Tapas and Fingerfood

The next few recipes are great items to prepare for cocktail parties or for an afternoon of tapas and wine.

Smoked Trout and Persian Fetta Pate

To prepare the smoked trout you first need to remove the skin and the bones. This is done by firstly peeling the skin gently away from the flesh the remove the fillet facing up first. Prize a knife along the back bone the gently start to peel the flesh away from the back bone and ribs. Once the top fillet is off, gently pull the whole skeleton away from the fillet lying underneath. Place the flesh of the trout in large mixing bowl and have a good check through to make sure you got all of the bones.

Strain the oil from the Persian fetta then crumble the cheese onto the trout. Using a fork gently stir mixture through until well combined.

Remove the seeds from the tomatoes then dice and add to the trout along with some finely chopped chives. Stir through capers and the lemon juice. Adjust seasoning, you won’t need much salt as the fetta and capers are quite salty themselves.

Serve with crusty bread or on a platter with the beetroot dip.

Ingredients
1 Smoked Trout
1 Tin Yarra Valley Dairy Persian Fetta
2 Shallots
¼ cup finely chopped chives
¼ cup of seeded finely dice tomato’s
2 Tbs Tiny Capers
Lemon Juice

Grilled Chorizo with Skordalia and Fig Balsamic

To prepare the white bean skordalia, roughly chop the bread and garlic then place into a blender. Chop the speck or keiserfiesch into small pieces then gently fry in a little oil until nice and brown, add this to the blender also. Blend all these ingredients until the consistency is similar to coarse bread crumbs. Add the strained beans and puree until the mixture sticks to the side of the blender.

In a slow gentle stream, add the olive oil until the mixture is smooth – approx. 75ml. Add the lemon juice and season with salt and pepper to taste.

Grill top quality chorizo whole on a BBQ or char plate. Cut into thin slices then spread a little of the Skordalia onto each piece. Place a sprig of Roquette and drizzle a little fig balsamic over each one. These are absolutely delicious as a finger food but would also go lovely with grilled lamb chops.

Ingredients
Top Quality Chorizo Sausage

White Bean Skordalia
1 Can Cannellini Beans
2 Loosely packed Cups of Stale Bread
2 Tbs Speck or Keiserfleisch (Optional)
2 Cloves Garlic
Lemon Juice
Olive Oil
Salt & Pepper

Fig infused Balsamic Vinegar
Roquette

Beetroot, Yoghurt and Sumac Dip

Drain the canned beetroots, discarding the juice and then place them into a blender with the garlic and sumac. Blend until all the ingredients become a completely homogenous puree. Add the remaining ingredients and blend well together. Serve drizzled with a little olive oil, a sprinkling of sumac and some chopped parsley. Use carrot and celery sticks along with some grissini to dunk.

Ingredients
1 Can Sliced Beetroot
2 Tbs Natural Yoghurt
1 ½ tsp Sumac
½ tsp Cumin
Garlic

Fresh Tomato and Basil Bruschetta

Cut the tomatos into quarters, remove the seeds and then finely dice. Place into mixing bowl and season with a little salt and pepper. Dice onion and finely slice garlic then add to the diced tomato.

Drizzle enough olive oil to wet the mixture along with a sprinkling of red wine vinegar. Chiffonnade the fresh basil and add to the salsa also. The basil should be cut at the last possible minute to keep its fresh flavour.

Thinly slice the sourdough then brush lightly with some olive oil. The bread can either be baked in an oven at 200° of grilled on a char plate. This will depend on where you will be preparing the bruschetta.

Present the salsa in a small serving bowl with grilled sour dough croutons on the side.

Chiffonnade is one of the precision cuts. This applies to leafy green vegetables and simply means sliced as thinly as possible.
Ingredients
6 Roma Tomato’s
1 Spanish Onion
1 Clove Garlic
Small Handful of Basil
Salt & Pepper
Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Sour Dough

Alternative uses - Perfect to serve as a garnish for fresh grilled white fish such as Blue Eye or Harpuka or toss through cooked green beans for a lovely salad.

Asparagus, Prosciutto & Blue Cheese with Shallot Vinaigrette

To prepare the asparagus for grilling remove the bottom part of each spear cutting off the bottom quater or by breaking it at the snap point, this is the point where the asparagus will snap when bent. Wrap each spear in a slice of prosciutto, If using two small spears place together then wrap starting at the top then overlapping at the bottom.

Polonaise is simply breadcurmbs which are roasted with butter. For this blue cheese polonaise, rub butter, blue cheese and bread crumbs together with your fingers in a bowl. Make sure it is very well incorporated. Place a sheet of baking paper on an oven tray then evenly cover with mixture and roast until brown in a preheated oven at 175°. This will take about 15 miunute.

To make the vinaigrette, finely dice the shallots and combine with other ingredients in a jar and shake well. This will keep unrefrigerated for several weeks.

Grill the prosciutto wrapped asparagus on a char plate, BBQ or fry pan. Serve the asparagus on a plate, sprinkle with the blue cheese polonaise then drizzle a little of the vinaigrette over the top. Enjoy.

Ingredients
Asparagus (1 or 2 spears per person, depending on size)
Thinly sliced prosciutto (1 slice per portion)

Blue Cheese Polonaise
½ cup bread crumbs
50g unsalted butter
50g Blue Cheese (Gorgonzola, Roquefort etc..)

Shallot Vinaigrette
4 Shallots (Finely Diced)
¼ cup red wine vinegar
Fresh bay leaves
Cracked black pepper

White Gazpacho Jelly, Red Gazpacho granita, Gazpacho Salsa and White Anchovies

This recipe is a variation on something I ate at a Spanish tapas bar, Delicado Foods, in McMahons point NSW. If you are in the area this restaurant is not to be missed.

Ajo Blanco – White Gazpacho
Ajo Blanco is a traditional Spanish chilled soup. It translates as ‘white garlic’ and the idea behind this dish is to balance the warm pungency of garlic, the sharp acidity of vinegar and the milky nuttiness of almonds. Just for a little bit of flair, and thanks to Paul at Delicado Foods in Sydney for his idea, this Ajo Blanco has been prepared as a jelly. Like most soups, and definitely when preparing this as a jelly, make this a day or so in advance to allow the flavor to develop and the gelatin to set. If you intend to serve this soup solely on its own - perhaps as a starter or part of a lunch of tapas, simply leave out the gelatin. Garnish the soup with fresh peeled grapes.

Ingredients
2 Cups of Almond Meal
750ml Iced Water
3 Cloves of Garlic (Crushed in 1 tsp Salt)
1 Fist sized piece of Stale Bread (Soaked in water for 5 minutes)
60ml Sherry Vinegar
60ml Olive Oil
½ tsp Salt & Pepper
10g Gelatin Leaf

In a blender combine almond meal, water and garlic puree. Blend for 5-10 minutes until it becomes white with the consistency of cream. Add bread, vinegar, oil and salt & pepper then continue to blend for a few more minutes. Strain mixture through a fine sieve. This is the point at which you would stop to use the Ajo Blanco as a soup.

To prepare the jelly, soak 15g of gelatin leaf in cold water until soft. Squeeze out water and place in a pot over a gentle heat. Allow the gelatin to melt then slowly add the soup to the pot, constantly stirring. Refrigerate overnight in loaf tin and allow to set.


Gazpacho Granita
Normally gazpacho is a chilled soup also, made with peppers, tomato and cucumber. Granita is like a chunky sorbet. This here simply combines the two by freezing the soup whilst breaking with a fork to a product like a chunky slurpie. Like the Ajo Blanco, this recipe is perfect for making the traditional soup; simply don’t do the freezing part. Set aside about 1Tbs of each of these ingredients before they are processed to prepare your salsa later.


Ingredients
1 White Onion (chopped)
1 Green Cucumber (peeled, seeded and chopped)
3 Cloves of Garlic
3 Tomato’s
½ Red Capsicum (seeded and chopped)
2 Greed Capsicum (seeded and chopped)
300ml Tomato Juice
1 tsp Sea Salt & Pepper
40ml Sherry Vinegar
20ml Tabasco Sauce (optional)
125ml water
2 tsp sugar


Combine all ingredients in a blender and process until complete smooth. This may take 5 – 10 minutes. To serve as a soup chill for a few hours then serve.

To prepare the granita, place the mixture in a shallow dish then into your freezer uncovered for 1 ½ hours. After this time, break the mixture up with a fork until it forms a slurry. Repeat this process every half an hour for 2 hours. Ones this is complete, cover with cling wrap and continue storing in the freezer.


Gazpacho Salad/Salsa
To prepare the salsa simply finely diced about 1tbs of each of the ingredients used in the Gazpacho granita. Dress with a little vinegar and olive oil. This salsa would also be perfect as a garnish for grilled fish, a dip or as a bruschetta mix.


Garnish – White Anchovies, Grapes and Celery Leaves
Although I think that if you are going to go to the trouble to prepare this dish then you would be crazy to leave out any of these components, I do understand that garnish can sometimes be a bit of expensive fuss. Should you choose to omit the grapes, celery and anchovies the dish will still be beautiful.


Another possible deterrent to this particular garnish is that most scary of all the ingredients out there – “The Anchovy”. For all you non-anchovores there is something you must know. They are not just the little fury fish that you insist do not come within ten feet of your pizza. Anchovies come in many different ways including fresh and pickled. The anchovies used in this recipe are the pickled ones. Instead of the brown overwhelming salty fish flavor you may have had in the past, the pickled variety are much more delicate with plump, soft, white flesh that perfectly combine the of acidity of pickling and the flavor of the sea. If you have never tried a ‘white anchovy’, as they are known, then it is something you must do. Another interesting point regarding anchovies - they account for pretty close to 50% of all of the fish that we take from the sea in total each year!


Final Preparation
Take a heaped spoon of the Ajo Blanco jelly and place in the middle of the plate. Spoon a little of the granita to the side then sprinkle some salsa over the top. Dress the plate with some peeled and halved grapes, a couple of white anchovies and a few celery leaves. Enjoy!

Beef and Red Wine Stew

If I had to single out the greatest contribution the French have made to cookery it would have to be jargon. Take the humble stew for example. I can think of countless different terms the French would use to describe this classic staple. There are ragouts, fricassees’, blanquettes and casseroles just to name a few. And the French have rules for all of them. If the game has feathers - it is a ‘salmis’, if it has fur – they call it a ‘civet, if it is from Burgundy - it is a la Bourgogne - I could keep going all day!

Down under though, we like to keep things simple. A stew is a stew. But this recipe here, my beef and red stew, is not just any stew. It is the richest, most tender and basically the all round best stew you will ever eat. And with winter setting in fast there is no better time to enjoy classic slow cooked soul food.

Ingredients
2kg beef shin, diced
200g smoked pork (kaiserfleisch or bacon), diced
1.5 litres red wine
75g plain flour
75ml olive oil
12 baby onions, whole peeled
1 cup celery, diced
1 bunch baby carrots, cleaned and peeled
3 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
300g mushrooms, quartered
5 sprigs fresh thyme, no stalk just the leaves

The Roux
The first step is to make what is known as a roux. This is just equal quantities of flour and fat, the same as when you make a white sauce. For this recipe though it will need to be a ‘brown roux’, so as to add colour the stew. Add the flour and the oil to a heavy bottom saucepan and cook over a gentle heat until dark brown. Continuously stir to prevent it from catching and burning. You will know when it is ready as it will smell like pop corn or freshly cooked bread and be the same colour as almonds.

The Wine
It is up to you as to how much you want to spend on wine for this recipe but just remember if it is not good enough to drink; it is not good enough to cook with. Never use old or corked wine thinking it will be fine, it won’t be - I have used good quality cask wine as quite a bit is required. Now you are going to add the wine to the roux. When the cold liquid hits the hot roux it will bubble and thicken immediately. Add half the wine and whisk until very smooth then add the remaining wine, whisk and bring to the boil. The base for the stew is now ready to add the remaining ingredients.

The Meat
The best thing about slow cooked dishes is you can use cheaper cuts of meat and they will be super tender and flavoursome. Never use prime cuts, such as porterhouse or eye fillet, as they will be to lean and become dry. I think beef shin is the best for this dish and if you ask the guys at Norfolk butcher for Chris’ cut, they will know exactly what you need. Along with the roux, the rich flavour and colour of the final product comes from browning the meat really well.
Heat a fry pan and fry of the smoked pork. Use a slotted spoon to take the pork out so as you can use the fat in the pan to fry the meat. Season the beef with salt and pepper and then fry in a hot pan until dark brown all over. It is best to fry small batches at a time. You will need to add a little more oil though after each batch of beef is fried. Add this meat to the stew base.

The Vegies
As this recipe doesn’t use stock using what is known as ‘mirepoix’ will add complexity to the flavour. Mirepoix (mirror-pwa) is just a combination of carrots, celery and onions. Fry of the baby onions until they are brown, sauté the celery until it starts to sweat and add them to the stew. I am using baby carrots, so rather than adding them at this stage I will blanch them and add them to the stew at the end. The mushrooms, thyme and garlic can be just added to the stew raw.

Slow cooking
Slow cooking became a real icon in Australian cookery about 20 years ago when a group of people formed the ‘slow food movement’. This name came as both a tongue-in-cheek remark against the growing ‘fast food’ industry and a literal derivation from cooking food slowly. When food is cooked slowly for a long time, the toughest of fibres will break down and become tender. Sinew and fat will break down and become beautifully rich and gelatinous, which is why the cheaper cuts work best. If you are worried about eating too much fat, please don’t be tempted to use a lean cut for this dish, instead, I suggest having a salad for dinner the next night! This stew will take about three hours or so to cook but like any stew, it is best to cook it a day or two before, refrigerate and reheat when needed. Serve with Mash potatoes, green beans and a garden salad.

If there is any stew left over, the next nights dinner can be made by adding the stew to a saucepan with a little extra water and cooking it down until the meat becomes stringy. Cook your favourite pasta, I like to use pappardelle, and use the stew as a pasta sauce with fresh peas and parmesan.

Tattoo

Greatest Restaurant Review Ever

Hello Gastro Bloggers,

This review by Red Symons of Vue de Monde was published in The Age 2002. I post this simply because I loved it when I read it, I love it still and I hope you will too.

Tattoo


A journey up the food chain in the embrace of nouvelle cuisine

RED SYMONS , The Age November 26th, 2002

I arrived late, fearing a repeat of the great Sambucca disaster of '89. On that occasion, I had arrived late knowing that the others were avid drinkers and had sought to minimise the damage by joining them for a polite aperitif at the end of the meal. Subsequently, I drank the equivalent of two pints of draught Sambucca and enough flaming coffee beans to fuel a convoy of midnight truckers. I ended up with both the composition and cognisance of a sloppy tiramisu.

I arrived late, yet again, determined to keep myself nice. These were three committed luncheoneers.

There was the master of the perpendicular pronoun, who will generously add to any anecdote some rather more interesting observations of his own. He is the sort of person for whom walking on the moon was devised, just so there's one thing he hasn't already done better.

The lady at the table was the consort of notables and notable herself. The Phantom ring on her wedding finger suggested that her consorting phase had passed, if I am any judge of a death's head symbol.

The third was a very dear friend of mine, a manipulator of media best known simply as the evil one. Each is no stranger to the grape.

There was much decanting and small cutlery in evidence, indicating that I was not late enough. I consented to a light beer.We started with a single oyster that had died in its sleep, in its own bed, in its shell, as a result of being asphyxiated in a light batter. It had been ceremonially cremated in the deep fryer and its loved ones had left tiny remembrance garlands of linguini. The dish was garnished with the foam left by its last gasp. So was my companion's beard.

Next course was a terrine or, for the uneducated, posh meatloaf. It resembled offal-coloured neapolitan ice-cream, and comprised the liver of a goose, which had eaten in restaurants like this every day of its life, and a layer of jellied calves' tongues sandwiched in between. For those concerned with gourmanderie and knowing what to drink with a particular meal, know this: light beer doesn't go with anything.

We were still on the small cutlery and a crab omelette, the flesh wrapped in a thin blanket of duck egg. I believe the duck is chosen in preference to the chicken's egg largely because it is more bother, but perhaps the light beer and the ultra-milds were tainting my palate.

Three dishes in and every one was a triumph of taste and vision. An army of hands had arranged each perfect morsel on a giant plate. Each plate was a perfectly arranged morsel of abstract expressionism. I was getting the hang of this nouvelle cuisine meal deal now. You order by saying, "I'll have one of everything please". You start at the bottom of the food chain and work up, and so, we now moved from exoskeletal to vertebrate, from crab to salmon with a sliver of abalone just to remind us of the march of evolution.

The light beers were really starting to kick in now so my memory of what accompanied the fish is hazy. I have a dim recollection of goose fat, lentils and a bunch of stuff that is now extinct.

I ordered another light beer and a palate-cleansing dish arrived simultaneously - a zero sum equation. The dish was a single, battered anchovy - dwarf flake, no chips - with the contents of a tomato laboriously separated into component parts. There was a tomato tart the size of a giant postage stamp and a little dolly's teacup from which I learnt that tomato juice is a clear liquid.

I think it was during this dish that one of my companions digressed and had the pig's ear. I'm not joking, and it was crispy. Yes, the hairs got stuck in your teeth.It was time for the big finish and the big cutlery.

Wagyu beef is the Japanese variant whereby the cow spends a couple of years being shown a good time in the bovine equivalent of lap-dancing bars then, having been lulled into a false sense of security, has its throat slit. If beef is a marbled meat then this is Michelangelo's David - one bite and you're full.

I staggered out of the restaurant vowing to eat nothing but gruel till the end of my days. It was the most elaborate meal I have eaten in my life.The funny thing is I raided the fridge at midnight, the earliest I could face food again, and ate about half a dozen of the finest supermarket lamingtons I have ever encountered.

I know you're going to ask so - Vue de Monde and Tip Top.