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Archive for the ‘Food & Friends’ Category

Old Friends & Homemade Butter

Posted in Food & Friends, Recipes, tagged , , on February 28, 2009| 7 Comments »

Last night, our friends Kevin, Carol and their Astonishingly Nice Juniors came over for dinner. It was Kev’s birthday, and we were making pizzas to celebrate. The four of us go back a long way – over 25 years in fact. The wonderful thing is, we’ve been close for all those years – this hasn’t been a friendship that has waxed and waned – we’ve seen them regularly over the entire time we’ve known them, and being with them is like being with family. I can say what I think, feel what I feel, all without fear of judgment. We certainly don’t live out of each other’s pockets, but when we haven’t caught up for a couple of months, I find myself missing them. So last night was easy, relaxed and reaffirming – a perfect Saturday night.

As Carol was bringing fruit, I didn’t make a cake for dessert, and opted instead for a batch of Divine Dorie’s World Peace Cookies.

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Pete thinks they would be more aptly named “World Conflict Cookies”, because either everyone fights over them OR you have an internal struggle not to eat five at one sitting. The recipe is from a great cookbook called Baking from My Home to Yoursand was recently discussed on Dorie Greenspan’s blog (there’s a recipe link here). For our batch, I used homemade butter, homemade vanilla extract and Belgian chocolate. As this recipe is quite simple, it really showcases the ingredients, so it pays to use the best you can find.

Homemade butter

This is one of the maddest, most empowering things you can do in the kitchen. Making your own butter is so easy, and yet it always makes me feel like Ma Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie. We never planned to make butter – it’s really just a byproduct of our desire not to waste anything.

Instead of throwing away cream that’s near its expiry date, we now beat it, with just the tiniest bit of salt, in the stand mixer until it splits into butter and whey (start with the whisk and move to the paddle attachment if it gets too thick). Rinse the butter in cold water, then it needs to be beaten to get all the residual liquid out of it. We do this by placing a wooden chopping board over the sink at a slight incline (to allow the liquid to drain off) and smacking the butter on it with wooden gnocchi paddles (one will work, but two is much easier). Surprisingly, the ridged paddles don’t stick to the butter, and the whole process is really quite quick, although it can leave your kitchen an oily, cream-speckled mess.

It really is delicious and worth trying – after all, how often do you get to taste butter which is just minutes old?  But being able to use our own butter in cakes and cookies – that makes me blissfully happy.

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More here : Butter Making #2
 and here : Step by Step Butter Making Photos

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Knitting

Posted in Food & Friends on February 26, 2009|

Small Man is learning to knit.  His first attempt started with 20 stitches, and by row 7, he had 24 stitches, despite having dropped three along the way (no idea how he managed that).  Anyway, I suggested we cast that piece off and start again, and rather than throw it away, I sewed the small knitted rectangle into an egg cosy for him.  It sits on his boiled egg every morning at breakfast and he’s a very happy little Vegemite.

egg-cosy-001

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Fig and Rhubarb Jam

Posted in Food & Friends, Recipes, tagged , , , , on February 25, 2009| 7 Comments »

Last night, Pete made Fig and Rhubarb Jam from Mrs M’s figs. He used all the tarter green figs and about half the black figs (the riper ones), and combined that with a kilo of rhubarb we had in the freezer.

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It’s a nice feeling to reap the rewards of proactive shopping. About six months ago, we bought a box of rhubarb offcuts at the markets – rhubarb retails for $3.99/bunch most of the year, so when we spotted a box with the equivalent of about 40 bunches for $12, it was an easy decision to make. We actually bought two boxes (as you do) and gave one to a neighbour. Unlike him, we washed and chopped up the rhubarb, and stashed most of it in the freezer in half kilo bags. Our neighbour was heading away for a week with friends, so he took his box with him and cooked it up for breakfasts and desserts during the holiday. Needless to say, he hasn’t been that keen on rhubarb ever since.

Most of the fig jam recipes online use dried figs, which isn’t surprising given how expensive fresh figs are. But if you’re fortunate enough to have access to an abundance of them, then this fresh fig jam really is superb.

