Abstract Gourmet

Just to prove that I can and do still cook on occasion, what with all these fancy schmancy restaurant reviews peppering the pages of late.

This dish is a highly unfaithful recreation of a dish I was fortunate enough to enjoy at a Slow Food Perth lunch in a what seems like a lifetime ago, making sausages at the home of Vincent Vitrelli. After wading our way through a good 100 kg or so of pig, we had time for a spot of lunch. The dish of the day for me was a delicious creamy polenta topped with Monte San Biagio sausage mixture, simmered in a little white wine.

This attempt had nowhere near the finesse of course, but I am happy to announce that my love of polenta is now assured, as is my ability to think of it as something other than the dry brick served at some Italian restaurants.

For the Ragu
Take a couple of good chorizo sausages (I had neither so I used some fairly ordinary chorizo and upped the paprika , chilli, and garlic levels myself) cut them up into chunks and set them to simmer in a glass or two of red wine. Add chopped garlic, onions, and tomatoes, and let it simmer until it starts to break down. At this point I added some chicken stock, salt, pepper, and passata, and then just let it all reduce down to a stewy consistency. A dash more paprika, and some fresh parsley finished off the dish, which was probably cooking for 30 mins or so.

For the Polenta
Despite what you may be thinking, there is no real trick to it. Aside from make sure your polenta is well lubricated with water, a little milk to finish, and I season mine with butter, salt, and cracked pepper. I’m not sure if this is heresy or not, it may well be, but it personally tastes like cardboard otherwise…
Whilst I’m happy for the polenta to be the starchy vehicle to drive the ragu home in a nice marriage of texture with flavour, I would prefer to be able to do something with it on it’s own.

I used a pretty standard brand, and initially used 3 cups of water to 1 cup of polenta. Set this on a medium heat and bring it to the boil… then reduce and let it simmer and bubble away until it gets thick. At this point I add more water, half a cup at a time, and continue stirring until it absorbs. Somewhere down the line, add some milk, a 100g of butter, and a good dose of salt and pepper, until the flavour is something in the realms of tastiness and the texture is soft and gooey. I like my polenta quite runny, and find it cool to watch the science experiment take place as it firms up on the plate when served.

I’ve been told its ready when the polenta starts to stick to the sides of the pan properly, but that seems an inexact method for me, so just let you conscience be your guide.

Serve it with a rioja or perhaps some fava beans and a nice chianti…

  chorizo, polenta, ragu, recipe, redwine, sausage

Filed by Matt at 12:49 pm under Eating In, Recipes 10 Comments (518 views)

I’m not what you’d call the most dedicated cook. I’m fickle… and probably lazy… and if I read over a recipe and it looks like it’s going to be either long or complicated, or will require me to scour the seven seas for perrywinkles and seaweed extract, I’m unlikely to give it a go.

This dish however… made me look twice.

Whilst browsing through my beloved flickr one day, I came across this outstanding photo from Santos, the talented author of Scent of Green Bananas. She’d been sent a copy of a book by chef Masaharu Morimoto (of Iron Chef America fame), and with some inspiration via Aun of Chubby Hubby, decided to give it a shot.

        

Now despite reading the recipe and finding out that the pork belly would be cooked for a total of around 10 hours, and would take around 2 or 3 days to complete if you follow the recipe to the letter, I figured that the end result looked too good not to give it a shot.

I won’t rehash the recipe here, you can feel free to get the real deal from Aun, or else go out and buy the book, which sounds like it’s full of a lot of great stuff. I will however give you a blow by blow account of the process I went through to make the whole thing.

Pork belly marathon checklist

• Purchase one slab of boneless pork belly
• Purchase 4 dried scallops (I got mine from Emma’s Yong Tau Foo in Northbridge), not cheap at $150 / kg !
• Purchase sake
• Purchase brown rice (I found some medium grain organic brown rice in Fresh Provisions)
• Sear pork belly on both sides til brown all over
• Place pork belly into an oven safe dish and cover it with water, add 3 cups brown rice to the water
• Cook pork belly for 8 hours in the rice (mine was left overnight, and then cooked for another 8 hours after I realised I didn’t turn the oven on properly… stupid symbols)
• Take the pork belly out of the rice and wrap it up, rest in fridge for 2 days
• Make spring onion oil, by slowly heating vegetable oil with spring onions and ginger.
• Mix rice for congee with spring onion oil, let it sit overnight to absorb the flavour
• Soak dried scallops in warm water til they are flakey
• Take pork belly slab out of fridge, slice it up into squares
• Braise pieces of pork in sake, soy sauce, sugar, and water for 2 hours or so (I also added star anise like Santos)
• Cook the congee using chicken stock, rice, dried scallops, and spring onion (I also added more pork, and a little coriander)
• Let the pork cook until it’s nicely caramelised and falling apart
• Serve the pork over the congee
• Do not accompany it with an aged 1999 Gewürztraminer from Henschke (it will not do it justice)
• Savour the taste of your labour

