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 meunière. 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!

Argentinian Blueberry and Chocolate Slab Cake

I know many food bloggers are all about the local, the fresh and the 100 mile diet, but I thumb my nose at the environmentally friendly and sustainable practice of the 100 mile diet. And I mean it. I'm not about to give up my bourgeois tastes in a multiplicity of things that must come across the sea to get into my belly. The lovely Persian dates that Ciaran recently brought me are a scrumptious example of that.

If it came to it, I would be reasonable, buy as many gai lan and Indian eggplant seeds as possible, attempt to grow my own curry leaf tree, and adopt the 100 mile diet. For now, I will indulge in certain naughty excesses like buying Argentinian blueberries at the end of November when I'm actually on a mission to buy leeks for Parisien Leek Soup. Buying blueberries from Argentina is something of a joke on the west coast of Canada. We're massive seasonal producers of blueberries. You can buy them by the crate for practically nothing during the summer.

What does a Canadian Sri Lankan Tamil do with fresh blueberries at the tail end of fall that really feels like winter? She uses it to crown her morning bowl of oatmeal, paired with freshly grated nutmeg.

Or, she could stud a decadent chocolate slab cake with them. I found the cake on a food porn site and was so taken with the image, I felt the need to replicate but modify the cake so that I could eat it. The results were deliciousness on levels that bordered the profane.

I feel the need to include a warning or disclaimer with this cake recipe. Once you finish slathering on the icing and studding the cake with blueberries, you will find it difficult to stop even after eating two pieces of cake. We found it nearly impossible to step away from the cake. I suggest wrapping the cake and putting it in the refrigerator to halt excessive cake consumption. This cake is guaranteed to seduce any man or woman, and might even possibly save marriages.

Here's the modified recipe I adapted from Picnics by Australian Woman's Weekly.

1/2 cup cocoa powder
1/2 cup boiling water
2/3 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 1/2 cups white sugar
3 eggs
1 2/3 cups rice flour
1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
3/4 cup Balkan style yoghurt
2/3 cup fresh blueberries

Chocolate Icing:
2/3 cup dark chocolate, chopped coarsely
1 3/4 tablespoons butter
1 cup icing sugar, sifted
1 1/2 tablespoons hot water

1. Preheat oven to 350 ºF. Grease 19cm x 30cm lamington pan; line with baking paper. Be sure to cut the corners of the paper on a diagonal so that the paper sits flat in the pan. Otherwise, your cake will have rippled corners.

2. Blend cocoa with the water in small bowl. Add the water a bit at a time to prevent lumps. Cool.

3. Beat butter and sugar in small bowl with electric mixer until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs, one at a time. Transfer mixture to a large bowl, stir in sifted flours and soda, and yoghurt in two batches; stir in cocoa mixture.

4. Spread mixture into pan. Bake about 30 minutes. Cool cake in pan 20 minutes before turning, top-side up, onto wire rack to cool. Don't remove the paper just yet.

5. Make chocolate icing: melt chocolate and butter in small saucepan, stirring, over low heat. Remove from heats; stir in sifted icing sugar and water until smooth.

6. Spread cold cake with icing, top with blueberries. Don't forget to take the paper off first. Cut cake into squares.

Serves 20.

Botticelli's Second Toe

I strained and filtered a jar of bing cherry liqueur the other day. After several months of macerating and occasional shaken jar syndrome, I retrieved the hermetic jar from its hiding spot in the dark, recessed top of my tallest bookcase.

Cherry liqueur, left, and blueberry liqueur, right.

I shook the jar experimentally. The broody blood red colour was intriguing, but the liqueur no longer had the virginal clarity it had several months ago when the bathtub booze madness began.

At the height of this year's genteel Victorian summer (never hot, never quite cold), I was seized with the inclination to try my hand at making liqueur. I daydreamed of speakeasys; running my very own blind tiger where hot jazz plays until the wee hours. Being a woman of action, I tired of daydreaming and got down to the business of research.

I pored over śliwowica and schnapps recipes, read about the resurgence of vintage cocktails, and stumbled on Gunther Anderson's site. I collected my cherries, blueberries, sugar, little Italian hermetic jars and the cheapest vodka and gin I could find.

I felt confident with my fifteen years of canning experience. Give me fruit, give me sugar and I will give you something delectable. Then I realized I had started out the hard way. Working with liquor would have been the best way to ease into the world of all things canned as high proof alcohol creates a preservation-friendly environment the jelly maker has to work hard to create.



Rhubarb schnapps

But fruit, sugar and liquor? Ye gods. There is something about that trifecta that is undeniably akin to the perfection of Botticelli's second toe. 



Botticelli's second toe. The great Italian Renaissance master painted beautiful women with second toes that were longer than the first. Have a good look at The Birth of Venus. She's riding that half shell with second toes that are longer than her first toes. Historically equated with beauty, wisdom, and royalty, the longer second toe is also known as piede greco or Greek's foot.



My first liquor experiment with my parents' rhubarb started it all. My decision to elevate rhubarb from its humble status as playmate to apples in a crumble allowed it to assume new heights of noblesse in vodka. There was something mesmerizing about watching the fine legs of vodka run down the inside of the schnapps jar while the scarlet hue of the rhubarb slowly eased into a faint pink, its colour blushing into the sweet liquor sea around it.

C. Aiken for Luscious Domestic. Plum schnapps.

Not content with rhubarb alone, I boozed up unsuspecting blueberries, cherries, orange peel, and, at Aiken's suggestion, golden plums that were too ripe to eat in polite society.

Then the jars sat. I'd like to glibly say I forgot about them as most people seem to write in their own musings about making liqueur, but I was too curious. I'd check to see how the colour changed. I'd shake the jars.

Now after filtering the cherry liqueur, the jar has gone back to the top shelf to age for another few months. Using coffee filters proved to be very time consuming. However, as the end product boasted a colour and clarity even more sublime than its first incarnation, I felt its beauty was reason enough to tolerate the wait.

Bing Cherry Liqueur

3 lbs fresh or frozen cherries (must be good quality)
Cherry pits of half the cherries (1.5 lb)
10 whole black peppercorns
3 cups sugar
1.5 litres vodka (I like Wyborowa or Bols for this sort of thing)

Method

• Pit the cherries and save the cherry pits. You may use frozen cherries, but thaw them out first. 
• Divide the cherries and sugar equally between two 2 quart jars. I like the hermetic ones, or ones made by Weck.
• Use a stone mortar or something equally durable to crack the cherry pits. Divide the pits and the peppercorns between the two jars. Shake the jars.
• Macerate in a dark place at room temperature for eight to ten weeks. Shake once in a while for first two weeks.
• After eight to ten weeks, strain liqueur using a cheesecloth to remove the larger solids. Do not squeeze fruit as this will ruin the clarity of your liqueur. You can squeeze your fruit to get every bit of liqueur out, but you'll be fussing with filters quite a bit more.
• Use a coffee filter or paper towel to filter your liqueur. Test for sweetness (if it isn't sweet enough, use this recipe for simple syrup). 
• Age the liqueur for another three to four months.