Crays too!

Did I mention that it is currently crayfish season as well? Yum!

Crabs, yay!

One of the reasons why my boy and I get along so well is that he loves to catch seafood, and I love to eat it! A match made in heaven.

It is just about time for crabs to be in season again, and I am loving it. The boys went out last Friday in search of the creatures. Pickings were slim - they only found six crabs that were sized - and for some reason we ended up with all of them. I think that C talks up my ability to demolish seafood until all that is left is the shell.

The crab meat was lovely and sweet. He boiled them up to cook and then I ate mine straight from the shell, with a dip of fresh cut garlic and white vinegar.

I try to pick as much out fromt he crab as I can - no wastage. My sister E gave me a handy set of tools, they never saw any use until I met C. Now I have found many uses for them!!

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Fruit mince pies!

Christmas is fast approaching and it is a good excuse for me to make some more fruit mince pies. Yum!

I was unadventurous this year and used the Donna Hay recipe that I used last year. I was hoping that this would make it easier. I still managed to come up with some notes the second time around. See here for the notes from last year.

• I abandoned the thin plastic cookie cutters that I have in favour of my tupperware scone cutter. Okay, it is still plastic but much more durable. I would really like to buy a 7cm metal cutter though for future use with my patty pan tray


• The best way to get the pies out of the tray - if they become stuck - is using a plastic knife. For starters it will not scratch the non-stick coating and secondly the plastic knife that I used bent and was better for getting out the curved bottom pies


• I used my new Kitchenaid food processor to make the pastry. Yay! It was so quick to make the pastry and the motor did not struggle at all


• A second tray would be very handy, as the recipe makes two batches. The tray was hot straight out of the oven and I needed to wash the syrup off the tray before I could use it again! I will keep my eye out for one that is non-stick - E and I saw that Willow has them and so I will try to find a couple after the craziness of Christmas


• I noticed in the current Donna Hay Magazine that she had a recipe for spiced fruit mince pies, with a spiced shortcrust pastry recipe. I had already made my pastry though so too late to experiment this time around


• I could see the benefit of having guides for rolling out your pastry to make sure that the pastry height is even. I always manage to have it thicker in the middle and the edges are thin. The pastry that was rolled first showed the least distortion during cooking so the aim is to cut them all from the same roll

Seafood bonanza

The abalone season here in Perth runs for one hour on a Sunday morning over five weeks. Yep, there is limited opportunity to bag your catch. In previous years it has been a six week season - this year it has been reduced to five due to an increased number of licences.

I am always interested to read the news reports of the opening season, as invariably there are one or two who make the headlines with the excessive amount that they have attempted to exceed the quota!

I have been told that it is not worth trying to cheat as the guys from Fisheries are super keen and make sure that they check everyone as they leave the water. It is good that most people stick to the rules and it means that there will (hopefully) be abalone for us to enjoy in years to come!

To cook up abalone, you need to clean them up, cut off the digestive tract (or poo canal as my grandfather would have probably called it!) and slice them thinly. C then bashes them with a meat mallet until the muscle breaks. They can then be shallow fried quickly and eaten fresh. We like to coat them in a thin layer of flour and cracked pepper before they are fried, and squeeze lemon juice on them once they are cooked. Yummy!

Ricotta and coconut flatcakes with banana and honey

I bought ricotta yesterday and this morning I woke up wanting to eat banana and ricotta hotcakes. I was fairly sure that I had a recipe somewhere and dug up Ginger and ricotta flatcakes with fresh honeycomb out of home food by Murdoch Books. The recipe required me to separate the eggs and beat up the eggs whites, which sounds like too much effort on a Sunday morning, so normally I would avoid it and try something simpler. I was eager enough for the flatcakes though so I persevered!

I decided to halve the recipe though as it was only me eating - the original served four! There was a minor setback though - halfway through pouring the wet ingredients into the dry I realised why it seemed like there was too much - I had forgotten to halve the amount of milk. Oops. I ended up adding more flour and ground ginger to compensate.

Here is the recipe, with correct proportions.

1/2 cup (75g) wholemeal plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 tablespoon caster sugar
1/2 cup dessicated coconut
2 eggs, separated
250g ricotta cheese
165mL milk
2 bananans, sliced
yummy honey (unprocessed)

Sift the flour, baking powder, ginger and caster sugar into a medium bowl. Stir in the coconut, then mix in the combined egg yolks, milk and 175g of the ricotta cheese. Mix until smooth

Beat the eggs whites to soft peaks, then fold into the pancake mixture.

Heat your preferred pancake cooking pan over a low heat. Grease with butter. Pour 1/4 cup of batter onto the pan. Cook until bubbles form on the surface of the hotcake. Flip and cook the other side. Keep going until you run out of batter!

Stack three pancakes onto a plate and top with ricotta and sliced banana; drizzle over with honey and serve. Eat fresh and hot and enjoy!

