Gingerboy's pantry

I am just in the process of indexing gingerboy for for eat your books and am up to the Crispy Yellow Curry-Marinated Garfish with cucumber and cherry tomato salad, which I am advised serves four as part of a  Shared Plate meal. So let's face it, this is not a grand main course, you'll want to be cooking a couple of dishes like this. But it has THIRTY-SIX ingredients, count them 36! I'm sorry, that's just plain silly. Even one of the cocktails has 10 ingredients. Somehow, I don't think I'm  going to be cooking much from this after all. And the combination of the book's design, which I had thought was mysterious, is now starting to appear plain old menacing.

UPDATE:  I just need to vent....

This book is going to be the cooking equivalent of Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time... Everyone's going to have it and no one's going to use it. It is SO obtuse!

You know the sort of book... Take a cup of the marinade on page 262, add it to a pork fillet, then make the salad which also has components from pages 260, 282, 127... You get the idea!

Already one recipe has 36 ingredients... including popcorn shoots. I mean, really!

Bill's Everyday Asian ~ Meatballs with a tamarind glaze

light flavoured oil, to brush and drizzle
600g beef mince
1 tablespoon finely shopped ginger
3 tablespoons coriander leaves
1 small red onion, grated
1 tablespoon soy sauce

Preheat the oven to 240 dedgrees celsius and brush a large roasting tray with oil. Put the mince, ginger, coriander, onion and soy sauce in a large bowl and season with sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. Use your hands to mix the ingredients together until well combined, then roll heaped tablespoons of the mixture into balls. Put the meatballs in the prepared tray, drizzle over a litle extra oil and roast for 10 minutes.

Remove the tray from the oven, pour a third of the  glaze over the meatballs and return the tray to the over to roast for a further 5 minutes. Repeat this step and roast for a further 2 miutes. Repeat once more before serving with steamed rice and steamed Asian greens.

Serves 4-8


Tamarind glaze

2 tablespoons light flavoured oil
2 tablespoons tamarind paste
200 ml honey
4 tablespoons lime juice
1 tablespoon soy sauce

Place the oil, tamarind paste, honey, 3 tablespoons water, lime juice and soy sauce in a small saucepan over the medium heat. Bring to the boi and simmer for 4 minutes. Set aside.

An afterword:  One thing I cannot stand on food blogs is badly photographed food. And I'm here to tell you I'm no photographer. So... I'll let other people's work (legally of course) do the photographic talking. This gorgous pic was taken by Kevin Connors, and I thought it lent a nice 'feel' to the recipe.  I found it here.

These are a few of my favourite things… for 2011

1. This is the message I see when I log in to eatyourbooks.com.
“Welcome… you have 413 cookbooks, 2 magazines, 7 blogs and 46,317 recipes on your Bookshelf.”
I find that very comforting. Now I just need somewhere to put them. But seriously, I now use a lot more of the 413 books than I ever did before. If you’ve got a problem with ‘Just saying no’ to a new book, you need this site.

2. Chef’s armoury. This store in Sydney thrills me to my tabi socks. Japanese food products, the most glorious barbecues and binchotan charcoal, knives, books. It’s a tiny wee place, but packed with great expertise and quality products.

3 feast magazine. New from our broadcaster SBS this year. It’s a cracker of mag and I hope it flourishes. Take out a subscription now.

4. Where I live being named the winner of the 100 mile food challenge at the Crave Festival. It’s an abundant part of the world, with award winning dairy, citrus dripping off the trees, oysters, mud crab and fish to die for.

5 .Jimmy’s Atta flour. Glorious for making flatbreads.

6. Eating at Hellenic Republic. Check out the menu here, and when you’re next in Melbourne, be sure to rustle up at least three other people, and go for dinner. You’ll need company so you can taste everything on the menu.

7. My local op shop and market for arcane utensils, including the Food Glamorizer. Angusf appears to have one too. It’ll be a very retro Christmas with a bit of assistance from this little treasure.

