recipes

How not to make hoummus.

by frogpondsrock on August 18, 2009

in food

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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Sushi.

by frogpondsrock on September 18, 2008

in Uncategorized

I recently told Hyphen-Mama that when I made sushi I would write a quick post with photos.

Veronica asked me to make sushi for Amy’s birthday. So seeing as I had already opened my big mouth promised that I would. I decided that I might as well turn it into a sort of  sushi by numbers photos.

Sushi rice:

5 cups of medium(short) grain rice,

5 cups of water

2 tablespoons sake (I always forget to add this ooops.)

* blended vinegar :- 12 Tbsp vinegar,4 Tbsp sugar, 4tsp salt

In a largish bowl wash the rice with cold water then drain. Keep doing this until the water is clear, this generally takes about 4 rinses.

Put the rice and water and sake in a large heavy bottomed saucepan, cover and bring to the boil over a high heat. When steam starts to escape from under the lid or if a white starchy liquid starts to  bubble out from under the lid,  turn off the heat. Don’t take the pot off the stove though. Just let it sit there for about 15 minutes.

Or you can cook your rice in a rice-cooker  until the rice is soft but not gluggy, each grain of rice needs to be clearly defined.

Mix the rice vinegar ( I use white wine vinegar) sugar and salt in a small saucepan and heat gently until the sugar dissolves.

Transfer the cooked rice to a large shallow bowl and sprinkle generously with the vinegar. While the rice is still hot fold the vinegar into the rice being careful not to stir the rice.(stirring the rice makes it go all mooshy).  I cover the rice with some clingwrap and let it cool down while I prepare the rest of the ingredients.

you can click on any of the photos to make them bigger.

The ingredients for this batch of sushi are cream cheese,carrot,cucumber,capsicum,white japanese radish, sprouts and some leftover roast pork. I tend to use three ingredients at a time and try to marry flavours as well as colour.

Put a sushi rolling mat on your work surface, then place a sheet of nori(shiny side down) on the rolling mat. Using wet fingers spread the rice evenly all over the nori.

Put a small smear of wasabi paste on your finger and draw a line across the middle of the rice. Then arrange strips of your filling across the rice.

Using the rolling mat as a guide begin to roll up the nori..

Then using a sharp knife cut the nori rolls into bite sized pieces and serve with a sweet soy sauce and some wasabi..

If anyone has any questions I will answer them in the comments..  I hope that you all have heaps of fun making and eating sushi.. cheers Kim

OOOPS!!! I forgot to mention that my mum taught me how to make sushi.

Hi Mum *waves*

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gluten-free… Choc Chip Cookies

by frogpondsrock on July 29, 2008

in friendship,Uncategorized

I found this recipe and immediately I thought of Tiff and Ivy, as well as Hyphen-Mama. It looked like it would make pretty nice biscuits (cookies).

*note.. soy flour has a strong flavour and can be bitter, apparently the bitterness decreases with cooking.

*another note.. I haven’t cooked these bickies so if they are horrible, I am sorry.

INGREDIENTS:

125g(4 1/2oz) unsalted butter

3 tablespoons brown sugar

3 tablespoons castor (superfine) sugar

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

110g (3 3/4 oz) fine rice flour

75g (2 1/2 oz) gluten free cornflour (cornstach)

3 tablespoons soy flour

1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

3 tablespoons of cocoa powder

200g (7 oz) chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 170 degrees celcius (325 fahrenheit). Line three flat baking trays with baking paper.

In a medium bowl,cream the butter and sugars. add the egg and vanilla essence and beat well.

sift the flours,bicarbonate of soda and cocoa powder three times into a bowl (or mix well with a whisk to ensure they are well combined). add to the butter mixture and beat well. Stir in the chocolate chips.

place large tablespoons of the mixture on the baking trays. Bake for 8-10 minutes or until golden brown. Leave to cool on the trays for 5 minutes,then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

I hope that these biscuits taste as good as they look. All the ingredients were available at my local supermarket.. cheers Kim  :)

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