I have been experimenting with the video function on my camera. I am going to make some more videos. I need to have a bit of a play around to see if I can amp up the quality without making the file too massive.
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food
In our family one of the must have foods at any celebration is a cheesecake. The recipe is Mum’s and over the years I have made this lemon cheesecake my signature dessert.
I normally use a packet of biscuits as the base but now that Amy has Coeliacs I needed to make a gluten free base. So I simply adapted a basic biscuit recipe and made a baked crust instead.I was thrilled with the results.
I didn’t really follow a recipe for this biscuit mix I just flew by the seat of my pants and unlike the hommous disaster this worked out really well.
Cream 4 tablespoons of butter with a 1/2 a cup of sugar, add a few drops of vanilla essence and then beat in an egg. Then slowly add a 1 and a 1/2 cups of flour to the mix.(I mixed together equal parts gluten free plain flour with almond meal) keep on slowly beating in the flour until it is well mixed. This makes a soft dough.
I spread the mix, which was quite sticky onto the base and up the sides a bit of my spring form cake pan. I then baked it in a hot oven until it went not quite golden brown. I had a bit left over so I put dessertspoon sized blobs onto a baking tray squished a hole in the centre with my thumb, plonked some jam into the hole and baked them for about 12 minutes or until they were golden brown. These were really yummy little jam drops and I am pleased that I have found an easy, gluten free biscuit recipe to cook with Amy when she comes to visit.
Now back to the cheesecake. Here are the ingredients.
1 block of philadelphia cream cheese (250 g), 1 cup of sugar. 1 can of carnation milk, 1 packet of lemon jelly, 1 tsp of gelatine powder. 1 fresh lemon.
Put the carnation milk in the fridge the night before as it needs to be really cold.
Before you start put a large mixing bowl in the freezer to chill down.
Add one teaspoon of gelatine powder to a packet of lemon jelly crystals, stir well. Then add one cup of boiling water to the jelly, mix well and put it aside to cool down.
Soften the cream cheese in the microwave for 30 seconds. Add one cup of sugar to the cream cheese and beat to a smooth consistency. I also add the zest from one lemon to make it a bit zingy.
Now quickly put the cold carnation milk into the chilled bowl and beat until peaks will almost stand up by themselves.
Add the philly cheese mix and beat on slow
Add the jelly mix and beat on slow for a minute. Then finish mixing by hand.
Pour it into the cake pan and pop into the fridge to set overnight.
If you like a really lemony cheesecake you can add the juice of a lemon to the cup of boiling water before you make the jelly.
There you go. Enjoy. Any questions just ask me in the comments and I will answer them.
*Make sure the baked biscuit base is cool to the touch before you put the cheesecake mix into the pan.
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Gluten is evil. Well in regards to my granddaughter Amy, gluten is certainly the enemy.
I will start at the beginning for those of you out there amongst the interwebs not able to read my mind.
Veronica was reading a blog post where the writer was describing her daughter’s behavioural changes when she ate anything with wheat in it.Tantrums, mood swings, manic behaviour and meltdowns.Yet again the blogosphere provided a light-bulb moment for Veronica as the writer could have been describing Amy.
Veronica rang me and told me that she was thinking of eliminating all wheat from Amy’s diet. During the course of our phone conversation, I pulled out half the contents of my pantry and we examined the ingredients. Massel stock cubes are gluten free yay, but homebrand french onion soup is chockers full of the stuff. Spring Gully worcestershire sauce is good, Holbrooks is bad and so it went on.
I found gluten in some very unexpected places. There is wheat in marshmallows. The sneaky fuckers! I was going to make rocky road for Amy’s birthday. Gah!
Fast forward a few gluten free days.
Yesterday Amy stayed with me for a few hours and the change in my granddaughter is very obvious. Amy was much, much calmer. We still did all the things that we normally do but we did them much, much, much slower.
Normally Amy has me tearing about the place at breakneck speed. Feed the fish.Look in the cupboards. Check the chooks.Collect the eggs. Cook the eggs. Throw the ball for Harry.Play in the dirt. Look for tadpoles. Eat the beans in the garden. See Poppy. Run in circles. Come on Nanny chase Amy! etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitum.
