Slow Braised Beef with Cornbread Dumplings

Slow Braised Beef with Cornbread Dumplings
Home Cooking

I consider myself lucky (or great at planning) because my 4 weeks off, post-surgery came at the peak of winter. I could hardly call Brisbane a cold place but because of that, being a Brisbane girl, I'm highly intolerant of cold. There were a few nights where I hid under the doona and refused to surface until midday. It was only about a week or two that we really felt the cold and for nights like that, there is no greater meal to have than this one.

I was fumbling around online and discovered this recipe by Donna Hay. Chili (as in, beef chili) is the meal I have cooked the most often in my life. I usually do it with mince and shove it in taco shells or wraps. It's just so easy and cheap and it tastes awesome. This recipe appealed to me because it not only included a chili beef component but also a topping of cornbread. I love cornbread!

Huge BBQ Lunch Courtesy of Meatcart

Meatcart Online Butcher
http://www.meatcart.com.au/

One of the perks of being a food blogger is being able to try new products and services as they become available. I was approached by Meatcart, a premium online butcher that delivers to your door, to taste some of their products.

I wasn't sure what to expect but one day last week, I got a knock on the door and a guy had a huge bag of goodies for me. It was a chilled freezer bag with a package labelled 'Summer Sizzler Pack - BBQ Master'. I was excited to find a variety of meats, including US ribs, beef sausages, lamb rump steak and beef rump steak.

What better way to sample everything than by having a huge backyard barbie? We called our family and friends over and that's exactly what we did this weekend.

Satay Chicken Lettuce Wraps (sugar free and low carb)

Satay Chicken Lettuce Wraps
Home Cooking

A major hurdle in my pledge to go low-carb and sugar-free has been "what do I eat instead of bread?" I read on a forum a suggestion of using lettuce to wrap filling rather than using a processed, grain-based item. Lettuce is not something that makes its way into my trolley very often. The only time I buy any is when I'm planning to make tacos. I know it's meant to be 'good for me' so I figured it was as good of an excuse as any to try and incorporate it into my diet.

I set about making a satay chicken filling that was sweetened with coconut products instead of sugar. Try to avoid prebought basting sauces because their sugar content is often through the roof. The types of vegetables you end up using in the satay is obviously up to you. Broccoli is popular in satay stir-fries, as are green beans. I used celery and red capsicum.

Low Carb Salmon and Cream Cheese Pancake

Low Carb Salmon and Cream Cheese Pancake
Home Cooking

Towards the end of last week, I had an excess of eggs that needed to be used up. Sure, there are tonnes of low carb egg recipes (e.g. quiche or frittata) but many of these also needed other ingredients that I didn't have at home. I could have cooked the eggs au naturale but one thing I have learnt from going low carb is that there IS such a thing as too much scrambled/fried eggs. After a while, even omelets seem too eggy.

I started this dish as a salmon and cream cheese omelet (without much enthusiasm). What inspired me to switch it up was remembering how delicious those Korean/Japanese-style savory pancakes are. I'm talking about okonomiyaki or Korean seafood pancakes. They're delicious and incorporate lots of vegetables but they require flour in the batter. Having just baked the paleo muffins with nothing but almond meal, I flirted with the idea of forming a batter with almond meal instead of flour.

Activated Nuts and Coco-nutty Granola

Activated Nuts and Coco-nutty Granola
Home Cooking

There's a lot of nutritional mumbo jumbo in this post about the theory of cutting sugar from one's diet and my opinions on it. If you're interested, read on. If you just want to know how to make delicious sugar-free nuts to eat at breakfast time or as a snack, skip to the recipe at the bottom.

Mochi, my friend and past regular on this blog has turned into a health fanatic. She's my idol! I'm totally inspired by her and wish I had her willpower. She told me a while back about how she was trying to cut out sugar from her diet. This seemed pretty intuitive until she mentioned that fruit was also out. I often eat fruit as an alternative to dessert to cut sugar cravings so for me, this was terrible news. I also found it non-sensical that fruit would ever be considered our enemy. I wrote it off as a quack theory and continued along my normal diet.

Just last week, I was roaming the internet when I stumbled across Sarah Wilson's blog and her plight against sugar. I started reading... and read enough to download her eBook 'I Quit Sugar'. What grabbed me the most was that she described herself as a past sugar addict who didn't appear to be a sugar addict. She had a seemingly 'healthy' diet, substituting honey instead of sugar, avoiding most processed foods and so on. It was reflective of my own diet and intrigued, I read more.

