Sweet potato and cauliflower for @shewgirl

When I recently returned to Australia, it was to discover that many of my online friends were participating in a #blogeverydayofjune project. I have been reading their blogposts and sometimes commenting and all the while reflecting on how slack I have become in my own blogging. So one of my aims this weekend was to do a few blogposts and in particular to finish off a few outstanding and half-written posts. This post is not one of those though it was triggered by my online community within some Twitter comments last night.

It has been a very long week here in Australia with the excitement of a new Prime Minister and all the lead-up to that. I also had a very busy week ending with all day Friday at Lilydale in a workshop on emergency management standard operating procedures. It was cold and pouring rain. When I finally got home after 7pm I wasn't in any mood to cook anything that was going to take time; nor did I even want to go to the supermarket on the way home to pick up anything.

A search of cupboards and fridge revealed that I wasn't going to starve (God forbid that that would ever happen!) and I started making a quick old vegetable stand-by. I think the origin of it was in an old Penguin Indian cookbook and related to cooking green peas with onion and turmeric. Over the years I have usually cooked the dish with green peas and often added potatoes. I often cook it with turmeric but sometimes with the first spicy ingredient that comes to hand, be this Malaysian curry powder, Vindaloo or whatever. Last night the potato shelf was bare, but I had a sweet potato and a cauliflower. And a jar of curry powder was the first spicy jar my hand reached for. So that was what I prepared to cook quickly before catching the end of the news and the start of the Geelong St Kilda match.

As I sat down to await the cooking, I reached for my iPod and found myself in the middle of a Twitter exchange that was about people wanting something quick for Friday dinner. After I mentioned my sweet potato and cauliflower, quick as a blink @shewgirl pointed out her expectations of a blog post so that she could check it out! So here it is @shewgirl! I think it has taken me longer to write this than it did to reach for the ingredients, chop, and cook!

Curried sweet potato & cauliflower

Ingredients
1 white onion
Olive oil
1 orange sweet potato
Quarter cauliflower
Curry powder
Water

Mode

Heat some olive oil in a saucepan which is large enough to contain all ingredients
When oil is hot, add sliced onion and stir until softened
Add to onions about a tablespoon of curry powder of your choice and stir
Slice the sweet potato and add to mix stirring again
Break the cauliflower into small flowerlets and add to mix and stir to combine
Add a cup of water to the saucepan
Place on the lid and cook until tender

Last night, I also unearthed some spicy sausages in the freezer and grilled them while the vegetables were cooking. I served them with Maggie Beer's plum sauce (ala Polyxena) and the vegetables. That was a yummy and very quick dinner. Unfortunately the AFL match was not so yummy :((

Trahanas in chicken stock

As some of you have been keen to tell me I have been very bad with my food blogging recently. I do apologize. Unfortunately my home PC was suffering and in death's throes and then I went off on long service leave. However, I am back now and ready to chase up all those half-written posts dating back to Christmas.

Today's post is a new one though. Trahanas is a Greek "pasta" apparently created by shepherds as an instant food as they could drop the yoghurt noodles into boiling water while tending their flocks. Today these noodles can be purchased ready made at shops carrying Greek produce and come in two forms, "sweet" which are made with milk and "sour" which are made with yoghurt. You can find a recipe here.

Trahanas is normally cooked with water and then served with crumbled fetta, parsley or avgolemeno. I well remember eating a bowl of it made by a student in Thessaloniki in the 1970s. Tonight I decided to do something a little different. I had some dried sour trahanas in the pantry. I heated some chicken stock, added the trahana and some dried thyme. Before serving I added some shaved parsley. It was delicious!

Ingredients

1 litre chicken stock
1.5 cups sour trahanas
Dry thyme
Shaved parmesan

Mode
Bring stock to boil
Add trahana
Add dry thyme
Stir regularly until thickened (about 15 minutes)
Serve topped with shaved parmesan

Abla in print again!

Great news for lovers of Abla's Lebanese cooking!  The Penguin website has an forthcoming announcement that Abla's Lebanese kitchen will be published in hardback as part of the Lantern imprint in 2010. Abla Amad's The Lebanese kitchen was published by Penguin under the Viking imprint in 2001 and was very soon being re-printed and then out of print.  It is not clear from the forthcoming promo whether this is simply a reprint or whether it will be a new edition. That the title is different makes one live in hope.  The Lantern imprint is the one which recently published Stephanie Alexander's Kitchen garden companion in time for the Christmas market.   That's to Pat Miller for this headsup!

I love Abla's food and only last night cooked lemon and garlic chicken drummettes made according to her recipe for chicken wings.  For those of you who don't know Abla, her eponymous Lebanese restaurant has been a Melbourne institution for years.

Butter chicken with Madras curry vegetables

One of the great things about working in Hawthorn is that being located near to Swinburne University there is a fabulous array of Indian eateries. I love being able to dash out at lunch time to grab some butter chicken or other dishes from one of the places where Indian students gather to eat and watch Indian TV. I also like being able to make a quick and easy butter chicken at home. And this is where supplies at Piedimonte's help me and provide the sauce which is the basis for this.


