Braised beans. Take a 400g can of butter beans (drained), 400g can of tomatoes, 1 cup of chicken stock, two teaspoons of minced garlic, misc herbs to taste. Put them all in a saucepan or deep frying pan and simmer for about 45 minutes or until the tomato sauce has reduced by half and is nice and thick and stewy. About five minutes before you think it’s ready, stir in some baby spinach leaves. Serve with toast, or with bacon, mushrooms and a poached egg for an epic Sunday breakfast.
Quiche is one of those amazing foods where as long as you have a fridge full of dairy (eggs, cheese, milk), you can probably put it together using absolutely any perishable food you may have lying around. I guess how difficult it becomes is dependent on your ingredients, but usually it is fairly easy if not quick to do.
My most recent attempt at quiche was a victim of poor time management, however you don’t really need to go making up a base from scratch like I was hell bent on doing. If you’ve got a few sheets of short crust pastry in the fridge, awesome. If you don’t, plan a few hours ahead and make some because it really isn’t that difficult. If forethought isn’t your forte, ditch the pastry all together and make a fritatta.
To make the short crust pastry:
1 2/3 cups plain flour
125g unsalted butter, chilled, finely chopped
1 egg, chilled
(I bastardized taste.com.au’s recipe for this)
You’ll need some kind of mixer/food processor for this. If you have one, you can just cut the rubbing out all together, chuck your flour and butter in and process! Then add the egg until it comes together in a dough! But I didn’t so, I started off with the good old “Rubbing it in” method. I learnt this in Home Economics and I remember it making the joints of my thumbs hurt, but it works. So, start of with rubbing the butter into the flour between your thumbs and fingers.
Then, when the mixture looks yellow and NOT like coarse breadcrumbs (Man I always thought this description was a crock of shit). You’ll know it’s done when it gets solid if you compress it.
Then, attach your bowl to a mixer and add the egg. Mix ’til it all comes together. Then knead for a bit. Then roll it into a ball, wrap it in glad wrap and stick it in the fridge for at least two hours.
Now is the fun part! There was bacon and sweet potato and a bunch of cheese and some onion in this quiche. I beat up about 6 eggs with a little bit of milk. I chopped up the sweet potato into cubes and boiled them for five minutes then let them sit until I needed them. I fried up the bacon and onion and garlic until it was all crispy (but not the garlic, no one likes burnt garlic).
The pastry is completely unworkable when it is cold, so it needs to get back to room temperature in order for you to roll it out. Roll it out to about 1cm thick. Press it into a springform cake tin, make sure there aren’t any cracks for holes with the pastry that falls over the sides.
Then tip all of your cooked ingredients onto the pastry and spread them out evenly and pour the egg over the top. It should take about 45 minutes to an hour to cook at 180 degrees.
Enjoy! Even at 11pm!
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Just before Christmas, I was treated to the most perfectly cooked steak I have ever eaten in my whole life at a restaurant called The Deanery. I know, steak is fairly subjective. However, my father has been a butcher for nearly forty years. Sans most of my teenage years where my ultimate rebellion against my parents was to become vegetarian and even vegan, I have grown up eating the best cuts of meat available.
I am in two minds about sharing my secret restaurants. On one hand, especially in this case where I have pretty much bragged to anyone who will listen about this fantastic steak, I love to share. On the other hand, and such is the dilemma when your favourite restaurant gets reviewed in a mainstream broadsheet’s food lift out, you don’t want the experience ruined by any old prole with enough savvy to “Google” or ask yahoo for an answer.
It was someone’s sweet someteenth birthday this weekend just gone, and I took them out for delicious steak to celebrate.
The Deanery change their menu fairly regularly (well, regularly enough that the menu had changed at least once since I had visited the month before), and I was a bit fretful that my beloved filet steak in red wine jus was noticeably absent.
Firstly, sourdough style bread with fruity olive oil and perfectly tartsweet balsamic vinegar.
(please excuse the lack of focus)
The shucked to order oysters dressed in lemon and olive oil are a divine gift from the ocean gods.
Calamari, though cooked to perfection, looked a little bit sad and soggy in person. They were quite photogenic though. And delicious.
Then, two T Bone steaks the size of your head. I could not finish mine. It was cooked to perfect medium, the flesh falling off the bone. Served with a side of potatoes.
The Deanery have an impressive wine cellar to accompany their menu, however we stuck with beer from their small selection of local and imports.
For a classy establishment we still managed to pay less than $150 for two people including drinks and tips. An amazing restaurant.
The Deanery:
13 Bligh Place
Melbourne VIC 3000
t: +61 3 9629 5599
www.thedeanery.com.au
I’m not sorry about the pun!
This weekend I made POACHED EGGS. This is important because a) I haven’t attempted them since I was an apprentice a good 7 years ago, and b) up until a few weeks ago, I haven’t eaten runny eggs for a very, very long time. I’m talking over twenty years.
It all started when I was making a salad and I didn’t quite boil an egg for long enough, so it was still a bit runny inside. But, I ate it; and to my amazement there was no upset stomach, nor overwhelming “eggy” taste that usually turns me off! Then there were no holds barred! The next day there were soft boiled eggs, mushrooms, bacon and spinach for breakfast. A week later there were fried eggs, sunny side up (is there a better term for fried eggs not flipped? I don’t particularly like that phrase). Then, this weekend just past I attempted the poached eggs. I failed at my first two, the recipe I was using as a reference on Taste.com.au suggested to crack the eggs onto a plate first but I found that it completely destroyed the egg white as it entered the water. It could have been the eggs that I was using (it recommends to use the freshest eggs that you can) but I found cracking the eggs into rapid simmering water helped the egg whites to set better.
So, here’s what I did:
Bring a deep frypan full of water to a fast simmer.
Add a pinch of sea salt flakes and two teaspoons of lemon juice.
Slowly and carefully crack your eggs straight into the water. I did two at a time.
Simmer for 3-4 minutes.
Remove eggs from the water with a slotted spoon, hold over a sink or other surface to drain slightly.
Serve with hot buttered toast (Rye! It’s good!) and bacon. Enjoy!
See, you don’t need a Sunbeam Eggo after all!
