So, we went back into our third lockdown this week. Albeit for only five days. But the news sent me into a spiral of gloom. So I was deep in need of comfort food. What I am trying to say is that sometimes you just need some crumbed lamb cutlets!
Outside of vegemite, a meat pie and maybe a lamington, a crumbed lamb cutlet is about the most Australian food you can get. I served mine with a fresh tomato sauce and some buttered zoodles. Exactly as per the serving suggestion in the Autumn 1986 issue of the Vogue Australia Entertaining Guide from when the recipe came. Here they are in all their 1986 glory!
Normally this mag (which doesn’t exist anymore) is quite high falutin’ so I was quite surprised to find something quite as downhome as a crumbed lamb cutlet within its pages. Having said that, their cutlets had those little chefs hat looking covers so I guess they did try to posh them up a bit!
Everything about the cutlets was perfection! I cooked them for around 2.5 minutes each side – the result? A crispy golden outside and a delightfully tender inside.
However, the zucchini was bland and the fresh tomato sauce was not great. So both sides were a fail. I would think that pairing the crumbed lamb cutlets with either minted yoghurt or beetroot chutney might be better options.
Crumbed Lamb Cutlets – The Recipe
Here’s the recipe for all three in case you want to make the full recipe as per 1986. And, the best way to eat these? Pick them up by the bony end and go for your life!
I know some of you find it hard to source lamb. You could use the crumb mix on flattened pieces of chicken or veal (as if you were making schnitzel). You would not get the fun “lollipop” element of a lamb cutlet but you will still get the lovely crispy comforting crumb crust!
I hope you are all doing well, where ever and whatever state of lock down or not you are in!
Maybe it is the whole Covid thing or maybe it is just because it is getting colder here but I have been craving comfort food like nobody’s business. My particular drug of choice has been potatoes. I love them at the best of times but nowadays? I have eaten them pretty much every day since lockdown. And one of the best comfort foods around that has been feeding my potato addiction is Shepherd’s Pie!
Normally when we make Shepherd’s Pie, it is the job of the Fussiest Eater in the World. He can’t cook much all that well but he knows how to do good British stodge to perfection. And his Shepherd’s Pie is great.
But wait…I am probably making some assumptions here. So let’s start with…
WHAT ON EARTH IS SHEPHERD’S PIE?
Shepherd’s Pie is a dish made of cooked lamb topped with mashed potato. The same dish made with beef is called Cottage Pie or Hachis Parmentier if you want to be French and fancy. Which usually is my default mode (wound up to eleven) but today I am using lamb so common or garden Shepherd’s Pie it is!
Traditionally, this was made with the leftover lamb from a Sunday roast. We usually use bought minced lamb for our Shepherd’s Pie but this time round, I wanted to, what they would call on the cooking shows, ELEVATE the dish, so I used some diced lamb.
A DIGRESSION ON WORKING FROM HOME
I was very pleased to read Yinzerella’s post the other day on the pleasures of lockdown. I too am enjoying many of the aspects of being at home 24/7. For instance I have
More time to spend with Oscar and Holly.
More time to read, to craft, to study, to do yoga and to blog!
Started to declutter and organise my life
Massively reduced my carbon footprint The last time I filled my car with petrol was in March! We got solar earlier this year so even though I am using more electricity by being at home, it is being paid for by the power we are generating.
Invented a push-up challenge and am doing a Buzzfeed core challenge.
More time to cook. 4-hour slow-cooked lamb on a Tuesday night? Not a problem. Grapefruit brulee for breakfast? You betcha!
Totally embraced my basic B instincts! These faux fir booties? I know, so chav, but wearing them made my feet warn for the first time in DAYS!!!! I may never take them off!
Anyway, back to the Shepherd’s Pies. I slow-cooked that lamb for four hours with red wine and herbs and garlic and tomatoes until it was melt in your mouth tender.
Then I made mashed potato with heaps of butter and milk to top it, and then topped that with a heap of grated cheese!
