And we're in...

After over two months of hard work (damn it was I being optimistic when I thought we'd manage in three weeks!) we've finally made the move. Both the husband and I are happy with the results... we've managed to go round the house's shortcomings and transform it into a comfy and welcoming home. Still, the new oven and washing machine haven't yet been delivered... as often happens on this tiny island... things move sloooooowly. But I have my slowcooker, a hob, a microwave oven and a rice cooker which should suffice to start off my daily cooking right? It's a challenge, but so far (ok, I've only cooked two meals) I'm managing. As for our laundry, I'll be using my mother-in-law's washing machine next door, which I'm awfully grateful for!

I had been promising the husband that I was gonna make him banoffee pie from scratch as soon as we moved into our new house. See, banoffee pie is his soft spot... and he had really worked hard what with moving heavy boxes and piles and piles of clothes (mostly his), drilling holes to put up new curtain rails, hammering in nails for our degree certificates that we finally got round to framing, cleaning out and organising the garage... plus all the technical stuff having to do with setting up our laptops and internet connection. Thanks to his being thoughtful enough to buy a router I now have a wireless connection which enables me to surf the net from my kitchen - I've been teasing the mother-in-law about being able to look up recipes at the click of a mouse ever since! So, he really did deserve a treat - so yesterday I browsed through some recipes for banoffee pie. Most recipes revolved around some variations, mainly having to do with:

1) Type of base: Pastry crust or Cheesecake biscuit base;

2) Toffee preparation: Ready made, cooked in can (4 hours of boiling cans of condensed milk in a pan) or prepared in an oven (pour condensed milk in a glass dish, put in bigger dish half filled with water, cover with tin foil and bake for 2 hours).

The base definitely had to be the cheesecake biscuit version, just cause I had asked the husband beforehand and he confirmed he preferred it. As for the toffee, boiling cans of condensed milk on a stove (whilst keeping an eye on them for the full 4 hours making sure that they are always covered with water, or else risk dangerous explosions of hot scalding toffee all over your kitchen) sure sounded like going back to chemistry experimental sessions... tempting, especially after reading all the rants about the delicious dulce de leche that results. But I was gonna get back from work at 4pm the earliest, so my pie wouldn't be even close to ready by dinner. So, needing to adopt an oven, I called the mother-in-law and explained my problem - she had a couple of cans of condensed milk (of the low-fat type incidentally, made with skimmed milk instead of full fat milk, still has normal amount of sugar which is the bit I wanted to caramelise, so worked perfectly well) and offerred to put them in the oven for me as explained. When I got back home, I popped next door and found a dish of gooey toffee ready to be transformed into a decadent dessert.

Back in my kitchen, one last look at the sad ripe bananas on the counter - soon you'll be heroes my friends.. here's the list of ingredients:

Banoffee Pie

Base

300 g digestive biscuits + ginger biscuits + Mulino Bianco's Grancereale Croccante biscuits
150 g melted butter
2 tablespoons brown sugar
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Filling

3 ripe bananas, sliced
600 mL condensed milk
400 mL fresh cream
2 tablespoons caster sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla essence
1 cup grated dark chocolate
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What to do
First thing to get out of the way is preparing the dulce de leche - that's the caramelised condensed milk - just open the cans and pour the condensed milk into a glass dish, cover it tightly with tin foil, then place it into a larger dish that's half-filled with water. Put everything in an oven and bake at 150 degrees celcius for 2 hours. Once it's ready allow it to cool down to room temperature then put it in a fridge or freezer if you want to speed up the process.
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While the condensed milk's in the oven, start working on the base - just throw the biscuits into a food processer and process until they're all finely chopped. Add the melted butter and sugar and whizz everything round until the mixture has blended well. You want a moist crumb which you can work with, but not a paste, so add more biscuits or butter to the mixture accordingly. The amounts will vary slightly according to the type of biscuits you use - although most recipes indicated using digestives, I wanted a more flavoured and easier to bite into base. So I mixed the digestives with ginger biscuits (for just a bit of spicy flavour) and Grancereale Croccante (very very crumbly and crunchy made with cereals and rice) make the base a bit less compact. This combination worked well I must say - will be trying it for other variations of cheesecake. When you're happy with the consistency of the base, press the mixture onto the base of an 8 inch springform tin. I got a pretty thick layer, about half an inch, cause that's how we like our cheesecake base - you could decrease the thickness if you think that's too much. Once the base is all spread out, place it in the fridge for an hour till it sets, or in the freezer like I did, for about 20 minutes.

When the base has set, spread half the dulce de leche on the biscuit base, then chop the bananas and arrange in concentric circles on top of the toffee. The remaining dulce de leche is then spread on top of the banana layer. For the final layer, whip the fresh cream with the castor sugar and vanilla essence and spread on top of the pie. Sprinkle the finely grated chocolate on top of the cream layer to make it pretty.

Ideally you should refridgerate this decadence for at least another hour - but if you can't wait, like my husband, go ahead and indulge. A word of warning though - the layers could fall apart if not allowed to set properly, though the husband's oohs and aahs weren't indicating any sort of discontentment!! It tasted even better this afternoon since the banana flavour had come through even more. So there you have it - easy peasy banoffee pie that's sooo much better than other versions we've had at restaurants! And it really did make our first official dinner in our new home even sweeter :)

Roasted chicken - two ways..

Last Saturday the husband left for what should be not more than five days on a work trip. I kept myself busy with housework on Saturday night - I managed to clean the main bedroom from top to bottom, which was quite an achievement. The mother-in-law was wondering whether to cook ribeye steaks on the barbeque on Sunday, or the two free-range chickens she bought. Since as it turned out it was only gonna be the in-laws and myself for Sunday lunch, and she had enough steaks to feed an army, we decided it was wiser to save the steaks for Monday (when there will be more mouths to feed).

I suggested trying out an experiment I had read on The Paupered Chef - basically roasting a chicken in a slowcooker by cooking it on the 'Keep Warm' setting (or about 60 deg Celcius) for 5 hours. This was based on a method mentioned in Heston Blumenthal's In Search of Perfection, and would theoretically lead to virtually no loss of juices from the chicken, leaving the meat plump and tender as no other roasting method would. The only downside is that the skin doesn't crisp up, as happens in the traditional oven-roasting method... so as a compromise, and also to compare the tenderness of the meat resulting from the two cooking methods, we decided to cook one chicken using the slowcooker, and the other we'd roast in the oven.

On Sunday morning mother-in-law was still hopeful that we'll be able to fire up the barbeque and sizzle those steaks, but we had to resort to the roast chicken plans as soon as we realised that the father-in-law might not make it for lunch due to a last-minute business meeting. Definitely not worth starting the barbeque just for three people.. so I took one bird out of the fridge, rubbed it with some good olive oil, seasoned it with sea salt and freshly-ground pepper and shoved it in the slowcooker. Then I rushed out to the garden and got a bunch of fresh rosemary which I shoved inside the chicken's cavity for aromatisation purposes. That was it. Since it was already 10am there wasn't gonna be time for the required 5 hours.. so I amended that to 2 hours on the 'high' setting. The mother-in-law put the other chicken on a roasting dish, seasoned it and shoved it in the oven for two hours. It was too hot to think of preparing anything more fancy or elaborate than simple roast potatoes and a nice fresh salad as accompaniments. Plus I was itching to rush next door after I had finished 'cooking' to have some more fun scraping paint off the floor.

Two hours later and there they were - Specimen A - Slowcooker Chicken.. Specimen B - Oven-roasted Chicken. Specimen A had released as much juices in the dish as Specimen B, although had I followed Heston's method of cooking at a lower temperature for almost double the time, I should have had no juices at all. Specimen A hadn't lost any juices through evaporation though, unlike the oven-cooked Specimen B, so the meat was much more juicy. The really obvious difference was when we tasted the chicken breast. I definitely prefer the slowcooker method, especially since most of the crispy skin of Specimen B was eaten by our two (very grateful) dogs. So trying out Heston's method, this time following the temperature and time instructions properly, is definitely on my to-do list once we move into the new house. I'm fascinated by my slowcooker and I can't wait to start experimenting on the different dishes that I can make in it. So far I've been using mother-in-laws (which is identical to mine), and I've experimented with dishes such as chilli con carne, stews and an amazingly rich and decadent chocolate mud cake. What I love about slowcooker recipes is that you usually just throw in the raw ingredients, switch the thing on, leave the house and slowcooker (safely) unattended for anywhere between 3 to 8 hours, and return to a kitchen full of intoxicating aromas and, more importantly, a ready-to-serve meal. I've been looking for reliable slowcooker recipes on the net for some time now so that I'll have a range of quick-resort meals for weekdays when I won't have time to cook dinner after work. On SlowAndSimple.com I've found quite a good list of recipes that sound interesting, whereas A Year of Crockpotting is a blog written by a slowcooker-obsessed cook who plans to use her slowcooker every single day of the year. While I definitely wouldn't want to use my slowcooker daily due to limitations that would bring along, I sure am looking forward to experiment with this cooking method. Right now though, I've got rooms to clean and vases to buy and curtains to hang.. hopefully the husband will be pleasantly surprised to see all the developments when he comes back on Thursday. From my calculations we should have moved in by the end of next week, so that's not too bad. I'll just have to keep myself from going crazy until the husband's return.. I was in such a bad way yesterday that I somehow ended up washing my car in the driveway - I decided that 2pm was the perfect time to wash my car.. it was scorching hot and I kept burning my feet on the pavement.. silly me. At least though, I could actually see through the car windows this morning on my way to work!

