On March 14th I’ll be at Foodbank Victoria cooking for the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival. It should be a great event and all proceeds go to assisting the amazing work that Foodbank does.

Every year, Foodbank helps distribute 4 million kilograms of food to those in need around Victoria. People affected by bushfires and floods; people living below the poverty line; victims of domestic abuse and many others. The work they do is so important to our society and I’m really glad to be helping out.

If you want a Melbourne Food & Wine Festival event with a difference, please do come along. I’ll be guiding you through some of my favourite dishes using ingredients from Foodbank’s warehouse. We’ll also have the chance to talk a little bit about food security in Australia, which is an issue that’s very important to me.

For more information or to book tickets, head to http://www.foodbankvictoria.org.au.

Hope to see you there!

Happy Australia Day everyone!

As an Asian Australian it makes me incredibly proud this year to be both Sydney’s Chinese New Year Ambassador was well as an Australia Day Ambassador at the same time. As a country, Australia has such a rich shared history with Asian culture, especially in terms of food.

It’s wonderful to see so many Asian restaurants in Australia and I am on record many times saying that in terms of its depth, diversity, availability of ingredients and authenticity, Australia is the best place in the world to eat Asian food. Many of Australia’s best chefs such as Neil Perry, Peter Gilmore, Mark Best and Tetsuya have undeniable Asian influences in the way they approach (and define) modern Australian cuisine.

I’ll be spending my Australia Day in Adelaide with my family – having a BBQ, watching the cricket and tennis and having a few nice cold beers. I hope you all have a cracking day!

These photos are from an initiative called ‘Australia – Make Your Mark’. As an Australia Day Ambassador, I was asked to write an inscription on one of these giant letters about what it meant to me to be Australian. Mine read:

“Australia isn’t just a place. We are also a community. More than just being here, we need to be involved in our country. Make your mark!”

I’m not a superstitious person, but at Chinese New Year even the most rational of us find ourselves following the old traditions such as buying new clothes, cutting our hair before new year’s day, paying off debts, cleaning the house and giving red packets. For many of us these acts are more of a mental exercise of renewal and an adherence to culture than any belief in luck, good fortune or evil spirits.

In the past few years I have had my own Chinese New Year To Do list, taking the opportunity to remind myself to keep my digital world updated. Given the amount of time we all spend on computers and digital devices these days, it’s worth spending a few hours at least once a year making the effort to keep these things running the way they’re supposed to.

If you’re one of those people to which these kind of things come naturally, my hat goes off to you. But if you’re anything like me, you might benefit from the list below:

• Backup all your hard drives
• Update your existing software on all devices (computers, iPods, iPads, phones, GPS etc.)
• Clean up folders and purge or organize old files
• Tidy up your desktop and dock or taskbar
• Clean up and organise your music, photo and video libraries
• Change your wallpaper
• Get any new software you’ve been needing and delete unused programs
• Synchronise your bookmarks across all your computers
• Clean your screens and keyboards
• Clean the outside of your computer
• Change your online passwords (Security experts recommend that this be done several times a year, but most of us don’t do it at all.)

Chinese New Year is coming up in a few days and I so I thought I’d share with you one of my favourite CNY dishes.

Yee Sang is a very popular Chinese New Year dish around Malaysia and Singapore (Do people eat this in China or Hong Kong? I really don’t know), and my family usually eat this on the eve of Chap Goh Meh, which is the 15th and final day of the new year festival.

Yee Sang is a colourful salad of prosperous ingredients, which are tossed together with a sweet dressing. Everyone around the table puts their chopsticks into the salad and tosses it high in the air. The superstition goes that the higher the salad is tossed, the more luck that will come in the new year. It’s can get a bit messy, but tossing the yee sang are some of my favourite memories of my childhood.

There are lots of recipes for Yee Sang around, and most of them use raw salmon or smoked salmon but I thought that this year, because it is the year of the Water Dragon, I would use lobster sashimi instead. Of course, if you want a more traditional yee sang, just substitute the lobster sashimi with another raw fish.

