Archive for the ‘Challenge or Meme’ Category
Lamb Kofte for Australia Day
Happy Australia Day for yesterday! I totally mean to post this on January 26th-Australia Day, the day we get to celebrate this beautiful country we live in! Alas, it’s not so easy to cook, film, edit, upload and post whilst fitting in various other activities, all in the one day! I hope you all enjoyed this (HOT) summer day by eating some Australian food, and hanging out with your friends!
We celebrated the day by eating this delicious lunch, and I even cooked a sponge!
This recipe video is also being entered into the Nuffnang/Barossa competition. I’d love to see what you come up with, and you can entere here.
The Barossa wine I chose was Peter Lehmann’s Barossa Blonde, and the Barossa ingredient I chose was Maggie Beer’s Barossa Tomato Sauce. Like I say in the video below, I specifically chose a meal, and wine that might not traditionally go together to show off the versatility of the beautiful wine from the Barossa! Also, using the tomato sauce as an accompaniment to the kofte, and also as the main flavour of the dressing really is a stroke of genius (if I do say so myself). Even Luke, who is NOT a huge fan of ‘regular’ salads (read: garden salad), which this basically was, ate this salad happily and even said ‘yum’! Here’s the video, and the written recipe is below. 
Enjoy!
Barossa Magic from Talia Carbis on Vimeo.
Lamb Kofte:
INGREDIENTS:
500g lamb mince
1 grated onion
3 cloves garlic (minced)
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp papper
1 tsp salt
1 tsp allspice (I used chinese five spice)
1 tsp cayene papper or chilli
1 tsp sweet paprika
1 egg
PROCESS:
Mix it all together in a bowl.
Dvivide into 6 equal clumps. Put one clump into a metal skewer. Repeat for 5 more skewers.
Serve with Maggie Beer’s Barossa Tomato Sauce, caramalised onions, and salad.
Salad
INGREDIENTS:
Mixed salad leaves
Cherry tomatos
Good quality parmassen cheese
DRESSING INGREDIENTS:
Maggie Beer’s Barossa Tomato Sauce
Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Freshly ground black pepper
PROCESS:
Mix sauce, oil and pepper together. Whisk so it’s combinced.
Add salad leaves, halved cherry tomatos, and shaved parmassen into bowl. Add dressing liberally.
We ate this with Peter Lehmann’s 2009 Barossa Blonde.
Factoids About Me
Luke and I in Orvieto, Italia
Here are some little factoids about me:
1) Today I am completley terrified, and completley excited at the same time. You see, we’re putting an offer on a house! I haven’t felt this nervous, but sure of something, since the day I got married!
2) The human body, particularly the brain, facinates me. It is so complex and amazing and I am in awe of they way it heals itself, adapts, learns, changes, and grows!
3) I’m clucky. But it’s strange. One day I am yearing for a little baby to hold, the next day I’m so thoroughly content with how life is right now- Luke, Pep and I.
4) Learning is one of my biggest passions. Both my own, continual learning, and also watching other people learn and figure stuff out. I love watching kids learn, because they don’t give us as easily as adults sometimes do.
5) It is almost impossible for me to stick to just one thing. I am almost always multi-tasking (though some schools of thought say that’s an impossibility) , and I never stick with anything long enough to become an ‘expert’. Hence I am ‘pretty good’ at a lot of things, and ‘really good’ at virtually nothing.
6) I like to draw, even though I’m not very good at it.
7) When I asked my close friends and family what they thought the driving force in my life was some of the things they said were: Creativity and a desire to do new things, self-expression and recognition, loyalty and obligation.
Orvieto, Italia
Jade awarded me the Stylish Blogger award!
Rules of the award:
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In Defense of Food: A Review
I’d just like to start by saying that this isn’t a paid review of anything like that. I genuinely just finished reading this book and couldn’t wait to tell you all about it!
In Defense of Food (link)
by Michael Pollan
To be completely honest with you, the reason i bought this book in Paris (at Shakespeare and Co no less!) was because of the cover, and secondly because of the title. I din’t read the synopsis, or hear good things about it, it just looked and sounded good!
Boy oh boy, am i glad that I did! Apart from the bible, I’ve never read a book that made me think so much about my own thoughts and views and want to radically change my life!!
In defense if food is about celebrating, and eating food. It’s about stopping to think about the truth in all the nutritional mumbo-jumbo that we’re told and making our eating a whole lot simpler. Well, kind of…
As it turns out, eating ‘real food’ in this day and age is harder then you’d first imagine.
Pollan takes the time in this book to firstly talk about nutritionism- what it is and where it came from, and secondly the western diet, and it’s effects of the human body. after all that doom and gloom, Pollan shares simple ‘rules’ to help you put what you’ve learnt into practice. And you know what, the rules he presents are in a way, just common sense. The kind that happens to be so rare today…
Some of these common sense rules he presents include:
“Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does” (we all one how rubbish petrol station food is),
“Avoid food products containing ingredients that are a)unfamiliar b)unpronounceable c)more than five in number or that include d) high fructose corn syrup”
“Eat slowly”
And “Try not to eat alone”
My only reservation about this book is how ‘American’ it is. But the principles, and general facts are stil applicable to Australia, expecially as we unfortunately become more and more like them.
