O hai, I can has weekend?

I haven't had many at-home weekends recently. I've been madly gadding about like a mad gadding thing. I've been to the Goulburn Blues Festival; Corinbank; a friend's birthday (staying away the night); visiting a friend in Sydney; and last weekend I was off to the global atheist convention in Melbourne. It's been fun, but exhausting - this sort of schedule doesn't mix well with full-time work. But yes! I have finally had a weekend at home! And I even have another whole free weekend before we have our Easter houseguests.

For a while I was feeling a bit guilty about not blogging, but I got over it. It's supposed to be some fun for me, not an obligation. I do keep thinking about it, so I don't think I'm over the whole blogging thing yet. Plummet decided to wake me up at 4.30 this morning, so I'm feeling a bit ordinary. But nevertheless I've had a good go in the kitchen, and am feeling quite proud of my production, and feel like telling the world.

Hello, world! Today I made roast tomatoes, stewed rhubarb with mixed berries, Thai red curry pork with veggies, and a spinach and cheese potato bake. The spinach and spring onions in the potato bake, as well as the rhubarb were from the garden, so that's extra gratifying. And yesterday I took a cake baked in the octopus shaped tin along to Skeptics in the Pub, where PZ Myers was speaking.

The curry was just from a paste, Mae Ploy brand. I used some lean pork, and added eggplant, green beans, red capiscum and bamboo shoots. And I used light coconut milk, not the proper rich coconut cream kind, so it's a bit thin. It's OK for an easy dinner, though it's a bit hotter than I intended! My previous tub of Thai red curry paste was Maesri brand, which I now know is milder.

The spinach bake is a trifecta of virtue: home grown veggies, using up some things that were on their last legs, and preparing for the work week in advance. Can you actually see my halo? *ting*

There's no recipe per se, but this is what I did.

* I mixed together a tub of low fat cottage cheese, some leftover fetta marinaded in olive oil & sumac, and 7 eggs. All of these were very close to their use-by dates.
* I ground in some pepper and chucked in some extra sumac, pine nuts, a handful of grated parmesan, a couple of crushed cloves of garlic, and three chopped spring onions from the garden.
* I picked lots of spinach from the garden, washed it and chopped it roughly. Microwaved it to wilt it, then wrung it out and chopped it up.
* I decided there wasn't enough spinach for me, so I defrosted about 250g of frozen spinach and added it in.
* Oiled a cake tin that seemed about the right size. (It's silicon, but I'm getting less trusting about the non-stick qualities of that where eggs are concerned.)
* Washed, peeled and finely sliced up four large potatoes (Dutch cream, they really are quite yellow).
* Layered it the cake pan - potato, spinach, potato, spinach, potato, spinach, potato.
* Took a picture part way through the layering.
* Baked it at 150C for half an hour, then added a bit more parmesan on top and baked it for a further twenty minutes.

And that's it - I made it up as I went along. I don't know yet exactly what it tastes like, since I haven't cut it open, but I'm sure it will be fine. It's hard to go wrong with spinach and cheese. And it will come in very handy this week. It can be reheated in wedges in the microwave, as cafes often do with their frittatas, or in a slow oven.

Back again

We've finished the first week back at work, and tonight we're celebrating with a G&T or two, a scratch dinner of leftovers, and Children of Earth just finished on the telly. An early night with a book to follow - the bloke has a Mike Carey and I have a Robert Harris. And a sleep-in tomorrow. It's been a hard Xmas, and parts of it were rather horrible, so I'm pretty glad it's over. Even if that does mean going back to work.

The week in cooking has been quite minimal - a curry from the freezer, a bolognese spaghetti sauce from the freezer, hot dogs with coleslaw, and a quick bite at Tien, a Vietnamese place in Dickson that opened late last year. The curry was very nice - I'll put more about that up for my next post.

Tien was rather good, too. I had the pancake stuffed with prawns and minced pork (about $14). Tasty food, the pancake is more eggy than a western style pancake, almost an omelet. It came with lots of fresh salad including some Vietnamese herbs that I don't know the names of. The Bloke had a chilli basil chicken stirfry - very fresh and light, with lots of crisp onion and carrot. We'll be going back there, for sure. In fact I have a cunning plan involving their steamboat...