Today is Saturday and so I had time to prepare and simmer the chicken and vegetables and cook rice as one needs to do with Indian food. It is also the start of daylight savings (Blah!) so I should have started to do my simmering earlier. I served the butter chicken with rice and a vegetable dish which I made with Madras curry powder.




Butter Chicken

Ingredients

600 gr chicken thigh pieces
Butter chicken sauce ready prepared
300 ml low fat Greek yoghurt

Mode

Heat butter chicken sauce in large pan
Roughly chop chicken thighs
Place chicken pieces in pan over medium heat and cook partially
Add yoghurt and stir through
Simmer on low heat until chicken is tender and sauce thickened.



Madras Curry vegetables

Ingredients

1 onion
Frozen peas
3 potatoes
Frozen broad beans
Water
Madras curry powder
Olive oil

Mode

Heat olive oil in saucepan
Chop onion and toss in oil until softened
Slice potatoes and add to mixture
Add Madras curry powder according to taste and stir through
Add frozen peas and beans and mix
Add cup of water and mix
Cover and simmer until tender

Serve the butter chicken and Madras curry vegetables on steamed rice.

Beetroot and fetta salad

I love beetroot in any shape or form - except the canned variety. I was delighted recently to find it available and stocked up. As it was Father's Day last weekend we were gathering for lunch so I thought I would make a beetroot salad using a couple of my other favourite foods: fetta and dill.



Note that it's a good idea to make this just before serving as the beetroot quickly colours the fetta. The taste is fine later but it's visually nicer early after tossing.




Ingredients

7 medium-sized beetroots
400 gr fetta
15 gr dill
Olive oil
White wine vinegar

Mode

Chop both ends of beetroots and crosscut ends
Place in a saucepan and cover with water
Cook until tender
When cool peel off skins and chop into pieces of desired size
Roughly chop dill
Add beetroot and dill to serving dish
Crumble fetta into mixture
Dribble with oil and vinegar and toss

Dill chicken balls take two!

After my first disastrous but redeemed go at chicken balls I thought I would have another go! This time the mixture was very firm and easy to form into balls.



They tasted very meaty as I didn't add any bread, though the addition of grated parmesan was nice. They were fine but I think I will try again with bread as I like that texture. Dill chicken balls are a work in progress!



Ingredients

650 gr chicken mince
15 gr dill
1 egg
2 cloves garlic crushed
4 tbs grated parmesan
Flour
Olive oil
Tomato sauce
Shaved parmesan

Mode

Roughly chop the dill
Place chicken, dill, parmesan, garlic, egg in bowl and stir
Roll up sleeves and blend the mixture until combined
Form balls of desired size and roll in flour
Add tomato sauce to large pan or saucepan and heat on top of stove
Heat oil in pan
Quickly seal the balls in oil and added to already heated tomato sauce
Simmer on top of the stove for 30 mins or if preferred in 180c oven for 45 mins
Serve with shaved parmesan and accompanied by vegetables or green salad

Dill chicken balls

I love all sorts of meatballs and am particularly partial to some chicken balls I buy as a treat from a chicken place at Northland shopping centre. So a couple of weeks ago I thought I would have a go at trying to make some myself. I couldn't make up my mind whether to do them with dill which I was excited to find at the shops or to do a more Asian tasting lot with chilli, ginger and coriander. I finally plumped for the dill as I thought it would go nicely with tomato sauce.



Unfortunately the process was somewhat fraught as I didn't realize how sloppy minced chicken would be in comparison to minced beef or lamb and ended up with a mixture that was too moist to form balls. I think that two eggs was too much for the mixture and that the bread would have been better not soaked in milk. I added extra dry bread to the mixture and managed to make balls and cook them. The end result tasted lovely but I am going to continue experimenting with this!



Ingredients
1/2 cup milk
4 slices stale multigrain sourdough bread
650 gr chicken mince
15 gr dill
2 eggs
2 cloves garlic
Flour
Oil
Ready made tomato sauce
Shaved parmesan

Mode

Soak two slices of bread in the milk
Roughly chop dill
Place chicken mince, dill, crushed garlic, and eggs in bowl
Remove bread from milk and squeeze before adding to bowl
Stir all ingredients until combined
Make breadcrumbs from other two slices of bread and add to mixture
Combine full with hands
Form mixture into balls and roll in flour
Place in refrigerator for an hour before cooking to help form
Meanwhile make a tomato sauce or heat ready-made one
Remove to ovenproof dish which is large enough to contain chicken balls as well
Preheat oven to 180c
Heat oil in frying pan and quickly seal the chicken balls
Add to tomato sauce in oven-proof dish
Cook in oven for 45 minutes
Serve with shaved parmesan and accompany with vegetables or green salad