Et tu, Flute?

I had to go out to Fyshwick to buy a new dishwasher hose, so of course I had to drop in at the Flute bakery. I got a lovely sourdough loaf, of course, and also picked up some of their Easter range - the hot cross brioche. This is cute, but I don't really recommend them. They're a nice enough little roll of rich dough, but sadly under-spiced to be a proper hot cross bun substitute. The fruit is just sultanas. No currants, and then there's the vexed issue of the mixed peel. Sadly, Flute have gone along with the recent trend to eliminate it. It's just not right having a hot cross bun without that little bitter citrus tang. For the first time, I am disappointed in Flute.

However, on a positive note, That Bagel Place is now making hot cross bagels! I queued up for them in the market this morning, and was not disappointed with them at all. Nicely spiced, and with the odd dot of peel. Yum! It was their "bagel of the week", so we can't count on a re-occurrence. But I do hope they continue baking these until Easter - that would make sense.

Grandma's Little Bakery

"Grandma's Little Bakery" looks like a misnomer to me. It should probably be called Ia-ia's or Nonna's or Siti's. This cafe, function centre and shop is located in the Fedra olive grove, just off the Federal Highway in the Collector region. They specialise in olives, of course, and other Mediterranean products, and they serve meals as well as selling foods. They seem to be doing pretty well - we dropped in on our way back from Sydney last week and the place was packed.

The shop is quite the treasure trove. You can find freshly made hummus, pestos, olive and ricotta dip, tapenade, and more. There's a range of home made nougats - the pistachio and apricot is great - and other confectionery. There's ingredients such as syrups of rose, date, and pomegranate, dry goods such as lentils and couscous, and a big range of spices, whole and ground including exotics like za'atar and baharat. But the spice tub sizes are a bit too large for me; they'd be stale by the time I finished. You can buy their specialty boreks packed frozen to take home. There's also fresh baked bread, bagels and pastries, and they stock the well-known Lynwood farm preserves.

We didn't actually stop for lunch or arvo tea, since we'd just had a big brunch in Sydney. But having checked the place out and enjoyed their produce, I hope to make it a destination sometime.

Slice

"Slice" is a very useful generic concept for clearing out the fridge. It's so generic that it doesn't have a name besides just "slice". It could be spinach slice, or zucchini slice, or mixed veggie slice, or many other things.

The idea is that you locate all the non-watery veggies that need using up. Clean them and grate them or chop them or whatever. Spinach, chard, silverbeet etc should be lightly steamed, then squeezed and chopped. I find that zucchini can be grated then squeezed out to remove excess water. Some mashed pumpkin is good, or precooked cauliflower or broccoli. Defrosted frozen spinach can be used, too. But no tomatoes in the mix, they are too wet!

Anyway, you pop them in a big bowl. Add any odds and ends of cheese that you have, grated if it's firm. Cheddar, ricotta, and cottage cheese are good basics, but there's nothing to stop you using fancy bits of brie or gruyere. Then add some cooked rice - one of those sachets of precooked rice from the supermarket is handy here, if you don't have leftovers and don't have time to cook it. I like to make this with brown rice.

Chuck in some flavouring agents. I like to use plenty of dill and lemony herbs like sumac and lemon myrtle, and some chopped spring onions. But perhaps some fresh basil and garlic might suit your fancy better. I usually like to make it fairly mild, and then add some chutney or sauce to taste at serving time. You can add other little bits and pieces of stuff for an accent - leftover antipasti, a handful of pitted and halved olives, some chopped sun-dried tomatoes or roast capsicum. If you're not cooking for a vegetarian, some chopped ham or cooked bacon pieces could well go in.

Now have a closer look at your bowlful of stuff. Will it fit into your shallow casserole dish or pie plate for baking? If it looks like too much, then scoop some into a storage container to freeze for next time. If it's not enough, add another grated zucchini, or some frozen spinach or frozen peas or something.

To finish off, take 4-8 eggs, depending on the size of the dish. Break them in, and mix well. If they're a bit old, because this is also good to use up excess eggs, then break them into a cup first to check that there are no bad smells. Put all in your oven dish and top with sliced tomatoes if you want, maybe some breadcrumbs for crunch, and definitely some grated cheese - more cheddar, or some parmesan. Bake at 160C until the egg is set - 30-60 minutes depending on the depth of the baking dish. Don't rush it with a high temperature, or it will tend to separate and get watery.

Serve it in big slices, like a lasagne. This is a complete meal in itself, with veggies, protein and carbs all together. But it's good to have something else alongside for variety. That could be a nice crisp salad, or any side vegetable, or even a sausage for the meat-eaters, or a slice of smoked salmon - that's especially good if you've gone for lemon and dill as your flavours.

Pretty!

Pretty colours!

