The Munchies Blog

A while ago, I had sent off a food parcel. When I returned from two weeks in Sweden last Thursday, I was quite surprised to see that it had somehow found its way back — in a new wrapping and filled with lots of goodies from England :) Thanks a lot, Katrin!

I managed to forget my camera’s battery and the compact flash card in Sweden, so this blog entry has to survive without any pictures. Sorry, folks!

The parcel contained

• A small bag of Hearty’s salted soy nuts.
• A cranberry and macadamia bar made by Eat Natural.
  
• Three small bars of Green&Black’s organic chocolate: Milk, White and Maya Gold.
• A bag of Organic Bombay Mix.
• A package of Desert Cajun Rub “proudly hand-made in Australia” by Screaming Seeds Spice Co.
• 2 vanilla pods in a very nice silver tube.
• A book with chocolate recipes, apparently from a series called “cook specials” by Oil&Vinegar (which is a shop in Bath, if I remember correctly).
• An organic almond biscotti (or whatever the proper singular form is) “made for Caffè Nero”, a café in Bath that I’ve heard mentioned once or twice or maybe a few more times…
• And, last but not least, a pencil sharpener with a wind-up flower (the head can rotate) which has removable eraser leaves. Or something. I guess I’ll have to take a picture of this as soon as I’ve got a working camera…

So far, I’ve tried the soy nuts (nice but a bit weird) and the cranberry and macadamia bar (ok for a granola bar, but somehow not quite my taste). But the biscotti thingy is definitely in danger now ;)

Yay for food parcels, especially those that also come with toys!

I’ve wanted to make panna cotta ever since I first tasted it. My only problem with the recipe I had was that it requires gelatin, which I do eat but prefer to avoid in my own cooking. Fortunately, I recently spotted an Agar-based gelatin replacement in a local supermarket, so I decided to give it a try.

Panna cotta as I know it is usually served with berry compote. Unfortunately, it isn’t exactly berry season at the moment. I was thinking about using frozen berries, but then I remembered the blood oranges that were lying around in the kitchen and decided to go for blood orange sauce instead.

The panna cotta turned out really well, and the combination with the blood oranges proved to be a good one. As usual with panna cotta, everyone would have liked larger servings (knowing full well it was better for them that they didn’t get more). The fruit sauce itself was so nice that people finished off the sauce leftovers with the rest of the grated white chocolate.

Vegetarian Panna Cotta
5 servings of 100 ml each

• 200 g cream (30% fat)
• 300 ml milk (3.2% fat)
• gelatin replacement (or gelatin) for 500 ml liquid
• 1 vanilla pod
• 50 g sugar
• pinch of salt

Pour the cream and milk into a small saucepan. Slit open the vanilla pod lengthwise and scratch out the seeds. Put the seeds and the pod into the saucepan. Stir in the sugar. Refer to the gelatin replacement’s packaging for usage instructions and use accordingly. The stuff I had could just be stirred into the mixture (the only requirement was that it had to boil for at least 2 minutes). Bring the mixture to a simmer and let it simmer for some 15 minutes. Stir occasionally.

Prepare 5 small molds (capacity 100 ml) by washing them out with cold water (I’m not sure why this step is required, but my original recipe included this. It might make it easier to flip the panna cotta out of the molds before serving). Fill the cream mixture into the molds, let cool down a bit, then refrigerate for at least 2 hours, better overnight.

Take the panna cotta out of the fridge about an hour before serving. Flip them out of the molds if you like (I didn’t). Serve with (warm or cold, I used warm) blood orange sauce and grated white chocolate (from about 15 g white chocolate).

Blood Orange Sauce
enough for 5 servings and some leftovers

• 5 blood oranges
• 1/2-1 Tsp sugar
• 2 tsp cornstarch

Put the orange juice and pulp into a small saucepan. Stir in the sugar and the starch and bring to a simmer. Let simmer for a few minutes. Taste and add more sugar if required. I had added too much sugar and tried to rescue things with about a teaspoon of lemon juice. I don’t think that made any difference though.

(Don’t know what the “Part II” is about? Go and read Part I.) The original recipe uses

• 400g good quality dark chocolate,
• 20cl whipping cream and
• 40g butter.

I decided to use half the amount of chocolate and went for a large (250g) bar of Rausch Amazonas (60% cocoa solids) minus some six pieces. I then followed the recipe, breaking the chocolate apart (I was lazy and only broke off the pieces, which I regretted later because the chocolate took quite long to melt), bringing the cream (30% fat whipping cream) almost to a boil, pouring the cream over the chocolate and finally mixing in the diced butter.

I used crushed butter cookies (Butterkeks), chocolate granules (Schokostreusel, like these), unsweetened cocoa powder and icing sugar (Puderzucker) for the toppings.

As mentioned in Part I, I used cayenne pepper, cinnamon, a sweet masala mixture from the organic supermarket, vanilla and salt (fleur de sel, to be exact) for flavouring the ganache itself. I can’t really say anything about the amounts I used; it was pretty much “use what feels right”.

And here’s the summary:
I think the truffles would be nicer with slightly less dark chocolate. Next time I’ll try Rausch Santo Domingo with 55% cocoa solids.

Toppings:

Flavorings: