GREEN CHEESE

Herb Garden Rebirth

2010-07-09T17:08:00.000+10:00

Gardening heroes!

Phoenix the Pumpkin and the Business of the Bun in the Oven

2010-06-30T13:55:00.001+10:00

If Green Cheese were a garden it would look like my garden, which last month looked like this:

Clovers from the North moved in swiftly and overcame the watermelon and the rosemary with little resistance. Raiding nettles moved in by stealth and the pumpkin made a bolt out South East but was cut off at the knees by a deadly fungus. Rogue grass and guerrilla weeds plundered the remains.

But hope glimmered among the weeds, for as I surveyed the devastation, my hands linked resignedly behind my head, I noticed a small, golden mass...

And then, slightly to the right of the head of a flaxen-haired cherub, I noticed another small, golden mass. On closer inspection, nestled like a phoenix among the ashy dirt and bark my cat uses as a toilet, I found this:

It was a pumpkin, and it had grown without me. It is a lesson in life, everybody. Something good might still happen even if you don't do any work and lie around on the couch instead.

Speaking of growing things, I have an excuse for this atrocious neglect of my garden and its metaphorical counterpart, and that is I'm growing a little something myself - yes, I'm delighted to say that baby number two is busy getting all ready for his or her December appearance into the world.

And why is this an excuse? So I don't have to repeat myself, please refer back to April 2008. Only this time my cast-iron stomach let me down for the first time in 18 years, which is unfortunate, because that was one streak I had been seriously hoping to continue for the remainder of my life.

So food-related talk and cooking has been off the cards for a few months now, and may be for some time if my last pregnancy is anything to go by. But let me assure you of one thing: Project Bake will be back. Hopefully not in black though, because that sounds like an Epic Fail to me.

Sun-dried tomato WIN

Quorn™. Eat Quazy.

2010-04-16T22:14:00.039+10:00

Here's another product offer promo marketing I'm letting through the net because someone may get some free "meat free, soy free protein" out of it.

Yay?

I won't be able to attend this Quorn party - and I'm not going to say I'm not a tad frightened of whatever Quorn is anyway- so feel free to RSVP yourself if you want to be among the FIRST in Australia to try the new range, or if you just want free champagne. Say you're me if you need to. Do whatever it is you need to do to get your hands on that free Quorn!!

I hope they have security at this event.

Project Bake #14: Hazelnut Caramel Slice

2010-04-16T20:55:00.002+10:00

While I had the hazelnuts out I also made this slice, about which Bake warned:

"The caramel won't be cuttable if you don't cook the caramel enough."

When I took the slice out of the fridge and tried to cut the slice - even with my best knife - the slice cracked and splintered and I stood dismayed. Not cuttable. I was ready to accept FAILure, with or without appropriately-placed pronouns.

Or was I?

My prolonged dismayed stance allowed my brain some quiet thinking time. After this time, I abandoned the knife and the caramel and editorial oversights and picked up a book to get lost in a story about a smelly boatman and a big-nosed doctor with a bruise on his chest.

I came back to the slice an hour later. It had softened. I sliced the slice with my best knife.

WIN

Project Bake #13: Chocolate Hazelnut Friands

2010-04-16T15:54:00.000+10:00

Made last night for Mums Group this morning. Very hazelnut mealsy.

WIN

Project Bake #12: Lime and Poppy Seed Syrup Cake

2010-04-12T15:10:00.006+10:00

"We have the countries of the eastern Mediterranean - Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan - to thank for the serendipitous act of transforming a simple cake into something truly splendid by drenching it in sugar syrup,"

says Bake. And I thank those countries. This may not be everybody's cup of tea, but it's my cup of tea, like a nice hot cup of Rooibos this afternoon with a good mate, who couldn't have cake because she's on Lite 'n' Easy (you don't have to shop or cook, you see, all you have to do is buy milk).