  brownrice, congee, gewurztraminer, japanese, porkbelly, recipe, sake, scallop, Wine

Filed by Matt at 11:25 am under Eating In, Recipes 13 Comments (456 views)

Sometimes I have good ideas. Sometimes I get inspiration from other people. Sometimes my good ideas lead me to find inspiration, and it’s all one happy little coincidence. So after geeking around the web recently I came across a nifty little thing called Meebo. Meebo is a site that lets you embed your own little message window into the browser, so visitors can talk to you while they’re visiting your site. Which i thought was a relatively novel idea, although I figured it would be a waste of time.

Imagine my surprise then, when not long after setting it up, long time reader, first time instant live chatter Brad decided to mosey on by the site and give me an awesome recipe for the now obviously titled “Vietnamese Caramelised Chicken”.

According to Brad it was made by his brother recently, but he was going to do one better by remaking it with some additions. After taking a quick look at the recipe, I figured it could just about fit the often eclectic mix of ingredients I had in my fridge at the time, and so I printed it out and headed home to make it that very night.

    

The recipe from Brad, in it’s elegant simplicity is shown below. With the stuff in brackets being my own modifications.

VIETNAMESE-STYLE CARAMEL CHICKEN

Heat the oil in a pan and brown the chicken in 2 batches, Remove the chicken and set aside. Add the garlic, shallots and chilli to the pan and cook over a gentle heat until soft and golden brown. Return the chicken to the pan and add the soy sauce and brown sugar. Cover and cook for 10 minutes, remove the lid, turn up the heat and cook, stirring until the chicken is coated and the sauce has reduced to a sticky syrup.

Serve on steamed rice with a squeeze of lemon or lime over the top.

For a very simple video of the process I went through to make it, check this out

So the result was great. Succulent chicken and a thick slightly sweet sauce that came together as the brown sugar was absorbed into the soy sauce. The coriander gave it a fragrant lift, along with a splash of apple cider (the new Pipsqueak brand from Little Creatures) that just felt right at the time.

Here’s to serendipity bringing great ideas your way soon. And if you haven’t checked out the actual website in a while, stop by soon and say hello, I promise to try not to freak you out :)

  caramelised, chicken, cider, recipe, video, vietnamese

Filed by Matt at 10:11 pm under Eating In, Recipes 6 Comments (452 views)

So in lieu of actually writing a new post, I’m resorting to the quintessential one I prepared earlier… this was dinner from a few nights ago… however the recipe is a little ripper that I pulled together last year, formerly Double Pumpkin Risotto, but now refactored into single pumpkin (downsizing is inevitable these days).

Butternut Pumpkin Risotto

How I Made Mine

This one will again be pretty short on specifics because I’ve made so many risottos that writing out the specific technique in detail again is like running my nails down a black board.

So suffice to say you make a risotto like you normally would. Fry the onions/leek/garlic in some butter or olive oil and then add the rice. Coat the rice in the veges and then add the wine, maybe a cup or so. Once the wine has absorbed, start adding the chicken stock (which has been simmering on the stove nearby) a ladle full at a time.

The different thing about this dish though, is the pumpkin purée. I made mine by chopping up the pumpkin into little chunks and putting it into a pot of salted water to boil until soft but not falling apart. When the boiled pumpkin is done, drain it, and put it into a blender along with some thickened cream, salt and pepper, and purée until it’s a nice smooth texture throughout. Seasoning or adding more cream until you get the consistency you’re after… which should be a thick liquid.

So once the risotto is about half way cooked, add the pumpkin purée and stir it through well. The moisture in the purée will continue to be absorbed by the rice, so let it simmer for a while and soften up, before finishing off with a good handful of grated parmesan. I also sprinkled chopped chorizo flakes over the top, which had been quickly fried til slightly crispy.

A delicious winter warmer if ever there was one…

  chorizo, pumpkin, recipe, risotto

Filed by Matt at 10:17 pm under Eating In, Recipes 14 Comments (629 views)

Well after a short lived foray into tea, it’s back to the tried and true original, coffee. Something a little different to my usual home barista shenanigans this time though. In the past, much of my efforts have been focused on preparing and perfecting espresso and milk based drinks. To the extent that I think I’ve been remiss in my attention to other forms of preparing coffee that are equally as rewarding. It’s easy to get excited about a perfect ristretto pour dripping like honey into your cup… but I’ve discovered recently that you can do just fine with nothing more sophisticated than a pot of hot water.

Enter Turkish coffee. Or Lebanese coffee, or Greek Coffee, or Arabic Coffee, or Armenian coffee… they’re all roughly similar, and I’m just using Turkish because it’s perhaps the best known. Long before Mr Gaggia pulled together the first modern espresso machine circa 1938, those crazy Ottomans (the people, not the foot rests), were hanging around the worlds first coffee shop in downtown Constantinople circa 1475… in fact Turkish law at that time made it legal for a woman to divorce her husband if he failed to provide her with her daily quota of coffee. Which is fair enough really.

So in a country (Australia) where some major cities have an espresso machine in every other laundromat, there’s a tendency to forget about the ways that millions of other people around the world appreciate coffee every day. Hence I present in it’s complex simplicity, my attempt at brewing Turkish coffee.

Let me just say right now that I am no expert at this. I’ve based my method on what I’ve gleaned from other websites, from talking to people, and from drinking variations of this in restaurants and cafes. I will not be offended if you completely disagree with me… much.

How I make mine

So to start with you need a couple of things. An Ibrik (or cezve), a grinder, and some coffee.

An ibrik (eee-brick) is a small pot, often made of copper or brass, that is used to boil coffee. The one I bought is a little fancier than the tradition sort, with a solid stainless steel base and a moulded handle… which hopefully doesn’t disqualify me in the authenticity stakes. You should be able to find them in middle eastern supply stores.

The grind is the next most important thing. Turkish coffee is the finest of all grind levels, and basically resembles dust. You can buy special Turkish coffee mills that will give you a really fine grind, or else you could try a mortar and pestle. I use my espresso grinder on it’s lowest possible setting… 4 stops below my normal espresso level, which gives me coffee so fine I can barely see it.

Turkish coffee is typically drunk out of small cups. Thimble sized ones sometimes. I use my Chinese tea cups, which seem to give a decent portion in each pour. To work out how much water you need in the ibrik, try using roughly one teaspoon of ground coffee per cupful of water. So to make 6 cups, measure 6 cups of water into the ibrik, and add 6 teaspoons of coffee.

View the pictoral guide by click the images above, or by going to my flickr site for some more details

There’s an old saying that goes:

Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death and as sweet as love.

If this isn’t talking about Turkish coffee then I don’t know what is. The fineness of the grind, when incorporated into water, creates a thick solution reminiscent of mud when you get down to the bottom. Sugar is also commonly added at the start of the brewing process, rather than at the end, which would account for the sweetness. I’d add about a third as many teaspoons of sugar as the number of cups… So 2 teaspoons of sugar for 6 cups…

If you want to be extra fancy/authentic (like I did), you can also add a pinch or two of ground cardamom at this stage. It gives the coffee a wonder flavour that is distinct yet not overpowering (given you don’t add too much), that seems to be popular.

Once you’ve combined all the ingredients and stirred well so that it’s all mostly dissolved, then it’s time for the cooking. Put the ibrik onto the heat (a gas burner in my case), and over a moderate flame, heat it til it starts to bubble up and boil. Once its beginning to boil, remove it from the heat before it can overflow the ibrik… It’s important to keep a close watch on the boiling because things can get out of control in a hurry.

Once the first boil settles down, put the ibrik back over a low heat and bring it back to the boil… again stopping before it overflows. Repeat this process a final time, and you’re done. It’s apparently quite important to try and retain as much of the thick foam as possible while boiling. I think I’m a long way off perfecting it, but the flavour in the cup at the end is definitely to my liking, so I think I’m on the right track.

