Dinner for 5 based around a trip to the markets and some bacon

August 29, 2010 in dinners, entrees, french, italian, meat, roasts, salad, slow cooking | 5 comments

Yes still alive. I suppose you want a picture of my blog holding up a copy of yesterday’s Guardian. Here’s a meal I made last night.

Pasta with Peas and Bacon.

3 eggs | 300 g OO flour | pinch of salt | splash of olive oil

Hard work done with a dough hook in the Kambrook and then a bit of kneading to get it soft and pliable. Rest in the fridge wrapped in plastic. Roll out to 6 on the pasta roller (dust liberally with flour as you go) and cut into rough triangly bits – no idea what I was doing, I think Matt Stone did this in the mag.

inch thick slice of bacon, cube | cup of peas | 2 cloves of garlic + inch of leek. finely chopped | 1/3 cup olive oil

Bought my bacon from Annie Kavanagh at Spencers Brook Farm. Free-range berkshire pigs make such a lovely ribbon of white fat across the top. Hope I’m not spoiling anyone’s fun by pointing out, you’re not going to get the same result with your one kilo plastic pack of bacon slices. Crisps up beautifully.
Shelled the peas with young E on the kitchen floor. This is a very nice thing to do.
Gently soften the leek and garlic in olive oil, add the bacon, brown a little and add the peas and cook through.
Cook the pasta in lots of salted water – I’m still impressed how it all manages to come apart. Top with the peas and bacon and some grated parmesan.

Really nice. Perfect light intro for a heavier mains.

Roast Pork with Cider, Veg

1.5 kg Rolled roast of pork, skin slashed, truffled honey and fennel seeds pushed into slices with a sprinkle of rock salt on top. Leave for an hour or so.

fennel bulb| carrot | 2 garlic cloves | 2 sticks of celery | leek

Just a bunch of aromatics that would, in theory, fill the roast and the eventually sauce with goodness. Chop into small pieces.
Brown the roast in olive oil in a cast iron casserole pot, add the aromatics and stir and place in a 170C oven. Let it cook down a bit for about 20 minutes. Add a cup of cider, cover and turn the oven down to 160C . Cook for 90 minutes.

parsnip, quartered lengthwise | sweet potato, cut into half rounds | apple chopped

Parboil the parsnip and the sweet potato and add them and the apples to the casserole dish. Check the level of cider and cover. Cook for another half hour and then remove the lid to brown everything up.
Keep the pork warm covered with foil, remove the veggies with a slotted spoon. Skim the fat off the top of the remaining liquids, add half a cup of cider and reduce, then add a half a cup of verjuice and a good splash of apple and balsamic glaze.

Cauliflower Puree
Half a cauliflower, boiled until soft in salted water. Drain and then cook in thick cream and butter. Puree and season to taste. Stir in some bacon cubes

Tuscan Cabbage
Chop into large pieces and sauteed in a pan with olive oil and bacon cubes until soft.

Rocket and Orange Salad
Just in case the pork got a bit much, something peppery and acidic. Segmented orange tossed with roacket and some olive oil.

Rhubarb Clafoutis
I was going to cadge out of dessert but I’d bought some rhubarb so hey. A clafoutis is basically a pancake batter pie or a yorkshire pudding without the dripping and with fruit. All you need to know is here.
Don’t overcook the rhubarb, you want it to keep some form. Rhubarb cooked in butter with caster sugar and orange zest. Splash of vanilla-soaked brandy in the batter and a 1/3 of a cup of almond meal.
Served with whipped Bannister Downs cream.

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Anniversary Dinner – 6 bottles on

April 1, 2010 in dinners, festivities | 9 comments

smoked duck and plum salad

6 years ago we went out and bought half a dozen bottles of a Katnook Estate ‘98 Cab Sav. ‘98 because that was the year we got married and half a dozen because I think that’s what we could afford. We enjoyed the last of the six last night and despite chucking a bit of a crust, as they say, it had done nicely over the years. I’m now going to have to trawl the internet auction sites for a replacement (wine that is).

The dinner was a day late because of what we will refer to as “The Gift of the Pixies”, where at one stage I’d unwittingly bought my wife a ticket to go and see a concert with my friend on our wedding anniversary. It worked out well in the end, I was bought a ticket, my Mum looked after young pudding and a complete performance of Doolittle under the stars at Belvoir Ampitheatre with what seemed to be an encore of half of Surfer Rosa was a very.good.thing.

Anyway, recipes …

Entree – Smoked duck, plum and rocket salad with an orange dressing
Easy as it is tasty. The smoked duck breast was from Holy Smoke. I gently warmed it up by frying it skin side down in pan until it browned up every so slightly and released some of the duck fat (more on that later). Slice the duck
Slice the cheeks off the plums – local, fresh and gorgeous – and the remaining bits you can chop up roughly to distribute more finely through the salad.
The dressing was three parts orange juice to one part EVOO and a pinch salt and sugar to taste.

Toss the duck breast and plums in a bowl gently with some rocket and some dressing.

Mains – Individual Beef Wellingtons

Admittedly this does seem like something you’d serve a retired Major but it was a good match for the wine.
It does have additional nostalgic form. We had beef wellington at our first proper, birthday, dinner party; the dessert was done at a catering gig we did, and duck breast is a constant fave.

