A Few of My Favourite Things !

My three year old son called a ‘deer‘ a ‘quesadilla‘ by mistake the other day.

As you can tell we’ve been talking Mexican food of late (well, this post is late but seeing as Melbourne is treating us to some lovely sunshine this week, you can let it slide can’t you?). Maybe it’s the plethora of tortilla and burrito wraps that are cropping up all over the place that’s inspiring us, or maybe it’s the cool freshness of the salsas that we look forward to on hot summer days. Either way, this food is right down my alley. I love foods that you have to use your hands to eat with and even more so when you have to assemble it yourself. I think eating with your fingers makes food taste different though I do try to avoid picking off food straight off shared plates when we have company.

And so it was that A & I cooked turkey tacos for my family using leftover turkey from our Christmas Feast (yes this post is late, isn’t it?). The turkey was diced and cooked with some onions, garlic, diced tomatoes, ground cumin, salt & pepper then sprinkled with coriander at the end.

This was accompanied by three types of salsas:

1. Tomato, red onion, mint
2. Lychee and avocado
3. Peach, capsicum, cucumber, red onion

The dressings were loosely based on some recipes I pulled out of a magazine, but for the life of me I can’t find the sheet right now. Well, there are loads of recipes you can trawl the internet for or just experiment with vinegar (sherry, cider), garlic, coriander leaves, lime/lemon juice, salt & pepper. It was just lovely to be able to use some summer stone fruits to make the salsas colourful and appetising. Mum used to tell me that you should try to have a bit of red, a bit of green and a bit of yellow in the dish. That way you won’t end up with a brown dish, and these dishes are anything but.

I love having a quick & easy recipe that you can turn to when you have one of those days. It happened to be one of those days for us yesterday, getting back from visiting the in-laws late then having to prep and cook dinner, get my boys (being hubby & toddler) to the table cleaned and ready to eat, as well as feed, change and put down the baby within the space of about 45 minutes.

While the pot of water was on the boil, I shelled and de-veined the Red Spot prawns then chopped about 5 cloves of garlic (yes, my boys wanted a lot of garlic!). The garlic and prawns were sauteed for a few minutes until the prawns had just turned opaque then removed from the heat. When the pasta was al-dente, the strands were tossed into the saucepan with the prawns and a little pasta cooking water to soak up all the garlicky flavours.

The idea is to then serve and eat but when I can’t seem to get everyone to the table at the same time….uh oh, that’s when I get nasty!

Did anyone NOT watch the Masterchef Finale? And did anyone NOT love both the finalists, Adam & Callum – whom both have blogs now.

Seeing as we had not done a potluck since our Neil Perry special, I decided it was time for us to have a Masterchef cook-off, the idea being to cook a recipe from the Masterchef website and bring it along for all to try. As I didn’t bother asking what anyone was making, I was a little concerned that we would end up with four desserts and one entree and we’d have to order in pizza – not that there would have been anything wrong with eating four desserts for lunch. Fairytale ending…

We started with Adam’s Prawn Scotch Eggs with a Coconut, Chilli Sambal. So good.

This was followed by George’s Open Beef Kofta and George & Gary’s Chicken Winglets, Hummus and Raw Vegetable Salad (I took the photo before the winglets were placed!)

To end the meal, we had George’s Braised Tomatoes with Smoked Chocolate Mousse – my effort – and a Fruit & Cheese Platter.

I’ve been a slack little blogger! I have been doing the occasional surfing through the Australian blogs but honestly there are simply too many for me to keep up with everyone now. Of course, I’ve still been taking the odd picture here and there – either of something I’ve cooked or when I’ve been out for dinner. I just haven’t been putting any of it here.

Then this week, I took my 2 year old to Prahran Market and saw someone peeling apples in preparation for her demonstration of A Thousand Layered Apple Cake. I had seen her before on Masterchef and a photo from I can’t remember where, and just this week was reading about the gourmet sandwich bar that she and her husband were about to open up on Bourke St. It was none other than Jackie Middleton, who also confessed that she had fallen off the blogging bandwagon, although not nearly as badly as I had.

I’ve been distracted by all the things you do with a toddler but I have been doing some important baking which is due in 2 months. Yes, a rather long time in the oven isn’t it?

