Cooking / Baking

Not a Spanish Omelette

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

100_3995 smContinuing with the egg theme…because I’m getting three a day now, and hardly know what to do with them all…

My husband introduced me to this dish before we were even married. He called it a Spanish omelette.

It is not a Spanish omelette. It’s more akin to a Texas omelette, but without the beans.

But it’s not even really that.

But whatever you call it, it’s good! And simple to make.

Chunks of roast potatoes topped with scrambled eggs and a thick spicy tomato sauce.

This dish can be served at any time of day, and can take on whatever flavours you want in the tomato sauce. This week, I made a sauce rich with an entire colander full of spinach, fistfuls of fresh basil and oregano, and heavy in paprika (including some smoked paprika, too). Sometimes I steer the sauce toward Central America, with cilantro, sometimes toward Greece with feta cheese and olives. The potatoes and egg are flexible, and will happily nestle under whatever you pour on top.

Best of all, it tastes like junk food, but is packed with nutrients and leaves you feeling satisfied. A real stick-to-your-ribs sort of meal.

Scromelettes

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messy but good

messy but good

I know there are many people who add things to their scrambled eggs, but for me, scrambled eggs have always been nothing but eggs and a little milk. If I wanted to add things to my eggs, I made an omelette.

Though I’m not particularly fond of eggs, I’m quite good at making omelettes, thanks to a summer job through my teen years that had me cooking breakfasts for hungry actors at the PA Renaissance Faire.

But the other day I exceeded my omelette abilities. I had so many yummy vegetables and so much cheese to put in our omelettes that I knew the egg wouldn’t hold it all.

So instead I made what we called “scromelettes”—scrambled eggs with omelette fillings mixed in. The result was delicious, if not so pretty as a perfectly folded omelette. Beyond the bonus of being able to use more filling, I was pleased to realise I could sauté longer-cooking ingredients before putting the egg into the pan, ensuring that everything was perfectly cooked.

Would I serve scromelettes to company? Probably not, but they’re a great option for times when your omelette just won’t all fit in a neat package.

Favourite Kitchen Tools: Scholtès stove

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100_0316 cropI prepared our dinner mid-afternoon and tossed it into the oven on delayed bake so we could come home this evening after piano lessons to a hot meal, and I figured that it was time for another Favourite Kitchen Tools post.

When we remodelled the kitchen years ago, we went for the cheaper flooring and cabinetry options, but we splurged when it came to the stove. It is the most-used tool in the kitchen, after all. It has been worth every cent. The previous stove was a barely functional old thing that had a habit of electrocuting mice (ztztztzztztzt…Is that burning fur I smell?—it was awful!).

We cook and bake a lot. We do a lot of preserving. We make cheese. We needed a nice cook top and a big oven.

At the risk of sounding like a salesman (that really isn’t my intent)…We settled on the budget-blowing Scholtès made by the Italian company Indesit—90 cm wide, 5 gas burners, and an electric oven. We’ve worked the cook top and the oven hard in the past seven years, and it has done pretty much everything we’ve asked of it. Many days during summer I have all five burners going at once, and I appreciate being able to slide my biggest sheet pans easily into the large oven. It has had its troubles—the display unit has had to be replaced twice. (Turns out it gets cooked by the heat of the oven if you don’t leave the door open once you turn it off.) The tiny burner in the centre of the large central burner doesn’t work terribly well anymore. And the front panel and oven door are made of a supremely difficult to clean stainless steel—no matter what I do, it looks filthy.

Oh, and the operating manual is written in French and Italian…illustrating just how rusty my high school French is after 27 years!

Still, I love my stove. I am particularly glad we chose to go with a gas cook top. I love the way the gas responds to my cooking needs, and I especially love the fact I can cook dinner when the power is out!

Oh yeah, and on nights like tonight, when I can’t be home to cook dinner, the delayed bake is a life-saver!

