Red wine and mushroom risotto

Using this recipe as inspiration, I made my first ever red wine risotto (I do white wine ones quite regularly). It was fantastic - will definitely cook it again.

Ingredients:
1.25 litres chicken or vegetable stock
2 tablespoons olive oil
80g butter
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 cups risotto rice
200ml red wine
75g finely grated parmesan, plus extra, to serve
200g mushrooms, thickly sliced. I used a mixture of brown and oyster.
2 teaspoons thyme leaves (fresh is best)
5 large leaves of silverbeet, center stems discarded (could substitute spinach, kale, beetroot greens or any other leafy greens you need to use up)

Place the stock in a saucepan and bring to a boil, reduce heat to low and keep at a gentle simmer.
Heat oil and half of the butter in a heavy-based pan over medium heat
Add rice and cook for 2 minutes until well coated in onion mixture.
Add wine and simmer until almost evaporated.
Add the stock to the pan, a ladleful at a time while stirring continuously, allowing the stock to be absorbed before adding the next.
When you have about 1 cup of stock left, stir in the parmesan and season with salt and pepper.
Remove pan from heat, stir in remaining stock, cover pan and set aside while you cook the mushrooms.
Heat remaining butter in a large non-stick frying pan over high heat until foaming.
Add garlic and cook, stirring, for 3 minutes.
Add mushrooms and thyme cook until the mushrooms are soft and golden.
Add silverbeet and cook until wilted.
Serve the risotto topped with the mushroom mixture and cheese.

Easy sushi

I don't have a recipe for this, just a bunch of tips! I think it's best to learn sushi making in person with someone experienced than reading how to do it.

Sushi is really fast to make when you've made it a few times before - this took me about 30 minutes, which includes 12 minutes of cooking the rice.

I cook my rice in the microwave. Use sushi rice and rinse it in a colander under the tap. The rice to water ratio is 1:1.5, and it takes about 11 minutes in my microwave. 1 cup of dry rice makes around 3 standard-size sushi rolls. Remember to fan it once it's cooked and to very gently stir through a little rice vinegar with a little sugar mixed in. It should end up nice and glossy.

While the rice is cooking, prepare your fillings. Clockwise from top: mushroom, radish (an experiment!), omelette (egg plus a little bit of sugar), shredded barbecue chicken, carrot and cheese in the center (not exactly a traditional ingredient, but it was introduced to me as a sushi ingredient by my Japanese sushi instructor!). This is just what I had available to use in the fridge - be as traditional or as creative as you like with your fillings.



Rice spread on the nori. To avoid getting rice stuck on everyone and everything in the kitchen, use a metal spoon dipped in water, and spread the rice with the back of the spoon.



Filling added:



Rolls. Put them in the fridge for 15 minutes or so to chill before slicing. To make slicing easy, wipe the knife in-between each cut.



Ready to eat (with Kewpie mayonnaise of course!)

Cookbook challenge, week 16: Gnocchi and rice noodles from scratch

This week's theme was noodles. I had a bit of a browse of the Wikipedia page for noodles, and was interested to learn that gnocchi are a type of noodle, and so decided to try my hand at making potato gnocchi. I've made it once before many years ago and it wasn't all that great, and so I hoped that I would be better at it this time! The recipe comes from Stephanie Alexander's The Cook's Companion.

I also really wanted to make rice noodles from scratch after seeing it done on Poh's Kitchen (I love cooking shows!). Rice noodle recipes don't appear in any of my books, so I used Poh's recipe and I've tacked it on to this week's challenge post.


Gnocchi ingredients:
1kg potatoes
300-325g plain flour

Dice and boil potatoes until tender, 15-20mins, then drain and peel (it's much easier to peel once the potatoes have boiled - the skin practically falls off!).
Bring another saucepan to the boil with at least 3L of lightly salted water.
Pass the potatoes through a food mill or potato ricer directly onto your work surface.
Sprinkle the potatoes with flour with one hand, and using the heel of your other hand, work it in. Be as quick and as deft as possible.
Continue until all flour is incorporated.
When the cooking water is at a fast boil, roll potato mixture into a long rope and cut into 1cm pieces.
Optionally roll the curved side of the gnocchi with a fork to create ridges.
Adjust the heat of the water so it is simmering.
Drop gnocchi in and skim out once they have risen to the surface.
Top with a prepared sauce, gently shake and serve at once.

I served this with a sage and walnut burnt butter sauce. I chopped up some fresh sage and walnuts and cooked them in some butter until the sage was crispy. I added the tiniest amount of chilli and a squeeze of lemon juice. It was very tasty, and really liked the texture of the gnocchi. Apart from the lemon juice (and the butter, of course) all the ingredients were things I had grown (or collected from a friend's tree in the case of the walnuts). I like that - but I do miss having a lemon tree, store bought lemons are really not good.




Rice noodles:
See the recipe here.

My notes on the recipe:

• I managed to fit a rectangular tray neatly in my wok with only a little gap.
• The tray that you steam the flour mixture in must be completely clean without a hint of a rusty spot, otherwise the noodles will be dirty!
• Any steam that drips into the flour will leave soggy patches - you can see this in the second photo below. Try to set it up so that this doesn't happen.
• The exposed top of the noodles beomes quite dry. This might be reduced by coving it in glad wrap when the mix is cooling.
• Slicing is a bit tricky and messy, especially if you try to cut flat noodles like I did. It works though, just be prepared for mess!
• I served my noodles with some stir-fried beef mince that had been cooked with garlic, ginger, chilli, spring onions, star anise, kecap manis, soy sauce and cabbage.

