No. 9: I am, you are, we are Australian

I'm sure I'm far from unique in having attended an Australia Day barbie. But how many others of you can claim to have cooked a heart healthy recipe on Australia Day?

The barbie I attended was hosted by Melinda, who's next to me in the photo, holding a pre-cooked version of my dish. (Note to self: Must stop posing for photos next to outrageously good looking people...)

Lots of Melinda's family and friends turned up for her BBQ, and given the delicacy of my dish (see below) and the competition to get food onto the actual BBQ, I decided to cook the dish - chicken breasts stuffed with goat's cheese and sundried tomatoes (page 60) - in Mel's oven. Once again proving that one does not need to be a dinkum Aussie bloke with a dinkum Aussie BBQ to be able to successfully cook from this book.

I pretty much followed the recipe on this occasion, and it was pretty simple. Mix up some ingredients (goat's cheese, garlic, sundried tomatoes, shallots, basil, etc), cut pockets in the chicken breasts, stuff the ingredients into the pockets, apply heat, and voila! Not sure whether any of you have ever tried to create pockets in chicken breasts. It's certainly possible, and my pockets were neat and attractive, but not deep, as the chicken breast was relatively shallow, and hence it was hard to stuff all the stuffing into the pockets. My pockets were in fact overflowing. So I ended up with chicken breasts with stuffing in and on top of them, which I thought may not hold together on the barbie, so I quickly stuffed into the oven without further ado, and cooked them for about 25 minutes.

When they were cooked I let them rest gently for a short period, before slicing and serving . They were very tasty and well received. People commented on the complexity of the flavours and the piquancy of the mix. Mind you, there were also many other dishes prepared by others, that were also getting good reviews (I recall partaking of grilled eggplant, couscous salad, chicken kebabs, meat kebabs, etc - all in moderation, of course), so I didn't let it go to my head...

Overall, I'd definitely recommend this one. Simple, quick, and tasty, and no fancy ingredients. Could be a good mid-week family meal, cooked on the barbie, under the grill, or in the oven.

No. 8: Vego's all let us rejoice ....

Happy Australia Day! We trust your Australia Day BBQ's were full of heart healthy options??? If not, do yourself (and your health) a favour and buy one of the Heart Foundation's BBQ Cookbooks or have a look at some of the fantastic recipes available for free on our Healthy Eating site.

Wrapping up the shameless plugs and before I go any further - I need to confess two things. Firstly, I am not the wonderful Kathy Bell. My name is Suzanne Ridley and I work for Kathy at the Heart Foundation. The second thing I need to confess is that I am a vegetarian. Before you start rolling your eyes and groaning I want to assure you I am not here to ram some ethical, greeny vegetarian message down your throats!!! Quite the opposite. As the token vego in the group, Kathy asked me to road test some of the fabulous vegetarian recipes in the BBQ Cookbook to show that a meatless BBQ can be achieved and it can be tasty. Since turning vego I have not taken much pleasure in the good old Aussie barbie but with great recipe ideas such as these and beautiful fresh ingredients we can all enjoy this great Australian tradition.

The recipe that I road tested on Australia Day was the Roast beet pizza with goat's cheese (pg. 20)

You may have guessed from the photo above that I made a slightly different version of the pizza than in the cookbook. My husband and I got a wood fired pizza oven for Christmas so I just had to try this pizza cooked over hot coals. To ensure accurate reportage, I did cook the cookbook version too – but had eaten most of it before I remembered my boss’s mantra "Make sure you take some photos!" This dereliction of duty will probably be raised at my performance review in a couple of weeks time but for now I hope you are all happy with me describing my experience of making the cookbook version.

Arguably, beetroot is the quintessential Australian vegetable. Who else but us Aussies feel a hamburger (vegie burger??) is not complete without a slice of beetroot? Tinned ones are great, but there is nothing better than roasting fresh beetroot as required by this recipe and it is really simple. Get a bunch of fresh beetroot, trim off the stalks then I wrap each beetroot individually in tin foil. No need to peel or fuss about. Cook for 30-40mins then cool. Simply top and tail the beetroot and the skin should just slip off. Yummo. I cooked my beetroot in the oven a couple of days before hand to save some time. This really the most complicated bit of the recipe. All you have to do on the day is chop up all of your ingredients, cook your pita then assemble. I found that I needed to put a little olive oil spray on the pita bread to help it crisp and mine took about 3 minutes to get that golden brown colour. The only other change I would make is to ditch the dried thyme I used in favour of the fresh stuff the recipe calls for. The intense flavour of the fresh herb would have completed the pizza.
This really is a great recipe - the beautiful rich beetroot is complimented by the smooth goat’s cheese and the bite of the spring onions. Fresh, tasty and healthy.

