I Suck (at cooking poached) Eggs…a breakfast recipe.

I love poached eggs. There’s nothing better for breakfast than the runny yolk to flavour your bread. The problem is, I’ve never learned how to do it. So I set out to learn a couple of weeks ago. I looked up my cooking Bible; Stephanie Alexander’s ‘The Cook’s Companion’ and she said that to poach eggs you’ve got to spin a pan of boiling water with a spoon to create a whirlpool, then drop the egg into the centre and out pops a perfectly poach egg. Problem was, when I did that, my eggs didn’t stay in the centre – they ‘went with the flow’ and spun around and lost most of their white. I tried one egg without the spin trick, and it lost just as a much white.

So… If you do know how to poach an egg, I’d appreciate a comment explaining how I can do it.

Here’s the recipe I was making. The eggs were editable, but they were really just good yolks with a thin layer of egg white. Besides that, it’s a pretty good, healthy, and slightly gourmet breakfast option.

Smoked Salmon, sauteed mushrooms and poached eggs on toast

4 slices thickly sliced, good quality bread. I used Ciabatta.
4 slices smoked salmon
three handfuls of selected gourmet mushrooms, sliced
4 sprigs thyme
1/2 sprig rosemary
6 small tomatoes, halved
4 eggs
1 big knob of butter
2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley.

To make the mushrooms, heat the butter with a little olive oil in a fry pan. Sautee mushrooms with the tomatoes, rosemary, thyme salt and pepper until cooked. Poach eggs (the above method might work for you, but check comments for a better one (hopefully!)). Toast bread, top with smoked salmon, mushroom mixture and eggs. Then garnish with parsley. Serves 2

Chargrilled Salmon Fillet on Chinese Broccoli with Oyster Sauce

My sister recently got me some new ’scanpan’ gear – a wok and a grill pan. They’re great! I love being able to barbeque in winter without having to die of frostbite. And one of the most beautiful sites in any kitchen or on any table is grill lines.

Fish
1 500g salmon fillet, halved length ways into two narrow fillets.
200ml light soy sauce
4 tablespoons shaved palm sugar (preferably the brown sort).

Put the palm sugar in a mortar and pestle, add 1 tablespoon soy sauce and pound until soft. Add the rest of the soy sauce. Taste: make sure it’s balanced – neither too sweet, nor too salty. If it is one or the other, adjust with either more soy sauce (salt) or sugar (sweet). Put salmon in a bowl, mix with marinade, and cover with cling wrap. Marinade for 30 minutes (or whatever you have time for).

Preheat oven to 220C. Heat a grill pan (or oven suitable fry pan) on stove with some oil, until very hot. Fry salmon skin side down for 1-2 minutes, then turn. Put grill pan/fry pan in oven for about 15 minutes or until salmon is cooked.

Broccoli
1 bunch chinese broccoli, washed and cut into 10cm chunks.
Vegetable oil
4 spring onions, cut into 5cm chunks
4cm piece of grated ginger
3 garlic cloves
3 tbs oyster sauce
1 1/2 tbs light soy sauce
1 tbs Shaoxing rice wine
1 teaspoon honey
1 1/2 teaspoons sesame oil
125ml water
3 teaspoons cornflour.

Place broccoli in a large bowl and cover with boiling water. Let stand for 2-3 minutes, then drain. Mix sauces, honey, sesame oil, water and cornflour.  Heat oil, fry garlic, ginger, spring onions for a couple of minutes. Add sauce mixture. Cook for a couple of minutes. Serve.

Serve on rice. Dish serves 2.

New Recipe: Hoian Hot Pot

First of all… sorry. Haven’t bloged in ages. I’m training for a marathon which means I’m eating lots but not spending much time cooking. But I have three new recipes ready to go. Here’s the first:

Pen recently went on a trip to Vietnam. This was a dish she learned while she was in one of the southern cities, Hoian. It’s a great, simple and versitile dish, that is surprisingly packed with flavour. You could cook this with fish, chicken, beef, pork, or vegetables. This version uses fish and eggplant:

Vegetable Oil
1 clove garlic
2 tomatoes, quartered
1 lemongrass stalk – dice white part, chop stalk into 10cm chunks
3 spring onions, cut into 5cm chunks
1 small eggplant, cubed
1 fillet fish, about 350g, cubed
1 small red chilli, diced
1 1/2 tbs fish sauce
1 teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon crushed fresh tumeric (or substitute with 1 tsp ground tumeric)
10 white peppercorns crushed
4 basil leaves sliced
3 tablespoons coriander, diced

First, mix tumeric with fish sauce, pepper, sugar and 1 cup water. Heat oil in medium clay pot or saucepan. Add spring onions, garlic and chilli and fry for a couple of minutes on low – medium heat. Add tomato and lemongrass, including stalks. Simmer for a couple of minutes. Add tumeric mixture. Bring to the boil. Add eggplant and cook for about 10 minutes. Add fish and cook for another five minutes, or until cooked. Serve on steamed rice with herbs as a garnish.

