I have a problem with stone fruit

I buy too much of it.

The Bloke doesn't eat any stone fruit, except for dried apricots. And yes, I can easily get through a couple of kilos of cherries in a week all by myself when they're in season. But right now the markets are packed with plums and nectarines and peaches and plumcots and I wander around thinking "I'll just get half a dozen of these" and "ooh, those look nice, how about I just buy four" and somehow I come home with far too much for me to eat in a week. Especially if I've bought huge punnets of blackberries, strawberries and blueberries as well.

And I have another problem with stone fruit. These days most of them are sold rock hard. Even the peaches from the growers market are too firm to be edible immediately. Stone fruit don't really ripen off the tree, no extra sweetness develops, but they will soften. Pop them in the fruit bowl for two or three days, watch like a hawk, and eat them when they are just softened enough. But if you leave them for even 12 hours longer, they start getting a bit wrinkly and too soft to be nice. And if you then put them in the fridge and leave them for a few more days, some will go off entirely, and some will get a bit squishy in spots.

Here's what I did to salvage the old fruit when I got back from Goulburn.


Recipe: White Peaches in Blood Plum sauce
3 white peaches or nectarines
4 blood plums
1 tablespoon vanilla sugar
1 teaspoon rose water
2 tablespoons water

Wash the fruit well.
Chop the plums small, removing stones and any nasty dead bits.
Chuck them in a saucepan with the sugar, rosewater and the water.
Bring to a simmer.
Cut the peaches in large pieces - halves, or quarters.
Add them to the plums, and let simmer for another 10-15 minutes.
Allow to cool slightly, then remove peach pieces.
Slip off the peach skins.
Mash the plum sauce, or if you feel energetic, sieve or puree it.
Return the peach pieces, mix well, and chill.


Notes: This was a really great outcome - the rose with the blood plum and hint of vanilla is a very good combination. It's obviously adaptable to other fruits; this is just what was in the fridge, but I think I lucked out here. The aromatic white peach holds up well against the sauce, and matches with the rose.

Peach skins are easy to slip off when the fruit is cooked. If you prefer, you can skin them like tomatoes, by standing then in a bowl of boiling water for a minute or two.

Eat these for breakfast - cold with Greek yoghurt and granola, or warm on porridge, depending on what the weather is doing.

Eating around the web

I'm very erratic with food reading on the web. There's a few blogs that I check regularly, but otherwise things just seem to turn up. From links friends post on facebook or message boards, mostly. Or sometimes I google an ingredient, and find something on some totally random site. I've had the chance to try quite a few things recently; with this crazy weather anything from salad to porridge is an option.

I googled quinoa a while ago and found a nice quinoa porridge. At the same site, a recipe for quinoa pilaf took my fancy. Now, as the bloke hates corn and walnuts, I had to make a variant. But the general idea is very adaptable. Quinoa cooked in stock, then fried up with onion, spices, and vegetables. It's good with that dark Tuscan kale, but you could try spinach or silverbeet. I served it as an accompaniment to some quick grilled lamb chops from that new Dickson butcher.

And 35C one day, 15C the next, it's still possible to have porridge. I was quite intrigued by this idea, cooking brown rice in a crockpot. I almost followed the recipe, except that I used low fat milk instead of full-fat, and coconut milk and a 1/4 cup of sugar instead of the sweetened condensed milk. And raspberries on top instead of cranberries or raisins cooked in. So, yeah, almost the same. The result is, well, OK. The bran separates off, while the inner rice goes squishy, which gives it more of a porridge texture than a rice pudding texture. Also I think it needed less sugar. I couldn't put maple syrup on top since it was already quite sweet enough for me.

Serious Eats crops up quite a lot, since I'm a facebook fan. This American site has some wonderful discussions. Check out this hilarious recipe for boiled water, and don't miss the reader comments. These chocolate chip cookies are from Serious Eats. I made them before Xmas, and have two sausages of dough still in the freezer waiting for the next cookie occasion.

And then there's this chocolate cake. I simply could not resist making this, as it is just so very weird. It's gluten-free - it uses not chickpea flour but actual chickpeas. I liked the flavour in the end. The chickpeas add some flavour, but it's quite neutral tending to nutty - a reasonable match to chocolate. The texture was less of a hit. It came out quite dry. I found that it was OK when tempered with a dollop of icecream, and B2 liked it, but B1 did not. So, variable.

