Scallop and Coriander Won Tons with Sweet Chilli Sauce

From Spice by Christine Manfield page 255

This recipe was relatively easy to put together. I made this as an appetizer before a Sunday BBQ... with a little help from my kitchen hands.

The ingredients are accessible, and the inclusion of the coriander root gives it more of an authentic South-East-Asian flavour. Anything that involves pastry / filling / rolling / generally-getting-messy is a lot of fun.

We probably need a little work on our dumpling making technique, but for a quick throw-together it was all we needed.

(plus we cheated on the chilli sauce and used store-bought stuff)

Happy cooking!

Rose Pudding

Underground Cook's daughters are big fans of a very educational show called Horrible Histories.

On occasion, as part of this show's accurate review of history, recipes are presented. M decided she was keen to cook a medieval recipe - Rose Pudding - for us for dessert the other night.

What a tasty dessert! It starts with rose petals. Add milk, cream, dried fruits, spices, sugar, and all of the other ingredients I didn't quite catch, and you're left wondering if those medieval times were really all that tough if they had this stuff for dessert every night!

Mind you, the recipe did make use of our 'medieval blender'. Without such a device those in the middle ages may have had something a little more thorny to contend with, as illustrated in M's artistic impression of the Rose Pudding.

Add feet, teeth, and other assorted body parts (in lolly form of course) and you start to get more of the medieval vibe.

Happy cooking!

Spiced eggs in coconut milk

From Spice by Christine Manfield page 193

I think I almost have a new favorite spice paste after this dish.

Or perhaps a new third place after laksa and massaman. (there's green curry paste as well - who can choose!!)

The inclusion of the black-beans in the paste gives it a Chinese angle which is a great combination. The recipe included what I thought was going to be way too much belacan (on top of the belacan already on the spice paste), but the dish was in no way too pungent. The flavours seemed to go really well with the eggs.

I did use a little extra coconut milk which didn't seem to matter as the flavours were quite rich.

Plus I dropped out one of the eggs to keep it to an odd number for presentation.

Happy cooking!

Roasted corn-fed chicken with saffron and cashew rice pilaf and tomato cardamom sauce

From Spice by Christine Manfield page 164

This dish was a straight-forward, built upon a previous recipe - Saffron and Cashew Rice Pilaf.

The 'correct' way to do this dish is to tunnel-bone the chicken, then roast stuffed with the rice pilaf. I'm no tunnel-boner - so I made the 'slightly modified' version - by roasting the chickens basted in the prescribed annatto pepper oil.

The chickens didn't come out looking as red as I expected (a problem with my oil and / or basting I think), and they were a little over cooked (...a problem with my cooking I think).

Either way - a great combination of flavours.

Tunnel boning... one day...

Food Resembling the Animal It Came From

So we were making pork roast the other night. For any food lover I don't need to go into detail about why roast pork is so good, but the best part in the opinion of many is the crackling!

The wifey got me to cut off the skin, prepare, and put in the oven when the roast was resting. I prepared it as you would, scoring the skin and rubbing with salt. I promise I did nothing more to trim or reshape the skin.

It came out looking like this:

Does that look like a pig to you??!!!?!?

Admittedly we added a tiny curl of cauliflower for the eye, but the rest is as it came out of the oven. You can even make out the mouth.

By adding more assorted vegetables, the effect becomes even better.

Rather than preserving such a chance freakish reminder of the source of our crackling in a picture frame / display / shrine to preserve for the many generations to follow as a lesson and a prod to our conscience regarding the blah blah blah blah blah...

...the smell of the crackling got to us and we couldn't help ourselves.

Yummo!