Puff pastry

Is there anything that you can't improve by wrapping it in puff pastry?

We're coming to the end of the Australian school year, and that means that in the canteen we're cutting down on ordering fresh food, and trying to use up what's already there - EDF on a large scale. Puff pastry does an excellent job of packaging up odds and ends of food, and makes them look great - and easy to eat out of hand - in the process. We've been serving up lots of "puff" specials for morning tea, and after watching hordes of schoolkids scarf them up, I've been inspired to come home and scavenge in my own fridge.

Some things I've wrapped in puff pastry lately:

- leftover sausage (either alone, or with spicy mustard and cheddar cheese - see above)
- leftover chocolate ganache
- blackberry-apple butter
- leftover meat and veg
- leftover apple pie filling (or any pie filling, or jam, or...)

I'll stop there, but I think you get the picture. Please feel free to share your puff-pastry excesses with the rest of us.

30 days

Note zested lime wedge - for topping up the citrus sugar jar. Frugal!

It's November 30. It's Friday. And I've made it through another round of #NaBloPoMo. I think a bit of a celebration is in order, yes?


NaBloPoMo sour
This is what the CVF evolved into after I ran out of cumquat julp, around the same time I discovered that you could buy lemon lime and bitters (my favorite non-alcoholic Australian beverage) pre-made and bottled at the grocery store. Just the thing for the end of NaBloPoMo, especially when the temperature has suddenly jumped to 35C/95F.

1 shot/1.5 oz/45 ml vodka

2 Tbsp/1 oz/30 ml citrus juice (I used blood orange for the flavor and lovely color)

1 Tbsp/.5 oz/15 ml simple syrup

5 oz/150 ml bottled lemon lime and bitters

fat wedge of lime 

Fill an 8 oz/240 ml drinking glass halfway with ice, then add first four ingredients. Stir to combine. Squeeze lime and drop in glass.

Makes 1 fizzy, tart, celebratory cocktail.

Raspberry muffins

Have I spent enough time yet waxing rhapsodic about Ratio? About how it’s fundamentally changed the way I approach cooking and baking? About how it’s like having the Rosetta Stone for deciphering, and then adapting, existing recipes, to say nothing of creating new ones? About how I love it so much I gave it its own blog tag?

No? You want to hear more? Oh, go ahead, twist my arm. Allow me, if you will, to explain the construction of a Ratio recipe.

Ratio raspberry muffins

Lately these are my go-to choice for playdate baking; they mix up and bake quickly, I pretty much always have the ingredients on hand, and small children devour them. (One recent small visitor ate four.)

Here is the basic ratio for a muffin batter:

2 parts flour : 2 parts liquid : 1 part egg : 1 part butter

Michael Ruhlman suggests that a recipe based on 8 oz/240 g flour should yield about a dozen muffins. So, working on this premise, I constructed the following recipe.

Dry ingredients

6 oz/180 g plain flour

2 oz/60 g whole wheat flour

2 tsp/10 g baking powder (working on another rule of thumb, gleaned elsewhere: 1 tsp/5 g per cup/4 oz/120 g)

1 tsp/5 g salt

4 Tbsp/60 g sugar (I used my citrus sugar here, for a little extra je ne sais quoi)

Wet ingredients

6 oz/180 g milk

2 oz/60 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 raspberries (I used frozen, and tossed them with more citrus sugar before adding)

Preheat oven to 350F/180C. Grease (or line) a 12-cup muffin pan and 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. Fold in raspberries gently until evenly distributed.

Scoop batter (it will be thick) into muffin cups with ice-cream scoop or large spoon. Bake for 15-20 minutes, rotating pan halfway through.

Makes 12 muffins.