Challenge recipe 23: Basmati rice salad

In the spirit of bringing back things that I've left half finished (see also: the start of yesterday's post about my trip to New Zealand), I figured it was about time to get a wriggle on with my cookbook challenge, which I started nearly three years ago and still have another six-ish recipes to complete by the beginning of April. Somehow, I went the whole of 2013 without making any new recipes from my cookbooks. Whoops????

Anyway, this one is going to be almost completely lacking in photos because a) I completely forgot, and b) I was making it because people were coming over for dinner, and I figured they probably wouldn't like it if I got all "Oh, the main course is going to be another 15 minutes or so because I need to photograph the salad from a hundred different angles, 'kay?"

ANYWAY. Here's the book:

Please excuse the crappy photo taken in 2011

My handwritten recipe book, filled with stuff I've stolen from Mum and written down from magazines as well as the best of the best from Dessert Day (the good but not great ones get printed and shoved in the front in a plastic pocket).

Here's what you'll need:
2 cups basmati rice
2 tbsp vegetable oil
2 tsp brown or black mustard seeds
1/3 cup coarsely torn coriander leaves (that's cilantro to you, America)
3 small red chillis, seeded and finely chopped
2 tbsp finely chopped ginger
1 cup plain yoghurt

And here's how you do it:
Cook rice until tender. Drain, rinse under cold water, and drain again. Place in a large bowl. Heat oil in small frying pan. Add mustard seeds and cook over medium heat 1-2 minutes or until seeds start to pop (it's a lot like making popcorn, so you may want to add a lid to the equation!).

Add seeds, coriander, chilli and ginger to rice and stir to combine. Add yoghurt a little at a time until well coated but not too wet. Season with salt and pepper. Serve at room temperature.

Serves 6.

The verdict?
It may not look particularly pretty in the above photo, but it's insanely tasty even to coriander haters like me. It's always been a hit when I've made it, and goes equally well with barbequed chicken or beef in summer. Give it a crack and see what you think!!

Is this something you'd be interested in making?

K xx

Challenge recipe 17: Arancini

First of all, this is my 300th post! So to celebrate, I've done a little five minute bloggy facelift. Wheeeeeeeee!!

Ahem. Moving rapidly along, I've been wanting to make this recipe for ages but it's always seemed like too much hard work. So I put it on my cookbook challenge list! I've detoured quite a bit from the recipe, but mostly in the technique rather than the ingredients. Here's the book:

And here's what you'll need to make the risotto:

You can actually make this part of it a day ahead. Start by dicing the onion as small as you can:

Smash a clove of garlic with the side of a knife (it's the easiest way to get the skin off. Trust me!):

Then shove it through a garlic press.

If you're me, this is the point where you decide to stop and have lunch, thus guaranteeing that your entire house smells like onion. Don't be me.

Add a tablespoon of olive oil to a saucepan, and cook the onion and garlic until translucent:

Then add half a cup of arborio rice:

Stir until it's covered in oil, then add in half a cup of dry white wine:

Stir constantly. Once the wine has mostly evaporated, add salt reduced chicken stock, half a cup at a time:

The recipe called for 2.5 cups. I ended up using 2 cups, and found that 1.5 cups probably would have been enough. Just see how it goes and judge for yourself. Anyway, when the last of the stock has almost evaporated, add in half a cup of frozen peas and remove it from the heat:

Also add half a cup of grated parmesan cheese. (The recipe also calls for 40g of diced ham, but as I don't eat pig, I left it out.)

Mix it all together, and then pour it into a medium sized bowl and let it cool for at least fifteen minutes.

Here's what you'll need for the second phase - turning the risotto into arancini:

While the rice is cooling, chop up 100g of mozzarella cheese into chunks. You want them to be about 1cm cubed. Obviously, mine were a little bigger than that. I wound up having to trim the edges later. Don't be like me.

