Sunday Slow-Cooking recipe #1

Anyone who owns a slow-cooker will understand how I feel about mine. There's a love and a reverence I feel for anything that will work through the day (or overnight even) to come up with a tasty meal and all I have to do is sling stuff into the pot.

Massive respect.

My slow-cooker hibernates through the summer but in winter it appears, sloughs off its coating of under-the-cupboard dust and gets back into the cooking of soups, stews, ragouts or chowders that the colder weather and my family demand.

My preferred approach to slow-cooking is that there should be as little preparation as possible. The use of cans, cubes, packets and any other pre-prepared ingredients may be a no-no to some, but for me it is the quintessence of the slow-cooking philosophy. Working mothers will understand that on the weekend, you need family-time and down-time and not 'six hours in the kitchen time'. Pre-prepared is good and is your friend.

So, what's currently simmering in the kitchen (and I mean that literally, I can smell it wafting into the study where I am currently typing) is a roasted red-pepper and tomato soup.  I am not sure how recipe-oriented this blog will turn out to be, but let's give it a go. 

Ingredients:

A jar of roast red peppers, two tubs of tomato puree and two cans of tinned tomatoes.

I have no preference for my brand of puree or tinned toms. There just happened to be Ardmona on the shelves. I like to get the chopped tomatoes with added herbs, saves me having to dig around in the spice rack or spend $$$ on out-of-season herbs.

About 3 cups of chicken stock and half a bottle of white wine.

Sometimes I use vegetable stock (when I am cooking for vegetarian friends) but generally I think chicken is more flavoursome and it means that I don't have to add too much extra salt as the stock does it all for me. The wine is a cheapy from the local bottle-o. I went in and declared "I need white wine to cook with" and this is what the nice man gave me (it cost $10 and is perfectly okay for the cook to quaff while tossing ingredients into the slow-cooker). 

One onion, a lemon and three sticks of celery.

The onion will be chopped and fried, the lemon will be juiced and have the zest taken off and the celery simply chopped.

A handful of chopped coriander.

I am a recent convert to coriander. Previously, I felt it was too soapy and alkaline for my tastes but I am getting used to it slowly. If you are feeling more trad, you can use basil, fresh is best.

First up, you need to chop and fry the onion. This is the only pre-cooking that I do. I get the onion on the stove to sweat while I put the other ingredients into the pot, then when I am nearly done, I turn up the heat and let the onion get really dark and sweet. If I am feeling indulgent, I will put some sugar in to help the caramelisation process along.

I drain the peppers in the sink:

The chopped tomatoes and celery go in the pot with the drained peppers.

After that, the tomato puree and the coriander.

Then I get the juice out of and the zest off the lemon.

The onion is usually ready by now so it goes into the pan with the lemon zest. I add my 3 cups of chicken stock and my half-bottle of vino bianco.

Then I add the secret ingredient (not so secret as of now):

One of my favourite spices to cook with.

You can't go past the smokey, earthy aroma of powdered smoked paprika. For me, if a soup or casserole dish comes out a bit on the thin side, then this will save it every time. 

I like to put the slow-cooker on a low heat for 6 hours, but if you are pressed for time, high for 3 hours will also work out fine.

To whizz or not to whizz? A bit of a whizz in the blender - up to you whether you want yours very smooth, quite textured, or, as I did, somewhere in between. Once this is done, I decide how much sugar to add. You need the sugar to balance out the acidity from the tomatoes and the lemon (and this came out super lemony!).Some people like to add their sugar when they cook up the tomato paste, but I prefer to taste and add at the end.

Then into bowls with a dollop of creme fraiche and some more coriander.

And the end result!

A word on the bread. I am lucky enough to live within walking distance of one of Lawley's bakeries. Originally located in Mount Lawley, there are now enough branches around Perth to make it possible to get hold of nice bread very easily.

As it says on the bag, they also operate a pretty good cafe on their premises.

I chose a rosemary flat bread. There were sprigs of toasted rosemary scattered across the top of the loaf. It was nice and moist with lots of olive oil which soaked into the paper of the bag.

Can you see the paper glistening?

The best thing about this soup? Well, beyond being smokey, peppery, lemony and sweet, there was heaps of it left. It served 5 of us with generously-filled bowls on Sunday evening, plus I will be able to have some for work for three days this week. The only drawback about having it at work - I can't have a glass of wine on the side...

Love Shak

One place that I often find myself on a Saturday afternoon is Fremantle Arts Centre.  I drop Number 1 son at his art class and then Number 2 son and self walk the short distance to the Arts Centre. We like it because it is (usually) quiet, it is historical, there are gallerys, there is a gift shop and there is a great cafe.

