food

Not exactly a seasonal recipe, I must admit (it appeared on our Christmas table just over 5 months ago), but I got an email from a reader named Caroline on Monday, requesting the recipe. She'd love to make that for her husband's birthday, you see :) Considering I must translate the recipe anyway, I may just as well blog about it. It's a bit more difficult recipe than most of my other recipes, but IMHO it was totally worth the effort. Hope your husband likes it, Caroline! Marbled Blackcurrant and Chocolate Mousse Cake ( Uhke šokolaadi-mustsõstratort ) Adapted from the Finnish Pirkka-site. 18-20 slices Chocolate sponge cake: 2 large eggs 75 ml caster sugar (5 Tbsp) 75 ml plain flour (5 Tbsp) 2 Tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder 0.5 tsp baking powder To moisten the sponge cake: 100 ml (2/5th of a cup) undiluted blackcurrant juice or cordial Blackcurrant Mousse: 3 gelatine leaves 220 g blackcurrants (thawed, if frozen) 75 ml (5 Tbsp) caster sugar 200 ml whipping cream 3 Tbsp undilu...

"Look! Look! There's fairy floss above our heads!"This is just one moment of glee in a food-filled evening at Ripples Sydney Wharf.We struggle at first to find the restaurant, looking for wharves nine and ten, before realising it's only a mere stroll from the grass of Pyrmont Bay Park, home of the Good Living Growers' Markets. There's a casual al fresco feel to the restaurant, the dining area set

Head chef and owner, Jan Gundlach, breathes in deeplyTruffles. Is there are food more veiled with gastronomic intrigue and romantic mystique?We headed to Canberra's first Truffle Festival to find out first-hand the allure of the truffle, a road trip that detoured via Berrima for scones, before arriving at Senso. for a four-course truffle lunch.Pumpkin pickles with lemon and pepperSenso. sits on

There's a dish that made rounds in foodblogs last summer. The author of the original recipe was a Greek chef Dina Nikolaou. Her recipe was picked up and adapted by Peter of the Kalofagas , and the rest was history. I then spotted it on my dear friend's Alanna's blog , and earlier this year on Farida's blog . I bet there are many more :) We had this for dinner tonight. I made some changes, leaving out the Kasseri cheese and upping the amount of feta cheese. I also added some dried oregano to the dish, a herb I always associate with my visits to Greece. Overall, this is an excellent supper dish - either with a light salad, as Peter recommends, or with flash-fried chicken strips, as we did. It's delicious both hot and cold, making it ideal for summer brunches and buffets. Greek Courgette Pie Kourkouto ( Kreeka suvikõrvitsavorm ) Serves 6 to 8 100 ml olive oil 1 kg courgettes/zucchini (4-5 younger ones) 2 large onions 0.5 tsp salt 1 tsp dried oregano 6 large eggs 250 g...

Black winter truffles from Manjimup, Western AustraliaOld socks and sex.That, according to some, is the most accurate description of the smell of fresh truffles.I'd never tried fresh truffles before which was why the first ever Capital Country Truffle Festival had me snuffling about the web like a truffle-hunting, errr... pig.Truffles have been cultivated around Australia for several years now,

I know someone who is always rather (overly) concerned about having a protein component to their meal. This is something I don't tend to worry too much about, but if you are of the same persuasion as my acquaintance then this could be the salad for you. Haloumi cheese is a common feature of most dairy aisles in the supermarket, and is a firm and salty Cypriot cheese made with sheep's milk. You can eat it as it is, but it is hugely improved by cooking. I grill slices of haloumi in a hot, dry pan. When it's golden on one side carefully flip it over and cook the other. The cheese should be lightly crisped on the outside, and soft and melting inside. I really like this served hot as part of a salad with avocado, tomato, whatever green leaves you have to hand and some thinly sliced red onion to cut through the richness. I'm not really the type of girl who usually considers salad a suitable dinner, but in the summer this haloumi salad with a little bread and olive oil makes a...