Pete’s Fig and Rhubarb Jam

  • 1kg fresh ripe figs (green or black) washed, topped and chopped into pieces
  • 1kg washed, chopped rhubarb (make sure you discard the leaves, or they’ll make you sick)
  • 300ml homemade pectin stock (instructions for this are here)
  • 1.2kg sugar
  • juice of 2 lemons
  • juice of 2 limes

Boil up everything except the sugar in a large pot until well cooked. It’s important to make sure all the skins are completely softened before adding the sugar. Add the sugar, and cook at a rolling boil until the jam sets and wrinkles on a cold plate. Spoon the hot jam into sterilised jars, seal tightly, then boil the jars for 10 minutes in a hot water bath. Label and store and eat.

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See our Jam Making Primer for more tips on making jam.

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Pasta Soup

Posted in Food & Friends, Recipes, tagged , on February 25, 2009| 4 Comments »

Every day, something happens to remind me of how blessed my life is. Today it was having coffee with two of my favourite people in the whole world, in my favourite coffee haunt in the whole world. This was followed by a visit to Paesanella, the best cheese shop ever, to stock up on weekly supplies of fresh ricotta, mozzarella and olives. Johnny and Rita are always so kind, and they regularly pass me bits and pieces to cook with. Today, Rita gave me a big bag of ham bones (which she does often, bless her), and I’m going to make pasta soup.

Many years ago, as newlyweds, we saved every cent we had, borrowed money from everyone we knew and mortgaged ourselves to the hilt to buy our old house. It was a deceased estate and by the time we found it, it had been on the market for nearly two years. There was a reason for that, too – it had a tiny kitchen, lots of boxy little bedrooms, no living room, no indoor toilet and no shower. The carpets were rotting away, the side fence had been eaten by a jungle of ivy and the electrical wiring was a fire hazard. We loved it to death and still do, but renovating on a non-existent budget is the folly of the young. At 23 and 24, we happily banged away at the walls and lived cheerfully with hot and cold running cockroaches. But it was pretty tight going money-wise.

It was at this time that we met the wonderful Mrs M. Wonderful doesn’t actually begin to describe her, she was (and still is) an absolute star. She was already in her 70s when we moved in next door and she immediately took us under her wing. One of the things she taught us was how to live on a shoestring and to this day, we still make a variation of her pasta soup nearly every week. Now in her 90s, she is as kind and generous as ever, so I wasn’t surprised (but ever so grateful) to come home today and find a tray of figs from her trees, waiting at the back door. Tonight we’ll have figs and San Daniele prosciutto for entrée, and pasta soup for dinner. And give heartfelt thanks to God for letting us live such a blessed life.

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Ham, Lentil and Pasta Soup

This is less of a recipe and more of a story. Start with bones of some sort – beg or buy some ham or bacon bones from the deli or butcher, and cross your fingers that they’ll have some meat left on them. If not, you might want to pick up some ham to boost the protein content of your soup. Put all the bones into a big pot and give them a quick rinse, then fill the pot with enough water to comfortably cover the bones. Bring it all to boil and let it simmer for about an hour, so that the bones can really impart their flavour. Skim off any scum or fat that floats on the surface.

Once you’ve skimmed the stock, add some rinsed lentils (I used blue lentils – similar to Puy lentils – as they don’t boil down to a complete mush in the pot), prepared chopped vegetables and some spice mix if you’d like. We use a Chermoula spice mix from Herbies, but I guess you could really use anything, or leave it out altogether. The choice of vegetables will depend on what is in the fridge, but will always include onions, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots and celery. At various times, we’ve also added corn kernels, frozen peas, baby spinach leaves, chopped beans, chick peas, rinsed baked beans and zucchini (although not all at the one time!). The vegetables get to cook in the pot for a good half an hour to an hour longer, until the lentils are well done, and the soup is a wholesome brown colour.

At this point, remove the ham bones and strip anything edible off them, and add the meat back into the pot. If there wasn’t much on them to start with, you might want to add the extra ham. Bring the whole pot to a boil, then add half a packet of soup pasta (sometimes we use baby macaroni, other times we’ll use what looks like broken angelhair pasta). I know it doesn’t sound like much, but with all the other ingredients in the soup, that half a packet of pasta makes enough to feed six comfortably (and that’s with Small Man currently eating five bowls at a sitting).

