Want to find out how big a tos$er you are?

Eh, here at Plusixfive HQ, that’s a huge COMPLIMENT ok!

Cos we’re talking about YU SHENG, a mahoosive crazy interactive raw fish salad we Singaporeans go nuts about during Chinese New Year.

Go here to see what I’m going on about.

Our Chinese New Year Yu Sheng supper last month was so popular we decided to do another one, just for you. Complete with some goodies smuggled back from our latest trip home to Singapore (really hoping none of you work for UK customs now…) Yeah it’s a bit late for Chinese New Year lah, but we don’t mind if you don’t!

Sunday 19 Feb, 7.30pm
Islington N1, between Angel and Old St tube
£35 suggested minimum donation, BYOB

Name:
Mobile number:
No. of seats:
Food allergies / dietary restrictions:

Hope to see you soon!

xxooo

TO THIS *GASP* SHOCKING MESS?

Were we savagely attacked and ravaged by members of the walking dead? Did we just give up on life, hope and plates generally and decide to serve guests food on the table instead? Or did someone just let out a biga$$ mother of all sneezes?

Nope, it was just another Chinese New Year in the plusixfive household.

Singaporeans do this thing every year called Lo Hei Yu Sheng which essentially, is getting beautifully plated dish of finely grated carrots, grated turnips, pickled ginger (of various E number colours), pickled winter melon, sesame seeds, peanuts, lime zest, lime juice, plum sauce, fried crackers and raw salmon slices seasoned in rice wine and soy sauce.

And then TOSSING THE COMPLETE mofoshiizamijiza outta it, tossing it up in the air and waving it around like you just dont care.

Whilst screaming out blessings and wishes that you want for the year often in mandarin idioms or idioms in general or just plain shouting.

(BIG BONUS BIG BONUS!!!!! MANY MANY BABIES BABIES!!!!! HAMSUM BOYFRIEND!!!!!!!!! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!! WWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! GONG XI FA CAI!!!!!!! WAAAAAAHHHH!!! WIN WIN BIG LOTTERRRRYYYYY!!!!! PIPPA MIDDLETON LOVES ME!!!!!! GISELLE BUNDCHEN MARRY ME!!!! CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON!!!!!!!!)

(ok maybe not the crouching tiger one)

And the custom has it that the higher you toss. The more your wishes and dreams will come true.

So more often that not. It ends up a complete mess. And the dining room looks like you invited the love child of the Tasmanian Devil and Cookie Monster over for dinner.

Pictorially, this is what it looked like:

It was lovely. We gave out prizes to the noisiest person, the best dressed and the biggest tosser. We had mad banter. We had an awesome electric and insane crowd including Alex (mad mad mixologist magician – ” I just made bacon butterfly wings!”), Issac of Young Turks @ Ten Bells, owners of the GreatBritishChefs, a bunch of  journos (Tara, Daven, Justin), the sweetest couple (PugarooJerrick)… Thank you all for making this truly memorable.

AND 

*****NEWSFLASH*****

 it was so awesome that we’re GONNA DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN FOR Y’ALL MID-FEB.

Who cares if its not Chinese New Year anymore by then. Pfft. Pedantic Semantics.

So sign up here for dates of the next one coming up and see you guys soon!

With eightreasurericewinechickenhugx and yushengkisses,

goz

Click to view slideshow.

(photo credits: Grace Hui, Tara John and Wen Lin)

Dong dong dong dong CHIANG!

January detox schmetox. It’s Enter the Dragon round here at Plusixfive HQ and we’ve got some kitchen kungfu afoot to celebrate the coming Chinese New Year.

Our fires got extra stoked recently, thanks to awesome unexpected press mentions in The Cultural Expose in London and The Online Citizen back home in Singapore.

So we’re thinking chwee kueh (recipe here if you’re feeling bad bad badass at home), Wen’s Hakka pork belly mui choi (recipe here), ngor hiang, and (boldbigflashingfreakinglights) YU SHENG (boldbigflashingfreakinglights), a crazy messy noisy loud raw fish salad interactive experience that is THE thing to do during Chinese New Year in Singapore (thats what the kids in the photo above are doing. No. they are not picking scraps of leftovers from a table). And we’ll see what else the week ahead inspires.

Sunday 15 Jan, 7.30pm
£35 suggested minimum donation, BYOB

Move Bruce Lee stylee and email us if you want a piece of the action with:

Name:
No. of seats:
Contact number:
Food allergies / dietary restrictions:

Oh yeah, u also need to wear RED and lots of it. So if you are, Marilyn Manson, an extra from a Tim Burton movie, a general goth, in mourning, just had a white wedding or are one of the members of this… (ok if you are really Tim Burton, Marilyn Manson and wanna come. Ok. but just this once ok?)
With lots of chinesey love and yu sheng kisses!

goz is so excited he had to jump for joy in the forbidden city

Alright, so lets kick of 2012, with a ridiculously simple recipe which is virtually impossible to botch up unless you are trying your darndest to do so just to spite me.

Everytime I serve it, theres always one person who squelches up their face and go, “eww! preserved turnip?! on what? a gooey rice cake?!”

But their look of disgust turns to euphoria and surprise when they take their first bite into the pillowy soft semi translucent rice cake and crunch on that savoury oily hit from the chai poh (preserved turnip) and take a wiff of the subtle gentle garlickiness.

YEAH KIDS! its possibly the best freaking turnip u will ever have eaten unless your tastebuds suck or have no tongue generally. I swear they should serve this in school canteens as part of Jamie Oliver’s food revolution. Kids will have no trouble meeting their 5 a day i reckon (although their sodium and fat levels might take a beating).

Its an awesome starter and very easy to make too. I think of it as a way to rev up the tastebuds a notch and set the tempo for the evening’s menu to come!

I also like to serve it in the same way which they serve it in Singapore – on that crummy brown paper to soak up all the oil and with little toothpicks which are completely ergonomically inappropriate for the task. But for nostalgia’s sake, I wont change it for the world.

This makes about 25 chwee kuehs. Im also using the authentic Chwee Kueh ramekin mold type thing here which I got in Singapore and stole borrowed from the very talented E. But you can use any small ramekin shaped objects… Gu choc ramekins, small sauce bowls, big soup spoons, ashtrays, a giant’s contact lenses, an oompa loompa‘s jockstrap…

Even if you cant be bothered to make the rice cakes, I reckon if you like anchovies on toast, u’ll love this on toast.

What to buy?

Rice Cake (this is the white carby rice cake base)

• 510ml water (boiling hot)
• 510ml room temp water
• 250g rice flour
• 60g tapioca flour
• 2 tablespoon of oil
• 2 tsp salt

Savouryyummykicka$$mouthwatering Turnip thing on the top (u wanna make more of this badboy to satisfy the masses or keep it all for yourself and eat it the next morning slathered on some toast)

• 200g of sweet preserved turnip (sometimes called sweet Chinese radish in stores/ sometimes called white radish/ always called Chai Por to a Singaporean)
• 1 whole head of garlic
• 3 tsp sesame seeds
• 4 dried chillis or add more if you think you are hardcore.
• LARD. yeap. a whole lotta lard. Like 300g of pig fat lard. If lard scares you n u rather lull yourself into a false sense of healthy security, use vegetable oil but it wont be as yummy i tell you. Its even better if u render your own lard cos u know u can be hardcore like that.
• a whole range of condiments – light soy sauce, fish sauce, sambal belachan and maggi chilli sauce

What do i do?

You can actually make these a day before the meal. They both keep well and in fact, the chilling time for the rice cakes help them keep their shape and not spoolge out into a gooey mess.

