Braised beef cheeks with mashed potatoes

Have you ever tried beef cheeks or ox tail before? These cheap cuts of meat are so delicious when slow cooked – they really do fall of the bone and are so full of flavour that it leaves you wanting more. It really is the ultimate comfort food. I bought about 6 beef cheeks from the supermarket and it cost me a mere $6. This amount ended up being enough for 6 meals for us. I went home and trimmed the obvious sinew and fat off the beef cheeks and then seared them on each side for some colour. I then fried up some onion, carrot and celery until soft and retunred the beef cheeks back into the pot with a can of tomato puree. After simmering for 3 hours, it was ready – best meal ever and wonderful for winter…

Berry and marscapone dessert

I made a quick dessert the other week – I was at the shops and saw some marscapone on sale for only $2 a tub so I immediately bought it before I knew what I wanted to do with it. I took it home and mixed the marscapone up with a little icing sugar and some lemon juice. Then I crushed some sweet biscuits I had in the cupboard and layered it with some berries. It was like a cheating cheesecake without the fuss and baking. It was easy and really nice after dinner in front of the TV.

Ricotta gnocchi with brown butter

I used to not like gnocchi – the ones I had in the past were gluggy, water-logged and not very appealing. Then one time,  I had a really good three-cheese gnocchi and the memory has been etched in my forever. When it’s good, it’s really good.

Keeping with the budget cooking, I attempted to make some ricotta gnocchi for dinner on Saturday – it is pretty thrifty stuff since it involves 1 egg, some flour, some parmesan cheese and then 250g of ricotta which I bought for about $2 at the deli. I served it with some prawns that were on sale (optional depending on extravagance factor required) and some sage leaves (which I had in my herb pot). They were a cinch to make – but could’ve been better. Mine were a little bit gritty so I think next time I have to make more effort into mashing up the ricotta first. Easy dinner for two and very more-ish – not sure if that brown butter business is necessarily good for the waistline so maybe opt for a tomato based sauce if it is all a bit too rich.

Ingredients:

250g ricotta

1/3 cup grated parmesan

1 cup plain flour

1 egg

Method:

1. Lightly flour a large baking tray. Place the ricotta, parmesan, egg and salt into a bowl, then gradually add enough flour to create a firm dough and avoid over-mixing.
2. Roll out the dough into logs of around 2cm. Cut the log into pieces and press down each piece with a fork to create indentations to hold the sauce. Place into a floured tray until ready

3. To cook, bring a large pan of saltd water to the boil and cook until floating on top

4. To serve, I pan-fried some prawns in some olive oil first and then set aside. In the same pan, I melted some butter over medium heat until it bubbled and turned an amber colour. Also add some sage leaves to the butter and cook until crispy. Return prawns to the pan and stir through the gnocchi

Pan-fried prawns served with ricotta gnocchi in a brown butter sauce

Portuguese Creme Caramel

Last night we wanted to reminisce about of of the excellent portuguese meals we had while we were in Macau. That night, we over-ordered and over-indulged on wonderful food and I am sure we will be speaking about it for the next few years. To celebrate the arrival of the weekend, I marinaded a chook with a paste consisting of garlic, spanish onion, chilli, salt and paprika. This was spread all over a butterflied chicken and left to marinate overnight before roasting it in the oven. I served it with a side of tomato rice and it was finger licking good.

My version of portuguese grilled chicken with tomato rice

To end the meal, I made a creme caramel – the recipe was taken from the SBS Food Safari website. It was my first attempt at making creme caramel and it was both easy and successful. I will definitely keep this recipe for the future – it would make a fantastic dessert for a dinner party.

Ingredients:
20ml water
50g sugar

3 eggs
50g sugar
1 cup milk
cinnamon, lemon rind and vanilla

1. Preheat the oven to 150C
2. In a heavy saucepan, place the water and sugar together and over medium heat, cook until sugar caramelises to a rich toffee colour. Pour into ramekins
3. Beat together the eggs and remaining sugar until frothy
4. Boil milk with lemon rind, cinnamon and vanilla. Whisk into the egg mixture
5. Strain egg mixture and pour into ramekins being careful not to crack the toffee
6. Bake in a bain marie for 30 – 50 minutes until custards are set but still slightly wobbly in the centre
7. Rest for 30 minutes before turning onto serving plates (run a knife around the rim to loosen the custard)

Portuguese creme caramel - a perfect way to end the meal and our Friday night

Katsudon – our delicious Friday night meal

I am determined to grocery shop wisely this year. I would like to minimise food wastage, eat well but also save on money. My new thing is to go through online supermarket catalogues to see what is on special before leaving the house. I will also base our weekly meals around these specials.