I did edit the recipe slightly for Australian measures, so here you go.

Recipe: Chocolate Chickpea Cake

1 tablespoon butter, softened
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
150g dark cooking chocolate
2 x 420g tins of chickpeas
4 large eggs
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
a pinch of salt

• Preheat oven to 180C.
• Grease a small loaf tin with the butter, and "flour" it with the cocoa.
• Drain the chickpeas and rinse them well.
• Weigh out 2/3 of them, and set the rest aside for some other use.
• Put them in a food processor, with the eggs, sugar, salt, vanilla and baking powder.
• Puree until very smooth.
• Melt the chocolate, and blend it into the rest of the mix.
• Pour the cake batter into the tin and smooth surface.
• Bake at 180C for 45-60 minutes, until a knife comes out clean.
• Allow cake to cool in the tin for 15 minutes before inverting to cooling rack to cool completely.
• Dust with icing sugar just before serving.

Note: I used the extra chickpeas in a mixed veggie curry. You could also add them to a soup or a salad, or mash them up with garlic, lemon and tahini to make hommous.

I like to melt chocolate in the microwave - break it up into a glass bowl, zap it for 20 sec, stir well, and repeat until all is melted. Much easier than a double boiler, or the old bowl over boiling water technique.

Regional Goings On

We've just got back from Goulburn, where we saw some amazing acts at the annual Australian Blues Festival. Pugsley Buzzard is a fabulous pianist, with a voice of gravel. Sorta kinda like a cross between Louis Armstrong, Tom Waits, Fats Waller and Nick Cave; always worth seeing. And we saw the Lemon Squeezing Daddies with new front woman, Perle Noire, who looks and sounds like she's out of Chicago but is actually a Londoner. In the one paid show we went to, Doc Neeson (of the Angels) walked on stage looking oddly like Matt Preston, and delivered a solid blues-rock set, with guitarist Mal Eastwick. New finds from this time are the young Shaun Kirk, from Melbourne and Luna, who it turns out are from Canberra, even though I haven't seen them around here yet.

In food news, we ate at the Tatts one night, which is pretty standard pub grub. They do a decent burger and a cook your own steak; the scotch fillet I had was great, very tender. The salad bar was decent, with good fresh greens but I'd steer clear of the curry coleslaw if I were you. The other night we ate at the Goulburn Workers Club, which is pretty standard club grub. A decent salt and pepper squid, a slightly odd caesar salad with whole lettuce leaves and no egg, and a big slice of garlic bread instead of croutons. Also no anchovies, but I don't even expect anchovies in a Caesar these days.

Cafe Book is our first choice option for breakfast, with a fairly standard bacon and egg breakfast. The menu is nothing remarkable, but the food is all fresh and hot and well cooked. You get service with a smile, and a huge wall of second hand books for sale. And enormous smoothies. The bakery up the road near the Big Merino is not bad, either, and do a nice sourdough and a good cornbread. In both cases, it helps to order the coffee extra strong. What is it with country towns and weak coffee?


Meanwhile, back in Canberra, the Handmade Upmarket is back next weekend. This thing just keeps growing and growing. It's a market for regional craftspeople, and the goods for sale include a decent selection of food, as well as all the jewelery, clothes, bags and so on. It outgrew the Albert Hall, then the Yarralumla Woolshed and the Kamberra Wine centre, and have now moved to the National Convention Centre. Saturday 19th February, from 11am. They're also running a shop, on the Boulevard near the former Electric Shadows, but the range there is naturally much smaller. As well as the crafty stuff, they stock some good chockies from Lindsay & Edmunds and the Curious Chocolatier.

By the way, pARTy cakes will be there, and donating 25% of their profits to ovarian cancer research. So get in there and eat cake. I've bought cupcakes from them before; they are very good.

Developments, mostly in Dickson

The non-Dickson developments are that I've given the blog a super-quick facelift with a standard blogger template. And I've taken up twittering. You can follow me at @CathCanCook if you feel so inclined. I'm not tweeting a lot, since my phone doesn't currently support it, but definitely more than I'm blogging at the moment!

