One of our favourite weekend meals is chicken wontons. Tragically, you have to drive at least an hour from Apollo Bay to obtain wonton skins so I tend to get lots at a time.  I always intend to make enough to freeze some down – if you’ve got homemade stock and wontons in your freezer then you have instant wonton soup for dinner. Hooray! In reality, however,we usually eat as many as we cook. The wonton experience works like this – bowls of rice and bottles of soy sauce and black rice vinegar are placed on the table. The wontons are ferried from the kitchen and devoured in approximately the same amount of time it takes another batch to cook. It tends to become carnage; sweet, delicious carnage. In some ways, this is like yum cha.

Look, these dumplings aren’t particularly special but they are real crowd pleasers. The kids adore them and they make a really fun family meal. I strongly recommend getting some black rice vinegar for serving -its easily obtainable from Asian grocers. Use like soy sauce. Some notes on this recipe – I have no idea what kind of quantities I use, I make these very much on spec. So these amounts are a bit of a guess and you’ll have to experiment. There are a number of ways to cook them, which I’ll explain below.

Chicken wontons

• 40- 60 wonton or gow gee skins
• 500g chicken mince
• good teaspoon of minced ginger
• clove of garlic, minced
• tablespoon of finely minced spring onion
• scant tablespoon finely chopped coriander leaf and stem
• teaspoon of sugar
• splash of chinese rice wine or dry sherry
• teaspoon of light soy sauce
• teaspoon of oyster sauce

Mix the filling ingredients by hand until well blended. Each wonton skin will take about 1.5  – 2 teaspoons of filling. I have NO idea to describe the wonton rolling action but it doesn’t really matter -just as long as they are well sealed. I shape them with a flat base like a gyoza because I like to pan fry them.

Once the wonton are rolled, you can do a number of things with them. You can drop them straight into a gently simmering Asian style broth and cook for around 5 minutes to have wonton soup. You can steam them, or poach them in boiling water. I like to lightly oil a non stick pan, place the wontons on the pan so they start to fry lightly on the bottom. I then pour a small amount of water into the pan and cover it with a lid. The steam cooks the wontons but they get also get a nice crispy base. These wontons freeze very well but I do find that frozen wontons are best used for wonton soup. If doing this, do not defrost the wontons first but drop them into the stock while still frozen.

• A single whole chicken is a thing of joy and wonder
• The Wye River food store, whilst very pleasant and a great place to take the kids, is really not that great
• The secret of poaching eggs is not to let the bubbles break the surface of the water
• Fried bread should be mandatory on Sundays

Let me explain. A couple of weeks ago I poached a lovely free range chook for the purpose of making a chicken and leek pie. Once the carcass had been stripped of its flesh, I returned the bones to the stockpot with stacks of fresh herbs, leeks, garlic, tomatoes and lemon rind and proceeded to make a (if I may say so myself) completely bitching chicken stock. It sat in the fridge overnight to allow the fat and impurities to rise to the surface. When I scraped the scummy layer of fat off the top, a rich red brown broth was revealed beneath. I had inadvertently made a consomme to remember and it did not deserve to be wasted on, say, my standard chicken and vegetable soup. Performance anxiety kicked in.

That afternoon we set off down the Great Ocean Road to the Wye River Food Store. I like this place because you can sit inside a lovely building and eat cake while the kids play just outside where you can see them at all times. Prior to this trip I had eaten there only once and was hugely disappointed by the quality of the food and the service. But people here  rave about it so I figured it was worth a second chance. It wasn’t. Don’t get me wrong – the weather was great, the company fantastic and the ambiance,well…ambient. But the menu was uninspired and my pork was dry and boring (although I did very much fancy the salty roasted baby carrots). And the consomme was on my mind.

I remembered reading a recipe for Zuppa Pavese from Elizabeth David’s 1954 Italian Food. I consider myself to have no talent for (and to be quite honest, no particular interest in) Italian food but this book has really got under my skin. It’s full of incredibly simple recipes with very few ingredients and it has completely changed my understanding of Italian food. Anyway, Zuppa Pavese is basically consomme with a poached egg and Elizabeth David suggests serving it with bread fried in butter and covered with shaved Parmesan. I made a couple of changes to the recipe -  most significantly I couldn’t bring myself to fry the bread in butter and used olive oil instead. This probably stems from the residual guilt I still sometimes feel when I recall the quantities of white bread fried in bacon fat I ate as a child.

It was just the perfect Sunday night dinner.  I have been trying to figure out the art of poaching an egg for ages and finally I figured out that you need to get the water to the point where the bubbles are just about to break the surface of the water but don’t. Then, of course, you make the whirlpool and drop the egg in. I’m sure there are people who can do multiple eggs at one time like this but I am not one of them. Each bowl therefore got served up separately as the eggs were poached which meant that by the time it was my turn I was sitting at the table with my glass of wine, my bowl of soup and my plate of fried bread and cheese all on my own. Bliss! Such simple,simple food and so much better than the mediocre plate I had payed good money for earlier.

