Friday, March 11, 2011

Kicking boring oatmeal in the teeth: Lemongrass infused oatmeal

I swore a solemn oath to myself at the beginning of this year. I have a fat hot pink binder full of recipes I've collected from the vast stretches of cyberspace. They're meticulously indexed by recipe type, and I swear I'm writing up a proper index to show at a glance what's in each section. I swore that I'd work through every recipe this year, and wouldn't, on the pain of gastronomic shame, repeat a single dish, no matter how much I love it.

This was the oath I fecklessly swore to myself at the beginning of this year. It was a dangerous oath for someone like me to take. I already have a habit of listening to a favourite song on loop. On top of that, I love, absolutely love my trashy quick dinner of frozen chipped hashbrowns pan fried up with frozen vegetables and a muddled egg. It's my comfort food go to. I adore my chips, ribena mixed with soda water and the frosted flakes (not all at the same time!). All these vices involve repeats depending on the weather, my mood, and whether anyone else is around to witness the food debauchery. On the other hand, I also love a fine lamb biriyani, a steaming bowl of tom yum goong or the always elegant sole meuniรจre. There's tyranny in only worshipping the divine. I like the profane things too.

The beginning of the calendar year is always a good time to plot future projects. For instance, I was checking out madame tigress' blog and saw her recipe for confiture des vieux garcon. By a fortunate stroke of luck, I managed to find a vintage rumtopf/pickling jar. A future post is coming up as soon as the first fruits of the season come in.
 

Now onto the subject at hand.  I've been finding ways to subvert the deeply ingrained boredom that generally accompanies a bowl of morning oatmeal. I began with the simple addition of some of the peach marmalade I made last summer. I just chucked in a tablespoon and a bit of it into the pot as the marmalade cooked. Delicious.




Then I took some blueberries I froze last summer and plopped a few of those in with a dollop of honey, some ground flaxseed and some freshly grated nutmeg. The main thing is to incorporate your flavours while the oatmeal is still cooking. I loved the vivid colours of this bowl. and its velvety sweet blueberry flavour. This particular variation of oatmeal was inspired by Lottie and Doof's breakfast porridge.

We experimented like madmen. We added candied ginger with fresh apple pieces and Saigon cinnamon to the oatmeal pot another morning. Flaxseed meal. Lots of it. Luscious atulfo mango with dried ginger and brown sugar. Blueberry with dessicated coconut and sliced almonds. The version I'm going to give you the recipe for excited me so much that I forgot to take a picture of it.  It's a great way to use up those ends and bits of lemon grass leftover from making a lovely Thai, Indonesian or Malay dinner.  We licked the backs of our spoons, examined the pot for more and then resigned ourselves to sipping tea and watching the local elderly people take their morning consititutional stroll.

Lemongrass Infused Oatmeal

1 3/4 cups of cold water
1 really good pinch of salt. I used kosher salt.
1 cup of large flake oats (the yellow label on the Quaker packet or the sort that take about 10 - 15 minutes to cook)
1 - 2 teaspoons of flaxseed meal (or ground flaxseed)
3 inch piece of lemon grass bashed up with the flat of your knife
1/2 a very ripe banana, smashed with a fork
1/2 cup chopped fresh strawberries
1 - 2 tablespoons of honey, depending on how sweet you like your oatmeal

 Method

1. Bring the water to boil in a medium sauce pan with the lemon grass. Chuck the salt in.

2. Drop the oats into the boiling water. Cover the pot with the lid cracked open. Give it a bit of a stir, but don't fuss about it too much. Add the ground flaxseeds or flaxseed meal.

3.  After five minutes, add the banana, strawberries and honey. Stir occasionally to ensure the oatmeal doesn't stick to the bottom of the pot and burn. Cook to the desired consistency. I like my oatmeal fairly stiff, but Ck likes his a bit more fast and loose.

Do you have your own oatmeal variations? Do tell and share!

My Mother's Malaysian-Sri Lankan Style Tomato Omelette


My mother's Malaysian/Sri Lankan style tomato omelette is a staple in our household. It's go-to comfort food, it's the food you make when you're too tired to come up with a fussily cooked protein source for dinner, and with all that, it's damn good. Mom made it for Ck and I a little while ago when we stopped by after work, famished and exhausted. 

