Did you miss me? I’ve been on holidays – three weeks out of the grey Melbourne cold and into the warmth of sunny Cambodia, Vietnam and Malaysia. The holiday was amazing and I will fill you in on the details over the next few weeks, most particularly about the amazing food.
Here is (literally) a taster….
You know how in most supermarkets you get tasting plates? For example, earlier today in my local supermarket I got to sample 3 kinds of dumplings (prawn, scallop and mushroom), 5 flavours of kombucha tea and some chia pudding…(yeah, my local supermarket is awesome!) Well, in Cambodia, the taster plates consist of Bamboo Worms…and only $2 a kilo!
Bamboo Worms
And these are deep fried crickets….an even better bargain at half the price of the worms…
Crickets
This is me about to taste one of the bamboo worms:
Cambodia Taste Testing
But before we go there, I wanted to talk to you about meatballs. As much as we love Asian food, after three weeks of it we were craving something that wasn’t. Funnily enough, we both had cravings for pretty much the same thing.
He wanted spaghetti bolognese. I wanted spaghetti and meatballs. I was doing the cooking so spaghetti and meatballs it was! As I was cooking these, I realised why this is such awesome comfort food (it’s not like either of us has Italian heritage). My meatballs are crammed full of umami flavours – parmesan, mushrooms, tomatoes, red wine….Hmmm…is red wine umami? Well it’s pretty damn good even if it isn’t. Also, the original recipe for this called for an anchovy fillet. I didn’t happen to have any so I added saltiness with a dash of fish sauce…guess what? More umami!
Spaghetti and Meatballs (and the joys of a plate on your knee in front of the telly…it really is good to be back)
The spaghetti and meatballs were delicious and everything I wanted – something to warm our bones in the winter cold, something that was quick and easy to cook after a day of travelling and something familiar – comfort food at it’s best!!!
They also require very little in terms of fresh ingredients so you can keep shopping to a minimum. And, if you were super organised, you could make a batch and pop them in the freezer before you left. (Massive sigh). I would love to be that organised!!!!
So, it was spaghetti and meatballs for dinner and then, (this mixture makes a lot of meatballs) I made a molten meatball mountain (i.e, a meatball sandwich ) for my lunch the next day. The meatballs were great with the spaghetti but for my mind, even better in the sandwich the next day. And Oscar was on hand for any leftovers.
Of which there were none!
Molten Meatball Sandwich
Remember these?
They tasted like this:
I wouldn’t say this was the worst thing I have ever eaten…but it sure wasn’t good. The outside was kind of crunchy and not so bad. It was the inside that was gross. It didn’t taste so much of anything, it just had an unpleasant texture – mushy and slightly gritty. Not to mention the thought that was impossible to dispel. “That thing in your mouth? That’s worm guts…you’re eating worm guts…that thing you just bit into, that was probably work heart….”
Not good.
Thank goodness I found much better things to eat in Phnom Pehn. Which I will tell you about next time…
Have a fabulous week!
PS – Is anyone doing the kombucha thing? I kind of want to grow my own….if you are please let me know!
Many years ago, my mum used to work in a local solicitor’s firm – and let me tell you right now – forget every glamorous tv legal drama you’ve ever seen. Sadly, this old chestnut, unfunny though it is, was far more the reality:
Each and every one of them was bonkers. Nicely bonkers, even sweetly bonkers. But bonkers all the same.
Downstairs was the domain of a married couple, both lawyers. They had a super cute boxer dog called Brigeeta who they used to bring to work with them every day. Nothing nuts about that. I wish I could take my dogs to work everyday.
Fennel and Lemon Salad 1
What was kooky was that Brigeeta used to have a different outfit every day. And I mean EVERY DAY. My mum worked with them for maybe five years. The dog never wore the same clothes twice.
And you know, I’m not averse to dogs wearing clothes…Oscar has a pair of pyjamas he wears in winter…
Oscar in his PJ’s
But there is a a difference between ONE pair of totally necessary pyjamas and 1500 separate outfits!!!
Remember that old song “You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you?” Well that could have been written about….well, let’s just call him Mr Magoo…(remember, these people are lawyers, they are familiar with litigation). Mr Magoo was badly in need of glasses but thought that getting them would spoil his handsome boy modelling school good looks. Which incidentally were fairly spare on the ground. Glasses were not the issue.
One morning the lady downstairs cornered him and started showing him photos of the party they had gone to the day before, many of which featured Brigeeta in her latest couture which was a Little Red Riding Hood outfit.
Later he asked Mum if she’d seen the photos. She said she had.
He said “Did you see that kid in the red? Man, that was the ugliest child I’ve ever seen”
Fennel and Lemon Salad 2
Captain of this particular Titanic was a lovely, elderly Italian solicitor. Now he wasn’t crazy as such he just sometimes had a bit of trouble with English. So, for instance, once Mum asked him what he did on the weekend and he replied “We went hunting the savage fennels”.
Have you ever heard anything more adorable in your life?
I LOVE that…
“Hunting the Savage Fennels” sounds like a Maurice Sendak book. Maybe the lesser known prequel to “Where the Wild Things Are”.
The Savage Fennels
The savage fennels grow in abundance in this neck o’ the woods; they spring up on every vacant lot and the hills are literally alive with them!
The Savage Fennels
This salad I have adapted from “Salads For All Seasons” is a perfect simple and gorgeous way to feature the savage fennels. Or the more mild mannered fennel you might find in your local supermarket or green grocer. I kept mine pretty minimalist but some black olives would be a great addition.
Fennel and Lemon Salad
I was a little worried about mixing cream and lemon juice in the dressing…because surely that would curdle? It didn’t.
Final tip on the salad – fennel is quite robust so it is perfectly fine to dress the salad and leave it for hours. I added the dressing in the morning and took this to work and it was still crunchy four or five hours later.
This is a perfect accompaniment to fish but would also be fabulous with a grilled steak!
Have a fabulous week! And beware the savage fennels!
As in guess which bozo forgot to celebrate her own blog’s 2nd birthday on May 25th?
So, today we’re having a Belated (don’t worry, I promise I won’t capitalise every word that starts with a B) Birthday, (no really, I won’t) celebrating my second annivesary with food using the second letter of the alphabet. See what I did? Second year, second letter?
You’d think I planned it.
Maybe you should keep thinking that….I”m all for anything that makes me look better!!!
So anyway, it’s my birthday so let’s get this party started. And I’ve said it before, and no doubt I will say it again, (purely because I’ve got a bottle of the stuff that isn’t going to drink itself) a retro party isn’t a retro party without Parfait Amour. And any party is better with a blonde bombshell!
Nope not like this, the blonde bombshell I am referring too is a cocktail made with the aforementioned Parfait Amour. I’m not sure why it’s called a Blonde Bombshell as it comes out a gorgeous dusky pinky purple.
First Course – The Birthday Blonde Bombshell
It’s my party…cocktails count as a course….in my perfect world, we would skip main meals altogether. We would move from cocktails to fingerfood to dessert.
Wow!!! I think I may have found my Parfait Amour drink of choice. This was lovely!!! Sweet and florally and almost kind of musky…it reminded me a little bit of Turkish Delight…maybe it was the roses in the Parfait Amour. Very girly, very pretty. Easy to drink….hmmm….maybe getting rid of that bottle won’t be as hard as I previously thought!
Second Course – Bay Wrapped Bacon and Prunes
Bay Wrapped Prunes in Bacon3
This is basically a take on a Devils on Horseback. But wrapped in a bayleaf. And I added a little smear of my Strawberry Habanero Sauce to the bacon before wrapping it around the prunes.
Note for the unwary – grilling bay leaves makes your entire kitchen smell like you’ve been smoking marijuana. For about a week. Which is fine until you have a plumber come to fix your leaking tap and they ask you if you can score them some bud.
