Sunday, August 15, 2010

Dangerous Eggplant and Stevie Wonder (part 2)

So, after being bitten by the eggplant and spending a suitable amount of time complaining about it, I began to assemble the harissa and honey glazed eggplants.

I mentioned in the last entry that the dish wasn't all that difficult, but I think that having the first line of the recipe state "twice cooking the eggplant gives it a luscious texture and a deep, rich flavour" scared me! You mean I have two shots at ruining this dish!?

Step 1: roast eggplants in a single in oven. I can do that. good. (except they didn't fit in a single layer. Multiple trays emerge. yep, roast in oven)

Step 2: Cook in fry pan over low heat all the millions of ingredients I had prepared 'Hewy' style; oil, garlic, ginger, cumin, coriander, cinnamon, harissa, honey, tomato pesto
and lemon juice.

Step 3: Transfer eggplant to mixture turning once or twice. Easy. And yet the recipe goes ahead to scare me again
with "take care as the honey burns easily". What, are they just trying to make this difficult?!

Step 4: that's it. You've really just finished it. As long as you haven't burned it or turned it to mush by turning it too much, it's done. Can be eaten at room temperature. Woo hoo!

Now to the Tagine Style Lamb

Again, as I mentioned in the last post, I had bopped my way through smashing all the spices in the mortar and pestle and was happily mixing it all together in our new glass type mixing bowls while still listening to Stevie Wonder. Then I read that the mixture was supposed to make about 45 meatballs, not the 2o or so I had, so I had to put them all back in the bowl and make the meatballs again, this time smaller.

Once this had been done, I began stressing about the timing of everything again. Normally I wouldn't mind about this sort of thing, but as it is one of the things we get marked on for this challenge, it has been playing on my mind much more frequently. You see, once the meatballs were made, it came down to just before serving everything you need to do fifty things all at once. It leads you into a false sense of security that everything is sorted and you are home free.

Then the guests turn up half an hour early and all of my timings scribbled out on the opposite page of the recipe are put to waste!

I quickly scramble together the starter I had thought of which was just a basic Turkish bread heated up in the oven with a Moroccan dip (bought not made, yes I'm a cop out) and Persian Fetta. Meanwhile, still trying to fry off meatballs in a pan and getting splattered by hot oil spitting out at me.

The difference with our challenge and real cooks/chefs is that they don't have to socialise until the end of the meal. At the end the chef comes out to see the guests, they all clap and compliment the meal and he's all happy. Here, we have to serve and cook and prepare and talk to our guests all at once. This is where the timing of everything becomes very tricky! We don't want our guests to be sitting in the room all silent and waiting. Awkward!

So I flitted between sitting at the table and enjoying the dip and fetta and rushing to the kitchen to make the meatballs sauce. Onion, cinnamon, special mortar and pestled spice paste, tin of tomatoes, honey, chicken stock, then simmer for 20 minutes. (20 minutes to talk and eat more fetta)

Make couscous. Cover, let rest. (eat more fetta)

Serve.

Last time I was concerned with the 'plating up' of everything. This time I went with the hearty Middle Eastern appr
oach of setting it all out on the table and letting people serve themselves. I thought it looked good, especially in the fully prepared tagine (even if it wasn't cooked in it!)

For dessert I made Middle Eastern Rocky Road that I saw on a cooking segment of a show like Better Homes and Gardens or something along
those lines. Unfortunately, all I had to go by was a list of ingredients hastily scribbled onto the back of a serviette. Still, with the help of Google I made it.

To make it Middle Eastern, you added Turkish Delight and pistachio nuts. It was supposed to have dried cherries, but they were no where to be found unless I drove to Prahan and I wasn't going to do that just for a dessert! I served it with good vanilla ice cream and also coconut ice cream. Although the little blobs of ice cream didn't look how I wanted them to, the coconut ice cream was great!

All in all, not too bad a dinner. Despite the eggplant attack and flashbacks to cheesy Masterchef dancing.


Sunday, August 8, 2010

Dangerous Eggplant and Stevie Wonder (part 1)

In this week's challenge I found myself using a mortar and pestle while listening to loud music. This of course meant that as I was singing and bopping away, the realisation that I looked like that chick from the start of Masterchef was very unnerving. I immediately ceased bopping and got down to the job at hand -

Tagine style Lamb with Honey and Harissa glazed Eggplants

Even though we have only been completing these challenges for a few weeks now, it has come to my attention that we have some patterns emerging. It seems that whoever is not cooking has to clean the house. This is only fair as we are having guests each week and it can't be left up to the cook to do everything! It also has become apparent that the best thing to listen to while cleaning (and therefore cooking) is our new Blue Ray version of Stevie Wonder live at last disc. So this week I found myself bopping along to Stevie and making Moroccan.

This weekend Dan was given special tickets to go to football and be waited on in special boxes. Me on the other hand had to clean the bath and soak a tagine. So much for the cook not having to clean! The recipe that Dan chose did not specifically say I had to use a tagine, but considering I got it for my birthday two and a half years ago, I think it's time I prepare it so it can be used! This is also why we get given the challenge on the Friday night, in case we have to soak a tagine for 24 hours!

Dan had to leave to go to his niece's 3rd birthday party so I got down to business (with my mortar and pestle and Stevie).After 24 hours of lazing in a bath, I had to cook it in an oven at 270 degrees celsius for two hours! This was now becoming quite high maintenance for something I was only using as a serving dish!

This was when i discovered an interesting fact. Eggplants can be dangerous!

Who would have thought that the firm purplish vegetable could be dangerous? Well, let me tell you, they are!! I was happily reading up my recipes and looking at the pictures, deciding that I needed as much of the eggplant as possible and that i should not just chop the whole stalk bit off at the top like I would normally do, but peel back the green bits
leaving a curved shape and more eggplant. That's when it BIT ME!! Well, 'cut' me would me more appropriate, I guess. Yes! Eggplants have tiny spiky bits that I cut my finger on! I knew no one would believe me so I took a photo!!

Luckily, no hospital visit was required and I could get on with making the honey and harissa glazed eggplants.

Apart from having to prepare fifty thousand little dishes of spices, like they do on Hewy's Cooking Adventures, this dish wasn't really that difficult. It was the same with the lamb one.

I decided that for this challenge, my biggest weakness was going to be timing. How would I get everything done at the right time, when it all seemed that it needed to be done at once?

(For those of you reading this as I write and upload it, you will be sad to know that my computer is about to go flat so I cannot finish this entry until a later stage! Think of it as a soap opera! Will it work out for Roz? Will she plate up on time? Will the horrible injury caused by the eggplant hinder her progress? Find out next time on....... it's not aeroplane food!!)

Monday, July 26, 2010

Week 2: What should I make Dan cook?

So, I survived my cooking challenge relatively unscathed. Now to choose something for Dan to cook.

I started looking at some of the cook books we own and wasn't overly inspired. In the end I chose two delicious magazines and 2 donna hay magazines. I picked the 'winter' ones because, well it's winter!

I narrowed it down and had four things to choose from:

a) a lamb shank pasta thing, which I decided against because firstly, Dan cooks lamb shanks fairly regularly and also it would involve a few extra hours of cooking

b) some kind of risotto, which again I decided against because Dan cooks risotto all the time and can make it easily! I can't make it too easy for him. It is a competition after all!

c) Mushroom gnocchi. I love gnocchi and the only time I tried to cook it from scratch it was a BIG disaster so I thought that it would be a suitable level of difficulty...

but then I found

d) Moroccan pasties with roasted baby carrots and beets. Comforting winter food. I love Moroccan food.

Let's see how he goes......

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Not as fun as I thought it was going to be...

So the challenge was set. Dan informed me that I was to cook:
a) tuna steaks with cauliflower ajo blanco and
b) waldorf salad

To begin with I was thinking, "Really? I don't really like cauliflower that much."
Shopping was interesting. We went to the supermarket for all the usuals, the deli for 'meaty black Spanish olives' and sherry vinegar and to the fishmongers where there was NO tuna steaks. That really puts a spanner in the works when you are cooking tuna steaks and you don't have any! Luckily, Maxi Foods came to the rescue and we bought the last 4 tuna steaks in the shop.

Once home, the enormity of the challenge began to set in.

Our bench space is not all that huge and I had it completely covered. To begin with the recipe for 'tuna steaks with cauliflower ajo blanco' said to make the ajo blanco first, which meant that I had to have 1/2 cup of roasted black olives. So I had to roast the black olives.

No where in the recipe did it say that I had to take the pips out first but I did. The olives were mixed with olive oil, thyme and garlic and roasted until the olives were shriveled.

To make the ajo blanco I had to cook the cauliflower in a pot with thyme, vegetable stock, garlic and cream. This is where i first began to have doubts. For some reason I thought that the cauliflower should have been covered up with the liquid while it was cooking and yet, when everything was in the pot, the cauliflower was only half covered. I waited until Dan had taken the dog for a walk and sneakily called Anna, my foodie friend who knows everything.

She told me not to add more liquid because in the end it would be too runny and watery, instead of the 'very thick soup or puree' that the recipe talked about.

