Fish with Star Anise (I Think I Made a Moon-Rock)

They say a cook should never blame their tools when things go wrong.

They don’t say you should never blame your husband though.

Tonight’s dinner was meant to be a nod to his healthy eating. Maybe not the rice part, or the half cup of brown sugar. But certainly the fish part was meant to be healthy.

It's safe to say that mine did NOT end up looking like this (image courtesy Jason Thomas)

Snapper fillets are lightly dusted with cornflour, pan-fried and then steamed in a fragrant sauce made with sesame oil, garlic, ginger, brown sugar, soy sauce, five spice and star anise.

The recipe promised a sticky sweet sauce.

I left my husband in charge and what we ended up with was a burnt disk of aniseed caramel. Except even that sounds so much nicer than it actually was.

It solidfied to the density of a volcanic moon-rock and smelled AWFUL

It’s not really his fault. I had been dragging my feet, as I am wont to do at the end of the weekend. I didn’t really feel like cooking so when he started getting the ingredients out and began mixing the sauce, I was hardly inclined to step in and take over.

I did remember that according to the rules of the Project I was meant to be making the recipes. But I made the damn rules so I feel justified in breaking them. As long as I am present in the room when the recipe is being made, then surely that must count.

He put the sauce on to reduce as I tended to a one year old with a broken leg, a three year old with a grazed knee and a five year old with a sore foot that "was probably broken and so Daddy must X-ray it and make me a cast."

Uh. No.

At this point I realised I had neglected to mention to him that I had only bought half as much fish as the recipe required, therefore the sauce he was simmering was twice as much as we needed. He didn’t dignify my declaration with a response.

The sauce is bubbling merrily away while the kids complain loudly in the background

The sauce had reduced to a thin syrup and was smelling pretty good. At this point he put the fish into the pan, seared it quickly, tipped the sauce in, and turned down the heat.

Except he didn’t turn down the heat.

He turned it up full and began boiling the fish into the same sticky black consistency they make roads with.

What do you mean it doesn't look like the picture in the book?

"The burning smell is just caramelisation," he told me.

"I think it’s just a burning smell," I told him, taking the lid off.

We stared into the pan at our $30 a kilo fish. As soon as the lid came off the syrupy sauce which had been bubbling away merrily only moments before, suddenly began to solidify.

"Quick, grab a bowl and line it with paper towel," he hissed at me. He is remarkably good in a crisis.

We took the fish out and began scraping the sludge out of the pan into the bowl. It was hardening so quickly the spoon almost stuck to pot, and long shards of black savoury sugar set as I tried to scrape it onto the paper towel.

Luckily the stir fried vegetables with pine nuts he had made as a side (and had been tending to lovingly while he was wilfully neglecting the fish) was both delicious and not burned.

Now fish is supposed to flake. It is supposed to melt in the mouth.

I had to get a steak knife for mine. It was a little tough.

This is not the first time this has happened.

My thoughts:

I imagine in the hands of someone more competent with fish than we, this would be a beautiful dish.

Today was not that day.

Szechuan Duck with Mango Salsa (I Could be on MasterChef with this One)

When I was presented with the opportunity to have a practically kid-free Saturday night, I knew I wanted to cook something a little bit special. Our baby is 10 months and at that horrible screaming-in-public-stage, so going out for dinner wasn’t an option. I wanted to try something new, but also appropriate for the 40 degree day. Duck with mango salsa seemed to fit the bill.

The image from the book is basically food porn it is so beautiful (courtesy Jason Thomas)

Duck breasts are rubbed with a mixture of crushed Szechuan peppercorns, cinnamon and five spice, and after being pan-fried and oven-baked, served with a salsa of mangoes, pawpaw, cucumber, red onion which is dressed with mint, chilli, sesame oil, ginger and sherry vinegar.

