Taste Sensation: Durios

We were walking past our Asian grocer and spotted this: The Durio


Our last Durian Taste Sensation was completely vile, but we thought, given how popular durians are around the world, maybe it was just a bad one? Perhaps if we had them in the form of a durian-filled Oreo it would be better? And for only $1.90, how could we go past that?

Opening the package made us all dry reach. But Gib took it upon himself to give it a go. Or at least try to...

Even after we had put it in two plastic bags and left it on the bench, you could still smell the stench of the durios. The smell of urinal cakes, sewerage and rotting mangos permeated throughout the kitchen, until finally Gib's mum cracked it and threw them in the bin.

Lesson: Do not eat durian flavoured anything.

Taste Sensation: Nacho pizza!

We created the ultimate Taste Sensation at a friend's housewarming recently. The marriage of two delicious comfort foods: Nachos and Pizza!

The pizza dough was made from scratch, and the crust was stuffed with cheese. The base sauce was just plain old pizza sauce...

...topped with a single layer of corn chips...


Then a layer of cheese, salsa and jalepinos...

Baked for 15 minutes until golden and bubbly

And eaten with guacamole and sour cream!

For all of you non-believers out there who don't think that Nacho Pizza can work, you'll be surprised (as I was!) to know that it was a hit and there were demands throughout the night for more nacho pizzas to be made. Even from the people who hated the idea to begin with. The corn chips melded beautifully with the pizza base, but had enough crunch that it was still distinctly nachos. The sour cream and guacamole on top, with a sprinkling of spring onions, is a must. Go on, try it yourself!

Taste Sensation! ... Vegetarian kidneys?

We have yet another new and exciting Asian grocer that has just opened up in our area. They are chocked full of exciting products that the other 5 Asian grocers in our area don't sell. Including this:


Can't tell you how it tastes. We're going to let that one remain a "potential" Taste Sensation! for a while longer.

Taste Sensation needs some translation

Gib and I were in our local asian grocer. It's a fairly new one to our area and the main reason why I like going there is because it's called "Glory Mart". For some reason that amuses me. Oh, and they are the only place I've found that sells edamame, which is a favourite of mine.

But they do stock an extensive range of delicious and interesting food (and some interesting but not so delicious food). We spotted this and had to buy it because it looked like a good Taste Sensation candidate, but then realised we have no idea how to make it. My Japanese skills ain't that good yet. I can read the words, but don't know what it means. I'm so used to Japanese food coming with awesome diagrams that I'm a little lost with this one. It looks like there are just 3 easy steps... 3 easy steps that I can't read. I'm assuming it is made with milk though. I'd even say 200ml of milk. I've sent a copy of it to my friend, Erika, who is Japanese. I'm betting she'll be able to help me with this one.

"Let's make dessert with milk!"

Taste Sensation: The Durian Smoothie

Tonight we had a family dinner at China Bar, which was of course the perfect opportunity for a Taste Sensation! At China Bar, the best place to look for a Taste Sensation is the drinks menu. Gib went with the durian smoothie - a bold move.

Courtesy of mt_rye. I love the description: "If you don't know what Durian is, you owe it to yourself to look it up on wikipedia. Yes, it made one fellow diner almost ill just from the smell."

If we go to wikipedia, here's the description of the flavour of a durian:

"The edible flesh emits a distinctive odour, strong and penetrating even when the husk is intact. Regarded by some as fragrant, others as overpowering and offensive, the smell evokes reactions from deep appreciation to intense disgust. The odour has led to the fruit's banishment from certain hotels and public transportation in Southeast Asia."

Further on in the article it quotes novelist Anthony Burgess as describing "like eating sweet raspberry blancmange in the lavatory", which is more in line with my opinion of it. The flavour descriptions amongst our family ranged somewhere between dry, mango or off lychee to urinal cakes. It's like a smooth, custardy, pungent fruit, but with an almost savoury twist to it as well. The initial taste was the worst - the smell/flavour is really hits you and is very overwhelming - then the flavour improves to almost pleasant, but quickly deteriorates into vile again.

