Consume Me

I shamelessly borrowed this recipe from Stonesoup, which is a fabulous Sydney-based foodie blog that I heartily recommend.

It’s so rare, though, that I come across a cake-style recipe that meets the criteria of simple, fast, tasty, and gluten-free, that I just had to share the results.

We realised a few years ago that M is somewhat gluten intolerant, which made baking much more complicated than it used to be. Often, gluten-free recipes involve 4 or 5 different types of flour, or they taste like sand – or both.

This is neither.

Gluten-free peanut butter chocolate brownies - they taste even better than they look

The only changes I made to Jule’s recipe was that I used a commercial gluten-free self-raising flour, since that was what was in the cupboard, and we also included some Green & Blacks dark cooking chocolate. We also used raw sugar rather than brown sugar – again, that’s what was in the cupboard.

As you can see, they came out nicely.

Five minutes worth of prep, 30 minutes worth of baking, and thick, dense, peanut-chocolatey brownies, with the dark chocolate warm and melting in the centre. Our peanut butter had been in the fridge a little too long, so we’re going to have to bake another batch – just to check, you understand.

What are you waiting for? Recipe here.

What are you waiting for?

Filed under: Baking, Gluten Free, Simple

Leftovers from the meal we were too tired to cook

It’s been a long day in a long week in a bad month. I was too tired to cook when I stumbled home, and M was out until late. So we decided to get takeaway.

Unfortunately, I was also too tired to remember to order takeaway. So by the time M got home,  it was late, we were both hungry, and neither of us could be bothered waiting for home delivery to show up.

So what to do?

There was brown rice in the rice cooker, some eggs & baby spinach leaves in the fridge, and the kimchi that I made back in June. Ten minutes later, we were sitting down to dinner.

Arwen’s Japanese-style omelette rice

Ingredients

4 eggs

1 tsp soy sauce

1 tsp sesame oil

Method

Break the eggs into a bowl and whisk with a fork. Stir in the soy sauce. Heat a frypan over high heat and add the sesame oil. Once you can smell the oil, add half the egg. Use the fork to move the cooked egg aside and let raw egg flow in. Once the first half is cooked, push it to the side of the pan, and cook the second half the same way. Cut into strips, and serve on the rice. I added a handful of baby spinach leaves, and a good amount of kimchi as well.

All in all, it was quick, hot, tasty, and nutritious. Of course, we were too hungry and tired to think of photographing it, so instead you have a lunch-bento  of the leftovers, still looking delicious for tomorrow.

And then I went to bed (after a quick pause to post this, of course).

Filed under: Simple, Vegetarian/Vegan Tagged: eggs, omelette, quick, rice

Making your own pesto is much faster and easier than you'd expect

Most people don’t seem to think of pesto as a quick meal, unless you’re dolloping it out of a jar. Actually, though, fresh pesto is fast, simple, nutritious, and much, much tastier than any jar version you might have tried – even better than most restaurant versions.

I first encountered pesto from my Italian aunt, who used to babysit me until I was three years old. I then promptly forgot about it, of course, until a friend reintroduced me about sixteen or so years later. It surprised me to find out that most people think of pesto as something that comes out of jars. It’s actually very quick and easy to make at home – and so very much tastier than anything you’ll find in a jar.

There are many varients of pesto. I generally make a couple of different version, depending on what I have on hand. Basil pesto is my favourite, but you can also make very tasty versions from parsely or coriander. As well as using them on pasta, you can put dollops into soup, or on baked or grilled vegetables, into sandwiches, or as a salad dressing – or anywhere else you want a fresh tang of herbs and parmesan.

If you have a food processor, you can go from herbs on stalks to pesto in about 10 minutes, or less if you’re skipping the toasted pine nuts. If you only have a mortar and pestle, it may take a little longer – but some people think it’s even more delicious.

I’ve always read that pesto made in a mortar and pestle tastes much better than the food-processor made stuff. So just to keep things interesting, I made this pesto two ways. One in the food processor, the other in the mortar.

Basil pesto
The fresher the basil, the better the pesto. Make sure you don’t use the flower heads in your basil; they’ll make your pesto bitter. And remember, all the quantities in this recipe are approximate, feel free to modify them to your taste.

Make sure you leave out the flower heads, or you'll end up with bitter pesto

Ingredients
1 bunch of fresh basil
a handful of pine nuts
1/4 cup of parmesan, grated
1-2 cloves of garlic, peeled
about 2 tablespoons to 1/4 cup olive oil
Pinch of sea salt
Extra parmesan, to serve (optional)

Method
Pluck the leaves from the basil, and put in your food processor (or mortar). Toast the pinenuts in a dry frypan until they start to turn golden brown – watch them carefully as they can burn quickly. Pop them into the food processor as well, along with all the other ingredients (start with the smaller amount of olive oil). If you’re using a mortar and pestle, slice the garlic finely to make it easier to pound. Process your pesto until it becomes a very rough paste, either in a food processor or by giving it a good pounding with the pestle. Add more olive oil as needed.

Process until you get a chunky paste, adding more olive oil as needed

Serve tossed through fresh-cooked pasta, with a sprinkling of extra parmesan, if you feel like it.

Serves 2 hungry people.

Serve with a little extra parmesan, or just as is.

So which version is tastier? M and I sampled each, and the version made in the mortar won hands down. It had a more complex flavour, with the basil coming through much more clearly.

The pesto made by hand had much more flavour and depth than the food processor batch

Does this mean I’ll be pounding my pesto from now on? I doubt it – it’s too labour-intensive for a fast meal. I may tip it into the mortar at the end, but the difference in flavour wasn’t large enough to make the extra effort worthwhile, except for extra-special occasions.

Filed under: Simple, Vegetarian/Vegan Tagged: Italian, quick

I love stirfries. They’re our default meal at home – quick, nutritious, versatile and tasty. This one is especially easy, since the tempe doesn’t need to be precooked or have anything fancy done to it.

