Category: Cooking

  • Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals #7: Asian-Style Salmon

    This is our seventh official cooking/blogging experiment from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. We picked this recipe because we hadn’t tried a fish recipe yet, and because we happened to have the corresponding TV episode saved on our DVR. (As before, we noticed that on the show Jamie does some things differently than the book. I’ll try to mention those as we go.) Historically I haven’t been a very big eater of fish, so these dishes are definitely going to be more challenging for me. This wasn’t my favorite of the Jamie meals we’ve made, but it did get me to eat a big piece of salmon… which is fairly momentous in our house.

    Asian-Style Salmon, Noodle Broth, Beanspout Salad, and Lychee Dessert

    Substitutions: Our salmon fillets were slightly bigger than the ones called for (250g instead of 180g), and the Snook had to remove the pin bones himself. (We didn’t count that as part of the cooking time.) He also had to spend a few minutes removing a few scales the fishmonger had missed. We had to settle for canned mango instead of fresh, and we used snow peas for the broth instead of sugar snap. We used some of the Snook’s duck stock instead of a stock cube.

    Quick verdict: We both weren’t that impressed, to be honest. Personally, I thought this was my least favorite so far. We both rated it 8/10. It was somehow less than the sum of its parts for me. The Snook thought the dessert was “kinda meh.” Our elapsed time was 39:59, but a lot of that was extra fish prep time. (Twenty minutes had elapsed before we got it into the oven.)

    (more…)

  • Jamie’s Recipe: Coming soon…

    In case you’re wondering, this week’s Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals recipe is going to be a day late. The Snook went to three different shops yesterday but couldn’t find any bean shoots, so we had to postpone…

  • Shared today on Google Reader

  • Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals #6: Duck Salad

    This is our sixth official cooking/blogging experiment from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. As we did last week, we picked this one with the idea of going to the Eveleigh Farmers’ Market Saturday morning to get any necessary ingredients. There are always a couple vendors there with duck. When we got there, we worked out pretty quickly that four duck breasts were going to cost us close to $30. The Snook persuaded me to get two whole ducks from Coles instead (for $40 total), which would also give us legs and fat for confit, and a carcass for making stock. Sounds like a plan! So earlier today he carved up the ducks so we could get started. I was running a pretty serious caloric deficit for the day thanks to my long run, so I was excited for such a big, healthy meal.

    Duck Salad, Giant Croutons, Cheat's Rice Pudding with Stewed Fruit

    Quick verdict: We followed it pretty much exactly (except for actually making homemade rice pudding in the rice cooker rather than buying expensive pre-made stuff). Elapsed time was 39:52, but we think this is one you could easily get down to 30 minutes once you have it memorised. There’s not much to it, really! In terms of presentation, this was the best one yet. If you served this at a small dinner party, people would be in awe! We both rated it 9/10 for taste (but we may have overcooked our duck a little bit).

    (more…)

  • Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals #5: Oozy Mushroom Risotto

    This is our fifth official cooking/blogging experiment from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. Hey, we’ve made it through 10% of the book! I had plans to go to the Eveleigh Farmers’ Market on Saturday morning, so I figured we should find a recipe that uses ingredients I can get there. We settled on Oozy Mushroom Risotto, Spinach Salad, and Quick Raspberry & Lemon Cheesecake. For most of my life, mushrooms have been my most hated food, but I’ve been working to get over that in the past few years. I figured this would help. But I wasn’t going to use just any old crap button mushrooms from Coles. There’s always a stall at Eveleigh selling fancy mushrooms (“The Fun Guy”), so that was my first stop Saturday morning. Let me tell you: 500g of fresh exotic mushrooms is NOT cheap. Neither are dried porcini. I’m glad I suffered the expense though, as the resulting meal was well worth it.

    Oozy Mushroom Risotto, Spinach Salad, Quick Raspberry & Lemon Cheesecake

    Quick verdict: No substitutions on this one; we followed the recipe pretty much exactly. Elapsed time was 43:07, which wasn’t too bad. In terms of taste it was fantastic, and we both rated it 9.5/10. I would have never thought such a quick risotto would turn out so good! We did come up with a couple things we’d do differently next time though.

    (more…)

  • Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals #4: Curry Rogan Josh

    This was our fourth official cooking/blogging experiment from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. The weather this weekend has been cooler, so we thought something warming was appropriate. We also had some pumpkin and carrots to use up from the veggie box, so one recipe leaped out at us: Curry Rogan Josh, Fluffy Rice, Carrot Salad, Poppadoms, Flatbread, and Beer. (I love that Beer is in the meal title!) No dessert with this one, but it made a huge feast’s worth of food.

    Curry Rogan Josh

    Quick verdict: The only substitution we made was using Kent pumpkin instead of butternut. Time-wise, we were worse than last week with an elapsed time of 48:02. There are definitely things we’d do to save time next time though. Overall I rated it 9/10, while the Snook rated it 8.5/10. (Personally, any recipe with two whole bunches of coriander/cilantro is A-OKAY by me!) However, we both agreed that the lemon pickle SUCKS.

    (more…)

  • Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals #3: Cheat’s Pizza

    This was our third official cooking/blogging attempt from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. It’s been so hot in Sydney this week that we wanted to choose a “cooler” meal, something with lots of salad. We settled on Cheat’s Pizza with 3 Delish Salads, Squashed Cherries & Vanilla Marscapone Cream. It actually worked out pretty perfectly, as we had a surfeit of tomatoes and basil from our weekly veggie box, and cherries were on special at the grocery store.

    Cheat's Pizza with 3 Salads and Cherry Marscapone Cream

    Quick verdict: This was the first recipe where we didn’t substitute anything; we had it all. This was also our FASTEST attempt yet! Elapsed time: 38:26. That’s pretty damn good! I think you could easily get this one down to 30 minutes once you had the recipe memorised. (There’s also a step we’d eliminate if we did it again; more on that in a minute.) Overall I rated it 9/10, while the Snook judged it 8/10.

    (more…)

  • Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals #2: Summer Veg Lasagne

    This is our second cooking experiment from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. We had about half a dozen episodes saved on the DVR, so we skimmed through them today looking for a suitable one. (We reckoned that if we could watch the episode first, we might stand a better chance of reproducing it.) We settled on Summer Veg Lasagne, Tuscan Tomato Salad, and Quick Mango Frozen Yoghurt.

    Jamie's Summer Veg Lasagne, Tuscan Tomato Salad, Quick Mango Frozen Dessert

    Quick verdict: We couldn’t find any frozen mango cheeks, and fresh ones are just way too expensive right now. So we subbed in frozen berries for the dessert. Everything else was according to the recipe, pretty much. It was FANTASTIC. We rated this one 9.5/10. Our elapsed time was 60 minutes. That’s why we’ve taken off half a point. We feel that with more practice we could maybe shave off 15 minutes, but there’s no way we could get this one down to 30 minutes total. Still, the taste made it all worthwhile!

    (more…)

  • Robbie Burns Night

    Snook and a haggisYesterday at 11am I got an IM from the Snook: “Och! It’s Rabbie Burns Day.” To which I jokingly replied: “Neeps and tatties for dinner then?” For those who are confused, Robert Burns was the most famous poet of Scotland and January 25th was his birthday. It’s traditional for Scots to have a Burns Supper on that night with traditional foods, whisky, and recitations of Burns’s poetry. Now, the Snook and I are not Scottish. Not a bit. But we’ve visited Scotland on a couple occasions, and we have good friends who are Scottish. Also, we’re foodies and we love any excuse for an exotic feast. (I have a dream of going to the annual Bastille Day dinner at Bennelong some year.) So that little joking exchange in the morning stuck in my head all day…

    At 5pm I was packing up from work and I messaged the Snook to see if he really did want Scottish food. On a whim, I asked Twitter where I could get a haggis in Sydney on short notice. A few people replied mentioning various specialty butchers in the suburbs, but making a special trip was probably taking the joke too far. Then my friend Sharon tweeted that Hudson Meats have haggis on their website. Hudson is in Surry Hills, which is only like a 20 minute walk from my office. So I rang the shop to confirm, and half an hour later I had a 2-pound haggis in my backpack. Was I really going to cook and eat this thing?!

    For those who don’t know (or who’ve never seen So I Married an Axe Murderer), haggis is a dish containing sheep’s ‘pluck’ (heart, liver and lungs), minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, mixed with stock, and traditionally simmered in the animal’s stomach for approximately three hours. Yes, SERIOUSLY. Basically, it’s like a cross between a meatloaf and a breakfast sausage… involving lots of organ meat. (You don’t actually eat the stomach though; that’s just there for cooking.) Neither of us had ever had one before. Haggis come pre-cooked, so all you really have to do is heat them up. Traditionally you boil them, but there’s always a risk they’ll rupture and you’ll have haggis soup. So I went with the safer oven method: wrap tightly in aluminum foil; place in roasting pan with some water; and roast at 180C for an hour. While it was roasting I invited Fiona and Matt over to join us. We had our haggis with mashed neeps and tatties (turnips and potatoes) and a whisky sauce. We also recited Burns’s poem “Address to a Haggis” in terrible Scottish accents. It was great!

    This is how the vac-packed haggis from Hudson Meats looked. It cost me about $26 for a 900g haggis.

    Haggis

    And here it is out of the packaging. I felt very brave doing this myself. (I am traditionally not a huge fan of organ meat.) Steeling myself, I leaned forward to take a whiff, expecting some sort of grossness. To my surprise, it smelled good! Like a fresh sausage with lovely spices.

    Haggis

    Fresh from roasting, still in its foil. It’s traditional to cut the haggis open with a dagger. We didn’t have a dagger, but Snookums had a fancy-looking letter opener that we used for the photos.

    Haggis

    And here it is unwrapped. It actually looked kind of good! The casing went translucent and you could see the dark filling inside. The smell was a little bit gamey, but by no means unpleasant.

    Cooked Haggis

    And now for the ceremony. A proper Burns Supper has a whole set of steps you’re meant to follow. Snookums gave the host’s welcoming speech, and then I recited the Selkirk Grace. I had an mp3 of some bagpipes playing the “Robert Burns Medley” playing in the background. Then we all took turns reciting verses from Burns’s “Address to a Haggis”. Great chieftain o’ the puddin’-race!

    Addressing the Haggis

    After a whisky toast to our noble haggis, it was finally time to cut the thing open.

    Slicing the Haggis

    Here you can see what it actually looked like inside. Basically, just a big dark meatball kind of thing. The texture was moist and slightly paté-like.

    Cooked Haggis

    I’ll admit that my first few bites were tentative, as I couldn’t get my brain to stop thinking about all the organs in it. But you know what? It was really tasty! It was lovely with the mashed veg and the cream sauce. Matt was the only one of us four who’d ever had it before, and he said this one was better than the previous two he’d had in Scotland. We pretty much demolished the whole thing!

    Burns Supper

    So what started as a bit of a joke in the morning turned into a full-fledged culinary adventure in the evening. It was loads of fun! Thanks to Sharon for suggesting Hudson Meats, who were awesome. And thanks to Matt and Fiona for helping us eat it!