Gluten Free Banana Date and Hazelnut muffins

Finding a gluten free flour that works well is like finding the holy grail for coeliacs. Only five years ago, they were only available in specialist stores, and varied in quality and texture - producing pizza bases that tasted like soggy cardboard, muffins that were as dry and heavy as boulders, and gnocchi that disintegrated as soon as it hit water. Now it's easier. A combination of factors - the discovery of wheat intolerance is on the rise (as with many allergies), research and development, and the demand for unusual grains and organic produce from a population armed with better health knowledge.

I love Doves Farm gluten free flour. It is a blend of Rice, Potato, Tapioca, Maize & Buckwheat, and it comes in both plain and self raising. The self raising flour makes wonderful fluffy pikelets, and the muffins below. Usually I wouldn't add a baking powder to a self-raising flour to make cakes, but gluten free flours are a little denser, and the rising agents are not quite as strong. It just helps give them a little extra lift. This recipe could be easily made without nuts.

Apple Pastries

 There used to be a show on Australian TV called "Surprise Chef". This excitable chef would accost people in supermarkets, force the camera in their face, and then go home with them and put the camera through their pantry and fridge. His aim was to make a gourmet three-course meal for their family with only what he could find there.

Today, I found some gorgeous pink lady apples - the kind that look like they have come straight off a tree and into your basket, ripe, smelling like a glass of apple juice, un-waxed, oddly shaped and un-spectacularly coloured. I had to make an apple pie with no pie pan, and the laziest way possible (children wanted to eat them RIGHT NOW!!!). So I delved into my shelves, and found some condensed milk. "Hmmm...", I thought "Now that will be my challenge ingredient".

So here are the easiest apple pastries ever.

Apple Tea Cakes

Sometimes I like to tell myself that the junk I eat is good for me. This recipe, for example. It is good for me, because I halved the suggested amount of sugar (although I added a little maple syrup for flavour), I included apple (hence helping on the old 5 and 2 a day that often falls by the wayside), and I iced it sparingly. 

So it is true, that these are healthy, but only when you compare them to other cakes and desserts. Well some of them at least. Fortunately, they are also very, very easy to make. Just don't eat them for dinner, because then they should be classified as decidedly unhealthy.

Ingredients 

• 125g butter, softened
• 125g (1/2 cup) caster sugar
• 2 tblsp maple syrup
• 2 eggs
• 200ml buttermilk (or plain milk with a dash of lemon juice)
• 250g (2 cups) plain flour
• 3 tsp baking powder
• pinch salt (can leave out if you use salted butter)
• 1 apple, grated coarsely

• ground cinnamon mixed with caster sugar or fine brown sugar for dusting

Giving veggies a hiding

My mum used to make me eat brussel sprouts. Not the tiny little gourmet buttered brussel sprouts with roasted chestnuts that you find on a lavish European Christmas table. Oh no - these were 1970s Australian versions - bitter, olivey-grey, egg-sized, boiled monsters of torture that would keep me sitting at the table twisting my fork idly over my plate until bedtime. One day I refused to eat them, and I got them back again for breakfast.

In my house, the monsters are not on the plate - they're eating off it. Or, more truthfully, they are running around the living room avoiding what is on the plate. I have absolutely no control of my children. They eat what they want, when they want, in the manner they want. I have no idea how my mother managed to handle me - I was far from perfect myself. 

So, with an utter lack of a firm parental hand or the juvenile respect for authority, the only way for me to get kids to eat healthy food is to disguise it in yummy form. I have hundreds of ways - they involve all manner of slicing, dicing, pureeing, grating, mixing, stuffing and coating. One of the favourites is the meatballs below. Bear in mind, these are for children (or grown men who won't eat their veggies), so are appropriately bland. I also make them for us, but with plenty of extra spice.

This time it's not thyme

Roast Chicken. It used to be one of the best known comfort foods. Delicious, easy to cook, dripping with juicy salty goodness. Then the supermarket rotisserie came along and spoiled it all for everybody. They sold cooked chooks for less than a fresh one, and so all the sensible people went and purchased them instead. 

Or were they sensible? A supermarket rotisserie has great skin, but that's where the comparison to a home-cooked chicken stops. They're dry, spindly little battery-hens, often overcooked, flavoured either too simply or with truckloads of horrible stuff like MSG.

Wouldn't you rather have the juicy free-range one in this picture?

Roasted Honey Pumpkin

It's amazing how many of my my greater achivements in the kitchen have come from a desire to get good food into the mouths of my children. Mother is the necessity of invention, they say, and it is so true. 

I love pumpkin. Soups, curries, roasted, scones, pie - all are great. But my children hate it. So to make them like it, I partner it with something I know they love, and I make sure they are in the kitchen helping me, so they can see the honey going in. This is the easiest way to cook delicious pumpkin - prep is less than 5 minutes, and the rest of the work is done by the oven.

Wedding Fever

I'm not a monarchist. In fact, there was a referendum in Australia some years back, and I voted to make Australia a republic. Luckly, at that time, more than half the population was over 50 (baby boomers), and they like ER and what she does very much, thank you. I say luckily, because if Australia was a republic, we would have lost touch with the British Royal Family, and I wouldn't have been at all excited that there was a royal wedding this weekend.

I probably wouldn't have decided that because I was going to a birthday party on the day of the royal wedding, that I should make my own version of english muffins, just because I felt the occasion needed to be celebrated via baking.

And so, we have English Muffins by Sarah. Complete with St George's cross (albeit baked in wonkily). Full of 'sweet as a princess' wedding white chocolate, and absolutely nothing like a standard English Muffin.

Saffron and Honey Breakfast Cake

Friday morning is the start of the weekend in this part of the world. It is the holy day, and so we rest on Fridays and Saturdays. I am still getting used to the whole 'work' routine on Sundays, but something I have settled into quite nicely is pancake morning on Fridays. It's an institution. 

But this week, Friday came at the end of holidays where we had worn our Friday institution out a little - when you have something every day, it is no longer a novelty. And so, to mark the special day, I really had to pull one out of the hat. So, with my new-found confidence in baking, I decided to make cake. I figured if it was shallow, then it would cook quickly, so this is what I came up with.

Crunchy prawns with korma dipping sauce

Every once in a while, there is a dish from a restaurant that sticks with me. One evening, about 8 years ago in Melbourne, I dined with my husband at Circa at 'The Prince' in St Kilda. It was fairly soon after it had opened, and it was still well and truly in its hey-day, a food style-leader in Melbourne, and in fact Australia. That night, among other things, I had a prawn dish, with the most perfectly crisp and delicious casing - knaffe pastry. 

Just recently I purchased Suzanne Husseini's new cookbook, and what did I find in there? Prawns with knaffe pastry. Hers are with orange and lemon rind and stuffed with almonds, and they are amazing. Of course, I can't put her recipe here, so I brainstormed a little - I really enjoyed the sweetness of the almonds with the sweetness of the prawn flesh, and that got me thinking about korma.

Korma is a curry sauce that is made with a cream and nut base - either almonds or cashews. But as far as I'm concerned, the almonds just don't cut it for this sauce - cashews are far creamier. Most of the work is done in the blender, so it's super easy to cook.

Fattoush - the salad for non-salad lovers

I hate salads that taste like a pile of grass. I'm more of a caesar salad person - sure, I like some leaves, but I prefer them crunchy, and then I want a whole heap of non-salad items in there, like bacon, eggs, bread and cheese. Or maybe a complete lack of leaves, like in a greek salad - again, with the cheese, and something tangy like olives. But just don't serve me weeds - ugh.

This region has a famous salad, and I'd never heard of it before I arrived - but now I order it everywhere. I'm on my own special mission to find the best Fattoush (also fatoush, fattush and probably a myriad of other spellings) that can be found in Dubai. So far, it's a war between Bayt al Wakeel on the Bur Dubai side of the creek in the middle of the Old Souk, and Tagine, at the One and Only Royal Mirage.

Fattoush's wonderful addition is fried bread. It's like an arabic crouton, but better, and I make mine in the oven and they taste just as good. These croutons are so awesome, I eat half of them before I even make the salad. But the salad is pretty good too - it's fresh, aromatic, colourful and crunchy.