Quick and Easy

Nothing to complicated for us tonight, we had some good beef sausages, and a whole heap of veges.

We had beetroot, parsnip, onion, carrots and potatoes, seasoned them and then roasted them for about half an hour and then added in the sausages with a dressing made from mustard, cider vinegar and capers, and then finished them off for about another half hour.

Bit too lazy tonight, but thought a nice mushroom gravy to finish it off with would be nice.

Interesting post on Cooking Issues

can be seen here

Wrapped up...

Had some tasty skirt steak last night, coated in white pepper, coriander, garlic and chili powder. Grilled it on the stove and finished in the oven. We had it in tortillas with a raw beetroot salad and sour cream.

Beetroot Salad: Peel and julianne Beets, grate in carrot, thinly sliced spinach, dress with oil, lemon and mustard.

A must do pork dish...

Caught a recipe by Michael Chiarello on Food TV the other day and had to try it out.

Check out the recipe here

We served it with tortillas, pickled onions & salad greens, very tasty.

Pesto

This is a really simple, cheap and tasty pesto.

Ingredients
Parsley (I used Curly, not the continental parsley)
Basil (about 1/4 the amount of parsley)
Chunk of Parmesan
Clove or 2 of garlic
Cashew nuts (I find the sweetness and high oil content of these nuts balance the parsley really well)
Water (a couple of tablespoons)
Olive Oil (about 1/4 of a cup or more)
Salt and Pepper
Lemon Juice

Method
Chuck everything (minus the oil and water) in a blender/food processor and blitz until roughly chopped up (you may have to scrape down a couple of times). Then add the water and blitz again, then the oil (add enough until you get a thick paste).

Season with salt and pepper to taste, and toss through some hot pasta.

Pork Belly

Well been AGES since my last post, since then moved and moved again and now back living in town, but the kitchens not so crap anymore, I wonder if I should change the name of this blog, good food in an average kitchen?

So a quickie for my latest post, excuse the photo, my camera died so I had to use my phone to take these (apparently canon used faulty parts in my model, so hopefully they'll play nice)

Aioli

I think the greatest condiment invention is aioli, so simple to make and alter the flavour and perfect on roast potatoes, french fries well just about anything.
I had an odd experience the other day though, when whisking the oil into the egg yolk it plain out refused to thicken at all, it was quite a humid day, anyone know why this could of happened?

salty coffee....

I came across an interesting post on ideasinfood the other day about adding salt to your coffee beans before you grind them, so I decided to try the experiment using the same beans one lot with salt and one without. All I can say is try it for yourself it makes a huge difference to the flavour (just don't add too much otherwise it will taste salty, just a few granules makes the difference)

Brown Butter & Sage Gnocchi

I thought I'd try my hand at making Gnocchi for the first time. A little research and found a simple recipe, and then decided to add to it.

I got a pan on a medium heat and put a decent lump of butter in there and let it sit, spit and bubble until it had turned a deep hazelnut colour (I can not say enough about brown butter, it's delish great with pasta and the aroma is amazing). Then added a handful of sage leaves and 2 eggs and pureed it.I had about 600 grams of (floury) potatoes peeled and cubed and boiling until nice and soft.

Next time I'll have to remember the post from Ideas in Food and what they did to their potato skins, and the byproduct sounds like fun to play with.

Wrap up

Haven't bought grapefruit for a long time, but I saw a couple with my name on them at the supermarket, very juicy and very tasty.