African Taste

When I was a teenager, fusion food - preferably stacked fusion food - was all the rage.  I had a signature dish, a shiitake mushroom and miso risotto I had gotten out of a Marie Claire cookbook (before Donna Hay who used to write those struck out on her own).  I was so proud of it but now I think so many friends must have choked down what in hindsight was a pretty disgusting combination.  I had a great idea to cook a lasagne of Asian vegetables - bok choy and enoki mushrooms layered with napoli sauce and cheese.  Thank God that never saw the light of day!  So suffice to say I approach "fusion food" with some caution.

It is perhaps reflective of the amazing place Footscray is, that when I first saw African Taste open I thought, "Cool, another Ethiopian restaurant!" and thought no more about it.  There is much more here than meets the eye, though.  Rather than just straight Ethiopian or Eritrean, this bright and cheery restaurant has a number of "fusion" dishes on its menu, with flavours gleaned from the chef's native East Africa as well as Sudan and North Africa.

Genfo African Fufu, $10.95

Fufu is apparently a kind of porridge or paste common across Africa and made from various flours, usually served in one large ball (perhaps like this Sudanese omnemia).  Instead of one large ball, though, these fufu gnocchi are small, made with toasted barley flour and served in a thick, rich, creamy sauce with a nice chilli kick and plenty of spice, particularly paprika.  They are so amazingly good!  They are just as light as traditional gnocchi but the barley flour gives a nuttiness to them and a slight graininess, which is more apparent as they cool down.  This sounds unappealing but trust me, you have to try this.  For a little extra you can add lamb, chicken or spinach & ricotta but I think they are fabulous as they are.  This is chef Ben's own special creation and it is a winner!

African Fasting Food, $14.95

Two days per week, Orthodox Christian Ethiopians "fast" or consume only 100% vegan food.  This was a sample platter of fasting food which included a simple, crunchy, tasty stir-fry of beans, onions and carrot, very spicy and therefore most excellent misir wat or red lentil dal, mild yellow split pea dal, tikil gomen or cabbage and carrot (I prefer more crunchy and less soft but it was still great) and what I know as dubba or slow-cooked pumpkin and eggplant cooked with berbere, traditional Ethiopian spice.  Everything was delicious and light on oil, which I prefer.  The Ethiopian and Eritrean restaurants in Footscray vary vastly in the amount of oil used in the vegetarian dishes in particular and I much prefer the drier style as here.

Tibes, $12

This dish of tibes or small, tender lamb pieces in a rich berbere and tomato sauce was excellent.  The lamb had great flavour, was perfectly cooked and so flavoursome.  I also love the tibs that African Town in Nicholson Street make, which is cooked in butter but without a red sauce and with lots of chunky green chilli.

Injera

Plenty of spongy injera was on hand to soak up all the delicious flavours.  The menu has plenty of other gems I am keen to try like the "cramped cauliflower", coated in a yellow seasoning and fried, and the "African enchilada" (available in both chicken and vegetarian).

The couple who own and run African Taste, Ben and Sunny, are delightful - friendly, genuine and passionate.  The restaurant is tiny and the kitchen is just beyond a simple partition, but it was packed on a Monday night.  There are plans afoot to extend out the back and take on more staff.  Thank you Eileen and Phil for your original guest post that set the tastebuds a-watering, and to Deb who was happy to revisit and give me a tour of the menu!  I am keen to try their breakfast menu, particularly the "gourmet vegetarian pizza" at $7.  Pizza for breakfast - a much-loved Australian tradition on an African fusion menu.  How cool is that?!


African Taste
124 Victoria Street, Seddon (map)
Phone: 9687 0560Hours: Wed - Mon 10am-9pm (til 10pm Fri & Sat) - closed Tues
NB $1.50 per meal surcharge after 7pm

Wheelchair Accessibility
Step to enter.

Grandma's Vietnamese chicken curry

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and New Year break!  Mine was almost too good.  Suffice to say I do not want to see another bottle of sparkling wine for a long time.  Time for some home cooking!  This is a wonderful, easy but authentic recipe from my friends M & S's mum.  It's a traditional Southern Vietnamese ca ri ga or chicken curry and is really unusual and delicious.  Best of all, it is very kid-friendly!

