I haven’t posted in a while so I thought I’d put up some home cooking. My usual stuff looks ugly as, but I always tend to splurge during Christmas and New Year.
In 2017 I bought a couple of live marron, and enjoyed them so much that I bought another one in 2018! One half was grilled, while I extracted the meat from the other half to form a salad of sorts, and then dressed with salmon roe, lemon, micro ice plant.
I also wanted to practise my knifework a bit. In the past year I’ve seen a few videos where super sharp knifes just slide through tomatoes, and while I don’t own a knife that can do that, I decided to try anyway. I took my Global to a knife sharpener, who commented that my knife was still sharp, and I explained I wanted it a tad sharper. I think he was a little confused as to why I wanted it even sharper, but he did it anyway. Lo and behold, much tomato slicing ensued!
I also noticed that because the slices were so thin, overlapping them made for pretty colours!
The final result, a pretty take on caprese salad. There weren’t any moneybag burrata at the shop I usually visit, so I settled for a fiore di burrata instead – which was smaller, and didn’t have as much of a creamy centre. Still tasty though!
I found a duck ballotine at the shops, but coming in at over 2kgs and costing $110, it was way over my budget. Instead I bought some duck pieces, and this was a duck breast with fennel and garlic. It actually turned out really yummy! I paired it with roasted heirloom carrots and charred witlof. So good!
This was actually the most surprising dish I made. I’d seen it featured at a restaurant (pub) in Sydney called The Dolphin Hotel, and it looked so simple, that I wondered if it would be worth the cost, if I ever ended up there and it was on the menu. Well, I’m not in Sydney, but I could try making my own! Was it just roe and avocado? Were there other ingredients I didn’t know about? No clue, so I decided to make up my own version! Hass avocado with Meander Valley creme fraiche, Yarra Valley salmon roe, some wakame salt, a dash of lemon, and olive oil. This was way better than I expected, and I think it was the creme fraiche that made all the difference. I wasn’t sure that avocado fat, cream fat, olive oil would be a good combo, but it turns out the tanginess from the creme fraiche worked so well! I should make it again!
More knifework, just because I can. I was feeling peckish and decided to make some hand sliced potato crisps, and then dolloped some sour cream (I ran out of creme fraiche :() and topped it with golden trout roe. I also realised that I hadn’t used any gold foil in this set of cooking adventures, so I decided to overkill it, just cause I could.
And that’s all for now. Hopefully I will have more fun food adventures this year!