Filed under: Cookbook Recipes, Dishes of the World, Food on the Web | Tags: antonio, antonio carluccio, carluccio, Food, food channel, italian, samoriglio, tuna
© Antonio Carluccio
Just turned to the Food Channel on the TV and caught an episode of ‘Southern Italian Feast’ presented by my all-time favourite foodie Antonio Carluccio. It’s hard to believe that I first watched this show on the BBC ten years ago back in England.
After picking up some marvelous ingredients in Palermo’s Vucceri Market, Carluccio cooks a simple Tonno al Forno con Salmoriglio (Baked Pasta with Herbs) which he served with Zucchini al Pomodoro e Basilico (Courgettes with Tomato and Basil). While samoriglio (a mortar-and-pestled mxture of herbs, garlic and oil) is usually used to dress steamed or grilled fish, Carluccio dressed the tuna steaks before baking, adding a few pine nuts and breadcrumbs for added texture.
We have friends coming over at the weekend and, for once, I know exactly what I’m going to cook ahead of time!
I made a great lunch box discovery today when I popped in to the Noodle Canteen franchise in Royal Oak, Auckland for a quick take-out lunch.
Having never been into a Noodle Canteen before, I was immediately impressed by the fresh ingredients laid out in the chiller cabinet for customers to see. Vivid green broccoli, plump prawns, crisp carrots and the many more prepped ingredients presented in a clean and tidy environment all pointed towards a franchise that took care and maintained standards.
Although I was craving noodles, the curry laksa caught my eye and I ordered that from the friendly young woman behind the counter before settling on a stool and chatting to a colleague while watching my lunch being prepared.
Back at the office, I was pleasantly surprised at the quality, freshness and variety of the ingredients in my laksa which included two types of noodle, at least three types of seafood and various julienned veggies.
The soup base was a rich orange liquor with a well-balanced flavour and warmth and the size of the portion was big enough to leave me still feeling satisfied and well fed some 5 hours later – no mean feat where my appetite is concerned. Although I have only tried one dish so far, that meal was certainly more than enough to encourage me to return to try others.
I was also amused to note that the Noodle Canteen web site, like Big Boy’s Brunch, is managed on WordPress.
A week ago, SWMBO’s friend flew out from the UK to join us for a week or so before heading off to explore the rest of the country. To give her a real taste of Kiwi summer, we packed the 4×4 and the trailer and headed north ahead of the Friday rush to drive to a great little bach on a secluded East Coast bay.
After a pasta and wine supper at the bach on Friday, we decided to go out to dinner on Saturday night and headed to the restaurant at the Bridge House Lodge in Warkworth, where we had a great meal with The Out-Laws last year.
We were early enough to get a table for seven without booking with the added bonus that we were by the window overlooking the river and I had a great view of the large screen TV showing the Sevens tournament down in Wellington. While restaurants with sports bars can often be noisy and less than pleasant to eat in, the volume of the TV and the good natured cheers were fine and we enjoyed mixing our dinner chat with rooting for the boys in black.
The waiting staff were friendly, helpful and efficient, bringing drinks and garlic bread to settle the sprogs while the three grown ups decided what to have. Being the sole hungry chap among the ladies, I alone ordered a starter – the salt and pepper squid to start – and ended up sharing it with everyone not having an entrée. Cooked and seasoned well, it was a very nice way to kick off the meal, even if the portion was on the small side even before the vultures descended.
SWMBO liked the look of the spinach salad entrée with feta, olives and roasted peppers and the staff were happy to ‘upgrade’ the dish to a main. Her friend, the District Nurse, went for the pan-fried chicken with cream cheese farce while I was unable to resist the lure of the venison sausages and chorizo with garlic mashed potato and gravy. The sprogs enjoyed their choices from the children’s menu which included freshly made pizza and fish or chicken & chips.
Each dish was well-presented, served without fuss and in a timely fashion. While I only have the contented murmurs and empty plates of my companions to go on, the spinach salad and the stuffed breast of chicken both got a hearty thumbs-up. The chorizo were packed with spicy paprika and the venison sausages were gamey with a discernible bite lacking in many Kiwi bangers. The garlic mash was lovely and smooth which, with the gravy, made each mouthful slip down that little bit easier.
Desserts were a split with two adults choosing the lemon tart with citrus sorbet and two sprogs voting for the mudcake with chocolate sauce, which they fell on like jackals on a carcass. I liked the sorbet more than the tart but as I’m not big on desserts and the District Nurse finished hers with much delight, who am I to judge?
More through laziness than anything else, we drank a 2007 Hunter’s Sauvignon Blanc, a long-time award winner from Marlborough, throughout the meal. Light, bright, full of elderflowers and gooseberries, we liked it so much we’ve bought more since.
It’s hard say if this was all value for money as the District Nurse picked up the tab, a very kind and wonderful gesture and much appreciated by all. That said, I’m sure we’ll go back on our own dollar again in the not too distant future.
Iced tea is among my favourite drinks on a hot summer’s day. I’ve often tried to make it by cooling hot brewed tea but only with limited success. I recently came across a cold infused iced tea recipe at The Simple Leaf. As we have no loose leaf tea in the house, I tweaked the recipe a little and found the resulting tea very drinkable and refreshing.
Cold Infused Iced Tea
With cold infused iced tea, you may find granulated or caster sugar doesn’t dissolve very well, so use powdered icing sugar instead.
4 good quality tea bags
1 litre cold water
juice of a lemon
2 tbsps icing sugar, or to taste
Place 4 good quality tea bags in a jug. Add a splash of hot water from a kettle to just wet the tea bags for a minute, pour in a litre of cold water and then remove two of the tea bags. Put the jug in the fridge and leave to infuse for at least 6 hours or overnight if preferred. Remove the tea bags, squeeze the juice of one lemon into the jug and add the sugar if desired. Stir and pour over ice in tall glasses.
The weekend is here and the cleansing continues. The breakfast smoothie was accompanied by 40 more of the cursed capsules. A peppermint tea quickly followed in order to ease the reflux and mild heartburn one gets from trying to wolf such quantities too quickly. This is not the way I usually start the weekend. For me, weekends are about spending time with friends and family and food is almost always involved. With the gorgeous run of hot sunny weather we’re having currently, it is hard not to feel that we are somehow wasting it by not having a barbecue.
After getting up late, I walked to the library to renew a couple of cookbooks, including Matthew Evan’s lovely The Weekend Cook, a title whose irony was not lost on me as I swiped the book out at the excellent ’self-serve’ facility. Stopping in at the pizzeria on the way back to see how Kevin was doing, he was quick to spot that I was out of sorts. “You’re not your usual sparkling self” was his parting shot as I walked away 10 minutes later, unable to enjoy our usual banter about this new ingredient or that great recipe.
The rest of the day was spent reading Per Petterson’s melancholy In The Wake, leafing through the newspaper and diddling about online, grumbling all the while about the boredom of cleansing. Late in the afternoon, I suddenly decided that I wouldn’t be beat and that I’d find something within the limits of the detox regime that I could cook on the barbecue for SWMBO and me.
Forty-five minutes later, I served up grilled field mushroom marinated in olive oil, balsamic vinegar and herbs, topped with a light guacamole and cripsy zucchini chips, together with spicy corn of the cob. I plated these up and served them along with a simple salad of cos, spring onions and cherry tomatoes, dressed with olive oil and red wine and a single celery stick filled with a hummus and raw yoghurt mix.
We both enjoyed the meal and reveled in the flavours and textures. The mushroom and guacamole combination, not something I had considered before, worked really well, making me wish I had made two each. The corn was fine if a little too caramelised in places; this was due to an uneven spread of herbs and spices, something that wouldn’t have happened if I’d been able to combine them with butter to coat the corn more evenly – rather than the olive oil I used on this occasion.
For the first time in six days, I really enjoyed preparing and eating a meal and, for a few moments, I even forgot my cravings for freshly baked bread sandwich with a nice juicy steak!
Pissaladina
Over the holidays, I have read a number of great food books borrowed from the local library. These include the delightful Rosemary and Bitter Oranges, kitchen memories and recipes of a Tuscan childhood and brilliant The Man Who Ate Everything by lawyer/foodie Jeffrey Steingarten.
