Coffeehouse.co.nz

The last week or two have seen three new kitchen experiences here:

1) Cooking with Quail’s eggs. They’re just so cute! And fiddly to de-shell. And seem to taste pretty much the same as ordinary eggs. Did I mention that they’re really cute though?!

2) Finally using our pizza stone to cook pizza on. Which did a fantastic job of getting the first crispy base pizza I’ve ever had with home made pizza dough.

3) Finally using our pasta machine to make some, wait for it… Wait for it…. PASTA! A bit of fun and games there, but we seem to have got the hang of it, and our ravioli and noodles turned out fine in the end.

Yup, it’s all go here!

Lately whilst I have been away from work Mike has been cooking himself some fancy food and then writing a post about it. Why won’t he cook food like that when I am home?

So today I decided to see if I could make some food worthy of writing a post.  And guess what it turned out not too bad at all!  So we had a layer of roasted red peppers and spinach, with a couscous red onion and feta cake, topped with some home made green olive tapenade.

OK so I used a recipe but I am happy to say my food even looked like the one in the cookbook. And it was that nice I would make it again, but I would add some water to the vege so it makes a bit of a sauce.

Bec was away tonight, so I got to cook a bit of a treat for dinner. RED MEAT!

But rather than taking the easy option and just frying up a steak I went for a restaurant style recipe for a Indian style rack of lamb on spiced spinach with a moilee sauce from one of the recent recipe books we’ve bought. Good call! Really good call!

BURP!

Although there were a reasonable number stages to complete before I was able to chow down, being able to spread them all over about 4 hours made it all seem quite easy. All except the trimming of the ribs. THAT was a long, potentially lethal task. And I only had one set to do!

Would I make it again? You bet! If I had another set of ribs I’d make another plate now!

Bec, you don’t know what you’re missing! (But don’t go away too often….)

This is one of our favourite  dishes lately. White chicken curry. YUM!

I think we’ve made it about four times now, including on New Year’s eve. As always with these sort of recipes,  each time has been slightly different, and never as good as the first time!

It’s got really nice, subtle, flavours, doesn’t take too much work or weird ingredients. Max points!

There’s quite a few other recipes in the same book that we’ve tried and liked too, but this one is the best so far!!

You must have seen a movie or read a book or something where a computer or robot or something is brought to its knees by a seemingly simple logic puzzle or something.

Last night that happened to me. Making couscous.

You have to be a bit careful making couscous. It’s all to easy to end up with something that’s just all glug and no  crunch, or all too crunchy and inedible. Or too oily and yucky. For something so simple there are quite a few potential pitfalls. So it really pays to follow the instructions on the packet, as they really should know the exact quantities of stuff to get perfect results.

The packet instructions: “Allow approximately 45g of couscous per 80g cooked serving. Place 250g of couscous in a large bowl with 400ml of boiling and 1tbsp oil”…

Ok, so there were 2 of us, so we needed to have 90g of couscous, so that means we need, um some water, so half what they’re saying is, um, 200ml but that’s for 125g which is still too much for just 2 of us, so we need a bit less, so that’s um, oh I give up!!! My brain’s overheating! Where’s the spreadsheet?!

Why don’t they just give instructions with a nice figure for each serving?! It would stop my head exploding anyway!

But for the record, after a lot of head scratching, the final result was probably some of the best couscous that we’ve ever made, doing us proud for dinner and lunch today.

I ended up using 300ml of water. I’ll leave  it to you to work out how much cous cous that was!

Thanks to Lennon and/or Kim’s comments on the previous entry we gave the cauliflower risotto another go last night. And it was yummy.

This time I even managed not to burn the anchovy and bread topping, so that was yummy too. (Last time we had to scrape it off and shove it far, far, far away from anything we wanted to eat)… We still got things just a bit wrong with the recipe as we assumed we knew what we were doing, but caught things just in time and managed to get back on track pretty quick. It helps if you read the whole recipe first sometimes!
Next time I must remember that if the food’s whiteish, use the blue plates though!

