Sesame Tofu Noodles, For Introverts

Happy New Year, everybody! Or, as I like to say, Thank Gosh The Party Season Is (Almost) Over For Another Year.

Right there, folks, is a clanging admission of my introversion. I wish I could be one of those people who party hops with gay abandon, getting high on the smell of Jatz, buzzing from witty repartee with charming strangers.

Problem is, I’m just not that particular flavour of fudge sundae.

While nice to see so many of y’all, I’m kind of exhausted by January. I’ve a strong desire to curl up with a book, a bowl of something cool and delicious to eat, and a blasting air conditioner, in the interests of restoring both mind and body from one too many brushed with festive cheer.

The book of the moment, and the reason why I’ve resolved to be more honest about my introversion, is ‘Quiet’, by Susan Cain. If anything about the above paragraphs resonates, you need to read this book. Reading it, I’ve been wondering if SC has been secretly following me around, peering inside my head, my entire life. She’s even written about some silly little introvert behaviours - behaviours which I hitherto believed to be Peggy-exclusive - which are actually quite common in the 50% of the population who are introverts. Apparently, a lot of other introverts frequent the loo multiple times a day, not to answer nature’s call, but for a bit of peace and quiet. And I thought I was the only one! The things you read…

The bowl-food of the moment, and the principal subject of this post, is Sesame Tofu Noodles. I’ve been making this for a while, but feel that it is a recipe particularly suited to these hot, depleted, post-festive weeks. The best thing about this recipe is that it’s spectacularly easy, and makes just enough for one hungry introvert to slurp while reading.

Sesame Tofu Noodles

Ingredients

150g silken tofu, cubed
1 clove garlic, whole but bashed with the flat of a knife
1 spring onion, finely sliced
1 tablespoon sesame seeds (you could toast them, if you liked)
1 tablespoon mirin
1 tablespoon soy sauce (plus extra, to taste)
1 heaped tablespoon tahini
1 teaspoon rice wine vinegar
Chilli flakes (only if you want them, this is fine without)
1 head bock choi, sliced
A couple of stems of Chinese broccoli, sliced
A good handful of green beans and/or snow peas, sliced
90g soba noodles
Chopped coriander, and/or Vietnamese mint, and/or Thai basil

1. Place tofu, garlic clove, sliced spring onion, sesame seeds, mirin, soy sauce, tahini, rice wine vinegar, and chilli flakes in the bowl that you intend to eat from (less washing up). Mix. Place in fridge to chill until you are just about ready to eat.
2. Boil a pot of salted water. While it comes to the boil, rinse your greens thoroughly.
3. Cook your soba noodles in the boiling salted water for about 3 minutes, or until almost done.
4. When your noodles are almost cooked, add in your washed greens to the pot. Cook for a further minute.
5. Drain noodles and vegies in a colander. Rinse under cold running water.
6. Remove the garlic clove from the tofu/dressing mixture. Add the noodle/vegetable mixture to the tofu/dressing mixture, and stir to thoroughly coat – tongs are the best for this. Taste test and adjust with extra soy sauce, salt, pepper or chilli.
7. Sprinkle with chopped herbs, and eat on the couch.

PS: you could easily make this gluten free, by substituting a cake of rice vermicelli for the soba noodles. If that’s your thing, just cook the rice noodles as per the packet instructions and blanch your vegies separately.

Salted Caramel x 3

Salted caramel is a food trend that’s been with us for the last couple of years. And, readers, this trend, pardon the pun, is worth its salt.

If you haven’t done so already, take yourself down to your nearest hipster café or restaurant, and order the salted caramel option. Believe me, if your hipster venue is truly thus, it will be there.

What I love about salted caramel is that it’s deliciously contradictory. The sweet, creamy caramel, interspersed with (ideally) still-flaky shards of salt. It’s so wrong, yet so bizarrely right, the only fitting soundtrack is the best of Prince (you have to promise me that you’ll eat salted caramel while listening to Prince at least once, just to prove that, although my suggestion sounds a little whack, it’s gosh darn perfect).

I have to admit, salted caramel is not something I make frequently, because when it comes to salted caramel, I have absolutely no self control. If it’s in my fridge, I WILL eat it. Within the day (actually, if I’m honest, within the hour).

