Vietnamese dinner for 3

I'm going off topic, branching out to savouries, carried away by the extreme moreishness of tonight's dinner. We had Japanese food the other night for dinner and I had tempura batter left over: googled it and some internet people claim the Vietnamese eat tempura. Well, if it's on the internet it must be true, right? What to eat when you take out the meat? Eat this, baby, eat this!

Jasmine rice: you can figure this out by yourselves. Just make sure you wash, wash, wash the rice first. If you don't have jasmine rice, make plain old white, I won't tell anyone. I threw in a few snowpeas once I figured the rice was done and left the lid on for them to steam.

Peanut Sauce:

this is crazy-good. It's great that you might have lots left over, put it on steamed veg, eat it with crudites, mmmm.

2 cloves garlic

2 tbsp cilantro

2 tbsp peanut butter

2 tbsp lime juice

1 tbsp soya sauce

1 tbsp rice vinegar

1 tbsp chopped ginger

1 1/2 tsp sugar

1 tsp sesame oil

1/2 vegetable oil

Whiz all this up in your whizzer of choice. (I use a tiny counter-top whizzing thing and it does the job brilliantly).

Tempura dipping sauce:

1/3 cup mirin

1/3 cup soya

Boil very briefly in a saucepan and pour in a little bowl for dipping.

Vietnamese Tofu:

1 package of firm tofu (or medium firm, throw caution to the wind!)

2 cloves of garlic

5 tablespoons soya sauce

1/2 cup vegetable oil

1 teaspoon sesame oil

1 bulb of lemongrass, fresh as you can find (should feel somewhat pliable)

Take the tofu out of the container and wrap gently in a piece of paper towel. When it's dry, cut into long, thinnish strips.

While the tofu's drying a little, chop up the bottom of the lemongrass, the bulb part and a bit of the green. You'll have to take off at least one of the outer layers of the lemongrass unless it's super, big-city fresh. Chop it up pretty finely and put it in a mortar. Add the chopped garlic and grind, grind, grind. Or throw it in a machine if you like making noise and washing up stuff. Put it in a bowl or pan and add the other ingredients. Add the tofu and let marinate for about an hour. When it's good and soaked, fry it up. There's plenty of oil in the marinade so no need to add more. Turn that heat up high, slap a lid on and turn the slice over when they are browned. Serve with all the nice goo from the pan (which will mostly have cooked away).

Tempura:

1 egg

2 cups of water

2 cups of flour

Mix egg with water, then watery egg with flour. Heat vegetable oil really high (then I usually turn it down just a smidge, but keep an eye on your tempura and judge accordingly). When the oil's nice and hot, dip your vegetables (we always have sweet potatoes or yams, carrots, broccoli, peppers, and onions are also nice) in the batter. Carefully (this stuff is Hoooot) drop into the oil. Stand there watching it a while. Think your thoughts, don't take any phone calls. When it's browning a tad, turn it over, cook a wee bit more. Take it out, put some more in. Let the stuff that's waiting on a paper towel cool down a bit then give it a test bite. Mmmmm.

Yummy, gooey, crunchy, soft contraband

As part of my saving money and decluttering drive I've realised I need to keep better track of the groceries we've already got on hand (so back you go, redundant package of black sesame seeds). We were needing something yummy, gooey, crunchy and soft and I unearthed a package of sliced pecans I'd semi-forgotten about. Mmmmm, these could become pecan squares I thought to myself (I was feeling a bit flaked out, if you'll pardon the pun, from the recent pie-making so didn't go to chocolate pie-crust pecan pie, which, of course, was my first mental stop on the pecan goody train). These turned out Gorgeous, just Gorgeous!! As I slipped them into the oven I realised Max could not take them to school as the school is nut-free. Ah well, better make him some Chocolate Spice Cookies then. Fortunately we were sent one heck of a wind storm which knocked out power to the school, giving us a chance to eat Every Last Pecan Square and me a chance to make the Chocolate Spice Cookies.

Pecan Squares

For the Shortbread base:

3/4 cup of butter, softened*

1/2 cup brown sugar (not packed)

2 cups white flour

scattering of chocolate chips (optional!)

For the gooey pecan top:

1/2 cup butter

1 cup brown sugar (not packed)

1/3 cup honey

2 1/2 cups (roughly) pecans

2 tbs cream (ran out of cream, used milk, seemed fine to me)

Making the shortbread: blend the butter and sugar thoroughly, then add the flour till combined. Put the dough in a lightly greased 8 by 8 square pan (or thereabouts) and press. Bake the base until firm, about 15-20 minutes at 350 degrees, until firm and lightly browned. When it comes out, if you like, scatter the chocolate chips about straightaway.

