Chicken Lollipops

More July cooking

On her blog Just Bento, Maki has a fabulous tutorial on how to make chicken lollipops for adding to bentos. I used the other half of my batch of chicken wings to give it a try myself.

I haven't worked with whole chicken or chicken on the bone very much. The first time I attempted to handle a whole chicken was only a few months ago. Making these lollipops though really helped me see where I was cutting to get an even clean cut. There were lots of joints that needed to be cut, so there was lots of opportunity for practice.

I didn't have as much success with the actual making of the lollipop stage though. I didn't have enough excess meat to fold over, so mine ended up being more like mushrooms or umbrellas than lollipops. I liked the way they turned out though. I found that it was really easy to eat because the meat was away from the bone, rather than having to gnaw at the joint to get at the chicken.

As Maki suggested, I used her recipe for chicken karaage and had a very impressive looking and tasty addition to my bento boxes the next week.

Ginger glazed carrots

I have been reading Cathy's blog Not Eating Out in New York recently. I am completely jealous of the plethora of food events in her area, but I also am completely in love with so many of her recipes.

One recipe in particular that called to me were her Ginger-Glazed Carrot and Pea Shoot Salad. It looked so fresh and the bright orange carrots looked so vibrant against the green of the pea shoots that it made my mouth water. I didn't have any pea shoots, or any salad greens for that matter, but I did have carrots. I marinated them and grilled them on a makeshift grill in my oven and then snacked on them. Fantastic. These carrots are definately going to be making an appearance in my lunch salads when I finally go back to work.

Update: D has just tried some of these and he has decided that they are "yum". Very high praise indeed, as he is normally not a fan of roasted/grilled carrot. He's asked me to make them again but trying to use sweet potato instead. I'll give it a try and we'll see how they go.

Shallot Pancake

More July cooking

The noodle restaurant next to where I work makes the most amazing shallot pancakes. They are so tasty. One night D and I visited there for some dinner. D didn't really enjoy the noodles, but he loved the shallot pancake so we got to thinking about whether we could make something like that at home.

I googled around a bit and found that there are many recipes out there for a shallot pancake, but this one from Fast-Ed.com.au looked to be quite uncomplicated and easy to try.

I did stuff up a bit and I added the mushroom soy and chilli oil to the dough because I wasn't reading the recipe. I also am terrible at rolling out dough, so the picture is of the experimental pancake cooked to check the taste. Or so I am telling myself.

The pancake tasted just like the ones from the noodle restaurant! (Well, if you take into account mine was twice, maybe three times as thick). It was awesome. I haven't made it again to see what it would be like if I actually followed the instructions, but I have no doubt it would be spectacular. When you can make awesome stuff at home, who needs to drive for half an hour to buy it?

See the post linked above for the recipe.

Soy Sauce Chicken Wings

Some July cooking

I love marinated chicken wings. They are just the best nibble food. They are cheap too, which is always good. D doesn't like bones though, so he is not a fan. I wanted to play around with some recipes and I wanted to go cheap, so these were made only for me.

I went out to buy these chicken wings and checked Lenards before heading into the supermarket to check out the prices there. I just gave it a quick glance, and there was something blocking the ticket but I saw part of the number. I said to myself, oh $4.99 per kilo isn't too bad, but I'll check the supermarket first. The supermarket had them for $4.99 too, so I bought them from the supermarket. On the way out, I got to see the unencumbered ticket at Lenards and they were actually $1.99 per kilo. Oh well.

I split my little hoard of chicken wings in half and used half for this recipe from Off the Spork and half to make karage chicken lollipops.

I'm a big fan of the soy sauce flavour and I love the combination with star anise and chinese cooking wine. I didn't have rock sugar, but substituted brown sugar as Agnes suggested. I didn't bother grilling them, but just snacked on them after they had poached. They were pretty awesome. I did find them slightly salty though, I might have to experiment with the balance to take away some of the saltiness.

See here at Off the Spork for the recipe.

Breakfast Juice

This morning I couldn't decide what I wanted for breakfast. I have been wanting something really fresh, so thought I'd rummage through my fruit bowl and have a simple fruit salad. I don't have all that much in fruit bowl at the moment, so my salad was just a crisp red apple, a corella pear and a baby nectarine sprinkled with a little fresh lemon juice. It was lovely and fresh, just what I wanted, but I felt that it was missing something so I sat at my computer and browsed through fruit salad recipes on Recipezaar.

One of the recipes I wandered across was this Ginger Zinger Fruit Juice. I looked at the ingredients and then I looked at my half eaten bowl and an crafted a plan. I tossed the rest of my bowl into the blender and added some orange and mango juice and water. I added some grated ginger and then gave it a blitz. It still needed something, so I added some fresh lime and it was a lovely refreshing end to my breakfast.

I haven't really thought about using my blender this way. I guess it's really no difference from using it to make milkshakes or puree soups or from the juice stores using the blenders to make your juices, but I had always thought juicers are for fruit. My blender had no problems whizzing the fruit into a lovely pulpy juice, so I'm definately going to play with this a bit more. Maybe some mint next time...

More Blasts from the Past

I'm sorry for all of these random photos, I am just really enjoying my wander down memory lane and have to share.

These photos are far more recent than my last post, they were taken in the months leading up to my decision to start this blog.

I'm pretty sure that this was an apple pie-ish experiment with a sponge cake-like topping. It was meant to be adapted from a Jamie Oliver recipe called Sheila's Pudding. If I knew then what I knew now I would have googled the recipe first to see what it was supposed to look like, but I didn't and ended up with this less than attractive dessert. I can't even remember how it tasted. I do know to google these things first now (I had to find the link to the recipe), and I'm inspired by the wonderful photos of other food bloggers. I think I may have to try this again.

Way back when this photo was taken, Channel 7 had a show called Saturday Kitchen. It was two hours or so of food shows and it was a godsend to those who couldn't afford Foxtel (that's us, and we still can't afford Foxtel). One of the shows was the BBC2 show The Best. I loved this show. I loved the food they cooked and I was very sad when they stopped showing it. I tracked down a copy of the cookbook from my local library and spent three glorious weeks cooking from it. Somehow, this was the only recipe that I took a picture of. My inner food blogger hadn't fully awakened. This is Ben's Crunchy Tomato Panzanella, which he made for The Best Cool Salad.

I have always been curious about panzanella, because it looks awesome but I have a morbid fear of soggy bread. I was careful with this one and made sure to only add the bread just before the photo and eating. Next time, I might just keep it separate altogether because by the time I ate it there was some sogginess. It was very tasty though. All of the recipes I've tried from that show have been awesome.

Ben’s Crunchy Tomato Panzanella
from The Best by Paul Merrett, Silvana Franco and Ben O’Donoghue

1 small, stale ciabatta loaf
4 tablespoons olive oil
salt and freshly ground pepper

For the tomato salad:
500g ripe vine tomatoes
a small bunch of fresh basil
2 garlic gloves
2 tablespoons white-wine vinegar
200ml extra-virgin olive oil
salt and freshly ground black pepper
about 100g wide leaf French rocket, washed.

Preheat oven to 200°C. Cut the crusts from the bread and pull of long strips. Drizzle with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Toast in the hot oven for 4-5 minutes until golden brown and crunchy on the outside but still soft in the middle.

Plunge the tomatoes into hot water, pour off the water, remove their skins and cut in half. Squeeze the seeds and juice from the tomato flesh over a sieve. Discard the seeds and retain the juice along with the flesh.

Rip the basil into pieces and put in pestle and mortar, with the cloves of garlic and a good pinch of salt. Pound to a pulp. Add the white-wine vinegar. Gradually add the olive oil and adjust the seasoning to taste.

Take the bread from the oven, put in a large bowl and add the tomato flesh and prepared dressing and toss around. Add the rocket and serve.


The last old photo is a recipe which either came from Jamie Oliver or Ian Hewitson and it is a variation on a classic jam drop biscuit. They were made in a cupcake tray with a puff pastry-type lining and a drop of jam placed in the centre and cream added afterwards. They were really tasty, I wish I could remember the recipe.

Blast from the Past

I was never all that interested in food and cooking when I was younger. My mother is an awesome cook and while I was happy to potter around making the odd cake now and then, I generally only aspired to be her sous chef. Even then, the camera only came out when I made something seriously awesome, which is why these pictures are quite unusual.

I was organising our pictures the other day after reformatting my computer and I came across these pictures. I was a big fan of Jamie Oliver's The Naked Chef and he made some chocolate truffles for his babysitter in the chocolate episode. I love chocolate and I remember really wanting to give them a try. So, I tracked down a recipe and this was my progress.

These pictures are from 2003, when I was still living at home and it was my mother's kitchen I was making a mess in. I'm pretty sure I cleaned it up. I think the truffles turned out okay, but I can't really remember that. I do remember that all the chocolate gave me a migraine, it was the first time I realised that excess cocoa/chocolate was one of my triggers.

Making the caramel for the praline

Praline setting. Now I'm looking at it thinking who makes praline with pine nuts and what kind of tray is it on?, but then I realised it's actually a pizza tray and they are almonds. It's early.

Blurry picture of the praline being blitzed.

Chocolate in its double boiler.

Mmmm, melted chocolate

Chocolate and praline mixed!

After this my hands got pretty messy rolling the truffles in cocoa, icing sugar and drinking chocolate so I guess that's why the pictures stopped halfway through the process.

It was pretty cool to find these pictures after so many years, I guess there was a little foodie in me hiding, even back then. I also found pictures I had taken to make my own little recipe folder of my favourite recipes. I made the recipe, took the picture and then wrote up the recipe attaching my photo. I still use some of those recipes today.

Superfood Salad

When I first started having balance problems I remember being quite distressed because I couldn't stand up long enough to make a salad, much less anything else. This salad was the one I was attempting to make. To be fair, this salad is quite a salad. It's the original Leon superfood salad.

Leon is a UK restaurant chain who aim to change the face of fast food using fresh and seasonal ingredients and meats sourced from directly from farms they trust. It's really wonderful to read their vision and I hope more restaurants follow their lead. They also have a book, Leon: Ingredients and Recipes.

I took some liberty with the ingredients because I am not a quinoa fan and I didn't have any broccoli and I substituted cos lettuce for the flat leaf parsley, but even with my changes this salad was awesome. I love feta and I love avocado and I love seeds, so it was winner with just these three but when you add these to everything else and add the lovely lemon dressing it because a fresh and fantastic lunch.

The recipe can be found here.

Chicken Tagine with Rice minus the tagine

This recipe is another of those that you just know you have to make after you read them. It was actually a two part discovery, I first read Haalo's post on Cook (Almost) Anything at Least Once about Rice Cakes and I thought they looked amazing. I love the crunch rice gets once you fry it, it's one of the reasons I've been obsessively making yaki onigiri recently (post to come). We haven't had a rice dish that would suit for a very long time, so I looked at Haalo's related post Chicken Tagine with Rice.

Haalo's cooking always looks amazing and my mouth waters whenever I read her blog, but I thought I could give this recipe a try, even though we don't own a tagine. It gave me an opportunity to pull out my enamelled cast iron stockpot which doesn't get enough use.

Although it's only the beginning of October, winter has well and truly been forgotten and spring is slightly confused, giving us dry and summary warm weather. It's not really the weather for a warm comforting meal, but D was happy to give it a try.

D doesn't like chicken thighs, so I was hoping to find some skin-on chicken breasts to use. Unfortunately, there were none to be found so I had to use normal breast fillets. We substituted sweet potato (cut small) instead of pumpkin and halved the recipe, but we made the rest as written.

It was very very good. I felt that it needed a tad more seasoning, but D thought it was perfect. It made heaps too, even though we halved the recipe there is still a large bowlful left over.

I tried to make Haalo's rice cakes with some of the leftovers and although the result was very tasty, it couldn't be called a rice cake. My mix didn't hold together, so maybe I needed to add more egg. I still have leftovers, so I may have to try again.

Cookie Dough Ice Cream

I recently received some less than welcome news from my doctor (nothing life threatening or life changing, just something I didn't need). After my appointment I cried a little bit but my mother told me to calm down because stress can make my symptoms worse. She said that I should relax. I tried to relax and in the process of doing so developed a craving for ice cream. Not just any ice cream but chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream from Baskin Robbins. Because that ice cream is awesome.

Unfortunately, my nearest Baskin Robbins is too far away for me to indulge as I wanted to, so I decided to see if the food blog world could help me satisfy my craving. This recipe from Joy the Baker made me so excited, I wanted to jump up and make it straight away. Unfortunately, I can't jump and my freezer is so well-stocked at the moment there's no room for my ice cream maker. I tried so very hard to make room for it, but there was just no way he was fitting in.


I tried to talk D into buying an esky so that we could move some things temporarily, but he wasn't convinced. I am still going to make that ice cream, but it may have to wait until we clear the freezer.

So with making my own ice cream on hold for the moment, I went to Plan B. I asked D to bring me home some good quality vanilla ice cream (the Homer Hudson vanilla bean ice cream you can see tucked in the top shelf above) and I went looking for a cookie dough recipe. I'm a big fan of licking cake batter bowls and trying my cookie dough before baking so generally eating something with raw egg in it doesn't particularly bother me, but you don't really eat too much of those things when you lick the bowl/taste the batter. I thought that I better err on the side of caution and went looking for an egg-less cookie dough recipe. There are many out there, but I decided to go with this recipe from the Cupcake Project.

I made this sitting at my kitchen table. I didn't realise how much you tend to move around while baking until I had to get up every time I wanted to go to the sink. It took much longer than I expected.

The cookie dough tasted as sinfully good as cookie dough should. However, I felt that the brown sugar gave it a little too much brown sugar taste. Next time, I will reduce the brown sugar and increase the white sugar to try and replicate the cookie dough taste from the Baskin Robbins ice cream.

I now have a big cookie dough roll in my fridge ready to be sliced and diced and added to my ice cream whenever I need to relax!

See this post from the Cupcake Project for the recipe for safe to eat cookie dough.

Oeufs en Cocotte

I've been ill lately so I've spent a lot of time watching TV and reading food blogs. Well, I've spent a lot more time than I usually do reading food blogs. I have bookmarked all of these wonderful blogs so I pick one and then read through all of the archives. One such blog is Confessions of a Cardamom Addict (Jasmine has such gorgeous cats!!!). In one post Jasmine made oeufs en concotte adapted from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I love a nice soft egg and since I am terrible at poaching them I'm always on the lookout for an easy way to get a soft yolk.

I followed the links on Jasmine's post to a gorgeous post on Beyond Salmon and then came across this recipe posted by Clotilde of Chocolate and Zucchini. You would think that I wouldn't need multiple recipes to make what is basically eggs broken into a ramekin and then cooked in a water bath, but my excuse is that I was engaging in research.

The good part about this recipe is that it involves very little effort on my part. I used cream cheese as my creamy base, I threw in some bacon I had previously chopped up and added some chives. Sitting at the kitchen table, I smooshed my bacon pieces and chives around in my cream cheese and then added them to a greased ramekin. I cracked in two eggs as it was a large ramekin and one egg looked so lonely!

I have recently discovered that my oven runs 20 degrees C colder than its dial (stupid oven), so I preheated it to 240 degrees C and then added my ramekin in its water bath. As I said, I like my eggs runny, so I set my timer for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, my egg whites weren't even white yet (stupid oven) so I put it back in for another 10 minutes. It took my oven 20 minutes to cook two eggs. I used a small tray for the water bath too, so there wasn't too much water to heat.

The white still wasn't quite set, but I was willing to take the risk because I wanted runny yolk, however my yolks were set hard. I'm not quite sure how that happened. It was all right in the end though, I mashed everything up and had a weird creamy warm egg salad to dip my soldiers in. It tasted very very good, it was the best breakfast I've had all week!

See the blogs linked above for your choice of recipes.

Chicken with Pancetta and Mascarpone

My life has been quite busy over the past few months, with work, study and sickness. I've found that my poor blog has often gone neglected or that I only post enough to get me through until the next weekend. Unfortunately, my busy schedule has only stopped me blogging, not cooking so my folder of photos for the blog is getting bigger and bigger. I'm trying to catch up, but when you are blogging in October about something you cooked in July and can't find the notes you wrote when you cooked it it makes the blog post a little uninteresting.

So, this will be the last post continuing the chronological order, and I'll space out the remaining July, August and September post between the posts about current cooking adventures. This way, I can waffle on in my posts about how I came across the recipe and what I was thinking when I was making it before I forget these things.

This recipe is one of those I can't remember where I came across it. I can't find it in any of my bookmarks. I do remember that the desire to cook this came about the night before or the same day as D bought his Man vs Wild DVD, because I remember watching Bear Grylls while I made this. There were crocodiles/alligators on TV while I bashed out my chicken breasts. The things we remember.

Anyway, this was very easy. I bought my favourite mascarpone and good quality pancetta from the Italian deli to try and make it special. All you need to do is flatten the chicken breasts, line the insides with pancetta and then add two tablespoons of mascarpone. Roll them up and secure them with toothpicks. I added some crushed garlic, sage leaves, pepper and olive oil.

I baked them in a 200 degree oven for just under half an hour.

They were extremely tasty. Hardly good for you, but hey, we don't do this very often.

Beef Stroganoff

This dinner came about when we had beef stir-fry strips ready for dinner and not a lot else. I rummaged through my trusty Delicious bookmarks and searched through Recipezaar and presented D with a list of dinner options and he chose this simple Beef Stroganoff recipe.

Beef Stroganoff may seem to be an odd choice for dinner, considering that both D and I don't like mushrooms. However, leaving them out didn't effect the dish at all, as we both really enjoyed it.

We did add two beef stock cubes to deepen the flavour before we added the sour cream though we may not have needed this is we had included the mushrooms. The recipe says that this should be served with egg noodles, but we didn't have any so pasta it was.


Beef Stroganoff
adapted from Ingrid H as posted on Recipezaar

500g beef stir fry strips
6 tbs butter
1 small onions, diced
3 tbs flour
2 cups beef stock
1 tbs tomato paste
1/2 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp dried basil,
1/4 tsp nutmeg
2 beef stock cubes
3 tbs dry sherry
225g sour cream
200g pasta, cooked

Melt 1 tbs of butter in a frypan over medium-high heat. Add half of the stirfry strips and only allow them to colour, any longer and they could overcook. Remove the strips from the pan and repeat with another tablespoon of butter and the remaining beef then remove.

Add another tablespoon of butter to the pan and saute the onions until soft and then remove from the pan.

Melt the remaining butter. Whisk in the flour and cook, stirring for two minutes. Slowly add the beef stock and whisk into the butter-flour mixture.

Add the tomatoe paste, paprika, basil and nutmeg.

Bring to a boil and then reduce hit and simmer for 10 minutes until the mixture is slightly thickend. Add stock cube/s to taste.

Return the meat and onions back to the sauce and simmer for another ten minutes.

Remove from heat and stir in sherry and add the sour cream.

Brisbane's Best?

ourbrisbane.com has a list of Brisbane's best food in a number of categories and I thought it was quite interesting.

Brisbane's Best Pizza

Apart from our local Pizza Capers, I have not been to any of the pizzerias listed. I'm quite excited. I love good pizza and D is quite a pizza connoiseur - he just knows if the pizza place is using older ham or a poor quality ham. It's quite uncanny. I can't tell the difference, but he knows. I hope I can talk him into trying some of these with me.

Brisbane's Best Burgers

Now, burger restaurants we have tried. We have tried many different burger restaurants in a quest to find somewhere that made a burger that was even half as awesome as they used to make at Seafood and Eat It in Greenslopes.

We haven't tried all of the restaurants on the list, though. Burger Urge we have tried, but we weren't that impressed. I think they really shine in their unique flavour combinations and not your standard beef patty and cheese kind of burger. Grill'd we have tried, I really like it but D doesn't really feel the love. Purple Gorilla make nice burgers, I think if I could choose, I'd pick Grill'd, but D loves Purple Gorilla and I do enjoy them so Purple Gorilla is our current go-to gourmet burger bar.

I think we are far more likely to try the other burger restaurants on the list than we are to try the pizzerias, but its fun to find out about these new places.

There is also a list of Brisbane's Best Cupcakes, but I adore Poppy Cakes and I think my waistline is very happy that I'm willing to just have one cupcake store to frequent.

What do you think? Do you agree with ourbrisbane's lists? Did they miss anyone out? Let me know in the comments.

Lao-Thai Cooking Class at James Street Cooking School

When I left my previous job, my fantastic co-workers gave me a gift voucher for the James Street Cooking School. I was so excited, I trolled their website for ages looking at all the classes that I wanted to try, however I'm a slightly nervous person and I am apprehensive in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people and wasn't quite confident enough to book a course. I tried to talk my mother into coming down and taking a course with me, unfortunately that didn't work out. I put off making a decision for so long that I was running out of time to use the voucher. In the end, I took the plunge and booked myself into a Lao-Thai class.

D thought I was silly as I have already taken a Thai cooking class, but the class description says that it explores the differences and similarities between Lao and Thai cuisine. Plus, I love the balance of flavours in Thai food so I wasn't worried even if it was the same kind of food.

I really enjoyed the class. I found that the background information the instructor gave about the Lao-Thai cuisine really interesting. This type of food comes from a very low socio-economic area and works to make small amounts of the more expensive and hard to obtain ingredients (like meat) go a long way. They steam muddy-tasting fish in a flavourful sauce to mask any residual muddy taste. It was really interesting.


We made four dishes: Stuffed Bamboo Shoots; Green Papaya Salad with Sweet Crispy Pork, Steamed Fish with Young Ginger and Spicy Minced Chicken Salad. My favourites were the green papaya salad and the spicy minced chicken salad.

I would love to go to another one of their classes, but I would love it even more if I could go with a friend. There were a few other people there on my own (we made our own group), but most of the other people were there in pairs or even in groups.


After the cooking was done, we all adjourned to eat our creations. Happily, there were no failures and everything was really lovely. It was a great night.

James Street Cooking School
Mezzanine Level
James St Market
22 James Street
Fortitude Valley Qld 4006
Ph: (07) 3252 8850
www.jamesstcookingschool.com.au

Australian Food Blog Website

I have an awful lot of food blogs on my "to read" list. I like it when the bloggers I do read link to other bloggers who have inspired them because it means I can add to this long list. A long list of blogs to read means a very happy Adrasteia, as that is where I tend to get most of my inspiration. Seeing where someone has cooked something and reading what they were thinking/feeling while they were cooking it and while they eat it is very exciting and I love trying the recipe myself and seeing what I think and feel while I cook and eat it.

That didn't make as much sense as I wanted it to in my head, but I can't think of a better way to express it.

Anyway, many of the food blogs on my list are American. This doesn't really matter, I've got my fabulous Food Substitution Bible by David Joachim for any unfamiliar ingredients and Google can sometimes help you source something that you didn't think you could find here in Brisbane. Sometimes, it is nice to read blogs that are Australian. They refer to places you know and even restaurants you can try. I started reading Not Quite Nigella because she blogged about many places near where D's mother lived in Sydney and I was looking for foodie places to visit on our holiday. However, we don't get to visit Sydney very often.

I have a few Brisbane food blogs that I love to read. I also love reading about someone's experience at a restaurant that you can visit. I love reading about the recipes that they cook and the stores they visit because it's the kind of recipes I generally want to try and the stores I want to visit. I have found that Brisbane bloggers tend to be a much smaller group than those in the fancier foodie areas of Sydney and Melbourne (this is evidenced by how much content is missing from our Good Food and Wine Show compared to those cities - I'm not bitter). I have always wanted to find more.

Then I came across this amazing project: Australian Food Blogs. It's a website compiling Australia's food blogs. The blogs are sorted into state groups and the site aims to collate "[a]ll of Australia's food, wine, coffee and restaurant review blogs in one place". I don't know how long this site has been up and running, I have to say that if someone hadn't linked to it I wouldn't have gone looking at it. Luckily, Google Analytics told me Anna's site has directed two people to visit my site (Hi!!) and I went and checked it out.

Thanks so much Anna for putting this all together. My "to read" list has just doubled!

Grand Taj Indian Restaurant Carindale

I had a hankering for some takeaway Indian food recently, the first time since we have been in the new house (more than a year!). There are a few Indian restaurants in the new (ish) area, but we decided to give the Grand Taj Indian Restaurant a try after hearing some good reviews.

D isn't keen on eating out at restaurants. He would much prefer to get takeaway and enjoy it at home, so that's what we did.

Dinner was a serving of butter chicken, lamb korma and some garlic naan on the side. I'm a little bit sensitive to heat, so we went for mild on both dishes. The lady serving us informed us that most people can handle medium. I wasn't that confident and D was a little disappointed. (Note: the next time we visited we did get medium and it was too hot for me). The heat level in the mild was non-existent, but the flavour was awesome!

The butter chicken was, according to the menu, cooked with tomatoes, ground almonds and spices in a smooth gravy, finished with cream. It was more tomatoey than some of the others I've tasted, but it really worked. It added a complexity to the dish.

The lamb korma (diced lamb with yoghurt, ground almond meal and cream) was very nice. I have memories of some awesome lamb korma dishes that I tasted when I first moved to Brisbane but I can't remember where they were from, so I like to order lamb korma in the hope I can get the spicy creamy lamb curry I remember. This wasn't as creamy and the spices weren't quite as harmonious as my ideal lamb korma, but I still really enjoyed it.


While I can't remember exactly how much this meal cost, the Grand Taj isn't one of our budget restaurants, however the quality was fantastic and the servings were extremely generous.

Grand Taj Indian Restaurant
Shop 10, Metropol Stage II
Corner of Creek & Pine Mountain Rds
Carindale 4152
Ph: 3343 8881
www.grandtaj.com.au

Easy Chocolate Icecream

D was looking through one of my America's Test Kitchen emails the other day and saw a recipe for an easy chocolate icecream. The recipe claimed that it made a creamy icecream without having to churn the mix in an icecream machine. He was excited and asked me to try it. Since there is never any room in my freezer for the bowl of my icecream machine, I was happy to give it a go.

It was pretty easy. You just melt some chocolate, coffee and sweetened condensed milk (which is used because it maintains its texture even once frozen) in the microwave until the chocolate has melted then fold in some whipped cream and freeze for siz hours.

It looked awesome, but to me it just tasted like frozen cream. I'm a big cream person, I will take cream over icecream as a side to a cake or dessert any day and I have been known to eat strawberries and cream where the cream ratio slightly outweighs the strawberry, but this was too much for me. I felt like I was eating thickened cream straight out of the container and I couldn't eat it. D, on the other hand, really liked it. He said it was really rich and you couldn't have much of it but he enjoyed the flavour.

It was an interesting experiment, but really it's not that much more work to make a custard based icecream, except I'd have to evacuate a lot of food in my freezer first. It's definately the way to go though. The texture is so much better. Give this a try though, it may just be me.

Easy Chocolate Icecream
from Cooks Country Magazine July 2009

1 tsp instant coffee powder
1 tbs hot water
115g dark chocolate, chopped
1/2 cup sweetened condensed milk
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
pinch salt
1 1/4 cups heave cream, whipped

Combine the coffee powder and hot water until coffee dissolves. Put the coffee mix, dark chocolate, sweetened condensed milk in a microwave safe bowl and microwave until chocolate is melted. The recipe says to stir every 10 seconds for about a minute, I cooked mine for a minute on high and stirred once at 30 secs and once at the end. Stir in vanilla and salt and let cool.

Whisk one third of the wipped cream into the melted chocolate to lighten the mix. Add the rest of the whipped cream and fold through until incorporated. Freeze in an airtight container until firm, at least 6 hours or up to 2 weeks.