Gremolata Roast Lamb Leg

Very zingy, fresh, and a little bit greek, this is a fantastic easy mid week meal; these photos were taken aboard the yacht on a Friday night after heading to the marina after work. It’s beautiful for leftover lunches too.

Quite often, if it is just the two of us, I cut the lamb in half and freeze half of it and make a great little meal for two, scaling down the other ingredients.

  • The navigation table on Apes is often used for food prep…..
  • The stuffing on the lamb prior to trussing.

INGREDIENTS:

  • A deboned/butterfly leg of lamb
  • 1 cup of chopped parsley leaves
  • 4 cloves of garlic (or to taste – I would use 8)
  • Finely grated rind of two oranges (or lemons to taste)
  • 300g of baby spinach
  • Olive oil
  • Salt and pepper to taste

METHOD:

Chop the garlic and parsley leaves finely, and add to the citrus rind. Swiftly wilt the spinach in a frypan. Open out the lamb and season to taste (I like lots of black pepper). Lay the spinach and then 2/3rds of the gremolata in the cavity, and then truss up the lamb. Splash some olive oil on the lamb, and season again to taste.

Heat up a frypan to very hot, and quickly seal the outside of the lamb. Put it straight into the oven at 180 degrees for about 30 minutes or to taste – I like my lamb quite rare.

Allow to rest in foil for ten minutes before carving. You will have a lovely colourful spiral, and delicious, tender meat.

On this occasion, I served it with roast veggies with lemon which I pre-roasted in my Tupperware roasting dish, and then put the lamb on top.

Lamb shank risotto. Not really.

We had a couple of lamb shanks that needed cooking, and the intention was to make a lamb ragout to have with parpadelle. But had to alter that plan on the fly…

This works just as well for any more robust/tougher cut of meat, like beef shin, or chuck steak. My plan was to have it with pasta, but we ended up planning to head out to sea sooner than anticipated, and so we didn’t want to be boiling water in rolly seas, and needed this to be edible cold or hot. It certainly is NOT a real risotto, but it is reminiscent of one. Just not creamy – it’s more like a stew mixed in with rice so that there wasn’t too much liquid.

Ingredients

  • 2 Lamb shanks
  • oil
  • 2 carrots, diced
  • 1 onion, diced
  • 2 stalks celery, diced
  • Oregano, thyme or any other flavourful herb
  • 1 Tbs tomato paste
  • 125ml white wine
  • 500ml stock – chicken or vege
  • 1 cup brown rice

Method

This was kind of made up on the fly, and I don’t have exact details, but the principles are here.

Cook shanks in a little oil until they’re well browned.

  • Lamb shanks on the way to being browned
  • Salute the onion, celery, garlic and carrot
  • Add some tomato paste
  • cooke the rice in the liquid from the cooking
  • You’ll need an ovenproof dish
  • Trevor having a bowl of this lamb risotto travelling south, along the East Coast of Australia
    Enjoy the dish hot or cold. Thankfully the seas were calm enough to enable us to heat it up.

Set aside, reduce heat and then saute the carrots, onion and celery until softened. Add garlic too if you want. Looking at these photos, that’s what I did too!

Once softened, mix in the tomato paste, white wine and herbs. Cook the wine off. I don’t bother salting this dish as instant stock is pretty salty already, but do add some pepper at this time.

If you are using an ovenproof dish, return the shanks and add the stock and some additional water if needed to cover the meat. If you need to, transfer everything to an ovenproof dish and then put in the oven at 150 degrees for about 3 hours. This works well on the boat, as our oven is not really that hot to start with!

When the meat is falling off the shanks, remove the bones, and cut the meat roughly. Add it back to the pan with the rice. Add more stock or water if needed to have enough for the rice to soak up/cook in. about two cups of liquid to a cup of brown rice. This is what I think I would do normally, but since it has been some time since I took the photos, I’m a little confused. It looks like I must have strained the veggies and meat, and cooked the rice in the remaining liquid on the stove. Either way it should still work!

Once cooked, this dish is pretty good in the fridge until ready to eat.

Tomato and Prosciutto Tartlets

Quiches or tartlets are a great hand-to-mouth food that is perfect on the rail for an inshore race. You can have them made already, in the fridge, or icebox (or even just a coolbag stashed away somewhere), and have them cold on a hot day, or warm them up for the railmeat to enjoy! These ones are simple, and most people will love them. And they’re easy to make vege-friendly. 

Continue reading “Tomato and Prosciutto Tartlets” →

Fish and Sweet Potato Cakes

fish and sweet potato cakes ingredients

I want to be hundred percent sure about the consistency of the temperature of my fridge (based on battery level!) on the yacht before taking seafood aboard, but based on the size you make the cakes, they can either make fabulous canapés, entrees, or cold as a snack lunch. We recently sailed Toccata to a deserted beach in Moreton Bay, and enjoyed these fishcakes with a lovely bottle of Tassie champagne, but it washes down with a beer on a hot day just as well!

These can be cooked in a frypan or on the BBQ.

INGREDIENTS:

  • 1 onion, finely grated
  • 4cm piece of ginger, grated
  • 150g sweet potato, grated
  • 1 green chilli, chopped finely
  • 100g green beans chopped
  • 2 spring onions chopped
  • 150g rice flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon sugar
  • 200g of firm white fish, such as roughy or queenfish, cut into 5mm dice
  • Zest of two limes
  • Oil for shallow frying

METHOD:

With a food processor with the grater blade, add the onion and ginger, then set aside. Then grate the sweet potato, and put in a separate bowl. Of course you can use a grater instead.

In a small frying pan over medium heat, add 2 tablespoons of oil. Add the onion and ginger, then the garlic and chilli and cook till soft but not brown, then set aside to cool.

In a bowl combine the rice flour, salt, sugar and 130ml of water, and mix thoroughly. Add the cooled onion mixture and stir in, then add fish, sweet potato, green beans, spring onion and lime zest.

Heat the BBQ or frypan to hot and well-oiled, and add spoonfuls of the mixture at the size that you would like. Cook till well browned on both sides, turning once.

Serve with sweet chilli sauce or chilli jam. Or something like this….

Pound two birds eye chilli, a clove of garlic and a tablespoon of sugar until it is a thick paste. Add juice of two limes and 30ml of fish sauce. You can then add between 30 and 100 ml of water, to tone it down to your taste!

An Arabic Feast – Part 1: Dips

The first part of this mini-series by our metho-correspondent, Stephen.

Sitting in the marina at Mooloolaba on a 27 foot Spacesailer in summer wondering what to do for a family of four coming for dinner – two adults, two teenagers (one a vegetarian) – and thinking about  the challenge of how to satisfy all tastes without resorting to the good ol’ barbecue. Just me and Maxie, a two burner kero stove, and Oskar, the food processor. Continue reading “An Arabic Feast – Part 1: Dips” →

Chijimi, or Buchimgae

When I lived in Japan I loved this dish on the few times I went to Korea Town in Tsuruhashi, Osaka. And when I saw garlic chives at the market, I thought immediately that this would be great on the boat.

I know that in Japan they were called Chijimi, which translates into Korean as buchimgae, known in the western world as Korean Pancakes. Jeon is a type of buchimgae, and buchu means garlic chives; so buchujeon is a garlic chive Korean pancake.

  • Garlic chives
  • The batter should be solidly packed with the chives
  • Spread it as thin as you can
  • Chewy, crispy pancakes

They are so simple to make and you can enjoy these pancakes at happy hour with a really cold beer, or serve them up for a breakfast after a big night with friends. . And you can use up whatever left overs are around. Seafood, meat and veges all work in this dish, but plain is still delicious.

I did search through a few korean pancake recipes on various blogs and websites, and decided that the one on JinJoo’s site looked like it would reproduce the pancake I remember in Japan. Check out her blog for some great Korean recipes.

Ingredients

  • 200g Garlic chives, chopped into inch-long pieces
  • 1 1/2 Cups flour
  • 1 Cup water
  • 1 egg
  • 1/2 tsp sea salt
  • Vegetable oil

Method

Simple. Just whisk together the egg, flour, salt and water until smooth. The batter should be slightly thinner than pouring cream consistency. You might need to add more water to get there. Jinjoo also adds a little sugar as well, but I don’t think it needs it.

Add the batter to the chives. The mix should be really heavy with chives – about twice as many chives to the amount of batter. If you have batter left over, chop up more chives – no matter how many pancakes you make, they will be eaten! This is your chance to add more ingredients. Shredded carrot, zucchini, squid, thinly sliced beef, etc.

Heat up the oil in the fying pan and ladle in a scoop of the mix. Spread it thinly, and cook until it is a little crispy. Flip it and do the same. The second side won’t take as long.

Serve it up while hot, with a soy and vinegar dipping sauce. Jinjoo has one on her site, but there are plenty of others around. A starting point is soy sauce and vinegar at 2:1 ratio. Then add to your hearts delight. ground sesame, fresh chilli, spring onion, chilli oil, ginger, etc. Rice wine vinegar works best in my opinion.

We have some plans to tart this up and make it more of a meal, so stay tuned for that in the future.