I guess that’s what they do. Or something very similar! We seem to have to have one in the fridge at all times anyway.

I can’t think of any other reason why we have to have one on call, slowly turning a weird kind of yellowy brown in the bottom of the fridge. But apparently it’s vital we have one. Even pointing out the fact that out of the 6 cauliflowers we’ve purchased in the last year we’ve thrown out 5 and a half didn’t stop one being added to the trolley in the supermarket….

What do you do with a cauliflower anyway?! I think it’s been almost decade since I cooked cauliflower cheese, or any of the more traditional cauliflower dishes. We’ve occasionally made a bit of a cauli curry, or cauli risotto that haven’t been too bad (especially the curry), but cauli hasn’t really been a kind of must have, store cupboard ingredient in my head at least.

But I’m determined that this one isn’t going to join the others in the great big rotting brassica heap in the sky. Or on the ground even. What it’s going to become I have no idea yet. I’ll try to remember to let you know. But in the meantime, if you have any great ideas, let me know. Please!

As none of you are here for Christmas this year, I thought I’d document our day so you can share it with us. For half of you your day is over anyway, so may as well enjoy ours too. I’ll try to update this as we go…

It’s a pretty quiet Christmas planned for us this year. No plans except to eat and drink. Oh, and we’ve decided that we need to go for a walk outside each day too. So don’t expect much in the way of excitement!

Christmas for me starts on Christmas eve. Unfortunately we both had to work Christmas eve, but fortunately we both were working at home. Yay us!  So at 3pm we downed any tools that we might or might not have been using and started Christmas proper.  First up, a good old Kiwi classic. Can you tell what it is then?!

Not long after the table was cleared of that, out came the first stage of the Christmas entertainment: a puzzle!

Oddly enough, this is the  first puzzle I’ve known that the blue bits got done first!Brief pit stop for some pies (an no, not Christmas mince pies, some real ones), then back to the puzzling until we couldn’t see straight any more, so bed called.

And then it was Christmas proper!

After a bit of a slow start, mostly because the puzzle kept distracting us (“just one more piece, honest…”), we finally got breakfast together. Eggs Benidictish (one plateful with ham, one smoked salmon) with champers.

Once that had at least started to digest, it was pressie time!  Here’s the gifts we gave each other (clicky):

In case you’re not quite sure what you’re seeing: it is indeed a Christmas pudding; some nail clippers; 3 sauce jugs (one with matching plate); a milk pan; an egg timer, and an indoor/outdoor light up gnome!  I’ll leave you to guess who gave who what. Maybe we’ll make that into a quiz a bit later on!

We had slightly more luck from our gifts from others. Although to be honest, most of them we purchased ourselves after coming to an agreement with friends that this year we’d all just buy ourselves stuff that we wanted, and it would actually come from them… Worked for us! So here’s what you got us! (clicky)

Right, course 1 of “dinner” complete now. Slightly later than planned, but then we weren’t getting too hungry after breakfast anyway. Starter was Indian inspired fishcakes with mint and coriander sauce. yum.

Oh, and I can report puzzle was completed at 15:05. Now what?! Oh yeah, better start on course 2!…

Second course/meal of the day: Spicy sea bass and new potato salad.

Burp! There might be a small delay now while deal with what we’ve already eaten!

Ok. So we decided that we’d skip a course today so we could have it tomorrow. Straight to the cheese course it is then! Yum!

Now, can you follow up cheese with fruit pud and custard, or should that wait for another day too?.. .

OK, enough grief already!  Here’s a new entry for you. Finally! And just for a change some of the pics are clicky for bigger versions…

The other week we had our first real holiday of the year. YAY! (And yes, for those of you that seem to think that we’re always on holiday, this really was our first real holiday of the year. Our only other trip was the long weekend in Morocco that doesn’t really count. Honest! Go back and have a look if you don’t believe me!)

