Caramel chicken

This tasted great, but appearance wise... less than satisfying.  My fault, I put the vegies in too early to cook with the chicken.  That meant they really soaked up the sauce, but look kind of brown!

Also, the sauce wasn't reducing quickly enough, so it was less sticky than it looked in Bill's version.

Oh well, can't win them all.

Bill's version:

Honey cheesecake

Wow, this is a weird cake.  Mostly all ricotta, with very little extra added (weight wise) to make it a cake.  Seriously, it took 1kg of ricotta.

Anyway, as you can imagine, it's pretty easy to put together.  Partly done in the kitchen aid (the sugar and eggs), partly done by hand (folding in ricotta). Into the oven for a long, relatively low temp, bake.  80 minutes.  You can get a lot of other things done in 80 minutes, particularly when you are trying to make dinner at the same time.

When it first comes out of the over it is HUGE:

And then it deflates, a lot:

And keeps going, here it is served with some orange syrup and whipped cream:

Modifications: dried apricots, rather than sultanas - G's mum doesn't like sultanas.  That's all of the mods - I am a believer that baking is chemistry and you don't mess with the formula!

Chocolate custard tarts

These are fantastic - I wish I could make custard!  As I have noted before I cannot make custard, but G can, luckily.

Bill has a neat trick for the pastry rounds - you layer 2 slices of defrosted pastry on top of one another, roll it up, slice it and then roll the spirals out into pastry rounds for tart shells.  

Anyway, simple enough concept.  Make custard on stove top, allow to cool.  Pour into unbaked pastry shells, bake together.   Sprinkle with icing sugar JUST before you serve or it will dissolve.

BBQ duck salad

Super easy - buy half a duck, tear up, mix with salad.  Done.  Or a little more fancy if you follow Bill's way!

And we did predominantly follow Bill's recipe, though I did add some extra vegetables so it was a meal, rather than an entree. 

The best part was probably the dressing - adding Hoisin sauce to a vinaigrette - delicious.  Of course, a good duck was pretty important too. 

Warm tomato and ricotta pasta salad

Making the breadcrumbs was the worst! I ended up with a blister (a serious one) on my thumb. This has something to do with how they are made - from toasted bread, crushed in my hands.

Anyway, the general idea is that you toast bread, make breadcrumbs. While the bread is toasting you chop up the tomatoes and marinate them in the appropriate vinegar and herbs.

Cook some pasta and toss the tomatoes through, along with some crumbled ricotta and then top with the breadcrumbs, and basil (assuming you have it!)

I cooked the tomatoes a bit - just because I like my dinner super hot, not just warm.

I hate cooking rigatoni. It is too thick and falls apart as it cooks. Yuck.

Brown sugar custard

I can't make custard - even though I can follow a recipe - so G helped with this one a fair bit!  To be fair, he is usually somehow involved (unless he is at cricket) but generally his assistance is restricted to heavy lifting (e.g. pulling the food processor out of the cupboard) or cleaning!

When it came to custard, he was mostly in charge!  Egg yolks, sugar, milk and vanilla.  Heat, whisk, bake... delicious.

Topped with whipped cream, and my raspberry coulis (a tried and tested post to soon come!)

Spiced zucchini soup

I made some simple, disturbingly green spiced zucchini soup!  Saute some onions, throw in some grated zucchini, appropriate spices, some rice (as a thickening agent) and simmer away. 

I put it in the food processor to blend it into soup, and luckily I only made enough soup for 2 or I would have had to blend in batches!

G had a blonde moment (and he is actually blonde) and removed the blade from the food processor bowl and unfortunately the soup was up higher in the bowl, and started pouring out the middle of the food processor - we rushed around and rescued most of the soup.

Topped with some blanched zucc ribbons and yoghurt = all ready to go!

Fish with lemon potato salad

I made the panfried fish with lemon potato salad for dinner the other night.  It turned out pretty well - I did the fish in a fresh herb crust, an optional extra, which I think really helped carry the flavours through.

It was a low effort dinner - like most of Bill's recipes to date, and simply required cooked potatoes, tossed with herbs, chilli and lemon, and pan fried white fish - think we used blue eye.    I do find cooking white fish more difficult than salmon/tuna - I am worried about cooking it all the way through!  Managed to do it, without overcooking it either, so was quite happy with that outcome.

Turkish Eggs

Breakfast out of Bill's Open Kitchen today - Turkish Eggs.  Quite an odd dish when you break it down: warm yoghurt, topped with a poached egg and some olive oil and paprika.  Quite a delicious dish when you eat it!

Well there were a couple of issues:

• poaching the eggs while they are wrapped in gladwrap - did not work nicely
• there is spinach in the recipe, but not in the picture in the recipe book
• way too much garlic called for!

So as you see we included the spinach, and unfortunately the egg wasn't awesome - it was very hard to get it out of the gladwrap.  Tasted pretty awesome though

Bridget's onion and feta cheese tart

Caramelised onion + puff pastry + salty feta = delicious!

Very simple, very effective, and combined with a good salad, a great meal.

The recipe is easy, and a little time consuming.  You have to chop up all the onions, which generally involves crying, and then caramelise the onions - all up that took 35 minutes to do about 350gram of sliced onions.  The actual recipe in the book calls for 1 kg of onions, and serves 6.  I was after a tart that would serve 2, so I had to chop a lot less onions.  I guess if I had done a kilogram the cooking would have taken the same amount of time (in a larger saucepan), but I would have needed more time for chopping!

Once the onions were caramelised I threw them on my scored, parmesan covered pieces of puff pastry and baked it.  I just threw on the chopped feta and some mint (not oregano, as I didn't have oregano) and served it. 

Spagetti with proscuitto and egg

When you read this recipe you will think 'oh, this is just fancy carbonara', and really, that is correct - except that it tastes much better than carbonara (in my opinion).

It's pretty simple really.  Cook some pasta (or spagetti, whatever you have) until done.  Pan fry some garlic (and I added spring onion), and then add the proscuitto. 

Remove the pan from the heat and toss in the drained pasta, throw in a whole egg, and stir so the heat of the pasta cooks the egg.

Top with greenery to make your photograph extra pretty, and eat while sitting on a balcony on a balmy late summer evening!

Apricot slice

Bill Granger and I must have different sized lamington tins - his recipe calls for 14 apricots, whereas I only needed 6 1/2, and I could not fit the 4 rows of 7 halves he suggests, rather my tin fit 3 rows of 5.

The other difficulty, also presumably connected to the size of the lamington tin, was that mine took 10 minutes longer to cook than Bill said.  I assume this is because the same amount of mixture was piled higher (in a smaller tin). 

The end result was delicious - see for yourself!