Chocolate raisin bread

I decided not to buy any bread at the supermarket this week and instead bake it all myself. I love kneading the bread, watching it double in size, having the smell of bread baking wafting through the house and then finally eating a slice with lots of butter and homemade jam while it's still hot. We'd normally spend over $10 a fortnight on bread so for that price I figure we can make some delicious loaves ourselves. 

The base ingredient is high grade flour - 5kg costs just over $6. And yes it is possible to carry 2 5kg bags of flour plus all the other groceries to feed 3 adults for a fortnight home by yourself - it's called a backpack! It probably weighs less than what I carried on my back while backpacking and I managed to lug that around at 3000m above sea level, and in the 40 degree Amazon heat. 

There's still wholemeal bread and english muffins in the freezer from last week's bread-making exploits so I'm topping that up so we have a variety of breads to choose from at breakfast time and for lunches. 

Last night I quick mixed up the dough and kneaded Chocolate Raisin Bread and left it to rise while I went to work (and made a triple batch of empanada pastry to chill in the fridge) - it calls for rum to soak the raisins in. I don't keep rum in the house (there was one exceptionally bad hangover from a night out dancing salsa in Colombia...) and so I used brandy. You could also use orange juice if alcohol at breakfast time isn't your cup of tea...

At work I whipped up a batch of orange muffins for the countertop, cut veges for a roast veg salad, taste tested a new recipe for ham and artichoke croquettes (yum!),  and finished off a batch of empanadas. Then it was home again to cook some more (love having a job where I get paid to do what I spend all my spare time doing any way!).

While the chocolate raisin bread had its second rising I folded empanadas for our freezer. If you freeze them 'raw' you can chuck them in the oven for half an hour and voila, dinner in a hurry when you can't be bothered cooking. This time I did corn and cheese (humita) for the vegetarian flatmate and rump steak for the carnivores. 

The two loaves rose overnight ready to be baked this morning. And so breakfast was chocolate bread fresh out of the oven with homemade plum jam and a cup of tea. Mmm. 

Right now I've got lemons squeezed ready to turn into lemon curd and need to pop out to get a jelly bag so I can attack some of the mint for mint jelly to use for Christmas gifts if it turns out well.

Better get cracking on that because I have a dinner date with some friends tonight at the Argentine restaurant because I don't have enough empanadas in my life already!!! So I'll leave you with two things, a photo of the Chocolate Raisin Bread and a video I made of my grandma making empanadas because noone makes better ones than her!

P.S. My neighbour just knocked on the door and gave me a set of brand-new gardening tools that she got given but thought I might use more than her. How lovely is that?! I think a batch of scones or muffins might be making their way over there!

English muffins

The bread stocks have been run down to next to nothing and it's still 4 days until shopping day so tonight I had to bake bread. I say had to but really for me breadmaking isn't a chore. I love kneading it. The only part I don't like is trying to get the bench clean after the kneading!

I made my usual wholemeal loaves which are on their second rising right at this moment, ready to be popped into the oven when I wake up. To mix things up a bit I also made Sophie Gray's english breakfast muffins. I LOVE english muffins but they are quite pricey. These ones taste even better than shop bought and were so easy to make (just a little time consuming if you don't start making them until 10.30pm). 

I'm so looking forward to breakfast in a few hours time when I can top one with fresh spinach from my garden and a poached egg. All that's missing is the hollandaise sauce!

There's also baking in the tin for lunches tomorrow. We ran out of butter so I made a carrot cake - no cream cheese icing though or icing at all for that matter. If I get a chance in the morning I might quickly do a batch of anzac bikkies to tide us over until grocery day. The only other snack food in the house is fresh fruit (getting low at this end of the week) or popcorn therefore baking is more of an essential than a treat (at least that's what I tell myself). 

We've been slightly naughty this week and had peach upside-down cake with custard and strawberry souffles for dessert. How my flatmates stay so skinny I do not know, haha.

