Entries Tagged 'Wannabe chef' ↓

So The Mister was in a jam (ha ha!) earlier this week – challenged by the partner of a guy we work with that HER jam is better than his raspberry jam. It started out as a harmless try-the-jam-at-home-on-your-toast kind of challenge but escalated into so much more – Al Brown of the very well know Logan Brown restaurant in Wellington waded in with support for the challenger, famous judges were lined up, Old Bank Arcade where it was held was jam-packed (ha ha), announcement of the event and write-up afterwards were in the paper and apparently the NZ Gardener magazine has put up their hand to sponsor it next year – WOW!

It was a great little get together – a really fun non-work, community thing to do left everyone in good spirits, even the loser, The Mister

I’ve put 2 posts about the event on the Xero blog: Xero jam session and Jamtastic!

Not so often we have a cooking failure and it’s pretty demoralising when it’s for a dinner party! Sigh. Guess the hand held beater is just not good enough. There’s no time, and no saving it

Who remembers Madeira cake from their childhood? Me! Another favourite from A Treasury of New Zealand Baking.

Mother made the Plum & Cardamon Shortcake on our last night in Awakeri which was a delicious mixture of sweet short cake and tart plums.

Then last week I made the Madeira cake. Didn’t have any lemon essence so I improvised with a bit of lemon rind and juice. It’s got to be one of the lightest, fluffiest Madeira cakes I’ve had. Really good.

So that’s 5 successes from the new cook book so far!

Now we cross off the 3rd recipe from A Treasury of New Zealand Baking. Last night The Mister decided to give the all-in-one pav a go. He had to become acquainted with Mother’s 42 year old Kenwood mixer (appliances don’t last like they used to, although having said that at the end of the 10-minutes beating time it leaked machine oil into my hand when I removed the beater) which made him feel like it wasn’t really hand made seeing as the mixer did all the hard work.

It was a great success! I drew a circle on the baking paper to help him with a nice round shape.

It rose up and up and only cracked a tiny bit – Mother was jealous!

It was a great mound of light crisp meringue outer and delicate marshmallow inner.

And I’ve just found this photo from Christmas 2005 when The Mister actually  made his first pav, and the niece was supervising back then too! (She’s very amused to see this photo, “look how little I am and look how long and funny his hair is!!”)

Last night I ended up making a second thing from A Treasury of New Zealand Baking – for dessert, plum cake with spicy plum sauce. This involved a trek to get the plums first (with the niece egging The Mister on to check if the electric fence was going with a blade of grass (which he did! (it wasn’t))).

Then The Mister kindly cut and removed stones from 1.5kgs of them. Bit of a palaver making the sauce, picking out cloves, cinnamon stick and vanilla pod, sieving it, reheating and it remained very runny but tasted SO good and soaked into the very buttery cake.

And behind every good photo is a photographers assistant, if you’re wondering how the book was staying upright in that last photo, here’s what was going on behind the scenes!

So that’s 2 for 2 that ended up looking pretty much like the picture in the book! And all made from the cupboard and our own harvesting – didn’t go anywhere near a supermarket!

Up in Awakeri I received a late Christmas gift A Treasury of New Zealand Baking – a collection of kiwi favorites from well known New Zealanders. With the family around it’s always tempting to bake because everything gets eaten pretty much straight away and you don’t have to wait a week before trying something else – so today I started.

Blueberry scones for lunch.  Nikau is serving these at the moment in place of date scones (noticed they did this around this time last year as well so perhaps an annual summer tradition) so I just had to try them. The mixture was very sticky and I was quite concerned they’d be very doughy and solid.

But they were light and delicious and just like the ones I’ve had at Nikau! And just like the picture in the book. Even my niece who announced she doesn’t like scones but seeing as I was making them and they had yoghurt in them she’d give them a go liked them!!

Everyone who knows us knows we’re city folk who stop by New World Metro or Moore Wilson’s quite a bit to get provisions during the week, eat only loaves fresh baked white bread and usually have a bare fridge and freezer.

So we’re pretty proud of our efforts over the 4 or 5 days of Christmas when we’ve eaten left-overs and ‘cupboard meals’ (we’re especially proud of these – in manner of Mother living in rural area with chest freezer and pantry of spices and bottled fruit we’ve made a few meals without have to go to the shops to get anything!)

Boxing Day and the day after was pretty much all left-overs from the mountains of food Sara & Lucy brought over on Christmas day – we’re still getting through the meringues for dessert every night and I just don’t know how I’m going to give them up! Then we made a zucchini flan that lasted a couple of days.

One day we make pikelets for lunch and had them with coffee and jam & cream. What!? It was raining and a holiday!

But then our carefully rationed loaf of fresh bread for breakfast toast came to an end. So The Mister baked bread. Forgot that we halved the recipe last time (from Patricia Cornwell’s Food to Die For) so we had a rather giant loaf (which lasted 3 breakfasts and a grilled cheese lunch!) and was a teensy bit uncooked in the middle but toasted up just fine!

And we made another batch of spinach lasagne last night which we wanted to make last for more left-overs so after we’d seen a Twitter Friend’s (@TheNoviceChef) recipe for beer bread The Mister decided he was on a bread-making roll so we made that to go with it.

Cannot believe I poured a whole bottle and a bit of beer into it! (Yes he was making it but I ended up in the Santa’s Little Helper apron when he got nervous of the instructions ‘blend until just mixed’ … )

And then you pour a whole lot of melted butter over it!

But it came out great, didn’t taste of beer, was very sweet and buttery and went very well with our cupboard spinach lasagne. (Then we had meringues for dessert!!)

Found these frozen balls of spinach at Moore Wilson’s when getting the ingredients for spinach lasagne to make a couple of times these holidays. Didn’t know you cold buy spinach like this and it makes it so much easier to just get out however much you want and put the rest back in the freezer. Genius.

What great weather – hopefully it lasts! More Christmas spirit this morning at Moore Wilson’s but what a crowd! We knew it would be a time for patience and we targetted the specific areas we knew most likely to be popular first but we did well to delay our arrival because produce was still arriving and being unpacked when we got there.

However Cafe L’Affare were there again making free coffee out the front and people were handing out nibbles and glasses of bubbly in store. If you know it’s going to be like that before you get there it makes it so much easier to just go slowly and take it all in.

Raspberries and salad were popular, but we got some in the end

Waiting patiently in the lines that stretched back passed the fridges

Put the raspberry layer on the trifles before heading into work

Started the Christmas cooking for the next couple of days tonight. So with Christmas food cooking smells coming from the kitchen, a slight pine fragrance coming from the branches we have in a vase, Christmas cards and gifts under the tree it’s beginning to feel pretty festive.

Cards on the table

The Mister making dinner & cooking up his delicious tomato base for the Spinach Lasagna on Christmas Eve at the beach house

Whoops goes the brandy onto the individual trifles for Christmas day, then onto melting the chocolate for the white chocolate rocky road to have on hand

Off to Moore Wilson’s with the 6am crowd tomorrow morning for the fresh stuff.