Here's a sample from today's market. Early autumn produce - new season apples, plums, rainbow chard, a big fat leek, and more. Even bananas! These ladyfingers from Coff's Harbour were selling for only $7 a kilo, excellent value at the moment. This is actually a small collection I've put together for B1, who is back in Canberra at last but couldn't get to the market today. I've also got a couple of slices of very fine leg ham from Balzanelli - smallgoods people from Fyshwick. They specialise in Italian style pork products, from pork & fennel sausages to pancetta and coppa. They slice to order, so I have nice fat slices. Yum.

I didn't buy any tomatoes or beans or figs, because last week I picked a good kilo of beans and 2kg of tomatoes from my minuscule veggie garden. I can highly recommend these "purple king" beans to any neglectful gardener. All my peas and snowpeas died, but these beans just kept on going. I put in four seedlings on a wire obelisk, added a handful of fertiliser, a dash of snailbait. Helped along by plenty of rain, they are now producing about half to one kilo of beans a week. They're a pretty deep purple, but they turn green when they are cooked.

And while the figs on my tree aren't ripe yet, there are hundreds of them coming soon - if the birds don't get them first. So much as I love figs, I'm not paying $1.50 each at the market.

Spaghetti Squash!

It's always exciting to try something new. I'd heard of spaghetti squash before, but never actually seen one in real life until just now. I found one in Choku Bai Jo, and I'm told that they grow quite well in the Canberra region. Since it's such an oddity, I've taken lots of photos.

So here it is in its original state, looking a bit like an elongated honeydew melon. There's a nice big avocado next to it for scale. The first step is to cut it in half, where it now looks like a cross between a melon and a pumpkin.

Now you need to cook it, and this is where the advice I found differs. Either you can put it in a greased oven tray, or on one with a couple of centimetres of water in it. Place it cut side down, and bake at 180C for about 30 minutes, until it's quite easy to pierce the rind with a knife. Take it out and scrape out the seeds. You can leave it to cool first, but I found holding it with an oven mitt and scraping with a spoon was fine.

And now, take to it with a fork and scrape lengthwise along the squash, and you will end up with a lot of strands, like angelhair pasta - that's very thin spaghetti. Serve it how you will.



Don't expect it to taste like spaghetti, no matter what the low-carb diet books say! It's definitely a squash, more like zucchini. But the texture is fun, and it makes for a nice light meal. Good for summer, tossed with pesto, olives and fetta, perhaps. We actually ate it with a tomato, olive, bacon and chilli sauce. It seemed to need cheese quite a lot. I've also had some tossed with tuna, chilli, peas and corn. It seems to leave me a bit unsatisfied, like having a salad for dinner. A hunk of nice bread would help complete it. Or it could be a side dish - I think it would be good in a gratin.

Hot Hobart Berry Cake

A couple of weeks ago I was at a friend's place, and spent a little time browsing How to Cook a Galah by Laurel Evelyn Dyson. This is a fascinating book about Australian culinary history, with plenty of recipes. I copied down a couple of recipes to try out. This one is a sort of fruit sponge, originally titled Hot Hobart Mulberry Cake. Apparently the original cook had a friend with a mulberry tree.

The recipe is dead easy, with no fussy creaming of butter and sugar, just a simple stir through. I didn't have mulberries, but I did have some blackberries from the Borenore Hillside orchards and some boysenberries from my back garden, picked about a month ago and frozen. So here is my variant.

Recipe: Hot Hobart Berry Cake
450g berries
juice of one lemon
300ml light sour cream
1 tablespoon vanilla brandy
2 eggs
3/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups self-raising flour

• Preheat oven to 180C.
• Beat together the sour cream, vanilla and eggs.
• Sift the flour and sugar together
• Wash berries and dry well, then coat with lemon juice.
• Grease a round casserole dish.
• Stir the sour cream mix through the flour and sugar.
• Turn out into the greased dish.
• Pour berries on top.
• Bake for 45min-1 hour, until sponge is done in the centre when tested with a skewer.
• Serve warm, with cream or icecream.

Notes: There was no vanilla in the original, and of course the sour cream was not light. I'm also guessing that they used butter to grease a dish, rather than a spray of rice bran oil.

Vanilla brandy is what I have on my shelf, it's a small bottle of brandy with vanilla pods in it. Use 1 tsp vanilla essence and 2-3 tsp brandy for the closest equivalent. It's quite a thick batter, and I think the extra dash of liquid is helpful. Possibly the original cook's sour cream was thinner, or her lemons juicier or eggs larger.

It came out very delicious when warm. It did take quite some time for the centre to set - 55 min even in my fan forced oven. By that time the outer part was a little crusty.

It went very well with a scoop of vanilla icecream, and I think pouring cream would be a good option, too. On the whole I think this is better warm than cold, and even better with more berries. Luckily it microwaves up alright with 30-60 seconds a serve.

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.