Midye Dolmasi (Turkish Stuffed Mussels)

Book: Mediterranean Street Food by Anissa Helou Theme: Hor d’oeuvre Recipe: Stuffed Mussels

And we’re up to Week 3 of the Cookbook Challenge already! The theme is hor d’oeuvre. Not a word I can spell without help, to be perfectly honest. Nor am I so much of a finger food person either. But one day I was flipping through a few of my ’street food’ type books and figured hey I could just work on that angle.

Slightly fiddly – having to make the stuffing and cooking the mussels but the effort is well worth it. It was so good. I suspect the key reason was that I had some truly good mussels. These are the Spring Bay mussels (their mussel fact sheet is a good read) I bought from a fish monger at Queen Victoria Market. I have to go back to the market every week for my seafood.

Mediterranean Street Food: what a great book. It’s all black & white and very few pictures but the travelling stories and the recipes are well worth reading from cover to cover. That’s a hall mark of a good book: the ability to read from cover to cover and not get bored. Josh bought me this book as a birthday present last year. I love it.

As usual I changed the recipe a bit to suit what I have on hands but the gist of it is still the same. It’s well worth the effort to source the best live mussels you can find. You need large-ish mussels to be able to stuff successfully. I had 20 mussels for 1/2 kg. That’s the size that’s perfect for the amount of stuffing I have given here.

Melbourne Food Review: Milano on Queen, Queen St., CBD

(Scrambled eggs with extra mushrooms – $7.5+ $2.5)

This was the morning after Cafe Vue Cocktail Night - believe it or not, no hang over. Jacqui (the champ who consumed 10 about cocktails, was not the least bit drunk, and to prove it drove home got breathalysed and passed) had theorised that that is the difference good quality vodka and the nasty cheap crap that gives you hang over.

Because KJ only had two more days in Melbourne, we decided to take her to a cafe for brunch, very relaxing Saturday brunch, Melbourne style. Because it was on the way to the Queen Vic Market (let’s face it, all tourist road leads the Queen Vic), Maya had chosen this place.

(Chicken and avocado salad – $?)

Random Stuffs I Eated #2

I’m beginning to think these random posts are a really good way to use up all these photos I would never otherwise make a blog post about. Let me know if you think they’re insubstantial. Not that I would stop. I love to show off what I ate. Hehe.

This was a random beetroot and fetta salad at some launch/opening party I crashed. No I wasn’t invited. I was just there for the food. This beetroot thing wasn’t bad. Or was it the beers I had before it?

Tuna sashimi, cucumber and black caviar. Didn’t taste like much to be perfectly honest. Yes, the same picture as the one on my Twitter page.

Crispy banh xeo (Vietnamese-style crepe with prawns, beansprouts and all the yummy things) from Tien Dat. So good. Does anyone have a recommendation for banh xeo? I love the dish and would like to try other restaurants.

A Most Excellent Rogan Josh and Saffron Rice

Book: Food Safari by Maeve O’Meara (recipe by Kumar Mahadevan) Theme: Indian Recipe: Rogan Josh

This week flew, didn’t it? The Cookbook Challenge Week 2 theme is Indian. I have been itching to buy myself an Indian cookbook as I love making Indian food but never really got around to it. The Food Safari book is the companion to the Food Safari series (which I love and have on DVDs despite not having a functional TV at home). It has amazing recipes – which better still can be watched individually on the SBS Food website.

This recipe is such a winner. It’s spicy, and oniony and meaty. The lamb was just so soft and rich. We have a bit of love for this Kashmiri specialty in our house because Josh orders a rogan josh when he is out of ideas at Indian restaurants simply because of its name. We amazingly enough never made it at home. I told Josh the night before about the idea of making rogan josh for the Cookbook Challenge and came home to find that he had defrosted the lamb chops, bought some tomatoes and fennel seeds and already made a start on chopping up the onions so I ended up backseat-cooking and helping him chopping things instead. He did most of the cooking.

We tweaked the recipe a little bit due to availability of ingredients – substituting here and there. But the full recipe, including a video, is available on the SBS Food site.

Happy 200th Post – Spatula, Spoon and Saturday!

Dear Spatula, Spoon and Saturday,

You are one of the spices of my life…

My little blog. How you have grown.

Do you remember the time we had together when I worked in Singapore? And I was lonely, away from home and I had you to keep me company? I’m sorry I neglected you then. I’m sorry I never really got a chance to tell you about all the interesting, diverse food culture Singapore had to offer. Did you know that Singapore has the most food bloggers per capita in the world? You should have been one of the shining ones, but work required 60+ hours a week from me. It was hard.

But this year, I made up for it, didn’t I? We made Melbourne our home. Again, for me. You, for the first time.

When we, you and I, moved back to Melbourne, you neglected, me bored and unemployed. I started cooking and I wrote to you about it. Remember the Fig, Mozzarella and Rocket Salad? That post started our big Melbourne journey together. Remember how I got given a whole bunch of fresh figs from Nana’s tree? Throughout May and June (when I wasn’t busy going places), I started telling you about Josh and my honeymoon trip to Japan, even some about Singapore and snippets of my travelling around South East Asia especially Malaysia. I’m sad though, that I never told you much about Thailand, my home. We will need to fix that.

Over the few, but productive months that I also took you to Central Australia. I started working again in July (enough travelling)  and that was when I could afford to take you out to all the fabulous eating places Melbourne had to offer. Remember my silly drunken review of Cafe Vue cocktail night? And the fabulous Maha, Bar Lourinha and SiChuan Dining Room with all its chilli glory. And Coopers Inn – where I had my 21st birthday the rerun. And Tempura Hajime? Who could forget Tempura Hajime? Fresh plump scallops stuffed with uni. Droolworthy. Not to mention the dingy little Thai place, Me Dee Thai,  in Springvale that does proper Thai food and the infamous Pellegrini’s Espresso Bar. I still have lots to tell you. I haven’t even told you about my eternal Melbourne favourites: the Cellar Bar for its charming Italian heart, Mitsuno for its wonderous ‘Japanese-inspired’ cuisine. I haven’t even told you about Bombay By Night properly and how much we love these places. But I will.

I experimented a lot too. I made all sorts of interesting food. What about my seafood craze? The simple steamed blue swimmers? My first perfect spaghetti con vongole? Nicoise salad with seared lemon & thyme tuna? The paella? What about the roasts? Beef with Yorkshire pudd, pork with apple sauce, lamb with rosemary and garlic, chicken with fabulous gravy. Not to mention the greenie spaghetti with asparagus, lemon and shallot that I made up after being inspired by the farmers’ market (we do love our farmers’ market, don’t we?) and Joshua’s best lasagna in the world.

Josh has been making lots of Thai food lately. I’m so proud of him.

Have I ever told you this little fact: people on the internet are by far most interested in how to boil an egg in a microwave. It’s so strange that every months, hundreds of people from all over the world learn how to boil eggs on Spatula, Spoon and Saturday. One of those mysterious things in life, I suppose.

We have many years of posts ahead of us. I have asked the lovely Tara who is a talented graphic designer, and with my old web development skills, we will give you a brand new face. Not that you need it. You are already beautiful  but you do deserve a unique, new face. It will take time. But I will work on it.

Meanwhile, I still have lots to tell you about food. Hear me out. Don’t get bored of me yet.

With all my love,
Kat