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.