I haven't managed to get myself moving very fast in the mornings yet, and I've been eating breakfast at my desk around 10am. Bring in some fruit and a peanut butter sandwich, and I'm set. Or failing sandwich making time, eat a muesli bar from the stash at work. But I exhausted that stash on Thursday, and I tried to restock at As Nature Intended at the Belco market.

I was out there having lunch with infoaddict at Beppe's - a favourite cafe of mine, they serve one of the best coffees in town. It's a drive rather than a walk for lunch, but Momo and Plunge are both closed this week. I picked up some good fruit from Wiffens, but the muesli bar shopping did not go well. The range at As Nature Intended is very small, probably because it's all organic. I bought one box from each brand, the Norganics blueberry and the Aribar raspberry.

Norganics is available widely in supermarkets, and I find them tolerable. A bit too sweet for me, but still it has chewy oats, dried blueberries and an appley tang, and it's made in Australia. I give it a credit grade. The Aribar, on the other hand... utter fail. The ingredients of wholegrain brown rice and raspberries sound fine. But I really should have checked more carefully. In the fine print, all is revealed. Norganics: 16.1g sugars/100g. Aribar: 32.8g/100g. Yes, it's unbearably sweet, and on top of that, it's made in Canada. Shipping right across the world, what a waste! Not that I'm a total local food purist; I am happy to buy imports of true specialties like real maple syrup. But there was no point to this import at all. I could easily have made a batch of chocolate crackles at home, to very much the same effect. And no, I wouldn't want them for breakfast, either.

The Lazy Way

I know it's all uncool, and serious cooks make their own pasta sauces and curry pastes; and do all their own meat & veg prep from fresh; and blend their own spice mixes from whole spices; and all that sort of thing. But I'm quite a sucker for a nice looking sauce being sold at a market stall. Or a good name on a product in a supermarket. Sometimes this works really well; sometimes it's just OK and a useful time-saver. And sometimes you just want to tip it in the garbage and pretend it never happened.

On the "works really well" scale:
1) Frozen baby peas. Shelling fresh peas is one of those jobs that you need to do in company, or at least with the radio or TV on. I was reminded of this recently when I bought a kilo of peas in the pod from the market. Shelling peas isn't unpleasant work, but compared to the ease of just chucking some frozen peas in the microwave, it's ridiculously laborious. And the frozen ones are more reliable. I was sampling as I shelled (of course) and while some were beautifully sweet, some were insect attacked, and some were mealy and tasteless.

2) Tubs of Thai curry pastes. Honestly, many Thai people use these too. On the advice of a Thai chef, I usually buy Maesri or Mae Ploy brands. Find them in most Asian grocers.

3) Crankypants Adobo marinade. Yum! It doesn't seem to be listed on their website, so I hope they haven't discontinued it. Find them at the Kingston Sunday markets, and the Handmade markets.

4) Herbie's spice and herb blends. He knows what he's doing. Find them at Cooking Coordinates, Manuka Fine Foods and many other places.

5) Ameet's Homestyle curry sauces. I bought a jar of Kashmiri Masala from a lovely young Indian woman with a thick plait of dark hair down her back, at the Growers' Market last week. I fondly imagine that it's her mother or grandmother's recipe, but anyway, it's a small Australian company. There's so artificial colours or preservatives, and it was very delicious. I used some Galloway chuck steak in it.

Less successful things follow.

Reasonable for rush hour:
On the "it's OK" level of the scale, there's a lot of things. Some good examples from the supermarket include:
* Patak's Indian curry pastes
* Some of the Paul Newman and Five Brothers jarred pasta sauces
* Some of the San Remo and Latina refrigerated pasta sauces - the plainer tomato ones, mainly.
* frozen "oven chips", spinach and green beans - but only if the beans are for a longer cooking time, they won't be crisp. In a veggie curry, for example.


Got very close to tipping in the garbage
Foodlover's macadamia satay sauce - to my taste, it is thin and harsh, and the nut flavour seemed artificial, like in those flavoured coffees. But I added lots of peanut butter and lime juice and chilli, and it turned out OK. Hmm, but now I think of it, so would water.

