Lalibela Platter

Ann put a lot of thought into this month’s Dinner Club selection and with only three days to go, she announced tonight’s restaurant: Lalibela. While Phil is off riding his bike in Vietnam, Angela, Ann, Kenny, Morten, and myself drove to North Burnaby to see what Lalibela has to offer. Although most of us have tried Ethiopian dishes, we were all new to the restaurant (which in case you were wondering, is named after a holy city in Ethiopia known for its stone-embedded churches carved below ground level).

Most Vancouverites who have tried Ethiopian cuisine have paid a visit to Fassil on East Broadway. When it comes to customer attention, Fassil wins hands down over any of the African restaurants I’ve tried. I still remember our lunch there a few years back where the owner spent a ridiculous amount of time explaining everything you’d need or want to know about Ethiopian food, cooking, and coffee. Our server today was courteous, but trying to get him to recommend a dish was like trying to pull teeth from a pitbull. If we’re being completely honest though, service alone isn’t enough to generate repeat business. I haven’t gone back to Fassil since my first visit. And when it comes to food, Lalibela takes the prize.

We ordered Lalibela’s signature dish Qey Doro Wot (spicy beef stew), Dereq Tibs (lamb sautee), and a Lalibela Platter to share. The Platter included five vegetarian dishes, and four meats including a lamb wot, chicken tibs, and two beef tibs, served on a mild injera.

Word of warning, this post contains a lot of foreign terms. In case you’ve never been properly introduced to Ethiopian cuisine, here’s a quick brief: Ethiopian dishes are served on and with a spongy warm flatbread the size of a large pizza (injera). It’s soft, squishy, slightly sour, and can come in a light tan, brownish, or grey colour depending on the restaurant’s method of preparation. You eat the dishes much like you would eat Indian food, by tearing a piece of injera and using it to pick up some tibs (vegetarian or meat dish), wot (stew), or (if you really trust the restaurant) kitfo (raw marinated beef). There are no utensils and it’s more fun to go with friends, so make sure you have friends with good hygiene.

The vegetarian dishes in the Platter consisted of Misir Wot (lentil), Shiro (chickpeas), Kosta (spinach), Tikil Gomen (cabbage), and Fasolia (potato, green bean and carrot gumbo). Kenny and I found the Misir Wot to have a rough and less enjoyable texture than the Shiro, but Ann was in denial and favoured her seasoned lentil puree. The Kosta was a popular choice, but only two of us placed it in our top three picks. I found the sour Tikil Gomen and Fasolia to be boring at best, but Ann’s quote of the night “Cabbage — it’s like eating dessert!” was worth having them included in the Platter.

Qey Doro Wot

When it comes to the meat dishes that were included in the Platter, I’m afraid I simply don’t know for certain what we were eating! Our server pointed out which one was chicken (which was pretty evident from the drumstick sitting in the middle of it), lamb, and which two were beef. But, he probably thought it’d be a waste of time to describe each in detail and so he didn’t. Of these four dishes, the lamb was the most popular for its unique blend of spices. One of the beef dishes had chunks of notably overcooked meat that left a dry aftertaste, while the other was made of ground beef and had an interesting mildly spicy kick. The drumstick in the chicken dish proved to be a bit of a challenge to split without the use of utensils, and was less memorable than the other meat dishes.

Finally, the Qey Doro Wot (beef) and Dereq Tibs (lamb) were by far the most popular choices tonight. It’s no wonder the Qey Doro Wot is their signature dish. The wot is spicy with an almost liquid texture that seeps through the injera faster than you can pop it into your mouth which makes for a very messy meal especially since plates are not offered at Lalibela (definitely not a date-friendly venue). The Dereq Tibs didn’t make my top three list because the lamb was annoyingly chewy. Ang noted that the lamb was fatty in addition to being chewy, but still thought it was good enough to make the top three cut — as did Kenny and Morten. Go figure.

Lalibela: 5 / 5

At just over $10 per person, our dinner was cheap compared to past Dinner Club meals and we all agreed that Lalibela was worth a repeat visit.

Overall Food Group Rating: 5 out of 5

The Good: Great flavour in the meat dishes, and I highly recommend the Qey Doro Wot and Kosta. The Qey Doro Wot is their signature dish for a reason, and you won’t find a better Kosta anywhere else. If you like lamb, you should also try the Dereq Tibs which was very popular tonight.

