Baked Italian Sausages, Beans and Eggs

Here's another dish to warm up your chilly winter. Preparing and cooking the beans takes a bit of time, if you are using dried beans that is. However, if you don't mind the idea of using canned beans, please be my guest; it will save you heaps of time to be frank. But for the sake of those purists out there, I will talk you through the steps right from the top, using dried beans to begin with.

Beans in Tomato Sauce with Italian Sausages and Eggs

300 gms dried borlotti/cannellini beans, soaked overnight in water
2 litres water
half an onion
half a tomato
2 bay leaves

1 onion, chopped
3 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 anchovy fillet (optional)
pinch of dried chilli (optional)
1 stalk of rosemary
3 stalks of thyme
1 litre of passata, or equal volume of tinned tomatoes

6-8 Italian pork sausages
a few eggs
extra virgin olive oil
crusty bread, to serve

Drain the beans from their soaking water. Add them to a pot with all remaining ingredients and simmer for half an hour to 45 minutes, or until beans are just tender, and not mushy. It is crucial to add the tomato half as it helps to soften the skins of the beans. Also, do not salt the beans at this point as salt causes their skins to toughen. Once done, drain and set aside. (If using tinned beans, simply omit this step and begin from below:)

In a saucepan, sweat onions, garlic, anchovy and chilli with a good amount of olive oil. Once translucent and fragrant, add in the entire bunches of herbs together with the passata/tinned tomatoes. Return beans to the pan and simmer for 15 minutes. Season to taste.

Place bean mixture in a baking dish. Randomly distribute over the sausages, pricking with a fork to prevent them from 'exploding'. Drizzle sausages with olive oil and place dish in a preheated 200 degree celcius oven. Bake for 15-20 minutes till sausages are nice and brown. Using a spoon, make a few wells in between the sausages and crack an egg into each well. Bake for a further 5 minutes till the eggs are just set. Serve bubbling at the table with crusty bread to mop up the beans and runny egg yolks. Lovely.

Roast Pork Belly with Crushed Anchovy Sauce and Cos Lettuce Hearts

This is the second pork dish in a row that Bev and I are posting on our blog. We can't help it. The quality of pork in this country is nothing short of fantastic, and so we are blessed. I'd expect that in a few days time you'd see yet another pork dish featured here in our blog: pork trotters braised in milk and sage, pulled apart and tossed through some fresh egg pasta. But let's leave that till then. For today's dinner, we cooked up a roasted pork dish using a slab of pork belly purchased from Burlington Butcher in Chinatown Mall, Fortitude Valley.

Pork belly is one of the cheaper cuts of meat that you can purchase. We got ours at around $9 a kilo, and a kilo of that makes up a pretty big slab! Because it has quite a fair amount of intra-muscular connective tissue, pork belly needs to be cooked gently and slowly to make it tender and delectable. Braising, slow roasting and simmering all work wonders for this cut of meat.



Below is the recipe for the roast pork dish that we made tonight. You may think that pork and anchovies are an odd match, but allow me to assure you that it's not quite as horrible it may sound to some! In fact, the saltiness of the anchovies and the acidity of the lemon in the sauce work well to offset the greasiness and meatiness of the pork belly, rounding out the overall dish quite nicely.

Crispy Roasted Pork Belly

1 kg slab of pork belly, from your local butcher
1 tbsp coarse salt
1 tbsp chopped rosemary
1 tbsp whole fennel seeds

Score the skin of the pork belly at close, regular intervals. Make sure that the incisions run deep enough to cut through the first layer of fat. This helps the fat to render out during the cooking process, and makes the skin crispen up nicely. Mix the salt with the rosemary and fennel seeds. Rub this dry mixure into the skin and grooves of the pork. Roast in a 250 degree celcius oven for 15 minutes till skin begins to dry slightly.

Turn down the temperature of the oven to 150 degrees celcius, a temperature great for slow roasting, and roast for another 3.5 hours. Place a tray of water underneath the pork to keep the oven humid all the time. As the water evaporates, keep topping it up. This helps to prevent the meat surface from drying out too much.

After 3.5 hours, take the meat out of the oven to rest. Depending on your oven, the crackling of the pork may or may not be puffed and crispy at this point. If yours, like mine tonight, is not crispy and puffed yet, transfer it to a higher shelf in your oven and cook it at 220 degrees celcius for a further 5-10 minutes till the skin puffs up. This step is crucial in ensuring that you have a crackling that is crispy rather than 'gummy'.

Rest for 15 minutes under a loose covering of aluminium foil. Carve and serve with anchovy sauce and salad leaves. I used cos lettuce hearts, which are essentially the inner most leaves of the cos (a.k.a. romaine) lettuce. These inner leaves are more crunchy and sweet than the outer ones.

Anchovy Sauce

5 anchovy fillets from a can/jar
1 tsp chopped herb (basil/rosemary/thyme/chive)
1/4 clove garlic
juice of half a lemon
100 ml extra virgin olive oil
freshly ground black pepper

Come to think of it, this is technically more a vinaigrette than a sauce. Either way, bash the anchovy fillets, herbs and garlic in a mortar and pestle till a rough paste is acheived. Alternatively, chop them very finely with a knife. Add them to a bowl and mix in the lemon juice. Incorporate the oil in a steady stream with a fork or a small whisk. Season plainly with pepper. Anchovies are pretty salty as is, so you may not need any extra salt for this sauce/vinaigrette. It goes great with fish, white meats and obviously, salad leaves.


