I have been in search of the uber healthy loaf for breakfast. I wanted tasty, filling, healthy, low glycemic, easy to make, good for toast, could last well in the fridge for the week, and a little moist. Shouldn’t be too hard?
There was the light rye with sunflower seeds and sultanas. It was almost there. Just needed a little more oomph to it though. A little bit more depth to the taste, and perhaps a touch too dry.
A few loaves later, and finally the uber healthy loaf steps up. (Actually I’m sure it could be made even healthier, by adding more grains and nuts, but if I just write the almost uber healthy loaf…well it doesn’t have the same ring to it does it?…)
The Almost Uber Healthy Loaf
200gms starter
1 cup rye flour
1/2 cup chestnut flour
3/4 cup strong bakers flour
3/4 cup sunflower seeds, LSA, (linseed, sunflower and almond meal) sultanas
1 tps cinnamon
1 tps salt
1/4 cup natural yoghurt
For this particular loaf I mixed the dough up, quick knead, and let prove for 4 hours. A fold, and then popped into my banetton for a further 6 hours in the fridge. Brought back to room temperature for another hour. Then baked at 250C with steam for approximately 25 minutes top shelf.
I find the natural yoghurt gives a touch more moistness to a sourdough with lots of other ‘bits’ in it. Not too sweet with the sultanas, which just helped balance out the nuts and seeds flavours. With the cinnamon rounding up the taste buds in it’s usual subtle way.
Mix wet ingredients together. Mix dry ingredients together. Mix them all together. Knead it a little on a floured surface, until you get a smooth dough. Let it rest in the fridge for 1/2 an hour, then roll out dough .5cm thickness (or thicker if you prefer) and shape.
Bake at 190C for approximately 20 minutes, or until light golden.
Stollen is a traditional German cake usually eaten at Christmas time. Filled with spices, fruit and nuts, then dusted with icing sugar. The shape is to represent an all wrapped up baby Jesus.
So, I had procrastinated for too long about whether to make this or not. Yes, no, yes, no…. To make or not to make?
Why would I make it?…
Because it’s delicious, I hadn’t made one before. Panettone was too daunting. I love all things German. I could sneak some marzipan in there. It would be a good Christmas cake to have. Doesn’t take a whole day (or several) to make…
Why wouldn’t I make it?…
Time factor. I’m squishing in quite a few things as it is, did I really need one more to add to the list? Not too many other dried fruit fans going to be around at Christmas…(no wait, that was a reason TO make it.)
Right let’s get cracking.
I had come across this delightful recipe. Who in turn had tweaked it from another German baker. Both sounded delicious, and as my german language skills are limited to asking how someone has slept, I opted for the English recipe.
Now obviously I can’t just follow a recipe to the letter, so a few tiny tweaks of my own were in order.
* 500gms of a mixture of sultanas, mixed fruit, macadamias, glace ginger, glace cherries, and almond flakes.
* I may have been a little heavy handed with the rum. My hand slipped and that’s the story I’m sticking with.
* Some Stollen has marzipan rolled within the dough log. This recipe didn’t have it. However, as my middle name is marzipan, I thought I should pop it in.
The shape wasn’t as easy as I had originally thought, however that just means I have to make it again and practise a little, (oh well. ) I hadn’t tucked in the top part enough, so there was a little unfurling.
Now I’m dying to cut into it. Smell it, see how it’s looking, but apparently it will taste better once ripened in a couple of days. Also, as these are to be taken else where and given to others, I couldn’t cut in to for photo purposes. (Although it was rather close, I nearly did.)
Fingers crossed it’s as delicious as I hope it is.
And for something completely different…a little Christmas in the city.
The first time I tasted a biscotti I thought it was a really stale biscuit. I kept going with it though, gnawing at the hard little morsel like a terrier with a bone until it was all gone. I was a guest and would never say no to anything I was given to eat in someone elses house. Looking around me, while gently massaging my poor gums, and discretely dusting all the crumbs that lay on my chest I realised that everyone else was dunking their biscuits in to either a coffee or little glass of sweet wine.
