Red is the new White.

A couple of weeks ago I won another competition. This time it was through one of our favourite wineries, Tahbilk in Nagambie. The prize was two tickets (valued at $150 each) to their Wine Club Dinner at the Comme Bar, in the city. SH was pretty excited about the prize as the dinner was actually their "Celebration of Shiraz" dinner. A four course meal, with shiraz tastings at each course. He was salivating! I, on the other hand, was more excited about the food. My dad felt that he should go in my place, and his logic was faultless... I don't drink red wine - only white wine, so it would be wasted on me. Unfortunately I had to disappoint him. There was no way I was missing out on this! I decided that if ever I was going to learn how to drink red wine, this dinner would be my chance. I can't talk about all these wonderful foods in this blog (although admittedly a lot of my favourite foods are sweet dishes) without being well rounded in my tastes. I can't spend my whole life completely ignoring red wine!


Our night began with pre-dinner drinks, glasses of Sparkling Shiraz, which were presented to us as we reached the top of the grand staircase. Half an hour of small talk later and we were shown to our tables in the Grand Room. We were seated with 7 other people, right up the front of the room. Our table was all decked out, with three glasses of Shiraz in front of each place. When I say glasses, they were tasters, so there was about 100ml in each. We were very lucky to be seated at the table with one of the Winemakers and his wife. He was a great talker, and happy to answer all our questions. It was also a plus sitting with him as he told us the order we should taste the wines in, as opposed to the order we were supposed to drink them. He smelled each wine, looked at each glass and then said "this one first" etc. When we did as he suggested, you could really appreciate what he was getting at.

We also got to take home the Shiraz Grape Jelly!

The remainder of the people at our table were great fun, and we had some very lively conversations going around them all. I found that the man sitting next to me had never drunk wine at all, he was a beer drinker, but it turns out his favourite rum is also mine - Mt. Gay. Anyway, enough about the people. I was talking about food and wine!

The menu for the evening was like something straight out of MasterChef. I was in heaven!

Entree:

Carpaccio of venison with celeriac, Lyonnaise salad, soft cooked quail egg.

Wines: 1991 Shiraz, 2002 Shiraz, 2008 Shiraz

Main:

O'Connors Striploin, tongue and cheek with horseradish croquette, jus viande

Wines: 1999 Reserve Shiraz, 2003 ESP Shiraz, 2006 ESP Shiraz

The "steak" is the tongue and the darker meat is the cheek. They were actually both delicious!

Cheese Plate:

Will Studds aged cheddar, parsley cream, quince and watercress

Wines: 1995 Magnum 1860 Vines Shiraz, 2005 Magnum 1860 Vines Shiraz

I didn't like the parsley cream, it tasted like lawn clippings!

Coffee and Petit fours

Wine: Muscat

Our evening finished with an invitation from the Winemaker to ask for him personally when we next travel to Tahbilk. SH is very excited about it, he loves that sort of thing. I thoroughly enjoyed the evening, and by the end of the evening, I had come to enjoy the taste of the Shiraz too. My favourite was the 1999 Reserve Shiraz, but don't ask me why. My taste for it is still too new to really break it down for you. I will say, that I am certain I will try other red wines now. I'm no longer afraid of trying them. I might not like them all, but I am sure to like some of them!

Finally I would like to leave you with a photo of me, enjoying a glass of red. Nothing momentous for most people, but something that my family felt sure they would never see me do.

Secret Family Recipes

I am very excited about my prize for the May Foodie Competition from albumworks and am really looking forward to spending the $100 voucher on making my own photobook. I have decided to use this opportunity to make my own personal cookbook (might be my only chance!), making the recipes that have been passed down from my Grandma, Oma, and various relatives and family friends. Once I have made them, I will photograph them, same as I have been for this blog, and then put it all together into an album. I have been tossing around names for the album, and think I am going to settle on "Secret Family Recipes". Which is silly, I know, considering that I share the recipes on here anyway! It just sounds cool to me. If someone asks me how did I make my Grandma's Nut Loaf, I can say it's a "Secret Family Recipe". (yes, yes, I am that lame!)

Anyway - my family are looking forward to me doing this as they get to eat all of our favourite recipes too! It's turning out to be heaps of fun already, and I have even tried a recipe that I have never been game to do before.

It was my sister's birthday at the end of June and we had dinner at my mum and dad's house with the whole family. I usually bring a dessert along, so decided to make a cake. Looking through my list of recipes that I want to put into the album I saw that I had put a "Blowaway Sponge" on the list. I've never made a sponge before as I have heard that they can be quite tricky. So I figured that now was the time to give it a try. I have been getting more adventurous with my cooking, so I figured I was up for the task. It turned out well, with only a minor sag in the middle. I have since made another for my neighbour as a birthday cake, and will probably make a third before it makes it to the cookbook.

