I went to an engagement party recently – one side is Indian, the other side is Greek so as you can imagine the food was amazing! All home made food, my plate was the oddest mix of dolmates, meats, curries, biryani…and the nicest discovery was a very simple eggplant dish that I fell in love with and have since tried to re-create.

Ingredients:

Eggplant, sliced

Parsley, chopped

Salt

Olive oil

Garlic, crushed

Mix the garlic and a few glugs of olive oil together in a shallow bowl, add a pinch of salt. Thinly coat the eggplant slices on both sides with the garlic olive oil mix. Place all the eggplant on a frypan on med – high heat, you won’t need to add additional oil to the pan there should be enough on the eggplant already. Cook on each side for around 3-5 mins or until soft.

Plate up by sprinkling parsley over the eggplant and drizzle a bit of olive oil on top.

This is a great entree or side dish and you can vary how strong / weak you want the garlic flavour to come out. Mine didn’t taste quite as amazing as the original but I’ll soon perfect it…

I’ve recently started to love alfalfa. Yes, alfalfa. It still reminds me a lot of the 1908s, Peter Peter Russell Russell Clarke (I’m not sure why) and alfalfa hair on sandwich faces

With the recent sudden heatwave in Melbourne the last thing you want to do is cook something hot on the oven for dinner, so I’ve been having a salad sandwich for dinner with a combination of salads, cheeses, tuna, salmon…yum! And it only takes a few minutes to put together and you don’t have to sweat it out over a hot stove.

Alfalfa is a great substitute for lettuce to give that crunch to a sandwich, it’s also high in vitamin C and K and folate so very good for you! Throw some into a salad, stir fry, rice paper roll, sandwich…how do you like your alfalfa?

I’m usually a bit hesitant with supermarket recipes but thought I’d give a Curtis Stone recipe from Coles (one of the “feed your family for under $10″ ones) a go this week – Cauliflower and Spinach Dahl. I’m still very unclear on how you could buy all the ingredients for this and still only spend $10 – oh that’s right – they use “actual portions” so you have to make sure you have most of this in your pantry already!

In any case, this is a pretty easy dish to make. I did have a few issues though…

Ingredients

2 tbsp olive oil

1 small brown onion, diced

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1 tbsp peeled and finely chopped ginger

1/2 teaspoon tumeric

1 1/2 teaspoons ground cumin

1 1/2 teaspoon ground coriander

10 fresh curry leaves

500g yellow split peas, rinsed

2 1/2 litres water

300g cauliflower, cut into small 2cm chunks

2 cups (50g) spinach leaves

4 chapatti bread to serve (these are not gluten free so leave out)

Heat the oil in a heavy based saucepan. Add onions and cook until soft for approximately 2 mins. Add garlic, ginger and chilli and cook for 1 additional minute. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Add tumeric, cumin, corriander and curry leaves to the pan and heat through for 2 minutes stirring constantly. Place split peas in same pot and stir to coat. Add water and increase to high heat. Bring to the boil. Reduce heat, and simmer, partially covered, for about 25 minutes until split peas are nearly tender and the mixture is a soupy consistency. Add cauliflower and cook a further 10 minutes (should be consistency of a puree). Check for seasoning. Remove from heat and fold in spinach.

My main issue with this recipe is the timings – it took over double the suggested time to cook the split peas – at 25 minutes they were still half raw, so make sure you taste a bit to see if they are cooked and keep an eye on the water level to make sure you don’t run out. The seasoning was also not as nice as I was expecting, I had to add extra to give more of a kick to the flavour.

Overall though this was a nice recipe – I’ve never made a dahl before and will happily experiment with some other recipes now that I know how easy they are to do.

In an effort to catch up on late posts, I’m combining my recipe for weeks 30, 31 and 32 of the Cookbook Challenge, with themes Baked, French and Potatoes. So I’ve made a Baked French Potatoes recipe from Jamie Oliver’s Ministry of Food.

Preheat your oven to 200 degrees. Peel and finely slice 800g of potatoes. Peel, halve and finely slice 400g of medium onions and 3 cloves of garlic. Pick the leaves from a small handful of fresh flat-leaf parsley and finely chop. Pour a couple of lugs of olive oil into a large, hot pan with the onions, garlic and parsley. Slowly fry for 10 minutes, until the onions are soft and lightly golden. Add a good pinch of salt and pepper. Mix 1 chicken or vegetable stock cube in 850ml of boiling water. In a large baking dish place a layer of potatoes, a sprinkling of salt and pepper, and a layer of onions. Continue, repeating until you’ve used up everything, but try to finish with a layer of potatoes on top. Rub some foil with olive oil, place it, oil-side down, over the dish and seal tight. Place in the oven for 45 minutes, then remove the foil, push the potatoes down and return to the oven for 20-40 minutes until golden and crisp.

This was a really easy recipe to make and makes for an interesting twist on the normal baked potatoes when you want a bit of variety. I loved the onion flavour and the crispiness of the potato. This dish is good the next day as leftovers too!

Week 28 of the Cookbook Challenge, the theme is Breakfast. I recently bought my second Nigella cookbook so picked a breakfast from it – Spanish Omlette.

I actually had this for dinner not breakfast – I often have omlettes for dinner when I need to whip up something and don’t have a lot of ingredients. My most common ‘dire straights’ omlette dinner when I am scraping what is left in the fridge and pantry before having to go to the supermarket is eggs with canned tuna, whatever fresh veggies I have (usually zuccini and mushrooms), a dash of paprika, salt, pepper – throw everything into a fry pan and voila you have dinner in 5 minutes.

