about 5 tablespoons red Martini
Monday, October 20, 2008
Cakes, cakes and more cakes
about 5 tablespoons red Martini
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Just for the record..
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
And I've still got sugar under my feet...
I did a few research on the net - what hubby and most of the Maltese population mean by donuts is the doughy, yeasty, sugar-enrobed concoction, and definitely not the glazed light Krispy Kreme version. On 101 Cookbooks, there was an oven-baked recipe which sounded tempting, but then I thought what's the point - if this is gonna be a treat, then let it be a full-blown one! I looked and looked and decided that I should really tweak my findings into my own recipe, and the risk was worth it.. I'm writing it here for my own reference in the very near future cause this one was definitely a hit!
3/4 cup milk
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon nutmeg
2 teaspoons vanilla essence
5 cups plain flour, sifted
2 sachets instant yeast
1/2 cup butter, melted
2 eggs, beaten
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Grilled pizza... charred bits included
After some time researching easy and practical pizza dough recipes, I decided to try out Heidi Swanson's (101 cookbooks) approach. The dough has a multitude of pros for a working housewife like myself - just have the very few and very basic ingredients ready and whizz everything into the food processor. Following Heidi's recipe, I had six small balls of dough, each yielding a medium-sized individual pizza. I wrapped the dough balls that I wasn't gonna use in plastic wrap misted with olive oil, and froze them (defrost overnight in the fridge, then place in a warm place for proving a couple of hours before intended use). Being based on a delayed fermentation technique, the pizza base had a notable yeasty flavour, and was impressively easy to spread out - in fact I just used my fingers till I got the right thickness. The only tricky part of the process was flipping the olive-oiled side of the pizza base onto the grill surface. I let the base cook slightly, with the barbeque lid shut to keep up that all-important high temperature as much as possible, then flipped the dough over (after brushing the uncooked side with olive-oil), spread enough tomato sauce and leaving the edges free to rise, sprinkled the toppings, then shut the barbie top again to finalise the cooking. I had to peep every now and then, to monitor the stage of cooking, and only removed the pizza from the grill as soon as all the mozzarella had melted nicely. The other toppings (ham, harboiled eggs, mushrooms) were all pre-cooked, so they just needed to be heated through. The result was very promising, despite the few charred bits, which I found quite pleasant anyway. This proved to be a very fast and tasty dinner, which we enjoyed alongside a medium sweet bottle of Rose' D'Anjou. Make sure you have all the toppings ready at hand, cause once you turn the pizza base you need to put your act together pretty fast!! The pizza sauce was one highlight which really pulled this simple dish together - cooked in a slowcooker over 6 hours on the LOW setting meant that the freshness of the tomatoes shone through, the onions melted and caramelised, and my nanna's secret tomato sauce ingredients - mixed spice and a sprinkling of cinnamon - worked their magic for a truly yummy sauce. Here's how I made it...
5 large cloves of garlic, chopped finely
ten medium fully-ripe tomatoes, chopped roughly
1 tablespoon salt
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 cup balsamic vinegar
fresh basil, chopped finely, or dried basil
dried mixed herbs
1 tablespoon mixed spice
Just put all the above ingredients in a slowcooker and cook on low for 6 hours, (whilst enjoying the aroma as it swiftly makes its way around your house). As soon as the sauce is done, use a hand blender to puree into perfect saucy decadence... hmm.. Oh yes, and freeze any leftover sauce along with the pizza dough - for those days when you realllly neeeeed to go clothes shopping after work :)
Friday, August 01, 2008
Carnivore's Chicken Salad
We've been indulging quite a bit these past couple of days, so while having our pre-bedtime cup of coffee on the terrace, the husband suggested I cook something light today. It's funny how men equate "cooking light" with "not steak or pasta". And it's not as if it means having a 100% vegetarian meal - when it comes to preparing a salad for example, I've now learnt that veggies on their own just don't cut it, so I tend to make it a bit more interesting. There are then the cardinal rules that I now know by heart - no cucumbers, no aubergines, no zucchini, no pumpkins, no anchovies.. oh yes and no fish mixed with pastry (our traditional Maltese lampuki pie is a no-no) and more importantly no fruit with any sort of meat (cranberry sauce, apple sauce, apricot chicken stuffing - I bid you all farewell). So when it comes to preparing our chicken salad for tonight (which he helpfully suggested), I had to scrap any thoughts of adding chopped apples, grapes or raisins like most recipes suggest, and stick to what I know will be something he'll love. Incidentally I too have my own red-light ingredients - raisins with anything chocolatey, green peppercorns and fennel all give me the creeps!
Dressing
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
What to do
Thursday, July 31, 2008
And we're in...
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.
Banoffee Pie
150 g melted butter
2 tablespoons brown sugar
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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 :)
Monday, June 23, 2008
Roasted chicken - two ways..
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!