jansson’s temptation

My very lovely and utterly delightful friend Val went off to university a year before me. A year later I moved to the same university town and spent a lot of time hanging out at her flat.

Val, who remember is lovely and delightful, wasn’t particularly accomplished at cooking. Her favourite meal, which was also her only meal, was mock waitbait patties. Real whitebait patties are a kiwi delicacy. Mock whitebait patties substitute grated potatoes. It’s nice, but not the same at all.

The flat, like most New Zealand university share houses, had a weekly cooking and cleaning roster. Val made mock whitebait patties every week.

So I thought of her and her disgruntled housemates, who weren’t overly fond of mock whitebait patties after the first month, when I discovered this reciepe.

Jansson was a Swede and a religious fanatic.

Pause to picture that. Do the accent. Okay, now let’s move on.

The legend goes that this dish was so delish that Jansson renounced his vow to give up earthly pleasures.

So this is what we had for dinner last night, with some little veal tbones and steamed green beans.

Ingredients

50g tin oritiz anchovies
4 medium potatoes (good all rounders will do)
2 large onions
200ml cream
200ml milk
pepper
1 slice day old bread, blitzed to crumbs

Measure the oil from the anchovies into a fry pan – you’ll need about 2 tbpns. If there isn’t enough then top it up with olive oil. On a low heat cook the onions until soft, but not brown. If you’ve got an anchovy phobic husband like me then chop the anchovies and add them with the onions – this cooks them down and they disappear into the onions. If you’ve got anchovy fans dining then add them later.

Grate the potatoes or use a mandolin to make julienne (looks better, more fun). Mix in the onions, anchovies and pepper and fill an oiled baking dish.

Pour over the cream and milk, top with breadcrumbs and drizzle with olive oil

Bake at 180 celcious for an hour until golden, bubbling.

Serve with another earthly pleasure like a very sinful, silky pinot noir.

apple and oat muffins

Who knows what my child eats in a day at daycare? I should know, I should read the menu posted next to the kitchen, but most days, err… every day, I forget. He knows where the biscuit tin is at home and one of his very few words is bissss, pointing to the pantry and the tin. So I’ve made these apple and oat muffins, which are a much healthier alternative to bissss …

150g plain white flour
1 tablespoon baking power
1 tsp mixed spice
100g brown suger
175g porridge oats
3 small apples
handfull of sultanas (optional)
2 medium eggs
125 ml milk
125 ml apple juice (I didn’t have any so used water)
1/4 cup sunflower oil (any low flavour vege oil will do)

Sift flour, baking powder and mixed spice into a bowl. Mix in oats and brown sugar. Chop apples finely – about 1/2cm cubes leaving the skin on – and mix into dry ingredients. Mix eggs, milk, juice and oil together and pour into a well in the middle of your dry ingredients. Mix lightly – don’t overmix.

Spoon into greased muffin tins. I used paper cases – so much easier than greasing tins. Bake in a 200 celcius oven for 20 minutes until risen, golden and firm to touch. Leave in the tin 5 minutes and transfer to a wire rack to cool.

fresh peach souffle

I just about fell over when these came out of the oven. There’s something about souffle that just sounds so hard. Incredibly, amazingly hard. In fact these turned out to be incredibly simple. However, when instructions for souffle say serve immediately they mean immediately.

By the time hubby and I did the victory dance, took the photo, changed the angle and the lighting, took the photo again, did the dance again, and sat down to eat the rise was on the decline.

Ingredients

2 ripe peaches – skin and blitz
3 egg whites
3 tablespoons caster sugar

Beat the egg whites and sugar until firm but not dry. If you go too long the souffle will sag fast. Fold in the peach puree and place (yes, place) in two lightly greesed and sugared souffle dishes (I used ramekins). Here’s the trick of the century – flatten the top then run your finger around the edge of the dish – this encourages the souffle to rise evenly because it doesn’t have to pull away from the edge.

Bake 15-20 minutes. Do the dance. Serve immediately with some great vanilla icecream with a little leftover peach puree poured over.

