13.3..... 13.3!!!!!!!!!

I made a near fatal Edmonds related mistake. I did a count. There are now fewer than 12 whole weeks until the end of the Edmonds! EEEEK. This leaves me with no fewer than 13.3 recipes to do each week. And I thought 10 was challenging! This means I now have to effectively cook two Edmonds related dishes every night for the next three months. It sounds so much more depressing when I put it that way.

Not to mention that I had spent all Saturday at the Champ Wag n’ walk lifting heavy boxes, painting faces and getting slobbered on. It was a 5.30 wake up call. At a push you could probably say I was a morning person, but not that kind of a morning person! I did the count when I was crashed out on the couch at 7pm. It ruined my relaxation somewhat!

So on Sunday I dragged my carcass out of bed and commenced cooking. The Husband had somehow negotiated more weekend release to go skiing, this time at the club fields just out of chch. I had to pick him up at 10pm and barely made it to and from the airport conscious but at least it gave me a free day without any complaints over the state of the kitchen.

I like to get a few recipes out of the way to get my numbers up and my confidence up also. I therefore picked on Custard and Custard Savoury from the invalids section. Not too challenging – milk and egg (with the addition of cooked mixed diced veg for the savoury version) steamed. Now, I am a self proclaimed custard addict but this stuff was completely safe from me. Must have been the complete lack of sugar. The invalids section continues to mirror hospital food in the worst way possible.

One of my most exciting recipe adventures was the billy sponge. It was in this spirit I made the billy currant loaf. It was a loaf, with currants, cooked in a billy. Except I don’t have a billy so it was cooked in a cast iron casserole. This had very odd texture almost like a big pancake. Slightly spooky. Would not do again.

I also made stewed prunes with the intention of making prune whip. I have not yet made the prune whip so the prunes are still in my fridge. I am hoping they will be ok.

You can never make to many cold puddings. Vanilla snow was a blancmange mixed with beaten egg whites and set in the fridge. I fed it to the husband a couple of days later after it had got lost behind the stewed prunes! He seemed to enjoy it and he is still alive. Currently however he is roaming the ceiling cavity so I hope he doesn’t succumb to the vanilla snow up there as it will be a real pain to get his corpse through all the spider webs and back down the little trap door.

Florentine caramel is flavoured with ginger and coconut. I think it is meant to be more of a soft caramel but I overcooked it and turned it into fudge. It was still fine! Everyone loves fudge so no harm done I figure.

Orange scones sounded better than the reality. There was a lot of orange zest in these - 4 tbsp – but yet not a lot of orange flavour. They did smell great when they were cooking though, which explains why there was no flavour. Still, wads of butter does miracles for almost anything.

Truly Outrageous

I’d heard of gems before but never tried them. The friend of mine who kindly leant me the tin warned me that they were not terribly exciting. What she didn’t warn me was that it would take me half the night to get the gems out of the gem irons.

Gem irons, for those of you who have never seen them before look a little like a loaf tin, a muffin tray and a cast iron skillet had a baby. These are truly weighty things and given that you have to heat them red hot before filling them there scarity is most likely because they have probably been completely banned by OSH.

There are three Gem recipes in the Edmonds – Gems, Ginger Gems and Honey gems. It made sense to start with the straight gems and work up to the more fancy version. Unfortunately I could not get the theme tune for Jem the cartoon out of me head – “Jem truly truly truly outrageous oooohh ooo - Jem”. Some times a childhood in the eighties can be a curse.

So Gems. I think they may have been a step on the evolution of the muffin. They are muffin like in texture although they differ in method in that they require creaming rather than just mixing in wet/melted ingredients. For the “Gems” I quite clearly did not use enough oil and they stuck like the proverbial to the blanket. I did not get one out in good nick. I did howevever manage to fill up the ripped bottoms with some high quality blackcurrant jam. They were definitely at their best hot out of the oven, over time they dried out and became tough. I’m not sure whether it was baking them in scorching hot gems irons or not enough fat in the mix but they were a little under whelming.

I had planned to continue on my Gem making ways and get the whole lot done in one night. however after wrestling the gems out of the irons for a solid ten minutes – I was tempted to exaggerate and say half an hour or possibly and hour but we all know that wouldn’t be true – I did not feel like making more Gems. I re-adjourned a couple of days later for the Honey and Ginger variants.

