William Chong

I have a minor love affair with haloumi at the moment. (So does C, incidentally.)

It’s a Levantine cheese popular in many a Mediterranean restaurant (including that beautiful meal at Ima and Ibn). You can read more about its backstory at Wikipedia, but in my opinion the best thing about it is that you can fry it, like a steak.

We bought a block of it a couple of weeks back and thought it would be fun to try cooking it for ourselves. To ensure they fry properly and not melt, you need to cut them into reasonably-thick slices (about a 1-2 cm, or the thickness of your index finger), and use a high heat to get the beautiful seared look. Also, haloumi does not end well when microwaved (lunch leftovers the next day proved this).

For this dinner, we added radish slices, boiled potatoes, tomatoes, red onion (all from our trusty Foodbox) and served it with rice.

Yum!

——————————

As an aside, we dropped by Barracuda in Bucklands Beach for our most recent date night. We didn’t eat too much to warrant a proper review, but I felt compelled to say a few things anyways:

• They had the worst antipasto platter I’ve come across in a restaurant setting. To be fair, it’s not a popular order, but C and I were given a hodge-podge of stuff that had seemed to have come from sitting in the fridge for weeks – vinegared cauliflower, olives, cold bread, some feta and cold sausage. My stomach definitely disagreed.
• They did serve us some tasty green-lipped mussels, drenched in a rich tomato pasta-style sauce. Which was tasty.

I’m sure others will have had more pleasant dining experiences – anyone else been before?

On our way home from a long and tough week at work/uni, we caught a radio advert for Nosh Food Market in Glen Innes, offering the following deal:

On a whim C and I decided to give it a go, so we bought a butterflied chicken and a bit of pumpkin, took it home, and tried to make our very first roast.

The advantage it seems with a butterflied whole chicken is a faster cooking time, due to its wider surface area. After accompanying the bird with diced pumpkin and baby potatoes on the side, we cooked it in the oven for 45 minutes at 230 degrees Celsius.

And that’s it – you’re done! The smells wafting through the air while we prepared our other dish (pretty much a basic stir-fry of long beans, beef mince and a healthy serving of oyster sauce) was fantastic – almost like sitting inside Nando’s, or next to Oporto’s.

The great thing with doing a whole roast chicken is that it’s possible to use the roast chicken again for other meals. The next day we enjoyed using the chicken in toasted sandwiches; other possibilities include stirfries, soups, salads and much more.

—————–

This was one of our “stay in and cook” date nights. A bit of freeform, recipeless cooking with a few favourite ingredients as guidelines.

This was in our fridge:

So we had mushroom, 2 carrots, some apples, fresh fettuccine, and some pork chops in the fridge. In our pantry was some packet white sauce, and there was some basil in the garden.

Between us, we like mushrooms. And cheesy sauces. So we included those in our dinner plan.

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Cut the apples into slices to try and fry it alongside the pork loins.

2. Crush basil leaf into little bits and throw them into the dish at random intervals.

3. Chop mushrooms and grate the carrots. We were lazy so we served them raw on the side.

4. Fry the pork and apples on medium. Our end result was more pork-flavoured apples than apple-flavoured pork – we really should have done the pork chops first, then added the apple.

5. Boil the tricolore pasta with a pinch of salt and some oil until soft and cooked. Incidentally, the green colour comes from spinach, and the red is tomato – the pasta’s meant to evoke the colours of Italy.

6. The end result: a very tasty meal!

——————-