Kitchen in progress

I'm in the process of cleaning the sploshes and splatters of paint from the floors of each room... I actually made the discovery that the blades that I bought for the job are worse than useless - the best method is to wet the 'problem area', which incidentally happens to translate to 'the whole house' and rub (vigorously) with a scourer. I did that between 8am and 1pm last Saturday and I only managed to finish the kitchen. After planning to start from the bedroom so that we could gradually move in our clothes and stuff into this very essential living area of the house, I decided last minute that I'd rather have the kitchen all nice and clean first. Go figure. But despite feeling exhausted after a whole morning on my knees (ok on my rubber kneecaps) and perched dangerously high on the (thankfully sturdy) ladder cleaning on top of each cupboard, I am now one step closer to having an actual working kitchen. Oh yes, I forgot to mention that since the existing oven wasn't working, we had to buy one. Our new Siemens oven will be delivered in four weeks' time, meaning five or six weeks by Maltese standards.. you'll see. The microwave we bought was in stock though, so as long as I can come up with dinners cooked solely on the hob, in my slowcooker and in the microwave (not!), for the first month after we move in, we'll be fine. In case of emergency, there's always mother-in-law's oven next door :-)

This week will be spent repeating last Saturday's procedure in all the other rooms of the house. Yesterday, I managed one corner, I kid you not, of the bedroom, just so as to stop feeling guilty about 'not even having started cleaning the bedroom yet'. Then the husband came back from the office (yes, Sunday morning at the office) and instead of cheering me on, he lured me away from housework with a 'let's go watch a movie and then we'll go out' offer. I wasn't complaining and really enjoyed the fact that we spent some time together. Until I get back to the cleaning though, I need to organise my thoughts on how to equip the kitchen with the basic essentials. I think I'm pretty much covered when it comes to utensils and food processing equipment - I got my slow cooker, Magimix food processor, Kenwood hand blender, digital weighing scales, toaster and electric kettle, rice cooker (from Australia, courtesy of Auntie Anne), waterless pots and pans, non-stick dishware, most (if not all) of Tescoma's range of utensils (thanks to the mother-in-law who even bought doubles of some items bless her), enough chopping boards to last me a lifetime (most came free with this and that), and about three full sets of professional knives (it took me a whole morning just to clean them of their very annoyingly sticky labels). So we got the tools - what's left is the basic cupboard staples.. the spices and herbs, the sugar and coffee, the oils, flours, pastas.. you can't just pop out to the nearest town in the middle of making dinner just cause you realise that you're missing an ingredient! Yes, the husband and I need to go on a shopping trip, a shopping expedition to be exact, to my favourite supermarket and fill up our cupboards with ingredients and supplies. That will take place as soon as we're over this verrry busy period at his office.. a wife can only hope!

The Paint Job

So, we're half-way through another week and just when I was feeling like we're getting somewhere with the house cleaning/renovation business, I get interesting news from our bajjad this morning. After barely downing half of my mug of coffee Joe il-Bajjad told us that we might as well have the whole hall, living room and dining room painted, cause he's had to fill in too many holes and whatnot. After Joe's first day, the house now looks like a gang of kids' been let loose with white paint. So yes, there's no other way but to paint the whole thing from scratch. We chose the colours for the hall/dining/living rooms in two minutes.. then we thought we might as well remove the (horrible) wallpaper in the main bedroom, which was starting to peel off anyway, and have that room painted as well... should we go for yellow? "No not yellow" the husband disagreed. I put the colour chart against the bedroom wall "Ok let's go for yellow-I like it".. a sudden change of mind. And yellow it was, "Morning Moon" yellow to be precise - I was trying to picture how the moon would look like in the morning.. yet all I could think of was how many days of cleaning (all over again) the whole house would The Paint Job amount to. Joe il-Bajjad said he'd be done by the end of the week. The husband thinks he's not gonna make it. I'm keeping my fingers crossed so at least I'll be able to start cleaning the house over the weekend. We'll see his progress by tomorrow, then I'll decide whether we should make other, more fun plans for Saturday. If all goes well, I'll be elbow deep in Sgrassatore and bleach on Saturday night. Gone are the days when I used to spend a couple of days planning out what to wear and where to go in the weekends - I don't imagine we'll be spending many nights out when the house is done up either.. we'll be too busy enjoying the cosiness of having a house to ourselves and the luxury of having some time on our own too. Not as glamorous as when we were younger, but tons and tons more fun :)

Coming soon...

Hi all!

Will start blogging regularly as soon as we move into our new house - I'm kitchen-less at the moment, but can't wait to start recording bits and pieces of my life as a newbie wife. The husband can't wait either, cause he knows he's gonna be pampered, so at the moment he's busy gaining brownie points by being my personal handyman- fixing lights, changing locks, and showing me how good he is with his new tool set :)

Come back in a couple of weeks' time to see what's cooking in my Maltese kitchen!