Finding Feasts | Cooking Eating Storytelling

Beef and Mushroom Cottage Pie

Beef and Mushroom Cottage Pie… What’s more warming on a cool winter’s evening than a pie, and not just any pie, a cottage pie… The beautiful full flavours of the meat and mushroom mixture blanketed with a thick layer of soft, fluffy mashed potatoes. This is the meal that you make a big batch of so you can freeze the leftovers in easy single meal versions and can just pull out of the freezer when you need an embracing food hug.

If you can, try to get organic, pasture fed beef. The difference in flavour is outstanding and when you are cooking something as homely as cottage pie, the flavours of each component are particularly important – that, and it’s nice to use meat from happy animals. The beef I have chosen for this pie is from Greenhill Farm and if you are lucky enough to live in Sydney or Canberra you can place your orders for pick up.

bellissimo! Blondie 🙂

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Ham and Pea Pie Floater with Mash Potato

Ham and Pea Pie Floater with Mash Potato… I have gone through, well you don’t need numbers, let’s just say a lifetime without ever having a pie floater. It never really appealed to me, but for some unknown reason the pie floater has been playing on my mind for the past week. The craving for ham and pea soup along with the desire to have a pie and all of a sudden the pie floater made perfect sense!

Looking into the history of this dish I discovered that it is uniquely Australian. Although it’s now labeled a South Australian Heritage Icon by the National Trust of Australia it became popular through Sydney’s Harry’s Cafe De Wheels (which is a must for visiting travellers) Harry’s is a food truck situated at the old graving docks down at Wooloomooloo, which are now the Australian Naval Dockyards.

Back in the Great Depression between 1929-1932 (although it did start a little earlier here in Australia) unemployed workers could go to the local soup kitchens who would serve them the soup of the day (this could be potato, pea or even strawberry soup) with the leftover pie scraps donated from the pie manufacturers in the area. They were able to get a cheap, if not free, nutritious and warming meal for themselves and their family to help sustain them till their next meal, which may not have been for days at a time.

Just looking into the history of this one particular dish you really get to see the extraordinary hardship people/families, for four decades, worldwide went through. It was one event after the other… it’s truly unimaginable. They would only just recover from one event then another one happens to slap you in the face.

WWI : 1914-1918

The Great Depression : 1929-1932

WWII : 1939-1945

It’s really is no wonder that the ‘plastic fantastic’ era of the fifties was embraced – they were given the convenience of gadgets and an easy ‘disposable’ lifestyle, and after all they had been through it’s no surprised that easy living gained such momentum.

…Blondie

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Smoked Salmon Gratin with a Dry Salsa Verde

Smoked Salmon Gratin with a Dry Salsa Verde… This mouth-watering dish is adapted from Annabel Langbein‘s salmon and egg gratin. Originally made by one of Bella’s family members and served for lunch one beautiful summers day while in New Zealand, it was then made by Bella for one of our dinners over Easter away this year and now it is made by me for you…

Like Chinese whispers the original dish has altered a little, Bella included the potato wedges on top and it works so well to help mop up all of the white sauce and to pad it out for a more filling meal. I have added a dry salsa verde (once you make it you will see why I call it a dry salsa verde), which adds another complimentary layer of flavour.

There is actually quite a bit of white sauce for this recipe and you don’t need to use it all, but do make it to the recipe as it’s so handy to have on hand. Freeze the leftover to make mac’n’cheese at a later date – simply reheat, add parmesan or tasty cheese and mix with cooked pasta.

Smoked Salmon Gratin with a Dry Salsa Verde is luxurious dish and is one of only a handful of meals that hubby goes back to for seconds.

Truly scrumptious… Blondie

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Perfect hard boiled eggs and easy shell removal with baking soda

Perfect hard boiled eggs and easy shell removal with baking soda… I have just come across this tip, well actually I had heard of this trick a while back but never really thought much of it. That is till I finally got sick of having peeled eggs that look like they had come back from playing with a wood chipper… chunks missing, bits of shell that refuse to separate from the body, just mangled messes of boiled eggs.

So what’s the magic trick to getting a perfectly peeled hard-boiled egg? Baking soda… it’s life changing!

For me, I always keep my eggs in the fridge and generally don’t think of taking them out to warm up till I actually need them, so this ‘recipe’ is for eggs straight from the fridge into boiling water – I like to live life on the edge! I haven’t received many egg casualties from doing it this way but it’s the risk you take if you too use cold eggs. If a breakage does occur it is generally a small crack with slight leakage, the egg will still cook perfectly.

Never fear your eggs again… Blondie 🙂

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Spiced Pear and Apple Chocolate Empanadas w/ Sweet Cayenne Pepper Dusting

With Cinco de Mayo today I thought I would come up with a recipe to celebrate it… Spiced Pear Apple Chocolate Empanadas w/ Sweet Cayenne Pepper Dusting.

Mexican desserts aren’t particularly sweet and can mix both savoury ingredients with sweet. With this in mind I chose to use a pear and apple filling, since they are so abundant at the moment here in Australia. Paired with a bittersweet chocolate pastry and sprinkled with a sugar and Cayenne pepper dusting and you have yourself a unique dessert that is the perfect accompaniment to the feast of flavours you would have had with your main meal.

Salud!

Blondie

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Rooster Ragu aka Pastitsada

Rooster Ragu aka Pastitsada… I’m not sure how easy it is to get your hands on rooster in the city – I haven’t seen it on my travels – but I was fortunate enough to receive one from my sister who got five live roosters yesterday. Four were prepared for the freezer and one went to a friend (but may well end up slow cooked after she gets woken up at dawn every morning when he gets to that age) I know this from personal experience after I saved a chick from the gas chambers at school, his name was Maxwell. We did try to do a light tight environment for him to sleep in till the family/neighbourhood woke up, but primal instinct was there, he just knew he had to start his wake up call at a particular time. Every day on the dot Maxwell would announce himself to the neighbourhood. Needless to say that the neighbours in our Lower North Shore suburb weren’t too impressed, that and the fact he would escape to go down to the beach so I would have to spend my afternoons trying to chase down a rooster on the esplanade after school, which wasn’t too much fun!

Finding Feasts - Balmoral Beach — Balmoral Beach

Anyway, a long story short, Maxwell went to a farm where I like to believe he lived out his natural life fulfilling his rooster duties.

This is my first rooster and was very excited to make an awesome meal of it, so I went with a traditional Greek dish from Corfu called Pastitsada, a type of Rooster Ragu.

When handling a rooster, the few differences from a chicken are that the fat is an amazing dark yellow, the legs are longer and the wings and chest are different to a chicken. The chest meat is much smaller and it was harder to cut into the pieces necessary, but maybe that’s because I wasn’t too sure of the breakdown of it? The flavour is chicken but enhance and the meat is leaner, which is why you need to do the slow and low cook.

I hope you get a chance to try one but if that’s just not going to happen, try and get a free range, organic chook so you get a more flavourful meat.

Happy plucking ! Blondie 🙂

Finding Feasts - Stivens Free Range Farm — Painting on side of shed at family’s farm in New Zealand

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Oil Free, Skin Free ‘Fried Chicken’

Yep, that’s right! Oil Free, Skin Free ‘Fried Chicken’ drumsticks – These are soooo good that you seriously can’t believe it till you actually make them yourselves.

This is a recipe adopted from The Food Truck with Chef Michael van de Elzen. Hubby and I love this show (this is the only cooking show he enjoys). Every meal Chef Michael Van Elzen converts to a healthier version of stock standard fast food is just so mouth wateringly good – I literally drooled over the burger episode.

This chicken has a covering that is crispy and oh so tasty, the meat is succulent and flavourful (be sure to buy ‘happy’ chicken) and all the family will adore it. It is just as good eaten cold the next day, so make a batch for your next picnic.

Truly finger lickin’ good! Blondie

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