Beyond My Control

Never Doubt Stephanie

(or Jonathan's).

In recent times (ok, since I've had a car) I've become the type of person who zips all over town on a weekend morning picking up ingredients from a variety of different places.

I am very fortunate that O'Heas Bakery and Deli, the source of fabulous bread and host to a giant cheese cabinet and a large variety of pasta (and that's before you even get to the cakes, which, again fortunately, aren't my thing) is 3 minutes walk from my house. I always have fresh crusty bread and bitey cheese on hand.

And then I flit around, sometimes to the Victoria Market, but frequently to LaMannas for fruit and veg and flowers, and Meditteranean Wholesalers for so many things. To Victoria Street for the Asian supermarket and spices and herbs, and kitchenware. Other places for fish and meat and beans and more cheese.

I really quite enjoy spending a Saturday morning gathering up provisions from a variety of places.

This morning, my eyes more on furniture at Angelluci - I'm looking for a lamp and a rug and a table for the entry hall - I took the opportunity to drop into Jonathan's and pick up some sausages and a lamb noisette (with basil and garlic), i.e. lamb roast for one (with left overs).

To remind myself of the cooking time I consulted Stephanie, as any wise person would do. Her Cook's Companion is really an essential in any kitchen.

Nevertheless, I was a little sceptical. Lamb loin, 500gm, 10 minutes at 220 degrees, plus 15 minutes rest, to produce a nice pink roast? That seems very short. Short enough that I could do it after work on a weeknight.

I had faith, however, and went with it.

My faith was rewarded.

Fabulous, simple, non-time-consuming roast. Pink, but cooked, cripsy on the outside, and so, so tender.

Served with fresh peas, and mushrooms tossed in a pan with a little olive oil and garlic and thyme and the pan juices from the lamb.

Simple, easy, yum.

 

 

 

 

I have been eating. And there's been some drinking.

Never fear, I have been eating recently.

I've also been working too much and traveling a bit and house hunting and generally, without intention, not blogging about food or anything else. 

I have also been cooking, and photographing the cooking, and mentally composing the posts, and yet not quite getting to the actual posts.  Balancing that out, however, I have also been racing around and eating crap and drinking too much and getting fatter.  Gah.

Today's non-diary eating list is an example of how things have been working recently:

1.    My morning diet consisted of three cups of tea (black, one sugar), 600ml of water and 1/2 a chocolate wombat.  Granted, usually there's no chocolate wombat involved (at least it didn't attack me and put me in hospital), but otherwise, there's nothing unusual about that on a weekday.

2.    At about 12.30 I ducked across the street and picked up a couple of sushi rolls and a miso soup.  This is not usual either, though, frankly, I wish I did it more often.  The eating of this meal was entirely symptomatic of recent weeks, however.  Because often I instead walk down the street and pick up the Best Chicken Schnitzel Sandwich in the World (post to come).  Three sips of the soup and two bites of the first roll in the phone rang.  Someone who I knew was in meetings most of the day so there was a very narrow window for conversation.  So much so that during our 15 minute phone call he ate a sandwich and I finished the soup.  Once I got off the phone I finished the first roll, and between the slow eating and the chocolate wombat I wasn't hungry any more.  I set the other roll aside.

3.    About 4.30, having only consumed another 600ml of water since 2 above, I was hungry and sleepy.  I acquired a can of Diet Coke (I'm cutting back again) and took two bites into the 2nd sushi roll when the phone rang again.  An international call I'd been waiting for.  I finished the roll about 5pm.

4.    Arrived home between 7 and 7.30 and crashed on couch with a glass of wine, wholly ignoring the fact that last night's somewhat excessive wine consumption has resulted in no ill effects whatsoever (something I regard as simultaneously great and horrible).

5.    8pm, an old, not that hungry because I ate part of lunch at 5pm, standby.  Omelette with mushrooms and spring onions - thin sliced mushrooms, chopped spring onions, 3 eggs, a little grated parmesan, pepper and salt.  Done.

