Author: Bunny Eats Design

Easy Stroganoff

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The other day, I made the bold claim that my parent’s stroganoff was the best stroganoff I ever tasted. There are few problems with this bold claim: I was immediately challenged to a dual (or a stroganoff off) I hadn’t tasted this stroganoff in a good 15 or so years When I last ate it, I didn’t really know what a stroganoff was When I asked mum for her recipe, she gave me a basic low-down rather than a step by step So, armed with mum’s rough guide and my own experience with cooking by feel, here’s my adaptation of the recipe. Use rump or sirloin steak with white button mushrooms. My family always had stroganoff with rice because dinner without rice is not really dinner at all. Feel free to use pasta if you prefer (I did). Did it live up? Yes. Is it the best? I’ll have to test out more recipes to be sure. I see a few slow cooker recipes out there which leads me to imagine you could make a …

Try A New Grain

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I get bursts of foodie enlightenment from non-foodie movies. Years ago, when I watched the Japanese epic film Seven Samurai, I learned that  millet was a food. In the movie, the poor, desperate villagers offer their precious white rice to the samurai when they could only afford to eat millet. I always wondered what could possibly be less precious than rice? In my life, rice has always been cheap. Many people will screw up their noses at millet as it’s known as bird feed. Not so glamourous and hardly something today’s foodie would choose to eat, right? Millet is technically a seed but used as a grain so for blogging purposes, I’m calling it a grain. Millet is gluten free and being a seed, it holds decent nutrients and makes a great substitute for pasta, rice etc. It’s very easy to cook, lasts in the pantry for ages and fairly versatile it seems. Tomatoes are in season here but if they are not, feel free to omit them or replace them with capsicum (peppers). I used …

Dumpling Wrapper Prawn Ravioli

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I have an open relationship with dumplings. I adore them, but sometimes I get busy and we see less of each other but when we’re together it’s phenomenal. My maternal grandmother made dumplings for us and my parents also made them us. For most of my life, my dad owned various eateries and wontons or dumplings were always on the menu. Dumplings travel well too. No, I don’t mean fill your pockets and go for a run, but that dumplings in one form or another appear in many cuisines. The concept travels well and has wide appeal. Naturally, as an adult, I’m more curious and experimental when it comes to my dumplings. If it tastes good, authenticity is nothing. Because I never ate ravioli until much later, ravioli will always be just an Italian dumpling to me and I make ravioli using dumpling wrappers. Sure, you can make pasta from scratch, but taking this shortcut will save some time and it’s not like you’re going full lazy. There’s still at least half an hour to …

Tofu Tuesday: Art

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Our home is heaving with art. Really. We have 32 pieces on display in our 1 bedroom home. There’s even 2 paintings in the bathroom. Though we haven’t bought any paintings lately, last weekend I retrieved three of my paintings from a local cafe before they changed owners. Now we have 5 paintings leaned up against walls awaiting wall space. I need at lease one more room to put them up in. If anyone knows an Auckland cafe or business that would like to display some paintings, let me know. p.s. Happy Chinese New Year!

Awesomesauce

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Every New Zealand household must stock tomato sauce at all times or risk village ridicule by vegetable flinging and it is without a doubt, our national condiment. In New Zealand, ketchup is tomato sauce. Marinara is what we call pasta sauce. So when a kiwi wants tomato sauce, it’s always the condiment, not the stuff you eat with meatballs and pasta. It calms him The Koala loves tomato sauce more than anyone I know. He can’t eat a pie or steak without it and pasta dishes (even marinara) need tomato sauce applied liberally on top before he can enjoy it. I recently read that tomato sauce calms people. The Koala eats a lot of tomato sauce and he’s pretty calm so I guess it explains a few things. Perhaps I should keep a little bottle of sauce in my bag as “rescue remedy”. I’ve always wanted to try making tomato sauce because I never knew what went into it and we go through a lot of sauce on a regular basis. The recipe This recipe …

Mid-week holiday

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Waitangi Day in the middle the week is freaking AWESOME. I completed 2 of my 10 summer tasks. If we had public holidays on Wednesdays more often, I’d get more shit done. Not burnt out enough to need a full day’s quiet time, not tacked onto a weekend to lead to 2 days of partying plus one of nursing a hangover. Waitangi Day is unofficially considered New Zealand Day and there’s a whole lot of history if you want to get into it, but for most kiwis, it is a public holiday that can be guaranteed to be sunny. My morning was spent nursing a bowl of leftover pasta, attending to emails and blogging while cooking up a batch of tomato sauce. Eager to take it for a test drive, the afternoon was spent with a van-load of friends at Cheltenham Beach. This is our favourite swimming beach at high tide (don’t even bother at low tide). We enjoyed fish and chips with my bottle of home made tomato sauce, a refreshing swim, making sand …

Easy Chalkboard Garden Markers

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My sister and I were ages 6 and 8. Eager to witness the magic of food production, we would visit our carrot plot in the garden every day, select a carrot and pull it up to examine it’s size. More times than not, it was still too small and went straight back into the ground. I don’t remember if our daily checking harmed the carrots but you can’t fault us for our enthusiasm. Like many foodies and home cooks, starting a vegie garden seems like a logical, noble and wholesome thing to do. After 5 years renting the same property, we’ve finally started digging around the garden. Of course I wish we had started this garden 5 years ago, but it’s better late than never. I have a bunch of seeds sown directly and some in peat. In the meantime, I’ve been on the look out for pretty garden markers to sort our tidy our new garden. I’ve seen beautiful ones online for up to $20NZ per garden marker. When you consider it costs a …

Tofu Tuesday: Mint

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Each winter, our mint plant dies and then in summer it returns. Mint is supposed to be invasive, so I’m not precious about planting it within Tofu’s reach. It doesn’t matter anyway, he doesn’t help himself. He doesn’t ravage the garden but he loves mint if you pick some and present it to him. Why? He finds individual leaves delicious but the whole patch is too pungent He likes the attention He likes to be “spoon fed” In any case, the mint plants are safe. I put together this garden marker over the weekend. Check out tomorrow’s post for how to DIY your own.

