Welcome to my new mini-cooking project! To celebrate my love of ice-cream (love.. obsession.. whatever,) and the warmer weather, each weekend for the rest of summer I’ll be trying out a new ice-cream recipe. I’ll mainly be concentrating on the more exotic recipes from the following books, but am open to suggestion.

Iced (Various Authors)
Ben & Jerry's Homemade Ice-cream and Dessert Book (Ben & Jerry)
Forever Summer (Nigella Lawson)
Real Food (Nigel Slater)

So join me, my trusty Breville Scoop Factory ice-cream maker and about 50 cartons of cream...

Starts this weekend...

onions

Nigella begins her recipe for The Ultimate Greek Salad in Forever Summer by explaining her red onion trick. Basically, red onions, if sliced and then steeped (or fried) in oil, and flavoured with lemon juice, can instantly add interest and lift to pasta, meat or a salad. For this particular salad, Nigella says to slice a red onion finely, add 1 tablespoon oregano, 1 tablespoon red wine vinegar and 200 ml extra virgin olive oil, and leave it to steep for 2 hours or longer, before tossing it through the remaining salad ingredients (lettuce, tomatoes, olives, feta - the usual suspects). This not only mellows the acrid onion flavour, but turns the onion slices a beautiful bright pink colour.

I prepared the onions on Monday afternoon, with the intention of finishing off the salad the next day. However, I became ravenously hungry upon reading Nigella's idea of adding fried red onion to cooked spaghetti with raw tuna and parsley, so I used half the onions for a pasta dinner that night. I fried some of the steeped onions in a pan, added capers and anchovies (raw tuna would have required a trip to the shops - too much effort!), and tossed it through hot spaghetti with parsley. Amazing!


big bowl


pasta

The next day I used the rest of the onions in the salad. I've made this one innumerable times before, and it was as delicious as ever. It is highly compulsive - just try limiting yourself to one serve!


Greek salad - it must be a brilliant recipe if it can make me wolf down lettuce compulsively!

Hello! I’ve just come back from 2 fabulous nights at my friend Alistair’s holiday house with some friends to celebrate his 22nd birthday. You may remember Alistair (aka Allstar) from such birthdays as his 21st! (Last year).

Happy Birthday Allstar, Part I [The Planning]
Happy Birthday Allstar, Part II [The Cooking]
Happy Birthday Allstar, Part III [The Eating]

Last year I think 15 people went up, but this year there were over 20 (!!!). I had to bake up a storm!

I made...

- The Rock's favourite chocolate chip cookies (The WWF cookbook)
- Cheese Stars (How to Eat, Nigella Lawson)
- Pavlova (How to Eat, Nigella Lawson)
- Chocolate Fudge Cake (Nigella Bites, Nigella Lawson)

Preparation at Home

I baked everything a couple of days before we went up to the holiday house, and iced and assembled the pav and chocolate cake up at the house.

The recipe for The Rock's favourite chocolate chip cookies are basically the same as that Neiman-Marcus cookie recipe that got spread around the internet in the 90's. (I made those back in high school a few times - delicious!) The dough has butter, brown and white sugar, eggs, flour, chocolate chips, grated chocolate and walnuts. It makes a very, very stiff dough - you will need biceps like The Rock himself to stir it up.


The Rock's Favourite Cookie Dough

Then you roll the dough into balls and bake for 10 minutes. The recipe says it will make 4-5 dozen cookies, but I got about 6 dozen. My balls must be smaller than The Rock's. Hmmm.


The Rock's Favourite Chocolate Chip Cookies

I saved a few for my family, and packed the rest in a tupperware container for transport.

Now, the pavlova. A pav is a pav is a pav. But check out how awesome the meringue looks in the Kitchen Aid! There is some serious power underneath the slick red exterior.


pav in kitchen aid


raw pav

Once it was cooked, I put it in a tin for transportation purposes.

I made these cheese stars last year for Al's birthday. They went down really well, but after that, I forgot about them completely and haven't made them since. This was until Al called me a week or so before this year's trip, specifically requesting that I make them again. Knowing how much he liked them, I made a quadruple batch, which resulted in 197 stars. These stars are super-easy - just mix red cheddah cheese, self-raising flour, cayenne, butter and cayenne in a food processor, roll out, cut into stars, and bake. Ta-dah!


cheese stars

The chocolate fudge cake needs no explanation. It's brilliant! I've made it probably a dozen times by now, and my friends know it as the "Sarah makes the best chocolate cake in the whole world" cake (they came up with that name, not me!) Thank-you to Nigella for the recipe!

