Mac and cheese

I don't make mac and cheese very often -- maybe once or twice a year. But when a craving hits, this is the recipe I turn to. It's sort of involved (two separate 'cheese' sauces) and a bit extravagant, but totally worth it. Apparently this recipe won 2nd prize in a (non-vegan) mac and cheese contest!

I make candy for the intellectual stimulation

These are homemade Butterfingers candies, from this recipe (I only had chunky peanut butter in the house, so that's what I used). I hadn't realized that Butterfingers were supposed to be peanut butter flavoured, but there you go.

These were very interesting -- and not in the euphemistic sense, I actually mean the candy-making process here is interesting. You heat the sugar until almost the hard crack stage, and then add the peanut butter. This prevents the sugar from hardening into a toffee consistency -- it ends up sort of flaky and crumbly.

Sourdough bread

All through the summer, I kept my sourdough starter alive by feeding it once a week and using it for sourdough pancakes. These days, with the cooler weather, I am back to baking bread with it.

Since I got a stand mixer, I have been drawn to recipes that require one, but it turns out that my current favourite sourdough recipe is actually based on the famous NYTimes no knead bread. The recipe is by JMonkey of The Fresh Loaf.

Bread nerd notes:
-- I have been using 400g white flour, 169g wholemeal flour, and 3 t vital wheat gluten.
-- It tends to need a little bit of extra water.
-- In our cold house I have been letting it have a slightly longer rise (up to 21 hours).
-- I had some trouble with the crust burning before the bread was done, so I lower the temperature to 375 for the uncovered baking period, and bake it for 30 minutes or a bit longer. (A few times, the crumb has been ever so slightly gummy, so I am careful to avoid underbaking.)
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UPDATE: I solved the gumminess problem. DO NOT add any extra water. When you mix all the ingredients together it takes a bit of effort, and the dough can be a little dryish and shaggy in places, but it works. I bake it covered for 30 minutes and uncovered for 20, and it works out perfectly.

Baked tamal

I love tamales, but they are kind of a hassle to make, so I was delighted to find a recipe for a baked tamal in Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen. You make one big tamal in a pie plate (I used a round casserole dish), and cut and serve it in wedges.

I used coconut oil in place of lard. (The recipe has you test the consistency by floating a small dollop in a glass of water, and mine didn't really float very well no matter how long I beat it. I decided it was good enough when it rose a little way from the bottom of the glass and hung there.)

I filled the tamal with leftover black beans, roasted pumpkin, and some shredded cheddarish soy cheese. We had this with tomatillo salsa (hooray for home grown roasted tomatillos in the freezer). Yum!

Nasi lemak (sort of)

I recently borrowed Yotam Ottolenghi's book Plenty from the library. It is a beautiful and inspiring cookbook. I have never seen such gorgeous photos of salads. Luckily (since I had to return the book) many of the recipes are actually published on the web -- Ottolenghi does a series for the Guardian called The New Vegetarian.

One of our favourites from the book was his take on the Malaysian dish nasi lemak. It's coconut rice (with ginger and kaffir lime leaves), topped with sambal (chili sauce, with tamarind), fried shallots, coriander (cilantro), and lime. We've had it a few times now, but I used roasted okra or roasted eggplant. One day I had leftovers for breakfast and it was a most excellent way to start the day.

Pizza with cashew cheese

There are some fake cheeses that I quite like on pizza (in the US, we liked Follow Your Heart mozzarella and Teese, and here in Australia we've had good results with Cheezly mozzarella). But now that we don't have a vegan friendly store close by, these days I have been experimenting with homemade cheeses for topping pizza.

I had some decent results combining pureed silken tofu and cashews, flavoured with miso and nutritional yeast, and sometimes some lemon juice or vinegar. But one day I had no tofu and just went with straight cashews with a little nutritional yeast and a lot of salt. I used this as the bottom layer on a potato pizza with rosemary, and it was fantastic. (I will probably keep experimenting when it comes to traditional tomato based pizzas, but for a white pizza this is perfect.)

Garlic scapes

I miss the farmers market in Noho a lot. For one thing, although you can get okay tomatoes all year round here, there are NO heirloom tomatoes. None!

I miss the little seasonal markers too, like the few weeks when they sell garlic scapes. But now, it looks like I may have garlic scapes any time I want, so maybe Perth isn't so bad after all. I didn't recognise them at first because they are straight and have had their heads cut off, and they're labelled 'garlic shoots', but they are scapes. Now, they are not seasonal, local scapes -- I didn't look too hard at the label, but they may have come from China -- but they are delicious nonetheless. (I hadn't realized it, but garlic shoots are not just an American farmers market thing, it seems they are actually a common Chinese ingredient.)

My favourite thing to do with them is saute them on a very hot pan with green beans. I like them to get browned and blistered. We had them with a Meyer lemon risotto, and chickenish seitan. (I liked this meal so much that I broke my own unspoken rule and made exactly the same thing the very next week.)

Key lime pie

I've never actually had real key lime pie, so I don't know how authentic this was, but it was good. I used Isa's recipe for Latchkey Lime Pie, with a few substitutions. (In particular, I didn't want it to be too coconutty, so I used 250 ml of Oatly cream and some pureed avocado, topped up with coconut milk.)

Citrus

One thing I really love about Perth is that so many people have citrus trees in their yards. I love walking around our neighbourhood, in this, the 'dead of winter' (read: more like a Massachusetts spring), and seeing enormous lemon trees laden with fruit everywhere.

We aren't so lucky: our house doesn't have a citrus tree, but generous friends and family have shared lemons (regular and Meyer), key limes, oranges, and a mystery citrus fruit. The mystery fruit is orange-skinned, but tart like a lime. I think I would describe it as more floral than regular lime juice. Here's one of the mystery fruits:

My internet research had almost convinced me that they were rangpur limes, but the fruit did not have the green seeds that rangpurs are supposed to have. Maybe they were bitter oranges?

I was a bit overwhelmed and not quite sure what to do with a bounty of mystery fruit, so these guys ended up zested and juiced and stashed in the freezer.

Singapore

We recently (okay, two weeks ago, but you already know that I am a slack blogger) got back from a short holiday in Singapore.

Food highlights included:

1. The day I had dosas for both breakfast and dinner
2. Sweet corn ice cream, bought from a street vendor on Orchard Street (like this)
3. Monkey head mushrooms
4. Kaya toast (crisp thin toast sandwiches of thickly spread cold butter and kaya)

I didn't try the durian pancakes and I sort of regret it.