Chutney x A LOT

A few weeks ago when we went to the market, our mango people told us that was their last week for the season. So we bought double our usual and went home to make chutney. This wasn't something we had really thought through very carefully, the results of which I will reveal as I go through my chutney tale.

In the past we have used a chutney recipe that requires soaking overnight. This was Sunday morning and we had to work on Monday, so that wasn't going to work. I did a quick search, and found a recipe from Not Quite Nigella that looked do-able, so we used that as our guide.

Her recipe called for 1 kilo of mango flesh, or about 2 large mangoes. We obviously wanted to make a larger batch to use up plenty of mangoes, so we started cutting and scooping them into a bowl on the scale. About 15 mangoes later, we were at 3 kilos - so I think the original estimate of 2 mangoes = 1 kilo of flesh is just not right.

We put the firmest mango cheeks through the shredder blade on the food processor, and chopped up the softer, riper cheeks. We popped this all into our big stockpot, and then realised we had almost no space for anything else. Wah-wahhh.

And because we tripled the recipe, we had nowhere near enough brown sugar, or raisins. We had no onions. We scraped in with just enough cider vinegar. But we realised that Andy would need to go to the shops. He had wanted to run to Bunnings for some seeds anyways, so, perfect.

Because I was expecting Andy back in about 30 minutes, I put everything that we had into a bowl and mixed it all up. Then I put it into two pots to start to simmer, to allow the sugar which we did have to dissolve a bit. Then I cleaned up - chopped up the mango skins so they would compost a bit quicker, gave a few of the seeds to Tika, who loves to suck the flesh off them, and wiped so much mango juice off of every surface. I even did all the dishes.



Over an hour later, I was beginning to wonder if Andy got lost or sucked into some sort of space-time vortex. He sort of did - in Townsville on Sundays, shops don't open until 11am, and he left the house a touch before 10. So although he spent plenty of time in Bunnings, he still had to wait outside the grocery store for it to open.

But eventually he did make it home. By that time the chutney had simmered down enough to fit back into the one pot. We added the onions and the last few bits and pieces, plus a whack of chilli sauce because it was so sweet, cooked it properly, and then got ready to can it.



We ended up with 13 and a half jars of this stuff - about 9 litres worth of chutney. The full ones we processed properly and put them away to last us throughout the year. But for dinner that night it seemed appropriate to have the little half jar with some curry.

I made chappatis, sag paneer (spinach and tofu curry), and we had some leftover dhal, with brown rice and, at the front, our chutney.



Sure, it was an epic process, but the memories of scooping 15 mangoes, stirring a simmering pot of chutney, and cleaning up all the sticky mess will fade as we enjoy our spoils for the next few months!

Baby Cooking

Not cooking babies - cooking for someone with a baby.

My gorgeous friend S gave birth to a beautiful boy 5 weeks ago. But she is moving overseas with her partner and baby in April - so they have been getting rid of stuff, rather than accumulating it. Rather than giving them baby-related gifts, I read on Offbeat Families that one of the best things you can do is bring food, so the new parents don't have to worry about cooking.

After googling what foods to avoid while breastfeeding, thinking about transportability, and taking into account reheating options (no microwave, too hot for oven), I came up with these two good meals and a dessert - all of which I made double of, so we could eat, too.

A quinoa pilaf type thingie, with green peas, grated carrot, green beans and toasted almonds is full of protein, fibre and flavour. Some quickly sauteed mushrooms were served on the side, because I remembered (luckily) my friend's partner doesn't like them. And a braised lentil thingie added Andy's most important virtue of a meal: sauciness. I had planned to do this with puy lentils, but I made this when the flooding was on south of us, and apparently there was a run on green lentils at the supermarket. So I used brown. They were good and gravy-ey.

I put this into an aluminium foil tray, which they could heat in the oven if they wanted to, but this food was good cold. Andy and I ate it at room temperature the night we made it - with our mushrooms mixed in, and with broccoli added (apparently broccoli-flavoured breast milk can give babies wind. The things I'm learning!).