Blowaway Sponge with whipped cream, Peaches and Passionfruit.

It's the first week of the school holidays now, and the kids are looking forward to baking with me. They love helping, mostly because they can lick the bowl, or taste the biscuit dough. Yesterday afternoon I made a batch of Oma's Chocolate & Vanilla Biscuits, a definite family favourite.

Chocolate & Vanilla Biscuits

These are very easy to make, and they look great. They are absolutely delicious too. I am going to play with the recipe a bit, add some different flavours, maybe mix up the colours a bit. Whatever I decide to do, I have a ready supply of taste-testers lining up to help.

Painted for You

Well it's official - we are open for business! Lynette and I have created a Facebook page called Painted for You that showcases projects from our weekly painting sessions. There are some items that are ready for sale, and others that are examples of work we can do for you. I hope you come along and check out the page, remember to "Like" it so that we can keep you updated as we add more things to it. Thanks!

The Female Prerogative

When I was growing up, my dad would always say if ever any of us girls changed our minds about something that it was a woman's prerogative to do so. With that in mind, I am going to make use of my female prerogative to change my mind about the Cook The Issue competition. Basically I am wimping out of it. I have entered two of the photos that I have taken, and have cooked a further 3 dishes now. My problem is, I have looked at the gallery of other entries and it seems to me that I wouldn't have a chance in the competition as there are a number of photos that look to have been taken professionally. I just don't have the energy at the moment to try to be more than I am. I am quite happy cooking for my family and myself, for pleasure, so that is what I will continue to do.

I am very happy with my win in the albumworks Facebook competition and I am looking forward to receiving my prizes. In the meantime I have been watching MasterChef avidly on the tv, and drooling over the great recipes. Last night's episode featured Nigella Lawson and her recipes. I love her! She is such a diva in the kitchen, she makes cooking look such fun.

I was inspired by the episode and decided that I absolutely had to give her Red Velvet Cupcakes a try. Needless to say, my family were behind that decision one hundred percent! Now up until yesterday, I didn't have any idea what a Red Velvet Cupcake was. I was under the mistaken impression that it was a "hot" spicy cake, perhaps with chilli or hot cinnamon in it. I don't really know why I thought that, perhaps just that the colour is such a "hot" colour. I know now that it is a chocolate cake with red colouring, which seems pretty straight forward to me.

Thanks to my sister for sending me a link to an article that features Nigella Lawson - Sharing the Love which includes her recipe for these cupcakes. A quick read over the recipe and I realised I would have to go shopping as she doesn't use regular everyday ingredients. I needed to pick up Buttermilk, Cream Cheese and Christmas Red paste food colouring. Luckily we have a great cake decorating shop near us, so I was able to get an awesome "Red Red" Wilton food paste that would do the trick, and grabbed the rest of the things from the supermarket.

I spent a great afternoon painting, although without my sister as she is ill (it's not the same without her, but I managed) and after a lovely dinner with mum and dad, decided the time had come to whip up the cupcakes. So recipe in hand, I went into the kitchen. It was surprisingly easy to make, although I altered the recipe just a touch. This batch of cupcakes is for the kids, so with all the allergies we have in our family I wasn't keen to use a tablespoon of food colouring! I decided to try a third of that and see how it turned out. The recipe says it serves 24, but when I spooned it into the cases I was lucky to get 18. I think for my next batch I will make 12 decent sized ones, and I will try more colouring to see if I can get a really red cake. Today's batch were delicious, but they are a light chocolate red. I am really happy with how they turned out. They are a delicious cake and I can see myself making them again, perhaps without the red colouring, for a regular cupcake.

Decorated with Vanilla Cream Cheese Frosting and a sprinkle of Rainbow Coconut

This is a third of the strength of the food colouring.

Winner!

At the start of May I received an email from my Dad suggesting that I might like to enter a competition online. It was a Facebook Foodies contest that asked for the entry of your favourite foodie photo of something you have cooked. I thought it sounded like a bit of fun and entered my photo of the Cookie Monster Cupcakes. It involved getting votes to win, so I shared it amongst my friends on facebook, and they shared it with theirs. I was interested to see how I would go, as the odds seemed to be in my favour. There weren't many entries, and I had entered at the start of the month, so had plenty of time to build up my voting base. I have a large circle of friends on facebook, but soon found that friends of friends of friends seemed to be voting for me too. I was definitely feeling the love!

