Patatas Bravas
I actually made this a while ago but haven't gotten round to putting up a post about it. Coming back from Encasa and having this dish, I simply had to have more, but I wasn't going to the city just to get some. Instead, I decided I'd make my own, I mean how hard could it be? After all it's just potato cubes with a garlic mayonnaise with a spicy tomato salsa.
When I had it though, I felt it was missing something, sauteed diced onions!
Patatas Bravas
Being the lazy guy I am, I made the recipe as follows:
Ingredients:
- Roasted garlic sauce (concentrated)
- Whole egg mayonnaise
- Hot chilli sauce (not the Asian variety)
- Tomato ketchup
- Onions
- Potatoes
- Dice up the potatoes into cubes
- Heat up some oil in a saucepan (to deep fry)
- Place the potatoes into the saucepan and cook until golden*, meanwhile, cook the diced onions on a low-medium heat until brown and soft
- Remove and strain
- Mix the roasted garlic sauce with the mayonnaise to taste
- Mix the hot chilli sauce and ketchup to taste
- Place onions on the potatoes and cover with sauce. Enjoy
Shepherd’s pie
So for lunch tomorrow (and until I finish it) I'll be having shepherd's pie, was a bad idea starting it at 9pm as it took a lot longer than I had expected. Modified the recipe on taste a little bit to add some more veges and it turned out pretty good.
The base of the pie
Doesn't look too crash hot before the mash and going into the oven but it smelt pretty good.
Adding the mashed potato
After putting it in the oven, the final result is below, and I think it's a success. Mash was nice and crispy on the top and just broke through when you dig in with a spoon.
The end result
Looked so good and tasted great, almost felt bad putting it straight into the fridge (well not before taking a big spoonful to 'taste').
Recipe for this is below:
Creme Brulee attempt
I bought a kitchen gas torch a couple of weeks ago with the intention of attempting a creme brulee at some point. Gave it a shot yesterday following the recipe linked below from MasterChef:
http://www.masterchef.com.au/creme-brulee.htm
Thought they had failed last night but I was just a little too keen and didn't fridge them so they stayed rather liquidy. Had one that I had fridged and it was divine. Next thing on my list is to add a little green tea to it, should be epic 
.
Not that hard to make but does take a fair bit of time.
Here's the end result:
Creme Brulee
Sunday Dinner – Pan Fried Salmon Fillet
Surprisingly there were no left overs from yesterday's BBQ with the family so I had to resort to making my own dinner, there was a piece of Salmon Fillet in the fridge so that'd be the choice for the main.
Salmon I keep very simple, all I did was sprinkle on some cracked pepper and a squeeze of lemon juice. In the frying pan I had a few cloves of garlic frying and once it got up to temperature, in went the fish. As it cooks sprinkle on a little salt and flip over. Serve once cooked to your liking.
Here's the end result, with a green salad on the side as well as some potato salad.
Pan fried salmon
Made a little dipping sauce on the side made up of mustard, mayonnaise, lemon juice and a little honey.
Very quick, very simple and pretty good in taste.
Lava cake attempt #2
So I decided to try the Chocolate Lava Cake again tonight (I never posted anything for the first because it failed XD), for those who want a recipe, I used the following:
- 100 grams dark chocolate (70% cocoa), roughly broken
- 100 grams unsalted butter, room temperature and chopped into cubes
- 3/4 cup sugar
- 1/4 plain flour
- 3 eggs
- A little extra butter to coat the ramekins.
Method:
- Preheat oven to 200 degrees
- Half fill a pot with water and place a bowl over the top (it shouldn't touch the water and should seal the pot's mouth),
- With the stove on a low heat, melt the chocolate and butter together in the bowl while constantly stirring, turn off the heat once done.
- In a separate bowl, combine the eggs, flour and sugar.
- Slowly add the melted butter and chocolate mixture while stirring constantly.
