toast
There’s something about a well-toasted piece of bread: one of life’s simple pleasures. When I was working on recipes for a cooking website, the first one I made (complete with photos) was for Vegemite Toast. Sure, it may seem a simple thing, but in my travels, I’ve seen even [...]
honey mustard chicken
I’d volunteered to cook dinner tonight, but had no idea what to cook.
First-time reader Cass left a comment on an old post about cooking with chicken, and I thought “why not”?
Behold, honey mustard chicken. Two brown onions, a generous amount of garlic, small amount of olive oil. [...]
We had friends stay with us last weekend, and so kel prepared a recipe - slow cooked beef - that called for pink peppercorns. In fact, we couldn’t find them for sale in the supermarket, so we settled for a tin of Green peppercorns. I’d never heard of either before.
You’ve probably never thought about pepper [...]
dinner - eye of sauron
I tend to improvise when I cook. As much as I’d like to find a good recipe, and just follow it, I really struggle to find something that I’m keen enough to try, and so I often end up trying to think through what ingredients [...]
dinner - lamb with watermelon salad
It’s been a while since I’ve cooked something worthy of photographing, but last night’s dinner made the grade.
I spotted a recipe in this month’s Delicious magazine that just sounded odd. Lamb with watermelon salad. How does that work, I thought, and so last night [...]
scrambled eggs wrapped in smoked salmon
Much easier than it looks; the photo in delicious magazine was pretty appealing, so I thought I’d surprise kel with a cooked breakfast. A quick trip to the shops, and I was ready to put this together: the scrambled eggs inside the salmon are cooked with a little bit of [...]
Last night I managed to put dinner together: mostly with what I could forage from the fridge. The tough part was working out how to cook the chicken: here’s what I tried, for future reference (I’ll leave out the bit where I didn’t steam the vegetables long enough, because they were more of an afterthought [...]
dinner for three
Originally uploaded by cafedave.
Every time I cook, I seem to forget something. This time, there were two things - check the quantities before you put the ingredients together, and work out how long the different vegetables will take to cook, so that you can steam [...]
The night after lesson one, I turned up for lesson six; this time, we were learning how to cook seafood. A different crowd attended this lesson; they knew each other from some of the other lessons, they were more relaxed in the kitchen, and they talked more: it seems like there had been quite a [...]
another satisfied customer
Originally uploaded by cafedave.
Kel’s old school friend turned up - he’s in town for a course this weekend, so he had the chance to test out my culinary skills; I subbed chicken for fish (long story), and perhaps the unit was a little more smoke-filled [...]
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With the the failed attempt a distant memory, I arrived at lesson one of the cooking school midway through the safety talk, and was promptly offered a (light) beer: this is clearly a cooking school that understands its target market.
Why was I running late [...]
roast
Originally uploaded by cafedave.
Last night was my turn to cook, while kel had her first relaxing evening in a long while. I thought I’d try and show her how much I appreciate all the cool dinners she’s made for me, so instead of the easy-to-prepare stir-fry, I [...]
Kel’s deep disappointment with my knife-wielding skills - combined with a offer too good to refuse (50% off!) - allowed me to extend my birthday still further, and head along (last night) to a cooking course being held over in Glebe.
Knowing that I had until 6:30pm to get to that part of Glebe that [...]
After a long absence from the kitchen, I managed to throw a few ingredients together and make something that was - if I do say so myself - not bad at all.
The main problem I seemed to have was overcoming my fear of the oven. For some reason, I’m quite happy cooking with a wok [...]