After a year of daily food-related posts, I couldn’t resist sharing this.
These are devil’s food cupcakes, topped with melted dark chocolate and white chocolate chips.
So decadent!
vegetarian
Vegetable Dip
Christmas day is a low-key affair at our house. We work like mad up through Christmas eve, preparing food, baking cookies, getting caught up on all the weeding, harvesting and processing of vegetables. Then Christmas day, there is nothing to do but enjoy the fruits of our labours.
To that end, I made a vegetable dip for our Christmas dinner, which will be a Mediterranean feast—bread, cheeses, olives, salad, and fresh vegetables.
Inspired by a variety of recipes, and by the lovely herbs in the garden, I made the dip up as I went. Taste testers declared it delicious, and we’re looking forward to enjoying it tomorrow with carrots, cauliflower, sugar snap peas, and broccoli from the garden.
1 (8oz/225g) pkg cream cheese, softened
2 small spring onions
small handful fresh flat leaf parsley
2 small stalks cutting celery (or ½ celery stick)
small sprig fresh savoury
½ tsp paprika
juice of 1 lemon
Beat cream cheese until fluffy. Chop herbs and onion very fine and stir into the cheese along with the paprika. Add enough lemon juice to make a dipping consistency.
Raisin-filled Cookies
Okay, one more cookie recipe, then I’ll be done for the year…maybe.
These are one of my all-time favourite cookies–big soft cookies that taste like raisin pie. Mom made them every Christmas when I was growing up (at least that’s how I remember it…), and she wrote down the recipe for me when I left home. The index card is stained and bent, but carefully guarded in a little wooden recipe box.
Like many handed-down recipes, this one is incomplete—little more than a list of ingredients. You have to know what to do to turn them into cookie dough. I’ve added more instructions below.
2 cups brown sugar
1 cup shortening (I use softened butter)
2 eggs
½ cup milk
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp vanilla
4 cups flour (I usually need about 1 cup more)
pinch salt
Mix baking soda into milk and set aside to thicken. Cream brown sugar and shortening together until fluffy. Beat in eggs, then milk and vanilla. Gradually add flour, mixing until you have a stiff dough.
Refrigerate dough at least 2 hours.
While the dough is chilling, make filling. Place in a medium saucepan and boil until thick:
2 cups chopped raisins
2 cups granulated sugar
1 cup water
1 Tbsp flour
Allow to cool to room temperature.
Roll the dough thin and cut out 2-inch circles. To form the cookies, place a circle on a greased baking sheet, put a scant tablespoon of filling in the centre of the circle, and top with another circle. Press the edges firmly together (a fork does a nice job and leaves a pretty edge). Bake at 190°C (375°F) for about 10 minutes.
Bake Us Some Figgy Cookies
I’ve had a hankering for figs lately—must be the holidays—so I made fig cookies. They taste like a cross between fig newtons and walnut crescents.
This recipe is adapted from a recipe in The Gourmet Cookie Book (Have I mentioned before that this book is the most beautiful book ever made? It is a lesson in effective graphic design, and has lots of good recipes, too. If you haven’t finished your Christmas shopping, you must buy this for someone. If you have finished your Christmas shopping, you need to buy it for yourself. Aw, never mind—just buy it for yourself, regardless.)
Anyway, these cookies take most of their sweetness from the figs. If you wanted a slightly sweeter cookie, I think they’d be fabulous dredged in powdered sugar!
1 cup butter
¼ cup sugar
1 cup walnuts, ground*
1 cup dried figs, ground*
1 tsp vanilla
2 cups all-purpose flour
Cream butter. Add sugar and beat until fluffy. Stir in ground walnuts and figs, and vanilla. Stir in flour, mixing until all incorporated.
Use a scant tablespoon of dough for each cookie. Form into small finger shapes about 1 inch (2.5 cm) apart on a greased baking sheet. Bake at 300°F (150°C) for 25-30 minutes. Do not let them brown. Cool completely before eating—they crisp nicely as they cool.
*I grind the figs and walnuts together in a food processor—the walnuts keep the figs from sticking together in a big clump.
Chevre Ravioli
I love chevre. Not only is it easy to make, it’s delicious in so many ways—on bread with jam, on crostini with olivade, covered with herbs or black pepper and spread on crackers. It’s a fine stand-in for cream cheese in cheesecake, too. It takes on sweet or savoury flavours and lends them a creamy tartness.
This week, I used chevre for a super-easy ravioli filling—I mixed about a cup of finely chopped herbs (oregano, thyme, rosemary and cracked pepper) into about two cups of chevre.
My husband made a lovely spicy sauce full of spring vegetables to go on top.
The result was marvellous! Full of intense, fresh flavours!
Girls’ Night In
My son is at school camp and my husband is at a workshop, so it was just me and my daughter for dinner tonight.
