The Salad of Champions

Do you love salads but detest all things worthy and wholesome? Especially those salads that make you wish for a clean and early death while you chew on eternal chaff and humiliated vegetables? Yes? Well my friend we should meet at Schmears for lunch one day!

Schmears is a funny little cafe in the Bermuda triangle end of St Georges Terrace where Bureaucrat-Banker-Mining people come together and gingerly exchange cards and favours. In this unlikely nexus, the little red brick heritage remnants of the Old Cloisters Building harbour a safe haven for lovers of fresh food who like ripe luscious flavour bursting salads but are also in dire need of watching the waistline.

Once there, don't waste any time looking around at the fridges hoarding the same old drinks and sweets (those caramel slices that look like tiles taste like that time you drank a tin of sweetened condensed milk when your mum wasn't looking. Trust me, you don't want to eat that stuff more than once!). Rush straight to the bountiful fridge on the far right where you can make your own salad. Not impressed, I hear you scoff, I can get that at MYO! No, no you can't! Because Shmears comes equipped with a posse of champions, much like the highlanders, who entertain and beguile with luscious salads while battling it out for the one true Shmearslander.

You need to be wily, and to observe. The best of the champions will reveal themselves in the fullness of time (ok, ok you only have a short lunchbreak so I'll tell you; the girl with the ponytail who wears Pinocchio style glasses and looks like a med student is the best! she chops things finely as a true surgeon of salad should... and she doesn't skimp on portions either).

The salads are $8.60 for a small bowl and $9.40 for a large. Go large. This gets you a selection of 7 ingredients plus a green of your choice. Be warned that the mixed lettuce varies in quality and colour and best avoided. Only try when feeling adventurous and devil may care... and by devil may careI mean on Thursdays when the owner's mum comes in especially to wash and chop the salad.

The ingredients are varied and almost always fantastically fresh. A true connoisseur of borderline wholesome salads knows that the salad is not to be judged till the dressing is in and here Schmears shines. You can mix your dressings depending on your mood. On a devil may care day (not necessarily a Thursday!) you can mix ranch with mayonnaise. On being good day you can get balsamic (be warned, it has olive oil in it! still can't figure out why) and on end of month and not yet paid treat day you can get a mix of all dressings as it doesn't cost you any extra.

I am also told that the bagels (it is named Schmears, after all!) are great but much as I'd like to be able to vouch for this fact I'm afraid I haven't been able to unglue myself from the Salad Championships long enough to order a bagel.

Now, some home truths which must also be told:

• The coffee is a mixture of the awful and the vile. Best avoided. Even on Devil May Care Thursdays.

• Do not, under any circumstances, allow the owner's mother to make your salad. You'll know her by her sweet bun hair and white apron. She will take forever to make a wholesome salad and arrange everything just so, forgetting to put all the naughty favourites in. And she is such a darling you won't be brave enough to ask her to correct it.

• You have to get in early (11:55 early) or pick an odd time that does not correlate with working people's organiser meeting times (ie. on the hour or the half hour) because Schmears is popular with the city's knife and fork brigade.

• Don't tell too many people about Schmears, because it is also a good hidey hole if you are a late luncher and need a spot to hide with a good book. The cushioned loungers are heavenly comfy!

• Do not pat the seeing eye dog who comes in daily with the lovely tall vision impaired girl in impossibly high heels. Just don't. I learned this the hard way.
  

Recipe: Cherry lamb

As I munched on another hotcrossbun for breakfast, I flicked through Claudia Roden's A Book of Middle Eastern Food.  Inspired by the simplicity of the meat and fruit stew recipes, I added lamb and cherries to my grocery list and decided to do a mini "Surprise Chef" on my own tonight.

 

Come dinner, I pulled the Morello cherries out (Bulgarian or Turkish?  We went with the Turkish, but would've felt exotic either way, there's just something about cherries, isn't there), sampled a few for inspiration, and just threw things into the tagine, without consulting Roden for more guidance.  Surprise indeed!  It worked.  Beautifully!

OK I'll admit that the lamb+tagine combination is completely idiot proof, so it wasn't a huge challenge, but sometimes I get completely menu-bound, and it's nice to test my confidence of cooking...one, from other cultures and two, from the heart! 

