Cook Republic Workshop - May 15,2015

This past Friday, I had the pleasure of attending a Cook Republic Workshop with Sneh Roy of Cook Republic and Katrina Meynink of The Little Crumb. The workshop was on how to pitch, write, style, photograph and publish a cookbook. 

My obsession with cookbooks is probably well known by now, so it might not come as much of a surprise that I would love to someday have one of my own. 

Lots of great and really useful advice was given by both Sneh and Katrina, and it was great to hear about both their experiences around publishing their cookbooks. I did find myself becoming memorised at the prospect of beginning such a project, and partly because I was sitting directly in front of Sneh’s enviable bookcase, all filled with cookbooks! I kept noticing books I hadn’t seen before, or ones that are on my ‘to be bought (at some time in the future) list.’ There were also carefully decorated corners of the room, so photogenic I sat there making a mental list in my mind of all the photographs that could be taken in this amazing space. 

By the end of the day all the advice, stories and ideas were swirling around in my mind, and it felt like I was walking away better equipped to tackle my own cookbook project sometime in the future. 

If you ever get the chance to attend one of the Cook Republic Workshops, do! It was a lovely day filled with extremely useful advice, warming cups of tea and wonderful food. All in all, a day well spent in my opinion! 

Thanks again to Sneh and Katrina for a wonderful day!

Easy Breakfast’s from Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution Live

Back in late March, few friends and I went to Jamie’s Food Revolution Live at the Opera House. It was great. We had so much fun, and Jamie was so great to see live and witness his passion for good food in person. 

Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution Live, Sydney Opera House (March 29, 2015).

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This pancake recipe is Jamie’s idea of a simple, and better for you, breakfast. He cooked them at the Opera House, and served them with different combinations of fruit, yoghurt, honey, ricotta and maple syrup. The whole idea behind this recipe is to start the day with something that will keep you full, whilst avoiding processed foods and sugars. Putting oats in pancakes might seem a little strange, but you honestly can’t notice them once the pancakes are cooked. They also help keep you fuller for longer. Jamie recommends using wholemeal self-raising flour and skim milk for this recipe. I used buttermilk the first time I made them, and it make the pancakes nice and fluffy.  They are however, just as nice with skim milk. 

Jamie also said to cook them on a non-stick pan, so as to negate the need for cooking with any fats. Our non-stick pan isn’t so non-stick anymore, so I used some margarine to cook the pancakes. 

While they are simple, I find cooking them in advance (the night before), the easiest way to tackle breakfast before going to work! I can’t say I feel like cooking pancakes, or anything for that matter, at 6:30 in the morning, so being able to just heat them up and top with some berries and maple syrup, is the quickest way to go. I find they last a few days in the fridge once cooked. 

This recipe makes about 6 pancakes, and is easily doubled to make more (about 12).

Some smoothie recipes were also demonstrated at Jamie’s Food Revolution Live. The recipe below is my interpretation of those, based on the flavours I like. The recipe is adapted from a berry yoghurt ice cream from ‘Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals’. If you won’t be using all the berry and yoghurt mixture in one go (it will make a few smoothies), put it in a container and freeze it for another time. Otherwise, halve the recipe so there is less leftover. 

Easy Pancakes for Breakfast

Ingredients:

1 cup self-raising flour (preferably wholemeal)

1 cup buttermilk or skim milk 

1 egg 

1/2 cup oats

margarine, for cooking (if needed)

maple syrup and berries, to serve 

Method: 

In a large bowl combine all the ingredients, and using a whisk, mix well. 

Heat a non-stick pan to medium-high heat. 

Place a couple of spoonfuls of the mixture onto the pan and cook for about 2 minutes on each side, or until golden and cooked through. 

Serve warm with maple syrup and fresh berries. 

Reference:  ‘Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution Live’ Sunday March 29 2015, Sydney Opera House, Australia. 

Berry Breakfast Smoothie

Ingredients: 

500g mixed frozen berries

3-4 tablespoons runny honey

500g natural yoghurt 

milk

Method: 

Put the yoghurt and honey in the bowl of a food processor and process to combine. Add the berries and process until combined. 

Add some milk and process until combined. Add as much or as little milk as you like, depending on how thick you would like the smoothie to be. 

Divide smoothie amongst a few glasses, or serve in a large jug. 

Reference:  ‘Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals’ by Jamie Oliver (Penguin Group, 2010), p.182.

Glenmore House

Here are a few snaps from my visit to Glenmore House this past weekend. It is such a lovely place to visit, and the stalls organised for the open garden were so good (the cakes in particular!). If you ever get the chance to go, take it! 

Glenmore House - Website 

Previous Post at Glenmore House - Slow Living Workshop, Sydney. 

Some of the Stall holders at Glenmore House Open Garden: 

Cooks Co-Op

The Cooking Tree 

Ovvio 

Patio Plants

Food and Words 

Peggy Porschen London + How to Make Peggy Porschen Style Easter Biscuits

I made these biscuits over Easter, hence the Easter egg and bunny shapes. But they would be lovely in any shape you would like! The book the recipe is from ‘Cookies’ by Peggy Porschen, has many wonderfully suggestions on what shapes to use and how to decorate the biscuits. Most of the biscuits are intricate and probably require a bit more skill and patience than I am will to provide, so I decided to use sprinkles to decorate the biscuits (and hide any evidence of poor piping skills!). 

I came across Peggy Porschen, her cookies, shop and books, via Sweet Bake Shop, who now has her own store in Canada. Peggy is based in London, and when I was there just over a year ago, Mum and I walked all the way to Belgravia to go to her shop. 

Peggy Porschen's Parlour - 116 Edbury St Belgravia, London.

I think we both agreed the walk was worth it. The shop was very cute, the cakes were lovely and the tea was good too. The areas of Chelsea and Belgravia are also quite nice to have walk around in as well. We ate cupcakes and sipped on tea, on some outside seats in the cold, but thoroughly enjoyed the experience! 

I walked away with one of Peggy’s iced biscuits, a biscuit cutter and a copy of her ‘Cupcakes’ book. This ‘Cookies’ book came out later, as was given to me for my birthday last year. There are lots of hints and tips in the book about making the biscuits and icing them, and gives step by step instructions on how to do all of it. I used the vanilla biscuit recipe, and learnt that for such ‘sugar cookies’, you should chill the cut biscuits on their trays before baking for at least 30 minutes to ensure they don’t spread in the oven. 

Tea and cake at Peggy Porschen, London.

I kept the icing for these biscuits white, as I wanted to decorate them with sprinkles. If you want to add colour, add it at the first stage of the icing, before you add more water to create soft peak icing for piping the edges or flooding icing to fill the biscuits. Add a small amount of colour to the mixture, and gently mix together with a palette knife. If you want multiple colours for the biscuits, you will have to divide the royal icing up at the first stage, and add the colours separately, and continue on with the following stages for each colour. Keep a bit of the white royal icing to the side (covered with a damp cloth), so you can adjust the shades of the icing colours. 

I served these biscuits with simple flavoured milks, but now that the weather has got chillier, they would probably be best with a nice hot chocolate! 

Ingredients for the Biscuits: 

200 g unsalted butter, softened

200 g caster sugar

1 tbsp vanilla bean paste 

pinch of salt

1 egg, lightly beaten 

400 g plain flour, plus extra for dusting 

Method: 

Line 3 baking trays with baking paper. 

Cream the butter, sugar, vanilla and salt in a large bowl until combined. Beat the egg in a glass or jug, and add slowly to the butter mixture. Mix until well incorporated. Sift in the flour and mix until just combined. Pull the dough together, and wrap in cling film and chill in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. 

Place the dough on a lightly floured surface and knead briefly. Roll the dough out, until it’s about 4-5mm thick. 

Cut out shapes with biscuit cutters, and place on the prepared trays. Once all the dough has been used, place the trays in the fridge so the dough can chill for a further 30 minutes before going into the oven. 

Pre-heat oven to 200 degrees Celsius. 

Bake the biscuits for 8-10 minutes, or until they are slightly golden around the edges and spring back when lightly touched. You may need to rotate the trays in the oven to evenly bake all the biscuits. 

Place on a wire rack to cool. 

Ingredients for the Icing: 

500 g icing sugar, sifted

small squeeze of lemon juice 

2 egg whites 

sprinkles to decorate

Method: 

In a large clean bowl of an electric mixed, place the icing sugar, lemon juice and three-quarters of the egg whites. 

Mix on the lowest speed until the ingredients are well combined. If the mixture is too dry add more egg white. The mixture should be smooth but not wet. Scrape down the sides of the bowl after a couple of minutes, to ensure all the ingredients mix together properly. If the mixture is too runny, add a little more sifted icing sugar. 

Continue to mix on the lowest speed for 4-5 minutes, ensuring the mixture doesn’t become too aerated. The mixture will be ready when stiff peaks form around the edges of the bowl, and has a smooth satiny texture. 

To get the icing to a pipe-able consistency, run a palette knife under water and use to mix the icing. The icing should become glossier and the peaks should be softer. 

Place some of the royal icing in a piping bag, with either a small nozzle or a small cut at the end. Cover the remaining royal icing with a damp cloth so it doesn’t dry out. 

Draw an outline around the edge of each biscuit shape with the icing in the piping bag. 

Now the remaining royal icing needs to be made into ‘flooding’ icing. Add a little water to the mixture, and mix with a spatula. The icing will flow, become shiny and flatten out within a few seconds after it has been mixed (i.e. it will no longer ‘hold its peak’ in any way). Tap the bowl on a bench or table to remove any air bubbles, then fill another piping bag with the icing. This piping bag should have a slightly bigger nozzle, or a slightly larger hole cut at the end. 

If decorating with sprinkles, have a shallow bowl filled with the sprinkles ready, so you can dip the biscuits into it while the icing is still wet.

Flood each biscuit with the icing, keeping within the border you have already piped. Don’t over fill the bordered area of the biscuit with flooding icing or it may run over the piped outline. You may need to use a small palette knife or cocktail stick to push the icing in to small corners of the biscuit. Dip the biscuits (icing side down) in to the sprinkles.

Leave to dry for a few hours (or overnight), or until the icing has dried hard. 

Original recipes from ‘Cookies’ by Peggy Porschen (Quadrille Publishing, 2014), pp.8 & 56-60.

ANZAC Biscuits Revisited

I have posted a fairly similar version of this recipe before. It is one of my favourite recipes from my Grandma’s collection, and often I adapt it to suit what types of ingredients we have or to try some new ingredient I have found. 

More recently, I wanted to play with the ingredients to alter to final texture of the biscuit. The type of sugar you use will determine whether these ANZAC biscuits are crisp and crunchy or softer and chewier. I like to try gain some kind of middle ground between these two opposites, by using a combination of caster sugar and raw sugar. If you like a more chewy biscuit use a combination of caster and brown sugar. 

I also found coconut chips in a deli a while back, and they are great in this recipe. The bigger chunks of coconut give the biscuits a litter more substance and highlight the coconut amongst all the other ingredients just that much more. Any coconut will do, but it’s nice to try something different every once in a while! 

I am posting this recipe again, not just because of my adventures in experimenting with it. It is of course ANZAC Day tomorrow, and a very significant one at that. I’ve said before that the main way I tend to mark these kind of significant holidays or events is with food. Not to lessen the significance of the occasion, but to mark it in my own way. I’m not one, especially on this occasion, for immersing myself in it all too much. Being a modern history major and the relative of some who have served and are currently serving, often makes the connection of the day a little too overwhelming for me. 

So I bake, look through family photos and reflect on the lives of those to whom this Day has real significance. 

Ingredients: 

1 cup rolled oats

1 cup plain flour

1/2 cup caster sugar

1/2 cup raw sugar

3/4 cup coconut chips

1 tbsp golden syrup

110 g unsalted butter

1 tsp bi-carb soda

2 tbsp warm water 

Method:

Pre-heat the oven to 150 degrees Celsius and line three large baking trays with baking paper. 

Mix the oats, flour, sugar and coconut in a large bowl. Melt the golden syrup and butter on a medium-low heat, then mix the bi-carb soda and warm water together and add to the butter. The butter mixture should froth a little. 

Take the butter mixture off the heat and add to the dry ingredients and mix together. 

Place teaspoon sized balls of the mixture on the trays, leaving room for the biscuits to spread. Bake for 10 - 20 minutes, or until golden. 

Makes approx. 32 biscuits.

Nigella Lawson's Italian Roast Chicken

I’ve never been much of a roast chicken fan. Really, I’m not a fan of meat in general. Which is why over this cookbook challenge, when it comes to savoury options, there will be few red meat dishes (possibly none), and lots of chicken dishes. Now that I’ve said that, most of you will probably stop reading, because I’ve just told you I don’t eat almost a whole food group! 

Never fear, baking will remain the focus of this blog, so there will always be a satisfying sweet recipe around the corner. I am however, trying to add a few more savoury recipes to the blog whilst I am doing my cookbook challenge. Not only does it help out with deciding what to make for dinner on the weekend, but some cookbooks in our collection don’t have sweet or baking sections and some just don’t appeal to me. So with using ALL the cookbooks in mind, sometimes a savoury dish here and there will have to be tolerated. 

Having said that, if anyone could brighten up dinner and change my mind about roast chicken it’s Nigella. I know I’ve said this before (probably more than once), but I really love Nigella, her recipes and her love of food. I know in the past I have heard Nigella talking about how roast chicken is such a comforting dish, and up until I tried this recipe, I found it hard to agree. But now, I definitely do! 

This dish is one of those that you just know is going to be good. And once you’ve made it a couple of times, it suddenly becomes a family favourite, requested over and over again. My Mum made this recipe originally, in an attempt to actually have all members of the family eat the same thing for dinner I suspect. I was suspicious at first, but I was soon eating my words, and the chicken with gusto. 

For a while when this dish was first made, we couldn’t find the dried olives specified in the recipe. It was still a great dish, and if you haven’t tried it with the olives you won’t know what you’re missing out on. But, if you can find them, use them! They absolutely make this dish! We eventually found them at a local deli, so they are out there, and not too hard to find. 

As this recipe has been made a few times at home, we have inevitably altered it slightly. We use two small chickens, and divide the stuffing between each. One chicken of the same total weight will also be perfect. Orange capsicums can sometimes be hard to find, so substitute another yellow one to make up the difference. We often serve this chicken with garlic roast potatoes, which should be prepared and put in the oven about 30 minutes or so after the chicken goes in, so they are ready together. 

Ingredients: 

x 2 small chickens (approx. 1.5-2kg total weight), or one larger 1.5-2kg (approx.) chicken 

1 lemon, halved

4 sprigs of rosemary

3 leeks, washed and trimmed 

2 red capsicums 

1 orange capsicum 

1 yellow capsicum 

100-200g dried black olives*, (pitted if possible)

60 ml olive oil 

sea salt and pepper 

Method: 

Pre-heat oven to 200 degrees Celsius. 

Cut each leek into three (length ways), and add to a large baking/roasting pan. De-seed the capsicums, and cut into thick strips, and add to the pan.

Sit the chickens on top of the vegetables in the pan, and place half a lemon in each chicken cavity, and two sprigs of rosemary. If using one whole chicken, place both halves of the lemon, and all the rosemary in the cavity of the chicken. 

Drizzle the chickens and vegetables with the olive oil (ensuring the vegetables are fairly evenly coated), and scatter in the dried olives amongst the vegetables. Sprinkle the tops of the chickens with a little salt and pepper. 

Place in the oven for 1 - 1 1/4 hours, until the chicken is cooked through and the juices of the chicken run clear when the flesh is cut at the thickest part of the thigh joint. 

Transfer the chickens to a carving board or plates, cover with foil and allow to rest for 10 minutes. Place the vegetables back in the oven (reducing the oven temperature if they are well cooked), to keep warm. 

Remove the vegetables from the oven, and cut the chicken up into pieces. Toss the chicken with the vegetables in the pan and serve. 

*Nigella’s original recipe specifies 100g of olives. We often buy up to 200g as a few of us are obsessed with them! If you aren’t so keen on black olives, keep it to 100g.

Original Recipe from ‘Nigellissima’ by Nigella Lawson (Chatto & Windus, 2012), p.96 or via Nigella's website.

All cooking, styling and photography for this post by Kathryn Vincent of Kulinary Adventures of Kath.