Linguine carbonara

I spent last week reading the blog from start to finish, and looking back, I'm not quite sure how I managed to do all that planning and shopping and cooking and eating and blogging! This was in addition to uni, part-time work, gym, family time and having a social life. (In fact, I got tired just reading about it, haha). But I suppose was young and energetic, and I lived at home, so I was lucky to have my mum and dad to take care of me, do most of the dishes, and help with the shopping if I was too busy or tired to go to the shops. (Thank-you Mum and Dad!)

Actual quote from me, from my April Progress Report: "I’ve got 2 months to do about 80 recipes. Easy!"

I loved exposing myself and my family to new, exotic foods (chorizo! elderflower! quince!), and learning (and mastering!) new cooking techniques - using leaf gelatine, making custards, pastry, risotti, pork crackling, and more.

And in addition to the skills I learned, it was just lots of fun! There were so many dinner parties, family lunches, late night blogging sessions, chats with the lovely folks at the (now defunct) Nigella.com forum, and endless MSN convos with my buddy Clarice.

Who can forget the Seville Orange Orgy;  the "Holy shit! A fan is involved!" roast goose; or the long and hard search for a non-stick brioche pan. I have more than a few favourite recipes - the Pig's Bum and Rhubarb Meringue Pie are obvious contenders, but I think the most useful recipes (i.e. the ones I still cook, to this day) were the pasta recipes: tagliatelle with chicken from the Venetian ghetto, linguine alle vongole, spaghetti carbonara, butter with pasta and stock cube juices. So delicious.

Let's look at some numbers!

The Statistics

• Recipes cooked: 395 in 365 days
• Posts written: 317
• Comments received: 702
• Items Autographed by Nigella received: 2 (thank-you Clarice for organising!)
• Dinner / Lunch parties held: 19
• Most Recipes made for the one meal: 9 - Christmas lunch with all the trimmings
• Custards made: 12
• Types of Crostini made: 8
• Pies made: 23 (holy moly)
• Pie or Sausage-related innuendoes included: Too many to count. Also, "in-YOUR-end-o".

Mushroom Crostini

The first Crackling I ever made!

Roast Beef, Beans, Roast Potatoes

Roast Potatoes

Poached peaches with baked Sauternes Custard

Autographed egg cup and saucer set!

Autographed photo from Nigella!

Sweet, sweet pie

Thanks to everyone who supported me and followed my cooking and blogging journey! Here's to many more delicious meals and fun times with family and friends!

Hi y'all!  Just a quick post today, to let you know I've (finally) made a Facebook page for my blog!  The link is here.



It's still quite new, but the general idea is:

• to create a bigger discussion space than blog comments will allow;
• to post up photos and fun foodie things that will only appear on my Facebook page;
• to connect with my readers who primarily use Facebook; and
• to inform y'all of any blog news or when I've published a new post!

I'm sure I'll think of more things as we go along, but for now, if you do like my blog, then may I suggest you head on over to the Facebook page and click "Like"!

The first couple of little things I've put up on the Facebook page are a couple of little breakfasty things I baked over the weekend.  I'll put the pics here too for this introductory post, but from now on my Facebook content will be updated independently of my blog, with additional and different content.

White loaf (Nigella Lawson recipe, from Feast)

Chocolate Peanut Granola (Nigella Lawson recipe, Feast)

Full descriptions (in my fabulous prose - haha!) are over on the page itself.  Enjoy!  Thanks guys!

xox Sarah

Hey everybody!  Today marks the 6th birthday of my little cooking blog!  I can't believe I've been blogging for 6 whole years.  I think this officially makes me Very Old in the world of food blogging.  Last year I baked a Victoria sponge with hazelnut crunch buttercream to celebrate, and this year I've made a Maple-Walnut Loaf cake.  (Adapted from Nigella Lawson's maple-pecan bundt cake in Kitchen). Hmmm... it seems I find nuts particularly celebratory!  (No giggling please!)

Before last year it never occurred to me to do a blog birthday post, but now I'm in the habit, I guess I better stick with it.  (Any excuse for cake, right?)  I'll blog about the cake in detail soon, but for now let me share some fun blog stuff with you.  Last year I gave a bit of history to my blog, and gave a top 10 of my most frequent labels.  Unsurprisingly, the top 3 were: "Nigella", "Chocolate" and "Travel", and I don't think much has changed this year!

This year I'll give you a best-of and share some of my favourite posts with you.  Please enjoy!

• The first post: Gooey Chocolate Stack

• A series of posts on Mum's Birthday Party, where we held a massive party for my mum's birthday and I cooked everything, including a Croquembouche! My series of posts include all the test-runs leading up to the big night itself.