However, when people are coming over, or when I’m invited for a leisurely BBQ with some mates, I’m more than happy to contribute something deliciously tasty as well as deliciously on trend.

To make matters even better, salted caramel is surprisingly simple. Here I’ve provided the basic salted caramel recipe, salted caramel chocolate pots, and, grandest of all, salted caramel and chocolate tart (my recipe is loosely based on one that appeared in Delicious magazine a couple of years ago, but I’ve fiddled with it sufficiently to feel comfortable calling it my own).

It’s like a salted caramel pick-your-own adventure book, where every path you pick leads to a sticky, sweet, salty end. Enjoy!

Salted Caramel (makes approximately a cup and a half of sauce, keeps in the fridge for up to a week – but let’s admit, it’s not likely to stick around for that long).

I cup sugar
1/3 cup water
125g salted butter
1/3 cup pouring cream
Sea salt flakes

1. Place sugar and water in a saucepan over medium-high heat. Swirl saucepan to dissolve sugar. Simmer, without stirring, until starting to colour – about 15 minutes. (You will need to watch this carefully, because, guaranteed, the moment you turn your back to put a load of washing on, you’ll have taken the caramel too far, and will have a horrible burnt mess in your pan).
2. Lower the heat once the caramel has started to colour. Add the chopped butter, and stir over the heat for another 5 minutes or until golden. The mixture will look hideously split at this stage. Don’t panic.
3. Take saucepan off the heat. Stir in half of the cream. Watch your split mixture magically coalesce into a cohesive caramel. Stir in the remaining cream. Gloat at your cleverness.
4. Add a PINCH of salt flakes to the caramel. You need to salt slowly, carefully: you can always add more salt, but you can’t take it out once it’s in, and it’d be such a shame to ruin some beautiful caramel. Stir, taste. Add more salt, if you feel it needs it. Repeat until your caramel is salted to the perfect point of contradiction.
5. Store in the fridge, to serve over ice cream, or, my favourite, with fresh blueberries.

Salted Caramel Chocolate Pots (Makes 6, depending on ramekin size)

1 quantity salted caramel (above)
175 g dark chocolate
1 1/3 cups pouring cream
2 eggs, beaten
Cocoa powder, to serve

1. Preheat oven to 160 degrees.
2. Distribute your salted caramel evenly between your (oven safe) ramekins, filling each ramekin to no more than 1/3 full. Place in fridge to chill.
3. Meanwhile, break chocolate into a bowl. Heat cream in either a saucepan until almost boiling, or in a microwave safe jug (watch very carefully if you are microwaving the cream to avoid overheating).
4. Pour hot cream over chocolate, and whisk until chocolate is dissolved and smooth. Whisk in eggs.
5. If you want a nice, neat divide between your caramel layer and your chocolate layer, chill the caramel for a bit longer, maybe even overnight. If, like me, you prefer an intermingled confection, pour chocolate mixture into the ramekins over the only-just-chilled caramel.
6. Bake at 160 degrees for 30-40 minutes, until the chocolate layer is just firm to touch. There will be bubbly, oozy soft bits, but these will firm up as the pots cool.
7. Dust lightly with cocoa.
8. Serve, with fresh berries and cream.

Salted Caramel and Chocolate Tart

2 sheets store bought shortcrust pastry (yes, I’m a failure as a woman for not making my own pastry)
1 quantity salted caramel (above)
1 quantity chocolate mixture from the Salted Caramel Chocolate Pots recipe (also above).

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees.
2. Line a non-stick, 22cm diameter spring form cake pan with thawed pastry sheets. (Although you are making a tart, and would assume a tart or quiche pan would be best, I find a spring form pan the easiest, least messy way to make this). Be sure to line you pastry all the way to the top of the pan – store bought pastry will shrink considerably when cooked. Chill in freezer for ten minutes.
3. Meanwhile, assemble your salted caramel, and your chocolate mixture.
4. Remove pastry-lined tin from freezer. Blind bake for ten minutes, or until pastry is golden (Don’t know how to blind bake? It’s easy. Search for a demo video on YouTube).
5. Pour caramel into your blind baked tart case. Refrigerate (see above recipe for suggestions about separation/intermingling of layers). Top with the chocolate mixture.
6. Bake at 160 degrees for 45min-1 hour, or until the chocolate layer is just firm to touch. As with the salted caramel chocolate pots, there will be bubbly, oozy soft bits, but these will firm up as the tart cools.
7. Dust lightly with cocoa.
8. Serve with – you guessed it – berries and cream.