For dessert, I made sweet rice with mango. I only realised after soaking my rice that it was sushi rice, rather than sticky rice, but I forged ahead. The result was less than excellent, but better than good. For my friend, I packed the rice into a container, the coconut sauce in a jar, and the mangoes whole, so they could construct the dessert when they wanted it.

The other meal was more casseroley. I called it "eggplant thing with polenta" ... it had eggplant (obvi), grated sweet potato, white beans, some green olives, tomato, and spices like cumin and coriander. For my friends, I put this into a loaf tin and topped with polenta, casserole style. Again, they could reheat in the oven or eat cold. (We also gave them a chocolate cake to go with it, because - chocolate cake).

For our own dinner, we put the polenta into bowls and topped with the eggplant.

This was yummy - a nice change from our usual food, a good way to use up some of the million eggplants coming from the garden, and nicely portable.

I will probably do this a few more times before my friends move overseas, so give me ideas - what are your favourite meals to cook and give?

Meal Planning: Week 1

Despite saying in my page on spending less money that meal planning isn't really for us, I made it a resolution to be a bit more organised about dinner. But I didn't want to adopt the kind of meal plan that requires choosing recipes, buying specific ingredients, and following a plan very strictly. We need flexibility, and also Andy gets a little grouchy about buying things full price when there are on-special alternatives, so specific ingredients are rarely purchased in our place.

Our first week of meal planning didn't come about as much through planning as through indecision. Scene: Sunday morning, after breakfast, on the couch. Me: Do you want to go to the market? Andy: We probably don't need to. Me: But the only veggies we have are corn and lettuce... Andy: Well, let's have... dhal, nacho salad, burgers, gnocchi with pesto, and pumpkin risotto. Me: Wait, let me write this down.

So we had a vague plan. Then I realised I wanted fruit so we went to the market anyways, and came home with some more things: potatoes, carrots, sweet potatoes and beetroots (plus bananas, a bucket of mangoes and three pineapples). Add to that our eggplant bushes heavily laden with quickly-growing fruits. So I amended our meal plan.

Monday and Tuesday I was home still, not yet finished with my holidays. So I did a lot of prep stuff for the coming week - cooking beans, making chappati breads, and roasting eggplant. And then we enacted our meal plan: no set schedule, just a pretty good idea of what we could make given the ingredients on hand, and no real thinking required (for those nights after work where thinking is very undesirable). Here's how it shaped up.

Monday: Nacho salad. Chips and lettuce on the bottom, a mix of kidney beans, sweet potato, tomato, corn and rice in the middle, and a fresh mango-pineapple-cucumber salsa on top.

Tuesday: red lentil dhal with wholemeal chappatis. I didn't snap a photo of this, because it was just dhal.

Wednesday: kidney bean burgers, with grilled pineapple (under the patty), potatoes, and corn on the cob.

Thursday: gnocchi with eggplant balls and a pesto-y, tomato-y sauce.

Friday: Andy went off script, and crafted a semi-delicious curry of eggplant, tofu and jackfruit.

Since this seemed to work reasonably well for us last week, I tried again on Sunday, this time going a little more adventurous and looking for recipes that we could use. I'll give week 2 a post of its own when we've finished it, but so far meal planning seems to be going well. As long as it doesn't require buying special things, and we have the flexibility to cook what we feel like on a given night, it seems to work for us.I guess I should update the part about not meal planning soon...

Holidays are Over

Today marks my return to work, after four weeks of blissful holiday fun. We opted not to travel during our time off, partially because we went south in November for a wedding, partially because we are trying to pay off a mortgage quite quickly, but mainly because our house is still new to us, we haven't had any significant time off since moving in, and we just wanted to hang out here.

