Category Archives: Basics

Recipe: Orange and Cranberry Marmalade Bread

Posted on May 9, 2013 | 1 Comment

risen2This bread is a cross between several different recipes, necessitated by the fact that my pantry does not currently contain polenta and that it does contain both marmalade and orange powder, not to mention cranberries.  Also, I like putting oats in my bread so that I can pretend it is healthy, so it got oats.  And rye, because I have this rye flour…

It’s not quite as orangey as I’d hoped, and it’s very, very sticky, and a little structurally unsound for toasting but it’s also entirely delicious and marginally healthy (it has oats!  And cranberries!  It must be good for you!).  And you don’t even need to put marmalade on it for breakfast!

Your shopping list

1 cup of lukewarm water (it should feel just barely warm to your finger)
1 tsp dry yeast
1 tbsp honey
1/4 tsp salt (I actually use less, but you do need to use some, as it keeps the yeast in check)
50 g rolled oats (about half a cup)
300 g bread flour (about 2 cups)
50 g rye flour (about 1/3 cup)
2 tsp dried whole orange powder
65 g cup dried cranberries (about half a cup)
1/4 cup orange jam or marmalade
 
 

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Recipe: Simple Mint Syrup / Mint Cordial

Posted on March 12, 2013 | 2 Comments

drinkThis recipe is a very simple one, born out of the fact that my husband really, really loves mint.  I thought it would be nice to make a fresh, minty drink for these hot days.  Though, having made it, I can’t help thinking that it would be gorgeous added to a rich hot chocolate drink, too.  Or drizzled over berries and ice-cream, for that matter.  Or frozen and churned into sorbet.

Or just eaten with a spoon.  Why bother freezing it first?

Your Shopping List (makes about 2 1/2 cups)

35 g fresh mint leaves – this would be the leaves from one nice bunch of mint, or from two dodgy bunches of mint, which is what I had.
1 1/2 cups white sugar
2 cups water
 

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Posted in Basics, dairy-free, drinks, egg-free, low fructose, nut-free, Recipes, vegan, vegetarian

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Recipe: Golden Snake Bread for Chinese New Year

Posted on February 9, 2013 | 7 Comments

bakedIt’s been a while, hasn’t it?  Apparently, the first week of work was rather more overwhelming than I expected, because while I felt totally fine at work, I was remarkably disinclined to cook when I got home each night this week.  This is particularly sad, because I’m yet to even make something for my own Vegetarian Lunchbox Challenge (fortunately, lots of other people have, so the page is  very much worth a visit).

Anyway, I’ve been invited to a Vegan pot-luck for Chinese New Year this evening by Steph (Edited to add: and it was awesome!), which requires suitable baking.  My initial plan was to make crysanthemum biscuits with red bean paste, but I was unable to find red bean paste, so I tried to make my own, and that turned out to be a big mistake, so I finally decided that instead of doing something that might be authentically Chinese (difficult, since I never cook Chinese food at all), I might as well go with the red and gold and Year of the Snake as my themes.  And how better to achieve gold than with the gorgeousness that is saffron?

I actually have several recipes for saffron bread.  Mostly, they are full of eggs and butter and milk, because this is the sort of bread people make for festivals, and nothing says ‘festive’ like enriched bread dough.  But eggs and butter and milk are not notably vegan, which is OK, because I also have a book of vegan and gluten-free breads with a saffron bread recipe in it.  The trouble with *that* is that it calls for a variety of gluten-free flours that I have not yet been able to find (largely because I was so tired after my first week back at work that I slept until midday and thus missed the various little shops that are only open on Saturday mornings).

So I decided to cross the recipes.  This bread is enriched with almond milk and olive oil, with chia seeds standing in for the eggs in some weird way that I do not fully comprehend but am willing to take on faith for now.  I’ve replaced the currants that are traditional to Saint Lucia buns with cranberries, which are much more red, and instead of the classic braided loaf, this bread is shaped into a rather fat serpent shape.

It tastes like honey, and has a texture like a moister, softer version of pannetone – very soft and tearable and delightful.  I thought at first it would need butter or honey, but it really doesn’t – it’s perfect just as it is, gorgeous and golden and vegan and full of happiness.  What more could you ask of bread?

Your Shopping List

1 1/3 cups almond milk
1 tsp saffron
2 tbsp chia seeds (white is better, aesthetically speaking, for this bread)
2 tsp dry yeast
1/2 cup maple syrup
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup olive oil
4 cups of bread flour
3/4 cup cranberries, preferably unsweetened, or barberries
A couple of tablespoons of almond milk and a couple of raw sugar, optional

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Posted in baking, bread, dairy-free, egg-free, Recipes, vegan, vegetarian

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Recipe: Tuna Salad

Posted on January 6, 2013 | 6 Comments

salad2We’re getting into the really hot days now, when any recipe that doesn’t involve switching on the stove, oven, or even toaster, is a recipe to be valued.  And in these post-Christmas weeks, there is a certain urge towards salad, to balance out all the rich foods we have been eating recently…

This recipe is another one of those embarrassingly simple ones, but it’s so very useful I’m putting it here anyway.  There’s a lot to be said for a recipe that requires no measurements, is portable, and gives you a reasonably filling and balanced lunch at the end of it.  Now, if only I had a really good vegetarian version of this… (stay tuned, however – I have plans!)

Your shopping list (serves 2)

1 lebanese cucumber
1 red capsicum
1 green capsicum
350g – 500 g  (1 1/2 – 2 punnets) cherry tomatoes, any kind, or 3 nice tomatoes
1 x 185 g tin of tuna or salmon, in olive oil if possible
2 x 125 g tins four bean mix
black pepper
1-2 tbsp red wine vinegar

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Posted in Basics, cooking with vegetables, dairy-free, egg-free, everyday cooking, gluten-free, low glycemic index, main courses, nut-free, Recipes

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Recipe: Gluten-Free Flour Mixes (including self-raising)

Posted on September 21, 2012 | 4 Comments

I don’t know if this really counts as a recipe, exactly, but since I’ve been doing a fair bit of gluten-free and fructose-free baking recently, I thought I’d post a couple of my preferred gluten-free flour mixes.  In all honesty, my favourite gluten-free things are often the ones where one uses a lot of nut meal to replace the flour.  I tend to think of these as ‘naturally’ gluten-free, because one isn’t trying to make some arcane chemical mix to replicate what one isn’t using.

Given that a lot of these mixes involve multiple types of flour, many of which need to be sourced from health-food shops, I find the best approach is to mix up a batch of about 12 cups when I am first doing some gluten-free baking, and store whatever I don’t use (ie, most of it) in a large airtight container for any gluten-free cooking I will be doing in future.  These mixtures are thus all very large.  (You can, of course, mix the leftovers from one mixture into a new mixture without any difficulties – just don’t forget that if one mixture has nuts or cornflour in it, this will render the whole lot unusable for anyone with an allergy to one of these ingredients.)

Most of these mixtures also convert rather well into self-raising flour – the trick to self-raising flour, incidentally, is that you need 2 teaspoons of baking powder for every cup of plain flour.  This may possibly be the most useful culinary fact I ever impart on this blog, so do take note of it, especially if you are like me and tend to forget to check that you actually have self-raising flour in the house before starting a recipe that calls for it.   

And if you don’t have any baking powder in the first place, just mix 2 parts cream of tartar with one part of bicarbonate of soda (also known as baking soda), and you are sorted.

If you don’t have cream of tartar, of course, you really do have a problem.  I mean, quite apart from anything else, how will you make playdough without it?

One final caveat – these flour mixes are designed for cakes, biscuits, cookies, and similar.  I haven’t tried them in pastry, so I can’t make any promises about that, and I definitely would not expect any of these mixtures to work for bread – too low protein, and I have no idea how you usefully replace the gluten, this being an aspect of gluten-free baking that has not yet come my way.  Though now I’m getting curious…

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Recipe: Easy, Yet Awesome, Tangy Lime Guacamole

Posted on July 4, 2012 | Leave a comment

This barely qualifies as a recipe.  It has two ingredients, other than seasonings, and the method could be summed up in a single sentence.  Except, this is me, Catherine McWordy, writing this, so we all know that I will rabbit on randomly about nothing in particular regardless…

Basically, I had this kaffir lime, and these avocadoes, and this vegetarian chilli in need of a guacamole, but I was too lazy to do anything elaborate, so I just made this, and then it tasted really good and really *interesting* – I love how perfumed and tangy kaffir lime is – and it was too late to take photos.  You will have to imagine it for yourself.  Or make it, of course.

