Olive and Rosemary Biscuits

I have a new-found obsession with the Gilt Taste website. Have you been there? It is an online retailer of all things delicious, nutritious and luscious.  I am religious about checking their recipe section several times a week, which explains techniques for many classic and simple yet comforting, tasty dishes.

My latest adventure involved buttery biscuits with olives and rosemary:

Tip: check if your baking powder has an expiration date!

You shape this crumbly mess into a sort of dough and get out the cookie cutters, or glass...

And voila! They are buttery and crumby, which I love, but I expected them to rise even more in the oven. Boooo.... Also if you are going to add olives, make sure you cut down the salt as the olive brine is quite salty as is. 

What kind of biscuit are you?

Hello... again...

Hi! Looks like I'm back from my mandatory annual leave of absence from this blog, it has been so flattering and sweet to have some of you ask me about the status of my life (aka. the blog), some people I didn't even know they knew about this space!

Holler Dawid, Melisa, Parisa, Dan and Joan for always bringing it up :)

I need to redesign the layout again, there's a lot of hating coming from my side (which is perhaps why I avoid this url?)... more on that later I suppose...

This is a little of what we've been up to this weekend:

Cooking! Always.. you know it... M made an amazing GRILLED whole eye fillet roast, grilled asparagus and a roasted garlic and red onion jam (he made everything!!! WHAT?)

We also got up extra early and went to the beach in the morning...

... and surprisingly watching a whole lot of nerdy videos :)

How was your weekend?

How to choose a sheep (and a dinner party)

"Goats and sheep for sale"

On my second day in Bishkek we were given the mission to go and choose a sheep to kill, chop and eat at a party the next day.

As surprising as it may seem, I knew nothing about how to choose a sheep for food (or for anything, for that matter) and neither did M, M's mom, or M's friend. So in the end we just chose (mainly, I think) based on price.

Everyone raved about the meat at the party, and about the left overs the day after, so I reckon we got lucky and chose a good one, (although what is considered "good" or "not good" is still not clear).

After the fact, we met a few people along the way who gave us 2 important tips on choosing a tasty young sheep for mutton.

Feel the skin, make sure it is nice and firm and doesn't have too much give (this suggests the sheep is old and wrinkly).

The most important tip is to count the teeth. Sheep have a set of eight teeth in the lower jaw, but they only grow two a year. So if the sheep has two teeth that protrude over the rest, this means it is one year old. If there are four large teeth, the animal is two years old, and so on until they have grown all eight. Generally you want to choose the youngest possible adult.

After examining the photo of the sheep we chose, we learned it must have been between one and two years.

Another fun fact: the sellers did not sell sheep by the kilo, only by the unit (i.e. per sheep), so there was no way of knowing how much meat you were buying (by the way our sheep cost around $120 and it fed over 25 people).

It is also worth mentioning we were at a private residence looking for sheep, these are people who buy it direct from cattle farms or at the animal market, a few at a time and bring it to their backyard for selling within the city.

So anyway, we chose the fine beast above and put a deposit on it. The next day we cam back to pick up this:

Not all of it, only the one on the left. The one on the right was waiting to be picked up by someone else. Judging by the butt, you can see that our sheep was considerably smaller than the one on the right.

Here you see the head and "chuchuk" which is what you get when you braid the small intestines and stuff them with some of the organs. Not shown is "kielbasa" or "kalbasa" which is a giant sausage made up of who knows what and encased in the large intestine. These are all considered delicacies.

The meat was put in plastic grocery bags and we took it to the restaurant where the party was to be held.

Several dishes came out, one of them was a meat stew with root vegetables and cabbage, my personal favourite (not shown). The next one was called "beshbarmak" or "five fingers" and it consisted of noodles, minced mutton and onions (shown below). The head, tongue and delicacies were also boiled and served (shown to the left of the head).

The legs and anything else attached to a bone was boiled and served separately. Most people put them in doggie bags and took them home (common practice at parties). The stock that came out of boiling the meat was also served.

There were several types of salad at the party, and huge fruit plates. I am proud to say I tried every single thing. I am not proud to say I had to let out not one, but two places on my belt.

The "delicacies", I'm sad to report, smelled and tasted like manure. I have never eaten poo but if I did, I imagine that is what it would taste like. I ate pig intestines once in China, and they did not taste like that, so perhaps the sheep wasn't properly cleaned?

