Paw Cookie

Yesterday evening I made some choc chip cookies (from the recipe on the back of the Cadbury's packet). I was just about to bite into one, when I noticed this:

Pawprint!

Then I remembered we shut Serenity in the bedroom because he was a pain while I was cooking dinner and wanted to eat all the chicken!

Maybe it's a sign, because the Strays Kickstarter launched this morning; I've been doing fuzzy animal art for this Fate Accelerated roleplaying game, including the cover illustration!

First Harvest

Things have been growing pretty slowly in the garden patch, partly because it's Winter and partly because I didn't buy any fertiliser for the first couple of months.

I took some pictures a few weeks back, but didn't get around to uploading them until now. Here's the initial patch; it's mostly leeks, with a few spring onions. I also planted some garlic cloves, which have really taken off! Some of the leeks are starting to look impressive, but they either have a long way to go still, or they're going to end up the same size as large spring onions.

I've also turned over a new patch, in preparation for the Spring planting season.

Today I reaped my first harvest - a whole two spring onions! These are from the Red Legs seedlings I planted when the garden first went in. I took the two largest, which were a decent size but not huge, and left the others to grow a bit more.

Steak knife for scale

Tonight for dinner, we had Atlantic salmon with poached egg on toast, garnished with our spring onions! I forgot to take a picture before I started eating it... Very tasty, but I overcooked the egg a little.

ALL the Baking!

I spent the afternoon baking things!

The banana cake is from an online recipe site, substituting Nuttelex and rice milk where necessary.

The bread is just a quick white loaf through our bread-maker, substituting canola oil for the butter and powdered milk.

The cookies are from the recipe on the back of Cadbury's milk chocolate baking chips.

Pear Danish

I sort-of made this up based on what little I remembered about danishes. It worked pretty well - nice and sticky and sweet.

• 1 sheet of puff pastry
• 4 tinned pear halves, drained (or previously stewed pears)
• Pear jam
• Canola oil (for greasing)

Cut the pastry into quarters. Spread each with a good coating of pear jam, leaving about 1cm clear at the edges. Place a pear half in the centre of each pastry square, aligned diagonally. 

Fold over the edges a little to create a ridge all the way around, then fold two of the points up over the pear half. Press together at the top where they overlap. 

Place on a lightly greased baking tray, and bake for about half an hour at 180ºC, or until the pastry is cooked. Allow to cool a little before serving, as the jam will be very hot.

You may notice that the recipe doesn't involve icing or sugar or anything on top. It didn't really need it, since as +Annette pointed out, the jam provides enough sweetness. I only just realised that most danishes use custard on the base, but I'm not a fan and I don't think we have any anyway.

I used a bit much jam, so some of it bubbled out onto the baking tray to form a sort of toffee. It came off pretty easily after a bit of soaking, though.

Dinosaur Pasta

I like dinosaurs! I saw Jurassic Park three times, and now constantly work to raise awareness that this is a Velociraptor:

and this is a Deinonychus:

Anyway, we were doing the online shopping order a few weeks ago and +Annette ordered a box of dinosaur pasta shapes. I'll ignore the fact that one of them is called "Bronty" instead of "Apaty" because at least Bronty sounds like a real name, even though Brontosaurus has been recognised as a mistakenly-classified Apatosaurus since 1903.

So I was boiling them up on the stove...

Steggy and Rex clearly visible on the fork

...and Annette walked past, and I said "Hey, look!"

"I'm making primordial soup!"

Chickenherder's Pie

This was my first attempt to bake a full-size pie in the oven, rather than the individual serve pies that come out of our pie-maker. It's a chicken and vegetable pie with mashed potato on top, so it's like a shepherd's pie but without the lamb.

It's actually been a while since I made this, so I may be a little vague on some of the exact ingredients and methods.

Top

• Four or five large potatoes, peeled and chopped
• Chives (fresh or dried)
• A splash of rice milk (or regular milk)

Boil the potatoes until cooked all the way through. Drain and return to the pot.

Add chives and mash, adding rice milk as necessary to make the mash smooth but not runny.
Set aside.

(I didn't bother adding spring onions or garlic paste to the mash, since both of those ingredients go into the main pie filling and I wanted the top of the pie to be smooth.)

