the capers of the kitchen crusader

The Hostess with the Something something (Announcing the March Sweet Adventures Blog Hop)

2012-03-04T20:13:00.001-08:00

Oh my god guys, I'm totally hosting a Sweet Adventures Blog Hop. I'm not going to lie, I'm a little nervous, I really am not the most technologically capable blogger. However, I believe in the power of desperate cramming ability, and I also believe in this Blog Hop... and I also believe in the topic of the March blog hop which is...

Yep, it's all about layered desserts... interpret that as you will but make a something sweet with layers...like a layer cake, or layers of pastry (like baklava) or you could make parfait (everybody loves parfait), or trifle, or... maybe you have a better and cleverer idea than anything I could come up with (you probably do).

I'm pretty excited about this topic- think of the possibilities!

Here's some stuff I've made before with layers that might help inspire you... I actually didn't have many entries on this sort of thing, so I apologise in advance...
Baklava cheesecake

Tiered Red Velvet Wedding cake

Maybe?

You can post your entries up from 9am AEST on Monday 19th March and you may post right up until 11:59 AEST Monday the 26th of March.

If you've thought about blogging for the Sweet Adventures Blog Hop before and haven't, why not have a crack, be as inventive as you like! We'd love to see all the cultural variety that this topic allows for, because if you think about it, lots of different cuisines use layers in their desserts...

If you want to know more about what this blog hop business is all about then you can find out right... here through some writing I shamelessly cut and pasted from the Sweet Adventures Blog Hop site:

What is the Sweet Adventures Blog Hop (SABH)?

SABH is a monthly dessert link-up. Each month there is a new theme.
The Adventure will be announced on the 1st Monday of each month.
The link-up will open for entries on the 3rd Monday of each month at 9am Australian Eastern Time (AEDT, Sydney Australia).
The link-up will close on the 4th Monday of each month at 11:59pm AEDT.

Who can participate?

This blog hop is open to anyone who blogs about food.
SABH is brought to you by your hostesses – Delicieux, 84th & 3rd, The Hungry Australian, Dining With a Stud, and The Capers of the Kitchen Crusader (hey, that's me!)

How it works – a few rules…

Each blog can submit one entry per month.
Please only link-up new posts published on or after the link-up goes live each month.Old posts will not be accepted.
The linked-up post must contain a dessert fitting the Adventure theme.
Include a link to the hostess post for that month and the words ‘Sweet Adventures Blog Hop – Adventure Name‘ (note that ‘Adventure Name’ will change each month).
We create new ‘bling’ for each Adventure. We would love for your to use the badge on your post or your blog! The badge can be grabbed from the hostess or from this site once the Adventure is announced.

So, blogger and reader types, do you have any amazing ideas? We'd love to hear from you!

Get your brains ticking, tell your friends, tell your acquaintances, get people involved, let's see how many different kinds of layered desserts we can collect!

-KCxx

I wrote a vegetarian dinner menu that takes not a lot of time/effort!

2012-02-29T01:27:00.001-08:00

Finally guys, I've blogged an entry on my Course Talk Over Dinner blog. I rambled about My Kitchen Rules and told you how to prepare for a dinner party in not a lot of time, even if it's for lotsa people. You can read all about it right here.

Go on, you know you want to. Plus I totally put a lot of effort into it, so you should feel guilty if you don't. Also: I don't have any pictures for this entry. Sorry.

stuff and nonsense (mushroom haloumi burgers and raspberry ketchup)

2012-02-26T20:46:00.001-08:00

Two related things:

Thing One:

I previously mentioned that the wonderful, amazing and decidedly very-good-at-cooking Sandra, of The $120 Dollar Food Challenge blog fame totally posted my recipe on her blog? Yeah I know, right? How COOL. She posted a favourite of mine, mushroom and grilled haloumi burgers.

Why is it a personal favourite of mine, you interrogate?

1) It's vegetarian but doesn't feel like it's "MISSING MEAT"

2) It has grilled haloumi in it, possibly one of the best eats ever known to mankind.

3) I made them for Nathalie's birthday lunch late last year and so associate them with her and all our friends.

Look at me, standing up to your interrogatory tactics with rationality, reason and general aplomb. I should be a super hero of some description or something. Or maybe I should just have lofty ideas of myself. Either of those and possibly neither.

Thing Two:

Anyhow I also previously mentioned that I presented at the Less is More Festival last weekend, which I had to get some snazzzz business cards made up for. Check out these sexy babies! Recycled cardboard and sex on a card care of the deliciously lovely ladies at Paper Fusion in Mount Hawthorn.

And also: now I HAVE PHOTOS TO PROVE THAT I ACTUALLY AND REALLY PRESENTED AT SAID FESTIVAL. Here are some shots that the organisers took on the day of me teaching people how to make a very similar recipe to the just previously mentioned "mushroom haloumi burgers" and also how to make some different ketchups. So today I'm going to give you an adaptation of the mushroom and haloumi burger recipe with a recipe for the raspberry ketchup that I match with it. This is flat out delicious, it'll have you reaching for your barbecues and stocking up on field mushrooms. It'll have you not missing meat from your burgers, it'll hopefully have you experimenting with ketchups in your own kitchen.

Chopping up potatoes to have with ketchup

People listened to me

Raspberry Ketchup:

Makes about a cup worth of ketchup (enough for 8 burgers)

You need:

1 cup of raspberries (frozen will be fine)

2 tsp cumin

1/2 tsp dried, ground coriander

1/2 tsp ground ginger

1/8 tsp chilli powder

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1/8 tsp ground nutmeg

2 cloves of garlic

1 tbsp rice bran oil or olive oil

1/3 cup roughly chopped tomatoes

1/4 cup ginger beer

2 tbsp brown sugar

1 tbsp apple cider vinegar

You:

Heat the spices through in a large fry pan, until you can smell them, but they aren't burning.

Add the oil, garlic, raspberries and tomato, mix through.

Cook on a low to medium heat for 10 minutes (allowing it to reduce), until the raspberries are cooked through and softened, then ginger beer and vinegar, stir through. Remove from the heat.

Allow to cool slighty, then blitz in a blender until smooth. Add salt to taste. You may need to put this back onto the heat to reduce to a thicker sauce. You might also want to add some more of the spices to your personal taste.

Grilled mushroom and haloumi burgers

makes 4

You need:

4 burger rolls (wholemeal works really well, or turkish)

4 large field mushrooms, stalks removed

1 tbsp brown sugar

1 tbsp olive oil + a little extra for frying the haloumi

1 tbsp balsamic vinegar

1 garlic clove, finely sliced

salt and pepper

1/2 a batch of raspberry ketchup

1 large red onion, thinly sliced

200g haloumi

1 couple of handfuls of fresh rocket

1 large tomato, thinly sliced (optional and not necessary really)

4 tbsp of mayonnaise

You:

(pretty much the same as the process on Sandra's blog, but adapted slightly)

Mix the sugar, olive oil, sliced garlic, balsamic vinegar and a dash of salt and pepper together in a little bowl with a fork.

Brush the mushrooms on both sides with this glaze, then grill the mushrooms on a barbeque or a grill over a medium heat, about 4 minutes on eat side (until cooked through).

At the same time, cook your onions over a medium heat with some olive oil in a frying pan. Set the mushrooms and onion aside while you grill your haloumi.

Grill your haloumi in a frying pan over a medium heat until golden on both sides (about 2 mins on each side.) If you are a multi-tasking genius you could fry your mushrooms, onions and haloumi at the same time!

Grilling mushrooms and making raspberry ketchup

Then stack your burger together.

Mushroom on the bottom, haloumi slices on mushroom, onion on haloumi, ketchup, tomato (if you must) rocket (mayo on the top bun).

Serve immediately. I like this with some sweet potato chips (for the recipe, look at Sandra's blog entry)but the burgers are pretty filling by themselves.

I made these for my lovely and vegetarian friend Nathalie's birthday last year, here's a picture of her eating one.

I suggest that you give these a whirl. You won't be disappointed. If you're looking for a less expensive option try Sandra's version of the recipe on her blog.

So, I invite you to try making some of your own ketchup. I also have a delicious recipe for mango ketchup right here, you're going to love it. I promise.

I'll pick you up when you're feeling down (cheese, kale and pasta bake)

2012-02-24T07:08:00.000-08:00

Every now and then we have a bad week. Recently my friend Kate had one of these weeks. I mean, it wasn't just her, but she had some difficult stuff going on at school. We teachers tend to care too much about our students, it tends to mean that if anything bad or sad happens to someone we teach we feel very bad for them and their families. I'm not going to go into details, but Kate was feeling weight on her shoulders a few weeks ago. Here's some science that I prepared to demonstrate how Kate felt:

So I decided that Kate needed a Friday night pick me up, a boost of her favourite foods all in one dish. So I designed this: cheese and kale gnocchi bake (adaptable to just a plain old cheese and kale pasta bake.)

Here's a picture I took...

Okay, so I made my own gnocchi (like this or this), it's pretty intense, but it is delicious. The strong cheese, the bitterness of the kale, the nutmeg that cuts through it all. Oh my. OH MY.

cheese and kale pasta bake

Serves 6-8

you need:

3 tbsp plain flour

40g butter

3 cups milk

250g blue cheese

1/4 cup grated parmesan

1/8 tsp ground nutmeg

6 cups cooked macaroni or penne or gnocchi

2 cups shredded kale

salt and pepper

You:

Preheat your oven to 200C.

In a large frying pan over a medium heat, melt your butter, then stir in your flour, allow to reduce slightly and go paler.

Whisk in your milk a little at a time to avoid the mixture going lumpy, allow the mixture to thicken a little before adding each new lot of milk.

When all the milk is added simmer the sauce, stirring fairly regularly, reducing to a thick sauce, so it coats the back of a spoon well, then, while still on a low heat, crumble in the blue cheese, allow it to melt through, add the parmesan and stir through. Remove from the heat.

Stir the nutmeg through the sauce and season to taste.

Place a layer of pasta (half of it) in a large baking dish, scatter half of the kale across the top, then pour over half of the cheese sauce, place the rest of the pasta over the top of this, then scatter the remaining kale over the top, top with the sauce.

Bake this for 20-30 minutes until starting to go golden brown in patches on the top. Serve immediately (you might want to serve it with a fresssshhhh salad of some description)

I really enjoyed this little chestnut of a pasta bake. It's easy and delicious and also delicious. It brightended Kate's day. Maybe it could brighten yours, but you'll never know unless you try it... go on, I dare ya. DARE YA.

getting love bites (how to make chocolate soft centred puddings)

2012-02-21T22:08:00.000-08:00

Hey it's a Sweet Adventures Blog Hop!

So... I might be a little late with this blog entry, I really did mean to have it all done and dusted by Monday. Except I just didn't. Instead I got involved in presenting at the wonderful Less is More Festival. I taught some classes on how to make raspberry ketchup and mango ketchup and then some mushroom haloumi burgers with said raspberry ketchup. I'll put the recipe up soon, but it's pretty similar to this recipe of mine that my lovely friend Sandra put up the other day *blush* - I'm pretty flattered.

Anyway, you may remember, back a while ago when I talked about the upcoming February Sweet Adventures Blog Hop... I told you that the theme was 'love at first bite," the I raved about how I didn't believe in Valentine's Day and thought consumerism was embarrassing. Anyway, I did promise that I'd write Dinosaur Jack and all my friends a love letter in the form of a recipe... so here we go:

Dear people I know and love,

I made this chocolate soft centred pudding for you, so that you could know that you matter. You matter a lot. Thank you for being wonderful. Thank you for listening to my rants and making me feel important and eating my food and spending time with me when I needed you to and respecting it when I couldn't spend time with you. I love you in many forms, but today I love you in this form:

This is a dish that is simple and delicious and easily to make you'll love it. unless you're chocolate intolerant. if so: I am so sorry. Also: is that a thing? I kind of a stole this recipe from Stephanie Alexander's The Cook's Companion, I've been making it for years and these are perfect EVERY TIME. Thank you Stephanie, you diabolical genius!

Do you own this? You should.

So I'm going to share this recipe with you, just so you know, everyone I've ever cooked it for has adored it. It's kind of my signature, stand-by dinner party dessert. It's so easy and tasty. I made these just yesterday for Dinosaur Jack in my kitchen. Here's how it went down:

chocolate soft centred puddings (chocolate lava cakes) with raspberry coulis

makes 6

You need:

170g butter

160g dark cooking chocolate

1/3 cup castor sugar

3 eggs

3 egg yolks

1/2 tsp vanilla essence

1/3 cup plain flour + a little extra

For the coulis

1 cup of frozen raspberries (or fresh if you can afford it!)

1/2 tsp vanilla essence

1/3 cup castor sugar

You:

Use 10g of the butter to grease individual metal moulds, cupcake tins probably won't work. You could make these in ramekins, but you won't be able to to turn them out, then, you'll have to serve them IN the ramekins. My moulds are about 7-10 cm in diameter on the top.

Coat the buttered surface of the mould (the easiest way to do this is to put a little flour in , roll it around the mould until its all stuck, then bang the side of the mould to get rid of excess flour. It'll look something like this:

Then put your butter and chocolate in a glass or metal bowl over a pot with some lightly boiling water on the stove, stir this gently until it's melted and well combined.

Before:

After:

Remove the bowl from the pot and set aside to cool slightly.

Preheat the oven to 160C.

Meanwhile, Combine your eggs and sugar in a mixing bowl.

Beat with a hand mixer until pale, thick and frothy:

Sift in the 1/3 cup of flour, then beat this in until well combined.

Finally, pour in your slightly cooled chocolate mix, beat this in and keep beating until the mixture is thick and glossy.

Divide your mixture between the 6 moulds (I only made half the amount so here are my 3 little puddings):

Bake for 12-14 minutes until the tops are just set, it won't look like CAKE, but it will be firm to touch (not runny.)

While your puddings are baking, prepare your coulis.

Either: blitz everything together in a blender (then put through a sieve if you don't like pips).

Or: force your raspberries through a sieve with the back of a spoon, scraping off the puree from the bottom of the sieve at the end. Then mix in the remaining ingredients.

Your puddings need to be served almost as soon as you take them out of the oven.

Run a butter knife gently around the inside edge of your moulds to loosen your puddings (so they'll turn out easily), place the plate you intend to serve on face down on top of a mould. Holding both the mould and the plate together flip them so that the mould is upside down on the plate.

Using the back of the knife, bang the bottom of the mould to loosen the pudding, then slowly and gently pull the mould off, pulling it straight upwards, keeping the pudding in tact.

Drizzle with the coulis. You might want to serve it with some cream or ice cream. In this case, I served it with cookies and cream ice cream and it was delicious.

Pictorial evidence of deliciousness

So, that's the end of my recipe-love-letter. I hope you feel lovelier after reading it! I hope that the loves of my life know that they are loved and lovely and loveable.

(schmaltz much?)

Dear people I don't know and love,

I hope you didn't feel unloved when you read that entry. That wasn't my intention. I wrote this recipe for you too, to make for the people that you know and love. Because I believe in food and cooking and community and chocolate. Because I'm such a freaking idealist. Because this is such an easy recipe, but the effect is LIKE WHOA.

Maybe if we all keep sharing it one day someone who knows and loves me will make it for me again and some kind of love cycle will be complete. Wouldn't that be amazing and awesome?

If you're sick of the schmaltzy romantic sentiments echoing throughout this entry... it's kind of your bad luck... maybe you should stop reading the blog of an idealist food/life lover.

Love,

The Kitchen Crusader.

P.S Just in case you wanted one more look at the melting deliciousness that falls from the centre of these puddings... here you go:

melting deliciousness

And if you didn't, bad luck.

