The perfect breakfast

It's no secret that I love madeleines - I own three different madeleine trays, and I've blogged them six times already!  (Seven if you count the madeleine post from my How to Eat project). Chocolate madeleines, green tea madeleines, Nigella's plain madeleines, and of course, my favourite recipe: the Roux brothers' honey madeleines. I made them for my mum's epic birthday party in 2008, I once coated them in chocolate, and I once made them when I was clearing out the pantry. So, why yet another post on these delectable French cakelets?

When I made Nigella's double potato and halloumi bake, I mentioned that I hadn't been cooking at home enough. (Excuses, excuses!) That frustration resulted in me searching through the kitchen to see what ingredients we actually had in the pantry...


In the freezer...

And on the shelfy thing that lives between the stove and the fridge.

And boy, I have accumulated a lot of food in the few short months I've been here! Rice, pasta, curry pastes, oils, packet-fixes, frozen veggies and other leftovers. After this, I made a big effort to actually cook at home, using up ingredients we already had. I'm happy to say the following meals were the result!


Rindfleischtopf mit Rotwein

This dinner, from my Dr. Oetker Eintopf (one-pot) recipe book, was a deliciously soupy beef stew, with a lot of red wine added. The red wine in question was the cheap red wine which we'd bought for Glühwein.

For the last 20 minutes or so, I chucked in a few handfuls of short tube pasta which had been in my pantry for months.

These little circles of pasta cooked in the stew, absorbing all the delicious beefy, winey flavours.

Delicious! A bowl of this with a DVD of Mad Men is a great night in!


Frikadellen with Sweet Potato Chips


This wasn't quite as glamorous as the red wine stew, but it was a nice and easy little dinner nonetheless. I took the Frikadellen out of the freezer, and chucked them in the oven with some McCain Sweet Potato Superfries that a nice PR lady sent me a while back. The Frikadellen are, well, better when freshly cooked, but I quite liked the superfries - I think of them like roast sweet potatoes, but without the peeling and chopping.


Chicken Tikka Masala with Pilaf and Cucumber Raita

Shortly after I bought Jamie's Ministry of Food, which has a whole chapter devoted to make-at-home curries, I went out and bought a bunch of curry pastes, thinking that freshly made curries would be a great weeknight dinner. That, of course, was some months ago, and with the pastes rapidly approaching their use-by date, I thought I'd better get cracking!

The first curry I made was chicken tikka masala, (Patak's brand) made even more aromatic by the addition of onions, coriander root and chilli.



Very inauthentically (even considering that chicken tikka masala is an inauthentic dish itself), we added carrots and cauliflower for a higher veggie content.


Jamie's recipe makes a huge amount - even though I halved his recipe (which serves 4), there was way too much for the 2 of us! But leftovers were good the next day!

To go with, I made a pilaf (just plain rice, with stock, spices, nuts and onions), and a cucumber raita.



Roast Chicken "Tikka Masala" with Muttar Halloumi

Another Indian style meal, this one to use up the remainder of the tikka masala curry paste. Rather than making a curry again, I mixed the paste with natural yoghurt and used it to marinate a chicken. (Wear gloves! Marinating a raw chicken in hot curry paste is an unpleasant task!) I let it sit in the fridge overnight, and I put it in the oven as soon as I got home from work the next day. While it was cooking, I made a muttar paneer, but with halloumi instead of paneer. (I'd luckily found some cheap halloumi at the market and thought this might be a nice way to use it). I hadn't made muttar paneer in over 5 years (see here for proof!) but now I'm thinking I really should make it more often! It's delicious.


The chicken was a little brown coming out of the oven due to the marinade, but didn't taste burnt at all. In fact, it was lovely and juicy thanks to the yoghurt! There were heaps of delicious pan juices too.


Madeleines

And finally, the madeleines you see at the top of this post. I can't really say that making these helped to clear out my pantry, but they certainly are a storecupboard recipe. Flour, butter, baking powder, vanilla, honey, sugar... and that's about it! The Roux Brothers' recipe doesn't even need an electric mixer, just some light folding with a spatula. 15 minutes of easy work and 6 minutes in the oven (and an hour of resting time in bewteen if you can be bothered) and you have a tray of delicious, light, fragrant cakelets.


What foods do you have lurking in your pantry?

***From the Archives*** As I've mentioned previously, I'm currently going through all my as-yet-unblogged photos in my photo archive.




