Food

Cupcakes

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

carrotcupcakes1 smThe whole family loves cake, and I much prefer cake over cookies or bars, but cake has some important drawbacks. It can be difficult to pack in lunches—icing gets everywhere and the cake crumbles. It’s also not something the kids can grab and go with, like cookies are.

So lately I’ve been turning many of my cakes into cupcakes. They travel well, are easy to snag on the go, and…well…they’re cake!

It’s still nice to have icing on cake, but with cupcakes, I can ice some and leave others plain for lunchboxes. These beautifully iced carrot cupcakes were divine, but the plain ones were just as good!

chocchipcupcakes1 smThere are also some lovely cupcakes that don’t need icing at all, like these chocolate chip cupcakes with cheesecake centres.

So far, I haven’t met a cake that didn’t do just as well as a cupcake. Just make sure you pull them out as soon as they’re done—they’ll bake faster than a cake and dry out easily.

 

A Culinary Adventure

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The kitchen, with 3-rock fire.

The kitchen, with 3-rock fire.

I spent a couple of hours today going through the letters I wrote home from Panama when we were in Peace Corps–trying to decide if there’s a book in that mass of experiences. As I went through, I noted that, in almost every letter, there is something about food. Life in rural Panama was a nutty mix of plenty and famine, luxury and squalor. We had no electricity, and only rudimentary water, but we had fresh hot bread delivered to our door every morning. Sometimes we ate nothing but rice with a spoonful of chutney for dinner, and other times we stuffed ourselves with fresh produce and tropical fruits.

Every week, I had something to say about food:

“Last night’s dinner was actually pretty good. The rice and beans and juice they brought us tasted fine as long as you ignored the dead bugs in both. Same with the soup for lunch today and the mouse droppings.”

“Tonight our dinner was 25 cents worth of bread and a little peanut butter. After eight hours of walking I would have liked more…oh well, we won’t starve to death.”

“6:15 am–I’m sitting here enjoying a delightful warm roll that was just delivered to our door a minute ago.”

“Thanksgiving dinner didn’t quite turn out as planned—the papaya we were planning on for the bulk of our fruit salad was full of worms—but it was very good.”

“We each ate about four oranges yesterday…and the citrus season still isn’t in full swing! We’re hard pressed to eat all the citrus we’re getting now! Guess we’ll just have to suffer.”

“We stopped by a kiosko (little store) on the way home this afternoon for a Coke (warm, of course).”

We grew to love the local lentils and rice, boiled yuca lightly salted and served with a slice of tomato, and thick sweet oatmeal drink that substituted for a meal in the fields. We perfected the art of straining ants out of the coffee with our teeth. We learned how to make lasagne and pizza on our 3-rock fire. It was a culinary adventure!

 

Birthday Cakes Past

/ Robinne Weiss / 3 Comments

DSC_0005 smFor Throwback Thursday, I thought I’d post some photos of a few past birthday cakes, just for fun.

2010: One of a long series of “flower” cakes requested by my daughter.

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2010: The Earth was my son’s request.

 

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2011: My daughter’s colourful paintbrush cake.

rabbitcakesm2012: The girl requested a surprise animal. This was my first attempt at using leaves as chocolate moulds (for the ears).

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2013: A dual birthday party cake–the spice cake owl was for my son, the chocolate log, for my daughter. I had always wanted to make meringue mushrooms…

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2014: After the 2012 success with chocolate painted leaves, I used the same technique for flight feathers on the LOTR eagle. Unfortunately, it was a blazingly hot day, and the wing tips melted and sagged within an hour.

DSC_0041 crop2014: The swan used more chocolate painted leaves—white chocolate this time, which managed the heat a little bit better than the dark chocolate (though the icing holding the wing to the body did not). It was also my first, not so attractive, foray into marzipan (for the beak).

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2014: My marzipan, cake, and candy triumph—Smaug was the joint birthday party cake. Tail, neck, head, and legs sculpted from marzipan, clear candy wings and jewels studding the treasure pile.

Vacation

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“So, should I put this pizza in the freezer for next week?”

“Yeah, that’d be great.”

“Um. There’s no room here.”

The freezer was already full of ready-made meals waiting for a day when they were needed. We’ve gotten into such a habit of making extra to throw into the freezer, that we’ve outstripped our need for those “heat and eat” meals.

So I took a vacation yesterday.

Dinner was baked beans made in the bread oven last week, reheated, served over rice. Fried eggs on the side. A 15-minute meal. And a few extra minutes to roll out a pie dough I made earlier in the week, fill it with gooseberries from the freezer and throw it in the oven. Felt like cheating.

Instead of cooking, I pottered around the yard on the unseasonally warm day, played the piano, paid a social visit to the goats, and did a little writing.

Excellent!

Repurposed tent

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

100_3308 copyOur 30 year old Eureka tent finally gave up the ghost this past summer, after many previous repairs and many years of use. I salvaged as much hardware as I could from the tent, and was about to toss the remainder in the rubbish when my hand slid over the silky no-see-um netting of the tent’s windows. That beautiful mesh was still in perfect condition, as was a lot of the rip-stop nylon of the tent itself. I found myself unable to throw it away.

