The night starts here... forget your name... forget your fear...
You drop a coin... into the sea... and shout out "Please come back to me"...
You name your child... after your fear... and tell them "I have brought you here"...

Monday, September 26, 2011

Welcome to Experiment House!

One place that you totally have to go to if you ever come to Perth, Australia, or god forbid if you live in this city already, one place you simply must check out is the Subiaco Markets- and take a word from the wise the earlier the better, in timing I mean, because boy after 9 am those lines get massive!

But anyway, as I'm sure you can guess I have been recently been aquatinted with the marvellous Subi Markets, this Sunday in fact my family decided to be unpredictable for once in their lives and dragged me with them to the markets for a croissant and coffee from the La Galette De France.

Of course when I got there and saw the largest range of fresh fruits and vegetables i'd ever seen in my life, and for prices that were beyond reasonable, I stood there (embarrassingly) gaping like a fish for a good 3 seconds...

Needless to say I grabbed my parents and dragged them into Subi Markets, before going completely spastic surrounded my vegetables... My parent's could only look on with a confused, dazed look on their faces while I picked up vegetables left and right going "OMG its OKRA!", "the fuck? TARO!" "RUBARB! I can never find you anywhere!" "FENNEL! my LOVE!" "mmmmmm artichokesss...mmmmm..." and so on and so forth...

We took a lot of vegetables home that day... and so now, I have a lot of vegetables in our fridge and with some not the faintest clue how to cook them... Okra, for example.... O.o whaaaat?

And so this is where i've dubbed this week "Experiment Week"

Day one: aka today

On the menu this evening was a beef steak (yeah I know not very exciting but we had to use it up ): ) Stir- fried Okra with tomatoes, and Tempura Fennal with candied Chillis.

p.s. I stole both these recipies from the internet, the Okra just from taste.com, however the tempura fennel was from The Kitchen Crusader, whom I suggest you go check out.

Stir- Fried Okra with Tomatoes

you will need:

2 cups fresh okra, washed, trimmed and sliced.
1 large tomato, peeled and sliced into 8 thin wedged
1/4 cup spring onions, sliced
1 1/2 tsp lemon juice
salt and pepper
butter and oil to fry in

What you need to do:

Melt the butter and oil in a skillet or wok.

Dump all the ingredients into said wok and toss around for a good 5-8 minutes

(as you can probably tell i'm not too confident with this recipe, as i've never cooked, or seen anyone cook okra and am sticking to the recipe quiet closely, at least in relation to timing)

I also realise that i forgot to take photos >.>

The end result: It...tasted good shall i say, the parent's loved it... however I felt like I was eating snot... literally, Okra has the consistency of snot... it wasn't too bad however...

Tempura Fennel and Candied Chillis

What you need:

Fennel part:

a large bulb of fennel
2 egg yolks
1 cup iced water
1 cup flour
pinch of salt
oil for deep frying

Chilli bit:
1/4 cup sugar
a cup non-alcholic ginger beer ( or a cup of water and 1/4 cup of sugar)
2 large red chillies, that have been thinly diagonally sliced

What you need to do:

Fennel part:

Heat the oil.

Thinly slice the fennel.

Whisk together the water, salt, flour and egg yolks into a batter.

Dip the fennel slices into the batter, and cook them in the hot oil.

Drain on a paper towel.

Chilli Bits:
Put all the ingredients into a saucepan, bring to the boil, the let simmer for 5-10 minutes stirring occasionally.

End result: OMG AMAZINGI'd never deep fried anything before so i think it turned out rather well thank you very much; fennel has a very strange taste might i say, it could almost be minty at times... you can;t have too much or it gets over powering. But the chillies, oh my FUCK! they were so good, adapting from Julie Powell "Candied Chillies are a revelation, I'm obsessed" (of course in the movie she says braised cucumbers but who cares about that) that pretty much sums up my relation to candied chillies at the moment. OBSESSION

and beef steak is beef steak, just slather it in oil, salt and pepper and let it fry on a really fucking hot pan (:

So hopefully over the next few days i'll be making a mango ketchup ( again from the lady crusader), a rubarb and apple crumble pie thing, i'm not too sure yet, artichokes with... something... maybe hollandaise sauce? homemade hollandaise sauce ;) and asparagus... and some other vegetables that i can't remember...

anyway this is me

taxi xoxo



No comments:

Post a Comment