Bay Wrapped Prunes in Bacon
I barely even know what that means.
Despite that, you really can’t go wrong with these…salty, sweet, spicy, crispy…The bay leaves added a slight resiny flavour that was quite pleasant but prevented the bacon from getting really crispy which was slightly disappointing.
I served it them with some more of the strawberry habenero sauce. And the saltiness was a great foil to the sweetness of the Blonde Bombshell.
Bay Wrapped Prunes in Bacon2
Delicious!
But now to the piece de resistance. The dessert.
So….what’s better than a triple chocolate baby bundt?
A QUADRUPLE chocolate baby bundt.
And what’s better than a quadruple chocolate Baby Bundt?
A Quadruple Chocolate Chilli Baby Bundt!
Third Course – Quadruple Chocolate Chilli Baby Bundt
So, if you’re following me on Instagram you would have already seen me post my first experiment with the Spice Peddler’s Mexican Chilli Chocolate Cake Mix. That was a Chili Chocolate Cupcake with a Chilli Toffee Shard topped with Vanilla Icecream and my Strawberry Habenero Sauce. OMG, I thought this was the best thing ever…so, so good. The cake was fudgy and spicy and delicious, the vanilla icecream and chilli sauce worked together perfectly and the chilli toffee was a cute and quirky touch. Basically, this was me on a plate!!!!
Chocolate Chilli Cupcake with A Chilli Toffee Shard
Gahhh….so how do you top that?
Well, I found a recipe for a cake called a Tyroler in a Delicious Magazine and I had a little play with it. And came up with the Quadruple Chocolate Chilli Baby Bundt. I used the Spice Peddler Mexican Chilli Chocolate Cake Mix as my base and it was super delicious!
Quadruple Chocolate Baby Bundt 5
This was really good. Then again, how could it not be?
It had quadruple chocolate.
And a touch of chilli.
And walnuts.
And rum soaked sultanas.
And did I mention quadruple chocolate?
Quadruple Chocolate Baby Bundt3
So, it may have been belated but worth the wait because these were all awesome!!!!
I’ll try to be on time next year and if not, I can always repost this and rename it Birthday 3 – Cocktails, Canapés and Cake.
You know how some people step up and excel under pressure? I’m not one of them. I warp. I buckle. I crumple and fold. When the going gets tough you can usually find me sobbing in a corner. And one of the things that really fazes me is cooking for other people – not so much for dinners but a bake sale? Guaranteed disaster. Last time? Yes, that was me running into the 7-11 well after midnight, (after the first four attempts at cupcakes had failed) wild eyed, smeared with flour and frosting and slightly twitchy. “Where’s your cake mix? I need a box of cake mix. And I need it now!!!!” I was like a demented Betty Crocker junkie desperate for my fix…..
Sigh.
The April Daring Cooks Challenge was brought to us by Joanne from What’s On The List. She taught us all about Pathiri and challenged us to create our own version of this inspirational Indian dish!
Challenge was right, I felt the first stirrings of panic rising even as I read the recipe….
So, let’s take a step back before I start hyperventilating (again) and look at this dish called Chatti Pathiri. For those of you, who, like me had never heard of Chatti Pathiri, the best way to explain is that it’s kinda, sorta like an Indian Lasagne where crepes step in for the pasta sheet and, in my case a spicy chicken and chickpea curry acts as the filling.
Yeah, you heard it….yummy, yummy crepes and delicious chicken and chickpea curry. And after you layer these two bits of deliciosuness, you slather them in coconut milk and bake it all together. And mark my words….It’s all good.
So why the fear? Why the cold hand of dread on my spine I hear you ask? Not because of the recipe, that was awesome!!! But because I kind of know Joanne. She reads this. She comments. She’s a lovely, friendly delightful person. And she has entrusted me (and yes, ok thousands of other people on the Daring Kitchen) with a recipe that is obviously very special to her.
And what if I took her delicious recipe and totally screwed it up?
Arrrgggghhhhhh!!!
The pressure….