You need to poke your breasts before rubbing them

 

My first problem arose when I had a panic attack in the middle of Woolies. My shopping list was so long it went over both sides of my paper, and I hadn’t clearly marked what ingredients were for my duck dinner, and what was for the salads I had planned on making for a BBQ later in the week. The trolley was overflowing, the shop was overflowing and all I wanted was to escape.

I made a few bad calls, and forgot two of the ingredients. Oh well. I never follow a recipe properly anyway.

The salsa is fabulous on its own

 

My next problem was when I started cooking, I didn’t read the recipe from start to finish. I skipped to the bit that told me how to make the salsa, thinking that it would need to ‘brew’ for a while as the duck was cooking. Pity I didn’t read the bit about the duck needing to sit out of the fridge for an hour before being cooked.

Sidenote: always read the entire recipe before you start.

At this point I needed a drink

When I mentioned this to my husband, he gave me a look that clearly told me he thought I was an idiot. However what he said was simply: ‘I’m not going to say anything.’

He is much more restrained than me: I always tell him off for not reading the recipe.

This is one salad I enjoy eating, maybe because it's full of fruit

I started by dicing the mango, pawpaw, cucumber and red onion. I’m not a fan of raw onion, even red, so I only used about 2 tablespoons in total. I also added a handful of tiny red tomatoes from the garden and a sprig of coriander, because I love coriander. I had forgotten to buy the chilli, but I figure I don’t need any extra heat in the kitchen when it is 40 degrees outside.

By the time I had read the recipe and realised I was meant to rub the spices into the duck and let it rest for an hour before cooking, it was already close to our dinner time (even the absence of the kids doesn’t mean we eat late).

I mixed 2/3 of a tablespoon of Szechuan seasons [perhaps my greatest culinary faux pas tonight, as my local Woolies didn’t stock Szechuan peppercorns as the recipe required], and ½ teaspoon each of salt, cinnamon and Chinese five spice.

I rubbed it on the breasts, not feeling remotely giggly. Three kids will do that to you.

 

My breasts got a serious tan

I was getting the hurry up from the gallery so it only sat for a short while before panfrying in a hot pan for two minutes each side. I panicked for a minute when I realised the recipe didn’t say whether or not to put oil in the pan. You always put oil in the pan, right? My husband pointed out duck skin is extremely fatty, so I decided to follow the recipe and didn’t oil the pan. It smoked like the Marlborough man and I needed to put the exhaust fan on, and when I shook the pan there were little bursts of flame. I felt like I was on Masterchef.

Then it went into the oven (180C) for 11 minutes. The recipe said 10-15 minutes. My rather small breasts probably only needed 10 minutes, as even though they were still juicy after resting for ten minutes, they weren’t pink. Aren’t breasts meant to be pink?

Dinner was served and it looked fantastic. I also dished up a side of asparagus. There was a moment of awkwardness about whether or not to eat the skin. After all, that was the part with all the spice and flavour, but a few dreary comments from my husband about cholesterol quickly put a stop to any enjoyment I might have had eating the skin.

C'mon, it's just like the book! Winner

In the end it was a successful meal, despite forgetting some of the primary ingredients (we both agreed that the chilli would have helped). Duck is very filling, even when you leave the delicious, tasty skin and fat on the plate. I still managed to find room for dessert though.

My thoughts

Because you can prepare a lot of it in advance, this recipe would be great for a dinner party. It looks spectacular and tastes fresh and zingy. It’s not cheap though, the breasts cost about $7 each and mangoes and pawpaw are not the cheapest fruit in the fruit bowl.

It’s worth it though, for a special occasion. Such as the kids having a sleepover at Grandma’s.

Ginger Cake (The Schmuck with the 20 Bucks)

This is a big cake. A celebration cake. I had originally intended to make it for my mum for her birthday, but then I got carried away by a 12 course degustation, and everyone knows big cakes have no place in the tiny world of degustation.

It has inner beauty (photo courtesy Jason Thomas)

So I’m not quite sure how I ended up making it not with the intention to eat it, but to donate it to the school cake stall.

My beautiful celebration cake. At a cake stall. State election. Whoopy doo.