Drink with something light, sweet and fizzy. I love the new style Moscato’s that are around, especially McGuigan’s Discover Moscato and Wirra Wirra Mrs Wrigley’s Moscato, which is a lovely pink, low alcohol girly guzzler.

sourdough bread starter

I’ve been writing a lot about wine and talking to a lot of winemakers recently, and a topic that comes up often is wild yeasts and fermentation (no suprise there). It’s been interesting especially given my new pet – a sourdough bug that I’ve started from scratch.

I’ll call it a bug, because it’s like the old ginger beer bugs we used to have as kids, except this bug is fed regularly with flour and water rather than sugar.

Starting the bug was relatively simple, but I can’t help thinking that maybe I just got lucky. The odds of it all going wrong and your flour and water mix catching the wrong “wild yeasts” floating through the kitchen is really high. But, for me a milky smelling, bubbling, creamy broth developed in about four days and has been gracing the kitchen bench, wrapped in a damp muslin blanket for the last month.

Ingredients (to start your bug)

100g 00 white flour
115 ml tepid water

for each feed

100 g 00 white flour
enough tepid water to make a paste

Mix initial measurement of flour and water in a small bowl until you have a sticky paste. Cover the bowl with a damp tea towel or muslin secured with a rubber band and leave it in a draught free spot in the kitchen.  Re-dampen the cloth as needed.

After 2 – 5 days the paste should have a skin and look bubbly, with a milky scent. If it smells bad rather than simply sour, or if you have mould, then chuck it and start again.

If you’ve got a live one, give it its first feed. 100 g of flour and enough water to mix the whole brew into a sticky paste again. Work the mix to get plenty of air in – your hand is best.  Cover with the damp cloth and leave on the bench for 24 hours.

Feed it again with another 100 g of flour and tepid water – it should be really bubbling and rising up in your bowl now. The bug should be bubbling and ready to use in about 8 hours and you should have about 400g of sourdough starter in your bowl.

Sourdough bugs last forever, as long as you keep feeding them. Mine lives in the fridge during the week and comes out on Thursday nights to warm up (with a damp cloth on top) and then get it’s first feed on Friday morning, getting ready for a weekend baking. They need feeding at least once a week, but even if you miss a week or it gets into bad shape, just stir it up, halve it and feed it and you’ll get it back in good heath fairly quickly.

You need about 200 – 300 g of starter to make a  loaf of bread.

Good luck.

asparagus and savignon blanc

We ate the tarts before I had a chance to take the photos – they were sooo delicious. The wine was delicious too – a nice kiwi savignon blanc. This one from Braided River in Marlborough, New Zealand has more citrus notes than the usual gooseberry flavours from the region. It’s crisp and refreshing and perfect for a light meal in spring. We are just starting to get the weather to enjoy the long evenings outside.

The wine matched well with a fresh asparagus and feta tart with toasted pinenuts. It’s very quick and easy, and looks impressive. I might bring this one out as an entree for barbeques later in the summer. I think one of the juicey moscato styles on the market now would be equally yummy to start a lazy sunday afternoon of eating.

Tart Ingredients

1 pre-rolled pastry sheet
1 egg beaten
1 bunch asparagus
200 grams danish feta (the creamier the better, rather than the harder greek style fetas)
100g pine nuts
1 tsp butter

Cut the pastry sheet in half and fold up the edges all around until you have a 1cm border. Press down the edges with a fork and prick the centre. Bake at 200 celcius for 15 minutes until lightly browned.

Meanwhile break off the tough bottoms of the asparagus (bend them slightly and they’ll snap at the right point), then slice the stalks on the diagonal. Steam for 2 mins until they turn bright green. Melt the butter in a saucepan and toast the pine nuts on a low heat – be careful, they burn really quickly so keep a constant watch on them.

When the pastry has finished, layer the asparagus and feta and put them back in the oven for 10 minutes until the feta melts a little. Sprinkle over the toasted pinenuts and serve with a green salad and a fruity savignon.

lazy ricotta gnocchi

To justify the arrival of Donna Hay magazine, and all the others that lie in piles around our home, I decided to actually cook from it this week. It was suprisingly easy to find four recipes that could feed us and the baby and survive the double sitting system we have going on here. The baby eats at 5.30pm and we eat at 7.30pm after he’s gone to bed, which means if we are to eat the same things either we have a warmed up version of his meal, or he has our left overs from the night before. This recipe was a winner – I cooked off some gnocchi for the baby at 5.30 then put the unrolled remains in the fridge until we were ready to eat at 7.30pm – and they were even more delicious than the first batch.

