All posts tagged: cooking

Foodbox Menu 1

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This the first week of our Foodbox deliveries. If I didn’t plan out a menu, we wouldn’t have a hope of finishing all the produce. I have decided to receive a Foodbox once a fortnight instead of once a week. I rediscovered a jar of laksa paste in our fridge so features heavily on this week’s menu. I got personal with the paste and a free range chicken at the start of the week and a spatchcock chicken led to dinner for two and 2 lunches. Foodbox Menu 1 Items in bold are from our Foodbox. Hash brown, garlic butter mushrooms, free range bacon and fried egg. (pictured) Scrambled eggs with parmesan and onion on Vogels toast. Avocado and parmesan on Vogels toast. Chicken salad with lettuce, tomato, boiled eggs, broccoli florets, dressing. Roast chicken sandwiches: lettuce, edam, mayo, mustard, pickles, tomato. Spatchcock chicken, smeared with laksa paste, roasted with potatoes, kumara, courgettes, onions, carrots and garlic Laksa with fat noodles, prawns, lime, mushrooms, broccoli and onions. Pan fried salmon with butter lime sauce. Served with sweet corn, courgette and millet. Courgette pasta …

I’m not done yet

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“A year from now, you will wish you had started today.” – Karen Lamb For those that have been following this blog for a while, you will know about my seasonal to do lists. Since winter of 2011, every season I have written a to do list of about 10 foodie challenges to push my cooking skills and eating experiences. I am leaps and bounds ahead where I was before I started. I feel confident enough to think “Ok, I can do this” as long as I pay a healthy respect to recipes and the advice I glean from those more experienced than I. It’s been an amazing ride. There’s immense smugness satisfaction in telling people that I’ve made bacon or ice cream or cheese or tomato sauce or a pavlova. I guess gloating rights is part of the accomplishment. If you own a sweet car, you want to show it off right? (That’s a genuine question, I’ve never owned a car) Many of the things that went into my lists were foods that I …

Our Growing Edge First Edition! (Jan/Feb 2013)

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It’s coming up to midnight, I’ve had an espresso and ironically, I’m writing this on an empty stomach. I think I would prefer Chinese water torture over missing dinner and then compiling a lengthy food filled post. In the spirit of the Oscars this week, I would like to give a huge thanks to all the foodies who joined the very first edition of Our Growing Edge. This event would be nothing without your passion, skill, hard work and hungry bellies. With 35 submissions to Our Growing Edge this month, there was plenty of variety in the new foodie experiences. This event showed a surprisingly well rounded cross section of what foodies are doing. Blogs from New Zealand, Australia, UK, USA and Canada were well represented. Blogs from Asia or with Asian culinary backgrounds also made an appearance. Success! Before we move onto the highlights… It would be wonderful to have Our Growing Edge hosted on different blogs all around the interwebs. To host a month, all you have to do is write a round …

This Week’s Specials – Week 5

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I’m having fun writing a weekly menu and we generally stick to the plan.  I admit I may be a bit ambitious when writing it. I also don’t think it helps to write a meal plan on an empty stomach! I came home with a few yummy things from The Food Show including 2kg of Southland Queen Scallops and 4 kinds of cheese! Still, this week, our pantry reserves are getting low and we haven’t been to the supermarket in a while so we’ll have to pick up a few things. This week our CSA box included: Vegetable Mushrooms Spinach Carrots Cauliflower Broccoli Fruit Newstead Gold Apples Gold Kiwifruit Winter Nelis Pears Mandarins …and a loaf of ciabatta. Meal Plan Week 5 Cauliflower*and potato* soup topped with with bacon and sour cream. Served with ciabatta* garlic* toast Individual cottage pies with carrots*, peas and mushrooms*, topped with cheesy golden mash Queen scallops and spinach* pasta, tossed with butter and served with grated Parmigiano-Reggiano and a lemon* wedge Cheese fondue with ciabatta*, baguette, carrot, broccoli and tortellini Chocolate …

The Food Show 2012 – Top Tips

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The Food Show at the ASB Showgrounds in Auckland started today. It kind of snuck up on me this year. I guess hibernating over winter does that. I really enjoy the Food Show and unlike other foodie events, this one is aimed more at the every day consumer rather than the gourmet. We are lucky that we have two big foodie expos  here in Auckland and I like to think of The Food Show as the supermarket and home cook expo, whereas Taste is the restaurant and gourmet expo. The Food Show a mega space and walking through the maze of exhibitors will tire you out. Take breaks when you can. Seating is pretty rare at the expo, but there are many seated food demonstrations in the makeshift theatre if you want a reprieve from meandering the halls. If you are heading that way this weekend, here are some tips I’ve compiled from years of experience… Food Show top tips: Avoid queues and buy your tickets online. Bring cash (notes and coins) as there is a …

Siam Rice Thai Cookery School

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This week, I made a Tom Yum Gai (hot and spicy chicken soup) at Siam Rice Thai Cookery School. Read about my Tom Yum experience here. Cookery school is a great value way to spend the day at 900 baht($38NZ/$28US) per person, includes hotel transfers, ingredients, class, market tour, 6 dishes, 1 curry paste and a vegetable carving session. I purposely chose to cook 6 different dishes to those I cooked at Baan Thai. If this were a science experiment, I would have repeated the dishes. You will not need to eat anything else on the day, so the price includes your meals for the entire day. A full day course runs from 9.30am to 3.30pm and runs at a good, relaxed pace. There are half day and evening classes available for those with limited time (Evening course: 800 baht. Half day course: 700 baht). No hard sell on anything at all. If you wanted to buy beer or souvenirs, you had to get up and enquire, but they were reasonable 50-70 baht for a …

Taking on the Ultimate Gnocchi

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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 …

Overeat at a Steamboat

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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 …

Make Polenta

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I have this rule that I don’t cook anything that I haven’t eaten before. It generally works well. I eat, I like, I cook. But then I broke that rule. I don’t know why I decided that I’d cook polenta. I put it on my list of things to attempt this Autumn/Winter even though I hadn’t had it before, but I cooked it and ate it and I didn’t like it. I followed the package instructions, even adding cheese and butter (which was optional). It was really, really bland. The Koala likened it to watery custard and ate everything else on the plate. I guess it looks like a gritty custard. I would have much preferred mashed potatoes for dinner. In any case, I’ve got a whole package of polenta that I don’t know what to do with. Is there anyone out there that likes polenta? What’s your polenta recipe? Failing that, does anyone want a big bag of polenta? Minus 1 cup, but there’s probably about 10 cups in there still. You can have …

A Cook’s Treat

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If you are a fan of Anthony Bourdain, then you may think I am refering to the white stuff that goes up one’s nose to aid a long night at work. But no, I don’t mean cocaine. The cook’s treat I’m refering to is much cheaper. In fact, it’s free! If you cook, then you may be familiar with a cook’s treat. It’s a portion of a meal that isn’t dished up but is rather eaten up by the cook. This delicious morsel is gobbled up by the cook and the guests none the wiser. It’s can be considered a reward for the hard work of preparing a meal. In baking, it is well known that licking the beater and the bowl clean of batter is a compulsory honor reserved for the cook. A cook’s treat can be an ingredient that is used for flavour (or fat) and then usually discarded. When we were in south east asian, we had the local bbq. A lump of pork fat is used to oil up the cooking …