Chocolate & Coconut Budino

This recipe was by Tobie Puttock from a recent Delicious magazine. A Budino is an Italian version of a self-saucing pudding. One tip that you probably don’t need, never attempt to make a self saucing pudding in a spring form tin, when you pour over the boiling water, it will leak straight out the bottom & you will have a big mess! Despite this minor disaster I managed to save the pudding by pouring extra water on top, banging it in the oven on a tray & crossing my fingers hoping for the best. The result was pretty darn good, I loved the addition of coconut for a bit of a change to your plain old chocolate pudding. I served it with some home made vanilla bean ice cream, yum.

Chocolate & Coconut Budino

1 cup (150g) plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 tablespoons cocoa powder plus 2 tablespoons extra for topping
¼ cup (20g) desiccated coconut
¼ cup (55g) caster sugar
40g unsalted butter, melted
½ cup (125ml) milk
1 egg
1 vanilla bean, split, seeds scraped
1 firmly packed cup (200g) brown sugar
halved strawberries & crème fraiche or ice cream or whatever takes your fancy to serve

Preheat oven to 175c & grease a 24cm non-stick metal pie or ceramic dish. Sift the flour, baking powder, cocoa & a pinch of salt into a large bowl, then stir in the coconut and caster sugar. In a separate bowl, combine the melted butter, milk, egg and vanilla seeds with a wooden spoon, then mix with the dry ingredients. Pour the mixture into the dish & set aside for a minute. Combine the extra cocoa powder & brown sugar in a bowl. Sprinkle the mixture over the pudding, then carefully pour 1 cup boiling water over the top. Bake in the oven until the centre has puffed & the pudding feels firm – this should take about 30 minutes (If you’re using a ceramic dish it will take about 40-45 minutes).

Serve immediately with strawberries & ice-cream or whatever takes your fancy! Serves 4-6

Ginger & Orange Syrup Pudding

This is an old recipe from the July 2003 Australian Table Magazine that I found waiting to be tried out. I have been trying to find some low fat desserts to make instead of my usual preference for fat & sugar laden heavenly concoctions! This is mainly for the sake of my parents who I am cooking for & are supposed to be getting their cholesterol down on Doctors orders. This recipe is low fat & doesn’t have much sugar in it & is actually quite tasty, my mum & dad were quite happy with it. I must say the Golden syrup does work wonders for what would otherwise be quite plain, serve with a good scoop of ice cream (low fat or not) to complete the pudding.

Ginger & Orange Syrup Pudding

Cooking Spray
160ml (2/3 cup) golden syrup
110g (3/4 cup) self raising flour
1 teaspoon ground ginger
grated rind of 1 orange, plus extra zested rind, to serve
2 tablespoons caster sugar
50g reduced fat canola margarine
1 egg
80ml (1/3 cup) skim milk
reduced fat ice cream (optional) to serve

Preheat oven to 180c. Grease 2 x 2 cup capacity ramekins with cooking spray.

Pour golden syrup into bases of prepared ramekins. Set aside.

Sift flour & ginger into a large bowl. Add grated orange rind, sugar & margarine & rub together with your fingertips until a crumb forms. In a separate bowl, beat together egg & milk with a fork, then pour into crumb mixture & stir until well combined. Spoon mixture over golden syrup in ramekins & bake in oven for 20 minutes or until cooked & golden.

Scoop ½ pudding out of ramekins, place in bowls & top with extra rind. Serve with ice cream if desired. Serves 4.

Mini Chocolate Puddings - Christmas treats Part 1

This year for Christmas I thought for that for the first time I would try & be creative & make some festive treats to pack up in boxes & give out to the family for Christmas. The first thing to go in is these minature chocolate puddings, recipe from the Christmas edition of Donna Hay. This is more of an assembly job than a recipe. Note that I doubled the recipe which is suppsoed to make 30 & only ended up with 42 so I must have made them too big. Also with doubling the chocolate started to harden up a bit towards the end making it a bit messy to roll the balls in. as you can see from the photos I totally got the rustic look happening, my chocolate coating & decorating skills far from perfect. I think they taste great though Michael thinks they're a bit rich, he is not much of a chocolate/sweet lover though. Will have to wait to see what everyone else thinks.