Guacamole discoveries of significant deliciousness

2012-02-17T05:48:00.000-08:00

A brief story about some Mexican food I made...

pictorial evidence of said Mexican food

...Last night my friend Kate and I discovered a technique to make guacamole significantly more delicious. This was largely because we were eating burritos and making the guacamole our-freaking-selves.

Dinosaur Jack was a little bamboozled by what I purchased to make burritos. There were the tortillas, some avocados, beans and onions but....

There were no spice mix packets, how could we possibly make burritos now? "Ummm... we're going to make our own spice mixes...?" I said.

"Oh. Yeah." He looked disappointed, somehow let down... but he shouldn't have been because the burritos were delicious. Also and in addition he has since claimed that he was clearly joking and always knew that there would be no spice mixes and that I can't take a joke. I prefer my version of events and seeing as he refuses to write any blog entries using the amazing and incredible gift that I bought him:

that's right: it cuts you DINO SANDWICHES (how ludicrous)

...I guess you'll have to go on my version of events.

At another time and in another place I'll give you my recipe for a a good bean based sauce for burritos, but today I'm going to share with you our guacamole epiphany.

Here's the secret: smoked paprika + tequila.

Wanna know more?

Significantly delicious guacamole

makes about 2 cups worth

You need:

3 ripe med sized avocados

the juice of 1 lime

2 tsp tequila

1 tbsp sour cream (suggested but not essential)

1 spring onion, thinly sliced

1/2 a red chilli, finely chopped

1/4 of a small red onion, finely chopped

1/2 a tomato, quire finely diced

a handful of fresh coriander, chopped (optional)

1 finely chopped red paprika, or 1/2 a small red capsicum

1/4 tsp of smoked paprika

salt and pepper

Right before serving you:

Remove the avocado flesh from the avocados, using a fork, mash this together with the lime juice, sour cream and tequila until quite smooth.

Mix the remaining ingredients (except the salt and pepper) gently through the avocado.

Season to taste, you might also need to add a little more smoked paprika or lime juice at this stage, depending on your taste.

That's IT! Serve it as a dip for corn chips, or put it on a toast!

Do you have any little twists on an old favourite that you've discovered makes the dish significantly more delicious? If so- I want to hear about it! (Look at how demanding I am).

Also... here's a picture of my semi-filled burrito pre-folding. You should be jealous... it was delicious.

announcing announcements and other things (The February Sweet Adventures Blog Hop is nigh!)

2012-02-09T21:49:00.000-08:00

*please don't be offended by any of the ranting you're about to read...

This is a a month that houses that hideous day of forced commercial romantic gesture, Valentine's Day, so it does seem fitting that we loosely relate the hop to all things sweet, sappy and romantic.

Right now you're probably thinking: this lady is a bitter old spinster who clearly has 27 cats and yells at small children to get off her lawn because she is loveless and betrayed and single. This is untrue, except for maybe the yelling at small children thing, but otherwise, untrue. I actually have a boyfriend. I actually just don't really like Valentine's Day. I would like to think that if Dinosaur Jack wanted to demonstrate his affection he wouldn't need the pressure of a day and my potential scorn to do so, he'd just do it. Anyway. He's relieved that I'm not a Valentine's girl, I think it takes the pressure off, also... he's just not the sappy type.

Maybe one of the reasons I'm kinda of not about Valentine's Day is that I believe in showing people that we care about them every single day of ever. Not just the people we are in a romantic relationship with but every person we care about. That's why I love the topic of this months' BLOG HOP- because for me... I show people I love them by cooking for them. I know: I'm an idealist, but I'd love to make sure that for my friends and family and boyfriend... they know that I love them with not just the first bite, but every bite afterwards...

... this month's Sweet Adventures Blog Hop topic is: LOVE AT FIRST BITE. You can interpret it however you want, write it as a Valentine's Day special, or write about a dessert that you just LOVED the first second you tasted it. Or write about it like I'm going to... about how you show your love through food. I might not believe in Valentine's Day, but I certainly believe in love... and not just the romantic kind. So... for this Blog Hop I'm going to write a recipe that's a love letter, not only to Dinosaur Jack, but also to some of my lovely and closest friends... to Jayne and Nathalie and Kate and Kale and Claire and Coz... and also to Cassie, my lovely friend all the way over in London, who I miss horribly. This is for all of you.. and to all my friends unmentioned... it's for you as well. P.S Schmaltz alert:

So hey, you, blog-reader! Have you ever thought about blogging a recipe about a dessert you love, for someone you love? It so totally doesn't have to be romantic, maybe it's to say thank you to someone for being amazing and lovely and amazing and lovely, or maybe it's just because you want to share you love of food with the internet and its millions/billions of hungry eyes. If so, then this is the blog hop for you! You can get involved by posting a recipe on or in the week following the 20th of February and linking it up to Nic from Dining with Stud's blog hop entry... Go on, you know it'll be super fun and amazing.

Now I just have to work out what I'm going to make... any suggestions would be great, especially given that dinosaur Jack is one of those rare breed of people who just isn't that into desserts... as a child he preferred carrots sticks and cheese to sweet treats... what a weirdo. The rest of my friends are far less taste-ology weird, though. Seriously, though: I need ideas. Oh god I need ideas.

xx KC

Cafe Crusades: Mixed messages from Hobart Street Deli

2012-02-03T06:55:00.000-08:00

I haven't done a review in a while. I am sorry. I really am,but these things happen. I was largely distracted by doing some other blogentries and a few other things. Okay, maybe I've also been a bit lazy.

So here's me making up for that and apologising: I'm sorry.Please accept this as my apology, one of my best discoveries for coffee andcake of late: Hobart Street Deli.

Hobart Street Deli is in suburban Mount Hawthorn, it'sopposite a park and consequently a pretty family-orientated space.

Pram sized room between tables!

I had been to Hobart Street Deli on multiple occasionsbefore with mulitple different friends for breakfast and I've had mixed experiences.

Rhubabr and something (maybe ricotta?) muffin with Brendan and Roz

They have decent coffeeand do the simple stuff really well, their big breakfast (called bratwurstplayground) is reportedly tasty, though I've never had it. The french toastwith coconut and marscarpone was pretty good...

the corn bread with salmon was pretty good...

and the first time I had thehaloumi fritters with beetroot pesto was delicious. However, every other timeI've had it I've struggled to eat it.

A picture of the first one I had (delicious) the most recent ones haven't had the haloumi separate like this... :(

There was too much raw onion, not enoughhaloumi and the flavour was a little sour. It's very disappointing, because itreally was so delicious the first time I had it. Consequently, even thoughHobart Street Deli is near my house I'd kind of written it off as aconsistently good cafe option, UNTIL...

We went there for coffee and cake. Oh MY GOODNESS. Thesecakes aren't necessarily as beautiful as some of the other cakes you'll see atcafes, but they are designed for taste and texture, CLEARLY. All their cakeswere lovely, but the gluten free-options were my favourite. Their almond orangecake (which is very common in cafes Perth-over) was the best orange and almondcake we've had so far, unanimously. The texture was fantastic.

The chocolatealmond cake was also a sensation....

The other cakes/slices we had were pretty tasty, this wasthe pistachio and lemon one...

This was a macadamia and chocolate one...

After coffee we took the boys (Ianto and Syd) across to thepark across the road and lounged with the other parents and their kids, peoplethere were drinking take-away coffees from Hobart Street Deli and it waslovely. If you have kids I totally recommend it... if you don't have kids it'sa pretty lovely place for coffee and cake, and a good solid place for breakfastif you don't get the haloumi patties, or fritters or whatever.

Fooling around with iced coffees...

I know that Hobart Street Deli has some very passionatefollowers on urbanspoon, and I know it has some pretty vocal haters.

I canunderstand both perspectives, but I agree with the former more, I don't thinkthat a couple of inconsistencies is worth writing a place off entirely. Theyreally are a great place for coffee and cake, they have nice décor, greatnatural light and TRUCKS above the doorway!

And their cold drinks are served with the cutest PAPER STRAWS! Oh retro-ness!

The staff have always been perkyand friendly with me and if the haloumi fritter thing is the worst thing theyhave going for them, then maybe we can just ignore it and eat cake instead.

did you know: I do stuff? (a catch-up on what's been going on and pics of the wedding cake!)

2012-01-28T18:47:00.000-08:00

Everyone always says to me: oh you're a teacher, those holidays must be lovely. Anyone who knows me usually guffaws into their food/coffee/open palm. This is because I can't sit still. I actually very rarely use my holidays AS HOLIDAYS. I usually sign myself up for any number of a million things, both related to my job and not and often find myself a week and a half out from the end of the summer holidays wondering where the hell they have gone. This is because I am a loser who hates saying no to things, especially if I really want to do them.

This holidays I have been writing some sample exam answers, researching TS Eliot for Year 12 Lit, reading the texts I have to teach this year, written lots of blog entries, made a wedding cake and finally, a week out from the end of the holidays finally went away and may have actually relaxed, probably accidentally. You can read about the holiday part of my holiday here.

Hold up, rewind, did you just say you MADE A WEDDING CAKE? Yes I did, co-crusader, well spotted. You might remember me mentioning previously that my lovely friends Brendan and Roz had asked me to make their wedding cake. What a huge honour.

Making a wedding cake is a pretty time expensive exercise, but oh my is it rewarding! The feeling I had at 9 thirty on the morning of the wedding as I looked upon that finished, decorated wedding cake is so difficult to describe. I was pretty close to ecstatic, exhausted, semi-maniacal ecstasy.

You can find the recipe I used here for the red velvet wedding cake. The red looked really stunning against the whiteness/irovyness of the fondant. It was lovely.

The amount of ingredients was pretty shocking for me. I used 12 times the recipe from that blog entry. Here's a shot of SOME of the ingredients I used. The box on the right IS ALL FONDANT. I had to get more red food dye (that wasn't even nearly enough) and heaps more milk. I kinda had to cook it in batches because I needed to reuse cake pans and also my oven wasn't big enough for lots of cakes all at one time.

Half of the butter that went into the whole cake. Mmmm excess.

The food dye situation... compared to the vanillas extract situation.

The redness. Oh the redness. Of the cake mix (well part of it).

Yeah I had to mix some of it in a casserole pot because I didn't have enough big mixing bowls.

The first turn out... this was a little stressful. Okay really stressful. There are 3 batches of the cake mix in just this one cake pictured here... THE BASE CAKE.

Ignore the scrappy background, I didn't care too much about aesthetics by this stage... here are the sizes of the 3 tiers. There were actually 2 of each of these cakes, we did a double layer of each one and put cream cheese icing between the 2 cakes of each tier.

Okay, around 10pm when we were doing the assembly my camera ran out of batteries. So there are no photos of the painstaking process that Dinosaur Jack went through to cut every cake tier to exactly the same height (it involved skewers and a tape measure and a bread knife... and a lot of slow breathing and squinting). There are not photos of me sticking dowel through cake tiers to stabilise the cake (which I'll do some time again soonish to show you how). There are also no photos of me rolling out fondant at midnight, or the fun process of decorating the cake (I'm serious! It was great!), pinning ribbons, getting the flowers just right, that was definitely my favourite part. However, here's a picture you may have seen before of me with my cake at the actual wedding...

Now, here are some actually lovely pictures of the cake, mainly because they weren't taken by me. They were taken by Brendan and Roz's lovely wedding photographer, Jun Song. He's been so lovely about me using his pictures, what a dude! You should check out his facebook page right here.

The flowers we used were from etsy and they were made out of CORN HUSKS! How cool is that? Look at these things, how gorgeous are they? They got lots of comments too. Good comments.

So there you go, co-crusaders, I made a wedding cake! It was a lot of fun and something I felt very honoured to be asked to do so. I'm so glad I didn't stuff it up. Wouldn't that have been awkward. Just to finish up Here are a few more of Jun's great pictures of the cake!

And finally a picture I took (that's why it's not as good) of the cake when it was served. (look at the icing and cake contrast!):

I know there wasn't a recipe in that entry, I'm sorry. I hope you enjoyed it anyway. I promise I'll post a new recipe soon.

-KCxx

a preview of food to come and a moghrabieh salad (moghrabieh, roasted tomato and chickpea salad)

2012-01-27T01:33:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry. I've been a little busy of late. A lot of thingshappened fast and I kind of had to try to get some work done and then try torelax. I've been doing just that and I'm not going to apologise. I've justspent the most glorious week with a my lovely friends in Dunsborough. We did a whole heap ofreading and some swimming, some winery visiting and a whole heap of foodexploration.

here's some proof in the pudding... or photographs... or something:

While we were away I set myself a culinary challenge while I was a way thathopefully you will benefit from...

What was it?

Everyday I had to use a different ingredient from theMargaret River region in a dish.

I know I'm going to sound like a hopelesslyromantic swoony food crusher, but it was just lovely to be able to experimentwith such good quality produce.

I hope you're excited about this, but if you aren't...here's a preview of what's coming up in the next few months...

(chicken) chorizo, roast tomato and kalamata olive risotto

haloumi and dukkah Lamb burgers

slow roasted tomatoes with grilled ricotta and grilled chorizo

scrambled eggs with slow baked tomatoes

(venison) boerewors rolls with tomato and cashew jam

Oven baked venison wraps, filled with brie and baked mushroom with honey baked purple carrots and parsnip and potato mash

crumpets with honeycomb

Yeah. It was alright. In the mean time... I made a salad! It's pretty warm in Perth at the moment, so salads that can serve as a lunch/ small meal are kind of important. Yesterday was Australia Day. I don't have a lot of time for Australia Day most of the time, there's a little too much enthusiastic flag waving and for some reason large groups of the community seem to link it to an idea like "fit in or f*** off"... which seems a little anti-multiculturalism to me... to Australia day. I think maybe it's just that there are different things that make us proud to be Australian. Maybe mine are less prominent, for example it made my heart swell to hear Geoffrey Rush talking about the amazing nominees for Australian of the year, he was a little giddy with pride that all those great people came from Australia. It also always makes me a little swoony to see the footage of people from all different nationalities become citizens on the news. Anyway... the main pro of Australia Day for me is: The Triple J Hottest 100. Yesterday my lovely friends Jayne and Matt hosted a barbecue for the Hottest 100 and so I made a salad. That's right, all of that long explanation actually just came down to that. I made a salad for a barbecue. I can't blame you if you feel cheated for having read all of that... sorry.

I made a salad using some odds and ends from my pantry and turns out: odds and ends= deliciousness! (Thank goodness!) My favourite odd/end that I had lying around was some moghrabieh, it's like REALLY BIG COUS COUS. It gave great texture to the salad, but the salad would also work with cous cous or Israeli cous cous (a mid size between cous cous and moghrabieh). Moghrabieh should be available from one of those stores that sells grains and dried beans and stuff, you've probably got one at your local markets. Around here Kakulas Brothers/Sister would probably be a fairly safe bet... or The Angry Almond at the Station Street markets. If it's going to be a hot day, prepare this in the morning to avoid having your oven on during the heat of the day and causing you to die of over-heating and hotness in your kitchen.

Serve with lamb, kangaroo (I'd suggest adapting this kangaroo recipe) or chicken...

Moghrabieh, Roasted Tomato and Chickpea Salad

Serves 4 as a side salad

You need:

1 can of chickpeas, drained

1 cup of moghrabieh or cous cous

Juice of ½ a lemon

1 ½ tbsp olive oil

1 punnet of cherry or grape tomatoes, halved

1 tbsp white sugar

a big pinch of salt +some extra to season

¼ cup chopped parsley

¼ of a medium red onion, finely chopped

2 tsp honey

2 tbsp dukkah

You:

Preheat the oven to 200C.