As usual when making food for family and friends, I have found a good deal of inspiration from my collection of Italian cookbooks. As Italian food rarely fails to please both the stomach and the eyes, here’s a few of the dishes I made with the odd photo for good measure.
Pissaladina
Inspired by ‘A Book of Mediterranean Food’ by the incomparable Elizabeth David of which I have a cherished 1960 paperback copy in which she writes the following
‘…across the Italian border, these dishes baked on bread dough are called pizza, which simply means a pie, and there are many variations of them, the best known being the Neapolitan pizza which consists of tomatoes, anchovies, and mozzarella cheese (a white buffalo/milk cheese). The local pizza of San Remo is very like the Provencal pissaladiere, but garnished with salted sardines instead of anchovies; it is known locally as sardenara.’
Writing in bleak post-war Britain, David advised getting unbaked dough from a local baker. Although I could ask Kevin for some of his, I usually make dough for my pizze, focacce and ciabatte to the superb recipes in Suzanne Dunaway’s No Need To Knead – Hand Made Italian Breads in 90 Minutes.
1kg onions, sliced
pizza or Italian bread dough
Black olives, stoned
Anchovy fillets
Olive oil
Roll out or hand stretch the dough to fit a large baking sheet or pizza stone. Cover the bottom of a saucepan with olive oil and add the sliced onions. Over a gentle heat, slowly cook the onions until almost to a puree – this will take around 40 minutes. Pour the puree on to the dough, put on the top and decorate it with stoned black olives and criss-cross with anchovy fillets. Bake in the oven, on the pre-heated stone or sheet as you would a pizza, until golden brown.
Salsa di pomodoro (l) and pissaladina onions (r) in the making
Salsa di Pomodoro d’Emilia
Emilia’s tomato sauce from ‘Rosemary and Bitter Oranges’ by Patrizia Chen. Emilia, the cook in Chen’s childhood home, would sometimes vary the recipe on a whim, adding a little rosemary or red wine to this classic sauce.
1 onion
1 carrot
1 clove garlic
½ stick celery
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
400g / 14oz can crushed or chopped tomatoes
Pinch of dried red pepper or chilli flakes (optional)
Salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste
Finely chop the onion, carrot, celery and garlic. Saute the vegetables in the olive oil in a medium saucepan over a low heat for about 5 minutes, or until they begin to soften, stirring. Stir the tomatoes into the vegetables. For a little heat, add some red pepper or chilli flakes. Simmer gently for 2 hours, stirring occasionally, until the sauce is thick and flavourful. Season with salt and pepper.
Orecchiette Piccante
Orecchiette Piccante
From Antonio Carluccio’s Passion for Pasta. Antonio Carluccio is possibly the best champion of Italian food, certainly in the UK. His books and television appearances ooze with passion and excitement about great food. I made my own orecchiette by mixing 1lb of flour and five eggs with the dough hook of my Kenwood chef for 3-4 minutes, then wrapping in plastic wrap and resting the dough in the fridge for an hour. I then simply rolled out lots of ½cm thick strings and cut these into little 1cm lengths before flattening each with a thumb to make the individual orecchiette or ‘ears’, using a little flour to stop things getting too sticky.
4 oz / 100g sun-dried tomatoes in oil
4 anchovy fillets, in oil
3 tablespoons coarsely chopped basil
3 tablespoons coarsely chopped parsley
¼ oz / 10g capers 2 cloves garlic, peeled and finely chopped
1 small chilli pepper
1 oz / 25g stoned black olives
6 tablespoons virgin olive oil
½ pint / 300ml water
12 oz / 350g dried orecchiette
2 oz / 50g freshly grated Pecorino cheese
Drain the tomatoes and puree them in a food processor with 2 tablespoons each of the basil and parsley, the anchovies, capers, garlic, chilli pepper, olives, olive oil and water, until the mixture is smooth and glossy. Cook the pasta for 20-25 minutes, or until al dente. Meanwhile, gently simmer the tomato mixture in a pan for 5 minutes, adding a little more water if becoming too thick. Drain the pasta and mix with the sauce. Add the Pecorino cheese, mix together well and serve with the remaining basil and parsley sprinkled on top.
