#110 - Sunday night dinner (dinner experimentation gone awry)

You know the saying "if it ain't broke don't fix it"?  Yup, broke the rule and this is what happened.

Texas sirloin chili

I've made before successfully.  This time I changed the cooking time and heat setting on the slow cooker with mixed results.  Tasted pretty good, although a bit heavy on either the cumin or the oregano (cumin, I suspect - I kind of spilled the spices) and needed a bit more chili for my personal preference.  But the cardinal sin...the meat was dry.  Not what you want, especially when you made some for a friend who also happens to be a food critic.  Nooooo!!!

However, the salad was delicious and it was a nice, refreshing accompaniment to the chili.  I think it would have been good if I had had some hot sauce to go with the accompaniments.  Edible but not my best work, a bit disappointing.  Oh well, next time the recipe will require a few tweaks until we get a good product.

The big excitement of the evening is that I got my invitation to a wedding of the friends with whom I had dinner.  In Tahiti.  In July.  There are worse things than having friends who are from all over the world - it's a hard life but someone has to do it.


So until next time, good luck on your endeavors (leave well enough alone) and may you have as good a week as I had tonight.

#109 - It's a little bit Korean, a little bit Chinese and a little bit Cajun...

Therapy (but not)

I've heard lots of people self medicate - drinks, shopping, drugs...I find cooking really therapeutic and calming.  Much more productive, I think - and a big change from how stressed out I used to get at the end of class when it was time to present plates and my sauce was not reducing quickly enough.  My parents are getting used to hearing "I had a bad night/day - I'm making dinner tonight".  We don't have far to go to find the silver lining.  There's something meditative about cooking when it's on your own schedule.

(FYI:  although help in the kitchen is always appreciated, it does have to be help.  This means that if you offer to help, get assigned a job (or several) but you disappear and don't do the thing you said you would do, you're not only not helping, you're being a pain in the ass because you're actually holding me up.  Get out of the kitchen because you're messing up my happy mojo!)

Cooking for 6

I was feeling a little bit lazy earlier - not really wanting to cook (yes, really lazy but I had a good excuse - really...). The good thing about promising to cook for friends is that it's a way to keep from giving in to the lazy feeling.

Anyway - I have a recipe in my slow cooker cookbook which calls for sirloin.  Yes, yes - some purists would say you use a crappy cut of meat for the chili since you cook it forever on low heat and you use the sirloin for steak.  Steak is all well and good, but having tried this recipe with sirloin and with chuck steak, all I can say is that the sirloin one is better.  Since I plan on feeding friends with very sensitive French palates and, most likely, my parents - I had to dial the heat factor back a bit.  It's a 9-hour (read:  overnight) cooking time so it should be fine by tomorrow morning.  It will even have tomorrow to sit in the fridge and so the sitting in its juices which makes stews and other things so much better on the second day.

Anyway - dinner to be served with rice, salad and the chili with assorted toppings - cilantro (coriander), green onions (spring onions), sour cream and cheddar cheese if people want it.  Not to mention fresh chili...a friend who happens to be a bit of a foodie / critic is going to give the chili a test run tomorrow - hopefully it will live up to his high standards.

Fusion food...

In the meantime, dinner for tonight - one of the chefs at the Cordon Bleu in London is not a big fan of "fusion cuisine", mainly because so many people seem to be confused about what it actually is.  Keeping his prejudices in mind, my dinner was more like French technique, Cajun seasoning, Mexican pico de gallo and served like a Chinese sang choy bao / Korean ssam (food wrapped in lettuce).  Back when the Atkins diet was such a big deal, I remember thinking it sounded kind of boring (lots of protein, no carbs, etc. etc.) but if they had had food like this, I might have actually tried it.  The one day I thought about not eating carbs, I immediately started to crave pasta and lots of bread / sandwiches - interesting and uncharacteristic, seeing as how I don't really eat sandwiches or much bread.  If you think about it, this is pretty friendly for most dietary restrictions:  gluten free, sugar free, nut free, dairy free...

And now - back to the A-team and looking forward to a day of friends, dancing, food and fun tomorrow.

Until next time, happy weekend!

#108 - Cooking for 1 and other little excuses for a happy dance

In which a little excursion out of the centre of the city leads to  an unexpected discovery...

There's always a bit of excitement when you find something unexpected - in this case, mini-Madeleines at this little bakery in Cammaray (on the North Short of Sydney).  Don't ask, I'm usually not out that far - definitely away from my usual haunts (and much further than my very small slice of Sydney which extends from Bondi Junction to Central to...perhaps, Wynyard).  Anyway - how can you not buy these for a little sample when they're so cute and the person in the bakery speaks with a French accent which reminds me of  my London days and the chefs back at Le Cordon Bleu?  Anyway, they tasted pretty good if you like sweets (personally I only bought them for the nostalgia factor because I'm not much of a cake person as a general rule) - a bit dry by themselves but perfect with a cup of tea on a Saturday afternoon.  I suppose there's a reason why they're tea cakes.

Cooking for 1...(aka "because no one should watch Iron Chef on an empty stomach")
Some friends were giving me a bit of grief because I don't tend to make an effort when I'm cooking just for myself.  Also - rice and seaweed can get a little boring after a while so I made pasta one night - inspired by the fresh pasta at the deli but dictated by the fact that I didn't have a lot of time or patience to cook since I've been getting home later than I've wanted for the past few nights.  Shrimp (or prawns, if you're going to speak like they do here) with chili, garlic and spinach is pretty standard here - and a bit predictable so I went the scallop route.  Add a little bit of sweated shallots, lemon juice and parsley - it takes the same amount of time to prep and cook everything as it does to boil the water and cook the fresh pasta (they said 1 1/2 - 2 minutes but it was much more like 7 minutes).  Absolutely no excuse not to cook dinner - and of course, it tasted pretty good, even if I do say so myself.  Besides, there wasn't much time because I wanted to watch Iron Chef and no one should watch that on an empty stomach.

Litany of kitchen fails...
Trust me, there have been some pathetic failed experiments in the kitchen - as much as I hate to waste food, the Cake Mix fiasco of 2001 and the Frozen Pizza fails (yes, multiple - and frozen pizza!) of 2003-2006 and the Burnt-Outside-Still-Raw-Inside-after-45-minutes-in-the-oven Cupcakes-from-a-Mix drama of 2006 all resulted in those attempts ending up in the rubbish because they were completely inedible.

Slow cooker happiness!
Thank goodness someone taught me how to cook!  And if not, you can always make it up a little bit.  Thanks to a good friend of mine, I just chucked in bits and pieces into a crock-pot and left it on overnight.  In the morning, voila!  Spaghetti sauce...and since my parents happen to be in town, I could call them up for a little bit of stomach assistance.  How nice to be able to toddle up the hill with vegetables and sauce in a bag and produce dinner in a matter of minutes...of course, you have to be careful what you say to BS because he pays attention and a chance remark led to the very kind gift of the slow cooker which is one of my best friends during the cool/cold winter months.  (Yes, I was a little lazy, I just stuck the veggies in with the pasta because I didn't want to clean another bowl, but really, what does it matter?  It all tastes the same...)

Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day -
Some of you may recognize the first line of a famous Rogers and Hammerstein song from Oklahoma! but what else can you say on a foggy morning that looks like this?  Foghorns were going in the distance and normally this view would show you a water line stretching across somewhere around the middle of this photo.  On this particular morning I woke to a glow in the sky (the horns came later).  The fog burned off a couple of hours later but it was pretty while it lasted.

Sometimes you forget to appreciate what's exactly in front of you until something reminds you to stop, take a deep breath and have a look around.  Suddenly there are leaves on the ground and some of the trees have turned red.  The colors might not be as spectacular as they get somewhere colder, but we get the great mix of a fall while the plumeria trees (aka frangipanis here) start to blossom again.

So until next time - have a nice day and give someone a smile.  As the saying goes, "Everyone can afford to give away a smile."

#107 - Mom's birthday dinner (What a wonderful world)

It's been a little while since I cooked anything worth posting but it was my Mom's birthday last night.  A bit of a rush since I made dinner after work but it's all in the preparation - last minute sauce but mise-en-place done before and/or most of the major cooking, which means the only things I actually had to do was make the sauce, reheat and flash the duck, supreme the orange, re-heat the broccoli, toast the almonds and plate.  Easy 60 minutes (only because the sauce takes a while).

Happy birthday Mom!
The result was a group effort - Dad made salad to which I added a few bits and pieces (roasting the almonds took the longest, surprisingly enough), Mom made the rice and I did the duck, sauce and veggies.

And I found out why you trim the duck's legs before you cook it.  Trying to trim them after - well, the bones shattered into pieces and the ugly end was still attached.  The confit leg may not have looked very pretty but apparently it tasted really good.  Frankly, I couldn't face eating any duck after smelling the duck fat while it was cooking.  Don't get me wrong, the duck fat actually smells really good but it's such a rich smell, all I wanted for dinner was a little rice and all veggies.

No madeira for the sauce.  Oddly enough, the liquor store / bottle shop didn't have madeira.   ("What?  No madeira?  What kind of bottle shop doesn't have madeira???")  They had port but I forgot it at home so I cheated - red wine and orange juice.  Substituted chicken stock for brown duck stock.  Yes, shock horror - but it all still tasted pretty good so happy faces around the table.

Dad's pretty salad to the right with cherry heirloom tomatoes - just right with the toasted almonds and vinaigrette.  The crisp greens were a perfect antidote to the duck fat smell.  I think I would have been happy just to eat salad and nothing else.  Why is it that there's so much pleasure in cooking but sometimes, the pleasure in the eating is just not there?

And then of course, dessert.  You can't have a birthday without dessert...but I didn't have time to make it so I bought it from the deli.  I have dessert guilt.  On the other hand, this was gluten free and my gluten free repertoire is (thus far) very limited.  Mousse, anyone?

 In any event, a lovely night with the parents and they got to eat something they don't cook at home and isn't necessarily on a restaurant menu.  Ah, Cordon Bleu was definitely not a waste, according to them.  A true pleasure for me to have more people who like to eat!

(I am off to pick up some dinner - yes, yes, cheating but all in a good cause - I don't cook Chinese food at home.)

So until next time, happy Mother's Day, happy eating and a very good night to you all!