Healthy, Fast Food

You know the feeling, you've had a hard day at work, you're tired and you really can't be bothered cooking something sensible. The temptation to eat some fast food, some generally unhealthy fast food, is huge.

We've found a bit of a way around that though. The meal turns out to have several of the food groups, it's fast and it's low in fat. Our current specialty is a chicken burger, simple and healthy. We also do a steak sandwich a similar way and it's equally healthy.

Buy a couple of chicken breast fillets, some tomato and salad and some hamburger buns - wholemeal if you like and if you can find them.

Firstly deal with the chicken fillets. Trim off any fat and lay each fillet out on a cutting board. Take a very sharp knife and cutting parallel to the board make each fillet into 2 or 3 slices depending on size. This means that the pieces will fit into a burger easily and cook quickly. Marinate the chicken with your choice of marinade some hoy sin sauce, or soy sauce - whatever works for you. Light the barbecue and cook the chicken (see note).

While that's cooking split the buns and toast them, spread with some mustard, sauce or mayonnaise if you must, and add the salad and sliced tomato. When the chicken is cooked put it on the salad and put the other half of the bun on top.

This is a tasty and simple meal, total time from unpacking the shopping bag to sitting down to eat is about 15 minutes. Is it haute cuisine? Of course not but it's simple, quick and modestly healthy. You get some carbs, some protein, some reds and some green leaves.

Note: The barbecue that we use is very small and very simple. We only have a small outdoor deck on the roof, so we have very limited space for a barbie. The key to success is that it has a cast iron grill so any fat drains away and it has a closing lid which keeps food moist. Almost all of our meat is cooked on this barbecue, it keeps cooking smells out of the house and it's a great way to cook. Legs of lamb, steak, chicken, sausages, pork roasts all end up on the barbecue. Careful management means that you get food without all the bad charring that is so common with a barbecue but you still get the lovely smoky taste that you associate with a barbie. We particularly love a slow cooked leg of lamb. We use a very low heat, wrap the seasoned leg in foil and cook for a long time. It comes out lovely and moist and falling off the bone. Just brilliant.

Pasta...Again!

You're getting a bit of cooking lately...it must be the colder weather!

Use the pasta recipe from the previous post to make some delicate tagliatelle or pappardelle.

Take two leeks, top and tail them so that you are left with the white, tight part of the leeks. Split them down the middle and then slice each half very finely - transversely. Throw about 25g of unsalted butter in a pan and gently sweat the leeks. You want them to be soft and translucent but not in any way browned.

Take 4 large, brown mushrooms, start at one side and slice them thinly, including the stalk. Add them to the leeks along with a dollop of olive oil and continue to cook on a low heat until very soft and well cooked down. There should be only a little moisture in the pan.

Put on your pasta water.

In another pan heat about 50ml of olive oil and add 2 finely sliced small, hot, red chillis and 4 anchovy fillets. Fry off until the anchovies disintegrate. Add 600g of chicken mince and cook on a moderate heat until cooked but still tender. Add the leek and mushroom mixture, and 3 finely chopped sage leaves, mix and cook on a moderate heat.

Put your pasta on.

Add about 80ml of pouring cream to the chicken and vegetable mixture, adjust the seasoning and mix through.

Drain the pasta. Take the chicken sauce off the heat and sprinkle a quarter of a cup of finely chopped broad leaf parsley onto it.

Serve the pasta and sauce with a bottle of good olive oil for sprinkling and some good grated parmesan.

Magic Pasta

This is a wonderful pasta dish. First make the pasta: put 500g of strong flour and 5 large eggs into a food processor. Pulse process until it comes together in a crumb. Turn it out onto a board and knead until it forms a silky dough. Wrap the dough in cling wrap and set aside at room temperature to rest for an hour.

After the pasta has rested process it through a pasta machine, making sure that it is well laminated. Then progressively work the pasta down to the finest setting on the machine. Once it is thin enough, use the die of your preference to cut into strips - tagliatelle, parpadelle or whatever you prefer.

