Onion & Gorgonzola Tarts

Caremelise heaps of onion in butter - low heat pan - takes forever!
Place puff pastry in muffin tray holes.
Place onion in pastry.
Place slice of Gorgonzola on top.
Cook in oven to pastry requirements: this was 20 mins at 200 Celsius fan forced

Poached Egg, Oven baked Bacon, Swisse Brioche

Bouillabaisse

3 kgs of tomatoes- peeled
Champagne - two bottles
Fish and shellfish and other creatures of the sea (as much as can be fitted in- maybe 1 kilo of dory plus meat from other creatures like prawns and crab and squid)
Fry garlic and fish in olive oil with smokey paprika, szechuan pepper, and cayenne pepper. Add tomatoes and start to make ragout style base. This will take a while.
Once it needs some liquid add champagne.
At the very end add other creatures of the sea (as these should not take long to cook).

Chestnut Pie

I pressure cooked dried chestnuts with sugar syrup i.e. 1 water to half sugar. For maybe an hour?
I baked blind some pastry (I used packet pastry as I was in a rush to take this pie to a birthday BBQ- NEVER use packet pastry as it tastes like old cardboard) anyway.
Whizzed up the chestnuts and added some butter and three eggs whisked. (might have to let the mixture cool down before adding the eggs) and filled the pastry and chucked back in the oven for about 45 mins at 180.

Omlette Deluxe!

Eggs, plus, wait for it... you can't guess this: mascarpone! One of these a day and you'll be fighting fit! In the spirit of St. Patricks Day I added spinach.

Claires pistachio and white bean salad

Drain sun dried tomato strips and rinse the oil off them
Tear up basil leaves and double the amount of baby spinach
Drain and rinse brine from cannellini beans
Dice finely Spanish onion
Chop pistachio kernels (unsalted)
Throw all the above in a bowl dressed with favourite vinegar based dressing

Larb

Chillies
Ginger
Lemon grass
Garlic
Fry in peanut oil
Cook Chicken mince AND pork mince in the above
Squeeze lime juice into a bowl
Add a bit of fish sauce and sesame seed oil and whip with a fork into an emulsion
Add to meat
Shred Vietnamese mint and Thai basil and throw onto meat
Throw on coriander leaves, some desiccated peanuts, and bits of red onion

Macleay Street Salad

Just in time to ensure that 2011 isn't a no-post year.

Last night invented the following delicious salad:

olive oil in the bottom of the bowl;

emulsify some Worcestershire sauce into the oil (not too much);

throw in leafy greens and toss into the emulsion;

sliced pear;

baby bocconcini - tear each globule in half;

fresh baguette - tear off pieces;

ranch dressing over the top of the bread.

This salad is called the "Macleay Street Salad".

Pork Belly Baste

canola oil
touch of soy for salt
tumeric
cayenne
paprika
cinammon
honey
sweet vermouth

Josh's Soup

two large onions
three clove garlic
one large cauliflower
100 grams soft blue cheese
table spoon corn flower
litre of vegetable stock
Method:
onions
garlic
fry
cauliflower
fry until soft
corn flower
stir
litre of vegetable stock
simmer 30 mins
blue cheese
blend in pot
add cream to serve
eat with cheese on toast, otherwise no cheese and just buttered bread

College Curry

High Heat
Mustard seeds in oil - fry but don't burn
Meat (Chicken) - just before browned some tumeric
Cook some more
Touch of soy
Lower Heat
Touch of Sesame Oil
Any Vegetables That Need Frying e.g. Eggplant (I didn't use any) maybe bamboo shoots
**Crushed Pineapple out of a tin with juice**
Simmer some
Put on rice
Curry Paste (which usually takes coconut milk) - I used Green out of a bottle.
Mix up and simmer until Rice is almost ready
Chuck on top of meat your green vegetables and red capsicum and DO NOT mix them in. Put the lid on and steam for a bit. When ready to serve on rice mix up greens and red (green beans, corriander, ocra etc.) into meat.

More college cooking

any sauce-kinda meat, often a can of tuna for me - could be mince or chicken thigh/breast; just before browned in pan, layer with paprika, fry 'till browned; now add tomato paste and fry for a bit longer; then canned tomatoes, add some herbs fresh or otherwise, and simmer (i.e turn heat to lowest and chuck on the lid); cook up your favourite pasta then chuck it into the pan for a bit and stir; et voila!

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: