Food

Corn Chips

/ Robinne Weiss / 4 Comments

2016-05-29 17.58.56Usually, when I want tortilla chips, I first make tortillas, then cut them into wedges, brush them with oil and bake them. It makes absolutely divine chips, but it’s rather labour intensive.

Last night my husband made a vat of chilli for dinner, and I gave in to my craving for chips. Instead of the usual tortilla chips, I made these simple corn chips. They take almost no time to mix up, and are quite good, though fragile. There wasn’t a single crumb left by the time the meal was over.

1 cup cornmeal

2/3 cup all-purpose flour

1 tsp salt

1 tsp baking powder

2 T dry milk powder

½ cup water

¼ cup vegetable oil

Combine the dry ingredients. Add the water and oil, and mix well.

Grease two large baking sheets. Divide the dough in two, and roll each half out quite thin (about 2mm) directly onto the sheet. The dough will be very oily, but you may need to dust your rolling pin with flour to keep it from sticking. Cut into triangles.

Bake on fan bake for 12-15 minutes at 175°C. Remove from the pan when they are browned, and cool completely on a wire rack.

If you’re a fan of flavoured chips, you might add paprika, smoked paprika, chilli powder, or finely grated parmesan cheese to these chips.

Don’t try to use these in nachos—because they are baked, they turn to mush when smothered in toppings.

Pumpkin Pie for Breakfast?

/ Robinne Weiss / 3 Comments

2016-05-29 07.08.49 smI made a variation on my standard pancake recipe this morning—pumpkin pancakes.

They were good—moist and heavier than plain pancakes. A bit like eating pumpkin pie for breakfast. Mmmmm! This recipe makes a huge stack of pancakes—enjoy!

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 cup whole wheat flour

1 cup cornmeal

3/8 cup sugar

3 ½ tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

1 tsp cinnamon

½ tsp cloves

½ tsp ginger

3 eggs

2 cups cooked, pureed pumpkin flesh

2 cups milk

6 Tbsp butter, melted

Combine flours, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder, salt, and spices in a medium bowl. Whisk together eggs, pumpkin, milk and melted butter in a large bowl. Add the dry ingredients to the wet, and stir just until combined. You may need to add more milk to get the right consistency if your pumpkin is particularly dry (mine was, and I added another ¼ cup).

Fry on a preheated griddle or frying pan, as for normal pancakes.

 

A Five-Alarm Waffle

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2016-05-15 07.33.29We love waffles at our house, but I make them only occasionally. There are two reasons for this—I don’t get to eat breakfast with everyone else when I make waffles, as I’m stuck tending the iron, and waffles have a tendency to set off the smoke alarms.

A well-seasoned waffle iron is…frankly, disgusting. It’s covered in a perfect layer of burnt butter. Unfortunately, that butter smokes every time you use the iron.

Even if I turn the extractor fan on, the smoke alarms go off.

So I’ve learned I can only make waffles on days it will be warm enough to open all the windows at 6.30 am. A good breeze blowing through clears the smoke and prevents the alarms from going off.

That usually means waffles only in summer, but since it’s been unusually warm, I decided to make pumpkin spice waffles on Sunday.

The morning was warm, so I opened the windows and turned on the extractor fan.

But the air was so still, the smoke hung indoors.

My son wasn’t yet out of bed when the alarms went off…

Well, no one was late for breakfast, at least.

Here’s a double recipe, so you’ll have waffles left over for breakfasts all week.

2 cups all purpose flour

1 ½ cups whole wheat flour

4 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

2 tsp ground ginger

2 tsp ground cinnamon

½ tsp ground nutmeg

¼ tsp ground cloves

2 cups cooked, mashed pumpkin

4 large eggs, separated

1/3 cup packed brown sugar

2 ½ cups milk

200g butter, melted

Combine all the dry ingredients in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, whisk together the pumpkin, egg yolks, and brown sugar. Add the milk and whisk until the sugar dissolves. Gradually whisk in the butter.

Pour the liquid ingredients into the dry and mix just until all the flour is moistened.

In a medium bowl, whisk the egg whites until they hold soft peaks. Fold the egg whites into the batter.

This batter is thick, and you will need to spread it with a spatula to get it evenly spread in the waffle iron.

Try them with warm applesauce!

When in doubt, eat cake

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2016-05-13 18.03.48 smI had an incredible week of writing this week. New book, lots of ideas flowing, and about 18, 000 words on paper (of course, that’s a figure of speech these days—all those words are just ones and zeros in my computer, actually).

And so I came to Friday and realised that I am just written out. Or maybe this new book is crowding out any other thoughts, because I sit down at the computer, and all I can think about is my next plot point.