When I bake bread I'm reminded of how easy it is to do and that there isn't really any reason why we should buy sliced bread at all. At $4 a loaf vogels is delicious, but expensive. If we put our bread budget towards raw ingredients like grains, dried fruits and nuts to make our breads interesting, I bet we wouldn't miss sliced bread at all. I'd just have to allocate an evening a week to do a whole lot and freeze it. Perhaps bagels for next week...

The other thing we've been thinking about is not buying fresh milk anymore and making it all up from powder. I don't taste the difference and it only takes less than 2 minutes to make up a litre or two and would save us a few dollars each fortnight. We're going to trial that idea next week.

One more thing I've been sneakily doing is topping the juice up with a bit of water once it's half drunk. Nobody has said anything to me yet so maybe they haven't noticed... when we have run out, I've chucked whatever fruit is lying around into the blender with some water. No wasted fruit and one delicious glass of goodness for breakfast. My favourite so far is pineapple/kiwifruit. Yum!

Our garden box...

It all started back around March when I decided my little garden of pots on the front porch wasn't big enough to house everything we wanted to grow. I do most of the gardening at our house but occasionally the girls help and chip in money, mostly from our groceries account if there's a bit of surplus. It's grown a lot in the past 6 months or so and here's the photos to prove it...

One garden box off trademe + soil from ZooDoo (they deliver)

= one garden ready to plant seeds in

It worked, the seeds started to grow. But issues with neigbourhood cats spread them all over the place

And so the string garden was born to keep the cats out

It grew

And grew, and survived the hail and snow...

This is it 2 weeks ago when we ate the last of the silverbeet and planted new lettuces and pak choy (the toilet rolls are to scare the cat away from the radishes. Everything grew except the caulis it seemed, they were just all leaves

Until today when the english flatty had a look and look what she found!!! Now she knows for sure that caulis grow above the ground which is something she has learnt this year. Bless.

We were all so excited and ran out to see for ourselves (that is me in the foreground with 6 months worth of hair. Yay!)

So very excited that we took a photo of all three of us with our bountiful garden

Then my very kind friend took time off from playing with his gorgeous baby to go out for lunch and take me to Bunnings to spend up on new soil. We've planted purple beans, peas, spinach, radishes and lettuces and taken a pre-emptive strike against neigbourhood cats by raiding all the water bottles out of the survival kit...at least if there's an earthquake and the house collapses our water is safe outside...

I also got more strawberry plants but was too cheap to buy another planter...and I found a tomatillo (cape horn gooseberry plant for sale. squee!)

And made the tough choice between buying a purple basil plant or chocolate mint

After all that gardening it was time for afternoon tea. I made the louise slice with pommy flatmate's homemade plum jam (half it went to the friend that chauffered me this afternoon to say thanks). It tastes prettier than it looks haha.

While jafa flatmate and I were busy gardening, pommy flatmate spent her day in the kitchen making rolls and fruit bread and tonight's dinner of egg plant and tomato pasta sauce... please Immigration don't deport her otherwise I'll have to bake all the bread myself! :-)

Empanaditas, island style

It's the last week of class so today instead of a lecture we had a shared lunch (we are a small class).
The only criteria was that we had to talk about how our dish related to globalisation and popular culture in the Pacific. I was going to make pineapple pies, a la Samoa, after finding this recipe on a blog. However the heavens weren't aligning and my first attempt was thwarted by a lack of coconut cream and the second by the internet going down meaning I couldn't access the recipe.

The clock was ticking and I only had a few hours left to conjure up something (I did nip to the shop for more coconut cream in the end), and so today a new recipe was born. Empanadas, island style.

Pastry

• 2 cups flour
• 50g butter
• 1/2 tsp salt 
• Water to mix

Rub the butter into the flour and salt mixture. Add water, stirring with a bread knife, until it forms a stiff dough. Put it in the fridge to chill while you make the fillings. 

That's my generic empanada pastry recipe. You can double or triple it depending on how many people you have to feed. 

Pineapple filling

• 1 400g can crushed pineapple in its own juice
• 1 generous tbsp custard powder
• 1 tsp sugar

Tip the tin of pineapple into a pan/pot. Add the custard powder and sugar and stir on a low heat until it thickens nicely. 

Luau filling

• 1 tin coconut cream
• 1 bunch silver beet (Swiss chard), stalks removed, chopped roughly
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 onion
• 1 cube vegetable stock
• splash of lime or lemon juice
• pinch of chili powder
• 1 tbsp fresh chopped coriander (or 1 tsp dried)
• 1 tbsp cornflour (mixed with a tiny bit of water)
• salt and pepper to taste

Chuck everything in a pot and stir over a low heat until it's thickened up nicely. 

Assembly

Assemble as you would regular empanadas - roll the pastry out on a floured bench, creating circles of pastry by tracing around a ramekin or plate of your choice with a sharp knife. Run a wet finger around the edge of the circle, place a tsp or tbsp (depending on the size of the circle) of filling into the centre and close by pinching around the edges. Press around the edge with a fork or fold like you would a cornish pasty (like a wee stegosaurus). 

Brush with a beaten egg and cook at 200 degrees C for 25 minutes or until golden brown. 

Dust the pineapple ones with icing sugar to serve. 

So easy and so delicious if I do say so myself. The class seemed to love them (yay) and not a single one was left on the plate...

The dishes the other students brought were so delicious too. It was a proper island feast with keke saina (Samoan biscuits), kumara cooked in coconut cream, coconut buns, taro chips, out of this world Hawaiian Ono (sp?) chicken, chop suey, surimi salad made with best foods mayo (of course) etc. It was a lot of fun. I'll miss this class. Speaking of which I should really go and finish my homework...

Afternoon tea

Cup of tea + fresh bread + big dollop of homemade plum jam (thanks to pommy flatmate) = one happy mumsie

Tastes like Autumn

I love doing the weekly grocery shop. Most Saturday mornings I get up, chuck on a beanie to cover the bed hair (that's right, 7 weeks of growth is enough to cause bed hair, which excites me no end - it's growing!) and head down the road to Newtown School.

On the way there's often a group of Samoans selling sausage sizzles to raise money for a church or school or family holiday back to the islands. It'd be rude not to buy one, and so I arrive at the market hurridly wiping tomato sauce off my chin. Every so often I have to pull a u-y and head back to the atm because I've realised at the first stall I've forgotten the money.

The best thing about the market is how cheap everything is. 30 odd eggs for $6. All sorts of fruit for 99c at the moment. And best of all yams are down to $4 already when they are still over $8 at Pak n Save. $20 later, laden down with a myriad of fruit and vegies I head home for a spinach nest and cup of tea if I've got enough time before work.

Tonight I used some of these goodies that were going a bit soft to make a crumble was all the gorgeous colours of autumn falling leaves. There wasn't much that wasn't in it - braeburn, pear, persimmon, kiwifruit both green and gold, mandarin...so delicious and served with a small dollop generous drowning of custard.

It followed goat casserole. Sneaky meat while the pommy lass is out of the house.

The only thing the crumble was missing was feijoa. But that's alright. Here's some feijoa jam I prepared earlier.

And here's a parting shop of the first bounty from the vege patch. We're very proud of our wee radishes, which is a good thing since I didn't stagger the planting, they're going to be ready all at once - whoops!

That's autumn over. Fingers crossed the warmish weather lasts until the end of the month when I'll be in beautiful, warm Samoa!

Crabapple jelly

When I was a kid, mum used to preserve peaches in big glass jars that sat on the top of the shelf all winter. They were incredibly delicious either by themselves or even better with custard or in a peach upside down cake. Now that tinned peaches are so cheap, I guess there isn't really much point, unless you are lucky enough to have a peach tree in your backyard. Unfortunately I don't, but I did go back home for a visit last week and found the crabapple tree covered in ripe fruit, just asking to be made into jam. And so, here is my first ever (quickly followed by second ever) attempt at making crabapple jelly.