Filling

• 500g chicken mince
• 1 leek, chopped or sliced
• 2 spring onions, sliced
• 1 celery stick, sliced
• 1 garlic clove, crushed (or some garlic paste)
• A pinch of salt
• A tablespoon of canola oil
• A few teaspoons of cornflour
• A splash of rice milk (or regular milk)

Fry the leek in the oil in a large pan until it softens. Add the chicken mince and cook until it's sealed.

Add the other vegetables and the salt and cook until mostly done and the leek starts to brown.

To bind the mixture, sprinkle in a teaspoon of cornflour and stir in well. Add a dash of rice milk. Repeat a few times until the mixture sticks together well. Try to avoid it becoming too sloppy or ultra-stodgy.

The Pie

• 1 sheet of shortcrust (or puff) pastry
• Mashed potato (from above)
• Chicken and vegetable filling (from above)

Line a pie dish with canola oil, and press the pastry sheet into the dish. Trim around the edges with a knife.

(Normally I would have used puff pastry, but we seemed to have accidentally acquired a packet of shortcrust pastry instead.)

Spoon in the pie filling, smoothing it down so the top is pretty flat.

Cover the filling with mashed potato all the way to the edges. I also used a tablespoon to shape the mash in a spiral pattern, but whatever floats your boat.

Bake in the oven at 180ºC for... a while. I didn't time it, but you basically want to make sure the pastry is cooked and the potato on top starts to brown. Since the ingredients apart from the pastry are all cooked to begin with, it shouldn't matter too much as long as the pastry is done!

Lessons I have learned

When you put mince in the freezer, flatten it out first so it'll thaw faster. If you leave it in a ball, you're left scraping layer after bloody layer of thawed meat off a lump that looks like a frozen brain.

I think cats charge around the house after making a deposit in the litter tray to make sure they don't have any remnants stuck to their butts.

Apparently you need to cover stuff when you put it in the fridge, to stop it tasting like fridge or stop everything in the fridge tasting like it.

You need to wait for cakes to cool down before you can ice them.

It takes a long time to dry out bread for breadcrumbs if you're actually trying to grill them while they're on a low shelf of the oven instead of baking them.

When +Annette said she wanted to clear all the plants out of the bed along the side of the house, she didn't mean the two herb bushes at the far end. I thought they smelled nice as the whippersnipper cut through them. I think they might be growing back slowly.

Birthday Cakes

Last weekend was +Annette's birthday, and she requested a cake! I haven't made anything but banana cake since high school, but with recipes to follow how hard could it be?

I started out with an attempt to make a low-chemical gluten free sponge cake, sandwiched together with pear jam and covered in marshmallow icing. This was possibly a little ambitious, but following the instructions I had high hopes of creating something spectacular!

The cake batter was mostly eggs and sugar, with a little corn flour and arrowroot, so it was pretty fluid. The recipe requested three circular cake tins at 23cm diameter or two square tins, but we only had a series of nesting circular tins with the largest at the requested size. I figured a tiered cake wouldn't be too bad. From the look of the mixture, it was going to make pretty shallow layers and then stack them together to create the full cake.

The circular tins has removable bottoms to assist with popping the cake out; a latch on the side tightens or loosens the sides to clamp the base in place. I was a little worried that the batter might leak out the bottom, but it didn't start doing that until it had been in the oven for a couple of minutes.

I suspect the heat may have expanded the sides enough to break the seal a little. With regular thick cake mixture that wouldn't be a problem, but with this liquid stuff it was. I poured the mixture out of the circular tins into a couple of rectangular loaf tins; the tops had started turning foamy while it was still runny underneath, so I tried to mix it together to make sure it wouldn't go lumpy. After cleaning all the semi-cooked goop out of the oven, I put the new tins in and started again.

It failed spectacularly. I ended up with two really flat cakes with almost-burned sides, cake-like tops with large uneven ripples, and a gummy and warped underside. It didn't even taste good. Into the bin, and on to Cake Number Two with time slipping away before company arrived!

The second cake was a plain butter cake with vanilla butter icing. The mixture was thick and smooth, but I took no chances and cooked it in a solid-based rectangular tin. It took a nail-biting hour in the oven, but cooked all the way through and slid out of the tin without disintegrating or sticking to the tin!

