Strong Verbs Are Just Better

Everything else: better for having time off, I guess, but I'm spending the time off going SPLAT rather than... doing.... things.

Except cookery.

Things I have cooked since last I reported on my cookery:

- a sort of baked medley thing: roasted chicken quarters (seasoned with powdered garlic, sumac, oil), diced butternut (par cooked in the microwave then seasoned with the same minus the sumac and plus pepper and roasted), broccolini (added to pumpkin, tossed with more of the second season/dressing, roasted more). Once coooked, shred the chicken, toss everything, add pomegranate seeds and feta cheese.

- pomegranate jam, which is actually mostly apple jam: around 500g total composed of apple (including skin, but crack open the core and reserve the seeds), pomegranate seeds, juice of one small lime; 500 g of jam sugar (ie reinforced with pectin already - the skin & reserved seeds SHOULD do the job but I like to be sure); and in a tea infuser, the reserved apple seeds and the skin/flesh/seeds of the small lime. First blitz the apple/pomegranate combo, then add it to the lime juice and sugar in a saucepan. Add the tea infuser. Proceed with Making Jam. This will make you 3-400mls of jam, starting from two medium-small pomegranates. If you have more pomegranates, scale up according to the usual 1:1 fruit to sugar ratio.

I stupidly came to my local café to write emails to my estate agent, but my local café is in the inner west reception black spot. I can browse DW, but I cannot upload photos of The Creeping Mould.

So here, have a list of things I made on Sat-Sun instead. Context: a week or so ago, our household "everyone buys 2-3 l of milk a week" free-for-all failed, possibly because the chief Milk Drinker has been staying elsewhere many nights. We had 2L just on its useby date, as well as an open bottle also close to use-by. I chucked the 2L in the spare freezer. My housemate was sceptical of my chances of turning it into profitable food.

This past weekend I had two nights of bad / pain-disturbed sleep that both ended in me sleeping in way too late in the morning. I have not got much formal admin done, but I did use up 2L of milk on various culinary projects.

To whit:

Mexican milk pork (ad-hoc'd between my ex's slow cooker recipe and this carnitas recipe)

Corn and bacon chowder (ad-hoc'd between kayloulee's 2010-13 recipe, which was milk heavy, and this one)

Veggie stock in the slow cooker

Soaked black beans (half to freeze, half to use)

Black bean and corn salsa (from a recipe an LJ friend gave me on my first UK trip - in 2024 I can easily find chipotle in adobo, unlike in 2011; I had not actually made it until 2023, due to the adobo problem)

Pear and custard impossible pie (based on this recipe, using tinned pears instead and half gf plain flour half almond meal. I think I'll use a bit more flour in future.

Impossible spinnach and fetta quiche/frittatta/thingy, using this recipe as a guide. Ditto on the more flour next time. And I don't think it will freeze as well as traditional quiche (pity, since I was batch cooking) - too fluffy. Some of the other impossible quiche recipes in this taste.com.au list use cream or yoghurt, and if I were not trying to use 2L of milk in 24 hours I would have gravitated to them instead - I suspect the result will be a bit denser and freeze better.

Of course, in the process of making nachos from the pork, I discovered I have nearly 400ml of greek yoghurt that's past use by but not actually expired, so maybe I should have made a yoghurt-based impossible frittata. Certainly, I now need to find a way to use up all that yoghurt ASAP as well. Muffins? I'm working tomorrow, I could make muffins today and feed my colleagues tomorrow.

Further complication: I used up (on the beans) the last of my previous batch of veg stock and the 2l of milk, thereby clearing most of my stuff out of the spare freezer (which is 3rd housemate's designated freezer space + ice cream storage). And then of course I made more stock, and soup, and so on. And now my freezer drawer is groaning and I'm taking up a lot of the spare freezer and I obviously need ice cream to eat with the impossible pie.

Good thing: if I'm starting the Coping Mechanism Course next week, and going back to German classes, and trekking up the coast every 2-3 weeks for the next while (teenage school musical; mum's surgery; etc), at least I have a a lot of freezer food. I can probably freeze a couple of containers of soup at work, in fact, if I can find space in with Well Dressed M's supply of popsicles.

Addenda: all of this was too lactose-y to take to K's place, as was my remaining "dish I have ingredients to make" (brown butter and sage mushroom gnocchi - K can do a moderate amount of butter but apparently brown butter is lactose too far). But I had leftover cabbage/bacon/mushroom sautée, so I toted that over there, and we ate kranskies with Two Veg. By a very Germanic fluke of our veggie drawers, the veg K provided was also cabbage. But green. Mine was red. That's two different colours of veg, prepared ... slightly differently... I swear...

I do not know how it has come to pass that I often go to K's place and eat what is, bascially, Swiss Pub Food (sausages, cabbage, potato), but I'm not complaining. Sometimes we do dumplings with rice and Broccolini Gomaae, just to balance out the "things we would struggle eat together in the country of origin because of one or both of our dietary conflicts" menu. I wonder if one can air-fryer Rosti or Okonomoyaki?

The original for this comes from Melanie Persson's "The Very Hungry Coeliac", and assumes you use her diy flour mix. I've successfully made it on supermarket gf flour mix, and tweaked a few things along the way. Her recipe assumes mini bundt pans, which I neither own nor desire to own; mine has been optimised for muffin tins and hence rises a little more.

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The ancestral recipe for this is the King Arthur Flour Co's recipe, with the "hot coffee + cocoa" trick borrowed from "Jan's Mud Cake" in the Penninsula Community Pre-School Cookbook 1994 (I think 1994. Maybe 1995?). I've posted it before, but hey, let's do it again. I just made a version for the Tortenessen festival in Bern, which I managed to figure out to be vegan, gf, soy-free, lentil-free, free of unspecified lethins, and nut-free. And it still tasted good!

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This will never be the prettiest or the most impressive cake available for any given dietary exclusion, but it tastes good, and it's so simple that it does cover a whole slew of exclusions in one go. If you were allergic to maize starch, say, as well as gluten, a bit of experimenting with diy flour mixes would probably work. If it fails to rise, you end up closer to a soft chocolate slice, but it still tastes okay.

Meanwhile, the Tortenessen was fun. I will post about my adventures signing up for "check and restock the toilets" at anarchist off-grid camp on a NOT food related post, I think. But the cake. I've never seen so many gluten-free cakes in one place. Amazing.

In Switzerland:

Fruit cake, iced, for Christmas: two small, one mini. Fed up with the trapezoidal shape of the loaf tins I used last year, I bought square cake rings. These were... annoying. Yes, sharp corners; but given the lumpy nature of fruit cake, I'm not sure that they were better than round-corner square tins would be: I had to place them, one in a baking tray and one in an oven-proof frying pan, on a lined base, and then line the tin, and... this worked okay but not worth the fuss. The mini one was in a tiny round tin with a removable bottom. I gave the square ones to my two immediate colleagues, and the round to Prof Medieval (UNIBE), who was uncomfortable and !! because she only planned gifts to her immediate minions. HOWEVER. She reported that her children were delighted, as the iced cake reminded them of school in the UK; so she's on next year's victim list regardless.

Fruit cake, iced, possibly gluten-free but not vegan: two small, one mini. Mistakes were made (eggs added on autopilot) and then I wasn't actually sure that the stash flour I'd used was GF. I iced one and sent it to friend J's husband, who is a Brit but hadn't made his own cake this year due to the household having a SMOL CHILD. The rest got crunched into cake-pudding-balls, see below.

Fruit cake, gluten-free and vegan: not entirely satisfactory. Too MUCH apple sauce replacing egg, definitely- leaked out of all the tins (I did this batch entirely in mini round tins with pop bottoms). I iced one, with a mere single fondant layer, for friends. Attempts were made at making my own hazlenut icing for the base layer, but I had chunky hazlenut meal rather than fine hazlenut flour and it failed abjectly. For myself, I ate one and froze the rest.

