Porterhouse in the front, 2 fillet steaks at the back.

Marge: Homer, I have to go out to pick up something for dinner.
Homer: Steak?
Marge: Money's too tight for steak.
Homer: Steak?
Marge: Eh, sure... steak.

No such problems for us recently! Yes, steak is expensive. And no, we don't have it that often. However, thanks to a very generous gift of top quality steak, we might have even had a bit of a beef overload.

2 weeks ago on Friday, we headed down to Vlado's Restaurant with a family friend for a massive meat-fest. (Click here for a step-by-step rundown of our previous visit.) It is an absolute paradise for meat lovers.

Clockwise from top left: char-grilled steak; "Vlado Junior" preparing the meat; desirably rare steak; meat fridge and prep area.

At the end of the evening, we were delighted when Vlado presented us with a foil-wrapped package of raw steaks to take home! How generous! I just knew I had to do something special with them. Of course, the day after a feast at Vlado's, there was no way I could eat another steak (in fact, I can't eat much at all the day after a feast at Vlado's), so I waited until Sunday before cooking them.

I decided to do Nigella's steak slice with lemon and thyme, from Nigella Express, AKA Nigella's "tender rump". For this, you quickly griddle a steak, and then marinade it in a lemon-oil-thyme-garlic mixture while it's resting. Simple, yet special. And, because the steak is sliced thinly, rather than served to you in a huge slab, I thought it would prevent a feeling of steak overload. However, when I unwrapped the foil package, I saw that Vlado had given us one sirloin and 2 fillets. I knew that the sirloin would be great for the tender rump treatment, but I thought the fillet could be put to better use. That's when I thought - carpaccio! Back in my early dinner party days, I'd often do a carpaccio/tagliata cross, inspired by a recipe from Jamie Oliver's The Return of the Naked Chef. His recipe uses a beef fillet, coated with a herb and spice mixture, which is seared and then thinly sliced. Back then, neither budget nor knife skills allowed me to do that recipe, so I'd always use rump steak, cook it medium rare, slice it reasonably thinly, and serve it on top of a pile of rocket. But now, with a super-sharp santoku knife and a real beef fillet, I knew I could try making proper carpaccio.

I wasn't sure if my parents would like a whole pile of almost-raw meat, so I only used one of the fillets for carpaccio. I got out my mortar and pestle, and bashed around a mixture of coriander seeds, peppercorns, chopped rosemary and salt, which I then pressed around the outside of the fillet. I seared it briefly on all sides, and let it rest. As for the tender rump, I used the sirloin and the remaining fillet, which I sliced in half lengthwise.

Clockwise from top left: Crusted fillet, seared carpaccio, steaks resting in marinade, meat frying in the pan

I decided to fry the steaks in my Le Crueset black enamel frypan, (similar one here but in a different colour), rather than my cheap-ass teflon griddle pan, so that I could get the pan up to a nice high temperature and get some serious crispy caramelisation on the steaks. Mmm... crispy.

Carpaccio. For the dipping sauce I used a mixture of soy sauce and sesame oil. It was a good combination, the flavours being reminiscent of Japanese beef tataki.

I was surprised by how much my family liked the carpaccio! It really was delicious - the meat was meltingly soft and amazingly complex in flavour. (There's a great article here about how Vlado selects, stores, ages and prepares his beef.) The meat was sliced very thinly, and in small pieces, so there was no need to be worried about the rawness overpowering the dish.

Below we have some broccolini - Nigella's suggested accompaniment for the tender rump. You boil it briefly and then toss it in the dressing that the beef has been marinading in. The flavour was great, but I found the dressing a bit too oily for my taste, and would prefer a more astringent accompaniment to the rich beef. Next time I will increase the lemon-to-oil ratio.

Now, the tender rump! I know this isn't the prettiest presentation. Normally I'd be inclined to strew the meat over a pile of rocket, or place it on a bed of rice on a platter, but we were hungry and I was in no mood for further faffing about.

With the rice and the broccolini, it formed a very satisfying dinner. I think it would be quite healthy too, if eaten in sensible quantities - lots of iron from the meat and the broccolini.

Thank-you Vlado for the amazing meat! I can only hope that I did justice to his wonderful steaks.

Welcome to Winter, Melbournians! Yesterday was cold and foggy. I was out of the house from 10am, when there was a distinct chill in the air, and when I came home at 6pm, it was already dark and the fog was descending again. Boo. Like the fog, I was coming down with a cold (again!!), and I wanted something very warm and comforting for dinner.


Pumpkin and Sweet Potato soup. (You can just see my parents' char siew / siew yok fan from Pacific House in the background). The soup is a Nigella recipe, from Nigella Express. Her recipe is express because she uses a packet of already-chopped pumpkin and sweet potato. I had to do the chopping myself, which made it less express, but still not that difficult. You just simmer the veggie pieces with some stock and spices for about 20 minutes, then blitz in a blender. Because the vegetables are quite sweet, the soup needs quite a bit of salt. And, unlike the coffee-art style swirl of buttermilk that Nigella suggests as a garnish, I just used a spoonful of yoghurt and a sprinkling of chopped parsley. I had it with country-style crusty white bread. Delicious and comforting.

