Slow Cooker Love - Mulled Wine Kangaroo

When I was sitting and eating a bowl of my Beef, Pear and Red Wine Casserole, my mind wandered into how the cinnamon and red wine were like a mini-mulled wine with the beef. So naturally, my next thought was why not make a full-on mulled wine casserole? Cinnamon, cardamom, cloves all lend themselves to a hearty meat dish – as well as the wintery beverage. A lot of casseroles already use red wine as a flavouring component, why not go all the way and use a whole bottle? I know that you should  use decent quality wine to cook with, but when I’m using a whole bottle and adding a lot of other flavours to a dish, I’m not reaching for my best bottle. It just won’t be appreciated. My general rule is if you can’t drink it, don’t cook with it. There are a lot of good quality lower cost spectrum wines available, try a few out until you find one you like. Just make sure you drink a good quality wine with the dish! 

Kangaroo is a good meat to use for this dish as the wine and spices cut through the gameyness that can put people off. Adding the lentils makes it a one-pot meal. Meat and vege in one. Although I also served it with steamed sweet potato and sautéed kale with gorgonzola. That way I had leftovers to take to work! Whilst I am so ready for Spring, meals like this still make me appreciate the benefits of colder nights. It won’t be long til it’ll be nothing but BBQs and salads.

Mulled Wine Kangaroo

500g diced kangaroo

1 red onion, diced
4 large garlic cloves, minced
1 tbsp rosemary leaves, minced
Juice and peel of one lemon
2 sticks cinnamon
5 cloves
5 cardamom pods
¼ cup brown sugar
1 cup beef stock
750mL bottle of red wine (something with oomph like a Shiraz or Cabernet Sauvignon)
2 carrots, cut into 2cm dice
1 cup de Puy lentils

Heat some olive oil in the base of your slow cooker up to a medium high heat and brown the kangaroo pieces, around 3 minutes on each side. Remove to a plate, cover and keep warm.


Turn the heat down to low and cook the red onion until translucent, around 5 minutes, then add the garlic cloves and rosemary. Stir and continue cooking 10 minutes until the onions start caramelising. Stir through the carrot and cook until it softens, 5 minutes. 

Add the lemon juice and scrape up any bits that have stuck to the bottom of the pot. Add the stock, wine, sugar, spices and peel. Bring to the boil and add the kangaroo and lentils. Place into your slow cooker and cook on high for 2 hours, alternatively, just reduce the heat back to low, place the lid on and simmer for 45minutes to an hour, or the lentils are soft and the meat is tender and pulling apart.

 

Experimenting with Produce - Taro Tarts

Ever since I first googled what to do with taro and saw a bunch of tarts made from it, I knew at some point I was going to give that a go. So when I saw some taro for sale at the Nanna Shop, I bought a couple. One I made into the sauce for the vege meatballs, the other I reserved for making pies. Or  tarts. I’m not sure of the difference in terms of semantics, but I know calling them Taro Tarts tickles my fancy more than Taro Pies.

At it’s heart, this is a pumpkin pie, but made with taro puree instead of pumpkin. I kept the flavours simple, to see how the taro takes on being a dessert and I think that was a good move. It’s a subtle flavour, but quite unique. Whilst experimenting, I also used agave sugar. This sugar is very sweet, but in an almost floral way. The texture is like icing sugar, which would be a suitable substitute in the recipe.This is also a dairy-free pie (no cream), which means the taro puffs up and develops a fluffy, almost bread-like texture. The spring roll wrappers for pastry mean these tarts are best eaten the day they’re made, while the pastry is crisp. It goes chewy if you leave them.

Taro is a traditional Hawaiian tuber, I’m using Mexican sugar and Brazil nuts. So whilst this multinational tart sounds a bit geographically confused, they all get along!

Taro Tarts

1 ½ cups taro puree

3 large eggs

¾ cup agave sugar

½ tsp freshly grated ginger

12 Brazil nuts

12 spring roll wrappers

¼ cup coconut oil.

Preheat your oven to 170C

Melt the coconut oil until it’s a liquid. Take a spring roll wrapper and brush generously with coconut oil. Fold in half to make a rectangle. Brush again with coconut oil and fold in half again to make a square. Push into a muffin tin, folding the sides to make a pastry base. Repeat for all the muffin holes.

Blend the taro puree, eggs, agave sugar and ginger until smooth. Carefully pour the taro mixture into each of the bases. Gently tap the tin to remove air bubbles. Top each one with a Brazil nut.

Slide into the oven and bake for 25 minutes, checking for doneness at around 20mins. When the pastry is crisp and gold, and the filling has puffed up and set, they are ready. Allow 15 minutes to cool before eating. Or eat at room temperature. Best eaten the same day as the pastry goes chewy.

Still Cold at Night - Beef, Pear and Red Wine Casserole

There are blossoms on my mango tree. And a few on the blueberry shrub. Spring is definitely in the air. Intermittently. It’s supposed to be thunderstormy and rainy again any day now. Despite being around 24C yesterday. And nights are still cold. So slow-cooked foods and casseroles are still well and truly on the cards. Rich flavours that warm you up are still part of my cravings.

This beef and pear stew combines sweet and savoury in a fairly subtle way.The cinnamon and ginger waving a friendly hello to the sweetness of the pear and the red wine in a way that made me then go on to cook a full mulled-wine flavoured stew. More on that soon. Everything is cooked in the one pot, veges and all so it's the complete package.

Whip me up a bowl, I'll be sitting under a blanket on the couch. At least for a few more weeks.

 

Beef, Pear and Red Wine Casserole

800g beef chuck, diced

1/3 cup plain flour

1 tsp salt

1 tsp pepper

1 tsp paprika

Oil to fry

3 baby carrots, diced

1 red onion, finely diced

1 large red capsicum, diced

2 buerre bosc pears

1 bay leaf

3 anchovies

1 tsp cinnamon

2 tsp ground ginger

1 cup red wine

1 cup beef stock

¼ cup capers

1 small zucchini, large diced

Cooked brown rice to serve

Preheat your oven to 175C

Combine the flour with the salt, pepper and paprika. Whisk to mix it well.

Heat a coverable dish that can go on the stovetop and in the oven (such as a tagine) over medium-high heat and add a thin layer of oil. Dust the beef chuck pieces in the flour mix and brown on all sides. Do it in batches so you don’t crowd the pan. Remove the beef and set aside.

If the pan is dry, add a tablespoon of oil. Add the onion and cook until translucent, around 5 minutes. Then add the capsicum and carrot and cook until softened, a further 5-10 minutes. Stir through the anchovies, cinnamon and ginger until the anchovies have ‘melted’.

Pour in the stock and red wine, bring to the boil then add the bay leaf, pear, capers and the beef.

Cover, and place in the oven for 45 minutes. Remove from the oven, then add the zucchini. Return to the oven for 15 minutes.

Serve with brown rice.

Low and Slow - Cherry Pork Ribs

One of the best things about when I was a Stay at Home Wife (albeit temporarily!!), is that I had time for slow cooking. One of the worst things about staying home whilst things are slow cooking, is that you are tortured by the smells all day! By the time Lance got home and these ribs were sticky and done, I was FAMISHED.

I found a bottle of cherry juice at the Nanna Shop and decided I needed to make cherry pork ribs. Pork and cherries are a great combination! The basic idea is from Alejandra’s Pomegranate Ribs – still my number 1 rib recipe. Make a rub, braise the ribs in fruit juice, reduce until sticky, enjoy. The rub spices and fruit juice have just changed! There’s very little hands-on time and the end result is definitely worth the wait (and torture!). So chuck some of these on if you are going to be home doing the housework and enjoy a fabulous dinner to reward your efforts!

If it's just Lance and I, I almost always just cook pork rib tips instead  of full racks because my butcher sells them so much cheaper. It just doesn't look quite as impressive. If you are making them for more than the family, maybe go for full racks.

Cherry Pork Ribs

serves 4

2 tsp Chinese 5 Spice

1 tsp cayenne powder

1 ½ tsp ginger

½ tsp garlic powder

1 tsp sumac

3 tsp salt

8 pork rib tips (or around 4 racks)

3 cups cherry juice (750mL)

½ cup whisky

1 tbsp oyster sauce

Combine all the rub ingredients, then rub generously over the ribs, place in a large oven-proof container with a lid (such as a tagine or crockpot), cover and set aside for an hour to marinade. They can overlap a little.

Preheat the oven to 125C

Remove the ribs from the tagine or oven dish and add the cherry juice, whisky and oyster sauce. Bring to a boil. Stir until the oyster sauce has dissolved, then add the ribs. Spoon the sauce over the ribs to coat before placing the lid on and sliding into the oven for 3 hours or until the ribs are tender.

When they’re done, turn the oven off, remove the ribs from the tagine and pop on a plate in the oven to keep warm. Bring the sauce to a simmer with the lid off and reduce until sticky, around 15 minutes. Place the ribs back into the sauce, serve with greens and plenty of extra sauce.

Christmas in July - Honeycake

When my brother first started doing Cake Club at his work about three years ago, he talked up this traditional Russian cake that a guy at his work brought in. Honeycake. He said it was lots of layers and one of the best cakes he'd ever had. I googled Russian Honeycake and had a recipe sitting in my "to-try" folder for years. It is a little fiddly, as it's basically a bunch of honey biscuit layers, softened into a more traditional cake texture by a cream filling that soaks into the cake. Before the cream is added, the layers are sort of the texture of gingerbread cookies. Being fiddly, it was pushed to the back of the pile when deciding on what cake to make.

But honeycake started popping up in my Instagram feeds as The Honeycake market stall became more and more popular. People in Perth were becoming obsessed with it. I was tempted to try it at last year's Taste festival, but I'd eaten so much by that point, I knew I wouldn't be doing it justice. Come the Good Food and Wine Festival this year, I finally got my chance. And it was good. Really good. But much more caramelly than I was expecting a Honeycake to taste. Especially as I knew the basic recipe for it.

Enter Google once more for answers! According to The Honeycake folk, they use a traditional Czech Recipe. The recipe I originally sourced was for a traditional Russian cake. So, what's the difference? Essentially, it is the caramel that I wasn't expecting. The Russian cake uses a sweetened sour cream filling. The Czech version uses two fillings, one a caramel cream, one a condensed milk cream. Given I'm less partial to super sweetness, It's still a sweet cake, but the honey is the much more dominant flavour.

I decided to stick to the original Russian version, with a few tweaks. Being Russian, a lot of recipes use vodka, I decided to switch to rum because I think the spicy flavour profile combines with the honey perfectly. Make sure you use a good dark rum, such as Angostura or Captain Morgan and not Bundaberg. The rest of the recipe is mixed and matched from around 7 different "traditional family recipes", and I think it is perfect. Which makes this now my traditional family recipe. Because I am definitely making this again. It is a little time-consuming, rolling and baking all the layers, but it needs to be made ahead of time for the cream filling to soak into the cake layers and soften them which makes it perfect for parties. And the effort is totally worth it. Definitely one of my favourite cakes ever, too! 

The caramel shards are made by melting together 1/2 cup of sugar with 1 tbsp lemon juice, heated over low temperature until the sugar dissolves, then turns caramel in flavour, drizzled onto baking paper to set into hard shards. Add these just before serving, otherwise they will soften too.

Honeycake

Cake

75g butter, softened
1 cup sugar
3 tbsp honey
3 eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp dark rum (optional, but delicious)
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
3 cups flour

Syrup

3 tbsp honey
3 tbsp water (room temperature or slightly warm)
2 tbsp dark rum (optional, but delicious)

Filling

500g sour cream
1 tbsp honey
1/2 cup icing sugar
125g walnuts, toasted in a pan and processed until fine

Preheat your oven to 170C

Set up a double boiler situation using a large saucepan of water over a low simmer with a large metal or glass bowl in the top - ensuring the bottom doesn't touch the water.

In a small bowl, whisk together the eggs,and vanilla.

Melt the butter, sugar and honey in the double-boiler. Stir, until the sugar dissolves.Very slowly, add the egg mixture to the butter, whisking as you add it so it incorporates and doesn't scramble. Then whisk in the rum, baking soda and salt.

Switch to a wooden spoon and add about a quarter of the flour, mixing in fully before adding more. It'll turn into a rollable biscuit-type dough and give your mixing arm a good work out. When all of the the flour is added, take the bowl off the heat and allow to cool to room temperature.

Get together your tools for making the cake. You need to decide what plate you are going to serve it on and then find a plate or cake ring just smaller than that so you cut all of the layers the same size and that it fits on the serving plate. Grab as many baking trays as possible, and line them with baking paper. Divide the dough into 6 equal pieces, covering the ones you aren't working on with a clean tea towel so it doesn't dry out. Roll the dough to 2mm thick and slightly larger than the cutter plate. Bake for around 4-5 minutes or golden, then remove from the oven and cut around the cake layer while it's still warm, then leave to cool and crisp up. Keep the offcuts.

Repeat with the remaining dough pieces.

For the syrup, mix all of the ingredients together with a pastry brush.

For the filling, whip the sour cream, sugar and honey together with an electric handbeater until soft and fluffy - it fluffs up almost like normal cream. Mix in the toasted crushed walnuts.

To assemble, place a layer on your serving plate, then brush with the syrup. Top with a few dollops of sour cream filling, spread right to the edges. Repeat the process, then cover the top and sides with the remaining sour cream filling and smooth.

Process the biscuit offcuts into crumbs and gently coat the sour cream layer, pressing in to cover completely. Wrap with plastic and refrigerate at least 4 hours, preferably overnight. Take out of the fridge 30 minutes before serving to take the chill off.

Decorate with caramel shards if desired.