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Hot Sauce Week

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I was given a bunch of these chillies this week so I thought I’d dive into making hot sauce! I’ve made BBQ sauces quite a few times, mainly from or inspired by the ones in this book. I can’t find it in print any more. It has 8 basic sauces from different regions in the US.

Thanks to Eat Your Books, I can search my 100+ cookbooks for recipes by ingredient. Thinking these were scotch bonnet chillies, I found some recipes in my cookbooks and then went looking for a few more online. All in all about 15 recipes to choose from. So I then went shopping to collect a heap of ingredients (only to find that suddenly there are NO mangoes in the shops)…. 

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Grand Final Sausage Rolls

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Today should be the Australian Rules Football Grand Final – it is always the last Saturday in September. Thanks to COVID-19 and a late start to a shortened competition, the Final is going to be a month late.

Nevertheless, why not still make Grand Final Sausage Rolls. Eat some today and freeze some for next month! It’s a Win-win (unlike the actual game)!

Here’s the recipe that I made up today. It’s pretty good.

750g pork mince
2 eshallots (or 1/2 onion) diced finely and sauteed
1 grated carrot
4 tsp garlic
1 tbsp + 1 tsp freshly, coarsely  ground fennel seeds (measure after you grind them)
1 tbsp cracked black pepper
1 tbsp sea salt
1 tbsp tomato paste
1/2 – 1 cup fresh bread crumbled

4 sheets puff pastry
1 egg for brushing
Sesame seeds

 

Feta and Lamb Gozleme

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Tonight I made gozleme for the first time, and it turned out really well. I hunted my cookbooks and online for recipes, and they were all varied. Some had yeast and some didn’t. Some were flour and oil. Some included yoghurt. In the end I based it on this recipe from Gourmet Traveller.

I made half the dough recipe for the two of us.

100g wholemeal flour
200g plain flour
130ml water
75ml plain yoghurt
1 tbsp vegetable oil

I mixed these in the bread machine for 10 minutes.

Read the recipe to see how to roll it out. I think I added too much oil in the rolling process, as it was a little greasy.

Once rolled and folded, the dough rested for about half an hour and that was fine, as it absorbed the oil more and softened.

For the filling I combined
shredded silverbeet leaves (raw)
spring onions
finely chopped roast lamb
minced garlic
home-made feta
mozarella
2 tsp Turkish spice mix from Herbie’s Spices
juice of 1/4 lemon
black pepper and sea salt

Assemble and cook as in the recipe.

It’s a bit of work to roll out the dough. I was really happy with the finished thickness and texture.

BBQ Whiting with Tarragon Butter Sauce

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Here’s my first attempt at a dish from Josh Niland’s remarkable and scary cookbook “The Whole Fish”. Josh is renowned for using the whole fish. THE WHOLE FISH.

I surprised the person at the local fish market (a favourite haunt) when I said that I wanted to scale and gut the whiting myself. Having done that, I lost the will to attempt to cook the scales or guts.

I then laboriously reverse-butterflied and pinboned 4 whiting. I took AGES, but I improved. I kept the bones and heads and made some fish stock to go into the sauce. c

The sweet potato, sliced fennel bulb and fish were cooked on the BBQ.

I must admit that I tweaked Josh’s sauce recipe.

300ml of the fish stock that I’d made
1/2 cup of white wine (the recipe said verjuice and we were out of it)
A piece of orange peel
Some fennel seeds
Fresh tarragon from the garden

Reduce it all down and add 80g butter.  The sauce was fantastic. The peas go realy well.

A great meal.