one-bowl easy veggie soup

Not the thing to be cooking in the middle of summer, I know, but the easiest way I know of filling me with veggies when I'm sick. In the middle of summer, after not having anything harsher than the sniffles all winter, I came down with the nastiest case of tonsilitis I've seen for a while.

So - The recipe. I just used whatever was in fridge or cupboards at my Mum's, and didn't measure anything, so please bear with me. Haphazardness means most of it's easily substituteable though.


Chicken Stock
Butter
Half an Onion
One Potato
One Carrot
Corn (tinned or frozen will be easier, but there was fresh in the fridge!)
Mushrooms
Small Pastas (Mum actually had special soup ones, but even spagetti broken up small enough will work)
Parsley, chopped


Put the finely chopped onion and butter in a large microwavable bowl, and cook on gight for 2 minutes. Add the chopped potato and carrot, chicken stock and corn (sperated from the cob, in kernals), microwave on high for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the mushrooms, cook for 5 minutes. Add the pasta and parsley, cook for 5 minutes.

Tada! Done! Easy and not very messy or timeconsuming. Yummy again later when re-heated. My mum found a thermos for me to bring it home in. Bless!

Christmas cheer...

Well, I hope everyone has had a food and beverage filled Christmas this year. What pressies did you get?

Two of my pressies are going to come in very handy for this here blog...

Firstly - The new Jamie Oliver book.



It's bloody huge, and filled not just with recipes, but with tips and tricks about how you should be shopping for food, what flavours go well together, ways to tailor the meals to your own liking, etc etc.

Secondly - Digital camera.

Yay! Now the blog will turn more into a recipe, photostyle blog (for things like this, I recommend heading over to my friend Liz's page, threekilosofricotta.blogspot.com) rather than the restaurant reviews it seems to have been so far.

Ok - now to the meat of the post. What did I eat for Chrismas lunch?

To start - two different kinds of prawns, and oysters, served natural. My sister tried her first non-kilpatrick oyster and nearly vommed, but that's fine with me, cos there were more for me. I stuffed myself, as I love seafood and don't eat it very often at home (this may well soon change, the seafood section of Jamie has got me a little bit excited).

The Main Event - cold ham off the bone, known as Mum's baby. My family are a little bit retarded. Baked turkey breast, known as buffy. See, retarded. Roast pork left over from our roast dinner last night, not known as anything. The crackling was tasty, but not up to the usual crunch standard of Mum's pork. We believe this is to do with buying shrinkwrapped meat from the supermarket rather than from the butcher. Never again.

And we had salads up the wazoo. A delicious roast potato and basil salad, served cold with a balsamic dressing. A green salad that barely got touched with all else that was on offer. The asian noodle salad from the recipe off the back of the Chang's noodle packets. And a cranberry couscous salad that nearly didn't happen.

Mum followed the instructions to the letter, boil chicken stock, add couscous, turn off heat, leave sealed in saucepan for 5 minutes. For a salad, you want your couscous to be nice and dry, with the grains separating easily. The couscous Mum found in her saucepan looked like polenta before it's baked. Not the greatest texture for a salad...

so, the defoxus hassle-free way of cooking couscous is thus:

Put stock or water in a microwave safe bowl, and heat on high for two minutes.

Add to couscous, a little at a time, you can always add more stock, you can't take it out.

Stir with fork until all couscous has swelled up and is tender to the bite. Don't cover it, don't let it stand without stirring it, if it's going to separate, you need constant motion.

Hope your bellies get to normal size again soon!

Peko Peko - Smith St Collingwood

I love Peko Peko. Like, love it.

I had never been big on Japanese food, and it wasn't just about the raw fish thing. I can do raw fish. I don't always like it, but I can do it (smoked salmon however, is always liked). It was more about not knowing what was what, and potentially also due to my introduction to the cuisine being Japanese exchange students cooking for my family, and teenage girls are never going to be the greatest starting point.

Lets please leave crude jokes aside at this point.

Anyway, my major introduction to Japanese restaurant food came about when a group of friends (yes, several of the same friends that witnessed food sookery and/or at at ezard with me) went and did the banquet in their adorable lounge room upstairs. I looked to my dining companions for guidance, but once they told me to eat the tatami mat, and I heard them speaking about trying to pass off wasabi as avacado, I stopped listening and just ate what was in front of me. And I've kept coming back.


For:

- Sweet potato gyoza. Pan fried and almost crispy on the outside, velvety smooth on the inside. And tasty little suckers too.
- Okonomiyaki. Oh sweet lord these are tasty here. A lot of that comes down to the sauce, which is almost a mix of Japanese mayo with BBQ sauce. Comes cut into bite sized pieces and slathered in said sauce, and sprinkled with nori bits.
- inside out teriyaki chicken nori rolls. I'm nearly drooling. I don't even know what to say about these. Just go eat them.
- spinich salad with one of the tastiest salad dressings I've ever eaten.
- pan fried miso balls. A big ball of rice, coated in miso paste, and pan fried. Bit bland on it's own, but great with other things for flavour, is a little bit different to the usual plain rice.

All the meals are set out in the menu as 'small', 'medium' or 'big', and prices are cheap-ish.