 

I'm off to experiment with making cherry cocktails, sadly enough, without cherry brandy or the luxury of having pre-made my cherry-infused vodka...however, there's a bottle of hibiscus flower cordial tucked up the back of the pantry, waiting for such opportunity...or...rosewater and cherry something...gin?  Coconut rum?  Could ginger beer and cherries be friends?  Yesno?  I have limes...ooo...yarr...(the pirate+lime equation is ALSO idiot proof...true story...)

 

In the meantime, here's the recipe, I hope you like it :)

 

Lamb and cherry tagine

 

If you don't have a tagine, I reckon you just add 30 to 60 minutes on your cooking time, go finish another level of Zelda or something...

 

For two people:

Enough lamb for two (I cut mine from a 2 kg leg tonight), trimmed lean and diced

half an onion, thinly sliced (the other half went into a big pot with the leg bone, to make stock)

turmeric, cumin, coriander, ground or stick cinnamon

handful of Morello or sour cherries (or use dried cherries, how about soaking them in red wine or port first?)

1 green apple, thinly sliced, or use your whizbang corer-slicer gadget

I wondered about preserved lemon or fresh lemon but gave it a miss, my fruit combo had enough tang.

1 cup small grain couscous

 

Do this:

Heat your olive oil and saute the onion with turmeric.

Brown your meat, add some freshly ground cumin and coriander, and cinnamon to taste.

Approximate two fingers' depth of water to the tagine, bring to boil, cover and lower heat; simmer for 30 minutes.

Add salt, cherries and apple, top of with liquid if necessary, ensuring the meat is submersed; simmer for another 30 minutes.

Check and adjust spices to taste.

Add couscous and cover.  Cook for about 5 minutes, till the liquid is completely absorbed. 

Remove from the heat and allow couscous to swell and fluff abit more.

Toast a handful of pinenuts. 

 

In the meantime, grate half a long lebanese cucumber into a bowl of natural yoghurt, I added lots of pink salt.  The worms got the other half, no salt. 

 

Serve up with a few extra cherries on top. 

 

The fruit and spices flavor the lamb very delicately, the pinenuts are a perfect complement, and the raita gives it a velvety finish. 

 

I wonder if anyone out there has tried and blogged a duck and lychee tagine.  That'll be next week's tagine.  To be continued. 

 

And now for those cocktails...

 

Easter musings

Easter. Already? Weren't we just serving up our roast Christmas duck (stuffed with veal and wrapped with proscuitto, served with many lovely things, most importantly with a freeflow of DJ Cornflake Mai Tai's...) two or three weeks ago? Err.

While Christmas is really joyful, Easter is often quiet and aptly reflective for us. We have a household tradition of waking up early to bake on long weekends. I do the Australia Day breakfast (fresh damper), we tend to make random baked goods on the Queen's Birthday (like grape bread or the Maloufs' cheesy pull-apart yoghurt bread) and Hubby always does the Good Friday hot cross buns. We've been using a recipe from Taste for years, with minor tweaks and additions on the day. This year we added fruit peel.

We also wanted to see if letting dough rise overnight made a diff. Certainly means you sleep in abit more since the hard work was done last night! Hubby hopped out of bed at 7, cranked up the oven and brought the buns to room temp, snoozed for another 30 minutes and pushed me out of bed before putting the buns into the oven.

As cranky as I was, I still remembered to photograph them before attempting to look human to attend Church. Thankfully, a warm buttered bun later and a big mug of coffee put me in the right frame of mind and we got seats up the back.

Easter thoughts: 1) kaya on a hcb is strange but good 2) I'd never thought about what Simon of Cyrene might've thought about having to carry Jesus' cross for him 3) does coating your currants and fruit peel really help keep the fruit from sinking 4) Judas didn't choose to get a second chance, and contemporary bakers leave him out of the equation (Google Easter cakes and see what I mean, some cakes traditionally only have 11 marzipan eggs on top!)...tsk tsk...

Since Hubby's Parental Units are due back this week, we thought we'd make and Easter Cake and some cookies. I pulled an Earl Grey Tea cookie / shortbread recipe off Nibbledish, but in a pre-coffee haze this morning, couldn't remember what a stick of butter weighs. I called across to Hubby at the computer, asking him to please find out because the bookshelf was "too far away". Tappity tap tap. Mr Engineer over there mumbles "the density of butter is 0.911 g/cm3...therefore 125ml of butter is 113.875 g..." which of course earned him a Wife Look. Yes, knowing the density of butter will come in really handy some day. For example, if anyone offered to drop a cubic meter of butter of me, I could work it out and be able to say "no thanks" with authority...

