The smells of childhood

It is Sunday afternoon and my kitchen smells like childhood. Specifically, like chicken soup and rice pudding. I only realised as an adult how spoilt we were food-wise (and in plenty of other ways) growing up - both my Mum and Grandma and excellent cooks and Mum always went to considerable effort to make sure we had fresh, healthy, delicious food available to us.

Growing up, chicken soup was a regular feature on our winter dinner table, and it reliably featured whenever anyone was sick with a cold or upset tummy. When I was newly home from the hospital with baby C, it was a big pot of chicken soup that Mum brought over. I was pleased to be able to make it recently for my FIL during his recovery from surgery. It's good convalescent food but can definitely be enjoyed by those in good health too! E still refuses to eat soup of any kind, but now when I make this I use at least some chicken legs, and then extract a plain one for her to have with salad whilst D and I have soup. I am looking forward to baby C being big enough soon to eat some of it blended. And despite having cooked this recipe a number of times I have only just nailed the dumplings. It's good on its own but it's even better with dumplings!

Rice pudding was another of my favourites growing up. I have never liked milk on its own, but I do like sweet, creamy rice with a brown volcanic crust. You can make it with very little sugar and call it a healthy dessert and if you like, eat it with fruit, fresh or tinned. I like it with fresh or stewed strawberries, or frozen raspberries, or tinned cherries or tinned pineapple. Or it's good on its own. It's also good for breakfast the next day! E is already a convert. C is still not old enough for anything containing sugar and is still stubbornly gagging on the slightest lump but soon I shall make a sugar free version for her.

Anyway, here are the recipes for rice pudding and chicken soup with dumplings. They make a good two course dinner because the soup is not so substantial you're too full for dessert, and it's light enough to justify a carb-heavy second course. I think the rice pudding was originally courtesy of the AWW cookbook and the chicken soup is courtesy of my Grandma.

Chicken soup with semolina dumplings

1. Put 1kg skin-on chicken pieces (either wings or legs or a combination are best although you can also use a whole chicken chopped into pieces) in a large saucepan, cover with cold water and turn on heat. If using wings then chop each wing into three pieces first.
2. Meanwhile, in a separate frypan, heat a little olive oil and add a large diced brown onion, two chopped carrots, two sticks of celery (and optional – a handful of mushrooms thinly sliced) – mix until combined, then cover and gently sweat for a few minutes until the vegetables brighten and soften a little.
3. Then mix two dessert spoons of plain flour with half a teaspoon of sweet Hungarian (not smoky) paprika and stir it into the vegetables. Sweat for another 30 seconds then turn off the heat.
4. Keep an eye on the chicken pot and using a slotted spoon remove any scummy stuff that comes to the surface.
5. Take a large tomato, score a cross in the skin, and put it in a bowl covered with boiling water for a few minutes. Then peel away the skin and finely dice the flesh.
6. When the chicken comes to the boil, add the vegetables from the frypan, the diced tomato and a few more inches of water.
7. Cook for at least 45 minutes, until the vegetables are soft and the chicken is cooked through. The cooking time will depend on the size of the chicken pieces you are using.
8. In the last 10 minutes you can add other soft vegetables if you want – Mum sometimes puts in a drained jar of asparagus spears, or a cup of frozen peas, or diced capsicum, or diced green beans.
9. If you have used chicken wings you can leave the meat on the bone if you want. If you used bigger pieces then take them out, shred the meat from the bones and replace the meat in the pot.
10. Optional semolina dumplings – per 75gm of egg add 4 tablespoons of semolina, 1/2 tspn salt, a 1/2 a dessert spoon of softened (but not melted) butter and some very finely chopped parsley. Stir hard to blend the butter into the egg and semolina. Put in the fridge for at least 15 minutes so the batter thickens.
11. Once the soup is cooked, drop small dobs of batter (about half a teaspoon - they will puff up as they cook) into it and simmer for about another 10-15 minutes. You can take one out to test and chop it in half to see if it is done, they need to be soft and cooked all the way through. The dumplings absorb the broth so you might need to add a little extra water if using dumplings.  Alternatively you can cook the dumplings in a separate pot of boiling water and then add them to the soup once cooked.
12. Serve the soup sprinkled with more chopped parsley, good bread and a dose of nostalgia.

