21 Jump Street

Sorry for the delay in posting everyone, I've been snuggled up in bed with a collection of viruses and daytime telly. Anyway, the post is here now!

Welcome to Duck Week!  This week we enjoyed Duck Salad, Giant Croutons and Cheat's Rice Pudding with Stewed Fruit. My first attempt at cooking duck actually went far better than expected, and I'm pleased to let you know that I'm now a fan of the stuff. There were a couple of roadblocks to deal with this week - ingredients not being in season or hard to track down - so there was a bit of improvisation involved in the cooking. But it all worked out okay in the end!

Let's begin with the Giant Croutons. I love that they have a fancy name, but how about we call it what it is - Fancy Toast. Delicious fancy toast, I might add. It is one of those great side dishes that take little effort or energy to make, you just throw everything onto a tray together and shove it in the oven. It basically deals with itself. The use of the whole unpeeled garlic cloves is fantastic - when the garlic has cooked inside the skin it takes on a really sweet flavour and you don't get such a pungent smell or taste. It holds shape but gets quite tender and can easily be mashed over your bread, making the yummiest garlic bread ever. I love roasted garlic and will often just roast some up on its own to smear over some grilled chicken or vegies - give it a go!

And the Duck Salad.... delicious. If we're being honest, I usually avoid ordering, buying or cooking duck because it is a little bit fatty, a bit more expensive or it comes as part of some awful greasy Chinese food dish from the local shops - three traits that tend to put me off my food. I can honestly say I haven't experienced a really nice duck dish or meal before, so I was naturally a bit apprehensive about this week. I was pleasantly surprised again! The salad is really fresh and tasty, super easy to put together and looks gorgeous on the plate. I had been given a few pieces of advice on cooking the duck breasts but everything seemed to be contradictory, so I just decided to wing it and hope for the best. I ended up cooking the meat until it was just a faint pink colour on the inside and then put it aside under some foil to let it rest while I finished up the rest of the meal. Apparently this was a good thing because the meat came up really tender and juicy! Yay! Beginners luck, I think.

The salad component of the Duck Salad was also fantastic, and I will definitely be making it again. It is really fresh and has great textures - the crunch comes from the radishes and pomegranate seeds, and the dressing is light and refreshing. I have to say I love pomegranate - it is another one of those 'superfoods' that is absolutely filled to the brim with good nutrients and vitamins. It helps that pomegranates are also really fresh and tasty, and bursting with juice in every seed. Just be careful not to let it sit too long on your skin or cutting boards as it can stain. They are really easy to find this time of year too!

Dessert was quite the challenge this week, which was surprising for such a simple recipe. Tracking down the rice pudding was no problem at all, but plums and stone fruit in general are not in season right now. After much searching I ended up just buying some canned plums and peaches and figured I could just cook them gently and for less time than I would do with the fresh stuff. Tinned plums are not such a good choice for this recipe, they are far too soft and break apart very easily when they are heated. The tinned peaches actually worked a lot better and it still tasted great. The dessert as a whole was enjoyable, but rice pudding really doesn't register on my favourite dessert list so I give this one points for flavour but I don't think I will be making it again. No pics this week - rice pudding and mushy fruit isn't much to look at.

Overall the meal was quite enjoyable, although I think it is better suited to feeding only a couple of people as opposed to a big group, given that the meat is a little expensive. It went pretty well all things considered - especially my lack of experience with duck meat! I don't think I would recommend this to a first-timer, but if you've had a go at the 30 Minute Meals before and are looking for something really fresh and easy to try, I'd say you should go for this meal.

Next week is the start of the 'fish section' of the book - another area where I have very little experience. I generally don't cook fish because I have real issues cooking anything with a face (think prawns and whole fish), although I really do love to eat it. So I guess it is probably about time that I had a crack at cooking seafood! The meal next week is Thai Red Prawn Curry, Jasmine Rice, Cucumber Salad and Papaya Salad. Sounds yummy.

Til then - Bon Appetit!

Twenty-Twenty Vision

Welcome to the twentieth challenge night for the year! This week's meal is Piri Piri Chicken, Dressed Potatoes, Rocket Salad and Quick Portuguese Tarts. The book indicates that this meal is designed for four people, with two tarts leftover. The main meal is definitely proportioned well for four people, but there will never be enough tarts to satisfy your guests. They're so good.... You should definitely make double.

The Rocket Salad is easy as, and appears a few times in the cookbook. Just some rocket, a bit of olive oil, salt, pepper and a squeeze of lemon juice. The perfect side to a meal like this, where the chicken is meant to be the star. It is actually climbing the list as one of my favourite side dishes now, if you can even call it that! Bitter leaves like rocket are really good for you, they're more interesting than your average side salad and the bright, rich green colouring looks awesome on the plate.

