Hola and Olé friends…and that’s the extent of my Spanish done!
Let’s talk about soup, baby….ok…I’m stopping with the bad music puns.
Right here. Right now.
Or..Maybe not…
Green Asparagus SoupOur November Daring Cooks’ hostess was Begoña, who writes the beautiful blog, Las recetas de Marichu y las mías. Begoña is from Spain and didn’t want to go with the more common challenges of paella or gazpacho, she wanted to share with us another very popular recipe from Spain that we don’t see as often called Sopa Castellana which is a delicious bread soup!
I chose the Green Asparagus version as not only is it my second favourite vegetable ( behind the far less exotic green bean) but also, currently in season here in the Southern Hemisphere..
Just look at how gorgeous it is!
And the soup was pretty awesome too…I love the combination of egg and asparagus and I also love a poached egg in a soup…so, so good.
And saffron in anything just makes it awesome!
Try it, it may just get you dancing just like this!
A few weeks ago I, was chosen to be one of the brand ambassadors for The Spice Peddlers, a great shop in Sydney selling a fabulous range of herbs and spices!
Each month, they will send me a different spice or spice blend and I can play with it as much as I want.
Happy days people, happy, happy days.
I can’t tell you how excited this made me. Well, I can’t tell you…but I can can show you.
There may have been a bit of spontaneous dancing round the kitchen.
I may have done a little bit of this… Followed by a bit of this…
I drew the line here.
It seemed a little bit too Monty Python Ministry of Silly Walks…
But I was right back into the groove with this…
That’s how excited I was.
Then I got my first blend and…the fear kicked in. What if it was terrible? What if I was totally uninspired? What if what I made turned out awful? What if the sky fell on my head? You know the usual nonsense panicky “I’m not worthy” that plagues the best of us at times….
So first things first. Which for me was to open up the pack, lick my finger, dip it in and have a taste.
Yeah, I know…
I’m classy.
So much for the first unfounded fear. The team at the Spice Peddlers had sent me a container of their Middle Harbour Seasoning. This is a blend of sea salt, lime leaves, lime zest, Tasmanian Pepper, black pepper, green peppercorns, lemon myrtle, dill, chervil and green and white onion.
Otherwise known as delicious! It’s tangy from the lime, zingy from the pepper, punchy from the salt with a very slight herby, aniseedy undertone. So good. So, so good.
This would be perfect just spinkled on pita bread which is then toasted in the oven until crispy to have with dips and a lovely crisp cold glass of white wine on a hot summer day. And you know what? I’ll be doing that very soon.
However, for the purpose of experimentation I wanted to get a bit more fancy.
We are heading into party season and I wanted to experiment with some new fingerfood dishes…have I ever mentioned how much I love fingerfood? There is something magical for me in a party pie, a mini burger, a bite-sized pizza, a canape….you get my drift.
I was once waxing lyrical to a friend about how if I owned a restaurant it would only serve small bits of food and wasn’t it crazy that no one had ever thought of that before?
She gave me a look. You know. That look. “They’re called tapas bars” she said in a voice that suggested she was speaking to the mentally incompetent.
Yeah but…
No but…
My idea is to have cocktails and fingerfood and it would only be open for the cocktail hour…
Ok…never mind…it’s a tapas bar.
Damn those Spanish and their eerily prescient good food ideas.
Let’s quickly move on and talk about some of my better ideas…like this:
Smoked Salmon and Herb Frittata
Makes 16 mini frittatas
8 eggs 400ml cream
500ml milk
4 spring onions
200g smoked salmon, chopped
2 tsp Middle Harbour Seasoning
1 tsp chopped tarragon
1 tsp chopped chervil
1 tsp chopped chives
1/4 cup grated parmesan
Preheat oven to 150º.
Whisk together the eggs, cream and milk.
Add the spring onions, salmon, spice mix and herbs and parmesan.
If not using the spice blend, season with salt & pepper and increase herbs to 1 tbsp each.
Pour into greased muffin trays and place in the oven for 15-20 minutes or until base and sides are set. Serve sprinkled with additional chives.
Except again, I subbed in the Spice Peddler Middle Harbour Seasoning for half of the herbs and I also sprinkled a little bit of the mix on the top of the pastry before cooking.
The mixture for this is delicious. However, when I make this next time, instead of the “pastry” mix in the Serious Eats recipe I would use a really light crispy buttery shortcrust pastry or even a filo.