Meanwhile take 8 or 10 leaves of cavolo nero and strip the leaves from the stems. Roll the leaves and cut into a coarse chiffonade. In a fry pan add a good dollop of olive oil, a couple of crushed cloves of garlic, six anchovy fillets and a finely chopped hot red chilli. Saute until fragrant and then add the cavolo nero. Put a lid on and braise for 20 minutes, you probably won't need to add any water.

Put on the water for the pasta and when it boils salt it and add the pasta.

Meanwhile steam two heads of broccoli until very well cooked. When it is well cooked crumble it and add to the cavolo nero along with 200g of finely sliced smoked salmon. Mix well and warm through.

Drain the pasta when al dente. Serve with the cavolo nero sauce, freshly chopped flat leaf parsley, grated parmesan, ground black pepper and a good olive oil to sprinkle on top.

Buon appetito.

Note: The word "laminate" may be alien to you when used with respect to pasta. In my view it's the key to getting good home made pasta. Maybe the real experts get to the same place another way, but if they do I'm not aware of it. Lamination is a simple process. Set the pasta maker on the thickest setting. Take pieces of dough and run them through. As they become wider fold the two sides together and put them through again. As they become longer fold the two ends together and put them through again. You need to put the dough through about 10-12 times. At the end the dough will have changed. It will now be durable and flexible, not like a biscuit dough as it may have been at the start. The dough should be about 1/3 to 1/2 the width of the pasta machine rollers and ready to be rolled thin. This is in my experience the way to get pasta that is delicate yet robust at the end of the process, when it's cooked.

Aniseed...must mean fennel

When I was a kid fennel grew wild along the railway tracks, we all knew the smell but we'd never think of eating it. Indeed I'm not sure that it was an edible variety. Then later I became used to the smell and the taste of fennel seeds in Indian cooking. The next stage in my culinary education was bulb fennel. I'd see the bulbs in the vegetable market but never buy them as I was unsure what I'd do with them.

Fennel is widely grown and widely available. I remember on my first trip to a little town south of Rome seeing a paddock with a crop with a feathery dark green leaf. At a distance I thought it was carrots. Asking my host I was told that it was finocchio. His English and my Italian weren't a match for solving the problem of exactly what finocchio was, however lunch a few days later provided the solution! Bulb fennel is sometimes called Florence fennel.

I suspect that many people find fennel interesting but they don't make it part of their diet through a lack of knowing how they will deal with it. It's easy really with lots of simple ways. It makes a great salad as long as you get a very young tender bulb, slice it thinly - paper thin - and put it into a salad with some citrus segments and a simple citrus and oil based dressing.

The most foolproof way of cooking it though is to braise it. Take a large fennel bulb and split it vertically down the middle - from head to root. When you do this you will see a wedge shaped piece of root in the base of each half. Remove this piece with a sharp paring knife and then lay the half on the board flat side down and slice the fennel thinly, starting at the root end. The slices should be 3-4mm thick and you should stop slicing when you start to get to the leaves which are darker green and have white pith in the stems. Do the same with both halves.

Heat a non-stick frying pan with some good olive oil - 100 to 150ml of oil, add the fennel and fry on a high heat moving it constantly. What you are doing is looking for the slightest browning on some of the fennel. When it reaches that point add a little water, reduce the heat and cover with a tight fitting lid. The fennel should now cook very slowly and not brown further at all. Add more water if required. After about 30 minutes the fennel will be translucent and much reduced in bulk, all the water will have cooked off. Check the seasoning, you will almost certainly need some salt and probably pepper, depending on taste.

Serve the fennel in a small bowl. It adds a flavour punch to the meal, a distinctive aniseed type flavour which is enhanced by the slow braising in olive oil. This dish is simple and just requires a little time. It tames the biggest fennel bulb!

Food, food, food...

I told you I liked food and cooking, so today you are getting a recipe. Nothing fancy just simple plain fresh food.

This recipe is for a very simple dish of Spicy Spanish Mackerel. I'd never heard about Spanish Mackerel until about 20 years ago when I was working in the Philippines where it is called Tangigue. We used to have it grilled over a small coconut shell charcoal brazier set up in the back yard. It was delicious. You can find out all about it here, including a little warning that is good for all fish (BTW that page is a US page but Spanish Mackerel is widely available around the world). The higher up the food chain a fish is the more organic mercury it will tend to accumulate. The Spanish Mackerel is a predator and so a little care is necessary - don't eat it every day.

Now to the recipe. Spanish Mackerel is almost always sold as steaks or cutlets in Australia. That is the fish is cut perpendicular to the backbone into slices about 18mm thick. For this recipe you can simply use the whole steak or you can remove the flesh from the bones - this will leave you with 4 roughly triangular pieces of fish from each steak. I also remove the skin, but again you don't have to. Once you have your fish ready just pat it dry with a paper towel.

Now prepare the spice mix. This consists of:

2 dessert spoons of powdered turmeric;

1 teaspoon of chilli powder;

1/2 teaspoon of salt;

Mix the spices together on a flat dinner plate. If you like your food spicy then increase the chilli in the mix, if you prefer a more bland taste then reduce the chilli. This dish relies on the synergy between the flavour of the fish and the turmeric, the chilli is just an added bonus! That amount should be enough for two steaks of fish.

Take the pieces of fish and press them into the spice mix - make sure they are fully covered with spice and shake off the excess. The fish is a little oily so it holds the spice mix well. Put the spiced fish pieces on a plate and leave them to stand for about 20 minutes so the flavour can develop.

To cook heat a non-stick fry pan and add the smallest amount of oil. I use rice bran oil. Put the fish into the pan and cook for a few minutes on each side. How long you have to cook it depends on the thickness of the steaks. Check by gently breaking one piece if you are unsure. Don't over cook. Also make sure that the pan is hot enough that the fish doesn't stew but not so hot that the spice mixture burns before the fish cooks. It should brown slightly only.

Serve the fish with lemon wedges, potatoes (or rice if you prefer) and salad.

To Cut is to Cook

At least that's what the Japanese say. In truth there's not much you'd want to cook that doesn't require cutting something at some point. Cooking can be pretty humdrum, same old thing, day after day. But you can add some passion to it. The process of cooking can excite you just as much as the eating of the food. That's where knives come in.
You can't cook good food without good knives because you can't cut cleanly, you end up doing a clumsy job of breaking food down and you cut yourself. What's the first stage of digestion in that stir fry your cooking? It's the cuts you made when you chopped the capsicum, garlic, onion, ginger and whatever else you tossed in. When that food is well cut and conforms to the picture in your mind of how it should look then it makes you feel good as you toss it around in the wok.
I grew up with crappy knives - a couple of stamped knives from a couple of different makers that wouldn't stay sharp. Then I made the (repeated) mistake of letting "knife sharpeners" - the people that is who claim to do this for a living - attempt to sharpen them. They made a crap job, I got frustrated and I cut my fingers. Finally having nearly amputated my left thumb I decided enough is enough.
Just on that subject. Ask anyone over about 30 to hold out both hands. You can immediately tell their "handedness" by the scars on their index finger. I've got 7 old and visible scars on my left index finger and a similar number on my left thumb - all inflicted by my dominant right hand wielding something sharp (or not so sharp). My right thumb and index finger are virtually scar free.
So onto the hunt for decent knives. I wanted something that had a good shape, felt good in my hands and would take and keep a really good edge. And I wanted to sharpen them for myself, at home, in my kitchen - no "knife sharpeners" ever again.
Japanese knives were where my head took me. The Japanese say you only need 3 knives in the kitchen and they should all be single bevel knives. Japanese knives are traditionally sharpened on only one side which means they are handed. If the sharpened bevel is on the right side as you hold the knife then it's for a right hander and vice versa. Many modern interpretations like the Global knives are sharpened on both sides just like a western knife. The other key difference is that Japanese knives use very hard steel so the angle at which they are sharpened can be much lower (and therefore sharper) without the edge folding as it would on a "softer" western knife.
So to the three required knives:
A Deba - this is a big heavy knife with a blade around 190mm long (up to 270mm) and a spine about 5mm thick. It's a big muscular sort of knife and it's used mainly for filleting whole fish. In the west we use slim flexible knives to fillet fish. The Deba isn't thin and it isn't flexible - quite the reverse - but it fillets fish superbly. The bevel is always laid against the bone and the knife held in a choke grip with the forefinger along the spine. This gives amazing feel - you can feel the knife ticking over the bones and the fillets come off very cleanly and with no waste left on the bones. It's also great for cutting meat and and other reasonably heavy jobs. It's hopeless for cutting pumpkin, potatoes or similar things - the wedge shape splits and breaks the food.
A Usuba - think of a rectangular shaped blade about 200mm long and 40mm high with a completely flat edge to the blade - no curve. That's the Usuba - it's the Japanese vegetable knife. It's much thinner than the Deba and it's designed for dicing onions, shredding cabbage - all the tasks you would use a chef's knife for. The difference is that you don't use a rocking motion, rather you push the blade slightly away from yourself as you slice through the food. This is the knife that you use if you want to turn a Daikon into a single wafer thin slice - the rotary peeling that the Japanese are so good at.
A Yanagiba - this is the long thin sashimi knife - yanagiba roughly translates as "willow leaf". The blade is anything from 210mm to 330mm long. The food is cut with a long drawing motion using the whole length of the blade. Ideal for wafer thin slices of fish for sashimi or for thin slices of that boned leg of lamb.
None of these knives is made for cutting bones. The Deba is OK for fish bones but nothing more. Because the steel is so hard the blades are prone to chipping if you cut bones or frozen food. Similarly twisting the knife in a cut is a great way to create unhappiness as the beautiful knife blade snaps.
Traditionally these knives are made of either high carbon steel or a lamination of high carbon steel with softer steel or iron. The softer steel supports the hard but brittle high carbon steel. The problem is that high carbon steel is prone to rust. You have to keep the blades washed and dried and you have to clean off acid foods promptly - things like tomatoes and lemons are anathema to high carbon steel.
Many manufacturers now offer traditional blades but using stainless steels. The traditionalists argue that the edge taking and holding characteristics are not so great as high carbon steel. I suspect that most of us would be hard pressed to tell the difference.
Now the hard bit. Japanese knives are brilliant to use in the kitchen, they glide through food, creating wafer thin slices and barely seem to pause on difficult-to-cut foods such as tomatoes. You do have to sharpen these knives however. If you buy a "westernised" Japanese knife like a Global then they will offer you a sharpening system tailored to the knife. However if you want the real experience of a traditional Japanese knife you have to learn to sharpen it. You can't use a knife steel or one of those sharpening wheels - you really do have to use Japanese water stones. Most home cooks would use a 1000 grit and maybe a 4000 grit stone. The 1000 grit is for normal use and the 4000 grit polishes and refines the edge to give it real sharpness - that painless friction-free cutting ability which ensures the knife reaches the bone before you feel the cut!
The bevel is sharpened at the required angle of 10 - 15 degrees - you just follow the bevel that the manufacturer has cut. The back of the knife is then flattened on the stone. As you sharpen the bevel you will feel a little burr forming on the flat back edge of the knife. You put the back flat on the stone and work it until the burr has gone.
Is it easy? Not really, but it's not that hard.
Using Japanese knives is a sublime experience, cutting food takes on an almost Zen feeling.