Lamb lovers

I love lamb.. (thri donot read this)

i love that it has a natural succulence unlike chicken or turkey where you have to inject flavor into it. The slow cooked lamb was the highlight of the meal. All i did was rub a shoulder of lamb with salt and pepper with some olive oil and crushed garlic. I then added a whole load more of unpeeled garlic and a bunch of fresh fennel. I then placed it in a baking dish covered it with foil and put it in the oven for 4 hours.
When i took it out the meat was falling off the bone.. ~heaven~ The unpeeled garlic was all mushy with oozing garlic paste :D sigh if food could be sexy. THAT was sexy

The rest of the meal included some super simple dishes such as spinach and beef cannelloni that i've made one too many times and this EXTREMELY simple vegetable dish. Seriously this is the most easy recipe ever! And what was even more awesome was that it was bloody good! I couldnt come up with any good vege recipes so i took this recipe off the net. Since then i have made it thrice and i love how easy it is to make.
You HAVE to try it! use fresh vegetables instead though

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Campbells-Swiss-Vegetable-Casserole/Detail.aspx

The vegetables were baked in cream, cheese and condensed soup and yes it was rich and fabulous! :D

we all have to eat

I cant wait to go back home so i can cook in peace in my kitchen with my ingredients! counting down the days..
Summer this year, Kevin was in Oman. so i had this dinner thing for his family and duvs (sadly he was back in Australia). I wanted to make a full menu and after hours of contemplation i finally decided on the menu. I had seen Jamie Oliver make this slow cooked lamb on Tv and i wanted to try it out. Boys love their meat so its was the perfect opportunity. I know most of your'll might think slow cooked lamb is the easiest thing in the world and yes it is, but i decided to put it on the blog because i turned out so beautifully and it tasted divine!
before i continue on however i must apologize for my horrible photo taking skills. I do promise ill pay more attention to my photographs from now on. :)

Kevin at dinner (this picture was originally taken as kavin's attempt to make davyn jealous but he never saw it. Oh well :) now i hope he will)

So for appetizers decided to make something very simple. Smoked salmon with chili feta and a cold pea soup. sadly i sort of ran out of time making the appetizers and i couldnt cut out the circles of salmon as i had initially planed so it ended up looking like this below

It tasted good and yes it didnt look so bad but oh well time management problems :S

love

THE MASTERCHEF AUSTRALIA KIDS ARE BRILLIANT... SERIOUSLY!!!

I like looking back. Sometimes i feel i remember more from when i was a kid than i do now.

It was agreed; cakes were a disaster.
So i moved onto my green book. I made scones (this time i bought self raising flour) and a I tried basic pilaf. I once even made my parents invite neighbors over for dinner and i served them scones and sandwiches... :S i dont suppose i really knew what i was doing.

So year 5 we had this subject called lifeskills and I loved it. We stitched a hand puppet and made kebabs with peanut butter sauce. Oh and we even made pineapple jam for Tamil class which was brilliant! i really do wish i was a kid again. speaking of being a kid iv been watching jr. masterchef australia and :O seriously those kids are AMAZING!! 8 year old whipping up things in minutes. sigh.. i should have spent more time in the kitchen and less in the books when i was their age.


I know most of you guys really hated being a little friend but i think i can honestly say that little friends helped me out. I learnt how to cook on fire wood and make simple dishes. It made me realize how much fun cooking really was.

I think it was the summer of 2004 that i fell in love with the naked chef.
honestly no one else had made me look at food in such an emotional way. Every ingredient was special and the food was beautiful. Yes i did love to cook but up until then i ate food simply for the sake of surviving, but with this exquisite new world that Jamie Oliver opened up, I started experimenting with food. I tried things i had never thought of eating. I had a whole new appreciation for food.

This blog therefore is to document my feelings about cooking and EATING :D
I love food. It is honestly one of the very very few things that can get me excited and happy! This blogs is going to be full of experiments, trial and error and hopefully a little bit of perfection <3 fooooooooooooooooood

Mary Ford

My mother could whip up some amazing dishes but she never was a recipe book person. Most of what she made was innovation or what she'd learned from others.

A year after my muffin disaster i found an 1980s Mary Ford cake book at home. Cakes are gorgeous to look at but they are such a pain to main (in my perception that is).

The Mary Ford cakes were unbelievable. (You need to understand i lived in Oman, never had a birthday cake and the only cakes i ever saw were these from Al Bustan bakery or patisserie which let me tell you were hmmmm..average)

So my mom agreed to bake me a normal sponge when i was in school so that i could ice it when i got home. To a child the idea of sugar paste is like magic. You can make flowers, leaves, little babies, cupid with a box, cut out shapes and in all colours too! So that night i made the sugar paste in 3 colours put them in the fridge. Then i took it out n tried to roll it out and it was sticky and messy, melting in my hands and most of all disgusting to taste.

Any wayyyyyy i ended up only being able to cover the entire sponge with the sugar paste and cut out a flower and stick it on top. so much for all the variety of flowers one could make.

But i didn't give up. I continued to go crazy with the sugar paste trying desperately to make something with no avail and finally decided to move onto royal icing. Those of you who know me would know that im not the strongest person. I was using one of those plastic icing things at the time and i couldn't really push much of the icing out. So yeah i wanted to ice my name... instead i ended up icing those beginner star shaped dots all over the sponge. That was that; i tried making a marzipan cake and doing more royal icing but it never really worked out and finally i gave up.

I know the Mary Ford book was way too advanced for me at that age plus i didnt have a lot of the apparatus that i needed, so it was a disaster from the very beginning.

Beginings

My first cook book one of those really thin cook books for kids. As far as i can remember my mother bought it for me from MV Doulos. I've never been one of those people who knew exactly what they wanted to do with their lives from the time they were toddlers. I never thought id study architecture until i finished my ALs. I never thought id love cooking the first day i laid my eyes on the pages of Mary Ford cake book. Cooking was something i just learned to love over time.

The first thing i ever made was a tomato salad. There really wasn't much to it; all it had was fresh tomatoes, basil and mozzarella. It was Oman in 1997.. i highly doubt they even had buffalo mozzarella so i used the one in the packet that people put on pizzas and even though it probably didn't even taste as good it felt amazing to be able to create something so satisfying.

More over i though it was brilliant that something that i made was laid on the lunch table amidst everything else my mother had made! My family was actually eating it too

Super ecstatic i moved onto the second page of the book which were muffins. As wierd as it may sound i hadn't even eaten a real muffin back them. There were these things called sponge cakes which were like muffins but squishier and airier but no i hadn't eaten muffins. The recipe called for self raising flour. I don't think my mother had used self raising flour before so she told me to just use the ordinary one. There i was sitting in front of the microwave waiting for the damn cupcakes to rise but they never did... i felt defeated. I had pretty much messed up the muffins completely; they even tasted weird.

I was a kid, other important things came along and i eventually gave up on the little green cook book until...

(obviously this isnt what i made, but it looked like this...)