So everything is back to normal and here is my most recent effort at emulating Mr Ramsay.

Not wanting to lull myself into a false sense of security or anything, but I SMASHED this dish, it was soooo easy. It probably helps that I have done a few of the elements before *BUT* it was my first time cooking duck (making duck pancakes from a Marks and Spencer kit doesn’t count), so I’m going to give myself, the Virgin Duck Cooker, a high five and pat on back.

The ingredient shop was relatively easy, I knew immediately salsify would be hard to find so after a quick consultation with the Cook’s Thesaurus, I saw that salsify could be substituted for parsnip and parsnip could be substituted with celeriac, so celeriac it was going to be as I needed it for the accompanying celeriac pureé.

So, celeriac pureé and glazed celeriac…. err I know what you are thinking…I could have just gotten parsnip. Not my most well thought out combination, early onset of senility anyone?

Everything else was simple and straightforward and I was thankful that I already had the expeno bottle of Madeira in my cupboard from cooking this other dish with Madeira Sauce.

This recipe is a great one to make for a dinner party, because the vegetables, sauce and pureé can mostly be done before hand, heating everything up at the last minute. So I started with the sauce as that is the most involved part of this easy peasy recipe (boastful much?).

The method for this Madeira sauce is slightly different to the one used for the pork belly – if you can remember, that one was made from the stock the pork was braised in. This is Gordon’s straight up Madeira sauce, that you can make anytime and whack on anything (well almost anything). It’s in the basics section of the book on page 248 and I REALLY REALLY recommend you try it sometime because it is so good you almost want to stick your head in the saucepan and lick it out.

Madeira Sauce 101

- heat olive oil in wide saucepan and add shallots, herbs and garlic, sweat until softened
- add the meat trimmings (pork, beef or poultry) and fry until browned
- deglaze pan with Madeira AND port, reduce by two thirds
- add chicken and veal stocks, bring to boil and reduce by ANOTHER two thirds (concentrated goodness)
- pass through sieve and season
- that’s it. Easy hey?

And soz, I was so bad at multitasking I didn’t take one photo of that process.

The sauce done, I set it aside and got to work on the vegies. Here’s what I need for the glazed salsify parsnip celeriac and baby onions.

First up, I took the baby onions (well they were really pickling onions but what defines a baby onion anyway?), immersed them in boiling water so as to easily remove the skins. Then simmered until tender, about 15 minutes.

Next up, parsnip celeriac. I followed the method they had for the salisfy, including, “[after cutting] immediately immerse in a pan of cold water with a generous squeeze of lemon juice to prevent discolouration”. It seemed to work. Cold water was brought to a boil then removed from heat, letting the parsnip cool in the pan.

For some reason I felt the need to put in a plastic bowl of cold water and then a pan of cold water. Why? because I love doing dishes.

Boring photo is boring.

The onions and celeriac were set aside ready for glazing later.

The crushed peas were exactly the same as the side that went with the Pork Belly and really are such a simple, tasty way to serve peas. I took some photos this time… and I will let you in on a little secret…

I LOVE SHELLING PEAS!  Haha, it makes me feel like I’m in the Famous Five or something. You know that wholesome, old fashioned feeling…

Awesome.

Celeriac purée, just three ingredients. So simple, I’ll let the pictures do the talking -

That's some white pepper in there with the melted butter

Stir over high heat, until starts to soften, add cream, cover pan

Cook until celeriac is very soft (15 - 20 min)

Transfer to food processor

Blend to a fine purée

So to summarize;  Peas are ready. Madeira sauce is ready. Celeriac purée is ready.

Time to pop my cherry.

I preheated the oven to 220C. Then prepped my duck breasts. Weirdly one was much pinker than the other. The recipe called for 4 x duck breast halves (so half per person) but I had enough for two so I cooked them whole.

Trimmed, scored and seasoned.

The duck breasts are seared in the pan and then cooked in the oven. So into a super hot skillet went both breasts, skin side down.

Sizzzzle...

Allow 3 – 4 minutes for the skin to brown, then quickly turn and sear on the other side. Transfer the pan to the oven.

With the duck breast in the oven it was GO GO GO!

I drained the celeriac and patted it dry.

I heated the olive oil in a sauté pan and then added the vegetables. When they started to colour,  in with the butter, honey and a squeeze of lemon juice (plus seasoning). These were tossed for a few minutes until nicely caremelised and left in the warm pan ready for service (I’m so cheffy).

In a pot on the stove top I wilted some spinach, at the same time in  the microwave I reheated the purée and the crushed peas, whilst taking the duck breast out of the oven to rest.  MULTI TASKING GO GO GO!!! The duck had been in the oven for about 6 minutes and probably just a touch too long. Lovely crispy skin though.

To plate up, place a metal cutter in the centre of the plate and spoon in the crushed peas and then top with a layer of the spinach. Remove the cutter then arrange sliced duck breasts on top. Alternate the purée, and glazed vegetables around the outside, then spoon on the Madeira Sauce.

As a whole, the dish was well balanced and perfect with a glass of red on a wintery night. The nutty sweetness of the celeriac, the rich velvety Madeira sauce and the fresh minted peas complimented the tender fattiness of the duck and the crispy skin. You can see in the second photo the duck looks a little bit over done. It was still pink, but could have been a bit juicier – OM NOM NOM. But hey….

No one was complaining -

My nemesis Dessert, is supposed to be up next. I’m not sure which one. So many of them need an ice cream maker, which I haven’t bought yet and I’m not even sure it will fit in my freezer (the bowl bit).

I’m tempted to get a new fridge/freezer all together, a side by side one. The one we have now has the freezer up top and there just isn’t enough room for saving meat scraps, bones and shellfish shells, all of which I need to make stocks for upcoming dishes.

My birthday is coming up in September, is it super lame to ask for a new fridge?

Big thanks to Brett for all his hard work on the site. I think it looks wicked and I’m so happy to have a non-generic and all around awesome looking blog now. I just need to take better pictures so as not to put the fantastic design to shame.

You probably have noticed I have had a bit of a hiatus. A few reasons for this -

1) Work has been busy and a bit annoying, not leaving me feeling very creative for cooking and writing.

2) Another little non-food related project I used to do last year has started again as of July (but with preparations starting much earlier in May) and that has been taking up LOTS of my time outside of work and on weekends.

3) Adam has been out of work since March due to the GFC so he has been doing pretty much ALL of the cooking since then to keep him busy. I think he is nearly better at it than me. Nearly

But now..

1) I remembered the reason I started this blog is to flex my creative muscle!

2) We are back into the swing of things with this other project, so I am hoping it is not going to take up as  much of my time ‘going forward’. (Such a lame work phrase that one).

3) This is the best one.. Adam got a job! And not just a regular job, he got a super duper brilliant job. He starts in August so I will be back doing our nightly meals and running the household kitchen again. He has done a stellar job, but I am so looking forward to being back in control!

Since my last post the G man has been and gone from Australia. Did anyone go see him? I love that his tour was filled with controversy, so Gordon!  Maybe the next time he visits I will be well into this project and I will go to his show and ask him questions on all my fuck-ups. Like WHY WOULDN’T MY FROMAGE BLANC FOAM, FOAM?

I have a cooking post pretty much ready to go, so stayed tuned peeps!

.

So I thought I would start with an easy dessert. One that didn’t require heaps of ingredients, fancy moulds or an icecream maker. Reaaaaalllly naive of me, because seriously, ‘sif Gordon does easy desserts.

Here’s how it panned out, ingredients at the ready -

I could just take the Moet & the Magic Dust & be done with it

What you probably cant make out in that fairly ordinary photo, is the words GOAT CURD on the white tub. The recipe called for 100g of Fromage Blanc and do you know I COULD NOT find any in Sydney. Not for want of trying, armed with my copy of  The Foodies’ Guide to Sydney 09 I either rang or went to every cheese shop, deli and providore listed in the book, plus others that weren’t and most of the places didn’t even know what Fromage Blanc was (not that I did either before this dish). So I settled for the goat curd and took this picture.

A few hours later, stressing about not having the right ingredient, I finally found a farm that makes it in NSW, rang them, cursed myself for leaving it so late as the stockists weren’t open on a Saturday then FINALLY found out that Wholefoods House on Danks St stocks the products. YEE HA! Made it there within an hour of closing and got the Fromage Blanc. Then forgot to take a picture of it. Sorry.

So on to the easy peasy lemon squeezy recipe right?

Chop pineapple, (which was a complete bitch I might add, picking out the eyes and stuff,  juice everywhere) then toss with sugar and place in a skillet on high heat until the chunks begin to soften and caremelise slightly.

Smelt great but took ages to caremalise as it got really juicy. Once it was done, I tipped it into the food processor and blitzed it into a fine puree.

I get a sick pleasure from using the food processor

Then I strained it through some muslin to extract the juice.

Baby food anyone?

Squeeze hard girl!

To this I added a splash of pineapple juice and a few splashes of champagne and that was the soup part of the dish finished. “Mmm cocktails.. so far so good”, I am thinking.

Next up was to prepare the chili syrup, which was super easy. It is just a stock syrup (sugar and water) infused with chili flakes, then strained (I couldn’t get all the bits out though). Sweet and hot! It was a great combo and would be interesting used in other desserts I think. This is what the end result looked like -

Now comes the tricky part of the recipe. I have to say that anything with the word “foam” in it, is somewhat terrifying to me. Having never used fromage blanc and never made a foam, I was suitably shitting it, but hey, anyone can follow a recipe, right? Right?   I was a bit light on with the photos here, because I was concentrating so hard!

First you beat the fromage blanc and the milk together in a large bowl. In a saucepan reduce some stock syrup and lemon juice, take off heat and add the pre-soaked gelatin sheets. Allow to cool slightly then whisk it into the fromage blanc mixture. Done and done.

Fromage blanc mixture.. soon to be FOAM

Then place that bowl in a larger bowl filled with ice water and whisk every now and then until it starts to set.

AND LOOK FOLKS IT SET!! IT ACTUALLY SET!! *dances around kitchen*

The last stage of the dish is to transform the jelly into foam and assemble it alltogether. The recipe clearly and plainly states “Whisk the fromage blanc foam with a balloon whisk or an electric mixer mixer until light and airy. (In the restaurant we use a soda siphon to make and apply the foam, but his method works too.)”

I was going to borrow a soda siphon, but my friends couldn’t make dinner (yes there were people present to witness this abomination) so I thought, “well the recipe says you can use a mixer and I trust the recipe”.

FAMOUS. LAST. WORDS.

Firstly, I would just like to say how amazingly quick the jelly like substance turned into a liquified mess when the mixer touched it. I don’t know if it was supposed to do that, but it did. And it made me kinda concerned.

Here is the first stages of the whipping, whipping whipping… “hmm yes a few little bubbles on the surface. It is going to be a foam any second now”.

Whipping, whipping

Here is me about 5 minutes lates, still whipping…

Whipping, whipping, whipping

And here’s a final shot of the whipping,  30 minutes later (I actually left it running and sat with my guests out on the balcony with the doors shut so we couldn’t hear the damn thing)… err  no change. It looked like a milkshake. A very, very thin milkshake.

Whipping, whipping, whipping

At this point, I realised two things 1) after a test run with a bit of the “soup” the “foam” as it was, was never going to sit on top and 2) the fromage blanc foam was going to be fromage blanc milkshake and no amount of whipping would change it.

I will take this oppourtunity to thank my brave and courteous guests, who at this point had been waiting for over an hour for dessert, yet still encouraged me to continue. (I would also like to say that dinner up until this point had been devine).  It assembles in a chilled tall glass, half filled with pineapple soup, then a drizzle of chili syrup and a large pinch of the Magic Dust. Finish with a spoon of foam on top and pinch of dried chili.  I was kinda pissed off and sulky at this point so I refused to even clean the glass for a nice presentation.

Pineapple Soup + Fromage Blanc Milkshake =

Foam fail

One for each of us, how delightful

mmm creamy pineapple

About the only thing I liked was the fat straws, that I pinched from the local Bubble Tea at Broadway.  It was a horrid wet creamy cocktail mess. The popping candy went all soggy and didn’t pop and you could barely taste the chili.  Aside from the foam not working, the rest of the dish wasn’t even that nice, it really didn’t taste like much more than milky pineapple juice. Suffice to say, nobody finished. Give me a pinacolada over that any day.

I don’t know where I went wrong though. Is Australian fromage blanc different to what they use in the UK? Could the soda siphon have made all the difference? If the latter was it, well then the instructions in the book are misleading. I guess I will never know then, because I sure as hell am not attempting this one again. I’d love to hear from anyone that does though.

Just so you know, here is what it was supposed to look like.

Gordon's version

And lets see my mess one more time

Louise's version

Yep, don’t think I’m going to be a 3 Star Chef anytime soon.

To end on a somewhat happier note, here is a picture of my favourite part of the whole dish – the Stardust Candy!! I thought it would be hard to find but our local British Sweets Store had a variety of popping candy and I’m not at all ashamed to say that I bought a few extra packets to “test”. OH MY how much fun.. opening and closing your mouth to hear it crackle and pop!

POP!

]]> http://irritatinggordon.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/pineapple-and-chili-soup-with-fromage-blanc-foam/feed/ 4 irritatinggordon img_1404 img_1454 img_1455 img_1462 img_1465 img_1470 img_1474 img_1480 img_1479 img_1482 img_1484 img_1486 img_1490 IMG_1487 img_1497 img_14991 img_15041 IMG_2463 IMG_1497 img_1485 http://irritatinggordon.wordpress.com/2009/04/21/slow-braised-pork-belly-with-langoustine-crushed-peas-and-madeira-sauce/ http://irritatinggordon.wordpress.com/2009/04/21/slow-braised-pork-belly-with-langoustine-crushed-peas-and-madeira-sauce/#comments Tue, 21 Apr 2009 12:44:22 +0000 irritatinggordon http://irritatinggordon.wordpress.com/?p=125 ]]> The San Pellegrino 50 Best Restaurants were awarded the other night. Sadly, Gordon Ramsay at Royal Hospital Road has fallen out of the top 100, but interestingly, Marcus Wareing who used to run Petrus for him, came in at 52. I wonder if Gordon has been intentionally snubbed or has the standard of the food at Royal Hospital Road dropped dramatically enough for him to fall from number 13 in 2007 to out of the list in 2008. Jay Rayner, the food critic for The Guardian in the UK, puts it down to the G-man being “less exciting” than his former protege. You can listen to what he has to say here.

Enough about that, there’s another 3 Star Chef in training (LOL!). I have to say that this dish was an effort, the culmination of 4 days of, well, mostly boiling stuff but it was every bit worth it.

I started on a Saturday morning with a visit to AC Butchery to get the pork belly, it took me the whole weekend to make the stocks and then the pork needed to be done over two days. Anything that takes two days to cook is a sure thing in my opinion, so with work and everything it was Tuesday night when we finally sat down to eat.

As this was only the my second attempt at being a 3 Star Chef (ok I’ll stop now), I wasn’t game to invite anyone around for taste testing just yet, so I halved the recipe on page 197 and also saved myself some dosh because that Madeira is expensive yo!

Here’s the loot (including the $45 bottle of Madeira and the neatly packaged HOME MADE stocks *smug*)

First up I had to trim the belly and remove the bones and skin, because the recipe says “1 fresh pork belly boned and skinned“. Of course, I didn’t think ask the butcher to do it, so here is my first attempt at boning a pork belly.

I think I did a good job but I couldn’t help thinking it was weird there was no skin in this dish because isn’t the skin the best part of a pork belly? Crackle anyone?

The next step was to season the belly, then roll up and tie into a neat log. Except I forgot to buy string, so thinking WWMD (what would MacGyver do), I grabbed the dental floss (plain, not minted) from the bathroom and used that.

This is where I’m showing my amateur-ness (naiveity?) because of course when I put the log into a pan to brown, the dental floss burnt through almost straight away and I had a mini disaster on my hands, frantically pulling the pork and the floss out of the pan while screaming to Adam “CAN YOU PLEASE DO ME A FAVOUR?!”.  Lucky I have a nice boyfriend who hot-footed up the road to the convenience store to buy me some heavy duty cooking string. <3

This is what is looked like after it was resurrected, re-tied, then browned in the pan for about 8 minutes. Muuuuuuch better!

Draining off the excess fat from the pan, I added the chopped vegies and cooked on high heat until they began to soften. I deglazed the pot with some white wine and let bubble until almost totally reduced. The pork was returned to the pot along with the chicken and veal stocks and brought to a boil, then after reducing to a simmer it was left for 3 hours, turning occasionally. By the time it was done a skewer should push through the meat easily – which it did!

Taking the pork out while it was hot, I layed it flat on a baking sheet, placed another baking sheet on top, then weighed it down with some cans ready to go in the fridge over night.

The leftover juice and vegies in the pan got pushed through a sieve, then brought to a boil AGAIN and reduced by two-thirds. Concentrated meaty-wine-vegie goodness.

In another sauce I took the black gold Madeira and reduced it by half (does he think I’m made of money or something?) then added it to the stock and BOILED SOME MORE to make a syrupy sauce. Then I did the dishes, hung up my tea towel and retired to bed (it was past midnight by this stage).

Day Two…

We stopped at the Fish Market on our way to work to pick up some langoustine.  This was the first time I’d been the fish market early (it was 7am) and man was it different to the usual weekend mayhem. The only people there were restauranteurs and fish shop owners, we practically had the place to ourselves and the pick of the days catch! It was all so beautiful and fresh, I was cursing not having my camera there.

Despite the selection, they did not have any langoustine, because according the the fish monger, you can’t get it in Australia. However SCAMPI is practically the same thing (is the same thing, does anyone know?), so I got 6 fresh scampi and they were pretty cute.

And this is what I did to these cute little fellas. I hope you’re not eating your lunch right now.

Sorry about that.

The reason I needed to decimate them so, (well, first of all if truth be told I had a little help with the decimating) is because they had to be peeled, cleaned and any coral reserved. For the uninitiated, coral means BRAINS. Scampi brains – well actually, I don’t know for certain it is the brain, but the book describes it as, the small sac in the head, so brains is close enough in my book. Anyway, it was a gag-worthy task and I appreciated the assistance.

The scampi were brushed with their coral, which gave them a slight orange tinge, and set aside to be cooked later.

I then blanched some freshly shelled peas and a bunch of mint for 2 – 3 min, drained and whizzed in a food processor with some olive oil. The trick was to crush them, without puree-ing, and I got it just right.

I got the pork belly out of the fridge and it had been squashed flat and looked a bit ridiculous.

I scored the top of the pork and cut into squares. Then got all my pots and pans ready for the mad cooking, frying, plating sessions.

Then it was all at once; frying the pork squares both sides until golden, heating the Madeira sauce, frying the scampi tails in another skillet (just a couple of minutes) and re-heating the peas.

This is how it all came together -

It was really fun plating it up!

The pork was melt in your mouth and PACKED with flavour. Having been slow-braised in the stock, then that same stock reduced to make the Madeira sauce, richly intensely flavourful, both meaty and sweet. I served the remainder of the sauce in a gravy boat and we used another whole serve each while we were eating it, it was that tasty.

The pork/scampi combo actually worked quite well because the scampi was strong enough flavoured to hold its own against the meat and the sweet sauce.

Given that most of it can be prepared ahead of schedule, you could easily do this dish for a dinner party.

High fives to Gordon all round!