Normally,  we sit in the leafy courtyard and have coffee and cake. However, the last time I went, something had changed. As I sat there with my mocha and muffin, I noticed a delicious spicy fragrance emanating from the kitchen and the waitstaff going past us with bread boards and little frying pans.  A quick glance at the menu revealed exactly what was going on:

Shak-shuka! 

I had only had shak-shuka once before and it had left an impression on my palate not easily forgotten. It's a North African dish of eggs poached in a spiced tomato sauce and, if you are tired of the standard breakfast fare offered in cafes on Saturday and Sunday mornings, shak-shuka is a wake-up for your weekend and your taste-buds. So it was with excitement yesterday, that I returned to the Arts Centre cafe to try it out.

My son is not into tomatoes or spice. He swears by the apple pie that they have there and declares that while they have it on the menu, he will never try anything else. I get this. When you are 10 and you have the opportunity for a large slice of warm apple pie, made with caramel and topped with cream, ice-cream or both, then you shouldn't pass it up.

It was one of those rare instances when he wanted his pie without anything on the side.

I ordered my shak-shuka, deciding that I would add a serve of chorizo into the mix. I also opted for a glass of local red. I've been a fan (and a mailing-list member) of Madfish Wines for many years now and when I see their shiraz on a menu I know that I can't go wrong. The shak-shuka took a little while to come but, hey, it is made fresh and when you see the little frying-pan come sizzling towards your table you get very excited!

I could have just sat and looked at it all day.

The tomato sauce was thick and still bubbling as the waiter set it down in front of me. I could smell onion, cumin and the generous handful of chopped coriander on the top. There were four slices of soft white baguette, a portion of garlic butter and  some kalamata olives on the side.

It's important to have enough bread for the mopping up stage.

The sauce was spicy without being hot - the last time I had shak-shuka, I'd been offered some home-made chilli sauce to go with it and I wish that I had had the same option this time around. That said, it was warm and studded with slices of quite delicate, fennel-y chorizo. I buttered my bread and got into it. The eggs were poached just the way I liked them, the yolk not too runny and not too firm.

 

Just-right yolk oozing onto the pan-base.

Such a good mingling of flavours in the mouth was made even better when chased with a slurp of decent WA shiraz. I tried to slow down, really I did, but before long my plate - sorry, my pan -  was clean.

The sign of a happy customer.

I sat, finishing my wine, feeling that I could easily eat the whole dish all over again if they had placed one in front of me. Luckily, things like that don't tend to happen. As it was, I was too full for dessert.

Fremantle Arts Centre Cafe opens for breakfast and for lunch. The staff are prompt, courteous and friendly - most importantly, kid-friendly. The menu is a short one, but a varied one and the wine-list is encouragingly local:

 All WA wines, bar one.

We like it so much there that we will forgive them their appalling typo at the end of the wine-list. In case you didn't notice, here's a close-up.

I don't know about you, but to me 'cockage' sounds rude.

The shak-shuka appears on both the lunch and breakfast menu, the main difference being that if you order breakfast shak-shuka, you can add chipolata as an extra rather than chorizo. Next time, I'm going back with my partner so that we can order a few more extras between us and see what they are like.

On a clear, crisp winter afternoon, sitting under the vines at the Freo Arts Centre is just lovely.

A Taste of Home

Let's start, in the words of the late. great Douglas Adams, with "a nice, hot, cup of tea". Here they are:

 Industrial strength tea to deal with industrial strength jet-lag.

What's not to like? It's strong, it's hot, it has full cream milk and it has sugar. Look at the pea-green mugs. Tea in a mug. On a wobbly table. In the village of Haworth. Luvverly.

Context: three hours before we had disembarked from a plane at Manchester airport, stumbled feeling jet-lagged and grubby to our hire car and headed north. We'd been on the plane for more hours than I care to mention, flying from Perth to Singapore, Singapore to Munich and then Munich to Manchester. The carrier was Singapore Airlines so the food and service were great but, let's be honest, airline tea and coffee, especially when you factor in those little containers of UHT milk, are not the best.

Determined to beat the jet-lag, we wound our way up through quaint towns such as Todmorden, Halifax and Hull, and then decided that, being fairly close, we would go and pay homage at the town-cum-shrine to the Bronte sisters, Haworth. By the time we got there, we were gasping for tea. Opposite the railway station was a tiny, hole-in-the-wall English tea shop. If I told you it was staffed by two hearty Yorkshire lasses with rosy cheeks and strong accents, you might not believe me, but it was. We sat outside on wobbly chairs by the wobbly table on a thin strip of pavement. It's fair to say that we gulped but, by heck! (or 'by 'eck!' as they say in Yorkshire), it was a grand cuppa. One of those memorable cups of tea that will live in legend. Nectar!

Fortified, we now had time for a bit of a look around. I won't dwell overly long on the village itself except to say that if you can go, as we did, on a glorious spring day with not too many tourists around, then it is well worth a visit.  It's very, very pretty as dour mill towns go.

Looking down Haworth High Street across to the moors.

We found a bakery in the high street with all kinds of interestingly named provender in the window. I had, of course, heard of parkin, which to me has always been a more substantial take on a flapjack or a more vigorous version of gingerbread. Parkin keeps well once made and apparently tastes better after a few days anyway, so I bet these ones stacked up in the window were approaching delicious.

I regret not buying some. They looked great and you could smell the ginger.

The jet-lag had robbed me of my appetite so I didn't buy any. Why I didn't think to buy some for later, I don't know, probably the jet-lag again. Neither did I purchase any of these:

It has to be good just because of the name.

I don't know how I managed to resist the fabulously named "Fat Rascals". I had never heard of them before but I will never forget the name. A quick search tells me that these are not only particularly local to the Cleveland and County Durham area but also that the recipe ( a rock cake with currants and fruit peel) dates back to Elizabethan times. Curiously, there is also an option to stuff them with the elements of a cooked breakfast - sausage, egg, tomato and bacon - to make a breakfast sandwich. Not something I feel I could stomach on a regular basis but  a combo that would surely make an excellent hangover cure.

We were staying in the little fishing village of Staithes where we had an 18th century fisherman's cottage (yes, I have been in Australia long enough now to be awed by anything architecturally older than 200 years) and where we also had a local pub.

On a cold night, it's great to be inside with a pint of ale and a roaring fire.

The Cod and Lobster has been on its site for many years but the building has been through a few changes. This is mainly because, sitting right on the harbour wall as it does, parts of it periodically get washed away by the huge storms that brew up in the North Sea.  Optimists that the locals are, they rebuild it and go on with the serving of beer and good pub food. It is a warm, welcoming place and has the added benefit of allowing children in until 9pm which our boys thought was 'cool'. The boys also liked the fish and chips:

I like it when you can tell there's a fish under the batter.

Now I live near to the port of Fremantle and have to say that the fish and chips there are great. However, too often the portions of fish that you get are amorphous lumps of shark covered in batter. You can't see that they were ever a fish - possibly because to do so, you would have toserve up a whole battered shark.  In Yorkshire we got used to fish that was fish shaped - wider at the head section tapering to the tail. It had a different texture to Aussie fish, firmer and chewier, very white and the sections falling cleanly apart. The chips were different too, thicker and very moist after they had soaked up the malt vinegar. And mushy peas are are main part of the dish...

 Shh! Don't tell - apparently most mushy 'peas' are really lentils.

Mushy peas with mint sauce or vinegar will come as a side serve if you order your fish and chips in a restaurant or, if you are in a chippy, close to the top of the extras' menu. A friend of mine who knows about such things, tells me that mushy peas aren't really peas but yellow lentils mushed and with green colouring added. This is because if you mush actual peas and then try to preserve them they will turn grey. Hmm.

We had a good many meals of this sort over the next couple of weeks.  Sometimes there were variations:

Deep fried garlic mushrooms at The Hatless Heron

Scampi and chips at The Hatless Heron

We discovered a great little cafe in Whitby called The Hatless Heron. I am ashamed to say that we only discovered it because of their big, obvious "Free Wifi" sign on the shop door and we were not just starved for food at that moment but also starved for Internet. We placed a biggish order (so we could eat slowly and garner as much time on-line as possible) and everything came out quickly and was very good. The scampi was juicy and there was lots of it, the garlic mushrooms were gorgeously buttery inside their crumbed coating. I got butter on my iPhone in the process of sampling one. The chips were big and fabulously textured because they had left the skins on the potatoes. I love it when they do that. Do you want a close up? Well, I do.

 Soft chips with just a hint of crunch on the skins.

As you can see from the pictures above, The Hatless Heron was also very good about serving up generous portions of simple fresh salad as part of each order. The staff seemed surprised that we actually cleaned our plates - it seems that often the salad is left behind. We could have had bread and butter for a little extra charge if we'd wanted it.

I have to put in an honourable mention for the drinks:

 I'm not a drinker of stout but I am married to one.

