Recipe: Cheese Scones

The weather has turned. Overnight. I woke in the small hours of the morning dreaming that I was being force-fed ice cream and not liking it much. Trying to snuggle in against Mr Tabubil, I found that he’d  he had taken his half of the blankets and rolled himself around and around like a caterpillar, so I climbed out of bed and padded barefoot across the icy floor and to drag the rug up onto the bed with me.
            Morning dawned sunless and sullen, with a dark, heavy sky. Cold, dark days inexorably bend my mind to thoughts of cooking.  Hot food.  Comforting food. Scones.
            The pantry being unaccountably bare of clotted cream, I took my mother's scone recipe and swopped the sugar for mustard powder and tipped in a cup of grated parmesan cheese(a canny pantry keeper NEVER being short of a good nippy cheese) and set to stirring.
            The scones came out hot and steaming and vaguely redolent of pizza, but something was missing so we peeled half a bushel or so of vegetables and whipped up a tureen of fragrant, autumnal,pumpkin soup. 
            By now, we were on a roll. The bit between our teeth, we turned out a batch of Chocolate-Guinness Ice-Cream (courtesy of David Lebovitz' A Perfect Scoop), a loaf of Gramercy Tavern Gingerbread and no less than two Madeira cakes.*
            Between Madeira Cakes One and Two, Mr Tabubil made a run to the shops for more eggs and came back with an incidental sack full of whipping cream, so we shrugged our shoulders and whipped up a metric lake (give or take a liter) of that as well. With sugar and vanilla.
            All of this sweet stuff was starting to jangle on our taste buds, so we rounded out the afternoon with a batch of Oatmeal Raisin Cookies. The oatmeal sounded healthy, and cookies looked granola-ish and virtuous, but as they stood steaming on the counter. Mr Tabubil began to swear that he could hear them begging to fulfil their true destiny as the world’s greatest ice-cream sandwiches.  He even pulled The Perfect Scoop back off the shelf and searching the index for vanilla ice-cream, but it was dinnertime, so we stopped. And looked at the trays and tureens all around us, and began to wonder who might be available to help us eat some of it. And possibly begin to sweep up some of the flour on the kitchen floor.
            The weather boffins are promising us a cold, wet winter, but if it doesn't clear up and let us out of the kitchen once in a while, what this winter is going to be is spherical.

*That old canard about opening an oven door on a rising sponge cake on a cold day? It's true. I opened the oven door a squeak to toss in a last dusting of sugar glaze and that sponge opened up like a Florida sinkhole on the first day of the rainy season and sank without even a sigh.  

Cheese Scones

Ingredients
1 3/4 cup self raising flour
1/3 tsp salt
2 tsp mustard powder
80 grams butter - diced
3/4 cup buttermilk*
1 cup strong cheese, grated (Cheddar is best.  Parmesan is also good.)
extra flour to dust ledge

*If you can't obtain buttermilk, use the same amount of regular milk, stirred with 2 teaspoons white vinegar.
 
Topping
15 grams butter - melted
3 tblsp whole grain mustard
1/2 cup extra cheese

Essential Equipment
 
Small scone cutter (>2 inches diameter)

Pre-heat oven to 220 degrees C.

Mix the topping ingredients together in small bowl.

Sift the flour into a large bowl and stir in the dry ingredients.  Cut the butter into the flour with a knife, and use your fingertips to work the butter into the flour, working quickly until you have a bowl of fine crumbs, without any loose unmixed flour at the bottom of the bowl.

Add the buttermilk and stir gently with a spoon until the mixture is just congealed and no further.

Note: There is no yeast or extra baking powder in this recipe - scones require a delicate touch to preserve the springiness of the dough, otherwise they will come out of the oven like rocks and knives will not avail you.

Accordingly, turn the scone mixture onto a lightly floured surface and with your hands, form the dough into a mound and knead lightly.  Bring the dough together, flatten it down, turn it over - for no more than a minute perhaps, until the dough is springy and one defined mass.  If the dough is wet and refusing to form, add flour a spoonful at a time until the dough coalesces.

