Tag: Chinese food

Bamboo Basket – Beef Brisket Noodle Soup 牛腩湯麵 (龍皇湯麵系列)

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Hands up if you’re missing those xxx noodle soups from all those xxx Chinese restaurants? 🖐 Me, me, me!! I happened to be in China Town a few days ago, and MummyGeek spotted these in the freezer section in See Woo Supermarket. Wooow! There’s two rows of these noodles with beef brisket, duck, wonton, braised pork, and I can’t remember if there were anymore. The Bamboo Basket brand is not a brand I’ve heard of. Have you? It seems that they’re a UK brand. They probably made this because a lot of people are missing restaurant food… Mind you, it’s very convenient, so I hope this brand carries on selling these products after the lockdown.

I’ve eaten a lot of beef in the past few days… It’s one of those times when you just miss eating a certain type of meat, so when I had this, it was my third meal with beef in two days! 😬

I took a close up picture of the instructions. When I was making this, I got stuck on sentence 2. The soup base? Is that the water from the noodles or the already frozen beef sauce? I guessed that part…

Now to start cooking! Here’s the ingredients in its frozen state. As you can see, there’s no packets of soup like what you see in those packets of instant noodles. This is what you see in frozen meals BUT the difference here is that you don’t use a microwave!

First I heated up some water in a saucepan, then added the noodles. Cooked it for approximately 3 minutes, then scooped it out into a bowl leaving the boiling soup water in the saucepan.

Then, with the frozen beef brisket, I placed that into the sauce pan with the remaining water, and cooked for approximately 5 minutes… I added a bit more hot water, but I don’t think it was necessary… Afterwards, I poured over the beef brisket and soup into the bowl with the noodles, and voila!

Voila again! A slight close up of the noodles. The soup isn’t a clear broth, this one seems to be a darker broth from how the beef brisket was cooked. You can see here that they use ginger slices.

Now to start eating! The noodles were al-dente, so they weren’t too soft, and weren’t too firm. They were a bit like Japanese ramen noodles. Hmm. The beef brisket was soft and chewy. The soup was a little bland, but it still had a beefy taste … maybe I shouldn’t have added that extra water, need to do a re-test when I buy this again. So I added some chilli oil in to create some depth, and it sprung some life into the soup ^_^. It’s unfortunate there were no pieces of white radish, but considering the price, it is a simple meal for people who miss this type of food.

Well China Town is looking empty for the time being… hoping to see the crowds when Lockdown 3 is over!! Stay safe, take the vaccine when it’s being offered, and don’t break the frigging rules!!

Price of Bamboo Basket Beef Brisket Noodle Soup: £3.60 (at See Woo Supermarket)

Worth the price? – a definite yes! Defo need to try out the other flavours!

You can also buy them online if you’re in the London area (Zones 1 and 2 for the moment) on this website – just found it by chance… https://www.chinacentreuk.co.uk/product-category/soup-noodle-meals.

Haidilao Hotpot 海底撈火鍋- London, Piccadilly Circus (@Trocadero)

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Made it to my 1000th Post!! 👏👏👏 Well done to me!

However I’m beginning to really dislike WordPress’s Block Editor, because I can’t seem to get the pictures to look the right size or resizing seems to be difficult and trying to centre is just a nightmare! It’s an annoyance for a long-term blogger who used to be able to control how a blog post should look like rather than the blogging site making you write a blog post in a certain way… Such an annoyance! Grrr.

(A few moments later after fiddling so much…)

But now after a few trial and errors, things seem to have worked out, I hope! (This was probably why I stopped blogging for a bit, as the picture/image issue was my major problem – how to edit them!). 🤓

Mr Sensible said he was disappointed of me and Miss Money, because we didn’t introduce him to Chinese hotpot. 🤣🤣🤣 I actually thought hotpot was already a famous method of cooking/eating in the cooking. I guess not! Shame on this geek for making assumptions. So it was decided we go and try out a popular hotpot place amongst the current Eastern Asians living in London – Haidilao 海底捞 (Canto: hoi dei l海底撈火鍋海底撈火鍋

Haidilao is popular and infamous for their polite service. It was defo polite service! I guess better than some other Chinese restaurants I’ve been to. Got complimentary dishes of strips of tofu skin and spicy peanuts.

