In the kitchen – Page 5

It puffed It puffed It puffed

Was what I chanted to our unexpected lunch guests as I jumped up and down excitedly. What was all the fuss about? My first ever home made puff pastry worked!!!

My morning started early – 2am to be exact as the kitchen was meant to be cool. However I discovered that the kitchen was still 27 deg at that time of morning so I went back to bed. I was interested to find that at 7am the kitchen was actually a lot cooler (22deg) so I could try the September daring bakers challenge. As of this week, I’m now in the daring bakers group officially so can participate in the October challenge actually in October!

I didn’t risk melting the butter, so only did one turn each time. This was interrupted by a lovely visit to the local park with my friend and godson. The pastry was easy enough to pick up after a couple of hours and continue the process. The initial plan was to continue making the dough and then the Vols-au-vents and make up a filling for dinner. However suddenly finding ourselves with house guests at lunchtime, I put together a quick filling and hoped that it would all just work. It was really yummy and enjoyed by all. The puff pastry was lovely, light and crisp. It is kind of hard to explain, but lighter and fresher than store bought pastry.

Here is my one pan, ‘ummm what to make’ for the filling I came up with…
Cut the chicken up into pieces, put them in the frying pan to cook. Cut up some garlic and add it to the pan. Grate the cheese and cut up the mushrooms and some baby spinach. Once the chicken is cooked, turn the heat down to medium and add some milk, stir and then some flour and a bit of the egg used to wash the pastry to thicken. Then add some salt/pepper. Take off the heat and add the cheese till mixed through. Then mix the mushrooms and spinach through. Spoon the mixture into the vols-au-vents and serve.

The photos were taken pretty quickly as I actually wanted to serve and eat
I have some left overs to make something special for my workmates who have been testing a major project for the last few days. We will see how it goes as I also have to be up at 2:30am for an international meeting and then at work at 6am for a deployment. This week is looking very ‘interesting’.

It is just meringue

I felt sorry for Josh on masterchef for not getting his meringue right and therefore losing the challenge… I’m guessing under pressure it would be easy to not call it quits too early on the egg whites.

In order to use up some fruit, cream and egg whites that I had spare, I made up some mini pavlovas. I wasn’t in a pretty decorating mood but luckily they just require you plopping them together. Already a few have dissapeared from the plate… I think we have food stealing fairies.

I also made flat bread wraps to go with the chilli concarne dinner tonight. Making flat bread is now going to be a common task in this household. It is going to save us a fair bit of money as bought wraps are expensive for what they are. Maybe the money can go to other baking escapades.

Spring rolls attempt 2

Still no luck…

I tried this spring roll wrapper recipe tonight. So it is more like a pancake and too egg heavy. Good news though is that it still tastes good with the mixture so all is not lost. The rolls do crisp up in the oven.

Honestly, I didn’t feel like a trip to the supermarket to find rice flour and so swapped with cake flour (the lowest gluten flour I had handy).

I’m thinking I might put the spring roll search on hold till we move into the valley. I can then wander around china town and get some real asian ideas.

Spring rolls from scratch

I normally make spring rolls using the store bought spring roll sheets. Today I decided to see if I could make them myself. I used this spring roll wrapper recipe.

I still need a lot of practice and a surface that can heat evenly over a large space. I wantto find a video or something to see the consistency of the dough, otherwise I will need to experiment a lot more! Good thing is the mixture is flour, water and salt so not too bad if completely stuffed up.

My first cordial

Recently I have been thinking a lot more about the food we consume and the additives in them. I drink a lot of water, but sometimes it is nice to have something a bit different with dinner. This thinking plus a lot of left over mandarines that really needed to be eaten ASAP got me to ask ‘how hard is it to make cordial’ – the answer EASY PEASY LEMON SQUEEZY!!!

I used this fruit juice cordial recipe. Firstly I squeezed the mandarines to find out how much juice we had then worked out the sugar/water/tartaric acid combination. Add soda water and it is as yummy as any commercial soft drink.

While looking at recipes and concepts, I discovered some really interesting combinations. One of them being this cola recipe and the fact that there is an open source recipe for cola.