Wok 'n' BBQ

Whenever we feel like eating out on the weekend, we usually end up at Burwood for some Chinese roast and rice. Since the lovely name and shame of one of our regulars, we thought we should try out another place. Wok 'n' BBQ has been open for about a year. We had visited it when it opened during its first week. We probably would've visited earlier if they didn't have a blackout on the day we went. hehehe The shop is located on the corner of Burwood Rd, next to the train station.



I've been back a few times since as its a nicer and cleaner environment to enjoy lunch compared to some of the other roasts shops (Which is more eat and run type style).

Complimentry soup that's not in a brown cracked plastic bowl

BBQ Pork and rice

Soya chicken and rice

Roast pork and rice

Another BBQ Pork and rice

Roast duck noodle soup - seperated

The roast is really nice and fresh. Taste wise, its very similar to the other shops. The portion sizes are slightly smaller, but that's because they don't load you up on the rice. They still give you the same amount of meat and veggies as the other shops which is good. The price is also similar to the other shops, usually around the $8-10 mark.

All in all, a lovely Chinese roast lunch in a nice clean setting with real crockery. If you're starving, you might want to head up to some of the other shops where they give you more rice. Otherwise, a good place to catch up with friends.

Home cooked comfort

My friends have been complaining that I haven't updated my blog for awhile. I guess I've been really lazy and basically just enjoying home time since I've been back from Houston. Plus I've also been busy planning my Europe trip! Yes that's right! Europe is on babyyyyyyyyy!!! I've booked our tickets and our tour, just need to sort out additional accommodation and transport for all the other free time in between. I can't wait for a proper holiday!

In the meantime, I've been at home cooking up a storm whenever I get a chance. Basically I want to dose up on homecooked comfort food every time I look at the food I ate in Houston.

Malay Chicken curry and rice

Combination Bugolgi

Easy to make. Get any amount of chicken, beef, lamb and pork, marinate in premade bottled bugolgi sauce. Stir fry quickly with onions, carrots and more sauce.

Stir fry garlic veggies

One of the things I missed the most when I was in Houston, veggies! The minute I got home, I stir fried a huge plate of shanghai bok choy and brocolli with plenty of garlic and a little oyster sauce. Really light and refreshing.

Homemade BBQ Pork

We couldn't get any decent chinese food in Houston, so I whipped this up for a bit of home comfort. 2 mins to put the marinade together, leave in the fridge overnight and roast. Can it get any easier than that? Recipe can be found here.

Min Chee

Inspired by TPF. I love this dish! Take some beef or pork mince and brown in a pan. And I mean REALLY brown in the pan. Add garlic, diced onion, potato and water. The water will lift all the lovely brown stuff from the bottom of the pan. Add oyster sauce, soya sauce and sugar to taste. Let it simmer til the potato and soft adn the sauce thickens (because the potato will start to break down). Eat with a spoon with or without rice.

Extra garlicky king prawns with choy sum and broccoli

Pork bone and watercress soup

I remembered one night we were all sitting around the office in Houston, 2am in the morning when we start discussing how miserable we were. And how we would kill for some home cooking. Specifically mum's soup! Every asian loves the soup mum makes. We were all craving pork bone and watercress soup. When I got back to Sydney, my whole family was on holidays leaving me home alone. Since mum wasn't around to make me soup, I had to make it myself! Comfort in a bowl.

"Sand Ginger" steamed chicken

Not sure what the herb is called, but its literal translation is "Sand Ginger". Its a common spice that is found in salt baked chicken. I covered the chicken with heaps of sand ginger and salt. Let it sit for a few hours before steaming. Pour the chicken juice all over boiled rice and consume. Yum!

Beef and capsicum in blackbean sauce

Stir fried bean sprouts

I didn't just miss home cooking, but also good quality junk food! Actually, non-liquid yellow paint like cheese would be a good start. And after all my junk food eating in Houston, I reckon I could whip up a mean burger.

SMJ Extravaganza!

For something a little different, I did a cheddar cheese stuffed all beef patty. Big hunk of cheese in the middle of my beef patty. You have to be super careful biting into the burger to make sure you don't get burnt by molten melted oozey cheese! Didn't make it easy to eat when I put bacon, eggs, lettuce and tomato into the burger as well.

Innards - Super oozey egg yolk

MmMmmm Cheesey...

I've also been hunting for a jaffle maker. Not the dodgy sandwich makers that try to cut your toasted sandwiches in half. I'm talking about the good old square pocket jaffle maker. I finally found one made by Breville! Damn I missed having a jaffle maker! I went and started experimenting with all different types of fillings. Ham, tomato, cheese, baked beans. But my favourite combo so far is my ham, cheese and egg jaffle.

A whole raw egg is cracked onto the bread, cover with ham and cheese and cook in the jaffle maker. Its best to use room temperature eggs, otherwise leave it cooking for a few cycles. Perfectly runny egg yolks......MmMmmm....

With winter hitting us full blast the other week, I've been sick as a dog. To make myself feel better, I've been having wonton noodle soup for lunch almost every day. The best thing to make me feel better when sick. I am also currently on a mission to find the best wonton noodle soup in the city. But why wait for the best wonton when you can make it? So I crashed a friends place to make a huge wonton and dumpling feast!


Left (Yellow): Homemade chicken and mushroom wonton
Right (White): Store bought pork and chives dumplings and seafood dumplings.

Homemade pork and veggie gyoza

Bottoms up!

The gyoza was super easy to make! I made a simple filling of pork, diced veggies, mushroom and black fungus. Wrap in gow gee wrapper and pan fry with a bit of water. I made a simple dipping sauce of soya sauce, rice vinegar and sesame oil.

Soya stir fried wontons

I made extra wontons with the chicken and mushroom and also the pork and veggie filling. Once boiled, these were quickly stir fried with dark soy and a little sesame oil. This was a dish my parents used to always make me when I helped out at the restaurant. Its been a good 8 years since I've eaten it, but its just as good as I remembered!

Great Century Restaurant - Dim sum galore!

I LOVE YUM CHA. I REALLY REALLY LOVE YUM CHA. Except I don't usually get to go Yum Cha. :(

I probably go......twice a year? That's because my Dad has a weekly ritual of going to Yum Cha with his friends, so when it comes to the weekend, he's all Yum Cha'd out! How rude! Determined to put a stop to this situation, I dragged a friend along (Actually, I don't think there was much resistance there!) for a bout of yum cha gorging at Great Century Restaurant in Bankstown.

The great thing about this place is that there is usually heaps of parking in Bankstown, the food is good, the portions are quite decent, AND you get 20% off Yum Cha Mon-Saturday! OH YEAHHHHHH BABY!

Despite getting a crappy seat by the fish tanks where most trolleys cannot go past, we still managed to get a heap of the dishes we love!

Siw Mai - Pork and prawn dim sim

I cannot go yum cha without ordering atleast one steamer of these. Luckily, I'm not with my nephew today, who will ONLY eat siw mai. He'll easily eat 4 steamers of these just by himself. And me, being the older Aunt, will need to give up a few of these babies to him because I'm suposed to. Hmpf. But today, it's all mineeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!

Har Gau - Prawn Dumpling, my second favourite!

Pork ribs steamed with black beans

Salt and pepper calamari

The first 2 times these came out, we couldn't flag the waitress down because of where we were sitting. By the time we got our hands on these babies, they were cold :(

Harm Sui Gok

These golden babies are crunchy and chewy at the same time. It's filled with pork mince, dried shrimp and mushrooms. There were actually 4 on the plate, but we were hungry!

Sui Gau

Standard won ton like dumplings. Quite nice, but not really worth the price. I think they put this down as an "Extra Special".

Whole prawn dumpling

This one had a whole prawn on the tail, wrapped with prawn mince and then the wrapper. Really nice, but I still like the classic Har Gau.

Chicken feet!

A second round of Siw Mai!

Teeheheheheeeeee! My nephew isn't here, so I get to have another steamer full to myself! Woohoo!!

The whole bill came to around $55. A bargain if you ask me! We didn't even finish all the food and ended up taking some of it home.

Great Century Restaurant
23 Greenfield Parade, Bankstown
(02) 9708 6354

The last of the feasting for awhile.....(plus a bit of a rant)

December was all about food. January finally rolled around where I tried to get back on track with eating right, going to the gym at lunch and basically going easy on the alcohol. Come February, my favourite Uncle was visiting from Hong Kong. This meant 2 things. Eating heaps, and drinking everything in sight. Thank goodness he's only here for 1 week!

One of the things we always do when my uncle visits is to load up on the seafood. He loves Australian seafood, we decided to go to Yummy Seafood Chinese Restaurant in Beverly Hills. This was a restaurant we've been to quite a few times, and is frequented by my parents and their friends. They were doing a special on lobster, which was the main reason for coming. They fished a 2.7kg lobster out of the tank for us, which we requested to be cooked with stock on a bed of e-fu noodles. We also ordered a few other dishes to go with it.

Peking pork ribs

Our night was going really well. We were enjoying each other's company, snacking on the ribs whilst watching all the other tables receiving their lobsters. Almost every single table had ordered lobster of some sort. Whether it was cooked or done sashimi style. Then our lobster came out and this is what we got:

Our lobster

If you have a closer look, those shreds of white stuff, is actually lobster meat. At first it looked like an eggy sauce was poured on top, but no. That was our $160 lobster meat disintergrating into the sauce. We asked the manager to check with the chef why our lobster was cooked like that. He took one look at it, lifted up a few pieces with a fork and watched it break apart and fall back onto the dish. He runs back to the kitchen and then gets another manager to talk to us.