The Bad: No cutlery and no plates in combination with lots of runny sauces makes for a very messy meal. Don’t wear white.

The Ugly: My photos of the food. It looks terrible in pictures, but it’s yummy in your tummy!

Before beginning this month’s Dinner Club review, I’d like to take a moment to dedicate all my deliciously fatty morsels of burgers, fries, cake, cookies, chocolate, and everything else that’s chubbifying to the douchy louche Kenneth Tong. This bite’s for you!

You can see our jaw muscles working as Morten and I try to take our first bites. These are single patties. There was one guy who ordered FOUR patties in his burger.

Phil chose our first Dinner Club destination this year and he set his stomach on Five Guys Burgers and Fries in Park Royal.

We drove around the mall for a bit trying to find this place (Google Maps is a bit off the mark for this one), and when we did I was surprised to see a red and white fast food joint. It looks like it ought to be a Checkers, but it’s not. Checkers has a much bigger menu selection.

The Five Guys menu consists of burgers and fries (can’t say they have a misleading name), hot dogs, and sandwiches. You don’t have the option of choosing chicken, or vegetarian for your burger patty, but you do get to choose what ingredients you want slapped on. We ordered five burgers with just about every topping, one sandwich, Five Guys Style and Cajun fries, and soft drinks.

Ann had ordered a “Little” burger, but I’m pretty sure she got a regular sized burger instead. Kenny ordered a bacon cheeseburger but he’s “pretty sure they forgot the bacon”. And Ang ordered a Veggie and Grilled Cheese sandwich, but was pretty sure they forgot what food is.

When it comes to the actual burgers, Ann, Kenny, Phil and Morten all thought they were “good” even though there was an “um..” followed by a long pause from Kenny before he decided he liked his meal. I thought the burger was alright, but there was nothing special about it and I got so bored half way through that I decided to stop eating. Though the burger patties were decent (not great, but not inedible), it bothered me that someone else’s bits of bacon had obviously burned on the grill before attaching to my bacon strips and bringing up thoughts of cancer as I took my bites. But, the thick cut pickle slices and grilled onions did make up for a bit of the bad burnt taste. Poor Ann was struggling with her waterfall of a burger that was literally pouring out of its wrapper and onto her lap. I still can’t figure out why hers was so soggy. Finally, I think everyone made a comment at some point along the lines of the burgers being “ugly as hell”, “disgusting to look at” etc.

Sad Veggie and Cheese Sandwich

Ang’s sandwich deserves a paragraph all on its own. That was one saaaaad something — I hesitate to even call it a sandwich. The “cheese” was that kind of liquid fake crap that you find in those little cheese and cracker dippers you get as a kid, but watered down. The vegetables were the same that we had in our burgers, but in a cold bun with fake liquid cheese, which leaves me wondering where the “Grilled” part of her “Veggie and Grilled Cheese Sandwich” was supposed to be. It’s pretty sad when the diner is happy to see peanuts (self-serve and free for patrons) after eating the worst meal in Dinner Club history.

I was satisfied at least with my Cajun fries until I tried Kenny’s Five Guys Style fries and immediately noticed that his were ten times fresher! I got stale fries. Then, I didn’t like them as much.

Not only was the service and food quality unreliable, but the place isn’t a cheap burger joint either — comparable to Red Robin at about $13 per meal. I won’t be going back.

Overall Group Food Rating: 4 out of 6

Five Guys Burgers and Fries: 4/6

The Good: Free peanuts and drink refills, generous scoops of fries, edible burger patties

The Bad: Unreliable service and food quality, and a lot of leftovers under the tables including a pickle that Ang kept stepping on.

The Ugly: The burgers. My goodness were they ever ugly. I’m sure a lot has to do with their tight wrapping of their mushy buns. Knowing that though still doesn’t make it look any better.

Sidenote: Phil wanted to give a little more than a half vote, but that’s not allowed according to Dinner Club rules. If it was, I would’ve given a little less than a half vote. So, we end up balancing out.

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Cannoli at Carlo’s Bakery

Ever since I went to Carlo’s Bakery (the bakery from TLC’s Cake Boss) with Ang and Morten, I’ve been wanting to make red velvet cupcakes myself.

Cake Boss

Carlo’s Bakery is just as tiny as it looks on Cake Boss. No, we didn’t see Buddy. But, we did see the sisters and one of the regular male bakers. The place was really busy but they were very efficient at getting orders filled and customers out the door asap.

Carlo’s Bakery Cookies

Gotta say though, the baked goods looked really ordinary and less than appetizing — I felt like we were looking at products at a school’s bake sale where you feel the need to hold onto each cookie with a handful of napkins because the butter is threatening to grease your fingers worse than a Wendy’s burger.

Still, you can’t go to Carlo’s Bakery and not try something. So, we got cannoli. The bakery is supposed to be famous for their cannoli and had even devoted an entire episode to them. We bought a box of ten, and the guy at the counter actually said “is that it?” I was a little surprised ’cause I thought ten was a bit excessive. We tried them outside and ended up polishing off the box in under 15 minutes. We went back for more and got red velvet cupcakes for later too.

Damn, they were good! I understood why the guy at the counter didn’t think we were buying much because on our second trip in I listened to see what other people were ordering and it seemed like it was the norm to buy a dozen cupcakes and throw in another box of cookies just because.

My Turn

My First Attempt at Red Velvet Cupcakes

Last weekend, we put up the Christmas tree and decorations. This weekend marked the official start of the holiday baking season with the traditional Norwegian pepperkaker, and my attempt at making red velvet cupcakes. The gingerbread house will have to wait until next week and I’ll probably test out my new Perfect Brownie Pan next Sunday.

The cupcakes turned out fabulously! I guess I picked a really good recipe. The cake is fluffy and light, and the cream cheese frosting is to die for (I suspect you could actually die from eating too much of it ’cause it’s really chubbifying). There’s a good chance I’ll make them again for Christmas dinner. Here are the recipes if you want to try making them too:

Red Velvet Cupcakes

Recipe is from the Best Cupcake Recipes Blogspot

Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups sifted cake flour
1 heaping teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
2 oz. red food coloring (two bottles) or 4 oz beet juice (if you use unprocessed light cocoa you can leave out the food dyes and you’ll get a warm red/brown color)*
1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 eggs, at room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup buttermilk, at room temperature
1 teaspoon white vinegar
1 teaspoon baking soda

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line two 12-cup muffin tins or silicone pans with cupcake liners.
2. Sift together the cake flour, baking powder, and salt into a medium bowl and set aside. In a smaller bowl, mix food coloring and cocoa powder to form a thin paste without lumps and set aside.
3. In a large bowl, using a hand mixer or stand mixer, beat butter and sugar together until light and fluffy, about three minutes. Beat in eggs, one at a time, then beat in vanilla and the redcocoa paste, scraping down the bowl with a spatula as you go. Add one third of the flour mixture to the butter mixture, beat well, then beat in half of the buttermilk. Beat in another third of flour mixture, then second half of buttermilk. End with the last third of the flour mixture, beat until well combined, making sure to scrape down the bowl with a spatula.
4. In a small bowl, mix vinegar and baking soda. Be careful as it will fizz so don’t do it in a shallow bowl. Add vinegar mixture to the cake batter and stir well to combine. Fill cupcake cups with cake batter until they are a little under 3/4 full. I ended up with 20 cupcakes. Place muffin tins in your preheated oven. Bake for approximately 20, rotating pans halfway through. The cupcakes are done when you are able to pat the tops and the cake springs back up. If it sinks down they are not yet complete. Or you can insert a toothpick into the center of a cupcake in the center of the tin and if it comes out clean they are done!
5. Cool the cupcakes in their tins on a wire rack for 10 minutes then remove and allow to cool completely before frosting.

Cream Cheese Frosting

Recipe is from Chow.com

Ingredients:

12 ounces of room-temperature cream cheese (this is about 350g or one and a half chunks)
1/2 cup of powdered sugar
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

Instructions:

1. Combine all ingredients in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment*, and beat at low speed until sugar is incorporated.
2. Increase speed to medium high and beat until frosting is light and whipped, about 3 to 4 minutes. Use to top cookies, cupcakes, or cakes.