Milk, Cookies, and Temporal Fractures

SPOLIER ALERT: in Men In Black 3 (completely awesome, I cried, go watch it), Agent O diagnoses a temporal fracture in the fabric of the universe via Agent J’s chocolate milk craving.

This is a tweak of what we all know elementally – that when adult life seems like a temporal fracture and we want to turn the clock back and be kids again, milk and cookies are exactly what we crave.

Don’t pity me and imagine that I had a culinarily deprived childhood, but milk and cookies together were not something I was fed as an after school snack by my domestic goddess of a mother. Cookies and tea, yes. Apple slices and cheese, yes. Rice pudding with jam, absolutely. But not milk and cookies, cool from the fridge and warm from the oven respectively.

I think it’s a testament to the power of our collective notions of childhood foodstuffs that even I, who cannot recall having milk and cookies as a child, feel the nostalgic pull of this particular combination. It’s in this spirit of embracing the platonic ideal-ness of milk and cookies that I offer you a recipe for the most perfect cookies to go with a glass of milk.

Fittingly for a post about childhood nostalgia - of the real and culturally imagined kind - this recipe is based on a recipe my grandmother passed to my mother, who passed to me. I have modified this recipe over the years to ramp up the chocolate chips and vanilla extract, because when I think about that platonic ideal of milk and cookies, the cookies are nubbly with chocolate bits and smell sweetly of vanilla. Comfort on steroids, after all, is the best thing for temporal fractures.

Choc Chip Cookies

Makes 25

125g melted butter
1 egg
¾ cup sugar
1 ½ cups SR flour
115g (half a packet) dark chocolate baking chips
125g (half a packet) white chocolate melting buttons, roughly chopped
2 tablespoons (yep, go with it) natural vanilla extract
Pinch of salt

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees and line 2-3 baking trays, depending on size, with baking paper.
2. Mix all ingredients together in a large bowl with a wooden spoon. The mixture should be the consistency of the cookie dough culinary amateurs buy at Coles – i.e., it should roll into a ball that holds its shape but is still pliable and moist.
3. Roll into ping-pong size balls and place on baking sheets, leaving enough room to for the cookies to spread.
4. Bake in preheated oven for 10-15 minutes, or until evenly golden.
5. Serve, warm from the oven, with a glass of icy cold milk, and, optimally, a quiet moment getting reacquainted with some childhood classics - Ann of Green Gables, anyone?

Sunday Soup Sessions: South Beach Black Bean Soup

Sundays are the best days. I like Saturday, for sure, with its catch ups and outings and, more often than not, evening derring-do (last night a girlfriend and I took in some theatre. The show was called Naked Boys Singing. One does so love to support the arts).

Saturdays, though, carry the weight, or, more accurately, the burden, of expectation. They are, after all, the first day of the weekend, and weekends so often are hampered with great expectations for fitting in all the extra curriculars, pleasant or otherwise, that didn’t happen during the week.

Sundays are free from these expectations because, by Sunday morning, expectations have either been fulfilled or dashed (that genius outfit you spent all week planning either debuted spectacularly, or sits on the bedroom floor, a reject and a flop).

This gives the more highly evolved among us the opportunity to Be In The Moment (whatever that means, I am yet to find out). For those of us less evolved, Sundays present an irresistible invitation to undertake pleasurable little busy-nesses that didn’t quite warrant top Saturday billing, but are, nonetheless, important.

This, for me, usually involves making soup, the beauties of which are manifold.

Firstly, soup makes fantastic lunch food, and if you cook and portion it out on Sunday, you can have lunches ready made in your freezer for the rest of the week.

