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.

Serves 4

INGREDIENTS

1. 2 tsp whole cumin seeds
2. 1 tsp black peppercorns
3. 1 tsp cardamom seeds
4. 3 in stick cinnamon
5. 1 1/2 tsp whole black mustard seeds
6. 1 tsp whole fenugreek seeds
7. 5 Tbsp white wine vinegar
8. 1 tsp salt
9. 2 tsp cayenne pepper
10. 1 tsp light brown sugar
11. 10 Tbsp vegetable oil
12. 2 large chopped brown onions
13. 6 Tbsp water
14. 1 in cube of fresh ginger, peeled and coarsely chopped
15. 8-10 cloves garlic, peeled and coarsely chopped
16. 1 Tbsp ground coriander seeds
17. 1/2 tsp ground turmeric
18. 1kg chicken thigh fillets, cut into a very large dice (think matchbox size)
19. 400g tin of pasata
20. 600g of large waxy potatoes, peeled and cut into six chunks

METHOD

1. Grind cumin seeds, black pepper, cardamom seeds, cinnamon, black mustard seeds and fenugreek seeds together in mortar and pestle. In a small bowl, combine ground spices, vinegar, salt, cayenne pepper and brown sugar. Set aside.
2. Heat oil in large saucepan over medium heat. Fry onions, stirring frequently, until they are really quite dark. Take them out with a slotted spoon and put them in a blender with enough water to just make them blendable, don’t throw the oil out. Blend and to an onion paste and add it to the the spices in the bowl. This mixture is the vindaloo paste.
3. Blend the ginger and garlic under the same circumstances (enough water to make a paste), and fry it in the oil until it starts to brown and the smell changes slightly.  Add the coriander and tumeric.
4. Brown the chicken, a small handful at a time.
5. Add the vindaloo paste, tomato sauce and potatoes to the chicken in the saucepan. If the liquid doesn’t cover the chicken and potatoes, add a cup of water.  Stir and bring to a slight boil.
6. Cover the pot, reduce heat to low, and simmer with the lid half-on for an hour, until the potatoes are tender and the whole sauce has reduced to a think curry gravy.

Image Credit: Johl (cc).  I didn’t photograph mine but used the creative commons licensed image that most looked like mine cooking

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).

One of the most annoying features of modern dining was prevalent, everybody ordering a main which is served centrally and everybody shares.  I’ve never minded it at Longgrain though; it works because it’s designed that way and isn’t merely a case of people just wanting to sticky beak others’ food.

Our pickings were;

• Egg net filled with pork prawns peanuts bean
  sprouts & sweet vinegar
• Green papaya salad
• Cuttlefish and pork belly
• Braised beef shin with a mint coriander & chilli salad
• Hot and sour poached chicken salad
• Kingfish curry

The food was magnificent, and according to a mate they make a decent vodka martini. If you get a chance, swing by, and if you do try and aim for a Sunday where nobody (yet) realises they are open for dinner. It was about sixty bucks a head for us and we didn’t hold back. The website is here but it’s rarely updated and they don’t take bookings.  Just roll up to Commonwealth St. Surry Hills and have a cocktail if they aren’t ready for you.

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.

Note: A couple of Americans have expressed surprise they haven’t heard of these, or thought they were different, or used terminology that Australians would be familiar with. The existence of something on this list is no warrant that it’s the pervasively used term, or that it’s even common , e.g the word cantaloupe is quite common for example, much more than the obscure “musk melons” above. Broad beans on the other hand is unknown in the U.S with fava beans actually being the only or almost only used term, and cilantro is a line-ball in that while corriander isn’t used to describe the leaves of the plant, it is used to describe the seeds (usually crushed in Indian food). Being on this list just means that it’s a term that does exist, and it’s useful to know the term.

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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.

I’m serious about how much “knowledge” there is out there about this simple task.  Various people recommend various depths of pan to poach eggs in, then there’s the swirlers and non-swirlers who argue about whether the water in the pan should be set into a light whirlpool motion to keep the eggs together in the pan (cooks don’t understand centrifugal force very well apparently) and then there’s the infamous vinegar wars – do you put a tablespoon of vinegar in with the eggs?

I use cling film.