Ainsley Harriot's "citrus kick" couscous - this seemed to be very heavy on citric acid and dried onion in flavour. Not nice at all. If I hadn't had a lot of chilli to cover it up, I might have tipped it out. I never bought it again, and won't now try any others in his range.

Actually tipped in the garbage:
This almost never happens, as I'm against waste. I'll still eat food that isn't very good. It's got to be seriously dire to go uneaten into the bin. That usually means badly burned, or gone off, or well past its use-by date. But one product made it to the bin: Jamie Oliver's tomato and chilli pasta sauce. This tasted to me like tinned tomato soup with a dash of tabasco. And I had such lovely ham and olives waiting to be to put in it that I couldn't bear to spoil them. An ordinary tin of tomatoes was a much better choice.

Icecream and Jelly

I've had an orange jelly in mind ever since my houseguests gave me some oranges from their backyard Sydney tree in late July. They came with a warning that they were very sour, which on an early test was proved to be true. A sprinkle of sugar was necessary to finish the wedges I'd cut. Then it took me a month to get round to it, by which time I'd had to throw three out for being moldy. But I got a cup and a half of juice from the remainder, which was enough.

And then I was toying with the title option: "Icecream and Jelly" or "Cold Jelly and Custard" since I had both options. Which would it be? The custard is just a Dairy Farmers, bought for my sloppy food phase last week. If I'd made a nice custard, things might have been different. The icecream is also a bought one, but it's pretty special. It's a new one from Maggie Beer: lemon and orange curd. Wow, it's a good one - very smooth, tangy and not too sweet, a nice pale lemon colour with no artificial extras, and some little dots of candied orange peel. A grown-up icecream to have with your grown-up jelly.


Recipe: Orange Jelly
1.5 cups orange juice
0.5 cups boiling water
10g (1 sachet) gelatine
30ml cointreau
2 tblsp caster sugar

Pour the boiling water into a small jug or mug.
Sprinkle the gelatine over, and stir very vigorously to dissolve.
Add the sugar and stir well until that also dissolves.
Leave for a couple of minutes and stir vigorously again.
Add the juice and cointreau, stir well, and pour into a bowl or mould.
Refrigerate to set.

Notes: You can use a bit less sugar if your juice isn't sour. Or more if you like it really sweet.

The double stirring bit is just because I find that powdered gelatine can be tricky to dissolve. Sometimes you think you've got it, and then there are lumps after all. You can even heat it up in the microwave to soften it again if it starts to set, and you find lumps. But I wouldn't do this is it has the juice in it. The freshness of the orange juice would be spoiled.

I know the foodie magazines often say to use leaf gelatine, not powdered, but this is one case where I don't buy it. Gelatine is a simple protein, there's no difference in taste, just in ease of use. And looks, and price.

Here's some more information on gelatine at taste.com.au. Oddly, they say that boiling can destroy gelatine's ability to set. But I've certainly never encountered that with a chicken stock!

Three at once

So I've risen from the sickbed, considerably improved but still not feeling overly creative or energetic. In an attempt to save work, I've got going on three at once. To the rear, looking quite orange, we have a keema, made with much less effort than the one in the link. It has 350g lean beef mince, a tin of tomatoes, garlic, ginger and some of a jar of Patak's Madras paste. There will be frozen peas to finish. We can have it on Monday with some leftover rice, naan and dahl from our dinner out yesterday.

And to the front, in more purple tones, we have a bolognese sauce, with mushrooms, zucchini and quite a bit of leftover wine that wasn't stored well enough to drink. It's two bottle ends, a shiraz and a tempranillo. It has the other 350g lean beef mince from the packet, and alos some onion and garlic and herbs. The bloke is actually quite keen on mince, so two mince based dishes in a week are quite fine by him.

And I set some of the mushrooms and onion aside to do a quick tossed together pasta tonight. One of those ones where you cook the pasta, then mix all the bits through rather than making a separate sauce. It's going to be sort of a carbonara, with egg and ham and Poacher's Pantry smoked tomatoes.

While I was making the bolognese, I tried a comparison. I used two tins of chopped tomatoes, one Woolworths' Select and one Home Brand. There was very little difference in colour or taste. There is a consistency difference: for 30c more, you get a slightly thicker product. The juice was a little runnier in the Home Brand kind, but not very much. I think Home Brand comes out better value for money.

It Aten't Dead

One week on and I still haven't killed it. Though the butter lettuce and rocket are looking alarmingly limp. Let us hope that today's feed and water picks them up.

This is a home hydroponics box from hydropantry, that I bought at the EPIC market last week. It is nifty. You put it in a frost-sheltered but sunny spot, and change the water once a week. Add 40ml of nutrient solution, and it's done until next week. You pick what you want from it as you go.

There are three kinds of lettuce in my planter, plus rocket, spring onions, curly parsley, continental parsley and coriander. We've used some of the red and cos lettuce already. It seems to be doing OK so far, just sitting on the table on the back deck. I think it's quite picturesque - adds a nice dash of green.

When you change the solution, you can put the old water on the garden. It's nice and clean, not smelly like the water from a week long neglected flower vase would be. Which makes sense when you think about it, since there's live roots hanging in there, not cut stems. I used the first batch of leftover water on my new cherry tree, which I am still excited about.

The garden is starting to look spring-like already. It's pretty in the sunshine, even if not exactly warm: the prunus is budding, and bulbs are sprouting among the hellebores and violets and cyclamens down the side that we've paved recently. And the wattle is starting to flower. Alice the wonder-gardener has pruned the trickier things for me and instructed me to feed the citrus. I'd better go do that while I remember.

Cheesy!

I'm on a roll with these short excitable titles.

Anyway, I am feeling rather pissed off with Perfect Italiano cheese for their new (to me) and repulsive "perfect man" ad. That slimy git who practises his "listening face" needs a good kick up the arse. Or more specifically, since the git is imaginary, the advertising agency that thought of that sexist bullshit and the executives that approved it need a good arse-kicking. I wish I hadn't taken their free cheese the other month. I shall now buy Millel instead.

And while on the topic of cheesiness, the kitchen renovations have dragged on a lot longer than planned. And so the takeaway and microwave have been in more use than I had hoped. TurkOz pide is a very fine thing, especially the spinach and cheese, which is brilliantly cheesy in exactly the right way. And I have discovered that a sandwich press is very good at reheating pide slices.

Also, I have recently eaten Weight Watchers frozen cannelloni and Healthy Choice lasagna. (They were on special, OK?). The weight watchers one is bland and curiously empty-tasting. It's much improved by a lot of extra grated cheese and a splash of chilli sauce. The Healthy Choice lasagne is a bit better - still bland, but more creamy and mouth-filling, somehow. It's probably all gums and flavourings, since it's 3% fat. I'm just not going to read the label.

I'm having vague fancies of what to do when I get the kitchen up and running again. Truffle risotto, duck cassoulet, truffled eggs...

Sauerkraut

Cabbage is such a maligned vegetable, yet it is delicious as long as it is not over-boiled to sulphurous rags. It's the star of coleslaw, plays well in stirfries, and can be preserved into kimchee or sauerkraut. I buy it in those huge 900g Benino brand jars from Poland. It keeps well in the fridge, and it's good just as it comes from the jar, heated up to go with German style sausages or corned beef. But sometimes it's fun to do a more fancy version - something along the lines of an Alsatian choucroute garni.


Recipe: Sauerkraut and smoked pork in wine
1 900g jar of sauerkraut
1 bottle white wine (riesling)
1 large onion
2 large green apples
2 tsp juniper berries
2 bayleaves
1 600g chunk smoked pork loin

Drain sauerkraut and rinse.
Put in a pot, and add the wine, chopped onion, peeled and chopped apple, juniper berries and bayleaves.
Simmer uncovered for 15 minutes, then cover and simmer 30 minutes more.
Add the pork, and bury it in the sauerkraut.
Add a little water if it seems to be drying out.
Simmer another 30 minutes.
Slice up pork into steaks.
Serve with boiled new potatoes, or some heavy rye bread. And mustard.

Notes:The wine should be riesling, but it's a waste to use the really good stuff since the sauerkraut and juniper flavours are so strong. Especially if you bite into a juniper berry - they are edible but very strong so you might like to pick them out. A cheap bottle or fancy cask is about right. Or you can use champagne for a French "choucroute royale".

You can add all sorts of meats to this: if they are not pre-cooked, put them in earlier. Sausages, ham, ham hocks, pork chops, and even poultry can be used. Even veggie hot-dogs, I would imagine. You can also cook the potatoes in the same pot for a true one-pot meal, but I prefer them separate.

Pesto in Winter

The bloke requested a pasta, and I thought of doing a pesto pasta with green olives and chunks of smoked chicken. And I thought - now, if only I could get some nice pesto, that would be great. Supermarket brands tend not to use the premium ingredients that make for a really good pesto. Cheap oils, and no pinenuts: it's not right. And I haven't got to the market in a while. Damn. But hang on - I could make some, couldn't I? It's not exactly hard.

I have done this before, but not in ages, so I went to look for a recipe. And the horse's mouth is surely Il Cucchiaio Argento. So I checked there and got the proportions - cutely, the recipe asks for 25 basil leaves. I weighed my 25 basil leaves and decided I needed to triple everything for the amount of basil I had on hand. I was actually a little short on a couple of things, but decided that it wouldn't matter. Here's how I made mine.


Recipe: Classic Basil Pesto
75 g basil leaves
100g pine nuts
150g parmesan
3 cloves (30g) purple garlic
200ml olive oil
Chop garlic and cheese roughly. Pulse in food processor to crumb.
Add pine nuts and basil, pulse further.
Add oil in a thin stream while motor is running, and continue until it all comes together in a rough paste.
Store in the fridge with a layer of extra oil on top to keep airtight.

Notes: Makes about 3 cups. Perfect Italiano parmesan was the cheese here again. And the basil was two supermarket bunches, the oil from Lowanna Paddock, and the topping oil for the stored batch was sunflower because the pesto used the last of the olive oil.

It's come out a lot lighter green than the ones I mostly buy, and I do prefer the more herby version to this one. When I do another batch, I will not use this recipe but experiment to find my own taste. That will mean less cheese and more basil. But it's not bad at all.

It's been very cold today, and I got rained on when I was unpacking the shopping from the car. All the food magazines are full of slow cooked casseroles and hot puddings now. Pesto, like basil, is usually a summer ingredient. But the basil was grown in Australia, so it's not like I bought Chilean asparagus or US cherries.

This got me thinking on the question of local eating. Obviously it's a good thing ecologically, because it saves on transport expenses - all those greenhouse gasses. I try to buy local, or at least Australian, for most things. But although I believe that our habits are important, I have exceptions. And when I eat in restaurants, I don't ask. I am no purist, and I haven't really got this thought through and planned out fully.

The only non-Australian ingredient in the pesto is the pine nuts, which was a mix of two packets. One said that the nuts were from China, the other that they were packed in Australia from non-specific imported ingredients. I'm fairly sure they were Chinese, too. European pine nuts are longer and thinner. And I don't think we grow any commercially in Australia. One could try bunya nuts, perhaps - Ironbark in Manuka does a bunya nut pesto sometimes.

Chocolate is clearly one of my exceptions - I don't think we even grow cacao here. And spices are an honourable exception, I think. Historically the spice trade has always been important. Like tea, coffee and cocoa, spices are small, high value goods. I do like to use some local spices, but I am never going to feel bad about a few sticks of Sri Lankan cinnamon or Tahitian vanilla.

For coffee, I strongly prefer to buy either Australian or fair trade. I've only recently started paying attention to tea and chocolate. I've been drinking Twinings for years without thought, and buying the best Dutch-processed cocoa. Is it fair trade? Almost certainly not.

Recently I've cooked frozen cranberries, which are all imported from the US. I don't know if anyone grows them here - they are a cool climate wetland crop, and I imagine such conditions would not be too easy to find here. Cool we can do. Wet, not so much. Cranberry sauces and drinks and dried cranberries are all imported, as far as I have seen.

I usually don't buy non-Australian fresh produce any more. I'm glad things are now labelled at the supermarket, so I can avoid accidentally buying end-season US grapes at the beginning of our season. I'm not always 100% sure of the origins - I must remember to ask at Saigon grocery when I next see a pomelo.

