Roast vegetables on couscous with Moroccan tomato sauce

Sometimes all you can manage when you stand in front of the kitchen is to assemble food, rather than really cook it or get too fancy. On the week that the magazine I edit goes to press (ie, the dreaded... deadline week!), that pretty much sums me up as a cook.

Mind you, the whole point of having good ingredients on hand, such as organic veg, high quality olive oil and a good supply of fresh herbs is that even the most simple of dishes is going to be pretty tasty. Or at least good for you...

Since this has been that very week, I present to you my latest assemblage!

Roast vegetables on couscous with Moroccan tomato sauce

There are four very simple components that go together to make this, and you'll end up with a hearty, filling, tasty and very likely nutritious dish that looks a lot fancier than it is. You've got roast vegetables, a bed of couscous, the tomato-based sauce, and some greens to add visual interest and in this case a really interesting flavour and mouth feel.

ingredients

Two kipfler potatoes

Two carrots

Four single clove garlic

One garlic clove

One whole beetroot (reserve the leaves)

Green beans

Ripe tomatoes

Coriander

Small red onion

Ground cumin

Ground coriander seeds

Cup of couscous

Half a cup of chicken stock

Salt & pepper

Olive oil

Tackle the longest step first - chop up your veg for roasting, peel the single clove garlic (don't bother chopping) and toss through some olive and season with salt and pepper. Get it going at normal roasting temp for your oven, and move on to the other ingredients.

For the tomato sauce you need to get a three tablespoons of olive oil heating in a pan, and then add finely chopped red onion. As it's starting to soften, add more salt and pepper, the ground cumin and coriander, and chopped fresh coriander. Finely chop up the tomatoes - about three medium size will do you - and add to the pan.

Add a touch more oil if the sauce is looking too dry, and cook the tomato down.

When that's done, transfer to a bowl and put aside. Next!

The couscous can take a little time, so get that going next. Simply add a cup to a sauce pan, and then pour over a cup of hot water out of the tap and the stock - so that's half a cup of water, half of stock. This needs to rest, and let the couscous soak up the liquid, so get cracking on the greenery!

You could use english spinach here, but since we've got the leaves from the beetroot - and they are edible - there's no sense in wasting them. Chop the crunchy stems up into inch long sections, add to the pan you've just removed the sauce from, along with a bit more oil and some sliced garlic. Roughly tear the leaves into two or three pieces, and after a minute or two add them to the stems. When the leaves start to wilt, the stems should be cooked but still crunchy, and garlic should just be browning. Take off the heat, and arrange around two plates.

Brush the green beans with some olive oil, and toss on top of the roasting veg.

The couscous is ready to heat now, so add either some rancid butter, olive oil or a dash of blue cheese. Rancid butter is traditional, but not something you can usually sell your friends on ("It's rancid-fresh!") - even traditional cooks tend toward the blue cheese option these days, and it delivers a similar complex flavour. Olive oil will do, and since you've used stock the couscous will be tasty regardless.

Warm the couscous over a low heat the stove, mixing whatever ingredient you've added thoroughly. Stir constantly, as you don't want it to stick and burn on in the ban. Taste test, then plate it up in a mound in the center of the plate.

Your veg should be done by now, so take it out of the oven and make a tasty stack on top of the couscous. Pour the tomato sauce over the veg, and the job's a good 'un.

And pretty tasty, too, though I really did wish I had some blue cheese on hand for the couscous - there are some very heavy, stolid flavours in this dish and the cheese would have given the meal some needed bite.

The big success, however, were the beetroot leaves, which have a lovely fulsome nutty flavour. It's not dissimilar to spinach, so I suspect the leaves would be even better with a dash of nutmeg. My friend Blu has an excellent warm beetroot leaf salad with crunchy croûton that I'm going to have to try some time.

Otherwise this a great meal after a long cold day - warming, filling, and pretty damn healthy to boot.

Lemon Roast Chicken

Ah, the roast.

It's one of those dishes that a lot of us grow up with, and then tend to end up taking for granted and ignoring once we start cooking for ourselves. Which is kinda dumb, as roasting a piece of meat - be it bird, beef or whatever - introduces a whole mess of flavours you otherwise can't replicate, as well as whole lot of cooking methods to explore.

And when it comes to roasting a lovely free-range organic chook, the thing that's really going to set the stage for the food itself is the choice of stuffing. Always important in terms of flavour, it's also very important in the technical sense. A good stuffing both stops the bird from drying out during the cooking process, and shapes it as well, making for much easier serving and slicing.

Plus, if you're a highline glutton like me... it tastes really, really good.

Lemon Roast Chicken

This is essentially Stephanie Alexander's excellent roast chicken recipe, though some small changes of my own have crept into it over the years. And I'm also a much lazier cook than her, so essentially cheat on some of the steps.

But it's still tasty!

ingredients

One realistically scaled organic chicken (so much smaller and tastier than the hormone monsters you normally get in supermarkets)

One lemon

Kalamata olives

Goose fat

Salt & pepper

See? It's such a simple recipe you don't even need to see a photograph! Also, this was meant to be a meal that my partner was cooking, since I was stupidly tired, but I did my usual trick of performing a drive-by take-over of the kitchen, and we worked on this together.

So once your partner realises what's happened and goes off to play World of Warcraft in between chopping vegies and brushing stuff with tasty, tasty fat, you need to stuff the bird. This sounds rude, and feels even ruder - you are essentially shoving stuff in the hollowed out bottom of a dead animal. But it's for a noble purpose.

In this case, we're using a lemon, cut into quarters. Take one quarter and rub the bird down vigourously with the fleshy side, then get stuffing. You want to place the quarters so that the rind is innermost to the body cavity - this insures that the juice of the lemon will cook through the chicken as it roasts. Add the olives as well, sliced up roughly. This adds a wonderful savouriness to the chicken, and let me tell you - they also taste great as you graze over the carcass after the meal!

Then, all you need to do is taking a basting brush, and brush the bird with the goose fat. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and you're ready to roast! This is where I get lazy; if you're really serious about roasting, you should turn the bird once every ten to fifteen minutes from side to side, top to bottom, so that it ends right way up for the final bit of cooking. I just left it on the roasting tray.

You can also add whatever veg options you want. In our case, we chopped up some kipfler and congo potatoes, added a couple of small onions, and sliced the top off a head of garlic, and surrounded the bird with it all. All the veg also got a liberal splash of fat. Finally, while the bird cooled, we steamed some broccoli.

So, after about 50 minutes of cooking you should end up with this:

Which when carved and plated should end up like this (and also end up with your mouth watering):

The real beauty of this method is that you don't need to baste the bird during cooking at all, making it a really easy dish to make even after getting home from work. The chicken's flesh is tender and lemon flavoured, with just a hint of saltiness from the olives. The skin is also just about perfect - the goose fat (trust me, a whole entry is coming on goose fat soon!) crisps the skin beautifully, and the lemon rub goes even further toward making the skin the most indulgent part of the meal.

Except maybe for those olives... *drools*

My other half's a baker

As you can likely guess, I like food. I don't consider myself a great cook - I know too many actual great cooks to be that vain! - but I'm very pleased with what I can put together.

But one thing I've never really grokked is the art of baking.

You see, I love all the processes of the things I cook. The slow concentration of a risotto, the expectation of waiting for a well-loved piece of steak to rest. Even the careful consideration of a good chicken stuffing, or discovering a new recipe is a secret thrill. But the process of baking, and of sweet or desert cookery in general, just leaves me uninspired*.

Not so my common-or-garden-girlfriend. Or fiance. Or Moogle. Or whatever she is. She's recently discovered a real love of flour and almond meal, of making sweet treats and clever icings. Bless her for it, 'cause she's making tasty stuff, but now that I'm privy to the making process, it still doesn't do much for me.

But when the end result is something like these great little cupcakes with royal icing, who's going to question things.