I did only a little bit of work during my time off - work that I have wanted to do for a while, but keep putting off because the idea of starting it, amidst all my usual work, was too daunting. Thus, the holidays were a good time to get a start on turning my thesis into a book with no other work distractions, and now that I have a good start I think I will have the motivation to keep working on it.

What made up the bulk of my vacation?

I did manage to blog a lot more regularly. I won't promise to keep it up throughout the teaching semester, but I'll try. I updated and added to the pages across the top, too.

We took Tika for plenty of swims.

I read a lot of books. I went to the library maybe 6 or 7 times during my 4 weeks at home, to pick up books I had reserved.

We painted the toilet and the hallway.

This line between living room and hall is gone. I call the colour "soy chai latte".

I did some bigger cleaning projects that I don't do normally, like dusting off the blinds (a big job, since we always have our windows open) and moving furniture to vacuum under it.

My dislike of these blinds is now more than aesthetic.

We planted a few more things in the garden - a peanut butter tree, jackfruit, another papaya, some more pineapples.

We harvested many huge piles of basil and filled up the freezer with pesto.

Gnocchi with pesto, spinach and broccoli.

(Seriously, our freezer is so full right now, between pesto and mango and reduced-to-clear tofu and veggie burgers.)

Future smoothies.

I took many, many naps.

Like this, but on the couch.

We watched series one of The Killing, a Danish crime drama. It was really good - a little bit like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but less polished. I am looking forward to watching series two!

I made a pretty good dent on organising my craft room.

Before.

After.

And used it for the first time, to sew a Go board.

I rediscovered my love of cooking and had time for more complicated recipes, like Mochi, Bacon Cheeseburgers, or steamed buns filled with Lamyong beef, cabbage and 5-spice BBQ sauce.

We made mango chutney and jam, and did a few more things that will get their own posts in the coming weeks.

Mango pancakes with mango jam.

But sadly, the holiday fun times are over. I didn't tick off everything I wanted to get done - cleaning behind the oven was never really a priority, I guess - but it was so great to have a few weeks off to play, to relax, to tinker.

Mochi - without a microwave

I discovered mochi by chance in Hong Kong in 2011, and Andy and I both dug it. Not enough to, like, pine for it or anything - I wasn't having dreams about mochi. But I would have liked to have some more. Then in September and October, while perusing The New Scoop (which I reviewed here) I saw the chapter on ice cream mochi. The author said mochi was just not possible without a microwave or a mochi machine, but instead of letting it go, I took that on as a challenge. I googled, and found James & Matt's mochi post the most helpful - they mentioned cooking mochi dough on the stove top, and even though it wasn't a part of their tutorial, just knowing it was possible was enough for me. I got some glutinous rice flour, and then eventually got around to making it. It took me two tries to get it right, using two very different methods.

First Attempt

The first time I tried it out, I used the recipe for mochi dough from The New Scoop, because I had a hard copy I could keep on the kitchen bench while I worked. My only variation was to cook the mochi in a bowl over a pot of simmering water, hoping that would do the trick.

I double-boiled for 10 minutes and thought that must surely be enough - the dough was getting dry around the edges, and the consistency was different.

So I took it off the heat and did the rest of the work. I kneaded my dough, briefly. I cut it into pieces, formed balls, and filled them with a mixture of rice bubbles, tahini and toasted sesame seeds.

All the while, I thought that all the dramatic explanations of how to make mochi, with dire warnings about hot lava-esque dough that sticks to you and itself and everything, were a little over the top. Sure, the dough was hot, but it was a bit easy to work with, really!

The ease which marked my mochi experience was the first indicator that I had done it wrong. Biting into them was my second clue. Instead of sticky, chewy, gluey dumplings, these were soft and doughy. The flavour was a little bit chalky - not unpleasant, but similar to icing sugar.

Second Attempt

A week or so later, I decided to try again. This time, instead of assuming a double boiler would work without actually looking up a specific stove-top recipe, I did a more thorough search. I found this gem of a video.