What you got out of the head was mostly skin, not meat. The tongue and the head were ok, once you got over the looks of it, but it wasn't anything to write home about. Beshbarmak was M's favourite, mine was the stew. The lamb stock simply tasted like a very rich stock, aka lamb fat.

On drinking...

At dinner parties people are expected to drink, and a lot. Every 10-20 minutes someone will get up and give a toast (more like a speech, the toasts are rather long). They will toast to any given person, to friendship, to love, peace, you name it, and everyone drinks a round of shots. That's right, people drink shots, not sips. I stuck to wine during this particular evening, and it seems that wine is considered a non-alcoholic drink in comparison to vodka, cognac and whiskey. Why else would the restaurant host send me a complimentary virgin mojito to go with my wine?

Needless to say everyone was having a merry ol' time and looked rather flushed by the end of the evening. So a good party all in all.

On eating...

If you are a guest in Kyrgyzstan, people will try to make you fat. They will likely insist you eat until you either pass out, cry, or throw up. If your plate is empty, it will be full again before you can say "no thank you".  If you say "no thank you" they will think you don't like them, or don't like the food, or that you are sick, or depressed. The last thought through their minds is that you are no longer hungry.

It took me 4 meals to figure out the only way to get of out it is to leave some food on your plate to make your hosts aware that you are properly stuffed. You see, these people don't take no for an answer. Is this strategy wasteful? Yes. Necessary? Also yes.

A Kyrgyz joke....

Kyrgyzstan is the #2 meat consumer in the world.

#1 are the wolves.


The End.

All the photos courtesy of M.

Candied Orange Zest

We had too many oranges at home :-)

Step 1. Cover (loosely) he bottom of a pie dish or baking dish with caster sugar.

Step 2. Wash your oranges really well and dry. Use a citrus peeler, thin or thick, up to you and peel anywhere between 1 to 5 oranges.

Step 3. In a small sauce pan bring 1 cup of sugar, a half cup of water and 3 tablespoons of Cointreau (optional) to a slow boil. Stir to ensure all the sugar has dissolved.

Step 4. Add the orange peels to your boiling syrup and wait until they start to look a bit translucent. Then wait a bit more, for good meaure.

Step 5. Drain (do not rinse!) and toss in the dish with sugar (I used chopsticks for this). Let it set for 5 minutes and toss again. Repeat as many times as you like.

I plan on using it as a topping for delicious baked goods.

How to Make a Manhattan

M and I put this together. Make sure you watch in HD if possible!



Not for the faint of heart ;-)

Red Velvet

Last week I met with the ABCD (artists, bloggers, crafters, designers) group of gals of which only a couple I had been following online prior to the meeting.

I'll admit, as lovely as everyone was, I felt out of place because I was literally the only one who wasn't trying to grow a business or make money out of their website. Still some of them however encouraged me to try and come up with a business idea, and said that I should make cakes for people.

Now of course I have thought about this before, but I simply don't feel like I can easily compete with so many amazing pastry chefs out there, or differentiate myself from others who like me, learned their own way to patisserie. Disclaimer: I don't really know what I'm doing when I bake a cake, I follow recipes, not write them, and I often imitate cakes, not create them.

But anyway, after that meeting I just felt like my blog needed one more cake :)

Red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting is a classic, rich, opulent cake, and more importantly, red = awesome.

This time I'm going to walk you through my creative process.

First you need an idea: I should bake a red velvet cake. Check.

Then you need a recipe. I used this one. Check. Then bake the cake, in as many layers as you'd like (I did 3), the general rule is you bake the batter until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.

I usually take a very sharp knife to cut the top of the cake and make it flat. Then I flip the cake upside down so that the flattened surface is the bottom. If you use a bread/serrated knife you will have crumbs everywhere.

After you make the frosting, you need to frost the cake. The cake must have cooled by now, otherwise the frosting will turn into a watery sugary mess, it is CRUCIAL that the cakes and frosting remain cool at all times. If your kitchen is hot, you might have to put the frosting in the fridge for a few minutes at a time.

Start with the "crumb layer" this is just a thin layer of frosting that gives shape to the cake and keeps it from crumbling too much. I use an icing offset spatula that I got as a present one Christmas.

