Duende

Well Sharon and I just got back from visiting Duende. It’s located in a funky spot in Leederville, and boasts an extensive wine list and a bevy of tasty bite sized dishes on the predominantly tapas menu.

I’ve been to Duende a few times now, and this return trip was mainly to refresh my memory on how great the place is, in readiness for writing a stunning review. But after getting back, I’m left with a somewhat dissatisfied feeling in my mouth/stomach/wallet.

Duende’s style is trendy tapas. Not cheap $5 potato balls, or spicy meatballs that you might find in a cheap tapas bar… more along the lines of intricate dishes made with specialty ingredients often sourced from overseas (like jamon serrano and manchego cheese).

My memories of this place are sublime tasting dishes full of flavour and paired with a huge selection of local and international (Spanish and French mainly) wines. This trip however, i found myself looking at the menu and wondering how a dish of potato, chorizo, mint, and olive oil, served in a dish the size of a peanut bowl, can be worth $14… Sure it was tasty… but was it worth it ? I am far from one to skimp on prices, but when I feel like im not getting value for money it tends to grate pretty quickly.

Then looking at the wine list and seeing out of total of a hundred or more wines… there was only a handful available by the glass.

I was really trying to find things to like, but it seemed like it just wasn’t the right night. We had a selection of different wait staff, who varied between forgetful, cheeky, and patronisingly friendly. The wait staff there generally have a bit more character and spunk than your regular restaurant, but tonight instead of seeming refreshing or funny, it just came across as irritating. You can joke and muck around all you like if you remember my order and bring me decent food… if not… don’t even bother.

So what did we order:

Organic Bread
Jamon Serrano
Potato, Chorizo, and Mint salad
Sweet Corn and Manchego balls
Some kind of avacado salad
Skewered King Prawns in garlic butter (i think)

Having ordered the sweet corn and manchego balls before, i clearly remember them being light and airy and melting in your mouth as you bit into them. This time they would be more accurately described as salty cheese balls, dry and floury. Far from the experience I’ve had in the past.

So after finishing our dishes and waiting another 15 minutes for someone to come back and take our dessert order, we thought it best to end the night there and then.

I would really love to go back and describe the first experience I had dining at Duende. Being continually delighted as dish after dish of simple, elegant, and above all delicious food came out… but alas, this was not that night.

I still think it’s a great place, but perhaps not the golden child of my memories.

As always, do try it yourself… having too high of an expectation may well have been a factor in my overall level of satisfaction.

Duende
662 Newcastle St
Leederville 6007
(08) 9228 0123 (booking advised, no byo)

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Aussie Aussie Aussie

What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?
Lin Yutang

So i sat and watched the sky being blasted with arrays of vibrant colour, silently grimacing each time the hoarse drunken chant of “Aussie Aussie Aussie” went up around the crowd.

Australia Day, a very confusing time for me in some respects. I love Australia, i think it’s a great country, and it’s definitely got a lot going for it. The nature of Australia Day itself has always bothered me though. It basically seems like a celebration of all the things i like the least about Australia.

Time to go home

Public barbeques in every park are packed with fat laden sausages and charcoal encrusted steaks. Drunken yobbos roam the streets with painted faces and Australian flags adorning various parts of their anatomy, looking for someone “unAustralian” enough to pick a fight with. Thousands of people flock to see a massive fireworks show celebrating the replacement of one culture for another more “civilised” one.

Young Love

Being a migrant to this country, but now also a citizen, i can see both good and bad things about our way of life, and how its “under threat”, in these times of world terror, by non western immigration. One the one hand i do think we need some kind of bridge between the various ethnic minorities that make up the population, or else we’re really just creating mini versions of Italy, Greece, China, Vietnam, and Lebanon on Australian soil. On the other hand i find it the height of hypocrisy to suddenly turn around and say we no longer want or need immigration, because that’s what this country was built on.

Without migrant labour half of our cities wouldn’t exist as they do today. Without migrant influences on food and culture we would be nothing more than a convict remnant of British society. Whereas today Australia as i know it is a culturally diverse environment where people of all ethnic backgrounds are able to celebrate their customs with the freedom they deserve.

My personal thoughts on the whole thing are possibly summed up by this quote:

To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
George Santayana

The fireworks are pretty though.

Fireworks Spectacular

This is Australia after all… apathy always prevails.

Chicken Kofta with Roast Pumpkin Salad

Chicken on a stick

I was in a real hurry to go and play tennis with Steve (he’s been promising to thrash me for a while now). So this was basically the quickest thing i could think of to make that still required some creativeness (and didn’t involve opening any cans of processed food).

I had some chicken mince that i bought ages ago and can’t remember why, and half a pumpkin and half a bag of tomatoes that needed to be used.

So the recipe for the Koftas:

Ingredients:

* Chicken mince
* Garlic (crushed)
* Onion, chopped finely
* Red chilli, chopped finely
* Bread Crumbs
* Coriander, Basil (basically any soft herbs you like) roughly chopped
* Tumeric
* 1 Egg

For the Salad
Ingredients:

* Pumpkin (cut into bite sized pieces)
* Tomato (quartered)
* a few cloves of garlic
* Olive Oil
* Fresh Basil, roughly chopped
* Salt and Cracked Pepper


Directions:

Basically just mix all the ingredients for the koftas together with your hands, until its a nice sticky consistency that holds together well. Soak some kebab sticks in cold water for a while and shape the chicken into little cylinders. Push the sticks through the chicken and make sure they’re good and sealed. Then heat your grilling pan or bbq or whatever you like to cook on, and fry/grill the koftas until they’re nice and crispy on the outside, but still moist on the inside.

