Entries Tagged 'Dinner' ↓

Kathryn Elliot of Limes & Lycopene is running another Pantry Challenge, inviting readers to rustle up something tasty from a list of staple ingredients.

I wasn’t able to participate last time , and was happy to see the launch of round two until I noticed she’d taken vinegar off the list! No vinegar! And no lemon juice! But I decided to do it anyway, and to do it without buying anything for the meal.

A meal from the pantry can be something knocked up in a few minutes, but that’s not the only way to make something quickly. In this case, I prepared a couple of elements in the morning and assembled it all in just a few minutes at night.

Here’s the ingredients list, with the ones I used in bold:

Mograbieh Dinner Salad

1. Olive oil
2. Tinned tomatoes
3. Tinned legumes or beans
4. Soy sauce
5. Frozen vegetables
6. Flour
7. Pasta or rice
8. Tinned fish
9. Eggs
10. Bread
11. Olives
12. Meat from the freezer
13. Fresh onions
14. One spice or spice mix
15. One dried herb or herb mix

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Today my sister, her partner Anne and their kids Ciara and Reece joined us for The Eating of The Hare. They took our bigger boy out to lunch and Owy went to cricket, so I had a couple of hours of uninterrupted kitchen time to potter while our smaller boy slept. There is nothing nicer than feeding people that you care about, and to be feeding them food which they’d been responsible for increased the pleasure. Anne is a bit of a spoiler, so things kicked off with spiders made with sexy ice cream and Cascade soft drinks:

I’m not sure if that’s sharing or territorial pissing that you’re seeing in that picture, but that’s five year old boys for you.

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Even though it’s spring time and the salads are getting a flogging and the BBQ is all cleaned up ready to rock and roll the nights are still cool enough to allow for the odd curry or soup or other winterish type dish – before we pack away the casserole pot for another 6 months.

It was 16 degrees this arvo when I decided “Bugger it – I’ll do my Red Meat Curry”. So off to Box Hill market I went. The kilo of rump already chopped was $9.90. It was chopped a bit smallish for me – I like bigger chunks in this dish but it would save me the slicing when I got home. I bought it from the Italian guys down the end as I don’t reckon the Asian butchers have got the beef under control. Worse with the lamb – I reckon the Asian guys don’t know anything about lamb and I suspect they don’t even like it. When it comes to pork and especially belly pork I head straight to the Asian guys. But tonight it’s Red Meat Curry. I have tried lamb as a substitute for this dish and it works ok. But beef is better.

Setup: Usually I would put Dr John Naw’lins on the speakers up loud while I’m cooking but tonight it was PM on Radio National.

Four medium brown onions roughly chopped.
Melt them down in a big pan on top of stove – a bit of brown don’t hurt just don’t burn them. When they are melted down a fair bit throw in about four good cloves of chopped garlic and a whole lot of chopped ginger. Continue to melt down for a while.

Have ready on a plate the spices:
2 teaspoon cumin seeds
2 teaspoon coriander seeds
2 teaspoons of turmeric
1 teaspoon of chilli powder
12 curry leaves
1 teaspoon of ground black pepper

Throw all these spices in the large saucepan on medium high heat and stir to brown off onions and melt them and toast up the spices and mix them.

When ready shovel out onto a plate and wait.

Slop more oil in the saucepan. I use Rice Bran Oil . Until exactly 5 minutes ago I thought it was healthier than Peanut Oil – now I’m not so sure. Get the oil hot – drop in half the red meat – not too much or it will stew. We are seeking to brown it here. Brown it. Then tip that half out on plate and brown other half.

Meanwhile you will have been warming the casserole bowl in the oven at around 220 degrees.

Throw meat and onions and spices into casserole and place in warm oven.

Get a large tin of Coles brand diced Italian tomatoes and open it up. Pour it into the saucepan used to brown the meat and smoke the spices. Deglaze the bowl and heat tomatoes. Grab about half a beef stock packet – I usually have half ones frozen in the freezer – and plonk it in the mélange. It’s not strictly Gunga Din but I like to splash a bit of salt in at this point. Depending on your tendencies you might like to chuck in a dollop or two of tomato paste – I don’t.

Slop a small amount of water in. Then pour it into the casserole dish what has the meat in it. Then whack it in the oven somewhere above 220C for two hours. Give it a stir every now and again.

I hardly need to tell you that this is best cooked slow and then left overnight before eating. That will make it taste mature and well integrated. But if your ungrateful unwashed unfed are like mine hanging around the kitchen saying “When’s it ready” then, like me, you will roll your eyes heavenward and sigh and you’ll serve it up on the night it’s cooked too.