I can tell you as I'm writing this and burping occasionally (oh, the burps are the worst. I'm actually afraid to burp right now) that I can assure you I will never again consume durian smoothie. Even a quick search on flickr will show you that I'm not the only one. My favourite is the one titled Never. Get. The. Durian. Smoothie. And then there's this poor guy. Regrettably, I was in a rush as I was leaving this evening and didn't have my camera or even my phone (it was charging) to capture the moment.

However we did manage finish the durian smoothie. I think this is a decision we are now regretting.

Taste Sensation: Trolli Glotzer

Edit: Sorry, dear readers! I know some of you were a wee bit grossed out and put off your lunch yesterday. I tried my best to put the rest of the post behind a "cut" by working through Blogger's horrible expandable post summaries help guide, and then I tried other methods and still couldn't work out how to do it. So I'm just going to do a:

Warning: do not read below if don't like gross things!

A dear friend sent me a packet of confectionery eyeballs in the mail the other day.

I was seriously impressed by the detail in them: the difference in texture between the iris/lens/cornea etc (which is quite firm, even the shape of this part is quite accurate) and vitreous humour (which is slightly more squishy), and blood vessels. Clearly these guys have gone to a lot of effort to achieve anatomical accuracy while still keeping it a fun confectionery, which I totally respect. They taste great too: the vitreous humour has a very fluffy texture, very sweet, while the iris is firmer and very tangy, like lemon.

There were 7 eyeballs in the packet, but now only one...

A thing or two about taro

I always get a bit worried doing my Taste Sensation! posts. I always feel like a bit of a dill, thinking that the whole world has tried these things before me, but nonetheless, I still feel I need document my adventures more as a note to myself about what I should look out for again, and what I should avoid. And also for remembering the fun times we had trying something "new".

Yesterday I posted about our taro ice cream tastings. Taro isn't too common in Australia, and while I always see it on the menu in many of the Asian restaurants nearby, it's something that hasn't filtered into the Australian mainstream.

A little more on taro:

It's quite a bland vegetable, tasting quite chesnutty, but also a bit potato-y too. Like potatoes, it has to be cooked, or it's poisonous and can be boiled, baked, roasted, mashed, crumbed/fried. The skin of the taro can be a bit irritating, so wear gloves when washing and peeling it. Of course you can check wikipedia for notes on its cultivation, if that tickles your fancy.

By rubber slipper

You can find taro fresh or tinned in your local Asian grocer (although I've only found 2/5 of our local ones stock it fresh). Apparently you can substitute it for potato in almost any recipe. My friends tell me taro also tastes great when combined with coconut milk. Australians generally have an aversion to any dessert or sweet drink that has a vegetable in it, such as sweet potato, pumpkin or taro. But I always think "Surely if a food is that popular and common, it must be good?" (Sometimes that thinking gets me into trouble - case in point: Red bean) but as I found on Sunday evening, taro ice cream is delicious.

Taro plantation: By Monroe Broadway

Stencil-along on hold and other things in my not-as-productive-as-I'd-have-liked weekend

No Mr Robo

So today I finally had time to stencil. I'd been hanging out all week and today I had my design all ready to go, I had made preparations for how to deal with stencils with islands. Then realised Gib had reinstalled windows so had to reinstall drivers/adjust network settings/fuss about with cables etc etc... only to discover that the printer had no ink. It was 4:45pm on a Sunday and no way would I make it to the shops in time to remedy this.

Sorry robo-dude, you're just going to have to wait a little longer...

No printer meant that I couldn't print out the soft baby shoe pattern (I have been asked to make some more!), and so I started cutting out some pieces for a bag I've started making (hear that, Kat!) but didn't get very far beyond cutting out bits. But some things were created on the weekend (not that I did much to help with them, but provided moral support).