So now pour the coffee out into small espresso / chinese tea sized cups and sip away at the thick sweet spiced flavours, and feel it warming you from the inside out. Traditionally it’s drunk with a cup of water and perhaps a little glass of mint liqueur at the end of a meal, which sounds like a good excuse for me to try and construct a Turkish dinner menu sometime soon.

So next time you’re kicking yourself over bitter espresso and woeful attempts at latte art, just grab the nearest pot and give this method a shot. 71 millions Ottomans can’t all be wrong :)

  cardamom, Coffee, lebanese, recipe, turkish

Filed by Matt at 2:14 am under Coffee, Photography, Recipes 17 Comments (731 views)

There are times when food blogging can be a difficult thing. You get to the end of the long day at work and come home, only to find that all you have in the fridge are a can of tuna, a carrot, some limp lettuce, and piece of blue cheese that isn’t supposed to be blue. Then you have to somehow magically conjure something out of them all that would make Gordon Ramsey stop swearing and act like a normal human being for at least the time it takes him to eat it.

This is not always easy…

Then of course there are times where being a food blogger is great. Like when you get to travel interstate and/or overseas and meet up with lovely people who appreciate the food that you do, and give you delicious little presents for you to take home. Sharon and I were lucky enough to have just that happen when we met up with Deborah in Sydney last month, and had a great time trying to smuggle her delicious banana jam back into the state.

So rather than risking quarantine laws again, or having to resort to some kind of undercover espionage to secretly ferry truckloads of the stuff in, I decided it was probably time to try the recipe myself.

So the orginal recipe is right here, but for the sake of easiness and to help my non-existent ad revenue, I will reprint the details here with a few of my modifications.

Jamaica (Australian) Banana Jam Recipe

How I made mine

Squeeze the lime juice into a bowl and chop the bananas into it in little chunks. I didn’t really need to worry about my bananas darkening, because they were so ripe they had darkened already. To take into account for having overripe bananas, and hence sweeter bananas, I simply reduced the amount of sugar in the original recipe by about 3/4 of a cup.

So then measure the sugar and water into a pot, and stir to dissolve sugar as you bring syrup to a boil.

Once it’s just starting to boil, add banana mixture and boil over low heat for about 30 minutes or until thick. Keep stirring it all the time to stop it from sticking to the sides, and to kind of mash up the banana as you go. Along the way add the cinnamon to the mixture, adding less or more depending on how much you want this flavour coming through. The mixture will slowly start to cook down over time, and will eventually turn into a thick gooey kind of paste, which will get even gooier after it cools down.

The jam is done when a spoon scraped across bottom of pan leaves a track that closes slowly.

Once you’re done, spoon the jam into hot sterilized jars and seal. I used the thinking man’s approach and reused the jar Deb gave me in the first place, which seemed to work quite nicely. I had one whole jar full, and a another half a jar or so left over. Don’t ask my what it is in metric quantities because I have no idea, but suffice to say you could easily double the whole recipe and make a whole bunch of this if you were so inclined. Once your friends and family get a taste you will have no problems getting rid of it.

Another couple of tips are not to try and lick the spoon while you’re making this, or you will more than likely burn your tongue, just like I did. And it will not be a comical Tom and Jerry like episode where you run around with steam pouring out of your mouth looking for a bucket of water to douse your head in… It will hurt.

Well that’s about all really. It was quite a lovely recipe to make, and I’ve enjoyed it very much over toast, crumpets, english muffins, and a variety of other toast like foods. I also think it would be fantastic on a batch of fresh scones with butter and cream… So maybe I should find a good recipe for them too… Deb ? :)

  banana, breakfast, jam, recipe, toast

Filed by Matt at 7:16 pm under Eating In, Recipes 23 Comments (444 views)

What is it about cute animals that causes such controversy when they’re turned into tasty dishes ? Rob certainly knows what I’m talking about ever since recreating an El Bulli masterpiece of deep fried bunny ears (!) Now any card carrying PETA member will get sufficiently riled at the mere thought of eating meat, whether it be sheep, cows, pigs, or other… but nothing fires up those latent animal rights activists, who might otherwise let meaty bygones be bygones, more than something cute and furry on the menu.

Now I’m not about to start harvesting kangaroo ears or tails, or paws, and turning them into some kind of elaborate sorbet that requires a half tonne of liquid nitrogen and an industrial meat mincer to create. I’m much more concerned about eating something tasty, rather than pushing any sort of quasi political agenda, however I do find it interesting that there is still something about eating our native animal and national emblem that a great deal of Australians find off putting. We’re still really working out whether we even have a national dish.