Place the tomatoes into a baking tray, sprinkle with thesugar, the salt and ½ tbsp of the olive oil.

Bake for 40 minutes, until the tomatoes are starting tobrown on the edges, they taste better with bit of dark colour!

While this is baking, prepare your moghrabieh/cous cous.Place it into 3 cups of cold water and bring to the boil on the stove, thenlower to a simmer.

Simmer until cooked through, about 20 mins for moghrabieh,possibly longer, but only 10 minutes for the cous cous. Drain, then stirthrough the tbsp of olive oil, honey and lemon juice. Set aside.

When the tomatoes are done, stir them, the onion and thechick peas through the moghrabieh. Alloweverything to cool, you might even want to refrigerate until you need the salad(up to 12 hours).

Mix the parsley and dukkah through the rest of the salad.Season to taste.

Hope you love it!
-KCxx

This recipe was totally featured on:

fast home-made cooked breakfasts and some personal food politics (scrambled eggs with baked cherry tomatoes)

2012-01-18T04:27:00.000-08:00

Some days just call for a cooked breakfast, don't they? Alazy Saturday, or a breakfast on holiday while everyone else is at work,working.

However, it's exactly days like this that we don't feel likedealing with the piles of dishes that a cooked breakfast always seems toentail. I know I've often been guilty of just skipping the dish scenarioentirely and eating breakfast out.

This year, though, I'm trying to spend less money and cookmore often/creatively to do so. I want to use better quality, fresher, moreethically produced ingredients... which I know will be more expensive, butworth it. Consequently, Dinosaur Jack and I have decided to cut back on ourmeat intake, trying to only eat meat 3 times a week, but ensuring it's goodmeat. We're going to cook more and eat out less often and we're going to tryand use what's in the house rather than buying new sets of ingredients all thetime for recipes.

Some straight talking about ethical eating (bear with me, please)...

A quick tip: if you use free-range, organic eggs/meat and locally produced seasonal veggies/fruit you won't regret the difference you'd find in texture, colour and taste, it's worth the more expensive price tag. I promise.

For me, it's really important to put my money where my mouth is on this one. Every time I buy a product my money is supporting the industry that produced that product and the people who sold it to me. So if I would rather not live in a world where factory farming is acceptable, then I'd better not support the factory farming industry by buying the products that come from that industry. “Barn laid eggs” are not free-range, not even close, “cage eggs” mean that chicken has never seen the light of day and lives in a 30cm x 30cm cage for it's whole life etc. If I don't believe in bad practices for the sake of less expensive food... then it's my role as a consumer to be choosy about what I eat. Most of the time it's not a big sacrifice, free-range (+anti-biotic-free + hormone free) meat and eggs aren't that much more expensive, and when I think about where that difference in expense is going, it makes paying for it that much easier. I also try to buy from local producers/ local businesses as much as possible, because it means my food is less likely to have travelled huge distances to get to me (contributing to carbon emissions) and also be far less fresh than stuff that came from WA. Plus- I want to support my local/state economy!

So look, how you eat and what you eat is totally up to you, your choice. However, I have found these food choices to have had a really positive impact on my life, I feel healthier and I have a great relationship with my local butcher. Dinosaur Jack has lost weight. I've started making my own bread and it's FUN! Imagine doing that with your kids! Or finding yourself a good local baker! I shop at the markets and get fresh, seasonal produce. It's fun to think about what I'm going to make with the new produce I see every week. I know we all lead busy lives and sometimes it feels easier to just go to the supermarket and buy everything, but it's not that much more work to do what I do. Afterall, I'm a High School teacher, with a lecturing/tutoring job on the side, who writes food blogs and is currently embroiled in the writing of a sample answers guide, does at least 2-3 hours worth of Literature research each week and about 6 hours of marking over the weekends, plays beach volleyball, futsal and rock climbs, maintains a relationship and entertains at least once a week. I don't have kids, and I know they can be a huge time sap, but if I can fit these food choices into my life maybe you can too? Afterall, what better message can we deliver to our kids than the importance of healthy, ethical eating and understanding where our food comes from? I know this has been a long and very ethical rant, but it's the new year, and I'm pretty idealistic about 2012, whatever the Mayans may say, so maybe you could cut me some slack? And maybe just have a think about what I said and consider the small changes you could make to your eating habits too? At the end of this entry I'm going to post some links to my favourite WA producers (I promise I've received no commissions on this) and if you're a WA resident you might want to check them out. If you're not, investigate what goes on in your state, there are bound to be some great producers near you too!

Now that I've told you about our food resolutions... howdoes this relate to cooked breakfasts? Well, obviously breakfasts are an areawhere we can save money and use more ethically produced food by not eating out for breakfast as much and being more choosy about what we put into the breakfasts we make. A good cooked breakfast, with coffee will set you backabout $25 per person in Perth. Is it really that justifiable to outlay fiftydollars when we could easily make breakfast and coffee for 2 people for underten dollars? And if we get it right and simple it doesn't have to be a dishwashing nightmare, or a big challenge. Here's my favourite, simple combinationfor breakfast, ready in 15 minutes and with only a baking tray a sauce pan, andthe two serving plates as washing up!

I'm going to give you some good ideas for scrambled eggswith a bit of difference and teach you how to make tasty and simple bakedvine-ripened tomatoes. However, before we get started I'd like to talk to youabout one of my major money saving devices this year. It looks a bit like this:

Actually it looks exactly like that. It's my stove topespresso maker. I'm going to use it a lot this year. I had to have a pretty serious conversationwith myself about coffee expenses recently. Have you ever thought about howmuch money you spend on take-away coffees? I'd say that last year I bought atleast one a day... and I like good coffee, so often that avegared out to about40 dollars a week. On top of that take-away coffee is very rarely fair-tradeAND unless your coffee shop uses biocups the take-away coffee cups are notsuper great for landfill... let alone the plastic tops!

Stove top espresso makers making a pretty flipping goodcup of coffee. For much less money, much less environmental impact and I cancontrol where/how my milk and coffee is produced/bought, by choosing whichbrand I use. So, even though take-away coffee is pretty cool, this year it'sdown to one or two a week.

Now, you can add anything you want to this combo, I've hadit with avocado and bacon (free-range), for example... but bear in mind that each new cookedproduct may well add another pan to wash up.
My current favourite thing to put through scrambled eggs is: Dukkah. It's this middle eastern spice mix that's just great for dipping and is seriously gorgeous through scrambled eggs. I've previously done an entry on scrambled tofu with dukkah, but this is just as effective.

Dukkah Scrambled Eggs with Roasted Cherry Tomatoes
Serves 2

You need:
4 eggs
2 tbsp milk or cream
1 tbsp olive oil + some extra for drizzling
1 tbsp dukkah
Some organic cherry/grape tomatoes (about 10) preferably still on the stalk (just because it looks sexy)
Salt + pepper
Some nice bread for toasting (as many slices as you fancy!)

You:

1. Preheat the oven to 200C.

2. Line a baking tray with baking paper. Place the tomatoes on this, then drizzle with a little oil and season.

3. Bake for 10 minutes until the skins have split.

4. Toast your toast and set aside or place in the oven until needed.

5. While this is happening, whisk the eggs, milk/cream and 1 tbsp of oil together, pour into a frying pan over a medium heat.

6. Don't move the eggs too quickly, you should move them occasionally, so you don't burn them, but you let bits properly solidify before you mess with them, I usually wait at least 30 seconds before my first pan scrape. At this point, sprinkle the dukkah across the top of the egg mix, then wait another 30 seconds or so before using a slow folding motion to fold it in, once.

7. You really should try to avoid moving the eggs about too much, move them every 20-30 seconds in a folding motion until they're done to your taste.

8. By this stage: your tomatoes should be ready! Serve up! Place your toast on the plate, spoon the egg over the top and put the tomatoes to the side. Drizzle with some olive oil and maybe sprinkle some parsley over it. DONE!

Variation: Pesto Scrambled Eggs with Roasted Cherry Tomatoes

You need:
Same ingredients as above except use 1 tbsp of basil pesto instead of dukkah

You:

do the same process, except at step 6 when you should scatter the pesto instead of the dukkah over the eggs.

Live in WA? Great! Here are some of my favourite brands that are produced ethically and right here in our own state!

Eggs by Ellah, really ethically produced in WA. Great quality product with a good rationale.

Baldivis Free-Range Eggs. They don't have a website, but you can buy them from some IGAs. They're always good quality and if you live in Perth that's a pretty short commute time!

Perth-based Sunnydale Dairy (produces kickass non-homogonised milk, icecream, yoghurt etc and puts it it glass so they can RE-USE your bottles!)

Bannister downs milk and cream. Produced in WA, packed in environmentally friendly containers

Plantagenet pork, available from good butches + some supermarkets, farmed in WA RSPCA approved, free range, free of anti-biotics, free of hormones (and great pork belly!)

Mt Barker Chicken and turkey products, WA based + farmed, RSPCA approved, all the free range and anti-biotic free and hormone free stuff and REALLY widely available!

There are so many more, but these are my mainstays. You can get them from lost of places, IGAs stock a lot of them and both of the big super-markets stock Plantagenet and Mt Barker, but your butcher does too, probably. Sunnydale is available from a few markets and their store front in Nedlands.

single-origin chocolatescapades and vacant lot figventures (no-bake fig and chocolate tart)

2012-01-15T18:01:00.000-08:00

OH MY:

It's a blog hop, ladies and gentlemen!
Sweet Adventures, those crazy dessert divas, Jennifer, JJ, Nic, Christina and I are back to smash a sweet blogging project out of the park... and you can take part! Got a chocolate recipe you want to share with the world? Blog about it by the end of the week and link yourself up! You can read all about it on Christina's blog entry, right here...

And seeing as how it's a blog hop, it makes sense that I've been hopping all over the freaking place, on all kinds of adventures to source my ingredients.
Firstly there was my friend Lisa's discovery of a laden fig tree in the vacant lot across from her house. She came buzzing over to mine one hot afternoon last week, mumbling something about fig trees and excitedly gesticulating, so what else could I do but grab a bag and drive over there with her?

I dropped back just yesterday to get a few more for this chocolate recipe... because figs and dark chocolate go like Bert and Ernie... wait is that a good example? Big Ears and Noddy maybe? Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum? (What's with the semi-suggestive collection of male "partners" here... weird). Anyway, they go. The end. But not really, because there's so much more to tell you about!

But WAIT! That's not the only trip I made for this blog entry, the other was certainly far longer, but also: much more exciting (yes, more exciting than vacant lot figs!) This weekend just gone co-Perth-food-blogger The Blue Apocalypse and I headed down to Margaret River for the weekend. If you don't know about Margaret River, do some research, it's the glorious food and wine region of Western Australia.

Right not you might be thinking: fair enough, but why would you go down this weekend, don't you have a chocolate blog-post to write? We certainly did, but we also weren't going to miss out on an opportunity to source our chocolate from our lovely friend Nadia's work, Gabriel Chocolate. Nadia is totally an actual chocolatier and she's way too excited about her workplace. Gabriel Chocolate has only opened 3months ago, but it's super interesting. It certainly really helped to have someone like her showing us around and explaining everything. I never realised how simple the process of chocolate making is, but yet how complex it is. I'm not going to lie: I'm a little gushy about it. The Gabriel point of difference is that they make single sourced chocolate. Here's a bad photo I took of the place:

What is single sourced chocolate?

The blocks of chocolate that they sell have all got beans from ONE place in them. That means they only have one kind of beans and they were grown in one place.

Why the hell would you bother with that?

Maybe you should try some single sourced chocolate and get back to me with that one.... but here's a hint: the flavour gets affected. I never realised how much an effect the soil that a bean plant is grown in can effect the flavour of the chocolate it makes. And we're not talking a small amount, we're talking chocolate bars that have notes of cherry vs. chocolate bars that have strong flavours of smoked paprika... without anything actually being added to these bars to flavour them except the beans themselves. I was shocked. And it made me kind of angry that I had never known this before.

My favourite chocolate was from Java and it was a shocking smoky chocolate that reminded me of smoked paprika. It was chocolate with balls. Big ones. I couldn't believe that it tasted the way it did. WOW.

Gabriel's had this cute little map that shows where their different bars are sourced from and apparently it's painted in all the different colours that cacao beans come in or something. What, I was totally listening and not distracted by THE CHOCOLATE OF AMAZINGNESS. See, I took a picture:

Then I took another one:

Then I got distracted by the "nibs" I think they're the outer casing of the beans, but you can eat them! They're pretty savoury tasting, but really cool texture wise and Nadia had a chocolate mousse cake there which was topped with them so I bought me some to put on my own little chocolate creation.

See:

Then I got distracted by hot chocolate making... because they just put melted chocolate straight in it and I had to use all my concentration power not to drool on the bench top while I took photos...

And more photos:

And did some more drool resistance and took some more photos and then got to drink the hot chocolate, which was AMAZING.

Then I got distracted by ice-cream. This was peanut butter and chocolate. DROOOOL:

Then we went back to Nadia'a place and dipped into her small collection of chocolate related cook books:

Then she and her partner Cam made us the most amazing dinner and we drank amazing wine and ate VENISON WITH A CHOCOLATE SAUCE.

The next morning we went to the farmer's market and sauntered around amongst free-range, organic produce of amazingness and I took photos to prove it:

See?

Which we then took home and turned into a fresh, delicious breakfast. Amazing how good quality produce cooked simply makes unbelievably good food. Amazing that.

There were heaps more escapades but none of them are really chocolate related and I'm going to save them for another time, given you probably want to actually read my recipe sometime soon.

I kinda bought a lot of chocolate... this was mainly because I wanted to show my friends how much the flavour differs.It's a great party trick. I kind of recommend it.

For my recipe I decided to use the Rio Caribe 72% chocolate and the cacao nibs. But you can use any intense dark chocolate for this. I also wanted to use the port from one of my favourite value-for-money wineries in Margaret River, Driftwood. Which was inexplicably selling their pretty-decent port for $15.50 a bottle while we were down there... weird.

I got home from the 3 hour drive (props to The Blue Apocalypse who drove the whole way without a single complaint!) and it was HOT. I hadn't properly worked out how I was going to combine my flavours, but I knew I wanted to use the dark chocolate, the port and the figs... and I knew I wanted to make a tart. But the last thing I wanted to do was turn my oven on. It's summer. We need low labour, low heat and high results for goodness sake!

Fig and Chocolate Tart (no baking)

Serves about 12

You need:

for the base:

125g butter, room temperature

1 1/2 cups almond meal

1 cup cocoa powder (depending on how string the powder is... I used a pretty crappy brand)

250g plain chocolate biscuits (these work best:)

for the filling:

1 cup ricotta

500g marscarpone

400g 70-80% cocoa dark chocolate

2/3 cup of port

for the topping:

10 figs

juice of 1/2 a lemon

2 tbsp honey

1 tsbp cinnamon

You:

Blitz the biscuits, almond meal and cocoa in a food processor until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs... like this:

Add the butter and blitz it through until it's combined The mixture should stick together if you press it together... it should look like this:

Press the mixture into a greased tart, flan or cake pan. This pan has a diameter of 26cm, but a you've got some room to move, a little narrower or wider will still work. You need to press the mixture down hard so it's compact. Notice here how there is an indent on the corners of the pan? That's because I'm trying to avoid having really thick corners, so really press in at the edges, it can be a little lower than the rest of the base.

Place a plate over the tin and put it in the fridge to set for about 30 minutes to an hour.

While this is happening you need to make your filling. You can pre-prepare the base and the filling up to a day before, but the figs you can really only prepare an hour before use.

Blitz your ricotta and marscarpone together in a food processor or in a mixer. Set aside while you prepare the chocolate mixture.
Oooooh:

Put about 4-5cm of water in a sauce pan.

Put a glass/pyrex or metal bowl on top of the pot, the water should NOT be touching the base of the bowl. Bring the water to the boil, then lower to a simmer (low, steady bubbling). The put your chocolate and port into the bowl on top. Mixing all the time, melt the chocolate into the port. This is a technioque called DOUBLE-BOILING. It's good for chocolate because it ensure you don't burn it by having it too close to the flame. The set up looks like this (only this is my emptied bowl).

Remove the molten chocolate/port mixture from the heat and blitz into the ricotta/marscarpone straight away. Then refrigerate until the base is done with its refrigeration time. You will need to get the fillinfinto the base at least an hour before serving to allow it time to set.

About an hour before serving (or several if that suits you better!) Spoon your ricotta mixture into the tart base, the spread it out. Replace the plate onto the top of the tin and leave to refrigerate for an hour to 6 hours., whatever best suits.

About an hour before serving you also have to prep your figs, to do so, you slice them up, into something that looks aesthetic, then you prepare their simple marinade. You heat the honey for about 10 seconds in the microwave, so that it's thin and runny, then mix through the lemon juice and cinnamon. Drizzle this over your figs, cover and refrigerate for about an hour.

Just before serving top your tart with the figs. This will stop the figs from getting a bit too squishy and smooshing into the tart, ruining the aesthetics of EVERYTHING EVER. It also really helps if you have an artist food style savvy boyfriend like Dinosaur Jack to do this part for you... but you can't actually have him. He's mine. Find your own.

Very carefully remove the sides of the tin from your tart. This may take some careful manouvering. I usually place the base of the tin on a large glass or a couple of food tins to do this, it means I can pull the tin sides down without fiddling too much (gravity ftw!) If one of the sides comes off, it's not great catastrophe, just reswish it on and refrigerate for about 20 minutes (without the cake tn sides now) to get it reattached.

Slice it carefully with a sharp knife and use a cake slice to get it off the tin (be careful, the base needs a little gentleness, remember it's just butter holding those crumbs together!)

Serve by itself or with some double cream on the side. It's very rich, but summery-delicious. And definitely death-by-chocolate appropriate!

Want to try something different? Why not grill the figs slightly on a barbecue or under the grill with a bit of brown sugar for some caramelisation instead of having them fresh?

Well! I hope that wasn't too arduous! I'm sorry there was so much photo narrative going on there, my little co-crusaders, but I really wanted to share the story of the tart with you.

What's your favourite thing to match with chocolate? I like the freshness of the figs in this recipe, but I'm also a massive sucker for peanut butter or cardamom with pears and dark chocolate.

Hope your weekend was as lovely as mine, loves.

Over and out

-KCxx

Chocolate: the Ryan Gosling of the culinary world? (January Sweet Adventures Blog Hop)

2012-01-08T18:42:00.000-08:00

Oh chocolate. You are the loveliest of lovely things. Youmake me happy when skies are grey. If you want to see people at their mostindignant and shocked, don't tell them that your aunt and grandmother are thesame person, tell them you dislike chocolate. Just for kicks, you know?

It's amazing how people respond to those of us who don'tlike chocolate. Usually a statement such as this is followed by the question:

“Oh, are you allergic?”

“Ummm... no I just don't like it.”

This is usually followed by the following question:

“WHY?”

I think this must be because by and large chocolate is loved by almost everyone. It'skind of like the Ryan Gosling of everything culinary.

Okay, I know how lame I am.

But also: hilarious, AM I RIGHT?

P.S: If you don't know why this might be lame or hilarious you need to check out this meme site.

Seeing as how chocolate is such a well loved sweet thing, itreally was a no brainer for The Sweet Adventures Blog Hop to saunter into itswell trodden dessert midst and have a crack at challenging everyone and anyoneto write up their favourite chocolate based recipe... or invent something newand crazily decadent? Chocolate. Everything good and delicious from childhoodis chocolate.

So...the theme for the January hop is: Death by CHOCOLATE!

This month the lovely Christina is hosting the blog hop onher blog The Hungry Australian. If you want to get involved all you have to dois post up a new chocolate recipe between the 16^th of January andthe 23rd of January, and link it up to Christina's post (you'll find the instructions on her entry). It's super easy andtotally recommended and fun and filled with camraderie, but more importantly:filled with chocolate! Oh my!

For more information on this blog hop and The SweetAdvetures Blog Hops in general, you can head over to Christina's entry, sheexplains everything and is far more succinct and sensible than this littleKitchen Crusader.

If you want to see some of my previous chocolate inventions, check these out (sometimes the recipes are right at the end of the entry):

Deep Fried Chocolate Wantons

Some Brownie and Blondie recipes

Peanut Butter and Chocolate Cupcakes

Pear, Polenta and Dark Chocolate Cake

Orange and Chocolate Cakes

Chocolate, Sweet Potato, Red Wine Cake

Wow: so much chocolate already!

I hope to see you on the hop... and now: to try and come up with some kind of dastardly chocolate plan... I'm going to be using Gabriel's chocolate, which is produced in our very own South Western Australia... I'm totally excited about the ROAD TRIP I'm going on with The Blue Apocalypse to get it and the tour of the chocolate company! WATCH THIS SPACE!

Until then, over and out,

-KCxx

actually good gift ideas 101. Installment 1: non-tacky gifts for men

2011-12-30T18:46:00.000-08:00

I don't mean to boast, but I have been told that I am outstandingly excellent at gift buying. Ask anyone. Anyone that I've actually bought a gift for. What the hell would just any-old-one know?

Right now you're probably thinking: why is she bringing up gift buying NOW? It was Christmas like 3-5 days ago (slash however long ago it is depending on when you're reading this.)

And yes. I'm doing this now. While it's still fresh in my head. Because it could be a handy resource for you or your friends or colleagues or cat at a later date. Also because I think I'm thinking of starting a thing- a gift buying ideas website. But I need to see how much interest I get first.

I have always bemoaned the fact that I have so many MEN to buy for in my family and so few women. Women are easy to buy for. If all else fails just work out what jewelry they like and head down to somewhere glorious like kartique in Mount Lawley/ Fremantle (if you're lucky enough to live in Perth) and purchase something snazz (am I right? [Yes]).

But look: I can write on gifts for women later. They're not the ones that have us TEARING OUR HAIR OUT WITH FRUSTRATION. Are they?

And I find that websites with ideas for male gifts often seem a bit tacky. I don't want to buy important males in my life novelty items like boob aprons, at least not for a serious gift. I So I'm going to start with the men I bought presents for this Christmas and the gifts I bought them. Feel free to steal my ideas. They were ideas that came from much consideration and consideration.

Man 1: Brother. 25.

Outdoorsy.
Lives with parents but has own section of house.
Can be annoying.
But mostly just outdoorsy.
Likes beer.
Doesn't really cook.
Has new girlfriend.
No-one has met her.
Winning present: Framed Photographs.

FRAMED PHOTOGRAPHS. They are a godsend. I gave my father 2 last year as well. You can totally find out what your man of gift is into and get pictures of that. Most framing stores have got some good photographs that you can organise to get framed then and there (this is of course, relatively expensive) Otherwise find a photographer you like on-line and ask if you can order some of their photos in a fairly standard frameable size. This means you can BUY frames pre-made to fit the photos.

My lovely friend Duncan is a super-ace photographer (with this blog) and I couldn't recommend his work more, particularly for younger males. This year my brother got 3 frames and the following 3 photos (click to go to the site):

Man 2: Boyfriend. 26.

Otherwise known as Dinosaur Jack.
Otherwise known as Macca.
More outdoorsy than my brother.
Debateably.
Lives in board shorts.
Likes vintage stuff.
Hip hopper.
Travel addict.
I think he's in love with mohair.
Once had to get a tetanus shot after standing in a coat handger clip.
It was my coat hanger.
Winning present(s): 2 volumes of Preacher, Banksy Locations and Guides, Leather wrist wrap, Vintage Straight Razor.

Jesse Custer

Section 1: a couple of volumes from The Preacher Series (written by Garth Ennis)
I have never met a red-blooded, non-religious male who didn't love the Preacher Series. A messed up, crazy set of antics following a swearing, smoking preacher, Jesse Custer, after he discovers he has the power to make anyone obey his words. It's battles of heaven and hell and corruption and more corruption. And sex and guns and vampires and oh my God. It's like Milton's Paradise Lost got into an alcohol fuelled bar fight with some porn stars and somebody took pictures. ONLY SEXIER AND FAR LESS PC. It's got some pretty smart sassy writing too. It's not a series that just assumes its readers are stupid and like pictures of semi-naked women or guys shooting stuff. It assumes that they're clever and like those things.

This series is crack though, for guys. They can't put it down. You won't hear from them for a while. It's important to note that you have to read the volumes in order. The Preacher series is a cumulative narrative that builds over all of the volumes, in order to make sense of it you need information from the preceding volumes.

You have a few options:
1) (What I did )buy him the beginning few volumes (he'll buy the rest himself) (click the images to go to a store that sells em)

Gone to Texas (Vol 1)

Until the End of the World (Vol 2)

2) Obviously buy all 9 volumes (quite an outlay and relatively difficult to source as there's no package that I've ever seen)

3) There are also "books" of the series, which are several versions put together into one "book" (obviously more expensive than an individual volume and usually hard cover). You could get one to a few of these. You can click on the images below to get to a site that sells these...

Book 1

Section 2: Banksy Locations and Tours Guide

Oh my goodness guys: this exists! It's a book that has locations for Banksy street art all over the world, so if you know a travelling person/man who thinks street art is cool/knows who Banksy is: this is amazing.

click to go somewhere that sells it

Section 3: Man Jewelry (well sorta)

Chris and Jessica of C.Johanesen Studio do some amazing stuff for people of the xy variety. I really recommend checking them out. Masculine stuff that's classy and somewhat rustic looking. The wrist wrap bracelet that I got Macca has a cute Winnie the Pooh quote on it. But that's just because it fitted with us, there's a whole heap of stuff and you can get stuff with personalised messages too.

Section 4: Vintage Straight Razor (or why I win at girlfriend)

Image from dapper dean's etsy store, to go there click on the image

These are gorgeous. And dangerous (mostly they're still really sharp.) The one I got is from 1910 and I bought it from turnstyle in Northbridge. However, you can also buy them from etsy.com. There's just something really cool about owning something that may or may not have been used to shave people you don't know at least 100 years ago. Some people actually might use them... but I think Dinosaur jack just wants to look at his and tell it it's pretty. This was far and away the biggest winner of the gifts I gave Dinosaur Jack. He was super crushy on it. It was brought over to my parents' house on Christmas day and I think my dad was a little crushy about it too. Here's a link to vintage straight razors/related products on etsy. Classy, cool and containing a bit of history. Winning.

Man 3: Dad. 58.

Architect.
Handyman extraordinaire.
Like camping, hiking.
Doesn't talk a lot.
Is very mathsy smart from what I can tell.
Has almost everything he could possible need.
Takes everything apart.
Occasionally puts it all back together, but always in working order.
Winning Present(s): The Best Australian Science Writing 2011, Bodum Pavina Double Walled Glasses

Section 1: The Best Australian Science Writing 2011.
My dad is my major hair tearing-instigator. Aren't ALL fathers? What does he need? Nothing. Plus it's his birthday TWO WEEKS AFTER CHRISTMAS. Which means I have to come up with 2 gifts, in close succession.
However the benefit of this is: I get the difficult gift giving out of the way all in one go, like a bandaid.

He really doesn't have a lot of time to read so I try to only get him one or two books maximum, and try to choose books that could easily be read in installments (like collections of essays or articles). This year I found THIS LITTLE CHESTNUT:

click it to go to a site that sells it...

Yeah. He loves it.

Section 2: 8 Bodum Pavina Double Walled Glasses

These are pretty darned ace. I got some this year and I adore them. They are science, being useful (I know, who'd have thought, right?) They're insulated so you can put hot drinks (like coffee- if for example you had a coffee maker like... my dad does) in them and not burn your hands when holding them. They also retain the heat/coolness of a drink for longer.

Click to go to a store that sells them...

Hey! I want your ideas! What gifts did you buy the men in your life this year? Maybe we can compile a list of fabulous ideas so none of us will ever have to buy something tacky and awful and might stay away from the old cliches of alcohol or socks or barbecue implements.

exciting ways to zazz up mayonnaise (mayo mixers)

2011-12-28T06:15:00.000-08:00

Today we're making some cool mayonnaise mix-ups... and drinking cider while looking at Asian men driving on television:

Sometimes you suddenly realise that it's eight thirty andyou haven't eaten dinner yet. And the last thing you feel like doing iscooking. All you want to do is sit in front of the TV and not think and you've hardly got anything in your fridge.And then, from the depths of your freezer comes an epiphany

And quick smart you need you a dip for your chips. Right?These are some of my favourite mayomixers, they add a bit of a zing to your mayo, which is super useful forburgers or for fries and not a lot of work.

So this is what we had for dinner last night? Jelly? (that'swhat kids these days are saying instead of “jealous”... I only know thatbecause I'm cool like that.)

what we did for dinner tonight

Here are some ideas for mayo mixes... every option given isto mix with 1 cup of mayonnaise (I like the whole egg stuff).

Truffle Mayonnaise (this was our fave)

+2 tsp tuffle oil

Peri peri Mayonnaise

+2 tsp peri peri sauce (or whatever your spice buds canhandle)

Lime and TabascoMayonnaise

+½ tbsp lime juice

+¼ tsp tabasco sauce

Horseradish Mayonnaise

+3 tbsp horseradish cream

Serve with chips/wedges, or barbecue prawns (like the garlic prawns here) or on a burger (like this one).

Do you have any great mayo mix combinations? I'd love toknow all about it. Place your comments below!

Until next time: mayo and out.

KC xx

4 days later... everything stopped feeling like it was in fast forward. Whoa.

2011-12-26T01:41:00.000-08:00

Whoa! Woah there. Woah now. Whoa girl. I woke up a few days ago at nearly noon o-clock. And I thought: what kind of a loser, lazy person gets up at noon? Geez. I'd have not respect for a person like that.

And then I reflected on the situation. Did I feel like I had been hit like a truck because I had been hit by one?
All signs appeared to point to no. There were no tyre marks. The walls of my house were still intact and there was no tell-tale smell of deisel.

Was I merely lazy and pathetic? This also seemed semi-implausible, given the fact that I am a crazy-over-commitment-junkie who can only exist while mutli-tasking. Kind of like a shark can only live while it's swimming because of something to do with gills and oxygen and moving water or something. Yeah I totally know about that sort of science animal stuff. Lots. Stop judging me. If you really want to know you can ask Dinosaur Jack about that. He probably knows. But he can't multi-task... so who's the real winner here? Don't answer that. Unless you were going to say me. Then answer it. ANSWER IT.

Then I (long-windedly) realised that I was probably completely justified in my tiredness and exhaustion. In the previous 4 days I have made, iced and decorated a wedding cake, been in a minor car accident, been to the said wedding and prepared for and attended multiple Christmas events... all of which were lovely. So all in all: an incredibly rewarding, but hugely exhausting 4 days.

1) Making a Wedding cake. Is actually really fun and rewarding. Just make sure you have at least 18 hours up your sleeve. And lots of icing sugar. And a Dinosaur Jack to be level headed and level minded (to cut every cake you make to exactly the same height uniformly across the whole cake). You also might have times when you want to throw a chunk of ivory coloured fondant that you've re-rolled five times out a window (frustrated fondant defenestration). But it was all totally worth it. Look look look:

(That's me with the purple hair, not someone who just wanted to have a picture with the cake I made)

Some of the ingredients... I needed 3 times this amount of butter and milk, though. And double this amount of food colouring... and more flour. Yeah... I made a few trips to the supermarket.