First we picked the fruit from the tree, rinsed it all well and pulled the stalks out.

Then we chopped all the fruit in half, just cutting out the hard core bit at the bottom of the fruit (keeping all the pips and what not for pectin purposes), and discarding any fruit that was getting a bit fuzzy or had a big maggotty worm camping inside it. It was roughly 1kg of fruit.

Then we put it in a large pot, just covering the fruit in water but not so much that the fruit starts to float. Here the recipe says to add a stick of cinnamon. I didn't. Then bring it to the boil and simmer for half an hour. After that you need to put all that fruit into a jelly bag and let the liquid drip overnight (careful not to squeeze the bag or the liquid will go cloudy).

Dad rigged up this contraption using twine and wooden spoons - number 8 wire mentality there. For the second batch Mum made good use of a bar stool. Note: if you tip the bowl on its side in order to get it to fit into the middle of the bar stool, you will need to ladle all the liquid out. At least I know where I possibly inherited my ditziness from :-)

The next morning there should be around a litre of liquid sitting there. Simmer the liquid for 10 minutes, removing the skin at the end, then add 1 cup sugar for every cup of liquid, stir it in until dissolved, and then simmer a further 10 minutes. Remove the skin and pour into sterilised jars.

 Then it's all ready to eat or gift or eat some more. Preferably with a cup of tea and a freshly baked scone. "Easy peasy", as Jo Seagar would say.





Chocolate Pisco Cake (otherwise known as heaven on a plate)

If somebody told me they were going to Iquitos (a Peruvian city planted smack bang in the Amazon, only accessible by boat or plane) the one piece of advice I'd have for them would be to go to the Dawn on the Amazon cafe and try the Chocolate Pisco cake. I did. Twice. Biting into that slice of heavenly goodness and taking a sip from an ice cold glass of sauvignon blanc is a food memory that will never leave me. Thinking about it puts me back in that moment, sitting in a comfy chair on the malecon watching tourists amble past, hawkers trying to flog off cigarettes,t-shirts or tours, a couple of ladies across the street selling juanes and coconuts and hippies sitting next to their pop up jewellery stands. I can hear the roar of mototaxis (tuk tuks) going past the square and the heat hangs heavily on me, my skin glistening with a constant layer of sweat. I'd spent 4 nights sleeping in a hammock on a rust bucket of a ferry to get here. Spent another couple of days exploring the faded grandeur of this city and the nearby zoos and butterfly farms (even being groomed by monkeys) and had sat on a white sand beach in the middle of the river chatting to the local kids.

Then I'd ventured out into the jungle for a 4 day tour with a lovely Slovenian girl and a rather creepy, dolphin-obsessed (and not in a oh dolphins are so cute way but dolphins as sexual objects way) guide, caught a piranha and eaten it, had a shaman blowing smoke and chanting over me to cure my vomiting bug, and held a pet sloth who was so lazy he didn't seem to notice he had huge lice-like creatures swarming over him. I had sweated profusely non-stop for at least a week in the opressive humitity and drunken so much juice (the choice of tropical fruits!) to counteract that that a child hawker knew me as the lady who really, really loves juice.

Iquitos was an absolutely magical place. And the bite I took of that straight-from-the-refrigerator Chocolate Pisco cake washed down with an actually cold glass of wine was beyond magical. It is one of my top food memories in a trip full of 'em. It's definately right up there with the first bite of a steak fresh off the barbie in Uruguay, sinking my teeth into a trout empanada to die for in Bariloche, the faina (chickpea bread) on top of a simple margerita pizza in La Boca, or a sip of Torrontes from Vistandes vineyard in Mendoza.

Since then, I've wanted to replicate it but couldn't find a recipe for Chocolate pisco cake anywhere online. How could this be?