Chinese new year foods are full of symbolism – Fish symbolise wealth because ‘yu’, the Chinese word for fish, is synonymous with the words for wealth and abundance. Long noodles signify a long life. Oranges signify good luck, and pomelos or grapefruits also signify wealth and prosperity. One of the most popular areas of symbolism is the balance between yin and yang, or the dragon and phoenix. In food the dragon is often symbolised by lobster or prawns, and the phoenix is often symbolised by pheasant or chicken. In this year of the Water Dragon, what could be more fitting than a celebratory dish paying homage to the symbolic Water Dragon, the lobster.

Dragon Yee Sang

Ingredients

• 1 live lobster
• 6 wonton wrappers
• Oil for deep frying
• 1 tbsp white sesame seeds
• 1 carrot, peeled and julienned
• ½ Continental cucumber, peeled, deseeded and julienned
• ½ daikon white radish, julienned
• 6 leaves Chinese cabbage (hakusai, lombok), shredded
• 1 cup pomelo or grapefruit, torn into small pieces (peel, pith, seeds and any membrane removed)
• 1 bunch fresh coriander, leaves picked
• 2 tbsp Japanese red pickled ginger (benishouga)

Dressing

• 150ml plum sauce
• 2 tbsp honey
• juice of 2-3 limes
• 1 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tsp sesame oil
• 1 tbsp peanut oil
• ¼ tsp five spice powder

Method

1. Slice the wonton wrappers into thin strips and deep fry in batches in hot oil until crispy, then set aside to drain. Don’t fry too many at one time or they will stick together. Also, it’s best not to slice the wrappers all stacked together, or they may clump on the board. Toast the sesame seeds in a dry frypan until golden brown and then set aside to cool.
2. Julienne the cabbage, daikon, carrot and cucumber. Arrange these on a large platter and separately place on the pickled ginger, coriander and wonton crisps around in separate piles.
3. To prepare the lobster, chill the lobster in the freezer for about 2 hours until it is asleep. Kill it quickly with a spike through the head and separate the meaty tail from the head. Cut down either side of the soft underside of the lobster and remove the flesh from the shell using your hands, and using a paring knife if necessary. Remove the vein from the lobster as neatly as possible and wipe away any residue. Although I don’t recommend this, if the lobster meat is very dirty and you feel that you have to, you can rinse the meat very quickly in a mixture of iced water and salt (using enough salt to give the mixture the saltiness of seawater).
4. Heat a large pot of water until boiling and add the lobster head and tail shell to the pot and boil until the shell changes colour. Clean the shells and remove any meat that was clinging to the shell, reserving it for another purpose (an egg white omelette with cream and spring onion is perfect, or you can just dip it in a little yuzu kosho tabasco – but that’s a recipe for another time…)
5. With a very sharp knife, slice the lobster into very thin slices and arrange over the centre of the salad.
6. If you would like to use the tail for presentation, clean it well with a paper towel and, if it’s looking a little dull, polish the outside with a small amount of oil.
7. For the dressing, mix together all the ingredients.

To serve, gather everyone together and give them a pair of chopsticks each. Pour over the sauce and scatter with sesame seeds. Everyone reaches in with their chopsticks to toss the salad. Toss it as high as you can for good luck!

Hi all,

I’m really proud to announce that I am an official Ambassador for Sydney’s Chinese New Year celebrations this year!

There’s lots to do in Sydney during the festival – the Belmore Park night markets, banquets, dragon boat races and even an enormous dragon parade of over 3000 (yes, that’s THREE THOUSAND) performers. You’ll even get to see me riding a giant dragon during the parade (which is something I’m very excited about).