So I baked a cake this afternoon, thinking that a little break from writing would refresh me and open up some ideas for today’s blog.

But it didn’t.

So here I am, with a cake sitting on the kitchen table waiting for me to finish today’s blog. I can have a piece as soon as I’m done…

 

Chick Pea Salad

/ Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

2016-05-08 17.32.36 smWho would have thought we’d still be eating tomatoes and eggplant in mid-May?

But since we are, my husband made baba ghanoush on Sunday, and we had a lovely Mediterranean meal of baba ghanoush, freshly baked bread, homemade goat cheeses, and chick pea salad.

I looked at a number of chick pea salad recipes on-line, then ignored them all and used what we had in the garden. The result was quite lovely.

1 cup dry chick peas

1 sweet red pepper, chopped

2-3 medium tomatoes, chopped

¼ cup chopped fresh parsley

12 large black olives

1 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil

1 Tbsp balsamic vinegar

1 Tbsp red wine vinegar

salt and black pepper to taste

Cook the chick peas until tender, and allow to cool. Drain. Mix the chick peas, tomato, pepper, parsley and olives in a bowl. In a small bowl, whisk oil, vinegars, salt and pepper. Toss the salad with the oil and vinegar.

This salad holds up reasonably well to refrigeration (I just ate the last of it for lunch today, two days later, and it was still good), but is best eaten at room temperature on the first day.

A Scourge of Snickerdoodle Scent

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

2016-05-05 19.47.42 smWell, I made Snickerdoodle cookies the other day, and it wasn’t until I thought to write a blog post about them that I discovered I could also buy Snickerdoodle scented shampoo, thus having that “just been baking” smell all day.

BLECH!

I love snickerdoodles, which, lets face it, are just sugar cookies rolled in cinnamon, but snickerdoodle shampoo?

Modern commercialisation has a way of turning even the best things into something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Next, there will be snickerdoodle scented hand lotion, snickerdoodle scented pillows, a snickerdoodle scented Barbie who comes with an apron and oven mitts.

How about just baking some cookies, eh? That’s a great way to fill your house with snickerdoodle aromas.

Pumpkin Ricotta Lasagne

/ Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

2016-04-20 18.18.45 smYesterday I made a large batch of ricotta, and then wanted to use some of it in dinner. I also had in the fridge some leftover pumpkin galette filling from dinner a few days ago. And over the weekend, I had made some pepper oil to use with pasta.

What came out of it all was a pumpkin ricotta lasagne that was an absolute hit.

I can’t even begin to give you a recipe. It would start with, “Make too much pumpkin galette filling on Saturday, pepper oil on Sunday, and a vat of goat milk ricotta on Wednesday…”

But the final assembly followed this recipe, and yielded a beautiful white and orange striped dish that kept its form well when cut. It would have been perfect for a dinner party, served with a leafy green salad. Perfect, because we didn’t even eat half of it—it’s much denser than a normal lasagne, and would have easily fed five more people.

 

Ristras

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2016-04-19 12.51.22 cropHung on the kitchen fireplace mantel, a ristra of hot peppers looks beautiful, and is said to bring good health and good luck.

But mostly it just brings good food.

They’re often just used for decoration these days, but stringing chiles began as a way to dry and store them. And a string of chile peppers in the kitchen makes it easy to add spice to any meal.

I grew up in a house with all sorts of dried plant material hanging from rafters and tucked into baskets. It was all purely for decoration. My house today has a similar profusion of plant material, but for more utilitarian purposes. Ristras are convenient ways to dry and store peppers, garlic and onions. They’re also very convenient hanging in the kitchen.

Do I make sure my ristras look nice? Do I string twice as many peppers as we can realistically use, so that I can pair the ristras on each side of the mantel? Yes, of course—they do make nice decorations, after all.

Corn

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment
This year's popcorn harvest.

This year’s popcorn harvest.

What would life be without it?

Even ignoring the highly processed corn oil and corn sugars found in so many products, what would a movie be without a big bowl of butter-laden popcorn?

What would chilli be without a slab of corn bread to go with it?

What would summer be without corn on the cob?

And how dull life would be without polenta, corn dodgers, corn chowder, corn and pea succotash, roast corn, caramel corn, tacos and tortillas, nachos…

And then, there’s chicha fuerte…

Um…well…we can just forget chicha fuerte. It’s a corn alcohol brewed in Panama. Tastes a bit like vomit, and even a sip leaves you with a hangover the next day.

But hurrah for all the other forms of corn!

Many thanks to the people in what is now Mexico who bred corn from its ancestor, teosinte, about 9000 years ago! I doubt they had any idea how ubiquitous corn would become, but they hit on a winner.