Spread a sheet of baking paper on a baking tray.  Press dough gently until about an inch in thickness.  Starting at the edge, wasting none of the dough (the less re-kneading and reforming of scraps you do, the better!) cut small scones.  One by one, cut and lay on the tray.

Spread the tops of the scones with the topping recipe.

Bake at 220C for 9-12 minutes, until they are risen and lightly golden on top, but not scorched.

Recipe: Garlic Prawns (and New Year's Wildlife)

Mr Tabubil and I rang in the new year in style.  When the countdowns and party hooters began in the street below us, we climbed out of bed and went to the window to watch the fireworks above the city skyline, then went back to sleep!
            On New Years Day, we went to the park and lay under a tree on a picnic blanket.  We watched small children playing soccer, and small dogs who wanted desperately to be part of the game, but ran like hell whenever the ball came near them.  Above us, parrots shrieked in the ceibo, showering the grass with little feathery fragments of seed pods, and beaning pigeons with whole ones when the pigeons strutted past.
            Under a tree was a woman with an accordion and a man with a guitar.  They played German polkas and Violetta Parra and Gloria Gaynor. In the sun, we closed our eyes and fell asleep.

In the evening we made a splendid year-end supper - light and summery and rich.

We did it like this:
 
We heated up some olive oil in a frying pan and tossed in 3 - 4 cloves worth of pressed garlic.
We sautee'd the garlic over low heat until it was fragrant and soft, but not caramelized.
Then we tossed in whole packet of prawns  - (previously peeled by moi) and added lots of fresh-ground salt and pepper.
We tossed the prawns in the pan, so they'd cook evenly without scorching, and added the juice of a lemon.  I decided that the flavor wasn't lemon-y enough and added the juice of a second lemon.
The lemon reacted with the oil  to form a nice thick emulsion. We threw in a handful  of finely diced fresh flat-leaf parsley and basil leaves. (previously diced by Mr Tabubil)
And we stirred and tossed until the prawns were tender but not yet rubbery, and served it up with jasmine rice!

I sent the recipe to my mother, who was so excited that she made it herself, and declared it fantastic.  And it is.  Give it a try!

Happy New Year!

Recipe: The Chocolate Rum and Raisin Mousse of All Good Dreams

Mr Tabubil tells me that my chocolate recipes are my dowry, and dreamily recounts the way I came to him with a notebook: a fat cardboard portfolio bursting with photocopies and handwritten recipes, all heavily smudged around the edges with egg, cream and chocolate – and rum.       
            I’m a boozy sort of cook. The recipes that Mr Tabubil counts among his favorites are a chocolate almond cake – with rum; a chocolate raisin mousse – with  lots of rum; and a boozy chocolate fondue sauce that kicks your teeth down the back of your throat and puts you to sleep at the table. If I could find a way to put rum into a cookie I'd try it, but philosophically speaking, an alcoholic cookie, doesn't feel quite right.  A cookie's a wholesome thing, and rum is hot and thick and dances on a tropical beach at midnight with its shirt off.  For cookies, dark chocolate alone (85% caffeine!) is as far as I dare go. Caffeine leave me dancing on a beach at midnight with my shirt off and bongo drums banging in both my ears, so I reckon that is sufficiently damned decadent.

             Chocolate, done properly, is a mouth full of silk and black velvet – with that lingering caffeine buzz.  Alcohol is a mouth full of fist and somebody else’s teeth.  Chocolate and alcohol, together, are a pairing that is divinely inspired, in which the alcohol ceases to be boozy, and becomes something intangible, a sensation that hovers, ghost-like, at the edge of your plate.  Try to pin it down and you won’t find it, but if you let go and return your attention to your plate and your fork, it will sneak sideways around the edges of your palate and lift the chocolate up into the realm of the sublime.