Salmon and Cream Cheese Ribbon Sandwiches

Salmon and Cream Cheese Ribbon Sandwiches
Home Cooking

I can't remember which day it was this week that I suddenly developed a craving for NY bagels. Marc only eats smoked salmon in sushi form and has a personal vendetta against bagels (they're too chewy? That's the point!) so he couldn't understand the appeal. I tried to make a point by point argument for it but in the end decided it was easier to make the damn thing and demonstrate. I didn't wind up doing that (forgot to purchase key components: bagel and capers) but I stayed with the smoked salmon theme and produced some neat little sandwiches.

I've used smoked salmon for catering before (smoked salmon omelet rolls for example) and I think it's one of the best ingredients for introducing a bit of class without having to work for it. These little sandwiches are a great example of something quick and simple that is not only tasty but filling.

Quick Turkey Bolognese Pasta

Quick Turkey Bolognese Pasta
Home Cooking

I pan-fried a batch of 16 mini turkey patties and felt overwhelmed with how I was going to eat them all. 16 x turkey burgers is alright for some but my burger quota is maybe once a week. Sure, some of them could be used in wraps or even mixed with leaves in a salad but I felt like diversifying.

This isn't going to be a complicated, fancy or 'proper' recipe. I just drew on inspiration from what I had available in the pantry and pulled together a quick and easy bolognese-style sauce to top some pasta with (I had papardelle on hand).

Turkey and Sage Burgers

Turkey and Sage Burgers
Home Cooking

As unlikely as it sounds, I 'accidentally' picked up a bunch of sage while grocery shopping on the weekend. It's not a herb I often use and I could have very well been stuck pondering over what to do with it, before following my usual strategy of spending $xxx to use up something that cost a lot less. Luckily, inspiration struck and I ended up pulling together a mishmash of what I had available.

Honey Roasted Pumpkin with Goat's Cheese and Hazelnuts

Honey Roasted Pumpkin with Goat's Cheese and Hazelnuts
Home Cooking

One day, I was rummaging around in my fridge when I stumbled across half a pumpkin that I'd totally forgotten I bought. I didn't really know what to do with it and I couldn't be stuffed mashing and using it to bake something (which is what I normally do with pumpkin) but I couldn't let it go to waste either.

I roughly chopped up the pumpkin and threw the pieces into a baking tray. Making it up as I went along, I added a drizzle of olive oil, salt and some sprigs of fresh thyme. As an afterthought, I added some honey to the mix. The pieces were left to roast until tender. I had already eaten that night so I didn't even use the pumpkin until the following day but that's irrelevant.

Savory Pumpkin Bread

Savory Pumpkin Bread 
Home Cooking

I went cucko about a month ago about bought all these vegetables that I didn't know what to do with. Pumpkin was one of them. I thought about just boiling the bejeebus out of it and making mash but I didn't want to eat pumpkin mash so I started scouting around for recipes that I could use it in. I found this recipe on Taste.com, which sounded perfect because it required 500g butternut pumpkin and that was EXACTLY what I had, once my pumpkin had been peeled and deseeded.

Oat and Vegetable Torta

Oat and Vegetable Torta
Home Cooking

My long lost friend Mochi has been initiated into the world of healthy, organic eating. She's detoxing from sugar and green-juicing it. I am so proud of her. I try to eat as 'clean' as I can during the week but man, sugar is in bloody everything! Everything good, that is. I've cut it out of my mixers at home (now buying sugar-free soda water or lemonade to pour my vodka with) but I don't know if health benefits are identifiable when you're drinking alcohol. Anyway, at least she's inspired me to some extent and that's better than nothing.

Mochi recently posted a link on my Facebook wall for a recipe to make an oat and vegetable torta. We are similar in that a lot of boring/weird-sounding foods appeal to us. We like things with oats and nuts and desserts made from vegetables. Whenever I bake these days, I always question "does this only sound good to me, or will other people eat it too?" For many items, I'm sure they would only sound good to me and Mochi, so I bypass them and stick to the conventional.

I'm not sure how an oat and vegetable torta sounds to anyone besides us but I can imagine Marc pulling his face and asking "where's the meat?" or "why are oats and vegetables in the same dish?"

Mushroom, Goat's Cheese and Hazelnut Open Sandwich

Mushroom, Goat's Cheese and Hazelnut Open Sandwich
Home Cooking

I recently went through a frenzy of flipping through my cookbook collection, dog-earing pages and highlighting ingredients. Any recipe that sounded doable was meticulously listed onto my phone so that I wouldn't forget. The problem with anything in book form is that I do forget and end up Googling for recipes instead. I'm trying to make my cookbook purchases financially justifiable. I need to use them more. To be completely honest with you, as nice as it is to have a hoard of cookbooks to decorate your kitchen/bookshelf/coffee table with, they are a pain to look through. The internet is much more practical, but I'm going to put in the effort and get my money's worth from these old purchases.

