Mutton/Lamb Sticky Sweet Stuff

This came about because I had a whole pineapple, and six cutlets of mutton (that's older/adult sheep, has a fuller flavour than lamb), and three people to feed. Had to use the pineapple, because it was ripening happily on the sink, and was getting to the point of being nearly over ripe so... I tried making a sauce-y type marinade without actually marinading. The fresh pineapple can probably be replaced by drained, tinned pineapple, NOT in syrup though! That would be waaaay too sweet.

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. 

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.