Friends: Ham, cheese and tomato
A classic list of ingredients. Still in love with Abe’s parmesan bagels.
All posts filed under: Eats
Nachos and yogurt
Ran out of sour cream so tried a pottle of greek yogurt instead. Total win.
Roast Chicken with lemon, garlic and herbs
The second kilo of Turks free range chicken thighs found a home with lemon slices and juice, herbs and garlic. I sprinkled a little raw sugar on these but you could use honey. Our honey was as hard as nails so sugar was the lazy option. The little lemon tree in our backyard is carrying mega lemons. There aren’t heaps of lemons, but the ones we have are big, thick skinned and look like they could win a bar fight. We haven’t gotten sick this winter (yet) and hopefully a bulb of garlic each will keep us going for a little while longer. I slice off the bottom, rub a bit of oil into it and season with salt, pepper and herbs. It’s good. I prefer rice with a roast dinner. To me, they go hand in hand. It probably seems weird to some, but I never had yorkshire pudding to soak up the juices, it was always rice. I guess it doesn’t really come as a surprise that we owned a roast dinner shop …
Happy Pork with Wild Meat Sauce
I took The Koala with me to Nosh the other day and his eyes widened at a bottle of Glass Eye Creek Wild Meat Sauce. I admit, I’m a sucker for a nice label and this hip flask sized bottle had a manly charm about it. Made in the West Coast of NZ, like all well made sauces, it has well spun story about how it came to be. It looked like a BBQ sauce to me so I always like a bit of pork to go with a good BBQ sauce. Wild pork isn’t as common as it could be and the very next best thing is freerange. There are a few companies now offering freerange pork in New Zealand, but Freedom Farms is the most well known. They’ve just put themselves out there a lot more than other names. Freedom Farms pork steak marinaded in Wild Meat Sauce. Some mashed kumara (sweet potato), cauliflower with cheese sauce and green beans and you have a decent dinner. The meat was a firmer and more filling than the …
Chicken, then egg.
After the chicken comes the egg. If I’m not making gravy or sauce with the juices from a roast pan, I save that up for another use. Rice is perfect for soaking up the sauce from a honey soy roast chicken and a couple of eggs make this an quick meal. 2 hard boiled eggs sprinkled with truffle salt and black pepper. Served on top of rice and honey soy chicken sauce.
Sin Removed
A bagel is a doughnut with the sin removed. – George Rosenbaum When I was a young design student, bagels were my eat on the run breakfast food. There was a bagel cart just outside the design building and early starts meant nothing else was open. The only savoury bagel I could afford was the cream cheese one and fresh, toasted cream cheese bagels are not too shabby for a student diet. It’s been 7 years since I’ve had a decent bagel. I ate them out of convenience and then promptly forgot about them when they were no longer convenient. Until I spied the bright Abe’s Bagel’s stand at the Food Show over the weekend. Their parmesan bagels rock my world. Cut in half, they fit into our toaster and smeared with cream cheese, avocado, salt and pepper they were easy yum. The Koala pronounced it, “Fucking delicious.”
Special Salmon
I love when salmon fillets are on special at Nosh. I buy salmon when it is on special so it’s good that it seems to happen fairly regularly. To keep each fillet in one piece, I fry it on the skin side only. It gets a little steam session so that the top and inside gets cooked too. Teriyaki Salmon Fillet Ingredients (for one portion) 1 salmon fillet 1 tablespoon teriyaki sauce A tiny bit if oil for the pan Salt (optional) Preparation Brush the fillet with the teriyaki sauce and marinade for an hour or so. Add oil to a hot pan, carefully lay the fillet skin side down and sprinkle with sault. Fry for several minutes. You should see the cooked colour (less bright) of the fish rise up the side. When it reaches the top, Add up to half a cup of water to the pan and cover. Allow steam to cook fish through (about 10 minutes depending the thickness of your fish). Remove lid and continue cooking until all the water is …
When it rains, it pours.
