Abstract Gourmet

I was lucky enough to score an invite to the launch of Perth’s newest magazine, Spice, by the ever charismatic Anthony of Spice Blog.

So Sharon and I dolled up and swaggered down to see what all the commotion was about.
Having no idea what to expect, we were a little suprised to see so many people. Upon entering we were given our ticket for the door prize (no, we didn’t win… I don’t think anyone ever does), and then processed to taste and sip every little tasty freebie on offer.

It was really well set up, with all of the main advertisers in the first issue having a stand of their produce. Wine, beer, olive oil, lamb, prawns, wood fired pizza, turkish bread, and various other little tasty goodies.

The event was held at the office/kitchen of Comestibles, a catering company in Perth that also runs cooking classes and events. They’ve got a great setup in there and we were all invited to wander through the kitchens and watch the chef’s at work. So roughly 50 people at a time packed themselves into the kitchen and filed around past more tables of goodies to get a taste of seared trout and mushroom crepes. Which all went down very well with the 2nd or 3rd glass of wine i was onto.

It was in the kitchen where we got to meet Mr Spice Blog himself (and his lovely wife Toni), keeping the party rolling by cutting up loaves of bread… (he may have been replicating fish as well, but this is yet to be confirmed). After a quick chat, we wandered around some more, ran into Corey and Ben of Core Espresso and Coffee Geek fame, and generally stuffed ourselves with as many little tid bits as was possible without looking like pigs.

(Nb: It’s always advantageous to bring a girl along for these purposes as they never get suspected)

So all in all it was a lovely event. Great to see so many foodies in Perth turning up, and great to see so much support for what looks like a really great magazine. The first issue has a lot of really nice articles in there, and the production quality is top notch, so congratulations to the team for doing such a good job.

Looking forward to picking up issue 2 !

  launch, magazine, spicemag

Filed by Matt at 10:55 am under Eating Out, Review 2 Comments (85 views)

Feeling mildly adventurous, i decided to make some pumpkin flavoured/coloured pasta. So in thinking what i’d like to have with it i found some nice fresh artichokes. Then decided to use the artichoke in the dish, and fill the pumpkin pasta with
spinach and ricotta (as you do).

The sauce was then made up of left over pumpkin, cream, basil, white wine, and salt and pepper.
Basically the pumpkin sauce was made by boiling the pumpkin in salted water (although you could also roast it for a more intense flavour) until its pretty soft. Then pureed in a blender til it’s a thick gloopy consistency.

I then folded that pumpkin puree into the pasta to give it a pumpkiny flavour and colour, and used what was left in the sauce.

So that was simply adding the puree, cream, white wine, salt, pepper to a hot pan with a little butter. I’m not good with measurements because I generally cook by sight and taste… but say 100 ml of cream and 50ml of white wine.
Just reduce it down til the alcohol isn’t so strong from the wine, and til you get the consistency you’re after.
When it’s basically done you throw a little chopped parsley (flat leaf) or basil in, and then toss through the ravioli.

Stuffed and folded the ravioli, cooked them quickly… boiled the artichokes, then combined it all together. I was suprised it turned out pretty nice.

The artichokes were so tasty… must find an excuse to use them more often.

***updated with a few more details a year or so later… but hey, who’s counting :) ***

  artichoke, homemade, pasta, pumpkin, ravioli, recipe

Filed by Matt at 12:21 pm under Eating In, Recipes 7 Comments (232 views)

This is some Ethiopian Yirgacheffe that has just finished roasting in my little IMEX CR-100 coffee roaster. This batch turned out a bit light because i stopped it too soon. I did another batch later and let it run for longer, and it turned out much nicer. I’m still refining my coffee roasting skills and experimenting with beans… but as a single origin Yirg is a top rated bean.

  Coffee, coffeebean, roasting

Filed by Matt at 1:40 am under Espresso 2 Comments (90 views)

I have finally beaten my Wordpress photo gallery plugin into submission, so it no longer messes up the photo gallery page by pushing all the menus down to the bottom. I’m not sure how it happened to begin with, but its now a lot nicer to view the image gallery.

Filed by Matt at 6:37 pm under Admin | Add a comment (76 views)

Sorry the photos are blurry and out of focus. It was late and I was getting hungry…

This meal consists of basically the same kind of potato salad as was used recently in my rack of pork recipe, but this time with the inclusion of some lebanese cucumber, cumin, and red cabbage, to give it a little Moroccan/Turkish/vaguely Middle Eastern or North African flavour.

The lamb rack was marinated in olive oil, salt, pepper, lime juice, and cumin before being grilled, sliced, and clumsily arranged on a plate…

  cumin, kipfler, lamb, potato, potatosalad, rack, recipe, salad

Filed by Matt at 2:59 pm under Eating In, Recipes | Add a comment (261 views)

I recently ordered some green coffee beans online from a cooperative website. They basically conduct polls as to which beans are the most popular, and then based on how many people are interested, contact the distributors directly and place large orders for the green beans. This means i can get really high quality beans at pretty cheap prices.

These ones are Indonesian Bukhit… Also in the set i order was some Indian Tiger Mountain, Costa Rican SHB Tarrazu, and Ethiopian Yirgacheffe.

If that means absolutely nothing to you…fear not ! It means very little to me as well, other than that other people have said that once roasted they make some awesome shots of espresso… So we’ll see how it goes i guess.