Too Hot To Eat

/ Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

100_3989 smIt was 32°C (90°F) when we got home today. Too hot to eat a hot meal. So it was salads and cheese for dinner.

A luscious green salad of spring lettuces.

A hearty lentil salad with Israeli couscous, dried tomato, spring onion and fresh herbs.

Homemade feta on Mommy’s Magical Crackers.

A perfect summer meal!

 

What’s your perfect summer meal?

(ch)Eating from the garden

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

saladgreens1 smSometimes it feels like cheating.

I came home today tired and not feeling like cooking. I had 16 litres of milk that needed to be made into cheese waiting for me in the fridge. Dinner was going to be a slap-dash affair cooked in the wait times during cheese making. I didn’t expect much.

But with vegetables so fresh they’re still photosynthesizing as they go into the pot, herbs snipped moments before cooking, and homemade cheese on hand, even a thrown together meal is bound to be something special.

I whipped up a pasta from whatever was on hand in the garden and could be picked in 6 minutes, threw in some feta cheese and a handful of olives, and had a meal I would have happily served to company.

You just can’t help but eat well when you’re eating out of the garden.

I can, can you?

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100_3986 cropsmFaced with 45 artichokes, there’s really only one thing to do—pull out the pressure canner, and bottle them up for later.

We thought long and hard before buying a pressure canner years ago—it was expensive, and signalled a whole new level of commitment to preserving than a simple water bath canner.

And then, of course, there are all the horror stories about exploding pressure canners. When the canner arrived, emblazoned with more warning stickers than a case of TNT, it didn’t alleviate my concerns.

But now I can’t imagine being without it. We can preserve so much more of what we grow, and not everything needs to be pickled to be preserved.

Pressure canning changes vegetables—the high pressure and temperature destroys their structure and basically turns them to mush. I wouldn’t want to subsist on pressure canned vegetables.

But our summer soup

LINK provides a burst of summer flavour, and wonderfully convenient instant meals through the winter. A few jars of canned green beans mean we can make our favourite Indian charcharis any time of the year. And canned artichokes add incredible flavour to pizzas, regardless of their texture. We could freeze these things, of course, but especially here where the power goes out with such frequency, having some of our preserved food not dependent on a continuous supply of electricity is a good idea. It also saves room in the freezer for those things that really don’t do well in the canner—berries, corn, peas, and of course the bread and baked goods from our baking days.

 

Cinnamon-Pumpkin Bars

/ Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

100_3970smI thought it was time for another recipe, and this one is seasonally appropriate for you denizens of the Northern Hemisphere. I made it these lovely bars this week with the very last of the frozen pumpkin from last fall.

This recipe is adapted from a recipe in King Arthur Flour’s Whole Grain Baking. These are one-bowl wonders—incredibly quick and easy to mix up by hand. Something even young kids could manage on their own.

¾ cup (170g) butter

1 cup brown sugar

1 tsp vanilla

¾ tsp baking powder

¼ tsp salt

2 tsp cinnamon

¾ tsp ginger

¼ tsp cloves

¼ tsp allspice

1 egg

1 ½ cups cooked, mashed pumpkin

1 ½ cups whole wheat flour

1 ½ cups raisins or dried cranberries

Melt the butter in a largish bowl in the microwave. Add the sugar and stir. Return the mixture to the microwave and heat until it is starting to bubble. Allow the mixture to cool until it is comfortable to touch.

Beat in the vanilla, baking powder, salt and spices. Add the egg and beat until smooth. Stir in the pumpkin, flour and fruit.

Spoon the batter into a greased 9 x 13-inch pan, and bake 40 to 45 minutes at 180°C (350°F).

 

Feta Cheese

/ Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments
Feta draining the kitchen.

Feta draining the kitchen.

I’m making one of my favourite cheeses this evening—feta. It’s the cheese that inspired me to get goats in the first place.