Once the rice is cool, lightly beat an egg and add it into the risotto:

Now comes the slightly tricky part, which will be unaccompanied by pictures because it was too damned messy. Take a tablespoon of risotto in your hand, press a piece of mozzarella into the middle, and put another tablespoon of risotto on the top. Roll it around to make a ball, then toss it in plain flour. I actually found the easiest way to do it was to use a cookie scoop. It meant the size was consistent and you could dump it into your hand easily. (The recipe actually says to take two tablespoons of mixture, roll into a ball, push the cheese into the middle, then form the ball around it again. I tried this way. IT'S DUMB AND OVERLY COMPLICATED AND REALLY DOESN'T WORK.)

When you've done that, put an egg in a bowl with a tablespoon of milk:

Beat it together, then grab at least 1 cup of breadcrumbs. Again, there will be no pictures of the process because it's really messy. Take a rice ball, coat it in the egg/milk mixture, then toss it in the breadcrumbs. Repeat until you have so many breadcrumbs on your fingers that you could deep fry your hands and not feel a thing (aka until you're finished).

At this stage, you can either push on with cooking them, or stick them in the fridge until you're ready to roll.

Now, cooking them is a little complicated. The book says to deep fry them for several minutes until the mozzarella melts. I tried that, and they ended up burnt and gross on the outside with a solid piece of cheese in the middle. So here's MY method, which was far more successful (and probably a *little* healthier). Dump an entire bottle of canola oil into a saucepan. Heat it up until it's ready (I tested it by sprinkling in a few breadcrumbs. If they bubble when you add them, it's hot enough). Then deep fry the arancini one at a time until golden brown (this took about a minute each):

Put them on kitchen paper when you take them out of the oil. Once all the arancini have been fried, put them on a baking tray and stick them in the oven at 150 degrees C for 15-20 minutes.

That sad looking pale one on the far right was an experiment to see what happened if you skipped the deep frying part and put it in the oven smothered in spray oil. Answer: it cooks, but doesn't even remotely brown.

ANYWAY. Serve them as finger food or with a salad as a main course.

The verdict? They were a lot of work, but they're pretty awesome. In the future, I'd probably try making them with a more flavourful (but equally melty) cheese than mozzarella. And possibly dip them in some kind of tomato sauce-y stuff. (By which I do not mean ketchup!) I'd probably also add more pepper to the risotto to give it some bite. (Oh. AND. I used gluten free flour and gluten free breadcrumbs, and they worked fine. So they're gluten intolerance friendly!!)

So thanks for sticking by me through 300 posts. Here's to 300 more!

Has anyone else made arancini from scratch? And what do you think of the new design??
K xx

Challenge recipe 9: Vegetarian paella

That's right kids - it's time for another challenge recipe! This time, it's vegetarian paella. Here's the book:

And here's what you'll need:

Start by pouring 2 cups of vegetable stock and 3 cups of water into a saucepan:

Heat until boiling. Meanwhile, dice an onion. It was meant to be a red onion, but I didn't register that part when I wrote down the ingredients:

Dice a red capsicum:

And two tomatoes, with the seeds and cores removed:

Add the veggies to a large frying pan, along with some olive oil and 2 crushed cloves of garlic:

Then add in 1/4 teaspoon of turmeric:

And 2 teaspoons of sweet smoked paprika:

Stir it all around and cook until the vegetables have softened. Then add in 1 3/4 cups of arborio rice:

Pour in the stock/water mixture and reheat until boiling:

Reduce to a simmer and leave it for 20 minutes or until the rice is ALMOST cooked through. Then sprinkle 1 cup of frozen peas and 100g of frozen baby beans over the top:

Cover the frying pan (and it's kind of helpful if it has a lid. Mine didn't, so I used tin foil...) and keep on the heat for another five minutes. Then remove it from the heat and let it rest for another five minutes before removing the tin foil/lid.

Stir it all together, and serve:

And, if you like that sort of thing, sprinkle sliced black olives and flat leaf parsley over the top.

