Chowder, CHOWDER! Say it SAY IT.

I can't even say the word chowder without this running through my head. I've never made fish soup of any kind but I had to do a knife sharpening demo in a fish shop today. They had a tub of salmon heads and frames which I scored five of for a few bucks. A random and cursory google search and I had a rough idea of what I wanted to get to.

I sweated off a leek, red and brown onion, garlic, added some brown sugar and semi carmelised it to give it a bit of sweetness. In my big pot I dumped the frames, onions, garlic, bay and carrots and simmered it into some fish stock. Smelt fantastic. In with the onions went some stock, potatoes and mushrooms. While that simmered away I made a roux to thicken it up. I was supposed to do that at the onion stage but forgot. I do that.

Once the potatoes were soft in went some of my home smoked salmon. This particular piece had been cured a bit too much and was a touch salty. That's why I had that sweet onion and leek base. Finally I pulled out the big vat of my fresh milk and scooped out all the double cream and chucked that in as well. Oh and some white wine. I put some of that in too. After sampling for quality control.

It was fan bloody tastic. The salmon was nicely salty and it had this real richness, which might have been from all the cream. So for a small amount of cash we had a rich, tasty soup as the wind rattled over the Lantanaland hills.

Bang up meals at fine dining quality

I love when some nights, despite making something that cleans out the fridge, you end up with a meal you would have happily paid for. Tonight was such a night. As the storm rolled in on my way home and I listened to the ABC tell me that there was high wind gusts, my thoughts went to a night two years ago when I lost a tree full of mulberries in a storm. I'd been saving them for a mulberry vodka I wanted to make. Devastating. I still drank the vodka.

So I rushed round and picked every ripe and semi ripe mulberry on the tree. No waste this time. Unfortunately as much as I love mulberry smoothies I'm not a fan of mulberry pie, too much when I was young and I was racking my brains for a good use for the fresh fruit. I thought I'd have a bash at some jelly, there was not quite enough fruit for jam. The fruit got dumped in a pot with a dash of water, stems and all. Once the fruit had gone soft I added some caster sugar. Some is a magical measuring device at Lantanaland, which is very easy to measure and impossible to replicate.

After it cooked down some more I passed the hot liquid through a sieve and added 'some' gelatine, then into glasses and chilled in the milk fridge. Now for dinner. In the fridge I had the following things that needed using, carrots, some roast pork and a capsicum. I also had an onion, potatoes and garlic that were all starting to sprout. The onion, carrot garlic and capsicum were diced and sweated off until really soft, then some white wine, the roughly chopped pork, some frozen homemade pigs trotter stock, more wine, the potatoes and a bottle of sugo.

It was all slowly simmered until the potatoes started to break up, mixed with a dash of sour cream and into bowls with lots of grated Parmesan. Bang up meals have no right to taste this good, I'd happily make that again from scratch and ill definitely be using up roast pork that way again.

The mulberry jelly was served with some yoghurt and mint. It was fantastic. I can't wait for my finger limes to fruit, a few of the bursting bubbles of lime in that jelly and you could serve it anywhere, anytime. The fruit saved and the fridge cleared, not a bad way to eat.

Pie voltage

Hello. Pop quiz, food lovers: pick the deliberate mistake in this paragraph:

While teriyaki chicken sushi and curried goat with feta pies had the 18 judges salivating, it was a delectable and delicate gingered peach and pear with Cointreau pie which really tantalised the judges' taste buds and took top honours in the 2012 Bakels New Zealand Supreme Pie Awards announced last night at the Rendezvous Hotel in Auckland.

That's right, ALL OF IT IS WRONG.

Setting aside the rancidly racist North Island bias of this alleged 'Supreme Pie Awards' which some bunch of industry frauds and idiots has perpetuated upon the fine, heroic and stoically vowel-free nation of Nw Zllnd - what the very merry fark is teriyaki chicken sushi doing in a pie?

This nonsense has to end. Molecular gastronovelty has committed enough crimes against humanity without the humble pie (heh, see what I did there) being dragged into this. There is no place for frou-frou flouncery like this in PIES. None. Bakels New Zealand Supreme Pie Awards, and all who sail in her: go and sit in the naughty corner until you can come up with a decent steak and kidney with a squirt of dead horse.*

*Rhyming slang. Not actual dead horse. Though these tossers would probably endorse such a 'NOW' fusion

Truth is, the pie is - or should be - honest, unpretentious fare. Done well - and by this we're necessarily excluding your Mrs Macs 3am-service-station-thermonuclear-pie-warmer-minced-lips-n-arses-efforts - the essence of a pie should be good, simple ingredients, prepared well.



And if you can't find one, do it yourself.

For this I'm employing the cold-climate-chef's best friend, the slow cooker. Mine gets a hammering year-round - it's a cheap, shabby old pile of crap, with cracks opening up in the crockpot like an Eighties WACA pitch, but it works. There is so much you can do (and do well) in a slow cooker, from lamb shanks to corned beef. In this case I propose using it to make the filling for a huge family pie. We regularly have the in-laws over for a big meal and a few bottles of wine on a Saturday night, so this is tonight's feast: beef, bacon and tomato pie, with a potato top. Because potato top pies are teh shizzle. Fact.

This particular recipe is themed (i.e. stolened) off an excellent beef, bacon and tomato pie which Dunedin's Who Ate All The Pies (shamefully shunned in the Supreme North Island Pie Awards) bust out with regularity. Generally, their stuff is excellent; occasionally they verge on the fringes of frou-frou, but even those efforts (eg their ostrich and black beer or their wild hare, sage and fennel) are usually bang-on. As usual for my MF posts I'm quasi-live-blogging this as a mostly untried recipe, and will update the interwombles with results at a later juncture.

STUFF WHAT GOES IN

• Beef. I'm using 1.5kg of fairly ordinary stewing (or 'gravy') beef. Another advantage of the slow cooker which might not be immediately apparent is that it enables you to get the most out of fairly average cuts of meat - in fact the cheaper and tougher the better, as long as you leave it long enough. It'll all come apart beautifully.
• Bacon. I keep a block of butchers' offcuts in the freezer, and just carve off a few chunks to add flavour. Call it 250g or thereabouts.
• Mushrooms. 200g white buttons quartered roughly, because I had 'em
• Couple of diced onions and a couple of cloves of garlic. Don't worry about mincing these too finely as the slow cooker will dematerialise them nicely. In general, bigger is better in the slow cooker game.

Brown all that in a pan (not too much, you want the beef to come apart in the slow cooker) and throw it in. Add about a cup of cheap cooking red wine (remember MF's cardinal rule never to cook with anything you wouldn't drink - if it tastes of arse in the glass, it'll taste of date on the plate), a can of tomatoes (any sort you like) and any herbs that take your fancy - a stalk of fresh rosemary would go alright. You can cheat a tad and use one of those slow cooker meal sachets to add a bit of punch, or simply add the same constituent ingredients individually. One thing to note with beef - it releases a lot of fluid when you slow-cook it so you don't need to add too much additional moisture.

Now the important bit: switch the slow cooker to LOW, and leave it alone. I mean it. Do not touch it. NO I SAID LEAVE IT THE FARK ALONE. CAN YOU NOT JUST STOP FIDDLING WITH IT. JESUS HANDSTANDING CHRIST.

Seriously, the one and only golden rule of slow cooking, as Naut pointed out to me years back: no matter what, don't open the lid. Even if the contents are desiccating, or on fire, or appearing to mutate into a sentient being. Easiest way to screw up a slow cooker meal is to keep opening the lid and fiddling about. If you desperately need to mix things up, pick the entire unit up and slosh it about with lid in place. You'll look like a toolbag but it'll redistribute the contents without your dinner losing a head of steam. Literally.

Low and slow, baby. Low and slow.

Nominally, eight hours is the usual figure you work to, but longer is better if you can jag it. If pressed for time you can do a few hours on high then back to low to finish, but it's not going to turn out as well. Should have just got your shit together earlier in the morning, you lazy git.

So that's the pie filling; for the pie, you can either do it as a pot pie or as a proper quote-unquote 'pie' with a lining of puff pastry. Your choice. (Haven't made mine yet, to be honest). Either way, grease up a big casserole dish, line with pastry (or don't), add filling, then layer sliced potatoes across the top. (Or leftover mash from last night if you have a crapload, for some reason) I'd sprinkle some grated parmesan over the top because that's how I roll, but you don't have to. It's not the law. You have free will. Own your future. Do what you want to do. Be what you want to be. Yeah.

Then bake the bugger until the taters are done, serve it up with something green (probably not gazpacho soup, unless you're into that fusion crap like the Bakels muppets) and a couple of bottles of red. Win.

That's the plan anyway... updates later. Pictures at 11.


******* SEAMLESS EDIT *******


Breaking: it was tops.

Dodgy slow cooker is dodgy

Went with the pastry base after all.

Finished arsetickle.

Pie requires pinot. Scientific FACT.

The Doctor is OUT.

Cream of Something Soup

It's a little cooler and raining at Lantanaland and I was feeling like a bit of comfort food. I felt like lasagna and The Wife wanted a bit more veg in it. I do a great slow roasted veg lasagna but it takes a little time to do and the cooking window is a little narrower with Curtis running around.

The next best thing would be soup I reckoned. I always keep some of my awesome pigs trotter stock in the fridge and I felt like some cream of something soup. I make this soup, or versions of it all the time as soon as the temperature drops below 30 degrees.

Take any combination of leeks, garlic, onion and celery and sweat that off in some butter. Add the stock and a diced potato. Sometimes I add some cauliflower, tonight it was a tin of chick peas. Simmer until the potato is soft then blitz it up into a purée. Add milk or cream or sour cream and blitz till the right consistency. I usually fry up a bit of bacon and sprinkle that on top but tonight all I had was some chorizo so that went on top with a bit of grated parmesan.

It's a simple soup but with good stock it becomes something fantastic. Lantanaland's sometime boarder Uncle Ryan thought it was the best soup he'd ever had. I'd hate to think how much I'd make it if it actually got cold.

Beeso Curry

I love it when you are confident enough in the building blocks of cooking that you can go 'off the reservation' and cook something delicious without following any recipe at all. I have a small amount of this knowledge I guess, mostly from Italian or French style cooking that allows me to just throw stuff together along those lines. Asian flavours and ideas though are my kryptonite.

I don't mind Indian food but lack the confidence to do it from scratch, relying on a tinned or bottled sauce on the rare occasion I cook it at home. I'm not a massive fan of premade sauces so we don't have much curry. The other day I felt like one though and had a bash at something completely unauthentic. Normally I would look up a recipe and get a feel for ingredients and rough amounts but I just threw some stuff together.

In the fry pan went cumin seeds, a bit of cardoman seed, coriander seed and bit of cinnamon stick. Once warmed it was bashed up with salt and turmeric. Meanwhile in the blender went three different types of chilli, lemongrass, garlic and ginger and some olive oil. The fact that I had all these ingredients in the kitchen or garden might have influenced the list a little. I pulsed all the fresh stuff up, adding a little oil to loosen then added the spices and one brown onion in chunks. I ended up with a highly aromatic paste.

Into my highly expensive Aldi French oven went some diced lamb and once browned I added the paste and cooked it off. Then I added some tinned tomatoes, coconut cream, diced potatoes and for the hell of it, sultanas. Topped it up with a little water, lid on and in the oven for two hours at a medium low heat.

Served up, with papadums and lots of yoghurt, it turned out to be bloody delicious. The Wife was most appreciative.
"This is good, what is it?"
"Beeso curry"
"Yes I KNOW that, but what type is it supposed to be, korma, rogan josh, what?"
"No, that's what I meant, it's Beeso curry, from Beeso"

Of course I'll never make it that way exactly again, not in a million years, but it was good!

Baking, the hidden art.

I don't bake much. Something about having to measure things out just doesn't seem like cooking. So I've steered right clear of it. I don't eat bought biscuits or cakes much anyway. Since Curtis has been born there has been lots of sitting around watching him (and cricket) and lots of cups of tea and for some reason I have been craving biscuits.

Last week I had a bash at some Anzac biscuits, replacing the coconut with chopped mixed nuts as I had no coconut. They were surprisingly good. So much so that yesterday I had a craving for some biscuits with sultanas. So a quick request of twitter I had a recipe (thanks Zoe!) and I had a go today.

They are a touch crumbly, but maybe I haven't let them cool enough. Pretty bloody good for me though. I now have two strings to my baking bow, scones and biscuits! Now for cake.

Lamb and Harissa 2.0, now with extra lamb.

I love me some lamb. And when I started to realize that I couldn't put something with butter in it on every meal if I wanted to stay off biggest loser I became a fan of yoghurt on my lamb. Then I discovered harissa. Man those Tunisians know their shit. A teaspoon of that through some yoghurt on a lamb cutlet is about as close to heaven as this non believer will ever come.

The problem with harissa, for those of us that do not enjoy the inner city lifestyle is that it is about as easy to source as a (insert stupid sponsors name here who do not own the team) wallabies win at Eden Park. When you do find it you'll need that second mortgage because it sells for about $10 for a teaspoon.

I'm addicted to the stuff and yesterday it struck me that it can't be that hard to make, especially as there had been a fair chunk of difference between the bottles I had bought at various small boutique delis in Brisbane. So I fired up the magic intergoogle and found that it was actually ridiculously easy.

Take even amounts of chilli, dried and reconstituted, or fresh and garlic. Whack them in a food processor with a squeeze of lemon juice and pulverize. Toast off some cumin and caraway seeds, grind them up with a little salt and add them in. Pulverize more. Add some olive oil to loosen the paste. Done.

Because I have an inbuilt talent to avoid following a recipe, I added some lemon zest and a pinch of coriander powder, but from the reading I've done on harissa, I don't think it matters as every region had it's own little twist.

The reason for the harissa was the the Neil Perry slow cooked lamb shoulder. All it takes is a bit more of those same spices smeared over the lamb with oil, then put in a roasting pan with foil tent or do as I did and use my awesome Aldi French pan. A dash of white wine in the bottom and a cup of water then go away for seven hours. Three at 130 deg and 4 at 110 deg. I now have a new favorite way to eat lamb. The meat was so tender, lifting off along the muscle.

Served with some mashed potato and peas and covered with that harissa yoghurt, mixed with a dash of lemon juice, it was one of the tastiest bits of lamb I have had in, well almost forever. If only the rugby had been that good.

Just an little extra. We had a big day Sunday and I didn't feel like cooking much. So I whipped up a small batch of Maggie Beers sour cream pastry and lined a small pie tin. While that was happening I quickly boiled some potatoes. In a small frypan I threw in a couple of chopped handfuls of the cold lamb with a dash of butter. Once warmed through I sprinkled in a teaspoon of cornflour and cooked for a bit. Then I threw in some white wines and harissa for gravy and cooked it down a bit, threw it in the cooked pie casings and covered in mashed potato. Back into the oven and once there were little crunchy bits on the mash lid, out came possibly the greatest pie I have ever eaten.

- Lantanaland from my iPad

Location:'lantanaland'

Camping Feasts

Being in the middle of nowhere doesn't mean you should settle for less than great meals. There is nothing better than getting in to camp after a hard days walking, paddling or whatever, and tucking into a good meal. There is nothing worse than getting in an eating a bland, tasteless meal that you only force down because you know you need to. Sometimes camping food can be like the midnight snack while you're on the turps. It tastes fantastic when you’re there, but if you eat it any other time it’s another story. Some camping trips you spend most of your time planning the intimate details of what your first meal back will be.

Its amazing what a little imagination and planning can do for a camping meal. I’m not talking about car camping, I'm talking about walking, cycling touring or kayaking, something where you have to carry it all with you in a bag, where weight and space are major issues. So the challenge is to come up with tasty dinner recipes for two hungry, active people. The criteria are:

1. The ingredients must not spoil without refrigeration

2. Preparation can be done before the trip, but must be minimal when doing the actual cooking

3. No frying, only boiling, or a really bad simmer. Most camp stoves have two temperatures despite any claims, it’s on or off.

4. It must be light, think about carrying it for week. If the ingredients are more than a kilogram then it’s probably too heavy.

5. The food must be able to withstand being squashed, and stuffed into a pack.

6. You can dehydrate things before hand. I can see the recoils in horror now… DEHYDRATE. Yes yes, it’s a necessary evil for this sort of thing though. Its like a lot of things, if you buy store bought dehy food its pretty ordinary, but home dehy stuff is actually not bad…..for camping.

7. You can use a maximum of two small pots to cook

To help give you some ideas some of our camping meals include laksa with noodles, Gnocchi with some dehy veggies and a tomato based sauce. A stir fry that is slightly more boiled than fried, or a home made bolognaise sauce dehydrated. I am interested to see what a bunch of gourmets can come up with, and very keen to try then on our next trip.