As a last minute dessert, and because I was so cold and tired, I decided to be sa-aad and make myself an individual cooked dessert. Based on Nigella's crumble-in-a-cup idea from Nigella Express, I made a crumble in a coffee-cup. I already had crumble mixture in the freezer, so it was all quite easy. Too easy, almost. I put frozen raspberries and chopped up apple pieces in the cup, mixed them up with a teaspoon each of flour and vanilla sugar, covered it in frozen crumble mixture, and baked it at 220C for 20 minutes. Once it was cooked, I put a gargantuan amount of vanilla ice-cream on top, and dug straight in. Fabulous. (Be careful not to touch the cup itself! It will be HOT!)


Crumble is one of my favourite desserts to make, which brings me to the Yummy Blog Award. Cindy and Michael from Where's the Beef? awarded me with the Yummy Blog Award. Thank you guys!


The Yummy Blog Award is an award given to blogs with yummy recipes/photos. If you are a recipient of the award, you're supposed to write about a few of your favourite desserts... so here goes!

1. Rhubarb meringue pie - this is one of my favourite all-time dessert to make, and a tie for my favourite recipe from How to Eat. I made it with doubled quantities of meringue for a recent barbecue. YUM!

2. Pig's Bum - my other favourite How to Eat recipe! A steamed sponge pudding with rhubarb inside, served with lashings of hot vanilla custard. Incredible. I pull it out for dinner parties when I can't think of what else to make, and it always goes down a treat.

2. Apple crumble - my mum's favourite. Last year she went through a phase of buying extra granny smiths just so I'd make it more often! As I previously mentioned, I now keep crumble mixture in the freezer for emergencies. I've also discovered my ultimate crumble recipe: rather than cooking wedges of apples in a pan, I now cut them into teensy-weensy pieces and mix them with orange juice and a bit of butter. This makes a super-soft, mushy filling. Fabulous. For the topping, I now use demerara sugar for extra crunch and toss in an extra handful of flaked almonds. And always, vanilla custard or vanilla ice-cream.

I'd like to pass this award along to Kelly-Jane at Cooking the Books. Her alfajores de dulce de leche looked amazing, as did her 10 favourite photos from her blog.

A selection of breads and pastries, a latte and an ice tea at Andersen Bakery, Ueno station, Tokyo.

We ate an incredible amount of bread and pastries whilst in Japan. Little bakeries were everywhere, selling high quality pastries, yummy bread rolls and coffees of varying quality. And they were cheap! Loaded up with a few pastries and bread rolls, we were ready to face hectic days of sightseeing and shopping. Great food for the budget traveller.

My favourite bakeries were Andersen Bakery (Ueno Station), and Kobeya Kitchen, although there are many others. Follow the warm smell of bread and look for the brightly-lit stores with trays and trays of baked goods.

The Andersen bakery in Ueno station, Tokyo, is huge, and turns out thousands of products every day. Whilst we were in Tokyo, we'd often start the day there, buying everything we wanted, eating what we could, and saving the rest for later in the day. Incidentally, Andersen Ueno was the only place in Tokyo I found that did a latte I liked - not scaldingly hot, not super bitter. When I wasn't at Andersen and needed a caffeine fix, I'd stick to coffee in a can, or cafe au laits. Yum yum.

Marble cupcake with marshmallow, Andersen
Madeleine! I also saw lots of places selling little round cakes called "madeleines", which I thought was interesting. I guess it's just a madeleine batter baked in a round tin.

Apple Turnover, random bakery
Cheese pastry!!! YAY!
Apple turnover. apperu taanova no naka

Selection of breads from Kobeya Kitchen - chocolate scone, Portuguese Pão de queijo (cheesebread), sugar raisin bun. Boss Rainbow Mountain Blend coffee in a can. Travelling food for the shinkansen.

Chocolate cake from Andersen.

Sausage bread, Garlic gread, random bakery in Shibuya station


And a useful phrase just in case you get stuck:

Where is the bakery? panya wa doko desu ka?

Lisa Simpson: I’m gonna go get some vegetarian chili before they get desperate and add meat!

This is my beloved terracotta pot, which I use for all stews, soups, chillis, or anything gloopy.

In my ongoing quest to find delicious, healthy midweek meals, I turned to an unlikely source - Nigella Lawson's Feast. In the Partytime chapter, she has a recipe for vegetarian chilli, which has a cornbread topping, and is served with guacamole, grated cheese and sour cream. It also feeds 10. Seeing as I wanted it to be healthy, I halved the quantity, left out the cornbread topping, sour cream and guacamole, and served it with low fat grated cheese and steamed broccoli. Steamed broccoli is much tastier than it sounds - we love it! Come to think of it, the cornbread topping isn't too unhealthy - it only contains 1 egg, 1 tablespoon of oil and 40g of cheese per 5 servings - but making the cornbread does add 25 minutes onto the cooking time. Maybe I'll try it when I have a bit of extra time.


