My new favourite thing to make...Biscotti

I have started to write my posts in Word first, and then copy and save them to the computer as more than one has fallen victim to a dodgy work internet connection. And I’m pretty sure I’m not allowed to a)shout and swear as loudly as I’d like and b) throw the stupid computer against a wall. According to Marty I’m never allowed to do b) so I throw the stapler instead. Coincidently, I broke the stapler during one of these tantrums and it didn’t staple properly for ages – it’s to be expected, but on a subsequent tirade I fixed it again by throwing it even harder on the floor and it all bounced back into place. This does not work for everything, but remotes and staplers appear to respond well. I can also check my word count on Word, which is more based on curiosity and some future references than anything else. I digress. I’m going to tell you about my biscotti making experience. A highly enjoyable experience to say the least and I think I’ll repeat it soon to see if I can get it right twice. That is the thing about baking, getting it right every time, or as in the case of my famous brownies, getting it better every time!

So, I found numerous recipes and then found one on www.taste.com.au that was only 4 steps and had great reviews. It was to accompany a very chocolaty dessert so I needed something that wasn’t too sweet or overpowering, and maybe had a slightly tart fruit. And didn’t have pistachios. EVERY biscotti has pistachios (because they look cool with the green – says Marty!)And pistachios are ridiculously expensive shelled and time-consuming not. If you’ll remember the M’Hanncha from a Christmas post I sat and shelled all the pistachios then. Not again. It was fine as I was sitting outside drinking champagne, but I certainly had better things to do this time. I thought, 4 steps, easy-peasy, I was warned of the time-consuming nature of making biscotti but set to work anyway. It is time-consuming, but not in any way different to making biscuits or baking a cake. When you bake a cake you mix the ingredients, bake the cake, let it cool, ice it, decorate it and then eat it. This is a whole day affair. Biscuits need to be made in batches unless you have a commercial kitchen or oven. And biscotti needs to be baked a second time.

We were having the dinner party in the evening, and had been so thoroughly organised, that while Marty enjoyed rewatching the All Blacks rugby game and then watching another game – Wallabies maybe? – I could get stuck into the kitchen quietly and on my own. I did seek his professional opinion through some of the process, probably only because he was there, but now having made it myself I feel equipped to repeat the process and know what to look for. I have become accustomed to attempting challenging recipes set out by Gordon (Ramsay) and Jamie (Oliver) and both offer advice as to how things should look, feel, smell, etc when they are at different stages. That’s the one thing this recipe lacked, but maybe I can impart some of that knowledge. Ready for the recipe?

What you’ll need:

2 cups plain flour, sifted

1 ½ tsps Baking powder

½ cup dried cranberries

2/3 cup raw almonds, I chopped mine a little

½ cup caster sugar

3 eggs, lightly beaten with a fork

What to do:

1.       Preheat the oven to 160deg.

2.       Place 2 cups sifted plain flour in a large bowl with 1 ½ teaspoons of baking powder (I sifted it all together), ½ cup dried cranberries, 2/3 cup raw almonds and ½ cup castor sugar. Combine and create a well in the middle. This will make it much easier to mix.

3.       Add the 3 eggs and mix until well combined. It will be a dough, but not too dry. Mine was on the stickier side as it had been dry and I’d added another egg – Thanks Marty! I did need to add more flour as well. I also added 2 tsps of cinnamon to the dry ingredients and a little more cranberries.

4.       Transfer the dough to an even work surface, lightly dusted with flour and knead with your hands until smooth. This did not take long. I had mixed everything quite well and didn’t want to over-knead it.  Shape into a log and place on a baking tray lined with baking paper. Press along top of log to flatten slightly. Because of my extra egg my loaf spread as little. In the future I may half the mixture and make 2 smaller logs and they did spread during cooking. This made for lovely long pieces on biscotti, but they could have been smaller.

5.       Bake for 30 minutes, remove from oven and cool.

6.       Cut log into 1cm-thick slices, place on baking tray and cook for another 12-15 minutes until hard.

Yes, the recipe I’ve given you is longer than 4 steps, but that’s because I’ve broken up a couple of the steps. And I’m going to change step 6 completely!

I do not like my biscotti thick and unmanageable. Left to Marty they would have been 1mm thick, but I think mine were between 3-5mm thick. Perfect in my opinion. Not too thin to break apart when used with the dessert and not to thick that you couldn’t bite through them.

I did them in batches as the slices need to be lain flat on the baking tray. I put them in for about 10minutes then turned the pieces over for another 3minutes. My oven has a hot spot in the back left hand corner so the tray generally needs to be rotated anyway. I think they were perfectly cooked!

 

Once cooled they were ready to serve. I loved them and quite enjoyed these biscotti.  Commercial biscotti I often find over-sweet and this had a nice tang to it. My boss – not a biscotti lover- actually rang me after I’d given her some to let me know it was the best she’d ever had and I should think about giving up my day job – to baking. Since I manage her store, I’m not sure if she was aware of the implications, but suffice to say I’d love to spend my day baking goods and selling them! So if you have a restaurant /café that want some biscotti I’ll make you a free trial and you can buy it from me if you love it!

 

I thoroughly enjoyed my biscotti-making experience, and I’d definitely do it again. I’d like to experiment with other flavours and ingredients and see if there are any other recipes out there. If anyone has a suggestion for me I’d love to hear from you.

 

Ciao

xoxo

Carrot & Cumin Salad

Today I have a food hangover. Or maybe a wine hangover? Probably both. We were treated to the gastronomic indulgence that was a whole pig done on the spit at the Greek Deli last night. I haven't eaten rich food like that, in that quantity, for a long time, so that would explain the food hangover. I also probably won't eat like that again until Christmas, so it's OK. And it was so completely worth it. I love pork generally, but so often it's done to dryness and it doesn't meet expectations. This far exceeded expectations, was completely delicious and succulent, and the crackling was perfection.

So to keep my mind focused today, and make myself feel a little healthier I'm going to tell you all about my Carrot and Cumin Salad from Sunday. Coincidentally, this would have been a great accompaniment to last night's feast. I did alter the original recipe slightly, cooking methods, etc but nothing drastic. This is a very, very easy recipe and will be an excellent addition to the usual repertoire of summer BBQ salads, certainly will be added in our house. It comes from one of my favourite recipe books - The Simple Art of Marrying Food and Wine.

What you'll need:
6 medium carrots, peeled and thinly sliced
1 onion, finely chopped
1 tsp Ground Cumin
1 tsp Cumin seeds
Olive oil
100ml Orange Juice
A handful of coriander - if you love it, add more, if not go easy.

Don't scrimp on the orange juice. A good quality, real orange juice will add flavour and the stuff from concentrate is just plain bad for you.

What you need to do:

1. I used the food processor on the fine slicing setting to chop up my carrots. It meant that they weren't all exactly the same size, gave it a great rustic look and cut them finer and quicker than I could do by hand.

2. Add the olive oil to a hot pan - 4 tablespoons was recommended by the recipe - I used a couple of healthy lugs. Add the cumin seeds and ground cumin to the oil and mix. With the finished product I felt I could have added more.

3. Add the onions and cook on a medium heat for 4-5 minutes to soften but not colour.

4. Add the orange juice and heat that through, then add the carrots. Because they were so finely chopped they didn't need to cook for long. I like my carrots with a bit of crunch, and I was making a salad not mash!!

5. Add a little bit of water, season and cook for a couple of minutes until it's all heated through. Taste the carrots to see if they're the desired texture. If you want softer carrots, cook for a little longer. I cooked them for a couple of minutes and let the sauce reduce a little bit.

6. Take the carrots of the heat, strain the sauce from the carrots, back into the pan and reduce down till it's a little thicker and more syrupy. I think that took 2-3 minutes. Pour the sauce back over the carrots and mix through. Allow to stand and cool.

7. Once cool, add the coriander and serve at room temperature.

The whole process took about 15 minutes and I did it early in the afternoon so it could just stand and cool. I had it cold the next day out the fridge and it was just as lovely. In fact the flavours had matured a little as so often happens with food that has spices in it, and it tasted even better. One of those things that can be prepped the day before you need it.

Enjoy! Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Ciao
xoxo

Some important dedications before we get onto the business of food...

I'm nearing the 5 month mark of no blog posts and that's a record I really don't want to hit! The reason for this spectacular laziness? None really, plenty of excuses, not many dinner parties and a thousand other details getting in the way. We did have a wonderful trip to Bali a month ago for my birthday that I will write about, but otherwise there's been different socialising and eating to stay trim and fit. Not that that isn't blog worthy, but there hasn't been much on the new and exciting front.