Mini Chocolate Puddings

350g store bought Christmas pudding, roughly chopped
1 tablespoon brandy
200g dark cooking chocolate, melted
1/4 cup cachous, (silver decorating balls)

Place the pudding and brandy in a food processor and process until it resembles fine breadcrumbs. Roll teaspoons of the mixture into balls, using a fork dip into the chocolate, place on a baking tray lined with baking paper & decorate with cachous. Allow to set at room temperature for 1 hour.

Banana Semi Freddo

Last night I had a couple of friends over for dinner, nothing lavish but a good excuse to try out some new food anyway. I am going to start with dessert just because it looked so good (in my opinion anyway). I have been loving ice cream & chocolate at the moment & had never made a semi freddo before so thought would give this recipe from Ben O’Donoghue and Curtis Stone’s Surfing the Menu a go. I t was pretty simple to make though did take quite a few bowls & in order to freeze you need to start this quite a few hours ahead or even the night before. The upside of this of course is that when you are ready to eat you just whip it out & serve, no fiddling around while the guests are there. Everyone loved the fact that it was full of fresh bananas & all in all it went down pretty well, nice to serve something a bit different for a change too

Banana Semifreddo

10 free range egg yolks
100g warmed honey
3 tablespoons rum or banana liqueur
4 tablespoons caster sugar
3 large ripe bananas
5 egg whites
500ml pouring cream
200g dark chocolate, chopped
55g unsalted roasted peanuts (other nuts may be used), finely chopped

Line a loaf tin or a glass pudding bowl with plastic wrap and place in the freezer to chill.

Place the egg yolks in a bowl with the honey, rum and half the sugar. Place the bowl over a pan of simmering water and whisk until the mixture is light & fluffy and doubled in volume.

Mash the bananas with a fork, add to the egg mixture & stir to combine. In a clean bowl, whisk the egg whites with the remaining sugar until stiff. Fold into the banana mixture. Whip the cream to soft peaks & fold into the banana mixture. Add half the chopped chocolate. Spoon into the lined mould & freeze until set.

Melt the remaining chocolate by placing it in a bowl over a saucepan of simmering water (don’t let the bowl touch the water). Unmould the semifreddo onto a serving plate. Using a spoon, drizzle half the chocolate over the top in a criss cross pattern, then sprinkle with the peanuts. Drizzle the remaining chocolate over the top. Return to the freezer until required.

About 15-20 minutes before serving, transfer to the fridge to soften.

Baked Chocolate tart

Today Rach was coming over for a bit of a catch up, she is a bit of a sucker for chocolate (just like me in my present state!) so I whipped up this tart of Jamie Oliver’s from ‘The Naked Chef. I had some left over pastry in the freezer from when I made the lemon lime tart so this cut down considerably on my prep time which was excellent, means I got to spend the whole morning in the garden! I’ve included the pastry recipe as per previous post. I served the tart with fresh strawberries & blueberries & let me say this, it was sensational, absolutely delicious. The fact that it was dark chocolate made it very intense without being too sweet, it tasted a little like a chocolate pudding but solid of course & of the sweetness of the berries was perfect along side. Also I have to say home made short crust pastry definitely kicks ass over the frozen kind. Make this tart & trust me you will not regret it.

Baked Chocolate Tart

1 x 25cm flan or tart shell, baked blind
140g butter, unsalted
150g good quality chocolate, (70% cocoa solids)
8 tablespoons cocoa powder, sifted
small pinch salt
4 eggs
200g caster sugar
3 tablespoons golden syrup
3 medium heaped tablespoons sour cream or crème fraiche

Place the butter, chocolate, cocoa powder and slat in a bowl over a pan of simmering water & allow to melt slowly, stirring occasionally until well mixed in. In a separate bowl beat the eggs & sugar together until light & well creamed, and then add the golden syrup & sour cream. Stir your choc mixture into this mixture, scraping all of the chocolate out with a spatula. Once you’ve mixed it well pour it into the pastry shell. Place into a preheated oven for 40-45 minutes at 150c. During cooking a beautiful crust will form.

