How the Focaccia - Lemon and Olive Wholemeal Focaccia

You know how sometimes you get given an appliance and it sits there? Or sometimes you even buy yourself an appliance and it just sits there. Well, I’ve got a few of those in cupboards around the house. And I feel bad, because I know they are probably really useful. But when you don’t have a great deal of time to cook already, it can be just too difficult to get out a new appliance and learn how to use it. Or even think about it sitting there. It may even be revolutionary in it’s time-saving-ness and it’s something you should be using every day…but it’s in the box and you need to read the instructions and. And. And…you don’t use it. And it sits there. You need a kick to get it out and use it.

One of those said appliances for me is a breadmaker. Stupidly, I grew up with a breadmaker, mum stopped buying bread and made it all when I was in high school, but I still didn’t rush to use my own. We don’t eat a great deal of bread in our house, so it just didn’t make sense to make my own. I already have to freeze a loaf and thaw/toast it as I need it. But then l I fell in love with pretzel rolls. Beautiful, fluffy pretzel rolls. Not having a proper standmixer yet, I had to work out another way of mixing the dough. And then it hit me. The breadmaker. Well, that folks, was the revelation I needed to start using my breadmaker.

Lance and I host an annual day-long BBQ for friends and family in October and being a full-day of drinking and celebrating – we need decent filling snacks to keep things from getting too rowdy. Bread is perfect for that.  This recipe makes a foccacia the size of a whole baking tray, so it's perfect for entertaining a large group of people.

I served this with maple butter. A little trick I learnt on the Sweet Escape Retreat. Drizzle a little maple syrup into room temperature butter and mix in well. Delicious.

Lemon and Olive Wholemeal Focaccia
2 cups warm water
1 tbsp yeast
3 tbsp sugar
2 ½ cups plain flour

2 ½ cups wholemeal flour
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1 tbsp salt
1/2 cup olive oil
zest from one lemon
2 sprigs thyme, leaves picked off
20 or so pitted olives, sliced into rings
Coarse sea salt
2 tsp raw sugar
Drizzle of olive oil


In the base of your bread maker, stir the warm water, sugar and yeast together. Let it sit until foamy. Add the olive oil, then the flours, cinnamon, ginger and salt. Select the ‘dough’ setting and leave it to do it’s thing. Once finished, it should be a risen slightly sticky dough.

(If you don’t have a bread maker, follow the steps above but mix in a standmixer. Then put the dough in a large oiled bowl , cover, and place bowl somewhere warm for an hour or so to double in size.)

Preheat the oven to 200C. Line a baking tray with paper and dump the dough out into the middle . Stretch the dough out until it covers the whole baking tray. Poke bumps and holes into the dough. Leave it to rise in a warm area.

Drizzle a little olive oil over the top and gently rub it across. You should only need a few tablespoons. Then poke the olives into the dough a little, so it ‘holds’ them. Sprinkle with the lemon zest, thyme, salt and sugar.

Bake until golden and slightly crispy at the edges. Serve with maple butter.

 

Overcoming Kitchen Fears - Crispy Roast Duck with Orange, Honey and Mustard Glaze

I love duck. The crispy skin, the moist flavorsome meat that stands up to stronger flavours than chicken. If I see duck on a menu, I will invariably order it. In fact, my husband recently went out to dinner and came home and told me he had to take me there because it had my ideal dish. We went, less than a week later because he was so excited for me to have it and he couldn’t have been more right. It was roast duck breast, with ginger and pumpkin puree on scallops and beetroot salad. You couldn’t get a more perfect combination of my current favourite foods in the one dish! Especially the duck and scallops. Love!

When I saw that a supermarket had whole ducks on special, I knew that it was time to try cooking it. Now, as much as I love duck, I’ve also been served a fair few bad duck dishes. It seems that duck is really easy to over-cook. And so I left my whole duck in the freezer for a while before I got the courage to actually try it. I read the cooking instructions on the back of the packet and then a few more recipes from the duck supplier’s website, and it all seemed pretty straight-forward. And from this, and the process of cooking it I learnt a few important things about cooking duck that are important. Number 1. Duck has a lot of fat just below the skin. You want most of this to render out – both to make the finished meat less fatty and to help the skin get crispy, not soggy. The best way to do this is to pierce the skin, so it can come out as it roasts. Number 2. This fat can smoke/spatter/be just plain dangerous. The best way to deal with this is to add liquid to the roasting tray, and put the duck in a rack up out of it. Apart from that, roasting the duck is pretty much the same as roasting a chicken. So don’t be scared! The added bonus of roasting a duck this way is that it creates an awesome duck stock and duck fat. Just pour the fat/pan juices into a container and put it in the fridge. It’ll separate into duck jelly below, duck fat on top. To make stock out of the jelly just add hot water.

