Category: recipes

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Hotter than Hell

So the ex has been hassling smartfoodmama for my chilli sauce recipe. Some might think that this is an issue for his solicitor, but I think it’s an opportunity for a quid pro quo – feijoada recipe Gomez!

Like so many recipes, this one just sort of developed.

I had spent a day in the kitchen with the late Alan Mansfield and wonderful ex-South Africans Aunty Joan and Ivan. We were there to make lime pickle and chilli paste.

I’d never seen anyone drinking port before lunch so as you can imagine it was an unforgettable experience! I still have the lime pickle recipe somewhere but I don’t think I ever wrote down the chilli paste recipe.

My “recipe” resulted from the need to use a half full sandwich bag of the hottest chillies I have eaten (not quite scotch bonnet – bird’s eyes). I bought about 300 gm of milder chillies and set to work.

The sauce I made was then used by the drop. Except for the ex-South Africans Gomez worked with up North. They woofed it down, making me think I might have got Aunty Joan’s recipe right.

While we’re talking chilli, for the longest time I wondered (well occasionally) what Shriracha chilli was and why it was so special. So one day I actually read the label on my chosen commercial sauce. Seems I have been using Shriracha chilli for years! It’s the only one that doesn’t use (that dreadful) bottled garlic.

But I digress.

Smartfoodmama’s Chilli Sauce

Finely dice:

2 large cloves of garlic

Ginger: approx half a thumb size piece (perhaps not Jason Mamoa’s thumb)

Gently sauté in about 2 Tbs EVOO (okay, extra virgin olive oil) for about a minute then add:

1 tsp raw sugar to caramelise (not carmelise as our American TV chefs are won’t to suggest, they also like to marinade things! Of course we know that you put things in a marinade to marinate them. Life is not easy for a food AND grammar Nazi).

Then add the chopped chillis (4/500 gms) and sauté till softish.

To seed or not to seed? The seeds have much of the heat and when the paste is blended it thickens it.

Add a cup of water, cover and simmer for about half an hour.

Remove lid, keep cooking another half hour or so, adding water if it starts drying out.

Blend and put in a container of your choice, keep the surface covered with oil to preserve.

I’m not one for sterilising jars – too much carry on and this will keep for ages in the fridge as long as you keep the surface under oil.

This can be made with any chilli you like, but will be unpredictable. If you made it with birds’ eyes do warn guests, though I have had a guest douse his entire plate with it, despite the warning. We really enjoyed watching him try to eat it. Feats of strength should not include chilli!

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Always Ready to Give Thanks

I was very excited to be invited to my first ever Thanksgiving lunch, even though traditional Thanksgiving foods were eschewed. I thought I’d better contribute so I baked a peach küchen. What is a küchen? Küchen is German and also Yiddish for cake. Why would I bake a traditional Jewish cake for Thanksgiving, well why not? Or maybe because it’s quick easy and delicious.

And it was, yes those are little bits of mango as well.

I got this recipe from Judy Jackson’s The Jewish Cookbook. I’ve only used a couple of recipes from this book but they’ve been great.

This recipe is a one mix-bowl number – then you top with fruit and brown sugar. I used 2 large duck eggs, from my mate Emma. They were huge so I tinkered with quantities. This isn’t usually recommended but I’ve messed with this recipe before as the first time I made it seemed not to be as runny as the illustration so I added more milk, I also tend to reduce the sugar. Judy Jackson tells us to peel the peaches, but in this day and age I leave the skin on and it makes it more colourful. You could do this with any fruit you like, and this will make pretty muffins too.

Küchen

Beat till smooth:

¾ softened butter (unsalted)

2 eggs

3 cups SR flour

½ cup milk (I probably used 1 cup)

Pour into baking tin (20cmx20cm) lined with baking paper

Top with peach slices then sprinkle over ½ cup soft brown sugar mixed with ½ tsp ground cinnamon

Bake for 40 mins @ 180 °. Baking times are always dicey I find. Ovens have a mind (or at least a temperature of their own) so do the skewer test – I find it takes closer to an hour in my oven.

This cake really deserves whipped cream and so do you.

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“There is only baked cheesecake, everything else is pudding”

Invited out for dinner and asked to bring dessert I decided to reprise the “classic cheesecake” I used to bake in my old café days. This really is a great cheesecake. On receipt of this cake my friend said “ Oh wow is it a baked cheesecake”. To which I replied, “There is only baked cheesecake, everything else is pudding”.

Cheesecake is a staple of the European Jewish repertoire, along with blintzes, nudel kugel, high cholesterol and heart disease. And while the fridge versions may be tasty and certainly quick, they aren’t really cakes, because cakes, as we know, are baked.

My childhood in Sydney was enhanced by the fact that my one of my father’s customers had a fabulous patisserie in Kings Cross, the Croissant D’Or – and it still exists, though who runs it I don’t know. One or the other of my brothers would deliver orders to him, and it always seemed to be on a Friday afternoon. My dad never charged for this service but Karl Schader always handed over a cheesecake for the Shabbbos (Sabbath) table.

I’m not going to claim that mine is as good as Mr Schader’s – nothing will ever taste as good as such a memory, but this is a recipe for a very fine “classic” cheesecake. I have just popped cheesecake MK 2 (gluten free) in the oven for a special friend and coeliac sufferer. Just substituted gluten free flour and made the base with GF rice cookies.

So if you want to throw caution to the winds and eat likes it’s 1970, this is for you.

This recipe came without a base – a very basic cheesecake but I make a base with biscuits, Marie or arrowroot:

Baked Cheesecake

In a food processor blend ½ packet plain biscuit with 1 T butter.

I use a spring-form baking pan – and just press the mixture down evenly with your knuckles.

Beat:

225 g cream cheese

225g ricotta cheese

2 lg eggs

½ cup white sugar

till very smooth

Add:

2T melted butter

1 ½ T sifted SR flour

1 ½ T cornflour

1t vanilla essence

Best till smooth then fold in

1 cup sour cream

Pour it onto the base – don’t grease the tin – into preheated oven @ 160°

Bake for about an hour till golden.

Then turn the oven off and leave it in there for 2 hours.

Remove it and when cool it goes in the fridge – and don’t worry about any cracks that appear – part of the charm (although the ones from the Croissant D’Or weren’t split.

I recommend eating this as is – whipped cream is always nice but is it too much? I think so. Now all you need is a good cup of coffee to go with it – oh Vienna!!

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Barley Soup for David

I should be sharing the joys of my week in tropical Darwin, but it’s cold and raining and I’ve just had a great chat with my brother regarding soup. His household in the cold Blue Mountains have feasted on a batch of homemade minestrone for some days. He suddenly realised that soup had been a missing ingredient in his past life.

No, I don’t believe Mothers should be the only providers of nurture, but his ex did have “domestic goddess” aspirations, unfortunately they did not extend to comfort food. So when I told David I’d just made barley soup he requested the recipe. My barley soup tastes somewhat like my mother’s, except that being a lazy baby boomer if I make a pot of barley soup, that’s dinner. Not for my Mum who regularly provided three course dinners, midweek, and yes, she went out to work. Here she is with her grandchildren and one great grandchild – she’s looking pretty good from 90 years of homemade soup, as are her descendants.

So, some years ago, driven by nostalgia I figured this would work – and it does, though I doubt Mum used lamb shanks, though they were so cheap back in the day, damn our new found cosmopolitanism! Back then my father couldn’t give away the massive tuna he caught. But those were the days, when men were men and squid was bait.

Now be warned I have no accurate measurements for this soup– only estimates and you will add or subtract whatever you do or don’t like, beef bones can be used instead of lamb, but for me the soup should be thick with cabbage. I blame it on my Eastern European ancestry but recognise that not everyone likes cabbage.

Barley Soup

In a large pot sauté:

Olive oil as needed (not that my Mum would have used olive oil)

A few bay leaves

2 lamb shanks

1 large chopped onion

2 cloves chopped garlic

*½ large diced capsicum

*2 celery sticks finely sliced

then add

2T ground coriander

2t ground paprika

Then add ¾ cup of barley that has been soaking at least 2 hours

Cover with water or stock of your choice and ½ cup of wine.

Add 2 diced carrots

*2 diced potatoes

Bring to the boil reduce to simmer and cook for approx. 2 hours till barley is tender and lamb is falling from the bone.

At this point I season with salt and pepper.

Finally I add half a coarsely chopped cabbage, I like big hunks and just submerge it in the soup till cooked through, I like to keep the crunch.

You may remove the lamb from the bone if you like or provide a shank in bowl, obviously more shanks can be used.

Enjoy.

*these are optional and to taste, any vegetable can be used really but I try and avoid cauliflower when using cabbage, because sometimes you can have too much roughage!

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Time for Chicken Soup

Monday night is the beginning of Passover, what we Jews call Pesach. The festival commemorates the hasty flight from Egypt, the Exodus.Pesach is a celebration of some duration — eight days in fact and as such preparations begin long before. There are various tasks which are performed even in a secular home such as mine. For me these involve mainly extended shopping expeditions, but it is not so easy for Orthodox Jewish women. In Orthodox homes preparations begin with the removal of all chametz or leaven, from the home. Leaven is literally the substance that makes bread rise, yeast most commonly.

