Cooking for a party

Well, well, well!  I just got back from doing the shopping and I’m a bit tired.  I’m catering a 70th Birthday Party and doing cocktail nibblies for between 30-35 people.  It’s on this Sunday so I’m just about to roll up my sleeves and get the bulk of the prep and cooking out of the way.

In truth, there’s not a huge amount I can do today.  Most of the things I’ve planned are make-ahead type stuff but I prefer to do them as little in advance as possible – things just stay fresher.

Here’s the menu!

Warm Dishes:

• Chicken Skewers (Satay and Teriyaki flavours)
• Caramelised Onion Quiche
• Spinach & Feta Pastries
• Pumpkin Soup

Cold Dishes

• Smoked Salmon on Pumpernickel with Wasabi Creme Fraiche
• Vegetable Maki (sushi rolls) with dipping sauce
• Cheese Platter with crackers and Quince Paste
• Fruit Platter with Warm Chocolate Bourbon dipping sauce

I’ve tried to arrange it so that any given food preference (gluten free, vegan, vegetarian, kosher) has at least one warm and one cold dish.  It’s been a challenge coming up with something for everyone that will still work as finger food, especially the warm stuff as I only have access to a tiny kitchen.

So, I’m off to trim the chicken and get it into it’s marinade, defrost the spinach and drain off all the extra liquid, portion the smoked salmon, make up the creme fraiche, sort out garnishes and assemble my platters.

Just a side note:  I’ve been able to get real wasabi from Harris Farm Markets at Broadway.  It’s prepped like a regular horseradish paste and you’ll find it in the cool-case right at the back of the store in a TEENY little jar.  It’s pretty expensive, but one taste and you’ll understand why.  That stuff packs an interesting punch!

 

I’m not dead

I’m not dead.  I’m just caught up in various bits of stuff.

 

Not happy, Jan!

As if I hadn’t had a bad enough weekend with my father having to go to ER in the wee small hours with a spiking fever (diagnosis: mumps)(mumps, FFS????!!!!), and feeling completely crap, my web-host appears to have fallen over and died.

As a consequence, my shop is completely dead and so is my email.  I’ve no idea how long this is going to last and I’m cranky.  If it’s not up by this time tomorrow I am shifting to a new hosting service.  God, like I need the drama right now.  All of the effort I’ve put in trying to be professional and reliable and trying to stand out from the fly-by-nights, all the advertising, all my customers – it’s all been rendered useless.

I am NOT HAPPY!!!!

 

Time for Tiffin!

Yay!  I’ve finally got some tiffin tins!  I’ve got a two-tier and a three-tier and they are just the coolest things!  This is the three tier…

Three Tier Tiffin

Groovy, eh?  With everyone banging on about taking your lunch to work to save money and the whole frugal thing being EVER so popular lately (wonder why?), I figured I’d jump on the band-wagon and get a few in for the shop.

I wish I was having as much luck with bento boxes.  The ones I can find for sale are so very small that everyone who has seen them so far has gone “You’re kidding me, right?  That’s for a child??” when in fact they’re the largest bento I can find.  Not to mention that finding an importer in Australia is proving to be difficult.

Oh well.  You win some, you lose some.

 

Whipped cream – and the end of days.

Today I stumbled across a recipe…for whipped cream.

*blink*

I have trouble believing that there are people out there (who, presumably, are perfectly capable of logging onto a computer and accessing the internet) who need to have it explained to them exactly how to make whipped cream.

I mean, the name itself is a bit of a giveaway, don’t you think?  Whipped cream.  It’s cream that has been…whipped.

*raises one eyebrow*

I sincerely hope that the webpage in question (which I will not name for fear that I should somehow humiliate them) was an example of a filler post.  You know the sort – the “I haven’t written anything for three weeks and I need to put something here to prove I’m alive” sort of thing.

Because, otherwise, I’d have to imagine a world where the twin perils of advertising (where all sorts of bizarre things have the word “whipped” applied to them) and the strange world of consumer products (that provide items we never ever knew we needed until the advertisers told us) had such a hold over people that they aren’t capable of anything that I might describe as rational, semi-educated thought.

Is it possible that there are people out there who have never come across the concept of beating or whipping cream?  Could they have never seen this on TV, or read about in a book?  That they lack the basic understanding or even the impetus to link regular cream with the pre-whipped stuff in a can?

Yes, I know – I’m a blowhard that likes to do things that hard way just to prove I can.  I mean, I made sausages from scratch last week with real pig-guts as casings (incidentally, never again with the pig guts) and I’ve done cheese, and home-brew and I grow weird stuff in the garden.  So, I’m willing to admit that my frame of reference is very likely waaaaayyyyy skewed.

But even so.

A recipe for whipped cream.

