Boom bang baking

Being an adventurous type has led to all sorts of cooking escapades but never until now have I needed to use a heavy stick and a hacksaw to complete the job.

What a fun way to get back into foodie cooking following a three week hiatus.

I’d burned myself out after an awful lot of cooking and baking in the lead up to Christmas and didn’t feel up to making anything more than the absolute basics over the ensuing weeks.  This was made easier by our family taking a 10 day break in the lower North Island and largely staying in motels, which generally have pretty basic cooking facilities.  

All of my culinary efforts were pedestrian at best and – according to Don – hideous at worst.  In my own defence, we’d arrived at a motel one evening armed with fairly minimal supplies that included a dozen sausages that really needed to be used, some spuds and a packet salad to discover the kitchen was only equipped with a microwave and one small glass bowl.  So I think Boiled Sausage and Spud Surprise wasn’t that bad given the circumstances.

The meals we purchased during our travels weren't much better, with the exception of the unpretentious but delicious home cooked fare served at Kapiti Island’s lodge, and the wonderful Italian food we enjoyed at Soprano in Paraparaumu.  So by the time we returned home, I was revitalised, dying for something exotic, and raring to cook.

Along the way I’d bought a couple of bags of stone ground flour from the store in Foxton’s Dutch windmill and I decided to put some of it to good use by baking ciabatta.

Ciabatta is probably my favourite bread, but only if it’s made the old-fashioned way by making a starter dough the day before, and incorporating it into the final dough mix.  Bread like this tastes divine and has a lovely texture but it requires forward planning because, resting time included, it takes the best part of 18 hours from go to whoa.

One of the challenges with ciabatta dough is that it’s extremely wet and gluggy, and impossible to knead.  So I use my trusty 18-year-old food processor to start the job, finishing with the gruelling task of mixing by hand when adding the final third of the flour.

I think you know where this story is going and, sure enough, half way through the job – just as I was wondering how much life the old gal had left in her – there was a loud bang and thick smoke started pouring out of the food processor. Impressive!

Having come this far, I wasn’t about to give up on my project, so I decided to remove the dough from the mixing bowl and continue by hand.  And that’s where things got interesting.

The food processor will (or used to) only work if a large tab on the lid is fully locked into a slot on the machine.  Trouble was the explosion’s heat had fused the plastic tab with the casing, making it impossible to release.  The machine was obviously a goner, so there was nothing to lose by taking a forceful approach.

I’d taken its smoking corpse out to the back steps by this stage because it smelled so bad and can only but wonder what the neighbours made of me squatting there bashing away at my food processor with a big stick in a futile attempt to release the stuck tab.

R.I.P.

No luck; bits started flying off the lid without releasing it, so off I trotted down to Don’s workshop for a hacksaw to do the job. It didn’t take long to liberate the dough, allowing me to continue on my merry bread making way.

I'd like to be able to report that the resulting loaves were a culinary triumph in the face of considerable adversity, but they weren't.

Until now, I’ve always made ciabatta with white flour, which produces fantastic bread.  But this time I decided to get slightly experimental and use the windmill’s whole grain bread mix to create a rustic version.

The end result was nice enough, although the bread mix was saltier than I’d have preferred.  Using whole grain flour meant the loaves were a bit drier and heavier than would normally be the case.

So, despite all the ‘boom bang’ in its creation, my ciabatta ended up being more ho-hum than va-voom.

Food porn

There’s something in females’ DNA that gets us really, really excited about cake, pudding and all manner of sweet stuff. Some women pretend not to give a fig, as it were, but they’re either lying, unhealthily obsessed with the size of their thighs, or are coming down with something.

Men are different. Although some probably spend quite a bit of time obsessing about thighs – usually someone else’s – many men genuinely don’t care for cakes and desserts. No strategic eating at restaurants for them; they simply flick straight past the dessert menu and head for (horrors of horrors) – the cheeseboard or – worse still – opt for nothing to round off the meal.

So, guys, you might want to go and get your kicks somewhere else on the Internet today because this blog is graphically and gratuitously all about cake and dessert.

Yum.

I won’t, however, be regaling you with accounts of sweet treats I’ve whipped up out of the Edmonds cookbook. Nope, every offering involves something I've invented.

My profiteroles dinner party dessert offering looked like mutants, but they tasted great. I experimented
with using freeze-dried plum powder when making the filling. The plum crème patisserie filling was tasty
but a little gluggy. Plum powder folded into sweetened whipped cream worked best.

I made two different versions of this spice cake, one that used the traditional all spice,
cinnamon and nutmeg spice mix, and one that used five-spice instead. Both versions of
the cake were lovely. Do you like freeze dried lychee nod to the East on the five-spice version?
A bit over the top maybe, but then again, I reckon 'more is more' when it comes to food.

