Entries Tagged 'Wannabe chef' ↓

Home alone on nights The Mister is out at band practice means I can have whatever I want for dinner – haven’t yet given in to peanut butter on toast followed by ice-cream but there’s a few weeks left of band practice left!

Look what I made tonight! And it even stayed stuck together in it’s shape! We saw a little bit of a broccoli cous couse thing someone made on Top Chef last week, didn’t see how it was made, just their pile of fine broccoli shavings and the finished product. So I tried it.

I ’shaved’ the broccoli flowerettes & grated the left-over stalks on the parmesan grater to get a pile of green ’sprinkle’ that I left to soak with the cous cous  so that it would cook a bit

Then added some chopped parsley and cooked garlic, pressed it into a non-stick pie mold and left it upside down for a while in the hope it would slip out – a couple of taps on the bottom and it did!

It tasted OK, although next time I might use more salt and garlic – you could taste the broccoli but the taste of cous cous was just a bit too prominent.

Still, healthier than peanut butter on toast I’m sure!

I love it that all our parents get on so well – another great family dinner when Mum & Dad were in town this weekend – lots and lots of laughing and nice comments about the pulled pork burgers and sticky date pudding with caramel sauce.

It’s not online yet but we tried one of the Quick Smart ideas from the latest Cuisine magazine last night – given that they’re just ideas and there are no measurements, correct order or times on anything, you do kind of have to make it up with the ingredients you’ve got. We had most of the things for an idea we’d seen in the magazine in a cafe at the weekend so gave it ago – it was our kind of food and pretty good!

Ours differs a bit from the magazine where we used our own ingredients or didn’t have stuff – here’s what we did…

In a frypan in extra virgin olive oil, cook finely chopped red onion, leeks, bacon, garlic, zucchini strips, lemon zest and parsley – the end result and fragrant and soft concoction. Stir through some baby spinach leaves until wilted, then stir trough cooked pasta and ricotta (I’m sure you’re supposed to use fresh ricotta but we just spooned in blobs of stuff from a tub!) and plenty of seasoning. Sprinkle with finely grated parmesan. YUM.

Made a great pot of minestrone yesterday afternoon – still without a car we’re foraging from the cupboard a bit more than usual and we had all the ingredients for this hearty soup. Recipe also recommended that any seasonal vegetables could be added as well – I used a bit of purple cabbage left-over from coleslaw earlier in the week – it looked rather fluorescent compared to the deep red tomatoey goodness when I first put it in but thankfully retained a somewhat lesser shade of purple in the finished product rather than boiling completely down to white leaving the soup a strange brown colour like I thought it would!

It was really rich and tasty and because I didn’t add any chilli or other spice it didn’t have that sharp often throat-burning taste that minestrone often has when you order it out. And we had left-over soup for lunch today so we’re doing well with our cupboard meals!

Had 2 sets of friend in town this week requiring 2 dinner parties mid-week. By the end of the week I was glad to take a rest from meat! We had an ‘American’ theme with Sara seeing as we hadn’t seen her in a while and hadn’t given her a New York debrief so had burgers

and Bev brought and cooked some steak to go with the kumara & feta salad that Dan requested for old time’s sake.

It was great to get around the dining room table with them again, and they’ve now all gone back home overseas.

On the same page as the leek & potato soup recipe we used last week, there was a recipe for buttery leeks, and ideas for how to use them. ‘Mix with eggs, cream, feta … put into pastry shells and bake’ kind of thing.

We didn’t quite have all that in the right quantities but in the fridge last night we had leeks, pastry, eggs and cream so invented our own quantities, although the mixture was a bit runny when it came time for assembly.

Had to leave them to cook a little longer than suggested because the middles weren’t cooking very well (I think we should’ve beaten the eggs first, plus I skimped a bit by not using extra egg yolks) and I was paranoid about eating partially cooked eggs.

However, the middles cooked and set nicely and the pies were absolutely scrumptious. Now just have to remember what we did!

Made a batch of leek & potato soup last night – very industrious of us for a Friday night. With some old bread toasted and cut into soldiers it was a great winter’s meal and saved the poor delivery man coming out on such a dreadful night with pizza.

Have been introduced to Yummy Mummy’s Cheesecakes – a little store in Woodville that now has cupboard of a store in the James Cook Arcade off Lambton Quay. Got our first little cheesecake-for-2 on the way home from work and it was divine! Not baked cheesecake, just regular, passionfruit – YUM!

Those following my blog will know The Mister discovered pulled pork while living in New York. We made it once, on the hottest day of our time in New York at Cousin Grant’s house, using a ready-made pulled pork starter from Williams & Sonoma.