• Rice Cake

• SuperduperawesomeTurniptopping

1. Soak the dried chillis til they are rehydrated and happy looking. Drain and slice and dice them to little fine bits.
2. Soak the turnip in water for 5 to 10 mins. Rinse and then dice roughly.
3. Finely dice the garlic.
4. Now melt the lard in a heavy sauce pan. Once its good and hot, flashfry the garlic and chilli for about a minute. Then add the preserved turnip and let that fri for about 10 mins on a small fire. Let those turnipygarlickyflavours get sexy and make sweet oily fragrant love in that pan. Once its super fragrant and yes u WILL know when its gets super fragrant, start adding the sesame seeds and then season according to taste.
5. Im bit hesitant to tell you exactly how much of the condiments to add because its really individual, some like it sweeter so u add more sugar, I prefer it saltier so I add fish sauce, soy sauce and a good dash of chilli.
6. Some people prefer the belachan chilli on the side. Can also. But i prefer it all mixed in.

(photo credit: Wen at EdibleEperiences and @equinoxhan)

dearest 2011,

being with u is like hangin out with a foodie drug dealer. with all your crazy manic coke uppers and xanax downers. but i have to say. thank you. thank you for  knockin’ me up and leaving me with plusixfive. But i guess this is where we say goodbye. Sorry. you have a past to go and I have future to rawk.  And I’ve met someone else. I’ll be seeing her at midnight in about 2 days. She promises me all kinds of awesomeness. A bit like the same of what you promised. But better. And i cant wait. 

xxooo

So here we are. At the end of the year. Me sitting in a hot bath as I type this listening to a heady mix of Ting Tings, Chet Baker, Smashing Pumpkins, Radio One’s live lounge and Aaron Tan with an oldfashioned in hand. Wondering why the hell people take baths as Im giddy from all heat and trying to find some sort of divine inspiration for this post.

Im still bloody horrible at writing blog posts as you can probably tell and are thankful for the lack of mail spam (unless you are following me on twitter then geniune complete utter apologies to you for my stream of consciousness verbal diarrhoea. SORRY!). I still have a backlog of about 20 dinners to write about and which I probably should instead of sitting in baths.

Its been a manic year huh? Never thought this ba*st*rd monster lovechild supperclub of mine would take off in the way it did. We had head chefs from michelin starred restos, popupsupperclubs, and japanese yakitori joints drop by, we had repeat guests who kept on coming back and bringing their friends, we featured guest chefs and baristas, we had bloggers gush about our food, bloggers who thought i couldnt stop yapping and bloggers who thought I didnt yap enough, we were one of the top 5 most offbeat supperclubs, we were featured in TimeOut and the CorkNews, we had pretty good looking irish celebs drop by, I also earned four new burn marks on my arm, about a trillion new cuts, my hands constantly smell of garlic now and I cannot stand the sight of yet another kueh pie tee or braised duck…

… and thanks to my superpower of micromanaging, I also probably have argued abused fought squabbled and go all batshiiitcraxy with everyone who has helped out at my supperclub.

So this post is really for all of you, honeys, guests, friends, lovers, boos, enemies, acquaintances, crushes, loves, sweethearts, monsters, foes, villains and weird superheroes who have helped make this dream of mine come true. And here are photos of some of them! (sorry if I havent got everyone. Its probably cos im as good with phototaking as cookie monster is with grammar.) Thank you and I love you.

Not quite sure what 2012 will hold for plusixfive (any ideas kids?) but we do hope to be able to feed you soon…!

Have an awesomely delicious foodp(0)rn filled new year wherever you are…!

with rojak love and rendang kisses,

goz

(photo credit goes to Sam C and Wen Lin)

(if u think u look ugly, is a vegetarian but is seen stuffing face with pork belly, or is caught in one of the pics with your secret mistress your girlfriend knows nothing about and would smash your balls if she found out, lemme know and i’ll remove it.)

“eh goz. I came all the way from Singapore and have extended my stay in London leh just so i can do FOH at your supperclub leh. Arrange one leh… pweety please…”

MARCUS

So when Marcus, co-owner of premiere uber cool coffee joint Loysels Toy in Singapore, said that to me (as he manically flailed his arms in the air at how amazing and awesome the ”bloom” of the coffee he was pouring – this happened EVERY SINGLE BLOODY MORNING AND EVERY SINGLE TIME HE POURS COFFEE) with his big bambi eyes:

And his girlfriend sat there with her big bambi eyes:

I couldnt say no. Well I guess I could but that would mean having them sulk around like a big girls blouse for the next week or so especially since they brought up some freshly roasted beans from Singers.

So I decided to organise one last minute and let them do their coffee thing at the supperclub.

We’ve always featured beans from PapaPalheta anyway, getting people to mule them from Singapore every now and then. We did this to showcase coffee from Singapore and just generally to see people’s reaction when told that this tiny island of Singapore do actually have our own pretty darn good coffee roasters.

So here they are bludgeoning me to death with coffee geekiness and  entertaining our guests with table side coffee pouring and explaining BLOOM (yes that is his hand sign for bloom), caramel, chocolate notes, and citrus nose etc and all things super geeky and coffee like temperatures timings swirls of the filter etc.

PLEASUREMONGER

After years (ok, maybe weeks) of convincing, armtwisting and guilt tripping and bambi eyeing the very lovely R (thepleasuremonger) to feature at the supperclub, she finally relented and rocked up at dessert time to serve up some pretty ”you mean u made this?!?!” fricking inserthyperbole/superlative gula melaka and salted caramel macaroons and lychee chiffon cake!

SEE BELOW DAMN YOU! SEE BELOW!

You can read all about how she did it here – http://thepleasuremonger.wordpress.com/2011/11/13/the-pleasure-monger-serving-up-at-plusixfive-tonight

Right we’re off to the pub. Here’s some random pictures  for you to scroll through as you wait for your day to be over.

Not sure when the next supperclub will be. We got some private parties booked and our first corporate event! woo hoo! But we’ll try to squeeze a tiny one in before the year is up!

hugxxx!

(all photos courtesy of the amazingly talented and fiercely humble E from Heaven in a Wild Flower)

Sometime ago, we were asked by the impossibly boyishly cute Donal Skehan (allegedly, according to the soft whimpering/ coo-ing of the female species when they see his page) to volunteer a recipe for his article on the Cork News when he dropped by awhile back.

I’ll like to say I took forever to write the article because my guilt and i were debating whether or not to share this deep secret recipe handed down from my great grandmother who passed it to a late grand uncle who kept the recipe shoved up his bum like Christopher Walken or whether I should be magmanimous and assist in the culinary advancement of mankind/ irish kind.

But it was just

(a) general procrastination and thumb twiddly twiddling … …

(b) nights watching Muppets and giggling like Spongebob … …

(c) headbanging, devil handsigning and air guitaring to Foo Fighters…

But we realised that no matter how badass Dave Grohl was, he wasnt gonna write no articles for me. So i finally got off my bum to write this recipe.

pork belly satay

So how this dish came about (I think…):

In Singapore, because we are a mix of cultures and races, some of our dishes overlap and fuse into one another as one culture will invariably influence another in this melting pot of a city. Satay is a good example. All the spices are clearly not chinese in origin and most probably came from the Malays/ Indonesian cultures of our neighbouring countries. And satay is a typical Malay/ Indonesian dish. But they are mostly Muslim so they do not eat pork.
The Chinese on the other hand, love pork. (If you are Chinese and you hate pork, Im sure Arkham Asylum has a place for you.)

And someone somewhere I guess probably thought. Mmm.. there’s beef satay… lamb satay… but why no pork (NO PORK! NO PORK!!!!!)
And so this was born.

