Harry's Secret Sauce

• Dijon mustard
• sambal oelek
• pear juice concentrate

Baked Quinces, Nuts in Salads, Butternut Pumpkin, Beans

Cut quinces in half and place a mixture of creamed (with sugar) butter and mixed dried fruit in between the two halves; the mixture was about a centimetre thick - mmm that's a lot of butter and sugar; I also stuck some cloves on the surface of the quinces; then baked them on a really low heat for about 4 hours or longer!

Roasted hazelnuts and unsalted cashews in your salads are good.

Butternut pumpkin: cut the pumpkin into about 0.5 centimetre thick or less slices and salt quite heavily - I opened up the hole on the salt shaker and just dumped the stuff out - then you fry in plenty of oil on a medium heat 'til it looks sort of like a roast pumpkin should.

After cadet camp I never thought I could ever eat four-bean mix again but we ate cans of the stuff over the past week: in nachos; this tuna salad with beans thing; other salads. Beans are great and good for you, although I think a bit of a novelty food - a bit like meringue, you couldn't eat meringue all day every day and quite frankly you wouldn't want to do so with beans.

ANU's computer network prevents crucial blog posts, following recipes is easy & college pasta bake

Far out! Stupid network at the ANU doesn't let me log into this for some reason... So, this really irritates me 'cause I been doin' quite a bit of cookin', since I now live at a residential hall which is non-catered and has this huge kitchen of about 10 sub-kitchens (each with 2 ovens, 3 stove tops, a toaster, a sandwich maker, and an industrial microwave). There's a fair amount of kitchen involved. So what have I cooked? Perhaps I should start with summer, before I went to Canberra (sigh): consisting of 11 lamb shanks and all things good I cooked a Stephanie Alexander dish "times" 3 (the recipe is in her book of multi-colours, somewhere, under lamb, no doubt) and accompanied it by a Stephanie Alexander "gramma pie" yet I successfully used Jap pumpkin and a pastry with almond meal substituted for flour to make a Coeliac's dream come true. Served to about 9 people this dinner was very successful and highly celebrated amongst those who had the pleasure of enjoying my ability... (to follow recipes); fuck you ANU-network I can't remember this cooking mémoire; "two meats, two sauces, two cheeses, one pasta, one love" is a pasta-bake concocted by myself and a fellow resident (Matt the satisfied) - we used chicken cooked in one pasta sauce in the bottom of a wok followed by a layer of cheddar follwed by some pasta (spaghetti) followed by mince cooked in a different pasta sauce followed by a layer of Parmesan and a little cheddar, the result... "faaantastic", try and see if you can eat a whole wok full!
In other news, my tooth should be hurting but ibuprofen is a wonderful drug, I hope the dentist gives me good news tomorrow...

Byron Bay Barbecue

Here in Byron bay, been cooking on the bbq, been good.

Philosophie de Cuisson

Exams are over, and summer's here! Exams take away from cooking time. That's really irritating. So it seems as if I should cook something, for the sake of cooking. Isn't that a great ideal? I'm going to cook not because I'm hungry, not because I need to cook, not even because I want to cook, but because cooking is demanded of me for some reason, not by any entity, not by me, maybe by the gods, but I think they lost out with this whole monotheism thing so it would be unlikely to be them, not for a competition, not for any conceivable thing that you might imagine, but for the sake of cooking, I shall cook! Damn the English sounds silly, how much better is cuisiner?

Cooked up Burnt Butter Biscuit recipe from Fulton on two occasions the other week: the first time I rolled the dough into balls, which were too big- how big's a walnut? I don't have any walnuts lying around how am i suposed to know how big a walnut is?- the recipe said roll into balls the size of a walnut, is that the size of a testicle?; the second time I did without the recipe and so by feel because I didn't think I had 4 oz. of butter- however much that is, the metric system is the only system for me, and it makes sense too- and I rolled the whole mixture flat into one big biscuit- this was tasty except i think if i had made several small bisuits they would have been even more satisfying being crunchier, never mind.