Minestrone
Also from Antonio Carluccio’s Passion for Pasta. Minestrone recipes vary from region to region depending on which ingredients are in season or available. For this vegetarian version – no bacon or ham – I adapted things a little further by substituting a tin or four bean mix for the borlotti beans and adding a little more pasta. These tweaks nudged the recipe to somewhere between minestrone and pasta e fagioli but that’s what I like to do; take a recipe as a starting point, not a prescription.
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 onion, peeled and chopped
1 small clove garlic, peeled and chopped
4 celery sticks, diced
1 tomato, peeled, de-seeded and finely chopped
1 large carrot, peeled and diced
2 potatoes, peeled and diced
A few leaves of fresh basil
1½ pints / 900 ml chicken stock
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1 x 13 oz / 375g tin four bean mix, drained
5 oz / 110g dried tubettini
3 oz / 75g freshly grated Parmesan cheese
Heat the oil and fry the onion and garlic until the onion is soft. Add the remaining vegetables and the basil and toss well with the oil. Add the stock and bring to the boil. Cook for 10 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste and stir in the beans and the pasta. Cook for about 10 minutes, or until the pasta is al dente. Serve hot sprinkled with the Parmesan cheese.
Auckland is pretty empty this week with many folks out of town on their summer break. With so many people away, many of the cafes and restaurants are also closed with their owners also taking the opportunity to take a well-earned break.
Having breakfasted early on a coffee and doughnut, completed my morning’s work and then gone for a 4k run, I was more than ready for lunch and thought I might drive a few blocks over for lunch in Dominion Road, the longest straight road in Auckland and home to pretty much every type of eatery there is.
With a bowl of noodle soup in mind, I called SWMBO who was in town with the two youngest and suggested we meet for lunch. However, it soon became clear that many of the Chinese restaurants were closed and instead we walked into Super Pollo, a Peruvian cafe specialising in charcoal-roasted chicken. The menu centres around various dishes made from Peruvian spice-marinated chicken cooked on a spit over a charcoal fire accompanied by rice, cooked with herbs and vegetables, fried kumara, corn cobs and fresh salads. Other options include charcoal chicken burgers, chorizo, charcoal grilled lamb and other traditional Peruvian meals. To complete the Peruvian experience, there’s chicha morada, a traditional Peruvian drink or Inca Kola, a famous soft drink imported from Peru.
Between us, we tried the chicken and chips, chicken tortillas wrap with salad and mayo and roast chorizo with lettuce, tomato and cucumber salad. Each of these were freshly cooked and very enjoyable, though the tortilla wraps were a little on the small side (compared to the photos in the menu). The chicken portion was well-cooked with a deep dark skin full of flavour. The fries, which I believe were twice-fired like all great fries, had a satisfying crispness and were declared to be the best in New Zealand by the fussiest of our daughters. The chorizo had the rich taste of paprika-spiced pork and the plain and simple, dressed with a little salad cream or mayo, was fresh and plentiful.
With four of us admittedly sharing a bottle of Coke, this tasty and satisfying meal cost us about $7.50 a head, about the same as one might expect to pay at a certain fast food chain that serves chicken that none of us would eat. I’ll definitely be eating at Super Pollo again; next week, in fact, as I’ve just invited my management team for a lunch there to start the New Year.
Today is Labour Day here in New Zealand and, wouldn’t you know it, the sky is overcast and no-one wants to do more than lounge around the house. We plan to have friends over for a roadt dinner later but, with bored kids and wife to feed, I needed to sort lunch in double quick time. A quick search of the web and a minute in the pantry was all it took to come up with following recipe – straight forward, no-fuss food that was easy to make and nice to eat.
Onion Pasta
By slowly cooking the onion until it starts to caramelise and then adding the stock and seasoning mix, the onions take on a sweetness that’ll win over the harshest onion critic. I know this because one of my daughters is anti-onion and she ate this dish with no complaints.