Fruit cake-pudding-pops, in a. regular and b. vegan issue. The regular ones consist of: take the top of the fruit cake that you carve off when you flatten it for icing; blend; add chocolate ganache and brandy; add almond meal when you realise it's too wet; form into balls and refridgerate. Top with melted white chocolate and half a glacé cherry the next morning. The other ones much the same except you try to make vegan ganache (dubious) and you roll them in dessicated coconut because vegan white chocolate is horrible to work with.

NB: for the cake-pudding-pops, note that my base recipe is something akin to this taste.com.au recipe for mini pudding, although I encountered it in Brownie Guides rather than on line. Cross-referenced with various online recipes for cake pops, and for rum balls. Reinvented annually based on what I have to hand.

Vegan coconut ice, which took two tries - the first time I didn't condense the coconut milk enough (needs more than the recipe indicates); the second time I had only brown sugar to hand and so ended up with an unsual colour of confection.

White Christmas. I have since been vehemently informed by my mother than White Christmas should NOT involve white chocolate, so I shall investigate before next xmas. If the alternative involves condensed milk, I might nope out, because vegan white chocolate is easier to find than coconut condensed milk, here.

In Australia:

A miscellaneously roast chook (with plenty of butter, onion and garlic rubbed into it; lemon and a bit of apple in the cavities)

A slimmed down version of Ottolenghi test kitchen celebration rice (no lamb; leftover roast chicken eliminates the first step; ad-libbed a bit with reference to Samin Nosrat)

An almond chocolate cake from the Women's Weekly gluten-free cake book, i forget exactly what the title was now. It was supposed to have a peanut butter icing but I did maple philly cream cheese. It lacked structural integrity but tasted pretty good - I'd be delighted if the recipe came from anyone other than the WW. At any rate I don't think my mother loved it, but at least SOMEONE made her a birthday cake, and that someone was me.

"Popcorn Lamb", which is what happened as a result of me attempting to make Stephanie Alexander's Witty Lamb/ Epigrammes d'angneau , given my lack of precision and the fact I didn't have a former biology student to hand to help. Also I gluten-free-ified it on the fly, and I couldn't get the good Ograms GF panko crumbs. This whole adventure deserves its own write-up. The end result was worth it; I can't figure out why the de-boning part bore NO RESEMBLANCE AT ALL to the instructions, and would honestly like to try it with my Mum supervising for clarity.

Two batches of GF pancakes, using Ograms's buckwheat mix (which is less than 50% buckwheat, upon inspection).

Regarding the Christmas cake problem: at one point I attempted to colour leftover fondant icing (with a view to carving stencil trees or bells and sticking them on top of the white cake), and failed with the particular variety of gel colouring in the supermarket here. Too tacky. Gross. Ew. BUT. By angry googling I found a proper cake decorating store in Zurich, who sell both powder and traditional liquid colouring, plus proper cake tins, and cutters, etc. Probably also pre-coloured fondant in colours other than the ugliest green, which is what the supermarket sells.

PLAN. Please remind me in august-sept 2022: By mid october, I aquire new professional standard cake deco supplies. I bake the regular-flour-and-egg christmas cakes (3-4 of them) Then I organise my birthday party (birthday early Nov), which shall consist of: my colleagues bring their children to my house, and then they fuck off to drink coffee. I, possibly with someone as backup (friend LW? R who is partner of KHC?), ice christmas cakes with children; Ms Bee, who can draw quite well, shall be in charge of tracery for fondant stencils. This will solve a. a large amount of mad christmas rush and b. the thing where I never do anything for my birthday and people feel sorry for me because I am Alone. After making cakes, perhaps we then eat a DIFFERENT cake I have pre-prepared for birfday reasons. Or mid-cake, between almond and fondant layer stages.
The need for a demo cake or several means Prof Medieval, and probably also non-tt-lecturer-medieval, will get another Xmas cake. I see no problems here. I'd invite both THEIR kids, but I know my limits, I am no brownie guide leader. And we may yet be in a pandemic; both my immediate team members are in my second-string-personal-life-contact ring anyway.

Liberally adjusted from the Women's Weekly 1970 (1972 reprint) 'steak in red wine sauce' recipe. I didn't have the added ingredients for most of the venison-in-red-wine-sauce recipes I could find online, so I went back to the Reliable Ancestral Cookbook (which has no recipes for venison, but does have steak recipes, and so here we are)

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1. WINE SAUCE STAGE 1: After dicing the onion, put half of it in a small saucepan with ... somewhere between 25 and 50g of butter, I eyeballed it. Melt butter and sautée the onion.
2. OPTIONAL MUSHROOM STAGE 1: place the remaining onion, the diced garlic, and sliced mushrooms in a small frying pan, with more butter (eyeball; add more if they soak it all up). Fry on medium-high until the mushrooms start to brown, then turn over to low.
3. When the onions in the wine sauce start to glisten (ie, after at least 5 min), add the wine. Keep at about medium heat, bring to boil. Add ground pepper as you're starting step 4.
4. Coat both sides of the venison steaks in ground pepper.
5. The wine needs to reduce by half. When it starts visibly reducing, add MOAR BUTTER - lashings of butter - to a larger frying pan. Sear the venison steaks on each side, no more than 3 min.
6. When you're done, the sauce will not be done. Turn the power off the steaks, and/or remove them entirely, depending on your ~vibes~ for where they need to be between med-rare and medium (you do not want to take venison further than medium).
7. Sift 1-2 tsp of maize flour over the mushroom mix. Pour the wine sauce into this pan. Turn heat up to boil off rapidly. If you're not using mushrooms sift directly into the wine pot.
8. When, as seems inevitable, this doesn't thicken enough, repeat sifting the flour. SIFT I SAY. Your alternative is to mix a bit of maize flour with cold water, then slowly integrate it into the hot sauce. If you do neither of those things, you get weird floury globs. Take it from me, a person who only sifts for Christmas Cake or sauce.
9. When the sauce looks like a pleasing texture / enough to go around, pour it over your steaks and nom.

A traditional side would be potatoes and steamed or braised veg. I ate mine with leftover cabbage and carrot pilaf, and enjoyed it greatly.

Also, while venison was nice, I'm 100% sure this recipe would be 300% tastier with kangaroo, if you can access kangaroo steaks. Serve those no more than medium rare!

Knocked together from some leftovers plus eggs that I went on a mission to buy today. Very good, noting recipe for future:

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In the process, I decided that a dairy-free version would actually make quite a good salmon and egg tart. If I do that, I'll hold the red pepper dip back and mix it in with the eggs, in place of yoghurt. Pine nut paste (halfway to pesto - blend pine nuts with oil and garlic) would be a good addition, I think.

A few weeks back I bought and cooked tofu for the first time - J and I made a horrible combo of her oven-baked tofu and a crispy tofu (I added a lot of flour, expecting something akin to crumbing meat, but her recipe involves soy sauce and we sort of... baked goop onto tofu). I had the other half of the two-pack left, so I attempted Jack Monroe's Crispy Seasoned Tofu (from Vegan-ish). And of course made some alterations on the go.

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The cubes are suitable to go straight into a stir-fry or curry.

I could talk about work, or socials, or family, but let's not.

1. Fruit cake, or, My Best Work This Millenium: Two loaf tin fruit cakes made, iced with almond and fondant, given ribbons, wrapped in paper and then tea towels and then put in cardboard cradles and dispatched to boss and phd-student-colleague. Boss sent a photo of her son cradling it reverentially: looks like one end got slightly dinged in transit but contrary to my mother's horrified predictions, it was not ruined by being wrapped in paper.