]]> http://irritatinggordon.wordpress.com/2009/04/21/slow-braised-pork-belly-with-langoustine-crushed-peas-and-madeira-sauce/feed/ 6 irritatinggordon img_1306 img_13101 img_1320 img_1327 img_1346 img_1348 img_13671 img_1371 img_1375 img_1376 img_1378 img_1380 img_1392 img_1390 img_1393 http://irritatinggordon.wordpress.com/2009/04/17/stocks-chicken-veal/ http://irritatinggordon.wordpress.com/2009/04/17/stocks-chicken-veal/#comments Fri, 17 Apr 2009 09:38:24 +0000 irritatinggordon http://irritatinggordon.wordpress.com/?p=91 ]]> I’ve never made stock before this. I had heard it’s easy. Chop vegies, place in water along with bones and boil the f*ck out of it for however many hours. But really who has however many hours to spare to make stock and surely the results can’t be that much better than the tetra pack stocks? Surely?

Man, was I wrong!

Homemade stock is the best thing ever and it wasn’t even that much of a pain in the ass to make. It’s categorised in the book as “Basics” so that should have given me a hint.

Take these ingredients, all very simple run of the mill, easy to find ingredients – the butcher even gave me the bones for free! (This is probably a common occurrence at butchers, but I get excited about stupid things like that).

Chop like this –

Sweat the vegies -

Stir in flour and tomato paste, then add the bones and fill with water.

Ok, I’m the first to admit that the above photo looks a bit grim, but anyway, from here it’s just boil, boil, boil like crazy for a few hours, skimming the scum from the surface as it rises.

This is how it looked after a few hours of boiling (ie, pretty much the same, my scum-skimming skills are severely limited).

Then I poured it through a sieve lined with muslin as I don’t have a “fine sieve” that the recipe called for, and there you have it. 2 litres of rich, delicious, chicken stock. I could have drunk it like soup, it tasted so good. But I didn’t. I reserved the amount I need for the up coming slow-braised pork belly and divided the rest into 300mL serves and popped into the freezer. I’m a regular Martha Stewart (minus the fraud conviction).

For the veal stock I basically repeated the above process with slightly different ingredients and a lot longer simmering time – 6 hours vs 1 hour for the chicken stock.

You can see the mise en place below.  Note the addition of Madeira and Ruby Port, which kind of made this stock an expensive exercise – the Madeira was $45 and the port $20. Both will be used in later recipes though so I considered it an investment.

I won’t bore you with the rest of the pics for the veal stock making but I will tell you that it was FREAKIN’ EXCELLENT!! Well worth the 8 hours cooking time and the beginning of a long a lustrous relationship between myself and Madeira.

Now that I had the stocks prepared I could look forward to my first attempt at a Main Course – Slow-braised pork belly with langoustine, crushed peas and Madeira sauce!

I live about a 10 minute walk from what I think must be one of the best Fish Markets in the world, certainly the best in Australia, and maybe only rivalled by this one in Japan. We go there regularly, to either hit up the Yum Cha restaurant above the market or engorge ourselves on freshly shucked oysters, or to purchase WAY more than seafood than we could possibly eat in one sitting, but inevitably do. Everytime we go there, we always wander around marvelling at the days catch and every single time we go there I  always stand in De Costi’s point at a swordfish at least a metre long and say “Look at the size of that swordfish!”

Except not on this occasion, the one time I actually wanted to purchase some swordfish. THANKS FISHERMEN WHAT AM I SPOSE TO DO NOW, HUH?

Of course I instantly took this as a sign of failure, moaning to Adam that it’s just not meant to be and I’ll start over next week.  He placated me and we searched the market again, eventually finding about half a dozen swordfish steaks on ice in one of the display cabinets.

The dish called for 600g swordfish, centre-cut.

After much to-ing and fro-ing about what a centre-cut actually is and cursing my lack of research, I decided to just ask. Genius. The girl serving the fish looked at me blankly, so  I asked for the best two steaks and with the whitest looking meat and left it at that.

Turns out centre cut of a fish, means a cut from the middle part of the fish, not the tail, because the meat is of better quality. Should’ve looked it up before I went. Lesson learnt. Not like I had a choice on this occasion anyway, CURSE YOU FISHERMEN. Hmm, on second thoughts, I better be nice to to the Fisherman Gods as I’m going to need them to be good to me later in this project.

The tuna was easy to get, althought not the best selection as it was getting kind of late in the day. Still awesome though. Then I couldn’t find baby chard leaves so I got watercress instead and I was lucky enough to get the last daikon (long white radish) at the market. I even found an el-cheapo $15 jar of black caviar to replace the $250 Oscietra Caviar recommended by the G-man.

Here are all the ingredients back home and ready to go. If you have the book the recipe is on page 146.

First I placed the fish in the freezer for a few hours to firm it up enough to cut some nice neat logs. Not quite as nice and neat as I had hoped – I think I might need some new knives for this project. Then the logs got wrapped together and frozen for a much longer time until I needed them later.

Next I sliced the daikon on the mandolin ready to be marinated….

And then combined the ingredients of the marinade until bubbling – soy sauce, sesame oil, balsamic vinegar, olive oil and shallots – I can tell you this smelled absolutely divine and would be a great marinade or dipping sauce for the tuna on its own.

Once cooled, I spread it over the daikon, covered it with Glad-wrap and left it to marinate for a few hours. Then I sat on the couch and watched TV for a bit as I was still recovering from attending this party the night before.

A while later, about an hour before we wanted to eat I was up for the challenge of the brown butter sauce, really the only bit of “cooking” in this recipe. I caremelized the butter in a saucepan and attempted to drain off the liquid leaving the residue behind.

That then got whizzed with the cream, some lemon juice and some olive oil until thick consistency. The book says blitz for 20 seconds but it took me about 5 or 6 times that to get the right consistency. I reserved the sauce in a squeezy bottle in a pan of luke warm water ready for plating up.

The fish in the freezer was now rock hard (and a little wonky) but more or less ready to go.

Then sharpened my knife and started slicing. They say in the book that they use a meat slicer to do this in the restaurant, so I was a bit worried, but my crappy knife worked fine and the fish held together well.

And VOILA!!

To say I was impressed with my presentation on this would be a massive understatement. I was ecstatic with the way it turned out.

Taste wise, well, disappointingly I wasn’t that thrilled. It just didn’t have the freshness of real sashimi after it had been pushed, pulled, frozen and thawed to get to the plate in that state. The marinated daikon was totally bomb, the brown butter sauce slightly too lemony (my fault) and the caviar a bit cheap tasting (no surprise there).

If I made this again, I wouldn’t bother with the checkerboard presentation. I’d simply prepare the marinated daikon before hand, whip up some brown butter dressing and serve with freshly sliced sashimi.

Why?

A few reasons. My love for food has been on a steady increase in the past few years – my eyes have been opened by experiences at some of Australia’s best restaurants and this had lead to more experimentation in the kitchen trying to emulate at home what we see on the plate.

Then I stumbled upon French Laundry at Home sometime in 2008 and instantly became captivated by Carol’s journey through Thomas Keller’s cookbook (she has now moved on to Alinea at Home).  A bit of research and I found there are all sorts of people cooking their way through all sorts of cookbooks.

I decided this was just the type of focus I needed to distract from my extremely non-creative work life (Facilities Management) and hone some skills in the kitchen. 3 Star Chef seemed the logical choice, with Gordon being my favourite on Lifestyle Food and the recipes seeming to be well-rounded in choice of ingredient and complex enough to be challenging (and entertaining for the reader), yet accessible enough to not have a failure every other week.

I actually started this project in January and due to holidays/parties/summer merriment it’s taken me a while to get the blog up.

So sue me.

A better design, courtesy of my most talented brother-in-law* will follow shortly. This means for you, lucky reader, I have a backlog of posts ready to go. Just don’t expect me to keep up this pace.

I look forward to having you along on this journey. Please excuse the swearing.