Valentine's Day

So Valentine's Day has come and gone, and the missus and I spent it in typical cheapskate fashion - at home. She had classes that day which meant I finally succeeded in wresting back control of the kitchen. Unfortunately, in all my excitement, I forgot to take pictures of the food. I'd successfully convinced her it was going to be a Western affair, but knowing she preferred Chinese food (and having bought hor fun fresh from Lo's in Chinatown earlier that morning), this was the final menu:

Mozarella and Tomato Salad
I know, not very Chinese,
but necessary to keep up the charade until the main course was served.
Sadly cut short with "I'm hungry, can we have the main now?"

~ @ ~

Hor fun steamed with tomato and haddock
Served on a bed of choi sum and a big dash of Po Po soya sauce.
This went down well.
Made way too much of it though, so had some for breakfast the next morning

~ @ ~

Chocolate Mousse
This went down really well. And I made it myself too!

You're going to have to settle for a photograph of the table setting:

Part of the Valentine's celebrations though, was something else I'd picked up in Chinatown: Durian. She'd been craving it for ages so I finally bit the bullet and plonked down the princely sum of £20.88 for a rather oddly shaped Thai durian. Normally I wouldn't touch the Thai ones with a barge pole, they tend to be overly fleshy with not much texture to the meat and just not as much flavour as a good Malaysian durian. But hey, desperate times.





That's me with the traditional threatening look. That knife ended up not being used because after spending a day trying to get the durian to ripen (including sitting a bunch of bananas on top of it) we finally noticed that its mouth had already opened and I managed to prise it open with my bare hands, the way Real Men do it



Can you see the missus drooling?



Despite its good looks, it was an average durian at best. It had the tiny, oddly shaped seeds that you tend to find in Thai durians (result of genetic selection to get more flesh?) but not much taste. Parts of it were still not quite ripe but I wolfed those down because they had a much better texture than the ripe bits. It has after all been almost 5 years since I last had a durian. We settled on a verdict of not great, but we enjoyed the experience and it did cure her of her cravings, so I suppose mission accomplished?

This though, I did enjoy to the max - five mangosteens as good as any you can find in Malaysia if a bit small, sweet and slightly sharp. Heaven.





And that ends possibly the most picture intensive blog I will ever do. If there's one thing I learnt from this, it's that I enjoy writing far more than I do the tedium of pasting pictures