If you like your blogs with attitude, you’ll feel right at home with Lady and Pups. Blogger Mandy Lee channels her daily frustrations living in Beijing, where she moved with her husband three years ago, through sumptuous cooking and the occasional tirade. She even dubs hers ‘an angry food blog’ – a disclaimer for anyone looking for girly pics, pleasant prose and fuss-free, healthy food. In its place are seriously rich, addictive dishes (think cheat’s ramen with 44 cloves of garlic), culinary mash-ups (one clam chowder with Korean chilli and miso paste, please) and dark, striking photography to match a hilarious, no-holds-barred writing style. The Taiwan native is also into cooking science, and scrupulously trials new ways to cook classic dishes. Magic 15-second creamy scrambled eggs? Check. The dreamiest of dreamy milk toast? Check. Lee rounds up her comfort food favourites, from peanut butter sticky rice balls with green tea to Taiwanese pork ragu on rice, to get you through the cooler months wherever you are – be it ‘exiled’ in Beijing or here in Oz.
“Here, while the season is starting to bloom after a slow defrost, it has always felt a bit strange to me that on the other side of the world, the leaves are just beginning to fall again. Hello Australia, I’m jealous. Autumn, while I was still living in New York, used to be my favourite season. There is always something much more tender about it. More than sunrise, it’s sunset. More than anticipations, it’s about dissipating. And let’s not forget that all the seasonal sentiments are just an excuse to indulge unapologetically in everyone’s favourite food: comfort food. If you are already married to your own definition of this phrase, it would be impossible for me to convince you otherwise. Nonetheless, I’d like to share with you some of mine.
“Comfort food for me is loudly slurping a bowl of ramen in an intense and milky soup flavoured with roasted and crisp-fried garlic.
“It’s the warming and sustaining heat from a new New England clam chowder spiced up with Korean gochujang paste and mopped up with torn sourdough. It’s chicken soup thickened with blended rice, then served with pan-crisped shredded chicken and poached egg. It’s the calling from my Taiwanese background of a bowl of dry-sauced noodle I call “crack slurp” and the insatiable appetite for lu rou fan (rice with braised minced pork belly and fried shallots). It’s also ending with sticky rice balls filled with peanut butter lava. And if none of those do the trick, I’ll throw in a flaming Cheetos-grilled cheese for good measure. I hope you like my suggestions.”
I started my blog… After I was dragged out of New York and found myself in real-world Mordor [Beijing], and I had to put my insufferable free time to good use.
The must-cook recipes on my website… And that I make again and again myself, are bunker crack slurp and Monday blue-berry oatmeal cookies. But I would also highly recommend investing in vampire slayer ramen and beer duck.
I can’t wait to go back to… Paris to smear borderline lava-like cheese on a warm, torn-open baguette; Bali to say, “I’ll take the bottom section of that roasted whole pork to go, please. No chopping needed”; and Penang to line up at the infamous Line Clear holding the best iced coffee that comes in a plastic bag.
My current food obsession is… The forever mystery of anything bread-like.
Eating… An onsen tamago (hot spring egg) that lurks between the texture of custard and jello [jelly] takes me back to the vague memories of my father coming home late at night from his business trip to Japan with a carton of those eggs in his luggage, which we would eat as a treat after I finished my homework.
Nugget of cooking wisdom… If you didn’t love cooking it, you probably won’t love eating it.
I learnt to cook from… My mother and television.
When I go back to my home town… Taiwan, the first thing I eat is bubble milk tea sweetened with black sugar.
Friends always ask me to cook my… All my good friends are overseas and ask me to cook them my latest recipes, and to that I always say, “The recipe is on the blog!”
The one thing I can’t cook is… Vegetables.
I always have… An array of instant noodles in my pantry, no space in my fridge, and things I don’t recognise anymore in my freezer.
My favourite biscuit to dunk in a cup of tea is… I’ve never done this before, but it sounds lovely.
My most sauce-splattered cookbooks are… Thomas Keller’s. I love them all and I’m pretty sure he’d strangle me if I splattered any sauce over them.
The most difficult food to shoot/style and make look tasty is… A really messy pile of carnage-like food that usually tastes the best.
The vampire slayer ramen express Source: Mandy Lee
Source: Mandy Lee
Source: Mandy Lee
Peanut butter sticky rice balls in green tea Source: Mandy Lee
Blog Appétit Editor Yasmin Newman
Blog Appétit is our curated list of go-to food blogs we love, with a focus on high-quality photography, trusted recipes, strong editorial themes and a unique voice and personality. View previous Blog Appétit entries.
