BBQ Sauce (How to tart things up)

My folks are keen travellers. A less charitable person might say they are madly spending all our inheritance, but I have a grudging respect for their worldliness. Very grudging sometimes, on this next trip they will be missing Dad’s 65^th, Mothers’ Day and my daughter’s 6^th birthday.

So, two days before they embark on their next big adventure we decided we would meet in the park for a picnic with my sister and her kids.

Picnic food. Hmmm.

I decided that meatballs would be a sufficiently finger friendly food to bring along. I threw some things in the bowl, but when I tasted one after they were cooked I was less than impressed.

These need some serious tarting up, I thought.

The BBQ sauce, image courtesy Jason Thomas

It was then I remember a recipe for BBQ sauce in the cookbook. Its subtitle was that it could be used to ‘dress up dishes that might otherwise be dull.’

My meatballs had dull written all over them. I needed this BBQ sauce.

Turns out BBQ sauce is onions, apple and tomato with a bit of butter and brown sugar for luck. It was easy to make, and even though the dire state of my pantry meant I used tinned tomatoes with basil&oregeno instead of the required passata, and I omitted the chilli because my kids would freak out…

[‘Ahhhhh no, we can’t eat chilli, we might burn up and diiieeee’]

 

Bung it all in a pot. Easy as

 

…the resultant sauce was quite tasty.

… so tasty in fact that I gave the leftovers to my sister (after she gave some subtle hints about how fantastic it was).

I made two jars... so I didn't mind giving one away

 

My thoughts

One of the things I love about my family is that they always make an effort when it comes to food. Sure, there are nights when we pull stuff out of a box or tin, but for big family events (or even small family events) you can see that dishes are made from scratch and with love.  

Cooking for each other is how we show our love: planning a menu, taking the time to make special dishes. We have got to the stage in our lives that we don’t really buy gifts anymore, but it’s not uncommon to make a multiple course dinner. A degustation if you will.

More food=more love.

 

Happy birthday Dad and Happy Mothers’ Day Mum xxxx

 

Mum and Dad on their wedding day, 1971



Beetroot and Orange Salad (Old Dogs Can Learn New tricks)

Making this dish probably signified a point of growth in my ability as a cook, a maturity perhaps.

It’s not that the dish was particularly hard or technical: it’s a salad - you chop things up.

No, it marked the day that I actually thought about consequences of what I was about to do, and took action to prevent the inevitable. In other words – I wore gloves.

You should always keep some gloves in the bedroom, um kitchen. You never know what you will need them for

Back step a few years to Christmas 2011. I had just bought Julie Goodwin’s second cookbook, even better than her first, because it felt like something my family would have put together, except with some fancy bits and bobs thrown in. I had rather grandly decided to make pots of chutneys and jam for family and friends and she had a tasty looking recipe for chilli ginger jam (try it, it’s awesome).

As I was making massive quantities of this jam I had bought dozens of red chillies.

And I started chopping.

With no gloves.

I didn’t really notice anything at first, but then after I had my hands in the oven numerous times and began handling the roasted capsicums, my hands started burning. Like they had been touched by the devil himself.

For two days my hands scorched. I couldn’t touch the baby, I couldn’t rub my eyes. I could only sit there and tell myself ‘next time, wear gloves’.

I wonder who the first person who thought 'we should definitely eat that!' was

 

There is no chilli in this salad, but there is something even more cunning: fresh beetroot. This stuff stains like a… well, like a beetroot. Clothes, benches and particularly hands.

It looks like a bit like a scene from CSI

 

So, it was a simple matter of gloving up to wash the beetroot before wrapping them in foil and roasting them for an hour and a half. Then I double-gloved when it was time to rub the skins off. I make a lot of mistakes, but I certainly try not to repeat the same ones (more than once or twice).

Purple and green: colours of the feminist revolution

Did you know you can eat the leaves of the beetroot plant? Well now you do. Together with some baby rocket, I threw the beetroot leaves in a bowl, added the chopped beetroots, some roasted red onion and segments of orange. Over the top I crumbled feta and tossed some roughly chopped pecans.

The dressing was a tasty combination of seeded mustard, honey, balsamic vinegar and EVOO.

This is the finished product, pretty awesome looking

I made it in advance so by the time we ate it, the feta had been stained pink by the beetroot, but considering it was a BBQ with seven little girls (and one lonely lad) it seemed only fitting.

