Dec 25th

Happy holidays all! 

Apparently this is a wise man holding myrrh. 

Picton Village Bakery panettone was a huge hit

We broke our fast with panettone and wise-man-decorated coffee before devouring a hot second breakfast of scrambled eggs, hash browns, bacon and croissants dripping with butter and strawberry jam. 

The dog was not keen to be a reindeer with me.

This book has the most fabulous pictures. Drool.

Pressies from the bf. I think he might want a feed.

And then there were two

I just went to scavenge left-overs and discovered that two mince tarts survived Christmas day. Now there is one. Too tempting!

Plan B

I had big plans for my day off yesterday. Recently at work, I realised just how long it's been since I used a piping bag when the potato I was piping onto pies turned out less than aesthetically pleasing. To build up my skills a bit, I decided to experiment on meringues. However, they didn't turn out exactly right. I used a combo of brown and icing sugar because I couldn't find any castor in the pantry. The brown sugar gave them a lovely caramelly flavour, but made them look, well, a little poopy. Observe.

My experiments continued with strawberry and chocolate meringues. I'd gotten bored with the piping bag half-way through the plain meringues so I was just spooning the mixture onto the tray. The strawberry ones tasted fab but are also a tad ugly.

I melted some very dark chocolate for the last round, but adding liquids to meringues just deflates the egg whites and it all just turned to goo. Determined not to throw anything out (or eat the whole bowl raw) I poured the goo into a ramekin and accidentally made a souffle. It was immediately descended upon and this was the first picture I could take of it. It used to be quite pretty...

Meanwhile, four wild ducks were slow cooking in the oven and were to be a triumphant dinner. Last time we had wild duck, everyone ended up with half a duck each - because carving the bony things was just too fiddly - and we quickly abandoned cutlery in favour of fingers. Today's ducks looked (and smelt) fabulous, but by the time 7pm rolled around, they were only half finished. A house-full of returned gym bunnies demanded light food, now, so the ducks were postponed of favour of quick pasta with gin and tonics.

Post-Gym Pasta
Your pasta of choice
1 onion- diced
4 cloves garlic
Oil
Red wine - 1/4c ish
Can of tomatoes
2 mushrooms
Half a capsicum
Handful fresh coriander and basil
Chopped chillies and pepper
Cheese


Boil water and add enough salt to make it taste like the sea. Chuck in as much pasta as you think you can eat, then a bit more.

Heat oil, onion and garlic in a big pan with the lid on. When the onion is soft, pour in quarter of a cup of red wine and tomatoes. Rinse out the can with a little more wine. Simmer with the lid off and add mushrooms,  capsicum,  basil, and coriander. Season with pepper and chopped chillies.
Serve topped with cheese and more herbs.


Accidental Souffle ( I had enough mixture left for one ramekin, but here's a 4+ person recipe, depending on the size of your ramekins)

3 egg whites
Lemon juice
100g brown sugar
70g icing sugar (or 170g worth of whatever sugar you can find)
Chocolate - I used Whittakers 72%

Preheat oven to 130°C. Beat the egg whites. Add lemon juice and beat some more. Super slowly, add teh sugars a little at a time, while continuing to beat. Melt the chocolate and beat it in. Pour into ramekins or one big container and bake for about 15 minutes. To prevent collapsed souffles - which aren't as pretty but just as tasty - leave the finished souffle in the oven (turned off and door shut) until completely cool.

Jammin'

False advertising, not actually mango chutney

In the weekend, I decided to finally get onto my Christmas shopping. Rather than heading into town, I mosied next door to the hydroponics strawberry-growing neighbours and bought two kilos of jam strawberries.

I scrounged some lemons from the yard and discovered that dad mows very close to the lemon tree, resulting in grassy lemons. My ambitious plans for strawberry and lemon zest jam were then scrapped. 

 

Strawberries don’t have very much pectin, which means they need a bit of hand to set, otherwise you end up with liquid jam. I used both lemon juice and tartaric acid because I like the juxtaposition between zingy lemon and sweet strawberry. The great thing about strawberries is that you don’t need to sweat over a boiling pot for long because strawberry is a quick jam!

Do not splash onto skin

  

Preparing for the skin test

To sterilise, place clean jars in the oven at 100°C for at least ten minutes. Boil lids for at least ten minutes, ensuring they stay underwater the whole time. Do this towards the end of the cooking process, so jars and lids are hot while bottling. Pro-tip: funnels are a godsend when bottling molten jam.

Method adapted from Alison Holst's Complete Cooking Class

2kg strawberries
4 Tbsp water
7c sugar
2 tsp tartaric acid
Juice from two lemons

Put strawberries and water in large pot and place over medium heat. Cook until soft and mash slightly to break fruit up.Add sugar and cook until sugar is dissolved. Boil for three minutes then add tartaric acid and lemon juice. Boil for ten minutes further, or until jam passes the skin test. Place a spoonful of jam on a plate and allow to cool. Jam is ready when it forms a skin which crinkles when you run your finger through. Pour into hot jars, filling to the very top. Screw lids on as tight as possible. Listen for the pops of the lids sealing themselves in the coming hour.

Bread and Butter Deliciousness

I have just started a new job as a bakery assistant at a fabulous Dutch bakery. It is simply brilliant. Quite apart from the fact that all the staff are all lovely, and every customer is pleased to see me, when I finished work yesterday, I got to take home a bag of date scones. Tasty though they are by themselves (they’re topped with cinnamony sugar!), I decided that if I left them for a day, they would make a delightful “scone and butter pudding.”

I only recently discovered that bread and butter pudding is essentially stale bread with custard. As a custard fiend, I was delighted and have been experimenting ever since. It’s a great pudding for students because an essential ingredient is stale bread – a standard in the uni cupboard.

I found some frozen berries in the freezer and everything fell into place. According to legend, bread and butter pudding tastes even better the next day. I compromised and made this one in the morning so it can develop its flavours during the day. The smell created by hot berries oozing into sugary, date scones combined with the Christmassy aroma of chai and star anise steeping in warm milk made for a rather pleasant kitchen. It’s pretty tempting to have some for lunch right now. 

This star anise reminded me of the tine a flatmate "accidentally" knocked a spider into the dinner I was cooking.

Mmm layers

Delicious layers

Ingredients

1 c fruit - I used frozen red currents 

Sugar to taste

1 c milk

Spices for flavour - I used a chai tea bag and a star anise, but you could also use ginger root, cinnamon quills, vanilla pods etc.

2 eggs - room temperature

4 Tbsp. brown sugar

3 date scones

Butter

Extra brown sugar

100 ml booze - I used walnut liqueur 

Stewed Fruit:

Heat fruit over low heat with a small amount of water. Add sugar to taste. 

Custard:

While fruit is stewing, place milk and spices over low heat and watch carefully, stirring frequently. Remove milk from heat as soon as it begins to boil.

In a large bowl, beat together eggs and brown sugar until thick and creamy. Remove spices from milk. In small increments, add milk to egg and sugar while continuing to beat.

Assembly: 

Butter tin. Half scones horizontally* then cut into soldiers. Cover the bottom of tin with 1 1/2 scones, breaking soldiers with fingers into smaller pieces. Pour half of stewed fruit over scone pieces and press down with the back of a spoon to ensure even coverage. Pour half of custard. Crumble the soldiers of one scone on top. Pour in the last of the fruit and spread out with spoon. Pour in remaining custard. Rest for 20 minutes. Preheat oven to 180° C. Place the soldiers from the last scone half in so they half stick out of the custard. Bake for 30 minutes. Sprinkle with extra brown sugar and pour liqueur over top. Grill for 10-15 minutes. Leave it overnight, if you can resist!

* If using jam, smear liberally in both halves before cutting into soldiers.

Oh, fudge!

It is immediately obvious which page has been most loved in my family's copy of The Edmonds Cookbook. The page for chocolate fudge has been ripped out completely, and, while other pages are pristine white, this page is yellowed with a good number of fudgey stains across it:

The way well-loved recipe books should look

Fudge is brilliant fun. It doesn’t take long, doesn’t use any fancy ingredients, and – of course – is delish. For the starving student, homemade fudge makes a grand Christmas gift: it comes from the heart, costs you next to nothing and you’d be hard-pressed to find the relative or friend who doesn’t like it.

The trickiest part of making fudge (which is pretty easy anyway) is getting it to the soft ball stage. You fill a wee bowl of cold water and spoon a tiny bit of fudge in. If it’s at the soft ball stage, you can form it underwater into – you guessed it – a soft ball. It should hold its shape out of the water too. Testing for this is fun because you get to eat all the failed balls. Excellent.

Mmm failed balls

Inspired by Edmunds Cookbook: Mocha Fudge

2 c sugar

1 Tbsp honey - I used manuka

2 Tbsp cocoa

25g butter

½ c milk

1 tsp vanilla essence

1 shot coffee - or 2 tsp instant coffee (dissolve in wee bit of water before adding)

Combine the sugar, honey, cocoa, butter and milk in a saucepan. Heat gently on stove, stirring constantly until all sugar is dissolved. Make sure all the sugar is dissolved by tasting the fudge and feeling for sugar granules with your tongue. Once sugar is dissolved, bring to boil and do not stir. Boil until fudge reached the soft ball stage. Remove from heat, add vanilla, and rest for 5 minutes. Butter a tin while fudge rests. When time’s up, add coffee then beat until thick. This takes a while, but don’t rush it! Fudge is ready when it starts to harden around the edges and the pattern the beaters leave behind remains. Pour into tin fast. Mark into squares and allow to set. Voilá!

By the time you've finished pouring it into the tin, the fudge left in the saucepan have turned crunchy. If your fudge doesn’t set right, or you’re impatient to get eating, stick it in the fridge for a bit.

Insert Christmas Pun Here

November seems a tad early to be thinking about Christmas but shops have been playing their carols and stringing up tinsel for weeks by now. It’s my mum’s tradition to make at least three Christmas cakes every year because they invariably get scoffed before the big day. The added bonus is that when you make the cake early, it needs to be soaked in booze to preserve it. How very jolly!

The cake post-boozing.

Ooo just look at those fabulous fake colours. Om nom nom.

And now the Christmas fruit has been snowed on!

Alison Holst has been a constant in my cooking education. Her recipe for paprika chicken was the first thing I learnt to cook for dinner so the family ate that on a weekly basis for a long time. Mum and I make her pineapple Christmas cake bi-annually, alternating with another of Alison’s recipes.

We mixed the leftover pineapple juice with ginger ale and Pimms to sip while the cake cooked and I thrashed Mother at a game of Kings.

Alison Holst’s Pineapple Christmas Cake (From Alison Holst’s Kitchen Diary)

225 g butter – room temperature

1 c sugar

1 tsp vanilla essence

1 tsp almond essence

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp ginger

1 tsp mixed spice

1 tsp coriander

½ tsp cardamom

¼ tsp nutmeg

6 eggs – room temperate

Mixed fruit – I used 1kg mixed fruit, ¼ c sultanas, 2 handfuls prunes

1 c drained crushed pineapple – reserve juice

3 c plain flour

¼ c brandy/whisky/ etc.

Line a cake-tin with several layers of newspaper, with a layer of greaseproof paper on top. Allison recommends leaving the paper higher than the tin, to save the cake from browning too quickly. Preheat oven to 150°C.

Beat butter and sugar until light and smooth. Add essences and spices, then beat one egg in at a time. Inbetween each egg add a little of the measured amount of flour to prevent curdling.

In a larger bowl add the dried fruits, drained pineapple and remaining flour. Stir the egg mix into the fruit mix using a wooden spoon. The batter should be moist enough to drop off the spoon, so add extra flour or reserved pineapple juice if needed.

Spoon mixture well into the corners of the cake tin to ensure the lining paper doesn't shift. Spoon in the rest of the batter.

Bake at 150°C for two hours, then lower temperature to 130°C and bake for 1.5- 2 hours more. The cake is finished when an inserted knife comes out clean. As soon as cake is ready, pour your spirit of choice over it. The fumes are boozey!  Leave cake in tin until cool enough to touch, then pop it on a rack to finish cooling.

Pour the same amount of spirits over the cake once every couple of weeks if baking well in advance of Christmas and ice around Christmas Eve ish.

Thunderbirds are go!

Hi there!

My name is Grace and I'm a full-time arts student, part-time food enthusiast, embarking on the voyage of food blogging.

The stereotype goes that students = poor, and therefore survival depends on 2 minute noodles and the cheapest beer about. It doesn't need to be that way! My goal is to eat well on a student's budget. Sometimes. I'll splash out on a fancy ingredient (like cream, what up) or pop home and 'borrow' my parents' flash food. But most of the time, I'll be focusing on turning cheap ingredients into delicious food and sampling the tasty treats of Wellington.

I've always enjoyed writing and cooking, although until now, always separately. Starting this blog seemed like the best way to combine these two passions, and to help me document my culinary adventures.

Guten Appetit!