But I dug in nonetheless, and she dug into her fabulously organised packages of dried apricots and berry yoghurt, and while I do like citrus flavours in desserts, I absolutely LOVED this. Hands down my favourite baked good of the project so far, and enjoyed in such fine company! Could this day get any better? Yes! There is still three-quarters of the cake left!

I'll be needing Lite 'n' Easy myself before this project's over, and it won't be because it's Easy.

EPIC WIN!

Project Bake #11: Honey and Museli Scones

2010-04-11T16:38:00.002+10:00

A Sunday arvo tea treat for husband and friend. We ate half of them before I remembered to take a picture. It's bound to happen eventually, in which case I'll have to draw a picture. Or steal something off Google Images.

WIN

Project Bake #10: Chocolate Banana Bread with Whipped Nut Butter

2010-04-11T15:06:00.001+10:00

This was a promised push present for my sister-in-law, who had my new chubba of a nephew on Friday night. And by chubba, I mean over nine pounds. He's a biggie!

Similar to the cake I made last week, but this is denser and you slice it and spread it with the nut butter. The book says it's good toasted in the toaster - who'd have thought of that??
I suppose it is bread.

WIN

Project Bake #9: Golden Syrup Dumplings

2010-04-10T11:48:00.000+10:00

Egg Man remembers delicious golden syrup dumplings from youth camps gone by, so I was enthusiastic to give them a go for an easy weeknight dessert.

WIN

I'm starting to get very nervous.

Project Bake #8: Chocolate Banana Cake

2010-04-06T15:00:00.000+10:00

For my man's birthday, I baked him this Chocolate Banana Cake decorated with manly 'Farm Friends'.

I didn't think the banana-chocolate combo was going to thrill me because I love banana cake and I didn't want the chocolate to come along and wreck it - but I was totally converted, despite the dodgy decorations (look, when you're being so precise you're treating the recipe more like instructions for dismantling a bomb, you've got to find room for creativity somewhere).

WIN

Project Bake #7: Buttermilk Scones

2010-04-02T23:40:00.001+11:00

The second morning-tea treat I made yesterday was buttermilk scones. While they were baking away in the oven, I perused Bake's intro to the chapter on scone-making. It said this:

"The fear-of-failure factor surrounding scones is very high... home-bakers seem to fall into two categories, those who can and those who can't make scones."

Wha?!? My fear-of-failure factor was fairly low on the scale before reading this! Now I'm terrified!!
Yes, I had some vague idea that scones could be tricky, but I ignored that, and now here I was, guests due in 15 minutes, peering nervously through the oven door as though expecting the things to explode at any moment and set the oven aflame. Would this be the inevitable first FAIL?

On pulling the scones out of the oven, I was surprised and relieved to discover I was apparently one of the Chosen Ones who have scone-making in their genetic makeup. Or it was a fluke. I'll accept either.

WIN

Project Bake #6: Mini Choc-Chip Friands

2010-04-02T23:36:00.000+11:00

I'd never heard of a friand, much less known what one was, until I got this cookbook. It says:

"The darlings of the cafe set, friands are the perfectly-sized little cake to accompany a cup of coffee ... originally baked in tiny, gold-bar shaped pans ... they're dense and moist and incredibly more-ish."

They look and taste a bit like muffins, but are more moist and rich. They've got a lot of egg whites in them.

Speaking of eggs, Egg Man has made this recipe twice before, and because I was making them right before serving morning tea to my old buddy and my sweet sister-in-law who are getting married in a few short hours (yay!) and friends visiting for the wedding, I wanted to have an expert on hand to avoid disaster. Hence:

WIN

(The chocolate sauce on top caused a bit of choco overkill for me because the friands are so rich anyway, so I'll omit it next time).

Oh Crimson Joy!

2010-04-01T19:11:00.001+11:00

After some initial bumps in the road, including an over-enthusiastic one-year-old and some Blake-inspired invisible grubs (I never did actually see one, so they may well have been plain old sick), may I finally present our crop of cute tomato babies!

Now I just have to figure out who to share them with. If only there were someone who would appreciate them, with a good bunch of parsley and basil thrown in. Someone who I could imagine using them to make a homely dish, or who might semi-dry them perhaps as part of a classy antipasto platter, or who'd just savour them over sourdough with a crumble or two of goat's cheese...

I think I know just the person.

And now that's done, all I have to figure out is what to do with my poor, ailing pumpkin:

Oh Pumpkin, thou art sick!
The invisible mould
That flies in the night
Or the day or who knows

Has found thy leaves
Of verdant joy
And whose dark secret love
Does my butternut babies destroy!!!!

World Food Friday: Yeah Maan Rastarant

2010-03-31T22:35:00.002+11:00

One of my fellow World Food Friday patrons remarked that it was worth giving this restaurant our business simply for the name. I agree. It's funny.

Did we walk in the door to clouds of marijuana smoke? No. Did we walk in to Bob Marley? Yes. Yes, there was Bobby M, but the good news is it wasn't overkill, just a picture or two among the many colourful murals and artwork that adorned the walls.
The restaurant was small, the atmosphere casual. Some tables were surrounded with chairs, others with long vinyl couches with rounded backrests.

They were certainly true to their theme at Yeah Maan Rastarant; I'm pretty sure our waiter and waitress were Jamaican, and the menu is scattered with Jamaican Patwa, as well as such punsy phrases as, "This is a yummy dish, ja makin you crazy" and "This one will have you dancing the Bougle". Not 100% clear on what the "Bougle" is, but I think it's some kind of butt dance.

The Jumbo Jumbie Cassava Fries were delicious - wide and crispy - and I enjoyed my "allo pies" (spiced mashed potato balls in a sweet sauce) and curried prawns. Max's Special Jungle Jooce had me interested... It turned out to be a mix of I'm not sure what tropical juices, but the name of it made me feel special enough.

For dessert we headed over to Orange on Chapel Street and indulged in chocolate fondant, Tiramisu and coffee, while discussing the various layers of human personality - the first-impression layer, the layer really much better covered up, and the "real you" underneath them. It was all rather reminiscent of the Tiramisu, really. Which is much preferable to meeting a person reminiscent of a fondant. Once you got past the outer layer and got inside it'd be all soft and gooey and ooze everywhere, and if you didn't deal with it immediately you'd end up in a bit of a mess.

So we did enjoy our little night in the Caribbean, and seeing as my father-in-law grew up in Jamaica and it's his birthday next month, I tink I may end up back at dat place real soon, kickin' back with Bobby M.

Yeah Maan Rastarant

Jamaican Cuisine

340 Punt Road

South Yarra

www.yeahmaan.com.au

Orange

Cafe/Bistro/Bar

124-126 Chapel Street

Windsor
www.orangewindsor.com/

Project Bake #5: Neopolitan Cupcakes

2010-03-27T12:23:00.002+11:00

It was my pleasure to bake a treat today for my sister-in-law's hens night extravaganza this weekend. I thought something novelty would be preferable to something especially edible, being an all-girl affair, so colourful Neopolitan cupcakes with buttercream icing and a love message were perfect. I used cake decorating letters from Coles and some of the old milk bar-style candy hearts.

Little Mr Cute Guy found a some very exciting wooden planks to play on outside for 20 minutes, so that was very helpful to my endeavours.

Wishing my special sister-in-law a great night tonight filled with lots of fun memories to look back on, as do I of my own hens night, such as the waiter that suddenly and without warning began stripping and got dragged away in handcuffs by a security guard. Another story, another day.

WIN

Project Bake #4: Fudgy Choc-Cherry Biscuits

2010-03-27T00:40:00.000+11:00

I really liked these biscuits. They were all crispy around the edges and chewy in the centre, and my Mums Group seemed to enjoy them this morning. However, their Number One Fan was my husband, who declared they're the best biscuits he has ever eaten.