- Coat some ramekins with butter (use a paper towel to spread the butter)
- Pour the mixture into the ramekins
- Place in the oven for 10 - 12 minutes.
- Remove from oven and tip upside down onto a plate, garnish as desired and sprinkle some icing sugar on top ( I used strawberries and cookies and cream ice cream.
Sounds simple enough and here was tonight's result:
Lava cake
With a lava cake, the most important question you've gotta ask yourself when you're done is...
Will it ooze?
My result? Unfortunately no where enough! Here's a shot of a tiny bit of ooze.
Not enough ooze
Not very happy and will give it another shot tomorrow.
Peri Peri Chicken for dinner
but not from Nandos! So I cooked up some Peri Peri chicken over the BBQ for dinner today and it was absolutely delicious, gives Nandos a serious run for its money. Recipe is very simple to make and just takes some time beforehand to prepare the marinade, then it's a simple matter of putting the chicken in there for 8 hours and then BBQ'ing. The result (note this one was an extra and reheated, it just smelt so good and I started eating before taking photos):
Yum!
So the recipe is as follows (this will be enough for about 4 chicken legs and thighs):
Results of my mango pancake adventure
So, I think I did pretty well with the mango pancakes considering that I was completely clueless, but will perfect them next time we’ve got some nice mangos. Pictures are below, they could have been presented better, but here’s some evidence that I made them, haha.
1. The pancake and the filling
Final product
Other thing of interest today, the mailman finally delivered the GPS logger I had ordered, I bought the i-gotu GT-600 and the plan is to have it on with me at all times while I’m on holiday to Japan/Korea and it will log exactly where I’ve been. The purpose of this is so I can attach some location information to every single photo that I take, either allowing me to plot them on a map or simply let me go back and see where the photo was taken if I forget. Much better solution than carrying a notepad and noting down image file names and location.
Mango Pancakes
While procastinating with my studies, I felt like a nice cold dessert and suddenly began to crave some mango pancakes (yes, the ones you get from yum cha). The recipe itself isn’t very definite, so looking online, I wasn’t sure if the one I had was right, but I had my first attempt today. I decided to go whipped cream and sugar for the filling (as well as mangoes obviously) and that was the easy part. The pancake batter itself isn’t difficult, the tricky part is cooking it.
The instructions on the recipe was to use a pan, add some water over the pan, add the batter and seal with a lid for two minutes. Didn’t seem that bad, however, the first failure came immediately, the batter was too thick and wasn’t really evenly distributed. A few attempts later, i resorted to steaming, so took out a pot with water and placed a plate inside and started steaming. Turned out well but it took ages. They’re just sitting in the fridge atm waiting for them to chill and then it’s chow time. I’ll take some pics if it looks somewhat nice.
The recipe I found was from Yahoo! Answers and it’s posted below if anyone wants to have a go (let me know how your ones turn out).
Batter Ingredients
2/3 cup or 5 oz flour
1 egg
2 Tbs. or 1 oz custard powder
2 Tbs milk
1 cup or 8 oz water
1. Sift all the powder together, add the egg and water mix to form the crepe batter.
2.To make small pancakes, gather a small non-stick pan that has a tight fitting lid to cover and hold in steam. Heat the pan to medium heat, add 2 Tbs water to pan and immediately pour several small pancakes into the pan. When you pour the batter, quickly cover pan and place over lowest heat to steam cook the pancake. (1-2 minutes).
Another way to steam pancakes is to pour into small containers or saucers and steam over boiling water in a covered wok steamer until batter is set.
3. When pancake is set remove from pan onto a plate and fold pancake to shape while it cools. When you have cooked several, unroll pancake and fill with cut mango and desired filling. Sprinkle filled pancake with powdered sugar before serving.
4. Fillings can be cream whipped with sugar, egg whites whipped with sugar to make meringue, vanilla or coconut ice cream -- and any of the above would have the added chopped mango pieces.