Potato and Cheese Frittata

And now a recipe for those of you who enjoy the morning. Or who screwed up something and are trying to appease their significant other in the morning. Or just those who want to look like they know how to cook something that a terrible chick movie that I've now seen twice* said was difficult but is really incredibly easy.

To make this culinary des un detre** first choose your base ingredients. You'll need eggs (2 per person), but past that whatever you have on hand will do. For today's experiment I used potatoes and onion. Other favourites are bacon, ham, tomato, peppers, steak, mignon, pate, caviar and anything else foodworthy. Cook them in an ovenable skillet until they're edible, and then pour your whisked eggs over them. Potatoes take around 15 minutes with a decent amount of oil until they're golden and brown. Chop them up small unless you like standing in the kitchen for 6 hours. About the eggs, I should have mentioned earlier that you need to whisk them in a bowl. Do that now if you haven't.

Once you've poured them in, put the whole skillet into the oven you've preheated. Remember? We preheated it to 200C earlier. I totally mentioned that. Pay attention. Anyway, pop it in there for 10 minutes, or until the egg mixture sets. Then take it out and put some grated cheese on it, as well as pepper and herbs and chilli if you like it (you totally do). Then put it back in until it melts.

Take it out, and voila! You've got an awesome breakfast/brunch/post-divorce-meal. Have it with some toast and butter. You'll look awesome.

I took this photo because I had no idea if I'd be able to get it out of the pan without scrambling it, and I was a little proud that I hadn't set fire to it. Go me!


*'Morning Glory', and by God if I have to watch it again I will commit some sort of crime against humanity.
**made-up French; hell, I can barely speak English.

Homemade Chilli Paste

Surprise, surprise; I have a large chilli plant in the backyard. As anyone who knows me would know, I can't eat anything without it being smothered in as much hot chilli as I can find. Sweet chilli? No. That's not chilli, and a pox on anyone who dares besmirch my sandwich or kebab with its sickly taste. Although wedges are OK, I guess.

Anyway, when I eventually remember to harvest my chilli bush I generally notice about 20-30 large chillis on it, as I remember about once every 2 months that I own one. They're big green chillis, but that doesn't mean they're not a little spicy. Here's how I turn them into something that can make most people cry, and anyone with a little backbone enjoy their food.

First, pop the chillis in a container or similar for a while until they go red and a little shriveled. This can take up to a week or so, and therefore this isn't recommended if you're planning a dinner party tonight. When they're done, assemble your ingredients as below:

For those of you without images, it's the chillis, a lime, some salt, garlic paste, vinegar and a mortar and pestle.

Chop up the chillis as much as you can be bothered after removing the stalk (and the seeds if you're a wimp that hates spice) and then put them into the mortar. Or pestle. Whichever is the fucking heavy stone bowl. Pop them in there. Grind them up as much as you can. The consistency is up to you, but I like mine a little like salsa so not too processed. If you really like it smooth then just skip the mortar and pestle and use a food processor and cry yourself to sleep for not enjoying real food.

Add 1-2 teaspoons of garlic and a similar amount of vinegar (to taste) and then squeeze the entire lime into it. Mix these up as much as you can. Add some salt to make the mixture set a little and also to give it a little bite.

Pour the result into a container and lo and behold, you'll have some awesome chilli paste to garnish every single dish in sight. Don't miss any, because if you're not eating scalding hot chilli you're not really living.

Prawn Comination Rice

This is something I knocked up the other night when I was home alone, bored and feeling lazy. Pro tip for the lazy: keep a whole lot of random junk in your fridge; if you're inventive it's amazing what you can knock together.

By chance we had leftover prawns in the freezer (it's not as dodgy as it sounds). We also had leftover rice from a previous dinner as well as some leftover corn and the eternal bag of frozen peas. Defrost all of these things, and you're halfway there.