*I don’t have a mixer with a paddle attachment so I just beat the cream cheese mix by hand using a spatula and it worked really well but took a bit longer.

Enjoy!

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I shrunk!

Morten originally didn’t want to bother stopping in Texas because he had heard that it was just cattle country without much going on. When I was at Surfers Paradise (Australia), I got to talking with a woman who moved to Queensland from Texas and made the food sound so good. I wanted to go to Texas just to try some of the traditional grub! Cattle country = good steak, right?

Well, it turns out both Morten and I were wrong.  Texas was a lot of fun (we ended up staying for three days) but the food wasn’t as good as I thought it would be — not bad, but not great.

The Big Texan

The one tourist attraction in Amarillo (our first stop in Texas) is the Big Texan restaurant. Why? Because it’s home to the famous 72 oz steak — free if you can eat it with a giant shrimp cocktail, roll with butter, salad, and baked potato in under one hour, or $72 if you can’t. How big is a 72 oz steak? Well, you’re only supposed to eat as much meat as the size of your fist. The 72 oz steak is roughly six or  seven times the size of my fist, or the size of a small cat.

We decided we couldn’t eat that much so we ordered a regular steak for two, and a chicken fried steak to share between the three of us. With each order, you get two sides so we picked: fried okra (a very bland green vegetable), beef steak tomatoes with raw red onions, coleslaw, steak fries, mashed potatoes, and macaroni and cheese. Needless to say, it was still too much food. We didn’t bother to pack up the leftovers because most of it consisted of the chicken fried steak which tasted cheap (imagine a fast food copy cat of McNuggets in a larger form made with mashed beef that doesn’t taste like beef).

The 72 oz steak at the Big Texan

If you order a steak at the Big Texan, always order it one step rarer than you would normally order (ex. if you like your steak medium rare, order it rare). They warn you on the menu that due to their cooking methods, their steaks always come out drier and more well-done than other restaurants.

I wouldn’t recommend the place for the food, but I do think it’s worth a stop if you’re in the area just to feel like you’re living in a world of giants. You’ll find just about everything in giant form: money, cow, cowboy boot, chair, rice crispy square, Hershey bar, cake, steak, etc.

Oh, but if you’re a vegetarian or animal rights activist, steer clear of the place. It’s a steak house and every wall is covered with the work of taxidermists: elk, deer, moose, beaver, boar, bear… anything furry and formerly wild.

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Vinhus with wine and cheese tasting

Dear Denmark,

I think you’re missing a piece of your country! We were in California driving across some tree covered hills when the trees suddenly disappeared, flat plains of tanned grass took over, and a little Danish town called Solvang appeared.

The houses and buildings are made in traditional Danish style, the restaurants serve open faced sandwiches, sausages, meatballs, aebleskiver, and sour red cabbage. And oh-my-goodness the desserts! The desserts are real Danish desserts with flaky pastries and real egg cream and napoleons that look like they’ll fall apart to the touch. You couldn’t fake that! No sirree. I’m certain someone has stolen a piece of your country and hidden it in California!

If you’d like to reclaim your missing land, Solvang is located just 15 minutes away from Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch or two and a half hours North-West of LA.

Sincerely,

Anny Chih

PS Can I please get another custard filled chocolate pastry or a napoleon hat marzipan cookie as a reward for this information? They were Soooooooo good!

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When you travel with friends and family, you get to take dorky photos.

This isn’t travelling. To me, travelling is when you have to constantly push your boundaries and don’t allow yourself the luxury of becoming complacent. It’s a learning process where you experience everything for the first time without the influence of others so that you can discover what you really love and hate. It’s a means of discovering yourself and learning to modify your habits and ways of thinking to become someone better than the person you were when you left. This is a vacation.

I’ve gotten used to having to figure out where I should go next and how to get there by myself, getting to the next destination on my own, eating at a table for one, sightseeing by my lonesome, and talking to myself. Now I have three other people to talk and laugh with, take dorky photos with, order and share food with… etc. One person drives while a second looks up the cities on the map, a third figures out which hotels are viable options at each destination, and a fourth distributes car snacks. I don’t think it could get any easier! It could be comfier (we’re pretty crammed in the Prius), but not easier.

Oregon Caves

Paradise Lost

Today we visited the Oregon Caves under typical West Coast weather: rain, rain and more rain. I don’t have proper hiking boots so I wore my runners. My shoes and socks were soaked right through. Poor Kim didn’t have a jacket with a hood or proper walking shoes so he wore an emergency poncho and was soaked from head to toe by the end of the tour.

Oregon Caves is definitely worth a stop in my books. It’s only $8.50 US per person for an hour long tour of the caves and you get to go really far down the caves and up the mountain from within. You get to see calcite deposits and structures that are hundreds of thousands of years old as well as the remains of the markings made by tourists back in the 1930s which are now permanently embossed under a layer of limestone.

My favourite part of the tour was probably the damp cave called Paradise Lost. It’s a small area with a high ceiling covered in these giant limestone structures that look like “claws” (if you’re Ang), “jellyfish” (if you’re Morten or Kim), or “the Grinch’s hands from Dr. Seuss” or “parachuters” (if you’re me). You get dripped on quite a bit in here especially since you’re facing upwards to look at the structures, but it’s worth the look.

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12►

Hot Pot

We left Canada at the start of Thanksgiving Weekend and are at our cousin Bessie’s place in WA right now. Even at 12:28am we’re still eating! LOL

If you’ve known me for a while or have read my posts, you know how much I’m capable of eating. A visit to my cousins is probably one of the only times where I can get so full that I fall into a food coma for an entire weekend. I actually gained three pounds during one of our visits over just two days! It’s a wonder that they’re not chubby. I think the trick is to be super active — they’re P90X-ers and ‘let’s go training for a half-marathon on Saturday mornings’ and ‘we just came back from climbing Mount Kilimanjaro’ uber-fit people.

We arrived yesterday evening just in time to surprise Bessie at her belated birthday party. Before arriving, we stopped to refill the tank at a gas station beside a KFC where Ang asked “you think we should get something at KFC?” to which I replied “are you kidding me? We’re going to Bessie and Mary’s!” (Bessie and Mary are sisters). Ang said that the party was only going to have “snacks” according to Mary. HA! As if. Mary ended up serving lasagna, seafood pasta, two types of salads, four types of hor’dourves, crackers with cheese and two types of dips, chips with salsa and guacamole, Chinese sticky rice, a Costco sized Greek dessert platter, moon cake, chicken nuggets, fancy cheese filled bread, in addition to Bessie’s signature lychee bellinis and iced tea vodka drinks etc.

Ang and me boxing at 321 Bounce

After “snacks” we went to 321 Bounce to sumo wrestle, box with giant gloves in a bouncy castle, compete through inflatable race courses, play dodgeball, and pretend to be kids at a birthday party. Mary had booked the place for an hour and didn’t think it’d be enough time, but one hour was the maximum allowed. After an hour we were all pooped! Best workout ever! It was so much fun — I was even laughing when Ang hit me square in the face with a giant boxing glove. My nose hurt for a while — she hit me so hard Morten actually heard a smack and thought I’d really been injured.

We got back to the house at around 11pm and spent the next three hours chatting and eating and then woke up eight hours later to meet everyone and start the food fest all over again! We went to a Chinese restaurant for a traditional Chinese breakfast that included salty soy bean soup, green onion pancakes, black bean noodles, Chinese beef pies (best ones I’ve tried), barley dumplings, stinky tofu, sticky rice filled with meats and veggies, fried Chinese donuts, and sticky seafood rice noodles.

It isn’t just the fact that there’s a lot of food around that makes us eat so much, it’s the fact that the food is SO GOOD!! My cousins know how to cook the yummiest foods and which dishes at which restaurants are the best. Tonight we had hot pot at Bessie’s for dinner and went to two different Asian grocery stores to get the right ingredients. Hot pot is always about the sauce, and they had all the stuff: garlic paste, green onion, soya sauce, vinegar, the hot pot black paste (it’s labelled barbeque, but it’s not actually barbeque flavour), and lots of grated daikon. They also had every kind of ball (fish, chicken, beef etc) and veggies, udon, clear noodles, and so on and so forth. For dessert Bessie made chocolate brownies that were crispy on the outside and gooey on the inside. YUM! If I spent a week with my cousins it’d take me a month to list out everything we would’ve eaten. Gobble gobble! Oink oink.

