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.