Mend and make do

Roast Beef and Vegetable Pie

It’s a Sunday morning in early January and I’m sitting in bed as I write this.  This is unusual for me as it’s now after 8 am and the house is very quite.  My partner has taken our three kids to stay overnight at a friend’s farm on the outskirts of Melbourne.  My alarm went off at 6 am but I kept on hitting snooze, relishing the opportunity for a sleep in on a cool and quiet morning.  

It’s been awhile since my last chance to look at this blog.  I started writing this back in November and then things started to get a bit crazy.  I had leased a shop front back in July while still at school fulltime doing a Patisserie course.  As the year started to wind up, I needed to do something about getting it open.  The events of the last two months are the subject of another (soon to be written) post but in the meantime, here’s one I prepared earlier…

Mend and make do was the way people used to live before 24 hour supermarkets, convenience stores and on-line shopping.  I’m old enough to remember when the shops shut at 12 pm on Saturday and didn’t open again until 9 am Monday morning.  Things seemed to move a lot slower then.  The cars didn’t go as fast, mail was delivered by the postman and the milkman still delivered milk in glass bottles with foil tops.

It’s a concept that seems foreign to many and old fashioned to most.  Why fix something when you can go buy a new one?  Shopping has become a recreational past-time rather than a necessity.  What do you want to do today? I don’t know lets go shopping.

After spending Saturday morning at the Collingwood Children’s Farm Market helping my de-facto cousin in-law Naomi on The Butterfactory stall, I came home laden with fresh local produce.  A succulent piece of bolar blade roast beef from Warialda and potatoes, pumpkin and parsnips from Kinglake were destined to become a Sunday Roast.

Sunday morning was spent in the Red Cat Food Store kitchen.  The strawberries my mum had picked up in the Yarra Valley became rather runny strawberry jam,  I’m calling it strawberry sauce.  It’s great with natural yoghurt and my coconut toasted buckwheat muesli for breakfast.

When I got home on Sunday afternoon, I put the piece of roast beef in the oven at 250 C and cooked it for 15 minutes before turning the temperature down to 160 C.  This ensured that the thick layer of fat started to render and crisp up.  After another half an hour the vegetables were put in and cooked along with the meat for another hour.  When the meat was cooked, I took it out and rested it covered in foil while I made the gravy.

We pulled broad beans out of the garden to make way for the summer tomatoes.  These were shelled and cooked in a pot of boiling water, then the skins were peeled off the beans and they were coated in a dressing of lemon juice, olive oil and garlic.

The now succulent beef was sliced thickly and put into a serving dish and all was served on the table with a jug of gravy.  I find with three small children it’s often easier to bring all the food to the table.  The kids seem to eat more when it’s there in front of them and it means I can enjoy a meal without having to get up and down all the time.

As the piece of beef was more than sufficient for one night’s dinner and I always cook more roast vegetables than we could possibly eat, there were plenty of leftovers.  What remained was chopped up and used to make the most fantastic Cottage Pie I’ve ever had.  That’s a pretty  big statement as my mum’s Cottage Pie was and still is a favourite of mine.

Mend and Make Do Pie

This is not really a recipe with measurements and a list of ingredients, it’s more of an idea and a method that will hopefully get you thinking about how you can re-purpose last-night’s leftovers.  

All the leftover roast meat was chopped into smallish pieces after removing the fat layer from the top.  The fat was also chopped and added to a hot cast iron frying pan to render.  When the fat started to run, I added diced onions and cooked them to translucent and golden.  Then the meat and diced roast vegetables (potatoes, pumpkin, parnips, carrots, onions and garlic) were added with the left over gravy and peas.  This was then cooked until bubbling and thick.

The filling awaits it’s potato topping

I could have stopped there and served it up as a roast meat and vegetable casserole but decide to boil some potatoes and mash them with a generous knob of butter and a little milk.  The meat mixture was placed in a square pyrex dish and topped with the mashed potato.  A sprinkle of parmesan and some more butter to finish it off and into the oven at 350C for about 30 mins or until the top is golden and crisp and the gravy is bubbling.

Absolutely delicious! This would also make a great pie filling and this method could be used with any leftover roast meat.  The kids devoured it and my eldest who hadn’t been so keen on it the night before came back for seconds and thirds.

Quick and easy does it

Today I’ve been at home with just my youngest son, Oliver, who is 3.  We took the two older ones at school and kindergarten then walked home.  When we got home, Oli decided he wanted me to make biscuits.  If left to his own devices, Oli would live quite happily only eating biscuits, Vegemite toast and breakfast cereal, maybe a banana or two.  He’s a carbs lover, likes potato, chips or boiled but not mashed.  He especially likes biscuits, sweet or savoury it doesn’t matter to him.

Because I’m in the process of setting up the kitchen in the shop, I have few ingredients or cake tins left at home.  This means that at the moment, when Oli says lets make biscuits, the options are fairly limited.  ”What kind of biscuits do you want” I ask.  ”Let’s look in the biscuit book” he says.  Yes I’m a passionate, some might say obsessive, baker but I have few books dedicated solely to biscuits.  I find one book with biscuits, but most of the recipes required ingredients I don’t have to hand.  Whilst the shop is only two minutes walk around the corner from where we live, the journey becomes longer and more difficult with a three year old, so I choose to use what’s in the pantry – not much.

I manage to find a bag of rolled oats, I know I have some butter, flour, sugar, eggs, spices and a couple of bits of dried fruit.  After trawling the interweb, I find this recipe on the Martha Stewart website that looks appealing.  ”10 mins preparation time” it says at the top of the recipe, just my kind of thing.  Melted butter, another of my favourite ingredients.  I love to cook, but sometimes I’m lazy.  After all day in the kitchen at school making “L’Exotique Gateau” yesterday, I really can’t be bothered.  Minimum effort for maximum effect is what I’m all about today.  I don’t have any brown sugar in the pantry but I have close to a cup of organic raw sugar and a jar of molasses.  Perfect, that’ll do the trick.  No raisins, just a small amount of cranberries and currants.

When it comes to baking, people tend to get all hung up on following the recipe exactly.  Yes, I agree, that it’s important when it comes to things like sponge cakes or pavlova to get a good finished product.  However, as my experience at college has taught me, in a class of 10-12 people, all given the same ingredients, the same recipe, the same instructions and cooked in the same oven, everyone produces something slightly different.

I’m learning to relax, trust my instincts and just go for it.  So when I didn’t have all the ingredients the recipe called for, I made it up as I went along.  This is the result -

Cranberry Oats Squares

• 170g butter, melted
• ¾ cup organic raw sugar
• ¼ cup organic molasses
• 1 cup plain flour
• 2 cups rolled oats
• ½ cup dried cranberries
• ½ cup dried currants
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 egg, beaten

Preheat oven to 200°C (180°C fan-forced).  Combine all dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl.  Add the molasses and vanilla to the melted butter.  Pour over dry ingredients and stir to combine.  Add the egg and combine.  Put into paper lined square tin and bake for about 30 minutes.  Cool in the tin for 15 minutes.  Remove from tin and cut into squares while still warm.

It’s smelling fantastic as it sits on the top of the stove cooling.  Just the thing for hungry kids after a day at school/kindergarten and hopefully some leftover for lunch-boxes tomorrow.

Cake for a Friend

Last week my friend and fellow blogger Lara, who blogs as Thornberry, asked me to make a cake for her book group.

We have a semi-regular play date on a Tuesday morning so our 5 year olds can get play while we drink coffee, eat cake and do some knitting and crochet.  The last time we got together I made an apple tea cake from a recipe of my great-aunty Alma.

It’s a deliciously moist cake topped with slices of apple and dregged with sugar and cinnamon before baking.  It was one my grandmother would make for her friends when they came for afternoon tea.  My brother and I would be lucky enough to get a piece when we visited a few days later.  It was always spread thickly with butter or served with lashings of cream as Granny claimed it was “a bit dry”.  It never was, but no-one complained.

A few weeks ago I had made an orange semolina cake with blood orange syrup for Father’s day.  Lara was lucky enough to get some of the leftovers.  So when her request came, she asked if I could make an orange cake or and apple tea cake.

I still had some blood oranges left from making Marathon Maramalade and had been thinking about making a flourless orange cake with them.  I suggested this to Lara and she was happy with the idea.

I used Stephanie Alexander’s recipe from Cook’s Companion for Claudia Roden’s Middle Eastern Orange Cake.  It’s always moist and delicious but notoriously hard to get to cook all the way through without burning the edges.  I followed Stephanie’s advice to use a tin that allows for the batter to be no more than 6 cm deep.  I also lined the sides of the tin with three layers of baking paper to offer some protection to the sides of the cake.

I used 4 small blood oranges in a pot of water and cooked until tender.  The recipe said 2 hours but as my oranges were small and thin skinned so they only took an hour.  I removed them from the pot and cut them into quarters so they’d cool quicker.

When it came out of the oven, the cake was cooked perfectly all the way through and didn’t sink in the middle.  I really wanted to cut a slice and have a taste, but as it was for an order, I couldn’t!  I thought about dusting the cake with icing sugar but as it was to be served later it would have melted. The other option was an orange icing but upon further investigation, the pantry was bare of icing sugar.

