Mmm. Delicious baked goods.
200g butter, creamed with 3/4 cup icing sugar; then add 1 cup cornflour, 1 cup ordinary flour and a 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder, and mix to combine.
When the flour is being mixed in, it seems to get a little bit clumpy, then it gets all grainy; but keep on mixing, because it’ll come back together again.
Roll into little balls, squish with a fork, and cook for 20 minutes at 180C. Once cool, smoosh two biscuits together with icing.
Mmm. Meringues.
1 egg white, whisked until stiff.
60g of castor sugar whisked into the whites.
Spoon onto either baking paper or a silicon baking sheet.
Bake at 150C for about 30 minutes
Sometimes, mistakes happen. Sometimes, mistakes are salvageable!
I had whipped cream (about 150ml, thereof); and made some caramel (enough sugar to just cover the bottom of a small pan, covered in water; heated gently until a medium-dark caramel formed).
The theory, was I’d whip the liquid caramel into the cream; and something delicious would result! I was hoping for thin strands of caramel.
Turns out, the caramel liquified the cream; and the cream refused to be whipped back up.
Fear not!
Luckilly, cream comes in 300ml bottles; and I had the rest of the bottle. So, I whipped the remaining cream, then introduced the liquified-caramel-failure slowly; and I ended up with a mousse like dessert treat. Hoorah!
It ended up being quite bittersweet; tasting a little bit coffee-like.
I wasn’t so fond of how this turned out; so I doubt that I will make it again.
It’s diced chicken, stirfried with a handful of mushrooms; and noodles. The liquid I used for the noodles was one tablespoon each of lemoncello and lemon vincotto. The resulting flavour was quite bitter.
No matter. Next time I’ll try something different!
I have been thinking about the sorts of things I might cook over Easter weekend, and rabbit is something that seemed just perfect, in a perverse sort of way (don’t hit me!). I had a poke around some recipe books to see what I could see; and nothing I saw was compelling.
I thought some more. Stroked my chin; and pondered. Then it struck me: I could prepare rabbit loins using a tried and true method that I devised for chicken!
First: Create a marinade using a combination of verjus and honey with salt, and marinate the loins for an hour or so, stirring occasionally. I used two heaped teaspoons of honey and about 1/4 c of verjus making this dish for two people; but by all means vary this as you see fit.
Second: After the loins have finished marinading, heat up a cast iron fry pan. Once the pan is hot, take each of the loins out of the marinade, and place in the pan. Hold on to the rest of the marinade! Brown each of the loins.
Then: Once all of the loins are nice and brown; and the honey is starting to caramelise, add the rest of the marinade back into the pan, and continue to cook until the marinade is all caramelised and the rabbit is coated in a delicious sticky glaze.
That, is all there is to it.
Of course, every dish needs a name. With this dish, however, the name came first. This, will be forever known as….
Honey Bunny.
(Nothing to do with the owl)
Monday night, involved roast pork. Since there are only two of us, that means Tuesday night, Wednesday night, and by the looks of it, Thursday night also involve roast pork.
Tuesday night was roast pork sandwiches. Delicious, but hardly worthy of making a blog post about it.
Tonight, though, we had stirfry.
First up, make “delicious liquid #94″ (Okay, so 94 is a somewhat arbitary number. Don’t ask me what the preceding 93 delicious liquids are.): So called delicious liquid #94 involves combining about a tablespoon each of soy sauce, golden syrup and mirin (It’s Japanese, sweet, white, rice wine) and mixing everything together.
Next, chop some stuff up! For the two of us, that was about two handfuls of roughly diced roast pork; Eight mushrooms sliced, and two bunches of pak choy (I used one. Two was the correct number, it turns out).
Finally: Fire! Heat up a wok with a little oil, and toss in the pork. Cook until it browns up. Next up, the mushrooms go in. When the mushrooms are starting to brown, add about 1/3 of delicious liquid and continue cooking until the liquid has evaporated off. Add another third, and evaporate again. Add the final third of delicious liquid #94, and add the pak choy. Continue to cook until the pak choy has wilted.
Unfortunately, this smelled so delicious I forgot to take a photo. Oh Noes!
Melt butter in a pan, and add chopped bacon. When the bacon is browned; add risotto rice (arborio or carnaroli), and fry until just starting to brown.
Deglaze the pan with a couple of glugs of vermouth; then add finely diced onion and saute until translucent.
If there is still fond on the pan (uh.. brown bits), use some chicken stock to deglaze further. Then, add enough chicken stock to just cover the rice.
When the stock has evaporated off; cover the rice with stock again.
This time, when the stock evaporates, add sliced mushrooms; and again, cover the rice with stock.
When the stock evaporates this time; the risotto is probably ready. Sample a grain of rice, and if it tastes about right; stir in grated parmesan cheese and serve. Otherwise, continue adding and cooking off more stock until it’s finished.