Why yes, I did just have hot dogs fried in bacon fat on toast (fried in bacon fat) for lunch. Thanks for asking.

Sydney. Snow.The two words seem at odds with each other, but for four days last week, locals had the chance to experience a winter wonderland at the inaugural Sydney Winter Festival.For the first time in almost fifty years, an outdoor ice skating rink was erected in Sydney's CBD, set up on the forecourt of St Mary's Cathedral. Ice skating session tickets were offered online prior to the event and

So like Oreo cookies and Hershey's chocolate, Krispy Kreme doughnuts are one of those American items that seem to have acquired cult status due to the fact that they used to be unattainable here and therefore were instantly covetable. However, as is often the way with such things, on actually trying them you wonder what all the fuss is about. Oreos are essentially a sweetened bourbon cream biscuit, and most Hershey's chocolate is verging on the unpleasant. But I got to try my first Krispy Kreme doughnut yesterday and have to say I was quite impressed. It seems that the company is opening more and more branches across the UK, although most seem to be based in London. The one in Harrods seems to have attracted quite a lot of attention, but for some reason I was unaware that there was also a small kiosk in the Tesco Metro by Liverpool Street Station. I tried the caramel dreamcake and the chocolate dreamcake (pictured below). Both these doughnuts had a light, crisp exterior with an...

Forget any jokes about swine flu. The pig outside the Establishment last Tuesday was more like a call to arms. Or a call to stomachs, as the case may be.We joined the hungry hoardes at the Merivale Winter Feasts launch party, a follow-up to the successful March Into Merivale campaign. Over the three months of winter, Merivale restaurants will be offering $35 lunches and dinners of one, two and

Sometimes you get tired of eating just strawberries. Not often, of course, just sometimes. If that happens, then there are several ways to dress up those luscious berries. You can macerate them in hibiscus and vanilla syrup (something I've done twice this month already). You can pair them with some young Brie cheese and serve as canapés. You can make the much-loved British summer classic, Eton Mess . You can go all Nigella-esque and serve them with a good balsamic vinegar and some brown sugar . There are plenty of alternatives to just plain red berries. Or you can cook up a simple basic syrup, spike it up with a citrus liqueur and drizzle over the berries. Like I've done here.. Strawberries in Cointreau Syrup ( Maasikad Cointreau-siirupis ) Serves 4 to 6 100 ml water (just under 1/2 cup) 85 g caster sugar (just under 1/2 cup) 4 Tbsp (6 cl) Cointreau orange liqueur 300 g strawberries little grated orange zest Mix sugar and water in a small pan and bring to a boil. Simmer for...

So, in keeping with my previous post about weekly dinners, here's our #1 standard dinner. It's cheap, easy as hell, and filling. Duhhhh, burritos! As we get terrifyingly closer to buying our first home (no jinx! no jinx!), this will probably be on the menu like 3 times a week. BEANS AND RICE 4 LYFE, SUCKAS. All my adorable mumbo jumbo about budgeting is going to get thrown out the window when we buy a house, because our rent is basically going to double no matter what- good bye, fancy eggs! We are lucky to have found a really cheap apartment a few years ago and the rent hasn't really gone up with the rest of the neighborhood. BUT, whatever- we're here to talk about food. First of all- "Burrito night." I know it's dorky, but along with enjoying family meals at the table, I like to keep a sense of order and consistency in my kid's world by referring to dinners like, "Burrito night! Pizza night! Noodle night!" etc. I feel like it will ...

dicking around with my template, please disregard. D:

I like to spend my Saturday mornings in bed. Under the covers. Blissfully warm and preferably asleep until midday. I call it my weekly banking, a catch-up on all those late nights spent eating. And blogging.Few things will get me out of bed early on a Saturday. Food is one of them. Sales are another.A food sale? Ahhh.... now we're talking.After hearing Pig Flyin wax lyrical about the annual sale