It wasn’t long before I came up with the perfect project for repurposing the tent—mushroom growing bags! Last year, we covered the mushrooms with old pillowcases to keep the fungus gnats from infesting them. The pillowcases were not quite long enough, and did a marginal job. Ian had already asked me to make some custom bags with draw string bottoms to keep the flies out. What could be more perfect than bags made of tough, largely waterproof tent nylon? Add a strip of that no-see-um netting so you can peek in to check on the mushrooms, and the project was perfect.

So yesterday, I whipped out a raft of these slick bags from the old tent fabric. Felt great to repurpose the old tent, and I can’t wait to try them out!

Ojaldre

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ojaldre smWhile I’m talking about fried food, I thought I’d share one of my favourite Panamanian foods—ojaldre.

Ojaldre is fried bread. It’s something we used to eat at fairs and festivals, like you’d eat French Fries.

I make ojaldre almost every time I make bread (which isn’t that often, as Ian usually bakes the bread). I always hope for a little extra dough—a little too much to put in that last loaf.

Take that extra dough, pat and pull it into a flattish, roundish sort of shape, and slap it into half an inch of hot oil until it’s brown and crispy on both sides. Shake a little salt onto it, and you’ve got a snack that reminds me of rodeos and terrifyingly decrepit carnival rides.

Happy Donut Day

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100_3297 copyBy lucky chance, I decided to make donuts today. Because of the time difference, It means I can blog about donuts on National Donut Day in the U.S.

I don’t think I’ve made donuts since the early 1990s, when I used to make them as part of living history programs for school kids at Camp Tamarack. I still have the old Camp Tamarack baking powder raised donut recipe, but decided today to go with a yeast raised donut.

I won’t post the recipe I used, because I wasn’t entirely happy with it. It has promise, but I think I need to tweak it a bit. Make a few more batches of donuts. Maybe try them with chocolate frosting…hmm. Sounds like a great winter project!

The Ugly Teacup Collection

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A portion of the ugly teacup collection.

A portion of the ugly teacup collection.

I’m not generally fond of fancy china, but many years ago, my husband brought back a pair of hand painted teacups from one of his international trips. They were gloriously, unabashedly garish—so ugly they were gorgeous. Thus began the ugly teacup collection. One by one, we’ve added to our collection, browsing second-hand shops for likely candidates. My mother-in-law sent us the “best” examples from the teacup collection she kept as a girl. We also picked up a suitably ugly china teapot to go with the teacups.

The collection has steadily grown, even though Christchurch’s stock of ugly teacups is greatly diminished since the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes. We love to hate the ugly teacup collection. We use them whenever we have visitors, for Sunday afternoon pots of tea by the fire, or whenever we want an extra special cup of tea. They make me smile, and I laugh at my own ridiculous fondness for these overly fussy, overly fancy, and just plain ugly dishes.

Winter Hope

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

100_3242 copyToday’s wind is bitter, driving icy rain against the windows. Though the heater is on in my office, I’m still shivering—just the sound of the wind and rain makes me cold. It is only the beginning of June. Winter is only just beginning. Three months of dark, cold wet stretch ahead.

But the garden tells me we’ll see spring before we know it. Though they are bent with frost every morning, the broad beans grow bigger every day. The artichokes are lush, and the broccoli and cabbages flourish with the winter cull of pests. They promise food, light and heat to come.

Satisfying or Sisyphean?

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100_3292 copyI have a weed problem. Or maybe I have a weeding problem. I spent the past weekend weeding the artichokes, which are busy putting on their winter growth. I keep them heavily mulched, which prevents most weeds from growing, but twitch (aka couch grass) has no problem coming up through even the deepest mulch.

I would rank twitch as my worst weed. It makes dandelions and thistles seem easy to pull. It grows faster than I can pull it out. It lurks amongst the roots of other plants, ready to spring back the moment I turn my back. It can even drill its way through my potatoes.

My fight against twitch never ends. Twitch grows year round, and if I relax for even a few weeks, it will encroach on the garden. Pockets of it persist, even in areas that are tilled annually and weeded weekly all year. I despair every time I see a blade of twitch poking up from a place I thought twitch-free. Controlling twitch is a never-ending, unrewarding job.

So, why do I sometimes want nothing more than to go out and pull twitch? Sometimes I’ll go out specifically to pull twitch for the sheer satisfaction of it. Especially where it is thick, and the soil is soft, you can pull it up in great branching masses of runners a metre or more long. Every crisp white growing tip I ease from the soil is one less clump of twitch in the garden. There is so much of it out there, that I can’t help but think I’ve gotten it all when I bring up runner after extensive runner.

I know the feeling will not last. In a week, the twitch I missed will be sprouting thick as hair on a dog’s back, and I will wonder if I actually weeded at all.

But for the moment, I have the satisfaction of several wheelbarrow loads of twitch dying on the compost pile, and an artichoke bed that sports more artichokes than weeds.