Time to sleep off the food coma…

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Eating chicken feet at Dim Sum

I arrived back home on Wednesday and I’ve been catching up with everyone and everything ever since (which by the way, involves a lot of food: Sushi at Kiku, Dim Sum at Red Star Seafood Restaurant, Thai at Green Basil and Brekkie at IHOP within the last 48 hours — oink oink). I still haven’t gotten around to resizing all my pictures from my last couple of weeks in Oz for posts. :S

Announcement

I just realized that although I’ve mentioned it on Twitter, I haven’t posted anything about it here on my blog. My sister (Angela), brother-in-law (Morten), brother-in-law’s brother (Kim) and I are going on a road trip of the states starting this Saturday, October 10th!

We’ll be heading down the West Coast, drop Kim off in LA (he’s got a conference to go to), drive across Middle America, head up the East Coast, and back across the Northern states in about a month. I’m hoping we’ll take a little longer because I’m pretty sure a month isn’t enough time to cover everything. The official site for the trip is By Land, Sea or Air. Twitter hashtag: #roundtripUSA.

Interruption

Ang just walked into my room, said “in case you feel like a little light reading” and dumped a box of travel books from BCAA on my desk. And these aren’t even all of them! They got a set of Canadian travel books too.

BCAA Travel Books

Hoooolyy Guacamole. Did you know that if you sign up for a BCAA membership you can get all these travel books for free (normally $17.95 CAN each)? And all the maps you want too! Ang and Morten both got memberships for about $100 Canadian (they had some sort of two-for-one summer special) which will give us roadside assistance, six free tows, and as many maps and travel books as we want. The travel books are very similar to other guidebooks like the Lonely Planet series, but they’re arguably drier and more fact based information dispensers than travel entertainment. I think I might borrow the USA Lonely Planet book from the library for the trip anyways. You know how it is when you get used to a certain guide book format. Damn you Lonely Planet. You’ve conditioned me!

Anyways, I digress. The point of this post was to let you know that I’m still kickin’ around and still in blogger mode. I’ve just been a bit busy unpacking, getting ready to repack, meeting with friends, and catching up with family. Only 24 hours left before we leave on our US roadtrip! Eep.

Rosella crusted scallop with strawberry and grapefruit dressing at Tukka

I wrote a list of all the blog posts I wanted to write from my Wicked Road Trip and it was a really long list (in blog post time I’m only on September 21st). So, I’m jumping forward a bit to the present to tell you about my dining experience with Sarah last night before I forget what everything tasted like.

I was telling Sarah about how I wanted to try kangaroo again because I suspected that the chef was the reason it wasn’t good last time. She did her usual “Oh!” thing when she gets a bright idea and said we should go to Tukka for dinner. Tukka is one of those trendy restaurants in the West End. Yes, that’s right Vancouverites, not only does Brisbane have the same “Translink” system, skytrains that they call either “citytrains” or the “airtrain”, but they also have a trendy bohemian West End very similar to our own West End. It’s no wonder Brisbane feels like a second home to me.

The Native Platter for Two (minimum order is for 2)

You know you’re at a fancy restaurant when the portions are literally bite size. LOL Tukka takes bush tucker (traditional Australian bush food) and makes it gourmet by serving it in slivers with unusual bush-inspired sauces.

Sarah and I both ordered the native platter entree (note: in Australia, an “entree” is an appetizer and a “main” is an entree) because it comes with an assortment of native berries, home-made damper (a heavy herb bread — I think it was thyme), native dips, kangaroo, emu and crocodile. We also asked to have a bit of Tasmanian possum thrown in as well.

Before our entrees came out, everyone received complimentary appetizers: rosella crusted scallops served on top of strawberry and with a grapefruit dressing. Each plate was really well presented and the scallop was yummy but I wasn’t a big fan of the grapefruit dressing. I know this is a terrible thing to say about food at a fancy restaurant, but you know that sort of sour gaggy taste you get when you’re just about to throw up from too much tequila? That’s what the grapefruit dressing reminded me of. Terrible eh? I’m obviously not cut out to review fancy restaurants…

Sarah hesitant to try the roo

Our entrees came out on one big wooden platter — sushi boat style. Again, the food was very well presented. We started off by trying each of the berries. A couple were on the blander side, one was sour and had the worst bitter aftertaste, the big purple one started off ok like a bland grape and then quickly turned to tasting like a bad grape, and by the end we decided we didn’t like any of them.

