Australian’s very first Master Chef has been finalised last night. I suppose that to a lot of people, who are enthusiast about cooking and would not miss even single one episode of the show, last night’s show was very emotional.I only watch this program occasionally and to me, I actually like the “Iron Chef” better, even there was full of American accent in the show and the Japanese title “Zu Ke Zan” was almost called out ridiculously like in every 20 seconds.

Another reason is that I found the dishes presented in the Master Chef were rather disappointing. Probably because of my background as a Chinese and from the grass root, I don’t really enjoy the presentation of most of the dishes. For example the last night’s choc dish appeared in the 3rd round, so called “the most elegant and exquisite dish”, I didn’t find it very appealing at all. If I had seen it in a restaurant table, I probably wouldn’t be very motivated to eat it. To me, it’s aesthetically awful and looked very ungenerous. Or another explanation is I have never really eaten any beautiful food, or I simply don’t have a taste for the art of food, or I am too mean to appreciate the beauty in a high restaurant-standard dish.

Comparing to that choc desert dish in the show, I actually enjoyed what I made for the last night dinner better. We bought two pieces of pig ear the other day. Yes, pig’s ears…that’s sort of gross stuff I eat and enjoy, which probably would disgust most of judges from the Master Chef:-(

I boiled them and cut them into very thin strips, and made a Sichuan styled hot and spicy cold salad. Well, you know, grated ginger and garlic, salt, soy sauce, sugar, vinegar, grated red pepper,really hot chilli oil, sesame oil and sprinkle with spring onion or shallot. But this time to make the flavour more interesting, I actually heated the red peppers in the veg oil first and then when it gets hot, stir fried some white part of shallots and fresh red chilies until the aroma came out, then poured the oil mixture into the dish, finally sprinkled with green part of shallots. It all came out shinny, red and yummy.

I’ve got my own fan as a family cook tonight. This is the very first time we actually ate pig ears in Australia. Wouldn’t you love the crunchy texture of white soft bone between two layers of gelatinous meat?

Sorry I didn’t have a photo for this as I accidentally deleted it this morning