A Christmas pickle - brinjal all the way

Merry Christmas fellow bachelor dads and mums, brothers and sisters. Christmas is complicated, right? 

In Australia, it’s summer and a wonderful time for garden and grocery produce - basil, tomatoes, chillies, and eggplants. 

I have a basil pesto recipe from a previous summer. Here is my version of a South Indian brinjal pickle to liven up a curry or steak. 

Ingredients

1 medium eggplant (about 400g)
1 cayenne pepper 
2 cloves garlic 
3 tbsp peanut or canola oil
1 tsp salt

— Toasted spices —
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 tsp cumin seeds
1/2 tsp fenugreek seeds
1/2 tsp black pepper

1/2 tsp sweet paprika
1/2 tsp turmeric
1/3 cup apple cider vinegar
2 tbsp palm sugar
4 curry leaves 

Method 

1. In a small saucepan, toast the spices over medium heat.

2. While the spices are toasting, cut the eggplant in to slices, then half-centimetre cubes, roughly chop the chilli and garlic.

3. Once the spices are fragrant, remove them to a mortar. (You know when they’re ready by testing the fenugreek which are rock-hard before toasting, and pound to powder easily after toasting.) With a pestle, grind the spices to a rough powder.

4. Add the oil to the saucepan, still on a medium heat, then add the eggplant, chilli, and garlic. Fry gently until the mixture softens and the juices come out. Fry until the juices evaporate and the mixture starts to stick. Don’t let it burn.

5. Add the toasted spices, turmeric, paprika, curry leaves and salt. Stir until the eggplant is thoroughly coated with the spices.

6. Add the vinegar and palm sugar and continue frying until the liquid is about 90% gone.

7. Spoon the mixture into a sterilised jar, seal it and put straight in the fridge.

Yields about 350g

You can’t beat beetroot

 

In-season if winter and early spring, beetroots are great for roasting, for casseroles, soups, salads and dips. It’s also easy to pickle and set aside for summer sandwiches and burgers.

Pickled beetroot

Ingredients

• 4 beetroots large (600-800g total)
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 3/4 cup water
• 1 1/2 cups white vinegar
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1/2 tsp peppercorns, coarsely cracked 
• 4 curry leaves
• 2 whole cloves
• 1/2 tsp mustard seeds
• 1/2 cinnamon stick
• 1 tsp salt

Method

Preheat oven to 160º C

Wash beetroot thoroughly. Place in a roasting pan and drizzle with olive oil. Roast, covered, for 1-2 hours, or until al dente (cooking them in boiling water is quicker, but the flavour isn’t quite as good).

Remove from oven to cool.

Place all other ingredients in a saucepan and bring to the boil.

Simmer for 5 minutes.

Remove the cinnamon and cloves.

Once beetroots are cool, remove skin and cut beetroot into slices - I like about .5 cm.

Pack beetroot into hot, sterilised jars.

Use some of the pickling liquid to deglaze the roasting dish and return the liquid to the saucepan. 

Top up the jars with vinegar mixture, evenly distributing the remaining whole spices.

Seal and store in a cool place.

Yields about 4 jam jars of yummy beetroot pickles.

My Asian pantry

My journey into cooking Asian cuisines began with buying a copy of The Complete Asian Cookbook by the great Charmaine Solomon in the 1990s. I still cook from it. But of course these days I also plunder various YouTube channels.

Last night I made a family dinner of a westernised restaurant favourite - Sesame Chicken. I followed Mandy’s method from Souped Up Recipes. All the shops are closed on Good Friday, so I was pleased to see I had everything in my pantry that the recipe called for.

And this got me thinking about my must-haves from my local Asian supermarkets.

Sauces

• Light soy sauce
• Dark soy sauce
• Sweet soy sauce (kecap manis)
• Fish sauce
• Oyster sauce

Choosing

As with all the foundational sauces, vinegars and cooking wines, you start by looking at the ingredients. The fewer ingredients the better.

Soy sauce is soy sauce - why would it need flavour enhancer this or colouring that? Unless they’re using low quality soy… For soy sauce, also look for ‘naturally fermented’ on the label.

There are grades to most of these - premium, superior and whatnot. The most impactful on the flavour is ‘premium’ for oyster sauce. Premium oyster sauce is much, much tastier than its regular counterpart, in this case (top image) brand Lee Kum Kee.