Carefully remove the tart from the oven & allow to cool on a rack for at least 45 minutes, during which time the skin will crack & the filling will shrink slightly. Serve with fresh berries

Short Crust Sweet Pastry

To make 2 x 30cm/12 inch tart moulds
250g butter
200g icing sugar
a medium pinch of salt
500g flour
4 egg yolks
4 tablespoons cold milk/water

You can make this by hand or in a food processor. Cream together the butter, sugar & salt & then rub or pulse in the flour & egg yolks. When the mix has come together, looking like coarse breadcrumbs, add the cold water or milk. Pat & gently work together to form a ball of dough. Use minimum movement as the more you work it the more elastic it will get, causing the pastry to shrink & be chewy. Roll into a large, short & fat sausage shape, wrap in glad wrap & place in the fridge for at lest 1 hour.Carefully slice off thin slivers of pastry lengthways, around 5mm thick. Place the slivers in & around the bottom & sides of your tart mould, then push the pieces together & level out. Now it needs to rest again for at least 1 hour in the freezer this time.Bake the tart for about 15 minutes at 180c, completely cool & fill with any uncooked fillings.For baked fillings, bake blind first at 180c for only about 12 minutes. You can fill the shell with rice, baking beads, etc but if your pastry is straight out of the freezer you shouldn’t have problems with shrinkage, etc.

Cook Islands Trip

We have just returned from our week of Paradise in The Cook Islands, as you can see from the photo, it is gorgeous over there & the pic doesn’t even do the place justice. We even got to spend a day & night in Tahiti as on the way there some very strong winds – apparently 120kms/hour, prevented us from landing so we had to divert, thanks to Air New Zealand for providing all we needed it was actually really enjoyed rather than being the disaster it could have been. They put us up in The Intercontinental which was beautiful, we spent the day swimming in their gorgeous & mammoth pool, walking around & chilling out. As for the food, well I know resorts aren’t usually the best but I have to say the buffet lunch was pretty awful so the eating extravaganza I had planned was not off to a good start.

All in all our food experience did not end up being that great apart from a couple of good feeds, for the most part I thought it was pretty awful, so as you can imagine I was very disappointed. Most of the food is imported from New Zealand which brings the prices up for a start, they are more or loss on a par with Australian restaurant prices which I wouldn’t mind paying if the quality was the same. The fact that it wasn’t & there really weren’t any cheap & easy options available for dinner didn’t make me any happier paying these prices. Lunch was a bit better with more available & at more reasonable prices. We had a tropical breakfast included daily which was fine, not much can go wrong with cereal, fruit, toast & pastries after all! I hate to write about bad experiences but really wasn’t left with much option. So anyway that being said now I will tell you about the good bits.

When we finally made it The Cooks, our first port of call was the stunning Island of Aitutaki, the photo is actually One Foot Island which is one of the surrounding motu’s (Islands). We did an Island cruise taking in a few surrounding Islands & some snorkelling – fantastic, and we had a local lunch on Honeymoon Island put together by the cruise people. This was great as they laid out a platter of traditional fruits & vegetables including Sea Grapes, these were very weird looking, a small branch with lots of very small ‘green grapes’ attached, squeezed with lime juice very tasty & apparently very good for you too, paw-paw, guava, lady bird bananas (as you can imagine I made the most of readily available bananas & stuffed myself with them for the whole week), some baked tapioca pudding – yum, steamed tapioca, purple kumara, fresh coconut & some fresh tuna sandwiches. Most of it was delicious though I was a bit iffy on the kumara & steamed tapioca. It was all served in a tiny little open hut on woven plates lined with freshly picked leaves of some sort, really enjoyed this experience.

That night was Sunday & not much is open on Sunday nights in Aitutaki so we opted for Te Vaka Bar & Grill, we caught a taxi there & the lovely driver gave us a piece of sponge cake for the ride that she had freshly baked that afternoon, it was delicious & moist & as you can probably tell the people here are very friendly, a very nice experience & cheap too! The restaurant was in a lovely open air building with the usual wicker furniture & Island feel, the food here was quite nice too, not fantastic but pretty good. Michael tried the Cook Islands speciality ‘Ika Mata’ which is fresh tuna marinated in lemon juice then tossed in coconut cream with onions, garlic, tomato & cucumber, he gave it the thumbs up, being pregnant I had to take his word for it as raw fish off the menu for me for now. I had Garlic chilli prawns, these were good too, with the marinade all making a lovely thick jammy sauce for the prawns. Michael then had some coconut topped Mahi Mahi (very nice fish if done the right way – we had a lot of it over the week) with calamari & I had an Island chicken curry, absolutely huge servings, don’t think I even ate half of mine. I then had some ice cream with freshly grated coconut & chocolate fudge sauce, their desserts were not overly creative! All in all it was a pleasant experience.

