Granola squares

My granola glistens. It’s softer than you’d think, and it’s studded with all sorts of treats.

The recipe draws on inspiration from both the Essential Baking Cookbook and Ottolenghi. The list of ingredients is flexible- Play with it, see what’s in your storecupboard. But this is my fave combo of sweet, crunchy, chewy, citrus-y moreishness. Keep it in the the fridge.

• 1 cup cereal (like special K)
• ½ cup pecan nuts, toasted
• ½ cup flaked almonds, toasted
• ½ cup ground almonds
• 1 ½ cup rolled oats
• ¼ cup sunflower seeds
• ¼ cup pumpkin seeds
• 1 ½ cups dried fruit (I used prunes, raisins, soft apricots, nectarines and pears)
• 1 tablespoons (30ml) mixed candied citrus peel
• 1 tablespoon mixed spice
• 250g butter
• 1 cup castor sugar
• 2 tablespoons honey

1. Preheat the oven to 150 C, line a 25x 35 cm baking tray with baking paper and butter, leaving an overlay on the sides for easy removal.
2. Place all the ingredients in a large bowl, except for the butter, sugar and honey.
3. Place butter sugar and honey in a medium- large saucepan and stir without boiling until the sugar has dissolved. Allow to boil and continue stirring until a light coloured caramel has formed and thickened slightly.
4. Combine caramel with the dry ingredients and pour into baking tray, spreading evenly. If you like your granola a little thicker, use a smaller tin.
5. Bake for about half an hour, then check for doneness. It should be light brown on top.
6. Allow to cool in tin the refrigerate for a few hours until set before slicing into bars or cubes. Keep in the fridge.

Chunky fig and white chocolate biscuits

I am sneaking some recipes onto the site Food 52- Just because its great and I feel bad for using other's recipes there and never sharing my own. Take a look here

Chocolate Sorbet in Snap!-ity baskets

Oozy Schmoozy dark chocolate sorbet

I undid the silver and brown wrapper of a bar of Green and Black's Organic dark chocolate recently and chanced upon this gem of a recipe. I can't even remember what my original intention for the chocolate was.I switched my plans to sorbet immediately.

I've decided that chocolate and sorbet are better  friends than chocolate and ice- cream. This is because dairy is an over-bearing character at times, hiding the best of chocolate's tasty traits away. We can't have that.

Of course the hazard involved in preparing a recipe from a wrapper is that someone will find the paper later, and, wondering why Carina is littering in the kitchen, will dispose of it. Of course, a guest asked for the recipe to be passed on.. and on discovering it's absence my mind immediately flew to a scene in film Charlie and the Chocolate factory (adapted from Roald Dahl's fabulous book). That horrible girl Veruca Salt's father orders his whole factory of nut workers to engage in opening chocolate bars in the search for a golden ticket. My imagination exploded with images of supermarkets selling out of Chocolate bars at an alarming rate as we all searched for the the golden recipe.. a fantastic chocolate frenzy would ensue of, course.

Then my imagination calmed down, rid itself of chocolate fountains and silvery- fireworks and sensibly googled Green and Blacks, who thankfully have their recipes online.. We were saved from having to buy a million more chocolate bars. Dammit.

For the love of summer. and strawberries.

Strawberry Summer Cake

I found this recipe on one of my favourite blogs, Smitten Kitchen. It's adapted from Martha Stewart, and is called Strawberry Summer Cake. Those are two things I adore: Summer and strawberries. It gives me great, great pleasure to hop on an aeroplane and escape at least one month of what I deem to be winter misery in South Africa. I live in a house without heaters, or electric blankets, and only hot water bottles tucked into our pants and between our blankets to warm us. This morning at 7am I went for a crisp morning run and chuckled (a little gleefully I confess) at the thought of my friends at home still enveloped in a dark chill.

Strawberries scream summer. In Smitten Kitchen  Deb writes of rainy weather combined with strawberry purchases that causes a bit of a dilemma. I know what she means. I bought a red mountain of half- priced berries from Waitrose intending to make a chilled strawberry soup. The constant, characteristically English drizzle outside did not invite chilled soup. Rather, it invited warm carbohydrates that were reminsicent of summer but with due regard for the downpour outside. I googled strawberry cake, as I am sure many have before me.. and came upon this gem that I’ve now made twice since in four days.

Please see this link for the recipe as I found it:

http://smittenkitchen.com/2011/05/strawberry-summer-cake/

The first time I made it, I scattered pistachios on top  ten minutes before the end of cooking and baked it in a sort of pie dish (that turned out to be tricky to serve). For round two I used a cake tin, and added 2 tablespoons of almonds to the mixture for a bit more richness.

                                     

Also, when following Deb/slash Martha’s recipe, I do the following:

Instead of adding the dry mixture after the wet ingredients, I make a mixture of egg and milk and add it alternately with the dry mixture of flour, baking powder and salt. I add the vanilla last (and I use vanilla bean paste, oh- glory). This prevents it curdling. Not that I’ve ever known a once- curdled mixture to be of lesser taste… but I just feel more satisfied if it stays smooth throughout!

Since it was a chilly summer evening (annoying actually, considering it was the summer solstice and the druids were all doing their thing at Stonehenge etc) I warmed it up in the oven before serving. M made a glorious runny vanilla bean custard to go alongside.

Vanilla sponge seeped with fresh strawberries.

Yes, please. 

Cater shmater

Now isn't that awesome? Designed by the marvelously gifted Nena Maree.

I'm dead quiet I know. Julia child says: No excuses.

Sorry my lovely blog; I'll be back soon.