Man, these were good. Ever so subtly lemony, and that frosting... well, yeah, it's royal for a reason. Silky and white, it looks a treat, and the eating's not bad either.

And yes, that bowl of icing didn't last long.

So anyway, I guess it's a good split. For serious dinnering, I can knock off a solid entree and mains, but my partner can handle desert. It's almost like it was meant to be...

* There is one desert I love preparing. Calling it cooking seems bit of a stretch, but it's certainly a crowd pleaser, and something a little different. Keep an eye peeled.

Stuffed capsicums with spinach and tomato salad

When you see 'stuffed' in the name of a dish you tend to think that it's a little bit fancy (sorry for quoting a McDonald's ad), but more often than not it's merely a matter of convenience whenever I stuff something.

Usually I'll look in the fridge or pantry, despair of having enough ingredients to make a satisfying meal, and then the wise words of Homer Simpson will come to me - "Bring me your finest dish, stuffed with your second finest dish!". Oddly enough, the idea of simply combining two really good base ingredients into a tasty whole is the start and finish of this meal.

Stuffed capsicums with spinach and tomato salad

You can use any old capsicum to make this, but we had on hand quite sweet baby capsicum, and in terms of plating and presentation, I think they're the best choice. The stuffing is essentially a risotto, too, so you add any of the normal variations of that dish to this one; for this meal, I kept things relatively simple, relying instead on the flavours of stock and mushrooms to strengthen the dish.

ingredients

Four baby capsicums

Chicken stock

Cup of arborio rice

Knob of butter

Brown onion

Garlic

Shallot

Basil & oregano

Snowpeas

Swiss brown mushrooms

Shiitake mushrooms

Parmesan cheese

White wine

Baby spinach

Vine tomatoes

Balsamic vinegar

Salt & pepper

The little bit of brie is entirely for pre-dinner nomming.

First up, melt a goodly knob of butter in a heavy-bottomed pan, get a pot of stock simmering away, and bring your oven up to heat. Finely chop the onion, and add to the butter along with the green herbs, salt & pepper and chopped shallot. Saute gently - you don't want the onion to brown, merely go all nicely transparent.

While the niceness develops, chop the tops off of your capsicum and remove the seeds and the gnarly center bit. Keep the tops. Slice the mushrooms and add to the onion, which should be approaching transparency, and when they get there add the cup of rice.

What you want from your rice, like in any risotto, is for the rice to start absorbing the liquids and oils from the ingredients. Conversely, the pan will start to dry out at this stage, so you need to keep stirring and making sure nothing is sticking to the pan or burning. Like the onion, you wan to wait until the rice is just turning slightly transparent, and then add the first measure of stock. Just enough to cover the rice and other ingredients.

Making risotto this way is bit of a time sink, as you need to keep stirring regularly to stop it from sticking, and keep adding stock as its absorbed by the rice - but it does deliver, I think, the best risotto.

Keep tasting the rice until it's just about losing it's crunch, then stir the snowpeas through (which are chopped roughly in half or thirds). The snowpeas added now will keep their crunch, and that adds a great texture to the final dish. Take the risotto off the heat, and prepare for stuffing!

Take each capsicum and spoon ricey goodness into them, tamping it down slightly but not stuffing them fit too burst. You want a bit of overflow, too. Place your capsicums in a baking dish of a size that will allow them to stand up, and pour some more stock - about a half centimeter - into the dish. We'll be baking the capsicum, so if you don't add some liquid the capsicum will dry out, and using stock adds a lot more flavour to the dish. Being the guy I am, I also added a similar amount of white wine.

With all your capsicums stuffed and standing proud, you can also add a splash of wine to each one - maybe a thimble full. Add some grated parmesan to the top of each one, and put the top of each capsicum back on. Whack it all in the oven, refill your wine glass, and wait about twenty minutes, or until the parmesan is browning and the capsicum is lovely and tender.

Serve with a simple salad of spinach leaves and chopped tomato, with a balsamic dressing.

