Cooking Archives - Page 2 of 3

Kimchi making season returns

April 30, 2015December 30, 2015 Stephen Carlin

Wom Bok, chinese cabbage, napa cabbage; whatever you call it, it’s a great vegetable to grow. It’s super quick and trouble free if you can keep the caterpillars off it. And on top of providing delicious greens for stir fries, soups or steaming, you can keep it and transform the flavour by making kimchi. Autumn is a good time to sow wom bok here in the subtropics. The plants reach picking size very quickly. I don’t leave them too long, as they will flower in the warm weather before they…

Rosellas; a pretty plant that makes great cordial

March 19, 2015 Stephen Carlin

Yesterday I cut and processed my first lot of rosellas, and my attitude went from skepticism to planning how many rows I will plant next year.

National Pickling Gherkin

February 13, 2015 Stephen Carlin

National Pickling gherkin; this name sounds rather grand to me. I’m not sure which nation they represent, but they were a lucky selection for our garden as they have yielded well and are different enough from salad cucumbers to be a separate crop for the kitchen. I planted two types of cucumber this year; a salad type and a pickling one, to hedge my bets. The first picking of the gherkins was a bit of a worry to me, as they were not only insipid but also bitter. Fortunately the…

Zopf braided egg bread

September 4, 2014 Stephen Carlin

As a bit of a reaction to the heavy wholemeal sourdough I’ve been making lately, last Sunday I was dreaming about zopf, the eggy-buttery bread that you buy in Switzerland on Saturday to have on Sunday (when the bakeries are closed). There are many versions of this type of bread, including the Jewish challah, which is baked the day before Sabbath. The butter is what makes it keep so well overnight, and the egg makes is rich and golden. I’d never made one before, so I learnt a few things.…

Homemade kimchi result

August 22, 2014 Stephen Carlin

It’s a week since I made homemade kimchi from wom bok, radish, and chillis out of the garden, and I’m really impressed with the result. It seems such a dodgy thing to do, to pile vegetables in a bottle and let them ferment of their own accord at room temperature, but it really works. We had it first night with pork chops, a classic combination. The kimchi cuts the richness of the meat. The second night we were going to have it as an accompaniment to chicken breasts, but ended…

All-wholemeal sourdough

August 19, 2014 Stephen Carlin

I discovered last week that the local IGA supermarket has 12.5 kg bags of wholemeal flour, so I got a bag to see what sort of bread it makes, and have been impressed. Normally I use white bakers flour, and add other flours in a 3:1 ratio, as the other flours aren’t ‘strong’ high protein bread flour and dilute the cohesiveness of the dough. I also thought that 100% wholemeal would be too heavy – I’m sure I read that somewhere. But this flour is rated for bread making and the…

Making kimchi from thinnings.

August 14, 2014 Stephen Carlin

Yesterday I was out checking the veggie plot and thought I should thin the beetroot. Beets come as compound seeds, and so they can germinate in bunches, and because they have been fairly slow to get going I didn’t have the heart to thin them when I should have. Now I’ve got big plants squashed together. It’s not survival of the fittest among beets in the garden, so it was well time to pull the smaller ones to make room for the big’uns. Then I thought I should do the…

Sourdough with millet

July 21, 2014 Stephen Carlin

I’ve been baking more often since we moved here, partly because we have lots of friends and family visiting, and partly because I have a cracker of a new oven that bakes beautifully. I usually make sourdough from my trusty starter culture that I’ve had for many years now, but I change the style with the extra flour, usually rye (sometimes with caraway), also wholemeal or fruit and nut or multi-seed, but this week I thought I’d try some of the millet flakes I’ve had in the larder for a few months.…

wattle

July 16, 2014 Stephen Carlin

Even up here in subtropical northern NSW, our mid-Winter flower is the wattle. We have a nice strip of sally wattle, also called black wattle (Acacia melanoxylon) which at the moment is lighting up the gully to one side of the house. Thinking of what you can do with an abundance of wattle, I read many years ago that you can make fritters with the flowers. I’ve never been much of a deep fryer, but maybe a modern tempura take would be the…

Coffee processing of our first crop

July 8, 2014August 25, 2017 Stephen Carlin

First processing of home grown coffee berries Coffee processing at home takes a little practice. I ventured into the old ‘food forest’ this morning. It’s a little way from the house so I’ve only now got far enough down the list of to-dos to consider cleaning it up. There’s a lot of weeds to clear up and a good amount of tree maintenance. It was good timing, though, because the coffee is just beginning to ripen. There are a few coffee trees, but the best ones are growing under a…