Readers of my Horror Food blog may recall the sauced duck tongue surprise I took to our
friends’ dinner party, and write me off as the dinner guest from hell. At the risk of ruining my
reputation, here’s the dessert creation I took to offset the duck tongues.
(See the end of this post for the recipe.)

I could go on, but I’m worried all that sugary, creamy excitement might prove too much for my female readers. So let’s plummet back to Earth with a bump.

Domestic goddess I may be, but even goddesses have their off days as I discovered when I attempted to make a sponge cake using a liberal measure of freeze-dried passion fruit powder in the batter.



L-R: Dish sponge, my sponge...or was that, my sponge, dish sponge?



Not even lashings of whipped cream could
redeem this sad puppy. 
PS: The right hand photo above was the dish sponge.

Anna’s cardamon scented roasted apple custard tart

Roasted apples

1.7 kg Granny Smith apple slices (peeled and cut into quarters or eighths)
½ c soft brown sugar
32 g butter

Toss apple slices in butter and sugar and roast until golden.  Leave until completely cool before using.

Sweet short pastry

170 g softened butter
85 g sugar
1 small egg
4 drops vanilla essence
260 g standard plain flour

Lightly cream butter and sugar. Add egg and vanilla and beat until just combined. Add flour and mix until the pastry comes away from the sides of the bowl. Be careful not to over mix. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 1 hour before using (overnight is fine).

Custard

5 eggs
6 tbsp sugar
2 tsp ground cardamom
1 tsp vanilla
2 c lukewarm milk
1 c lukewarm cream

Beat eggs, sugar, cardamon and vanilla together.  Pour in warmed milk and cream while beating, and mix until combined with egg mix but not foamy.

Method

Roll out the pastry to about 3 mm thickness and line a greased 28 cm, deep flan dish. You can brush some lightly beaten egg white over the pastry to help prevent leakage.

Place roasted apples over the pastry case then gently pour in custard mixture. Bake at 180 degrees C for 50 minutes or until the custard sets.

Like mother, like son

Despite my best efforts, I’ve found that parenthood and exotic food don’t always go together. I’ve managed to train my family to at least try some of my more unusual offerings, but they don’t usually go for seconds.

Plain fooders Don and Rory are lost causes, and I confess to knowingly serving ethnic foods that are torture on a plate to them. But my 12-year-old son Kieran is another story.

Like me, he has always been interested in trying new things so I didn’t have to look far for a companion when I saw an Indonesian culture and food festival advertised in this morning’s paper.

I’m relatively familiar with Indonesian cuisine but it has a very low profile in New Zealand due to our miniscule Indonesian population (3261, according to the 2006 census).

Most of the Indonesian food I’ve tried has been of the satay / gado gado / beef rendang variety but I know there’s far more to the cuisine than those dishes. Needless to say, I was seeking something at the more ‘interesting’ end of the scale when Kieran and I headed off to the festival.

Like the local Indonesian population, the festival was small; four or five food stalls, a similar number of craft stalls, and a simple programme of movies and cultural performances.

True to form, I steered us towards the food stalls with the weirdest looking offerings.  Here's what we bought:





Croquettes that I think were made from
pancakes stuffed with carrot sticks and something
else, crumbed and deep fried.  Served with a very
tasty peanut sauce (and a blob of hot chilli
sauce for me!).





Croquette innards.



 

Fish cake stuffed with egg.  Served with a
slightly sweet-sour-hot liquidy sauce that had little
chunks of cucumber in it.  Nice enough but it would
have been good to have a bigger spoon so
that we could get more sauce with the fishcake. 
I love the way runny Asian food is often sold 
in little plastic bags that are tied with a
rubber band; so pragmatic!

A medley of weird things.  Clockwise from bottom
left: hot chilli sauce, fried green chilli, fried cubes
of mysterious savoury gelatinous stuff, fried tofu
cubes, fried brown stuff, tempeh (the big rectangle
of grey-white) with unidenfitied sauce, sweet
jackfruit curry, soya sauce (?) boiled egg. 
Unusual. Not a favourite with either of us but
I'm glad we tried it anyway.



Steamed coconut flavoured cakelets.  Nice.



















A sweet cold soup that was similar to
the Indian dessert, Falooda.  The Indonesian
version contained cubes of Nata de Coco (a
densely textured coconut juice jelly), bits of
avocado, finely shredded coconut flesh,
mysterious orange bits that may or may not have
been mango and/or carrot.  Tasted far nicer than
it sounds.























To be honest, none of it knocked my socks off but it was nevertheless great to try the real deal and we’ll be back for more next year.

What did knock my socks off, however, was Kieran’s willingness to try everything. He didn’t like all of it, but was still open to the experience.