You get a wonderful layering of flavours in a dish like this. The outer layers of rice take up the sharp flavour of the capsicum, the capsicum itself takes up the stock and wine from the dish as it bakes, and the top layer of rice and the parmesan is infused with white wine complexity. All the while the rice itself is enriched with the strong earthy tones of the mushrooms, and the occasional fresh snap of snowpeas makes for a great taste and a pleasing mouth feel.

It is a bit of a messy dish, though. You should really stir some of the parmesan through the rice mix, as you would a traditional risotto, and that would give the rice much more adhesion and support. As it is, each stuffed capsicum tends to fall apart after a few mouthfuls are cut away. But I think the flavour complexity of my iteration of the dish more than makes up for it.

Roast beef on a bed of bok-choy, with kipflers, peas and tomato

I'm not really one for formal recipes most of the time. I like to look at what's in the fridge or in the pantry and work from there; plus, I like the challenge of making something that looks and tastes good from relatively first principles.

Of course, sometimes this doesn't quite work out - some things that sound great in your head don't quite work on the plate (or palette). Similarly, it can be really easy to overdo a dish or the amount of ingredients when you start thinking that you should start using a certain ingredient (like when it's been sitting there for a while and you want to use it before it collapses under its own entropic field).

My roast beef attempt last night was pretty much a success, but also - I think - one ingredient too far...

Roast beef on a bed of bok-choy, with kipflers, peas and tomato

Pretty much everything here is care of the food co-op, including the excellent slab of beef. In fact, this dish is pretty much inspired by a fellow Feedbagger (our delightful name for our co-op), who used a similar combination a few nights ago to very good effect. She went for a sweet sauce, though, while I was feeling like something a bit more savoury.

ingredients

Slab (it's a metric measurement) of grass fed sirloin

Three Kipfler potatoes

Goose fat

Dijon mustard

Two bunches of bok-choy

Peas

Cherry roma tomatoes

Coriander

Sea salt

Pre heat the oven to around 200 degrees celsius, or whatever's good for roasting - so many inner city ovens in rental houses are so wildly different in their heating that real measurement's a quaint whimsy rather than a hard rule. Unless you're clever and have an oven thermometer.

I'm not that clever.

While the oven's warming up, work on the slab and the 'taters. Arrange them on the baking tray, with the meat resting on a raised grill or similar, for even roasting. Use a basting brush to coat the meat and veg with a liberal coating of goose fat (ah, goose fat... I'll wax lyrical about you in a later post!), then brush on a good coat of dijon mustard to the upper surface of the beef. Sprinkle it all with some salt and pepper, and whack in the oven.

A piece of meat that size should take about a half hour to 45 minutes to cook to medium rare, and you'll also want to give it some time to rest once you remove it from the oven, so now's a good time to refill that glass of wine and check Facebook. Alternatively, it's a good chance to consider why you need to rest meat.

When you apply heat to steak or large fillets like this one, it contracts. It's a muscle, after all, and as the muscle squeezes itself, it squeezes all the tasty juices into the center of the cut. You can perfectly cook a steak, but if you serve it straight off the pan it'll be less than stellar. One cut will see all those juices flooding the plate, and the meat's colour will be quite uneven.

As a rule of thumb, you should rest meat cooked in a pan for as long as you cooked it. With a roast, like this, something like ten minutes will suffice for those juices to have suffused the entire cut. It'll be more tender, tastier, and look a lot better.

So, having pondered the importance of rest, you can now prep the rest of the meal.

Remove the bok-choy leaves from their stalk, wash, and place in a steamer (or a collander, if you're kind of half-arsed about having the right tools). Set a pot of salted water boiling, and then switch off your brain while you're shelling peas. Once you've got a good handful, set aside, and chop up some baby romas quite finely, and add some similarly chopped coriander.

You can plate the tomato right away, making a circle around the edge of the plate. Check the meat, and either guess it's done or be fancy and stick it with a thermometer: 60 degrees in the center means medium rare - the only way to eat good meat. Rest the meat in foil or in a warmed bowl, leave the potatoes in the turned off oven to stay warm, and get to steaming your bok-choy.

You want the bok-choy just wilting, when the leaves no longer look dry and unappetising. Create a mound of bok-choy in the center of the plate, then add the peas to the boiling water you've just used for steaming. Get the potatoes out, chop them into halves or thirds, and arrange around the bok-choy. Uncover the meat, slice thickly, and carefully place the slices on the bok-choy, before sprinkling some sea salt over the tomatoes and potato. Finally, spoon the peas over the meat, letting them fall where they may.

Serve to a salivating partner, and ponder your greatness.

Now, this was quite good if I do say so myself, but I regret including the potatoes. The kipflers are great, and tasted wonderful, but they really didn't add anything to the dish, and I think they actually made it a touch too much - and I'm not pleased with their aesthetic impact, either. I think this would have looked much more appetising without them, leaving the bold colours of the greens, the meat, and the tomato to speak for themselves.

That said, my partner devoured it no time, with a slight look of possibly wanting a bit more. So who am I to judge?

And the meat was perfect. Annoyingly, it was cut in such a way that a seam of connective tissue ran right down the center, but otherwise it was tender and juicy, and the mustard crust was a simply and very tasty addition that did away with the need for a sauce to add interest. The tomatoes with sea salt were fresh and tasty, and the steamed but still crunchy bok-choy complemented the meat superbly.

Done hard, played strong.

Eating out (or in): Crust pizza

It was said by a friend many years ago that I must have a wholly separate stomach reserved for the processing of pizza. Before my metabolism slowed down to a mere sprint, I could easily pack away close to two whole pies, as those whacky Americans call them. I still loves me some pizza, but these days I usually stick to a more reserved rate of consumption.

You know - just one.

There's a lot of quite good inner city pizza joints, but they tend to change in their consistency as staff come and go. Pizza Picasso in Newtown used to be our number one, with their Korfu - a truly wondrous concoction of freshly sliced tomato, fetta, sliced garlic, roast red capsicum and kalamata olives - being a regular guest in our house. Sadly, these days the Korfu tends to be over-oiled and lacking in freshness.

Albert's, also in Newtown, can always be relied upon for an oily mess of a pizza that is nonetheless satisfying and very tasty (and if you like things spicy, try their Acapulco - a true two burn pizza), but one cannot always handle that much oil. Torino's on Enmore Rd is another good choice, but they do tend to over-cheese their pizzas. That said, there are few things more satisfying than staggering into Torino's after a few well considered drinks and chowing into their Margarita. Bliss.

However, for regular pizza action, we've got a new favourite.

Crust

For what's effectively a chain pizza outlet, Crust really knows their stuff. Not too much cheese, not too oily, really interesting ingredient combos, and - unsurprising, given their name - a great crust.

This is Crust's Supreme, and it's awesome. Lots of tasty meats, juicy kalamata olives, and the perfect dusting of cheese. I'm not a pineapple fan as a rule, but once again, Crust gets the ratio just right and I can suddenly understand why people like it on pizza.

And this is Crust's Wild Mushroom pizza (wine glass purely for scale... ), which we had for the first time last night - wow. There's three or four different mushroom varieties, including Shiitake, with mozzarella and Parmesan cheese, and the asparagus. Asparagus + Parmesan = awesome. However, poorly prepped asparagus = woody and not at all pleasant.

It looks like they take each spear, chop it in two, and throw it on the pizza - this means every other slice is tender and noms, while the other other slice you can't even bite through properly. It's an easy mistake to make with asparagus, too, but it's just as easy to dodge. All you need to do is take your fresh spear, and bend it until it snaps in two - you'll end up with naturally woody portion snapped off, and it'll snap in a slightly different spot for each spear.

Otherwise, this was stupidly tasty pizza topping.

The only other issue is the closest Crust to us is in Dulwich Hill, and that's just far enough for the pizza to arrive not quite hot enough every now and then. Or maybe it's because they get lost in the maze-like innards of our apartment block.

Who can say...

Broccoli, Aglio, olio et peperonchino

The last thing you want to do when you get home from work is cook up a meal that's going to leave you slaving away in the kitchen for hours when you'd rather be relaxing. Or, in some cases, shooting complete strangers online. Which is why this one's such a regular dish in my repertoire. I picked it up off a cooking show years ago and it's been a keeper ever since.

The important thing here is fresh ingredients. You can get away with dried chillis or slightly wilted broccoli, but you'll be doing yourself and the dish a dis-service. Good olive oil is also a plus, otherwise, this one's dead easy.

Broccoli, Aglio, olio et peperonchino

In other words, it's a broccoli pasta with garlic and chilli in olive oil. It's pretty much as simple as it sounds, and the name is pretty much also the ingredients list!

ingredients

Rotini (or spiral) pasta

Two heads of broccoli

Two or three cloves of garlic

Two or three hot birdseye chillies

Parsley

Oil

Pepper

Parmesan

A much easier proposition than my last effort!

Get a pot of salted water boiling away, and while you're waiting for a good rolling boil, chop up the broccoli, basically separating each branch without leaving too much stalk - maybe an inch at most. Toss the broccoli into the boiling water, leave for a couple of minutes or until it starts to simmer again and remove broccoli, but keep the water.

This is blanching - it brightens the colour of the brocolli, and heightens the flavour, but the trick is to be quick. You don't want boiled broccoli mush! It should still be very firm. You keep the water because you want that subtle broccoli flavour for the pasta.

When the water's boiled again add your pasta. Spiral's the best choice, because it'll really work with the sauce and looks great alongside the broccoli. Those who make their perception tests might notice I've mixed spirals and penne - that's more a case of lack of foresight than anything else, as we had less pasta in the pantry than I realised.

While the pasta's coming along, chop everything else up very finely - garlic, chilli and parsley. generously oil a frying pan and add the chopped ingredients, then add heat. You don't want to fry the herbs, but warm them as the oil warms. Add the drained broccoli, and toss through the oil. If you've timed things right, you can drain the pasta and add it straight to the pan, otherwise remove the pan from the heat to make sure you don't end up with crunchy garlic.

With everything in the pan, stir it all through vigorously. You want everything nice and shiny with the oil, and you'll note a lot of garlic and tastiness sticking in the spirals of the pasta - that's why we want spirals!

Remove from heat, plate up in a bowl, grate or shave some Parmesan over the top and add freshly cracked pepper.

This is a brilliant dish on so many fronts. It's super-tasty, and the brightness of good hot chillies goes really well with the smooth broccoli flavour. It's also really healthy, with a huge hit of vitamins C, K and A. The speed of the dish is a plus, and with a crisp white wine it's a real palate-pleaser.

Without the broccoli, it's also a classic pasta dish in its own right.

The importance of prep, plus Scotch Fillet with spinach, mash and stuffed zucchini flowers

In the Le Halle Cookbook, Anthony Bourdain really stresses how necessary it is to have your shit together. Of course, even he isn't so gauche as to say that - the fancy name for it is mis en place, but whatever you call it, he's really spot on.

It's even more important when you're cooking a dish with about five or so parts that need to be plated more or less together. A sensitive smoke alarm really doesn't help, but doesn't seem to have hurt proceedings (other than stressing me out, and thus stressing my partner out).

And speaking of partners, this is also one of those rare occasions where I simply had to have help. Normally, I like to fly solo in the kitchen, but this was beyond me. If you're doing something like this, another set of hands is just as important as good prep. Remember: this is why kitchens have so many stations!

Scotch Fillet with spinach, mash and stuffed zucchini flowers

Woolies is starting to do a really lovely range of home-brand meats, and the scotch fillet they're doing is no exception. Vacuum-packed in clear and black plastic, it's well marbled and coloured, and cooks up a treat. Not too expensive, either.