The verdict? It's pretty damned good. It's got a *little* too much of the smoke flavour for my liking, so if I make it again, I'll probably decrease the amount of smoked paprika. But it's pretty quick and easy. Once you've chopped the veggies, you can pretty much just let it do its own thing, which definitely makes it my kind of meal! And it's really filling.

If I make it again, I'll probably mix up the veggies a bit. I'm not a huge fan of beans, so I might replace those with snow peas or something. And I might use cherry tomatoes to save on the scraping the guts out of the tomatoes part, which always frustrates me. If I do make these changes, I'll let you know how they go!

(Or, you know, you guys could do it or me and let me know how it goes??)

K xx

Branching out - risotto

So I was making risotto last week, and I figured that it was probably about time I branched out from blogging about things that contain unhealthy quantities of sugar and chocolate. So I hereby present risotto with fillet steak and vegetables!

Here's the cast of characters:

I committed a cardinal sin and forgot to marinate the steak... So I figured I'd just cook it in olive oil and balsamic vinegar instead:

Cook the steak:

While the steak's cooking, get started on the onion. Cut the top off it:

Then cut it in half:

Then peel it:

And dice it. If you need a detailed tutorial, go visit Pioneer Woman Cooks...:

Nice, finely diced onion!:

Then take the steak:

And slice it thinly. I'm sorry, I committed a cardinal sin (again) and overcooked the steak. I got distracted watching appallingly bad reality TV. It was either the Biggest Loser or So You Think You Can Dance...:

Next, take the capsicum:

Chop the top off. Does anyone else get capsicums where one of the seeds has sprouted and grown a little capsicum inside the big one??? Because I seem to get them ALL the time:

Remove the core:

And dice it:

Then take the cherry tomatoes:

And chop them into quarters:

Finally, take the sweet potato. Peel it and chop the ends off it:

Aaaaand dice it:

Once all the veggies are chopped, start on the risotto. First, melt some butter:

Then add the diced onions:

And stir until the onion is softened and translucent:

Once the onion's done, add the arborio rice, and stir until it's well coated in butter mixture:

Then take a couple of cups of beef stock:

Typically, you should use about half a cup of wine. But considering I don't drink wine on its own, that would leave me with the better part of a whole bottle of wine and nothing to do with it. So I just use half a cup of stock instead:

Once that first half cup has been absorbed, add the other one and a half cups of stock:

Then add in the frozen peas:

And mix them through:

Meanwhile, cook the veggies as you see fit. I steamed them in the microwave. The sweet potato took about six minutes, the capsicum took about four minutes, and the tomatoes about two minutes:

Meanwhile, once the stock has been absorbed to about this level:

Add a cup of water:

Continue adding water and letting it evaporate until the rice has cooked. It's usually two cups of stock and just over two cups of water:

Then grate some cheese. You can use the pre-grated stuff if you want, but it tastes better if you grate your own. Don't ask me how or why. It just does...:

Mmmmmmmm, cheesy goodness:

Once the water has evaporated to a suitable extent:

Add another chunk of butter. Strictly speaking, you can use margarine or olive oil instead, but it's just not the same:

Then add the cheese:

And mix it through, along with a liberal dose of pepper. You can add salt if you like, but it probably doesn't need it, courtesy of all that stock:

Then add the herbs. I used Italian herb blend because I'm too lazy to buy basil and oregano separately. But you can use whatever you want:

Then toss the vegetables through:

Along with the chopped beef. I ended up dicing it rather than just slicing it. But if you used a bigger chunk of steak, you could use slices:

And serve!!!

Yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuum:

This is sooooooo good. And it smells just as good as it tastes! It might seem a bit complicated the first time you make it (especially the whole standing there and watching it the whole time part - NEVER leave risotto unattended!), but after a couple of times, it just becomes habit. And you'll be able to whip it up in no time!

Enjoy!!!!!!

K xx :)