 

Holidays

We’re just back from a short break in the lovely Hunter Valley.  Not ones to let a little rain dampen our days, we managed to pack a lot into a week.  We bought a lot of good food, plenty of wine and spent a lot of time lounging around waiting for the rain to stop (which it didn’t) which eventually turned into just generally lounging.  Ah!  Il dolce far niente!!  Brilliant!

We went to the Lovedale Smokehouse which was a bit of a mixed bag.  I would have loved to have seen the actual smokehouse and learned a little about how they did things, but it was hidden behind a gaggle of buildings labelled “Staff Only”.  Instead, to one side of the large restaurant, there is a small glass-fronted fridge with a variety of products for sale.  They have chosen (quite rightly) hygeine over artistry, but I can’t help feeling the loss.  Anyway, we bought a few things here and there and I can tell you that their vine-smoked prosciutto was the most delicious, piggy thing I’ve ever had!  We’ve got sausages in the fridge but we won’t be getting to those for a while.  Oh, and the Smokehouse also makes a mean latte.

We also visited The Smelly Cheese Shop which I highly recomment to all the cheese fiends out there.  They carry a superlative range of domestic and imported cheese, are lavish with their tastings, and handily carry all the makings of a perfect picnic (olives, bread, drinks, cutlery and so forth).  They also sell a mouthwatering selection of gelato, but we didn’t get around to that.  Perhaps next time…

I also recommend the Binnorie Dairy – their marinated feta is so damn good that we took a kilo bucket home with us again.  Their labneh is excellent as are their various goat-cheese.  They do only the soft cheeses, but they do those awfully well!!

Our last cheese stop was the Hunter Valley Cheese Co which is in residence at the McGuigans winery complex.  Again – they sell all manner of delicious things.  I took a delicious washed-rind brie (stinky, unctuous, creamy, complex, delicious!!) and a smeared-rind cheese (even stinkier but ever-so silky and mild inside).  I also recommend picking up a small pot of the chicken pate – excellent stuff!  If they have it, see if you can grab a loaf of the apricot & fig bread they also sell and take your booty and sit on the picnic tables underneath the trees.

We didn’t grab as much wine on this trip as we did last time.  We revisited the Tintilla winery.  They do some excellent shiraz and sangiovese, but as The Husband was doing the tasting that day I settled for buying some delicious manzanillo olives (not too salty, and retaining a small amount of natural bitterness), and some outstanding vin cotto.  Translated roughly as “cooked wine” this is a somewhat syrupy reduction of good red wine that has been infused with orange peel and cinnamon.  Sweet, sour and complex, it should be used a little like balsamic vinegar (which it resembles, but nowhere near as sharp and sour).  Put a little in a dish with some fresh, peppery olive oil and just dip bread into it.  I used it the other night to dress a salad and it really went well with the aragula (or rocket/roquette if you prefer).

We seemed to buy a lot of olives this trip.  Olives are relatively new to the Hunter (or so we were told).  Introduced about 10 years ago, they’re just starting to come into commercial production and the result is some absolutely stellar oil.  We bought several different varieties, but one that I love is the Pukhara Estate Extra Virgin Olive Oil with Wasabi.  The oil is naturally green peppery and the wasabi is a gentle prickle on the palate – I can’t wait to pour it over mashed potatoes.  My only quibble is that – so far as I can tell from the packaging – they use the standard wasabi paste to make their oil and it usually contains little to no true wasabi.  It’s to be expected – the true wasabi grown in Tasmania is amazingly expensive (about $60 for two smallish roots) and hard to come by. If only they could do some sort of deal…

Lets see.  What else did we do?  Oh, we paid a visit to the Hunter Valley Chocolate Co and bought a large quantity of fudge.  Our favourites were the chocolate/macadamia, caramel/macadamia, dark chocolate/ginger, and the plain caramel.  Tooth-achingly sweet, moorish and addictive.  I wish they’d do something like the Cocoa Farm chocolates that do a shiraz and merlot/pinot variety of rum and raisin.  You’d think with all the wine floating around that it would be a no-brainer, but there you go.  We suggested it to them.  I REALLY hope they run with it.

Anyway, that’s part of what we got up to.  The dodgy wi-fi, excellent pub food, ultra-expensive tapas, ant-nest terror and 4am thunderstorm will have to wait until the next installment.

 

Salted Chocolate Chip & Almond Cookies

So it’s a quiet day here – overcast, dull, boring.  I’ve cleaned out the fridge, labelled everything in the pantry, processed the days orders for the shop and was avoiding doing the laundry.

What better thing to do than make cookies?

Salted Chocolate Chip & Almond Cookies

And these are goooooood!  (Even if I do say so myself.)(And I do!)

It’s just a basic choc-chip recipe to which I’ve added a cup of slivered almonds.  But the kicker is the salt on the top.  There’s just something so VERY good about salty-sweet – particularly when chocolate is involved.

