Finding Feasts | Cooking Eating Storytelling

Lamb Rice Bowls w/ Lots of Veggies

Lamb Rice Bowls w/ Lots of Veggies – One of the quickest meals you can make during the week is a Korean Rice Bowl, even quicker if you have prepped your cooked vegetables over the weekend to use throughout the week.

I doubt there is a right or wrong way to making up this bowl, just so long as you can fit everything in, oh and that you have the vegetables cut into largish bite size mouthfuls. Use any mix of vegetables and remember to use some warm and some chilled, some crispy and some tender. Let your creativity run away with you.

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Asian Slow Cooker Boneless Leg of Lamb

Asian Slow Cooker Boneless Leg of Lamb – This is a 6 hour on high or 8-10 hour on low slow cooker recipe for a simply stunning lamb recipe, which you will be able to use throughout the week in various meals, like a Lamb Rice Bowl, Lamb Tacos, Lamb Ramen Noodle Soup…endless possibilities.

This really is a no effort type of meal with amazing results that will give you melt in your mouth tender meat and a sauce that has a slight heat with sweet and sour flavours. Once the lamb is cooked and you are reducing the liquid you can add fresher flavours like coriander root, more chilli and some lime juice.

Genuinely mouth wateringly good. Blondie 🙂

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Gulab Jamun | Indian Syrup Soaked Doughnuts

Gulab Jamun | Indian Syrup Soaked Doughnuts are delicious light and moist deep fried balls that have been sitting in a sweet syrup gently scented with cardamom and saffron.

I have been wanting to make these for such a long time, ever since my first tasting, which oddly I can’t quite pin point. They really are like an Indian version of a doughnut and ideally with the same consistency, that being light almost fluffy. So with Mother’s Day on Sunday I was able to explore this amazing dessert.

Surprisingly they are a very quick dessert to make and have an added bonus of needing to be made ahead of time so the balls have time to soak up the syrup. So you can easily make these in the morning and then leave till serving time later in the day or night. All you need to do is lightly reheat them so the are slightly warm, this can be done (carefully) in the microwave, on the stove top or, ideally place in a low, warm oven during dinner.

A couple of things to point out with Galub Jamuns is that you do not want to overwork the dough, the more the dough is worked during the mixing process the greater the risk of gluten forming. This will produce a tough, dense ball that will have trouble soaking up the syrup. They are still edible but not ideal.

If you are wanting to make more balls than the 12 that this mixture makes (will serve 4 people with 3 balls each) then make a completely new batch of dough, don’t try to double the recipe as you run the risk of tough balls. I tried two different recipes, this one and then one, which was a bigger batch of dough and that batch was definitely not as light as this recipe.

The balls may appear small when you first roll them out but they will almost double in size, firstly from the cooking and then soaking up the syrup. Three balls works perfectly per person.

Try adding different flavours to the syrup; rose water is very popular, a couple of strips of peel from a citrus fruit will work beautifully, maybe a chai spice blend (great for Christmas).

Happy soaking! Blondie

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Chermoula Marinade & Dipping Sauce

Finding Feasts Chermoula Marinade — Click here for recipe – Chermoula Marinade & Dipping Sauce

I have said it before, I am a huge fan of Annabel Langbein, her recipes are homey, simple yet they packed full yummy flavour.

This Chermoula Marinade / Dipping Sauce features in her book, The Free Range Cook. I had something similar a few years back during my first trip to New Zealand when my husband’s aunt Cheryl made the most amazing tasting chicken skewers I have tasted in a very long time.

This marinade can be used on all sorts of meat and it can also be made into a delicious Chermoula Dipping Sauce.

The recipe called for preserved lemons, I didn’t have any so I omitted them.

The Chermoula Dipping Sauce is to die for and makes a fantastic salad dressing for a quick and easy Creamy Moroccan Cucumber Salad.

What is your favourite marinade for meat?

Bella

Finding Feasts Chermoula chicken skewers with dipping sauce — Spicy chicken skewers with chermoula dipping sauce

PS…you can use it to make these fantastic Spicy Chicken Skewers!

BellaLeave a comment

Polish Stefanka cake – Honey cake

Looks good huh! It’s a Polish cake called Stefanka or Miodownik (honey cake) and yep, it’s pretty awesome.

Each school holidays Imogen and I do our usual girls road trip to Rosedale, a small holiday town on the NSW South Coast to visit Nanna and Pop. During one of my last visits I decided to make something Polish, sweet and slightly challenging, Stefanka cake it was.

Like all recipes there are many, many versions of this cake on the web, with altering ingredients, toppings and layers. The one that appealed to me the most was on my favourite Polish cooking website called, Kwestia Smaku.

The cake has the most amazing filling made from semolina, milk, butter, icing sugar and almond extract, almost a custard like texture. The chocolate topping isn’t bad either.

