i wanna be the minority....

heard that Coffeenut has opened in Smith St in the old Gourmet Deli site - Hungry drove past it a few weeks back and stopped to get her morning coffee (she said it was nothing special, but given it had just opened i'm willing to give it a go before writing it off - as an aside, this led to a discussion where we floated the possibility that liking the coffee we like (strong, full of flavour
etc) makes us a minority in a world of people who really like shitty weak coffee).

Coffeenut only do takeaway coffee from the morning until midday, but Hungry's mate, Gourmet Chick tells me that they sell Kopi Luwak - the kind of coffee that is made of beans poo-ed out by a civet cat - at $45 a cup!!! i thought i'd make them a deal - if you can make me a REALLY KICK ASS latte from ordinary beans, i'll have a go of your $45 coffee.

post traumatic stress

Met up with Hungry and an old mate today for lunch - lets call her NGO chick - admittedly, our friendship is relatively young, but when you've lived in darwin together, its like going to WAR man! We hooked up at the roast duck/pork/chicken place cos i needed to check out the steamed chicken to see how it compared to yesterdays lunch and it. shat. all. over. it.

for $10 i got the steamed chicken combo, but unlike a combo at nandos, maccas or any other such hideousness, this consisted of chunks of pillowy steamed chicken on steamed bok choy and fluffy rice served with a small dish of soy sauce and cut chillis, a bowl of sweet corn and egg soup and a bottle of water. WOOOOOOHOOOOOOO!!

i took photos with Hungry's phone but will have to bluetooth them and post them
later :-))))

mush!

Hainanese chicken rice... mmmmmmmmmmmm.............in Singapore i became a little bit obsessed with it after finding out that it's regarded as the national dish of Singapore (just lucky it isn't kaya toast!!) - and i did a lot of compare and contrasting of HCR in different places, refining my criteria ...... the meat has to be tender, the flabby looking goosebumply white skin has to be easily removable *shudder*, lots of cucumber on or near the chicken is excellent, the rice must taste good......naturally i've carried the hunt over to Darwin and on the weekend, Director Chick 2 told me of a place that a mate refers to as the best hainanese chicken rice ANYWHERE. Try try must buy! I took off like a bat out of hell this afternoon (i even went to sleep last nite thinking about it) and found myself near the roast bbq duck and pork place looking at an unprepossessing place called asian cuisine on the mall ...lots of bain maries ... ? so i read the menu thinking this was surely the wrong place when suddenly i spied "chef's special - hainan chicken rice". As i hungrily read this i watched the chef ( a wizened woman) carry a massive tray of steaming chicken out of the kitchen - so i ordered it on the spot. I sat down, read my book, until a similar tray appeared .. big pile of tender chicken - check, skin off quick - check, lots of cucumber hidden under the chicken - check, broth yummy - CHECK! ok so it wasn't the best chicken rice i've ever had - that award would go to the lone man hacking up chcken with his cleaver at a stall at bugis junction dry market in Singers - but it was bloody nice. tomorrow i'm going to have a go of the steamed chicken from the roast pork and duck place and let you know which one is better :-)))))

not a tonic at all!!!

Avoid Avoid! Went to Tonic on Mitchell St last nite for dinner and it was weird, greasy and grimy. Food. not. good.

chickwithnogutsy

For days now i've been wandering past a new Indian cafe slash restaurant on Knuckey St - Darwin's Little India, near the corner of Stradforth Lane. What pulled me in was the mention of Teh Tarik - a kind of frothy sweet pulled-milk tea that i became obsessed with in Singapore. Given my penchant for unhealthy attachment to weird things, the mere mention of it was enough to make me start stalking this cafe, which has been closed for the past week. I agreed to meet my mate Hungry for lunch today to get sushi and decided to poke my head in on the way back if it was open to check it out and try their tea..... anyway we stuck our heads in on the way on a whim and the proprietor, a delightful woman called Aminah, engaged us in a lengthy conversation about the evils of backpackers who don't turn up for work and by the time she'd finished talking, Hungry and I were starving. Also she had done a fine job of convincing us to stay - the shop which used to look pretty grimy has been renovated and is all sunny yellow paint, captivating indian music and good looking food! and Aminah offered us loads of it!!

I had the chicken biriani (chef's special) and tried the medium lamb, the beef and the butter chicken. The food was fresh, delicious, aromatic, all good and there was no greasiness, no hideous gutsache or any other unwanted, unanticipated after effects......(sadly she made me a teh tarik and it wasn't as good as Singapore, just proving that you can never really recapture the past).....

Darwin's Little India is open from 830am to 8pm, 7 days a week and Aminah does a chef's special every day. She offers a lunch special at $9.50 and does catering!!! Get down there.

goumet deli - or gouRmet even!!!

For anyone in Darwin who remembers the Gourmet Deli, it's reopened. Used to be in Smith St, closed down for ages and is now in Knuckey St past EastWest restaurant and opposite Ben's Bakehouse. I recognised it from the communal tables! Anyway it's been given a pretty funky makeover and as well as doing breakfast and lunches and coffees and stuff they sell Italian and European deli items like pasta, olive oil, cold meats, sauerkraut, a strange mixture of stuff... haven't worked out the full story but don't really care cos the vego burger i had there today was really really good - it was a lentil and chickpea patty with caremalised onion, cos lettuce, tomato, soy mayo, cheese and i'm not sure what else. GOOD. My only criticism is that the patty slid around so much on the cos that it fell out of the burger - LUCKily i had a knife and fork and a napkin with which to amend the rapidly developing situation. They also do that really irritating thing - that seems to be peculiar to Darwin - where they serve your food ON the napkin. WHAT IS UP WITH THAT!?! There can be no good outcome when people do that! They also sell cakes, some made on the premises and some imported from Adelaide (??). Oh and Nivagi homeware stuff too. And they have free papers to read.

sexy sari

Sexy Sari Rasa............mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Shit my camera phone sucks!!!!! I take a photo thinking this will tell you all everything you need to know, no words necessary, and it looks like crap really *frown*

What you can't see here is the sexy pile of fried potato chips underneath all the little beefy nuggets of dried beef. Steamed green beans in coconut milk. Silky chilli eggplant. All from Sari Rasa, a little hole in the wall indo place on Cavanagh St in Darwin. It's so popular with the locals that it's only open for about two hours every day for lunch. As usual I dont know where until i turn down the arcade. But it's soooo good - my lips are still burning from the chilli :-) :-) :-)

Singapore!!!!

Director Chick, me and small fry one and two have just been to Singapore for Christmas - God it was good, apart from the hideous cold I picked up that turned into bronchitis and sinusitis - I mean you know it's good when you spend $4 and eat aMAZINGLY yummy hainanese chicken rice, or 90 cents and get a great cup of tea/coffee :-) :-) Also loved that whenever i broke a note in Singers i ended up with loads of $2 notes, so felt richer than when we began....such good foodcourts/hawkers centres in Singers - they put western foodcourts with their hideous greasiness to shame!!! So good that i took hardly any photos, too busy eating and coughing all round Singapore.

I did get photos of some Char Siew rice dumlings down in the basement of Carrefour in Suntec City - like a gigantic Kmart with a massive grocery store underneath.. and the choice! I thought we had choice in Australia, but we really don't. I was paralysed by the range of stuff you could buy and fascinated by the different signage - in particular the "adult diaper" sign.

Good and GREAT food places we found - the foodcourt stall on level 3 under the Swissotel the Stamford where they carved off the noodles by hand, Din Tai Fung at Raffles City (amazing dumplings and you can stand there and have a cup of green tea offered by the staff and watch as the chefs make your dumplings by hand and then cook them), J Co Doughnuts (those coffee cream filled ones were a killer!!! I ate like 10 of them!!!) downstairs at Raffles City, carrot cake at Newton Hawker Centre - and not the carrot cake we know and love, a savoury version made of radishes and eggs and such - Ananda Bhavan in Little India, the best vego food I ate, Thunder Tea Rice, a freaky combination of brown rice, yummy mixed veges, peanuts, dried shrimp and tea broth, Hainanese chicken rice everywhere was pretty good, i got obsessed with teh tarik - pulled milk tea with condensed milk - and dipping roti prata into it. I tried some of those fried savoury donutty looking things - they were ok with tea!!!

Not so good food - i adventurously tried a kaya toast set - two half boiled eggs (yuk! they're all boogery and you crack them into a bowl and then mix them with soy sauce and pepper), kaya toast (thick slabs of butter and kaya jam made from coconut milk between two slices of toast) and a cup of teh or kopi (tea or coffee) - eek!!! it was weird. But just to make sure it wasn't my starvation clouding my judgement i went again another time - and it was just as bad :-(

Highlights? Being whisked thru immigration as soon as they spotted our tired grrl sitting on her bag, our hotel, spending Xmas Day at Singapore Zoo breakfasting with the Orangutans, the beyond family-friendly vibe of Singapore...

Did I love Singapore? Why yes I did - it was the ideal first overseas trip with two little ones :-) yeah yeah can't wait to go back and finish our list of things to do!!!