Tuna salad and coleslaw

What to cook when you don't feel like really cooking and more just 'throwing things together'. A nice, cool dinner for the warmer nights of heading into summer :)

Where have I been?

Where oh where have I been? I know I promised that I would update once, or twice a week, or at least try to! And then I up and vanished! What happened? Well, this happened.

Tuna Mornae

Whew! Talk about busy! A broken ankle on the 20th of May put a hiatus on my culinary explorations, and just getting back into the swing of things. Thus, we have our next choice up for deliciousness desired! Tuna Mornae.

It's heavy, and thick and very delicious and high in nutrition, the sort of meal you'd have when starving hungry, chew on the floorboards starving, and then go off to do some heavy lifting, or something. It'd get you through the lot! For this, you will need:

1-2 ~500g of tuna tins (a good brand, preferably, in brine not oil or anything. Springwater works too)
1 cup of frozen peas
1 cup of frozen corn
250g dried pasta; shells, macaroni, twists, the short pasta types
250-400g cheddar cheese (grated)
100g parmesan cheese (grated)
3-4 cups of milk
3/4th cup of flour
150g butter (In two batches, so 2 tsp for the potato, the rest for the sauce)
4-5 decent sized nadine (white) potatoes, around the size of your fist.
3 cloves of garlic.
1/4 tsp siracha
2 Tbsp vegetable oil

Peel and dice the potatoes, peel the white papery bit off of each of the garlic cloves, chop off the 'dry' end, that's the part of the clove that was attached to the base, or the roots, roughly slice and chop up each of the cloves. Put them in a pot with the potatoes, fill with water and put on to boil. You want the pieces of garlic to be large enough to stay in the potatoes as they get drained of water mind.

Get a larger pot fill it with water, put it on the stove to heat. Add the oil and the siracha (or hot sauce with a nice flavour) to the oil and leave it to boil. Once boiling, add the pasta, stirring to make sure it doesn't stick.

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees celcius.

Peas and corn go into the same pot, water yay! Bring to the boil. About this time your potatoes should be boiling, lift the lid to release steam, and boil for another five to ten minutes, stab a piece of potato with the tip of a knife to see if it's cooked. The potato should be SOFT. The pasta should also taste 'cooked', just a little bit raw and a hint chewy, but not soggy or gluggy or overdone.

Once the peas and corn are boiling, turn them off. Taste the pasta, if it is right, strain it out of the water, give it a quick rinse over and put it into a large baking pot. A glass thing like I have. Drain the peas and add them as well. Turn off your potato, drain them, add the butter and a little bit of milk (or a little more) and mash them until they are soft and fluffy and well.. rather sloppy. The potato is going to be a lid for the dish, which means that the solidity of the filling has to be more than the weight of the potatoes, elsewise they'll just sink.

To minimalise on cleaning up, use the pasta pot to make the sauce. While it is drying and cooling slightly from having hot water and pasta in it, grate the cheese.

Once the cheese is grated, put the rest of the butter in the what was a pasta pot, turn it onto heat, and wait for the butter to melt but -not- bubble. Add the flour one teaspoon or so at a time, stirring it into the butter until they look like a dough, add the last of the flour and stir, rolling the 'dough' around on the bottom of the hot pot to lightly cook it. Add the milk in SLOW measurements. A tablespoon or two at a time, just enough to barely cover the base of the pot, and mix it into the dough.

You want a sauce without lumps in. Dough has no lumps. It is all solid, so what you are doing is slowly, gradually, turning the flour from a dough into a sauce by adding the milk. Once you have added all the milk, still stirring your smooth sauce, make sure that it is hot not just warm, and add your cheese. Slowly. You don't want to have clumps of cheese. (Oh, and make sure to keep some aside for later!) Stir the cheese in, making sure that each pinch or whatever amount is fully melted and stirred in before you add the next batch. Remember the corners on the bottom of the pot! Cheese is sneaky and it hides!

Once all the cheese is gone and your sauce tastes wonderful, turn off the heat. Open your tin(s) of tuna, strain out the juice by holding the lid and tipping the tin slowly, compressing the lid down to squeeze as much of it out of the fish as possible. Drink the juice. Mmmm. Delicious. (You don't -have- to, I just like to)

Put the tuna into the bowl with your pasta and peas, make sure that it is broken up into flakes, and stir it through, making sure to spread the peas and corn through as well. Add the sauce and stir again, slowly, careful not to make a mess. Add the mashed potato last, smoothing it out over the top so that it is a nice lid, sprinkle with grated cheese and put in the oven (remember, you preheated it?) for around 15 minutes.

The primary point of this is to melt the cheese and reheat the food in there that may have gotten cold, or was never hot to begin with.

Pull the thing out of the oven, and leave it to rest for 5 -10 minutes or so, until the cheese stops bubbling with the fury of a thousand suns! Get out plates, and serve. Yum!

Works great as leftovers too, since it is so filling it is HIGHLY doubtful you'll eat all of it in one hit!

Deliciousness, Delivered. 

Damper

Have you ever wondered how the ancient sort of civilisations managed to make their bread without high-tech things like yeast, or a bread maker or the HomeMaker 3000 or whatever it is that you put everything into and it stirs the mix into dough for you? I did too! So here is something that you don't need a breadmaker for, or a HomeMaker 3000 or the MixMaster Millennium (any similarity to actual products is purely coincidence) or even a food processor. This is called Damper. 

It hails from Australian's history when everything was cooked in a pot over the fire, and you really wanted to get -all- the juices from your bowl. Really simple to make, and it is traditionally done with purely drystore products -- flour and salt -- and water, however, nowadays with the invention of the fridge and freezer and easily accessed ice, there is the addition of butter. You can also replace the water with milk if you want it to be extra creamy, but I stuck with the water. For this you will need:

3 cups of self-raising flour

'pinch' of salt - around 1/4th a teaspoon. Not much.