With the salad, i just roasted the pumpkin by putting it on a tray and nestling a few cloves of garlic in amongst it. Then liberally poured olive oil over the top and seasoned with salt and pepper. This roasted for probably 20 minutes or so (my pumpkin was quite soft already). Then when the chicken is basically done, you pull the pumpkin out of the oven, combine it with the tomato (which has not been cooked) and the basil, add a bit more olive oil for good luck, and some more cracked pepper, and you’re done.

To serve them i found a few more things in the fridge i needed to use, namely some sour cream, ginger paste, a lime, and some more basil. I just combined all of these in a bowl (i would normally have processed it, but i had literally 10 minutes to eat before i needed to leave), and dolloped it on top.

This meal took me literally half an hour to prepare and make… So i was pretty happy with how it turned out. Plus i won the game of tennis, better luck next time Steve :)

White Chocolate Passion Fruit Mousse

I stole this recipe from Nigella Lawson. I just happened to be flicking channels on TV one day and there she was, looking all nice and summery, out at the seaside (albeit a horribly English looking seaside), cooking up all sorts of tasty little treats.

This one appealed to me because i had previously made a chocolate mousse that went completely wrong… So i thought it about time to make amends for it.

Ingredients and Basic directions from Nigella:

Ingredients::

* 300g white chocolate
* 6 eggs, separated
* 10 passionfruit
* 300g – 500g raspberries

Instructions:

Break the chocolate into pieces and melt in the microwave for about 3 minutes, or in a bowl over a pan of simmering water then set the bowl aside, and let the chocolate cool a little.
Beat the egg whites until stiff but not dry. Mix the egg yolks into the cooled chocolate, though be gentle to ensure it doesn?t seize. Cut the passionfruit in half and scoop them, juice, pulp, seeds, into the yolk and chocolate mixture, then fold into the egg whites until completely incorporated.

Then just pop them in the freezer or fridge for a while and serve with some more fresh berries on top.

I took this dish down to T’Anne’s place for dinner last night, and despite the fact that everyone was completely stuffed, they went down a treat.

It’s with much regret that i didnt take a photo, but trust me when i saw they looked great too :)

Caramelized Onion stuffed Pork Burgers with Enoki & Sweet Potato Fries

Onion stuffed Pork Burgers with Enoki & Sweet Potato Fries

I love burgers. To me they are the epitome of the self contained meal.. You’ve got your carbs, your protein, and your vegetables… animal, vegetable, and mineral all together in one nice little bundle.

This recipe was inspired by a great book i’m reading at the moment aptly titled Burgers, by Paul Gayler (actually, the link is to the US version of the book, the Australian version is basically the same with a different name). This one is my own creation though… so blame me and not him if it all goes horribly wrong.

Open faced

Ingredients (I’m not good with quantities, so you’ll have to fill in the blanks):

Pork mince (500 gms or so)
1 red chilli
small bunch of coriander
1/2 tsp ground cimmanon
1 egg
good olive oil
couple of onions
2 Tblsp sugar
a few knobs of butter (yes knob is the correct term for a piece of butter)
sea salt
cracked pepper

baby spinach
enoki mushrooms
couple of big sweet potato’s
vegetable or sunflower oil for deep frying
flat bread for toasting
japanese mayonaisse

Directions:

Chop the chilli finely and roughly chop the coriander. Mix well through the pork and add the other ingredients. Cinnamon for a sweet taste, salt and pepper to season, egg to bind the mixture, olive oil because everything needs olive oil.

Now chop the onions finely and saute them in a little butter and olive oil. Slowly add a tablespoon or so of sugar to the onions, and perhaps a little white wine, so they soften up and caramelize nicely. Give them a while to cook so they are really soft and golden brown. These onions are a great garnish to lots of different meals, but we’re going to stuff them inside the burgers just for the hell of it.

So now get a ball of the pork mixture, flatten it out, and place a small pile of the onion mixture inside. Add another ball of pork to the top and seal it up into a nice burger looking shape. Good to go.

Heat a pan with a little oil and sear the burgers on each side until they’re just cooked through. At this point i transferred them to a
flat grilling tray to try and get those nice grill marks on them… but it was only mildly worthwhile.

Meanwhile heat your vegetable oil in a heavy pan… I’m not the greatest deep frier in the world, in fact it scares me everytime i have to do it, so by no means am i an expert. The trick for me is finding the right temperature. You want it cool enough so you don’t burn the sweet potato to a crisp on the outside and leave them hard in the middle, but no so cool that they go all soggy without crisping up.

So now peel and cut up the sweet potato into big chunky fries and rinse them under water to wash the starch off. Them
my best advice would be to keep an eye on them closely and fry them in small batches until they’re nice and golden on the outside and soft inside.

Once you’re burgers are done and fries close to finished you can start to assemble the burger. Toast or grill your flat bread and arrange a bed of spinach, then pile on top the burger, enoki mushrooms (Sharon’s all time favourite mushroom), and a little of the caramelized onion.

Season the sweet potato fries with salt and cracked pepper, and perhaps a little paprika, and serve next to your burger with some japanese mayonaisse as a dipping sauce.

Stop...burger time...

There you go… a nice complicated way to make a simple burger :)