At Haidilao you get to choose more than one soup base for your food to boil in (up to four soups I think). So the ones we chose were the ones on discount – Mala (麻辣) – a very spicy soup that burns your mouth for a short of period of time compared to other spices, and the other was Tomato – a milder flavour.

Miss Money and I decided on getting ourselves a bubble tea each, whilst Mr Games and Mr Sensible went for fizzy drinks. I don’t think my Thai bubble tea was sweet enough. Oh well.

There is also an area where you can create your own sauces to dip your food in after boiling – see my two little plates next to the drinks?

Haidilao basically asks you to order your ingredients using an iPad. So all the ingredients you order are raw.

Once the soups start boiling, start putting the food in, boil it for up 5 to 10 minutes, then scoop, dip in your sauces and eat. And that’s we did all night! Well, for a couple of hours… You can keep ordering more food using the iPad if you feel you haven’t had enough.

Mr Games wasn’t impressed with having to constantly cook, wait and then eat. Mr Sensible seemed to enjoy it – I think he would go and eat this again. And Miss Money and I were just used to eating this way. LOL!

After eating and leaving the restaurant did I realise that they really did offer a free manicure! Wow!! That’s called SERVICE!!!

Did you know that you can buy the soup bases for hot pot in a Chinese supermarket? MummyGeek and I spotted the Haidilao brand in New Long Moon Supermarket in China Town!! You can easily make your own hotpot at home. ^_^

Total came to £102.46, that’s with drinks, some other extra food not pictured about (some fish and hand-pulled noodles – which are pulled right in front of your table!).

My geeky rating: 4.7 / 5 (it didn’t impress Mr Games so much, so knocked off a 0.3 points)

Address: Unit 4 Trocadero Centre, 5 Piccadilly Circus, London W1D 7DH

Tel: 020 8150 0616

Website: https://www.haidilao.com/en/index/index.html

Oriental Tasty Express 好好吃 – London, East Street Market

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My driving test is just around the corner. A bit nervous. Writing that I’m nervous might ease my nerves a bit. I hope it does… But in case I fail, I will try and try again before I give up! Just need to focus and plan ahead. Brexit is going to happen soon (whether we like it or not), so it might be best for me to finish up with this driving!!

 

I’ve been waiting patiently for Miss Pinky to suggest to go to this Chinese restaurant in East Street Market for a while now, but it’s been too long now, I went to try this place with MummyGeek (because I think she wanted to try it out as well).

This place is called Oriental Tasty Express 好好吃 (Canto: hou hou hek; Mando: hao hao chi). The Chinese meaning literally means “very tasty”. It’s a small restaurant

 

MummyGeek and I love eating beef brisket, so we ordered curry beef brisket with rice. This was an ok dish. I actually liked it!

 

I ordered the beef brisket noodle soup. The beef brisket was nice, but the soup hardly had any flavour to it. The soup was so plain. If you went to China Town, the flavours are much richer and suits well with the beef brisket.

 

 

 

Here’s a few takeaways… Special fried rice. I liked it. This didn’t have any soy sauce, which is what I like!! I think Mr Stingy thought it lacked a bit of flavour to it.

 

And these are the salt and pepper fried frog legs which I have been craving for! Yummy! They really taste like chicken.

 

Total here including the tea for two, plus adding the takeaway on top came to £40.70. I don’t think any service charge was added. That’s a first for a very long time!
I wouldn’t say it was all that tasty, but it feels like they do give it a try. It’s very much a northern style Chinese restaurant rather than a Cantonese based restaurant. The tastes are very vast.
MummyGeek actually bought some other types of takeaway from this restaurant a week or two later – I don’t recommend the duck and barbeque pork… I also bought some takeaway from the JustEat app for Miss Pinky and Mr Picky to taste. The sweet and sour food was ok, mussels were very spicy although Miss Pinky and her father said it wasn’t! Egg fried rice was ok.
My geeky rating: 4/5 (MummyGeek wouldn’t agree with this rating – probably a 2.5 for her Cantonese tastes).