• Croissant in a Can. Enough said.

• The Kylie Kwong Drinking Game.  Incidentally, I watched Luke Nguyen's Vietnam for the first time tonight, and he was awesome! It proves you can go back to your homeland and be respectful of the locals, hehe.

• I've also enjoyed cooking for my family and friends!  PORKTOBERFEST, Christmas BBQs, A Fun Sunday Lunch for 15, Tonkatsu Time, and 2 pulled pork meals!

• I've also been travelling a lot - in particular Europe 2006, Japan 2007, Vanuatu 2009, and - how could you forget? - Germany 2007!

Thanks everyone for reading and sharing my little cooking journey with me!  Looking forward to many more posts!

xox Sarah

Yes my dear readers, today is my little blog's 5th birthday! In all these years of blogging, I've never once done a birthday blog post, so I'm sure you'll forgive me while I gush.

I started little ol' Sarah Cooks some 5 years back, when I realised my food obsession just wasn't going away. At the time, I had a personal blog, The Blog of Sarah, which my friends read. It was one of those typical teenage girl pieces of fluff - pictures of friends at nights out, complaining about uni etc. (It has since been taken down because I stopped updating it). Anyway, after a while my posts started becoming more and more food-related, and I decided I should just stop bugging my friends with my food-obession, and start a proper food related blog. And thus, Sarah Cooks was born.

My very first post was (quelle surprise!) Nigella related - Gooey Chocolate Stack. And since then I've been blogging pretty regularly, a few times a week. I started blogging about food I cooked at home, and most of my readers at the time were my buddies from the old Nigella.com forum.

In June 2006, I started Sarah Discovers How to Eat, my quest to cook all 395 recipes from Nigella's How to Eat in one year. It was a hugely fun project, and I still love that book and return to it regularly.

These days my Sarah Cooks posts are a mixture of food I've cooked at home, baking experiments and restaurant and cafe reviews. I've also made some good friends through blogging and can't see myself stopping any time soon!

Out of interest, here are my top 10 labels and the number of posts I've done about them:

1. Nigella (164 - and no, this doesn't include the 400+ posts from Sarah Discovers How to Eat!)
2. Chocolate (100)
3. Travel (86)
4. Restaurants (83)
5. Cake (69)
6. Melbourne (69)
7. Salad (50)
8. Breakfast (48)
9. German (45)
10. Seafood (43)

I wish I could say that it's an exaggeration that I cook/eat twice as much chocolate as salad (100 vs 50 posts), but there's no point in lying now, haha.

Now, about that cake! I actually made and ate that a couple of weekends ago (definitely not detox-friendly!!) in preparation for today's post. It is a Victoria sponge, filled with hazelnut-infused buttercream, topped with ganache and sugared hazelnuts. I'll blog it in more detail in the coming week, but I need to let you all know that nut-infused German buttercream is my new best friend.

Hi Everyone!

Welcome to the new, improved layout of Sarah Cooks! I hope y'all like it. Big thanks to Sandra for her awesome web-design skills and massive efforts.

A few small changes:

Rather than having the labels in the sidebar, I've got them sitting just under the header, under the categories: authors, baking/sweets, restaurants, travel, cooking, entertaining, global and random. If you still can't find what you're looking for, then the Search Box in the sidebar will be helpful.

For interest, here's what the old layout looked like:


As you can see, the current header is just one giant choc-chip cookie. Blogpost to come soon! Mmm... cookies.

xox Sarah

Hi Everyone!

Jenny from Panda & Cakes has awarded me with a "Kreativ Blogger Award", which I was very happy and surprised about! Yay! Thank-you very much Jenny!


Ok, as part of receiving this award, you have to list "7 things about yourself that people might find interesting". I've decided to list things that are both food and non-food related, to mix things up a bit.


1. I love musicals. If you've read my last post, you'll be thinking "duh" right about now. But it's not stage musicals that I mean. The ones I really love are the classic Hollywood film musicals - West Side Story and Singin' In The Rain are my favourites. I generally don't like modern ones (Moulin Rouge - blergh), but I unreservedly adore Dancer in the Dark. (However, this film is so incredibly depressing that I often forget it's a musical until I sit down and watch it).

2. I love The Simpsons, Family Guy and Futurama, and quote them endlessly (even at work when I should be concentrating... shhh!). When I quote The Simpsons, I put on a raspy Marge voice.

3. I enjoy economics and finance. (Promise you won't tell anyone!) I loved economics at school, hated it at uni, and like it again, now that I realise how relevant it is to daily life.

