Simple Sunday supper

This is our simple Sunday supper of choice at the moment... a delicious tomato pasta that everyone from 2 to forty (or nearly) loves.

This makes more than enough...

Two tins of good crushed tomatoes
Olive oil - about six tablespoons
Garlic - 2/3 cloves
Vegetable stock - 250ml
Salt and Pepper
Pasta  400g of whatever you like.
Basil - if your kids eat green stuff, lucky smug you, long may it last!

Slice garlic and add to cold oil. Garlic straight into hot oil loses the subtle fragrance and becomes bitter.
Cook on a medium heat until the garlic is just starting to brown and you get that fabulous garlicky aroma.

Add the tomato and stock (tomato first as hot oil and water is not a good combination)
Season and turn up the heat and cook uncovered for ten minutes or so until the sauce has cooked down and is lumpy in the pan.  Meanwhile cook the pasta, then stir it through the sauce and serve with parmesan and fresh basil.

Delicious with crusty bread and peas - the only green thing my youngest eats with gusto. Even better in the summer with quickly qrilled prawns.

I think this started life as a Nigella recipe and has been changed a little. It's certainly not something you need to follow to the letter which surely is the point of a simple Sunday supper?

Little things...

It's the little things that make life so much easier. Such good advice from a friend and fellow mother.* She told me once that if you find a spoon or bowl or cup that works for your child buy three so you're not always looking for it.  That explains the drawer full of plastic in my kitchen.

That's the trouble isn't it - the little things can add up to a drawer stuffed full of little things. That's why I'm usually against those kitchen gizmos that will apparently make your life easier (by skinning a mango or slicing an egg). Despite this I still have a drawer full of crap.

So what does this have to do with a batch of freshly backed biscuits, Ann?

Well, the other day in a weak moment (other women have their weak moments in shoe shops, mine come in kitchen shops) I succumbed and bought a cookie scoop, rather like this one. 

And you know what? It's fabulous...  go and buy one now.**

I made a choc chip biscuit recipe where the instruction was to roll into balls... I scooped instead and it took seconds and I wasn't covered in sticky dough up to my wrists. 

It was so quick and I was feeling so chuffed I made anzacs too.

Now to find the device that controls the two year old dough monster.  Luckily my 'helper' is not that heavy as he ate his body weight in biscuit dough.

*I have had an awful lot of advice from friends and fellow mothers (and dished out rather a lot myself) but not all of it is good.

**See there you go, more advice. Sorry.

Diary of a crazed cake decorator....

Next time I see a cake I am not, not, not going to think "I can make that...."
I do that a lot. Year after year in fact.  Last year my midnight icing job produced a wonky, chocolately caterpillar that looked more like a train than a creature.

This is the cake that started it all last week....

A cake made by our seven year old neighbour's grandmother for his soccer party. How cool is that? Of course I thought, 'I could do that'.

I was given her cake mould, the board, the figures, the green spray paint stuff for the coconut grass... I went to a professional cake shop and wrote down everything the girl told me. She told me the roll out icing was too iffy in the humidity, piping would be better. Advice from an expert and all the right gear. Success would follow. Surely?

Friday 10.30am
I baked my first ever pound cake. A mission in itself - 6 eggs, a packet of cream cheese and three cups of flour and three cups of sugar. No rising agent. It was like a brick and took two hours to cook. A tasty brick though and one that would stand up to the rigors of a soccer shaped cake mould.
Et viola (ah yes I bake and speak French - sort of)

I went to bed feeling very pleased with myself. The party looked on track for the next day. Outsourced entertainment (a soccer coach) and low key party food - just chocolate crackles and lots of store bought additive filled rubbish chosen by the six year old. Boy heaven.

7.50am Saturday morning
The kids skipped off to cricket with Dad leaving me alone with a bag of icing equipment I didn't really know how to use. No problem... I've made notes.  I'll knock it off in an hour.

First I made the icing. Butter icing made with the cake decorator's friend - fat in a bucket. They don't call it that or you'd never buy it. Look away now if you ever want to eat a commercial cupcake again.

But I wanted white icing and this is how you get it. A cup of gloop, 500g of icing sugar and a dash of milk.

8.15am
Now to make black icing.
W.R.O.N.G. Two batches of grey, sludgy brownish icing.