Foodie Mecca

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Coco and I checked out the eagerly awaited Ponsonby Central yesterday. It was busy and happening with a good number of people enjoy the sunshine and foodie mecca. With butchery, fresh produce, fish, bakery, cafes and many street food style, Ponsonby Central is foodie heaven. They have office space upstairs too and I swear, if I win a substantial prize in the lottery, I’m buying office space here to freelance in and preparing to get fat. Hands down the most popular place in the street food lane is El Sizzling Chorizo who specialise in Argentinian BBQ. The big hunks of smokey marinaded meat cooking in their open kitchen looked fantastic. We had a day of moseying planned so were not quite in the mood for a meat feast (one should have a lie-down/siesta booked immediately after). Judging from the happy eaters, this is the place to get a meat fix. We started at the furtherest end of the eating lane at Maldito Mendez. This place is all about the fresh and punchy flavours of South …

Our Growing Edge – An Intro

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Dear Food Bloggers and bloggers who also happen to like food, I would like to introduce to you a concept I’ve been nibbling on for some time. We all have bucket lists. Whether they’re written down somewhere or kept in our heads and hearts. Our Growing Edge is the part of us that is still learning and experimenting. It’s the part that you regularly grow and improve, be it from real passion or a conscious effort. This monthly event aims to connect and inspire us to try new things. Who can join? This blogging event is open to anyone. It is not a competition and there are no prizes or winners, it is just a way  to share new experiences. You do not have to commit every month, only when you have something to share. The host will do a write up and a round up on the first of the following month on their blog. If you would like to host a month, please email me or comment below. Submissions To enter, you must blog about …

A sucker for scallops wrapped in bacon

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I’ve been gorging on seafood and booze all weekend and today is the final day of the Auckland Seafood Feastival. Please note, it wasn’t until late afternoon that I realised that it was a feastival rather than a festival. On a blue skied Saturday, I attended with my three of my friends at the opening time of 11am and we didn’t leave until closing around 6pm. I would say we gave it a mighty good bash. Scampi Street I’d been raving about Scampi Street since last year so we grabbed two plates of BBQ scampi to share. Scampi Street was slightly relocated this year and didn’t have the same “street” or alley feel. I recently learned that scampi are known as langoustine so if you know that term for it, you’ll know that these are sweet and fleshy and can be good eating. The scampi were smaller than last year’s and were not cut in half (crayfish style) for easy eating. The result was messy and a little disappointing. After I’d hyped it up so …

Cream cheese stuffed mushrooms

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I have no idea when I moved from the mushroom hating camp to the mushroom loving camp, but I love them fiercely now. There’s something uniquely satisfying about popping a whole stuffed mushroom into your mouth. Maybe it’s the piggish feeling that I like so much. I first tried these stuffed mushrooms when my sister cooked for us a couple of summers ago. My sister Joey can bake and cook. Her version had streaky bacon weaved throughout but I decided to try and make something similar sans-bacon. Not because I’m against bacon, not at all. But even a meat eater can enjoy these tasty vegetarian morsels. Mushroom hating camp may still not be convinced. These stuffed mushrooms are a summer BBQ winner. These can be made a day ahead and they cook quickly on the BBQ so you can pop these on the BBQ just before everything else as a tasty pre-dinner snack. They’re easy to make ideal if you want to employ any idle hands floating around your kitchen. My 30 mushrooms is just …

This is serious now

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One New Year’s Resolution down. I just bought the URL www.bunnyeatsdesign.com. It’s like getting a real cape made for your superhero costume. Tea towel cape is no longer required. This must be serious now. Hush now all you bloggers out there that have had their own URL for years. p.s. Old links still work. Bonus!

SweetNZ: My First Carrot Cake

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Our oven has been cold for a week and I hope a new oven is on it’s way soon. Not new new, but newer will do. Until then, no oven-based recipes. At least I can bask in the glory of this wee cake that I baked over my holidays. I’ve been meaning to make an “easy” cake for a while now. Those I know who bake always say to start with a banana cake or a carrot cake. Tofu the bunny adores carrots and carrot cake sounded delightfully blog worthy. When we eat carrots, Tofu gets the tops and the peel. Carrots are gold in this house. I also figured it was worth finding out what exactly was in the cream cheese frosting that I adore so much. I used Mama Dorosch’s Carrot Cake recipe from KitchenTrials.com and it was a successful first go. The cream cheese frosting is as follows. Cream Cheese Frosting Makes plenty for one cake  Ingredients 250 grams cream cheese 100 grams butter  2 cups icing sugar (powdered sugar) Preparation Bring …