Roast Pork

Takes a long time, but so tasty. I start off by scoring the fat and then rubbing salt into it to help it crackle.

Then put it in the oven on a very high heat (I just turned mine up to max, which is about 250 degrees) for about 20 minutes. So now it should look something like this.

 Turn the oven down to 150 or so and add the vegetables. I had potato, sweet potato, pumpkin, onion and carrot (not seen here - I put it in later as it takes less time to cook and I didn't want it to burn). I also added a few cloves of garlic.

Leave it to cook for about half an hour per kilo and it should be done. I also cooked some beans and corn on the cob to go with it. At the end, when everything's pretty much cooked, I siphoned off some of the pork fat that had dripped into the tray to make gravy (drippings + water + flour, put in saucepan, heat and stir) and poured that on top.

As you can see there was quite a lot - my brother was possibly going to come for dinner so I made enough just in case. He ended up not coming but I'd hardly eaten all day so it worked out well for me. :)

Bacon and Whitebean Soup

Cooked this last night, like many slow cooker recipes it was pretty simple.
It needs:
Bacon
Cannellini beans
Celery
Cherry tomatoes
Liquid Chicken Stock
Chives

You cut up your celery and cherry tomatoes and put em in the slowcooker, along with your beans and chicken stock. You cut up the bacon and cook all but one rasher, then cook em for a little bit and put them in the slowcooker. Turn on your slow cooker.

In the evening when you plan to eat, you cut up and cook the last rasher of bacon and the chives.
Open the slow cooker and use an immersion blender to blend the soup, doesn't need to be thoroughly blended, the aim is for slightly chunk soup. You add some salt and pepper along with the bacon and chives and mix it.

Then serve with bread. It was really tasty and none lasted long enough to become leftovers.

Grilled Lemon and Herb Chicken with Mash

This was a lot more complicated than what I normally cook. I grabbed an app called Jamie Oliver 20 minute recipes when it was on sale on the android market. It only works on my phone which is a pity, it would be nice to have my tablets big screen when doing this kind of thing.

This recipe required:
Chicken breast
Potatos
Tomatos
Basil
Thyme
Lemon
Sweetcorn (I used baby corn instead)
Red Wine Vinegar
Olive Oil
Butter
A Red Chilli
Shallots

You boil potatos the for about 12 minutes.
Whilst they are cooking you roughly cut up the basil and tomato, dice the shallots, deseed the chilli and finely dice it. Then add them all to a mixing bowl along with some red wine vinegar, olive oil and a bit of salt and pepper.

You then take your chicken, cover it in glad wrap and then hit it with the base of a pan until it is about 1cm thick. You score the underside of it and rub some salt and pepper into it then you grade lemon zest onto the top of the chicekn, put some olive over over the top and sprinkle thyme over the top of that.

Your 12 minutes are probably up at this time, you should add the corn to the pot with the potatoes now. Then leave that for another 3 minutes. Once that is up, move them to a collander and let em sit for a bit.

Cook your chicken, then leave it in the pan with the heat off, you are close to the end.

Put your potatoes and corn back in your pot, add some butter, salt and pepper and mash!

Now you put some mash on each plate, put chicken on top, add some lemon juice and serve with the tomato and basil mix from the bowl.

It was pretty good though I needed to go through the recipe a bit more before cooking. I think next time I might add a bit more chilli to the mix.

Pumpkin, Chicken and Chickpea Curry

This is a dish that has been pretty regular in my cooking, it was one of the first ones I grabbed from 4 ingredients. It consists of chicken thighs, pumpkin, chickpeas and korma sauce. I tend to also add other vegetables like beans, carrots and capsicum. Pretty much whatever I am in the mood for. This time I added beans, carrot and some potatoes.

There are 2 methods for cooking this, the stovetop and the slow cooker.

With the stove top, you microwave the pumpkin, then cut it up. You cook the chicken in the pan then once it is browned add the vegies and korma sauce and then wash out the korma sauce bottle with about a cup of water and add that to the mix. Simmer it for half an hour (which is when I then cook some rice) and serve.