Whereas if you sneak a look My Way, your favorite search engine may return a chart called "Butter Measurement Translation Chart to Defeat Nefarious Recipe Writers", which has worked it all out for you in a printable little table. Ahem. Next time I'll just walk to the bookshelf, hey?

And Easter Cake! Wow, where do you start? I suppose, being the holiest day of the year for many cultures, it's not surprising how many types of celebratory cakes there are to choose from! We eventually decided on pashka, a Russian style dessert. We didn't start give up the traditional foods for Lent, but now, reading the recipe, I wish we had...I think there's enough dairy in here to cover the last 40 days!! Eggs, ricotta, sour cream, Philly cream cheese...eek..yum...eek...yum...

Well, I'm off to unbag a few packets of Lady Grey...I'm sure that's insufficient calory-burning exercise to warrant even a tablespoon of pashka...nevertheless...

Happy Easter!

Recipe: Tiramisu Three Ways

When my brother and his housemate J helped us to move house, we thanked them with a big lamb shank dinner plus tiramisu.

J wanted to learn how to make Tiramisu, so I’ve compiled three recipes, ranging from Easy to Effort.

The “Oh No’s” were something I made up, the Medium one is probably a basic one found all over the internet, and the Effort one is from a lovely Italian cookbook (will post an edit later for a proper credit). 

Leave a comment if you’d like me to email you the neat little A4 PDF document…I’m not sure what blogspot will do to my neat little tables...

I wish I had a photo, because they always present really well, but they always disappear too quickly to be photographed!! 

Bill Granger does an ice cream version in the latest issue of Delicious mag…I’m not sure how I feel about it yet…any volunteers to come guinea pig with me? ;)

 

Easy.   I call these “Oh No’s” because if you forget that someone is coming over for dinner (oh no) you can whip these up really quickly. 

 

Ingredients: 

Custard:

300 ml thick cream

250 g mascarpone

¼ cup icing sugar

 

Base:

1 packet biscuits

100 ml Kahlua or Cointreau

100 ml strong coffee

 

Topping:

Drinking chocolate

Chocolate curls

 

Method:

Make custard – beat the cream and sugar till stiff; fold in the mascarpone and 1/3 the liqueur.

Make base – combine the rest of the liqueur with the coffee and brush onto the biscuits (or dip the biscuits in the liquid but be careful not to make them too soggy).

Fill your trifle dish / wine glasses with alternating layers of base and custard, finishing with a layer of custard. 

Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate at least two hours and up to 24.  Just before serving, dust with chocolate.    

 

 

Medium.  Involves eggs, minus the cream. 

 

Ingredients: 

1 C mascarpone

3 egg yolks

¼ C castor sugar

2 T liqueur mixed with

2 T coffee

 

12 biscuits

2 T liqueur mixed with

2 T coffee

 

Drinking chocolate

Chocolate curls

 

Method:

Beat egg yolks in bowl with the castor sugar until smooth, and then add the liqueur and coffee and beat again.   Brush the biscuits with coffee and liqueur as you use them, layer in a bowl and chill.    

 

 

Effort.  Involves whole eggs.   The Italian cookbook says tira mi su means ‘pick me up’ and that the dessert started as a ‘nourishing dish’ to be eaten when feeling low. 

 

Ingredients:

 

5 eggs, separated

¾ C / 170 g castor sugar

300 g mascarpone

1 C / 250 ml cold strong coffee

3 T liqueur

36 sponge fingers

80 g dark chocolate, finely grated

 

Method:

Beat the egg yolks with the sugar until the sugar dissolves and the mixture is light / fluffy. 

Add the mascarpone and beat till smooth. 

Whisk the egg whites (in a clean dry glass bowl) until soft peaks form.

Fold into the mascarpone mixture. 

Mix the coffee and the liqueur in a shallow dish; dip enough biscuits to cover the base of your dish (say 10 inch square).  Arrange biscuits in one tightly packed layer in base. 

Spread half the custard mix over, another layer of coffee-dipped biscuits, then finish with the custard, smoothing top neatly. 

Chill, dust with chocolate before serving.   

 

 

General Tiramisu Notes:

The recipes tend to serve at least four (or two hungry boys).  ‘Biscuits’ = sponge finger or lady’s finger biscuits.  You can also substitute a plain French vanilla cake recipe for the biscuits to make a tiramisu cake instead.  Make your coffee early; hot coffee results in soggy biscuits (eww).  At a pinch, you can substitute the 1 cup mascarpone with 1 cup cream cheese beaten in with 2 tbsp castor sugar.  Liqueur – some recipes call for brandy or sweet Marsala.  You can make a fruity version by using Framboise and pureed raspberries instead of the other liqueurs and coffee.  The topping can be drinking chocolate (easiest), cocoa sifted with icing sugar (substitute), or just cocoa, grated chocolate or chocolate curls (use veggie peeler and a block of 80% Lindt dark).

 

Recipe: Duck Salad

It's been awhile since we've had an official Jameliche night! Some of the Jameliche-ites meet regularly for Bruncheroos, and we've possibly got a Jameliche coming up in April to celebrate the visit of an ex-Jameliche-ite who now lives in Hong Kong...watch this space.

In the meantime, here's another recipe from our home! I had a late night at work, and although I'd planned the meal, I came home to discover that Hubby had prepped most of it and was about 10% off finishing. Ah bliss! What inspired me to blog it: he said he felt very 'restauraunteurish' and gourmet while making it, and I hope you do too; it's a lovely way to inject abit of weekend glamour into a low fuss, 'school night' meal!

Troy's Duck Salad

(Serves 2, and he deserves the credit, he made it work!)

10-12 small mushrooms (cleaned, trimmed and marinated in lemon juice, thyme and parsley)

2 large beetroots (ends trimmed and sandy bits washed off)

1 parsnip (peel, then ribboned with a veggie peeler)

2 duck breasts (score skin and season)*

2 serves of mixed salad leaf (better than plain lettuce or spinach; you want the rocket or mesculin to cut through the duck)

1 orange (peeled, seeded and segmented)

handful of whole walnuts

handful of mint leaves (chopped)

Dressing

Juice of 1 orange (make it two if it's a depressed lil' orange)

1-2t Dijon mustard

2t honey

1-2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped (or not, if you don't mind...)

1/2c (80ml) olive oil (or approximate a 1:1.5 ratio of juice:oil)

salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 180degC. I like to warm up the roasting tray (with a layer of foil) in the oven.

Boil beetroot in salted water till tender (about 20 mins).

Drain and cool; peel and quarter.

Place duck, skin side down, on cold frying pan, on medium heat, for about 5 minutes.

Transfer duck, skin side up, to your roasting tray.

Dip parsnip into the duck fat before arranging on the tray.

Scatter beetroot on the tray.

Roast for about 10 minutes to achieve a medium cooked duck.

Remove tray from oven** and allow to rest while you assemble the salad.

Mound leaves in bowl, scatter walnuts through and arrange orange segments over.

Layer beetroot, parsnip and mushrooms, then slice the duck and array on top.

Dress. Add more salt (I'm loving this pink salt I got from Epicurious...the lady told me it's the salt they use at El Bulli...I haven't verified this by any means but I just couldn't go past the pink...)

Drizzle dressing and garnish with mint.

Notes:

*If you live near Mt Hawthorn or Inglewood, you can buy duck off the shelf at Meat @ The Mezz and Mondo's; ours came home frozen on Saturday and just defrosted in the fridge for two nights and finished defrosting at room temp for an hour on the bench plus 20 minutes in some warm water. I don't own a microwave, I loathe them...they make me a lazy cook!

** And if you've thought about your meals well enough, you can now put your two types of pumpkin into the oven to roast while you eat, so that tomorrow night's pumpkin soup is a walk in the park ;)

What can I say, I'm married to a total genius. We had the salad with a drop of Hardys Regional Reserve Merlot 2004. It's soft, plummy and vanilla-ish, and they forgot to try it with duck, otherwise I'm sure they would've recommended it on the label!

The warm duck was perfect for the cooling, autumn nights. The slightly bitter leaves, crunchy earthy walnuts, tangy orange, salty beetroot, herby mushrooms and fragrant parsnip...very good friends indeed!

What made the night extra enjoyable was the fact that we slipped into our evening at home together over the first glass of wine, a little household custom that we've been neglecting for awhile. Sometimes our days get so busy, it's hard to remember to put our relationship and our 'home selves' forward, when our 'work selves' and professional faces have taken charge for the last eight to 12 hours! It's lovely to come home and 'debrief' over a cup of tea or a glass of wine, to slowly transition into being at home and being together, before bustling around to get dinner ready or do chores around the house.

