462/1038 - Parsley chicken breast with verjuice and crème fraîche sauce

Chicken lovers - you must try this dish! 

I was left to my own devices a few nights ago when my boys deserted me to check out the prowess of the wonderful football players of Real Madrid. I was making flatbreads for my sister for her taco night and so kept one for my dinner, topping it with a salted chilli chicken breast and pan-fried vegetables. (Yes it was as good as it sounds!)

With a chicken breast left over, I decided to add it to another 500g pack and whip up this delicious dinner the following night for the family.

This was one of those fabulously tasty dishes that saw the entire family go quiet as they started to eat. The chicken was cooked perfectly and was juicy and amazing. Slightly spiced up by the paprika flavoured flour in which it was coated and enveloped in a pile of parsley, the pièce de résistance was the verjuice and crème fraîche sauce which took the taste of the chicken to somewhere out of this gastronomic world.

Highly, highly recommended x

461/1038 - Orange ricotta tart

Ooh I do love discovering a wonderful new dessert!

We were on orange duty for my son's soccer match a couple of weeks ago and unfortunately the game was cancelled due to a sad and soggy ground. Being the diligent parents that we are, we had already purchased said oranges before the cancellation notice came through. This of course meant that we were left with a bag of them to use up, and as well as eating them for snacks and making the odd juice, I thought this tart sounded like a lovely way to finish a meal.

Starting with home-made shortcrust pastry (love my pastry!), the filling for this tart was ridiculously easy to put together. I replaced two thirds of the Grand Marnier with orange juice given that my young'uns were to be enjoying this dessert. Of course I realised I was reducing the intensity of the flavour by doing this but the result was still really lovely, and even better with some orange zest grated over the top. 

As usual, the pastry was the hero, yummy and crumbly. I honestly don't think I could go back to the packet variety! If you were wondering, yes I buy my butter by the kilo x

460/1038 - Grissini

Crunchy and salty - what's not to love?

I made a lovely little soup for dinner the other night, using up a pile of vegetables about to hit their expiry date. These petite and crunchy little breadsticks were a big winner and I was thankful I had doubled the recipe!

Being an almost daily baker, I have thoroughly enjoyed making my way through the bread recipes. I only have three left to cook in a chapter I will definitely be sad to see the back of. 

To be honest I think I will quadruple this recipe next time and keep the leftovers for little lunchbox fillers. Anything to keep hungry boys happy x

459/1038 - Abalone braised with white wine

Abalone braised with white wine = completion of my 8th chapter! Of course there are 125 chapters in total and so mini-milestones are what keep the energy levels high in this challenge. 

To recap, I am now completely finished with;

                    Abalone
                    Asian greens
                    Bacon
                    Broccoli
                    Bugs
                    Chives
                    Prawns
                    Sweet potatoes
                   

Abalone is now officially one of my favourite things and I enjoyed cooking them five different ways. This recipe was particularly simple and had the family crowded around the plate scoffing abalone like you have never seen it scoffed before. 

I have mentioned before how truly devastated we were when our first son acquired a taste for our favourite seafood. I am now incredibly sad to report that our youngest is now an additional little hand grabbing at our favourite things. They said parenthood would be challenging but we definitely did not consider the smaller portions of seafood when we decided to extend our family. Quite devastating really. 

In all seriousness, I was pleased to see the boys enjoying these as much as we did. Definitely a little luxury, but absolutely worth it. 

458/1038 - Confit of abalone

More abalone! 

I thought I would space out the abalone recipes and this one is the second last in the chapter. Cooked in olive oil and an enormous pile of vegetables, herbs and spices, these were buttery, soft and full of flavour. 

It's such a shame abalone are so expensive because my family love them!

The boys have been on holidays for the last couple of weeks and I thought it would be nice to treat them with some spectacular seafood just before they went back to school. To be honest I have been cooking up a storm lately and so they were pretty much spoiled for the entire two weeks. Treacle bread was my absolute favourite new recipe (thanks to the Press Club for sharing), with the abalone coming in a close second. 

So far, so good. Every abalone recipe has been a winner. 

457/1038 - Slow-cooked shallots

Shallots to me are the shining lights of the onion world; so pretty and with such a lovely, gentle flavour. 