Chichifregi, chiboust and a Queenly Quiche

Ah. I’m so in love with my Larousse Gastrominique. It’s full of stuff no one cooks anymore but oh! I can never look one thing up without flipping through a few pages in interest. My version is from 1988, the year I was born in (what a great gift, thanks Dad). It is filled with terrible photographs of drab food that often involve a lot of aspic, and other garish things like cock’s combs used for garnish, and canned pineapple.

Well hey, I reckon. It’s not their fault that cucumber garnish was in and photoshop hadn’t been invented yet.

I was just wondering what to do with the whole half- smoked turkey that I never used for Christmas- hmmm. Maybe I should just stuff it with truffles and wrap it in puff pastry? Titan, old- school chef August Escoffier (who prefaced the origianl Larousse) would probably dig it. In fact, he would suggest another block of butter and litre of cream.

Today I was looking up the word chiboust. As it turns out, the person Chiboust was a 19^th century pastry chef who invented the Saint-Honoré cake, in honour of the patron saint of pastry cooks and bakers.

The chiboust page in my Larousse also contains entries for Chicken where the explanation reads: “A domestic fowl reared (raised) for both its meat and eggs”. I searched the same term on Wikipedia and found a similar explanation. Thus, the Larousse takes itself very seriously as a dictionary, even kindly giving us a synonym for the word rearing. Sweet.

It makes sense- what did all those people who had never seen a chicken before do in 1988? When google was still a twinkle in the eyes of Larry Page and Sergey Brin? The Larousse was a history book, source book, and encyclopedia all in one.

The Chiboust page also contains an entry for chichifregi, “a type of fritter from the region of Marseille and Aix-en-Provence.”

I wiki’d it: and found zilch. Ka-Pow. Furthermore, Google had nothing to offer but a few dodgy french sites. (Sounds of a mechanized rifle going off… bang.)

That’s one for the Larousse.  

Granadilla Chiboust

Chewy, nutty spice biscuits

Its 37 C outside and I feel like a cookie in the oven myself. But I've been getting grief from Mrs X's daughter, Mrs Y for not putting up my recipes on this blog. She's the second boss in command so here goes...

I found a ginger cookie recipe in my old file ( I can't remember where I got it from) and tweaked it. You can leave out the preserved ginger and 25g of flour if you want, but it makes a yummy touch.

Chewy, nutty spice biscuits. 

• 200g brown sugar
• 200g butter, softened
• 150g slivered almonds
• 50g ground almonds
• 225g cake flour
• 2g salt
• Zest of 1 lemon
• 5g mixed spice
• 3g ground ginger
• 40g ginger preserved in syrup, chopped

1. Preheat oven to 160 C
2. Cream together butter and sugar until fluffy.
3. Add remaining ingredients, mix well to combine.
4. Shape the dough into walnut- sized balls and place, well spaced apart, on a baking paper lined with baking parchment.
5. Bake at 160 C for about 10- 15 minutes until golden brown.
6. Cool on a wire rack before filling the cookie jar. 

Day 2. Magazines and Cookie jars

Two of Mrs X's guests arrive tomorrow (by the way, I'm behind, its Day 4 already, so we're currently dealing with backlog) and its the calm before the storm. Nice.

Mrs X's nephew, lets call him Mr P, is coming for lunch, and is bringing with him the Awesome Magical Triangles. These crispy samoosas, with their perfect spicy flavour combination and faultless texture are made in a legendary little spaza- type spice shop in town, (called Village Foods) and are the bane and the blessing of my life.

The blessing because it is heaven to eat them, (and Mr P kindly bought enough for all to indulge in) and the bane because Mrs X inevitably says: "Can you make these?"  The answer is an irrevocable "no" and the insult to my ego is intensified by the fact that she wholeheartedly believes I could achieve this kind of perfection. It's not for lack of trying that I cannot. I have spent countless hours trying to make samoosa pastry, but there is clearly not even a touch of the required Inner- Indian  in my bloodstream. It's a ridiculous task that involves the thankless chore of separating paper thin sheets that have just been baked onto eachother. Don't try it if you value your sanity.

It has recently dawned on me why I can't achieve those perfect magic triangles.Its very obvious. The truth is (and I kid you not) that there is a legitimate kind of magic going on in Village Stores.  The proprietor Abie is a mind- reader, in my opinion. But I'll tell you more about his magic tricks later. I feel I have to go and test my theory one more time before I go. But just imagine his business card: Abie X- Samoosa Magician, Psychic Spy.

Enough whinging about food that I can't even give you the recipe for. I spent Day two just shuffling around the kitchen, flicking through Foodie magazines and vouching to cook all the snazzy- looking dishes I never get around to. I have this awesome stash of old Gourmet magazines. Sweet thing is, I don't even need it, because all their recipes are online at www.epicurious.com. I don't even have to type out the recipe for the yummiest little snacks ever for you, wahaha. http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Mustard-Cheddar-Crackers-233553

So I made those two days ago and have since had to bake off two more batches from my handy roll of frozen dough. That's moreish for you. The Gouremt issue of December 2004 also turned out to be a gem- it has a grossly amazing section on biscuits. I tried these bad  boys: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Cardamom-Butter-Squares-231217, just minus the espresso icing, and they were super- yum:

Day 2 was wrapped up with a luxurious diet platter (yet another weight loss tip for all those tipping the scale this season) which consists of 2 hard boiled eggs and a grilled tomato. Douse the tomato with balsamic vinegar and sprinkle some basil chiffonade for and be weightless in a wink.  (Jokes, man. What works for Mrs X will probably not work for you.)