I also use a decorating turn-table from IKEA, $15. This makes life *way* easier.

After each layer of frosting I put the cake in the fridge for 5-10 minutes to make sure the frosting sets (hey I never said the process was quick).

Next comes the decorating bit! This is the fun part :)

For my inspiration I used the ruffled cake from the Sweet and Saucy homepage. If only I could buy ALL their cake stands.

Anyway, I experimented with a few of my tips and settled on Ateco's No. 46. Then started piping away...

After the fact I decided that I shouldn't have done the top part, it looked a bit bulky. I much prefer the look of the first photo above.

So anyway, then you're done! I took some flowers around the house and slabbed them on top.

Mmm. Cake.

Gift ideas

Our cool neighbor friend celebrated a birthday last weekend and we discussed many a gift ideas for this chap. We know he enjoys wine and cocktails, but M and I (mainly I) decided that that was too cliche. We thought of many other nice things available for purchase but didn't want anyone to feel uncomfortable about "buying" something... so instead I thought I could make something!

The gift receiver likes spicy food, he is also Australian born and raised so he likes barbecuing (that's a given for most Aussies), so I thought I could combine both likes into a single spicy, sweet and tangy homemade barbecue sauce!

I have made barbecue sauce before, it is ridiculously simple, but I personalized it and gave it a kick by adding two chopped up chipotle peppers in adobo, plus a little extra of he adobo itself.

We bottled it up and I scribbled some letters on a brown paper bag to create a personalized label (the pixelated area said "from [our address]".

I included the recipe in that little piece of paper that I tied to the bottle, you know, in case he wants to refill it.

This is another excellent reason to always keep your glass bottles and mason jars around. Now you go make something for someone.

PS. The original recipe is here, but remember I added some chipotle peppers in adobo for spice.

San Francisco and food (yes, again)

We're back in Sydney everyone!!! *the crowd goes wild* *roars* *applause*

In one of the recent posts about food someone commented "food? again?!", and the answer to that is yes, food, AGAIN!

Both of my parents are amazing cooks and growing up even the left overs were always tasty (except for that time my dad cooked capybara*), so food to me is not just sustenance and guilty pleasure, but equally important is what happens around the table and the people who are with you. So in short, this is my blog and I write whatever I damn well like.


We had an excellent time in San Francisco, I got to see my brother a ton, heaps of old friends and even made some new ones. We ate very well, drank homemade ales and cocktails, walked incessantly (when the weather allowed), did a little shopping, baked cupcakes with a friend and even helped create a music video for someone.

Having a full time personal photographer with me, it is difficult to bother to take photos of the travel experience. So It is no surprise that when I looked at the shots I took with my phone, they are mostly of food :-) Enjoy!

Black bean and smoked cheddar tamale with the fixings. From Donna's Tamales stand at the ferry building farmer's market. Best meal I ever had for $3.75

A perfectly cooked soft boiled egg inside a savoury cheese, ham and rosemary muffin. By Tell Tale Preserves also at the ferry building farmer's market. It was a tasty novelty, but at the hefty price of $6 I am not sure I will be trying it again.

1 Gingerbread cupcake with cream cheese buttercream from Miette. 2 Chocolate cupcake with vanilla buttercream from Miette. 3 beet cupcake with bood orange jelly and mascarpone cream from the ferry building farmer's market, cannot remember the stand's name :( 

Sunday brunch at the Linares-Krumme household, featuring black beans, cheddar and cottage cheeses, crepes with honey, cantaloupe, sliced avocados and tomatoes, homemade beer bread and soft boiled eggs. No joke.

* One Christmas my father decided to cook capybara, which is not commonly eaten in Venezuela however some people do, especially if they live in the regions where the animals roam. He purchased and cooked too much of this fibrous, chewy and not very tasty meat, so much that we resentfully had to eat capybara for weeks after.

The new baby (and blue cheese burgers)

It is 2pm and today I have done two loads of laundry, vacuumed the house, cleaned the bathroom, applied to 8 jobs (2 of which already rejected me, that was quick!). It is currently 37 degrees outside and it comes as no surprise that the highlight of my day was the cold shower I took after lunch.

I'm taking a break now by blogging (ok, I won't lie, I'll probably take a nap after this and then pick up the job search again), because I wanted to talk to you about our new baby.