  Coffee, coffeebean, greenbean

Filed by Matt at 1:15 pm under Espresso | Add a comment (92 views)

After a tiring volleyball game on a dark, cold, late night, Matt and I decided to drop in to Cinnamon Club in Leederville to feed our empty stomachs. It was only a few weeks prior that we saw a sign on the vacant room advertising for “exceptional waitstaff” for this restaurant, so we were quite curious to find out what it would be like.

Well, unfortunately it didn’t meet my expectations as I feel that indian restaurants trying to be different and unique, have to ultimately achieve this goal - which I feel Cinnamon Club does not (well not yet anyway).

We ordered a couple of standard indian dishes including butter chicken, an eggplant curry and a lamb vindaloo. The food was nice, but didn’t differentiate itself as much as I thought it should have to match it’s pricing. I felt the food was not as cheap as what you could get at other indian restaurants but for the price you pay, I didn’t feel the food was that much better either.

The music didn’t set the appropriate mood for the restaurant as it sounded like a cheesy 80’s “best duets with a saxophone” CD. This was a pity, as the restaurant looks great with its stone walls, suede booths, and unique red lamps but this atmosphere is quickly destroyed by the music which made me cringe with memories of my Dad’s St Elmo’s fire and Kenny G music.

However, the waitstaff were friendly and attentive and the food arrived quite quickly, which still made it a pleasant dining experience.

To summarise, the restaurant wasn’t bad, but wasn’t exceptional either. You can try Cinnamon Club at:

228 Carr Pl
Leederville 6007 WA
Phone: (08) 9228 1300

  byo, indian, midrange, perth, restaurant, Review

Filed by Matt at 12:29 am under Eating Out, Review 5 Comments (97 views)

My first ever attempt at making my own pasta. I basically combined a bunch of different techniques i found on the web into my own style, and was really happy with how it turned out.

So for the pasta:

I happened upon some ‘0′ rated pasta flour by chance in Fresh Provision’s Mt Lawley while getting essentials… milk, bread, belgian chocolate etc. I thought to myself… it’s about time i try this homemade pasta caper out… and so the seeds were sewn.

Coming home, i did the perfunctory searches for “home made pasta” and came up with enough to whet my appetite, just enough rope to hang myself, and a few other catch phrases of less noteworthy quality.

So the pasta went basically like so:

*Ingredients*

200 g white flour
2 eggs

The quantites indicated are for four helpings. Pour the flour onto a flat cool work surface, preferably marble, into a mound shape a “fontana”. Make a deep dent in the top and break in the eggs. With your fingers or with a fork, gently mix in the eggs with the flour. When all the egg has been absorbed into the flour, knead the dough for 15/20 minutes until it is firm and tiny bubbles appear on the surface. Form a ball with the dough and flatten it slightly with the palm of your hand. Using a rolling pin, start flattening the pasta out, then roll it out into a thin even sheet. Work slowly and rythmically.

In reality the dish served 2/3 people, probably because i didn’t roll it thin enough…. having only realised after I started making it that i didnt have a rolling pin. I ended up using a sturdy left over bottle of olive oil…which was actually quite good. I just made sure to keep adding flour to the wet patches, so it didn’t stick at all, and from a novices point of view, it looked pretty good.

I also didn’t have a pasta cutter or any other fancy type equipment, so when it was time to make some shapes i took my trusty Wusthof paring knife and sliced as thinly and evenly as i could into some fat fettucini/tagliatelle-ish strips. They looked pretty funky when they came out, the relative unevenness of my rolling and the little kinks in the slicing got accentuated after cooking into somewhat rustic (for want of a term Jamie Oliver would use to describe something crappy) looking patterns. It was however, rather satisfying that it turned out like actual pasta… it was also a lot fresher tasting, with much less starchy nastiness, and took about 1 minute to cook (!)

The rest of the dish was an afterthought to be honest.

I found some salmon that had to be used, and braised it in some white wine til it was just cooked on the outside.

In the meantime i made a simple roux and added to it some white wine, basil, rosemary, salt, pepper, and peccorino cheese.

Once the sauce was done, i poured it over the salmon, added the pasta, and then threw in the baby spinach on top… gave it just a minute to soften and then served it up.

So there you go. A simple meal in the finish, but very tasty. Bouyed by the relative success of this effort, i’ll definitely be giving it a shot again in the near future, with perhaps some more exotic variants and/or additions.

Let me know in the comments if you found this recipe vaguely interesting :)

Sadly, my skills as a photographer are not improving, but the food is still getting eaten…

  homemadepasta, pasta, recipe, salmon

Filed by Matt at 10:47 pm under Eating In, Recipes 3 Comments (133 views)

I’m not the biggest fan of pork, but occasionally like to dabble with it. This is one of my more successful dabblings.
The only rule i’ve learnt is that honey and pork go well together (i got that mostly from the fact that most pork flavoured snacks also contain some form of honey flavouring). So it must be a match made in heaven… because this was delicious.

Recipe to follow… but for now, note the use of Kipfler potatoes in the salad… tres yummy.

  honey, kipfler, pork, potato, recipe, salad

Filed by Matt at 12:49 pm under Admin, Eating In, Recipes 6 Comments (168 views)

This is an example of my current drink of choice. A short macchiatto (or perhaps more accurately labelled, a piccolo latte, because i prefer more milk than the “stain” referred to by macchiato).

The latte art is coming along ok, i think i’ve got the milk steaming technique in hand now… The only problem now is trying to keep my hand steady enough to pour the patterns properly… But really, most of the fun is in the trying, and you always get to drink it in the end anyway :)

  coffeegeek, Espresso, latteart, macchiato

Filed by Matt at 11:21 pm under Espresso 2 Comments (109 views)