Pineapple glazed....... I'm on it! Sugar, pineapple juice, some milk, pinch of yeast, cant be more to it than that. I'm not sure how to get glazes to go dry though. I really liked the delicate crustiness of the glaze of pineapple donuts. I was also thinking of savoury donuts. Onion and garlic inside, melted cheese and bacon pieces on top. Bacon and maple syrup.

If I fail at music I am opening a cafe. Coffee, roasting, and donuts.

:)

Went out of favour I guess ev, I'm not much of a sweet tooth but I used to like jam doughnuts until the day I bit into one and it was full of glass...

Fortunately I was quick enough not to get any severe lacerations, took it back, the baker nearly fainted and took the entire stock and binned it, something blew in the oven apparently. I think I was an early customer and the only one affected, never paid for a thing in that shop ever again :)

Decades ago, in a place called Leatherhead.

I'm not sure what I'm going to cook today, but dis just made me hungry for an egg sandwich, which is unusual, I'm not much of a fan of eggs overall although those Thai ones were delicious. I come of a generation that sort of eschewed eggs over cholesterol concerns, I know it's not the case, but the imprint is there - odd for someone who partly grew up on a chicken farm.

Perhaps a fish pie, heading to the supermarket for some inspiration :)

Cheers

Couldn't you do both please ? I mean donuts and coffee are extremely important, but accompanied by beautiful music, would make for the ultimate cafe experience.

I will invite you as the first customer (: Last time I was in Sydney live music had started up in some cafes, there was some change in laws if I recall correctly.

I dreamt about f*%@#ing donuts all night. I blame komuso and eveln equally. -_-

Better scratch that itch (:

I just finished some incredible pork spare ribs that I marrinated in a smokey bbq & chili mixture for two days and cooked for four hours. I grabbed a bone and it slipped out like the meat wasn't even there. Had them with corn on the cob, pan fried asparagus, broccoli and a couple of my favourite brand of dill pickles.

And much better for you than donuts !

/ bummer 'bout the nightmare the other night :P... Thanks komuso, Waltish and I will be there !!

Yeah I wont be having any donuts for a while. Maybe I'll make some when I get down to 100kg. It was a very healthy meal for sure. Pork spare ribs are actually just under 50% fat but the way I cook them most of it renders away into the sauce, which I'm not eating.

:)

Had a really simple chicken and veg pie last night, was going to add some green veg but there didn't seem much point, it was delicious :)

When you live with someone who has an aversion to most red-meat you get creative with chicken, fish and veg :)

Cheers

Didn't get a chance to post it last week, but after a dinner of assorted burritos, I threw together some diced melons with a handful of lychees and cherries and blueberries, and smothered them with some vanilla yoghurt and maple syrup.

Just marinated a whole chicken for a recipe I've been wanting to try since I saw it on the telly a few weeks ago. Jamie Oliver called it empire chicken, but it's really just a whole tandori roast chicken with a nice gravy and some roast spuds done up with mustard seeds, corriander, chilis, garlic and tomatoes. Will probably have it for dinner tomorrow so it can marinate for a good 30 hours.

Light lunch of smoked salmon, boiled asparagus and a poached egg on a piece of toasted soy and linseed bread. Was delicious. Will be putting on the weekly rotation till I tire of it.

Did some salmon again the other night, but changed the sauce by basing it around sour cream, milk, mushrooms, capers, turmeric, salt and pepper, came out very well and the salmon was superb quickly seared in butter with a little pepper.

Cheers

made some epic Garlic chicken the other night for the mother and girlfriend
using chicken breast tossed with garlin coriander, parsely and then cooking it with the ocassional squirt of lemon juice.
served with Chorizo sausage and steamed green beans.
quick easy and delicious!

Last night I made a smoked duck salad (rub duck with salt and pepper, place in smoker at 100C for 5 hours [hickory, btw]). Duck stands up well to this, it seems. Which is nice: it was an experiment and I didn't have particularly high expectations, after my first attempt at using the smoker sort of kind of failed (the ribs tasted nice enough, but they were nowhere near as tender as I wanted, resembling a well-done rump steak in terms of chewiness).

Tonight I'm cracking open one of the latest additions to my collection: the Gingerboy cookbook. The sexed up Ma Po Tofu w/ cherry tomatoes and Viet basil sounds like a plan.

