I'm in love

Don't tell Don, but I'm in love...with my new gas wok ring, that is.

For the past 12 years I've only had an electric stove top on which to cook, which was totally usesless for stir-frying and wok cooking. But that all changed a few weeks ago and I'm now the proud owner of a majorly grunty Ilve wok ring, a Bosch induction hob and one (soon to be two) Miele ovens...and a huge Visa bill.

All these appliances were bought in anticipation of a major kitchen overhaul later this year / early next.

At lunch time today it was fab to be able to pop upstairs and quickly whip up a decent stir fry. See?

And now for a gratuitous close up. Yum, that monster bit of chilli was great!

Trouble is, it's been so long since I cooked with gas that I don't know how to properly control the flame, as my old, rusting wok now attests:

Does anyone have an opinion as to which is best - a stainless steel or a common garden wok?

Crumbs!

Despite another relapse yesterday, I've been pretty good on the gluten-free front (refer blog 'Gluten-free glue: http://annasfoodsafari.blogspot.com/2010/07/gluten-free-glue.html)

But what is a Mum to do when her 11-year-old proudly bakes his first pizza and really, really, really wants you to have a taste? For the record, it was yum! Anyway, I'm going to be pragmatic and avoid gluten where practicable but not get too worried if I really want to eat something with gluten in it.

A good thing about going gluten-free is that it largely keeps me away from the temptation of the cake tin. Most weeks I bake something yummy for the kids' school lunches and sometimes feel tempted to undertake (quite a bit of) quality control. I work from home, so the cake tin and its goodies is always handy.

A bad thing about going gluten-free is that the cake tin is usually off limits when a snack attack hits. Sometimes fruit just does not do the biz. We've had some quite cold weather over the past week, which bumped up my appetite and got me thinking of caaaake. A lot.

The weather has warmed up and my appetite has abated, but I thought I'd have a go at making a flourless walnut cake with the pre-shelled and diced walnuts that I bought at the Food Show. Here's the recipe:

350 g walnut meal, lightly toasted

5 eggs, separated

200 g caster sugar

1/4 tsp vanilla essence

Preheat the oven to 180 C. Grease a 24 cm springform tin and line the base with baking paper.

Beat egg yolks until smooth then gradually add in sugar. Beat for about 4 minutes until misture is thick and creamy.

Transfer mixture to a large bowl. fold in walnut meal and vanilla.

In a clean bowl, beat the egg whites until firm peaks form. Fold 1/3 of the egg white mixture into the walnut mixture, then add remaining egg white.

Spread the mixture into the tin and bak for 20 min or until cooked. Cool cake completely in the oven with the door ajar.eheat oven to 180 C. Grease a 24 cm springform pan and line the base with baking paper.

(Recipe courtesy of Uncle Joe's: www unclejoes.co.nz)

For some reason I had the hankering to turn it into a European-style cake by splitting it horizontally and smearing the middle with raspberry jam. The cake was very crumbly so it took quite some doing without destroying it in the process.

Here's how cakey looked after its little operation:

Don't you just love the mis-en-place. More like 'messy place'!

Keeping with the European theme, I made cinnamon icing (something I invented specially for this cake). It's yum: just put a tsp of ground cinnamon with the icing sugar, then add lemon juice. What do you think of the end result? I think it looks really funky. Maybe there's hope yet for a future food styling career.

Okay, maybe not.

Even though the cake is intended for the kid's lunches, we sampled some (accompanied by whipped cream) after lunch. It's nice but extremely crumbly. It would be impossible for the kids to easily eat it at school, so I consigned it to afternoon tea duty and whipped up a batch of date and walnut muffins for the lunch boxes.

Living on the edge

Every month our family dines out together. Rather than Don and I always choosing the venue, we have a democratic approach whereby everyone takes a turn to choose.

The rules are simple: if it's your turn, you can choose anywhere provided that it's a restaurant (as opposed to a 'restaurant' such as McDonalds, Wendys, etc.). Everyone must accept the choice without complaint, and participate in the meal with good grace. This approach works well, given the extreme differences in our individual food preferences.

This month it was Don's turn to choose. He's a plain food person and wanted to go somewhere 'Kiwi'. We decided to put our Entertainment Guide to good use and, after some consideration, Don opted for a Titirangi restaurant called Toby's.

Even though I'm fairly familiar with Titirangi, cycling through it regularly over the summer, I'd never heard of Toby's so I checked it out on www.dineout.co.nz

The reviews were mixed. Very mixed. Scary even. And it transpired that Toby's had been the subject of a recent 'restaurant rescue' makekover yet to screen on telly.

Suddenly Toby's seemed a dodgy choice, despite the Entertainment Guide's lure of a free main course. What to do? Give it a go and potentially have a disgusting meal? Or try somewhere safer?