Season and sear two beef fillets all over and allow to cool. If you tie them in the middle, it serves as a kind of corset, plumping and rounding them up nicely.
Duxelles are a beef wellington must have and you make them by chopping up a good handful of mixed mushrooms, half an onion and a couple of garlic cloves and sauteeing in plenty of butter. Allow to cool.
Roll out the puff pastry, place the fillet in the middle, place the duxelles in any gaps and place a slice of blue cheese on top. Wrap with the puff pastry (I did it with my gift wrapping skills, which are rubbish YMMV) make sure it’s sealed properly. Then brush with an egg wash and cook in a 190C oven for about 20-25 minutes for medium.

Served with brussel sprouts. Peel them back well, as the outer leaves tend to be more bitter. Boil and refesh under cold water and then fry gently in the duck fat you were reading about in the entree. There were baby zucchini which I sliced like a fan and then roasted in the oven with some EVOO.
The sauce was the steak pan deglazed with red wine and then adding some sauteed chopped mushrooms and leaks. A couple of heaped spoons of double cream, stirred in well and reduced.

Dessert – Puff pastry biscuits with berries
Take a spare strip of puff pastry, sprinkle it with caster sugar, roll it up, slice it in half lengthwise (you should have two spirals rather than a series of concentric half hoops), flatten the pieces gently, and cook in the oven for 7 minutes.
Simmer half a cup of fresh blueberries with a good splash of vanilla brandy (keep a small bottle filled with brandy and a vanilla pod in it – endlessly useful) and a teaspoon or two of sugar to make a coulis.
Biscuit on plate, then dollop of double cream, splash of coulis and a scattering of blueberries.

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Market Dinner

March 16, 2010 in dinners, drinks, entrees, meat, roasts, salad, seafood | 7 comments

obviously a rubbish shot but a startlingly accurate one

—

You know, you meet at the Subiaco farmers market to select food for the night’s dinner with friends, share in the fruits of the farmers toil by filling your basket with produce and then you go and drink several beers, a couple of G&Ts, a bottle of sparkling red (experimental Myattsfield), a bottle of Riesling (’09 Castle Rock) and a Shiraz (’04 Will’s Domain) [all local and great] and wonder why the room’s spinning while you’re carving the main course.

It’s a valuable lesson against starting early and then waiting for excitable kids to go to sleep before starting dinner but, that said, mission accomplished. Three courses from what we picked up earlier – pecans, snapper, organic sweet potato and potatoes, an eye fillet of beef, rocket and assorted lettuce, field mushrooms, snapper, bread, double cream and, as an added challenge for a nation troubled by fruit/meat combos, a tray of peaches.

So.

Entree
Snapper cooked and tossed in a peach salsa of a couple of diced peaches, handful of coriander, half a finely chopped onion, a finely chopped green chili, a squeeze of lime juice, and a splash of olive oil. Leave salsa for an hour to let the flavours mingle with each other and adjust flavours to taste.
Frozen snapper reacquaints itself with the sea with a sprinkle of salt and left for five minutes before cooking on the BBQ. Try also with frozen prawns.

Mains
Beef fillet seasoned, seared, brushed with eggwhite and truffle mustard and then covered with a mix of ground pecan and fresh breadcrumbs (2:1 ratio). Popped in a baking tray flanked by large field mushrooms cut in half and sprinkled with the pecan-bread mix and all splashed with olive oil. Pop a meat thermometer in the fillet and cook it in a hot lidded BBQ. Remove when the thermometer reads about 55C for medium rare and let it rest.
Jus made in from chopped mushroom stems and red wine reduced [actually I can't remember exactly what happened here]
Potatoes diced and parboiled to join the oven roasting diced sweet potato [slow roasting releases the sugars] and then roasted up with extra olive oil and some salt.
There was also a rocket and peach salad somewhere in there.

Dessert
Slice the cheeks off the peaches, brush with a little olive oil and grill on the BBQ. You can even go that bit further and manage not to cremate the skin. Extra points for crosshatched 90degree rotation on grill.
Serve with double cream and a few wavy lines of cream of balsamic .

I then walked through a screen door, demanded photos of myself, a few other things which I’ll be told in due season and then the autonomic defense system kicked in, found me a comfy chair and sent me gently to sleep. A perfect evening.

Pro Kitchen Drinking Tips!
1. Prep! Get all the tricky slicing stuff out of the way earlier on – nobody loses a finger stirring.
2. Cook and leave! High maintenance dishes take away valuable time spent socialising with a glass of something.
3. Desserts! You’ll be at the lowest level of your skills. Keep it easy.
4. Coffee! You’ll need one to make it from dessert to the cheese platter.
5. Manners! Nobody’s going to pour you a glass of something nice after an expletive filled rant on cycleways.

Public Notice: I’ll be speaking about editing a food mag, food blogging and related interesting things next Thursday as part of the Autumn UWA Extension Course. I believe there might still be a seat or two available. More details.

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It was the wife wot done it – ladybird cake

February 14, 2010 in dessert | 2 comments

ladybird cake

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.

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Rillettes – the pastey pork treat

December 27, 2009 in basics, chinese, entrees, french, meat | 3 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.

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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

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A home cooked meal

November 29, 2009 in roasts, salad | 1 comment

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.

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