My first Singaporean cookies

I made my first batch of cookies in Singapore! And yes, I will probably continue to get excited the first time I do every very normal thing, only this time in Singapore. Anyway, the cookies were really just to have a snack for Andrew to take to work; while we were in the hotel, we bought granola bars that he ate for work-day snacks. They were good but I never like how very sweet store-bought granola bars are, so I prefer making my own for snacks.

Except then I made batch of granola on Sunday (first batch of granola in Singapore!) and used most of my newly bought (first big shopping trip for groceries in Singapore!) granola-bar-type ingredients for the actual granola. But I did have an interesting new sugar (black sugar, which seems way more exciting than brown sugar although it is in fact a similar colour to treacle sugar, muscovado sugar, and other dark brown sugars), an interesting new flour (very fine, pale yellow-ish whole-wheat flour; I’m not sure if it actually is whole-wheat), and some baking staples like eggs and baking soda (and here is another set of parentheses, just so I can say I have managed to fit five sets into one two-sentence paragraph).

So I made up some sugar-laden cookies, meaning I could just as well have bought more sugary granola bars for work snacks. But I’m glad I didn’t because, much to my surprise, the cookies made with all the new-to-me ingredients, eyeballed measurements and some unusual elements turned out to be some pretty decent peanut cookies. I’m glad I paid attention when I made them; I will definitely make them again, although this time for a treat instead of a snack.

For now, though, off to go get some more granola bar ingredients. After I sort out a little kitchen disaster I just had (first kitchen disaster in Singapore!)

Whole-wheat olive oil peanut cookies

Makes about 18

I’ve listed alternative options for things like the fine whole-wheat flour and black sugar, which should all work perfectly well. You could also substitute the peanut butter with any other nut butter, and the olive oil with vegetable oil, but then you'd have to give the cookies a new name. Add-ins could work well – chocolate chips, dried fruit, other nuts – although I liked the simplicity.

1 c fine whole-wheat flour (or use cake flour)

¼ tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

½ c toasted sweet peanuts (another new-to-me ingredient; alternatively, use raw peanuts or very lightly salted roasted peanuts)

¼ c olive oil

¼ c peanut butter

½ c black sugar (or any other dark, moist sugar such as treacle, muscovado, demerara, etc.)

¼ c caster sugar

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 175 C and grease a cookie sheet with a little olive oil.

In a medium bowl, sift and mix flour, baking soda and salt. Make a well in the centre and set aside.

In a small bowl, whisk olive oil, peanut butter, sugars, egg and vanilla extract until well blended and frothy. Pour into the flour mixture and mix with a wooden spoon until the mixture comes together into a firm dough.

Break off slightly-larger-than-walnut-sized chunks of dough and roll them into balls. Place the balls spaced about three centimetres apart on the cookie sheet and press each ball to flatten into a disk. 

Slide the cookies into the oven and bake for 8 to 12 minutes - less if you want softer cookies, more if you'd prefer them a little crisp. Remove from the oven and cool for 5 minutes before lifting onto a wire rack to cool to room temperature.

These cookies kept well in a sealed container for one and a half days and then they were gone, so I have no further information on how long they might keep.

And now: eating AND cooking in Singapore!

Living in a hotel and being forced to eat out every night is not really a hardship, especially not when you’re doing so in Singapore where there is sure to be yet another hawker centre, food court, cafe or restaurant around every corner, all of them offering a bewildering array of dishes to choose from. But, as evidenced by this site and my former life as a caterer and chef, I like to cook. What with the crazy few days before leaving South Africa and nearly three weeks in a hotel, I hadn’t cooked a thing for about a month. The closest I came was making peanut butter and apricot jam sandwiches on the floor in our hotel room for Andrew to take to work. Peanut butter and jam sandwiches are delicious, but a three-year-old can make them with eyes closed (maybe; perhaps I should get my sister-in-law to do an experiment with my three-year-old niece). Which is to say, my daily sandwich-making hardly provided me with any sense of culinary achievement.

The walk home from the shops, along a canal

However! Buying random, unfamiliar vegetables, packages, bottles and jarred things and trying to figure out what to do with them in order to end up with an edible dinner – now that does provide me with a sense of achievement, even more so if the dinner is not just edible but actually good. We moved into our flat – called a condo here – over the weekend, and before we’d even unpacked anything, we’d been to our local grocery shop and stocked up on some familiar staples, and a whole lot of other things that seemed like they might be good and weren’t too expensive (in case they weren’t good).

Inaugural dinner, much more average than the word "inaugural" implies

After weeks of eating out we both just wanted vegetables, so I roasted a big tray, tossed it in a spicy peanut sauce (that possibly contained cuttlefish; I think I accidentally bought cuttlefish-laced chilli sauce but didn’t tell Andrew and he didn’t seem to mind) and called it dinner. It was edible, but not great; it appears Chinese green carrots and white radishes are perhaps not best when roasted (although, please do correct me if I'm wrong).

Dinner number two - much better!

But I was not discouraged, and dinner number two fared much, much better. We managed to find proper whole-wheat spaghetti, to my delight, and tossed the hot, cooked spaghetti with sautéed shiitake mushrooms, enoki mushrooms, Chinese spinach, crushed garlic, lime juice, soy sauce and olive oil. I topped the pasta with enormous toasted pumpkin seeds, and voila – dinner. So good. The kind of thing I would’ve made back in Cape Town, but using lots of local ingredients (that is, as local as things can be when not much is grown on this small island).