I saw a catalogue which had the cookbook associated with Jamie Oliver’s new show teaching you how to use leftovers to maximize the cost savings of using up everything you buy. This roast duck was a good example of how to do this. Served as a roast the first night, I then shredded the leftover meat and heated it up in the leftover glaze/sauce and served it with pancakes the next night. The following night I used the stock to make a buckwheat risotto, and the duck fat is in my fridge for making duck fat roast potatoes.

 

Crispy Roast Duck with Orange and Mustard Glaze

1 duck
1 cup red wine
1 cup water
4 cloves garlic, peeled and slightly crushed

Rub

1 tsp sumac
½ tsp caraway seeds
Generous amount of salt
1 tsp black pepper
4 sprigs thyme

Glaze

2 teaspoons seeded mustard
4 tsp honey
¼ cup orange juice
1 teaspoons caraway seeds
1 tsp sumac
½ tsp salt

Prick the duck all over. Try not to prick it through the meat, you just want to open up the skin so the fat underneath can render out.

Pour a kettle of boiling water over the duck to tighten up the skin. Pat the duck as dry as possible using paper towels, then put it on a rack and stick it in the fridge for at least 1 hour.
 

Preheat the oven to 175 degrees C. Pat the duck dry again with paper towels. Rub a few tablespoons of salt on the inside and outside of the bird. Mix the rub ingredients together, and rub all over the duck and a little inside the cavity. Fill the cavity with the remainder of the thyme sprigs and the garlic cloves.

Pour 1 cup of water and 1 cup wine in the bottom of a roasting pan with a wire rack and place the duck on the rack, breast-side up. You want the duck high in the pan so it doesn’t sit in the fat that renders out of it. Roast for about an hour. After an hour, when the bird has about 30 minutes left to go, make the glaze.

Add all of the ingredients to a small pot and simmer until reduced down to a sticky sauce. Baste the duck with the sauce, then return to the oven. Roast for a further 15 minutes, then baste again. After the remaining 15 minutes it should be ready, but prick the bird in  a thick part meat and if the juices run clear, it’s cooked through. Serve immediately so the skin stays crispy.

Spring Salads - Quinoa salad with Tamarind Dressing

The days are (occasionally) getting warmer and brighter and the need for raw veges is slowly creeping in. My body craves crunchy, fresh produce and as I unpack my box of groceries, I can't help but pick at bits. A broccoli floret might have 'accidentally' ripped off into my mouth. A snow pea 'fell-out' of the bag on to the counter so I might as well eat it. Then Lance points out that it's lunch time.

There's some cooked quinoa in the fridge (ready for these biscuits), a few slices of chilli pancetta and a tiny bit of sheep milk fetta leftover in the fridge. Add some fresh vegetables, some parsley and mint from the garden and the tamarind dressing I'm currently in love with and you have the perfect weekend lunch. Make enough for lunch the next day, too. All of the vegetables are interchangeable for what you have or what you like. My aim was for pretty colours and a range of textures.

Quinoa Salad with Tamarind Dressing

(serves 3-4)
1 cup cooked quinoa
1 small carrot
4 large cauliflower florets
½ capsicum
1 tomato
1 dill pickle
2 kale leaves, inner rib removed and shredded
3 slices pancetta
Sheep fetta
1 tbsp toasted pepitas
1 tbsp toasted pine nuts
½ tbsp. cacao nibs
¼ cup shredded flat leaf parsley
¼ cup shredded mint
3 tbsps Tamarind dressing (recipe here)

Chop all the vegetables into similar size pieces, I went for a very small dice. Slice the dill pickle smaller still. Shred the pancetta into small pieces.

 
Toss all ingredients together, apart from the fetta and dressing. Slowly add the dressing, using just enough to coat, rather than drown it. Crumble fetta over the top and serve!
 