Such a simple little recipe, I decided to include it as a part of our dinner party entrée. I also included smoked tomatoes which I have been dying to try since I added a smoking gun to my cache of kitchen toys. Big lovers of anything smoky, we all loved the result and I am now keen to use this little toy more often! Keep an eye out for a smoked chocolate dish coming to the blog soon.

The shallots were supposed to be cooked with a bay leaf and thyme, but sadly when I ventured into the backyard I discovered my three varieties of thyme had all but disappeared from the garden. Devastated, I decided to use rosemary as a substitute, given that our rosemary bush is simply enormous and crying out to be used. 

With twenty shallots in the recipe, we had a number of them left over after the dinner party. Some were eaten as a nice little snack and the rest were included in last night's spaghetti carbonara. 

Another simple little recipe crossed off the list! 457 down, only 581 to go...

Slow cooked shallots served with za'atar baked zucchini,
smoked tomatoes and crispy shallots

456/1038 - Moroccan-inspired chicken

Don't be put off by the extensive list of ingredients! This is a lovely dish with beautiful flavours and is not at all complicated to make.

In order to feed dinner guests and also my family again the following night, I decided to double the recipe. What I hadn't counted on was running out of room in the pan! So doubling turned into "one and a half-ing" some of the ingredients and also splitting the ingredients into a second pan halfway through the cook. 

We had a four year old at the table on the night I served this and so I was feeling a bit guilty about spicing up the couscous. Although it didn't thrill our little guest, I thought it was wonderful! 

Served with freshly made whole meal flatbreads, this was a good hearty meal that we will definitely enjoy again soon.  

454 & 455/1038 - Simple apple tart with sweet shortcrust pastry

It is very satisfying to knock off two recipes in one dish!

Given that I am now a self-professed master of shortcrust pastry, I decided it was time to tackle the slightly trickier sweet version. Mixing the dough was easy enough, but rolling it out took significantly longer than I am used to!  

Thankfully all of the effort was worth it; the resulting pastry was wonderfully firm and held my apple tart together beautifully. The tart was a lovely mixture of apples and apricot jam, which I decided to leave lumpy, quite liking the idea of a chunky, jammy finish. 

Served with lemon myrtle ice-cream (oh my goodness, yum!!) and rosemary flowers, this little dish was definitely the highlight of our dinner party x

453/1038 - Polish sausage and potato salad

It appears I am on a bit of a recipe roll at the moment! 

There were some sensational pork and apple sausages in the freezer* which I thought would be a good substitute for Polish sausage. Thankfully I was right and this dish was absolutely wonderful. 

A little concerned about some of the ingredients being welcomed by my family, I chopped and mixed them with trepidation; the chopped gherkins for my husband and capers for my youngest. Amazingly, everybody liked everything! 

This was a really easy dinner to put together and I paired it with raw vegetables (peas straight from the pod, capsicum and cucumber) to continue with the wonderful theme of a quick and easy dinner.

Love x

*no I didn't make them, but look out for some sausage making action soon!

450, 451 & 452/1038 - Abalone 3 ways: Steamed/Sautéed with butter and lemon/With soy and ginger

With a bunch of beautiful abalone to hand (and uncertainty with regards to when I will have more) I decided to cook them a number of ways instead of using them all for one recipe. I am really glad I did too, because the recipe that turned out to be my least favourite was the one I was originally going to cook for us all!

The first method was by far my favourite and can be seen in the picture above. Coated in smoking oil, soy and spring onion, these were bursting with flavour. I used coconut instead of peanut oil which I can highly recommend! 

The second method I loved was simply steamed and then covered in soy and ginger. So, so simple but of course soy sauce is one of my favourite things and so it was almost a given that I would love this one too. 

The third and final method was to sauté the sliced abalone in butter and oil with garlic and parsley. My youngest liked this one the best. I thought it was lovely but think I preferred the slightly fresher flavour of the other two. It certainly is a first world problem, comparing abalone recipes! 

So there we have it folks - milestone 450 achieved with a bang x

449/1038 - George's chocolate nut cake

This cake responded to my keeping up with our constant stream of eggs and also the seemingly never-ending appetite of my hungry boys.

Out came the second version of The Cook's Companion for this recipe as it appears not to have made the cut for the final edition. It satisfied my needs as it required nine eggs (hooray!) and also ingredients I already had in the pantry. Admittedly there is not much I don't keep in my pantry!

Almond meal is something I always make myself in the thermomix using slivered almonds, but on this occasion I was down to my last handful. I substituted for whole almonds which I thought worked beautifully, providing a slightly earthier texture and taste. 

This cake was is incredibly moist in the middle and light on top. We loved the texture the whole almonds gave the cake and I was pleased I left my meal more coarse than usual. My husband came home late and so sadly missed out on the double cream we devoured before he arrived.  

With or without cream, this was definitely another hit x

448/1038 - Crab cakes

My own little crabby patties! (Apologies to those who are not across the whole SpongeBob caper...)

I do love a good fish cake and these definitely delivered. I made the beautiful golden breadcrumbs from a leftover soda bread and I am sure their milky flavour enhanced the finished product. Sticking with the truly home-made theme, I also whipped up a batch of mayonnaise to include in (and serve with) the patties. 

I decided to bake rather than fry these and so melted some butter and poured it over the top before I popped them in the oven to ensure they weren't completely boring. If I made them again I would redo this step but with even more butter! 

We ate these with gherkins and a lovely fresh fennel, spinach and orange salad.

Lovely. 

447/1038 - Marieke's chocolate cake

With our chickens still going great guns, I decided that today's cooking adventures would be all about eggs. As well as an open egg, bacon and chive tart which was absolutely amazing, I decided that a chocolate cake would be a fabulous choice for dessert. 

Confession time: I have made this cake once before! It is cooked in a water bath and last time I made it I was mortified to see that water had leaked into the tin, making the bottom of the cake soggy. I actually managed to rescue it, baking it again to dry it out, but decided not to post it anyway. 

So this is Marieke's chocolate cake, take 2.

I decided to halve the ganache amount and still felt I had plenty to spread around, so I would definitely recommend this tip to others! 

Not only were there were groans of happiness as my family took their first bites of this, but my husband has vowed to head for seconds before the night is through. 

Win! 

446/1038 - Choi sum and chinese mushrooms over rice

Such a fabulous and tasty dinner!

It has been a red rice fest in this house since my husband inadvertently purchased a couple of packets recently. I have really grown to love both the look and the flavour of this rice and will continue to keep some in my ever-expanding pantry. 

This dish was lovely, but choi sum, shiitake and rice is not complete without some fabulous chicken! I marinated some thighs with honey. soy sauce, ginger and sesame seeds and once fried, there was plenty of beautiful sauce to pour over our dinner. Paired with the mushroom and garlic sauce from the choi sum recipe, this meal got a big thumbs up from the boys. 

Sometimes it's the simple things...

445/1038 - Parmesan cake

This was my third cake for the week, and it was savoury and fabulous! 

I was making burgers for dinner and thought the boys would appreciate a little cheese injection into the meal. Such a quick and easy cake, this one included freshly grated parmesan, which I grated into little chunks to give the cake some texture.

My husband was away on the night I made this and sadly he didn't get a chance to taste it, with the boys and I polishing it off within a couple of hours. We loved the texture and also the good, strong parmesan flavour that came through. 

Given how fast this was to make and also how much the boys loved it, I can definitely see this one becoming a lunch box staple in future. 

444/1038 - Angel cake

I had quite a lot of chocolate icing left over from making lamingtons and decided that if I made another cake it might just stop my teenager from eating it straight from the bowl.

I have never made angel cake before and was surprised to learn that I needed the whites of twenty eggs! Because my chickens lay lovely big eggs I was able to use a few less to achieve the required 600 grams. 

I ran out of cornflour and so supplemented it with some gluten free flour instead, which worked beautifully. Anybody else who is looking to make this cake, be aware that the recipe makes two of them! I filled a very large cake tin and when I realised the mixture was not going to fit, made this mini version at the same time. I am certainly not complaining! This little cake was devoured last night and we are already well and truly into the big one too. 

So lovely and light and full of lemon zest, my husband thought this tasted a little like cheesecake. Being a person who is slightly wheat intolerant I just loved the fact that it was predominantly made of egg whites and so helped myself to a couple of extra pieces! 

I am going to make this again and play around with the recipe to see if I can make a completely gluten free version. The only downside being that if I succeed I may just be so excited that I eat the whole thing. 

Life could be worse.

443/1038 - Lamingtons with Genoese sponge

I was never really a big lamington fan...until I made them myself! Oh. My. Goodness. They really are quite fabulous, aren't they?

The Genoese sponge was really simple to make and resulted in a gorgeous cake that was light and airy. After tasting a little bit to make sure it was OK, I popped it in the fridge and waited patiently until it was a day old so that I could turn it into lovely lamingtons.

Although I covered myself in chocolate and coconut as I made these (is that a bad thing?) the result was absolutely worth it. The trick is to add a good thick layer of the chocolate icing so that when you take a bite you get a good taste of all three elements.

The chocolate layer is simple;

One part melted butter

One part dutch cocoa

One part hot water

Eight parts icing sugar

Yum, yum and double yum.

442/1038 - Farrotto with garlic and porcini mushrooms (but with pearl barley...)

I must have been feeling really guilty because my challenge cooking has taken off this week! 

I undertook a half hearted search for farro but unfortunately came up empty handed. Not deterred, I decided instead to substitute pearl barley for the farro in this recipe, having made pearl barley risotto  many times before.  

The taste of this was quite wonderful, with the porcini mushrooms bringing a wonderful depth to the dish. Rather than cooking my begetables separately, I decided to add broccolini to the farrotto, stems first and the tops in the last few minutes of cooking.

The family liked this one, except for the fact that my husband confessed to a strong craving for red meat which I have not served in some time. Looks like it's steak for dinner tonight! 

441/1038 - Son-in-law eggs

My amazing little chickens are laying like crazy at the moment and so I am in egg cooking heaven! 

I have always been interested in the sound of this dish, but to be honest was always turned off by the sound of deep fried boiled eggs. I decided I would finally try it out but must admit I cheated and only fried one of the eggs, with the reminder being chopped up straight after peeling. 

I didn't have a problem, however, with making a beautiful little pile of fried garlic chips. If I wasn't worried about how I would smell I could certainly eat these all day long!

The sauce for this dish was absolutely divine, made with tamarind, fish sauce, palm sugar and lime juice. Sticky, sweet and sour all at once, and such a great pairing with the boiled eggs. 

So there it was, my fourth challenge recipe for the month. Nowhere near my best effort but at least I have reached my (self-imposed) monthly minimum with almost a week to spare. 

440/1038 - Lime dressing

Recently I was the lucky recipient of a big bag of kaffir limes. As well as whipping up my first batch of lime gelato (zingy and fabulous!) I decided to make this little lime dressing to serve with a simple stir fry dinner. 

As the dressing was cooking, my house smelled wonderfully of lime and sweet bubbling sugar. I will admit to adding any extra lime or two to the pot and so my sauce had a pretty good zing to it. I do love my flavours quite tart, and so the slight criticisms that came from my family fell on fairly deaf ears. 

Being a bit busier than usual, this is only the third recipe I have posted for the month of May, making it officially the least productive challenge month to date. I am feeling more than a little guilty for letting the momentum slip and so expect to see at least one more recipe churned out before the month is done. 

439/1038 - Prawn coconut curry (in lieu of bug meat)

I feel as if I am cheating a bit completing the Bug meat chapter with this recipe. I had every intention of using bug meat but just couldn't get my hands on some in time! 

The flavour of this curry was absolutely sensational and think it worked wonderfully well with prawns as a substitute. The only downside to the taste was that by the time I got around to cooking this, the bunch of basil I had bought was no longer any good. 

In my defence I launched my new business last week (hooray!) and have been flat out setting up processes, spreadsheets (of course) and servicing my first clients. The motivation for the business was to ensure my life was completely focussed on food (and my family of course) and the service model plays to my strengths beautifully. The website is at a Fork for your Oyster if anybody would like to take a look!

Knowing that I would seriously be missing the basil, I decided instead to top my dish with even more green peppercorns and I was pleased that I did. If you have not yet cooked with green peppercorns, do yourself a favour! They are wonderfully peppery (of course) but mild enough to chew on without gagging.

The other change I made to this recipe was to add green and yellow capsicum to the curry a few minutes before it was finished cooking. We ate this with red rice which I can highly recommend for it's nutty flavour and slightly firmer texture. Yum, yum, yum.

So there we are, six chapters from one hundred and twenty five completed. Even if I did cheat a little bit.

438/1038 - Chicken and leek pie

Life has been a bit "all work and no play" lately and so I decided to take some time out to make a special dinner for my busy little family, and even decided to make my own puff pastry. All was going well, the dough had been rested once and I was performing the first roll. As I was rolling I read the rest of the recipe and realised the pastry was going to take FOREVER to make (roll, rest, roll etc.) and decided that my patience was not quite up to it on this particular day. 

Not wanting to waste the pastry, I simply rolled the life out of it and decided that I was happy with very buttery (but not puffy) pastry instead. 

Having recently smashed my grandmother's pie dish (devastating I know) I needed to retrieve one of the dishes I keep on top of my kitchen cupboards. I was once surprised by a dead huntsman curled up inside one and so now I have taken to teetering on a step ladder and using my camera phone to scan the inside of the dishes before I will lift them down. 

It was lucky I did! There was indeed a well sized spider inside the square dish I had my eye on and so of course that one remained on the shelf and my pie became a rectangle instead. Note to self: get husband to dispose of spider in the square dish! 

The pie was lovely and absolutely enormous so it will serve us for a second dinner tonight, leaving me time today to make a yummy dessert. Look out for a tasty sweet on the blog soon!   

437/1038 - Zucchini and feta fritters

Recipes like this one make me LOVE meat free dinners! 

I cheated and skipped the step where I was supposed to salt the zucchini and leave it for an hour. Those who know me well will know that this was because I was in a rush to get dinner on the table and simply did not have time to comply! I thought I got away with it, even though the mixture was a little runnier than it probably should have been.

Continuing with my rebelliousness, I decided not to deep fry the fritters. Using a medium amount of coconut oil, I fried these for quite some time on medium heat, ending up with amazing tasting little discs that tasted incredible, even though they were not as light as they might have been had I followed the recipe. 

The fresh mint and feta added the most incredible taste to the zucchini and for a meat free meal, the family exuded a particularly high level of enthusiasm. 

Love x

436/1038 - Lemon delicious pudding

Lemon delicious indeed! 

In our house, my husband is the pudding man. The boys delight in telling me that his chocolate pudding is BY FAR the best dessert they have ever tasted. It is a running joke in this house which has been going on for some time. Well at least I thought it was a joke! 

When I said I was making pudding the kids got really excited. Until I started making it and asked my eldest to hand me a lemon. "A lemon?", he asked. "Whatever for?" In his mind, of course, there is no pudding other than chocolate. 

Insert horrified child here.

Once the pudding was made and my children had gotten over the fact that it was not chocolate, we sat down to what truly was a very lovely, and wonderfully tangy, dessert. 

...but apparently the chocolate pudding is still better.

435/1038 - Lois's almond and orange biscuits

These biscuits are so good they should be illegal! 

I completely changed the shape they were supposed to be, due to my almonds not being ground as finely as they could have been. I was fairly sure my mixture would not hold together in a log formation and so opted for these semi-squashed balls instead. 

There was a moment of panic when I was about to make the drizzling syrup and realised I had allowed my youngest to drink the remainder of the orange juice. Thankfully I had not squeezed the orange completely and was able to eke out just enough to make the syrup appropriately orange flavoured.

As is customary in our house, I sent a biscuit along to school with my youngest for his teacher to eat for morning tea. Apparently this one was a winner, with my son passing on his teacher's request for the recipe.

Unfortunately for my figure I ate around half of these. Given my desire to remain a reasonable size, I will be unlikely to make them again in the near future. 

434/1038 - Spicy chicken parcels

A few weeks ago my eldest had a little "incident" with my camera, which explains the dodgy pictures I have been posting! Thankfully this is the last of them, with my good camera (and also my peace of mind) having now been restored. My son and I are still on speaking terms and we have a mutually agreeable arrangement in place regarding the $600 repair bill...

It is amusing to me that I had always read the title of this recipe and assumed that the "parcels" were made of pastry. So on a day that I actually felt like a pastry encased dinner I pulled out this recipe...and discovered the parcels were made of foil! It sounded so nice I decided to make it anyway and push back my pastry craving for another day.   

I do love a yoghurt marinade and the toasted cumin and coriander in the mix made it wonderfully tasty. To top it all off, the coriander and squeeze of lime over the top of the baked chicken is a must for the full flavour experience. 

Stay tuned for another blog post soon...with decent photos! x

433/1038 - Mushroom custards

I spied a container of portobello mushrooms in the fridge as I was beginning dinner preparations last night and decided it was time to try out this custard recipe.

The custards were simple enough to make, but as per usual I had some trouble getting them out of the moulds looking perfect. With a piece missing from the side of this one, I decided a photo of the custard in the mould was much more attractive! Given my inability to consistently unmould custards, I was certainly playing the safe option serving these to my family rather than at a dinner party. 

The flavour of the custard was very rich, thanks to the fabulous rehydrated porcinis I included in the mix. We ate the custards with my chia seed meatloaf (nice combination!) and also slathered on slices of freshly baked rye caraway bread. 

Lovely x

432/1038 - Freekeh pilaf with spinach and fried onions

I have an overflowing pantry at the moment and this recipe was my first attempt at clearing out some of the tupperware containers of grains and legumes I have tumbling about in there. Only appearing in the latest version of the Cook's Companion, this recipe is a beautifully flavoured dish which would pair nicely with meat or veg but would also be lovely on its own as a quick lunch. Tonight I decided to serve it with a small pile of buttery, mashed golden sweet potato which we enjoyed very much. 

I used baby spinach rather than English, and instead of cooking and pulverising it, I chopped it finely and then simply wilted it in the pan. 

Had I known how lovely this would be, I definitely would have doubled the recipe! So nutty and quite salty from the stock, it was also given a wonderful lift with the addition of some preserved lemon. 

Big winner on all fronts! Although I still have some freekeh left, so sadly my pantry is no tidier than before.

431/1038 - Bok choy with fermented black beans

This is the beautiful dish which inspired my first attempt at cooking cha-siu pork. 

To be honest, once the pork was organised, this dish was very quick to put together. I really liked the way the bok choy was cut into quarters, making it pretty to plate and also enabling the edges to char a little in the pan. The cubes of pork and black beans gave this dish a wonderful flavour and certainly made vegetables seem much more exciting to the boys!  

We all adore fermented black beans and given that I now have almost an entire packet stinking out one of my tupperware containers, I think I need to get cracking with some more black bean recipes.

430/1038 - Cha siu-style pork

I have had this recipe ear-marked for more than a week now but, due to a small misunderstanding, this is the first time I have actually had all of the required ingredients to hand.

After an incident with a rather large huntsman, lots of bug spray and a car door that was not closed properly, my adored little Smart car has been sitting idle for the past week with a flat battery. As such, I asked my husband to pick me up some red rice vinegar, the only ingredient I was lacking for this wonderful recipe. 

Apparently when you are only semi-listening, red rice vinegar sounds a lot like red rice...and so that's what he came home with! No matter, we had a lovely meal that evening with red rice the star, supported by steamed trout and steamed veg.

Today he came through with the goods, having spent quite some time searching at the local Chinese grocer. I excitedly threw together the cha-sui marinade and spent the next four hours intermittently rotating my pork and inhaling its wonderful aroma.

This was actually a very simple recipe, but one that created a lot of mess! Marinating dish, draining rack, oven rack and drip tray...there was a lot to clean up. Thankfully it was worth it. (Easily said given I was not on dishes duty!) It smelled so good the boys began tucking in almost the second it came out of the oven.

The actual reason I made this was to include it in my bok choy with fermented beans, which I also made for dinner tonight.

Post to come! x

429/1038 - Rice noodle soup with garlic chives and pressed bean curd

There has been quite a lot of blogging involving cabbage lately and so thought I would shake things up with this simple noodle soup.

Eating dinner tonight, I couldn't help but think of Kung Fu Panda as I struggled to capture slippery squares of silken tofu with my chopsticks. It was the, "You are free to eat" scene that came to mind and I was chuckling to myself thinking that somebody should create a chopsticks diet to encourage people to slow down their food intake. It's not a bad idea really, since it takes twenty minutes for the message that you are full to get from stomach to brain; and of course by the time it gets there it is usually too late! 

As she has done so many times in the past, Stephanie provided me with a recipe that is quite simply fast food at its best. So simple to put together, this soup was on the table in minutes and as a bonus, everybody loved it! I didn't have any black rice vinegar and so we topped this with a splash of dark mushroom soy. At a pinch, I am sure regular soy would also have worked to provide the dash of flavour this soup needed to make it truly fabulous. 

The obvious substitution I made was to use silken tofu instead of pressed bean curd, for no reason other than the fact that it was in the fridge and pressed bean curd was not. I also replaced the fresh chilli with a good dash of Darwin Chilli co. hot sauce. The smell of this, together with the fresh ginger in the pan was simply wonderful. 

I highly recommend this soup to anybody looking for a quick feed. Don't forget the chopsticks for a truly amusing experience. 

You are free to eat x

428/1038 - Sweet potato and prawn fritters

This recipe takes us way, way back to the original edition of The Cook's Companion and also represents my fourth chapter completed. I can imagine what you are thinking - almost four years into the challenge and only four chapters finished? In my defence, I do like to spread my cooking around and try to focus on the chapters with more recipes left to cook. This plan should also mean that I am not left with a multitude of recipes centred around the same ingredient at the end of the challenge. There is, as always, method in my madness. 

I will confess to messing about with this recipe a little, omitting the sugar and replacing the flours for coconut and a gluten free flour blend that I purchased recently from Pomona cafe. I also replaced some of the coconut milk with water, purely because I had trebled the recipe and didn't have enough. Last but not least, I used coconut oil for frying. My fritters were little oil suckers and I had to keep adding it to the pan as I fried. This upped the coconut flavour quite a bit, which of course was a fabulous outcome.

I really liked these, as did the family. We ate them on top of raw cabbage and carrot, to counteract the decadence of the fritters. A fabulous addition to our dinner was a drizzle of the fiery sweet chilli sauce recently purchased from Darwin chilli co. Such a fabulous taste, but wow did it blow our socks off!

I have quite a bit of fritter mixture left over, which I cooked up in a scrambled fashion in the pan. I confess this was mainly because I was tired of making patties! I imagine tonight's dinner will either be a crustless quiche or perhaps little home made pasties.

Leftovers really are one of my favourite things.

Darwin Chilli Co. sauces that recently landed on my very
lucky doorstep. Amazing product from a small family business.
(This enormous quantity was an order for my extended
family, we are not crazy chilli heads!)

Post Script! I made a beautiful oven bake from the leftovers with fresh corn, chorizo, egg and spring onion. 

Sensational.

I love leftovers!

427/1038 - Cabbage salad with anchovy sauce

Calling all anchovy lovers...this recipe is fabulous! 

I had plenty of cabbage left over from the lion's head meatball recipe (it was enormous!) and so decided that this salad could be the basis of a lovely meal. I do try to sneak at least two vegetarian meals past my family each week and this one was absolutely wonderful. My reasons for doing this are threefold; health-based (a balanced diet must be a good thing!), environmental (read: less meat production) and ethical (I would much rather eat animals which are raised humanely, therefore it is logical that I should not expect to be able to eat meat every day). 

So for this dinner I started with potatoes, which I sliced, oiled, salted and baked. Next step was to put the salad together as it needed to sit for at least thirty minutes before eating. I used beautiful white anchovies instead of the grey, salted variety as their taste is quite mild and I tend to keep them on hand for recipes such as this. Oh and also for random snacking, which I do frequently. The salad literally took a couple of minutes to put together - my kind of salad! 

Once the salad was resting it was time to slice a pile of Swiss browns and pan fry them in lots of butter. My family adore mushrooms done this way and so I knew that no matter what the rest of dinner tasted like, I would be on to a winner. 

Last of all I lightly fried a thick piece of halloumi for each member of the family. I would normally do this in oil but given there was a fair amount of butter still in the pan I used that instead. Stacking it all together, I was conscious that a bit of colour might have been nice. Given that this was a Wednesday night dinner for my family (and not a fancy dinner party) I didn't bother to rectify this. 

The flavour combination of these elements was nothing short of fabulous! The sweetness of the buttery mushrooms was beautifully offset by the saltiness of the potatoes and halloumi, and the anchovy salad gave the dish a wonderful flavour burst.

Very happy with this one x

426/1038 - Lion's head meatballs with Chinese cabbage

I do love a recipe with a fabulous name! 

As my children so aptly described tonight's dinner, these meatballs are just like the inside of a delicious pork dumpling. Only of course it would need to be one big dumpling to fit these babies in! The meatballs are large, as big as a fist, and full of wonderful Asian flavours including soy sauce, rice wine and fresh ginger.

Simmering for two hours on the stove resulted in lovely light balls that I served smothered in Chinese cabbage with brown rice, steamed capsicum and plenty of the chicken stock they were cooked in. 

Having already added a good pinch of river salt to the pork mixture, I found that all my dinner needed was a good crack of pepper to finish it off. 

The family were big fans of this dish and everybody hurried back for seconds. Even so, we still have plenty left for tomorrow night which I am thinking I might extend with more liquid to make it more of a soupy affair. 

Options everywhere. 

425/1038 - Slow-cooked zucchini

This is the lovely looking little entrée I served to my dinner guests on Sunday evening.

Having decided that I would like to road test the recipe for slow-cooked zucchini, I simply added a few more layers and my dish was born. On the bottom was a home-made tomato sauce, slow cooked for several hours and flavoured with bay leaf and rosemary. The filling was the absolutely incredible zucchini which also spent a couple of hours on the stove top. It was the coriander seeds that made it fabulous! The zucchini leftovers ended up in a fabulous and very homely beef mince stir fry the following night.

On top was a small handful of Barossa Gypsy ham, which has the most wonderful onion and garlic coating. To finish things off I made mini garlic chips, which not only looked pretty but imparted a good crunch and great flavour to the dish.

These lovely layers were held together by circles of potato, which had been pan fried in coconut oil and then baked. I almost had a mini disaster on the day after I fried the potato and put it in the oven to be baked a bit closer to plating time. Completely forgetting they were there, I absent-mindedly pre-heated the oven in readiness for the bread, and after a few minutes wondered why I could smell potato cooking. I took them out without any damage done, but it did mean that the dish needed to be served cold as I was not keen to cook them a third time.

Last but not least, some lemon zest was grated over the top of my little stack, an addition I love to include in so many dishes, both sweet and savoury.

I was pleased with this entrée, but it was nowhere near my best work. Remembering to add the smoked salt and heating the potato just before plating might have elevated my rating of this dish. No matter, the guests were happy and on this night it ticked all of the required dietary boxes for my guests. 

424/1038 - Roman lamb stew

Do not let this fairly ordinary picture deceive you! Roman lamb stew is absolutely lovely and quite frankly deserved a much better effort on my part of photographing the result. In my defence it was served at a dinner party and so I was conscious of not spending too much time away from my guests, fiddling with the camera. 

I spent a bit of extra time designing the menu for this event as one of my fellow diners is on a restricted diet for medical reasons; abstaining from dairy, gluten and sugar. I found myself discarding recipe after recipe in search of the perfect menu but got there in the end with a range of dishes I was comfortable would complement one another nicely. 

Apart from cooking two separate loaves of bread, I was keen to ensure the menu was accessible to all, not wanting to serve up two different versions of a meal and make my friend feel different or uncomfortable.

As I generally do when putting the final touches on a meal, I hacked a rather large piece out of my finger while dissecting the lamb shoulder. After this incident I was not keen to go anywhere near the bone and so left that to the side for another day. About 15 band-aids later I stemmed the bleeding and rendered myself presentable enough to greet my guests. 

The resulting stew had the most beautiful flavour (minus any blood, I swear), with the lamb taking in the scent of the herbs and drawing flavour from the simple soffritto which spent some time in the pan first. The meat was also lovely and tender, falling away from itself easily.

My husband had made a Roman lamb stew many years ago, using the recipe from The Silver Spoon, another favourite cookbook of ours. It is probably a good thing that it was too long ago to say which version was better, although if memory serves his was every bit as good as this one.

Conclusion: All Roman stews are fabulous!

My special menu