Strong Verbs Are Just Better

I have once again subscribed to a vegetable delivery service, and once again, this leaves me staring at vegetables thinking "I don't have a roast meat to serve with you, what SHALL I do with you?" (I made a rather tasty non-vegan version of this roasted brussel sprout pasta earlier in the week, for instance.

Tonight, I did not actually make this roast apple beetroot and halloumi salad, not least because I can't eat pearl barley. But I did use that as a launching pad for the below:

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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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While in Geneva I figured out that Jack Monroe's Peach and Chickpea curry, if made with mango, sort of approximates the sweet chicken and mango curry that was the first Indian dish I actually liked and which is really hard to find. Jack's recipe, while a good workhorse, is definitely on the bland anglo curry side of things. Having obtained a jar of long-life mango slices recently, and being in the midst of making a multi-curry bonanza, I spliced Jack's recipe together with Madhur Jaffrey's "Chickpeas in a simple northern style".

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I served this tonight with a red lentil and tomato dahl, a stir-fry of zuchhini and broccoli in a mildly spicy yoghurt sauce, and a not-particularly-good batch of Becky Excell's gluten-free naan bread, but i've eaten variations on the Jack Monroe one as a main dish (in which case, I often chuck green string beans in to round out the one-pot meal).

nineveh_uk expressed interest in the pork recipe I mentioned yesterday. As the Big Red Book ("In the Kitchen" by Campion and Curtis) is out of print and very difficult to find second hand (might be easier outside Aus, actually - the only copies I can find are not in Aus, and the shipping costs significantly more than the original book did), I present you, a recipe using quince jam.

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Bafflingly, the Big Red book gives this recipe twice: once as is, and once with an accompaniment of Catalan Potatoes. I assume this is a quirk of the Big Red Book being a "best of" Campion and Curtis' previous books.

Other savoury quince recommendations from the Big Red Book (which I have not tried: when I was living in Aus a decade ago, quinces and quince products were both unfamiliar and way out of my price range. In Europe, meat was much more of a luxury. Currently, my partner has introduced me to roast pork, and possesses a stash of quince paste pots bought for Occasions, upon which I may prey): consider Proscuitto-wrapped pork fillet with roasted quinces, or, sticking with quince paste, Moroccan lamb with quince glaze.

This is a recipe I finally got Shiny to dictate to me, because I like to have things written down, especially when it's someone else's recipe I'm cooking.

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Meanwhile, important cat news: Gathgwyn is not only losing weight but putting on muscle tone from chasing and wrestling with someone 1/3 his size, despite the significant increase in treats in his diet. His afternoon auto-kibble has been restored.

He is dedicated to licking the kitten's bowl after she's done. Right now she has kitten food in tins, and he tips over the garbage bin in order to lick out the tins. Consequently there is usually a paté coloured stain on his otherwise snow-white brow.

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!

I have FINALLY managed to make savoury muffins that aren't deeply gluey. Skipping the paper wrapper in favour of butter-bathing the metal tin seems to have helped.

The following is Modified from TheRecipeTinEats

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This was actually my cookbook_challenge recipe for March, but apparently I was having a weird time for most of March and April, wherein I mostly... did things, but didn't follow up on them. Weird. And while I did cook some new stuff in April, none of it was from pre-2021 recipes. Oh well. Onward to May!

Chocolate Espresso Cake
From Smitten Kitchen Every Day, gluten-free-ified and caffeinated by me.

85 grams butter, softened
145 grams dark brown sugar
25 grams granulated sugar
1 large egg
1 large egg yolk
1 tsp vanilla extract
about 125 ml buttermilk
about 50ml espresso, warm, mixed with at least a tablespoon of cocoa powder and stirred
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
40 g cocoa, additional
About 130 grams of flour - if baking gluten-free, it's worth cutting your basic cake flour mix with about 30 g of almond meal. (The abouts here are because flour weights don't transfer - I'd cook in cups if I had three different measuring systems worth of cup measures, but all I've got is scales and a jug marked at 50ml increments. Aim for 1 US cup of assorted flours)

Heat oven to 180 C. Coat and line an 8-inch square tin or a single loaf tin.

Beat butter and sugars in a large bowl until fluffy; beat in egg, yolk, and vanilla. Scrape down, then add baking powder and soda, and beat thoroughly. Add the wet ingredients and mix. Add flours, and fold in by hand until flour has just combined.

Scrape into pan; bake for 20-30 min.

Frosting: go with your preference, but I strongly recommend adding warm espresso to whatever liquid is involved. (I use this basic recipe.)