Easter 2022

Here's this year's edition of my annual Easter post...

...freshly completed tarrale...

...a piping-hot pizza chiena...

...a bouquet of tulips from my visit to the first farmers' market of the year on Saturday morning...

...all culminating in this morning's Easter breakfast spread.

I also discovered from a friend's post that this weekend is a rare confluence of spring festivals in a number of different cultures and traditions. So I'm sending good wishes to everyone celebrating Easter, Passover, Ramadan, and Vaisakhi this weekend - and a weekend of peace, goodwill, and abundance to everyone. 

March roundup

March got away from me, so here are a few recent highlights:

I’m continuing to find new uses for my sourdough starter and this one is right up there: a recipe for nearly-instant crumpets, aka TrashCrumps, constructed mainly from starter and found on Instagram. Definitely a keeper.

We had a weekend in New York City mid-month where we visited friends and family, ate lots of good food, and walked a good chunk of Manhattan (21,000 steps in one day!). Our Saturday evening included taking Miss B most of the length of Central Park, including the reservoir.

I’ve been continuing to make snacking cakes, inspired by this book. Miss B’s recent favorite is a raspberry cake topped with a glaze made with icing sugar mixed with equal parts milk and blood orange juice. A good way to make the most of their short season.

Spring has come to northern Virginia and the flowers are blooming. I snapped this gorgeous camellia when it was all just beginning a couple of weeks ago.

And now it's time to jump into April. Hoping it brings good things to all.

3-day weekend

The third Monday in February is a public holiday in the US - Presidents’ Day. I can’t say I commemorate this in any meaningful way, other than this year by being even more grateful than usual to get an extra day off. Last week felt like it went on about twice as long as normal, thanks to a confluence of professional and household events that started way too early on Tuesday morning with discovering puddles in the basement, and finished late Friday with a day that felt like a real-life game of Tetris, trying to slot repeated visits from various repair personnel in with work-related Zoom calls, and vice versa. The time in between involved 48 hours of industrial drying equipment that invaded 2 out of 3 floors, sounded like a jet engine was parked in the kitchen, and required constant wearing of earplugs in order to function indoors. 

This disrupted my sleep patterns just a bit, and I was awake before 6 on Saturday morning, even though I didn’t need to be. This was an improvement over the previous 2 mornings - not only because I had slept past 4, but also because it was quiet. Even with a busy Saturday of offline and online chores in prospect, I thoroughly enjoyed a peaceful breakfast - and the ability to move about freely in my own kitchen again. 

I celebrated by making a little something special - a batch of biscuit croissants. I made up a batch of 2-Ingredient Biscuits; rolled the dough out flat; sliced into 8 triangles; filled half with chocolate chunks (for Miss B) and half with cinnamon sugar (for me); rolled them up like croissants; and baked them on a parchment-lined tray at 400F/200C for 15 minutes. I had 2 of the cinnamon ones for breakfast with some cranberry-apple butter.

No alarm tomorrow morning either - hurrah! Hope that wherever you are, you're getting some rest and relaxation too.

Crumpet experiments

By special request of Beck, fellow Canberra blogger from In Search of Golden Pudding, today I'm posting the crumpet recipe I've been using for the last couple of years. I only make these a couple of times a year, so even though I'm not entirely overjoyed with this recipe, I've just been tweaking it rather than researching others. The way these come out reminds me more of the American version of English muffins than like my memory of crumpets - not enough air holes, in particular. However, I will come clean here and say that my only experience of crumpets (other than my own) is out of a packet, so my expectations may not be realistic.

This recipe is adapted from Delia's Complete Cookery Course, by UK cooking powerhouse Delia Smith. My main adaptation is drastically cutting the amount of yeast (from 1 Tbsp), because I prefer to let the dough rise overnight rather than the 45 minutes suggested in the original recipe - I think the crumpets taste better, plus I'd rather not have to hang around for 45 minutes before I can even start cooking Sunday breakfast.

