Moroccan

A fancy for fish led me to my next recipe. I looked in the 'fish' folder in the 'recipes folder' on my trusty laptop and came up with 'fish tagine' for dinner tonight.
And...... wonder of wonders ......  I have actually written down where this recipe came from, so thanks to Neil Perry - Australian wonder chef ;-)

Firstly one has to make a chermoula, thereby creating all the flavours in the gravy and making a fish stir-fry into a tagine. I roughly chopped some flat leaf parsley, fresh coriander, red onion and garlic. Added some spices to the mix; cumin, coriander, turmeric, paprika, ras-el-hanout and chilli, then blitzed away with a stab mixer using some lemon juice and olive oil until a thick paste was formed.


You can see from the photo it actually doesn't look so appetising, but believe me when I say it is an amazingly flavourful taste. Really got my tastebuds a-singing!

Next step onto the tagine itself. It's a fish tagine, so nothing wants to be cooking too long or it will get all tough and nasty to eat. The sweet potato I diced quite small and steamed for a few minutes, I roasted the red capsicum halves in the oven for 35 minutes, the cherry tomatoes and dates I chopped in half, and the olives I used whole. Once all the preparation is done it seems a quick cook!


To create the tagine spread the fish - I used Barramundi as there was no snapper today - with a tablespoon of chermoula each (see photo). Brown the fish in a pan for a few minutes before adding the other ingredients, another tablespoon of chermoula and some chicken stock. Simmer away for 5 minutes or so until the fish starts to flake and is therefore cooked. This timing would totally depend on the fish you have.


This is the step of course where one would use one's tagine if one had all one's belongings out of storage. Sadly that is not the case for me currently, so an everyday frypan will just have to suffice ;-)


Apparently the cover of a tagine is so designed to promote the return of all condensation to the bottom, then with the cover removed, the base can be taken to the table for serving.


I served the tagine with the obligatory couscous and some steamed asparagus and beans. 

Ya gotta have some greens with every meal - right?

MFM and sweet things

Today I have learnt to collage my photos in Picasa - well actually I always knew I could do it, but this is the first time I have actually done it. Just a guess, but I think you can expect quite a few more collages from me in the future ;-)

Yesterday was Meat Free Monday again and I made some falafels. Now I love falafel balls and have made these quite a few times but never as a main meal, more often as simply part of an antipasti type lunch. The challenge became making it enough of a meal for H'o'M. Just serving it with pita bread and some tahini sauce as directed in the recipe just didn't cut it for me, but by the same token I didn't want a heavy meal loaded with calories..... compromise.... a salad.

I chopped up some lettuce, and added the regular suspects - tomato, capsicum, cucumber, mushroom and  spring onions, then added extras like avocado, cheese for H'o'M and beetroot for me.  I toasted a large pita bread under the grill and chopped it up to serve with a couple of tablespoons of hummus. I think it worked out just fine. I'm sure H'o'M could have eaten a steak as well, but he didn't complain ;-)

The falafel balls are really easy when one has a tried and true food processor in the house. Just bung all the ingredients in, whizz briefly and you're good to go. The balls are made of chickpeas (garbanzo beans), tahini, cumin, coriander, pepper, salt, fresh coriander (cilantro) and a little plain flour to bind them all together. I pan fried them quickly to get a slight crunch, then baked them in the oven for another 10 minutes.

As you can see from the photo collage I made a few other tidbits too.... a couscous tabouleh type salad for lunch in Ballas on Saturday. Loads of parsely, lemon juice, tomato and spring onions all mixed with the couscous.
For a treat I also baked Nigella Lawson's 'totally chocolate choc chip cookies'. They are too chocolatey for me - using real dark choc makes them far too rich. I prefer my chocolate milkier! Not so all the kids though - I think they were a hit ;-)

While down on the farm I baked some more yo-yos. This time I iced them 2 different ways. I added lemon juice to half the mixture and orange juice to the other half. I liked the tangy lemon one much more than the sweet orange one.