The rest of the ingredients are pretty basic, with the possible exception of the zucchini flowers. The joy of our produce co-op arrangement is you're never quite sure what you're going to get, and will sometimes get stuff you'd never think of getting yourself in a million years. So I was determined to do these justice, and found a good basic recipe to start with.

ingredients

One scotch fillet (our was big enough to halve)

Two dutch cream potatos

One yam

Handful of baby spinach

Chicken stock

Two Swiss brown mushrooms

One Shitake mushroom

Four zucchini flowers (we had female ones, with the added tiny zucchini)

Ricotta

Shallot

Continental parsley

25ogm flour

450ml mineral water (preferably cold)

Vegetable oil

Parmesan cheese

Salt & pepper (is here in effect)

Crikey, that's a lot more ingredients than I usually cook with!

I really can't stress enough that with something like this you need to carefully work out what needs to be cooked when. Which, to be honest, I'm not sure I did - this is definitely a keeper, but it needs some serious streamlining work. However, if you want to follow this recipe slavishly, here's what to do.

Stand around looking at your pile of stuff, wishing you had the wherewithal to buy some wine while shopping. Not for the meal, but for the cook. Then work on some more prep - pour enough vegetable oil into a small pot to cover the zucchini flowers, get a pot of salted water going for the potato and yams, and get a non-stick pan ready for the steak.

Clean the tubers (it IS a tuber!), peel the yam, then chop it all up - reasonably smallish to get it to cook faster. While waiting for the water to boil (which you may want to stare at suspiciously at this point), get the flower stuffing ready.

Add a few healthy Imperial dollops of ricotta to a mixing bowl, then add finely chopped parsley and shallot. Mix well, then spoon into a kitchen bag (and chop the corner off once full to create a DIY piping bag). Realise water is finally boiling, and toss in the tubers.

Stand back, with the immense feeling that you must be missing something, and turn on the heat under the steak pan. Realise you still need to make the batter for the flowers, and call in your girlfriend.

She should mix up the flower and mineral water (this makes a really light batter), while you realise that flower stuffing, while sounding vaguely rude, is actually merely fiddly. Oh, and you should also carefully remove the stamen from the flowers - this too is fiddly. The flowers themselves are already partially split, and it's very easy to widen this as you mess about with stamen and stuffing. Just take your time; fill up each flower with the stuffing to the level of split in the petals themselves, then twist closed. Pass the finished flowers to your girlfriend (a boyfriend may suffice), and then get startled by how much your supposedly clean non-stick pan is smoking.

Toss the halved fillet into the pan after seasoning it with salt and pepper, and then squeal in rage when the smoke alarms go off in your apartment. Remove pan from heat, run around like headless chicken removing batteries from potentially lifesaving devices.

Return to steak, fuss over possibly ruining the meat (which you haven't), and get on with the job. Cook the steak a touch over a minute each side, and remove to rest. If it's a good pan and good meat, no oil is necessary at all - you'll end up with enough pan juices from the meat itself. Deglaze the pan with a bit of chicken stock, and then add the finely sliced mushrooms and some more sliced shallots.

Meanwhile, your girlfriend, other or cat should be frying the flowers. Just dip them carefully in the batter (they're pretty fragile), leave for about thirty seconds, and the remove and repeat. We wanted a slightly heavier battering, so repeated the entire process of batter and fry. Leave the flowers on a tea towel or paper towel to drain the oil.

At this time, you should have forgotten your potatoes, so remove them from the heat, drain them, and make a really rough and ready mash. Just add some milk, though to be accurate you should not have nearly enough, and you should forget to add butter. But there's some of that ricotta left, so that's worth experimenting with. Mash til... mashed.

Dash back to the mushrooms, remove from heat, and arrange around the rim of two dinner plates. Add more stock to the pan, and quickly wilt the spinach leaves. Add dollop of mash to the center of each plate, then layer the spinach on top, then add the fillet on top of that. Carefully arrange the zucchini flowers on either side of the tasty mound, and then great some parmesan onto the flowers.

Done (thank fuck).

It all turned out pretty well, with the exception of my nerves - but that's fire alarms for you. The mash has a lovely sweet flavour from the yam, and this goes nicely with the earthy taste of the mushrooms and spinach. The zucchini flowers are great - nice and crunchy because of the batter, brilliantly rich and soft from the ricotta, and fresh and snappy from the small zucchini itself.

