Scallion pancakes

Lunch, complete with iPad (because reading) and spilled sauce (because real life)

One of the unexpected benefits of my new fridge-dwelling friend is that it has multiple uses. In addition to the whole wheat sourdough loaf that is the centerpiece of Bittman Bread (and my primary motivation for embarking on starter ownership), it turns out that there are quite a few other things you can do with it. The later chapters of the book provide a number of options, including a recipe for scallion pancakes which is a multi-step procedure. In the recipe notes, however Mark Bittman comments that one of his colleagues makes scallion pancakes using nothing more than a portion of starter and a pile of chopped scallions. I tried it myself this weekend to complement a lunch of leftover fried rice, and it was as good as any recipe that I’ve tried before. Maybe even better, because it was so much easier.

I started by melting about 1 Tbsp/15 g bacon fat in a frying pan. While it heated, I poured 100 g of whole wheat starter into a bowl, then thinned it out with about 50 ml of water and a pinch of salt, stirring until it was the consistency of pancake batter. The original recipe specified a bunch of scallions, but thanks to recent supply issues at the supermarket, I couldn’t get any. So I bought watercress instead, similarly spicy and crunchy and green, to bolster the end of the bunch of scallions I had in the fridge. I chopped them up together and mixed them in, then poured the mixture into the hot bacon fat. Cooked for about 5 minutes at medium heat on each side, then sliced up like a pizza and ate with a soy-based dipping sauce. A successful experiment, and one that I expect to become a regular fixture.

Strategic cooking

A lovely place for a hike, except for the part where I don't really like to hike

The first half of June seemed to involve an epic amount of cooking (unaccompanied by any photo-taking or blog-posting, alas - hence the entirely gratuitous scenery shot of a recent trip to Blue Moutains National Park). During that two-week stretch I had close to two dozen people over for meals, in varying amounts and combinations, all associated with DP's programme in one way or another (ie, mostly - but not all - teapot people). Enough of these events were back-to-back that I had the opportunity to experiment with re-purposing leftovers strategic cooking in a way that I was comfortable with, rather than starting from zero every time.

Here are a few of the hacks I came up with, mostly to do with starters and desserts - I think because I'm used to cooking a main meal most nights anyways, it's the frills that drive me around the bend.

Starters
This is not rocket science, but worth noting - a sturdy dip such as either of these will hold well for a couple of days. Maybe freshen the second batch with a squeeze of lemon or a slug of olive oil before serving?

• Basil-cashew-parmesan dip (I made a big batch of this, divided it, and served it two nights running to non-overlapping groups of guests)
• Garlicky sun-dried tomato spread (ditto; the second use was part of a bigger starter spread for a large group)

Desserts

• Chocolate ganache (I made a big batch of this; the first night I drizzled it over brown sugar pound cake and vanilla ice cream; by the second night it had firmed up in the fridge and I used it to fill a batch of Essential Cookie Sandwiches for a simple dessert for a non-teapot-person visitor.)
• Flourless chocolate cake (I served this in slices with whipped cream the first night, then in rounds, topped with roasted pears and maple whipped cream (an homage to the flavors of poires belle Helene) the second night)
• Caramel apple upside down cake (again - first night in slices with cream (ice? whipped? maybe a choice?), second day in hefty chunks in muffin cases as part of a lunch dessert spread)

It's probably worth noting that both the chocolate and the apple cakes were just as delicious the second day and not at all dried out or otherwise deterioriated.

Extras
In the event that you make a very large batch of nice homemade rolls one night and happen to have a lot of leftovers, they make excellent garlic rolls to accompany the next night's main course (particularly if it's something Italian, which it usually is in my house). Simply cut nearly all the way through each roll in an X-shape, then drizzle generously with butter that has been melted and combined with lots of chopped garlic. Wrap tightly in aluminum foil and re-heat for 15-20 minutes.

I also tried out some new stuff, which I'll write up as soon as I make them again and take some pictures of them. Hightlights to come include an entirely GF meal, something Miss B refers to as "flat tasty chicken", and my new favorite dessert.

Improvising appetizers

After I was stunned to realize that I had let the whole of January pass by without blogging, I promised myself I was going to get back into posting with some kind of regularity. And thus here I am, almost three weeks later. Oh well; at least it's better than a month later. Baby steps!

Life has returned to a semblance of normal routine since January disappeared; school's back in, which in turn means the re-appearance of regular after-school activities, and (more or less) set slots for getting work done, as well as things like running, errands, cooking, etc. It also means the start of this year's round of visits from guest lecturers and former students for DP, as well as various other colleagues, friends, and overseas visitors for one or all of us. Most of them end up eating dinner at our house at some point.

My standard dinner provision for guests includes something to nibble on with drinks - necessary since, no matter how hard I try, I've never yet managed to get a guest meal on the table in less than an hour from the stated arrival time, especially on weeknights. I have a repertoire of starters/appetizers that I rotate through - mostly dips served with pita chips - but I fall back on frico regularly when I need something that's really fast but really good.

I had these at someone else's house about two years ago, and appropriated them immediately. I usually serve them as one of a selection of small bowls of finger foods, most often accompanied by slices of grilled spicy salami, roasted nuts, and/or fancy olives. Their preparation barely qualifies as a recipe, and they are always well received. Their crispy texture and salty, savory flavor makes them an especially great option for vegetarian or gluten-free guests, but  they're pretty universally popular in my experience.

Frico (Cheese crisps - literally "Little trifles")
Some recipes specify cooking these on the stovetop in a skillet, but I use the oven; it's hands-off, and I can cook more, faster. You can also gussy these up with various accompaniments, but the most I've done is sprinkle them with freshly ground black pepper, or add a small basil leaf before cooking. Both are good variations, but these are also excellent when they're totally plain.

120-300 g/4-10 oz good-quality parmigiano-reggiano cheese, depending on number of eaters (I buy it pre-grated for maximum laziness/efficiency)*

Preheat oven to 180C/350F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Place mounds of grated cheese (about 30 g/1 oz each) on prepared tray, leaving space between mounds as cheese will spread as it melts. Bake in oven for 5-7 minutes, or until spread into round crisps which are lightly browned on the edges. Remove from the oven and let cool for another 5 minutes, then serve.**

* I usually make at least 2 mounds per person.
** I slice into half-circles (or quarters, depending on how much they spread) with a pizza cutter for serving.

Makes 4-10 crisps.

Five/one

Happy Friday! Time for another installment of Five Things That Make Me Happy and One Thing That's Pissing Me Off:

1. I had to stay up super late last night to finish a major assignment - but now it's done and ready to go out the door and off my mind in time for the weekend.
2. The weather in Canberra is suddenly summer-warm and it's lovely to have the windows open and be able to eat meals outside.
3. I love going away, but I also love not going away - really looking forward to a weekend at home.
4. Miss B is tackling learning a new skill that she's been working up to for ages - and she's making amazing progress at it. It's fantastic to watch.
5. I've been digging into my bookmarked recipes for spring and summer cooking inspiration; I made this herbed feta dip for a starter recently, subbing cilantro/coriander and basil in for the herbs specified in the recipe. A hit!

And:

6. I can't believe, in the throes of my deadline fog last night, that I forgot to post! NaBloPoMo fail #2!

August wrap-up

How can it be August 31 already? Tomorrow is the first day of spring in Australia! Not that winter has been much of a hardship; we've had quite a few grey days, and more rain than I remember in the previous two winters I've spent here, but also plenty of bright, sunny weather for Miss B to put some miles on her new birthday scooter. Some other items of note from August:

Here's a preview of a recipe that is under construction: sliced chorizo glazed with a mixture of red wine, wholegrain mustard, and maple syrup, baked in the oven, and served as an appetizer. I'm still fiddling with the measurements, proportions, and cooking times, but the first couple of trial batches were a hit. Then the chorizo I was using disappeared from Costco, and I've only just found a replacement. So more on that shortly, I hope.

Or I could just start making my own, I suppose, since I signed up to take a sausage-making class earlier this month at a local butcher shop - or, as the butcher called it, "Salami Academy." I learned all kinds of interesting facts and tips, had a chance to use the professional sausage-stuffing machine pictured here, and am now seriously tempted to plunge into the world of charcuterie - two years after everyone else, just as I predicted during my Year of Canning in 2011.

The second half of August has been another round of solo parenting, which means more cooking experiments that hopefully also double as treats for Miss B (and me!). This experiment is crumpets, which went down a storm. I used this recipe, and although they were delicious, they didn't turn out quite as I expected. I'm going to have a go at Delia's recipe next, so more on that later.