Baked rice pudding

1. Preheat the oven to about 200C.
2. Get an oven proof casserole dish and into it stir together:
   a) 1/2 cup of rice - aborio is good but long grain also works
   b) 2.5 cups of milk - if you're feeling particularly indulgent you can substitute some of the milk with cream but we rarely have cream so I almost always use all milk and it works out fine
   c) 1/4 cup of brown sugar (less if you are trying to be healthy)
   d) 1 tspn of vanilla essence or some grated vanilla bean
   e) the finely grated rind of half a lemon
3. Over the top of the liquid scatter a dessert spoon of butter, broken into little knobs and about 1/2 teaspoon of grated nutmeg.
4. Cook for about an hour depending on how solid you want it. It's helpful to use a glass dish as you can see how cooked it is. The top should have a brown, puffy crust which will collapse when stabbed with a spoon.
5. Serve with fresh or tinned fruit.

Meatless Monday: chickpea and vegetable soup

Soup, pre-mulching

As of the last fortnight we've started menu planning in an attempt to reduce our grocery bill, which has increased by about 50 percent in the last two years. Part of this involves attempting to use stuff from the fridge, freezer and pantry rather than buying lots of new ingredients each week. Obviously the effectiveness of that will reduce as our stockpile does, but it's working quite well so far. So it was that during last week's planning session I decided we needed to eat something involving lots of chickpeas, and concocted said soup. I used:

2 tins of chickpeas, including the liquid from one tin
Two and a bit large carrots, sliced thinly
A few bits of floppy celery from the fridge, sliced thinly
1 large white potato, chopped
Half a red onion, diced
Half a teaspoon of minced garlic
A sprig of rosemary
500ml vegetable stock
A slosh of milk

1. Saute the onion, celery, carrots and garlic in a bit of oil in a big saucepan.
2. Add the potato, stock, chickpeas plus juice and rosemary, crank up the heat and cook until the vegetables are soft (20-30 minutes?). I took the rosemary out after about 10 minutes thinking the flavour might be overpowering but next time I probably wouldn't bother. Next time I do it I might use cumin and ginger instead of rosemary.
3. Add the milk and mulch with a hand blender.
4. We had it served with a bit of plain yoghurt, plus toast.

Not souper glamorous, haha, but nutritious and tasty and fed two people with leftovers for probably less than $5.

This post is part of the Veggie Mama's Meatless Monday series.

Meatless Monday: lentils, feta and other stuff salad

This was a really good salad improvised after a bit of a rubbish day. It was supposed to involve lentils, pomegrante, feta, mint, parsley and vinaigrette, but when I cut the pomegranates open they were patently unripe (just topping off the day really).

So it wound up involving lentils, fried onion/garlic, cherry tomatoes, cucumber, avocado, parsley, mint, feta and vinaigrette. I'm not sure what the originally planned one would have tasted like, but this version was amazing.

We had it with Tasmanian salmon, which was not very vegetarian of us. And it was a Wednesday not a Monday. And I was too hungry to bother taking a photo of it. So you'll have to take my word for it that it was good.

Meatless Monday: grilled vegetable pasta salad

This was a mish-mash of various googled recipes. These ingredients made enough for two adults:

Half a bag of pasta swirls

Handful of mushrooms, sliced

One large spring onion, finely chopped

A bunch of asparagus, cut into pieces

Half a red and half a green capsicum

Half a punnet of cherry tomatoes

Quarter of a zucchini, finely sliced

Handful of basil, shredded

Salad dressing (olive oil, vinegar, teaspoon of mustard, crushed clove of garlic, in jar, shaken)

1. Put the pasta on to cook.

2. Fry the mushrooms and spring onion together with some garlic in olive oil until the mushrooms are cooked.

3. Grill the zucchini until soft and grill the capsicum until blackened. I grilled the zucchini in a frypan and blackened the capsicum directly over the stove flame which was a bit of a pain but effective. You could also do both jobs at once on the barbeque but I couldn't be bothered turning it on. Run the capsicum under cold water, then rub the skin off and finely slice the flesh.

4. Throw the cherry tomatoes whole into a dry frypan until they get a few brown/black spots and soften. Then cut them in half. 

5. Lightly steam/boil/microwave the asparagus. It occurs to me now that it might have been worth turning the barbeque on as I could have done the asparagus, mushrooms and tomatoes on it as well as the capsicum and zucchini, although I think you would need to be careful not to burn/overcook various components.

6. Throw everything together in a big bowl, including the salad dressing and basil, stir well, serve.

Meatless Monday: Gazpacho

It's been so hot here than anything we can eat that doesn't require cooking is a winner.

So here is a probably-not-that-authentic version of gazpacho.

750 grams of the best tomatoes you can find

Half a long cucumber

Half a red onion

Half a big red capcisum

Two slices of stale bread, soaked in cold water for 20 minutes

2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar

150ml of olive oil

Coriander

Mint

Salt, pepper

1. Score crosses in the tomatoes, then cover them in boiling water for a few minutes, remove skins and roughly chop.

2. Roughly chop all the other vegies.

3. Blitz everything in a food processor/blender.

 4. You will wind up with a very unattractive looking mush that does not appear at all soup-like. Strain it through a sieve, pushing down on it to get all the juice out.

5. Finely chop coriander, mint and extra cucumber to use as garnish.

6. Refrigerate for several hours and serve cold.

If I was doing this again I would use a quarter of an onion rather than half as I don't much like strongly onion flavoured foods. Some recipes I looked at used a few cloves of garlic rather than onion wihch might also improve things. I made this after E had gone to bed one night, thinking it would be a quick meal, but the the straining took a lot longer than I expected and rather than waiting for it to chill in the fridge we went with a few bogan ice cubes in each bowl. And so much for a meal that didn't require cooking; we wound up eating a few bowls of this as first course followed up by a healthy main of oven chips as the soup isn't really substantial enough to count as dinner on its own. That being said, it tastes fantastic and is worth the effort.

Linking up with the Veggie Mama's Meatless Mondays.

Meatless Mondays: creamy pumpkin pasta

 I've been lurking around on Veggie Mama's blog every Monday enjoying the cache of vegetarian recipes. We are far from being vegetarian at our house, but I do love vegetables of all varieties, and we have a number of vegetarian friends and relatives, so a good veggie-friendly recipe is always handy.

I'm not going to commit to eating vegetarian every Monday as we probably manage meat free meals about twice a week anyway, but I will try to post a meat free recipe each Monday even if it was consumed some other day. Here is my first attempt - creamy pumpkin pasta. It's not particularly decorative, but it creates an instant party in your mouth. Promise.

Creamy pumpkin pasta

The amounts here are very approximate as I didn't measure. I googled a few different versions of similar recipes, and then just used what we had.

500gm butternut pumpkin

1 tbspn olive oil

1/2 cup of cream

2/3 cup of full fat milk

A clove of garlic

The leaves from three or four sprigs of thyme

Grated parmesan cheese

A handful of chopped parsley

1. Cut the pumpkin into chunks, toss them in the olive oil and put them on an oven tray. Mine were probably about 2.5x1.5cm but it doesn't really matter how big they are, except that bigger bits will take longer to cook. Bake them in the oven at 200C for about 20 minutes, or longer if necessary, until very soft and a bit brown.

 3. Whizz the pumpkin into mush using a hand blender or food processor.

4. Put the cream, milk, garlic and thyme in a saucepan on low heat. You want it to boil but not crust over or curdle, so stir it frequently. Let it boil for maybe one minute then turn the heat right down.

5. Add the mushed pumpkin to the saucepan and stir it all together. Then blend it again so it makes a smooth sauce.

6. That's it. Serve it on pasta, with some grated parmesan and parsley. If I were writing a real chef-ly recipe I would have told you at some appropriate point to boil the water and cook the pasta, but you can figure that out, can't you?

 7. Eat it for dinner. Yum! If you are game you can try serving it to your toddler, but mine sent it straight back and demanded cheesy pasta for about the tenth time this week. I wasn't entirely unhappy with that as it meant there were leftovers. Yum!

Toddler creamy salmon pasta

Little E pleases me very much by being willing to eat fish. If we have fish and chips she won't touch the chips but will get through quite a bit of fish, either grilled or fried with the batter removed. 

I bought salmon for dinner for D and I, and had planned on giving E what is a staple for her: small pasta shells, a few cubes of cheese sauce from the freezer, frozen peas. Then I decided that it would go well with salmon, and chopped the skinny end off the piece (which would have been annoying anyway as it would have cooked much faster than the rest of the piece) fried it in a little bit of butter, flaked it and, voila! Creamy salmon pasta. Put together in less time than it took for Little E to watch her daily ration of Playschool. I contemplated taking a picture, then decided that the creamy mess in the red plastic Ikea bowl with the googly eyes didn't quite justify it. But E gobbled two bowls of it, then a bowl of strawberry yoghurt for dessert, and I felt like a virtuous Mumma.

