Last night we made something very different for dinner, somewhat spurred on by needing to find something as a pre-dinner snack on Thanksgiving but mostly because our Twitter friend @TheNoviceChef in Florida made a video of herself making them for a blog competition she’d entered and she made it look so easy and she used all ‘normal’ stuff in them, nothing too foreign!
We cooked the noodles and chopped all the stuff up ready to roll.
Our only encounter with rice paper had been to buy some from Moore Wilson’s to take up to Mother one trip but we’d never used it ourselves – quite strange stuff! It’s really hard and brittle but once you run it through some water it becomes all smooth and almost like fine rubber. Trying to be like @TheNoviceChef we videoed making one!
They took a wee while to make and I was worried that the rice paper felt quite sticky and would be messy to eat but no need to worry! They were big enough to pop into your mouth all in one go and didn’t leave any sticky residue on your hands and they tasted really good! Even the soy sauce based dipping sauce was nice with them.
Not sure if we’ll make them for Thanksgiving yet, could be a bit mucky dealing with dipping sauce and glasses of wine from the coffee table.
Haven’t made ratatouille in years but eggplants were on special in Moore Wilson’s at the weekend and didn’t look too bumped or oddly-shaped so we got one and the makings for ratatouille … which also The Mister reckoned he’d never had so it was time to introduce him.
We got some of the bake-at-home ciabatta too – made for a nice home-cooked healthy meal although we had to come home from work a bit early to start the salting process on the eggplant.
I made Halloween cupcakes again this year – we have all sorts of ghoulish baking and decorations go up at work for the event so this was my baked offering. I’ve finally found orange icing so didn’t have to make it up from red and yellow food colouring like I did a couple of years ago – although they turned out alright!
This year my cupcakes were coffee flavoured with vanilla butter cream icing – delicious.
Although they did look kind of yellow next to me that day!
When asked “Have you made your cake?” at this time of the year there’s no need to qualify which cake, especially if the question is from Mother (she asked me this evening when I rang for her birthday). She means Christmas cake. That long held tradition (I guess around the world but certainly in my New Zealand life) of making the Christmas cake (or fruit mince) at Labour Weekend. I still have the book out with my cake recipe in it from last weekend when I went off on a rant about tradition dying away (another sign of middle age (EYEROLL)) and even though I think writing in books with pen is naughty, I love that I’ve written in this particular book. Between that and the move to recording everything on my blog, I can track my Christmas baking for the last 15 years … with just one year unaccounted for … am still trying very hard to remember … 2004.
Years 1995 – 2003 Christmas cake, per the Australian Woman’s Weekly New Cookbook (with inscription from Mother inside from 1987)
Even after all that cooking yesterday and our big walk this morning we found some energy to make chicken and leek pies for dinner – with little love hearts on top – awwwwww!
All that remained in the back of the pantry was one jar from the 2008 batch and even though probably well preserved in brandy it looked a little dry so we set about getting the ingredients for a new batch yesterday and we’re now the proud owners of 5 new jars, just sealed up now.
We had a massive day cooking yesterday and that’s when we did all the mincing after a trip to the supermarket for the ingredients. I worry that traditions are going out the door in our mile-a-minute lives … I think we’re in the 3rd phase of my Christmas Baking Lifecycle …
Phase 1: The early years
Many years ago, whether shopping for dried fruit for a Christmas cake or fruit mince for pies, I’ve not been alone in the dried fruit isle at Labour Weekend before. These first few years it was always a bun fight of housewives for bags, pens and lots of eying up each others concoctions in the Alison Holst scoop-your-own-fruit section – much weighing out a colourful array of sultanas, currants, dried cherries, apricots, peel and nuts. I always appreciated the scales – very smart thinking I thought, especially for someone like me who never bakes with dried fruit except at Labour Weekend.
Phase 2: The convenient years
Last time I stocked up for Christmas fruit mince in 2008 I noticed that there were significantly less housewives and many of them had picked up the handy pre-packaged supermarket bags of Christmas Fruit for their cakes or pies. No more hand-me-down family recipes calling for carefully measured this and that. And no more carefully measuring either – the help-yourself scales had disappeared by this time as well, and those of us left sticking to our worn reeipe from the Australian Woman’s Weekly New Cookbook (with inscription from Mother inside from 1987) eye-rolled each other as we traipsed back and forward to the spotty teen-aged boy who was getting increasingly annoyed by us popping bags on his scales and then whipping them off again to go away and take out or put in to get just the right amount.
