We had a fun day yesterday at our Tasmanian Cooking Experience workshop cooking 10 recipes from my books here is some lovely feedback from one of the guests.

“This was an amazing experience! Ellie prepared mouth watering dishes and shared her own cooking tips! Learnt a lot and am inspired to cook more! Especially with Tassie seafood!”

The only thing I had preprepared was the slow cooked lamb for the cannelloni. We made the bread, pasta, pastry , shucked the oysters, filleted the fish, cleaned the occy and more over a few hours in the morning and then the guests enjoyed a lunch of all our cooking. Here is the Menu and all the recipes are from my cookbooks:

Next week we have our first of 2 School Holiday workshop I am trialling for junior chefs we are making pizza, we will make the bases and then a few different toppings including Steph’s Dessert pizza. They will be able to enjoy the pizza for lunch before they go home. The following week we will make Pasta, a few different types and then lasagne for lunch. We also have a Seafood Workshop for the Tasmanian Seafood Industry Council Maritime and Seafood Teachers, Teachers please message Lek at TSIC to register for this lek@tsic.org.au

Then we have a Bread Baking workshop on the 12th. I listed this in the holidays as I thought it would be a fun one for a parent and child to attend together.

Our Master Classes are only a few weeks away I am excited for these. Anyone with any level of cooking experience will learn something here. I know yesterdays guests were impressed with the simple stock making form the fish bone into the delicious fish and wakame broth. It takes no time to make stock and is really from waste products, that you are paying for anyway. If you buy fish in fillets and don’t take the frame you are still paying for it in the price of the fillet. Buying the fish whole and filleting it would always be the most economical way to purchase. Stock making was one of the first posts on my website all those years ago and I am still banging on about it. A good stock/bone broth is the base to so much of our cooking and good for us too.

I was just in the supermarket today and the better quality stocks are so pricey when you can make them pretty much for free. There were a few packet stocks I would never consume, most the ingredients were horrifying! They have no flavour just a salty weird chemical rank taste.

Every “process” done to the food we pay for. Plus the extra packaging that is then needed so extar waste. Plus of course all the extra stuff that then goes into it to preserve it, like extra salt, sugar and fat and additives that we know we need to avoid where we can. I recently purchased an air fryer ( i know I have been bagging them out for 10 years😂) it was 29 dollars from cash converters but that is a whole other story for another day. Anyway I though I might buy the kids some nuggets for fun for the holidays, I looked at the back of the packet and they contained 41 percent chicken, seriously the percentage of chicken in a nugget seems to drop every year. Aside from the fact that WHAT THE F%^& is in the other 59 percent of the nugget that we are consuming? At $13.50 a kilo and that was the cheaper pack thats $30ish a kilo for the chicken. When you can buy probably the same quality chicken for $5 a kilo whole, you’ll end up with at least 50 percent meat so its $10 a kilo for chicken meat no skin PLUS you get the bones and skin for stock. And then add the extra processing the butcher needs to do of the whole chicken the thighs and breasts are around 16 a kilo. Dipping the chicken in flour, than egg, then breadcrumbs is not hard to make nuggets and they taste better too! I repeat it is not f*&^ing hard, yes the packet food industry has convinced us it is and we have no time to cook but it is not hard or time consuming. I just couldn’t hand over my hard earned money for the packet nuggets. We will be boning out chickens at the stock making master class, it is easy once you’ve done it a few times. I know bone broth has magically health claims these days and I am not sure I agree with all of them but boiling the bones you absolutely must be getting some goodness from them?