Seafood - Retro Food For Modern Times

28
May
2023

May 2003 – The Letter P

categories: Chicken Liver, Classic Recipes, Crab, Steak, Super Food Ideas

Welcome friends to Twenty Years Ago today, where we find out what the good people of 2003 were eating via a magazine of the time and a self-imposed challenge by which to deliver a menu. Today’s magazine was Super Food Ideas from May 2003 and the challenge was to build a menu that featured the letter P.

But first, let’s set the scene by having a quick peek at what was hot in May 2003. The Matrix Reloaded was number one at the office followed by X2: X Men United and Bruce Almighty. Topping the Australian music charts through that same month were “In Da Club” by 50 Cent, “Rock Your Body” by Justin Timberlake and “Bring Me To Life” by Evanescence. Also, sneaking up on those charts was another favourite of mine, “Seven Nation Army” by The White Stripes so for my mind, May 2003 had some pretty good music and some fairy average films. In book sales for the month, The Da Vinci Code was #2 and The Devil Wears Prada was #8.

So, pop some JT on your speakers and open that bottle full of bub, because we are going to party like it’s your birthday with a menu featuring the letter P.

The Menu – May 2003

Chicken Liver Paté – To Wake You Up Inside

There were actually a few options for the starter – the paté which I chose, a prawn cocktail and some mini potato cakes with smoked salmon and creme fraiche. I literally eeny meeny miny mo’ed these three recipes to choose one. The pate was easy to make and was quite delicious. It was a little grainier than bought patés but that probably says more about my food processor than any real flaw in the recipe.

Chicken Liver Pate Recipé:

Pepper Steak – To Rock Your Body

The pepper steak main was delicious! And another classic to go with the very traditional starter! And although I am trying to limit my consumption of red meat, this is likely to go on high rotation!

Pepper Steak Recipe:

Pecan and Date Syrup Pudding

I was soooo disappointed that I didn’t have time to make this. I even bought all the ingredients but, the weekend I had planned to make it, I also realised we had most of a bag of apples that were getting a bit old…so apple pie it was. However, as I said I have all the ingredients so this pudding may make an appearance in the coming weeks.

Pecan and Date Syrup Pudding Recipe:

My Nigella Moment – Chilli Crab

For first-time readers, this refers to the moment at the end of Nigella Lawson’s cooking shows when she sneaks back to the fridge to have another bite of something delicious. In the context of these Twenty Years Ago posts, it is something contained in the magazine that does not fit with the overall menu theme but I’m sneaking it in either because I made it and it was really good, or I just didn’t have time to make it but it was the most appetising thing in the mag!

I mean…who does not love a Chilli Crab. I mean…who does not love Chilli Crab. We had the most memorable chilli crab in Malaysia. We went on a tour to see the fireflies where part of the tour was dinner. The restaurant looked pretty basic – plastic plates and cups, definitely catering to the tourists going to see the fireflies so we were not expecting much. Then they brought out the chilli crab!!! It was amazing. So fresh and tasty. It was divine. So expectations were high on this one. Could I do our memories of chilli crab justice?

I am not going to blow my own trumpet to say this was as good as our Malaysian meal. For a start, it was not followed by cruising down the river watching fireflies, it was followed by a night on the couch watching Forgetting Sarah Marshall which was this week’s film club choice! BUT…this was AMAZING!!!! A seven-nation army couldn’t hold me back from this one!

Chilli Crab Recipe:

Oh my gosh, Super Food Ideas delivered on the P recipes! This was a great month of eating for me culminating in that chilli crab…possibly the best month yet! And the pudding still to come!

So tell me, if you were making a menu featuring the letter P, what would you make?

And have a great week!

26
Mar
2023

Let’s Get Lit – March 2003

categories: 20 Years Ago Today, Bread, Pasta, Sangria, Seafood, Soup, Tomatoes, Wine

Hello friends and welcome to March 2003! Avril Lavigne was topping the charts with I’m With You, Bringing Down the House was #1 at the box office and U.S. troops invaded Iraq looking to seek and destroy Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. No wonder, when reflecting on the events of twenty years ago, we here at Retro Foods for Modern Times felt we might need to get a little boozy! This was the theme for our menu which came from the March 2003 issue of Delicious Magazine!

March 2003 – The Menu

Sangria

As if we could have a boozy menu without a starting drink! I love Sangria which despite being Spanish in origin always reminds me of our 2017 trip to Portugal where we would have a pre-dinner sangria most days!

Happy times! Here’s the one from Delicious!

Sangria Recipe:

Beer Bread with Pastrami and Relish

Due to time constraints, I didn’t make this but doesn’t it look amazing?

