Recipes – Page 10 – Abstract Gourmet

Chilli Beef Noodle Stirfry

I feel like a bit of a fraud making meals like this. It isn’t really cooking so much as arranging ingredients in a wok and applying heat. In saying that though, this is the kind of meal that started me off on my cooking adventures, when I was young and impetuous and carefree.

Back in those days (circa 1997), men didn’t cook at all. Certainly not ones that went to university anyway. So I would throw together my stirfrys with all the flair and extravagance of a young Ernest Shackleton, boldly trudging into the unknown (but with a cocky assurance that I’d be rewarded with rapturous praise if I managed to assemble anything vaguely edible onto a plate). My gratuitous use of peanut oil, and my willingness to embrace the exotic world of coriander, baby corn and bean shoots made all my meals an instant success. The world was my oyster sauce… and I squeezed it for all it was worth.

So here again is my homage to simple cooking. To getting people excited about making their own meals, and to preparing food in less time than it takes to get in the car to drive to McDonalds.

Ingredients

Sliced Beef (I used about 400g of rump steak, but anything is fine, topside was my original goto cut)
2 chillis, chopped finely (less or none if you don’t want this to be spicy)
1 clove garlic minced
1/2 red capsicum
1 onion, sliced
1/2 zucchini
1 pack of egg noodles
Soy sauce
Oyster sauce
Red wine / Chinese Cooking Sherry
Big handful of chopped coriander
whatever else you can find in the fridge that looks tasty

How I Made Mine
Fry the chopped chilli in oil by itself. This gives it a real kick, and will infuse your oil with capsaicin (the stuff that makes chillis hot). Fry the garlic now too, and when its soft, throw in the beef to get it nicely coated. Fry the beef until its just cooked, adding some red wine or sherry while its going for a bit of extra flavour in the meat, then take out of the wok.

Now fry your onion, capsicum, zucchini, and whatever else you’ve decided to use. When they are getting a little soft (but still have some bite), throw the beef back in, add in the egg noodles, toss it all around, splash in enough soy sauce and oyster sauce to get the flavour your after coating the noodles and veges, then toss through your coriander (cilantro for americans), and you’re done.

Then place in front of your partner/friends/family/cat, and wait for the praise you so richly deserve :)

Breakfast – the forgotten meal

Breakfast always seems to fall off my things to do list somewhere in between the second or third time I reach over to fumble over the snooze button on my alarm clock. It’s something I know I probably should be doing, but lack the motivation to bother with most days. Yes, I know what you’re thinking, “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day!”, “You’ll never have enough energy without a good breakfast!”, which is all very well and good, but then the rest of you are thinking… “Do cigarettes count as breakfast?”. (and yes, they do, but only if they’re menthol. Regular cigarettes are more your brunch type smokes, and a cigar would be a tidy lunch (Monte Cristo No 2 if you’re feeling gourmet).

Last weekend however, I decided to see what all the fuss was about. So I dragged myself out of bed at the ungodly hour of 11am, washed the sleep out of my eyes and started to get busy in the kitchen.

Now for me… breakfast has to simple. I’m not entirely coordinated at the best of times, and so I don’t really want to be performing intricate surgery with sharp knives while my eyes are still half gummed up with sleep (is it just me that it happens to btw ??).

A quick glance into the fridge proved fruitful. I had eggs. The backbone of society, and the most complete meal you will ever find that can be squeezed out of a chickens backside. The central element of the story in place, the rest of the meal all fell into place with a resounding thud… Omlette.

Ingredients

4 eggs
2 handfuls of fresh basil leaves torn up
chopped garlic – clove or two
Handful or two of grated mozzerella
baby english spinach (teenage or toddler spinach if you can’t find babys)
a dash or two of white wine vinegar
a couple of splashes of milk
a sashay of salt and cracked black pepper
A sprinkling of chopped red capsicum

How I Made It
Directions were simple… I was still half asleep remember. This is my standard method for making an omlette, so if you have some additions or suggestions to make, then please let me know as I am nothing if not flexible.

Beat the eggs and mix in all the ingredients, season nicely with salt and pepper and add the milk, vinegar, cheese and mix again until its a relatively homogeneous looking mixture. In a pan, melt a little butter over a moderate heat, and then pour your omlette mixture in. Give it a bit of a shake to spread the chunky bits around, and then let it settle and wait til the base starts to set.
Once the base of the omlette has set enough, and its still a bit wet on top, transfer the whole pan into a warm oven (180 C). Then just leave it in the oven for about 5 minute or so and you are done. Take the pan out (careful of the hot handle) and place a plate over the top. Flip the pan and if you’re lucky it’ll drop out nicely onto the plate. I don’t do any other fancy flipping or shimmying of the omlette because I don’t know how, and at this point I’m starving and need protein.