RED!

A double batch of butter... enough for half of the cake.

red!

Turning the cake out: one of the most stressful things ever. In this ONE cake are 3 batches of my red velvet cake recipe. That's how mega it is.

The red food colouring to vanilla ratio...

losing:winning

2) Christmas. I am not religious. Not anymore. But I love the way that Christmas brings people together. Presents and all that: whatever. I mean I love buying stuff for people, but only stuff that I think they'll get a kick out of. I like that. And I did get a very exciting present from my parents: a new and much better camera for food photography! Oh yes. But mostly Christmas means you spend time with loads of people. And hopefully: this is a good thing. If you want to you can read about my impassioned attitude regarding Christmas festivities (it's all about food and family) right here. Otherwise you can look at some pictures of my family eating food below (all taken with my NEW CAMERA):

My parents being cutesy. Whatevs. Losers.

Wonder where I get my love of food from? This is my dad with some salmon he did on the barbecue on cedar with lime zest. IT.WAS.AMAZING.

I ate 3 massive "meals" on Chrsitmas and this was the last of them. That's totally bro Crusader at the back of the photo saucing his salmon (no sexual innuendo intended) and Dinosaur Jack's hands on the right.

So I hope your Christmas was merry, joyous and family filled (in a good way). I'm doing a post soon on potato galettes (like a bastard child of hash browns and potato cakes). Look out for that. Also: look out for awesome and amazing photos.

xx KC

P.S I'm trying this networked blogs thing... so please follow me if you want to:

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edible + adorable = edorable! (Christmas ginger cookies with stained glass centres)

2011-12-19T07:11:00.000-08:00

If you're sick of food blogger posts about Christmas food, you should probably look away. But maybe you should keep reading just because these cookies are so cute and you can hang them on your Christmas tree as decorations. Unless, like me, you have a cat (or probably a dog) which might just eat sections of the biscuits off the tree. Which would then result in you having to clean gingery cat vomit off things...Couches...Pillows...Small children
etc.

Anyway. This is the level of cute we're talking about here...

...and this:

more cuteness... yes:

And maybe this too, when we're talking about my cat. But not when she's vomitting. She's a lot less cute then... which in her defense is very rarely and usually only when I done something stupid like hang ginger biscuits on my Christmas tree in plain sight and possibly paw reach.

Christmas cooking is made for company. I think all too often we think we have to cook FOR people, stressing ourselves out and trying to make everything perfect BEFORE guests arrive. I've actually discovered that cooking WITH people is far more pleasurable than cooking FOR them ever could be. I think you should try it sometime. I made these biscuits with my lovely friend Nathalie. She was feeling a little tired and stress, but GUESS WHAT? Cookies made everything better. Like magic and also like cookies. But at the same time.

Ginger Stained Glass Cookies
Makes approximately 24 biscuits

You need:
85g butter (room temp)
100g brown sugar (the soft stuff, NOT RAW SUGAR)
1/4 cup treacle
1 egg yolk
230g plain flour
1/2 tsp bicarb soda
1 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/8 tsp cayenne pepper (optional)
1/8 tsp ground nutmeg
300g clear boiled sweets (eg. lifesavers)

You:
Combine butter, sugar and golden syrup in a bowl.

Mix together using a hand better until creamed.

(It should look something like this:)

Sift dry ingredients into the bowl, then mix in at a low speed on the hand mixer, or fol in with a spoon.

According to the Stephanie Alexander recipe that I adapted this from, you're supposed to refrigerate that sucker in cling wrap overnight. You could do that... or you could be impatient like me and shove it into the freezer for 30 minutes.

When you remove the dough, leave it for about 5 minutes until it's more pliable.

While this is happening double bag your lollies/sweets in sandwich bags. Bash them until they're roughly broken... with a rolling pin or anything else on had...it's probably a good idea to crush separate colours separately so you can pick and choose your colour combos for the "windows"

Line several baking trays with grease proof paper.

You need dough that's about 3mm thick for these cookies.

Roll the dough out onto a floured surface.

cut it into cricles of about 10 cm diameter. Then cut a shape out in the middle.

Make a little hole in the top of your cookies with a chopstick (or something similar) to enable you to thread a ribbon through later (so you can hang them!)

Place cookies carefully onto baking paper, at least 2 cm apart, using a spatula.

Fill each cookie with crush sweets in the middle... Enough to get decent coverage of the paper... see below for a guide of how much to put in.

Bake your cookies for 10 minutes on 160C - fan-forced (preheated) The cookies should be starting to brown and the lollies/sweets should be melted by this stage. if the lollies aren't quite melted, bake for a little longer until they are. If you bake for too long the lollies will discolour.

Remove from the oven and carefully remove the baking paper, with cookies still on it, setting aside to cool. Then bake the next batch of cookies in the same fashion.

When the cookies are cool you can thread some ribbon or twine through...

Or cut some thin strips of licorice for this purpose.

How cute are they? In our humidity/heat they won't always hang for long, but they'll serve their purpose. Out them on your tree... or make a garland:

Or just serve them...

Cute as a button, no?

And super easy!

If you like my Christmas sweet recipe ramblings... maybe you should check out my post for the Festive Favourites Sweet Adventures Blog Hop... which I made: Apricot and Macadamia Pastry Snaps (with my momma...)

For me, Christmas is a time for the f word

2011-12-18T06:00:00.000-08:00

Food... (what were you thinking I meant?)...

But actually it's about F words...

food, family, festivity...

So obviously I had to write a Festive Dessert recipe that encapsulated all of these things...

They look a bit/ exactly like THIS:

AND TASTE DELICIOUS. Just quietly.

And now to demonstrate my point about F words... here is a short pictorial history of my Christmases...

Back in the day when my family still lived in South Africa Christmas was a pretty massive family affair...

In 1990 my family moved to Australia... it was just us for a while Mum Crusader Dad Crusader, Brother Crusader and Kitchen Crusader, then my Aunt and cousins moved here.

And my grandparents...

Oh my goodness look at how grown up I suddenly got!

See what I mean? Christmas is all about food and family and festivities. It always has been for me. I bet if you look at most of your Christmas pictures there's food and family involved... Christmas was one of the things that really made me love food. Everyone worked together to produce culinary deliciousness!

My love of things culinary comes from my mum. There's a pretty massive tradition in my family of cooking. So when I saw that we were doing a Festive Dessert blog hop I thought: I'm going to make something with my mum. Let's do something that speaks of our family food traditions and favourite Christmas desserts. We examined my mum's recipe folder... This folder has recipes from way back, some of the recipes are in my Ouma's writing, some are in my mum's handwriting, some are in my 12 year old scrawl...

And some recipes are from daggy 80s magazines...

In the end we decided that we'd combine our favourite Australian ingredients to make little Christmas dessert canapes, inspired by some South African and family traditional desserts. Because Christmas is filled with heavy, non-hot-climate-appropriate desserts, and really what we need is some lighter mini dessert options to take to barbecues look fancy and also be delicious... enter the:

Apricot and Macadamia Pastry Snaps!

We used my Ouma's traditional mince pie pastry recipe, a brandy snaps recipe (oh so South African) and adapted an Ian Parmenter recipe for the Australian Christmas Pudding, made with macadamia nuts and dried apricots, which we make every year for Christmas dinner because it's lighter than the heavy, traditional Christmas pudding.

Apricot and Macadamia Pastry Snaps

Makes

You need:

For the "fruit mince filling":

500g fresh apricot flesh
200g dried apricots
2/3 cup brown sugar
zest of 1 lemon
juice of 1/2 a lemon
300g macadamia nuts, roughly chopped
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/8 tsp nutmeg

For the brandy snap tops:
25g butter
1 tbsp golden syrup
25g brown sugar
25g plain flour
1/2 tsp brandy
1/4 tsp ginger

For the pastry:
2 cups flour
1 cup butter
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 thickened cream
1/2 tsp lemon juices
salt

You:
To prepare your pastry, rub butter into flour, then mix in cream and knead lightly.

Wrap in cling wrap and refrigerate until needed (you can refrigerate for a few days if necessary)

Cut up your dried and fresh apricots into eights.

In a large frying pan (we used an electric frying pan) over a medium heat, heat your spices for the fruit mince until fragrant.

Add your apricots, lemon juice and zest, sugar and sultanas, heat through until the apricot is cooked. It should be strongly flavoured and will be a little sour (this is okay, don't adjust the flavouring until after you add the macadamias, later, as they will dull the flavours slightly.

Set aside apricot mixture. Until needed. Well grease 2 oven trays.

Start preparing you brandy snaps. Preheat your oven to 170C. Heat the butter, sugar and golden syrup in a pot on the stove, until the sugar is dissolved.

Then, still on the hob, stir in the flour, brandy and ginger, until combine and glossy. It should look something like this:

Place 1/8 tsp mounds of the brandy snap mixture onto a tray, about 5-7 cms apart.

Bake for 5 minutes, then remove, and allow to cool slightly for a couple of minutes.

Then remove from the tray using a metal spatula (they may still be slightly flexible, be gentle) and set aside on some grease-proof paper.

Roll out your pastry thinly. (Check out my mum's massive guns of steel!)

Cut your pastry into individual rounds (or whatever shape you like!) They are going to shrink when you bake them, to about 2/3 to a half of their original size, so bear this in mind when choosing your cookie cutter.

Bake your pastry pieces in the oven on greased trays for 10 minutes, until golden. Remove from the oven and allow to cool on a cooling rack.

Meanwhile, pulse your macadamias briefly in a food processor, or beat them with a rolling pin to break them down a bit... you still want some chunks of macadamia, so don't pulse for too long. This is the kind of texture you're looking for...

Add the macadamias to the cooled apricot mix and stir through. Adjust the sweetness of the mixture if you need to... but remember that the brandy snap tops will add sweetness too. This mixture is designed to be tart.

All the individual parts can be kept for several hours separately, just assemble them into the canapes right before serving!

The base of the canape is one of the pastry rounds, topped with about a tbsp of the apricot mixture and finished with a brandy snap top. You might want to dust them with icing sugar for prettiness...

And serve with a side of double cream if you wish...

Or even just as little dessert canapes for people to help themselves to...

Until next time:

I hope you have a delightful Christmas filled with family, fun, festivity and most important food (fabulous, fantastic, fanciful food).

P.S I totally just took part in another blog hop! (Keen) For some reason the coding isn't working with my new layout though, so PRETTY PLEASE tap this. (hey I'd tap that [to see other bloggers in this blog hop and their AMAZING DESSERTS OF AWE AND DELICIOUSNESS])
This was part of the...

slow cooked lamb with broad beans and purple carrot pan-fried gnocchi

2011-12-14T07:41:00.000-08:00

Today I'm going to tell you about slow cooked lamb. And how delicious it is. Disclaimer: you're going to want to make it...
But worry not: now you can.. because IT'S SO EASY.

Anyway, story-time: recently I went to the eatdrinkblog conference inSydney. You may have heard about this because I was unashamedly boasting aboutit in other blog entries on this very blog, for example: here.

I could now tell you all the ins and outs of the conference,but other more organised bloggers have already written about that, for examplehere’s one by my friend Capital Gourmand and another by the lovely BlueApocalypse.

So I’d kind of be covering ground already well covered. Andreally, I just don’t trust that my words could adequately express how much thiswas possibly the best day of my life. A thousand thanks to Jen of Jenius, Trinaof The Gourmet Forager, Reemski of I’m Obsessed with Food and Simon of TheHeart of Food for their orangising. Oh god: thank you.

No, I’m not going to tell you all about the conference, I’mgoing to show you some pictures I took and move on to talking about myfavourite part: the LAMB PART. I am going to give you a recipe adapted fromNonie Dwyer’s slow cooked lamb (which we ate on the day). I made it recently.It was delicious.

I will tell you more later, suffice to say: look out, youshould be making it.

So here we go… a brief pictorial representation of myconference experience:

the day started with pastry...

Oh... pastry:

...and macarons

followed by cake...

but also brownies...

For lunch we had lamb. Amazing amazing lamb... but more on that later.

we had some sessions on different skills, for example food styling... I liked these forks, which were being used for different food styling ideas, so I took a picture of them. I'm artsy like that.

Followed by some other cakey delicacy (brasserie artisan bakery went to town with this- they were so deliciously amazing)...

and here's some attempted artsy picture of our dessert that night...

Yeah, we ate a bit of food. OMG.

Okay, as promised: the LAMB PART.

Before I left for Sydney, Dinosaur Jack challenged me tofind an exciting new vegetable to make gnocchi with. This is largely because Ihave been a bit of a gnocchi fiend of late. I’ve been getting a littleexperimental with gnocchi flavours since discovering Tess Kiros’ beetrootgnocchi recipe- which I adapted and wrote about in this previous blog entry. I’ve also recently tried swede gnocchi andbaked semolina gnocchi to great effect (recipes soon, I promise).

It was while Nonie was cooking the vegetables for one of herlamb dishes that I had an epiphany- Nonie was using purple carrots. I lovepurple carrots. If you haven’t tried them, they’re delicious.

They don’t tastethe same as your average-every-day-orange-carrot. Oh my GOD! I thought: whatabout PURPLE CARROT GNOCCHI with Nonie’s slow cooked lamb? Oh DEAR GOD.

OH DEAR GOD. So I got back to Perth and went straight to mybutcher and ordered me a lamb forequarter. Actually, before I progress I mustgive a shout out to my butcher. I’m not getting any kind of complimentary stufffor this; I just think it’s important to point out how awesome my butcher is.

Reasons that Meat @ the Mezz (Mt Hawthorn) is awesome:

1) All their meat is free range and ethicallyproduced

2) They make their own sausages using only thisfree range meat

3) They don’t just sell what they have in thedisplay, they’ll cut stuff for you, or organise it for you with just a few dayswarning (normally) or even sometimes on the spot!

4) They care about meat but aren’t crazyenthusiastic crazies, they’re butchers. (surprise!)

If you live in the area, Ithoroughly recommend Meat@ the Mezz.

Anyway, so after I’d organised mylamb forequarter I got to work making arub for it. If you’re going to make this, you’ll need to give yourself about 7hours for cooking/marinading time. You can serve it with whatever you want… butI suggest the pan fried purple carrot gnocchi (or just normal pan friedgnocchi).

You need:
2 fennel bulbs, roughly chopped
2 red onions, roughly chopped- skin still on
3 carrots, roughly chopped
(or whatever stock kind of vegetables you have, roughly chopped)
1 lamb forequarter

The marinade:

1 ½tblsp coriander seeds

1 tblspcumin seeds
1 tsp fennel seeds

zest of 1 lemon

4 cloves of garlic
1 tsp sweet paprika
75ml olive oil
salt

The gnocchi and sauce

4 purple carrots, peeled, roughlychopped and steamed til soft

800g potatoes (royal blue)

1/2 cup grated parmesan

400g + 2 tbsp plain flour

50g butter

400g shelled broad beans

You:

Crush the coriander, cumin and fennel seeds together fairly roughly in a mortar and pestle.

Then mix the marinade ingredients together.

Rub these onto the lamb shoulder... all over it, so it's well covered.

Place the meat in a deep baking tray and marinade in the fridge, covered for 2 hours (or up to overnight).

Remove the meat from the baking tray, rinse out the baking tray, then place your baking vegetables (fennel, carrots (not the ones for the gnocchi) and red onions in the base of the dish...