Next, scramble an egg. I've found by experimentation that one egg per person is a good amount for combination rice. You can leave it to cool, it doesn't matter if it gets cold because:


Next, heat up your wok. I used a dash of peanut oil, soy sauce and mirin to prime it, then threw in all the ingredients. I then added a dash more soy sauce, some fish sauce and some thick teriyaki sauce I found lurking in the back of the fridge. Stir constantly throughout. Finally, I sprinkled some chilli flakes on, but that's more of a personal choice than a recommendation.


And then you're done! Easy! The hardest part is cleaning the @#$%! egg out of the pan you scrambled it in.


Enjoyed in combination with:

Badlands Brewery London Porter

I found this gem in my local bottle shop. It's from a microbrewery in Orange, limited run. Absolutely delicious (although, not authentically Asian, but still worked surprisingly well with the meal).

P.S. sorry about the crappy picture quality. I blame the camera.

Beef Roulade

For my first post on this blog, I thought I'd share something I made a couple of weeks ago. It was attempt to try something slightly more complicated than my normal fare, and it came out excellently! The recipe is known as Beef Roulade, although my version is not quite as perfect as the pictures I found on Google when researching the recipe.

To make Beef Roulade, start with some thin steak, and then make it even thinner using the magical implement known as a rolling pin. You're going to want it to be about 1/2 - 1 cm thick in total. Depending on size, cut the steaks in half to make pieces about the size of your hand. Lay them out flat and along the centre of each piece lay a piece (or two if you like!) of prosciutto. On top of this, put a mixture of herbs to taste - I used parsley, garlic and parmasan cheese, but you could use anything you like to get a different effect.

Next, wrap the steak rolls up tightly and pin them together with toothpicks. Try and make them as tight as possible so that they hold their shape while cooking. Fry them in a big pan in a little oil for long enough to brown the outside but not cook them entirely, and then put them on a plate and cover them with foil. It's now time to be all fancy and look like you know what you're doing in the kitchen. Pour a can of crushed tomatoes in the same pan and add a glass of red wine to it. Mix them together, and then let them reduce by half. While you're waiting, feel free to reduce the bottle of wine by half by imbibing. Worst case scenario: you get tipsy and forget you're cooking. It helps to have someone else around to remind you so that you don't miss your awesome meal.

The final step, once the red wine and tomatoes have reduced to a nice sauce, is to add the steak rolls back to the pan and cook them for a couple of minutes in the sauce. Don't overdo it, they're very thin and won't take long. Take them out of the pan, pop them on plates and serve with whatever you prefer. In this case I went for a light salad and a toasted roll with aioli spread on it. Serve with a glass of the wine (if any is left over) and bask in the glow of being able to toss around words like 'roulade' and 'red wine reduction' as if you were a real chef!

Enjoy! (As a side note, don't eat the toothpicks. They're not good for you.)

Beck's Secret Chicken Satay

This is a quick recipe and one that Emma and I both cook. It is a nice quick satay recipe that doesn't just taste like you stuck some peanut butter in a stir fry.

The meat is browned first and set aside, then you re-oil the pan and cook some red curry paste until fragrant. Then you add a can of coconut milk and some crunchy peanut butter. Mix that and then add your vegies. When they are done add your meat, squeeze half a lime over it, mix in a little bit of sugar and serve.

I generally serve this with rice as pictured, I occasionally forget to put the rice on until about half way through which kind of delays dinner a bit as happened tonight.

Making Nachos

So, Steph and I both love throwing together nachos - an avocado, some mince, some onion, some beans, and five minutes, and bam: unhealthy deliciousness.  The difficulty comes in finding good chips - Most we can find are either too salty or too bland, and are so energy-dense you could probably use them as firestarters.

I found a recipe for baking tortillas into chips - just cut them into bits, baste them with some oil and flavour, then bake for 15 minutes.  We brushed on some lime juice, olive oil, salt, cayenne pepper and curry powder.  A few at the back got slightly overdone - the perils of trying to adjust things to fit a fan-forced oven.