Secondly, soups are time consuming but low maintenance. You do need to be around (ish) for an hour or so to keep an eye on the stove, but you are free to engage in other busy-nesses that make Sundays so lovely (painting BOTH finger and toenails. Cleaning the shower while listening to Prince. Re reading Truman Capote. Trialing new eyeliner techniques in front of your freshly cleaned bathroom mirror – I finally got the knack of lining the inner rim. Subtle, yet effective. It’s my new favourite trick).

Thirdly, and finally, your neighbours are more likely to be home on Sunday, all the better to tease with the tantalising smells coming from your apartment. No, I’m not mean, but it is sometimes satisfying to know that that delicious garlic-onion-spices smell the whole neighbourhood is salivating over is all for me.

Bwahaha.

Today, I made South Beach Black Bean soup, adapted from Nigella Lawson’s How To Eat. I made this soup last year for Kitty Gillfeather and I to share one night, and, whilst it was Okay, it was not Omazing.

Never one to be defeated by a recipe, and with complete faith in the kitchen gospel according to Nigella, I attempted it again, this time with a couple of modifications.
I’m pleased to report that my faith in Nigella’s inherent rightness was rewarded, after a couple of hours of simmering, by a dark, deeply spiced, lime-spiky soup. The best kind.

Given its Cuban heritage, I feel it’s only appropriate that you eat a bowl of this with something rum-based to drink: a Cuba Libre, perhaps, or, if you’re a little out-of-left-field, like me, sarsaparilla and Bacardi over ice with a squeeze of lime.

Yet another reason why Sundays are the best day: they’re the only day when lunchtime drinking (infinitely more satisfying than evening drinking) is de rigueur. After all, we’ve got work in the morning…


South Beach Black Bean Soup (Adapted from Nigella Lawson’s How To Eat)

(Makes three large portions)

200g black turtle beans
1 bay leaf
Olive Oil
1 red capsicum, finely chopped
1 onion, finely chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1 tablespoon dried oregano
Zest of one lime, plus extra limes to serve (allow one per person for citrus fiends like me)
Sugar, salt, pepper, to season
1 tablespoon dry sherry
Sour cream, sliced avocado, dried chilli flakes and/or spring onions and coriander, to serve.

1) Cover the beans and the bay leaf with a generous amount of water in a medium sized saucepan. Bring to the boil and keep at the boil, topping up with more water as needed, until beans are beginning to tenderise, but, still have quite a bit of bite.
2) Meanwhile, in your largest saucepan, heat the oil and add your finely chopped onion and capsicum. Cook over medium heat until translucent, which should take about ten minutes.
3) Add the garlic, cumin and oregano to the onion and capsicum and cook a further five minutes. The mixture should be starting to colour, which is good. You want this mixture caramelised, almost to the brink of burnt, for depth of flavour.
4) Hopefully, your beans will be crunchy-tender by this stage. If so, add them, and their cooking liquid, to the large pot, and bring to the boil. If your beans are not quite ready, remove the onion-capsicum mixture from the heat. Return to the stove when the beans are just about ready.
5) Cook at a high simmer until the beans are completely tender. Add in the sherry and lime zest, and season to taste. Nigella’s original recipe suggests using a whole tablespoon of salt (admittedly for a larger quantity of soup than my specifications), which sounds like a lot, but bean dishes do tend to need a lot of seasoning to taste of anything at all, so taste test thoroughly and often and salt accordingly.
6) Locate rum, chill glasses.
7) Spoon soup into bowls and serve, sprinkled with any, none, or all of the following: sour cream, sliced avocado, dried chilli flakes, finely sliced spring onions, coriander, and lime wedges to squeeze over the soup on the side.
8) Viva Nigella, Viva Soup Sessions, Viva Sundays.

Celebrity Chef Redux Chicken, Sweet Potato and Amond Stew

I think someone (hello, former students of mine) should do a sociological study of Australian food culture as expressed through the recipes section of Good Weekend magazine. (If you would like someone to help you prepare and taste test recipes, I am your go-to girl). Charting the social, economic, ethical and aesthetic dimensions of food consumption in Australia would be fasciminating indeed, as my friend Mimi Goss would say.

