What Others Brought

I have just moved house! That’s right: I finally have a brand new Cardboard Kitchen – complete with lime green bench top and four working hot plates. More on this later. Due to limited time and even more limited internet connectivity, updates have been and will continue to be sporadic. Here’s the recipes for my friend’s contributions to the Iron Chef Coconut battle, to keep you busy in the meantime:

Iron Chef Queanbeyan brought Coconut Fondue: we skewered cut fruit, then dipped this into a gorgeous sweet coconut concoction which was kept melty and warm in a dish supported by a hollowed out pineapple with a tea-light inside. This delicious skewer was then rolled into toasted coconut and consumed with joyous gobbling noises. Iron Chef Queanbeyan supplies the following instructions:

"Well I reckon you can probably work out how to cut fruit and toast coconut with a bit of cinnamon in :-). The cream I made up as I went along but the process was something like:

Put 2 tbsp of cornflower in a pot and mix with coconut water until you get a thin paste, stir in a can of coconut cream until smooth. Place over medium heat and stir until it starts to thicken slightly and set aside.

Peel a custard apple and cut in to small pieces. Using a food processor or bamix process for about 2 seconds only. This is just to loosen the seeds so you can go through and pick them out. Once you've removed the seeds process it to a goo and sieve the goo in to the pot, pushing it through with the back of a spoon. I also added a few spoonfuls of the goo from inside the sieve for a bit of texture. Finely dice about half a cup of fresh coconut flesh and add that to the pot too.

Stick back on a low heat, stirring continuously while you grate in 2 sticks of palm sugar. Depending on the sweetness at this stage (which depends on the sweetness of the custard apple) you might want to also stir through about a teaspoon of glucose.

Keep stirring until you reach the required consistency, using more coconut water or coconut milk to loosen if needed.

For the record, the fruits which I found worked well were banana, strawberry, rock mellon, persimmon and pineapple. Red tamarillo also is very tasty but impossible to get to stay on a fondue fork!"

Iron Chef Perth brought a coconut and a bendy blue straw. Here is her recipe:

"Step 1: Fail
Step 2: ??
Step 3:Profit
Step 4: Slight panic
Step 5: Discover coconut innocently sitting on kitchen table
Step 6: Rifle through drawers to find a straw
Step 7: Nick above coconut and straw

If you follow the above steps exactly you should have a most tasty cop out."

The Iron Chef previously known as Iron Chef Hackett brought an amazing sticky black rice pudding with coconut sauce and sweet toasted coconut. She apparently used the recipe to be found by following this link, but added the Vietnamese mint using her own initiative. It must be honestly said that the mint really makes the dish – I went back for seconds three times.

I'll upload more pictures later - I have a stupidly tiny limit to play with.