As for the chilli itself, it's pretty much a stock-standard chilli con carne, with capsicums and red lentils instead of meat. It takes about an hour to cook, but most of that time it's just simmering on the stove and you don't need to do anything. While it simmers, the red lentils cook down and become mushy, with a texture rather like minced meat. You'll see that I used chickpeas instead of the more usual red kidney beans, simply because that's what I had in my cupboard. Very healthy! The dish is high in protein and fibre and low in GI. I would have served brown rice with it instead of white, but I didn't want to scare my family away from the whole healthy-eating thing right away.

Unlike the patrons at the Chilli Cook-off (in The Simpsons), I was not tempted to add meat to this dish, and thought it was perfectly satisfying just as it was. As a bonus, I didn't get that greasy-orange taste you get when you have a minced-meat-and-tomato-dish. Woohoo!

Cooking with yeast is not my thing. However, eating food made from yeast is definitely my thing. Especially Nigella's apple and blackberry kuchen - a sweet yeasted dough, enriched with eggs and topped with blackberries, apples, and a crumble mixture. A quiet weekend in Germany gave me the opportunity to test out some of my (still developing) yeast-baking skills.

Kuchen simply means 'cake' in German, (a topic I researched in great depth whilst in Germany), but Nigella's Apple and Blackberry Kuchen is the German-American version. You start off with the yeasted base....

..., which contains, in addition to flour, salt, sugar and yeast, some eggs, vanilla, lemon zest, milk, butter and cinnamon. I'm sure you can imagine how divine the fragrance is..

Once it's risen (overnight in the fridge, or an hour in a warm spot), it will be soft and springy and doubled in size. My photos make them look the same size, but rest assured, the dough did actually expand. Can you see the stretch marks at the top of the ball?

Once it's risen, you stretch out the dough into a 9x13 inch pan, glaze it with egg-wash, and cover it with fruits and crumble.

This is the crumble mixture, with yummy crunchy almonds:



Once it's baked, it will be risen and divinely fragrant.

It's supposed to be eaten as breakfast, but we had it for afternoon tea with crème fraîche. (It's only 79 euro cents for a tub! Blackberries were cheap there too. *Sigh*). You'll also be able to see from the picture, that it's quite high. It's supposed to be a thinner, burnished and brown slab, but mine turned out high and slightly doughy, although not unpleasantly so. I realised later that the ruler I used to measure the tin was a technische Zeichnerin (technical draftswoman) ruler, which measured increments slightly smaller than inches, undiscernable to the naked eye. Or I just wasn't looking closely enough. Whoops! At any rate, the finished product was really good. We ate about half of it, and I carefully sliced up the remainder and wrapped it up in foil to freeze. Come to think of it, my host family might still have some slices in their freezer! Frau Margit, bitte schicken sie mir kuchen!

Grilled pork chops with lemon and caper dressing, rocket salad and fast fries

I don't often cook chops, as I have been disappointed by the quality of supermarket chops a couple of times in the past - bony, dry and tasteless. When I do head to one of my favourite butchers, it's usually to buy a big-ass roast or steaks for a special meal, and often I'm too lazy to be hitting the speciality shops for a weeknight dinner.

I have been delighted to see that Coles and Safeway are now stocking a good selection of cuts of free-range Otway pork. According to a media release on their website, it's actually been in Coles across Melbourne since 2004, but I've noticed a much larger presence lately. I'll probably still get my big pork roasts from a butcher - Nigella says that plastic wrap gives crackling a "very sloppy kiss of death", and the friendly guys at Rendinas, or any other quality butcher, will cut your meat to size, as well as scoring the rind and other fiddly jobs. For individual porky pieces, however, like chops or fillets, the supermarket will be a great source. Yay!

Last week I found a juicy pair of Otway pork chops at Coles, reduced in price because they were approaching the use-by date. Score! I took them home, and in an uncharacteristic display of spontaneity, marinated them in lemon juice, olive oil, peppercorns, salt, rosemary and garlic. (Loosely based on a chop recipe that Lisa emailed me).


I let them sit for an hour or so, before grilling them on a medium flame for 5 minutes a side and letting them rest. Meanwhile, I washed some rocket, knocked up some fast fries, and mixed together a lemon-caper dressing. The recipe for the dressing - just lemon juice, olive oil, capers - is from bills open kitchen, and accompanies Bill's veal chops. Easy peasy.

I was absolutely knocked out by how delicious this dinner was. It didn't take a huge amount of effort, and the result was fabulous! I will definitely be trying this combination out on my family soon.

The dinner was really, very easy to make. Please give it a go! I made it when I'd strained the muscles in my right hand, and it was all bandaged up. Yes folks, I made this whole dinner with my left hand! Yes, this also means I can't slice up the meat. I did a Joey Tribbiani, and, extremely classily used the bone as a handle to eat it. YUM!