It's cold...casserole

It's cold. Well, you know, not really. But cold by our standards. It's been getting down to around 3, 4, 5 degrees C in the mornings. And even though it's up to around 20-25 in the days, it's still cold in the house. Also, as our Canadian mate Donny put it once, the windows in houses here around Queensland are like the windows in the projects in cold places... and that's pretty true. We also don't dig on insulation much in older homes here. So it's cold!

Anyway, I hate the cold. It's horrible. I hate wearing heaps of clothes. I hate waking up with a runny nose. I hate sneezing. I hate having cold feet no matter how much I rug them up. It's all shit basically.

Our new house has a fireplace, which is cool, but I still hate the cold.

The only good thing about the cold is that you can cook warming food! So this afternoon I thought, nice, I'll casserole up some gravy beef and get warm. It turned out ok. Charisse liked it more than me, but that's kind of standard for anything I cook. Here's how it went (I used my pressure cooker by the way).

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About 0.5kg gravy beef (or whatever cheap meat you like to put in this sort of thing), cut into inch squarish pieces
1 cup red wine + 1 glass of red wine
1 tablespoon plain flour
1 bay leaf
3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
2 large brown onions, quartered
a can of crushed tomatoes or punnet of cherry tomatoes, or some chopped tomatoes
2 large potatoes, cut into roughly inch squarish pieces
olive oil
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First I had to brown off my onions. So I heat some oil (I don't use a lot - just whatever you normally use to brown things) in the pressure cooker pot and throw in the quartered onions to cook for a couple of minutes. Just to brown.

Then I put them aside and run through a similar process for the meat. I threw in a little extra oil as well. After about 3 mins I sprinkled the flour over the top (there was a little meat juice in the pot, but if not, I would have put a tablespoon or two of water in), stirred and cooked for another couple of minutes. Added plenty of ground pepper and a little salt too.

Looking nice and gluggy now, I paused for a moment to consume the glass of wine, being careful not to let the juice thicken and burn in the pan.

Next step was to pour in the wine, add the garlic and the bay leaf, pop on the pressure cooker lid and turn up the heat. I set it for 20 mins on a low pressure, finished the glass of wine and disappeared for a minute.

When it was done I carefully released the pressure, added the potatoes, popped the lid back on and cooked for another 10 mins (following heat up etc, the usual pressure cooker dealie).

Following that 10 mins, carefully release again, add the onions and tomatoes and cook for another 5 mins at low pressure.

That's pretty much it!

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Additional thoughts, post eating:

• I had no carrots. Not an issue since I hate them, but maybe it would have been nicer for Chaz.
• Mushrooms perhaps? Added at the end with the onions and tomatoes.
• It could have done with a little more juice...perhaps add a touch of water at each step.

Cardamom espresso

My first food and drink blog post... a momentous occasion I'm sure you'll agree. Rather than spoil it with some of the abominations I actually come up with myself, I'm stealing something that a friend from work told me about.

Ben is a really interesting guy. We took some undergraduate mathematics classes together back in the late 90s at QUT in Brisbane. Rather than steamroll a boring path through PhD, postdoctoral research and straight in life as an academic, Ben has taken a slower version of this path that I have taken, but along the way filled it with amazing life experiences backpacking all around the globe. I believe that this particular idea comes from his time in South Asia where he travelled around enjoying food and partaking in yoga wherever he came upon it.

I've noticed a few cardamom espresso recipes around, but all seem to be referring to crushed cardamom in ground coffee. This one on the other hand involves burying a bruised pod within the grinds in the group head itself when using an espresso machine. I don't imagine it would work with filter machines or presses...perhaps a stove top would apply sufficient heat and pressure to release the flavour - I'm really not sure.

Anyway, it's as simple as that - make an espresso shot as usual, except bury a bruised cardamom pod (or 2, or 3 if you wish!) within the grinds prior to pressing with the tamper.

The end result is a delicately sweetly flavoured espresso - quite nice. It might be a nice touch for bitter coffee if you prefer a sweeter brew.

Thanks to Ben C.