holiday food

Lots of celebrations this month and we start off with The Peninsula Hotel's 85th Anniversary. An all night party with fabulous food, drink and edible displays.

Black garlic has been making some headlines promoting many health benefits.

We get our hands on some and enjoy the rich balsamic-like flavour it adds to our dishes. Using grass-fed French butter, cream and a mix of fresh shitake and oyster mushrooms, we add the black garlic to our pasta.

For Christmas dinner we get a case of fresh parsnips from the US. We serve them Nigella Lawson's glazed with maple syrup.

Also on the menu is a ginger and apricot glazed ham and New York Magazine's Cauliflower and Gruyere Macaroni Gratin.

Christmas wouldn't be the glutinous holiday it is without all the baked treats. Check out this very moist and delicious recipe for Guiness Gingerbread Cake. And using US sourced dried cranberries, almonds and pecans we make...lots of holiday cookies!

What to do when you get a 11 pound box of cherries?

 The answer is Nigella Lawson's Chocolate Cherry Trifle!

autumn holidays

This holiday time of year in HK showcases some uniquely American autumn produce on supermarket shelves like these Halloween-themed black grapes.

Sugar or baking pumpkins.

Great for making pumpkin pie of course.

Also soups and stews.

And nothing is wasted with the seeds being roasted with a little olive oil and coarse salt.

This year for Thanksgiving, we were very fortunate to try 2 new types of turkey. This one's from Framani and it comes pre-brined and seasoned:

It's oven ready so there's nothing to prepare. Just unwrap and roast.

 This is a Mary's Heritage Turkey:

 Brussel sprouts sauteed with Oscar Mayer bacon:

Corn bread and oyster stuffing:

 

Baked garnet yams. Recipe courtesy of nigella.com:

And another pumpkin pie to end the meal.

quinoa and mussels

We've been experimenting with more quinoa recipes. A black quinoa salad made with red onion, pineapple, cucumbers and an olive oil and white vinegar dressing.

Makes a fruity and crunchy accompaniment to grilled salmon, baby Chinese kale and mixed short grain steamed rice.

This is a mix of black and white quinoa with fennel, mint and lemon vinaigrette.

As we head into the cooler months, US black mussels come into season. These are from the Pacific Northwest.

Steamed mussels in a white wine sauce, recipe adapted from SimplyRecipes.com.

 And this version is made with a champagne cream sauce.

adelaide

We were in Adelaide, Australia this month visiting Ferguson Australia, a premium seafood processor, supplier and retailer.

Their specialty is Australian Rock Lobster and the season has just started.

We also visited the K1 Vineyard in the Adelaide Hills wine region of Mclaren Vale. Below are tastings of their Chardonnay 2012 and Rose 2013.

At the Central Market, we perused the stalls to see what was in season. There were beautiful bunches of butter, red and coral lettuce.

Really vibrant rainbow carrots.

And these not so fresh looking, thick skinned, but actually alright tasting Muscat-like grapes. They must have been leftover or rejects from a wine, table grape or raisin vineyard given how low they were priced.

To round off our trip, we had a lovely lunch experience at Celsius which was opened by a chef who once worked at the famed Noma in Copenhagen. The chef sources local ingredients, uses produce grown on the restaurant's own farm and serves it all with a modern twist. Our starter was a really fresh and pretty salad of Raki cured Kingfish, apple, cucumber and whey. We especially loved the edible floral additions.

For our mains, we decided to try kangaroo (when in Rome...) which was served slightly rare (as it is a very lean meat) and tasted very venison and caribou-like. The kangaroo was paired with turnips (served 3 ways; pickled, ribbon-ed and pureed) and onions (served 2 ways; red wine reduction and powdered form). It was all a delicious melody of complimentary and satisfying flavours.

seafood of the season

We didn't know that when a case of lemons was ordered this month, we would end up with 96 of them. That's a lot of lemons. Well you know how the saying goes, "When life gives you lemons..."

But in our case rather than making lemonade, we decided to pair with some seafood of the season instead. First up are Alaskan King Crab Legs. They arrive fully cooked and frozen (done on the boat apparently like on Deadliest Catch), so all you have to do is thaw, blanch in hot water to rinse off the excess salt (from the seawater), and serve chilled or warmed via steaming, baking, or grilling. 

The season has just started for Barron Point Oysters too. They're a type of pacific oyster that hail from the pristine waters of Puget Sound in Washington State.

These type of oysters are fairly large and plump. They range in size from 3 to 3 1/2 inches.

Serve raw with a lemon vinaigrette or maybe try Sriracha or wasabi.

Escolar from Hawaii is also available in HK now. It's an oily, tender and meaty white fish that sometimes appears on restaurant menus as Butterfish. If you search for it on the Internet, you'll find many gastro-related warnings about consuming large quantities of this fish because of its oily content.

We've had it several times in the past with no issue, enjoying it especially at Roy's in San Francisco. It's a very flavourful and delicious fish that requires little dressing or saucing. Substitute it with Nobu's Black Cod with Miso recipe or have it simply steamed with ginger, green onions, and topped off with some low sodium soya sauce.

And we've posted about Langoustine or Scampi before, but we just had to write about it again because The Drawing Room served us a really delectable dish with it. The New Zealand langoustine came paired with Italian coco beans, Italian ovary egg mushrooms and Turkish figs. It was a lovely melody of flavours with the carmelized figs adding sweetness and a crunch of sugar, the buttery textured beans contributed the perfect amount of starch, and the mushrooms were a sponge of all combined juices.

fall equals spring

Fall in America means Spring in Australia and this is where our latest shipment of goodies comes from.

Tender and very sweet asparagus stalks. We're usually not big asparagus fans, but we have to admit that these were exceptionally good. We had them steamed, blanched, grilled, and stir-fried with with shrimp.

These Aussie mandarins were the sweetest we've ever had. They did have a ton of seeds though, but other than that little extra effort they were a delight to have.

On your supermarket shelves these days, you'll find ECO bananas from Australia. They're environmentally friendly and you'll recognize them instantly from their red wax tip.

And in the refrigerated section, you'll find these new specialty items from the US. Framani sausages from Berkeley, California.

And Blue Hill Bay smoked seafood from Brooklyn, New York.

We also got a big 5 pound bag of black quinoa with our delivery, so we're in search of more good quinoa recipes. We find that it has a nuttier flavour than regular white quinoa, but we couldn't really tell the difference in taste from the red kind.

Last week's SCMP Post Magazine featured quinoa prominently in its recipe section.