Yesterday I didn’t get time to eat lunch so I wanted something fairly substantial for dinner. My wife makes a delicious beef stroganoff and I thought I’d try my hand at something similar. If I intended to come up trumps I need to use my usual trick of top quality ingredients – in this case the basis of the stroganoff is Tasmanian wagyu beef from Urban Food Market, and I’ve used brown mushrooms instead of the usual white buttons.
Tonight’s dinner was pasta with Arrabiata sauce and meatballs; a really, really simple meal. What makes this blog-worthy (at least as far as I’m concerned) is that the meal was simple not just because it had few ingredients and was not challenging to make, it was made out of incredibly high quality ingredients that had minimal interference from people. Biodynamic beef mince, pasta from an Australian independent producer (I’d originally intended to handmake pasta but was out of 00 flour), organic pasta sauce and carrots, onions and herbs from a local, small independent retailer.
None of this meal was produced with the input of large chain supermarkets which have a sole priority of driving down prices by purchasing the largest available quantities from factory farms and large scale producers. It was good not just because it was delicious, but because it wasn’t tangled up in a situation that I don’t really like.
I’m in California at the moment, having just returned from an IBM Tivoli conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. My wife came along and stayed with me on holiday while i went to the conference which afforded us the opportunity to have a night at a truly special restaurant together once my presentation was complete and my stomach was sufficiently settled from nerves.
That’s not to say I had all the time and ability in the world to enjoy Joël Robuchon’s Vegas restaurant, I was still feeling the effects of the IBM boys’ festivities from the previous night even at 8:15pm when we were seated (I don’t recover like I used to), but if anything has the ability to set you straight after a big night, it’s truly incredible food ending with a take-home gift for my wife of the sweets you see here – macarons, nougats etc.
Rendang curry is a Thai restaurant favourite (although it’s originally Indonesian and popularised by the Malay) and from what I’ve seen around the web, it causes vexation. Talking on Twitter tonight about making it has caused at least one person to specifically ask me to blog about what I did because their efforts haven’t come out right.
Thai food is actually, at least for me, really difficult to cook. I don’t know why, but it really does seem as if it’s made out to be much easier than it actually is.
If forced to guess, maybe I think the reason behind this is Thai (and surrounding area), food is very much about combining very subtle flavours with very pronounced ones. For example coconut milk which is fairly bland (though unique) a flavour, gets mixed with chilli and galangal which are respectively so flavoured it’s painful and the sweet version of already powerful ginger. Stuff up this interplay between buffer and highly powerful flavours and you’ll either get paint stripper or milk.
I made green curry a while back and it was an utter disaster, it tasted like chicken poached in coconut milk. I was a bit apprehensive giving rendang beef a shot tonight which is silly because I’ve cooked similar but “not southeast Asian” curries before that are prepared similarly and not had the faintest problem. It worked great and here’s what I did.
I recently bought a Neil Perry cookbook that I think is awesome. Generally speaking if you can find two recipes in a cookbook that you’d be willing to cook at all, and one you’d be willing to cook regularly, that’s the highest standard you are likely to find in cookbooks.
This Neil Perry’s “Good Food” has two I wouldn’t be willing to cook at all, and one that makes me totally screw my face up. It’s absolutely great.
Last night was valentine’s day, and while we don’t usually make that much of a fuss on the day I thought it’d be nice to cook something a bit special. My wife had been leafing through the book and appeared to particularly like her lips at orecchiette with braised cauliflower, broccoli and pumpkin so I gave it a whirl. It was nice, as was the wine, but whether it needs a “something else” to kick it up I’m not sure. It could just be that I didn’t adjust the recipe from four servings to two very well. Anyway, here’s what I did which is almost to the Perry recipe, it produces a delicious meal even if it’s not what you’d expect at Rockpool.
Imagine my surprise when I logged into my blog this evening to brag about dinner, and noticed that I received a well-above-normal amount of traffic to my bit of the food web. Seems that New Matilda (imo Australia’s most intriguing, interesting and compelling media outlet) ran an article by cultural studies PhD Tammi Jonas about the parochialism of the barbeque in Australian cuisine. Coupla hits. More yesterday than past five days put together.
She has some great points in her article, and it feels a tiny bit silly to participate in discourse about a national identity through food (not that that’ll stop me). I really encourage you to read the article, because it’s incredibly well written and raises a couple of highly important points. That said, I challenge anyone anywhere to deny lamb a place in Australian cuisine and (if such a thing exists) our national food identity. I had a great meal tonight and here’s what I did.
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Making your own sushi is nowhere near as hard as you’ve been led to believe. A lot of people worry about how hard it is to roll sushi rolls, you may have heard weird horror stories and you may have even seen that this non-problem solved with a sushi rolling machine.
The truth is, you don’t even need one of those bamboo mats. I made the sushi in the picture using baking paper.
The only hard thing about sushi is the rice, it’s easily the most important thing. Selecting good quality fish to go inside, or opting to get some nice tuna to put in, is another task to be completed successfully. Thinking about it, the only easy bit is rolling the sushi!
This is how you make sushi for dinner, a hot weather dish that can be prepared in advance and then just taken out of the fridge.
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It’s difficult to flesh it out much more than the title. It’s easy, stupid easy. In fact if you were to have a girl around to your place to cook her dinner and you cooked this and made some garlic bread and got a bottle of wine and a salad, I reckon you’d be a chance for a back rub after dinner and it’d be the easiest meal for two you’ve ever cooked.
As a side note, stop buying bad pasta. You shouldn’t do it. The standard 500g dried pastas that you get from Coles and Woolworths (in particular their generic brands) are tasteless rubbish. The best results but most effort is your own fresh pasta made from type 00 flour and eggs, but if you are going to buy dried pasta get something produced on a smaller scale from an independent producer. The stuff in the picture is “Aussie Gold Premium Wheat Linguine” and has a very wheaty flavour to it, it’s $3.85 for 300g as opposed to the $1.60 – $2.00 / 500g pastas in supermarkets. It’s really worth it.
Carbonara is derived from the Italian word for charcoal but that’s about all we know for sure. Things like this are absolutely drenched in urban myths from some saying that the it was made for the charcoal men (a secret society that helped unify Italy) through to it originally containing squid ink (making it the colour of charcoal). There are also fights over what it should contain, but my recipe gives it the basics and it’s delicious.
On our national day I’m writing a few words about our national emblem and how delicious it is. You should know how to select, cook, serve and eat roo and you should do it regularly because it contains 200% of your recommended daily intake (RDI) of awesome.
Kangaroos are animals of the family Macropodidae meaning “large foot”. Theoretically all kangaroo-like creatures are kangaroos but when the word is used it usually refers to the largest of the creatures, with words like wallaby used to describe the smaller ones. There are four main species of large kangaroo; the red, the eastern and western grey and the antilopine, and there are forty species of kangaroo over all. The four large main species, in particular the red, are the ones that go well with pepper sauce or rubbed with lemon myrtle olive oil and chopped thyme.
I have no idea why kangaroo meat isn’t eaten more often in Australia, it was legalised for consumption only as late as 1993 but that’s no excuse. It’s incredibly cheap, very high quality in that it is has tender flesh that is almost fat free, and is absolutely delicious. I think part of it is that people just don’t know how, so I’d like to clear some of that up. Here’s how to select, cook, serve and eat roo.
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ABC Radio Brisbane has just mentioned on Twitter that Poh Ling Yeow, recently famous due to the TV show Masterchef, has offered that salt and pepper calamari is our national dish.
It took my five minutes to calm down enough to be flabbergasted. I have some strong opinions about national dishes, and I want yours.
