Surprise dinner date
This evening we attended the launch of my Honours supervisor’s new novel. The event was held in a function room at a restaurant in Fremantle, and the book was officially launched with a speech (complete with a very funny blooper!) by the author Tim Winton. I would’ve taken photos of the finger food that was served, but I didn’t really want to draw too much attention to myself and look like a complete weirdo in front of the literary crowd and various staff members from my university, including my tutoring boss (no one at uni knows my secret identity as a food blogger, and I plan to keep it that way, at least for a little while longer). The finger food included these cute little deep-fried money-bag shaped wantans with gingery meaty filling served with sweet chilli dipping sauce, samosas served with a chunky sweet onion jam (the jam was too chunky to be served as a dip, but it did smell good), vegetarian spring rolls, battered chilli squid, and these strange round, bready discs topped with olives and caramelised onion (extremely bready, but served fresh and hot from the oven). It was all pretty nice, but I didn’t really eat much – I was too busy checking out the crowd and catching up with a couple of people I haven’t seen for a while (in one case, quite a long time, oh say, 12 or 13 years?).
When we left the launch we were both still hungry. We hadn’t specifically made any plans for dinner; we thought we’d eat whatever food was at the launch and see how we felt afterwards. It was just before 9pm when we got in the car and began our search for food. We drove around and ended up at the Yummy BBQ Chinese Restaurant, in Myaree. And so this was our unplanned, surprise dinner date. We decided to order some rice and a couple of dishes to share. We ordered a small special fried rice, which was really delicious. As you can see it was loaded with stuff, including sliced mushrooms and big bits of char siu and chicken. It had a really lovely “wok hei” flavour. Definitely one of the yummier special fried rices we’ve eaten.
We also ordered the fried chicken with supreme sauce. We had no idea what supreme sauce was, but we felt like some fried chicken, so we just went for it. It turned out to be a REALLY delicious dish! We think the supreme sauce had soy sauce and sugar in it, as well as loads and loads of… sherry! Jac just loves sweet sauces, and she was really happy with the sweet, sticky supreme sauce. I loved how the chicken had a really crunchy, crispy coating, and they were very succulent dark meat pieces.
As we were shown to our table, Jac noticed some people at another table tucking into a dish of ma po tofu. She thought it looked really good, and since that’s one of my favourite dishes, that was our third dish. The ma po tofu was even better than what we regularly have via our local chinese home delivery, which is pretty damn good! This was even more delicious. I don’t know what the secret ingredient was (some of you will probably suggest it was msg) but it was really moreish. I did bite into extra-hot chilli bits (there was red and green chilli in the dish, so it was pretty spicy) a few times and needed lots of tea to soothe my burning mouth, but I really enjoyed the dish.
We couldn’t finish all the food, and so Jac asked for a doggie bag (yep, we’re both the doggie!). The waitress asked if we minded if she “put the food all together”. We told her that was OK (thinking she would put the food from the three dishes into the same takeaway container), and I was a little surprised when she (at our table) quickly scraped the chicken over the top of the ma po tofu and then literally plonked the last of fried rice messily over the top of that, and then took away the pile of food to be shoved into a takeaway container. I’d kind of thought she’d put the rice in the container first, then the chicken on one side and then the tofu on the other side, you know, have a little order/neatness to it, so that the flavours were kept at least minimally separate (maybe I’m just anal, eh?). Oh well. This little doggie will be happily sharing the messy pile of food with the other doggie tomorrow.