January round-up

A bit later than planned...one of these days I'll go less than a month between posts and not have every one be a photo-filled epic. Until then, here are the latest happenings:

Two days after DP returned from his trip, and the very day of my last post, we headed off on our annual family vacation to the coast - not to Jervis Bay this year, but further down the New South Wales coast to Tuross Head, which we loved so much we may have to switch our allegiance permanently.

Then, less than 24 hours after we returned to Canberra, it was my turn to flit off - on my annual January work trip to England - all London this time, with no chance of jaunts to Oxford or elsewhere (woe) - and Germany.

For the second year running, I celebrated my birthday in England - this year with a fancy birthday tea at Fortnum & Mason and a swanky dinner as well.

After a jam-packed week of meetings, dinners, team-building activies, and more meetings, I flew to Germany to spend a weekend and a few days in the office with my friends and colleagues in Freiburg. There was snow for sledding...

...cheese for raclette...

...and this vegetable, which we thought was a parsnip - the German name for it is "parsley root", and it appears to be topped with...parsley. C and I were so struck by this - the possibility that parsley grows parsnips, and vice versa - that we went home and looked it up. Apparently parsley root is a different root vegetable, which looks like and is closely related to parsnip, but is much more widely available in central and eastern Europe than elsewhere (probably why I'd never encountered it before).

The other notable food milestone was my first time baking a cake in Germany: a lemon cake, made by special request (basically this recipe, with  a lemon apiece - zest and juice - in batter and frosting).

I really enjoyed my trip, but I was also very glad to get back to my regular routine in Canberra - including my first Saturday-morning farmers' market run (complete with coffee and planning) since before Christmas.

More cake! For my belated birthday celebration with DP and Miss B - vanilla cake (as above) and chocolate buttercream (but with double the chocolate shown there).

So, to sum up: travel, cake, travel, cake, travel, cake. And now it's February, and Miss B has started Year 6 (Year 6! Holy hell!). We're heading down the path of another year, and the first day of autumn is just around the corner.





I hope there is plenty of adventure (or not, as you prefer) and cake where you are. More to come soon, I hope.

In progress

No word yet on a delivery date for our household goods. At least once every day for the past week or more, I have a moment of complete and overwhelming frustration at being in life limbo and my total inability to do anything to change that. This is usually rapidly followed by an internal talking-to about my first world problems and an attempt to focus my attention elsewhere, on things that I can control.

This past weekend, my displacement activity was an afternoon in the kitchen, focused on cooking projects that I could carry out with the TUK’s limited resources: a batch of skillet jam for Miss B’s morning toast; a batch of roasted rhubarb (plus strawberries) for my morning yogurt; a tray of cinder toffee, drizzled with chocolate and boxed up as a hostess gift for a lunch invitation for the following day (more on this later); and two jars of preserved lemons.

Preserved lemons are a great project to undertake when you’re itching to can something, but the circumstances aren’t auspicious. At the moment, I don’t have a pot deep enough to water-bath can anything. Nor is it exactly high season for cannable produce in Canberra right now, what with it being the last month of winter and all. But citrus is definitely still in season – I got 2 kilos (~4.5 lbs) of various kinds for about AUD $5 last week at the famers’ market – and preserved lemons require exactly two ingredients: lemons and salt.

Perhaps even more appropriately for my current situation, preserved lemons also require a third, less tangible element: time. Recipes generally recommend that you let them do their thing (steep? brew? pickle? ferment?) for at least 3 weeks before using. So this project, in addition to giving purpose to a weekend afternoon and preserving a fruit at the height of its quality, is also an investment in my own future – a physical manifestation of the hope that, by the time these lemons are ready to use, I’ll be back in a kitchen of my own, settling in to the next phase of this transition.

Preserved lemons

All of the recipes I looked at included complicated instructions for slicing into the lemons to get salt into their insides while keeping them intact. Since I immediately screwed this technique up on my very first lemon, I made the executive decision that quartering the lemons wouldn’t dramatically alter the chemical process going on here, or the taste of the finished product. Plus, it made them easier to cram into the jars.