They were not ground breaking alternatives but the healthy application of cooking spray at least ensured that they could be more easily evicted from the irons. I did save some until the next day but I think they were well and truly at their best straight out of the oven. Neither the honey nor the ginger was particularly strong but they were pleasant enough.

So you can probably guess I was not all that excited by the Gems. Not that they were bad but in the grand scheme of things that I’d like to buy but have no space for in the cupboards you can guarantee than Gem irons probably won’t be making the list anytime soon.

Return of the Offal

I may have made it clear just how much of a fan I am of offal. Unfortunately as time ticks on – now less than 12 weeks remaining I have to face these challenges. A trip to the Aussie Butcher left me with no less than 5 sheep’s kidneys. You can probably imagine my excitement.

I picked two recipes to tackle – kidney soup and steak and kidney pie.

Kidney soup was not one of the undiscovered gems of the Edmonds. It’s a little like what I imagine people having eaten in the depression or at least what Grandparents served up to unfortunate grandchildren on weekend visits. Kidneys, onion and macaroni floating in stock. I particularly liked the large amount of scum that came to the surface during boiling. Needless to say I ate one mouthful and resigned it to the plug hole. I think the photo speaks for itself.

Steak and Kidney was more successful. I cooked the meat slowly on the stove for several hours and then placed it into ramekins the next day and covered with pastry. You could hardly taste the kidney although admittedly there was only 1 kidney in the whole mix – the recipe said 1 or 2, what do you think I was going to do!
So two more offal recipes down. I’ve still got the sweetbreads, brains and tongue and many more kidney recipes to go. I’d love to say I was looking forward to it!

Where Do All The Cow Tails Go?

The Birthday cake recipe had insisted upon Royal icing so now that I had left it to cook overnight it was ready to ice. In the cold light of day there was a definite black crust on the sides and bottom. Nothing a vat full of white icing couldn’t adequately disguise.

I’ve made royal icing before – in fact once I, along with a very good friend of mine who is an engineer, made a full gingerbread village complete with sugar glass paned windows and working lights and the whole thing was “glued” together with royal icing. This wasn’t royal icing as I remember it. For one it was runny – it all ran off the cake and pooled. Not good when you are trying to disguise a burnt exterior!

Thinking about it it’s probably the fact that I used massive eggs so there would have been too much egg white to icing sugar. I had more icing sugar that I could have used – the rabbit had broken into the cupboard where the overflow of baking supplies is kept and eaten her way into a bag of icing sugar and scattered icing sugar everywhere. The bag was in no state to be kept so what wasn’t used in the royal icing was thrown out.

The Rabbit regularly gets into places where she shouldn't. The attached video is of the recent Special K boxes with the hole in the front for the excercise DVD's. Feel free to turn the sound down or you will hear me calling the rabbit Horseface. Her real name is Matilda but we call her horseface for short. Because she has a face like a horse (of course)


Eventually the royal icing did set but when I cut into it, all of the icing cracked and fell off exposing the burnt crust. I must have bad baking karma.

I also made a quick bowl of soup for the husband’s return. It was pea and bacon, which I keep desperately wanting to call pea and ham. Pea and bacon just sounds wrong. I am over pushing soups through sieves, it is not doing the sieve any good and whenever I want to use it for sieving flour etc it is always wet so I can’t use it. Also the soup isn’t completely smooth the way it is when you use a blender – it has all these tiny little sieve sized grainy bits. Not good, not good at all.

I mortgaged the house and bought some oxtail. Why is it so cripplingly expensive? Doesn’t each cow have a tail? Or are they normally docked? Each cow only has one heart and they’re cheap as chips. Perhaps there is a huge export market. I remember Nigella Lawson waxing lyrical about oxtail during the BSE days when they were banned from selling meat on the bone in the UK. Perhaps all the tails are going there?

Sorry, rant aborted. The recipe for oxtail said to joint the tail – I was somewhat glad that mine came pre-jointed. I’m not up for that sort of palaver. I cooked it on the stovetop until it was a sticky glutinous mess. I love a bit of oxtail and this was very nice, I will admit that I left it until the next day so I could remove all the hunks of solidified fat out. Definitely better out than in, I’m not sure my arteries need any more animal fats this year.

