Thanks to Peta from Peta Eats, I found a super easy way to do a lovely consomme.
All 3 methods, traditional egg white, gelatine, freezer, and meal supplements, can be found on this Darking Kitchen's Official Recipe on PDF. Keep it, it will come in handy when you need to do an effort free WOW entree or meal etc...
Nothing exciting about my beef stock and soup, the normal stuff I make all the time.
Chuck steak, a couple of beef ribs, onions, black pepper, button mushrooms, white wine (I didn't want a dark stock), parsley stems, bay leaves.
I make beef stock a fair bit, use the beef in my curries or other stews, this time in pies, and use the stock separately.
Due the renovation happenning at home, I wasn't able to do a lot of cooking, so the freezing methods suit me. And it works. After defrosting in the fridge for a day, you can see clearly it's seperating...
I have a very fine siev, that I use instead of mousseline cloth sometimes, I have packed a few items and trying to live with the bare minimum.
And it's just easy to get the clear clear soup...
Will add some dumplings to it?
I go through my phrases with cooking - I'm definitely not cooking as much lately, as much as I want to.
The thought that I have to pack up everything in the kitchen in a few weeks time does stress me out quite a bit. I'm trying to use up everything I have in the pantry, and not to increase new ingredients. It's just too easy for me to pick up bits and pieces for some one off dishes and keep the rest to use later, and end up, having quite a bit of left overs in the pantry. Some of the items I do use quite frequently. Like all different types of flour, self raising, chick pea, polenta, semolina, tapioca, whole meal, rye.... They do end up in different jars and containes, and all different types of sugars and syrups etc etc etc.... argg.... the panic of packing!
So the strategy is trying not to replace the item used, including every day items like cheese, butter, flour, I don't mean don't replace any, but reduce to just one type of every major category, so by the time I have to pack up the pantry for the worker to do the demolishing work, it will be easier.
But that also means I have to cook a bit less of varieties of things until my new kitchen's in, which is about a month and 2 weeks away.....
However, there are a few items I'd like to keep it going, including the yoghurt, and the sourdough. I have to keep the yoghurt culture alive as well as the sourdough starter. They are my babies, although I haven't really named them yet!
I bought some tubs of strawberries for the children's school lunch box. There were some left so I decided to make some strawberry yoghurts.
It's simple. Add 1 cup sugar, 2 tbsp water to half tub (around 100g-125g) of cleaned strawberries, bring it to boil on stove top, let it simmer for a few minutes to maximise the strawberry taste in the syrup.
My children don't like the actual fruit in their yoghurt so I took the cooked strawberries out leaving just the strawberry syrup.
The rest steps are the same as making any other yoghurt.
Bring 1 lt full cream fresh milk to boil, I usually let it simmer for 10-15 minutes, let it cool to 110F or 43.6C, add the strawberry syrup to cooled milk, and 2 tbsp of warm plain yoghurt, leave it in the thermo pot to keep the heat over night.
Home made yoghurt are nicer with all the fresh ingredients.
I've used Greek Coffee, and dried figs in this bread, but some how, I wouldn't really label this loaf as being "Greek", although I do cook a bit of Greek dishes and there are a lot of Greek influences in my food.
I read somewhere that Greek coffee is the finest and used in pastry, it can be quite nice, and dried figs is the type of snack that is always available at home.
Greek Coffee & Figs Loaf
250g dried figs
300ml water
1 tsp bi-carb soda
1.5 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
150g butter
150ml sour cream
2 tbsp Greek/Turkish coffee (medium roast, not dark roast)
3 cups of Self Raising Flour
Dice the figs and place figs and water in a small saucepan, bring it to boil and then take it away from heat. Add in the bi-carb soda and stir through, let it soften and cool to room temperature.
Meanwhile, cream butter with sugar, add in eggs, one by one.
Add the softened and cooled figs mixture to the butter and egg mixture. Stir in the sour cream.
Sift in coffee and flour.
Add to greased and lined loaf tin, bake in pre-heated 180C oven for 50minutes to an hour, or until skewer comes out clean.
It's a very easy recipe, and I actually used similar method making sticky date cakes so it's a blend of ingredients?
Pretty nice with a cup of Espresso (or Greek coffee) for brekky or afternoon tea....
We wanted something different, some warmth during the still cold months but something not as heavy as red meat.
I have been wanting to try out Kiwi chef Fleur Sullivan's recipe when she did it on Masterchef Australia a couple of months ago. Please follow to the link to the original Master Class recipe.
I did use some gourmet marinara mix instead of the shell fish because it's easier for the children and used what I have on hand. The marinara mix consists of prawns, calamari, mussels and king fish fillets.
For the Chowder:
100g butter
100g plain flour
2 tbsp tomato paste
1/2 cup white wine
2 tsp Hungarian paprika
600g gourmet marinara mix
chopped parsley and oregano
1 fennel
1 carrot
half of onion
1 glove of garlic
1 lt fish stock
For the Spaetzle:
250g plain flour
160ml milk
1 large egg
pinch of salt.