Anyway, as you can no doubt guess from the title of this post, I was placed First! in this contest. I logged on to check it out yesterday and they had just announced that my photo was the winner. I am very excited about this! The prize is a $100 voucher for a photo album from the company running the competition. Also included in the prize is a 12 month subscription to the MasterChef Magazine, and Adam Liaw's Two Asian Kitchen's hardcover cookbook. I can't wait to receive these in the mail, and then also to choose the photos that I would like to form into a hardcover album.

Needless to say, I am immensely grateful to my dad for suggesting I enter, and to all the family and friends who have voted for me over the month. Thanks for the support! (Oh, and thank you to the Tupperware recipe page from where I got the idea in the first place).

My SH and the kids are very excited that I won, and SH has taken to calling me his personal MasterChef. He is glad that I have decided to enter the Cook the Issue competition as he gets to continue trying new dishes as I cook them.

I don't know where I am going to go with my cooking. At the moment it is something that I am doing for me (although my family are benefiting from it) so while I enjoy trying all these new things, I will continue. I am like a sponge, everything I can watch, or read about cooking, I will. I have just started reading Julia Child's cookbook "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" which I first learned of in the movie "Julie and Julia". It's an old old book, but it has some fantastic knowledge in it, which is what I am looking for.

My favourite cookbook is the one I used when we were taught cooking at school "Cookery the Australian Way". I really enjoy reading a cookbook to discover the techniques that different cooks or chefs use. Slowly I am piecing these together and I think it is starting to pay off in the dishes I am able to prepare now. Where before I was a tentative cook, now I am becoming more ambitious and adventurous. I am really enjoying pushing myself in the kitchen, and I know my family are too.

I must be crazy!

I spent the night poring madly over the Good Taste magazine, trying to decide what recipes I would like to try my hand at. I had a notebook and pen handy, so that I could note down the recipe and page number of each one. I realised quite quickly that I wouldn't be cooking everything in the magazine, there simply aren't enough days in my week to do that. Especially as I have too many after school activities with the kids, plus my own part time job and the job of being a mum/housewife. So, I have made a cut-down list, and I don't even know that I will get through all of those!

So far I have cooked two recipes (and I only bought the magazine yesterday), so I am on my way. The rest of the recipes that I would like to tackle, in no particular order, are as follows:

Beef & Guinness Pies

Choy Sum (side dish)

Pear & Frangipane Tart

Beef Lo Mein

Pea & Ham Soup
Smashed Roasted Garlic Potatoes

Tomato, Zucchini & Capsicum Bruschetta

Baby Beetroot & Lemon Chicken

Ricotta, Mixed Vegetable & Beef Lasagne

Chickpea & Prosciutto Minestrone

Chicken with Ham & Cheese

Yaki Udon with Chicken & Mushrooms

Chicken Cacciatore

Chicken Cottage Pie

Choc-Chip Cupcakes

Raspberry & Lime Friands

Spiced Fruit Scones with Maple Walnut Butter

Choc-Vanilla Cupcakes

Hazelnut Choc-Chip Biscuits

Rocky Road Brownies

Banana Cinnamon Muffins

Golden Syrup Dumplings

Chewy Caramel Slice

Mini Baked Coconut Cheesecakes

Beef & Potato Pot Roast

Bolognaise Pies

At this point, I was 3/4 of the way through the magazine and forced myself to stop as there is no way known that I can finish these, let alone any others. Anyway, as I go along, I am going to cross out the ones I have done, and post their picture on the other page. Wish me luck!

Cook The Issue Competition

I have been inspired by my dad to enter a Foodie competition on Facebook over the last month. I submitted my photo of the Cookie Monster Cupcakes as my entry and am now waiting for the month to end and a winner to be announced.

This has given me a bit of confidence and I've decided to enter another competition to see how I go. The new competition is in the Woolworths Australian Good Taste Magazine (available at your local Woolworths Supermarket) and is called Cook the Issue. Basically to enter you need to cook one of the recipes from either the June or July issues, photograph it and then submit it as your entry. You can do this for one recipe, or for as many recipes as you like. There are a couple of different ways to win, you can even try to cook every recipe! That sounds like a challenge, but the trouble is, we wouldn't eat half of the food I would be cooking. Unfortunately our family are not fans of anything with chili or curry (really hot spicy flavours) which are so popular with most people.

I have created a new page on here for all the photos of the recipes as I make them. I started today, so there is already a photo in there. I am going to make the sweets, cakes and desserts first, as I know that my family are definitely fond of those! Today's effort was a Butter Cake with Orange Icing. It was absolutely delicious with my coffee, so I will make that one again.

If you are interested in knowing the recipes, I can probably put them up too. I will just reference the page in the magazine at the moment though. So let me know in the comments if you are wanting the recipes too.

Wish me luck, I'm going to enter my first photo now!