Tannic Teeth

It’s been a while since my last post, and I really should find another small bar to blog about (which will come in time), but at the moment it’s fun to knock around the kitchen.
In the foray into kitchendom we broke a few things including two reasonably priced bone china mugs and an unreasonably priced Luigi Bormioli Bordeaux glass.

Keeping inline with effing-up or breaking, I thought it would be a good time to showcase the coddled egg.

Cooked in it’s own little ramekin, you can add anything you like, plus egg, add cream (and spring onion) and coddle.

1) Put your desired ingredient/s in a buttered ramekin. (We used a cabbage-carrot-onion mixture festooned with garlic thanks to @misshandmaid)

2) Crack an egg over the mixture

3) Pour cream, top with spring onion

Now, most recipes that I read didn’t say to slightly lift up the mixture.  But if you use a blunt knife  to lift up the gooey mass, it would be beneficial for consistent cooking.

4) Use foil to TIGHTLY cover the lid. If you do not cover the lid, it will take the better part of half an hour. I recommend using egg coddlers (if you have them gathering dust somewhere) because foil doesn’t pressurise the vessel — hence reducing cooking time. Chris suggested to use an elastic band to fasten a more secure closure with foil. Point taken.

5) With a shallow pan/tray on the simmer, place the ramekins in water half way up the side. Don’t do what I did and misread the recipe in an act of gungho-kitchen-prowess and place in the oven. Keep the thing simmering on the stove. In hindsight, the oven may have been more effective . If that was the case, an alternative gungho Master Chef would have placed this an in oven at 180 C for 10 minutes.

6)Next,  watch as the cream is capillarised out of the ramekin via the foil lid and fill your saucepan with milky goodness. This should not happen but for some reason the chef’s ideal and fluid dynamics don’t always see eye-to-eye. Physics 1, Master Chef 0.

7) Pick and prod the egg every 5 minutes if you are impatient, and possibly burn yourself in the process. Check facebook while you’re waiting. Tweet your frustration.

8 ) Viola. In about 30 minutes, and after using a small LNG plant of gas, your coddled eggs are ready. Serve with Caraway sourdough rye that is almost burnt while you are facebooking.

Enjoy this little gem. It’s well worth the effort of scrubbing the burnt egg, and a saucepan full of creamy water.

No seriously. They are a pretty good sunday morning folly outside of Benedict.

Who would ever think that one of the most destructive introduced pests to Australia would fetch $21 per kilo at your butcher? Though I can say that these rabbits are farmed; they’re white (to be honest I prefer the wild rabbit) and pretty much taste like – you guessed it – chicken. And for a whole boned sectioned carcass, that’s about $24 a pop.

Leaner than beef, pork and chicken, rabbit meat is per meter squared, the most ecologically sustainable animal protein. They can be grown in hutches, mature quickly and, er, breed like rabbits. I don’t understand why rabbit meat isn’t:

1) cheaper

2) introduced widely among culinary menus (along with Kangaroo).

3) readily avilable available (thanks wonderfully accurate and anonymous literati for your contribution)

Our hopping friends are our only future if every one of the 6.6 billion hungry mouths are to get adequate protein and not reduce the earth to dust.

So we thought we would roast a rabbit (or two) and enjoy with some WA wine. I’ve kept wine it in the theme of the Rhône Valley. Shiraz (Syrah), Viognier, Marssane, and Roussane.

I could have been daring and picked a few bunnies off the road on the way to the butchers. But with the recent spell of Bikram weather, they’ed be close to jerky au jus than anything else.