Glasses of wine and a lil' gourmet...a nice, easy way to inject a Moment into my week...Happy Monday!

Recipe: Vietnamese meatballs (cha bo)

I've recently developed an amusing and strange aversion to sunshine. OK, I'll admit, I'm generally not a summer bunny; my favorite kind of day: clear skies with lots of sun but a maximum of 16 to 20degC. Anything above 24degC is Too Hot. So how did I survive the Perth summer days of 35 and 40 plus? A bemused girlfriend suggested ice packs. Yes, ice packs, lots of gin and tonics, and limes.

Bags of limes. We'll grow our own lime trees one day, but in the meantime, I'm held ransom to highway robbery at our friendly local supermarket chains. I can't understand why limes cost so much more than lemons. I won't Google it, but I think it's because of pirates. Yarr, and yes, the influx of pirates in our community has driven up the cost of limes. Go on, prove me wrong? ;)

Anyway, as the season changes (it was 10deg on the train platform the other morning, yahoo!), we're looking for easy dinners that suit the weather. This one has a hint of summer, abit more warmth for the cooler weather, and yes, limes. The Vietnamese have really perfected balanced flavors in each mouthful - sweet, salty, spicy, hot and sour, and often with soup, noodles, lots of fresh veggies or all of the above!

Here's a great recipe we tried the other night, enjoy!

Vietnamese meatballs
(Serves 2)

Dipping Sauce (nuoc cham) (Make first so it cools while you make the patties)

1t Castor / palm sugar

1t rice vinegar

3T water

2T fish sauce

1 garlic clove, finely chopped

1 chilli, finely chopped (size and seeds up to you)

1 lime, juiced

Combine sugar, vinegar and water in small pain, boil and reduce to simmer ~2 minutes till sugar is dissolved.

Remove from heat, allow to cool, stir everything else in.

Patties
3T sesame seeds or 2T sesame oil <if making salad, toast extra seeds to scatter on top>

1t cumin seeds

2-3 beef steaks of your choice* or 250g minced beef
1-3 cloves garlic, finely chopped (or process with the steaks)
4 stalks spring onions, finely chopped (or process with the steaks)
1t curry powder
1t sugar (or even better, grate a smidgen off a round of palm sugar)
2T coconut cream
fish sauce to taste

Soak about 8 bamboo skewers for 30 minutes, or use your metal ones.
Dry roast the sesame and cumin seeds for about 1 minute. If you're feeling meh, just grind up the cumin and use sesame oil, it's still good!
Tip into a big bowl with everything else (see, I said easy!) and season ( I tend to leave salt out if using fish sauce).
Shape into patties, cover and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes while you make your accompaniments.
Anyone know if it's better to skewer now or skewer later? I don't think it makes a diff, I skewer before chilling so I don't get meaty hands again!
Anyway, if you made big patties, thread onto parallel skewers to hold better, otherwise pop the lil ones along single skewers.

When ready, heat your BBQ or charcoal grill...it was too late that night so we used a cast iron grill plate on a gas stove, cook about 3-4 minutes each side.
Bonus limes: grill halves / wedges to serve
Hubby also grilled up a few stalks of spring onion, because he knows I value presentation, even on a school night ;)

Salad & dressing
1-2 Lebanese cucumbers, peeled and ribboned with a veggie peeler
1 red capsicum, seeds removed and cut into really thin strips
half a punnet of cherry tomatoes, halved

Mix up a few tablespoons of the leftover coconut cream, a splash of sweet chilli sauce and a tablespoon of natural yogurt (I couldn't bear to make the dressing completely out of the coconut cream, not sure if the yogurt, being a Greek style one, was any better in the calorie department!!)
Sprinkle sesame seeds over.

I think it would've been lovely with abit of coconut rice too (if you don't know how, Google 'nasi lemak Amy Beh' for an easy recipe), which would've used up the rest of the coconut cream.

Notes
*1)I like to mince my own meat, 2)my food processor was one of the best gifts ever, thank you Aunty C, 3)that way you can choose how lean or fatty your meat is, 4)you actually KNOW what went into your meal.

And I suppose you already guessed what happened to the leftover lime...mmm...gin... ;)