Short summary: instead of cooking the dough and then forming dumplings, this recipe turns the process upside down - steam the pre-formed dumplings. Revolutionary.

So I did! The only change I made to the recipe was to use corn flour rather than wheat starch, which may have been a mistake - these mochi did not stay soft at all.

Mochi
1 1/4 c. boiling water
1/2 c. sugar
1/2 c. corn flour
2 1/2 c. glutinous rice flour
filling of your choice

In a big bowl, dissolve sugar in boiling water. Add flours and mix them in. Knead for a minute or two, until the dough resembles play dough in texture.

Break off small pieces of dough, roll into balls, and flatten them. Place your filling in the middle and then pull the dough around the filling, sealing it in.

Place the finished dumpling on an oiled steamer pan. When the pan is full, steam the mochi over gently boiling water for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, make the rest of your mochi.

I used two fillings: in some, peanut butter mixed with icing sugar; in others, pieces of mango. The peanut butter, of course, melted as a result of being steamed for 10 minutes. So instead of nice, round mochi dumplings, I had flattish, blobby things.

Take the mochi off the steamer tray immediately, trying not to break them. This is where I got to experience the joys of molten, sticky mochi dough. A few busted open, so I ate them right away.

Put the (unbusted) mochi straight from the steamer into a container of coconut (or sesame seeds, crushed nuts, icing sugar, etc) and shake them around to coat.

 Eat them within 12 hours. Fridging them made them firmer, but still chewy and nice - on the first day. By the second day they were hard from the fridge, and reasonable (but not great) when they came up to room temperature. By the third day, they were practically inedible. In future, I will cut the recipe down to make only what we can eat in the same day. This batch made 24, which in hindsight is only worth making to bring to a party or something.

Mango mochi looks a little bit like a soft-boiled egg.

So the form-then-steam method is the way to go for those who, like me, don't own a microwave. Or for those who don't want to knead and mould molten hot mochi dough.  It won't work at all for ice cream mochi, and isn't the best for runnier fillings like peanut butter, but I think I'll try mixing the nut butter with some crumbs of something to see if that firms it up.

Yummy chewy mochi. 

Mango Chutney

What do you do when you have three trays of ripe or quickly ripening mangoes on hand? Well, there are lots of options - eating them straight up, pancakes, cakes, jam, salsa, smoothies.... But if you want to spread the mango love across the year, preserving them in one way or another is a good idea. Drying them, either straight up or as fruit rolls, is one option. Or you can turn a bunch into chutney, to spice up drab meals and accompany Indian curries all year long.

Andy and I have made a few batches of this chutney recipe, but have found it, at various times, too spicy, or too vinegary, so have modified it a bit and come up with a configuration we quite like. Andy bought a starter canning kit from Green Living Australia, so this year we could make a very big batch (or several) and keep them in the pantry - in years past we have been limited by refrigerator space.

Mango Chutney
10 ripe mangoes
1 onion, finely diced
4 cups of vinegar
1 cup of dried fruit (Andy used dried mixed fruit, with the cherries picked out, which was actually better than I expected. The citrus peel gives it a bit of zing every few bites)
1 chilli, minced
2 Tbsp. fresh grated ginger

Cut the cheeks off each mango. Score each cheek into fairly small squares, and then scoop the fruit out with a spoon. Put all the fruit from the cheeks into a very large, non-reactive bowl. Peel each seed. Cut the flesh from the seeds and put into a separate smaller bowl, or a jug, or a blender. Blend this up and then mix it with the diced fruit.

Put the diced onion into a jug and cover with boiling water. Let this sit for a few minutes and then drain the water and add the onion to the bowl (I do this because I find the raw onion a bit bitey. If you like raw onion, skip this step). Then mix in the vinegar, dried fruit, chilli and ginger. Cover this and let it soak overnight at room temperature. We stuck ours in the oven, so it was out of the way. 