If a student of mine were to undertake this course of study, I would strongly hope that they would come out swinging against the current celebrity chef responsible for the food pages. I won’t name names, but he is, I find, singularly irritating, to the point where I’ve begun to skip his columns as, firstly, I, and no one I know, could afford the first five items on the ingredients list for an ‘everyday meal’, and, secondly, no one I know would want to spend the five hours in the kitchen sharpening our Furli knives to slither kingfish sashimi between coming home from work, running out to the gym, or just, you know, having a life.

Except, every now and then, I look at a recipe and go…hmmm, with a bit of tweaking and a simplification/economisation, there is potential for a halfway decent recipe. Sometimes even a good one.

Such is the case with my Celebrity Cher Redux Chicken, Sweet Potato and Almond Stew. The initial recipe provided by He Who Shall Not Be Named featured lamb backstrap, but I modified it to use rump steak, and then, as in the following recipe, chicken thighs. I liked the beef stew, but something about chicken, cinnamon and sweet potato is too terrifically right for me to not give you the white meat version.

If you’re worried about the whole stew-in-summer thing, don’t be. This actually tastes fresh (I think it’s the lime and mint) and, if you serve it cooled down a little from piping hot, it’s rather pleasant on a balmy evening, particularly if you wash it down with chilled sarsaparilla as Clementine Kemp and I did this past Friday.

Celebrity Cher Redux Chicken, Sweet Potato and Almond Stew

Serves 5

600g chicken thigh fillets, cut into inch-ish chunks
Olive oil
2 onions, chopped

Heat a little oil in large casserole dish (I use my le cruset). Fry onions and chicken over medium heat with a pinch of salt until chicken begins to turn white. Throw in the following…

1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon cinnamon
6 bruised cardomon pods

And cook until fragrant. Now add in…

1 teaspoon chicken stock powder
1 teaspoon vegetable stock powder
Enough water to ONLY JUST COVER the chicken
(or, instead of the above, a carton of liquid chicken stock)

Bring this briefly to the boil and turn to the lowest simmer possible. It’s now time, while you wait for the pot to boil, to add…

About half to three quarters of a cup of chopped pitted dates
A really generous splash of lime juice (we’re probably in the vicinity of a quarter cup)
A teaspoon of palm sugar (or brown sugar, or just some extra dates)

Put the lid on your casserole dish and leave on a very low heat, while you peel and chop into inch-ish chunks...

Two medium large sweet potatoes

Which you then place on a baking tray, toss with some olive oil and salt, and roast at 200 degrees or until tender. By this time, your chicken should have been in the pot for just over an hour, and well on the way to being tender and delicious. If you chicken is not quite slow-cooked enough, leave the potatoes in your (turned off) oven. Once the chicken has cooked until it’s tender and lovely, add in the roasted sweet potatoes and allow to sit off the heat for ten minutes to infuse. Meanwhile, chop a large handful of fresh mint and a large handful of almonds, and garnish your stew.

Serve with steamed rice and some quickly pan tossed greens. As one of Farmer Wants a Wife’s more…special…farmers would say, winner winner chicken dinner.

Cups Runneth Over.

I feel bad filing this post under the ‘recipe’ tag, because it isn’t. But, after evangelizing about the merits of oven roasted ‘shrooms, and happily discovering a high quality supplier of particularly awesome ‘shrooms at my local shops, I feel compelled to share my recipe, or, borrowing a Nigellaism, my ‘enthusiastic suggestion’ for preparing mushrooms.

(As an aside, I’ve recently been reading Nigella’s ‘How to Eat’ and ‘How to Be A Domestic Goddess’ not for the recipes, but for the writing. I love her stories, and I love the warmth that emanates from her prose. Give me Nigella over some of the more lauded novelists of our generation any day of the week!).

To begin your ‘shrooming, preheat your oven to 200 degrees. You don’t really need to preheat, and, as I often make these as a super fast lunch or dinner, I often don’t have time to, but it makes good sense to get your oven heating whilst you undertake the two minutes of preparation required.
Place your mushrooms, cup side up, on a baking-paper lined tray. I would allow about 5 palm-sized mushrooms per person, but then I tend to err on the side of gluttony so you may want to revise downwards. You should also consider size when selecting your ‘shrooms at the grocery store – you want mushrooms that have enough of a cup to catch the roasting juices, so buttons and the more exotic varieties are probably out. I usually stick to medium-large field mushrooms, which seem to be the tastiest.

