In the kitchen - Round-up 5-11 October

Apologies for the lack of photos this week. Things are less exciting without photos.

We went to a lovely wedding on Friday afternoon, up in the Dandenongs. Miss 1.5 (at the time, Miss 1) stayed at home with my mother and had a lovely evening too.

On Saturday 6th, Darren marinated some chicken in red curry paste, garlic, tumeric, soy and palm sugar, using the recipe for satay marinade and sauce in Stephanie Alexander's 'The Cook's Companion'. I made the accompanying sauce of tamrind, peanut butter (you're meant to use peanuts, but I can't be bothered crushing them), garlic, chillies, palm sugar and coconut milk, as well as rice and salad to go with it. It's a good recipe.

Sunday 7th, Darren cooked a tasty risotto of pumpkin and seafood marinara mix - yum :-)

I had a work teleconference on the evening of Tuesday 9th, so dinner was reheated curry lamb with rice and peas from last week. Most curries work well on reheating and this was no exception. The only problem was that Darren hadn't realised that I had frozen the rice and peas as well, so he cooked up a big pot of rice to go with the curry.

As a result, on Wednesday 10th, I made fried rice with the excess rice (luckily he hadn't added the coconut milk, stock or kidney beans). I used David Thompson's recipe for fried rice with crab from 'Thai Street Food', but with a chicken breast fried in garlic, as well as egg, soy, sugar, white pepper, green beans, baby corn, carrot and coriander. On the side there were chillis and garlic in fish sauce and lime juice, which is the best way to complete this dish.

Fried rice with chicken.

Last night, Thursday 11th, I made laksa. I have a few recipes for laksa, but a lot of them are too oily - the best one that I have is for prawn laksa in 'Bowl Food' (I put a big tick on the page so that I remember that this is the good one), which makes the paste out of coriander seeds, cumin seeds, turmeric, onion, ginger, garlic, lemon grass (didn't have any), macadamia nuts (didn't have any), chillies (left them out), shrimp paste and stock. The paste is then cooked with coconut milk (it calls for 750 ml, but I only add a tin usually, and in this case I added a tin minus a cup), kaffir lime leaves, lime juice, fish sauce and palm sugar. I put in fish balls that we get from our fishmonger in Box Hill, as well as cauliflower, mushrooms, capsicum, coriander and Vietnamese mint. The whole lot goes on vermicelli noodles. Is good!

Fish balls from Box Hill.

On a side-fish-ball note, I buy these fairly often and can never remember which are the good ones. So! If I record them here, I'll have a record. Going clockwise, (1) is kind of a fried crab stick, (2) and (3) are just fish/crab cake, (4) has a bit of extra flavour in it and (5) is stuffed with spinach (and is therefore the most exciting).