Recreating Deliciousness - Coppelia Calamari with Tamarind Dressing

On my recent holiday, I ate a lot of Cuban. A lot. It started at Bar Pulpo at the Melbourne Airport. And it was good. So rare to get good food at an airport! But I was really impressed. It made the 5 hour plane delay bearable! Then in the states, I went to a restaurant in New York that was recommended to me - Coppelia. And even though it's been two or so months since I've been there, I still consider it one of my favourite restaurants. It's a funky Latin diner style restaurant with ridiculously good, well-priced food. We went to another 4 Cuban restaurants in our trip and loved every single dish. So I came back and wishlisted a few Cuban cooking books on bookdepository (but if you have any recommendations for other good Latin and Cuban cookbooks to add to the list, I'd love to hear). So you can look forward to Skamp's versions of other Latin dishes!

 

Lance and I both fell in love with Coppelia's blue cornmeal crusted calamari with tamarind vinaigrette. We are haunted by it, so I am trying to create an "at-home" version. We don't get plantains in WA (or if you know of a place they're available, please, please, please let me know!!!) so I substituted bananas. Here's a photo of their version:

 

 

I couldn't find blue cornmeal, but I already had some blue corn flour (blue masa), which I used for the flour for the dusting as well as in the coating cornmeal. I get mine from one of my favourite shops in Perth - Kakulas. Using masa for the whole dish makes it naturally gluten free, if that's an issue for you.

 

To make the tamarind dressing, firstly you have to make tamarind syrup. There's a recipe here on my Kale Tamarind Salad recipe. You'll see in the pictures of my version, that it wasn't nearly saucy enough compared to theirs. When I heated the sauce, it reduced right down, so this recipe is double.

My verdict on it's similarity? Well, it's not quite the same, but it's still delicious. But my memory might also be failing me. I think the best thing to do would be to go back to New York to re-acquaint myself with the original!

 

 

Calamari

200g squid rings

1 cup rice bran oil for frying

2 firm but ripe bananas, cut into 3cm chunks

Flour mix
1/4 cup blue corn flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper

2 beaten eggs

Cornmeal mix
1/4 cup blue corn flour
1/4 cup cornmeal
1/2 tsp ancho chilli powder
1/2 tsp chipotle chilli powder

Tamarind Dressing
16 tbsp tamarind syrup
8 tbsp red wine vinegar
4 tbsp olive oil
4 tbsp cachaca
salt & pepper to taste

Have the flour mix, egg wash and cornmeal mix in three separate bowls, ready to go. Then an empty plate for the coated ring.

Dip each calamari ring in flour mix, shake to remove excess. Then the egg wash, shake to remove excess. Lastly coat with the cornmeal mix. Then coat the banana pieces in the same way.

Heat the rice bran oil in a wok or frypan - enough to create a shallow layer. Carefully splash a drop of water into the hot oil. If it sizzles, it's hot enough. Without crowding the pan, fry the calamari rings a few at a time, allowing to crispen and darken before turning over. It'll take a few minutes per side.

Place on paper towel lined plate and keep warm. Repeat with all rings until they're all cooked, then do the banana pieces, cooking each side until crispy.

In a separate pan, add all of the dressing ingredients and heat the pan to medium. Stir as it cooks for a minute or two until it reduces into a sticky sauce. carefully put the calamari and bananas in the sauce and stir to coat. Plate up, the drizzle the remaining sauce over the top.

Served here with a bean sprout, coriander, ginger and peanut salad.

 

Dilemma - Cauliflower Gnocchi with Burnt Butter & Orange Sauce with Hazelnuts, Lamb and Snow Peas

So after replacing our broken dishwasher a few months back, our fridge has decided to slowly stop working as well. I'm not sure why my whitegoods are all abandoning me! But the fridge has brought up a few issues that have been swirling around in my head. Firstly - do I transplant my time-machine of old invitations and post cards and take-out menus and magnets and a calendar from 2011 onto the new fridge, or start with a clean slate? The next issue relates to some frozen cauliflower.

See, we have two fridges - one outside 'drinks fridge' and the everyday fridge that's in the kitchen where it should be. This is so common in Perth where for the majority of the year you want your drinks cold. And plentiful. The power companies tell you that the old outside fridge is just a power-drain and not a good idea - and yet we can't give them up! I know that come December, that extra fridge space isn't 'extra', it's just space. Every inch of both fridges are full of watermelon and rockmelon and every colourful vegetable you can imagine and then you can try fit in some drinks. Maybe. I was telling an overseas friend that we had two fridges and she was blown away. It just seems so unnecessary in places that don't regularly get above 35C, I guess! On the opposite end of the spectrum, I visited Germany at Christmas time as a teenager and I was so delighted to see my host family chill their wine by placing it in a planter box outside the kitchen window. So novel and different to the way we live in Perth!

