Dinner at home - Nigella's Kitchen!!

I got the new Nigella Lawson book "Kitchen" so I have been trying some of the recipes!! When my Mum & Dad came for dinner to see our now unpacked new house, I made "Spanish Chicken with Chorizo and potaotes" for the meat eaters.... This was a super easy recipe, which involves throwing everything into a roasting tin and baking in the oven!!
I halved the recipe, since I was only feeding 3 rather than 6. 

( I also cooked some pumpkin and peas to go with)





This recipe got the thumbs up from everyone - Janet had the left overs for dinner the next night.





for myself, I made roast vegies with haloumi - I threw potatoes, pumpkin, sweet potato, onion and halved tomatoes into a roasting tin, sprinkled with oregano and a little olive oil, and put some slices of haloumi on the top, and baked along with the chicken dish.  MMMMM delicious!!!

For desert? Nigellas Chocolate Key Lime Pie! This was a chance to use my new flan tin! Another easy recipe with great results!!! No baking involved here - just whizzing up digestive biscuits, cocoa, choc chips and butter for the base, and beating together condensed milk, cream, and lime juice for the filling. If I made this again, I think I would use chocolate wheatens for the base, to eliminate the need to use choc bits!

Melbourne!!! Day 3 - Great Ocean Road Tour

breakfast was a couple of croissants from "Pie Face" which we had purchased the night before.  I tried to heat them up by snuggling them close to the boiling kettle in our hotel room. fail. Still, yummy enough croissants! We were being picked up by Wild Life Tours Australia for a one day tour of the Great Ocean Road!


first stop was the famous Bells Beach






I saw my first ever "wild" Koala. In that we saw Koalas that were in trees, not in zoos!





We had lunch (included in the tour) at Apollo Bay. Hanet had the Roast Chicken, Chips and I ate her salad :-)




I had a Vegie Burger.


We had about half an hour after lunch to have a wander around. We found ourselves at this ice cream shop :-)






It was delicious icecream! Janet had honeycomb, I had Dulce de Leche Gelato. mmmmmmmmm



We ate our ice cream whilst walking out to see the view of Apollo Bay.Then it was back onto our little bus.




next stop was Maits Rest Rainforest Walk


Then on to the twelve apostles.....


......Loch Ard Gorge


........London Bridge. All amazing sights to see (and a million more of my photos can be found here!!




on the way back to the city, we stopped at the Noodle Canteen at Colac for dinner

lemongrass & chilli vegie noodles



sweet chilli chicken noodles

Dinner at Home - Spring Rolls & Sweet Corn Soup

So I was feeling brave and actually tried deep frying something.  I was planning on making rice paper rolls, but on reading the packet, saw that it had instructions for deep frying them, so I decided to have a go!  The filling was a basic stir fry of vegies, tofu and rice noodles tossed in some soy & sweet chilli sauce.  The deep frying was a little scary, and I probably won't be rushing in to do it again, but the result was some quite tasty spring rolls!

to go with the rolls, I made sweet corn soup - this was fresh corn cooked up in some vegie stock with some garlic and ginger, then whizzed with a stick blender.  I then drizzled in whisps of beaten egg. Delicious!!!

Dinner at Home - Sausages x 2

for me - a couple of vegie delight Rosemary sausages, served with onion and tomato "gravy" (just onions and tomatoes cooked down into a chunky sauce), with mashed potatoes and green peas!

for Janet - sausage "balls" in gravy with mashed potato and peas. TO make the sausage balls I just took the skins off the sausages, broke them into pieces and rolled them into balls.  I fried them in the pan, before removing them and making the gravy (it was just a bit of gravy powder, water and some bbq sauce).  I popped the sausage balls back into the gravy pan to simmer for a little while.

The mashed potato was made with a dollop of the new Philadelphia Cream. Made them deliciously creamy!!

New Year Barbeque

We went to my parent's place for a barbeque just after New Years......

There were mystery sausages - in that some were beef and some were not, and no-one knew which was which.  THis did not concern me, as I had my own vegie sausage :-)

Delicious smashed potatoes - with rosemary- these potatoes had such delicious crispy bits, as well as soft fluffy centres!

A Salad with just about anything you could think of - feta, tomato, capsicum, onion, mushrooms, avocado, YUM!!

Some marinated barbeque chicken

Crusty bread - with real butter :-)

And for dessert? Well this was my department, so I made individual pavlovas with fruit salad.  Basically, I piped out meringue into the appropriate shapes (and they actually were not too wobbly looking!!) and baked them.  I made them the day before, so I wanted a crunchy meringue, rather than a chewy meringue which may have gone soggy with the wait in the fridge....  I assembled the pavlovas just before we ate them - I put a little Vanilla Fruche in the bottom and topped each one with a pile of fresh fruit salad - I chopped up all the fruit quite small, so that everyone got a little bit of everything in their little pavlova.

Red Rooster?

This is what Red Rooster gives you when you order a serve of roast vegetables. That tiny shrivelled up orange thing is supposedly a carrot. Next time Janet wants a Rooster Roll, I am getting my dinner from somewhere else!!

Dinner at home - Roast Chicken & Minestrone Soup

I roasted a chicken - I marinated it in some lemon juice, soy sauce and garlic for a few hours before roasting it in a hot oven surrounded by some vegies.  I was very impressed with the way it turned out - nice and golden and glistening. Tasty too apparently!

for myself, I cooked up a big pot of minestrone soup, with plenty for the freezer to be eaten another day.  And because it was just for me, I put in some fresh asparagus, and some tinned beans to make it extra yummy!

Out for Lunch! Yum Cha - Landmark, Sunnybank

We went with friends to Yum Cha at Landmark, Sunnybank - its in the Sunnybank Plaza shopping centre on Mains Road at Sunnybank.  This is a very busy restaurant! Fortunately we had a booking, and friends who knew the procedure, otherwise we would have been rather lost!!  It was a very tasty - and filling - lunch!!

cheesy scallops

dim sims (pork & prawn?)

crispy squid

Pork Buns

some sort of meat

bbq pork

vegie dumplings- yum!

another vegie dish - vegies in pastry - tasted a bit like a meat pie, but without the meat.

bbq duck

pork spring rolls - with very orange sauce that made fingers turn orange!!

vegetarian rolls - crispy deepfried dough, wrapped in rice noodle. Tasted quite bland, but the sweet soy sauce that came with it made them quite tasty.  The crispy filling was reminicent of a doughnut - jst missing the cinnamon sugar!  THis was a special vegetarian dish - They described this to us as rice paper rolls, with something crispy in the centre, I was imagining vegetables myself, and when the dish was brought to the table, it was described as "salad". Interesting - and good to try something different!!

vegies in oyster sauce - nice and green!

lemon chicken on a stick