Then put the meat on top of the vegetables. Allow the meat to return to room temperature. Preheat the oven to 250C.

Bake the meat for 30 minutes until it's all brown and gorgeous like this:

Pour the glass of wine and the same amount of water over the meat.

Cover with alfoil and bake in 130C for 5 hours, until the meat is super tender.

About 30 minutes before the 5 hours is up, put your potatoes, whole, with their skin still on, on to boil, until they are thoroughly tender.

Then remove the meat from the vegetables, let it rest for about 15 minutes and start TEARING IT APART WITH YOUR BARE HANDS. Or aided by a fork- as Dinosaur Jack demonstrates here (in a pretty crappy picture - my fault):

Sprinkle about 1/4 cup of the pan juices over the top to keep it moist, cover with alfoil and set aside. Reserve the rest of the liquid, discard the vegetables (or keep them for stock/soup)

Steam your purple carrots until they are tender, then blend them in a food processor until very smooth.

Remove the skin from the potatoes and mash them until smooth, then mix through the carrot mix.

Add the flour and parmesan with your hands, it should be relatively sticky, but not so moist that it can't keep shape. Add flour or water if needed. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Use a little flour to roll the gnocchi into rolls of about 2 -3 cm diameter. Cut them into pieces about 3 cm

long.

Set these aside (but for as briefly as possible) while you prepare the sauce.

Place the pan juices into a sauce plan (on a medium heat) with the 2tbsp of flour, mix the flour in quickly and thoroughly, add the broad beans.

Cook, stirring regularly, for several minutes until the sauce thickens slightly. Toss the meat through the sauce. Then keep this warm on a very low heat while you cook your gnocchi.

Fry the gnocchi in batches (about 20 pieces at a time) in a frying pan, with a blob of the butter at a time.

Serve immediately, as each batch is done: place the gnocchi into plates as it cooks, then top with the sauce and meat. You might want to garnish this with some parsley.

Look: it's totally purple! Sexy, eh?

Sorry about the slight blurriness of the above picture... I kind of wanted to eat the gnocchi and was in a rush.

-KCxx

make me a sandwich (simple tasty toasted sandwich ideas)

2011-12-13T05:33:00.000-08:00

Dinosaur Jack is not always in the biggest bundle of joy when I pick him up from work. I have recently discovered the trick is to feed him as he gets into the car. Recent and very scientific experiments into the effects of this approach have resulted in very positive results.

Firstly: apparently people struggle to complain or say negative things when their mouths are full.

Secondly: tasty food makes people happier, even if you're a bit tired and have been working all day. Endorphin win.

And also: science win.

Today I made toasted sandwiches. What IS it about toasted sandwiches that have the ability to make us feel incredibly happy?

So when I went to ReStore today... I got all excited at the deli counter. I bought delicious sliced roast beef and this crazy preserved pork that was delicious. Then I went home and made toasted sandwiches, toasted with a little butter and totally delicious.

Roast Beef and Horseradish

Fillings:

Sliced roast beef

Swiss cheese, melted slightly in the microwave before grilling in the sandwich

Rocket

Mayonnaise mixed with some horseradish cream

Try it.

Ham and apple toasted sandwich

Fillings:

Sliced apple

Ham

Roughly chopped sage

Cream cheese or mayonnaise

I know: I just posted about toasted sandwiches. But these sandwiches were delicious. And maybe I just felt we all needed a reminder of how great the good old grilled cheese sandwich is. P.S we had toasted sandwiches for dinner as well, that's how good they were.

I always used to say that when I have kids I'm going to take a bite out their sandwiches in the mornings to let them know that I checked they tasted okay and also be a bit schmaltzy and remind them that they're important. I totally delivered Dinosaur Jack's sandwiches to him today with a bite taken out of them... nawww. Then I had to explain, otherwise it could have seemed a bit weird.

Jean Pierre Sancho (Syd's birthday special)

2011-12-12T03:45:00.000-08:00

So... several of my friends have cute babies. For example, this is Ianto:

This is Syd:

They are both modelling something their parents dressed them in and chilling out at Jean-Pierre Sancho in this pictures. Why are they hanging at Jean-Pierre Sancho? (You might ask.)
Because recently we took our cafe crusades to that very cafe on the day of Syd's birthday. He was totally turning 1. And also turning into a toddler.
Those of us who weren't babies/toddlers ate macarons...

Look how colourful they are!

This delicious chocolate croissant cake. It was absolutely amazing...

And some ridiculous chocolate moussey thing. RIDICULOUS.

And yes, I took candles and put them into all the cakes we had because candles mean BIRTHDAY.
I really liked the cakes at JPS, the coffees were fine, and the ambiance was okay, some nice leather armchairs, but otherwise a little bland... and they didn't have a toilet. Is that even legal? I don't know. Either way: the cakes were lovely. And good cafes in the CBD are fairly hard to come by.

I totally gave Syd a drum for his birthday because he's going to be a rock star.

...maybe.

Either way: JPS was nice, cakey and pretty family friendly. And I just noticed today that there's a little one one on James St in Northbridge.

but that's cheating (cheat's gourmet sausage rolls)

2011-12-08T18:00:00.001-08:00

What are we making today? Here's an artsy picture I took of it:

Cheating. Most of the time: I'm not about it. Most of the time I think cheating is wrong and shameful and unfair.
MOST OF THE TIME. For example:

However, if you can find a cheating way to prepare dish, making it seem quite fancy, but it's actually really easy and not-even remotely difficult...

So, as I said. I mostly dislike cheating, except when it makes cooking easier. So here is a little trick of mine that I make as a canape/snack/light lunch when people are over and I really don't feel like spending ages in the kitchen.

Cheat's Gourmet Sausage Rolls with Mango Ketchup
Serves about 4 as a light lunch, makes about 30 canapes

You need:
1 batch of mango ketchup
4 good quality raw Italian (or other gourmet pork or chicken) sausages
2 sheets puff pastry

You:
Preheat your oven to 200C

Line 2 baking trays with baking paper.

Halve the puff pastry sheets and really tightly wrap the pastry around each sausage.

Cut the pastry rolled sausages into rounds (about 8 rounds per sausage). At this point you could freeze your sausage rounds in glad wrap for use later.

Lay the rounds on the grease-proof paper (face up, so you can see the sausage round).

Bake for 10-15 minutes until the pastry is golden.

Serve immediately with you mango ketchup.

It's so easy, but so effective. Much nicer than store bought sausage rolls. You'll look like a total gourmet and no-one will ever know that you're a cheater. Unless they read this blog. Then they might.

-KC

falling in love with vanilla slices at Fiorentina

2011-12-06T18:36:00.000-08:00

A tale of cake love and hot hot hot heat...

It was hot, and dry and unpleasant on the recent Wednesday that the intrepid cafe crusaders headed to Fiorentina in North Perth (it's moved recently, don't you know?)

Unfortunate Fiorentina fact: they didn't have air conditioning. So we sat outside and made the best of it...

However this unfortunate fact was outweighed by their delicious cakes and ample supply of San Pellegrino and ice. As well as a delicious concept of serving their iced coffees with a side of milk- so you control how strong/weak your coffee is...

The decor was pretty funky (I'm such a sucker for a brick wall!) and the staff were friendly...

And then... there were the pastries...

...so many pastries.

So I guess I might have got carried away with taking pictures of cakes and pastries... But who can blame me, right?

The two pastries/cakes that I enjoyed the most are pictured below. Whenever we go to cafes we ask what their specialty sweet is, then we order that. At Fiorentina the staff members both chorused (at the same time) "Vanilla Slice."

Vanilla slice? I'd thought. That's pretty plain and normal, isn't it? I mean, I can get one at basically any bakery.

There are reasons why I don't tend to favour the vanilla slices of any old bakery. Mostly these reasons involve congealed gelatinous custard slabs. Really, though vanilla slice should be made with creme patissiere, which should have a light texture. Well: Fiorentina has got this down. There is not gelantinous slabbing to be found in that little cafe. Hell no. Their vanilla slice may well have been simple, but there was something lovely about that simplicity. It meant they had to get all the components right, because they were all on show, right there, all up in your taste-buds, with NOWHERE TO HIDE. And they were delicious.

And then there was this cool little strawberry sort-of-tart-thing... with a roulade base, which also had a bit of creme patisierre in the roulade, but while I was eating it I thought: HOLD THE PHONE! Did I just taste one of my personal favourite flavour combinations in this little piece of cakey goodness? Berry and basil? Holy gamoley! I loves berries with basil! And basil in a creme patisierre- what a stroke of genius! It was really interesting and a bit different and OH MY.

Look, I'm not great at writing reviews, I do know this. I just like talking about food. And Fiorentina did have quite lovely cakes. They obviously take great pride in their cakey delights. The coffee was decent (though lots of people on urbanspoon don't seem to agree!)and it is leafy and lovely outside. It wasn't the most perfect experience of my life ever...but even though it was hot as anything, I forgot about the discomfort just for a second over vanilla slice and strawberries.

But what is going ON HERE? Because it's not doing well on Urbanspoon...? Have you been to Fiorentina recently (since its moved) lovelies? What did you think?

hands up who loves Christmas desserts?

2011-12-05T17:33:00.000-08:00

Did you just put your hand up?

I imagine that must've been a bit awkward for you, I hope you weren't reading this blog entry somewhere public like in an office or on a bus or at a rock concert.

Awkward. Maybe next time just put your hand up in your head.

But, I digress. I was talking about Christmas AND Desserts. Why would I be doing this?

The long of it:
Last month a group of lovely cooking types and I got together to organise The Australian Pavlova Blog Hop. It was amazing and sugar-high-delicious.
But one slice of dessert wasn't enough for us. We want a second helping, and then probably a third, fourth, fifth etc etc.We're greedy like that. But also: we're going to turn this dessert blog hop (sweet adventures) into a monthly thing. That means it's going to happen every month. That means that EVERY MONTH YOU CAN READ NEW RECIPES BASED ON DESSERTS FROM AROUND THE WORLD!
I'm sorry, I wasn't shouting at you, I just got really excited.

If you're a food blogger - jump on board and get involved! You'll be able to post your own version of the dessert of the month and link it up to the post.
If you're a food lover - salivate with your eyes over the delicious pictures and scrummy recipes that will be on offer... EVERY MONTH!

If you can't tell: I'm super excited!

The short of it:
The next dessert focus has already been chosen. We're going to do FESTIVE FAVOURITES (because everyone loves a good Christmas dessert!)

And I'm going to do an entry with MY MUM, because that's what Christmas is about for me: cooking with my mum. So you'll see heaps of pictures of Mother Kitchen Crusader and I making our "bastardisation of Australian, South African and Traditional Christmas desserts" and also making fools of ourselves on December the 19th when everyone will be posting their festive recipes. Also: have you had your daily dose of cuteness? Because check out THIS CHRISTMAS APPROPRIATE FAMILY FOTO:

If you're interested in who the mothers of this crazy dessert invention are (my co-conspirators-of-doom/dessert) they are:
JJ of 84th & 3rd - hosting the "festive favourites" hop
Christina of The Hungry Australian
Jennifer of (Delicieux) - hosted the pavlova hop
and Nic (Dining with Stud)

Here's an unashamed plug for us, because we're doing this FOR FREE AND LOVE OF FOOD:
You can follow our sugar-fuelled-antics on twitter if you so desire: @SweetAdvBlogHop
Or check out our website.

get your pavlova freak on (an easy pavlova recipe with some quirky flavour combinations)

2011-11-27T15:27:00.000-08:00

What are we making today? Here's a fancy picture I took of it:

Do you start getting excited when friends with hay fever start getting the sniffles and itchy eyes? I mean, it's not that we don't feel sorry for them, right? But really, they should be glad that they get to be the bearer of good news: Summer and allergies are imminent. Mainly though: I'm just excited about the summer part. Allergies aren't that exciting.

For all the excitement that the promise of summer brings, it can be a bit of a chore. Who does deal well with the super-hot middle of the day in Australia/Perth during December and January? Probably not many people. There are those moments when one wouldn't be blamed for questioning their amorous feelings towards summer when:

... your clothes are stuck to you (and not because of an epoxy based product)
... you're lying in bed at midnight, begging sleep to come, staring at the useless ceiling fan as it stirs the thick humidity
... you're trying to teach a group of Year 10s last period on a Friday (or is that just me?)
... you're playing sport and get sweat in your eyes (and you don't know if it's even your sweat)
... you get sunburnt from just hanging out the washing
... the flies are so bad and annoying that you angry about EVERYTHING EVER. EVER.
... you have to peel yourself off plastic chairs (shorts+summer+plastic seating appears to = disaster)

... but then, when I'm sitting in my backyard during summer evenings with lovely company, a glass of wine and some delicious and fresh and zesty food, all of the stickiness and Year 10s drooling onto their desks and eye sweat and fitful sleep and laundry related sunburn... and possibly even the flies seem/s worth it.

I LOVE SUMMER EVENINGS. I love that they invite conversation and conviviality and consumption of creative culinary combinations... and yes: you can applaud now, I know: I'm a pro-alliterator.

But I hope my message wasn't lost in all that language usage prowess that just happened... Summer evenings make the discomfort and anger worth it.

Summer evenings mean sangria.
Summer evenings mean lemon myrtle prawns on the barbecue with tequila lime mayo.
Summer evenings mean watermelon salad with feta and pepitas.
Summer evenings mean chilli vodka ginger beer.
Summer evenings mean fading orange light and citronella and potato salad and watermelon eaten straight out of the skin...
Summer evenings mean pavlova or meringues...

So when this pavbloghop was set up I thought: OH HOW SUMMER APPROPRIATE! And then I started romanticising about summer (that's what you just read).

If you want to read more about this Pavlova Blog Hop, or get some new and exciting pavlova recipes, you can click on the specially designed and fancy icon below, which demonstrates that this blog entry is totally a part of THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN PAVLOVA BLOG HOP, and see everyone else's entries!

To further illustrate the fact that this blog is part of said blog hop, here is a Venn Diagram that I prepared earlier...

And now for a brief and pavlova related narrative...

During this week I considered what I wanted this recipe to look like. While the flavour combinations might look fancy-schmantzy, the recipes here are designed to be really straightforward. Hopefully you won’t be all freaked out by the freaky/fancy looking pictures. So: recipe/s = fancy + straightforward AT THE SAME TIME… they’re designed to give you something a bit impressive/different/awesome for your repertoire! Trick people into thinking you’re a culinary whizzzzzz kid (or become more of one!)

When I thought about how I wanted to design this recipe, I looked at my fan forced electric oven. I looked at my beautiful, durable kmix mixer, which came with warnings about its motor strength. I looked at my well-equipped pantry and kitchen and I thought: this simply will not do. This is the kitchen of a foodie. I want to design a recipe that anyone could make with limited cooking equipment and not much culinary-know-how. So I went over to my boyfriend’s place. If you don’t know how weird or difficult it is for me to call him my boyfriend, you can read all about it in this blog entry here.

We made delicious pavlovas...

...in this kitchen... (the mess is mine from making pavlovas)

With this hand beater (25 dollar kmart special)....

In this oven... (not fan forced and gas)

… and with very few ingredients

So now you have no excuse. If it can be done at a boys’ share-house with limited kitchen resources. It can be done at your house.

Anyway, back to the task at hand, pavlovas.

There are a few ideas here to make your pavlovas a little bit freaky-cool and different. For example, I made mine with purple cornflour, which I recently discovered at a health food shop. Here's a picture of it (and some of the other ingredients I use in the recipe...)

It gave the inside of the pavs a lovely purple tinge… see?