Tomorrow I'm baking another cake for another birthday, I think it will be rock cake!

Depression Birthday Cake Poem and other Musings

Cake was what I thought would be a nice present for a friend's birthday last Saturday, and indeed it was a nice idea. I mixed flour, water, sugar, fruit and spice for a cake that would provide plenty of cheer. I baked it to perfection, considered adding icing, and let it cool. A Depression cake it was, from the skill of some past mother, and when I presented it to the birthday-boy all he could do was drool.

Actually that's a lie, but I think I've written something that rhymes there? Even if the meter is off. No matter. In other news, my brother has gone. YAY! and oh!:(. But I think all those curries he was feeding us were rather bad for one's system. Nevertheless I've begun to start using the word "nevertheless" cause I think its a fun substitute for "however", however "however" has its merits. Oh and guess what, it hailed the other day so that it looked like snow on the ground, in Sydney!, in Spring! WOW! and it was so cold yesterday, yet so warm today. Weather make up your mind. Now what does this have to do with cake, well not much but I guess you could say its rather like yesterday was when the cake was being cooled and today was like it being cooked, so that the weather is in fact crazy, not me, and it's working in reverse. Are we in El Niño, or La Niña?

Banana dog desert and fiddling on the Internet

I have invented a new desert, maybe not, but I made it up on the spot, what I did was I made biscuit (cookie?) dough from one of the Margaret Fulton biscuit recipes - jam fingers - and then I wrapped a banana (several in fact) in the dough and put it in the oven for around 20 mins at a high temperature. The criticism I received for it was that it looked a bit odd, and wasn't terribly trés sophistiqué. My suggestion is that I cut the banana up and instead make some nice little sort of pie shape around the banana and then cook. Now in other news. And I thought I'd show a picture of some trees near my house:

Big Brothers

Well I cooked some snags on th bbq - nothing new - but i did cook eggs for th first time. You see my brother turned 21 today. But th thing about th eggs on th bbq is that i used rings to cook them in. So some of th rings were non-stick and others weren't. Luckily a trusty guest came and pushed th eggs out of th rings for me. I think that eggs are better cooked on stoves with pans. Damn that Merlin and his stupid sign - "th"!

Musings on a Winter's Day in Autumn

My brother has been cramping my cooking style in the kitchen recently with his little better than tinned boot-camp stews and more tasteless than manufactured tomato based pasta sauces, but what has been bothering me is life in general. Maybe its because its winter (its cold in Aus right now, while technically being Autumn [its not called fall - in Australia that's a verb!! and a noun, but still, Autumn, doesn't it have a nice ring to it?]), maybe its because I was clothslined a few days ago and was seen to have a "Marcia-style" nose, and puppy-dog eyes (due to the swelling), and was hence feeling like a 70's dog-man, however it could have been because some crazy woman just kept walking into me as I crossed the road, despite the fact that I made every effort to get out of her way, and ended up clipping my muscley shoulder (too bad for her), today, and hence therefore in conclusion, well make up your own minds, but I really just think we need to start cooking better food, using better ingredients, watching Iron Chef more often, creating an Iron Chef channel for cable (wouldn't help me I don't have cable, 80% of it's CRAP anyway), and generally life would get better for everyone; that crazy woman wouldn't be so peeved, and my brother would be inspired to learn some cooking skills to catch up with his peers. Hey some car just beeped its way past my house (in suburbia)! Dammit he obviously wanted a better dinner!

Plug-and-Play Robots

You have to click here

Flourless Cake

More on cakes: One of the best experimental cakes I've made thus far is flourless; it uses almond meal instead! I dunno off the top of my head how to make it but it's really tasty, and gluten-free, and you can make it just about everything free and it tastes super! I notice too that for some reason I now have more options when I post a message like: click here but I don't know if this means I can put other html up? let me try:
Yay! A different colour!.
Any way I'm also reading this famous book called Lolita- its pretty good.

