Crock Pot Mongolian Style Beef

Instead of the Sunday roast, we like to do the occasional Sunday slow cook on wintery weekends. This weekend I wanted to try something a little different and try and get some Asian flavours into our slow cooker.

I found this recipe for Crock Pot Mongolian Style Beef on Recipezaar and really liked the look of it. DD loves Mongolian anything, so he was happy with the choice as well.

I do enjoy slow cooker recipes, it's something about throwing a whole heap of things into the dish and not having to worry about anything until dinnertime, when there's a lovely meal there. Or more accurately, it's this idea, because it rarely turns out that perfectly. I'm still perfecting my technique. I've worked out how much liquid I need to add to stop the meal from becoming a soupy mess and I've worked out that it's better if I add my sweet potato an hour before serving to stop it from disintegrating. I learn more each time I use it.

This fusion meal turned out very well. I followed the suggestion in one of the reviews and substituted sake for the fruity wine to give it more of an Asian feel. We served it with some rice, baby spinach leaves and bean sprouts. It wasn't a typical Mongolian flavour, but a more subtle taste. It was really nice and I'll definately try it again.

Crock Pot Mongolian Style Beef
adapted from Julesong on Recipezaar

500g beef stir fry strips
1 medium white onion, sliced thinly
1/2 cup light soy sauce
1/2 cup dry sherry
1/2 cup chicken broth
1 tbs minced garlic
2 tbs hoisin sauce
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 tbs ground ginger
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
1 cup spring onions, cut
1/3 cup sake
1 sweet potato, cut into chunks

Combine the soy sauce, sherry, chicken broth, garlic, hoisin, brown sugar, ginger and pepper flakes in a bowl and then put the mixture into the crockpot along with the onion.

Add the beef, gently pushing it into the liquid to cover and pour the sake over.

In a Breville slow cooker, cook on "Auto" for 6-7 hours. 1 hour before serving, add the sweet potato and spring onions. Cook for the remaining hour.

Stir and serve over rice, baby spinach leaves and bean sprouts.

Salted Caramel Cupcakes

The winner of one of the polls on How to Eat a Cupcake were salted caramel cupcakes. I recently realised how much I loved salted caramel visiting Adriano Zumbo in Sydney, so I couldn't wait for Cassie to make these so I could try them too!

Cassie's recipe has a buttercream frosting drizzled with a caramel sauce sprinkled with salt. It was late when the cupcakes came out of the oven and I didn't feel up to a buttercream, so I thought I'd just go with the caramel sauce. I had put the sugar on to melt when I had a brainwave. In the Crabapple Bakery Cupcake Cookbook, there is a recipe for a caramel sauce frosting. I thought I would try my hand at turning my currently melting sugar into a caramel sauce frosting. I had a small problem in that I'd run out of sugar, but in the end it didn't matter anyway.

While the sugar was melting I added some butter, golden syrup and cream and let it boil. While it was boiling I thought I would throw all caution to the wind and I sprinkled some kosher salt into my caramel. I risked my tongue a few times tasting and adding more salt, and when it got too hot just guessed as I added more salt. I had originally scaled the recipe for caramel sauce down to the small amount of sugar I had left, so I really just guessed a lot of the measurements.

After the caramel sauce had cooled I used an electric mixer to beat in the icing sugar. I didn't measure how much icing sugar, I just kept adding until the frosting stopped looking so wet. It looked pretty bad though, it wouldn't come together. The recipe suggests that you add extra cream if the mixture is too dry or extra icing sugar if it was too wet. I drizzled in a small amount of cream and hey presto! it came together into a gorgeous smooth salty caramel icing. It was gorgeous and perfectly salted, but really really sweet.

The cupcakes are surprisingly dense, but when you pair them with the frosting they go very very well together as the denseness of the cake can hold up to the sweetness of the frosting. The next day the frosting seemed to have settled and it wasn't as toothachingly sugary. In fact, it was so good it was tempting to just eat the frosting off the top of the cupcake (I may or may not have actually done this).

Salted Caramel Cupcakes
from Cupcakes by Shelly Kaldunski.

1 1/4 cups flour
3/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
2 large eggs, at room temperature
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup whole milk (I did use skim)

Position a rack in the middle of the oven and preheat to 180°C. Line a standard 12-cup muffin pan with paper or foil liners.

In a bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt. In another bowl, using an electric mixer on medium-high speed, beat the sugars and butter together until light and fluffy, 2-3 minutes. Add the eggs and vanilla and beat until combined. Add flour mixture in 3 additions, alternating with the milk in 2 additions, beating on low speed until just combined; scrape down the sides of the bowl as needed.

Divide the batter evenly among the prepared muffin cups, filling each about two-thirds full. Bake until a toothpick inserted in the center of a cupcake comes out clean, 20-22 minutes . Let the cupcakes cool in the pan on a wire rack for 5 minutes. Transfer the cupcakes to the wire rack and let cool completely, about 1 hour.

Real Caramel Sauce Frosting
from Crabapple Bakery Cupcake Cookbook by Jennifer Graham

(I really only used this recipe as a guide and I have no idea about the measurements I used, this is the recipe as stated in the book with salt as the only change I've made)

100g butter
2/3 cups soft brown sugar
1/4 cup golden syrup
1/2 cup cream
salt to taste
8 cups icing sugar (or as much icing sugar as needed to achieve the right consistency, I used much less than this)

Combine the butter, sugar, golden syrup and cream in a heavy-bsed saucepan over medium heat. Stir occasionally with a flat bottomed wooden spoon until the sugar has dissolved. Turn heat up to high and boil for at least 5 minutes. Add salt to taste, but be careful as the caramel can get quite hot. Take off the heat and cool to room temperature.

Add sifted icing sugar a little bit at a time to the cooled caramel mixture and use an electric mixer on medium speed to beat for 3 minutes until the desired consistency is achieved. Add extra cream if the mixture is too dry or extra icing sugar if the mixture is too wet.

Pastry hates me

I was so close to not taking a photo of this and just pretending that the whole thing never happened, but the food blogger in me took over.

I'm trying to suppress the memories, but it was meant to be a freeform apple pie from the latest delicious. magazine. I even cheated and used some bought vanilla bean shortcrust pastry and still failed!!!

I can't seem to roll out pastry for the life of me. I try flouring the surface, I cover my rolling pin because the porous surface of the roller is like pastry velcro. I did not try to roll it out between two pieces of baking paper though, but I think I'm too scarred to try pastry again soon.

Anyway, the pastry stuck to every possible thing it could stick to. I couldn't get it round, so I threw a little tantrum and left it lopsidedly rectangular. Of course, this meant I couldn't get the top to match up with the bottom and it was terribly wonky. I didn't spread the apple inside out well enough, so the top quarter of the rectangle was pretty much just pastry.