Remove the stem from each of your mushrooms, being sure to keep the cup intact. Now it’s time to get creative. The basic rule here is that you need salt, pepper, and a little bit of fat – butter or olive oil – to give you that rich, delicious juice. However, if you are feeling fancy and have a good supply of fresh herbs to raid, pick a couple of the following and add them to the cups along with you basic seasoning: garlic, thyme, rosemary, sage, paprika, chilli, oregano, anchovies, capers.

Put the tray of ‘shrooms in the oven, and leave them for ten minutes. I find that cooking time varies wildly with these, depending on the size and freshness of your ‘shrooms, the amount of time your oven had been preheating, and the planets rotating through your sun sign (kidding). Basically, though, what you want to see, when you open the oven door, is a wrinkly brown mushroom with a pool of dark, richly scented juice in the cup. The visual, I’ll admit, is not appealing, but it’s honest. Your ‘shrooms will, and ought to, look manky at this stage.

At this point, you can proceed to the eating, but, if you are feeling really really fancy, or you’re just showing off, add some cheese (feta, mozzarella, and parmesan are favorites) and give your ‘shrroms another 2-3 minutes so your cheese begins to bubble.

Serve with a tossed together salad, or some wilted greens, and polenta or bread to soak up the juices. So now you know – you’re only ever 20 minutes, tops, away from complete culinary satisfaction. And if that isn’t a comfort in these troubled times, I don’t know what is.

Recipes that Keep On Giving: Honey Baked Lentils.

Too much of too-muchness is glorious, isn’t it?

Except for the day afterwards.

Returning to my humble abode after a lovely few days of camping out at the parents, I’ve decided to make good use of a much anticipated Christmas present and cook a dinner that, whilst richly flavoured and a pleasure to eat, is low-fat, low-sugar, low-GI, high fibre, gluten and dairy free, and vegetarian – even vegan, if you’re flexible.

Normally I don’t restrict what I eat in light of any of those particular dietary requirements. After Christmas, however, a meal that fits all of those bills is not so much of an act of restrictive discipline, but more of a compassionate gesture to my system, in the hopes that it will forgive me, for I know what I have done, and it was BAD.

As for the much anticipated present? Well, let me tell you – or rather, let me show you…




It’s a Le Creuset! Those of you who are serious cooks, or those of you who’ve just watched Julie and Julia, will know that Le Creuset is the Alpha Romeo of kitchen brands. And mine is red.



Along with kindness towards my body, taking this baby out for a test drive is a further compelling reason why tonight’s dinner needed to be Le Creusefied.

So, here is my recipe for Honey Baked Lentils, served with steamed snow peas and soft polenta. I hope that your tummy appreciates your compassion as much as I hope mine will.

Honey Baked Lentils with Steamed Snow Peas and Soft Polenta

Honey Baked Lentils – serves 4, and freezes beautifully.

1 cup black, brown, or green lentils
½ an onion, chopped
2 ½ cups water
2 teaspoons vegetable stock powder (ensure this is a vegan, dairy and gluten free brand if these are core values for you)
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons honey (Here’s where the veganism of this dish is called into question. I personally think that bees are pretty darn happy buzzing around and making abundant rivers of honey, but I may just be an unenlightened philistine when it comes to bee rights. How about we all just do what we know is right in our hearts, m-kay?)
2 tablespoons oil (I use 1 tablespoon sesame oil, 1 tablespoon extra virgin)
2 garlic cloves, crushed
A large knob (about 4cm) ginger, grated. (As a side note, who decided that anything measuring 4cm merited the descriptor ‘a large knob’? Every recipe I read seems to use 4cm as the benchmark for large. In most other contexts a 4cm knob would warrant a completely different descriptor regarding size – ‘small’, ‘miniscule’, or ‘medically interesting’ are all adjectives I would use. Perhaps I should henceforth refer to all 4cm knobs of ginger as size challenged but lovely once you get to know it? But I digress…)
2 bay leaves
2 teaspoons ground cumin
3 teaspoons chilli flakes (more or less, depending on how hot you like it)

