Ocean Trout, Rice and Egg Donburi - A Warm Salad for Breakfast.

The Japanese word for Big Bowl is Donburi - and there's no better start to the day than with a big bowl of fishy-ricey goodness, a balance of complex carbs, proteins and fresh herbs.

It's simple and quick - if you don't have fresh fish on hand then canned or smoked fish can be used.

Method & Ingredients:

Compose in individual bowls for each breakfaster:

- half a cup of cooked rice (brown, white, red - whatever your preference on the day)
a serving of flaked fish (ie, cooked fish, separated into bite-sized 'flakes'. Nice fish for this dish include: tuna, salmon, ocean trout, or river trout, etc.)

- top with a fried egg

- sprinkle on a handful of rough-cut Italian parsley

- dress with a mixture of lemon juice and organic mayonnaise

- season with a grind of fresh black pepper.

Yum-oh!

Kota Bharu Breakfast Revisited

Lately I've been longing for some of the food we ate on a trip through central and northern Malaysia a few years ago... Still haven't found anything in Sydney *sigh* like the Nasi Lemak Bungkus that we had at the night Markets up in Kota Bharu on the border of Malaysia and Thailand... The other thing I've been longing for is the delicious curry breakfasts we had in cafes sprinkled throughout the country towns we visited. The first picture shows a typical breakfast meal: rice, curries, a fried egg and condiments. The second picture is my breakfast this morning, a red lentil curry on red rice with salty mango pickle, at home in Sydney Australia, dreaming of Malaysia.

Curried Red-lentil Dahl with Red Rice, Egg and Mango Pickle
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
oil
1 tablespoon mild curry powder
1 teaspoon tamarind concentrate
1 teaspoon palm sugar
1.5 cups red lentils
water

red rice, cooked
fried egg
mango pickle

Slice and fry the onion in a little oil until golden. Add chopped garlic and fry lightly. Add curry powder and fry until fragrant. Add lentils, water, palm sugar and tamarind paste and simmer until lentils are tender, approx 15-20 mins.

serve with boiled red rice, a fried egg and a spoonful of mango pickle.

Mmmmmm - Yum-oh!

Eggs For Breakfast

And a Visit to the PhotoShop Beauty Parlour...

It’s the terrible irony of the food photographer in-the-making: I woke up all excited about exploring my new camera and lenses, but was so hungry I didn’t feel like I could wait hours fiddling around with ingredients. That’s what a food-stylist is for, hey. But the fresh organic eggs I had picked up from the market, along with the Organic Rye loaf from the local IGA agreed to collaborate: I could have my cake (or eggs-on-toast-for-breakfast in this case) and eat it too. Or so it seemed…

You will understand my disappointment then, when my eggs didn’t exactly turn out looking like Marie Claire… They did in fact look pretty awful, full of bubbles and pock-marks and a bit green around the gills from where I had improperly set the white-balance in my camera. Not something you'd want to take home to meet your mother.

I surmised that this happened because:

a) I’m not a regular maker or consumer of fried eggs on toast,
(I like Omelets better, or Fried Rice With Egg)
and
b) because I didn’t manage the temperature of the frying pan very well – still getting to know the stove in the new studio kitchen.

Suffice it to say, they looked like they didn’t egg-xactly get out of bed sunny-side up…

















I wept quietly into my cup of tea:
“I’ll never become a food photographer, what was I thinking??”

Nevertheless, it dawned slowly on me that perhaps the food one sees pictures of in magazines may arrive at the studio in a less-than perfectly groomed state. So I decided, after eating my poor benighted eggs – at least they tasted good: the free-range chickens had held up their end of the bargain – that a trip to the Photoshop Beauty Parlour might be just the trick for my two googies.

Ten minutes on the Cloning Tool, a bit of tweaking with the Colour-Balance and voila! Behold, gorgeous eggs, sunny-side up, smiling for the camera.