And then everything happens at once. We had a dinner party for the first time in ages and a few life events (that I'll get to) reignited the flame and here I am again with recipes, pearls of wisdom, and general stories to impart and entertain you with - and to keep me sane. I've found that without this regular blogging, or any of my writing really, my head gets too full of words and they either all come out at once or they get bottlenecked and can't make an appearance at all. A writers block if you will.

I digress. Let's begin at the beginning. The feast I'm about to tell you about is definitely the inspiration and body of this and the next couple of blogs, but there needs to be a dedication or 2 in here. In the last 3 months, 2 of my most important food mentors/teachers/guides have passed away. Both my grans. They both taught me very different skills but ultimately had the same set of knowledge. As I was preparing some of the dishes for Sunday night I got to thinking of their influences on how I cook and eat, and the skills they taught me in my day-to-day life. So this and any related posts are dedicated to Granny Fay and Nana.

Granny Fay, my paternal grandmother, passed away almost 3 months ago and she taught me all I needed to know in the craft department. I learnt to knit, embroider, craft, crochet and sew from her. I also learnt how to make chocolates for Easter and crackers fo Christmas. She was the Queen of the melktert or milktart, a traditional South African custard tart, that she was so good at she sold at a home industry and sold out within hours - after making 50 of them (or some such number). She taught me how to make delicious custard slices and sausage rolls from scratch, and every weekend I went to visit her was a new project. We would make something in the kitchen or be sewing something.

My strongest food influence and my biggest fan, Nana, passed away a couple of weeks ago. As my maternal grandmother her influence on what my mom cooked and passed down to me is obviously strongest. I can see it in the food traditions we have at Christmas and all year round. And some of my favourite dishes are ones that her or my mother would have or still do cook. And here's where I started thinking of her influence in my cooking. I was chopping onions to make the upcoming Carrot and Cumin salad and realised that this particular method of onion cutting was taught to me by her, in her kitchen in Old Belvidere, Knysna. I was sifting the flour for the biscotti and her advice to sift the flour 3 times to make sure the sponge cake was light and fluffy was as clear as day. I'm only sad she won't be able to read this and see that I still use those skills! After my grandfather had passed away, and while Marty was working nights, we had plenty of discussions while on Skype or the phone about cooking meals for 1 and how I often adapted bigger recipes for it, or the different storage methods. She was always interested in what we were doing and loved to read this blog.

I have no doubt over Christmas we will be having a few dishes that these ladies have always served up for our family, and hopefully we can start some new traditions of our own to carry on to our future generations along with these.

And now the feast. After a few fabulous dinner parties last year - particularily in BBQ season - and a couple where attendance was lacking, we decided to take a break and eat out a little more. You get stuck in the same dishes and menus when you don't eat out and experience new trends in food. We also had a fabulous set of guests to invite over who love food as we do and would appreciate something different. This was a feast! Quite literally a anti-pasti/tapas-inspired meal where we could enjoy unique flavours and dishes, but be able to pick and nibble and chat without too much hassle during dinner.

It consisted of -
A Selcection of olives
A selection of dips - namely basil pesto, salsa verde, garlic aioli, horseradish cream, tzatziki, yogurt, farmstyle relish and the list goes on
Cured meats
Smoked salmon
Bruschetta and fresh baguette
Tomato Salad
Chorizo sticks - cooked mild chorizo - YUM
Prawns marinated in garlic, olive oil, chilli and parsley
Carrot and cumin salad
Guacamole
Cucumber sticks
Fennel, radish, celery salad

There was also marinated lamb skewers and Portuguese chicken skewers but we never got to those because we were all full! I'll let you know what they're like because that's leftovers for the week!

And dessert....
Deconstructed truffles with homemade biscotti, nuts, cocoa and fresh fruit ~ a Jamie Oliver recipe.

The biscotti and carrot salad recipes and posts are to follow as they were the most interesting and not pre-bought or prepared. We have made the avocado salsa before and everything else was wonderfully easy. Wine flowed freely and I had a lovely Moscato from Montalto, Mornington Penisula to serve with dessert. A fabulous evening with fabulous company is all that one can ask for, but we got added inspiration and that's pretty great for the next few dinners! Keep reading for 2 awesome recipes...

Ciao for now
Helen
xoxo