Dinner at Maze

Gordon Ramsay has opened Maze and Maze Grill at the Crown Metropole in Melbourne.  Maze Grill is a steak restaurant and Maze is a french small plate restaurant.  I think the waiter recommended 4 dishes each (because we weren't doing the degustation) and we decided to get 3 savoury and 1 dessert each.

The interior of the restaurant is beautiful, with plenty of room between the tables.  The service was good - attentive, but not too much 'story' about each dish, just a short description so the meal was hot when you ate!

Tuna with truffle and radish:

Scallops with champagne foam:

Artichoke salad:

Pan seared snapper:

Roasted quail:

Chocolate fondant:

The "Lamington":

How can you tell a restaurant is truly fabulous?  For me personally it's when I choose a non-dessert course as my favourite.  In this case it was the tuna and G loved his scallops. 

Greek meatball salad

It is finally getting warm (on some days) so I decided it was time for a salad.  However, it's not quite warm enough for an entirely cold dinner, so G and I made some greek meatballs to add to the salad. 
Making meatballs is a messy job - one that I generally defer to G!

'Greek' meatballs are just like regular meatballs - mince, spices, breadcrumbs and egg, but instead of beef you use lamb and the spices are 'greek' - mint, oregano and also some lemon zest.

Made even more 'greek' by the tzatziki like salad dressing!

Wedding cake!

G and I were married in mid November and I wanted to share the cake.  When we arrived at the reception and I saw the cake I exclaimed "oh, the cake, it;s perfect, now we can get married!"

Maybe that was a little extreme because I would have married G anyway, but the cake was an added bonus.  We had spoken with Kerrie of Love at First Bite about the cupcakes in detail, but had given her free range, using our invitation as the base, for the top tier cake.

There were 100 mini cupcakes (half vanilla and half chocolate and all wonderful) and the top tier, which we didn't serve.  So we ended up with a few left over cupcakes which we ate the next day and the top tier.  We have frozen some for later, each took some to work and enjoyed a slice the day after the wedding.

Salmon rolls

I decided to use a salsa verde smeared on the salmon, rather than dry spices, and I think that was a good move. This is quite a nice looking meal, and my version looked similar enough to the Delicious picture, so I was pleased.  Of course it was a messy meal - smearing the salmon with salsa verde gave G green fingers!  And a little bit fiddly - wrapping the salmon, the various amounts of 'chilling time' - in fact, this is definitely not a week night meal unless you have the afternoon off!

I cooked ours on the rare side, because that is how I like it - but you could easily cook it for longer if you like your salmon cooked through!

And the picture from Delicious, just for comparison purposes!

Zucchini fritters

These were not as successful as the delicious corn fritters I made recently.  The recipe was much wetter, despite the draining and squeezing, and as a result the fritters were quite limp.

To try and remove some liquid I first salted and drained grated zucchini for 30 minutes.

 Served with lamb sausages and Bill's yoghurt sauce.

Spagettini with lemon, chilli and proscuitto

Another delicious and simple meal from Bill Granger.

Pretty easy really - mix together olive oil, lemon juice, lemon zest and chilli.  Let that sit.  Cook the spagettini.  Chop up the proscuitto and cook that, throw in the rocket to wilt, the spagettini to warm through and the olive oil mix over the top!

It even looks very similar to the book.

Greek style pasta

It's like spagetti bolognese with a greek twist!

Lamb mince (which was trickier to find than I had expected).  A butcher offered to grind up some diced lamb but that was way too expensive, so I persevered and eventually found the lamb mince.

Olives, tomatoes, parsley... yum!

Coiled mushroom streudel

Let's see if you can spot the difference between the magazine version

and my version

I bought all the ingredients to make the magazine version but on Wednesday night, after work and going to the gym, I looked at the time and realised that we wouldn't be eating until after 9pm if I made the filling and then baked the filo for 40 minutes.  So I made the filling and turned it into super delicious pasta.  Highly recomended.

Parmesan crusted blue eye

Another successful Bill dinner - just for me (G was away, so he missed out).  A side note, I wouldn't recommend turning grainy bread into breadcrumbs for this dish - that is why there are darker brown spots on the crust!

There are a couple of things that make me sad about this dish.

1. The fish still had scales on it and it ended up being easier to mangle the fish and get the skin off rather than try and get the scales off. 
2. Why doesn't it look as pretty as Bill's???

Breast cancer cupcakes

G had a bake-off to raise funds for breast cancer research a couple of weeks ago and these little beauties came second!

Just my regular vanilla cupcakes, with some choc chips thrown in.  Iced with pink butter cream and pink ribbons!

September, October, November Delicious

The months have been flying by and some of you may be wondering why I haven't mentioned any recipes from September or October Delicious. 

I moved house - but not only house, I moved cities and jobs, and although I redirected my mail I never received the October issue.

During September I wasn't staying in my house, but I was couch (and spare bedroom) surfing.  I never had the groceries for more than one meal ahead, and didn't have access to all my kitchen equipment. So I let September slide...

However, November Delicious really excites me! 

Doesn't that cake just look delicious!  Although, imagine trying to cut it!

Corn fritters and (fish) with olive relish.

I was pretty excited to make these corn fritters, having had the pleasure of eating these in Bill's restaurant in Surry Hills, Sydney.

Strangely, the fritters are in the dinner section of Bill's Food - so I made them for dinner one night and then cooked the other half of the batter for breakfast the next morning (because I really believe these are delicious for breakfast!)

My interpretation of the fritters involved combining them with salmon with olive relish (supposed to be tuna, another recipe from Bill's Food).

The salmon? Well the only tuna available was super amazing sashimi grade tuna which was exorbitantly expennsive - in fact, too expensive to cook so I cooked salmon.

The corn fritters in the fry pan for breakfast the next morning.  I served these with some pan fried tomatoes and herbs.  YUM!