             Mr Tabubil has come over to the computer and snorted hugely and said that I wouldn’t know what to do with an elusive alcoholic essence if it came up to me on the street, wrapped its arms around my knees and begged me to take it home.  My recipes, he says, use alcohol in quantities that resemble a one-two punch, a knockout blow that leaves the eater flat on the floor with the carpet wrapped around his head.

             To which I replied that a dessert that isn’t intended as a showstopper is a waste of time and chocolate for both guest and baker, and referred him to the chocolate mousse I made for a party last Saturday night – a chocolate mousse that broke two diets, left four guests under the table (albeit smiling) and sent everyone home in taxis.

            Mr Tabubil snorted again and said it was a fault of my upbringing, and went away. 

            Mr Tabubil is not entirely wrong.  I was raised in a household both sozzly and decadent. Not to drink- my parents never drank, but they kept booze on hand for guests who did, and after the really good dinner parties there were always half-bottles by the score that needed using up - so we cooked with them. And my mother, an almost-teetotaler, tippled while she cooked, and dinners that started with beef bourguignon went down deep and twisting rabbit holes to places that were extremely interesting indeed.  

             Her magnum opus was the evening, two days after a really good party, when I came home to find that she'd used the leftover red wine in a cabbage stew, soaked the cucumber salad in chardonnay instead of vinegar (I don't recommend the substitution) and, halfway down the second half-bottle of the stuff, she'd had a brainwave and boiled the rice in champagne.
             It wasn't a meal that was precisely edible, but it got us through all of the leftover bottles, all right. The liqueurs and chocolates that we ate for dessert were almost conventional - except for the moment when someone giggled and cried 'whoops!' and sat down and missed her chair - with a carafe of hot coffee in her hand.  The next morning was all about caffeine - believe me- but the bongo drums came first.

             In her honor, and in the honor of the six sozzly guests of Saturday last, I present to you my mother’s own recipe for Chocolate Mousse.  You can work with the given amount of rum, or you can go the whole Tabubil and magnify it.  I leave the choice to you.  I will only note that dinner invitations to our house are a highly sought-after commodity, and a guest who doesn’t have a headache after the dessert course is a guest we haven’t yet satisfied. 

Chocolate Rum and Raisin Mousse

Begin Marinating raisins 2 days ahead of serving.

Make the mousse 1 day ahead of serving.  

You need at least twenty-four hours to soak the raisins (a full week is even better), and the completed dessert must rest in the fridge for another twenty-four before you serve it so that the flavors can blend and mellow.  Serve it early and you will be astonished by its insipid banality.  Wait a day and you will be hit with a bolt of pure chocolate goodness.

Ingredients:

225g semi-sweet chocolate (substitute for 112 g dark chocolate and 112 milk chocolate)

1/2 cup sour cream

3 eggs, separated

1/2 cup loosely chopped raisins (slice them open to allow entree to the alcohol)

3 tablespoons dark rum (start with 1 1/2 and add the rest as and when needed)

300ml thickened cream

2 tablespoons castor sugar

The day before you plan to make the mousse:  

 Put the rum and raisins together in a shallow bowl.  Cover and leave to soak.  Add more rum as and when necessary.  Use as much as you like!

The day of the cooking:   

Bring the sour cream and egg yolks to room temperature.  Melt the chocolate.  Add the melted chocolate to the sour cream and egg yolks and stir until smooth; add the raisins and all the unabsorbed alcohol.  Lightly whip the cream and fold it in. 

In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form, gradually beating in sugar.  Fold beaten egg whites into the chocolate mixture. 

Spoon into serving glasses (keep portions small!) and refrigerate overnight.

Enjoy!

(Important note – you must always add melted chocolate TO the eggs and dairy – and not the reverse.  There’s a complicated chemical reason for this that I can’t precisely recall  – but I can tell you from extensive personal experience that if you do it wrong the chocolate tends to seize and solidify and ruin, and you have to start over!)

Saul's Vanilla Icecream

Saul likes to serve home-made vanilla ice cream with his Apple Tartain.  And his Crepes Suzette.  Here's how he does it.