To make this with chicken or pork, follow these directions but cook some chicken thigh fillet or pork fillet in the sauce for about 15 minutes or until cooked. For beef, slice some beef fillet thinly and cook for about 1-2 minutes in the sauce. For a very tasty beef version, add big chunks of stewing beef, 2 star anise and 1 cinnamon stick to some stock and cook for two hours. Drain, reserving one cup for the hot pot sauce, then follow directions as normal. Serves 2

Master Chef Australia: Romanticism on a Plate

I watched the show last night. I felt like i was back in the 19th century sniffing edible flowers, inventing words and polemicising reason with Lord Byron, the Shellys, Wordsworth, Blake and my personal favourite; Keats.

Don’t get me wrong, it was certainly entertaining. Especially with all the exciting music. And surely, the fact that reality TV has been successful for this long shows that watching others make fools of themselves is always depressingly great fun.

But there was more romanticism in this show than blood plasma in a Big Ben pie. I mean could you imagine a reality TV show called ‘Master Carpenter’, or ‘Master Bricklayer’??

I think even Channel 44 would reject it.

There is something about being a chef in popular culture that brings forward connotations of vibrancy, artistic flair, youth, open-mindedness, radicalism and sensuality. I think the popular mind imagines chefs constantly tucked away in a kitchen full of fresh, organic and exotic ingredients, spending all day creating dishes that wage genocide against tastebuds with an affinity to traditionalism.

If you’re wanting to be a chef, i don’t want to break your heart, but i reckon the job sucks arse. I grew up in a restaurant and every chef or cook i came across was more highly strung than a Bouzouki.

And no wonder.

They work in a restaurant packed full of people, highly volatile people with too much money who have come to have a good time, and if their food is late, or if it’s got flavour in it, and they’ve had a few drinks on an empty stomach, they get angry, the waitstaff agree with them and the chef’s the one that gets beaten with the wooden spoon. But it’s not just the stress, they work the most depressing hours of any job – when their friends and family are off work, they work. Good luck in having a life. Sure you can cook great food, but you’ll be too depressed and lonely to taste it. And the idea that chefs spend all their time creating dishes is a load of dog food too. You create a menu, if you’re lucky, a seasonal menu, and pretty much stick to it. Sure a dish every year or so will change, but the vast majority of the time, you’re cooking the same thing, again and again. And that’s if you ever get to be a head chef, if you’re not a head chef, then you’re just cooking your boss’s same thing, again and again. And as an assistant chef, the hysterical ramblings of the customers will stop with you, making you feel like you’re constantly stewing in a scapegoat curry loaded with so much chilli it makes you cry. Finally, restaurants are highly risky businesses. So many of them fail, and even if they have found a niche, they are the first to be hit by economic recessions and changes in fashion. This means, any idea of job security for a chef is an idea floating in the acrid mist arising from the organic compost of this stupid romanticism.

What a rant. Felt good.

For a great post on ‘How to get a reality TV judge to like you’ check out the fountainside.

Dunch

You’ve heard of ‘brunch’, now there’s ‘dunch’. A meal between lunch and dinner.

Genius.

I ate dunch with friends everyday over the easter weekend. Please use the term and do duncheon as much as possible, I would love to see it used as much as ‘brunch’ is.

More info:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dunch

(I didn’t write the entry above, and I don’t really agree with the strictness of the content of the dunch meal in that entry)

Getting the most out of Stovetop Espresso Machines

Mystery surrounds them, kitchen cupboards are full of them, tongues have tasted their pleasures and their tortures, folklore speaks of their glory yet their use requires intense concentration, discipline and skill.

They’re not that hard.

But, like any quality coffee made in any style, there are a plethora of factors which contribute to a coffee that tastes like the resin scraped from the inside of your sewrage pipe or one that tastes… good.

The tips from this post come from my personal coffee Rabbi – Andrew Beitsch.