For all the information about the http://www.sydneychinesenewyear.com/

But just to whet your appetite, here’s a few points about Chinese New Year this year, and how my family celebrates it:

• This year is the year of the Water Dragon.
• There are 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac and 5 elements (metal, water, wood, fire and earth), meaning that the year of the Water Dragon only comes around every 60 years. The last year of the Water Dragon was in 1952.
• The first day of the new year is 23 January 2012.
• Before the start of the new year, many people will clean the house, cut their hair, buy new clothes, pay off debts and try to begin the new year on the best possible footing.
• Each Chinese New Year period I also update all of my software, clean out my hard drive of unnecessary files, back up all of my data and generally just clean up my computer. This is my 21st century way of spring cleaning.
• During the new year, married people usually give red packets (‘hong bao’, or ‘ung pao’) to unmarried people.
• The new year festivities end on the 15th day of the new year known Chap Goh Meh. For the entire 15-day period of the new year, visitors to your home should be well taken care of. (When I was young, many of my Australian friends visiting my house during the new year period would be very happy when my Dad suddenly surprised them with a red packet.)
• On Chap Goh Meh, my family usually eats Yee Sang, a salad of raw fish, vegetables and fruits with a sweet dressing. Everyone around the table puts their chopsticks into the dish and tosses the salad high into the air. The higher the salad is tossed the more luck the year will bring.

So please come along and enjoy the festivities. Until then, Gong Hei Fat Choi, Xin Nian Kuai Le and HAPPY NEW YEAR!

If you ever felt inclined to make a list of “food trends” for the past couple of years, “adding kimchi to everything” and “Mexican-Asian fusion” would both certainly be near the top. It seems that everywhere you turn these days there’s a kimchi quesadilla, spicy pork burrito or bulgogi taco. David Chang and Roy Choi should be getting royalties for this stuff.  Paying too much attention to food trends is a often a dangerous thing to do, but  love them or hate them, there’s no doubt that a tasty dish is a tasty dish. Let’s not take ourselves (or our food) too seriously.

I love breakfast, but as a meal it’s often overlooked as a source of variety. Day in and day out we turn to toast, cereal, bacon, the occasional pancake, and then add some eggs – fried, poached or scrambled. Even the simple and delicious breakfast dish of Eggs Benedict has lately been co-opted by brunch, that most mystifying and indefinable of meals. But such is the lack of respect we in the West tend to afford our breakfast. It’s ironic really, considering just how versatile eggs can be.

It’s easy to see where we get disillusioned by breakfast. We are constrained by time, ingredients, appetite and nutritional value.  We need something that’s fast, nutritionally balanced, not too difficult on the stomach and which will carry us through to lunch (forget brunch). But in the face of this adversity, we form solutions. I think the constraints of breakfast can be a source of great creativity, as we are almost forced to think outside the box.

Taking the old Mexican favourite, Huevos Rancheros (Cowboy’s Eggs) and combining it with some very good kimchi and enoki mushrooms resulted in this dish, which will definitely be taking its place in my kitchen’s breakfast repertoire.

Huevos Coreanos – Korean Eggs (Cowboy Style)

Serves 1

Ingredients

• ½ cup cherry tomatoes, quartered (80g)
• ½ cup enoki mushrooms (50g)
• ½ cup kimchi (with juice), roughly sliced (100g)
• ¼ cup tomato passata
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• ½ small red onion, sliced
• 1 tsp rice wine vinegar
• 2 free-range eggs
• 1 tbsp fresh coriander leaves
• 1 large red chilli
• Grated cheese (optional)
• Salt (to season)
• Black pepper and buttered crusty bread, to serve

Method

Preheat your oven’s overhead grill. Heat a small cast iron or other ovenproof pan until very hot. Add the olive oil and sautee the onions, tomatoes, chilli, mushrooms and kimchi until all are softened and nearly cooked through. Add the tomato passata and vinegar and cook for a further 1-2 minutes. Taste and season.

Make two small wells in the mixture in the pan and crack an egg into each. (If you wish, you can now scatter the top with a little grated cheese). Transfer the pan to your grill and grill the top for about 2 minutes until the whites of the eggs are set but the yolks are still runny. The heat of the pan will continue to cook the eggs from the bottom.

