If Christmas has an official fruit, to my mind it would have to be the cranberry. We smother our turkey in it, serve it up with some brie for an oh so yummy canapé and knock it back by the bucketful in Christmas inspired cocktails.
If retro cooking had an official dish, it would have to be the jellied salad.
And if these two met at a party and got a little tipsy on a few too many festive sherries and had their very own love child? It would look a little like this:
Cranberry Party Salad
And you know what? If there’s any rationale for hiding your love children in the attic? The Cranberry Party Salad from Salads For All Seasons could well be it.
I wasn’t the worst thing I made this year. Oh, no, that is a dead heat tie between the Paleo Muesli and the Paleo bread…
Sprouted Seed Bread
It wasn’t awful like these, it was just way too sweet for my taste to have as a savoury dish. It’s a problem I have in general with Cranberry sauce. Sometimes it feels as if someone snuck up whilst I wasn’t looking and smeared my turkey with jam. To me, the thing, the whole raison d’etre of the cran is the tang.
Cranberry Party Salad2
I was also a little disappointed that the fruit and nuts and…yep ok…spoilers ahead…celery…floated to the top which became the bottom once I turned it out. Then I looked at the picture in the book and it looks like her fruit is all chunked at the bottom too.
Original Cranberry Party Salad
Also, look at her terracotta water cooler in the background. And look at my Kris Kringle present this year…we do the one where you can steal gifts and believe me, there was nothing coming between me and this baby. Sadly, I stole it off one of the nicest people in the world. And she really wanted it because she had stolen it from one of the boys. Caitlin, if you read this, I’m sorrynotsorry.
Kris Kringle 2014
I am seriously a couple of oddly placed copper moulds away from having that retro kitchen!!! That woman also has weirdly large man hands like me too. And that blue salad? Will be made. I promise. I have to see how that particular combination of ingredients becomes blue…we will find out together in 2015. I may even wear a badly fitting blue dress and have my water cooler in the background for some happysnaps.
Cranberry Party Salad Crackers
Rosemary says this is to be served with light meats and poultry. But how? You have to remember that this type of dish is most definitely not in any kind of ancestral memory I have. Well, having said that, I did ask my mother WEEKS ago to give me the recipe for a salmon and jello type thing she used to make. Which, I have STILL not got. Someone’s game needs to be lifted….
Given the spread between chunky at the bottom and clear at the top, it seemed sensible to slice it. To my mind that just looked way too weird on the plate. In the end, I treated it like a cranberry sauce and ate it on crackers with ham and cheese.
Cranberry Party Salad and Cheese
Cranberry Party Salad and Ham
Huh…it doesn’t look too bad in the photos and, in all honesty, this wasn’t awful….just waaaaaayyyy to sweet for my taste. And I tarted it up by adding fresh cranberries into the mix….
Leave this one with me. I’m going to ponder it over the next 12 months and next year, I’m going to bring you the best cranberry party salad ever!!!
A few of the recipes in Salads For All Seasons have odd names that have little bearing on the contents. Take the Sportsman’s Saturday Salad I made a few weeks ago. This one however is exactly what it says on the box. With it’s gorgeous shades of green and red, it’s very festive. It’s duck. And it’s salad.
And it’s deeeelicious!!!
Festive Duck Salad2
I have a weird issue with duck. I love to eat it. Really love to eat it. But I find it very hard to cook correctly. I also have an issue in that we live very close to a lake. The ducks there are so tame; when they see you coming they come racing all the way across the lake because you might have food for them. Which we never do. Because we already have two walking, barking dustbins that are more than ready to consume any scraps. But seeing them and particularly the ever so cute ducklings in Spring does make me feel a bit guilty about eating them. Also I’m sure I heard somewhere that ducks mate for life and it always makes me sad that somewhere out there is a lonely duck who has lost the love of it’s life and will spend the rest of his or her life alone.
Ok, so now that I’ve put you off eating my yummy salad, let’s talk about something else for a while so we forget the lonely ducks.
Oscar also has a complicated relationship with the birds on the lake. The swans more than the ducks though. A swan at Williamstown beach had a go at Lulu when she was younger. She keeps her distance. He is just fascinated…. And now feels like a good time to tell you the Oscar story because it is our personal Christmas miracle.
December 2012, I was working at a place that I hated and was day by day destroying my will to live. Seriously. One of the few days of joy in those last 6 months was that, as a team, we worked with the RSPCA on Santa Paws. Santa Paws is a fabulous initiative where people bring in their pets for a photo with Santa that then gets printed onto Christmas cards, keyrings etc. It’s pretty cool. And not just dogs, people were bringing in goats and kittens and goldfish. It was awesome.