Although I was vegetarian for a long time, I don’t much like most versions of tempe – I find most of them mushy and tasteless-yet-tangy. Nutrisoy do a tempe ‘burger’ though, which is nutty and firm and tasty – I like it a lot. And it’s available in most supermarkets, which is even better.

There’s quite a lot of ginger in this recipe, as it’s very good for my poor arthritic feet and their struggles to deal with winter. The final meal isn’t overly hot – or gingery, but feel free to adjust the amount of ginger to your taste, if you’re not as fond of it as I am.

The main thing with stir frying is to use a high heat. I’ll go into tips for successful stirfrying in another post; for the moment, just remember to have your wok (or frypan, at a pinch) hot, and keep your ingredients moving.

I also used a secret ingredient in this recipe.

When I last went to Penang, I tracked down an old fashioned soy sauce maker, one of the few remaining who brew the sauce naturally, by hand, without additives or preservatives. The place was so obscure that our driver had to call them and find out where they were hidden, but it was worth it. This stuff is ambrosial; complex and deeply flavoured (our driver left with several bottles himself, so he obviously thought it was worth the trip as well). I used some of it in the stirfry – but if you don’t happen to have artisanal, ambrosial soy sauce on hand, just use the usual stuff. It’ll still be tasty.

My secret special soy - not so secret now!

Tempe & Ginger Stirfry

There are a lot of different ways to vary this recipe – feel free to experiment with different vegetables or sauces.

Ingredients

2 x Nutrisoy tempe burgers (There’s three to a pack; if you both have big appetites, use all three)

1/2 capsicum (bell pepper)

2 sticks of celery

2 heads of bok choy (or other green of your choice)

2 garlic cloves (optional, but the finished stirfry certainly isn’t over garlicky)

Fresh ginger, about the length of your thumb, or a little less

1/2 tablespoon peanut oil (or olive oil if you prefer)

Soy sauce to taste

Rice, to serve

Method

Put the rice in the rice cooker, and turn it on – or start it cooking in your usual way.

Slice the bok choy into chunks, and rinse well to remove any dirt, then set aside to drain. Slice the ginger into small sticks, and peel the garlic ready for the garlic press (or mince it finely if you’re that way inclined). Cut the tempe burger into even strips, and cut the celery and capsicum into even pieces as well.

Make sure you chop your ingredients evenly, and try to have everything ready to go before you start cooking

Put the wok on the stove at as high a heat as possible. Add the oil. When it runs across the pan like water, add the ginger and garlic, and stir well for a few seconds, until you can smell them clearly. Add the tempe burger to the wok, and cook for about a minute or two until it browns slightly. Add the celery and capsicum. You may find it helpful to add about a teaspoon of water, to steam the vegetables a little – they cook faster, and you end up using less oil.

When the celery and capsicum start to soften, and their colours are bright, add in the bok choy and stir until it’s just wilted and cooked. Turn the heat off, add soy sauce to taste, and serve.

Eat while fresh and hot - yum!

Enjoy!

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Yes, I’m still here. It’s been a busy couple of weeks – I’ve gone from unemployment to two shiny new jobs, and am settling myself back into the routine of full-time work. As well, this cold, damp, Sydney-winter weather plays havoc with my disabilities and pain levels, making it even harder to put in the effort to cook healthy food.

As a result, I’ve been eating more takeaway than I like. M has been cooking as well, but as he travels a lot, it really is up to me to make sure I look after myself.

So, the focus for the next couple of weeks will be quick and easy meals that are still healthy and nurturing. Some of them, like last night’s baked sausages and vegetables, take next to no time to prepare, but about an hour in the oven, while others are as quick to cook as they are to put together. I’ll be posting a homemade pesto recipe in the next few days, assuming I can find some nice basil, with some more recipes to follow over the coming week.

Let me know if you have any requests!

Filed under: Uncategorized

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My local sources for Asian ingredients

I’ve had a few questions about where I buy the odder ingredients I cook with, like mirin (Japanese sweet cooking sake), or kombu kelp, or even dried shiitake mushrooms.

I have a habit of wandering into Asian groceries and happily browsing for large chunks of time, but most of the ingredients I use that aren’t at my local supermarket (or in the fortnightly feedbag) come from two places, both of them in the Sydney CBD.

The first one is a lovely little Japanese grocery store hidden behind Woolworths at town hall. It’s called Conveni8, and it’s located an arcade on Pitt St at Town Hall, just down from Park Street.

They stock just about every Japanese food ingredient you can think of, and a wide range of Japanese sweets (including my favourite chocolate bar ‘Crunky’, and green tea & cherry blossom KitKats).

Anything I don’t get from Conveni8 usually comes from Thai Kee supermarket in Chinatown’s Market City shopping centre. This place has a fabulous range of ingredients from Chinese cuisine, Japanese, Thai, Malaysian, Korean – you name it. They also have a well-stocked freezer section full of tasty dumplings, and a good kitchen implement section (as well as some of the largest mortars & pestles I’ve ever seen).

They even have an impressive range of vegetarian ingredients, from vegetarian fish maw to two different kinds of vegetarian shark’s fin. There’s some vegetarian pork floss sitting in my cupboard at the moment from Thai Kee, which I haven’t yet had the courage to sample. (If you do go there for vegetarian foodstuffs, make sure you check out the freezer section as well as the general food isles – they have two full freezer cabinets jammed full of vegetarian tasties.)

Where do you go for the stuff you don’t find in your local supermarket? Share it with us all!

Filed under: Shopping

So, what happened to the home-made kimchi. I said in my last post to give your kimchi about two to three days to ferment, before you popped it in the fridge. Of course, I then went out of town, leaving my kimchi sitting happily on the bench, and came back five days later.

And whaddaya know, it’s delicious.

Fresh, sour, tasty kimchi ready for dinner tonight

It’s salty, hot and bitey from the chilli, tangy and sour from the fermentation, and delicious. Next time, I’ll reduce the salt slightly – it’s a little saltier than I’d prefer, but we’re going to have no problems chowing our way through this batch. In fact, we’ll be eating this lot tonight.

Did anyone else try the kimchi recipe yet? How did it turn out?

Filed under: Uncategorized

If you’ve ever eaten at a Korean restaurant, chances are you’ve eaten kimchi, the fermented chilli and Chinese cabbage pickle that tastes so, so much better than that description makes it sound. I love kimchi – I’ve been known to eat it by the spoonful. And, surprisingly enough, it’s pretty easy to make – well, this version is, anyway.

I’ve also discovered that some people haven’t encountered Chinese cabbage, or wombok, the main ingredient in most kimchi. It’s one of my favourite greens. It’s light and crisp, without the heavy sulfur tang of most Western varieties, but more robust than lettuce. It also lasts much better in the fridge than other Asian greens like bok choy or gai lan, and it cooks quickly in dishes like stirfries or stews. Chinese cabbage is one of the traditional ingredients in Japanese hotpots, too. For any Americans reading along, it seems to be known as Napa cabbage over there.

But if you’ve been staring at the remains of a Chinese cabbage in your fridge, wondering what on earth you’re going to do with it, tasty spicy bitey kimchi is a damn good option.

There are many, many different variations on kimchi. From ones that use different vegetables as the base, like daikon radish, or various greens, to different flavourings, like fish or soy sauce, or even fresh oysters. I like mine fairly basic, and didn’t happen to have any oysters lying around the house, so here is my version.

Arwen’s Simple Kimchi recipe

Korean chilli powder is normally a little milder than most others. I couldn’t find any when I went hunting through Asian supermarkets, so I just used normal chilli flakes, whizzed in my spice grinder until they were mostly powdered. If you’re using Korean powder, you may want to up your chilli quantity a little – or just leave it as it is for a slightly milder pickle.

The word ‘shmoosh’ appears frequently throughout this recipe. In case it’s not clear, I mean ‘give it a good squeezy mix with your hands’.

Ingredients

1/2 Chinese cabbage, cut into rough pieces

1/4 cup salt (don’t worry; it isn’t all ending up in the finished kimchi)

water

1/4 cup Korean chilli powder (or any other chilli powder)

3 spring onions, roughly sliced (optional)

2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger

2 teaspoons crushed fresh garlic (or 2 large cloves)

Method

Chopped cabbage, ready for brining

Pop the chopped Chinese cabbage into a non-metal bowl big enough to hold it comfortably. Dissolve the salt into about 2 cups of warm water, then pour the salty water over the cabbage. With clean hands, give the cabbage a good mix to make sure it’s all covered with the salt water, then pop a weight on top (I used a dinner plate) and leave it overnight (or for at least 4 hours) to brine.

I used a dinner plate as a weight for my brining cabbage

The next day, drain the brine off the cabbage, and rinse it well, preferably two or three times. Let it drain. Mix the chilli powder, garlic, and ginger with enough water to make a paste. Pop your cabbage pack in its bowl, and add the chilli paste and the chopped spring onions.

Before shmooshing

Now put some food-safe gloves on! This is important – you’re going to be doing more shmoosing, and grinding chilli into your skin burns, even if you don’t accidentally wipe your face with a chilli-hand. I used disposable latex gloves.

Give it a good mix and squeeze - and I mean it about the gloves!

Once you’re gloved up, mix the kimchi up well, giving it a good shmoosh as you go, to further break the cell walls in the cabbage and help the chilli marinade penetrate it.

And after shmooshing.

When mixed well, put the kimchi into your container (make sure you wash it well first!). Leave it out for 1 – 2 days to start to ferment, then pop it into the fridge. The longer you leave it, the more sour your final kimchi will be. You can eat it any time after it’s ready for the fridge;  and it should last several months.

Note: it’s best to use a glass or ceramic jar to store your kimchi in, as the chilli can stain plastic. I had neither on hand, so I’ve resigned myself to a red-stained container.

The finished kimchi. Over the next few days, the liquid will go red, and the kimchi will get tastier and tastier.

I’ll make sure I post pictures of the final kimchi when it’s ready to eat, and hopefully a recipe as well.

Filed under: Pickle/Preserve, Vegetarian/Vegan Tagged: cabbage, kimchi, Korean, vegan, vegetarian

Back at the end of May, I made roast duck. Since I dislike wasting leftovers (and since I don’t roast meat often enough to get sick of saving the carcass), I made stock out of the bones the next day – and then a Vietnamese-style soup from the broth. There wasn’t enough duck left over to add meat to the soup, but the flavour from the stock came through clearly enough to make it deliciously full of unami anyway.

The soup turned out well – I ended up bowls of warm, fragrant soup, redolent of star anise, rich duck, lemon, and a subtle hint of cinnamon. Lovely on a cold winter’s night!

Duck stock

Any leftover stock can be frozen to use later – it’s probably worth concentrating it as much as you can, so it takes up less space in your freezer. You can freeze it in icecube trays to get little cubes of stock to add flavour to foods, or just freeze it in a lump.

Ingredients

1 roast duck carcass, along with reserved wingtips & neck bone

2-3 sticks of celery, roughly chopped

1 onion, also roughly chopped

1 carrot, yet again roughly chopped

3 shiitake mushrooms  - I had fresh ones on hand, but dried would be just as good or better. Tear them into chunks.

1 small piece of kombu (Dried kelp. This is optional, but it does add to the umami)

Tops of two spring onions

Piece of cinnamon bark

2 star anise

3-4 good slices of fresh ginger

About a teaspoon of peppercorns (fresh or dried – I happened to have fresh ones)

About 10 ripe cherry tomatoes (because they needed using – but they also add a richness to the stock)

Pop all the ingredients for your stock into a big pot, cover with cold water, then cook for about an hour and a half

Method

Throw all in pot, cover with cold water (it’s very important that you use cold water – it helps bring all the flavours out of your ingredients), bring slowly to simmer. Cook on a low heat for about an hour & a half to two hours. If necessary, remove all the solid ingredients and reduce the stock to concentrate the flavours, or just season to taste.

Vietnamese-style duck broth

This soup may look complicated, but it’s actually very quick and  straightforward, if you have the stock already made. You can substitute the vegetables and meat for whatever you have in the cupboard, so it’s a good way of using up your excess veg, as well.

Ingredients

Duck stock – about 4 cups per person.

4 shiitake mushrooms

tops of 1-2 spring onions, cut into rounds

A handful of enotake mushrooms, bottom piece removed.

1 carrot, finely sliced

Noodles of your choice – I used sweet potato noodles, but rice noodles or wheat noodles will work too)

Handful of green beans, cut into bite-sized pieces

Leftover duck meat, if you have any, or thinly-sliced beef, or tofu (we used vegetarian burdock balls, since they were in the freezer)

1 lemon, sliced into quarters

Fresh mint (optional)

Soy sauce and fresh chilli slices, as dipping sauce

Method

Warm the stock until just boiling. Add the mushrooms, carrot, beans, and leftover meat or substitute to the broth, and cook ’til just tender. Pour boiling water over the noodles, and add to the soup to finish cooking.

Serve with lemon slices and fresh mint, and soy and sliced chilli on the side.

Serves 2

Duck soup, taken on the couch just before eating. There almost wasn't a finished picture of this - it smelt so good I very nearly just dug in!

I’m still finding the knack for stock. I’m not sure if it’s just that commercial stocks are filled with additives and a half-tonne of salt to make them enticing, but many of the stocks I’ve made previously have seemed a bit insipid – vegetable ones especially. This one worked out well, especially once I’d turned it into soup, but I’m still working on getting the full flavour of my ingredients into the stocks. Any suggestions gladly accepted!

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In other news, my sourdough adventures continue. I made a batch of spelt & wholemeal bread last week, and it turned out surprisingly well! Embarrassingly enough, it’s the first loaf I’ve made that actually came out of its banneton after rising without getting stuck and pulled around, and it looks lovely and rustically cute. Once I cut into it, too, it had a nice crumb, with reasonable sized air holes in it, and a fine, translucent character to the bread. It tastes good, too – quite mild, for a sourdough, since I used my dry starter, and it was recently fed, but still with that complex sweetness and flavour depth of a good sourdough.

Cooling from the oven. It looks so tasty!

I think this one worked partly because it’s a slightly drier dough than I usually work with, and partly because the banneton is finally getting seasoned with the right flour. I still have a long way to go, but it’s very encouraging!

I'm definitely getting better at my baking

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As I promised last week, here’s another recipe for anyone still trying to work out what one does with daikon, other than wave them around the kitchen, in all their long radishy glory. I made this for dinner last night, along with a hot & sour stir fry of tofu, eggplant and capsicum, and some quick daikon & carrot pickles. It was well tasty!

The sauce for this dish is a sweetened miso sauce, known in Japan as dengaku miso. It keeps indefinitely in the fridge, and is traditionally used for Japanese country-style cooking, on top of eggplant or tofu. Because it’s cooked, the healthy miso cultures will no longer be viable, so I usually stir a little bit of fresh miso back into it when I put it in the fridge, in the hopes that it will recolonise. I have no idea if it actually works, but it can’t hurt.

Braised Daikon with Sweet Miso

The rice is there to soak up the bitterness of the daikon, resulting in a smooth, tender vegetable base for the sweet miso to shine through. The quantities of mirin and sugar aren’t a typo, you really do want almost as much sugar and mirin as miso.

Ingredients

1 daikon radish

1 tablespoon of rice (any type except basmati or jasmine)

1 largish piece of kombu seaweed (optional)

2 tablespoons of red miso

1.5 tablespoons raw sugar

1.5 tablespoons mirin (sweet Japanese cooking wine)

Peeled daikon chunks, ready for simmering

Method

Peel the daikon and cut into 4 chunks. Put the chunks and the rice into a saucepan and cover with cold water. Bring to the boil over medium to high heat, then reduce heat to medium and simmer until daikon is tender when poked with a skewer or knifepoint; this will probably take about 20 minutes. Drain and discard the rice, and rinse the daikon chunks under cold water until cool.

While the daikon is cooking, make the miso sauce. Mix the miso, sugar and mirin together, then cook over medium heat until it starts to bubble, then reduce the heat to as low as possible, and stir constantly until the mixture is thick – you want it about as thick as your original miso. Turn the heat off and let the sauce sit while you finish the daikon.

The braised daikon chunks soaking with kombu seaweed. That's the sweet miso sauce behind it, too.

Wash the saucepan you cooked the daikon in, then pop in the kombu and radish chunks, and cover with cold water again. Heat the pot to almost boiling point, then turn the heat off and let it sit for about 15 minutes to absorb the kombu flavour. If you don’t happen to keep dried seaweed in your kitchen, you can substitute with instant dashi (Japanese stock), or just use plain water. The seaweed does give it a lovely subtle flavour, though. I save the seaweed flavoured water afterwards, too, to use as a stock base.

While the daikon is sitting around, I usually stirfry whatever I’m serving along with it.

To serve, stand 2 chunks on your plate and top with a generous teaspoon of the miso. Add in whatever else you’re serving for your tasty dinner. Eat, making happy noises.

Serves 2 people as a side dish.

Just to round off the daikon posts, here is the daikon I started drying in last week’s daikon post. As you can see, it’s shriveled up and dried nicely, and is ready to be popped into a jar until the next time I make an Asian-style hotpot. So if you’re really stuck for things to do with your radish, you can always delay having to make up your mind!

Last week's daikon slices, now completely dry and ready to put away

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One of the meats in the last Feedbag was some diced goat. I haven’t actually cooked diced goat, but I’ve eaten goat curry both locally and overseas, and loved it each time, so it was easy enough to work out what to do with it.

I spent a little while drooling through various cookbooks. I ended up going with a recipe from my current favourite Indian cookbook, Mangoes and Curry Leaves, by Jeffrey Alford & Naomi Duguid. This is the sort of cookbook I want to write – part cookbook, part travelogue, part photo book, and full of very authentic, and very tasty recipes. The recipe I ended up using for my precious diced goat was a ginger & coconut lamb curry from Southern India. It’s full of tasty spices like toasted coriander seeds, cinnamon, turmeric, and lots of ginger, while still fairly easy to prepare. And best of all, I had all the necessary ingredients in my cupboard.

I won’t give you the whole recipe here, since I used the cookbook version almost exactly, and I don’t want to steal anyone’s creativity, but I would like to share the spice marinade. This smelled unbelievably good. Seriously. I’m going to make this up separately as a marinade for meats, since it was just so damned good on its own. And quite quick and easy to make!

I prepared this in my mortar and pestle, since it was quite straightforward,  and I like pounding things with rocks. If you don’t own a mortar, or you just don’t like smashing things, feel free to use a food processor or spice grinder.

Toasted Coriander & Ginger rub for tasty meats

(from Mangoes & Curry Leaves)

The secret with this is the toasted coriander – toasting it not only brings out its spicy, nutty fragrance, but adding it hot to the marinade seems to bring out the other ingredients as well – especially the ginger.

This went together really easily and quickly, and smelt amazing.

Ingredients

1 tablespoon of ginger, chopped roughly

1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper (I used two dried chillies from a previous feedbag)

1 teaspoon of coriander seeds

1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric

1 teaspoon of sea salt

Method

Toast the coriander seeds in a dry frypan until fragrant. Pop the other ingredients into your mortar or food processor, then add the coriander seeds while still hot. Pound or blend until a rough paste, then rub on meat of choice. Leave at least an hour to marinate before cooking.

Easy, isn’t it! And it is so very, very fragrant and tasty – I’m hungry just thinking about it.

Delicious, fresh goat curry

The rest of the curry recipe went together equally as well, as you can see from the finished curries. I served them with a fresh mint chutney, also from Mangoes & Curry Leaves, since I wanted something bright and fresh to bring out the flavours, and my poor mint from the last box was looking very wilted and forlorn on the bunch. It was all uber-tasty.

Tasty fresh mint chutney

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I’ve heard from a few people that they’ve no idea what to do with the daikon radishes in this week’s feedbag, so here is Arwen’s handy how-to tips for daikon radish.

Daikon radish

You’ve all probably eaten daikon radish, unless you have a loathing for Japanese food – the grated strands of white stuff you get with sushi or sashimi is just grated daikon. It’s basically a very large, mild radish. Daikon is tasty sliced in salads, or you can cook it in stews as you would turnips. They do well with slow braising. Or you can slice it into thin rounds or semi-circles and quickly stir-fry it with other vegies.

Chinese turnip cake, a popular yumcha dish, can also be made with daikon.  JustHungry, one of my favourite Japanese food blogs, has a recipe for vegan turnip cake, but I haven’t actually cooked it for myself.

Maki, writer of JustHungry also points out you can dry daikon radish. She says to shred it into long thin shreds and put it in a basket in the sun for a few days. I don’t have a grater capable of doing long shreds, so I’ve sliced my radish as finely as possible, and it’s currently sitting in my front window on the lid of my bamboo steamer. Here’s hoping we actually get some dry weather for a few days!

Drying daikon slices on my windowsill

Another easy use for daikon is Japanese style pickles, which are served alongside main course dishes. I pulled out my copy of  Easy Japanese Pickling (yes, I really do own a Japanese pickle cookbook), and ended up trying two different versions of daikon pickles.

Oolong tea daikon pickles

The recipe actually asked for Japanese green tea, or sencha tea, but I don’t actually have any, and I thought that the slight bitterness of daikon would actually go better with the earthy taste of oolong anyway, so I substituted.

Ingredients

1 tsp oolong tea

1/2 tsp salt

1/3 daikon radish, cut into matchsticks

Method

Add all ingredients to a small ziplock bag (you can use a normal plastic bag if you have to). Squeeze out the air and seal the bag, then squoosh gently with your hands until the daikon starts to look wet. Put aside for about an hour, then serve.

Finished pickles - next time, I rinse the tea in boiling water to bring out the flavour more

Next time, I’ll pour some boiling water over the tea first, then drain it off quickly – I found the finished pickles didn’t have much of a tea taste. I’ll also use less salt – I’ve already adjusted the recipe here down, but it may need to drop to 1/4 teaspoon instead. Still, the pickles have a nice bite to them from the chilli.

Soy sauce daikon pickles

Kombu is dried kelp – the Japanese use it frequently as a flavouring, and to add umami. If you don’t have any, you should be able to skip it without losing much. Similarly, if you don’t have mirin, Japanese sweet cooking wine, you can substitute ½ teaspoon of sugar.

Ingredients

1/3 daikon radish, cut in half, then into segments, and scored lightly across the top

2 tablespoons soy sauce

1 tablespoon mirin

About 10cm of kombu, cut into little pieces with kitchen scissors

Method

Add the kombu (if using) to the soy and mirin, and set it aside while you slice the daikon. Then put your daikon gently into a ziplock bag, and add the kombu and marinade. Seal, and set aside for about an hour before serving.

Finished soy sauce pickles. I sliced my pickle pieces into smaller chunks - they're quite tasty

If you’re really stuck for things to do with daikon (other than take it to the movies or invite it home to meet the parents), you can also grate it and add it to kimchi, Korean chilli pickled cabbage. This is made from wombok, Chinese cabbage, which we also got in this week’s box, and is surprisingly easy to make. I’ll be posting a recipe for that in a few days, so make sure to check back. I’m also planning on using my last daikon to make Japanese slow-cooked daikon with miso in a few days, so stay tuned for that as well.

Filed under: Uncategorized

This post was originally published over on Tree in Forest. It’s much more suitable for here, though, so I’ve moved it, with a few modifications. Apologies anyone who’s seen it before. To sweeten it for those who’ve seen it before, I’ve added in some new pictures. I’m also going to try and make a batch of the cherry unpronouncables from the class, so if any Feedbaggers  feel really hard-done-by, comment and I’ll try and save you one.