Part of me thinks that beautiful cakes belong on the cake stall. Who has ever rocked up to their local school, clutching a handful of cash and then stared at a trestle table of packet cakes and plainly iced butter cakes. It makes you sad.

Luckily I had three half-empty bottles of golden syrup in the cupboard

Before I had kids, I used to love election day, not because I particularly liked voting, but I always knew the local school would have a cake stall. But before I had kids, looking at a box of cupcakes that had obviously been decorated by a six year old used to make me shudder.

Now I have kids I still love election day for the cake stall, except now I have to work on the damn cake stall, and I’m not so traumatised about a cake decorated by a child. Let’s be honest, they’re a lot more generous with the lollies than we are.

But it’s always nice to find a special cake on election day, and I think this one meets the mark.

Golden syrup and brown sugar. Eggs and flour. Ginger and cinnamon. That’s pretty much it.

The recipe book describes it as fudgy and best baked the day before to let the flavours develop. Sounded perfect to me.

Because I needed the oven for dinner I thought I would make the cake after lunch. I thought there would be plenty of time before heading to school to collect my eldest.

I took my time.

I stopped to play with the baby.

I stopped to help dress a Barbie doll.

I stopped to check my email.

I didn’t read the recipe properly. Again.

That 40-50 minutes baking time, on closer inspection actually said 80 to 90 minutes cooking time. Almost an entire hour extra.

Crap.

It came out of the oven just as the school bell rang

 Making it was simple enough, except for the fact it was such a big cake, my largest tin proved a bit inadequate and the cake began overflowing the tin.

A generous layer of lemon icing fixed that, and I must admit I was quite impressed with the finished result. It was a pity I wouldn’t get to try it though. I bundled it in to a box and put it under the pram for the walk to school.

Cake box stylishly decorated by Miss Five

The Awesome Grandparents were joining us. On arrival at the cake stall I handed over my box, it was opened and perused and $20 written on the lid in big black texta.  Twenty bucks? It was a stupendous cake but what schmuck was going to pay twenty bucks for it at a school cake stall?

Turns out that schmuck was me. My mother-in-law who hadn’t previously seen the cake at home, wandered past and stopped in front of my cake. ‘That one!,’ she said to the lady manning the stall.  She opened her purse to discover she didn’t have enough cash. Fair enough, who expects to spend 20 bucks at a school cake stall?

So I fished through my wallet and pulled out a twenty and handed it over. 

My cake went back under the pram and I wheeled it home again.

My thoughts

Don't try and hide a sunken middle by filling it with icing. It doesn't work

 

This was a lovely moist cake, although it probably could have spent ten minutes less in the oven and been happier for it.  It is more of a spice cake than just a ginger cake, but it would be delicious with a spiced cream or a cinnamon icecream.

Worth the $20. And it goes to a good cause.

Slow Cooked Lamb (Another Disaster)

It looked so pretty in the photo. Juicy, still pink. A leg of lamb, flavoured with lemon and herbs and garlic and slow cooked in the oven for five hours.

This is what it was meant to look like (image courtesy Jason Thomas)

 

And before I put mine in the oven, it didn’t look too bad either.

Well, it looked like it had potential

But then I cooked it and this is what happened.

Ummmm, yum?

‘What happened to the chicken, Mummy?’ asked my three year old (we call all meat chicken, because they’re more likely to actually eat it).

‘Nothing happened to the chicken,’ I snapped. ‘It’s meant to look like this. Caramelised…’ I muttered.

‘Sure it is,’ said my husband. ‘Needs gravy.’

He was right.

The outside with the lemon and oregano and fennel seeds tasted great. It was just the inside bit that wasn’t. I had overcooked it: how un-Australian.

Lamb is NOT meant to be brown all over

 

My thoughts:

Now I need a recipe to use up half a leg of slightly overcooked lamb… any thoughts?

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.

Braised Pork with Onion Marmalade (A Home Run… in nine hours)

‘Would you call this golden?’ I asked my husband at the forty-five minute mark.