The last two times I have been at the supermarket, I have been able to score some cheap meat. It was drastically reduced because it was about to expire in a few days so I went home and stuck it all in the freezer. I think this is a safe practice – we haven’t gotten sick so far and I thoroughly cook it before eating.

Anyway…back to the katsudon. I had three lovely pieces of pork scotch fillet in our freezer (that I bought for something like $2.50) so I thought I would try my hand at making katsudon. Out of sheer lazines, I wanted to pan-fry the pork instead of deep-frying it. I told hubby it was for health reasons – he gave me a quizzical look and said “How can it be called katsudon if the pork is not crumbed and deep-fried?” Fair call – so off to the kitchen I went to dig up some breadcrumbs to coat the pork with.

I found some frozen bread in the freezer and to dry it out, I toasted it before I whizzed it up in the food processor to make some crumbs. The crumbs felt wet but it made a lovely crunchy coating on my pork this time. I coated the pork with flour first, then rolled it in egg and then finished off with the breadcrumbs. I rested the meat briefly before deep frying them.

Crumbed pork straight from the hot oil

For the rest of the katsudon, I boiled up some instant dashi (about 1 cup) and then flavoured it with some soy and mirin. Some onion was added to the broth until cooked and then 2 beaten eggs were cooked in the broth.

The pork was cut into strips and placed on top of steamed rice. The egg/onion/broth mix was ladled over the rice and voila! Katsudon was ready!

Hubby took one bite and said “This is really good – thanks so much.”

Effort worthwhile!

Macarons and all the fuss

I was first aware of French Macarons when I watched the Masterchef dessert challenge. From what I saw on TV, these little colourful suckers looked pretty but they didn’t really take my fancy. They looked like wafers to me and my initial thought was “who cares about them enough to suffer through a dessert challenge?”

After that episode, I noticed that macarons were around everywhere and people were obsessed with them. Over the last six months, I have googled them to learn what the deal is with them – why are people so keen on the “foot” and what makes people swoon over them? In my recent trip to HK and Macau, I saw them at a french chocolate shop for HKD$25 a pop. I can eat an entire meal for HKD$25 so I couldn’t justify buying one to try.

Luckily for me, the experience was just around the corner. Hubby and I went to dine in a French restaurant called Aux Beaux Arts at the MGM Grand in Macau one night. It’s a lovely restaurant set out like a french bistro – elegant but not snooty. The menu is delicious and the service is very good. We opted for the “Panda Set Menu” option which was a four course meal that consisted of two entrees, one main and one dessert. Lo and behold, strawberry macaron was on the menu – served sandwiched with strawberry sorbet in between.

Strawberry macaron dessert at Aux Beaux Arts at the MGM Grand in Macau

The dessert was served and it was impressive – a rose pink coloured macaron which was quite flat but it had the frilly foot on it that I had read about but never seen for myself. I bit into it and was surprised by what I tasted – it was sweet, had the distinctive taste of almond (which I love) and had the chewy texture to it that made it fun. Whilst I still don’t think it’s the bomb, I enjoyed it enough to understand why some people are obsessed with it.

So, being the way I am, I was determined to master the macaron at home. By having this skill under my belt, I would be able to whisk macarons up left, right and centre when the occassion calls for some impressive entertaining. My decision was to make green tea macarons with a dark chocolate ganache filling. Being my first attempt, I used the least amount of ingredients I could just in case it turned into an epic disaster.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup icing sugar

1/4 cup almond meal

1 large egg white at room temperature

2.5 tbsp sugar

Method:

Preheat oven to 160C.

Finely grind almond meal and icing sugar in a food processor until mixture is fine. Add in 1 heaped teaspoon of green tea powder and grind again.

Whip egg white until soft peaks form. Add the sugar gradually to the whites while beating and whip until stiff peaks form.

Fold the ground almond meal mixture into the egg whites in three additions and mix well.

Pipe onto pre-lined baking trays.

Bake for 15 minutes.

Where's my frilly foot?

So my macarons came out of the oven green like I thought they should. They were shaped nicely – quite evenly shaped considering I just guesstimated. Some tried to pop a frilly foot but most of them missed the mark. They stuck to the baking paper a little which was also a little disappointing. I popped one into my mouth and it tasted fairly good – chewy? Tick. Almond-y? Tick. Green tea? Tick. All components were there but the physical appearance lacked a little. By this time, I couldn’t be bothered delivering on the dark chocolate ganache I had intended to make for these macarons – instead, I went through the pantry and dug up a jar of nutella and just smeared it in between. Nice!

