Curried Sausages by W.R. Brohke.

There comes a time in every woman's life when she must confront the greater truths. These truths include the lies in cosmetic advertising, the failures of dieting as a means to happiness, and perhaps worst of all... the fact that eating at Tetsuya's every night is simply beyond the reach of most Orstrayan wallets.

The third truth is, perhaps, the most difficult to deal with when the vast majority of one's decisions are directly or indirectly motivated by food. Perhaps this strikes one's stomach even more severely during those leaner weeks where one realises that going out to dinner at a lesser establishment, or even ordering a Domino's Pizza delivery (check that website out, by the way, I LOVE the little counter thingymebob!) wouldn't be the smartest financial move... even if one can technically afford the lazy slip up.

Oh yes, my friends, THRIFTINESS has struck the BitchBloke household!

Following a weekend of indulgence, our fridge is currently full of your typical party leftovers - a platter of chopped celery and carrot sticks, rapidly ageing salad ingredients, and perhaps the piece de resistance - two kilos of beef barbeque sausages. While the gathering we had was certainly somewhat less elaborate than, say, P.Diddy's White Parties, the fact that we spent more on booze than we did on food has left us feeling somewhat sheepish about the proportional remainders of these two gastric pleasures.

Now, while spending more on drinks than food isn't an altogether new experience for The Bloke and I, the weekend has coincided with us making the momentous decision to seriously save for a kitchen of our own... oh, and perhaps the rest of the house around it as well. And so, driven by the need to set an example (and make up for my latest bout of internet shopping), I nervously set about finding a way to use up as much of the leftover food as possible.

Now, I must confess that I've never cooked curried sausages before. Actually, to be perfectly honest, I've never even eaten curried sausages before. Being raised by a family with... err... alternative culinary leanings, curried sausages were somewhat of a joke, thrown into the same hat as apricot chicken and rissoles with boiled peas. Owing to these youth-installed prejudices, I feel dirty even having this in my blog, which has previously been a bastion of high eating,*cough*, but hey, if the maxi dress is back in for summer, why shouldn't retro recipes follow suit?

And so it is with only slightly blushing cheeks that I present to you:

Curried Sausages by W.R. Brohke

Ingredients

6 thin beef sausages
Oil
1 large brown onion, chopped
1 1/2 cups carrot, chopped
1/2 cup celery, chopped
1/2 red capsicum, chopped
2 teaspoons curry powder
1 teaspoon beef stock powder
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 cup tinned peaches, chopped
1 tablespoon soy sauce
2 cups water
Water, extra
Salt and pepper to taste

Method

1. Place beef sausages in a wok. Cover with water. Bring to a boil then simmer for five minutes. Remove sausages from wok, pour out water. Remove skin from sausages (if it hasn't floated off already) and slice each sausage into four chunks. Resist the urge to poke at the flaccid sausages like dismemberd anatomical parts, and set aside.
2. Place same wok back on the burner. Add one tablespoon of oil and heat momentarily, then add chopped vegetables and stir until they soften slightly. Add the curry powder, beef stock powder and ginger and stir for a minute or two. Add the water and soy sauce. Bring to a boil then drop heat and simmer for one hour.
3. Add the sausages and peaches to the vegetable mix. Simmer for another half an hour.
4. Add the flour paste and stir until sauce thickens. Remove from heat. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Serve with mashed potatoes, steamed green vegetables and a profound apology to resist spending the week's shopping budget on prescription downers and a new pink lipstick next time.

Vegetable Pasta Pom'adore-no

Ahhh, the humble tomato. Fruit of a thousand uses, vegetable of a thousand recipes. Yes, before anyone kicks up a stink, it is possible for a plant to fall into both categories. Even if the tomato's reputation as the "Fruit of Love" actually resulted from a drunk Italian chef slurring his words to a deaf poncy Frenchman who heard "Pomme de'Moors" (apple of the Moors) as "Pomme d'Amore" (apple of love), you must admit it's a pretty rad ingredient.

When The Bloke and I first started seeing each other, we would oftentimes stay at one anothers houses (some 150-odd-kilometres apart) over the weekend. And oftentimes, we would cook vast quantities of food for one another, a sort of culinary-love-dedication that only the heady days of a new romance can produce (i.e. before "what's for dinner, my love?" is met with scowling declarations of impending divorce and both parties having it out with smashed bottles and box cutters... OK, sorry, too many daytime movies).

During this time there were many meals that were culinary triumphs - a selection of curries made from scratch using recipes from Nilgiris restaurant and cooked by me at 10pm at night as the bloke caught an after-work train up from his home city; a perfectly cooked salmon steak with a lemon feta sauce cooked by the bloke after a trip to the Sydney Fish Markets; and Asian-influenced vegan dumplings constructed with silken tofu and a multitude of herbs and spices, steamed then served in a ginger-soy infused broth. There were also, of course, some meals that didn't work out so well - the time that we attempted to barbeque potato slices using the ancient grill in the bloke's backyard; and an attempt at repeating the dumpling recipe above only to have the dumpling-wrappers stick to the bamboo steamer then disintegrate completely, resulting in a very angry Bitch and a very confused Bloke. But nonetheless, like any worthwhile cooking adventure, both "failures" were memorable as learning experiences.

What's all this got to do with tomatoes? Well, reminiscences aside, my favourite meal from that time, without a doubt, would have to be a simple vegetable pasta sauce which The Bloke concocted one cold Friday evening when there was nothing better to do than stay at home, eat and be merry with the end-of-week veggies floating around in the bottom of the fridge. Like all good meals, it wasn't so much the content as the context that made it special - or, in less wanky terms, hell, who wouldn't want to be presented with a massive bowl of steaming pasta and a kiss on the cheek whilst curled up on the couch with the heating on after a long train trip south? Especially when the presenter is someone you, you know, really, really, really, really dig.

If you're not in the process of shacking up with someone (or you have a lot of love to share around), this recipe will make enough pasta to serve three or four people as part of a meal with garlic bread, salad and wine. It's especially good to use as a demonstration that you can just "whip together" a meal out of the ingredients you have lying around the place, thus demonstrating your flexibility AND thriftiness (just be careful not to cook this for clucky people you DON'T want to have children with, because they will surely interpret your newfound home-making skills as a plus for potential paternity. Ewwww.)

Vegetable Pasta Pom'adore-no

Ingredients

Olive oil
Six large ripe tomatoes, chopped (leave the skin and seeds, you sooks)
One brown onion, chopped finely
2 cloves of garlic, chopped finely
Assortment of "crisper veggies" totalling about three cups
- e.g.:
1 carrot, peeled and diced
1/3 red capsicum, chopped
1/3 green capsicum, chopped
1 zucchini, chopped
6 mushrooms, quartered
1/4 broccoli, cut into floreats
1 Lebanese (long) eggplant, chopped
1 spring of marjoram and 1 sprig of oregano - or 1/2 tablespoon of dried Italian herbs
2 bay leaves
Tabasco
Sea salt and freshly cracked black pepper
300g egg fettuccine (or long pasta of your choice)
Basil leaves and excellent parmesan cheese to serve

Method

1. Place a large pot of water on the stove and heat until boiling.
2. Meanwhile, heat olive oil in a large fry pan over a medium flame. Add onion, cook, stirring, until translucent.
3. Add garlic to pan and cook for about thirty seconds, then add the carrot and tomatoes and herbs and cook, stirring, for about five minutes, or until the tomato softens and goes pulpy.
4. Stir through the zucchini, mushrooms, capsicum and eggplant and cook for about five minutes.
5. Add Tabasco to taste (we like it HOT), then simmer for around twenty minutes or until vegetables are soft.
6. Throw half a handful of sea salt into the water-pot (which should be boiling by now) then chuck in your pasta, give it a stir and allow it to cook until al dente. While this is happening, add broccoli to the pan with the sauce in it and simmer for another five minutes.
7. Drain the pasta, reserving about half a cup of the cooking water. Add the pasta and water to the vegetable sauce and allow to cook for another minute or two. Remove from heat. Present to your intended in a big bowl garnished with parmesan cheese and freshly torn basil, accompanied by a cheap and cheerful merlot, garlic bread and salad. Sit back and enjoy the fruits of the vine and your labour, but hopefully not your loins. Yet.

Banana Butterscotch Puddingcake by Di A'Beattiez.

I made a promise to myself when I started this blog, that I'd stay away from the woosy, womanly arts of sweetness and light. Dessert is so goddamn girly. And acknowledging its presence on menus, let alone detailing recipes for end-of-meal sugar fixes would compromise, if not negate my misogynistic tendancies, and reputation as a general hard bitch.

So it was with raised fists that I repeated the following mantra:

I won't "do" confectionary.

Or maybe it was:

I don't "do" confectionary.

OK, OK.

I can't "do" confectionary. There. HAPPY NOW?

