Tuesday, 21 August 2012
Thursday, 16 August 2012
101 Things Update - June-July 2012
Even though it's not the end of the month, I thought I'd do a bit of a 101 Things update for June-July.
2. Taste wine the Barossa. Done! By the time this post is out the Barossa post will be a few posts back. Six wineries visited and ten bottles of plonk purchased, mostly fortifieds and sweet things cos that's (generally) how I roll. What a fantastic day!
8. Make a highly-decorated, awesome cake. I think my birthday cake counts, don't you??! It probably wasn't quite what I had in mind initially as my super-duper-awesome cake but for now that'll be the one.
15. Hold a dinner party with a theme every six months. Well I may not have done it every six months but I've decided that "Afternoon tea" is a dinner party theme, especially if said afternoon tea stretches on to dinner time. You can read about it here and here. Sorry about the ugly photos. But that second link has a really yummy cake, which I insisit you bake immediately! Hopefully when things are less hectic I'll get a chance to try out my Mexican cook books and have a proper crack at this dinner party business.
23. Make ice cream. I did it as part of the Annual Ice Cream Cupcake Contest. Vanilla ice cream base, which I then swirled some lemon curd and crushed meringue through. Oh, yes. Also, note to self - must buy ice cream maker. It would give me much better ice cream for much less effort. Oh, and FYI - the ice cream is the stuff oozing out the middle, not the pretty swirl on top. Sorry to get your hopes up!
24. Blog at least twice per month for a year. Well I counted back a year from today and have managed 95 posts in the time that I had committed to writing 24. I think I can consider my game lifted.
48. Participate in a fun run/walk. I did the Run Melbourne 5km race with my BFF Alice and raised $1080 for the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute and promptly made it onto their FB page. Go me! I only ran the first and the last bit - the first hill got my heart doing stupid things - but I'm still proud of my achievement. Especially the fundraising part, because it means they're a little bit closer to curing me.
54&55. Visit Africa and Mexico. Well I'm booked in! I'll be doing this tour and this tour, plus spending a bit of time in the USA and the UK. If any of my bloggy friends want to catch up then shout out! I'm also going to Bloggy Boot Camp in Vegas and would love to meet some people going to that before I'm actually there. Drop me a line and say hi so I'm not a total stranger :)
65. Read my unread books. Yep, I've been working on that but have also been far too lazy to review them. You might cop a bunch of those as scheduled posts whilst I'm galivanting around the globe later in the year.
68. Take a language class. Well, I sort of am. I downloaded an app on my iPhone called Mind Snacks. I chose the Spanish one in preparation for my trip to Mexico and I'm doing pretty well so far. I know nothing replaces actually holding a conversation in the language, but at least now I won't feel like I'm drowning. Plus I can now say "great-grandfather" in Spanish. Cos that, like, so important!
Oh, and I changed #37 from not eating processed foods to not eating lollies, chocolate, biscuits or chips for a month. It's all but impossible not to eat processed foods in this tiny little town because food options are quite limited, and I don't have my usual arsenal of pantry items to make up my own sauces and marinades so I'm stuck with bottled stir-fry sauce etc. I do eat a lot of lean meat with steamed vegies but that gets soooo borrrrring, and not eating lollies, chocolate and chips is a much more important to me because it effectively represents not eating in an out-of-control manner. If I'm not eating that stuff then I'm not going to binge, end of story, and at the moment that's quite a challenge for me.
Well, that's me done for another (two) month(s). I just realised I probably won't update this until November or even December because I'll be away for a couple of months, and won't have done much on that list anyway. But I will be able to tick off Africa and Mexico! WHOOHOO!
Tuesday, 14 August 2012
The Daring Kitchen: Cornmeal (Polenta with Blue Cheese, Sweet Potatoand Basil)
I can't believe another month has rolled around, and I'm also quite glad that Rachael from Pizzarossa chose a challenge that had a bit of flexibility about it and got me excited. Part of the excitement was because Joy the Baker advised me that grits and polenta were basically different grades of the same product, and so recipes for a product that is largely unavailable in Australia suddenly opened up to me! Sure, the texture of polenta is smoother, but they're roughly interchangable and so a whole world of cooking has opened up for me. YAAAAAAYYYY!!! *does happy dance*
Rachael of pizzarossa was our August 2012 Daring Cook hostess and she challenged us to broaden our knowledge of cornmeal! Rachael provided us with some amazing recipes and encouraged us to hunt down other cornmeal recipes that we’d never tried before – opening our eyes to literally 100s of cuisines and 1000s of new-to-us recipes!
I can't remember where I read about it, but I wanted to cook something like grits with blue cheese. I have never been a big fan of blue cheese, although since living in Adelaide and doing a few of those cheese-and-wine trails I have been exposed to fairly tolerable variations on the theme, like a nice, mild Roqueforte (I don't know if I spelled that correctly) rather than that manky, powdery blue stuff. Ugh.
So when my friend Mary introduced me to the most excellent combination of gnocchi with roasted pumpkin and basil leaves wilted in browning butter, with chunks of blue cheese stirred about until all nice and melty and creamy, well, I was pretty darned happy. And relieved. Because blue cheese isn't so bad after all. I can't ever see myself gobbling down that stinky stuff like my mum does, but that bite is quite passable in cooking.
Fast forward a couple of months, and I'm making the polenta equivalent of Mary's dish within a day of reading about the challenge, using what we already had in the fridge. I was just so excited!!!
I should have written down what I put in, shouldn't I... oh well, I'll give it a go!
1 small sweet potato, in 1/2-1" cubes
1tbsp dijon mustard
2tbsp olive oil
Salt and pepper
1/2c polenta
1c cold water
1c hot water + extra
1 rounded tsp chicken stock powder
1/2c milk
20g butter + extra
40g blue cheese + extra
Squeezy basil stuff (or I'm sure torn fresh basil would be nice, too)
Mix mustard and olive oil together until homogenous. Toss sweet potato in it and roast at 190oC for about 25 minutes then flip the sweet potato around and turn it up to about 210oC until a little browner and soft enough to eat (about another 10 minutes but your oven may differ). Ideally I would have used pumpkin as it's sweeter, but this had to do. I wanted to make this dish NOW!!!
Put polenta in medium-ish saucepan (maybe on the large side of medium. I don't know what the official ruling on saucepan size is!) and add 1c water. Stir around then turn on the heat. Boil the kettle, measure out another cup of water and add the stock powder. Stir around and bring to boil. You'll have to really watch it when it comes to the boil because it pops like lava bubbles!
I think at this stage I added the milk and was taste testing it fairly often so I could tell when it was cooked (it will become smoother). It took less than ten minutes from the boil, probably less than eight but I wasn't timing it as I placed priority on not being splattered by hot polenta.
Once it reached the cooked stage I turned off the heat, stirred through some squeeze basil and some butter and cheese. I kept adding those two until I got the desired consistency and flavour.
Mine turned out quite soft and quite wet, but that's how I like it. If you don't want it as wet then maybe reduce the amount of water you add. You could eat it alone or as a side dish - I served it with some left over casserole, which was nice.
Thank you Rachael for a great challenge!
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