Wines and vinegars 

• Dark cooking wine (shaoxing - also spelled shao hsing)
• White cooking wine (shiwan from Pearl River Bridge is good)
• White rice vinegar
• Black vinegar

Choosing

Follow the ingredients rule. The wines will often come in salted or unsalted versions. They’re both fine. The ingredients of my white cooking wine are: water, rice, salt; while the darker is: water, rice, wheat. What you don’t want to see is ‘alcohol’. That means it’s not wine at all, but a bunch of flavouring with alcohol added.

Black vinegar: White rice vinegar can be satisfactorily substituted with European white vinegar, but there is no substitute for delights of Chinese black vinegar.

I’ve found products labelled ‘black vinegar’ to be particularly susceptible to imposters. One I bought without checking had about 12 ingredients which, from memory, included carrots. Just a cocktail of flavours made to mimic the real thing. Look for: water, black glutinous rice, wheat, salt.

Oils

• Canola oil
• Peanut oil
• Sesame oil
• Ghee

For general use, I like canola oil best. It does the trick, and its flavour is unintrusive. It’s also safer if you’re not sure of the allergies of the people you’re cooking for. Peanut oil has a stronger flavour, and it just depends on how I’m feeling.

With sesame oil, just remember a little goes a long way. It’s not a cooking oil, it’s an flavouring oil and great for dipping sauces. In a stir fry - add it last. Right at the end. Just before serving.

As with black vinegar, there is no substitute for ghee. A South Indian curry made with ghee will taste sooo much better than one made with vegetable oil.

Other stuff

• Palm sugar
• Chilli bean sauce (toban djan)
• Chicken bouillon powder
• MSG

Some might say that brown sugar is an acceptable substitute for palm sugar. They are wrong. It’s not terrible. But palm sugar is much better in Thai, Indonesian and Filipino cooking. Toban djan is just great stuff - a staple of Schezwan food  A little of this can do wonders for a basic veggie stir fry.

The absence of chicken bouillon is why so many people ask - why doesn’t my fried rice taste like takeout?

MSG is a much maligned flavour enhancer, but the serious negative health effects it’s been blamed for are debunked. It has been used in many Asian cuisines for more than a century.

Go-to channels

• Chinese cooking demystified 
• Souped up recipes 
• School of wok
• Pailin’s kitchen

Chinese cooking demystified 

Steph and Chris explore the many cuisines of China. Often the recipes come with a little social history.

Souped up recipes

I’ve followed this since Mandy first moved from China to South America (she’s now based in North America) in search of a warmer climate to help her arthritis. Again, mostly Chinese, including ‘international’ Chinese.

School of wok

Jeremy is a very charming presenter. His technique of arranging stir fry ingredients in a ‘wok clock’ changed the way I cook.

Pailin’s kitchen

In the late 1980s, the Pailin (no relation), on Parramatta Road, was at the forefront of the explosion of Thai restaurants in Sydney. So I’m fond of that name. 

Also known as ‘Hot Thai Kitchen’, it includes neighbouring cuisines. As Pai says - let’s get started!

Smashed patty cheeseburger

I’ve had the flu for the last couple of weeks and only just coming out of it this weekend (I hope). Streaming The Menu during the week made me want to lift my cheeseburger game.

And it ruined my life. I will never buy a burger again.

These are ingredients and directions for 1 burger. Scaling up to 2, 4 or 8 or 12 is simple ingredients-wise. The logistics is the trick. 

It all happens very quickly, so you’re much better off doing 4 beautiful burgers, followed by another 4, then another 4, rather than doing 12, serving them all together with only 4 of them properly cooked.

Doing 4 burgers (8 patties) is about the limit for 1 pair of hands (or at least for clumsy ones like mine) beyond that, you’ll need to enlist the troops so you can concentrate on smashing those patties.

Fat hack

Burger mince, especially when you’re smashing the patty rather flaming it, needs at least 20% fat to keep it moist and getting that gorgeous crust.

This is no problem if you’re buying from a butcher. But not so easy from a supermarket where often 17% is the highest fat content available.

Not to worry. You have options.

You can oomph it up by chopping up some bacon fat, or adding slivers of dripping. In my example I had home-made beef stock in the freezer and scraped off some of the clarified fat and mixed it into my supermarket-source beef mince.

Ingredients

1 65g brioche bun

110g beef mince, at least 20% fat

2 tbsp vegetable oil

2 slices American cheese

3 very thin slices tomato

2 leaves baby cos lettuce, halved

1 eschalot bulb, thinly sliced

1 tbsp very thin slices cucumber pickles

1 tsp mayonnaise and wasabi sauce

1 tsp chilli and tomato chutney

For assembly

1 cocktail skewer

Method

This is 90% assembly and 10% cook. But the 10% cook is very, very important.

To get the assembly right, room temperature is your friend. The lettuce - fresh, crunchy, room temperature; the tomato thinly sliced, juicy, room temperature etc.

Having everything ready for assembly lets you concentrate on the cook.

On one board, lay out your assembly items: lettuce, tomato, pickles.

On another board, lay out your cook items: two patty balls 55g each, sliced eschalots, cheese

Halve and lightly toast the bun. I do this under a grill. I don’t want the buns to be browned, but to be crisp enough to hold it’s crispness once the juices begin to flow.

Once they’re ready, apply the salad sauce (mayo and wasabi) to the bottom bun and the bbq sauce (chilli chutney) to the top bun.

Now you’re ready to cook.

There’s really no timing involved here other than - the moment you’ve done one step, move to the next step.

Put a non-stick frying pan on a high heat. Add the oil. Once the oil starts to smoke, add the first patty and squash it down with a steel spatula to about .5cm thickness. Quickly, do the same with the second patty.

Season the top side of the first, add the sliced onion. Do the same to the second. Flip the first, keeping as much of the union underneath the patty as you can. Do the same with the second.

Season the new upside of each. Top each with a cheese slice. Remove from heat. Stack first on top of the second.

Avengers - assemble!

Bottom bun

(Mayonnaise and wasabi)

Lettuce

Tomato

Patty and cheese stack

Pickles

(Chilli sauce)

Top bun

Press the burger down gently, so that the juices cascade through. Gravity is also your friend.

Spear with a cocktail skewer, and you’re ready to chow down.

Favourite Pesto Recipe

A hot first couple of weeks of March (next week in Sydney will be in the mid 30s) has meant summer garden produce continues to kick on.

In my fridge I’ve got 4 jars of sweet and hot chilli sauce, 3 jars of chilli and tomato chutney and 2 jars of pickled chilli slices.

The key to a good home harvest is harvesting. It reduces the risk of pest attack. You don’t want your sweet basil to flower, but you do want your cherry tomatoes to flower.

Today was basil harvest.

Just two plants in one pot has kept me going since November.

I’ve pestoed lots of times. This one isn’t exactly authentic, but it’s the recipe I like the most.

The following yields about 300ml or 260g

Ingredients

• 100g basil leaves, about 2 cups packed 
• 40g pine nuts, about 1/4 cup, lightly toasted
• 2 cloves garlic, peeled and lightly browned
• 1 green chilli
• 25g, about 1/3 cup, fresh grated parmesan cheese
• 1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 1 teaspoon salt
• .5 teaspoon white pepper
• 1 lime, juiced

Method

Heat a frying pan over medium heat. Toast pine nuts and garlic cloves until golden, tossing occasionally in the pan. Add the pine nuts to the bowl of your food processor along with all the other ingredients

Run the processor until you achieve and even, slightly coarse paste. You will need to pause a couple of times and adjust the contents with a spatula.

Yields about 260g pesto, about 300ml

Storage: this pesto can be stored in a sterilised, air tight jar and refrigerated for a couple of weeks.

Slow cooked, sticky spare ribs

It’s been a long time between recipes!

My boys are now young men and it’s rare that the three of us sit at the dinner table together.

If you have a roasting pan with a lid, this one is a beauty - quick to prep, slow to cook, and all done in the pan.

Ingredients

1 kg rack of beef spare ribs (pork is also very good)

200g eschallots, peeled and separated into individual bulbs. Slice the bigger bulbs in half. 