More fun with cross-cultural food terminology: the substance pictured here is known as fairy floss in Australia, candy floss in the UK, and cotton candy in the US. I'd love to know if it has yet another name in, say, Canada or New Zealand. (Full disclosure: I loathe it no matter what it's called and always have, but Miss B devours it at every opportunity.)

Did I mention that tomorrow is the first day of spring?

Savory bread

When I perused the breads that the Vintage Homes Society had for sale last year, all I saw were sweet breads—pumpkin and zucchini and so on. When I signed on to contribute, I asked if savory breads were welcome. This is what I had in mind.

Bacon blue cheese bread
Adapted slightly from David Lebovitz’ The Sweet Life in Paris
Savory quick breads are known as le cake in France and David Lebovitz mentions coming across them being served as a trendy hors d’oeuvre. I don’t know if this is still trendy in Paris, but anything with bacon and blue cheese is a perennial favorite with me. Apparently I’m not the only one; when the sale organizers saw this, they requested that we double our suggested contribution. And I've already had two requests for the recipe—hence its jumping the queue from yesterday.

8 strips/5 oz/150 g bacon
2 scallions
5 oz/140 g blue cheese
bacon fat for greasing the pan
1.5 cup/6 oz/210 g all-purpose/plain flour
2 tsp/10 g baking powder
.5 tsp/3 g cayenne pepper
.5 tsp/3 g kosher salt
4 large eggs
.25 cup/2 oz/60 ml olive oil
.5 cup/4 oz/120 g plain whole-milk yogurt
1.5 tsp/7 g Dijon mustard
2 oz/60 g grated parmesan

Preheat the oven to 350F/180C. Lay the bacon on baking sheets and place in the oven to cook until crisp, turning once, about 15 minutes. Allow to cool, then chop coarsely or crumble. Set aside.

While the bacon is cooking, chop the scallions finely and crumble the blue cheese. Set aside.

Use the rendered bacon fat to grease a 9-in/23-cm loaf pan.

In a large bowl, measure the flour, baking powder, cayenne, and kosher salt and mix thoroughly. Set aside.

In a medium bowl, crack the eggs, then add the oil, yogurt, and mustard. Mix with a whisk until smooth.

Pour the wet mixture into the dry mixture, then use a rubber spatula to mix until nearly, but not quite, combined. Add the scallions, blue and parmesan cheeses, and bacon, and fold gently into the batter until evenly distributed throughout.

Scoop batter into prepared pan and smooth into corners. Bake for 45-60 minutes, or until the top is golden brown and cake tester inserted into the center comes out clean (try to find a spot with no cheese bits in it!).

Basil overload

So, my basil has done rather well this year. I think it’s over four feet tall at its highest point—definitely taller than Miss B and nearly chest-high on me. Now that the weather has cooled off, it has slowed down, but is still flourishing. I know my days of walking out the back door and picking a leaf (or a handful) are numbered, and that I’ll have to start thinking about doing a major harvest soon, before we get a frost.

What to do with it? I’m planning to make some more pesto, and with very limited freezer space right now I’m also looking for shelf-stable ways to preserve it—possibly drying some and canning some. I found an obscure recipe for Basil-Pepper Jelly that looks like a good way to preserve some of this and, as a bonus, use up the bags of Italian fryers my prolific gardener friend T. has bestowed upon me.

Deconstructed salad

Clockwise from top: pita chips, hummus,
cucumber sticks, grape tomatoes, Caesar dip, baby carrots

One of my cooking idiosyncracies is that I absolutely loathe cutting salad. I’m not really sure why; it could just be that I’m impatient. Or it could be that people always throw salad in to recipe and menu discussions as an afterthought, as if it’s a snap—you know, all that “serve with a tossed salad”; “all you need alongside is a salad”; etc.—when cutting and making dressing for a tossed salad involving more than one ingredient can take up a pretty good-sized chunk of time. It’s not hard, but it is fiddly, and not my first choice of activity when I’m trying to get dinner on the table for the hungry hordes, or for that matter, lunch on the table for my hungry self. I don’t find “knife work” (that’s cheffyspeak for “cutting up things”) soothing at the best of times, and right before I want to eat is definitely not the best of times.

Action points

Conferences are great, especially if, like me, you work alone most of the time. They allow you to re-connect with friends and colleagues, resolve problems in a five-minute discussion that would’ve taken days over email, brainstorm projects for the future, talk about things using jargon and shorthand that only your co-workers can understand and appreciate. They send you home feeling professionally recharged, motivated, and inspired.