Spaghettini Alle Vongole

OMG, this was so good. And also when I really wished I had made the beer bread so I could mop up all the delicious sauce left in the bowl. I had never eaten Spaghettini Alle Vongole before and although this took a bit of effort to cook, it was worth it!

Spaghettini Alle Vongole Recipe:

Citrus Salad with Cointreau Cream

To finish out the meal, we have a Citrus Salad with Cointreau Cream. For an alternative dessert, but one that still uses Cointreau, you could sub in last week’s White Lady which also came from this magazine!

My Nigella Moment – Salmorejo

For first-time readers, this refers to the moment at the end of Nigella Lawson’s cooking shows when she sneaks back to the fridge to have another bite of something delicious. In the context of these Twenty Years Ago posts, it is something contained in the magazine that does not fit with the overall menu theme but I’m sneaking it in either because I made it and it was really good, or I just didn’t have time to make it but it was the most appetising thing in the mag!

This was a difficult one. I was torn between two recipes that really appealed to me. One was a pink grapefruit tart. However, as we already had a dessert containing grapefruit I decided to go with the other recipe from March 2003 which caught my eye – salmorejo.

Salmorejo is a cousin of gazpacho. Gazpacho is one of those things that I thought I would hate. Cold tomato soup? Yeccchhh!!! That is until I tried it. And from then on it was love! I will note that even though I am a garlic lover, 4 cloves of garlic was too much for this! Two would, I think have been plenty!

It looked exactly as it did in the picture too!

Salmorejo Recipe

Delicious Magazine certainly delivered on our ask for a boozy menu. We had red wine and brandy in the sangria, beer in the bread, white wine in the spaghetti and Cointreau in the dessert!

Let me know if you would like to contribute a theme to my list. I’m happy to take on any challenge!

02
Jan
2023

Oysters with Caviar

categories: Oysters, Posh Food, Starters

Happy 2023 everyone! Today I am sharing a “recipe” for a starter that is low on fuss and time but high on elegance! Oysters with caviar will bring the luxe to a formal dinner party or some glam to your backyard barbecue. We had these as a little snack before heading out to dinner on New Year’s Eve. I am actually using salmon roe instead of caviar for my oysters. I may like to eat like a posh person but my budget does not spread to a 1/4 cup of real caviar. If you would like to use the real stuff though go right ahead! Oh and please invite me to your party!

Australia’s Favourite Recipes – The Book

A few months ago, we decided to use charity shop books as a theme for our Tasty Reads Cookbook Club. Most of our club members met for breakfast and then went looking through the local op shops for some culinary treasures. The book I chose, Australia’s Favourite Recipes is a monster of a book. I regretted buying it almost the minute I got it home because it is so big it does not fit into any of my bookshelves and so can only be accommodated lying flat. It is also very heavy which makes it quite cumbersome which probably explains why I have not cooked from it a lot. For context, it is about shoulder height for Holly who is a small beagle.

One thing I did make from this book was a lovely Apricot Meringue Dacquoise for the Cook Book Club meeting.

Actually, on reflection that Dacquioise was amazing. Even if I do say so myself! I’ll throw in the recipe for that too as it would also be perfect for entertaining!

And speaking of recipes, here is the one for the Oysters with Caviar if you can even call something this simple a recipe! I guess though when you are using some luxe ingredients like Oysters and Caviar, you want to keep things simple! The last thing you would want to do is to overshadow them!

I used the Yarra Valley caviar infused with Four Pillars Bloody Shiraz Gin for these. The dark colour of the gin-infused salmon roe is so pretty and festive!

The Recipe – Oysters with Caviar

I really liked the pop of the salmon roe in this. Which got me thinking…for Christmas, the Fussiest Eater in the World bought me a Finger Lime tree. These are Australian native limes but instead of the normal lime flesh when you open them up your get these lovely pearls as in the picture below.

They are very slow growing so it will likely be a few years before my little tree bears fruit. But I already have plans to celebrate my first lime by remaking this recipe using a finger lime instead of a lemon for a double pop! We have the variety called pink ice which is the middle one in the picture above. Here is our little tree. And in another comparison, here is the large book next to the small tree.

Ok, I promise that will be the last time I compare one thing of a size you don’t know to another thing of a size you don’t know. 🤦 Here’s the recipe for the Dacquoise!

To all of you, thank you so much for reading and commenting! Have a wonderful, safe and happy new year!

29
Dec
2022

Avocado and Crab Finger Sandwiches

categories: 1980's Food, 1980's recipes, Afternoon Tea, Avocado, Crab, Sandwiches

Hello friends! Welcome to the latest post on “What Posh People ate in the ’80s”. This recipe for Avocado and Crab Finger Sandwiches comes from the Vogue Entertaining Guide from Autumn 1986. The article features a mother and daughter who love to entertain after a match or two on their private tennis court. When I said posh I meant swish enough to have a house with its own tennis court!