Food is just not meant to be black. I was told in the cake shop that the black colouring goes straight through children so warn their parents. I should have stopped then but I was blinded by that picture of the perfect soccer ball cake. Damn, I'm shallow and stupid.

8.45am (the weather is warming up nicely and so am I. Humidity at around 85% already).
I gave up on black, tossed out the icing and started again.

This time green made with Kelly Green colouring. How appropriately on trend. I just love to be on trend. Mmm, a green and white soccer ball. He'll love it. Again a vision floated before me of THE perfect cake.

9.15am
I commenced piping stars. My hand killed. It looked alright, almost professional but you could see the brown of the cake in the gaps.

A little surge of panic. THERE SHOULD NOT BE GAPS.
I should have worked through it. I didn't.  I wiped off the stars and started again.

This is where I lost it. Hence there are no photos. I was hot, sweaty and getting beaten by a cake. Again.

10am-ish, (heck I don't even know what time it is now...)
I made more white icing. The white icing was smeared over the cake. The soccer ball's ridgey bits disappeared - a few crumbs appeared in their place. Professionals do NOT have crumby icing.

Disaster didn't just loom, it engulfed me. I wiped off the icing, again.
The fat in a bucket was gone.  I was out of piping bags. The car was at cricket.

I counted to ten (around ten times), had a shower, came back and started piping again with some icing I salvaged from a previous attempt.

10.45am-perhaps (it felt like 1am).
Husband reappeared from cricket looking very unsurprised that the cake preparation had descended into stress and that icing covered the bench top.

Luckily my neighbour was also on the scene. My calm, encouraging, wonderful neighbour. Even her 7 year old son whose grandmother had made the Best-Soccer-Cake-Ever  knew what to say, "It's really good that you're making a soccer cake," he said encouragingly. Bless him.

11am
Saintly Neighbour zipped off to buy more white fat and more piping bags. I resumed piping. Things were looking up. Disaster and her friends Tragedy and Defeat tiptoed back and hung around in the corner of the kitchen waiting for me to fail again. I didn't. And I had help. Many hands do make light work....

It looked okay in the end.

Good actually. Heck, great in fact. Whoo-hooo!!!!!

So now a few days later and I've forgotten the pain. It's like childbirth. I'm even thinking 'next year I'll make something a bit harder, really push myself.'

See how stupid I am?

My son, the one who's now six, says he doesn't even like icing. If I were more sensible and actually listened (to him and those whispers of doubt in my head) I'd give him what he really wants... just a cake.

By the way - If a cake tragedy makes you chuckle then please do read this blog - it will make you laugh and laugh.  

Slowwww....

I am a bit slower than your average Ms Joe on catching the latest trend.... if I buy something cool it was generally 'cool' the season before last.

I have just bought myself THE kitchen accessory of winter 2008, the slow cooker. Better late than never, or better slow than ... dead - is that the cliche I am looking for?

Yesterday I got it out of the box and fired it up. I cooked a beef curry and for the first time in a long, long time I shopped for the recipe and followed the steps I was supposed to.  While browning the meat I set off the smoke detectors and they in turn set off the two year old. When things calmed down and all was in the pot I watched with satisfaction as it bubbled away quietly all day.

Here it is under one of our favourite wedding presents, a rather quirky print by Tasmanian artist Tom Samek.

Tom Samek was born in Prague but has lived in Tasmania for rather a long time. Chances are if you are Tasmanian or know a Tasmanian you have seen one of his works on a wall. We have five and have vowed not to get any more. I love his offbeat humour and what he has to say about the sometimes ropey politics of a small place. Don't get me started on Australian politics this week... I'd never stop.

I digress. Back to the slow cooked curry.

Delicious? No. Absolutely bloody awful. So bloody awful that my other half admitted (after kindly eating it for dinner) that we should toss and not freeze the leftovers as had been my cunning plan.

Disappointed? YES. YES. YEEEESSSS.

I am not giving up - 2010 is not the year of giving up - but I may need your help.
This is my favourite, simple, slow cooked casserole dish and if you have time I'd love to hear yours.

Ann's slow, simple Osso Bucco (Hey if you can't name a dish after yourself on your own blog when can you? And yes Osso Bucco Proper uses white wine and a load of other things - this one came from a magazine clipping and lord knows where from - sorry!)