I shouldn't have worried really because really what was happening was that the cauliflowers were getting steamed in that pot and therefore they don't need to be covered with the liquid. It's been that long since I've officially steamed vegetables that the thought of it had completely left my mind!

When it came to using the food processor to blend the cauliflower with almond meal, it all began to get more messy in the kitchen and not so much fun. Cooking with friends is so much more entertaining that cooking for judges.

I had to cook bulb spring onions. I chopped the stalks and then the bottom hairy bits and then thought, "I shouldn't have cut the hairy bits. In the picture, they still had the bottoms, just the hairy bits were washed off, not cut". This is what this challenge has come to. I care about the hairy bits on the bottom of bulb onions!

When it came time to 'plate up', as they say (hee hee... sounds silly when I say it), the bulb onions weren't becoming golden and glazy in the sherry vinegar, butter and sugar. It was also time to put the tuna on the hotplate.

Here, I should probably mention that our stove has only two hotplates that work. One had the very slowly glazing onions, the other was being used to reheat the ajo blanco. Enter Mr Foreman and his grill.

I was supposed to cook the tuna for 2 1/2 minutes each side for medium rare. After two and half minutes there was still extremely rare sections on the outside of the steaks, let alone the inside! I kept it cooking a bit and then realised it was probably too long.

I'm happy to say that my dish looked exactly like the one in the book (which by the way is called cocina nueva - the new spanish kitchen.

(Small note: The waldorf salad entailed chopping the ingredients and mixing it together with mayonaise.... not that difficult, so therefore I haven't bothered writing much about this)


As this dish was Spanish, I decided to have churros or Spanish donuts, with a chocolate fudge sauce and strawberries and cherries.
The fudge sauce came from the recipe book 'Chocolate' by Christine McFadden and Christine France. All it included was chocolate, cream, sugar and butter (I left out the brandy). It was really quite easy. Unfortunately, I have to admit that i cheated with the churro
s. I bought them from a shop. This of course meant that by the time they were being eaten they
weren't fresh and so not all that nice.



The hardest thing about this whole challenge was timing everything properly and also making it look nice. I'm not the greatest with presentation, which I think is what Dan is hoping for throughout this challenge.

Overall though, overwhelmingly good results. The biggest compliment from Dan himself saying, "Wow, you did heaps better than I thought you were going to do!"

Now to decide what he will cook next week!



Saturday, July 24, 2010

Challenge #1

Well, it was my (Dan) turn to choose something for Roz to cook last Saturday night. I wanted to pick something that would have some technical elements to give Roz a challenge but didn't want to make it to hard or this little competition may have finished early should things turn into disaster.

I love Spanish food, there are so many things that are just yum!! I also wanted to make sure that the dish I chose for Challenge #1 wouldn't work as a Aeroplane meal - it had to be something that was served up straight away.

So here it is:

"Tuna steaks with Cauliflower Ajo Blanco" - I also asked for a side "Waldorf Salad", that was just because I like it.

So the glove has been layed down.....

Sunday, July 18, 2010

The challenge is set

Fact 1: We love food.
Fact 2: We love to travel.

Unfortunate fact of life: We can't afford to travel all the time.

Conclusion: Why not enjoy the things that we can't while we are traveling - cooking and eating delicious food.

It's been six months since we went around the world on our honeymoon. We enjoyed two months of indulgence in 3 different continents and loved all 17 cities we visited. Now that we're home and haven't got any huge plans for traveling, (well at least not for the next 10 weeks!) we thought we would become a little more social by inviting friends around for dinner.

What's the challenge in that, I hear you ask? Okay, so there's more to this story...

After being inspired by foodie friends, Masterchef and reading and watching 'Julie and Julia', we have decided to set our food challenge.

Each week it will be one person's task to cook a meal for ourselves and some guests. What they cook is up to other person. For example, if it is Dan's turn to cook, then I (Roz) would choose what he has to cook. There are some rules though:

1. The meal must be chosen and told to the cook by Friday night (dinner parties to take place mostly on Sunday nights)
2. It must be picked from the cook books we already own (we really need to get through some of the amazing recipes we have and never seem to have time or inspiration to do so)
3. The meal must be something that we would both willingly eat (so no brains or cow's tongues)
4. There will be no lobster or truffles involved (we need to have some money left over at the end of this!)
5. The main course is decided for the cook, but the cook can choose the accompanying dessert or entree

Each meal will be critiqued by all who take part. The cook will be marked on the following:

1. Presentation
2. Timing
3. Taste
4. Accuracy
5. Matching of courses

The challenge is set.
The coin was tossed (well actually we couldn't find a coin, so we flipped a credit card)

Week 1: Roz will cook