Light. Sweet. Crude.

Chorizo & Fennel w/ Penne

This is why I love autumn so much... fennel.  I didn't even know this vegetable existed until a couple of years ago.  OK, that's not entirely true - of course I knew it existed - but I'd never used it in any recipe I'd followed.  And then I was looking for an easy-to-prepare meal for a Gourmet Weekend Away* and found this in one of Donna Hay's first issues.  I've got one other recipe that I've used fennel in (a salad).  And that's all I know about fennel.  I'm not Martha, no matter what you may have heard.

Chorizo & Fennel with Penne
(serves 4)

2 chorizo
2 baby fennel
1 red capsicum (pepper)
1 bunch continental (Italian) parsley
400g penne, prepared according to directions until al dente
freshly grated parmesan cheese

Thinly slice the chorizo and fry in a non-stick frypan until done.  Remove from pan and set aside, leaving the oily goodness in the pan.

Thinly slice the capsicum and fennel, then stir-fry in the oily goodness for about 5 minutes or until it begins to soften.  You can keep cooking this until quite soft if you like, it's up to you.  Throw the chorizo back in and heat through.

Roughly chop the parsley.  Drain the pasta then return it to the big pasta pot with the chorizo, fennel and capsicum.  Toss in the chopped parsley and stir.

Dish up in bowls and sprinkle with an obscene amount of parmesan cheese.

(if you want to see the how-to photos, go over here).(i fixed that link... it was broke)

*Gourmet Weekend Away - once a year PJ and I go with a group of friends (three or four other couples) and we rent a house with a great kitchen and have a three-day cook-off.  We all come home a few kilos heavier.  It's fantastic.  The next one is booked for October and I can hardly wait.

Ella's "Sweet Nibblets" Chicken Pastarama

Tonight, feeling equally inspired by this recipe on The Pioneer Woman Cooks and uninspired by the contents of my fridge, I embarked on a culinary adventure that could only be described as Good Old Australian Ingenuity Meets Good Old American Love Of Cheesy Goodness.  I told Ella I was going to make dinner and it would have chicken in it, and she said "ooh, sweet nibblets, mummy!"  to which I responded " ??? " and she said "I heard that on Hannah Montana."  Fair enough.

So we totally made this up as we went along.

Preheat oven to 180/350

Half a kilo of chicken breast fillets.  Slash through the thickest part with a sharp knife.
500g thin spaghetti, broken up into sticks
One large onion, finely diced
Two or three sticks of celery, finely diced
100gm butter
3 or 4 tablespoons of plain flour
2.5 cups milk, heated in a microwave jug
2 cups frozen peas, corn, carrots (any or all of these)
1.5 cups chicken stock
half a bunch of parsley, finely chopped
A cup of grated cheddar cheese

Put a large pot of water on high heat and bring to the boil.  Gently put the chicken breast fillet in, turn the heat down to simmer and poach.  It will take around ten minutes to cook through.  When it's done, take the chicken out and set aside to cool.  Toss the pasta into the pot.  After about five minutes, toss in the frozen peas etc and cook for another three minutes or until the pasta is al dente.  Drain when this is done and set aside to cool.

Melt the butter in a heavy based saucepan and gently fry the onion and celery.  Sprinkle the onion mixture with the flour and stir (yes, you're making a roux).  Add the milk a bit at a time, stirring, until it's all in and nice and thick (when you're making a roux, adding heated milk a little at a time is the secret to lump-free goodness... unless you're making an oniony-roux in which case the lumps are unavoidable).  Simmer on very low heat, stirring to avoid burning on the bottom.  Add more milk if it's too thick - you want it to be about the consistency of pancake batter.  Rinse the jug from the milk and use it to heat up the chicken stock.

Dice the chicken and toss into the white sauce with the pasta, peas/corn/carrots, parsley.  Stir.  Add enough warm chicken stock to make it nice and 'stirrable' but not too 'soupy.'  (We thought of adding vegies afterwards, so dished those up separately on the plate... a crisp green salad would have been yummy too).  Taste for seasoning, and add whatever you think it needs.  We added a few shakes of garlic salt and some freshly ground black pepper.

Pour the whole lot into an ovenproof dish.  Sprinkle with the cheese, and if you have half a packet of old croutons you've been meaning to use up, throw them on top too.  That's what we did. 

Put into the oven for about half an hour, or until it's all bubbly and crunchy-brown on top.  If you didn't have the croutons but still want the crunchy topping, see if you've got a packet of potato chips in the back of the pantry that the kids haven't discovered yet, and crumble a coupla handfuls of those on top.

Serve with my favourite accompaniment:

Oh lordy.  And yes, it tasted as good as it looks.  I love me some comfort food on a cold autumn night.  Ella had seconds, in case you were wondering.  I only had room for another glass of wine.

By the way - I didn't arrange those peas like that.  I know they look all posed and everything, artistically arranged for balance and cleverly echoing the colours in the wine bottle.  But it was totally random.  Swear to god.  I'm actually THAT clever and naturally talented.

Chicken Noodle Soup

I took some soup around to my friend's house this afternoon.  She's not feeling well but I hope that soup will at least dull the ache for a moment.  I actually took the ingredients over there, chopped up and prepped and ready to go, and gave them to her husband so that he could make the soup himself and maybe feel, for a second, that there was something tangible he could do to make her feel better.  Because when someone you love is sick all you want to do is take away their pain and just fix it and usually that's just not an option.

