Elizabeth September 1st, 2011

The first time I heard of Daniella Germain it was through her blog and now I’m broke.  This blog began after she spent her last $300 on a pair of boots, and decided to use her skills in illustration to motivate herself to watch her pennies.  Over the course of the project she illustrated every little purchase – big and small – and shared them on her blog.  Lucky us!

Daniella was a student of graphic design at RMIT when she embarked on a project to document her family’s collection of recipes.  Her abuela (grandmother) had kept a collection of recipes in a manila folder for 30 years, and these were passed on from generation to generation.

My Abuela’s Table is a cookbook of more than 100 authentic mexican recipes, but it is also an incredibly inspiring book of illustration.  Daniella made a decision to not photograph her recipes and instead drew them in incredible detail.  I honestly don’t know whether it was the foodie or art nerd in me that ripped this book off its shelf when I saw it this afternoon!

There is a certain Americano living in this house who adores Mexican food, and every now and then he complains that it’s hard to find good authentic Mexican cuisine on this side of the Pacific.  When I showed him this book tonight his eyes lit up, and then he informed me that there’s about to be a whole lot of chillis in my life for the next little while!

My Abuela’s Table is published here in Melbourne by Hardie Grant, and you can buy it a lots of Aussie book stores including Readings (RRP $35).  If you’re outside of Australia you can also find it at Amazon, but don’t forget that measurements are metric and our Australian cup is slightly different to the US cup!  Don’t let that put you off – quantities are easy to convert and all my favourite recipe books are full of little pencil notes anyway.  And besides, it’s not as though you’ll find a soufflé in need of such precision!

This lovely book is worth owning even if you’re not a foodie.  I love the story behind the creation of this book, and the lovely illustrations would be right at home on my kitchen walls.

I kind of want to buy a copy for everybody I know!

Oh, and the best part?  Next month Daniella will hand-deliver a copy of her book to her beloved abuela.  What a precious gift!

• Art , Food
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Elizabeth November 10th, 2010

At the rate we’re going, chocolate is going to be a rare—and extremely pricey—commodity within the next twenty years. Somebody needs to light a fire under those Oompa-Loompas, stat.

The problem’s easy to explain, and much harder to fix. According to the Cocoa Research Association, we’re consuming more chocolate than we’re producing cocoa. Which means, eventually, we’re going to run out.

Cocoa’s notoriously difficult to harvest, meaning more and more small-scale West African growers—who make an average of 80 cents per day—have little incentive not to turn to more lucrative crops, like rubber, or give up farming altogether in favor of more stable opportunities in cities.

What will the shortage mean? $11 Snickers bars, sooner than you think. Pretzels given out for Halloween. Or more candy made from carob, a poor substitute for the sweet and sticky real deal. And a tectonic shift in how we view our mochas, according the Nature Conservation Research Council’s John Mason:

“In 20 years chocolate will be like caviar. It will become so rare and so expensive that the average Joe just won’t be able to afford it.”

But don’t lose hope! Both Hershey and Mars, Inc. have sequenced the cacao genome, meaning more resilient trees could be in our future. And 20 years seems like enough time to figure out how to incentivize farmers appropriately.

Read the original post at Gizmodo, who found it at The Independent, who fou… oh, I can’t keep this up when there’s a chocolate shortage happening out there!

It’s time to panic, everybody.

• Current Affairs , Food
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Elizabeth November 9th, 2010

This post is dedicated to Laura.

Because…

Cupcakes on cupcakes. Made with the help of mini peanut butter cups, and a whole stack of awesome.

This is the genius creation of Confessions of a Cookbook Queen. Granted, the wheel was a pretty great invention but I think this wins, right?

Right.

• Cool stuff , Food
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Elizabeth November 2nd, 2010

Halloween isn’t something that most Aussie kids care about, but I’ve noticed its popularity is starting to grow (at least in the merchandise department). This year Tim and I thought it would be fun to put together a little Halloween party for our friends, and coming up with ideas was lots of fun!

First of all, we had to tell them what was in store. I made these invitations out of glitter card and foil wrapping paper, and included a severed finger in each envelope…

Gross, right? Even worse was the text on the back, which promised delicacies such as “cultured mould” (cheese), “cured epidermis” (prosciutto) and “a boutique brew of swamp water” (lemonade with tapioca pearls, a gummy killer python and a glow stick)

Tim and I gradually spooked up our house throughout the week leading up to Halloween, and hid fake spiders in all sorts of places. Who wants to bet that I find a forgotten spider in an unexpected place two weeks from now, and end up screaming like a girl?