Anglaise Sauce

This vanilla sauce can be used as a base for an ice-cream, or, with a little brandy or Grand-Marnier added to it, poured it over fruit cakes and fruit salads!

If you're using this anglaise as a base for ice-cream, you can toss anything into it before you put it in the churn: strawberries, peanut butter, honey etc. etc. etc. 

Note:  If you are adding a sugary ingredient, cut down on the sugar in the base recipe.  If you are adding alcohol, keep the amount to a minimum or it will affect the freezing and cause the mix to separate. 

Yummy example:  To make rum 'n raisin ice-cream, soak raisins overnight in just enough rum to allow the flavor to permeate the fruit.  Toss the mildly alcoholic raisins into the anglaise at the very end of the cooking process - allowing the hot anglaise liquid to fully rehydrate the fruit.

Ingredients:

1 Cup Heavy Cream

1 cup milk

1/2 cup caster sugar

5 egg yolks

1 vanilla bean split and scraped, OR 1 overflowing tsp of vanilla seeds.  (NEVER use the cheap vanilla flavoring on the supermarket baking shelf.  You may as well go buy Dairy Bell ice-cream, and then there is no hope for you at all.)

In a small saucepan, and over a moderate heat, bring the cream and milk to a gentle boil.  Do not walk away!  The milk WILL overflow as soon as you turn your back.  (If using a small pot over a gas stove, do not let the heat get high - or the flames will run up the sides of the pot and scald the milk.) 

            The anglaise must be prepared over a water bath, so set a pot of water to boil - you want only an inch or two of water in the bottom of the pot so that there can be an air space between the boiling water and the bowl of ingredients.

            In a cheap metal bowl, whisk the egg yolks and the sugar.  (These must be whisked immediately upon contact - or the sugar will begin to cure the yolks, and you will have nasty flakes of dried egg throughout your anglaise.)

            As soon as the hot milk mixture begins to boil, remove it from the heat.  Whisking continuously, gradually – very gradually - add the hot liquid to the egg and yolk mixture.  Adding the hot liquid very slowly will stop you from ending up with rich scrambled eggs instead of a smooth sauce.  (Which might be nice to try as well.  Go ahead.  I dare you.)

            Place the mixture over the water bath and whisk continuously.  You must keep the liquid MOVING.  If the sauce at the sides of the bowl begins to solidify, stir it back in - you don't want scrambled vanilla eggs.  Stir until the mixture holds –

            Test by dipping a spoon into the sauce.  Remove the spoon, turn it over and drag a finger through the sauce on the back of the spoon - if the clear line holds free of sauce, the anglaise is ready.  Remove from heat.

            Important Note: Because of the egg and dairy content, an anglaise is very susceptible to bacteria growth.  Unless you plan to use it within an hour or two, chill quickly in an ice bath or over a bowl of ice.

Speaking of Cooking - A Recipe for Apple Tartain

There were a few things I'd meant to post before we left Australia that didn't quite make it up (on account of being busy packing and all the associated nonsense.)  Here's the first.

In our very last cooking classes before we left Australia, Saul-the-French-Chef taught us to make Apple Tartain.  It was a very Saul  sort of dish - an apple tart distilled to its essence: many apples, much butter, equal parts sugar, more butter, and a little slice of pastry - buttered delightfully.

            And though the tartain was ambrosial, it was the Nurses who Will Not who made the evening noteworthy.

            The Nurses who Will Not are a three nurses from the maternity ward of the local hospital, and weekly, they profess themselves horrified at every single scrap of evidence that cooking involves objects and processes biological. 

            I've nothing against dietary principles, but these ladies don't do meat, vegetables, carbs or basic mineral supplements.

            Raw meat and vegetables leave them appalled, and as for dairy - the obscenity of anything that comes out of the squeezy bit of a cow leaves them glagging and glaaaking and quoting heart-healthy statistics before the stove like they're reciting scripture.

