inner pickle

Signature

Do you have a signature dish? Something people ask you to make? 

I wish my signature dish was an awesome Boeuf Bourguignon, or breathtaking hand rolled sushi or a specially delicate lemon tart. Nope. I'm pretty sure this is my signature:

Caramel.

Now, before we get into Dulce de Leche, I HAD to talk about caramel. This is one of those things I shudder to think of how many batches I've made in my young life. SOOO many. I haven't made it for ages, I obviously wouldn't let the kids eat it and Adam just doesn't really eat sweet stuff. (Leave the olives out and it's all over, though.) 

I bought a tin of condensed milk to try Dulce de leche, I had it in my hand today and thought, have to make caramel first.

A neighbour of ours when I was eight years old, Mrs Deasey, used to bring little foil pans of this to us, two doors down, as a treat. I'm not even sure we ever wrote the recipe down. I remember learning it very very young, and it's still in my head.

I remember making it at college, in the college kitchens late at night, and a bunch of us would sit around and not even let it cool.

I've made it thinner to pour over icecream and pour in tart cases but it's best left unadulterated. 

Caramel

Ingredients:

3oz (about 95g) unsalted butter

2/3 cup brown sugar

1 tin condensed milk

Method:

Start the butter melting in a heavy based saucepan on the stove then add the other ingredients and start stirring. Don't make this if you're likely to get interrupted, you can't stop stirring for a 2 year old bathroom emergency or 5 year old battery replacement drama. It'll burn in a breath.

So stir stir stir, the butter will melt and the sugar dissolve and it'll be a pale camel colour. Be very careful not to let it get too hot, use a moderate heat on the stove, if you can see it starting to burn pull it off and stir stir stir!! Basically you stir it fast for 6-8 minutes on a moderate heat until it turns a deep golden colour. It'll get quite thick, too.

When it looks like this (below) pour it onto a greased and lined plate and let cool for a minute before putting in fridge.

Mine's a tad speckled because I let it get too hot and and I got a couple of burnt bits! oops.

Chop it up with a sharp knife once cooled and hard, put it in a container and take it to work for the fellas to eat. I seriously don't need it in my fridge!! It's like the inside of a cobber. SO yummy. 

What about you? What's your signature?

xxx

Paint job

Henry hates painting. It's messy and it takes up time he could be (a) surfing the Disney Pixar website, (b) talking about his allocated computer time or (c) arguing, pleading, whining for more computer time.

Tilly LOVES painting. She's paint all day if left alone. Which is a mistake. Refer exhibit A below:

You may notice the flannel PJs: it was a before-breakfast painting bonanza today.

Everyone's getting Christmas presents wrapped in Tilly-designed paper this year. Even Elliot, the poor painted doll. (No, I didn't name him. Rachel's partner Craig named him. A year later they named their beautiful daughter Stella, so pretty. Meanwhile poor old Elliot chafes away at amusing dolly moniker. Craig is a fabulous uncle, the best kind, but perhaps don't let him name our future pets?)

Here's one she was quite sure she needed to make some artistic improvements to:

I love painting.

xxx

Oh the fun of making stuff up

I'd like you to meet my new biscuit! We might call it, I don't know, Peanut Butter and Oatmeal Biscuit?

Welcome to the world, dear sweet little thing! I'm so proud of you. I'll always be here for you. 

Ingredients

125g butter, melted

1 cup brown sugar

1 egg

2 dessertspoons peanut butter

2 cups self raising flour

1 tblsp custard powder

1 cup rolled oats

Method

Melt butter. Stir in sugar. beat in egg then add peanut butter and stir unitl combined. Add flour, custard powder and oats. Form into small balls and cook on paper-lined cookie trays at about 180c for about 10 mins or until golden. Cool on trays. Makes about 24.

*****************************************************************************************************************

A note on the 20 NEW THINGS (you may have noticed, off to the left hand side of the screen.) 

My 20 year school reunion is actually the reunion of my year 10 class. Kiama High School for some reason doesn't celebrate finishing Year 12. Excellent. 

So while I actually turned into a fairly self confident person, I wasn't always one, and opening the Facebook link for this group sent me scurrying back to sixteen years old. Really excellent.

Everyone has a nemesis at High School, right? Someone that was always there to see you trip over, go out with the boy you adored, always had the self assurance that eluded you. And there she is. On the reunion page. Oh my god this is going to so really excellent. And all of a sudden I REALLY wish I'd invented post it notes. Or moved overseas. Or could at least wear high heels without looking like an idiot. 

So I've set myself some fun things to do to take my mind off it, and maybe you'd like to come along for the ride!

Dulce De Leche is what you get when you boil a can of condensed milk for hours. Incredible caramel. I've never been game to do it with the fear of exploding cans and shattered windows. 

Shall we start with it?

Also, if you have a Brownie recipe you love, please send it to me!! I'm determined to find the perfect Brownie.

See you tomorrow!

xxx

It's always a good day...

...when you invent a biscuit! With peanut butter in it!

Except my damn camera is out of batteries and it's such a crappy old thing it only takes AA batteries (no charger) so I'll blog my bikkies another day.

