Bake with potential

I went into the kitchen this evening with the intention of making tuna rice bake (p107). It's the sort of recipe that's designed for using up leftover rice: except that since I seldom have leftover rice, I had to begin by cooking some up specially.


That step was accomplished without difficulty; the next proved difficult when I realised I didn't have any onions. I'd checked the recipe when I went to the supermarket to get the tuna, but overlooked the fact that I'd used up all my onions making soup the other day. Sigh.. well, it won't be much good without onion: wrap up; get in car; drive to supermarket for 30c onion purchase; return to kitchen.

With all ingredients now on hand, I could make a start on the sauce, cooking onion, celery and garlic in a pan before stirring in flour and gradually adding milk. When the sauce thickened, I took the pan off the heat and beat in egg and grated cheese. The white sauce turned yellow from the yolk and became almost like an omelet in appearance.


The next step was to season, and then add tuna. The recipe indicates a 425g can, which seems like an awfully large can of tuna to me. I used a standard 190g can for my half-recipe, and that was plenty.


Finally, I stirred in the rice and spooned the mixture into an oven dish. After 20 minutes in the oven, the tuna rice bake had gone golden on top, and was ready to eat. (Well, ok: I was also supposed to garnish the top with parsley, but couldn't be bothered going out to the garden in the cold just for a garnish).

Tuna rice bake might not be the most spectacular meal you'll ever eat - it's pretty ordinary sort of fare. Still, it's has quite a pleasant savoury flavour - and it's not too fishy. If you added some extra vege you'd have a more balanced meal. In fact, I think this recipe could be quite versatile as a 'throw in whatever you've got' kind of meal. Especially if what you've got happens to include leftover rice!

Snow day

This morning I awoke to find it had been snowing overnight. Since snow seldom stays around long in Christchurch (when it falls at all) I got ready for work as usual, climbed in the car and inched my way through the snowy, slippery streets to work.

The snow didn't melt away as I'd expected. Instead, it continued to fall thick and fast. Few people had made it to work and since we weren't going to be able to do much anyway, I ended up heading home again.


For anyone reading this who isn't familiar with the weather in New Zealand, and particularly Christchurch, the thing you need to understand is that we're not well-equipped to deal with snow. What in many countries would be considered a light dusting of snow can bring the whole city to a standstill. 

In weather like this, a bowl of soup seems like an ideal meal. Good thing I'd made some meat stock (p85) over the weekend, then! 

Stock takes time to make, but very little effort. I got some beef bones from a local butcher, trimmed off any obvious fat, and put them into a stock pot with two litres of water. When the water started boiling, there was a dirty-looking scum on the surface, so I followed the recipe, which stated that if this was the case, I should drain the water, rinse the bones and start again with fresh water.

When I had the fresh lot of water boiling, I added a carrot and a couple of celery sticks, along with some peppercorns and a bouquet garni made of parsley and a bay leaf. It was supposed to have a sprig of thyme in it too, but I couldn't get any. Instead I sprinkled a little dried thyme in the water and hoped for the best.

That's pretty much the sum total of effort involved in preparing the stock. After this, you just let it simmer for six hours, then strain it through a sieve and leave it cool before refrigerating.

I got my big bowl of stock out today to make some french onion soup (p86). I already had some thinly sliced onions cooking in butter over a low heat, so while that was happening, I skimmed the layer of fat off the top of my stock. With the fat gone, the stock had a weird jellyish consistency, but it melted down into a liquid almost immediately when I added it to the pan with the onions.

The soup had to simmer for 15 minutes, so in the meantime, I sorted out the cheese on toast which apparently goes with french onion soup. It probably would have looked prettier if I'd used dainty little slices of french bread, but I didn't have any (and wasn't going out in the snow to get some!) and anyway, the recipe seemed to indicate normal toast bread. Probably grainy bread isn't exactly traditional, but never mind, it's all I had.

When the 15 minutes was up. I removed the pan from the heat and added a little sherry and some seasoning, then served myself a bowl of soup topped with the cheesy toast.


The french onion soup had a far more mellow flavour than I expected from all those onions, and while I found the soggy, cheesy bread an odd addition, it tasted ok. I think my beef stock was a little lacking in flavour, and I had to add quite a lot of salt to prevent the soup from being bland. Still, it was a warming, pleasant meal - just the thing on a snowy day!

When was the last time you had a banana split?

What with the chilly weather predicted for this weekend, and a sore throat/runny nose on the verge of becoming a cold, I decided it might be best to spend the weekend hibernating. In furtherance of this goal, I stayed in bed until well into the morning, and this afternoon wrapped myself in a duvet and settled on the couch to watch my way through The Lord of the Rings trilogy.


Halfway through The Two Towers, I found myself wanting chocolate. Well, I didn't have any chocolate in the house and going out to get some doesn't really fit with the hibernation thing, so I had to think outside the box a bit. Chocolate sauce (p189) would do the trick, but I had to come up with something to have it with. My eyes strayed to the fruit bowl and I thought of something I hadn't eaten in years: a banana split.

The sauce took no time at all to make. You just mix cocoa with cornflour and a little milk, add butter, sugar and the rest of the milk, then stir it over a low heat for a few minutes until it thickens. Easy.


While the sauce was cooking, I cut a banana in half and scooped out a couple of balls of ice cream. When the sauce was ready, I poured it straight over the ice cream and sprinkled over some chopped nuts. The hot sauce melted the ice cream almost immediately, but it still tasted great.

The sauce itself was perhaps a little disappointing in terms of chocolate flavour - it mostly tasted of cocoa. But the combination of the sauce with creamy vanilla ice cream, banana and nuts was actually fantastic. I couldn't believe I'd gone so long without eating one of these. Well, it won't be years before I have another one!

Forced compromise

I can understand why Edmonds would want to have a section in their cookbook promoting recipes which use their cake mixes. What is less easy to understand is why they would subsequently stop making the products required in some of these recipes.


Muffin cake (p75) is one such: the recipe lists Edmonds Apple and Sultana Muffin Mix as an ingredient. Sounds good - except that the only muffin mix Edmonds make these days (as far as I can discover) is a chocolate one. And that wouldn't really work in the recipe. So I'm sorry to say I was forced to purchase the most similar product I could find: Betty Crocker's Mixed Berry muffin mix. Forcing me to use a competitor's product kind of defeats the purpose of plugging your products in recipe-form, doesn't it?

When I got my muffin mix home, I turned to the muffin cake recipe, only to find a second non-existent product listed in the recipe: Fleming's Vita-Crunch. As far as Google was able to tell me, Vita-Crunch was some kind of toasted oaty muesli type stuff. As a substitute, I toasted up some rolled oats, and added a handful of crushed cornflakes and some chopped nuts, crossing my fingers that it would do the trick.


The cake itself was very easy to make. I combined the dry ingredients with come cinnamon, before adding the contents of the berry sachet, along with an egg, some oil and a bit of water. I briefly considered switching the berries with some apple and sultanas, in an attempt to more closely replicate the original recipe, but decided not to bother.

The cake was supposed to be made in a ring tin. I don't have one, so just placed a small drinking glass in the centre of my 20cm round tin. I spooned in the cake batter, scattered my substitute "Vita-Crunch" over the top, chucked it all in the oven and hoped for the best.


I wasn't feeling too optimistic when I got the cake out of the oven. It seemed to have cooked through just fine, but I wasn't sure how it would taste. I brought it to work today to feed to my fellow blood-donors, warning them all that the cake was a bit experimental and that might taste a bit weird.

With such low expectations, it was a pleasant surprise to find that the cake was in fact very tasty. The "Vita-Crunch" topping was entirely unnecessary, since it didn't add much to either the flavour or texture, and also since most of it fell off as we attempted to eat it. Probably the original Vita-Crunch was more successful.
The cake itself, however, was really very nice: it had a nice moist muffiny texture and the berry and cinnamon combination actually worked really well.

Muffin-shaped scones

I've never had much of a knack with savoury muffins. Sweet ones: no problem, but as soon as I try my hand at savoury, they come out lumpy and hard. Still, I wasn't going to let that get in the way of attempting savoury cheese muffins (p32).

The savoury additions to these muffins are cheese, celery and capsicum. You're only supposed to put in one tablespoon each of the celery and capsicum, but that didn't seem like much to me, (especially as I'd gone for a special walk to the supermarket just to get a single $4.99 capsicum) so I added a bit more.


