Lemon yoghurt muffins

So we are back from our trip down south. A lot of driving for one weekend, but it was worth it to see my parents.

I try to make a batch (or two) of these muffins every couple of weeks to have with my morning coffee at work. They freeze pretty well, so I just grab one out of the freezer in the morning and it's usually defrosted by coffee time.


I have used orange zest for this recipe in the past, and a combination of lemon and orange zest - it usually just depends what we have at the time. Today I used lemons that I picked from Mum & Dad's lemon tree this morning. We make our own yoghurt, well, kind of, we use the easiyo packets. I used the low-fat greek yoghurt for this.

Lemon yoghurt muffins
adapted from 500 cupcakes, pg 313
makes 12

• 200g plain flour
• 175g caster sugar
• grated zest of 1 or 2 lemons
• 1tbs baking powder
• 225ml low fat plain yoghurt
• 115ml unflavoured oil, I use rice bran oil
• 1 egg, lightly beaten

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees. Grease muffin pan (you don't have to do this, I use a non-stick muffin tray, and forgot to grease it today and they came out fine).


Combine the dry ingredients (flour, sugar, lemon zest & baking powder) in a large bowl. Beat the yoghurt, oil & egg together in a small-medium bowl. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix until just combined.

Spoon into the muffin pan, and bake for 20 minutes. Cool in the pan for 5 minutes, then eat!

-Alphie

Mum & Dad, penne with broccoli

Sorry for the lack of posts yesterday - we drove down to Victoria after work to spend the weekend with my parents. So dinner was eaten on the road, shh don't tell...

Today is a bit of a guest blog, courtesy of my Mum. I'm still blogging, but she cooked, and I took the photos.

The recipe is based on one in The Silver Spoon, orecchiette with broccoli, but modified (as all Mums do), to suit the ingredients she has. My parents grow a lot of their own produce, and this is a great recipe to use up the smaller heads that sprout from a broccoli plant once the main head has been harvested (they look a bit like broccolini).

Penne with broccoli

adapted from The Silver Spoon, pg 274

serves 4

• 800g broccoli florets
• 2tbs garlic olive oil
• splash chilli olive oil
• 4 anchovy fillets
• pinch chilli flakes
• 400g short pasta
• large handful finely grated parmesan

Boil pasta in a large pot of salted water until al dente.
Put broccoli florets in a microwave safe container with a splash of water. Steam in the microwave for 3-4 minutes, until bright green.
Meanwhile, heat the oil in a large fry pan over medium-high heat. Stir in anchovies and break up with spoon.
Drain the broccoli and add to the pan with the chilli, stir until heated through and coated with anchovy oil.
Stir the parmesan through the drained pasta, then add the broccoli, and stir until well combined.
Serve with cracked black pepper and extra parmesan.
-Alphie

Beef keema

This is something we have pretty regularly in our house, for a couple of reasons; it's tasty, pretty quick, and we almost always have all the ingredients in the pantry & freezer. And, the recipe came from an Australian Women's Weekly cookbook - you can always count on the AWW to give you a tasty, tried and tested recipe!

Somehow though, it tastes different every time, which is quite strange given that it is one of the few things I cook where I follow the recipe to a tee, every time, especially when you consider how often we have it. It always baffles FH Alphie and I how it can vary so much. Never the less, it is always good. We have gotten to the stage where the 'leftovers' are packed before we eat, to prevent the two of us from eating the whole lot in one go... :shifty:

FH Alphie rates it: 6/10

We also had dessert tonight!! Yay!! FH Alphie volunteered to make something (yes, even with the busted wing - I think he might be getting bored) to compensate for the average day I had at work. He whipped up Ben O'Donoghue's twice-cooked chocolate brownies (delicious. November 2009, pg 51). There is seriously nothing better than coming home to a toasty warm house that smells of brownies, aahhh....

I'm not going to post the recipe for the brownies, FH Alphie claims that he 'just followed the recipe' and didn't do anything special, so doesn't think I should blog about it. So, I'll link to it instead - the brownie recipe is here. I will add this; we cut ours into 15 squares (18 seemed too difficult) and they were waaaay to big, we ended up cutting the rest in half again.