1 x 'camp oven' (a small cooker that looks like a 5 gallon, not 20 gallon, drum cut in half and given legs)
1 x chicken
A pile of charcoal
a pile of oak shavings.

I have the charcoal (which are a renewable charcoal. Made from coconut fibres) sitting at white ash at one end of the barbeque. The chicken was put in there with legs towards the pile of charcoal (Charcoal covered up to about 1/4 the length. They're there for heat at one end, not the entire length).

After chicken was placed in, 1 fistful of oak chips was scattered on the coals and the lid was closed with the vents about 1/2 open.


Will keep you posted.

AD

anyone got a simple recipe for 'roo steaks? Am planning to make some for Australia day! :)

Salt, pepper, a minute or maybe at most a minute and a half of high heat on each side. Rest for ten minutes. Buy the 'fillets' instead of the 'steaks'--the steaks tend to have a lot of silvery skin on them, which toughens up and constricts, fucking up your steak, unless you peel it off. Or, you know, just avoid it altogether by buying the fillets.

OR

Low (very low) heat for a long time.. If you can make it so it takes 1 hour or so to cook to get medium rare, you have it right

Typically, Kangaroo is good for mince recipes and stews.

AD

Grass fed porterhouse steak rare medium, corn on the cob, broccoli, red cabbage and some mushrooms and spanish onion fried up and dashed with balsamic. Dijon mustard to go with steak.

Gingerboy's Ma Po Tofu.

Baby beets, cucumber, tomato, a little carrot and spanish onion, quiche (pumpkin and zucchini I think?), and chicken stuffed with cheese and bacon. A 'light' breakfast.

How simple? Slice it up into small pieces, put it in a pan on medium-high and seal it.

sounds simple enough. Might give it a go! Thanks!



Something that i don't have to prepare for 5 hours for? haha the above recipes from Saponification and AccessDenied look right up my alley!

:)

I quite often use 'roo mince in bolognaise, very nice, steaks I agree with both the above from Sap and AD, buy fillets and cook slow.

Tuesday's for us is usually take advantage of cheap-arse Tuesday at Dominos, so nothing to report on for last night, except the local shop's quality has gone down. I don't expect perfection but there's somewhat of a difference between "thin and crispy" and "thin and soggy" :)

Cheers

Damn! That duck looks good. Well done Sap.

Bought a nice piece of pork belly. Brought it home, rubbed it all over with salt, pepper and a little bit of garlic powder, and placed it in the smoker (hickory) at ~90*C. Will revisit it in a few hours.

Two wholemeal rolls with smoked salmon, capers, spanish onion, lettuce, avocado and extra light Philadelphia cream cheese. Super nom! Would be better with real cream cheese but that is in conflict with my eating habits atm. I finished off my smoked salmon so it's off to the fish market to buy some more. With the exception of duck it's my favourite food.

I just made myself 2 salad and tuna rolls.
Yummo!


DP

rare roast beef with hot english mustard, tomato relish, caramelised onion, beetroot and home grown tomato and lettuce on toasted bread

and the left over breakfast espresso as iced coffee

A serious sandwich.

Incidentally, if you have a Jones the Grocer store near you, buy some of their 'balsamic onions'. Those + steak sandwich = happy times.

the caramelised onions are sweated in virgin olive oil then a dash of worcestershire sauce once they are nicely browned :)

i note for those so inclined that aldi now stock ready-to-flash bul-go-ri and argentinian seasoned minute steaks that are cheap, delicious, and screaming to be a steak sandwich

I cooked off a kg or so of caramelised onions the other week. I realised once I had finished that, rather than using a bottle of olive oil, I had used some truffle infused olive oil. Oh well, extra tasty hotdogs.

Still don't hold a candle to the onions pickled in balsamic :<

veal (schnitzel) pizzaiola with chat potato wedges and peas

and several coronas


fresh rock melon / cantaloupe (if you prefer that title) with ice cream for dessert

I cooked bacon and eggs.

Impressed? You should be! :P

Hit Jacques Reymond for lunch. The lunch special is, I think, pretty good value. The glass of burgundy, priced at what I'd normally pay for a nice bottle of red? Well. It was very good. I did like, tho', that the by-the-glass selection offered wines at a range of price points (it's common to find, say, everything at $20-25 per glass ... when what's a lot nicer is to get a spectrum of offerings starting at something reasonable and working up to costlier options).

