Archives for August 2019

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Blog: Rocking winter fruits

Best balls & baked beauties – read all the bits and bobs about them!

Tamarillos Baked with Maple Syrup

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? YES!

Tamarillos – golden and red beauties

When I grew up these little beauties were called tree tomatoes. Where does the name tamarillo come from?

Maple Syrup

Want to use less sugar in baking? Substitute maple syrup for sugar … just make sure you use the real thing.

Meatballs with Peppers & Red Onions

Mid-week meatballs!

Roll ’em up and roll ’em out

Dip, dunk or smother … making tender juicy meatballs is easy with the tricks of the trade at your fingertips.

Meatballs – Never been easier, never been better!

Little round things it seems appeal to the eye and are good in the mouth, morsels of food you can shove in without having to worry too much about chewing and swallowing. Little nuggets of flavour. Mmmm, they’re pretty damned good.

Blog: I’m not going to prattle on …

But who said you can’t eat potatoes after dark?

Baked Kumara

Ohhhh … would you look at that! Zero prep. Zero leftovers. Scrumptious.

Potato Perfection

Everything you need to know to find potato Heaven. Get ’em on!

Crusty-baked Jacket Potatoes

Yes, they’re pretty delicious with lashings of butter and flaky sea salt, but what else can you do with them?

Carrot & Cinnamon Salad

Add a pop of colour to your plate!

Cinnamon

Cinnamon is slightly sweet, slightly earthy and slightly hot.

Bolognese Sauce with Pappardelle

The crimes committed under the recipe name Bolognese! Tsk. Tsk. It takes time to chop vegetables finely, to cook them slowly to extract flavour and to cook everything down to a rich and pulpy sauce. Give it time and you’ll be rewarded with a delicious sauce.

Plenty of bang for your buck

Check out Rag Noodles with Fresh Walnuts (below). This is a super-simple dish to make, and the perfect home for a first attempt at making pasta. You can use all the raggedy pieces and make them look like you meant them to look this way!

Fresh pasta versus dried

The texture of quality dried pasta is like worn suede, if you can imagine that, not smooth, not furry but somewhere in between.

101 Making Pasta

Don’t despair if your first attempts produce holey shredded dough (mine did!) because with a little practice you’ll soon be turning out silky smooth sheets of pasta like a pro.

Rag Noodles with Fresh Walnuts

This sauce is made in less time than it takes to cook pasta!

Semolina

Make semolina your friend when rolling out fresh pasta.

Parmesan cheese, grana cheese and grana padano

Those Italians! How can you not love a cheese whose recipe remains unchanged since at least the thirteenth century?

Home is where the heart is

Home-cooked meals. Don’t you love them? It’s something most of us think about, dream about, reminisce about. If you were lucky, a mother, grandmother, or an auntie, or someone who emanated cheerfulness, warmth, caring and love (they were all women when I grew up, but don’t take offence, slip in whoever it was, or whoever you wanted it to be), stood by the stove, stirring pots of gorgeousness (yep, that’s a word), food that smelled so good you couldn’t wait to eat it, food that tasted so good you licked the plate clean (well, as a kid …), and food that spread such a wonderful feeling of happiness deep in the pit of your stomach. Read more …