Category: Food & Drink

After last nights sugary madness, tonight I decided to bake something a little more savoury.

Vegetable Tart.
2 potatoes.
1 large red onion.
2 tomatoes.
3 eggs.
125g sour cream (about half a pottle).
100g feta (about half a block).
2 sheets frozen savoury pastry.
salt & pepper to taste.

Pre heat oven to 180c.

Defrost pastry and line lightly greased tart dish.

Slice potatoes thin, chop onion roughly, add both to a large frying pan to saute – not too hot, the potatoes will take a while.  Probably 20 minutes or so.

Mix eggs & sour cream in a bowl, chop up tomatoes roughly, slice feta into small cubes, mix all together.  Add salt & pepper to taste, mix a little more.

When potatoes are done (the red onions should be long since done, but won’t burn unless you have the heat up too high) make a layer with them and the onions in the tart dish, then pour egg mixture over the top.

Put into oven until visibles tomatoes look nicely cooked through and everything starts to look golden, about 30 – 40 minutes.

Best served with some sort of chutney or relish, tonight I served with turkish salsa and hummus, and it was really good.

If you’re awesome and nice, make a special extra tart in a ramikin for your delightful loving partner of 5 years to take to work, when she gets home from yoga and sees it, she’ll be very happy indeed.

So, I’ve been known to give off a bit of a false impression of myself through this site, and my dietary habits are one of the things I’m most prone to lying about, so today I present my most common lunch.  (Well, aside from something like toast.)

Rice with tuna and furikake.  Furikake is a Japanese seasoning sprinkle, full of lovely things like dried bonito, sesame seeds, sugar, seaweed, bean powder, and egg.

My rice method requires fairly accurate measurements.  If you follow the instructions everything will work out just fine.

• 1/2 cup of rice.
• 1 cup of cold water.
• A little oil.
• Tuna (or a hard boiled egg or two, if you prefer).
• Furikake.

Heat oil in a pot, rinse rice under the tap (I put it in a sieve) then drain as well as you can before dumping in the pot.  Stir around in the pot with a wooden spoon while it sizzles up a bit.

Pour in the water, stir it around well, get all the rice off the sides of the pot, scrape the wooden spoon around to make sure none of the rice is stuck to the bottom.

Put the lid on the pot, wait until it comes up to the boil, then turn the heat right down, below low if you can, really just keep it so it’s barely on.  Now leave it alone.  Don’t take the lid off.  Don’t stir it.  Don’t even look at it.  Set a timer for 15 minutes, and try to avoid even thinking about it.  You see, your sizzingly and boiling were really just a practical majick to entice kind hearted spirits into your pot, they do the job of the cooking and puffing up of the rice, and if you bother them, they’ll all run away.

After 15 minutes, the kind spirits will drink up all the water, and leave, you’ll find a bunch of little holes, that’s where the spirits were lying while they did their work.  Stir the rice up so any excess moisture on the rice steams off.  Unless you cheated (or estimated, against my advice) your water & rice quantities, there will be no spare water in the bottom of the pot.

Put as much of the rice in a bowl (or on a plate) as you want to eat, all of it makes a very filling lunch for a big lad.  Add some chunks of tuna on top.

Got your favourite furikake?  I’ve got mine.  Chilli flavour.  Awww yeah.

Sprinkle on as much as you like.  I get about 5 meals from a pouch.

Mix everything up a bit, and it’s ready to eat.  And so good.

After wasting my morning in the jury room at the Auckland District Court (not being drawn in the ballot, and having to hang around for three fucking hours while they clown-arsed around as if it was their first time ever running a jury) I decided the rest of the day would be well spent being creative, first on the list was something I’ve never done before – cheese making.

I decided to do a really simple one to begin with.

Ingredients are simple and easy to find, milk, vinegar, salt.  That’s it.  The recipe I found was a bit bigger than I wanted (eight litres of milk? no thanks), so here is the pared down version:

500ml milk.
3 teaspoons of white vinegar (normal malt vinegar might be okay as well).
1/4 teaspoon salt.

Heat the milk in a pot to about 90C (don’t let it boil, if it looks like it’s about to, pull it off the heat right away).

Add vinegar to the milk.  Give it a gentle stir.

It’ll start to seperate right away.

Leave it to cool.  Doesn’t take too long from that heat.

As you can see, the seperation is quite dramatic.

Pour the curds and whey through a sieve.  Gently.

Mmmm, delicious whey.  Ok, not delicious really.  I tasted it, it’s a little bit sweet, quite weak flavoured.  Nothing too scary, but I wouldn’t want to drink it every day.

Curds!  Looks just like cottage cheese.  There’s a reason for that.  Add the salt to the curds, mix it in well.  Add more salt if you feel like it.  Do it to taste.

Time for the taste testing.

Claire said it was very good.  I said it would do nicely piled into a couple of toated sandwiches with a bunch of chilli beans.  I was right.