The Munchies Blog

Ingredients:

• 350 ish grams of Beef Mince
• 1 small Red Onion
• 2 cloves of Garlic
• ca 4 Peeled fresh tomatoes
• 50 ish grams of Feta
• 1/2 cup Cream
• 1 tablespoonish Tomato paste
• 2 Bay leaves
• 1 teaspoonish Strawberry jam
• 1 splosh White wine (Chardonnay?)
• Pasta

Approach:

Cook pasta.
Fry the mince together with onion and garlic. Add salt, tomatoes, tomato puree, a teaspoon strawberry jam and two bay leaves. Let simmer until it thickens a bit. Add wine and cream and let it cook longer.

Mix pasta and sauce in an ovenproof form and sprinkle feta on top. Chuck into oven and bake for around 20 minutes at around 225 degrees Celsius. The feta should look brownish.

Not much text required, really: I made bagels (following Anne’s recipe, with 350g high grade flour and 150g organic wholemeal flour) twice in the last week. They’re great. With and without sesame.

I first tried out this recipe two years ago and it was quite a failure. Back then I mistreated the yeast (I think) and didn’t pre-heat the oven. So the failure was entirely my own fault…

About a year ago, a recipe for No-Knead Bread published in the New York Times made its rounds through the foodblogs. I’m usually quite skeptical about these fads, but I did go and have a look at the recipe after reading so much praise about it. The bread is baked in an ovenproof saucepan, which I didn’t have at that time. So I put it aside but never quite forgot about it. Especially here in New Zealand, where it’s so difficult to get hold of nice bread, the promise of doing almost no work and getting something that nice as a result is just too good! One thing that did bother me though was that the bread is yeast-based. I generally prefer sourdough breads. So even when my flatmate bought a nice set of stainless-steel ovenproof saucepans about half a year ago, I didn’t try out the bread recipe.

Yesterday we had pizza for dinner. I used our two-years-past-its-use-by-date dried yeast (Edmond’s activated yeast, to be precise) that my flatmate kept telling me was still perfectly ok to use. I once did use it for a recipe (I don’t remember what it was), which ended in disaster. Since I suspected that some difference between German and NZ yeast might have been to blame, I stuck to my Edmond’s cookbook for the pizza base. And it turned out fairly nice.

Thus encouraged, I decided to finally try my luck with the no-knead bread. I used a variation of the original recipe and changed it further by using oat bran instead of flour to coat the tea towel.

And the result? Oh yum. Just like promised, a nice brown crunchy crust with soft, chewy interior and really great taste. It even almost satisfies my craving for German Brötchen (bread rolls, to give a completely inadequate translation).

Have a look:

Fresh out of the oven.

A bit later when it had cooled down: cut open.

And I even found a recipe for a sourdough version. So I’m going to order some 150-year-old sourdough starter and hope it’ll make it past the biosecurity watchdogs.

One of my flatmates bought a big bag of courgettes (called zucchini in other parts of the world) the other day. I remembered that we’d once made really nice stuffed courgettes but I couldn’t find the recipe anywhere. It think the recipe below is close enough though.

This recipe takes a bit of time to prepare, but I think it’s well worth the effort. The amounts given were enough for 3 people for 1.5 meals.

Mince and Feta Stuffed Courgettes

• 8-9 smallish courgettes
• ca 300g beef mince
• 1 big onion
• 2-3 cloves garlic
• ca 3 handful rice (we used red rice, but brown or even plain long-grain rice should be fine)
• 200g feta
• 3 eggs
• ca 100-150ml milk
• ca 200g cheese (e.g. gouda or mild cheddar)

Boil the rice.

Pre-heat the oven to 180° C. Wash the courgettes, cut off the ends and cut in half lengthwise. Scoop out most of the flesh, leaving a boat-shaped shell. Keep the flesh.

Chop the onion and garlic. Fry the onion, meat and garlic in a little bit of olive oil.

Cut the courgette flesh into small pieces and add to the meat. Fry for a few more minutes.

Cut the feta into very small pieces (or crumble with a fork). Grate the other cheese.

In a bowl, mix the meat mixture, drained rice, feta, an egg and some spices — we used salt, white pepper, smoked paprika and some rosemary. In a small bowl, whisk together the other two eggs, the milk and some more spices — in our case I think it was salt, white pepper, paprika and oregano.

Put the courgette halves into a shallow ovenproof dish, “open” side facing upwards. Spoon the meat/rice/feta-mixture into the courgette halves. Pour over the egg/milk-mixture so that some of it ends up in the dish itself and sprinkle the cheese over everything.

Bake in the middle of the oven for about 20-30 minutes. The temperature and times are for a conventional oven, you will have to adjust them for convection ovens. It’s done when the courgettes are soft enough to eat and the cheese has browned nicely.

I think next time we might use more rice and maybe also slightly more mince.

For those days when the local veggie coop box brought you yet another cauliflower, or when you’re recovering from having a wisdom tooth pulled out…

I think the basics for this recipe are out of Cuisine (the NZ version), but it’s heavily modified.

Cauliflower Soup

• 1 big onion
• 50g butter
• 1 cauliflower
• ca 6 medium-sized potatoes
• vegetable stock powder
• salt, white pepper, smoked paprika

Cut the onion into small pieces. Cut off the cauliflower florets and wash them. Wash and (optionally) peel the potatoes and cut them into quarters or so.