For lunch one day I also made another foccaccia. I do like this recipe. We ate one loaf for lunch on Friday with some chicken noodle soup I made, and the other one for lunch on Monday - toasted - with a vegetable frittatta.

Gardening *Updated with Photos*

Well spring is definitely here - although one could be forgiven for doubting it today as the rain is pouring down and it is so windy and grey. However the garden tells the story!

I have been puttering away out in the garden for months trying to teach myself how to prune shrubs,  keeping up with the weeding, and mastering the art of lawn mowing and now, finally, the results are showing! We have some new growth on nearly all the bushes along the driveway, the daffodils and bluebells - kindly donated from Mary next door - have bloomed, the kangaroo paw, the wattle trees and the banksia have flowered too - along with all the other plants, the names of which I just don't know!
There is something so satisfying in looking over ones domain and seeing the new growth and being able to bring some of the flowers inside!

Last weekend though, H'o'M and I decided it was time to add some vegetables to the mix. I have been wanting my own vegie patch for years! The issues in our garden here at the beach house are that long term, there won't be anyone here to tend to said garden and also that we don't want to take up too much of the lawn as that is the play area for 2 very active young men!

So, we did what people have always done in this situation.... we used pots!  A trip to our own garage proved to be a veritable gold mine of pots.... clearly they somehow made their way here from various households over the years. We were good to go.

A trip to the nursery ensued.... don't you love walking around a nursery on a warm day in spring. There are blooms everywhere and butterflies and warmth in the air and the promises of what your own garden could look like one one day if only you had a green thumb :-)

After much discussion H'o'M and I decided on some lettuce, spinach, basil, Italian parlsey and just one tomato plant as a good start. All of these are reasonably quick growing - a girl's gotta see some results right? - and are all produce we will use regularly over the summer months.

Well we potted away happily and now have some waiting to do before the harvesting can begin.

I'll take some photos and update this post when it stops raining!

Which one???

    



People are outraged/horrified/disgusted or even all three when we tell them we like to eat kangaroo steaks. Well really.... what's the difference between the lamb/beef/pork/fish we all eat and kangaroo? They all taste good, they can all be farmed and they are all animal meats. Well I have to tell you that for Australia the difference is actually enormous and here's why:

• kangaroos - for reasons unclear to me - produce very little methane gas. Something to do with a bacteria in the gut I think. They therefore have very little impact on the ozone layer! How 'green' is that?!
• kangaroos are native to Australia and do not have cloven hooves like the imported animals - again creating less impact on our environment 
• kangaroo meat is very lean - always a bonus from my point of view!  ;-)

Having said all that I was still a little dubious when H'o'M announced he wanted to swap all red meat for  kangaroo meat exclusively. I was sure this would create some issues with some of my recipes. I knew there would be no real issues with the quick cook dishes like stir fry but I wasn't too confident how it would stand up to the slow cooking. As it is such a lean meat I thought it might go all stringy and tough if left to simmer away for hours on end. The only way to answer this vexing question was to give it a go ...

so

...

I cooked 'cinnamon beef balti' a slow cooked Indian curry (recipe kindly donated by my little sis) which I have made many times.  I guess in this instance it should actually be called 'cinnamon kangaroo balti' right?

I'll let you know straight away that this dish was a success in that the kangaroo cooked beautifully in the sauce and tasted just fine!

This recipe calls for lots of spices, in particular garlic - 10 cloves in all - along with cinnamon, coriander, turmeric, paprika, ginger, chilli flakes, cloves and cumin! With a gravy base of whole chillies, red wine vinegar, tomatoes and water, the curry is simmered for 1-2 hours. Then to serve I sprinkled a stir fry of chopped tomatoes, red onion and fresh coriander over the curry and added some Naan bread to each bowl!


It tasted great and although I didn't take a photo - I have to get better at remembering I know - I think H'o'M might have something with this kangaroo idea! 

Souvlaki

The days are getting longer now that we've put forward our clocks, spring is definitely here and summer is definitely acoming, so a salad type dinner was a perfect end to a long sunny day!