To be honest, it was interesting cooking these as an experiment but I really don't think it's worth the effort! The texture was a little odd (almost crumbly after cooking) and dried rice noodles are so cheap to buy.
The mince mixture was delish though - I'll make that again!


The noodles during steaming:



Steamed, with drip patches quite obvious:



Sliced:



Served:




The next theme (for this week!) is Vietnamese. Hopefully I'll get this one posted on time, as I am heading away on holidays for three weeks, so will be having a bit of a hiatus from the challenge!

Cookbook challenge, week 11: Crispy risotto of marinated prawns with parmesan cheese and black olive tartare

The theme for week 11 was mixed, and here's my recipe, 5 or so days late! Things have been a bit hectic lately.

This week I decided to attempt a 'fancy-pants' dish from Emmanuel Stroobant's Vine Dining: White. I purchased this book recently, and it's fascinating. Each recipe has a picture, but it's of all the individual components in a very artistic style, not of the completed dish. Many recipes use luxury ingredients, but there are plenty more with ingredients that are within easy reach.

I chose a risotto-based dish, as plenty of mixing/stirring is required to make risotto! Also, it has quite an interesting mix of ingredients.

I found the dish a little challenging. The basic risotto was easy, but frying into cakes wasn't - unfortunately, as the crispy bits of risotto that I did taste were delicious! I think it's easily overcome, but more about that later.

Ingredients:
Risotto:
2 tbs butter
2 peeled and chopped shallots
250g risotto rice, washed and drained
700mL chicken stock
1 tbs grated parmesan cheese
Ground black pepper, to taste
2 tbs olive oil

Prawns:
8 peeled and de-veined large prawns
1 tbs white miso (I forgot to buy this! So substituted with kecap manis to give a bit of colour and depth of flavour. It's not the same, I know, but was the best I could come up with!)
1 tbs mirin
1 tsp sugar

Black Olive Tartare
4 tbs pitted and diced black olives
1 tbs balsamic vinegar
1 tbs chopped italian parsley
1 tsp chopped red chilli

Garnish
2 tbs shaved parmesan
Rock salt

To cook risotto, heat butter and fry shallots in a pot.
Add rice and stir for 3-4 minutes until translucent.
Bring chicken stock to the boil and add slowly to the rice, ladle by ladle.
Stir constantly for 15 minutes until rice is cooked and al dente.
Finish with cheese and pepper.
Lay 30x60cm of aluminium foil on a bench, brush with butter and pour risotto on.
Roll up and leave on bench for 1.5 to 2 hours.
Use a sharp knife to slice through foil, resulting in risotto cakes (beware little shards of foil!).
Remove foil.
Heat oil in a non-stick pan and fry each side of the cake for 3 mins (this was really hard - mostly because I don't have anything non-stick - most of my cakes fell apart so I didn't cook them for as long as I should have! Non-stick seems to be crucial, also beware spitting oil).
Set aside.
Marinate prawns with combined miso/kecap manis, mirin and sugar.
Place prawns on a tray and cook at 220ºC for 2-5mins.
Combine black olive tartare ingredients.
Serve cakes with tartare and prawns.
Garnish with parmesan and salt and serve.


The end result was pretty good! A great range of textures with the crunchy risotto edges, firm prawns and soft risotto. The components were all subtly salty which worked together well. I don't know if I'll cook this exact dish again, but I've learned while cooking it, and will certainly use this as inspiration.

Cookbook challenge, week 7: Fried rice

The theme for week 7 was soft. I was thinking of making something along the lines of a pannacotta but after the excesses of the Christmas season, sweet dishes just didn't appeal at all! So instead I made fried rice - it's soft, tasty and a good way to use up leftovers.

I used the notes in Stephanie Alexander's Cook's Companion. It's found in the margin of the book - where there are notes for cooking a dish instead of a specific recipe. I used this for inspiration, but cooked it sort of backwards to the way Stephanie suggests... my version is below! The quantities are a rough estimate, nothing here really needs to be accurately measured. I've used fairly standard fried rice ingredients, but anything goes!

Ingredients: peanut oil onion, diced crushed garlic crushed ginger red chilli, diced spring onions, finely sliced frozen peas frozen corn prawns eggs dried shiitake mushrooms, rehydrated then drained cooked, day-old rice (for the quantities of other ingredients shown in the pic, I used 3 cups of uncooked rice) soy sauce sesame oil

Heat 1-2 tbs peanut oil in a wok.
Fry the rest of the ingredients in the following order, stir-frying each for 1-2 minutes:

• onion
• garlic, ginger, chilli
• spring onion
• peas and corn
• ham
• prawns
• mushrooms

Make a well in the center of the wok as shown in the picture below, and turn the heat down. Crack the eggs into the well and mix them together to break up the yolks. Gently heat and turn to cook, then mix into the rest of the ingredients.
Add rice.
Add soy sauce to taste (I probably used ~1/3 C).
Add ~2 tsp sesame oil and mix well.
Serve!