Roast Pumpkin Soup

Last night's little experiment for today was a roast pumpkin soup with a little twist on my usual.
100g triple smoked shaved ham
2 medium cloves of garlic
1 onion
1 medium-to-large pumpkin
300mL of cream
250mL of chicken stock
2 tablespoons of crumbled dry feta cheese

1) Dice the pumpkin, without skin, add salt and olive oil to them on a tray and roast/bake them until the pumpkin just starts to charr or on the corners at around 180C.
2) Cook the onion until it is translucent. Dice the shaved ham and put it in with the onion. When it is fragrant, you should crush the garlic cloves and put them in the pan.
3) When the pumpkin is cooked, remove it and put it into the 250mL of stock in either a large bowl or a pot. Then add in the garlic, onion and ham mix. Use a stick blender to turn it into a puree.
4) Heat this through in a pot. When it has been warmed through, add in the cream and bring it to the simmer.
5) Once the cream has been combined with the puree and is simmering, add in the crumbled dry feta cheese. Continue heating it until the feta starts to dissolve into the soup.
6) Serve this with crusty bread.

A Wild Chicken Leap...

Okay, I've never really cooked a stuffed meat.  I've also never really tied meat around a stuffing.  So this was a BIG jump into the unknown.


Stuffed Chicken Thighs

 

4 chicken thigh fillets
a bunch of parsley
1 round of brie
a large handful of almonds, toasted (I'm not sure of the amount, but they 2/3 covered a medium frypan)
3 medium garlic cloves
olive oil
pepper
salt
(You will need string)

1. Heat an oven to 180C.  Put a frypan onto a really strong heat (so you can get a nice browning on the chicken)
2. Put everything but the chicken into a food processor/'blitzer'.  Buzz it into a dry paste.
3. Put a few big spoons of the blitzed mix into the centre of the chicken thigh fillets and then tie them up like you would tie a beef for roasting.
4. Put it in the pan and let it brown and start cooking through.
5. Turn it and let it brown. Repeat until its browned all the way around.
6. Put it into the oven for 15-20min to cook through.

This has actually come out really well... I'm quite happy with it.  It was served with grilled eggplant (aubergine), mashed potato (cooked with thyme in the water) and blanched green beans.

Making a Stew...

Winter is coming, and coming FAST.
Stew is an easy weekend meal for almost anyone to make.

Step 1: Meat
You can use any red-ish meat.  Lamb, beef, veal, pork, mutton... any of them would be excellent for a stew and usually the 'tough' parts of the animal can make good stews.
I use skirt steak most of the time.  It's cheap (at most $9/kg), it has a strong taste and is easy to handle.  But you could use any great meat.  I was very tempted to make one recently with a big rack of smoked pork ribs...

Step 2: Vegies
You need three things for a stew to taste beautiful.
1) Sweetness
2) Starchiness (to add thickening to the liquid)
3) Texture

Carrots are brilliant.  Swedes, Potatos (sweet or regular), 'white carrot', etc.  The big trick is to buy the things that come out in winter.  Pumpkins are brilliant.  I love sweet potatoes in things like mock-tagines...

Step 3: The Soupy Stuff
On the cheap end of things, I'd suggest you need to have about 3 things in the soupy stuff.
1) Stock
2) Starch (flour, cornstarch, potato starch..)
3) Caramel-tastes

Caramel tastes come from onions usually.  I can't help but also put mushrooms into almost every stew.  I end up starting all of my stews with basically a chopped onion, olive oil, mushrooms and beef.

Tricks and Tips
Coat meat in a starch mixed with salt and pepper.  I love paprika in stews, particularly smoked paprika.
Garlic and bay leaves should be in almost all stews...
Parsley goes in while you're letting it cool down on a bench so you don't make it sour/bitter.
LOW temperatures and LONG times. (150C for 2.5h + )

Mother's Day Food

Here is another one of my "Get out of Jail Free" dishes...

Hazelnut Cheesecake with Dark Chocolate Base & Butterscotch Sauce.

Like many of my recipes, this started out as something else (it used Pecans).  But I'm not a huge fan of pecans, plus my wife is a sucker for Ferrerro Rochere chocolates which contain hazelnuts.

So, my version of the recipe.

Preheat your oven to 160C (140C fan-forced)
Dark Chocolate Cheesecake Base
150g of Nice Biscuits (these should be mild-tasting-to-no-real-taste sugary biscuits)
50g of melted butter
50g of melted dark chocolate (70% or darker)

Break up the biscuits and either crush them or put them in a dicer/food processor.  You want them to be granular and about three or four times the size of a sugar crystal.  While you're breaking them up, melt the chocolate and butter together (I use a coffee pot for this). Once the butter and chocolate are now nice and fluid and the two are starting to almost become a single liquid, pour them into the biscuit and hand-stir with a spoon.  The entire mix should be a gentle brown colour when you are done.  Take this and pack it down into the base of a 22cm springform pan (I recommend you actually wrap the base of the springform pan in grease-proof before you do this and lock the base in upside down springform in place).  Refrigerate this for at least 30min.

Cheesecake
500g of cream cheese
165g of caster sugar
2 eggs
1 tbspn of plain flour
60g of hazelnuts
a dash vanilla

Trick: Let the cream cheese come to room temperature (have it sitting on the bench while you make the base).
Get the 60g of hazelnuts and toast/roast them in the bottom of a pan.  Don't be afraid to have the skins burn a little.  When you can easily smell the roasted hazelnuts, take them out and cool them.  Then either crush them (I use a mortar and pestle and crack them against the mortar) or very gentle chop them with a knife or food processor.
Put the cream cheese into the bowl of a food mixer (I don't recommend using a hand blender, because you want to leave it to sit and keep mixing) along with the sugar.  "Cream" the cheese with the sugar and when it is starting to look very smooth and much more fluid, put in the two eggs one at a time allowing each egg to be mixed through.  Put in the dash of vanilla (if you want it to have a more "vanilla and hazelnut" type taste, be a little heavy handed with the vanilla).  Sprinkle in the flour and let it mix through.  Last, but by no means least, put in the hazelnuts (don't be put off by putting in the skins, I have found it genuinely adds something to the cheesecake).

Pour the cheesecake mix over the biscuit base.  Then bake it for 45min.  When the timer goes off, turn off the oven and have the door open a crack.  When it has cooled, make the butterscotch topping.

Butterscotch Topping
75g of DARK brown sugar
40g of butter
1 tbspn of cream (any cream will do)

Put all three into a pot on low-to-medium heat and just keep stirring until you can't hear the sugar scratching on the pot.

Pour the butterscotch over the cheesecake (while still in the springform) and refrigerate it for at least 3 hours.  I recommend overnight with plastic wrap over it.


My wife never really quite appreciated cheesecakes, she'd mostly had chilled cheesecakes, but this decadent little experiment is now one of the desserts of mine she loves best.  By the way, this is the first time I have told people how this dessert is made.  Go win friends and influence people with this little dessert.  If you want something to really go over the top with this... chantilly cream will just about make people's mouths explode (and also likely to kill their GPs level of calm with your cholesterol levels).

"Stuffed" Mushrooms

This is probably going to become one of my "Get out of Jail Free" meals*.  It takes a little longer to prepare, but it wins super-food-brownie-points with a particular woman in my life... and that's a good thing to have.

Stuffed Mushrooms

• 4 large cap mushrooms (They should have a cap larger than your palm)
• 1 bunch of asparagus
• 8-10 green beans
• sundried or semi-dried tomatoes
• shaved Jarlsberg cheese
• Optional: A red chilli slided finely

1. Take the stems off the large-cap mushrooms and dice them.
2. Dice the asparagus into small pieces along with the beans and semi-dried tomatoes.
3. Fry the diced stems and diced vegetables in a pan with barely enough oil to make sure they stick.  Take them out when they are 3/4 cooked. (Include sliced chilli here...)  The tomatoes will be very fragrant by this point.
4. Spoon this mixture into the underside of the caps.  Then either pan-fry or, even better, put the caps into a grill-pan.  Use a pan you can put in the oven.
5. While you are grilling/pan-frying the mushrooms, heat an oven to around 150C.
6. Take the mushrooms off the stove heat in the pan and put the shaved Jarlsberg on top of all of the ingredients.  Melt the cheese over the mixture in the oven and make sure that mushrooms are now cooked, but still able to hold their shape.  Depending on taste, they can have a sprinkle of salt over the cheese at this point.  They are gorgeous on their own, rarely need any pepper and I'm yet to think of a side-dish for them.

*Get out of Jail Free Meals: These are dishes or complete dinners that allow you to apologise, bribe, or otherwise get yourself out of troubles with your significant other.  They are often to their personal tastes, but many of them are generally approved by others.  I've made some of these and given them to coworkers and been pestered for the recipes... So they work well.

Blood Orange Tart

I have plans to create a Blood Orange Tart, if they come into season.  I tend to just buy the fruit that I see that is cheap and in season.  So, since I tend to keep track of it by looking at the price at my local fruit market (which is a 'budget' fruit market that sells fruit that may not be sold by the big chains because it may not meet their aesthetic requirements).  This lets me get things like 500g of mushrooms for about $3/kg, or bananas for $1.50/kg, and so on.  (I've also been tempted to make Banoffee Tarts because of the price of bananas... but I'd likely be the only person eating it and while tasty it's not brilliant for a person's waistline...)