Nigella’s omlette recipe was a bit more structured than my usual ‘throw bits together’ omlette.

Ingredients:

225g baby new potatoes, halved
4 eggs
75g chopped caramelised or flame roasted peppers from a jar
3 spring onions finely sliced
75g grated Manchego or Cheddar cheese
1 teaspoon butter
drop of oil
salt and pepper to taste

Turn on the grill and let it heat up while you start off the omlette.

Cook the potatoes in boiling water for 15 minutes, until cooked through, then drain.

Whisk the eggs in a bowl, add the peppers, spring onions and cheese, and season with salt and pepper, then add the cooked, drained potatoes.

Heat the butter and oil in a small, heavy-based frying pan, and, when hot, pour in the omlette mix and cook gently for 5 minutes.

By this time, the bottom of the omlette should be set and, rather than turn it, simply sit the pan under the grill for a few minutes to set the top.

Turn the omlette upside down onto a plate to let cool. Don’t worry if it feels a little wibbly-wobbly in the middle, as it will carry on cooking as it cools.

Once cool, slice into 4 large or 8 smaller wedges.

I made a smaller version with not as many potatoes and eggs so it spread out a bit on the pan and didn’t quite end up looking like the picture, but it tasted great anyway and was very quick and easy to make.

Week 20 of the Cookbook Challenge, the theme is Tangy.

I decided to finally use the Preserved Lemons I did way back in week 1 in another recipe from the same book, Moorish. The recipe I cooked was Preserved Lemon Risotto.

Ingredients

60ml olive oil

1 small onion, quartered

400g Vialone Nano rice (I have no idea what this is, I just used Aborio rice!)

60ml white wine

1 litre of chicken or vegetable stock

1 preserved lemon, skin only, finely diced

1 tablespoon chopped celery leaves

100g unsalted butter, chilled and diced

60g parmesan, grated

salt and pepper

Heat the oil in a pan and add the onion. Fry for a few minutes to flavour the oil, then discard. Add the rice and stir for a few minutes to coat each grain of rice with the oil. Add the wine and let it bubble away until evaporated. Next, ladle in enough simmering stock to cover the rice by a finger’s width. Cook on medium heat, stirring with a wooden spoon from time to time, until most of the stock has been absorbed.

Add a third amount of stock, and when half the liquid has been absorbed, add the preserved lemon and celery and stir gently until the stock is all absorbed.

Stir in the butter and parmesan and season with salt and pepper. Add the final 100ml of stock and stir until the butter and cheese have melted. Cover the pot and allow to rest away from the heat for a few minutes. Taste and adjust the seasoning if needed, and serve straight away.

I’ve never seen a risotto recipe that tells you to discard the onion at the start, I think I prefer keeping it in for that extra flavour. This turned out nicely, the lemon gives it a nice punch. You can serve this as a side with steak or as a light lunch. I had it for dinner with a really basic tomato, avocado and parsely salad. Yum!

I’ve never really been a massive fan of Chinese food, I would always choose Japanese or Thai if I had the option however my friend Adelle recently lent me a book called Why the Chinese don’t count calories, and it totally changed my opinion on Chinese food (and on eating in general!). I realised that the Chinese food I’d known, the typical take away style beef with black bean sauce kind of meal, does not in any way do Chinese food justice. I read this book when I was interstate on holidays, and it was so well written with beautiful recipes and food stories I was itching to get back home so I could cook!

So, inspired by what I’d read I of course then was inspired to get a Chinese cookbook and I liked the look of Kylie Kwong’s Simple Chinese Cooking – it has a lot of really basic and traditional recipes that you can use day to day.

For week 19 of the Cookbook Challenge the theme is rice, so perfect timing for my new cookboook! I decided to do a Vegetarian Fried Rice. Fried rice is pretty simple but it does take a bit of skill, or a good recipe, to do a good one.

Ingredients

1/3 cup vegetable oil

4 free range eggs, lightly beaten

1 small carrot, peeled

1 small red onion, finely sliced

1 tablespoon finely diced ginger

100g fresh shitake mushrooms, stems discarded and caps finely sliced

2 teaspoons sea salt

4 cups steamed rice

1 1/3 cups finely shredded Chinese cabbage leaves

1 cup fresh bean sprouts

2 tablespoons finely chopped corriander roots and stems

1 tablespoon light soy sauce

2/3 cup finely sliced spring onions

Heat half the oil in a hot wok until surface seems to shimmer slightly. Pour beaten eggs into wok and leave to cook on the base of the wok for 10 seconds before folding egg mixture over itself with a spatula and lightly scrambling for about 1 minute or until amost cooked through. Carefully remove omlette from wok with a spatula and drain on kitchen paper. Set aside.

Using a vegetable peeler, finely slice carrot lengthways into ribbons and then into a fine julienne.

Heat remaining oil in hot wok and stir fry onion, ginger, mushrooms and salt for 1 minute. Add carrot, rice, cabbage, bean sprouts, coriander, soy sauce and reserved omlette and stir fry for about 1 1/2 minutes. Use a spatula to break up the egg into smaller pieces while cooking. Lastly, toss in spring onions and stir fry for 30 seconds or until well combined and rice is heated through.

Transfer rice to a bowl and serve immediately. Yum!