As you can probably tell by now they are very big on coconut on EVERYTHING in The Cook Islands, I was ok with it at first but by the end of the week hated it as most of the time thought it was way overdone & think it will be a while before I eat anything with coconut again which is a shame as I really like the stuff.

Anyway back on the mainland, Rarotonga a couple of places worth mentioning. FBI fish and chips , near the main bus stop in town. As we were getting off the bus we could smell it and you know what that smell does to you, we had no choice but to then find the place & order up. The fish was Parrott fish & the batter was light & crispy & all seemed to be cooked in nice fresh oil & at NZD11.50 for the 2 of us very good value for a change.

We went to Trader Jacks for dinner one night which is apparently the place to go, unfortunately I thought the food was crap here, our char grilled octopus was very tough & chewy & the coconut braised lentils it was served on well, yuk! For the mains Michael had some Wahoo fish, pan fried with garlic, lemon, fresh herbs & fries, this was nice & simple & really good, I ended up eating half of it as my Mai Mai wrapped in banana leaf & served on a bed of ginger, coriander, chilli & COCONUT cream was disgusting, I had one bite & didn’t go any further. So I was pretty hungry after this & ordered dessert, Chocolate & apricot cake with chocolate fudge & ice cream – bad mistake again, cake was dry & I don’t know what the fascination is with bloody vanilla ice cream & hot chocolate fudge on anything either! The place had a good feel & was fun but I would definitely order plain if going again, the bar pizzas looked & smelt terrific too – maybe that’s the way to go?

For our last night we went to Tamarind House, recommended as the best spot on the Island I had high hopes & it didn’t disappoint, the setting is a majestic restored colonial era building & the piano player perched in the corner all night also added to the ambience. Michael started with the seafood chowder, another Island specialty which he enjoyed & I chose the chicken & mushroom won tons which were delicious, I finally learnt not to order Cook Islands food which I have developed an intense dislike for! For mains I had some smoked salmon spaghetti & Michael some Island style swordfish, we both left very happy customers for once.

All in all it’s a gorgeous & relaxed place for a holiday, Aitutaki was the highlight & highly recommended but if you go don’t have too high expectations for the food, hope I am not being too critical here, who knows maybe its just my pregnant taste buds after all.

Molten Chocolate Puddings

Last night my good friend Megan came over for dinner & I’m skipping straight to dessert which was pretty bloody good & so easy it wasn’t funny. You even get to prepare the whole thing in advance so after dinner you just have to pop them in the oven & 20 minutes later like magic you have a pot full of hot gooey chocolate bliss, very highly recommended. The recipe comes from Allan Campion & Michele Curtis’ Food with Friends which hasn’t let me down yet

Molten Chocolate Puddings

350g dark chocolate, chopped into chunks
50g soft butter
150g caster sugar
4 medium eggs, lightly beaten
2 tablespoons plain flour
cream to serve
6 x 125ml ramekins

Grease 6 x 125ml ramekins & place on a baking tray. Put chocolate in a heatproof bowl & set over a saucepan of simmering water until it has melted. Beat butter & sugar until light & fluffy. With the mixer still going, gradually add the beaten eggs. Add the flour & ensure all ingredients are well combined. Add chocolate & beat to a smooth paste. Divide mixture between ramekins. You can set these aside at this point if leaving until later.

Preheat oven to 180c. Place tray with ramekins in the oven & cook fro 18-20 minutes. Check puddings by inserting a skewer: you want them to be gooey in the middle, but cooked at least 1 cm inside from the edge. Serve straight from the oven with cream.

Easy Sticky-Toffee Pudding - Dinner Party prt 3

I’ve made this once before a few years back & from what I remember it was wonderfully rich & pretty simple to make so I thought it would be perfect for dessert at tonight’s dinner party. The recipe comes from Nigella Bites. As always I was buying everything at the last minute & the local shopping centre does not stock any dark muscovado sugar so I just used dark brown sugar which works fine for me. Also the recipe calls for full-fat milk, I used light start which is what I normally have in the fridge. As for the dates, I don’t know what ‘rolled’ dates are & just used a packed of pitted dates from the dried fruit isle of the supermarket. Served with some vanilla ice-cream it was the perfect end to dinner.

