August 2005 - Braised Chicken with Lemon and Honey

Mmm...chocolate indeed. I love the look of Valli's warm brownie pudding with chocolate sauce. Wickedly decadent and I am sure divine. As wonderful as it looks though, I have no desire for desserts at the moment. 

When first revisiting issue # 41 there was one recipe already marked. One that I wanted to make when this issue first came out, Gordon Ramsay's Saddle of lamb stuffed with spinach. The whole dish looks and sounds so succulent with a beautifully golden roast saddle of lamb. The stuffing with a combination of mixed mushrooms, spinach, mascarpone and sage (amongst other things) sounds perfectly delectable. There were two things stopping me from making this. The first was the fact that I am trying to do a pantry/freezer/fridge month and I definitely don't have a saddle of lamb in the freezer. However I would have been willing to break that for this recipe but it has a suggested serves of 8 - 10, so even half of that is a huge amount of food and I would be eating left overs for days. So this one will have to wait until I have guests coming for dinner. 

I had Nancy Duran's Pasta with roast pumpkin, feta & basil on my menu plan for the month. When I did the menu plan I was sure that I had pumpkin in the fridge, apparently I didn't so I decided to pass on the pasta dish. I will make it at some stage though. 

I was won over by Bill Granger's recipes for Braised chicken with lemon and honey and served as he suggested with Shepherd's salad with feta. This was a fantastic meal. While it all sounded nice, I was blown away by the combination. I love chicken dishes but this one really wooed me and I am sure that I will make it over and over again. The salad cut through the richness and sweetness of the chicken dish nicely. The lemon added a lovely tang to the dish. I made half the recipe and used 4 chicken cutlets with the skin on rather than a jointed whole chicken. I would highly recommend this one.

August 2004 - Haloumi with Santorini Salad

Two posts in two nights...yay! I may actually get all these post done this month after all. I had hoped to get some cooking done tonight but I will have to wait until tomorrow night now as it is starting to get a bit late to do any baking now since I have to be up early for work tomorrow. Oh well, as long as I get it done tomorrow night it will not be a problem so that I can get cake decorating on Saturday. 

There were plenty of recipes that interested me in issue #30. The first of those was Jamie Oliver's Lamb chops with bay, paprika and chickpeas. A wonderful spiced combination. I had everything but the lamb cutlets. Although it would have meant seriously depleting my bay tree of leaves and since it is still fairly cold here I wasn't all that keen on doing that as I have had one die in the past. 

The next one that I considered was Bill Granger's Glazed salmon with bok choy and brown rice. This is a nice healthy meal. A bit of a healing one really. The salmon is glazed with a combination of ginger, garlic, oyster sauce, sweet chilli sauce and soy sauce. It sounds wonderful. Satisfying but light at the same time. I had it on my menu plan for the month. 

On a Saturday afternoon, after I had been out shopping and doing errands I needed something quick and easy to make for lunch. It was then that I recalled Valli Little's Haloumi with santorini salad. A wonderfully simple salad made from onion, cucumber, tomato capsicum and olives with seasoned fried cubes of haloumi. This was a fantastic lunch dish. I used some parsley and garlic, onion & alfalfa sprouts in it as I didn't have any fresh oregano and I had a big punnet of sprouts to be used. I was so pleased with this. I think the addition of some chickpeas or beans would round it out a bit and make it last a bit longer. The ease would make it the perfect work lunch as it doesn't take long to fry up a bit of haloumi. The other ingredients could already be chopped and mixed together in the fridge just waiting to be eaten. It would also be a wonderful side dish for for a grilled or barbecued steak. 

August 2003 - Beef Stir-fry with Rice Noodles

Well, I haven't managed to make much of a start on posting yet. I have gotten quite a bit of the actual cooking done though. I guess that it is a start. Something I noticed looking through this month's magazines was that on all but two of the covers are some very delicious looking desserts. The Malted chocolate pudding with Mars bar custard looks incredible. There were two reasons that I didn't make it the first being that I didn't have everything needed for the recipe and and second, I really don't need any desserts at the moment. 

The first recipe that I actually considered making was Jill Dupleix's Hokk Bol (Chinese pork noodles). Jill describes it as an Asian version of spaghetti bolognese. I was intrigued by it but at the same time I wasn't convinced that I would actually like it. There were only two things that I didn't have to make it, hoisin sauce (which I normally have) and Shaohsing rice wine, which I know in small quantities can be substituted with sherry. In the end I just decided to not to take the chance with the lovely pork mince I have in the freezer. 

