Local Man Does Recipe – Snapper cooked in Banana Leaves

January 21, 2010 in drinks, seafood | No comments

The good people at Enjoy WA Wine asked me to match up a bottle of local wine with a dish, which was really rather nice of them. You can find the recipe here.

It was a few things I’m enjoying at the moment – lemon, chilli and garlic as a flavour combo, wrapping things to cook them, and the snapper is such a magnificent beast to have whole on a table. Semillon Sauvignon Blanc blends are my hot day sessional favourite and I could drink them all day long before I decide that maybe I’ve had a bit too much to drink but then manage to remind myself that I’ve got a nice bottle of fortified somewhere.

And if you haven’t tried Western Australian wine because of poor distribution networks or a misplaced sense of regional pride, please do. One of the great opportunities afforded by the mag had been the chance to taste some stunning local wines. I’d like to say I used that opportunity to become an expert but there’s still much more work to be done.

Leftover Xmas Ham and Prawn Head Soup

January 12, 2010 in entrees, meat, seafood, soup | 2 comments

If you’ve got to the point where you’re not entirely sure if you’ll be OK just slicing off a piece of Xmas ham, you could always make a stock out of it. It’s also prawn season in Australia so heads aplenty as there’s no gratis fry-em for me that they’ll do in Japan (mind the horns).

Chop what ham you’ve got into cubes, add enough cold water to cover by an inch or so, bring to the boil and skim off anything on the surface. Add half a dozen white peppercorns and allow to simmer for 30 minutes.

Take your prawns and stir-fry them in a small amount of oil until they turn pink. Add them to the ham and water. Return the pot to the boil and skim the surface. Add a whole red chilli or two and a bruised stick of lemon grass. And simmer for another 15 minutes.

Strain through a fine muslin cloth and taste, it may need to be reduced for a  stronger flavour if that’s what your after or just consider adding a few lemon wedges and some chopped chilli to your served broth.

For this I put two raw scallops, a prawn tail, and some watercress in each soup bowl and poured the boiling stock over it – this should very lightly cook the meat. Garnish with coriander leaves, some sliced red chilli and a wedge of lemon.

7 day lamb roast

January 3, 2010 in french, meat, salad, slow cooking | 4 comments

7 day lamb

It looks a bit wrinkly but it's really very good and if you look carefully you can see the adjustment bolts on my hibachi cradle which are not at all a result of poor measuring. It's also a shoulder rather than your classic gigot.

This is a Michel Roux Jr recipe that I’ve removed a couple of minor convolutions from and kept the basic principles. One useful tool is a vacuum sealer because a piece of meat sitting in a bowl in a fridge for a week isn’t ideal for household harmony

- The marinade is your classic French marinade of onion, celery, and carrot (all in big chunks) and then some rosemary, peppercorns, and half a bottle of dry red wine and splash of brandy. Place it in the bad bag with the lamb shoulder, seal and leave in the fridge for a week.
- Separate the lamb, the vegetable and the marinade. Sear the lamb in butter and remove; then brown the vegetables with some chopped bacon; and then return the lamb with the marinade. Top with stock – I used chicken and white verjuice instead of veal. Bring to the boil and skim.
- Cover and cook in a 140C oven for seven hours or until the meat is flaking off.
- Allow the meat to cool in the juices. Here you would let it sit for another day but I just chilled it to the point where the fat had set on top of the liquid and I could just skim it off.
- Remove the meat, carefully strain the liquids and toss the vegetables out.
- Reheat the meat in the liquids, which are by now a lovely rich jus. Once heated the jus can be seasoned and/or reduced to taste.

I served the meat on polenta cooked in half water-half milk and ‘carved’ the meat with tongs.

Fig and Mozarella Salad
This is hiding behind the roast. Figs are gorgeous at the moment – soft, sweet and fleshy – and are quartered and combined with rocket and buffalo mozzarella. I’m not the biggest fan of pre-made dressings but Maloufs Pomegranate Dressing is just brilliant.

Right at the back are some steamed beans with chopped tomatoes, EVOO and sea salt.

Bottle of slightly chilled MyattsField ‘08 Tempranillo hit the spot for red meat on a hot day conundrum.

Tags: , , , ,

Rillettes – the pastey pork treat

December 27, 2009 in basics, chinese, entrees, french, meat | 2 comments

free-range ham and home made rillettes

from l-r: rillettes, loaf of bread, spencers brook ham (glazed with marmalade)

Request for a recipe so I’d share it with you all/both. Rillettes is a rufty tufty pate that’s basically pork with pork fat and thus a simple pleasure to be enjoyed. It’s been well liked by young and old and the best use to date has been for breakfast on toast with a few bubbles.

It’s best made in bulk so you can either live off it for a couple of weeks or, for that christmas magic, share it around.

500g pork fat – you can use pork lard, I just carefully scraped the fat off a bit of pork skin for crackling (really it’s beautiful stuff – makes me think of soft serve ice-cream for some reason)
700g pork – shoulder, leg, loin … whatever really as long as it’s lean and meaty
500g pork belly – just trim the skin off and don’t worry about the bones.

Dice the meat into inch (roughly) pieces.

1 onion, 1 carrot, 2 cloves of garlic – peeled
1 stick of celery, 10 sage leaves, 3 twigs of thyme
white wine

Simmer the pork fat gently in enough water to cover and drain.
Add everything into a casserole dish and add a big glass of white wine. Cover with a piece of greaseproof paper and simmer at as low a flame as you can. A diffuser is handy. Stir occasionally.
At some stage I decided it as time for bed so I added a splash more wine, put the lid on the casserole dish and put it in the oven overnight at 70C.

Allow the meat to cool, remove everything that is neither meat nor fat, and then break the meat and fat up into small pieces. Disposable gloves are handy for this. The meat, if you’ve cooked it long and slowly enough, should really just fall to bits and shreds. Season generously.

Now you can distribute it into jars or ramekins and seal the top with a little clarified butter. Allow to chill. Enjoy with good white bread and whatever drinks you have handy.

BONUS! Roast Char Sui Pork

Take a piece of pork, make some deep slashes on either side. Put it in a bowl with a cup of Char Sui sauce, several star anise, and a decent splash of Chinese rice wine. Leave for a couple of hours but just turn it over now and then to coat.
Place the meat on a rack over a tray with water in it. The steam keeps it moist and it stops the sugary sauce from burning in the tray. Cook at 150C for about an hour and a half to two hours or until the pork reaches 80C on the meat thermometer.
I’m sure it’d be great in soup but I just had it in nice big slices while enjoying beers with friends.

Do make sure you grab some fruit and veg at some stage.

Tags:

crayfish en papillote

December 7, 2009 in french, seafood | 4 comments

crayfish tail

The crayfish/western rock lobster  man of human kindness came last night with two fresh crustaceans. This provided a golden opportunity to do a post that didn’t involve potatoes.

This was very much an experiment that started with the simple technique of en papillote – wrapping in, literally, parchment and cooking. If you can get your hands on a piece of treated goatskin, good luck to you. I used baking paper.

  1. remove the crayfish tail (humane method) and then remove the poo tube by inserting a skewer at a join near the end of the tail and lifting it out. Run some kitchen scissors up the inside to open up the bottom part of the shell – this will expose the flesh (phwoar!)  and make removing the meat easier.
  2. I used a combination of chopped basil, tarragon leaves (handily flowering), butter, wedge of lemon, and a finely sliced clove of garlic. What you do next is wrap the tail around them and then secure it with a wooden skewer.
  3. place this on a piece of baking paper, bring the sides up, give them a twist to seal and tie with a piece of string.
  4. cook in a 170C oven for 20 minutes [ this may of course vary wildly but the paper turning brownish isn't a bad cue for doneness]
  5. cook some pappardelle (always makes me think of this) and mix through a bit of EVOO and basil leaves.
  6. now, plate the pasta, remove the string on the package and then place it in the middle of the pasta.
  7. you (actually since you had two crayfish, with someone you love) remove the paper, dump the buttery herby goodness onto the pasta and get your hands dirty cracking the shell open while you eat the meat with the pasta. It’s fantastic.

I opened up a bottle of McHenry Hohnen 3 Amigos 2007 Marsanne, Chardonnay, Roussanne. It sounds like it should be layered in a shot glass but is, in line with their track record, very good. It’s got that fine dining feel of a chardonnay but a lot of freshness built in and some lovely aromatics. If I were pushed I’d say it’s like a nice sofa made of lemon and soda water but that’d be nonsense so I’ll settle for – was perfect with a monday night bit of seafood slap-up fancy.

cray plated 2

Tags: , , ,

A home cooked meal

November 29, 2009 in roasts, salad | No comments

sunday roast

Quite novel of late.

Assorted extras while I’m at it:

- if you’ve muffed up your mayonnaise and it’s separated, it’s repairable. Just get another emulsion going with another egg yolk and a few small drops of olive oil, then gently add your previous failed FAILED! effort.

- a lot of potato salads are steering away from mayonnaise and going for a bit of vinegar and olive oil. Sounds nice and healthy but unless you’re using that sugary shit from a jar, all you’re adding to the olive oil by making your own mayo is an egg yolk.

- the mayonnaise was two egg yolks, a cup of EVOO, salt pepper, a tbs of truffled mustard and a splash of sherry vinegar at the end.

- in the salad was kipfler potatoes, chopped spring onions, roasted walnuts, crisped prosciutto, chopped sorrel and four eggs boiled for 8 minutes.