You start by chopping up some white onion, spring onion, a bit of tomato, a bit of shallot, a bit of garlic and a bit of ginger. Chuck it all into a nice frying pan that's got a bit of oil in it. Add a dried chili if you like. Fry it up until the onion is translucent and the tomato has softened up.


Beat a few eggs up in a bowl, temper it with a bit of cold water (it makes your eggs lovely and fluffy), salt, white pepper and whatever spice you like. You can add a bit of chili powder to give your omelette a kick. In true Malaysian-Sri Lankan homecooking style, Mom cuts her omelette up into four and flips it over to give it last bit of a cook.




Serve with hot rice, a vegetable side and you've got a fabulous light weeknight supper!


Tuesday, March 1, 2011

On the Subject of Winter Produce: Persimmon Cake


Dear readers, I have a great deal of catch up to do and a significant number of stories that need to be told about the pictures I've been taking for the last few months. We'll start with persimmons and fast forward to the present. This will include tales about asado negro and how my eyes wept from the vinegared fumes, to preserved lemons and the furious pounding of cherry pits for sour cherry liqueur. But back to the persimmons. My parents went a bit mad buying persimmons back when Victoria was teetering on the cusp of winter. They ended up sharing some of the spoils of these persimmon shopping trips with me.


There are two kinds of persimmons - the astringent (e.g. hachiya) and the non-astringent kind (e.g. fuyu). Both types are high in fibre, contain tannins and are supposed to be good for your heart. The heart-shaped hachiya persimmon is not pictured here because in my haste to mash it into a pulp, I forgot to take a picture.

Unless you like furry tasting fruit, for consumption, the hachiya has to be ripe, so ripe that its skin becomes translucent and the fruit feels almost like mush. You can blet persimmons by simply putting them out in sunlight or by wrapping them in paper. My hachiya lived in my kitchen so it was alternately exposed to sunlight and temperatures hovering around zero. The tomato-shaped persimmons pictured here are the fuyu variation. The fuyu persimmon can be eaten when it's quite firm, and it's still lovely to eat even when it has ripened into a supple softness.


Persimmons can be eaten fresh, dried or cooked. I prefer the persimmon when it's still firm. I'm not generally a huge fan of mushy fruits although I did recently try a grenadilla and instantly fell in love with its crunchy seeds and sweet viscous flesh. Since my hachiya had ripened into the golden pulped treasure pictured above, I decided to make cake with it.

As for the rest of the fuyus, I made a darkly spiced persimmon paste out of them and froze it. I have plans for this paste. It will likely be used at some not too distant point in the future for meat dishes and perhaps another cake. Here's my recipe that I adapted from Fresh Approach Cooking:

Persimmon Cake
1 to 2 very ripe hachiya persimmons, yielding about 1 cup fork-mashed pulp
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/2 cups unsifted rice flour
1 tsp xanthan gum
1/2 tsp guar gum
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp each fresh nutmeg and ground cloves
3/4 cup butter
½ cup white sugar
½ cup brown sugar
1 egg
½ cup balkan style yoghurt, slightly diluted
1 tsp orange zest

Method:
 
1. Preheat oven to 350F.

2. Fork mash the persimmon into a pulp. Don't worry if it isn't perfectly smooth.

3. Sift together the flour, xanthan and guar gum, baking soda, baking powder, nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon.

4. In an large bowl, beat butter and sugar until fluffy for about 3 minutes. Add the egg and combine well. Add the persimmon pulp. Add half the flour mix and mix to just combine.

5. Add the yoghurt. Add the remaining flour and stir until it just comes together, then stir in the orange zest.

6. Grease your baking pan of choice with butter. You can use a bundt pan or cake ring or 9 inch cake pan. Spoon the batter in and bake for 45 minutes or more until knife comes out clean. Allow to cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then invert onto a platter to cool completely.

This is best served slightly warm. Before serving, dust lightly with powdered sugar. I loved eating this cake for breakfast!