I would LOVE to be invited to a spot of doubles followed by an elegant afternoon tea! (Note to friends – can one of you please get rich so we can do this? And can we also wear gorgeous tennis dresses like these?)

The whole thing reminded me very much of the John Betjeman poem called A Subaltern’s Love Song:

Miss J.Hunter Dunn, Miss J.Hunter Dunn,
Furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun,
What strenuous singles we played after tea,
We in the tournament – you against me!

Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,
The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,
With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,
I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn

Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,
How mad I am, sad I am, glad that you won,
The warm-handled racket is back in its press,
But my shock-headed victor, she loves me no less.

Her father’s euonymus shines as we walk,
And swing past the summer-house, buried in talk,
And cool the verandah that welcomes us in
To the six-o’clock news and a lime-juice and gin.

Rather than lime juice and gin, this article waxes lyrical about a boysenberry daiquiri served with the afternoon tea:

One of Helena’s specialties is the delicious boysenberry daiquiri which is smooth in texture, with a wonderful colour and just enough zing in it to revive tired tennis bodies

And even includes a large picture of said daiquiris:

But, back in 1986, if you had a tired tennis body and needed the reviving properties of a boysenberry daiquiri, you would have been SOL as the Vogue Entertaining Guide did not give you the recipe for it! It’s the opposite of Chekhov’s Gun. Even today, with full use of the internet, the closest thing I could find is this recipe for a berry daiquiri from the BBC. Never let it be said that I don’t give you something to soothe your tired tennis body! I mean it’s not boysenberries but what can you do? Maybe boysenberry daiquiris only exist in the realms of people who have their own tennis courts and would never dream of publishing their recipe on something as mucky as the internet!

The Recipe – Avocado and Crab Finger Sandwiches

The article made no mention of who Margie is/was so neither shall we. These were very yummy and delicate sandwiches. And whilst I don’t want to drag Agatha Christie into every post, they were certainly something I could imagine people eating after a hit of tennis in one of her novels. Whilst someone was being stabbed in the drawing room.

I added a sprinkle of chives from the garden and some chive flowers as a garnish for my sandwiches.

The Saratoga Torte which I featured a while back is from this same article.

I am now going to go dream of a life that includes

The traditional charm of a tennis afternoon tea expressed through the use of gleaming family silver and old lace

Have a wonderful week!

19
Jun
2022

Hummer Strudels

categories: 1980's recipes, Lobster, Magazines, Seafood, Spinach, Vogue Entertaining & Travel

Welcome friends. Today we are channelling our inner Gordon Gekko’s and subscribing to the credo of Greed is Good” to make some luxurious Hummer Strudels. These are coming to us via Vogue Entertaining and Travel from Autumn 1986. Now, greed and huge shoulder pads may have been good in the 1980s but this name is not. To me, hummers are giant gas-guzzling cars nearly always filled with semi-drunk teenagers off to a school formal (aka prom for my American friends). It makes no sense why this is called a Hummer strudel. It also possibly made no sense to the magazine editor who added a subtitle to the recipe so everyone knew they were going to be eating Crayfish and Spinach Strudels.

Or were they? Let’s address the Hummer-sized elephant in the room. These also aren’t really strudels. I guess it depends on a definition of a strudel but to my mind, a strudel has layers of pastry wrapped around a filling. I would call this thing a pasty or an empanada or, if these are considered cultural appropriation, then maybe a hand-pie. Maybe these terms were all too common for the la-di-dah folks of 1986?

Hummer Strudels – The Recipe

The pastry was really short and rich and the spinach, lobster tail and cream filling was delicious! But just because we are adopting the 80’s creed of “greed is good” for today’s meal, it doesn’t mean our 2020’s sensibilities need to suffer. I waited to make this until I could find some highly discounted lobster tails in my local supermarket. These were on sale for $1.50 each! If you are unable to find cheap lobster tails most other seafood would work in this – prawns, scallops, or even any firm white fish. Or a mix of any of them. If you are not a seafood lover, chicken would also work and for a vegetarian version, mushrooms would be great!

A quick note on the pastry too. The OG recipe calls for both lard and butter. I used coconut oil instead of lard and as mentioned above, the pastry turned out beautifully!

For the two lobster tails, I used half quantities of all the other ingredients which made 8 hand pies. So enough to share…or not!

The Hummer Strudels were delicious! So why not channel your inner 80’s icon, stream Wall Street and make these this soon!

Have a great week everyone!

Category: Seafood