(I know. Such a Drama Queen. Feel free to roll your eyes. I would be.)
Luckily for me, Joanne’s recipe proved to be idiot proof!!! And super delicious!!!! You can find it here.
I added a little bit more chilli and a can of chickpeas into the chicken mix but apart from that I used Joanne’s recipe as is.
Chatti Pathiri
I served my version of Chatti Pathiri with a coconut and coriander sambol and some cherry tomatoes drizzled with a little bit of pomegranate molasses.
A spicy and refreshing side dish, perfect for eating with your Chatti Pathiri or any other indian dish
Prep Time:15
Total Time:15
Ingredients
Scale
3 tbsp coriander leaves
75g coconut (freshly grated is best, I used dessicated)
3 green chillies, deseeded
1 clove of garlic
2.5 cm piece of ginger
2 tsp mint leaves
1 tsp sugar
Salt and freshly squeezed lime juice to taste
Instructions
Place all ingredients, except lime and salt in a food processor and process until finely chopped.
Add salt and lime juice to taste.
Serve as an accompaniment to curries
Nutrition
Serving Size:4
The sambol will last in the fridge for about a week if you seal it up. Which is perfect because the Chatti Pathiri is also pretty good reheated on the second day!!!
Joanne, if you’re reading this, thank you very much for the recipe. I loved making it and I loved eating it even more. I hope I have done your recipe and you proud!!!
If this has piqued your interest in Pathiri and /or you would like to see how other Daring Kitchen members interpreted the challenge, you can see some of the completed dishes on Joanne’s blog here.
Or just head over and have a read, you won’t be disappointed!
And speaking of reading, I joined the Goodreads Food and Fiction book. And here’s another thing you may not know about me – my first venture into blogging was trying to match food to the books I was reading. It’s an idea I return to every now and again and I may start adding in one or two of those in the not too distant. In the meantime, if, like me you love food and you love fiction…the Goodreads group may be something for you! You can find a link over on the right.
Have a great week!!!!
And if you want to get chatty, leave a comment!!!!
For March’s Daring Cooks’ Challenge, (yes, I know I’m a little behind the times) Ruth, Shelley and Sawsan asked us to totally veg out! We made salads and dressings, letting the sky be the limit as we created new flavors and combinations that reflect our own unique tastes.
My own unique tastes huh? Oh boy. Who smells trouble? With a capital T.
Vanilla Horseradish Dressing with Roast Beef Salad
The salad dressing challenge actually came at a good time as I had just started on “SaladsFor All Seasons” and the 1971 recipe comes directly from that.
Remember a few posts ago when I mentioned that the word “Surprise” when contained in a vintage recipe generally denotes something dubious? Well here’s another instalment of words to strike fear into the heart of any retro cooker. Beware words denoting parsimony of any description – Pennywise, Frugal, Thrifty. Even more than the “Surprise” these should best be avoided.
Then brace yourselves, because today we are taste-testing Rosemary Mayne-Wilson’s recipe for….
ECONOMICAL MAYONNAISE
On page 23 of Salads For All Seasons“, Rosemary Mayne-Wilson describes mayo as
“A process of forcing egg yolks to absorb oil and to hold them in an emulsion, thick and creamy”
And ok, not the most romantic of descriptions but technically correct.
I can only assume that somewhere between writing page 23 and page 24 she was possessed by the devil. It’s the only way to explain the eggless, oilless monstrosity that is the economical mayonnaise.
A lot of the time, if I think something is going to be awful, I don’t make it because I hate to see food wasted. However, by its own definition this is economical. So I thought I would give it a try. So, I made it. And it was…
Drumroll please….
Absolutely fucking horrible.
The best thing you could say about it was that it looked like mayonnaise. And that it tasted like condensed milk mixed with vinegar.
Yeah, I know normally that wouldn’t be a plus. Believe me, I’m scrambling for positives here.
The worst was….