6.    Wine.

7.    No photos, though it looked pretty.

Regular posting to recommence now.  With catch-up posts re stuff cooked an eaten previously.

Breakfast for Dinner

I'm quite the fan of Breakfast for Dinner.

Perhaps it's because as a general rule I only eat breakfast on the weekends, so I sometimes need to get my fix at other times of the day.  (And yes, I know, I know, most important meal of the day, but I have tried all sorts of weekday breakfast options and it just never works for me.  I have long ago come to terms with this and developed a fondness for lunch right on the strike of noon.)

Another reason for Breakfast for Dinner is simplicity.  Sometimes I just cannot be bothered cooking a full-on meal when I get home, or get home at an hour when I need something fast.

This may lead to happily resorting to the old favourite of Vegemite on toast.  But that's usually only when I'm not really hungry but just need a little something to take the edge off.

More frequently Breakfast for Dinner is an omelette.  Often filled with the bits and pieces that are about to die in the fridge or fruit bowl.  Tomatoes, mushrooms, capsicum etc.  Fast, easy, tasty.

Less often it's scrambled eggs.  This is because I don't keep milk in the house.  I don't drink it in tea, I don't eat cereal and when I did I was never, ever a fan of the sloppy, milky variety, I don't drink coffee at home, and my sinuses dislike it.  So I actually have to plan when coffee or milky tea drinkers are coming over.  Often I have to buy the coffee too. 

This past weekend my Mum stayed over and so I planned ahead stopped by the supermarket after picking her up and bought some milk for her tea.  Which meant that come Monday I still had most of a small carton of full cream milk sitting in the fridge.  Which for me means only one thing: scrambled eggs.

I'm not sure there's any right or wrong way to make scrambled eggs.  I pretty much taught myself/came up with a way of doing eggs as I like them. 

I just take two or three eggs, depending on the size, whisk them in a bowl with a fork, and then mix in a generous splash of milk, some grated parmesan and pepper and salt.  I then push the mix around in a pre-heated lightly buttered pan with a spatular until it comes together in a nice, but not to runny or dry, pile of lovely scrambled eggs.  Takes about three minutes.

Served on light rye toast, with a side of sauteed mushrooms and spring onions (with the tiniest hint of garlic):

The perfect dinner for an oh my, I am so tired, weekday evening.

Made-up Lamb Meatballs

Over time I have found a few good recipes involving lamb meatballs.  I have even made them actually following the recipe.  Which, as you would know by now, I'm not generally inclined to do.

I bought some lamb mince a few days back with the aim of making one of those recipes during the week.  Except that in wandering around the supermarket I had clearly mixed up the recipes in my head, because when I came home to make it this evening I discovered that the things I had bought were part from one recipe and part from another.

So I did what I always do and made stuff up taking what I had to hand and a few elements of those recipes.

I figured the outcome would be either bland or spectacular.  I'm pleased to report they turned out really well and thus I am posting this recipe in order to remember it myself.

Made-up Lamb Meatballs

Mix the following in a bowl:

500 grams of minced lamb

1 small onion, grated (Best meatball trick I learned from one such recipe: grate the onion.  No more onion chunks, great onion flavour, and the meatballs hold together much better (a perennial problem for me with any type of meat patty))

1 clove of garlic, chopped

1 red chili, de-seeded and chopped

a handfull of mint, chopped

2-3 generous splashes of Worchestershire sauce

pepper & salt

1 egg (free range, of course)

breadcrumbs, enough so the mixture is still moist, but no runny egg left  (now, let's be honest: it's a weeknight, and a made-up as I go along recipe, so these are packet breadcrumbs.  And, you know what?  Who cares. Tastes good.)  

Mix it all up with your hands.  Leave it to sit for a while - perhaps because you are ducking out of the kitchen to watch something on TV for a while with a glass of wine - and then make them into medium sized meatballs.  Perhaps let them sit around a while longer while going back to the TV.

