Chick Pea, Chorizo and Orange Salad

I spent most of last week sleeping and reading, trying to shake off a nasty cold. As a result we hadn't worn down the food stores quite as much as usual, so this week I'm attempting to cook entirely using whatever I have left in the fridge from last week. OK - I definitely cheated here, as there was a HUGE bag of red peppers going cheaply at the grocers' when I popped into the park centre to buy milk, and I did have to top up the onion supply. Now that I've made this salad, I think it's actually worth going out to get the ingredients, as it was amazing! No internet link this time; I just had ingredients I needed to use and found the right flavours to link them together.

Ingredients:

• one tin of chick peas
• one medium white onion
• 1/2 tsp sugar
• a handful of green beans
• a small handful of raisins
• a fat, spicy chorizo sausage
• two roasted peppers, skinned
• an orange
• a small handful of mint
• 1 heaped tsp dijon mustard
• 1 1/2 tbsp white wine vinegar
• 3 tbsp olive oil

Drain the tin of chick peas and tip into a salad bowl. Thinly slice the onion into slivers, and fry over a very low heat until golden, translucent and falling apart - about 12 minutes. Add the sugar and cook for a further minute, then tip out of the pan onto the chick peas. Meanwhile, top, tail and blanch the green beans and raisins, then drain and add to the salad bowl.

If the skin of the sausage is tough, skin it, then finely slice the sausage and fry in the onion pan for a couple of minutes, until crisping up and colouring. If you like, blot the excess fat with kitchen paper before adding to the salad bowl. Slice or tear the peppers into strips and add to the bowl. Using a sharp knife, cut the peel and pith from the orange, then segment into the bowl; squeeze out the core over the bowl to retain all of the lovely juices. Finely chop the mint and add to the bowl.

Whisk the remaining ingredients together to form a dressing, pour over the salad, toss well and serve immediately.

Beetroot Risotto

I'm going to be lazy and link my usual risotto recipe. This was exactly the same, but I boiled a few small beetroots for 40-50 minutes, until they were perfectly tender. Slipped out of their skins, cubed and stirred through right at the last minute, they made a beautiful addition to a risotto base, with a little feta and a generous squeeze of lemon juice.

Roast Pumpkin and Pear Soup

I've come down with a cold after working in Melbourne for a week, so need nice bland comfort food to cheer me up. Yesterday the SO made an excellent chicken soup, which I always crave demand the first day I have a cold. Today I needed more soup, and I was inspired by Really Not Wanting to Go Shopping, so Googled what we had in the fridge, and found this recipe. It sounds like a completely bonkers combination, but somehow, it works perfectly! I put the oven on, asked the SO to cut up a huge wedge of pumpkin, then slumped under a duvet while everything roasted. A little work with the blender and, bam,  comfort food.

Ingredients:

• 1/5 large pumpkin -- about 400g
• a pear -- doesn't have to be ripe
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• chicken or vegetable stock
• dukkah -- substitute with toasted, salted sesame or sunflower seeds if you can't get hold of it
• sour cream

Preheat the oven to 220C. Peel and cut the pumpkin into 1-2" chunks. Halve and core the pear. Put the pumpkin and pear in a large roasting dish - preferably with the pear skin-side down with a little room around it, and the pumpkin in a nice big pile. Drizzle the pumpkin with a little vegetable oil and dust the cinnamon over the top of the pears. Roast for 35-40 minutes until the pumpkin is tender right through, and the pear is soft and caramelised. Blend the pumpkin with enough hot stock to make a soup of your desired consistency -- probably about 200ml. Serve the soup topped with dukkah, half a roasted pear, and a generous blob of sour cream.

Baked Greek-Style Beans (and some Dolma)

I had a strong craving for dolma after visiting a nice little Greek cafe for lunch while I was in Melbourne. I tried making my own, following a random recipe online. They had included the prep time, but cheekily didn't mention that they had their own 'dolma-making machine', where you simply lay the leaf out, put some stuffing in, and then push a lever to wrap it all up! It took nearly an hour to get good at doing it by hand, and I highly recommend you watch a Youtube video first :) They turned out ok, but the rice wasn't thoroughly cooked, so I will try again another time.

What was a success, was the massive tray of baked Greek beans. I was pretty lazy and used tins instead of boiling the beans from scratch, but it really didn't matter. They were gorgeous, a sweet and umame counterpoint to the lemony dolmas, and incredibly filling.

Ingredients:

• Two medium white onions or one large
• Two tins of chopped tomatoes
• 4-6 cloves of garlic
• a small tin or 4 tbsp tomato puree
• Three tins of butter beans
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• pinch of ground cinnamon
• a small handful of parsley

Preheat the oven to 180 C. Finely chop the onion and gently fry in olive oil until translucent - about 6-7 minutes. Crush in the garlic and fry for a further two minutes. Finely chop the parsley and add, along with all of the other ingredients; season well and stir to combine. Tip into a deep baking dish and bake for an hour; the sauce will thicken and the beans will absorb the flavours.

Lemon Drizzle Cake

It was my lovely husband's birthday at the weekend, and I booked a show at the Perth International Comedy Festival - The Pajama Men. As I clicked 'buy', I had a strong sense of deja vu. Checking my email inbox, I found we'd gone to see their show at almost exactly the same time last year. I guess I'm getting stuck in a rut -- but they were hilarious, all over again!