Yup.

But the best part of all was putting together the menu! We managed to come up with some pretty disgusting stuff, although I had a last-minute failure with my egg eyeballs when I realised that they’d been frozen at the back of my fridge.

Here are some of the gross stuff we enjoyed:

“Witches Fingers” (mozzarella sticks, with dyed shaved almonds for fingernails)

“Blood Worms” – made from gelatin & cream, and set inside bendy straws. These were awesome! Here’s the recipe.

We had jars full of baby teeth, earthworms, brown snakes, frog eyes and artificial eyes.

The “Cultured Mould” and “Cured Epidermis” attracted some fake flies!

Everybody who came was awesome and brought something, but I didn’t think to take photos of their excellent offerings. One person brought cupcakes with M&M spiders on top, another made a spooky pool of green jelly and snakes, and someone else brought brain poppers (pop rocks)! We all had diabetes by the end of the night.

Lastly, here are my owl and witch cupcakes (decorated with oreo cookies and chocolate dipped sherbert cones)

I highly recommend “Drag Me to Hell” for a scary (but silly) movie for a crowd. It gave me dumb nightmares, but it was worth it!

• Food , Life
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Elizabeth August 28th, 2010

One of my 101 Things in 1001 Days tasks was to resurrect my old recipe blog. It began (and ended) in 2007, and it’s always bothered me that I abandoned it.

I should make one thing clear: I don’t have any aspirations of becoming a food blogger! I’m not that talented, nor do I have the required dedication. And besides, I prefer to eat when my food is hot rather than run to perfect lighting to compose a photo!

The idea behind my food blog is really simple – I just want to collect all of my favourite recipes in one place. Over time I hope to have a strong collection of food that I adore, and it’s an added bonus that I can share it with others at the same time. I have temporarily named it “cracked pepper” until I am blessed with an idea that’s more creative.

Updates will sometimes be infrequent, so throw it in your RSS reader and forget about it. Be assured that when I do blog over there it will be because it’s worth it!

I’m ticking three things off my 101 List this weekend – the clock is ticking!

ETA: Did anyone notice the part where I forgot to link to my awesome new recipe blog? Geez.

• 101 in 1001 , Food , Website news
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Elizabeth January 10th, 2010

Here we go: a blog post in which I go right ahead and BLOW YOUR MIND.

I suppose I shouldn’t take all the credit for this recipe, considering that I stole it straight from the pages of Married/Single Parent.  You’d better go say hi to Michelle and thank her for the inspiration.

But first…

PEANUT BUTTER CUP COOKIES

INGREDIENTS
(including rough Australian conversions)

- 1.5 cups plain flour
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 125g butter, softened
- 1/2 cup caster sugar
- 1/2 cup peanut butter
- 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
- 1 egg, beaten
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 2 Tablespoons milk
- 40 miniature chocolate covered peanut butter cups

HERE’S WHAT TO DO:

STEP 1: Preheat the oven to 190 degrees Celcius, and unwrap all those little miniature peanut butter cups.  The recipe calls for 40, but you’re going to need an extra 5 or so to allow for “accidents”.  KnowwhatImean?  And never fear – Aussies can buy these online in packs of about 120 at USA Foods (or from their storefront in Melbourne).

STEP 2: Cream the butter, sugar (both types) and peanut butter in a large mixing bowl. Add the beaten egg, vanilla extract and milk and mix well.

STEP 3: In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking soda and salt.  Throw it into the sugar/butter bowl and mix it all together.

STEP 4: Consider, briefly, a world in which peanut butter does not exist.  Give George Washington Carver a mental high-five, and line a tray with baking paper.

Form the dough into 40 round balls, and bake for 8 minutes (I did this in a couple of batches, but feel free to show off and cook all 40 at once).

STEP 5: Remind your dog that chocolate is a toxic substance, and that it is your duty as his owner to expose yourself to this poison on his behalf.  Give him a pat, and silently congratulate yourself for booking him into the dog groomer tomorrow.  He’s starting to look like he might be homeless.

STEP 6: Remove the tray from the oven, and immediately push a peanut butter cup into the centre of each cookie.  Allow cookies to cool completely before transferring them to a wire rack.  Don’t freak out, they’re supposed to be that soft.

STEP 7:

These cookies take a long time to cool, and disaster will strike if you try to shift them too early.  While you’re waiting, why not familiarise yourself with Diabetes Australia or find a dentist in your local area?

• Food
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Elizabeth November 29th, 2009

Last night’s belated, antipodean Thanksgiving was heaps of fun. I was too busy enjoying the company and incredible food to take any other photos, so tonight I am forced to relive the memories in the form of leftover pumpkin and apple pie.

It’s a tough job, but I’m just trying to get through it without complaining. I hope nobody minds if I blog with a full mouth.

Tim took complete ownership of the food for yesterday’s event, cooking a red currant glazed turkey in the BBQ (sooooo good) and a bunch of “family recipe” side dishes that his mum sent him during the week. A trip to USA Foods last weekend sorted out some last minute ingredients, including fried onions for the green bean casserole and Reeces peanut butter chips for his amazing chocolate cookies. Our talented guests provided the pumpkin and apple pies, and the wine floooowed!

The SingStar fairy visited a couple of hours after dinner, and didn’t leave again until about 3am. I woke this morning to the smell of bacon & eggs, and the last of our guests headed home at about 1pm today!

Post-Thanksgiving depression set in at approximately 1.04pm, so I began pestering Tim to help me put up the Christmas tree. We agreed to give it a couple more days to get the turkey coma wear off before kicking off Christmas, so instead of my tree I thought I’d show you Naomi and Josh’s tree from last year!

(If you’re not already following the adventures of Naomi and Josh via their blog, you really should. It’s basically the happiest place on the Internet.)

Maybe Tim would have been more excited if I’d suggested a more contemporary tree this year?

Panty Tree by VSPink.com – thank you for the link, Dooce!

• Family , Food , Friends , Life
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Elizabeth November 28th, 2009

So…

Since you guys were no help at all with my Aussie Thanksgiving table, I was forced to take matters into my own hands!

With the help of some orange napkins, raffia, candles and flowers I have put together a table that uses all the colours of Thanksgiving, all without using actual pumpkins. I added some purple to the mix because, let’s face it… there really is a thing as too much orange.

The turkey is in the oven BBQ, the house is full of amazing smells, and the guests will be here soon. Now might be a good time to stop blogging and get myself pretty!

• Australia , Food , Life
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Elizabeth November 27th, 2009

By Gun Show Comic

My Americano and I are celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow night with a bunch of friends. I’ve never done Thanksgiving before (if you can’t figure out why, you might need a history refresher) and I’ve been learning a lot about the traditions of this holiday over the past couple of weeks.

Tim has taken total control of the cooking, which began last night with an incredible batch of peanut butter & chocolate cookies. Tomorrow night we’ll be eating red currant glazed turkey, green bean casserole, honey glazed carrots and garlic mashed potatoes. Our guests are providing pumpkin and apple pies.

So with all of that under control, I guess my job is to make the table look beautiful! I’ve spent some time googling pictures of Thanksgiving tables, but confess that I find most of them sort of ugly. And besides, most of the produce that features in traditional centrepieces is completely out of season in Australia.

Please share your amazing Thanksgiving table with me in the comments, or point me in the direction of your inspiration! I feel like such a rookie.

• Australia , Family , Food
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Elizabeth November 25th, 2009

Sometimes, for no reason at all, I scour the web for pretty cupcakes. It’s almost as good as eating them, or so I try to tell myself!

If you have a similar problem with interest in cupcakes, you might enjoy some of these lovely things from Cupcake Social:

Assorted Pretty Pastel Tulip Cupcake Liners (45)

These beautiful Tulip shaped baking cups are sure to bring a smile to anyones face who is about to peel it off a yummy cuppycake. They come in these nice pale shades of yellow, orange and green. You will get 45 liners to create some festive cupcakes, or muffins. 15 of each color.

Gro Designer Cupcake Liners (20)

These baking cups are produced from the highest quality
of Swedish greaseproof paper.

The paper is 100 % cellulose and biodegradable. These baking cups are for the household baker or pastry professionals who recognize the value of having quality paper baking products in their kitchens.

Edible Hearts For your Cupcakes (35)

These are molded sugar hearts that are 1/2 inch in size. You will get 35 in an assortment of 7 different colors.

JUMBO Hillary Paisley Designer Cupcake Liners (20)

JUMBO SIZE!

Finally here- you can get them too- you will get 20 liners that come packaged in a cute box with a bow, great for gift giving.

Aren’t these liners incredible?  Cupcake Social stocks a huge range of pretty cupcake liners (in mini, standard and jumbo sizes), lots of edible and plastic toppers, candles and cookie cutters.

And most importantly, they’ll ship to Australia!