Into the bowl with the cheese, celery and capsicum, I sifted flour, baking powder, cayenne pepper and salt. In a separate bowl I mixed melted butter with milk and beaten egg, before carefully combining the dry ingredients and liquids.

There didn't seem to be enough liquid: the muffin mixture was more like scone dough than anything else. I could have added more milk, but then it'd be overmixed. I decided I'd better leave it the way it was. Dividing the dough into 12 lumps, I filled up my muffin pans, put them in the oven and hoped for the best.


My savoury muffins didn't look that great when I took them out of the oven - kinda lumpy and odd-looking. Mum, Dad and I gamely had a try of them though, and to my surprise, they tasted quite good. The texture was quite heavy - more like a scone than a muffin, but not at all unpleasant. And though the savoury mixture of celery and capsicum may seem overly simple, it was surprisingly tasty. As an added bonus, they were really good dipped in the leftover tomato soup I had for dinner!

I'd make these again, but probably wouldn't bother pretending they were muffins: I'd just shape them into scones, because that's clearly what the dough is best suited for.

Fresh doesn't have to be best

I have to confess to a little substitution in my completion of the tomato soup recipe (p90). With tomatoes out of season and ridiculously expensive, there was no way I was going to buy fresh ones, just so I could blanch, skin, chop and cook them into soup. Nope, canned tomatoes are a fraction of the cost, and are pretty much the same as blanched and skinned ones.

With a can of tomatoes at the ready, I began my soup, beginning by frying up some chopped onion and celery, then adding the chopped tomatoes along with tomato paste, chicken stock and seasoning. When this mixture was close to boiling, I took it off the heat and blitzed it in the food processor.

And that's that: soup done. I ladled myself out a bowl, added a dollop of sour cream, and sat down to eat it. I clearly hadn't processed the soup for long enough, because it was still quite lumpy (I've since returned the remaining soup to the processor and given it a more thorough blitzing). Also, the sour cream, instead of melting and adding creaminess, seemed to separate into clumps resembling cottage cheese as I stirred it through the soup.

Despite these minor negatives, the tomato soup tasted alright. A bit salty perhaps - I should have seasoned to taste instead of simply following the quantities in the recipe - but otherwise, a perfectly good, quick and easy winter soup.

The cake that killed a rolling pin

Having baked my apple pie on Saturday, I washed my rolling pin and set it in the still-warm oven to dry out. Unfortunately, I'd forgotten about it by Sunday night, when I turned the oven on to make a ladysmith cake (p49). Of course, I would have found the rolling pin before long had it not been for one thing:

On perusing the recipe more carefully, I decided it looked like way too much faff for a Sunday night, elected to do it Monday instead, and went back to my room to watch TV. Some hours later, I wandered out into the lounge and wondered, "why does it smell like sawdust in here?" Actually, it doesn't smell like sawdust; it smells like burning rolling pin.

So clearly, it's the complicated recipe that was at fault, and not my own stupid carelessness, right? (Oh, come on - it was worth a shot!)

This evening I had a chance to find out just how tricky the ladysmith cake was. Answer: not very. It just requires a few different bowls and a few different layers. First, you cream butter and sugar in one bowl, and beat eggs in another. In a third bowl, sift flour and baking powder, then add the eggs and dry ingredients alternately to the creamed mixture.

Ok, so you have to dirty a few bowls, but it's really quite simple, as is the next bit - separating out one-third of the mixture and adding cinnamon. Actually, my split ended up more like half/half, because I accidentally got some of the cinnamon in the main bowl and had to scoop out more of the mixture, but it still worked ok.

The next step is to spoon the cinnamon mixture into the bottom of a cake tin. On top of this I spread some raspberry jam (slightly heated, to spread more easily) before adding the plain cake batter and topping it all with a sprinkling of chopped nuts.


After 50 minutes in the oven, the ladysmith cake came out looking and smelling delicious. As soon as I got it out of the tin, I cut a piece and had a taste. It was just as delicious as it smelled: light and fluffy, with a pleasant nutty crunch and a cinnamon and jam flavour almost reminiscent of belgian biscuits.

This recipe is certainly not as involved as it first appears, and the result is definitely worth dirtying a couple of bowls. I really have to concede that the effort required does not in any way justify a delay which in turn results in the sacrifice of a certain kitchen implement. Guess I'll have to take the blame after all.