Good points:
– Polite service
– Some foods are ok – especially the beef brisket
– No service charge added (!?)

Bad points:
– Slightly bland with their soup bases for the noodle soup
– Wouldn’t recommend the bbq or duck

Address: 54 East St, London SE17 2DN
Tel: 0203 609 4888

They have no website.

Gourmet Travels in Shenzhen – Day 11 + 12: Dim Sum, Durian and Dining

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Have paused my driving lessons for the moment. I’m almost there. Just need to kickstart my confidence and add a bit of oil, then do the test… But for the moment I have some time to do some blogging!


Saturday 7th July 2018

Woohoo! It was another weekend in China, and time for a spot of dim sum dining. It’s such a common activity and I’m so used to it by now! But the only thing I can’t understand is when everyone orders a lot of the same foods… The table just kept getting filled. So much food that my poor stomach couldn’t take anymore. I seriously don’t eat that much, I just don’t exercise. 😛

I saw these gluten butterflies and thought they were quite pretty. But tastewise, they were quite plain. The design was the only nice thing about this. 😑

Can’t remember what these were but there was prawn stuffed inside. Missy S was about to kill me with her glare when I said to Mrs Travels that she already 2 or 3 har gaw… Uh oh. I must not mess with Missy S and her foods. 

I was quite happy everyone got together. Family visits and being together is important in Chinese culture. 
It rained for the rest of the morning and afternoon, so we ended up staying in. I don’t mind. 
Later in the day, we ended up eating a lot of durian. Yep. Stinky durian. The taste is hard to describe, but it’s like mango/pineapple with a smooth cheesy texure and the smell of very stinky cheese… Talking about it makes me want to eat some. The bad thing about durian is that it makes you go to the toilet if you eat it with different combos of food… like don’t drink beer with durian which I had done. Not nice. 😱

Mrs Travels used some of the durian to make a pizza.

It actually tasted ok, but probably needed a bit of mature cheese as it was a little too sweet. But not bad! I want some now!

Uh hm. Yeah we had a bit of late night snacking with a beer… Excellent! There’s noodles at the bottom of this. ^_^

Mrs Travels had this… I think she had some cravings…

Sunday 8th July 2018

Short post. I can’t remember why we went out shopping again. It was one of those random things we were doing. Anyway, we ended up dining in KFC! The KFC in China feels a little different. Feels like they take in frying these chicken. 

And here’s just a random drink I bought from the shop… If only the British could be cuter with their food packaging. ^_^

End of Days 11 and 12. ^_^

Chung Ying Cantonese Restaurant 中英 – Chinese Quarter, Birmingham

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Free time means blogging time. 😉

Dim sum feast time!!!

The last time I went out to eat dim sum was a week before going to Birmingham! 😂

We went to a Cantonese restaurant which was Miss Wine’s choice, as originally she wanted us to try a Malaysian place a few doors down, but it looked busy and there was nowhere to put Baby B’s pram…

Chung Ying 中英 (Canto: jong ying; Mando: zhong ying) could have several meanings: “Chinese and English”, “Middle of England”, “In England/Britain”. I don’t know what the owners intention was but the name fairly fits in. 😆 It’s located in the middle of Chinese Quarter in Birmingham.

So we had a few minutes wait before going to our table.

And on the menu was KANGAROO! OMG. A Cantonese restaurant selling kangaroo meat. Woah. That was totally unexpected. Did I order any? Of course not!

We all ordered our dishes and dim sum… I think I ordered too much. But it makes up for the evening meal on the train journey. A sandwich for dinner. A feast for lunch the next day. 
I ordered my favourite Shredded Pork Crispy noodles. Practically had the whole plate as the other two didn’t like the mushrooms in it. ¬_¬ Seriously, why do people hate mushrooms?

Miss Pinky had her squid as usual. It was definitely fried differently. A different type of batter. It tasted quite crispy.

Miss Wine ordered the veggie spring rolls… Tasted ok!

Fried prawn balls with thousand sauce on top. Yummilicious!! I could eat these all over again!

