Slice

"Slice" is a very useful generic concept for clearing out the fridge. It's so generic that it doesn't have a name besides just "slice". It could be spinach slice, or zucchini slice, or mixed veggie slice, or many other things.

The idea is that you locate all the non-watery veggies that need using up. Clean them and grate them or chop them or whatever. Spinach, chard, silverbeet etc should be lightly steamed, then squeezed and chopped. I find that zucchini can be grated then squeezed out to remove excess water. Some mashed pumpkin is good, or precooked cauliflower or broccoli. Defrosted frozen spinach can be used, too. But no tomatoes in the mix, they are too wet!

Anyway, you pop them in a big bowl. Add any odds and ends of cheese that you have, grated if it's firm. Cheddar, ricotta, and cottage cheese are good basics, but there's nothing to stop you using fancy bits of brie or gruyere. Then add some cooked rice - one of those sachets of precooked rice from the supermarket is handy here, if you don't have leftovers and don't have time to cook it. I like to make this with brown rice.

Chuck in some flavouring agents. I like to use plenty of dill and lemony herbs like sumac and lemon myrtle, and some chopped spring onions. But perhaps some fresh basil and garlic might suit your fancy better. I usually like to make it fairly mild, and then add some chutney or sauce to taste at serving time. You can add other little bits and pieces of stuff for an accent - leftover antipasti, a handful of pitted and halved olives, some chopped sun-dried tomatoes or roast capsicum. If you're not cooking for a vegetarian, some chopped ham or cooked bacon pieces could well go in.

Now have a closer look at your bowlful of stuff. Will it fit into your shallow casserole dish or pie plate for baking? If it looks like too much, then scoop some into a storage container to freeze for next time. If it's not enough, add another grated zucchini, or some frozen spinach or frozen peas or something.

To finish off, take 4-8 eggs, depending on the size of the dish. Break them in, and mix well. If they're a bit old, because this is also good to use up excess eggs, then break them into a cup first to check that there are no bad smells. Put all in your oven dish and top with sliced tomatoes if you want, maybe some breadcrumbs for crunch, and definitely some grated cheese - more cheddar, or some parmesan. Bake at 160C until the egg is set - 30-60 minutes depending on the depth of the baking dish. Don't rush it with a high temperature, or it will tend to separate and get watery.

Serve it in big slices, like a lasagne. This is a complete meal in itself, with veggies, protein and carbs all together. But it's good to have something else alongside for variety. That could be a nice crisp salad, or any side vegetable, or even a sausage for the meat-eaters, or a slice of smoked salmon - that's especially good if you've gone for lemon and dill as your flavours.

I have a problem with stone fruit

I buy too much of it.

The Bloke doesn't eat any stone fruit, except for dried apricots. And yes, I can easily get through a couple of kilos of cherries in a week all by myself when they're in season. But right now the markets are packed with plums and nectarines and peaches and plumcots and I wander around thinking "I'll just get half a dozen of these" and "ooh, those look nice, how about I just buy four" and somehow I come home with far too much for me to eat in a week. Especially if I've bought huge punnets of blackberries, strawberries and blueberries as well.

And I have another problem with stone fruit. These days most of them are sold rock hard. Even the peaches from the growers market are too firm to be edible immediately. Stone fruit don't really ripen off the tree, no extra sweetness develops, but they will soften. Pop them in the fruit bowl for two or three days, watch like a hawk, and eat them when they are just softened enough. But if you leave them for even 12 hours longer, they start getting a bit wrinkly and too soft to be nice. And if you then put them in the fridge and leave them for a few more days, some will go off entirely, and some will get a bit squishy in spots.

Here's what I did to salvage the old fruit when I got back from Goulburn.


Recipe: White Peaches in Blood Plum sauce
3 white peaches or nectarines
4 blood plums
1 tablespoon vanilla sugar
1 teaspoon rose water
2 tablespoons water

Wash the fruit well.
Chop the plums small, removing stones and any nasty dead bits.
Chuck them in a saucepan with the sugar, rosewater and the water.
Bring to a simmer.
Cut the peaches in large pieces - halves, or quarters.
Add them to the plums, and let simmer for another 10-15 minutes.
Allow to cool slightly, then remove peach pieces.
Slip off the peach skins.
Mash the plum sauce, or if you feel energetic, sieve or puree it.
Return the peach pieces, mix well, and chill.


Notes: This was a really great outcome - the rose with the blood plum and hint of vanilla is a very good combination. It's obviously adaptable to other fruits; this is just what was in the fridge, but I think I lucked out here. The aromatic white peach holds up well against the sauce, and matches with the rose.

Peach skins are easy to slip off when the fruit is cooked. If you prefer, you can skin them like tomatoes, by standing then in a bowl of boiling water for a minute or two.

Eat these for breakfast - cold with Greek yoghurt and granola, or warm on porridge, depending on what the weather is doing.

Things I've learned

Recently I was looking at cracked.com, that scary site of internet crack; it's second only to tvtropes.org in addictiveness. Just ONE more funny list. I'll just follow that ONE more link. No, OK just ONE more. Oh, I wonder what that next one is like. Hang on, how did it get to be 3am? So with due warning given, look at just this ONE list of the 10 most important things they didn't teach you in school. It's hilariously and totally true, all of it.

In the spirit of that, but on a very much lesser scale, here are some things I've learned recently.

1) You know when you cut yourself while chopping up food, and put on a bandaid really tightly, because you remember from first aid that compression stops bleeding? Always remember to loosen it within the hour. Ow.

2) You really shouldn't pot roast one of those heart-tick extra lean cuts of meat. It will come out much too dry.

3) An overly dry piece of meat can be turned into a rather good cottage pie, by chopping it very finely and adding tomato paste, herbs, stock, wine, carrots, onions, peas etc, then simmering together for an hour or so to meld. Then add a good topping of mash and bake until hot.

4) You don't have to peel your spuds under cold running water. Dunking them in a bowl of warmish water will do nicely, once to peel, once to rinse clean. It feels much better in midwinter, and it saves water.

5) Don't use a serrated knife to chop up cold (dry) meat. Use a chef's knife or carving knife. (See point one.)

Feijoa time again

It's almost a month since I last posted. I don't have any major food news, since for a lot of that time I was sick - a nasty cold developed into an even nastier chest infection, for which I've been taking mega-antibiotics and using an inhaler of nasty tasting drugs. Bleah. What can I say? Tinned soups and spaghetti is pretty dull stuff, but at least I did get to eat my stewed quinces and apples - pretty good to perk up a tub of Le Rice. I like the caramel or vanilla flavours, heated up with the stewed fruit.

Meanwhile, the garden has delivered the last of the season's rhubarb, a bucket of feijoas and three mutantly huge butternut pumpkins. Well, stewed or roast rhubarb is lovely, and pumpkins make good mash, baked veg or soup. Or a sweet spicy pie filling, though not everyone agrees... But what is there to do with feijoas?

I've been eating the best of them for my lunchtime fruit, feeling very exotic as I stand in the kitchen at work peeling them and cutting them up onto a plate, along with a sliced persimmon. I prefer to leave them for a couple of days after collection, to soften a little before eating. The inside goes from greeny-white to cream, to pale beige, to deeper beige to brown as it ages. I find the cream stage is best, and I cut off anything past the palest of beige. I'm also not mad on the skins, so I usually peel them. But it is actually edible.

Last year I made a feijoa chutney, which I speculate was invented by someone who was very sick of feijoas. It was more like a Branston pickle, sharp, dark and malty, and I still have masses of it left. This year I decided to try a jam instead. And since feijoa isn't exactly my favourite fruit, I thought of zesting it up with some ginger for interest. This is my first attempt, based loosely on a recipe found on the net somewhere random. If I do this again next year, I'll add even more ginger.

