whine & dine

Whilst sifting through my blog for inspiration one afternoon this week (I had drunkenly invited a friend and his girlfriend over for dinner and had no idea what to cook but wanted to impress), it came to my attention that there’s a huge discrepancy in the number of Asian vs Western recipes I post. Some of this is due to my not being a huge fan of Asian desserts, so all dessert recipes I post automatically add to the Western category, and also thanks to how most of the Chinese food I cook at home (stir-frys, fried rice, Chinese soups, steamed fish) doesn’t tend to be very photogenic. Keep reading →

Recipes are a divisive thing. Everyone’s got an opinion on which is the most authentic or the best. And if there’s a type of recipe that gets everyone’s panties in a twist, it’s how you make a cocktail. This is probably since you don’t need to know how to cook to be able to make a cocktail, and that opens the floor to just about anybody’s opinionatedness. And as much as I often appreciate digging into the history of a dish and researching the original way of making it, there’s often room for improvement and for tweaking something to suit one’s tastes, while still respecting what it’s meant to taste like. Keep reading →

I hate brandied cherries. Well, to be fair, I’m not the biggest fan of fruit that comes in any form apart from fresh or as juice. (I particularly dislike dried fruit and that annoying knack they seem to have for appearing in my cake or cookie which just destroys the entire eating experience for me.) But brandied cherries, as far as I was concerned, deserve a special place in hell all for their sickly sweet, horror-face-and-gag-reflex-inducing qualities. Why anyone would voluntarily include them in desserts or cocktails was far beyond my comprehension. Keep reading →

Goose. Cabbage. Carrots. Stuffing. Potatoes. Corn. Ham. Gravy. Tiramisu. Oh my god, I feel sick all over again. Which is probably why it’s taken me two weeks to muster up the strength to look at the photos I took of the food (whilst slowly working my way through the leftovers) so that I could do up this post. But boy was that a meal to write home about. :) One guest at our dinner of Christmas orphans, D, even dubbed our apartment The Goose & Cabbage and proceeded to draw a sign for our gastropub. (PS: D – Don’t kill me, I love that picture to bits!) Keep reading →

I don’t know about you lot, but I’m still recovering from the last month of mayhem. And I think I will be for another month or so. When I begin to think about the buckets of booze, piles of food, and general excess we partook of in the name of festive fun, I still feel a bit sick. Keep reading →