The Munchies Blog

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 :)