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.

Peaches plus

Peaches and rhubarb are only the beginning of peaches-plus combos I have come to love over the last few years; just this summer I’ve also experimented with peach-raspberry tarte tatin, peach-blackberry crumble and, over Christmas, peach-redcurrant jam.

Peach-redcurrant jam

I used what I had in the fruit bowl to make this when I realized I had enthusiastically overbought redcurrants, forgetting that no one but me likes them. This batch was probably about 600 g/20 oz fruit, roughly 65/35 peaches/redcurrants. I added in half the weight of sugar – some of it from my stash of citrus sugar. It wasn’t a long cooking job, as it was such a small amount; I followed my usual method and I got about 2 jars out of it – one 360 g/12 oz size, and one 240 g/8 oz. I didn’t bother with canning for only 2 jars, just stashed them in the fridge for easy access for breakfast toast, yogurt-and-granola, etc.

The peaches and redcurrants make for a great sweet-tart combo – worth a try if you can a) get your hands on some redcurrants (this batch is the only time I’ve seen them for sale anywhere in Australia in the past 6 years) and b) don’t immediately eat them all yourself.

Coffee cake

I've been getting more interested in coffee cake lately, after one of our guests brought a particularly delicious one to the Lasagna Lunch. I've also recently rediscovered one of my favorite flavor combos from my first stint in Australia - rhubarb and peaches - when the first peaches of the season turned up at the farmer's market. I combined them to make a coffee cake which, though I say it myself, was thoroughly delicious.

Rhubarb-peach coffee cake

Dry ingredients

8 oz/240 g self-raising flour

1 tsp/5 g salt

4 Tbsp/60 g sugar (I used my citrus sugar here)

Wet ingredients

4 oz/120 g milk

4 oz/120 g Greek yogurt (for a slightly denser and more complex muffin)

1 tsp/5 g vanilla

2 eggs (= 4 oz/120 g)

4 oz/120 g (1 stick) butter, melted

Embellishments

1 cup chopped rhubarb and peaches, tossed with 1-2 oz/30-60 g sugar

Crumb topping (I used a combination of roughly 2 oz/60 g each butter and sugar + 4 oz/120 g flour)

Heat oven to 350F/180C. Line an 8 in/20 cm square cake pan with parchment paper. 

Make the crumb topping by whisking together the ingredients. (I also added some cinnamon, cardamom, and ginger to the mix.) Set aside.

In a medium-sized bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients. In a medium-sized jug, whisk together all the wet ingredients except the butter; add the butter slowly and carefully last, so as not to scramble the egg. Dump wet into dry and whisk until just combined.

Scoop all but about one cup of the batter into the prepared baking pan. Scatter the fruit across the surface of the batter, then do the same with the remaining cup of batter and the crumb topping.

Bake for 25-30 minutes or until lightly browned, rotating pan halfway through.

2017 so far

Not long after I published my last post, we headed out for New Year's Eve and possibly the most Canberra activity there is - climbing the Parliament House lawn (while we still can!) to watch the fireworks:

Canberra has two sets; we watched the 9:00 ones and were all home and in bed well before midnight.

A few days later we were off for our annual beach holiday - a week of sun, sand, and as much floating in the ocean as I can fit in.

Then, as usual, the day after we got back from the coast I set off for my annual trip to London for work meetings - an intensive week, followed by a relaxing weekend in my old stomping grounds in Oxford, including cooking a Saturday night spread for my hostess and our other visiting friends.

I also got to peruse the cookbook section of my favorite Oxford bookstore, and flirted once again with the idea of getting involved in a relationship with sourdough starter. But I can't commit....

...and always end up reverting to my tried-and-true bread recipe. These days, it's my go-to gift for other people's houses; when they tell me not to bring anything, this is what I bring.

Also as has been usual for the last few years, I was overseas on my birthday, so when I got home I made my own cake - which looks rather small and overpowered by candles here.

It was nice to come back to summer weather and summer fruit after a week in frosty England...

...get back to the regular kitchen routine, and try some new things. I've been working on making my own flour tortillas lately, working off this basic recipe...

...I also made homemade gnocchi for the first time, using leftover mashed potatoes and this recipe from River Cottage Love Your Leftovers. They were a rousing success...

