Crumpets

It is fun to make your own crumpets from a few simple ingredients. These crumpets are slightly softer than the commercial variety. They can be frozen.

Ingredients

4 cups plain flour

2 tbsp baking powder

1½ tsp salt

1½ tsp sugar

3 cups warm water 

1 tsp instant yeast

 Method

Sift flour, baking powder, sugar, salt into large bowl. Dissolve yeast in a little water, and when all the yeast has been incorporated into the water add it to dry ingredients. Beat until smooth.

Pre-heat a frypan, lightly grease some egg-rings, put them in frypan to heat them through. When hot, three-quarters fill the rings with batter.

Allow to cook over low heat for approximately ten minutes or until surface is covered with holes. Remove rings.

Cover frypan and cook further 2 to 3 minutes or until surface has set. Remove from pan, cool on wire rack.

When cold, toast and serve with butter.

Maple pecan pinwheels

Ingredients

Biscuit 

185g butter roughly chopped
2 cups plain flour (300g)
½ cup brown sugar (100g)
2 tblspns maple syrup
1 egg yolk

 Filling 

1/3 cup maple syrup
½ cup pecan nuts very finely chopped
4 tsp cinnamon sugar

Method

Put the butter, flour and sugar into a food processor and process until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs. Add the maple syrup and egg yolk, and process again until the mixture forms a ball, then remove from the processor, and knead on a lighly floured board until smooth. Wrap in a 60cm long piece of plastic wrap (there is a reason for that length) and put in the fridge to rest for an hour.
Remove the wrap and set it aside for later.

Roll out the dough between two sheets of baking paper – you are aiming to get a rectangle of dough 48cm long and 28cm wide (which is the width of the average sheet of baking paper). You don’t want to make it too long, because it needs to be able to fit in your fridge. I found that putting the baking paper on a silicon sheet helps to keep it still on the bench.

Spread the maple syrup on the dough, sprinkle with the pecan and cinnamon sugar. Roll it up along the long edge, using the baking paper to help. Wrap in the plastic wrap and put in the fridge for 30 minutes.

Preheat your oven to 180°.

Remove the plastic from your roll, and cut 1cm slices, and bake on a greased baking tray (I reused the baking paper). Bake for about 15 minutes until golden brown. Cool for 5 minutes on the tray before moving to racks.

Makes about 50 biscuits.

A foodie in Japan... a photographic view of a week in the orient...

I just spent a  really delightful week in Japan, my first trip there ever.

The food was occasionally confronting, oddly named, but pretty much both cheap and delicious.  I am not going to give you restaurant reviews, but just a bit of a visual tour of what you might find in Japan...

 My first lunch.. gorgeous tempura

 and such a pretty soup - the autumn leaf is made of layers of beancurd skin apparently

Matcha and a sweet at the golden temple

 A home cooked meal - okonomiyaki (a sort of Japanese pancake with cabbage in it and topped with salted pork)

Japan's equivalent of lutfisk or balut - something that most other countries occupants find completely inedible.  Fermented soy beans, they smell outrageous and taste, sort of like vegemite gone off.. I was grateful for my hayfever blocked nose when I tried it!

 A sort of corn fritter on a stick... yummmmm

 cheap and cheerful bento box, still beautifully presented

 the "autumn feast" in a rather fancy restaurant... so much food!

Plastic food for sale in the plastic food shop!

 More plastic food

 Looks remarkably real some of it

 Some rather less so

and some uncannily real looking

Real food, a nice simple dinner

A speciality of Sendai - beef tongue. 

and at the coast, how can you go past fish and chips?  Well... .tempura fish and vegetables anyway. 

Restaurant review: Canberra: Koochi Afghan cafe

Dear reader,

My penurous state has meant that I haven't been in a position to indulge myself fully in rediscovering the joys of the Canberran restaurant scene, however that does not mean I have been entirely stuck at home researching old recipes.

In fact, the other day I found a little gem that I thought I really had to share with you.

The Koochi Afghan cafe is in Gungahlin - yes I know for many of my Canberra readers, this is the equivalent of outer Mongolia, and I admit that I was not holding out a great deal of hope to find a decent meal.

But Koochi sparked my curiosity and I decided to give it a go.  

The restaurant was quiet (but so was the whole of the area at the time), with only a solo diner and a small family beside myself.  I was invited to sit anywhere, and settled myself down in a window seat.

The decor is all very modern, apart from the rather charming ceiling which has wooden beams and is hung with modified kerosine lamps.

I ordered a cup of tea and chose for my lunch Borrani Bonjon - described as pan-fried eggplant, topped with tomatoes, onions and drizzled with yoghurt and dried mint, served with rice. 

Now I do love a bit of well prepared aubergine, and as the dish was placed before me I had to admire the colour and presentation - a rich red, swirled with yoghurt.   They gave me the dish of aubergine, rice, a yoghurt based dip, and a fresh condiment that they called chutney - but you need to imagine something more like a light chilli dressing.

The scent of my dish was so tempting I took a bite immediately.  Oh my.  What a glorious balance of sweet and savoury and of delicate spices.  It was at that moment that I decided that I had to write this review.  That is why the photo I took (which I will post shortly) has a bite out of it.

I didn't quite get to the point of licking the plate, but I can promise you, there was not a morsel left of that dish.  The price of this memorable meal?  $12 for the dish itself - prices for meals range from 12 to 32 dollars, depending mostly on the meat factor. There is a 32 platter to share for two, which I would like to try next time.. 

Try it... go on, head out to outer Mongolia and let me know if you love it too!