I hear what you saying ..."One vegie pizza does not a BBQ make!" Well stay tuned, over the next few days there will be a flurry of posts about some other meals that the team will be cooking up, including some more vegetarian options.

Thankyou letting a vegetarian loose on a BBQ Blog! Happy BBQs to all and here is hoping you add a few vego options to your next get together.

No. 7: If I knew you were coming, I'd have baked a cake

On the weekend I had a little BBQ to wish my friend Mmaskepe bon voyage, before she headed off for a month back home in Botswana. Her daughter Tab, and my daughter Amy and her boyfriend Kent, were also invited.

I met Skep when we were both working for a few years in Darwin. Tab, her daughter, is an artist who does amazing photographs and prints, and is starting her own business making unique cards and stationery. Many thanks to Tab for the photo montage on the left!

Having grown up in Botswana, a beautiful but landlocked country (or should that be beautiful and landlocked?), Skep never got to taste seafood as a child, but instead grew up eating plenty of meat and vegetables. She genuinely can't understand why people would eat something so odd-tasting as fish; when I try to describe a delicious seafood dish to her, her response is, "but what about the taste? Are you trying to tell me you actually like it??"

So it was a no-brainer to cook meat and vegies for Skep and Tab. I made balsamic sirloin steak with fennel, served with mushroom and pecorino salad (page 92), and couscous salad with chicken and lemon (page 116), followed by blueberry cake (page 148) for dessert.

The date, balsamic, and oil marinade for the meat is excellent - just remember (unlike me) to chop the dates before putting the ingredients in your blender; the effect will be much less startling, I'll guarantee. The marinade seeps into and tenderises the steak, and the result is really delicious. The accompaniment is a melted light cream cheese sauce with garlic and parsley - yum! The steamed then grilled fennel was also very good, especially with some lemon squeezed over. And the salad was nice and crunchy, though perhaps not so appealing to those who don't actually like mushrooms (Tab).

The hit of the day, however, was the couscous salad with chicken and lemon. I coated the chicken with moroccan spice before grilling and slicing it up, and it was really delicious. There's a great mix of fruit, veg and herbs in with the couscous, and we all loved it.

However, I can't give such a strong recommendation to the blueberry cake. It was the first time in years - in fact since I was a hippie child bride earnestly cooking from "Recipes for a Small Planet" - that I'd used a bunch of ingredients including wholemeal flour, raw sugar, canola oil, and buttermilk in a cake. I followed the recipe exactly, but the batter wasn't of the consistency to "spoon into the prepared cake tin" - it was more like a pancake batter, very pourable, and it took ages to cook. The resulting cake was very dense, with an appearance very much like the picture in the book, and a consistency to match. My guests were very kind, but all I can say is, the two punnets of blueberries I used for this cake could have been put to better use...

Here are some comments from my guests about the meal (with apologies to Iron Chef):

Skep: "It's a winner! The salad is light but fresh and crunchy at the same time. The fennel works really well and complements the steak - especially with the lemon."

Tab: "The couscous is definitely my favourite. I love the textures - the crunchy almond, the fluffy couscous..."

Amy: "The steak with cheese sauce tastes rich and decadent - you'd never know it's low fat."

Kent: "I like the couscous too. It's really simple and tastes great. The fact that it's healthy is a bonus!"

Skep and Tab are two of the most vivacious women you could ever meet, and we had a hilarious afternoon. Has everyone else in the world but me been following international versions of "Idol" on YouTube? Tab had us in stitches with her impersonations of certain Eastern European and South East Asian contestants (I'm afraid to name countries for fear of litigation!) Have to go now, have a date with YouTube...

No. 6: Don't come the raw prawn...