The challenge was to see if we could make it back here and after not being able to find pork shoulder at Moore Wilson’s on our first trip there when we got back we thought we’d not be able to. However, I had another look when we were there yesterday and there was 1. Yes ONE. Must be something rare, or very popular here. However, no pulled pork starter so we had to make that bit up – we knew that we needed about 600ml of reddy-brown sauce of a particular consistency involving smoke and a bit of spice.

So we assembled a bunch of things from Moore Wilson’s and home

I felt like a kid in a garage in the 70’s making feijoa ‘jam’ out of feijoas and water (Mother you know what I mean) as I just poured and glugged random amounts of stuff into a jug and stirred it up until it looked the right consistency and colour

The Mister browned some vegies and the pork like he did in Cousin Grant’s kitchen and we poured the sauce over and popped it in the oven for 4 hours.

The house smelled very smokey and restaurant-like and when we finally got it out of the oven (look away vegetarians) it was ready and pulled apart very easily.

Assembled the burgers with a bit of the left over sauce concoction and YUM – a great winter meal. Would’ve been perfect if we’d had buns with potato in them (seems most burger buns do in the States) but they were fresh enough so went well. The pork wasn’t as spicy as our first attempt (a good thing), just tasted smokey and tomato-y. Very good.

And here’s what I think I put into the pulled pork starter (for a 1.35kg boned pork shoulder):

300 ml tomato sauce (bottled pasta sauce of just tomatoes & salt)
250 ml smokey bbq sauce
150 ml ginger beer
3 large tsp plum jam
half dozen glugs balsamic vinegar

Make a vegie base of onions, celery, carrot and sweat down until well cooked; brown the pork on both sides which will also caramelise the vegies. Put the pork and vegies into the bottom of  a casserole and pour the starter over. Cover and cook in a slow oven (about 150*C) for 4 hours. We turned the pork over half way but not sure if that’s necessary.

Following true to our offer to take ingredients over to Cousin Grant’s flash kitchen to cook him dinner, we shopped, prepped and transported food, tinfoil, apron, salt, napkins and oil (it’s a New York bachelor pad after all) over to his apartment in Soho. He was away in London for the weekend so we had to let ourselves in and work out how to use the oven and locate dishes so that dinner would be on the table when he arrived back that night.

This presented the perfect opportunity for The Mister to try pulled pork. We’d got into a long conversation with a chef at Williams & Sonoma (kitchen store) a few weeks ago about it after going to the Madison Square BBQ Block Party and after that and the pulled pork he always orders at Morrell’s he was really wanting to try it.

So when Cousin Grant said he loved pulled pork there was no holding us back.

In a very cool cooking 2.0 experience, The Mister tweeted @EatMeaty – the butcher in Chelsea Market and asked if they had pork for making pulled pork and any advice. They responded and expected our visit on Sunday morning. Very cool.

It was great hanging out at Cousin Grant’s and using his kitchen – his place has central air (we were there one of the days of the heatwave when it was 39 degrees C outside), extremely sharp knives and a massive gas oven. Eventually we found the light switches, a casserole dish and some piggy salt & pepper shakers (felt kind of cruel putting them on the table but they were orange), and luckily we took a few other supplies of our own because everything I didn’t think he’d have, he didn’t!

We put the pork in the oven for 4 hours and enjoyed a nice cool quiet afternoon working.

The house smelled great! And Cousin Grant said so when he burst through the door right on dinner time. We toasted the family gathering with champagne, assembled the burgers with pulled pork and some caramelised onions I’d made the previous day and coleslaw I’d made that afternoon and sat down to an extremely delicious family dinner.

So now we have to set about finding BBQ sauce (not something you’d normally find in our pantry) and other tomato-based basting ingredients to try it at home ourselves. Perhaps our Thanksgiving Dinner this year will be a burger feast!

Went out to dinner last night at a little cafe in one of the less-travelled streets of Soho that we’d spotted people sitting outside at a couple of nights before – Cafe Gitane. We had no idea what type of food they were offering, just that it looked cool, funky and cafe-ish.

And it was! Not sure what the equivalent in Wellington might be, maybe Lido, but it was definitely a coffee shop by day/restaurant by night with a simple Moroccan (we think) menu. The Mister had a lamb pot-pie and I had the most amazing couscous with a huge dollop of hummus on top.

We tried to remember all the ingredients in the couscous so that we could try making it at home – we like couscous but often wonder what to put in it – plus the hummus went really well with it. Our list got as far as:

• potato
• pinenuts
• sultanas
• egg plant
• coriander
• apricots
• sweet peppers (roasted & really finely chopped)
• red onion
  (basically a whole lot of sweet stuff that contrasted really well with the hummus)

Cafe Gitane, 242 Mott Street (between Houston St & Prince St), Nolita, New York