Heat some olive oil in a pan over a high heat, and then place the meatballs in.  Leave them to form a crust on the bottom.  Seriously, don't touch them.  Don't play with them.  Go into the other room and watch some more TV and have some more wine.  (Can you tell this is a patty-cooking lesson hard-learned by me?).  Then turn them over and do the same on the other side.  Do not over-coook them. They should be nicely brown and bit crusty on the top and bottom but still moist and generally squishy.  Take them out and put them on some paper towel on a plate.

In the same pan, with the heat turned right down, put in a couple of small tins of chopped tomatoes.

Here I will divert for a moment and confess that I put in one small tin of chopped tomatoes and one jar of small tomatoes with a hint of basil which I bought from Mediterranean Wholesalers.  The second one on this list.  They are good.  Very good.

Leave the tomatoes to cook in the pan on a low heat with a bit of pepper & salt and a splash of balsamic (the latter: because it was there), and, of course, the leftovers from the meatballs in the pan.  I guess I left the tomatoes go for 15-20 minutes.  Can't tell you exactly how long because I was looking at photos from Fashion Week and posting over here.

I also added 1/4 of a green capsicum because it was there and about to die, but I think that's totally unnecessary.

Then add the meatballs back in and mix them around a bit in the sauce.  This amount of sauce won't cover them completely, but coat them a bit.  Leave it cook a while longer.   Towards the end if the sauce is a bit watery, add a tablespoon or 2 of tomato paste.

Serve with rice, or pasta, or salad, or whatever.

A Typical Untypical Weeknight

Up to a point, today was a very typical day in the life of this single career girl/woman/no-labels-at-this-age-thanks.

I had a very full - one might go so far as to say relentless - day of work. I managed to get out for 15 minutes somewhere in the general vicinity of lunchtime to go to the ATM and grab a wrap from one of my favourite cafes in Centre Place/Degraves St (post to come, I'm sure), which I ate at my desk. 

I left work at about 6.45 fully aware that I had nothing in the kitchen for dinner.

In this case the lack of groceries came about from the following series of events: kitchen cleaned to within an inch of its life for the purposes of pre-sale inspection (apartment now sold!); unwillingness to cook or eat anything in said kitchen because it was so clean; a few naturally occurring meals out including a dinner meeting last night. 

That unusual set of circumstances notwithstanding, the weeknight no groceries situation is actually not all that unusual, largely because I've been putting in an effort to cook a wider, and fresher, variety of meals which means more frequent shopping and fewer stand-by items in the fridge.  Also because sometimes I am lazy or uninspired.

Tonight I was uninspired, but not sufficiently so to warrant vegemite toast for dinner, so this seemed to be the perfect opportunity to, on the tram on the way home, make use of the Jamie Oliver iPhone application which I had downloaded a few weeks ago and scrolled through but not yet used.

I settled, quickly, on Herby Grilled Chicken Kebabs.

Of course, I then did it my own practical/lazy way.

First, the actual skewers? Um, no. See above re being single. Single means not needing to present chicken on skewers that you're just going to pull it off anyway.  Thus I also skipped the zucchini intersects, though if I make this for others - which I probably will - I'll be perfectly happy to do both.

Second, I also skipped the coriander.  Those of you who know me will be immediately saying "that's because Uli doesn't like fresh coriander", but in this case it wasn't that.  I'd have been happy to try it out in the context of this recipe (as it's a new recipe and it would be partly cooked and I have no issue with cooked coriander (the reason I have an issue with fresh goes back to an incident involving tequila that may or may not be told later)), except there was none in the store. 

This is another point about the whole work/life/cooking thing; sometimes I don't have the luxury of heading to the market for herbs and have to rely on the supermarket.  In my current apartment-living location growing my own is also a challenge, one that I plan to overcome when I buy a house some time in the next few days/weeks/hopefully not months.

Anyway, no coriander.

It might just be my anti-coriander bias, but totally not necessary.

So, leaving the lack of coriander and skewers aside, I followed the chicken part of the recipe.  Up to and including the point of blitzing (yes, yes, I watch a lot of English cooking shows) the herby mix in the food processor.  This might not seem so dramatic, but think about it for a moment.  Lazy career person who has not arrived home from work/supermarket until after 7pm actually getting out the food processor as part of the evening meal for one.