2 slices of osso bucco (sliced veal shank really)
2 x 400g tins of crushed tomatoes
1 cup of good-ish red wine
4 cups of hot veg stock (or beef if you like)
2 sliced cloves of garlic
salt, pepper and thyme and then lots of time....

You don't need to brown the meat. Just chuck it all in the pot. Slow cook for a couple of hours until the meat is falling apart. Then tip the sauce (minus the meat) in a pan and boil it off on the stove top until the sauce thickens. Shred the meat into the thick sauce and serve with pasta and parmesan.

It will work perfectly in my slow cooker. If not it has always worked bloody well in this....

And I am very sorry for all the 'bloody' swearing in this. I am cross. I hate it when my food is not even worth freezing.

Toddler taming...

My two year old looks like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. You know the type - hair so blonde it sometimes looks almost translucent, clear blue eyes and sweet squeezable cheeks. People quite often offer to take him home. 'Go right ahead,' I say. 

He may look sweet but he has an iron will and takes an irrational pleasure in exercising it all over me. 

Take baking. I like it and if I'm honest I like that slightly smug feeling of assembling lunch boxes with healthy home made things and airily producing freshly baked biscuits as friends walk in the door. 

My five year old wolfs down anything I make. The two year old does not. Won't touch it and even has a new word for it,  'eeergh.'

Last week I saw him eyeing off another kid's home baked biscuit at the school gate. Traitorous little... 

Hang on, that mother has put sprinkles on top. When we got home I baked and sprinkled hoping I might win one round.

He took the biscuit. I smelled victory.

Then he ate the sprinkles off the top and threw the biscuit on the ground.

Round 4,321 to him.

(At this point do I have to point out that of course I love him and am honestly not giving him away? At least not yet.)

Cracking cookies...

I love baking... so satisfying and you get so much gratitude for a little bit of measuring and mixing.  

I made cookies last week but they flopped.  Not so satisfying. They merged together in a most annoying way and didn't have that satisfying snap when you bit into them. The boys loved them regardless (see? gratitude) but I wanted them to be better.

Then I watched Ina the next day and she had almost the same cookie recipe with a few tweaks and this one worked.  She's a genius or maybe I was just paying more attention... 

Ina's raisin and pecan nut cookies. 

• 1 1/2 cups pecans roasted and chopped
• 130g unsalted butter
• 1 cup dark brown sugar
• 1 cup caster sugar
• 2 extra large eggs at room temp
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1 tspn baking powder
• 1 tspn ground cinnamon
• 1 tspn salt
• 3 cups rolled oats or oatmeal 
• 1 1/2 cups raisins

Beat the softened butter, brown sugar and caster sugar until light and fluffy. Sift together the flour, baking powder, cinnamon and salt and mix together. Then add the oats, raisins and chopped pecans.

Spoon on to a baking tray using a tablespoon or as Ina helpfully suggests an ice cream scoop. Bake for 12-ish minutes until they look like they should. Cool on a baking rack.

Lovely. Roasted pecans for a bit of crunch but nothing a two year old would choke on. A touch of cinnamon but not enough to turn off a five year old. A little too nice perhaps. I had to quickly put them in the freezer for school lunches so that I wouldn't eat them all...

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By the way the secret to my success might have been this new gismo that my mother kindly gave me a few weeks ago. I love it! Thanks Mum. x

Kitchen dreaming...

Winter for me is all about food. I start looking at recipe books, flicking through the pages searching for pictures of beautiful summer picnics, salads and grilled seafood on skewers laid out beside sparkling aqua water... what a nice way to escape a dull grey winter.

If I'm cold and feeling slightly rundown (like now actually) then it's the slow food I look for and perhaps even cook... coq au vin, slow cooked lamb shoulder or shanks. Comfort indeed.

Then of course there's the good old Food channel.  Number one for winter escapes at the moment is the Barefoot Contessa, Ina Garten. It's summer in the Hamptons and she also ticks my top three for food watching.

• Simple recipes that can be scribbled on a scrap of paper and once cooked done again without a recipe
• Kitchen utensils to lust after (I am unashamedly shallow)
• A fabulous kitchen and home as a backdrop.

