malay chicken

My philosophy is never miss out on a meal just because you don’t have all the ingredients. Substitute where you can, or just leave stuff out. Sometimes this works really well for me, other times I have to do a last minute dash to Red Rooster to feed the family. Drive thru’s are my saviour.

I’m devouring Gordon Ramsay’s Sunday Lunch at the moment and took inspiration for last night’s dinner from his Malaysian Chicken recipe. I am ashamed that my pantry was missing whole star anise and lemongrass, but the result was still delicious. One day I will try it with the ingredients I left out.

Making your own curry paste is great fun and now that I’ve done it a few times I don’t think I’ll ever go back to the jars from the supermarket. It’s worth the trouble for the frangrance you house is filled with when you pound, or process, your own pastes. It keeps okay in the fridge for a few days too.

Ingredients

Curry Paste
3 garlic cloves
1 long red chilli
2cm piece fresh ginger, peeled and chopped
1 small onion
zest of 1 lemon
1 tsp ground turmeric
1/2 tsp sesame oil
1 tbsp vege oil

Roughly chop everything and either pound with mortar and pestle, or zap in the food processor until ingredients form a paste. I like it a little chunky, but you can puree if you need to hide the chilli chunks. If you want it hotter add more chilli, or use the little birdseye ones – they’ll burn the hairs on the inside of your nose!

Curry
2 tbsp vege oil
2 skinless chicken breasts (or 4 chicken thighs) chopped in 2cm pieces
1 onion, peeled and sliced
2 kaffir lime leaves
1 cinamon stick
300ml coconut cream
100ml chicken stock
1 tsp brown sugar
2 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp fish sauce
2 handfulls of grean beans

Heat the vege oil in a large heavy bottomed fry pan. Add the curry paste and stir over a medium heat until gragrant. It smells utterly fabulous. Add the onions and cook for a few minutes until they start to soften, then throw in your chicken pieces and stir to coat them in the curry paste. Cook for 5 minutes until chicken starts to brown slightly.

Add the lime leaves, cinamon stick, coconute cream, chicken stock, brown sugar, soy and fish sauces and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for 20-30 minutes until chicken is tender and the sauce is creamy. Add the grean beans in the last 10 minutes of cooking time.

Serve with steamed rice.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

The Edmond’s Sure To Rise cookbook is a kiwi institution. Every New Zealand household must have one, and I am certain no kid leaves home without getting their very own copy. I have had three or four copies over the years – they are always stolen by people in share houses I’ve lived in around the world.

The book covers everything, baking included, and the best of all baking recipes are the Chocolate Chip or Sante biscuits. The secret ingredient is Edmond’s Sure to Rise baking powder, but really any old baking powder will do.  These are so easy to make, just watch the time in the oven because the bottoms can caramelise (read burn) very quickly.

Ingredients

125g butter, softened
1/4 cup sugar
3 tbsp sweetened condensed milk
few drops of vanilla essence

1 1/2 cups plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C. Cream butter, sugar, condensed milk and vanilla essence until light and fluffy. Sift flour and baking powder together and mix into creamed mixture. Add chocolate chips. Roll tablespoons of the mix into balls and place on a greased oven tray. Use a a fork dipped in flour to flatten each ball. Bake for 20 minutes, but keep an eye on them and pull them out as soon as the bottoms go golden.

Makes about 25 cookies.

Coffee And Breakfast at The Old Fire Station

I just rated The Old Fire Station great for coffee and breakfast at Docoloco.

All hail “The King”. Had I known about this when I was pregnant I would have eaten here every single day. Peanut butter and banana sandwiches made as french toast and served with bacon and honey. Their coffee’s not bad too!

the BBB at Las Chicas

I just rated Las Chicas great for Breakfast … especially the BBB at Docoloco.

The Bikini Blowout Benedict is possibly THE most divine breakfast in Melbourne. I travel from far north Melbourne once a week to feast and its worth every second of the drive down Punt Road. A famous Balaclava bagel smeared with avocado, crispy bacon and two perfect poached eggs drowned in the creamiest hollandaise sauce. Pop one of these creamy yolks and all your dreams come true (except for the bikini ones).

chard & spinach pie

We have three silverbeet (or chard) “tree’s” growing in our garden. Slowly over the past few months we’ve been eating them leaf by leaf, but with the warmer weather and a bit of rain they’ve gone tropo and are almost as tall as our back fence. I’ve been hunting through cookbooks looking for recipes, but most tend to use the white stalks and recommend keeping the green leafy bits for soup.

I found a recipe for a spinach pie and have modified it to half spinach, half silverbeet.  Considering how tragic my experiments have been over the last few weeks, this turned out spectacularly. I used to have a theory that all mothers were great cooks – the act of giving birth bestowing you with magical culinary skill. Now that I am a mother my ability to cook seems to be slipping, blowing that theory out of the water. Perhaps when I start to sleep again the magic will appear.