...this chocolate fudge bundt cake, not so much. Tastes great, but half the cake stuck in the pan despite copious greasing. I think in future I'll stick with this one.

And this week's flower selection - hydrangeas from the farmers' market (with special guest provided by Miss B).

Before I finish, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that all of the above are examples of my continuing to try to focus on positive aspects of daily life and practice meticulous mindfulness. It's all part of my ongoing attempt to grapple with, among other things, the uncertainty and anxiety engendered by the current state of affairs in my home country, and the knock-on effects and similar trends abroad. This article has confirmed my fears, but also bolstered my courage, and I share it for anyone who may be in similar need:

A Clarifying Moment in American History

While you wait

Nearly four years ago I wrote a post about how stressful I find waiting, at a time when I found myself in a state of limbo, awaiting significant outcomes over which I had no control in my personal, professional, and national life.

Well, here I am again - and it doesn't feel as though I've gotten any better at being zen about waiting. Possibly even worse, at least at the moment, compounded as it is by grief. My current strategy is something I call "meticulous mindfulness" (or would "mindful meticulousness" be better? I can't decide), by which I mean that I am trying to focus on the things that I want to accomplish each day, and then trying to give each of those things my full attention. In the short term, when I can accomplish it, it stops the hamster wheel in my brain from spinning; and in the long term, I hope it adds up to a period of sustained accomplishment and satisfaction, rather than one of fruitless frustration.

So: this morning, I woke up early for Sunday, slightly jetlagged after returning from my second trip to the US in two months (this one, a family trip, was the one I had been planning to take this year). I lay in bed and thought about what I wanted to do with this unexpected block of time. Did I want to stay in bed and read, enjoying having nothing to do after three weeks of non-stop activity (including stops in five cities)? Or did I want to tackle some task on my monster To Do list?

I split the difference - I read for a while, and then I got up to bring my blog up to date. Here's some recent happenings, aside from what I've already told:

An impromptu family trip to Perth and the southwest corner of Western Australia during July school holidays that almost didn't happen, between DP's travel schedule and my father's hospitalization. But it did, and I'm glad we managed it - as well as this, which was on Miss B's must-see list: sunset over the Indian Ocean. Our last night before we flew back east, we went down to the beach in Fremantle and sat there to watch it happen.

The saying goes that in the midst of life we are in death, but the reverse is also true. My father died five days before Miss B's twelfth birthday, and I flew to Boston the day after. We had a family dinner and cake on the day with a few close friends, and with the help of some of the aforementioned meticulous mindfulness I was able to give Miss B the cake of her twelve-year-old dreams, even if I didn't manage a birthday post.

And to continue the theme: my oldest sister's birthday was the day after my father's funeral, and for my gift I made a birthday dinner, for her and all available family members. For dinner we had spaghetti al'amitriciana three ways: the standard version, as outlined in this post; a batch made with gluten-free pasta, for the GF contingent; and a vegetarian version for the birthday girl, substituting fried halloumi for the bacon. For dessert we had her favorite treat: birthday pie. I tested out Nigella's GF Pie Crust (a smashing success, even made under sub-optimal conditions in someone else's kitchen) and made maple-blueberry for the birthday girl (who doesn't eat refined sugar), and peach-raspberry for the non-blueberry fans.

That takes us up to early August...more to follow soon.

Christmas 2015

I'm going to go on record here and say that Christmas 2015 is not going to make my lifetime Top 10 list of Christmases. What with the sinus infection beforehand, DP leaving on the 27th for a 10-day work trip that got rescheduled at the last minute, and the emergency dental work, it wasn't quite the relaxing family interlude I had been planning on all year. I rounded off the holiday week with having the one book I found in the library confiscated at the desk because someone else had reserved it, and ruining a batch of strawberry jam. So there was some fairly epic self-pity going on...at least until I had a conversation at the end of it that reminded me forcefully of how truly fortunate I am. And that there was some good stuff mixed in there too:

As usual, I made up goody bags for friends, neighbors, teachers, and DP's team. These ones include strawberry jam and chocolava cookies - Miss B requests these first every year when Christmas baking starts.