Take a coffee mug and tear off a sheet of cling film as long as it is wide.  Place it lightly over the mug and poke it down with your fingers until you’ve somewhat coated the inside of the top of the mug but there’s still air underneath.  Using a pastry brush (or your finger) smear butter or a little oil over the sheet and then crack the egg into the cup.  Fold the cling film up and twist it, securing the top with a clothes peg.  You should now have basically a cling film bag with an egg in it – a little practice ensures that the yolk stays in the middle of the white, if you somehow break the yolk ,start again with new cling film.

Heat a pot, pan or tray of water until it’s got bubbles in it but it isn’t boiling.  Place the bags in the water gently, poach them until 60 seconds after there’s no apparent clear white and it’s all gone opaque, this will ensure that the yolk is hot and semi cooked but still liquid.

Remove the bags from the pot/pan/whatever, remove the peg and flop the poached eggs out of the bag and onto toast.  Too easy.

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?

My mate put 00 flour and egg yolks into a food processor, buzzed it and tipped it on the bench so I could have at it.  Kneading when sozzled is a strange experience, you occasionally sortof wander off mentally and at the first point I asked how long I’d been going (“45 seconds dude, and that looks a little damp, more flour”) and at the next (“er, that’s bouncing back, wrap it, you’ve been at it for ages”) I never thought to actually look at my watch.  The dough was golden and springy though so I wrapped it in film and set about mincing salmon.

I have essentially one kitchen knife (other than a bread knife or other things that perform one task), it costs a fortune and it’s the highest quality. I’m comfortable with it, it’s bitten me twice and only once was it particularly savage.  Other people’s knives are another thing.  My mate has a set of Global knives and the larger chef’s knife he gave me has a laser edge on it.  I’d had five beers since the middle of the day (some hours ago now) and we’d picked up wine on the way back to his place, but nonetheless salmon needed to be hand minced with an unfamiliar knife.  I managed to get the stuff minced up and the other ingredients for entrée fillings prepped while my mate set about burning himself on the oven making tweel cones.  I think at one point he even tried to reposition an oven shelf a run higher to fit sweet potatoes in and neglected to use a glove.  Ouch.

Miraculously, we got the cones out and they were great.  Seasoned well, light, with crispy cones (mate was too self critical about the cones, I think they were really good).  Next time I take a crack at these I’ll probably be sober though, I’d have less score marks in my fingernails where I nearly lost a finger tip, and I could probably take better photos with my phone.  Still, omnomnomnom.

Only step left was to fill the agnolotti with the potato and the panfried bacon.  His kitchen, his task so I stood by with a glass of wine (from a newly opened bottle) and offered moral support or mocking criticism depending on whether you’re asking me or him.  A few minutes in a furiously boiling pot while I melted about forty kilos of butter in a pan for sauce, and plate up and good to go.

The meal was well received although we were eating late, really late.  It turns out when you are not in full possession of your sobriety, everything takes longer.  We weren’t done eating until about 10:30pm, and once we were all full it wasn’t long before my wife and I headed home because cooking hammered is exhausting work.  In any event, I can throughly recommend that the next time you’re having a boozy afternoon out, ignore the kebab stand and cook up some proper food.

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.

This recipe makes about a cup of sauce.

Prologue:  when making sauces one of the most indispensable items you can own is a tamis (pronounced “Tammy” like the girl’s name), running a sauce through it makes it glossy, smooth and uniform as opposed to having suspended detritus in it.

Ingredients

1. 14 small red chillis, bird’s eye if you can get them or any small, red chilli if you can’t
2. 3 cloves of garlic, diced finely
3. 1 tsp salt
4. 1/2 tsp of smoked paprika
5. 1/2 tsp of powdered oregano
6. 100ml of olive oil
7. 50ml of red wine vinegar

Method

1. Simmer the chillies, salt, garlic, paprika, oregano, olive oil and vinegar in a saucepan for three minutes.  Put the ingredients in a blender and wait for 20 minutes for them to cool.
2. preheat the oven to 180, top the chillies and roast them for 10 minutes
3. Blend for about a minute until the sauce is very fine, then place a tamis on top of the container you intend to store the piri piri in.  A “blodge” at a time, pour the sauce on top of the tamis and push it through with a spatula.  The pushed-through sauce should be fine and glossy, and you’ll notice a lot of chilli skin and seeds on top of the tamis.  Refrigerate the sauce, it’ll keep for about a month.

