Risotto

• 1/5 fresh King of Fruit pineapple
• 1 cup rice
• 1/2 a Spanish onion
• 3/4 bunch of coriander stems
• 5 garlic cloves
• 2 cinnamon sticks
• 3 apricots
• 1 vanilla bean
• 2 tbsp cumin seeds
• 1 cup pinot gris
• 500ml chicken stock

Lamb Cutlets

• 12 frenched lamb cutlets
• 3 garlic cloves
• 1 red capsicum
• 1/2 red onion
• 1/4 bunch coriander stems
• 2 tbsp cumin seeds
• 1 bunch coriander leaves
• 2 lemons
• 4 tbsp olive oil

Method

Risotto

Dice the pineapple and apricots into centimetre cubes
Put the fruit, wine, rice, stock, cinnamon sticks and vanilla into a tagine (or a casserole dish)
Finely dice all remaining ingredients, grind the cumin seeds, and fry on high heat in a heavy saucepan
Mix everything in the tagine and bake at 180 degrees for half an hour, or until rice is cooked, fluffing up regularly with a fork

Lamb Cutlets

Dice 1/2 capsicum and other bits into a salsa, add the oil, juice from one lemon and marinate the cutlets for as long as you can. Ideally a few hours. A week might be too long. Don’t get carried away.
BBQ them with the 2 cinnamon sticks from the risotto, nom
Garnish with coriander leaves, cinnamon, lemon wedges and julienne capsicum
Drink some red wine. Lots of red wine.

By gosh, was it delish. We had to go before I could grab the recipe, but I think, *think* this was what’s in it:

Ingredients

• 1.5 cups of wholegrain barley, washed, and then boiled for 35-40 minutes in 5 cups of water. You could also probably soak it overnight in 3 cups of water and lime juice and then quickly cook it off. Don’t soak or boil it for too long or you’ll end up with mush. Let it cool down before you serve it.
• A block of good, strong, Greek goat feta, cut into cubes, or crumpled. 1cm Cubes would look better with the round pomegranate seeds
• The seeds from three pomegranates, or more if you’ve got heaps. Go nuts.
• Juice from two limes
• A tablespoon of olive oil
• A good handful of roughly chopped coriander
• A cup of mint leaves
• Pine nuts, if you want

Method

Put the ingredients in a bowl.

Vegetarian Nachos

I’m also discovering barbecues aren’t just for meat.

The place we’re staying is in a tiny little settlement called Flinders Beach on North Stradbroke Island, about 30km off the coast from Brisbane. I’ve been here many times before, but always with a gang of male carnivores. There’s usually enough smoke rising off the hotplates to start a war between the Sioux and Cherokee. This time it’s a little different, but I had the idea of putting the smoke to good use.

There’s a grove of paperbark trees nearby and I know Alby Mangels and Co. loved baking with the stuff. The BBQ where I’m staying had no lid, but I figured out a way to use a couple of cast iron pans to create a smokey-dokey setup which channeled the fumes of delicousness onto the food without also funneling ash. Results varied between raging bushfire and birthday candles, but ended up under control and not entirely dissimilar to the way I saw it being done on a beach in San Jose Del Cabo a few years ago.

Mexican food should be smokey. I had no chipotles but I had enough capsicum and birds eye chillies to improvise.

Ingredients

Mushy Bits

• 1 can of red kidney beans
• 1 brown onion
• 2 birds eye chillies
• 1 red capsicum
• 2 tablespoons of cumin (or more, or less, to taste)
• Squeeze of lime
• 4 roma tomatoes
• 2 corns
• 3 garlics
• 3 tbsp white truffle oil (optional, but divine)

Other Bits

• Gourmet fancy-schmancy corn chips
• Guacamole (make it yourself, it’s dead easy)
• Coriander leaves to garnish

Method

• Char-grill the tomatoes and corn on the BBQ and dice everything else (don’t dice the guacamole or chips, actually, do, it’ll be funny).
• Put all the mushy bits into a cast iron pan and place it on the BBQ
• Wrap the outside sides of the pan with paperbark bark
• Place a larger cast iron pan over the top of the first one so that it holds the paper bark in. Make sure there’s room for air to circulate into the first pan.
• Cook until the smell of smokey paperbark and nacho mushy bits is so overpoweringly delicious you have to eat it.
• Eat

Thai Scallops

Orange Chilli Dipping Sauce

• Peel from 1.5 oranges or so, loosely chopped, don’t get too excited
• 1 cup water
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup ginger, loosely chopped, skin on, be lazy
• 2 tbsp honey
• 1 roughly chopped chilli
• 1 finely diced chilli
• Fish sauce

Simmer that and reduce it to a syrup which is somewhere between water and honey in viscosity. Strain the syrup into a bowl and add in one very finely diced chilli, a slice of orange and two tbsp of fish sauce. Refrigerate.

Scallops

Put the ginger dregs of what you’ve strained to make the dipping sauce into a cast iron pan and fry it off for 5 mins in sesame oil. Drain that and set aside. Sear the scallops in it later.

Veges

Mix up/make your favourite Thai/Khmer/Vietnamese chilli paste in a wok or large saucepan. Add coconut cream. Reduce way down. Add in some tofu, bright veges (beans, capsicum, purple cabbage). Simmer quickly.

Noodles

Vermicelli

Serve

With a drizzling of fish sauce and fresh coconut cream, scatter heaps of coriander, mint and Vietnamese mint about the place. Drizzle some of the dipping sauce over the top. Add chilli to taste.

Bircher Muesli

Bircher Muesli used to be something of an enigma for me. A metaphor for health retreats and people named Sven. An option on a breakfast menu you chose if you didn’t eat bacon. It contained sultanas, and oats and fibrous things which stirred the bowels but not the soul. Then I discovered blueberry sauce and vanilla soy milk.

This bircher muesli recipe is still super-healthy, but it’s delicious and creamy and as boring as a weekend away with Bear Grylls. You need to make it the night before. Or for best results, two nights before.

Muesli Ingredients

• 2 Cups of oats. Good ones
• 2/3 cup of apple juice
• 1/3 cup of mandarin juice
• 1 cup of natural greek yoghurt. As healthy or as fatty as you like. Doesn’t matter either way
• 2 large teaspoons of vanilla paste
• A sprinkling of cinnamon

Mix all that in a bowl and leave overnight.

Blueberry Sauce Recipe

• 2/3 cup of blueberries
• 1/3 cup of strawberries, stalks removed
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup water

Put that in a saucepan and simmer over a medium heat until it’s bubbling slightly. Mash it up with a potato masher. Reduce it a little until it’s syrupy, but not tooo syrupy, it needs to be easily pourable. Strain it into a jug so there’s no pulpy bits. Refrigerate.

Serving

The next day (or the day after) put the muesli in a bowl. Pour a large hint of vanilla soy milk over the top. Cover gently with strawberries, blueberries, mango, macadamia nuts and a big dollop of mango yoghurt. Drizzle with blueberry sauce. Add a sprig of mint.

OMG.

Corn Fritters

I had Bill Granger’s corncakes not long ago. At his signature restaurant in Surry Hills. They were f***ing terrible. As was everything else about the restaurant. They put bacon on my vegetarian girlfriend’s plate. They didn’t even realise they hadn’t wiped the table down until 3/4 of the way through the meal. They got the coffees wrong. They said they were out of potato and leek soup and that we could have pumpkin instead and then brought potato and leek soup anyway. They were even out of orange juice, at breakfast time. And we weren’t the only ones complaining. Don’t go there.

Corn cakes should be so easy to get right, I don’t know how people fail. They always come out too dry. The trick is to go heavy on the corn. And add onion for sweetness. You want mostly corn in there, with two grains of flour and enough egg to make it stick together. Get them crispy on the outside, but don’t burn them.

Ingredients

• Corn. Der. Heaps of it. So much corn you vision turns yellow. Cut up a few cobs or use a whole tin if you’re lazy. About a cup if you have to measure.
• 1/2 cup flour or so
• 4 eggs
• Coriander leaves, 1/3 loose cup
• Cumin
• Salt
• 1/3 of a small red chilli
• Juice from 1/3 of a lime

Method

• Mush
• Fry in oil, like pancakes, but with more oil

Serving Suggestion

• Rocket and lime juice on the side
• Avocado/Tomato/Coriander/Lime/Salt/Spanish Onion salsa
• Greek yoghurt

Serves: 2.5 people

Homemade baked beans

Wow. How poncy. So delicious though. SOO delicious.

• Broad beans (just the beans, not the pod)
• Fresh as ripe red organic tomatoes
• Butter
• Garlic
• A splash of white wine
• Some healthy dollops of white truffle oil
• Salt
• Cumin
• Brown sugar (1-2 tablespoons)
• A little lemon juice

Chop the tomatoes up really roughly. Put that all in an oven-proof receptacle of some kind and bake for an hour.

Crack eggs on top. Cook them until the whites all turn white, not a minute more. You want those yolks to stay nice and runny.

Sprinkle with truffled pecorino and a dash of pepper. Let that melt. If that isn’t the best vegtarian breakfast ever I’m a deep-fried truffled hindu cow.

Ponce on.

What goes in it

Cake Bit

• 3 large bananaas (no need for them to be over-ripe, we’re going to caramelise them)
• 1/2 cup of olive oil
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup of gluten-free self-raising flour
• 100g caster sugar
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder

Icing Bit

• 250g cream cheese, softened
• 50 g (50 mL) butter, softened
• 1/2 1/2tsp tspvanilla paste
• 1/2 1cup (250 mL) icing sugar
• 1/2 1cup (250 mL) icing sugar
• 1/2 cup brown sugar

Layer Bit

• 1 cup of sugar
• 6 Tbsp butter
• 1/2 cup heavy whipping cream

How to make it

• preheat the oven to 180°C and line a circular cake dish with butter
• dice 2 bananas and fry/caramelise them with the sugar and oil in a pan
• pour the oil out of the pan, into a jug and beat in the eggs
• place the flour, sugar, baking powder and bi-carb soda into a large bowl
• mix in the beaten-egg-and-oil mixture, followed by the caramelised bananas
• bake for 30 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean
• leave to cool
• cream the icing ingredients together
• layer that mofo up with the remaining banana and cream and caramel

• Olympics
• Running
• Civilisation/Society
• Science
• Halloumi
• Effie
• Hawaiian Pizza

Sam Panopoulos: Fricking champion. Imagine the scene. 1962, small town Canada, Ukelele mania is sweeping the world. The Aloha State has only just been added to the union, grass skirts are everywhere. Surfing is the bomb. You’re young. You’re smart, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re in the pizza restaurant business. What are you going to do to to ensure you absolutely kill it at next year’s Chatham-Kent Chamber of Commerce small business cafe innovation awards? Pineapple; ham. Bam.

Hawaiians hate it apparently. As do Canadians. As does everyone else, except us. Ham and pineapple is the most popular topping in Australia, at least according to a broken hyperlink reference on Wikipedia. I can’t find any recent research to back that stat up, but given that chicken menu items generally incur an additional fee of between $1.1-1.2 million, it doesn’t surprise me. In fact, I used to work as a Dominos delivery boy in Western Sydney when I was at uni and I must admit, the thing they seemed to want the most of, other than flannelette and heroin, was Hawaiian pizza.

Pineapple and ham naturally do go so well together so it’s no surprise Sam Panopoulos saw the connection. Pineapple contains the enzyme ‘bromelain’, which breaks down protein (meat is made of protein), so when you have a fatty animal like pig, duck, or westie, throwing some pineapple their way can make them a lot more tender (depending on your aim).

I used to love ham and pineapple pizza when I was a kid so I thought I’d have a crack at a more grown up version. I present to you a Italian/Canadian/Greek/French/Polynesian favourite:

The Fricking Ultimate Hawaiian Pizza Recipe

Ingredients

Topping

• A large slice (roughly 300g) of  leg ham cut at least 1cm thick
• 1/4 of a fresh pineapple
• 3 sprigs of rosemary
• 1/2 a red onion
• 4 slices of Jarlsberg cheese

Pizza Sauce

• Either buy it ready-made (because you’re lazy/time poor/living in a car), use tomato paste (tight-arse) or better still make your own reduction from garlic, basil, olive oil, salt and 3-4 fresh tomatoes from your garden (hippie), local farmers markets (yuppie) or supermarket (on the way back from soccer practice). Jamie has a decent easy recipe, but only use tinned tomatoes if you can’t find some super-red, super-ripe ones somewhere else.

Base

• I use Neil Perry’s pizza dough recipe, mostly because I’m a celebrity chef tart and would cook my own toenails if someone with a TV show told me to. It also has honey in it, which goes with ham.
• You could buy a ready-made base if you want, but I would think less of you.
  • Unless you were Neil Perry

Method

• Put the base on the pizza stone (you’ve got a fricking pizza-stone don’t you?) and cook it just a little bit, until it gets a bit crispy on top, but not so crispy it’s black. Black is too crispy.
• Put the sauce on the base
• Put the toppings (rip up the ham along the grain, chop the pineapple into bits of your personal size preference, finely dice most of the rosemary, caramelise the onion) on the sauce
• Cut the cheese into sexy little strips about as wide as the word ‘wide‘ in 12px arial and put the cheese on the topppings.
• Cook until the cheese melts and goes a bit brown
• Lay a spring or two of rosemary on the tip so people think you’re fancy/own a food blog/watch Masterchef too often
• Nom nom nom

A national broadbean network
with a mirin and murray basin climate change sea salt seasoning
A selection of rice crackers and a liberal serving of dips

Entrée

Spicy tomato and sage soup with crispy tofu
and Crusty gluten-free rye bread

Main Course

Annabelle Crab Cakes with a sweet Julia ‘ginger’ Gillard soy dipping sauce

Dessert

Flourless chocolate cupcakes