This certainly felt healthier than the packaged option - although to be honest it's probably not by much.  Getting to make your own flavours is pretty awesome, though.  The lime juice, salt and cayenne mix was awesome. It took the two of us about half an hour to get this all done, although I suspect it would be faster the second time. That said, there is a certain appeal to the five minute version.  If I could find perfect packaged tortilla chips/corn chips/whatever I would probably not bother.

Incidentally, my guacamole recipe is an avocado + half a (firm) tomato finely diced + lime juice + lots of coriander leaves.  I've experimented with guaca recipes a fair bit, and this one is my current favourite.

(Also, yes, that is yoghurt not sour cream.  We didn't have any sour cream :( )

Beef Goulash

We needed something that could satisfy a very variable schedule on Sunday night as we were taking part in a TF2 comp and were uncertain as to how quickly we would be eliminated so a slow cooked meal sounded great.

It is chuck steak, onion, carrot and potato, with a combination of tomato paste, white wine and paprika to create the sauce.

I was pretty nervous about this as I have never made a goulash before and the one who had suggested it was otherwise occupied when it came to preparation and was unable provide a detailed recipe. The instructions were very straight forward, they just lacked amounts.

First I peeled and chopped up the potatoes and the carrot and placed them in the slow cooker. Then I cut up the steak and onion and browned them on the stove and placed them in the slow cooker on top.

Finally the sauce was just mixing a single tub of tomato paste with some white wine, paprika and some ground cayenne pepper. This was very imprecise and I did it until the paste changed consistency and tasted okay to me, then I put it on top. I think if I were to do this again I might consider using another tub to add more sauce and probably would add another vegetable.

It was tasty and we had enough to fill about three bowls with the amount pictured above.

Honey Soy Chicken Stirfry

Honey Soy Chicken Stirfry

This is a meal I cook relatively often because it is tasty, fast, easy and only uses one pan so has minimal cleaning up. It is essentially just chicken, hokkien noodles, vegetables and sauce in a wok (or a normal frypan also works). I get the Kan Tong noodles because you don't need to soak them or anything first, you can just throw them straight in.

To make the sauce, you put some soy sauce in a bowl, add some honey and put it in the microwave for about 30 seconds to melt the honey. Then add a teaspoon of sugar. I use raw sugar but white sugar also works fine. Stir it to make sure it's all mixed together and taste it to check it's ok. If it's too salty, add more sugar or honey. If it's too sweet, add more soy sauce.

You should only add the sauce to the pan at the very end so the sugar and honey don't caramelise. You pretty much just have it in there long enough to heat it up and stir it through.

You can put whatever vegetables you like with this and I frequently change it around. However, I almost always include water chestnuts, cashews and baby corn as they have a good combination of flavours and textures for this sauce. Other things I added this time: carrot, onion, red capsicum, choy sum, birdseye chillis (I used three), and sesame seeds.

Things From The Past IV: Chilli con Carne

Slow-cooked chilli con carne. This is one of those long, involved recipes that I only cook when I've got time and motivation.  It is, however, delicious, warm, filling and healthy.

I'd previously made this with any old lump of beef, but this time I did some research into high-collagen cuts that will best gelatinise into finger-licking-goodness after a long, slow cook. I settled on chuck steak, which is very attractively priced at Coles/Woolies, as it's very tough stuff if you *don't* cook it for hours. Chemistry, yay!

The major components are the diced chuck, onions and garlic (browned in a pan), then capsicum, kidney beans, fresh and canned tomatoes, chillis, passata, spices, red wine, dark chocolate and time. I can provide a full list if anyone's interested, I have the spices written down somewhere.

My wife told me that this looked like dogfood. My wife is a bad person. At least she also said looks can be deceiving.  :)

Things From The Past III: Steak and Mash

The third of my things-I-photographed-before-this-blog series: Marinated steak, sweet potato mash and random vegetables.