1. Preheat oven to 100 Celcius.
2. In your Le Creuset…




or, if you’re still waiting on Santa to make you a member of the Kitchen Equipment Elite, in a medium sized casserole dish with lid, combine all ingredients.
3. Place casserole dish or Le Creuset in your preheated oven for 2 and a half hours, or until lentils are soft and most if the liquid has been absorbed. You can shorten the cooking time by increasing your oven temperature to about 160 Celsius, which means you only have to wait an hour and a half for dinner. The resultant lentils are still amazingly tasty, but will probably be even better the next day, as the flavours will have had more of a chance to get to know one another. Whereas if you let them mingle in a very slow oven for three hours, the resultant flavours have had time to work out their differences and harmonise into a beautiful marriage without the need for a period in the cold wasteland of the refrigerator.

Soft Polenta and Steamed Snow Peas – this makes enough for just me, so adjust to suit yourself and the number you are feeding accordingly. It’s also a nifty way to kill two birds with one stone – you cook the snow peas in the steam emitted by the water you have to heat for the polenta.

Approx. 250g super fresh snow peas, topped and tailed, and cut into largish chunks.
1/3 of a cup instant polenta (you can get this at most supermarkets – it’s in the isle with the flours and other baking goods).
Water
Salt, pepper, olive oil, and/or butter (again, depending on taste, dietary requirements, and how much cheese you ate at Christmas).

1. Place about a cup and a half of water in the bottom of a saucepan which can be fitted with your steamer. Set over a high heat.
2. Pop the snow peas into the steamer, arrange your steamer over your pot of water, which should be heating up nicely now, and cover with a lid, so as not to loose any precious steam.
3. Give the snow peas between one and three minutes, until they are done as you like. Remove from steamer, replacing the saucepan lid. If you’re the kind of person who likes to blanche things, then blanche your peas. I just think it wastes ice cubes and makes your peas cold, but if you like cold soggy vegetables I’ll only judge you a little.
4. Set the table, even if it’s just you, with a cheerful tablecloth, soft fabric napkins, pretty bowls (another Christmas present from my lovely big little brother and his lovely girlfriend) and nice cutlery.




Don’t argue with me, just do it, it’s a very important step in this recipe.




5. Select a dining companion from your bookshelf. Tonight, I’m dining with Paul Kelly.




Paul and I go way back, and his ‘mongrel memoir’, his words not mine, was a welcome addition to my Christmas stocking. It’s the perfect reading for a dinner as soothing and compassionate as this one.
6. By the time you’ve faffed around with the peas, the table, and the bookshelf, the water should be at a good boil (there is method to my madness, as mama-K often says). Add in your polenta. The packet says ‘in a slow, steady, stream’, but I throw it in the pot and stir like hell.
7. Continue to stir until your polenta thickens – this shouldn’t be much longer than a couple of minutes. As the title implies, I like my polenta relatively soft, so I can tell that it’s done because it’s about the consistency of thick porridge. It also has the propensity to spit boiling hot dollops of polenta out of the pot and onto the stovetop, or an unsuspecting forearm, when it’s at this stage.
8. When it’s all getting a bit too difficult, remove polenta from heat, and add in your salt, pepper, oil and/or butter.
9. Pile the polenta into a bowl, top with a spoonful of the lentils, and the snow peas.




10. Eat, read, and drink some sparkling mineral water. Fell your inner equilibrium mercifully restored.

Reciepies That Keep On Giving – Part One: Stovetop Magic Brownies

One of the things I’m really excited about branching out into with this blog is recipes. I love to cook, and loved to do so before it was trendy. Ok, that was a hipster moment, but I’m willing to deal with that because this is 100% truthful. Watching Junior MasterChef with my housemate, Virginia Boots, I can’t help but be a little put out that cooking is now what all the cool kids are doing. Cooking is what I used to do all weekend, every weekend, when I was small, and it certainly wasn’t cool. Often, it was with Mama-K, but other times, it was by myself, mucking around with flour and sugar and butter. I guess that’s a point of difference between my childhood cooking and the childhood cooking depicted on Junior MasterChef – no expensive or flashy ingredients, but lots of good, honest, floury fun.