I do buy the occasional premium charcuterie or dairy product - I had some French truffled brie for my birthday one year. But we do make excellent cheeses and preserved meats in Australia, so I keep the imports for exceptions.

Experimental Crockpotting

I'm into experiments at the moment. The latest is a simple beef stew in the slow cooker, which I made up after searching for a good half an hour for a decent recipe. Seriously, what is it with crockpot owners and tinned soup? Any time you google for crockpot or slow cooker recipes, you get a million of them with cream of mushroom soup as a major ingredient. I'm unimpressed.

So I made up my casserole in a minimal and lazy manner, just to see if it would work. I wasn't too worried if not: the materials could be recycled into a chilli or pasta or something if need be. But it turned out fine. We ate it on the first day with small potatoes and spinach from B1's garden.

And today, we ate it with dumplings and broccolini. I made a variant on my usual dumplings with parsley and ricotta - the Perfect Cheese freebie. I also cooked these in the slow cooker, with some trepidation. I had a recipe in a crockpot cookbook which was too large a quantity, but it did give a 30 minute cooking time, unlike the usual 15-20 minutes it takes on the stovetop. This did not work too well, but we did still end up with an edible dinner, so it could have been worse. Recipes follow.


Recipe: Slow cooked beef and red wine stew
1.25kg topside beef
500g button mushrooms
500g small onions
375ml red wine
2 tblsp worcestershire sauce
2 tblsp tomato paste
large bunch of rosemary
sprig of bayleaves
salt to taste
Peel the onions, leaving most of the root end attached. If they are very small, leave them whole, otherwise halve or quarter them. Put them in the crockpot.
Wipe the mushrooms clean, trim if neeeded, and put them in the pot.
Cut the beef into large cubes. Add it to the pot.
Pour over the wine and worcestershire sauce.
Top with the whole bunch of herbs, and cover.
Cook on low for 4 hours.
Remove herbs, stir, and replace herbs on top.
Cook on low, stirring occasionally, for another 4 hours or until meat is tender.
Taste, adjust for salt, and discard herbs.

Notes: I used this layered method because I have read - and noticed - that vegetables seem to take longer than meat, and it's hotter at the bottom of the pot. Also, the herbs sitting on top scenting the steam that drips back in may seem a bit wasteful, but if you have massive garden trimmings, it's not an issue. If you don't have ridiculous amounts of rosemary on hand, I'd recommend a couple of teaspoons of the tube variety, like Garden Gourmet. I have no freebies from them, I just like this as it mixes well without leaving tough spiky leaves everywhere.

Recipe: Slow Cooker Ricotta & Parsley Dumplings
1 1/4 cups self raising flour
1 egg
1 tablespoon butter
75 ml milk
100g ricotta
1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
pinch salt
1 big pot of stew!

Set your slow cooker to high an hour in advance, so that your stew is bubbling gently.
Beat together egg, milk, parsley, ricotta and salt.
Melt butter, and add to egg mix.
Mix all of this though the flour.
Stir to combine well.
Dollop tablespoons of the mix on top of the stew.
Cover and let simmer for 30 minutes. (ORLY? or until done)

Notes: Makes about 8 dumplings. I used the last of the Perfect Italiano low fat ricotta, and of course the beef and red wine casserole above.

Now, importantly, this didn't work quite right. My crockpot's high setting may not be as quick as the one in the recipe book. Or I may not have let it heat up long enough. My dumplings took more like an hour, and even then the innermost ones were still a bit sticky. But we were hungry and didn't want to wait any longer. The flavour and texture of the cooked part was still pretty good, but still I'd prefer the more reliable stovetop method.

Pub Night & Curry Day

I got the bloke home from Chicago yesterday, and we ate out - a post airport breakfast at Satis, dinner at the Old Canberra Inn. The OCI is another favourite place. It's one of Canberra's very few actual pubs, and it's quite close to us, on Mouat Street, Lyneham. It's based on an old slab hut that predates Canberra, and it has a main bar with wooden beams, fireplaces, and old maps on the wall. There's often functions out the back, in the old stables, and a room with a couple of pool tables. It's got totally ordinary beer and standard pub grub - no boutique microbrews, no cocktails, not much top shelf spirits. The food ranges over nachos, burgers, steaks and chicken schnitzels. The burgers and steaks are usually pretty good, reliable tucker, and for $10-15 a meal, I'm not going to quibble!

