On the chair: Petite Kitchen by Eleanor Ozich

A funny thing happened about a week ago.  I was in a gorgeous wee Grey Lynn store (Father Rabbit) with my BFF (yay!  It doesn't happen often enough!!) and spotted the cutest little cookbook, Petite Kitchen.  It's one of those books that catches your eye and you just have to pick it up.  Seriously, you have to.  I'm pretty late to this party, but it turns out that Petite Kitchen has a huge Facebook following and a beautiful blog as well as producing beautiful recipe journals*.  And she's local, which I love even more, doing all of this right here in New Zealand (because it also means I can find all the ingredients she uses with relative ease).

So, I picked it up and I loved it but I don't cook so left it back on the shelf to think about.  And I knew Father Rabbit has an online store so I'd be able to find it again later.  As beautiful as it was and as much as I wanted it, the husband does all the cooking (he has for quite some time, since taking the task over a few years back probably as a means of preserving his own life.  I'm not joking) and I generally (always) leave him alone with his own recipes ... getting involved in the cooking at any level is a bit like making eye contact with that person you don't want to talk to, in my opinion. A bad, bad idea.

All I really did though was cost myself shipping once I got home.  And then two days after putting my online order in, when I was once again pouring through Petite Kitchen, I learned exactly how much attention I don't pay to things (quite a bit).

There's an italicised list that features at the bottom of the recipes on. every. page.

Gluten free ... grain free ... wheat free ... refined sugar free ... dairy free ... egg free ... nut free ... vegetarian ...

Some lists were slightly shorter than others, but you get the idea.

Horrors.  Absolute, total horrors.

Me, of the butter, sugar, eggs, sugar, butter, butter, more butter, as many eggs as possible, three different types of sugar? excellent! flour, miiiilk ... 

In possession of a cookbook free of ... 

It felt a bit like the ladle, all over again.  Do I show the husband?  Do I pretend I absolutely meant to do it (which he wouldn't believe at all)?  What if he makes me eat stuff?  He was out when the courier arrived, so I could just as easily hide it under the couch and act like nothing ever happend, and when the Mastercard bill arrives, maybe Father Rabbit was ... ahhh ... lunch.  Yes, lunch.  I mean, it's a cookbook, so it could potentially have been lunch, couldn't it?  I'm sure that's not fibbing ... exactly.

Except I'm all rusty and out of practice, and so I just showed him and sobbed (not really) that I made a dud purchase.  And he, not out of practice at all, flicks through it, hands it back to me open to a recipe for Vanilla Nut Butter Biscuits with Raisins saying:

"These look really nice.  And easy.  And we have all of this stuff too.  You could make those while I put the kids in the bath." and walks off to put the kids in the bath.

And since the biscuit tin was empty, and I had a free pass on skipping bath time, I did.

They weren't pretty (my homemade ground almonds weren't quite fine enough so my bickies were a bit breaky/crumbly when I flattened them for baking.  Must make them again asap to improve on the prettiness), or complicated, but they were fun and tasted beautiful.  Really, really yum.  It's a bit of an exciting new world too.  We've since tried Buttered Balsamic Lentils with Spinach and Garlic for dinner ... yuuum ... (the husband made that - I'm still working up to non-baking) and collected Chia seeds, coconut oil and milk and a big bag of ground almonds so that I can continue to play.

 

Chocolate Coconut Rough Macaroons with afternoon tea coffee (sooo good!).

 

* If anyone knows where I can get the first one, I'd be really grateful to know!

We went away for a long weekend so it'll probably take me until the end of the week to be fully caught up on work and home and be able to bake and blog again.  It was a brilliant weekend away and very exciting that we managed it too, to be perfectly honest - Wooooooo us!!  (was crapping myself about taking the two nutcases on a plane, disrupting their routines etc and praying they wouldn't behave like little psychopaths as a result)  Before about last Wednesday, I was just being useless and hadn't updated. 

(Also, I have no idea what the rules are about these things, so the above pic?  Stole it off the web!)

Hot. Cross. BUNS! !!!!!

I'm so happy.  After the great yeast revelation of last week, I was completely confused.  I thought I heard the one thing on Hottest Home Baker (the husband would argue that I never listen properly. He's right, but because he never remembers anything he'll forget to read this blog and won't come across the admission, so I'm safe), but then reading through all the notes at the start of Baked it says that active dried yeast doesn't need to be added to water before use.  It can be simply added to the flour and mixed through.  I have no idea.  So I followed my nose.  So far, I've clocked 100% failure with dough and each time I've added yeast to flour as a dry ingredient so I decided to try sponging it first (putting it in a little warm water, adding a bit of sugar and leaving it to bubble - activating it) and see where that'd get me (it could hardly go any worse).

It got me hot cross buns!!  Edible hot cross buns!!  (I've also now eaten too many hot cross buns, so the rest are in the freezer.  We'll see how they survive the freeze test when I can bring myself to look at them again)

You have to look at step by step pictures because I am so relieved.  I barely breathed for about 4 hours making these.  The photos also came in handy as I went - I was able to compulsively and weirdly keep comparing the photo taken of the beginning of any given stage against what the dough was doing at any given minute (pretty much every given minute) while I had many anxiety attacks trying to work out it if was actually increasing in size.

This one is just me being all bakery and making my own spice mix.  I can highly recommend pounding cloves into dust as excellent stress relief, if nothing else.  Everything did taste a bit like cloves for a while after though.

Dough, the beginning.

Dough, the rising.

Dough, the buns.

Dough, the buns again after another rise.

Buns!!

More buns !!!

 

Soup for the soul

The husband is starting to laugh at me and my food obsession.  He likes food too (a lot) but he thinks it's funny that I've started taking photos of mine.  Not that I'm taking photos of all my food (unless you particularly want to see a fuzzy shot of marmite on vogels tomorrow? No, I thought not), just the stuff that really makes me drool, or is something new and worth talking about (in my opinion).  Also, he's mocking the actual photos since I couldn't (can't?) take a decent picture to save my life.  I have a goal to get a decent camera and take excellent photos of food and I've warned him that at some stage he'll be doing overtime to fund my weirdness (he seemed fairly accepting of this, although I have a suspicion it's because he's planning to use it to justify a new coffee grinder).

Anyway, a couple of nights ago, I had the most delicious Thai soup*.  Usually (by which I mean always) I order a red curry with chicken, but I'm getting into the swing of this and I really love soup, so I took a leap of faith and ordered a Gaeng Jued Woon Sen - a clear vegetable soup with chicken and vermicelli.  Amaze.  I've never had Thai soup before, and I have no idea why.  You'll probably never talk me back into a curry to be honest.

And I'm going to show you my picture even though the husband, full of support for my endeavours saw my photo and laughed "It looks like spew! Look! There're the carrots!" and snorted away into his Phad Thai.  (I really don't think you can talk about food without including pictures of food.  It's all wrong.  Even bad pictures are better than no pictures, and it totally doesn't look like spew.  Much.)

(Also, I'm trying not to show you that I was super classy and ate it straight out of the container.  Mostly I was just starving, but we don't really have any soup bowls.  Obviously, I've added deep soup bowls on my list of current wants.  These actually in a large size.  There are a few different designs, but I think this is my favourite.  We have a dwindling selection of Crown Lynn bowls, but they're really shallow and soups get cold quickly in them.  Yuck.  Unless soup is supposed to be cold, soup is not supposed to be cold.)

You have no idea how much I want to go and have this again for dinner as soon as possible, except order a double portion.  Next time I will (it's mostly water and veges anyway so I consider it possibly weird, but technically not excessive).  The other night I ordered a roti to go with, but that was a big mistake and I really, really wished I'd paid a couple of extra dollars, skipped the roti and had a double portion of soup.  It was such a beautiful, fresh soup, the roti was heavy to have with and follow it and wiped out a lot of the happiness.  Bad roti!

Back to the soup though because we're not finishing with a roti again ... Yuuum.


*  We've had a reasonably significant work-related curve-ball thrown into our routine in the last couple of weeks, so there was a bit of takeaway consumption in our house.  I really should've taken pictures of the pizzas a couple of nights before - Armenian Street Bread (Lebanese bread, lamb mince, cottage cheese, fresh flat-leaf parsley and chopped chilli) and a pork belly pizza (all you really need to focus on is the pork belly.  All the goodness!).

Cookie Saturday

Some days are just made for cookies, and today is one of them.  Cold, wet, windy ... a properly miserable Wintery day! 

So, Al Brown's classic chocolate chip cookies it was.  They're meant to be a cookie sandwich with chocolate ganache in the middle, but I love them just as they are. 

Click, and a lightbulb comes on

I was watching Hottest Home Baker last night, because ... Well, it's a bit obvious really, isn't it?

They were doing brioche and pastry (dough, people - dough!) and "Ah HA!" says I, paying attention with great interest (and praying that our power would hold out against the storm raging outside), "This could be helpful ...".  And helpful it most certainly was.

Someone's dough doesn't rise (welcome to my world, Hottest Home Baker contestant.  Welcome to my world), Dean tells them why it didn't rise, and do you know what?  I literally tore out a bit of hair.  There were actual strands in my hands.

I've been using dried active yeast (not an error in itself).  It could well be that this is one of those things that everyone knows (except me), but is probably the biggest lesson I've learned so far and may well (it'd better) change the course of my Global Baker experience (much less likely to slit my wrists now I think).  Active yeast is encapsulated and needs to be broken down to activate it.  Insert four-letter word here.  ('Argh' - and yes, that is actually what I said.  At something of a reasonable volume, while grabbing a fist full of hair and nearly rolling off the couch in hysterics.  Not to be over-dramatic or anything in this moment of knowledge gaining).

I haven't been activating my yeast. 

Sooo ... bugger.

It bodes well for my hot cross buns though.  And kind of makes me wonder how I managed a half-decent brioche. 

Skills.  Must be.

On a totally different topic, the day after the massive storm hit Wellington (and pretty much while it was still doing its thing), I thought it would be a genius idea to take the dog down to the beach for his walk.  He looks like he's holding onto the sand because I'm pretty sure he is.  Walking up the beach was brilliant - all his sticks threw themselves.  Win!  Walking back was a little more challenging (nearly impossible) and done mostly in the dunes (don't tell Council) for a level of shelter from flying sand and insane winds. 

It goes down as one of my favourite dog walks ever - so crazy and freezing and it's not often that there is no one around.  No cars, no boats, no people, zip (good reason for that, mind).  Lucky I've had all that baking to weigh me down.  Heh.  The poor dog though spent a fair amount of time running sideways into the dunes.

Collateral damage

So, for all the do-over pile from the project is growing, it seems that enough of what I'm making is still plenty edible that this was necessary at the weekend.

Oops.

It's possibly a bit of a stretch to sneak these into the budget as baking equipment, but I'm going to give it a try anyway.