The next day, put the mango mixture into a very big pot with:

2 and 2/3 cups of sugar

Heat this over low heat until the sugar dissolves, then add:

4 tsp. salt
2 tsp. cinnamon
2 tsp. mixed spice
2 tsp. ground ginger
4 cloves of garlic, minced
chilli powder to taste, if you want it spicier.

Bring this up to the boil and then lower the heat down to a simmer. Cook the chutney for about 1 hour and 15 minutes, until it has thickened up.

If you are canning these, put the clean jars and new lids into a big canning pot filled with hot water (with a trivet or something in the bottom) and bring them up to a simmer, then turn the heat off and leave it on the stove. Do this about 20 or 25 minutes before the chutney is finished cooking. When the chutney is nearly done, remove the jars from the pot. Using jar tongs, shake out the extra water and then place them onto a tea towel.

Fill each jar, and then clean the rim of the jar with a damp cloth. Remove the lids from the hot water with a fancy magnetic lid wand thingie, and seal each jar up tightly. Put the full jars back into the hot water, ensuring they are submerged by about an inch, and bring it back up to the boil. Boil for 10 minutes, cool a bit, and then removed the jars and let stand at room temperature until they are fully cooled and have sealed.

The three days of Christmas

This year, Andy and I continued some of our earlier Townsville Christmas traditions, which are beginning to cement themselves into place as proper traditions. Basically, we spread things out across Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

We have Christmas dinner on Christmas eve. We had, of course, a stuffed seitan roast with yuba skin. I had planned to cook this on the BBQ, so as to avoid heating up the house, but then Christmas eve was rainy and by dinner time it was a chilly 25 degrees, so into the oven it went! 

Christmas dinner, waiting to go in the oven.

The yuba didn't crisp up as much as usual, for some reason, but it was still good.

Along with the seitan roast, we had okra-corn bread stuffing (based on Susan V's recipe), mushrooms baked with garlic-parsley-butter, some (bought) cranberry jelly, and spinach. We topped the seitan with mango chutney, made that morning (which will get its own post soon). 

Tika got a veggie pig's ear, and Nacho had some pumpkin, one of her favourite treats. 

For dessert we had mango-fruit mince ice cream, made with the tropical fruit mince I also used for tarts.

Served up with little pastry bits, the baked scraps from when I made my tarts.

Christmas morning, Andy woke with the beginnings of a sinus infection or summer flu or something, so I cooked him up a nice breakfast and a hot lemon. For breakfast we had creamy mushrooms, spinach, and Vegg (another thing which will get its own post soon) with toast and tea. 

After brekky, we took Tika to the beach, where she chased plenty of sticks, ran around with a few other dogs, and ate too much salt water, making herself a bit sick as a result. 

Then it was back home for a cup of tea (for Andy), a mango-ginger-rum smoothie (for me), and some chocolate and white chocolate spiders, as we opened the gift(s) Andy's parents sent us. 

It was in pieces when we opened it, but a phone call cleared things up - it's a seedling tray, and a little thing for making seedling pots out of old newspaper.

For lunch, Andy cooked up some mushroom burgers with spinach and bacon bits and cranberry jelly.

Which we ate with salt and vinegar potato chips, another of our solidifying christmas traditions.

We spent the rest of the day doing not much - reading books, watching a movie, pulling some weeds in the garden, and drinking rosella cordial.

Our first harvest of rosellas was a small batch, so I only made a little cordial.

Then we ate leftovers for dinner, adding some more mushrooms and spinach to our leftovers, because Andy got a lot of both on Christmas Eve, reduced to clear!

Now all that's left is one piece of seitan, and some sweets. 

Our Boxing Day was pretty similar. For breakfast, we had mushrooms on toast, with spinach and Vegg.

And we spent the rest of the day eating fruit, chocolate spiders, and panadol (for poor sickly Andy). It wasn't the christmassiest christmas - in fact, it didn't really feel terribly christmassy at all. But it suits us - a christmas full of mushrooms, spinach and mangoes is a success, as far as we're concerned. 

Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrated it!