Here's the few new points of note around Dickson.

An Asian supermarket, Asian Quay, has opened on Challis St, where MalAdjusted used to be. If you're worried by this news, do not fear! Mal's lovely bicycle shop has just moved around the corner. It's now in the square behind Zeffirellis. You'll also find a new cafe/bar here, by the name of Dzire, where the much lamented TurkOz used to be. I haven't tried this one out yet, but I will try to get there soon. They have a website at http://www.dzire.com.au but it's just a stub at the moment.

Asian Quay is a bit different from the other Asian grocers around the area. They seem to stock a lot more vegetarian ingredients than most - veggie versions of instant noodles, oyster sauce, and fake meats from TVP to soy "duck necks". There's also a wider range of sweets, especially icecreams and other frozen desserts. But the veggie section is very minimal; Saigon is still far and away the best for fruit and veg.

Finally, there is a new butcher, imaginatively titled "The Butcher Shop". It's near Woolworths, in the square in the corner. From Woollies, go past the chemist and jeweler, and look to the right, across from the Shiny Things Shop. (Not its real name.) They're in the new tradition of butchers, with house-made sausages and ready made kebabs and marinated ready-to-go roasts. They stock King Island beef. I haven't checked all the details about what's local and what's free range yet, but I can say that the sausages, silverside and lamb chops that I've had so far have all been top quality.

Coo, lumme!

Coo is a little Japanese restaurant on East Row, up the London Circuit end. It's run by the same people as Iori, and they seem to have maintained their tradition of hiring sweet, friendly but vaguely confused Japanese students as staff. They also share a website - here is Coo's section.

The routine here at lunchtime is that you rock up to the front counter, order and pay. The menu is posted all over the wall, and there's a lot more to choose than is shown on their website's lunch menu. You can have your lunch to take away, or eat in with no price difference. If you choose to eat in, you then go through the curtain, clutching a card with your table number, and also any bits of your lunch that have come out of the cold storage at the front. Behind the curtain there's a lot of small tables, a licensed bar with sake and Japanese beer and some odd fruity slushy mocktails. There's also more menu items on the wall, and a TV playing bizarre Japanese shows - while we were there it was Tokyo shock boys, pretty autumn travelogues, and sumo wrestling.

The sushi and sashimi plate ($8.50) is the normal variety you'd get from many a takeaway place. Tuna, salmon, some white fish, a couple of cucumber rolls, a cooked prawn, a piece of California roll. It was all good, and to my surprise a small cup of light green tea and a styrofoam cup of white miso soup turned up to accompany it. My friend had a white pork noodle soup - there are many to choose from, with ramen, udon or soba and a bewildering variety of stocks and accompaniments. To add to the difficulty of choice, you can have combos - a half serve of soup and something else like a tonkatsu, tempura, or sushi selection. Large bento boxes, whether eat in or take away, run at about $12.

The food is very good, and the lunchtime service very quick. We will definitely be back for more. I'm pleased about this, as I love Japanese food. Last year, when they had recently opened, we had a bad evening with ridiculously slow service. We tried to grab a quick bite of sushi before a show, but nothing arrived for 45 minutes! I can now hope that this was just teething pains - this lunch experience bodes very well.

Happy Easter!

No, seriously, WTF are you thinking, Woollies? Hot cross buns for sale already? I'm barely over Xmas, and even though I didn't do the big dinner thing, we still have leftovers to get through. And seriously, EPIC is currently full of Summernats, not folkies. Your timing is just way off.

My main Xmas food discovery this year has been the Delicious recipe for fruit mince scrolls. Valli Little titles it the "Christmas Morning Crown". I made, well, not exactly it, but a variation of it for Xmas breakfast a couple of weeks ago. And then I liked it so much I did it again to host an arvo tea for some friends. And then again just because I got into a YEAST FRENZY!!!! In just one day I made the scrolls, no-knead bread, and some pizza bases. And then I ran out of yeast, or who knows what else might have happened.