Chole batura is a Punjabi classic, that I absolutely love. The chole (aka chana masala) part refers to the chickpeas and the batura is a type of bread that manages to combine the crisp flakiness of a paratha with the soft chewiness of a naan. Making this entirely from scratch would undoubtedly be quite time-consuming but I've recently discovered that my local Asian grocery store Al-Amin now sells ready-made batura. They come vacuum packed and are made in Southall (which puts my authenticity fears to rest). All you need to do is heat them through in a dry pan, turning frequently, until they become golden and crispy on the outside. Batura are usually shallow or deep fried so can be greasy, but these examples were exceptionally non-oily. For the chole I used a tin of chickpeas and the Mangal spice mix I've described previously. Impatience meant that I only quickly fried off some onion before adding the chickpeas, spices, and some water, rather than the ginger, tomato, etc, that ...

Nami-Nami food blog turned four this week. That's been four great years of reading about and eating and enjoying and writing about delicious food, and four years of meeting numerous inspiring fellow food bloggers from all over the world. Just imagine - had I not come across Melissa's food blog in June 2005, I would not have started my own . And if I hadn't started my own food blog, then I wouldn't have met Johanna (in England & Scotland), Andrew (in England), Jeanne (in England), Ximena (in Spain and in Estonia), Dagmar (Estonia), Anne (in Estonia), Kristina (in Estonia), Alanna (in St Louis, USA), Paz (in New York),  Antti (in Finland and in Estonia), Melissa (in Scotland), Keiko (in England), Chloe (in Greece), Nupur (in St Louis, USA), Zarah Maria (in Denmark), Amy (in England), Blake (in New York last summer and in Estonia just last week), Klary and many others in person over these four years. And that would have been a real pity. I mean it.....

Food bloggers ahoy!Pic above just added - thank you Karen for your wide angle lens and the tripod donater (can't remember who?). We took this shot towards the end of the evening when alas, a few people had already gone home.How many food bloggers can you fit into a 25-seater room? We managed to squeeze in 30, a feat achieved when Chocolatesuze celebrated her birthday at Wagaya. Just when we

Okay first of all, let's talk about how I had this big idea about how I was gonna post a week's worth of dinners and talk about my budgeting and grocery list and How We Live® and blah blah blah. I tried to remember to take pictures of dinner every night, but then I did a lousy job of keeping track of them. I worked late one night and had leftovers for dinner and forgot to bring my camera- the whole week was kind of a clusterfuck of obligation and I was BUSY! Baby-sitting for friends and family, extra shifts at work, meeting with photography clients, spring cleaning in the apartment- it's Sunday and I'm wrecked. In a good way, though- the kind of wrecked you feel after getting a lot of stuff done. So I guess what I'm saying is, like everyone else- we are pretty disorganized. But, we try to make time for dinner together every night, because it kind of glues us all together. I'm pretty old fashioned when it comes to stuff like that, I really feel like every ...

The winners of the Grab Your Fork Freebie Friday competition have been decided and confirmed*.Avik has won the major prize with their question: "What was the first dish you taught your children to cook?"Avik has won 1 x double pass to the Good Food & Wine Show Sydney including tickets to the Gordon Ramsay session at 12.30pm on Saturday July 4 2009, worth $95 in total.The Random Sequence Generator

This one's a winner.Every time I've made this upside-down pear and macadamia cake, everybody wants seconds. The cinnamon-spiced pears are a perfect match for the chill that is winter, and the inclusion of almond meal gives the cake a lovely moist friand-style crumb.What I love most about this cake, is it can be made in advance and then reheated to serve. Once up-turned on a plate, I like to place

For a few weeks now, K's mum has supplied us with large bunches of rhubarb. In addition to several rhubarb cakes and tarts and pies, I've also experimented with different rhubarb desserts. Here's a recipe for a warm rice pudding served with rhubarb compote. It's best served warm, so make it in a weekend morning or as a pudding after a light weekday meal. The recipe is a very slight adaptation from the Australian Fresh Living magazine. As always, choose the pinkest rhubarb stalks you can find, and don't peel them. Creamy Vanilla and Rice Pudding with Rhubarb Compote ( Vanilli-riisipuding rabarbriga ) Serves 4 Rice pudding: 100 g short-grain pudding rice (known as 'porridge rice' here in Estonia) water 500 ml (2 cups) milk 2 Tbsp caster sugar 1 vanilla bean, halved lengthwise Rhubarb compote: 300 g pink rhubarb (3-4 stalks) 2 Tbsp sugar 1 Tbsp water In a medium-sized saucepan, bring water to the boil, add the rice and simmer for 5 minutes. Drain thoroughly i...

I do love a good bathroom.Just as they say you can judge the quality of a coat by its buttons, so too is the mandatory bathroom inspection a good indicator of a restaurant's attention to detail.It's a little dim when you first enter the bathroom at The Smokehouse, your hands flailing in the milky shadows searching for the light switch, until you realise, in fact, the lights are already on. By

I do like a nice cupcake, so I thought I'd give these ones from the Tesco bakery a go. But having experienced premium cupcakes from the Hummingbird Bakery (about three years ago now, but the memory remains strong) I didn't have terribly high expectations. Which was a good thing really, as these cakes verged on being actively unpleasant. I thought I was eating a chocolate cupcake, but on closer inspection it turned out that I was actually eating a chocolate-flavoured cake with a chocolate-flavoured frosting. Cunningly, the Tesco cake makers had decided to go for a chocolate flavour that didn't pick up any notes of cocoa, but instead tasted mostly of soap. And not a pleasant soap at that. The topping was slightly better in that it didn't taste of soap, but it didn't seem to taste of anything else either. It had the texture of toothpaste but was completely flavourless. I think I ate about half of one before throwing the rest away, a highly unusual act in itself as I...

It's true. I do derive an inordinate amount of pleasure whenever I say the word schlachtplatte.Partly it's because I relish putting on a very bad German accent, trying to generate as much noise as possible on the schlaaaaacht (I did say it was a bad accent). But perhaps the most exciting part about saying schlachtplatte to the waitress is the promise of the meat to come. A feast of meat. A

Another box of sweets that K. brought back from Brussels on Wednesday. These were mini macaroons by Pierre Marcolini , a fine Belgian chocolatier that only makes 5 flavours. I loved these - especially the yellowish ones. Pierre Marcolini Rue des Minimes 1 Brussels Belgium

It's been raining non-stop for the last two days (or is it three now?), and the temperatures have dropped below 10 Celsius. That's quite sad, as the kids have all began their summer vacations and just last weekend the weather was hot, sunny and truly summery. Full of promise. That's when I made this rhubarb ice cream, to keep us cool in the heat. I really loved the creaminess that wasn't cloying, as the acidity of the rhubarb came through. Plus it had a rather nice colour, don't you think? It's very easy to make, as you only need to whisk the egg yolks, and not turn them into a custard base. You don't even need an ice cream machine to make it, even though it's a lot easier if you have got one. ( If you haven't got one, then read the instructions further down on how to make the no-churn version of this. ) Home-Made Rhubarb Ice Cream ( Rabarbrijäätis ) Serves six to eight 300 g young rosy-pink rhubarb stalks 4 Tbsp water 85 g sugar 200 ml whipping cre...

Oh HEYYYYY food blog, what's up? I almost forgot about you. On our budget, we eat a lot of the same crap, so we don't do anything too fancy on a regular basis. I've mentioned this to a few people, and they seemed interested in the same-shit-different-day approach that we have, so pretty soon I'm going to do a week of our meals, and you can see how we eat on a daily basis. It's boring food but we try to keep it healthy. Until then, dig this hippie chow! Look, I love to make fun of hippies. I can't help it, there's just something so funny about being like, "Shut up, hippie!" When I see some goofy hippie walking down the street, I say stuff like, "HAHA, HIPPIE!!" to whoever I'm with. If someone I know is doing something to make their lives more "green" or whatever, I'll jab them in the ribs and be all, "HIPPIEEEEE!" It's not that I have anything AGAINST hippies, I just love saying the word, and I also...

K. was in Brussels for two days and brought me this Macaron Joy from Wittamer pastry shop. The rose cream, raspberries and lychee are all there, but the signature red rose leaf is missing. Rather delicious, I must admit. I had this with a cup of freshly ground Has Bean 's Guatemala COE La Perla y Anexos speciality coffee this morning..

Ok, this isn't a food review as such (or in fact at all) but mirrors a book review on the other blog. It is a food book review though, so thought I'd post it here too. I should probably start out by saying that I really like Nigel Slater, and would ideally like him to be a close friend so that I could pop round to his for lunch and sit in his rustic but functional kitchen, or delightfully untamed but productive garden (c.f. The Kitchen Diaries by Nigel Slater ). I would be very happy to sample a seasonal meal or sip on a mimosa, while indulging in some light gossip. However, we have yet to be united in friendship so in the meantime I've been reading a couple of his books. Read more....

"Hi Helen...I’ve been looking at your fabulous blog ‘Grab Your Fork’ and I wanted to extend an invitation for you and a guest you to experience the award-winning cuisine of Chef James Privett at the Light Brigade’s Bistro..."And that email--by Lisa from the Trish Nicol Agency--is how Suze and I find ourselves at the Light Brigade for her early celebratory birthday dinner.Light fitting in the

I've baked probably about dozen rhubarb cakes and tarts over the last few weeks, and I still haven't had enough. Rhubarb is the first local "fruit" ( I know it's actually a vegetable, but it classifies as fruit for the cooking purposes, a bit like quinoa counts as a grain, even if it is not ) to arrive on the market stalls, and after a long winter season of mediocre imported fruit flown if from the other side of the world, it feels like a blessing. I'm proud to say that I managed to resist buying the imported pink forced rhubarb stalks that arrived about a fortnight earlier - and the sweeter the home-grown rhubarb tasted (if one can use that word in relation to rhubarb :)) Here's one simple tray bake recipe, made special by generous amounts of cinnamon and cardamom, and the lack of eggs. It's soft, tender and tasty. Choose the pinkest rhubarb you can find, and you're guaranteed one Pretty in Pink cake ( note that I never peel my rhubarb stalks. Can...

Updated and revised, with a new photograph. Originally posted on November 24, 2005 We don't eat meat every day in our household. We're not vegetarians, but meatless days definitely outnumber the meaty ones. Here's a typical dish we would have as an evening meal - a large portion of sauteéd, yet still slightly crunchy carrots, seasoned with mustard seeds and lots of ginger and topped with feta cheese just before serving. Served with some crusty Italian or French bread, and you're set for a wholesome and light meal. It would also work well on a buffet table, as the carrot salad tastes nice when lukewarm. See other vegetarian carrot recipes @ Nami-Nami: Oil-marinated carrots with rosemary and orange Alanna's carrots with African spices, my way Kalyn's Roasted Carrots and Mushrooms with Thyme and Parsley Alanna's Cumin Carrot Chips Estonian grandmother's Carrot Ragout Warm Moroccan Carrot Salad Warm Ginger and Carrot Salad with Feta Cheese ( Soe porgan...

Sometimes you need to hit "pause" just to appreciate all the good things in life. You would think the end is nigh, what with economic woes and flu outbreaks, yet if you stop just a minute and breathe, you'll find there are plenty of things to smile about and be grateful.Even the official onset of weather means good things. I'm thinking rich hearty comfort food and cuddly doonas, big steaming mugs