I finally broke out my mini-loaf pan to make some cranberry bread (like this but without the walnuts and with a dollop of maple syrup in place of some of the brown sugar).

Sugar cookies - for ease of preparation I made the dough in the food processor, formed into logs, rolled in colored sugar, and chilled overnight. Slice and bake in the morning and then all you have to do is assemble the bags. (As a side note, I finally found some cellophane goodie bags and I felt like they changed everything in terms of providing simple but elegant packaging. Highly recommended.)

Calabrian Christmas doughnuts - make the dough the night of the 23rd (a basic yeast dough, almost 1:1 flour and water with a teaspoon of yeast and a half-teaspoon of salt for every pound/half kilo); on the morning of Christmas Eve, fry in olive oil (the tradition is to try to make rings, but I usually just give up and fry blobs) and serve up hot with honey. I gave DP a box of these hot out of the frying pan to share with his Calabrian barbers - always nice to spread Christmas cheer to people you know will appreciate it!

Only the second year and it's already a tradition - the bûche de Noël. I didn't love the way the cake came out this year (I was rushing and I think I used the wrong recipe) but no one else seemed to care. Extremely decadent but in my opinion not as difficult as it looks - you can cover up your mistakes with chocolate buttercream icing or powdered sugar and it just looks more rustic and festive.

I didn't make this, but I have to share it because I thought it was so flawlessly beautiful and minimalist. It's a traditional Christmas fruitcake, made by one of DP's admin team. Since none of us are big Christmas cake fans (and neither were our two Christmas lunch guests), I left it pristine and brought it to my friend L's Boxing Day lunch to share, where it was devoured and raved over by a crowd - the proper fate for a lovingly made Christmas cake, I feel.

My lovely sisters always send care packages of goodies from the US - here's this year's haul from one of them. Note the Moscow mule mugs - specially designed just for my new favorite cocktail.

And of course, it wouldn't be Christmas without cookbooks - although when this arrived, I did wonder if it was some kind of cosmic sign that it was time to stop (despite the fact that I picked it out). Either that or living in the Midwest made more of an impression than I realized.

And that pretty much wraps up 2015 and kicks off 2016 - planning for which is under way, fuelled by coffee. Hope it is good to us all.

Recipe tweaking

Nothing really major has happened this month - which in itself is kind of major, because it seems like such a long time since that has been the case. We had our first dinner guests in the new house last weekend, which was the first real cooking I'd done in the new kitchen - marinated goat cheese and pita chips to start, followed by braised short ribs of beef, gratin dauphinois (with a layer of blue cheese and caramelized onion in the middle), and Swiss chard for the main course (plus bread), and finishing up with brownies topped with vanilla ice cream and salted caramel sauce.

This generated quite a lot of leftovers; I used the leftover short ribs as the basis for a thick bolognese-type tomato sauce, and we had that on Tuesday night with gnocchi and shredded kale. On Thursday, I tossed the leftover gratin and chard into the slow cooker along with some leftover short-rib sauce and stock, and blended them into a thick soup for dinner. I wanted a little something to top it, so I rooted around in the fridge, pulled out some odds and ends, and made pangrattato with a twist:

Pangrattato, in case you don't already know, means "grated bread", and it's an Italian invention - basically fried bread crumbs, most often used to top pasta. For this version, I threw a leftover (cooked) Italian sausage into the food processor along with the bread; then toward the end of cooking in the frying pan, I threw over a handful of grated pecorino romano cheese. Both tweaks highly recommended.

On the sweet side of things, I've finally found most of my baking equipment, not least of which is the abovementioned food processor. Miss B has fallen in love with jam drops this year, and asked if we could make a batch not long after we moved in. I had to improvise to put a batch of dough together, including using a pastry cutter to blend the butter and sugar. This made for a very warm batch of dough which, when shaped, filled, and put into the oven to bake, spread like crazy. The cookies were delicious, but not neat or easy to eat out of hand.

She asked for another batch to take to a school party last week, and this time I thought I would do things a bit differently: I made the dough in the food processor, then rolled into a cylinder and chilled in the fridge overnight. The morning of the party, I scooped mounds of dough off the cylinder with my cookie scoop and arranged them on a baking tray. I made a thumbprint in each mound and filled with jam; then I chilled them again for 30 minutes or so. Then I baked them and voila!