4. I adore pampering indulgences, including but not limited to: facials, massages, and hot spring baths. I would do this more if it weren't so expensive.

5. I am really into make-up, especially MAC, and different types of foundation (any brand). From memory I have at least 10 different foundations in varying brands, shades and formulations, and 3 foundation brushes.

6. I don't eat MacDonald's (just don't like the taste or the smell), but I love KFC.

7. I drink a lot of tea, only English Breakfast. I can't stand Earl Grey.


And here are the 7 bloggers I would like to pass this award onto...

1. Laura - Hungry and Frozen
2. Happy Home Baking
3. Cat - The Catty Life
4. Norm - It's The Norm
5. Su-Lin - Tamarind and Thyme
6. KY - KY Speaks
7. Stephanie - A Whisk and a Spoon


The Kreativ Blogger award comes with the following rules:
1. You must thank the person who has given you the award.
2. Copy the logo and place it on your blog.
3. Link the person who has nominated you for the award.
4. Name 7 things about yourself that people might find interesting.
5. Nominate 7 other Kreativ Bloggers.
6. Post links to the 7 blogs you nominate.
7. Leave a comment on which of the blogs to let them know they have been nominated.

Hello All!!

I do apologise for the lack of posts recently - not only has the start of the year has been unfathomably busy, but my internet has, once again, been capped. ARGH!! We've just upgraded to a faster package, but this will take some time to be effective.

So, a belated Happy New Year to all my lovely readers. Here is an update of what I've been up to, and what is to come for 2009.

1. Wrote a review of Venezia for The Gastronomer's Bookshelf. This website, Duncan's baby, is a collaborative website for informed food lovers to share their opinions of the latest cookbooks. Anyone interested in reviewing, sign up now!

2. Embarked on THE BOX HILL CHALLENGE! We have decided to test the limits of human endurance (and our waistbands) by trying every single Asian restaurant in the Station St area of Box Hill (La Porchetta does not count). We've already tried about 4 new ones... posts will be coming soon.

3. Enjoyed some yummy POM Wonderful pomegranate juice that I was sent as a sample a few weeks back. I've tried it in a couple of recipes, but have found it's best enjoyed mixed with soda water as a refreshing summertime drink.

4. Spent an enjoyable weekend in Canberra, basically just eating for 3 days straight.

5. Planned the next Blogger's BBQ with Thanh and Duncan. It's gonna be on Saturday 7th Feb @ Batman park. Click here for more details, or here to RSVP at the motherpost.


Photos and blogs of all these, and more, coming as soon as my internet is back!

Next time there's a Kylie Kwong marathon screening on Lifestyle food, you can play this fun drinking game with your friends. You will need a TV with Foxtel, and lots of alcohol.

Now, every time one of the following events occur, take a sip:

1. Kylie makes her version of a Chinese dish, which involves pouring hot peanut oil over garlic/ginger/shallots/chilli/brown sugar/light soy/Chinese cooking wine.

2. Kylie says the words "garlic, ginger and shallots" or "depth of flavour".

3. Kylie does something odd and the locals look at her like she's really weird.

4. Kylie says "the Chinese" or "we Chinese" as if she's actually Chinese and not just a 5th-generation Australian selling her Asianness to the highest bidder.

5. Kylie changes her faux-Chinese tunic.

6. Kylie tries to pronounce a Chinese word in a super-broad Aussie accent.

7. Kylie tries to talk to someone, and the camera quickly pans away to give the translator time to come in and explain to her what's going on.

8. Kylie backs away while talking to the camera and bumps into someone, without saying sorry or acknowledging them.

9. Kylie barks at someone in English, as if talking louder will make her easier to understand.

10. Kylie barges into someone's kitchen and they nod politely as they taste her Kylie-fied version of their dish.

BONUS: If Kylie eats a char siu pau with chopsticks, you must down your glass.

***Disclaimer: This is a joke. Don't actually play this drinking game. Sarah Cooks does not encourage the consumption of alcohol in excessive quantities. Or eating paus with chopsticks.***

Check out this hilarious blog post about Kylie Kwong at through the Looking Glass. You said it, sister!

Goodbye pile of food magazines dating back to 1999. Hello bedroom floor, which I haven't seen since at least 2003....!

(N.B. this pile isn't even half of what I had, collecting dust, in my room. Clearing up can be sooo liberating!)

Yum Cha! Who stayed up late watching the Olypmics opening ceremony last night? I watched it over at a friend's house, up until 1:30 AM!!! We marvelled at the massive LCD screen and the incredible co-ordination of all performers, thought the little girl singing in the red dress was cute, if a bit psychotic, wondered WTF Sarah Brightman was doing there, and rolled our eyes at the woeful commentating. I secretly wished that Jackie Chan or Andy Lau would be involved in the ceremony, but no such luck.