It did start to pull apart when I tried to flip it over, since I wasn't aware of the cake-flipping technique - place another cooling rack on top and then pick up both racks and flip to keep the cake intact. Also it helps to wait for the cake to cool off a bit, but I was running out of time to get it finished. On a taste test, even with rice milk and Nuttelex substitutions, it tasted delicious! Spirits buoyed, I moved on to the icing.

The icing was pretty much just icing sugar (or icing mixture in our case) and butter (Nuttelex) with a little vanilla essence. It's soft and creamy, not that shell-like icing. I started applying it to the cake, only to find it melting and threatening to slide off! Luckily I'd only applied one smear with a knife, so I scraped it off and put the cake in the fridge to speed up the cooling process.

Just before our guests arrived, I started icing again. It went on pretty thick, and it wasn't pretty, but it worked. I must admit, I could definitely taste the Nuttelex in the icing, so I don't think it was the greatest, but all up the birthday cake turned out very tasty and was well received.

It took a huge effort, and a near-meltdown in the middle, but perseverance and Annette's calming influence got me there in the end.

Crumbed Chicken

I've occasionally cooked crumbed pork cutlets before, so I was already familiar with the basics of crumbing food. Flour, then egg, then crumbs, then fry it. I used a modified crispy chicken recipe from +Annette's Friendly Food cookbook as the basis for tonight's dinner.

Crumbed chicken with mashed potato and fried leeks

The mashed potato was as I've described earlier (which also details the preparation of breadcrumbs), and the leeks were just chopped and fried until browned. The leeks turned out a bit chewy, but I'm not sure if it's because I cooked them too long and dried them out, or if it's just because the leeks I used were a bit old to start with.

The crumbed chicken recipe is as follows.

• Chicken breasts, depending how many people you're feeding
• Plain flour
• An egg or two
• 1 tablespoon of water per egg
• Breadcrumbs
• Poppy seeds
• Salt

Cut up the chicken breasts into medallions about 15mm thick. 

Prepare three bowls; in the first, put plain flour. In the second, whisk the eggs and water together. In the third, combine a good deal of breadcrumbs, a few teaspoons of poppy seeds, and a dash of salt. 

Coat the chicken pieces in flour, then dip in the egg mixture, then coat with the breadcrumb mixture. Place the pieces onto a lightly greased baking tray. 

Put the tray in the fridge for 20-30 minutes to let the coating set a little. 

Preheat the oven to 200ºC, then bake the chicken for half an hour or until cooked all the way through.

Caramelised Leek Stir-Fry

+Annette's on an Exclusion Diet to test for food intolerances, so we are somewhat limited on the ingredients we can use. It's mostly green vegetables, potatoes, pears, eggs, beans, as well as lean meat. I usually try to make things interesting so she's not always stuck eating the same stuff.

A while ago we had a happy accident while Annette was making chicken and leek pies in the pie-maker; a little mixture leaked out around the edge, and some of the leek got a bit over-cooked. But it smelled delicious, and added a nice bit of caramelisation to the flavour.

Since leek's related to onions, it seems that it caramelises in a similar manner. To test this theory, I made a leek-based stir-fry that turned out very nicely, so I present the recipe here. It's simple, but I'm proud of it nonetheless!

• 1 whole leek, sliced into thin rings
• 2 spring onions, finely chopped
• 1 stick of celery, finely chopped
• Half a cup of green beans
• 1 chicken breast, thinly sliced 
• A handful of cabbage (drum-head or red), chopped into strips
• A little Canola oil to line the pan

Put the oil in a large frying pan or wok over a medium heat (2 out of 6 on our stove-top using a heavy-based pan, but probably go higher if you're using a wok). 

When the oil is heated, stir-fry the chicken until it's sealed on all sides. Remove from the pan and set aside. 

Apply some more oil, and fry the leeks until they soften and start to brown. Stir them with a spatula to separate the rings and give them all a good chance to cook.

Add the rest of the vegetables and the chicken. Fry it all up, using a spatula to mix the ingredients and heat everything through. Keep going until the leek is well browned and the smell loses its sharpness and starts to turn caramelised, but avoid burning it to the bottom of the pan!

I've often been making this without the chicken as a side to a meat dish, and haven't been making a sauce or anything. If your diet allows, you might want to try a sauce (not sure what to suggest; ideas?) or experiment with additional stir-fry ingredients. The caramelised leek is the focal point though, so I guess you probably don't want to add anything that's going to overwhelm that flavour.