I’m so proud to be his mum!



Chopity, chop

I truly started to wonder about my eating habits when I found myself heading down to the garage for an axe so that I could finish lunch.

I’m afraid you’ve been suckered into this blog post by the promise of drama, action and violence. Truth be known, I’m going to spend most of the time talking about tofu (although I promise to come back to the axe later).

Go on, be honest: would you have bothered even opening the blog if I was more upfront and started writing about the T word in the first paragraph?

I was a vegetarian for many years, during which time I ate a fair amount of tofu. Most of it was nice enough, apart from one cruel concoction I experienced at 20,000 feet.

I travelled a lot during my vegetarian phase and, despite having flown on most of the world’s worst airlines, the only inedible vegetarian meal I ever encountered was the scrambled tofu and parsley horror on an Air New Zealand red-eye flight to Wellington. What were they thinking?! To this day I’m convinced it was a ploy to punish their vegetarian customers.

I now eat meat, but my love of Asian food leads to frequent tofu encounters.

Earlier this week, on the way back from skiving off work to check out Sabatini’s knitwear sale, I saw the Wesley market in action and decided to stop and take a look. Even though I’ve lived near the market for more than a decade, I keep forgetting about its existence and have never been until now.

It’s only a small market – probably a dozen fruit and vege stalls, a couple of food stalls, and a few other bits and pieces. The only out-of-the-ordinary offering was a tiny stall selling a selection of home-made tofu products. Like a moth to the flame, I was drawn to take a closer look.

Here’s what I ended up buying:   

Marinated bean skin

  

Plain bean skin

The stall owner suggested a few ways to prepare these, as did the ever-useful Internet. So, come lunch time, I got cooking - with delicious results. The marinated ‘bean skin’ was particularly nice. I think it’s flavoured with five-spice and soy sauce. It was tasty on its own, and even nicer when included the salad recipe at the end of this blog.

Deep-fried tofu

 As for the axe, I felt like rounding off lunch with something sweet and, tempted though I was to offset all that healthiness with a big slab of cake, for once I exercised some willpower and resisted.

I had a drinking coconut in the fridge, from which I’d extracted the juice for a Nonya dessert I made the other night. I’d only managed to cut a little hole in the top, which was large enough to let the juice out, but my kitchen knives weren’t up to the task of carving larger hole from which to extract the soft flesh.

So it was off to the woodpile to get a better tool for the job. Trouble was, the chopping block and axe were buried under a mountain kitchen renovation detritus and other general crap in our garage. Too lazy to move it all out of the way, I burrowed my way through stacks of polystyrene underfloor insulation, a bunch of bicycles and bicycle parts, and rolls of carpet and attempted to cleave the coconut.

There was barely any room to swing the axe so all I could manage do without putting my fingers at risk was cut a slightly larger hole, just wide enough to accommodate a dessert spoon.

And that, I’m afraid, is all I have to report. Not very exciting, really, but not your everyday lunch experience either.

Cucumber and tofu ‘noodle’ salad

No matter what your foodie preferences may be, this simple salad hits the mark: sweet, sour, salty, crisp, soft, gluten-free, dairy-free, vegan, low-cholesterol. Most importantly, it’s really tasty! I made some more to go with dinner the next night and, to my surprise, the kids liked it - even fussy Rory.


                                                                                     Salad dressing

Bean skin strips stir-fried with chilli, ginger and garlic (left),
cucumber and tofu noodle salad (right).

Mix to taste:

Vegetable (or other bland) cooking oil

Chinese black vinegar

Salt

Sugar

A few drops sesame oil

You could add some chilli flakes and garlic for extra zing

Salad

Cut marinated tofu skin into thin strips and mix with peeled, seeded cucumber that has been julienned. Pour over the dressing. You could substitute any crisp, crunchy vegetable: lettuce, julienned or grated carrot, finely shredded cabbage, etc.

Pain, pleasure

Sunday got off to an unpromising start when I grumpily dragged myself out into foggy, soggy, barely breaking morning for a training ride.

As much as I enjoy cycling, I’ve started to resent spending hours every Sunday morning sweating my way up as many big hills as I can find. My neglected husband and kids agree. But my second and final event looms large so I needed to get in one last ride.

Action Woman in the

72 km class at the
Kona Colville Connection.
12 March 2011.

Despite suffering little physical pain, I struggled mentally the whole way and it took all of my willpower to resist the urge to turn around, head home and curl up with a coffee and the crossword.

Sadly, my heroic efforts featured little in the form of culinary excitement: just a carbo-shot and a sand fly. For the record, I spat, rather than swallowed.

My ride took me out past the Kumeu Showgrounds, the venue for a return on four wheels to the pleasure part of the equation – The Kumeu Country Market.

