Yet another month passes by, and the glaring lack of blog posts is apparent to all my faithful followers, and weighs heavier on my mind with each passing day. The weekly affair that I had envisioned in those early days of naivety has petered out into a semi-monthly occasion. I know I do this every time I post, but I have to apologise again for letting you all down. I promised more blogs, and more blogs is what I should have delivered. To make up for it, this is going to be a super-long blog full of super-awesome dishes. Please enjoy responsibly.
So what have I been doing this last month? For the most part I've been working, and I use the word 'working' loosely since most of our day is comprised of sitting at the corner shop sipping lattes and shooting proverbial breezes. It becomes a disappointment if my registrar and I haven't managed to order our coffees by 11 o'clock, followed closely by a long lunch. Living in a country town which moves at a country pace definitely has its advantages, and now that Spring has arrived in Wangaratta it's hard not to sit back and enjoy the serenity...so much serenity.
But it hasn't been all coffees at the corner shop. My kitchen has been a flurry of boiling pots and piling dishes as my country cooking adventures pick up the pace. It has been a highly productive month full of dinner parties and desserts and fine dining, and one star dish that my co-interns can't stop raving about. I'm not usually one to hype up my own food, but it was pretty damn good.
But we start with the simplest of the simplest dishes. After touting my amazing non-stick TEFAL pans in the last post, I felt obliged to give the dreaded omelette another go. The results will amaze you!
Yes! My perfect 3-egg omelette, successfully slid off my super non-stick pan. I kept it simple and just put cheese in the middle, but now that I know how easy this is to do I'll start getting fancy with my fillings. Breakfast will never be the same again. I lie, breakfast has been the same everyday since. I just don't have the time to whip up an omelette batter and cook it. My quick breakfast of choice is Uncle Toby's Plus Omega 3 Lift, a tasty nutritious meal that even your kids will enjoy. Find it in your supermarket cereal aisle.
The second dish on the menu is a variation of one I've made before. You may remember me cooking Jamie Oliver's prosciutto-wrapped roast chicken in a tin foil tray. I really enjoyed cooking it last time, particularly the part where I could throw away the make-shift tray and have less cleaning to do. Jamie actually features 4 different single-serve roast chicken recipes, and I decided on rosemary roast chicken breast with asparagus and cherry tomatoes in white wine.
Not too bad to look at, but unfortunately I did a very naughty thing and didn't cook my chicken properly. After biting into a very raw and very salmonella-looking piece of chicken, I promptly spat out the bacteria-infested wad in my mouth and nuked the rest of the chicken in the microwave. Damn these electric ovens and their crazy cooking times. Luckily I didn't get food poisoning, but I did get a nice colourful picture for my blog.
By this time I was feeling a bit lazy (which is not all that unusual for me) and decided to make a big pot of something or other to last me through the week. Noting the lack of pasta-based dishes throughout my country cooking adventures I threw together a bolognese sauce from a recipe my mum taught me, which is basically crushed tomatoes and tomato paste, mince meat, garlic, onions, red wine, salt, pepper and sugar, and whatever veggies you want chopped into little pieces. I also made use of some of the herbs Michelle gave me during my last trip to Milawa, bless her soul. Thrown together with fettucine, this is what it looks like:
Not great, but not terrible. I was a bit impatient and didn't let the sauce reduce down into nice, rich, thick loveliness. I really want to aim for the restaurant quality sauce that looks all creamy and oozey. Instead my sauces usually turn out wet and runny. Still I can't complain too much; it got me through a whole week of meals, including lunch!
I returned home for Father's Day weekend, and as has become a tradition in our family my younger sister and I cooked breakfast for the family. Up until now it's mostly been a lot of pancakes, with a fairly fantastic batch of ricotta pancakes whipped up just this last Mother's Day. I decided to change things up a bit this time around and searched through my Donna Hay book for some ideas. I settled upon a delicious looking breakfast/dessert that was also really simple to make.
It's hard to tell from the picture, but those are Dark Chocolate French Toast Sandwiches. The name alone is enough to make your mouth water and your pancreas shut down for good. They were really quite tasty, however the dark chocolate really overpowered the french toast, so it felt like we were just eating nutella. Plus it was super rich. I recommend a side of bananas or strawberries to accompany this dish, sliced to perfection of course. P.S. I'm pretty sure my parents enjoyed it, though they could have just been trying to make me feel good.
Delighted with my french toast experience, I returned to Wangaratta filled to the brim with cooking confidence and girlish glee. I invited my fellow interns over for dinner, with the aim of cooking an awesome lamb rack roast I saw in Donna Hay. Trundling down to the Woolworth's the night before the night, I discovered that supermarkets don't routinely stock whole lamb racks, which was disappointing needless to say. Also, the recipe called for figs, but me being the foodie novice that I am didn't realise figs weren't in season. Plus, as my cousin informed me later, they are really expensive. I was wracking my brain trying to think of an alternative and decided that apples might do the trick. The next day I called the local butcher while I was at work (and sipping lattes simultaneously of course) to order a few lamb racks, and by 5:30pm I was all set to start cooking. Apples chopped, fennel sliced, lamb coated in salt, pepper, rosemary, and garlic mustard from my favourite mustard shop. A surprisingly short cooking time later:
So to recap: Lamb rack roast on a bed of roasted apple and fennel, with a serving of mashed potatoes on the side for good measure. Yes, its all just a lot of brown a beige, but this is the dish of the trip so far. Better than my lamb shanks probably. The fennel/apple combo worked a real treat. In fact, one of co-interns keeps asking me to make the fennel/apple and mash potatoes again, she really couldn't get enough. I have to say I'm quite proud of this one, though next time I'm gonna try and add a bit of colour to the dish. If you have any suggestions about what I could use, please let me know!