So, Blood Orange Tart...
I've been using a recipe for Citrus Tarts.  It has an almond-meal, flour, sugar and butter pastry (which I have to admit I can find a little frustrating to handle because of its crumbly nature) and a filling of 5 eggs, 165g of caster sugar, 250-300mL of cream, the grated rind of half a lemon & half a lime & half an orange, the juice of half-to-all of each citrus.  The plan is to substitute the three citrus fruits (or in the original recipe, the three lemons) for 3 blood oranges.  This could easily be garnished by something such as long lime-zest strands, chantilly cream or for those with slightly more bitter tastes (such as myself) scraped/finely grated dark chocolate.

Whenever I have this tart, I always think of having things like straight espresso, a thick book (probably writted by Robin Hobb or a 'classic Russian author') and sitting outside in the sun.  Of course, I can also see things like serious vanilla icecream on the side (like the Conoisseur stuff, but I refuse to buy it since they were taken over by a certain multi-national who is famous for their instant coffee).

I'd consider putting a meringue type top on this, but I couldn't tell you if it was any good because I personally dislike Pavlovas and hard-meringues.  Never really seen what all the fuss was about with them.  I'd much prefer to have something like some thin, dark toffee/caramel sculpture-doodles-shapes with that slightly smokey and strong sweet taste and that gorgeous cracking shard-like texture.

When I get around to making this, I will potentially dabble with toppings (such as dark chocolate, dark caramel, chantilly cream etc).

Black Pepper Beef & Noodles

This is a quick-ish main course.  Most of my 'weekday dinners' take around 45min to cook and I do them from scratch but there are funny little tricks I've collected mostly by just tinkering.  This one is for my version of Black Pepper Beef.  It could easily be served with other noodles, white rice or possibly even as a pie filling.

Black Pepper Beef & Noodles

• 500g of good beef for frying (I regularly use Skirt Steak because it makes tender fillet-slices most of the time, but you could use other steak.  Most butchers will be happy to turn it into stir-fry type pieces, but I do this myself by slicing the skirt steak in half along the grain and then cutting the thin pieces across the grain)
• 1 fist-sized onion (This is cut in half against the rings, then you place the most recently cut surface face down and cut 'vertically' across the rings so you get pieces that will be about 4-5cm long and 1cm wide)
• 8 medium to large sized button mushrooms (I tend to slice mushrooms for most dishes)
• 1 large garlic clove (more if you want more of a kick to it)
• 1 tspn of beef stock powder
• A black pepper mill
• Soy Sauce
• Shao Xing Wine (Chinese rice-wine for cooking)
• A handful sized bundle of noodles (Most of the time I use soba noodles, but you could easily use almost any other kind of noodle and Hokkien or Thick Egg Noodles would do very well)
• Fresh coriander leaves/stems (depending on if you want to add its taste to the dish or if you want a nice kicker/garnishes)

1. Prepare the different ingredients and heat a good splash of oil in a wok.  I work on an electric stove, so its usually quite hard for me to get the oil smoking hot.  I tend to have this oil at the point where the onion will start frying and if you leave it rest it can get that sort of brown-blistering you get from oil frying.
2. Fry off the onion.  Don't worry if it goes a little brown, the caramelised tastes (and the smell) will be good later.
3. Put in the mushrooms.  Again, don't worry if you get a strong colouring on them, it all seems to work towards a nice half-way Chinese gravy taste.  They should still be a gentle grey colour, nowhere near that lovely thoroughly-cooked black colour mushrooms get.
4. Brown the beef.  I tend to have partly-thawed meat.  It seems to help with the gravy because the condensed water will end up in the dish but also the skirt steak seems to 'bleed' well into sauce.
5. While the beef is browning, bring a pot of water to the boil suitable for your noodles.  I tend to add a little kick into the noodles by adding a splash of soy sauce into the water particularly for soba.  It's surprising how that alternative 'saltiness' of the soy sauce makes the subtle difference.  There isn't more than 1 tbspn into the whole pot, the water will look dirty more than 'soy flavoured'.
6. When the beef is browned all over and has stopped obviously bleeding you should put in a good splash of Soy Sauce and Shao Xing.  (Both of them would be about 2 tblspns each).  Add in either grated garlic or diced garlic at this point.  Also add the stock powder here.
7. No more than 10min before you plan to serve this, take your pepper mill and put in a LOT of pepper.  If you want it to be very peppery I'd be suggesting something like 25 turns of your pepper mill.  When I tend to make this I'd say I put in something like 15-20 turns.

This tends to taste really good with something such as blanched green beans, blanched broccoli, blanched qing cai (Bok Choi) and carrot.  The green vegies seem to make a light counterpoint to the sometimes heaviness of the beef.