I decided to make something quick one night after work and Valli Little's Beef stir-fry with rice noodles was just the thing.  I didn't have a leek, so just used onion. I had no tamari, so just used light soy sauce and used sherry in place of the shaohsing. The end result was a but gluggy, perhaps I didn't have the heat high enough when cooking. It was also quite salty, water may have been a better option than stock. It was nice though and was very quick and easy to make from store foods. 

 

August 2002 - Bill's Hot Chocolate

Oh dear, I really have made a late start of it this month. I am not really sure what happened. I even got a late start with the actual cooking too. It is amazing that you can put off doing some thing for one night and it snowballs and the next thing you know two weeks have passed and nothing has been done...sigh. Well, I am back on top of it now. 

I had originally decided to make Valli Little's Polenta with Sausage Casserole. I love polenta any way that it is cooked. This was a soft polenta however the left overs normally harden up and it can be cut up and grilled or fried the following night. The casserole a lovely tomato base using sausages. However I really needed something that could be made quickly and, to be honest, I just didn't feel like making this and I really needed to get making something. 

The other thing that I really want to do this month is to use up some of the food that has built up in the freezer, cupboard and fridge so I am hoping that this month, as much as possible, will be a stores month. I am trying to choose recipes based on what I already have. It really isn't that hard as I have so much food in this house. 

Since I was behind and I needed to get started quickly I decided to go with Bill's Hot Chocolate. It was easy and quite tasty, although I used a little bit too much chocolate. I think that one tablespoon of chocolate per glass is plenty. I used Cadbury dark chocolate chips, although I am sure it would have been better with Callebaut, like Bill used. 

Bill's Hot Chocolate

Serves 4

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup good-quality chocolate buttons
• 1 litre (4 cups) (I used 300 ml for 1)

Method: 

• Pour boiling water into 4 heatproof glasses and leave for 30 seconds. Pour out water & dry glass thoroughly. 
• Divide chocolate between glasses and turn glass on side & roll to coat sides in chocolate. 
• Heat milk until warm (but not too hot) and pour into glasses and serve immediately. (I would heat milk first next time as the chocolate melted a bit much on the side of the glass)

July 2010 - Smoky Texan Short Ribs

Wow, another month as been and gone, it really is incredible how fast this year is passing by. It feels like I only started this blog yesterday.

I was interested in making the Spinach, brie and mushroom freeform pie. However since I had planned on making the creamy chicken, pea and bacon pies from the 2009 issue I didn't want to have two pies in a row.

The next recipe that I considered making was Justin North's Beef braised in stout with winter mushrooms and crushed potatoes. This sounded like a really good recipe which involved marinading the beef overnight in stout and various other ingredients. However I had made a couple of, non-blog  related, casseroles so thought I would try something different.

Finally I decided to make Adrian Richardson's Smoky Texan Short Ribs. These were really nice, although I was feeling a bit under the weather when I ate them so I didn't enjoy them as much as I may have if I was feeling ship shape. These were easy to make and I got some of the biggest and meatiest ribs from my local butcher. I think that I could have trimmed them a bit but they were great as they were.

Smoky Texan Short Ribs

Serves 6

Ingredients

• 3 onions, roughly chopped
• 6 garlic cloves, roughly chopped
• 4 small red chillies, deseeded, roughly chopped
• 1/2 firmly packed cup (110 g) brown sugar
• 2 tbsp smoked paprika 
• 2 tbsp ground ginger
• 1/4 c (60 ml) soy sauce
• 1/4 c chopped coriander leaves 
• 2 cups (500 ml) red wine
• 1/4 c (60 ml) extra virgin olive oil 
• 1/4 c (60 ml) sherry vinegar or red wine vinegar 
• 2.5 kg beef short ribs cut across the bone into 10 cm pieces

Method

• Place all ingredients except ribs in a processor with 1 tbsp each of salt and pepper. Pulse to combine. 
• Arrange ribs in a large shallow container and pour marinade over turning to evenly coat. 
• Cover and marinate for up to 48 hours (I didn't 36 hours) 
• Preheat oven to 160 C. 
• Transfer ribs to roasting pan and cover with foil. 
• Bake 1 1/2 to 2 hours basting with marinade every 20 minutes. 
• Remove from oven and allow to cool. (This can be done up to 4 days ahead)
• Preheat bbq or chargrill to medium-high and grill ribs for 3 minutes each side or until sticky and warmed though.