Bill Granger provided the first viable option. I found a recipe for an open sandwich with mushrooms, hazelnuts and goat's cheese in his book 'Feed me now!' When it comes to sandwiches, I don't think they can be correctly termed 'recipes' but rather ideas of what to put on bread. I hadn't thought of this idea before but it sounded great to me. I once asked Marc "if you had to guess what supermarket items I can't live without, what would you say?" I actually asked the question on this blog first and then randomly decided to ask him. His first guess was goat's cheese, which is correctly on my list. That should tell you how dependant I am on goat's cheese. If goat's cheese was a banned substance with life-destroying properties, I'd be in rehab for it.

Avocado Egg Salad Sandwich

Avocado Egg Salad Sandwich
Home Cooking

I get the 11-midnight munchies predictably, as long as I'm awake around then (which I usually am). I don't improve matters by then scouting the internet for food porn. I was on one of my favorite everyday eating food blogs (by which I mean, he makes plausible food suggestions that are easy to reproduce at home), Closet Cooking when I found a suggestion for avocado egg salad.

It's a hilarious concept (in an inside-joke way, so apologies if no one else gives a bum) because to me, it sounds DELICIOUS. I love avocado in any way shape or form (including as a dessert or cooked or whatever) and so I was interested in how it would work as an egg salad sandwich. Marc HATES avocado, HATES tomato and hates egg (he'll eat it if it's disguised in cake form but that's about it). He especially hates egg salad. There's not many things he doesn't eat but those 3 items pretty much cover it. If I snuck in some olives (the food he hates more than anything in the world) , I would have successfully created an amalgamation of his worst food nightmare.

Anyway, I didn't add olives. But the rest is all there.

Zucchini and Carrot Slice

Zucchini and Carrot Slice
Home Cooking

When it comes to baking, it's not hard to find a host of sweet recipes. I went through a few and got a bit overwhelmed by sweetness. There's only so much sugar I can handle! It was time to find something salty, and I don't just mean in the form of salted caramel or the likes.

I had zucchini in my fridge and a couple of carrots too. I hate eating carrots raw but I like them in baked products so I was glad when I found this recipe for zucchini and carrot slices. It sounded reasonably healthy too so I figured it would be a good idea for workday lunches.

Roast Pumpkin and Bread Pappardelle with Ricotta and Thyme

Roast Pumpkin and Bread Pappardelle with Ricotta and Thyme
Home Cooking

I haven't made a pasta dish in a long, long time. There are 2 things I can't be bothered with when cooking for myself at home and that's proteins and carbs. Boring right? That's why you mostly see baking recipes on here. My dinners tend to comprise of vegetables cooked in different ways (usually boiling or if I'm feeling adventurous, stir-frying) and mixed with something for flavor. Goats cheese and/or pesto is my go-to. I'll add lemon if I'm feeling 'fancy' and if I have nothing else, plain salt will do.

For 99.99% of the population this will undoubtedly sound like boring mixed with bland, but that's the reality of what I eat during the week. That should also explain why pumpkin pasta, despite not being the grandest of meal affairs, is still exciting to me and a step outside my comfort zone. It contains carbs after all (in the form of pasta). It's not that I'm a health freak (have you seen what I bake or eat on the weekends?) it's just that I'm lazy after work and like to keep things simple.

Sweet Potato and Coconut Soup

Sweet Potato and Coconut Soup
Home Cooking

Soup and winter: two things that go hand in hand. I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago and it's now spring so I better publish it before the heat waves strike and everything I say becomes irrelevant.

Soup is one thing that makes the cold mornings, dry air and shorter daylight hours almost worth bearing. We had a couple of weeks in Toowoomba a while back that were close to the 0 degrees mark through the night and barely 10 at maximum. I know that would be mild for some but I'm a Brisbane girl and to me, that's slit-my-wrists cold. Maybe not that extreme but I sure as hell didn't feel like getting up for work in the mornings.

Soup makes everything better.

Sweet Potato and Salmon Cakes

Sweet Potato and Salmon Cakes
Home Cooking

I've recently taken yet another step towards becoming the ultimate sloth. Don't get me wrong. I work full time. My weekends are jam packed with activities (what isn't food-related will be alcohol related). The time between when I finish work and go to sleep flies by so fast that I find myself writing OCD notes in my diary to remind myself to do menial tasks like showering and nails.

With this, I justify that my day off should be spent as lazily as possible. That's easier said than done because as I've mentioned on this blog many times before, I don't possess the ability to sleep in. I've also designated my day off as my cooking and baking day and I try to do 2-3 recipes (I have to take advantage of daylight for my photos) so that's not really resting, but cooking is fun.

Julie Goodwin's Flatbread

Julie Goodwin's Flatbread
Home Cooking

Like many others out there, I've been weaning myself off Season 4 of Masterchef by watching the All Stars series. It's nowhere near as good but it's still some form of Masterchef and that's better than nothing by far.

In the episode where they're forced to axe their Mystery boxes for firewood, Julie is praised for her delicious char-grilled flatbread. I was browsing through the internet and stumbled upon THIS, no less than Julie Goodwin's flatbread recipe! This recipe doesn't force us to chop wood or cook oven an open flame so it's much easier to follow.

Labneh Plate with Flatbread

Labneh Plate with Flatbread
Home Cooking

I saw a mention of labneh when I was reading through Julie's flatbread recipe. It's one of her suggested accompaniments with the flatbread and when I saw it, I thought "what?" because I'd never heard of labneh before. It's essentially just strained yoghurt, aka yoghurt cheese. I have heard of the term 'yoghurt cheese' before and I don't know about you but it sounds kind of gross to me so I'm glad I can now call it labneh.

The principle behind this is pretty good. You let some Greek yoghurt sit on a seive over a long period of time until a significant portion of the water content has drained out. What remains is a thick, spreadable substance that has a more intense, tangy flavor than regular yoghurt.

Mushroom and Ham Stuffed Zucchini

Mushroom and Ham Stuffed Zucchini
Home Cooking

I fall victim to the cooking trap of treating my fridge/pantry like a  home mystery box challenge (Masterchef reference, for those not in the know). I start thinking about what bits and pieces I have that need using up, finding recipes that accomodate them and often buying extra ingredients to bring those recipes together. That sort of defies the whole point but what the hey.

On this occasion, I had a tray of mushrooms that were bothering me. I usually pan-fry mushrooms with zucchini and eat that with goats cheese on toast or in a wrap. In light of my current mood for cooking, I thought I could use those ingredients but in a new way.

Googling for inspiration, I found a couple of references for stuffed zucchini so I decided to give that a crack. With any recipe that involves stuffing something with other things, there's a lot of room for alteration. For someone in my situation, that makes it the perfect platform for using up troublesome ingredients. I had some corn kernals and green chili too so I threw those into the mix.

Mushroom and Ham Stuffed Zucchini
Serves 3-4

Ingredients:

• 3 large zucchinis
• cup of mushrooms
• 50g ham, chopped
• 1/3 cup corn kernals (optional; I used frozen)
• 1/2 green chili, chopped finely (optional)
• 1/2 cup bread crumbs
• 1 tbsp lemon zest
• olive oil
• 1/3 cup mozarella cheese, grated
• 50g butter, melted
• rocket and fresh lemon, to serve

Procedure:

1. Boil the zucchinis whole until they're just tender (about 10 minutes). Let them cool down.

2. Meanwhile, stir-fry the mushrooms and ham in some olive oil until the mushrooms are cooked.

3. Add the corn and chili (if using) until everything is warmed throughout.

4. Make the crumble by mixing together the breadcrumbs with lemon zest, cheese and butter.

5. Slice the zucchinis in half lengthwise and scoop out the insides.  These bits can be incorporated into the filling mixture if you like.

6. Preheat the grill so that it's nice and hot. Set the tray towards the top of the oven.
7. Fill the zuccini halves in with the filling mixture. Top with some of the crumble and drizzle the whole thing with olive oil.

8. Grill until the crumble is golden and the cheese has melted.

9. Serve with a fresh rocket salad, with some lemon wedges.

Stuffed vegetables have the benefit of looking fiddly and slightly fancy when they're not that difficult to do. I recommend using a small metal spoon for scooping out the zucchini flesh. Again, I reiterate that you can use anything for the filling really.

My filling didn't have a clear theme (besides 'get rid of igredients that Cora doesn't want in her fridge') but you could go the Italian route and fill with tomato, basil and ricotta or maybe the Mexican route and try some mince with ground cumin and coriander, beans and corn.

The mushroom and ham stuffed zucchini suited with the lemon zest crumble and I thought rocket and fresh lemon was the best accompaniment. If you change the filling, you could try some different tops and sides to match.