Fresh cherry unpronounceables (I'm told they're actually schiaciatta, but I prefer my version) - fellow Feedbaggers, comment if you're appalled by the double post and need to be bribed with one

At the end of last year, a (now ex-) workmate and I were given some gift vouchers. We found an interesting looking artisan breadmaking day course at Brasserie Bread, and since  at that time I’d just started dabbling around making sourdough (or really, getting a lot of flour all over the kitchen, and occasionally coming out with some rather dense loaves), we enrolled in the first vacant day we could find, and dragged a bunch of workmates with us.

So at the end of January, we got down & doughy, and it was such fun.

We were lucky enough to have Michael Klausen, one of the directors, as our tutor, and he was friendly, knowledgeable, and obviously passionate about his bread. He gave us the 10 steps of breadmaking, which I think we all forgot immediately, then we started kneading. Soon enough, the room was filled with the sounds of dough slapping the table, and the occasional friend showing off by trying to knead two rolls at once.

Some of us did show off a bit.

An amazing procession of different bread doughs came past, and we were shown how to mix them, how to shape them, how to knead them and how to tell when they were ready. In the middle we paused for some bread sampling, cheeses and white wine – very civilised after all our hard bready work.

Things did get a little messy at times.

And finally, we slid some cherry olive oil breads with an unpronouncable name into the oven – and out into our mouths.

The Brasserie Bread kindly set up a little table for me, since there was no earthly way I’d be able to stand up with everyone else, but even with that, and taking it as carefully as I could, I ended up pretty damned sore afterwards. Still, my bread went into the oven the next night, and came out looking respectable, if not fabulous, and tasting delicious. And I learnt a hell of a lot, and we each left carrying several bundles of freshly baked bread, and our own sourdough dough to take home and proof before baking.

Jenny and her large loaf

All in all, such a fabulous day – and most of us are planning on going back. If nothing else, we still can’t remember the ten steps of baking! Me, I want to do their wholegrain baking course. I also want to go down there soon just to sit in the cafe, drink the coffee, and munch on as much tasty bread as I can fit into my tum. Anyone feel like an outing?

Filed under: Uncategorized

I have a thing for baking bread. Sourdough bread, specifically. There’s a few reasons for this – the main one is that I really like eating it. Also, though, I enjoy the actual process of sourdough making, of nurturing the starter culture, throwing the wet dough around, and watching the magic that happens as the gluten and yeasts activate and the bread structure starts changing from a sodden lump of flour to a shiny, elastic, fragrant dough. I love the nuances of flavour that happen depending on how long I let it rise, and when I last fed the starter, and what flours I’ve used as starter-food. I’m very grateful for the robustness of sourdough bugs, too – they’ll happily adjust to a sunny summer bench, or a fridge, and if you happen to need to shove your dough in the fridge overnight instead of baking it when you should, they’ll happily just slow down their activity, rather than deflating into a limp and gassy lump, like standard yeasts. And they can live in containers in my fridge, getting fed once every week or so, without complaint. How cool is that!

As well, I love the fact that each person’s culture will be subtly different. The starter changes based on the native bugs in the air around us, the bugs in the original culture, and the bugs in the flour that they’re fed on (which is one of the reasons I almost always use organic flours in breadmaking). The idea that my bread is truly local bread, shaped by the environment it came from, is just wonderful. True Inner West bread!

Of course, I’m not a very good baker, but I’m having a hell of a lot of fun practicing.

Earlier this week, I made a loaf of one of my favourite breads; a sourdough spelt fruit loaf with currants, dried cranberries, and a tonne of poppyseeds. It turned out remarkably tasty; soft, moist, chewy, and richly fruity, so I thought I’d share some process and pictures with you. Sadly, I can’t fit the actual bread onto the computer screen.

This even counts as a Feedbag bread, if only just – there’s freshly-ground cinnamon from this fortnight’s feedbag in it. Not enough to overpower the bread, just enough for a subtle depth of spice.

Currants, cranberries and cinnamon (with lots and lots of poppy seeds), ready to be kneaded into the dough

The fruit actually goes into the bread with the last knead, so it got to sit around in the bowl for a while, while the mixing and resting and dough-slapping went on.

Raw dough, when first mixed together, really looks like just a pile of sticky flour – most unappetising! After sitting for about 20 minutes, it gets its first kneading. Because sourdoughs usually contain much more water than standard bread doughs, you can’t use the traditional fold-push-turn method of kneading. Instead, most people throw the dough. Seriously! You scoop the dough up with one hand and a dough scraper, then slap it down hard onto the bench and stretch it slightly, before scooping it back up again, turning it, and throwing it around. It’s very therapeutic. Fortunately, because of the resting times, you don’t need to spend as long throwing it around as you would do with standard dough.

Just after the first knead, trusty dough scraper at the side

Once it’s been thrown around, it gets to sit in its bowl for about 20 minutes to get its breath back, then it’s time for another throwing session, until the dough is stretchy and elastic, and lightly glistening (like the picture above, except stretchier).

Then it’s time to rise – in the case of this fruit bread, it only gets one rise, in the pan it’ll be cooked in. Here it is, fruit and spices added, and settled into its bread tin:

Just in its pan, waiting to rise

And a few hours later, it had doubled in size, and was ready to go into the oven:

All grown up, and ready to bake

There’s a whole bunch of tricks you can use to bake sourdough well in a normal kitchen oven, but I’ll just share the most important one: don’t forget you’ve closed all your doors to keep heat in, and still expect to be able to smell when your bread is done.

The top got a bit over-browned, but as you can see, it was still delicious.

Out of the oven, and slightly cooled. Too brown on top, but very tasty!

I haven’t posted the recipe here, but if you want to make your own, comment and I can add it. And if you’re interested in some sourdough bugs for your very own, to love and cuddle and make tasty bread with, I can usually spare some, so let me know!

