Purple Citrus & Sweet Perfume: 1

My first attempt from Purple Citrus & Sweet Perfume by Silvena Rowe: Pomegranate Glazed Kebabs with Spiced Pomegranate Chutney, became more of a “cut & paste” creation rather than a carefully followed recipe.  In fact, the whole kebab notion went out the window when I decided to slow cook the meat in my tagine. Talk about deviation!

And I confess… I didn’t make the chutney. BUT I did combine part of the chutney recipe into the stewing sauce for the meat.

Silvena’s original calls for marinated, quickly cooked kebabs, glazed with pomegranate sauce, served with a fresh and spicy, uncooked citrus chutney.  My original became a marinated, slow cooked lamb dish with a sticky, spicy pomegranate sauce.

It ended up looking like this:

Combine:

4 garlic cloves, crushed

200ml pomegranate juice (which I didn’t have so I watered down apple juice)

3 Tbsp pomegranate molasses

4 juniper berries, crushed

10 peppercorns (ideally pink… I used black)

1 teaspoon Ras-el-Hanout

Marinade 500-800g lamb fillet, cut into 2.5cm cubes in the above mixture for at least 2 hrs (over night would be perfect). When ready, brown meat in the base of a tagine over high heat with 2 Tablespoons of oil, for a few minutes till seared, reserving the marinade for later.

Add to the marinade:

The juice of 1 lemon

1 tsp of lemon rind

1 Tbsp honey

2 tsp freshly grated orange rind

1 dried red chilli, finely cut

Pour over the meat. Throw in a handful of coarsely chopped onion. Pour over enough boiling water to cover the meat, Seal with the tagine lid and simmer on low for 1.5 hrs.

Then add:

2 potatoes, peeled and cubed

Taste for seasoning, add further boiling water till the potatoes are almost submerged. Seal tagine and cook a further 30 minutes, until potatoes are tender and meat falling apart with a nice thick sauce.

I ate this with couscous, mixed through cucumber and mint, with a dollop of natural yogurt on the side.  The stand out flavour for me came from the juniper berries. Having never tasted them before, I loved how their smell made me think of Gin and Tonic in bite sized form. They have an amazing herbal/medicinal undertone, very difficult to describe, but perfect for lamb. I’ll be keeping my packet of juniper berries very carefully for next time!

Molasses, anyone?

I never thought of myself as a sweet-tooth before, but January consisted of all things cake. After tossing up between a few recipes for days undecided, I took the plunge and made both. One for me. One for my sister. Of course having made neither cake before it was fate that one of them would be a little “different”, and of course it was that cake which, in all it’s glorious golden brown beauty, I left at my little sister’s place, before taste testing. Just my luck!

So to begin, both cake recipes were from 101cookbooks.com, an amazing website I check regularly for inspiration:

Maple Huckleberry Coffee Cake & Old-Fashioned Blueberry Cake

It was the Old-Fashioned Blueberry cake that let me down. Not the recipe’s fault, by my lack of understanding of the key ingredient – MOLASSES.

Doesn’t it sound good:  blueberry’s and molasses?

So when I stumbled across a jar of  “Molasses” quite by chance I knew what I had to make. My initial warning should have been when I popped the jar open for my first taste the of the black syrup. Being Australian bred I had never tasted the stuff, only ever read about it in childhood books, and assumed it was rather like treacle or golden syrup. It was sweet but the predominant flavour was salty aniseed, reminding me very much of salty Dutch liquorice.  The recipe also called for a further 2/3rds of a teaspoon of salt, and it went also.

The batter became a lovely warm brown, the sweet blueberries gave it a splash of colour, and then into the pan ready to go. The batter in the bowl was strong, but I assumed cooking would balance it out letting the sweetness of the berries kick in.

It came out of the oven so pretty, oozing soft blueberry juice. As it cooled I debated with Tim how it was only fair for me to taste test one piece before I gave it to my guinea-pig sister. Tim’s power of persuasion held sway and I eventually agreed that a whole cake did look better than one already cut up into pieces to disguise the fact a small morsel had been removed. It smelt lovely. So after cooling I wrapped it and deposited at my sisters, leaving it outside in the blue chest of draws under the patio as no one was home.

A few days later I spoke to Hannah.

“So how was the cake?”

“Err um… well the blueberries were fantastic, but it was SO salty!”

Surprise, surprise.

I have since discovered I used Black-strap Molasses, which turns out to be a very different cookie to Molasses. For now I have large jar of the stuff I need to use, and I’m tempting fate by considering tweaking the original recipe, only a few teaspoons this time, and the rest golden syrup. This time I’ll try a piece first.

Night shift reality

A good percentage of my life is spent at work. Shift work, as a midwife. I love it! But this week has been a week of night shift and that means it’s “easy food week”. Eating at random hours, going to bed at 8:30am waking up at 4pm (if I’m lucky, the lawn mowing guy doesn’t come over, the phone doesn’t ring and it’s not 40 degrees C). It really plays around with the inner wiring of knowing when and what my body even wants to consume.

Yesterday my cooking creativity consisted of heating up leftover rice with salt,pepper, butter and cheese. Eating cucumber sticks, and a frozen yogurht paddle-pop icecream (Not together mind you). A fried egg for breakfast on toast.

But tonight is my last night shift, and then a beautiful stretch of days off. So when my body has reached equilibrium again (and my computer decides to start working properly) I will return with a little more creativity.

Book: Purple Citrus and Sweet Perfume

One of my aims for this blog is to feature cookbooks I own, and share my journey using them. So to begin, I was given Purple Citrus & Sweet Perfume by Silvena Rowe for Christmas.

Visually stunning, Silvena leaves you wanting to taste each dish on every page. Some stand out, ‘wouldliketotry’ recipes include:

Jerusalem Artichoke Hummus Topped with Lamb and Sumac

Smashed Cucumber, Mulberry and Pistachio Salad

Pomegranate Glazed Kebabs with Spiced Pomegranate Chutney

Red Mullet with Pine Nuts, Currants and Gremolata

Cumin-scented Broth of Celeriac, Summer Squash and Orange

Pink Peppercorn and Cardamom Meringues with Mulberries and White Chocolate

Between discovering pink peppercorns at my local deli, and having fresh cucumbers growing in my garden a few of these recipes are one step closer to being attempted.

Tonight: Basil

A beautiful bush of basil is growing rampant in my garden.

To stop it from going to seed I’ve been pinching out the heads each day.  The constant supply of basil leaves has called for a lot of spur of the moment basil creations. I’ve been wanting to bake basil with chicken and lemon but struggling to work out how to do it without completely killing the intense basil aroma with the high heat of  the oven. So I decided to experiment today and see what resulted.

Searing chicken breasts till just browned, I sliced them open, filled them with basil leaves, strips of lemon rind and gently fried garlic slivers and closed them back up to bake them in the oven on a layer of soft onions I’d fried up earlier with the garlic. While the chicken cooked I created a basting syrup of lemon and orange juice (unfortunately my verjuice had died or I would have sloshed some in), olive oil, sweet orange marmalade and lemon and orange rind. It made a nice shiny glaze after a few applications.

The basil seemed protected enough inside the chicken that it didn’t fade away and with a few fresh leaves on the side it lifted the whole thing. Basil win! Just when I thought basil couldn’t get better  my house-mate mentioned she’d been out for lunch/desert and basil scented panacotta was on the menu….

What does cooking mean?

Still Life with Lemons on a Plate by Van Gogh

“It means the knowledge of Medea, and of Circe, and of Calypso, and of Helen, and of Rebekah, and the Queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge of all herbs and fruits, and balms and spices; all that is healing and sweet in fields and groves, and savory meats; it means carefulness and inventiveness, and watchfulness, and willingness and readiness of appliance; it means the economy of your great-grandmothers, and the science of modern chemists; it means much tasting and no wasting, it means English thoroughness, and French art, and Arabian hospitality” ~ John Ruskin, Ethics of the Dust.