So our outside fridge is an old hand-me-down fridge and it has just the one setting - COLD! So now that our kitchen fridge has one setting too - OFF, everything has been moved outside temporarily. And it's frozen the cauliflower. I had two of them, because of a sale at the Nanna Shop, both froze solid. Well, what to do with frozen cauli? I love the crunchiness of fresh cauliflower. I love make cauliflower "rice" salads. I love using them with dip. I'm not a huge fan of soggy, fully cooked cauli. But I am not going to throw out two otherwise perfect cauliflowers. So I made soup with one. And cauliflower gnocchi with the other. The soup was a standard cream of cauliflower soup. Nice and simple. The gnocchi however. Oh. My. Goodness. Nutty and delicious. It's fiddly, but give it a go! So good!

To make the gnocchi, first you have to make cauliflower mash, then the gnocchi. Like you would a traditional potato gnocchi. I've split it up into different stages to make it easier to describe. The first night, I served it with this lamb and orange butter sauce, the next night with a simple Arrabiata sauce. Both were good! And I still have enough leftover gnocchi in the freezer for two more meals.


Cauliflower Mash
1 head, chopped into smaller florets
4 garlic cloves, diced
water to cover
big pinch salt

Put all ingredients in a big pot. Bring to the boil, then simmer until the cauliflower is tender. Approximately 30 minutes. Mash mixture, then put into a fine mesh sieve to remove all of the extra water. Allow to cool completely whilst draining.

Gnocchi with Spelt and Hazelnut
Cauliflower mash (1 think I ended up with 3-4 cups)
1 egg
1 tbsp salt
4 + cups wholemeal spelt flour
1/2 cup hazelnut meal

Combine mash, salt and egg in a bowl and mix well. Add the hazelnut meal and 1/2 cup spelt flour. Mix well, then add more flour 1/2 cup and a time until it comes together into a big ball of dough. I think all up I needed about 4 1/2 cups of flour for the amount of mash I had.

Turn out onto a floured surface and knead until the dough is smooth.

Put a large pot of water with a big pinch of salt on to boil.

Cut the dough into pieces and roll out into a rope, and cut into pieces. I made mine around 1cm wide, 3cm long. Roll over a fork to shape the gnocchi. Repeat for all of the dough. I recruited my husband to help with this process.

About 20 pieces at a time, carefully drop them into boiling water. When they float to the surface, scoop them out with a slotted spoon and set aside in a bowl. Whatever you aren't using that night, freeze.

 

Burnt Butter and Orange Sauce with Hazelnuts, Lamb and Snow Peas
100g unsalted butter
big handful of hazelnuts (approx. 2/3 cup)
zest and juice of two oranges
20 or so snow peas, cut into 2cm pieces.
2/3 cup shredded roast lamb
Enough gnocchi for 2 people
lots of fresh cracked pepper to serve

In a frypan on medium-high heat, toast the hazelnuts until fragrant and darker brown. Set aside to cool, and when you can, rub between your hand to remove the skins. Roughly chop.

Put the butter into the same frypan, allow to melt and then swirl around as it  turns brown and nutty smelling. Add the zest and juice, mix around to full incoporate into the butter and add the gnocchi. Stir to coat and keep stirring for a few minutes. Add the lamb, stir it through, allowing it to heat through. Add the snow peas and cook until they soften slightly and turn brighter green.

Just before serving, toss through the hazelnuts.

 

 

Kale "Salad" with tamarind dressing

I hesitate to call this a salad as really, it's just dressed leaves. But I don't know what else to call dressed leaves. I guess I only really hesitate now because of a conversation on the weekend in which salads of just leaves were accused of not really being salads. Which leads to a huge semantic discussion of what a salad "is", that I don't really care about. I am happy just to eat! I made this dressing and put it on the kale leaves in my fridge and some parsley from my pot plant and served it with sweet potato hash, Puerco pibil and an egg. It went perfectly together. I then made it with just the leaves and some toasted black sesame seeds with my red-sotto. Also a brilliant match. So salad or not, it makes a great side dish.