8. And just when you thought there couldn't be any more, new and wonderful cook books. And a high Australian dollar for a while there meant shopping at Amazon & Book Depository was even more fun.

If ever a book needed eatyourbooks.com...

It's this one, all 1000 recipes of it.


It really is a bible of the subcontinent, and we have stumbled across some great dishes in here. In fact, we're making spicy potato stuffed parathas as I write. Why stumbled? Because the index only lists the Indian names for each recipe. Although there is an English title at the head of the recipe, there's no English language index. So if you can't remember exactly what your recipe's called, you haven't got a chapati's chance in Mumbai of finding it. God help you if you can't remember the name of the curry you cooked from it, or you run out of post-it notes! Please, eatyourbooks, please index this book.

Bill's Everyday Asian ~ Bill Granger

Billl’s Everyday Asian
Harper Collins
ISBN: 9780732291686

I’m not going to include the price, because wherever you are in the world, it could vary.

Now…
There’s a marked difference between the cook book that has grown out of a restaurant and the book which have the definite authorship of a person. This was thrown into sharp focus when I sat down with my cup of Japanese tea (well, it is an Asian cookbook) to thumb my way through Bill Granger’s latest offering. I read somewhere the other day that Bill is being touted as the new Jamie Oliver. Bill’s got a few years on Jamie, and has been around probably longer. And Bill is Bill, he’s a not new anybody. His food to date has been simple, achievable and bloody delicious. Let’s see what his foray into a book devoted to Asian food is going to be like, shall we? His scrambled egg recipe is sublime. Don’t knock it ‘til you try it. Takes scrambled eggs to a whole new plain. And his coconut bread is iconic.

The first thing I notice in this book is Bill’s voice. It’s reassuring, interested and helpful. He’s starting to sound like my pin-up boy, Nigel Slater. Maybe it's because he's not a chef, he's a self taught cook. So he gets how we want to, and need to cook... every day.

Design: Very pretty styling. Swathes of Asian pastels, celadon, duck egg blue, pinks, red lacquer. Mikkel Vang’s photography is clean and zingy like the food.

Typeface: Clear, if not a point or two too small.

Bookmarks: None. It’s not a huge tome, so not really necessary.

Country of origin/Travelability: Australian, metric only. No alternative ingredient names given for US market. No special ingredients required. Just your basic Asian flavours. Get yourself a bottle of fish sauce, some ginger, coriander, soy sauce (both light & dark), lash out on a wok, and you’re good to go. I live in the country, but there’s not a basic ingredient I can’t find in my local supermarket. As Bill says, approach Asian food in the same way as Italian food. They’re similar. And we don’t think twice about cooking Italian these days.

Text: Delightful. Welcoming, encouraging, confidence inspiring, and downright chatty. Simple clear directions that won’t frighten a novice cook.

Yum factor: High.

Degree of difficulty: Low.

Recipe test:
Meatballs with tamarind glaze ~ easy, delicious, and the kiddies will like love ‘em. They’re a little bit sweet and sour. And the tamarind glaze lifts the slight bitterness of the bok choy. In fact, I’d make up the glaze just to have on bok choy instead of oyster sauce. And you could make the meatballs with pork, or even chicken. And if you’re in entertaining mode, make up two or three times the amount and serve them with drinks.

Banana batter cake with caramel sauce ~ Bill calls it an ‘Asian variation on sticky toffee pudding.’ Ooh, yeah. I have to say we had it with cream rather than coconut milk, but the coconut milk would make it ever so tropical. And a great recipe to tinker with… Palm sugar instead of brown, some pineapple on the top with the bananas. That sort of thing.

And in both of these recipes, you’re not going to kill it by substituting a little bit here or there. That’s the thing about Bill. He wants us to cook, not slavishly replicate. So I suppose he is a little like Jamie in that regard.

There’ll definitely be more recipe tests from this volume.

Index: Good.

What I learnt: Bill predicts Korean food will be ‘the next big thing’. I actually predict it will be Peruvian food. Want a wager, Bill?

