Champagne

Merry Christmas and happy holidays everybody! I hope you're all having a nice relaxing time, and, for those of us in Melbourne, enjoying the wonderful sunny weather! I've got an entire week off work and I am So Excited! Today I wanted to show you the meals I cooked for Christmas with my family.

As you can see, I went with a vaguely Scandinavian theme for the Christmas Eve dinner. I started a few days earlier by preparing the gravlax. (Nigella recipe, previously blogged here!) How pretty is the salmon fillet?

Salmon fillet

With mustard / gin / sugar / salt

Dill blanket

Ready for curing

On the day itself, we made the remaining items. Normally I go for buckwheat blini with gravlax, but I saw a recipe for potato pancakes in Tessa Kiros' Falling Cloudberries, and thought it looked fabulous - mashed potatoes mixed with flour, egg and cream. (I thought they'd be dense and stodgy but were actually very delicate and light!) The cucumber salad was just a mixture of thinly sliced cucumber, salt, sugar, chopped dill and apple cider vinegar.

I was feeling very domesticated on the weekend and decided to whip up a batch of Tessa Kiros' Finnish Cardamom and Cinnamon Buns, from Falling Cloudberries. I like Tessa Kiros a lot, but rarely cook from her books, which in my experience, tend to be more pretty than practical. (See my review of Venezia at The Gastronomer's Bookshelf). Falling Cloudberries is the exception - I love the wide variety of recipes from Kiros' international upbringing; more like a personal recipe journal than a cookbook. I've made a few recipes from Falling Cloudberries, and so far they've all been winners.

But back to the buns. I've wanted to make these for ages, and nearly got distracted by Saint Cinnamon style mega-buns or Nigella's gooey, sticky Schnecken. I even considered making the saffron cinnamon buns from Snowflakes and Schnapps, but the boring flat spiral shape just didn't do it for me. I loved the idea of these curled Finnish buns; their curves oozing out in a spirally fashion like a headily perfumed concertina.

I started these buns at about midday on Saturday (having to walk to the shop when I realised that we'd run out of yeast!), and by 4 in the arvo we were tucking into hot buns (haha... I said "buns") .

So, you start by mixing yeast, sugar and milk and waiting until it "activates", (i.e. the mixture froths up and gets bubbly).


Then you mix all the other ingredients in and let it prove for 2 hours (the recipe suggests kneading by hand - I graciously let the dough hook on the KitchenAid do all the work for me).

Whilst this was proving, I actually whipped up a batch of petits sablés shortbread biscuits. Because that's the kind of person I am. They will come up in a later post!

The dough actually only needed 1.5 hours to prove. I kept it in a very warm part of the kitchen to help it along.

Then you roll the dough out into a large rectangle, spread it with softened butter and sprinkle a mixture of cinnamon and sugar on top. The next step is to roll it up.


You then cut the dough sausage on a diagonal (see below)...

...before flipping each piece over onto its larger base and squishing down. This is what gives the finished Finnish buns (ooh!) their distinctive shape. After being brushed with beaten egg and sprinkled with sugar, the assembled buns need another 30 minutes proving.


Bake them for a mere 20 minutes, and they are done!


I was so pleased with how the recipe turned out - the buns rose impressively in the oven and smelled beautiful. The cardamom flavour was present but not overpowering (thank goodness!), and had just the right level of sweetness for my taste. They were crusty on the outside, and soft and fluffy on the inside.


We had a couple of friends over for afternoon tea, and these buns (and the petits sablés) were wolfed down with a strong cup of tea. There were some leftovers - I ate a couple for breakfast the next day (still good!), and have stashed the rest in the freezer for future cravings.

Hopefully these buns will keep for over a week - because as of today I am officially on detox! This means no caffeine/alcohol/white flour/white bread/white rice/meat/dairy or eggs for a whole week. (EEEEEK!) I managed to get through a Monday at work with no coffee, so I think I'm off to a good start.

As you may recall, my family's expensively bought paella pan is more often used for roasting chicken than making paella. I'm not quite sure why we bought it, seeing as we'd never made paella at home... perhaps my mum bought it in the hope that I'd start cooking it for her. I have cooked paella ONCE, but only very recently. And it was a decidedly inauthentic version. Our pan is non-stick, which I'm told defeats the purpose of a paella pan anyway, because the non-stick surface prevents you from getting the requisite crunchy base. Oh well.

The paella pan, however, does make a great roasting dish, and is nice enough for presentation. It was gathering dust for a good 6 months before I figured out what to do with it. I'm sure I can't be the only food-lover in this predicament... can I?

(BTW, I know many foodies have big, expensive tangines [sic] knocking about their cupboards... How popular were they in '07??? I am soo glad I avoided that craze.)

But back to the paella pan.

The first picture in this post is of a Nigel Slater-style roast chicken - full of lemon and thyme, and with the potatoes roasted in the same pan for chicken-fat flavour. (This tastes nicer than it sounds). Cooked this way, the potatoes don't have the perfect crunch of separately cooked goosefat roast potatoes, but have a most alluring sticky and flavourful crust.

The chicken below was cooked in the paella pan, but transferred it to a Nigella Lawson Living Kitchen egg-shaped serving platter (another overpriced cookware indulgence, but I couldn't help myself). This is Ludi's Chicken, from Tessa Kiros' Falling Cloudberries.

The chicken and potatoes are all cooked in the one pan, with generous amounts of lemon, garlic, white wine and seedy mustard. The potatoes here are soft, rather than crunchy or crusty, but delicious all the same.

Finally we have the paella-pan used to cook rice. The non-stick surface and wide area make it great for cooking fluffy soft rice without having it get crusty at the base (again, making it unsuitable for actual paella). This recipe is a fabulous homestyle Peruvian Chicken with Coriander and Spinach Rice, another from Falling Cloudberries.


It is a little fiddly, but not too difficult. You start off by browning chicken, and setting it to the side. Then you cook some vegetables in the same pan, with spices and a purée of spinach and coriander. Following this you return the chicken to the pan with some water, and simmer it for 15 minutes for the chicken to cook and absorb the flavours. Then you set the chicken to the side, add rice and water to the pan and simmer it (uncovered, then covered) until cooked through. Ta-dah!

Tessa suggests serving it with cumin'd yoghurt and chillies in oil. It was amazing! My family totally loves one-pot rice meals.

So far I have used that pan 3 times for chicken, and once for paella. Does anyone have any other ideas for ways we could use it???

A Vegetarian Lunch for 4
Baked Stuffed Eggplants
Chickpea, Coriander and Feta Salad
Rice and Lentils
White Mochaccino Cake


This was the menu for an ill-fated lunch party I had a couple of weeks back, where 2 of my guests did not rock up (including the vegetarian for whom the menu was designed!), and I sat in a huff for most of the afternoon. Ah well. The rest of us had a good time eating and catching up, although I must say the experience put me off entertaining, at least for a little while.

The stuffed eggplants (first photo), were an adaptation of a recipe in Tessa Kiros' Falling Cloudberries - her version is stuffed with minced beef, I substituted rice.


I'd never made stuffed eggplants before, so it was quite interesting for me to figure out how to do it. You start by disembowelling the eggplants (the recipe says to use a spoon, but I found a little utility knife much more effective), then boiling the shells for about 10 minutes until soft. In the meantime, you cook the eggplant flesh with some onions and rice, tomato passata and stock until the rice is cooked. Let it cool a little, add some parsley and feta. Then, you stuff the mixture into the eggplants, layer them in a lightly greased dish, pour over some tomato sauce, sprinkle with parmesan and bake! (I couldn't find animal-rennet free parmesan, but by the time I got around to baking, I realised our veggie guest wasn't going to show, so I sprinkled parmesan over the eggplants with gay abandon).

Side dish of choice was my absolute favourite chickpea salad - at the insistent request of 2 of my good friends (who did come!), who tried it at the Lunch for Leukaemia, and loved it! What can I say? They've got good taste.


I served the meal with rice and lentils - 1.5 cups of rice, half a cup of puy lentils, which I simply put in the rice cooker with 4 cups of water. Too easy.


Dessert - a must for my coffee-drinking government buddy was a grown-up version of the white mochaccino cupcakes I made for Fanny's Sugar High Friday: Cupcake event. Or more simply put, a blonde mocha layer cake from Nigella's Forever Summer. Going from previous experience, I halved the icing quantities so that I wouldn't have a huge amount leftover. The halved amount didn't make quite enough to cover the entire cake, but that's fine because it is verrry sweet.

I have to say I prefer this cake in delicate cupcake form, but I loved the way it looked sitting on the kitchen table, all majestic and swirly.

As far as the food was concerned, the lunch went quite well - the taste of each item was nice, and full of healthy legumey protein. However, in total the meal was a bit rice-heavy, and quite uniform in texture. My next challenge will be to get a bit more texture happening in my veggie meals.

I've noticed that recently I've been spending too much money on takeaway and cafe food - and generally unhealthy stuff too - a pie or a focaccia on my lunch break at work; a muffin at uni when I sleep in and don't have time for breakfast; and coffees and any given time of day, for any reason at all.

Last week, I realised the folly of my ways, thought, "stop the madness!", and made a few salads to last me through the week.

