This week we have a house guest. Our house guest has been wanting to meet a certain friend of ours, after seeing her Facebook page…. So the guest list is set. Joining our trio will be Luke and Trish. It turned out to be perfect timing for Trish, after a trying weekend. Her response to our invite was fabulousness itself.
I was unaware how much Asian influence there is in Australian food, until our friend came to stay, so this week we decided to go with an Asian theme. Once our guests were settled with a lovely Ontario wine, we gathered at the table to enjoy Sweet potato soup with ginger and lime, and crisp mushroom roll.
The sweet potato soup, is similar to a pumpkin soup, but the added ginger and lime, adds a nice Asian flavor. The crispy spring roll was a fresh mushroom spring roll that is sliced and fried until crispy, which gives a bit of crunch.
For the main, Shawn found an interesting recipe, Asian braised pork belly with duck crepes.
With a selection of fresh scallions, cucumbers and hoisin sauce, on the freshly made crepes, this was a nice build your own meal. The star, of course was the pork belly, which had been slowly braised, with star anise, cardamom, ginger and other Asian flavours. At the end it gets a sweet glaze. Trish brought a lovely bottle of Ontario Hinterbrook 2012 Deeply Red, to accompany the meal, with its notes of black cherry, currant and black pepper. Sometimes it’s just fun to get your hands dirty.
While dessert was being plated, it gave our guests a chance to get better acquainted, and catch up on life events. The dessert was a new twist on an old favorite.
This is a fun dessert to make, as it is assembled upside down, and then inverted to allow the caramel to flow over the dessert. With dessert and some herbal tea, we are ready to do a full run through of our spring show. So leaving Shawn and Luke with the dishes, the rest of us whisked off to rehearsal.