Where did we go? We gatecrashed Rach and Rupert’s planned holiday to South Africa, making the most of a week off work by leaving on Friday night, and flying back on Monday morning straight to work. From the UK, South Africa is an easy place to visit as there’s no significant time difference, so the overnight out and back work really well. As long as you can sleep on a plane, and luckily we managed to get enough of that both ways.

It was a pretty busy time though, as you can imagine with such a short break.  Landing in Johannesburg we pretty much jumped straight on another plane and headed off north a bit to Kapama, a private game reserve on the edge of the Kruger national park, while the other kids drove off to visit friends. 2 nights there and then they picked us up on the way past and we headed to another smaller lodge nearby, Pondoro, for another couple of nights.

The daily timetable at both lodges was roughly the same. A very, very early wakeup call, early snack and coffee, a dawn/early morning game drive for a few hours, back for breakfast, a bit of rest time, lunch, a bit more rest, then high tea (yes more food) before the afternoon game drive for a few hours, dinner, then sleep, ready for the next day. A lot packed into a day! And if you arrived just before lunchtime, you just kind of slotted in with lunch and then the night drive etc…

What did we see? Well, luckily for me Pondoro issued us with a little list of possible sightings which I proceeded to tick off, as well as trying to remember what we’d already seen at Kapama. Here’s what it shows we saw of the larger animals:

• Lions
• Jackal (Pondoro only)
• Baboons (Pondoro only)
• Vervet Monkeys
• Elephants
• White Rhinos
• Giraffes
• African Buffalo (Kapama only)
• Tree squirrel
• Burchell’s Zebra
• Waterbuck
• Wildebeest/Gnu
• Greater Kudu
• Nyala (Kapama only)
• Bushbuck (Pondoro only)
• Wharthog
• Impala
• Common Duiker
• Steenbok
• Blue tailed scrub lizard

We also saw a huge number of different birds as well. Almost enough, and enough pretty ones, to understand the twitchers…

The only one of the big 5 we missed seeing was the Leopard, which apparently is the most difficult to find. We don’t feel particularly hard done by though. It’s just a potential reason to return one day!

Do we have a favourite lodge?  They were both quite different, Kapama is a fenced in reserve that caters for a lot of guests (60 rooms)… but you are pretty much guaranteed to see some animals I guess, just not sure what and when as although its fenced in it is still a vast space.  Pondoro is a lot smaller reserve with only 6 rooms, so the experience is a lot more intimate (they know your name and the staff hold down about 6 jobs i.e bar tender, tour guide, ranger etc) and the food is fantastic. The reserve itself is not fenced in so you can actually drive around for ages and not see anything.

So which one would I go to again, that’s a hard one… I am glad we spent time at both, they each have their own advantages, they both had fantastic service which you can’t really fault.  But if we had to go back I guess we would choose Pondoro though for the size… but then it would be a bit of a bummer if you went the whole time and saw no animals……but then that’s wild animals for you!

After those fun and interesting days, we said goodbye to the animals and headed south for something completely different.  A couple more hops in various aeroplanes later and we were at the other end of the country in Capetown. We had 2 nights there, eating, drinking and doing the hop on hop off tourist bus trail around town. There was an aquarium on the waterfront there, and I find it very hard to walk past an aquarium so I managed (with actually no effort at all) to convince everyone to go in for a wander. I’d give it a 7/10 on the aquarium, 8/10 if you factor in that it was just a couple of degrees cooler inside than in the sun outside!

And then another quick drive out to Franschhoek for a couple of days and nights of wine tasting, wine drinking, eating and sleeping.

We let Rupert pick the wineries, including a full day tasting session around Franschhoek and Stellenbosch, which started at 9.00am (a lot of spitting was required), and he did a pretty good job!  It was just the 4 of us being driven around in a van by a local wine tour guide who knew so much (he was really great).  The wineries I recall are:

• Rupert and Rothschild
• Boekenhoutskloof
• Kanoncop
• Rustenburg
• Delaire
• Thelema
• Muratie

Burp!