Filed under: Baking Tagged: Bread, fruitloaf, sourdough

One of the things in the latest feedbag box was a whole duck. I’ve never cooked duck before, so I was a bit wary about this one, but it turned out tender, and moist, and extremely tasty. M, Mr Chocolate and I were all sitting around with very full bellies making happy yum noises for a good hour after polishing off all but a few scraps of the duck. Well, maybe I was making most of the noises. I’m like that.

Here’s how I cooked it.

Rinse the duck under cold running water, and dry with kitchen paper. Using a bamboo skewer, prick the skin of the duck every few centimeters so the fat can drain while the duck roasts. Cut off the last section of the wings, and the neck. I’ve put them away in the fridge, to make stock from tomorrow, along with the bones. Pop an onion, cut into quarters, into the duck’s bum, along with a few sprigs of sage, and use the skewer to close the cavity.

Washed, dried, and waiting for the next steps

Put the duck on a roasting rack over a pan, and pour a couple of cups of boiling water over the duck – this softens the fat and helps the skin crisp. When I did it, the skin tightened immediately under the water, and the duck went pink and plump-looking – it was fascinating.

Just about to go into the oven. Amazing how much more appetising it looks - to me, anyway.

I then rubbed a mix of preserved lemon and honey all over the duck, to help it brown. Next time, I think I’ll skip this step, or just use the lemon alone – the duck was brown and tasty, but slightly sweeter than I prefer. It’s up to you.

Roast your duck for about 3hrs at 180°, turning every half hour or so.  I put the vegies in to roast about 2 hours in, after parboiling them for about 10 minutes. Once the duck and veg are cooked, let the duck rest for 10 minutes, then carve.

Carving the duck

While it’s resting, pour off the fat from the duck pan –  we ended up with about a metric cup full of duck fat, which we’ll keep in the fridge, and use (sparingly) for other tasty cooking. Use the remaining juices for gravy. I added a couple of cherry tomatoes, well squished, and some salt to mine, and thickened it with potato starch.

Carve, eat, and you too can make many yum noises.

Yum!

Filed under: Meat Tagged: duck, roast

I’m told that some people have tried and liked the lamb shanks recipe – hooray! Be sure and post your experience if you’ve tried out any of the recipes here. I’m looking at the commenting system to see if I can make it a bit easier; I’m new at WordPress, so I’m still working out the options.

I’ve also been asked to post some more recipes. Whether that’s so there’s more tasties to try, or people would prefer not to read me meandering along about wholefoods, I’m not sure.

Either way, here’s an easy and simple recipe that I cooked last night. It’s vegetarian/vegan, unless you do as I did and add chicken breast at the end, and takes quite literally 5 minutes to prepare, then cooks itself. Well, if you own a rice cooker, anyway. There’s slightly more supervision involved if you don’t.

Personally, our rice cooker is our most-used kitchen item. 5 meals out of seven will involve rice, or sometimes quinoa, cooked in the rice cooker. And on weeknights it’s a life saver. Come home, pop rice in the rice cooker, then cook the rest of the meal when the rice is done – it’ll wait. Or, in the case of this recipe, chop for 5 minutes, toss things in the rice cooker, then eat when it’s done.

So simple.

I really, really love my rice cooker - it cooks me meals like this!

I used packaged chestnuts for this – I usually pick up a bag or two when I’m in Chinatown, for snacks. You could also use dried chestnuts; I haven’t tried it myself, but I think the cooking time would be enough to rehydrate them. Or you can use fresh chestnuts if you want – the amount of effort it takes to roast and peel them usually means I just eat them on the spot, personally, but if you happen to have more than you can easily shovel in your gob, you can use them here.

These are the chestnuts I generally buy

If you don’t have chestnuts, you could substitute green peas or beans. It would change the final dish, and make it much less autumnal and sweet, but it would still be damn tasty.

Shiitake and Chestnut rice

Ingredients

1 rice-cooker cup of brown rice (or about 1/2 a metric cup, if you don’t have a rice cooker)

4-5 shiitake mushrooms

1 stick of celery

4-5 chestnuts

A couple of handfuls of baby spinach leaves, washed

Prep time!

Method

Chop the mushrooms, celery, and chestnuts – it doesn’t have to be too fine, just even slices. Put everything but the baby spinach into the ricecooker, or saucepan, and add the recommended amount of water. If you’re not using the rice cooker, add water to the depth of your second knuckle from the tip of your index finger. Cook normally. (if anyone needs instructions on cooking rice by absorption on the stove, comment and let me know – it’s pretty straight forward). Once cooked, stir the spinach leaves through.

Serve as is, or do as I did, and top with chicken breast, which I poached then quickly fried with a little soy sauce. Or you could add some Asian-style eggs quickly cooked in the wok with soy sauce and sesame oil.

If you want more flavour in your rice, you could partially or wholly replace the cooking water with chicken stock or Japanese dashi stock.

Chestnut & shiitake rice with chicken breast

Serves 1 on its own, or 2 as part of a larger meal.

Enjoy cooking, and your food!

Filed under: Simple, Vegetarian/Vegan Tagged: autumn, one-pot, simple, vegan, vegetarian

Whole grains, like this mixed brown rice & wild rice rice ball, don't need to be boring - but they're definitely good for you

There’re a lot of buzzwords around food, like everything else. Organic, Natural, Pure, Fresh – and another one, that used to be restricted to the health food shop, but is being used more and more commonly, is Wholefood.

So what is a wholefood?

You hear the term bandied around a lot these days, or I do, anyway. I’ve been hearing (and talking) about wholefoods since I studied nutrition back in the 90s, but for some reason the term seems to have gone almost mainstream these days. Michael Pollan talks about them in In Defence of Food, and Michael Evans wrote a whole book around them in his new Real Food Companion. (a book I really want to get my hands on, incidentally! It looks scrumptious.) But whole foods aren’t restricted to just Michaels.

So what are wholefoods? And why should you care?