We indulged in biscuits—eaten first with egg, cheese, lettuce, and all manner of toppings as dinner, then later filled with strawberries and whipped cream for dessert.
MMMMMMM…
A game of washers in the late evening sun, and it was a perfect Girls’ Night In!
Parsley
Parsley is a ubiquitous herb, easy to overlook, easy to undervalue.
It is said its seeds must go to the devil and back seven times before germinating. I don’t think it takes quite that long, but parsley is slow to germinate.
Once up, though, parsley is tough and long-lasting. The plants I start in August will survive spring frosts to flourish through the heat and drought of summer, and continue flourishing through the cold wet winter, to be finally pulled out in October of the following year, when they begin to bolt, to make room for new plants.
We eat parsley by the handful (none of this Tablespoon stuff), and love it in risi e bisi, soup, potatoes, and gratins.
We grow both the Italian flat-leaf and the curly varieties (because, why not?), and enjoy the flat-leaf parsley fresh in salads (or just standing up in the garden as we pass by). We also enjoy parsley mixed with other fresh herbs to make a non-basil pesto that is lovely on pasta or as a topping for polenta crostini.
Of course, the best reason to grow parsley in much of the world is to attract the beautiful swallowtail butterflies, whose caterpillars specialise on parsley and related plants, incorporating the toxins from the plants into their exoskeletons to serve as defence. Unfortunately, we have no swallowtails in New Zealand, but the flowers of parsley attract bees, flies, and our native butterflies in large numbers.
Waffles
Whenever I ask what folks want for Sunday breakfast, my son’s response is waffles. He always wants waffles, and only gets them a handful of times a year. I find waffle making tedious—I never get to sit down with the rest of the family, as they’re usually done eating by the time the last waffle comes off the iron.
But I love waffles, too, especially with strawberries.
So when I came in with almost four quarts of strawberries yesterday afternoon, I knew what breakfast would be today.
This recipe is adapted from the Basic Waffle recipe in Joy of Cooking. I double it—leftover waffles toast beautifully the next morning!
1 cup all purpose flour
¾ cup whole wheat flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
1 Tbsp sugar
¼ tsp salt
3 eggs
6 Tbsp butter, melted
¾ cup milk
Mix dry ingredients in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, beat eggs and whisk in milk and melted butter. Combine wet and dry ingredients, stirring only until it is smooth. Cook according to the instructions for your waffle iron.
Waxing Lyrical
When I say I’m going to do some waxing, chances are it’s not the sort of waxing you think of. Instead of depilatory waxing, I’m doing cheese waxing.
I used to hate to wax cheeses. The “instructions” for cheese wax say you should brush it on. I used to try to brush my wax on, but very quickly realized that the wax hardens in the bristles before you’ve even got half a cheese covered, and then you’re trying to brush wax onto your cheese with what amounts to a block of wood. Meanwhile, half the wax ends up on your fingers, and you end up with a lumpy cheese, burnt fingers, and a stove covered in wax drips.
So I started dipping my cheese. This worked much better…until I accidentally dipped my fingers one day and dropped the cheese into the wax. I thought drips of wax on the stove were bad, but the tsunami of hot wax resulting from the dropped cheese took weeks to remove.
I still dip my cheeses, but now waxing is quick, clean and painless. Instead of holding the cheese, I create a sling for it out of cotton string. With my fingers hooked into the string and safely above the wax, I can dip an entire cheese all at once. I get a beautiful finish, no drips on the stove, and no burns. I also get a perfect place to attach a label, so I know which cheese is which after months of maturing in the fridge.
Broad Beans
I had never eaten broad beans (aka fava beans) before moving to New Zealand, but now I can’t imagine early summer without them. They’re uncommon in the U.S., and even here where they’re grown by the hectare, they’re often considered “old people’s food”. During my brief stint selling vegetables at the Leeston market, I never sold broad beans to anyone under the age of 80.
But his attitude is unfair. Broad beans are more versatile than that. They have a bold, almost floral flavour that needs no embellishment. When young, the beans are sweet like peas, and they grow starchier as they mature. Somewhere between sweet and starch, they are at their best.
The “usual” way to eat broad beans is to blanch them, peel the skin off each bean, then serve them or cook them into a dish. Nothing wrong with that, unless you’re the cook, who has to shell and peel all those beans.
We prefer to make the consumers do half the work. We blanch the beans and serve them as finger food. They make a lovely appetizer—pop them out of their skins right into your mouth. Paired with a nice Sauvignon Blanc and eaten outdoors on a summer evening, they are no longer “old people’s food”. They become urbane and sophisticated. Something to be savoured with intelligent conversation.
And if you’re more the beer and burgers type, broad beans will oblige. They make a mean green burger that goes well with cheese, mushrooms and ketchup. Light enough for a lager, strong enough for a stout, broad bean burgers go with just about anything.
Broad beans—a versatile legume that’s not just for old people.
Robinne Weiss 