Blackberries galore

On the weekend, we went blackberrying at my grandmother's house, and came home with 2kg of blackberries. I've made the following three things, and we still have 3 small Chinese food containers of blackberries in the freezer...


Spiced blackberry cake (external)

Spiced blackberry cake (internal)

Blackberry and apple pie

Blackberry pie.

Recipe consolidation & a culled recipe

I have been consolidating my recipe collection: transferring the ones I liked into my shiny Word document cookbook and consigning the ones I didn't like to the Recycle Bin.

The recipe cited here is one of the culled recipes - however, I'm including a link to it, simply because of the effort I expended in making the damn thing. You need about 3 mixing bowls and have to clean the mixer in the middle of the preparation process. Juicing mandarins is a fraught process and let's not even get into how impossible it is to grate mandarin peel...

So here you are: Choc-mandarin mousse

Kiwi Muffins!

Yes, it's Teddy Tahu Rhodes!


(Though the photo I really wanted to use was the one from Opera Australia's production of Don Giovanni - the one involving black leather underwear. You can see that photo here. The drooling going on from all the women - and probably a good number of the men - in the audience was almost palpable.)

But this is in fact a Bad Pun brought on by people's insistence of referring to kiwifruit as kiwis. This is wrong: kiwis are either small flightless birds from New Zealand, or the small flightless New Zealanders themselves. Trust me, I'm a Sydneysider - we know these things :)

Bad Puns aside, my main point is in fact kiwifruit muffins. Thus:

This is the sort of muffin that will probably work with any kind of fruit - I just happened to have a couple of kiwifruit that were threatening to go off if I didn't do something with them soon, and I remembered I'd found this recipe. Thus, kiwifruit muffins, with non-blurry photo (the bananas in said photo are mostly there to block out my housemate's laptop):

KIWIFRUIT MUFFINS

Ingredients
185g self-raising flour
2 tbsp sugar
1 tsp baking powder
80g butter, melted
1 egg, lightly beaten
3/4 cup milk
2 kiwifruits, peeled and diced
pinch of salt

Method
1) Preheat oven to 200°C
2) Grease a six hole muffin tin (or be lazy like me and get a silicone one....)
3) Combine flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in a large bowl
4) Combine butter, egg and milk and then stir into flour mixture
5) Fold kiwifruit into mixture.
6) Spoon mixture into the muffin tin
7) Bake for 20 min, or until golden
8) Cool in tins for 5 min and then on a wire rack

Preparation time: 15 min
Cooking time: 20 min
Serves: makes 6 muffins

Source: Lynne Mullins, Cuisine.com.au, http://www.cuisine.com.au/recipe/Kiwifruit-muffins, 16/10/07

Banananana bread (with added raspberry!)

The Netherlands only has one Starbucks at the moment, which may go some way towards explaining why the Dutch seem to be ignorant of the concept of banana bread. I was surprised by this - given how popular it is in Australia as the addition to one's morning coffee - and so I made some yesterday, taking it to work today to try and convert the natives.

No photo, but recipe follows:

BANANA BREAD WITH RASPBERRIES

Ingredients
150g butter
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs, beaten
2 bananas, mashed
2 cups self-raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
½ cup milk
½ cup frozen raspberries

Method
1) Preheat oven to 180°C
2) Grease and line a loaf-shaped cake tin
3) Cream butter and sugar
4) Gradually add in eggs
5) Add banana, flour and baking powder, milk and stir
6) Carefully add raspberries
7) Pour into pan and smooth surface
8) Bake for 45-55 min
9) Cool in pan for 10 min before removing to a wire rack to cool completely

Preparation time: 15 min
Cooking time: 55 min
Serves: one shop’s worth of staff

Source: Kim Meredith, Taste.com.au, http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/365/banana+and+raspberry+bread, 16/12/07

Additional notes
Add the raspberries to taste, however be careful as too many will distort the structural integrity of the loaf (i.e. it will fall apart when you try to slice it...) The recipe I cribbed from said you could use fresh raspberries, however that to me is the worst kind of food sacrilege - my reaction here mirrors Gollum's reaction to the idea of spoiling the nice fisheses by frying them! Disgusting!

Vierentwintig Mereltjes

(aka Beef, mushroom and red wine pie)

(and no, it wasn't supposed to be burnt around the edges)

Leftover milk and apples = pancakes!

While hunting for a recipe to use up 3/4L of milk that is about to pass its use-by date, I came across this recipe. It doesn't use much milk, so it didn't entirely suit my purposes, but it was very tasty (and I got to use some of my left-over apples instead!)


GRATED APPLE PANCAKES

Ingredients
½ cup self-raising flour
2 tbsp caster sugar
½ tsp ground cinnamon
1 egg, whisked
1/3 cup milk
2 apples, peeled and grated

Method
1) Combine flour, sugar and cinnamon
2) Add egg and milk. Whisk until smooth.
3) Stir in apples.
4) Heat a non-stick pan over low heat. Cook batter in small pancakes (about 10-15cm diameter)
5) Cook for about 2 min on each side.