The Piri Piri Chicken is so good, I don't know where to start. I was a little concerned about the chilli content - our guest is not a big fan of hot food and I tried to find a way to tone down the spice without knocking out the flavour. I went with just a single chilli in the sauce, and tried to use a bit less of the other spicey ingredients. When you first make the sauce and give it a taste, it is super hot. Its a great taste, but it definitely has a burn to it. Even when moving the tray in the oven after some cooking I noticed that the steam was burning my eyes and making my nose run. But when it is all cooked and served up, it is just so tasty and the heat is cooked right out of it. There's enough flavour and spice to make it worthwhile, but not so much that it becomes unpleasant. It was really easy to put together and I can see myself making it again.

The dressed potatoes were dead easy, and they're actually pretty good for you too. I love sweet potato because it is stacked with loads of vitamins and has actually been classed as a 'super food'. That and it is delicious. I usually chop mine into chips and roast them in the oven with some pepper sprinkled over, but the microwave method is just as good. I thought it was strange that there was no added water or oil in the recipe, but when you seal up the bowl with glad wrap before popping it into the microwave it helps to draw out the moisture and use it for the cooking process. When they were ready I mashed them up a little bit, gave it a stir and then topped with the feta and chilli. So very, very tasty. We left out the coriander but I can't say it really hurt the dish at all!

Quick Portuguese Tarts. What can I say... they are delicious. They are really refreshing, with the flavours of the orange breaking through the creamy centre. I made mine so that they were ready just as we were sitting down to eat the main meal, so by the time we were ready for dessert they had cooled a little and the caramel sauce on top had thickened a bit and was easier to eat. They were dead easy to make, which I love about all of the desserts we have made so far. They were so delicious it was sort of hard to stop eating them. In fact, I think we only did because there were no tarts left! I would definitely recommend that you give this recipe a go. Just make extra!!

So there you have it - it was quick, easy, fresh and full of stuff that is good for you. I can see this one being made for a weeknight dinner. Nothing too special, but nice enough to be enjoyable and healthy enough to be eaten regularly. If you haven't already given a 30 Minute Meal recipe a go, get out there and try this one. It is a nice little introduction to the 30MM style of cooking and a really good starting place for anyone who is a little intimidated by the kitchen.

Next week we get to try making duck - I have no idea where to buy good fresh duck meat around here. I have never cooked duck and I rarely eat duck. So this should be really interesting!! The official menu is Duck Salad, Giant Croutons and Cheat's Rice Pudding with Stewed Fruit. Can't wait to give it a go.

Until our ducky adventure next week - Bon Appetit!

Nineteen Minutes

We changed things up a little bit this week. I can't wait to tell you all about it! The feast consisted of Stuffed Cypriot Chicken, Pan-fried asparagus & Vine Tomatoes, Cabbage Salad, St Clement's Drink and Vanilla Ice Cream Floats. It isn't the most outrageous or wowing of meals as far as the 30 Minute Meals cookbook goes, but it is simple, healthy and delicious. What more could  you ask for?

We were cooking in a different kitchen this week, eating off different plates and dining in a different room. It is the first time we have taken the meals out of our own kitchen and it was a really nice little change up. It was perhaps a little bit more stressful, trying to find the right serving dishes for the meal amongst all the unfamiliar cupboards, but we got there in the end. If nothing else, the warm lighting and different decor ended up giving me some very dramatic and impressive looking photos, which I am quite happy about!

Now, if you're not into getting your hands dirty, you probably won't enjoy this meal very much. There's a lot of hand-to-food contact in the preparation stages and if you're squeamish about raw chicken, or getting too touchy feely with food then you will probably suffer through the cooking stage of the meal. But I can guarantee you that it is worth it in the end! The chicken is really simple to make and it basically looks after itself while you get everything else up and running. I love a fuss-free meal and this chicken dish is perfect - it takes little preparation, the cooking is simple and it comes up beautifully.

I have made the asparagus and tomato dish a couple of times before - simply because it looked so good and I needed a nice veg dish to contribute to a meal with friends. The colours are amazing, just looking at the bright, luscious green contrasting with that gorgeous red gives you the impression of freshness and high nutrition. It is dead easy to make, incredibly difficult to mess up and it makes a really nice side to any meat dish. The leftovers were fantastic too - I chopped them up and dropped them into a mixed-leaf salad with a bit of grilled chicken and chopped spanish onion. It really helps to make your average, boring lunch a bit more special.

This week we also had the help of a fellow blogger in choosing our wine. We were given a list of wine to try and ended up selecting a nice red from France. Beyond reading the label I'm not much use at choosing wine - I can generally find my way through sweet and dry, and red vs white, but that is as far as my knowledge goes. So the label on this particular bottle reads "Georges Duboeuf - Beaujolais-Villages" and I can confirm that it is delicious. It even goes well with this meal! For some more in-depth insight into the wine world, I can recommend you read this blog: http://thewinebl0g.blogspot.com.au/p/contact.html.