I had never made lasagna before but in the last few days I got 2 lasagna pins on my foodie sash. I don’t think The Koala minds the new lasagna obsession one bit. My first was a classic attempt. The meat sauce made in the morning so the flavours had all day to develop. This time being a weeknight, I wanted something much, much faster. I had 2 lasagna sheets left over from the other night and only 200 grams of lamb mince so I bulked up the meat with bacon. Lamb and bacon are two of the tastiest meats around. Using white sauce and a vintage cheddar made for a strong tasting sauce rather than the mild ricotta based sauce I made the other night. Bacon and Lamb Lasagna for two Ingredients 2 sheets fresh lasagna Meat sauce 250 grams (half a pound) lamb mince 4 strips streaky bacon, chopped into postage stamps 1 onion, diced 4 garlic bulbs, chopped 1/2 a cup tomato paste 1/2 cup red wine Salt (about a teaspoon) Cheese …
Make A Lasagna
I love lasagna but have always avoided making it for fear of hard work. I read a few recipes and found them all to be quite different. With that in mind, I figured I could just take a combination of recipe ideas and still do ok. I made the meat sauce in the morning with beef and lamb mince, 1 onion, 4 garlic cloves, a can of pasta sauce, 1 pottle of tomato paste and a can of whole tomatoes. I browned and then simmered it for an hour and then left it alone until the evening. My friend Miss A helped me with the cheesey white sauce. We used ricotta, milk, butter, flour, vintage cheddar. Meat sauce and cheese sauce layered between 4 sheets of fresh pasta and topped with more cheese sauce and a thin layer of mozzarella. Covered in foil and into the oven for 30 minutes at 175°C. Then another 25 uncovered. Eat with good company and plenty of red wine. Miss A had made a decadent banoffee pie for dessert. …
Scrambled
Scrambled eggs with truffle salt. Verdict: The flavour of the truffle salt is more subtle than I would like. I guess I prefer more pungent flavours.
Taking on the Ultimate Gnocchi
I tried gnocchi for the first time a couple of weekends ago. It was at a restaurant and they weren’t the light pillows of deliciousness that I expected. They were dense and a bit chewy. Thinking I could do better, I was determined to give gnocchi making a go. Pronounced nyo-key and translates to lumps, but may have come from the words nocchio or nocca which mean knot (in wood) or knuckle. Commercial gnocchi look more like fat grubs than knuckles. Gnocchi isn’t familiar to me so I’m not sure if it’s considered a pasta or a dumpling and a quick search online suggests that it might be both. I did a little research and found Cook Almost Anything’s Ultimate Gnocchi article an amazing guide for new gnocchi makers to work with. Apparently, too much flour leads to heavy gnocchi and with the fear of creating chewy bullets, I overcompensated. I made my dough with less flour than suggested. My gnocchi wasn’t so soft it disintegrated in water, but they were really, really light and soft. Is there …
Like a Chinese Paella
The other night, The Koala and I got takeaways from Love A Duck on Dominion Road. While waiting for our meals, I was pleased to see that during winter, they offer a range of claypot cooked dishes. Claypot Chicken Rice Claypot Chicken Rice is popular in Malaysia, Hong Kong and Singapore. For those not familiar with this style of cooking, rice, chicken and various sauces and flavoursome ingredients are cooked in a claypot. The rice sticks to the bottom resulting in a fragrant, delicious mess like a Chinese version of paella. Chicken Can’t have this dish without the hardcore marinated chicken. Cantonese love bones and I always make this with chicken wings but you could use boneless thigh or breast to make this a kid friendly dish. Lap Cheong Chinese dried sausages or Lap Cheong are dry cured sausages normally made of pork and fat. These are smoked, sweetened, seasoned and taste like awesome. The sausages I buy from my local are vacuum packed and hail from Canada. You might like these if you like streaky …
French food and truffles
I had a lovely foodie day yesterday celebrating Bastille Day. I adore French cuisine (who doesn’t) and it is a dream of mine to one day eat French food in France. Yesterday, some of us at work dressed up in French inspired garb and we had an incredible feast for morning tea. Morning tea is a big deal at my work. Because we have a lot of early starters, not everyone is around for afternoon tea so morning is the only time we can get everyone together. Our French inspired morning tea consisted of: Baguette Croissants Pain au chocolat Chicken and cranberry pâté Mushroom and brandy pâté Cheese Cream cheese Ham Cake Pickles It was so delicious and a lot of fun assembling your own bite sized morsels of goodness. I forgot how much I love pâté. We ate as much as we could and there was plenty left over. If only the French had siesta I could crawl under my desk and have a nap. Sabato Field Trip A couple of hours later, I gathered …
A Dinner inspired by South East Asia