Everyone looks forward to the meal eaten on the first night – the seder, the central set piece of the celebration of Passover..  “Seder”, comes from a Hebrew root word meaning “order”, and indeed the meal will progress in an orderly fashion, each piece of the story represented by a food item.

There was no time to allow the bread to rise and so we eat matzo, flatbread. Tracey Rich adds that: “It is also a symbolic way of removing the ‘puffiness’ (arrogance, pride) from our souls”

So the flattened matzo sheets are used instead of bread. After 8 days there may be uncomfortable digestive repercussions. Matzo is also ground and rendered into flour (matzo meal), fine medium or coarse. The finest matzo meal is used for baking cakes and biscuits. I use coarse ground for my kneidlach, (matzo meal dumplings) since fine meal would make the kneidlach too solid. There are many families who like them that way, I’m told.

As Oded Schwartz has observed:

There are two opposing schools of thought about the making of these simple, delicious dumplings: one maintains that they have to be ‘as light as a feather and quiver under their own weight’ and the other, which is almost as popular, insists on a heavy, substantial kneidlach ‘which will sink to the bottom of the plate’. (94)

My mother’s recipe should produce “light as a feather” dumplings.

Mum’s Kneidlach

Beat well:

2 eggs

2 tablespoons oil

2 tablespoons cold water

pinch of cinnamon

salt and pepper

Then add coarse matzo meal, one tablespoon at a time until the mixture drops from the spoon, loose but not runny, should make a ‘bloop’ sound as it drops. Refrigerate for at least an hour.

Roll into little balls (use about a teaspoon of mixture) with wet hands, drop into rapidly boiling, salted water and cook for thirty minutes, or until cooked through. This quantity will make 12- 15 kneidlach.

Serve with clear chicken broth and cooked carrot rings. Add shredded chicken if you want to make it a meal.

Enjoy!

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Festive Frying

I’m rather shamed to admit I’ve been busy eating rather than writing – poor show. But what a month December was! December always begins early for me with the simchafreo Chanukah party, which I usually host. So, simchafreo http://simchafreo.info/index.html is the Fremantle Jewish community group Ari Antonovsky. Ann Marie Medcalf, Mark and Lea Zweir, and I established five years ago with help from all sorts of sundry “freojews”. More of that another time.

Chanukah is probably the best-known Jewish festival – at least amongst non-Jews. On the Jewish calendar it doesn’t qualify as a “High Holy Day”,  but with increased secularisation, i.e., the pressure of Christmas, Chanukah has become more important.

Chanukah commemorates the miracle of the oil. http://www.jewfaq.org/holiday7.htm– the story goes that having overcome their oppressive Greek conquerors the Jews found only one jar of oil to relight the candles in the Temple, that is, enough for one day. Miraculously it burnt for the 8 days required to produce fresh olive oil.

Jews commemorate the occasion with games, small gifts, lighting the candles over 8 nights, and…eating friend food. What’s not to like?

So we meet each year, serenaded by local klezmer band Gems, we eat our share of fried food – in this case – latkes (see below) and terrific donuts (sufganiyot) provided by Abhi’s organic bakery – delicious donuts, fried but not greasy. I ate too many.  (http://abhisbread.com.au/)

A Recipe for Latkes

Latkes are a very typical Ashkenazi (Eastern European Jewish) food. Very much like a potato rosti they are potato cakes.

So you grate about 1 med onion and 2 med potatoes. You will need to strain the potato in a tea towel to remove the starchy liquid – but you should always keep a little liquid in case your mixture gets too dry and claggy.

The potato and onion is added to 2 beaten eggs, salt and pepper. Mix it well and then add about 2 tablespoons of flower (self raising or not..)

Just enough to bring it all together.

Then you heat your oil – and don’t bother with olive oil – you need peanut or safflower oil. Drop a tablespoon in and flatten it with a spatula or the back of a spoon.

Cook them till they’re brown and then drain  on paper towels. Latkes are such a treat that in my family the word signifies anything rather good. So for example my Dad’s winning cards in a bridge game would be referred to as “these little latkes”.

They don’t look elegant, but then Ashkenazi food has little to do with elegance and everything to do with taste. Potato, onion and oil, what can go wrong?

I have served them up with turkey for an interfaith Xmas. So how was my Xmas? Delicious thanks, but perhaps a little less of that from this Jewish Mama!