As soon as I tasted the Middle Harbour Mix I knew I wanted to make cocktail with it..and what else would go with a lemony, peppery zingy herb mix than a Bloody Mary?
Can i just digress for a moment to talk about how much I love a Bloody Mary? I love a Bloody Mary the way Don Draper loves a Manahattan. To me they are the height of sophistication. In my mind, enjoying a Bloody Mary is like enjoying oysters…when you can do it, you know you’re a grown up. Even more so if you can down one before noon!
I’m also a big fan of drinking my vitamins and all that tomato juice, has to be good for you!
This recipe is probably the best one I have tried. I think it’s the splash of sherry which adds a teeny bit of sweetness into the mix that does it – and I used the Spice Peddler Middle Harbour instead of the celery salt and also to rim the glass.
OMG, this was sooooo good, it set off another bout of dancing…
Bloody Mary
200ml tomato juice
1 tbsp Worchestershire sauce
1 tsp Spice Peddler Middle Harbour Seasoning or Celery Salt
1 tbsp fresh lemon juice
6 drops Tabasco sauce
30ml Vodka
Splash of cream sherry
Stir ingredients in a mixing glass with ice, strain and serve!
I’m going to be spending my week perfecting my moves from my new favourite possession – the Barbie Allen Dance/Exercise Book.
She has an entire routine for Xanadu which I may share as a special Christmas Present for all of you…hell, if I get full enough of some Christmas spirit (we here at RFFMT are quite fond of a little bit o’ Hendricks for the holidays) I may even dance it for you!
So last time we left off, I had been eating for love and beauty for 4 days and loving it.
However, through the week, I began to see a certain theme running through my dishes…
Day 5
I made two recipes from Eating for Love and Beauty.
The first was a delicious Egg Curry.
This was very tasty, spicy and quick to make. I will definitely make this again. Also, I didn’t have fenugreek because…well who has? However, I noticed my Garam Masala contained fenugreek, cumin and coriander so I used that in lieu of all individual spices.
I think we all know eggs are a symbol of fertility…I had my egg curry with a Rice Exotica – Saffron & Lime Casserole. Rice Exotica huh? I think the Swami might be getting a bit saucy!
Sadly, the Rice Exotica, was the least sexy dish of the week. Probably because in my first mouthful of it, I bit directly into a clove which spoiled entire dish for me Yes, it was my fault and I should have been more careful when I was counting them as I fished them out but still, not good. I was also not happy with the texture and I only par boiled my rice initially! I like my rice light and fluffy and this was a bit too mushy and stuck together for me. I dread to think what it might have been like had I cooked it all the way through the first time as per the recipe.
If I was going to make the rice again, which is unlikely, I would probably not cook it at all before bunging it in the oven with the nuts and spices. Hmmm…maybe I will try it that way. Sans the cloves!
Next up was an Eggplant Dish….and lo and behold, the internet tells me that eggplants are a symbol of abundance or fertility, passion and devotion. See what I mean about a theme beginning to develop?
Day 6 – Eggplant Gourmet
This was AWESOME!…
Earthy eggplant, sweet, sour..all sorts of deliciousness rolled into the one dish. The flavours reminded me very much of a Sri Lankan Eggplant dish that sometimes contains cashew nuts…and maybe dates?
(Dear mother given you have started to chime in on here, maybe you could offer some insight into the constituents of an eggplant moju???)
Either way, I had some cashews left over from the Rice Exotica so I dropped them in for extra flavour and crunch. I’m definitely making this again….
I also ate it more as a side dish than as a main. It’s also pretty good cold on crackers or some tzatziki on pita bread.
Day 6 – Lovers Dandelion Salad
If you’ve read my earlier post…(here)…you know I have a bit of a penchant for a bit of foraging. So the Swami’s Lover’s Dandelion Salad was as good a reason as any to go comb the local environment for some dandelion leaves which, luckily, were plentiful.
I loved this salad. There is something about bitter greens that makes me feel incredibly virtuous and just oozy with health! Again, I had no fenugreek sprouts so I just used a sprout combo. I was becoming curious about why the Swami used fenugreek in so many dishes so I did a bit o’ research and hello…fenugreek is sometimes used to cure erectile dysfunction.
When the Swami wants you to eat for love, she doesn’t muck about!
She also says this salad is good for those suffering from mental or sexual debility. I ate mine for lunch a the office and it kind of worked. It certainly gave me a mental boost for the afternoon!