As always, the most interesting part of the ceremony was watching the parade of participants. I love seeing people from exotic countries that I've never heard of - Azerbaijan, Guinea-Bissau, Moldova, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines to name a few. (Obviously, "exotic" is a relative concept, so please excuse me if I sound as uncultured as Homer "hey... there's a New Mexico!" Simpson). I cheered the loudest for the Malaysian, German and Australian teams, and loved the Malaysian team's outfits. Good luck to all athletes, especially my peeps, the Malaysian badminton players. Malaysia Boleh!

In keeping with the Chinese theme, and in honour of my Chinese heritage, today's post is about that great Chinese culinary tradition - YUM CHA! (After some research, I realised that Yum Cha is a Southern Chinese tradition, rather than a Northern, Beijing thang, but let's not let that spoil our enjoyment of delicious yum cha). Yum Cha literally means "drink tea" in Cantonese, and is the Chinese tradition of eating many small plates of different foods for a weekend family breakfast / brunch / lunch. And of course, drinking lots tea with it.

We have yum cha quite often, more so when I was a kid, but I never even though to blog it because it was just way too ordinary. I mean, yum cha is a regular family weekend activity - definitely not special occasion or exotic or unusual. However, remembering that "exotic" is a relative term, I thought some of you might be interested in how Yum Cha from Melbourne goes down.

I'm no expert on Yum Cha, and I don't even speak Cantonese - we're proud to be Hokkien-speaking Penangites - so my approach to Yum Cha is the good old "point-and-nod", which is what I advise to anyone else who doesn't speak Cantonese. So, with that in mind, please excuse any mistakes I may have made in the following captions. This particular Yum Cha session was at Shark Fin Inn in the city (see below for address), and although there are hundreds of different types of dishes that can be eaten at Yum Cha, the ones below are my family's standard dishes.

Top Row R-L: Chee Chong Fan (Prawns wrapped in rice-noodle sheets), Sticky Rice in Leaf, Some dumpling or something
Middle Row R-L: Japanese Tofu with Minced Prawn and Scallop, Eggplant/Prawn, Vegetarian Rolls, Sticky Rice with Lap Cheong
Bottom Row: Siew Mai (steamed pork dumplings), Har Gao (steamed prawn dumplings), Shark Fin Dumplings


Clockwise from Top Left: Century Egg Congee, Roast Pork Puffs, Teapot, Woo-cock (Deep-fried yam balls)

Tan-taat (egg custard tarts) and Yong Tau Fu (sweet bean curd with sugar syrup - light and refreshing).


FYI, these photos of me eating are a joke. Despite what Kylie Kwong might seem to think, Chinese people do not eat paus with chopsticks. Why don't we just eat tan-taats with chopsticks then? Silly.


Sarah's Top Picks for Yum Cha in Melbourne

Shark Fin Inn
50-52 Little Bourke St
Melbourne 3000 VIC
(03) 9662 2681

Shark Fin House
131 Little Bourke St
Melbourne 3000
(03) 9663 1555

Plume
546 Doncaster Road
Doncaster 3108
(03) 9840 1122

Taipan
239 Blackburn Rd
Doncaster East 3109
(03) 9841-9977


Of course, I'm just scratching the surface here. Tell me, what are your favourite restaurants in Melbourne for Yum Cha? And what are your family's favourite dishes?

That Red Rooster Olympics TV ad with the "notice how well red goes with China" slogan is stupid. Everybody knows that Chinese people like Kentucky Fried Chicken the best.

Check out that cannoli! I had it yesterday for breakfast at Setto Belle, corner Hardware lane and Lt Bourke st. (I've previously waxed lyrical about my visit to the cafe here.) The chocolate cannoli was filled with ricotta cream and studded with dark chocolate pieces. Wowza! I'll definitely be back soon to try out their savouries and other cakes.

So, onto the "news" part of the post. Guess what? I've just got a job! Finally! I mean a real, grown-up, full-time job that's related to my degree. I'll have to wear a suit, carry a briefcase and order my skinny-latte-no-sugar-thanks from busy city cafés. I am sooo excited! No more school, no more retail, no more hospitality, no more working on weekends! I'll be able to go to markets! Take weekend trips! Sleep in!

I've got a few weeks free before I start, so I'll be using that time to cook as much as I can, and I'll finally blog all these food photos and drafts that I seem to have accumulated over the past few months. Yay!

xox Sarah