I had a hankering for the stuff we ate while in South East Asia. Hot, sour and savoury soups, banana pancakes were eaten in balmy countries. But what about on a cold winter’s night? I thought they would translate quite well so I made a brothy soup with noodles with some nice sirloin steak. I made this up on the fly using some of the flavours I enjoyed in South East Asia. This was followed by a dessert of asian-inspired banana pancakes with melted chocolate. Yum. Bok choy is cheap and it is super easy to grow. I know this because I’ve grown it before. But at $0.50 for a bag of 2 or 3 bok choy at my local Chinese supermarket, I don’t bother to grow my own. So easy to prepare, just wash and slice into quarters lengthwise. Good rabbit food too. When we have bok choy, Tofu the rabbit also enjoys bok choy. Beef Noodle Soup Beef Ingredients 1 piece of sirloin steak enough for 2 (200-300g) A little sesame oil …
Wedges Are Friends With Homemade Burgers
As much as I like fast food, homemade burgers with real beef patties you have formed yourselves are world apart. Every time we make burgers (and it’s becoming quite a regular occurrence) we manage to find this and that in our fridge until the burger becomes a towering monstrosity. So this time, even though I thought we had virtually nothing, there was still cheese to be melted, an onion to be sliced and fresh rocket from the garden. Not a towering world wonder, but still mighty good. With plenty of practice, I’ve perfected oven baked wedges. These are a perfect friend for your homemade burgers. Oven Baked Spicy Wedges Ingredients 3 large potatoes 1 tablespoon oil 1 tablespoon flour 1 tablespoon chili seasoning* (Mild, try 2 tablespoons for medium) Salt Pepper Preparation Pre-heat oven to 200°C / 390°F. Cut potatoes in half lengthwise and then into quarters and then eighths. All lengthways. You know, like wedges. Place in a clean, airtight plastic bag. Add all the other ingredients, twist the top tight and give …
Pork Shank with Incredible Sauce
Mum gave us a bag of oranges the other day. I’m not a fan of fruit. No sir. So I immediately started brainstorming what I could cook these oranges with. I had a large pork shank in the freezer, waiting for it’s time to shine so I summoned it on a cold winter evening. I started this a few minutes after 5pm and it took close to 3 hours to make. So it’s not the one if you want to eat fast. But if you have a few things to do and can wait for an amazing dinner, this could be the one. We had a big can of Guinness on the side of this. The sauce is sweet, flavoursome and very rich. Make it for someone you love. This would be a great recipe to translate to a slow cooker if you have one. Pork Shank with Incredible Sauce Serves 2 with leftovers for lunch. Or serves 2 with a food coma for dessert. Ingredients 1 large pork shank 3 oranges 2 tablespoons of …
Maketu Pies
I spied the Maketu Pie shelf in the deli section at the supermarket the other day so I bought 2 of their mussel pies. “Kiwi mussels cooked in a beautiful creamy cheese and parsley sauce then encased in our handmade, flakey golden pastry.” I feel like I’m a late bloomer when it comes to these pies. The few people I’ve spoke to all said they love Maketu Pies. I popped these in the oven and served with a simple green salad with tinned beetroot slices. I really enjoyed this pie. Full of flavour without all the salt. Store bought pies often have so much salt in them you can’t taste anything else. I guess it’s just as well because sometimes the ingredients in pies aren’t things you want to be tasting. I like the fact that these pies have a very short shelf life. As mussels should be. I’ll be buying these again for an easy quick dinner. I actually think the 2 for $6 “special” is their permanent pricing. More on Maketu Pies including a …
Salmon and an easy guacamole
I had a ripe avocado and I figured it was time I used my mortar and pestle for something other than grinding salt and spices. I’m glad I did. Himalayan rock salt, peppercorns and 2 cloves of garlic were ground down to form a paste… …then I added a whole avocado followed by half a pot of sour cream and a sprinkling of chili seasoning. A big dollop of guac went well with our salmon dinner. Salmon makes my world rosy.
Overeat at a Steamboat
For those who are unfamiliar with this style of cooking, a brief introduction: Steamboat begins with simmering stock to cook a range of raw (or pre-cooked) ingredients at the table. Everyone at the table participates and take turns fishing out their cooked treats. Various sauces are used for dipping. Personally, I prefer a beaten raw egg with a little oil, soy sauce and chili. The egg helps to cool the food so that you can eat it fairly quickly. Other names include hot pot or Chinese fondue. Many different cuisines have a variation of this and are known as Shabu shabu in Japan, Thai suki in Thailand and Lẩu in Vietnam. It’s easy to overeat at a steamboat because you never really know how much you have eaten. So you cook a piece and eat a piece until you can’t do it any more. Steamboat is usually a big social affair and with lots of people, there are usually lots of different dishes. This time it was just my parents, sister and The Koala and …
We Love Boobs Day
It is We Love Boobs Day at work today and we’re having a pink themed morning tea to raise awareness for breast cancer. I made these ham and beetroot quiche pies for the occasion. They didn’t turn out as pink as I hoped, but they’ll have to do. I always find it stressful and tiring having to do lots of rounds of the oven so I upgraded from a 6 to a 12 muffin tin. I’m tempted to buy another twelver so I can make 24 at once. Just imagine that. 48 quiche could be less than an hour away.
Bunny Eats Design 