The OCI also has regular blues nights, which is the big lure for us. Last night local boy Jonno Zilber and Kyla Brox, from the UK, were on the bill. No cover charge, just great music. Jonno is a young lad, and he keeps on getting better and better. He did an acoustic guitar set, with his own material and a spot of Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits. Kyla Brox had a band with her; and she had a mix of classic blues and her own more funky R&B. She has a huge deep bluesy voice, amazingly powerful; I wish she had done a few more of the classic blues, as I liked that better. We only stayed for her first set, as the jetlag was setting in.

So onto the food. I bought yet another cookbook during the week, at a Co-Op Bookshop sale. Regional Indian Cooking is the one - I got it for $11. Resistance is futile. As the bloke was due home yesterday, I just had to make a curry dinner. His usual response to the question "what would you like to eat this week?" is "curry". With the occasional variant into "chilli", and once, shockingly, even "vegetables". But relying on the popularity of curry, I made a South Indian lamb meatball curry from my new book. On the side I've got some chopped tomato & cucumber, mango chutney, pappadams, a carrot and peanut raita (sort of from the book but adjusted to ingredients I had on hand), and I've whipped up one of my favourite cheat foods - fake dhal makhani. This is nothing but a mix of tins, but it's great.

Lamb meatball curry
Part 1: Meatballs
500 g lamb
1 egg
1/4 cup fine semolina
1 tsp crushed garlic
1 tsp grated ginger
Spices: 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp turmeric, 1/2 tsp chilli powder, 1 tsp coriander, 1 tsp cinnamon, 1/4 tsp ground cloves.
Part 2: Sauce
2 tsp oil
2 medium onions
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 tablespoon minced ginger
1 tin tomatoes
1 cup veggie stock (from a cube is fine)
40g dessicated coconut
blender spices: 2 tsp cumin, 2 tsp chilli powder, 2 tsp coriander
whole spices to fry: 10 curry leaves, 2 whole cloves, 5cm cinnamon stick, 3 cardamom pods
salt
1/2 lime
chopped coriander

Meatballs are easy: just mix up the lamb, egg, semolina and spices. Roll into meatballs of your preferred size. I made 20.

Toss tomatoes, coconut and blender spices into a blender. Blend.

Slowly fry onion in oil until golden. Add whole spices to fry, and cook another 2 minutes. Add ginger and garlic, and cook for another minute or two. Add contents of blender to pan, then add stock to blender and whizz to get the rest of the tomato. Toss that in the pan, too. Simmer for 5 minutes or so, add salt to taste, then add meatballs. Cover and cook over low heat for at least 20 minutes. (Longer will not hurt.)

When ready to serve, stir in lime juice and sprinkle with chopped coriander.

Notes: You'll want to wash your hands well after you roll the meatballs or they'll go all turmeric yellow. Also, feel free to use whole spices and grind them up. I had a mix of whole and pre-ground that was different from my recipe book. As with all curries, a mellowing overnight improves it.


Cheat's Dhal Makhani
1 tin dark red kidney beans
1 tin brown lentils
1 tin chopped tomatoes with Indian spices
2 tablespoons yoghurt or sour cream or cream
Drain and rinse the lentils and beans. Toss into a saucepan with the tomatoes. Simmer for 15 minutes to thicken up. Add the dairy. Simmer more until well amalgamated. Add extra chilli and salt to taste.

Notes: This will surprise you by being actually really nice, despite the tinned assembly job nature of it. Ardmona brand tomatoes are the ones I found with the curry spice mixed in already. It seems quite strong on turmeric and very mild on chilli. You could use a dessertspoon of your favourite curry paste or powder, and a normal tin of tomatoes instead. I've used non-fat yoghurt, full-fat sour cream, and "lite" sour cream at various times. You may need to be careful not to boil it too vigorously once yoghurt is added, as yoghurt can separate. Or stabilise it with a little cornflour. I guess that a bit of coconut cream could also do, if you don't want any dairy. Or butter or ghee if you want to get closer to the original idea.