Dinner for Mumma Bear | Luce's Eternal Sunshine: Dinner for Mumma Bear

14 May 2013

Dinner for Mumma Bear

Yep, the belated Mother's Day post.

My mum is definitely one in a million. She's completely bonkers, ridiculously caring and a bit of a psycho. We argue occasionally and she annoys me sometimes, especially when I have to show her how to change the TV settings for the MILLIONTH TIME. Mostly though, we are the best of friends and you will generally find us laughing manically about something nobody else gets. I love her to bits. 

Crazy mumma! 

To show my love, I decided to cook a Mother's Day dinner.

I like to think of myself as a bit of a champion in the kitchen, but in all honesty, I would be eliminated well before the croquembouche stage on Masterchef. So I pulled out Jamie Oliver's 15 Minute Meals cookbook to trawl through the colourful pages in search of a tasty meal. I was cooking for seven: myself, mum, dad, brother, sister, brother in law and my three year old nephew. My 12 week old nephew slept right through dinner, how rude! 

In the end, I decided on Jamie's ultimate pork tacos. I made them with kidney beans instead of black beans (black beans are hell to find!) and an avocado green salad.

I was so concerned in actually locating the pork belly (first time cooking pork belly and all) that I missed one small but important requirement. The recipe quite clearly says 'skinless' pork belly is required, for obvious reasons. I honestly thought I could outplay Jamie Oliver - rookie mistake. 

Utilising my sister's knife skills, and ignoring her vegetarian gag reflexes, we then removed the skin from poor Babe whilst trying to keep the fatty parts that make pork belly so scrumptious. This definitely reaffirmed Harmony's belief in vegetarianism, I mean, the skin still had little piggy hairs on it! Please forgive me for reminding you of this again Harms. 

Prepping my ingredients, like Jamie says.
Jamie is obviously a god with this 15 minute cooking nonsense, but the whole meal took me about 40 minutes, including cooking chicken for my skeptical brother in law. The only thing affected was the cooking time of the pork, which might need to be pulled off early if you're a slow poke like me to prevent overcooking.

The flavours were incredible though, and I developed a love affair with coriander - seriously, who knew coriander in a salad could be that amazing?!

For dessert, I made Salted Caramel Pots de Creme out of Curtis Stone's cookbook What's for Dinner?. Pots de Creme are basically baked custards and melt in the mouth divine. Salted caramel is my absolutely favourite so this was the number one pick!

What was lacking in presentation made up in flavour, promise! 
In typical Lucy style, I ran into a bit of a hurdle with this one too when I realised we didn't have enough ramekins in the house. After having a mini meltdown, I proceeded to make one giant Pot de Creme instead and increased the cooking time to ensure it wasn't a runny mess.


They were the perfect balance of salt and caramel, with a hint of vanilla and I added chocolate wafer sticks for some crunch. I scored 9 out of 10 according to my darling brother, so I'm guessing the meal was a hit!  
Happy Mother's Day Mum!

xx Luce 

1 comment:

  1. You're so sweet! :) oh and you need to invest in gloves for when working with meat or flesh of any description!! hehe ;) love ya!

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