We tried some great restaurants in Cape Town and Franschhoek, they were Fork, Tank (Cape Town), La Petite Ferme, Ruebens, and Tokara.

And then another short hop back to J’berg airport to jump onto yet another plane for the overnight flight back. Yes, I know, a lot of flying. We’ll plant a couple of trees or something in a few weeks to offset our carbon footprint.

As you can imagine there are far too many photos for us to wade through, argue over and then work out what to do with. Even more than usual this time as we had 2 cameras with us along with a heap of memory cards and were both busy snapping away merrily at anything that moved, along with some stuff that didn’t. When we finally agree on a few more that we like we’ll chuck them on another page for your viewing pleasure. Or we’ll bore you stupid with the whole set when we’re next with you sitting around a laptop or something. You have been warned!

But I leave you with this, a kind of ugly animal, but kinda cute in an odd way:

And here it is.

I must admit to being slightly surprised that I own a red teapot. It’s not the “red” bit of that statement that is surprising me, it’s the the “teapot” bit.

To be honest, it’s not the first teapot I’ve owned.  I did once have a conical stainless steel one (for all I know I still do have it packed in a box somewhere), but it has been over 10 years since I’ve used one.

Why have I got one? Well oddly enough it’s all to do with coffee really. In this flat we have an espresso/latte coffee maker built into the kitchen. Why? I have no idea. I guess the building company thought it would be a great USP (unique selling point) or something when showing the latte set around the showflat and might get them an extra sale or two. It’s actually more of a pain in the butt more than a good idea. We would much rather have had the space that it takes up as cupboard space to store more goodies, but as it’s there I have been making quite a bit of use of it.

It makes a pretty good espresso type coffee, which is about all I’ve ever used it for. But sometimes it seems like I’m at it’s beck and call, rather than the other way around. It should be so simple. Hit the button that says (helpfully) ‘cafe’ and get a cup of coffee. But no. More often than not it says ‘add beans’, ‘add water’, ’empty trays’, or the dreaded ‘calc’ (which means it needs a deep clean that demands more than half an hour attention and needs some relatively expensive tablets stuffed down it). And sometimes, even when I’ve just emptied all the trays it still says ’empty trays’ until I smack it a bit, then it seems to think about it and grudgingly decides that yes, I can have a coffee after all and belatedly changes its display to ‘cafe’.

Even with all of that grief, and because it does make a reasonable cup of coffee, in the early evening or when working at home I find I tend to wander up to it quite often whenever I’m thirsty (or have some difficult or boring work to do) and hit the ‘cafe’ button, and more often than not drink the coffee (I do, however, often not drink the coffee, as I’ll go back the ‘puter’ and get engrossed fixing the problem that I originally walked away from to get the coffee, and by the time I remember I’ve made a coffee, it’s stone cold…)

Drinking all that strong coffee seems to lead to the usual effects of too much caffeine which in not that relaxing or enjoyable, but is only evidenced a reasonable time after the last cup.

Right, so back to my teapot (as this was about my little red teapot after all)… In order to find an alternative to drinking too much coffee, for some random reason that I could not explain to myself even if you asked me to I seem to have taken up interspersing the coffees with a few cups of Chinese jasmine tea.
Close family will understand my slight concern that I might be turning into my grandfather!

Anyway, originally I was making said tea in a pyrex measuring jug and tipping it through a huge sieve (like you drain your pasta in), which possibly really wasn’t the best approach to tea making ever invented. Then I managed to buy myself a small sieve which was a huge improvement on proceedings, but still apparently left far too much of a mess on the bench for Bec, so she insisted we got a teapot.

So. Here we are. I now have a little red teapot!

(but no lemon balm handy so far, so don’t tell Pop!)