Cake Base

So I've started baking cakes. I use a recipe for butter cake from a cooking book by Margaret Fulton; something along the lines of 1/4 cup butter with 3/4 castor sugar and vanilla essence creamed then add two eggs and beat then fold in 1 cup flour then 1/2 cup milk then another cup flour. Bake at around 160 celcius for 30 minutes.

What I've done successfully to change the taste, is to replace some of the flour with almond meal, and/or add some orange rind and juice- the extra liquid means a bit more flour or equivalent. Also food colouring is fun, plus you can use any type of essence like almond or peppermint - it doesn't have to be vanilla. This is a good cake to cook 'cause its really fast and really tasty and there's all sorts of different offspring from the mother recipe above.

Meringue

Made some meringue from the egg whites I didn't use in the lumpy custard... suuuugaaaar! Finished reading Crime and Punishment. Good book- I even said that out loud after I'd finished and then felt embarrassed that I had said it was a good book to myself out loud, also no one was around so I had no reason to but I did. Shows how much it must've been a good book. I've never thought about cooking with an axe until just now.

Lumpy Custard

Today I did a maths exam of three hours in the morning and history exam of 1.5 hours. That totals to 4.5 hours of exams for which there is no historical significance.

In other news I attempted to make French cream custard... it was lumpy, so I'll have to work on that before I have any original tips.

Banana Gems

Pancake mix- a thick one w/ lots of eggs, then you take little hunks of a banana dip them in the mix and put them in lots of oil on a pan on a stove. You have to move them around a bit but its all good in the end. YUM YUM.

Marsupials

Well I just cleaned up a half-eaten ring-tail possum. And it occurred to me that what was more gruesome was the thought of how gruesome the half eaten possum would be to clean up than the actual reality of cleaning it up; it was easy. In fact it was very interesting. I think the possum had been killed the other night by a wild cat, so it was still fresh; great looking meat. Now that is an interesting cooking point- marsupials. The best marsupial meat is from a kangaroo, it's just like beef steak but better in some respects. If you're going to be BBQ'ing, Kangaroo turns out with a much better texture than beef. Also, for that special feast you were planning, whole 'roos thrown in a fiery pit are great. Perfect for weddings and birthdays.

Chicken Parmigiana

This is seriously the best of the best when it comes to not wanting to cook something terribly hard but still not something too boring. DO NOT under any circumstances use chicken breast, ALWAYS use thigh. This leads to a much juicier tastier meal. OK, so first you cook the thigh on one side, then you flip it over and put the cheese on, Mozzarella of course. Then pour Parmigiana sauce onto each bit of chicken. Let the chicken cook a while longer until you are pretty sure it's nearly cooked all the way through. THEN, you turn the heat down and put a lid over your saucepan and let it simmer. What happens is the cheese melts properly, the sauce becomes infused with all the chicken juices, the chicken with the sauce, to some extent, and there you have it. Also anything left over in the pan should be put on a side dish of pasta, tastes great. YUM!

Pancakes

To make the perfect pancake there is no strict recipe! However you do need to have an idea of what the pancake is going to be used for. I make two types of pancakes; sweet and savoury. Sweet has sugar in it savoury doesn't. Basically, if your making pancakes for four people you use four eggs, and so on. The you add plain flour, milk and sugar until the mixture is sufficiently thick. When I make breakfast pancakes I like to have a thin mixture because it spreads out all over the pan. When I make say, entrée pancakes, I like to have a thick mixture so that the pancake has some height. In both cases they have different textures because of the thickness that the mixture has. When it comes to cooking the pancakes, I fiddle around with the temperature until I get the type of pancake colour that I feel for the day. Sometimes I like them browned, so lots of heat, sometimes I like them blonde, so a bit less heat and maybe even more than two flips per pancake.