No. 1: Kicking off the cook-off

Just to get any potential lawsuits out of the way early, I should acknowledge that the idea for this blog came from my friend Kim. After a trip to the movies, Kim suggested to me that in my role as head of the Heart Foundation in Victoria, I should cook my way through a Heart Foundation cookbook, and blog about it. "Hmm, that's original," I thought, "I bet nobody's every cooked their way through a whole cookbook and blogged about it before..."


So the seed of the idea was planted. After a bit of thought, I emailed Kim to say I'd decided to take up her idea, and that as the Heart Foundation had just come out with a new "BBQ and Grill Cookbook", I'd have a go at cooking my way through that over the summer. "Have you even got a BBQ?" she emailed back. "Define BBQ?" was my response. It's true that I live in a fifth floor apartment with a small balcony, and don't own anything that most Aussies would recognise as a dinkum barbie, but I do have an electric cast iron contraption with grill bars and a plate that will cook up a mean barbie for a limited number of people. And more importantly, I do have a number of friends and family members with real true blue BBQs, so this summer they can expect many visits from me, esky of prepped food in hand, ready to throw on their barbies. What are friends for?



So in this spirit, for my first barbie of the blog I turned up at my friend Mike's place with the first meal in the esky all ready to go, and with my flatmate Cody (11) - he's my grandson, actually - in tow. I decided for the first meal to have a go at the meal shown on the cover page of the book: olive and coriander lamb patties with cummin, served with turkish chopped salad (page 102).


The patties grilled up in no time and were great. They were prepared using a technique I've never used before - soaking the mince in lemon juice to tenderise and flavour it. They had plenty of herbs and spices, so while they were meaty enough to appeal to the boys, I liked them too. The salad was nice and fresh, but I departed from the recipe a bit because it listed two final ingredients - harissa and pomegranate molasses, both as optional additions to the salad. I thought they might overpower the salad and noticed that the picture of the meal showed what looked like that mix as a relish on the side, so being unsure of the author's intent, I decided to do the harissa mix as a side dish. Funnily enough, I didn't have any pomegranate molasses in my cupboard, and what's more my local deli doesn't stock it either. So I used Canadian maple syrup mixed half and half with harissa paste, which made a truly fantastic hot and spicy sauce for the meat - can really recommend this one!

As the audience for this culinary experiment were both sweet freaks (and so am I to some extent, I must confess), I also had a go at a dessert from the book - caramelised plums with honey yoghurt (page 138) - but no plums being available at my local shop, I used nectarines instead, which worked a treat. Really easy and yummy dessert.

Stay tuned for further instalments...

Kathy