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....