Grind over a little black pepper, scatter with some coriander leaves and serve with some buttered crusty bread.

Note: For a more mild version, you could reduce the amount of chilli or substitute with thinly sliced red capsicum.

Ingredients

Sweet Guinness Damper

• 2.5 cups self raising flour
• 3 tbsp caster sugar
• 70g unsalted butter, chilled and cubed
• 1 tbsp molasses
• 175ml Guinness

Blackberry Maple Compote

• 400g blackberries
• 2 tbsp maple syrup
• 1 tbsp caster sugar
• 2 tbsp water
• ½ tsp lemon zest

Good quality vanilla ice cream to serve

Method

Preheat the oven to 200C. Sieve the flour into a large bowl and mix with the caster sugar. Rub the butter into the flour with fingertips to form fine breadcrumbs. Mix the molasses into the Guinness and stir into the flour. Knead very lightly on a floured board until just combined and form into a round cob. Place on a greased baking sheet and bake for 30-40 minutes until the loaf sounds hollow when tapped.

For the compote, place half the berries in a pot with the maple syrup, caster sugar and water and bring to a simmer, Simmer for 5 minutes squeezing the berries with a wooden spoon. Remove from the heat and fold through the remaining berries and lemon zest. Allow to sit for at least 30 minutes.

Cut a thick slice of the damper and spread with a little butter. Chargrill until toasted and warmed. Top with a generous scoop of vanilla ice cream and a couple of large spoonfuls of the compote.

This Christmas, check out Merry Guinness® promos and parties throughout December in Malaysia at www.facebook.com/guinnessmalaysia

Ingredients

Guinness® and Fruit Christmas Puddings

• 500g raisins
• 500g mixed dried fruit (currants, oranges, dates etc.), roughly chopped
• 200ml Guinness®
• 250g butter
• 280g caster sugar
• 5 eggs
• 1 cup plain flour
• 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• ½ tsp ground cinnamon
• ½ tsp ground clove
• ½ tsp ground nutmeg
• 2 cups soft white breadcrumbs

Method

Mix the fruit and Guinness® together in a non-reactive bowl, cover with a tea towel and leave overnight to soak.

Cream together the butter and sugar, then beat in the eggs one at a time. Fold through the dry ingredients and fruit mixture, including any liquid collecting in the bottom of the bowl.

Grease and line the base of 2-3 pudding basins and divide the mixture between them. Cover tightly with more greaseproof paper and aluminium foil and leave overnight in the fridge.

Place a small rack, trivet or layer of tea towels in the base of a large saucepan big enough to fit your pudding basins. Fill the saucepan with boiling water three-quarters of the way up your pudding basins. Bring to a simmer and cover, continuing to simmer for 3½ hours, topping up the water every hour. Alternatively, steam the puddings for 7½ hours, topping up the steaming water every half hour.

Turn out the puddings, slice and serve with vanilla custard.

This Christmas, check out Merry Guinness® promos and parties throughout December in Malaysia at www.facebook.com/guinnessmalaysia

Ingredients

• 8-10 chicken wings, winglette and drumette separated and wing tip discarded
• rice flour, to coat
• oil for deep frying
• Guinness® BBQ Sauce
• 1 cup malt vinegar
• 3 tbsp olive oil
• 2 small onions, finely diced
• ½ cup brown sugar
• 1 tbsp Dijon mustard
• 1 cup Guinness®
• 1 tsp smoked paprika
• 1 tbsp chili powder (or to taste)
• 2 tbsp molasses
• 2 bay leaves
• ¼ tsp ground star anise
• ½ tsp ground cumin
• 2 tomatoes, roughly chopped
• 1 apple, grated
• zest and juice of 1 orange
• 1 tsp dried marjoram
• 1 ½ tsp salt
• 1 cup loosely packed flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped
• 150g butter

Appleslaw

• 1 apple, cored and julienned
• ½ red onion, very finely sliced
• 1 tbsp finely chopped parsley
• 3 cups shredded cabbage

Appleslaw Dressing

• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• ¼ cup mayonnaise
• ¼ cup yoghurt
• ¼ tsp flake salt
• ¼ tsp ground black pepper
• ¼ tsp ground turmeric

Method

For the Guinness® BBQ Sauce, place all ingredients in a saucepan except the butter and the parsley. Bring to the boil. Simmer for 30-45 minutes, remove the bay leaves and then blend to a smooth sauce. Stir through the butter and parsley until the butter is melted. Adjust seasoning to taste.

