Once a month we're going to ask a great local artist to make their favourite dish and share stories and a song with us.
We couldn't think of a better artist to launch this series than our friend Jordie Lane.
Some people need careful planning and a sense of order to create magic in the kitchen. Others are much more spontaneous, producing brilliance out of whatever they have lying around. Jordie Lane fits somewhere in between these two categories, he is organised kitchen chaos at its most impressive.
Jordie expresses his creativity in the kitchen with a unique style that blends an obvious knowledge of key flavour combinations with a slap-dash technique that involves no measuring and little planning. He prefers to create non-recipes by selecting a few key ingredients and dressing them up with whatever is available in the fridge or pantry.
For our visit Jordie prepared a loosely Asian inspired meal of marinated salmon steak, grilled veggies and crispy rice. A born storyteller, Jordie explained his approach to cooking while preparing our dinner on a big round table in the backyard. He told us that creativity stems from the need to use up whatever ingredients he has in the kitchen. This economical approach sees Jordie using locally sourced, base ingredients combined with anything from the fridge or pantry. The result is an experimental style that champions with creative flavours and produces little waste.
Cooked on his parent’s balcony by the bbq with new age light-up tongs the whole experience was the most authentic version of quirky that we could have hoped for.
While cooking for us on Thursday night, Jordie offered an interesting analogy for his two creative passions“I’m starting to realise that it’s far more rewarding to make music in a space where I have fewer constraints, kinda like the way I cook without a recipe”, he said.
If you want to whip up your own Jordie Lane inspired Salmon dish, follow this recipe:
Ingredients:
Method:
Grate the garlic and ginger into a large dish then add soy sauce, a splash of sesame oil, juice of one lime, chopped coriander, salt and pepper and stir. Add the salmon and marinate for 15 minutes to a couple of hours, however long you like or have time to wait.
While the salmon is marinating slice your veggies, salt the eggplant and leave to sit while you fire up the bbq. Once you’re ready to cook the veggies add a couple of glugs of olive oil and salt and pepper, remembering to wash the salty eggplant before marinating.
Cook the rice using the absorption method and add a few drops of sesame oil (Jordie’s trick). Once the Barbie is hot and the rice is almost ready place the veggies on the hot plate and cook for about 5 minutes on each side until soft and charred.
Place the salmon on the hot plate, skin side up and cook for about 15 minutes, turning once. Cook for 10 minutes if you like your salmon a bit more pink.
All measurements are dependent on personal taste preference, just experiment and create something yum.