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.

In Australia and New Zealand chocolate hot cross buns are increasingly popular.  This practice is unethical behaviour and should be stamped out.  Hot cross buns should contain currants, a mix of currants and raisins or in some cases orange zest.

This recipe makes delicious hot cross buns that are quite simple.

Ingredients

• 4C bakers “strong” flour
• 2 x 7g sachets dried yeast
• 1/3C caster sugar
• 1 1/2 teaspoons mixed spice
• pinch of salt
• 1 1/2C currants
• White wine
• 40g butter
• 300ml milk
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten – see note

Note: The type and quality of eggs you use when you make buns produces a profound difference in the end result.  Small battery eggs that have been kept for a long time in a cold fridge will produce hard, difficult to work dough and a resultant cake the consistency of furniture foam.  Large, eggs from pasture ranged chickens that are fresh and haven’t been aggressively cooled produce an infinitely better result – a smooth, elastic dough that produces a lighter, airy bun.

Method

1.  Put the currants in a shallow tupperware bowl or similar, and cover them with the wine.  Leave them for ten to fifteen minutes or until the currants are not reconstituted but definitely have picked up some extra puffiness.  Rinse them lightly, discard the wine.

2. Combine flour, yeast, sugar, mixed spice, salt and currants in a REALLY big bowl. Melt butter in a small saucepan over medium heat.  Add the milk then the eggs and keep warming, but don’t allow it to become hot or you’ll wind up killing yeast or cooking the eggs.

3.  Add warm milk mixture and eggs to currant mixture. Use a spatula to mix until dough almost comes together, pulling flour mix into the eggs/milk/butter. Use clean hands to finish mixing to form a soft dough.

4.  Turn the dough, which will likely be quite sticky, onto a floured surface and knead for ten minutes until it’s quite elastic.  Clean out the bowl, grease it lightly with some more butter, then return the dough ball to the bowl.  Cover it with cling wrap then put it in a warm place for about an hour to an hour and a half or until it’s doubled in size.

5.  Punch the large dough ball back to its original size (this process is called “knocking” if you’re unfamiliar, and stops the result tasting yeasty by removing certain gasses).

6.  Pull the dough into even thirds, then pull each third in half for six balls, then pull each ball in half so you are left with twelve evenly shaped balls.  Arrange them on baking paper on a large baking tray with a centimeter between them.  Preheat the oven to 190 while the balls rise to double their size again over half an hour.

7.  Put half a cup or more of plain flour in a ziplock bag with enough water to make a thinnish paste, about the consistency of honey.  Cut a corner off the bag and use it to pipe crosses on the buns.

8.  Bake the buns for about 25 minutes.  If you want to glaze them, either dilute some honey and brush the tops of the buns when they are 5 minutes away from being done, or cook three tablespoons of castor sugar in a 1/3C of water until it’s starting to thicken and use that.

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.)

The Taste of Sydney

I won tickets thanks to Urban Food Market which was awesome because despite the fact it was an incredible festival with top nosh from everywhere, Goddamn was it expensive.  $30 to get in (which I avoided being a prize winner) and a Disney Dollars scenario where you exchange cash for books of vouchers that are used at stalls.  While some stalls take cash (basically produce but not restaurant stalls) and some bargains were to be had particularly in terms of native herbs and spice, the Bultarra lamb (which is where the rump is from) and these awesome tomatoes, prices were generally at the high end of bar and the normal end of restaurant.

The food I did eat was delicious, some sliders with wagyu, some pasta, plenty of fish (Sydney is obsessed with mid-high end fish restaurants and I guess they are trying to differentiate) and I walked out of there with several bottles of quite decent booze.

The Hunter

My wife and I went to the Hunter Valley on the weekend for a wedding and made a weekend of it.  The Hunter is essentially just NSW’s larder – chocked full of vineyards, wineries, providores and places to eat and drink.  We walked out several dollars lighter but picked up some of the most delicious bits and pieces.  If you live in Sydney and haven’t been up that way before, you have no reason not to.

Shown in this picture are a whole buncha wine, a jar of peaches cured in chardonnay, a bottle of olive oil with lemon myrtle, a jar of whiskey orange marmalade and Murray River salt which is naturally pink.