I got to do some cooking for little people this week as our playgroup has decided to do a foodswap on Monday. I figured that there would be a few meatballs and frittata recipes so I went with fried rice, cooked with peas, corn and good ol’ spam – the way I remember it from my childhood. I used to dash on some tomato sauce for additional flavour….. mmmmm. To accompany, chicken nuggets marinated overnight in yoghurt then dipped in beaten egg and flour peppered with five spice powder – enough to tantalise but not overwhelm delicate taste buds. Some of the chicken nuggets were dredged in dessicated coconut instead of the five spice mixture. Either way, they turned out great and one piece even obligingly too on the appearance of a drumstick.

We have been awaiting the opening of Old Town Kopitiam in QV for the last few months, especially after spending a couple of weeks in Malaysia recently and reacquainting ourselves with the joys of kaya toast. Finally made it there for breakfast this morning, which actually turned out to be lunch when I couldn’t get out of bed before 10:30am. This also meant that we had to forgo the kaya toast in favour of something more substantial – roti chanai with curry sauce, Siamese Laksa and ban chang kueh. All great and we’re heading back really soon to try the rest of the menu.

The first batch, made with three orange sweet potatoes, were terrible – dense, chewy. All because I followed the recipe from Yoshoku too closely. The recipe called for 300g flour to 1.2kg sweet potato and although I had only used about 220g of flour, the dough was already too dry.

Then, I only had one sweet potato left but I was determined to give it another go. I added one egg yolk, a tablespoon of grated parmesan and a few sprinkles of flour. Voila, lovely, light gnocchi! Pity about the terrible photo though =( My mum reckons that this is similar to Abacus Beads (a la the one Poh made in Masterchef) which is a food of the Hakka people.

An oldie that I’d forgotten about (blush)…

Chickpeas and chorizo are not the most asian of ingredients are they? but they do cook well in the old claypot regardless!

We were facilitating The Marrige Preparation Course a couple of weekends ago which meant that I needed to prepare a quick and easy lunch that could be had between a couple of the sessions that were being held on Sunday. I took inspiration from a recipe Matt posted late last year, one that had been on my mind since that time, and threw together a chickpea and chorizo hotpot.

Using my trusty chinese claypot, I fried the chorizo with some garlic and onion, added some passata, tin of chickpeas and some spices then simmered for 20 minutes. It was as easy as Matt had promised and absolutely delicious with crusty white bread. Best of all, the claypot made it easy to transport.

We were all sitting around at J’s house one night flicking through cookbooks when we came up with the brilliant idea of a Neil Perry potluck. Taking turns to flip open at a random page, we managed to select an entree, three mains and one dessert for each person would have to cook for the next get-together. It’s such a good thing that this group all (most?) love to cook.

This was meant to be a Salmon, Green beans and Egg Caviar salad but N decided to substitute snowpeas as they looked fresher on the day he went to the market. Even A, who doesn’t like smoked salmon all that much, enjoyed this dish. I managed to sneak a little bowl of leftovers away to have for lunch the next day.

J&L, big Neil Perry fans, brought this Salmon with Tomato-Braised Chickpeas and Herbed Yogurt. According to them, Neil Perry’s recipes are deceptively simple, more straightforward than Jamie Oliver’s.

J’s dish, a Dry Prawn Curry, was pronounced the most delicious looking when she saw the photos later on. Tasty as this was, J didn’t agree with J&L that Neil Perry’s dishes are easier to cook!

Unfortunately, I don’t have a photo of my Honey-Braised Duck with Orange and Olives but we did finish the night off with E’s Lemon Yogurt Cake, baked on behalf of S&B.

All-in-all, a good night with good friends with Neil Perry’s Good Food.

Sometimes you need a reliable and safe recipe that doesn’t require much preparation. This was certainly the case last week when I needed to organise lunch for the TMPC crowd. I’m in the middle of getting ready for our move so I didn’t really have time to cook anything that was going to take too much time or effort. Fortunately, these two dishes worked out really well although it was the first time I had tried either!

I flicked through some recipe books and finally settled on an easy Chicken & Mushroom Bake recipe. All you need to do for this is saute some onions, brown some chicken pieces then place these two ingredients in a tray with some mushrooms, condensed cream of mushroom (or chicken) soup, water and some cream. Bake at 190C for 60 to 90 min until the chicken is tender.

Dessert was equally easy to make. Layer sliced panettone drizzled with cranberry juice with berries and cream.