Recipe: Feijoa and Ginger Jam
1.5 kg feijoas
2 lemons
150 g preserved ginger (glace or crystallised)
5 cups sugar

* Chop the ginger finely.
* Wash the lemons, halve and juice one half piece. Save the skin.
* Put the juice of half a lemon in a large bowl, with about 3 cups cold water.
* Peel and chop the feijoas quite small, dropping the pieces into the lemon water as you go.
* Transfer 375ml of the water to a large jam pan.
* Strain the feijoas and add them to the pan.
* Add the chopped ginger, the juice of the 1.5 remaining lemons, and the lemon rinds in large pieces.
* Bring to a simmer and cook for 15-20 minutes.
* Add the sugar and turn up the heat.
* Stir until dissolved, and then boil rapidly until set point is reached (10 minutes).
* Remove the lemon.
* Pour into sterilised jars, and seal.


Notes: To get 1.5kg of feijoas, you will need 2-3 kg of raw fruit, depending how bruised they are. They do say not to use bruised fruit for jam, to which I say - nonsense! Sure, don't use the actual bruised part, but just chop it off and use the good bit. Feijoas fall from the tree when they are ripe enough, and they often have a bruised portion if they land on hard surfaces like a concrete footpath. So here we see the upper one is brown and goopy - into the compost. Lower one, fine. Cut off bruised bit, at left.

Also, jam setting time is a little random. The lemons provide the pectin here, as well as a dash of flavour, but you could use jamsetta instead, and follow the packet directions.

I clean my jars very simply: wash them in the dishwasher and set aside in the cupboard until needed. Then pop them in a sink of very hot water and leave for 10 minutes. Then put them in a warm oven to dry off. Put their lids on when it's still hot.

Jam is really very forgiving; the sugar is a powerful preservative. Scare stories about bottling tend to be about preserving vegetables, with no sugar involved. Chemical sterilisation and very careful attention to detail is much more important there - and one reason among many why I don't actually do that. (Not often having a surplus of veg, and the existence of tins and supermarket freezer sections are other reasons.)

More Autumn Gold

Pretty! Here are some quinces sitting in the dish, when I was testing them to see if they would fit. They cme from Pialligo, via Choku Bai Jo. The next step was to wash all the fluff off, and chop off the stem ends and get them ready for roasting. I put them on the bottom shelf of the oven, which I was roasting some tomatoes on the top shelf.


Recipe: Pot roast quinces
5 quinces
150ml honey
vanilla bean shards
Wash quinces well, chop off the tops and trim the tail, and place in a pot just the right size to wedge them all in upright.
Pour over the honey, and drop in the vanilla.
Add water to cover two thirds of the way up.
Bake slowly at 120-140C for two or three hours, turning a couple of times.
If it seems to be getting too dry, put the cover on the pot for the last hour or so.

Notes: the cooking time is quite arbitrary, they can go a very long time without disintegrating. They blush a pale pink when just done, and the longer you cook them, the darker this colour gets, all the way to a deep burgundy. You can eat the skins, or peel them off if you don't like the texture. But do cook them in the skin, it helps to enrich the juices.

Serve warm with cream or icecream (Maggie Beer's quince & bitter almond would be a nice luxury). Cut some up to go with porridge or yoghurt for breakfast. Cover with a sponge topping for an old fashioned pudding or scone dough for a cobbler. Whatever you like to do with stewed fruit.

I used up the remnants of the vanilla bean I'd used in the creme caramel, washed of course. And a large part of a jar of generic honey that I thought was a bit boring. I prefer my honeys powerful, like stringybark and ironbark, or interesting like lavender, coffee-blossom and orange-blossom. This was a good way to use it up.

Old fashioned things, and the importance of numeracy

My good friend B1 has been out of town a lot, for personal reasons that I won't go into on this blog. Recently she was back, and hinted shamelessly at me about lamb shanks and creme caramel. So what could I do but comply? I even managed to put this together on a weeknight by dint of moderate planning ahead.

I didn't quite manage enough forward planning to get market lamb, so I had to get the shanks from Woolworths, who sell them as whole bones, not the easier to manage French trimmed version. They're not particularly cheap - they averaged about $4.50 a piece, which for the actual amount of meat makes it's cheaper to buy a hunk of rump steak.


I do actually remember when they were cheap - the offcut bit, good for a soup, or a cheap family meal, but not fit to bring out for company. That was before the revival of the slow cooked homestyle food in fancy restaurants. My Mum hasn't kept up with the trends, and a while ago was horrified when some visiting friends chose to eat lamb shanks at a fancy restaurant. To her generation, it sounds like ordering spam. But really, it's good - I remember trying to bags the shank end of the lamb roast whenever possible. Sticky, tender and full of flavour.

I more or less followed this recipe from allrecipes.com.au, which involves browning the meat & veg, then a slow cook in red wine, tomatoes and stock, with lots of herbs, and in my addition, some strips of lean bacon. For six lamb shanks, that's two tins of tomatoes and a whole bottle of red, then stock to top up. Then it's overnight in the huge cooking pot in a very slow oven (120) - my slow cooker was too small to take them. Simply reheat for dinner. I served it with mash, which I enriched with a little leftover cream, and frozen baby peas. Half the shanks minus bone, and most of the veg and sauce went into the freezer, to be a ragout later on. With the Italian tomato, garlic and rosemary flavours, it should go well with pasta.

I had leftover cream, of course, from the creme caramel. This is another easy one to cook ahead, I made the caramel on a Monday night, baked the custard on Tuesday and served them on Wednesday. In this case, I used a Maggie Beer recipe, from the Maggie's Harvest book. I looked up several to get the proportions, and decided to use the one with the whole eggs. I have too many egg whites in the freezer already.

The importance of numeracy comes in here. Check the recipe and see if you can spot the problem!

Recipe: Maggie Beer's Creme Caramel
110g sugar
125ml water
-
4 large eggs
125g caster sugar
250ml cream
300ml milk
1 vanilla bean

First, make the caramel. Put the sugar and water in a small saucepan and heat until sugar is dissolved. Continue to heat until it turns into a dark amber colour - watch carefully when it first starts to turn, because it can be quite quick to change. Pour the hot caramel into 4x120ml capacity individual ramekins, and swirl a little to get it around the edges. Leave to set.

Heat the milk and cream together with the vanilla bean and scraped out seeds. Bring to just off boiling, then remove from heat and let cool. Overnight is fine. Later, make the custard by beating the eggs, sugar and re-warmed vanilla infused milk together. Strain this into a jug.

Prepare a large roasting tin with a folded tea-towel on the base, then the caramel ramekins. Pour the custard into the ramekins in situ, then gently pour hot water around them to soak the tea towel. Fill up as high as you can manage around the edges of the ramekins, without getting water into the custard when you move it.

Bake in a 180 degree oven for 25 minutes, or until set. Allow to cool in their water-bath, then refrigerate until ready. To serve, run a knife around the edge of the ramekin and invert it onto a plate. The caramel will mostly have dissolved into a sauce, though if you've done a thick layer there may be some left.



Notes: Actually I reduced the sugar in the custard from the 145g in the recipe, and slightly changed the milk/cream balance because I had low fat milk in the house. (Hers: 375ml milk, 190ml cream.)

And did you spot it? If the eggs make up about 200ml, then what we have here is about 650ml of custard. This is not going to fit into 4x120ml ramekins! I spotted the need to get more ramekins - I used six. I also increased the caramel amount by half, which I think was unnecessary, since the caramel layer came out much thicker than it needed to be.

Making the caramel dark gives it a bitter-sweet sharp edge, which makes the dessert more interesting and less cloying. You can make it a bit lighter, if you prefer.

O hai, I can has weekend?

I haven't had many at-home weekends recently. I've been madly gadding about like a mad gadding thing. I've been to the Goulburn Blues Festival; Corinbank; a friend's birthday (staying away the night); visiting a friend in Sydney; and last weekend I was off to the global atheist convention in Melbourne. It's been fun, but exhausting - this sort of schedule doesn't mix well with full-time work. But yes! I have finally had a weekend at home! And I even have another whole free weekend before we have our Easter houseguests.

