Pizza night!

Well, here’s day 7 of my week of food. My menu has worked sometimes but then been hijacked at others. But nothing can hijack Sunday pizza night…except going out for lunch which we did a couple of weeks ago.

Pizza is a wonderful Sunday night dinner. I always think of pizza as a quick dinner, but it never is, so at least I’ve got time on a Sunday to put together all the component parts. It also makes great school lunch for Monday (never any arguments). So here goes:

Dough (done in the breadmaker): 350ml water, 500g flour, 1 1/2 tsp salt and 2tsp yeast (4tsp of surebake). When it’s done, I divide it into two, roll them out and put the fillings on.

Tomato base: I use a very simple base these days of a couple of cans of tomatoes blitzed in the blender, then put in a saucepan to boil down to a spreadable paste. Add some salt and pepper near the end, or if you’re being terribly adventurous you can fry up some onions and garlic and put them in the blender too.

Toppings: whatever I’ve got but tonight we had fresh oregano, fresh mozzarella (homemade of course!), red and yellow capsicum, mushrooms, sliced sundried tomatoes, stuffed olives and feta (again, homemade). That was one of the pizzas anyway.

The other one was made along the lines of a recipe I read from an Australian chef whose name escapes me…he used to be on Surfing the Menu and he’s this kind of blonde surfing bloke. It’ll come to me at some point, so if I just randomly insert a name at any point (Ben something?), please put it in this story. Anyway, his recipe was a potato and gorgonzola pizza. Yep, potato. Never have blue cheese (just waiting till my 1kg block of it will be ready), so I just missed that out and it’s still great. Basically, you spread your uncooked pizza base with garlic butter (plenty), then a handful of chopped herbs (I used garlic chives, rosemary, parsley and thyme), then very very thinly sliced potatoes (if you have a mandolin it does a fantastic job), then more butter and herbs and top it off with a good grating of parmesan (homemade!). It’s yum, especially with some rock salt over the top after cooking.

We always have pizza with chips. Yum!

Sunday is usually a reasonably busy cooking day, but not quite so today as Briar seemed to have what Tara had yesterday. And I forgot that I did cook one thing yesterday! Remember that slow cooked chook from earlier in the week? I had chopped it all up and still had some of the carcass in the fridge, so I added it to the slow cooker with some onions, carrots, celery, parsley, thyme and some peppercorns. Covered it with water and left it on low for 24 hours. Came out beautifully! I only thought about it after reading another blog, the zero waste chef (haven’t quite worked out how to link you to that blog, but I’ll work on it! Oh, done it now!). She actually freezes all the bones after a chicken dinner and then makes stock when there’s “enough” bones. Now I’ve got to put it in some zip lock bags in the freezer.

And of course there needs to be something for the lunchboxes, so as we have loads of lemons and excessive eggs at the moment, a lemon slice seemed to be a good option. Haven’t made anything like this for ages, so found a recipe on the internet for Lemon Delicious Slice. It’s pretty good too!

So that’s a week of food from us. Not as much different bread as I would have thought, and a quiet week on the cheese front, so I can see that there might be a week of bread and a week of cheese at some point. As for this week coming, it’ll be the week of Tara. She starts school tomorrow, officially leaves playgroup and day care on Wednesday ( a cake required for each of these I’m told), has her birthday on Thursday and her birthday party (obviously another cake required) on Saturday. Phew! Busy cake week. Can’t wait.

I know, I know

What a start to the week! Not only have I not managed to stick to my menu, I haven’t even managed to stick to posting about not sticking to my menu.

No, I didn’t go to sleep. This time it was a situation beyond my control (though having said that falling asleep last week was a bit beyond my control too!).

This time, Telecom had a cellphone coverage outage. For more than 24 hours. And it affected a huge area apparently, so I have an alibi for not posting last night. Oh, mainly because our internet is through a mobile T stick which means it runs through the cellphone network.

Anyhoo, I’m back, at least for now. And good news, I did have Monday’s menu for dinner last night. Bad news, camera’s not working! Told you it was a good week. So you will just have to trust that my words convey the truth with no photographic evidence to back them up.

Stop babbling!

We had slow cooked chook last night and because we had no internet I couldn’t look up a recipe….most of my recipe books are vegetarian, so they weren’t really going to help. I remembered looking up a recipe the day before so made to copy it. It went something like this

Ingredients

1 chook, or however many pieces of chook you want

oil

seasoned flour

2 onions, sliced

2 cloves garlic, sliced

some tomato puree (whatever I had over from the tomato pizza base I made on Sunday)

2 cups chicken stock

some red wine

1 can chopped tomatoes

seasoning

I chopped up the chook into pieces, then tossed them in the seasoned flour and browned them in some oil in a frying pan. Once they were browned, I popped them in the slow cooker. Oh, I forgot, Adrian had just fried up some bacon in the frying pan, so I also used the fat from that to add some extra flavour.

Next, brown the onions, add the garlic and cook slightly, then add tomato puree. Cook down for a few minutes then pop in the slow cooker. I then sluiced the pan with some red wine to get all the scrummy bits out of the bottom, and added that to the slow cooker with the chicken stock (found some homemade stuff in the freezer when I was clearing it the other day to fit two pigs in!), and the tomatoes. Salt and pepper to taste, plus a bit of sugar (I like to put some sugar in when I’m using tinned tomatoes). Cooked on low for the rest of the day, then served with mashed potato, peas and carrots.

Everybody seemed to like it, even Briar! And even better, because there was plenty left, I reheated it all today, cooked down the sauce a bit, shredded up the leftover chicken and served it over spaghetti tonight…brilliant! I know I was supposed to have Dal Makhani tonight, but Adrian’s away and quick and easy and something the children will eat happily won the day.

Other than that, there were a few other bits and bobs coming out of the kitchen yesterday. Had to make bread as all the girls (and Adrian) needed packed lunches today. Buns are in at the moment, so buns is what we made. Our usual recipe goes like this:

1 1/2 c warm water

2 tsp salt

2tbsp butter

4 cups flour

2tbsp milk powder

2 tsp sugar

2 tsp easy blend yeast (4tsp surebake, which has improvers and the like added to it)

I like to do the mixing and rising in the breadmaker, which takes an hour and a half, then break the dough into the requisite pieces, let them do a final rise and then bake.

Our usual recipe has changed recently, owing to 1. Adrian and 2. the availability of buttermilk.

So now, we use buttermilk (a byproduct of our recent buttermaking attempts) instead of water, and we need a little bit more than one and a half cups. The butter we’re using at the moment is stuff we’ve made (yay!) and we skip the milk powder for, probably, obvious reasons. For some reason a couple of weeks ago, Adrian substituted the white sugar that we usually use for soft brown sugar. Don’t know why, but it’s great! The bread we make at the moment is so soft and yummy I may overdose on it!

And finally, we had another go at butter last night. We had 3 litres of cream and our friends had just given us an old butter churn. It’s a gorgeous thing, so I look forward to showing you the photos. We cranked this thing for quite some time, gave up, then had another go. Eventually, we got thick cream and RSI but nothing resembling butter. Plan B. Cake mixer. I put the whisk on my cake mixer and put small amounts in at a time. It took about another 15 minutes for each batch to turn into butter, then I drained it all and rinsed it, then squidged it with my lovely butter paddles (made from NZ Kauri…beautiful, and yes, squidged is a technical term), then popped it in the freezer. So as per usual we finished around 10.30 with bits of butter, buttermilk and cream liberally spread around the kitchen! Still not sure whether making butter is worth the effort, but will persevere with different methods for a while longer.

Then to today. You already know what dinner was, and due to everyone needing packed lunches and my penchant for snacking on my yummy, soft buns, more bread was required. I’ve made 15 buns and they are sitting on a baking tray in the lounge doing their final rise before going into the 190 deg C oven for about 15 minutes. Oh, and let me share a trick with you if you don’t already know it. I always rise my bread in a plastic bag. Just pop the tin/tray into a shopping bag,, tuck the open end under and it keeps it lovely and humid and warm. Helps things rise really well.

The tins were empty today too, with the last of the chocolate cake from Sunday heading out in lunchboxes. In order to prevent a tirade of Emily in the morning, I needed something sweet. I went to my Nana’s recipe for German Cake. Don’t know why it’s called German Cake, and the German we had staying in March didn’t seem to think it was very German, but nevertheless, that’s what it’s always been called in my house, and we’ve all loved it for years. It goes like this:

Mix 225g flour, 125g sugar, and 1 tsp baking powder in a bowl. Add 1 beaten egg and 125g melted butter and mix it all together to form a dough. Push 3/4 of this mixture into a slice tin. Next, in a saucepan, melt 1/2 can sweetened condensed milk, 1 tbsp golden syrup and 50g butter. Pour that over the base. With the leftover base mixture, sprinkle it over the filling, just randomly to have a crumbly effect on the top. Pop it in a 180degreeC oven until it is pale golden. The longer you cook it, the more caramelised the filling becomes. Leave to cool then cut into squares. One of our favourites…Adrian will be grumpy he is missing it. He’s back on Friday, so there might be some left….yeah right!

I nearly forgot that I did make cheese yesterday too…a Colby this time, so in 3 months time I might be able to comment on it’s outcome!

Until tomorrow (Telecom and somnolence permitting!), night night.