Green bananas – sooo good for you!

I love bananas but they have to be just right – call me Goldilocks! But what do you do with green bananas which incidentally may be healthier than yellow/ripe ones – it’s all to do with the starches and conversion to sugars. Well, you can boil, fry or make them into smoothies. We had delicious fried bananas, banana omelette and other unusual things on Tanna Island, Vanuatu - think plantains but these were actually very starchy bananas.
Bake them in foil then toss in a little oil or butter and salt. Boil them in their skins and then mash them as a totally different side. Slice them into ‘chips’ as you would potatoes or sweet potatoes and fry.
https://www.mnn.com/food/healthy-eating/

Today’s bit of trivia
'They' tell you to put unripe fruit in a paper bag for a day or two to speed up the ripening process. It is in fact the ethylene gas given off by the ripening fruit and trapped in the bag, that causes the fruit to ripen faster. Just one of those fascinating pieces of trivia!

Greek Lamb Stew with Green Beans

This delicious dish has some of the wonderful flavours of Greece – it’s a favourite in our house!

Ingredients
1.3Kg lamb boneless leg or shoulder, cut in serving-sized pieces – remove as much fat as possible
2 onion (finely chopped)
1 tsp minced garlic
2 Tbsp olive oil
1 ½  cups of water
2 tsp salt
3 medium-large tomatoes (pulped) or 1 can diced tomato
1 Tbsp tomato paste
1Kg of string beans (fresh or frozen, ends trimmed)
1Kg pounds of potatoes (peeled, cut into large chunks)
1 Tbsp fresh mint (chopped)
1 Tbsp dill (fresh chopped)
1 Tbsp parsley (fresh chopped)
½ to 1 tsp crushed fennel seeds
Serves 6

Method
In a casserole or stew pot, sauté the onion and meat in the oil over medium heat until well browned.
Add water, tomatoes, tomato sauce and 1 tsp salt.
Bring to a boil, cover and simmer for 45 minutes, or until meat is tender.
Add beans, potatoes, mint, dill, parsley, fennel seeds and remaining salt.
Bring to a boil, cover and simmer for 30 minutes.
Remove from heat and let sit for 10-15 minutes before serving.

Chook’s note: this could go into the oven for a slow cook once the meat is browned. Long slow cooking can only enhance the richness of the dish but make sure to check the liquid level from time to time and add more water if needed.
 

Peanut Brownies

This is an oldie but a goodie out of the recipe book my mum gave me when I got married – the PWMU Cookery book. The book is beautifully basic and is my go to for basic ingredient balances which is a good starting point - then you can go as crazy as you dare! It covers everything from stocks to soap making to home remedies!  I gave my kids one each when they left home.  Every home should have one - mine is well used so much so that it's held together with a rubber band! But to the Brownies ....

Ingredients
115 gm butter
2 Tbsp peanut butter
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 ½ cups SR flour
2 Tbsp cocoa
50-60 gm salted peanuts
Salt and vanilla
Mix all together adding peanuts last. Put in pieces on a baking tray and back in moderate over 10 mins.

Chook’s note: in my oven I bake at 190 C ~15 mins – the longer you leave them the crisper they become. Cook to your preferred texture or cook half and half - chewy and crisp.  Take them to a friend - they are not so pretty but they disappear off the plate - yum!

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Whole Chicken and vegetable soup

Ingredients
2 Tbsp butter
2 carrots, peeled and diced
2 stalks celery, diced
1 brown onion, diced
2 leeks, halved and sliced into 1cm pieces
2 Tbsp flour
1 cup tomato passata
1 whole chicken, around 1.6kg
2 bay leaves
a small handful of parsley
2 tsp salt
1 large potato, peeled and cut into 1cm cubes
Serves 6

Method
Melt butter in a large pot over medium heat. Fry the carrots, celery, brown onion and leeks for around five minutes, stirring frequently, until the vegetables are fragrant. Add the flour and stir to combine.

Add tomato passata, stir then place the whole chicken with enough water to just cover the chicken. Tie the bay leaves and parsley together into a bouquet garni and add to the pot. Add the salt and bring to a boil. Cover the pot and continue to cook at a rolling boil (not a simmer) for 40 minutes.

