everyday experiments with food
This worked really well, despite my initial doubts. Chicken marinated in lime juice and coriander leaves, then fried in cajun spices. Salad of radicchio leaves, red onion slices, cherry tomatoes, sliced snow peas, mandarin slices, radish slices, home-made feta, baby basil leaves. Orange juice squeezed over the top. Sea salt. Drizzled with orange-infused balsamic vinegar which is to die for. I would make it again.
Christmas dinner is something of a gastronomic event in our house.
We decided to have the entree as lunch instead of with the evening meal. BBQ prawns marinated overnight in lemon and lime juice, garlic, lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, chilli, black pepper and prawn oil. Served with a salad of cos lettuce, charred baby capsicum, cherry tomatoes, sliced zucchini and avocado and a dressing of palm sugar, fish sauce, lemon juice and diced chilli.
Here’s the dinner menu, served with Bird in Hand Sparkling Pinot Noir.
Spiced Duck Breast with Cherry Sauce
This started with an Ottolenghi recipe (from his book “Ottolenghi“), with the duck marinated overnight in a spice mix of crushed fennel and cumin seeds, pepper and salt. I made a duck with red wine sauce base from a Masterchef recipe (vol 2. p144). Then giving Ottolenghi a twist I added a few star anise and about 15 cherries and cooked it down. This worked really well….
Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi are my favourite chefs at the moment. Not only are Ottolenghi’s restaurants famous, the cookbooks are sensational. Here’s our second experiment with blood orange.
One my aims on this blog is to share my own inventions, but also to share one great recipe from one of the cookbooks on my shelves and encourage you to go an buy it!
Here’s the recipe on his website. It’s the kind of thing that you’d expect from Kylie Kwong, except that she uses blood plums.
The website has lots of sensational recipes here.
I served it on top of a carrot and sweet potato mash, with asparagus and Jerusalem artichokes, and a chilli as garnish. Very, very yummy.
I’ve just made by first batch of duck prosciutto, thanks to a simple recipe in Feast Magazine (Issue 36, October 2014). Tastes excellent.