Ah… I tried again, reaching for another hard biscotti. If nothing else, my back teeth would a get a good work out. Dunk, dunk, dunk…a tentative nibble. Ohhh, now that’s the ticket!
Why didn’t some one tell me before?
Now for these little biscotti, there has been a varied trail of evolution behind them. The first batch tasted too plain, it lacked depth of flavours. The consistency was fine but the taste wasn’t grabbing me. Next batch, added green ginger wine and changed the sugar to a darker one. Much better in flavour, but did I need the chocolate? Third batch, chocolate gets ditched, green ginger wine and dark sugar stay. I think the winning combination. However if you do want to give them a try, tweak them to your own taste buds.
The great thing about biscotti is that they are really versatile with their flavour combinations.
Ginger Chocolate Biscotti
2 eggs
3/4 cup brown sugar (if you can get a dark unrefined one, it gives more depth to the flavour. eg. Muscavado or dark molasses sugar)
1 tps vanilla essence
2 tbls green ginger wine
1/3 cup chopped uncrystallized dried ginger
1/3 dark chocolate chips (optional)
1 1 /3 cup plain flour
1/3 cup s/r flour
Mix all the ingredients together, and give a quick knead on lightly floured surface. Divide mixture in to two and roll out, approximately 1.5 inches wide. Pop in the oven at 180C for about 30 minutes. Take out and carefully slice on the diagonal with a serrated knife (bread knife). Lay biscotti down and back in to the oven for a further 10-15minutes at 160C either sides.
These little biscotti are good dunked into an espresso or a little dessert wine, (and if not, then prepare your back teeth).
Now instead of taking a bunch of flowers to someone what about a bunch of grissini?
Easy breadsticks, that look a bit different to your usual bready business. Usually made about the thickness of your finger, and as long as you want to make them. Perfect thing to give someone as a little gift, take to a picnic, or a funny little snack that The Monkey’s thought were very cool.
Rosemary and Sea Salt Grissini
(adapted from The Bourke Street Bakery Cookbook)
600gms strong bakers flour
2 tps dried yeast
400mls water
3 tbls olive oil
2 tps salt
* 180gms old dough (I keep some in the freezer, you can easily omit this if you don’t have it though.)
extra sea salt
roughly chopped fresh rosemary
Pop all ingredients in to mixer, and mix until throughly combined (approximately 5 minutes). If using the old dough add it in, broken in to small pieces. Keep mixing on low, until dough is smooth. Cover with a damp tea towel and let prove for 1.5 hours with two folds in between at the 30 minute marks.
Put the dough on to a lightly floured surface and roll out to about 1cm thickness. Any tears in the dough just join it together, rest the dough for 5 minutes and then roll again. Once it’s rolled out let it rest for another 5 minutes and then cut the dough into strips. Any thickness you like, and then gently roll them in some fresh roughly chopped rosemary, and roughly ground sea salt. I twisted my ones which you can just make out in the end product. Pre-heat oven to 170C. Place them on a lined baking tray and let prove for 20-30 minutes. Turn oven down to 150C and bake for about 30 mins. I then turned the oven off, but left the grissini in their to further dry out.
Grissini should be dry with a great snap when they are finished.
gently cook all these ingredients, letting the spices waft around the kitchen tantalizing your taste buds
Now pop in 4 roughly cubed medium sized potatoes, (you can partly cook them in the microwave beforehand just to make the process quicker. Only partly cooked though, you don’t want mush.) Stir it round, spices and onions coating the potatoes. Done when the potatoes are soft when pierced through.
Serve with a dollop of natural yoghurt, and a seasonal salad.
Have some pastry, and fruit? Dessert doesn’t have to be fancy to taste good. I will quite often make a double batch of pastry, so it’s always in the freezer and ready to go. For this use what ever fruit is season, or if you have a batch of fruit from last season still lingering in the freezer, then it might be time to reacquaint yourself with it.
Roll out pastry, dollop on either cooked fruit, fresh berries, thinly sliced apples/sultanas/spices and then simply fold up the sides of the pastry and bake at 180C until pastry is golden. Done. Super easy, yes it is. Dust it with a bit of icing sugar if you want to ‘fancy’ it up.