Dinner guests

One of the lesser-known drawbacks to being in life limbo is a dearth of people to cook for. In some ways this is for the best, given the corresponding lack of cooking utensils, but that doesn’t make it any easier to adjust to. I read other people’s blogs where they describe cooking up vats of goodies to feed family, friends, neighbors, school groups, and random passersby, and honestly, I feel a little envious. I’ve been bringing homebaked treats to every event I’ve been invited to (adhering to Sparkly Em’s philosophy of “Make friends through cake”), but Miss B’s preschool doesn’t allow homemade food to be brought in (WTH?) and we don’t have enough chairs—or plates—in our serviced apartment to have more than one dinner guest at a time.

Home made

Confession: I haven't managed to do any Cookbook Challenge cooking since I got to Boston. I blame the fact that I've only cooked dinner three times in the past 10 days--and one of those was Christmas dinner, which is about as far from a 30-minute meal as you can get. The rest of the dinners have been in restaurants or in other people's houses, as we make the rounds of people in Boston that we haven't seen for more than a year.

So most of the cooking I've managed to squeeze in has been of the "sheer necessity" or the "food gift" variety. In the former category, I made homemade mayonnaise over the weekend, for only the second time ever, when I realized we didn't have any.* In the latter, to bring to friends hosting us, things like homemade chocolates and, yesterday, these cheesy, salty, spicy treats.

Cheesy nibbles
Adapted from Tamasin's Kitchen Bible by Tamasin Day-Lewis
These have been described as being like "homemade Cheez-Its", but I think that's only because they're cheesy and it's really hard to stop eating them. Texturally, they are like tiny, crumbly cookies, and they taste complex and savory. To me they're more like what Cheez-Its want to be when they grow up.

110 g/4 oz plain/all-purpose flour
110 g/4 oz parmesan, grated**
healthy pinches of: salt, freshly ground black pepper, mustard, and cayenne pepper
110 g/4 oz butter, melted

Preheat oven to 180C/350F. Mix dry ingredients together, then add in butter and stir until mixture has the consistency of breadcrumbs. (Add more butter if necessary.) Make walnut-sized balls*** and place on baking sheet(s) lined with parchment. Bake 15-20 minutes (reversing position of sheet(s) halfway through) until lightly browned. Sprinkle lightly with more salt and black pepper after removing from oven, and allow to cool on sheet(s).

Makes 20-40.

* I also managed to slip this into the latter category, by bringing some of along yesterday as a gift--I thought my hostess would appreciate it.
** I used a mix of mostly pecorino romano and some sharp cheddar.
*** I used a deep teaspoon measurement to make half-balls. They were a good bite size and went further.

Brain block

I’ve been a little slow about posting lately. (Sorry about that. I’ve got a lot on the brain.)

I’ve been slow on the uptake in other areas, too, if that helps. An explanation, by way of a digression: one of the by-products of having a child in preschool is that they meet other kids. Those other kids have parents. If you’re lucky, your child will hit it off with some other children, and you will hit it off with some other parents. If you’re very lucky, some of those children and parents will be related to each other.

Exotically familiar

Dateline: Auckland, New Zealand

That's right, Roving Lemon is on the road and posting from the other side of the Tasman Sea. This is my second visit to New Zealand and, if possible, I've fallen even more in love with it than I did the first time, seven years ago. The topography in and around Auckland--green hills and ocean views everywhere you look--makes me feel right at home, while the dormant volcanoes that dot the landscape provide a bit of spectacular contrast and a visual reminder that you're on the tectonically active Pacific Rim.

Luckily for me, the friends that we're visiting also like nothing better than a bit of good food, so our visit thus far has been a procession of delicious treats. Over the weekend I got the chance to go to not one but two regional farmers' markets. We sampled a variety of specialty products and local produce; I saw and tasted some fruits I'd never heard of or seen before (more on that later); and talked to people from all over, from locals to European visitors to longtime transplants who came from Philadelphia once upon a time.

Among the huge variety of specialty products we had the opportunity to look at, touch, smell and taste, we made sure to pay a visit to the only producer of buffalo-milk mozzarella in the whole of NZ. On top of some surprisingly good winter tomatoes from a few stalls over, with basil, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper scattered over, it made a fantastic insalata caprese starter for dinner: authentic Italian taste, locally made.