            Saul smiles blandly and deploys butter like pre-emptive military strikes, and the rest of us are flummoxed as to what these women are doing in a Cordon Bleu cooking class in the first place.  Our initial suspicion was that they'd thought the class would be theoretical.  But after the first class, when they kept coming back -  imagine an unusually specific fundamentalist religious group, hanging around a skateboard park, casting dire looks across the half-pipe and passing out tracts on the sins of playing x-sports on Sundays.   As far as we can tell, these medical ladies have identified Saul as the Anti-Christ of Nutrition, and we've started to suspect that they're only staying around in the hopes of driving him entirely demented.

This evening, they didn't disappoint. As the slabs of butter came out of the fridge, the Nurses started shrieking.

            "O Lord!  O LORD - he's at it again!" They tittered, collectively.

            Saul put on a deeply blank face and commenced to cook.  He peeled and sliced the apples, dropped them into  a bowl of water and lemon juice, set a cast-iron skillet over a gas flame and set to melting butter and sugar -

            The nurses scowled and huffed their way through the demonstration, until the apples were simmering with the butter in the skillet, and Saul had  picked up a spoon to begin teaching us the accompaniment. 

            "We'll do an anglaise custard."  Saul said.  "And a note here, although I hate to have to say it, when you make an anglaise, try not to use a really thick cream - " (He sighed a little in regret.) "It tastes fantastic, but there's just too much fat in it.  You'll split your sauce."

            The scowls became a row of deeply tucked chins and mouths folded up like purses.

            "Well, there you go."  They said.  "Well there you go."

            "Finally some sense, don't you think?"

            "He's learning something at the last, isn't he?"

            While Saul whipped his anglaise with slightly more than necessary vim, Nurse #1 turned to her compadres-in-denial and said - very sotto voce  - "Are you coming back next term?"

            One of her compadres snorted and said in a scarcely less audible voice - "I hardly think so.  He's so lax.   In his…standards."

            They eyeballed the happily bubbling pan of apple and (mostly) butter on the stove below, and they snorted and pursed their lips some more and looked at each other with righteousness in their eyes.

            Saul eyed them right back and flipped another hundred grams of butter into the frying pan, and began cracking eggs.  Double-yolkers.

            The Nurses urrgh-ed and glaah-ed in disgust. 
            "It's so….. biological!"  One of them moaned, with her hand pressed to her mouth.

            Saul smiled.

It is a very good Tartain, and taken in moderation, would make an excellent addition to a dinner table once every six weeks or so.

            In defiance of those who eschew all dairy on glakker-y principle, and in praise of all standards that reckon that a whole brick of butter is never enough, here is the Recipe for an Apple Tartain.  And on Friday, the recipe for Vanilla Ice-Cream to accompany it.

Apple Tartan

I kg Granny Smith Apples

Bowl of Water

Juice of Half a Lemon

1 tsp cinnamon

Generous slab of butter

1/2 cup sugar

50-100 g butter (Depending how non-heart-friendly you are feeling) plus 1 tablespoon of melted butter for brushing onto pastry

Two small non-teflon-coated skillets

Baking paper

One sheet of puff pastry, chilled.

Place the puff pastry in the fridge to chill, and pre-heat your oven to 220C (400F).

Peel  1 kg of Granny Smith apples.  Juice half a lemon, and add the juice to a bowl of water.  Core the apples and slice thinly, then place the apple slices in the water to rest until needed.

Heat a small non-teflon-coated skillet  and drop in a generous slab of butter. (Go on, don’t be shy.  Add some more.  It’s good for you.) When the butter is melted and sizzling, add the apple slices, half a cup of sugar and 1 tsp cinnamon.  Cool until the moisture from the apples has boiled off and keep cooking until the contents of the skillet have caramalized to a dark brown color.

While the apple is cooking, make a cartouche.

Short version: Using baking paper, cut a circle with a diameter that matches the diameter of your skillet.

Fancy cordon-bleau version: Take a square of baking paper whose side is the diameter of the pan you  will use to bake your tartan.  Fold it in half.  Fold it into quarters.  Fold it again - and keep folding until you have as narrow a triangle as you can fold without the paper slipping out of shape and sliding every which way.  Cut off the wide end of the triangle.  Unfold your paper - hopefully it will be in a circle!  (If not, try again.  It's only paper!)

Take another small non-teflon-coated skillet - or other shallow circular baking pan - and spray the bottom with a non-stick cooking spray.  Lay the cartouche on the bottom of the pan. 

When the apple has caramelized, remove the puff pastry from fridge.  Lay the puff pastry over a plate roughly the dimension of your baking pan and using the plate as a template, cut the puff pastry to fit.  (Don't remove the puff pastry from the fridge until you're ready for it.  You want to use it CHILLED.)

Spoon the caramelized apple on top of the cartouch in the pan.  Drape the puff pastry over the top of the apple and press firmly into place.  Brush the top of the pastry with melted butter.  Work fast - the heat of the apple will retard the rise of the pastry if you wait too long!

Bake for 20 minutes or so until the pastry is golden brown.  Remove the tartain from oven and let it sit for 2-3 minutes (otherwise the tartain will fall apart when you turn it) Turn pan over onto plate and serve with home-made vanilla ice-cream.  Enjoy!

* A variation.  Once out of the oven and while still hot, flatten the puff pastry with a tea-towel and you have a lovely biscuit crust.

French Onion Soup Redux.

Last night's french onion soup was sheer heaven on a plate, but I do not recommend that you make it for yourself.

This morning, Mr Tabubil and I stink. 
Everything we wore to cooking class last night smells heavily of onions.
Everything we put on last night after we got home from cooking class reeks of onion flatus.  Deep and complex and rich and layered and green.
As does our hair. 
And our skin.
And our bed - oh lord - I snuggled down next to Mr Tabubil this morning and as the covers shifted, I just about fainted.  I rolled over to tell him so and he almost passed out from the fart-and-sulpher miasma that beat the words past my tonsils.

We are doing a lot of washing this morning and we are deep-six-ing all of the leftovers.  I shed tears as I watched the croutons slid into the rubbish bin, but we both have to go to work today - and we both care to keep our jobs.

The soup was delicious, but ultimately, not worth the cost. Unless you live alone, somewhere out on a desert atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  In which case - go ahead.  I bear no responsibility for what your off-gassing is going to be doing to the reef.

Recipe: French Onion Soup!

This evening in cooking class, we made french onion soup!

            It was the real thing: two kilograms of onions, a liter of beef broth born from scorched beef bones and simmered for 12 hours in a stock pot the size of an oil drum, and a block of ancient gruyere cheese that smelled like your very best vintage toe-jam.  It’s a  recipe for the ages - requires no particular technique, but the payoff is enormous; for every scrape of your wooden spoon across the enamel bottom of your cast iron pot, the flavor - and the afterburn - are massive.

It goes like this:

Peel two kilograms of onions (my partner and I had to do this in shifts on account of the tears) and put them through a food processor.  (Ye old traditional chefs can chop them by hand if they like.  We didn't bring along our swimming goggles.) 
            Take a deep, solid, cast-iron pot, chuck in the sliced onions along with 100g of butter and a pinch of pepper and salt (one pinch each), pop the lid on the pot and let the onions steam over high heat.
            Stir occasionally, and as the onions start to ooze and caramelize, stir more often, and after an hour or so, when you have a pot of dark, brown, odorous onions, add a liter of beef stock (in half-cup portions, so that you don't cool the pot down with a great one-liter liquid dumping) and a bouquet garni (parsley stems, thyme sprigs and a bay leaf, all tied together with string so that the woody stems don't get lost in the soup and end up between somebody's teeth), season it with more salt and pepper, and stir and stir and stir until the onion has disintegrated and the liquid has become thick and gelatinously brown and and you have one incredibly fragrant onion stew.

