Peter's recipe: Beef fillet

Beef fillet on an eggplant round with a peppered beef reduction sauce

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For the fifth course I chose fillet of beef.  A round of fried eggplant is a good foil for tender beef but the real effort goes into the reduction which can be made over a number of days leading up to the occasion.  As a general rule I make a stock of roasted beef bones, mirepoix vegetables [carrot, celery and onion], fennel heads, star anise, juniper berries, dry porcini mushrooms, peppercorns, parsley stalks, bay leaves, a chilli pepper and, after a while, a measure of red wine [say a bottle or two, remembering that life’s too short to use lousy wine].  For the ten people for this dinner party, I was looking to produce about 300ml of reduced sauce.                  BACK

Houghton’s Jack Mann is from the Western Australian wine regions, an area famous for big red cabernet blends.  I could easily have chosen a wine made by one of our legion of great female wine makers, Vanya Cullen’s Diane Madeline, but those in my cellar are too young right now.


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Peter's recipe: Grilled Duck Breast

Grilled duck breast with mushroom risotto and snow peas        BACK

Like many wine enthusiasts, I am doomed to seek out the best Pinot Noir I can afford.  All my reading suggests a matching of Pinot Noir with either duck or mushrooms. The fourth course chooses both.  For the duck, I cross cut the fat side so that the fat is rendered in a hot pan and flip for a brief period to keep the duck rare.  The risotto recipe is:

Dried Porcini Mushroom Risotto 

30g  dried porcini mushrooms

4 cups vegetable or mushroom broth

2 Tbsp finely chopped onion

60g butter

3 Tbsp olive oil

300g  Arborio rice

30g freshly grated Parmesan Cheese

Freshly grated black pepper and salt 

Soak the mushrooms in two cups of warm water for 30 minutes.  Strain them through a sieve and keep the juice.  If the mushrooms are gritty you may have to strain the juice through kitchen paper. 

Bring the broth to a high simmer and cook the onion in the olive oil and half the butter until just pale gold.  Add the rice.  Stir until well coated with oil and cook gently for 4 minutes. 

Start to add the broth a ladle or two at a time.  About half way through the broth add the mushrooms.  Continue to add the broth (and more if needed until the rice is ‘al dente’ and liquid absorbed. 

Take the risotto off the heat and stir in the grated cheese and the rest of the butter.  Add seasoning to taste.  Serve at once from a hot serving dish and have extra grated cheese available on the side.                   BACK

My one regret is that we can’t get fresh porcini mushrooms in Australia.  An all too short holiday in Tuscany last October allowed me to indulge; but I digress, the wine chosen is from the Yarra Valley to the east of Melbourne.  Our Pinot Noir is getting better every year but possibly not as quickly as those produced by the crowd across the swamp in New Zealand.  I have several bottles from Tasmania in the cellar and I expect good things when they’re ready to crack in a year or two.                    BACK

Peter's recipe: Braised belly of pork

Braised belly of pork:

Braised Pork with Egg and Coconut Juice (Thit Heo Kho)

Nhut Hunyh & Jeremy McNamara – RQ Thai & Vietnamese Cuisine, 294 Crown St,

INGREDIENTS                              BACK

1 kg pork belly (not too fatty), cut into 5 cm cubes
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
4 shallots (small brown onion bulbs), finely chopped
3 tbsp fish sauce
3 tbsp light soy sauce
1½ tbsp dark soy sauce
4 star anise
½ tsp cracked black pepper
2 tbsp palm sugar or dark brown sugar
2 whole green shallots
1 tbsp vegetable oil
½ white onion, finely diced
3 cups (1 bag) young coconut juice (not milk or cream!)
1½ cups water
8 hard boiled, free range eggs, peeled
Jasmine rice and coriander, to serve

DIRECTIONS

1. Combine pork belly, garlic, shallot, fish sauce, soy sauces, pepper, star anise and palm sugar. Use the whole shallot including roots. Lay on a chopping board and smash with the flat side of the knife then chop finely. Add to marinade. Marinate pork for at least 3 hours or overnight.
2. Heat vegetable oil in heavy based pan and brown onion. Remove pork from marinade and add to the pan and seal over high heat. Add coconut juice, marinade and water.
3. Bring pan to the boil and skim surface. Simmer for 1 hour on low heat (skimming occasionally) and then add eggs. Simmer for a further hour. Serve with steamed Jasmine rice and garnished with coriander.

And vegetable pancakes [OK so they’re pikelets not pancakes]:

Vegetable Pikelets

  1 small zucchini grated
1 carrot grated (or equivalent amount of pumpkin)
1 tablespoon orange juice
1/2 cup self raising flour
1/2 cup wholemeal self raising flour
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 egg
3/4 cup milk
1/2 teaspoon margarine

Cook zucchini and carrot with orange juice in pan or microwave until tender.
Put flours in a bowl and stir in sugar, egg and milk.
Mix in cooked vegetables.
Heat frypan and lightly grease with margarine.
Drop tablespoons of mixture into pan.
When bubbles appear turn and brown the other side

Seemed like a great combination at the time.  By cooking the pork belly ahead of time and allowing the pork and some of the juices to sit, covered, in an oven set to keep warm at 70^oC for a number of hours, I produced a dish which was exquisitely tender and rich.  The pikelets could also be made up early and kept warm between layers of kitchen paper.  The chosen wine is one of the emerging popular varietals in Australia.  I always remember my first tour of Spain in the late 1960s when I felt at home among the browns and olive colours of the countryside after over a year in verdant England.  These climate and rainfall similarities have attracted Australian winegrowers to experiment with grapes such as Tempranillo, Graciano and Albarino [though we found out that a lot of what we thought was Albarino is Savignan].  Tempranillo is very popular and an excellent food wine.  My favourites are from a wide range of areas, though higher country seems to produce the better wines, such as a local winery near the Canberra airport.                    BACK

Peter's recipe: Oven roasted salmon

Oven roasted salmon is a favourite at our house.                    BACK


Skin the fish and cook it on an oven tray brushed with butter or macadamia nut oil, depending on the tenor of your conversations with your doctor about cholesterol; brush the fish as well and season it with lemon pepper and a little garlic salt. 

Bake for no more than 20 minutes in a 100^oC oven.  


Kumara skordalia was a construct replacing the traditional potato or bread with sweet potato for this dish.  The level of garlic and vinegar had to be reduced so as not to fight with the delicate fish flavour and the accompanying white wine.                          BACK


As a Riesling fan, I prefer wines from South Australia’s Clare or Eden Valleys but our local Rieslings from the Canberra wine region and those from Tasmania are also very good.          BACK