My Kitchen Rules: A Waste of Time!

 Last night, Monday, we were watching My Kitchen Rules and after a long ad break there was a very short piece of MKR and then back we went to ads. Rather amazed at both the length of the ad breaks and of the short piece of show we began to time the ads and the show itself. We came up in 45 minutes with the startling, though not surprising, total of 28 minutes of show to 17 minutes of advertisements.

Here is a breakdown of the times:

            MKR               5 mins 47 secs

            Ads                 4 mins 27 secs (11 ads)

            MKR               10 mins

            Ads                 4 mins 25 secs (13 ads)

            MKR               6 mins 30 secs

            Ads                 3 mins 57 secs (10 ads)

            MKR               6 mins

            Ads                 4 mins 7 secs (12 ads)

           

This is really not acceptable for either viewers or the advertisers. It’s hardly worthwhile wasting your time sitting through this.

And to compound things the show has so much repetition in it that you can cut more time out of it still because after every ad break you have to put up with a repeat of what happened before in case you were stupid enough to have forgotten it.

The show time now seems also to have been lengthened (no doubt to accommodate more advertisements). So it would seem to watch the show you now have to sit for longer and endure more ads. I can cope with the normal length of advertisement time but not what we now are presented with.

The show is not worth watching under these conditions. If you must watch it then there is no alternative but to record it and then watch it skipping through the advertisements. But don’t stop there. Skip through the beginning until the titles are over because before them you are given snippets of the show to follow that not only spoil the show itself but are falsely edited to give you the wrong impression. So skip all of this, skip all of the ads and also skip the start of the following sections of MKR so you don’t have to suffer endless repeats of information.

If you really want to watch the show on the night it is shown then record it and start to watch your recording when it is about half way through. That way you will find that you catch up at about the same time as the show ends. You don’t go crazy watching the same ads over and over; you don’t watch the show repetitions and you save yourself such a lot of time.

I feel sorry for the advertisers but they are getting bad deals from the television channel anyway. They are no doubt being crushed in with heaps more ads and charged at exorbitant rates to boot for this. And people are tuning out because of the length of time the breaks go on, or recording to watch later and skip the ads. 

Broad Bean Burgers

From Plenty, Yotam Ottolenghi, Ebury Press, 2010.

I didn’t expect to find a recipe for burgers in Plenty but there it was and as it came from Yotam Ottolenghi I guessed that it would be a good one—and I’m a fan of burgers.

There was a fair amount of separate little cooking jobs before the burgers could be put together.

Firstly the broad beans had to blanched, cooled and carefully removed of their skins—a reasonably long process but rather pleasing to do if you aren’t in a hurry.

Then some spice seeds (cumin, coriander and fennel) were dry roasted and ground in a mortar and pestle.

Spinach was wilted in a pan with some olive oil. It was then squeezed as dry as possible and chopped.

Potatoes were boiled until tender. They were drained and the broad beans were added to them with the ground seeds, some chopped green chilli, chopped garlic, turmeric, some olive oil and seasoning. This was mashed with a potato masher. It was only mashed until it was generally broken up. The spinach was added, some chopped coriander and breadcrumbs. The final ingredient was an egg. It was then all mixed together.

The mixture was formed into patties and placed in the refrigerator for half an hour. 

The burgers were then fried.

I’m sure these were not intended to be lost in a bread roll. They were wonderfully flavoured and this flavour mix would be somewhat lost placed in bread. I decided to serve it on a plate with the standard three vegies. A bit dull I suppose but I wanted to just enjoy the burgers without any fuss surrounding them.

These are definitely ones I would go back to. I guess they would rate tops on my burger list.

Taste: ✔✔✔✔✔ 

Ease of cooking: ✔✔✔

Red Cabbage Slaw

From Veggie Burgers Every Which Way, Lukas Volger, Wakefield Press, 2010.

I have never been one for cabbage slaw. I enjoy cabbage, but I need it cooked. Occasionally you might gain a cabbage slaw with a pub meal and, while they go down all right, they are not my favourite. So I can’t really understand what prompted me to make this red cabbage slaw. I guess it’s some kind of puzzle in the back of my mind as to why I don’t like it and yet other people do so I keep going back to check on it. I thought possibly red cabbage would be different from the green. I still don’t like it.

The cabbage was sliced very thinly. It was then mixed with rice vinegar and salt and left to stand for a while. The recipe says until it begins to wilt. My didn’t wilt. You then had to drain off any liquid from the bottom of the bowl. There wasn’t any liquid in my bowl.

Finally you added yoghurt, dill and pepper. It was ready.

It looked a pleasant colour on the plate. I didn’t enjoy it.

Taste: ✔ 

Ease of cooking: ✔✔✔✔

Summer Moussaka

From Quiet Food, The Buddhist Institute of South Africa, Double Storey Books, 2006.

I’m not really sure why this has been called a summer moussaka. There doesn’t seem to be anything in the recipe that makes it more one season than another. But since it is supposed to be summer at the moment, despite the weather which definitely isn’t, I decided to give it a go.

