Fat little dumplings

For Easter we celebrated Greek style and had a few friends over for dinner.  It was a very fun night which ended in playing ‘The humming game’ (where you hum a song until the group guesses its title – a terrible game which you only resort to when there is nothing else to entertain your guests with, and you’re out of food to throw at them).

We started off with Domatokeftedes, which are basically little tomatoey balls of fried goodness. I got the recipe from the March issue of Gourmet Traveller.  Mine didn’t turn out quite like the picture in the magazine, but they were tasty.

Anything fried is of course going to be awesome, but the dipping sauce was what made it good.  Though it looks a bit murky here, the sauce was fresh and zesty with lemon, parsley, mint, garlic and olive oil.  I felt very authentic pounding it into submission in the mortar and pestle.

After that we moved onto individual spinach pies, which I made from Donna Hay’s ‘Seasons’ book – though I didn’t make it in the right season according to Donna.  If I ever disappear you know it will be because I’ve met Donna Hay and she’s glassed me for making spinach pies in Autumn.  They were yummy, basically just chopped spinach, mint, fetta, eggs and lemon zest.  I used filo pastry which was a bit time consuming but worth it.

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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

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