To top it all off, as I was brushing it with its egg wash I managed to knock over my bowl, spilling egg all over the tart. I mopped it up as best I could with paper towels, but you can still see the baked egg on the bottom third.

The apple inside was fantastic and turned out well, it smelled amazing and I think I might try the filling again but stick it in some fillo. Less stress.

Breakfast

DD and I love going out for breakfast. It's such a lovely contrast to normal mornings where breakfast is often plain toast with Vegemite (for me) or a coffee (for DD) to have someone else make us a delicious meal that we can enjoy at our leisure. This Sunday I really felt like a cooked breakfast, but DD had somewhere to be at 9:00AM and we didn't have time to eat first, so I decided to cook myself the breakfast of my dreams.

We stopped in at Zone Fresh while getting coffee and picked up some gorgeous bacon and sausages. I had some fresh ciabatta from Brumbys (I can't believe how good their ciabattas are, they are almost as nice as the ones you can buy from Pennisi's) and some fresh organic eggs.

DD had his in a sandwich. I served mine with a side of tasty cheese (a la Bills), some tomato chutney and a little bit of BBQ sauce. I've found that if I combine some jarred tomato chutney with some strong BBQ sauce I can get a chutney that tastes almost like I want it to taste, it's really good.

The good thing about cooking it yourself is that you can make sure your egg yolks aren't hard and your bacon isn't charred beyond recognition. It was a perfect breakfast, so good I think I want to do it again!

Mediterranean Noodle Stirfry

This recipe caught my eye in July edition of Recipes+. It combines Eastern techniques with Western flavour, apparently. I liked it because it had noodles, chicken, balsamic and mozzarella and was easy and quick. DD loves balsamic vinegar too, so it was also good for him.

It was really nice, but the flavour was on the sweet side. I found that it needed a lot of salt to balance it out. DD didn't have a problem with it at all though, so it may have just been me. I did cut out a large amount of the olive oil, so perhaps the full 1/3 cup olive oil was required to balance it out.

The recipe tells you to toss through some rocket leaves at the end, but I forgot to buy some so I increased the amount of basil and oregano.

Mediterranean Noodle Stir-fry
Adapted from Recipes+ Magazine, July 2008 p21

1/8 cup olive oil
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
2 cloves garlic, crushed
500g chicken breast stirfry strips
1 red onion, cut into thin wedges
250g punnet cherry tomatoes, halved
350g packet fresh egg noodles, rinsed
1/3 cup shredded oregano leaves
2/3 cup shredded basil leaves
180g bocconcini, sliced

Combine 1 tablespoon of oil, 1 tablespoon of vinegar, garlic and chicken and turn to coat. Marinate for 15 minutes (cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate if marinading longer)

Heat a frypan over moderate heat, spray with non-stick cooking spray. Brown the chicken and remove to a clean bowl. Stirfry the onion for 2 minutes, add the tomato and stirfry for 3 minutes.

Remove the onion and tomato mix from the frypan and add the noodles. Cook the noodles, trying not too stir too much, until the outside goes crispy but the inside is still soft.

Return the chicken, onion and tomato to the pan with the remaining oil and vinegar. Stirfry for 1 minute or until hot.

Remove pan from heat. Add herbs and toss to combine. Top with bocconcini to serve.

Market Morning Cupcakes

I'm starting to find that Sunday afternoon baking is becoming quite the tradition in my kitchen. I'm enjoying it though. This particular weekend, DD and I were both feeling a little under the weather, so Sunday morning was spent curled up in bed watching Will and Grace and reading my new book The Crabapple Bakery Cupcake Cookbook by Jennifer Graham.

After maybe three episodes and three quarters of the book I started to feel like baking. There are so many recipes in the book I want to try, but the one that called to me that Sunday were the Market Morning Cupcakes. They are an orange and poppy seed cake with an orange juice icing, and they are beautifully light and easy to eat.

I love orange and poppy seed cakes but I've never made one myself before. These cakes are really easy, simply soak the poppyseeds in some milk for at least half an hour, make the cake as you normally would, adding orange zest to the butter at the beginning and the poppy seeds in with the milk at the end.

I halved the recipe. I have been baking a bit lately and I'm trying to reduce the amount of cupcake temptation that remains after the baking has been done so I'm halving/thirding recipes left right and centre and taking them to work for morning teas, but there are still an awful lot of cakes around. This particular halved mix made one 12 hole tray of small cupcakes and one 12 hold tray of muffin-sized cupcakes. There was a small amount of mixture leftover, so I might have been able to scrap another two muffin-sized cupcakes out of it. I switched to the muffin sized cupcake tray because it was late at night when these were ready to go into the oven (I had to wait for the roast dinner to be done) and I've only got one small cupcake tray. When I had filled it once and saw the huge amount of mixture left I didn't want to be spending the next two hours repeatedly baking the small tray, so I switched to the bigger one.

Last week I bought an ice cream scoop to assist with my cupcake liner filling. It was much easier than the two spoon approach even if you needed to make sure you only filled the scoop halfway. When I switched to the muffin tray and I could use a full scoop, I became a convert - the ice cream scoop is definately the easiest way to fill a muffin liner. It was so quick!

I had two small issues with my interpretation of the recipe. First was pure laziness in that I didn't grate the orange zest which meant I did have long orange ribbons swirling through my batter. Luckily enough, they tended to get caught around the paddle of the mixer and I could remove a majority of them before I filled the pans. You couldn't notice them in the baked product though. The second was the sheer amount of poppy seeds you needed. When I poured out my milk and poppy seed combination I left half the poppy seeds behind in the measuring jug. When I checked the batter, it had a perfectly suitable amount of poppy seeds, if not already too many. I left the rest out.

My cupcakes took about 25 minutes rather than the 18 minutes in the book, I turned my oven up to 180 degrees for the second batch as well.

They are amazing cupcakes. I love them very much. They are light and fluffy and not too sweet. I didn't ice them. I love orange and poppy seed cake by itself and I felt it didn't need icing. Jennifer says in her intro that she loves to sit down with this cake and a cup of Earl Grey after her market setup early in the morning. I thought this was a great idea, so I copied it and enjoyed my cupcakes and a cup of Australian Breakfast tea while at work early in the morning.

Market Morning Cupcakes
from Crabapple Bakery Cupcake Cookbook by Jennifer Graham

(This is the recipe with full quantities. It makes 24 loaf cakes or 30 regular cupcakes)

2/3 cup poppy seeds
1 1/4 cups milk
3 3/4 cups plain flour
2 1/2 tsps baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
300g softened unsalted butter
zest of two oranges
2 1/2 cups white sugar
5 eggs
1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Soak the poppy seeds in the milk for at least half an hour.

Preheat the oven to 170 degrees C. Lightly grease or line your loaf or cupcake tins.

Sift together flour, baking powder and salt.

In another bowl, cream the butter for 1-2 minutes. Add the orange zest and beat for a 1 minute. Add the sugar a third at a time, beating for 2 minutes after each addition. After the last addition, beat until the mixture is light and fluffy and the sugar has almost dissolved.

Add eggs one at a time, beating for 1 minute after each addition or until the mixture is light and fluffy. Add the vanilla extract and beat until combined.

Add a third of the flour mixture and beat on low speed until combined. Add half of the milk and poppy seed mixture and beat until combined. Repeat the process. Add the remaining third of the flour mixture and beat until thoroughly combined; do not overbeat as this will toughen the mixture.

Spoon mixture into the tins, filling each about three quarters full. Bake for 18 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean. Remove from the oven and allow to cool for 5-10 minutes in trays before turning out onto a cooling rack.

Chicken and Udon Stirfry

Pinky from The Poison Doughnut posted the most amazing looking stirfry the other day. It looked so good that I had to try it for myself.

I had some problems though: DD doesn't eat seafood, I didn't have any beans and the udon noodles that I did have wouldn't have fed the three of us, so I had to make some adaptations. I still want to make it as written, but one day when I'm by myself.

I substituted chicken for the prawns and I marinated the chicken in Chang's Chinese Master Stock Sauce, which is a mix of soy, rice wine, ginger, star anise and cassia, and some chilli to give it some flavour. I found some snow peas in the fridge, so in they went and I stirred through 3/4 cup chopped Thai basil and coriander. I used thin egg noodles in place of udon, but at the last minute decided that I really wanted to try the udon so made up a packet of that as well.

It was gorgeous. So very yummy and flavourful. I love the udon noodles (I've never had them before) and it tasted like something you would buy from an Asian restaurant. I was very happy with it. Thanks so much Pinky!

Chicken and Udon Stirfry
Adapted from The Poison Doughnut

500g chicken stirfry strips
1/3 cup Chang's Chinese Master Stock Sauce
1/2 tsp minced chilli
1 packet longlife thin egg noodles
handful snow peas, sliced into strips
chopped galangal, ginger and garlic
light soy sauce
peanut oil
1/4 cup Thai basil, chopped
1/3 cup coriander, chopped
chilli oil and sesame oil for sprinkling

Heat peanut oil in a pan over medium-high heat. Add the galangal and ginger and stir until fragrant (30 seconds). Add the chicken and garlic and stirfry until chicken is cooked through. Add the snow peas and herbs and toss through. Remove to a bowl.

Return pan to heat. (Pinky says to rinse the noodles here, I didn't notice that and just threw them in). Add a tiny bit more peanut oil and fry the noodles over a high heat for about 4 minutes or until the outside of the noodles becomes slightly crispy. Add a splash of light soy and stir through.

Stir the noodles through the chicken and snow peas and sprinkle with chili and/or sesame oil to serve.

The Gunshop Cafe West End

D and I were both a feeling a little under the weather this Saturday morning and D was less than enthusiastic about getting up early and heading out the markets in the cold. While that makes him sound a little cranky, he is quite sick so I let him stay in bed a little longer and we went out for breakfast instead.

We decided to try The Gunshop Cafe at West End. We got there at 8am and the inside was quite full (and so loud!!!) so we chose to sit outside in the sun. It was a lovely spot. Unfortunately, we were the only people sitting outside and it seems that they forgot about us as it was 8:25 before someone came out to take our order and 8:30 before we got our coffees (which we ordered when we were seated).

D's cappucino. He said that I was silly taking a photo of it because it was just a normal cappucino. Hehe.

My hot chocolate.

My hot chocolate was awesome. It had two different types of chocolate on top. A crunchy chocolate powder and small chocolate chunks which melted into the creamy milk. It was beautiful.

D ordered toulouse sausage, sweet potato cake, rocket, scrambled eggs and bush tomato chutney with a side of bacon.


Neither of us liked the toulouse sausage. It was chewy and dry and tasted awful. Our palates must not be advanced enough to appreciate such a French sausage. D's eggs were cold, so he didn't eat them and ended up having a breakfast of sweet potato cake and bacon. The sweet potato cake was nice, crunchy on the outside and smooth and soft on the inside.

I had double smoked bacon, poached eggs, tomato, herbed hollandaise on toasted turkish bread.


This was okay. I didn't mind it. I didn't necessarily like it though. There was a hint of balsamic somewhere that just threw me off and didn't let me enjoy the other flavours. I couldn't tell if it was in the hollandaise or if the bread was brushed with it, but it was very distracting. The bread was soggy under the eggs (perhaps from poaching water?) but other than that it was good. The eggs had soft yolk which is my dream with any eggs benedict and it seems to be so hard to find a place that cooks their eggs soft. If it weren't for that balsamic taste and the soggy bread I'm sure I would have enjoyed it far more.

It should be mentioned that even though we had to wait half an hour for our coffee, our breakfasts came out less than 10 minutes after we ordered them.

When the bill arrived we found we had been overcharged by $10, which meant D had to go in and find someone to fix it. Both of us do not like having to do stuff like this, so it became just another thing that didn't really work for us with the Gunshop Cafe.

The good things about our visit weren't quite enough to make up for the things that didn't really work for us, so we don't think we'll be going back.

The Gunshop Cafe
53 Millison St
West End
Ph 07 3844 2241
www.thegunshopcafe.com

Grilled Cheese Sandwich

I love grilled cheese sandwiches. I have studied the America's Test Kitchen study on them and discovered a method that I follow religiously to get a nicely melted inside and a crispy but not burned outside. Sometimes, though, I do feel that they need something more to make them perfect. Maybe the cheese I use isn't strong enough, maybe I should add mustard. All these possibilities that I rarely try because even though my sandwiches aren't perfect, they are pretty darn good.

I bought a new Donna Hay book the other day and in the soup chapter was an intriguing recipe for toasted cheese sandwiches using cheddar cheese, sour cream and Dijon mustard. The whole idea of putting sour cream on a cheese sandwich was quite intriguing to me so I had to give it a try the next day.

It's really easy and after the first try you don't even have to measure, just add stuff until you get a nice colour and consistency.

I used some Brumby's ciabatta and brushed the outside with melted butter (ATK tip #1) rather than spreading it with butter because it's not as messy and it's easier to evenly coat the bread. I cooked it over a relatively low heat (ATK tip #2) so that the heat had a chance to really get in and melt the cheese without overtoasting/burning the bread.

It was awesome. Easily the best grilled cheese sandwich I've ever had. The sour cream melts with the cheese into an oozy gooey inside and the mustard gives it that little bit of extra kick that the mildness of the cheese needs. It was creamy and decadent, but I used low fat cheese and low fat sour cream so it most certainly wasn't as bad as it could have been.

Toasted Cheese Sandwiches
adapted from Donna Hay Modern Classics Book 1, p36

1 1/3 cups grated cheddar cheese
1/3 cup sour cream
2 1/2 tsp Dijon mustard
sea salt and cracked black pepper
4 slices bread
melted butter

Mix the cheese, sour cream, mustard, salt and pepper in a bowl. Spread onto half of the bread slices and top with the other half of the bread slices. Brush the outside with melted butter. Cook the sandwiches in a non stick frying pan over a medium-low heat until the bread is crisp and golden brown (this can take 5-10 minutes each side), flipping back to the first side to reheat and crisp, about 15 seconds.

New mixer

After the death of my Sunbeam Mixmaster (which never mixed properly anyway), I have traded up. I was tossing up about getting a Kitchenaid, but I just couldn't come to terms with paying that much for a mixer. Of course, it was my inability to see that you pay for what you get with these things that meant while I saved a bit of money paying only $100 for the Sunbeam, here I am replacing it 7 months later.

I was reading through the reviews on Choice.com.au and saw that the Kenwood mixers were actually rated higher than the Kitchenaid. In fact, so was a Breville, which I found quite surprising. I had a look around keeping everything in mind and decided that I really didn't want to spend more than $350 on a mixer. If the $350 one breaks down 7 months from now I'm going to be a lot crankier though. In the end I bought a Kenwood Patissier.

The Kenwood is worlds away from the Sunbeam. I'm not having to stand over it and force the mixture up into the beaters because there is a good 2 cm of air between the beaters and the bottom of the bowl. It's so much quieter too! I want to buy the splashguard but I can't find the one for this particular mixer. Does anybody know which one fits the Pattisier?

I made biscuits to celebrate. I've never had butter and sugar creamed that well before...

S'mores

I loved to read all the American teen books when I was a kid and s'mores came up more than once. I've always been curious as to what they tasted like, because everyone in the books thought they were magic.

The latest Donna Hay magazine had the most gorgeous picture of s'mores on the front and a recipe which included making your own biscuit from scratch (because what is a graham cracker?). I had some Ghirardelli dark chocolate squares tempting me so I thought I would give it a try.

Before I even got to the s'more part, I fell in love with the biscuit batter. This was the most divine biscuit batter I had ever tasted, dangerously so. I could have gotten another 2 biscuits from what I left in the bowl "for cleaning".

I'm not a big fan of lots of chocolate chips in biscuits, I like them sparse and far between because chocolate chips as they are are too big a chunk of chocolate. Ideally, I should have put them in the food processor for a bit and chopped them down in size, but I was lazy, so I just halved the amount of chocolate chips required. I only used milk chocolate because that was all I had.

I also left the oats out of my second try. On my first try I did add them, but I think my oats had gone stale because they were horrible. This (and only having half of the chocolate chips) meant that my biscuit dough was more of a biscuit batter.

I overcooked the second batch. I set the timer for 12 minutes and then forgot about it, but I definately should have checked at 10. They were still good though. I am going to pretend that I meant to do it this way and I'm calling them 'snaps' instead of biscuits. They are crispily chewy on the outside and nicely chewy on the inside. DD really liked them.

The s'more part was a little underwhelming, truth be told. On my first try (see the first picture), I had way too much chocolate. This is why the picture is still of it on the baking paper - the chocolate was going everywhere! I had only used one marshmallow and the dark chocolate overpowered everything. The next time I used two marshallows and half a square of chocolate which worked better, but I didn't really like it. It tasted like a chocolate coated marshmallow lolly and didn't have the toasty melted taste I was hoping for.

The biscuits are fantastic though.

Chocolate and Oat S'mores
from Donna Hay Magazine Winter 2008, p92

125g butter, softened
1 1/2 cups (220g) brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 egg
1 1/2 cups (225g) plain flour, sifted
1/2 tsp baking powder, sifted
100g dark chocolate chips
100g milk chocolate chips
1/3 cup (30g) rolled oats
20 pieces of dark chocolate
20 marsmallows

Preheat oven to 180 degrees celcius. Place the butter, sugar and vanilla in the bowl of an electric mixer and beat for 8 to 10 minutes or until light and creamy. Add the egg and beat until well combined. Add the flour and baking powder and beat until just combined. Fold through the dark and milk chocolate chips and rolled oats. Roll tablespoons of the mixture and place on baking trays lined with non-stick baking paper, leaving space between them to spread. Flatten slightly and bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until golden. Cool on trays.

To assemble, place the biscuits bottom side up on a tray. Top half with a piece of chocolate and the other half with a marshmallow. Bake until the chocolate and marshmallows are starting to melt. Sandwich the halves together and serve.

Sweet chilli and lime chicken

Another quick and easy dinner from Donna: sweet chilli and lime chicken. The idea behind it is to marinate your chicken in chilli jam/sauce/paste, oil, lime juice and garlic and then cook it on a chargrill pan or BBQ. That's it. Nothing else involved, unless you count steaming the rice and Chinese greens Donna recommends serving with it.

I chose a sweet chilli sauce for ours, because I'm a little sensitive to hot things and I just cooked it in a normal frypan. It worked really really well, the sweet chilli thickened to almost a glazey consistency and coated the chicken perfectly. Everything stayed nice and moist. The only thing was that the lime was quite subtle and I like a stronger lime flavour. I would increase the lime juice and maybe add some zest next time. It was really good and since it only used half a bottle of sweet chilli sauce, I have enough to make it again!

Lime and Chilli Chicken
adapted from Donna Hay Magazine Winter 2008, p 45

1/4 cup vegetable oil (Donna says to use 1/3 cup but I reduced this to a little under 1/4 cup)
2/3 cup sweet chilli sauce
1/3 cup lime juice
4 cloves garlic, crushed
1kg chicken breast fillets, cut into strips (Donna says to use trimmed thigh fillets)
steamed rice to serve

Place oil, sweet chilli sauce, lime juice and garlic in a non-metallic bowl and stir to combine. Place the chicken in a bowl with half of the marinade and toss to coat. Set aside for 5 minutes.

Heat a frypan over high heat. Cook the chicken until cooked through. Spoon over the remaining marinade and serve with steamed rice.

Serves 4.

Crazy Cupcake Sunday: Decorating

I posted about my piped icing in my creme brulee post, but I also played around with some other decorating bits and pieces.

Decorating bits and pieces

Hee, its the cupcake equivalent of finger painting.

Properly decorated ones. Some are covered in Max Brenner drinking chocolate, others with milk chocolate chips, others with cinnamon and others with cocoa.

Packed and ready to be taken for morning tea

DD eyeing off the cupcakes

Crazy Cupcake Sunday: Gingerbread Cupcakes

Part two of Crazy Cupcake Sunday were these gorgeous Gingerbread Cupcakes. They turned out to be a really good choice for a second cupcake, because these weren't lightly sweet like the Creme Brulee cupcakes. These were dark and rich - a perfect counterpoint.

The ginger and molasses really gives these depth. Not only were they the perfect counterpoint to the other cupcakes, they were beautifully matched with their sweet cream cheese icing.

Gingerbread Cupcakes
from Crazy About Cupcakes by Krystina Castella as posted on How To Eat A Cupcake

1/2 cup (113g) unsalted butter, at room temp
1/4 cup dark brown sugar
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
2/3 cup light molasses
2 teaspoons lemon zest
2 1/2 cups plain all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 1/4 teaspoons ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1 cup sour cream

1. Preheat the oven to 180 C . Insert liners into a medium cupcake pan.

2. In a large bowl cream the butter and sugars together with an electric mixer on medium speed until fluffy, 3-5 minutes. Add the egg, molasses, and lemon zest to creamed mixture. Beat well.

3. In a separate bowl combine the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, ginger, and cloves.

4. Add portions of the dry ingredients to the creamed mixture, alternating with portions of the sour cream, until they are completely integrated, about 30 seconds.

5. Fill the cupcake liners 2/3 full. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool cupcakes in pan on a wire rack.

Ginger Cream Cheese Frosting

225g cream cheese, at room temp
6 tablespoons (85g) unsalted butter, at room temp
3 cups confectioners (icing) sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

1. In a medium bowl cream together the cream cheese and butter with an electric mixer on medium speed until smooth.

2. Slowly sift in the confectioners sugar and continue beating. Mix until all lumps are gone. Add the vanilla and ginger and mix until fully integrated.

Crazy Cupcake Sunday: Creme Brulee Cupcakes

I have been reading cupcake blogs recently and they have inspired me to try my hand at cupcakes. I haven't really made a lot of cupcakes, the only time I have tried since I started blogging was a terrible failure and I ended up using a packet mix. I also really wanted to learn how to ice and decorate cakes. I am not very creative and I've never really experimented with icing beyond Nigella's royal icing, which is pretty foolproof.

So, I purchased a patty pan tin, some cupcake liners, a pallet knife and a deluxe cake decorating set (not all at the same time, I've been building up to this) and set to work one fine Sunday. I had trawled through many a blog and I had decided to try four different recipes. Three cupcake recipes (all with a different type of icing) and a biscuit recipe.

Unfortunately it seemed that I had bitten off a bit more than I could chew. It didn't help that my Sunbeam mixmaster, which is only 7 months old, decided to die halfway through beating the first cupcake mixture. Luckily, my $10 Coles hand beaters were still in the back of the pantry. I dug them out and kept on mixing.

Only having one 12-hole tin did put a bit of a dampener on the proceedings, as it meant that I had to fill the cupcakes, bake them, wait for them to cool enough to turn out, refill, rebake etc etc. As it got towards the end of the day I did have to call it at just two cupcake recipes and two frostings.

The two cupcake recipes are from How To Eat A Cupcake: Creme Brulee cupcakes with brown sugar Swiss meringue buttercream and Gingerbread cupcakes with ginger cream cheese frosting.

The creme brulee cupcakes are absolutely amazing. They were soft and creamy and light and delicate and everything all at once. The Swiss meringue buttercream was lovely and tasty and really made the cupcake sing. I am definately going to make these again.

Crème Brûlée Cupcakes
from Cupcakes Galore by Gail Wagman as posted on How To Eat A Cupcake

2 ½ cups plain all-purpose flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt, plus a pinch for the egg whites
½ cup (113g) unsalted butter, room temperature
1 ½ cups sugar
2 eggs, separated
1 cup milk
3 tablespoons caramel syrup (ice cream topping)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1. Preheat oven to 180°C.
2. Mix flour, baking powder, and salt together and set aside.
3. Cream butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add egg yolks, one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Alternately beat in dry ingredients and milk. Add caramel syrup and vanilla. Beat until smooth.
4. Beat egg whites with a pinch of salt until stiff but not dry. Gently fold whites into batter.
5. Spoon batter into cupcake papers, filling cups about 2/3 full. Bake for about 15-20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Remove from oven and cool.


Brown Sugar Swiss Meringue Buttercream
from Everyday Baking from Everyday Food as posted on How To Eat A Cupcake

1 cup light brown sugar
4 egg whites
¼ teaspoon salt
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature

Put sugar, egg whites and salt into the top of a double boiler over a pan of simmering water. Whisking constantly, cook until sugar has dissolved and mixture is warm (about 160 degrees). Pour heated egg whites into the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment. Beat egg white mixture on high speed until it forms stiff (but not dry) peaks. Continue beating until fluffy and cooled, about 7 minutes total. Switch to the paddle attachment. With mixer on medium-low, add butter two tablespoons at a time, beating well after each addition. Increase speed to medium-high; continue beating until frosting appears thick, about 3 minutes. Reduce speed to low and continue beating 1 minute to reduce air bubbles.


As I said above, my stand mixer died during the first beating. Even if it hadn't died I didn't have a paddle or whisk attachment, so I was a bit apprehensive about the Swiss meringue buttercream almost to the point of not even trying. I was just going to make Royal Icing and be done with it. In the end I decided to give the buttercream a try, no stand mixer, no whisk attachment just my trusty $10 Coles hand beaters.

Using hand beaters was really good when it came to whisking the egg whites and sugar over the double boiler, they were light enough to keep whisking easily over the stove. When my beaters and I moved off the stove it took about 6 minutes for the egg whites to cool and turn fluffy. It took a further 10 minutes to get it to look like this:

Which is how it is supposed to look! I was very excited. I did have some severely shaking hands for quite a while afterwards though, so the icing had to wait.

Once my hands had stopped shaking I took my piping bag and started experimenting. My first area for improvement is filling the piping bag. I made such a mess. The first time I didn't put enough in and could barely get a cupcake out of it. The second time I did better and made this:


It looks almost decent, doesn't it? It's my very first piped icing! I did find that my whisking was less than impressive while it was over the double boiler as I occasionally found bits of egg sticking in my nozzle, making very strange ribbony swirls. I'm pretending that I meant for them to be that way.

I took them to work for Monday morning tea, they were a hit!

Cheat's Chorizo Paella

One fine Sunday I felt the urge to bake cupcakes. Not just one lot of cupcakes, but lots and lots of cupcakes. It was going to be a Crazy Cupcake Sunday (more on that later).

Halfway through Crazy Cupcake Sunday, I was buzzing a bit thanks to lots of sugar, chocolate, butter, caramel sauce, cream cheese, eggs... and thought 'I need something seriously savoury, stat!'. I had my latest Donna Hay magazine out on the counter with the intention of trying her recipe for s'mores (more on that later too) and though a nice sausagey rice would be the perfect foil to my sugar high.

This was very very simple. Donna calls it an everyday easy one-pot wonder and I completely agree. I mean, I managed to cook this one while trying to manage two cupcake batters which were making around 60 cupcakes in one 12-hole cupcake pan. I know, I should have bought two.

It is lovely and light. I used half a csabai smoked sausage bought from the Swiss Gourmet Deli which meant the chorizo flavour wasn't as strong as it could have been but in this situation it was really good as there was nothing really overpowering in it. It's quite tomato-y though, but I think that might be because of the mildness of the sausage. A stronger sausage may have cut through the tomato a bit. It was still very comforting, and the feta melted into lovely creamy little blobs which was a nice surprise throughout the dish.

Cheats Chorizo Paella
from Donna Hay Magazine Winter 2008, p64

1 tbs olive oil
2 cloves garlic, sliced
1 onion, chopped
1 chorizo sausage, sliced
1 cup (200g) medium grain rice
2 cups (200ml) chicken stock
1 x 400g crushed tomatoes
1/2 cup coriander leaves
100g feta, crumbled.

Heat the oil in a large, deep frying pan over high heat. Add the garlic, onion and chorizo and cook for 4-5 minutes or until browned. Add the rice, stock and tomato, cover, reduce heat to low and cook for a further 15 minutes or until stock is absorbed and rice is al dente. Stir through the coriander and feta to serve.

Donna says that this serves two, but DD and I got lunch that day and I got two work lunches out of this.

Grill'd

One of the major competitors with Chimi's was the burger restaurant Grill'd. Grill'd promises to deliver delicious, healthy burgers using only the highest quality, freshest ingredients. As you can see from their bags, they are healthy burgers! In fact, they aren't that bad really. A Simply Grill'd burger with herbed mayo (grilled 100% lean beef - the patties are 95% fat free, salad, relish) is only 537 calories. You can cut that down to 453 calories but omitting the mayonnaise.

Since experiencing Chimi's burgers, I discovered that I loved a burger with a nice strong cheese, a tasty sometimes tangy relish and a good mayonnaise or aioli. That combination really worked well for me and now I'm spoiled for a plain sauce burger. I was excited to see that Grill'd also embraced the relish/mayonnaise combo and I asked DD if we could try it.

We went down the restaurant in Bulimba to find it absolutely packed. It was crazy busy, almost overwhelmingly so. We were able to place our order immediately, but we had to hide behind the door to wait. Despite the crowds, it was only 15-20 minutes for our order to be ready. The next time we visited we called our order ahead and that was a much better plan.

I ordered a Simply Grill'd burger with tasty cheese ($8.90) and DD chose the Crispy Bacon and Cheese ($9.90). You can choose between white or wholemeal rolls or a panini. The buns are freshly baked daily and are low in sugar. We also ordered a regular size hot chips which come sprinkled in a Grill'd herb mix.


The burgers were awesome. They were fresh and flavourful and all the different flavours really came through. The meat patty is amazing, you could eat it on its own it's that tasty. The chips were a little overcooked for me, but DD liked them and the herb sprinkle.

We thought both of the burgers were great and they went a long way to soothe the ache that Chimi's closure had left in DD's heart (well, not really - but they will be a good substitute). Grill'd also has a wide range of chicken, lamb and vegie burgers if you're not in the mood for beef.

Grill'd Bulimba
124 Oxford St
Ph 07 3359 3888
(lots of other locations, check
www.grilld.com.au

Wattleseed Muffins

I bought some ground wattleseed from Herbie's Spices not too long ago, but it's been sitting unloved in my pantry because I didn't know what to do with it. While browsing around, I found this recipe on Milk and Cookies and decided to give it a try.

According to Wikipedia, wattleseed (seeds from this species of Australian native acacia) is becoming quite popular because of its high nutritional content, hardiness, availability, low GI and low toxicity. I think it might also have something to do with the fact it tastes a bit like coffee and a bit like chocolate but then again like something completely different. It blends well with both coffee and chocolate too, by the way.

While checking my wattleseed facts, I found a recipe for Chocolate Wattleseed Biscuits. I think that will be my next wattleseed recipe.

JenJen's recipe was very easy to make. I omitted the dates because I don't like them. I also didn't have any muscovardo sugar, so I substituted brown sugar with a tiny little bit of molasses. I made full sized muffins, but I did have trouble with them rising. I don't think I creamed the butter and sugar well enough and I may have been a bit heavy handed when mixing in the flour. Both of the batches I made were a little leaden. They still tasted good, they were just heavy.

The muffins tasted amazing. They were beautifully flavoured, a little sweet but not too much. The wattleseed added a little crunch too. The molasses/maple syrup gave a nice depth. I took them to work for morning tea and everyone enjoyed them. Thanks very much Jen for posting such a wonderful recipe!

Wattleseed Muffins
From Milk and Cookies.

Note: I halved the recipe both times I tried it, but I will post the full measurements here. The halved recipe made 6 full sized muffins.

1 1/4 cup plain flour
1 tbs ground wattleseed
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
170g unsalted butter
1/2 cup packed light muscovado sugar (I used brown sugar with a touch of molasses added)
2 tbs maple syrup
1 egg
1 cup dates (I omitted these)

Preheat oven to 170˚C. Line a muffin tray with paper cases.

In a bowl sift flour, wattleseed, baking powder, baking soda and salt together. Set aside.

In another bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

Add the egg and maple syrup and mix to combine; the mixture may look a little curdled at this stage but this is fine.

Fold in the flour mixture until just combined.

Spoon about 2 teaspoons of the batter into the prepared muffin tray, careful not to over fill the cases. Only fill them about ¾ of the way.

Bake in the oven for 12-15 minutes or until the muffin tops are golden brown.

Remove from oven and allow to cool for 5 minutes before turning out onto a tray.

Sizzling Garlic Beef Stirfry

I really enjoyed this dish when I first tried it after finding it on taste.com.au. However, it did require me to get the wok out and heat lots of oil and it made a splatter and a mess, so when I tried it again I took the lazy option and did it in a pan on the stove and cut out a lot of the oil.

I also wanted to try out my new vegetable peeler which peels fine julienned cuts from your vegetables, so we had to have carrot. The carrots at the fruit shop were huge, in the end I had the equivalent of three carrots worth of juliennes. The stirfry ended up quite orange.

The flavours in this stirfry are really yummy. Its really easy and adaptable and light and tasty too.

Sizzling Garlic Beef Stirfry
Adapted from Australian Good Taste March 2006, courtesy of Taste.com

500g stirfry beef
1 tbs cornflour
1 tsp sesame oil
1 tsp cracked black pepper
peanut oil
1 brown onion, halved and cut into wedges
4 garlic cloves, crushed
1 red chilli, finely chopped
5 chives
1 large carrot, julienned
1 handful green beans, julienned
small knob ginger, julienned
1 red capsicum, julienned
2/3 cup vegetable stock
2 tbs kecap manis
Steamed rice, to serve

Combine the beef, soy sauce, cornflour, sesame oil and pepper in a large bowl.

Heat a small amount of the peanut oil in a frypan over high heat. Add the beef mixture and stir-fry for 1-2 minutes or until brown. Transfer to a heatproof bowl.

Heat a small amount oil in the frypan over medium-high heat until just smoking. Add the onion and chilli and stir-fry for 2 minutes or until soft. Add the garlic, ginger and chives and stir-fry for 1 minute or until aromatic. Add vegetables and stock and stir-fry for 3 minutes.

Return beef to the wok along with the kecap manis and stir-fry for 1 minute or until mixture boils and thickens. Serve with steamed rice.

Beef Pot Roast

DD loves meals cooked in our slow cooker and requested on for a Saturday night dinner. I was reading a Super Food Ideas magazine at the time and happened across a recipe for Beef Pot Roast that we decided to adapt to the slow cooker.

We used a big chunk of beef topside which I browned on all sides first, as per the recipe, before transferring into the slow cooker. DD isn't a fan of the vegetables in the actual recipes so we cut them out and just used onions and sweet potato. We have learned from previous slow cooker disasters that you really can't just throw everything in there and walk away, because when you come back 6 or 7 hours later your vegetables have disintegrated. In fact, we get a refresher on this every time we use the slow cooker because we never remember the next time. I did remember this time! I added the vegetables 4 hours after the meat, which meant that they were only cooking for about 2 and half hours. They were still a little mushy but if they had been normal potato they would have been fine. Next time I'll have to leave it a bit longer before adding them.

I turned the meat twice during the cooking time as the liquid didn't cover the entire hunk of meat. I increased the liquid by an extra cup (1/2 beef stock, 1/2 water) to bring it up to cover more of the meat. There was a little flappy bit attached to the meat that did dry out a little, but the main piece turned out lovely and tender, and you could separate the meat strands easily with your fork. The flavour was really rich and deep too, but I did add some soy sauce after tasting the liquid for seasoning. It probably could have been served with something light in contrast, but I didn't realise how strong the flavour had become so I didn't think of it. I think some lightly steamed vegetables would have been good, or I could have left out the soy sauce.

We used the leftover meat the next day for lunch in roast meat and gravy sandwiches. It almost tasted better in the sandwiches than it did for dinner, but gravy is very good...

Beef pot roast
Adapted from Super Food Ideas magazine July 2008 p 42

1 1/2 tbs olive oil
600g whole lean beef topside
1 onion, chopped
2 tsp dried thyme leaves
2 tbs plain flour
2 tbs worcestershire sauce
2 cups beef stock

Heat half the oil in a frypan and brown the beef of all sides, approx 5 minutes per side. Transfer to slow cooker bowl.

Heat remainin oil in the frypan and add the onion and thyme. Cook until softened. Add flour and cook, stirring, for 2 minutes. Add the sauce, stock and 1 cup cold water. Bring to the boil.

Pour the liquid over the meat and turn on the slow cooker. Cook for 6-7 hours or as recommended by your slow cooker. Turn the meat every two or so hours and add sweet potato approximately 1-1 1/2 hours before finishing time.

Pizza with Eumundi Smokehouse Sausages

While on my quest to find the perfect recipe to showcase our Eumundi Smokehouse sausages I thought I should make pizza. I'm pretty picky with my pizzas. I like them to be saucy and cheesy with a base that is not too doughy or floury and that doesn't overpower my sauce and cheese. I also like pretty plain pizzas, I don't like those that have too much going on. I find that I very rarely get a bought pizza that I truly enjoy and that I feel is a perfectly satisfying pizza. I get good pizzas where you can taste the quality of sauce and the ingredients and they are good, but they just aren't my perfect pizza.

So, why not make my own? Well, because I'm lazy really. But DD sent me on my own to do grocery shopping one day and I saw premade pizza bases and thought I'd give it a whirl. I didn't make my own base because of the abovementioned lazy thing.

Anyway, I made two versions of this pizza with varying levels of success. The first pizza was split into sixths, one sixth for each type of Eumundi sausage and two sixths for just plain cheese. I added some torn mozzarella to the cheese only bit in addition to the pre-grated cheese. I used pizza sauce infused with basil and garlic and baked it on my pizza stone.

It was so good. The Eumundi sausages added the perfect extra flavour to my pizza and the base was perfect as the vehicle for the flavours without detracting from them. I knew it was a good pizza when I tried it cold the next day and it was just as good, if not better, as when it first came out of the oven. This is huge for me, because I normally hate cold pizza.

The second pizza was fairly similar. I used the Kasana and Russian Farmers sausage from Eumundi and spread them out over the whole base instead of keeping them separate.


I then topped it with some torn mozarella and grated cheese - a bought combination of grated mozarella, tasty cheese and parmesan. It's low fat pizza cheese! It was the same amount of grated cheese as the first pizza and I cooked it in the same way.


I must not have cooked it long enough though because this time the base was floury and doughy and really took away from the flavours in the pizza. I think I overdid it with the cheese, I should have left off the torn mozzarella as the flavours started fighting each other. When I had some the next day, I thought "ugh, cold pizza". I do think it was because I didn't cook it long enough. Maybe my stone wasn't as hot this time as it was the last time. DD told me that the pizza needed more cooking but I didn't listen as I thought I knew better, so sorry DD. You were right.

Burgers from Bennetts Road Seafood

DD has made a little bit of a tradition of visiting Chimi's Burger Bar on a Friday. He loves their burgers and sweet potato fries. I like it because you can downsize the burger size and get a smaller, more manageable burger that won't make you feel like you can't move after finishing it. Plus, their meat is nicely flavoured, they use good cheese and have a great tasting relish and aioli which all comes together to make a really good burger.