Green tea macaron sandwiched with Nutella

My first Christmas dinner as host

I love having people over for dinner and dishing up impressive stuff – the smile it brings to people’s faces and tummies is priceless and I love the relaxed nature of talking at home compared to a restaurant setting. I also love the compliments of course! Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy when I know people go home satisfied from a night at our place.

This year, I decided we should have some friends over for Christmas dinner – since we aren’t going to be around on Christmas Day, we had it a few weeks earlier and booked them all in for a Saturday night. I spent the morning cleaning up the unit with hubby and making sure the kitchen was all in working order with clean stove tops and clean benchtops. For our menu, hands-on time was kept at a minimum so that I could also enjoy the time with our guests.

Our table setting - champagne and white wine glasses were out and ready. The table runner was bought from Beijing and the heart decoration to bring some colour to the table was brought from good old Ikea

Our entree was poached prawns in a mango and corn salsa. I bought a bag of mangoes from a roadside stall a week ago so thought I would put it to good use. I chopped it up, added some finely diced spanish onion, mint and chilli. It was seasoned with salt, pepper and lemon juice. Aside from the salsa being a little “wet” from the mushing of the mango upon mixing, the entree was very good – the sweetness of the prawns worked well with the tang of the salsa. It was dead easy to plate up aswell – everything was made beforehand and once our friends had arrived, I arranged the dish and it was done within five minutes.

For mains, it was roasted pork belly with seared scallops and cauliflower puree. I also made a little bit of cranberry sauce to go with the pork belly which worked out really nicely. I bought a large piece of Murray Valley pork belly – I seasoned the flesh (not the skin) with salt, pepper and paprika a few days beforehand and then let the skin dry in the fridge for 48 hours. By the end of this time, the skin was dry which really helps with the crackling. The pork was roasted for 1/2 hr at 22oC to get the skin blistering and then the oven was turned down to 180C for 45 minutes to cook the meat. The cauliflower puree was also made beforehand and heated up prior to mains being served.

The crackling was good. The cranberry sauce was also surprisingly good – I just put together some frozen cranberries, sugar and a little water in a pot and cooked it until it was in a jam like consistency.

Dessert was also pre-prepared – maximum taste for minimal effort. I made a chocolate and cherry brownie and served it with vanilla ice cream. Brownies are delicious but so not good for you – there was like 200g butter, 200g chocolate, 200g sugar, 80g flour and 3 eggs. That’s it – fat, sugar and some more fat. But it was divine! Just the chocolate would’ve been too rich but addition of the cherries cut it quite nicely. There are leftovers as well that we are still enjoying!

Chocolate and cherry brownie with vanilla ice cream

All in all, a lovely evening and I thoroughly enjoyed preparing for it aswell. Below is our little Christmas tree at home – it is all we can put up given the space we have!

Cured salmon

When we were in Sweden, we ate alot of cured salmon. We bought a cookbook and in it, there’s a recipe for making your own cured salmon using just salt and sugar. We tried it at Easter for the first time and got the proportions and timing bit wrong and it resulted in a very hard salmon from too much water loss and it was also very salty. I tried to make it again – this time, I bought one piece of salmon fillet from the shops. I mixed 2 tablespoons of salt to 1.5 tablespoons of sugar and covered the salmon with this salt/sugar mix. I wrapped it in gladwrap and left it in the fridge for 2 days…when you see water accumulating, tip it out. We used the cured salmon in a salad as well as in some open sandwiches – it was divine this time and well worth the effort.

My first attempt at frijoles

When I was younger, I would never eat the beans that came on my plate when we would go to Montezumas etc. I thought they were pretty bland, not every exciting so I never liked them. However, I have really grown to love them now – and I even crave them every now and then. Canned refried beans are relatively expensive – a 425g can cost around $3 so I figured I would try making it myself. I bought 1kg of dried pinto beans for around $7 and set off to work. I soaked them overnight in water and was surprised to see them double in size in the morning – I forgot that dried means dehydrated!

To cook them, I added water to the beans and then bought them to the boil and added one chopped onion to the mix for flavour. It was then simmered for around 2hrs until the beans were soft and breaking apart upon stirring. I cooled the pot overnight and then the next day, I whipped them into a smooth bean mix. The next night we used some for nachos and I will use them again for enchiladas, tacos etc.

Seafood platter

The weather has quickly become hot in the last two weeks so food habits have changed quite quickly. For two weekends in a row, we’ve had some sort of grazing platter for Saturday night dinner. This week we had haloumi, pate, some pickled Kangaroo Island scampi and fresh bread. Last week I made a seafood platter using a seasoning mix from Squid Inc – deep fried some whiting and calamari. Also cooked some scallops with chorizo and served it all with some fresh fruit. It was a great night…