Ingredients

2 chicken thighs/1 chicken breast
1 Tb Madras curry powder
1 Tb oil, eg rice bran
1 large can coconut milk (try Ayam or Mae Ploy brands)
1 piece lemongrass
2 bay leaves
1 clove garlic
1 onion, cut into large chunks
500 mL chicken stock
1 Tb white sugar
1 Tb or so fish sauce
1 carrot, peeled and cut into large chunks
2 potatoes, peeled and cut into large chunks
1 small sweet potato, peeled and cut into large chunks

Remove visible fat from chicken.  Rub with the curry powder and set aside for 30 minutes.  After 30 minutes, heat the oil in a deep frying pan and fry the chicken over medium heat until sealed.  Add a dash of coconut milk (about 1/4 cup) and cook until fragrant, about 5 minutes.

Chop up chicken and return to the pan.  Next, separate the white bulbous part of the lemongrass from the top stalkier bit.  Cut into 2-inch lengths and give them a bash.  Add to the chicken along with the garlic, bay leaf and onion.  Cook for about 3 minutes then add 1 cup of chicken stock, 1 Tb of sugar and about 1 Tb of fish sauce and simmer for 20 minutes.

Add chopped carrot, potato and sweet potato and the other cup of chicken stock.  Cover and simmer until the vegetables are tender, about 20 to 30 minutes.  The smell will be absolutely divine!

Add the remainder of the can of coconut milk and heat gently.  Now is the time to taste to see if it needs more fish sauce.  Remove lemongrass before serving.

This delicious curry can be served with rice or noodles but also traditional and best in M & S's (and my) opinion is a crusty bread roll from your local banh mi bakery.  It is so good.  The curry powder is quite sweet itself with very warm spices like cinnamon and just a hint of chilli.  The sauce is rich, abundant and almost like a curry laksa soup.  The root vegetables - seemingly so unusual for a Vietnamese recipe - soak up all the rich sauce and just melt in your mouth.  So supremely comforting.  Try with a glass of sparkling.  Oh my god, did I just say that?

I want to give a little shout-out to my friend Bryan's wonderful blog, let's get fat together.  Bryan is a great writer, takes vivid, wonderful pics and I love his gentle and reflective style.  He is currently getting pui (fat) in Singapore, rediscovering his roots and chronicling his family's Makansutra in the hawker bars and kopitiams of the island city.  Do check it out and Bryan, keep up the awesome work!

Merry Christmas

Thank you all so much for your comments, emails and support over 2010.  It has been a great year.  I have enjoyed writing this blog so much and have learnt so much and met so many wonderful people in the process.

I am taking a break and hope to be back in 2011.  Have a happy and safe Christmas and a wonderful summer.

Nick's Grill

Do you trust your beautician?  Against my better judgment, I do, from the eyelash tint I never knew I needed to the hair product I never knew I wanted, which inevitably joins its cohorts stuffed up the back of the cupboard, unused.  Arguably however this trust comes from the fact I walk out of the salon with change from $30 no matter how many treatments and products I have had.  I am glad that my dear friend Ms C trusts her beautician too, as that particular lady's recommendation led us to Nick's Grill.

Kenny recently pointed out that "little shop strips that look a bit run down are gems", and by this logic, Nick's certainly is a diamond in the rough, tucked away in a strip in outer St Albans.  The family who run this little Macedonian hideaway have been much-loved caterers to the Macedonian community for years, and son Nick has become the earnest, genuine and friendly maitre d' for their new venture.

Nick's specialises in grilled meats and from our table, we could watch dad firing up the grill in an open kitchen.  They have been open for around three months.

Sopska, $8

This salad came highly recommended, and with good reason.  It was similar to a Greek salad in its ingredients - fresh tomato, cucumber, a little red onion and sheep's or goat's milk cheese.  However, here the vegetables were chopped into small pieces rather than the large chunks one associates with Greek salad and the cheese was grated on top, a la Parmesan on pasta.  It was so delicious - I could have eaten this alone with bread quite happily.  The vegetables were super fresh and the dressing light, lemony and tangy.

This soup is a soon-to-be menu item and we were lucky enough to be offered a taste.  It was simply divine - a thick, rich broth with carrot, potato and fat flakes of pink rainbow trout.  I have never had good luck with fish soups or curries as the fish needs a very careful hand or it disintegrates or goes mushy and grainy.  The fish flavour in this was superb, present but not at all overpowering.  The broth was thick, rich and unctuous, as fine as the best lobster bisque.  It is Nick's dad's special recipe, perfected through years of cooking in Germany.  I can't speak highly enough of this wonderful soup.  With a swish of its Macednonian petticoats, it has nudged pho off its pedestal as my favourite soup of all time.  Big call but justified!!!

