Back To Basics, Christina Aguilera Style

Hey everyone!  Yes, even though I said I would put up another post soon, I bet none of you thought it would actually happen.  Hell, even I had my doubts.  The PS3 sitting here in front of me is begging me to push its buttons, but instead I'll sit here typing away, at 12:30am on a Tuesday night, listening to Paul Anka belt out swing covers of classic rock songs whilst I lounge around in my home clothes.  I'm not sure if everyone knows what home clothes are, but they are very loose, very comfortable, very daggy clothes to bum around at home in.  I don't understand why people would choose to keep on all that suffocating going out apparel.  And shoes!  Shoes?  Indoors?  Seriously, free those feet.

Alright I seem to have gone off on a bit of a tangent there and its only the second paragraph.  Let's get back on track and head on a journey that will take us through some of the very core dishes that I think every cook should know how to make.  As the title suggests, over the last few weeks I've tried to steer away from anything fancy-pantsy and instead concentrate on some very basic dishes.  When I first started this thing, I really just wanted to be able to cook a few things:

• Lasagna
• A Stir Fry
• A Curry
• Some sort of cake or tart, ooh or brownies
• A good roast/casserole type dish

I also wanted to be able to replicate some of my mum's food.  I didn't notice so much when I was growing up, but after eating out at Asian restaurants I realise now that my mum is an amazing cook.  However as much as I want to fry up a plate of Banh Xeo or whip a huge vat of Pho, Asian food is often so involved and uses so many different ingredients, most of which you can only get at specialty Asian grocers.  It's definitely not anything I can attempt in my little isolated corner of Wangaratta.  Perhaps I will try something once I get back to Melbourne.  Look forward to An's Asian Cooking Misadventures in the near future.

Alright moving on now to the aforementioned Basic Foods of the Week!  True to my word, the first dish is a basic lasagna which I got out of 'The Cook's Companion'.

Stephanie Alexander's Lasagna

I really do love a good lasagna.  There is something about the combination of a lovely rich bolognese and creamy white sauce in between soft layers of pasta that just makes you feel good inside, like you're home again.  My lasagna started out really well.  I was so proud at finally making a bechamel, and my bolognese was looking fantastically thick and rich, and tasted great.  However when it came to constructing the actual dish things quickly came apart.  For one thing, I didn't have a proper lasagna tray, so I had to make do with a deep circular dish thing that I assumed was OK to put in the oven.  I ended up having to break up all my pasta sheets so they all fit, which I'm pretty sure is OK coz I've seen it done before.  The second problem was the order of my layering.  Though I'm sure it's mostly my fault, some of the blame has to go to Stephanie Alexander herself.  Her recipe explicitly says that the lasagna sheets should be on the outside i.e. beginning and ending with pasta sheets.  However I think that she was using fresh lasagna sheets, while I only had Leggo's instant lasagna sheets at my disposal.  Consequently, the top of my lasagna became hard as a crisp, and no amount of re-heating could take away that yucky rubbery texture.  But beyond that, everything tasted pretty good!  I thought it was going to be a lot harder to make than it was, but those sauces weren't too involved at all.  I just need a spare hour to let the bolognese reduce properly, and another 40 minutes to an hour cooking time, so all up a 2 hour dish that will always be a house favourite.  And next time I'll get the layering right.

Well that doesn't look like much

Bechamel and Bolognese.  I don't know why that other pot is there.

Layering

More layering

That dastardly top layer

It may not look it, but it tastes OK

Stephanie Alexander's Apple and Cinnamon Muffins

Part two of my basics cooking misadventure had me itching to bake something using the silicone baking gear I bought off Catch of the Day a while back.  Unfortunately, that baking set didn't include a cake tin, so I would have to make do with tarts, muffins and loaves of bread.  Having already made banana bread (which I never posted up here unfortunately) and not game enough to make a pastry, I decided to take a stab at a muffin recipe from 'The Cook's Companion'.  I'm loving this book at the moment.  Not only does it sort recipes by ingredient, Stephanie Alexander provides a whole bunch of 'base recipes' such as this muffin base, and then tips on adding all the extra bits.  Thus, Apple and Cinnamon Muffins.

So from a batch of 12 I kept three for myself and took the rest into ED to share around.  They went down great and I got a lot of compliments, from mothers no less, and you can't get much better praise than that.

Donna Hay's Red Thai Curry with Eggplant and Pumpkin

Blergh.  I don't want to talk about this dish too much because it turned out to be a bona-fide disaster.  Probably the worst dish I've made since those zucchini fritters circa 9 months ago.  I should have known it was going to turn out bad when the only spice on the ingredients list was red thai curry paste.  And on my end, I left the vegetables to cook for too long so they all broke down into a mushy paste.  What resulted was a flavourless slop of a curry that tasted worse than it looked.  The majority of it ended up going into the trash. And I will never trust a Donna Hay curry ever again.

Nigella Lawson's Pasta Puttanesca

So after a week of triumphs and tragedies in the kitchen with my basics experiment, I was back on night shifts in ED yet again.  This of course meant going to my fall back of cooking a big pot of pasta for the week, but rather than cheat again with stir-through sauce I instead took a recipe out of Delicious for Pasta Puttanesca, or 'Whore's Pasta' as Nigella calls it.  I don't know why she calls it that, but I can definitely imagine her describing it in a very sexy way.

A very oily sauce

More of that swirly pasta thing

This recipe called for a lot of oil, a lot of garlic, a whole jar of anchovies and a container full of olives.  It tasted great, and lasted me most of the week, but I don't think it did my breath any favours.

Well that's all for this week guys.  It's Saturday already and I have to head back up to Wangaratta tomorrow for the final two-week stretch in this rotation.  Even though its taken a few days this post still feels kind of rushed.  Obviously I've had to stop and come back to it a few times, and more often than not I was typing while concurrently watching Dexter in side-by-side windows.  But that's no excuse for poor quality posting.  The next post will be my final one from Wangaratta so I'm going to try and highlight a lot of the town itself before I leave.  Looking forward to it.