2 thinly sliced sliced onions
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp butter
1 tsp dried basil
1 cup chicken stock, or 1 tsp stock powder in water
1 pinch ground black pepper
1 pinch of salt
1 pinch of powdered garlic
500g pasta of choice
Warm the stock, add the basil, pepper, salt and garlic powder, stir and leave. In your largest frying pan or skillet, heat the oil, butter and cook the sliced onions until they take on a golden brown colour. Add the prepared stock and seasoning mix, reducing the liquid over a medium heat for 10 minutes, adding a little more stock to keep moist if required. Drain the pasta and toss with the onion mixture thoroughly and serve. To help folks dress the pasta to their liking, I served side dishes of grated cheddar and blue cheese, roasted pine nuts and freshly torn basil leaves.
A tweaked version of Onion Pasta @ Allrecipes
Filed under: Food on the Web
I know there are a good many versions of the same idea but over at 101 Cookbooks, Heidi Swanson has posted a great Five Minute Tomato Sauce Recipe with a twist – of lemon. Heidi recommends that the first time you make this sauce, you try it over ricotta-filled ravioli but goes on to say that it is also great for baked pastas, pasta-based casseroles, thin-crust pizzas, lasagna and even as a soup base. Definitely a versatile stand-by for those times when you need a trusty recipe to bale you out of a meal time crisis.
As Kevin will tell you, most of us folks from the East End of London are partial to the odd curry. Having started out on my Dad’s homemade curries based on meals he’d eaten while in India with the army, I have enjoyed many curries over the years. From beer-chasing curries in student discount curry houses to the home cooked dishes of Indian friends, I have come to appreciate the almost infinite variety of foods from the Indian subcontinent.
Although I enjoy cooking, there are days when I wish that I could walk through the door after a long day and find a meal has magically cooked itself. Though that day may be a long way off, we recently picked up a family sized crockpot (slow cooker) that gets us a little closer. Given that rich, sauce based curries lend themselves to slow cooking, it seemed only fitting that the first meal cooked in our new purchase was just such a dish.
As the tolerance of chili and spices varies in the family, I decided on a curry house style butter chicken dish. Much like the British obsession with chicken tikka masala, butter chicken is very popular with Kiwis and is readily accepted as an authentic Indian dish, despite a somewhat doubtful and hazy provenance.
Regardless of authenticity, the only real test is taste and flavour and this slow cooked curry proved to be very popular with four out of the five present and declared one of the best curries ever made in our house. In fact, we polished the whole thing off inside 15 minutes despite having said we’d save a portion for the absent curry-loving daughter. All of which means I’ll be making it again soon and, having written about it here, I’d better invite Kevin and Tanya too!
Makhni Chicken
This recipe was adapted from one I found on Yogi Gupta’s web site Indiacurry.com. I substituted extra yoghurt for a reduced amount of cream and added a little hot curry paste which gave a little more depth to the flavour without adding any more heat.
3 tablespoons cooking oil
3 or 4 large skinless chicken breasts cut into bite size pieces.
1 finely chopped onion
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 tablespoon minced garlic
½ tablespoon minced ginger
2 teaspoons curry powder
1 tablespoon hot curry paste
3 tablespoons yoghurt
1 cup chopped tomatoes
2 tablespoons butter
¼ cup water
1 teaspoon garam masala
½ teaspoon paprika
½ cup cream
Heat the oil in a heavy bottom pan and fry chicken pieces till white/light brown. Remove with slotted spoon and put in the crock pot. Add onions, salt and cayenne to hot oil in the pan. Sauté until the onions are translucent and the edges start to turn brown. Add the garlic and ginger, sauté for another 2 minutes. Add the curry powder and paste and sauté for a minute before adding yoghurt and reducing for 2-3 minutes. Add the tomatoes and butter and heat until the mixture starts to bubble before transfering to your crock pot. Use the ¼ cup water to deglaze the pan and add water to the crock pot. Add remaining ingredients, except for the garam masala and cream, stir and cover the crock pot. Set the crockpot to high, After the first 40 minutes, turn down cooker to low and leave to cook for 5 hours, stirring in the cream and garam masala 10 minutes before the end. Alternatively, if you want a quicker result, cook at high for 4 hours. Serve with basmati rice and roti
