Leftovers. Both a blessing and a curse, they can be the most convenient thing in your fridge, or that tub of mystery meat that you don’t want to throw out but you’re absolutely tired of eating.
Enter pies: one tool in the modern cook’s arsenal to repurpose just about everything that you can throw in it. Just sandwich it between layers of puff pastry and call it a pie!
And what is that? Creamy cheese sauce? Why I think I will, thank you very much.
I think that it’s entirely appropriate that my first bowl of Man Soup was made by a man. I had a bad case of the cold, and was holed up under the covers feeling incredibly sorry for myself. I swear my life was flashing before my eyes, and I was absolutely starving, but wasn’t feeling up to cooking at all.
Enter the Man Soup – the modern man’s answer to sustenance, and bonus points if it’s made for a woman suffering from the man-cold!
I think I have food ADD. I love food, but I crave the variety. Maybe it’s from growing up in an Asian culture – once you have dinners that involve a smorgasbord of different platters from which you can pick, you’ll never truly go back to single plate dining.
But I digress.
Ever since the Beak and Sons launch I attended the other week, I had sausages sitting in my fridge, and really, we all know I don’t just eat them straight if I had a choice. =)
Inspired by one of the canapés we had that night, I decided scotch eggs were in order.
Winter is the season for noodle soups, and I don’t discriminate! From chicken noodle soups, to one-pot man soups, and everything in-between, noodle soups are the perfect all-in-one dish to soothe a cold and rejuvenate a tired body.
So why not expand your noodle soup horizons with this version of a Persian classic?
A basic red sauce is so versatile. Just tweaking aromatics and spices can turn it into a sauce from almost any culture. And it’s not only a culinary chameleon, it’s also freezer friendly!
So when I had a tub of red sauce defrosting in my fridge, I just knew that I had to do something different with it – I had already made lasagne and spaghetti bolognese, so what about meatballs?
Given that we had been eating a lot of pasta, I knew that I didn’t want to have meatballs over more pasta. So, inspired by the smells coming from the local bakery, we decided that meatball subs were in order!
In the words of Game of Thrones, winter is comingggggg.
And with the cold weather, comes the perfect occasion for stews and curries. And that, my friends, speaks to my comfort-carb-lovin’-self. So what better way to kick off the cold weather than to make a seafood curry?
Only one more week to go to Mothers’ Day!!!! Any celebration for women seem to involve breakfasts in bed – I know my dad and I have tried on and off over the years – and I was inspired by Cinco De Mayo (which is today! Happy Cinco de Mayo guys!) to share this mexican breakfast – Huevos Rancheros.
Winter weather puts me in the mood for noodles. There’s just something insanely comforting about soft silky noodles steeped in soup or a stew, soaking up all that beautiful flavour.
I absolutely fell in love with Tanoonmai’s Bangkok Steamed Noodles when I went the other day, but unfortunately, Chatswood isn’t right next door to me, and sometimes you gotta listen when that craving strikes!
So based on the description from the restaurant – pork and mushroom cooked in a soy based broth – I found this recipe for Moo Palo from Thai Food Master. Incredibly, this recipe works soooo well. I was a little worried at first since the broth didn’t look quite dark enough, but I’m happy to report that the longer it stews, the darker it gets, and the deeper the flavour.
Y’all know that I absolutely LOVE testing and posting up recipes on the blog, but I’m sure it’s not as obvious that each recipe that I put up goes through hours of research, testing, a myriad of different versions, and agonising decisions regarding how it should look.
I usually start with either a craving or ingredients that I have in my kitchen, and then do tons of research to try and find interesting things to create with it. Sometimes I try out a pre-written recipe to start off with, or sometimes I start throwing things together and go from there.
Well, once in a while, a recipe just doesn’t go quite right, or just plum doesn’t work out the way you want it to!
Recently, I had bought a whole bunch of brussels sprouts on special at the green grocers, but had some left over after using them as part of a roast. So what now?
I found this nice looking idea on Gourmet Traveller – a simple salad of shaved brussels sprouts, with toasted walnuts to add depth, parmesan to add flavour, and just lemon juice to dress it. Some versions of this recipe online also had olive oil to add moisture.
So of I went, to shred those tiny cabbage-looking sprouts. I do love a good slaw, in many variations, so I was similarly excited about this particular salad. After all, in my research, there were many who described it as a more delicate cabbage-y flavour.
Well, no matter what I did, this salad was dry, and had a somewhat astringent after-quality to it. Even adding olive oil didn’t do much in terms of lubrication. The brussels sprouts themselves had a light, peppery quality to it, similar to rocket, and that went quite well with the toasted walnuts and parmesan. But I couldn’t quite get around the texture issue. Adding more lemon juice made it super sour and seemed to accentuate the dry texture, and adding more parmesan just made it worse.
In all, it was a promising recipe, but didn’t quite work out.
How about you? Have you had any disappointing recipes that you couldn’t quite figure out?
Who doesn’t love fully loaded potato anything?! Roasted potatoes gives us such a beautiful, comforting, starchy base that it just begs to be loaded up with a myriad of toppings to add to the awesomeness!
Roasted potatoes can take many forms – you can have anything from the classic cut potatoes, the funky smashed chats for maximum crispy surface areas, to the fancy looking but very simple Hasselback potatoes!