Coffee
The first thing that will contribute to either a good or bad coffee is the quality of your beans. Cheap beans will nearly always taste bitter, or in the very least will be stale. Coffee goes stale after roasting quite quickly so it is important to buy beans that are roasted locally. I buy my beans from a friend who runs a local roasting business; and he supplies great beans at a great price: http://threebeansroasters.com/.

Grinder
The second major factor in using these machines is the grind. It needs to be medium-fine and consistent. The only way to really get a consistent grind is to use an expensive burr grinder. To be honest i don’t have one, i have a cheap blade grinder, it works fine, but it means i waste coffee because the water is only extracting the coffee from around the largest pieces of the grind. I don’t have one, but i want one.

Heat
Thirdly, heat is important. A few tips here. You will improve your brew significantly if you boil the water before you put it in the stovetop machine. This  prevents the machine overheating and burning the coffee. Once the boiled water is in, move quickly.

As soon as you see the coffee change colour, remove the machine from the stove and plunge it into a bowl of cold water. You will get a world of bitterness from the creamy coloured foam that comes at the end of a brew and this trick reduces that evil foam.

Thirdly, a gas stove, as opposed to electric, makes an incredible difference. On electric the heat gets too high and the stream becomes too aggressive, causing bitterness. Gas is controllable and gentle and helps dramatically.

In the end they are great machines. You will probably get a better espresso out of a stovetop using a few of these tips than you would out of many home espresso machines, and even at times, better than your local cafe. The other thing is, they last forever. The only perishable part is the rubber seal in the machine which costs 50c to replace.

Drink up!

Lentils and Curry Leaves

As i said in my last post, Pen and I are moving soon and will then be able to grow plants. We were given a ‘Curry Leaf’ tree from some Sri Lankan friends the other day. If you haven’t had curry leaves before, they are a fantastic herb. They are used in South Indian, Sri Lankan and Malaysian cooking and have a fresh, peppery, fragrant flavour that really improves your curries. The thing is, they are incredibly easy to grow, but not that cheap to buy, and a little difficult to find. The thing is, the plant grows like bamboo – it has runner roots which means, if planted in the ground, it has the potential to become a weed you can never get rid of. But it also means it is incredibly easy to cultivate – you just need to find someone with a curry leaf tree. (no i don’t have any spares at the moment, ask me in a year i might then)

The thing i use curry leaves most often in is Dhal. Dhal is a lentil dish that people literally live off in India. Despite the fact that it looks like a cross between vomit and the contents of a newborn’s nappy, it actually tastes great, and is dirt cheap. I also serve this with some home made naan – all you do is use my pizza dough recipe, but add 1 teaspoon Nigella Seeds into the dough and then barbecue it.

Here’s my Dhal recipe:

Yellow Dhal
Lentils
1 cup red lentils
1 onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 4cm piece of ginger, grated
1 tomato, chopped
1 can coconut milk
2 bird’s eye chillis, chopped
1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric
1/2 cumin seeds, ground
1 teaspoon coriander seeds, ground
1 teaspoon salt

Final Seasoning
1 teaspoon black mustard seeds
1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds
15-20 curry leaves

Handful chopped coriander leaves

Fry the onion, garlic, ginger and chillis in a little oil until onions are soft. Add lentils, tomato, and coconut milk, salt and water to cover. Cook for 30-45 minutes, topping up with water to keep at a ‘thick soup’ consistency. For the final seasoning, heat some oil in a small saucepan over low heat. Add mustard seeds, cover until the seeds start to pop. Add cumin seeds and curry leaves and fry for a minute or two. Add seasoning to lentils. Serve in bowls, top with coriander leaves. Can be served with naan bread or rice.

Chilli Season!

Pen and I are moving house in a few weeks. One of the benefits of this is that it is impossible, where we are at the moment, to grow anything – the possums eat everything and anything i put on the balcony. So i’m looking forward to growing a few herbs and spices again.

I’m particularly looking forward to growing chillis again. If you haven’t grown them before, they are incredibly easy. Just find a chilli variety you like  – try and choose some from your local fruit shop. Then dig out the seeds and dry them for a few days on the window sill. Keep the seeds until early August, them plant them about 2cm deep into some well drained soil. Water, and within a month you should have a chilli plant. Chillis will fruit in their first season, but you’ll get a better harvest in the following year if your prune the plant down in winter. You can also create your own varieties of chilli. Just grow two plants, pick the flower off one, rub it into the flower on another plant, and that flower should produce a hybrid variety.

