Planting our garlic

Today, on the last day of April, we visited our patch and finally planted in our garlic! We thought it was best to do this earlier in April but didn't have time until now. However, the 'garlic guru' in our community garden (Tony) said that he always plants them in May and gets great results. So maybe we weren't too late after all. Everyone has different advice to offer and sometimes the information is so different that I have to decide who to listen to and just ignore the rest. That's one thing I've learnt from being part of this gardening community!

garlic goes into holes that are 5cm deep

'Rustic' French toast for lunch

My wife and I wanted to eat the 'rustic loaf' that we bought at Knead Patisserie for yesterday's soup while it was still fresh, so we decided to do something special for lunch today: make french toast! I think it was the first time I've made french toast for lunch, but it was quite the experience. Really made it feel like I was on holiday.

To me, french toast means soft white bread soaked in loads of egg mixture. In Hong Kong, it's common to even have it with peanut butter and butter. I wasn't a big fan of that sort of french toast, although I liked it with condensed milk, which is just as unhealthy(!)

But nowadays, since I started cooking my own food, I've started to enjoy and really appreciate herbs and spices in my food, even if it isn't quite obvious what the herb is. So I often add cinnamon (or nutmeg) to my french toast.

the final product; all it needs is some maple syrup or honey!

I'll admit I didn't actually do much here, my wife found a simple recipe and put together the ingredients (spices included). I was in charge of whisking the eggs and cooking it.

We used:
4 eggs
1/4 tsp vanilla bean paste
1/2 tsp cinnamon
2 tbsp milk (Devondale long-life milk, as we rarely drink milk)
8 slices of bread
(Toppings)
Butter
Honey
Vanilla sugar

batter for french toast

As with pancakes, controlling the temperature is quite important and can determine the fate of your final cooked product. Things get especially tricky when you're using an electric element to cook, which not only one of the least energy-efficient means of cooking but also can be quite inconvenient in terms of temperature control. The main problem is that it takes forever to heat up and cool down your cooking pan or pot. I usually compensate turning it up really high and then lowering it and waiting for it to stabilise in temperature before I start the actual cooking. I can't wait to start using a gas or IH cooktop, which is much more cooking-friendly!

cooking french toast properly has
much to do with timing and heat

The chewy texture of the rustic loaf means that it doesn't soak up the egg mixture, especially when given only 20 seconds. (It was getting late and I really want to have my lunch ASAP!) So after cooking the first batch and finding it a bit on the dry side, I tried cooking it a bit differently in this way:

1. Soak the non-soaking bread in the mixture as per usual, and pierce it a little bit to get more egg to cover the egg on the inside.
2. Cook it on one side for a short period, making sure it doesn't brown too quickly.
3. Flip it over, and pour more egg batter on the top. A little spillage is okay, but try to keep most of the egg to remain on the surface.
4. Again before the bottom side gets overcooked, flip the toast over, and add more egg mixture on the top side, as per previous step.
5. The more times you keep pouring a bit of egg, the softer your toast will become :)

I ended up doing pouring the batter four times (that's all I had left). This resulted in a much softer french toast and my wife liked it better! That's all that matters.

I would love to hear from readers about their french toast experiences! In particular, I'm interested to know when and why you make french toast (is it to use left-over bread, or is it your favourite weekend breakfast? or dinner?!), and any special recipes you might have.

Celebrating thesis submission with pumpkin soup

Today, I submitted my PhD thesis, after more than five years of intellectual labour. To celebrate, I made a 'garden soup' with my wife.

The main ingredients were:

• 15 tomatoes (beefsteak, russian black, and green zebra)
• one large 2.3kg Walthum butternut pumpkin (called Star Trek)
• 3 onions, 8 garlic cloves, and 2 carrots (roasted)
• home-made chicken stock diluted in half (about 2 litres after dilution)
• 1/8 cabbage chopped
• sugar (as our pumpkin was not very sweet)
• fresh thyme 
• happiness
• time

Of these, the tomatoes and pumpkin were grown in our plot. :)

The recipe was based on Pam's recipe (from 'For the Love of Cooking' blog). But we made a few variations, including substituting kale with cabbage because our kale plants aren't ready for eating yet.

Peeling Star Trek, our biggest pumpkin so far

The first step was to peel the pumpkin. 'Star Trek', as you can see, had a bit of a surface scaring, which is why we brought him home before the others. As we suspected, the inside was perfectly fine. We wanted to put the pumpkin in the oven as soon as early as possible because it needed the most time.

For our chicken stock base, we used a stock we made earlier with boned chicken pieces and some ginseng. (Basically, it was just 10 lovely legs, which are skinless drumsticks with the long bone chopped off, cooked on low heat for 2 hours with a tablespoon of American ginseng flakes.)

Once peeled, I removed all the seeds and chopped it into small pieces. Because there was so much pumpkin in relation to the rest of the vegetables, we decided to also blend some of the pumpkin to give the soup a pumpkin-soup texture.

our tomatoes, and bought carrots and onions, before baking

I then cut up our tomatoes. I have had them sitting on the dining table for about 4 weeks!! It's amazing that most of them lasted so long. Before I knew better, I used to store my supermarket tomatoes in the fridge to keep them longer. I only realised this was wrong after reading websites and talking to farmers at my local farmers market. Those that got damaged were mainly due to worms that had attacked during the rain. But most of them were fine and unaffected, although they were soft (i.e., really ripe!). Meanwhile, my wife cut up the onion and carrot pieces.

This is how they looked after baking them, as well as pumpkins, at around 190°C.

our tomatoes, and bought carrots and onions, after baking

We then popped the tomatoes, onions, garlic, and around half the pumpkin into our pre-made chicken stock and blended it with our trusty Bamix. Added lots of salt, sugar, thyme (harvested from our pots) and pepper.

 Finally, we added in chopped cabbage that we bought at the Belconnen Fresh Food Market on the same day. My wife did the flavouring bit, adding more salt, sugar, and spices to blend all the flavours together.

cabbage added

We enjoyed this soup with the 'rustic loaf' bread at Knead Patisserie (one of my wife's favourite breads in Canberra; it has a lovely chewy dense texture, and is made with wholegrain rye goodness). To top it off, I relaxed with a glass and a half of a merlot sparking champagne (Anderson), a gift from my PhD supervisor.

I wish I could let my readers taste this soup. ;) The photos will have to do for now! We shared this soup with my supervisor as well as with two friends in Canberra.

So there you have it, my first blog post on my cooking experiences (my wife did most of the real cooking, I'm just the sous chef in charge of cutting and washing things).

final soup, delicious home-made goodness.

 Bon appetit!

Silverbeet baked in puff pastry: ideas

baked silverbeet product, served with potatoes from our plot

Silverbeet is not most people's favourite vegetable. My wife came up with a great idea for using it in a baked puff pastry dish. Yum!

Basically, one only needs to chop up the silverbeet into small pieces and cook it on a skillet (with garlic or your preferred flavour) until softened. My wife suggests that you could squeeze water out because this vegetable is quite wet (or dehydrate it on the pan). Once cooked, you simply spread it on a piece of puff pastry and make a dent (or two) where an egg (or two) is placed.

looks prettier on the inside, doesn't it?

You can put any other fillings in; my wife usually adds cheeses (garlic cream cheeses are great, but this time it was just normal low-fat cheddar), hams or salami (if you're not vegetarian and want some extra protein). It should be well seasoned with salt and pepper. We could have put more in if it wasn't so hard to 'close' it up with the top layer of pastry, due mainly to the eggs that we added in. Next time if we really need to finish off our silverbeet, we would skip the egg and just load it up with lots of silverbeet and cheese.

It's ready when it's golden brown and plumped up. Make sure you use a fork to press down on the edges (to prevent explosions in your oven), and to paint the top with egg wash (one egg with 1 tbsp water, mixed) to give it that nice golden colour.

golden brown means it's been cooked to perfection
(and well-painted with egg wash!)

My wife used to put other 'more yummy things' (her words!) into this puff pastry... i.e., cheese, ham, and mushrooms. It's her kind of hot breakfast. But this creation here is one of our first attempts at making silverbeet interesting and delicious. I'm sure there are other ways to enjoy silverbeet too, and we'll learn them in the coming months. We have quite a few silverbeet (or silverbeet-like) plants on our plot. We never cooked this vegetable before we started growing it.

My wife is still eager to improve this recipe... I'll post it up hopefully in the coming month or two!

Oh, and she recommends serving it with a good tomato sauce.

Do you like to bake your veggies inside a puff pastry container? Do you have other ideas for using up your silverbeet / spinach? Please share your ideas in the comments below!

An introduction to Garden Soup

25 April 2012.

Today marks a special day.

It is the day my wife and I officially started this blog, Garden Soup.