Notes

• the recipe calls for flaked coconut (toasted) but I only had desiccated


• the honey that I used is White Gum from The House of Honey. They had a stall at the WA Pavillion at the Royal Show this year and E and I sampled their wares. I like to buy local and unprocessed honey. The different flavours are fantastic too - so much more interesting than the bland processed squeezy jar stuff you can get at the supermarket.
  

New food processor

I finally committed myself to a new food processor! I am very excited. It will replace Mum's Breville Beast that I have been borrowing for the last few years.

What I am getting is a black Kitchenaid Food Processor. It comes with three different sized bowls and a few different blades. I think that there will be more than enough to keep me occupied and out of trouble for a while!!

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Nigella's breakast bars

I finally got around to making Nigella's Breakfast Bars. I have been eyeing them off for some months now and have had all of the ingredients to make them cluttering up the pantry.

I did make a few adjustments, although I kept the proportions of ingredients the same.

395g tin condensed milk
250g rolled oats
75g desiccated coconut
100g dried dates
125g mixed seeds (pumpkin, sunflower, sesame)
125g walnuts and almonds

Preheat the oven to 130C. Grease and line a 23 x 33 x 4cm baking tray.

Warm the condensed milk in a small pan. Mix the rest of the ingredients in a large bowl and add the warmed condensed milk.

Spread the mixture into the tray and smooth the surface.

Bake for an hour. Remove from the oven and sit for 15 minutes. Cut into bars.

Notes
- Next time I need to cook the bars for longer. The tops seemd cooked but the bottoms were still rather sticky.
- Yum! The three ingredients that I most notice are the dates, the sesame seeds and the condensed milk, and not necessarily in that order.

Purple beans!

Our first crop of (purple) beans from our garden. We bought a three bean mix and took our chances. Of the seeds that we planted, all but one that sprouted gave us the purple beans! I have planted some more and we shall see if we can produce the other two colours.

Despite the colour they definitely taste like beans, and when they are steamed they lose their purple hue.

Pancakes for one

I thought that I might change from the usual weekend porridge, and made myself a pancake feast! Pancakes are very easy - you need three ingredients for the batter - but do need a little patience, and not too great a hunger, to cook.

1/2 cup wholemeal plain flour
1 egg
1 cup milk (approximately)

Mix all ingredients together in a bowl to make a batter. This mix should be fairly runny. The wholemeal flour requires more liquid than using plain white flour.

Sit batter for half an hour before using.

Heat a pan on a low heat. Grease pan as required with butter.

Pour 1/4 cup of batter onto the pan and allow to spread to a wonky pancake shape. Bubbles should form on the pancake. Cook until these pop and then turn over the pancake.

Once the pancake is cooked, pop onto a plate lined with kitchen paper and cover with a second plate to keep the pancake warm.

Practice makes perfect in getting the heat right and the length of cooking time.

Serve with cut strawberries, banana, caster sugar and fresh lime (or lemon) juice.

A Garden in the City

A few weeks ago I was intrigued to discover the Urban Orchard in the Perth Cultural Centre.

According to the official website, the "...planter boxes are made from recycled waste from other parts of the building works, the plants are managed organically and will be harvested and planted seasonally. This is the embodiment of sustainable community gardening and is a resource for all."

I think that this is such a great idea. The fruit trees and vegetables and herbs are available for all to use and I hope that is is used in a positive way. It is great to bring food production so close to the city.

White chocolate and Macadamia Cookies

Father’s Day (and Mother’s Day for that matter) is always a good excuse to have the family around for dinner. Of course, a good dessert is essential to finish any dinner and since Dad loves chocolate I thought that I would bake something along that theme. I initially planned to make chocolate brownies and serve with vanilla ice cream, but I ran out of time to make them and thought I would make something simpler and quicker – white chocolate and macadamia cookies. Yum!

I looked to Donna Hay Chocolate for inspiration. I had not tried this recipe before and I was a little skeptical about the amount of flour and other dry ingredients. It seemed like a lot of flour to the ratio of wet ingredients but I pressed on. I ended up using my hands to bring the dough together but it did in the end and they baked beautifully!

125g unsalted butter
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup caster sugar
1 egg
1 cup plain flour, sifted
1 cup self-raising flour, sifted
1 cup unsalted macadamias, chopped
250g white chocolate, chopped

Preheat oven to 180C. Line two baking trays with baking paper.

Cream butter, vanilla and sugar. Add the egg and beat until incorporated.

Mix in the flours, macadamias and white chocolate.

Form two tablespoons of mixture into a ball, place on lined baking tray and flatten slightly.

Bake for up to 12 minutes or until just golden. Cool on trays

Chicken soup

For the last week and a half I have been craving chicken soup! So I finally got organised and cooked some up!