We went to Chimi's as usual on our first Friday night back after Sydney, but they were closed. We tried to think of all these reasons as to why they'd just close for one night but deep down we knew that there would be no good reason as to why a place would be closed on a Friday night if it wasn't a permanent thing. Later, DD emailed Chimi's and they confirmed it (plus it's on their website): Chimi's was no more.

The problem was that we still wanted burgers that Friday night. Where could we go? When I did my initial research into Brisbane's best burger I did remember reading that Bennetts Road Seafood do a good burger so we went down to check it out.

Bennetts Road Seafood is a completely unassuming little place in Norman Park. It's got the suburban fish and chip shop feel complete with really low prices. It offers a selection of seafood and snacks (like Chiko Rolls and dim sims, crumbed sausages, "sav in batter" and deep fried Mars Bars) but we were there for the burgers. I love fish and would like to try their seafood one day, but DD hates the taste and smell of seafood so it will have to be one day by myself.

Their burgers range in price from $4.00 for a vegie burger and a bacon burger up to $7.00 for the steak burger works. All burgers are served with lettuce, tomato, beetroot, onion and BBQ sauce but you can get extra cheese, egg or pineapple for 50c or add bacon for 80c.

Chips are sold by the scoop, one scoop (which could have fed us twice over) was $2.50. If that doesn't take you back to the good old days I don't know what will!

We ordered a cheeseburger for me and a cheeseburger with no salad but lettuce for DD. The one in the picture is mine. The rolls are lightly toasted with the cheese melted into the bun which was very cool to see.

The meat patties are freshly made with a nice even texture and they had a nice meaty flavour. I felt the cheese was not strong enough to hold its own against the meat and it got lost in the burger. I like a good strong flavourful cheese and unfortunately you couldn't taste it. The salads were fresh and there was a really good meat/bun/salad balance. I also really liked the bun, but I'm a sucker for tasty white bread. The chips were perfectly cooked with a nice crispy outside and a soft fluffy inside. They were very liberally coated with chicken salt as DD requested, I think I'd prefer mine chicken salt-less. As I said before, $2.50 bought heaps of chips. We had to throw at least half of them out, which was sad because they were great chips.

DD enjoyed his burger but felt that it was missing something. He says that next time he is going to try his with bacon.

It was a great simple meal for a fantastic price. The service was wonderful too. They saw me looking at the menu and taking a business card for this post and offered to get me a takeaway menu. They were quite busy but our meals were still ready very quickly.

Bennetts Road Seafood
187 Bennetts Road
Norman Park
Ph 3399 8667

Vodka Cream Pasta with Eumundi Sausages

Since we put in so much effort to visit the Eumundi Smokehouse, we had to do something special with them that would really show their depth and flavour.

Not Quite Nigella used her Eumundi sausage to make this wonderfully simple dish. I thought it looked spectacular and I had a bottle of vodka in the pantry - it was meant to be.

Check out NQN's blog for the recipe, but it is really easy and a perfect weeknight meal when you just want to get dinner out of the way super fast. I used low-fat evaporated milk instead of cream as she suggests.

We used the Chorizo and Polish Kielbasa sausages for this and the way the sauce melded together and coated the pasta was absolutely fantastic. Better than any carbonara!

I've made variations on this twice since then with varying success though (once with pancetta and once with chicken). I've never had it taste as good as it did on the initial try, unfortunately. Of course, the second time I burned the pancetta and all you could taste was burned pork, but the glossy coating of my pasta just wasn't there either of the repeat tries. It must have been the luck of the sausages.

I'm not giving up! I may not be able to get anymore Eumundi sausages for a while, but there's got to be something out there that will make this work.

Chestnuts

You know the songs, they sing about chestnuts roasting on an open fire... Jamie Oliver cooked chestnuts (over an open fire, funnily enough) in a recent episode of Jamie at Home... Chestnuts are in all the American books when they talk about Christmas/Thanksgiving... And until now, I have never tasted a chestnut. I've had chestnut puree, which is awesome, but never an actual chestnut.

Chestnuts are sold loose in the supermarkets now, so I bought some with the intention of finding out just what this nut tastes like. Following the handy dandy instructions on Not Quite Nigella, I set to work.

I crisscrossed the ends and put my little pile chestnuts in a roasting tray with a little water and roasted them for 8-10 minutes in a hot oven. I let them cool and then removed their outer shell.

I ate them as I shelled them (well, not all of them) and they were very good. They were fairly soft after their spell in the oven, but they were lovely and sweet. I could probably eat these quite easily if I didn't have to shell them first.

Sydney Market Roundup - Orange Grove Markets

This was our third last stop on our holiday. (The last two were Max Brenner St Ives and Ribs and Rumps for dinner with friends, if you were wondering). The lovely guys at Adriano Zumbo recommended these markets to us, saying that they had the best bacon and egg rolls ever. People have been known to line up for over 45 minutes for one. We had to go and see for ourselves.

We arrive a little later than we normally do to a market to find the surrounding streets absolutely packed full of cars. The markets themselves were sprawled across the grounds of Orange Grove School and there were stalls there selling everything from bread to plants to cookbooks to clothes to bags to beauty products... There was a huge range of stallholders there. There were gozlemes there, but today we were after the famed bacon and egg roll. We wandered around a bit until we turned a corner to see a giant line snaking back through the stalls. This must be it, we thought. DD jumped in the line while I went for a look around the rest of the markets.

I found the Eumundi Smokehouse stall and a stall selling beautiful quiches and pies. Apparently these are favourites at the Orange Grove markets and often sell out well before 10am. Today was a slow day as there were still a few available. There was also a stall selling a variety of cookbooks for really really good prices.

After my wander about the stalls I returned to DD. He had made a friend in the line and she told him that the best coffee was a stall down the end of the markets and there was always a line for that too. She had sent her partner off to get her a coffee while she waited for the rolls. DD wasn't in the mood for coffee so I was saved from that job.

She also said that there was a stall that sold the best yoghurt ever. I love a good yoghurt, so we had to check that out. She was right too. It was thick, creamy and beautifully flavoured Greek yohurt. I bought a small tub of plain and DD and I ate it on the car in the way back to where we were staying. DD isn't a big yoghurt fan, but even he loved this.


After about 15 minutes in the line, DD ordered our two bacon and egg rolls. They were very simple, a soft white bread roll, a perfectly BBQ'd egg, some BBQ sauce (DD had tomato) and the best flavoured bacon you have ever tasted. We completely agree with everyone who had raved about these rolls. The thing about them is that everything is perfectly balanced with nothing overpowering anything else. And the bacon was sublime, it was just perfectly smoked and tasty. No pictures, we were too busy eating.

Absolutely amazing.

Orange Grove Markets
Orange Grove Public School
Perry St
Leichhardt, NSW
Every Saturday 8am-1pm