Butterscotch Blondie Bars

Crumb Cake with Pineapple & Custard

This Sunday in Melbourne is of course Father's Day! We had 15 people over for lunch and i was tasked with making two desserts! The first dessert was easy - the always satisfying torta di chocolate but for the second dessert i wanted to try something a bit different. In my daily perusal of Eats on the iPad app Flipboard, i came across the recipe for a Hazelnut Plum Crumb Cake on Smitten Kitchen. Of course plums aren't in season in Australia at the moment so i opted to make a tweaked pineapple version (also happens to be my dad's favorite fruit).

This cake is similar in ways to the crumbles that we're familiar with here in Australia, except with a base that makes it easily slice-able! And the best part is that the custard is baked IN to the cake so there's no need to dollop it on top! Unless you're feeling extra piggy today.

Buffalo Chicken Pasta Bake

Call me crass, call me unsophisticated, but don't you ever, ever say i'm not tasty! Nom.

I came across this recipe originally from a great blog with great photography, How Sweet It Is and tweaked it to suit my own tastes, and have also included a buffalo chicken sauce recipe!This pasta bake is the sinfully unholy amalgamation of macaroni cheese and buffalo wings!

There would be only one improvement to this dish and i feel almost as though i should not say it in the interest of public safety! But... if you actually made buffalo wings, plucked the meat from the bones and used THAT instead of the poached chicken i used... you may be in United States-Hyrbrid Heaven.

Chicago Style Baby Back Ribs

Ribs, who doesn't love them! Covered in sweet, sticky rib sauce they're even better, but the stuff in the bottle doesn't suffice. Nor do the marinated ones from the butcher! You need that smokey, slightly nostril searing flavour that's finger licking good! To make good ribs, you have to put in the effort to make them right!

Traditionally, good Chicago style baby back ribs are smoked over a very low heat, like 100 degrees or lower. Most of us would have a hard to making sure our BBQ or webber stayed at the level. But fear not! There is another way....

Old School Apple Pie

Nanna's apple pie. Brings back memories! My mickey mouse spoon, the litte square cornishware bowls. Creamy yellow Blue Ribbon icecream. Sitting at the long table with the doily tablecloth. My grandfather sneaking loose change to me wherever he could. A crust embedded with one million crystals of sugar, containing a rich treasure of melted apples.

It is time for me to try my hand at the humble apple pie.

Corn Chowder

As the cold weather sets in i've been getting a bit sick of tabbouleh for lunch- not to mention the rigmarole of waking up every morning and cutting up parsley, cucumber, garlic and tomatoes, and not forgetting to soak the bourghul the night before. No more!!

Instead, it's time to move to soup. I hope to bring one soup recipe to the table each week (to cater to my lunches) for the foreseeable future. Oh soup, how do i express your many virtues? Soups tend to be cheap, and you can use alot of scraps in them. Pureed soups freeze quite well, and there are countless variations and recipes, not to mention using your own creativity. And finally, soups can incorporate a lot of vegetables, so they're good for you too.

First up: corn chowder.  A chowder is a soup which has been thickened using flour.

Serves 4 as a meal, 8 as a starter. Cost me about $8 to make.

Raspberry & Pineapple Upside Down Cake

An upside down cake is a cake that once cooked, is flipped over and eaten, obviously, upside down. The allows you to make patterns and essentially glazes in the bottom of the cake pan before adding the cake mixture, which will look fantastic once turned over.

The one we're all most familiar with in Australia is pineapple upside down cake, an old favorite. Not wanting to meddle too much with tried and true form, i've opted to mix raspberries through the cake mix to bring an extra bit of tang to the table.

Bring on the cake sale!

Pecan Pie

North Americans seem to have such sweet tooths. New York Cheesecake. Peach Pie. Mississippi Mudcake. Brownies. And that's only the stuff that's now common everywhere else! Less common in Australia is the truly so-sweet-you-could-cry foods like Pecan Pie, essentially a pie filled with pecans and caramel. The caramel was so intense in this dish based off an American recipe, the first time i made it, that the pecans were almost like an afterthought. This time upped the quantity of pecans to help balance sweet with nutty.

Hoppin' John with Masa Cornbread

Come sit a spell whilst i cook up a storm of good ol' fashioned Southern hospitality. Hoppin' John is a traditional American New Year's soul food from the deep south. Technically if you eat it the day after the 1st January, it would be called Skippin' Jenny. Can someone tell me what to call it when you eat it on the 6th??

Well slap me on the head and call me silly, this dish is meant to be good luck to eat in the new year! And shoot, i reckon it sure is satisfying, and pretty darned cheap too. Authenticity be damned, you should use black eyed peas but as i could not source any, i've used harricot (white) beans in lieu. You could really use any beans you like, just don't use canned ones as they ain't worth a plugged nickel.

Creole Cuisine: Red Beans & Rice

Red beans and rice incorporate the holy trinity of cuisine (celery, capsicum and onion) with kidney beans and smoked meats to create a cajun style, creamily textured stew, which makes for great comfort or winter food. The closest i can come to describing the taste is as a mix of frijoles and pea and ham soup.

Serves 5

Cooking Time
5 hours excluding soaking the beans overnight

Background on the dish
Red beans and rice is the emblematic dish of Louisiana Creole cuisine, and also be found as a staple food in Central America. It was traditional made on Monday or 'wash day' and left on the stove to cook away with ham leftover from the previous night, whilst the housekeepers washed the week's clothing.