Lunch On The Terrace

Well, my life has got so boring now that I’m in employment, and I’m aware that I haven’t blogged for a week, so I thought I’d share with you the menu for our lunch today, when we invited one of Nicola’s work friends, who’s also been a stalwart of our quiz team successes:

Sesame-crusted seared tuna

With wasabi mash and chimichurri sauce.

Moussaka

With Greek salad

Pear tarte tatin

With cinnamon ice cream.

I was watching Masterchef UK the other day, and the bit where they send the contestants off to work in a professional kitchen (it was Asia De Cuba) involved one of the cooks making seared tuna, with the above accompaniments. I decided to improve on this by crusting the tuna in sesame seeds rather than just salt & pepper, and cooking it in sesame oil. I’m told (by my highly biased audience) that it worked.

Chimichurri sauce is basically a South American version of salsa verde. With added chillis. I may “improve” this again next time by using fresh green chillis rather than dried red ones.

Moussaka – well, you don’t need a receipt for this, but it does get to use up one of our surfeit of cinnamon quills.

Talking of which, I made cinnamon ice cream to accompany the tarte tatin. I looked up various recipes on the interwebs, and tried to synthesise them into something that would work for me. Whilst I can hardly claim this as original, I adapted the quantities and such, so it’s not a direct copy of anyone else’s as far as I can see; I can also tell you that it works:

450 ml cream*

150 ml half-fat, semi-skimmed, “slim”, milk – not the grey stuff

125g caster sugar

6 egg yolks**

2 cinnamon quills

Put the cream, milk and cinnamon in a saucepan and bring to the boil, then leave it to cool for 30 minutes to infuse. Whisk the egg yolks and sugar together in a bowl until pale yellow. Strain a little bit of the cream into the egg mixture, then reheat the rest of the cream to boiling point, let it cool for a couple of minutes, and strain the rest in gradually, mixing it in all the time to stop the eggs scrambling. Pour the mix back into the saucepan and heat gently until it’s thick and coats the back of a spoon, but don’t let it boil.

Chill overnight (I do this by pouring a stiff G&T and watching the telly, but each to their own ;-))

Then churn the custard in your ice cream machine, until…er…you’ve made ice cream. Simples! ;-)

So there you are. A blog about our life in New Zealand that also includes recipes…what’s not to like?!

* NZers don’t seem to have the concept of single and double cream, but it looks like single to me.

** Everyone says “What do you do with the whites?” You can make a pav if you like, but frankly I don’t, really. I just flush them down the sink. They are the least economically useful part of the egg (apart from the shell) and I don’t mind chucking them out.