Tessa Kiros' Chickpea, Coriander and Feta Salad

I remade this chickpea salad, which I'd originally made for my cousin Catherine's birthday. You will notice that the following picture is actually an old one, from the birthday night. The new batch I made looked exactly the same, and I am happy to say, tasted just as good. I did use tinned chickpeas this time, to make it a low-effort exercise. Still good!
















Nigella's Green Lentil and Goat's Cheese Salad

For this one, I cooked French green lentils rather then using tinned. (Tinned lentils = mushy = not right for a salad!) The salad also contains goat's cheese, roasted capsicum and mint. Fabulous!

Whilst I was making those salads, I cooked some brown rice, because I wanted to make Karen Martini's fabulous brown rice salad. I've made it twice now, but never blogged it, because it is so delicious that we always finish eating it before I get a chance to get to the computer. Soon, soon. However, after making the above 2 salads, I was all salad-ed out, so I didn't end up making that salad this time.

The chickpea salad, the lentil salad and the plain brown rice ended up going together very well. And they lasted me about a week. Much healthier, and nicer than a meat pie! One scoop of lentil salad, one scoop of brown rice, and one scoop of chickpea salad - a delicious lunch, described aptly by my co-worker Paolo as a "health bomb".

This delightful triple-chocolate semifreddo served as a birthday cake for my cousin Catherine's birthday dinner tonight. The last time I cooked dinner for my relatives, Catherine was flicking through Falling Cloudberries, and I suggested she bookmark the recipes that looked good so that I could make them for her sometime.

Menu

Chickpea, feta & coriander salad
Calamari with butter, lemon & garlic
Lemon & oregano chicken
Ciabatta rolls (Convent bakery)
Green salad
Triple Chocolate Semifreddo (Donna Hay's Modern Classics)

Obviously the dessert wasn't chosen by Catherine - she'd chosen loukmades - but the forecast was 38C and sunny. Definitely not the weather for deep-fried balls of sweet and yeasty goodness. Next time, next time.

I made the semifreddo a couple of days in advance (see below for description of the process), soaked the chickpeas the night before, and made the rest of the dishes on the day.

For the chickpea salad, you start by soaking and cooking some chickpeas. Tessa says that tinned ones work fine, but I had a couple of bags sitting around. Next, you cook a red onion with garlic and red chillies in olive oil and leave it to cool. Once everything is cooked and cooled, you mix the drained chickpeas with the onion mixture, lemon juice, crumbled feta, spring onions, coriander and parsley. It sits happily in the fridge until you need it.

The chicken needs to be fried in butter and oil until browned, and then grilled under a high heat with some water, lemon juice and oregano. This crisps up the skin, cooks the chicken through, and makes a little sauce.

The calamari, simply, is chargrilled on a super-high heat, and doused in a sauce of butter, lemon juice, and garlic. (You're supposed to use parsley, but I used it all in the salad. Whoops.)























I didn't dress the green salad, or offer butter with the bread. Left plain and simple, they were the perfect foil for the rich dishes, mopping up the buttery juices.

I think the chickpea salad was the most popular of all the dishes, although my dad loved the chicken. I was really impressed by the freshness of the calamari - I'd bought it a few weeks ago at Box Hill when it looked too good to pass up, but stashed it in the freezer, knowing I wouldn't cook it immediately. It was soft and flavourful, without a hint of rubberiness. Phew!

We were absolutely stuffed after the meal, so the grown-ups got up to do the washing, whilst my cousin, a friend and I went on an appetite-building walk.

Here's the semifreddo. It was a bit tough to slice, especially on a pretty white plate, so I transferred it to a heavy-duty wooden board, dipped my largest roasting knife in hot water and got slicing. It was very, very rich and chocolatey, and as it melted, the texture became more moussily soft, and the chocolate flavour became more pronounced. Lovely!
















Happy Birthday Catherine!!


Making a Semifreddo

This triple-chocolate semifreddo recipe comes from Donna Hay's Modern Classics, which I received as a gift for my 21st birthday. I have to admit that I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Donna Hay's work. On one hand, her pictures look so fake! They are pretty, but look so stylised and so far removed from anything you'd would serve at home, that they don't look particularly edible. On the other hand, her books and magazines are a useful resource of dozens of basic recipes, and her recipes can be pretty fabulous. Her melt-and-mix white chocolate mud cake with white chocolate frosting is divine! I used it as the birthday cake for my 20th birthday, and 5 years ago, for my mother's... umm... birthday.

I don't normally look through my Donna Hay books, but I recently loaned Modern Classics 1 & 2 to a friend who's living out of home at the moment. Before parting with these cookbooks, I had a read through them, and, looking beyond the artistically arranged picture that I knew I'd never be able to replicate, was tempted by the semifreddo recipe.

