Super fast post of super fast low carb breakfast pudding…

We do a bit of low carb round these parts, in a kind of casual sort of a way, and this pudding has been good for my breakfast (and for the odd snack here and there for the kids).  I’ve been a bit of  die hard homemade bread, butter, and yummiest lime and ginger marmalade woman for a while but I’m trying to give myself a break from the wheat.  So, breakfast pudding it is!

It lends itself for yumminess cooked in a deep dish – moist and better flavour, but is nice for snacking in the drier shallow dish form.

This recipe will make two puddings – a one litreish deep dish, and a shallow quiche or flan, each has several serves.  Our family of five won’t eat one in one sitting so if you are only baking for you, reduce the recipe somewhat – though it will keep in the fridge for a good few days.

Citrus (and berry/fruit/whatever) Breakfast Pudding…

1/3 cup sweetening (reduced as much as is still nice to your palate) either

raw/rapadura/brown sugar or honey (or less but boosted with some stevia)

50g butter

rind of 3 lemons or two oranges, or 3 limes or a mixture…

500g cream cheese

1 1/2 cups almond meal

2 tablespoons four (besan, quinoa, or rice, lastly wholewheat)

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

8 eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla essence

Put all ingredients in a food processor and process ’til smooth.

Stir through some berries, or some stewed fruit of your choosing (apricots were nice).

Pour into a couple of dishes and bake a quiche sized dish for 20-30 minutes, and a deep dish for 50ish minutes.  Eat with the rawest, freshest cream you can find

More fun than one ought to be allowed to have all by oneself!

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With the Chief Gardener away on yet another one of his interminable trips to places exotic and oh so very distant, I am left to find ways of entertaining my lonesome self, which is never that hard really, cos well, there’s never enough time in the day as it is…

Last night I discovered Audacity!  I know that those of you who know me in person probably won’t believe it is such a recent discovery for me , but it is!  Audacity is a cool little open source audio program that does lots of stuff – stuff that is too hard for me to work out, but I did manage to create a small ensemble tonight, playing first my father-in-law’s old Hohner tenor, and then a cruddy ole 30 year old Yamaha soprano that has been in the toy box for the last 5 years – indestructible!!  As far as I know, if you click on the wee little arrow below, it should all work…

Spanish Pavan by Michael Praetorius

Bonny Sweet Robin by Anthony Holborne d. 1602

Here’s a picture of the garden this week to look at while you listen

Dulche de Leche Self Preservation Style

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While I have been dancing around Dulce de Leche, coming into contact with it’s lusciousness here and there, I wasn’t really aware of what it was called, or how it was made, until Bron Marshall, with her well honed culinary wisdom, pointed out how nice those yummy cinnamon shortbreads would be with it sandwiched in between.  Then when I looked up how to make it, it was all condensed milk this, and don’t use evaporated milk that…  Well we don’t have that fancy tinned stuff round here, so I thought, why not?  So I dug a little deeper and found that basically all you need is milk, perhaps some vanilla bean, and an alkaliser, like bicarb.

Twenty minutes later we were cooking with gas, using a very approximate recipe, I mean surely we don’t need all that sugar?  So to 4 liters of milk I put a generous cup of raw sugar, a nice juicy Madagascan vanilla bean, and 1/2 a teaspoon of bicarb soda dissolved in some water (just a hint for beginners like me – don’t add this after you have begun boiling the milk, or you may end up needing to clean your stove *ahem*).

It wasn’t long before the milk began to brown and, I always love these transformations, began to smell just like tinned condensed milk – really!  A few hours later it was rich and thick and jammy and tasting very much like Werthers lollies – another project for the future – I would love to throw in a couple of shots of espresso at this point and continue boiling down to hard candy stage to make hard coffee caramels, one of my favourite lollies…

After it was cooled and poured into jars (in which it will last for months in the fridge) all that was left to do was the making of another batch of shortbread within which to sandwich the luscious caramel velvet, and being school holidays, it was the perfect project for the brood to get into.