Koochi Cafe
Gungahlin Marketplace

Deepest Darkest Chocolate Fudge biscuits

Ok, I am about to share with you one of my most precious recipes. These amazingly rich, tasty and chewy biscuits (cookies for my US friends, so don't go thinking this is a scone recipe!) are seriously unbelievably good.  The recipe was given to me by my friend Jocelyn, for which I will thank her forever.

It is a rare recipe that uses this much chocolate without being too sweet. Cocoa, melted chocolate, chocolate chips, this recipe has it all, and the final result is truly special. 

One of the fun things too about this recipe is sharing the list of ingredients with friends... making a double batch particularly so, because then you can tell them that it contains 1.3 KILOS of chocolate chips. 

I think that one of the keys to this recipe is beating the butter and sugar by hand... I don't know why it is, but I do it by hand, and my version seems to come out better than those made by friends using a mixer. Proof that there are times in life, where it is best to do things the slow way.  If you are going to use a mixer, I advise beating on a slow speed.

Deepest Darkest Chocolate Fudge Biscuits (cookies)

214g plain flour
56g cocoa
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
a pinch of salt
227g milk chocolate broken into pieces
113g unsweetened chocolate broken up (a nice dark bittersweet will do)
340g soft light brown sugar
170g unsalted butter (take out of the fridge to soften)
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla essence

OPTIONAL - 680g plain chocolate chips. 

Method

Sift flour, cocoa, bicarb and salt. Set aside.

Put plain and unsweetened chocolate pieces into a double boiler and heat for 12 - 15 minutes. Stir till smooth and keep at room temperature until needed. (You can microwave the chocolate instead, but be very careful not to over cook it)

Beat butter and sugar. Once creamed, add eggs, one at a time, beating into to the mixture. Add vanilla essence and beat. Add chocolate and beat. Add flour mixture and chocolate chips stirring until thoroughly combined.

For lovely big giant cookies, drop a tablespoon of mix per biscuit onto baking sheets (about 6-8 biscuits per sheet).   For more normal sized biscuits, a heaped teaspoon is about right. 
Bake on the top and middle rack of the oven at 170ºC for 15 minutes, rotating half way through baking time. Do keep an eye on the time, as the high sugar content means that they can burn very easily. 
 

Cool on sheets for 5-6 minutes. Transfer to cooling rack. 

Sit back and enjoy one of the most sensational sweet experiences of your life.

Interesting new marinade

Last weekend I joined some friends for the weekend in a 17th century chateau in Burgundy (sorry I know I am boasting... I can't help myself!).

On the first night, we were cooking a BBQ for dinner.  My friend Christoph had bought some Bon Maman chestnut spread... he didn't quite know what it was when he bought it, but thought it might be interesting to try.

He and his girlfriend decided that it might be fun to use it as a sort of marinade on some chicken breasts they had bought for the BBQ.  I suggested that mixing it with grainy Dijon mustard might balance the sweetness, so Monika did just that; smeared the chicken with pretty close to even quantities of mustard and chestnut spread.

The chicken was cooked, and the marinade declared to be an unqualified success.  I thought I would post  it up here so that I would remember it, and maybe you could try it sometime.  It proves once more that the real key to exciting cooking is the willingness to just experiment, and try new things that you haven't tried before.

Guerilla cooking

I rented an apartment on the meditterranean for a week to study. The plus to this was that I was away from my normal space, and forced to study. The hard part was that being away from my kitchen, its tools and ingredients.

You don't realise what you have till its gone!

I arrived to find a kitchen that did have pots and a fry pan, a microwave, two hotplates (which I discovered through bitter trial and error have their numbering back to front), crockery and cutlery.

The glaring omissions were that it had no oven, sharp knives (a blunt paring knife and a twisted out of shape blunt peeler were in evidence), chopping board, storage containers, cooking tools such as slotted spoon, serving spoons, tongs, ladle.
Also no food.

Well, to give credit where it is due, there was a bottle of salt. So what to buy? I had no desire to buy a whole pile of foodstuffs and kitchen tools for someone else. I needed food for 5 days of staying in, so I needed variety, simplicity, and flexibility. And a sharp knife.

When I got to the supermarket I found some cheeses that had a cheeseboard included for free. 1 problem down. I found a little purple knife for 4 euros. Another problem down. A packet of "herbs de provence", some oil, pepper and I was just about at the end of the things I was willing to buy and donate to the apartment owner. Until I stumbled upon one of those sets of plastic containers... 14 containers for 3.90 euros. Yup I will have that.

I bought some meat, some bread, some vegetables... the usual stuff. I was set, vaguaries of my desires set aside.

Two days in and my second meal of pork chop, potato and sweet potato. The first time around it was burnt pork chop (see above comment on the stove) and mashed potato and sweet potato (pressed with a drinking glass then mashed with a fork). This time I had an onion to add to the excitement and had boiled the potato and sweet potato. But the dish cried out for a gravy. But... I had no flour, no stock... nothing to make it from!

I looked around. Ahah. There was the packet of french onion soup I had bought in case the predicted rainy day happened. There too was the "pompote" I got as part of my 'kids meal' at a cafe the day before (I usually find that a kids meal is actually more than enough food than we need and, limits in options aside, is very good value. 3.50 euros for a little hamburger patty, fries or vegetables, a drink and a dessert [the aforementioned pompote]). A pompote is a sort of apple mush in a squishy tube.

So I fried up my fresh onion, sprinkled on a tablespoon of the french onion soup mix and squeezed out a good dollop of the pompote. Gradually added some water and raised it to a simmer. What do you know? I had a very yummy gravy!

It just shows what you can do with a bit of imagination and willingess to experiment.