For the Appleslaw, mix together all the ingredients for the dressing and set aside in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. Toss together all the ingredients for the Appleslaw together with the dressing and leave in the fridge for 10 minutes before serving.

Toss the chicken wings in rice flour to coat and shake off any excess. Deep fry in 170C oil for 8-10 minutes until golden brown and cooked through. Drain well, season with salt and then transfer to a large bowl and toss with enough Guinness® BBQ Sauce to coat generously.

This Christmas, check out Merry Guinness® promos and parties throughout December in Malaysia at www.facebook.com/guinnessmalaysia

Ingredients

Pie Filling

• 4 lamb shanks, frenched
• 2 garlic cloves
• 2 onions, diced
• 1 carrot, diced
• 1 rib celery, diced
• 1 sprig rosemary
• 4 sprigs thyme
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
• 2 cups sliced mushrooms
• ½ cup tomato puree
• 440ml Guinness®
• 1L chicken stock
• ½ cup flat leaf parsley, finely chopped
• 1 tsp sea salt flakes
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 2 tbsp butter kneaded with 2 tbsp plain flour

• 4 sheets puff pastry
• 1 egg, beaten (for brushing)

Champ

• 500g potatoes
• 100g butter
• 1 cup cream
• 1 cup spring onions, chopped
• a little extra melted butter, to serve

• dressed watercress salad, to serve

Method

Heat 1 tbsp oil a casserole dish and brown the lamb shanks well all over and remove to a bowl. Add the remaining oil and fry the onions, carrot and celery until softened and then add in the mushrooms, tomato puree, salt and herbs and fry for 1 more minute. Return the lamb shanks to the pot and add the Guinness and stock to completely cover the shanks. Bring to a simmer and them reduce the heat, cover the pot and simmer for 2-3 hours, stirring occasionally until the lamb is nearly falling from the bone.

Strain the lamb and vegetables from the sauce (removing bay leaves and herb twigs), return the sauce to the stove and reduce until quite thick. Whisk the butter and flour together with the reduced sauce over heat for 3-4 minutes. Return the lamb shanks to the sauce and refrigerate overnight.

To make the champ, peel the potatoes quarter them and cover with cold, salted water. Bring to the boil and simmer until tender. Drain the potatoes very well and mash or pass through a sieve until smooth. Whisk together the butter and cream over heat until emulsified and whip the emulsion into the potato. Stir through the spring onions and season to taste.

Preheat an oven to 200C (180C fan forced). Wrap one lamb shank in puff pastry and add 2-3 tbsp of the sauce mixture, gathering the pastry tightly around the bone. Brush with egg wash and bake for 15-20 minutes until golden brown.

Alternative: Preheat your oven to 200C (180C fan forced). Line a small individual pie tin with puff pastry, prick the base weight down with dry beans or pastry weights. Bake for 10 minutes until the pastry is firm. Strip the lamb meat from the bone and discard the bones. Return the lamb meat back to the sauce. Set aside. Remove the pastry weights and fill the pastry case with the lamb shank mixture. Top with a pastry lid. Brush with egg wash and bake for 15-20 minutes until golden brown.

Serve the pie with the champ and a dressed watercress salad. Make a little well in the centre of the champ and drizzle in a little melted butter.

This Christmas, check out Merry Guinness® promos and parties throughout December in Malaysia at www.facebook.com/guinnessmalaysia