Our new Weber Baby Q120 that is!

So we got this bad boy last Saturday and took some scotch filets out for a spin in it. M won't let me get near it, not because he is mean, he is doing it unconsciously kind of like when someone doesn't let you drive their brand new car. I hope am sure I'll get to play with it when the novelty wears off...

Since I wasn't allowed to grill, I was on salad duty, something else I am equally good at. I made a heirloom tomato salad with mint, basil and feta cheese. It was light, sweet, tasty and the perfect complement to the steaks.

And the next logical step was burgers of course. These shots were taken the day after, and no we're not eating burgers for breakfast, M just happens to be wearing pijama pants in the afternoon.

By the way there is nothing wrong with burgers for breakfast.

These are blue-cheese and sundried tomato burgers, crickey they were good. There were little pockets of blue cheese oozing out from everywhere. Recipe follows:

{ingredients}

(makes 4 massive burger patties)

• 400 grams lean minced beef
• 100 grams minced lamb
• 50 grams crumbled blue cheese
• 4 sundried tomatoes, chopped
• 1 long stalk thinly sliced green onions, or 2 small stalks...
• 3 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
• Salt and pepper to taste
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon minced garlic

{directions}

Wash your hands thoroughly with antibacterial soap. Add all the ingredients in a bowl. Mix them with your hands until homogeneous and divide this big lump into 4 small lumps. Shape each small lump into a burger patty. Cook to your liking.

***

See how M has his head cocked when he is cooking? I call this the business angle because that is how I know he means business.

And the end result:

:-X

Why you should get an electric mixer if you bake

I have been using my new electric mixer from Christmas and I can see and taste the difference especially on the quality of buttercream icing.

Check out this buttercream I made using a whisk, by hand:

See how it is all grainy and sorta chunky? Well I'm guessing that the power I am putting in with my arms  must be around 40 Watts (tops), and I can only do it at full power for a few seconds at a time (go ahead laugh, but try it yourself).

Now compare it to my new 220 Watt electric mixer:

It is *perfectly smooth*. It makes for a much more pleasant experience in your mouth, texture and flavor wise since all the ingredients are blended much better and are less likely to separate should the temperature rise a bit.

These are strawberry champagne cupcakes by the way. I made a couple dozen today to bring to a BBQ tomorrow celebrating Australia Day.

The recipe is from a blog called Love & Olive Oil, which I use often because the cupcake recipes there seem to be pretty reliable, none have failed so far. A down side is that some of the recipes are lactose free or vegan  (no butter, no milk, no eggs, etc.) due to personal choices of the author. I don't mind at all, but I suppose some people would.

I used slightly over half of the sugar that the recipe called for in the icing. I often cut back on the sugar because most icing recipes will make my teeth hurt :-) You can cut the sugar and will still obtain a pretty nice texture. I always put the icing in the fridge for 10 minutes before I start piping to ensure the buttercream will be stiff enough to hold its shape.

A few notes on the final result:

• These were the most expensive cupcakes I have made to date because I had to use a whole bottle of sparkling wine (I made double the recipe). Bad idea but too late by the time I realized. The taste of champagne is sort of there but not really identifiable, so next time I will use a more normal/cheaper flavoring.

• There is a hint of strawberry in the cake itself, but not as strong as I would have liked so I will need to experiment more. 

• The cake is lovely, spongy, springy and melts in your mouth. I would not mess with the sugar content here, it's perfect.

Lastly, a shout out to my homey Parisa, who made a sweet looking hot pink raspberry cake!

Christmas 2010 (2 of 2)

So on Christmas Day we invited a few of our non-aussie aka.-no-family-commitments-friends to come over for a holiday dinner. It was our first time hosting at the new place and I really wanted to make it special and grown-up like (no more college student dinners on the floor).

We served a few canapes in the living room, a mix of cheeses, crackers, spicy nuts and olives stuffed with roasted garlic.

The cloth covering the chest in the living room, as well as the dinning table cloth and napkins, came from a couple of yards of Japanese fabric purchased from a very nice Japanese lady (the beehive gallery on 441 King St). Then I cut it myself, pinned the borders and asked the dry cleaners nearby to please sew it for me. If you own a sewing machine, this would have been an excellent and cheap DIY project, but for me it wasn't so cheap because I had to pay for the sewing.

I always keep glass jars from jam and pickles, or sometimes glass soft drinks bottles and reuse them as flower vases, which is what I did this time. For the life of me I cannot remember the name of these flowers but they look adorable when bunched up like so. Tying the cutlery and napkins with twine is such a mindless detail but I think it made a big difference in presentation.

{M making negronis for our guests with his new cocktail spoon}

The dinner menu consisted of chickpea and greens salad, grilled tomatoes with basil, root vegetables gratin dauphinoise and baked salmon with dill and white wine (no link, as M made up the recipe).

Our guests all live here in Sydney, but came from Singapore and Venezuela. We had a fantastic evening and even though we had to wash all the dishes by hand I would love to do it again in a split second! We're looking to buy a small bbq grill soon and have another small soiree for the neighbors.

Maybe a post about new years next?

Christmas 2010 (1 of 2)

I know it has been almost a month but I am just glad I finally got around to it and I hope you are too!

I wanted to share our first Christmas in Sydney with the world (because the whole world reads this blog). Get ready for cheesy pictures, oh well, I tried to make them look interesting by adding some cross processing and (over) using the mosaic collage feature.

On Christmas Eve, also referred to in this house as "the night before December's work holidays" because we try to remain a secular home, we celebrated with a little dinner just the two of us.  I made kangaroo steaks, M's favorite spicy baked potato wedges and some green beans. I also busted out the fancy wine for this one, that's right, $22 bucks a bottle just for this special occasion.

The next morning, Christmas day, also known as "joyous secular gifts day" I got up to make us breakfast as well. I'm the biggest fan of breakfast and for the most part I don't really believe in cereal, unless I'm in a rush or too sleepy. I don't mess around with breakfast, ever. You can always count on me to have some coffee, juice and eggs at hand. Toast, tomatoes and avos are seasonal ;-)

So after brekkie it was opening presents time!!! woot woot!

This year M hit it right out of the ballpark and got me some awesome stuff, like a super powerful jet-engine hand mixer encrusted in diamonds.

Ok so it wasn't encrusted in diamonds, but my point is that even if it had been, I couldn't have been more excited :-) except when right after that I opened two huge presents that were full of crafty goodness!!!! M went to a craft shop and went to town on awesome stationary, cutters, paper, stickers and markers galore. I love that man.

And next he was up. He was a very good boyfriend this year and received a one year membership to our local movie theater (for discounted tix yay!) among other things. Like these brand new house slippers:

He hates waking around the house in shoes because supposedly they bring dirt and germs and poop from the outside, so we usually walk around in slippers.

He also got a pimping bathrobe.

But the gift he was most excited about was his new professional cocktail spoon. M loves making cocktails for himself and his friends and I guess this makes him look more legit. The spoon end is for stirring and the flat end is for crushing ice.

I should also note that he was uncomfortable with me showing photos of him in boxer shorts, but I just think he looks so cute and ultimately wanted to share what our day was genuinely like. Somehow I managed to convince him to let me use these shots, please praise him for it ;-)

We weren't the only ones to receive gifts this year of course. My awesome friend Parisa sent us a super thoughtful package and in it there was a cat toy for Murka. She immediately loved it and to this day it remains her favorite toy. She already broke it twice and we had to fix it both times.

So that's all I'm sharing for today, but I will finish and post part 2 "dinner with friends" very very soon!

Hope you all had a nice Christmas or whatever holiday you celebrate.

xoxo

Grilled cheese

I found a blog dedicated to grilled cheese sandwiches and started experiencing an uncontrollable craving (similar to the one creeping into you now) to make one.

So I headed to my fridge to see what was available. We always have a couple of nice cheeses at hand, but sadly today, not much else was there.

My grilled cheese consists of basil pesto, chevre with dill, tomatoes, vintage cheddar and dijon.

Doesn't look as good as the ones from Grilled Cheese Social, but it hit the spot and was grilledcheelicious!

A birthday cake

My mom's birthday was yesterday and I decided to bake a cake in her honor. This is a layered cake with chocolate and raspberry swirl layers, covered in chocolate ganache and chocolate buttercream.

Mom I wish I coud share this cake with you in person! I promise to make you another one next time we see each other. Happy birthday!