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Elizabeth June 21st, 2009

• Polyvore is my new favourite way to waste time. You can use their editor to pull together images and create a ‘style board’ of stuff you love. It’s strangely addictive, and I imagine it would be awesome inspiration for a special event like a wedding.

Polyvore is a free, easy-to-use web-based application for mixing and matching images from anywhere on the web. It is also a vibrant community of creative and stylish people.

Polyvore lets you create sets composed of individual images using an easy to use, drag and drop editor. After you have created a set, you can publish and share it with your friends and the Polyvore community.

• Danny Katz explains how Masterchef is ruining peoples’ lives

See what you’ve done to me, Masterchef? I’m watching your show every night of the week and now all I think about is food preparation and food design and food names. I’ve been walking around the house mumbling “tarte tatin” over and over again since Episode 13. I haven’t been so obsessed with a food name since Geoff Jansz whipped out a cock-a-leekie on What’s Cooking. And stuff you, Masterchef, for making me flabby: all the weight I lost earlier this year watching The Biggest Loser in the same time slot I’ve put back on again chewing blocks of butter washed down with a pail of olive oil because that’s all anyone cooks with on this show. In Episode 11, George poured olive oil into a chocolate mousse then topped it with pouring cream.

• In other food related news, here are five things you didn’t know you could eat (or four, in my case!)
• An important new initiative has just kicked off, as many Australians will already know. Operation Kerplonk is targeting households with crap wine, and aims to replace them with a bottle of Fifth Leg. On 7/7/09, Australians will be required to dump their crap wine at designated drop zones. There are also rewards for dobbing in offenders.
  
  You can read more about Operation Kerplonk at their website, including a very informative video and details of dropzones in your area. Penalties apply for missing the date!




• Art , Cool stuff , External Sites , Food
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Elizabeth June 20th, 2009

Boston taught me several things during my 3-month stay in New England: Baseball is a religion (and Fenway Park is holy ground); walking across the Charles River in early January will leave you so cold that you lose all sensation in your legs; and…

… one of the best ways to warm up again is with New England Clam Chowder.

Photo from Portland Mercury

A few months ago Tim and I discovered the tinned Campbells variety in the imported food section at David Jones. It was a surprise discovery, after searching high and low for it throughout the city. However, at $7 per can we were only dedicated enough to buy two, and we savoured every last drop.

It was good, but it wasn’t exactly the same as the stuff we ate in Boston.

I pledged to make it from scratch one day, but problems arose when I went searching for a recipe. There are so many varieties of this chowder – even within New England itself – and no two recipes were ever the same! After reading pages of debate on the topic of fresh vs tinned clams, I think I lost heart and forgot about the whole thing.

Until a couple of days ago, when I discovered tinned baby clams and threw them in my shopping trolley. It was time to just pick a recipe and run with it – and this is the one we made tonight!

Warning: Your arteries will hate you for even reading this.

INGREDIENTS
Serves 4 people as a main course

3 x rashers middle bacon
2 x 200g tins of baby clams (drained, juice reserved)
1 x finely chopped onion
1 x large stalk celery, diced
4 x medium potatoes, cubed
2 x medium carrots, diced
3 x bay leaves
130g butter
70g plain flour
2 x 300mL cartons of single cream (or light cream)
150mL milk
1 Tbsp red wine vinegar
Salt and pepper to taste
Fresh parsley, chopped

METHOD

• Fry the bacon until cooked. Remove the bacon from the pan to drain, and add the potatoes, onion, celery and carrot to the remaining bacon fat. Cook for a minute to soften.
• Add the reserved clam juice, and extra water until the vegetables are just covered. Add bay leaves, and simmer gently until the potatoes are tender.
• While the vegetables simmer, melt the butter in a large saucepan. Whisk in the flour to create a smooth mixture, and then add the cream and milk. Combine until smooth, being careful to not bring the mixture to the boil.
• When tender, pour the vegetables and clam juice into the cream. Gently combine ingredients, and remove the bay leaves. Add salt, and generous amounts of cracked pepper.
• Add clams, sliced bacon and red wine vinegar, and continue to stir over a gentle heat until the clams are cooked through. Be careful not to overcook, as the clams will become tough.
• Serve, and garnish with fresh parsley and extra pepper.

Were you thrown by the red wine vinegar? I know I was. The recipe that I followed (and modified) promised incredible things from this ingredient, but I really wasn’t convinced until I tried it myself. I thought that the chowder was very bland and uninteresting until the addition of that last ingredient, and somehow it managed to tie everything together and give it all a butt-kicking. Don’t be put off by this strange addition!

