Finding Feasts | Cooking Eating Storytelling

How to make the perfect pork crackling

How to make the perfect pork crackling… Pork crackling is as important a part of my Christmas dinner as the ham or the pudding.

Every year my dad makes a delicious Christmas cocktail to greet all the family when we arrive, each year it’s different and sometimes quite experimental, but this is generally when the crackling gets eaten as no one can wait till dinner time – cocktails and crackling what better way to start a beautiful Christmas evening…

Since most of us in Australia will buy a Smoked Leg of Ham – and you can’t use the skin off this, you will need to buy the pork skin separately from your butcher. It is so cheap, if not free if you are lucky, so buy up big.

There are some vital elements to making this that will determine whether you succeed or fail…

Firstly, get pork skin that has quite a bit of fat still under the skin, at minimum there needs to be .5cm. It’s the the contrast of the juicy fat under the crispy skin that makes pork crackling perfect!

Secondly, get your butcher to score the skin. You may think you can do it yourself but trying to score skin that’s flat on a bench is really hard. They have super sharp knives and can do it seconds flat!

Finally, the pouring over of the boiling water is what will open up the scored skin, which will then let in the salt, which then forms the crispy skin. Without one process the others won’t work.

Happy crunching! Blondie.

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Coconut Beef w/ Thai Red Curry Paste… From Scratch

Coconut Beef w/ Thai Red Curry Paste…From Scratch. This is a stunning, slow cooked Thai dish using Martin Boetz’s Red Curry Paste recipe from his stunning book, Longrain: Modern Thai Food.

If you are going to make one from scratch you must try this one! Plus it makes 1 cup worth of paste, which is basically 5 meals so it’s well worth the effort. I explain my favourite way of storing pastes and the such in the recipe so you have it easily on hand.

I used a gravy beef for my recipe as I love big chunks of melt in your mouth meat, that along with the sauce and the rice to sop it up with and you have a meal you would pay a small fortune for quite happily. Serve it with a side of shredded greens.

Enjoy, Blondie

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Pork & Lentil Thai Red Curry + Thai Pork Meatballs w/ Dipping Sauce

What to do with leftover roasting pork? Make Pork & Lentil Thai Red Curry + Thai Pork Meatballs w/ Dipping Sauce

With close to a kilo of pork to use (leftover from our Christmas in July) and the weather warming up, a roast was out of the question. Feeling like something Thai inspired I decided to do meatballs.

It feels like forever since I spent a day in the kitchen pottering around, which is why there are 3 different recipes included in the one post. The first one is…

Pork and Lentil Thai Red Curry

Mum does a gorgeous Curry Pork and Lentil soup, which can also be served over rice if you choose, so this is my version, Thai style!

The benefit of using a roasting pork for the curry is that the pork becomes beautiful and tender while simmering away with the lentils for 40 mins or so, but you can most certainly use pork mince. I also cooked them in the oven first though so they would retain their shape.

Some notes for making this dish…

Buy a pre made Red Curry paste – there are so many out there and it’s trial and error to find the one you will love. Be warned some are extraordinarily, mouth searingly hot!

If you do find that it’s just too hot for you but you love the flavour add some sweet yoghurt (not Greek style) and lime, works a treat.

Use coconut oil to cook with – it smells divine when cooking and has just so many health benefits – LOVE IT!

Thai Pork Meatballs w/ Sweet Chili, Dill and Coriander Sauce

While rolling out the meatballs I started feeling hungry – it was lunchtime, so quickly fried some of them up and they were just so good I had to give them their own recipe page, which is the reason for this second recipe. Served with a sweet and spicy dipping sauce they make a lovely plate of appetisers. Skewered onto some ornate chopsticks or served with the sauce already over them (very Christmasie) they are great tasting and so quick.

You can make these at anytime, freeze them and then cook as you need them.

Sweet Chili Sauce

I always have Sweet Chili Sauce on hand, it’s the only sauce my son likes so I make big batches of it and it lasts for ages. I also have the jar out on the kitchen bench so it’s always at hand to add to food that needs some sweetness, it’s used instead of sugar as it already has the chili infused and the zing of vinegar that is the perfect compliment to any Asian dish.

Enjoy, Blondie

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Mussels Cooked in White Wine & Parsley

Mussels Cooked in White Wine & Parsley… Imagine sitting by the water with a bottle of Moët and a big bowl of freshly cooked mussels to graze on… this is what you call a great day!

Fishing rods poised, ready to catch a lovely bream to have for dinner – Holiday’s don’t get much better than this.