80g of butter, chilled and cubed -- roughly 1/3rd a cup

3/4 cup of water - tap water does fine.

Dump your flour and salt into a bowl, and add the butter (there's actually more flour than visible here, I only added half at first whoopsie) and break up the butter with your hands. If you have little ones that loooooove to help you bake, put them onto this task, making sure hands are clean and all that! What you need is for it to be resembling fine breadcrumbs. How do you tell that, I hear you ask? Tada!

Illumination! Basically it should -look- crumbly and incomplete and kinda powdery or crumbly, but if you scoop up a palmful it should stick together -- slightly -- and fall apart again. Similar to a good bit of damp sand, perfect for throwing at someone. 

Add the water, mix it in initially with a butter knife or spatula. Why? I hear your disbelieving snorts, as to why it would be preferable than to use a spoon? Simple. It harks back to the days of yonder before there were such things as cake mixers and electric beaters. A round tipped or 'blunt' knife gets air into the mix much more effectively than a spoon, because a spoon scoops, and shifts the dough all of a piece, however the knife mixes in the liquid, while leaving air-pockets. Saves your arm and makes it very fluffy!

Once the majority of the water is mixed in, then you knead it with your hands, shaping it out onto a lightly floured surface -- baking paper works wonderfully for this -- until it is smooth, elastic and looks like ...well... dough. Shape it into a round disk, and score it with a sharp knife into eight sections, lightly flour the surface. 

Now, you can either put your damper onto a tray and bake it in the oven for 20-30 minutes on 200 degrees Celcius, or, if you don't have an oven handy, build yourself a fire, in a hole, and make sure there are LOTS of coals. Wrap your damper up in foil, bury it in the ash for half an hour or so, and dig it up again. Nice, hot, crisp on the outside damper. 

If you go the oven method, try the traditional route, make your family a soup, or stew, and while everyone is eating, cook the damper, so that when the plates are being emptied, any lingering nibbles are solved by fresh, hot damper! 

It doesn't last much beyond that first meal mind, and tastes best when eaten hot. But! No preservatives, or artificial things. Lovely, simple, and a way to fill the belly when you're low on funds. Butter and self-raising flour, $7 and you have quite a bit of bread to fill your belly! Still hot the butter melts in ...cream, or jam works just as well! Like a really large scone, really. 

Deliciousness Delivered.

ICanhascheezburger macaroni

Mmmm. This turned out -much- better than I had expected! It is filling, and a little bit addictive, which is the downside, but oooh so good. For a simple lazy I-don't-know-what-to-cook meal. For this you will need:

500g beef mince
1 cup of cheddar, grated (around a 2-3cm thick slice)
1/2 cup parmesan cheese, finely grated (the smaller holes)
2 garlic cloves, finely diced
1/2 tsp minced ginger
1/4 tsp onion salt
1/4 tsp siracha hot sauce
1 tsp bonox (beef stock paste)
1 tsp worchestershire sauce
2 tsp tomato sauce
1 tsp oregano, mixed herbs, onion salt
2 tsp parsley
3-4L of water
1 Tablespoon of oil
2-3 handfuls ...uh, around 1 1/2 cups of macaroni
500ml of milk
2 Tablespoons of flour
2 Tabelspoons of butter.

I know I know, it looks like a -lot- of ingredients, but really, it's very simple.

Fill up a medium sized saucepan/pot with water and oil, and the siracha sauce. This is going to have your macaroni in it, but you don't put it in yet, the water has to boil first! The mince goes into a frying pan/skillet/saucepan, with a spray over of oil, so that it doesn't stick. Break it up with a spoon, and brown the meat off.

While it's cooking, chop the base off of your garlic cloves, peel off the papery shell, slice and dice the two cloves into teeny pieces. Make a space in the pan with the mince, put the cloves in. Fry them lightly for ten to fifteen seconds -- basically as long as it takes you to put the ginger in -- and stir it through the meat.

Add the bonox, the herbs, onion salt, worchestershire sauce, tomato sauce (ketchup) and parsley, stir through, add a half cup of water to the mix, stir it through so that the seasoning is evenly mixed through the mince. Leave to simmer on low heat while the water for the macaroni reaches the boil.

When that is bubbling away happily, grate your cheeses, get out a smaller saucepan, and melt your butter in the bottom, over low heat. Add the flour, stirring to lightly toast it. Add the milk a little bit at a time, stirring constantly. If you have issues getting lumps out of the sauce, use a whisk. It can only be used for the flour part of the mixture. Bring the milk temperature up to warm or hot, -without- boiling, and add the cheese a half-handful to handful at a time, crumbling it over the hot milk as you stir.

Once the sauce has thickened -- it should still be fairly thin though, so that you can mix it in with the rest so less cheese is better, or more milk -- leave it to rest, as you strain the water out of the macaroni, mix the meat in with the pasta, serve it into a bowl (or two, depending on how many you are feeding) and top with the cheese sauce.

The more people you are feeding, the more pasta you cook. ~1 handful per person, cupped, for me and my father, I had 2 and a half handfuls.

Deliciousness Delivered.

Prawn Cocktails

Yum yum prawn cocktail! I don't know about you, but these are one of the things I look forward to the -most- when I go to an asian restaurant for some 'exotic' dining. Exotic in that I have no idea how they manage to make half of the delicious things they do. I'm having a very ....asian themed cooking thing at the moment, thus, prawn coctail! For this you will need:

400g of prawns, frozen, raw and peeled. Make sure that they are such, and not 'cutlets', prawn cutlets still have the shell on the tail. Add or reduce as determined by how many people you are serving. Around 9-13 decent sized prawns per person.
1 tsp of butter
2 cloves of garlic
1-2 leaves of iceburg lettuce
1 1/2 TableSpoons of Mayonaise
1-2 tsps of tomato sauce
1/2 tsp of worchestershire sauce.

Peel the papery shell off of the garlic, chop off the 'hard' end -- that's where the head of garlic used to be -- slice and dice and chop both of the cloves into small pieces, the smaller the better, as it lets more of the garlic's oil out to flavour the prawns.

The butter is purely to stop the prawns (or shrimp, I guess, but they are TINY) from sticking to the bottom of the frying pan. Fill said pan up with the prawns, making sure that they're fairly evenly spread out, and put the lid on. Walk away! ...Nigh literally. You only have to stir them periodically, to make sure that they're not sticking. They start out grey in colour, so how do you know when they're cooked? When they're all pink!



See? In the process, there are little pink bits from where I've stirred. Don't be alarmed if you end up with a LOT of water in the pan. It's come out of the prawns as they've thawed, and it's not like you're making a sauce with the water and butter :)



When your prawns are around 3/4ths cooked you can start preparing the sauce and garnish for your prawn cocktails. The mayonaise, worchestershire sauce and tomato sauce, remember that you want it to be a fairly pale pink colour, so tailor the mixes of liquid colour accordingly! Not muuuuuch worchestershire sauce. In the first mix, it was too dark so I added more mayonaise, thusly;



Cocktail sauce mixed, slice up the lettuce leaves. For this, put the smaller inside the larger, fold and wrap them in amongst each other like ...well... a wrap. Burrito, if you want the spanish version, and start slicing from one end -- end, not side. The smaller part of the thing. Slice it finely, so that each cut is about a half a centimetre thick, or less. Chop chop chop, and put the lettuce in two small bowls -- arranged similar to a birds nest, with walls that can let the lettuce be seen, and provides a bit of a support for the prawns.

Take said prawns off of the heat, and serve, placing them on the lettuce.



Adding the sauce last. It's best if you wait about five minutes or so, before serving up the prawns, so that they cool down a little. -- Warm lettuce is not very nice. All in all, it is quick, simple, and very easy to make, and it makes for a wonderful entree to a larger meal, or a snack for when you're not -really- hungry, but you want to eat something and it's around dinner time.

Deliciousness Delivered.

How to Shell A Crab!

No real recipe! Just practicality. Today, I shall show you how to shell a crab so you can have fun eating the crustacean!

Step one: Have a whole crab.



Step two: Remove the legs and claws.





Step three: find the 'pull here' tag.



Step four: Pull the 'pull here' tag and use it to lever the upper portion of the crab away from the lower, splitting the shell in two. Discard upper shell.





Step uh, five: Locate the gills and remove them. They are poisonous!





Step six: Wash! Run the bottom of the crabs shell under water to wash away any remaining goopy bits and clean your hands too!



Step seven: Break lower shell of crab in half, tugging off any non-meat parts that are 'excess' on the lower shell, mainly around the back legs and where the 'pull here' tag was. Arrange on a plate if you like, or just dump it, get a pair of crab claw crackers, or nut crackers, and feast!



It is easiest if you break the grippy part of the claw, and use one of the pincers to hook and fish the meat out from inside the shell. Also, if you want to catch/cook your own crab, make sure it is -alive-. The gills rot incredibly quickly and will toxify the whole crab! Yes, it has to be dropped into boiling water alive and cooked for 15-20 minutes. ....Much easier, and nicer, if you buy your crab from someone who cooked it for you!

Deliciousness Delivered!

Beef Jerky -- In the oven

Beeeeeeef jerky! -- yes yes I know it's got white powder. That's flour. This is my first attempt, and I am sharing where it worked and where I failed with you people so that you don't fail on your first attempt too! Even if the setup is -incredibly- easy.

For this you'll need:
500g beef steak (lean, preferrably, though rump does just as well)
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
1/4 tsp paprika
1/4 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper (or more if you want it spicy!)
~1 handful of plain flour

Preheat your oven to 90 degrees celcius -- you don't want it very hot, because the idea is to dehydrate the meat, not cook and crucify it into charred strips.

Pull out your steak, cut away as much of the fat as you can (and gristle if you got a crappy cut) and cut your beef into strips, roughly the same width, thickness and length. To unify the dehydrating times and remove as much variance as possible.



Put the spices/seasoning into a bag, add your slight amount of flour, and the meat. Hold the top of the bag closed and shake the living daylights out of it to cover the strips with the seasoning. With the flour, less is more. It is merely there to stop the seasoning from becoming overpowering and making the meat taste blech. The flour -will- cook in the oven, so you don't have to worry about the raw flour taste.

If you have a roasting tray, which has a rack above a fat catcher thing, use that as the best choice. Make sure the rack is -clean- however, lay the bottom of the tray with paper towels to catch any drips, and lay your strips of seasoned meat out on the rack, tapping off excess flour in the process. The more flour that is on the strip, the higher chance of it -retaining- moisture, and that is not what we want.



Now, you put it into the oven and 'forget' about it. This takes a LONG time. I put mine in for 3 and a half hours, and they were still a little hmm, soft in the middle. Four, five, six and some recipe's I've seen recommend 8 to 10 hours dehydrating. Either way, if you're not sure, poke them with a knife. If the meat squishes, they're not done.

Once they -are- done, take them out of the oven, and leave them to cool down completely. Then, you can eat, or seal them away. Heat introduces moisture in an airtight container, which allows bacteria to grow. If done properly, and completely perfectly, beef jerky can keep for up to two years like this. :)

Deliciousness ...almost delivered. They tasted delicious still slightly warm! Once in the container though... well, there was too much flour alas.

Chicken Noodle Soup

I know I know, it doesn't look like much! I was lazy and used instant noodles rather than pasta -- I felt insanely guilty because I managed to eat so -little- of the feast. My goodness. So much! But, spaghetti does just as well as a replacement for the instant noodles (and the recipe I was following actually -called- for that so...) but either way, it tasted really really nice.

You will need:
2 chicken breasts (around 500g of chicken)
3 cloves of garlic
1/2 a carrot
1/2 brown onion
1/2 red onion
5 spring onions (the one I used was home grown, and goodness me did it produce a lot of disks as you'll see!)
2 full sticks of celery
2L liquid chicken stock
1 tsp of butter
1 tsp of oil
1/2- 1 cup of corn
ditto for peas or any other frozen vegetable you want.



Oooh ingredients! This is for the vegetable part of your soup. What you'll want to do is put your chicken stock in a BIG pot and top it up with water, enough that all the vegetables are covered and able to move freely. Don't turn it on yet though! You don't want to cook these for very long, elsewise -everything- will taste of celery. (I'll recap this later when I actually -did- it in my cooking)

First up you'll want to slice your chicken into strips. This is easiest with a really sharp knife, and slice -along- the body of the breast, against the grain, to make sure that the raw chicken doesn't run away from you! Once you have done that, resulting in pieces around 2-3 cm wide and 5-15cm long (don't stress too much on length, so long as they're all around the same thickness and width) put the raw chicken on a plate.



Now, hygiene! Very important. Raw chicken carries with it a high risk of salmonella. This is bad for you! It'll make your belly very very unhappy with you for daaaaays. So what you need to do, and this is -essential- is after you cut raw chicken, you wash the cuttingboard, -and- knife -and- your hands in hot water and soap. You should do this every time you go from cutting vegetables to meat, or vice versa. It is not -such- a big deal with steak, or lamb, or most things not poultry, but it is very very important for chicken. So! Nice clean cuttingboard and knife and we're good to go!



Now, this is when I chopped up the vegetables. Scroll up if you want the picture! I just basically sliced and diced the onion into smaller pieces because I like my onion more for flavour than to actually -eat-, and I cut this with the thought of 'eating with chopsticks' in mind. Hence, cut your carrot in half, slice one of those halves in half again lengthwise. Put the flat side of the carrot on the cutting board and slice along the carrot to make carrot 'sticks'. Chop off the root of your spring onion, peel off any dead leaves, or 'crispy' layers on the white root of the thing, then using the back edge of your knife and keeping the tip to the cuttingboard, -carefully- slice your spring onion into disks. Your non-cutting hand should be doing the moving of the onion, so that the knife is going straight up and down. Slice two stalks of celery into roughly even pieces, removing the leaves in the process, and the stems of the leaves as well. Slice along the celery length, cutting each section into halves or thirds, depending on how wide they are. You don't -have- to use as much celery as I did, depends on your preference. It is just that celery is 'negative food', it takes you more energy to digest celery, than what you get -out- of it.

Slice and dice and mince your garlic, put the butter and oil in a fryin pan, add your chicken and garlic, stirring regularly to make sure the chicken is nicely seasoned with the garlic. Be careful though, chicken breast -does- dry out rather quickly and sneakily, so keep a closer eye on it the closer you get to serving.



Now that is what you want your vegetable pot to look like. Looots of water. Looots of vegetables! You can now put on water for the pasta -- spaghetti etc -- if you are going with the pasta route. Your chicken should be evenly white by now, about half cooked. Put the vegetables and water on to start heating up, dumping in your frozens at the same time. When this pot boils -- the bubbles are coming large and often and it's doing the bubbling sound -- that is when, ideally, you serve up the whole lot!

What I ended up doing however, is turning off the heat once the vegetables had boiled, putting on the kettle for hot water -- instant noodles, remember? -- pour half of the water into one of the cups of instant noodles, and half in the other cup, topping both up with the hot water, and the seasoning, putting the vegeables in while I left it for the three to four minutes, turned off the heat for the chicken as well.

Once the time was up, chicken went into the top of the cup, and it was served!

Yummy, lazy chicken soup! No seasonings or anything other than the stock and garlic. :)

Deliciousness Delivered. (kinda, I don't really like soup -_-)

Turkey Buffalo wings!

No picture this time, alas, because I didn't think of sharing this until -after- they were eaten. Bad me!

It's really rather simple though, as I have already covered the buffalo wing sauce here: http://deliciousnessdesired.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/buffalo-mash-of-deliciousness.html

Except instead of using chicken wings, I used turkey. Oh my goodness. So big! And due to the huuuuuuge size disparity, it is slightly difficult to find something appropriately sized to marinade the wings in. I went back to what the original recipe had, as my 'marinade' being a sauce. You will need:

1.2kg of turkey wings (around 4)
Buffalo Sauce
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp worcestershire sauce (a generous galooping)
1/2 tsp tabasco sauce
6 Tbsp chilli sauce -- I used Siracha. I recommend you use less if you are not fond of the spice. This thing ambushes!
6 Tbsp sweet chilli sauce -- A decent sort, that has flakes of chilli and the seeds visible in the mix. Alternatively, one hot chilli, sliced with half the seeds retained whole, and
6 Tbsp of honey. Less or more depending on how flaming you want this.
Seasoning
1 cup of flour
2-3tsp of garlic powder
1/2 tsp of powdered chicken stock.
Blue cheese dip
3 tsp of sour cream
1 1/2 tsp of light mayonaise
1 tsp garlic powder
2-3 tsp finely grated blue cheese (strongly flavoured)

Toss all the sauce ingredients in together -- that's from the cayenne pepper to the honey -- and mix them in a bowl until well combined. Or straight into a small pot, to heat them up and blend the mixture nicely, this is the last thing you do, the heating by the way. So the bowl is fine to set them aside for safe keeping.

Put the flour, extra garlic powder and chicken stock on a dinner plate, mix them in together and then place one wing at a time on the flour mix. Rub it thoroughly into the skin and flesh, ensuring you get all the folds and sneaky places. Preheat your oven to 180 degrees celcius (I -think- that is 270 farenheit, but don't quote me on that) while you finish rubbing this flour stuff into the skin.

Line a tray with aluminium foil, two or three layers if you don't want to wash the tray -- which is really the idea -- and put your floured wings in the tray, tapping off the excess flour back onto the plate.

Put them in the oven for 30 minutes per side. Chop up and make a garden salad, if you desire, lettuce, tomato, cheese, carrot, cucumber, while you're waiting for the wings. Heat up your sauce, when the oven dings for the last time, take the wings out, leave them to rest as you set up the other food for preparation -- You can also make the blue cheese sauce.

To do this you get a -small- bowl, one for teeny little things, put the mayonaise, sour cream and garlic powder in, mix them together. Grate the blue cheese, using the smallest holes -- the ones you use to get skinny spiral curls of parmesan cheese, rather than the normal ones for cheddar -- and mix this into the sour cream mixture. You can add more, or less cheese depending on your taste preferences, but the whole thing should be smoothe and delicious looking, like a professional made it! ...All because you grated the cheese, rather than breaking off the crumbly stuff.

Salad, sauce, dip, wings, and extra plates for it all go on the table, and it's self serve of deliciousness! I'm not sure if I slightly overcooked the turkey, or if it was the flour, but the skin was deliciously crunchy and mmmn, so good. This'll serve about 4, one turkey wing per person, added with the salad, is more than enough to satisfy. ...Sure you'll be a little nibbly, but that is good, means you're not over full! And if you want more, have more salad. Tastes good either way!

Deliciousness Delivered.

Lamb and Stuffed Spuds

Well! Here we are again, a lovely new recipe for everyone to enjoy. I do apologise for not uploading as much, but hey, I have to try things out and get them -right- before subjecting you guys to their deliciousness. This recipe, for instance, is VERY nice. A teensy bit fattening, and bad for you, but, only a small amount. This is lamb chop and vegetable stuffed potatoes.

For this you will need:
1 lamb chop per person
1-1 1/2 potatoes per person (depends on the size of the potato. I was feeding two, so three spuds, two medium-small and one large)
1/2 cup finely diced zuccini
1/2 cup carrot (around half a carrot)
1/2 large brown onion (or 1 whole small brown onion)
1 1/2 tsp sour cream
1 tsp butter
1/4 cup of milk
1 spring onion
1 small tomato
1/2 cup grated cheddar cheese

First off, because I try to make things as easy as possible, grab yourself a bowl, and your potatoes. Stab your potatoes with a fork, once or twice for each side, working your way around the potato. Put them into the bowl (try to fit them all into one, to save on dishes) and fill it with water so that your potatoes are half-immersed. Put it into the microwave, and cook them on high for ten minutes, pull them out, turn them over so that the -other- half is immersed, and cook them for another ten. When your microwave dings, pull them out, drain off the water, and let the things cool for about five to ten minutes.

While your potatoes are cooking, you get to go mad with the knife! No seriously. I am having a 'millions of chops for teeny fiddly things is FUN' mood lately. So! What you'll need to do is top and tail the onion, shallow slice in the side through the first layer or so, and peel off the skin. Discard. Cut the onion in half, and carefully slice and dice it. Try to make each slice and piece of the onion as small as possible. Don't worry too much if you can't do this in the initial chopping, since you can pile them up into a neat line, rest one hand on the tip of your carving knife, (on the blunt side, not where you get poked and bleed) and chop/rock the knife to completely decimate your onion.

Same thing with the zuccini, you only need a couple thin slices, two to three millimetres thick at the -most-, slice vertically through the two rounds, then horizontally to make them into teeny tiny little cubes. Top and tail and peel your carrot, if you have a full sized one, you only want to use half. Slice the carrot into disks, and then go nuts with the knife on those disks. If you can cut them up the same way you did the zuccini great! If not, don't stress. Just make sure that you have tiny little bits of carrot, not lumps. You are going to be mixing this in with mashed potato, and you don't want to go from soft mashed potato to chewing on a chunk of carrot.



Spray a frying pan, put it on low heat and toss your onion in first. Cook it until it is starting to soften and go from opaque white of raw onion to the more transparent colour of cooked. Then you toss in the zuccini and carrot, and stir occasionally to fry them evenly without burning. Hopefully.

Your potatoes will be ready for their turning over now, so deal with that, and put on the lamb in another frying pan. You want the blood to rise to the surface and puddle slightly before turning over. Yes, I know, it doesn't -sound- particularly appetising but it's a way to tell how well cooked it is. Potatoes back in the microwave, the teeny pieces of vegetable are frying, and it is all wonderful. If you are especially skilled, or y'know, have the attention span of a gnat like me, wander off and do something else for a little while, just don't forget that you -do- have things cooking.

Microwave will ding a second time, take the potatoes out and drain them, as described above. Now they get to cool down! Why? Because you have to handle them! Cut each potato, once it is cool enough to touch (and providing that a testing prod with a fork has the tines sinking easily into soft flesh) cut each potato in half lengthways.



Using a dessert spoon, carefully scoop out the potato from the skins, you want to take as much as possible, without the skins losing their shape. Put the potato in a bowl, all in the same bowl, add in the butter, sour cream, and the fried bits of vegetables. Using a fork, mix and mash the potato and bits in together, adding milk about halfway through. Not too much, you want the mix to be firm, and feel more like dough, than mashed potato.



Once it is mixed through completely, and there is no milk, sour cream, or butter visible as a separate entity, carefully spoon the mash back into the skins and set them on plates.



Grate up your cheese and top and tail the tomato. Slice and dice the tomato, so that you have little tomato cubes. Push the cubes onto the potato, sprinkle the grated cheese and ...leave for a little while. Odds are your meat isn't finished cooking! Make sure the blood has risen to the surface to pool for a second time and then turn it over.



It may rise and have -slight- amounts for a third turning, to sear the juices back in. I know this may seem a little excessive, but I assure you, undercooked lamb is FOUL. Really really bleh. While beef can and apparently is eaten in all stages from raw and chasing the lettuce to old boot leather, lamb needs to be well done. Always. So, while you're waiting for the searing of the final turn to happen, pop your potatoes in the microwave, and zap on high for a minute to a minute and a half.

Peel off dead leaves, or 'crispy' bits of the spring onion, cut off the roots, and slice into round disks. Chop chop chop ding! The first lot are ready, pull them out of the microwave, put the second plate in (if you have a second plate) and do the same thing. This has the added bonus of reheating your potato mix, so you can prepare this earlier, and it doesn't -really- matter what time your potatoes are ready, because you're reheating them just before serving anyway, to melt the cheese!

Once cheese is melted, put the bits of spring onion ontop of your potatoes for garnish (and because it really brings out the onion flavour. So good) and add your lamb to the plate. Ready to serve! Yum.

You can also have some more sour cream ontop of your potatoes and underneath the spring onion, but you have some in the potato already, so it's slight overkill. Less is more, and subtlety is the key! You can, if you desire, eat lamb with mint. It goes rather well, actually. But, not necessary. Thus!

Deliciousness Delivered.

Chicken meatball tube spaghetti pasta!

Goodness me. So filling. So unanticipatedly filling that I could only eat half! :( A bit of background, this is the typical 'style' that Americans have their 'pasta' as. Spaghetti, meatballs and sauce. I have had an american -cook- me said meatballs and through no fault of his own, I found it absolutely ... unappetising. The meatballs were just beef, or it tasted like, moulded into fist size balls that sit on your plate and were covered in tomato paste, water and salt. Ugh. So, with -that- in mind, I made the meatballs much ...smaller. Much, much smaller. And it turned out rather lovely! For this you will need;

500g chicken mince
1-2 spring onions, finely (very very finely) diced
1/4 of a green capsicum (pepper) finely diced. Very finely.
3 large cloves of garlic
A handful of tube spaghetti (or normal spaghetti) per person.
1-2 Tbsp of butter
1 1/2 cups of plain flour
4 tbsp of olive oil
6 tsp of powdered chicken stock
2 eggs
1-2 cups of breadcrumbs
2 tsp of Worcestershire sauce
1 tsp thyme
1 tsp oregano
3 tsp parsley
1 cup of grated cheese (cheddar)

This is sliiiightly complicated because I've listed the full amounts of everything, rather than piecemealing it out into separate parts. I hope this doesn't confuse people!

The spring onion, capsicum, cheese, worchestershire sauce, 2 tsp of chicken stock, the 500g chicken mince, 2 cloves of garlic; finely diced, thyme, oregano, 1 tsp of parsley, the breadcrumbs and 2 eggs allllll go into the same bowl, and stirred through thoroughly, so that it is evenly mixed, stirred through thoroughly. Use a dessert spoon to do the stirring if you like, makes it easier to do other things.



Mmm, delicious looking right?

Fill a pot with water, add oil and 3 tsp of chicken stock to the water. Turn on, so that it can start to boil. Get your chicken mix, and the dessert spoon, using -half- of the dessert spoon as serving size portions. You want these to be small, so that one and nearly two would fit on the dessert spoon when you turn them over. Roll the mix into small balls, and put directly onto the hot frying pan.




While they are cooking on one side, your water should be starting to boil, turn the heat down slightly, and put the pasta in. Turn the meatballs over, remembering to stir your pasta so that it doesn't stick -- protip; to lessen chance of pasta sticking to the bottom of the pot, keep the water boiling. Bubbles from the bottom means the pasta isn't sitting there long enough -to- stick. But, do try to stir your pasta, keeps it cooking evenly.

Put the butter in another pot, and 1 clove of garlic, diced and sliced very finely. Melt the butter, and fry up the garlic in the butter. Stir so that nothing burns -- keep the heat low! -- before adding the flour. Stir. Thoroughly. You want to lightly cook the flour into a crumbly sort of dough before you add the milk, one little bit at a time. One dollop and little dribbly bit, stirring all the while. Once you have around half the milk in, add 1 tsp of chicken stock (I know! Used a LOT) and 2 tsp of parsley.

...Now, you'll want to rope in some help for this, just tell them to keep stirring the sauce, paying attention to the corners of the pot (yes it has corners, that's where the side meets the bottom. Flour has an unpleasant tendancy to hide there and burn) while you pull the meatballs off of the heat and onto a clean plate. If you haven't a frying pan large enough (like I didn't) then put the rest of the mix into little balls and on to cook. The sauce should be really rather thick by now.

Easiest way I found, to turn the little balls of chicken deliciousness, I used the dessert spoon, and a pair of tongs -- though another spoon, fork or if you're exceptionally skilled, pair of chop sticks would do just as well. Strain the pasta, serve it onto plates, add an appropriate number of meatballs (five to seven) and pour the sauce over the top.

It is EXTREMELY filling, so you probably wish to serve up less than I suggested, because I could only eat half of my plate. SO MUCH CHICKEN flavour though, goodness. As you are cooking the pasta in the equivalent of liquid chicken stock, and chicken and more chicken and ... so good.

If you do not want the pasta etc part (it is very difficult to co-ordinate it all on your own and not burn anything or overcook or fubar) then the meatballs do well enough on their own. They would do wonderfully for finger food for the kids, stick a toothpick in each, some tomato sauce and it is gold.

Deliciousness Delivered. ...So. Full.

Rolled-Roast beef, warm pasta salad and 'edible' zuccini

Okay! First off, this is focusing nigh exclusively on the vegetables or 'side dishes' on the plate. I -loathe- zuccini. Ugh. It's the vilest most despicable vegetable on the earth, in close competition with aubergine for repulsiveness. So, this was my attempt to make it an 'edible' part of my meal. Why, you ask, if I hate it with such a passion? Because we have a garden. The garden has vegetables. One of those vegetables growing are zuccini. And tomatoes. MY GOD. So many tomatoes. Avalanche of tomatoes! In any case, to the meal! For this you will need:

1 rolled roast
1-2 cups bow tie pasta
4-5 tomatoes
2-3 tsp sour cream
1 large brown onion
2 tsp tumeric
1-2 cups finely chopped zuccini
1-2 spring onions
1-2 Tbsp oil (vegetable or olive)
2 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp oregano
2 tsp powdered chicken stock
1/2-1 cup of grated cheese

Complicated list huh? But don't worry! It will aaaaaaaall make sense in a few moments. First, top, tail, peel and slice the onion. Slice, not dice. The difference is that you have half-moons of onion rings, you can cut them in half again if you wish, but the idea is to have fairly long 'strings' of the onion. Put the oil in a wok (if you have one, if not a large frying pan would do just as well) let it heat up and then toss the onions in. You want them to start to brown.

While they're doing the cooking thing, and you've broken them up into the individual layers with some deft applications of bashery with a spoon or pair of tongs. Slice and dice the zuccini (leave the skin on) into around 1cm cubes, or there about. Put the water on to boil, add some more oil so that the pasta doesn't stick together. Chicken stock and garlic powder in the oil and the water, add the oregano to the water as well. Once it is boiling add in the pasta.

Your onions ought to be real nice by now, and three quarters cooked, add in the zuccini. (Remember to turn your roast whatever) Dice and chop up your spring onion. To do this, slice off the roots and perhaps a half inch above, peel off any 'dead' leaves, or brown layers around the outside (should only need to do one or two) then slice even rings off of the spring onion. Toss it in with the Zuccini and onion, making sure that it is all stirred through and left to cook and soften and absorb delicious flavour.

At this point, add the tumeric, and some salt and pepper if you desire. Stir through so that everything coated evenly. When the pasta is cooked, turn off the water, and drain it. Yes, drain before the rest of the meal is done. Slice the top off of the tomatoes, and dice them into even squares and pieces. Put the cold tomato into the warm past, stir through with the sour cream and cheese, leave to cool/warm/whatever.

Take your roast out, snip and peel off the string (if you used a rolled one, like I did) and carve, put on a plate with the zuccini onion mix and the pasta salad. The pasta tomato thing tastes best warm. Not hot, not cold, but warm, enough for the tomato and stuff to be 'cool' and for the sour cream to be slightly melted.

The best thing about the way I cooked the zuccini? It gained the flavour of the onion and spring onion, which is what the plant is best for, and made it taste nice! The pasta was my favourite part as for me, the beef was a little undercooked (oops, my bad) but my father loved it all. So for that, I can say that this one is again;

Deliciousness Delivered.

Pork Tenderloin, potato salad and tomato mushroom 'salad'.

Happy Day After Australia Day! Yes, I know, the last post I did a few hours ago said happy new year, but shhh, work with me here. It all makes sense! Now I don't know about you, but for me, cooking when it is hotter than holy cooked egg on a rock is not on my list of 'top things to do today'. Eating a hot meal when it is hotter than that crispy egg on a sizzling rock is -equally- low on the list.

But, we need to eat or else we'll wake up at 2am with a growling belly going 'oh god so hungry' and after eating it's 'oh god so tired WHY do I have work in the morning' while you can't sleep and... yeah, it's just not pretty. So what do we do? We make a food that is eaten -cold-. Yep! Lovely coldness. For this recipe you will need:

Pork (tenderloin, chop, whichever, could also use a beef steak... doesn't matter)
Potato salad:
5 medium-large potatoes
5 eggs
2 cups of peas
2 cups of corn
~250g of bacon
2-3 Tbsp of mayonaise
1/2 tsp of worchestershire sauce
2 tsp white vinegar
1/2 tsp garlic powder.
Tomato salad:
1-2 tomatoes
3-4 button mushrooms, fresh
1-2 2cm thick slices of cheddar, cubed.

Peel and dice your potato, try to keep all of the potato pieces around the same size, as this is the size of your final potato salad will be. Put them in a pot with cold water, bring to the boil, put in the peas and corn -- yes, into the -same- pot, why waste water, or make extra dishes for yourself if you don't have to? -- put on the lid cracked a little to let steam out, and bring to boil a second time, leaving to simmer. Once that part is cooked, drain the water, and put them into a bowl to cool.

Get out four eggs from the fridge, put into a pot of water (you can use the potato pot if you like) and bring to boil (it should take around 5 minutes) once boiling (thats when the big bubbles are plopping up and effecting the water surface) put the timer on for about seven minutes. If you prefer, you can boil the water -first-, just add a teaspoon or so of vinegar to the water, this will keep the egg shells from cracking, and if they -do- crack, then the egg-white will stay inside, once boiling, carefully put the eggs in (I balance them on a table spoon and slide them in gently) and set the timer for seven to ten minutes. Once the timer is done, pull them off the heat and set aside to cool in the water, or, conversely, empty out the hot water, and replace it with cold. There's more than one way to boil an egg!

Once they are cool enough to touch without you going 'ow ow ow hot hot!' peel and dice the eggs. Three slices, and cut into quarters. You can add more, or less egg as is your preference. While the eggs are cooling, whip out a frying pan, spray oil in it to warm up. While it is warming, you want to slice and dice your bacon into small cubes. Fry them in the pan until cooked, slightly crispy, but not burnt. So they shouldn't crack or crunch when you eat them.

Toss them into the bowl with the potato, along with the egg, and leave to cool down. Or rather, let it rest while you mix the mayonaise with the vinegar. It will separate, and form little clumps as you are stirring it (in a separate bowl to the potato) but you should remix the vinegar in until the mayonaise looks like it did before you thinned it, only smoother and slightly creamy looking. Same principle, add the garlic powder and worchestershire sauce, stir until well mixed in and creamy looking, add to your potato, egg, bacon etc, and stir the whole lot through. Leave to cool -completely- in the fridge. Warm potato salad tastes funny to me.

For the 'tomato salad', I'd been having a hankering for raw mushroom, and this fullfilled that nicely. Raw button mushrooms are very dry, and powdery in taste, the tomato juice counterbalances that nicely, and there's cheese well.. because I like cheese in my salads.

Dice up your tomato, top and tail, three slices horzontally and then checker-board the upper edge, three cuts vertically through the meat of the tomato, and another three crossing over -those- cuts to cube the tomato nicely. Slice the mushroom into little umbrellas, and then cut each umbrella in half. Slice and cube the cheese, toss it all into a bowl, and voila. Another nice cold salad!

Put your meat on (whatever type you chose) and cook it through. If lamb, or pork, you'll be wanting/needing to turn it over -four- times, each time letting blood rise to the surface and puddle slightly before turning it over, the last turning is to sear the juices onto the outer layer. If it's beef, or steak, then you needn't worry so much. Just cook it how you like! 10 seconds sear on each side for, I think, blue rare, 30 seconds on each side for rare... and so on. Personally, I prefer medium well done which is blood to rise twice, and three turnings to cook on each side and sear.

Put the meat on the plate, serve up the potato salad and tomato stuff, and have a lovely cool dinner on a wicked hot day. If you wish to add a dash of surprising freshness, simply slice up some of a cucumber and place it on the plate. It works well!

Deliciousness Delivered.

Rolled-Roast stuffed chicken breast

Happy New Year everyone! Yeah, I know, I have been lazy and not updated for the WHOLE of the new year, how shameful of me! But here it is. A nice roast that I'm sharing with you, including a cheaty way to get your delicious roast vegetables.

A major problem with -having- those lovely roast vegetables, is how the devil do you know when to put them in? And if you -do- put them in and they come out cooked when the roast is done, you lose the delicious crispy to the pan, tray or foil! Dilemna! Never fear however, I shall help you make wonderful, delicious roast vegetables.





First of all, you're going to need some potatoes and carrots. Around one potato and one carrot per person you are serving. You want to cut the carrots in half crosswise, and then half them again down the length. Cut the potatoes in half, on the longest side of a decent potato. A 'decent potato' is the type known as nadine, they are about big enough to fill your hand, without your fingers curling over and connecting, white skin and white flesh.




An appropriately sized roast, I had a net rolled chicken roast, available from a chicken-specialist butchers, so I won't go into the preparation of how to make one. Wrap a baking tray in alfoil, tinfoil or whichever you want to call it. Put the rolled roast into the tray, net and all, if you take the net off, the roast will fall apart while cooking. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celcius, and once it is ready, put the roast in for fifty minutes. This is to cook the first side and make sure the skin is crunchy. While this is going on, you put the roast vegies on. But wait! I haven't said -how-!



If you've got yourself a banquet frying pan, then you're sweet. What you want to do is put some dripping into the pan, as it is heating, to melt down. Dripping is the fat that melt out of red-meat roasts, so like beef, lamb, the clear film that sits at the bottom of the tray, when it is still liquid, you pour that into a jar, and put it in the fridge to solidify. If you haven't kept/got any no drama's, butter will serve. BButter mind, not margerine. Duck fat as well, if you want to get expensive. Another alternative is to use cooking spray -and- vegetable oil. The cooking spray keeps the oil from sticking, and the oil keeps the vegetables from sticking, and you have a lovely crunchy roast vegie, undeniably the best method is the dripping. So, start saving the fat from your roasts!

Pop all your vegetables in -- you can also roast a whole onion in the same way, if you like, one onion per person that wants it. Cook on medium to low heat, checking them periodically, and turn them over when you have a lovely golden crispy layer forming.




Like so! Around this time, your oven should 'ding' and your roast is asking you ever so politely to turn it over. Do so, and roast it for another 20-30 minutes. If you're not sure, stick it with something sharp -- cake skewer, tip of a thin knife -- and if the juices that come out are clear, it's good to go.

This is when you get to polish up on your multitasking skills, as you also put on the frozen vegetables you want to add to the meal, peas, corn, beans, brussel sprouts... put them in cold water, bring to boil on the stove on a medium to low heat -- I cook with gas, and 'high' is insta-burn because of how hot the flame is. Now you just need to keep track of the time passing.

If your roast is done early, before you have finished doing all the vegetables, no need to stress, or worry, just turn the oven down. 80-90 degrees celcius will keep your roast nice and hot, without cooking it further. When your pot-vegetables (peas, corn etc) are boiling, put on the gravy.

Packet stuff, it's usually six teaspoons of the mix to a cup of water, or there abouts, and it should serve four people. Put the powder in a glass, (or cup measure) stir the powder and water together, put them into a pot and put it on high, while you are -still- stirring. Don't take my hazarded guess measure as gospel, read the packet for the precise requirements. Once the gravy starts to thicken -- you'll notice it -- turn the heat DOWN while still stirring. For the love of all that is holy do NOT let the gravy boil. If it boils you get brown water. Seriously, it does not thicken for love or money. Keep stirring until the gravy is completely thick and gloopy and delicious, the way we all like it, and turn -off- the heat. For everything!

Take your roast out of the oven, and it should look gloriously golden and crispy and delicious, like so;



But! We have a net around our food. And this is bad! What you want to do, is using a pair of tongs, and pair of scissors -- scissors, NOT a knife -- grip, and snip through the netting at the end, and work along the length of the roast. Being careful, and using the tongs to hold the roast, using your fingers peel the netting back. Do so gently, and patiently, and you will have a delicious thing in one piece ready to carve, if you rush, bits of the skin will stick to the netting and on the whole, it will look a lot less appealing. We -prefer- to eat things that look nice, not all mangled after all.

Carefully slice your roast, and serve, putting two halves of a potato, two to four bits of carrot, a serve of peas/corn/beans etc and drizzle gravy over the top. I am sure I have mentioned this in previous posts, but just in case I haven't, the serving sizes per person for the frozen vegetables, is one handful. So if there is peas -and- corn, then it is a half handful of each, per person. It doesn't seem like a lot, but it is all you need.

Enjoy your lovely roast and easy roast vegetables!

Deliciousness Delivered.