Alphie rates it: 8/10

Beef keema with cumin and currant pulao
AWW Fresh food fast, pg 47
serves 4

• 2 tbs vegetable oil, I use rice bran oil
• 1 small onion, sliced thinly
• 1 clove garlic, crushed
• 1 tsp cumin seeds
• 1 tsp caraway seeds
• 1/4 tsp ground turmeric
• 1 cup basmati rice
• 2 cups chicken stock
• 2 tbs dried currants
• 500g beef mince
• 2 tsp hot curry powder
• 1/2 tsp ground ginger
• 2 tbs sweet chilli sauce
• 1/4 cup water
• 4 green onions, sliced thinly (optional)
• 2/3 cup frozen peas
• 1/4 cup firmly packed fresh coriander leaves (optional)

I make the rice (pulao), in a rice cooker, because I'm lazy. Heat 1 tbs of the oil in the rice cooker, then, holding the bowl down to 'trigger' the rice cooker, cook brown onion, garlic and spices, stirring, until onion softens. Then add rice; cook, stirring, until rice is coated in spice mixture.


Stir in stock, make sure the rice cooker is on 'cook' (not 'warm') put the lid on, and get on with the keema. Remember, you have to stir the currants into the rice about halfway through.



Heat the remaining oil in a large frying pan. Add mince and stir until broken up and cooked through. Add curry powder and ginger; stir until fragrant. Add sauce, the water, green onion (optional) and peas; cook, stirring, until peas are tender. bring to the boil.


Serve keema on pulao, sprinkled with coriander (optional).


You can, of course, cook the rice on the stove. If you do this, follow the instructions above, and once you have added the stock, bring it to the boil, then reduce heat and simmer, covered, 12 minutes. Remove from heat, stir in currants and stand, covered, about 5 minutes or until rice is tender.

We usually omit the spring onions and coriander leaves, unless we happen to have them at the time, as they are not items we typically have in the kitchen.

-Alphie

Curry Powder

We had something I pulled from the depths of our freezer for dinner tonight, so I don't really have a recipe to share today. I thought I'd share my recipe for the curry powder that was the base of the pumpkin, lentil & spinach curry I rescued from said freezer.


In general I try not to buy anything pre-made. I prefer to have the pantry (and fridge & freezer) stocked with enough base ingredients that I can make anything we want/need - even if it means a bit more work. Plus, the food tastes a lot better, I know exactly what is in everything, and we can avoid the dreaded preservative 282, and palm oil products. One of the few things I do buy pre-made are Thai and Indian curry pastes, and 'it's not ideal' (to quote Claire from MC), but I have no idea where to start without them.

So when FMIL passed me this recipe for and Indian-style curry powder, that could be made with ingredients I already had in the spice cupboard (except fenugreek - I have NEVER known what you were supposed to do with it, so I have consciously avoided buying it... but FMIL provided that too :) ), I jumped at the chance.

It's not a spicy curry powder, so if you prefer it hotter, I would add chilli flakes (to taste) with the other ingredients.

I used 3-4 tbs, cooked off in approx. 2 tbs vegetable oil (I use rice bran oil), for 2/3 smallish pumpkin and 1 (or was it 1 1/2?) cup of lentils. I'm sure you could also use it in similar ratios for chicken, but I'm not so sure about beef - I don't think it would be robust enough.

Alphie's FMILs Indian-style curry powder

makes just over 1 cup

• 1/4 cup coriander seeds
• 2 tbs caraway seeds
• 2 tbs turmeric
• 1 1/2 tbs cumin seeds
• 1 1/2 tbs black peppercorns
• 1 tbs cinnamon
• 2 tbs ground ginger
• 1/2 tsp whole cloves
• 1/2 tsp fenugreek
• 1/2 tsp cardamom
• pinch nutmeg
• 1 tsp chilli flakes (optional)

Now, this is the hard bit... put everything in a food processor and process until well ground. Then store in an airtight container.

It is actually harder than it sounds, I used my stick mixer, and the bowl attachment that came with it, and it did a pretty poor job. Next time I'll use the proper food processor, with its 'dual blade technology'. I am tempted to use the coffee grinder, but FH Alphie had a fit when I mentioned it, so it looks like its the food processor or the mortar and pestle (if I'm feeling active!) next time.

-Alphie

Lentil and spinach en croute

Tonights dinner was a bit of a last minute affair. We had originally planned to see a movie, and have dinner somewhere after or before. But, it turns out that one week before the school holidays is not a great time to see a movie - there is nothing on, bar all three Twilight movies, Toy Story 3, Shrek 3 (or is it 4?) and Sex in the City 2... None of which appealed.


So, just before I left work, I sent FH Alphie to the supermarket to pick up the last few ingredients I needed for this recipe. This caused a bit of drama, as our tiny local supermarket only had 'peppers' in jars and he wasn't sure if they were capsicums, or chillis.

One of the main reasons I had been meaning to try this dish was to try out the puff pastry we had in the freezer - lovingly made by FH Alphie (before the busted wing).

To be honest, it wasn't exactly what I had anticipated, although it definitely made more than the recipe suggested. I probably wouldn't bother to make it again - I can think of a few better uses for the precious puff pastry.