I see that I made these madeleines and chocolate mousse last year in November. It was the night after my work's Christmas party, and I was hideously hungover. The type of hungover where you feel so ill that you just want to curl up and hide under a doona, but you can't lie down because your head won't stop spinning. What fun. I had invited my cousin over for lunch that day, and by the time I woke up she was already on her way. (It seemed like such a good idea in the middle of the week, to say, "I'll cook cuz, just rock up at midday on Sunday!")

I think I ended up making a panzanella salad - plans for marinated grilled chicken had to be scrapped - and for dessert, chocolate mousse and some chocolate madeleines.

I got the recipes from a Lindt Chocolate brochure. How I love Lindt! Both mousse and madeleines tasted lovely, as expected. Meanwhile, I totally want to go to the Lindt Chocolat Cafe in Sydney - how good does it look!?

In contrast to their amazing creations, check out how lumpy my mousse was! The melted chocolate/butter re-solidified on contact with the cold whipped cream. Oh well, it still tasted good, and I knew my cousin wouldn't mind.


Once I piped the mixture into little containers, it looked decent. Cuz arrived as I was making the madeleines, by which time I was feeling a bit better, thanks to a lot of water and diet coke. The madeleines were an ordinary madeleine mixture with some cocoa, rum and cocoa nibs added for contrasting crunch and smoky cocoa depth. It had a more adult flavour than you might expect from 'chocolate madeleines', and were delicious.

Served with balsamic-marinated strawberries. A great summer dessert.

A-hah! This is the way to eat madeleines au chocolat with mousse au chocolate. First you dunk it...
.... then you Chomp it!

And if coke and water don't help your hangover... then fried food is the only way to go. Later that night, still feeling a little seedy, I headed to a Thai restaurant with some other friends and enjoyed some hot spring rolls and green curry, effectively kicking that hangover to the curb!

Madeleines are one of my favourite things to bake. They're fantastically easy, fill the kitchen with a gorgeous aroma, and are absolutely delicious. If you don't inhale the whole batch immediately, they freeze very well too. Armed with that knowledge, I made 2 batches this week, and froze them, ready for Mum's birthday party. I'll defrost them the night before, arrange them on a platter and whip them out after the savouries are done and dusted.

By the way, I've seen packets of 6-8 madeleines at gourmet supermarkets around town, selling for $10. TEN DOLLARS!!!!!!! How could you justify spending that much on something so simple? They aren't difficult to make like macarons, or full of expensive couverture chocolate like brownies. I admit that the tins are a speciality item, but I got my Baker's Secret non-stick madeleine tray for less than $10 at Myer, and it's lasted for years. I also think these would be worth baking if you just had a patty-pan or mini-muffin tray - they'd taste the same, and I often saw round "madeleines" at bakeries in Japan. However, being an avid madeleine-baker myself, I actually own 3 trays - one non-stick tray with large indentations, one tray for mini-madeleines, and a silicon tray I picked up at Kappabashi Kitchen Town.

Unless I'm experimenting with a new flavour, I'll always use the Roux Brothers' recipe for madeleines au miel (honey madeleines), because it is the easiest, and the best.

No machinery is required. You just beat eggs and sugar with a spatula (don't be too energetic about it), and fold in flour, baking powder, vanilla extract, melted butter and honey. Let the batter sit for 30 minutes, and spoon into your madeleine trays.


Full size madeleines only take 8~10 minutes, and the mini ones (see below) take just 5~6.

I always thought that the patterned side was supposed to be the top, but in the Roux Brothers' book, they display them with the domed-side uppermost.

This week was the first time I tried out the silicon tray. I didn't have enough batter to fill the whole thing, so I just filled what I could, and poured water into the remaining indentations. I read somewhere that that prevents the madeleines from burning.

As you can see in the photos (above and below), the batter didn't spread out as much in these ones, and they didn't brown as evenly. They seemed to brown mainly where they came into contact with the metal sheet that the silicon tray had been resting upon. I think I prefer the shape of the silicon mould though; it's deeper and a bit more shell-like.


Packed away.

Incidentally, I am totally obsessed with these Decor Tellfresh containers and labels. I've been using their 1 litre rectangular containers for months now, mainly to store soup and home-made ice-cream. You do not want to know how many I bought last week when they were half price at Safeway. (It's not a habit, it's cool....)