Have fun!!

Let's talk about vegetarian lasagna.

I have to say I hesitated before writing about vegetarian lasagna. I mean, it brings up images of hippies, living in the country in some run down house on a ramshackle farm, milking the cows and collecting the free range eggs from their chooks and ducks and that's just not me...... Hmm, maybe I could have thought that opening paragraph through a bit more.

See I don't think that vegetarian and normal lasagna should be considered in the same space. I love meat based lasagna, the thick, rich, meaty, tomato sauce and the creamy layers in between. But my vego version comes from a different space. For a start there are no tomatoes. And it's a hell of a lot easier.

When I make a real 'I'm sure I have Italian blood in me somewhere' sauce for a lasagna, I like to cook out the meat and tomato sauce for hours, slowly simmering until my taste buds can take it no more. Of course, I don't always do this, sometimes I brown off some mince, wack in tinned tomatoes and layer up but it's not the same.

With the vego version all I do is throw a bunch of roughly cut vegetables into a roasting dish and slow roast. This time it was squash, garlic, cauliflower, carrot, mushrooms, zucchini and red onion but I also use eggplant, pumpkin, sweet potato, fennel and peas. Takes all of about four minutes to chop up. I'll lightly coat with oil and add some salt and other seasoning, cumin seeds or rosemary or thyme.

While that's roasting I make some pasta. It's not essential, but I have duck eggs and I find that duck egg pasta is the smoothest, silkiest, sexiest thing I've seen outside my marriage. But that's just me. Use the packet stuff if you want. Bash the dough in the fridge and make the white sauce.

I use lots of cheese with this. In this case that means a hunk of homemade camembert that is a bit strong to eat fresh, some homemade mozzarella and some cheddar. The more interesting and varied the cheese, the better the dish. That's one of the joys of cheesemaking, the mistakes you make can usually be thrown into a white sauce or onto a pizza.

Layer it up and bake until the white sauce is golden on top. I traditionally eat it after a three hour yoga session sitting in the lotus position, naked, under a full moon, but it will taste just as good fully clothed in front of the TV.

Enjoy!



MF from my iPad

Location:Lantanaland

Bush Fruit

There is a native bush fruit you can get in TAS and some parts of NSW and VIC called the climbing blueberry. It produces little blue berries that look like mini capsicums, are blue to deep purple and no bigger than a small grape. Like a capsicum they have a firm outer skin, are generally pretty hollow (no flesh) and have plenty of seeds inside. They have a pretty bland, some people say slightly apple flavour and the seeds inside make it gritty, so its not really appealing to on its own. As Mick Dundee said "you can live on it but it tastes like shit", but you would probably struggle to find enough to live on. One thing it does do though is make really good jam.

My partner and I were at festival a couple of years ago and tried some blueberry jam. It was really different, very subtle flavour. We liked it so much we went out and bought some seedlings in the hope we could grow them ourselves and make our own jam. Unfortunately the local wallabies like the plant more than we do so they never grew big enough to fruit. a few weeks ago we saw a few plants on the side of the road so we went berry picking.

I went searching for a recipe but couldn't find anything, people didn't even realise you could eat it. Because the fruit was quite unusual I wasn't sure how the lack of flesh would effect the consistency, how much sugar to put in or if it would set on its own. So when I started I had a lemon and some jam setta ready. I added a couple of grated apples, mostly to bulk it out. The lemon juice was mostly for a for a bit of acid and some extra zing. I got lucky and the lemon juice was enough to set jam. I did have to use the stick blender as the fruit weren't falling apart.

The end result was lovely, very sweet (it is jam), with quite a subtle flavour. You can taste the apple, almost too much. As nice as it is though, it probably needs something else. For a first try with no real recipe to follow I was pretty happy. We tried another recipe with no apples, a teaspoon of vanilla and half a teaspoon of cinnamon, but the cinnamon was a little overpowering.

We'll have to wait until next summer to try again. The funny thing is we don't even eat jam. We did keep a jar but that will last us all year. Our mates liked it though. The plant is Billardiera longiflora or the climbing blueberry for those that want to know. The recipe is below. Enjoy!!!

450g Blueberry fruit
2 regular apples, peeled, cored and coarsely grated
450g sugar
Juice of half a lemon
1/2 cup of water

Cheesemaking

I spent all weekend making cheese so I was pretty shagged when it came to Sunday dinner. Try this for a simple meal. Serves two, tired, not that hungry people.

Get a batch of ricotta, I used inari, a traditional Cypriot cheese made from whey, very similar to ricotta. I hade made it last weekend after making my best batch of haloumi, using the leftover whey.

Mix two eggs into the ricotta with a handful of finely grated Parmesan. I didn't have any, so I threw in some marinated feta for a bit of extra flavor. Whisk that up till it's smooth, adding a bit of salt and pepper to your tastes.

Get a sheet of puff pastry and quarter it. Spread the mix over each square leaving a 1cm border around the edge, about 1-2cm thick. Sprinkle over some sliced leeks and brush with melted butter. A few stripped thyme leaves and more cracked pepper and bake until the edge is nicely brown. Tasty.




I've been making more and more cheese for my Herdshare and for myself, learning along the way. But this was the real deal, a two day intensive course learning to make ricotta (whole milk and whey), cheddar, brie, chabichou, cheddar, mozzarella and quark. It was run by Graham Redhead an ex DPI guy who was raised on a dairy farm, has worked for a lot of big dairy industry companies and just, loves, cheese.




I was there thanks to The Wife, gorgeous creature that she is and the generosity of her family and one of my best mates who all chipped in for a Xmas present for me.




I was using a bit of Lantanaland milk so I was even busier than everyone else, as I was doing my thing and also helping out my partner on a lot of the cheeses. If definitely helped that I was the only person there that had made cheese before. I still had a lot to learn, especially about process and ways of getting stuff wrong. There are margins of error and there are definitely ways to err on the right side and it was good to know.




The cheddar and the mozzarella were the best. I'd made brie/camembert to a half decent level before, but had not really been that keen on cheddar, mainly because of the long aging times. But when you see the cloth bound wheels, you start dreaming of creating big ten kilo wheels of cheese that you can roll out at your leisure. I'm definitely investing in a cheese press.




Mozzarella was all about the confidence in the process. There are things that can go wrong pretty easily in the making but now I'm sure I can replicate a pretty good pizza cheese. And stretching and shaping the cheese is awesome fun.



All in all a great learning weekend that my herd sharers will appreciate for years to come I reckon. I am also going to hold a mini Cheesemaking day down here, to show off what I can do!


- MF from my iPad

Location:Some tafe training kitchen.

Sausages

I like sausages, I don’t care what people say they put in them, lips and a$%^holes as one colleague puts it, not too mention the jokes that even if you’re a vegetarian you can still eat sausages because there is no meat in them. I think it comes from a childhood of going to BBQ’s and getting steak that was so over cooked it was impossible to cut let alone chew. When I am at a BBQ I still always go for the sausages first, I’ll still get steak too, but sausages first. Luckily I have the stomach to match my eyes.

The other night one of my mates who makes his own sausages brought over some home made salmon sausages. There were a couple of types on offer, a teriyaki salmon and plain salmon. Using a thermometer we poached them until the salmon was 60c (140 f). The plain salmon was nice, beautiful flavour but a little dry. It really needed something just to give it that moisture to really let it melt in your mouth. The teriyaki sauce gave the sausage the right amount of moisture to really set it off. It had the lovely taste of salmon with the spices really enriching the flavour without overpowering it.

The recipe and notes from the creator.

Teriyaki Salmon
1kg salmon offcuts from local salmon farm
1.5 meters of hog casings ~ 30mm diameter (doesn’t matter)(soaked)
Medium to large onion
Medium to large red pepper (capsicum)
Half a Small onion
Good chunk of ginger (thumb size?)
Several cloves of garlic
Soy sauce
Mirin
Sugar
Rice vinegar
Corn starch (corn flour)
White pepper

Dice the large onion and red pepper and then sauté in a pan with a bit of oil until cooked to your liking. Chill.

Dice small onion, ginger, and garlic, and sauté in a small sauce pan until the edge is taken off. Add soy sauce ( cup???), mirin, and a bit of water. Simmer for a couple of minutes. Taste and adjust as needed with rice vinegar and sugar. . .likely will need some of both. The mirin is not essential and can be replaced with more vinegar and sugar. When happy, strain out chunks and save. If already happy, strain it when you like the flavor. Thicken sauce with corn starch until quite thick and then chill.

Sausage: Combine and mix everything (plus add some white pepper and green onions if you like!) in with salmon meat cut in chunks suitable for the grinder. Grind. Knead ground mixture with hands for a couple of minutes to develop some stickyness. Cook a bit in a pan and test flavor. . adjust ‘til happy. .. but don’t eat too much of it.

Stuff it! Or make a log and wrap in several layers of plastic wrap. This you can then poach.

Have only made this once with, making it up as we went. The texture, especially when poached in plastic, was a bit crumbly. I’d possibly add an egg white to the mix, or mousseline a portion of the salmon.

Enjoy!!!!

Oysters at ten AM

Even for someone who doesn't 'get' oysters like me, I recognize that a culinary adventure that starts with starts with 12 super fresh oysters at ten AM is probably going to end up being a good day




This was our trip to the beautiful island of Bruny, postponed for a day so I could battle a dose of super mutant Tasmanian flu and it actually started with my first caffeine in 72 hours at the ferry terminal. It was like giving the biggest coldest beer in the world to a man who'd been lost in a desert where the pubs only sold VB.




Straight off the ferry the first stop was Get Shucked. The Wife had declared them the best oysters she had ever had at Taste so a stop was seen as compulsory. We were the first customers of the day, she was still opening up and the oysters were again declared delicious. The way they were inhaled certainly seemed positive.

Next stop was my personal goal, Bruny Island cheese. We got to taste a fresh 'young' hard cheese, a smoked hard cheese, which they claimed was smoked for three months, but I think the girl at the counter was a bit confused. We also tasted their brie/camembert soft cheese, their one day old fresh cheese in olive oil and a raw milk cheese flavored and colored with saffron. All very tasty. I was entranced with their aging room, which is at 12 degrees. I should be able to replicate that with the second hand fridge I hope to score soon. Fired up about making some soft cheese.




After the cheese we did a bit of sightseeing to keep The Wife happy before stopping for lunch at the Hothouse. We shared a smoked salmon and salad wrap and a beef and guinness pie. Both very nice. Hothouse was a real homestyle cooking sort of place, great friendly staff, lots of fruit trees and veggies around the grounds. The girls had this great herb damper with butter and cheese, salmon and salad on the side. Yummo!




After lunch we struck out, food wise for the first time this trip. The berry farm had no berries! All the vine berries were done and we were too early for the strawberries. We skipped the fudge and headed back to pick up some cheese on the way home.

The day was completed with a nice free range roast pork and these great strawberry cream potatoes which I tried earlier in the week and had not gone great as mash. No matter, they made fantastic roast spuds, tinged pink all they way through. I used a trick a mate of mine had told me about the crackling, pouring a kettle of boiling water over the skin before oiling and salting it. It worked a treat, best crackling I've had in ages. Thanks Spud.

