Our Easter

We took it slow over our Easter break.

• Sleep ins.




• Dog walks at the beach.




• Just hanging out at the block, planting trees.




• Snuggling under my Easter present from Rob, a heated throw rug.




• Inviting ourselves to cook a paella at our friends place.




• Eating chocolate.




• Camping at the hut overnight and christening the new Weber Q bbq.

The little hut is getting there, unfortunately the builder has run out of the timber for the back wall. So there may be a little wait til it's completed. I've decided that instead of having matching timber Z strap Barn doors for the laundry hut, I'd like blue doors. Rob has graciously allowed me this slight change of plan!

Yesterday the builders made a big mess at the block by installing the septic tank and water tanks. So there will be mud everywhere. But he's starting to promise the end is near.

Not long now.

Sunday Lunch

I haven't blogged about food for a while.

We have been eating, just too quickly to take a photo!

The season of middle eastern food has begun.

Sunday's menu:

Hummus

Baba Ghanooj

Cacik

Za'atar chicken

Lamb kofte

Lavosh

Green beans cooked with onions and tomatoes

It was all good. Very good.

It was my first attempt at lavosh. So much better than shop ones.

They were dead easy to make.

The best bit - we made so much food we also have Monday dinner sorted.

My weekend was:

I love to prepare food for people, so it didn't take much convincing for me to volunteer to cook for Rob’s botany field trip on the weekend: a total of 21 students and 6 staff. We did a scaled down version of my birthday dinner. I’d been busy during the week and had made a double batch (each) of Turkish Delight, Baklava and Nummoora (semolina cake).

So Saturday dawned, and after dropping Rob off at Uni I headed to Salamanca to buy herbs from the Hmong people. The smell of fresh mint and parsley filled the car- I love that fragrance, better than any expensive perfume! After packing the van with ingredients and equipment I drove to Orford to the camp behind Spring Beach. It has a commercial kitchen so it was going to be nice to spread out and have enough room to prepare the food.

After unpacking, I got the eggplants burning nicely on the hotplate to create lovely smoky baba ghannooj. Meanwhile I set about roasting walnuts in the oven and juicing lemons for the dips and salad. Unfortunately my luck ran out with the big food processor – I pressed all the buttons and fiddled with it but couldn’t get it to work. It would have been great as I would have only had to do 1 batch of each of the three dips. I had come prepared though, so out came our dinky little 500mL food processor. I’m surprised it didn’t blow up cause I had to do the hummus, baba ghannooj and muhammara (red pepper & walnut) in 5 batches!

After a quick clean up, I set up the tables in a long row, the gym is perhaps not as nice a setting as the royal tennis club, but it didn’t look too bad with the white tablecloth, magenta runner, Moroccan lanterns and candles.

Next was top and tailing the beans for the Loubyeh bi Zayt (green beans cooked with tomatoes, olive oil and allspice). I was in the middle of this when everyone arrived, which was excellent timing. The kitchen became a hive of activity; my Sous-chef (Rob) made lamb kofte with Ras el Hanout, mint, red onion and lemon rind, and my kitchen assistants chopped mint, parsley, tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers and radishes. I got the beans going at the stove, and got used to directing other people in the kitchen!

Whilst Rob grilled the lamb kofte and the Za’atar chicken kebabs, I set out the dips and cacik, drizzling them with olive oil and decorating them with paprika and herbs. In the final rush I tossed the salads and sprinkled them with sumac, and then we took all the dishes out to the long table.

The students were suitably impressed and appreciative. Rob introduced me as their chef for the evening and ran through the menu. Then everyone tucked in, apart from an occasional “ohh” or “ahh” all was silent for awhile. After clearing the main course from the table we sat chatting over the sweets.It was a great evening, and although I was satisfied I was pretty tired by the end of it all. Cooking for more than 6 people always increases my respect for real chefs- it is pretty tough, both mentally (making sure everything is ready at the right time) and physically (it was such a long day for me, and my back and knees are still recovering). But the pain must be easily forgotten, like women having more than one baby. On Monday I brought in the leftover sweets for my workmates, and afterwards I agreed to do it for our Christmas lunch this year!

A Middle Eastern Feast

In the last couple of years Rob and I have become increasingly fond of Middle Eastern food, particularly Lebanese. We visited Abla Amad’s little restaurant in Carlton a couple of years ago and were thoroughly inspired to try cooking the food ourselves. I found her book ‘The Lebanese Kitchen’ and we were off. Claudia Roden’s books ‘Arabesque’ and ‘A New Book of Middle Eastern Food’ also quickly became our food bibles. I love the freshness of the cuisine, with the lemon juice, fresh mint, parsley and coriander. The spice mixes such as Ras el hanout , Baharat and Za’atar are so fragrant, and have become a favourite way of adding flavour to lamb and chicken. The food culture of sitting down to a table of many small dishes, mezze, creating an array of flavours, colours, and aromas is so appealing. We had developed a repertoire of favourite dips, salads, kebabs and desserts to feed our friends. We have become so obsessed that a BBQ to us is always a Lebanese one!

So as I approached a particular milestone last year it came as no surprise (to Rob) that I decided upon a Middle Eastern Feast for 30 of my friends and family to celebrate. Half of the fun of this sort of entertaining for me is to pore over the recipe books, selecting and writing lists of ingredients and a plan of attack leading up to the day. The day dawned, and we found ourselves at the venue with all of our cooking gear, buckets of fresh herbs from the Hmong people, fillets of Ocean Trout, a couple of legs of lamb, chicken, a large mound of fresh flatbreads, yoghurt, lemons, sparkling wine and an array of desserts that I’d been preparing the whole week. Luckily one of my friends is far more artistic than me, so I gave her 100 candles, 30m of silky pink fabric, a couple of Moroccan lanterns, fresh lilies, rose petals and a staple gun, and let her loose to transform the room.

The feast consisted of:
Hummous – it’s compulsory!

Baba Ghannooj – I love the smoky eggplant flavour.

Muhammara – a roasted red pepper & walnut dip, seasoned with lemon juice, pomegranate molasses and cumin, with flat breads to scoop.

Tabbouleh- again another classic mezze dish.

Fattoush- a salad of mint, parsley and lettuce, with radishes, tomatoes, cucumber, a sprinkling of sumac and some crisp toasted flatbreads.

Cacik- a cucumber, mint and yoghurt salad, a favourite with lamb.

Salatat al Bataata- a minty potato salad.

Loubyeh bi Zayt- green beans cooked with tomatoes, olive oil and allspice, it is delicious warm or cold.

Ouzi- middle eastern roast lamb.

Djaj Mishwee bi Za’atar- chicken kebabs marinated in lemon juice and za’atar then grilled on a BBQ.

Samak Tarator- the Greg Malouf salmon dish I described recently.

Lokum- I made a mountain of Turkish Delight.

Baklawa-bright green with pistachios and dripping with the sugar syrup.

Nummoora – a semolina cake that is also bathed in sugar syrup.

Ma’amoul- date filled pastries.

Barrosi-crispy sesame seed biscuits.

Damascene Shortbread – a short and rich biscuit topped with a pistachio.

Muhallabeya- a milk pudding to eat with the

Middle Eastern Fruit Salad- made of poached dried fruit with spices and honey, sprinkled with slivered almonds.

Persian Love Cake- the recipe for this came from Gourmet Traveller, a very moist cake made with yoghurt, almond meal and nutmeg.

My friend had also made me an appropriately decorated birthday cake.

The evening went well, my fondest memory was looking down the candle lit table at my guests tucking into the food in front of them, and all of the preparation was worth it!