Quinoa

I came across this delicious recipe while browsing Jen's blog Milk and Cookies for a healthy quinoa dish. DD and I have been trying to eat healthier and quinoa is a fantastic substitute for our normal carb component.

We used some gourmet chicken sausages from Woolworths, though I was green with envy at Jen being able to use the fantastic Eumundi Sausages which I can't get in Brisbane.

Everything turned out really well and DD really liked it. I liked the flavour and the idea of the dish but came to the conclusion that I just don't really like quinoa. There's something about the texture that just puts me off and I can't convince myself that the health benefits are worth a slightly less palatable texture.

If you do like quinoa, definately give Jen's recipe a try, because it is really nice in its flavour.

Tasty BBQ Marinade

UPDATE: I've found the recipe! It was hard to find because it was actually in an issue of recipes+. See it below.

This is going to be a pretty useless post as I can't remember what issue of Super Food Ideas this fabulous recipe came from.

It was a simple marinade with only a few ingredients, but the flavours really work well together. I loved the chicken that was marinaded in this. Even after removing the skin the flesh was beautifully flavoured.

DD loved this one too, I marinaded some steak using this recipe and he gave it the thumbs up.

The feature in Super Food Ideas had a collection of three simple marinades. I haven't tried the other ones because I enjoyed this one so much.

I will keep up my search for the edition of SFI and update this post with the recipe when I find it!

Smokey BBQ Marinade
from recipes+ February 2009 p48

Whisk 1/4 cup tomato paste, 1/4 cup BBQ sauce, 2 tbs Worcestershire sauce and 1 crushed garlic clove in a bowl. Brush over meat before cooking or use as a marinade.

Nigella's Buttermilk Roast Chicken

I've been making a lot of variations on a roast chicken salad for lunches lately. I love how the chicken can really make the salad into a meal, which is my biggest complaint about salads usually. I started out buying a BBQ chicken from the supermarket and shredding it, but decided to try roasting my own chicken pieces. I could use the cheap pieces of chicken and I could play with my own flavours.

This is my first experiment. I didn't go for anything too fancy, I was just aiming for a nice flavour that was about as strong as you would get from a supermarket BBQ chicken. I googled "best roast chicken" and came up with Nigella's buttermilk chicken drumsticks.


It hardly complicated, just mix everything together, marinate and then cook.

The ingredients are very simple, with the interesting addition of maple syrup. The chicken turned out lovely and juicy, with a gorgeous golden finish. It looked beautiful, but it tasted quite underwhelming. I only wanted a subtle flavour, but this really didn't have any flavour to speak of.

I'm not sure if I did something wrong, but I don't think I'll be trying this again. There are so many other marinades recipes out there to try.

Buttermilk Roast Chicken
by Nigella Lawson

(I halved this recipe and used chicken thigh pieces instead)

12 chicken drumsticks (approximately 1.25kg total weight)
500ml buttermilk
60ml vegetable oil, plus 2 tbsp extra for drizzling
2 garlic cloves, peeled and lightly crushed
1 tbsp crushed peppercorns
1 tbsp sea salt or 1½ tsp table salt
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tbsp maple syrup

Place the chicken drumsticks into a large plastic freezer bag and add the buttermilk and 60ml of vegetable oil.

Add the lightly crushed garlic cloves to the bag along with the crushed peppercorns and salt.

Sprinkle in the ground cumin and add the maple syrup, then gently squeeze the bag to mix the marinade ingredients together and coat the chicken.

Seal the bag and leave the chicken to marinate in the fridge, ideally overnight, or out of the fridge for at least 30 minutes and up to two hours.

Preheat the oven to 220C.

Take the chicken pieces out of the bag, shaking off the excess marinade, and arrange them in a roasting tin lined with foil.

Drizzle over the remaining two tablespoons of oil, then transfer to the oven and roast for about 30 minutes, or until golden-brown and completely cooked through.

To serve, place two drumsticks onto each of six serving plates.

Breakfast at Cafe XS

We love visiting Cafe XS for a quick and cheap breakfast if we are out at Carindale Shopping Centre. The food is great and the prices are more than reasonable.




Mum, DD and I all chose to have bacon, eggs, tomatoes, hash browns and toast. We were a bit of a pain and all asked for our eggs different ways.


My sister wasn't really into breakfast, and chose to have a ham and pineapple pizza.

It was a great way to start a day of shopping.

Dinner at the Pineapple Hotel Steakhouse

My mother and sister came down for a visit recently and we decided to try someplace new to eat. We've heard great things about the Pineapple Hotel Steakhouse and we were eager to see if it lived up to the hype.

My sister had decided to go and spend time with friends rather than going out to dinner with us boring folk, so it was just going to be three of us for dinner. We made our booking, and then she called and said that she wanted to be picked up before we ate but it meant that we couldn't make our initial reservation. We called the Pineapple, and they happily changed our booking from three to four people and made it half an hour later. Then my sister changed her mind again, and we ended up being three people but we couldn't eat at the later time as then we wouldn't be able to pick her up on time. We called them back and they (again) happily changed our booking.

DD thinks that the only reason they were so happy to oblige our changes was because the restaurant wasn't all that busy, and we probably could have turned up without a reservation and everything would have been fine. For whatever reason it was that they were so patient with our changes, it doesn't really matter. They were very nice.

Anyway, when we finally got there we were shown to a very nice but very dark table, so I apologise for the bad photos.

We decided to forgo an entree as we were on a tight timeframe as we did have to collect my sister, so we just ordered mains.

The steakhouse has an impressive steak menu. DD and I chose the MSA Eye Fillet - farm direct, grass raised, grain finished beef - while mum went for the Darling Downs Wagyu Rump - grainfed for 350 days and rich in marbling.

You can choose your sides, be it chips or potato, salad or vegies and your choice of sauce. I chose garlic butter, DD chose dianne and mum had mushroom. I also added some garlic prawns onto mine.

400g Wagyu Rump with mushroom sauce, chips and vegetables

200g MSA Eye Fillet with dianne sauce, chips and salad

200g MSA Eye Fillet with garlic prawns reef topping, garlic butter, chips and salad.

While we were waiting to order we noticed that the steaks cooked medium rare were very pink. I love my meat medium rare, but not too rare, so we all upgraded our steaks. Mum and I went medium, DD went medium-well. They came out cooked to perfection, exactly how we liked them.

The steaks weren't the only things cooked well. The chips were lovely and crispy, with the perfect crispy outside to soft inside ratio. The salad dressing was fantastic too, it was a pity that I didn't have enough room to eat it all!!

Next time we are going to make a few changes. DD and I both preferred Mum's wagyu rump to our eye fillet. It was much juicier and had a nicer flavour. I would try the dianne sauce next time, the garlic butter was just too much.

It was a fantastic meal and we all enjoyed it very much. The staff were friendly and helpful, it was a great night.

The Pineapple Hotel
706 Main Street
Kangaroo Point QLD 4169
Ph 3393 1111
www.pineapplehotel.com.au

Tasty breakfast

Nothing earth-shattering about this breakfast, I just liked the colours. It's some Green Zebra Heritage Tomatoes on some tahini with feta.

Satsumaimo Amani

I have been browsing through Just Bento and Maki's flickr group and came across the intriguing Satsumaimo Amani, or simmered sweet potato. I love sweet potato and I'm eager to try preparing it in different ways.

I found a very simple recipe for it and decided to give it a try. Simply soak the sweet potato for 10 minutes and then drain. You then simmer the sweet potato in some dashi and sugar until soft.

It's so easy, but the sweet potato comes out beautifully flavoured thanks to the dashi. It was so tempting to eat them by themselves, but I did end up putting them into a salad.

See Japanese Solution for the recipe I used.

Salad for lunch

I know there is an awful lot of feta on this salad, but I love feta so much I find it hard to portion control it.

Anyway, a nice simple and very very tasty workday lunch: a variation on pumpkin and asparagus salad using sweet potato instead of pumpkin and baby spinach and rocket instead of mesculin mix. Yummy and filling.