The thing is though… Kangaroo is delicious meat. It’s dark and rich and gamey, and if seasoned well and cooked properly, can evoke all the melt in your mouth qualities of a well cooked hunk of beef. Of course, Kangaroos aren’t renowned for the amount of fat they have on them, so if you overcook it, it will turn out dry, and hard, and rubbery, and terrible. Along the lines of one of Dad’s lambs fry (fried liver) breakfasts from my childhood.

Don’t expect me to start draping myself in the flag, eating witchety grubs for breakfast, and seasoning everything with wattleseed. But I think Kangaroo is something that everyone should try at least once so they can say they have. The sooner we break out of the mould of thinking of ourselves either as a former British colony, or as the Mediterranean relocated down under… the sooner we’ll be able to embrace much more of our native produce in new and interesting ways.

Ingredients

How I made mine

So basically rub the fillets all over with olive oil and season well with salt (perhaps trying some Murray River salt as mentioned by Linda in the comments recently), then grind the Szechuan peppercorns up and rub it all over the meat. Leave that to sit for a while, and in the meantime, put the potatoes on to boil.

When the potatoes are almost cooked, but still quite firm, take them out and plunge them into an ice bowl (or bowl of cold water). Then carefully (they’ll still be hot inside) peal them. Cooking them in the skins supposedly keeps the flavour in while they’re cooking… but if you can’t be bothered, peel them beforehand.

Once they’re peel, slice them into little round pieces for sautéing. Season a pan with olive oil on high heat and very quickly fry some garlic for flavour, then throw in the potato slices and a good stick of butter. Sauté the potatoes on a high heat until they are nice and crispy and golden on the outside.

Now we’re ready to cook the kangaroo. Remember… less is more… less time cooking = more juices and flavour left in the meat… obviously there’s an optimal point for everyone, but I personally don’t go much past rare when cooking kangaroo. So put it into a hot pan with olive oil and sear quickly all over for a few minutes (depending on how thick the piece is). Give it a poke to try and work out how done it is, and when it’s close to being done, take it out and put it into the oven to finish cooking. It should only be in a moderate oven for a 10 minutes or so before being ready. Take it out of the oven, let it to sit and rest for a few minutes, and then slice it up into elegant morsels.

When you’re done with the kangaroo, deglaze the pan juices with red wine, add your cherry tomatoes, red onion, and a little sugar for a caramelising effect to the sauce. Reduce it down until the onions and tomatoes are falling apart and the sauce is thick… And you’re done.

Arrange your potatoes and kangaroo on a plate and spoon the sauce over the top. I served mine with a robust Shiraz (the Croftiers Shiraz from Houghtons in the Swan Valley), which fit the full flavours of the kangaroo perfectly.

If that isn’t a slice of Australia, I don’t know what is !

  australian, cherrytomato, kangaroo, recipe, redwine, shiraz

Filed by Matt at 10:22 pm under Eating In, Recipes 10 Comments (193 views)

What do you do when you have a hankering for something different, as a curry, without breaking the bank ? You buy duck sausages ! (of course).

Last time I went to my local butchers (The excellent Meat the Butcher in Dog Swamp Shopping Centre), to find duck for my curry. The friendly chap on the other end of the meat cleaver suggested I try their duck sausages as an alternative. I decided against it at the time, as I wanted the gaminess that duck breast provides that time around… but then found myself strangely drawn back there the following week (I have a certain attraction to butchers, kitchen supply stores, and bottle shops, which I’m sure that puts me in a certain category I should be concerned about).

So I bought three lovely duck sausages at a pittance (compared to duck breast) and rushed away gleefully to find a recipe for them. But what do you know… in a first for food nerds the world over…the internet failed me… Searching for all manner of terms including “duck sausages” “duck curry sausages” “curry sausages” “+sausages +curry +duck -sweetandsour” etc provided nothing that I could easily steal and proudly claim for my own. So it was up to my wiley self to come up with something suitable.

My thinking cap firmly on, I raided the spice rack for every conceivable thing I could think of that might go well with duck sausages, and came up with this.