OK. It goes with basmati rice. Plonk a measure for each person in the rice cooker and 1.5 of water for each measure. Sometimes I put frozen peas or sultanas in the rice mix prior to cooking. Squeeze a lemon into the rice cooker.

Ok it’s ready. Rice on plates with meat curry alongside it – not slopped on top please, some Patak’s Lime Chilli Pickle on each plate, a big drop of ordinary mild chutney on each plate as well and a big dollop of fresh Greek yoghurt. Or you can plonk it all on the table in separate serving bowls and yell out “It’s ready”.

All that’s needed is a fork and mouth.

Spring “officially” starts in Australia on 1 September, apparently because the colonial soldiers were so desperately hot in their woollen jackets they couldn’t bear to wait until the vernal equinox, when it was properly Spring, to be allowed to wear their hot weather uniforms. It’s never really seemed right to me, so I’ve always waited until the equinox on 22 September to begin the new season.

Early Spring’s not that fancy if you pretend it’s three weeks earlier than it actually is. As Cath wrote at the beginning of the month at The Canberra Cook, even the real early spring was still pretty grim pickins if you were growing your own food. Because I mostly shop at Choku Bai Jo, I mostly eat fairly local and fairly seasonal food. I haven’t eaten a tomato (except for some cherry tomatoes) for months and months and months. But we’re inching closer, and now the Spring foods I’ve been missing are starting to appear.

All of a sudden the shops are full of asparagus and strawberries. The early bearing Camarosa strawberries that CBJ has for $3.50 aside, all the strawberries I’ve had have been pretty pale imitations of a ripe strawberry. Not to mention harbingers of the endtimes, which are fast approaching {⇐ Evidence}

We planted some asparagus crowns last year, and looky! Unfortunately that picture shows our entire asparagus crop for this year, thanks to the chickens. But what a spear!

I don’t much like that skinny asparagus that some people fancy, as I find they can be stringy. So when I saw nice big bunches of fat asparagus at 3 for $5 last week, I pounced.
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(This post is the final in a series which begins here and continues here and here.)

On Friday I visited my delightfully mad aunt who totally rocks. It was my turn to cook, so I brought the ingredients for the second version of a Italian seafood dish with which to impress the Hot Interior Designer.

My aunt is an avid cook and generally awesome woman for whom I acted as chauffeur and butler on a two week driving holiday/seafood odyssey into Victoria last October.

We discussed many recipes on the way including many she disparaged.
Aunt: I mean, look at this! Fennel and Rocket Salad!? Easy! And yet there’s a recipe for it.
Nephew: Yes, it’s hardly Fennel and Rocket science.

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I was walking up Spadina St, which is where much of Chinatown is in Toronto, looking for bits for a ‘thank you’ dinner party for my Canadian hosts.

Many of the grocers have baskets of produce out the front and one shop owner had to periodically wipe the snow off piles fruit and veg. It was all pleasingly charming and disorientating (no pun intended).

Anyway, one of these baskets was full of small, dried, white figs of the same type that I had discovered back home in Sydney earlier that year. They come from Iran and are often labelled as “Iranian figs”.

I bought a bag and popped one in my mouth for the walk home which, when I almost broke a tooth, was how I discovered I’d actually bought several handfuls of dried chestnut kernels.

Taking them back with me to Halifax I sought a recipe. And there in my sister-in-law’s collection was a doozy.

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Melbourne Gastronome seems to be outrageously fortunate in the extended family department. My own good luck runs to having a sister-in-law who has a family farm in Bombala. It’s very pretty, but it can get quite rugged –

Here’s the timber of the old shearing shed inside:

and out:

As you can see, we don’t use the freezer for much. Usually just stock, a giant bag of my favourite dried chillies from the Asian Grocery, cold packs and a beast. This is a fat lamb from my sister-in-law’s farm, a whole one, 25 kilos.

We’ve had braised shanks and ridiculously tender and juicy cutlets, and there’s a lot of baggies left in there. I reached in and grabbed one this morning, and when I work out what it is it’ll be dinner for tomorrow.

Rachel of Thus Bakes Zarathustra is presently sojourning with a bunch of Yankee pointyheads in pursuit of her PhD. Writing at TBZ’s previous incarnation she said:

… The thing is the next day I came home from the library starving and sick of books, and there was a bowl of carrot and avocado salad in the fridge and this cake, and I ate it and I felt a rush of righteous maturity akin to flossing my teeth or getting a pap smear.

We all need that feeling sometimes, don’t we?

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