But the recipe works fine (and is cheaper) with normal cornflour…

Always use room temperature eggs/ egg whites. I actually don't keep my eggs in the fridge (you shouldn't have to if you're eating them within about 2 weeks) I have this super cutesy egg basket that makes me drool...

Jealous? You should be.

Okay, re: toppings...I've chosen to use Summer-appropriate fruits, because of my excitement at the imminence of summer... huzzah!

Basic mini-pavlova recipe

Makes 6 mini pavs

You need:

A small pinch of salt

4 room temp egg whites

250g castor sugar

1tsp vanilla extract

2 tsp white vinegar

1 and a half tsp corn flour (purple?)

You:

Preheat your oven to 120C.

Line 2 baking trays with greaseproof paper.

Beat your eggs to “soft peak” stage. This means that the egg whites can hold a loose shape when you make “peaks” out of them with your beater. It should look something like this:

Beat in your sugar gradually, about a spoonful at a time, beating the sugar in thoroughly before adding each new spoonful. When all the sugar is in, then beat until the mixture is smooth. Test the smoothness by rubbing the mixture between two fingers, if it’s gritty, keep going.

You might not be able to get rid of all of the grittiness, but give it a really good shot, because the smoother your mixture is, the smoother the pavlovas will be, it’s pretty important.

Gently fold the cornflour, then vinegar, then vanilla into the egg whites.

Divide the mixture up evenly into 6 mounds of egg white. 3 evenly spread out mounds per tray

Bake at 120C for 55 minutes to an hour (the outside of the pavs should be hard and may have a couple of cracks.

Then turn the oven off, open the oven door a bit and leave the pavs in the oven to cool entirely.

Then choose your own topping adventure...

Ginger Mango, Lime and Sesame Pav

(no cooking- simple but effective topping)

You need:

1 large, ripe mango

1 tsp crushed, fresh ginger

the zest of 1 lime

the juice of half a lime

350ml thickened cream

1/2 tbsp sesame seeds

1/2 tbsp black sesame seeds

You:

When the pavs are cooled...

Whip the cream until thickened, but not starting to form butter.

You Slice the mango into thin slivers (about 1/2 cm) while the skin is still on, then peel the skin off from individual slices. Lay them out on a plate and sprinkle the minced ginger, lime zest and juice over the top, evenly.

Place a good dollop of cream on top of each mini pav, then lay the slices on top of each, as artsitically, roughly as you like.

Sprinkle the sesame seeds over the top of each pav and serve immediately. You might choose to garnish with a little extra lemon zest.

Caremelised Pineapple with Black Sesame Seeds

(really simple, tasty topping with a little cooking)

You need:

350g peeled, cored and roughly chopped (to about 1cm cubes) pineapple
2 tbsp castor sugar
1 tbsp tsp black sesame seeds
1/4 cup of shredded coconut
350ml thickened cream

You:

While the meringues are baking, toss your pineapple in the castor sugar.

Fry in a large frying pan, browning the pineapple to a golden brown, slightly caramelized colour.

Set this aside to cool until your meringues are ready.

When the pavs and pineapple are both cool...

Whip the cream until thickened, but not starting to form butter, then mix the coconut through.

Place a good dollop of cream on top of each mini pav, divide the pineapple between the 6 pavlovas, place these on top of each pav.

Sprinkle each pavlova with the sesame seeds. Serve immediately.

Peach Pav with Marscarpone Cream and Lavender and Pistachio Toffee

(A little bit more involved, a bit more expensive, but totally worth it)

You need:

200g castor sugar
2 lavender flower heads, finely chopped
50 ml water
120g of raw, shelled, unsalted pistachio nuts roughly choopped

2 ripe peaches

120ml thickened cream

200ml marscarpone

You:

While the pavs are baking you make the toffee...

Place the water and sugar for the lavender toffee in a fry pan on the stove, on a low heat. Heat through until the sugar dissolves.

Heat the toffee on medium heat, stirring fairly regularly, until the toffee goes a golden colour, this should be ready to set hard. Do not allow your toffee to crystallise. Test your toffee by placing a little bit onto a ceramic plate, even though it'll be really hot, rub it between your fingers quickly, if it goes hard and glass-like.

Pour the toffee onto a baking trays evenly and try to get the toffee as thin as possible, and then scatter over the lavender and pistachios.

Here's a picture I took of my toffee...

When the toffee is set, twist the tray to break the toffee up and get it off the baking tray.You want it in shards to look artistic and fancyeseque.

Set aside to use when the pavlovas are ready.

When the pavlovas are cooled, whip the thickened cream, then stir through the marscarpone.

Thinly slice the peaches.

Place a dollop of the marscarpone mix onto each pavlova.

Then decorate each pavlova as artistically as you like, using the peaches and pistachio toffee.

I've never been the hugest fan of pavlolvas, I've always been more of a meringue girl... BUT: making these pavlovas was super fun and I actually really enjoyed them, if you get the consistency right they're actually super delicious. And playing around with flavours was really rewarding and funky. So go ahead, blog-readery-type, why not get your summer-pavlova-freak-on? I double dare ya.

(Ooooh er.)

Over and out
KCxx

BREAKING PAVLOLA RELATED NEWS

2011-11-15T17:44:00.001-08:00

Some other overly-food-zealous-bloggers and I have decided that THE WORLD NEEDS MORE PAVLOVAS.
Or more specifically: more pavlova recipes. So over the next week and a half we're all going to be feverishly writing up pavlova recipes for YOUR PRYING EYES. Which, I'm sure you'll a agree is SUPER EXCITING AND ALSO: AWESOME.

If you want to know about my personal concerns in regards to this:

1) I'm more of a meringue girl than I pavlova girl. I make lovely chewy, delicious meringues and they are my favourite. I don't really go for that soft bit in pavs, so I'm going to try and have the best of both worlds and create a soft centre, with chewy surroundings and a hard outer layer. This is not as easy a job as it may first appear.
The trialing process has been a little taxing on Dinosaur Jack, who tries very hard to be supportive, but finds it somewhat difficult when I'm going from despairing over a texture failure to a manic sugar high from eating too much SUGARANDEGGWHITE (but mainly sugar).

2) I have to work this problem out BY NEXT WEEK AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGHHH. Uhoh.

I think I need another sugar fix.

If you would like to read more about this pavlova-pandemonium, you can click on this specially designed and fancy icon:

...to read what far more professional and smart-sounding bloggers than I say, with far fewer bad ms paint drawings and a lot less capitalisation/shouting. If you would like to see pictures of my proposed pavlovas you can go: here.

And if you want to read about the final result of all these stresses (the recipe for my pavlovas) you can go here.

what the moonpie face? (Moon pies and meeting new and exciting food bloggers)

2011-11-13T04:41:00.000-08:00

Here's a picture of some cake. Actually they're moonpies. And they're really easy to make. Wann see how? Yeah, that was rhetorical question. Awkward.

Does there come a moment in everyone's life when McDonald's coffee starts looking attractive?
For my own dignity: I hope you said, yes, in the most dire of situations, yes.
For your own dignity, I hope that you didn't just think: well, hell yes: all the time!

Okay: in my defence (however flimsy it may be)I'm going to contextualise and also talk about pie face...Last weekend I went to Sydney for the Eat.Drink.Blog food bloggers' conference with my co-Perth-food-bloggers Gastromony and The Blue Apocalypse.

I flew out on Friday afternoon and arrived late Friday night into Sydney-town. We had to be at the conference by 9am. I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but that's 6am in Perth time. I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but being there by 6am Perth time necessitated getting up at 4am Perth time.

While The Blue Apocalypse and I walked to meet Gastromony at her hotel I searched (feverishly) for a coffee shop, because I am a caffeine addict and I was tired, because let's face it, it was 4:30am according to my timing. We were in central Sydney, at 7:30am on a Saturday morning and no small scale, reputable looking coffee shops appeared to be open.
We DID walk past a large number of business purporting that they were totally capable of selling "coffee."
McCafe
Gloria Jeans
aaaaaaannnd something I had never heard of before: Pieface.

"What about Pieface?" Blue Apocalyse inquired.
Even though I had never heard of pieface before, I was genuinely concerned about getting coffee from a place that sold pies with faces... and also distributed their coffees in a bright purple take-away cup, with a semi-maniacal face smiling in lime green from the side of said cup. Blue Apocalypse also doesn't care about such things because she is weird and doesn't drink coffee.

Finally, right before desperation so bad that I was willing to drink Gloria Jeans coffee set in: we found a coffee shop just opening up where the barista tapped the milk on the counter and didn't pour the coffee into a labelled and garish take-away coffee cup.

THANK GOODNESS. And then I discovered, upon arriving at the conference venue (a little later) that Toby's Estate was sponsoring the Eat.Drink.Blog conference. Oh yeah: can you say caffeine overload? That was my life for a whole day: soy flat whites to the power of infinity!

Once I'd consumed at least ten tonnes of coffee, I felt equipped to discuss all things food with other food bloggers. The first thing I asked almost everyone I met was: What the hell is pie face?

And lots of people seemed to know. It seems they sell pies. With faces.

But my lovely new friend Lauren, of the Corridor Kitchen fame (check her out, she's amazing), had a story about pieface that made me giggle...
Once upon a time Lauren was young and looking for a job. She applied for a job at pieface. At this time Pieface had a whole 4 stores in the world.

She met with the manager of all of pieface... a lady who had a desk in a shared office space. Lauren reports that this lady had surveillance of all four of the pieface shops... right in front of her, as the interview progressed. She was making sure that everyone wore their uniforms properly, did the right thing, etc etc etc. It was like the Matrix... or 1984, except with more pies and less killing and fewer thought police.

In case you were on the edge of your seat wondering: did Lauren work in nineteeneightypieface? No: Lauren didn't take the job, she just got too freaked out by the surveillance thing. The lady kept saying to her: you don't understand: pieface is going to be massive, we're going to have 200 stores. Lauren thought this lady was crazy. Turns out: the lady wasn't crazy.

The lady was right. Because even thought this little back-water-Perth-bumpkin had never heard of pieface... over east THEY'RE EVERYWHERE. Pretty sure there are more than 200 stores. I wonder if there's still a lady somewhere watching all of the pieface stores... obviously it works...
... and obviously Lauren now had a small and tiny insight into how it worked, so in theory we could surely come up with a business plan as effective and money-making as the pieface plan...

As far as we were concerned the pie face business plan must've looked something like this:

So now we just had to come up with a food product to put faces on and sell. And a truckload of surveillance equipment, but mainly: a food product to anthropomorphise.

Pork bun face? (Very specific and also requiring Asian food skills)

Steam boat face? (Not very good take-away food)

Sandwich face? (Seems pretty work intensive for not that much gain... plus I've heard Subway already sells sandwiches)

Salad face? (How would this even work?)

Pizza face (Uneven distribution of toppings, plus issue of lots of take-away pizza places already existing)

Burger face (Lots of work to make burgers look like faces also lots of burger places already exist)

Pie face? (Oh wait)

But really, we couldn't get away from the fact that faces on pies was a really good idea and pieface just sounded like a viable business name... probably because it is the name of a viable business. We also obviously don't have very good imaginations... so here is my suggestion for face food business success... moon pies/ whoopie pies.

Moonpieface. It still has the word pie in it, it's just not really actually a pie at all. I actually have really been wanting to make them for a while and needed an excuse and they have the word PIE in their name. Recipe: justified.

So to start with I got me a whoopie pie recipe book and ten tonnes of different baking dishes to try so I could suggest the best ones to you...

you really don't actually need any. you can just dollop 2 tbsp of mix onto greaseproof paper... but the whoopie pie tin did work the best, even though it was most expensive...

Then I recruited a worker called Nathalie and watched her help me prepare the moon pies.

Then my cat tried to help sift the flour.

Then I made the pies... and took pictures of them. These things are delicious and really simple... and I'd say you can't stop at one, but you REALLY actually can, because they're kind of rich. You'll just wish you didn't HAVE to stop. Here is my basic recipe, adapted from whoopie pies, produced by "Love Food" and after that I'll show you a few delicious adaptations I made up out of my own head.

The Basic KC Moon Pie (face)

Makes 10 moonpies

You need:

Cakey part:

175g plain flour

1 1/2 tbsp baking soda

70g cocoa powder

a pinch of salt

170g butter, softened

90g brown sugar

90g castor sugar

1 large beaten egg

1 tsp vanilla extract (or 1/4 tsp vanilla paste)

150ml milk

Filling part:

1 1/2 cups of thickened/pouring (not double) cream

1/4 cup of icing sugar

You:

1 Preheat oven to 180C.

2 Sift the cocoa, flour, bicarb and salt into a mixing bowl.

3 In a separate, large mixing bowl, cream the butter and sugars together (whip with an electric beater until light, fluffy and pale).

4 Mix in the egg white with the beater, then add half of the dry ingredients (the cocoa etc from your other bowl). Mix through, then add the milk and mix to combine.

5 Add the remainder of the dry ingredients, mix til smooth.

6 If you're using a whoopie pie tin, place a dollop of the mixture into the middle of each disc shape. Careful not to put too much mixture in, it'll rise and you don't want to have too large a "pie" as a result. About a a tbsp and a half of mixture. You should make 20 cakes.

7 If baking on a baking tray, line with greased baking paper. Place about 2 tbsp worth of mixture into blobs about 12cm apart on these trays. You should make 20 little cake mixture mounds.

8 Bake your cakes for 12-14 minutes. At this point the cakes should've just risen and bounce back when touched gently in the middle.

9 Allow to cool on a baking rack.

10 To serve... whip your cream with the icing sugar until thickened and fluffy (but not to butter).

11 Put a good dollop of cream between two of the little cakes. Serve dusted with icing sugar (if you choose)

Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Inspired Moon Pie

makes 10
You need:
the ingredients for the basic moon pies (above)
Plus...

for the cakey part
100g milk chocolate

For the filling:
1/4 cup of smooth peanut butter

You:
Follow all of the steps for the basic moon pie up to step 10.

10: Melt the chocolate and drizzle it across the tops of all of the cakes before assembling. Allow the chocolate to cool and harden.

11. Whip your cream, peanut butter and icing sugar together until fluffy.

12. Assemble your moon pies as directed in the basic recipe.

Pistachio and Chocolate Moonpies with Lavender Cream

makes 10
You need:
the ingredients for the basic moonpie recipe plus...
for the cakey part:
70g crushed unsalted, shelled pistachios (I put them into a zip lock bag and beat them with a rolling pin)

For the filling
3 lavender flower heads, finely chopped

You: Follow the steps for the basic moon pie recipe up to...

5. Add the pistachios as well as the remaining dry ingredients.

then follow as the recipe dictates up to:

10. Whip the cream and icing sugar to fluffy, then stir through the finely chopped lavender.

11. Assemble the moonpies as directed in the basic recipe.

And if yu're feeling cutesy... you could make these cookie-cutter shaped moonpies by speading the mixture across a whole grease baking tray, then cutting out individual shapes after it's baked... just saying...

Anyway, that's my genius business plan. Now if only I had some decent capital and the ability to not get sued for totally stealing someone else's idea I'd possibly be maybe a rich lady. Also: you may have noticed that none of my moonpies actually have faces, making my claims of moonpieface a little to completely fallacious and my business plan flawed.
To this I say: shut up, I forgot to make faces and also didn't know how. They were delicious anyway. As well as this: the idea of eating a face is kind of scary anyway, don't you reckon? Especially if it's smiling while you're devouring it... gross.
Until next time:
Over and out.
KC.

Tiger Tiger (or: the good décor, the bad barista and the ugly crusaders)

2011-11-06T21:13:00.000-08:00

Just a quick post, because time is not my friend currently. I think I said something to offend her, but she's pretending she doesn't know what I'm talking about...