1.a. Fruit Cake 2: Gluten Free Boogaloo: I made two loaf tins of gluten free cake. My intended victim turns out not to like cake, so I was planning to freeze one for later work purposes. However, I cut one open in an attack of cravings the other day. I had thoughts of icing HALF of it, but it didn't make a clean cut. Perhaps I will just eat two fruit cakes all by mineself.

2. Rum cake balls: the offcuts from the tops of said cakes (levelled, and then turned over, so the baking bottom becomes the flat top surface for icing) got whizzed in the food processor, then mixed with brandy and cream and made into balls last night. This morning I dipped their tops in white chocolate and nestled them in patty pans. Two sets have been dispatched in cute tins to friends in Geneva already. I have three more tins and some more victims to come.

3. Project: vegan coconut ice. Not all of my intended victims like cake, so I set about making vegan-ised versions of "traditional" (to me. Note the high incidence of cold fridge treats for Australian summer) Christmas treats. This recipe including making one's own coconut condensed milk seems to have worked out pretty well, but we shall see tomorrow.

4. Project: vegan white Christmas. I have learned an important lesson about not melting vegan white chocolate in the microwave. I ended up with separated fats, some bits of crispy caramel, and chunky other bits. However, I had some leftover coconut condensed milk, and had found 'kokosfett', which seems fairly similar to copha, and first tried whipping it (only half was soft enough), then melted some, mixed in the chocolate mix, added coconut and some icing sugar, and then proceeded from there. Remains to be seen if this turns out to be food or not. I added some melted margarine at the last minute because it ended up too dry.

Based on these experiments I THINK, if I keep the kokosfett at room temperature and then maybe slightly heat it in the oven, I can make Toni's cake using a mix of a solid margarine block designed for baking and kokosfett. The trick is creaming the "butter" and sugar: I found a recipe for buttercream icing made on copha, so it seems it can be done.

Also I have stock in the slow cooker again, plans for a casserole type thing tomorrow, and assorted possibilities for xmas.

Thursday: after stressing all morning because the maintenance men who were supposed to come at 10 didn't come until 1.30, it turned out they had a master key, and therefore I could leave them in my flat while I went to Basel.

Basel was hot! I acquired about 15 books from the main library, which is an excellent library with multi-storey open stacks. I met up with Hobbit S and, briefly, their boyfriend. Boyfriend fits exactly Type 2 of Polyamorous Men (the probably harmless type with bad hair). Hobbit S is delightful, and showed me the mysteries of the library, and then chatted to me for a while in Tibits after.

Friday: I had only medium success at salvaging my workload, but I did interview N. re the Lords of Misrule audio production of the Canterbury Tales, which was vr interesting. I took more naps than is really normal?

Saturday: I had a video date with Shiny lined up, and dinner with J and her partner Y scheduled for my place in the evening. J had been disappointed I couldn't make it to go swimming with them Thursday or Friday, so we planned to visit a museum on Saturday afternoon. I'm actually quite glad this plan fell through (they overslept and their dessert plans took longer than expected), because although I got my whole house vacuumed before calling Shiny, I did not get the chicken in marinade or the vegetables pre-prepared. A quieter afternoon let me do that.

J and Y are both a delight to talk to; dinner (roast chicken with plums) turned out deliciously. I forgot I had set the table outside, though, so we ate inside in front of the hot oven! Ooops. They brought wine with, and I broke my streak of abstinence - my goal was never complete teetotal, and I do intend to resume comfortable social drinking once I feel like I've broken the mental pattern that was leading to drinking too much at home. For now, though, I'm resetting the 'a month dry gets you a reward' calendar, so no reward for august. Nominated reward for September is a printer, and I really want a printer at this point, so that should prove reasonable incentive.

Sunday: Has been quiet. Podcasting. Knitting. Ordered some brightly patterned fabric, so I really need to get onto sewing some stuff with the LAST brightly patterned fabric I ordered. German class happened, and was pretty boring.