If you already grow a chilli plant or two, you may have noticed them going nuts at the moment. It’s chilli season and now is the prime time of the year to harvest, buy and eat chillis. I made this very easy chilli sauce the other day. If you make it, be warned; wear a face mask and sunglasses – the chilli-vinegar fumes hurt:

Home-made ‘Tobasco’ Style Chilli Sauce
1 cup fresh chillis (can use all red or all green, or combo)
1 375ml bottle good quality white vinegar (Mccormacks is good and has a drip control)
1 tablespoon salt
1 clove garlic

Bash and bruise chillis in mortar and pestle. Soak in some cold water for an hour. Drain. Blend chillis with garlic, salt and a little vinegar, as fine as possible. Soak in vinegar for 24 hours in a bowl in the fridge (keep bottle!). Using a funnel and fine sieve, strain chillis into the empty vinegar bottle, sqeezing all the juice out with back of spoon. Top up with water. Done

What I buy at the Asian Supermarket

I love Asian supermarkets. I remember recently walking through the ‘New Yen Yen Supermarket’ at Eastwood, Sydney with a friend of mine, darting from isle to isle, handling, sniffing, and laughing at all the strange products we could find. My friend picked up a frozen baby turtle like it was a hidden treasure chest he’d just stumbled upon. At this a Chinese man in the isle started laughing and began to pull out even stranger items from the depths of the icy freezer: bullfrogs, abolone, and other things that didn’t really have a shape or colour, and i’m sure don’t have a translatable name.

But I love Asian supermarkets because there are a few things that I frequently use in cooking that are best bought there. Here’s a copy of my typical shopping list:

2L light soy sauce (much cheaper at the Asian Supermarkets and you can buy in bulk)

Shaoxing rice wine (this is a delicious, dark rice wine that with a tablespoon adds an incredible amount of flavour to your stir-fries)

Thai Palm Sugar (an absolute essential in Thai cooking and has a soft, rich, caramel flavour. Make sure you get the dark one in a cylinder and it should be just soft when you shave it)

Mao Ploy Thai Curry Paste (this is the best Thai curry paste you can buy and is the product that a huge number of Thai restaurants use. Be careful though, it has a lot more chilli than the western pastes)

Dried, smoked squid (this is the Chinese equivalent of Beef Jerky, but made from squid. It is the quintessential beer snack!)

Coconut milk (cheaper and usually richer in flavour at Asian Supermarkets)

Banana Leaves (a fantastic product to wrap fish in to barbeque)

Shrimp paste (this is the stinkiest product on the market, but an essential ingredient in South East Asian cooking; be careful, use more than 1/4 teaspoon and you’ll be tasting plankton shrimp for the next month).

Chinese Five Spice (a great spice mix that makes a boring stir-fry or braise taste great. Can usually get it cheaper and in bulk at the Asian Supermarkets)

I’m sure there is much that you could add to this list, and there is much at these Supermarkets than I’m sure I’m neglecting. Would love to hear the prized purchases of others when they frequent the Asian Supermarket.

Nick

(A friend of mine at college, Sam, gave me the idea for this post – thanks Sam!)

Very easy, very cheap Hommus

I recently made some Hommus for some friends that were coming round for dinner and what surprised me was how simple it was to make. And dirt cheap as well! This recipe does not follow traditional methods in a couple of ways: Most recipes will call for you to use dried chickpeas. Do this if you like, but to be honest, I really can’t be bothered to soak the chickpeas overnight then cook them for an hour. I use canned instead – to me they taste identical, are cooked perfectly in the can, and cost around 99c per can. Since they already contain salt, you do not need to season the Hommus if using canned chickpeas. I also saute my garlic. Traditionally you would use raw garlic and if you really like the pungent flavour of raw garlic then just reduce my garlic quantity by about a third. The reason I cook the garlic is that it is the only way to ensure I’m not forced to sleep on the couch for a couple of days while my garlic breath wears off. This recipe is also stored on the  ‘Bits and Pieces‘ page.

1 400g can chickpeas, drained and rinsed well
3 large cloves garlic, sliced
1 small red chilli, finely chopped (use pepper if you or your friends have issues with chilli)
The juice of 2 small or one large lemon
1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds
2 tablespoons oil
1/4 cup water

Saute garlic and chilli in oil on medium heat until just browned. Add cumin seeds and stir for 5 seconds. Add mixture into mortar and pestle and crush (use the back of your knife you don’t have a mortar and pestle). Place all ingredients into a blender (I use a hand blender for this one). Blend until pureed. Serve.