Throw four chicken carcasses, three potatoes, two sticks of celery, two small-ish onions, one carrot and a cob of corn into a large pot. Fill with water until the chicken is almost covered and simmer until the bones fall apart. Yum!

Chad hates my chicken soup as he does not like picking through the bones. Me, I think that is the best part!

A packet full of custard

Today, I felt like something sweet, and custard was in my sights! I have to confess to going the easy route and pulling out the custard powder, rather than using egg yolks but really what do I do with all of the egg whites??

A local Western Australian brand of custard is the Fulcreem Co Custard Powder. This is the custard powder that I grew up with. Mum used it to make us custard and she had a special plastic spoon that she used to measure and stir it with. Ahh, memories of childhood.

This brand was cruelly taken off the shelves for a wee while, and we had to resort to other unfamiliar brands. Thankfully the makers of Nurses Cornflour reinstated it on the supermarket shelves! I still have the cut recipes from the Fulcreem box in my tupperware, you can see that they have changed the name to Full Creem and the "Nurses" name is on the new box.

Yum! Anyway I thought I had no cake in the house to eat with it so I broke a biscuit over my custard. It just wasn't the same.

Fresh grapefruit juice

Mum brought over some grapefruit from one of her friend, as she knows that I am a fan! I happily juiced them this last weekend.

Yum.

Fresh grapefruit juice.

Homemade rissoles

Yum! Chad made rissoles for our dinner tonight. We made use of the food processor for a change to shred the bread and slice up the onion and capsicum. The mince we used was given to us by one of his mates. They have a farm down in Collie and were kind enough to gift us mince and sausages the last time they slaughtered a cow!

He topped it off with maashed potato and steamed vegetables and a splash of tomato chutney.

Peach flowers

It is that time of the year again. The peach tree is in bloom. I am looking forward to lots of fruit this season. They are small and sweet and do not last too long once they are ripe.

Jamie's roast chicken

Earlier this week I felt like eating roast chicken. We had lamb out so I made do with a lamb stew and saved up the chicken roast until Sunday evening!

I did a quick search of my cookbooks and failed to find a roast chicken recipe, so I turned to the internet and Jamie Oliver for some inspiration. I used his recipe for Roast chicken with lemon and rosemary.

1.2kg free range chicken
900g potatoes
1 large lemon
1 bulb garlic, broken into cloves
handful lemon thyme
olive oil
handful rosemary sprigs, leaves picked
1 carrot


Boil a large pot of water. Preheat oven to 190C.

Cut the potato into golfball sized pieces and cook with the whole lemon and garlic cloves for 12 minutes.

Drain and allow to steam dry for one minute, then remove the lemon and garlic. Return the potato to the pan and toss. According to JO this will help to crisp up the potatoes when they are roasted.

Stab the lemon ten times. Pat the chicken down with kitchen paper and rub it with olive oil. Put the garlic cloves, lemon and thyme into the cavity. Place the chicken on a rack in a roasting tray and bake for 35 minutes.

Remove chicken and rack from the tray. Add the potato, carrot and rosemary leaves and coat with the fat in the tray. Replace the chicken and rack into the tray and bake for a further 35 minutes.

Notes
- JO = Jamie Oliver
- lemon, thyme and garlic all fresh from the garden!
- I skipped the part where JO salts the chicken
- As soon as I placed the lemon in the water I could smell it
- Far too many potatoes! This meal would feed four. JO suggests 2kg of potatoes for the recipe and I used less than half and still think it was too many.

Beety

Beetroot from our garden! Chad has been nagging me for a while to eat it, and this week he pulled out a couple to force me to cook them.

It has been sitting in the garden for a little too long! I steamed the beetroot and they were a little bit bland and woody.

I think I need some more interesting recipes.

Cauliflower soup

Inspired by the spicy lentil soup that Chad made, I thought that I would try a recipe from the AWW Soup Plus cookbook. The Cauliflower soup stood out for me, and it seemed quite simple so what could go wrong?

I confess to feeling skeptical about the flavours, the ingredients are fairly basic and I was concerned that the flavour in the meal was from the bacon and cheese toasts that you prepare to serve as an accompaniment.

Sadly, I was right and this soup is bland. It tastes like pureed and watered down cauliflower. Personally I prefer my cauliflower with lashings of cheese.

There is leftover stale bread and hopefully I can make some jarlsberg cheesies to go with it... but I have such a huge pot of the soup that I do now know how I will make it through the whole lot. Maybe add some bacon??

1 tablespoon oil
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 large onion, chopped
1kg cauliflower, chopped coarsely
1 large potato, chopped finely
750mL chicken stock
750mL water

Heat oil in a saucepan. Fry onion and garlic until onion is translucent. Do not brown!

Add cauliflower, potato, stock and water. Bring to the boil and turn down the heat. Simmer for 15 minutes, or until the vegetables are tender.