Here’s the recipe I used;

• 150 grams of soft butter
• ½ cup caster sugar
• ½ cup brown sugar
• big splosh of vanilla essence
• 1 jumbo egg
• 1 ¾ cups of plain flour
• pinch baking powder
• 1 cup milk chocolate chips
• 1 cup slivered almonds
• salt for sprinkling (I used Murray River salt flakes – so pink and pretty)

Preheat your oven to about 160°C.  Cream butter and sugar.  When light and fluffy, add egg and vanilla essence and beat until combined.  Add flour and baking powder (better to do this in two or three batches) and when completely mixed, add in choc chips and almonds and mix until all the bits are evenly through the dough.

Take tablespoons of the mix and put onto lined trays at least an inch apart (they will spread slightly).  Press down a bit and then sprinkle each cookie with a tiny pinch of salt.

Bake for 15-20 minutes (depending on your oven).  They should be a pale gold and not too brown on the underside.  Let them cool and put into an air-tight container, if you can!

They’ve got a bit of crunch and a bit of chew.  They’re sweet but have a salt kick.  These really are the best choc-chip cookies I’ve ever made.  Try them for yourself – it’s a really simple recipe!

 

Ingredients

Sometimes it’s all about the ingredients.  Here are a couple of ripe capsicums – fresh roasted and just peeled out of their blackened skins.

Roasted Red Capsicum

Look at that colour!  They’re going into a hot chilli sauce tonight but they’re almost too pretty to eat!

If your ingredients are good, then you don’t need to do too much to them.  I nibbled on a strip while putting them into the bowl – these are really sweet and the roasting has made them slightly smoky.  All I’m going to do is purée them with a pinch of salt, add a little garlic, a little balsamic vinegar and a heap of fresh chilli and spoon it over some steak.

Simple and cheap.  And delicious.  And pretty.

 

Gone crackers

Well, earlier today I bought some Il Caprino con Tartuffo truffled goat cheese and it was only after I got home that I realised that I didn’t have any bread or crackers in the house (courtesy of a mammoth pantry-cleaning where I’d turfed out anything that was getting old, stale, or I couldn’t remember when it had been purchased).

Bugger.

So after finding a gazillion recipes online and not being happy with any of them, I decided to make my own up, and this is what I ended up with…

Home made crackers for cheese

They’re not too bad for a first try, although I would have preferred them a little thinner and crisper.  (Solution: let the dough rest, dammit, and omit baking powder).

Here’s the recipe that I ended up using;

• 2 cups plain flour plus some for dusting
• 1 tablespoon of fresh rosemary (minced finely).  Feel free to replace with any selection of seasoning you want – I used rosemary, black pepper and garlic.
• 1 teaspoon of baking powder (I might reduce or leave this out next time)
• 1 large pinch of salt plus flaky salt for dusting
• 1/2 cup water (plus a little extra depending on how dry the dough is)
• 1/3 cup olive oil (plus extra for brushing)

Pre-heat oven to 180C.  Combine all ingredients until you get a smooth dough and knead gently for 5 minutes or until silky.  Let the dough rest for at least 20 minutes (I’ll pay more attention to this next time.  Roll dough out very thinly on baking paper and brush with olive oil.  Sprinkle with flaky salt and cut into strips (a pastry cutter or pizza roller is excellent), and then cut again at 90 degrees to make your shapes.  Cook for 10 minutes and check the colour.  They should be golden.  Turn off the oven and let them cool in the oven for added crispness.  Serve with a selection of cheese or dips.

And there you go!  Too easy!

POSTSCRIPT:  They were great with the cheese.  God, I love having a stand mixer to do all the hard work!

 

Farmers Markets

I’ve just got back from the farmers markets at the Entertainment Quarter at Moore Park.  It’s the second time I’ve been and I have to say I’ve got some mixed feelings about it.

I suspect that my main problem is that I went today (Wednesday) rather than Saturday, but it wasn’t quite the packed-with-goodies experience I was hoping for.  Granted, there’s only a reasonably small undercover area, but the whole precinct is like a ghost-town – most of the shops and restaurants are closed and there’s just this small area that’s alive.  It’s a bit sad.  The people that were there generally fell into one of three catagories – mothers with HUGE prams,  people with SMALL dogs, and the rest of us who desperately danced around trying not to tread on anyone.

Not to say that I didn’t find some interesting stuff – I bought two sorts of truffle-studded goat cheese, some ricotta filled pastries (oh god, they were DAMN good!) and some crocodile fillet (which will feature here shortly).  There were two bread stalls selling the most delish-looking loaves and sticks, but I just didn’t have the wherewithall to fight my way through the pram/dog tangle to get to them.

Still, it marks the first in what I hope will be a series of trips to the various markets about the place – with luck I’ll get my mitts into more interesting and fantastic food.  (If you have a favourite and feel like sharing, please let me know.)

Well, I’m off to make crackers (to go with the cheese) and to break up the enormous salmon I bought yesterday.  Dinner is going to be interesting!