Day 7 – 21 Essences of Kama Sutra
I followed the Lovers Dandelion Salad with the 21 Essences of Kama Sutra Salad although I guess I only had 19 Essences as I subbed a yellow pepper for the red and green peppers and could not find soy sprouts for love or money. Then again, I used my handy sprout combo per the last recipe so maybe I had more than 21 Essences of Kama Sutra! The Swami offers no comment on what the 21 Essences of Kama Sutra is good for. I think she’s letting the name speak for itself.
This was also a very nice salad, although if I made this again, I wouldn’t bother with the Lotus Nuts. In the first pack I bought there were two dead moths. That made me gag and I had to throw them out. The second lot of lotus nuts was, thankfully, mothless but also largely tasteless.
I read on the internet Lotus Nuts are good for irritability. Well guess what? After the moths, and having to make two trips to the Asian food store to buy them, then finding they taste of sweet F.A. I guess they are. I was certainly a lot more irritable after all that palaver than I was before I started!
And quelle surprise, also apparently good for impotence!
Day 8
It’s Plum Wonderful
I ended my week with the Swami’s recipe for an uncooked Plum Pudding which is basically dried fruit held together with jello. It’s really tasty, and has all the flavours of a plum pudding but is fruitier and not so heavy. It would be a perfect alternative to a heavy pudding, particularly here when it is warm at Christmas.
I recently read that a good maxim to use when trying to moderate your alcohol intake is to abstain one day a week, one week a month, one month a year.
It doesn’t work for me alcoholwise as I am aiming for far more than one AFD a week but it’s certainly a philosophy I can embrace when it comes to adopting the principles behind Eating For Love and Beauty.
That book, which also had a whole host of other good advice was:
Apart from the moths and the failure of the Rice Exotica, Eating For Love and Beauty has been fun and I feel really healthy. It is winter here now and whilst people around me have been dropping like flies with all sorts of horrible lurgies, I have never felt haler or heartier!
I really want to go to the Swami’s retreat now….
I’m going spend my week trying to find a yoga class I can do at lunchtime so I can exercise for health and beauty as well as eat for it. Enjoy your week whatever you do!
I figured after the alcoholic debauchery of the last post, it was time for some restraint and a bit of detoxification. So, I spent the last week eating for Love and Beauty. Not exclusively mind you but at least one dish per day…and, it was pretty good. Actually, it was better than that – I felt great! I was full of energy, more alert, I was focussed, I steamed through tasks at work, I lost about a kilo in weight, my skin looked great, a cute boy held a door open and winked at me…seriously this shit worked! Imagine if I lived like this…I’d be invincible!
So, this is how the week went down.
Day 1 – Balinese Rice
I know this dish better as a Gado Gado and it is delicious. Mind you, peanut sauce is a bit like bacon…or cheese for me….you could drizzle it over a stick and I would not only eat it but ask for seconds…
I chose to keep my vegies and rice separate because I liked the way it looked on the plate, but you could choose to mix them as suggested by the Swami.
The colours in this are so pretty and fresh as well!
Day 2 – Vitality Bread I baked bread!
No wait…
I. BAKED. BREAD.
You have no idea how happy this made me. It looked like bread, it tasted like bread, the entire house was filled with the delicious aroma of freshly baked..happy days!
You also have no idea how my heart sank when Mark said “Wow, this bread is great, you can bake a loaf every week.” That won’t be happening anytime in the foreseeable, but I will bake more bread…I really want to do a walnut loaf. But not every week. Life’s too short and yeast is a temperamental little fucker.
In the interests of full disclosure, there were two failed attempts before the loaf of success.
Here is how not to go wrong baking bread.
When they say mix the yeast with warm water…don’t use boiling. Yeast doesn’t like heat.
When they say leave for one and a half hours, don’t think “Well overnight will be even better” and go off to bed. Particularly, in winter. Yeast also doesn’t like cold.
See what I mean? Yeast. It’s the Goldilocks of food.
Day 3 – Chive Relish Sauce
I’m not sure what the original recipe for this would be like…minus any pictures from Eating for Love and Beauty, I didn’t really have a guide. Mine turned out like an Egg Salad. It tasted great with the Vitality Bread so I’m not complaining but I suspect it might have been meant to be a bit more mayonnaise-ish.
Excuse the plastic wrap, I took this to work for lunch and took the picture at my desk whilst eating on the fly!
Day 4 – Lover’s Blush
It’s Rhubarb, fool!