Turn off the heat and stand for 10 minutes. Blend soup and serve.

Chcolate cupcakes with White chocolate icing

Mum and I made my favourite chocolate cupcakes in honour of my friend SH's baby shower. In lieu of the normal coffee buttercream I wanted to find a simpler icing. SH is generally unable to eat cream so a ganache was out, pregancy overruled a cream cheese icing and so I searched for a white chocolate icing.

I found this recipe and thought that I would give it a crack!

30g white chocolate
1 tablespoon water
115g icing sugar, sifted
1 teaspoon vanilla essence

Place chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water, and melt.

Turn off the heat and gradually add the icing sugar, water and essence, stirring as you go.

Reheat icing as needed.

Notes
- The icing cooled pretty quickly so the last few cakes just crumbled when Mum tried to ice them.
- Yum. But I would still like to find a recipe for icing that looks a little prettier.

Fair trade fondue

Last night a few girlfriends joined me for chocolate fondue! Everyone brings something to dip, and I organise chocolate and pull out my fondue pots.

I had initially thought that I would buy special chocolate - usually I have a stash of Cadbury's chocolate in my cupboard and use that - but I thought I might buy Lindt or similar. That all changed when I went to the Oxfam Shop in search of a birthday present and decided that I would buy fair trade for the fondue.

We started with the dark chocolate and finished with the milk chocolate. Note to self - two 200g blocks of chocolate is about right for five hungry women.

I shall try to make an effort to replenish my stocks with fair trade chocolate. The Oxfam Shop is close to work so I have a ready source of fair trade products including chocolate, coffee and teas.

Pastry weights

My sister is such a sweetheart. She bought me these pastry weights. No excuses now for me to make bad pastry, and I can throw away the soup mix that I have been using!

Any suggestions for a tart E?

Macarons at last!

Macarons seem to have become popular recently. After seeing Poh’s Kitchen and Emmanuel and Poh make macarons of different flavours, Chad expressed curiosity in tasting them.

I promised to bring him macarons home next time I saw them and we happened to wander past Cacao selling macarons in Melbourne's GPO. We selected four different flavours (short mac, tangy lemon, pistachio, hazelnut praline), all nicely presented in a box, and proceeded to taste.

I am not sure what he was expecting them to taste like. I know he thought that they would be harder, rather than the soft meringue that he experienced. He wasn’t that impressed though, and now that he has tried them he has satisfied his curiosity.

Unfortunately he liked them well enough to eat his share!

Macarons could be the answer to my egg white dilemma...

The Burger Bistro

Last Friday I caught up for lunch with a couple of my workmates at The Burger Bistro. I have often walked past and noticed it being quite popular. I have also noticed the prices and so never bothered to stop before now.

It is an intimate space (ie small) and we did well to get there just before twelve and grab ourselves seats. The burgers came out in a constant stream from the kitchen, and I enviously watched the bowls of chips flow past as we waited for our lunch.

My order was the Lamburghini. It promised so much, and failed to deliver for me. The burger itself was lovely and fresh, but I found the flavours to be very bland. The product description was hand made West Australian premium lamb patty seasoned with fennel & cumin with a shredded beetroot & orange zest tzatziki on a bed of our usual salads. For $16 I would have liked my tzatziki to zing! I consoled myself in the thought that the reason why the lamb had no flavour was because there was very little fat in it.

The burgers that I think the boys had were the chatchi’s chilli chorizo burger and the big smoke.


So... if someone suggested that we eat there, I would give it another shot. The bread used for the buns was great and the salads and all the food was was fresh, something that I do not normally associate with my workday lunch. I might just think a little harder about what I order and try the classic beef burger!

Cantina

E and I went to Mount Lawley after our outing to Made on the Left on Sunday, and amidst all of our shopping we stopped for lunch at Cantina. I believe that Cantina is E's favourite restaurant and she dines there often (E??).

She strongly recommended the gnocchi, but in the end she opted for a risotto of mushroom and brussel sprouts and I munched on penne with prawns and mussels. We shared a caramlised pear salad. The food was excellent and we cleaned our plates!

We finished the meal with a divine panna cotta and poached pears. The texture of the panna cotta was silken and we fought for the last morsel on the plate.

Steak. Pasta. Spinach. Mushrooms

I like a simple dinner. Tasty food and easy to throw together with fresh ingredients.

Scutti's is a great place to get fresh ingredients. The fresh pasta that they sell includes Mancini's, made in Kelmscott with no preservatives.

Add butter to a frypan. Brown slices of steak. Remove from the pan with a slotted spoon and keep warm.

Cook sliced mushrooms in the same pan until the liquid is release. Add a splosh of red wine or sherry.

Add sour cream to the pan. Return the steak to the pan and add the spinach and cooked pasta. Heat through until spinach is wilted and serve.