Your Shopping List

2 ripe avocadoes.  If you know how to tell from the outside the point at which an avocado is ripe but not browning, you are a wiser person than I am.
1 kaffir lime
salt and pepper to taste
 

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Posted in Basics, dairy-free, egg-free, gluten-free, low fructose, low glycemic index, nut-free, Recipes, sauces, toppings and frostings, vegan, vegetarian

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Recipe: Mayonnaise with Roasted Garlic, Tarragon, and Hubris

Posted on February 19, 2012 | 4 Comments

Hello!  It’s been a while, hasn’t it?  Unfortunately, I forgot, when I started this blog in the slow season at work, that there would come a time of year when I would be drowning in a seemingly endless sea of grant applications.  The nice thing about this time of year is that I get to feel useful – I’m really good at organising grants, and I actually quite like talking new postdocs through the application process.  Another nice thing is that I work up so much time in lieu that I get to have a little holiday at the end of this period.  But the flip-side is that I am working long hours, in addition to all my usual sidelines, and this leaves little time for cooking, let alone blogging.

And then we get days like last Thursday, when I had a totally brilliant idea for dinner while I was still at work, and sent Andrew out to buy the ingredients while I was at choir.  I was going to make my amazing pan-roasted fillet steak salad with home-made mayonnaise, and in my head, I had already started drafting my cheerful, friendly, reassuring post about how, despite what you may have heard, mayonnaise is actually really *easy*!  I’ve made it five times, and it has worked without a fuss every time!  And here are my secrets!  I even had a delightful little side comment about saving the egg-whites for meringues or, if one was feeling ambitious (as indeed I was), for macarons!

Ha, I say, and Ha again.  I got home on Thursday night and found that my lovely husband had indeed bought the ingredients I didn’t have, and had roasted the garlic, just like I had asked him to.  So I settled down to make mayonnaise.  I even took photos! And it didn’t work.  Not even a little bit.  And I have absolutely no idea why.  So I threw out the first batch and tried again.  This time, I know exactly why it didn’t work.  Apparently, adding way too much vinegar very early in the piece ruins everything.  Since I no longer had any roast garlic left, I grimly added another egg yolk, and decided that it was time to get out the beaters, rather than using the fork method.  And finally, finally, it came together.  I was so relieved that I promptly flicked a large dollop of the mayonnaise into the egg-whites which I was so frugally reserving for future meringue needs (and this is why you should cover things you leave on the benchtops, even if it’s only going to be for a few minutes)…

So yes.  Do try making mayonnaise.  It’s delicious when you make it at home, and so exciting when it comes together.  But if it’s late at night after a long day of work and choir, I strongly recommend having some of the good quality bought stuff to hand.  It will save you a great deal of frustration…

Oh, and one final confession.  After all that, I no longer had the faintest idea what quantities of olive oil I had used in the mayonnaise!  So I have come up with my quantities by looking online and through my cookbooks until I saw something that looked about right.  And on my merry way, I ran across this website which talks a lot more about how egg yolks emulsify things, and it’s all very fascinating, so I think you should have a look at it – though I don’t recommend using 100 cups of oil for each egg yolk…

Your shopping list

1 bulb of garlic
olive oil for roasting garlic
1 egg yolk (make sure it’s fresh, and please get free-range if you possibly can)
1/2 tsp sea salt
1/4 cup grapeseed oil
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/4 cup olive oil (you may need a little more to get the consistency you like)
1 tsp white wine vinegar
black pepper and dried tarragon, to taste
 

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Recipe: Pizza Serafina (Sultana pizza)

Posted on January 24, 2012 | 4 Comments

Sultana pizza

I work in a Medical Research Institute, and the nature of research is that people travel a lot for their careers.  My current Divisions include scientists and students from France, Germany, Switzerland, Algeria, China, New Zealand, Sweden, The Netherlands, The Cook Islands, Afghanistan, Japan, Brazil, England, the USA, Serbia, Spain, Iran, India, Scotland… oh yes, and a few Australians. (I’m sure I’ve missed a country or five in there, actually).  And of course, at least half of the Australians  – myself included – in the lab have parents who were born overseas.

So tomorrow we are celebrating Australia Day a day early by having a lunch for our two Divisions, with everyone bringing a dish from home.  Wherever home is for the person in question.  (I wish I could say this was my idea, because I think it is absolutely wonderful, but one of the RAs came up with it, and more power to her.)

As it happens, I’m one of the few people in the lab who is of Italian extraction, and since food from home often means food of one’s childhood, I’ve decided to have another go at making my Nonna’s pizza recipe.  So far tonight, it’s been a case study in why you should add the water gradually, but we’ll let that pass for now. 

Nonna, as I believe I’ve mentioned before, had two traditional pizzas she made  for us when we visited – one topped simply with oregano (green pizza), and another topped with tomato passata (red pizza), and maybe the odd olive or anchovy or pepper.  (It’s the cuisine of poverty – you don’t have many ingredients, but you make the best of the ones you do have.)  But she was also very fond of spoiling her sweet-toothed grand-daughter, so when I was quite little, she invented a sultana pizza which she would make at the same time.  I’ve never really grown out of it.  I’ve also never made it successfully, largely because until recently, the only recipe I had for Nonna’s pizza was extremely vague – Nonna knew all the quantities by feel and cooks pizza ‘until it is done’, which is not very helpful to the novice cook!  The recipe I have now (via my aunts) has actual quantities for everything except the water, and, as I will explain later, I’ve learned this evening just why the water measurement is as vague as it is – so I’m hoping I’ll get it to work (I’m writing this while I wait for it to rise the second time).  I’m also going to make oregano pizza, of course, but what I’m truly hoping to feed my colleagues tomorrow is my Nonna’s sultana pizza – pizza Serafina!

Your Shopping List

2 small potatoes (about 165g)
1 kg bread flour
1 tbsp salt
35 g fresh yeast (the kind that is a beige, spongey block, not the powdered kind)
100 ml olive oil, plus more for your hands.  Oh yes, definitely more for your hands.
‘Enough water to make a sticky dough’.  This is somewhere between 450 and 550 ml.  Which is to say, it was 550 ml a couple of weeks ago, but tonight that turned out to be way too much and my dough is impossibly sticky and I couldn’t knead it properly at all.
2 tbsp oregano, or 175 g sultanas and 2 tbsps raw sugar, or about 500 ml passata, or pick two of these options and use half of the quantity.

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Planning and Pizza

Posted on January 5, 2012 | 5 Comments

I was hoping to write more here while I was on holidays, but the combination of my usual December activities, plus confectionery, plus the funeral, all followed up with several days of drainingly hot weather have left me more exhausted than I could have imagined.  The notion that I might, at some point, not be tired doesn’t even seem possible.

Still, tomorrow is a Shakespeare evening, and having been completely uninspired all week, I’ve decided to simply celebrate the last of Shakespeare’s Italian plays (we still have Coriolanus, of course, but that is Roman, which is a whole different cuisine) by doing a proper Italian-style feast in the manner of my Nonna or my aunts.

Be afraid.  Be very, very afraid.

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Basics that aren’t: Scones

Posted on July 2, 2011 | 10 Comments

This recipe doesn’t come with pictures, because the first thing you need to know about making scones is that the faster you make them, the better they taste.  That means no stopping at every step to take the lens cap off the camera, switch it on, figure out the light levels, and take a photo, or at least, not if I want a creditable scone at the end of the process.

Scones are one of those things that are incredibly quick and easy once you know what you are doing.  Prior to that point, they are… rock cakes.  At least in my experience.  I figured out how to make good scones about two years ago.  This coincided with me getting a new oven that actually cooked things at the temperature it claimed to, and also with me being given three pieces of advice on scone making. Scientifically speaking, therefore, I cannot be conclusively sure that one actually does need to do all the things I think I need to do to get a successful scone (for example, I have my doubts about the need to wear a complete set of sequinned undergarments during the process) (yeah, OK, I made that bit up, and I’m pretty sure it’s poor advice anyway, because I can’t help suspecting that sequinned undergarments would be really uncomfortable, which might slow down your scone-making).  On the other hand, I do know that when I follow all these steps I get good scones, and as my spirit of scientific enquiry is  regrettably outweighed by my culinary ego (which refuses to take the risk of making bad scones, even for the greater enlightenment of you, O my readers), the truth about scones must necessarily wait to be revealed by a more rigorously-minded cook than me.

The recipe that follows is taken from Margaret Fulton, but with excess verbiage because I’m the one writing it.  Well, also because there are a few details which she misses out and which I think are important.  Still, I stick religiously to her quantities, because these are also the first (and so far, only) scones I have made successfully.  Which isn’t to say I don’t add all sorts of things to the recipe, of course…

Your Shopping List

60g butter (at room temperature, or chilled – either works, but room temperature is easier)
3 cups of self-raising flour
a pinch of salt
1 1/4 cups buttermilk
a little milk, to brush on top

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