The following weekend I came back down to Melbourne again to hang out with my cousins, one of whom was visiting from Sydney. Being ever so much more the foodie that I am, each visit from her takes us to yet undiscovered culinary gems hidden from we who have lived in Melbourne practically our whole lives. Last time she was down she took us to The Panama Room, which had a great atmosphere and very good food which was surprisingly hearty given the young hip chic vibe I was getting from the place. This time around we went to Pearl restaurant in South Yarra, which got some great reviews in The Age and two hats. I have to admit though, I really didn't enjoy it all that much. I think I just can't enjoy "asian fusion" dining, particularly Vietnamese fusion dishes. When my whole rainbow trout came out all I could think was, "My mum could probably make this." I suppose the same could be said for other cultures and their traditional cuisines. You don't really want to be paying fine-dining prices for a home cooked meal.
The highlight of the visit for me was brunch/lunch at Outpost, which coincidentally is near my old high school. Fantastic coffee and atmosphere, and for lunch I had the Chicken Pot Pie which was delicious. Commenting on the apparent simplicity of the pot pie we got into a discussion about stews and the such. I didn't even know where to start making a stew. Apparently you just brown some meat, throw it in together with chopped veggies and stock and whatever else you like, simmer and thicken with flour to your liking. It was just that easy! So why not try it up in Wangaratta?
So for my stew I used bits of mystery beef, onions, carrots, potatoes, mushrooms, vegetable stock, red wine, copious amounts of salt and pepper and some bay leaves. It sat on my stove top for ages, and being the impatient guy that I am I added a lot of flour to speed up the thickening process. In the end the texture wasn't far off from where I wanted it. What I didn't like was how bland it all tasted. I know I didn't have a lot of fancy herbs to throw in there but I didn't expect it to be so tasteless. The next day I was talking about it with some of the other people and I realised I didn't add any tomato paste or garlic. I guess the great thing about stew is if you make a big enough pot you can just keep cooking it till you get it right. After adding the tomato paste and garlic, and some random thyme I found in Michelle's herb garden, the stew suddenly tasted like a completely different dish. You really need the tomatoes to add that extra bite to the whole thing. And to complete my stew adventure, I stole a ramekin from home and bought some puff pastry so I could make my pot pies. I don't think the puff pastry really adds anything to the dish, but it does look better than serving up a bowl of stew with rice.
My final dish is another Donna Hay recipe, or recipes should I say. Chicken breast cooked two ways: parmesan-coated roast chicken breast and roast chicken breast on a tomato and eggplant base topped with cheese. To accompany this I decided to make a salad that was suggested to me by, you guessed it, the ever so lovely Michelle at the mustard shop. I forgot to mention I went back to Milawa on one of my afternoons off and picked up some more mustard, this time opting for the hot honey mustard flavour. Wondering what might go well with it, she suggested I make a salad with roast pumpkin and spinach and top it all with the honey mustard. I took her advice and added some roast sweet potato and pine nuts for extra texture.
Both the chicken components of this dish were crap. The 'parmesan-crumb' that was meant to coat my chicken breasts really just became a melted cheese flavouring. And the eggplant and tomato base turned into a soggy mess. The only saving grace was that the chicken was cooked well, or at the very least it wasn't raw, which is lucky since I was serving it to my other interns. Also, the salad was fantastic. The combination worked really well, though next time I probably need to dice my pumpkin and sweet potatoes into smaller bite size pieces.
The following day I still had heaps of salad left over and some chicken strips I had cut off the breasts, so I put together a grilled chicken salad for dinner.
To be honest this salad tasted a lot better than the dishes I made the night before. Sometimes a simple chicken salad is all you really need.
And that finally bring us up to date with all the exciting happenings in my cooking world. I hope it hasn't been too much of struggle reading through all of that. I've been writing this blog up over a few days so I haven't noticed how long it is, though on preview it's probably the longest one I've done so far. Normally I'd finish it here but I wanted to let you all know about all the other exciting stuff that's been happening in Wangaratta.
Living together in a block of flats so close to the hospital opens up opportunities that just aren't available to you in the city. Like flat parties. Big drunken flat parties on Thursday nights that somehow end up being in your flat. Big drunken flat parties with a bunch of rowdy medical students that aren't all too careful with their beer and red wine. I woke up the next morning to the stench of beer and dude and rotten as. Actually it was Chance my medical co-intern who woke me up with a phone call 15 minutes after I was meant to start work. Good times!
I much more sedate news, I discovered this last month that a friend of a friend of mine is working as a dentist in Benalla, which is not too far of a drive from here. I actually found out after finding her name on a dental review of one of my patients. What a random crazy world we live in. We ended up meeting up for dinner and she dragged me along to a swing dancing class that she attends here in Wangaratta. OK, so she didn't 'drag' me along. Truth be told, I love dancing, absolutely love it. I don't care that I was swing dancing in a hall with a group of mostly over 50's who look like they might do a hip if they sway too much. When I get back down to Melbourne I will definitely have to con some people into coming to dance classes with me. If you have any interest in it at all please let me know. I'm putting the call out!
Alright guys that's it. It's now 11:38pm on my third day of blog writing. And I've only just realised I've skipped over one of my dishes. It's too late to add anything now; I'll have to add it on to the next blog.
Whenever that might be.
