No matter how much you think you may know about cooking, there is always some new trick or technique that you can pick up from a cooking class and I continue to learn new things whenever I go. You can read about the technique of pasta making, for example, but until you actually feel the pasta dough, you never know exactly what the end result feels like for the best pasta. Over the past few months I have attended a few cooking classes from cake decorating to meat butchery and thought it was time I shared them with you, before I head off to the next one tomorrow.
Category: Photos
Meat free Mondays – Pumpkin, spinach & ricotta filo parcels
Although I’m not vegetarian, I also don’t feel like eating meat every night. So I do cook quite a few meat free dishes. Meat can get quite expensive, especially as I prefer to buy local, free range, top quality meat. I would rather eat meat less often and buy the best I can get, than eat cheaper/mass produced and imported products.
Meat free Mondays is an international campaign aimed at encouraging us to take a day off meat and raise awareness of the personal health and environmental benefits of reducing our meat consumption. A number of Australia’s celebrity chefs and cooks are involved, including Maggie Beer and Kylie Kwong. Some of the facts quoted on the campaigns website include:
- Australians are some of the world’s biggest meat eaters, with many consuming double the global average.
- 9 out of 10 Australian adults aren’t eating the recommended amount of vegetables.
- Health authorities recommend against eating large amounts of meat.
- Australian livestock industries are responsible for approximately 10% of our total greenhouse gas emissions.
- Livestock production accounts for 70% of all agricultural land around the world.
- Meat production is water intensive.
While I don’t limit myself to eating meat free dishes only on Mondays, I think anything that encourages people to add meat free meals to their diet and raises awareness of the benefits of a meat free meal once a week is a great initiative. With that in mind, here is the latest meat free dish I have tried. I added in a pinch of cayenne pepper to the recipe and I think the addition of the heat from the cayenne works well with the sweet and creamy pumpkin.
I also used filo pastry from the fridge rather than the freezer section for the first time, and found this so much easier to work with than frozen filo.
Raspberry crumble slice
The older I get, the faster time seems to move. Weeks, months and years are just flying by and there never seems to be enough time to do all the things I want to do.
I suddenly woke up this morning and remembered I needed to make something to take with me to a picnic this afternoon. That didn’t leave enough time to make my usual cupcakes, which need to be started the day before. So I decided to make this raspberry crumble slice. It is a great last minute recipe, as it uses ingredients that I usually have on hand in the house and doesn’t take too long to throw together. The rich, nutty, buttery shortbread base and crumble provide a great contrast to the fresh, tart raspberries and it is one of my favourite quick treats.
Click here for the recipe
Sweet potato, tomato and asparagus frittata
I really like watching cooking shows and reading cookbooks. However, a lot of the food featured in these shows and books isn’t the best for everyday cooking and eating. I also love to bake, but I know I can’t eat desserts and baked goods every day. Well I could, but it wouldn’t be very good for me.
A few years back, when browsing the cooking magazine section, I discovered the Australian Healthy Food Guide magazine. This magazine is different to other cooking magazines, with half of the magazine devoted to articles on health, food and nutrition, and the other half healthy recipes. The magazine and website are now my first stop when looking for a quick, easy and healthy weeknight meal, like this frittata. A few of the recipes from the magazine are now regular weeknight favourites of mine. Reading the articles in the magazine gives me a better understanding of healthy eating and nutrition, and the recipes demonstrate that healthy food can still be exciting and tasty.
Nutella cookies
For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved to read. I think I’ve been a bookworm for as long as I’ve been able to read, and there are photos of me, only a few years old, reading to my brother when he was a baby. And others of me at only nine months old reading a book. Okay, at that point I was probably only looking at the pictures, but still, I liked my books. And I remember as a child, sneakily trying to get away with reading a book under my covers with a torch (I think that was probably about as rebellious as I ever got, trying to read after it was lights out time). And although I’ve previously stated that I read cookbooks like novels, I do like reading novels and my “go to” genre would have to be sci fi/fantasy.
A few months ago, a friend of mine recommended the A Modern Witch series by Debora Geary. It didn’t take me long to be hooked on Debora’s books and I very quickly worked my way through the whole series (that has been published to date that is). If you like a bit of magic in your books, I would certainly recommend this series.
You may be wondering what this has to do with a cooking blog and nutella cookies. But there is actually a connection. It is almost impossible to read Debora’s books with out getting hungry and/or having the urge to start baking. Food plays quite a large role in these books. Cookies most of all with nutella cookies and snickerdoodles featuring the most prominently. This made me curious to try to bake these cookies, as I had never tried either. And as a recipe for nutella cookies had already been posted on Debora’s website, they seemed like the best place to start. I have also tried to make the snickerdoodles, but I wasn’t that happy with the recipe I used, so I am going to do a bit more research on those and will post a recipe when I am happy with the results. If you have a recipe you recommend, please let me know.
Now I don’t actually like nutella, so judging the success of the cookies was a bit difficult for me. However the cookies were very popular at work, and I got a few requests for the recipe. I liked the texture, but because I don’t like nutella, the flavour wasn’t really for me. Jerome, who likes nutella, liked them but suggested that they would be better without the extra nutella on top, as he preferred just the cookie itself. Just remember, the most important thing with cookies/biscuits is that they keep cooking after they come out of the oven, so if you wait until they are completely finished, they will then overcook. I found the recommended bake time worked well for these cookies.
Cherry Jam with Lemonade Scones
It was quite hot here in Perth over Christmas. I had to go back to work two days after Christmas, and it was a very warm 41C that day. On top of that the air conditioner at work wasn’t working, resulting in a very unpleasant day. After a very warm day at work, of course it made perfect sense to me to come home and make Cherry Jam. In my defence, I did have what I think is a valid reason for putting myself through a session in front of the stove top in that heat.
On Christmas day my parents gave me a 2kg box of cherries (thanks Mum and Dad). Now I love cherries, but there is no way I can get through 2kg and I really didn’t want to waste them. So, I decided to try making a batch of cherry jam. I’ve never made jam before, though I’ve made lemon butter quite a bit. I found a recipe on-line, bought a cherry pitter and some jam sugar and I was ready to go as I’d already been saving jam jars for a while. I then decided that I needed to make something for the jam to go with, so I made a batch of Lemonade Scones that I had recently learnt from Sarah at babyCakes. I had all the ingredients already at home, although my lemonade was a bit flat which I think resulted in less of a rise than usual. But they still tasted great.
I have to say in the end the heat got to me a bit. The jam probably needed another 5 minutes on the stove to make it thicker, but I stopped as soon as I had any kind of set as it was getting very warm by then. I was still very happy with the result. It tastes great on scones. I’ve even spooned it on top of yoghurt for a quick and simple after dinner snack.
myfoodmywayblog 