Pleasantly coarse, crunchy Continental bread was perfect for wiping up every last drop of soup and salad.  The dip is makalo which is a hot garlic paste similar to Lebanese toum.  It was brash and almost acrid, great to spread on the bread and then dip in the soup.  First dates, beware!

Mixed grill, $26

Time for the main event.  Most of Nick's meat platters are $17 or so and come with your choice of meat, be it cevapi or skinless sausages, raznjici or skewers, various cutlets and patties.  They all come with chips and vegies.  We went for the mixed grill for a bit of everything.  The cevaps and the very similar pork pljeskavica or hamburger were great, with a pleasantly springy and even spongey consistency similar to Vietnamese 'kebab' or 'roast pork', the sausage-like, skewered tubes or balls sold at Ba Le and Nhu Lan (I don't know the Vietnamese for them - please enlighten me if you do!).  A simple piece of grilled chicken breast was perfectly cooked and delicious.  The meats went perfectly with the makalo, served here thinned with oil and I think broth, its garlic flavour tempered somewhat.

We were so full by this stage and got defeated fast, though, only managing a bite or two of the other meats before surrendering.  I am actually not that big of a carnivore and would have liked less chips and more of the wonderful grilled capsicum.  The chips were somewhat unremarkable.  The Croatian Club in Footscray has a very similar mixed grill of just cevapi and raznjici, but their vegies (capsicum, onion and mushroom) are abundant and heavenly, plus their chips are crispier and have a special spice mix on them (I acknowledge Croatian and Macedonian are different cuisines, of course!)  Next time I will choose a single platter of just one meat and share that, and hope that there will be more room for more vegies.

The standout dish was still the rainbow trout soup, coming soon to the menu and in my opinion, it can't come soon enough.  They were so kind to give us such a generous sample (and they hadn't busted me taking photos, at least not at that stage!)  Just like in the beauty shop, we got more than we came for, but unlike yet another bottle of hair product, this soup is definitely something I now cannot live without.

Nick's Grill

177a Main Road, St Albans (map)

Phone: 9310 9996

Hours:  Mon/Tues closed, Wed-Sun evenings

Fully licensed but BYO coming soon

Wheelchair Accessibility

Entry:  Level.

Layout:  Roomy-ish.

Hello Gelo

Icecream in summer is one of my fondest memories of my childhood in Melbourne.  We never had it at home; it was an "outing only" affair.  The discussion of what flavour to get was a matter of national significance.  I remember Charmaine's first opening on Brunswick Street and later at Southbank and totally revolutionising ice cream.  They had crazy flavours like licorice and chilli chocolate whereas all prior icecream had been hokey pokey, old English toffee and bubblegum.

Footscray and surrounds has been somewhat devoid of a good icecream parlour.  Charlie's did open a gelati bar on Droop Street but to me, half the pleasure of an icecream in summer is lolling about outside the shop or walking along a pleasant promenade, which is hard to do on a busy strip like the Droop St/Ballarat St corner.  Hello Gelo is a recent addition to Yarraville village which is supremely wonderful for lounging about, particularly on a warm summer night.

The icecream here is handmade, very creamy and ranges from the classics to curiosities such as chestnut (made with real chestnut puree and marron glace pieces) and pear & Pernod.  A kids' cone, which is ample even for an adult, is a mere $2.50 or $3 for two flavours.  Take-home packs may be made up, too.

I tried to interest the kids in blood orange or black forest cake, but they just wanted chocolate and bubblegum.  Some things never change.

Thanks Kenny for the tip!

Hello Gelo

15 Anderson Street, Yarraville (map)

Phone: 9078 5696

Hours:  Mon-Wed 11am-8.30pm, Thurs 11am-9pm, Fri & Sat 11am-10pm, Sun 11am-9pm (but variable depending on the weather)

Wheelchair Accessibility

Entry:  Level.

Layout:  Inaccessible upstairs seating but can sit on the street

Tan Truc Giang's vegetarian selection

There are many great things about being married to an American.  Apart from the fact my husband is just generally awesome, the benefits that spring to mind are home-made, lovingly crafted barbecue sauce and elotes, BBQ'd corn cobs slathered in mayonnaise, Parmesan cheese and chilli powder.  But there are some eye-rollingly infuriating, very American parts of my partner's personality that I would love to change, namely his tendency to customise the menu within an inch of its life.  "Can I have the tomato and avocado on toast, but with the Promite on the side, and can you squeeze a lemon over it?  And can you add just one scrambled egg - yes, just one - and a piece of black pudding?  And a macchiato with cold milk, not steamed.  Thank you."  Cue much shrinking-behind-menu-until-level-with-floor on my part.