Easy Sticky-Toffee Pudding

For the cake
100g Muscovado sugar (or dark brown)
175g self-raising flour
125ml full fat milk
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
50g, unsalted butter, melted
200g chopped, rolled dates

For the sauce
200g dark muscovado sugar (or dark brown)
approx. 25g unsalted butter in little blobs
500ml boiling water

Preheat the oven to 190c and butter a 1 ½ litre capacity pudding dish.

Combine the sugar & flour in a large bowl. Pour the milk into a measuring jug, beat in the egg, vanilla & melted butter and then pour this mixture over the flour, stirring with a wooden spoon to combine. Fold in the dates & scrape into the pudding dish.

Sprinkle over the rest of the sugar & dot with butter. Pour over the boiling water & transfer to the oven. Cook for 45 minutes, when cooked the top of the pudding should be springy & spongy, it might need an extra 5-10 minutes. Serve with ice cream, or cream as you wish – I choose vanilla ice cream.

Movida

Last night I caught up with Megan & Rach for dinner at Movida, which is a fantastic little tapas bar tucked away in a laneway in the city. They do dinner in 2 sittings, either 6 or 8.30, so if you do the 6 you have to get out fast & if you do the later session you can settle in & relax. As we were all going straight from work we did the 6.00 session as last time I went for the later one we were all very drunk by the time we got there, not very good at restraining myself from the bubbly whilst waiting! The menu is divided between tapas (small dishes) & racions (slightly bigger dishes) that are designed to share. You can also have a banquet. I love eating this way as it means you get to try so much more of whats on offer. Last night was no exception with 3 hungry girls not afraid to eat! The huge selection we tried last night was as follows:

Bread with Olive oil
Ensalada Valencia – Valencian Salad, endive, orange, palm hearts, & Manzanillo olives
Croqueta - Fried croquette flavoured with chicken & garlic chives
Tortilla de Patatas – confit potato & onion omelette
Setas Asado Con Jerez – Oven roasted portabello Mushrooms finished with sherry vinegar
Gambas A La sidra – whole prawns cooked in terracotta with Asturian cider
Chicken Speical – cant remember the exact flavours, was braised with an almond meal breading
Costilla Con Sobrasada - Roasted lamb cutlet encased in a Catalan pork & paprika pate
Vierna, Jamon Y Espuma – Half shell scallop oven baked with jamon & potato foam

Churros – Rich hot drinking chocolate & Spanish doughnuts & Ganache Caliente Con Turron, Hot chocolate ganache pudding with vanilla bean ice cream & nougat

Everything was absolutely yummy as you can see form the photos, the salad which the waiter suggested was really good & a bit different, the croquettes absolutely melted in your mouth, the mushrooms didn’t look much but were very tasty, the chicken special was delicious, in fact it was all lip smacking good. I had also heard that the churros for dessert were to die for so of course I had to try them along with the ganache which we shared between the 3 of us, of my God, as Rach put it, you could come here for dessert alone. The dipping chocolate was so thick & rich & good, it was a shame we ran out of dippin doughnuts & had to leave some & the ganache was exceptionally good too.

All in all it was really, really good & lots more to try in future visits, the menu changes regulary too so always something new to try. Very highly recommended, just remember it is very popular so book at least a week in advance

Movida
1 Hosier Lane, Melbourne
Ph: (03) 9663 3038
www.movida.com.au
Open 7 days 12pm to Late

Roast Beef & Yorkshire Puds

Had a couple of friends over for dinner last night & given the cold blustery conditions outside thought it was time for my first roast of the season. Decided to follow Jamie Oliver’s recipe from Happy Days as I saw him cook it on tele & it made me drool, also has been years since I’ve had Yorkshire puddings. As well as the veggies suggested I added roast beets & pumpkin with some salt & rosemary & cooked some bok choy in garlic on the side. As usual I cooked way too much & Michael & I are enjoying some roast beef sandwiches for brekky as I type. Everything was delicious, forgot how much I love a good roast. The potatoes were crispy as promised so think I will always parboil first in the future. The Red wine gravy after a shaky start where I thought it was just going to be a runny mess was sensational so we didn’t need my backup gravox after all, and I didnt even sieve it as recomended! And the puds, well just look at the photo, how delicious do they look & yes they were as good as the picture.

