Friday 20 July 2012

In the kitchen - Round-up 13-19 July

Darren thinks that I am confused about whether I'm a craft blogger or a food blogger. He's probably right. I'm a me blogger.

What did we cook this week?

On Friday 13th July (ooooh), I had chicken thigh out, so I made ga xao gung (stir-fried ginger chicken) from Luke Nguyen's 'The Songs of Sapa'. I like vegetables and find that most recipes don't have a large vegetable component, so I always add in at least three different veggies. Tonight I added julienne carrot, Chinese broccoli, sliced bamboo shoots, sliced water chestnuts, and baby sweet corn and served on udon noodles. Miss 1 roused herself enough to eat three baby corns and some noodles - yay!

Saturday 14th we had an excess of fruit, since Miss 1 didn't eat any this week, so I juiced some of the extra pears, nashis, apples, kiwifruits and carrots (mmm) and pureed some more for breakfasts. Darren made banana bread from 'The Essential Baking Cookbook' - he's been hanging out for extra bananas.


Banana bread


For dinner, Darren made hamburgers and got all the girls and took 'em out to dinner and gave 'em all a whirl... His hamburgers are mince meat, with carrot, bread, egg and maybe some herbs (? I'm actually making this up - I make my hamburgers differently to Darren and wasn't paying attention when he did it), and he cooked some onion and eggs and chips and made sweet chili mayo to go with them. I sliced up tomato, cucumber and red capsicum and grated carrot. We had the whole lot in damper. Filling!

On Sunday 15th, Miss 1 had finally decided that food was a good idea after all. She ate breakfast, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea and dinner! Hurrah! Dinner was swordfish stir-fry from Roger Berkowitz and Jane Doerfer's 'The New Legal Sea Foods Cookbook' (I was in Boston for work in 2009 and went to Legal Sea Foods. It was great and I was happily full of lobster. I bought the cookbook home for Darren as a souvenir). Darren used flake instead of swordfish, omitted the snow peas and cabbage and sambal oelek, and added red capsicum and garlic chives. It was yum.


Flake stir-fry.


On Monday night I made cauliflower soup for Tuesday 17th's dinner. Years ago Darren and I were watching something on TV (Burke's Backyard?) and saw someone make cauliflower soup and thought "that looks nice". A few days later we tried to remember what they did and came up with this.


Butter
Whole head of cauliflower, broken into flowers
2 medium sized onions, chopped
Ginger, finely grated
Garlic, crushed
[2 teaspoons curry powder, which I didn't use tonight, because we didn't have any]
2 cups vegetable stock
2 cups milk

Melt  butter in a large saucepan. Add the onion, ginger and garlic and saute until soft. Add cauliflower and stock. [Add curry powder.] Boil until cauliflower is soft, stirring occasionally. Put mixture into the blender, then return to the saucepan. Add milk and heat until warm.

Darren also made berry and apple slice (minus the berries) from 'Sweet Food', but the middle didn't cook very well.

On Wednesday 18th I made pizza, using pre-made pizza bases, with a tomato and pesto sauce, grated cheese, ham, salami, mushroom, tomato, red capsicum, capers and roquet. Miss 1 had her appetite back and appeared to be making up for lost time, by eating even more than usual.

Thursday 19th was a roast lamb. It was a pre-marinated butterflied lamb leg in garlic and herbs, and I roasted potatoes, pumpkin, zucchini and mushrooms with it, and then added steamed sweet corn as well. The corn was really sweet, the lamb cooked just right, and the potatoes crispy on the outside. Yum.

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