All in all a great day for those of us who travel through our stomach and a mixed berry crumble is being assembled as we speak!

MF from my iPad

Location:Bruny Islands

Taste of Tasmania.

On our Tasmanian trip there was two objectives, lots of pretty scenery for The Wife to take pictures of and lots of good food for me to eat and cook. It kicked off last night in fine fashion, with potatoes I'd never even seen, let alone cooked with. They were strawberry creams, a starchy potato with pink skin and like a pink juice when cut. I mashed them, which was completely wrong, but I'm going to take some home and try them as a roast spud.

Today though was like speed dating for food, the Taste of Tasmania festival. It was blazing hot, so a beer with the best slogan ever (Moo Brew, not suitable for bogans) went down very nicely. We kicked off the food with a rosti, with mushrooms and goats cheese and chutney. The rosti could have been crispier but the goats cheese and chutney was fantastic.

We followed that up with some garlic mussels which everyone else said were very tasty. Seafood is a bit wasted on me, so I wandered off to get some real food, pork belly. Soft and succulent, with probably the best apple sauce I've ever eaten, it was very hard to share.

Maybe I didn't share enough, because Dave came back with a dozen oysters which The Wife claimed were the best she has ever had. The Wife has eaten a lot of oysters.

I went for more beers and when I returned Marj had braved the huge line for tempura mushrooms. They were nice, but I pride myself of being pretty good at tempura so wasn't blown away like I was with the pork belly.

After a walk to look at the maxi yachts and settle our stomachs down we got stuck into the fruit. A raspberry and ice-cream sundae just blew my mind, maybe because raspberries are not something we see a lot of in QLD, but these were BIG raspberries and so juicy and rich. We'll be visiting a raspberry farm tomorrow. The raspberry pudding was nice as was the waffle and mixed berries and strawberries and cherries and chocolate fondue. The chocolate fondue was very nice but Sarah was very disappointed that we didn't drink the leftover fondue straight from the cup like she had the day before.

All in all a great start to a culinary holiday!

- MF from my iPad

Location:Princes wharf, Hobart.

Dairy has endless possibilities.

I have really only scraped the surface of making cheese and other dairy products. The soft cheese is on hold till I procure an old fridge to use as a substitute for the awesome railway tunnels and caves in use all over Europe. That or I bury a shipping container under Lantanaland and use half for cheese and the other half as headquarters to rule the world.

This week has been a bit pressed for time to make cheese, so I was after something quick and simple to utilize the available milk. Making yoghurt is easy, but fiddly to do in small batches. Yoghurt in a large batch is easy thanks to the dream pot, essentially a stock pot wrapped in a large thermos.

Sally Lynch, cooking school guru, herdsharer and tastetrekker makes labneh, a middle eastern soft fresh cheese from yoghurt and had mentioned how good it was made from Lantanaland yoghurt so I thought I'd give that a go. All you do is set the milk into yoghurt, which i do for 12 hours in the dreampot. Then ladle into a cheesecloth bag and let drain for another 12 hours.

The taste? Wow. A tart cream cheese. Fantastic spread on a muffin for a morning snack. I'm also wondering what it would be like in a set cheesecake. Or in a spinach pie. The possibilities are endless (and I'll take recipe ideas in the comments if you've got them).

It will definitely be a fixture in the fridge here from now on, that's for sure.


- MF from my iPhone

Location:Needham Rd,Luscombe,Australia

I Love My Job

Sometimes you just can't believe how lucky you can get. For those that don't know, I work for a butcher supply company, which gives me access to a whole bunch of interesting small goods manufacturers and butchers, not to mention bulk spices and other things I can use in the kitchen at Lantanaland.




We have a small test kitchen at work, with a mincer, hand sausage filler, brine pump and slicer and I have enjoyed learning and experimenting with our products at work. The chorizo fresh sausage would have to be my favourite.




Recently we managed by a bit of good luck to score a second hand commercial oven, and the GM decided that it would be good for myself and Spud the machinery manager to learn how to cook everything that could be cooked in a smokehouse. This is the older model of the smokehouse we sell, so it would benefit the company greatly for us to have this knowledge, but I was not exactly reluctant to try everything out.

So far we have done, boneless ham, 4x4 ham, frankfurt, kabana, franksy (made when I acccidently combined the kransky and frankfurt mixes together), cooked mettwurst salami, smoked and brined chickens and chilli beer sticks.




Just because we had the smokehouse there, I've done two big batches of smoked tomatoes as well, which add a depth of flavour to lamb shanks, bolognese or a pizza sauce that has to be tried to be believed.

Next week we will be trying a full leg ham and for an experiment, lamb ham, a pumped cured and smoked leg of lamb. Cant wait for those sandwiches next week.

Yep. I love my job.

- MF from my iPhone

Location:Vadals Test Kitchen

My Own Personal Beef Week...Jesus!

Greetings, gentle readers. It's been a while, I know. I've been busy saving the world, one sausage at a time. But I thought y'all might like to know of a recent trip I took to Rockhampton.

Now you might recall this is not my first trip to the Beef Capital of Australia. My last trip was in Beef Week in 2009. You can read about the best carpetbag steak ever, here.

