Pasta Salad with Broad Beans, Pancetta and Fetta
I ended up with a pasta salad, a quick trip to The Deli for some pancetta and everything was go. Straight forward and only taking 15 minutes I had dinner. Coming into summer it’s great the next day for a picnic once the flavours have mingled even more.
Little Creatures, little food and a little class
The brewery is housed inside one of the two boat sheds that make up their premises, the other houses the bar and restaurant with a giant glass wall separating the two so you can watch the brewers occasionally scuttle around checking valves and whatnot. It’s not a fascinating show if you ever even get to see someone, large modern brewery, even the smaller ones like Little Creatures are generally set-and-forget with only some monitoring of the brewing and fermenting. I was hoping for an ommpaloompa, but I guess they’re probably locked in cages to protect the public.
Little Creatures,
Fremantle
It was a beautiful sunny day so we went
through a couple of false starts to try and secure an outside
table, having much more success than most. The back area is large
and set to have the feel of your mate’s back yard, complete with
bocce pit taking up some valuable real
estate. Full credit has to go to management for not trying to
squeeze in an extra 100 people and ruining a great
atmosphere.
Inside are two levels of seating that seem to be able to fit
hundreds of people with the ground level split with a large bar at
the front and the open planned kitchen at the back, including the
wood fired pizza oven that probably didn’t help to cool the inside
of the warmer than outside shed. It was cooler outside in the
sun.
We didn’t want a huge meal, just something to tide us over until
dinner so we just ordered a plate of prawn skewers (a little over
cooked) and a spicy sausage pizza that left a satisfying lip tingle
for 15 minutes after you’d eaten it. For a wood fired pizza, I was
a little disappointed but I still went back for another slice. I am
glad they showed restraint in the toppings department and didn’t
overload any of the pizzas on the menu.
Prawn Skewers @ Little Creatures,
Fremantle
Spicy Sausage Pizza @ Little
Creatures, Fremantle
We only had the pale ale to drink here
and it was as nice as ever, and one of the better pale ales around.
I saw the cider on the menu when we first sat down inside but
completely forgot about it by the time we’d moved seats twice to
try and get outside.
It was really nice sitting outside watching the well-behaved
toddlers run around, a group of friends play a round of bocce and
others clamber over the small stage that’s occasionally used for
live bands so I’m glad we did shuffle around to get out there. The
wait-staff were friendly and mostly professional. The best evidence
of this was how the waiter and subsequently management dealt with a
woman we’d pointed out to them who probably chose the wrong seat
and should have waited to get an outside seat too…
Dignity. She Needs It
Pork Sausages with Roased Tomatoes, Capsicum and Fennel with Cannellini Beans
The quality of supermarket sausages is generally pretty poor so I try not to buy them unless I have no choice. Who want’s a monochrome pink paste that’s supposed to be pork? I try and get to the David Jones food hall for they’re excellent selection of high quality classics to more unusual blends. The Duck Pear and Cognac is a favourite. Last night however, I had to get what I could form the supermarket and ended up with what were labelled as “Pepperberry and Garlic” and assuming pork.
What a surprise. No pink monochrome paste and a good blend of herbs. These were really quite nice sausages. The idea was to make pork sausages with tomato sauce and cannellini beans, but given what I originally suspected were going to be bland sausages I picked up a fennel bulb and a red capsicum (bell pepper) and roasted them all for an hour with olive oil, salt pepper and rosemary before I diced and mushed them together to go with the beans and sausages. It turned out to be an excellent combination, although it could have used a bit of a chilli kick.
Bunny, Pancetta and Shitake Pasta
They’re cute, fluffy and hop around a lot. I’ve got one named Sneaker and boy is he cute. Except when he’s being a jerk. And that’s a lot. I’ve lost $2000 worth of cabling from around the house that I’ve had to replace (he has a taste for the expensive proprietary Apple kind) and his favourite game is to hop up on my bed an hour before I want to wake up each morning and run around across me until I get out of bed, after which he’ll ignore me. He’ll make a great pie one day.
In the mean time, I happened across fresh grain fed farmed bunnies in the David Jones food hall. Now, I love Sneaker and since I haven’t cooked much bunny before I figured I needed some practice to do him justice so I picked one up with no real idea what to make with it that night.
When I got home I rummaged around and found some pancetta in the fridge and some dried Chinese mushrooms in the cupboard. I didn’t want to have to make a buttery short crust pastry, so, pasta. Easy.
Jointing the bunny was fairly easy; it only took five minutes, slicing off the legs at the joint, and since I was going to be chopping the bunny up after it was roasted I hacked off the saddle with out too much care, just keeping close to the ribs to keep as much meat as I could. The rest of the carcass went into a zip lock bag and into the freezer for a future bunny stock.
The jointed bunny pieces were dusted in flour and fried off in a heavy roasting dish then set aside. The onion and pancetta were fried in the oil left over from the meat. The bunny was added back in along with the diced mushrooms, stock, mushroom soaking liquid and some chopped rosemary. The roasting dish was covered and the lot was roasted slowly for two or three hours. Once roasted, I shredded the bunny meat off the bone with two forks ready to be used to top the pasta.
The pasta was simple, 100gms of flour and 1 egg per person (the should be enough sauce for 4-6 people). Kneaded until smooth then rolled to a low setting through a pasta machine. Once I had the long sheet, I simply tore off chunks (not cut). The pasta was cooked in salted water and then added to the bunny sauce. Tearing the pasta helped the pasta to soak up more of the juice from the sauce.
Served with some lightly grated parmesan.