This was relatively affordable steak - rump from Coles - marinated for a day in red wine, lime juice and sweet chilli.  I was pretty much throwing random stuff together, it came out pretty good. I put it straight from the freezer into a ziplock bag with the marinade in the morning, then retrieved it from the fridge when I got home.

The sweet potato mash is a favourite of mine - steamed sweet potato, butter (or butter-substitute-of-choice) and cayenne (or chilli flakes). The fat really carries the flavour of the steamed sweet potato, and the chilli and the sweetness are great.  I previously was not much of a fan of sweet potato, but I could eat this stuff by the bowlful.

The vegetables were just random crap chopped up and fried in a little oil with a little garlic.  Mostly cabbage, onion and carrot, it seems.

Things From The Past II: Tuna Wraps

Second in the stuff-I-photographed-before-this-blog parade, tuna wraps!

This is a favourite two-minute-meal standby of mine - drained canned tuna-in-water, sweet chilli and cream cheese in a wrap with some greens (I like baby spinach), some avocado and some pepper. If you're willing to go the extra effort and make it a ten-minute-meal, dice some crunchy fresh veg into the tuna mix - carrots, capsicum, sometimes corn. A tin of tuna makes enough for about 3-4 large wraps, more if you add a smallish carrot, half a red capsicum and half an ear of fresh corn, so you can get a few good meals out of your ten minutes.

Steph prefers tuna and mayo based mixes on on grain breads, toasted. I'm open to being convinced, but so far I'm sticking with the sweet-chilli-and-cream-cheese edition.

Things From The Past: Lamb And Lentil Stew

I thought I'd quickly throw up a selection of cool stuff I've cooked and photographed in the past - before we kicked off this blog.  These will have quite brief descriptions as I'm supposed to be off working.  In fact, I'm only here because a slow-moving progress bar distracted me long enough to write stuff.

First, lamb and lentil stew!   This was pretty simple: diced lamb and some veg went into a frying pan, lentils were boiled in a saucepan, then the two were brought together and liberally doused with smoked paprika. Deliciousness - and relatively quick for a stew (~45mins), as lentils take only 15mins or so to boil, much less than some other legumes/beans, and don't require pre-soaking. Still more of a weekend-night dish than a quick weekday slapdash. I've been meaning to try this again slow-cooker-style some time.

Proatcakes

So, Steph got a recipe from a fitness-minded colleague for high-protein pancakes last week, and we resolved to try it for breakfast on Sunday. Not our usual kind of thing, but it sounded fun. Here's the result:

Oat, whey protein powder, cottage cheese, egg, milk and a little nutmeg & cinnamon in the pancakes, plus toppings of apple, banana, honey and a sweetened yoghurt/fruit/nut mix. Took about 30 mins to put together a stack of four with toppings, etc., although that was including the trying-to-figure-out-if-we're-doing-it-right time. I still wouldn't have the energy to make this on a week-day, though.

They came out quite well, although the mixture was a little thicker than it should have been (more milk!) and so the pancakes were a little thick. That's usually not a problem but this mix seems to produce quite solid cakes that absorb liquids less readily than traditional mixes.  I butterflied mine (double the toppings!) and it was great.

Also, these are ridiculously, hilariously filling.  We could not finish four medium sized pancakes between the two of us, and neither of us was hungry until about 3pm.

The Idea

The purpose of Stuff We Cooked is simple: a repository of things we ate, possibly with ingredients/recipes, to serve as both the author's own records and as a means of facilitating the exchange of culinary know-how.

There is only one rule: Put a photo (preferably a plate-shot) with every post. Everything else is fair game - upload the fastest snacks, the laziest meals or the finest four-course spreads, use any camera you want, add a recipe or don't, add ingredients or don't, be as verbose as you like.

But: pics or it didn't happen.

If you'd like an invite, let one of the existing members know - we're always up for more posters.

Have fun!