Rub

• 1 tbsp brown sugar
• 2 tsp paprika
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1 tsp onion flakes
• .5 tsp cumin powder
• .75 tsp mustard powder
• 1 tsp salt
• .5 tsp white pepper

BBQ sauce

• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• .5 cup apple cider vinegar
• 1.25 cups ketchup or tomato sauce
• .25 cup brown sugar
• 2 tsp each white pepper, onion flakes, mustard powder
• 1 tsp cayenne pepper
• 2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
• 1.5 cups water

Chopped parsley or chives for garnish

Method

1. Preheat oven to 160°C
2. Mix rub ingredients in a small bowl
3. Rub in the mixture to all sides of the rib rack
4. Mix BBQ sauce ingredients, except water, in the roasting pan. Then mix in water
5. Place ribs in sauce, turning to coat. Remove, then drop in the eschallots. Put the rib racks on top, arranging them bone-side down, sort or arching over the eschallots.
6. Cook covered for 3.5 hours
7. Remove from oven, baste with sauce and return, uncovered, to the oven.
8. Cook for 30 minutes, basting with the sauce again halfway through
9. Remove ribs onto serving plate. The surface of the ribs will be caramelised and sticky. The eschallots will be soft explosions of sweet, savoury yumminess.
10. Mix sauce to bring together, adding a little water if necessary to produce a pourable sauce.
11. For serving, the ribs will be falling apart and so easy to separate 

I served this with linguine and steamed broccolini. There were no leftovers. None.

These became sweet and savoury little explosions of yumminess

Hearty white bean soup

Back trackin'

When I started this blog so many years ago, my boys were 7 and 9. The trick was to find pretty simple meals that they'd love (or at least like enough to try new things). Now that are 17 and 19 and gigantic! Which I suppose means the meals were ok. Now the question is - how to fill those bottomless bellies?

This is a tasty, filling soup or stew that works great as a lunch, side or main.

If I’m ladling over pasta, I have it more as a stew and reduce the water by 2 cups. If I’m serving it with crusty bread and a salad, the consistency I like is more like a soup.

If I were to do a vegetarian version, I’d chop and sauté a turnip, then remove and add it back in again with the chopped kale.

In this pic, I didn’t have any feta in the fridge, so used pecorino instead. This is an Italian dish, so black pepper would be more authentic I guess, but I like white pepper here.

Ingredients 

2 cups (375g) dry cannellini beans
4 cups water (for soaking)
2 or 3 Italian pork sausages with garlic and fennel, bratwurst also works well
2 chopped brown onions
2 cloves chopped garlic (reduce if your sausages have lots of garlic)
⅓ cup dry white wine
1 teaspoon freshly ground white pepper
¼ teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 bay leaf
2 cups veggie or chicken stock
6 (or 8) cups water
1 teaspoon salt, plus more to taste
4 cups chopped kale (or other leafy green)
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil, or to taste

To serve

Crumbled feta
A few pinches red chilli flakes
A few splashes of balsamic vinegar 
Chopped parsley

Method

1. Soak beans in cold water overnight.

2. Drain beans (retaining the liquid) and set aside.

3. Make a cut down the center of each sausage and peel off the casing. Transfer sausage into a dry, cold, 4 litre soup pot. Turn the heat to medium-low. You want to render out the fat. Once it starts to sizzle, raise the heat to medium and brown the sausage, breaking it up into small pieces with a wooden spoon, 5 to 7 minutes. Cook and stir until juices start to caramelise and stick to the bottom of the pan, creating a fond, 3 to 5 minutes.

4. Add onion and garlic and stir to coat in the rendered sausage fat. Add a little olive oil if necessary. Cook until onion starts to turn translucent, about 5 minutes. Add white wine to deglaze the pot. Add black pepper, dried chillies, bay leaf, and water.

5. Add drained beans, increase heat to high, and bring to a boil. Once boiling, reduce heat to medium-low and simmer for 30 minutes. Add salt and continue to simmer until beans are tender, about 30 more minutes. Taste beans to be certain they are perfectly cooked.

6. Smash about 1/4 of the beans with a potato masher to give the soup a creamy texture. Stir in chopped kale, increase heat to medium, and cook until tender, 10 to 15 minutes. The time will depend and the greens you choose. If you choose English spinach, for instance, this can be done one minute before serving. Taste and adjust salt.

7. Ladle hot soup into bowls, drizzle with olive oil, and sprinkle with feta and a pinch of chilli flakes and chopped parsley.