Fried beef balls. Very different! Interesting to be honest. I would order these again. ^_^

Some steamed dumplings…

Elks in curry sauce. Yum yum. A bit spicy. Miss Pinky thought they look slimy.

Miss Wine ordered this… Not sure what this was to be honest. Hahahahah.

Miss Pinky had the gizzard / tripe. She loves the stuff.

But she found the ribs not to her liking. I think she thought they were the ones with extra sauce like the ones you get in the American steakhouses. She hardly had any of this… Too bad.

Total came to £52.10. Not too bad for three people. Although I feel like I ordered the majority. Roughly ~£17 each. It’s good. I paid the majority and Miss Pinky the rest. LOL! Treating our host Miss Wine. 😉

My geeky rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (5/5)

Good points:
– Polite service, one of the waiters even helped me with Baby B’s pram down the stairs even when I said she’s a bit heavy (sorry Baby B 😅)
– Reasonable prices… we apparently chose the ok cheapish dishes on the menu
– Very spacious restaurant
– Food came out reasonably quick… and steaming hot

Bad points:
– Can’t think of any! It just tastes as good as the stuff in London.

Address: 16-18 Wrottesley Street, Birmingham China Town, B5 4RT
Tel: 0121 622 5669
Website: https://www.chungying.co.uk/

Noodle Family Limited 万家面馆 – London Surrey Quays

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Christmas is now over and it’s a Happy New Year! We’ve got some food posts to get through! It’s been a somewhat quiet Christmas at home but busy at work… Couldn’t even catch up with my own database work. Damn work colleagues!!
How long has it been since I’ve blogged about Chinese food? Donkey years! 
So, Miss Pinky decided to take Baby B to see Santa, and so I tagged along. First stop, we had to go to a baby party and see Baby B’s cousins… Then it was time to eat something. Anything. I had a feeling that Miss Pinky wanted Chinese food, and seriously I couldn’t be bothered to say no to our first stop. Hahahahah.
Noodle Family Limited 万家面馆 (Traditional: 萬家麵館 – Canto: man ga min gun; Mando: wan jia mian guan. Meaning: 10,000 Family Noodles Restaurant) is right next door to Surrey Quays Overground Station. Miss Pinky used to go here when she was pregnant as she had lived nearby (now moved) but it’s my first time here.

Quickly looked at the menu. I think Miss Pinky was kind of rushing before Baby B threw a tantrum. 
Squid was the first option for starters. This was nicely prepared and tasted ok.

I had the beef slices with the handmade noodles and soup… It was kind of bland unfortunately. If the soup was a bit richer in taste I would have given this a thumbs up. Had to add lots of salt into it. The bowl of soup noodles contained stripped tofu slices, egg, black fungus, veggies… all a nice combo, only the soup was the main problem.

Miss Pinky had her beef in black bean sauce and veggies… as always she rarely touched the veggies and just went for the meat and sauce. I just don’t understand why she hates veggies! Why do people hate vegetables so much?

This is Baby B with her lightning hair trying to eat her chips… They were a bit too hot for her. Heheheh. Fussy eater at the moment. Her “Terrible Twos” is going to stay for a little bit. 😆 (But at least she enjoyed seeing Santa in Surrey Quays Shopping Centre).
Total came to £31.57. Gave Miss Pinky a little scare of the price by saying it was over £50. LOL! 

My Geeky Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4/5)

Good points:
– OK service
– Food came out quite quickly

Bad points:
– My noodles were a bit bland

Address: 1B Rotherhithe Old Rd, London SE16 2PP
Tel: 020 7232 1323

Zing Zing 调味 Chinese Food. Delivered – London Walworth Road

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Ah… for some reason the blogging app and website don’t sync! Had to rewrite some of this…
A long awaited post for those who live in the area of Walworth Road (not Elephant and Castle). Not sure why restaurants in the area like to place their addresses in the vicinity of Elephant and Castle, when they are clearly in Walworth! Get your geography right peeps… Elephant and Castle is technically part of Walworth and Newington (confusing, I know) – Part of Lambeth and Southwark… Awkward!
Geography lesson over. Let’s get on with the food! 
So Zing Zing! Is not the actual pronunciation of those two Chinese characters that are displayed. 调味 (Mando: tiao wei; Canto: tiu mei) means “seasoning” which gives the “zing zing” on our food. All our food needs a bit of Zing Zing I guess.
Zing Zing! is slotted between some not so obvious shops so it’s easily missed with their black outer layer and shop sign saying “Chinese food. Delivered”. 😅

Inside the tiny takeaway serves the not so typical Chinese foods but actually a variety of Asian foods like Korean and Thai foods. It’s pretty much a Pan Asian takeaway. (Should they really be using the word “Chinese” for their foods? Controversial!).

Ordered a few dishes. 4 dishes to be exact. The nice thing about this place, although small, you can see the chefs cook. Took a little while to cook but I didn’t mind since it was raining heavily outside. 🌧
These are the free Thai prawn crackers I got… (actually got 2 boxes… Think the guy serving probably thought I didn’t get any). 😅 
This is the salt and pepper squid. The squid had enough zing zing on top, fried nicely and was not rubbery at all. Nice and soft.

I think this dish is quite popular. Sweet and sour chicken. It wasn’t too sweet and not too sour, had a nice texture… I would go for this dish again!

The Chilli beef strips were a little tough but it tasted amazing! A nice lot of zing zing here!!

The beef chow mein was really tasty!! It reminded me of the Chinese fried and dried beef with flat rice noodles… Woooow…!! 

The leftovers were taken to work. Couldn’t waste it!

Total cost came £28.80. Expensive for 4 dishes! I can actually buy more dishes in a normal Chinese takeaway for the same price.

My geeky rating: 4.5/5 (lost a 0.5 because of being expensive)

Good points:
– Very tasty dishes
– Customer service was somewhat ok (but I think arguments can be set aside… Even if they are minor)

Bad points:
– Expensive!

Address: 227 Walworth Rd, London SE171RL
Tel: 020 3745 8696

Website: https://www.zing-zing.co.uk/

One Plus Chinese Restaurant 一品天下 – London China Town

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As you may remember Miss Money, who has been my friend for 10++ years, works around the China Town area, so she knows when there’s a new restaurant opening, or some sort of new food shop. LOL! She’s been waiting for me to write this post since February, but I’ve been too busy and lazy… 😀 Getting old is not fun peeps… you become a tired zombie from work, social life, Pokémon hunting (LOL) and all you want to do is sleep…

So this restaurant One + 一品天下 (Mando: yi pin tian xia; Canto: yat bun tin ha… kind of literally means “one goods/product world”, but I don’t know the exact meaning of it) opened in February. Miss Money had already been there once with her colleagues, but invited me (plus Mr Games and Mr Sensible, but they decided not to come). 

The table settings look quite plain and simple.

We looked at the menu and they were all in colourful pictures which I guess helps people who aren’t Chinese speakers or readers to decide what they want. There was a big seafood platter on a hot plate on the menu which looked kind of messy when I saw other people eating their food. 
Anyway, we ordered. Well Miss Money did the ordering…
Out came first were my spicy pig intestines. I love these. I know that they can be unclean, but these were ok. They were very spicy, slightly on the salty side, but didn’t mind that. Did I eat these in HK last year? I can’t remember.

Next came out was the sweet and sour chicken. It was kind of a small portion size for the price tagged alongside with it. This is what Miss Money wanted to eat. I’m not sure if we were impressed with the flavouring or not, but it did need more sugar in it. To be honest, I still like Cantonese style sweet and sour foods, other My Old Place in Liverpool St still has a great northern style. ^_^

The portion size of our shrimp egg fried rice was not impressive either. Felt too small! But taste wise it was fine.

I ordered this aubergine dish… it was mega salty!! Slightly spicy, but I did like the dish which went well with the rice.

Miss Money and I were still hungry (well I was anyway), so we ordered for a plate of chicken dumplings… it took forever to come, and I felt like we were going to be there all night… Had they forgotten our order? Nope… just took too long!

It was interesting served like this…

And all we had to do was split them up.

