the silly baker

I may have been out of my mind, but I joined the Daring Bakers for a little bit of ... something.
It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I was up half the night (I happened to be up half the night in a head-cold-induced trance) pondering fillings and rollings and my arms .. what's the underside of the forearm? .. were sore for two days after the rolling, we definitely need a rolling pin on a wheel, rather than a big fat stick that requires much awkward wrist twists.

Was it worth it?
My Danish Braids. It made a truckload of pastry and with my offcuts there is a little family of darling croissants. I think I forgot to take photos once the croissants were done, but they are sugar and spice and all things nice.

Apricot Almond Danish braid. and below, apple.











I am worn out! ....but vaguely proud.

Longwinded kitchen spells

...seem to be wearing me out. I am spending ridiculous amounts of time performing menial tasks that chain me to the bench. However it does get some kind of cool results.
Above is the first silly pursuit. I read in the paper about beans dressed softly in chickpeas, it was that Alexander woman again, and we didn't have any ricotta for the beans so it was Homemade Milk Ricotta - very easy to make, as it turned out. Only my saucepan on the lowest heat was determined to do nothing less than boil, so boil away merrily it did until I (too late) remembered the simmer mat and it may have been my fault if it was slightly too hard to beat to a creamy consistency. But it was delicious.
Next was to make a porridge of chickpea flour (besan), oops, thought that said 250g, no wonder it needed so much more water than I originally put.. never mind, it will be fat, bake it anyway for a much longer time. Process the tomatoes for a vinaigrette? No, I'm hungry. Lemon/olive oil salsa it shall be.
Did I mention it was meant to be a roulade? No way that was going to happen when I had the exact sized pan (18 x 28 cm, thankyou very much) with double the amount of chickpea.. thing.. and anyway a roulade is meant to wait for an hour.
I had a sandwich, and very pretty too.

I am also having a slight teacake obsession at the moment, no photos of any of them yet. So far I have made three and am hunting around for more.. apple and custard may make an appearance somewhere in the next month or two, and the glazed Irish will definitely get a second go. Oh winter and sore throats and comforting English ideas (and puddings! lovely old stodge).

It has to be one of my favourite things to curl up - sorry for the cliché - with a good book in front of the fire (or in front of some BBC with a blanket) and a hot cup of tea. Oh tea, how I love thee.
Especially when we get winter rain, which was kind enough to drop in for a few hours this morning and may yet be back, fingers crossed.

More sweet things to come.

Rahat Lokum

I love all Middle Eastern consumables I have come across so far (with the exception of some ultra-perfumed lemon sugar water that just didn't seem right). And I do enjoy Claudia Roden's writing, and read her book quite a bit, and my brother loves Turkish Delight - the real stuff of course - and I was hiking off to Coburg for music lessons and catching the tram down Sydney Road, and so it came about that we planned to make our own Turkish Delight, or as it is otherwise called, Rahat Lokum. The lokum will keep for a long time in a box, apparently. Sugar usually does.
So more than once I jumped off the no. 19 and wandered interestedly but less fruitfully around Brunswick/Albion (is Albion an actual place or just a lonely station like Dennis?) in search of mastic to flavour our lokum. Mah-stick-uh seems to be the way to say it, best as I can spell anyway. It took a few goes and I was late for class twice because of this quest! Eventually A1 produced a tiny plastic pocket (turned out to contain a small teaspoon's worth) of tiny translucent pebbles, one of many stapled to a cardboard backing, that cost me either 70c or $1.65 or something. Not much. Will have to go back to the grocery I found for that sour cherry jam...
Brother and I followed the recipe as faithfully as we could, grinding the mastic tears with sugar, mortar and pestle, taking turns to stir for - granted - 2 hours not 3, but we were only making half the whopping 3kg of sugar's quantity. We still didn't have enough cornflour and had to run down to the neighbours.. and had serious lump problems.. and with pistachios, lemon, all the pink colouring we had, mastic and a new packet of cornflour (maybe wheaten would have worked better? No amount of stirring would smooth our lumps) not poured but scooped and scraped into a heavily dusted dish. It must have been fate that the Sunday of stirring was the day the Age magazine had an entry about the tears of the mastic tree.