Add the potato and continue to cook for a further 10 minutes. Turn off the heat, adjust the seasoning and allow to stand 10 mins. Shred the chicken, remove the bones and return the meat to the soup.

Chooks note:  You can play around with the vegetable combo depends on what you have in the crisper or garden.  I save the chicken carcass and cook it for a further few hours, with half onion and whatever veggie ends I have in the freezer, with 1 L or more of water. Makes a fine chicken stock.  
Tomato passata – if you are making a tomato sauce and remove the seeds from the tomatoes, freeze them and this serves as well as a passata.

Chickpea crackers

Ingredients
1 cup chickpea flour
2-3 Tbsp olive oil
3-4 Tbsp water
½ tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
Additional options -1 tsp dried rosemary and/or  1 tsp caraway seeds - bruised

Top with 1 or more of the following:
dukkah, bruised cumin or caraway seeds, dash of turmeric, course salt, sesame seeds

Method
Preheat the oven to 180 C and line a large baking tray with baking paper.
Place flour, salt, baking powder and the oil in a food processor and process until the mixture resembles wet sand or simply mix by hand.
Add the water 3 tbs at first and the 4th if necessary, and process until the mixture forms a ball.
Gently knead until smooth then roll or flatten to 5mm thick or less. Use a cookie 5cm cooky cutter to cut into shapes or hand cut to whatever shape you like.
Bake on lined baking tray. Sprinkle with whatever topping you prefer then gently press it into the surface of biscuits.
Bake for 15 minutes, or until golden around the edges.
Place on a cooling rack to cool completely before placing in an airtight container, if not serving immediately.

Chook's note: I prefer using dried rosemary as I find the oil from the fresh rosemary can be a little astringent. These have a texture akin to oat cakes and can also be a little mealy so if you like oat cakes you'll love these!
Great served with double brie, fig and preserved lemon or ........

Braised veal - slow-cooked

A delicious stew or casserole, or cassolette. By whatever name it’s worth. This is one of Neil Perry’s with some small variations – but of course! Thank you Neil.

Ingredients

800g veal shoulder, cut into 3cm cubes

2 Tbsp plain flour to dust meat

80ml extra virgin olive oil

30g butter

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped or 2 tsp minced garlic

1 small leek, white part finely chopped

salt

250ml red or dry white wine

1L chicken stock

1 Tbsp tomato paste

400g can whole tomatoes, chopped

2 rosemary sprigs*

2 thyme sprigs*

1 fresh bay leaf (if you have it else use dried)

8 baby onions, peeled or equivalent larger onions (whatever you have)

8 baby carrots, peeled or use a couple of large carrots cut in chunks

freshly ground black pepper

For the gremolata

2 large handfuls flat-leaf parsley, roughly chopped

finely grated zest of 1/2 orange, 1 clove garlic, minced

Put all the ingredients in a bowl and mix well. Add a little olive oil or orange juice if it is too dry.

Method

Put the flour on a large plate and roll the veal shoulder cubes in it to coat – or put flour and meat in bag and shake to coat; this creates less mess!

Heat the oil and butter in a large, heavy-based saucepan and cook the veal in batches until browned all over. Remove the veal from the pan. Add the garlic, leek and salt and cook for 5 minutes until soft. Pour in the wine and simmer until reduced by half.

Add the stock and bring to a simmer. Add the tomato paste, canned tomatoes and herbs and stir well. Return the veal to the saucepan and simmer very gently for 1 hour with a lid on. Add the onions and carrots and cook for a further hour, stirring occasionally, until the meat is very tender.

Remove from the heat and discard the herbs. 

Serve sprinkled with gremolata or leave as a side.

Chook’s note: *what is a sprig? About 6-7 cm of the tender end of the stem.  Don’t go overboard! 1 sprig is roughly equivalent to 1 tsp fresh chopped rosemary; halve that for dried herbs. Thyme is about the same but err on the side of caution. 

If you can't get veal, blade or other steak works just as well.

After the first hour on the stove top, I transferred this to a moderate-slow oven for a further 1.5 to 2 hrs.

Gremolata is not to everyone’s taste. I love it but it can be a little overpowering. This dish is perfectly delicious without it. 

Gustatory impressions from an amazing journey to the Arctic and back!

This is a Caesar. A spicy version of the Bloody Mary invented in Vancouver. Vodka, 'clamato' juice (clam ‘nectar’ and tomato), squeeze of lime juice, Tabasco, Worchestershire sauce, celery salt. 

The Chook has been having a holiday from cooking, but I have been on the lookout for tasty morsels as we've traveled.  We tend to travel as economically as possible, ie., not going to fancy restaurants, in fact rarely going to restaurants at all, choosing instead to self-cater. Oh boy does that have limitations! But we did embark on some tasty walking tours. In Chicago, we took a fascinating architecture, history and food tour with Chicago Detours, a women-owned tour company for the curious - that's me!  We strolled for a delightful few hours. From Fanny May's handcrafted candies to the Intercontinental Hotel commissioned by the Shriners Organization in the 1920s to house the  exclusive Medinah Athletic Club and now among other things home to Michael Jordan's Steak House. From super glitz to the Billy Goat tavern, the hang out of Chicago’s newspaper men, and to 437 Rush, the first Black and Tan club, a favourite hang out of Al Capone during the prohibition era and where the word ‘jazz’ was first recorded. More architecture and food awaited us in New York where we wandered the Financial District tasting street food from a selection of New York’s street carts (with Turnstile Tours) as well as taking a whirl wind architecture, history and food tour of the Flatiron district taking in among other delicious stops, Eataly - a huge Italian food emporium, the 90 year old Eisenberg’s deli and Beecher’s handmade cheese factory right on Broadway (Like a Local tours).

This is a great greasy spoon in Chicago with lots of history and colour.

The seafood section in Eataly a vibrant Italian market place with just about everything you might want food wise - eating, buying and cooking classes 

We were fed well on the trains across USA and Canada, the latter being more interesting and varied each day. I indulged my taste buds with juicy veal in a black current-balsamic reduction (somewhat like my Christmas Gastrique - 14 December 2017), melt-in-your-mouth rack of lamb and seared cod - and a Bison burger! The French influence was very evident - except for the latter perhaps!  Meals on board the Polar Pioneer, our expedition ship, while not silver service, were imaginative and plentiful – fillet mignon, veal pillard, prime ribs, rack of lamb, salmon, red fish and cod. This menu with amuse you - it’s a traditional Aurora next to last night menu:

Roast Musk Ox served with sautéed Narhwal Muktuk (a traditional Inuit meal of whale skin and blubber) with a Barnacle Geese garnish. Finished off with Arctic Hare sorbet.  

We actually had a delicious BBQ out of the back deck that night served with mulled wine completely perfect with icebergs floating passed.

G and T with a small chunk of iceberg. 

But we did indeed try Musk Ox in Ittoqqortoormiit, a tiny Inuit village at the mouth of Scoresby Sound, East Greenland, population ~300. Quite delicious. Tasted like a cross between like veal and goat (makes sense it is a member of the goat family!)

This lovely little man was offering us morsels of cooked Musk Ox

In Iceland, we lunched at a world-class restaurant on the Snaefellsnes Peninsula, the Sker, where we ate cod fresh out of the Greenland Sea with Hollandaise sauce and a delicious warm salad.

In Newfoundland, we just had to try a traditional meal - Fish and Brewis. This is made from salt cod and hardtack soaked overnight then boiled and served with scrunchions (salted pork fat which has been cut into small pieces and fried). Think of those arteries! And we tried another traditional Newfoundland dish in Port aux Basque – fried Cods’ Tongues (actually not a tongue but a small muscle extracted from the back of the fish's neck). Interesting and tasty.  Cod is an east Canada fish, that and Haddock, we ordered it wherever we saw them on the menu. Other local dishes we enjoyed were deep fried Brussel sprouts and crab cakes; we enjoyed both in Toronto. 

We’ve come home to a very depleted larder albeit with a few tubs of yummy soups in the freezer, so we lashed out and bought a whole Red Emperor fish at the markets. It was way too big for one meal so I sawed it in half and we enjoyed the tail end last night baked with lemon, pepper and oil; I used some fresh lemon but also some preserved lemon prepared by our son and daughter-in-law.  Delish and delicate!

Sprinkled with EVOO and Svaneti salt (brought back from Georgia in the Caucasus), and popped into the oven. Yum!