This time was just a day trip, unfortunately. But after some wheeling and dealing in the morning your correspondent clocked off and took a long lunch at Cassidy's, a local steakhouse. Here I sampled the very excellent local Teys Brothers Black Angus rib fillet, cooked to a perfect medium rare and didn't it go down a treat with a New Zealand Pinot? Well, yes. Resisting the urge to have a post luncheon Highland Park from the extensive choice of single malts at this fine establishment, my colleague and I made our way cross town to Wiggo's fine meat emporium at Allenstown shopping centre, where I stuffed a Woolies esky bag full of about 8 kgs of beef and a couple of kilos of ice. Craig Wiggo looked after me like an old mate (which he wasn't. Although one of my brothers used to buy his beef there when he lived in our nation's beef capital) and salted my ice down and chilled my meaty selections down in the freezer for half an hour while we downed a couple of beers at the pub before our long flight(s) home.

Resisting the urge to sneak said beef onto the flight as hand luggage, I fessed up to the check-in chap. Unfortunately (and here is the really important moral of the story folks, so read up, get yourself educated and BE PREPARED) the way to ship any foodstuffs like raw meat or seafood is to bring it in a foam box with a lid, but leave the box unsealed. The ground staff are happy to do the packing and sealing for you, but you must check it in and it has to be in a foam box. This left me with a problem, as I had no foam box. So I left my colleague behind and raced out to the taxi rank, where a local cabbie agreed to drive me to a fruit and veg store to find me one. Sure enough, after explaining my predicament to the checkout chap at Tancred's fruit and veg, I was just about to buy the broccoli box he produced when my colleague rang from the airport to tell me that the helpful Virgin Blue guy had found me a polystyrene box.

Sweet, I thought, as I raced back to the waiting cab, leaving the checkout chap somewhat relieved (5 minutes of tapping on his machine had not revealed how much he should charge me for an empty foam box) and $30 later I made it back to the airport, where I was greeted by the beaming Virgin Blue man again, proudly holding the world's smallest polystyrene box.

The look on my face must have been priceless when I revealed the 8 kilos of beef I had stashed in my little esky, as I told him I HAD HAD THE RIGHT SIZED BOX IN MY HANDS ONLY 5 MINUTES PRIOR at the fruit and veg store.

Luckily, he agreed to have another look out the back and to my great relief, he returned 5 minutes later with the right box. He then proceeded to pack my beefy package and I made it into the departure lounge with about 5 minutes to spare. I still don't know whether the whole song and dance routine was just to terrorise the shiny bum visitor (and to stimulate the local taxi industry) or whether he was just trying to be helpful, albeit a little slow (given he had seen the size and weight of my esky).

Anyway, the first leg of my homeward journey was uneventful and I could feel my blood pressure returning to a more reasonable level. Later, in Brisvegas, I watched the baggage handlers loading up the luggage for the Canberra flight. They must have heard from their collegue in Rocky, as they saw me watching them and pretended to make off with the well marked and well wrapped box of food. They must have thought it was a great joke to see me jumping up and down upstairs behind the glass as they kept putting the box on the loading device and taking it off. Putting it on. Taking it off. Over and fucking over.

Eventually they took pity on me and packed my fucking meat.

After the world's longest 80 minute flight I made it home with said meat. God knows how I didn't get a speeding ticket driving along Pialligo Avenue, but all was fine as the meat was still chilled when it arrived home some 5 hours after leaving Wiggo's house of fun.

Now after tonight's roast rib fillet of Black Angus yearling from Nolan's, served with roast chats and carrots, and a pear, rocket, parmesan and balsalmic salad, I'd have to say all the hassle was worth it.

I still have a little bit more meat kicking around the bottom of the fridge...some Nolan's eye fillet, supposedly from their Brisbane Exhibition display (not sure if it was from the 'before' or 'after' display, as I was too excited to ask Wiggo) and some Nolan's Black Angus rib eye.

Not to mention some 3.5 kilos of Teys Brothers Rib Eye, which I'm planning to roast up for a dinner party in the coming weeks. (BOTTOM)

So there you have it, folks. If you're planning on flying with beef, remember to take a polystyrene box and some double bagged ice to the airport. The check-in staff have all the big bags and gaffer tape you need and will want to pack it themselves to ensure you're not carrying a dismembered body. So learn from my own mistakes how NOT to do it, gentle readers. And save your blood pressure for eating the beef, rather than just getting it home. Mind you, I've always wanted to conduct a public auction in an airport terminal, but I guess that can wait for another day!

Rockhampton Beef: Good enough to make a man blog again!

Food for the ill

I was pretty crook this week, with a virus or flu or something similar. I didn't bother to check. It was bad enough that I went five whole days without wanting a coffee and considering I think a blood/caffeine balance of about 50/50 to be appropriate I gauged I was pretty damn crook.

The funniest thing with me is my appetite when ill is almost nonexistent. All week I lived off a variant of Flinthart's awesome Asian soup/broth that he uses for wontons. Some sort of chicken, chilli, ginger, fish sauce, a sugar (I use honey), salt, onion, carrot, garlic, bay, lemon or lemongrass, bring to a simmer and turn the heat off and let infuse.

I use a whole chook and just tear the poached chicken off at the end. That was dinner, and lunch, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday I felt a bit better so I roasted off some pumpkin and used the leftover broth to make pumpkin soup.

What scares me is the lack of appetite, the lack of willingness to cook and explore flavors. It's such a big part of my life that the thought of ever having a terminal illness or something that took my hunger away for a long period of time is truly frightening.

I know a few crook people through twitter and my one week with a virus made me reconsider how much of a struggle it must be, just to deal with those little things that we all take for granted.