Home alone

Saturday was supposed to be sunny. They went on about it on the news and in the papers. It was going to be the first fine weekend we were going to have since May. It rained.

The Husband had abandoned me and gone skiing – naturally it was beautifully sunny down the line – so I had free rein to make all the mess I wanted. Time to make some jam.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I don’t like jam. It turns out that this is almost entirely true. It turns out that I LOVE blackcurrant jam. I made it with frozen blackcurrants you buy at the supermarket. One bag was enough to make three jars which I didn’t think was too bad a deal. And it set beautifully. And you can eat it by the spoonful just like Thursday’s mayo – don’t use the same spoon though. I’m in love.

I had envisaged myself lying on the couch all weekend reading a book, perhaps sipping a little something. In reality I spent the whole weekend cleaning. This left me with an issue. I wanted the Husband to appreciate all of the work I’d done but I didn’t want to set a precedent – he goes away for a weekend skiing; I clean. Not a good direction to be taking the marriage!

So while I was cleaning I thought I might as well have the oven going. I opted for birthday cakes – I did have the option of other fruit related baking but it appeared that there is a currant shortage at the supermarket. Not a single currant at New World. Very concerning.
Birthday cake is actually a very solid fruit cake. Sizeable too – 7 eggs. You may have heard my opinions on raisins before, I would be highly disappointed to get this for my Birthday! Not least (aside from the raisins) because it had a nice black layer on the sides and bottom. Ooops. It’s like I’m taking my revenge on dried fruit one carbonised fruit cake at a time.

The Weeknight Quickie

It’s challenging to cook 10 recipes a week. I have a tendency to slack of all week and end up on Sunday with a lot of cooking to do. This is not ideal. So instead I’ve been trying to do a little on the weeknights, and f I can organise it so that it’s dinner, well that’s great planning.

Salmon Macaroni salad is not the usual sort of thing that I’d cook on a Thursday night but I had managed to get my hands on a top secret as yet unlaunched new Mayonnaise and it was necessary to try it out. Or at least try it out in a recipe as opposed to by the spoonful – this stuff is seriously good!
It’s not a challenging recipe – cooked macaroni (I didn’t have macaroni so I used shells), tinned salmon, mayo and peas garnished with boiled eggs. The Husband was actually quite impressed though, whether it was the recipe or the mayo – jury’s out. I think I’ll have another spoonful while I decide.

My Poor Oranges

It’s that time of year, the work cafeteria bench is littered with citrus. Generally Grapefruit – I guess there are only so many Grapefruit you can eat. In my limited experience only two types of citrus are truly prolific in the Auckland garden. The first is the Lemon, which no one has any issue getting rid of or using, and they seem to be fairly happy just sitting on the tree semi permanently anyway.

Grapefruit is another story though. Equally if not more prolific but with a tendency to drop off the tree and rot to a consistency perfect for lawnmower blades or bare feet. I’m not a fan of grapefruit. I seem unable to handle bitterness of any type - Tonic water is my kryptonite.

So given that there was a local grapefruit glut I figured that it was Marmalade time – really it was the least that I could do. I started to make the Marmalade on Sunday. Unfortunately in traditional style I completely failed to read the instructions – slice four grapefruit finely and leave overnight. Damn. This cookbook when the next morning was a valid time to be making Marmalade.

So Monday night I got home and made my marmalade. It wasn’t too bad although as per usual the boiling took longer than advised. It’s very hard to give away liquid jam so I imagine marmalade is no better. It does look pretty though in the jars with the sun shining through and reflecting of the little strands of peel… Pretty.

There are two types of Marmalade in the Edmonds. The other is Orange. The Orange recipe requires “poorman’s oranges” as well as sweet oranges. I don’t know what they are. So I contact the nice people on the Foodlover’s forums.

They told me that – in short – what we call grapefruit are actually “poorman’s oranges” not traditional grapefruit which are a different colour and flatter. Like the Grapefruit you see in the shops. So I had just made poorman’s marmalade by accident. Bugger.

The upside was that I had no problems finding some poorman’s oranges!
So I made the orange marmalade. I think it was nicer that the grapefruit actually, a little of the marmalade caught on the bottom of the pot so it had a slight toffee note. I thought it added something, if anyone asks I’m saying it was intentional