There are many ways to cook lamb and we love them all - especially in the spring - but one of my favourites is to make a souvlaki!

The lamb sat marinating in a mix of yoghurt, lemon juice, cumin and garlic for an hour or so - the longer the better clearly - then I pan fried it quickly to sear the marinade onto the lamb!

I served the sliced lamb over a bed of rocket layered with tomato, cucumber, spring onion, and sprinkled with a little of the reserved marinade that I had added some mint to.

Of course it just screamed out for some bread so I toasted a couple of small pita breads and we were good to go!

MFM again!

It must be about the 5th one by now - I seem to have lost count.

Coming back from our weekend on the farm I was figuring out a menu for the week - well it is one way to fill in the 2.5 hour drive - and came up with burgers for dinner on Monday night. Mmmm, then I remembered it was a meat free day, so decided to make our burgers with Portobello mushrooms instead of your everyday mince. Just for a little twist I gave them a Moroccan inspired rub on top too!

I mixed together some ground cinnamon, chili flakes, cayenne pepper, ground cumin and some salt & pepper and after spraying the mushrooms with some olive oil, I rubbed the top of the mushrooms with said rub.  H'o'M then took them outside and BBQ'd them - absolutely perfectly I might add!

While he was outside getting the BBQ hot and then cooking the mushies, I got some fillings ready for the burgers. To make some sort of dressing/sauce, I mixed yoghurt, lemon juice and mint together, and left them to merge all the flavours as long as possible.

For the burger fixin's, I chopped up a few baby beets, two tomatoes, a cucumber and half a red capsicum. As we love onion in our house, I also caramelised a couple of brown onions using Donna's quick caramelising technique - see I did learn a few things from my Winter challenge.

Then to complete the burger, I grilled a couple of Turkish rolls! Actually the chain market here in our resort town, sells these rolls partially baked, so I first had to bake them in the oven for a few minutes, then I grilled each side for a couple of minutes. I'm not sure they'd taste any good the next day - or indeed even a few hours later -  but for an immediate use, they were terrific!

Of course, I had to add basil pesto to my burger - not so for H'o'M who simply tolerates my slight obsession with pesto. Seriously though what's not to love??? ;-)
I enjoyed these burgers and have to say that although I didn't serve them with curly fries, (which would have definitely put them into the realm of *awesome*) this Portobello burger was better than the one I had at the famous  'Barney's Burgers'  in Rockridge in Oakland CA! 

Unfortunately though, although we've had a few attempts already, it seems H'o'M hasn't totally got the whole point of Meat Free Monday. While outside BBQing the mushrooms, he trickily BBQ'd a sasusage too!!! His theory being that

• it's only a side dish, so doesn't really count 

and

• as it's a sausage there is every chance that there really isn't any meat in it anyway ;-)

Dubious rationalisations at best I'd say! 

Yo Yos

After my totally rustic looking yo-yos last week I thought I'd try again this weekend while relaxing down at the farm!
Last week I used a Donna Hay recipe which tastes perfectly satisfactory, but seemed to be very crumbly and didn't form very regular circular shapes. This week I used a different recipe from the internet allrecipes.com.au and the results were much better. The dough rolled very nicely into a ball that was then easy to squish with the fork to make pretty lines on top. My m-i-l has the teaspoon size scoop too with which to make balls that were more similar in size

It's interesting to note that some recipes for YoYos require the use of cornflour while others use custard powder. I wonder if that's what made the difference with my 2 batches as generally the other ingredients in each recipe are exactly the same. To add an extra dimension to the dough next time, I think I'd add a few drops of vanilla. You know me, I can't help myself with the tweaking of the recipes ;-)


I stuck the biscuits together with some very tangy lemon icing, and, although as you can see they are still quite rustic and not particularly uniform in shape, I think they taste OK!

Another thought for next time is to use the pulp of a passionfruit in both the icing and the dough, or perhaps a little lemon zest or orange zest in both icing and dough....my goodness the possibilities go on and on!

Clearly I'll be practising yo-yo recipes for quite some time!