Monthly Archives: May 2012

Pressure Cooker!

Posted on May 29, 2012 | Leave a comment

OK, it’s official – I love my pressure cooker.

What pressure cooker?  I hear you ask..

That would be the one I bought because I really wanted a slow cooker and thought one which had a pressure cooker option might be nifty.  So far, I have used the pressure cooker function twice, and the slow cooker function not at all.  And now that my slow cooker cookbooks have arrived,  I am eyeing them off to see how the recipes might convert to pressure cooker recipes…

Expect recipes – actual savoury recipes – soon.  At the moment, though, I’m far too busy being enamoured of being able to cook beans in little over half an hour, and without any pre-soaking… which isn’t a recipe, just a delightful and wonderful fact.

In other news, I still have Iceland’s song in my head,  I still have lurgy in my throat, and I’ve just been asked to sing the soprano solos (!!) in a performance of The Messiah later this year (!!!), so all I want to do right now is sing… and really, I can’t.  Not coloratura, anyway.  Which means leftovers for dinner and an early night, so that I can get shut of this lurgy and learn my music.

(And it’s totally weird going through The Messiah looking for soprano solos after thinking of myself as an alto for so long.  I know every single alto or bass aria in the entire oratorio – I learned them all just in case someone, sometime, asked me to sing them – but do I know any of the soprano ones?  Of course I don’t…)

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This time last year…

Ancient Roman Inferiority Complex
More Thoughts on Roman Cooking
Shakespeare Feast: Cymbeline

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Recipe: Unnaturally Blue Curaçao Tart for Eurovision

Posted on May 28, 2012 | 5 Comments

Well, that was really rather a satisfactory Eurovision.  I actually liked Sweden quite a bit, and while I still feel that Turkey and Iceland were robbed, there was a very pleasing mix of the truly bizarre (moonwalking bagpipe players?)  with the unexpectedly good, and not too many power ballads, either.  And for once neither Italy or France embarrassed me (and I did approve of France’s decision to garnish their number with attractive and topless gymnasts).  No costume reveals, but other than that, it was a very good effort, and definitely one of the best Eurovisions I’ve seen

I’m in the throes of a horrible lurgy, so I haven’t been feeling very inventive, culinarily (hence all the desserts with nary a savoury dish in sight.  Savoury is much harder to be creative with).  This meant no painstaking research of Azerbaijani cuisine with a view to feasting thematically.  Instead, I made up a giant pot of vegetarian chilli, cooking the beans in my new pressure cooker (and this deserves a post of its own, because I am so very excited about being able to cook beans without soaking them first), baked a lot of potatoes, and put out salsa, guacamole, grated cheese and corn chips.  Simple.

Still, a Eurovision gathering, however small, requires a suitable dessert, and I believe I may have found, if not the perfect Eurovision dessert, certainly one of the most apt.  This dessert was born when I looked at Nigella’s recipe for Grasshopper Pie and thought – yes, but how can I make this *more* unnatural? (I suspect I am the only person in the world who would ask that particular question…)

For one thing, it’s quite unnaturally blue.  For another, it is exceedingly alcoholic (thus obviating the need for a drinking game – you can simply take a bite of the tart any time there is a key change, or an all-white costume, or a wind machine…).  For a third, it is ridiculously sweet, a bit tacky, and has absolutely no redeeming nutritional value.  (I will leave the parallel to the reader). In short, it embodies the magnificent excess, silliness, sweetness, artificiality and need for alcoholic stimulation that encapsulates Eurovision.  And, in case that wasn’t enough,it has a costume reveal!  Not a very good one, but I can’t blame Eurovision for that.

Also, it’s really easy to make.  And rather tasty, in a my God, I am eating blue curaçao mixed with marshmallows and coated with chocolate kind of way…

Oh, and one last thing.  I should probably confess that I actually like Eurovision.  I even watch it sober (blue curaçao tarts aside).  You may all feel free to laugh at my terrible taste now.  But it’s not about the singing – it’s about the outrageous performances and the sheer strange variety – you really never know what you are going to get – baking grannies, red-cordial-fueled twins, or bat-dancers forming themselves into a boat.  It’s sheer delight, even when it’s horrific.  How could anyone not love that?

Your Shopping List

300 g chocolate ripple biscuits
200 g granita biscuits
75 g dark chocolate (Lindt 70% cocoa cooking chocolate is my favourite) + 125 g for topping
100 g softened butter
200 g white marshmallows!
165 ml milk
185 g blue curaçao
500 ml double cream
smarties, sprinkles, silver cachous, or any other colourful sweets to decorate the top

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Posted in desserts, egg-free, nut-free, Recipes, Special occasions

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Recipe: Eurovision Random Fridge Brownies

Posted on May 25, 2012 | 6 Comments

Tonight is the first Eurovision Semifinal (or rather, it is when they broadcast the first semi-final in Australia), and it is our tradition to watch both semi-finals each year, for the simple reason that so often the true gems don’t get through.  Of course, by ‘true gems’ I mostly mean ‘songs with the highest number of costume reveals, Eurovision key changes, bizarre dancing, violins and ridiculous outfits’, not ‘really good songs’, but if you are looking for really good songs on Eurovision, you are missing the point, I think.

Anyway, we tend to have friends around to help us appreciate the Eurovisual madness, which means I tend to make desserts… generally by dashing into the kitchen in between acts, or when I am bored by an act, to find the next ingredient or stir something in.  The technical difficulty was increased by the fact that I really didn’t plan ahead, and was thus missing a lot of ingredients and making things up as I went along and just randomly using things I found in the fridge.In twenty-second bursts.

The following is my attempt to reconstruct what I did, because these brownies actually turned out surprisingly well, and E. wanted the recipe.  Just for fun, I’m writing up the recipe along with my Eurovision commentaries, because that’s how I experienced it…

Your Shopping (or Fridge) List

225 g chocolate, of which 100 g should be Lindt Intense Orange chocolate
40 g butter
125 g mascarpone
2 eggs (finally, an ingredient which isn’t guesswork!)
1 cup raw sugar (this is also definitely true)
2/3 cup flour
1/3 cup almond meal
2 slices glacé pineapple, chopped
1/4 – 1/3 cup glacé ginger, chopped
1/4 cup glacé cherries, chopped, with the proviso that all these 1/4 cups were, ooh, look what I have half a packet of, wonder how this would go?
smarties, to decorate, because this is Eurovision and one must be colourful.

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Recipe: Friendly Raspberry, Coconut and Lemon Marble Cakes

Posted on May 23, 2012 | Leave a comment

Tomorrow, my workplace is hosting Australia’s Biggest Morning Tea, a fundraiser for the Cancer Council.  Since a lot of my postdocs and PhD students are supported by the Cancer Council in one way or another (and because we are all obsessed with cake), we take this pretty seriously.

Because allergy-friendly cooking is what I do, and because several of my favourite colleagues have serious food allergies, I always make it my goal to bring something that is at a minimum egg-free and nut-free.  And often vegan.  Since last year, another colleague of mine has been diagnosed with coeliac disease, so this year’s cupcakes are nut-free, vegan and gluten-free. 

At this point, you might be wondering if they have anything in them at all.  Of course they do – they have sugar!!!!   (This is why I no longer work in the diabetes research lab.  They black-balled me…)   You might also be wondering if they taste of anything, so you might be reassured to know that other than sugar, they have all sorts of lovely things – raspberries, coconut milk, lemon zest, and my current preferred gluten-free flour mix, which is composed of rice flour, potato starch, tapioca and xanthum, and has the advantage of fading nicely into the background rather than singing loud songs of gluten-freedom and whole-graininess.  (There is a time and place for such songs, but I maintain that marble cake is not one of them).

