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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.
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.
Rendang curry is a Thai restaurant favourite (although it’s originally Indonesian and popularised by the Malay) and from what I’ve seen around the web, it causes vexation. Talking on Twitter tonight about making it has caused at least one person to specifically ask me to blog about what I did because their efforts haven’t come out right.
Thai food is actually, at least for me, really difficult to cook. I don’t know why, but it really does seem as if it’s made out to be much easier than it actually is.
If forced to guess, maybe I think the reason behind this is Thai (and surrounding area), food is very much about combining very subtle flavours with very pronounced ones. For example coconut milk which is fairly bland (though unique) a flavour, gets mixed with chilli and galangal which are respectively so flavoured it’s painful and the sweet version of already powerful ginger. Stuff up this interplay between buffer and highly powerful flavours and you’ll either get paint stripper or milk.
I made green curry a while back and it was an utter disaster, it tasted like chicken poached in coconut milk. I was a bit apprehensive giving rendang beef a shot tonight which is silly because I’ve cooked similar but “not southeast Asian” curries before that are prepared similarly and not had the faintest problem. It worked great and here’s what I did.
