Cookies... they are always needed when you have growing children, great after school snacks.
Since they are no longer able to have peanut butter at school (so many allergies these days) I decided to make some cookies with peanut butter.
This is adapted from my new cook book, Home Baking Cook Book by Jacqueline Bellefontaine. I like the book because it has got all the basics, and the recipes developped on the basics.
The original recipe used peanuts and it was a Peanut Better Biscuit..
I've turned it into:
Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies
115g butter, softened
115g crunchy peanut butter
225g granulated sugar
1 egg, lightly beaten
75g dark chocolate chips
150g plain flour
pinch of salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
Method:
Beat the butter and the peanut butter together, gradually add in sugar and beat well.
Add egg, a little at the time, and beat, until well combined.
Sift in the flour, baking powder and salt into the mixture and fold in the chocolate chips, and form the dough.
Roll into a long log and cover by cling film, put in fridge for half an hour.
Preheat oven to 180C or 350F, grease 2 cookie sheets.
Slice up the cookies and place them on the cookie sheets, they will expand, so give them 5cms apart.
Bake for 15 minutes or until golden brown. Cool on rack.
I love the peanut flavour in the cookies!
Blue cod was my favourite fish when I lived in Auckland. It was nice and fresh and best fish cook as a steamed fish in New Zealand. In Cantonese cooking, the steamed fish usually calls for the freshest you can find, that's why a lot of Cantonese restaurants have those big fish tanks... The only way to make sure the customers get the most fresh fish...
It's hard to have a swimming blue cod, because it's a sea fish, so selecting the right blue cod is very important, if you want to have it steamed.
Since we moved to Australia, barramundi and coral perch are usually on the list for steamed fish dishes, local, fresh and nice sweet meat. But every now and then, there are some nice blue cods, from New Zealand, fresh from our local fish mongers.
Steamed fish is usually quite simple - after all, fresh produce speaks for itself.
Rub the cleaned fish with a bit of salt, inside and out, set aside for half an hour. Slice a few pieces of fresh ginger, and steam the fish for roughly 10 minutes. While the fish is in the steamer, juvienne some spring onion (cut into thin strips, not just battens) and fresh ginger. Prepare sauce, a mixture of light soy, shaoxin wine and a bit of shaved palm sugar. This time, I also added a tiny bit of fish sauce, it's not Cantonese, but oh well.
Drain all liquid and take away the ginger slices that steamed with the fish.
Pile the freshly juvienned spring onion and ginger over the fish, and pour in the sauce. Heat up some canola oil in pan (or wok, it doesn't really matter as the fish is not going back) until smoking and pour all over the spring onion and ginger (that's on top of the fish).
Serve with steamed rice and Asian greens.
It's a simple dessert, really. But the whole family love it. Less the boy who only eats chocolate of course.
Reason why we don't make it often, we have to watch out waist lines.
Sticky Date Pudding with Butter Scotch Sauce
Serve 4 - 1/2 cup Metal Dariole Moulds
The pudding
100g Pitted dates, diced.
160ml water
1/4 tsp bi-carb soda
80g dark brown sugar
1 egg
80g self raising flour
30g butter, softened.
Butter Scotch Sauce
30g butter
100g dark brown sugar
130ml thickened cream
1/2 tsp vanilla essense
Method
Bring the water to boil, add date in and stir in the bi-carb soda. Let it break down the date, and stir to mix well. Set aside to let cool.
Meanwhile, beat the butter with sugar, till pale, and add egg, beat well. Add the cooled date liquid, mix well and add in sifted flour.
Divide them into pre-greased moulds and bake in water bath, in a pre-heated 180C oven for 40 minutes or until skewer comes out clean.
Make sauce while the cakes are in the oven. Put everything into a small saucepan over low heat, bring it to boil and let it simmer for 5-6 minutes till thicken.
Pour over the cake and enjoy!
It has been a good season for crabs this year. They are big, good quality and cheaper. $25.99 a kilo for live mud crabs, from Darwin, my favourite type of crabs.
I like blue swimmers, but mud crabs from Darwin have so much more to offer. We had the crabs from restaurant, but children were not too keen so we decided that it's probably best to have them at home, we have more time to deal with the shells and all the work involved in eating...
We had the ginger and spring onion crab and the crab fried in egg yolks from the restaurant so this time, decided to do something slightly different.
We normally freeze the crab before taking them into parts, this time, no different. Less suffering for the crab, easier job for us.
First of all, prepare the tapioca, salt and white pepper mix, for the 1.26kg crab, which has been cleaned and cut into chunks - with legs and craws attached. Craws were cracked, easier to handle later on at the dinner table, and easier to get a bit of sauce in.