What to do with yet more mandarins

1. Pick up all the ones that fell down during the rain, plus anything off the tree that looks vaguely ripe.

2.Start peeling.

3. Enlist a bit of help.

4. Keep peeling. Smush a few down your front if you want. Don't worry, there's plenty to spare!

5. Eventually you'll have peeled them all. 

6. Take them inside, whizz in food processor, put pulp in sieve over a big bowl. A heaped bucket = 1.5L of juice. Tastes good mixed with soda water and ice!

Some variety for the sausage roll fiend

I've written before about Little E's penchant for sausage rolls. Oh ok, penchant is a bit classy, it's more like an addiction. (So far at least) she has never turned them down, and lately all kinds of things I never would have predicted have been shoved away, smushed, dropped on the floor, met with a raspberry, or her old favourite "no more!"

Anyway, a while ago, Lovely Friend E gave me her recipe for vegetarian sausage rolls. I suppose given they contain no meat they don't really need the "sausage" ... perhaps "vegetarian rolls" is a better description? I digress. It took me a while to get around to making them as we were working our way through the veal and pork stash in the freezer. These ones are predominantly mushroom, capsicum, onion, oats and cheese, flavoured with tomato sauce, sweet chilli sauce and soy sauce. Little E has finally started doing what I would describe as a proper "toddler nap" - two and sometimes more hours in the middle of the day. It is really wonderful and please please may it continue. It gives me a chance to eat, read, clean, cook, potter in the garden and even have a semi decent sleep if I need to. Today it gave me a chance to whip up a batch of these little goodies.

Little E is still asleep so I don't know if she will like them but I just had four with salad for my lunch and they are yummo! I was worried the sweet chilli sauce would be too spicy for a toddler but it doesn't taste hot/spicy at all.

Here is the recipe for anyone who is interested:

Vegetarian Rolls

Ingredients

1 cup of finely chopped onion (I used half a cup and added a couple of cloves of finely chopped/crushed garlic)
1 finely chopped red capsicum (medium size)
6 finely chopped button mushrooms
1/2 cup rolled oats (I used quick oats)
1/2 cup breadcrumbs (I doubled the oats and omitted these)
1 cup grated cheese (I used half cheddar and half parmesan)
1 tablespoon milk
1 tablespoon soy sauce
3 or 4 tablespoons sweet chilli sauce (I used 2 tablespoons of this and 4 of tomato sauce)
3 or 4 tablespoons tomato sauce
3 eggs

3 sheets of square frozen puff pastry

A little extra beaten egg for brushing

Poppy/sesame seeds (optional)

Method

1. Preheat your oven to 200C and take the puff pastry out of the freezer.

2. Finely chop the onion, capsicum and mushrooms and crush the garlic (if using).

3. Mix the eggs, milk, soy sauce, tomato sauce and sweet chilli sauce together in a small bowl.

4. Stir together the chopped vegetables, oats and cheese. Then add the egg mixture and give it all a good stir. The mixture will look quite wet but don't worry because the oats will absorb most of the moisture as it cooks. If you think it looks really sloppy you can add a little extra breadcrumbs or oats.

5. Cut each square of puff pastry in half so it makes two rectangles. Using one rectangle at a time, put a line of filling down the middle. Then wrap each side over and gently press down to seal.

6. Brush each roll with beaten egg and sprinkle with poppy seeds or sesame seeds.

7. Carefully cut each roll into 8 small rolls. Arrange them on a greased baking tray. After 15-20 minutes hopefully you should wind up with something like this:

Enjoy!

 

The Great Mandarin Glut of 2011

It's on, folks. And it shows no signs of abating any time soon. This has to be the most tolerant, generous tree on the planet. It barely rains all summer, we vaguely remember to turn the hose on it a few times, we do absolutely nothing else. And look what it bestows on us:

We've been through a couple of dozen already and I'd say there's another couple of hundred to go. So earlier in the week I decided it was time to attempt some mandarin-heavy recipes in an attempt to dispose of a few.

