Saturday digest

Cooking chocolate from Germany - food souvenirs are the best kind

How can it be the beginning of June already? Here’s the roundup of the latest doings round here.

Work/school Term 2 is nearly half over, and Miss B is trucking along happily. (Bouncing along might be more accurate in her case.) The other week she had her first experience of full-blown standardized testing, taking the NAPLAN along with every other Year 3 student in Australia. Her school did their best to make it a non-stressful experience, but I for one am glad it’s two years until the next round. DP, who promised us his workload would ease up somewhat around this time, has been as good as his word and has been sighted at home on the occasional weekday between the hours of 7am and 6pm. I’ve had a fairly quiet week – not one nighttime conference call! – but my To Do list remains chronically overstuffed. I did record a significant milestone earlier this month: my organization’s Twitter account, which I manage, hit 20,000 followers, a little more than four years (and nearly 3,000 tweets!) since we first joined up. So I’m pretty pleased with that.

Recreation The big news is that this week we booked tickets for our trip to North America later this year, which involved sorting out a fairly complicated itinerary and then spending 2.5 hours working through it with a travel agent (after both DP and I crashed the Qantas website trying to do it ourselves). But it all looked right at the end and we should be good to go (fingers crossed). Other than that, Miss B has been having a steady stream of afterschool playdates, and I’ve been plowing through this month’s book club selection: Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, widely hailed as a ‘modern Australian classic.’ The jury is still out on that, but it’s definitely educational for a non-Australian. More to come when I finish, perhaps.

Food Shorter days and colder nights have meant lots of familiar, rib-sticking comfort foods lately: 

• oatmeal for breakfast at least twice a week (savory oatmeal, that is)
  
• the disruptive bolognese sauce continues to prove its worth - and the longer you cook it, the better it gets
  
• lemon-mustard chicken remains a reliable workhorse in my recipe rotation; one of the first things I learned to cook on my own, and still going strong
  
• I found curly kale at the farmers’ market for the first time in nearly a year! So it’s back to a steady supply of kale salad
  
• and an old favorite – Nigella Lawson’s Dense Chocolate Loaf Cake (known around here as Brownie Cake) - which I was reminded of recently and have made twice in the past two weeks in response to demand (apparently it’s the best thing for morning tea ever)

Weather Cold, grey and wet this weekend; described by a fellow transplant to Canberra as ‘fabulously miserable’.

Miss B’s Quote of the Week During a conversation about jellyfish:

Miss B: So why does it hurt when they sting you?

RL: Well, they must release some kind of chemical when they touch you that makes your skin hurt.

Miss B (obviously finding this explanation similar to another one I had provided recently): Oh, so they’re like the onions of the ocean!

How are your onions?

 

Homemade cannelloni

I have an ongoing battle with myself. It happens in the grocery store, at the farmers’ market, at Costco. Every time I walk past a packet of fresh pasta, whether it’s noodles or ravioli or whatever, I have a momentary urge to make it mine, regardless of what I’ve put on the meal plan for the week and am supposed to be buying at that moment. My appetite for fresh pasta is insatiable.

But then the battle happens. It’s entirely internal, and it goes something like this:

Id: Ooooh, fresh pasta! Let’s have some of that.

Super-ego: Look at that price! What a rip-off! We could make that at home for a fraction of that cost.

Id: But it’s so much work. And I want some now.

Super-ego: Tough toenails. Homemade is not only way cheaper, it tastes about a million times better and it’s not that much work. We’re not wasting money or calories on this garbage.

Id: But I want some noooow.

And so it goes. The super-ego almost always wins; after the economic and aesthetic arguments are exhausted, we can always move on to the political/moral arguments (we shouldn’t encourage Big Food; whatever happened to concentrating on single-ingredient items? etc., etc.) until the id, which really has only the one argument, caves.

And every so often, the id is rewarded with a batch of homemade pasta – inexpensive, delicious, and morally upright. (Probably super-calorific as well, but who’s counting?)

Homemade cannelloni

These give you all the flavors of ravioli with a lot less work. For making, I follow essentially the same procedure as for making ravioli, with two significant differences:

1)    I mix a batch of sautéed greens (spinach, kale, chard – whatever you’ve got going on) into the filling.

2)    After rolling out the dough, I cut it into squares, place filling as shown, roll up, and place in a baking dish.

As with ravioli, I think serving these with a basic marinara sauce (I put some in the bottom of the baking dish, spread some over the cannelloni, and keep some more hot on the stove for serving) and topped with a shower of grated pecorino romano is the best way of showing off the flavor combination.

Sniffling Saturday

I have a cold. A knock-you-flat, no-energy, even-spicy-Thai-food-doesn’t clear-your-fuzzy-head cold. A sneezing-so-hard-I-may-have-just-sprained-something cold. A so-zonked-I-can’t-think-of-one-coherent-thing-to-say-in-this-blog-post cold.

DP has it too. And he never gets sick. Especially not so sick that he cancels things on the schedule, which he did today, rainchecking a dinner guest invited for tonight until next week. Probably for the best, since the very thought of cooking anything beyond the most basic dinner makes me want to go lie down. To say nothing of passing this germ along to an unsuspecting visitor.

But after having sat aimlessly at the computer for a good chunk of time, when I had intended to do something productive (why, I don’t know), I thought I could at least share my latest successful jam-making experiment. I don’t have a recipe as such, because I kind of wing-it with jam-making nowadays. I followed my usual procedure (based on Julie’s jam without a recipe), using these components:

~8 green pears

~6 purple plums

raw sugar (half as much sugar as fruit)

lemon juice (~2 Tbsp/kilo of fruit, or ~1 Tbsp per pound)

a chunk of fresh ginger (~2.5 cm/1 in long), peeled and grated finely

generous sprinkles of cinnamon, cardamom, and nutmeg

I chopped and cored/stoned the fruit; I didn't peel it, but put it through my food mill when the fruit has softened completely. And produced Spiced Pear-Plum Jam – otherwise known as Autumn in a Jar. Perfect on toast on a chilly Canberra morning, and something for you northern types to file away for about five months from now.