Time for kangaroo. Sarah was hesitant about trying this because she’s not a fan of rare meats and the roo was still pink in the middle. Because the meat was so rare, its texture reminded me of sashimi but it tasted like beef jerky and was tender, flavourful and mild. This was much better than the roo I tried at Undara.

Next up: emu. I definitely preferred the roo to the emu. The emu was tougher and I think there was a little bit of tendon to it because it was difficult to cut and chew. The meat had a smokey flavour to it but neither of us could quite put our finger on how to describe the taste of the actual meat. Nothing special, but just slightly different than your usual meats.

The roo and emu also came with little roo and emu sausages. The roo sausage was so good! It was full of spices and had just the right consistency. I was a big fan. The emu sausage was good (you can’t really go wrong with sausages), but it felt more packed than the roo sausage and I didn’t like it as much.

Trying to cut the emu sliver

Crocodile time! *sigh* No croc will ever beat the croc burger I had at Daintree Village! The croc here was a little fishy again and also a little bit on the drier side. It certainly wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t nearly as good. I wish Sarah could’ve tried the burger at Daintree too.

Finally it was time for Tasmanian possum. I haven’t seen possum on any other menu in Australia, and I think I know why: it’s not good. Possum tastes like day old chicken McNuggets. It’s a bit chewy, reminds you of whatever is the opposite of fresh, and you actually feel like you’re eating road kill. Sarah said it reminded her of that scene in Shrek where he’s roasting rats. I guess neither of us are cut out to be food critics. LOL

We finished off with some lemon myrtle tea which was a lot calmer and soothing than I expected. When I think ‘lemon’ tea, I think of a tea with a little kick. This was more like a tea you’d have in front of a fireplace with some heavy cookies just before heading off to bed. A nice ending to an unusual dinner.

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Left to Right: Eastern Grey Kangaroo, Crocodile, Emu

I fed them, I played with them, I lay on the grass with them, I took pictures of them, I took pictures with them, I saw them as roadkill, I saw many of them as roadkill, I learned how to tell them apart, I learned how to avoid hitting them on the road, I learned how to shoot them, I learned about their habits, I took a tour about them, and now… it was time to eat one!

That’s right folks, nearly three months after my first encounter with a kangaroo I was finally ready to try eating one. The verdict: tender, juicy, but bland. I’ve heard that kangaroo is supposed to be gamey, but it didn’t taste that way to me. In fact, it didn’t taste like much at all. I also had emu and crocodile on the same plate and they were equally bland which makes me think it was the chef rather than the meat because the last time I tried crocodile it was delicious and full of flavour. Boo-urns.

Tips for Travellers Eating at Undara

1. Get to the buffet when it first starts around 6pm. You have to order your main dishes at the counter and the chef makes them one at a time. If you get to the dinner at 7pm or after, you’ll likely end up waiting a half hour before your meal is ready because that’s when everyone starts to arrive. There were a lot of hungry loud kids impatiently waiting for their food when I was there.
2. The buffet style dining will soon be scrapped for a la carte dining. This isn’t a bad thing. I’d recommend the Undara Volcanic Prime Rib Fillet (steak). It comes from the Collins family Spring Creek Station nearby. If they still have the same chef, order it one step rarer than you normally would.

Dinner at Undara

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You might think after looking at the pictures that I would’ve been full. At least, that’s what the chef thought. I didn’t really mind his jibes about my appetite but I certainly didn’t appreciate them either. I think people often underestimate how much I can eat because they think “oh, little Asian girl. She couldn’t eat much.” If I’m with company I normally don’t eat that much because it takes me a really long time to finish my plate and I don’t like to make people wait for me. But, if I’m on my own I take my time and I can end up eating quite a bit. After all the food you see in the pictures (which I finished by the way — I don’t like to waste food), I didn’t feel like I had eaten anything but the kitchen had already closed.