Let me know if you have any suggestions for variations or improvements!

Baked Eggs in Potato

I was looking through +Annette's Friendly Food cookbook for an easy, low-chemical lunch and came across these little things. Normally it would take about an hour to prepare, but we had some left-over mashed potato from last night so it was relatively quick. I'm just going to describe basically what to do, rather than provide a full recipe.

• Make some smoothly mashed potato! The quantity depends on how many of these you want to make, but you don't need very much per serve. Our mash also contains finely chopped spring onion, chives, garlic paste, and rice milk (although regular milk would be fine too).
• Preheat your oven to 180ºC. Get a muffin tray and line the cups with a little oil (I used spray canola oil). Sprinkle a bit of rice crumbs (or breadcrumbs) in so they stick to the oil.
• Grab a small ball of mashed potato and push it into the base of each cup, spreading it across the bottom and up the sides. Crack a fresh egg into each potato cup (making sure your cup doesn't runneth over).
• Cook for about 15 minutes or until the egg sets. Pop them out of the tray and serve egg-side up with garnish of your choice.

It makes a tasty change from fried or boiled eggs, and makes less mess than scrambled eggs. It does take a bit of time if you have to make the mashed potato first, though.

Game Day

I think I'm mostly going to post one thought or observation or recipe or something each day. First up, though, I thought I'd write about one of my days.

This morning before breakfast I fed the cats, emptied the dishwasher, made the bed around our fat cat Serenity, ironed +Annette's new workshirt, packed her lunch, put some bread in the oven to toast for breadcrumbs later, and saw her off to work.

Dry breadcrumbs are pretty easy. Just cut up some crustless bread into inch squares and toast on an oven tray at 130º until they're dry and crispy all the way through. Thinner bits of bread cook faster; if I feel any squish when I pinch the pieces, I put them back in for another five minutes.

You can use a blender to turn the lumps into crumbs, but I'm still a little leery about using such devices so I put the pieces in a plastic bag and gently crush them with a rolling pin. 

Today I have some guys coming over for a roleplaying game session from 12 to 5, so I have to race around like a whirlwind to get everything organised in time! Thankfully we don't have many plans for the weekend, so we'll both have some recovery time.

School went back earlier this week, so Annette's work at the college has been extra busy. Luckily her daughter Maddy is pretty self-sufficient, so I don't need to worry too much about getting her organised in the mornings as well.

I put a load of laundry on and vacuumed the carpet. Needing to pick up a few things, I hopped on my bike and did a circuit of the shops - hardware store for ant sand and a replacement globe for the bug zapper, pet shop for cat food, and grocery store for milk. Back home I had a quick snack and hung out the washing. Time to shower and get things ready for the game!

I was just having some lunch when people started turning up. I managed to keep my brain running for the duration, and it was a fun game. I ran a session of Ryuutama, where the group journeyed into a swamp to negotiate with a witch. After running a five hour game though, I felt like a nap.

But it's time to get dinner ready! Tonight I'm going to cook pan-fried steak with mashed potatoes and some frozen veggies. Annette's on a low chemical diet to test for food intolerances, so our menu tends to be at once limited and interesting.

Our mashed potatoes usually consist of boiled potatoes, finely chopped spring onions, chives, garlic paste, and rice milk. 

I used to cook steak too slowly, so it would turn grey and chewy. Now that I have access to a good stove and a heavy ridge-based frying pan, I crank the heat a little and sear lines into the meat while leaving the middle tender.

Before I started cooking, I loaded the dishwasher, took the recycling out, and brought the laundry in. I managed to coordinate the food reasonably well, so everything ended up being cooked and ready at the same time. It's a talent I'm still working on; in my first few weeks, one item would often be finished while something else was far from ready.

After dinner we relaxed with the last few episodes of The Walking Dead season one. It's my first time watching the show. It's good! Very tense and visceral.

Before bed, I had time to check the bug lamp (not sure if it's working properly), rinse some plates and scrub some pots, and load the dishwasher.

As I was getting ready for bed, I saw our other cat Suki tearing strips off their cardboard scratch mat. Something to clean up in the morning

Goodnight!