Food Resolution

The end of the year is a good time to reflect on the year past and gear up for next year.

2012 was my year to master fish. I wouldn't say I am quite a master but I do have coral trout, scallops, bugs, salmon, snapper and whiting under my belt. I am no longer fearful of the fishys.

This year I received my amazing Kenwood mixer. We experimented with sausages and now have a few sizzlers up our sleeves for summer BBQs. I tried some great desserts in the Sweet Adventures Blog Hop, attended my first pop up restaurant hosted by Kylie, Audra and Mindy of Masterchef fame, learnt and feasted during an amazing trip to Adelaide for Eat Drink Blog 2012 and discovered some new favourite recipes from my wonderful collection of magazines and books on our new food bookshelf! We are now set up for great success in 2013.

Armed with the Kenwood and some great new cool books from Jamie Oliver, Andy Allen and Gordon Ramsay we are heading well equipped into 2013. What will 2013 bring? MasterChef Pros is just around the corner to keep me occupied! Health kick, at least in Jan, more fresh produce to cook with and in winter I am going to augment my soup repertoire with M(i)sch(i)ef soup kitchen with an attempt to post some recipes! So, with that, let's crack open the champers, clink your glasses! Happy New Year and here's to 2013!

Off with a bang(er)!

Mincing the lamb and pork belly

My best birthday present ever this year has been on my wishlist ever since I moved out of home! A Kenwood Mixer! Not just any mixer either, this is one of the top of the range models: the Titanium Major. This wasn't a surprise gift, as my hubbie knew he had to involve me in the decision making of what make, model, features and attachments I was hoping for, but what was a surprise was when we put a bid on an online auction for significantly less that we thought it was worth, and WON! I was ecstatic!

Sausage snake

What to cook to "pop the cherry" of the Major, I wondered. It couldn't be any old cake or pavlova that I could have made using my trusty food processor.... It had to be something that we couldn't do before: Sausages!

I've always liked the thought of choosing our own sausage filling, but having seen the sausage making debacles on MasterChef, I wasn't convinced it would be successful first time! Now, I had a mincer and sausage attachment, there was no excuse to give it a go. I figured, worst case, we'd end up with some meat patties!

They look like the real thing!

We wanted to start off with a recipe before we branched out and experimented, so we tried out Poh's Spicy lamb and pork sausage recipe with lots of herbs and spices accompanying the 2 types of meat, that we minced from scratch. The resulting sausages were juicy and tasty, but just a little overcooked (with so much fresh meat in there, the cooking requirements are obviously different to the supermarket bought ones), so we have since fixed that up in subsequent serves, ready for a sausage sizzling summer ahead!