The other method is the slowcooker, it is pretty much the same except you don't add the extra water. I made the mistake of doing so this time so the curry was a lot more watery than normal.

Lamb and Rosemary Pie

This is definitely not a meal to make on a weeknight as it takes a significant amount of time and the pie part is somewhat fiddly. However, it is pretty tasty, and making pie is fun.

The basic idea is to first make a filling for the pie in the slow cooker. You can also just do this without the slow cooker, thus drastically reducing the time required, but slow cooked things are nicer. I used lamb leg steak, though other cuts would also work fine - the main thing is to not put any bones in as they don't work so well in pie. I also added rosemary, garlic, beef stock, onion, potatoes, carrot, parsnip and green beans. As usual for slow cooking, brown the meat then layer your ingredients in order of cooking time (longest on the bottom).

This is what it looks like after being in the slow cooker for ~8 hours (and after being stirred to mix everything up).

Towards the end of the slow cooking process, you can start making the actual pie. For the benefit of anyone who hasn't made pie before, I'm going to go through all the steps. If you have made pie before, there's nothing particularly special here, so you can probably skip to the end.

Making the pie will naturally be easiest in a pie dish, but I've also made pie plenty of times just in a square crockery baking dish like you might use for a lasagna or something and it works fine; you just get a square pie. You should grease the dish first - I actually forgot to do this which made serving it a little tricky.

Next you make the pie base. I just bought some sheets of puff pastry. This is much easier than making your own pastry and they will have a nice even thickness which can be hard to get manually with a rolling pin. The main downside is that my pie dish is a bit too big to use a single sheet for each half of the pie, so I have to use two. I overlap them a bit so that the pie won't get a hole in it. I also use some of the extra to reinforce the sides where the pastry otherwise doesn't quite reach the edge of the dish. You just put the pastry in, shape it to the dish (making sure it is flush against the sides and bottom - be careful not to tear the pastry when doing this) and then cut off any excess pastry. It will now look something like this:

Now the pie goes in the oven for blind baking. This will make the bottom of the pie cook properly and go crispy, which it might not do if you just cook the whole thing together with the filling already in it. I used uncooked rice on a sheet of baking paper (to make removing it easy). Anything that will give enough weight to hold the pastry down will work, however.

After 10-15 minutes, you get this:

Now add the filling (and some pepper):

And put the top on the pie. Just put your pastry over the top and cut off the excess as before. You can also crimp the edges to help the bottom and top stay together - I just do this with my fingers. I then brushed melted butter over the top, added some poppy seeds and stabbed it several times to make air holes. It was then ready to go in the oven.

And after about 20 minutes it was ready to eat!

Mmm...pie

So, the moral of the story is, next time you are cooking something in the slow cooker, consider making it into a pie.

Steak, beans and salvation

This one was born of necessity rather than desire.  Steph and I realised we had basically no food items remaining except rump steak, a tin of kidney beans, an ear of corn and a red capsicum.  We had some bread, rice and pasta, plus one lime and a bunch of spices, etc, but there didn't appear to be too much we could do.  Things looked pretty dire, so I started scouring internet recipe websites for something that fit our ingredients list, and found this: http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/recipefinder/cuban-steak-beans-recipe-ghk0112.

Steak, corn, beans, capsicum, even the lime.  Everything we needed!  Genius! Thankyou, internet machine! You're my hero!

We modified the recipe a bit - no orange, mostly, but it turned out to be an interesting mix.  I probably wouldn't make this again, because I prefer other things with steak, but it got us out of a tight situation!

Slow cooked lamb shanks w/ brown rice

These shanks sat at the very back of the freezer for a while until we found time to cook them properly, but it was worth it.  Browned the shanks and then some onions, garlic, celery and carrot.  Tossed it all in the slow cooker with some tinned tomatoes, oregano, thyme and a little red wine. We didn't actually have any rosemary at the time, which was a shame.  

But it turned out pretty good, and went well with the flavour of the brown rice - white would probably have been kinda boring.

Glazed roo & slaw

Another simple yet awesome-tasting "meat-and-a-side" recipe. I originally adapted this from a pork chops recipe, but it works great with 'roo.

Pan-fry some kangaroo steaks, preferably in a non-non-stick pan so there's delicious brown gunk at the bottom. Shred cabbage, grate carrot, chop apple, crumble walnuts.  Then dissolve some sugar in a little water and mix lime juice, cider vinegar a little white wine.  Once the roo is done, deglaze the pan with the mix, scrape up all the tasty bits and simmer for a minute or two.  Plate up and drizzle over everything for sweet, tangy deliciousness.  Very quick, as little as 15 mins if there's two people.

Thai beef red curry

(Editor's Note:  Steph made a bunch of very quick posts without really having the time to write stuff, anyone who wants details should prod her in the comments)

Red curry paste
1 tin of coconut milk
Beef (rump)
onion
garlic
chilli
capsicum
mushrooms
carrot
peas

Capsicum and eggplant stir fry beef

Quick stir fry. Note: requires vegetable chopping!!

Beef (rump) marinated in:

• salt
• pepper
• sweet soy sauce
• soy sauce (1 tsp)
• curry powder

onion
garlic
chilli
capsicum (cut into strips)
egglpant (cut into strips)
corn kernels (1 cob, tinned is ok, maybe 200g)
carrot
steamed rice (to serve)

Chicken, butter bean and chickpea thing

Easy chuck-together dish that you bake in the oven

• Chicken (drumstick or maryland)
• Salt, pepper
• Garlic
• Lemon slices
• White wine
• Tin of butter beans
• Tin of chickpeas
• 1 doz small tomatoes (we used baby truss, though you can use cherry or grape or anything you like)
• 1/2 onion
• Oregano
• Small pinch of basil

Pork chops and waldslaw salad

Pork chops are great because they are reasonably quick to grill or pan-fry.

A good way to use a surplus of cabbage (that you want to eat fresh) is coleslaw, but I made this pasta salad using apples and through I'd try it with this. It works brilliantly, especially with the addition of walnuts and the pork-based dressing.

Stephie should really be faster at writing posts!  :P

-K.

---
Kaz is a troll!

Chicken fajitas

This is the first dish I ever got allspice to work properly with. The chicken is quite different to most recipes I cook so it's a very welcome change of flavours. I'm pretty sure that it's not authentically Mexican, allspice being more of a Jamaican thing, but authenticity is not particularly important to anyone but food historians anyway, and food historians are boring people.

Cut some chicken breasts into strips and marinade in the juice and zest of a quarter lime per breast, plus roughly equal amounts of allspice, cumin, cinnamon and cayenne, a little salt and pepper and just enough olive oil to slick it all up without pooling at the bottom.  Mix thoroughly to ensure deliciousness and stick in fridge for at least an hour or preferably overnight, then chuck them in a hot pan until your house smells awesome.

Cut onion, carrot and capsicum into sticks and sautee with chilli and garlic until nicely brown. Steph and I like our onions quite well done so I sweated those alone for ten minutes before upping the heat and adding the rest.

Serve in (warmed) tortillas with guacamole (avo, coriander leaves, diced tomato, a little spring onion, lime juice and just a dash of cumin), shredded lettuce, a little grated cheese and salsa and yoghurt if desired.

Not counting marinading the chicken (which I did just after lunch) this took me slightly over an hour from fridge to plates working by myself.  So not all that bad.

Roo and Peas

This dish sounds awful, and provides opportunities for some truly terrible Indian currency related puns, but is actually pretty awesome.

Sear the roo steaks in a very hot pan, reserve and lower the heat a bit.  Add onion, garlic, capsicum and carrot diced fine and get some good Maillard action going on.  Dump in some passata and a little oregano, then lower the heat even further, re-introduce the roo, cover and simmer for a bit while the roo cooks from super-rare to where you want it.  Which is rarer than where you think you want it, because if you cook a roo steak until it's grey all the way through you will have made boot leather, so don't do that.  It's on our national crest, and you should show the poor animal some respect!