Fresh potatoes and fresh broadbeans with frozen mackerel gratin

October 13, 2009 in seafood, vegetables | 8 comments

Well that was tasty. A providence dinner of sorts – I was given some freshly-picked broadbeans and some freshly-dug potatoes. I’ve actually, and this is both a personal embarrassment and an indictment of how stuffed up things are with food generally, never had a fresh potato.

The two make a nice pairing for a few reasons; colour contrast, different textures, slightly bitter and slightly earthy. I thought a mayonnaise would bind them together as a lush potato salad but then worried that the fresh taste would get swamped in fatty goo. So olive oil it was and some chopped leek for an aromatic and a bit of chopped coppa for the taste element meaty. And so…

4 fresh potatoes, diced
a cup of broadbeans (velvety pod goes but don’t strip it down to the inner pod)
a couple of inches of leek, finely chopped
a few slices of coppa, torn into small bits
EVOO

Boil the potato to cooked but firm and while you’re doing that you can steam the beans on top – they work out about the same time. Remove and rinse in cold water.
Sautee the leek in a good solid splash of olive oil and then add the coppa and cook until lightly brown but not crispy. Add the beans and potato and stir through until heated; gently mind, it’s not a stirfry.
Season and serve.

Meanwhile, in the freezer was some mackerel from my brother-in-law in Darwin. Being not quite so fresh, a bit of ornamentation was in order so it became a gratin.

two bits of mackerel, defrosted, skin removed and chopped into several pieces
a small red onion, sliced
clove of garlic
glass of white wine
a cup of panko breadcrumbs (redundancy noted)
tsp of paprika
a reasonable bit of feta cheese, cubed

Gently soften the onion and garlic in a suitably sized casserole dish. Add the wine and bring to a boil. Remove from heat, add the fish, cover tightly and cook for 10 minutes in a 190C oven. Meanwhile, toss the breadcrumbs with the paprika. Remove the casserole from the oven and top the fish with the breadcrumbs and the feta. Return it to the oven and cook until the top is lightly browned.

Serve the two together next to each other on a plate and you can combine at will. It’s really rather good.

Tags: ,

Hermeneutically Sealed Moroccan Lemons

September 23, 2009 in basics, middle eastern, ramblings | 4 comments

preserves

it’s lemons, it’s a pufferfish, it’s hitler’s head

I was a bit sad to find that the Flannery O’Connor facebook fan site’s nicely quoted punchline (”Joyce who?”) from her short story The Enduring Chill had been spoiled by a few holy joes trying to find the tale of redemption in it all – stamping on the funny in the process. You can only be lectured so long by a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, who believes that death, offering the hope of resurrection, is no bad thing and was once a paramedic. It’s not surprising, comedy and organised religion have never been equal partners. They fight over the same epistemological turf [sex, death, walking into bars] and in the end humour needs serious people more than serious people need humour. Eco covered this well in Name of the Rose, with the heretical book [spoiler alert] being a book of gags by Aristotle. While the book was about a deductive proto-Holmes unravelling superstition, there was enough slack in the mystery to force the reader into interpretation and interpretation based on context. As he says in KANT and the Platypus

I would not say we can have any real knowledge; if anything, I would maintain that we have an excess of real knowledge. Some are prepared to object that there is no difference between saying there is no truth and saying there are many truths. But we might likewise object that this excess of truth is transitory; it is an effect of our groping our way along , between trial and error; it indicates a limit beyond which these different perspectives (all partly true) could one day be combined in a [jar].

The relatively simple tale of preserving lemons in salt in a jar suffers from an excess of knowledge on the internets and is widely open for interpretation by both readers and writers on the internets. There are at least three different cutting techniques, at least one glaring omission of a hygiene step and differing values placed on perceived taste over cretinism.

This is what I can tell you:

- obtain lemons from your tree or a neighbourhood tree. Don’t buy them, I thinks it better if you just face up to your lack of social connections and your eventual stabbing – Kitty Genovese style – to indifferent neighbours

- don’t bother being too choosy, the ugly ones can be put to good use later.

- give the lemons a scrub and then lop the last few eights of an inch off the ends of the lemons.

- the lemon is then cut into quartered claw; an x made at one end that continues through to all but the last centimetre. The lemon is then stuffed with a tablespoon or so of salt and the salt gets to work on the freshly exposed lemon innards.

- somewhere it’s argued that commercial salt has a metallic taste and that their many mattresses have a pea underneath. Elsewhere it’s said that the added iodine is no bad thing when compared to the goitered life of a Catskills cretin. I used sea salt, if only for the reason that the coarse size allows for a good fill of the lemon, where a finer salt would smother.

- sterilise your jar. Food safety is something you don’t want too much vagary for. In the fridge or a cool dark space? I’m assuming there was a time of preserved lemons before the refrigerator and went for a cool dark space

- in the pantry, behind the booze. One suggestion I followed, and didn’t see elsewhere, was to top the jar up with a sealing layer of a 1/4 cup of olive oil. It seems sound advice.

- most of the action happens over three days. The lemons release their juices and soften. This means that extra lemons can be added to get a nice snug fit and you will need to fill with extra lemon juice to cover the lemons (from the uglies)

- cinnamon sticks, bay leaves, coriander seeds, cloves and peppercorns can all be added in their twos or threes or tablespoon or so.

- from here you’ve got about a month long wait. I’m planning on holding out until christmas, when it’ll be distributed up into gifts and hopefully put to good use. I’m freshening up tagines with mine and they also make for a lovely citric seafood pasta sauce.

**********
And this post is my yellow contribution to LiveSTRONG With A Taste Of Yellow 2009 – once again organised by the inestimable Barbara of winosandfoodies. The events is part of the Lance Armstrong Foundation’s efforts to raise cancer issues worldwide. I’d be surprised if you haven’t got your own experiences. Even in my own fortunate life I’ve got a grandfather I never met, a friend who scared the shit out of us last year, and a colleague who’s on the mend. Keep an eye out for the round-up on the 3rd of October.

UPDATE: it’s up and it’s awesome.

Tags: , ,

Keith Floyd, actually dead.

September 17, 2009 in ramblings | No comments

teeth will be provided

I was a tad premature before.

And it’s a very sad thing but really, on a happier note, I can’t see in the league of reasonable expectations how he could have packed more into his life.

Not so Jay Rayner of the Guardian who, as if Floyd had donated himself to a medical school, manages to get a few salutory lessons out of his corpse.

And now he’s gone. In truth of course he went a while back, a victim of his own capricious appetites. But at least as he was taking his leave his importance and brilliance had finally been recognised.

If only the bad boozing Floyd could have been removed like a cojoined twin with unshared vital organs, he may well have been presenting into the 21st century, seen financial success as owner of the British franchise of Kenny Roger’s Roasters, and eventually died at the ripe old age of 108 surrounded by his 43 grandchildren and great grandchildren. It’s a story I will tell my child to and may even sneak in a deathbed confession to a priest to nail home the dangers of drink.

Did you know Floyd set the coordinates on TV for Reality TV by being realistic? Jay does. Did you know a “subdued” [read sober] Floyd saved Jay’s dinner party? Now you do.

As I was coincidentally reading today from Kay Steiger.

Hesse is like other unimaginative journalists. She cannot possibly comprehend that what’s going on in her own personal life isn’t interesting to the rest of the world.

Now I suppose you’re wondering what chefs had to say?

*****************

coda update:

Floyd was prone to depression and grumbled incessantly about the burden of fame. Inebriated barristers were forever waking him up on trains, he complained, with dull questions about how to cook geese.

Anyway a cock walks into a bar and says “I’ll have a pint of heavy” and the barman says “Sorry we don’t serve genitalia here but I hear there’s a job going for a food writer at the Guardian.”

Rolled pork belly wrapped in prosciutto

August 27, 2009 in meat, roasts | 10 comments

pork and fennel[a later reconstruction of the dish]

I found a lovely piece of free-range pork down at the Herdsman. It was a piece of pork belly with the skin removed and then rolled and tied into a roll. Very cute – looked like the kind of roast you could munch on while driving down the road with your elbow out the window.
Lovingly tied as it was, I ended up removing the string and wrapping it in prosciutto – unfortunately it burst its smallgood chains half way through, but no harm done.

6 inches of rolled pork belly
150 g of thinly sliced prosciutto
1 tbs truffled mustard
8 sage leaves
salt and pepper
fennel leaves
EVOO

fennel bulb, quartered and halved
purple-skinned sweet potato, peeled and chopped into bite sized pieces
bunch of broccolini

Rub a line of mustard along the top of the pork. Roll it a quarter and then place the sage leaves on top. Season well and wrap with the prosciutto.
The pork is roasted with the vegetables and I kept them nice and tight in my nice Raymond Loewy cast-iron pot. The addition of ingredients is staggered over the hour or so of cooking as follows
0 min - good splash of olive oil and in with the sweet potato into a 190C oven.
15 min - fennel and pork added with a few fronds of fennel – another splash of olive and a pinch of salt
25 min rotate pork to ensure all-over crispiness
30min turn down to 170C
Cooked minus 10 min – broccolini and another splash of olive oil.

When the pork is done, allow it to rest and then serve on top of the vegetables. Didn’t bother with a sauce.
It’s a lot of oven opening but as the temperature heads down over cooking, no biggie.

Tags:

« Older entries