Plantains in Perth - Beef Ragu with Mashed Plantains (Slow Cooker Love)

Last time I travelled to New York, I fell in love with plantains. Head over heels. In every guise that I ate them. I have spent the two years since mourning their absence in my life. Hopefully checking out tales of plantain sightings in Perth from the definite to the more vague. None were fruitful (ha!) Then one day a few weeks ago, I walked into The Nanna Shop, and there they were in all their (at the time) green glory. I bought some without thinking. Without concern that I’d never pay $7.99 a kilo for bananas or potatoes – but here I was paying that for plantains. I finally could relive some of the dishes I had loved whilst travelling. I started with simple tostones – twice fried plantain chips. Just as crispy and salty and delicious as I remembered! Then I did a bit of a search for more plantain recipes both online and in my Cuban and Peruvian cookbooks. I came across a Dominican recipe for plantain gnocchi with a beef short rib ragu on the Saveur website. Not much one for the price of beef ribs, I decided to use that recipe as a flavour guideline and mix it up a little to make my life much easier by switching to a slow cooked blade roast. So no removal of bones, no straining the vegetables out of the sauce, everything just cooked and eaten together. It also meant changing the plantain gnocchi with yuca flour to mashed plantains with white rice – skewing things a bit further to the Cuban style of serving. I’d love to experiment with a plantain gnocchi one day (although yuca flour is probably well out of the equation!)

The flavours here an big and punchy. The meat has a decent heat kick – feel free to add more or less cayenne depending on how hot you like things. There’s a subtle acidity from the vinegar and tomato paste, but it’s well tempered by the big beefy flavour and the creamy crème fraiche added just at the end. The plantains should be yellow, this means a slightly sweeter mash that has an almost limey brightness to it. The rice and tomato salsa are fairly standard additions, adding bulk, texture and freshness. I loved this meal. So much. The beef here then lasted for a subsequent 4 meals, including a hungover quesadilla morning for four.

And I was delighted to learn that they still had plantains on offer this weekend just gone, so I am restocked again. This time I bought enough that I might even be able to hold off until a few go black and try them that way!

Beef Ragu with Mashed Plantains

(barely adapted from Saveur)
2kg beef blade roast, fat layer removed and discarded

2 tbsp. rice bran oil
2 brown onions, diced
4 garlic cloves, minced
2 carrots, diced
3 sweet paprika, diced (sub 1 red capsicum)
2 tsp. salt
2 tbsp. smoked paprika
1 tsp. black pepper
2 tsp. dried basil
1 tsp dried thyme
1 tsp. cayenne
3 tbsp. tomato paste
½ cup balsamic vinegar
2 cups beef stock
200mL crème fraiche
2 yellow plantains
White rice for serving
Tomato salsa (2 fresh tomatoes, 2 spring onions, handful of coriander and flat leaf parsley finely diced and tossed together)

Heat the base of your slow cooker to medium high and add a slick of oil. When the oil is hot, brown the blade roast on all sides, around 3 minutes per side. Remove to a plate. Turn the heat down to medium and add the onions, stirring here and there until translucent, around 5 minutes. Add the garlic, carrots, paprika and salt, and cook a further 10 minutes, or until the vegetables soften. Stir through the smoked paprika, pepper, basil, thyme, cayenne and tomato paste. Add the vinegar and beef stock, stirring to pick up any bits stuck to the bottom.

Bring the liquid to a boil, then place the beef back in gently. Place inside the slow-cooker, cover and cook on low for 8 hours, or until the meat is falling apart.

When the meat is ready, prepare the plantains. Without peeling, cut the plantains into cylinders around 4cm long. Place in a shallow glass bowl, add ¼ cup water cover with plastic wrap and microwave for 5 minutes, or until the plantains are soft. Remove the peel, then mash the plantains with the water remaining in the bowl. Season with a little salt.

Shred the beef with two forks, then gently stir through the crème fraiche. Serve with plain white rice, tomato salsa and mashed plantains

Simple Sides - Pink Grapefruit Beets

This is just a really quick post about what is one of my favourite side dishes at the moment. I really love the earthiness of beetroot, and our tree is currently laden with pink grapefruit which led to this experimentation. Ordinarily, I add a little balsamic when I roast my beets, but the grapefruit juice brings a brightness with the acidity, rather than the richness that balsamic vinegar does. The ginger adds a little bite and the pink peppercorns add a dill-like freshness to the whole situation.

This is great served alongside a roast and if you have leftovers, they make the best salad with grains and a little Greek Yoghurt or goat’s cheese.

Pink Grapefruit Beets

8 baby beets, peeled and quartered

1 pink grapefruit, zest and juice

Thumbsize piece of ginger, peeled and grated

½ tsp salt

½ tsp pink peppercorns

1 tbsp olive oil

Preheat the oven to 170C

In a casserole dish, pour in the baby beets, olive oil, zest, ginger, salt and pepper and toss to coat. Pour over the grapefruit juice. Cover the casserole tightly with a lid, or alfoil, then pop in the oven for 45 minutes, or until the beets are tender.

Remove the lid/alfoil and pop back in the oven for a further 15 minutes so the juice reduces a little.

Serve, drizzling with the reduced juices.

Muddling Together Memories - Muddled Mulberry Manhattan

When I was in primary school, we went through a phase of silk worms. Every second family had silk worms. I’m actually surprised there wasn’t a massive rise in silk shirts worn in the local area. I’m assuming it started off as a classroom “pet” or lesson or something. My childhood memories are sketchy at best. But I remember two things about that Silk Worm Saga:

1. Disused washing machines are a great silk worm home
2. Silk worms love eating mulberry leaves.

Kids would bring in big bags of mulberry leaves to share about for all the other kids with silk worms. This was my first real memory of mulberries. The second memory I have is visiting my grandma when I was around 12 and seeing her arms and legs scratched to pieces and her triumphantly showing us the ice cream containers full of mulberries she’d picked from the bramble growing wild down the back of her yard. Then we’d get to eat some mulberry compote with ice cream. Good times!

So when I was offered some mulberries, I grabbed a few to take home. Despite most of my recollections of mulberries being deeply rooted in my childhood, I thought a more adult offering was required for their use. Muddling a few with some rosemary and boozing it up with rye and vermouth; Manhattan style was where my tastebud’s imagination took me. Instead of bitters, I layered a teaspoon of Laphraoig whisky on top to give it a smokey edge. The resulting cocktail is strong, mildly sweet and intensely berry-flavoured. Garnish with a chocolate cracker or biscotti.

Muddled Mulberry Manhattan

5 mulberries
1 tsp panela sugar (or raw sugar)
4 fresh rosemary leaves
1 1/2 shots (50mL) rye whisky
3/4 shot (30mL)sweet red vermouth
1 tsp Laphraoig whiskey

Chill a martini glass.

In a cocktail shaker, muddle the mulberries, panela and rosemary. Add the rye and vermouth, then top up with ice. Put the lid on and shake until the outside of the container is frosty. 

Strain through the lid, through a tea strainer into the martini glass. Gentle pour the Laphroaig over the top. Enjoy!

Entertaining with the Skamp - Wine Tasting Party

As you may have gathered from the plethora of recipes that use it, or tales of my trips down to the Margaret River region, I’m a big fan of wine. Like most people, I started on sweet white wines before my palate developed and now I’m a solid red drinker, with forays back into white and rose usually weather dependent. (I loved seeing the hashtag #summerwater as a reference to rose over the Northern Summer. Such a cute name!) And whilst I really enjoy my wine, and I’ve reached a point where although I am fussy about drinking bad wines…I’m certainly no expert. So when Lance and I decided to host some wine tasting parties, I knew it would have to be a little bit different to the usual.