————————————————————————————————-

Chinese Pork Belly Satay (makes about 30 sticks of satay. Or 15 if you make really really really big uns)
Ingredients:

1kg pork belly from your favourite butcher (get him to remove the skin unless u have knife skillz of a ninja. Keep the skin to make chicharron)
4 tablespoon brown sugar
12 shallots (or three big white onions)
8 cloves of garlic
2 inch galangal (sometimes called blue ginger)
1 tsp white pepper
1 tsp coriander powder
2 tsp garam masala or any decent fiery fragrant curry powder
4 tsp cumin
1 tablespoon of belachan (this is like an intense smelling dried shrimp paste – jam packed with umami)
1 tablespoon of sambal chilli
2 tablespoon of soy sauce
4 tsp of tumeric
5 fresh stalks of lemongrass
1 tablespoon of oyster sauce
1 tablespoon of cooking oil
30 wooden skewers

What to do:

(1) Ideally, you need to prepare everything the day before you want to wow your guests, partner, spouse, offspring and mother-in-law.
(2) Blitz everything above, save for the pork belly and the wooden skewers (duh!), in a food processor til fine and mushy. Add more oil tablespoon by tablespoon if its not a nice smooth paste. Now you got your superduperkickass marinade.
(3) Slice pork belly into 1 inch cubes/ rectangles.
(4) Submerge all pork meat into the super secret kickass marinade and get your hands in there and mush it all around til every single sliver of pork meat is submerged in this wildly fragrant kickass marinade.
(5) Now skewer all the pork onto the wooden skewers.
(6) Leave overnight in fridge to let the pork meat and marinade get kinky and intimate.
(7) Next day, preheat oven at gas mark 4.
(8) Take pork satay out of fridge, and grill it on each side for about 10 mins in the oven.
(9) If you feeling confident and adventurous give it a good blast of heat at gas mark 5 on grill for a minute to get it nice and charred. You get special bonus points if you do all of this on a charcoal barbecue pit.
(10) Serve and consume! If your friends aren’t impressed, change friends.

(photos by Wen of www.edibleexperiences.com and Sam of www.lifeoutsidetheviewfinder.com/)

Reviews of the day itself can be read here, on the Cork News (apparently we made an Irish star step out of his comfort zone!) and here (with some pretty awesome photos by the only dude i know who can make black soy braised duck look that good).

Notable highlights/mentions:

a) it was the first (and very possibly, last) time we decided to do two sittings in one day. (im definitely still wondering how we did it or whether or not it was all a dream… *pinch*)

b) all the guests came dressed in RED (see below!) as requested. It was magical seeing a sea of red in my living room…! (Before you wonder why and whether I have an unhealthy vampire robert pattinson obsession, its Singapore’s national colour)

c) some great great friends turned up!

d) we had a small irish star factor in da house with Eatlikeagirl and Donal Skehan!

e) did i mention we did two sittings in a day?

The menu is set out in a previous post here.

I basically wanted to set out and showcase and cram as much of anything which reminds me of home.

(If I had my way, I would have played the theme song from the Unbeatables on repeat. But i think Wen would have killed me.) 

Anything which really tugged at my foodstrings and of which brought me back to a place somewhere in Singapore. Take the starter snack of belingjau crisps. Its a bitter indonesian cracker made from this obscure Indonesian seed. But everytime i bite into it and close my eyes, all i smell is chlorine, wet goggles and damn towels…! Cos its exactly what we would treat ourselves every Sunday when dad brought us swimming!

And laksa was also a treat after swimming… that whiff of fragrant laksa leaves also always takes me right back to scorching hot recess breaks in primary school or sitting at holland village in my later tween years, shoving molten hot (both spicy AND temperature hot) with a crap load of cockles, for lunch.

And seems like it did the same for our guests. People came and had intense discussions over where the best katong laksa was from… where they tasted belingjau the first time and how they loved/ hated it… how they loved the lor ark at pasir panjang… looked befuddled when asked what sea coconuts were (no one seems to know!), and had heated debates over whether rojak should have cuttlefish or not!