A semifreddo is a bit different from an ice-cream. If homemade ice-cream is a churned and frozen custard, then semifreddo is an unchurned, frozen mousse. You start by whisking eggs, egg yolks and sugar with an electric hand held mixer in a double boiler until thick and pale, then take it off the heat and continue beating until the mixture room temperature. However, once it came time to remove it from the heat, my 20-year old Chefette mixer (and more importantly, my 22-year old arms!) were feeling the strain, so I put the mixture into my KitchenAid mixer, and let it whisk.
















Once the mixture is cool, you fold through melted dark chocolate, followed by whipped cream, and a mixture of white and milk chocolate chips.
















Then it's simply a matter of putting it in a gladwrap lined tin, covering it well, and freezing it until solid. There was a bit too much mixture to fit in my tin, so I shared the remainder with my parents as a "triple chocolate mousse". It was good. In fact, I'm not sure I don't prefer this semifreddo in its unfrozen, mousse-like state.
















On the night I served it, I unmoulded it onto a plate, drizzled melted white and dark chocolate over it in a decorative fashion, and tumbled fresh strawberries on top.

Two of my cousins from Queensland have been staying with us for the past week, and last night we had a big dinner at my house for all the family who live in Melbourne. There were 10 of us in total, and I wanted a meal that was simple to make, fresh, light, healthy and delicious. Finished with a massive crème brûlée, naturally.


Menu
Pasta al forno con pomodori e mozzarella (Jamie Oliver, Jamie's Italy)
Roast pumpkin and red onion with honey dressing (Bill Granger, Every Day)
Rocket, parmesan and pomegranate sald with balsamic (Tessa Kiros, Falling Cloudberries)
Crème brûlée (Nigella Lawson, Nigella Bites)

These dishes, I thought, would be suitable for a large family dinner. They're all large and easy to share, look very welcoming lined up on the table, are not-too-challenging for the eater or cook, and are fine if left to stand around for a short time after being cooked. This gives you all the time you need for your aunts and uncles to exclaim how much you've grown! As for the dessert, my cousins had never had crème brûlée before, and wanted to try it. More importantly, though, I have a brand new blowtorch which really needed to get broken in! Can you see it in the top picture? My dad bought it for me half-price blowtorch in the Boxing Day sales. Woo-hoo! Filling the thing with WARNING: HIGHLY FLAMMABLE butane gas is a bit of a scary experience, but my mum and I managed between ourselves. (Well, I say "between ourselves", I really mean she did it while I cowered behind the island bench).

I started off my afternoon of cooking by making the crème brûlée. Nigella's recipe is a little different from most other ones that I've seen. Rather than cooking a custard on the stove, and then in a waterbath in the oven, she simply instructs you to make a very thick and rich custard on the stove, then chill it in the fridge until firm.

Whilst it was chilling, I got on with the roast vegetables. The roast vegetable dish consists of wedges of unpeeled pumpkin and onion, tossed through chilli flakes and olive oil, which you then roast in a hot oven for 45 minutes. At the end, you boil honey and red wine vinegar, and pour it over, finished with a good sprinkling of mint.

I have made the baked pasta once before. It's fantastic! You just make a simmered tomato sauce (onions, garlic, tinned tomatoes, red wine vinegar & basil - easy peasy)...












There's nothing like a big pot of tomato sauce to make you feel like a hot Italian Mamma.

...boil the pasta (I used penne instead of the orechiette specified because it was vastly cheaper in such gigantic quantities), mix the pasta with half the sauce, and layer it in a dish with parmesan and mozzarella. I ended up filling 2 large dishes, with more pasta leftover. I do love cooking in industrial quantities! Then you just shunt it in the oven for 15 minutes until it is all hot and golden and bubbling and making your house smell just like a home should.
















Here it all is...











































Rocket, pomegranate seeds and juice, parmesan shavings, olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Toss together in whatever quantities please you, and there it is.

I had doubled the quantities for the pasta, but not for the vegies or the salad. You can't make friends with salad, and I've generally found that people don't really go in for side dishes when you're cooking for a crowd. This time, however, I was wrong. The salad and the vegies got absolutely demolished! I guess I forgot... I wasn't cooking for a "crowd", I was cooking for a Malaysian family! I needed double of EVERYTHING. (Triple quantities probably wouldn't have hurt).

After dinner, I retrieved the custard from the fridge. It wasn't exactly firm enough to hold its shape out of the dish, but it looked and smelled good anyway. I suppose if you're not going the waterbath route, then you need to cook the custard until super thick, and it'd need a good long time to firm up in the fridge.















It was easy enough to sprinkle demerara sugar over the top, and use the blowturch to transform the custard into crème brûlée...
















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