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Home-Cured Kingfish 'Bacon'

Most of us know pancetta, the famous Italian version of bacon, which is essentially pork belly that has been salted and spiced, and left to dry for around 3 months. But which of us would have thought of making pancetta with fish?

Well, thanks to the the ingenuity of Melbourne chef, Matt McConnell, the brains behind Bar Lourinha, I've had the joy of making this myself. The recipe for this dish appeared in the September 2006 issue of the Australian Gourmet Traveller, and I've been wanting to make it for the longest time, except that I couldn't find any decent kingfish around Brisbane. Or maybe I just wasn't looking in the right places.

Anyway, John West, the household name known best for tinned salmon, has recently released a range of packaged fresh seafood for Coles supermarket shelves. Within the range I found yellowtail kingfish, one of those wonderful foods that I've been hunting down for ages. In a snap, I bought a pack, and raced straight home to finally make this dish that I've been dreaming about for months.



Kingfish Pancetta

400 gm piece of yellowtail kingfish, skinned and boned

'Pancetta' spice mix:
165 gm sea salt
3/4 tsp sweet paprika
1/4 tsp each of ground allspice, ground cloves and ground cinnamon
1 tsp finely chopped thyme
1 tsp ground black pepper
1 tsp sugar

Mix all ingredients for spice mix in a large bowl. Roll fish in spice mix and wrap in plastic wrap. Refrigerate for 4 hours, then unwrap and pat dry with absorbent paper. Wrap fish in muslin cloth (you can use kitchen towels or paper towels) and continue to refrigerate overnight or for up to 4 days. The flavour will develop and intensify over time.

Before I sliced my fish, I rinsed it with water to remove the excess salt. This was not specified in the original recipe, but I found it too salty initially when I didn't rinse it first. Using a sharp knife, slice kingfish very thinly on an angle. Arrange slices on a plate and drizzle with extra virgin olive oil and lemon juice. Scatter with any kinds of herbs or greens as you wish. Here, I have used thyme and sliced red onion, which works very well with the saltiness of the fish.

If you can't get you hands on kingfish, I reckon salmon would be a decent alternative. Just make sure its really fresh, and not looking like those sad one that seem to have been stepped on (quite a common scene at supermarket seafood counters).



This dish makes entertaining a breeze- just slice up the fish in advance, lay it on a large platter, and scatter over the greens. When your guests arrive, simply drizzle over the olive oil and fresh lemon juice. Crack some pepper over the top and pass around with toothpicks. Everyone will be grinning, I guarantee you that!

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Pasta with rocket pesto and ricotta fritta

A pesto is a fabulous sauce to have on hand at any time. It can be tossed through pasta, potatoes, salads, mixed into a cream sauce for meat and seafood, or literally drizzled over anything at all. Making pesto is so simple, and the ingredients required are few. Just be sure to follow the general guidelines below. Once you have tasted your own fresh pesto, you'd never go back to buying it off the shelves.

PESTO 101

- Use a good handful of greens per batch of pesto. Basil, rocket, coriander and parsley are all widely used to make pesto, basil being the most traditional.

- Use a handful of freshly grated parmesan-type cheese (parmigianno reggiano, pecorino, grana padano, romano, etc). Never be tempted to use those longlife shelf versions, they just don't match up. Someone once compared their aroma to baby vommit.. I second that.

- Use half a clove of raw garlic (not half an entire head!). Just a little raw garlic goes a pretty long way.

- Throw in a couple of teaspoons of toasted pinenuts, macadamia nuts, almonds or hazlenuts. Pinenuts are the most commonly used. Add more if you prefer a chunkier pesto.

- Add one cup of good extra virgin olive oil. Make sure it is extra virgin, because you want that fruity flavour. Add more later, if necessary, to thin down the pesto.

- Whiz everything together in a blender, or you can opt for the more traditional method, via mortar and pestle. Do not overblend as the excess heat generated by the blades can 'kill' the wonderful aromas of the herbs. Season liberally with salt and black pepper.

-I like to add a little lemon juice to balance the oiliness of pesto. This citric acidity also adds a touch of 'zinginess'.

For dinner, I made up a batch of rocket pesto and tossed it through some hot pasta. Then I topped it off with some ricotta fritters that I picked up from Jamie Oliver's book, Jamie's Italy. For this recipe you need to use fresh, crumbly ricotta from the counter section of the supermart, or a deli. Creamy ricotta from plastic tubs will not work here.

Jamie Oliver's Ricotta Fritti

455 gm crumbly ricotta cheese
2 tbsp finely grated parmesan cheese
1.5 tbsp flour
1 large egg
salt and pepper

Mix ingredients in a bowl. Season well. Cook spoonfuls of batter in a hot, oiled pan on both sides till crispy, but moist on the inside. Eat immediately.

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Spatchcock Braised in Red Wine

Just a little something I cooked up for dinner. I used American smoked bacon in this dish, which was purchased from Ingredients, a wonderful little deli in the Kenmore Village Shopping Centre (which also sells my favourite Spanish Jamon Iberico!). The spatchcock was from Clancy James, one of my favourite meat retailers, in Taringa.

When cooking with red wine, be sure to use a wine that you would deem as good enough to drink. Most people open a bottle of wine, find that's not quite nice to drink, then use it to cook with instead. Either that, or they think that spending the extra few dollars on a good wine for cooking is a waste of money. Truth be told, I too have been guilty of these more than once in the past.

However, costs aside, cooking does indeed condense the flavours of wines, and if you use wines that have unpleasant flavours (to you), you'll concentrate the 'bad' taste to end up with a pretty nasty final dish. So give it a try, don't scrimp on those extra few bucks when it comes to choosing wines for cooking.

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