Archive for the ‘All Recipes’ Category
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Insalata di Strada (Italian Street Salad)
Book: Jamie’s Italy by Jamie Oliver Theme: citrus Recipe: Insalata di Strada
This post kicks off my participation in the week 1 of the Cookbook Challenge in this hot (and eventually rainy) week. First of all, allow me to ramble before I get to the crux of this recipe. I found it really hard to be doing citrus (such a winter theme) in one of the hottest Spring week in Melbourne history. And guess what? I have no one to blame but myself because it was I, who pulled the theme out of the envelope. D’oh.
So here I was, totally stuck with this theme. I’m definitely not giving in and bake orange and poppy seed cake (although I have wanted to do that, the sticking point would be I have no cookbook that has orange and poppy seed cake – actually maybe Stephanie’s Cook Companion, but I digress) because that would be too easy.
This recipe in itself was no picnic. It is, in essence, a winter salad. Its main ingredients proved difficult: Cedro lemon? Non-existent here. Fennel? Winter vegetable. Blood orange? Well, I’d be lucky to find them. But guess what? The market provided! I went through all the stalls in the market to find decent fennel (believe me when I keep saying it’s not fennel season), some new potatoes, a head of radicchio and some blood oranges. Read the rest of this entry »
Pancetta-wrapped Asparagus with Soft-boiled Eggs
I got this idea from Jamie Oliver’s book Jamie At Home. It was a decent breakfast. Nothing beats bacon fat in the morning.
- 2 eggs per person
- 4 fat asparagus per person
- 3 slices of mild pancetta per person
To soft boil eggs (I was fiddling with the asparagus and overcooked the eggs so the picture isn’t really of a soft boiled egg), cover eggs with cold water and bring to boil. Once the water is boiling, turn the heat down to gentle simmer and boil for 3 minutes.
Trim back the woody ends of the asparagus and wrap the pancetta around the asparagus. Bake in preheated oven for 20 minutes at 220′c or until the pancetta is crispy. Serve.
Nicoise Salad with Seared Tuna (My Way)
I am going through a fish phase since I discovered that I can easily run to the Queen Vic during the lunch hour to be the best fish imaginable. I have been wanting to make something with fresh tuna for a while and I figured the classic nicoise salad would be ideal. I bought some really nice yellow fin tuna steaks and seared it quickly before tossing it into the salad.
I had all the ingredients for the nicoise salad except for the actual nicoise olives and dijon mustard. So I improvised a little with the dressing. I decided to marinate the tuna in the salad dressing and since my new thyme was growing rather nicely, I thought I would make the dressing a combination of thyme and lemon zest.
Lemongrass and Chilli Beef (Bo Xao Xa Ot)
Josh made this the other night with a recipe that I suggested (got to get myself in for a bit of credit here) from Pauline Nguyen’s Secrets of the Red Lantern, which is a really, really fantastic book. I literally took it on the train and read it everyday from cover to cover. This is one cookbook I strongly recommend, not for just their great recipes (and believe me, if Josh cooked with it and it turned out well, it’s good recipes because he would follow instructions whereas I just read it once and then wing it), but for the stories of her family and all the events in their lives. I can’t recommend it enough (by the way, I got it at Costco for about $40. Score.)
We adapted a bit (again, he may have made it but I was yelling instructions 
) by using beef rather than chicken and adding some green beans. This recipe was enough for the two of us plus lunches on the next day. Read the rest of this entry »