So I've used my favourite chocolate cake recipe gleaned from my mother who in turn gleaned it from some unknown (to me) source. Instead of 1 cup of hot coffee I used 3/4 cup coffee and 1/4 of pisco (Peruvian/Chilean white wine brandy) - possibly it doesn't taste quite pisco-y enough, but still a worthy first attempt.

Here's the recipe.

In a food processor combine

• 2 cups sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup milk or plain yoghurt
• 3/4 cup cocoa
• 200g softened butter
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 1 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 3 cups self-raising flour
• 3/4 cup boiling hot coffee
• 1/4 cup pisco

Cook for 1 hour in a 160 degree oven, although mine is taking longer than that - possibly due to the pisco?

I also had enough mixture for 6 cupcakes made from the mixture. 3 of which I totally have not eaten while writing this post :-)

 Just for fun, here's a couple of other pics of food in Iquitos. Peru really is foodie heaven.

Dinner in the jungle

Palmito salad hit the spot after 4 days of chicken/fish, rice and banana 3x a day



Caiman (alligator) in garlic sauce. Note the huge jug of juice

 







Barefoot in the kitchen

 Today was one of those days where like a true housewife mumsie I spent the entire afternoon barefoot (well I would've been had the temperature risen above so friggin cold you'd think you were at Scott Base) in the kitchen.

I had a bright idea the other day that the person who ate the last slice of bread should have to bake the next loaf. Of course that person was me. I didn't mind because I have a brand new bread bin that is so ridiculously cute. Yay for closing down sales and bargains to be had. No bread bin that adorable should be left empty and so I got to work. This is the recipe I always use. It's yummy, but not too yummy. My flatmate makes an incredible loaf that never lasts more than a day because it is that good. Sneaking a piece on your way to the bathroom at 2am kind of good. Thus, that is not every day bread.

Normally I leave it out in the sun to rise - a bit of a problem today. Solution = turn the oven on and sit the dough on top of it. And since the oven's on, might as well get some baking down while you're at it. Cue anzac bikkies (my all time favourites) and Bill and Ben's ridiculously easy date loaf. When a bag of dates winds up in the shopping trolley it's a not-so-subtle way of flatmates saying "MAKE US SOME DATE LOAF, MUMSIE". Another thing that doesn't last more than 1 day. Served with a scrape generous mound (a la Julia Child) of butter of course.

Tangelo & tequila jelly

Then it was off to Samoan class but not before juicing (in my hands - note to self; buy juicer) the tangelos that didn't get eaten last week and making jelly for dessert. Tequila and tangelo jelly. It's an Annabel Langbein recipe from her Pacific inspired recipe book, except hers has lemongrass, lime and rum. I didn't have rum so tequila it was. Any attempts to turn the jelly onto the plate from it's rammekin nest failed. How the heck do you achieve this? Ideas? I tried sitting it in some hot water and slipping a knife around the sides, but it still didn't work. But I could hear Meryl channeling Julia ("never apologise")and left it in the cups - it looked rather awesome if I do say so myself. Except for tasting the tiniest bit burnt - don't use the pot with the burnt bottom next time. Success.

Loving all things Samoan at the moment and so dinner was Luau (sp?) which is basically palusami without any corned beef.



Luau



Take one can of coconut cream and a bunch of silverbeet/spinach (taro leaves if you can find some, which I can't) and simmer for about 45 mins. I added a pinch of chilli, garlic, salt, vege stock and there should be lemon too but we're all out. Serve on rice. Fatty and delicious!

 I made soup too. Let's call it an experiment in what happens when you blend orange pumpkin with purple cabbage. I'm about to whizz it up in the processor to see. Every time I look into the crockpot I'm reminded of Bridget Jones' epic blue string soup. It looks about as appetising. Hoping it doesn't taste too 'interesting'.

And check out my latest pot garden pic. They're all still alive, although the basil looks like it needs a trip to the infirmary. For that I blame the cat, but that is a WHOLE 'nother blog entry.