First off the bat was mandarin jelly:

500mL mandarin juice

100 gm sugar

10 gm powdered gelatin

... all stirred together over low heat until the sugar and gelatin dissolved, and then refrigerated for several hours. It used up about 20 mandarins, which I juiced by whizzing them in the food processor and then straining the pulp through a sieve. It's tangy and sweet and was declared a success.

Next attempt - mandarin muffins courtesy of this ABC recipe. I did them in cupcake containers and they also turned out well, pretty much just butter cake with mandarin juice and zest, but nothing to complain about.

I have in mind a mandarin chicken dish but don't have a recipe, I've  googled for one but to no avail. I was thinking a stir fry kind of thing that uses mandarin juice, if I can't find a specific one I might adapt a lemon chicken recipe.

So today I"m grateful for citrus, citrus, citrus! How are things at your place this weekend?

The sausage roll fiend

Recently we had afternoon tea with lovely friend Em and her Little H (two and a half) at Lawleys, a local bakery/cafe. We preceded it with a play in the park but then E started yelling for food (fair enough as I tend to give her dinner by 4:30 at the latest as that seems to be when she is hungry and if she doesn't have something approximating dinner at that time then she winds up eating fruit and cheese and rice cakes and then not wanting dinner when I offer it an hour later). Anyway, I should have known that the box of grapes was not going to cut it food-wise and wound up buying a sausage roll for E and I to "share." The quotation marks are because E loved it so much she ate about three quarters of it and when we got home her little tummy was all distended with the quantity of meat and flaky pastry she had managed to shovel into it. So I decided that I better learn how to make the things myself.

I wanted a recipe that didn't involve commercially produced sausages, just mince and this one from Kidspot looked promising. I used veal and pork mince because that was what I could find at the supermarket, added a big stick of celery as well as the carrot and onion, and left out the salt and pepper. I wouldn't attempt it without a food processor, but with one it was pretty easy, and they worked out really well. I did them in two batches and only thought about the fact that they would freeze better uncooked after I had put the first batch in the oven. I thought we'd have trouble getting through the 32 I cooked, but pigs that we all are they are disappearing pretty rapidly! They are a big hit with E and D and I had a sausage roll dinner the other night and enjoyed them too. Here's what is left:

My Grandma's Chicken Paprika

I thought I'd add a recipe to Kate's Menu Monday even though it's not Monday (and thank God it's Friday, while we're at it). Back in the days when I got paid to work, this was quick enough to whip up after work, and if you have people coming for dinner it dresses up well as dinner party food. D will eat this and he doesn't much like chicken. Little E (14 months) will eat it if I finely shred the meat. For me, it is mainly comfort food, because it is a dish that both Grandma and Mum cook, and which I never get sick of. So here it is:

1kg chicken (thighs or drumsticks, not breast as it is too dry)
1 brown onion
2 dessert spoons of good quality sweet Hungarian paprika**
1 tablespoon of tomato paste
1 green capsicum
1 red capsicum
A little cornflour
Parsley and yoghurt/sour cream for serving (optional)


1. If you are using thighs, chop them into bits of whatever size you fancy.
2. Dice the onion and fry it gently in olive oil on low heat until it is transluscent. Be careful not to let it burn. Do this in a thick bottomed saucepan that has a lid.
3. Add the paprika and stir for another 30 seconds or so. Be especially careful not to let it burn at this point as burnt paprika tastes really bad.
4. Add the chicken and brown it. You might need to this in several batches.
5. Add the tomato paste.
6. Put the lid on and let it cook. The chicken will release enough juice that it shouldn't need any additional liquid but if it looks like it's burning/sticking then you can add a little water.
7. If you are using drumsticks it takes longer to cook and I usually cook it until the meat is falling off the bone and then remove the bones because D is a fuss pot about meat with bones in it, but you could leave the bones in if you prefer. It takes maybe an hour to cook if you're using drumsticks, less for thighs.
8. Cut the capsicum into strips and add it about 5 minutes before it is finished.
9. Once it's cooked if it looks too watery, thicken with a cornflour paste.
10. Serve with chopped parsley and a dob of yoghurt/sour cream on top.


We mainly eat this with rice or thick egg noodles but you can also have it with boiled potatoes. It is good with green beans or carrots and peas on the side.

** Grandma and Mum both moan about the quality of paprika available in Australia and specifically in Perth. Their brand of choice when it is available is Hoyt's. Apparently you should keep it in the fridge to ensure it stays fresh.