In the mean time steam some peas, some broccoli and possibly some green beans (but we'd run out). If you've never steamed ordinary garden variety peas before you really should - they are way more delicious than their nutritional content has any right to be.

This whole dish is hilariously healthy, by the way. If that's a thing you're into.

Grilled flathead

So there was a special on this usually-fairly-hard-to-get small flathead fillets the other day, so Steph and I picked up half a kilo and set to putting their delicious freshwater fishiness to good purpose.

Pre-sauteed some green beans, carrots and onions with some fresh chilli and minced garlic, then reserved.  Chucked the fish straight in with a little oil until it got a good browning on one side, then added some lime juice & zest, some white wine, a little more garlic and a lug of sweet chilli sauce. tossed that all around a bit and then threw back in the veggies to get it all mixed up and hot.  We tried to keep each of the accompaniments toned down a little more than usual to let the fish shine through - worked very nicely!

Delicious and easy, but at $38/kg when not on special it's not something I'd cook often - I need to find a cheap source of good fish that doesn't require getting up at the crack of dawn to go to the fish markets!

Rissoles of Unknown Provenance

OK, so these aren't really that mysterious, it's just that I've had this photo sitting on my machine for a good month now and I can't remember exactly what Steph put in these - but they were tasty!  I know beef mince, egg and onion were involved, but there was also some spice-ification.  I'm sure she could be contacted in the comments if anyone wanted specifics.

Steamed green beans and potatoes to accompany, with a garlic, rosemary and butter (or butter-like substance) drizzle.  Steaming things is awesome, because even boring vegetable sides taste awesome when steamed.

(I'm trying to clear a backlog of things I intend to post here, so I'm going to make a whole pile of brief posts - please ask for more detail in the comments if you want it!)

Banana Smoothies

Pretty simple: bananas, vanilla ice-cream, vanilla essence, honey, natural yoghurt and milk, blended together. Other things I sometimes add are chocolate (I recommend Lindt dark chocolate flakes) and coffee. And of course you can use different fruit: some I like to use are mangoes, strawberries, and blueberries.

Thai Beef Sitrfry

The cooking time on this is fairly short but the large number of small, fiddly ingredients can take a while to prepare. Unless you cheat and have a magic chopping stuff up thing like me.

Before:

After:

We now have a very finely chopped mishmash of garlic, ginger, mint, coriander, basil and lemongrass.

When I do stuff in the wok I usually like to chop up all the ingredients before I start cooking as I find I end up less stressed and better able to keep stirring it very frequently. So if you're like me, you can chop up your vegetables - I used capsicum, carrot and onion - first. And your herbs etc. if you're doing that by hand. You probably also want to put the rice on at this point because the other stuff won't take long.

Then take the onion and beef and put it on on a high heat until the beef is browned. Now take it out and set it aside (so the beef doesn't get dried out by too much cooking). Put in the vegetables and herbs, add lime juice - I used a whole lime, raw sugar, soy sauce and fish sauce. You don't want to use very much soy sauce, basically just enough to keep your ingredients from drying out. The fish sauce should actually be the stronger flavour so don't skimp on that.

Once it's all done, serve with rice.

Chicken and Basil Pasta

This is something I make fairly often. It is tasty, easy and quick. It has chicken, basil, garlic, semi-dried tomatoes, pine nuts, snow peas, tomato paste and fetta cheese. If you want the cheese to stay in intact pieces, you need to add it at the end - you can just put it in after turning off the heat from the frypan and then stir it through. If you add it earlier it will melt and mix through everything else. Both are tasty, just depends on whether you want general cheesiness or cheese pieces. Other than that, everything is pretty straightforward: brown meat on high heat, turn down to low-medium, add everything else, wait for it to cook, serve with pasta. I tend to add the snow peas later than everything else because I like them crunchy.

Apologies for the blurry phone photo. :/

Chicken Pesto Parcels

This is a delicious and filling meal that is alas not nearly as well suited to leftovers as many of the other meals I make.