I remember making gnocchi with mashed potatoes and flour once a long time ago and being disappointed with the pasty, gluggy results. These little numbers however, were just delicious. Light, flavoursome, and with some  blitzed tomato sauce over the top they were just heaven for baby and for us.

Ingreditents

500g fresh ricotta
1/2 cup finely grated parmesan
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 cup plain flour, sifted
Finely grated rind of a lemon
1 tbsp chopped mint leaves
250g steamed, chopped spinach – squeeze as much water out as you can before choppiing
1 cup semolina (for rolling)

2 fresh tomatoes, roughly chopped
2 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
leaves off a large sprig of basil
salt and pepper to taste

Mix the ricotta, parmesan, eggs, flour, lemon rind, mint leaves and spinach in a bowl and mix to combine.  If you have time, cover the mix and put it in the fridge for the flavours to combine.

Turn the mixture out onto a surface sprinkled with semolina and roll into 4 x 30 cm long ropes. Cut your rope into 2cm lengths and cook them in batches in a saucepan of salted boiling water for 2-3 minutes or until they float to the surface. You’ll know they’re ready when they suddenly start bobbing to the top all at once.

Remove with a slotted spoon and keep warm while you cook the rest.

The tomato sauce is a great trick I saw on TV and is one of the yummiest pasta sauces ever. Just blitz the tomotoes, garlic, basil and salt and pepper in your blender (or use a stick blender into a jug), then strain out the pips and skin over a small pot. Warm it gently (don’t boil it or you loose the fresh flavour) then pour over your gnocchi. It’s also fabulous with plain spaghetti.

More parmesan on top to serve.

Matched with a citrisy Pinot Grigio from McGuigan Wines- they have a great city vineyard in town at the moment with vines planted and a cellar door. Very cool concept.

organic wholemeal blueberry muffins

I found some amazing organic wholemeal flour. It comes in a cotton sack, which is what caught my eye in the first place. I’d like to be the sort of person that seeks out the organic  and always cooks with wholemeal flour, but thanks to Nigella and my DNA, I’m not.

But, when I find a fine product like the Organic Stoneground Wholemeal Plain Flour from Kialla In Queensland, I’ll gladly wave the organic flag.

I used it in a tried and tested blueberry muffin recipe. I’ve been making muffins for my son (now 14 months). He looks so cute with a fist full of muffin, which he always likes to shove whole into his mouth. He uses his hand to stop the food falling out when he puts too much in. We’ll work on table manners next year.

Ingredients

2 medium eggs (at room temperature)
250 ml of milk
6 tbsp sunflower oil
1 tsp vanilla extract
finely grated rind of 1 lemon

280 g organic wholemeal flour (or plain flour will do)
1 tbsp baking powder
pinch salt
115 g soft brown sugar

150 g frozen blueberries

Most muffin recipes ask you to sift dry ingredients, make a well and pour the mixed wet ingredients in and combine without overmixing. To save dirty dishes I simply sift the dry ingredients over the well mixed wet ingredients and combine without overmixing. It works for me.

It’s important you don’t overmix, it makes the muffins tough and the texture compact like old bread. The flour mix should be just moist, lumpy is okay, and with a few traces of flour that will disappear in the heat of the oven.

Spoon into well greased muffin tins and bake in a 200 celcius oven for 20 minutes.

the garden is in …

It’s spring in Melbourne. Glorious Spring.

The first warm afternoon we got busy outside and I dug over the garden. The compost bin in the corner of the backyard has been filling up with lawn clippings and vege scraps for two years and when I pulled it to pieces we had some amazing, beautiful organic goodness to dig into the garden bed. It took me two days to dig it and some cow and chicken manure into our 6 metre strip of garden, and Billy was a great help.

A great help until I started planting the cos lettuce and silverbeet (chard) seedlings and running rows of seeds. Despite him pulling the lettuce out twice, they’ve survived and two weeks after our planting everything is thriving.