I have it on good authority, a Russian guy I worked with once, that Бефстроганов is something of a made up word but it sounds kinda like the word for “cut” which makes sense for a dish which is cut strips of beef sautéed in a sour cream sauce.  That’s somewhat stuffed up by the fact that what is widely accepted to be the first mention of it, Elena Molokhovets Russian cookbook from 1861 has “Govjadina po-strogonovski, s gorchitseju” as having cubes of beef instead of cut strips (and incidentally uses a mustard based sauce).  Larousse Gastronomique (the cooking Bible) describes it as strips and with tomato paste so I’m deferring to that, even though I wonder if the definitive source of French cooking can be relied on to cast the deciding vote on a Russian dish.

Whichever way history chose to make it, here’s how my stroganoff went.  Serves 4.

Ingredients

• 500g topside cut into strips as wide as your finger and half as deep
• 1 brown onion cut to a fine dice
• 8 large brown mushrooms, stalks cut flush with the caps and sliced half a centimeter thick on the vertical
• 2 cloves of garlic, finely diced
• A tub of tomato paste
• 230ml of sour cream
• 2 tsp of cornflour
• Half a cup of beef stock
• 2 tbsp of chopped continental parsely
• Pasta of your choice

Method

1. Brown the beef strips in a large pot, in batches and set aside.  Start the pasta cooking if it’s dried.
2. Turn the heat down and sauté the onions and garlic until the onions lose their colour (about five minutes), add the mushrooms and sauté until soft.
3. Mix the sour cream, tomato paste and cornflour in a bowl and then add to the vegetables.  Once the consistency has settled down, return the beef and simmer for five to ten minutes until it’s all warm.  Stir half the parsley through.
4. Plate the pasta and serve the stroganoff on top.  Garnish with the remaining parsley.

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.

I’m reading “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” at the moment.  It’s a book which is horrifying in many ways, describing how the food we eat gets to us and why.  To an extent, a mitigating factor is the fact that it’s US-centric.  This normally aggravating-to-Australians trait means that the expose of such foreign concepts as high fructose corn syrup (an artificially derived sugar which has replaced cane or beet sugar in almost 100% of American food) is only an amusement rather than an actual source of terror.  That doesn’t mean there’s not plenty to frighten though; descriptions of how grain-fed cattle needs to be drugged so they will eat grain (cows, unsurprisingly, normally eat grass and can’t naturally tolerate grain) and how “free range” chickens are able to be called that if they have “access to the outdoors” – by which is meant a doorway to a run outside the enormous shed that they are too terrified to go out into, given it’s only available for one week of their lives (for fear of outside contagions getting in to young chickens).

I’ve long been critical of bits and pieces of the “I’m doing the right thing” pantomime around eating and cooking.  ”Organic” is a term which means a lot of things that you wouldn’t expect (as I’ve previously written) and for the longest time I was critical of the idea of avoiding genetically modified food – not being able to see why one would avoid food which has been made better (I now realise “better” means able to be more cheaply produced, not more nutritious or tastier).  But the Urban Food Market ingredients I picked up today are fantastic.  I’m going to write the recipe for specifically the ingredients I used because if you drop by my blog every so often, you do so to see what I’m cooking and eating, not my opinions on sustainable food ecology.  If you want, although it’d be cool if you had a look at the advantages of sustainable food, substitute plastic supermarket food for the ingredients I’ve used.

Ingredients

• 300g of Kialla South organic, biodynamic beef mince. This was a  cow grazing in a pasture not long ago.  The meat is rich and delicious.
• 1 medium sized carrot, very finely shredded (I actually used a lemon zester)
• 1/2 a brown onion, grated coarsely
• 2tbs of chopped mixed, fresh herbs from a small, local green grocer.  Mostly parsley
• 300g of Australian durum wheat pasta
• 1 jar of Lario organic arrabiata pasta sauce
• Shredded hard Parmesan style cheese

Method

Combine the mince, carrot, herbs and onions and roll tablespoons of the mixture into balls.  Cook the pasta.  Meanwhile pan fry the balls in a large pan with a tablespoon of olive oil until almost browned through then add the pasta sauce and reduce to a simmer for ten minutes until the sauce has thickened.

Plate the pasta, then spoon the meatballs and sauce on top and garnish with cheese.