Am I making you hungry???

I couldn’t resist posting another creme brulee picture. This time its wattleseed creme brulee (while I’m on a wattleseed frenzy):

Still trying to perfect the texture…I have a couple of ideas so hopefully more to come on this.

Wattleseed and blueberry friands

Wattleseeds are my iron chefesque ingredient of late. I’m constantly thinking about ways to incorporate it into my breakfast, lunche, dinner and baking. I fully intend to make an extensive blog post about these lovely seeds, but for now my work hours are getting crazy and I don’t usually feel motivated between the hours of 1am and 6am to cook anything beyond pasta or rice. So that will come later…possibly quite far into the future!

Anyway, wattleseeds are, in my opinion, an under-utilised ingredient in Australian kitchens. They have a taste that is a hybrid of hazelnut, coffee and chocolate with a slight liquor after taste. In ground form (the form that I purchased from my health food store and is from the Vic Cherikoff range of aussie ingredients) is probably the easiest form to include in cooking. In the friands* below I included 1/8 C of ground wattleseeds to an adapted VCTOTW vanilla cupcake recipe, used homemade vanilla extract and also used 1tsp of homemade wattleseed extract that has been curing away in the depths of my pantry for three months**. As a finishing touch, after pouring the batter into my pretty friand tin, I added ~1tsp blueberry conserve to the centre of the batter.

You can just see the jumper of my friend from work as she was impatiently waiting for me to take a picture so she could eat one. She and the rest of my lab seemed to really like them, but I’m thinking they need a bit of work, especially as they didn’t contain nut meal of any kind* and really are just muffins in friand- shaped moulds. One of my work friends suggested using hazelnut meal, which I think would be a perfect way of complementing the wattleseeds.

*Friands, or financiers as they are known in France, are usually golden buttery tea cakes. They’re a popular type of morning tea here in Australia.

** I recently made several extracts (lavender, vanilla, hazelnut, wattleseed and coffee) using a handful of the product I wanted to extract flavour from, 2 cups of vodka, a glass jar and 1 TBSP of agave nectar. They take two months to cure and need to be kept in a dark place and shaken for a couple of seconds every day. The two month wait certainly pays off, as the extracts tend to be stronger than store bought and significantly cheaper per mL

Banana bread with a sugar-crumb topping

I had 5 medium-sized bananas that were leaving a less than desired aroma in my dorm room, and the best way to use them up is surely banana bread. In reality, the end product was more of a cake, but if you call it banana bread then its guilt-free – right? I used a double batch of this recipe and made a crumb topping by generally using the crumb topping from this recipe.

Slightly burnt on the sides but it was incredibly light in colour and banana flavour and had a really nice cake texture. It was also one of the easiest banana breads to make, so I’d definitely recommend trying it if you have bananas that are starting to gross you out.

Polenta and herb crusted tofu…

This meal was based on a recipe from Delicious magazine (I think August, 2007 ), in which fish was crusted with a mix of uncooked polenta and herbs. I simply made up a mix of polenta, sage, rosemary and thyme with some cracked pepper, in one bowl and a corn flour and warm water mix in another. I double dipped a 3/4 inch thick tofu ’steak’ in both mixes then fried lightly in some vegetable oil until the polenta had turned a golden brown colour:

Served on some pappardelle pasta with a side of roasted asparagus and snow peas. I’d recommend marinading the tofu for a while before hand, but can’t really think what would be best – any ideas?

Lavender and vanilla bean creme brulee

No recipe yet as I’m still trying to perfect the texture, taste and the cooking method , but isn’t it pretty?

Hot garlic eggplant

Three of my favourite things – chilli, garlic and eggplant-y goodness. A local vegetarian restaurant here in Canberra has this dish called ‘eggplant and mushroom in clay pot’ that my very omnivorous friend probably has steamy dreams about (if the noises he makes as he eats is anything to go by). The soft eggplant and chewy mushrooms, combined with an amazing spicy sauce is really quite close to perfect.

So a recent expedition to the farmer’s market led me to buy an eggplant and ponder what I could possibly make that was a little different from my standard (but spectacularly delicious) eggplant rollatini from Veganomicon. A short google of eggplant hotpot led me to this dish and with a little tweaking and a lack of hot bean paste resulted in:

Hot Garlic Eggplant

1 large eggplant, cut into strips and then bite sized pieces

1TBSP chopped ginger

1TBSP minced garlic

2TBSP Hot sauce (I used Sri Racha hot sauce)

2TBSP dark soy sauce

2 tsp white sugar

1 tsp salt, plus extra

1/2C stock

~1 handful of chopped green shallots

2TBSP corn flour + 4TBSP water

Saute eggplant in a little hot oil until golden, then add water and cook until eggplant is soft. Remove from pan.

Cook garlic and ginger in a little oil at low heat then add the hot sauce and cook for 30 seconds. Add the soy sauce, sugar and salt and cook for 2 minutes, continuously stirring until sauce forms. If sauce is too thin, add the premixed corn flour+water and stir until combined. Add the eggplant and cook for 5-10 minutes over medium heat. Add the shallots and take off the heat. Serve over rice.

Paperbark smoked root vegetable parcel

I recently developed an interest in Australian food. Not the lamington, ANZAC cookie, TimTam, vegemite on everything kind of fare (although soooo very good in their own right). Rather, utilising native Australian herbs, spices and methods in cooking more interesting dishes. Truth be told, my research led me to mostly fish and meat based recipes (not that big a deal as most recipes can be adapted, as we are learning from Hezbollah tofu!). But as I was searching through Benjamin Christie’s website I came across this nice sounding recipe for a paperbark smoked vegetable parcel I didn’t have all the ingredients listed in the recipe (although, oddly I did have some paperbark I recently bought from the markets), but made do with potato, carrot and green capsicum all thinly sliced. I layered half the amount of the vegetables on to the paperbark then seasoned with salt, pepper and an Australian spice mix called yakajirri (bush tomato). I then repeated the layering and seasoning and rolled the parcel up and tied both ends with string.

It was so quick to cook – only 20mins at 200-220 degrees celcius. I didn’t have the tomato relish that was a garnish in the original recipe, but I topped the parcel with dry roasted roughly chopped macadamia nuts and a side of mashed potato:

It definitely had a smoky flavour to it, and the bush tomato spice mix was a really nice addition. I’m thinking tofu with a dry rub will be the next thing to be wrapped with the paper bark.

Lime Bars

So I’m back, somewhat. My laptop is getting fixed as we speak. I, ahem, found my camera on monday in a really obvious place, weeks after I was convinced it had been stolen (I probably should clean my dorm room more frequently – yeah?). Mention of my PhD is best left in that corner of my mind where I allow myself to freak out.

So, while I haven’t had time (or groceries) to make anything new (or repeat with photos some of the rather wonderful things I mentioned in my last post) since finding my camera, I did find some older photos on my camera that I hadn’t blogged about before.

Late last year I found The Joy of Vegan Baking cookbook in my local bookstore. It was quite a surprise, considering we usually have about three copies of Vegan Cooking for One (probably the saddest vegan cookbook there is) and that’s about it! So, while reading through the many recipes and salivating over the gorgeous glossy images, I found a recipe for Lemon Bars. I most definitely have a deep love of all citrus, with perhaps the most special place reserved for lemons. Sadly, I had no lemons in the house just then, but I did have several limes I had bought at the market for cheap-cheap. So Lime bars were made:

Its too long ago to remember the exact number of limes I used or the precise taste of the bars. I do remember that while the recipe was a little fiddly, they turned out pretty good. Still. Lemon bars would be better.

Thanks for the comments from the last post! New recipes coming soon!

I am the woeful food blogger

My life is pretty crappy right now making me an incredibly woeful food blogger. My laptop is still broken (meaning I’m left with a crappy Dell work computer that has adminstrative privileges preventing me doing pretty much everything!). What’s worse is that my camera got stolen out of my dorm room while I took my rubbish to the bin (I stupidly thought I could leave my room unlocked for the three minutes it takes to walk to and from the garbage room) and I really can’t afford a new camera right now. Compounding these technology issues is the realisation that I should be writing up my thesis but don’t have nearly enough data to do so. To put this last point into perspective, I have an entire results chapter worth of results to get (about 1 to 1 and a half years worth of work) in about 8 months! Anyway, those are the reasons for my lack of posting, but hopefully things will settle down soon, I’ll get some more results for my thesis, my parents will take pity on me and buy me a camera and Toshiba will help me out and pay for some of the repairs for my poor little laptop.

Hopefully those who occasionally visit this site will continue to do so as there will be a few posts eventually (once I acquire a camera of some sort), including my vegan version of creme brulee,  a recipe for wattleseed and macadamia-crusted tofu, a second attempt at zucchini puffs, stuffed french toast, and some cupcake recipes I’ve been trying out (how does lavender-vanilla bean cupcakes with a lavender-infused buttercream frosting sound?).

DIY shallot cakes – attempt 1

My poor unfortunate Toshiba satellite M60 had a fit and died two weeks ago, taking all of my work files and pictures with it! But thanks to the awesome IT team at work I was able to salvage my data. That said, it doesn’t look good for little bluey (my laptop) and I’ve been on blog strike until the shock wore off. But I’m back now…

I’ve blogged about these before and mentioned at the time that I was attempting to make them at home because they were so delicious. I recently stumbled upon a recipe on a blog (that I now can’t find a link for!) from Madhur Jaffrey’s A Taste of the Far East for scallion (spring onion) bread. The image looked similar to what we’d had previously at Dumpling Inn and the only ingredients needed were plain flour, cold water, hot water, shallots, sesame oil, vegetable oil and salt. Sounded easy enough! The most time consuming part is preparing the dough, so if you use this recipe be prepared to make the dough a few hours in advance and spend some time rolling the pastry and a sesame oil roux in a fashion not too dissimilar to making a croissant (ok, its not like it at all except for the rolling of a fat into dough, then repeating the process again). As soon as I can find that other blog, I’ll post the recipe, however the end results were good but not as great as the Dumpling Inn shallot cakes:

Next time I think I’d quickly fry the shallots with some garlic and salt before filling the dough and I would probably bake them instead of frying them as they were a little greasy.