I baked the cake, (2 layers) adding some chocolate chips because there was an open packet in the kitchen leftover from the cookies, and I was seriously in danger of inhaling them all. Once the cakes were baked and cooled down, I wrapped them in foil, ready to be transported and subsequently iced.

And here's the icing. I put it in a tupperware container for transportation.


Check out that icing! I see that my KitchenAid really got a workout with all this baking.

At the Holiday House

The night I arrived, I plonked the cookies and the stars on the table, and they were pretty much gone by the next morning. Success!

Later that day, my friend Symone and I iced the, and put it in the fridge to set. I was afraid that the icing would have gone solid and all lumpy, but remained smooth and spreadable.


Massive Cake


Cake from above - We decorated it with some snake lollies.

Here's the pav. I whipped the cream by hand. (I must have developed some biceps from making the cookies!)


Pav ready to be iced


Decorated Pavlova


Cake in fridge

Al's brother Nick also brought up a Freddo Frog ice-cream cake, which has lots of little chocolate freddo frogs inside. Yum!


Freddo Cake


3 Cakes


That is one MASSIVE cake

Mmm... so much sugar! So much fat! So good!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ALISTAIR!

Monday morning. The morning after my work's Christmas party. I needed eggs. Fast. And there's no egg recipe more delicious than scrambled eggs, Bill Granger-style.



Mix together 4 eggs and as much cream as you dare, and cook in a bit of butter on a super-low heat, gently folding the eggs over as they cook. Make sure you take the eggs out of the pan before they are completely solid, as the eggs will continue to cook even once the heat is off. Now, this isn't Bill's exact recipe (refer to any of his books if you want exact measurements), but it's in the same style, and produces a fabulous breakfast.

Mum and I ate this, on toast, whilst watching our tape of the finale of Prime Suspect: The Final Act. It was awesome! As were the eggs.

I think I should preface this post by explaining my stance towards that most clichéd of Chinese culinary clichés, lemon chicken. It's that type of dish available at every "Chinese" restaurant, right from the Flower Drum, down to your little suburban takeaway, in varying quality (usually poor). Generally it consists of pieces of battered, deep-fried chicken, doused in a luminescent yellow "lemon-flavoured" sauce. I don't think it bears any resemblance to anything people in China actually eat, and for the longest time, I refused to order it, even in better restaurants, believing that my selecting lemon chicken would diminish my food credibility.

This was, of course, until a couple of weeks ago, when I saw Bill Granger make it on his program, bills food 2. He dusted chicken breasts in flour and five spice powder, fried them until they were crispy, and put them in the oven until they were cooked. He then doused the cooked chicken pieces in a sauce made by stir frying wedges of real lemon with ginger, rice wine, honey, brown sugar, soy sauce, lemon juice, chicken stock and cornflour. It looked good. Really good. So good that my dad insisted that I make it as soon as possible, and so good that I instantly threw away my prejudice against declassé foodstuffs and decided that, good God, yes, I too must have this lemon chicken.

The recipe appears in Every Day, and Bill serves it with oven-baked rice, made special with the addition of Chinese cabbage, peas, rice wine and ginger. Now, although I was more than ready to embrace lemon chicken, I still couldn't countenance oven-baked rice (I mean, why?). I just cooked it on the stovetop, but a rice-cooker would work equally well.

While the rice was cooking, I got on with the chicken. How beautiful does floured and fried chicken look? Frying this chicken, I was suddenly inspired to make some good ol' Southern fried chicken. Nigella has a fab looking recipe, as does Tyler Florence. Soon, soon.

fried chicken

As you can see from the first photo, I piled all the rice, chicken and sauce onto one large platter to share with my family. It was the only appropriately Asian-looking dish I had. In the book, Bill says that the recipe reminds him of Chinese dining in suburban Melbourne. So true! I'm from suburban Melbourne! And it's such a staple dish - I used to eat it all the time as a child, before I worried about what was "cool", and before I though of fluroscent food as a problem. But having said that, Bill's version is a far cry from the dodgy takeaways of my childhood. It tasted absolutely wonderful! It was fresh and light, whilst at the same time being substantial enough for a proper dinner. The rice, additionally, was a great accompaniment.

Yes, lemon chicken is a culinary cliché. But when it is made like this, fresh and delicious, it hardly matters.