Making the pecan topping: While the shortbread base is cooking, chop the pecans if not already chopped (though why you'd buy whole pecans for a recipe indicating chopped is beyond me: ergonomics, bakers, ergonomics!). Melt the butter slowly (burned butter seldom being a good idea) and stir in the brown sugar, honey and cream. Remember how hot this is and do not touch it, even if it does look really good. Simmer for a minute, stirring a little. Stir in the pecans, Bob's your uncle. Pour the pecan ooze over the base and pop it back in the oven. Given that the base is already cooked it's a good idea to put it on a cookie sheet so that the base does not overcook. Maybe tent the top with tin foil so that it doesn't over-brown. cook till most of the filling is bubbling and then whip it out. Let it cook, significantly, and then ... ooooooh :)

* recipes almost always specify unsalted butter, but it costs more and in my possible ignorance I figure that if recipes asking for unsalted then always ask you to put salt in the recipe, well, I'm skipping the middle man here and just using regular old salted butter. If you really like unsalted, or understand the mysterious behind buying unsalted and then putting salt in the recipe, well, it would be about 1/2 tsp of salt back in. But I don't see the point really.

Pie day!

This is very unseasonal of me. The grocer's had a sale of two bags for one (doesn't that sound more enticing than 50% off? Implies somehow that we are getting one over on the man!), so I bought two bags of granny smith apples. Then I had to do something with them as the kids are perversely not eating apples this week. Normally I love making pies: today not so much, but forced myself to get up and bake and despite my seething I got into it after a bit and it all turned out quite nicely. The key to making pie dough is Don't Overwork It! It makes it all tough and nasty. Making a ring of pastry around the edge of the piepan helps keep it from burning (burning's a bit of a theme with my oven). If you use butter it's more likely to burn a bit. This was made on a big cookie tray as it goes further and is easier somehow to cut up for lunches. Still have too many apples!

Pie dough: makes enough for one huge sheet pie or a regular pie and little jam pies after.Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2 1/2 cups flour
4 tablespoons sugar
1 cup butter
4 tablespoons very cold water


Mix flour and sugar. Cut butter into chunks and pinch in with your fingers. Stop as soon as the butter is fully incorporated. Add in a touch of water and blend. Add a touch more if needed. You want it to just stick, if it's too wet it's a nightmare to roll out, ditto if it's too dry. I roll it out on a sheet of clingfilm and then dust with flour, then put cling film on top. For this pie roll out a huge rectangle, for a regular pie roll out rounds, and place on cookie sheet.

Apple filling

Combine about 7 thinly sliced (sliced, not chunks) Granny Smith apples with about 1/2 cup white sugar or a combination of white, brown and honey in a bowl. Add 1 teaspoon of cinnamon and a pinch of nutmeg and stir to combine. Put the apple mixture on the dough and roll out the top sheet of dough. Place that on top and trim. Poke a few holes with a fork (not sure if this is strictly necessary as apples might like a bit of steam, but puts you in the pie-making tradition). After about 30 minutes watch it carefully as some ovens (ahem) like to burn people's pies. Cool a few minutes before letting kids attack pie. We like ours with a thin piece of cheddar. If you make a regular sized pie use the leftover dough to make little round jam pies (they bake much more quickly and need longer to cool: boiling jam is not your tongue's friend!).

Best weekday breakfast for cold days

It's been a heck of a year and my appetite has returned in leaps and bounds. I tell myself that this breakfast might keep me going till lunch and keep me away from (in the winter) chocolate cookies at 10:00 am or (in the summer) Starbucks chocolate banana smoothies. Mixed results on that front as willpower has as least as much to do with it as a full tummy, but this is a gorgeous breakfast, and once I've made a batch it lasts at least a couple of weeks (eating it 6 mornings a week). This is a flexible recipe: feel free to change up the nuts and dried fruit, but the oatmeal + oil + sweetener ratio should stay the same

West Coast Granola with compote

3 cups uncooked oatmeal
1/2 cup oat bran (OR 1/2 cup flax meal OR 1/2 cup hemp seed OR both)
1 cup pecans (or walnuts or whatever nut you like)
1/2 cup pumpkin seeds
1/2 cup sunflower seeds
1/2 cup olive oil
1/4 cup water
2/3 cup maple syrup or agave syrup or brown rice syrup or honey or a combination
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 heaping teaspoon cinnamon (optional)
1 cup dried apples (or blueberries, cherries, cranberries etc)
1/2 cup dried barberries (available in Middle Eastern stores)

Mix together everything but the fruit and bake for 20 to 30 minutes (till it's pretty dry) at 250 degrees. Stir every 10 minutes or so to ensure even cooking and avoid burning. Remove and stir in fruit, store in an airtight container.

Fruit Compote
1 bag frozen berries (about 3 cups?): generally I use rhubarb, a little raspberry added in is nice too
a bit of of water
honey to taste (in the case of rhubarb you will need maybe 3 tablespoons).
Boil till the fruit is softened.

I tend to add about a couple of tablespoons of fruit compote as well as some nice plain yogurt (goat yogurt is very luxurious). The compote lasts a couple of weeks in a jar in the fridge, if I can it properly then of course it lasts longer. Mine does not tend to last at all as I eat it up!

Keeping us warm on a snowy day food

Oh my, look what it's doing out there. Snow! Real, Canadian-like snow. I was going to drive somewhere, but I guess I'm not so it must instead be time to do some cold-weather cooking. A nice sun-shiney cake and a bin full of homemade granola should do the trick.

This is adapted from Ottolenghi's Orange Polenta Cake but as I don't much like polenta in cakes I've reworked it and it is now Orange Blossom Cake. It is gorgeously damp and looks like the sun and tastes like Portugal (if Portugal were a cake).

for the batter:
just shy of 1 cup butter
just shy of 1 cup sugar
3 eggs, just beaten
zest of two oranges
2 teaspoons orange blossom water
2 1/2 cups ground almonds
1 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder

for the caramel topping
1/2 cup sugar
2 tbsp water
2 level tablespoons butter
2 oranges, very thinly sliced

Glaze
bit of marmalade

Lightly butter a cake tin and line with parchment paper (really you want to do this otherwise you will create a very sad mess due to the caramelising). Heat the oven to 325 degrees.

Grate the two oranges and set the zest aside. Slice a smidge off the bottom and top of the oranges so that there is no white showing. With a small and delicate knife carefully cut away the remaining white bits of the oranges. Now slice them very thinly indeed (not so thin they'll fall apart but not so thick they will feel chunky when you bite into them: thinnISH). Make sure there are no pits because when the cake is upended you will the oranges.

Now make the caramel. Put the sugar in a nice, heavy saucepan and add the water. Stir gently to incorporate the water and slowly bring to the boil. Be very careful with it as a) it rather likes to burn and b) it rather likes to burn you. When it gets to a lovely golden caramel colour remove it from the heat. Standing well back carefully add the butter. Stir and then pour all over the bottom of the pan and tilt to coat. Lay the oranges in the caramel.

The cake is very quick and easy. Cream the butter and sugar then add in our eggs. Now introduce the orange zest and orange blossom water. Finally add in the flour, ground almonds and baking powder. Mix till combined but don't overmix. Pour over the oranges taking care not to dislodge them. Bake for about 40 minutes, tenting if necessary.

Remove from the oven and leave to cool for 5 minutes. While the cake is still warm (otherwise the caramel sticks like glue) turn the cake out and let cool. Remove the paper, natch.

Glaze the cake with a mixture of 4 tablespoons warmed up marmalade and hot water (boil up in a saucepan).

Shabbat Shalom!

Alright, it's not Shabbat, because if it was, well, I would not be on posting, right? But to get ready for next week, and for Clara, here's our challah. I am assuming most people's ovens do not try to burn things (ala our 1947 General Motors oven), but I do tent mine after ten minutes as I suspect the sugar in it and the glaze increase its tendency to go way too dark. So be forewarned it's a possibility. This is bread machine mixed, but if you don't have a bread machine, combine as usual, kneed 10 minutes, rise one hour, braid then rise two. Otherwise, follow directions below.

Challah

1 cup warm milk
3/4 cup sugar
1 tblsp salt
1/4 cup melted butter
2 eggs
4 1/4 cups white flour
3/4 ounce yeast (about one tablespoon)

Optional glaze
either brush a little milk over the top or an egg beaten with a teaspoon of water (you won't use the whole egg of course). Then sprinkle with sesame seeds or poppy seeds. Do this right before baking and be gentle so that you do not cause the bread to collapse.