Also, I have to comment that I am immensely proud of the icing.  It’s a variation on my lemon-coconut-buttercream, which is quite easy, but I’ve actually managed to marble it a little, which fills me with glee.  It’s not that difficult an effect to achieve, either, especially if you are competent with icing (I definitely am not).

Your Shopping List (for 24 cupcakes)

1 cup white rice flour (supermarket-friendly)
1 cup brown rice flour (supermarket or health-food shop)
1/2 cup potato starch (definitely health-food shop, but cornflour would work in a pinch)
1/4 cup tapioca flour (also in supermarket, frequently disguised as arrowroot)
1/4 cup cornflour (supermarket friendly)
1 tsp xanthum gum (health-food shop, no two ways about it)
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarb of soda
pinch of salt
2 cups coconut milk (I use light coconut milk, and it works fine)
2 tsp cider vinegar or lemon juice in a pinch
2/3 cup canola oil
1 cup caster sugar
zest of one lemon
100 g raspberries (defrosted frozen raspberries are actually better than fresh for this purpose), crushed well
optional red food colouring
 
For the icing
500 g icing sugar mixture (make sure it’s gluten free, or all your hard work will be undone!)
125 g coconut oil or coconut butter (back to the health-food shop with you!)
2 tbsp lemon juice
optional yellow food colouring
2 tbsp raspberry juice, or, more likely, about 60 g defrosted frozen raspberries, crushed up with a fork.

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Recipe: Linzer Torte, Traditional and Sydney Road Style

Posted on May 19, 2012 | 6 Comments

Mothers’ Day has never been something we’ve really celebrated in our family (Mum just wasn’t into it.  Maybe because I would have quite liked to do breakfast in bed when I was little, and she feared what I would do to the kitchen?  A justifiable fear, to be fair).  Anyway, this year my mother *did* want to celebrate Mothers’ Day, so to make this much easier for my brother and me, she promptly went gallivanting off to Perth for a ten day holiday, two days beforehand.  (Apparently, the best Mothers’ Day celebration is one that puts a largeish continent between you and your children.)

OK, I should probably stop being cheeky now and get to the point(s) of this post, which are that a) we are doing Mothers’ Day ten days late and b) I decided the most appropriate thing I could make Mum for her belated Mothers’ Day would be her mother’s Linzer Torte.  It’s the perfect gift recipe, because it’s a family favourite, but it’s also really fiddly and annoying to make, and thus not something that any of us make very often.

My philosophy with fiddly and annoying foodstuffs is to make them in huge quantities, so that all that fiddly annoyingness pays off for more than one meal (or one batch).  I therefore decided to triple Oma’s recipe.  But then I started mentally composing blog-posts about it (as you do) and realised that while hazelnuts or walnuts might make interesting variations, the one I really wanted to try was pistachios.  Because who wouldn’t like green pastry?  And of course, pistachios and apricots are absolute Middle East favourites.  It turns out that pistachios make a very fragile, but delicious, pastry.  The one thing I’d do differently next time is not forget to move the biscuits to the cooling rack, so that they will crisp up better.

So herewith, two recipes for the price of one: Oma’s Linzer Torte, and my Sydney-Road inspired Coburger Torte.

(Happy Mothers’ Day, Mum!)

Your Shopping List for Linzer Torte
200 g plain flour
180 g butter
100 g sugar (raw caster sugar is good)
160 g coarsely ground almonds
1 egg yolk (optional, but if you use it you can make meringues with the white!  Or a very, very small pavlova!)
250 ml plum or raspberry or cherry jam
 
Your Shopping List for Coburger Torte
160 g pistachios
200 g plain flour
180 g butter
100 g sugar (raw caster sugar is nice)
1/4 tsp of cardamom (optional, which is to say, I meant to put it in, but forgot
1 egg yolk (optional, but you can use the whites for macarons, and you know you want to!)
250 ml apricot jam
1/2 tsp orange flower water

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Reader, I bought it.

Posted on May 18, 2012 | Leave a comment

The multi-function pressure cooker / slow cooker / rice cooker / electric saucepan / steamer thingie, that is.  Well, it’s on order, anyway.  I’m already dreaming about things I could cook with it (I wish that wasn’t literally true, and I wish the ideas my subconscious mind came up with were anything other than terrible, but I suppose one can’t always dream a recipe and have it actually work).  I’m not sure whether I will use all the functions, but it seemed to me that a slow cooker that had an electric saucepan function would save on the washing up nicely if I wanted to brown things before casseroling them.  And pressure cookers sound fascinating…

Then, of course, I was unable to resist buying slow cooker and pressure cooker cookbooks.  To be fair, the pressure cooker one is justified – it sounds like it’s a whole new way of looking at cooking, and some instruction is certainly required.  But I probably didn’t strictly need two slow cooker cookbooks.  I am reasonably competent at casseroles…

So no new recipes today – it’s been a very long week at work – but I think you can look forward to a number of kitchen-gadget-oriented recipes in the near future.

And cake recipes, of course.  One can never have too many of those.

NB: I told Andrew that I had asked the internet whether I should buy a slow cooker and that the internet said yes.  He rolled his eyes.  I then explained that I did this using my blog and he cast aspersions on my ability to construct an un-biased poll, which I thought was a bit rude.  For some reason, he thinks you people are likely to encourage me to buy kitchen gadgets.  Isn’t that strange?

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This time last year…

Garden to Plate: Jerusalem Artichokes (which reminds me, I’d better start digging up my triffids.  Does anyone want some Jerusalem artichokes?)
Recipe: Three Roasted Vegetable Soups

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Slow cooker, pressure cooker, other cookers…?

Posted on May 17, 2012 | 20 Comments

Kitchenware Direct is trying to make me buy kitchen gadgets. It’s being quite blatant about it, actually.

I’m immune to the allure of roasting tins – I have quite a nice one, thank you – and while I adore Le Creuset it’s so far out of my budget that I am fairly safe.  Also, I do have reasonably good fake Le Creuset for my general cast-iron pot needs.

I’ve been flirting with the idea of a food processor for a while – the one I have is not really heavy-duty enough for the sort of things I inflict on it – but the really good ones are so expensive that I remain un-tempted.

My current problem is with slow cookers.  And possibly pressure cookers, since some of the slow cookers come with a nifty little pressure cooker option.

Let’s face it, the concept of the slow cooker is pretty appealing – you put things in the cooker in the morning, leave it happily stewing away on the benchtop during the day, and when you come home, dinner is ready.  Fabulous!  And just the thing for using all those interesting cuts of meat that need long cooking.  Then, if you have a pressure cooker too, you have the option of instant meals!  Instant meals with *legumes* even!  This does have a certain appeal.

On the other hand, I’m not actually a morning person.  Would I seriously be getting up early enough to set my slow cooker going on a regular basis?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  I suspect this would depend on just how good my first few slow-cooked meals turned out to be.

Also, while the idea of using a pressure cooker for legumes is possibly the most appealing thing ever (I’m not actually a snob about legumes from tins, but for one thing, not all legumes are readily available in tins, for another, it’s fun sometimes to infuse my own choice of flavours into things, and for a third, dried legumes are *really* cheap), I can’t help wondering if the pressure cooker might, in fact explode.

I mean, all that pressure has to go somewhere.  Theoretically, I imagine that they are not designed to explode, but I am not wholly convinced that explosions would not be a likely occurrance.

And if I want to be really paranoid, will my slow cooker set the house on fire while I’m at work?

(on the other hand… imagine slow cooking quinces overnight for a lovely stewed fruit breakfast.  Or rice pudding cooked overnight – I’ve heard you can do this.  Or… oh, believe me, I’m very tempted)

So, O my readers, do any of you meddle with slow cookers or pressure cookers or machines which are a combination of the two?  Do they work well?  Do they produce good meals, or does everything start to taste the same after a while?  Do the pressure cookers explode every day, often, sometimes or never?  How do you clean legumes off the ceiling when they do?  Is there a brand you recommend, or one you hate?  Do you have any truly spectacular things you use them for that I haven’t thought of?

Talk to me!

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This time last year…
Recipe: Lemon coconut buttercream
Review: Serving Up The Harvest, by Andrea  Chesman
Recipe: Arroz Con Pollo with Peas

 

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Shakespeare Post: Much Ado About Nothing

Posted on May 15, 2012
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This gallery contains 1 photos.

I still love this play.  My friends and I saw the Branagh / Thompson version of this at the end of Year 12 (it was part of our big outing after our last day), and adored it then, too.  Though … Continue reading →

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Gluten-free love!

Posted on May 14, 2012 | 1 Comment

What with all the gratuitous gluten-free baking I’ve been doing recently, I thought it was time to make an index of all my Gluten-Free Recipes. I’ve been pretty strict in my interpretation of what constitutes a gluten-free recipe; unless the recipe is naturally gluten-free or I have a very concrete alternative to any gluten-y ingredients, I haven’t listed it.  If you are accustomed to adapting recipes, or are happy using gluten-free flours in baking, quite a lot of my other recipes are very much adaptable, so please don’t feel limited to the Gluten-Free page.

(I am, of course, now feeling very guilty because there aren’t enough recipes in this section… but I think we all know that this will change with time.)

This is the first of several indices I will be making that go by dietary restrictions, so keep an eye on the general Recipe Index drop-down menu for more developments.  Eventually, I will find a better home for all these pages, but that time is not yet…

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This time last year…

Review: Cooking for Kings: The Life of Antonin Carême, by Ian Kelly
Recipe: Chocolate Cake with Bling
Basics that aren’t: Béchamel Sauce and variations

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Recipe: Fruity Macarons

Posted on May 13, 2012 | 12 Comments

Ceçi n’est pas un macaron

I seem to be on a roll with gluten-free recipes at present.  I’m not sure why that is, but there you have it.

I’m going to start by acknowledging that these macarons lack something in looks.  One might say they lack everything in looks, in fact – no foot, and they are kind of on the lumpy side.  This would be because I have never made macarons before *and* didn’t follow the recipe (I know you are all swooning with shock at this remark), but I’m actually so delighted with the flavours and texture I wound up with that I’m posting the recipe anyway.  I can work on the looks another time…

These macarons were inspired by my discovery of freeze-dried fruit powders in a local shop – strawberry and blueberry.  These are surprisingly vivid both in colour and taste, and completely dry, making them ideal for imparting flavour to macaron shells, which aren’t going to work if you add much in the way of liquid.  Then, I had a bunch of leftover egg-whites from making lemon curd last weekend.   I really couldn’t face making meringues after all those sponge cakes, but my Hermé Macaron book suggests using ‘liquefied’ egg-white which has sat in the fridge for about a week before use, so I cheerfully set them aside for experiments this weekend.

These macarons are chewy and moist and very strongly flavoured with fruit.  I’ve put together the blueberry ones with a violet-scented white chocolate ganache that turned out to be an inspired combination, and the strawberry ones were sandwiched with a raspberry buttercream – less inspiring, but pleasingly tangy.

Note that you will need four piping bags for this recipe, and at least one plain nozzle.

Your Shopping List

For the shells
4 egg whites, separated the night before, or up to a week in advance (they will be fine in the fridge for this time, and they are really strangely unelastic, completely unlike your usual egg-white texture)
265 g icing sugar, sifted, and I really mean this.
1 1/3 cups ground almonds (the finest ground you can get)
2 tablespoons strawberry powder
2 tablespoons blueberry powder
3 tablespoons caster sugar
 
For the violet filling
100 g white chocolate
2 tablespoons thickened cream
a few drops of violet essence (sorry, the number of drops really does depend on how strong your essence is, so I can’t tell you)
a few drops of purple food colouring
 
For the raspberry filling
40 g butter, softened
1/2 cup icing sugar – sifted again
50 g raspberries (frozen is fine, but defrost them)

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