Abstract Gourmet

Just a quick one because I am terribly behind in a lot of these posts. This was a pretty simply meal I thought up after coming across a great little Chinese butcher called Wing Hong, around the corner from where I work in Northbridge (the studious among you might be able to work out where that is now). They sell more parts of a pig than I knew existed, and so I eventually braved the language barrier, headed in, and managed to buy myself a pork belly. The fact that I was actually asking for chicken is irrevelant, and we’ll all pretend it was a great idea from the start.

Pork Belly is a pretty trendy cut of meat of late, or at least it was up until a year or so ago. So maybe I’m behind the times, but that’s never stopped me from jumping on the bandwagon. So what to do with it…I heard you whispering excitedly… thanks to the bugs I’ve installed in EVERYONES house ! Ahem…

Well, for some reason the words “roast pork belly with fennel” jumped into my head… perhaps from a recipe I’d seen before, perhaps from a dream (albeit a sad one) I had once… who knows… but the inspiration was secured.

So after scoring the top of the belly and rubbing a bunch of fennel seeds, salt, pepper, and olive oil into the top, it was time for oven. (oh and some sliced fennel to go with it, but don’t do what I do and leave it in there for 40 minutes to burn unmercifully into little fennel crunchy charcoal chips).

The next part was another dream like idea that came to me… Caramelised red cabbage, which had been sitting in the fridge for too long and needed to be given a good home. Fortunately cabbage is a good hardy vegetable, and can withstand the long periods of neglect that it is often forced to endure in the dark recesses of my fridge.

So sliced up into strips and sauteed in a little white wine vinegar and sugar, til nice and soft and caramelisedly looking.

The rest was pretty basic, a garlic mash made by crushing a couple of cloves of garlic into boiled potatoes and mashing with salt, pepper, and cream, for smooth texture and consistency.

Slice the pork belly up into thin pieces and layer daintily on top of the cabbage and mash.

Score one for breaking language barriers the world over. You never know what you might find.

  belly, cabbage, fennel, mash, pork, recipe

Filed by Matt at 6:19 pm under Eating In, Recipes 2 Comments (543 views)

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.

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.

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

  burger, enoki, mushroom, onion, pork, recipe, sweetpotato

Filed by Matt at 2:41 pm under Admin, Eating In, Recipes 2 Comments (171 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 (281 views)