We have cos lettuce, silverbeet (chard), carrots, celery, basil, spinach, two tomatoe plants and a row of sunflowers. More to go in this weekend.

french lessons – justin north

I’ve been away awhile. Still cooking, but when my son starting eating solids at the beginning of the year most of my creations were pureed and looked the same going in as they did coming out. Perhaps they are worthy of mention, and I will one day, but they certainly aren’t worthy of photographing.

I’ve started working again, from home, for a fantastic new wine, food and travel site that is launching in the next few weeks. The coolest thing about my new gig is that I get to review cookbooks. Oh heaven, there you are!

So Justin North’s French Lessons turned up in my mailbox a few days ago. Justin is chef/owner of Becasse restaurant in Sydney and is first book, called Becasse, was an exploration of regional foods and producers in Australia.

His new book really is a beginners guide and is set up in a series of lessons: flavourings, stocks, soups, preserving, confits, roasting, sorbets, gelatine, breads and the cheese course. A great companion for someone learning about French food.

Images are great, the recipes are easy and there’s information on cooking times to accompany each, so you know straight away if you’re attempting an all day extravaganza or a simple miracle.

Now, what shall I cook first….

custard tart

Today I learnt many things.

• Wine bottles do not make great rolling pins;
• Nigella’s pastry, while fabulous, quick and easy, will not be patched. Roll it perfectly the first time or start again;
• Pastry shrinks, make neat edges after you blind bake it;
• Nigella is hot, and her blind baking is hotter … to hot for me I’m afraid;
• Sweet pastry burns easily;
• Even the smallest hole in your pastry matters, though I’ve not idea how to fix holes other than starting from scratch;
• Sweet pastry can be eaten raw;
• Custard tarts are worth making over and over again until you get them right.

It sounds dire, but really there were only two attempts. There will be another attempt to perfect the custard tart, but this one turned out edible and almost presentable. Some trick photography covers up the effect of having a hole in my pastry, which let the custard mixture seep out to create a second custardy case in the gap between the flan tin and the crust. I haven’t attempted to extract it from the tin yet. This may be my undoing.

Ingredients

Pastry
120g flour (00)
30g icing sugar
80g butter
1 egg yolk
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
1 tbspn iced water

Measure and sift the flour and icing sugar into a bowl and cut the butter into cubes on top. Place the whole lot in the freezer for 10-15 minutes. Mix the egg, vanilla and iced water together and put in the fridge.

After 10 mins put the flour mixture into your food processor and blitz until the mixture resembles oatmeal. Add the liquid and blitz until the mixture almost forms a ball – it gets kinda lumpy looking. You may need to add more iced water, but do so a tinsy little drop at a time.

Scoop out the dough, push it into a disk and cover with clingwrap and bung in the fridge for 20 minutes, or longer. Then roll it out and line your flan dish (23cm thin or 20cm deep dish). Don’t trim the excess off until after you’ve done the blind baking – it shrinks too much.

For a custard tart you need to blind bake your case, so cover it in baking paper and pour over some rice or ceramic beads or something. Nigella blind bakes at 200 degrees for 15 mins, then covers the edges with tinfoil and blasts it for another 10 mins. I got crisps on my first go at her temperatures, so I did the second attempt at 160 degrees, which is the temperature you’ll bake the custard at anyway.

So, bake with paper and rice for 15 minutes then pull out the rice, brush the case with the left over egg white (this helps seal it), cover the edges with foil and bung it back in for andother 10 – 15 minutes until the base is nicely browned. Let this cool slightly before you add your custard mix.

Custard
3 eggs
1 egg yolk
2 tbspns sugar
splash of vanilla essence
300ml single cream
100 ml milk

Put the milk and cream in a saucepan and heat until just about to boil. Whisk the eggs, yolk, sugar and essence together in a bowl then slowly pour the hot milk mixture into the eggs, whisking constantly.

Pour the custard mix into your pastry case and top with grated nutmeg. Bake for 45 minutes, checking at 35 minutes. When it’s done it will be slightly wobbly still, but will set more as it cools.

Easy, huh?