Well we’re coming up to SinterKlaas, or Saint Nicholas day. On the eve of his day, Dutch and Flemish children put out shoes next to the fire in the hope that Sinter Klaas will leave them lollies and presents. One of the traditional treats left behind is speculaas. Saint Nicholas is who Santa Claus is based on, and it appears he was quite a top bloke. Not so “Commercial Christmas” afterall. Anyway back to food.
Our neighbour is Dutch, so each year we’ve attempted to make speculaas, and we take them over to him on December 5th. I have used internet recipes and they are just not spicy enough. Last year, Karl used a basic biscuit recipe and made his own spice mix; cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, coriander, allspice – the secret seems to be cardamom. This made all the difference to making a tasty biscuit.
I have always loved proper German gingerbread with its yummy spiciness and soft texture. We have German pfeffernuse biscuits in the shop, which the closest I’ve found. I hadn’t thought of making my own before, but now I’ve worked out they add more spices to make them yummy – I think I will give it ago.
Then, through the wonders of Facebook. I found out about Basler Leckerli – a Swiss spicy biscuit. I quartered this recipe. They are delicious – I reckon they would be good for Christmas Eve. I didn’t have Kirsch at the time so I used rum, which worked a treat.
Now I have found out the Hungarians have a similar style of biscuit.
Now I have so many recipes to choose from. Great with coffee too.

–Fiona

Ful Medammes is a traditional Egyptian dish. To do it properly you need to start with dry fava beans. I will do this as I have been planning to do it for ages. But impatient (as I mentioned in the sourdough experiments) I wanted to try Ful Medammes now. So I used a can of fava beans already cooked to the first part of the recipe with lemon and spices. Then I searched the internet and compared recipes with the one I had photocopied out of a book over a year ago. I cooked some onion, garlic and crushed cumin seeds in olive oil and added the can of beans in their sauce to that. It didn’t take long to cook and then I added some salt to bring out all the flavours. I served it with warm pita bread, chopped mint and coriander, roughly chopped boiled egg and lemon wedges. It was delicious. We ate it for a fast and easy Sunday dinner, which is probably not the done thing. It would certainly set you up for the day eating it for breakfast as I understand it is more usually eaten. The combination of the beans, the fresh herbs, egg and lemon juice was bright and zesty.
Now I have some dried fava beans, I will have to make it completely from scratch and compare the taste.

- Fiona

The kids and I had a plan. We wanted a speedy, tasty meal and kedgeree fitted the bill nicely. Only issue was when we got to the cupboard our supply of basmati rice was running too low. A couple of tablespoons of rice wasn’t going to cut it. What we did have was some couscous and it pretty much fills the same niche. Could kedgeree be made with couscous instead of rice? Only one way to find out!

We have a good system for cooking light, fluffy couscous so that’s where I started. Cover the couscous with a bit of water and leave it to soak it all up. Add some oil and mix it with your hands until every grain is coated with a thin coat of oil and cook in the oven (tightly covered) until light and fluffy. It usually takes about 10-15 mins at 180 degrees.
To make the kegeree I did much the same, but I added some peas and tinned tuna (yellowfin, of course) along with some cumin seeds, fennel seeds and salt. A pinch of Indian chilli powder and a grind of black pepper to give it some bite, and into the oven.

While the cous-cous was cooking I hard boiled a couple of eggs but not completely hard- just so the yolks were nearly set. Once the cous-cous came out of the oven, the eggs were peeled, quartered and served with the cous-cous.

It worked pretty well! It was far from authentic, but it tasted wonderful and I would definitely make it again. I might even make it if there was rice in the cupboard…

–Karl

It’s so important!

My Mum taught us all to cook, and once we hit secondary school we were expected to take on a cooking night and feed the family. We learned a load of valuable skills in the process. We had to plan what we were going to cook in advance so Mum could get the ingredients; we had to cater for a range of tastes and food aversions (mercifully very few of those in my family); we had to get a handle on portion sizes and how much food to prepare; and we had to think on our feet when unexpected guests arrived, or when ingredients were missing.

Sure, the family had to put up with some fairly bland and clumsily prepared meals, as well as a few spectacular failures and experiments gone awry. But we all got there in the end. When we left home we could all cook, and fairly skillfully too! Even better is we all found that we really enjoyed it, and to a greater and lesser extent, we all still cook.

