This spring has been spent sneezing, spending, and cooking! I still absolutely adore central markets and the farmers markets, and now go to both, because it’s fun and the produce is amazing.

There is great joy in unplanned purchasing (of ingredients mind you, not impulse buying!), so I end up with goodies like heirloom carrots and blood oranges to play with.

First up, to get the silliness out of the way, there are two neverfail ingredients that can help out in a pinch – the first, as you know, is bacon. The second, is tomato sauce. One day, I had no dinner prepared whatsoever, and managed to create a chicken, bacon, tomato pasta that was somewhat decent! >_> Free parsley also helps :)

For the real spring deal, I found bunches of amazing multicoloured heirloom carrots, so had to buy some to ensure I was getting enough beta-carotene (I don’t like carrots, but I feed my body the nutrients it requires). It turned into a massive julienned carrot salad, which was awesome with fennel, asparagus, rocket, witlof, blood orange, corn, red onion. Plus it looked gorgeous!

Heirloom carrot, fennel, rocket, corn, blood orange salad

Real spring pasta involves fresh handmade beetroot pasta, with beef, pesto, and goat curd. The original version (that I didn’t take a picture of) had parsley instead of zucchini.

Beetroot pasta with beef, zucchini, goat curd, rocket and pistachio pesto

With the abundance of blood oranges, I wanted to do something other than spam it in my salads. So I went from the idea of blood orange juice, to blood orange jellies! Done in a similar style to my Virtual Valentine, it has two layers, with macerations of goodness. I’m not sure whether I just used too much gelatin (the wobbliness was right), but it did have a weird aftertaste. The blood orange juice remained cold during this process; I dissolved the gelatin in boiling water, though for next time, I would make a separate batch of boiling juice to ensure I get the full flavour instead of having it diluted. There were suspended chopped strawberries and mint, and the garnish layer was suspended in place using “lemonade” jelly – lemon, water and sugar to taste.

Because of how pretty they are, here’s a lot of pictures!

“Bespoke cocktail” – Blood orange jelly, strawberry, mint

I also ran into some mixed whole pepper in one of my nearby shops, so I had to play with them, even though I’m not a pepper fan. Whole white, whole black, and some funny looking long peppers. So I slow poached chicken breast in olive oil, fresh rosemary, lemon, sea salt and pepper. It smelled great and the flavour actually got into the chicken, which I was happy about. I used the end result in a salad as a great refreshing lunch.

Lemon, pepper, rosemary poached chicken and quinoa  salad

I then replicated this dish with just salt and pepper roasted chicken which was just as tasty and so much more moist. I also used tomatoes instead of capsicum, and had plenty of asparagus because it’s in season and super cheap!

Now onto planned pasta dishes. There was some fresh squid ink pasta, so I bought that and wanted to make a creamy seafood pasta. I wanted it to have great depth of flavour, so I decided to overload on absolutely everything and my ingredient list ended up being: onion, garlic, butter, white wine, corn water, whole peppers, dill, chives, parsley, celery, carrot, corn, fennel, prawns, cockles, mussels, salmon, lingfish, mullet, snapper bone, creme fraiche, parmesan. I separated the prawn heads from bodies, so that I could cook them for a long time. As a stroke of genius, I also popped the shellfish in when the base of my sauce was only half done, and fished out the meat (pun intended) as they opened (some of those cockles were very stubborn!) so that I could cook down the juices. I had to pick out my snapper bone, peel the prawns, and get rid of the large herbs, and when it was ready I put a whole tub of creme fraiche in and let it mix.

Oh it was gorgeous and super fishy, but that’s what I wanted as I’ve never had a restaurant make one so fishily rich.

I also managed to obtain some white truffles as they’ve just gone on the market! They were so crazy expensive that I cried a little on the inside. The black truffles I bought were $3000/kg, but these white ones were… $7000/kg!!! That’s more than double! So I went way over budget (not that I have a food budget) and bought some. And made eggs! Lots of eggs. Fried, scrambled, all the truffle!

The egg is a little whiter than normal as I used the whites of 2 eggs and the yolk of 1, as I originally wanted the 2nd yolk to sit “in” the bed of white scramble, but the toast I had didn’t work for it… so I ended up exploding the yolk afterwards (lesson learned: don’t let yolk sit in a bowl by itself for too long; it sticks then breaks upon trying to pick it up).

And of course, cheese and truffle! My makeshift cheese plate with 2 proper cheese plate cheeses, plus an olive stuffed buffalo mozzarella. Gruyere and some French washed rind cheese. I love washed rind cheeses! Is white truffle worth it? Yes, but only once per lifetime XD

And new season South Australian strawberries have just been harvested, so my crazy idea of juicing strawberries was put to the test! Turns out, strawberries really don’t juice well. But I had to make handmade strawberry milkshake for the hot weather! Plus I kept the pulp for yoghurt and muesli!

Before: strawberry “nectar” and milk. After: After some yoghurt and stirring, voila!

And lastly, duck and carrots take 2. Roasted this time, in chicken fat (cause I was cooking my salt and pepper chicken just before), hence the carrots look blistered. I bought pre-marinated Mongolian duck, which was pretty tasty!