Rec.Cooking.Chicken.Vindaloo

It’s not from rec.cooking, but this last weekend I made Chicken Vindaloo for the second time from a recipe I found on newsgroups.  It’s delicious, and newsgroups are a great source of cooking advice if you dig in because the sense of community is very strong.  If the primary focus of a technology medium isn’t advertising, you can expect a better functional result, newsgroups > taste.com.au.

Vindaloo isn’t meant to be obnoxiously hot, the Goan curry has more black curry seeds in it than cayenne pepper.  I prefer naan bread or some other source of carbs than rice, so I ate it with “Not Just Naan” from the supermarket (despite the name, the packet did in fact contain just naan).  Give the recipe a go, it’s a bit fiddly to begin with, but delicious.

Longrain

Thai food is such a contemporary staple that it’s almost just “Aussie take away”.  Pad thai, pad khee mao and green curry chicken are meals that Sydneysiders eat if they can’t be bothered cooking tonight, delivered on a motorbike from the place that you probably could’ve walked to.

Longrain in Sydney’s “no bookings please, we’re edgy” restaurant district, smashes that mould.  In the six or so times I’ve eaten there the experience has been fantastic.  Delicious, contemporary Thai food served to your table which is one of only a handful in the giant converted warehouse –  fifteen of the twenty people you are sitting with are unknown to you but you get to perv on their food.

Last night I went for Sunday dinner with my wife and three friends, we had an outstanding time (I finally remembered to order the pictured egg net).

American Ingredients

Recently I’ve been cooking a few dishes from recipe sources that are outside of the norm.  A couple of years of Taste.com.au, a collection of Australian recipe books, Australian magazines etc. have led me to search wider and start cooking from some U.S. sources.  This presents some challenges.  The first is obviously that the measurements are imperial, ounces of this and a pound of that in my head get multiplied by 30g and half-a-kilo in my head.  But what sees me reaching for Wikipedia is the ingredient names for things that are specific to the US, things we have different names for.

I thought I’d share my table with you.  This table has names of common ingredients in the US that have different names in the rest of the English speaking world.  I don’t really know why I keep it because once I figure out that ground beef is not an earthbound variant of air beef but means mince, I rarely forget it.  Either way it’s a useful tool, bookmark this page because I’ll update this.

Poached Eggs for Breakfast

I just finished breakfast.  Two poached duck eggs on toast that had been buttered to within an inch of its life, with some chopped parsely and salt seasoned with chilli and native lime.  Oh, and a massive glass of apple juice.

Poaching eggs is one of those topics that this blog now adds to about forty million other blog posts, cook books and gossip notes about.  It’s apparently horrifyingly difficult, Larousse Gastronomique’s instructions for it take up two pages with several photos illustrating the various stages.  I treat poaching eggs the same way that I treat most things if they are highly finicky and the amount of effort involved threatens to eclipse how much the results are worth it; I cheat.

Tag Team Drunk Pasta

On Saturday afternoon I caught up with a friend for beers in Surry Hills.  After a few hours of drinking and talking technology (will the iPad dominate?) we decided that the only logical thing to do given both of us were hungry and both of us were three quarters drunk, was to go back to his and cook up a storm for the three of us (him, me and my wife).

Still full of confidence after serving it for others at a dinner party last weekend, my mate dictated that dinner ought be agnolloti stuffed with sweet potato and bacon with a butter sage sauce, and beforehand we should snack on salmon tartare tweel cones with red onion and crème fraiche.  ”Shounds like a plan”, I said – and got off my stool and swayed towards the door of the bar.  We were tired and emotional, and about to go fire up hot ovens and whirling blades in food processors.

What could possibly go wrong?

Piri Piri

Piri piri sauce is a particularly hot chilli sauce made from the African bird’s eye chilli.  Burgers and wraps, particularly chicken, really have their flavour picked up by the sauce and this may be a motivating factor in why there are now no less than three Portuguese chilli chicken burger chains in Australia which utilise the sauce.

Bird’s eye chilli isn’t easy to find in Australian grocers but any small red chilli will do when making piri piri sauce, including these Thai things that I use in most hot sauces.  If you want something to marinate a chicken in, or something to smatter a tablespoon of in a sandwich, wrap or chicken burger, give this a try.  Be wary that if your usual chilli sauce is sweet chilli sauce from a bottle, this may be out of your league as it’s much hotter than the fluorescent orange gear.

Making the sauce is not more complicated than roasting the chillies, simmering the ingredients briefly and then blending and straining the results.  Leave the seeds of the chilli in the sauce, they’ll be removed when you strain (so they don’t get caught in your teeth) and the white pithy membrane that covers them is what gives chillies their kick so you want that transferred into the sauce.

Hot Cross Buns

Easter is a holiday typically characterised by eating lots of chocolate which is not my thing, I like the flavour of chocolate but vastly prefer it to be something flavoured with chocolate than just eating it.  To me, eating chocolate rabbits is like eating honey from the jar.

I love hot cross buns, they’re delicious.  They’re certainly the best thing about Easter.

In most Christian countries or those that have a large population identifying as such, hot cross buns are traditionally eaten on Good Friday which is the Friday before Easter.  The cross (barely visible on mine, my oven produces great food but doesn’t brown things well) has a bunch of different historical explanations; these days symbolising the crucification of Christ but previously symbolising the four quarters of the moon in honour of the Saxon goddess Eostre, and the ancient Greeks marking cake with crosses much earlier.

Last Week’s Adventures

Lamb Rump

My brother in law came around late last week on a lat minute work trip, which is good because I had lamb rump that I wanted to eat and only one other person to eat it with (he’s a great guy too).  I’ve noticed that the Masterchef website actually has some decent recipes on it that are really quite cookable unlike what you sometimes get with cooking show website recipes (an afterthought offering that is either unduly complicated or poorly represented).  I won’t reprint the recipe here because I didn’t really change much, but it’s at this location on the Masterchef website (just so you can find it in among the advertorial recipes for Coles et al.)

Strog Blog

Yesterday I didn’t get time to eat lunch so I wanted something fairly substantial for dinner.  My wife makes a delicious beef stroganoff and I thought I’d try my hand at something similar.  If I intended to come up trumps I need to use my usual trick of  top quality ingredients – in this case the basis of the stroganoff is Tasmanian wagyu beef from Urban Food Market, and I’ve used brown mushrooms instead of the usual white buttons.

A Simple Meal, In More Than One Way

Tonight’s dinner was pasta with Arrabiata sauce and meatballs; a really, really simple meal.  What makes this blog-worthy (at least as far as I’m concerned) is that the meal was simple not just because it had few ingredients and was not challenging to make, it was made out of incredibly high quality ingredients that had minimal interference from people.  Biodynamic beef mince, pasta from an Australian independent producer (I’d originally intended to handmake pasta but was out of 00 flour), organic pasta sauce and carrots, onions and herbs from a local, small independent retailer.

None of this meal was produced with the input of large chain supermarkets which have a sole priority of driving down prices by purchasing the largest available quantities from factory farms and large scale producers.  It was good not just because it was delicious, but because it wasn’t tangled up in a situation that I don’t really like.