            But don't stop there!  Decant the stew into bowls, and top with a thick layer of gruyere cheese that your partner has grated while you've been stirring the onion pot.  Top the cheese with a layer of king-size croutons (take one baguette, a tureen of melted butter and a paintbrush - slice, paint and bake) and more cheese, and pop under the grill till the cheese is bubbly and you're about to lose your mind from all the incredibly redolent smells swirling through the air.  Eeek!

Now eat.

I adore me some gruyere cheese.  When Saul reached the cheese part of the cooking demo, reverently unwrapping a wedge of gruyere , inhaling deeply of the odor of mouldering socks and pubescent male bedrooms, and passing the block of cheese around the class for our own personal moments of reverence, the Nurse who Will Not made her Great Pronouncement of the evening:  
          "Oh, that stuff."  She said.  "You know, Coles (a supermarket chain) sells a version of this.  It's called Gruyere, too.  It doesn't look anything like what you've got there, and it doesn't taste anything like it, and it's all waxy and slippery, but it also doesn't smell like that stuff there (urgh!) - and that's the main thing."

             Saul didn’t even try.  He merely breathed deeply and tossed an extra pinch of salt into his onions.

            With malice forethought.

            The squeamish hospital nurses are a something of a bewilderment to Saul.  There are three of them this term, and he's not entirely sure what they're doing here.  They appear to be cooking under sufferance,  they emit screams (with hands clapped to mouths and pointing fingers of horror)  whenever Saul adds salt to a frying pan, they quote heart-health statistics at him whenever he cooks with butter, and most deplorable to his French-trained soul, they refuse to cook animal flesh to a state that is anything less than black and leathery - and then they slice and pan-fry the leather to make certain that there's absolutely nothing organic left in it.  The things those three women found it in them to do to a Chateaubriand two weeks ago had Saul almost in tears. 

            He recovered - and rebounded - last week when he brought in a tray of plucked ducks for duck l'orange:  these women don't enjoy handling raw meat, and when he lifted one from the tray and it dripped, they gagged and had to turn their faces to the wall, and all evening it was clear on his face that the intermittently squeamish noises of maternity ward nurses suffering a crisis of nerves when faced with a raw duck was pure music on his ears.  One hopes that this class will broaden a few horizons, but at present they're refusing to join us on the main range for cooking.  They prefer to work with the slow domestic gas stoves on the back wall - this way they don't have to worry about somebody (read Saul) accidentally (read More Malice Forethought) dropping a pinch of salt into their pot as he passes.

Mr Tabubil is working a project that doesn't leave him time for cooking classes at the moment, but he stopped by on his way home from work, and stayed for dinner.  He wasn't given much of a choice.  Saul fell upon him with a delighted cry of "Maaaattteeee!" and fussed around him like the old proverbial mother hen, filching everybody's croutons and dipping spoons into everybody's soup and generally "feeding him up". 

            "You're looking thin, mate.  Isn't she feeding you?  What sort of hours are they working you?  Don't they leave you any time for meals?  Here, have a beer. Red wine?  White wine? Another slice of bread?"

            Even after the filched snacks, Mr Tabubil was hungry- Saul caught him slicing the end off a baguette and brushing it with the melted butter, and disappeared into the walk-in fridge.  He reappeared a few minutes later with a club sandwich three inches tall, and sat Mr Tabubil down at a work-bench and watched delightedly as he ate the whole thing.

            Mr Tabubil still had room for most of a big bowl of soup afterward, which might be why tonight, as I sat on the sofa gently off-gassing, he was sitting upright in bed complaining of a terrible stomach ache and belching like a bull moose.

            This soup is an amazing recipe, but don't try it if you have to be around people for fourteen or fifteen hours afterward.

Seriously.  We were a cautionary tale for the ages.

(Bonus quote for the day:

            The Nurse that Will Not: "How do you tell when the caramelization process is completely finished?"

            Saul : "The onions are completely black and have turned into briquettes.  Any other questions?"