Bloopers:
There’s no cutlet in the Japanese pork cutlet
There’s no soy in the Asparagus, chilli, garlic & soy,
And for crying out loud… There’s no salt in the Salt & pepper whiting. This recipe is also on the Lifestyle Food website, and still no one’s told us how much salt we need. Or am I missing something?

This is a welcome addition to Bill’s oeuvre. It’s a lively, joyful collection. I’m filing it under B for Bill, rather than the more anonymous A for Asian on my bookshelves. It’s that personable a book. A place to turn for bold Asian flavours that won’t send your carbon emissions skyrocketing trying to find ingredients.

Bring on Bill’s Tasty Weekends book please.

And just to get you started, although it’s not in this book, here’s the recipe for the aforementioned coconut bread:

Coconut Bread Recipe
Recipe from Sydney Food by Bill Granger
2 eggs
300ml of milk
1 teaspoon of vanilla essence
2 1/2 cups of plain flour
2 teaspoons of baking powder
2 teaspoons of cinnamon
1 cup of caster sugar
150g of shredded coconut
75g of unsalted butter, melted
To serve: butter and icing sugar
1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius and grease and flour a loaf tin.
2. Sift the flour and baking powder together into a bowl and add the cinnamon, sugar and coconut. Stir to combine and make a well in the centre.
3. Whisk the eggs, milk and vanilla together and pour into the flour mixture and mix until just combined before adding the melted butter. Stir until the mixture is smooth, being careful not to overmix.
4. Pour into the prepared loaf pan and bake for 1 hour or until a cake tester comes out clean. Leave in the pan to cool for 5 minutes before removing and placing onto a wire rack to cool.
And my word on it: It freezes beautifully. Slice and wrap in foil and pop her in the freezer, then toast or put in a café press thinking

Is Greek cooking the new vegan?

I have three Greek cookbooks. Doesn't everyone? The most recent, by our very own George Calombaris was purchased after a sensational meal at Hellenic Republic.

What's struck me of late, is how much of Greek Cooking is vegan ~ yes, vegan. So many of the mezedes are vegetable, bean and grain based, and cheese is not automatically included to finish off a vegetable based dish.


If I were to say that the meal we were eating was vegan, my Significant Other woud probably run screaming from the room. But tell him it's Greek and he's up for it.

Try fava, a yellow split pea dip, often served with finely sliced onions and capers, although at Hellenic Republic they serve it with a light touch of truffle. My word it's delicious. And each of these books has a recipe for it. You may never go back to houmous again. Or the Aubergine and Walnut Salad from 'The Real Greek at Home'.

All three of these books are worth having on your shelves. You've got all bases covered ~ summer, winter, carnivore, vegetarian, and yes VEGAN.

Kali orexi!

Au revoir city

Almost 12 months ago, we threw in the city for a coastal country town in NSW on the south coast. Sydney was getting too hard, and there were things we wanted to do which required space. So here we are. Which is why this blog has been neglected. I've now unpacked the 400 cookbooks, got them in some sort of order, and with the help of all those recipes are now at my disposal. The shelves are organised ~ by type of cooking, by country, and a separate book case for those with whom I'm on first name terms. Nigel, Bill, Jamie, Maggie, Yotam.
And its an abundant part of the world. Lots of citrus ~ possibly the best ruby grapefruit I've yet to encounter, and even banana trees in the back yard that had a wee hand of bananas. And given the price of bananas, they're very welcome.

So back to the citrus. 10 kilos of oranges, much ruby grapefruit and a whole lot of lemons came my way. After a scour of the 'preserving' section Sally Wise's A Year in a Bottle (which is NOT about drinking too much) won the day with the lemon cordial. A scan of the net gave me the right quantities for adapting it to Grapefruit cordial, and can I tell you it's going to be gorgeous with campari and/or vodka, and a slug of spritzy bubbly water. The summer drink de jour.