Preparation time: 10 min
Cooking time: 10 min
Serves: makes about 6-8 small pancakes

Source: Claire Brookman and Jenny Fanshaw, Taste.com.au, http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/17045/apple+pancakes, 12/12/07

Apple pie

And look - pie!

But that's another story....

Polenta pie

This took quite a long time to make, but I didn't try cooking the polenta and the sauce at the same time (which would have cut a good 15 min off the whole time) But other than the time-consuming nature of this meal, it was very filling and was nice cold the next day. Which, I might add, was when the photo was taken, hence the pretty layering going on - when it was still hot, the sauce tended to run somewhat.

I might also add that the really odd measurements are a result of my halving a recipe that had been converted from Imperial measurements. It made way more numerical sense in oz.


POLENTA PIE

Ingredients
113g polenta
450mL water
200g mushrooms, finely sliced
15g parmesan cheese
salt

Béchamel sauce:
20-30g butter
1tbsp plain flour
375mL warmed milk
20g grated cheese

Method
1) Preheat oven to 220°C
2) Boil polenta in salted water.
3) Let cook slowly for 20 min, stirring frequently.
4) Turn cooked polenta out onto a plate and let cool.
5) Meanwhile, melt butter in saucepan on medium heat until foaming.
6) Add flour and cook (stirring) for 1-2 min or until bubbling.
7) Remove from heat and slowly add milk, while whisking.
8) Return to heat and cook (stirring) for 10-12 min.
9) Remove from heat and stir in grated cheese.
10) Also meanwhile, cook mushrooms in some butter for 3-4 min.
11) Grease an oven-proof tin and layer polenta – béchamel sauce – mushrooms. Repeat, finishing with the béchamel layer and then sprinkle with parmesan.
12) Bake in oven for 30 min.

Additional options
Suggestion: grease polenta pot with butter first, to prevent sticking. (I had to spend a good 10min cleaning the polenta pot afterwards...)

Preparation time: 40 min
Cooking time: 30 min
Serves: 4 people

Source for polenta pie: Elizabeth David, BBC Food, http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/database/print/polentapie_5283.shtml, 02/12/07
Source for béchamel sauce: Annette Forrest, Taste.com.au, http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/9918/basic+bechamel+sauce, 02/12/07

Inventive casserole

I made up a whole new and exciting dish the other day: Inventive Vegetable Casserole. It was originally going to involve chicken, but I ran out of space in my oven dish, so it became vegetarian by necessity.

I took an oven bowl and tipped in a can of tomatoes. Then I added 4 potatoes, 2 carrots & 6 mushrooms, all cut into smallish pieces. Next came various herbs and spices, namely oregano, rosemary, Italian herb mix and black pepper. This was all topped off by a very large glass of red wine, then stirred and put in the oven at 180°C for about 1 3/4 hours.

And it ended up alright - even though the red wine was quite a dominant flavour!

For next time, the vegetables need to be in smaller chunks and I think cooking it for longer at a lower heat might be a good idea.

[And it might have been nice with some lamb, but they don't sell it in the supermarkets here - *sigh*]

Cake of Infinite Variety

For years I saw cookery as being a difficult thing in which one had to follow a recipe with pinpoint accuracy or else the dish would go up in smoke and taste like rubbish. However, I've been learning to cook recently (a side effect of moving out of home and into a share house in a foreign country) and have had my perceptions of the whole thing substantially altered. This means I have come up with a new Philosophy of Cooking. Cooking: a process in which you take a whole lot of raw ingredients that you like the taste of, mix them all together, and come up with something that tastes as good, or better. This was the principle by which I discovered the joys of Mustard Chicken Schnitzel.

Anyway, I've been cooking a lot recently, and have resorted to the internet to find easy recipes involving only the ingredients I have in my cupboard. The following was one of the better discoveries.

VARIABLE CAKE with EXTRA EXCITING INGREDIENT

Ingredients
½ cup butter (which is silly, because you can't measure butter in a cup - just approximate instead)
½ cup sugar (the original recipe calls for 1 cup, but even I found that excessively sweet)
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla essence
1¼ cup plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
Extra exciting ingredient(s)

Method
1) Preheat oven to 180°C
2) Grease and line 20cm cake tin
3) Cream butter and sugar
4) Mix in eggs and vanilla
5) Mix in flour and baking powder
6) Add extra exciting ingredient! Things I have tried include: diced melon, sultanas, diced canned peaches and combinations thereof. Make sure to add more flour if the extra ingredient is wet and makes the batter drippy. Apparently you can also try using 3 tbsp cocoa, but I haven't tried that one yet (cocoa not being in my cupboard, you see...)
6) Bake for approximately 40 min (the original recipe said 25 min, but my cake was still runny in the middle after that time - I suspect that had something to do with my butter and sugar not being properly creamed)
7) Remove from oven, cool and eat

Preparation time: 15 min
Cooking time: 40 min
Serves: makes one medium sized cake

[Source of original recipe: Cooks.com, 12/9/07]