I really liked Tiger Tiger, (really liked it because it mademe feel like I had street cred just sitting in the café. It certainly attractsits fair share of coffee-fanatic-hipster-types. The mismatched plates, thesmall selection of cakes, but done well, the mix n match décor… it was likesome kind of hipster caffeine-funk-dream. )

The cakes were tasty. The caramelly nut slice was delicious.The brownie was good, but not amazing (it was nice to have it heated, though,and serving it with marscarpone was a pretty inspired and generally sexy idea.)

The coffee was good but my goodness, it appears that hipper-cool cafes comewith hipster-I’m-too –hipster-cool-for –you attitude. I felt like was such animposition on the barista’s life.

Look, as you might know, I portray myself as a “food lover,not a food fighter.” Thus, it’s important that I say: food wise-tiger tiger waspretty good.

Coffee: tick! However... I’ve had good coffee elsewhere and Iwasn’t made to feel like crap while ordering it. Service is not hard to getright. And while I understand how passionate one can be about coffee (hey, I’vebeen a barista too, once upon a time), but pulling a face and saying, “If Ihave to,” when asked by a person if they can have an iced coffee… and P.S Ikind of like the person who asked for this, his name’s Oli and he’s a friend ofmine… well… that’s just completely not okay, no matter how caffeine-idealisticyou are.

So: Dear Tiger, Tiger,you certainly are cool, you are probably what all the cool kids are doing. Butif being cool means that level of service distain - I’m not interested inhanging out with you, but then, you’re probably not that interested hangingwith me, either-I’m a bit too much of a nerd and my shoes don’t always match mybag.

our lives are ridiculous - the sagas of Dinosaur Jack and The Kitchen Crusader (chocolate deep-fried wantons)

2011-11-06T20:34:00.000-08:00

Most people who have relationship sagas have public fights, making others feel slightly to very awkward. Other relationship saga commonalities: an endless cycle of make-ups and break-ups, a friends vs. love interest scenario, etc and so on.

Dinosaur Jack and I haven't really had any of these sagas. Our sagas are far more entertaining. There always seems to be a new and mildly ridiculous occurrence where one of both of us is thinking: SERIOUSLY, this is happening right now? I think our friends have just got used to this series of humorous and silly events and just laughs at us. We probably deserve it, after all. Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of the last six months of sagas for your entertainment and our humiliation:

1) Are you guys in a relationship or what?

For a really long time we were actually in denial about this. We so weren't in a relationship. Even though our friends kept pointing out to me that: "you guys are so very boyfriend/girlfriend". "Lies!" I said. These were not lies. You know that awkward moment when you wake up and realise you're in a relationship? Yeah that happened. However, this has not really abated our awkwardness at referring to each other as "my boyfriend/girlfriend" there's always an awkward pause as we search for quite the right term... examples of poorly chosen terms include... he's my...
"person" "pseudo-boyfriend" "guy that I'm seeing" "um...friend"

2) How'd you guys meet? Oh we met at a wake.

Yeah, this is pretty close to true.

3) The earwig saga.

If you're interested in reading about this, and let's be honest: why the hell wouldn't you be? You can go to this blog entry right here.

4) Care for a metal prong in your heel?

Recently Dinosaur Jack stood on a coat hanger in my room, because I'm not the tidiest of people and had left it strewn by the side of the bed. Unfortunately it was one of those suit hangers that has those "pants clips" which have plastic covering, plastic covering that covers metal sprung prongs... standing directly on one of those basically ensures it goes directly into your heel, apparently. About 3 cm into your heel.

P.S pulling one of those out of your ...um... friend's heel results in it pissing blood. And when I say "pissing" I mean A STREAM OF FREAKING BLOOD, shooting 30cm out of the foot and getting all over anything that might be on your floor... which would obviously be lots of stuff because you're not very good at clearing up... which caused this situation in the first place. So yeah I probably deserved that,
P.P.S he couldn't work for a couple of days and had to get a tetanus shot, got put on antibiotics and had a pimp limp for several weeks. I am the best um... person ever.

5) You're in a bridal party in a few hours? Let me accidentally rip a portion of your skin off from the pointer finger of the hand you're going to use to sign your witnessing of that marriage... a bloody portion.

I have never ever got my nails done, but it was my friend's wedding and all and she'd organised it and we all went together and so I got my nails done. The poor nail doing lady took one look at my hands and winced... "sorry, I'm a rock climber," I smiled. She did not smile back.

Getting your nails did totally dries the skin out on one's hands... which may already be dried out from overly heavy chalking from rock climbing like some crazy woman.

After having my nails done I totally I taught Dinosaur Jack how to make lamb shanks in his multicooker that night (recipe soon, but it's super easy, hey). He did all the slicing, dicing, cooking and dishes because I didn't want to ruin my nails... see I was obliged to try and be lady like for a whole day the next day and should probably therefore keep the nails that my to-be-married friend had paid for me to have). I was SO careful with my nails.

20 minutes before I had to leave to meet up with the rest of the bridal party the next morning... Dinosaur Jack accidentally scratched off a chunk of skin from my finger, simply by brushing it accidentally with his finger nail. This would never have happened if my skin wasn't all crazy dried out by chalk and nail polish. There was blood, there was stress (mostly his, if I remember a key phrase was: "oh my GOD, I've ruined Claire's wedding.") The photographer is photo-shopping the finger sore out of the witnessing photo...

6) This mosquito bite isn't going away... oh wait that's a burrowed tick

Yep: recently, on a morning that I was supposed to be having breakfast with friends I was a little late because less than an hour before we'd discovered this situation.

Ten minutes in: we discovered that the tick was actually dead, he'd tried to twist it out, but of course: being dead it wasn't going to let go. Yep, the head was lodged in his skin, under his knee, and it was a public holiday, so it was: go to the emergency department or get it the freak out yourself.

Twenty minutes in: we abandoned the tweezers and took up a pin we'd heated to disinfect it.

Thirty minutes in: the stanley knife and rum came out. I had run out of antiseptic cream, so the rum was going to have to be used, and we heated the knife with a lighter and proceeded to work on digging the tick's head out. And we were so getting somewhere.
Can I just, at this point, point out that we are both entirely civilized human beings who are relatively capable of leading normal lives, not crazy savages who usually just dig stuff out of people's legs with rum and a stanley knife.

Thirty five minutes in: I was told to go to breakfast with my friends, because otherwise I was going to be seriously late. I did.

Forty five minutes in: I'm drinking coffee and gossiping with my friends (like a bad um...friend), meanwhile back at the ranch, my housemate walks into our back room to discover Dinosaur Jack in only his boxer shorts, digging at his leg with a stanley knife next to a nearly empty bottle of rum.

An hour in: I get a message telling me he thinks he got it out, I'm still drinking coffee and was probably eating baked eggs by this stage. "Person he's seeing" fail.

But we are actually are pretty awesome. We're like those yin and yang couples you always hear about. I stress out and he de-stresses. I over commit to everything ever and he just lives each day as it comes. It's a pretty cool balance.

We do a lot of cooking together, Dinosaur Jack is an endlessly useful kitchen hand and recipe recorder. So here's a little and brief story about a delicious dessert discovery that we both got a little besotted with...

Segue time! (It's just like Hammer time, only with much less street cred and much fewer parachutey pants)

One night Dinosaur Jack and the Kitchen Crusader felt like having dessert. However, there really was very little in the way of desserty type stuff in the fridge/pantry.

Inventory:
Some random raspberry coulis sitting and chocolate blocks and wanton wrappers.

I could have probably made a cake, I did have flour and eggs and all that. Cakes are lovely, but sometimes we just don't have the energy or the patience to wait the time it'll take them to cook, or deal with the washing up they produce. I had neither energy nor patience on this very evening. So, I made something up out of my head that I had suspicions would be tasty-as-anything. AND IT WAS: Culinary Super Hero win.

And I'm the kind of altruistic lovable super hero who will willingly throw a recipe of great simplicity and awesome all up in your face, because, let's face it: don't we all want to have a simple, tasty impressive dessert up our sleeve? (The answer is yes)

chocolate wantons with raspberry coulis

you need:

6 wanton wrappers

6 squares of chocolate (whatever you like- my faves are dark or white for this)

700ml of deep frying oil (I like to use rice bran oil)

1 egg, lightly whipped

a bit of ice cream to serve it with (I like to use cookies and cream)

mint for a garnish (optional)

some raspberry coulis (recipe embedded in here)

you:
Pre-prepare your raspberry coulis.

Place a square of chocolate into the middle of each wanton wrapper, brush the edges with egg, then smoosh them all into the middle, entirely covering the chocolate. If you want to fold them like a properwantonpro, learn how here.

Heat your oil hot enough (when you put a cube of bread in it starts frying immediately and rises to the top quickly, going golden brown in under a minute)

Fry your wantons, three at a time (or up to five at a time if you're making them in bulk), theyre done when they're golden brown and crispy.

Drain them on a cake rack over the sink (much better than putting them on paper towel- that'll only see them get soggy again).

Serve immediately, with a scoop of icecream to the side of your wantons and some coulis in a jug.

Here's a picture...

Delicious? Yes.

Cafe Crusades: Chapels on Whatley (making life lovely)

2011-11-04T06:08:00.000-07:00

You know those days when you stop for a second and think: this is happiness, this right here. That's what life should be about. It doesn't have to be BIG MOMENTS. It doesn't have to be anything special. It could just be this. Right now. Right while you're reading this blog entry.
And too often, for too long, I forgot to remind myself that I was happy. That I was lucky. That this one moment was perfect. I know: this sounds hyper-idealistic. But I'm an idealist. And if we can't get idealistic about happiness, then what's the point in even getting up every morning?

All of this “living life to celebrate and be mindful ofhappiness stuff” is the main reason why we started the café crusades in thefirst peace. That and the fact that we love cafes, coffee, cake and each otherand wanted to spend as much times around all of these as humanly possible. But wait-that’s actually the happiness stuffanyway. So ignore me, I’m right. Correct and rambling. Anyway… this is another manifesto of sorts,about life and enjoyment.

Since starting the café-crusades, way back during sometimethis year, with my great friends Jayne and Oli (and of course their lovelyoff-spawn, Ianto and Syd, respectively) our group has grown significantly.Nowadays, every Wednesday, every week,, somewhere in Perth, in a space thatserves coffee and has a decent urban spoon rating, you can spot a group ofabout seven to ten people, some with their small children, some with theirpiles of marking, all with something caffeinated in front of them, talkingsmack, ranting about life, sharing copious amounts of cake and frivolity andgesticulation.

So before I tell you about Chapels (spoiler alert: it wasquite pleasant) let me get to the action part of this manifesto, this is ourthing, café crusades, our celebrating happiness thing.

Here is my manifesto: find something you do regularly thatmakes you happy. And do it simply because it makes you, or the people you careabout (or both, preferably!) happy.

What will your things be? What little pieces of happinesscan you inject into your life? Maybe you could form your own Café crusadingcrew and go to Chapels on Whatley. Because it’s quite lovely.

Stuff I liked:

The cakes were good, particularly the macaroons and thebanana rum tarts.

The coffee was decent and they also appear to serve largecoffees so large that I suspect they classify as their own country.

The décor is pretty cute, Asian influenced, with some barebrick walls, and quite a pleasant area out the back, with hanging lanterns,greenery and some very chirpy friendly staff, who weren’t at all bemused by thesheer number of prams at our get together (three), or the fact that we neededto use three tables because of the number of people…

The savoury stuff looked nice, but I didn’t have any… hereare some pictures I took of it. I just kind of forgot to ask what it was like,mainly because I was distracted by happiness and gossiping.

Stuff working against Chapels:

I’m not going to lie: on that strip of cafes on Whatley Iprefer the coffee and cakes from Sherbet and the décor of Mrs S is more mystyle, but Chapels on Whatley was also really pleasant…

The outside chairs were weird, the seat wasn’t deep enough,I think they might have been designed to improve your posture, and maybe theydid, but the only thing I was aware of them doing was making me feel like I hada fat ass.

The profiteroles: were kinda dry and had icecream inside them. They were still okay, but not great, not even really good... but that was the only one little blip on the culinary radar...

Okay: back to nice things and idealism...

I think the experience of sitting outside at Chapels wasparticularly lovely, there was just the slightest reminder that summer wascoming, and there was great company and good food and good coffee. It was justone moment. And you know what: moments of happiness don’t even have to be atorganised get-togethers. Of course you probably already know that. I’m totallynot meaning to patronise you here, hey. I’m just being a bit of an idealist… Ijust get a bit enthusiastic about finding happiness in one’s life and holdingonto that, on not forgetting to remember that we’re very lucky…

And so… Chapels at Whatley reminded me a little bit, as manythings lately have been reminding me lately…

That happiness is there… and it’s not always big andattention grabbing and loud…

Sometimes it’s just there, sitting quietly next to you…

…waiting for you to notice it.

So... I'm going to Sydney. (Chilli vodka ginger beer)

2011-11-01T03:41:00.000-07:00

So: I'm going to Sydney for the eat.drink.blog foodbloggers conference. It's kind of a big deal and it's going to be amazing. Perth Food bloggers represent! (Because I only know of three that are going- filling a teeny tiny percentage of the 70 spots). I'm going with gastromony and the Blue Apocalypse.
HellllllllllsYES.

So in celebration of my imminent and brief departure (I'll be gone from Perth for a whole lotta 36 hours): here is a recipe that my lovely friend Nathalie and I invented one night.

This is mainly due to our prolonged ranting and raving about Kitsch's cocktail of the same name (chilli vodka ginger beer) and our resultant decision to experiment until we worked it the hell out.

Turns out: it's super easy!

Summer is coming, co-crusaders, and this is prefect summer evening drinking...

Summer evening patio drinking is one of my favourite things ever. With good company. And conversation. And snacks. And nowhere pressing to be but here.

So in upcoming weeks I'm going to be posting my favourite summer time patio drinking recipes and cocktails. Because I'm just that exciting. I meant excited. But maybe I'm exciting. I'm not sure. That's probably subjective.
Conclusion: I'm super excited about summer evenings. And subjectively exciting.

Also: here are some examples of recent chilli vodka ginger beer consumption and testing (for your benefit so that the recipe was more awesome. That is the only reason. I get kinda tired of being this giving sometimes.)

recent celebratory drink after helping Kate move in

chilli vodka ginger beer with fabulous Kale, Steve, Nathalie and Kate company, accompanied by Flying Taco burritos? Why yes: I'll do that

So this is all you have to do:

chilli vodka ginger beer
makes 1
you need:

100ml of good ginger beer
1.5 tbsp vodka
3 mint leaves, slightly smooshed
2-4 thin slices of chilli
a wedge of lime (about 1/8 of a lime)
a little extra sugar or soda water to taste
4-6 ice cubes

If you have a cocktail shaker and are making multiple drinks, you:
Put the ice into the tumblers.

Chuck the vodka, chilli, mint and the lime (squeezed over the top, then chuck the slice in) into the shaker. Shake it- like a polaroid picture n(except do you know that you shouldn't shake polaroid pictures? It ruins the picture quality- fun fact of the day)

Divide the vodka mix up evenly between the glasses (distributing the chilli pieces, mint leaves and lime slices between them).

Pour ginger beer over the top. Taste to see if it needs more sugar or water.

If making just the one, or if you don't have a shaker you:
Put the ice into the tumbler.

Pour in the vodka, squeeze in the tlime, then chuck in the wedge.

Put in the mint and add the chilli, pour over the ginger beer.

Consume. Delicious!

Happy imminent summer and food bloggers' conference, everyone legally allowed to consume alcohol! Everyone else: wait til you're older.