We decided to live on the edge and give it a go. Yep, that's our idea of living on the edge. Tragic really.

To cut a long story short, the venue was very pleasant and welcoming - a nice neighbourhood restaurant. It was busy and the service was friendly but a bit disorganised. The food was okay but nothing special. See my review if you want to know more: http://www.dineout.co.nz/restaurant.php?rest=223&Restaurant=Tobys_Restaurant

I'd taken the camera so I could regale you with photos of what we ate but I just couldn't bring myself to whip it out and draw attention to our table by flashing away. And therein lies a weird dichotomy; I have no qualms about snapping away in Asian or ethnic places but can't bring myself to do it in Western style restaurants.

What's that all about?

From yuk to yum

It was a weekend of two food experience halves. Things got off to a bad start on Friday evening when I opted to try Fijian Indian takeaways. For years I've eyed up a Fijian Indian place not far from where I live but, for some inexplicable reason, I've never got round to giving it a go.

Now I know I was wise. I don't know whether the guy picked my Kiwi accent on the phone and assumed I wanted totally flavourless food, or whether all Fijian Indian food is like that. I suspect it's the former.

The dhal tasted of split peas, salt and little else. There were a few mustard seeds floating disconsolately on top, but there were not enough to impart any flavour. Usually one would expect to taste curry leaf and chilli in such a dahl, but not in this case. Snore.

Things didn't get any better with the goat curry and bhindi (okra). Both were seasoned with salt and nothing else. The bhindi was finely minced and fried, but not sauced. Anyone who knows okra knows it has mucilaginous properties and the nett effect of this dish was (skip the next bit if you're squeamish) like eating snotty green lumps (see, warned you).

The warmed up goat and bhindi leftovers the next day were no better, despite a pathetic attempt to jazz it up with a dollop of pad Thai sauce.

Fortunately Saturday night's dinner more than made up for Friday's Fijian flop.

I love spicy, tasty food but my husband does not. Rather than cry into my mashed spuds, earlier this year I decided to form a dinner club of likeminded people. 'Fire Eaters' aims to relish the following: authenticity, flavour, variety and expanded culinary horizons.

I identify a restaurant - Cambodian in last night's case - and work with them to develop a reasonably priced set menu. I then email my fellow Fire Eaters and let them know what's on the menu, how much it will cost, and where and when. People love it because it's so easy - all they have to do is pay me beforehand and turn up.

Twenty-one of us enjoyed last night's dinner at Auckland's only Cambodian restaurant - Sopheara. It was a great evening. Cambodian food is a cross between Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese. We had a number of dishes, but I think my favourites were the two pictured below - battered prawns on a bed of red curry and broccoli, sprinkled with peanuts. What's not to like about battered anything, especially battered prawns?

I really liked the curry sauce, which was more like a light peanut sauce.

The beef salad with fresh Asian herbs, salad greens and crushed peanuts was delicious and refreshing, even if the beef was a little chewy.

We rounded of our meal with sticky rice and coconut milk, which was - oddly enough - accompanied by a scoop of French Vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce. The sticky rice was topped with a disconcertingly grey sauce but despite its unpromising appearance, it all tasted pretty damn good.

Guar bean report

I took the opportunity on Saturday to bust into my Food Show stash and can report that the guar beans weren't amazing. They tasted okay - beany - but were quite stringy.


As my father put it: "you could get the same effect by leaving any kind of bean too long on the vine".

Oddly enough young Rory, who is a pretty fussy eater, liked them and asked for seconds. This is the same boy who turns his nose up at just about everything I cook.

The disappointing beans were off-set by one of the meal's highlights; manuka smoked eggs.

http://www.ch9.co.nz/node/14052

Raw hen's eggs are cold-smoked for many hours, imparting a delicate smoky flavour. The shells look scary - quite blackened at one end - but don't let that put you off trying them. I served them fried. Rory wouldn't even sniff one, let alone taste it.

The rest of us hoovered them up and fought over the leftovers.

We also ate some delicious beef chorizo sausages that I bought at the foodshow.

Just in case you think that I only ever eat weird things, here's what I made for lunch on Saturday (using more Food Show ingredients, including artichoke hearts and washed down with a passionfruit soda made with the syrup I bought at the show):


The white cubes are fried haloumi cheese (bought at the Rotorua market at Easter and recently rediscovered lurking in the depths of my fridge), plus the salad includes baby cos lettuce, cucumber, tomato and Kalamata olives. All very normal fare. At least in our household.





I held off the urge to eat one of the chocolate brownies until the following day when I became mired in a combination of household chores and trying to complete the never-ending rumpus room Roman blind project (something which has dragged on since last year). I HATE sewing Roman blinds and, as the day progressed, found myself getting increasingly grrrrrrrumpy.

I'm not hugely into chocolate, but sometimes there's nothing like having a good old chocolatey pig-out to make life seem sweet again.