Put ingredients in the order above into bread machine. Make sure milk is warm but not hot (hot kills yeast, cold does not allow it to rise). Beat the eggs with a fork before adding flour. Once everything's in, turn it on to dough setting. Once it's done, take out and braid: to do this separate the challah into three balls and then roll each ball into a long piece (like playing with playdough!) and braid as you would hair (Not sure mentioning hair in a recipe is very appealing ...). I put the challah on a buttered silpat mat to rest, you may also use parchment paper. At this point the challah needs to rise for at least 2 hours. We normally make the challah this way after dinner, put it in the fridge for a slow rise overnight and take it out when the cat wakes me up at 5 a.m. or so. Take it out as soon as you wake up if you lack a cat alarm clock. Bake at 350 for about 50 minutes. Check to see if it needs tenting with tin foil after 15 minutes: if it looks baked at that point then it's going to be black after 50! As with all bread it is done when it sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom. Let bread cool before either slicing or pulling apart (the braiding allows it to pull apart very nicely and is much more traditional than slicing: I've never actually witnessed slicing but I'm sure it must happen).

Chocolate bananas in paradise

Ooooh. Totally in love with chocolate and bananas all mushed up into a bit of heaven: which conflicts horribly with my attempts to swear off chocolate! My camera's bitten the dust so at the moment I'm a bit short in the "photo of our favourite chocolate cake of the moment" photo, but maybe that can come later? I do have pictures though of our chocolate banana oatmeal cookies and our banana bread chocolate cake to stimulate you and get you softening butter. So read on and turn the oven on!

Banana Chocolate Chunk Oatmeal Cookies

In light of most schools being nut-free and it being back to school season, I've taken the nuts out of this equation. Feel free to pop them back in if circumstances allow (pecans or walnuts: personally I think it's overload with the nuts, but on the other hand it's added protein). Unlike some chocolate chip cookies, these stay moist and fresh-tasting all day. Gorgeous.


3/4 cup butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1 and 1/2 tsp vanilla
1 egg
1 large banana (or about half a cup)
1 cup white flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 cup rolled oats (the kind you cook for three minutes to make oatmeal)
chocolate chunks or chips to taste

You know the drill, right? Cream the butter and add the sugar. Blend the sugar, and add the egg and vanilla. Mush that together (spoon or mixer), then add the banana. Now it's getting really wet, right? Add in the dry ingredients (which you've mixed together beforehand, right?). When everything's blended add in the oatmeal then the chocolate. As much chocolate as can be reasonably accomodated in the cookies. Bake for about 12 minutes at 375. Mmmmm


Banana Bread with chocolate icing

for years I've been baking this as straight-up banana bread and then - did I mention I've got a problem with chocolate? - I thought, I'm going to ice this sucker and chocolate it up a bit! So make it as straight up banana bread (in which case you need to bake it for longer and, in the case of my loving oven, tent it against scorching) or put it in two pans and bake for 20 minutes or so, cool and ice. Either way it's the absolute best banana bread in the world. Seriously.

1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups white flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup mashed bananas (two big or about 3 small, should be a cup though)
1/2 cup yogurt (or sour cream or 1/3 cup keffir: I usually use plain no sugar no gelatin yogurt)

Cream the butter and add the sugar. Mix that til you're bored. Get it out of your system now, instead of at the flour stage: overmixing flour in anything but bread makes it tough and rubbery. So mix the butter-sugar well instead if you're that way inclined. Add eggs, mix well. Stir the dry ingredients together and add to the wet. Add banana-mush, yogurt and vanilla. Stir well. Pour into buttered and lightly sugared loaf pan or two cake pans (hmmm ... heart shaped pans would be nice). Bake about an hour for the loaf, 20 minutes for the pans.

Chocolate icing (for any cake at all).

1/2 cup butter (very soft)
3/4 cup sifted icing sugar (if you don't sift, you get lumps, see lumpy icing in the photo where I got all lazy and instantly regretted it)
1/4 cup cocoa (sifted, see above)

Stir up the butter till it's creamy add icing sugar and cocoa and mush it all up! Ice the cake (which you've let cool for half an hour at least: it tastes incredible slightly warm with the icing, on the other hand it's hard to ice a warm cake without the icing slithering down onto the cake plate). Enjoy!

Chocolate and banana pecan crumble cake (adapted from UK Country Living)

1 cup brown sugar
3/4 butter cup
1 cup good dark chocolate
2 small bananas
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups white flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt

For the crumble topping
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup pecans, chopped
1/2 cup chocolate chips

Butter two cake pans. Melt the butter, chocolate, sugar together and then add the smushed bananas. Next add the eggs and stir the bananas in and mix well. Next fold in the dry ingredients. Pour half into the pan. Crazy-easy cake! Next, make the crumble: just chop nuts, mix with sugar and add in chocolate chips. Put half the crumble on top of the half the batter in the pan, then the rest of the batter, then the rest of the crumble. Pop it in the oven for about 40 minutes (or 20 if your stove is a maniacal 63 year old General Motors model like mine). Let cool about 15 before turning out (some of the crumble will fall off, pile it back on!).