Unfortunately it seems that I can’t even follow my own recipes so I found myself exchanging some of the flour for ground almonds and still more of it for Green and Blacks cocoa, to make rather yummy chocolate nutty shortbread.  My child labour didn’t last the distance either, having eaten far too much mixture to have the stomach to continue cutting, so I was forced to finish the job myself.

Once the biscuits were cooled, all it took to get the kids ready to eat still more chocolate shortbread, was to sandwich two together with a generous spread of dulche de leche.  The Chief Gardener was pretty impressed with them too.

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Rockin’ lunch.

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Ciabatta – made at home from locally farmed wheat

Grated beetroot salad – from the garden

Mixed leaf salad – from the garden

Marinated eggplant with garlic – from the garden last summer

Bresaola – homemade from wild harvested deer

Quarg – from the cow

Butter – from the cow

Dressing – homemade vinegar from homegrown grapes, olive oil from Cobram Estate, northern Victoria

The only food miles contributed to the meal are from the wheat (30kms), the olive oil – probably a good few hundred kms as it came via the supermarket, the red wine (also from the supermarket) and salt used to preserve the bresaola (bulk Australian) – not sure how many they would contribute, and a few spices.

It feels good.  It feels really, really good that this amount of home grown  and home made stuff is now the norm.  And it doesn’t ‘alf taste good too.

☺

Hazels, blossom, and rugelach

Spring has well and truly sprung, and the clover is rizzing out of the ground as if powered by fossil fuels.  The hazelnuts are in full flower, their brilliant red blossoms contrasting very prettily with the yellow lichen covered branches.

I spent a lovely afternoon under the trees recently, soaking up the first warm days of sunshine and blossom, playing with Sas and collecting some of last seasons nuts.  It was like an Easter hunt with their beautiful brown roundnesses hiding amongst the leached and matted grasses and the faded fallen leaves.

Cracked open they revealed large, full nuts, and I kicked myself for not collecting more at the beginning of winter before half of them had moldered and sunk into the damp earth.

Being Friday today, I decided to use them for Rugelach, a tasty and really (no really!)  moderately healthy Jewish pastry, eaten on Shabbat (or the sabbath – for Jewish people this begins a few minutes before sunset on Friday, and lasts until a few minutes after the appearance of the first three stars on Saturday evening).

There are lots of different fillings used to make rugelach but my preferred is a mixture of hazels, cocoa, cinnamon, with a touch of orange rind.  Currants are lovely in them, and I’m sure that dates, figs, different nuts and varied spices would also be delicious and best chosen according to your taste.

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Rugelach

Pastry

200g butter

200g cream cheese

1 tablespoon rapadura or 2 teaspoons raw caster sugar

150g fine wholemeal flour

Cream butter and cream cheese in the food processor, or with a wand or electric beaters, add the sugar and then lastly lightly mix the flour in by hand.  Form a ball, wrap and refrigerate overnight.

Filling

120g ground or finely chopped hazelnuts

5 tablespoons rapadura or 4 rich brown sugar

4 tablespoons cocoa

3 teaspoons cinnamon

zest of one orange

30g melted butter

Preheat oven to 180C.  Combine dry ingredients and the orange rind and process together, set aside.

Remove pastry from fridge, roll out half into a neat even circle, about a foot in diameter.  Paint the surface with half of the melted butter and then sprinkle half of the hazelnut mixture over the pastry.  Using a sheet of baking paper and a rolling pin or the flat of your palm, gently press the hazelnut mix into the pastry.  Carefully cut into 16 even pie shaped wedges and gently roll each on up into a croissant shaped roll.  Place on baking tray lined with baking paper.  Repeat with the other half of the pastry.

Paint all the rugelach with the eggwhite and water mixture, then sprinkle with raw sugar.

Bake for 20mins, until they are gently browned.  Try not to eat all of them as they come out of the oven, they are better cooled off a bit, with or without a nice cup of tea or coffee.  Also rather lovely after dinner, with a tokay.

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