james test

Another day, another Sydney Road inspired dinner. This time we started off with the polenta and the porcini mushrooms. Cindy was uninspired by her mushroom-focussed cookbook , so after some judicious internet searching, we settled on this recipe . I won't bother retyping the whole recipe seeing as it's right at the other end of that link: basically it's a bunch of mushrooms (including some soaked porcinis) fried with some garlic, thyme, stock and wine (we used sherry instead) served up some fried polenta squares. We added some fresh greens and roasted capsicum strips to fill out the meal. The polenta was crisp on the outside and soft and a bit doughy inside - a good combination with the liquidy mushroom topping. The rehydrated porcini mushrooms and the sherry dominated the taste, enhanced by the thyme and parsley. I'm not sure if I'd rush back to make this particular dish again, but I'm pretty enthused about going back to polenta in the near future. Categ

Ex-officemate and now email cooking contact, Carlo, has been getting into French cooking and perfecting a recipe for meat-based glaze. I didn’t feel like I was missing out on much until I saw his cream of mushroom soup, and he helpfully sent me a link to this site so that I could have a go at a vege-based glaze/stock. I figured I’d best do it straight away before spring takes hold, and made a shopping list to take to the Ceres markets . We got started in the early afternoon with lots of chopping. We had more of most of the ingredients that the recipe specified, so we ended up making 1 ½ to 2 times the quantity. This was probably not the greatest idea on our first attempt, during the browning stage in particular. We must have stirred those things around in our biggest pot for at least 45 minutes, with the parsnips browning slightly and the rest just turning to greyish-green mush. The base of the saucepan developed a layer of hardened mush that couldn’t be scraped off easily with