Sensational Salads

For my recent Italian dinner party, I made two sensational salads - Bill Granger's Rocket & Pumpkin Salad, pictured above, and Curtis Stone's Tomato Salad with Basil, Buffalo Mozzarella and Balsamic.

Unfortunately, one of my guests was not a salad man, but I enjoyed the salads. It was a nice change from roast veges to go with my porchetta.

To make the rocket & pumpkin salad (from the May 2007 edition of Delicious magazine), you will need:

500g peeled pumpkin cut into 1.5cm cubes
1 thinly sliced red onion
1 teaspoon dried chilli flakes (I left these out)
2 tablespoons olive oil
sea salt (to taste)
100g rocket leaves

Preheat your oven to 220 degrees Celsius.

Put all ingredients other than the rocket into a baking dish, toss to combine, and bake for 45 minutes or until the pumpkin is cooked through.

Put the rocket into a salad dish, add the pumpkin mixture, and toss to combine. It's that simple!

To make the tomato, basil, mozzarella and balsamic salad (from the May 2008 edition of Delicious magazine), you will need:

1kg mixed tomatoes (no mixing at Woolies - just tomatoes)
1/2 cup basil leaves
6 teaspoons balsamic vinegar
6 teaspoons extra virgin olive oil
2 balls buffalo mozzarella or 4 bocconcini

(Note - I only made a half batch, so you'll get way more salad than in my photo)

Cut the tomatoes into 2-3cm pieces and place in a salad bowl. Add the basil and half of the balsamic vinegar and olive oil. Season the mixture with salt and pepper and toss to coat the tomatoes.

Scatter over the torn mozzarella, and drizzle with the remaining olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Enjoy!

TWD - Coconut Tea Cake

This week's Tuesday with Dorie takes us to the tea houses of Austria, but with the coconut flavour, it could just as well be from a tropical isle. Our host is Carmen of Carmen Cooks, and she chose Dorie's Coconut Tea Cake.


In the blurb accompanying this recipe, Dorie said that this recipe will produce a plain cake which can be eaten as is, toasted or spread with jam. I liked it as is - I cut a piece while the cake was still warm, and it was delightful:


The coconut leaves a nice smell in the kitchen while it is baking. I made the straight up recipe, including the rum, although I think any of the variations would have been just as nice. Instead of shredded coconut, I used toasted dessicated coconut as this is what I had around.


I would definitely make this again - it is a simple, easy cake, with a taste that is pleasant but not over the top.


For the recipe for the Coconut Tea Cake, visit Carmen's site. To see what the other TWD bakers though of this recipe, visit the TWD blogroll.

Jamie Oliver's Porchetta Stuffed with Mushrooms

Do you love entertaining friends? It is something that I don't do often enough, but I love the planning and effort that goes into it, and it gives you a real sense of satisfaction when it is done, especially if your guests has a good time and enjoyed the meal.


Recently (ummm, well 4 weeks ago), I held a dinner party for my friend and her husband. It was around the time of the Daring Bakers tiramisu challenge, so the dessert was obviously going to be tiramisu. This made me decide to plan an Italian inspired meal for my guests. I pulled out all of my Italian editions of Delicious magazine, and came up with a menu.


For the main course, I selected Jamie Oliver's recipe for porchetta stuffed with mushrooms from the May 2009 edition of Delicious magazine. As Jamie rightly says, it looks impressive but is not that hard to do. The price of the meat from the butcher kind of shocked me (it was twice as much as I had estimated in a telephone call with the butcher), but I took it on the chin, lesson learned, and really enjoyed this dish. The mushrooms enhanced rather than overpowered the flavour of the pork, and Jamie's gravy recipe really set the whole meal off. The crackling was also a highlight of the meal.


The ingredients required are as follows:


Large handful of mixed mushrooms (I used button and shitake)
Olive oil
Small bunch of thyme leaves
2 garlic bulbs, 1 thinly sliced
1 tablespoon of butter
zest of 2 lemons
salt and pepper
a few slices of torn stale bread
3kg loin of pork, belly on but skin removed and kept for crackling (I only used 2kg)
2 tablespoons fennel seeds
2 celery stalks, roughly chopped
2 carrots, roughly chopped
1 onion, roughly chopped
1 small wine glass of alcoholic cider (drink the rest!)
1 tablespoon plain flour
500ml chicken or vegetable stock


Preheat your oven to its highest setting.


Tear the mushrooms roughly. Heat a large frypan, add some olive oil for cooking the mushrooms, add the mushrooms and thyme, then the sliced bulb of garlic and butter. Fry the mixture for about 10 minutes until the mushrooms start to brown. Add the lemon zest, salt and pepper, then tip the mushroom mixture into a bowl to cool. Once cool, add the torn bread and toss together.


Lay the pork loin, fatty side down, on a board, and use a knife to make a pocket between the loin and the belly meat, as shown:

Stuff the mushroom mixture into the pocket, then season the pork with salt and pepper all over:

Roll the belly around the loin, and tie it up with string in around 5 places to hold it all together:

If you have the pork bones, scatter them over the base of the roasting pan, and place the pork on top. Put the pork into the oven and immediately reduce the temperature to 180 degrees Celsius.


Score the surface of the pork skin into diamonds with a sharp knife. Crack open the fennel seeds with some salt in a pestle and mortar, then rub the mixture into the scored pork skin, and place it on a baking tray.


After the pork has been in the oven for one hour, remove it and add the vegetables and the remaining garlic bulb broken up into unpeeled cloves to the baking tray. Pour the cider all over the pork, then return the pork to the oven and allow it to bake for another hour. Put the crackling into the oven at this stage too.


When the pork is cooked, remove t from the oven and allow it to rest on a plate, covered with foil, for 20 minutes. While the pork is resting, make the gravy by pouring the juices from the baking tray into a saucepan (with excess fat removed), mashing up the vegetables with a fork or potato masher, then adding the stock and the flour, and stirring over the heat until the gravy has reduced to the desired consistency. Sieve the gravy to remove the vegetable chunks and any flour lumps, and serve with the pork and crackling.


This is what the sliced pork looks like:

And here is the gorgeous tasting, burnished brown crackling:

The pork was appreciated by both my guests, and I would definitely make it again.


I went to see Jamie Oliver Live in Melbourne a couple of weeks ago. Although I enjoyed it, it wasn't as much fun as when I saw him about 9 years ago in a more intimate venue. Quite a few people left well before the end of the show, which seemed to drag a little in a few places. I was also embarassed for a well known Australian pizza chain when Jamie rang up for a pizza live onstage and got more than a little attitude from the operator taking his order. If it had been me in real life, I would have told them to stick their pizza because the operator was so rude. A big hello to the lady from Malaysia who came on stage and was prepared to go to great lengths to get books signed for her friends and to find her daughter a husband. You go girl!

Daring Bakers - Orange Tian

When I saw that this month's Daring Bakers challenge was an Orange Tian, I thought, "What the ...????" Perhaps I have been living in a cave, but I had never heard of an orange tian before, and when I read the ingredients, I wasn't initially enthused. However, after tasting the finished product, my mind was changed.

The 2010 March Daring Baker’s challenge was hosted by Jennifer of Chocolate Shavings. She chose Orange Tian as the challenge for this month, a dessert based on a recipe from Alain Ducasse’s Cooking School in Paris.

Basically, orange tian is comprised of a biscuit base, spread with home-made marmalade (a la Jaffa Cakes - one of my favourite biscuits in the whole wide world), then topped with orange flavoured whipped cream and caramel-flavoured orange segments and drizzled with orange-caramel sauce. I would never have chosen to make this of my own accord, and while I won't promise to make it again, I have to say that it is good. The zing of the oranges against the fluffy whipped cream reminds me of orange sherbert, and with the caramel sauce on top, this is a devine combination.

On to the step by step photos so you get the picture. Here is my pate sable (biscuit) base:

You then segment oranges - a lot of oranges - for the top of the tian. Here is an orange being segmented:

Thanks for the link to the video on how to do this Jennifer - I would have been a little lost without it. My technique improved as I went along, but I also believe that some oranges were meant to be segmented, while others - well, not so much. I ended up segmenting 6 and a half oranges for this dessert.

The orange segments are coated with an orange-caramel syrup, then arranged in a pattern in the bottom of a ring mould (in my case, the rim of a spring form pan):

The oranges are then topped with whipped cream through which gelatine and marmalade have been folded:

The biscuit base is spread with home-made marmalade:

I didn't need to use pectin or jam setter to make this marmalade - the time tested ratio of 1:1 fruit:sugar worked just fine by itself.

You place the jam side of the biscuit base down on top of the cream in the mould, then you freeze the whole thing for around 20 minutes (as mine was a large one - smaller versions need only 10 minutes).

After the dessert has set, you turn it out onto a plate, orange-side up:

Ta da!

The piece de resistance is to reduce some of the orange caramel syrup made to coat the oranges down into a thick sauce and drizzle it over the tian before serving:

I was skeptical about the sauce too, but man it is good! The dessert is made even better by the sauce, so don't skip it.

To take a gander at hundreds of other orange and other flavoured tians, visit the Daring Bakers blogroll. Thanks to Jennifer for introducing me to something new and exciting this month, which I otherwise would never have known about or made.

Sydney weekend - Doyles on the Beach & Chinta Ria

Last weekend, I was away again, this time in Sydney for a dear friend's wedding. My companion and I took the day off on Friday and made it a three day weekend so that we could make the best of the opportunities that Sydney has to offer.


I didn't get to Adriano Zumbo's in Balmain, because we left it til Sunday, and then found that the ferry timetable was rather woeful in meeting our need to do other things and get back in time to catch our return flights, so that was left for another day.


However, on Sunday, we did have a wonderful lunch at Doyles on the Beach in Watsons Bay. The Doyles name is synonymous with seafood in Sydney, and while there are a number of Doyles establishments, I am informed that the one at Watsons Bay is the original and best. It is pricier than the Doyles cafe nearby, but for the authentic Doyles experience, it is worth it. Mains average at around $40, and entrees are around the $19 mark.


For your money, you get this fabulous view as you dine:

I don't own Photoshop, so everything truly is as bright and as sunny and as blue as it appears in the photos. It was a truly glorious day. It may have been autumn, but it felt like summer in every way.

My companion ordered the Doyles Selection, with a mixture of battered whiting, stuffed prawn, fresh prawns, blue swimmer crab and chips:

I orderd the Hahns beer battered snapper with old fashioned chips:

Both serves were very generous (we could not have fitted in entree or dessert), and came with soy chilli, tartare and tomato sauces. We washed it down with a Boags beer (in my companion's case) and a Semillion (in my case) while admiring the marvellous view and general holiday ambience.

Our bill was just over the hundred dollar mark for two (including a weekend surcharge), but it is not something you do every day, and was a very enjoyable meal.

While in Sydney, we also went to the Chinta Ria Temple of Love restaurant in Cockle Bay. The food was very good, although on a Friday evening, we were lucky to get a table without booking and without waiting long. I recommend booking if possible because it seemed to be a very popular venue. We even did some celebrity spotting, as Angus Sampson (for international readers, he was The Bull in Where the Wild Things Are movie) arrived as we dined. I selected the chilli scallops - and man, they packed some punch - while my companion chose the Sassy Duck (duck in soy sauce). We had Pisces Toast (lovely toasts topped with ling, which you dip in sweet chilli sauce) for entree. Again, this was not a cheap meal (just over $100 for two with wine and beer), but it was very good food.

