WWDH - Feta and Eggplant Meatballs

For Wednesday with Donna Hay this week, Sarah has chosen feta and eggplant meatballs.  I have had a strange aversion to meatballs because of their appearance, but after tasting these, I know that it is all in the mind - these meatballs are very tasty.

These meatballs do take some prep - you have to chop up and roast eggplant, crumble feta and both shallow fry and bake the meatballs.  However, if you are not in a hurry, the result is pleasantly spicy.  The meatballs are made with beef mince, although I think lamb mince would work well too, as eggplant and lamb seem like the beginnings of a good moussaka to me.

I served these with a chickpea and spinach salad and they made a delicious light meal:

To see what Sarah, Kayte, Margaret and Chaya thought of these, visit their websites.

FFWD - Boeuf a la Mode

This week's French Friday with Dorie dinner is Boeuf a la Mode.  What does that mean?  I have no idea.  However, broken down into main components, it  is roast beef and vegetables in a red wine-based sauce.  I served mine with stir fry veg - yes, I know that's a little weird, but it fits in with my current dietary circumstances better than mashed potato and pumpkin.

I found this dish a bit of a pain to prepare, because you have to marinate the beef and veges for 12 hours first, then you have to render the sauce, brown the beef, soften the veg, combine with sauce and brandy, and only then can you cook it - for 3 hours.  It is an all weekend job.

I was also going out on the day after the marination so a 3 hour babysitting session with the beef was not happening.  Instead, I stuck it all in the slow cooker on low for 5 hours - which was probably around an hour too long, but it did the job.

This meal was OK, but not worth the cost in terms of my ultimate enjoyment of it.  My favourite part was the marinated veg.

To see what the other Doristas thought, visit the LYL section of the FFWD website. 

FFwD - Veal Chops with Rosemary Butter

Today's French Friday with Dorie dish is veal chops with rosemary butter.  It is as sweet and simple as it sounds.

The sauce on the plate is made with the pan juices, chicken stock and white wine - I liked it but I used too much stock by misreading the recipe, so it wasn't as thick as it should have been.

My chops may have been slightly on the rare side, but they were good.  I served them with stir fried veg, as mash is off the cards for me at the moment while I go low-carb to try and shift some of my belly.

 To see what the other Doristas thought of these chops, visit the LYL section of the website.

Corned beef and cabbage

Every week, I attend a clinical Pilates to keep mind and body together.  When I mention "mind", I have been lucky enough to fall in with a terrific bunch of girls in my class, and each week we chat about all manner of things during the class.  A regular topic is "what are you having for dinner?" A couple of weeks back, Alison said she was having corned beef.  Now I love corned beef but I had never cooked it myself before, so I was inspired by Alison to give it a go.

I had to look up a recipe for cooking corned beef, and after some unsuccessful searches thorugh my recipe books, I chanced upon this Donna Hay recipe on the Internet.  I left out the onions and carots, but otherwise cooked the corned beef as instructed.  The end result was magnificent - just like mother used to make, even though mother did not put all the extras in  she just adds a splash of vinegar, apparently.  My corned beef is topped with some chutney out of the jar - perfect!

 I had also never cooked cabbage before, and was wary of all the bad cabbage stories that I had heard.   Initially, I intended to boil the cabbage, but another trusty Internet search yielded a forum thread with a method for sauteeing shredded cabbage on the stovetop in oil, all purpose seasoning, salt (added last to avoid drying out the cabbage) and soy sauce.  This cabbage tasted pretty good, and stayed crispy rather than turning soggy.

Chuffed, I served my corned beef and cabbage with a jacket potato, cooked simply in the microwave and sprinkled with salt and all purpose seasoning, with a dash of low fat cream.  This was a dinner of champions! 

Even better, I have leftover corned beef for corned beef sandwiches for my lunch - solving the difficult question of what to have for lunch this week.  Corned beef, pickles and tomato on crusty bread is a winning lunchtime dish.

I hope that if, like me, you are a corned beef and cabbage novice, you find this post useful.

WWDH - Beef and Caramelised Onion Cous Cous Salad

For Wednesday with Donna Hay this week, I chose Donna's Beef and Caramelised Onion Salad from Off the Shelf.  You can also find the recipe online here.  As the name of the dish suggests, it is comprised of pan fried beef fillet slices atop a bed of onion cous cous and baby spinach.

I took heed of the Cookbook Critic's comment on the excessive onion in the cous cous, and I only used one onion (instead of four).  For me, that was plenty.  I used wholemeal cous cous instead of white, for no reason other than that I could.  I had a heck of a time finding cous cous that wasn't already flavoured with dried veges by Ainslie Harriott! In the end, I bought some from the organic shop in Flinders Street (as Mediterranean Wholesalers was not on my weekend travel list).  My beef fillet (which cost a motzah) was cooked to medium rare.  It looks funny because I don't have a sharp carving knife for meat, so the slices are a little mangled.

Although it is reminiscent of Manu on My Kitchen Rules to say so, for me, this dish needed some sauce.  I liked it way better on day 2 when I added some chilli jam to the mix.  

To see what my fellow Donna Hay group members, Kayte, Margaret and Chaya, thought of this dish, visit their websites on Wednesday their time.

WWDH - Shepherds Pie

It's Wednesday again, and this week's Wednesday with Donna Hay recipe was Shepherds Pie, chosen by yours truly.  A number of people have preceded us, so you can for instance find the recipe online here.

I liked the rich, red meaty sauce topped with cheesy potato.  I also liked that this is a complete meal in itself, as it contains peas, carrots and onion.

My Mum doesn't put herbs in her Shepherds Pie, so I found the thyme and bay flavours a little odd, although not unpleasant.  Just like Mum, I added a dash of hot suace (Worcestershire sauce) to the mince for extra flavour.

This dish is a keeper.

To see what Kayte, Margaret and Chaya thought, visit their sites.

Baked stuffed zucchini

On Friday night, I had friends over for dinner while their kitchen is being renovated.  On the menu was Jamie Oliver's Asian-flavoured version of cook-in-the-bag chicken, an old favourite of mine from his Happy Days tour (not the leek and mushroom one that is all over the web), followed by Long and Slow Apples from French Fridays with Dorie.

My friends grow vegetables, so I was the recipient of a very large zucchini.  You can't generally buy zucchini that big, so I thought I would try something new - stuffed zucchini.  A quick Google search later, and I came up with this recipe.  The only changes that I made were to substitute the lamb mince for beef mince, the rosemary for tarragon (I couldn't buy rosemary at the supermarket - how weird is that?), and the parmesan for Dutch smoked that I had in the fridge.

I really enjoyed the end result - it was a hearty meal that didn't take ages to prepare, and used up the entire zucchini.  I think I would add a touch of chilli next time to make the filling sing, but recommend this as a nice change.  My interest in stuffed vegetables is now piqued, and on the same night  that I made this, I saw Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall make baked butternut squash which looked equally delicious - perhaps another dish to add to my repertoire.

FFwD - Beef daube with carrots & elbow macaroni

This week's FFwD recipe is Beef [cheek] daube with carrots & elbow macaroni.  There are no cheeks here - just beef.

This was absolutely delicious, and a complete meal in a pot:

 

 

 

 

To see what the other FFwD cooks thought, visit the LYL section of the website.

Beef with Olives and Tomatoes; Fresh Almond, Green Bean and Peach Salad

Despite my best intentions, I can't give up my cookbook addiction, especially when there are bargains to be had!  I recently acquired Angela Hartnett's Cucina on sale, and am glad I did - it is a gorgeous book with practical recipes, with an Italian slant.  The salads in the book are particularly gorgeous - and this from me, a former salad hater and now just a salad "meh" girl!

For a weekend meal, I made Angela's  Rib Eye with Tomatoes and Olives, featured in the photo at the top of this post.  It was a simple but delicious way to cook steak - I just used porterhouse steak.  You have to like olives though for this to work, as the olives are a dominant flavour in this dish. 

To accompany the steak, I made Angela's fresh almond, green bean and peach salad, on p170 of Cucina:

Doesn't this look scrumptious, and so summery? It is so simple to make - just boil up 150g of trimmed green beans, drain and cool them, and cut them into pieces ~ 1 inch long (or save yourself some hassle and cut them before boiling them).  Put the beans into a large bowl.  Cut 4 peaches into 4-6 wedges (I used 2 large peaches, which was plenty), and add the peach wedges to the beans with 75g blanched almonds.  Chop up 6 basil leaves and 6 mint leaves and add to the salad just before serving.  Toss the salad with a vinaigrette made from 20ml cider vinegar and 100ml olive oil.  I had this salad for a couple of days, and it stayed delicious for the entire time.