I think this had to be my favourite dish of the evening… A nice thick doughy skin texture, and it was a good portion size.

Total price came to £43.89 including drinks. Very expensive looking dinner Miss Money!

My geeky rating: 4.5/5

Good points: 
– Polite service
– Liked the dumplings

Bad points:
– Had to wait a bit long for the food
– A bit expensive

Address: 31 Gerrard St, London W1D
Tel: 020 7287 2838

After dinner, we went walking (whilst catching Pokémon)… Noticed a drawing on New Loon Moon Supermarket’s pillar. LOL!

Tried to take a picture of the signs on the traffic lights… total fail with my mobile phone… :p

This was outside BFI Southwark. Euro forever! 😀

And of course the London Eye lit up in red… I forgot what for at the time. ^_^

Tuen Ng Festival (Dragon Boat Festival) 2016

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About a week and a half ago, on June 9th was Tuen Ng Festival in Asia. What’s Tuen Ng Festival? It’s called 端午節 (Canto: dyun m jit; Mando: Duān wǔ jié) literally meaning “end, noon, festival” but it means Dragon Boat Festival.
There’s various stories of it’s origin which I think you’ll need to look up because I can’t decide which one is a good one to tell!
As well as boat racing the Chinese will eat Zhong (pronounced: Jung) which is sticky rice with some meat and veggie filling and yellow beans wrapped in banana leaves and then are steamed. I bought lots on the day in China Town (after a really, really stressful day which ended in misery at work.  
‧º·(˚ ˃̣̣̥⌓˂̣̣̥ )‧º·˚ – needed cheering up!!). 
This all cost me £31!!! OMG. So expensive. 

I bought 6 savoury ones and 2 sweet red bean ones (the smaller version) in a back street where they manufacture these and lots of other foods for the companies around China Town and London wide.

The savoury one smelled so nice!! It’s massive compared to the normal triangular version you would see in the supermarkets. There was a lot of yellow beans, some char siu and one piece of mushroom. Needed some salt! My parents had some and I had loads (finished the last one yesterday).

This is the smaller, sweet one. I didn’t really like this one. It wasn’t sweet enough. MummyGeek thinks even diabetics could have tried this one as there was hardly any sugar in it. Hahahahah. Anyway, to make it sweet, add syrup or some sugar on top methinks. 

If you see this piece of paper on the wall in China Town (if it’s still there) you know which alleyway I went into. 😉

On that weekend when The Queen was celebrating her second birthday (which was also MummyGeek’s birthday – Happy Birthday Mother!) I saw the English doing their Dragon Boat race along the River Thames! Heheheheh… thankfully I didn’t take the Tube!! ^_^

p.s. Happy Father’s Day!!!!! DaddyChef is doing the cooking this afternoon though… hahahahahahah!!

Chinese Tapas House 愛吃鬼小屋 – London Little Newport Street

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On one weekend I really wanted to try out the squid in Bigbe Chicken. But every time (that’s a total of three times) I went in and asked, they’ve sold out… meaning…?
I decided in the end to give Chinese Tapas House 愛吃鬼小屋 (Canto: oi hek gwai siu uk; Mando: ai chui guai xiao wu)  a go (apparently Miss Money goes in there all the time. So greedy!). The place literally means: “love eat ghost small house”.
Looking at the displays on the window, I wanted to try out the savoury pancake which I couldn’t see on their menu at first but saw a big picture of it when I looked up. 

I was looking at someone else’s savoury pancake being made…

With my poor Mandarin (although I understood what they were asking) I ordered it…

It was like watching crepes being made.

So when I went home, what they add is a frankfurter, fried dough (yau jia gwai), salted preserved pickles, fried pigs skin, egg, spring onions, sesame seeds and chilli oil. I had asked for it to be a little spicy but it was spicy anyway… The fried dough became soggy enough to bite into as they are usually tough. Biting it bit by bit meant I could taste the pancake blending in with all the ingredients. The pickles gave it some saltiness but the rest is bland so it went well with everything. ^_^

That was worth a good £3.50.

Address: Little Newport Street, China Town, London