Last part of my cooking adventures! My team gave me a techniques cookbook as a going away present so that makes me happy – I love it because techniques are much more valuable than any old recipe.

Anyway, so in my last weeks of Adelaide here’s some things I’ve whipped up.

I wanted to have a go at pickling, so I bought some carrots, apple cider vinegar, pickling spice mix, garlic, onions, and some chilli. I mixed this all in various quantities, and added salt and sugar to taste. I don’t think I got it quite right however it was still very tasty.

I also cut my carrots all different ways in case one was more visually appealing. Plus julienning is SKILL. Then I would also have carrots for some fantastic salad. I love making salad with access to a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables because it makes for incredibly varied salad.

This leads on to grilled snapper. I love snapper. The kind I’ve been buying is some red skinned queen snapper fillet thing, I think. I’ve managed to cook it well the two times I’ve played with it, it tastes great.

I decided to try making dessert for the first time after visiting some farmer’s markets and finding purple pears. I’m not usually a dessert person, but those purple pears were totally asking to be purple-fied with some red wine poaching. So red wine, cinnamon, vanilla and star anise it was! With a “pomegranate surprise” as I added a few bits of pomegranate into the poaching sauce, though I don’t think it did anything to the colour or flavour.

I like this shot cause you see my workspace and that I did the pickling on the same day. And lol, that bottle of wine. Tastes good, but I should use something cheaper for this stuff next time!

The amount of mascarpone on display wasn’t enough for both pears, but at the same time two pears is way too rich! I was so full trying to eat all of it as I needed more mascarpone to counter the winey-ness of the pears. It still tasted good and looked amazing.

Now that I had pickled carrots, I put them on all my salads!

And when I was too vingearised by the pickled carrots and/or couldn’t be bothered putting a lot of effort into thinking about what to cook next, I went back to trusty old tuna tataki style steak with avocado and tomato.

I realised that unless I got an entire kingfish, I wouldn’t find a time to make kingfish ceviche as there were never any fillets for sale. So I decided, why not, let’s make ceviche from scratch! So I tried my hand at filleting a whole kingfish, since the fish shop wasn’t able to do it for me. The only experience I’ve had prior to this was just watching Masterchef contestants filleting fish, so I was fairly sure I wasn’t going to fare any better. I still missed a lot of the meat but I reckon it was good enough!

 

It took 6 limes to get enough juice to marinate the amount of flesh I got from the fish. I also added some chilli here because I regretted not adding any heat last time.

And here are some pretty tomatoes and the salad:

The final mixed result! Presentation-wise, I chose this shot. The first time I did it, I hadn’t prepped enough coriander to garnish and it was missing some chilli decoration. Second time round I remembered that but forgot to toast the corn before serving :( So here is just a pretty dish!

And here is some lamb, as I have cooked lamb but never found it interesting enough to post:

So much cooking!!! And now that I’m back home I no longer have to constantly think about cooking, I can go back to constantly thinking about eating :)