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.