unexpected fluttering

We're big on notes in our family. Not so much of the 'thank you for the thoughtful gift' variety but more often than not our handwritten notes feature the details of a new favourite restaurant, important bus route numbers or, from when we've holidayed together, instructions as to our whereabouts - 'gone to the shop to get fish, bread, milk etc back soon.' 

I have always been a collector of words (I still have all my childhood and teenage journals, detailing fervent plans to have exciting haircuts and boyfriends and amazing clothes and I've kept just about every birthday card I've ever been given) so I find it hard to throw these notes away. I feel like there's something of the person preserved in the note. Sometimes when pulling a cookbook out from the shelf a note will come unexpectedly fluttering out from between the pages and I'll find myself tearing up at the sight of my Mum or Grandmother's handwriting. 

I came across one of these such recipes the other day, for Armenian Nutmeg Cake, and knew that I wanted to make it as part of this month's cooking club challenge (which incidentally is all about recipes handed down by voice, handwritten notes or memories). The funny thing is I can't remember for the life of me who usually made this cake, whether it was my Mum or my Dad, as they're both pretty good cooks. Dad was normally in charge of dessert when they were having guests over but the nuts and spices in it has all the hallmarks of a Mum-type cake, the kind that as a child I would probably not have been interested in picking at before the guests arrived.  

Regardless of who was the author of this cake, the minute I tasted it I was transported back to Sunday guest lunches in our old house in Pennant Hills. I think it somewhat miraculous that time can be preserved in a recipe like that. In sharing this recipe with you, hopefully you can make it and create your own new timeline.

Armenian Nutmeg Cake

2 cups brown sugar
2 cups wholemeal flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
125g butter
1 egg
1 cup milk
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon carbonate of soda
walnuts

Set your oven to moderate (180°C) and grease a 20cm cake tin.

Combine the brown sugar, sifted flour and baking powder; rub in the butter until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. Place half of this mixture evenly over the base of your cake tin and press down lightly with a fork to form a base. 

Dissolve the carbonate of soda in the milk; add the beaten egg and nutmeg. Pour this on to the remaining crumb mixture in your bowl and mix well. Pour this onto the tin, sprinkle with chopped walnuts. Bake in a moderate oven for an hour. Check on the cake about halfway through the cooking time and if it's getting quite brown you can cover it with aluminium foil. Once cooked through, allow the cake to stand in the tin for five minutes before turning onto a rack to cool.

And there you have it. 

It's sort of halfway between a cake and a slice and is at once both chewy and slightly crunchy, caramelly and spicy. Not the most beautiful of cakes but a damn good afternoon cake or one for when friends drop by. One thing though, if you're prone to colourful dreaming perhaps avoid having it just before bed. I don't think the teaspoon of nutmeg is enough to bring on the screaming jeebies but just to be on the safe side...

For a lot more wonderfully inspired recipes and memories have a look and see what the other cooking club members got up to this month:

Lucent Imagery  (cooking club founder)

From River’s Edge
Down by the Sea 

Explody Full 

Under Lock & Key  

Christa to the Max 

Juanita Tortilla 

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magnolia jam

As you may have picked up from my recent posts, I've become rather enamoured of magnolias lately. I feel like I'm seeing them everywhere at the moment but especially in a few key locations where I often need a beautiful pick me up (on the way to work; on the way to the hospital). I feel like they're such a hopeful flower - blooming as they do at the end of Winter and early Spring on naked branches, gradually making way for green sprouting leaves.

If only I could cook up and bottle magnolias as jam, to savour them on toast in the morning, to literally consume the hopefulness they hold for me. Instead I thought perhaps homemade strawberry jam might be a fair substitute, especially as the strawberries seem to be exploding with brightness and flavour at the moment. There is something about the idea of ingesting bold colours that is appealing to me, something intrinsically nourishing and life affirming. And besides, I've never made strawberry jam before. In fact I never even used to like it. I don't know why, perhaps it was because growing up we were more of an apricot jam household. But the strawberries are demanding my attention at the moment and so to strawberry fields of jam we go.

Sally Wise, as usual, was my go to for this one and she makes it pretty simple and straightforward, which is always a nice way to go.

Strawberry Jam
Adapted from Sally Wise

500g strawberries, hulled
3/4 tsp tartaric acid
1/4 cup of water
500g sugar

Chop the strawberries roughly and place in a medium saucepan with the tartaric acid and water.  Bring to the boil and simmer gently for 10 minutes.  Add the sugar and stir until dissolved.  Bring the jam to the boil and boil over medium heat for 20 minutes. Keep an eye on it though. If you have a raging hot gas burner like I do, you may want to lower down the heat or take it off the stove a bit earlier. My jam ended up quite caramelised, which was good but might not be what you're going for.

Pour into sterilised bottles and seal immediately. Then enjoy on toast or stirred through yogurt or with fresh strawberries, gingerbread biscuits and mascarpone (as we did with my Mum on Tuesday night) or however you like it.

Just before we go, here a few interesting facts about magnolia which I discovered during my travels and which further reinforce my enjoyment of this rather amazing plant:
- Magnolia evolved before bees appeared
- the aromatic bark contains magnolol and honokiol, two polyphenolic compounds that may have demonstrated anti-anxiety properties
- in parts of Japan, the leaves of magnolia obovata are used for wrapping food and as cooking dishes.

So there you go: beautiful, hopeful and useful - qualities I think can safely apply to jam as well.

I wasn't the only one to make jam this month.
To see what all the lovely cooking club members made, do stop by their places below.

Lucent Imagery (cooking club founder)
From River's Edge
Down by the Sea
Explody Full
Chi Garden
Under Lock and Key
Adventures of the Ordinary
Christa to the Max

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gingerly

I've long been a fan of ginger. I enjoy it in just about any form - pickled, crystallised, in its beer or ale variety or ground up and baked in cakes. Up until recently I had a pretty cast iron stomach when it came to motion sickness but apparently it's good for that too and for nausea, something patients undergoing chemotherapy can benefit from. That's why I take it to my Dad. Coated in dark chocolate or crystallized, its a small something I can do to help in the face of big uncertainty.

Sometimes when the ground shifts underneath with the disorientation that illness can bring the best path to tread is a familiar one. It requires less cautious navigation and a sense of firmer footing. I think this is why despite owning so many cook books I tend to turn to the same few again and again:
Homecooked: Favourite recipes from Australian kitchens
The Australian Women's Weekly Classic Cakes
A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg
Leftover Makeovers by Sally Wise

Reading and cooking from these books is like meeting up with old friends. They might not be the most gourmet or fancy of tomes but there's something in each of them that speaks to me when I wander into the kitchen and think about turning on the oven and creating something comforting or nourishing.

Writing this now I just realised, they were all given to me as gifts (by a former boss, a childhood friend, Kristian and his sister respectively) which makes them even more special.

In search of the reassurance that familiar things can bring, I thought for this month's cooking club challenge - a dish from your current favourite recipe book - what better than ginger cake from a well loved cake book.

Ginger Cake with Caramel Icing
Adapted from The Australian Women's Weekly Classic Cakes

1 1/2 cups brown sugar
1 1/2 cups plain flour
1 1/2 cups self-raising wholemeal flour
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 Tbs ground ginger
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground nutmeg
250g butter, softened
2 eggs
1 cup buttermilk (or half a cup yogurt, half a cup milk)
1/2 cup golden syrup

Caramel icing
60g butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 Tbs milk
3/4 cup icing sugar

Preheat your oven to 170 degrees C or 160 degrees C fan-forced and grease a square cake tin.

Sift the dry ingredients into a large bowl. Add in all your remaining ingredients and beat with an electric mixer or wooden spoon until well combined. If using a mixer, crank up the speed and beat the mixture for an additional few minutes or until it is smooth and pale.

Pour the mixture into your pan and bake for approximately 1 1/4 hours. Stand the cake in your pan for about ten minutes and then cool on a rack.

Meanwhile make your caramel icing by stirring butter, brown sugar and milk in a small saucepan over medium heat until the sugar dissolves. Bring to the boil and simmer stirring for 2 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in sifted icing sugar. Spread over the cooled cake and cut into slices or squares. Share with loved ones.