It’s one of those recipes where you cook lots of sections one after the other and then combine them for the final dish. This would suit the premise of the book that suggests moving from fast food to slow food and then on to quiet food. By ‘quiet food’ I suspect that the cook, by taking time and enjoying the cooking process, reaches a state of relaxed being where they can sit back and eat in a calm manner.

Eggplants (or brinjals as the recipe calls them) are sliced and fried.

A white sauce is made and some grated cheese added. I used a mixture of cheddar and Parmesan.

 Mushrooms are fried.

Onions are fried and garlic added in the last few minutes. Then canned tomatoes are added with tomato paste, marjoram, ground allspice, dried basil and seasonings. The fried mushrooms are now added to this mix and it is cooked at a simmer level.

It is then time to put all the sections together. First in a casserole goes a layer of eggplant, then the tomato mix, then the cheese sauce. The layers are then repeated. Over the top of this to finish it off is sprinkled a mixture of breadcrumbs and Parmesan cheese.

This is all baked for a good 30 to 40 minutes. A good time for relaxing.

The recipe calls for it to be served with noodles. I couldn’t go with that idea. It also suggested it be served with crusty bread and a salad. I wasn’t sure about that either. What it really needed was a crisp green salad but I, choosing poorly, had a warm lentil and rice salad with it.  It all ended up a lot of muddy brown items on a plate. They tasted all right though. And was I calm? Relatively, I guess.

Taste: ✔✔✔ 

Ease of cooking: ✔✔✔

Warm Lentil and Rice Salad

From Gourmet Vegetarian, Jane Price, Murdoch Books, 2007.

I am not overly excited about heavy salads, ones made with pasta or rice. These somehow don’t really feel like salads. For me, a salad is something quite light that accompanies heavier meals. A salad that is filling and heavier does not truly do the complementary job that I feel is its role. That said, sometimes a rice salad can be just right as an accompaniment for some meals.

I have not cooked over much from Gourmet Vegetarian but the lentil and rice salad looked—at least from the photograph—as if it might be just right for what I wanted. And as it was a warm salad it would just be like serving rice with a meal.

Both the rice and the lentils had to be cooked separately. While this was happening some red onion and garlic were slowly fried in olive oil and butter. The rice was ready sometime before the lentils so the onions had a little longer time to cook which enabled them to be wonderfully soft and sweet.

Into the onion and garlic went ground coriander, cumin, paprika and cinnamon to cook for a few minutes.

The lentils were ready by now so they were mixed with the rice, and the onion and spice mix was stirred in. Seasonings were added, together with chopped spring onions.

The salad was served warm without a dressing.

Lentils and rice always go together really well and with the added onions and spices this was quite flavoursome. For my taste I think I would have preferred that there was a vinegary or lemony dressing to go with this to add a little more bite.

Taste: ✔✔✔ 

Ease of cooking: ✔✔✔

Zucchini Flower Fritters

From Italian Food Safari, Maeve O’Meara with Guy Grossi, Hardie Grant Books, 2010.

Walking through the local markets I spotted zucchini flowers for sale on one of the stalls. I knew I had a recipe for them and had wanted to try them so I was able to please the stall holder by purchasing some.

The recipe in the book was supplied by Lina Siciliano and it is basically a very easy dish to prepare. Three flours (plain, SR and cornflour) were mixed together and turned into a paste with water. This was seasoned and chopped parsley was added.

It was then the turn of the zucchini flowers. They were washed, sliced and added to the mixture. Tablespoons of this were then fried. All very simple to prepare.

Possibly I had not done very well with the cooking for these turned out to be rather ordinary. The flavour of the flowers was possibly very subtle for I missed it. I think next time I see zucchini flowers I might try to use a stuffed flower recipe and see if this changes my mind about them.

Taste: ✔✔✔ 

Ease of cooking: ✔✔✔✔

Minted Carrots with Goat’s Cheese

From Moroccan, The Australian Women’s Weekly, ACP Books, 2011.

I frequently commit the sin of putting two different cuisine dishes together. While some chefs seem to be dismayed whenever cuisines are not kept accurate to their source and should not be tampered with, I, as a home cook, am quite happy to mix and match whenever it pleases me.

I needed an accompaniment to go with an Italian recipe for zucchini flower fritters and, without any feeling of guilt, went looking in a book of Moroccan recipes. The recipe for minted carrots with goat’s cheese seemed as though it would suit and it was relatively easy to put together.

A bunch of Dutch carrots was simply oiled and seasoned then put on a grill for about 5 minutes. While they were cooking some cumin seeds were dry fried until fragrant.

It was then simply a matter of putting together the carrots and the cumin seeds with mint leaves and crumbled goat’s cheese.

An easy accompaniment to prepare and quite flavoursome. I did feel that the carrots were still a little on the raw side and in future if I prepare carrots this way I will give them a brief dunk in some boiling water to soften them up just a fraction. Other than that a good dish to go with.

Taste: ✔✔✔ 

Ease of cooking: ✔✔✔✔