September vibes

 

Miss B came home for a visit for the last part of August, and went back over Labor Day weekend to start her third (!) year of university. (The cat does not approve of this arrangement.) DP’s semester got underway in mid-August, but Miss B's exit, plus changing the calendar to September, makes the back to school/impending fall vibes inescapable for me. The temperatures here have cooled off enough to leave the windows open during the day, and maybe even pull on a blanket at night. The other morning I woke up wondering why I didn’t have a comfortable chair in my room. So I pulled this one out of the basement, moved it upstairs, and embellished it with some me-made comforts. An instant life upgrade using what I had available; an ongoing encouragement to use limitations to spur creative problem solving, and to take regular breaks from the daily onslaught. 

Instant brining

NaBloPoMo, Day 6.

Speaking of incredibly useful throwaway tips from great food writers, here's one I picked up from the most prolific cookbook writing team in the US, Mark Scarborough and Bruce Weinstein (they also blog occasionally): pickle-juice brining.

This is just what it sounds like: when you finish a jar of pickles, save the brine and use it to brine your next pork or chicken dish. (Brining, in case you're not already aware, makes lean meat juicier and tastier.) Thus, you save a step (since you don't have to make your own brine), avoid waste (since you don't pour perfectly good ready-made brine down the drain), and get a better meal at the end of it. And no, your meat won't taste like pickles - I worried about this the first time I fed pickle-juice-brined meat to the pickle-hating DP, but all he noticed was how good it tasted. Try it and see!

Chocolate tart

Today I’m going to share with you what may be one of my weirder frugal habits.

When I have baked goods sitting around that are starting to lose their allure, I don’t throw them away. Instead, I put them in my food processor and grind them up into crumbs. Then I freeze the crumbs.

I also don’t bother to distinguish between the crumbs. The kinds of thing that are likely to get ground up are all sort of variants of the same thing, points along the chocolate chip cookie/congo bar/blondie/brownie continuum. Since they all have more or less the same ingredients, I cavalierly assume they all taste good together, and freeze all the crumbs in the same bag.

That way I’ve got them handy to make stuff like this without advance notice or planning. And they do make the crust taste better than one made with store-bought cookies, though I say it myself - particularly if you’ve browned the butter beforehand.

Chocolate tart

In researching how to make this tart, I discovered that there are two ways of getting a crumb crust to firm up: cooking it briefly, or refrigerating it. Since all the crust ingredients had already been cooked once, and the filling needs to be chilled, I opted for refrigeration. As a bonus, this is a great do-ahead dessert.

Cookie crust

8 oz/240 g cookie or baked-good crumb of your choice

4 oz/120 g butter, melted

2 Tbsp sugar (optional)

Grease the inside of a cake or tart pan* (preferably one with a loose bottom) generously and set aside.

Mix the butter into the crumbs gradually; you might not need all of it, depending upon how dry or wet the crumbs are to start with. You are looking to achieve a thick, lumpy but malleable mass, somewhat like wet sand.

When the crust mix has reached the right consistency, spread evenly in the bottoms and up the sides of the prepared pan, to a thickness of about ½ inch/1 cm. Place in the refrigeration to chill for 20-30 minutes while you get on with the filling.

Chocolate ganache filling

8 oz/240 ml cream

8 oz/240 g bittersweet chocolate chips

2 Tbsp sugar

1 tsp vanilla

pinch of salt

Heat cream in a small saucepan over medium-low heat until hot but not boiling. Remove from heat and pour in chocolate. Leave mixture to sit for 2-3 minutes, then whisk until cream and chocolate have combined into a thick, shiny, pourable liquid. Whisk in remaining ingredients and allow to cool slightly, about 5 minutes.

Remove prepared crust from refrigerator and pour in ganache. Tap and tilt the pan to make sure the ganache fills the crust evenly and smoothly, then return pan to refrigerator and chill for at least 1 hour.

Remove tart from the refrigerator 20-30 minutes before serving to take some of the chill off.

Serves 8.

* I used an 8 in/20 cm loose-bottom cake pan for this recipe. If yours is much bigger, the filling may be too thin.

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.

Getting crafty

When we moved to Canberra the first time, in 2008, we bought a table and chairs. Not heirloom quality or anything, but functional. Four years, two moves, and about 4,000 meals later, most of the chairs were looking like this when I set up the new kitchen.

A bit worn and stained, and in most cases, with the seat cushions coming loose from the seat frame. I decided it was time to spruce them up a bit, and did some research on the internet to find a solution in line with my level of handiness and desired financial expenditure. Then I went and found some fabric that I liked, brought it home, measured it against the chair seats, cut it into squares, folded it around the detached chair seats, stapled it in place with a heavy-duty stapler, and re-attached the seats. And voila!

Presentable chairs! Suitable for guests! And who would’ve guessed that having all my seat cushions falling off would have made it all that much simpler!

I’m beginning to see why people get into this whole DIY thing.

Rosemary salt

When I took a break from unpacking boxes long enough to take a look at the garden of our new house, I was thrilled to discover that we are caretaking a large and flourishing rosemary bush. Rosemary seems to grow prolifically in Canberra; I’ve seen varieties that grow so big that people use them as hedges. Ours isn’t quite that impressive, but it’s definitely more than enough for my needs, and has prompted me to begin rebuilding my stash of flavored salts and sugars.

Rosemary salt is about as easy a recipe as you can find: pick some fresh rosemary, strip the needles off the stems, chop them up as finely as you can, and mix into at least double the quantity of salt. Then leave easily accessible, for adding to all sorts of things. I mentioned stirring a large pinch into my experimental cumquat curd; here are a few other things that come to mind:

-      savory cheddar oatmeal

-      disruptive bolognese sauce

-      roast chicken

-      breakfast sandwiches

-      orange soup

 

You may notice, in looking at this picture, that there’s a patch of mint flourishing alongside the rosemary – what you can see is about one-quarter of what’s there. I’m thinking mint sugar, or maybe mint simple syrup, for my next experiment.

Cumquat curd

Wow, am I glad I took the road less traveled and didn't make those windfall cumquats into marmalade. This curd is stupendous. I had enough to fill a little more than two jars for canning - one to bring back to C. as a thank-you for letting me forage in her garden and one to hoard for myself for a bit - plus just enough left over for a Sunday lunch dessert I'll tell you about later. For now, here's the recipe. 

Cumquat curd
I adapted what appears to be a pretty standard lemon curd recipe to make this, and I didn't bother straining out the zest (as some recipes suggest), as it had already been chopped pretty finely in the food processor and I thought it would add some nice texture to the finished curd.
 
6 egg yolks
1 cup/210 g sugar
½ cup/120 ml cumquat julp
2 heaping Tbsp cumquat zest
½ cup/120 g unsalted butter, cut into pieces
generous pinch of salt*

In a medium saucepan, whisk together the egg yolks, sugar, cumquat julp, and zest. Cook mixture over medium heat, stirring very frequently with a whisk until the mixture comes to a boil and thickens. Remove from the heat and stir in the butter. Set aside to cool.

Makes enough curd to fill to half-pint/250 ml jars with a few large spoonfuls left over.

* I used a big pinch of rosemary salt here - a fantastic combination with the cumquats.