I'm playing around with my blog template, please bear with me. Fonts are likely to change before your eyes as I tend to make live changes rather than in preview. Live on the edge, and all that.

Hope you all had a marvellous day. The kids are both in bed asleep or were until I heard an enormous crashing noise while on the phone to Mum about half an hour ago and it was Henry spectacularly falling out of bed. Sounded like a stage dive. Peeled him off the floor and sang two songs and all's quiet.

I love this time of night. 

(I'm so not a morning person.)

xxx

Books that change lives

So I first thought about this when I read a post by Mia Freedman here about how much she adored this book:

The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood. It changed her life. 

Huh? The only way it changed my life was that it took the place of the worst christmas present I've ever bought for anyone, particularly my beloved sister in law, Rachel. She was so polite. I kept asking her about it, I was so keen to read it after she'd finished. It had all these interviews with fabulous women about balancing their different arts and child rearing. I thought it would be great. TOTALLY depressing. Mostly all about the impossibility of balance. How if you want to do anything creative DO IT BEFORE YOU HAVE KIDS. Or after they leave home. EXCELLENT christmas gift for someone with a two month old.

I love Mia Freedman. Maybe I could send her a book that might really change her life. 

This one, my favourite of all time, a children's book of course:

The Little Bookroom. The sweetest set of stories ever written. I was given this book when I was about 8 years old and have loved it ever since. It was out of print, impossible to get, and I looked for it again just recently on Amazon for a friend and found it's available. I should buy another copy, mine is a paperback that I left out in the rain when I was 10 and it's held together by elastic bands. You can actually click here for a reproduction of the first two stories in Google Books! 

It's a big call, right. Books that change your life. I'd like to hear yours. 

I have old favourites, mostly met in childhood, the Narnia series, Anne of Green Gables, anything by Sharon Penman.

I have perennial favourites, Middlemarch by George Eliot, Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons and things I've read in the last couple of years that were brilliant, Life of Pi by Yann Martel, The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall. Mostly I forget. I read about a novel a week and I've probably read about 20 this year and I can barely remember the last five until they come up in conversation.

Any books that actually changed my life? I can think of things I was reading at critical points in my life, Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson, The Passion by Jeanette Winterson... but I haven't read any JW since about 1995. What about you? BIG books in your life?

xxx

ANZACS!

Oh the marvellousness of the ANZAC biscuit!! 

The crunchy oaty golden syrupy coconutty FABULOUSNESS! 

And all the while you're nibbling, you can think about the wonderful Australian and New Zealand women making them throughout World War I to send to the fellas in the trenches. A sensible bikky, one with no eggs and not too much leavening that could spoil them on the trip to the western front/middle east...

Except, perhaps not so! A quick check of Wiki spells trouble for the origin of this familiar recipe. 

Must look into it further.

Now, however, if you have not already memorised Margaret Fulton's ANZAC recipe, you must. It's the best. None of this puffy, raised cookie business. These are flat, fabulous, familiar ANZACS.

The very last of a whole batch disappearing (above). And I forgot to photograph them OR save one for Adam, on his way to the picnic after a 10km run. Oops.

ANZAC Biscuits 

1 cup plain flour

1 cup sugar

1 cup rolled oats

1 cup coconut

125g butter

1 tbsp Golden Syrup

2 tblsp boiling water

1 teasp bicarb soda, dissolved in a little water

Method:

Mix together dry ingredients.

Melt butter with Golden syrup then add the water and the dissolved bicarb to it. (It will froth up famously. Make sure you've used a reasonable sized saucepan!)

Mix all together, spoon onto greased oven tray and cook on a coolish oven, 150-160c for 10-15 mins until golden.

Don't forget they'll continue to cook on the hot trays for a minute once out of the oven

Makes about 24.

Found one! Hiding it for Adam.

xxx

the perfect custard

Is it possible? Is THIS the perfect custard?

My friend Estelle, also a custard fanatic, sent me this recipe yesterday. It's her Mum's custard recipe and Estelle warned that it's so good I may need to eat it all standing at the stove.

This is always possible.

I was surprised to see full cream milk powder in the recipe, in place of milk. But always willing to give something a go for the sake of food exploration, I also happened to have milk powder in my cupboard as it's an ingredient in a protein bar I make for Adam when he's endurance training.

So late last night I made Estelle's Mum's custard.

Ingredients:

2 tblsp custard powder

4 tblsp sugar

Half cup cold water

2 eggs

2 cups full cream milk powder

4 cups boiling water

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Method:

In a saucepan mix the custard powder with the sugar and the cold water. Then add the eggs and whisk. Then mix in the milk powder, not made up, just the powder. Stir in the boiling water one cup at a time and cook over a low heat until thickened. Add vanilla at the end.

Now this is interesting! Someone other than me uses custard powder!! You'd never find it in a professional kitchen but what I love about it is it's stability. There's nothing tricky about custard with custard powder.

Nigella Lawson has a kick arse custard in Nigella Bites which involves plunging saucepans into sinkfuls of cold water etc, plus half a litre of cream and 5 eggs. 