The preserving section revealed a larger collection than I'd originally thought. In addition to Sal there's Syd Pemberton's Jams & Preserves, a nice volume but with some clangers of typos in the quantities, Maureen Kirwan's Pot o' Jam, which has just fallen open on the Orange Coriander Marmalade page. That's me! Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz, is perhaps better known for her coverage of Latin American cooking, but Clearly Delicious is a cracker for the novice. A Family Circle Jams, Pickles and Chutneys is great if you've got too many chokos, and doesn't one always have too many chokos. And finally a gorgeous little piece of ephemera that I picked up at a market ~ Spepelt's Wine Vinegar Recipes. Mainly purchased for the interesting creature on the cover, and it's very '50s colour palette, but one needs a Chicken a la Tartare receipe, n'est ce pas.


The results of the preserving madness coming soon.

Yippee

Have loads of cookbooks? Continue to cook out of the same few? I know I do. But hey, the best tool for cooks is now available at the touch of a button, or is it the click of mouse? Anyway. Get yourself to Eat Your Books What is it? Well, you enter your cookbooks into the EYB library, and hey presto, there's the index for your book. So let's just say you've got strawberries. EYB will tell you where you can find strawberry recipes amongst your cookbook collection. I tell you people, it doesn't get much better than that. Not all books in the library are indexed yet -- it's a work in progress, but I've entered 173 books, and I now have 13,771 recipes at my disposal. Love it, love it.

The Wookie's Favourite Magazine

Lala likes nothing better than a new mag to salivate over. Just like her mother.

Two sorts of tandoori

One night was the Tandoori lamb cutlets with baked cumin pumpkin, panch pora carrots and roasted beetroot, and the second innings was Tandoori chicken with curried cauliflower. We baked the chicken, but grilled the lamb.

And S.O. made a ham and veg frittata one night.

Both were delicious.

And on the CSIRO program. Yay. 2 kilos in two weeks.

Tuna & Beans

Click on the photo and the recipe will be clear as a bell. It was lovely, with fantastically fresh green beans cooked in eggs and parmesan. (from the Silver Spoon)

Breast of Lamb Ste Ménéhould ~ such a great name

S.O. had a bit of a cookathon last week. We had bought some very cheap and cheerful cuts of meat at Haberfield, and where else do you turn in those circumstances but to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's 'Meat' Book for his Breast of Lamb Ste Ménéhould . It was delicious, but what a palaver. Took days.

S.O. did as Hugh suggested and made the tartare sauce, and served it with an orange and watercress salad and some mash.

Not to be served to my Jewish friends.

Pork cooked in milk. Yep. I know, sounds terrible, and it's decidedly unkosher, but it's lovely. The milk makes the pork meltingly tender and then it goes all nutty brown bits around it at the end. Yummy.

And a couple of loaves of Mr Oliver's Ciabatta, which seem to be the most successful on the crust stakes.

And another night was the Veal stewing chops with Olives.

Jam Donuts.

I LOVE Jam Donuts. And I've let myself go during the non-smoking period. A Jam Donut a day keeps the doctor away. Isn't that the adage.

It was getting a little out of control though, when I remembered Nigella's recipe for the Jam Donut Muffin:

• 125ml milk


• 85ml corn or other vegetable oil


• 1 large egg


• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract


• 200g self-raising flour


• 100g caster sugar


• 12 tsp of berry jam (I used Bitton’s Strawberry & Vanilla Jam ~ it’s divine)

With a fork, beat together milk, oil, egg and vanilla extract. Stir this into the flour and caster sugar to combine, the lumps don't matter. Remember not to overbeat or else the muffins will be tough. Spoon the mixture into each mini muffin cups so that it's just under a third full. Add a tsp of jam, then top with more muffin mix so that the cases are just about full.

Bake for about 20 minutes in a preheated oven at 190 C.

While still hot roll in melted butter and sugar.

My word, they are SPLENDID!

A bit of catching up to do...

Spinach & Paneer Curry, Egg Curry and Parathas

Savoirdi biscuit, icecream, passionfruit and choc sauce

Pork Chop with blood orange marmalade sauce, braised fennel and roasted spuds

Pumpkin and Gympie Goat Cheese risotto