On a different note, I want to thank Gloria of Canela Kitchen Recipes for awarding me the Happy 101 Award and the Honest Scrap Award:

and Lily of Lily's Kitchen Window for awarding me the Kreativ Blogger award:

The rules for the Kreativ Blogger award are:

1. Pass it onto seven other blogs you love.

2. Let everyone know seven things about yourself.

3. Notify the awardees on their blogs.

4. Link to the awardee's blogs when giving the awards.

I am unsure of the rules for the other two awards, but I am going to roll them all into one and pass them onto the following blogs that I enjoy reading regularly:

1. A Duck in Her Pond

2. Green Gourmet Giraffe

3. Cooking for Comfort

4. Food Baby

5. Jill's Blog

6. The Caked Crusader

7. Kopiaste

And ending with 7 things about me:

1. I have lived in 3 states, 2 countries and 2 hemispheres.

2. I did not travel overseas until I was in my mid twenties.

3. I did not fly in a plane until I was sixteen.

4. For me, it is dogs rather than cats, although this very sweet cat followed us to the ferry in Sydney last Friday (when it really was not in its best interests to do so given the heat, the distance it walked, and the fact that we could not take it with us):

5. I cannot live without chocolate - the panacea for everything - and I usually have some every day.

6. I regularly do clinical pilates to help my poor old back.

7. My current favourite shows are Mad Men and The Circuit, both of which are thankfully available on DVD.

Have a great Wednesday!

TWD - Dulce de Leche Duos

This week's Tuesday with Dorie is hosted by Jodie of Beansy Loves Cake, who chose Dorie's Dulce de Leche Duos.


Dulce de Leche Duos are soft, cakey biscuits containing dulce de leche in the batter, and sandwiched together with more dulce de leche. What's not to love? In Australia, ready made dulce de leche is sold in the supermarkets as the far less exotically named Caramel Top'n'Fill:





Not quite the same ring to it, but definitely the same stuff. My favourite use for Caramel Top'n'Fill is to eat it straight from the can, and this recipe obligingly left me enough caramel in the tin to do just that.


These biscuits are easy to make, although they tend to bake into some odd shapes and sizes. They taste very good, and I'd make them again if it took my fancy.


Thanks to Jodie for hosting us this week. If you'd like some other views on these cookies, visit the TWD blogroll.

Soft Chocolate and Raspberry Tart

Hi to all. Sorry I have been a slacker this last week - I have been distracted by all manner of things, including a weekend away in lovely Melbourne, which belied its reputation for bitter weather with summery blue skies and hot sunshine. I ate at some fabulous places while I was there, including Jimmy Watsons in Carlton (salmon pizza with marscapone and salmon roe), Cooper & Milla's in Armadale (banana and date porridge - very thick and substantial - and an enormous lamington), and a Chinese restaurant upstairs in Chinatown somewhere with a 5 course banquet for $32.50 a head that included Peking Duck - yum! (From the photos, I think it was Da Hu Peking Duck Restaurant.) I also had lunch at Cafe Eden in Canterbury - a rather large but lovely honey mustard chicken salad, together with a lime spider.


However, I am back and I have as of Monday night made this week's Tuesday with Dorie recipe. Our host this week is Rachelle of Mommy? I'm Hungry, and she chose Dorie's Soft Chocolate and Raspberry Tart. A dessert with a name like that has me written all over it, so even though I struggled to fit this into my schedule and in fact made it in about 4 stages, it was worth it.


This tart is comprised of a pate sable tart shell, filled with raspberries (in my case, frozen ones) and a milk and dark chocolate ganache. You bake the filling, and it sets at room temperature to a smooth, silky delight studded with tart but complementary raspberries:




Now don't you just wanna sink your teeth into that chocolate filling? This tart is oh so good, and surprisingly not very sweet.


You can get the recipe from Rachelle, and to see what the other TWD bakers thought of the tart, visit the TWD blogroll. As for me, I am having some more tart ...