To see what wonderful things the other cooking club members cooked up this month, check out the links below:
Lucent Imagery (cooking club host)
Down by the Sea
Anything Squirrel Squirrel
Chi Garden
Under Lock and Key  

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workaday meals

I realised recently, after reading this wonderful post, that I don't often write about the food I actually prepare for us during the week, especially those regular workaday meals or snacks that come together almost by themselves because I've made them many times before.

I don't know why I have this hesitation because I get just as much inspiration from seeing what people make to nourish themselves when they're busy as from perfectly styled meals that require fancy ingredients and dedicated preparation time.

So here goes, a simple meal that I often make for breakfast or whenever the need for something quick and sustaining arises, or just when I feel like it.

Avocado Toast

1 avocado (makes plenty for two)
some thick crusty bread or toasted bagels
salt and cracked pepper
squeeze of lemon

Spoon out your avocado into a small bowl and mash it up well with a squeeze of the lemon. Toast your bread or bagel (I didn't make the bagels this time around but I have before and if you have a bit of time up your sleeve one weekend I recommend making some - it feels a little bit like a magic trick).  Then lather the avocado onto your bread, season with salt and cracked pepper and eat with gusto. An optional very Australian extra: spread your bread with a little bit of Vegemite before putting on your avocado and then omit further salt.

In NSW the Hass (purple pebbly skin) and Sharwil (greenskin) varieties of avocado are in season for the next few months, so I daresay I'll be having a few more avocado based meals before then. My childhood self is cracking up laughing at this because she knows I used to hate avocados with a passion and now look how far I've come.

For more seasonal produce inspiration make sure you check out the other members of the cooking club below:

Lucent Imagery http://www.lucentimagery.com/
From River’s Edge http://fromriversedge.net/
Down by the Sea http://downbytheseadorset.blogspot.co.uk/
Anything Squirrel Squirrel http://anythingsquirrelsquirrel.com/

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homemade marmalade

There's something almost magical about some things that you make yourself. Especially when they're items that you usually buy from the supermarket. This is me and marmalade - I love it, as you can probably tell from here, but I've never made it myself.

So when a lovely blogger friend recently invited me to take part in a cooking club, with this month's challenge being to make something from scratch that you would normally buy in a jar/carton/bottle/packet, I leapt at the chance. The universe was giving me a little nudge to get over my weird fear about preserving and canning and just do it.

There is a wealth of information out there about preserving, canning, bottling, pickling and it can be a little overwhelming to say the least. I think part of the secret of not talking yourself out of doing it is to start small. Remember when I made pickles a while back? - well I made so much of the stuff and was worried that I hadn't properly sterilised the jars so I ended up having to throw some of it out - something I hate doing.  Since then I've found a few good tips, such as here and here on sterilising jars.

So now onto the fun part, making the marmalade.

Orange Marmalade
Adapted from A Year in a Bottle by Sally Wise

Makes 750g, approximately (enough for three jars)

4-5 large oranges
1/2 a lemon
3 1/2 cups water
500g sugar

Start by chopping the oranges finely.  Place them in a large pot, add the water and bring to the boil. Cook for about 25 minutes or until the fruit is soft. 

Now add the sugar and bring to the boil, stirring until sugar is dissolved. Continue to boil on high for 25 minutes. Don't do as I did and try to make an omelette for dinner at the same time and forget to stir your marmalade - burning will ensue.

Allow the marmalade to stand for 10 minutes before pouring into warm sterilised jars.  Seal immediately.

This recipe produced a fairly chunky, thick marmalade, which is exactly how I like it but if you prefer yours more runny, I'd suggest adding more water at the start and reducing the heat a little in your second boil, towards the end of the 25 minutes. 

I opened up one jar this morning to go on my toast, one jar went into the cupboard and the other was gifted to a friend at work. I have a feeling I'm going to be finding ever more inventive ways to feature marmalade in my cooking over the coming months. I'd like to think my marmalade loving Gran would be proud of my efforts.

You can find out what the other wonderful members of the cooking club came up with for the challenge below:

Lucent Imagery http://www.lucentimagery.com/

Quiet Paws http://quietpaws.com/

From River’s Edge http://fromriversedge.net/

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