Phase 3: The token years
So now we’re in the token years, the just in time years, the self-deprecating years, where I was alone with Alison’s bins of dried fruit and nuts (and a spotty teen-aged boy at the scales) – this year there will be cries of surprise from housewives when they realise it’s Christmas again and tear into the supermarket after work one night to grab extremely overpriced yet very trendy packets of mini fruit mince pies from Aro Bake because they should have some Christmas baking on hand for neighbours and family who might call around for a bit of Christmas cheer. And anyway, Aro Bake make much nicer ones than anyone could at home themselves anyway.
Like martyrs we embraced the Christmas spirit – minced our fruit, ‘whoopsied’ in a measure of brandy, stirred it up with a kiss and a wish, sterilized jars, made labels and ferretted the hoard away in the back of the pantry.
The Mister lost a bet at work and had to provide a cheesecake. He reckoned he’d build a feature with 10 bugs or less but Susanne from the Quality Assurance team had her doubts – 10 bugs or less and she would provide a cheesecake, more than 10 bugs, The Mister would. There were 11 bugs.
So we made cheesecake on Sunday. The Mister unveiled it for a dev team afternoon tea yesterday. Susanne was thrilled with it and The Mister received many compliments on how wonderful it was.
There were a couple of requests for the recipe so here you go.
10-12 plain digestive biscuits (of if you’re in the States, 15 graham crackers)
3 TBSP melted butter
900g cream cheese
1.5 cups white sugar
3/4 cup milk
4 eggs
1 cup sour cream
1 TBSP vanilla essence
1/4 cup all purpose flour
Preheat the oven to 175C (or 350F). Grease a 24cm (9in) spring form tin
Crush the digestives finely in a food processor and mix with melted butter until they look like wet crumbs, but not clumping together. Press into the bottom of the tin with the back of a spoon.
In a large bowl (if your hand-held blender can cope with it!) or a food processor/mixer, beat cream cheese and sugar until smooth. Blend in milk and then mix in the eggs one at a time, mixing just enough to incorporate. (It’s at this time I pour everything out of the food processor into a bowl and use the hand-mixer because the processor is getting rather full and leaving unbeaten cream cheese on the bottom.) Mix in sour cream, vanilla and flour (I sprinkle it from a little sieve) until smooth.
Pour filling onto the crust and bake in preheated oven for 1 hour.
After an hour turn the oven off and leave the cheese cake to cool in the oven without opening the door for 5 to 6 hours to prevent the top from cracking. Store in the fridge.
Home alone on nights The Mister is out at band practice means I can have whatever I want for dinner – haven’t yet given in to peanut butter on toast followed by ice-cream but there’s a few weeks left of band practice left!
Look what I made tonight! And it even stayed stuck together in it’s shape! We saw a little bit of a broccoli cous couse thing someone made on Top Chef last week, didn’t see how it was made, just their pile of fine broccoli shavings and the finished product. So I tried it.
I ’shaved’ the broccoli flowerettes & grated the left-over stalks on the parmesan grater to get a pile of green ’sprinkle’ that I left to soak with the cous cous so that it would cook a bit
Then added some chopped parsley and cooked garlic, pressed it into a non-stick pie mold and left it upside down for a while in the hope it would slip out – a couple of taps on the bottom and it did!
It tasted OK, although next time I might use more salt and garlic – you could taste the broccoli but the taste of cous cous was just a bit too prominent.
Still, healthier than peanut butter on toast I’m sure!
I love it that all our parents get on so well – another great family dinner when Mum & Dad were in town this weekend – lots and lots of laughing and nice comments about the pulled pork burgers and sticky date pudding with caramel sauce.
It’s not online yet but we tried one of the Quick Smart ideas from the latest Cuisine magazine last night – given that they’re just ideas and there are no measurements, correct order or times on anything, you do kind of have to make it up with the ingredients you’ve got. We had most of the things for an idea we’d seen in the magazine in a cafe at the weekend so gave it ago – it was our kind of food and pretty good!
Ours differs a bit from the magazine where we used our own ingredients or didn’t have stuff – here’s what we did…
In a frypan in extra virgin olive oil, cook finely chopped red onion, leeks, bacon, garlic, zucchini strips, lemon zest and parsley – the end result and fragrant and soft concoction. Stir through some baby spinach leaves until wilted, then stir trough cooked pasta and ricotta (I’m sure you’re supposed to use fresh ricotta but we just spooned in blobs of stuff from a tub!) and plenty of seasoning. Sprinkle with finely grated parmesan. YUM.
