Andrew does not cook very often, but when he does, he puts in a pretty impressive effort. If I insist that he cook on a week night (the day he picks the kids up from school should be his responsibility entirely, I say), it is invariably the meal he likes to eat – steak with either a potato salad/coleslaw or with chips and an egg. And it invariably irritates me. Something about him cooking the meal that he likes to eat tends to grate on me. Why not cook something that I like to eat…or something different for a change? hmm?
But every now and then he will plan a day to cook for me, and on that day he is willing to tackle anything at all. He once made me this Balinese duck salad from a recipe from the Bathers Pavillion cookbook I think. It was this ridiculously involved thing with about 20 steps starting with pounding up a curry paste as a marinade for the duck, then wrapping it in banana leaves and steaming it, then shredding it for the salad….etc. It was absolutely sensational….and I can’t say that I would ever bother with all those steps myself!
A couple of weeks ago when the kids were having a sleep over at my parents place I came home late from work expecting that we would go out for dinner. I was greeted with this feast. Not only the feast but a clean kitchen too! I may cook many feasts myself but I always, always trash the kitchen in the process.
Here is what he made:
Oysters – with a lovely dressing made with lime, sesame oil, fish sauce, ginger and coriander. Really nice.
Some lovely cheese and flat bread
Garlic herb prawns
Tuna and fig on skewers – barbequed. An unusual combination that was quite nice.
Not bad eh?! It even ticked the box for the low carb/high protein dinner we are supposed to be eating at night.
Sam my gorgeous nine year old made these for me the other evening. Little individual sized pavlovas with cream, mango and passionfruit. I should mention that he made them with eggs from his chickens (he feeds them and collects the eggs so thinks of them as “his chooks”), and passionfruit from his vine (that he also carefully nutures, such is his love for this fruit). If he had his way (and got a cow…from Santa) then the cream too could have been from his own little suburban “farm”. I used to often wish that I had someone willing and able to whip up a quick dessert for me, on demand. This wish was often expressed at night with a hopeful look at Andrew, only to recevie an eye roll in response. But now I have Sam – ever willing and ready to make me dessert. Just a small problem of needing to send him to bed at a decent hour so he can go to school the next day.
He made these little pavlovas all by himself, served them up and took the photos too! I am starting to feel redundant…
He really does make the best pavlovas – just the right amount of crispy outer shell and soft inside, and not too sweet. Yum. These were supposed to be a treat for me on my last day of eating sugar before starting my sugar-free month. (Which as you now know I broke just a mere three days later!). Here is his ’secret’ recipe:
Sam’s Pavlovas
(makes 6 individual sized pavlovas)
5 egg whites at room temperature
200g caster sugar (this is a lot less sweet than what pavlova normally is. If you like them sweet, add in another 50-100g of sugar)
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp vinegar (ideally white wine, but he used apple cider)
1 tsp cornflour
Preheat the oven to 160C. Place the egg whites in a stand mixer and whip until soft peaks form. Now gradually add in the caster sugar a spoonful at a time. When all the sugar is incorporated add in the vinegar and vanilla and sprinkle over the cornflour. Mix for a further minute. The mixture should be firm and glossy. Scoop six large spoonfuls onto a baking tray lined with baking paper. Bake at 160C for 15 minutes and then turn the oven down to 130C and bake for a further 40 minutes. Turn the oven off and leave the pavlovas in the oven to cool slowly with the oven door propped open slightly (we stick a wooden spoon in the door to achieve this). When fully cool top with some thick (or whipped) cream and fruit. Use any fruit you like but passionfruit is essential – it won’t be a pavlova without passionfruit! If you need to store these, when cool place the dry meringues in an airtight container and they will hopefully remain crisp for a day.
I have been on a quest to find a good recipe for those lovely light, yeasty, addictive Italian doughnuts for over a year now. We got rather addicted to them on our last trip to Italy. A bomboloni (the bigger version) filled with crema (patisserie cream) eaten at a cafe, standing up while drinking a very nice expresso coffee. Yum! I have tried a couple of recipes which have been lovely doughnuts but not close enough to what I was trying to create. So I did what any food obsessed person who wants to waste time at work does, I googled “bombolini”. I found one promising looking recipe on an Italian food blog. My six months of Italian lessons many years ago was good enough to translate the ingredient list but not the recipe, or maddeningly the ‘cooks tips’. Other recipes called for tons of eggs and looked suspiciously like the recipes I had tried before. So armed with some scribbled notes from a few recipes I attempted these again yesterday. I ended up making it up as I went along, hence the reason to quickly write down the recipe before I forget what I did! The end result was beautifully light, melt in the mouth with still enough bite in it (the yeast effect I think, compared to commerical donuts that can be light but turn to glug in your mouth). They are lighter than the ones I made using the Richard Bertinet recipe. The texture was a bit like a Krispy Kreme donut (not that I am in any way a fan of them) – but a much nicer , tastier and slightly lighter version. They were so delicious that I ended up breaking my goal of staying off sugar for a month (only three days into the start of the month…ooops), and I broke that goal in a rather spectacular fashion. Goal smashing continued this morning with my inability to stop eating some more of the left overs for breakfast. Still pretty good this morning, although not as sensational as when they were still warm. If you decide to make them, don’t say I didn’t warn you!
I started writing this post a few weeks ago, before I went on holidays and totally forgot about any diet/nutrition aspirations. Now that I am trying to get back into it, I found some of these tips quite useful (I surprise myself! 
). You may find them of use if you are thinking about post holiday period recovery.
For the last six months I have been on this program to lose a bit of weight, increase my fitness and develop good exercise habits. Since I live to eat, the whole restricted diet thing is rather a challenge for me. And I am not a huge meat eater, so the high protein thing has also been challenging. Andrew however describes the eating plan as the equivalent of someone instructing me to go into a patisserie and eat as much of anything I want, and please eat it five times a day! Yes, he loves eating meat and loves the fact that this ‘diet’ is making me cook more meat more often. I notice that my post about the wierd high protein/low carb/low fat biscuit I tried to create, and the post asking if more protein equals more anger, continue to be two of the most popular posts on this blog. So there are clearly lots of others out there also struggling with this sort of eating plan. Hence my idea to post up some tips based on my last six months of living on this eating plan. read more…
“Choriz pau” are words that will spark the interest of anyone with even just a few drops of Goan blood in them. It is a taste sensation that we all search for and try (usually unsuccessfully) to recreate – those of us who no longer have easy access to Goa or its products that is.
Tara called these “Goan burgers”. This was our standard breakfast fare most days that we were in Goa. Goa sausage is a fiery, tangy pork sausage that probably started life off as a Portuguese chorizo (Goa was a Portuguese territory until 1961) and then became much, much spicier, hotter and tangier from the local Goan influence. It is cooked for quite a long time in a pan with some sliced red onions, a little water, a splash of vinegar and sometimes diced potato as well. We layered it onto a small bread roll (“pau”) that is very typical of the very plain bread rolls you find in Goa (another Portuguese influence) and topped it with a fried egg. Delicious.
I am planning yet another attempt to make some of these goa sausages at home. Stay tuned for the report on how well I go. I have a secret that is sure to help this time – spice mixture as mixed and ground for me in Goa by one of our old neighbours in the village where our house it. And ground with the very special goa vinegar – can it get any better? Yes, I think so. I will use some lovely free range pork and hope to get the best of both Goa and Sydney!
How cute is this tiny pan? We bought it for Tara along with a tiny little wooden spatula. It is a proper heavy metal pan, the same make as Sam’s crepe pan that I bought him as a then slightly controversial and now highly popular birthday present. Tara has declared that she is now in charge of cooking eggs in the family and they can only be cooked in the tiny pan. I hope her egg cooking skills improve soon…. And we need to find a tiny lid to fit the tiny pan…
All the pets survived our three week absence – including the sourdough starter. I had intended to leave it with my neighbour (whose son was looking after the goldfish and the chooks)….but embarrassment about asking her feed and water a container of flour and water made me leave it until the last minute and in the end I forgot. I had made up two containers of the starter, and made one of them very dry as I had read somewhere that it would last longer that way. The dry one grew so much that it popped the lid of the container and flowed over the side. It was rather hard and dry-ish. The other one in the bottle had a thick layer of liquid that was pretty dark in colour and smelled like pure alcohol. I tipped out most of the liquid, fed them both separately and used the second sample (which had the normal flour/water ratio) for my first batch of bread. The first batch of bread worked which made me very happy. Both samples appeared to have survived so I combined the two batches together and popped it back in the fridge. Last night I made my second batch. read more…
Wow. Just wow. Shouting, whistling, thunderous clapping, standing ovation wow.
I have just come out of this incredible concert given by a group of forty Indian musicians from Rajasthan – one of the Sydney Festival highlights this year. It was powerful, moving and absolutely stunning. I think the rest of their shows may be sold out but you should try and get a ticket if you can.
Before the show we had dinner at Sub Solo the Spanish tapas prestaurant/ bar in King Street in the city. I have had a couple of nice meals there in the past. This time we opted for a Sydney Festival fast eat deal – a meal and a glass of wine or beer for $30. A bargain. I hope to eat my way through quite a few of the participating restaurants this month! Here is a pretty dodgy photo of the tapas box that was on offer for the festival deal. Albogandos (Meatballs), patatas bravas, salt cod croquette, chicken chorizo, salad and a slice of bread was in the mixed box. Service was great, food was pretty good. A 7/10 overall from me.
Back from India for just a few days and already I am starting to crave some Indian food. I thought I would have a sedate month of salads to recover from the trip. But three days back and wide awake late at night, I wish I could have some pani puri.
Pani puri is the quintessential street food snack. Ultra crispy puris (like mini flat bread fried until it puffs up like a ball) are the carrier for a zingy spicy, sour, hot, peppery and slightly sweet taste sensation that explodes in your mouth. The puris are cracked open and then filled with some chickpea and potato concoction, a drizzle of fiery corriander chilli sauce added (for the spicy hit) and then the whole thing is dunked into a bowl to fill with first some tamarind water (for the sweet sour taste) and then a second bowl with some salty-peppery water. They are handed to you one at a time as they must be eaten immediately to retain the crunch and the liquid. It really is a flavour explosion in your mouth.
I was wary of trying it on thus trip given the whole water borne disease thing. But after my cousin boldly proclaimed that he had eaten some and was still standing, even though it was only five hours later (I should have waited for 24 to see if he was still standing then!), I left Andrew and the kids behind and rushed off to have some too. I ate in a tiny shop at the markets, not a street stall, in the hope that there would be marginally more hygene. And what can I tell you? It was so good and I survived to tell the tale and go back for more on my last day in Pune.
Back in Sydney….quiet, clean Sydney. Quite a relief to breathe in the (relatively) clean air, travel on roads free of chaos, honking horns, diesel fumes and the rest. Lots of green stuff all around, our comfortable bed, and three days with nothing to do/nowhere we have to go and phones still turned off. We have spent the last two days lying in bed sleeping or reading. The kids have fended for themselves and happily rediscovered their home, toys and dog. Luckily my sister invited us over for a bbq last night as it was the only ‘real meal’ we have eaten. Andrew had to have a big steak yesterday (three weeks of Asian food had left him hankering for steak with chips), Sam is fiercely vegetarian again so he ate a bit of salad and Tara and I enjoyed a bit of everything that was on offer. Particularly the prawns we had marinated in some of the lovely reinchaad masala I had brought back with me from Goa.
One of the first things I had to do, after picking up the dog, was to check to see if my sourdough starter had survived the three weeks of neglect. I fed it a couple of times, each time I emerged from my travel recovery slumber, and then made up a big batch of dough. So today we have lived on sourdough bread and not much else. Not sure what, if anything the kids ate. Terrible parents.
So it’s nice to be home but also sad to be away from my other ‘home’. I feel like I didn’t manage to eat all the food I wanted to, and yet I know that I have almost certainly put on all the weight I worked so hard to lose for six months before the trip. I am definitely not looking forward to my first appointment back with the personal trainer next week!
I will try and post some photos and stories from the trip over the next few weeks. Lots to tell….hope I get to it.