Roast Beef & Yorkshire Puddings

Serves 8
2.5kg fore-rib, wing-rib or sirloin of beef, French trimmed
sea salt & freshly ground black pepper
olive oil
3 red onions, halved
3kg roasting potatoes, peeled
4 large parsnips, peeled & Quartered
3 rosemary twigs
4 cloves garlic, peeled
2 thumb sized pieces of fresh ginger, peeled & diced
flour
½ a bottle of robust red wine

Yorkshire Pudding Batter

285ml milk
115g plain flour
pinch of salt
3 eggs

Before you start get all veg prepared & getting pudding batter ready.

Preheat the oven to 230c & heat a large thick bottomed roasting tray on your stove. Rub your beef generously with salt, then add a little olive oil to the tray & lightly colour the meat for a couple of minutes on all sides. Lay the onions in the tray with the beef on top, then cook in a preheated oven for 1 ½ hours. While the beef is starting, parboil your potatoes in salted water for about 10 minutes then drain. Toss about to chuff them up, this will make them very crispy.

After 30 minutes, take out the tray & toss in your potatoes, parsnip & rosemary. With a garlic press or grater, squeeze or grate the garlic and ginger over everything in the tray. Shake the tray & whack in back in the oven for the final hour. Remove the potatoes & parsnips to a dish to keep warm, place beef on a plate, covered with foil, to rest & get your greens & puddings on.

Preheat a muffin pan with 1cm of oil in each section. After 10 minutes, divide the batter into the pan. Cook for about 30 minutes until crisp – don’t open the oven door or they won’t rise!

Remove most of the fat from your roasting tray & you should be left with caramelised onions & sticky beef goodness. Add a teaspoon of flour to the tray & mash everything together. Heat the tray on the stove & when hot add your red wine, simmer for 5-10 minutes, stirring every couple of minutes until your gracy is nice & taste & thick enough. Add any juice from the beef if you feel like it. Pour through a sieve & serve with the roast.

Spiced lamb tagine with preserved lemon & green olives

Well after going out for a fairly late breakfast this morning I wasn’t really up for lunch & instead when I got peckish late this afternoon I had some left over Christmas plum pudding made beautifully by my mum, I love the way these things last forever & get better with age (as do women of course), a very generous dash of custard & a minute or so in the microwave & yum all done!

As is typical of Melbourne weather, after a couple of gorgeous perfect hot days the sky turned dark, lightning flashed, the sky rumbled & then came the rain, has been pretty heavy & steady all afternoon which of course left me with lots of time to cook up some slow food for dinner as I couldn’t get stuck into the garden as planned.

Made the following Lamb Tagine which in my modesty I claimed to be ‘absolutely sensational & possibly even better than the one I had at Mecca Bah recently’. Michael though, as is usual said it was ‘nice’ but much preferred last nights duck as the flavours were not strong enough for him. Anyway I think this dish won out myself, lamb falling apart, beautiful subtle spicy flavours, & perfect with a glass of 2001 Brown brothers merlot & the sounds of the rain beating down outside. Now all I need is a Tagine Dish so I can make it for my next dinner party & impress everyone, next time I’m in Morocco perhaps…! The recipe was ripped from a recent magazine, sorry can’t remember which one, here it is

Spiced lamb tagine with preserved lemon & green olives

Olive Oil
3 sticks celery, finely diced
2 carrots, finely diced
2 medium brown onions, finely diced
6 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 tbspn roasted & ground cumin seeds
1 tbspn roasted & ground coriander seeds
¼ tspn ground turmeric
¼ tspn ground ginger
¼ tspn ground cinnamon
pinch saffron threads
1 boned lamb shoulder, approx 1.5-2kg, cut into 6cm pieces
2 x 400g cans chopped tomatoes
2 bay leaves
2 sprigs thyme
2-3 litres chicken stock or water
2 tbspn honey
2 tbspn harissa
1 cup pitted green olives, cut in half
1 tbspn julienne of preserved lemon
salt & pepper
1 cup picked & washed coriander leaves
1 cup picked & washed parsley leaves
steamed couscous to serve

In a saucepan big enough to hold the lamb, heat a good splash of olive oil, add the veges & garlic & cook over low heat for 15 to 20 minutes or until soft but not brown. Add the mixed spices, lamb, tomatoes, bay leaves, thyme & enough stock or water to cover the lamb. Bring to the boil, skim the surface of any fat, then reduce heat to low & simmer very gently for 2 hours or until the meat is very tender.