What a great market it turned out to be. There was a good range of artisan food producers, cooked food vendors and some – but not too many – non food stalls.

Having just biked 62 km gave me license to scoff anything and everything - which of course I would have anyway – starting with Hungarian fried bread, rubbed with garlic and served piping hot with a sprinkling of sea salt. Mmmmmmm.

It was on to Mr and Mrs Serbian Salamis to hoover up free samples and buy some five-star delicious air-dried beef and two spicy pork salamis (a true compliment given that I don’t like pork).

The kids were having their own foodie fun with their $10 allowances, predictably heading straight to the sweet and gut-rot vendors for as many multi-coloured, sugar coated, artificially sweetened horrors as they could guzzle before I noticed.

Meanwhile I continued on my epicurean quest, hovering up an Argentinian beef empanada (okay, meaty but a bit bland) and an Alfajor, which is made of two layers of corn flour cookies stuck together with dulce de leche and sprinkled with grated coconut (a bit dry and crumbly for my taste).

The handmade ricotta.  I took the
vendor's advice and have
been eating it for brekky atop
honey on toast.  Delish!

Full to bursting, I gallantly staggered on to buy some handmade ricotta, cinnamon and sugar coated almonds, cheese (Clevedon buffalo mozzarella and a Nelson grown sheep milk pecorino), some smoked eel, a loaf of ciabatta bread, then a glass of carrot juice to sustain me for the trip home. Burp.

By some miracle we all managed to develop an appetite by dinner time and a pot of home grown, homemade pumpkin soup was complemented by the market's smoked eel smeared on ciabatta, with a squeeze of lime juice.

The evening’s highlight was the Italian buffalo mozzarella classic, Insalata Caprese. Don’t tell anyone, but I like to enhance mine with...I can hear the purists gasping...a wee drizzle of high quality balsamic vinegar. Naughty!  But so, so very nice.

Here's a bit of gratuitous food porn to show what you missed.

As an aside, when you watch a movie or flick through the food or fashion pages in a magazine, have you ever wondered what's lurking off camera? And now for an appetite killer if ever there was one:

Plenty to drool over

I got a bit carried away at the Auckland Food Show today.

http://www.foodshow.co.nz/

I actually bought more; hours after taking this photo I discovered four tubes of vanilla beans in my handbag (paid for, I might add!).

I've never been to the food show before, mainly because I'd always mistakenly assumed it would be hideously crowded and impossible to get to the counters to scoff any samples. It did indeed get crowded, but not in a bad way. And I got to eat plenty of samples.

When I wasn't walking in a zombie-like foodie trance sussing out the hundreds of exhibits, I enjoyed watching other foodies in their own little worlds. Some people seemed more intent on standing around gas-bagging, quaffing lots of wine samples. A few seemed SERIOUS about thoroughly investigating everything.

I even saw one resolutely wheeling a suitcase (no doubt stuffed with foodie finds) after him. Now that's scary.

And then there was the stroller brigade. Despite a couple of close calls, I managed to avoid tripping and sitting on several pushchair bound toddlers along the way.

The food show has a range of really good guest chef presenters and I made a bee-line for Josh Emett, Gordon Ramsay's (Kiwi) right-hand man. The fact Mr E is also handsome had nothing to do with anything of course.

I was surprised to find that the auditorium wasn't full of drooling middle-aged women. In fact there were probably as many men, as women. Not sure what that means.

I had wondered whether Mr E's good looks were something only I'd noticed, a fallacy dispelled when I got chatting to a woman next to me, who immediately commented on how handsome he is. And here's the handsome devil in action:

He cooked two dishes from Ramsay's Melbourne restaurants (we all got recipes):

* Seared yellow fin tuna with daikon, enoki mushrooms and black garlic. This is more of an "impress your friends" dinner party dish. It looked divine!

*Prawn and miso salad. Apparently Josh loves this salad and eats it for lunch all the time. What's good enough for him is good enough for me...once I find time to go out an buy a few of the necessary ingredients (including white miso paste and fresh-frozen soya beans).

So, what did I buy? Apart from the vanilla beans, I bought (clockwise from bottom left in the photo above): beef chorizo sausages, manuka smoked eggs, NZ grown passionfruit syrup, NZ grown chopped walnuts, NZ grown chopped hazlenuts, Jamican meat jerky paste, Kokako organic truffles (not for me, but for one of my clients who's going through a tough time), Kokako gluten free chocolate brownies (all for me - they're goooood), guar beans and four packs of artichoke hearts.

Many of these will provide great inspiration for blogs over the coming days. Perhaps the most unusual thing was the guar beans (a dollar a handful) from the Pacific Islands Trade and Invest stall. Apparently they taste like, well, beans.

I'll cook 'em up tomorrow and tell you all about it.