Kate's veil

My friend Kate, who is getting married in November, came over Friday night. My mum helped her to make a veil in about 2 hours. I provided food, cups of tea and jovial conversation, while my mum and Kate busily worked away cutting and stitching. All that was left to do in the end was attach the comb. In total it cost her $16 for all materials + $12 for the pattern - and was therefore 10x cheaper than what you can pay in the shops for a veil (She tried on one in a shop that was $300 and looked similar to the one we made - obscene, isn't it?).


Taro taste sensation!

But I did get to try a new Taste Sensation last night. About 2 months ago I finally tried taro for the first time. We spotted it in the shop, took it home then worked out what to do with it later. It was quite bland, but definitely not unpleasant. Last night we were out with some friends at a newish claypot restaurant that's opened up in our area. One of our friends loves taro and he ordered a taro dessert. At first they got the order wrong, and provided this taro dessert (which was just chunks of taro, ice and ice cream... with yes, that is parsley instead of mint)


instead of this one (which still came with parsley on top).

Taste Sensation! verdict: Taro ice cream is really nice - it taste especially with sago, although I'm not so sure about the taro on its own... I don't particularly like the texture, but it could grow on me. I would order this myself in future.

Taste Sensation: failure.

Gib and I have been playing the Taste Sensation game for some time now, many successes and many failures. These two go into the failure category for me.

Roasted green tea pumpkin seeds:

They taste great, but only eat if you eat one or two of them. The nutrition information says 2050mg sodium per 100 g: that's a $#@%load of salt! Even me, who puts salt on everything and whose favourite food in the world are those giant, warm doughy pretzels with massive chunks of salt on them, could not get past the saltiness in these little bombs. After a few seconds, a kind of sweetness from the seeds comes through and they're quite pleasant. We'll eat them, but it'll take us a while to get through them.

Salted and spicy apricot:

Um, I don't know where to start. They are sweet, salty and spicy, all at the same time. They remind me of fruit mince pies... but salty, which, as you can imagine, isn't a whole lot of fun. When you just get a taste of the sweet and spicy it's ok, but then I'll get a massive wham of salt and my stomach flips. And now we have a whole bagful.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong. Maybe they're not snacks and all and you're supposed to cook with them or something. That was my next thought.

Taste Sensation! Errr... not so sure I want to taste these ones...

Yesterday we discovered another local asian grocer that we haven't been into before. We bought a packet of dried guava with chili and it tastes delicious, a lot like eating ginger. But then there were other Taste Sensations to be discovered, like this...


Yes, that does indeed say Chinese forest frog's oviduct & red bean lotus seed sweets. Sorry, this is one Taste Sensation I'm not so keen to taste. Anyone for some forest frog oviduct? Good for replenishing kidney essence, nourishing yin and moistening the lung!

This is one of my two mischeivous pet rats, Kita, pretending to be a dumpling for the camera. I wouldn't want to eat her either. Apart from the fact I don't think rats would make great dumplings, she's way too cute -- in my somewhat biased eyes, anyway. Although not as bright and outgoing as her sister, Pippa, she certainly makes up for it in charm and affection. She's a real snuggler but doesn't cope well if woken up before midday (understandable).

Taste Sensation! Kickapoo Joy Juice

While in the local Asian grocer, we noticed that they'd stocked their drinks fridge so of course Gib had to stock up too. We bought a few different types, but this one is always a favourite, not only for the name (which cracks me up every time), but the taste:

Kickapoo Joy Juice

It's a citrus flavoured soda, produced by Monarch Beverages in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, and tastes similar to New Zealand's L&P (Lemon and Paeroa). It's lemony but with a bitter edge owing to it being made with tonic water. It was named after a drink that featured in Dogpatch comics. Made by Lonesome Polecat & Hairless Joe, it was "a liquor of such stupefying potency that the hardiest citizens of Dogpatch, after the first burning sip, rose into the air, stiff as frozen codfish". And it doesn't contain any caffeine.