But when it comes to the end of a rotten day and all you want is custard, you need to be able to make something you can trust. Something that will never split and will work every time.

Estelle's custard rocks, it really does. It's even better cold.

But being the daughter of a dairy farmer, I'm not sure if I can revert permanently to the superior custard... I also wonder if there's something about the custard your Mum made you when you were growing up that will always taste like the proper custard.

So in the name of exploration, I made another batch today, this time of my Mum's custard, just to do a scientific comparison. Of course. I did this because the recipes were so close, I had to see the difference.

My Mum's custard

Ingredients:

2 tblsp custard powder

4 tblsp sugar

4 cups full cream milk

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Method:

In a saucepan mix the custard powder with the sugar and half a cup of milk. Then add the eggs and whisk. Add the vanilla. Whisk in the remaining milk and cook over a low heat until it almost comes to the boil and thickens. 

One last little note: If you're making a dish with only a few ingredients, it makes sense to use the best you can afford. The fewer the ingredients the more you taste the individual quality. For an awesome custard use organic milk, free range eggs and good quality extract (or even better, a split vanilla bean in with the milk and take it out at the end.) Or not. It's still awesome. 

I wonder if your kids will have a thing about your custard?!

xxx

change is as good as a holiday

Except that's not true. Is it.

A holiday looks something like this:

*Sigh*. It's been a LONG day. So the post I intended to finish about life-changing books will have to wait till tomorrow (or maybe the next day as I might have to blog Estelle's AMAZING CUSTARD tomorrow.) Anyway, this particular post is falling victim to my need to close my eyes to imagine being right here:

*Deep breath*

xxx

housekeeping

Hi! I know some of you have already found it but just wanted to draw your attention to the new Recipe Index page on the right hand side bar. It's a work in progress, I'll categorise it so it's easier to use, but at least it's a start!

Thanks to those lovely friends who've been commenting - without your comments it's a bit of a one-sided conversation and I can have that with my navel. Or with Adam when he's crashed out on the couch at the end of the day. Or with Cow, the next door cat. I love Cow. She sits in my dining room in a patch of sun in the morning. I digress. I love your comments because it gives me an idea of which posts people are responding to. 

I'm also going to list in the right hand side bar all the food adventures I plan to have in the next month, it'll give you an idea of what's cooking!

And meanwhile, I'm going to tell you a few things about me. 

I love cooking.

I love medieval history.

I love reading.

I love writing.

I love blogging.

My biggest goal in life is to publish a novel.

I love Celtic music, even though it can be as daggy as all get up.

I love films.

I love yoga.

I love people, generally. (Which I didn't, when I was younger.)

I love this guy:

He's marvellous and possibly the best fella I've ever met.

I love fabulous food and extravagant dinners but most of all I love grilled cheese on toast, sausages, baklava and I love custard. Any kind. Most of all the kind that my sister Naomi used to bring me home when we shared a house and she knew I'd had a bad day. My sister in law Rachel has taken over that post now that Nomie is out of the country and she will occasionally drop in with a pot of custard to ward off the world. I'm very lucky.

I love dark beer, like Toohey's Old, or Stout or Caffrey's.

I love a really big Shiraz.

I know it's horribly corny but I love love love my family. All of them. They're the best people I know.

I love the country (although I live in the city) and I love this house, currently for sale, three hours out of town:

Awesome, hey?

I have a just-turned five year old who's been in various therapies since he was nine months old and was recently diagnosed with a genetic disorder called Velo Cardio Facial Syndrome. He's developmentally impaired and gets terribly terribly tired and is a HILARIOUS mimic and could re-programme your web browser with his eyes shut.

I have a two and a half year old who has been trailing after her brother through hours and hours of Occupational therapy and Speech Therapy and Physiotherapy and is the most cheerful person I've ever met. She's the queen of stripping naked and wearing her swimmers over her clothes. She loves her dolls above all else and I love watching her put them to bed and sing them baa baa black sheep and pat them till they go to sleep.

All right then. 

Shiraz, anyone?

xxx

OMG! Real children eating real broccoli?

Well OK, not ACTUALLY broccoli, but broccoli soup!

(Or: what do you cook when all that's left in the fridge is a couple of heads of broccoli that might not be fresh enough to steam?)

Broccoli Soup. Even kids will eat it.

Ingredients:

1 onion, chopped

3 cloves garlic, sliced

1 tblsp olive oil

4 small to medium potatoes, peeled and cubed

1 medium sweet potato, peeled and cubed

2 heads broccoli, chopped

1.5 litres vegetable stock (or chicken)

salt and pepper and nutmeg

Method:

Cook onion and garlic in the oil in a big saucepan. Add the potatoes & sweet potato & broccoli and cover with the stock. Bring to boil then simmer for about 20 minutes or until the potato is easily sliced or squashed. Or perhaps I could have said: cooked. Season. Mine (above) served with wee dollop of sour cream and cracked black pepper.

You could halve the stock and whizz this up for babies. Yum!

xxx