When I first read that it had semolina I ran a mile, you see in the cooler months mum used to make us eat a semolina style porridge as kids for breakfast and I HATED IT! No disrespect to you mum but it was bland, lumpy and gluggy, I still get shivers just thinking about it! Fast forward many, many years, add some sweetness and the semolina it is to die for! I only just had enough filling for the cake, most of it was eaten from the pot by me and Miss H.

Cake difficulty wise I would rank this about a 6 out of 10. The pressure point in this cake are the layers. The cake is meant to be quite soft and sponge like. I failed at the soft and sponge like bit, although in my defense I was using a foreign oven, so I over baked the cake layers. It was definitely 100% edible but would have been much better had the layers been a little softer, cloud like.

All in all, I am very chuffed at my first Stefanka attempt, if anything I have also learnt how to make a yummy semolina custard!

If there are any Polish fans reading this and you know where the cakes name originates from do drop me a line! I know that Stefanka or Stefania is a Polish female name, similar to Stephen in English however I am stumped why the cake has been named so!

Bella

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ANZAC Biscuits

ANZAC Day – 25 April, 2016

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them”.

I’ve only been to one dawn service. It was in Melbourne, Victoria about 18 years ago and as miserable, cold and wet as it was, I found it heart warming that so many people turned out to pay their respects to service men and women, young and old and those gone but not forgotten.

As many of our service men and women prepare for todays ANZAC day marches around Australia I realised that I know absolutely very little about the humble ANZAC biscuit.

For those unfamiliar with Australian and New Zealand history, ANZAC day falls on the 25th of April each year. It is a national day of remembrance in Australia and New Zealand and commemorates the anniversary of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) landing in the Gallipoli Peninsula, Turkey during World War I. Nowadays, it is a day that goes beyond the anniversary of that landing and honors the service men and women both past and present.

The exact origins of the ANZAC biscuit are not so clear, it can however be traced back to the Scottish oat cakes. The original biscuit, used in soldiers ration packs was not sweet at all. According to the Australian War Memorial the ANZAC biscuit or Soldier’s biscuit was a hard or tile like wafer that the soldiers were given as part of their rations. The biscuit was given instead of bread due to its long shelf-life, however wasn’t said to be very palatable.

The current sweet version appeared in cook books during the 1920’s and was used at fete’s for fundraising for the troops overseas. With ingredients such as butter, flour, coconut, golden syrup and bi-carb soda it has also been suggested that the wives would make these biscuits to send to the troops overseas because of their long shelf life. Unlike traditional biscuits no eggs were required!

Miss H loves ANZAC biscuits, however with having a wobbly tooth these slightly more chewy biscuits are just the perfect treat to share with friends and family both young and old.

Bella

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LA to Vegas Road Trip via Route 66

The second part of our four part American holiday – Part 1 being Los Angeles with Disneyland and Universal Studios, Part 3 being Las Vegas and Part 4 being New York City – is our much anticipated road trip, an icon of Americana, the drive from LA to Vegas via Route 66.

Although it’s a relatively short day trip of just four hours if you were to stay on Interstate 15, there are quite a few things to see along the way when you start researching it. For those who don’t know, four hours on the road in Australia doesn’t get you very far but thankfully they are such beautiful drives. So to help you nut out your perfect day trip, here’s how we ended up spending, what ended up being close to seven hours on the road.

There were a few main things that we wanted to check off the bucket list for this, as well as appease a 10 year (although he is such a great traveller), and they were…

Doing the road trip in a massive pickup truck – hubby’s bucket list item, mine was a convertible.
Drive on Route 66
See the desert and Joshua trees

Tick, tick and tick! But, as with anything, it wasn’t going to be as easy as that. Firstly, looking into hiring a ute for the trip took quite a while, not only actually finding one but putting our faith in the hire company to have our dream car there on the day (there are lots of complaints in regards to this one particular subject, lots!). When dealing with car hire companies you are going to come across loads of bad reviews, but after juggling the pros and cons I finally decided to put my trust in Dollar Rent A Car at LAX Airport … well, they were the only car hire company, near enough to Anaheim to have a pickup truck available to cross state lines on the date we wanted it so I had no choice but to book with them and take my chances.

Even though I had booked the pickup a couple of weeks in advance, I wasn’t going to believe I was going to get it till I was actually standing at the counter of Dollar Rent A Car with the keys in my hand. We didn’t care if it was a bomb of a ute or a latest model, just so long as it was a pickup truck. But, like a miracle from the Road Trip Gods they had one, and not just one but two, which worked out really well as the first one we got into had the oil light turn on as soon as we got in, so we just hopped into the other one.

Our gorgeous ute for the LA to Vegas road trip

We had our American pickup truck for the LA to Vegas road trip, a 2015 Chevy Silverado. We were so happy!

We hit the road about 9:30 Wednesday morning with the itinerary mapped out…

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