everyday experiments with food
I’ve just bought a salt block from Williams Sonoma after looking online at a few. It comes from Pakistan. You can use it as a platter, cool it for cheeses or desserts, or heat it and cook at the table.
I chose the Williams Sonoma one because of the size and the metal holder. For $42 it’s not unreasonable just as a fancy platter. But I want to cook with it!
I hunted around online to see how you use these and find some recipes. I’ve started a Pinterest salt block page here.
So how did we go?…
It’s summer here and our ‘fruit salad’ tree is finally full of peaches (red and yellow), but alas no nectarines yet. It is the first year that we’ve had any kind of peach harvest.
So we’re making peach pie, peach tart, peach chutney, and eating fresh peaches.
Here’s a simple salad
Rocket lettuce (arugula)
Red onion, sliced thinly
Radish, sliced thinly
Cherry tomatoes, halved
Green papaya ribbons (substitute zucchini)
Peach slices
Proscuitto (I used Spanish jamon)
Goat curd
Black pepper
The dressing added later was macadamia oil and blood plum vinegar and it went very well.
You could substitute shaved parmesan for the goat curd.
I cooked a half leg of lamb for 15 hours overnight in the souse vide water bath. I use an Anova Precision Cooker stick and a Trespade Vacuum Sealer.
The cooking time came from Dale Prentice’s excellent book “At Home with Souse Vide” (stunning photos by my friend Mike Emmett and his friend Bec at RedFishBlueFish Photo.
Dale is the talent behind Sous Vide Australia. I also bought my smoking gun from them.
The recipe was as follows:
3 tbsp Moroccan spice powder. (For once I used some from a jar.)
1 x 5 cm knob of fresh ginger sliced thinly
3 cloves of garlic, sliced thinly
1 long red mild chilli, sliced and de-seeded
1/3cup white wine
1/3 cup olive oil
2 tbsp fig jam
1 tsp black pepper
1 tsp sea salt
In hindsight I wish I had added juice of 1/2 lemon. Next timeI would stud the meat with the garlic.
After cooking it overnight, I finished it off on the BabyQ gas Weber.
It tastes really good, although next time I’ll use a home-made spice mix to give it more kick.
I’m going to serve it cut up with warm pita bread and accompaniments.
I’ve just made Roti Jala so I thought I’d post in more detail about this. This is a Malaysian lattice pancake that is used to soak up the sauce of a meal. Tonight we ate it with a Chicken Kapitan Curry and some stir-fried vegetables.
We first ate Roti Jala when we visited Malaysia in 2013. When I returned I was desperate to get a roti jala cup, and tried in a few directions, ending up with three! The metal one was brought back from Malaysia by my friend Titus on his first home visit there in years. If you can’t get a cup, the roti gurus just use one cone with a small hole in it! Or you could make holes in a tin can.
I have two quite different recipes for the batter. The first came on the packet of one of the pouring cups.
2 eggs
2 cups of flour
1/2 tsp salt
2 1/2 cups coconut milk
1/2 -1 tsp turmeric powder
Sift the flour, salt and turmeric powder together. Whisk the eggs, then gradually beat them into the flour. Slowly add the coconut milk, beating to get a smooth consistency.
Strain the mixture. Test it with the cup and add more water or flour until you get a smooth flow through the nozzles.
Recipe #2 has more eggs and less coconut and it is here. It comes from Ong Jin Teong’s “Penang Heritage Food.”
You can decide whether you like your roti with more coconut or egg.
You’ll see from the video below that it is easiest to keep something under the roti cup. The mixture will settle, so keep stirring it before you fill the cup each time, otherwise you will need to thin the batter with water towards the end.
Here’s a short video of me from the other night.
Making Roti Jala from Craig Mitchell on Vimeo.
I will confess that on this occasion I bought a jar of curry paste. It was a good decision as the curry was excellent and transported us back to Malaysia. It gave me a better idea of what to aim for when I make the curry from scratch in future.
Good luck hunting for a roti jala cup!