Cheesy Creamy Shin Ramyun Korean Spicy Noodles

I saw a post pop up on my Facebook feed talking about ramen with milk and cheese and it was just one of those trainwreck dishes that sounds terrible but you can’t stop thinking about.  So bad it must be amazing right?? Ramen + spicy Korean chilli kick + creamy cheesy sauce. Like an asian style spicy mac and cheese amiright? And in the aftermath of the horribleness our little old NZ had been through over the weekend, I am all about comfort eating.

Grammed: Miso Kimchi Udon Noodles with Kale and Tofu

Kimchi miso udon noodles with fresh kale, bok choi and spring onions from our vege garden 🌱🍜 #sofresh #gardenbounty #plantsusuallydieonus

A post shared by Nessie@bakingequalslove (@bakingequalslove) on Feb 11, 2017 at 1:39pm PST

This is a super quick super yum meal we have pretty regularly on our weeknight dinner rotation.  We usually have it as a vego meal but you can add some pan fried chicken or a softly boiled egg for extra protein

Flavour of the Month: New Flavour, Mt Eden

花よりだんご (hana yori dango) Meaning: Someone who prefers dumplings over flowers ~ Japanese proverb

I am a dumplings over flowers kinda girl.  


Whilst the Japanese saying implies the person prefers practical gain rather than aesthetics, for me the meaning is more literal: give me food over pretty things any day.  


My husband caught on to this early on.  While in the eight years we've been together, he has not yet bought me a bouquet of flowers, he has taken me out to many a delicious meal.  The boy knows the way to this girl's heart.   


For this particular delicious meal over summer we went on a double date with my brother in law and his wife to the restaurant that everyone seemed to be talking about: New Flavour on Dominion Road for some handmade dumplings and noodles.

A study in lanterns and dumplings

The lantern festival marks the 15th and final day of the Chinese New Year holiday and every year the Asia New Zealand Foundation puts on the Auckland Lantern Festival: a lavish three day long extravaganza with glorious techni-coloured lantern displays filling Albert Park and street stalls of delicious asian food lining the length of Princes Street.

You really get the sense you're in some exotic bustling marketplace in South East Asia rather than the immaculately colonial Albert Park next to Auckland University.

Me and my girls from high school went last night on a beautiful if somewhat muggy Auckland evening and ate our weight in dumplings, noodles, donuts, and steamed buns.

{$4 for 6 pork dumplings. I kid you not. Make sure you get plenty of soy sauce and sweet chilli on these bad boys}

Chinese New Year Feast at One Dream, Mt Wellington

Kung Hei Fat Choi!  Happy Year of the Dragon lovely people!

Chinese New Year is THE most important event in Chinese calender.  It marks the start of the lunar year and starts with a family feast on Chinese New Year's Eve, followed by another massive feast on Chinese New Year's Day and ends with a feast for the Lantern Festival on the 15th day of the lunar calender.

For our New Year dinner we went to our family's fav little Chinese restaurant in Mt Wellington.  It's a gem of a place.  Family-run and tucked away next to Harvey Norman on Mt Wellington Highway, One Dream specialises in home style Chinese cooking that's authentic, delicious, and incredibly reasonable.

They are usually closed on a Monday but the lovely owners open just for us for Chinese New Year Day.  Legends.

Hong Kong Honeymoon: Foodies Highlights Part 2

{prawn and spinach dumplings? why yes please}

Before I get into the post proper I need to vent just a little....I was an unfortunate victim of a manky computer virus that had my poor laptop down for almost a week (a week!?) and requiring a lot of TLC to cox it back to life.  People who make viruses = not cool.  Grrrrr.

Ok, now that I got that off my chest...back to the foodie posting!

Now, how could I possibly blog about the wonders of Hong Kong food without talking about yum cha?  Yes, my friends, the 4th wonder of this Hong Kong Foodie Top 10 is not a dish but a whole way of eating.  In fact, this whole part 2 post chronicles uniquely Hong Kongese styles of chowing down.

Of course, this is by no means all the wacky ways of getting your eat on in HK...this is after all a top 10 from our trip and 6 days does not a comprehensive foodie tour make.  But even in 6 days we managed to rack up an impressive repertoire of eating styles, so without further ado, let the Hong Kong foodie good times roll.

{daikon cake? don't mind if I do}

Hong Kong Honeymoon: Our Top 10 Foodies Highlights Part 1

{That, my friends, is A Foodcourt With a View.}

So sorry for neglecting my post as of late, blog post that is.  It was the university hols and we were lucky enough to get to spend some of it in the shopaholic/foodie's dream city Hong Kong for our sort-of honeymoon.

Why sort-of? Well, it was our first trip away together (and first full week of seeing each other) after getting married which is very honeymooney.  But the main purpose of going back was to have dinner with and catch up with my relos in HK which is less honeymooney.  And my Mum came with us - not that honeymooney at all. 

So while it was technically our honeymoon, hopefully we'll get to go somewhere later on and lie on a beach for days with just the two of us (hint hint darling husband??).

So as a blogapology for the post-tardiness I present you our Top 10 Hong Kong Trip Foodie Highlights.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of what you should eat when in HK.  That would need to be a top 100 at least!  No, no, this is a much less ambitious venture: a round up of the tasty meals and morsels we loved most on our trip back this time.   I'd probably need to go back for months to get a more definitive must-eat list...which I would LOVE to do sometime, so if you're reading this Harper Collins - call me??

Dragon's Gourmet, Epsom, Auckland and being a banana

I've always been a bit of a banana: asian on the outside, kiwi on the inside.

But it has recently come to my attention that my tastebuds may be just a wee bit more asian than I first thought.

I've lived in New Zealand since I was five and was for all intents and purposes was a kiwi kid: played touch rugby in primary, did the Kiwi Kids Triathlon, had a mince and cheese pie from the tuckshop for lunch everyday.  At home though, Mum and Dad were very Chinese in their tastes: Dad cooked traditional Cantonese dinners and when we go out it would be to Chinese restaurants and Yum Cha. I, on the other hand, have always preferred variety be it indian, italian, french, carribean, morroccan etc.  Just ask anyone, I'm an easy girl to feed: I'm just happy to be eating.  I've eaten everything from fetal chicken eggs to frog's legs to rabbit stew.  Be it bacon and egg pie or peking duck my motto is get in my belly. 
 
Or so I thought....

It's only upon moving down to Dunedin, where there aren't a heck of a lot of Chinese restaurants around, that I've discovered that I really miss good authentic Chinese tucker.  Guess it's like missing your mother's cooking yeah?

So, if like me, you're craving lunch Canto styles, and you happen to be in Auckland, then check out Dragon's Gourmet in Epsom for an authentic Hong Kong tea house experience.

{refreshingly tangy lemon iced tea}

Cookies for Grandma: Traditional Chinese New Year Peanut Cookies

Is it just me or is 24 hours in one day is far too little?   30 or 35 hours would be more like it.

Dear big man upstairs, for my next Christmas prez I would really really like just a couple more hours a day, if it's not too much trouble.  Thanks big fella. 

For the last couple of months the days have just flown by so fast I find that we are suddenly in March and I swear new years was only about a week ago.  Where on earth did February go?

Chinese New Year fell at the beginning of February this year, right smack bang in the middle of the intense craziness, one week before I moved down south.  We had Grandma over for dinner and I had meant to make some Traditional Chinese New Year Peanut Cookies, which as the name suggests, are peanut cookies made and served traditionally at Chinese New Year.

But in amongst packing and organising and general mayhem, the cookies fell through the gap and even though I had all the ingredients ready and the recipe all sussed out, I didn't end up making them in time for the dinner.

Grandma did come over for dinner though: we had amazing scampi sashimi, steamed tofu with ginger and spring onions, pan fried snapper and stir-fried kang kong.  I love cooking for my Grandma - there is just something incredibly wonderful about cooking for someone who has cooked all her life, who taught my Dad to cook who in turn taught me to cook.

I ended up making the cookies a couple of days later, fully intending to get some to Grandma before my big move but again just got too busy and I never got that package of cookies to her.

My Grandma passed away at the end of last week.  After a sudden and completely unexpected stroke.

I won't get the chance to give her cookies again.  Being down in Dunedin, I didn't get a chance to say goodbye before she slipped away. It's really hit me rather hard.  Another suckerpunch.  Grandma was the only grandparent I've ever known and it's incredibly sad to think of all her stories, her recipes, her hopes and dreams that we never got a chance to ask her about.

I think from now on, I'll make sure to take time out to breathe and bake cookies.

Ch ch ch ch ch changes, Chinese New Year and Cereal prawns

Change is inevitable - except from a vending machine. ~ Robert C. Gallagher

Happy belated Chinese New Year!  Kung Hei Fat Choi! Welcome to the year of the Rabbit.

I don't know what my horoscope is supposed to be for this year but it's definitely a year of Change with a capital C.

I've tried on many different hats in my time: pharmacy, research science, and most recently, lawyer.  But deep down, all along I've wanted to be a doctor.  I just missed out when I applied straight out of high school waaaaay back in '02 and that blow made me bury those dreams for a long time.

Now, I've been given another chance.  At the ripe old age of 26, I am uprooting my life, moving away from my loved ones, my friends, even my fiance to go to med school in a completely different city on a completely different island: Dunedin.

It has been an agonising decision...can I do it? Move away from everything I know and everyone I love to live in a place I've never even visited.  I'm excited and exhilarated but at the same time terrified and sad.  The hardest thing is knowing I'm leaving my Mum all on her own and be living away from C just when we are about to get married.

But at the end of the day the question was - is it worth it?

And it is.

Nothing worth having is ever easy and it's facing your fears and challenging yourself by doing things out of your comfort zone that shapes you as a person.

So this Chinese New Year, I am saying au revoir to the life I know to follow my dreams and to celebrate I tried a brand new super yummy Malaysian dish: Cereal Prawns.