For a while I was feeling a bit guilty about not blogging, but I got over it. It's supposed to be some fun for me, not an obligation. I do keep thinking about it, so I don't think I'm over the whole blogging thing yet. Plummet decided to wake me up at 4.30 this morning, so I'm feeling a bit ordinary. But nevertheless I've had a good go in the kitchen, and am feeling quite proud of my production, and feel like telling the world.

Hello, world! Today I made roast tomatoes, stewed rhubarb with mixed berries, Thai red curry pork with veggies, and a spinach and cheese potato bake. The spinach and spring onions in the potato bake, as well as the rhubarb were from the garden, so that's extra gratifying. And yesterday I took a cake baked in the octopus shaped tin along to Skeptics in the Pub, where PZ Myers was speaking.

The curry was just from a paste, Mae Ploy brand. I used some lean pork, and added eggplant, green beans, red capiscum and bamboo shoots. And I used light coconut milk, not the proper rich coconut cream kind, so it's a bit thin. It's OK for an easy dinner, though it's a bit hotter than I intended! My previous tub of Thai red curry paste was Maesri brand, which I now know is milder.

The spinach bake is a trifecta of virtue: home grown veggies, using up some things that were on their last legs, and preparing for the work week in advance. Can you actually see my halo? *ting*

There's no recipe per se, but this is what I did.

* I mixed together a tub of low fat cottage cheese, some leftover fetta marinaded in olive oil & sumac, and 7 eggs. All of these were very close to their use-by dates.
* I ground in some pepper and chucked in some extra sumac, pine nuts, a handful of grated parmesan, a couple of crushed cloves of garlic, and three chopped spring onions from the garden.
* I picked lots of spinach from the garden, washed it and chopped it roughly. Microwaved it to wilt it, then wrung it out and chopped it up.
* I decided there wasn't enough spinach for me, so I defrosted about 250g of frozen spinach and added it in.
* Oiled a cake tin that seemed about the right size. (It's silicon, but I'm getting less trusting about the non-stick qualities of that where eggs are concerned.)
* Washed, peeled and finely sliced up four large potatoes (Dutch cream, they really are quite yellow).
* Layered it the cake pan - potato, spinach, potato, spinach, potato, spinach, potato.
* Took a picture part way through the layering.
* Baked it at 150C for half an hour, then added a bit more parmesan on top and baked it for a further twenty minutes.

And that's it - I made it up as I went along. I don't know yet exactly what it tastes like, since I haven't cut it open, but I'm sure it will be fine. It's hard to go wrong with spinach and cheese. And it will come in very handy this week. It can be reheated in wedges in the microwave, as cafes often do with their frittatas, or in a slow oven.

Sherry Berry Trifle

Blueberry, that is. I contemplated a Sherry Cherry Trifle, but who has time to pit cherries right before Xmas? A trifle, though, is traditional for Christmas, and it's quite useful. It's a dessert that can be made in advance, with whatever is on hand, and yet is quite festive. It's also a traditional way to use up stale sponge cake - though that's not a common thing in my house.

They can be pretty dire, when made from the supermarket jam roll soaked in Aeroplane jelly with tinned fruit and packet custard, and a splash of wino's cheapest sherry. Though if done with care, even that can have nostalgia value. But there's plenty of room to improve on any or all of those options without much effort. Even packet custard can be tweaked into something rather better. And since the packet kind sets, it's actually a better option than a proper egg yolk custard sauce, if you're planning to put it in a large bowl and empty it over a couple of days. And I do still like to have jelly, even though I'm grown up.

Recipe: Sherry & Blueberry Trifle
625g blueberries
3 tablespoons vanilla sugar
150ml water
1 sachet gelatine
--
1 250g sponge cake
1/2 cup medium sweet sherry
--
750ml custard
300ml cream


* Tear up the sponge cake and put it in the serving bowl.
* Drizzle the sherry over the cake.
* Wash 500g of the berries, and pop them into a saucepan with the sugar and water.
* Bring to a gentle simmer and stir well to make sure the sugar is all dissolved and the berries are a bit broken.
* Remove from heat immediately.
* Drain berries, reserving juice.
* Sprinkle cooked berries over the cake.
* Make a jelly with the juice and the gelatine, topping up with water if necessary to make 500ml liquid.
* Pour the warm liquid jelly over the cake and berries, and refrigerate to set.
* When set, top with cold custard.
* Top that with whipped cream, and decorate with fresh berries.


Extra Copious Notes

Cake options -
Make your own sponge, and spread it with a good jam. Make your own swiss roll. Buy a bakery or supermarket one - the quality need not be too high, since it will be soaked.

Soaking options -
A decent sherry matters here, and you want at least a semi-sweet, not a fino. Pedro Ximinez is lovely, if expensive, for a chocolatey one. Or for fruity options, an Amontillado style or premium cream sherry. Other kinds of soaking liquid can be used to taste. Port is traditional, but you could also consider muscat, tokay, a dessert wine, a liqueur or for the non-drinkers, a fruit juice. Or hmmm, how about black coffee, or earl grey tea, or chai?

Fruit options -
Go for cooked fruit (including tinned) unless you are going to eat it very quickly. Fresh fruit is nice, but much less so after a couple of days. You can use frozen berries to make the cooked part, but fresh will still look better as decoration on top.

Custard options -
I made a custard from packet custard powder, you may be shocked, shocked! to learn. But I used 750ml of full cream milk, with powder enough to set 500ml milk, and also added two whole eggs, well beaten, into the mix. This is much less likely to split than a straight egg custard, too. Bought custard could be used - the premium Paul's variety is pretty good for a dollop.

You can probably improvise for the rest. Use your favourite Aeroplane jelly from childhood, or a wine jelly, or no jelly at all. Top with soft thick cream dollops, or whipped cream, use any fruit or nut or even lollies for topping decorations... It's a bit of fun, not a rigid haute cuisine recipe.

I'm sorry I didn't take a picture. I got a bit otherwise preoccupied during Xmas. I will say that it looked very pretty, with a ring of whipped cream around the edge, dotted with fresh blueberries and some maple toasted pecans from the market nut sellers. The pecans didn't age well, though. The sugar coating dissolves, and the nuts start to soften. That would be a same-day decoration option, not good for 2-3 days.

The Lazy Way

I know it's all uncool, and serious cooks make their own pasta sauces and curry pastes; and do all their own meat & veg prep from fresh; and blend their own spice mixes from whole spices; and all that sort of thing. But I'm quite a sucker for a nice looking sauce being sold at a market stall. Or a good name on a product in a supermarket. Sometimes this works really well; sometimes it's just OK and a useful time-saver. And sometimes you just want to tip it in the garbage and pretend it never happened.

On the "works really well" scale:
1) Frozen baby peas. Shelling fresh peas is one of those jobs that you need to do in company, or at least with the radio or TV on. I was reminded of this recently when I bought a kilo of peas in the pod from the market. Shelling peas isn't unpleasant work, but compared to the ease of just chucking some frozen peas in the microwave, it's ridiculously laborious. And the frozen ones are more reliable. I was sampling as I shelled (of course) and while some were beautifully sweet, some were insect attacked, and some were mealy and tasteless.

2) Tubs of Thai curry pastes. Honestly, many Thai people use these too. On the advice of a Thai chef, I usually buy Maesri or Mae Ploy brands. Find them in most Asian grocers.

3) Crankypants Adobo marinade. Yum! It doesn't seem to be listed on their website, so I hope they haven't discontinued it. Find them at the Kingston Sunday markets, and the Handmade markets.

4) Herbie's spice and herb blends. He knows what he's doing. Find them at Cooking Coordinates, Manuka Fine Foods and many other places.

5) Ameet's Homestyle curry sauces. I bought a jar of Kashmiri Masala from a lovely young Indian woman with a thick plait of dark hair down her back, at the Growers' Market last week. I fondly imagine that it's her mother or grandmother's recipe, but anyway, it's a small Australian company. There's so artificial colours or preservatives, and it was very delicious. I used some Galloway chuck steak in it.

Less successful things follow.

Reasonable for rush hour:
On the "it's OK" level of the scale, there's a lot of things. Some good examples from the supermarket include:
* Patak's Indian curry pastes
* Some of the Paul Newman and Five Brothers jarred pasta sauces
* Some of the San Remo and Latina refrigerated pasta sauces - the plainer tomato ones, mainly.
* frozen "oven chips", spinach and green beans - but only if the beans are for a longer cooking time, they won't be crisp. In a veggie curry, for example.


Got very close to tipping in the garbage
Foodlover's macadamia satay sauce - to my taste, it is thin and harsh, and the nut flavour seemed artificial, like in those flavoured coffees. But I added lots of peanut butter and lime juice and chilli, and it turned out OK. Hmm, but now I think of it, so would water.

Ainsley Harriot's "citrus kick" couscous - this seemed to be very heavy on citric acid and dried onion in flavour. Not nice at all. If I hadn't had a lot of chilli to cover it up, I might have tipped it out. I never bought it again, and won't now try any others in his range.

Actually tipped in the garbage:
This almost never happens, as I'm against waste. I'll still eat food that isn't very good. It's got to be seriously dire to go uneaten into the bin. That usually means badly burned, or gone off, or well past its use-by date. But one product made it to the bin: Jamie Oliver's tomato and chilli pasta sauce. This tasted to me like tinned tomato soup with a dash of tabasco. And I had such lovely ham and olives waiting to be to put in it that I couldn't bear to spoil them. An ordinary tin of tomatoes was a much better choice.

Cauliflower and/or Macaroni Cheese

This is what we had for dinner yesterday. As I was making it, I remembered that a white sauce or bechamel is sometimes seen as a bit tricky and off-putting, yet there I was doing it entirely by eye. And it worked just fine. Which means not that I am a super-genius chef, but really that it's not all that hard.

Cauliflower cheese is one of those old stock favourites, simple old-fashioned comfort food. So is macaroni cheese. My Mum used to make cauli cheese when I was a kid, and she'd usually serve it with some bacon or fried mushrooms on the side. Combining the cauliflower with macaroni is my idea, though. Sometimes I use a light white sauce for it, much the same as the light parsley sauce that goes with corned beef.


Recipe: Cauliflower & Macaroni Cheese
1/2 medium cauliflower
250g macaroni or other short pasta
Cheese sauce made with about 600ml milk (see below)
30-50g finely grated cheddar or parmesan, to top.

Boil the macaroni until barely al dente.
Split the cauliflower into florets, and steam or microwave until barely done.
Combine the two in a deep casserole dish.
Make a cheese sauce, and pour it into the dish.
Stir to make sure everything is well coated with the sauce.
Sprinkle grated cheese over the top.
Bake at 140C for 1 & 3/4 hours.


Notes: I've often baked it shorter and hotter, but this slower cooking works better. The sauce can split (separate) at the hotter temp. This was also perfect timing to put it in oven, go to dance class, and then come home ready for a hot dinner. I popped in some large chunks of pumpkin, and when I got home all I had to do was microwave some frozen peas. And there's plenty left over for another dinner and a lunch or two.


Not Recipe: Cheese Sauce
OK, if you want to see a proper bechamel, you can find it on the web, or in most basic cookbooks. Your classic cheese sauce is just a bechamel with grated cheese mixed in. You do this mixing off the heat, after the sauce has thickened. Stir well to melt the cheese into the sauce, add a smidge of nutmeg, and you're done. Here's a Delia Smith version.

The good thing about doing it properly is the flavouring of the milk with the onion and parsley. Stodgy old British plain cookery tends to skip this nicety. The bottom line basic is the plain white sauce - here's a site with measurements. What I did this time was much closer to the stodgy Brit version than the French, though I did add some extra flavour.

I whacked a large spoonful of margarine in the saucepan. I was all out of butter, so I had to use the Bloke's anti-cholesterol marg that he keeps for his toast. Which, judging by the sputtering, contains quite a bit of water. Melt it, then stir in about twice the volume of plain flour. Stir over the heat until well mixed. Pour in about 600ml cold milk all at once. Stir very well - in fact, use a heat-resistant whisk. Keep stirring until it thickens. If it's still lumpy, whisk it some more, but it's best to get the lumps out before it gets hot enough to thicken. Add two tablespoons of sherry and half a teaspoon of mustard and stir well.

If it's too thick add a little more milk. If it's not thick enough, a teaspoon or two of cornflour dissolved in a little water will fix it up. A thin pouring custard is about the idea, not one of those premium heavy ones.

Remove from heat and add plenty of grated cheese - I used 50g of parmesan, 50g of sharp cheddar, and about 75g of "pizza cheese". Stir well until cheese is melted and mixed in well. Taste, and add a pinch of salt if you like. I usually add a little nutmeg, but I forgot this time.

This is good for using up loose ends of cheese. Remnants of ricotta or cream cheese can go in as well as the hard cheeses.

Meals from the market

Monday dinner was the slow roast hoggett, with plenty of market veggies. The hoggett was beautiful - meltingly tender. As mint sauce is traditional with lamb, and red currant jelly with mutton, I offered both. Neither were made by me: the mint was from a market stall sometime, and the jelly made by B2 from her home grown currants. I made the gravy. B1 brought us a wonderful dried fruit & booze compote, heavy on the oranges, and some good vanilla icecream. Houseguests P&R bought a cherry pie from Kingston market. A good feed was had by all.

I did a tray of roast fennel and beetroot, another tray of roast pumpkin and potato, and I steamed some broccolini. It was a little tricky and the timing didn't quite work right for the potato/pumpkin tray. The pumpkin was a tad overdone and the spuds were a little underdone. I cut the pumpkin too small, and the start with the 125 degree slow roast, followed by half an hour on 180 wasn't quite enough for the spuds. Oh well. The smallest ones were OK and the rest have been cut up and tossed in the soup.

What soup? The leftover roast soup, of course. I used the shank to make stock for the gravy, and then topped it up with the bone - there wasn't much meat left on it after feeding six. I'm having it for lunch now, in between typing this. I also chucked in the leftover stock and the soaked porcinis from the risotto.

What risotto? Tuesday's dinner was a mushroom risotto using the truffle scented rice, with swiss brown mushrooms, and a stock made from Monday dinner's leftover white wine (thanks, M), some frozen homemade chicken stock and soakings from a few dried porcini. Mushrooms and the accompanying salad were from the market.

And tonight I've got a baked egg & silverbeet thingy in mind, perhaps with a side of baked cauliflower. I need to use up the last four truffled eggs ASAP, while they're still good.


Recipe: Slow roast hoggett
1 leg hoggett
500ml red wine
bay leaf
mixed herb/salt rub

Sprinkle the hoggett all over with the herb rub.
Put the hoggett on a rack over a baking pan, with the wine and bayleaf in the pan.
Cover well with foil.
Put into a 125 degree oven. Leave for 5 hours, removing foil and basting once an hour or so. Top up liquid with water if running dry.
Take foil off and return to oven for another hour.
Remove from oven and wrap well in foil to rest in a warm place for half an hour.

Notes: It will fall apart when carved; I prefer to present it in a bowl for people to serve themselves. No neat slices. For the herbs, I used a native herb & salt rub that I bought in Byron Bay. It has lemon myrtle and mountain pepperleaf, among other things. You could make up your own - I was thinking of a lemon zest, garlic & rosemary one, but I was out of garlic. The rich wine and meat juice mix makes excellent pan gravy.


Recipe: Mushroom risotto
180g truffle-infused arborio rice
1.5 litres liquid (see notes)
1 medium onion
1 clove garlic
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
200g swiss brown mushrooms
75g grated parmesan

Heat the oil and butter in a large pan.
Saute the finely chopped onion gently until just barely golden.
Add the finely chopped garlic and sliced mushrooms.
Saute until mushrooms are wilted, then add the rice.
Stir around for a couple of minutes until it begins to look a little translucent around the edges.
Add a ladleful of warmed liquid, and stir well.
Continue to add the stock mix a ladle at a time until the risotto is done to your taste. This will take 20-25 minutes.
Turn off the heat, stir through the grated parmesan, and let it sit for 2-3 minutes before serving.

Notes: In this case I had 400ml white wine, 500ml chicken stock (at a guess, I had condensed it before freezing), and 600ml water in which I had soaked a handful of dried porcinis. For a veggie version, just use veggie stock. But it's best to taste it as you go, and if it seems too strong or salty at the 15 minute mark, add some water instead. You may not use all the liquids - I chucked my leftovers in the soup.

This was another stealth truffle dish. It's not strong, but it just makes everything that bit better. The Bloke loved it. There's more rice left, so I'll probably repeat this soonish.


Not Recipe:
A variation on leftover roast something soup.
This is a standard use-up, irreproducible, and this one came out brilliantly good. I must have another bowlful.

This variation:
* Stock made from the hoggett shank, leg bone and veggie trimmings, bayleaves and parsley stalks.
* Leftover gravy from the hoggett roast dinner. I couldn't deglaze the roasting tin into the stock, because I'd already used it to make the gravy.
* Stock made from a previous roast lamb dinner, from the freezer.
* Stock, wine and porcini left over from the risotto dinner
* a good handful of pearl barley
* a diced carrot, some frozen green beans, and diced leftover roast potatoes
* the few shards of meat from the shank and bone.

So simple: simmer the barley & carrot in the mixed stocks for half an hour, add the other veggies and meat, simmer until veg all cooked. Eat. Yum. Tragically I have to eat it all myself since the Bloke objects to soup with bits in. But he got the leftover risotto, so he's not suffering.

Old Standards

I have not much to report, since I've been sick again. I sometimes think I should just hibernate until spring. Towards the end of the week I picked up, and I have done a little cooking of the easy kind. I made a chicken curry from paste, and a 3-tins dahl - though it was only one tin this time, as I had kidney beans and home roasted tomatoes and red capsicum in the freezer.

I also made some more muffins this morning - these ones are blackberry and lillipilli. I used the same recipe as for last week's cranberry and orange, except with blackberries swapped for cranberries, and a half jar of lillipilli jelly for the marmalade. And no orange flower water and sugar - the jelly is sweet enough for me. Though I did add sprinkle of cassia & sugar on top. Also, I left the oven on a sensible temperature, and they were nicely done in 20 minutes.

This dahl and the generic muffins are old standards that take very little thinking. The other old standard was the takeaway the bloke bought from the our favourite pide house, TurkOz in Dickson. Spinach and cheese, and lamb, tomato and capsicum pide, and also some bread and hummous. I used some of the bread to make cheese, chutney and parsley toasties. Lots of parsley. Parsley is high in vitamin C and iron, and it is too a salad vegetable!

Don't Clean The Stove!

Not while baking, anyway. The stove still had a few sticky patches from yesterday's chutney - on the oven door handle, so I didn't notice it yesterday. This morning when I popped a batch of muffins in, I noticed the stickiness. So I grabbed a sponge, wiped away, and cleverly managed to shift the temperature dial from 190 to 230. So there I was, sitting in the lounge, confident that the timer would go off in good time to test them. Not being in the kitchen, I didn't even get the smell cue. Bugger.

They were not burned through, so trimming off all the burned bits was actually possible. I cut off the tops and scooped out the crumb - I had two inside bits of muffin and a couple of feijoas for breakfast. Obviously I wouldn't present these to guests, but it would be a waste to just chuck them in the bin when parts of them are still edible! It was lucky that I'd decided on Texas muffins, so that cutting off the crusts actually left some muffin for my breakfast.

I had been very pleased with my muffin idea. I had about half a jar of a light sweet orange marmalade left behind by guests, that I was not ever going to eat. Using it in muffins seemed like a good plan. I also found some frozen cranberries at one of the chicken shops at Belco markets a month or two ago. And while I've seen recipes using whole cranberries in muffins or teacakes, I've never made any until now. The berries are very sharp, so the muffin needs to be sweeter than usual to compensate. They are good, really!

The rest of Sunday worked out a bit curate's eggish, too. I went for what should have been a lovely lake shore walk with B2, combined with a visit to Kingston markets. I bought no knickknacks - I really have too much Stuff and ought to prune rather than buy. I was also resistant to the lure of yet more jams, honeys, spice pastes, chilli sauces etc. I need to use some of them up before buying new ones. I did buy some great fat green olives, a crusty Italian loaf with rosemary and roast garlic, and a couple of packs of Wagonga coffee. And for a real luxury, some gorgeous fresh raspberries.

The problem was that although it was sunny when we left, an icy cold rain started falling when we were a good 10 minutes walk away from shelter. Not pleasant at all, we had no choice but to soldier on back to the car. That bit was no fun, and now I've come over all dwarfish. (That's sneezy and grumpy and dopey and sleepy.) Bugger.

Recipe: Cranberry Marmalade Muffins
1 cup white selfraising flour
1 cup wholemeal selfraising flour
1 1/2 cups frozen cranberries
1 egg
4 tablespoons sunflower oil
4 tablespoons sugar
1 1/2 cups milk
1/2 cup orange marmalade
1/2 teaspoon orange flower water
* Preheat oven to 190C.
* Warm marmalade slightly so it will mix easily - 30 seconds microwave.
* Mix marmalade, milk, oil, egg and orange flower water well in a small bowl.
* Mix flours and sugar in a larger bowl.
* Mix cranberries through the flour, toss to coat.
* Mix liquids through the flour mixture
* Spoon into 6 Texas muffin cups
* Bake for 25 minutes or until done


Notes: Don't turn the oven up!

Feijoas, Green Tomatoes and Cauliflower

I've been on a spree to use things up. The things I had were feijoas and green tomatoes from the garden, and an old cauliflower, bought to make roast cauli with almonds, to go with a chicken risotto. But I didn't get around to making it until this week, and the cauli had gone rather limp. I bought a small fresh half to make the roast veg, and relegated the older one to soup.

I was quite happy about this, as we'd had a lovely curried cauliflower soup while visiting friends in Melbourne. It was a novel idea to me: curried parsnip is a classic, but cauliflower? I couldn't quite remember the details, but we had a a brief email exchange and A reminded me that coconut was the missing element. I went on to make a soup inspired by hers, rather than the exact same soup.

I got the green tomatoes from my plants. They went all brown and crinkly one night, so we must have had a frost. The feijoas just fell out of the sky. Well, OK, the tree. But you find them on the ground.

Feijoas are very popular in New Zealand, and the trees grow quite well in Canberra. They're bushy and evergreen, and have pretty flowers with a central fireburst of red stamens. They do like a reasonable amount of water to set good fruit, so the one in my back garden closer to the water tank did much better than the one down the side.


The fruit is always green. It simply falls off the tree when it is ripe. If you try to pick it, then if it just falls off into your hand, it is ready. Or you can shake the tree. If the fruit falls onto cement it will get bruised, but a good mulch ground cover is enough to protect most of it.

I've been eating the larger better ones straight. They have a sharpish rather guava-like taste, and as with guavas you can eat the whole thing. I was intrigued to read that if you peel them and mash the pulp you can use it as a substitute for mashed banana in baking. I haven't tried this, and I won't until next season as I've either eaten them all or chutnied them. Unless someone gives me some, that is. There were some in the supermarket this week, but the prices are ludicrous. It's only worth it for homesick NZ expats.

When you cut a feijoa across the middle, the pulp inside is white to cream, with a four-quarter pattern of softer gel-like flesh around the seeds in the centre. It also browns with air exposure: the ones in the picture are just starting. If this centre is obviously brown, it is overripe. Bruised pieces will be brown generally, not just at this centre - these can be trimmed and the good bits used.

I managed to salvage 750g of usable fruit from a kilo of feijoas, and I turned it into a dark spicy chutney with some dried fruit, onion and green tomatoes. I got the idea for the recipe from a NZ morning TV show site, but it was one of those annoying ones with weird quantities. What on earth is a packet of currants, or ginger? I decided to just wing it. Chutney is pretty flexible - it's even easier than jam as you have no need to worry about pectin. It's just boiled down to the texture you want, and that's it.

Recipe 1: Curried Cauliflower Soup
1 medium-large cauliflower
1 medium onion
1 stick celery
1 tablespoon schmaltz
375 ml chicken stock
375 ml coconut milk
375 ml milk
2 tsp curry powder
pinch salt
* Chop onion and celery and fry gently for a couple of minutes in the schmaltz.
* Add chopped cauliflower and stir fry for another few minutes, until golden tints occur.
* Add the curry powder and fry another minute, making sure it does not catch.
* Add in all liquids, and bring back to boil.
* Cook until the cauliflower is just soft.
* Puree to your desired consistency, and add salt to taste.

Notes:
Schmaltz! I love that word. It's yiddish for chicken fat, and I had some from the top of the homemade stock. I actually used the stock to make the risotto, and used a tetrapack for the soup. If you have no schmaltz (or are a vegetarian), some nice fruity olive oil would be good.

I used a stick blender to puree it to a rough porridge texture. You could take it smoother if you like, with a blender. If you like the rougher texture, a potato masher will also work fine.

A's soup has a potato and a bayleaf, too. There's no reason you couldn't use some other vegetables. Parsnip might be good...


Recipe 2: Feijoa and Green Tomato Relish
750g feijoa
530g green tomato
230g onion
200g dates
150g currants
250g crystallised ginger
--
2 cups malt vinegar
1 kg sugar
2 tblsp treacle
--
1 stick cinnamon
2 tsp cassia
1 tsp cayenne
2 tsp garam masala
1 tblsp mustard seed
* Cut the feijoa, onion and green tomato into small dice.
* Chop the dates and ginger into smaller pieces
* Toss in a non-reactive saucepan and add the vinegar and spices.
* Simmer for 20 minutes, or until fruit is softened.
* Add the sugar and treacle, and boil moderately until the mixture is a loose jammy consistency.
* Discard cinnamon stick, and allow to cool slightly.
* Pour while still warm into well-cleaned hot jars.

Notes: The exact amounts are merely what I had once I'd cleaned and chopped the fruit & veg. Roughly similar quantities will be fine - chutney is so flexible. Swap in any dried fruits you prefer, use green apples instead of green tomatoes. Use cider vinegar for a lighter flavour.

I bought some crystallised ginger to do this, as the lot I was given by my Easter houseguests is so good that I am eating it as an after dinner sweet. I whizzed the ginger and dates in the food processor to chop them finely. You can leave the mixture part-cooked during the reducing stage, and heat it up again next day to finish. (Pan must be non-reactive - enamel or stainless steel - or the vinegar will attack it.) Ideally leave it for a week or two before eating, but if you have some nice bread and cheese waiting, well, what can you do?

Farewell my pantry

It was a good pantry. With a light in the top, and wide U-shaped shelves so you could still reach things at the back at the top. And now it looks like this. It's at the right, a mere empty frame where the new laundry door will slide in. There is no replacement coming up in the immediate future: I'll be living with shelves in the laundry until we re-do at least some of the kitchen.

It's not so easy to cook with all the ingredients in boxes on the floor. I managed a stirfry on the day the pantry went, and we've been eating the chilli. Tonight I've got ham steaks. I know I've said "never buy ham steaks", but these are different. Free range pork, from the wonderful Eco Meats at Belco Fresh Food market; they are all lean meat. I'm going fruity with them: panfried ham steak with fresh panfried pineapple, plus some "Ham Jam" spicy cherry relish. Add some spuds and a green salad and we're done. I'm actually cooking one steak for the two of us tonight, and a smaller thinner one for 'Ron. I'm going to brush it with Hoi Sin, and pretend it's BBQ pork, and slice it up into a laksa. I usually make laksa with a pre-made paste from the Asian grocer; but maybe one day I'll make a project of it and do my own.

I've also made the bright green pea dip "poicamole" from Clotilde's Chocolate & Zucchini. It's dead easy, and very nice as a dip or a sandwich spread. Note that 300g baby peas only need about 5 minutes to microwave from frozen, if you choose that over the steaming that she recommends.

Today's harvest was 2 figs, the 400g rhubarb, and two medium-small zucchini. It's not much, but at least I'm keeping up with it easily. Today I'm cooking up the rhubarb with four old pink lady apples, to make some breakfast stewed fruit.

I'm microwaving it rather than roasting. I have no tomatoes left over to roast this week, since I used them all in the chilli, and I prefer not to use the oven for a single small dish. It seems like a waste of electricity. The microwave is very energy efficient, and works well on most things that you'd usually steam or boil.

I just chucked the cleaned chopped apple & rhubarb in a glass bowl, with a scant 1/4 cup sugar and a drizzle of Bundaberg ginger beer syrup. Nuke it for 5 minutes, stir, test, keep nuking for 2 minute blocks until it's done. The hardest part was finding the box which had the sugar in it.

This is rather haphazard, and depending on the variety and freshness and fineness of chopping of the apples, you might not get both fruits cooked at once. But it's only for me and I don't care if the rhubarb turns into a sauce. Cooking is much less of a fine art than people often think - perfection is hard, but "reasonably edible" is almost guaranteed with a bit of common sense.

Real Blokes Eat Quiche. And Burgers

Especially a decadent rich quiche. I made a caramelised onion, chargrilled capsicum and brie quiche, and it met with blokey approval. I haven't made a quiche for ages; they tend to be rather rich and heavy. This combo was no exception, but very good. You can do more or less work on it as you buy or make the fillings. On this occasion, I used caramelised onion marmalade from a jar, and grilled my own capsicum, but you can also buy capsicum in jars, or from deli counters. Look for the antipasto sections.

Recipe 1: Caramelised Onion, Roast Capsicum and Brie Quiche
1/4 cup caramelised onions
1 very large red capsicum, grilled and peeled
125g pack Brie-style cheese
3 eggs
150ml milk
pinch salt
20cm pastry case, blind baked
Cover the base of the pastry case with the onion. Add a layer of chopped capsicum. Mix the egg, milk and salt well and pour in. Arrange the sliced brie on top.
Bake at 180C for 30-40 minutes, until filling is set.

Notes: The cheese will melt, so a test knife may not come out clean. If you want to be super-decadent, use cream instead of milk.

To make the capsicum, char it over a gas flame - I just drop it on the burner and turn over regularly to make sure all sides are done. The skin can go quite black. Put into a plastic bag and twist it closed. Leave for 5-10 minutes, and then peel. The blackened skin will mostly just flake off, and the rest will peel easily. Also, oven-roasting them is an easy option, if you are preparing in advance. Skins peel off very easily from a well-done capsicum.

How do you make a pastry case?
Recipe 2: Pastry Case
2 cups plain flour, plus a little extra
1/2 cup butter
iced water
This is the simplest pastry I do, and it's even easier in a food processor. Dump flour in the processor, add roughly chopped butter, and whizz until it's mixed well. It sort of looks like breadcrumbs. Add iced water - start with a tablespoon, whizz it up again, and then add teaspoons as a time until the dough just comes together. The amount of water varies with the weather, the type of flour and butter, the phase of the moon, and the number you last thought of.

Remove dough, knead very briefly, and let it rest for half an hour. Roll out on a floured board or benchtop to make a pastry case size; trim and edge by pressing with a fork. You'll probably have enough leftovers for a small turnover or something. (I made a rhubarb & raspberry jam turnover with the trimmings.)

Prick the pastry gently with a fork, not going all the way through. Line the case with baking paper and pour in some pastry weights or dried beans. (You can't cook the beans later, but you can save them to re-use as weights.) Bake at 200C for 10 minutes, remove weights. If you are going to return it to the oven with a filling, bake for another 5 minutes. Otherwise, if you will fill it cold, with no further cooking, give it 10 minutes.

So that was the quiche - serve with a salad, it is rich. We actually ate mostly vego all week, though not 100%. I rummaged through the freezer when we got back from Corinbank, and converted some leftover wallaby curry with lots of sauce and little meat into a veggie curry. So it was a curry, this quiche, and then there was also a wholemeal pasta dinner.

I've never had any luck with the dry kind of wholemeal pasta - I can never cook it right, it was too raw or total mush with nothing in between. But the Latina wholemeal ravioli with ricotta and spinach worked pretty well. I'll buy then again. I made a simple roast tomato, onion, zucchini and fresh basil sauce for it.

We did this diet switch on medical advice for the Bloke, and he didn't object much. But when the tests came back negative, he wanted a burger, stat! So I made us cheezburger last night. In this pic: cheezburger, made with Belted Galloway beef mince and my favourite supermarket cheddar - Bega vintage strong'n'bitey. Also, McCain's heart-healthy oven chips, baked with a good shake of Crankypants cajun seasoning, and a salad.

Classic Chicken Cacciatore

Yay! Cooking again. I'm planning reheatable things, because of the constant business of evening rehearsals and events. Last week was a total no-show on the cooking, except for some roasting of tomatoes, another kilo of rhubarb from the garden, and a few old beetroots.

And they weren't even my beetroots - B1 gave them to me when she went off to Adelaide for a week. They did come in handy: sliced up and sprinkled with white balsamic, they made an excellent salad with some mixed leaves (mostly spinach), brown "kumatoes", and Dutch semi-hard goats cheese. Toss over an extra virgin olive oil and lemon juice dressing, serve with a bit of bread and butter and it's a good lunch. Is that cooking? Mmmm, I guess it wasn't a total non-event, then.

I was out to dinner last night, and the conversation turned to cooking skills, and the ability to look in a fridge and produce a meal from whatever's there. So this morning I felt obliged to live up to my words, and use some things up. Zucchini from the garden (and two from B1's, damn her), the roasted tomatoes, some olives, a cup or so of flat pink champagne, a few bits of salad... It sort of said "Italian" to me, and I started thinking chicken cacciatore.

With that in mind, I toddled off to market with B1, only to find that preparation for the show has shoved them off site and without electricity. No coffee! The horror! I grabbed a couple of necessities - new season apples, blackberries, tomatoes - and then headed for Belco. Beppe's coffee and berry pancakes restored my sanity, and I was able to buy all the things I thought I needed: mushrooms, fresh basil, and chicken. I had a bit of fun at the Market Gourmet chicken shop watching Dave helpfully joint a couple of chooks for me, in between training a new boy in important life lessons such as "Never get in the way of a man with a knife".

When I got home, I turned to the great Italian classic cookbook, Il Cucchiaio d'Argento, in a quest for authenticity. I was quite surprised to read the recipe. It was not what I thought it would be...

Recipe: Pollo Alla Cacciatora
1 chicken, jointed
25g butter
3 tblsp olive oil
1 onion
6 tomatoes, peeled, seeded and chopped
1 carrot, chopped
1 celery stick, chopped
150ml water
1 flat leaf parsely sprig, chopped
salt & pepper

Brown chicken and onion in the oil and butter, stirring frequently.
Add tomato, carrot, celery and water.
Simmer 45 minutes, or until chicken is tender.
Add parsley, salt and pepper to taste before serving.

Notes: Well, how simple is that? Note the complete absence of olives, mushrooms, capsicum, zucchini, stock, wine, basil, oregano, bayleaves and even garlic! The book does say that this is the simplest version, and in some regions white wine or stock may be used, or sliced mushrooms added. But 90% of the recipes you find on the web include a lot more ingredients and a lot more fuss.

My version so far this time is quite simple. I've used a lot less fat, and the legs and thighs of the two chickens. I also used the roast tomatoes (not seeded, I can never be bothered with that) and 200g sliced flat mushrooms. The flat champagne went in instead of water, and I've added a couple of bayleaves. I have not used carrot or celery. I don't like carrots in this, and the bloke avoids celery if it's not very well disguised. I may add some fresh basil at the end, just because I have it and it is delicious. Maybe some olives, too. Authenticity, schmauthenticity.

The rest of the chickens is being used separately. I've frozen the breasts for later use in stirfries or grills, and popped the frames in a stockpot with the rest of the champers, plus water, bayleaves, an onion and a carrot to make stock. Also on the stove is a recipe-less ratatouille: onion, zucchini, mushroom, eggplant, tomato, bayleaf. I intend to add fresh basil later. I've left out the usual garlic, because I suspect that some antibiotics are giving me a heightened allium sensitivity. Bugger.

I also have some wallaby rump defrosting, which I intend to curry extremely simply by using a Charmaine Solomon rendang paste that took my fancy in the Food Lovers shop. Three things simmering away at once, and another started, that feels better!

More baking: carrots and onions

I've been slowly cleaning out the fridge and discovering things that need using up. Some very nice young carrots from the EPIC market had gone all limp and floppy. I also had some baby leeks and spring onions (the kind with the bulb) that were looking the worse for wear. And a couple of old tomatoes and half a punnet of large cherry tomatoes. These are easy things to deal with.

If you're a regular reader, you know that I roast tomatoes all the time. Cherry tomatoes work too. Since I'm basically reducing them to sauce, it doesn't matter that they take less time than the larger ones. Into the slow oven for an hour or so to caramelise a bit, peel when cool, and squish into a container for later use in a pasta or pizza sauce.

Floppy carrots will come good with iced water. You peel them and cut off the tops, and stick them in a container of cold water. Then it's into the fridge for an hour, or up to several days, even. They came so good that I ate several of them raw as a nice crunchy side to my sandwich lunch the other day. But I also saw a carrot muffin recipe in one of those cheapie supermarket food magazines and I felt inspired. I didn't have quite the required set of ingredients, so I improvised a bit. See below for the recipe.

As for the onions, well, as long as they're not too slimy you can just keep stripping off outer layers until you get to a nice core. I did this and chopped the resulting onion and leek mix fine. I fried them gently in a little mixed olive & canola oil until soft and a bit browned. Then I mixed them in to a beer bread mix, along with a teaspoon of caraway seeds and half a cup of coarsely grated strong cheddar. The beer was Cascade this time. We'll have it for dinner tonight, with some of that Carolina pork from the freezer, and a coleslaw.

I confess that I had to throw out some green beans and plums. They were definitely off. And some bread went moldy. In this weather, it really helps to keep it in the fridge. Mea culpa.


Recipe: Carrot and Honey Muffins
1 cup white SR flour
1 cup wholemeal SR flour
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp allspice
2 cups grated carrot
--
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup sunflower oil
1/2 cup plain yoghurt (low fat Greek)
2 eggs
3/4 cup milk
--
Mix all dry ingredients thoroughly.
Mix all wet ingredients well.
Add wet mixture to dry mixture, stir gently to just combine.
Bake in muffin pans for 20 minutes at 200C, or until a skewer comes out clean.

Notes: Makes 6 large or 12 small.
Tip: honey is easier to measure if you microwave it for 20 seconds to runny. Using an oiled spoon helps, too.