That's not typical, I promise.  But it seemed ridiculous to try chopping this by hand and the food processor is right there.  

I mixed it up with the chicken pieces and left it to sit for half an hour or so while I caught a little of Masterchef Professionals on Lifestyle Food and had a glass of wine.  And answered a few emails.  See, the food processor was an anomaly, and normality quickly reasserted itself for the evening.

I then ignored Jamie's salad recipe - don't like avocado and don't need a recipe for a side salad - and mixed up a quick one of my own.  Baby cos, Lebanese cucumber, tomato, spring onion and a balsamic mustard dressing I'd be happy to make myself but have in a lovely bottle from Milawa Mustards.

I didn't grill the chicken in a pan.  I don't have a decent grill pan at the moment - though I intend to buy one - and, as previously mentioned, I'm lazy.  So I covered a tray in foil, spread the herbed chicken pieces out over the tray and put them under the grill.  Easy, less washing up, still moist (the only circumstances in which I can cope with the use of that word is in relation to the cooking of meat), and crisped on the edges.  And can I say how fantastic I smelled while grilling?  So fantastic.

So, here we have it, my lazy weekday version of an already very easy dish, and it tasted really, really good.  I will make it again.

Tomorrow, normality, and a whole different style of eating, continues when I take a day trip to Brisbane for work.

Mashed Potato, Mashed Potato

To celebrate the sale of my apartment (holy, crap, I'll soon be homeless!), last night I headed around the corner to my local with a few friends for dinner.

It turned out there was an unplanned and largely uncoordinated theme to dinner.  And that theme was Potato.

Everyone ordered some form of potato. 

Two of us had different kinds of steak, with chips.

Someone else ordered a side of chips.

And two people ordered sides of Mashed Potatoes as their main meal.

And no, that salad did not get eaten.  Though a chip did wind up in a glass of lemon, lime & bitters, in order to make the theme complete.

Clearly we know how to celebrate in a healthy and low-carb way.

All of this did remind me of my brother, who as a child and teen regularly asked Mum if she could just make him a plate of mashed potatoes for dinner.  She gave in and did it about once in every ten times he asked.  

Now, clearly, he can just order his own.

The Big Salad

Call me Elaine if you will, but I am extremely fond of a big salad.

While I may order a side salad in a restaurant - usually when I know my main is a giant plate of meat and really I need a little colour - the only circumstances in which I'm likely to make myself a side salad at home are when I make lasagne.  Which requires lettuce (usually cos), tomatoes, spring onions and balsamic on the side.

I am, however, very likely to make a giant bowl of salad and have that for dinner.  

My love of the big salad is not one of those things that stems from childhood.  Growing up our meals fitted generally into two categories, meat and three veg, and stuff on rice.  This is by no means a complaint as given a moment's thought you can see how broad those categories can be, especially when you throw in some Mauritian heritage and my mother's early adoption of stir-fry.

Salads, however, were to go on the side of lasagne, or in bread rolls for lunch.

Having come to the salad-as-meal option in adulthood, I can pinpoint where my love of the big salad originated: an evening in early September 1992, California, at Dolores on Santa Monica Blvd in West LA.

I remember this so clearly because (a) it was only my second night in LA; (b) I was in an authentic American diner that had been around since the 1940s; (c) it was my first meal with my two new roommates who remain friends to this day; and (d) I'd never even considered ordering only a salad as a meal before.  Plus, there was a choice of about 15 dressings when all I knew was "French" and "Coleslaw".

How did I come to order a large salad with Ranch dressing (low fat, this was California after all)?  By copying my new roommate of course.

I had arrived in LA the day before, spent the night in a youth hostel, and - having set aside a week to find accommodation for the year I'd be there - had in the course of one day managed to get myself enrolled at University (good lord, my student ID photo was appalling), tramp all over campus, meet with three sets of prospective flatmates, agree on the spot to move in with my actual roommates on the strength of meeting only one of them, drive across town to pick up my stuff, move in, meet my other roommate who was also new to LA, and then the three of us went to dinner.  A worldly almost 22 year-old California-native college senior, a sophisticated 25 year-old grad student from Bombay via upstate New York, and me, clueless barely 20 year old Australia fresh off the plane. 