Put the butter into a big pot and melt in medium heat. Fry the onion until soft. Stir in some smoked paprika powder. Add cauliflower and potatoes, stir for a minute or so. Add water so that it just doesn’t cover the contents of the pot. Add vegetable stock powder. Bring to a boil and let simmer until the potatoes are soft.

Remove from heat and puree with a stick blender. Add salt, pepper and more smoked paprika to taste. I noticed that it takes quite a lot of salt to make it taste nice.

Add more water, milk or cream to get the consistency you want. I like this soup very thick, almost like a puree.

Serve with nice bread, something like ciabatta should work fine.

You can use parsnips instead of cauliflower, the taste is almost the same.

This is what I made for dinner tonight (I’m sorry there’s no picture; my flatmates came home just when dinner was done and we immediately started eating).

Red Rice and Tuna Baskets

• 3 sheets flaky pastry, frozen (they’re about 30×30cm here)
• 3 handful red thai rice (normal rice probably works just as well)
• 1 can tuna in spring water (185g)
• 1 onion
• 1 handful chives, cut into small pieces with a pair of scissors
• 2 handful grated cheese (I used colby, but cheddar or gouda would work as well)
• 2 large eggs

Take the pastry sheets out of the freezer and spread out on the kitchen bench to defrost. Cover with clean tea towels if you have a non-trustworthy cat. Pre-heat the oven to 200 C.

Grease a standard muffin tray with some butter.

Boil the rice in salted water until soft.

Chop the onion into small pieces and fry in a little bit of olive oil together with the tuna until the onions are soft.

Cut the pastry sheets into quarters and put each piece into one hole in the muffin tray so that it lines the walls. Some parts of the pastry, especially the corners, will stick out.
When the rice is done, drain it well and put it into a medium-sized bowl. Add the onion and tuna, the chives, the grated cheese and the eggs. Season with salt, black and white pepper and smoked paprika (I used La Chinata spicy).

Spoon the filling into the pastry baskets and bake for about 20 minutes or until the pastry starts to get brown and the filling looks set. Leave to cool for a few minutes before eating.

I’m quite happy with this food and I’m pretty sure this is what I’ll bring to the next potluck dinner.

The other day, I had a good reason for baking a cake. Somehow, I didn’t really feel like chocolate (still not quite sure how that could happen, but nevermind…). We did, however, have lots of nice sprayfree lemons in the fridge. So I decided on lemon, passionfruit and preferably white chocolate for the flavours. A quick search led me to this recipe. Here is the result:

I followed the recipe exactly, with the one exception that I used preserved passionfruit (it’s not exactly passionfruit season right now). I could only find preserves that had sugar added, so I left out the sugar in the passionfruit topping.

I was very happy with the result. I think this was the first time that I managed to make a nice fluffy sponge cake. Now I just need to practise cutting sponges in half horizontally and piping pretty chocolate lace thingies :)

It’s still blueberry season here in New Zealand — but you have to be a bit careful, some varieties are not really nice.

The other day, I made blueberry clafoutis, a recipe I’d wanted to try out for ages.

I didn’t change much from the original, but here is a translation.

Blueberry Clafoutis

• 500g blueberries
• 3 eggs
• 50g icing sugar
• 4 tablespoons standard flour
• 100ml milk
• 100ml cream — or just double the amount of milk
• pinch of salt
• butter for greasing the baking dish
• icing sugar for dusting

Pre-heat oven to 220°C.

Grease an ovenproof dish and put the berries in.

Beat the eggs together with the icing sugar until frothy, then add flour, milk, cream and the pinch of salt.

Pour mixture over berries and bake about 35 minutes. Let cool down slightly and dust with icing sugar.

I was a bit confused when I got the ingredients out of the pantry, so I overlooked the icing sugar. I used caster sugar instead, which seems to work just as well. I used 200ml of milk as the cream… well, let’s not talk about this.

Altogether, I liked the clafoutis. But I think I prefer more substantial cakes.

I felt like baking the other day, so I made chocolate crinkle cookies from a recipe at Anne’s Food.

It feels a bit strange to make them: most of the moisture comes from melted chocolate and butter, and they have to stand in the fridge overnight. Then you form small balls, roll them in icing sugar, and put them on a cookie sheet — almost like baking chocolate truffles…

The cookies look very good (I was actually quite impressed — I have this unfortunate tendency to mess up things that are supposed to look good, but this time things went really well). I’m not that happy with the taste though. It feels like something’s missing. Maybe it’s because they do look a bit like christmas cookies, but there isn’t even any cinnamon or something in there. I think next time I’ll try adding some chopped almonds or something.

Today I tried my first bottle of Innis & Gunn.
I think it is one of the best ales I have ever tried, and urge all of you to try it, assuming you like ale.
Innis & Gunn won the International Beer Competition 2004, and I understand why.
The ale has been aged for 77 days, 30 of these in oak barrels. The oak barrels lend much richness to the flavour, and it reminds me a bit of whisky. Having this taste in an ale with both strong and subtle flavours gives you a very nice experience.

The only thing I do not like about the ale is that I only bought one bottle of it ,)