I guess the real "recipe" here is the dressing. You can make a much bigger, ingredient filled salad with this dressing. When the weather warmed up (for what felt like all of 2 days), I made  wonderful quinoa salads full of crunchy nuts and seeds and this dressing for a fun weekend lunch. Stay tuned for that.

I mainly used tamari in this dressing because tamari and tamarind are so similar in name. It amuses me. You can use soy sauce if that's what you've got. In my experience, soy sauce tends to be a tad saltier, so maybe start with less. And the tamarind syrup is sweet and sour at the same time, so you don't strictly need extra acidity, but a splash of lime as a kicker over the top would also be good. I have heard you can buy tamarind syrup, but I haven't seen any myself, so I included the simple version I made below. I made it initially in an attempt to replicate a different dish I ate in New York. It blew my mind! Stay tuned for that one, too! Tamarind is often available in the "Asian aisle" of supermarkets, or failing that, at Asian grocers.

Add the dressing a little at a time, it'll probably make more than it needs.

 

Tamarind Syrup
1 1/2 cups water
2/3 cup sugar
100g tamarind
1 jalapeno, roughly chopped

Bring everything to the boil in a small pot, simmer for 10 minutes or so until the tamarind paste "dissolves". Strain through a fine mesh sieve to remove pits, tough bits of tamarind skin and the chilli. Leave aside to cool. Stir well before using.

Kale Tamarind Salad
serves 4 as a side
3-4 kale leaves, removed from the stem
1/4 cup flat leaf parsley leaves
2 tbsp olive oil
3 tbsp tamarind syrup
2 tsp tamari
1/4 tsp freshly cracked black pepper
toasted sesame seeds to serve

Pour the olive oile, tamarind syrup, tamari and pepper into a small jar with a lid and shake vigourously to blend. Pour over the kale leaves and use your fingers to massage in, to help soften and make all the leaves glossy. Toss through the parsley leaves. Garnish with sesame seeds.

Comfort Food - Pina Colada Pudding Cake

Do you like pina colada? I actually don't like the cocktail so much, they're usually a tad too sweet for my drink tastes - but I do love the pineapple and coconut combination. It's a classic! Remember my Greek Yoghurt Souffle with pineapple, mango and coconut fruit salad? It was amazing! Loving the combo, when I saw a recipe for pina colada pudding, I was intrigued. And then disappointed and overwhelmed by all of the sugar in it. So I decided to make my own version, using a basic self-saucing pudding recipe as my base. Then, instead of using regular flours, I decided to use coconut flour, for fairly obvious reasons and superfine polenta to give it a nice golden colour. Which then makes this pudding cake gluten free!

It should be saucy at the bottom, but the pictures I've got show mine didn't turn out super saucy. Namely because my dish wasn't large enough, and I spilt most of the boiling water on the floor while trying to put it in the oven. Not my finest culinary moment, and I knew it was a bad idea when I was doing it. With an audience. But the cake still came out nice and moist and the pineapple pieces added a nice juiciness. That's why I've called it a 'pudding cake' instead of a straight pudding.

It is a decidedly unglamourous cake in presentation - but great for putting out as a serve-yourself dessert for a large amount of people. It will serve 10-12 easily. And then if you're lucky, you'll have leftovers for breakfast the next day (or three) reheated in the microwave!

Pina Colada Pudding Cake

825g can pineapple pieces - juice drained and reserved
1 tbsp dark brown sugar
2 tbsp dark rum
1 cup superfine polenta
3 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarb soda
2 tsp vanilla extract
2 small tins coconut milk
2 eggs, beaten
2 tsp honey
2 cups boiling water
1/4 cup sugar

Preheat oven to 160C

In the bottom of a big casserole dish, empty the drained pineapple pieces, the dark rum and the dark brown sugar, stir to combine, then spread evenly over the bottom of the dish.

In a large bowl, whisk together the coconut flour, polenta, baking powder and bicarb soda. In a smaller bowl, whisk together 1 cup of the reserved pineapple juice, coconut milk, eggs, vanilla and honey. Whisk together the liquid mixture into the dry mixture, then spread this batter over the pineapple.

Sprinkle the sugar over the top of this mixture, add the remaining pineapple juice to the boiling water and carefully pour this over the top of the batter. Don't mix it in.

Pop it in the oven to bake for approximately 50 minutes, or until the cake is cooked all the way through, and the top is golden.

Serve warm with vanilla or coconut ice cream!