#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."

#104 - Great Expectations

Beanless Chili
Finally a sighting of my chili!  It's been a bit like the search for Bigfoot or a Yeti - this is the first time a sighting has been made (less the fresh jalepenos, cilantro/coriander and spring onions/green onions).  My ever reliable food chronicler sent this one through a couple of days after I left.

See post #103 for more about the chili - and my sister sent me a message tonight saying it still tops the list of things she wants when I come home, followed closely by the veggies below.

Passover
I have been invited to a Passover Seder on Tuesday night.  See this link for more information about the seder - http://www.chabad.org/holidays/passover/pesach_cdo/aid/1751/jewish/The-Seder-in-a-Nutshell.htm.

Zucchini "spaghetti"

No pressure, but my invitation to seder made a point of challenging my cooking skills in requesting a vegetarian side dish which complied with requirements to be Kosher for Passover.  Surprisingly enough, the thing that took the longest amount of time was the tomato sauce - especially since I had to look up the recipe because I forgot it and had left out the garlic and tomato paste.  It took forever to pass it through a sieve because I don't have a chinois here.  It was easier to make everything from scratch than to have to doctor something from the correct Kosher section or to check I didn't breach any rules (except the tomato paste, which I ran past my hosts).

Vegetarian "spring" roll - named by my sister

I can't get people to choose between the variations but hopefully some tasting by independent third parties will tell me if one of them is better than another.

The vegetarian "spring roll" and the veggie stack are both wrapped in savoy cabbage leaves, which were surprisingly hard to get in Hawaii for the family Christmas dinner and a previous attempt at something like this.

Veggie stack (aka vegetarian stuffed cabbage)

The veggie stack will somehow need to be changed slightly because it's meant to serve 26 people.  So far the Mise-en-place consists of 9 red bell peppers, 8 tomatoes,8 shallots, 2 bouque garni, I'm not sure how many zucchini, 1 savoy cabbage and...I think I forgot something.

Everything needs to be cooked just a bit more but I think it may just be a matter of getting the balance of the different vegetables and the sauce right.  There may not be enough sauce for the zucchini spaghetti so that may or may not make it to the dinner.

So until next time, happy Easter / Passover and food in good company.