All posts tagged: Recipes

Banana Hakanoa Mini Cakes

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I’m one of those optimists who buy fruit with hopes of eating well, but the moment the fruit gets home, it loses it’s appeal. The longer I leave it, the less I want to eat it. It’s a problem and I’m working on it. The four bananas on the banana stand were queuing up to enter the blacklist so I decided to quickly do something about them. I heard rumours that banana cakes and muffins were good for baking noobs like me. Baking isn’t my thing. I am slowly but surely getting there. I admit, I’m not a natural. I’ve raved about Hakanoa Ginger Syrup before and gave away a big bottle to celebrate this blog’s second birthday. This organic sugar syrup is really versatile and delicious and makes a great gift for yourself or for a ginger loving foodie in your life. I have to be honest, I usually use this syrup to add dimension to savoury dishes. Equal quantities of Hakanoa Ginger Syrup, soy sauce and oil make for a quick and yummy marinade for …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Macadamia Pesto (by hand)

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Pesto is one of those things I buy all the time and I often wonder if it’s worth the price for what you get. Pine nuts are ridiculously expensive and with a macadamia nut tree in our backyard, I figured I should try to make some macadamia nut pesto. The macadamia nuts I harvested from our tree about 6 months ago are now dry are ready for eating. The nuts haven’t been roasted, but in their raw state, the are great for pesto. Let me start off by admitting I don’t own a food processor. I had one once but I never used it so I gave it away. This pesto recipe is all choppped by hand which doesn’t take long at all, but would be faster if you let a machine do the chopping. Saying that, it’s also really satisfying chopping up a whole bunch of stuff. I mixed this batch of pesto with a pan of whole button mushrooms and baked for 20 minutes in an 180°C / 350°F oven but this would …

Scallops Bacon, Bacon Scallops

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Is there anything quite as decadent as a mouthful of scallop and bacon? A fresh, sweet scallop and a smokey salty streaky bacon. Oh gawd. Scallop season here in New Zealand starts from late August and runs right through until February. The most common is known as the Nelson scallop, though most people here just call these “scallops”. Now that I’ve had both the tiny queen scallop and the popular Nelson scallop, I am confident that the Nelson scallop is lovelier by miles. They are our default scallop for a good reason! Market value is roughly $1NZ / $0.82US per scallop which makes them a treat, but affordable every now and then. Part of what makes them good value is how easy they are to cook. I don’t like things that are both expensive and difficult to cook. Nelson scallops are sold and eaten with the bright orange coral or roe. When at their peak, they are both rich and sweet. Nelson scallops are small, averaging just 30 to 40mm (1.2″ to 1.6″) and are …

Artichoke Dip

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I’ve always wondered what artichokes were like and while I’m sure that fresh artichokes are different to the canned ones, I tested the canned ones yesterday because they were easily accessible and required no messy leaf scraping. What do canned artichokes taste like? The canned stuff has the textured of leeks and tastes a little like leek in a light brine. I was hoping for something stronger flavoured. I whipped up this artichoke dip on a sunny afternoon when we had some friends over. It didn’t take long at all and would go well with crackers, bread, crudites or with a platter. We also had a dollap on the side of some crumbed, pan-fried fish. It was really good. I admit, it’s mostly fat so resist the urge to eat all of it by yourself. Artichoke Dip Makes a party sized bowl  Ingredients 1 tub of cream cheese (250g) 1 can artichoke hearts (390g) 1 cup finely grated parmesan 2 tablespoons mayonnaise 1 clove garlic, finely chopped Optional: Salt Preparation Warm the cream cheese in …

Spicy Sausage and Broad Bean (fava) Pasta

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Broad beans are also known as fava beans and though I didn’t plant any this year, someone at work brought in bounty of beans so I squirreled some home. I’m not much of a gardener so I need encouragement or inspiration to grow things. The low yield for work of fava beans turned me off growing them but if it’s free, I’ll take it! Like most households, we always have a few bags of pasta in stock. Actually, right now we have four varieties of pasta. A 500 gram (1 pound) bag of spaghetti should feed five people, but I always cook half a bag of spaghetti which equals to 250 grams. We always get a portion of leftovers for my lunch the next day and I figure a free lunch is good. We’re a two person household so splitting a bag into five portions is nonsensical to me. I used spaghetti, but use whatever pasta shape you like. The sauce is thick and robust and will stick to any pasta like glue. There’s nothing watery …