The senior manager comes up to us and apologises, saying that the chef is really busy tonight rar rar rar.....and (I'm paraphrasing since this was going on all in cantonese) "can we just live with the dish". Excuse me??? "Live with the dish"??? If this was any other dish that cost $30, we wouldn't even have complained. We would've eaten what was good and left the rest. THIS dish was going to cost us close to $160.!We weren't going to just "live with it". We asked if he could cook us another lobster, and he exclaims that he's barely making any money on this lobster as it is! Honestly, if you can't afford to do a special without making a profit, then you shouldn't be doing a special at all. Just because you're doing it at a special price, doesn't mean you can serve us turd. When we told him this was not acceptable, because we're paying for a lobster dish, and we're basically not getting any lobster as everything has disintergrated, he starts yelling "WELL WHAT DO YOU WANT THEN!?".

To be fair, we offered to pay for 50% of the dish. I mean, they did use the lobster, just that they massacred it. Upon hearing this, the manager stood there thinking for about 3 seconds and went "Well, if you're only going to pay for 50%, you might as well not pay!". He yanked the dish off the table and almost throws it at another waiter whilst screaming "THROW THIS IN THE BIN!".

Having worked in a restaurant and knowing heaps of people in the restaurant business, we know its stressful when its busy. But what they brought out to us was a joke. It was clearly not restaurant quality. Even the standard housewife can cook something better at home, it was THAT bad. If Gordon Ramsay was there, he would've throw the plate half way across the restaurant. Heck, after the managers performance, I would've thrown it half way across the room if they didn't take the dish from us. Needless to say, we did not enjoy the rest of our meal one bit. Even when the other dishes came out, we had already lost our appetite to eat. We left most of the food untouched, paid and left.

I can tell you, we won't be back for a VERY long time, and neither will our friends and relatives. And considering the way word spreads, neither will our friend's friends.

To make up for this huge disappointment of a meal, we went home and drank 4 bottles of wine! Woohoo! The only bad thing was that we had to get up early the next day to hit the Sydney Fish Markets. I was definitely going to make up for the seafood debarcle that happened last night!

We get to the Fish Markets for brunch. Having left the restaurant without really eating the night before, being hungover and haven't had breakfast, I got straight into action! We grabbed a table and set off in groups of 2 to buy food!

Part of the spread

2 Doz Sydney Pacific Oysters - served with lemon or Tetsuya oyster dressing

Calamari rings

2 x Oyster mornay and 6 x grilled scallops in half shell

1/2kg salmon sashimi

2 whole crabs

2 whole lobsters

I also grabbed 1/2 kg jumbo king prawns, a packet of abalone sashimi, uni (sea urchin), seaweed salad, grilled barramundi with chips and fish cocktails! This was really for 3 people. My mum ate 1/2 of the barramundi and some seaweed only. My dad had a few fish cocktails and 1/2 a lobster. The rest was shared amongst me, my uncle and aunt! We were so full we almost had to be wheeled out of there! We finished almost everything except 1 crap, the seaweed salad an calamari.

My sister, hearing about our dinner the night before, went out and bought another 2 dozen oysters and a kilo of prawns for our BBQ dinner that night. (Not realising we were going to the fish markets, and the day before my mum had bought 1kg of prawns for snacking on at home!).

Later that night, we headed over to my sisters place for a BBQ. (She had asked if we wanted to BBQ at our place or her place, of course her place I said! No washing up for me afterwards! LoL). We decided to split up the food prep as she had already marinated the chicken and bought the sausages and seafood. Me and my uncle got together to do the red meat. I did a lamb chops with garlic, rosemary and red wine. He marinated the world's BEST pork chops I've ever eaten! I really hate pork chops as I find them dry and tasteless. His pork chops were moist, succulent and melts in the mouth! Oh yum!!

Some of the stuff cooking on the BBQ

I ended up manning the BBQ stove most of the time and didn't really get to take much photos. Here's a few.

Pork and chicken sausages and grilled chicken wings

Grilled garlic prawns - done by my uncle

He also did his favourite garlic oysters!

Close up

Hot damn! These oysters were amazing! He simply put them on the grill in the shells, and DOLLOPED on a heaped teaspoon of chinese crushed garlic. (Lee Kum Kee brand) As the oyster cooks, it bubbles on the grill. When we took them off the grill, the oyster was hot, but still smooth and creamy on the inside. Sooooooo good! And, we didn't have to worry about vampires! lol