I’m pretty grateful for my parents’ lessons. My love of food has moved from a hugely enjoyable hobby to a serious business proposition, and I’m going to make damn sure that our kids learn to cook too. They’ll have a cooking night, and they’ll learn all those valuable skills. At the very least they’ll be able to keep themselves fed, but who knows? Maybe they’ll get hooked and have a lifetime of fun and culinary adventure like their parents!

–Karl

Most weeks we have Fake Takeaway Fridays. Basically we make takeaway type food but we make it at home so it is yummier (and possibly healthier ). Our Fake takeaways include; crumbed fillets of fish pan fried and potato wedges – cut thin to cook fast in the oven, burritos – especially yummy if I have managed to cook up some dried beans and make the refried beans myself (not very hands on just needs prior planning! ) and homemade pizzas are some of the mainstays. The homemade pizzas the kids get in on the action too. I set the breadmaker making the pizza dough in the morning. OO flour makes a lovely texture to the base when you are eating it, but often I just use normal flour. Then when we are ready for pizzas, the kids get the pastry brushes and paint the thin crusts of dough with a tomato sauce – made from diluted tomato paste or mashed tomatoes (whatever is handy), while I cut up toppings for them to sprinkle on once they have finished the painting bit. I do try for us to make different flavours and not just pile all the toppings on all the pizzas. Lucy usually makes her own, choosing her own toppings (Tristan has often eaten his toppings before they even go on the pizza). Then it is in the oven for 10 or so minutes at 200C.
We also have Vegetarian Thursday and I was totally excited to hear a little girl in our shop mention their family had Sushi Sunday. What a great idea!

- Fiona

I bought some kidneys with the plan of making a steak and kidney pie but we used the steak for something else so we decided to try devilled kidneys. Neither of us had particularly good memories of kidneys but having watched a couple of shows where they raved about them and their flavour, we decided it was time to give them a second chance. Besides there was cream in the sauce, so surely anything with cream has to be good? This recipe is very close to what we made. It looked good on the plate. Karl cut out the little veiny bits and everything.
The verdict on the taste? I’m sorry I couldn’t finish it. It had more to do with the smell. The flavour was also very strong. It seemed to stir up some memory I couldn’t quite place but it wasn’t a good one. I was disappointed, maybe I was expecting too much or maybe those people who go “mmm delicious” on television cooking programmes, lie. I am not ready to give up yet, next time maybe I will try them at a restaurant or try a different recipe.
Earlier I tried Hugh’s slow cooked Chinese pig’s trotters. This dish actually turned out pretty well. The flavour was excellent. However the first part of the recipe calls for browning off the trotters. Maybe I did this wrong but the smell was of burning flesh and it was not a nice smell. It was hard to get that smell out of my head. Next time maybe I won’t brown off the trotters!
Karl made a fantastic English Pork Pie using the trotter to provide the jelly. So trotters are definitely worth messing around with.

- Fiona

It often comes up, especially at the moment with recession going on, that you should do your own home baking. The theory is if you do the sums it is much cheaper than buying ready made biscuits or slices and you can put proper ingredients in them.
I don’t always agree with this. There were these biscuits in the supermarket that were quite cheap and no one else in the family was that keen on them so they lasted all week. If I do baking we eat it up far too quickly because it is so yummy and then I need to bake again.
Now I do bake more – I am eating homemade chocolate slice as I type – especially now the supermarket doesn’t stock those cheap biscuits.
When I bake, I tend to be patriotic. I think New Zealand does have some of the best slice recipes around. In a hurry, family hand-me-down biscuit and slice recipes are the best.
I have also switched to butter for baking, it seems to be cheaper than using the special “lite” spreads we use for on toast and the taste is just so much better. We also finally got around to putting a vanilla bean in a jar of sugar(after we had used the seeds). This is so worth it, especially for biscuits. The bean keeps staying in the jar and I keep refilling it with sugar – it smells yummy too.
My latest triumphs in the biscuit area is this recipe from Brit Allegra McEvedy. I have this dough in the freezer as I write and it is easy to cut off some rounds and cook ‘em up in 10 minutes with whatever toppings I find in the pantry. This solves my running out of biscuits problem very nicely.
Recently I also made “apple cakes lovely” from our family recipe book, so called as someone had (quite rightly too) put “lovely” beside the recipe title. I made this recipe because we had some homemade apple sauce that had been sitting around in the fridge for awhile and this recipe required stewed apple. They were a fantastic afternoon tea hot from the oven. I’ve frozen some for lunches. It reminded me again how these older recipes are often about using up what is leftover to get the most food for your money.

- Fiona

Recently we have been trying to be thrifty, moral citizens and buy our chicken whole, unfrozen and free-range. We cut it up into portions (you can get 8 of them) and put them in the freezer. Aside from the wonderful flavour of chicken that has been reared properly and cooked with the bones in, we have a carcass that we can make into stock.

We have really got into our stock making. If all you have ever tried is the stock from the supermarket, then it is worth giving this a go. Sometimes we roast the carcass for extra roasty flavour, sometimes we just bung it in the pot. You can use all the bones and leftover bits from a roast (even if the bones have been nibbled – it’s going to boil for hours anyway). We sometimes make beef stock from the t-bones left over from a steak dinner. A bone from a lamb roast is perfect too – take all the leftover meat off and get a stock on the go.

Water is added to cover the meat and then we normally add our mirepoix (stock vegetables – onion, carrot, celery).

Celery normally comes from the garden, but here’s the cool bit!! None of the veges need to be in good condition. Bendy carrots? Chuck ‘em in! Limp celery? Get it in there! You could even see that the celery was going limp, throw it in the freezer and then add it to your stock later. Onions can be biffed in skins and all, leeks can go in there, any tired herbs can be used. Just about the only thing that you shouldn’t use are brassicas like cabbage and brocolli.

We normally throw in some aromatics as well. Black peppercorns are a must, and always, always a couple of bay leaves. Juniper berries often find their way into the stock too. The thing we don’t add is salt! Stocks aren’t supposed to be salty. You should be seasoning any dish the stock is added to anyway, and you’d lose a lot of control of your seasoning if you dumped a load of salt in there with the stock.

Once you have the pot loaded up, you simmer it very, very gently for hours. We set ours going just after dinner and it bubbles away gently to itself all evening. We turn it off and sit it outside in a safe place just as we go to bed, in the cold, so any fat solidifies and sits on the surface.

I never really “got” stocks when I first tried to make them. I couldn’t understand how this watery dishwater was the thing that all the top chefs were raving about, and why people bothered with them. Then I discovered the secret to good stocks—REDUCE THEM!

In the morning, the stock gets skimmed to remove the fat and drained. All the bits from the pot get a good squeeze in the sieve to get the last bits of liquid and flavour from them, then the stock goes back onto the stove at a very high heat to reduce by at least half. If you can be bothered to reduce more then it’s worth it. Not only does it make the stock easier to store, it massively concentrates all those wonderful flavours that you were after in the first place. You can always add more water later if it is too intense. I can have the stock reduced before it’s time to leave for work

Give stock making a go! It takes ages, but most of the time the stocks take care of themselves on the stove, and you aren’t actually doing anything towards them.

– Karl

I always used to find, “salting to taste” tricky. Some dishes were not even cooked yet and the recipe would say add salt and pepper to taste. I would just randomly add some salt and pepper and hope for the best. Even in dishes that I could taste as they were cooking, I found it hard to know how much salt to add. What taste was I aiming for? The options I thought were to add some salt or too much salt. To avoid too much I added just a little, in most cases not enough to make any difference to the dish. Then I was reading a book by Linda Carucci who is a chef and cooking instructor. In her book she said to add salt until you can taste the first ingredient you added. For me, this really works. I might be looking for garlic or an onion flavour, if they went in the pan first. The process is almost like bringing a camera into focus. Suddenly all the flavours are there and the point of adding salt to the dish is worthwhile – bringing out all those great flavours.
I do like how not all cuisine styles follow the adding salt to bring out the flavours routine. Some Indian dishes are completely a balance of the ingredients – hence the large amounts of the ingredients that make up the dish. Some Thai dishes it is the balance of the salty (usually from fish sauce) the sweet (usually from palm sugar) and the sour that make the dish.

- Fiona

Now the shop is up and running, I am an even bigger fan of tagines. We have it on good authority (from a Moroccan), that these days electric slow cookers are the preferred implement in which to cook them, which is fantastic because we have one of those.
My two mainstay tagine recipes are variants on a lamb tagine and this beef one.
It seems from a lot of reading we’ve done, that it is the normal method to not even brown the meat or the onions. I like this sort of easy preparation. The spices have to be good and added in quantity. The dried fruit adds a sweetness I really like with the meat and it makes the kids eat more meat as by the end the meat, dates and prunes look very similar. The other great thing about tagines is being a slow cooked dish, it requires cheaper cuts of meat with more flavour.
I put it on in the morning after breakfast and then come home late to a dinner mostly prepared. I usually add slivered toasted almonds and fresh coriander and serve with some couscous or yummy Lebanese bread. There is dinner and the house smells fantastic as well.

- Fiona