Baking for Hospice: Matcha Green Tea Shortbread

This was my second lot of baking for the All About Dads round for Baking for Hospice.

My dad absolutely LOVED shortbread.  I could never understand why. I mean, I like shortbread: you can't really beat it for its buttery crumbly goodness but it was never my first choice out of those Assorted Biscuits tins we used to always get for Christmas from relos.  I'm all about the glamour cookies - the chocolate coated ones, the choc chippies, the ones with the creamy filling, the malt ones.  But there was no other cookie as far as my Dad was concerned.  It was shortbread or nothing.  He could mow through whole bags of Farmbake shortbread all by himself.  Even when he was staying at the hospice, a piece of shortbread dunked into a milo was his daily afternoon tea.

So seeing as the theme was All About Dads, I just had to bake shortbread.  No two buts about it.  I knew that a couple of other bakers were making shortbread for the B4H round (perks of doing the organising :P), so I thought I'd mix it up a little and make Matcha Green Tea Shortbread.  I'd seen recipes for Matcha Sables or Green Tea shortbread doing the rounds on tastespotting and I just couldn't resist trying a batch myself.

Plum chardonnay sago pudding and UMAT results

UMAT results came out last week coincidentally on the day of the Full Moon Festival.

For those not in the know, UMAT is the external medical admissions exam you have to sit if you want to get into med school in New Zealand and Australia. 

I had been dreading these results.  The UMAT test was awful.  Hundreds of us sat in row after row of desks at Mt Albert Stadium to answer cryptic questions testing your logical reasoning, interpersonal skills and non-verbal reasoning.  I never want to try and find non-existent patterns in another set of clip art doodles ever again.

The test wasn't all bad though: the Warriors provided some light relief by coming out and running drills on the field but other than that UMAT was like going to the dentist: expensive, painful and terrifying!

So when these results came out, I knew I needed something sweet and just so slightly alcoholic to help me get the courage up to check my results and an old fav: Plum chardonnay sago pudding did the trick nicely.

DIY sushi buffet for a mid winter family feast

I love sushi.

Tangy rice encasing delicious nuggets of fresh sashimi wrapped in ozone-y seaweed.  Just smear on some nose-clearingly hot wasabi and dip in soy sauce and you have a healthy, delicious, portable bite-sized meal.

However, if you've ever attempted to make sushi at home you will know that making sushi is not as easy as it looks.  

All that rolling and tucking while trying to keep it all even and pretty looking.   My sushi rolls inevitably look like deformed cigars and that sticky rice just sticks to everything.

Struggle no more my sushi challenged friends, I have discovered a way to wow your guests with sushi but not have to roll a single roll yourself...a DIY sushi buffet!

Why go through the anguish and frustration of making sushi when you can get your guests to make it themselves?

East meets west coconut vanilla mochi cake

This Coconut Vanilla Mochi Cake is a little east meets west.  Kinda like me.

Born in Hong Kong but raised in New Zealand, I'm a Chiwi, a Chinese Kiwi.  I love Marmite, Watties T sauce and fish 'n' chips on the beach (or "fush and chups" as we say in NZ).  But I still celebrate Chinese New Year, love yum cha and eat with chopsticks.

I'm lucky to have the best of both worlds and this mochi cake, a cross between a vanilla cake and mochi, combines the best of west and east with the delicious flavour and crust of a pound cake and the delightful chewy texture of mochi.  It is so good, I ate half the cake myself, no kidding.

Hoddeok: my almost authentic Korean pancakes

On the corner of Wellesly and Lorne in Auckland's CBD,  tucked under the "pagoda" building is a little shop, a stall really, selling Korean pancakes.  The queue there is always snaking along the footpath around the corner.  A queue which balloons into a crowd around lunchtime.  I've walked past this stall for years, but for some reason never tried it out.  Until the other day, while running an errand for the boss, I thought why not have Korean pancakes for lunch?

Pay it forward dumplings

My blog is called 'baking = love', but it could easily have been 'food = love'.  Whenever a friend or loved one is unwell or going through a tough time, I can't help but want to make something to take over to them.  Usually I bake something sweet but I also like making dumplings to send as part of the care package.

Why dumplings?  Well, everyone likes dumplings, right?  Not only are they delicious and nutritious, they're a meal in one, with carb, veges and meat all in one little package.  They're also something just a little bit special. Something you wouldn't normally get to eat at home.

Practical reasons aside, these dumplings also have a special meaning for me.  

The recipe was taught to me by an auntie* who came and helped us out when Dad passed away.  When all the visitors had gone and friends and relos went back to their normal lives, we were still shell shocked and left trying to work out how to deal with life without Dad.  Auntie came in, helped us tidy and sort out our house, cooked us dinner and taught me some of her signature dishes.  She taught me how to make dumplings to keep in the freezer so that when I got home late from uni I could have dinner on the table in a jiffy.  She was our guardian angel during that time.  There's no way I could ever repay her for her kindness and thoughtfulness. So instead, I am paying it forward, with dumplings.