- MF from my iPad

Location:Riverside Dr,Tumbulgum,Australia

Duck season

Dr Yobbo here. Duck is usually something I'm all over if I see it on the menu on my now-rare restaurant sorties. Amphora in St Lucia used to do (probably still do) an excellent one, likewise a short-lived but awesome place in Yamba called Beachwood. My Italian farmer relatives from up the back of Lismore also used to put on some fantastic duck dishes when we had the inevitable family get-together barbeques up at theirs. Never actually had a crack at prepping roast duck myself, so when the local supermarket had them on special I figured why the hell not. Now, obviously, this being a Serious Food Blog, using frozen duck is blasphemy and you should be getting only free-range, organically farmed fresh-killed duck raised on a diet of love and sustainably grown tofu, but as usual we've taken lazy shortcuts, so frozen duck it is. Looks a quality bird though, raised on a farm on the Canterbury Plains. Just like half of the current All Blacks. Works for them. This size 17 bird was $20, reduced from a budgetarily implausible $30. No idea what it'd be in your part of the world. Probably less.


Now the thing you need to remember about duck is that it's not chicken. That's not entirely the cretinous statement of obviousness that it looks. Ducks are longer and thinner of frame, carry more fat under their skin as waterproofing insulation (being waterfowl), and less bulk about them around the breast compared to chooks. As such you need a bigger bird to feed the same number of heads. They also dry out more easily, so you need to baste them regularly to retain the moisture. Beeso confits his. As with most cooking stuff there's a bunch of recipes on the web, including this one from Hugh Fairly-Twattingballs from River Cottage Thingie, but the general process is about the same. I'm actually going to do mine at a lower temp than Hugh, then ramping up in the final phase. Reason for that is I want to use that rendered duckfat runoff to roast some 'taties, but I don't want to have to leave the duck out to get cold and old while I do it, not for too long anyway.


Preheat oven to 220 C. This will only be used for the fat-rendering part of the roast, not the main cook which will be around 160. Have seen anything from 190 down to 120 (250 F) suggested. The latter for VERY slow roasting (3-4 hours).

Prep the bird. Rinse and pat dry, remove any large fat deposits, and pierce or score the skin (only lightly, not through to the meat - just enough to allow the fat to run off.) Am actually using a Stanley knife for this. Season with salt and pepper. I'm also sprinkling over some wild rosemary the old man recently discovered in the garden, because I can, and we have shitloads of it.


Render the fat for around 20min in the 220 degree oven, then take it out and turn down to 160. Baste the bird with the runoff. Do the same for the next 2 or so hours every half hour or so. For some reason my lads like souveniring my silicon basting brush from the second drawer, so even finding the bloody thing is an achievement.


Parboil some potatoes, just to get ahead of the game and shorten the final roast time. I like red jackets with golden flesh (is that the right term for potato innards? for the taste, the texture and the aesthetics of them. Lop them into rough cubes - I tend to leave the skin on, partly for the health benefits, partly because I can't be arsed peeling them - chuck them in boiling water - you know the rest.


Duck season? Rabbit(oh) season. I mentioned we ran the Tigers down last night? Yeah? If not, we did. 34-30 with a try in the last minute of golden point. After trailing 28-12 midway through the second half. Every All Black cloud has a silver (or coachwood and myrtle) lining.


Anyway - strain the runoff, combine with a bit of crushed garlic and chopped rosemary, over the parboiled 'taters and into the dish the duck came out of. Fire it up to Crispy Temp (220-250). Serve with Something Else. In our case corn because the eldest monster refuses any meal that doesn't include corn. Seriously. We had to order a kiddie-sized corn pizza on Friday.


Verdict: Excellent. If a bit fatty. Actually, a lot fatty (still slightly queasy.) Can't underemphasize just how lardy duck is. Which, I suppose, is why it tastes so fricken AWESOME. Give it a crack, if you can find it at an agreeable price, just keep it moist and avoid too much of the lardiness. It's a winner. As voted unanimously this evening - the only thing left over on Monster v1.0's plate at the end was... corn.

The Doctor is OUT.

Food Bloggers Assemble! At Moo Moos

The latest catch up of the Brisbane food bloggers was at Moo Moos, a fairly upmarket grill inside the Marriot hotel in Brisbane city. As most people who read this blog know, I'm not that big on restaurant reviews, mainly cause I just love doing the cooking, partly because I forget the incredible amount of work that goes into a kitchen like this and get snippy over small things.

Nights like the food bloggers nights and the Burger meet ups are massively enhanced by being surrounded by people who just want to discuss and dissect food, tech, current affairs, you name it. It's never boring. Neither was the entree, a tasting plate with four small portions gracing it. I'm not a big seafood fan, but i had to do a double take at the scallop, it was so soft and pleasurable it was like eating flavoured textured air. Divine. The pork belly was excellent, wouldn't make my top five, but that is a very, very long list. There was a superb piece of dry cured meat on a cracker and a deep fried zucchini flower filled with goats cheese. I love these and this one was done beautifully, creamy and crunchy.

The main course was a sirloin on mash with asparagus. Now I'm going to say up front that I'm stupidly hard to please when it comes to beef. I work in the butcher industry and I know how to cook a nice piece of beef. Don't always get it right, but I cane myself just as hard when I don't. Because beef is something that when you do get right, is mind blowingly good. This sirloin was OK. The mash was just OK and the asparagus was pretty tired. Again, I have my own asparagus patch and no restaurant can ever compete with the fresh picked stuff, but this asparagus was not that fresh. I could have had the fish, but why go to a grillhouse and have fish?

The dessert however was on another planet. There is no way I'd be able to cook that at home without a bit of practice. A small chocolate brownie, topped with some vanilla ice cream and dusted with crunchy, tasty honeycomb, with a little side dish of hot fudge ready to be tipped over at the last second. It was the tastebud highlight of the night for me, a non sweet tooth.

It was great to catch up with all the different people that I interact or watch on twitter and in blogland, the conversation was sparkling and interestin and I'm looking forward to the next one already.