And in the spirit of good, honest, floury fun without expensive or flashy ingredients, here’s my first recipe in my series of Recipes That Keep On Giving – Stovetop Magic Brownies. My idea about posting the occasional Recipe That Keeps On Giving is a chance to showcase some of my favorite and most frequently cooked things. Not because they are the fanciest, but because they are the easiest, most economical, are always well received, adjust up and down to feed a crowd or just yourself, and, more often than not, freeze, defrost and transport beautifully. They’re kind of my kitchen’s best and fairest players.

This brownie recipe is fairly new to my regular rotation, but it certainly meets all the criteria for a Recipe That Keeps On Giving. Having played with other brownie recipes and not being particularly happy with the results, especially when the outlay on ingredients is taken into account, I was very pleased with the results this recipe yielded with minimal effort or expenditure. Originally, it came from ‘She’s Leaving Home’, lovely cookbook by Monica Tapapgia (AKA, Monica From Playschool, if you grew up in the 90s like I did…). However, I’ve simplified the methodology, and adjust a few ingredients – enough so that I feel justified in changing the recipe’s name. I call these Stovetop Magic Brownies because all the mixing is done in a single large saucepan, on the stovetop, and they are magical because…THEY DON’T CONTAIN ANY ACTUAL CHOCOLATE ! Although I’ve had arguments with The Dreamboat and his housemate, Jordan Hawthorne, about whether cocoa powder, a principal ingredient in this recipe, counts as ‘chocolate’ or not – I maintain it doesn’t, Jordan and Dreamboat maintain it does – what we can all agree on is that these brownies are amongst the richest, moistest, and chocolatiest we’ve ever tasted, semantics aside.




Stovetop Magic Brownies

Makes approximately 24 medium brownies, depending on how you slice it.

350g Salted Butter
140g Cocoa
675g (yep) White Sugar
6 Eggs
250g Plain Flour
3 Tablespoons (yep) Vanilla Extract
200g Chopped Nuts (Although I never really bother…)
1. Preheat oven to 150 degrees Celsius. Line a lamington tray, or other largish, deep sided, square or rectangular dish with baking paper, or grease generously with butter. This temp might seem quite low for brownies – it is indeed, and it’s one of the variations I made on the original recipe. I’ve found, at the suggestion of Sam from Amore Cakes’ cookbook (check out her brilliant chocolate almond cake next time you’re at the Epic farmer’s markets!) that all manner of things have a better taste and consistency when cooked at a lower temperature for a slightly longer time, these brownies being no exception.
2. In a large saucepan, begin melting the butter over medium heat. When your butter is about half melted, add in your cocoa powder, and stir occasionally with a wooden spoon, being careful not to let the cocoa/butter mixture burn, until almost all the butter is melted and the mixture is dark and glossy.
3. Turn off stove, but leave saucepan on the element to make good use of the radiant heat. Add in the sugar, and stir until thoroughly combined. I like to add the sugar whilst the mixture is quite warm, as it seems to help it integrate into the mixture more quickly.
4. Now, add in your eggs. At this point I like to switch to a balloon whisk, but I’ll leave the choice of weapon to you. Mix until smooth. Stir in the vanilla essence.
5. Finally, carefully add the flour (and nuts, if you are using them), bit by bit, so that you don’t have too many flour splashes to clean up.
6. When everything is incorporated, pour mixture into your prepared tray, and let it settle out. I never bother trying to make a groove in the middle with the back of a spoon to ensure even rising, but if you would like to do that, you can. I’ll just judge you from afar.
7. Bake for approximately 40 minutes, or, more importantly, until the middle of the brownie doesn’t smooch in when you touch it.
8. Slice brownie in the tin about ten minutes after cooling and dust with extra cocoa or icing sugar, if that takes your fancy. Leave the brownie in the tin until entirely cold, if at all possible, to get the best and moistest result.

And there you have it. Last week, I made a triplicate batch of these for my first years, to celebrate the last tutorial of semester. Needless to say, they soothed the pain of talking about exams no end. Ah, the devine power of a Stovetop Magic Brownie. I think this rather bad photo captures how I feel about them…