I asked the SO what he'd like for his birthday cake, and he didn't have a strong preference, so I went for something I'd been craving - LEMON CAKE. Mmmm, just typing it is making me salivate. I went for the lemoniest recipe I could find, and then added more lemon. Unlike their picture, my lemon drizzle ended up soaking into the cake, so I've changed the icing to make what you see on my own photo.

Ingredients:

• 225g unsalted butter softened
• 225g caster sugar
• 4 eggs
• finely grated zest 2 lemons
• 220g plain flour
• 1½ tsp baking powder
• juice 1½ lemons
• 4 heaped tbsp icing sugar

Preheat the oven to 180C. Cream the butter and sugar together with a whisk and a strong arm, or a food processor. Break in the eggs one at a time and whisk to combine. Add the grated lemon zest and stir again. Sift the flour and baking powder onto the liquid mixture, and use a wooden spoon to fold in, being careful not to overmix and make the gluten strong. Bake for 45-50 minutes, until a wooden skewer comes out clean.

Combine the lemon juice and icing sugar until you have a slightly thick but still drizzle-able topping, then drizzle it all over the cake.

Mechoui Lamb

Some of our friends have a pomegranate tree, and this year it has produced some lovely fruit, which they were kind enough to bring into the office and give away. The seeds are a lighter pink than the ones I've seen in the store, and they are tart, astringent, and aromatic. I wanted to set them off well in a dish that really needed their sharp, middle-eastern flavour, and as it happened a friend had mentioned this Jamie Oliver recipe for mechoui lamb on Facebook. I bought a whole shoulder of lamb and gave it a go! Verdict: needs improvement.

The recipe itself is missing half of the ingredients mentioned in the text, which makes it quite confusing reading. 3 hours at 220C was not enough to get my lamb to 'fall off the bone', so what Jamie implied was a little action with a couple of forks turned into a full-on Silence of the Lambs cleaver job, with plenty of swearing and bits of lamb going everywhere. I improvised a roasting rack out of a few stalks of celery, and the resulting broth under the lamb was absolutely heavenly... but the recipe makes no use of it! It was also expensive: the whole thing took around four hours, most of which was spent with the oven on, and the lamb cost around $30, but it only fed two of us, with a little lamb for leftovers. And the spice rub went entirely on to the fat and bone, so was completely wasted. It also seems really odd to have a salad with a meal that you have to eat with your hands. Not to mention it had too much dressing for the surface area of the carrot, so it all ended up at the bottom of the bowl, wasted. Much better to include the salad ingredients IN the flatbread - the flavour combination was great, but Jamie's execution was terrible. So here follows my amended recipe, which I look forward to trying sometime.

Ingredients:

• 300g lamb neck fillet
• 1 tsp ground coriander
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1/2 tsp chilli flakes
• 1 orange
• 1 carrot
• a handful of fresh mint
• half a pomegranate
• a little natural yoghurt (optional)

Trim off any really fatty bits on the fillet, then rub in the spices. Roast in a 220C oven or bbq on a grill for 15-20 minutes, until cooked but still pink and tender on the inside; turn off the oven and remove the lamb to rest. Meanwhile, deseed the pomegranate into a bowl. Segment the orange over a salad bowl, letting the juices drip in. Peel the carrot and finely julienne with a sharp knife. (If you're in a hurry, you could grate it, but the texture won't be quite right.) Shred the mint and combine with the orange and carrot.

Pop the flatbreads in the still-hot oven for 30-50 seconds, until hot. Slice the rested lamb into thin disks and toss with the carrot and orange, then pile into the flatbreads and top with pomegranate seeds, and yoghurt, if using.

Spicy Potato-stuffed Green Peppers

Back in March we had a wonderful visit from friends from the UK :) Amongst the fun of visiting Fremantle, Rottnest, Margaret River and generally pottering about and playing games, we had time to cook a few favourites: lamb abruzzio, T-bone steaks with salad and BBQ'd potatoes, and of course, lots of kangaroo!

Since then I've been a bit swamped by work, and under the weather from the 'winter'. We've had lots of old favourites and fallbacks, like that wonderful chicken, orange and almond salad. I just started getting the cooking bug again this week, but I'll be away for work next week! So I thought I'd better update while I had a little enthusiasm.

This recipe came originally from The Flavour Thesaurus, under the 'peppers and chillis' combo. I didn't actually get much of a taste of the chilli in this - yes, it was spicy, but it didn't have that kind of jalapeno-like aroma to it. What I really liked was the savoury contrast of the spiced potato with the fresh green peppers. All it needs is a touch of sweetness to round it all out. You could serve it with some sweet chutney, or some peshwari naan. I made gajar ka halwa to go after, but it was too sweet, too late. Next time perhaps I'll cook the carrots with fenugreek and a little honey, and have them with, instead.

Ingredients:

• 2-4 large to medium green peppers
• one large white onion
• 4-5 mashing potatoes
• 2-3 tsp garam masala
• a whole chilli (optional)
• butter, ghee or oil
• sour cream or yoghurt
• 1tsp paprika
  

Halve and deseed the peppers, then grill or microwave, cut-side down, until beginning to go tender. Arrange in a roasting tin or baking dish, cut-side up. Meanwhile, scrub and boil the potatoes, and finely chop and gently fry the onions and chilli, until golden and sweet. Mash the potatoes and stir into the onions, with the garam masala. Spoon into the green peppers and top with a little butter, ghee or oil. Roast at 180C for 20 minutes, until the green peppers are soft and the tops of the potatoes are golden. Stir the paprika into the sour cream or yoghurt and serve the peppers topped with a blob.