            The moral of the story being - don't attempt to mollify a French chef by suggesting that he "top his French onion soup with Coons Tasty Cheese (TM) to stop it smelling funny."*)

*Translation for non-Australians:  in our supermarkets, domestic cheese comes two ways:  Mild and Tasty.  That funny foreign stuff is for gourmet wierdos who shop the deli section. 

Recipe: Fabulous Ginger Cookies, at last and so there.

Well, after one perfect inaugural performance and several subsequent months of reading the recipe completely arse-backward (too much butter, then too much flour, then not enough flour, then absolutely no idea but they came out of the oven as ginger-scented puddles) and overcompensating in all the wrong directions, I have finally figured out how to make really good ginger cookies.

            It's not actually that hard.

            All you have to do is follow the recipe.

            These cookies are a slightly modified, Antipodean friendly version of a recipe from Epicurious for those of us who don't want to- or don't have the ingredients to - play with shortening or molasses.  They are dense, moist, chewy, gingery, and very very moreish.  This afternoon I made dozens.  I have plans.

Behold!

Ingredients

2 cups plain flour

2 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger

1 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon ground cloves

1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom

3/4 teaspoon salt

1 cup diced crystallized ginger (slice it really fine or an unwary bite could take your mouth off)

1 cup (packed) brown sugar

227g unsalted butter

1 egg

1/4 cup golden syrup (or molasses, if you're being all northern hemisphere about things)

Granualted sugar for rolling cookies (blonde is best!)

What to do with the Ingredients

Combine first seven ingredients in a bowl and whisk to blend 'em in.

Cream the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy.  Add egg and golden syrup and beat until blended.

Stir in the flour mixture until you have a smooth dough.

Lay the dough on a sheet of clingwrap, wrap it and refrigerate it until cold.  (minimum one hour)

Preheat the oven to 350F/180C.  Line two baking sheets with baking paper.

Fill a shallow bowl with granulated sugar.  Using wet hands, break off dough and roll into 1 inch balls.  Roll in sugar and place on prepared baking sheets. 

Bake cookies until cracked on top but still soft to touch - about 12 minutes.  Cool on baking sheets for 3 minutes, then transfer to racks and cool.

(Cookies keep -airtight -  up to 5 days at room temperature.)

NewMarket!

I'm back home! And receiving hugs and cuddles and mmmm....  It's nice to be back. 

As a farewell to Brisbane of sorts - here are a few photos of the Newmarket Farmers Market - taken last Saturday on an outing with my sister and a few friends.  Five weeks ago this land was underwater.  Today it's the best place in Brisbane to buy your fruits and vegetables. 

Our friends did their bread-and-butter shopping, but it was a first visit for Dr Tabubil and I, and we ran around like mad things, drunk on sunshine and German sausage and home-churned butter, dodging terriers on leashes and babies in strollers and came away with our arms full of total non-essentials:

A kilo of ripe lychees
Lime and Grapefruit Cordials
Loaves of French Bread
Fresh Haloumi Cheese
Great bunches of damp mint leaves
Fresh-roasted macadamia nuts
Dukkah and zaa'tar made with aniseed and walnuts and pomegranate seeds
Portobello mushrooms the size of dinner plates
 

For dinner that night we baked the mushrooms and ate them like steaks.  We fried the haloumi with lime juice and ate it with slices of fresh valencia oranges. And we buried our noses into the arm-loads of mint between courses.

Baked Portobello Mushrooms
4 large portobollo mushrooms, cleaned
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
Fresh or dried herbs (I used basil, because it was what I had in the pantry.  It tasted fabulous)
Salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. With a sharp knife, score a cross-hatch pattern in the mushroom caps.  Score an X in the base of the stem.
Whisk other ingredients together in a bowl.
Lay a sheet of baking paper in a shallow baking dish and lay the mushrooms gill-side down on the paper.  Brush the oil-and-vinegar mixture over the mushrooms, covering the entire surface.  Bake for 30 minutes or until tender.