beef, veg and blackbirds baked in a pie

Recipe coming soon.

simple roast chicken and potatoes

This is barely a recipe, but that said, it might be useful for those looking for a basic idea of the ingredients and method required to cook a roast chicken. You could really use any size chook within the 1.5 to 2kg range, and the number of spuds can also vary according to how many mouths you’ll be feeding / how many leftovers you want!

stir fried beef and vegetables in hoisin sauce

Not much to say here. This was simply steak and vegetables, quickly fried, and tossed through a combination of sauces. Served with steamed rice it was a tasty and quick early dinner. Another great summertime meal idea! The recipe goes something like this…

soya chicken or chicken in a master sauce or red cooked chicken

Here in Perth you often see Soya Chicken hanging in the windows of Chinese BBQ shops and Asian foodhall stalls. The secret of Chinese Soya Chicken is the soy sauce broth or Master Sauce which it is simmered in. Chinese cooks reuse the same broth over and over again after reboiling, straining out and replacing the aromatic components. Over time more meat stock is imparted into the broth and its richness is continually enhanced.

This method of preparing meat is called Red Cooking. I don’t know why, as I can’t see any red colour and its probably the reason why red cooked chicken is just called Soya Chicken at the shops. It could be a problem with translation  perhaps.

Other meats are also prepared in this way. Beef and offal are simmered in a broth based on dark soy sauce, which imparts a very deep colour, while poultry is simmered in a light soy broth - obviously lighter in colour. My recipe is adapted from Charmaine Solomon’s 1970s-era Chinese Cookbook and I have made it many times over the years. Although I haven’t always kept my Master Sauces for that long, it is possible. Many Chinese restaurants have had their sauces in operation for many years, even decades. I’ll explain how you can do that in the recipe below.

We have been cooking this frequently over the past month. Its simplicity makes it a convenient dish to make, and served with a salad and a scoop of steamed rice it’s perfect on balmy spring/summer evenings.

roast lemon and sage turkey hindquarter with trimmings

Usually if you go to the supermarket freezer, you’ll find packs of two whole turkey breasts (still mounted on the carcass) for around $36. Right next to them you’ll find turkey hindquarters for around $6 to $7. Although the hindquarter is not endowed with visually appealing white meat, if cooked correctly it is juicy, tender and very flavoursome. Don’t just wait for Christmas - eat this wonderful meat all year round! A 1.5 to 2kg hindquarter should feed about 4 people.

three cheese potato bake

Served with juicy tomato slices, crisp cucumber slices, and a spoonful of cottage cheese, this three cheese potato bake was a winner. It wasn’t quite as rich as I expected it to be, considering the heavy cheese content, and made a fantastic, hassle-free lunch. It’s best to use a really good quality potato in this dish so that you get that yummy earthy potato flavour. We used some Royal Blues:

For memory the recipe went like this…

speck, spinach and swiss chard quiche topped with tomatoes

We have had a huge surplus of eggs in the fridge lately, so I decided to finally turn them in to a quiche this afternoon using some of the speck we bought the other day from Dubrovniks, along with some freshly picked spinach, Swiss chard and spring onions.

I more or less followed the recipe for quiche that we posted up last time we made it, apart from the following variations:

• I used 8 eggs;
• I only added a few tablespoons of parmesan for the cheese component (i.e. I didn’t add any cheddar);
• I used a combination of speck and general bacon for the bacon component;
• I evidently used fresh spinach & Swiss chard in place of the frozen stuff - prepared by chopping it small but roughly and wilting it in a pan until most of the water had evaporated.
• I also used hot water pastry instead of puff pastry (made by halving our hot water pastry recipe - which can be found here). This meant that I baked it at around 150C until set and slightly browned - which probably took between 30 to 40 minutes. Our oven runs hotter than most though, so you might find that 160C is more sufficient. I checked often to be sure it didn’t burn on the bottom.
• When the quiche had more or less set and was on its way to being ready, I lined some slices of tomato across the top and put the tin back in the oven on the highest shelf. When the tomato had warmed and wilted somewhat, I removed the quiche from the oven and transferred it to a serving dish shortly after.

I was going to serve this with a light salad, but I thought the greens inside the quiche and the tomato on top gave it a fresh enough flavour to have it on its own. It would be nice with salad, though, and particularly good if served at a picnic or BBQ.

Instead of cutting it in to squares like last time, I thought I’d have a go at slicing it. This made the pastry crumble a bit more and was a bit trickier to eat, so I think I’ll stick to squares in the future!! Nevertheless, this was totally delish yet again.

another thrown-together, summery meal to celebrate saturday

I’m surprised I fit this in tonight. The sausages were pretty substantial, but the salad was refreshing and moreish.

The snags pictured are cold beef Beer Bratwursts - yet more(!) Dubrovniks’ fare.

The salad consisted of sliced tomato, sliced cucumber, and roughly chopped lettuce (the latter from the garden).

The lettuce was drizzled with low-fat thousand island dressing (a back-of-the-fridge afterthought).

The two generous spoonfuls of cottage cheese were delicious.

The bread was a nice fluffy rye.

saturday brekkie bliss: crispy speck with dill scrambled eggs and tomatoes

If you could only smell how wonderful this speck smelt this morning

(yet more of our Dubrovniks’ fare).

The eggs were merely a few homegrown eggs beaten with some dill added, and cooked in some of the oil leftover in the pan after frying the speck. The dill gave them a Scandanavian sort of flavour, and reminded us of something you’d eat at Miss Maud’s. (Yum)

The tomatoes were a fried combination of romas and generic hybrids.

The bread was a roll (leftover from yesterday) sliced in to four and buttered.

Mmmmmmmm…

viennas & weisswursts with mustard, bread, and braised lettuce

Following on from our previous post, tonight’s dinner was another simple concoction. We bought these sausages today from Dubrovniks in Bayswater - definitely the best butcher in Western Australia. Everything you buy there has the most transcendental flavour, and the sausages aren’t full of crap - they’re the real type that give you that ‘pock’ sound when you bite in to them. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you haven’t had a good enough sausage before! After poaching our snags, we served them with a buttered bread roll, some simply braised lettuce (we didn’t have any sauerkraut around, but this worked really well!), and a generous dollop of wholegrain mustard. Yes, it’s not the most nutritionally balanced meal, but it’s all we felt like today. So simple and so, so delicious.