Food party
Oh look it is the



horusporus introduced me to Zee Avi, who sings a song of my people. (I mainly say this because she mentions Damansara. I am of the people of Damansara. I guess I'm not really of the people of cheatin' drama.) And frangipani posted a delicious-sounding Riotous Chicken Rice recipe.

I'm not gonna post any recipes because I'm not really at the point where I make things up and they turn out good. But taking pictures of food, that is a thing I can do!



Starting off early in the academic year at Bea's of Bloomsbury, where I go for tea with my law school buddies.




Raspberry meringues in the window.


I had English breakfast tea and cake. I think the cake was chocolate, and the cream on top was coffee-flavoured. With maybe some bourbon? It was amazing, anyway.

I like it when sugar is in irregular cubes, don't you? So posh!


In the weekend my boyfriend Cephas visits and we go to the Byzantium exhibition at the Royal Academy. The Byzantium exhibition is cool. The Patisserie Valerie nearby is delicious.


If this doesn't make you happy, you have no soul. Or no tastebuds. One or the other.


The cream on this tart made me happy to be alive.


This fluffy mango cream cake was from a place near Chinatown, which does Chinese-style cakes.


I thought the cream could have been fresher and the cake fluffier, but it's not a style of cake I particularly favour anyway. Fortunately mango lifts everything to the next level. Of AWESOME.


During the Spring Festival/Chinese New Year, my friend's parents come to London to visit her and treat us all to dinner at Royal China Club. Everything was intimidatingly posh. We wore cocktail dresses -- it was that kind of dinner.


I know shark's fin soup is a bad thing and I don't really eat it anymore, but since I wasn't the one who ordered it ... I know that is just ducking moral responsibility. But it is so yummy. :(


Loooobster! I think. It might have been some other kind of crustacean.

There was also duck's feet but I did not get any especially fancy pictures of those.


So one night we hung out at Gir's place and made nasi lemak. I made the chicken curry! All on my own!

This is especially impressive if you know that for much of my culinary career, my idea of a recipe ran along the lines of "steamed rice + frankfurters". I mean, that was it. That is what it was called and that is what you did. You could also add some soy sauce when it was done, but only if you wanted to be extra gross.


The rice is Japanese rice, though. That was a bit weird. But still tasty.


One time a couple of friends from Cambridge came to London for the day, and after dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant on Kingsland Road we went to that ice cream place near Leicester Square that does ice cream that looks like other things. My friends had ice cream shaped like ice cream, and to be fair the spaghetti-shaped ice cream looked like the sort of idea that should stay an idea, but I felt having normal ice cream would be a cop-out. So I ordered the ice cream shaped like tiramisu.




People are always impressed that I finished it on my own for some reason.


Cephas and I have tried a couple of times to make scones. The first time -- well, they were good if you like biscuits. Um, burnt biscuits. The second time was better, though I think we allocated insufficient dough for each scone.


This last scone we made was the nicest. We had it with clotted cream and ginger conserve, which is very tasty, burny and sweet.


For Gir's birthday, I gave her a cupcake recipe. For my birthday, she made me cupcakes.

I know, I know, if we both took a friendship exam she would totally get better marks than me. But I would forgive her for it! That makes it OK, right?


Gir's birthday present -- chocolate and peanut butter cupcakes with cream cheese icing, made jointly by me and Gir. Joint baking by me and Gir always goes less well than if she did it by herself, because I usually suggest that we do something absurdly ill-advised, like e.g. spread BUTTER on our cake. In this case, I thought we should follow the recipe and put in as much sugar as was recommended.

Bad, bad idea.


Gir's green tea cupcakes for me (baked by Gir and Gir alone!) were much more attractive and much more edible. Because you did not feel like you were going to lose all your teeth when you sank them in the cupcake.


I guess I like my birthdays to feature dessert foods? Cephas treated me to lunch at Galleria and didn't even mind when I strayed from the lunch deal menu.


I don't remember what I had for the main course, but I had a fruit tart with the posh kind of black-spotted vanilla ice cream for dessert. Cephas had crumble but it did not make as interesting a photograph.

I dunno about the kiwi. The crumble came with kiwi too. I'm guessing there was a kitchen surplus that day.


All the best home cooking photos I get are at Gir's place. This is because Gir actually makes food that looks nice, unlike e.g. me.


Bibimbab and chilled green tea, both by Gir.


Our friend A brought along macaroons from Laduree for dessert. We broke each into four pieces and passed them lovingly around, our palms cupped around them so as not to drop a single crumb.

The flavours are pistachio, hazelnut, vanilla, lemon, rose and chocolate. They tasted like heaven. ;_;


Gir signed up for a free trial of the Taste London card and said, Let us eat ribs. So we did.

This was at the Chicago Rib Shack. There were balloons and small children. I'm pretty sure High School Musical was playing on the TVs in the back.


(L to R) Baby back ribs, onion loaf and chicken wings. An onion loaf is lots of onion rings squished up together. It was the only thing we couldn't finish.


The Penangite had brownies with vanilla ice cream.


I had a Mississippi mud pie.


Also by the grace of the Taste London card, we had a couple of nice meals at Arang2.


This is pork and kimchee and tofu. I dunno what it's called. It's SO GOOD.


Raw beef with slices of pear and sesame seed. I ordered it 'cos it sounded exciting. It tasted like yee sang basically.


This was described as sea toad in the menu and was also ordered for reasons of excitement. It turned out to be flatfish, which is less exciting than toad. Still, pretty good!


Lovely cakes at Konditor and Cook, where I and aforementioned lovely law school buddies fled the thought of exams for a while.




Viet Pho is near Chinatown but not in it. It's really nice and small and sort of bustly and down-to-earth; it reminds me of the kopitiams back home. At the back of the restaurant (which is pretty near to the front) there is a table which is always occupied by aunties -- presumably the owners' mom and aunts.




And here is a meal I had just last Thursday, when Cephas was in town and I took him to Ciao Bella on Lamb's Conduit Street. It's less pristine than it looks on its website and a lot less empty. It's usually crowded with suits, but not in a depressing way -- it's very noisy and there's different sorts of people and you sit very close to one another because there's not that much space, and the waiters are terrific and sing out compliments to you if you smile at them.


And they give you olives and parmesan cheese and bread sticks (not shown) at no extra charge.


Cephas had calzone. The crust was incredibly soft and chewy.


I think mine was called tagliatelle alla romana.


We had profiteroles for dessert. They were OK; I think they would've been nicer with chocolate sauce instead of mousse. Why mousse?



That is my food party! It is a party that goes on all year round. \o/ You can contribute pictures of food too if you like. That would be pretty cool.

This entry was originally posted at http://bravecows.dreamwidth.org/11197.html. Please comment there using OpenID.