It’s hard to give a proper definition. I think the term ‘wholefood’ has come to be as much emotive as descriptive, and it was never intended to be a black and white categorical definition. But a wholefood, ideally, is a food that’s been processed (or meddled with) as little as possible – so it’s as close to whole as possible.

You're still allowed to take the skins off your onions!

That doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to take the skin off your onion, or wash the dirt off your potatoes. It just means, as a rule of thumb, that brown rice contains more nutrients than white rice, and is usually better for you – and definitely better than rice puffs or bubbles! By the same token, eating an apple is much better for you than eating an apple pie.

Of course, a little common sense is still needed. Chickens still need to be plucked before you eat them, unless you want a mouthful of feathers and not much else. And it’s still probably better to cook those potatoes after you’ve washed them, rather than chowing down on them while they’re raw.

But food that’s as fresh as possible, as little processed as possible, and as nutritious as possible? That’s wholefood. Yum!

Filed under: Ramblings, Uncategorized Tagged: health, wholefood

I mentioned a post or two ago that I have a thing for tea, yet here are three entries up already, and not one of them is about tea! Time to fix that.

I do love my tea. Mind you, I couldn’t live without coffee, either – I’m definitely bi-beverage. A nice strong cup of coffee gets me out of bed in the morning – and down to the cafe for another to face the day. But once the morning caffeine hit is done, tea is my drink of choice.

I had to go out today, and as anyone in Sydney will know, it’s cold, grey, and disgustingly rainy. Wet weather is a real pain to manage on crutches, so I consoled myself with a little retail therapy, and bought myself a Japanese matcha tea bowl from the wonderful T2.

My shiny new Japanese tea bowl

Mind you, I did need a tea bowl. Really! I picked up a Japanese tea whisk when I was in Tokyo last year, and brought it back with some matcha tea, but so far, my efforts to whisk it in a normal tea cup have not been a complete success.

This may explain why the whisk isn't working so well.

So, when I saw the bowl in the shop, it wasn’t hard to convince me to buy it.

Matcha tea is a Japanese powdered green tea, most famous for its use in the Japanese tea ceremony. It gives the distinctive taste and astringency to green tea ice-cream – and a whole range of Japanese sweets (stay tuned for a post on green tea & cherry blossom KitKats!).  Traditionally, matcha is made from shade-grown tea leaves, which are slower growing, and sweeter, than the usual non-shaded version. After harvest the tea leaves are dried flat, then de-veined and powdered, resulting in a brilliantly green, distinctive-smelling tea.

See what I mean about brilliantly green tea?

Making the tea is quite simple, in theory. You warm your tea bowl with hot water, then put in about 1/4 teaspoon of matcha powder into the bowl. Pour onto it about 70ml of hot (NOT boiling) water, then whisk with the bamboo whisk in a back-and-forth motion, with the whisk tips about a cm or so away from the bottom. Once the tea is well mixed into the water, lift the whisk so it’s just within the water, and whisk until a fine foam of tiny bubbles covers the surface. You want very small, even bubbles to give a silky texture, not great big vulgar ones.

Whisking matcha

Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out that way for me today. I’m not sure whether it was because my water was too cool, or my technique is crap, or it’s just not sensible to try and manage a whisk, camera, and reflector all at once while precariously balancing on a chair because your feet won’t hold you up. Whatever the reason, rather than a fine jade of bubbles, my tea definitely had vulgar big ones.

Sadly, my bubbles were vulgar rather than fine and elegant

So, I definitely need more practice. It’s a good thing I really like the taste! Whether or not I had satisfactory bubbles, I still enjoyed the tea – the empty bowl is still sitting next to me now. I’m patting it occasionally to enjoy the rough autumn texture.

A comforting bowl of tea for a cold day - whatever the bubble size

Happy tea drinking!

Filed under: Tea Tagged: Green tea, howto, Japan, Matcha, shopping, Tea, teaware

Winter always makes me think of soups and stews and roasts; warm hearty food to warm the belly. So  I was really happy when this fortnight’s feedbag box turned up with three juicy lamb shanks in it, as well as a bunch of really ripe tomatoes that needed using quickly, and a group of pungent, tasty, single clove garlic bulbs. Given the cold, windy, rainy weather outside, a warm, slowly baked roasty, casserole-y thing with lamb and potatoes and tomatoes, and plenty of tomatoes and garlic for a good, flavourful sauce sounded about perfect.

Bulbs of single clove garlic

I’m not sure if you’ve encountered single clove garlic before; you see it in fruit and veg shops sometimes, and they’ve had lovely bags of it at the markets for the last few weeks. The clove is much larger than a normal garlic clove, and slightly sweeter and less sharp. The main reason I like them is because they’re much faster and easier to peel than normal garlic. Yes, I’m lazy!

So, in my roasting I softened two chopped brown onions, from our box of many onions, with a diced carrot, a stick of celery, and some fresh sage, then added the lamb shanks to quickly brown. Once they had a little colour on them, I took them off the heat. Next I added some red wine (about two good slurps), six of the single garlic cloves with their skins removed, a couple of handfuls of green beans, some kipfler potatoes, chopped into rough chunks, and the chopped tomatoes.

Before going in the oven - looks tasty!

Then into the oven with it, for several slow hours of cooking, to make the house smell rich and warm – it did a very good job of it. I turned the shanks and the vegies a couple of times while they were cooking, but otherwise left it alone. This is the result.

All cooked

Looks good, doesn’t it! It tasted even better. My partner M suggested I take a picture of the shanks and vegetables plated up and ready to eat, but by that stage I had a fork full of potatoes covered in tomatoey, winey juices in my mouth, and was too busy making happy food noises to get the camera out. I think my favourite thing about lamb shanks is their texture; the way they fall off the bone, but still retain the rich, gelatinous texture from the cartilage. And the garlic cloves were cooked to sweet, melty perfection, too. I could have taken a photo of the empty plates afterwards for you, but that would have just been mean.

Enjoy your cooking – and your food!

Filed under: Meat Tagged: bake, casserole, lamb, Main, meat, roast, shank, tomato, winter