See? Fabulous. She has a large home in the Hamptons and has built a new barn in the garden (oh yes the garden is to die for and looks even better in snow...) Read all about and see more lovely pictures here.

Ina's kitchen also has good eye candy for the shallow shopper. And I am not just shallow but also stupid enough to think that if I buy the beautiful utensils in a television chef's kitchen then I too will cook like that...  

In my Nigella phase I bought the whisk she swears by  -  I LOVE it and use it every day.

Jamie's favourite Thai-style stone mortar and pestle  is now mine... I waited until I left London to buy it as I could never bear to lug it home on the tube. It weighs a ton. 

Everyone who cooks on the telly seem to have a  KitchenAid in white  - I'd like an original please but I'd settle for a brand new one in red.

 I'm still saving but that's ok. We should all have to wait for some things in life...

Little chef, Big chef...

Okay, so how do you cook a meal that's healthy, easy and your kids love? Well, you let them do it. 

Pizza bases, piles of sauteed mushrooms, steamed broccoli and zuccini, sliced ham, plain old tomato sauce and frozen peas. Even more fun than lego.

Nowhere in any cookbook have I seen a picture like this. But the boys love it AND they eat it. And quite often I have a slice or two myself.

Gourmet Farmer...

Our Friday night date at the moment is with the Food channel. Each week we head home to Tasmania for a delightful half hour with the Gourmet Farmer.

Matthew Evans was the food critic for the Sydney Morning Herald  - surely one of the best jobs in journalism? Apparently not. He has chucked it all in and bought a small farm south of Hobart - my hometown - with the aim of getting closer to the food he eats.

The program which you might have seen already in Australia on SBS, is a fantastic introduction to all the interesting people who've moved to Tasmania to grow unusual foods, go organic, make cheese, raise dairy cows or live off the power grid. Not to say that everyone in Tassie is living an alternative life... but certainly many do live a very good food life. 

We knew we'd found a new favourite program when Matthew pointed out that he was finding potatoes are often the star of each meal. Couldn't agree with him more. There's nothing better in the world than a Tasmanian potato (I have looked). The best is the Pink Eye, steamed until the skins pop open and served with a bit of butter.

Matthew has set himself up with pigs, chooks, turkeys (not so successfully) a dairy cow and a whole load of lovely vegetables. He has a blog too... and a new book.

He spends a bit of time with mates on Bruny Island and lives in the Huon Valley.

We sit there on the couch sighing at the scenery and remembering camping and sailing trips with scallops, salmon, abalone and even blue eye tuna. We caught a beauty last June while away with friends on the Tasman Peninsula.

I was in raptures. They were a bit casual about it... sometimes I think you need to leave to realise just how special Tasmania is. We might never live there again but we both still call it home.

(Second image from the Gourmet Farmer's blog)

Simple suppers...

Butternut squash was sold at my local Waitrose supermarket in London - it came with a large sticker with the cooking suggestion, "CUT INTO CHUNKS AND BOIL."  Good heavens, please don't. Anything but that. Unless you're seven months old.

It should have said "cut into chunks and ROAST." There is nothing better than roasting any pumpkin with a whole head of garlic, pepper and a generous drizzling of olive oil. Flakes of dried chilli are good too.

If you're feeling lazy then soup is a lovely option, cook off some garlic and leek, add chunks of roasted sweet butternut and vegetable stock, a smidge of curry powder - cook until soft and then whizz.

A great midweek meal is cheat's risotto.  Baked not stirred.  I do love making a traditional stirred risotto just not on a Thursday night after wrestling two children to bed.

This is fabulously easy and tastes good. Very good. You just have to give it a very hard stir for two minutes or so at the end to get that oozy risotto texture.

For 2 people...

• Small butternut squash 
• 1 cup of arborio rice
• 2 1/2 cups hot vegetable/chicken stock
• 40g butter
• 2/3 cup parmesan cheese

First roast squash with half a head of garlic, olive oil and pepper.
Put it in an ovenproof dish that seals well with a lid along with the rice and hot stock and butter. Squeeze out the roasted garlic and add it too.
Cook at 200 °C  for about 25 minutes until the rice is soft but still wet.
Add about a third of a cup of grated parmesan and stir madly for a minute or two. The pumpkin will mash together and the risotto will become thick and creamy.

Really rather easy and really rather good. Sometimes my passion for cooking has to come second to a need for a simple midweek dinner.

Party baking...

We hosted a party for our two year old on Saturday. I made pom poms thanks to Martha Stewart of course.

I have never done anything Martha before and I am not sure she would approve of my rather wonky version but they looked pretty good hanging over the table and I was much much better at it by the fifth one!

I also made lamingtons - partially a nod to the mix of Australian and Kiwi guests but actually mostly because I love them.

I think Australia may have won the argument about who invented the lamington but we once found them in a tiny bakery while on a sailing holiday in Croatia. They were called Cocos and it sparked much lazy discussion on deck about how they'd got there.

They're dead easy to make and they taste fabulous and they look a little bit tricky so it makes you look like a hot home baker.

1. Make two sponge cakes (ie 2 x 20cm square tins) Don't be put off by baking sponge cakes - the bought ones are not great and it's just a lot of beating of eggs and sugar really.
Mine never rise as much as I have seen at country cake shows but as you can see it still gives you a good size lamington.  Let them cool. Cut into squares. Small is good as you get a better icing to cake ratio.

2. The icing - according to Donna Hay in her Simple Essentials series - the Chocolate one of course, given to me in my old life as a chocoholic.

450g icing sugar
90g cocoa powder
250ml boiling water
60ml milk
75g melted butter

Sift in flour and cocoa - add the rest and mix.  It is really runny which made me panic at first but of course it needs to be runny for dipping and dripping.

Dip each square in the icing mix and let the excess drip off - then roll it in a separate bowl of desiccated coconut.   Keep replacing the coconut as it gets lumpy with chocolate.

Put them on a tray lined with baking paper and pop them in the fridge.

That makes about as many as you can see in the photo plus a few more that didn't quite make it to the party!

Food, glorious food

A plate of hundreds and thousands (is that what you call them too?) is bound to make any child's day and it certainly made mine... I love, love, love new and interesting things to eat.  It really takes the edge off a holiday for me if I'm not enthralled by every meal. It's one of the reasons we went back and back to Italy and only once to Poland! 

I ate my way around Europe but didn't make it to Hungary and so never saw these... apparently they're sold on almost every corner.  They're originally Transylvanian and called Kürtőskalács or stove or chimney cake. 

We found them at a lovely market in the countryside less than an hour from Auckland but about a million miles from Budapest!

What a treat to try something absolutely new, delicious and too hard to make at home.

The yeasty sweet spiced dough is rolled out and looped around a wooden stick - brushed with oil, rolled in sugar and baked in a hot, hot, hot open oven or traditionally over hot coals until the outside is crisp and the sugar has caramelised.

Then it's rolled while it's hot in your choice of more sugar, nuts, cinnamon, chocolate sprinkles or hundreds and thousands. 

Piping hot, sweet, doughy and quite delish...

The rest of the market was fabulous too - more on that tomorrow.

Chocolate love

I love chocolate. So much so I gave it up in January because things got a little out of hand. Easter was my undoing but on the up side it means I've been baking again.

Am I allowed to say that my brownies are pretty good? Well, to be fair mine and Nigella's.

Her book How to be a Domestic Goddess is one of my favourites and the brownie page is rather well used. I'm not a fan of a pristine cookbook... bit like a skinny chef...

I often halve the recipe which helps lessen the temptation to eat five at a time. Mostly!

I always trim the edges to get that perfect square and I leave the walnuts out because I'm a useless shopper and forget to buy them. Nigella says you should only use the best dark chocolate you can find - I agree, no cocoa.

Line the pan with baking paper and don't overcook or you won't get that gooey loveliness. Imagine me purring that last phrase in the manner of the original domestic goddess... or not!



375g soft unsalted butter
375g best-quality dark chocolate
6 large eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
500g caster sugar
225g plain flour
1 teaspoon salt
300g chopped walnuts
 
Melt the butter and chocolate together in a large bowl. 
Beat the eggs with the sugar and vanilla. Measure the flour into another bowl and add the salt.
Let chocolate mixture cool a  little before beating in the eggs and sugar, and then flour and nuts.  Bake for about 25 minutes at 190 degrees - or longer but don't walk away from the oven....! 

Apparently makes about 48 but I've never counted. They are fabulous warm with vanilla ice cream and freeze rather well.