Enjoy!

Wednesdays with Donna Hay - Beef Burgers

This week's Wednesday with Donna Hay recipe is my lunch/brunch choice - Beef Burgers!  I adore a good burger, and this one has all the trimmings that I like - namely, onion rings and beetroot.  So many burgers come sans beetroot, which in my books is a crime.  The juicy beetroot goes a treat with the beef, and is a must for me.

As you can see from the photos, Donna's recipe makes a very tall burger - you almost need a flip-top head to take a bite of it all in one go.  That's not a complaint though!  I did find the patties a little crumbly, but that could just have been me.  I used rocket instead of iceberg lettuce on my burger, and spruced it up by spreading the bun with Emilia's onion jam, and a  splash of barbecue sauce on the beef patty.

I made a second burger using Donna's patties, this time with cheese in lieu of onion rings, but using Emilia's onion jam on the bun again, with fries on the side: 

This one was pretty good too.

To see what Kayte, Chaya and Margaret thought of these burgers, you can go visit them tomorrow. 

Next week: Red Wine Osso Bucco

And happy birthday to Canadian actress, Megan Follows, who turns 44 today.  You can watch a fan video wishing Megan a happy birthday here.

Wednesdays with Donna Hay - Beef and Cashew Stir Fry

Hi to all.  It's "hump day", or as the Germans so elegantly and correctly put it, Mittwoch (mid-week).  That means that we have survived almost half a working week, and it is not too premature to be looking forward to the weekend (when I am seeing Roxette in concert - ya!).

It is also known as Wednesday with Donna Hay, when Kayte, Margaret, Chaya and I (yep, there's four of us now) all make the same Donna Hay recipe, direct from her website.

This week, I chose dinner, in the form of a beef and cashew stir fry.  You can find the recipe here. This dish was attarctive to me because stir fry is quick, easy and relatively healthy, and hence I make a lot of them (when I am not making something for French Fridays with Dorie).  I especially loved this stir fry because it contains cashew nuts and snow peas - they lift a stir fry from good to gorgeous.

I added hokkien noodles to my stir fry to make it an all in one dish.  I loved it - just my kind of dinner.

To see what Kayte, Margaret and Chaya thought, go visit them when their posts are up (I am half a day ahead of them).

Next week: Blue Cheese and Caramelised Onion Brioche 

FFwD - Cafe Salle Pleyel Hamburger and Eggplant Caviar

This week's French Fridays with Dorie dish is not at all what you'd expect to see on a French dining table - a hamburger.  However, this is apparently not just any hamburger, but the Cafe Salle Pleyel hamburger, created for the cafe's owner, Helene Samuel, who stated the following about the burger in The New York Times:

“It has the taste of the forbidden, the illicit — the subversive, even. Eating with your hands, it’s pure regression. Naturally, everyone wants it.”

You can find the recipe online here, but in a nutshell, this burger is comprised of beef mince, sun-dried tomatoes, capers, cornichons (for which I substituted gherkins) and fresh herbs (I only used coriander and dried tarragon and skipped the thyme).  The burgers are browned to medium rare on each side:

An onion jam is made to go with the burgers:

The burgers are topped with thin slices of parmesan cheese:

and the whole lot is placed on a burger bun, as shown at the top of this post.  If you are so inclined, you can decorate the plate with dill pickles, but I also skipped this.

I am not sure that this burger was so good as to be subversive, but it was definitely delicious and beats the pants off the cardboard offering at your local greasy spoon.  I served my burger with Outback Spirit wild rosella cranberry relish one night, and with Cooper's Ale barbeque sauce the next - both combinations were good.

Playing catch up, I also made eggplant caviar from last week:

Just like Tricia S's teenagers, I didn't dislike this, but I wouldn't run out to make it again either.

Finally, I am featuring a gratuitous photo (sourced from Yahoo! Seven TV) of Bec's fab 1920's inspired wedding veil by Melbourne designers, J'Aton, featured in Tuesday night's finale of Winners and Losers:

There was a lot of criticism of Bec's hair and dress on Facebook.  Personally, the dress was not my style (too much like a doily), but I loved the much-maligned veil and hairdo - anything inspired by the 1920s wins my heart, and I thought Bec looked great.

Have a wonderful weekend!