everyday experiments with food
Our Christmas meal is naturally something of a feast, with bits of preparation happening over several weeks, starting with the marinating with the fruit for the Christmas cake. It has become a bit of a tradition to produce a menu as follows (printed back to back and folded).
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Here’s a salad idea from 2013 that I’m bringing over from my old blog’s recipe page. The original recipe, which I varied, can be found here. This was my second time cooking with quinoa, which I struggle to enjoy. But this worked fine!
Ingredients
3/4 cup quinoa, rinsed
2 tomatoes, diced or 1/2 punnet cherry tomatoes, halved
1/2 red onion, quartered and sliced thinly
A large handful of snow peas, sliced crossways
4 radicchio leaves, shredded
1/4 cup parsley leaves, chopped
1/4 cup basil leaves, chopped
1/2 long red (mild) chilli, diced finely
Dressing
1 1/2 tbsp lemon juice
1tbsp extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper
Put quinoa and 1 1/2 cups cold water into a saucepan. Bring to the boil and simmer for 10-12 mins. Drain.
Add salad ingredients and mix gently. Combine oil, lemon juice and salt and pepper. Toss salad.
As well as BBQing some marinated chicken hearts on rosemary branches the other day, I brined and BBQed a chicken with charcoal and hickory wood. I’ve never brined a chicken before, and it came up amazingly moist and tender.
This simple brine recipe comes from “Slow Fire” by Ray Lampe.
Heat 1 cup of water to almost simmering.
Add the following:
2 tbsp sea salt
1 tbsp sugar
1 tsp onion powder
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp black pepper
Mix well and cook until sugar and salt have both dissolved – 3 to 4 minutes.
Put mixture in a bowl and add 1 cup of iced water. Put in the fridge until it is cold.
Place chicken in a plastic bag with the brine, squeeze out as much air as possible and seal the bag. Place in the fridge for 3 -4 hours, turning every hour.
I then cooked the chicken using one of Ray’s spice rubs and served it with some of my kick-ass chipotle BBQ sauce.
There you have it.
We went to the Adelaide Cheese Festival on the weekend and came home with a swag of cheeses. Since we ALREADY had cheese in the fridge, the challenge is to eat it all. So this is a variation on a quattro formagio. Home-made pesto on the base. Then gouda, blue vein, ricotta, and goats cheese, garlic prawns, baked cherry tomatoes, grana padano and baby basil leaves. It was let down a bit by the quality of the prawns but otherwise rich and tasty!