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By clare, February 5, 2012

Celery seed is well known for its beneficial effects on gout and arthritis, both of which are tendencies in our family.

I love the intense celery flavour of celery seed – the seed not of the common garden celery but of a wild cousin, Apium graveolens.  So it is both a culinary pleasure and a preventative measure to make regular use of home made celery seed salt.

I make an intensely flavoured version of celery salt, by simply combining one quantity of celery seed with one quantity of quality salt (I use Murray River flaky salt).

Because celery seeds can be bitter they need to be lightly roasted, but only briefly and in a mildly heated cast iron pan as they are so tiny they will burn quickly.  Just put them in the pan until they begin to be fragrant, then immediately tip out onto a clean plate and shake around to cool them down.  Grind them, either in a mortar and pestle or in a spice grinder, then add the salt and grind both together to a fine consistency.

Use wherever you would use ordinary salt.  Celery seed salt is great to dip crudites and hard boiled eggs into, and fills out the flavour of stocks, stews and sauces.

(C) Clare Richards 2012

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By clare, February 1, 2012

Coconut palm juice

Hot?
It’s been humid, still and hot here in Cairns.  All the rain we should be getting seems to be landing on flood-battered South East Queensland.  So we’re all hot, and some wetter than others.

I thought I’d mention this drink because it is the BEST thirst quencher.  I’ve encountered several brands and they all seem to taste similar, with the big tip being to go for the ones bottled in brown glass, not plastic or cans.

Serve with ice and a good squeeze of lime juice

Coconut palm juice is 100% coconut palm syrup from the flowers of the coconut palm.

It has a flavour somewhere between pandan and hazelnuts.  Serve it super-chilled over some ice with a good squeeze of fresh lime juice (about 1 tablespoon or a little more).  The lime helps to balance the sweetness and the slightly earthy pandan edge to it’s flavour and really accentuates the hazelnut flavour.

A friend remarked when tasting it for the first time that he thought it was Frangelico, the Italian hazelnut liqueur.

Look for it in your local Asian grocery store.

For an extra kick at sundown, add a dash of quality mellow rum to see in the (hopefully!) balmy night…

(C) Clare Richards 2012

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By clare, January 18, 2012

Butter, butter, butter (C) Clare Richards

I’ve just had a fabulous time making butter from the voluptuous Jersey cream from Misty Mountain Farms (sister company of the biodynamic producer, Mungalli).  Made two batches from their two litre bottles – one was normal salted butter, the other I cultured gently with the addition of two teaspoons of their yoghurt and left it to mature for 3 days in the fridge.

Both batches made about 900g of butter each from the 2 litres of cream, with about 900ml of buttermilk left for pancake making.  That makes it the same price to make homemade butter from this exquisite cream as buying the plain brand Tasmanian butter from the supermarket.  So if you see their cream in stock, look at the massive two litre bottle with a butter maker’s eye, as it is great value.

Both butters are so more-ish they’re (mostly) stacked away in the freezer.  I was surprised that it remains quite spreadable in the fridge.  Apparently this is due to having worked the butter in VERY cold water.  If you work it in warmer water, the butter ends up harder – a contrary result.

I worked with the butter making method given by Darina Allen whose cookbook Forgotten Skills of Cooking is on my wish list

Next batch I buy I’ll be making some ghee to see how that goes…

(C) Clare Richards 2012

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By clare, January 10, 2012

Well it wasn’t broken rice, just cooked (deliberately) until the grains burst into little soft pillows.

Along with brown stew, the ‘chicken legs’ that the butcher made (more about them later), and a weekly glorious roast beef, one of mum’s staple foods of our childhood was  brown rice, cooked such that each grain remained packed away in its little skin.  Didn’t absorb any sauces or juices on the plate, and was not a favourite.  So it took me a while to approach brown rice again.  The obvious finally dawned on me when I’d got to the stage of being able to overcome childhood prejudices – that it might be fine if just cooked a bit more.  And, voila, so it is.

Back to the chicken legs for a moment.  I wish we had a photo of them, as the butcher who made them, Mr King at Kings Butchers in Sea Lake, the little wheat farming town in which I grew up, has passed on.  They were culinary works of art, in the arts and crafts tradition perhaps, but nonetheless.  Sausage meat, plain, crafted around sturdy circular wooden skewers about the length of a real chicken drumstick.  The sausage meat was shaped into the form of a drumstick, complete with the skinny section which kicked out slightly at the base, just as the ankle joint of a drumstick does.

I’m providing this detail because it meant that when cooked, having also been dusted in breadcrumbs, they contained a wonderful variety of textures from plump and juicy up in the drum of the drumstick down to crunchy and satisfyingly dry at the stick end.  I don’t eat standard sausages these days, and I’m off wheat for a while, but if I found them again I’d indulge, definitely.

So back to the salad, which is in none of the traditions described above, being full of fresh summery flavours.  Here it is:

Busted rice salad

1 1/2 cups brown rice, preferably soaked overnight prior to cooking

2 teaspoons flaky (kosher) salt

1 cup finely diced jicama (2 small or 1 medium jicama)

1/2 medium sized red onion, finely diced

1 cup shelled pistachios, roughly broken

1 tablespoon coconut, rice bran or peanut oil

150g tempeh, cut into small squares & marinated overnight in 1 tablespoon tamari or soy sauce

2 – 3 tablespoons finely julienned young ginger (about 5cm long knob)

6 sprigs Italian parsley, leaves finely chopped

4 leaves Cuban oregano (Plectranthus amboinicus), finely diced

1 mild red chilli, finely sliced

Dressing

1 – 2 tablespoons honey

1/4 – 1/3 cup lime juice (2 to 4 limes)

1 tablespoon tamari or soy sauce

In a saucepan, cover the rice with about 10 times its volume in water.  Bring to the boil then reduce to the lowest possible heat and cook very gently, lid off, for up to an hour or until the grains are completely busted open.  At about the 1/2 to 3/4 hour mark, when the grains are starting to pop open, add two teaspoons of salt to the water.

While rice is cooking, dice all the other salad ingredients.  Mix the dressing ingredients and taste for balance of tart, salty and sweet, adjust as needed.

Drain the tempeh and keep the soy marinade, heat the oil in a pan over a medium to hot heat and quickly cook the small tempeh sqares until crisp on one side, toss over briefly then place back into the soy marinade.

Once cooked drain rice into a colander, then transfer into a bowl while still warm and mix through all other ingredients and dressing.  This salad is great warm or cold and keeps well for a day or two in the fridge (although it’s hard to make it last that long).

Substitute the parsley and Cuban oregano for whatever herbs you prefer or have in abundance in the garden at the time.  The chilli can be left out and replaced by cracked pepper, or not.  Can make a lunch just on its own, serve with other salads for a heartier meal, or as a side with fish or poultry.

© Clare Richards 2010

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By clare, January 9, 2012

Winged bean roots

Post-Christmas indulgence in the sultry heat of the Wet season is a great time to be eating heaps of herbs to help the body regenerate from the excesses of the party season.

The garden is madly sprouting – young turmeric leaves, wild pepper leaves, long leaf (sawtooth, