Fat little dumplings

Here’s a quick mid-week meal I tried for the first time tonight…I had been planning a totally different pork mince dish, using rice noodles, but Woolies thwarted me by having their fridge break down, and I couldn’t get rice noodles.  Grabbed some glass noodles/vermicelli noodles instead and decided to go for a cold salad.

It was really tasty!  I just cooked the pork mince with some oil, a dash of fish sauce, and lots of soy.  The idea for the sauce was borrowed from my friend Rachel, who had used the same thing for a dipping sauce.  Unlike me, she has an instinct about mixing asian flavours.  For the sauce there was the juice of 1 lime, half a teaspoon fine grated ginger, 4 tablespoons fish sauce, sweet chilli sauce to taste, a dash of peanut oil, chopped mint, and about a third of a bunch of coriander.

An easy, awesome salad.

Oh Look, it’s the new year, so I decided to celebrate my return to blogging by cooking something from the recipe book of a good friend, Maggie Beer*.  It is a new recipe book, and this is the first thing I have cooked from it…and i’d have to say I was pretty happy with it.  Take a look:

It’s not the best photo, but it looked pretty good, and tasted great as well – only VERY rich, it had 14 egg yolks in it! and two cartons of pouring cream.  The tart was fairly easy to put together, my downfall though was Maggie’s sour cream pastry – I dodged it up.  It needs a food processor, which I don’t have (maybe you should send me one Maggie?).  I ended up sort of kneading the butter into the flour, which I think softened the butter too much, and kinda ruined it…buuuuut, overall, pretty awesome.

You can check out the recipe on Maggie’s website:

http://www.maggiebeer.com.au/recipes/Details/?Item=ArtclsAsparagus88

Read the rest of this entry »