EPIC WIN!

Project Bake #3: Date & Butterscotch Self-Saucing Pudding

2010-03-25T09:31:00.001+11:00

WIN

This pud' made a sweet ending to a roast beef dinner, and a nice change from my old chocolate self-saucer. The best part? It's a five-minute, mix-ingredients-and-put-in-oven job. Would be great for guests because you wouldn't have to disappear for half an hour making dessert (or be organised enough to make it beforehand).

All this success is going to my spare tyre.

The Sick Tomatoes

2010-03-24T16:54:00.000+11:00

Oh Tomatoes, thou art sick!
The invisible grubs,
That crawl in the dirt
With the snails and slugs:

Have found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And their dark secret love
Does my tomatoes-on-toast dreams destroy!

Project Bake #2: Apple Custard Teacakes

2010-03-23T22:48:00.000+11:00

These teacakes were one beater-lick away from being an epic fail. On tasting the mixture, I was alerted to the fact that I'd omitted the sugar. See what I have to work with here?

Thanks to that beater-lick, they came out light and fluffy, with a yummy burst of vanilla custard inside. Perfect for morning tea with a friend and a couple of one-year-olds tomorrow.

WIN

Project Bake #1: Chewy Chocolate Slice

2010-03-22T19:37:00.005+11:00

PROJECT BAKE

The Mission: To bake through the "the definitive book on baking" from the Australian Women's Weekly Test Kitchen.

Aim: To improve baking skills from 'poor' to at least 'good'.

Hypothesis: A person's baking skills will improve if they bake a lot.

Method: Entire volume of Bake will be baked. Each finished product will be placed in the categories 'win' or 'fail' (and in extreme cases, 'epic win' or 'epic fail').

The commencing win-fail ratio for this experiment is 1:2. After the final recipe is baked, and my fellow nursing home residents have celebrated with me, the final win-fail ratio will be calculated to discover if, in fact, this person's baking skills will improve if they bake a lot.

Number of Recipes: Unknown (the blurb just says "literally hundreds". Yikes.)

So, I sat myself down to get acquainted with my new baking buddy book, and after wading through several such introductory chapters as, 'A Century of Lamingtons', I came across something about baking being "all about chemistry and science".
Perhaps I've discovered the answer to my baking woes already. I never did Chemistry, and I spent Science exploring the heat-related properties of whiteout and milking rubber gloves.
That, and I use too much slap-dashery in cooking. I don't think I've ever sliced off the floury mound atop a measuring cup with a knife in my life. I just shake it off.

Precision is my new middle name.

I opened up to the first chapter - 'Chocolate Cakes' - and I realised baking 29 varieties of chocolate cake (I do not kid) in succession would be enough to have me sticking my own head in the oven, so any ideas of chronology went out the window.

Instead, I had a bit of a flicketty look-look until I found something I couldn't possibly get wrong. To start with a fail would be irrevocably damaging to my bake-esteem.

So without further ado, may I introduce the opening number of Project Bake: Chewy Chocolate Slice! And it was a winner!

WIN

Julie & Julia

2010-03-21T16:47:00.008+11:00

On a night in a couple of weeks ago, we decided Julie & Julia was the pick of the bunch at Video Ezy. We enjoyed it, but I'd probably have more informative and insightful things to say if I were a movie person. My favourite movie is probably Edward Scissorhands, and I've only seen that about twice.

The story: "1960s cooking icon Julia Child's story of her start in the cooking profession is intertwined with blogger Julie Powell's 2002 challenge to cook all the recipes in Child's first book within a year." (Thank you Internet Movie Database).

I had friends tell me I must see J&J, and my guess is that's because the movie is about cooking and blogging and has my name in the title, but if I find out it was actually because Amy Adams' character Julie reminded them of me in any way then I may lose my will to live.

Although as irritatingly adolescent as she was, you have to imagine the girl can cook after getting through a massive instructional-style cookbook at a rate of 1.4 recipes per day, seven days a week. No wonder her husband stomped out. She was obsessed. Her final words of the movie were, "I love you, Julia Childs", before leaving a block of butter under the woman's picture in the Smithsonian Institute. This is creepy.

But yes, you have to imagine the cook-your-way-though-a-cookbook thing would be a great way to get better at cooking. While I was watching the movie considering this, several thoughts and pictures simmered gently in my brain, like the juices of a tender beef bourguignon: ... a bone-dry chocolate cake ... a mud-puddle monster ... my personal baking success to failure ratio of 1:2 ... a large instructional tome called Bake on my bookshelf....

Light bulb moment! It was time to copy my way to success! I would cook through the entire Julia Childs' book thingie in 365 days and blog the results!

Just kidding. That would be daft, because there is a 0% chance of me having the time, money or motivation to succeed.

But surely I could make it through Bake. Eventually. Over an undefined period of time. And at the very least, I would have to be better at baking by the end of it. And at the absolute least, my friends and neighbours would get free food, the quality of which may or may not improve over time.

I feel an experiment coming on...

Borsch, Vodka and Tears

2010-03-14T21:20:00.032+11:00

Borsch, Vodka and Tears is a Polish restaurant on Chapel Street. It should be called Borsch, Vodka and More Vodka, because they have a lot of vodka. More vodka than I had imagined exists, those times I'd sat around imagining how much vodka exists.

As much as we enjoy a tipple, and as intrigued as we were by the several varieties of absinthe on offer - including a 'Green Faery', concocted "by our Polish friend with a chemist's license" - we felt it was more important on this occasion to make it home without a DUI (or wormwood-induced pixie hallucinations) so we stuck mainly with Scandanavian beer and food, which they describe as 'modern Polish'.
I felt the proper thing to do would be to get one of the three varieties of borsch available, but soup just wasn't going to cut it for me at 8pm on a Friday night, so I went with a yummy crumbed pork schnitzel that was served on the most quaint, mismatched-but-matching patterned crockery.
I did make sure I stole a nip of someone else's borsch, and it was thin and full-flavoured and sweet. And by 'someone' I mean my mate, not a stranger at the next table, although if I had leaned over and sampled a stranger's borsch, I could have ended up doused in the whole gamut of borsch, vodka, blood, sweat and tears.

There were two unfortunate things about an otherwise enjoyable dining experience at BV and T. The first was that there were a lot of questions asked that weren't answered, answers given to questions that weren't asked and questions that were given answers that belonged to entirely different questions altogether, because it was so LOUD. Lip-reading abilities would have been useful.
The other unfortunate thing was that a most cherished long-time friend of ours who spent a year living in Poland couldn't be there because she put her back out in the bathroom 12 days earlier and still couldn't sit down for more than ten minutes at a time. Most unfortunate.

You've got to love the veritable people-fest that is Chapel Street; girls in dresses so short and heels so high it's amazing they can walk and keep their crotches covered; the obligatory pink Hummer cruising down the street as slowly as possible with half-sozzled bridesmaids-to-be hanging out the windows; P-platers with bass amped, sitting in clearways; outrageously trendy twenty-somethings, and thirty-somethings who wish they were still twenty-somethings.

So, if you want to impress people, be impressed by people or enjoy watching people trying to impress each other, while lip-reading and drinking yourself unconscious, this place is ideal. Or if you just like a good pork schnitzel on charming crockery.

Borsch, Vodka and Tears

Modern Polish

173 Chapel St, Windsor

Ph. 9530 2694

$17 - $25 main

www.borschvodkaandtears.com

Herb Garden Show & Tell

2010-02-26T17:01:00.006+11:00

Just planted...

...and two months on...

...We're using fresh herbs almost every day, and the veggies are thriving too. We have clusters of little green tomatoes budding all over the place...

...snow peas popping up too...

.... an abundance of spinach which I used for the first time last night making Spinach & Ricotta Cannelloni (see San Remo cannelloni packet for recipe)...

...and my pride and joy, a little baby watermelon. Oh come on, look at that thing, it's just wrong for a fruit to be that cute.

You know, the garden seems to be going so well, but I don't do a thing except water it and pull out the occasional weed or two. It just seems all too easy somehow...

Ah well, let the good times roll, eh?

[My true pride and joy doing some herb-stomping].

Cake-Baking: "To Conquer Without Risk is to Triumph Without Glory"

2010-02-21T20:09:00.001+11:00

My cooking weakness is baking. It's no secret. And look, despite my wonderful new ~~man~~ oven, I've had a spate of bad baking lately. Relationships don't always go according to plan.

One example of my recent baking failures is this attempted Donna Hay mud cake:

Looks fine, sure, but it was dry. With a dryness that may be likened to a bone. Not even a chocolate fudge sauce could save this dehydrated disaster.

After this fail I had pretty low cake-esteem, so I'm not sure what possessed me to offer to bake my adored friend's birthday cake for her upcoming party. I think it was partly my determined streak and partly because I like doing practical things for friends, especially adored ones.

The Adored One's favourite cake is Hummingbird Cake - like a banana cake with coconut and pineapple and a cream cheese frosting - and I decided that this was It; if I couldn't even get this simple, straightforward recipe right, then it was time for baking to join 'taking photos even with a digital camera on auto setting' on my list of Can't Do's. It all rested with this cake.

I bought the correct size cake tin. I bought the finest ingredients Woolworths had to offer. The party was in three hours. Nothing could go wrong.

Nothing was going wrong until my recipe didn't specify whether or not to drain the crushed pineapple before adding it. I ran to Google to check what other Hummingbird Cake recipes advised, and to my great alarm, some said to drain it, even "thoroughly", and others said to add the juice.

Panic. Rising.

I started trying to figure out an average ratio of wet to dry ingredients across a number of recipes, but I wasn't that smart and I didn't have time to get that smart. My whole cake-baking future was riding on this; to juicify or not to juicify?!? I was at an impasse.

As I held the can of pineapple in one hand and the mixing spoon in the other, I looked to the sky for inspiration.. and suddenly a bone-dry mud cake flashed through my mind. I felt those moistureless crumbs in my mouth, the parched cake flesh on my tongue....

In went the pineapple, in went the juice, and I spanked that cake into the oven before you could say "start over with a different recipe". It was done.

Fast forward three hours:

Looks fine, sure, but the true test was to come after the Happy Birthday had been sung, and all the candles had been blown out... and with a roomful of guests waiting for cake, I picked up the knife and faced my fate.

I sliced gingerly through the frosting and plated up a small piece... a bit crumbly... I took a deep breath... and gobbled.

It was moist.

It was delicious!

Success was mine! Glory was mine! I would live to bake another day!

That day came the following week when I volunteered to bake a chocolate coconut cake for Mum's _ _th birthday.

Looks fine, sure, but I had to cut half of it off before I iced it because there was a major sink-hole in the top.

Perhaps I should just give up cakes.

Free Stuff

2010-02-20T19:56:00.000+11:00

I usually ignore offers and requests from foodie sites because I'm not interested in fame and fortune (think, advertising), but I thought I may as well take this one up because it could get you a whole ten dollars worth of free food! Wow! Value! etc.

Menulog Restaurant Delivery Guide www.menulog.com.au
Australia's largest restaurant guide (20,000+ restaurants)

Order home delivery online and get $10 off your first delivery order using this voucher code: 843F2D. Valid until Nov. 11, 2010 at participating restaurants on the site that have "accepts voucher" sign, for a minimum order of $20.

There are a number of options if you live in the Melbourne CBD, but if you're in Wezza like me it's So 'n' So's Chinese in Laverton or nothin'.

Not sure how much delivery costs. Probably more than ten dollars.