Gadgets for the galley, or a very small kitchen!

I have put a lot of effort in keeping junk (and weight) out of our yacht, and so we have spent a lot of time making sure that all of our galley gear is highly functional, and preferably multi-purpose, as well as space saving. Like most things we write about, there isn’t a lot of difference between efficiency on board, or efficiency in the small kitchen in the city unit we have recently moved into, after letting out our large waterfront home! Here are a few things I cannot live without……

Biome Lunch Box

These lunchboxes change the way I eat at work, and are perfect for inshore racing lunches, or semi-prepared Friday night meals on the yacht after a busy commute to get to the marina.

Consisting of three sections, one large enough for two sandwiches, they also come with a small and medium size container. They are so flexible. In the simplest form, you can put a sandwich in one side, and leave the items that make them soggy (such as tomatoes) in the smaller section, for adding at the last minute. But I usually use this section for a salad, and put the dressing into one of the smaller containers for the last minute add. Then in the smaller sections, add some olives or strawberries as a snack.

On a Thursday night, I can pre-marinate some meat, and put the dressing or marinade in the smaller containers, or herbs in the smaller section.

The greatest change that it has made for us, is that I am always prepared the night before. I spend a lot of my work time in the car, and Lucas is in concerts or on-air. But when our workday begins, it is just a matter of taking our meals out of the fridge and into a bag, and off we go. Mine is red (Apriori) and Lucas is green (Toccata)!

Stacking bowls, colander and measuring cups

Joseph Joseph has this off the shelf solution which gives you everything you need, but it all stacks in one place. The purple and orange spoons start from a teaspoon and go up to a cup, then you have a small bowl, a stainless steel mesh sieve, a colander, and a large mixing bowl. And it all stacks into one space. We have had it a year, and it appears to be extremely good quality. The sieve hasn’t rusted, even though it has lived on the yacht for a year!

Aldi collapsible containers

Some of the items that I have outlined are rather expensive, but I consider that all represent value for money. These fabulous containers, sourced from Aldi, represent incredible value, and we use them all the time. They win out as when they are empty, the can be collapsed down and take up little room.

Tupperware bakeware

This is a winner on the yacht with no rusting and light weight; if it slips off the stove and is dropped it will not shatter. It comes in two sizes, and the lid can be used as a shallow baking dish as well. For storing, the lid slots upside down into the base, taking up minimal room.

Joseph Joseph Chopping board

This is one of my favourites. The board itself is on a slight angle, with a ridge around the side. My pet hate when cutting up food with a lot of liquid, such as tomatoes or roast meat (at home, but especially on the yacht) is that the liquid runs everywhere. This neatly contains it so it can be poured down the sink. Turn it over, and it also has a meat grate.

Compact food processor

We have experimented with hand drawn food processors, but have found them difficult to clean and unreliable. We have a small multifunction food processor that fits into a plastic container, which we run off the inverter and swap from apartment to yacht. It gives us a lot more scope for our cooking, and I couldn’t live without it.

Joseph Joseph washing up caddy

These keep everything nice and clean. We have a washing up brush with liquid in attached to the bulkhead, with another caddy with the scourer and hand wash. I have some “Thank you” sanitiser restrained by saddles and shockcord if you are on the run and don’t want to use the galley water.

Sink Colander – again, Joseph Joseph

This flat colander fits directly into the sink, and it is really handy to put in if you are washing up, as it collects all of the food scraps and stops them clogging up your drains!

Soda Stream

I love water, and the Soda Stream has a number of benefits. Besides being cheaper than buying soda water, it means we eliminate single use water bottles. The added benefit on the yacht is that it seems to take away the “Tank water” taste. Don’t understand why. We have one at the house and one in the yacht; unlike many of the fairly extravagant purchases on this post, we bought both of ours second hand for about $30 combined. Jump on Facebook marketplace or Gumtree or equivalent wherever you might live.

Sheathed knives

Knives on boats are really dangerous; I don’t like them to be unsheathed if we are anywhere except the marina. And as you plunge your hand into the drawer and the boat lunges, you don’t want to be cut by a sharp knife! These were purchased very inexpensively via Peters of Kensington.

Paper towel dispenser

We are always looking for ways to use “wasted space” in the yacht. With two saddles, a little bit of shock cord and a shackle we lost the pin for, we now have a use for this wasted bit of space.

And a bit of fun…..

If I can’t drink out of crystal, then these fine, stemless champagne flutes are the next best thing. And they fit into a winch handle pocket – so you are sure not to spill a drop! We don’t allow glass on the yacht in case of breakages, so these are made of a hard plastic, making them very durable.