Have you ever bought berry scented nail polish remover? This tasted like how that smells – there was an initial sickly sweetness followed by a throat catching, eye watering sharpness…it was really bad. And not one iota like lovely, gorgeous, creamy, delicious mayonnaise.
However, I wanted to be fair to the recipe and it’s not every day you eat mayo straight off the spoon – which is what provoked the above reaction. And here at Retro Foods For Modern Times we are nothing if not scientific – so I had the idea to do a blind taste testing of the Economical Mayo vs a normal mayo. And what better item to test this on but what is fast becoming this blog’s favourite ingredient, the humble egg.
The Egg Experiment
I wanted to keep this very plain so the flavours of the mayo would be “pure” so I found a very simple recipe for Stuffed Eggs – pretty much just egg yolk and mayo. The idea was to make up two identical mixes, one with a bought mayo and one with the Economical, then mix up the egg halves so it was impossible to tell the difference between them – and blind taste test them. If I couldn’t tell them apart…then any snarkiness on my part was utterly due to my own prejudices and not fact.
That didn’t work.
Primarily because the two versions looked completely different to each other. It was utterly impossible not to tell them apart:
Stuffed Eggs
Even though the recipe was too heavy on the mayo, the bought mayonnaise behaved as it should when mixed with egg yolk and formed a rounded dome. Mixing the boiled egg yolks with the economical mayonnaise just made a yellow runny “mayonnaise”. It was so runny that when I bit into it, the mixture ran out of the egg all over my hand which was gross. The egg did temper some of the sharpness of the vinegar but in this instance – Epic Fail for 1971!!!
So, after the disaster of the Economical Mayo, I was a little apprehensive about trying the modern recipe for salad dressing which also mixed a sweet ingredient with something quite pungent.
The following is based on a recipe for Vanilla Horseradish dressing which I found in “500Paleo Recipes” by Dana Carpender.
I would have through cavemen would have been too busy trying to survive to be pfaffing about with vanilla beans. Then again, my entire knowledge of the paleolithic era is based on B grade movies where scantily clad cavewomen and dinosaurs co-exist. So what do I know?
¼ cup vinegar – I used white wine, the original recipe calls for white balsamic
1/8 tsp vanilla extract
¼ tsp white pepper
¼ tsp salt
¾ cup (175 ml) olive oil
¼ tsp mustard powder
2 tbsp horseradish
Instructions
Put all of the ingredients into a blender and mix together until it looks creamy – around 30 seconds.
Notes
If you can lay your hands on fresh horseradish, it would be good to finely grate your own. I used bought horseradish sauce from the supermarket
This was awesome!!! Really, really good. I had this on a salad I made with some left over roast beef which was rather dry. By the time I came to eat this at lunch time, the beef was gorgeously, melt in your mouth tender – I suspect this was some action of the horseradish or maybe the vanilla. Either way, it was delicious!!!
Vanilla Horseradish Dressing
The vanilla is quite subtle, initially providing more of an aroma and only the teeniest undercurrent of flavour. You know, it’s of those times where, if you didn’t know what it was, you wouldn’t know what it was. But it would drive you mad trying to pinpoint what exactly it was.
I also had this on a few other salads and it was good every time!
I would caution against adding more vanilla into the mix as I found that the longer I kept this in the fridge, and I had it in there for close to a week, the stronger the taste of vanilla became. My vivid imagination? Possibly.
I would love to know what other people think of this recipe and if they noticed the same thing. Please let me know if you make it!!!
Oh, and just in case you thought I meant a different kind of dressing for success, lets take a peek at what the cool kids were wearing in 1971.
For the ladies, it was definitely the year of the hotpant…
Whereas for the gentlemen, it ranged from the high necked and tightly belted straightlaced work attire….
To the “manly gown” which was both smart and comfy for lazing in.
Toupé and soap on a rope optional extras. Sold separately.
And then there was the downright bizarre….hang on…isn’t this the same guy from the first photo? Is this what he’s wearing under that tightly belted turtleneck?
Eww…I’m going to go before this gets creepy…or should that be any creepier?