The steak itself is simple but hard to beat. In future I think the dish could really serve from adding something with more bite to it to cut through all the creaminess. Something with balsamic seems like a good idea, or perhaps a tartly sweet berry sauce. So, more experimentation necessary on that front. I'd also like to try sharper flavours for the flower stuffing - I've read that anchovies work well on that front.

But all in all pretty good, if I do say so myself.

Welcome, plus pumpkin soup!

Ever cooked up something really tasty, on the fly, and then kind of forgotten the exact recipe? It's really annoying. You try and try to get it 'right' again, but it never seems to work... bollocks to that I say!

So, partly, that's one of the things I'm hoping to achieve with this blog - a regular account of meals cooked, and what went into them. I also want to talk about food in general - good ingredients, awesome places to shop in the inner city of Sydney, and even the odd restaurant review.

By way of a quick bit of background, I'm not in any way trained - but I love food, enjoy cooking, and really like making my food as presentable as possible. A well-plated dish is a joy even before you start tucking in. So without further ado...

Rustic Pumpkin Soup

My partner and I are part of a food co-op, which is a fancy way of saying that once a fortnight, a group of the twenty-odd people in it wake up at stupid o'clock and head out to Flemington markets to get a mess of food. It's a great way to shop - you get very fresh produce (often still muddy-fresh!) that lasts a lot longer than store-bought goods. And it's a deal cheaper, too.

But you can sometimes end up with a lot more of something than you really know what to do with. A couple of boxes ago we ended up with a large pumpkin - I think it was Japanese (or not - see comments), but it's pretty much all nommed now so don't quote me. We roasted it, put it in thai curries, but still had a fucktonne of the stuff. So cue the classic pumpkin soup, especially as it's now getting cold enough to really enjoy something this hearty.

Ingredients

Roughly a third of a pumpkin

Three dutch cream potatoes

Head of garlic

Two brown onions

Ground nutmeg

Ground cumin

Fetta

Goose fat

Chicken stock

Salt & pepper to taste

Remove the seeds and soft stuff from the pumpkin, cut into relatively small chunks, and remove skin. Wash potatoes and chop up; I leave the skin on, but you can remove if you want. Slice the top off the head of garlic, and place all ingredients in a baking dish, along with a generous spoonful of goose fat (oil will do just fine, but I loves me some goose fat!).

Bake at a high temp until it's all just starting to soften, and then remove from oven.

Roughly chop the onions and add to a large soup pot, then add the roasted ingredients; remove the garlic cloves from the skin by squeezing out with a fork on your chopping board, and add them too. Cover with a litre of chicken stock (I cheated and used bought stuff, but like all dishes, this would really benefit from a proper stock prepared yourself). Add a generous dash each of the cumin and nutmeg - though you might not want to add quite as much nutmeg as I did, given I somehow unscrewed the entire top and dumped in something like three teaspoons! Season with salt and pepper to taste, but remember the stock will add a lot of salt itself.

Then just cover it up and let it boil away. Once everything's starting to fall apart, get a masher and move the job along - no need to get it smooth, as the rougher texture is what this is all about. Let it simmer along for another few minutes, repeat the mashing, and take off the heat.

Ladle the steaming orange goo into bowls. Crumble some fetta off a fresh block with a fork and sprinkle on top; add some freshly ground black pepper, and then a garnish of continental parsley and coriander.

Turned out pretty well if I do say so. This was the first time I'd added nutmeg, and let me tell you it really lifts the dish, making for a much more complex flavour. The fetta adds a sharp contrast to the richness of the soup (the partly caramelised pumpkin is seriously flavoursome), and the touch of fresh green herbs cleanses the palette as well as looking damn good.

It also cooks up quite a lot. One bowl along with some crusty bread is more than filling, so you can freeze the leftovers and get at least one other meal out of it.

I'd also recommend checking for random hairs before photographing... ah, the perils of being one of the last long-haired men in Sydney!