The dish requires chicken thigs, pesto, salt and camembert cheese and puff pastry.
You cut the pastry into two triangles andrub salt on the outside of the chicken thighs. You then roll the chicken thighs around pieces of camembert and then put pesto on the outside and place each one in the centre of a triangle.
Finally you fold the pastry around them; either the recipe book I took this from is using larger pieces of pastry or the chicken thighs I get are a little too big, so I tend to use another piece of pastry (about a quarter of a sheet per triangle) to help cover the gap otherwise they leak all over the place during the cooking process.
You then bake the parcels for 30 minutes at 180 degrees and serve with a salad. In this case I just tossed together a salad of lettuce carrot and green capsicum.

With the amount of chicken thighs you tend to get from the supermarket this meal serves 4.

More than 5 Minute Pasta

This is the laziest meal that Emma and I cook that we still actually consider cooking.

It consists of:
1) Latina Pasta (typically the beef ravioli)
2) A Latina Pasta Sauce (typically a red one)
3) Vegetables

I also added a bit of other pasta from the cupboard because I was fairly hungry at the time. Simply cook the pasta, heat the sauce and cut up the vegetables (in this case it was just capsicum and carrot). I then mix the pasta sauce and the veges in a heated saucepan briefly and add the pasta for the final mix.

Then serve with grated cheese, it takes about 10 minutes in total and is a nice low effort meal especially when one or both of us are home very late but we still aren't actually ordering dinner.

Pad Thai

This is fast and tasty and only requires one pan so cleanup is easy too.

Get some rice noodles and soak them in hot water - you should do this first because everything else cooks so quickly that they are not going to have time to soak enough before you need them. So I usually put them in the bowl to soak before I even start any of the other prep.

Cut up some chicken and brown it in a wok on high heat. Once it's done, push it to one side and crack an egg or two into the pan (or if you're paranoid like me, crack them into a bowl first to make sure there isn't any shell in there). You need to immediately scramble the egg as it will set quickly. Break it up and mix it in with the chicken. Then remove both from the wok and set them aside.

Now you can turn the heat down a bit and add the following things to the wok: the noodles, bean sprouts, peanuts (finely chopped - I highly recmmend having a magic immersion blender attachment thing to do this for you), lime juice, a teaspoon or so of sugar (raw sugar is nicest, IMO), garlic, cayenne pepper, fish sauce. You can also leave aside some of the bean sprouts and peanuts to use as a garnish, which makes it look fancy and the fresh bean sprouts give a nice crips texture. I didn't do that this time because I couldn't be bothered. But if you're having a dinner party or something, it's nice.

Cook all the stuff in the wok until it's cooked - the main thing you're looking for here is the noodles, since everything else doesn't need that much cooking. I like to test the noodles by eating some.

When everything's done or nearly so, add back in the chicken and egg. Leave them in there long enough for the chicken to be thoroughly cooked and to have absorbed the delicious flavours of the other stuff and then serve. Optionally add your garnish and/or some more lime juice.

You can also make this with prawns and/or tofu in addition to or instead of the chicken if you want.

Easy and Impressive: Pesto Pasta with Pine nuts and Pmushrooms

This one's a snap. Fellas pay attention, it's a great way to impress a lady, fast.


Bonus points, it's even vegetarian compatible! Whoever said vegetarian food sucks hasn't seen me cook (ask me about my salad)


Extra bonus points, it's easy, and cheap. It's only got four ingredients (six if you include salt and pepper, seven if you include oil for frying). They are:

• Pasta. Any kind will do, but I recommend penne. Obviously, you'll need as much pasta as you need for the number of people you're cooking for.
• Mushrooms. About two per person.
• Pine nuts. A decent handful per person.
• Pesto. Usually about two teaspoons per person, depending on taste.

Righto, let's go!

Get your water boiling for your pasta and get your grill up to temperature. Once the water's boiling, chuck the pasta in. It'll normally take about ten minutes to cook, which i plenty of time for the rest.

Grill the pine nuts while the water is boiling. This is probably the trickiest step as you need to watch these nuts like a hawk; they go from raw to lumps of char in about ten seconds. I've found that usually by the time they smell cooked, they're already too far gone. You can tell when they're cooked just right, they'll be a lovely golden brown colour. Obviously, when they're cooked, take them off the heat. It doesn't matter if they go cold.

Chop and fry the mushrooms. Easy.

When the pasta's done cooking, strain it and then mix the pine nuts, mushrooms and pesto in the pan, and then serve.

Mm, delicious and easy.

I've always found some salt really brings out the flavour in this dish.

Enjoyed in conjunction with: I would normally recommend a white wine for this one, but it's a weekday and I'm not on holidays *shakes fist*.

Roast Lamb with Juniper Berries

As we approach winter, I start doing more and more cooking in the slow cooker. It has the dual benefits of cooking awesome, rich, filling meals that also make the house smell awesome, whilst being ridiculously easy to make beautiful tasting meals using cheaper ingredients. Here's what we had Saturday, which was awesome to come home to after playing a game of soccer in the rain.

First get a good hunk of lamb - in this case a leg with the bone in. I meant to get shanks but unfortunately they were out. Pop it in the pot and put it to one side. In the pan cook up whatever you want the sauce to be made out of. In this case it had juniper berries and orange peel as the main flavours, with merlot, onion chunks and crushed tomatoes to flesh it out. A bit of flour went in as well to thicken it. Then pour it over the lamb and cook it for 7 or so hours on High.

Here's what the lamb is like when you take it out. Note that it was so soft it literally fell apart as I took it out - it was so juicy and soft that you could have used a butter knife to carve it. Put the sauce back in a pan and boil it for 5-10 minutes to thicken it a little to make it your desired consistency.

Serve with mashed potato with the sauce over the top, and then settle in for a hot, tasty and above all else filling winter meal. Serve with the rest of the wine, assuming any is left.

WOMBAT STEW or possibly SLOW COOKED KANGAROO THING

This was an experiment, based off one of those microrecipes Dad remembered from the back of a packet of Beef stock.

To make this, you'll need:

• Diced kangaroo, 500 grams (Beef may also be used, but I prefer Roo)
• Beef stock, 660mL (one pint)
• Tomato paste, 1 1/2 tablespoons
• 1/2 cup - 1 cup red wine (ALL of the wine!)
• 250 grams of mushrooms, diced
• Two carrots, peeled and diced
• Two onions, peeled and diced
• Two cloves of garlic crushed
• One stick of celery, diced
• 1 1/2 cups of rice
• 1 1/2 teaspoons mixed herbs
• Oil for frying stuff
• 2 - 3 teaspoons of cornflour
• Salt and pepper as desired
• One big-ass pan for cooking stuff in
• One less big-ass pan for cooking rice in.

First thing: heat up the pan and put in about 2 tablespoons of oil. Brown the kangaroo then set aside, on a plate or whatnot.

Next, using the same amount of oil, fry the onion and garlic until it's just starting to go translucent (about 3 minutes). Now, add about 3/4 of the stock, the mushrooms, carrots celery and the mixed herbs, and bring to the boil.

Boil for about ten minutes, then lower to a simmer. Whilst simmering, add the meat, wine and tomato paste.

Simmer for about 30 minutes, stirring frequently, and taste frequently. Add salt, pepper, more ingredients as you see fit.

This is what it looks like, taunting you, smelling amazing, for thirty minutes

While this is simmering, cook your rice. If it finishes before the rest, I normally put it in a bowl with a lid in the oven on low to keep warm.

Anyhoo, back to the main event. After about 30 minutes simmering (you can probably do it in a bit less time if you desire, or in way less time in a pressure cooker), add the remaining stock and the cornflour. For this, I mixed the remaining stock with the cornflour in a cup and stirred the bejeezus out of it to break up any lumps in the cornflour before adding it to the rest of the dish, and then stirred the bejeezus out of that. My point being: avoid getting the cornflour to go lumpy.

Simmer for about ten more minutes or until you're satisfied that it's thick enough. Serve.

This is what it'll look like when it's finished. Now you may taunt it instead.

Enjoyed with: If you cook with wine, drink it with the meal. For this one we used a Rorlach Estate 2010 Shiraz