Luckily for me, I have ready access to the critique of a true New Englander who really loved it. I’m so happy to have found this recipe, and to have crossed another country off my recipe challenge!

• 101 in 1001 , Food , Recipes
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Elizabeth April 14th, 2009

Part of my 101 Things in 1001 Days challenge.

There isn’t much to say about this task, other than to say that it’s done! I’m very glad that this is out of the way. I actually found myself standing in the cafe queue at lunch time, trying to determine which meal would be easiest to draw!

I think I deserve extra credit for going to a birthday party in the middle, where the food was served in a variety of bite-sized pieces.

• 101 in 1001 , Food
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Elizabeth March 6th, 2009

STOP PRESS: I made this again tonight, adding a mashed up overripe banana and substituting walnuts for the hazelnuts. BEST CAKE EVER! This time I cooked it in a dessert bowl because of the extra volume, and gave it an extra 30 seconds in the microwave. Try it!

It’s been a really long time since I’ve posted anything here, so I thought I’d come back with a gift for my readers!

The 5-minute “cake in a mug” isn’t new, as a google search will quickly prove. I’ve noticed that the recipes out there vary a lot (and so does reader feedback!) so I thought I’d experiment a little myself. This is my own little contribution to the obesity epidemic – the Chocolate & Hazelnut Cake in a Mug.

WHAT YOU WILL NEED:

4 Tablespoons of Self Raising flour
4 Tablespoons of sugar
2 Tablespoons of cocoa
1 egg
3 Tablespoons of milk
3 Tablespoons of vegetable oil

1 mug
1 Tablespoon

I added a small handful of hazelnuts and cooking chocolate, which added a much-needed dose of class to the recipe! I only used about half of the quantity in the picture.

Throw in whatever chocolate you have handy, as it can be a bit dry otherwise.

STEP ONE:

Combine the flour and sugar, and add the egg.

STEP TWO:

Add the cocoa, and mix all the ingredients well with a spoon.

STEP THREE:

Add the oil and milk, mix well.

STEP FOUR:

Add a small handful of chopped hazelnuts and chocolate.

STEP FIVE:

Mix it through, and it should look a little like this.

STEP SIX:

(Here’s somebody else’s mug-of-cake. Mute your speakers if you don’t enjoy the screams of an excited small child.)

Cook the mixture in your microwave for 3 minutes, on high. A perfect cake will rise well above the top of the mug without falling apart, but don’t worry too much if some spills over the side during cooking. This is a tasty cake, not a beautiful one!

Otherwise, do this part in a bowl. Crybaby.

STEP SEVEN:

Here it is! Allow it to rest a little before transferring it to a plate. The cake looks best if you slice it in half down the middle. And besides, it serves at least two people – don’t be a pig!

STEP EIGHT:

Be a total show-off, and serve the cake with icecream and berries. And if you add Haighs Raspberry Sauce you will not only quadruple the cost of each serving, but you will possibly see God.

STEP NINE:

Eat it, quick, before the icecream melts! This cake is absolutely designed to be eaten warm.

Anyway, by now you’ll know that it smells too good to put aside for later.

STEP TEN:

Seek the support of a trusted friend or family member, and promise them that you will not make this cake every day for the next week. For the sake of your arteries it is very important that you be accountable to another person.

Preferably a boring, skinny person.

That’s it! Sadly, cake of any other type will be completely uninteresting to you from this point on.

Next time I want to try a banana & walnut version – just to see if it works. Try this out and tell me how yours was!

• Cool stuff , Food
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Elizabeth February 19th, 2009

I recently came across an incredible new diet, and can’t stop telling people about it. It really has changed my life, so I wanted to share it with my readers.

This is a specially formulated diet for women to help deal with the stress that builds throughout the day.

You will notice instant results!

BREAKFAST
1 Grapefruit
1 slice wholemeal toast
1 cup skimmed milk

LUNCH
1 small portion lean, steamed chicken with a cup of spinach
1 cup herbal tea
1 biscuit

AFTERNOON TEA
The rest of the biscuits from the packet
1 tub of Gino Ginelli ice cream with chocolate topping

DINNER
4 bottles of wine (red or white)
2 loaves garlic bread
1 family size Supreme pizza
3 chocolate bars

LATE NIGHT SNACK
1 whole cheesecake (eaten directly from the freezer)

Don’t forget, “stressed” spelled backwards is “desserts”. Coincidence? Not likely.

• Food , Funny Stuff , Health & Fitness
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