If you would like to make your pie to look a little different, but not too much extra effort, try the stretched lattice look for a pie top. First up a pastry that is not going to crumble if you look at it.
Pastry
150gms chilled butter
1 2/3 cups plain flour
1/3 s/r flour
1/4 cup sugar
2 heaped dessert spoons of natural yoghurt
In a processor add the cubed butter, flour, and sugar. Process until it resembles bread crumbs. Turn out to a bowl and add yoghurt. Mix well and then knead until well combined and smooth. Pop it in to the fridge and let it have a little rest (approx 30 mins). Now roll your pastry out to the thickness that you require. Line the pie dish, cutting any extras off. Spoon in the pie middle. I used a plum and apple mixture but you could use anything that you have at hand. Roll out the remainder of the pastry and slit it intermittently with a knife.
Once that is done, gently stretch the top over the pie. This stretches out the the slits, opening up the latticing.
With this one I then brushed it with milk and sprinkled it with raw sugar. Bake until golden.
Serve with a dollop of home made yoghurt or mascarpone.
Two easy ways to make a rustic* looking pie.
* Rustic meaning I didn’t spend hours making it look pretty. Still tasty and still got The Monkeys jumping up and down yelling for PIE!!
My Nana. If you think of a little old lady with grey blue hair, hard of hearing, and a taste of milky tea. Well that’s not my nana. It may well be someone elses though.
Always impeccably dressed, wouldn’t wear a track suit to the super market, with a soft spot for chocolates and coffee, and likes her sport. Sorry did I say likes her sport? Mad keen on sports would better describe dear Nana. Will happily sit up on and watch, AFL, rugby, tour de France, soccer…anything that involves a ball, tight shorts, and moving quickly. She’ll watch it. Also a mad golfer, and rather competitive when it comes to playing board games. If by chance you need to go to the toilet while playing chess, make sure you take a good look at where all your men are before you get up…like I said she can be QUITE competitive.
Nana always has three important cooking tips for me in the kitchen.
1/ If you make a mistake in a savoury dish, cover it in gravy and no one will ever know the difference.
2/ If you make a mistake in a dessert, cover it in whipped cream and no one will ever know the difference.
3/ *this one has to be whispered* When giving someone a recipe for one of your famous dishes…always leave out an ingredient. You always want your dish to taste that bit better, (…did I mention competitive?)
Nana’s Fruit Cake- my version
(with all the ingredients in it…maybe)
250g mixed fruit
125g butter
1 tsp mixed spice
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp cinnamon
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup water
2 beaten eggs
1 cup plain flour
1 cup self raising flour
50g chopped up uncrystallised ginger
2 tbls maramalade
In a pot add the dried fruit, sugar, butter, spices, water bring to the boil. Allow to cool slightly, then add the beaten eggs. Add the flours, chopped ginger, and marmalade. Pop it into a greased pan, and bake at 150C until cooked, and skewer comes out clean.
This a dead easy recipe that you can alter to taste buds and things you have on hand. Nuts, other dried fruit, more spices etc. Freezes well too.
For people reading you’re probably thinking one of two things…
1/ what is a hopper?
or
2/ THAT is not a hopper!
To answer Number 1/ A hopper is a cup shaped rice flour pancake basically. There a few different types, (string, egg, plain…) A staple from Sri Lanka quite often eaten for breakfast. Nothing tastier than dipping a freshly cooked hopper into some curry with attitude.
hoppers photo from ‘lanka.com’
In answer to Number 2/ I don’t have a hopper pan, or anything remotely like it. Which is why my little hoppers look like plain old pancakes. If you had a deep enough wok, it would work just as well, (I have a flat bottomed one.) A traditional hopper pan is like a mini wok, and I am on the look out, yes I am…
This recipe is my take on the delicious hopper. So maybe not traditionally correct, but they still work.
I even got my mum’s vote of approval.
Sourdough Hoppers
1 cup sourdough starter
1 cup rice flour
1 tps salt
1 cup coconut milk/ or coconut cream
1/2 cup water
Add all ingredients together, and let sit for approximately 5 hours. Mixture is a like a pancake consistency, and should be bubbling away happily, when the time is up and they are ready to cook. Pop some of the mixture into the pan, if you are doing it in a rounded pan, let the edges get a little crispy and then popping a lid over the top to enable the steam to cook the inside. (The middle part will be thicker.) For egg hoppers, drop an egg into the middle, just before the lid goes on to steam.
Serve with a great curry, ripping off bits of the hopper and dunking it in.
Or, easy thing to have on Frugal Friday. Make the batch up in the morning, forget about it, then they will ready to cook up by dinner. Serve with some lightly cooked vegetables in some vegetable oil, garam masala, salt and pepper…and maybe a dollop of natural yoghurt on the side.
Night starvation…It doesn’t sound very good does it? All my life, my grandfather has used the words ‘night starvation’. I thought it was just his way off getting in a few more biscuits before bed time. “Better have a little more, you don’t want any night starvation”…Don’t mind if I do Grandpa, biscuit number 43 should do it. I always thought it was just Grandpa’s way of looking out for me, and being lovely.
It turns out, that yes, he was looking out for me as there really was something called the dreaded ‘night starvation’. Horlicks invented it back in the 1930’s as a selling slogan. A cure of those terrible hunger pains that you may be prone to if you didn’t drink their lovely malted drink before bed time. So there you go…
So what’s that got to do with my Almond Coffee Cluster? This is my prevention of night starvation. I have a habit of being just a little peckish around 9pm, not one for hot malted drinks, the cluster is an easy one to pop in the freezer and break off a segment when I need to.
Night starvation prevented once more.
Almond Coffee Cluster
200mls luke warm milk
2 tps dry yeast
1 tps vanilla
1 egg
100gms softened butter
1/3 cup raw sugar
1 cup almond meal
1/4 cup espresso coffee
450gms flour (3 cups)
3 tbs olive oil
1 tps salt
almond flakes
Mix yeast in luke warm milk and set aside for 10 minutes. Mix remaining ingredients together and then also adding milk. Once mixed together, knead well until smooth and elastic. Cover and leave until doubled in size. Divide dough into 8 even balls. Placing in greased large springform pan. Scatter some almond flakes on top. Bake at 190C for approx 30-40 minutes.
After being generously given some chestnut flour from Celia, I thought I would give Chestnut Coffee Cluster a go as well. Tastes remarkably similar, a little darker in colour, the subtle tones of the coffee added to the nuttiness of the chestnut. Same recipe just substituting the almond meal for chestnut flour.
When I was about 10 years old I tasted pumpkin pie. I thought it was delicious and it went down in my memory bank as one of the most delicious things I had ever eaten. It remained at the back of that cluttered old mind of mine, occasionally popping out long enough for me to think mmm, pumpkin pie, and then pop back in. Since starting a blog, I have been inundated with delicious looking foods around the blogasphere and one that kept catching my attention was this pumpkin pie again. Perhaps it was time to give it a crack?
A traditional Thanksgiving pie eaten in American it doesn’t seem to get much of a look in many other countries. There always seems to be other desserts to be made first. After consulting a friend from the US, pouring through my own cookbooks and scrutinizing any one that blogged a pie. (Like the lovely Joanna’s and Kimberley’s.) The day was set. Pie was to be made and let no one stand in my way.
Verdict?
….Actually I’m not sure there is a verdict. As I haven’t had a pumpkin pie since I was about 10 to compare it to it makes it a bit tricky. The recipe I had seemed a little bland. So I doubled the spices, (or was that tripled?) most American recipes call for canned pumpkins, and that just wasn’t going to happen here, (I’m pretty sure, no one would sell it in Australia.) So using a butternut pumpkin, egg yolks only (I needed the whites for something else), and condensed milk not evaporated or fresh, it was made. My grandmother rang just as I was making the mixture up and after complaining it tasted a little bland, she suggested some lemon zest. Brilliant, that lifted it up a notch. In the oven and away.