I was jet-lagged, actually not all that overwhelmed, and ready to try new things, so when the local ordered the big salad with Ranch dressing on the side, so did I. Even though I had no idea what Ranch dressing was.  I never went back. And the three of us bonded over big salads. As we would later bond over booze and evil happy hour bain-marie chicken wings and Melrose Place Wednesdays and getting drunk on horrid Southern Comfort-based cocktails while making Thanksgiving dinner for 20.

The fridge in our apartment was always full of giant bags of mixed salad leaves and mixed coleslaw, and several kinds of dressing. (Though never in the crisper drawer which was known as "the soggier" drawer and is the reason why I still use the bottom drawer of the fridge for beer and never, ever, fresh produce).  Open the bag, dump it in the bowl, pour on some dressing, maybe some garlic bread on the side, plonk down in front of the TV. 

I don't really do bag salad anymore, and actually not that much lettuce, but the rest remains the same.

One of my favourite salads is a mix of red onion, tomato (cherry, frequently, but really, whatever), cucumber (Lebanese, always), croutons and sliced smoked salmon, with a tart vinaigrette with both lemon juice and red wine vinegar and only a little olive oil.

Then there's Step-Aunt's Christmas Salad.

I also quite like a really simple coleslaw of red cabbage, spring onions and finely - finely - chopped celery.

That's the undressed version - as you can see it's all about the colour - and I've taken to making my own coleslaw dressing because the bought stuff is way too sugary for me.  Just some mayo, Dijon mustard, pepper and a little white vinegar.

Lettuce, tuna, spring onions, parmesan, croutons and Caesar dressing is an old favourite.

Not to mention Fatoush.

As you can probably detect, I like some crunch in my salad. 

And, like Elaine, I retain a particular fondness for big salads from American diners.  Though I always buy my own.  It's easier that way.

All Day Chilli

Chilli is one of my favourite things to cook.  And eat. 

Chilli con carne was a staple in our house when I was growing up; I think Mum's original recipe came off a Leggo's pack, which is by no means a criticism as many good recipes came off the side of a Leggo's pack, or a Philadelphia cream cheese pack, in our house.  And it's something I've always cooked since I left home. 

I generally make it one of three ways. Either Mum's Traditional, Vege Throw Everything In, or, when I have some time, say perhaps on a lazy public holiday in January, I make All Day Chilli.

All Day Chilli requires two things I don't always have: (a) a good memory; and (b) time.

The good memory because I make it with black beans, which need to be soaked overnight.  If you forget that bit, the recipe kind of stops dead, or morphs into one of the other kinds of chilli.

The time because I like to just let it cook, and cook, and cook.  But you probably got that from the name.

All Day Chilli goes like this:

2 Cups of dried Black Beans, soaked overnight

2 x 800 gram tins of tomatoes (crushed, chopped or whole, doesn't matter)

1 medium red onion, chopped

1 medium brown onion, chopped

3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped

2 medium red chillies (medium in size and heat), chopped

2 medium green chillies (ditto), ditto

700 grams of tomato puree

1 red capsicum, chopped

1 green capsicum, chopped

1 large tin of corn

1 lime

Oregano

Chilli powder

In a large pot cook the onion and garlic in a little olive oil until translucent.  Add in the capsicum and chilli and cook for another couple of minutes, then add the tomatoes, beans and corn.  Stir, and then add a healthy amount of oregano.  I actually prefer dried oregano for this, probably because I grew up in the 70s and 80s and we only ever had dried oregano.  Also add the juice from one lime.

Bring it all up to the simmer and let it cook away for a while.  That's a technical time.  A while.  It really doesn't matter with this recipe.  But give it, say, half an hour and then taste the sauce and see how spicy it is.  If you want it a bit spicier then add a dash or five of chilli powder.  Also add the tomato puree.

