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.

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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.