Victoria's Food Trail

More TV food shows. Last week and this, started watching a show with Paul Mecurio as the host - Victoria's Food Trail, currently on Sunday nights on Channel 7, at around 5.30pm. It was first shown in February-March this year and is now in its second or third repeat. The link includes a recipe book of all the food Paul prepares. You can also buy the dvd of the show.

More information about Paul Mecurio.

The Chef and the cook

Say Cheese!

No really this is the title of episode 41, in this fabulous series with Maggie Beer and Simon. I watched this the other day and just wanted to eat every dish. I must ask CJK for a gluten free biscuit base and then I will try the savoury cheesecake. There is a section of the show where they go to the markets in central Adelaide, where I too have browsed with excitment and anticipation of what might be around the next corner. You can tour the market and I intend to do that next time I get to Adelaide.

Fetta and mint omelettes with crisp bacon

Serves: 4

Cooking time: 20 minutes

Ingredients
1½ tablespoons olive oil

8 slices thin bacon

12 eggs

¼ cup (60ml) water
s
alt and freshly ground black pepper

20g butter

4 green onions (green shallots), chopped finely

¼ cup fresh mint leaves

120g fetta cheese, crumbled

75g baby spinach leaves

Method

Heat 2 teaspoons of the oil in medium frying pan; cook the bacon until crisp. Drain on absorbent paper.
Combine eggs, water, salt and pepper in a large bowl; beat lightly.
Heat a quarter of the butter and 1 teaspoon of oil in same pan. When butter is just bubbling, add a quarter of egg mixture to pan; sprinkle over a quarter of onion, mint and fetta. Cook over medium heat, tilting pan, until egg is just set. Slide omelette from pan and fold in half. Repeat with remaining butter, oil, egg and filling.
Serve omelettes immediately with spinach and bacon.

So that is the official way of doing it and of course that is not what I did. I added extra greeen onion, I poured all the mixture into the pan and made it into one omelette and then divided it into four, I put the spinach leaves into the omelette, I did not have any mint, so I left that out. I did not use any oil to cook the bacon - why would you.

Recipe for happiness

Today's Recipe-To Make us Happy and Agreeable to Other People.

Ingredients -1lb Good Temper, 2lb Forbearance, 1lb Patience, 11/2lb Contentment, 3lb Unselfishness, 1lb Fun and 2lb Cheerfulness. Method - Mix well with two quarts of Human Kindness. Dose - One glassful the first thing in the morning, repeat as soon as the effect wears off.

Recipe Inspirations

I really hate the question "what's for tea?" and you know you only get it on the day that you just wish that the food genie would just magic dinner out of thin air. For those times you may choose to come here and gain some inspiration.

When you're down and troubled and you need a helping hand, and nothing, whoa, nothing is going right. Close your eyes and type in my URL and soon I will be there....

with sincere appologies to James Taylor.


Australian Sites
ABC Backyard Recipe Finder
Recipes from around Australia hosted by the ABC.

Australian Women's Weekly Recipe Finder
Offers an emailed recipe of the week, as well as finding recipes based on your ingredients.

Dining Downunder Recipes
Uses Australian native food.

Golden Circle Recipes
Good if you love Pineapple, does have other recipes and it is Australian Owned.

Nestle Recipe Search
Also gives you access to your own online recipe book that is free and you can add to.

Old Aussie Food Recipes
Click on the links down the side to get to these classic Aussie recipes. If you pay you can access many more recipes.


US sites
There are many US sites, but these two are my favourite.

I Village Recipe Finder
US based - enables you to put limited choices for a list of suitable recipes.

Busy Cooks
Great US site that gives recipes, you can sign up for an emailed recipe, and you can search for recipes. This site is a bit like going into a great bookshop, it can be hard to get out.

If you have great sites or recipes that you want to share, please send them to me or link from there to here.

Aunty A

Bush tucker, Borders and Blarney

Here are the cooks extrodinaire - very black and white.

Wonderful food was prepared for a feast last night - vegetarian (bottom of photo)and non vegetarian (top of photo) entrees, mains and dessert. The cheesecake was topped with passionfruit pulp and cream from a can.

Food was followed by a trip to the new Borders Store at the Canberra Centre. This trip was taken under the misunderstanding (from the brochure supplied to TSS by Borders) that the store was open til 10pm on Thursday, Friday and Saturday!!!

Well we can report that it definitely was not open at 9pm on Thursday the 9th of November 2006. We all mournfully gazed through the windows at the expanse of books, and cash registers and wondered what we would have bought, had they been open!!!
If you check out the Borders link it suggests that it is open until 11pm?!?!? I later spoke to a Borders person who suggested that in the States they stay open long hours and that here they had two options, stay open later and change people's shopping habits or wait until the patrons demanded longer hours - they have gone for the former rather than the latter.

Here is the view through the grill into the store and here is what TSS thought of the night.

We also checked out the Ms Dewey site. Note that this is very slow loading even on broadband, so be prepared to pop out to Borders (as we did) or do a load of washing and hang it out while waiting!!!

This morning I came into work and was rung up by the Borders store to see if they could help me. I thought "they want to apologise for last night", but no they wanted to see what my needs were as a Librarian! I am going to breakfast with them next Friday morning and I have told them to invite JC, so we will see.

Wednesday Dinner

Well today we had home made pesto and pasta.

Pesto
1 bunch of corriander
splash of lemon
splash of oil (to bind)
half a cup of pine nuts


Blend all ingredients in the blender or whizz and then pour (or scrape) over cooked pasta and serve.

Use gluten free pasta for a gluten free dish

Dinner on Monday

Hi there,

well there was left over salmon that could not be wasted, so here is Aunty A's new recipe.

500 gms light riccotta (for a heavier effect you could use 250gms of philedephia cream cheese)
1 bunch corriander (sorry JC) could use basil or parsley
squeeze lemon
handful of pine nuts
1 bunch aparagus cut into three
3 spring onion chopped into three
left over smoked salmon
6 sheets of filo pastry
oil spray
medium sized muffin tray (12)

Method
1. put first seven ingredients into the blender and blend until moderately smooth.
2. Spray muffin tray with oil.
3. Take three sheets of filo and cut using a scone cutter to fit the muffin tray.
4. Spray the filo in the tray.
5. Add heaped teaspoons of filling to filo pastry and bake in moderately warm oven (180) for 10-12 minutes - watch for burning.

Take second set of three filo sheets and repeat steps 2-5. To make a meal of this, serve with a green salad or roast tiny tomato's.

Great Tapas food, or Melbourne Cup food.

For Gluten free, serve on rice crackers or gluten free bread (as I did).

Fabulous Recipe

I made this today. Action shot going into the oven!
Brie Smoked Salmon Stackers


The link at the top of this page is a site that sends me recipe's regularly, from the US - so of course at the moment I am getting recipes for Autumn. Check it out and sign up if it looks interesting.

I have made changes of course, I added a spinach leaf to each stack and used no mustard as there is no mustard in fridge.

Here is what the children had for tea. Veggie burgers.

Cheers
Aunty A

Cooking and Blogging

Sweet Potato Rosti recipe
I got this recipe from Sanitarium, who send me a recipe a week to try. Sometimes I try and sometimes I delete. This one I should have deleted, however it was not a complete disaster.

TSS came around with beautiful offerings of an apron (need to have an apron if you are an internet cook!!!!), modelled by Aunty A on this page, as well as a meatless recipe book, which will feature in books section of this page. TSS kindly marked all her favourite recipes for me.

First Aunty A chopped up the sweet potato and then the red onion. We were making sweet potato rosti with tomato and bean salsa. Using my brand new whiz - pictured here. (that has a blender as well as a whizzer) I grated the sweet potato and the onion, mixed it with the egg and flour and made a mess. After some consideration, and consultation, it became obvious that the rosti's wanted the freedom to turn into a fritata (on account of how the rosti's where trying to get together in the pan), so I added some garlic and tomato, sprinkled grated cheese on top, omitted the beans and hey presto we have sweet potato fritata. Here is what we did with the original recipe. TSS and I had no trouble consuming our "fritata", along with a bottle of wine, ice cream and lollies.

We then looked at how I load photo's (we need to get out more I know) onto my blogs. I need to download photoshop at some point, but it does take 10 hours to download, so I want to do it at night, and then of course I forget and then it is another 24 hours.

Halloween Adventure

Here is the adventure we had today when all the scary people came to our house. First there was the food!!

Snakes in bats blood


Eyeballs
and frogs in green slime, worms in sludge
and of course there were cupcakesdecorated by the ghouls, ghosts, pirates, princesses, fairies and vampires.

Then there were the people
Big witchesand little witches


Vampiresa pirate and the grim reaper

A yellow ghost, a fairy a princess (dressed up here as a ghost)was also spied.

Here are the whole crowd it all ended too soon and all the characters had to go home to bed.