Then put the heat on low, so it's just bubbling, and stick a lid on it and let it cook, and cook, and cook.  Stir it occasionally.  The lengthy cooking is partly because I think the black beans need it, but also because it tastes really good having all cooking together for a few hours. 

About an hour before you want to serve it - or finish cooking it, because it's really easy to cook this and put it to one side and then heat it up and serve it later - take off the lid and let it cook, still on a low heat, until the sauce is nicely rendered down and just as saucy or not saucy as you want it to be.  

Yesterday all up I probably cooked mine for about 4 hours, maybe a bit more.

Serve with rice, or corn chips, or - with the sauce more rendered than not - in burritos. 

This amount makes a large pot full, certainly enough to feed several people and have left-overs left-over. But if you're cooking something for multiple hours there's no point doing small amounts.  And it freezes nicely. And tastes even better the next day.

A bit Italian

This week in food had something of an Italian flavour.  It wasn't deliberate, it just turned out that way.

Aside from making pasta and meatballs, I also had lunch with colleagues at the distinctly Italian Benito's during the week. 

Benito's is one of that string of small restaurant/bars in the block of Little Collins Street between Queen and William Streets that are great for lunch in particular.  I worked it that general vicinity for a long time, but had never been to Benito's before.  It's a nice little place with friendly staff, though it suffers from some truly horrid acoustics - small room, high ceilings - which are okay for talking amongst a group in a booth but really bad for hearing accented specials and questions from the staff.

They do some great anti-pasto, and we had a very nice fruity but dry Italian white wine (even though they were trying too hard to sell us something boring from New Zealand), but I have to say I wasn't completely overwhelmed by my main.  Salmon with potatoes, roasted capsicum and saffron aioli, it was pleasant enough but not anything to rave about.  Still, it was a very pleasant weekday lunch.

On Saturday, after lunch at Miss Marmalade with friends, we look Percival around the corner to introduce him to Mediterranean Wholesalers in Sydney Road which, amazingly, he'd never been to before.  To quote: "It's a Wonderland."

Indeed it is.  I'm always quite grateful when I go there that I don't have a car, because it makes me restrict what I buy to what I can carry, and what I can carry usually equates fairly well to what I can store.  Otherwise I'd probably being making cubby houses of tinned tomatoes and beans.  I made sure to enforce that rule even yesterday when I had a lift home.

We also stocked up at the fruit and veg down the road and somehow I managed to buy only green things, and lemons.  Green capsicum, limes, mint, sage, leek, other green things.  Green, green, green.  I did already have red and white and purple things at home, but it still looked very monochromatic as it was loaded into the green bag.

And accordingly I suspect that next week's posts may have a greenish tinge.

Benito's Cafe & Wine Bar - 445 Little Collins St, Melbourne - 9670 5347

Mediterranean Wholesalers - 482-492 Sydney Road, Brunswick

Step-Aunt's Christmas Salad

This is a salad that I associate completely with Christmas.  In fact for years I only had it once a year when my Step-Aunt (I have a few of those, and the title is a term of endearment) brought it to Christmas lunch. 

Recently - accompanied by a forehead slap of 'why didn't I think of this earlier' - I actually started to make it myself for a great light summery dinner. 

Of course I haven't ever asked my Step-Aunt for her specific recipe, and I can't get mine exactly the same, but there are variations on this available all over the web.  My take on my Step-Aunt's take on a recipe of unknown and possibly multiple origins, is as follows.

Spinach, Pear and Parmesan Salad

Thinly slice a fresh pear, and toss slices in a bowl with a couple of large handfulls of baby spinach leaves.

Add some shaved Parmesan cheese, and a few finely chopped anchovy fillets (this is a twist from my Step-Aunt that I love, but is totally optional).

Dress with a vinaigrette of balsamic, olive oil, seed mustard and a little pepper.

My Step-Aunt also throws in toasted pine nuts, but I am lazy and therfore do not.

See, easy.  The above serves me as a dinner, or me and others as a side, and it's obviously very simple to increase for however many people you have.

Here's the neat, undressed version:

And here's the sloppy, yummy, dressed version: