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!