I'm back at work now, so a frenzy like that is unlikely to recur for a bit. But the cool thing about the scrolls is that you can make them the day before you bake them. A little easy prep on Saturday, and then fresh baked scrolls on Sunday morning, oh my yes! The dough is a rich one and quite tender, since it's not really kneaded. It's also not a sweet dough, so you could even try a savoury filling. Ham, cheese, pineapple & jalapeno pizza scrolls, perhaps? Probably not with the icing, in that case.

Recipe: Iced Fruit Mince Scrolls

Dough:
225g bread flour
7g sachet yeast (1 teaspoon granules)
2 teaspoons sugar
a small pinch of salt
40g butter
1/2 cup warm milk


Filling:
1/2 cup fruit mince
2 tsp grand marnier
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 cup mixed glace fruit (chopped to half cherry size)
3 tablespoons soft brown sugar
45g softened butter.

Icing:
1/2 cup sifted icing sugar
1 - 2 tablespoons liquid (lemon juice, grand marnier, rosewater etc)

* Measure out the flour and add yeast, sugar and salt.
* Melt the butter, and mix in the warm milk, stirring well.
* Add the egg to the warm milk, and beat well.
* Make a well in the flour, and mix in the milk mixture, stirring flour in from the sides gradually to prevent lumps.
* Bring together in a rough soft ball, and cover with plastic wrap.
* Let rise in a warm place for about an hour. Or a not quite so warm place, for an hour and a half - until about doubled in size.

* While it's rising, prepare your chosen filling. For the fruit mince one, simply mix all ingredients together well, mashing the butter up with the fruit.

* Punch down, knead for half a minute, and turn out onto a floured surface.
* Roll or stretch it out to the size of a small oven tray.
* Spread filling out, leaving about 2cm space at the long edges.
* Roll up from the long edge so you have a filled sausage of dough.
* Grease and flour an oven tray, or line with silicone and flour lightly.
* Cut the sausage into 8-10 pieces, and arrange these in a ring on the tray. Keep cut side up, and let the sides just touch.
* Cover with a dampened teatowel or strong kitchen paper, and leave for another hour in the warm spot.
* Refrigerate overnight, if you want - bring back to room temperature before baking.
* Bake at 180C for 20 minutes, until golden.
* Cool for five to ten minutes before drizzling some icing over the top in swirls or zigzags.

Icing:
To make the icing, sift the icing sugar into a bowl, and add liquid by teaspoons, stirring well, until it is just liquid enough to drizzle.

Other filling options:
* 1/2 cup of your own fruit mix (currants, raisins and mixed peel), pre-soaked in tea or Grand Marnier, with 3 tablespoons soft brown sugar and 45g softened butter.

* Valli Little's original - 50g soft brown sugar and 85g softened butter, plus 1/3 cup sultanas, 1/3 cup mixed peel, 1/4 cup glace cherries, 2 tbsp chopped hazelnuts.

* Use your imagination. Jam, other dried fruits, chopped nuts, stewed apple or rhubarb, cinnamon sugar, spices etc.


Notes: The icing is also totally generic. Use a couple of drops of vanilla essence, plus water. Or Grand Marnier, lemon juice, lime juice, rosewater, or whatever you fancy. Spices can be added, too - I made one with 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon mixed in with the icing sugar.

Christmas and the Crazy Cake

You might want to know that there is a pre-Christmas market at EPIC on Thursday 23rd, and then a break until 15 Jan. And despite the rains, there's still plenty of cherries to be had.

And the day is nearly here. This year it's a really weird one for me. Hardly any cooking - no relatives visiting; and we're going to a friend's place for lunch, then going to Sydney to spend some time with B1 & M. I have made a cake, and in a vague effort to get in the spirit, I made a turkey risotto tonight. Though with pre-cooked turkey breast from Woollies, and packaged stock it is nowhere near as awesome as a proper leftover feast.

There have been work Xmas parties - three, count them: my unit, our group and the whole institute. And there were musical events - my teacher's studio concert, and the St Phil carols. I've contributed cookies and fruit plates and cakes and pies, and eaten mince pies and old-fashioned white Christmas, and some amazing coconut sticky rice (Maneerat has promised to give me her recipe for that.) The tree is up and the kittens, now small cats, have pulled off the first decorations to roll round the room.