PS: For the kids, I cooked them up some penne and served it up with a poached egg and lashings of shaved parmesan – a very,verykid friendly meal!

Zuppa Pavese

• About 1 litre of good quality hot stock (any meat or vegetable stock would work)
• 1-2 fresh eggs per person – depending on how hungry you are
• Freshly picked leaves of flat leaf parsley
• 3 slices of ciabatta per person
• Olive oil for frying
• Shaved Parmesan

Bring a pan of water up to the point where the water is just about to boil but bubbles are not yet breaking the surface. Make a gentle whirlpool in the centre and carefully drop the egg in. Alternatively, use whatever poaching method works for you, unless its one of those evil aluminium poaching tins that turn eggs into bullets and gives you Alzheimer’s disease, in which case you ought to be ashamed of yourself. The egg only needs to be just, just set as it will continue cooking in the hot soup.

Sprinkle some parsley leaves in a soup bowl and ladle in some hot consomme. Season to taste. Carefully place 1-2 eggs in the soup.  Serve with the bread that has been fried until golden, removed from the pan and covered with shaved Parmesan.

This recipe is for a dish I’ve been making for some years now, vaguely inspired by (although nothing like!) an avocado curry I once had at a Balinese restaurant. It’s very simple, very tasty and great for meat-free nights. Best of all, it’s totally adaptable. Basically it’s steamed rice surrounded by a few different ingredients and smothered in a sweet curry sauce. I use slices of mango,  avocado halves and deep fried blocks of tofu. You could also use hard boiled eggs, slices of tomato and cucumber or whatever else you fancy. I guess it’s basically a nasi campur style of eating – a buffet on a plate and so the joy of it is that you can chuck whatever ingredients you want on the plate and everyone gets something they like. My kids will only take a small amount of the curry sauce, but that’s just fine for now.

Look, I just completely made this dish up so please consider this recipe a guidleine only. Put whatever ingredients you want on the plate and whatever spices you want in the curry sauce. I can’t imagine that I’ve ever made this dish the same way twice but I do like to keep the spices on the sweet and fragrant side as they go so nicely with the fruit.

Mango rice with sweet curry sauce

• 1 onion, finely diced
• 2 ripe tomatoes, finely diced
• half a teaspoon of tumeric powder
• quarter of a teaspoon dried galangal powder
• 2 cinnamon sticks
• 6 cloves
• 6 cardamon pods
• Kaffir lime leaf
• 1 teaspoon good quality curry powder
• stick of lemongrass, bottom part only, bruised
• tin of coconut milk
• Tablespoon fish sauce
• 2 teaspoons palm sugar
• 1 – 2 ripe mangoes
• 1 – 2 ripe avocados
• Block of firm tofu cut into 1 cm slices, each slice cut in half to make a square (does this make sense??!), dried with kitchen paper and sprinkled with salt, fried in 1 cm of hot oil until golden and crispy on both sides.

Gently sweat off the onion in small pan with just enough oil to stop it from sticking. When it’s starting to soften, add the tumeric, galangal, cinnamon, cloves, cardamon and curry powder, give it a stir for a minute or two, and then add the tomato. Fry this gently for a good ten minutes until it’s a sticky pink mess and then add half of the coconut milk (reserving the rest), the kaffir lime leaf and the lemongrass stalk. Simmer for another 10 minutes. Add the fish sauce and sugar, stir well and simmer for another couple of minutes. Taste and adjust the fish sauce / sugar balance accordingly. Strain the sauce through a fine sieve, pushing the pulp through with a fork. Set aside – this can be made well in advance. Just before you are ready to serve, reheat the sauce, adding the remaining coconut milk (this just freshens it up nicely and allows you to taste the coconut).

Remove the mango cheeks and score the flesh into 2cm slices along the length and gently remove. Halve the avocado, remove the kernel and skin. Starting about 1.5 cm down from the skinny end, slice each half in 2cm along it’s length. If you leave it intact at one end you can then fan it out into a nice attractive shape.  Put a neat round mound of rice in the centre of a plate. Place an avocado half, slices of mango and pieces of tofu in little separate piles on the plate. Douse the whole lot with spoonfuls of the curry sauce. Fresh herbs and crispy fried shallots make a delicious little mouthful of extra fun on top if desired.

Asian style pork patties and pineapple salad

• 1oog pork mince
• Handful of fresh pineapple pieces
• Handful diced cucumber
• Handful of fresh mango pieces
• dash of soy sauce
• dash of oyster sauce
• splash of fish sauce
• pinch of sugar
• squeeze of lime juice
• Steamed rice to serve

Mix the pork mince up with the soy and oyster sauces and form into little patties and whack into a non-stick frying pan on moderate heat until cooked. Make a salad out of the fruit and veg,  lime juice,fish sauce and sugar.Serve with rice. It’s a no brainer.