Thankfully Tan Truc Giang in Leeds Street are set up so you can have what you want how you want it.  Want only carrots, broccoli and cauliflower out of the stirfry?  No problem.  Want a piece of chicken, a hardboiled egg, plus just one spring roll?  Absolutely.  This is a great place to bring kids to as everything is right there, enticing and colourful.  As Dani Valent writes about yum cha, "You don't have to read out a menu and have every dish description batted back with, 'Yuk, I don't like that,' until you get to ice-cream".

Tan Truc Giang have loads of interesting dishes which I for one have never seen before.  There's a special prawn-and-egg "cake" plus mackerel dishes, both crispily fried and braised.  They do a fabulous roast pork roll that you have to know to ask for.  They always have southern-style Vietnamese chicken curry which is mild, yellow and coconutty.  A friend just mentioned the other day how much she loved this and had only ever had it at people's houses, when it had usually been made by the grandmother.  She feels it is very much home cooking, and to me that is the style of cooking here at Tan Truc Giang.

This separate unit is 100% vegetarian (and I assume vegan).  I have been on the hunt for a Vietnamese wheat gluten dish for a reader, veggiegobbler, and here it is, or something like it, I hope!  The dish at the bottom right is wheat gluten with chilli and lemongrass, so I settled down for a plate of that with a few of the other mixed stirfries.

Mixed vegetarian plate, $8

Yum yum!  The wheat gluten, which I know as seitan, was really good.  It is eerily similar to meat, tasting (and looking) like well-cooked shredded chicken.  Seitan is made by making a dough out of water and flour and then washing it until only the strands of gluten remain.  I remember doing this in Home Ec at school but I cannot recall why or what we did with it - certainly not make seitan, given that most of our Home Ec offerings were anachronisms like roulades or things stuffed in crepe baskets.

Anyway, the rest of the stirfries were tasty mixtures of soft, juicy tofu and mushrooms and crunchy vegetables.  They use interesting gourd-like Asian vegetables here of which I don't know the name, but they are similar to zucchini or cucumber.  It came with a tangle of sweet, lightly vinegared carrots and bean sprouts.  A great, healthy lunch.  Veggiegobler, I know it's not with cashews or satay as you remembered, but I reckon it is pretty yummy!

Another reader, Matt, highly recommended the goi cuon chay or vegetarian rice paper rolls.  These are made daily and stacked in containers on the counter.  Wow - great call, Matt - they really are the best rice paper rolls I have ever had!  The skins are so tender and soft and the fillings super fresh.  Inside are rice vermicelli noodles, marinated tofu, mushroom, pickled carrot, lettuce and other good things.  I like that they are not wrapped within an inch of their life - the wrapper is still delicate, soft and pliable.

Goi cuon chay (vegetarian rice paper rolls), $5.50 for 4

The dipping sauce is made up fresh with each purchase and is delicious, hoi sin-based, sprinkled with chopped peanuts, chilli and carrot.  Eat them soon after purchase and if you can, purchase them early in the day soon after having been made as the skins become hard and unappealing fast.

The man in particular who runs Tan Truc Giang is really lovely.  They keep their bain marie spick and span, constantly refilling the trays and plates and ensuring no drips smear the sparkling silver between the various dishes.  The counter is often a few people deep and with Footscray shoppers of all ethnicities.  Everyone is welcome - even finicky Americans.

Tan Truc Giang

36A Leeds St, Footscray (map)

Phone: 9689 9509

Hours:  Mon - Sat 8am - 8pm, closed Sun

PS:  From a reader:  "This is the best Vietnamese place in west. Pork roll is absolutely delicious plus try their diced beef with fried rice (yummmm). I live in North Carlton but visit Truc Giang at least once a month."

Wheelchair Accessibility
Entry:  Step - inaccessible.

"How the West was won in taste"

For easier reading, here is the online link.  Thank you Pho Tam for kitting out my desk with your amazing pho!

For more wonderful pho all around Australia, check out my friend and SBS Featured Foodie Thang @ Noodlies' guide to the best pho around.

If you would like some more Sunday morning reading, The Age recently published a thought-provoking article on food blogging.

Have a wonderful day and as always, thank you very much for reading!