food geek

Restaurants, recipes, rants.

chicken xacuti

~ maireaddoyle ~ Leave a comment

>A heavenly dish originally from Goa – pronounced “chakooty”. The chicken is marinated in freshly roasted spices and cooked slowly in sweet, fresh coconut juice. Perfectly Delightful!

Ingredients
1Kg chicken, cut into medium sized pieces
(substitute tofu, paneer or soya if veggie/vegan)
6 tbsp ghee or vegetable oil
6 -8 onions
Juice of 2 limes
Coconut juice either tinned or fresh
1 fresh coconut – grate the coconut and roast with two of the onions (sliced lengthwise) and a little ghee.
The coconut needs to turn a pale brown

The key is to roast the whole spices before grinding them. This brings out the nutty, warm flavors. To roast, heat a griddle over a moderate heat, add the spices, and shake the pan for 20 seconds. A lovely aroma will be released.

Roast and grind (to paste with a little water):
– Toasted coconut/onion mixture
– 2 tbsp coriander seeds
– 5 black peppercorns
– 10 dried red chilies (or less)
– 1tsp turmeric
– 4 cloves of garlic
– 1/2 inch piece cinnamon
– 1/2 nutmeg
– 3 tblsp aniseed
– 1tbsp poppy seeds

Method
• Chop four of the onions and fry until light brown.
• Add the chicken and brown.
• Add the ground paste, fry for a minute and then add the coconut milk.
• Cook until chicken is tender.
• Cut the remaining onions and add to the chicken.
• Boil for a few minutes then lower flame
• Add the thick coconut milk.
• Add salt if required.
• Simmer until sauce has thickened.
• Sprinkle over some limejuice and fresh coriander leaves prior to serving.

Enjoy with naan bread, chappatis or rice.

back with a vengeance

~ maireaddoyle ~ Leave a comment

Sorry for the gap folks – I’ve been globetrotting as you know. Ireland for twelve days, London for a couple of nights, then a glorious five nights on Hamilton Islands in the Whitsundays on the Queensland coast.

It was a double celebration – my mum’s 80th birthday and my 40th a week later.


Don’t we look good?

More later once I have settled back in: I have many tales of dinners eaten including the wonderful Italian Mum and I had in Don Giovanni’s in Dalkey (above).

A Real Slow Food Weekend

~ maireaddoyle ~ 2 Comments

>

Never mind A Taste of Slow, this weekend I did things my way.

For once I got up early enough to get to Victoria Market at a reasonable hour. Still suffering from my cold, I didn’t delay, but headed straight for my favourite local winery stall to stock up on shiraz. Davd from Candlebark Hill winery chatted about famous people (he traded his story about Tim Spall for mine about Sir Ian McKellen). Six bottles better off, I wandered back through the throngs to my own local market in Footscray.

There I bought some beautiful pork belly from the Vietnamese butcher, and some diced beef. At the fishmongers I chose a nice slab of fresh tuna (which I froze when I got home for later in the week) and threw in a kilo of fresh sardines as they looked so lovely.

Back at home, I realised that the sardines would need gutting before we could eat them. Orlando vaguely remembered how, from his aunt Gloria, and after a brief instruction session I set to. Fifteen minutes later I had a big bowl of fish guts and 22 tiny butterfly fillets.

I remembered my chilli chutney from the Taste of Slow market, and combined it with garlic and lime for the marinade. I grilled the sardines lightly and we polished them off for lunch with some fresh bread.

It didn’t take long to prepare the spices for my favourite Rick Stein recipe for crispy pork belly. You have to leave the meat resting in the spices for a day or so before cooking so I got that organised after the washing up.

While I was at it, I cleaned out and re-filled my trusty masala dhaba. From the top, we have lemon pepper, black mustard seeds, cloves and cardamoms, garam masala, turmeric, chilli powder, and finally szechuan peppercorns in the centre. Pretty, isn’t it?

Then I took a nap.

Next day, I spent the afternoon on the sofa watching a remake of South Pacific, with a proper old-fashioned box of Milk Tray chocolates on my lap and a blanket over me. It took almost five hours to cook the pork belly to perfection and less than twenty minutes to devour it.

Now, that’s what I call a slow food weekend.

Blog by Mail incoming

~ maireaddoyle ~ 2 Comments

>Less than twenty-four hours after I sent my BBM package to Weekly Dish, I found a cardboard box on my doorstep from Jenny Collins from Salem, Massachusetts. Inside, I found lots of lovely New England goodies.


A letter from Jenny said:

Hi Mairead –

I thought long and hard about what to send – things that would be sort of exotic to you (or at least hard to get in Australia) but not so exotic that no sane person would try them. They also had to be sturdy enough not to melt, or be crushed, or otherwise destroyed in transit. So here’s what I came up with. A bunch of things that are cloal to Massachusetts, and to New England generally:

Dried cranberries and wild blueberries

A jar of jam made with cranberries and raspberries

The Toll House Cookbook – it has lots of old-fashioned New England recipes – pot roast, Indian Pudding (I love it, but it’s an acquired taste, I think), and grapenut pudding. It also includes the original Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe. The bad news – it uses American temperatures and measurements so you would have to convert to use it…

A tin of Cope’s dried sweet corn. This is from Amish Country in Pennsylvania, not New England. It’s very good, with a caramely sort of taste due to the special drying process. There’s a recipe on the tin, and more at www.copefoods.com.

Hope you enjoy!

Jen

I am fascinated by the dried sweet corn (what do you do with it? Sprinkle it on your breakfast? Put it in a stew?) and will research fully before cooking with it.

Thanks so much for the lovely package, Jenny!

Five Things to Eat Before You Die – preamble

~ maireaddoyle ~ 2 Comments

>Traveler’s Lunchbox has been hosting a Foodblogger’s Guide to the Globe, asking everyone to list their top five things to eat before you die. The list is up to 1,245 not including those left in the comments. Fascinating reading.

Some people have specified not only what dish, but where you should eat it and who should have cooked it. I think this is cheating a little bit, because how are we ever going to sample “my mother-in-law’s oxtail stew with butter beans” or “a piece of my world famous carrot cake”?

I preferred Harmonia’s approach:
1151. Quinoa
1152. Hummum
1153. Avocado
1154. Tea
1155. Garlic

…or the contribution from doodles:
1156. Cioppino in San Francisco
1157. White pizza in Italy
1158. Beer in Munich
1159. Chinese food in Toronto
1160. Lobster in Maine and Mexican food in Topolabumpo

But my favourite was probably Andrew – simple and yet perfect:
261. Picking the bits off a chicken carcass
262. Fruit straight from a tree
263. Blackberry and Apple Pie
264. Mr Whippy Ice-cream
265. Any meal with friends

I am still working on my top five, but in the meantime here are five things I will be eating in Ireland (far too specific to be included in my real list):

1. Proper Irish brown bread
2. Irish sausages from my mother’s pork butcher, Peadar Kelly, in Palmerstown
3. Bananas!
4. Smoked cod and chips from the local chipper
5. Real apple tart made by my mum