Every Autumn when I start spying lovely plump pears, plums and apples, thoughts of warming fruity goodies are not far behind. This particular little loaf I’m bringing you today has been a long time in the making. It first starting flitting about the corners of my mind a few …
I love walnuts. Perhaps this started with the grand old walnut tree in our garden when I was little. When I wasn’t swinging from it or chasing the chickens that lived at its feet, I was happily crushing walnuts between concrete blocks so I could prise the …
Ladies and gentlemen, we have finally hit the International Dishes section of the Edmonds Cook Book.
As I make my way alphabetically (and rather slowly, I do admit) through the Edmonds Cook Book, the A section to date has yielded a fair bit of baking and things involving almonds. But now, we find ourselves at Antipasto, opening a rather ambitious International Dishes selection including foreign delicacies like nachos and cucumber salad.
I suspect in this day and age, many of us are familiar with antipasto and its role as the opening dish in an Italian meal. In our little far-flung corner of the world, however, the inclusion of Antipasto, and indeed an International Dishes section at all, to the Edmonds was no doubt a bold leap into the unknown at the time.
This may explain why tasty cheese makes up the cheese selection in the ingredients list, when in other antipasto recipes we see rather more exotic cheeses such as aged Manchengo or Gruyere. But tasty cheese is a firm favourite in our shaky isles and it is only appropriate that it features in the Edmonds take on antipasto. And I don’t want to seem as if I am sneezing at tasty cheese. There are very few snacks as lovely as a thick slice of tasty cheese on a cracker with a generous spoonful of my Mum’s tamarillo chutney.
So for an antipasto platter, Edmonds-style, you will need the following:
And the rest is pretty simple chaps. After draining and rinsing the artichokes, all that one is required to do with the ingredients is ‘arrange decoratively on a plate.’ I will leave the arranging up to your imaginations. This is how mine looked and it was most pleasing with a little tipple on a late Summer afternoon. Enjoy.
These little lovelies simply wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the mighty Anzac biscuit, which inspired me with its comforting blend of oats and golden syrup. I shan’t be going into too much more detail on this point, because Anzac biscuits will be coming up …
Today we greet the last entry in the ‘Almonds’ section of the Edmonds Cookbook, Broccoli with Almonds. And can I say, what a delight. Lightly cooked broccoli covered with lemony butter and toasted sliced almonds. Oh yum.
You can tell the state of the economy by the price of a lime, or so the saying goes. What it’s meant to tell you, I’m not sure, but I can reliably inform you that limes in these here parts cost a small fortune at the moment.
This is why I can never resist the bags of juicy, home-grown limes which perch temptingly by the counter for only five dollars a pop when I visit the lovely Shannons to attend to matters of personal grooming.
I’m never at a loss for what to do with a lime and with a whole bag in hand, my thoughts turned to this delicious orange and almond cake that my lovely sister brought along for a lunch visit a few years ago.
Curiously, I learned, the orange is boiled to provide a flavoursome, moist base. It may feel sacrosanct to boil a precious lime, but with a whole bag, I was feeling reckless. Having never considered the possibility of boiling fruit for the purposes of cake before, my imagination was on fire.
A little polenta to the recipe, inspired by Nigella’s lemon polenta cake recipe, gives this cake a lovely texture and just the right amount of chew to the crust. I enjoy the tanginess of the limes, but for the more faint-hearted, include a little extra sugar if you like a touch more sweetness. And, if you make sure to use gluten-free baking powder, this even ticks the gluten-free box.
Ingredients:
Butter and line a 21cm springform tin.
Put the limes in a saucepan, cover them with cold water and pop them on the stove. Bring to the boil and boil for an hour.
Drain the limes, watching for your fingers as they will still be a little hot. Chop the limes into bits and pick out any seeds. Use a blender or masher to puree the limes, skins and all, until smooth. Set this aside.
In a largish bowl, beat the eggs and sugar until they are thick and pale.
Add the pureed limes, ground almonds, polenta and baking powder to the egg and sugar mixture. Gently fold in until everything is just combined.
Pour the mix into the prepared cake tin.
Bake in a 180 degrees celsius oven for 45 minutes, or until a skewer prodded into the centre of the cake comes out clean and the cake is just beginning to pull away from the sides of the tin.
Leave the cake in its tin on a baking rack to cool before turning out. I can heartily recommend this cake warm, with a little yoghurt or vanilla ice cream on the side.
Herman came into my life my accident. My plans were to have morning tea with my sister and gorgeous little niece. This did happen. But what I didn’t expect was to leave my sister’s house with my very first sour dough starter for my own Herman the …
It was time to slay the mighty parsley-beasts. I felt a little regretful about this, as they had done me proud by growing all green and bountiful, despite my doing very little to help them. But, many leaves had been picked for many dishes, and now the beasts had gone to seed.
My parsley-beasts looked a little sad all uprooted and laid out on my deck:
My garden likes very much to grown parsley, which has left me with similar questions in the past about what one should do with the crop. This was an unprecedented situation because rather than just a mere glut, I had several large plants’ worth of the stuff. And when I think ‘something that uses an unholy amount of herbs,’ I think ‘pesto.’
As I’m sure you know, traditional pesto is made from basil, pine nuts, olive oil, parmesan and Fiore Sardo, a sheep’s milk cheese. Its name comes from the Genovese word ‘to pound,’ and some even say it lends itself to the English word ‘pestle’, as in ‘mortar and.’
Apparently the Ancient Romans themselves ate a paste called ‘moretum,’ consisting of herbs, cheese and oil. This was of particular interest to me, as my only memories of food and the Ancient Romans, scraped from the dim, dusty part of my brain labelled Third Form Latin Class, were that stuffed field mice were typically on the menu. How unfair of me. I shall be contacting the editors of Ecce Romani forthwith to suggest a showcasing of moretum and pesto.
It seems to me that these days, we are increasingly embracing any number of nut, cheese and herb combinations for our pesto. The parsley pesto I have made here, based on this parsley pesto recipe, contains walnuts, almonds, parmesan and olive oil. I made it like so..
My ingredients (note: I had a HEAP of parsley, so needed a heap of everything else and in turn made a heap of pesto – you could quite easily halve or quarter this and still have a respectable amount):
I toasted the almonds and walnuts of the stove-top in a non-stick frying pan until they were all golden and smelling tasty.
I ripped the parsley into smaller bits with my hands, and added it to the bowl of my food processor, along with the toasted nuts, parmesan, olive oil and plenty of ground black pepper. I processed it until it made a smooth paste, adding a little salt and squeezing in some lemon to taste along the way.
I wound up with 6 jars of roughly 250mls capacity, meaning that a few friends and family members had pesto thrust upon them. Our first meal with the bounty was a salad with roasted potato, shredded poached chicken and plenty of pesto. This pesto is rather tasty slathered on freshly toasted bread, and I am reliably informed it tops pasta quite nicely too.
Happy gardening and eating.
We have recently started smoking. No, not the nicotine kind (don’t worry Mum!), the charcoal kind. And my is it fun. Our little smoker cost us the princely sum of $50, half price on the GrabOne daily deals website. I think it looks a bit …