I recently mentioned that I was going to be cooking for a big real grown-up dinner party. That was on Sunday night. We had 9 people in total: my family (4 of us), my friend Frances, and 4 of my parents' friends (the grown-up contingent). 2 of them are a husband and wife team who run a fabulous Lebanese restaurant, and the other couple run a similarly fabulous bakery nearby.

I had a hard time planning the menu - obviously Lebanese food was out of the question. I wanted to make something that was fancy but not too try-hard, reasonably easy to make, and above all - delicious! After a week of frantically searching through all my cookbooks, and asking almost every single person at work, school, and everywhere else, I decided on a menu.


Menu

Roast Prime Rib of Beef with Horseradish Crust and Wild Mushrooms (Real Kitchen, Tyler Florence)
Perfect Roast Potatoes (How to Eat, Nigella Lawson)
Green Bean and Lemon Casserole (Feast, Nigella Lawson)

Summer Fruit, Elderflower and Prosecco Jelly (Happy Days, Jamie Oliver)


As you can see, it's pretty much a normal roast beef meal, but made slightly special with flavourings and a fancy dessert.

Earlier in the week I trialled the jelly in individual moulds, and it was very pretty, but difficult to work with. This is the jelly I made for a trial - as you can see, there is a lot of fruit and not enough jelly. Additionally the jelly wasn't very firm and a bit messy around the edges.



For the dinner party itself, I made it in a large ring container, used less fruit and a bit more gelatine. You basically dissolve gelatine leaves in elderflower cordial, add sugar and sparkling wine, and pour it over chilled fruits in a mould. Although the recipe stipulates prosecco, I used a cheap Asti for the trial run, and a Seppelt sparkling rosé for the real thing. It gave it a really pretty dusky colour. (See below).

This beef and mushroom recipe was the first I've ever tried from Tyler Florence's Real Kitchen, and it did not disappoint. It involves getting a fab piece of beef rib (from Rendinas, of course)...


Raw Prime Rib

... and covering it in an intensely flavoured paste of salt (1/2 a cup!!), olive oil, pepper, thyme, rosemary, horseradish and garlic... before roasting it with some vegetables at 180C for 20 minutes a pound (44 minutes a kilo).


Marinade + Vegetables

While the beef was cooking, I prepped the other vegetables (slicing mushrooms, parboiling potatoes, slicing beans etc.)


Roasted Vegetables - ooh pretty!



Tyler says this gives you medium-rare beef, but at the end of the cooking time, it was well done. It still tasted good, but next time I'll be more careful with cooking times. I covered the beef and the vegetables in foil, and finished off the side dishes and had a drink as our guests arrived (with champagne! Yay!).

For the potatoes, they need a high blast in the oven for an hour (don't be impatient, because they are worth the wait!). See Feast or How to Eat for Nigella's roast potato method. They are amazing! The beans need to be boiled, and turned through butter and a chopped-up lemon. For the mushrooms, you slice them, and cook them in butter before adding red wine and the pan juices from the beef.


side dishes

And then, it is time to eat! Joe watched me hack at the beef with my usual ineptitude before offering to carve it himself. He sharpened the knife (ooh, scary!), cut the meat away from the bone, and then sliced it into delicious-looking slices. What a pro!


Joe about to cut meat


Joe cutting meat


Mum getting some pointers


Nearly there!


Sliced beef - Mmm... delicious.

The meal went down really well! Thank goodness! Tyler's recipe gave a fabulous flavour to an already fabulous piece of meat, and the mushrooms were a perfect accompaniment. The beans were lovely and astringent against the rich beef. Now, the potatoes! Everyone loves Nigella's potatoes, and I highly recommend her method for each and every potato lover of you out there.


roast potato


roast potato

For dessert we had the jelly! It looked beautiful when I turned it out, but collapsed soon after. No-one seemed to mind though. Perhaps extra gelatine and a longer refrigeration time would benefit it. Richard also brought a banana cake from his bakery, which was fabulous.


Prosecco and Elderflower Jelly


Jelly, served with vanilla-scented Greek yogurt. (It was highly unnecessary of me to add seeds from a vanilla pod to the yogurt, but it just looked so pretty!)

The dinner was so much fun! It was just so relaxed and enjoyable, and everyone got along really well. After eating, we moved onto the porch and kept drinking and talking into the wee hours of the morning.


Banana cake - my breakfast the next morning.