I finally decided to make blood orange compote to serve with the cake as a little something extra on the side.  Segmented oranges and orange zest were placed in a bowl.  I made then a light caramel to which orange juice was added then poured over the top of the fruit and allowed to cool.  I’m told it tasted “superb”.  Thanks to Lara for the great photos.

I have a few blood oranges left and it’s my partner’s birthday in a few days.  I think I’ll have to make another Flourless Blood Orange Cake so I can get a piece!

 

Make cake while the sun shines (twice cooked is twice as good)

Today has been a gorgeous spring day in Melbourne.  I’ve always loved the “in-between” seasons, spring and autumn. The cool crisp mornings that give way to sunny warm afternoons.  It makes me just want to get into the garden and pull up the weeds that have thrived in the winter rains.  Instead I’ve been in the kitchen, driven by the small nagging voice of my 5 year old daughter.  ”I want ice-cream, mummy”.  I’ve been trying really hard to refrain from buying things from the supermarket.  Instead I make it at home.  Mostly it’s mayonnaise, more on that another day.

Instead of going back out to the shop to buy cream for ice-cream, I remembered a Nigella Lawson recipe from delicious Magazine I’d made sometime ago.  It has no cream in it, only egg yolks, milk, sugar and lemon rind.  All these things I had.

So having made the custard for the gelato di crema, I was left with egg whites.  Usually I put them in a container in the fridge with good intentions of doing something with them.  They then languish at the back of the shelf until discovered some months later as the source of that mysterious bad smell in the fridge.  Not today.  Today I decided to make pavlova.  I used a mish-mash of various recipes.  The result was a concoction of 5 egg whites, a cup of raw organic sugar ( ground in the food processor to somewhere between caster and icing sugar), a pinch of cream of tartar, 2 tsp of white vinegar and 2 tsp of tapioca starch.

I baked the pavlova in the oven at 160C for about 40 minutes then turned it off and let it cool down in the oven whilst I went and did the after-school pickup.  When I came back and opened the oven about and hour later, I was somewhat disappointed with the results.  It was crust, but when touched it broken and seemed to be very thin.  There was also a lot of weeping going on and not by me!  I had undercooked it or not whisked enough after the sugar went it.

After it was cooled I put it into and airtight container to await the return home of my pav-loving partner.  When I took it out again a few days later it was very wet and not looking the best.  My choices: bin it or rebake.  So back into the oven it went, for about half an hour, I can’t tell exactly, I forgot to set the time (something I do a lot).  I was alerted by the smell of something cooking and when I opened the oven, I remembered I was trying to save the pav! By this stage it was nicely brown and crusty so the oven went off and I left the pav to cool again.

Some of you may remember I had collected a large box of blood oranges from my defacto-cousin-in-law a little while back.  Being early spring here in Melbourne, I just couldn’t bring myself to buy strawberries to top my twice cooked pavlova.  I like to use what’s at hand where possible.  I’d been reading Maggie Beer’s “Maggie’s Table” and had come across her recipe for Blood Orange Curd.  ”Why not?” I thought.  It would be a bit like an upside down lemon meringue pie, only with blood orange.  So I preceded to follow her recipe, but being nervous about curdling it, I took it off the heat and but it into a bowl in the fridge to cool.  it seemed a bit runny but I hoped that was because it was hot and a rest in the fridge would thicken it.

A few hours later I returned to check and the curd was still runny.  Under-cooked again! What was going on.  So this time I did away with the bain marie and put the curd into a saucepan and recooked over gentle heat until it thicken.  It tasted good but lacked the citrus punch I wanted to compete with the sweetness of the pavlova, so I zested a blood orange and added it to the curd.  This vastly improved the flavour, however next time I’ll add more juice.

When the curd was cold, I slathered it over the top of the pavlova, and served it with a good scoop of lemony gelato di crema.  Delicious!

Dinner, the easy way…

The last few weeks have been a bit of a blur for me.  My partner is often away for work. Usually it’s two-three days at the most.  This time it’s different.  He’s in Europe on business (and pleasure!) and he’ll be gone for 4 weeks in total.  Today marks the end of the third week.  He was due to return tomorrow, but is staying away an extra week. Lucky him!

Tonight I had to pick up my eldest from a play date at his friend’s house at 5:30, right in the middle of dinner prep.  Whilst doing the food shop today I picked up some chicken schnitzel at the butcher.  For anyone who knows me, this is unusual.  Normally I would buy the chicken and crumb it myself but after three weeks of solo parenting whilst also going to school three days a week, I was looking for something quick.  So at about 5 pm I decided I should get dinner organised.  Obviously chicken schnitzel was on the menu, but the last few times I’ve cooked it, I’ve found it a bit oily.  I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately about paleo diets and not using processed oils, so I needed another way to cook my schnitzel.  Why not cook it in the oven, so I Googled and came up with this recipe.  It solved both my problems of frying and using oil.  Fantastic, Butter Baked Chicken Schnitzel.

