Sushi! Yum! (寿司! おいしい!)

February 1, 2010 in Adventures, Food Tech, Recipes | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

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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Linguine Carbonara is the Easiest Lunch Ever

January 31, 2010 in Dinner, Recipes, Wholesome | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

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.

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Eating Kangaroo

January 26, 2010 in Adventures, Food Tech, Wholesome | Tags: , , | 1 comment

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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Australia’s National Dish

January 25, 2010 in Adventures | Tags: , | 2 comments

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.

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Blueberry and Cinnamon Panna Cotta

January 24, 2010 in Dessert, Recipes | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

Hot weather desserts are tricky.  No cakes or anything that will run the oven too hot in a Sydney summer (and hence heat the house up worse),  a lot of people revert to ice cream with chocolate topping or fruit salad.

I love panna cottas, they’re a really rather simple thing to make but I think the result is fantastic.  My wife introduced me to them a couple of years ago at the Taste of Tasmania festival in Hobart which is in my opinion the best festival nation wide for celebrating food.

The best thing about them other than the taste, is the fact that they are a blank slate.  Any selected combination of flavours can be expressed neatly in a panna cotta – I make blueberry and cinnamon ones but they are a bit of an open canvas.  I’ve almost got a shortlist of what I want to try in terms of panna cotta flavours and I’ll probably get through all of them by the end of the warmer weather;

  • Honey and Rosemary
  • Rasperries and Rum
  • Pecan and Bourbon and
  • Blood orange

But for now, here’s how to make the blueberry and cinnamon ones;

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Cornish -ish Pasties

January 24, 2010 in Recipes, Wholesome | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

I had a post about this on the old site, I love Cornish pasties and I make pretty good ones.  Now a lot of people will argue that it’s not a Cornish pastie the way I make them, because they have carrot in them which is a cardinal sin of making pasties.  Well screw those people, because I make them the way I like and they are absolutely delicious.

I tried something new with them last night, I don’t know if it was Australia Day motivated or if I just wanted to be different but instead of the beef mince I usually use, I went half-half with beef and lamb mince.  I think the result was pretty special because it really picked up the flavour of the herbs a little more than is normal.  Either way, these are delicious, here’s the recipe, make them, eat them, they are awesome the next day for lunch too.
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Incredibly Hot Carrot Sauce

January 18, 2010 in Adventures, Recipes | Tags: , , , | 1 comment

The bottleshop down the road had a basket out, “Free Habñeros, Please Take!”.  Well that’s not something I am going to argue with right?  They politely asked me to take the chillies, it wouldn’t be civil to decline.

I took four of the habañeros out of the basket, leaving about twelve.  I took them home and tried to figure out what to do with them.

Habañeros are essentially the silver medal of all chillies, the only hotter are Naga (or Bhut) Jolokia, the hottest chillies available which are from northern India – and are smeared on fences regularly to keep wild elephants at bay.  Seriously.  Four habañeros is not many unless you are finely slicing them for pizza, I needed ideas.

Twittersourcing a plan for the habs was interesting, one person suggested seeping them in a bottle of vodka which while appealing would leave me with an aggressively spicy (and aggressively alcoholic) bottle of vodka that’d be useful for maiming friends and family, but the twitter user who piped up about a carrot sauce won me over.

Warning:  I am deadly serious, this is painfully hot.  If you are anything less than a rabid chilli fan do not make, or eat this sauce.  Habañeros are hot enough to be dangerous to work with, wear gloves, throw the gloves out when you are done.  The sauce is hot enough to blister delicate lips so it’s absolutely unsuitable for children.

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Sheep Cheese!

January 15, 2010 in Adventures | Tags: | Leave a comment

A guy at work has just returned on holiday from Slovakia, he just emailed around that he has put out a plate of sheep cheese for us to all enjoy.

Don’t you love it when someone puts out a plate of sheep cheese at your work?  Me too :)

The gear with a rind is smoked and tastes incredible.

Blueberry Soup

January 14, 2010 in Adventures, Dessert, Recipes | Tags: , , , | 2 comments

Blogged about on the old version of the site was blueberry soup, a truly gourmet and eccentric undertaking experienced by a friend of mine in Hong Kong as a breakfast delicacy.  We hunted down a recipe and I made it, it’s delicious.  Surprisingly savory, really quite easy to make and certainly has the “wow!” factor both to read about but more so to taste.

My recipe is a little different to what we dug up, I put cinnamon in most things where it makes sense and even a few where it doesn’t.  It absolutely does here, giving it a spicy ring which makes it much more of a soup like it’s intended to be, and significantly less of a jam.

I strongly suggest this for an “as people turn up” thing.
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Pizza

January 14, 2010 in Dinner, Recipes | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Pizza you make yourself is always significantly better than pizza you can buy from anywhere else.  I think people are inclined to over value of meat on pizza, in fact some of the most delicious pizzas I’ve mad have had no meat on them at all, and not anywhere near the metric truckload of cheese that people feel compelled to drown a pizza under.  There’s also nothing like making your own pizza dough.  My favourite pizza for home is spinach, fetta, pine nuts and pumpkin on a pesto base.  Here’s how you can have it at home too.

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