Method:
For the Chowder, melt butter in pan, sweat the vegitables, add in flour and cook and stir till it's sandy, add tomato paste and wine, make sure there's no lumps, and slowly add the warmed stock to make roux, keep stirring to make sure there's no lumps. Add herbs and spice, and then bring the sauce to boil and add the seafood mix, allow to cook quickly.
For the Spaetzle, mix ingredient to make a very wet dough, let it sit for a while when making chowder. Boil a big pot of water with a bit of salt when chowder is almost ready, and put dough into the ricer (my potato ricer has got 3 discs and one of them is the spaetzle setting) and squeeze into the simmering water.
When cooked, drain and stir through some olive oil.
Serve....
It was a warm pudding we made a couple of weekends ago, after our normal Saturday roast dinner. Just like all things, the renovation and the flu and cold in the family had the best of me, and I haven't been doing much cooking and updating on the blog in the recent weeks. Updating things slowly.
I made a ginger bread peach cobbler using one of the recipes from Super Food Idea's Magazine, a simple food magazine with a lot of easy everyday recipes. This chocolate Ginger & Peach pudding / cobbler is just the adaption from that.
Chocolate Ginger & Peach Pudding / Cobbler
50g Dark Chocolate (Lindt's 70% Cocoa with Ginger)
50g Milk Chocolate
2 eggs
1 tbsp good cocoa powder
150g sour cream
200g SR flour
1/2 tsp bi-carb soda
100g room temperatured butter
150g brown sugar
1/2 tsp ginger powder (The ginger flavour from Lindt's is pretty strong, if use normal dark chocolate, use a bit more ginger powder)
815 can of sliced peaches
Cream butter and sugar.
Beat in eggs, one by one.
Melt chocolates with sour cream, let it cool to room temperature.
Mix the wet ingredients together, mix well.
Sift in the dry ingredients.
grease a baking dish, I used my 10" ceremic quiche dish.
Put in the peach slices (drained syrup).
Spoon on the batter. Bake in 190C oven for 30 - 38 minutes, dust with icing sugar.
Spoon out and serve with fresh double cream.
I have been making yoghurt for myself for a while, I like plain yoghurt, simple to make, can be used in cooking, dips and add a bit of fruit, coulis, jam, it's great for a snack.
However, I have been having trouble converting my whole family into home made yoghurt, maybe sometimes, but not all the time. They are used to the sweet taste of flavoured yoghurts.
So recently, I have been making Vanilla Honey Yoghurt for them, it's easy, and it has the natural taste and as many natural ingredients I can put in.
It's simple.
1 lt milk, full cream, good quality milk, it's always a good sign to tell if milk is really milk - some milk can't be made into yoghurt. Can we trust any products these days?
2 heap tablespoon of full cream milk powder
1 tsp vanilla essense
3 tbsp white sugar
1 heap tablespoon of good quality honey
2 heap spoon of plain yoghurt (home made will be best, you know what's in there, otherwise try to get organic yoghurt, full cream. There are yoghurts sold in shops that will not make yoghurt)
Bring the milk to boil and then reduce heat to a slow simmer, let it simmer for 15 minutes.
Let milk cool to around 110F or 43-45C, add to the mixture of milk powder, vanilla, sugar and honey, stir through till smooth, and let sugar dissolve, add the room temperatured plain yoghurt to the milk mix.
I use my trust worthy thermo pot to keep the yoghurt warm over night, it can be a slow oven of 43C (110F).
Usually it takes 7-8 hours, the yoghurt will set in pot, and leave it at the back of the fridge to cool. If it's left in a warm spot, yoghurt culture will keep multiplying.
Ready to be consumed when it's chilled!
I made it a while ago and didn't have time to post it.
Since Febuary this year, we have been talking to the builder, the draftman and the pool builders, and kitchen makers to negotiate our home renovation. Although cooking is stress relief for me, sometimes, I just didn't have the energy any more after going around and look at different colours of paint, designs and spending whole afternoon in the hardware stores.
In a couple of week's time, I will be living without my kitchen, new one will be in, but old will be out. We are in the mode of packing, reducing pantries and fridge items, and all of the renovation dos and don'ts.
I haven't put this tart on the blog before, it was a bit of reminder of our wedding cake, a big chocolate mud cake with profiteroles filled with chocolate creme pattiserie and lots of chocolate curls.
A dark chocolate tart based on this recipe from Epicurious Website:
Chocolate Glazed Chocolate Tart
The only thing I did different was using Arnott's Chocolate Ripple Biscuit instead of chocolate graham crackers (I'm not sure if I can find it here).
Added profiteroles filled with vanilla creme pattiserie and drizzled with spun sugar, caramel to stick the profiteroles together.
Voila....