Chicken Noodle Soup (as it should be)
from The Cook's Companion by Stephanie Alexander

4 large dried shiitake mushrooms
1/2 cup shredded snow peas
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 tablespoon light soy sauce
1 tablespoon rice wine
1 litre well-flavoured chicken stock
1 1/2 cups shredded, skinless, cooked chicken breast
1 slice leg ham, shredded
250g egg noodles, boiled and drained

Soak mushrooms in warm water for 30 minutes.  Discard stems and finely slice caps. Toss snowpeas in boiling water for 30 seconds then run under cold water to stop cooking.  Set aside.

Heat oil in a heavy-based saucepan large enough to hold all the ingredients and saute mushrooms for one minute.  Add soy sauce and rice wine and stir.  Add stock and bring to the boil.  Drop in noodles, chicken and ham and stir gently to mix well.  Drop in snow peas and taste for seasoning.  Adjust with extra drops of soy sauce, if necessary.

To serve, lift noodles out first and divide between heated bowls, then ladle in the soup.

Variation: Substitute or add sliced cooked pork or seafood.  Alternative seasonings might include chilli and Vietnamese mint.  Bean sprouts can also be added.

Trish's variations: a handful of sliced regular button or swiss brown mushrooms work just as well.  Garnish with chopped coriander and shallots/spring onions.  Add steamed, chopped English Spinach at the end for added vegie goodness.  Udon or soba noodles, or rice vermicelli, are all good alternatives to egg noodles.  Angel hair pasta would even do. 

Tinned soup, from scratch

I've just made soup, with lots of help.  You can make it, too. 

One bag of Woolworths vegetable soup mix (chopped carrots, parsnip, celery, leeks, and other stuff)
One tin chick peas, drained
One tin lentils, drained
One bottle tomato passata (or one tin chopped tomatoes)
Cup of water (or chicken/vegetable stock if you have it handy)

Heat some olive oil in a large saucepan, then fry the vegetable soup mix for a few minutes until the vegetables soften and start to smell yummy.

Add the chick peas, lentils, passata and water.

Bring to the boil then simmer gently for a while.  Maybe 15 minutes. 

Secret ingredient: a tablespoon of Fruit Chutney.  My sister adds this stuff to casseroles and spaghetti bolognese and swears it makes everything taste better. 

I thought it tasted a bit sweet, so I added a generous pinch of salt.

That's better.  I might add some extra liquid and throw in a handful of pasta.  Or just add some extra liquid so that it's not quite so chunky.  I love that about soup - you can stand there tweaking it this way and that, until it's just right.

And that's it.  I've got a pot of pumpkin soup on the other hotplate, bubbling away, and the whole house smells like soup.  In a good way.

Take THAT, girlfriend!

Someone found my site when they googled "what do I do now that I'm a kept woman?"

Let me tell ya, honey.  You start by making chicken stock.  Why?  Because you can. 

I had coffee with my friend Ann the other day, and the weather in Canberra has just turned chilly so of course we started talking about what kind of food we'll need to start cooking.  Ann's a kept woman, too.  But she doesn't do chicken stock.  We were talking about making large quantities of soup, and I was extolling the virtues of home made chicken stock, and she crinkled up her nose and said she can't be bothered and anyway, does it really make that much difference because frankly I'd rather go for a pedicure?

Ann, Ann, Ann.  Let me tell ya, honey.  Any kind of soup, any kind of anything, is improved beyond measure when made with home made stock.  It is SOOOO worth the effort.  And it's not even that much effort.

Oops, forgot to take photos.  You'll have to use your imagination.

Get your biggest pot and put as many dead chickens as you can possibly fit into it.  My local supermarket very considerately sells the de-feathered kind, so I put at least three 'chicken frames' into the pot.  Today, though, I went a little nuts, and put in FIVE.  I know, crazy, right? 

I told Ann that you need to add your aromatics to the pot and she gave me a look that I totally deserved.  A look that said 'Trish, you're a wanker.'  Aromatics is just a fancy way of saying celerycarrotsonions.  I'm fresh out of celery so I just put an onion and a couple of carrots.  And then I threw in two old mushrooms, and a chopped up sweet potato.  If I had a bunch of parsley I'd have put it in there too, but I didn't. 

It's now 5.50pm and those chooks have been bubbling away for nearly four hours.  They're about done.  So now I'm going to strain the liquid into another saucepan, I'm going to throw out all the chicken bones and the mushy veggies, and then I'm going to turn the heat up under the liquid and boil it like crazy for a few minutes to reduce it even more.

And then I'm going to take a couple of litres over to Ann and say THERE! Now you tell me that this stuff is as good as your Campbell's Reduced Fat Real Chicken Stock.   Let's whip up a quick batch of soup with my stock, and a batch of soup with that fake stuff, and let's see if it's as good as mine.

It's just not.

And that's what you do when you're a kept woman.  You make chicken stock and then you challenge anyone to deny that you haven't done something completely valuable with your day.

Potsecret: Vegetarian Lasagne

Over the last few weeks I have been tearing recipes out of my delicious. magazines, and somehow I have managed to end up with three different versions of vegetarian lasagne.  I didn't follow any one specifically to make this, but the idea for the ricotta came from one of them, and the cream in the tomato sauce came from another. 

Look over here for the step-by-step instructions.  Apologies for the last few photos; my camera's battery went dead and I had to use my mobile phone's camera.  When I'm a famous chef I'll have a photographer, and he shall be called Alberto.

Light Sweet Risotto

I gave my risotto recipe to a colleague at work a few months ago, and yesterday she told me she had finally gathered up the confidence to give it a go.  "It was easy!!" she said, surprised at herself.  Yes, it is. 

And if, like Kerrie, you don't think you can make risotto, then THINK AGAIN.

I've made it even more straight-forward for you by taking photos at each step, a la The Pioneer Woman.  Except half of my photos are out of focus.  She must have a camera crew there to help her.  There's no other explanation.

Go on, you can do it.  And it's DELICIOUS.