This was so good. Tender lamb, cheesy mashed potato…what else can I say except if you are craving a cuddle in the form of food, make this straight away!!! Of course, you can use this mix to make one large pie but I love small food so individual serves it was – one for each of us and one for lunch the following day! This reheats beautifully so you can make a few extra to warm up for additional meals.
I cut the recipe in half for these pies because I only had 500g of lamb but the full recipe will make one large or 6 small pies (depending of course on the size of your small pie dishes).
250ml beef stock (more if cooking for a long period of time)
200 ml red wine (I used a cabernet merlot)
145g tomato paste
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
1 sprig of rosemary
2 bay leaves
1 kg potatoes peeled and halved
50g butter
175ml milk
180g Cheddar cheese, grated
Salt & freshly ground black pepper
Instructions
Heat 1 tbsp of oil in a frying pan over medium-high heat. Add half the lamb and cook, turning as required until browned on all sides. Transfer to a plate and repeat with another tbsp of oil and the remaining lamb.
Heat the remaining oil in the pan over medium heat. Add the onion, carrot and celery and cook until the vegetables are softened, stirring occasionally. Add the garlic and cook for another minute, stirring to ensure that the garlic does not burn.
Sprinkle the flour over the onions and cook, stirring, for 1 minute.
Gradually add the stock to the pan followed by the wine, stirring to remove any bits stuck to the bottom of the pan. Add the lamb, tomato paste, Worchestershire sauce, rosemary and bay leaves. Cover, reduce the heat to low and simmer for between one to four hours – you may need to add more stock or wine if you are cooking for longer than an hour.
While the lamb is cooking, boil the potatoes in salted water for 20 minutes or until tender. Then drain and return to the pan. Add the butter and milk and mash until smooth. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Preheat the office to 200C.
Once the lamb is cooked, measure it out into 6 small (1 cup capacity) ovenproof dishes. Top with the mashed potato and then with the grated cheese.
Cook in the pre-heated oven until the cheese is golden brown and melted – around 25-30 minutes.
Enjoy!
What is your go-to comfort food? I hope you get to have some this week! My next post will also be comfort food but of the cake variety,,,,
One of my joys, particularly on a wet and cold weekend is to curl up with a good book and lose myself for a few hours. Now, just to be clear, when I say good book, I don’t mean the kind of book that wins literary accolades for their perfectly constructed sentences and their ability to cast a light on the shadows of contemporary society that had previously been ignored.
I mean sure, those books have their place. It’s in a prominent place on the bookshelf so visitors can see how clever and worldly you are.
But no, for there here and now, good refers to one of those guilty pleasure books – the kind you can race through in an afternoon or two and become totally absorbed in, resurfacing only for snacks and sleep.
Tubing by K.A.McKeagney was one of these books. Tubing is about Polly a 20 something girl living in London with her boyfriend Oliver, a doctor who on the surface seems like a perfect catch but is totally bland. Polly seems….lacklustre…content just to drift along in her relationship and her job neither of which seem to be fulfilling or providing her with any real meaning or enjoyment. Enter a chance sexual encounter with a handsome stranger on a train and all of a sudden Polly’s placid life is thrown into turmoil.
Polly becomes obsessed with him and through searching for him online discovers “Tubing” a phenomenon where strangers hook up for sex on crowded tube trains. Each to their own right? Anyway, through following a series of tweets, Polly tracks down her handsome stranger. Tubing provides her with the thrills and excitement that are missing from her regular life.
Until it all goes horribly wrong…
Cue dramatic music….
And cue snacks….or in this case, not so much snacks but a big bowl of carby cheesy comfort food aka Ultimate Mac and Cheese. (Because Tubing…geddit? 😉) Is there anything more comfort foody than mac and cheese? If so, I would like to know about it!
I also like the idea of eating something warm and comforting whilst reading about murder and mayhem. It creates a nice juxtaposition of knowing exactly what you will get next taste wise versus not knowing what will happen next plot-wise! Although Ultimate Macaroni and Cheese does have a few twists of its own!
The recipe for Ultimate Macaroni and Cheese comes from the Lyndey Milan section of The Great Australian Cookbook. It differs from regular Mac ‘n’ Cheese in that the normal cheese sauce is replaced by a mix of ricotta, blue cheese, cheddar and leeks. I loved the hint of blue cheese and the leeks in this!
