Stephanie's Mushroom Confit

On the recent Queen's Birthday holiday when we went to Canberra to celebrate Pat's birthday (see previous blog posts and Flickr photos referred to there), one of the other recipe books that was used was, of course, Stephanie's bible which we all refer to regularly. I think we only had one dish that actually came from Stephanie and that was Mushroom Confit that we had served on biscuits as a pre-dinner nibble a couple of times. Actually I lie. I had forgotten the Stephanie's Spiced Oranges which we did have the odd nibble of with cheese.



I was impressed by the Mushroom Confit and made a batch of it when I got back to Melbourne. I basically used Stephanie's recipe apart from a few variants. I don't have any sherry vinegar and don't even know what it is like so I used cider vinegar. And I didn't empty the final mixture into a food processor to pulse as Stephanie suggested: I just whisked it with a hand-held chopper. Otherwise I think it was really Stephanie's recipe.

Ingredients

15 gr dried porcini mushroom
1 head garlic
300 gr button mushrooms
Couple bay leaves
1 sprig thyme
100 ml olive oil
freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup cider vinegar






Mode

Preheat oven to 180c
Pour boiling water over the porcini and leave to soak for 30 minutes
Wrap garlic head in oiled foil and bake in oven until tender (30-45 minutes)
Squeeze liquid from porcini
Place porcini, roasted garlic, button mushroom, thyme, bay leaves, and 1/3 oil in a baking dish which can also be used on top of stove
Grind on pepper and cover with foil
Bake until mushrooms are tender (about 30 minutes)
Place baking dish on top of stove over medium heat
Add sherry and stir to dislodge stuck bits
Allow to boil and reduce
Remove garlic, peel and press flesh through coarse sieve
Discard thyme, bay leaves and garlic skins
Chop the mushroom mixture with hand-held device or else pulse roughly in food-processor
Pack into hot, sterilized jar and pack down firmly
Cover with remaining oil and seal
Leave for at least two months but once opened eat within two weeks.




My jar of mushroom confit is still sitting high in kitchen cupboard waiting for its time to come. I hope it is as delicious as the batch that Margie made for Queen's Birthday! I think she used field mushrooms that had been picked around Yarralumla so the flavour might be a bit different from bought button mushrooms! We'll see in the fullness of time.

Cauliflower and Broccoli Cheese

It's cold and wet in Melbourne at present and there's lot of cauliflower in season. So what better to do that whip up a vat of comfort food like cauliflower cheese? Lemons are around also and I always have Greek yoghurt and fetta on hand so I thought I would give it a bit of a Greek flavour by adding the quintessentially Greek flavours of lemon, yoghurt and fetta. There was nice broccoli around at the shops too, so I used both cauliflower and broccoli as the vegetables.




Ingredients

1 cauliflower
1 bunch broccoli
1 lemon
1 cup water
1 tbs margerine/butter
1 tbs flour
1 cup milk
2 heaped tbs Greek yoghurt (low fat)
150 gr fetta
Grated low fat cheese

Mode

Preheat oven to 180c
Break or chop cauliflower and broccoli into flowerlets
Add vegetables to large pan
Grate the rind of the lemon over the vegetables
Juice the lemon and add
Add a cup of water, stir and cover
Steam on stove top until vegetables are tender
Meanwhile in a saucepan melt the margerine/butter
Add the flour and stir until mixed
Add yoghurt to the milk and stir until combined
Add yoghurt/milk mixture slowly to butter/flour mixture stirring all the while
Crumble the fetta and add to mixture
Stir until fetta melted and mixture starts to thicken
Place vegetables in an oven-proof dish
Pour over cheese sauce
Sprinkle with grated low-fat cheese
Bake for about 45 minutes until golden.



This is delicious by itself with some crusty bread and a glass of retsina, or serve with any main meal as a side dish. The night I made it, it was served with chicken schnitzel (take note @shewgirl) but it also goes well with Abla's chicken from the previous post.

Lime garlic chicken - after Abla

Over the recent Queen's Birthday weekend several of us journeyed from Melbourne to Canberra to stay with Margaret and Tony and to celebrate Pat Miller's 60th birthday. You can see some of my photos here. You may notice in the dinner photos that there was a lot of food. Margaret had cooked up a storm before we came and, though I had come up the night before the others with a view to helping with the cooking, there wasn't much to do!

The major themes (apart from the requisite pavlova) were Greek and Lebanese and the recipe sources were Abla Amad's the Lebanese Kitchen (now sadly out of print) and a book on Greek cooking by Andy Harris. As I had given both of these books to Margie I was pleased to see them so well used and literally stained. I always think this a sign of a well-loved cookbook!



The good thing about such a feast where we are sharing lots of dishes is that it reminds one of old favourites. One of those that I hadn't eaten for a while was Abla's chicken wings in garlic. Needless to say, once I got back to Melbourne and my kitchen and my copy of Abla's recipe book, I cooked up a variant.

As I had a whole lot of limes I substituted that for the lemon juice, I used little chicken drummettes instead of wings and I just used already prepared and purchased minced garlic from a jar. So the principle and the cooking methodology was Abla's but practically no ingredient remained the same! Well, that's how I like to cook: getting ideas from different sources and seeing what's at the shops.

Ingredients

12 chicken drummettes
1 teaspoon coarse salt
Juice of 6 limes
1.5 tablespoons minced garlic (purchased prepared)

Mode

Preheat the oven to 220c
Place the chicken pieces in a single layer in a baking dish
Sprinkle salt over
Roast for approximately 30 minutes until browned
Meanwhile squeeze limes and add minced garlic to resulting juice
Remove chicken from oven and pour over garlic and lime mixture
Stir through
Cook for another 20 minutes


These chicken pieces melt in your mouth. I served them with a simple rocket, pear and parmesan salad which we had also had at a Canberra meal over the break. I was flattered at the reception this simple main course had when I was told I was serving restaurant quality food! Well, it was: Abla's!

A few days later I tried another variant. I had some chicken breasts that I had intended grilling souvlaki style but as I still had limes that were also needing to be used, I chopped up the chicken breasts and cooked them using the same method above. They ended up being a little dry and probably didn't need the whole first 30 minutes of cooking; probably 20 would have done. But nonetheless they were delicious in salad for lunch and I'll be making them again too. Thanks, Abla, for being such an inspiration.

Ceylon Curry Pasties

Having a few days off work before and after Easter means that I have time to do a few things during the week - such as cooking and blogging about it. I have been very slack in this department recently. So what took my fancy on this cold, autumn day in Melbourne? I decided to revisit the idea of cooking pasties. I had last done this just after Christmas to cope with Christmas leftovers.



Today I wanted something warm as I stubbornly refused to turn the heating on during the day. I used a mixture of vegetables which I had on hand as well as ready made short pastry from the freezer. My friend Graham makes his own Ceylon curry powder (ingredients are secret) so I used some of that to add flavour. This made a quick, hot, tasty meal in about an hour.



Ingredients

Potatoes
Brussel sprouts
Broccoli
Red pepper
Short crust pastry
Graham's Ceylon curry powder
1 egg


Mode

Preheat oven to 220 c
Take pastry from freezer and leave to thaw for 15 minutes
Chop vegetables and place in steamer with Ceylon curry powder to taste
When vegetables are tender and pastry thawed, roll out puff pastry to desired thickness and using dinner plate or smaller plate if desired cut circles for pasties
Beat egg
Spoon vegetables onto pastry circle, making sure not to overfill
Brush edges of pastry with beaten egg
Bring the edges together and pinch to form pastry
Brush with beaten egg
Repeat to make as many pasties as desired
Bake in 220 c oven until golden (20-25 minutes)

Salmon & ricotta patties

Today was the hottest day in Melbourne's history. I think weather started being recorded in about 1855. The temperature rose to 46.4 celsius: that is 115.52 fahrenheit. We sweltered and there are fires throughout the state. Xena and Hecuba felt the heat though not as badly as they did during the last heatwave when we had 40+ temperatures for days.

In the midst of a lot of serious monitoring of fires and people at risk of evacuation, we had a lot of flippant comments on Twitter (and Facebook) about magnums, peppermint or otherwise. Then @shewgirl stopped me in my tracks by asking when I was going to blog! Good point. I wasn't going to blog about peppermint magnums but I did have a blog post waiting to write. So Tania, thanks for the wakeup call! This is for you! You may even be interested to know that during the week I had a couple of chicken schnitzels influenced by you. I bet you don't normally eat them with plum sauce though ;.)) Delicious!

Over Christmas one of the jobs I did was a major clearout of the pantry. This was needed but I also wanted to make space to store my new food-processor and my vacuum cleaner in the pantry. Well, I succeeded in all that. I also found various items that I needed to eat. Amongst the booty was a stock of canned pink salmon. Nom, nom! But what should I do with it? I had a couple of salads and then I remembered that once upon a time I used to make salmon patties. I remembered that I used ricotta in them, and think I probably also had grated carrot, grated zucchini and potato though the recipe varied according to what was in stock at the time. However, this time I decided on a much simpler recipe focusing on salmon, ricotta and the piece de resistance, dill! The mixture can be used to make patties or smaller balls which can be used for nibbles.




Ingredients

375 gr low fat ricotta
420 gr canned pink salmon
Cup dill
2 eggs
2 cloves of garlic
Breadcrumbs, dry
Olive oil


Mode

Drain salmon and ricotta
Roughly chop dill
Place salmon, ricotta and dill in bowl
Add one egg
Crush garlic cloves and add to mix
Mix thoroughly and form into patties (or small balls if desired for nibbles)
Beat remaining egg and put in a dish
Put breadcrumbs on a plate
Crumb the patties (or balls) in the egg and breadcrumbs
Let these rest in a cool place for a couple of hours
Heat some olive oil in a pan
Cook the patties until browned on the outside and cooked inside, turning regularly
Serve patties hot or cold with a salad or vegetables for a main meal
If making salmon balls, serve as nibbles with drinks.

Plums and Australia Day weekend

I came home on the Friday night before the long weekend with about 10 kilos of blood plums that a colleague had harvested off her tree. This year the harvest seemed particularly good because of the vigilance of her cat who warded off marauding birds by choosing the plum tree as a favourite place to rest. So I'll be interested to see how many more kilos of plums make their way to work this weekend. Thanks Aileen and Doyle!



But, don't misinterprete what I am saying! I wasn't a reluctant receiver of these plums: I had been waiting for them to ripen and seeking updates on their status regularly. Last year at the about the same time I took home a batch and experimented with making a batch of Maggie Beer's plum sauce. I blogged about it here later in the year when I was eating some of it and it was a great favorite with a number of friends. So I was keen to repeat the exercise. I only cooked about three kilos and made one batch last year. This year the kitchen became quite a production line as I washed plums, chopped onions, belted ginger, dashed out to buy extra sugar and vinegar, simmered it all, strained and bottled it. Finally I could stand back with relief and admire my 14 bottles of plum sauce - the product of six kilos of the plums.





I won't repeat the recipe and the method here as I basically used Maggie Beer's recipe. However, I varied it a bit and also varied the ingredients between the two batches. I used red wine vinegar in one batch according to Maggie's recipe, but in the other I used apple cider vinegar as I had a lot of it on hand. I will be interested to see the difference in taste. I was also rather loose in sticking to the recipe in terms of the onion, ginger, peppercorns and cayenne. But then I always am. I also added the strainings (ginger, plum stones, peppercorns etc) from the first batch to the cooking of the second, in addition to all the other ingredients. The strainings are also nice to keep and add to various other dishes, I found last time.



And the rest of this batch of plums? Well, I decided I would stew them. I washed them and cut off various weathered bits, then I simmered them with about a cup of apple and peach juice and half a cup of currants. That will keep me in breakfast fruit for a while.

Now to clean down all the surfaces in the kitchen which seem spattered with plum! I have had a lovely long weekend immersed in plum cooking with the Australian Open tennis playing along in the background and providing a very Melbourne January sound that brings back decades of memories.

Christmas pasties

Inevitably Christmas Day ends and there is food over! We divide the spoils and head home with ham, turkey, chicken, spanakopitta, roast vegetables, pudding, pavlova, berries - and vow that next year we will not bring so much. Well, of course, that remains to be seen. And let's face it, we always say it.

As usual I was responsible for the vegetables and did a tray of delicious vegetables roasted with garlic and rosemary. But people also said they wanted carrots and peas cooked on the stove top. So I did a big pot of those too, thinking that the vegetarians at least would eat them up. The vegetarians didn't seem too keen and like everyone else piled their plates with roast vegetables. One of them even said later she didn't like peas and carrots. Humph. Next year they are not being cooked despite what anyone requests.

Meanwhile, I went home with a big pot of peas and carrots. What could I do with these? Well, initially I stuck them in the freezer and during the week, in response to a moan about them, my friend Sue said the magic word: PASTIES. Now I hadn't made pasties for decades, but it seemed a great idea particularly once I saw a recipe in Stephanie for pasties made with ham, mustard and leeks. So I decided that I would make Christmas pasties with ham, mustard, peas and carrots!



Ingredients

1.5 cups chicken stock
2 potatoes
1 parsnip
2 cups cooked peas and baby carrots
1 egg
Ham cut from ham on bone
Dijon mustard
Puff pastry

Mode

Preheat oven to 220 c
Heat stock in pan
Peel and dice potatoes and parsnip and add to stock
Add cooked peas and carrots
Simmer until vegetables are tender
Roll out puff pastry to desired thickness and using dinner plate or smaller plate if desired cut circles for pasties
Beat egg
Place ham at bottom and add dollop of Dijon mustard (or other mustard of choice)
Spoon on vegetables, making sure not to overfill
Brush edges of pastry with beaten egg
Bring the edges together and pinch to form pastry
Brush with beaten egg
Repeat to make as many pasties as desired
Bake in 220 c oven until golden



Enjoy! Be careful not to overfill or the pasties will open up while cooking like mine did. They still tasted delicious but the look left something to be desired. And the rest of the vegetables? Well, given the unseasonal wintery weather, they became part of a vegetable soup. Of that, maybe more anon.