Cooking: Steak, roast potatoes and roasted chilli cauliflower with gravy

After cooking over 50 steaks in my cooking life, I have yet to master how to tell how cooked they are. Every time I manage to overcook them, this time was no different. But only overcooked them slightly, by overcook I mean medium-well done instead of medium-rare.

However this time I focused mainly on roasting a cauliflower for the first time, sounds pretty odd. And TRYING to perfect roast potatoes.

Roast Potatoes:
Ingredients: potatoes chopped into the shape you want them to be. salt. water. olive oil.
Method: Place potatoes in boiling water and cook for about 10mins (if cut into bite sized pieces) or 15-20 if half/whole. Drain and shake pan like there's no tomorrow to rough up the sides to get super crunchy potatoes. Drizzle with oil and salt(normally hot oil to start the crunchy part forming but I find that too much of a hassle because I'm lazy). Mix well and spread onto a tray lined with FOIL. I find u end up with wet potatoes if you use baking paper, not sure why. Bake (180ish) until crunchy looking?/golden, 30 minutes or so?

Roasted Cauliflower
Ingredients: Head of cauliflower broken into florets with larger ones cut in half, coat with some oil. Place them onto a tray lined with FOIL (for the same reason as potatoes). Season with salt and chilli and roast for about 30 mins. DEAD SIMPLE. Roasting cauliflower seems be sweeter than boiling them.

Gravy:
Ingredients: Beef stock. Sliced mushrooms. Butter. tablespoon or two of flour
Method: Melt the butter in a saucepan, add flour and stir and cook for a few minutes. Add stock little by little, whisking well after each addition. Put in mushrooms and also any juice that has come out of the resting steak, this will give the gravy it's darker colour. Taste. Add black pepper if you want a black pepper gravy.

Steak is a dish I think everyone should master, because steak is yummmmmmyyyyyy as.

Cooking:Cauliflower Soup. Roast Lamb, Tandoori Lamb Cutlets, Grilled Lamb Cutlets, Scalloped Potatoes and Mint Sauce.

All for dinner =) So full afterwards.
Tried to make a 3 course dinner all by myself yesterday. Things didn't exactly go to plan and it ended up taking me 2 and a half hours to plate dinner up and I decided to scap dessert.

Cauliflower Soup: Recipe off taste.com.au except I forgot to add the cream at the end.
Roast Lamb: Simple roast lamb with just rosemary and no garlic (cos I couldn't be bothered)
Scalloped potatoes: Recipe also off taste.com.au. Used the mandolin slicer to slice potatoes, way way way faster.
Grilled Lamb Cutlets: Simple salt, pepper, rosemary and oil. Then grilled on the griddle pan.
Tandoori Lamb Cutlets: Brush tandoori paste onto lamb, then grill. Use sparingly, maybe mix with a tiny bit of yoghurt as the paste by itself is quite salty.

Looks pretty bad yeah? Tasted better than it looked. The chilli really packed a punch.

Yummy lamb cutlets.

Lesson learnt from today. Too many dishes for my skill level. Gotta start off simple and master doing them all quickly before combining. 

Cooking: Roast Pork and Potatoes

Another thing to cross of the list of things to make these holidays. A recipe from Jamie Oliver's book. Roast rosemary potatoes. As for the roast pork, it was on special at safeway. I'm not sure y but the skin was almost impossible to score, used a serrated knife, a ceramic knife and a cleaver  However I did manage to score my thumb =.=" knives are sharp.

So sad, the crackling didn't work and the meat was a bit dry. Also I didn't make a sauce. I think I might avoid making roast pork for a while.

Potatoes weren't too bad. Just not golden and crispy enough. However I didn't have time to leave them in for any longer because I had tutoring soon. Herbs were from the garden.

Cooking-Schnitzel, Caesar Salad, Potato and Corn mash

Friday nights means NO RICE night :) For dinner I made Veal Schnitzel with Caesar Salad and Potato Corn Mash.
Took 2 hours....but there was so much to do.
Veal Schnitzel: Needed to crumb and fry. Such a pain in the ass. (only can fry 2 at a time)
Caesar Salad: Wash lettuce, make dressing, grill bacon, make croutons, poach eggs.
Potato Corn Mash: Peel + chop potatoes, boil them, cook off onions and corn, mash potatoes, mix in onion and corn.
Made to serve 6 people, as my two younger cousins come over for dinner every Friday night. (poaching 6 eggs in a row it a absolute pain cos you have to do them one by one =.=") is there a way to poach more than one egg in one pot?

 

Dinner : )

It actually wasn't that good. Need to improve on a lot of things.

My little cousin was shocked to find out that mayo is made of raw egg yolk and oil. Well proper mayo anyways.

Cooking-Chips/Wedges + instant noodles

Yesterday I came home from school and decided to make potato chips. But since I didn't have 40 mins to bake them, I decided to microwave the cut up potatoes to speed things up. However thanks to the storm, the power went out whilst I was microwaving =.=" So I made an instant noodles instead, my favourite flavour. Tonkotsu :) Or pork bone soup flavour.
SOOOO YUMMY :)
So after like 30 mins, the power came back on and I decided to finish making my chips/wedges. Finished microwaving them, then seasoned them with herbs and random spices, then chucked them into the mini oven (which is really really good for just baking small batches of things). Unfortunately managed to burn myself on the oven whilst flipping the chips (did I mention I'm extremely clumsy in general?) Whipped up some chilli mayo to dip them into and had my 2nd afternoon tea XD

 

Verdict? Alright, not crunchy enough unfortunately. Also I should have peeled the potato, the skin was chewy and gave a weird texture.

Yeah, instant noodles and chips for afternoon tea : ) 

(so gonna get fat now =.=")