Skim the fat from the surface again, then add the honey, harissa, olives & preserved lemon. Season to taste with salt & pepper, then transfer to a tagine dish (if you are lucky enough to have one that is!) for serving.

Scatter the herbs generously over the top & serve immediately with steamed couscous on the side.

Boomerang at Byron Bay Monday 12th November

Well I am lucky enough to say that i have just returned home from a glorious week in Byron Bay where Michael & I did a damn fine job of relaxing, lots of long walks on the beach, good food & afternoon naps!

We arrived last Saturday & Sam & Tracey, friends from Brisbane had come to down for the night so it was off to the pub for drinks & then Cocomangas for dancing the night away, good way to start the holiday. Aftr all op this of course we were in need of a huge greasy brekky so we headed down to The Beach Cafe overlooking the beach, brekky was lovely. I went for the big one of course & had a very generous dish of bacon, poached eggs, grilled tomatos & mushies, baked beans & a home made hash brown on sourdough toast, needles to say I didnt finish it all. Very yummy & the hash brown did it for me, I love these & its not often they come home made - definitely worth a visit if youre ever in Byron

Monday we headed out for dinner to Boomerang which I found listed in the Gourmet Traveller 2006 restaurant guide, lucky as its not on a main street & could have been easily missed! There was only one other couple in tonight so we had excellent service & Marc Romanella the chef & I believe owner was serving tonight which was excellent as he was very passonate about his food & wine. The decor & table settings were all beatiful too.

The menu was a bit different to the norm as you are asked to create your own degustation menu from a list of fantastic choices, choosing from as little as 2 to 5, we chose 3 as we were told the portions were only entree size to allow you to taste several. We also went for the matching wine option.

I started with the Crusted yellowfin tuna sashimi with an ume, fuji & chilli chutney. This looked too gorgeous to eat & was delicious, the fruity flavour of the chutney was a brilliant match for the tuna. As this was a sweet flavoured dish I had a Japanese plum wine which was really nice, I had not had one of these before so nice to try something new too.


Second was a Marinated Beef tenderloin with parsnip rosti & white asparagus in soy, ginger & red wine served with a Bendigo Shiraz, again sensational flavours & the beef was very tender


Lastly I had the Duck pudding with citrus confit in Grand Marnier & ginger. This sounded odd & when asked exactly what a duck 'pudding' was Marc explained that it was actually slow cooked lamb wrapped in fine pastry, was absolutely scrummy & served with a lovely 1998 merlot from Washington.

The servings were also quite generous & with the hot bread rolls & herb infused olive oil on the side we were quite full by this stage, though of course I couldnt pass up the opportunity to try out dessert at such a wonderful place so we shared a Blood Orange tart with Mango & tequila sorbet & fresh strawberries on the side, Luscious!

All in all, this place is not to be missed!

Weekend away on the Mornington Peninsula Prt 2

Saturday 29th October 2005 - Lunch at Montalto Winery

Lunch was spent at Montalto & was fabulous. The views from the restaurant are gorgeous & its lovely to take a walk around the grounds, esp the herb & vege garden. If you're ever down this way & are looking for a great spot for lunch this place is not too be missed


To start with I had a celeriac raviolo on an asparagus salad with some corn fritters on the side, beautiful combination of flavours though some of the boys suggested the serving size was a bit small. I was happy as more room for the rest, always a shame if you are full after the entrée!




For the main I had flathead on wasabi mash , again a delicious choice







Dessert was the luscious soft centred chocolate pudding with
Bourbon Vanilla bean ice cream, with some cumquats on the side
- this was fabulous piece of work!





This finished us of & it was back to the house for a quiet night in

All in all a great weekend had by m always happy to revisit