Hello Friends and welcome to Twenty Years Ago Today for January 2003.  It’s summertime here in Australia and living is easy. We want some no-muss, no-fuss food – and if we can slap it on the BBQ – so much the better!  The magazine I am using for this month is Super Food Ideas from December 2002.  The theme is summer vegetarian…will the magazine meet the challenge?

Here’s the menu I devised from the recipes in the magazine.  I was able to meet my challenge of relaxed summer vegetarian food quite easily – there were a few options for the opening drink, the starter, side and dessert.  There were not so many vegetarian mains but I really liked the sound of the sweetcorn and zucchini burgers!  And the fussiest eater in the world loves peanut brittle so we appeared to be onto a winner, winner vegetarian dinner!

Pineapple and Rum Crush

This was summer in a glass!  Rum and pineapple is a classic tropical flavour combination.  I also liked the refreshing scent of the mint.  This is a perfect hot-weather drink!

ChunkyAvocado Dip

I did not make this as I could not find a ripe avocado for love or money the day I wanted to make it!  Here’s the recipe.  This came from an advertisement for Tupperware, hence the mention of the serving vessel. 

Sweetcorn and Zucchini Burgers

I was excited to make these because I love a zucchini fritter and I love a corn fritter.  Also, I picked the zucchini and the parsley from my garden! What could be better than combining the two?  Unfortunately, these were not good.  Usually, when I make zucchini fritters, I squeeze the water out of the zucchini after grating them.  This recipe did not say to do so and, when I am cooking a recipe for the blog or for Tasty Reads, I follow the recipe exactly.  Maybe because I did not squeeze my zucchini (which sounds like a euphemism if ever I heard one) the mixture was a mess!  I had to add almost double the amount of flour suggested to get something that would even hold together.  The burgers tasted too much like flour and not enough like sweetcorn or zucchini.  I would not make these again.  If you want to try them, I would try squeezing the moisture out of the grated zucchini.  Or for a really good recipe for zucchini fritters, use this one from Epicurious which is one of my faves!

Tomato Salad with Creamy Dressing

This was good, nothing special but a tasty tomato salad.  We are about to have a bumper crop of tomatoes from the backyard so  I might be making it again very soon!

Peanut Brittle

This was a semi-fail but entirely due to user error! The recipe says to microwave for 6-8 minutes.  I do not cook with my microwave very often and got a bit panicky when at the six-minute mark the dish I was using to cook the brittle in felt very hot.   The mixture inside it looked like something normally seen in the crater of a volcano about to explode.  I lost my nerve and stopped the cooking process!  As a result, the candy creation was not brittle but had the consistency of fudge.  It was delicious though!  Next time I will hold my nerve and cook it for the full eight minutes!

My Nigella Moment

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 in because it was really good!  This  month, my Nigella  moment came from an article on Asian food which included one of my restaurant favourites, Thai Fish Cakes.  This is my go-to starter when eating Thai but I have never even contemplated making these at home!  I loved these!  They were deliciously tasty and were very close to the ones you eat in restaurants. I will definitely make these again! Also, happy Lunar New Year Everyone!

I hope you have enjoyed my trip back to the vegetarian food of 2003.  It certainly had some mixed results.  The absolute highlight for me were the fishcakes, they were sensational! The cocktail was pretty good too!

Future Twenty Years Ago Today Posts

I have been thinking about these 20 Years Ago Today posts and I decided that, whilst I love doing them, the risk is that the menu themes will get a bit predictable and will be limited to the food that I like.  To give me a challenge and to hopefully really highlight what is featured in my 20-year-old magazines, I have come up with a list of menu themes and each month I will randomly select a theme and see if I can build a menu from that theme out of the magazine in question.  Some of the themes are serious, some are based on actual food preferences of people I know (for example, the Fussiest Eater In The World once told me he did not eat white food. Except for potatoes, bread, rice, cauliflower, fish, milk, yoghurt….the list goes on!) and some I made up to challenge myself!   You can find the list of themes here:

If you would like to contribute a theme, please let me know,  I’m up for any challenge you can throw at me!

Have a great week.