Salted caramel banana bread

I have a friend who likes to salt slices of green apple. Some might find this unusual, but I completely understand it. Until you have tried salted caramel in Provincial France (yes, you have to be there, not just have it shipped out), you might never understand how salt can affect the taste of sweet things in a very good way.


As my wine study showed me (Yes, I spent 4 years drinking at university), sometimes contrasting flavours is the best way to bring out the best. Think foie gras (salty, creamy goose liver pate) and Sauternes (sweet and marmaladey dessert wine), or maybe a ripe Australian Shiraz with a wedge of gorgonzola. Each element tastes good on its own, but put them together, and 1+1 suddenly makes 3.

Lamingtons - the great Australian cheat

I've only been baking for a year or two. I used to think that making cakes is hard. I presume a conspiracy of the Australian CWA (Country Women's Association) and other organisations similar. They got into our heads that cakes had to be perfect, and perfect meant the way they had always been made. 

With the rise of modern baking however, we see things like whoopie pies. I'm sure it was initially an accident by someone like me. Tried to make biscuits, but mucked up the measures and they ended up too soft, and whoopie! You get something even better. I can feel the old dears turning in their graves every time someone tastes one and says - "Wow - this is SO much better than shortbread!"

Balaleet - An Emirati Breakfast

Noodles for breakfast? With fragrant spices and omelet morsels? Doesn't sound like the kind of thing you could just whip up every morning for breakfast? Well the Emiratis do - citizens of the United Arab Emirates. Maybe not every morning, but more than just sometimes they might prepare this traditional vermicelli noodle dish.

It sounds harder than it is - it's one of those no-measure things, and tastes good both hot and cold. I tasted it for the first time at the Cultural Breakfast in Dubai, and learned how to make it myself last week at La Mere Culinere's cooking session. This is my own slap-dash version.

Ingredients:

Kids Chicken Urumaki

So pretty. I love japanese food, but my kids don't. I used to look longingly at children in malls munching on sushi cones while mine dragged me towards the chicken nuggets. All that lovely flavour, nutrients like iodine omega 3 and zinc that their diets are so deficient in. Eventually I just stopped looking and longing and accepted my fate - I am a mother of fast food junkies.

Not any more.

This is the first step in getting my kids to eat sushi. They love it. Not only that, they love making it - ahh, my dreams of being mother to a great chef are not shattered after all. Thanks for the inspiration Movenpick (post here about kids menus)

Ingredients:

• 200g boneless chicken thighs, trimmed of fat then pan-fried and sliced into 1cm ribbons
• 1 avocado, sliced
• 100g lean lardons (bacon cubes), panfried
• 1 cucumber, sliced lengthwise
• 3 cups cooked sumeshi rice (preparation guide here)
• nori sheets
• mango pulp (puree or push through a seive) and blanched edamame beans for garnish

Schnitzel

Before visiting Vienna (read my food path through old Vienna here) I had only had one great schnitzel in my life, and that was at the Tivoli Club, in Prahran, a German club with platter-sized schnitzel, cheap boutique beers and lederhosen to be enjoyed in the glow and tinkle of the inevitable poker machines that you always find in struggling Australian pubs and clubs. The schnitzel was to die for – it came about 15 different ways, in varieties of pork, turkey and veal, and with various flavours – Jäger, Zigeuner, Paprika, Käse, Rahm, or my favourite, Holstein – with fried egg, onions and capers. But to be honest, it’s really all about the schnitzel itself. It’s the kind of meat that every carnivore loves, including the super-fussy three-year-old kind of carnivore.

Ingredients:

• 500g lean meat, preferably pork or veal 
• 2 eggs 
• splash of water 
• ½ cup plain flour 
• salt and pepper 
• 1 ½ cups breadcrumbs 
• oil for pan-frying (canola best)

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?