Dip the crab chunks into the dry mix, seal the exposed parts of the flesh. Prepare 2 dry chilli, cracked sichuan pepper corn, juvienned fresh ginger and crushed garlic, throw in the hot wok with heated oil, about 1/2 cup. Put in the crab pieces, turn and let oil seal all tapioca dipped area. Stir. Once the crab start to turn a bit red, add light soy, shaoxin wine, and a bit of raw sugar. Stir the crabs and let it coat with sauce. When almost ready, put in the spring onion battens.
A nice fresh Darwin mud crab, doesn't need a lot of cooking, the simpler the better. The meat is sweet, and the fresh seafood always speaks for itself.
Since we have a lot of lemon myer ready this year, apart from making desserts with them, I also use them in cooking. I made some quick preserved lemons (wedges) according to fellow Food Buzz blogger Kitchen Konfidence a couple of weeks ago and stored in fridge.
When I got home, first thing I did was to prepare the dough for the naan bread.
It's a simple dough with plain flour, yeast, salt, water and a little butter. I didn't use spices apart from a tiny pinch of white pepper, as the children were not into too much spices.
Once the naan dough was set aside to proof, I cut the chicken into big pieces and rub with morrocan spice mix, salt and olive oil. Set aside for 30 minutes.
Cut onions and garlic, lay at the bottom of the casserole dish. Put the chicken pieces on top with a bit extra spices. Add preserved lemon wedges and olives. Add a bit of white wine, and put in a medium oven for 50 minutes, with lids on.
Mean while, naan dough had proofed by double, rolled out and cooked naan on a non stick pan on stove top, until bubble up, flip sides.
When all naans were made, served with chicken and steamed greens.
I love Italian food. I cook a lot of it. I don't have an Italian nonna, so most of my knowledge of Italian food come from friends, and cook books.
I must admit since Italian food is so popular, it has changed a bit since migrating to the new world, just like all the other cuisines from the old world.
One of my recent collection was The Italian Cookbook, by Australian Gourmet Traveller. It's a rustic torta, and I have been wanting to try out for a while.
I bought a kilo of fresh ricotta during the weekend, after making some potato ricotta smoked salmon patties, I decided I still have enough ricotta to do my torta. Recipe adapted to suit my pantry, I don't have dried figs, and I did add mascapone which was not in the original recipe, used walnuts instead of hazelnuts. And it's a bigger torta, so I didn't have enough left over pastry to do the cross over stripes on top, but instead, cut out some hearts. I also used lemon myer, instead of oranges as I have a tree load.
Torta Di Ricotta
Fillings:
100g raisins
40ml masala
juice of one lemon Myer
zest of one lemon Myer
750g fresh ricotta
250g fresh mascapone
2 tbsp honey
110g sugar
1 egg, lightly beaten
100g roasted walnuts, roughly chopped.
Pastry:
185g plain flour
125g cold butter, coarsly chopped, plus extra for greasing
55g caster sugar
1 egg, separated
Method:
1. Pulse flour, butter, sugar and egg yolk together with a pinch of salt in a food processor till it's just coming together, knead mixture till smooth and roll between 2 sheets of plastic wraps into a large disc, put in fridge for an hour.
2. While the pastry is resting, mix the juice and the masala, soak the raisins for 30 minutes.
3. Mix ricotta, mascapone, honey, egg in a bowl, mix till smooth, I used my bench top mixer. Fold through the lemon zest, the walnut and the soaked raisins with the liquid.
4. Preheat oven to 190C. Roll pastry whilst still in plastic wrap to 34cms round. Remove top layer of wrap and invert pastry into the tart tin, I used a deep 10" loose bottom tart tin.
5. Spoon ricotta mixture into the tin and trim the edges of the pastry and roll out the left over pastry. I didn't have enough to do the criss cross, so I cut out some hearts....
6. Brush pastry with a bit of egg white and bake for 40-45 minutes or until golden. brown.
7. And as most of the Italian tortas, dust with icing sugar and serve warm or in room temperature...
Buon Appetito!
I had some left over chocolate sauce from the Chocolate Pear Pudding I made last week. I guess when scaling down the recipe, there are some not quite right moments.
What do I do with the chocolate sauce? How about use it in the bread I make for hubby's brekky?
Mocha Date Loaf
50g Chocolate Sauce (from Chocolate Almond Pear Pudding recipe)
350g Strong Bread Flour
1 table spoon good quality instant espresso coffee (I use Moccona, however if chocolate sauce was made from scratch, properly brewed espresso coffee would be preferred)
80g chopped dates
7g dry instant yeast
10g Butter (there's already some butter in the chocolate sauce and sugar)
1 tiny pinch of salt
160ml warm milk
1 large egg
The bread making part is just as same as other breads, and I do prefer the activate the yeast with the milk first and stir into the dry ingredients, add chocolate sauce and light whisked egg - keep a tiny little bit for egg wash before baking. After I formed the rough dough, in goes the dates.
It's a pleasant brekky loaf, not over powering, and great as toast with a bit of butter.