It smells of urine, but in a good way.

English liquor licensing laws are much more relaxed than in Australia, especially Western Australia. While there has been some recent change here about what alcohol you can buy and when, it is still something of a treat for us to go to the UK and have a drink with lunch in a cafe. My partner proclaimed his stout to be satisfactory and, not being a stout drinker myself, I will take his word for it. Me, I had a bottle of organic cider - you can tell it is organic when it is cloudy rather than clear. It was a real flavoursome mouthful, the fizz gentle and not overwhelming, the taste crisp and sour and the scent that strong fusty umami that is pleasantly reminiscent of an orchard in autumn and riskily close an un-mucked out horse stable. My partner took a sniff and declared that it 'smells of pee'. And it kind of does, but in a good appley way. Pee-smell aside, it went so well with the chips.

We did have a good day in Whitby. It was school holidays and quite crowded but we managed to buy some sticks of rock:

  All the colours of the rainbow - plus rainbow.

 And we found, but didn't buy, Vampire Relish.

Spooky.

I did try the Vampire Relish. It was your standard tomato and chilli jam which was being sold on the promise of being super-hot. I've been destroying my palate with chilli of increasing degrees on the Scoville scale for many years now so any claim to superlative chilli heat is like a red rag to a bull. I have to give it a go and see if it I can humiliate the vendor by responding to their concoction with a shrug and a 'meh'. The Vampre Relish to me it was mildly warm and not worthy of anyone's (or any vampire's) attention. It would have been nice in a ham sandwich or on a pork pie though.

If you are wondering "Why Vampire Relish?" this is because of Whitby's starring role in the book, "Dracula" by Bram Stoker. It is at Whitby that Count Dracula first steps ashore in England in the guise of a giant dog leaping off a ship where all the crew are dead, drained of their blood by the vampire.. Whitby Council, bless'em, have capitalised spectacularly on this and as a result, you can now go on "Dracula Tours", "Ghost Tours" and even experience Goth Weekends in the town. Certainly parts of it, such as the Abbey on the cliff top, are gothic enough:

 Spookier.

I don't know about a Gothic Weekend personally. Me, I'd rather go back for the scampi and chips.

Time and relative dimension in gingerbread

A few years ago I had my gall-bladder removed. (Nice hook, Strawberry Thief, you’re onto a winning blog entry here…)

No, actually, this has relevance because, sans gall-bladder, my stomach didn’t take to certain foods anymore, not without protesting its discomfort in ways both loud and embarrasing. One of  these foods was fruit-cake because of the irritating dried fruit. Now, I’m not desperate for fruit-cake for 99.9% of the year but at Christmas, for most people, fruit-cake is a bit of a sine qua non. Suddenly, I needed an alternative. It was either that or eat the fruit-cake and make Christmas afternoon unbearable for anyone who shared the room with me.

So I decided to go with gingerbread. Gingerbread is still Christmassy, causes no embarrassing eructations on my part, and is fun to make and to decorate.

One year I made this:

Christmas 2009 I made this:

But Christmas2010/New Year 2011, I made THIS:

It was the suggestion of #2 son, who, like myself, is a huge fan of Dr Who. I grew up with Dr Who. I hid behind the sofa or a cushion whenever there were Daleks and Cybermen and it is a source of unending joy for me that my own sweet boy is now terrified in turn. (Hmm, perhaps that isn’t quite what I meant, but I digress…)

So when he suggested that this year’s construction should be a TARDIS, I was happy to assent. Three days later, 'happy' was possibly not the best choice of adjective to describe my mood, but #2 son was elated and so were all his small friends.

Anyway, this is the story of the making the the gingerbread TARDIS. Fans of Dr Who might not agree that she is ‘Sexy’ but she was ‘Tasty’(and only fans will get that joke.) And, BTW, if copyright is a concern, I acknowledge that the TARDIS concept is wholly the intellectual property of the BBC/lovely Dr Who writers etc and this is not the real TARDIS, this is just a tribute.

Step 1:

Study a bunch of TARDIS images. This is easily achieved if you own boxed sets of Dr Who DVDs as we do. Watch them over and over again. Fetch out pencil, paper and ruler. Try to remember your high school maths. Make a ‘toile’ from cardboard. Use the pieces of cardboard for your dough stencils.

Step 2:

Make the dough. FYI – I am not an expert. I have had no training in making pastry or cakes, I own no fancy equipment. My kitchen is small. Things sometimes go wrong. Like this dough. I followed the recipe but it was far too ‘puffy’ and caused my all kinds of problems later on. Next year, my plan is to source a dough that makes a crisper, lighter gingerbread.