So much for my (bad) Mr T. impersonation…this is super delicious!
Mind you, in my mind, rhubarb belongs in the Pantheon of Foods That Can Do No Wrong (Bacon, Cheese, Peanut Sauce…) so there was more than likely not going to be a downside with this recipe. I did substitute some Amaretti’s for the wheaten biscuits though and added some orange zest for extra zing!
This was just lovely – tangy, sweet, creamy…and (relatively) healthy. And just look at that gorgeous colour!
I’m going to be spending the week doing more eating for Love and Beauty, I have some salads, an eggplant dish and another (jello) dessert! on the menu. In my spare time I’ll be planning how to use my newly bestowed Eating for Love and Beauty super powers to take over the world, for good, not evil. Enjoy your week whatever you do!
I go through phases where I become utterly obsessed with a dish or an ingredient and have to buy it, cook it, eat it, ad nauseam. Earlier this year it was tahini – I ate more hummus than some of the smaller Middle Eastern countries during that particular phase! Prior to that, it was the Mary’s Gone Crackers Black Pepper Crackers – who knew that something so good for you could also taste so delish! Before that it was chipotle chillies….I quite obviously have an addictive personality.
You can relax mum. This is not when I confess to the crack/smack/cocaine/gambling addiction. Sleep safe. My newest and only…(well, as long as you don’t count things that are French and bubbly) addiction is my version of Mary Meredith’s Television Egg.
Why Television Eggs? Who knows. Mary doesn’t explain her reasoning. In my version she is bereft of ideas and just shouting out random bits of household furniture and food to see what sticks. “Dishwasher Cheese. Coffee-table bacon. Couch potato…that one’s good. Let’s go with that. What the fuck do you mean it’s been done? Ok….Ermmm…..Television Eggs.”
(Oh, and in my mind Mary Meredith has a very strong Scottish Brogue. I’m not going to go all Irvine Welsh on you…just saying that should be the accent in which she is read).
Whatever you call it. It’s a baked egg with asparagus and tomato. I love a baked egg. What I don’t enjoy is scrubbing baking dishes to rid them of the residue of a baked egg, so I have added my twist. Instead of serving it in a ramekin with toast soldiers as per MM’s suggestion, I’ve been baking them in a hollowed out bread roll.
I have now made three four versions of this and plan to make many more over the next few days. But lets start with the original:
I added some tarragon and a teeny drop of cream into mine, just because I had them in the fridge and neither was going to last much longer. Waste not want not right? But it points to one of the strengths of this recipe, you can pretty much do what you like with it!
You can, of course, cook your eggs longer for a harder yolk or less for a runnier one.
Whilst the original version was great, I then got the bug and started making television eggs out of everything we had on hand.
My variations thus far have been Rocket, Feta, Tomato and Smoked Paprika:
When I made the rocket and feta version, I also made a breakfast egg to have after my workout at the gym the next morning. This consisted of Ham, Swiss and Tomato:
A handy hint I discovered was that, if you cook your television eggs on a rack, the bottom of the bread doesn’t burn.
More Variations to Try
Smoked salmon, dill and cream cheese, (maybe with a splash of hollandaise).
Mushrooms, chives and goats cheese
Spinach and feta, spring onions
Leek and Gorgonzola (and yes, for those of you who know me, this is inspired by the best pizza ever!)
Baked Beans, cheddar cheese – another breakfast version
Chorizo, Potato and tomato – sauté this mixture first.
Creamed spinach
Sautéed potato cubes, green chilli, red onion and goats cheese
Hummus, Chipotle chillies and Mary’s Gone Crackers Black Pepper Cracker Crumbs Sprinkled on top
Ok, so that last one may be just for me but you get the drift. Cheap, cheerful, easy, healthy-ish and delicious! What more could you ask for?
Yes, ok, I want that too.
And I believe me, if I was in a position to give it to you, my dear and loyal readers….you’d have to step over my cold dead body to get it. That would be mine. All mine.
I’m sharing the eggs though…and they are pretty damn good.
I’m going to be spending my week working through versions of Television Eggs for my lunches. Oh, and look at the totally awesome retro lunch box I’m going to buy to put them in:
However you have your lunches, have a great week…and try these eggs!
PS – Late breaking news – newest post gym version – ham, cheese, avocado, chilli sauce. Put on very low heat before leaving home. By the time you get back (an hour?) this will be cooked to perfection!