The piccie here is of a "Crazy Cake", cut up and decked with fruit ready for the supper at St Phils. It's a strange recipe, that I couldn't resist trying out. I don't even remember how I found it, but the recipe comes from a vegetarian site. Maybe one of my facebook friends mentioned it, or something. It has no egg and no dairy, and was apparently a depression era invention.

Recipe: Crazy Cake
1 1/2 cups plain flour
1/3 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup sifted good quality cocoa
1 very high heaped teaspoon baking soda (bicarbonate of soda)
1 pinch salt
150g chocolate flakes (Dutch dark vlokken)
5 tablespoons rice bran oil
1 tablespoon raspberry vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup cold strong brewed coffee
1 tablespoon icing sugar


Preheat oven to 180C (170 fan-forced)
Sift together flour, sugar, cocoa, salt and bicarbonate of soda.
Mix the water, oil, vinegar, vanilla and coffee together.
Pour wet ingredients into dry ingredients and mix well.
Pour into a baking-paper lined 22cm square cake tin.
Bake for 30-40 minutes, until a test skewer comes out clean.
When cool, dust with icing sugar to serve.


Notes: Seriously, amazing. It works. The vinegar is important to react with the carb soda for leavening, it does not end up tasting vinegary. It's an American recipe, so the tablespoons are 15ml. (And the flakes weren't in there originally. I guess they were about 3/4 cup.)

If you look at the original recipe you'll see I have changed a bit, using coffee instead of water, a different type of vegetable oil and vinegar, a lot more cocoa, chocolate flakes, and a smidge less sugar and salt. And I lined the tin - and would recommend that strongly.

But I've got nothing on the commenter who said "1)I used whole wheat flour, 2)I used applesauce instead of oil, 3)I used a cup of sugar-free raspberry preserves instead of sugar, 4) I used rice milk rather than water, 5) I added 1 cup of Sunspire Grain Sweetened Chocolate Chips to the batter, 6)Rather than greasing the pan, I lined my cake pan with Reynolds Release Non-Stick Foil, which worked perfectly" I mean, is that even remotely the same cake?

If you do read the comments, you'll notice lots of other variations, and a couple of things that worried me - some said it was dry and tasteless. Well, lots of extra cocoa would have sorted the tasteless. I suspect it might go dry if you leave it in the oven too long? Anyway, mine came out moist and very fluffy. I may have overdone the bicarb. It actually seemed better the next day, when it had settled and solidified just slightly.

Gloria in Excelsis Deo

A quick plug:

Traditional Kings' College Style Xmas carols and lessons at St Phil's, O'Connor, Sunday 7.30pm. Plenty of old favourite singalong carols, and some very interesting and fun choral pieces. Supper in the courtyard (weather permitting). I will be singing. Come along! All welcome, and it's free!


Note that - also in wonderfully traditional style - our local government has decided that NOW is the perfect time to resurface the driveway leading to the church parking area! I mean, who would be wanting to use a parking lot at Christmas? So, it's street parking only, and in O'Connor at that. Bicycles and feet are highly recommended as transport.

PS to those unfamiliar with church vocab: "lessons" means readings from the Bible, not actual lessons in, say, Latin grammar, or how to do long division. I must admit that there is a *little* bit of Latin, but I promise there is no quiz.


(No actual "read more" content, it's buggy. I'll fix this one day. Next year when the moon is blue.)

A big day

I had a big day of cooking today, turning out 2 dozen molasses cookies, an impossible pie, a pot of poached apricots, an arrabiata pasta sauce and a roast chook for dinner. The cookies are for a work morning tea on Tuesday, and I'm hoping the pie will freeze well, so I can take it to a Friday evening Xmas thing.

The pie is from a Kerry Greenwood book - if you don't know these already, I highly recommend her as a writer of delightful Melbourne based cosy mysteries. In the Phryne Fisher series, it is always and eternally 1928. Private detective Phryne is a poor girl turned rich, with sound feminist, socialist and anti-racist sentiments, and a love of fast cars, fine food and beautiful young men. The Corinna Chapman series is set in modern times, and stars a baker of ample size who lives in the a classical themed apartment complex with many other interesting characters. Several books feature recipes at the back. This impossible pie is from her latest, Dead Man's Chest.