FH Alphie rated it 7/10

I'm not going to include the recipe today - I didn't really make any changes to the original, which is at the link below.

Lentil & spinach en croutedelicious magazine, March 2009, pg 102
http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/22062/lentil+spinach+en+croute


Puff pastry
Bourke Street Bakery - The ultimate baking companion, pg 162-165


PS Does anyone know what these weird leaves are that are always in the baby spinach packs??

Tuna pasta bake

Ok, so a bit of pasta overload here, but it's easy to eat one handed, which is a requirement in our house at the moment - FH Alphie has a busted wing.
 
This is something I have never cooked before, as it brings back bad memories from my childhood, as Tuna Mornay, as it was called in our house, had a long stint as my sisters FAVOURITE MEAL EVER, and we ate it at least once a week. It took me a long time to recover from that period in my life, however I think I am now over it. I saw a recipe for Creamy tuna and pea pasta bake in Super Food Ideas (SFI) magazine recently and it caught my interest (the fact that I even noticed suggests that I have recovered from the tuna mornay overload) and mentally filed it away for a future time.

This is a bit of a bastardised version of that recipe. The recipe in SFI used peas, and since FH Alfie has a thing against peas, and I made him eat them yesterday, I substituted that for baby spinach, the recipe also used evaporated milk, which I didn't have, and don't usually buy, so I made up a basic bechamel/white sauce instead.


FH Alphie rated it 7/10

Tuna pasta bake
(adapted from SFI, June 2010)
serves 6 hungry people

• 3 cups short pasta
• 1 head broccoli, cut into small florets
• 90g butter
• 1 or 2 onions, diced
• 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• 90g plain flour
• 2 heaped tsp mustard (seeded or smooth)
• 750ml milk
• 425g can tuna in springwater, drained and flaked
• 100g (approx) baby spinach
• 1 cup fresh breadcrumbs (or 1/2 cup dry breadcrumbs)
• 1 - 1 1/2 cups grated cheese (I used Colby)
• salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 170 degrees.

Cook pasta in a large saucepan of boiling salted water until tender. Add broccoli for the last 1-2 minutes of cooking. Drain, and set aside.

Meanwhile, melt butter in a medium saucepan, add onion and cook over medium heat until just soft, then add garlic and cook for 1-2 minutes. Stir in flour, and keep stirring until flour has 'cooked off' a bit, then stir through mustard. Add the milk slowly, stirring constantly to avoid lumps. Bring to the boil, stirring, then stand aside.

Combine pasta and broccoli, white sauce, tuna and spinach. Season and pour into a 3L ovenproof dish. Sprinkle with combined cheese and breadcrumbs.
 
Bake for 30 minutes until heated through and the top is golden.

One pot pasta

As promised, dinner tonight was 'one pot pasta'. I got the recipe from taste.com.au, but I think it was in delicious magazine first.

It is kind of reminiscent of a Bolognaise, or at least Bolognaise the way is it generally interpreted in Australia - rich, tomato-ey and meaty. Regardless, it is the perfect thing for a winter night, especially a lazy Sunday, because although it takes a while, you don't have to do much for most of that time, it just bubbles away, making the house smell delicious. Although the recipe says it serves 4, it looks like it would easily serve a small army, or 6 at least - after FH Alphie and I have eaten, there is always a lot more than half left. And, if you are the cook and washer-upper (which is my status, currently), you only dirty one knife, chopping board, pot & spoon. And the cupboards & floor, if, like me, you have an incident with the red wine...
One pot pasta
serves 4-6, see above.

• 2 tbs olive oil
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
• 1 tbs rosemary leave, finely chopped
• 500g beef mince
• 250ml red wine
• 750ml beef stock
• 2 tbs tomato paste
• 500ml tomato passata
• 2 tsp caster sugar
• 1 bay leaf
• 500g small pasta shapes (shells are best, as they 'hold' the sauce, but any small shapes will do)
• 1 cup frozen peas
• 1 tbs chopped flat-leaf parsley leaves
• parmesan, to serve

Heat oil in a large, heavy based saucepan (I used a cast iron Le Chasseur pot), and cook onion until soft (1-2 minutes). Add garlic & rosemary, and cook for 1 minute. Then add beef and cook for 5 minutes, or until browned.

Add the wine, stock, tomato paste, passata, sugar & bay leaf. Season, and bring to the boil, then cover and simmer for 30 minutes.

Add pasta and 25oml boiling water, and cook until pasta is al dente. Stir it frequently once the pasta is in because it will stick. Stir in peas and allow to heat through.

Stir through parsley, and serve with parmesan, and a glass of red wine!