Here’s the recipe for a delicious take on a classic dish!
Back to Tubing… it’s immensely readable but by no means a perfect novel. Polly is largely unlikeable and some of her actions (as well as those of some of the other characters) are unfathomable. The storyline also seems to be unnecessarily convoluted at times. However, for escapist enjoyment that will have you turning the pages wanting to know what happens next Tubing is a fine way to while away a few hours!
It also made me wonder if tubing was a real thing? It seemed a little too well thought out not to be! London readers, your thoughts?
Thank you to Net Galley and RedDoor Publishing for the ARC of Tubing!
If there’s one food Australians love, it is pumpkin.
Ethiopian Pumpkin Soup
But unlike our American pals who like to eat their pumpkins for dessert, for us it is sadly almost always served savoury as a vegetable. Just incidentally though, Australia, why don’t we have pumpkin pie? We get all the trashy American stuff – the Kardashians and ice bucket challenges to name but a few. Why can’t we get some of the yummy delicious pumpkin pie action too?
According to this, you don;t even have to cook it. It’s MAGIC…
Pumpkin Dream Pie
Sadly for us, Pumpkin Dream Pie remains just that…
We eat pumpkin as a side for a roast, in lasagné’s risottos, salads and scones. But more than eating pumpkin, we love to drink it.
How much do we love to drink it? Pumpkin soup is a, no probably the Australian ubiquitous menu item – just about every cafe, restaurant, pub bistro and hole in the wall has their own version prominently displayed on the menu – I go to a cafe where it has been the soup du jour for at least five years.
Out of curiosity I had a little look on taste.com.au for pumpkin soup recipes. There are 79 of them. Ok, so it’s not the 765 recipes they have for chocolate cake but 79 variations on a theme of pumpkin is still quite a number. There are recipes for Classic Pumpkin Soup, Creamy Pumpkin Soup, Perfect Pumpkin Soup and Smashing Pumpkin Soup (I guess that’s the soup that despite all it’s rage is still just a rat in a cage).
I did start to notice a trend though -not only do we love our pumpkin soup but we like it to be a bit of a international bright young thing. There are recipes for:
Thai, Moroccan, non – specific Asian, Tortellini (Italian), Japanese, Thai again, Thai again again, Curry x 3, South Indian, Australian (whatever that maybe…I didn’t look, possibly flavoured with beer and vegemite), two more Thai’s. The Americas are represented by one paltry entry for Maine Pumpkin soup.
Africa too is sadly missing from that list. Ok, yes, Morocco is there but…jeez…(eyeroll), if you must be pedantic, sub-Saharan Africa is completely missing. Hopefully not for much longer…because it’s time this delicious Ethiopian Pumpkin Soup adapted from Diana Henry’s Plenty took the stage!
This is gorgeous to look at, the inclusion of tomato paste and the Berbere spices gives it a real 1970’s burnt orange colour. It’s really tasty too – slightly sweet from the pumpkin, slightly smoky from the spices, slightly spicy from the chilli and cinnamon and ginger. If you leave out the yoghurt garnish it is also vegan.
Ethiopian Pumpkin Soup 2
And, whilst I don’t want to blow my own trump….actually, no, wait, it’s my blog, I can blow whatever I damn well want! The Berbere pepitas and pinenuts which were my own invention were amazing! They add some additional spice and salt and crunch. The only problem with these is that they are so good you will be hard pressed to save any for the soup. I had to make about three or four batches of them because we kept eating them before they could be used as the soup garnish. They are seriously good!
Berbere Roasted Pepitas and Pinenuts
The key to this soup is the Berbere spice mix. I bought mine but you can make your own. There are about a thousand of these on the interwebs, each of which is slightly different. I have included a recipe for Berbere here
Berbere Spice Mix
Either way you’re going to end up with a lot more Berbere than you need to make this one recipe. Of course you could make the soup more than once and you will surely make the Berbere Pepitas and Pinenuts more than once but if you want to experiment a bit more with this spice blend you can also try these:
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!
