Nom nom nom!

New Taste Sensation!

It was a bit of an experiment by T, but it worked!

Steak, covered in honey wasabe mayonnaise.

Believe me, it works!!

Best Drinks In The World!

This post is mainly because it’s been so long since the last post.  Yes, we are lame slackers.

Anyway, next time you’re at your local Coles, look for Galvanina mineral water.  There are two types, the clear ones (which are rather nice), and the organic fruit mineral water, which are the ones you really want.  They’re about 10% fruit juice, and some of the flavours include lemon (not too sweet, nice bite to it), grapefruit, pink grapefruit, pomegranate and the best of all, blood orange.  I could drink the blood orange all day.  Seriously, so nom!

We’ve also discovered a really good lemon cordial.  Extra Juicy cordial says it is 90% juice, and it’s not too sweet and has a nice bite to it.  Very good in soda water.

Chilli Con Carne

Quite possibly my favourite recipe of all time.

This recipe is very closely based on one from Kelly Brodsky’s disturbing, fantastic, extremely dated Food for Lovers (ISBN 0 207 12291 1). The book was only released once, in 1971, as far as I’m aware, and is now quite close to being a topic which defeats Google, so I figure I’m quite safe to reproduce a single customised recipe here, in a hopefully more legible form than the original.

1 kg beef mince
2 tablespoon olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 green capsicum, sliced
1 cup chopped bacon
1 375g tin diced tomatoes
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1½ cups beef stock
1 bay leaf
1 tablespoon plain flour
½ teaspoon oregano
a pinch of cayenne pepper
2 teaspoons of chilli powder
a pinch of basil
1 375g tin of red kidney beans, drained
a dash of lemon juice
water
salt

(For rice: cooked rice for two, 1 tablespoon butter, 2 tablespoons chopped parsely)

Heat olive oil in a deep non-stick frypan, brown the chopped onion and garlic, add the mince and brown it thoroughly. Once browned, transfer to a stock-pot with a lid, and add capsicum, bacon, tomatoes, tomato paste, beef stock and the bay leaf. Cover and simmer for 45 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Now, in a small bowl combine flour, oregano, cayenne, chilli powder and basil. Add enough warm water to make a thin paste, and stir until smooth. Add to the meat mixture, stirring promptly. Add red kidney beans, and simmer for another half hour.
Just before serving, stir in a dash of lemon juice and salt to taste.

Serve over steaming hot rice which has had butter and parsley stirred through it.

This stuff freezes and microwaves beautifully, and will also keep well in the fridge. It seems to get hotter and tastier when reheated.

Instrucshuns

As E points out:

Vaguely Greek Burgers

This is a recipe for ‘lambburgers’ which tries to produce a very different flavour in a familiar package.

It is vital to note that this is lamb mince, not beef mince. I am quite certain that this won’t work properly with beef, pork or chicken mince.

1kg lamb mince
¼ cup chopped fresh sage
¼ cup chopped fresh spring onions
1 teaspoon fresh mint, chopped
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
2 eggs
½ cup breadcrumbs
1 green capsicum, finely chopped

Combine ingredients in a bowl and smoosh together into a nice firm burger mix. This is best done with your clean hands. Form into generous 1″ thick patties, remembering that they will shrink significantly when cooked. Cook in a pan, rather than a griddle, or on the flat solid plate of your BBQ. Little or no oil is needed, as the burgers will typically produce a fair bit of fat while cooking. It’s good to cook these longer and at higher temperatures than ordinary burgers, because caramelised lamb is a very fine thing. You can optionally add a bit of tasty cheese on top when you turn the burgers, to soften and melt.

Makes eight generous burgers.

To serve, your standard burger bun, with maybe lettuce, sliced fresh avocado and tomato. You can also go for a more non-standard burger: I’m fairly sure this would work with a little mint or coriander in the bun. Tomato sauce is right out.

Thorne’s ABM Tomato Bread

This one is my own almost-from-scratch invention, and as such it’s tested, but I may still post some late refinements and subtle changes to it. It’s a much more strongly flavoured bread than a lot of the internet-borne ABM recipes; I aimed to make a specific, new nom, rather than a subtle variation on general purpose bread.

1 400g tin of diced/chopped tomatoes
3 cups bread flour
2 tablespoons sugar
1 ½ teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1 tablespoons chopped fresh chives
2 tablespoons butter/margarine
1 ½ teaspoons dried yeast

Add ingredients to ABM bowl and select regular white loaf.

If anyone has any feedback about this, I’d really like to hear it. Thank you!

ABM Buttermilk Blue-Cheese Bread

This Automatic Bread Machine recipe comes from the extensive list at RazzleDazzleRecipes, but with an important alteration for use in Australia: You can’t buy buttermilk powder here, at least, not easily. This recipe changes the original by removing the buttermilk power and substituting buttermilk, with the attendant fluid levels changed according to the documented proportion of water needed to reconstitute buttermilk powder.

1/3 cup water
180ml buttermilk
2 cups plain flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons sugar
1/2 cup blue cheese, crumbled
1 tablespoon butter
1/4 cup fresh parsley, chopped
1 1/2 teaspoon dry yeast

Add ingredients to ABM bowl and select regular white loaf.

The somewhat ambiguous “1/2 cup blue cheese, crumbled” can be taken as either half a cup in volume before or after crumbling, and very approximate at that. The ‘crumbled’ part can be read as simply ‘broken up’ in the case of any decently creamy blue cheese.

The parsley really should be fresh: I’ve tried part-dried/part-fresh, and it just wasn’t quite right.

My only word of warning with this recipe would be that the chemistry of different cheeses can make a serious difference to how effective your leavening is. Despite being a two-cups-of-flour recipe, this can fill a large-ish ABM pan, or produce a half-height loaf, depending entirely on the cheese.

ABM Cheese and Bacon Bread

This Automatic Bread Machine recipe comes from the extensive list at RazzleDazzleRecipes:

1 cup water
3 cups bread flour
1/2 cup cheese, grated, sharp
1-1/2 teaspoons salt
1-1/2 tablespoons sugar
1-1/2 tablespoons butter or margarine
1-1/2 teaspoons dried yeast
3 tablespoons bacon bits

Add ingredients to ABM bowl and select regular white loaf.

We’ve made this mix up a few times and had especially good results with some MilLel chilli pecorino we picked up on bulk/special. i.e. Don’t be afraid to use strong cheese.
You can also increase the quantities of cheese and bacon by at least double if you like, without effecting the rise.

Yummy ice cream!

I figured this was as good a way as any of keeping track of which recipes we’ve tried and which ones worked!

We got this ice-cream recipe from minxdragon, who found it in the forums of the Simple Savings website:

1 cup cream, 1 cup milk, 1 tin sweetened condensed milk, 1 tsp vanilla essence.

Mix together, put in ice-cream maker for approximately 1 hour.

We haven’t made the original vanilla flavour yet (although we did try it last time we visited minxdragon and cainbits), but for Christmas we made brandy ice-cream (no vanilla, with a 1-2 tbs brandy), and made raspberry ice-cream last time we used the recipe (no vanilla, but a big handful of frozen raspberries – this increased the total volume a bit much though, and it overflowed in the machine).