Apologies for the low quality of the images--I took them with my phone.



watercress soup w/ marrow tempura, tartare vinaigrette



seared yellowfin tuna w/ miso dressing, chlorophyll veil, red cabbage relish, freshly grated wasabi, duck neck tempura



lacquered sweetbread w/ quinoa, pickled radish salad, crispy potato



kangaroo w/ 'light Asian dressing' of soy and ginger, tofu and sweet chilli jam



pork fillet w/ lentils, lemon dressing, beetroot bigarade, brussel sprouts w/ yoghurt



millefeuilles of vanilla & lemon custard w/ caramelised banana, orange sauce



macarons

Any good? Sure. Maybe not Marque or Four in Hand or Bentley (Sydney) good, or even Embrasse or MoVida (both Melbourne) good ... but probably above some of the other well-established big names, such as Grossi Florentino (Melbourne) and Quay (Sydney), I've dined at. The food plays it safe to a point, but I get the impression game--whether it's roo or hare or whatever--is always on the menu in some form. And that's nice. Indeed, the highlight of the menu was probably the 'roo, altho' there weren't any dud dishes (the dessert and soup weren't mine, by the way). The coffee was nice enough. Service was good--fine dining efficient without any stuffiness or wank.

Smoked salmon roughly chopped and mixed with dill, capers, cucumber, Spanish onion, asparagus, avocado, cream cheese, horseradish and a dill poached egg between toasted soy and linseed bread. Best sandwich EVER! Seriously, it was fucking amazing. Try it.

Edit. explanation is misleading. Only the salmon and dill was mixed, the rest was layered.

Lunch yesterday ... large round pita bread on pizza stone, layered with camembert and quartered pepperoni slices, cooked at 200 degrees until cheese bubbling and pita crispy, then topped with cherry tomato roundels and rocket.

:drool:

My 'roo fillets turned out alright for my first attempt :)

Went with the slow cook, served with some crushed garlic, and soy sauce. Turned out quite nice :) Thanks for the recommendations earlier, yal!

Apparently tonight I was cooking snags, prawns, pies, salmon steaks, frittata, and pulled pork.

garlic prawns, salmon & trout on the bbq.

I'm stuffed!

Cracked open a new addition to the collection: Adam Perry Lang's Serious Barbecue. It was recommend after I purchased the hot smoker. Was flipping through it and among the many awesome recipes I saw--including one for lamb shanks I'm maybe going to try this weekend--was his (alleged) recipe for 'competition' chicken ('competition' in the sense of those American BBQ competitions). Sounded like fun. They're in the smoker now while I transform the house from a slum into something liveable again.

I am just about to get going on some very slowly cooked lamb shanks that I've frenched and balled. Once I get those in the oven I've got three flavours of cubed chicken thigh that have been marinating for the last couple of days that need to be skewered.

I am cooking up some brown rice with an assortment from the spice cupboard (I should probably point out that the big tub is cinnamon):



Something I had the other day while trying to clear some stuff out of the fridge:



Two kinds of quiche, five kinds of beans. Currently eating that minus the quiche for lunch, hoping the rice will be done by dinnerish.

Success. Rice is a little bit sweet and a little bit savoury and a little more than a little bit spicy.

Rice and beans, god bless peasant food.

I just made a massive tub of no fat tzaziki. I'm going through a kabab phase atm so it'll all be gone in a week or so. Going to have a lamb one tonight. First I'm going to make another lot of tabbouleh then dice and marinate 1.5kg of chicken thigh ready fo the rest of the week.

Poached eggs with smoked salmon (didn't have enough eggs left to make hollandaise sauce), Greek salad with spring onions, and a middle of the range chardonnay.

A dessert. With chickpeas! :-) I discovered the recipe quite by accident and now I make them all the time when I'm in the mood for some easy baking :-)

I don't know what a snickerdoodle is, nor do I know strictly what a blondie is (the opposite of a brownie, obviously!), but these are so yummy that I just don't care :-) I didn't have chocolate chips to add, which is my usual addition, so I added saltanas :-)

A blondie and a green smoothie for dinner - an appropriate amount of -ie suffixes for one evening :-p

edit: just like my favourite chocolate pudding recipe, or banana whip recipe, don't knock it until you try it! :-) Wow... I eat a lot of weird foods, don't I? :-)

Snickerdoodles are sugary cookies coated in cinnamon.

Ooh, thanks for the heads-up... they sound yummy, too :-p :-)