8 lemons, unwaxed if possible

2 cups/~12 oz/360 g of kosher/cooking salt

Have available 1 or 2 clean jars for storing the lemons. Avoid metal lids, as these could corrode from the salt/acid concentration.

Wash and dry the lemons, scrubbing skins if necessary to remove any grit or dirt. Put salt into a medium-sized bowl. Cut the lemons into quarters and toss in the salt to coat, then stuff into the jars, pressing down on them to release the juice. Try to extract enough juice to cover the contents of the jar(s); once you have filled up the jar(s), sprinkle over 1-2 Tbsp of salt as insurance.

Close the jar(s) and store in a cool place, away from direct sunlight, for at least 3 weeks. Turn the jar(s) occasionally to redistribute the juice and salt.

Stay tuned for updates on how mine turned out - and what I do with them.

Pucker up

As you may have gathered from the name of this blog, I am very partial to lemons. The most useful of kitchen staples, they can be used in either sweet or savory foods. They can add a subtle sparkle to the background of almost any dish, or hold their own as the starring flavor. I may not go so far as my friend SC, whom I have witnessed eating whole lemon slices from her drink, peel and all, but short of such demonstrations of unconditional love I am among the lemon’s greatest admirers, and aim always to have some on hand.

Unfortunately, my housemates do not share my adoration of all things lemon. Miss B, despite her love of pickles and salty things, has not (yet) embraced the full spectrum of the sour palate, while DP thinks we’re both nuts and sits firmly in the sweet tooth camp. So when I recently developed a craving for lemon poppyseed cake, I knew I’d have to get creative about finding someone to share it with me, or else end up eating the whole thing myself. I took the advice of another cake-baking friend, and carted it off to my weekly parents’ coffee morning. A genius suggestion—I got enough to satisfy my own cravings, and had the added satisfaction of making a host of other lemon- (or just cake-) lovers happy. There was even enough left to take home for a photo shoot, which I had forgotten to do beforehand. Win-win-win.

(Bonus comment: “Isn’t it unusual for Americans to bake?”)

NL's Mother-in-Law’s Madeira Cake
Aka Cookbook Challenge Recipe #3. This is a variation on the very first recipe in HtbaDG, described as “baking at its simplest and most elegant….[O]ne of those plain cakes you think you can’t see the point of, until you start slicing and eating it.” It is delicious as is (although not quite up to the standard of the Ukrainian Poppyseed Cake in the Moosewood Cookbook), and would also make a great dessert topped with fresh berries and whipped cream.

240g/10oz unsalted butter at room temperature
200g/8oz caster/granulated sugar, plus extra for topping
zest of 1 and juice of 1.5 lemons
3 eggs
210g/8oz self-raising flour*
90g/4oz plain flour
2 Tbsp poppyseeds

Preheat the oven to 170C/350F. Grease a loaf pan and line with baking parchment.

Cream the butter and sugar. Chop the lemon zest very finely and add. Mix the eggs in one at a time, adding a tablespoon of flour each time. Mix in the remainder of the flour, followed by the lemon juice and poppyseeds. Spread in baking pan and sprinkle extra sugar over. Bake for 50-60 minutes; let cool in the tin.

* I didn’t have self-raising flour, so I used all plain flour and added two teaspoons of baking powder.

Citrus facts

Have you ever noticed how, in some cuisines (Italian, Greek, Moroccan), the citrus fruit used to flavor the food is generally lemons, while in others (Thai, Mexican, Vietnamese), it's limes?

Have you ever wondered why?

(If you haven't, don't tell me. Let me cling to my illusions that I'm not the only person who thinks about these things.)

Well, I found out why recently. It's because lemons traditionally grow best in Mediterranean and subtropical climates, while limes can flourish in hotter, tropical areas.

Of course, I can't now remember where I read this, so I haven't been able to verify it (other than on Wikipedia, which doesn't really count), but it makes sense to me and I'm sticking with it.

This nugget of useless food information presented to liven up your Monday by Roving Lemon's Big Adventure.