These muffins came out surprisingly well. At first I thought I'd totally screwed up by burning them, and I'm still dubious about whether my oven is behaving itself on the non-fan setting. (Fan setting is still broken.) I made 6 large ones, baked them for 25 minutes before testing, and by then they were all a bit burned on the bottom and a couple a tad burned on top. (Oven is hotter at front than back.)

But it wasn't too bad - cut off the bottom and trim any burned bits, and they are good to go. They're even nicely moist; perhaps that's the yoghurt. They are good with cream cheese - it's almost like having carrot cake for breakfast.

Oh, and here's a bonus. My lunch, a tuna pasta salad. Using up the last of several salad veggies - and now I must go to the shop to restock.

Muesli Bars and Muffins

I've mentioned before that I like to make muesli muffins with the out of date muesli. I have this because every now and then I buy muesli, and eat half the packet. Then I get bored. And I hate waste, so as long as it's just a little stale and not actually gone mouldy or rancid, I'll try and use it up. If you have a good recipe for anything that includes muesli as an ingredient, do let me know.

This time I made these muesli bars and I'm going to record the recipe for future reference. But don't make them, they're not worth the effort. They came out very soft, but by the time they were cold they were nicely solid and crunchy. So that was good. But also they're rather bland, and the dried fruit on the surface is overcooked - chewy and slightly burned. See the little black dots in the picture? That's not so nice. I don't know how people solve this problem to make raisin cookies; I must look that up some time.

My Sunday morning muffins were much more successful. These were in part a use-up: I had half a cup of pumpkin puree in the freezer, leftover from the pumpkin pie experiment. That's why they're so orange. I used a similar spice mix as for the pumpkin pie: cinnamon, ginger and allspice.

While I do sometimes follow recipes, especially for tricky cases like high bran content, muffins can also be a great home for leftover odds and ends. Toss in the last of a jar of honey, that last tablespoon of syrup, some old cereal. Chop up that one dodgy apple, and chuck in the last couple of spoons of rhubarb. Whatever. I have a sort of routine that I use, which I'll put below the fold. I admit it's not perfect: it does tend to produce slightly dry muffins. I think this is because I make them low fat. But if you are eating them hot from the oven, it's not really a problem. Reheat the next day in the oven for best results, or nuke for 20 seconds. They're not so great cold.

My google-fu failed me, and I could not find a recipe for a muesli bar or slice that included muesli as an ingredient. It's all about oats and nuts and dried fruit. I found this one by googling about, and used it as a rough guide to developing my own.

Recipe 1: Muesli Bars
50g margarine
100 ml honey
100 ml golden syrup
50g brown sugar
75g plain flour
600g muesli
Preheat the oven to 180C.
In a pan over a low heat, melt together the margarine, honey, syrup and brown sugar, stirring well until all is melted.
Combine together the muesli and flour in a large bowl and then pour over the syrup mixture. Mix well.
Tip the mixture into a shallow baking tray. Press the mixture down well to get an even spread. Bake for 25 minutes, or until golden. While still warm and soft, cut bar shapes with a pizza cutter.

Notes: Meh. This could work, without the fruit, to make some nice thick oaty cookies. Also, I'd add some cinnamon or something to boost the flavours.


Recipe 2: Muffin of the Week
2 cups self raising flour
2 cups liquid
Some fruit and spice and stuff
Preheat oven to 180C.
Mix everything together quickly, without over-doing it. Add a dash more milk if it's too solid.
Tip into silicon muffin pans and bake for 20-25 minutes until golden.

Notes: This makes 12 small ones or 6 large - the large ones only take about 5 minutes longer.

This week's implementation was:
* Liquid: 1 egg, 1/2 cup pumpkin puree, 50 ml maple syrup, 25 ml sunflower oil, topped up to 2 cups with light milk.
* Flour: just ordinary white self-raising.
* Fruit and stuff: 3/4 cup blueberries, 1/4 cup white sugar, 1 tsp cinnamon, 1/2 tsp ginger, 1/2 tsp allspice
It worked nicely.

One chicken, three meals

An Asian style poached chicken has been the basis of all dinners from Tuesday to Thursday this week. I started this chook on Monday night while we were eating our tomato, olive, mushroom and basil pasta and salad. It's a very easy recipe. It doesn't take much effort, just a little observation and a timer.

On Tuesday, I stripped the meat and used some in the first of our chicken meals: a refreshing cold noodle salad. On the same night, I tossed the bones back in the pot and let the stock simmer down for another couple of hours, before straining and reducing it to about two cups.

On Wednesday, I made steamed rice in the stock, and we ate more of the poached chicken. This was a pretty good meal, and the rice was delicious. Sadly, the accompanying bok choy in sate sauce was disappointing. I bought a jar of macadamia sate sauce from Food Lovers in Belconnen Market, as a small time saving luxury, but I was in a hurry and did not read the ingredients carefully. Macadamia flavouring? Not actual nuts? Oh dear. I'd never have bought it if I'd read the label, but now I have to use it up anyway. It's not vile, just disappointingly lacklustre.

Finally, tonight I made fried rice. I don't do this often, but it is a good way of using things up. And if your rice is as tastily chicken-flavoured as this was, it is totally delicious. A fried egg topper and a swirl of classic Sriracha chilli tops it off. I used the last of Fiona's "green" eggs, nearly a month old but still good. Fi, what sort of chook lays them? I forgot.

I'll put recipes for the chicken and salad below the fold, but really the only one you need is the poached chicken. The rest is improv. To cook rice in stock, you simply put stock instead of water in your rice cooker. Duh. To make fried rice, you stir fry some onion and garlic and vegetables; add cooked meat and leftover cooked vegetables and a splash of soy or rice wine or something; then add the cold cooked rice and stir well, and keep stirring so it doesn't get stuck. I used red capsicum, broccoli, a bit of leftover bok choy, some frozen peas, and a small tin of pineapple chunks. I like pineapple, OK? You don't have to.


Recipe 1: Asian-style Poached Chicken
1 chicken
2 teaspoons salt
1 lemon, whole
3 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced
2 shallots, sliced
a large chunk of ginger, about 2 thumbs in size, washed and sliced
50 ml Chinese cooking wine
water
Wash the chicken, and rub it with salt. Stab the lemon a few times and stuff it inside the chicken with a few slices of the ginger, garlic and shallot.
Put the chicken in a large saucepan and pour over water to cover. Add a good splash of rice wine.
Bring the chicken to the boil rapidly, then reduce heat to a gentle simmer. Simmer for 20 minutes, then turn off the heat and let the chicken cool in the broth for a couple of hours, then refrigerate overnight.
Next day, skim the congealed fat off the broth, and remove the chicken for whatever use you like.

Notes: My chicken was a 1.8kg free-range bird. Smaller or larger won't matter as long as you keep it covered. Recipes often say to skim off the scum as it boils, but I have found that the floating ginger and shallot gets in the way, and there isn't that much scum anyway.

Recipe 2: Cold Chicken Noodle Salad
300g cold poached chicken
150g bean thread vermicelli noodles
1 bunch coriander
few springs vietnamese mint
1 carrot
1/2 red capsicum
cos lettuce to taste
30 ml lime juice
20 ml soy sauce
10 ml sesame oil
1 tsp palm sugar shavings
1/2 tsp chilli flakes
Soak the noodles in cold water for 15 minutes, or until softened to your taste. Strain them and dry them well, and chop roughly. Put in a bowl, along with chopped herbs, chopped chicken, julienne shredded carrot and capsicum. Put lime juice, soy, sesame oil, sugar and chilli in a small jar and shake well. Mix into salad.
Serve salad on a bed of chopped cos lettuce

Notes: Improv! Use other salad veggies, herbs, maybe some nuts, whatever. Use any other cooked meat, or tofu if you must. Mung bean vermicelli comes from Asian grocers, in little bundles, and really does not need cooking at all.