Not that any of the kids would deign to eat it though. OMG ‘Nuts!’ run screaming for the hills, girls.

My thoughts

After three successes with salads, I am considering changing my opinion to ‘you can make friends with salad’.

As long as there isn’t too much of that leafy stuff.

Mixed Capsicum and Chickpea Salad (An Ode to my Mother’s Group)

About five and three quarter years ago, when my eldest daughter was barely three weeks old I was told by the local child health nurse I should join a mothers group.

Don't believe everything you think when you are pregnant.... you are often very misguided or deluded

Ughh, I thought. A group of women constantly complaining, or worse still, bragging about their children. No thanks, I said.  I have plenty of friends.

The nurse, clearly much wiser than me, said ‘but do they have children the same age as yours? They will be a great comfort to you in the years ahead’

So I fronted up to the first meeting, and came upon a mixed bag of women, with different lives, different birth experiences and different histories. Yet we all came together with one thing in common, our babies.

The original salad (photo courtesy Jason Thomas)

Six years later, as those babies are entering Year One, and as we have welcome almost fifteen more children into our group, said goodbye to five families and welcomed one more, our group is still intact despite the different experiences, the different parenting styles and the different plans for the future.

Tonight we farewelled another family, destined for the red dirt of the far north and as I trawled through ‘Essence’ for a salad to bring to the group BBQ I decided on a mixed capsicum and chickpea salad.

This is how mine turned out, perhaps I overdid the dressing. Don't care, it was really tasty

Like my initial reaction to the idea of a mothers group, I wasn’t sold on the idea. My dislike of capsicum is a matter of public record and chickpeas reek of ‘healthy eating’. Yet, just like the group of women (and husbands and children) the salad fell together easily and the flavours just worked.

Sometimes it’s nice to be proved wrong.

The salad brings together capsicum (red, green, yellow), tinned chickpeas and fresh coriander and mint. I threw in a bag of pine nuts for good measure. The dressing is what makes it work – a mix of hummus, lemon juice, brown sugar and tahini.

My thoughts

Sometimes you need to just give something a go. Sometimes your initial reaction is wrong, and what you think might be awful, might actually end up changing your life.

Of course, I’m talking about my mum’s group. The salad, though pretty damn tasty, probably won’t change my life.

The dressing might though… I’m going to pinch it for other salads, and I bet it tastes great on steamed asparagus and green beans.

 

 

If you want to find out more about this recipe or have any questions, contact me on frommumtome(at)hotmail.com

Coriander and Mint Relish (The Big Easy)

It was curry night and I didn’t even need to make a curry. Someone else was bringing it. Awesome. I probably could have got away with some basmati rice and shop bought pappadums, but that’s really not my style. Going completely over the top and over-catering is more my style.

This is the relish from the book (photo by Jason Thomas)

The only problem with this dish was that I made it at about nine in the morning, so it meant I couldn’t have a glass of wine as I cooked. I had a cup of coffee instead.

Apart from the obvious coriander and mint, the special thing about this relish is that it is made with toasted coconut and spices. It make it into a very substantial relish, practically a meal unto itself.

And this is mine. The chilli sticking out of it is purely for food-bling, I'm too much of a girl to add real heat.

I heated the oil, added the spices, coconut and sugar and cooked until the coconut went a lovely pale brown. The recipe warns that you must watch it constantly because the coconut burns easily.

I do have a tendency to get distracted in the kitchen, so while I was tossing my ‘nuts, I pretended I didn’t hear the baby screaming, and ignored the fact that the three year old had fallen off the couch. It could wait.

There was more of this toasted coconut, sugar and spice mix, but I ate it

I tend to double any spice quantities in any recipe (except chilli, which I halved in this one) and I admit to playing loose and fast with exact quantities in general. However, I would strongly advise against using more mint sauce and lemon juice than the recipe suggests, as I did, and it ended up a bit waterlogged.

I've never used onion flakes before, and now I am not sure what to do with the rest of the jar. Suggestions anyone?

Once the spicy coconut mixed had cooled, it went in the food processor with all the other ingredients until everything was all whizzed up and finely chopped.

Mint tends to overpower things, which is why it’s the flavour of toothpaste I suppose. The expectations are rather high, so remember this when it is up against another herb in a recipe. This recipe uses half as much mint as coriander, and I probably should have thought about this a bit more before playing the ‘oh whatever, chuck it in’ game with the herbs.