1. Heat 275 ml/10 oz milk and 55 ml/2 oz water to 'hand-hot' in a small saucepan (I interpret this to mean I can stick my finger in for about 10 seconds).

2. Pour liquid into a jug, stir in 5 g/1 tsp sugar and 5 g/1 tsp yeast and leave to prove for 10-15 minutes, or until frothy.

3. Sift 225 g/8 oz plain/all-purpose flour and 5 g/1 tsp salt into a medium-sized bowl, then add yeast mixture and mix together thoroughly. (I use my dough whisk.)

4. Cover the bowl and leave batter to rise overnight. (I do this in the fridge.)

5. When ready to cook, grease your frying pan or griddle well, as well as the inside of your crumpet or egg rings. When your cooking surface is hot, spoon 1 Tbsp of batter into each ring, and let cook for 4-5 minutes, looking for the appearance of bubbles and allowing them to burst.* Then remove the ring and flip the crumpet to cook for 1 more minute.

Makes 10-12 crumpets.

* This is the step that hasn't really worked for me - I don't get as many bubbles as I expect, either using the original recipe or the adapted overnight version. They're still yummy, though. Suggestions welcome.

Eight weeks (part 2)

April arrived in Canberra complete with an April Fool's Day joke from Mother Nature:

...making our local landmark, Black Mountain, topped by the Telstra Tower, disappear in the morning...

...and reappear in the afternoon.

Other highlights of the month included our quarterly care package of American goodies from sister/aunt L...

...two weekends at the coast - one to Kioloa...

...and one to Durras Beach in Murramurang National Park...

...where we got up close and personal with some of the locals...

...and admire some of the oldest gum trees still standing anywhere in New South Wales.

Most of the rest of April was taken up with a combination of school holidays and solo parenting, which meant juggling work with activities around Canberra - and Miss B's and my now-traditional Sunday breakfast of crumpets when DP is away - making the batter the night before is definitely the key to success.

And my latest foray into flower arranging brings us up to date, with autumn taking hold in Canberra - the heat is on, the nights are drawing in, and the slow cooker is getting a workout. What's happening where you are?

Ten things

Ten things of note since my last post:

 
1. Breakfast on the deck, possibly for the first time since we moved in last August. (Note that said breakfast is leftover Oat-Fruit Bars – following the rule that if it includes oats, it counts as breakfast food. Also applies to crumble.)

 

2. Cleaned off my desk to give me the space I need for the final push on another major work project, which launched online at the end of February. (Lucky for me we had an extra day this year!) 

3. Looked up how to make a gin fizz after we finished re-watching The Jewel in the Crown, where they appear to be the main source of hydration for most of the characters. I haven’t made one yet, but soon! (I have, however, christened my Moscow Mule mugs, and now one lives permanently in my freezer.)

4. Made a zuzagna – a lasagna with zucchini noodles instead of pasta. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t stellar either – I need to fiddle with it some more before I post a recipe.

5. Giving thanks for my evaporative cooling system. Are you familiar with this method? The main benefits from my perspective are that they add some humidity to Canberra’s arid air, and that you don’t have to keep all the windows closed. In fact, you shouldn’t, so you don’t have that hermetically-sealed freezer feel that I hate about air conditioning. I’ve been especially glad to have it in the past few weeks, when Canberra temps hit a record-breaking 38C/100F at least once – the highest late-February temperature documented since record-keeping began. 

6. Trying to keep up with my tomatoes, which are attempting to branch out from the two raised beds and take over the back garden. I didn’t even plant the ones in this picture – they appeared spontaneously and are producing golden cherry tomatoes by the dozens! 

 

7. Refreshing my memory of the Hunger Games trilogy, since Miss B held me to my promise that she could start reading them when she got into Year 6, and then promptly found all three in a used bookstore.