Whilst searching for recipes I came across a Jill Dupleix recipe for Chicken Parmigiana  which took my fancy, so by combining the two recipes, and steaming some vegies, I had dinner on the table in half an hour of arriving home. As I don’t have a microwave, this was a bit of an achievement. I made the sauce from Jill Dupleix’s recipe. It took 5 minutes to chop the garlic (and onion, not in her recipe, as I realised after I’d chopped half of it!).  Then I threw the lot in a saucepan, brought it to the boil and simmered for 20 minutes.  That was done before leaving to collect son number one.

When we got back, I put the potatoes in the bottom of the steamer, covered them with water and brought them to the boil.  I brushed the crumbed schnitzel with butter, put them on an oven tray and baked in a hot oven for 10 minutes.   By the time they were ready to turn, the potatoes were almost done, so I put the broccoli, cauliflower and carrots on to  steam.

The kids all turned up their noses at the idea of chicken parmagiana, so I was on my own. I put the sauce and cheese on one lonely schnitzel and put under the grill while I served up the kids meals.  Being 3, 5 and 8 they like their food to be simple.  I need a bit more flavour.  It turned out to be a delicious meal with a minimum of stress, just what I needed.

Marathon Marmalade

Last weekend I took a drive 3 1/2 hours north of Melbourne, to the delightful town of Myrtleford. I was lured by the offer of free blood oranges as well as the opportunity to visit my de-facto cousin-in -law and her family. My kids got to spend the weekend with their cousins and I got free fruit. It was a win win all round. Plus I got to try my hand at buttermaking at The Butter Factory.
The Butter Factory is run by Naomi Ingleton, where she has been making beautiful cultured butter for almost two years now.

Blood oranges in the pot

There was reason for my mad dash northwards, Blood Orange Marmalade. The assessment task for Gateaux (one of the units in the Patisserie course I am doing at the moment), is to make and present a Gateau. The one I have decided to make will have a blood orange marscapone mousse layer in it. I have tried in the past to buy Blood Orange Marmalade, with no success. The solution to this problem? Make my own!

Back home I looked around for a recipe for Blood Orange marmalade, and found one for Sicilian Blood Orange Marmalade that sounded like fun to make. I never seem to be able to follow a recipe exactly, though. I used 3 kilos of oranges, which barely made a dent in the box! As the recipe said, I used a fork to prick my oranges all over. Then I soaked them in a bucket of water for 4 days, changing the water every day. It may sound like a lot of work but it only took a minute to pour off the water and refill the bucket. At the end of 4 days I chopped the oranges, quite roughly, because precision cutting is not one of my strengths. I also recommend using a really sharp knife, as those orange skins are quite tough.

I had started cutting at about 10 pm. I’m a late night cook. With three small kids I don’t always get around to doing the things I want at a reasonable hour. My youngest decided to wake up in the middle of my chopping and would not go back to bed without me. He is three and still co-sleeps in the bed with my partner and I. With my partner overseas, it was up to me to get him back to sleep. After a few failed attempts at returning the youngster to bed I gave up and explained that I wouldn’t be going to bed until my oranges were chopped. He sat down on the kitchen stool to watch and wait.

With lots of interruptions, I finally finished cutting the fruit at about 11:30 pm. The recipe said to add the sugar and cook until it was dissolved then cool and leave over night. I knew I was pushing my luck with my little helper, so decide to stir in the sugar, cover the pan and leave it until morning, effectively macerating the fruit. I have done this in the past with apricot jam, so why not marmalade?

In the morning, whilst eating breakfast, I stirred the fruit and sugar over a low heat until dissolved, then turned it off to cool, while I dropped my eldest son at school. Upon my return back home I brought the fruit and sugar to the boil and simmered until it gelled.

The bottled results of my marathon efforts are cooling on the bench behind me, with the seals on the jars “popping” in a most satisfying way as I type this.  It is only now that I realise, I forgot to put the lemon juice in! Told you I can never seem to follow a recipe…

PS. As this is my first ever blog post, I’d really appreciate any constructive feedback on my writing style, content etc.  Just be kind please!

The finished product freshly bottled and awaiting labelling.

Coming Soon…

Welcome to the blog of the Red Cat Food Store.

The store is still under construction.  We aim to be open to customers full time from December, when there will be seasonal festive goodies to buy.  We will be making delicious hand made cakes and pastries to take away.