He peered into my frypan. ‘Not even close,’ he replied.

The onion marmalade was refusing to colour-up

 

It was T minus 20 hours and I had already been cooking for an hour. My youngest daughter was having her 1^st birthday party, and since it would be last ever first birthday in our household, it felt only right to celebrate in style.

Braised Pork with Onion Marmalade (aka Pulled pork rolls) was one of those recipes I had been aching to try. However, since it needed a 3kg hunk of pig and a full day to prepare, it wasn’t something you did at the last minute.

 

From the book (image courtesy Jason Thomas)

 

So the night before the party I started the onion marmalade, which was basically a kilo of onions, finely sliced, butter, olive oil and cider vinegar. I admit I also added a good fistful of brown sugar because I was erring on the side of Onion Jam.

It took me a fair while to finely slice the onions. It made me very sad.

Yes, I must be ridiculously confident (or stupid) to put such an awful picture on the internet... but those onions made me CRY

But after an hour of sweating (the onions, not me) and caramelising, the damn things still weren’t golden. So I pulled my trademark cooking move, and ignored them. I disappeared off and began the spice rub for my pork and when I remembered the onions some time later, not only had they caramelised, but somehow (luckily) they hadn’t even burned.

The braised pork takes almost nine hours to cook at a low temperature (120C), and has to dry marinade overnight. The thing I liked about the spice rub, is that more than half of it consists of brown sugar. Plus cumin, thyme, fennel, garlic and pepper.

This is the before picture

I got personal with the pig and rubbed it all over before putting it in my beautiful red Le Creuset baking dish and bunging it in the fridge.

It was about quarter to five the next morning that I had the following thought process.

“I need to get up and pork the pork in the oven. Nine hours to cook, man that’s a lot of gas. Oven. Need to make those four dozen cupcakes as well. If I start the pork at 5am then it should be done by 2pm and give me time to shred it before guests arrive at 3pm. Oven. Cupcakes. Pork."

Oh crap.

I couldn’t cook the pork in the oven at 120C for nine hours if I also needed to cook ten thousand cupcakes at 200C. Why was I only figuring this out now, on the morning of the party?

Luckily I had made pulled pork before (but an inferior recipe that called for a bottle of BBQ sauce to be dumped on top), and I had used the slow cooker. Easy fix. Except the other recipe was obviously so inferior I had chucked it out and wasn’t quite sure how long to cook it for, and whether the instructions for the oven were translatable to a slow cooker.

I guess I was going to find out.

So there I was at 5 in the morning banging around getting the slow cooker out and whipping up the cooking sauce, which had a host of flavours including more brown sugar (yay), Tabasco, soy, tomato paste, mustard, ginger and garlic. It also called for dry cider, which I didn’t have, so I opened a beer.

It was very very early

In case you’re wondering I didn’t drink the rest of it then (it was 5am!) but I did drink it later that afternoon. And yes, it had gone flat.

The pork happily cooked away all day. It made the house smell delicious.

I sit and wonder why-oh-why-oh-why-oh-why

Then, in front of Grease which was fortuitously playing on the TV, I got my forks and began shredding the tender meat. I drizzled a fair portion of the cooking sauce over it, and put it in the oven to stay warm.

When my guests arrived I took great pleasure in lifting the lid on the pork and showing them my onions. It was pretty saucy.

 

I made dozens of rolls, lacing them liberally with the onion marmalade and took them round on a big pink tray like the old-time cigar girls. The only person to refuse my rolls was a vegetarian but I think even she was almost convinced.

My thoughts:

The recipe book says this is a special recipe for a late night party, and it certainly would be. Unlike my 3pm kids’ party time, if you had a late night party you wouldn’t need to get out of bed at 5am to start cooking.

Of course, if you’re the sort of person who is having late night parties, you probably don’t even know what 5am is. Half your luck.

 

If you have any questions or would like to know more about this recipe please contact me at frommumtome@hotmail.com

 

 

Bouillabaisse en Papillote (aka Fish Stew in Paper)

Look at the two titles above. One looks tempting, fancy, you might see it on a menu in a classy restaurant. The other looks… ordinary.

I started out with the intentions of one, and wound up with the reality of the other.

The image from the book doesn't actually show the finished product... although that is one very nicely tied bow (image courtesy Jason Thomas)

It was my mum’s significant birthday, worthy of celebrating with a completely over-the-top thirteen course dinner. I am not an athletic person, I can’t run marathons or participate in grand finals. I’m not very musical. I drive a seven-seater beast with bird crap on the windows. I am not fashion model and I have fuzzy hair. If I can’t show off in the kitchen, there is pretty much nowhere I can show off.

I decided to show off with this.

Yes, I even laminated the menu. Show off.

 

I can’t take credit for all thirteen courses. The last five are courtesy of my sister who was on dessert and kids duties. The kids got little red sausages and ravioli and we ate bouillabaisse en papillote.

Actually, we had fish stew.

Actually we had giant-baby-octopus-stew-with-a-sliver-of-fish-stew. Nummy.

The recipe calls for an assortment of goodies from the sea: mussels, prawns, scallops, squid rings, baby octopus and pink snapper. This is baked in tomato sugo and white wine and flavoured with garlic, chilli and fresh herbs.

But this was going to be the final savoury course and I didn’t want my guests to be overwhelmed by the cast of Finding Nemo and The Little Mermaid having a party on their plate, so when I went to the fishmonger to buy my ingredients I began making a few changes to the recipe.

The first to go were the scallops, based on the fact I was already dishing them up with the chilled avocado soup.

My soup was a huge success

 

Next to be deleted were the mussels because Mum doesn’t like them and I figured if it was her birthday, there was no point serving up things she doesn’t like.

The Boatshed (I drool just thinking about that place) doesn’t ‘do’ squid rings but they did have some extraordinary baby octopus. It wasn’t until I got home and unwrapped my packages that I discovered that my babies were more like tweenies. Oh well.

Ooo la la, I'm feeling so French today

Deluding myself I was on a cooking show, I cut all my ingredients and put them in little bowls. Mise en plus, I believe is the technical term. See. I know stuff.

Looking at my show-offy menu I realised there weren’t many vegetables on offer. In fact, it was going to be a meat-fest, so in a half-hearted attempt to be balanced I added some zucchini and leek rings to my packaged.

So began the laborious job of making eight parcels of double-layered alfoil lined with baking paper, then layering the ingredients inside, before tying with twine.

Yes, I think that is an octopus tentacle pressed against the paper

There were two good things about this process. The first was that all the prep could be done well in advance of my dinner party. No last minute stressing (except for the bit when I forgot to actually put them in the oven, but we’ll ignore that).

The second was that each parcel needed only a tablespoon of white wine, which meant the majority of the bottle was left over for me to drink as I cooked.

It looks like the cast of Alien

I had bought enough king prawns for each guest to have two each, but considering they were almost large enough to be legally considered a crayfish, I decided to just put one in each package. So in the end each package had one giant prawn, one even gianter so-called baby octopus and a three unforgivably small pieces of fish. It was a bit of a let down.

Because my quantities were significantly less than the recipe suggested, the cooking time then became my biggest concern. Not much fish… but there were 8 parcels. What to do?

In the end it was irrelevant because the timer on the oven stuffed up and who knows how long they cooked for. ‘Too long’ was the general consensus.

My thoughts:

These were a pretty awesome dinner party offering, as they were posh-as, easy to prepare and you could do it all in advance. Some crusty sour-dough and real butter were all we needed to soak up the juices. I didn’t even bother with fancy dishes, I just served it up in all its alfoily glory.

But, they deserved to be on a main-stage (with a full complement of ingredients) rather than bringing up the rear of eight other (highly successful) courses with less than half of the recommended ingredients.

So, fish stew. How about you?