To celebrate (!) the end of our brief summer hols and our imminent return to work, I invited Kim and Brian over for dinner. Naturellement, another Heart Foundation BBQ experience was in the offing.

Kim had spent the day on Bridge Rd, shopping for a new summer wardrobe, and wore one of her fabulous new items to dinner - see pic. She will be happy to receive any compliments readers of the blog may wish to offer her.

Given how much eating we'd all been doing over the festive season, I decided another seafood and salad meal would be appropriate. The dishes du jour were quick thai prawn salad (page 29), tomato and onion salad with mint and chives (page 30), and rice and green chilli pilaf (page 36).

I have a confession to make: I didn't even actually use a barbie, not even my electric grill plate quasi-barbie, for this meal. The only thing that needed cooking other than the rice, was the prawns, and for ease of preparation I'd bought raw prawns already shelled and deveined (rather than barbequeuing prawns in their shell and then preparing them). I marinated them in a tiny bit of olive oil and a little garlic and chilli, then stir fried them in a big non-stick frypan. Whilst not totally faithful to the methode du recipe, I think this does prove that even non-barbequers will find something they enjoy cooking out of the book. The prawns were then mixed with a cucumber salad, quite similar to the one featured in Blog No. 5, but this time with a much spicier sauce. I also used heaps of chopped herbs (much more than quarter of a cup) and a crushed peanut garnish for the salad, and served it with extra lime segments, in addition to the lime in the dressing.

It was quite delicious. Kim said, "the smell of lime is great - it's really summery". Brian's contribution was, "these herbs are deeply, deeply, sensuous". I was relieved that he'd chosen to channel Nigella rather than Gordon Ramsay.

The tomato salad and the pilaf were good accompaniments - it all added up to a tasty, fresh meal which everyone enjoyed. A couple of Kim's food art pics are pasted below. I suspect she could be looking for a new career in food photography, so feel free to contact me with any offers.

Just one final note - the prawn salad was meant to be served with 3 cups of mizuna leaves. Neither I nor my very good local greengrocer had any idea what these were. I ended up using some other salad leaves ("lamb's breath"), which were very nice, but I feel like we may have missed out on a critical element that would have added that little something extra special to the meal. Dagnam it...

No. 5: Happy New Year!

After much feasting and socialising over the Christmas break, the obvious thing to do on New Year's Day 2010 was to continue along the same lines - but perhaps to go a bit lighter on the volumes of both food and people! So I invited Mike (friend), Amy (my younger daughter) and Kent (Amy's boyfriend) over to celebrate the New Year with a small seafood BBQ at my place.

For entree I made prawns with fennel slaw (page 38). I haven't used fennel as a salad vegie before but it worked very well, giving an aromatic aniseed-like flavour to the slaw. It was in danger of being overpowered though by the red onion in the recipe, so I'd recommend using less onion, or even none (I'm not a big fan of raw onion). The amount of dressing in the recipe seemed like too little, but because it's strongly flavoured, it turned out to be quite enough. The prawns were delicious - the chilli, lime, and mint flavours were really good and this was probably everyone's favourite part of the menu. The pic above shows Kent (flying the Queensland flag) and Amy with the entrees.

For main course, we continued along the spicy seafood theme with flathead with avocado lime salsa (page 46), and spicy cucumber salad and peanuts (page 36). Flathead's one of my favourite fish, and we grilled it on my little electric BBQ plate. A friend had told me that a good way to prevent fish sticking on your barbeque is to line the plate with baking paper and cook it on that. We tried that, but it didn't look like it was browning up very well, and it started sticking to the paper! So we gave away that idea and just grilled it in the usual manner, and it was very nice indeed, and well set off with the ginger and lime avocado salsa. The cucumber salad with peanuts was also very good - crunchy and tasty. Amy mentioned that she makes a similar Asian cucumber salad, but blanches the cucumbers, and her recipe includes fish sauce and fresh chillies. I do think fresh rather than dried chillies - and probably also coriander instead of parsley leaves - would work well for this salad, and will try that variation next time I make it.

Dessert was a delicious pannetone, decorated to a Stefano de Piero recipe, and definitely not from the Heart Foundation cookbook! Never mind, the festive season comes but once a year...