Looks like Christmas, tastes like summer

My thoughts:

Usually I only tend to follow baking recipes strictly, otherwise cakes never rise, biscuits end up the size of dinner plates and muffins can be used as shot puts. With savoury dishes I tend to use the recipe more as a guideline, rather than a rule (a la Pirates of the Caribbean).
THIS IS NOT ONE OF THOSE DISHES

In my humble opinion, this is one of the few savoury dishes where you should actually follow the recipe to the letter. Don’t muck around with the quantities, and if it says ‘watch the pan’, then for heaven sakes, watch the pan.


Please contact me if you have any questions or would like to find more out about the recipe.

Brown Rice, Lentil and Feta Salad (A battle between good and evil)

This was always going to be a toughie. A salad made with some of my least favourite and most favourite ingredients: capsicum, brown rice and lentils being the least favourite, fresh herb, feta, rocket and pine nuts being some of the favourites.

I could hear Homer Simpson singing ‘you don’t make friends with salad’. So I guess it was a good thing that the dozen or so people I had coming to my BBQ were already friends, because I suspected I wasn’t going to love this salad very much, and so I needed to share the love, if you get my meaning (cough: no leftovers please).

Guess whether this is the photo from the cookbook or the real thing?

Now capsicum is one of my least favourite vegetables. I couldn’t tell you why, but there you go. Cold rice is also a big bleugh in my books. Lentils, unless cooked with lots of Indian spices and a bucketload of coconut milk also don’t rate very highly in my kitchen. When I saw this recipe, I knew it would have to be made for a large group of ‘other’ people (not least because it makes about twenty cups of salad).

I had already been to the shops to look for Camellia tea oil (for the dressing) with no joy. I could have got sesame oil, grapeseed oil, avocado oil, macadamia oil, peanut oil and about ten thousand varieties of olive oil, but no camellia tea oil.

So I Googled it.

Turns out its (other) most common use is to lubricate woodworking tools. Yum.

I took a punt and decided to substitute some good, old-fashioned EVOO.

Three colours uninspired

 

The recipe allows for tinned lentils to be used to save time. I also took the liberty of using some precooked rice a la Uncle Ben, figuring that it couldn’t possibly hurt, especially since I had no intention of actually eating it.

Did I just write that?

So I drained the lentils and threw them in a bowl with the rice (I just used the whole 450g packet), the chopped capsicum and the sultanas. My husband is a firm believer that fruit has no place in dinner*, so I didn’t hold much hope that he would help eat it either.

Here comes the conflict. The rest of the ingredients are some of my favourites: fresh herbs, feta, pine nuts, rocket. It was going to be a battle of good versus evil: could my love of these ingredients overrule my loathing of Cold-hearted Rice and the Red Yawn?

There was a mild panic that I had no lemons until I remembered I had a lemon tree in the back yard

 

I then chopped all the herbs and rocket, mixed it through the rice, chopped the feta, dumped a packet of pine nuts (minus the three handfuls I ate before they made it to the bowl) and then stopped in a mild panic.

I was going to need a bigger bowl.

It was about to escape the bowl and take over the kitchen

 

This recipe, supposedly serving six, was ENORMOUS. Six sumo wrestlers, perhaps.
I squeezed the lemon and added it to my counterfeit Camellia oil for a good shake-up. Can I just stop for a second and say that all those (predominantly male) TV chefs who use their fists to squeeze lemons claiming that juicers are just ‘a waste of kitchen space and one more thing to wash’ are just showing off.

A little Dutch courage at the prospect of eating cold rice

Dress the salad and bung it in the fridge for the flavours to absorb (or battle?) for an hour or so. I had every intention of pulling it out at least an hour before serving, because fridge cold rice is even more woeful than room-temperature rice.

Later that night…

I will admit, the salad looked quite pretty. The compliments came thick and fast and when I tasted it, not only did I swallow the salad, I also swallowed my words. It was awesome. I couldn’t taste the capsicum and the rice merely absorbed the flavours of the dressing. I did end up giving some away at the end of the night… but I made sure I kept some for my lunch the next day.

Adult 'goody bags'

My thoughts

Regardless of whether or not my friends actually liked the salad, I hope they are still my friends after reading that I basically used them as not only guinea pigs but that I deliberately fed them a salad I didn’t even think I would like.

*Funnily enough, one of the authors, Kristen Watts also is not a big fan of sultanas and her inside tip is to added finely diced apple instead.

Please contact me if you have any questions or would like to find more out about the recipe.