When we lived in St. Paul, Minnesota, there was a Greek deli just a couple of miles from home—Spiros (a quick Google tells me that Spiros is no longer open). Spiros sold several different feta cheeses, half a dozen types of olives, and all manner of other Mediterranean foods. We almost always had a block of feta from Spiros in the fridge.

When we moved to New Zealand, I was dismayed at the lack of good feta available. When we needed some livestock to keep the paddocks under control (just until we got around to planting the trees…that was 10 years ago), I chose goats so that I could make proper feta.

I was not disappointed by my decision. Feta made from goat milk, and processed just right to get the crumbly texture I like…divine!

We use feta in many ways. Because it is strongly flavoured and very salty, a little goes a long way, and more is wonderfully decadent. We add it to pasta, gratins, and pizza. It browns beautifully in the oven, and the “toasty bits” are everyone’s favourites. It is, of course, an essential ingredient in Greek salad, and also goes well with lentils and grains. And it can be marinated in olive oil and herbs for an incredible pop-it-in-your-mouth snack or appetizer.

And it’s one of the easiest cheeses to make!

Hand and Foot

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100_3964 smHand and Foot always goes hand-in-hand with food.

Hand and foot is a 4-person card came similar to Canasta, and played with 4 decks of cards. The game was introduced to me by my husband’s family. Indeed, I think it must have been written into the marriage agreement somewhere—will learn Hand and Food and agree to play whenever called upon.

The game is a good mix of luck, skill, and partner compatibility, so it works well as an evening’s entertainment at home or when visiting relatives.

Best of all, it is always accompanied by food—usually decadent and seasonally appropriate food. Cookies in the winter, ice cream in summer, strawberry shortcake in spring or pumpkin pie in the fall.

You might win or lose the game, but you always end happy and well-fed.

To Pasteurize or Not To Pasteurize

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

100_3960 smThis is the question, when you have your own milk-producing livestock. Pasteurization is the process of heating the milk to reduce the number of pathogens and increase the milk’s shelf-life. There are many different techniques for doing this, but they all involve raising the milk to a certain temperature and holding it there for a specific length of time (the higher the temperature, the shorter the time).

I have a number of friends and acquaintances who produce their own milk—some pasteurize, some don’t. There are certainly some strong opinions out there on both sides of the question:

“People have been drinking unpasteurized milk for thousands of years.”

“Yes, but people have been dying of diseases in unpasteurized milk for just as long. Raw milk is the perfect growth medium for all sorts of diseases.”

“It ruins the flavour of the milk.”

“I can’t taste the difference.”

“Cheese from unpasteurized milk is better.”

“I enjoy cheese from pasteurized milk just as much.”

“Unpasteurized milk is more easily digested.”

“I have no problem digesting pasteurized milk.”

“Pasteurization kills all the good bacteria and destroys nutrients in the milk.”

“It also allows milk to be kept for longer, and kills bad bacteria, too.”

The arguments go on and on.

So, what’s the truth?

Truth is that both sides have some valid points, and some points on which they grossly exaggerate or mislead. Yes, you can drink unpasteurized milk your whole life and never get sick. You can also drink pasteurized milk your whole life and never get sick.

I pasteurize.

Why?

Because I know exactly how clean I’m able to keep my milk while I’m milking. I know, from what’s left on my filter afterwards, that a few hairs, a little dirt, some dried skin flakes, the odd bug falls into the milk while I’m milking. Would bacteria from those things make us sick? Probably not. Does the idea of that stuff in my milk make me sick? Yep. Does the idea of drinking something that is the modified sweat of an animal that doesn’t even groom itself make me a little queasy? Yep.

So I pasteurize. For my peace of mind. For my sense of cleanliness.

But I gladly accept some of my non-pasteurizing neighbour’s milk when she has excess, and if for some reason I’m not able to pasteurize, I still use the milk. I don’t fret about it. Life is far too short to worry about whether your milk is pasteurized or not.

Relax and enjoy the cheese!