So yeah, I hope we did manage to bring a little bit of nostalgia to the Singaporeans who came (short of blaring something from SBC) and for all those who’ve never been to Singapore, bring a little bit of Singapore to London that one weekend!

Here’s a couple of pix (SEE THAT SEA OF RED! WOO HOO!)

pork belly satay

Katong Laksa!

No Singaporean dinner should be without a Good Morning towel.

this dude flew in from Dubai (to have a grumpy face off with Wen)

Click to view slideshow.

(credits for some of these awesome photos go Donal Skehan and Sam@lifeoutsidetheviewfinder - both of whom have cameras bigger than my tummy)

We promise to hit you up with pictures of the awesome National Day session when everyone really sportingly came dressed in all manners of red (well except for Donal Skehan who claimed his undergarments were red)! (Red being our National Day colour and half of our flag. Not cos im a weirdo with a vermilion obsession)

Anyway in the meanwhile, I thought I should let you know we are in the press again thanks to the superduper handsome Donal Skehan! You can read it online HERE!

And we have been reviewed by Sam from Life Outside the View Finder! http://www.lifeoutsidetheviewfinder.com/2011/08/65-supper-club There are some hopelessly awesome photos on his site!

Sam has possibly the biggest camera in the world and therefore the most AWESOME pictures of my food. Geez. I didnt think satay could look THIS good!

(Superduper satay photo courtesy of Sam at www.lifeoutsidetheviewfinder.com)

Wen always told us our farts were pretty potent.

So finally, Wen, the dudette who you probably speak to when you email us, runs our reservation system, creates strange spreadsheets to track our guests and mailing list, generally kick goz’s butt to get this whole supperclub going, takes a lot of unnecessary yelping from goz and together with ms plusixfive, generally keeping goz’s head sane and dreams realistic, she has kicked some programmer (read: her longsuffering hubby) butt and www.edibleexperiences.com is now live jive and ready to rock your weekends. Questions?

Q: Whats EdibleExperiences and who are you to tell me you monster! YOU ARE BIASED AND EVIL!

A: Its a website which “helps you discover food & drink experiences in London, in cooking schools, homes and outdoors alike.“

Its like a compendium of just about every single possible food experience your brain can think of (within reason… so don’t go moaning that there are no whale filleting classes or unicorn butchery lessons) in London.

You are perfectly entitled to think I’m biased but when she told me it finally went live, I went in and had a wander and goodness gracious.. I remembered I couldnt stop clicking and scrolling through the site in disbelief. You mean there were SO MANY classes/ courses/ walks/ tours based on food in London?!?!

It lists everything from knife skills, to how to fillet fish, to mushroom forays and supperclubs. You wished your kid could cook you some chinese food? well, theres a cooking class for 4-8 year olds. You want to learn how to make a dessert to go along with your kid’s chinese meal? Well theres a talk by David Lebowitz coming up soon. And if you wanted to know how to taste the wine your kid used in the stir fry? well… theres a course called just that too. Or if you have always secretly wanted to have BBQ on the roof of a car park eating Grouse Sausages. Well, you’re in luck cos lookey here!

Q: How will it change my life?

A: Well. Now, if you wanted a night out and wanted to book a resto, there;s a gazillion restos out there, listing what cuisine u want, what area and what your budget is.

If you wanted to learn how to fillet fish or carve a cow or simply cant decide but know you want to pick up a new skill or go for a foodie outing, whatcha gonna do? Well. Now u know. And its all here. In one helpful single location. Its like the CEREBRO of the foodie experience world – you can use it to reach out to other likeminded foodie people/events out there (not saying that Wen is a bald mutant in a wheel chair).

Q: So. What do I do now?

A: Well, dont take my word for it. If you didnt know me, why should you (unless you are one of those kids who are so loving and trusting and constantly sending money via Western Union to your “friends” in need)?

So go on. Go have a click round. I can almost guarantee that you’ll find something you’ll have no idea existed and wouldnt mind trying.

xxooo