My first experience with wine tasting events was as a white wine only drinker in my early 20s. There was a group at my workplace who met after work once every few months with a wine seller who would bring wines to taste and snacks to eat and we’d sample away. The more experienced wine drinkers of the group would discuss all of the technical aspects of the wine – the tannins, the length, the flavours. The two of us youngens would discuss the wine in terms of how we’d drink it. This red feels like you’d be wearing a smoking jacket, sitting in front of the fire. This white feels like a summer lunch, flash-fried prawns and crispy greens. And that remains to this day the way that I approach wine tasting at cellar doors, or just generally out and about. That helped broaden my taste in wines and introduced me to the wonders of reds.

I’ve spoken of my love of Cape Naturaliste Winery before. Many times. One of the wines Lance and I fell in love with and bought on our first trip here (on our honeymoon) was the 2008 Cabernet Sauvignon. We bought (a few of) both the reserve and non-reserve and decided we would drink them side-by-side to compare them. Then have a lovely meal to go with it. So into the “cellar” it went, ready for that special occasion. Then we bought the 2010 Cab Sauv, so that one was going to become part of the tasting. And then we bought the reserve and non-reserve 2011 Cabernet Sauvignon. 5 wines - all the same, but different. That was going to require us enlisting some help to taste and drink! A wine tasting party it was!

We decided to host it as a blind tasting. We put all of the bottles in brown paper bags and numbered them at random. We’d taste them blindly, making notes and then taste them again, knowing which one was which. We had plain water crackers for cleansing the palate – you don’t want anything with heavy flavours as a snack between wines or it will affect the taste.

The 5 of us at the tasting were all seasoned Cape Naturaliste drinkers – we often take a little picnic and have a glass or two on Jen’s balcony watching the vineyard – but none of us are wine experts. So the tasting notes page Lance and I designed looked a little different. We had the usual spaces for the flavours and smells we could discern. We even printed out a little sheet with terms that might spurn on ideas. We had a little space for the mouthfeel. Lance suggested we had a place for a breakdown of the drinking process. What was the “first bite”, when you held it in your mouth, what it was like to swallow, the aftertaste. These are all things that we have noted whilst drinking that can greatly vary and influence your overall experience of a wine. But the think that set ours apart was the experiential questions. Is it a food wine? What would you eat with it? What’s the ideal day/occasion for it. Does it evoke any particular memories?

Whilst it might be obvious because of how many shared memories our group had with each other and with wine, I was still surprised at how similar our experiential tasting notes were. One wine we all said would be best drunk on a crisp afternoon down south “Luxury Fishing” (for reference, luxury fishing is everyone with a line in the water in the river, deck-chairs, a cheese platter and some wine while Lance baits our lines and does all the other dirty jobs. I then handfeed him cheese crackers so his baity grossness doesn’t mean he can’t eat). We also all imagined eating with a variation of fresh bread, olive oil and dukkah. And although I was biased because I knew what was coming, it didn’t stop 3 of us thinking that the same wine would go particularly well with sticky ribs.

We finished up the wine tasting with a DIY Hamburger lunch, then continued listening to music, chatting and finishing off the bottles. Basically just creating more shared wine memories for the next tasting day. Being a hostess-with-the-mostest, in our admittedly “happy” state by the end of the night, I made sure there was a good dinner. There were no photos by that point, but I previously slow-cooked some pork in the cherry ribs sauce (good thing we left the 2011 Reserve til last!!) and re-heated that and served it with some freshly steamed buns and cucumber and radish slices. This is such a good party option as all the hard work is done before-hand. We stood around the kitchen island and assembled them as each batch of buns came out of the steamer.

We've also used the same approach with three 2013 Sauvignon Blancs from the Margaret River region (Cape Naturaliste, Leeuwin Estate and Cullen) and one $5 2013 Sauvignon Blanc from South Australia and the cheap bottle was unquestionably the least liked.


Have you held a wine tasting party? I’d love to hear how you do it, or if you like our approach to it.

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.