Sun soakingly delicious… Blondie

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Checkered Birthday Cake – Dirt Block Minecraft Cake

Finding Feasts - Checkered Minecraft Cake — Click on image for recipe

Checkered Birthday Cake – Dirt Block Minecraft Cake… It was my son’s birthday last week and of course the cake was left to the very last minute. Considering last year’s cake was a hasty store bought chocolate cake that I threw coloured specks at, surrounded with plastic rings and stuck a Power Rangers dude on – which he absolutely loved – I knew the last resort would be, at the very least something similar. I mean really, I have yet to hear of a kid having a tantrum when they saw their cake on their birthday, so long as it has candles, colour and people singing “Happy Birthday” you really can’t go wrong… but I still had hope that I could pull something spectacular out of a hat.

With only 2 days left, finally an idea comes to me… Minecraft!

Minecraft is his greatest love at the moment and I can’t believe that it didn’t hit me sooner. So with the clock fast ticking down, I needed a plan of action and unfortunately it was too late to pay someone else to make it – I had to do it myself.

Action plan…

Thursday: Make the sponge cakes – I ended up with 3 usable ones out of 5 made
Friday: Construct a work of art with fondant – Well it kind of resembled what I had finally decided on

What I was actually going to construct from the Minecraft game was still being tossed around at lunch on Friday, but settled on a dirt block (I realise that unless you know even the basics of this game a dirt block birthday cake just seems too strange for words).

Now, I love to sculpt and had this picture in my head of a beautiful dirt block that was going to wow all the kids (and anyone else who’s eye-line would pass across this Minecraft beauty) but being realistic I knew I needed something that would make this mound of dirt even more spectacular, just in case the outside wasn’t what I was hoping for.

Checkered sponge on the inside! The idea was to have the 8bit effect on the inside just in case the outside failed to represent that effect to my expectation. We want pixels!

I am very fortunate to have an amazing friend who is a stunning cake designer and was able to give me a few hours of mentoring on the Friday, who without guidance (and some tools) this would have been quite a unique cake, to say the least.

All up it was a great first attempt at cake sculpting and will next year aim to start something like this 2 weeks prior!

Oh… and complete respect to all cake makers/artists out there, it’s insanely hard to master sugar and they deserve every single dollar that they charge for their designs!

Happy Birthday… from mum (Blondie) xxx

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Brazilian Fish Stew – Moqueca

Brazilian Fish Stew – Moqueca is a beautiful, full flavoured fish stew with coconut milk, heat from chilies, sweetness from the capsicum with a zing of lime juice… such gorgeous flavours all in one bowl.

You could use any seafood/crustacean in this recipe, actually, more the merrier. If I had more on hand I certainly would have thrown them in. I like to keep the fish fillets whole rather than cut into pieces and to very quickly sear the fish and prawns, remove them and then de-glaze the pan with the stock. It’s incredibly fast so just have all your ingredients ready to be thrown into the pan.

Eat it with a bowl of rice, crusty bread or like a soup with rice noodles – yes, not very Brazilian but oh so good!

Slurp away… Blondie xx

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Smoked Mushroom Bruschetta w/ Wild Cherry Brandy Sauce

Wild Musrhoom Bruschetta — Click on image for recipe

As simple as this dish looks, this bruschetta mix was a whole weekend’s labour of LOVE! Yes it took me a whole weekend to do!

Let me explain…the mushroom bruschetta mix you are looking at comprises of oyster, swiss brown and shiitake mushrooms. They have all been lightly smoked using hickory chips, dehydrated overnight and re-hydrated prior to cooking.

This isn’t your average bruschetta mix, it’s what I will call heaven on sourdough, if there ever was such a thing!

So why all the effort? Mushrooms are yummy on their own, however I wanted to experiment and take them to the next level. Ever since I was a little girl I remember that mum would slow dry her slippery jacks or saffron’s in the oven overnight, the house would be filled with the most amazing aroma, the drying process would accentuate the flavour of the mushroom giving them a much richer and deeper flavour. Did I just sound like Manu from the Continental Stock commercial???

I know I sound like I am bragging but my efforts paid off! I cannot begin to explain the taste sensation. Smoking the mushrooms gave them that meaty, hearty taste without the meat!

Ohhhh and the tiny drizzle of Walsh’s Homemade Wild Cherry Brandy sauce took it to another dimension, honestly out of this world!

It took a whole weekend to cook but ohhh so worth it!

With love from a self-professed mushroom addict…a.k.a Bella

PS…a huge thank you to the ABC’s The Cook & the Chef for providing inspiration and base ideas for this recipe.

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