The St Clement's Drink was not all that I had expected - I think this may have had more to do with the individual ingredients than anything else - but in theory the recipe is quite good. I believe the oranges I used may have been a bit beyond their best before date, making it a bit too tangy. Add the tartness of the lemon and it ended up being a bit of a disaster and almost all of it got tipped after the meal. So my advice here is to make sure you get really fresh (but not too ripe!) fruit. I think it may even work a bit better with lemonade instead of the sparkling water.

And finally, the Vanilla Ice Cream Floats. Yummy! A recurring problem has been that the desserts have coffee in them. I personally don't mind having a little bit of coffee at night, but usually our guests are not keen on too much caffeine after dark - and rightly so. This was the case again this week. I had intended to mix up a bit of hot chocolate in place of the coffee but realised that I had none left on hand, so I gave my non-caffeinated guests a cup of ice-cream with crushed up bikkies in it and that seemed to go over fabulously. I enjoyed the coffee over mine - ice cream, cookies and coffee are a mix made in heaven! Again, it is dead easy and it is also a way to cut down on a few calories, because you're combining the dessert course with the coffee. You don't need to add any sugar and because you're using teacups you end up with far less of a dessert than you might ordinarily make. Its alllll good.

So there it is. Simple and unpretentious, delicious and relatively healthy, full of fresh and whole ingredients. And it looks as though we can expect a little more of that next week too, with Piri Piri Chicken, Dressed Potatoes, Rocket Salad and Quick Portuguese Tarts. Can't wait!

Til next time - Bon Appetit!

Eighteen and Life

Dear Housemate took charge this week from start to finish, including the shopping, planning, cooking, photography and even writing the post! I was absent from this week's meal entirely (and none too pleased that I had to miss out!), so I'm experiencing it through the blog - just like you guys get to each week! To see how it all went, check it out below...

Guest blogger time!! Due to Head Chef's nut allergy, we thought it would be best for her to stay far away from this meal. So I'm flying solo for tonight's dish of Chicken Skewers, Firey Noodle Salad and Fruit & Noodle Salad. To be completely honest, I went into this expecting a huge fail. I'm not the best cook and usually avoid it if possible (I am, however, an excellent dishwasher!) so I gave myself heaps of preparation time and started with the satay sauce.

The sauce was extremely easy to make. All the ingredients whacked together in the food processor and bam! This was where I had my first freak out of the meal. The sauce had a strong citrus taste, due to the zest of 2 limes and the juice of 1 lime. And I may have added too much soy sauce (I need actual measurements Jamie, not these silly 'lugs'!). To counteract it, I added some more peanut butter and hoped for the best. The taste was still strong and not like the typical satay sauces that you get in restaurants. I was keen to see how my guests for the night would enjoy it. My family love Thai food, so who better to have dinner with.

The next task was the chicken skewers. I hate raw chicken with a passion and it usually takes me forever to cut it. So for this, I decided to just get on with it. And the skewer trick is pretty handy, except when the skewer breaks! By this stage, the family had arrived and no matter how many times I told him to relax, my dad joined me in the kitchen to lend a hand. I let him deal with the chicken once I had marinated it with the satay sauce.

Next to make was the Firey Noodle Salad. Red onion, chili and a range of sauces was the base for this interesting salad. The taste of these ingredients is amazing with a nice kick at the end. Tossed with egg noodles and cashews makes it even tastier.

This is a hands-on type of affair. Everyone built their own parcels with lettuce, noodles and chicken pieces. It was a really refreshing meal. And any reservations I had about the sauce disappeared once everything was combined. I also think the extra bit of peanut butter helped!

The Fruit and Mint Sugar consisted of a platter of pineapple and blueberries and the mint sugar. The mint was grounded into paste and then the caster sugar. It had a sweet taste and the mint wasn't overpowering. The sugar was sprinkled over the fruit platter and served with Greek yoghurt. For someone who doesn't like pineapple, this was always going to be the interesting part of the meal. But as with most Jamie nights, I was surprised to say I enjoyed it. With the addition of the sugar, the pineapple didn't have the usual strong sweet taste.

So another recipe down and another awesome dinner. Next week is Stuffed Cypriot Chicken, Pan-Fried Asparagus & Vine tomatoes, Cabbage Salad, St Clement's Drink and Vanilla Ice Cream Float.

And I'm happy to report that the much better cook and blogger will be back next week - no nuts in the next recipe!

Dear Housemate

So there you have it guys. She didn't do too bad at all! In fact I'm rather impressed. Hope you enjoyed this week's post, and until next time - Bon Appetit!