Mini Party Scones

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Do not trust these seemingly innocent baked goods. Mini items are deceptive. Because they’re so small, they hardly count as food. So you pop one of babies into your mouth each time you walk by and before you know it, you’ve eaten ten. True story. It happened to me and it may happen to you. Scones are not too different in composition from the American biscuit, though they’re usually eaten differently. Cheap and filling, they’re never far away from the menus of cafes and lunchrooms and often one of the first things a child will bake in school cooking class. Sometimes there are different ways to say a word: the posh way and the common way. I’ve always called a scone a “skon” which rhymes with con, swan and Tron, but the posh way to pronounce it would be to call it a “skone” rhymes with bone, phone and loan. I play pretend posh and I jokingly call it “skone” so often that it’s part of my vocabulary now. So call it “skon” or “skone”, …

Lamb Sausages and Grapes

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Lamb is getting cheaper and cheaper here in NZ and I suspect it’s to do with our strong kiwi dollar. A lot of the lamb raised here gets shipped off to overseas markets so it’s a treat to be able to afford it. Still, if you don’t want the commitment of a whole lamb leg, lamb sausages are a cheap and tasty way to eat lamb. Nosh Food Market usually put a different sausage on special each week and last week was their really good lamb sausages for $11 kg. Nosh’s Black Rock Butchery are surprisingly good and their specials are very good and it’s no small feat that Nosh recently won the NZ Ham of the Year prize at the annual 100% Bacon and Ham competition. At Nosh, you can ask the butcher real foodie questions, like portion sizes and their cooking reccomendations. A stark contrast to the supermarket where I once asked the lady behind the seafood counter if they had any flounder left (on special that week). She did not know what …

Make Hollandaise Sauce

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I made a ten egg hollandaise sauce once. Don’t be impressed, it wasn’t my intention. Years ago, long before I got into cooking, I tried to make hollandaise sauce. The sauce split on me. The recipe I found had the tip to salvage split sauce by adding it to egg yolks in place of butter. So I took my split sauce and added it to two egg yolks. It failed. So I tried to salvage it again. Ten eggs later, I had ten egg hollandaise sauce. That experience meant that for years, I didn’t attempt hollandaise sauce again for fear it would take ten eggs to get right. Well, it was time to put on my big girl pants and give it another try. Here in New Zealand, Eggs Bennie (Benedict) are held in high regard. On their own or with couple of strips of streaky bacon or smoked salmon and the compulsory toast or toasted English muffin, this dish can be found in cafes in every nook and cranny of the country. It takes …

Halloumi with Balsamic Reduction

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There is an almost unbearable smugness that comes with frying up a piece of home made halloumi. It might be a bit of work, but the satisfaction and the cheese is completely worth the journey. A couple of weekends ago, I roped in my best friend Coco into a day of cheese making. She is more adventurous than I when it comes to cheese, but we have a mutual love of squeaky cheese or halloumi. As a virgin cheesemaker, I didn’t have a single specialty item I needed to make cheese, so instead of buying each new item on it’s own, I opted for the easy way out and bought a Mad Millie Fresh Cheese kit. There are several kits available, but for me, the fresh cheese kit meant quick results so fresh cheese it was. The fresh cheese kit also makes feta, quark, cottage cheese, cream cheese and ricotta. It’s not cheap at $70NZ but the items soon add up when bought individually and at least I knew I have all required pieces. The …

LBTL Challenge: Day 4

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Day 4 Menu 2 slices of french toast and 1 sliced banana A small bowl of leftover egg fried rice (from dinner last night) Chicken noodle soup Satay fried noodles with a fried egg 1 slice of peanut butter toast I’m getting into the swing of things now by giving myself enough to eat during the day. Eating 4-5 times a day is working for me. I didn’t have good start to the day when I found that a quarter of my banana was black and slimy because of how I’d ripped it off the bunch at the store. When you have a single piece of fruit for the week, quarter of a banana is a lot of banana to miss out on. I took a lemon and 3 slivers of ginger to work today to add to my steaming hot mugs of water. It’s like a flavour explosion compared to plain water. I’m drinking a cup of ginger tea while I’m typing this. Just a slice of ginger and hot water. Simple but beats …

LBTL Challenge: Day 3

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Day 3 Menu 1 bowl of Congee (made with 2 cups of chicken stock, no meat, garnished with a clove of garlic and ginger matchsticks) 2 Peanut butter sandwiches 2 slices of toast with peanut butter Egg fried rice Today I’m halfway through the 5 day Live Below The Line challenge. I feel good in the morning and at night, but at work, I haven’t allocated enough to eat. This afternoon in the office, I felt lightheaded and dizzy and started seeing stars. Generally, I feel foggy from a couple hours after a meal until the next meal and god help me if I have to do any work that requires a lot of concentration. I wouldn’t trust myself to operate heavy machinery or drive. Luckily, I don’t have to do either. Breakfast was yummy and the 1/4 cup of rice that sounded like so much yesterday was gone too quick. I ate one sandwich at morning tea and the other at lunch and I was still very hungry so it was a long, long …

LBTL Challenge: Congee Recipe

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Congee is a simple rice soup or porridge that has been eaten all over Asia for centuries. The two essential ingredients are rice and water but many different meats, vegetables, sauces and spices can be added to it. Congee is a cheap dish and quite filling considering and it is eaten as comfort food for the unwell, the very young and the very old. It is usually eaten for breakfast, but also lunch or dinner. It is so common that even McDonald’s sells congee in many Asian countries. I’ve eaten congee from when I was a tiny baby and I’ve eaten rice soup and porridge in many Asian countries in my travels. I always find it very comforting, especially for a traveller’s tummy. When I first signed onto the Live Below The Line challenge, I thought I wouldn’t be eating meat. But when I saw chicken frames at $1.99 per kilogram at my local Chinese supermarket, I knew I had to use it. So at the start of this week, I cooked up one kilogram …

LBTL Challenge: Day 2

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Day 2 Menu 1 soft boiled egg on 2 slices of toast Satay Vegetables on rice with broccoli, cauliflower, carrot, garlic and ginger Chicken soup (Chinese style) with a bowl of rice Day 2 of the Live Below The Line challenge was much easier than yesterday. I’m going to blame yesterday’s fogginess on a lingering hangover. I felt a combination of sick, hungry or stoned all day. After a bowls of chicken congee, a nap, 2 more bowls of chicken congee and great night’s sleep I fixed myself and I got up early this morning for breakfast and to cook my lunch. I cooked 3 cups of rice last night and was surprised that it made 5 generous portions. With 5 cups of rice for the week, I’m going to have more than enough rice to eat. Good thing I love rice! This is the meal I made for lunch today and the amounts can easily be multiplied for more mouths. I haven’t worked out exactly how much this costs but it’s less than $1 …

All-In-One Seafood Stew

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I was recently given the opportunity to test drive a recipe from a new cook book. Adie McClelland’s first Black Dog Cottage Cookbook was published in 2009 and her second book, sensibly titled The Second Black Dog Cottage Cookbook was released in August. She’s a well travelled foodie and it shows through her recipes. Her style of cooking is much like mine – unfussy and easy but with a Mediterranean angle. I think she would forgive me my casual cooking style. The Second Black Dog Cottage Cook Book has just been released throughout New Zealand. For more information please visit Phantom House Books http://www.phantomhouse.com or their Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/BlackDogCottageCookbook. I wanted to make the All-In-One Seafood Stew because it’s what I would order if I were dining out. This recipe requires 10 tomatoes, which for a long time were unbelievably expensive and probably not very good. They’re starting to come down in price now so it was time to tackle this stew. After a quick scan of the recipe, I identified just one unknown ingredient: passata. Passata …