Generally after spending a few hours with Amy I am exhausted, happy that we had fun together but totally exhausted. Yesterday after I waved goodbye to my granddaughter I compared notes with The Spouse and we both agreed that WOW, there was a marked difference in Amy’s behaviour. And double Wow I also,wasn’t completely knackered and in desperate need of a nanna nap. *cue applause.*
The most exciting behavioural improvement from my perspective, was that Amy allowed me to correct her speech. Previously when I would correct her speech,Amy would sometimes listen and sometimes not. Yesterday she not only listened to me but she practiced her pronunciation with me, until she had the tricky word down pat. I am thrilled to bits.
Gluten is now the enemy.It also seems that there is a link between Ehlers Danlos and food allergies or intolerences. *sigh*
Also whilst we are on food related issues, my friend Barbara has just discovered her 22 month old son is allergic to peanuts.
Our issues with gluten aren’t life threatening and the changes needed are fairly easy to implement. Gluten wont send my Grand Daughter into anaphalactic shock it just sends her into meltdown mode, but it does mean a re-think on the foods we eat and it looks like I am going to have to add a whole lot of new sites to my reader.
So my lovelies that was my weekend, How was yours?
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I am a fly by the seat of your pants cook and ninety five percent of the time we arrive unscathed at our culinary destination.Five percent of the time I crash and burn and it is a culinary disaster.Veronica still casually mentions the time I served up raw fish to her as a child and no, I wasnt trying to make sashimi. Oooops.
My friend Sue makes really nice hommous.So I thought that I would make some, as the pre packaged stuff tastes like shit.
Unfortunately I am prone to daydreams as well, so I only heard Sue say, mix some chickpeas with some tahini, chuck in a bit of lemon juice and some garlic and away you go.
I had a can of chickpeas in the pantry, so I plonked them in a bowl and mashed them up with a fork. I stirred in a crushed garlic clove and added a squeeze of lemon juice.
It was looking all right so far.
I added a couple of tablespoons of tahini and mixed it through with a fork. It still didn’t taste like Sue’s, so I added some more tahini and some more lemon juice. This didn’t look like Sue’s lovely creamy hommous either.It was very thick and gluggy but I am an optimist so onwards and upwards.
I don’t have a food processor because it takes longer to wash them up than it does to mooosh things by hand. Mix, mix,mixity mix. By now my wrist was getting sore from all the mixing and I was rethinking my aversion to food processors.
I had added half a jar of tahini to a can of chickpeas.I was going nowhere fast and I was starting to wonder if maybe I should have googled a recipe first.
My fly by the seat of my pants hommous experiment was fast descending into farce. I had added enough tahini to make a bucket load of hommous. So I put it all into the fridge and went to bed.
Day two of the hommous extravaganza.
I cooked up a fresh batch of chickpeas to try and even up the ratio. This took nearly all afternoon because they took ages to get soft. The pulse gods were not smiling on me at all.
Heartily sick of the sight of chickpeas by now, I mooshed up the fresh batch with a fork. Encouraged by how soft they were I grabbed the stick mixer. Ha. Chickpeas are so gluggy that they gummed up the blades of the stick mixer in about 5 seconds flat. *sigh* A food proccessor was starting to look very,very tempting. I added them to yesterdays failed hoummous and starting mixing it all together. I had run out of lemons so I added a good splash of white balsamic vinegar, another clove of garlic and about half a cup of extra virgin olive oil. Flying blind indeed.
So at this stage of my hommous adventure I now had a very large mixing bowl full of a chickpea/tahini/miscellaneous mixture that didn’t remotely resemble Sue’s at all. The craving for hommous had vanished days ago. The kitchen looked like a bomb had hit it when in walked my saviour, The Spouse with a case of beer induced munchies. Yay.
Half a packet of dry bickies later, a decent dent had been made into bowl and my confidence was slightly restored. I put the hommous back into the fridge and went to bed. Again.
It is now Tuesday and I have this huge bowl of pseudo hommous sitting there in the fridge, mocking me. I think I might have to add some paprika and chilli to some of it, some parsley and cucumber to another handful of it and voila a plethora of mixed dips will grace my fridge. Now I better nip down to the pub and get The Spouse some more beer. Lots of beer.
*** Note: If you totally forget about the hommous for a couple of weeks and then discover it lurking at the back of the fridge. It will be fizzy. Very fizzy.It still smelled fine. It had just fermented and fizzed very unpleasantly on my tongue. Ooops.
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