Toast some bread, butter it up, slap the omlette on top, and Robert is your fathers brother.

This one was particular airy and fluffy, which was quite delightful. It went just nice with my latte as well, which whilst having some very dubious attempt at latte art done on top of it, was actually quite good, and may have been the last coffee I made on my Silvia before her boiler died (see next post).

The rest of the day was just as good, lying back on the couch watching downloaded episodes of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential (which I somehow missed when it was on TV), and revelling in eggy gluttony. Can’t think of anything much better.

Fancy Aglio Olio

Some days laziness pays off. It was late, I was tired, Sharon was tired, the fridge was basically empty except for a few slightly mouldy looking vegetables and the cupboard was bare ( and so the poor dog had none ).

So I starting my normal routine of sifting through the usable ingredients from those that would be best confined to a hazardous materials containment area. What I came up with was.

Ingredients

Pumpkin (over 75% of usableness)
Spices (lots of, to roast the pumpkin with)
Basil (wilting, but still flavoursome)
Pasta (dried :( )
Chorizo (didn’t know I had any, but cured, so should still be good)
Cherry tomatoes (the ones at the bottom were all smooshed, but the ones on top were still good)
Olive oil (I have lots of it now… which i’ll be writing about soon)
Garlic (enough to scare off a coven of persistent vampires, always handy)

Directions
I started by peeling and chopping the pumpkin, then covering it will all the spices I could find (ok, not all of them, but a few), which was coriander seeds, fennel seeds, cumin seeds, dried chilli, salt, pepper. Then drizziling them in olive oil and roasting them on a tray in the oven for 15-20 minutes or so.

I then chopped the cherry tomatoes, chopped some garlic, mixed the garlic and tomatoes together with lots of olive oil and the chopped basil, started frying to chopped up chorizo, and then added the tomato mixture. Let that all soften up a little and then threw in the pasta (which had been secretly boiling in a large pot with a little salt and olive oil the whole time). Stir it all around, add lots more olive oil, some crushed garlic, the roast pumpkin, and some more olive oil for good luck.

What you get is fancy aglio olio (garlic & oil) :)

Just the thing to hit the spot after a hard night of lying of the couch, playing video games, watching downloaded episodes of Little Britain (Computer says no…), and generally mooching about. Sharon gave it the thumbs up and so I have another quickie to throw into the repetoire.

5 things to always have in the cupboard for gourmet emergencies

Dried Pasta
Canned Tomatos
Risotto Rice
Sea Salt and Black Peppercorns
Liquid chicken stock

5 things to always have in the fridge for gourmet emergencies

Milk
Fresh basil and spinach (if not in the garden)
Chorizo (Or equivalent pork based sausage product)
Onions & Garlic (my garlic actually lives on my bench)
Fresh Parmesan Cheese

Let me know if you can think of anything to add to those lists.

Chinese Risotto

Anyone who reads this site on a semi regular basis would think I have some kind of risotto obsession.

So to add to that… here’s another concoction I made recently. A chinese influenced risotto using baby corn, bok choy, and chinese cooking sherry as the base.

It was tasty… but somewhat “uninspired”, which is my new favourite word to describe things that are nice, but not up to my own level of expectation.

Thus ends the risotto posts for the time being. Unless anyone out there can suggest some I should try ??

Cmon…challenge me !

Mouse Traps

Another lazy night, sitting around, drinking, chatting, doing nothing imparticular, and once again it gets to be late at night and all I’ve eaten is half a bag of Nacho Doritos and two bottles of strongbow. So now to find a proper solution for dinner.

I quickly realised that the house was almost completely devoid of any real food, but did manage to find some cheese, bread, and a few grape tomatoes… So the choice was simple… Mouse traps !

Mouse traps were what my family has always called grilled cheese on toast. I have no idea where the name originated, however it’s no great mystery as to why. If i were a mouse i’d find it pretty hard to resist delicious golden grilled cheese oozing over crispy toast as well. Basically if it was Sunday night, and mum couldn’t be bothered cooking for 5 children, mouse traps were what we got.

The stock standard mouse trap was ham, cheese and tomato, however we also experimented with creamed corn, baked beans, spaghetti, and any else you could conceivably make fit onto bread, cover with cheese, and grill.

These literally took 5 minutes to make, including preparation time, and about 1 minute of cooking time under a hot grill.

I pimped mine up with grape tomatos, fresh basil, mozzarella, cracked pepper, and a liberal splashing of extra virgin olive oil.

The ultimate low impact dinner solution.

Cheating Cajun Curry Chicken (if a woodchuck could chuck wood)

I love alliteration. I also love curry. In the past I could probably be described as a curry ignoramous. I had no idea what went into it, how to eat it, and how many different kinds of curry there actually are out there.

The lovely Sharon however, has opened my eyes to the big wide world of curries that exist. She is personally an afficionado of Malaysian and Thai Green Curry, and makes a pretty decent Indian Curry too. She is at the point of having a specially concoted mixtures of herbs, spices, and chilli’s that she crafts in a seriously hot base. So needless to say my natural causcasian aversion to eating spicey foods has taken a back seat of late, and I am growing a new stomach lining to handle a bevvy of new taste sensations… and loving it too :)

So this was my attempt at getting in on the act… Albeit by making a curry I have no real idea about… but that’s never stopped me before…

The meal was actually inspired by a trip we took to Rickies (?) Cafe in Mt Lawley. It’s run by a West Indian guy from London, and they serve really down to earth West Indian/Jamaican style food (and you get free Johnny Cakes !). I ordered a really tasty curry chicken dish, and ever since I’ve thought about making it myself.

I do feel like a bit of a fraud though, because I haven’t gone and investigated how to make the cajun spice mix myself. I just happened to be in Fresh Provisions one day and came across a packet of “Cajun Spice Mix”, containing such exotic ingredients as “Pepper”, and “Mixed Spices”… So i decided to give it a go.

Ingredients

Chicken (i like breast (teehee), but apparently meat on the bone is better for curry)
Cajun Spices Mix (in lieu of actually making your own)
Few Potatos
One big onion (or two small onions… or 4 miniature onions)
3 bullet chilli’s (tiny little ones that pack a punch)
Capsicum (i used some roasted stuff I needed to use up)
Sugar Snap Peas (again not exactly a cajun style ingredient, but had to use them up)
Raisans/Sultanas
Apple

Directions

Deceptively easy really. Cook it as you would any curry, which for me meant coating the chicken in the spice mixture, and rubbing it all with some olive oil (or ghee), then cutting up the chilli and frying it in some oil before adding the chicken to be browned. At the same time boil the potatos in a pot (actually sweet potato would go great in this too). Then adding the onion and getting it nice and soft, before adding the capsicum and anything else you want in there. When the potato is getting soft, add that into the mixture, and just before its done, drop in the sugar snap peas. I like these to be nice and crunchy for a bit of texture contrast.

And thats basically it. I tossed up whether I should use coconut milk or not, but opted out in the end, as I wanted to preserve the heat of the chilli… and the spice mixture I used seemed to have some kind of thickening agent in it already. I probably should have added coconut milk, because the spice mixture also had chilli in it already… So added to the 3 mega hot chillis I added, it was SPICEY ! But so very good.

Give it a try :) And if you have a good recipe for a DIY from scratch cajun/creole spice mixture, please let me know.

Poached Salmon on Scrambled Eggs

This is another in a series of faux spiceblog posts that I seem to keep arriving at. What can I say, the man is good.

So it lazy Saturday morning, but for once i wasn’t going to be satisfied with weetbix, toast, or even (shock horror) bacon and eggs. (Although that was mainly because I didn’t have any bacon).

Realising that I still had a lovely piece of salmon left over from last week, I remembered Anthony’s recipe and thought i’d give it a try.

It turned out really nice, and i did my normal routine of substituting in things I have for things I don’t, which always seems to work out ever so nicely.

Cherry/Grape Tomatoes are officially my favourite egg accompaniment.

Ingredients

6 eggs
White wine vinegar
Salmon fillets
White wine
bay leaf
Pepper corns, and cracked peppercorns
Baby Spinach
Cherry Tomatoes
Slice Field/Button Mushrooms
Cream

Directions

This is really a very simple dish, and personally I think it’s hard to cook salmon badly (although a lot of restuarants seem to try).

I like it pretty pink on the inside, so it was just a case of poaching the fillet very slowly in the white wine with bay leaf and peppercorns.

Turn the heat right down so it doesnt bubble away furiously, and you’ll soon see it start to turn a darker shade of pink, and it should be cooked in about 5 minutes or so.

The scrambled eggs were dead simple too. Slice up your mushrooms and half the cherry tomatoes, then beat your eggs together with a tablespoon or two of cream (I used double cream as thats all that was on hand). Add a dash of white wine vinegar (not sure why but eggs seem to like it), and a healthy crackling of black pepper and some sea salt. You can add whatever you like to scrambled eggs of course… but these were basically what was left in the fridge on a Saturday morning before the weekly shopping routine.

Then get the scrambled eggs cooking in a hot pan, and just before they’re done, through in a good few handfuls of fresh baby spinach and let it wilt a little.

Then serve it up and lay your poached salmon fillet across the top. Add some more cracked pepper, and perhaps a great cup of coffee, and you have the makings of a great start to the day :)