Ingredients

1 bunch of  silverbeet
2 small bunches of English spinach
1/3 cup finely chopped spring onions

1 tsp dill seeds
1 tsp oregano leaves
sea salt
black pepper

250g cottage cheese
250g  feta cheese, crumbled
3 eggs, beaten lightly

375g block puff pastry (or 2 sheets ready-rolled butter puff pastry), thawed
1 egg, beaten lightly, extra

Preheat the oven to 220°C and grease a 20cm x 30cm lamington pan. Line the pan with half the  pastry.

Remove the stalks from the silverbeet and wash the leaves. I roll them up into logs and then slice them finely and drop them into a pan of boiling salted water for 2 minutes. Add English spinach to the pan, return to the boil then drain. Cool and squeeze out excess water – it needs to be really dry or the pastry will go soggy, so wrap it in a teatowel and give it an extra squeeze to get rid of all the water.

Combine spinach, silverbeet, spring onions, spice mix, cottage cheese, feta, and eggs in a bowl and pour mixture into pastry and spread evenly.  Cover with remaining pastry and pinch the edges together to join leaving no holes. Brush pastry lightly with the extra egg.

Bake for about 30 minutes or until golden brown on top.  Leave to sit for 10 minutes before slicing.

date and yoghurt muffins

Dates have a chocolate-ish flavour in muffins. I often substitute dates for chocolate chips, especially when my Dad who is diabetic is around. I made these muffins for the mothers group – the cheesecake seemed a bit elaborate. Just as well, the other mums bought TimTams (I knew it!!).

I’ve made these muffins twice. The first time I used rolled oats instead of wheat bran. The muffin mix was a lot wetter and I left the mix too long in the bowl so the muffins were flat. The bran version are a lot denser.

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups of self-raising flour
2 cups wheat bran (or rolled oats)
1 cup brown sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1 cups dates, chopped
1/2 cup walnuts, chopped

1/2 cup oil
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups yoghurt (any flavour will do)

Sift the flour and baking powder and add the bran, brown sugar, dates and walnuts. In a seperate bowl beat together oil, eggs and yoghurt until smooth. Pour all the liquid into the dry ingredients and fold together until just combined.

Spoon into greased muffin pans and bake 10 minutes at 200 C or until centres spring back when lightly pressed.

tangelo cheesecake

I have my first mothers group meeting this week. I’m nervous. We have to take a plate. Here begins the crazy mothers competition that will extend to birthday parties, baby clothes and possibly even baby milestones.

So I’m tossing up whether to be tre’ casual and turn up with a packet of TimTams, or go all out and bake something. I practised on the weekend for a BBQ with friends – Tangelo Cheesecake Slice. Perhaps a bit extravagant for a mothers group plate. Symmetry is important – its fine to be fancy, but if you can’t cut into perfect squares then fancy is lost.

Maybe I’ll just try doing something stylish with those TimTams.

This is a great recipe. It came from the Fresh show on channel Ten last week.

Ingredients

1 packet gingernut biscuits
75g butter, melted

3 teaspoons gelatine
2 tablespoons water
juice of 1 tangelo

250g packet cream cheese, softened
395g can condensed milk
zest of 1 tangelo

4 tangelos, extra
½ cup (125ml) water
1/3 cup (75g) caster sugar
3 teaspoons gelatine

Blitz the biscuits until they resemble fine breadcrumbs and add the melted butter. Blitz again until just combined. Press biscuit mixture into the base of a greased and lined 20×30cm lamington pan and chuck into the fridge while you make the cheesecake layer.

Sprinkle gelatine over the water and tangelo juice. Stand until gelatine absorbs the liquid, then heat slowly over a pot of boiling water or microwave in 15 second bursts until the gelatine dissolves. Blitz the cream cheese in the processor until very smooth, add condensed milk and zest and blitz until well combined. Fold in the gelatine mixture and pour over biscuit layer. Refrigerate 1-2 hours or until set.

Then, finally, the jelly layer. Segment 3 of the tangelos into a medium bowl and squeeze the juice from the membranes into a separate bowl. Squeeze final tangelo and add to the juice. Combine sugar and water in a small saucepan and heat until sugar dissolves. Meanwhile, sprinkle gelatine over the tangelo juice and repeat process above to dissolve the gelatine. Let the sugar mix and gelatine mix cool to room temp before you combine them, then add the tangelo segments and pour this over the set cheesecake.

Refrigerate 2 hours until set.

Using a hot wet knife cut slice into small, perfectly symmetrical squares (if possible, good luck!).