Biggest pumpkin seeds I've ever seen

Mushroom spaghetti with spinach and lime

Serves 3 or 4

Most of the ingredients here can be easily substituted. For example, you could use normal spaghetti, or a different shape pasta; use sunflower seeds instead of pumpkin; replace the mushrooms with any other variety of mushrooms you can find; use English spinach or rocket instead of Chinese spinach; and while the lime juice is lovely, lemon will also work. Reduce the garlic if you’re not used to too much.

150g shiitake mushrooms

180g enoki mushrooms

2 cloves garlic, crushed

Large bunch of Chinese spinach

Juice of 3 tiny limes, or 1 average lime

75g pumpkin seeds

4 tbsp olive oil

Salt

250g whole-wheat pasta

4 tbsp soy sauce

Pepper

First do your prep: slice the mushrooms, crush the garlic, cut the spinach up into bite-size pieces, squeeze the lemon juice and toast the pumpkin seeds in a hot oven till golden – watch them, they burn quickly.

Once your prep is done, place a large pot filled three-quarters of the way up with water, a tablespoon of olive oil and a teaspoon of salt over high heat to bring to the boil.

Meanwhile, place a large, heavy-bottomed pan over high heat, pour about a tablespoon of olive oil in the pan, and add the shiitake mushrooms. Sauté the mushrooms until dark golden; add the enoki mushrooms and sauté for a few more minutes (skip this step if only using larger mushrooms; the enoki mushrooms should be cooked much less since they’re so small and frail). Remove the pan from the heat and lower the heat to medium.

Your pasta water should be boiling by now – add the spaghetti.

Return the mushroom pan to the heat, adding the spinach and garlic. Sauté for a few minutes until the spinach has wilted. Scoop a few spoonfuls of pasta water into the pan and add the lime juice, soy sauce, another two tablespoons of olive oil and plenty of freshly ground black pepper. Give it a good stir and turn the heat as low as it can go.

When the pasta is cooked, drain thoroughly and add to the mushroom pan. Turn the heat up to high and toss the pasta quickly until most of the liquid has evaporated. Remove from the heat and taste – you might need to add a bit of soy sauce or salt, or some more lime juice or pepper. If you do add more liquid, return it to the heat for another minute or two; otherwise, remove from the heat and scrape into a serving dish.

Top with the toasted pumpkin seeds and serve.

Mangosteens, then and now

Eleven years ago I had my first mangosteen, and then many more over the course of the few months I spent in Malaysia. Despite some misgivings about the texture, I thought that it might be my perfect fruit – sweet, almost rich but with a great juicy, tangy, refreshing quality. I do realize that this is a ridiculous description of a fruit’s taste – sweet, tangy, rich, juicy, refreshing – all words that can be used to describe so many kinds of fruit. I think maybe I mean that it was all these things, but so much more intensely than any other fruit I’d had. Then I left Malaysia and there were no more mangosteens, and as far as I could tell, there wouldn’t be for a very long time, if ever.

When I tried to explain them to people who had never seen or tasted a mangosteen, I was a little bit at a loss. The outside was easy enough – very dark purple, the colour and also roughly the size of a ripe granadilla, but perfectly round and smooth with a stalk. When it came to describing the inside, though, I couldn’t think how. My best shot was to say that the fruit is segmented, like a citrus fruit, but with only one big seed in the biggest segment; and the segments are white. I suppose that does describe what they look like, but somehow not clearly enough.

Now, eleven years later, we are in Singapore and I have been reunited with mangosteens. We bought a net bag full last week and as soon as we were back in our hotel room, I peeled one and gave Andrew one of the segments before eating one myself; I was so excited for him to try this near-perfect fruit. Delicious, was his verdict, and “when it’s peeled it looks like a head of garlic”, he said.

Yes. Yes, it does, a much more concise description.

They are still very good, but the fruit inside the thick peel is so small, the texture still strange, and I’ve decided I don’t like the segment with the one big seed at all. I feel a little disappointed in myself that I am no longer so easily moved to rapturous declarations about fruit, but I suppose it’s natural to be more given to extremes at seventeen than at twenty-eight.

So in the end, having upheld them as my perfect fruit for eleven years, mangosteens are making me feel old and a little alienated from my former self. I must remember in the future not to have quite such high expectations for fruit.

Eating (but not yet cooking) in Singapore

So! We are in Singapore, and it is hot and wonderful. We are also in a hotel for the time being, meaning we have to eat out for most meals (how we suffer!). I am very much looking forward to moving into our flat at the start of September, and being able to cook again (albeit very basic things, since out shipment with implements only arrives in October). Once I can cook again, I suspect I will bombard this blog in delight with all my creations using new-to-me ingredients.

But until then, here are some of the most delicious things I have eaten after one week in Singapore, listed in no particular order:

1. Lor mee - thick, flat egg noodles in a dark broth with lots of goodies - pork, prawns (I think), hard-boiled egg, and more. The chilli sauce on the side was smoky and slightly sweet. I am getting better with the slippery-noodles-and-chopsticks-and-spoon technique (if anyone knows a less cumbersome term for the technique, do let me know), but still ended up with dark brown sauce splatters all over me after this meal. Worth it, though.



2. Omu yakisoba - this is actually a Japanese dish. I feel guilty eating things that are not actually very Singaporean, and yet it hasn't stopped me from eating Japanese, Korean, Thai and Vietnamese food, as you will see. Clearly I am able to push my guilt aside. Anyway, again noodles, this time cooked on a hotplate with bacon and a mysterious sauce, topped with egg, "special white sauce", delicious mysterious brown sauce and dancing fish flakes.

3. I can't remember this salad's actual Thai name. I could google it, but so can you - it's a green mango salad, with tom yum soup on the side. My stomach lining was burning for hours afterwards due to the large chunks of chilli you can see in the salad, and yet I couldn't stop myself from eating them all.

4. Chewy Juniors - custard-filled cream puffs, sometimes with toppings added as above, seem to be a Thing in Singapore, and one of the chain brands is called Chewy Juniors. Eating puffs from a chain brand is probably a very rookie-ish thing to do, but I might never be able to eat another kind, due to these having one of the best brand names ever.

5. Pad thai - again with the non-local food, and extremely well-known-in-the-West non-local food, too. Sorry. It was good.

6. And a blurry picture of a plate from a vegetarian buffet-style stall; brown rice and vegetables, so healthy! (If you choose to ignore all the delicious oil, sodium and coconut milk also contained in this meal.)

And thus concludes my Top 6, so far.

Chocolate orange cake, and a bit of nostalgia

We are in Singapore. I have eaten many notable things, despite only being here for just over 24 hours, and I have many thoughts. But first, some nostalgic pictures from our last week in South Africa, spent both in Cape Town and in Pretoria.



Mountains!



One of the views on one of our favourite
running routes in Cape Town



We ate lots of delicious food in the last week, including this
springbok ravioli dish at Bizerca Bistro



And we drank lots of wine,
like this pinot noir flight at French Toast



Cake and wine at the end of a family braai



That last photo is of a chocolate-orange cake I made for dessert at a family braai; chocolate with orange is one of my mom's favourite flavour combinations. I winged it, being at my mom’s house without recipes and my usual implements, but it turned out well enough that I think it should be made again.

Chocolate orange cake

Makes one large, high cake, or two layers for a layer cake

I had only one cake pan, so I baked the cake as a single layer, sliced it in half and filled it with marmalade. Two thinner layers would probably be easier, although you’d have to reduce the baking time.

When the cake was baked, I decided against covering it with frosting or icing of any kind. But I was afraid it would be dry without a topping, so I both soaked it in a flavoured sugar syrup and filled it with marmalade. It was delicious and I wouldn’t make it without the syrup, although you could add a chocolate frosting or ganache topping to make it richer and fancier if you like.

Batter:

½ c butter

1 c golden sugar

Zest and juice of 1 large orange

3 eggs

1 ¼ c flour

½ c cocoa powder

1 tsp salt

1 ½ tsp baking soda

1 tbsp balsamic vinegar

¼ c milk, plus more if needed

Syrup:

Juice of 1 large orange, plus a few strips of orange peel

¾ c water

½ c sugar

Preheat the oven to 165 C. Butter a large cake pan and line with baking paper, then butter again and dust with cocoa powder. Set aside.

In a large bowl, cream the butter, sugar and orange zest until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one by one, beating well after each addition; the mixture might start to split just a little, which is fine.

Sift the flour, cocoa powder, salt and baking soda into the butter mixture and add the orange juice, balsamic vinegar and milk. Stir until just combined. If the batter drops off the mixing spoon easily at this point, you’re done; if it seems thicker, add a bit more milk and mix again.

Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and bake for  approximately 45 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean.

While the cake bakes, place all of the syrup ingredients in a small pot and bring to the boil. Boil for about five minutes and then remove from the heat. Remove the orange peel.

When the cake is baked and has cooled for five minutes, poke it all over with a sharp knife or a fork. Make sure you get to most of the cake’s surface. Pour the syrup over the cake, distributing it as evenly as you can.

Cool the cake further to room temperature, then invert onto a plate and fill and decorate as desired. Like I said, I just cut it in half, spread a lot of marmalade in between the two layers, and topped the cake with sliced kumquats and strawberries.

Interruption for pecan-cinnamon coffee cake

Coffee cake seems to be an American thing, for me another relic from my childhood spent amongst Americans. Because by coffee cake I don’t mean coffee-flavoured cake, I mean a general group of cakes originally meant to be eaten along with a cup of coffee. Of course, any cake can be eaten along with a cup of coffee, so I’m not sure why there is a specific kind of cake that’s given this definition. Regardless, as far as my experience goes, coffee cakes are sometimes but not always yeasted, often contain nuts and are often topped with a buttery, crumbly streusel topping – no frosting or icing. They tend to be sturdy, moist cakes, flavoured with vanilla and maybe some spices, but nothing too overpowering. They are, in fact, very good to have with a cup of coffee, and so I decided to bake one for afternoon coffee with a friend (fine, we had tea. Hopefully there are no coffee cake police).

I had a bag of good fresh pecan nuts that I had to use before we left, so I did some searching for pecan nut coffee cakes on the interwebs. There were many, but here’s something that bothered me: this kind of cake is not supposed to be very sweet, yet most of the recipes had many, many cups of sugar, and some even had glazes topping the streusel. Just reading the recipes made my teeth ache. So I used a few different recipes as pointers and cut and pasted and edited until I ended up with my own coffee cake. Sweet and buttery, but not so much so that you wouldn’t be able to have a piece for breakfast. Of course along with the obligatory coffee.

Pecan-cinnamon coffee cake

Makes one large sheet-pan cake

You can easily play with this recipe, using different nuts or spices, adding raisins, or citrus juice and zest.

Streusel:

1 ¾ c flour

½ c treacle sugar

½ tsp cinnamon

1 tsp salt

½ c butter, cold and cubed

½ toasted, chopped pecan nuts

Middle layer:

¼ c treacle sugar

¼ tsp cinnamon

1 c toasted, chopped pecan nuts

Batter:

½ c butter

2 c flour

1 ¼ tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

¾ c sugar

2 eggs

1 ½ tsp vanilla

¾ c sour cream or full fat yoghurt

½ c milk

Preheat the oven to 170 C. Butter a large casserole dish or sheet pan and dust with flour, shaking out excess flour. Set aside.

For the streusel, combine all the streusel ingredients in a bowls and rub together with your fingertips until the mixture resembles coarse breadcrumbs. Set aside.

For the middle layer, combine all middle layer ingredients in a small bowl and toss together. Set aside.

In a large mixing bowl, cream the remaining butter and sugar until light. Add the eggs one by one, beating well after each addition. Sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt into the bowl, add the sour cream (or yoghurt), milk and vanilla extract, and beat until well combined with no lumps.

Spoon half of the batter into the prepared pan and smooth with the back of a spoon. Sprinkle the middle layer mixture over the batter evenly, then top with the remaining batter and smooth over to cover completely. Finally top evenly with the streusel mixture.

Slide into the hot oven and bake for 40 – 50 minutes, until the topping is golden and a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean.

Cool at least ten minutes before cutting into squares.

Dinner party number ten

This dinner party, in fact another Sunday lunch, was the very last meal with friends in our flat before we moved out to stay in a friend’s house for our last few days in Cape Town. I had thought ahead and frozen the leftover roast chicken from the previous weekend’s dinner party, as well as the leftover pastry from the pumpkin pie. (I have a complex about not having enough food to feed people, whether they’re guests or just my husband and I. The result is that I inevitably make far too much food. I take out four potatoes knowing that they’ll be enough, but then the doubt starts and I take out another one. And halfway through peeling, I’ll whip out a final sixth potato, just to be sure. Result: leftovers!)

But I digress. Leftover roast chicken and leftover pastry, combined with a quick creamy white wine sauce and some roasted root vegetables, leaves you with a creamy roast chicken and root vegetable pie. Add a salad and it’s a comforting, filling lunch.

So, the menu:

Creamy roast chicken and root vegetable pie

Spinach salad with avocado

Cappuccino bars

I was going to make another batch of brownies for dessert – they’re quick and easy and I know they’re good. But then I happened upon a recipe and accompanying pretty picture for glazed, chocolate-y cappuccino bars. I am a slave to pretty pictures of baked goods, so I decided: lack of baking implements be damned, I’m going to make these things. I had to become a little creative in the process given my single giant catering-size mixing bowl, one wonky wooden spoon and bent, charred baking slide, but the bars turned out anyway. They’re good, but they are incredibly rich; do cut them into small squares.

Cappuccino bars

Makes about 30 small squares

Dough:

1 c softened butter

1 c packed treacle sugar

1 tbsp instant espresso powder

¼ tsp finely ground espresso powder

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 ¼ c flour

½ tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

2 c dark chocolate, chopped (I used Cadbury’s Bourneville)

Glaze:

2 tbsp milk

1 tbsp butter

¾ c icing sugar

¼ tsp cinnamon

Preheat the oven to 190 C. Line a rimmed cookie sheet/baking slide with baking parchment.

Cream the butter, sugar, coffee powder and grounds, and vanilla. Add the flour, baking powder and salt, and mix – the dough will be crumbly, which is all as it should be. Add the chopped chocolate and mix.

Dump the dough onto the lined baking slide and press it down into a smooth, solid sheet, using a rolling pin to smooth the top. If your baking slide is too big for the dough (you want it to be at least 1cm thick), the dough doesn’t have to go all the way to the edges; just be sure then to square off and trim the edges.

Bake for 10 to 15 minutes; watch them carefully as they burn easily. You don’t want them to get too dark.

Remove from the oven and let cool for 10 minutes. While they cool, melt all the ingredients for the glaze together in a small pot, and spread over the bars.

Cool to room temperature, until the glaze has set, and cut into small bars or squares.

Bonus baked onions

I’ve decided I’m not done with number nine yet; the onions deserve a mention. 

It’s a Nigel Slater recipe - one found in The Kitchen Diaries - that I’ve been meaning to make for ages. In the spirit of Getting Things Done before we move away, I finally made the baked onions (funny how I manage to tick things like “make baked onions” off the to-do list much quicker than “go to the dentist”). The onions were as good as I hoped, but they are baked in cream and cheese so it’s really no surprise.

Onions baked in cream

Makes enough for 6 – 8 people, as a substantial side dish

4 large onions, peeled and halved (but don’t cut off the core)

250ml cream (the original recipe calls for 330ml, but I found 250ml to be plenty)

Large handful grated parmesan (although I in fact used pecorino, which was good)

Salt and pepper

Place the peeled onion halves in a large pot with a teaspoon of salt and cover with cold water. Place over high heat and bring to the boil, then lower the heat to medium and simmer for 20 – 25 minutes, until the onions are tender but not soft. Remove from the heat.

Preheat the oven to 180 C. Remove the onions from the water with a slotted spoon and lay in an ovenproof dish. Pour the cream over the onions, season generously with salt and freshly ground pepper, and sprinkle the cheese on top. Place the onions in the oven and bake for 30 – 45 minutes, until the tops are dark golden and bubbly.

Dinner party number nine, with bonus nostalgia

The ninth dinner party was for a group of lovely cousins.

The menu:

Camembert baked with white wine and garlic, with carrot sticks and bread sticks for dipping

Roast chickens with vermouth gravy

Roast potatoes

Onions baked in cream

Salad:  rocket, watercress, avocado, citrus segments, sugar snap peas, peas, sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds

Pumpkin pie with ice cream

Pumpkin pie

I grew up amongst Americans – although not actually in America – and as a result attended quite a few Thanksgiving dinners. The first one was the most intense, including a reading of the pilgrims’ story from a children’s book, with voices and (forced) audience participation. My dad was scarred by the experience and from then on remained mildly horrified by the whole idea. But I was sold – stuffing! pie! cranberry sauce! I could sit through a great deal of pageantry and public thanksgiving for all that deliciousness. And so we continued on to many Thanksgiving dinners in subsequent years, and I continued to love the food.

So much so that, years later and once again living in South Africa, my sister and I organized our own Thanksgiving dinners for two years in a row with various friends and family members. They were good, but without the necessary Americans it felt like a bit of a forced production, so we stopped.

I was sad about the loss of Thanksgiving dinner, until it one day occurred to me that, hey, I can make my favourite parts of Thanksgiving dinner whenever I feel like it, without actually having to have a Thanksgiving dinner. I do not, in fact, need a turkey with all the trimmings in order to justify making a pumpkin pie.

So now I can make pumpkin pie whenever I feel like it.

And a close-up!

The recipe I use is Jean Sorrels’, my childhood best friend’s mother. The Sorrels family hosted us for our second, and my favourite ever, Thanksgiving dinner. I don’t remember too much from the main course, aside from the fact that we ate a vast amount and that, since it was November in Russia and the meal started at 4pm, it was pitch dark by the time we finished. The three Sorrels girls and my sister and I went outside to the playground after dinner and played in the snow, eventually laying down to make snow angels and stare at the stars. Then we went back inside, cheeks and noses pink from the cold, and Jean produced her homemade pumpkin pie and pecan pie with whipped cream.

Pumpkin pie

Serves 12

I think (but am not American, so do not know for sure) Jean’s pumpkin pie is quite traditional, and there are all sorts of variations and things you can add to fancy up a pumpkin pie. But as is probably obvious, I am very nostalgic about Thanksgiving dinner in general and pumpkin pie in particular, so this is the only pumpkin pie I’ll ever make.

A note on the pumpkin used in the filling: I cheat and use butternut, which I like better and is easier to work with. I peel and cube it, roast it, mash it, then push it through a sieve to make it really smooth. You don’t have to do the last bit, and you can steam instead of roast, although I think roasting makes for a more flavourful pie.

Pastry for one-crust pie (I use classic shortcrust pastry, one recipe’s worth, but store-bought is fine)

1 ½ c strained, cooked pumpkin (see note above)

2 large eggs

1 x 380g tin, or 1 ½ c, evaporated milk

2 tbsp high test molasses

½ c brown sugar

1 tbsp flour

½ tsp salt

½ tsp ground ginger (I used a bit less)

½ tsp ground cinnamon (I used a bit more)

Pinch of nutmeg

Pinch of ground cloves

Preheat the oven to 230 C. First, blind-bake the pastry: roll out the pastry and line a standard pie tin or quiche tin. Lay some tinfoil or baking paper over the pastry shell and fill with baking beans. When the oven is up to temperature, slide the lined tin onto a baking sheet and into the oven. Bake for 10 minutes.

While the pastry shell is in the oven, place the pumpkin, eggs, evaporated milk, and molasses in a bowl and whisk to combine. Add the remaining ingredients and whisk again, making sure there are no lumps.

When the pastry has baked for 10 minutes, remove it from the oven, lift the tinfoil/baking paper out and pour the pumpkin filling into the shell. Slide into the oven and bake for 10 minutes at 230 C, then lower the temperature to 180 C for a further 30 minutes. Check the pie after 15 minutes at 180 C – if the crust is starting to get quite brown, cover just the crust (not the whole pie) with some foil to prevent burning (I was distracted and did a very sloppy job with this, and ended up with some of the foil sadly making marks on the finished pie’s surface).

Remove from the oven and allow to cool to room temperature before slicing. Serve with ice cream or whipped cream. Leftovers make an excellent breakfast.

I tried to hide the worst of the foil-damaged top of the pie
with the cunning use of foliage

Dinner party number eight

The eighth dinner party was the night after the day the shipping people (what do you call them officially? shippers?) came to pack up all my kitchen things. By necessity, anything I cooked from that point on had to be simple, so a simple dinner it was.

I did, however, manage to impress myself endlessly by making a cake despite having no mixing bowls, no measuring cups or spoons, no scale, and to make it just that little bit more exciting, no recipe. I just tossed random amounts of things into an old bunged-up pot to melt, added still-random quantities of dry ingredients and stirred. Ta-da: cake batter. Poured into an old, battered pan on top of leftover poached pears. Miraculously, it rose and was edible, even very good, although of course I have no idea how much of what I used so there is no recipe.

Recipe-less cake

Anyway, the menu:

Cheese plate (insanely good taleggio and port salut, a gift) with crostini made with homemade bread (a leftover from my weekend baking escapade)

Oven-grilled beef fillet with chimichurri and sliced avocado

Smoky, spicy sweet potato wedges

Steamed greens – a mix of broccoli and green beans

Upside-down pear and ginger cake

Even though it would be nice to have the cake recipe to share, the chimichurri is really what stood out for me. The piece of fillet we had was on the small side for four people, and I got the idea in my head to stretch it by layering the cooked, sliced fillet with avocado slices. A red wine sauce or pepper sauce probably wouldn’t work well with the avocado, I thought; I wanted something light and fresh, and preferably not hot. Chimichurri seemed liked a good bet.

I’d never made chimichurri, so I scanned a few recipes to get the basic idea and then went ahead on my own. I thought it would require some effort, since I’m lazy and generally make similar kinds of sauces in my food processor which was packed and hopefully on a boat to Singapore. In the end, it was the simplest thing and something I’ll definitely make often. The finished fillet-avocado-chimichurri dish was probably my favourite thing I’ve made in months.

Bowl of chimichurri

Chimichurri

Makes about 1 cup

I made this a couple of hours before using it, and kept it at room temperature. I’m sure it would keep, covered and refrigerated, for a few days, although the garlic might become more pronounced with time.

2 big handfuls flat leaf parsley

1 big handful picked oregano leaves

2 small cloves garlic, peeled and chopped

½ c olive oil, approximately

½ tsp salt, approximately

¼ tsp chili powder (or less, a pinch, if you don’t like things too hot)

1 tsp red vinegar, approximately

Place the chopped garlic, parsley and oregano on a chopping board, making a big pile. Using a sharp knife, start chopping, working from top to bottom and side to side so you get to all the bits. Keep chopping until the herbs are very well chopped but still have some texture – the finished product isn’t meant to be smooth.

Scrape the chopped herbs and garlic into a bowl and add half of each of the remaining ingredients. Stir well and taste, then decide if you think the sauce needs the moisture from the remaining olive oil, and the seasoning from the remaining salt, chili powder and vinegar. Add and adjust as you see fit, tasting as you go.

This is a very strongly flavoured sauce, so however you use it, a little goes a long way.

Plated main dish

And here are bonus instructions for assembling the main dish I served:

Beef fillet with avocado and chimichurri

1 x recipe chimichurri

1 beef fillet, as much as you need for the number of guests (as I mentioned, we used one that was a little small for the number of guest, but worked perfectly presented this way, so it’s a good recipe to stretch your meat if you need to)

Salt

Pepper

Olive oil

1 avocado for every four guests

Make the chimichurri first, and set aside.

Grill the beef fillet, simply rubbed with olive oil and seasoned with black pepper and salt – use the oven’s grill, a stove-top griddle pan, braai it, whatever you like. Our griddle pan was packed and gone so I used the oven grill and it worked perfectly.

When the fillet is cooked how you like and resting, peel the avocado and cut it up into thinnish slices, about ½ cm thick. Slice the fillet into 1cm thick pieces. Lay the fillet and avocado down on a platter in an alternating pattern – 1 slice avocado, 1 slice fillet, repeat. Sprinkle with salt (crunchy Maldon salt flakes, if you have them), pour any steak juices over, and finally top with the chimichurri.

The mixture of meat juices and leftover bit of chimichurri that’s left after all the meat and avocado has been eaten is delicious, so some bread for mopping is nice to have on hand. 

Interruption for sweet orange rolls

I interrupt the dinner party posts for orange rolls. Halfway into our final month in our flat, the people shipping our things to Singapore came to pack up and remove everything we wanted to take with us. This consisted mostly of kitchen things, including all my baking tools and implements, leaving me only with a few very basic and battered cooking tools we plan to give away when we leave. So the weekend before the packing up happened, I felt I should bake while I still had the chance; it can apparently take up to fifteen weeks for our shipment to arrive in Singapore.

Ideally, I would’ve made cinnamon rolls. They’re comforting to eat, and while not difficult to make at all, it is a bit of a process so it feels like real baking (muffins, for example, don’t feel like real baking to me because it’s all over too quickly). But Andrew hates cinnamon.

So I made sweet orange rolls instead and they were delicious. I highly recommend them, but I also highly recommend that you follow the recipe suggestion to cut the filled, rolled-up dough into 12 pieces and place said 12 pieces in a big enough baking pan. I cut the dough into 10 pieces and then squished those ten pieces into a pan that was, it turned out, too small. The rolls rose beautifully high, so much so that they squashed a whole lot of their buttery, sugary filling out onto the oven bottom and caused a fire. Smoke! Drama! And lots of burnt caramel for me to clean, not my favourite activity on a Sunday night when I want to get a pizza in the oven (pizza dough and the resultant homemade pizza was another one of the weekend’s baking projects).

Sweet orange rolls

Makes 12

Dough:

1 ¼ c milk, warmed

1 packet instant active yeast

1/3 c sugar

2 tbsp butter, melted

1 tsp salt

1 egg, lightly beaten

4 c flour

Filling and topping:

1 c softened butter

½ c packed treacle sugar

1/3 cup orange zest (I substituted a bit of this with lemon zest)

½ tsp salt

3 c icing sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 tsp orange extract

2 tbsp orange juice

Place all the dough ingredients except the flour in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a dough hook and mix on medium till combined. Add the flour and mix on medium to form a dough; increase the speed to medium high and knead until the dough is smooth and has come away from the sides of the bowl completely. Place the dough in an oiled bowl, cover with clingwrap and leave to double in size. This takes anywhere from one and a half to three hours.

While the dough rises, beat together the butter, brown sugar and zest to combine. Add the salt, icing sugar and extracts and beat again until light and fluffy. Remove a quarter of the mixture into a small bowl, add the orange juice and mix to combine. This mixture will “break” and look pretty grim, but don’t worry – this is the icing, you’re going to spread it over the hot rolls where it will melt into them. Cover the icing and refrigerate, and set the remaining filling aside.

When the dough has doubled in size, turn it out onto a floured surface and roll it into a rectangle measuring approximately 45cm by 22cm. Spread the filling onto the dough evenly and roll it up the way you would a Swiss roll. Trim the ends, and cut the roll into 12 pieces using a sharp knife. Lay the pieces cut-side up in a buttered baking dish, making sure there is enough space for each piece to fit in with a little bit of room between the pieces. Cover with clingwrap and refrigerate overnight.

The next morning, take the rolls out of the fridge while you preheat the oven to 190 C. Bake the rolls for about 25 minutes, until doubled in size and dark golden on top. Remove from the oven and immediately dollop the icing on the hot buns, spreading it out as it melts.

Let cool for a few minutes and eat; these are best still warm from the oven, although they reheat very well. They also freeze well.

In which we have dinner but not a dinner party

And then, we had friends over for hot dogs. I am too embarrassed to call it a dinner party, and I don’t even know why we had hot dogs other than that Andrew said we should. In my defence: I bought sausages from the German deli, and bread from a nice bakery, and then made a potato salad with lots of colour so we didn’t just have plain hot dogs. I liked the potato salad; it’s not the mayonnaise-y, eggy one I grew up with, which I also like but which leaves me wracked with guilt in the middle of the night. This one has green bits and no mayonnaise, so it feels like it’s a bit French and much better for you.

This looks like mostly green beans, but there were
actually quite a few potatoes underneath

Potato salad

I haven’t included any amounts, because I just add as much as I have or feel like; this one turned out with a lot of greens in comparison to potatoes, for example, because I had a lot of lovely fresh baby green beans I wanted to use.

Baby potatoes, halved and roasted with a little oil, thyme, salt and pepper; roast a couple gloves of garlic, skin on, along with the potatoes

Fine green beans, topped and tailed and lightly steamed (they should still be crunchy)

red onion, very thinly sliced

wild rocket

olive oil

lemon juice

salt

pepper

Dijon mustard

flat leaf parsley, roughly chopped

Place the potatoes and red onion in a bowl. In a smaller bowl, combine the peeled roasted garlic and mash it up with a fork. Add the olive oil, lemon juice, mustard, salt and pepper and whisk to combine. Taste and adjust seasoning, adding a pinch of sugar if you like. Add to the potato bowl and toss well, set aside and leave to soak up flavours until you’re ready to eat. At this point, add the green beans, parsley and rocket, toss again, and serve.

Dinner party number seven

The seventh dinner party was a somewhat more casual affair, since I had been sick and wasn’t up to a huge cooked dinner. But there had to be cake, since it was also a belated birthday dinner for my mother-in-law.

The menu (which broke the red meat/pork sausage rule. It’s my rule so I can break it):

Corn chips with guacamole and tomato salsa

Pork carnitas and flour tortillas, with:

Smoky, spicy roasted sweetcorn and red pepper salsa

Tangy avocado and pineapple salsa

Radish, red onion and feta salsa

Sour cream

Pistachio and almond cake with crystallized rose petals

I make lots of carnitas and salsas, so I’ve got my standard base recipes which I find delicious but not very exciting to talk about. I also make lots of cake, but rarely pistachio cake. I don’t know why, since it transpires that pistachio cakes are very good.

Pistachio and almond cake

Makes a one-layer cake, enough for 12 – 16 servings

This is a simple butter cake with ground nuts that I made up as I went along, hence the strange quantities and the mix of volume and weight amounts in the ingredients list. I bought the almonds already ground, but ground the pistachios in my food processor and left some nice bigger pieces in there – not huge, but big enough to notice. The texture, flavour bursts and colour that the bigger chunks provide is nice, I think.

I topped the cake with crystallized rose petals (wash and dry some rose petals, lightly whisk an egg white and paint the petals with the egg white, dust them with castor sugar and let them dry for a few hours), chopped pistachios and toasted flaked almonds. That was all just to make it pretty, though; I really don’t think this cake needs any toppings or sides as far as flavour goes. It’s perfect as is, with a cup of strong tea. If you must have an accompaniment, some baked/poached/stewed fruit, such as apricots, would be good, as would thick Greek yoghurt.

½ c butter

¾ c plus 2tbsp sugar

2 large eggs

100g ground almonds

100g ground pistachios

¾ c flour

2 tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

1 tsp vanilla essence or extract

¼ - ½ c milk, as needed to achieve correct consistency

Preheat the oven to 160C. Butter a standard cake tin, then dust with flour (lining with buttered, flour-dusted baking paper is also a good idea).

Cream the butter and sugar – don’t worry about getting it very light, I didn’t and the cake was fine. Add the eggs one by one, beating well after each addition. Add the nuts and stir through, then sift the flour, baking powder and salt into the bowl, add the vanilla and ¼ cup milk, and start to stir slowly. As you stir, add more milk if necessary to achieve a dropping consistency. Stir until just combined.

Bake for approximately 30 minutes, until firm and golden brown, and a knife inserted in the centre comes out clean.

Dinner party number six - with complex broccoli!

The sixth dinner party was in fact a Sunday lunch, and was the afternoon after the fifth dinner party.

The menu (which, now that I look at it, contains lots of things cooked in wine):

Cheese plate – oozy camembert and local gruyere with spiced red wine plums and crackers

Beef and red wine pie

Roasted sweet potatoes and potatoes

Smoky-savoury roasted tenderstem broccoli, tossed with baby greens

White wine-poached pears with thick chocolate sauce and toasted almonds

Sunday lunch in progress

Aside from the fact that I managed to slightly burn some of the potatoes and sweet potatoes, I think it all turned out well and was a good cold-day meal. But what I really loved most about this dinner (aside from the chocolate sauce, of course; chocolate sauce always wins) was the broccoli. It’s so simple, but tastes complex. And who doesn’t love complex broccoli?!

Smoky-savoury roasted broccoli florets

Toss together:

250g tenderstem broccoli

2tbsp soy sauce

½ tsp sweet smoked paprika

1 tsp canola oil

¼ tsp salt

Spread the broccoli out evenly on a roasting tray, and slide into a hot (200C) oven. Roast for ten minutes – the broccoli should still have a bite to it. Serve as is, or toss with baby greens.

Dinner party number five

The fifth dinner party was the night after the fourth dinner party, and I was not up to cooking much. Also, there were a lot of people, too many to fit round our table, so by necessity it was going to be a living room, eat-on-your lap affair. Hence, the menu:

A variety of ordered-in pizzas

Homemade Maldon salt-sprinkled brownies, with ice cream

and caramel sauce

I was going to make a salad to go with the pizza, but after consultation it was decided that we all really just wanted pizza and brownies. We ordered the pizzas from a nondescript little place close to our flat that, in all our years in the neighbourhood, we’d never tried. Turns out they make perfectly thin-based, crispy, chewy and flavourful pizzas. That’ll teach us to judge a restaurant on its nondescript cover.

Brownies! I forgot to take photos on the night; this
is a recycled photo. Same recipe, though.

I used my favourite brownie recipe. It’s a slight adaptation of the old classic Hershey’s recipe: simple and basic, with no melted chocolate in the batter and no specialty extra-dark cocoa powder. There is a time and a place for expensive brownies laden with couverture chocolate, but I think there is even more time and place for these simpler brownies. My only concession to fancying them up is to add more salt to the batter, as well as sprinkling Maldon salt flakes on top before baking.

Again, a recycled photo - there are hazelnuts in these.
Most nuts are a good addition to these brownies.

Basic gooey brownies

Makes 9 to 12, depending on your pan size and how big you cut them

¾ cup cocoa powder

½ t baking soda

2/3 c butter, melted and divided

½ c boiling water

1 c packed treacle sugar

1 c sugar

2 eggs

1 1/3 c flour

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 tsp salt

180g chopped dark chocolate – I generally used Cadbury’s Bourneville

Maldon salt

Preheat the oven to 160 C. Butter a square or rectangular cake tin (20cm x 20cm is the classic size for this recipe, although I prefer a slightly bigger and more rectangular tin) and line with baking parchment, enough so that the parchment hangs over the sides of the pan and can be used to lift the finished brownies out of the pan. Butter the parchment and dust with cocoa powder and set aside.

In a medium-sized bowl, combine the cocoa powder, baking soda and half of the melted butter and stir to combine. Add the boiling water and stir until thick. Add the remaining butter, sugars and eggs, and beat for about two minutes till smooth and glossy. Add the remaining ingredients and stir until just combined, taking care not to over-mix – it’s fine to leave a few streaks of flour.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 30 to 45 minutes – the smaller the pan and the thicker your brownies, the longer they’ll take. The brownies are done when they’re starting to pull away from the sides of the pan a little, but still seem gooey and under-baked in the centre. It’s important not to over-bake the brownies, as they’ll end up dry, so don’t be afraid to take them out of the oven when they still seem a bit raw. Remember, they’ll continue cooking and setting as they cool.

(Tip: if you become distracted and over-bake your brownies, fill a larger pan than your brownie pan with some cold water and lots of ice cubes. Gently place the brownie pan into the ice and water, which will cool the brownies down quickly so they don’t keep cooking as they cool.)

Allow to cool for about an hour before lifting out of the pan and cutting up into squares.

These brownies keep well, covered, for up to five days.