I don’t usually need to add any more seasoning to this, but it’s always good to taste the soup and see if there is enough salt in it. We serve it with a sprinkle of grated Parmesan cheese and a slice of homemade sourdough bread, although lately I’ve taken to stirring in a spoonful of chilli sauce as well. Astonishingly, no-one ever seems to get sick of this soup. We honestly do make it about once a week, and often Small Man will ask the following day if we have any leftovers in the fridge.

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Pizza

Posted in Food & Friends, Recipes, tagged , , on February 23, 2009| 1 Comment »

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Pizza starts with the dough.  Ours is hardly traditional, but we love it.

Pizza Dough for Four (double this to make eight)

•    500g pizza flour (bread flour is ok too)
•    10g instant yeast
•    8g fine sea salt
•    Scoop of sourdough starter (optional)
•    320ml water
•    50ml extra virgin olive oil

The flour goes into a large mixing bowl and the yeast and salt get whisked in.  The water, starter and olive oil are poured into the flour, and the whole lot is squelched together by hand.  This is quite a wet dough, so I knead it by lifting it up, slapping it on the bench, and folding it onto itself.  Over and over and over.  It helps if you let it rest for 10 minutes or so before you start.  The kneading doesn’t take very long, and when the dough is smooth, it’s left to rest for an hour in an oiled covered container.

Once it has doubled in size, the dough is divided into four pieces (about 220g each), shaped into balls, and left to rise again, covered in oiled Gladwrap.

Tomato sauce

Lately we always seem to have tomatoes in the house.  That’s because Jimmy the Tomato Man at Flemington markets is so darn persuasive, and Pete and I feel bad if we don’t buy something from him every week.  I think we’re a part of his weekly cashflow now, and I’d hate to make life difficult by depriving him of the $12 a week we normally give him.  It’s really silly too, because we then spend the week trying to find something to do with 10kg of tomatoes.  At first we were making our own semi-dried tomatoes, then we tried our own passata, and last week Pete made tomato relish, and I made pizza sauce.  Jimmy’s got it made, because Big Boy has pronounced our pizza sauce to be massively better than the “bought stuff”.  Sigh…there’s no going back now.

To make pizza sauce, I roast a tray of tomatoes, which have been cut in half, trimmed and sprinkled with Maldon sea salt.  I usually line the tray with Bake first, to make cleaning up easier.  We have a BIG oven (90cm Smeg – you should see our electricity bill), and it usually takes about 3kg of tomatoes to fill a tray.  These are roasted at 220C (fan forced) for half an hour, then added to a pan in which some chopped onion and garlic have been cooked in olive oil.  The whole thing simmers on the stove for about half an hour, and then it’s pureed in a jug to a smooth paste.

Toppings

The quest for the perfect pizza topping continues.  It doesn’t help that Big Boy won’t eat a pizza with olives and anchovies, and Small Man won’t eat one with onions.  In the end we make one each for them.   I’ve finally moved Small Man off the daft and boring Spanish olives in a glass jar that he used to like, and onto some deliciously salty Kalamatas marinated in oil.  The anchovies are always bought from the Italian supermarket in little glass bottles, and lately I’ve taken to rinsing them before I use them – they’re still salty, but not mouth-puckeringly so.

We used to put ham on our pizzas, but it was never quite right.  Johnny at the cheese shop, our oracle of knowledge when it comes to all things deli related, put me onto coppa, and when that was out of stock, suggested I try pancetta.  Oh my.  The pancetta coupled with the roasted pizza sauce created an astonishingly delicate yet complex flavour, and, to use wine tasting terminology, fantastic mouthfeel.  It didn’t just taste good, it felt good in the mouth when you ate it.  I suspect it has something to do with all the fat on the pancetta, but I tried not to think about that as I was scoffing my eighth slice.

Another perennial favourite is potato pizza.  We use pink potatoes – usually Desiree although we buy Royal Blues on a semi-regular basis as well – peeled and sliced on a mandoline to get super-thin slices.  These are laid onto the flattened dough in a barely overlapping pattern, then topped with garlic oil (a gift from Robyn last Christmas) and sprinkled with some mixed Italian herbs.  If Small Man and I had our way, we would only ever eat potato pizza.  It’s like eating potato chips baked onto crispy pizza crust.  I can’t see how it could possibly be good for you, except for the fact that it often makes us truly happy!

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