Food

For the last few months, I’ve been thinking about starting a couple of new blogs, partly because I have been enjoying it so much and partly because the anally-retentive control freak in me likes to keep things compartmentalised. I like the idea of having different blogs for different topics.

One of the blogs I wanted was a food blog - somewhere to post recipes, kitchen stuff, cookbook reviews and in general anything to do with food. I enjoy cooking, love reading food blogs and I love searching the net for recipes. Not that this has resulted in me being a gourmet chef or anything, but I do like to try new things. I also am a compulsive collector of cookbooks, food magazines and recipes so housing all those recipes in one online, searchable place was a pretty attractive idea.

So, I have a new blog, which I’m ready to “launch to the world”!

A Roaming Aussie Kitchen

So far I’ve posted a few recipes I’ve cooked recently, including yesterday’s Easter treats - Choc Chip Hot Cross Buns. If you’re interested in food or want to share recipes or just curious, then pop over and take a look - I’d love your feedback.

My aim with the blog is to collect my favourite recipes in one place and link to other recipes I find around the web. Some recipes are my own or those handed down in my family. Others have come from websites or cookbooks I own. Where appropriate/possible, I have cited the source of the recipe. If you’ve got a recipe you’ve posted on your blog or would like to post at A Roaming Aussie Kitchen, then please let me know and I’ll put the link/recipe up.

Hope you enjoy it - Happy Cooking!

Every time we come back to Perth for a visit we spent a lot of time eating out. Its always a whirlwind of catch-ups with friends and family which often involve going to restaurants and cafes. We have been missing some of our favourite restaurants and the variety of cuisines that are on offer. In Mexico a large proportion of restaurants serve Mexican food, which is really tasty (a lot better than the Tex-Mex we get here) but I definitely crave other flavours, particularly Asian food.

So, we’ve certainly been eating our way through this holiday, some days out for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I think we’ll be rolling off that plane in Mexico! We’ve had some great meals, like last night at a Subiaco “institution” with legendary garlic prawns. After arranging to catch up with our friends who are getting married next weekend we belatedly realised it was Valentine’s Day. I am pretty anti-Valentine’s Day. I just can’t see anything remotely romantic about the weight of expectation and commercialisation of a day where it is decreed that you will show your love. I remember years ago in the office I worked in overhearing a telephone conversation between a secretary and her boyfriend. She was loudly berating him for not sending her anything for Valentine’s Day. All the other girls got roses and chocolates, where are mine?

An hour later an enormous bunch of red roses arrived on her desk. She must have felt so thrilled at that expression of love, so satisfied that she had guilted a gift out of her man. To me that sums up all that is wrong about Valentine’s Day. Can you tell I’m not really sentimental? At least not in the traditional way.

Anyway, we were concerned that we’d struggle to get into the restaurants filled with tables for 2, but luckily at the last minute we organised to join up with another friend (and his family) who we haven’t seen for 5 years and is soon moving to Brazil. The friend is a school mate of Rocky’s, but we’d met his Mum before, I went to uni with his brother and we flew to London with his other brother and put him up for the night years ago. Perth’s a bit like that - everyone’s connected somehow.

We’ve also had some ordinary meals, like at a new wannabe restaurant in Como, recommended by a friend. All I knew was that it was tapas, which I love, but on arrival we discovered the only menu choice was a short or long menu - 8 or 12 tapas courses of whatever the chef felt like preparing that night. I think I’m a fairly adventurous eater, but I am not a huge fish or seafood eater. I do like some seafood and fish, but not as obsessively as many people. Despite requesting a fish-lite selection our courses included caviar, fish and scallops. The food was…OK; the whole thing just seemed a bit pretentious to me, and horrendously overpriced - $50 a head for not a whole lot of food!

Every time we come back we are struck again by how expensive Perth has become, particularly eating out.  It’s hard to get dinner for less than $30 a head and even lunch costs $15 upwards in a cafe. It’s crazy! When we move back here, I don’t think we’ll be eating out nearly as much as we do on holiday or are able to do in Mexico.

So, gotta go now - off to dinner again! This time to a regular haunt from my uni days, which has changed hands since then, but its still a pretty good feed (at least I hope it still is!)

Tomorrow brings lunch with the in-laws and a very special meet-up…..fill you in soon!!

P.S. Just watched Gilly get a century at his last match in Perth - what a true blue legend.

I promised I´d do a post on Mexican food, but there´s so much to say it´s going to be more than one post I think. I´ll start with our dinner out tonight at one of our favourite places in town, a taco joint close to our house.

Apart from the food (which is awesome - I’ll get to that in a minute) one of the reasons we love this place is that it has a great playground, so instead of the usual struggle to keep the kids sitting quietly at the table in a restaurant (like that´s ever going to happen) Guerita can flit happily from the table to the playground and back again.

We often run into people we know there since its close to home and to Guerita´s school. Everyone with young kids loves this place. It´s an outdoor venue but still a permanent structure, unlike a lot of mobile taco vans you see around town. The kitchen is a large open air grill where they cook the fresh carne asada (grilled meat) - the menu consists of different forms of meat tacos, so no joy if you´re vegetarian. The tables are outside under a roof, which is slightly chilly in winter but beautiful in summer when the temp has dropped ever so slightly at night time. We eat at picnic tables with vinyl tablecloths and the plates are disposable (sorry, environment). 5-star it´s not but with food this good, who cares?

So, the food. That´s what you really want to know about, right? It´s all tacos, tacos, tacos and if you´re on a diet, you don´t want to eat here. A real taco is nothing like the hard shell, mince filled numbers back home. In Mexico, they are made with soft flour tortillas and the most tender strips of meat. We live in cattle country so the steak here is FANTASTIC.

Once you get your tacos you pile it high with condiments from the salad bar

Clockwise, from top left - radishes, limes, guacamole, pickled onions, salsa casera (the house salsa), salsa bandera (bandera means flag in Spanish - this salsa is made with chili, onion and coriander for the colours of the Mexican flag), cucumber and cabbage, plus a couple of extras like spring onions, and few more spicier salsas.

The end result

To go with the tacos we often have Quesadillas (grilled tortillas filled with melted cheese)

(again, no dieting allowed!)

And my favourite from the salad bar - cucumbers with Aderezo Cilantro (Coriander Dressing made with cream, coriander, capsicum and a few other things…)

I have to find a recipe for this dressing. It is unbelievably yummy.

And can you guess how much this meal cost (tacos, quesadillas and soft drinks for us all)?

$25 !!!!

No, not an “A-ha! moment”, which is what I think of when I hear the word epiphany, but the actual religious celebration that is held on January 6th.

I am not religious at all, so I didn’t really know much about Epiphany and had never taken much notice of it since its not something that is celebrated much in Australia (at least not very visibly). I was aware of it last year because it was my due date for Chiq and a lot of people told me it would be an auspicious day for her to be born. Whichever day she came would be auspicious as far as I was concerned because it would be the day I made the whole beached whale to milking cow transformation. (Note: I am the only person allowed to call me a cow.)

This year, my January bookclub meeting was an Epiphany celebration. Even without the books we read these meetings are an education for me. The ladies are such a great source of knowledge on traditional and modern Mexican life. Although Mexico is a staunchly Catholic country, my experience is that a lot of these religious celebrations are as much about family and tradition as they are about religious significance.

Epiphany is celebrated widely in Mexico and is called El Dia del Los Reyes (Day of the Kings) because, in case you didn’t know, it marks the day the Three Wise Men were supposed to have arrived in Bethlehem and presented their gifts to Jesus. It is traditionally the day that Mexican children receive gifts, rather than at Christmas, although from what I can gather they now seem to get gifts on Christmas Eve and then maybe also on Epiphany. Sounds like a pretty good deal.

One of the traditions of a Mexican Epiphany gathering is to serve Rosca de Reyes, a sweet bread in the shape of a crown decorated with candied fruit with one or a few baby dolls baked into it, representing the baby Jesus. The tradition is that you must cut your own piece of bread and see who cuts the piece with the dolls inside. I was a bit worried that if you got the doll it meant you were next to have a baby. Thankfully, no - the lucky guest is expected to host a party on the 2nd February (Dia de la Candelaria). The rosca was really tasty, sweet and spongy, almost like cake. The Mexicans do know how to do pastry well, which is not something I expected before we came here. At home Mexican food is all about chili (and the Mexican food you get in Australia is not a patch on the real thing), but you never really see much in the way of sweets. I must do a post about Mexican food soon - tacos, tamales, flan, salsa and some pretty awesome steak.

Anyway, there was no baby in my cake (now there’s a strange sentence) so I’m off the hook for Feb 2nd. We’ll be in sunny San Francisco on holiday then, so its just as well. I really have to get ready for our annual trek back home (San Francisco is our “on the way” stop) in only a few weeks time. As excited as I am about visiting home, I am already dreading the travelling with 2 little ones. Oh, for a Bewitched nose so I could just wrinkle it and *snap* we’d be there.

It´s so nice being on holidays, or more importantly for Rocky and Guerita to be on holidays. Rocky has been working so hard lately and we´ve had so many visitors that having a whole week of lazy sunday afternoons is just bliss. The kids have even been sleeping in which is unheard of! Well, till 7.30am, but that is positively half the day when you have little kids.

Today I discovered a Christmas treat I completely forgot to bring out for the day - Panettone.

I bought it weeks ago and put it away in the pantry, and then forgot all about it. A few years ago we started having panettone toast for breakfast Christmas morning, so I was all set, but obviously feeling a bit too relaxed this year… Anyway we had pancakes on Christmas morning so it was a pretty good substitute.

Panettone French Toast this morning - mmmm indulgent holiday treats….

Chiq is no longer the crusty nosed, hacking cough ball of mucus that she was all last week and is much happier, specially now that she has worked out she can reach the gingerbread house on her own.

Guerita is sitting beside me playing with her new Princess Pop-Up Castle that Santa brought - it has been on her wish list for about 6 months, so it is well appreciated. She´s making up a story about Sleeping Beauty and Prince Whats-his-name - all in Spanish. I guess its not surprising since she has more discussions about princesses with her school friends (in Spanish) than with us (in English).

Rocky is engrossed in his “Where´s Bin Laden?” book (in the style of Where´s Wally) - one of his Christmas presents. And me? I have been whiling away the day exploring a great new forum for Aussie bloggers. What a great resource - I need all the tips I can get and I must admit I do crave contact with other Aussies, so its nice just to go there and have a chat.