Recipe: Kerry's Impossible Pie
1/2 cup plain flour
1 cup caster sugar
3/4 cup coconut
1/4 cup flaked almonds
4 eggs
vanilla essence to taste
125g melted butter
1 cup milk
extra 1/4 cup flaked almonds to sprinkle on top.

* Mix everything together thoroughly.
* Pour into a greased pie dish, and sprinkle reserved almonds on top.
* Bake at 170C for 35-45 minutes, or until it seems all just set.

If you have too much to go in the pie dish, the remnant can be baked in a ramekin or two. I did one today - you can see it sitting there on the festive green and red silicon baking sheets. This is a good idea anyway - that way you can have a test serve and check out the taste and texture before taking it to the party it's planned for. For me that's next Friday night. So I really really hope it freezes well! Serve this warm or cold, on its own or with some stewed fruit - perhaps poached apricots? Yes. By the way, poached apricots are very nice with a dash of rosewater and a sprinkle of toasted flaked almonds.

The molasses cookies were also nice and easy, and a great success. They're sweet but with complexity from the molasses and spices. I got this recipe from an American blog called "Not Martha". She has some wonderfully gorgeous stuff there, like mini gingerbread houses for perching on the side of a mug of hot chocolate, and miniature fruit pies.


Recipe 2: Sparkling Chewy Molasses Cookies, by Not Martha.
2 cups plain flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda (bicarbonate of soda)
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 cup sugar
3/4 of a 250g packet salted butter, softened
1 large egg
1/4 cup molasses, blackstrap works well here
about 1/2 cup demerara sugar

* Beat the butter, sugar, egg and molasses together well.
* Sift the flour, spice and baking soda together.
* Add the flour to the butter/sugar mix and mix well.
* Spoon out tablespoons of dough at a time, roll to balls in your hands.
* Roll the balls of dough in the demerara sugar.
* Lay them out on a baking tray, about 5cm apart.
* Bake at 170C for 12-15 minutes, until the edges are firming up.
* Let cool on the tray for a few minutes before moving to a cooling rack.


Notes: this is American, but keeping the same proportions is OK. Although I used an Australian tablespoon, and this may be why mine cracked more than the picture in the original. I also baked 2 trays at once in my convection oven. I made 2 dozen (yes, two are missing from the picture, how odd!), and froze the third dozen unbaked.

I have removed the salt, but used salted butter; and I used cassia, which is commonly used as cinnamon in the US. It's a bit hotter than true cinnamon.

Molasses is available from health food shops, or you could use treacle. Microwaving your jar of molasses for 20-30 seconds makes it easy to pour.

Demerara sugar is a light brown sugar made to a larger crystal than regular raw sugar, but you could use raw sugar if demerara is hard to come by.

Couscous porridge

With winter passing into memory for another year, we've still had enough of a Canberra spring - warm and sunny one day, freezing the next - to feature porridge. This is another find from my recent Jamie Oliver book, "Jamie Does..." a couscous porridge with apricots. There are two good concepts here, one is the honey-sweetened couscous as a porridge, and the other is the fresh, uncooked dried apricot dish.

Recipe: Couscous Porridge with Honey and Orange Apricots
200g couscous
500-600ml milk
2 tablespoons honey
200g dried apricots
1 orange
Extra honey, nuts and cinnamon to taste

Prepare the apricot compote in advance.

• Zest and juice the orange.
• Chop the dried apricots finely.
• Just barely cover the dried apricots and orange zest with boiling water.
• Let soak until cool, then drain off a little of the water and add the orange juice.
• Soak overnight, and mash roughly with a fork.

When ready for breakfast, make the couscous.

• Put the couscous, 500ml milk and 2 tablespoons honey in a saucepan.
• Bring to a simmer, and let simmer for 5-10 minutes.
• Add a little extra milk or water if it's getting too thick; it should be quite wet.
• Serve with a dollop of the apricot mix, a drizzle of honey, a sprinkle of cinnamon, and some toasted pistachios or almonds.

Notes: Of course it's varied from the original - I so rarely follow recipes these days. Jamie Oliver serves this with pistachios that have been toasted on the spot, and drizzled with honey. I'm not fiddling with that at breakfast time. And he purees the apricots in a blender, while I prefer a more chunky style.