8. Getting familiar with Spotify. (Yes, I know I’m way behind on this.) A group of my coworkers does a challenge during Lent every year, called 40 Days of Open Listening, where each day we get a randomly selected album which we’re supposed to listen to with an open mind. I’ve been getting the emails for a couple of years, but this is the first year I’m actively participating. My latest discovery is the Triffids, who I’d never even heard of – I’ve decided they’re a cross between the Waterboys and Arcade Fire, in a good way.

9. Making a test batch of homemade cereal: I based it on this recipe, which only has 3 ingredients - oats, oil, and sweetener. I used half canola and half olive oil, and maple syrup instead of honey, and instead of using the oven, I made it in the slow cooker so I wouldn't have to worry about burning it. It took a couple of hours on high - I just kept cooking it until it smelled toasty and delicious. It tastes so good I daydream about when I'm going to eat it again.

10. Admiring my backyard lemon tree, which is covered in growing lemons. (Roving Lemon has a lemon tree! How meta is that?)

That’s the news from here. Got any to share?

Wayback Wednesday

This concoction - slow roasted rhubarb and peaches - was one of my favorite things to eat during my first stint in Canberra, and was strongly associated with my memories of Australia after I left - mainly because this is the only place I've ever found rhubarb and peaches in season at the same time. (Although I suppose you could use frozen.) The other day, I made my first batch in nearly 3 years. Just as good as ever.

Cured meats

Did you know that when you ask for “bacon”, what you get will depend on where you are? In the US you get a long, thin rectangular piece of meat which comes from the belly of the pig and is about equal parts flesh and fat, optimally fried until perfectly crispy. Outside the US, this is known as “streaky bacon” or “streaky rashers”. In the UK and Australia, the bacon you commonly get comes from the back of the pig, is much less fatty, and is called, not surprisingly, “back bacon”. (This is known as “Canadian bacon” in the US, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me.)

Despite this being my fourth stint of living outside the US, I have to re-adjust every time to the fact that the bacon elsewhere is significantly different from what I'm used to and that, honestly, I don’t like it as much as I do the traditional US style. So much so that at least once I’ve done something that is usually unthinkable, and run out. As it turns out, this domestic faux pas has yielded some unexpected benefits, principally discovering that salty, cured meats are more interchangeable than I’d realized. A recent, very successful breakfast experiment emphatically demonstrates this; wanting some bacon to jazz up my fried egg on toast and finding none, I swapped in some fried spicy salami. The variation has now officially entered the RL breakfast rotation.

Fried egg & salami on toast
Of course, following the cured-meats-are-interchangeable principle means that you should feel free to swap in whatever you’ve got lying in the fridge.

1 slice whole wheat toast

2 slices spicy salami
1 egg
salt & pepper

Toast bread. In a small frying pan, fry salami until crisp on the edges, turning once. Remove salami from pan and crack in egg, frying to your liking. (I like sunny side up with a runny yolk.)

Put toasted bread on a plate, top with salami, then with egg. Sprinkle with salt & pepper and consume.

Cheesy grits

In the RL weekly breakfast rotation, Monday belongs to Savory Cheddar Oatmeal. Until I ran out of oats a couple of weeks ago, that is. Since then, I’ve been trying to make some space in the pantry (via my insides) and simultaneously branch out in my exploration of some things that I have bought on a whim but have not since used to their full potential.

Those motivations were how, without really intending to, I made myself grits for breakfast last week. Or at least a reasonable facsimile of grits.

Grits, for those of you who don’t already know, is a breakfast porridge made from coarsely ground corn or hominy (which is corn that has been treated with alkali, via a process called nixtamalization, improving its nutritional value), cooked in boiling liquid, seasoned to taste, and served hot. Left to cool, it congeals and becomes firm enough to slice and fry. It is of Native American origin, and mainly available today in the regional cooking of the American South. It is similar in composition and texture to polenta.

Since my exposure to grits has been minimal (even though technically I’ve been living in the South for nearly two years), it wasn’t until I was well into consuming my breakfast that it dawned on me that it wasn’t original or even very unusual; merely another update of a dish so old that probably no one will ever know who first devised it.

Yankeefied cheesy grits
Most recipes for grits (and porridges generally) seem to call for cooking the grains in water, but I always use milk for at least half the liquid. It bumps up the nutritional value and the flavor.

1 part cornmeal*
3-4 parts milk or other liquid of your choice**
1-2 oz/30-60 g sharp cheddar cheese, thinly sliced or shredded
1-2 strips bacon, cooked and crumbled
salt & freshly ground black pepper

Combine the cornmeal and liquid in a small saucepan and bring to a boil over medium-low heat. Lower the heat and simmer, stirring often, until nearly all the liquid has been absorbed and the cornmeal is cooked to a consistency that you like. (You may need to add more liquid than the amount specified here if you like your grits mushier than I do.)

When you are satisfied with the grits’ consistency, add the remaining ingredients and stir to distribute throughout the mixture. Taste for seasoning.

Serve hot. (I often eat mine straight out of the pan. Saves on washing up.)

Serves 1. Can be multiplied. Leftovers are great sliced, fried up in bacon fat, and served as part of a subsequent breakfast.

* I used about half a cup of coarsely ground cornmeal to make this batch. It would have fed 2 people easily.
** For this batch, about 2 cups/500 ml of liquid.

Tiny omelettes

Like millions (billions?) of other people, many of whom you’ve probably encountered on the internet in the past few weeks, I annually buy into the whole ‘January-Fresh-Start’ mentality. On top of the general zeitgeist, my birthday is in January, so this month is the start of my personal New Year as well as the one indicated on the Gregorian calendar in widespread use worldwide.

I don’t make resolutions as such, but in the few weeks that elapse between January 1 and my birthday, I try to give some thought to the things I want to focus on in the coming year to make the most of my time. These usually boil down to living more mindfully in various ways: working on replacing sloppy or unhealthy practice with good practice, focusing on habits I want to develop, eliminating various kinds of physical (and mental) clutter, and so on. Some of this is directed toward food, generally with a view to making the most of what I’m eating while practicing moderation. I told SP last year that my personal food philosophy is “make every mouthful count”. One of the ways in which I do this is to eat a variety of different foods, since when I fall into eating ruts I am more likely to lapse into unrestrained and mindless snacking. So I’ve been working on coming up with different things to eat for breakfast, and ideally to develop a schedule where I eat a different thing for breakfast every day of the week, which to me is the ideal combination of repetition and variety.

Paradoxically, my latest addition was inspired by reading a blog post where its maker talked about eating it for breakfast every day for the last several months as part of a weight-loss program: an egg-and-cheese omelette that clocked in at a mere 220 calories. But what caught my attention about this was her note that it was a 2-egg omelette. Revelation! Omelettes don’t have to be made with 3 eggs, the way they are in restaurants. I could even make one with just 1 egg, add a little filling, have a bit of starch alongside, and still not break the caloric bank.

One-egg omelette
Eggs, in addition to being a pretty reasonably-priced source of protein (even if you buy the free-range, no-chemical, gold-plated kind), are filling, tasty, and versatile. Probably the reason why most cuisines offer some variation on the omelette.

1 tsp olive oil
1 egg
~2 teaspoons filling of your choice*
salt & pepper

Heat the olive oil over medium-low heat in a small frying pan.** Meanwhile, break the egg into a small bowl and beat the yolk into the white until consistently mixed.

Pour egg into hot pan and allow mixture to cook for 30-45 seconds or until the edges are just starting to set. Sprinkle over fillings, then season with salt & pepper. Using your preferred spatula, gently flip one half of the omelet over the other half. Allow to cook for 1-2 minutes more, then slide out onto a plate.

Serves 1. Tastes great with a toasted whole wheat and olive oil biscuit alongside (if you've still got some calorie allowance left).

* I have been using chopped bacon and shreds of cheddar cheese.
** I have a 4-inch cast iron that’s perfect for a tiny omelet, but you can use whatever you have that's good for cooking eggs. The omelet won’t look as neat in a bigger pan, but will still be fine.