Cooking

Cooking

15 14 things to do with rosemary this weekend

I’d prefer it if my front garden was a herb garden. Instead it is a stupid pattern of topiary, hard to maintain and even worse to eat. My neighbour has a rosemary hedge which I’ll sometimes “harvest” just because I can (when they’re not looking). If like me you have a plentiful supply, here are 14 things to do with rosemary for Weekend Herb Blogging #39 back over with Kalyn’s Kitchen this week. 1. Par-cooked new potatoes roasted in the […]

Cooking

Shadows of my colonial past: kedgeree

Ingredients Smoked fish – ideally smoked haddock but smoked cod will do. One good-sized fillet. Onion garlic Rice: long grain or pilau hard boiled eggs Curry powder plus turmeric, coriander and cardamon pods. Cinnamon quills. fresh coriander Bay leaf Butter Ghee or oil Lemons Yoghurt This is quite daggy and old fashioned. In fact it is a colonial dish. Yet I find it extremely comforting and delicious, probably because of the amount of butter involved. And it’s entirely appropriate that […]

Cooking, Drinks

Missing ingredient makes the chai

Sometimes you just need something to calm you down… when you’ve become hot under the collar over teabags. When two interviewees postponed today. As a matter a fact, I’m hot under the collar now. So it was that I though I had to buy chai, that calming hippy dippy Indian spiced tea. Three local supermarkets later and I had none and was too bothered to drive or ride across town to buy it. The best selection was at the local […]

Cooking, Easter, Eat streets

Hot and cross, yes. Buns? Not so sure…

Now that you’ve been exposed to my technical ‘skills’, it may not be surprising to learn that my hot cross buns were lacking something, too. I followed a recipe that I downloaded from the internet – probably my first mistake! – and while they turned out perfectly edible, they had a texture more akin to a scone than a bun. Everything started out nicely enough, although I was apprehensive about using copha, or vegetable shortening, as I associate that stuff […]

Cooking

Gordon Ramsay’s recipe wrong?

Anybody who has dismantled a car or a motorbike will have had this feeling. You reassemble it and end up with a box of extraneous nuts and bolts. Sometimes a similar thing happens with recipes. You assemble all the ingredients listed and methodically go through the recipe only to have several left over. Or something just doesn’t seem right. I won’t list them all here but this one of Gordon Ramsay’s comes to mind although funnily enough the problem is […]

Cooking

Apple Fragipane out of sync with the world

One short weekend and everything has change. yes, the sun still shines but the cold – relative cold at sub 20C – sets in. It’s time for blackpudding, bacon, egg and fried bread for breakfast. And it’s time for comfort food. Things like apple fraginpane tart, served with sour creme and a sticky or a glass of Pedro Ximinez. The beuaty of this recipe is that if you can make – or heaven forbid have access to premade shortcrust pastry […]

Cooking, Menus

What lurks inside

I have one update at the end here from Betel at Rustic Food, Ay Coregi, a crescent roll from Turkey. By now we all know the reasons for staging this monthly event. I need say no more. A crew of ten cheese sandwich munchers (plus myself) show what cooking at home is really about and how imaginative it can be. It’s about trying to find a use for the limp celery lying in some undetermined liquid in the bottom of […]

Books, Cooking

I’m not bitter, just delicate

There’s probably more than a few hangovers in Canberra today as the Prime Minister John Howard – a great friend of George Dubya) yesterday celebrated ten years in office. If we believe the PR, he was Australia’s great white hope (don’t mention multiculturalism) rescuing us from Labor, high interest rates, unemployment and almost certain doom. I’m not one of the big man’s cheerleaders. But I am feeling a tad delicate myself. Pat over at Gourmet Traveller reminded me of Fergus […]

Cooking

Foxy meal: I want you

Sometimes the eating habits of us former country folk can be controversial. I appalled a local Aussie food writer with stories of road kill from the Essex countryside. We’d often hit pheasants/partridge/rabbit/hare or just find them in the road. We’d pick them up take them home and hang them – this would be during winter remember – and wait until the maggots dropped out. At this point I could slip them out of their skin by hand. The meat will […]