After our shift finished I asked if I could go have a look in the kennels. There was a very cute beagle but it was going to Beagle rescue the next day. In the next cage was a big lolloping gangly boy who came running over and as soon as I patted him fell over for a belly rub. And he was lovely and an incredibly weird combination of a Greyhound and a Staffordshire Bull Terrier.
Which seems like a combination that doesn’t work however you play it.
But there he was.
Oscar Sleeping
And then I read the sign on his cage. It said something like “I have been here for nearly 100 days and lots of people have looked at me; then they leave with their new puppy. I just want a home with a family who loves me as much as I will love them.”
OMG, it makes me cry even now.
The poor little fucker was two years old and it was his third time at the RSPCA. He had been born there; the last owners had brought him back because they could no longer afford to feed him. We also strongly suspect he has been massively ill-treated because even now, he will cringe at any loud noise, like a door slamming for the wind, he is pretty much scared of his own shadow.
So I went home and Mark was “So how was it, did you have a great time?”
And I started to tell him. And I got as far as “There was a dog and he had a sign…” and then I cried. For hours. And when he could finally get the story out of me, he cried. And then he sighed and said “So, when do we go get him?” Bear in mind at this time, we were living in a one bedroom apartment, and we already had one dog. A second dog was also going to be a stretch and a real life changer, and not in a good way, for us. But we reasoned, it would only be a couple of months until we moved into the house we were building so we all had a bit more room to breathe. That couple of months turned out to be nearly a year….
But who could resist that face?
The next morning we took Lulu and we went to get him. Our get-out card was that if Lulu hated him he couldn’t come. She is so bossy that we couldn’t have another dog that challenged her authority and fought with her all the time.
So we drove for an hour in a huge rainstorm where you couldn’t even see ten metres in front of the car and I was really scared driving in such bad weather but I did it because I was so happy that we could take him home. When we got there he came running up but then he turned away. He was really disinterested in us – as if he was sick of investing in people who weren’t going to take him.
Mark liked him and Lulu didn’t kill him. So it was pretty much a done deal that we were taking him.
Until they told us that we couldn’t.
Lulu and Oscar Front Door
Their dog psychologist had deemed he was food possessive and could not be in a house with another dog.
We argued and argued the point. We said Lulu is such a dominant dog she would NEVER let anyone come between her and her food but they stood firm. We could not take him.
I cried all the way home.
Oscar Lulu 2
About four days later, I got a call from the RSPCA. “Are you the girl who wanted to buy Thor?” Oh, yeh, his former name was Thor….we didn’t want a dog called Thor so we renamed him. Anyway, yes that was me. “Well the psychologist has reevaluated him. He’s all yours.”
Two years on, I can’t imagine life without him. He is the sweetest, most gentle, most affectionate boy in the world. With an increasing cheekiness as his confidence grows. He knows this is his home and I hope he knows we will never abandon him. I am confident we have given him the best life he has ever had. We love him to death and, yes, the sign was true, he absolutely loves us in return.
If you’re wondering why so many of the photos show Osky sleeping or in some type of bed, it’s because greyhounds are surprisingly, incredibly lazy. He and Lulu get walked for about an hour every day and we are lucky enough to have an off leash park close by where, ideally, he can run with another dog. Ten minutes of flat out running during the walk and that’s him done for the day. He’ll snooze for most of the rest of the day, waking up only to eat. And there’s always time for a cuddle…
And then, it’s time for a bit more snoozing….
Oscar in his PJ’s
We might be good to get back to the salad now. The original recipe is here if you want it. I wasn’t taken by the idea of orange and egg so I omitted the egg and added some cranberries to my version. Also, I used homemade mayo, also from Salads from All Seasons but you can use store bought if you wish. Having said that, this one is super easy and tasty!
I cooked my duck according to the Gordon Ramsay recipe here and it worked pretty well. It was certainly the most successful I have been with duck.
Festive Duck Salad
You could also make this with some leftover turkey post-Christmas. It will lack some of the richness of the duck but will still be pretty good!
I”m going to try to get one more post in before the big day but just in case life gets in the way, Merry Christmas to you all from me and a special Christmas Angel.
I solemnly promise that will be my only egg pun for this whole post.
But really, what is Easter about if it’s not about eggs?
What?
Well, yeah, ok sure it’s about Jesus….but eggs are important too.
This year I made my own chocolate eggs.
Home Made Easter Eggs
And ok, so Adriano Zumbo is not shaking in his shoes just yet but I get some points for trying right? Can’t this be like Little League and I get a medal just for turning up?
For those of you who don’t know Adriano Zumbo, he is a mad-scientist genius baker (kind of like an Australian Heston Blumenthal but with more macaroons and fewer snails). He makes things like this gorgeous V8 cake.
Think it looks simple?
Think again.
Because when you cut this baby open you get this:
Yeah…uh huh and OMG wow!!!
Maybe I’ll try to make that next Easter never.
For anyone brave enough to try, you can get the recipe by clicking the link below:
However, ’nuff about Zumbo, back to my eggs. They weren’t just any plain old chocolate eggs. Uh uh. No way.
They also had a peanut butter fudge filling:
And in true retro style the peanut butter fudge mix has a secret ingredient.
Mashed potato.
Yes, I did just say mashed potato.
And it works surprisingly well. You can’t taste it but it gives the peanut butter a firmer texture. Actually the texture is very similar to that of my one of my all time favourite decadent little treats – a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. And when I say “a” Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, I of course mean a four twin pack.
I even had to check that there wasn’t mashed potato in a Reese’s PBC. There isn’t but there are two things that don’t actually have names, just initials. And you have to love a list that contains non-fat milk and milk fat right next to each other. So, that would be milk right?
You can check the full list out here.
I’m not going to come over all Michael Pollan about this (guess who finally finished reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma?) but you know what? I’m really not sure about eating the stuff that is just initials. However, whilst we’re on the subject of Mr Pollan, here is what he has to say about TBHQ, one of the ingredients in my possibly formerly beloved peanut butter cups:
But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to “help preserve freshness.” According to A Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause “nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse.” Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill.
Hmm…compared to lighter fluid, the mashed potato suddenly seems a bit more attractive does it not? And yes ok, you would probably have to eat your own weight in them to get that gram of TBHQ but it was enough to make me walk away from the rack of peanut butter cups today. Damn you Pollan.
Melt 2/3 of the chocolate in a bowl over hot water and coat the moulds with the melted chocolate. You may need to do this more than once to get the desired thickness of chocolate shell.
Place the chopped potato into a saucepan and cover with water. Boil until tender.
Drain and mash.
Add your condensed milk, just as you would add regular milk to normal mashed potatoes.
Allow this mixture to cool.
Mix in your peanut butter and confectioner’s sugar. It should form a fairly thick paste.
Add more condensed milk or confectioner’s sugar if required.
Spoon this mixture into the chocolate lined moulds.
Melt the remaining 1/3 of the chocolate. Use this to seal the mixture into the moulds.
Chill until the chocolate hardens then press your eggs out of the moulds.
Notes
You will also need Easter Egg Moulds. I bought mine from a craft shop for around $4.
Ox Eye Eggs
In my last post I assumed that everyone would know what Egg in a Hole was. I then further confused the issue by using the name we call these things in my family which is an Ox-Eye egg.
I actually managed to trace back the source of why we call it that. It comes from this book which I inherited from my…hmmm…I’m not sure of our exact relationship…maybe my second cousin? A great cousin? My nana’s sister’s daughter.
My Learn To Cook Book
This was possibly my first cook book and the ox-eye eggs have become a family favourite. I will return to this book in due course because the illustrations are awesome but here is the recipe for the original ox-eye eggs:
I prefer to do mine in a frying pan than in the oven as I think it gives you a little more control over your preferred degree of yolk runniness but the choice is yours!
And look at this for an amazing breakfast – seriously, if I’d thrown some cheese on this plate all my five favourite food groups would have been covered – eggs, bacon, avocado, and bread!
Ox Eye Eggs, Bacon and Loaded Guacamole
Loading up that toasted circle with a piece of bacon, some guac and some semi-runny yolk? Probably about as close to heaven as I’m going to get!!!
The Perfect Bite!
And that’s Easter 2014 done!
Next time, a double whammy, a retro treat from Salads from All Seasons and a Daring Kitchen Challenge. I’m 3 months behind on my Daring Kitchen stuff and I’m really nervous about all of them – for very different reasons – again which we will get to in due course.
February’s challenge was Salad Dressing – and if you’re thinking that should be fairly impossible to fuck up, well, you haven’t seen the recipe I’m planning on using.
Hint – it too has a secret ingredient, which incidentally has been mentioned in this post. And it’s not mashed potato. If only.
I’m loving my extended Easter break. Hope your week is fabulous whatever you are doing!
The Pita Bread Christmas Trees mentioned in the article are adorable. And, will be featuring in my Christmas menus.
The article mentioned Susan’s Party Loaf which is this gorgeous looking thing
However, if you are going down that route you could also try this very pretty version from Betty Crocker. You really know you’re taking a ride on the way-back machine when you have a completely gratuitous use of food colouring!
Betty Crocker Party Loaf
And the Madras Cocktail ? Take a look at this piece of awesomeness…
Madras Cocktail
Don’t drink them all they say? Who are they kidding? The recipe which is here
put me in mind of the old Dorothy Parker quote:
“I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I’m under the table,
after four I’m under the host.”
This thing might not just knock your socks off, it could take your ankles with it.
I can’t wait to try it!
So what retro treats are you all planning for Christmas?