Duck Sausage Curry

So basically I do my curries in a similar style most times, whether it be right or wrong. I started off by dry roasting the dry spices (fennel, coriander, and fenugreek) for about 30 seconds in a hot pan, then taking them out and putting them into my mortar and pestle to be ground finely.

Then add some butter/oil/ghee (whatever you like to cook with) to the pan and fry the chopped onions, fennel, and garlic at a relatively low heat until translucent and soft. At the same time (and this is probably cheating), I have the potatoes boiling in their own pot of water, so I don’t need them to cook in the curry itself, which saves a bit of time.

So once the onion mixture is nice and soft… add all the dry spices, the turmeric, chilli powder, and other stuff that was ground up, and coat the onion mixture with it nicely, so all the turmeric is absorbed into the mixture, and it colours it. Now add your duck sausages that have been sliced up into pieces (as chunky as you like them). Stir them all around and get them coated in the onions and spices too, and perhaps add a little water if the mixture is starting to stick to the pan and dry out.

Once the sausages are nicely coated and basically cooked, add the potatoes (which should be cooked but still firm), and the coconut cream and curry leaves, and then stir it all through so the sauce is nice and thick and the colour has absorbed all throught the coconut cream. Taste it and see if it needs anything else at this point, like more chilli or salt/pepper, and if not, turn the heat down, put a lit on the pan, and let the flavours absorb for a little while.

When you’re happy with how it’s looking, and all those wonderful flavours have pervaded every corner of your kitchen. Spoon it out over a pile of steaming hot rice, and dig it. One of the tastiness creations I’ve made in a long time.

And introduce yourself to your local butcher. You never know what great things they may have in the back of those fridges just waiting for you to discover them.

  curry, duck, fennel, onion, recipe, sausage

Filed by Matt at 5:12 pm under Eating In, Recipes 11 Comments (116 views)

I had the idea recently of organising a little curry night. I’ve been getting into all sorts of curry over the past couple of years, spurred on by Sharon introducing me to some excellent Malaysian curry. I’d never really understood the curry before then. I just figured it was a hot spicey kind of soup that other people ate, and that I didn’t like. I’m not sure why I had that idea, but I think it’s an important one to get rid of if you ever want to experience all the world of food has to offer.

Since then I haven’t looked back, having tried out a whole range of Malaysian, Thai, Southern Indian, North Indian, and Vietnamese curries, a good number of Moroccan tajines (which are almost kinda like curry), and doing my best to avoid Japanese curry, which still defies all logic.

So just last Saturday night a few of our closest curry making friends dropped by to share the love, and the food in their own special way. Sharon and I spent the better part of the day procuring supplies from Kongs (the local Asian supermarket), and preparing the base for her curry. I’m always amazed walking around in those places… it’s like, just when you think you have a pretty decent grasp on a type of food, you step one foot into a store, look around, realise you don’t know what even half of the stuff is for, and suddenly feel very small again.

A recent discovery along those lines for me personally was Asafoetida… which i’m sure is pretty common to my sub continental readers, but was a complete mystery to me. Turns out it’s a kind of spice made from the resin extracted out of the stems and roots of the Ferula plant, and is used particularly by Indians who are practitioners of Jainism, as a replacement for certain foods (onions, ginger, garlic) that they aren’t allowed to eat.

That has nothing to do with this post of course, other than to state formally that I still know bugger all about a great many things… and any education my learned readers are able to give is always appreciated.

So on to the curries.

Dan and Mabel brought a lovely lamb curry, I would say vindaloo, but I might be wrong, so i’ll stay general for now.
Dave and Mel also brought a lamb curry, this was a southern Indian style dish with no coconut milk and a predominant clove, cinnamon flavour to it.
Jen and Ben brought a Bicol Express (!). My first experience with Filipino curry and apparently one of the few of such dishes that exist in the Phillipines, It’s basically pork, chicken, beans, chilli, tumeric, and… ummm, stuff. Very tasty indeed and sadly too hot for the creator to manage, but well done Jen for taking one for the team.

Sharon made a Malaysian chicken curry. This one had a lot of ginger, chilli, kaffir lime leaves, galangal, garlic, onion, tumeric… all blended into a wonderful paste that got smeared all over the chicken (one the bone) while they cooked away for a good few hours til nice and fall apart-ified.
I was stuck for options, not having a home land from which to draw curry making experience from I either had to choose from my list of previous conquests that turned out ok, or tread the lonely road of experimental curry making.

Plucking up all my courage, I turned the pages of Mel’s curry book she had kindly lent me, and settled on one that looked sufficiently different yet still tasty… Duck curry. A slightly odd choice perhaps, and not the most well known of all curries, but it was in the book dammit, and apparently is quite popular in the Kerala region of India where water fowl are more prevalent, and clearly not fast enough to not get eaten.

So I started with Duck breast… three of em, skinned and cubed. Fried a little fenugreek and fennel seeds in some oil and then added a whole onion, two green chillis, and a good dose of shredded ginger. When that was nice and soft I added some more chilli powder and a dash of turmeric. To that lovely concoction went the duck breast, to get coated and loved with all the spices and flavours. The rest was simple, throw in a few baby potatoes, a handful of curry leaves and a spash or three of coconut cream, and Babu’s your uncle. It turned out pretty darn good even if I do say so myself, and I do… Of course I am the worlds most biased food critic, and can quite easily overlook the slighty dry and somewhat gamey texture of the duck, which perhaps would have been nicer had I used it on the bone and cooked it for a couple more hours. Still, it was a triumph for experimental curriests the world over, and a great first effort.

We finished off with these lovely little mango and coconut puddings that Mel lovingly coaxed out their shells and served with a good dollop of ice cream.

All in all a great night, and like all things curry, the best was yet to come. Two days later and I’m still going strong with the left overs, and as much as a fan of Johnny Cash I am, there hasn’t been one ring of fire to speak of. Thanks to everyone for putting in the effort and all I can say is the next one will have some huge expectations… Anyone know where I can buy Iguana ?

  chicken, coconut, curry, dinner, duck, filipino, friends, indian, lamb, malaysian, recipe

Filed by Matt at 12:28 am under Eating In, Recipes 12 Comments (188 views)

In a rare display of creative fervency, I’ve decided to post more than one thing in any given week… So I hope you’re all realising how lucky you are… and are basking in the happy glow that only my biting sarcasm can provide.

You may have just read my post on The Pony Club restaurant… a tapas restaurant Sharon and I went to visit recently. The other part of the story that I didn’t share was that we had a little encounter as we were leaving. As we were strolling out the door and down the steps, mumbling to ourselves at how much of a rip off it was, and how we could have made better at home quite easily, when suddenly we heard a “snap”, turned around, and there was a photographer standing on a ladder with her camera pointed directly at us.

“Can you do that again ?” she said…

“What? Walk out ?”

“Yeh… but a bit slower this time”

“Yeah sure, why not”

So Sharon and I spend the next 5 minutes walking up and down the stairs and looking at the menu on the door with introspective contemplation, while she continued to take shots of us, to be used somewhere down the track in a review of the Pony Club for the Qantas inflight magazine.

I thought it was all quite hilarious, and being an amateur photographer of increasing aplomb, I swiftly handed her my card and let her know I’d appreciate a copy of them. None have arrived yet, but that might just be because the review hasn’t turned up in the magazine yet. If their review was anything like mine I somehow doubt it will… but then I can’t see Qantas magazine putting a byline of “Overpriced Spanish Flavoured Crap” on any of their reviews in the near future.

So after wandering off feeling like C-grade celebrities, we headed straight for Fresh Provisions to pick up supplies for this very dish. With keen determination to make it better and significantly cheaper than we’d just experienced.

Chorizo and Chick Pea Stew

How I made mine

So simple it’s not even funny. Fry your chorizo in a little olive oil and then add the splash of red wine to deglaze. Wait til it’s absorbed into the chorizo a little and then add the garlic and onion. When they’re starting to soften, add the tomatoes, tomato puree, and chickpeas, then stir through well. When it’s thickening up nicely, add the paprika, chilli, and any other spices you might find, stir it through well, turn down the heat, and walk away.

Come back in about 20 minutes or so and you should hopefully have a nice thick hearty, spicy concoction, worthy of any drunken Spaniard.

Serve with a few thick pieces of crusty bread smothered in butter, and a wedge or two of lemon for a continental tinge.

So easy and quick and tasty… and with the volume I made of it, possibly worth a small fortune in a trendy tapas restaurant. Fortunately I am a VIP in my own dining room, I don’t think I could afford to eat there otherwise…

  chickpea, chorizo, recipe, stew

Filed by Matt at 12:42 pm under Eating In, Recipes 10 Comments (184 views)