The American taste test, declared not bad. A little heavier than a traditional one, but not bad at all. (Lovely polite friends I have :-))
Not crazy sweet, (despite a whole can of condensed milk in there) and filling enough to let you know, yep I just ate pumpkin pie. I think next time I want to play around with the flavours a bit more. I may have some American readers yelling at the computer screen about now, you did it wrong. What is she thinking?…but I am thinking some muscavado sugar to give a more complex flavour in the pumpkin mixture and maybe a little caramalised toasted macadamia nuts on top to give it an Aussie twist and a little texture.
I think to be continued…
Pumpkin Pie
your favourite shortcrust pastry
desired pie dish sizes (I did individual ones and mini)
2 cups of mashed cooked pumpkin (I used butternut)
1 can condensed milk
2 tps cinnamon
1 tps ground ginger
1/2 tps nutmeg
1/2 tps salt
1 tps cardamom (I couldn’t resist, my hand naturally falls on it)
1 tps lemon zest
2 egg yolks.
Mixed it all in together. Divide into pastry lined pie dish/es, and bake at 180C until golden (approx 40 mins).
You know when something speaks to you? I mean really speaks to you?
Whether it be a person’s conversation, a song, a documentary, a book, a simple quote written on a wall. Something that really resonates in your mind. Something that that has the potential to question everything you held dear, change your perspective, lift your mood or simply make you smile and think.
I know I’m not the only one to have been moved by a simple song. (Thankfully times have moved on from when they first did. Although as a early teenager I really did believe that Roxette and Bryan Adams knew my pain and lofty love ideals. They ‘spoke’ to me. THEY understood.)
In more recent times it was a song from John Butler. I was having a woe is me, poor us living in a 2 bedroom flat in the city- whatever are we to do? No room, blah, blah, blah. ‘Better Than’ comes on and suddenly the lyrics make sense to me…..”life’s not about whats better than..” A nice slap back into reality that was. That two bedroom flat was just fine.
Watching a documentary awhile back of a young couple. Her terribly effected from a stroke, him being forced from the job he loved, to try his hand at something completely foreign in order to care for his disabled wife and two young children. All I could think about was, jeez, we had it so easy. This couple came across as so happy and yet to me their life seemed so incredibly hard.
A couple of weeks ago, watching the second part of a Kevin Mc Cloud documentary on living in a slum in India. Watching this has made me question, really question things that I hold dear once more. In comparision we are so well off. So well off it’s almost difficult to comprehend. Honestly, I felt guilt at ever complaining of lack of space. Here these people were living 20 family members to a tiny dwelling with no indoor plumping and yet they were clean, happy looking, beautifully dressed. What on earth did I have to complain about?…(and perhaps it was time to get out of the yoga pants, baggy t’shirt and ugg boots- it’s not a particularly attractive look for me.)
Gavin (from Greening of Gavin) had a documentary ‘speak’ to him. He had a green moment that changed his whole lifestyle. A suburban family man now living a wonderfully inspiring sustainable life.
Running through the park recently, feeling pleased with my running, I paused to catch my breath. Two people over took me. Casually chatting, decked out in their uber cool running gear, going at a cracking pace. Gazelles would have had trouble keeping up. This was also another nice slap back into reality for me.
Reality was, that if I wanted to keep making things like Spiced Banana Syrup Pudding, I really had to run a lot further.
Spiced Banana Syrup Pudding
125gms softened butter
2/3 cup brown sugar
3 ripe mashed bananas
125mls cream
1 tps vanilla
1tps cinnamon
1 tps cardmom
1/2 tps nutmeg
1 1/2 cups s/r flour
Add all ingredients in order, bake in a spring form pan at 180C until golden. While that is cooking add 1 cup brown sugar, 1/2 cup water, 1 tps cinnamon, 1/2 tps cardamom, and bring to a slow boil. Turn down slightly and keep at simmer until the mixture thickens just slightly (you don’t want toffee!) When it has thickened slightly turn off and add 1 tbs of dark rum. Allow to cool a little. When banana pudding is cooked through, place on serving plate and carefully pour spiced syrup over the pudding. Best served warm with perhaps a dollop of your favourite vanilla icecream.
cityhippyfarmgirl 