Not quite magazine-ready, but definitely an improvement over the first batch. I'll be carrying on with the chilling from now on. I used this recipe, which as you'll note doesn't suggest any of that - odd when you consider how perfect the ones in their picture look!

That's all the exciting news from here - more to follow shortly, I hope!

New beginnings

Time for another lengthy update - and this time, a recipe! Lots has been happening since my last post, and I do mean lots....

In early July, I went with DP and Miss B on our first trip to Boston in nearly two years. I was so busy doing other things that I didn't manage to take many pictures, but I did record my first-ever taste of a Boston institution - Dunkin' Donuts iced coffee.

I also managed to record a few other highlights...

...a visit to one of my favorite beaches in the world, in southern Maine...

...and my first U2 concert in (gulp!) 14 years. I went with two of my sisters and one of my nieces who was born not long before my last show. She's only been to a few concerts, and this was her first non-pop show (or, as we said to her when the lights came back up and she was standing there looking like she'd been hit over the head, "That's what happens at a real concert!").

I left Boston ahead of DP and Miss B to fly to Mexico City for a conference. I was there for two and a half days and the only time I left the conference hotel was to attend the conference reception at the Museo Soumaya, which had a fascinating and eclectic collection, including this Salvador Dali snail with an angel on its back.

After the conference I flew back to the East Coast to meet up with DP and Miss B in Washington, DC. DP and I tag-teamed work meetings, and also caught up with some friends and took Miss B to see some of the sights. The Smithsonian Natural History Museum was top of our list; we went early to get an unobstructed look at the Hope Diamond before the crowds descended...

...and also spent some time getting up close and personal with some exotic butterflies.

I had forgotten how walkable DC is - much more so than Canberra. Our last day there was unexpectedly pleasant (DC in July traditionally being stinking hot and muggy), so we walked across a good chunk of downtown, taking in views of the White House and the Washington Monument...

...and ending up at the Lincoln Memorial in the early evening.

En route back to Australia, we stopped overnight in LA and had our traditional day out in Santa Monica - a last dose of sun, sea, and American shops.

Back to winter in Canberra, just in time to prepare for Miss B's 11th birthday, a visit from close friends from the US and, last but not least...

...moving house! Having found out a few weeks before our US trip that we had to vacate our rental property, we found a new house and negotiated a move date - 10 days after our return from the US and with overseas visitors with us. It was a frantic couple of weeks, but it all happened.

And to help us recover, we stuck to our plan of taking our visitors to Jervis Bay for the weekend - even if it was in the middle of the move. I ask you - given the choice between spending the weekend unpacking boxes or looking at this, what would you have done?

The unpacking continues, and life is returning to a semblance of normality. We're even seeing signs of spring in Canberra - but before we did, we had our first glimpse of snow in 3 years, which you can (barely) see here.

And finally - now that I've found (most of) my baking supplies, I've resumed making my new favorite dessert, which I mentioned in my last post:

It's so simple I'm not sure it even qualifies as a recipe, but it's delicious and lovely enough to serve to company. Here's what I do:

1. Make up a batch of 2-Ingredient Biscuits; bake half as a cake-sized round and cut decorative shapes out of the other half. Bake at 450F/225C as directed until lightly browned.

2. While the biscuits are baking, place a cup or so of frozen berries in an oven-proof bowl (I used blackberries). Drizzle with maple syrup and cook alongside the biscuits.

3. Whip about a cup of heavy cream to soft peaks, sweetening with a bit more maple syrup.

4: Assemble: cake round, fruit, cream, more fruit, decorative biscuits. Serve immediately.

Kind of like a giant shortcake, now I come to think about it. I frequently make a single one for myself when I want a bit of a sweet treat, and when I do I substitute Greek yogurt for the whipped cream. I like this even better, but I realize I'm probably in the minority there.

Whew! That brings us up to speed. One of the new beginnings referred to in the title is to get back to a more regular posting schedule, so more to come shortly, I hope. And I hope all is well (and calm!) in your worlds.