Sunday 26 March 2017

Not for the faint-HEART-ed

At the farmer's market, I was scanning the choices available at the grass-fed, free-range beef stall, when the stall-holder must have noticed me look aghast at the tray with the beef heart. Now at $4 for an entire heart, it's clearly an economical cut, but he offered to GIVE it to me if I was prepared to cook it. I was in two minds but decided I was up for the challenge.
I did a lot of searching online for how best to cook it and the recipe that perhaps sounded the nicest was a Peruvian recipe called Anticuchos.
Probably quite luckily, I forgot to take a photo of the heart before I removed the outer fat and sinewy bits, which were really quite gross. So then I chopped it into thin pieces and marinated the meat in the mixture of garlic, red wine vinegar, chilli, paprika, cumin and oil.
The Roasted Yellow Capsicum sauce followed, and this was really smoky and delicious. Not bad going to use two whole BULBS of garlic all up: one for the meat marinade and one roasted that went into the sauce.

Back to the meat, instead of threading onto kebab skewers, I just pan-fried it in batches, quite quickly on a reasonably high heat. And served it on cauliflower rice (whizz up the raw cauliflower florets in a food processor, pile into a casserole and microwave for 5 minutes), with the sauce on top!
Now the taste was good, but you know, I don't think I'd go back. One friend was happy for a taster, and said it was delicious. But no one else seemed at all keen to come share it with me. So I got to enjoy it for several meals. And now I think I've had enough. Forever. And always. Cross my heart.... 

Tuesday 21 March 2017

Caramelised white chocolate

I've been hearing about caramelised chocolate for a while so of course I wanted to see what the fuss was about. And I've always been a big fan of caramel...