Golden Groceries sells black soy bean noodles!

One of my all time favourite local shops is Golden Groceries. Whenever I find an unusual ingredient in a recipe I've found, these guys always have it. They stock every type of lentil, bean, grain and noodle you can possibly think of and the same goes for herbs and spices. They sell all manner of soy products, curry bases, frozen goods, snacks (Pocky for just $1 a box!) and a small selection of fresh herbs and vegetables, like kai lan, mustard, daikon, kaffir lime, birds eye chilis and all sorts of mushrooms. There is also a small but growing section of reasonably priced organic products (noodles, tea, snacks). But best of all is the owners are totally wonderful people. Whenever I shop there I always come out with a big smile on my face. They are always happy and welcoming, and they'll be able to explain to me what to do with the mysterious foods I'm buying.


One such mysterious food was black soy bean noodles. There was also white soy bean noodles, but why would you buy white noodles when you can have black ones?


So I boiled them up for about 10 minutes and it was great! You could use them for pasta too, as the taste was very pasta-ish. But for my first blay soy bean noodle experience, I chose to put them with a stir fry of garlic, ginger, chili, purple cabbage, red capsicum, green beans and mushrooms. I then stirred through 1/4 cup miso paste and 2 tbsp tamari soy sauce and mixed them in with the noodles. I took it to work for lunch in my lovely yellow Tupperware tub!

Taste Sensations! - Japanese snacks

I'm finally catching up and getting my photos sorted. A picture tells a thousand words, so this will be a pictorial post of some of the snacks we had in Japan. Most of the snacks we found were just so sickly sweet that we couldn't bring ourselves to buy them (I don't have a big sweet tooth - give me savoury!).

UFO 2 minute noodles - Japan's 2 minute noodles are simply far superior to Australia's!

Meiji Orange Chocolate - White chocolate with orange flavouring... yummo

Pokemon crispy things - We liked the cute packaging.

Green donut from Mister Donut - Can't remember exactly what's it is


Banana and cream crepes from AM-PM - A cheap and delicious but not so healthy breakfast.

Panda biscuits - These were cool. Chocolate on one side and biscuit on the other but both sides look like pandas!


Strawberries - The strawberries were just amazing in Japan. So amazingly sweet you'd almost think they were fake! We ate so many.


Soyjoy - an oxymoron?


Chocolate candy ball things (the packet down the bottom) - These looked suspiciously like my own little tablets...

Strawberry sponge cake - Kyoto was full of delicious cake shops. This came with a packet of dry ice to keep it cool on the way home. Perhaps a little overpackaged!

A little scone like thing that had ginger and some seed inside, with sugar sprinkled on top.

Birthday cakes - or is that birthday bread? I didn't understand these.

Fish type thing - I can't remember what these are called! But our Japanese friend, Erika, explained that these are a very old snack. They are something between a doughnut and cake, with different fillings (custard, red bean, chocolate) and taste delicious.

Choco pie - Perhaps a relative of Fresh Pie, but not anywhere near as good.

Tokyo banana - There were always massive queues for these so of course we had to try them. These are a bit of a gourmet treat of a little sponge cake filled with banana flavoured custard. Delicious! Erika was very excited we bought them.

Beer snacks - Dried squid, chili rice crackers and peanuts.

Fried sweet potato and ice cream - A not so appealing taste sensation.

Coke - The coke tasted like it came from a bottle! So much better than regular cans.

Blendy - Iced coffee. Bitter and milky, the way iced coffee should be.

1 litre Asahi - Why can't we get that here?!

Pocky - That does indeed say 'Brazilian Pudding' flavour (What is Brazilian pudding?). I also tried blueberry flavour but it wasn't nearly as good. Not photo worthy. New and improved pocky was in fact new and improved. Smaller pretzel with richer, smoother chocolate. Delicious.