Step 3:

Cut out your pieces and bake them. Each piece takes about 15 minutes and there were so very many pieces. My tiny kitchen has no airconditioning and this was in Perth in January in a record breaking summer. Indoor temperature was in the low 30s.(Centigrade, my US friends, centigrade.)

Step 4:

All good gingerbread cooks know that you make your windows from smashed lollies. I wanted clear windows but the only clear boiled sweets that I could find were sugar-free and eucalyptus-flavoured and that would have been simply nasty. I mean, I don't even eat these lollies when I am sick (I have Allen's Butter Menthols - which taste great and make you forget your sore throat. How effective a medication they are, I am not sure.) So I went with bashed up Starburst lollipops and hoped that the effect would be cosmic.

Step 5:

The fondant. I bought this premade but not pre-coloured. Oh, that the original TARDIS could have been made of unpainted wood but, no, ‘tis blue. So there’s me, sweating into the kitchen (but not, you will be glad to know, into the fondant) and messing around with gel paste.

My hands were this colour for days afterwards. Do you remember that scene in ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ where Violet Beauregarde turns into a blueberry?

Step 6:

Roll out the fondant. Hope you have good forearm strength. I didn’t, and my arms only stopped hurting around the time that my fingers lost the blue colour.

Step 7:

Melt apricot jam. Stick on fondant. Cover all the pieces.

Step 8:

I decided to make life easier for myself by stamping in the panel-effect. Technically, on the actual TARDIS, the panels are recessed but making recessed panels would have meant more fondant which would have made the day longer which would have made me swear even more.

Step 9:

Whip up a batch of extra strong royal icing and start constructing. I use mugs to hold the pieces together while the icing dries.

This is when you find out whether your maths was correct. See how one door is higher than the other. Actually, I don’t think it was my maths. I think it was the ‘puffy’ gingerbread recipe.

Step 10:

Oh, sweet heaven, NOOOOOOOOOOOO!

The gingerbread with the fondant on top was too heavy. It folded before my eyes. I think I may have screamed. It's all a dim, dark memory.

Step 11:

Gin and tonic break. Actually, two gin and tonics.

Step 12:

Fortified by “Mother’s Ruin”, I begin the repairs.

Step 13:

No one will notice, right?

Step 14:

The roof and door detail. There should have been four slightly-pitched layers on the roof but I didn’t want to risk another collapse. Nerd that I am, I felt the lack of verisimilitude keenly. Making the light on top was interesting as I had never really paid attention to it before. I also needed to make the notice for the door panel.

Writing in gel-paste with a tooth-pick is fiddly beyond belief. I had to keep pressing on the fondant to give myself more writing space. It was suggested that I could have typed this on the computer and printed it out but I really wanted the whole TARDIS to be edible.

Step 15:

Door signage. Could I find black liquorice straps anywhere in Perth? Could I, hell. What I did find – organic liquorice, which is brown rather than black, doesn’t cut into neat rectangles and looks a bit like squashed slugs, really. By this time, however, I had reached the ‘whatever’ stage. Writing on liquorice using royal icing and a toothpick took over an hour. By that time, I was past caring that some of the signs looked like they said 'publuc'.

Step 16:

Stuck the signage on. We are done. D.O.N.E. Looks like a TARDIS and every bit edible.  Pass the Hendricks. (Actually, I had forgotten to put a Yale lock on the front door. This was pointed out to me later. Too bad. In my eyes, I was done.)

This black-and-white picture is for the William Hartnell/Patrick Troughton fans.

I sprinkled it with edible blue glitter to make it a bit more disco. I also had a tea-light inside to make it glow like the real TARDIS. What you can’t see is that fact that it is crammed, piñata-style, with jelly babies. This was a surprise for when the kids came to demolish it. Jelly-babies, hee hee!, I think Tom Baker would have approved.

Step 17:

Along with the new tradition of the gingerbread creation has grown the tradition of a Gingerbread Smash. We invite our closest friends and their children around for lunch at the end of which we let the kids loose on the gingerbread.

Like this:

And what’s left is this:

After all the angst of baking and creating, it was actually a sense of relief to see it reduced to ruins and stuffed into small mouths. The kids, nerdy offspring of nerdy parents, all knew what it was but, better still, liked the way it tasted. We won't talk about the next hour or so when the blue colouring and sugar hit home...

And that was it for another year. The problem is that with each successive year, I feel the need to go one better. I’m not sure how I’m going to do better than this but if you want to tune back in around December this year, and if this blog is still around, you can see for yourself how I go.