Category: Eating In

Meals i’ve made, possibly with recipes.

Fettucini with Cherry Tomatos & Tuna

sharons-fettucini 001

Another pretty simple recipe. Sharon wanted to have a go at making pasta, so I did my best to impart the benefit of all my years of surfing the web and stealing other peoples recipes.

A simple set of directions would be:

Start with a mound of really fine flour ’00’ rated is good, add an egg, mix it in… add a bit of salt, mix that in… then gradually add water until you’ve got a nice firm ball of dough. Then roll it out… knead it for a while so it’s nice a soft and consistent… then put it through the pasta roller or roll it really flat with a rolling pin. Now you’re ready to turn it into whatever else you like. We put it through the cutter that comes with the pasta roller, and it made us nice fettucini strips.

So after about half an hour of “instruction” we had some nice freshly made fettucini.

Then we had to work out what we wanted to do with it… So this recipe was basically determined by what i like to call the refridgerator gamble ™ (actually thats the first time i’ve used that term, but it sounds catchy).

I opened the fridge, looked to see what could be used, what needed to be used, and what i wanted to use.

So what we found was:

Ingredients:

* Cherry Tomatos
* Mushrooms
* Basil
* Garlic
* Red Wine (no this wasn’t in the fridge)
* Tomato Puree
* Tuna covered in Japanese Mayonaisse (left over from sushi).

The idea then was simple. Sautee all the ingredients together til there was a nice rich creamy sauce, boil the fettucini in a deep pan of water with oil and a little salt (fresh pasta cooks so quickly… probably only took about 3 – 5 minutes). Fold the fettucini into the sauce… Serve !

sharons-fettucini 004

I can’t say it’s the prettiest thing we’ve ever made… but it was tasty and healthy… and economical, and no animals were harmed during the making of this meal… unless you count fish as animals of course…

Cinnamon Scrolls

Cinnamon Scrolls

My mum made these for us on a regular basis. They usually formed part of a casual Sunday evening meal, along with thick pumpkin soup and freshly scones with lots of butter. I always remember the smell of the cinnamon coming out of the kitchen, and being slightly disappointed whenever i got the end one…which was a bit harder than the others…

Cinnamon Scrolls

Here’s the recipe i roughly followed…

INGREDIENTS:
* 1-1/2 packages (about 3-1/4 teaspoons) dry yeast
* 1/4 cup warm water
* 1/3 cup vegetable oil
* 1/3 cup sugar
* 1-1/2 teaspoon salt
* 1 cup milk
* 1 egg
* 4 to 5 cups sifted flour
* butter
* brown sugar
* cinnamon (ground or crushed from sticks)
* crushed fennel seeds

DIRECTIONS:
Combine yeast with the warm water and let it sit for a minute to activated the yeast. Heat the milk up in a microwave til its warm, and then add it to the vegetable oil. Then add to this the yeast mixture, sugar, and salt, and the beaten egg. Mix it til it forms a kind of solution.

Now start adding the sifted flour one cup full at a time, working it into the mixture with a spatula until you’ve got a nice big soft doughy ball. It shouldn’t be too sticky, but it shouldn’t be very firm either.

Once you’ve got it to the consistency you want, leave it in a bowl with a moist towl over it to prove (let it rise). Then after an hour or so, punch the air out of it, and let it rise again. When you’re ready to make your scrolls… roll out your dough on a flat tray that has been rubbed with butter… get it a nice rectangular shape, and then cover it with a layer of brown sugar, cinnamon, and the crushed fennel seeds. Then roll it up nice and slowly and cut the roll into little scrolls about an inch and a half thick.

Pop them in the oven and bake at about 180 C for around 20 minutes… possibly longer, i forget how long i actually took… just keep an eye on it, because over cooking turns them dry and lifeless pretty quickly (i learnt that the hard way with the first batch).

enjoy :)

Curried Chicken Risotto

Curried Chicken Risotto

I hadn’t made a risotto for a while so i felt in the mood for one. I decided to use a chicken/white wine base this time.

This is my standard procedure of cooking risotto…

  1. Cook the onion/leek/garlic,
  2. heat stock (wine, stock, water, salt),
  3. heat and coat the rice with onion/oil/butter
  4. add a cup of wine to start with
  5. stir
  6. add stock
  7. stir
  8. test rice…still hard
  9. add stock
  10. stir
  11. add stock
  12. stir
  13. test rice…getting soft
  14. add stock
  15. stir
  16. add stock
  17. stir
  18. test rice, close enough to being ready to add things that need a bit of heat
  19. add those things (meat,seafood, hard vegetables)
  20. add stock
  21. stir
  22. add more stock (stock getting low so hope i dont need much more)
  23. add seasoning (pepper, salt, ground spices, coriander, cumin, tumeric, fennel seed etc)
  24. add stock
  25. stir
  26. taste
  27. add more seasoning
  28. test rice, getting close to being done now
  29. add stock
  30. add cheese (parmesan, peccorino, whatever you like, skip if it doesn’t suit cheese)
  31. stir
  32. taste
  33. add more seasoning
  34. add spinach or greens that need to be wilted (bok choy, cabbage, roquette etc)
  35. stir
  36. taste
  37. add a bit of butter or cream to boost that fat content up and add extra creaminess to finish (can also skip this)
  38. stir
  39. taste, perfection on a spoon.
  40. done !

So for this recipe i added onion, garlic and fennel at step 1, chicken (pre cooked) and baby carrots at step 19, tumeric, cumin, salt, pepper, lemon juice at step 23… and skipped the cheese, green vegetables, and cream steps of my normal routine.

It turned out pretty nice… lovely creamy curry flavour coming through the rice and chicken. I also use Carnaroli rice instead of arborio. This is because im under the impression that it has a higher starch content than Arborio, and gives a much creamier finish than Arborio rice does.

Give it a try !

Fresh Artichoke Ravioli with Creamy Pumpkin Sauce

Fresh Artichoke Ravioli with Creamy Pumpkin Sauce

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 :) ***

Moroccan Lamb Rack with Spiced Kipfler Potato Salad

Morroccan Lamb with Spiced Kipfler Potato Salad

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…

Home made pasta with Salmon & Spinach

Home made pasta with Salmon & Spinach

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…