The next day we tried to cut with cornflour and probably too much icing sugar, but still.. our sweet fragrant lokum releases its hard-sought flavours in a slow rush of mouth-watering tang that requires a second (almost solid) piece. It's slightly tinged with colour and very soft, like we would no doubt become if we ate it all quickly - as is quite tempting.

Luinces

Quinces, beautiful and weird fruit that they are, have abounded lately... in our house anyway. When I go for a run I pass this big laden tree, breathe in a lungful and try not to steal any. Cheap at the shops too. I like 3-hour-dark-pink-poached quince with yoghourt at breakfast time and after tea and in the afternoon. If it hasn't made an appearance at breakfast, as well as if they have, you could have them in the mid-morning too.

Anyway.
My mum comes from the country, and her mum is therefore a country cook. They lived on a farm and it was roast lamb pretty much every day, and my Grandma ran the house and cooked for everyone. She's a hard worker and when we visit, it's like this huge chance for her to feed us all up with roasts and sponge cakes and kisses. Her teacake is a first prize winner at the local show. We LOVE her apricot jam, and I particularly love visiting the source of it in summer, a little home orchard that is really hard to find even if you've been driving there for 75 years and when we go is chockers with warm apricots, and peaches and plums appearing. Grandma's tomato relish... well, you understand.

So on the farm where Mum grew up, there is a quince tree more than fifty years old, and her brother and his family live there now and I think they pruned it last year. Pruned or not, it is awesomely prolific!
And it is still the origin of Grandma's fantastic Quince Jelly, or Luince Jelly as we know it, because she doesn't quite close her Qs.

Thus it was at Easter we came home with a box of quinces (and four pomegranates), a box or two of jams and relishes and a warm-quince-scented car.

Me, I finally got to make a certain buttery tart and affirm in my opinion that yes, Stephanie is right, butter and quinces do both certainly go with cream. I was too lazy to photograph that part, and it really needed eating, but I hope you get the gist.

a bit of weekend baking

Weekends are the time when there is a little bit more.. well, time. For things like chasing down photocopies and handwritten copies and shorthand copies of recipes from all over the place. And even more importantly, time for things like baking.

I came home on Friday to discover a long-longed-for new biscuit barrel.

It needed yoyos.
Yo-yos.
Yo-yoes.
I can't make the word look right but the bikkies did me just fine!

There they are above with icing firming out.
Humble, lovely, just buttery enough yo yo biscuits.

saturday night pizza

Bread is great if you're up early enough and can be bothered washing dough off your hands that many times. In our house, though, Saturday night is pizza night when we're home.. being the culinary innovator (or, as I see it, rebel) of the house I like different things on mine and secretly try to lean everyone towards simpler combinations. Anyway, we happened to have some basil in the fridge last week and cherry tomatoes on the bench, and there is always parmesan of course, and balsamic, and every week olives (kalamata. What does 'black' mean? Is a neutral 'black olive' spanish or other?) so we were in business for the House Favourite Pizza that was discovered in my aunt's olive oil book. The black blobs are olive paste which is simply olives lazily mushed up in the mortar and pestle and a bit of balsamic vinegar. The photo truly does not do justice to how good it was!

First Things First

It had to come. And here it is, my admission, confession, profession and admonition to the netting world: I am a foodie.

I like the word foodie. It just feels right. Nothing else quite means what I want it to, though the French got close to making me feel elegant (until they explained with a bit of English). Isn't that interesting? To love food in France seems tasteful, and to love food of English background just seems ... not. Not that I'm meaning to start a Franco-Anglo discussion.

It's just this:
(identity crisis)

greedy guts, glutton, pig/hog, eater

gourmandise

sounded lovely until they explained it meant Glutton (yes, it does need a capital letter). And anyway, wish and try as I might, I'm not French. Though I do love their culture, surtout la cuisine.

The other thing going here should be a disclaimer: No, I don't feel the need to eat cream with everything. Just have a look at the book (you know the book. the big fat one that doesn't fit in the recipe stand) and the nifty little lists of what goes together.

All right my little food blog. You are golden brown and setting, and smelling delicious...