The last time I tried to make something which would have fallen into the lolly section of the 1975 Better Homes and Gardens cookbook which was my cooking guide as a child, it failed.

Not once, it failed. Not twice, it failed. Not three times, it failed.

FOUR TIMES. FOUR TIMES IT FAILED.

Four times I tried to make caramel syrup. And four times the sugar and water bubbled away for ten minutes before becoming cloudy rather than golden. And four times the sugar then crystallised out of solution and wrecked my saucepan, my kitchen sink; and eventually, my bidet (where I poured the third batch after blocking the sink plug hole with the second).

After the fourth time I'd run out of caster sugar and self worth. And I vowed never again to attempt anything that resembled a confectionary product, and I vowed to stick to sarcasm and the savoury dishes which go with it. If you can't join them, beat them and run away.

But yesterday, I was faced with a dilemma. Three of them, in fact. Three overripe bananas, sitting in my fruit bowl, waiting to be made use of either through composting, or through baking. There's not much else you can do with overripe bananas, see, and baking is quite acceptable in The Bitch School of Cookery (even if it requires sugar) because it involves the flexing of arm muscles and the slamming of oven doors. Brutal, oui? So I pulled out my trusty cookbooks (because even culinary genii like myself require guidance in foreign lands) to find a recipe for banana cake. But almost all the recipes contained sour cream, and the dairy compartment of our fridge was all Old-Mother-Hubbarded out of it. And yes, I could've walked to the shops, but truthbeknown: I couldn't be bothered.

Flicking through another book I found a recipe for a toffee topped banana cake, sans sour cream. Toffee. Toffee. I had flashbacks to the caramel sauce disaster, and picked up the bananas to compost them. But then I had a lightbulb moment.

Surely if a cake involved "hard" confectionary like toffee, it could also involve "soft" confectionary, like, say, butterscotch?

Butterscotch is EASY. Butterscotch involves cream, butter, and sugar. Add a saucepan, a low flame and a wooden spoon, and five minutes later Bob's yer uncle (or your aunt, depending on the gender reassignment laws of the state you live in).

Butterscotch doesn't set like toffee. After cooking, when it's heated it stays syrupy and bubbles. So what if I used it to make a sort of pudding / cake hybrid - baked, but with pockets of squishy, syrupy goodness throughout?

Reading back over this now, it sounds like a recipe for disaster. But obviously the confectionary- Evolutionists were looking out for me yesterday, because, by jove, it actually WORKED!

This recipe will make enough "cake" to appease about eight - ten people for dessert with icecream or cream to serve. You can bake it in advance and then nuke the slices in the microwave for thirty seconds to heat through just before serving. You can get the butterscotch off whatever it sticks to (and it will stick to stuff, this recipe is delicously messy) by running hot tap water over it. If you tell anyone I was responsible for the creation of this type-II-diabetes- inducing monstrosity, I WILL roast your bones for stock. Are we clear? Good.

Banana Butterscotch Pudding Cake

Ingredients

Cake
1 cup mashed very ripe bananas (about two large bananas)
2 ripe bananas, sliced
2 eggs, lightly beaten
2/3 cup vegetable oil
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2/3 cup plain flour
1/3 cup self raising flour
1 tespoon bicarbonate of soda
2 teaspoons allspice

Butterscotch sauce
2/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar
80g unsalted butter
300mL cream


Method

1. Pre-heat oven to 180 degrees celcius. Grease and line a 22cm round springform baking tin with baking paper.
2. To make the butterscotch sauce, place the butter into a small saucepan and melt over a low heat. Add the sugar and stir until dissolved in the butter. Add the cream, stir over low heat for two minutes or until combined, and then allow to cook over a low heat for another couple of minutes, until smooth and thickened slightly.
3. Combine egg, brown sugar, vegetable oil and vanilla extract in a large bowl. Sift the dry ingredients into the wet mixture, then stir to combine. Stir in the mashed banana. Set aside.
4. To assemble: Spoon the cake batter into the prepared tin. Top the cake batter with the sliced banana. Pour 2/3 of the butterscotch sauce over the top of the cake and banana slices.
5. Bake in the oven for 40 minutes. Remove from oven, allow to cool in tin for five minutes before releasing springform and sliding from the tin base onto a plate. Serve immediately with ice cream or cream and the reheated leftover butterscotch sauce, and a late picked riesling. Otherwise, allow to cool then cover with cling wrap and store in the fridge for up to three days.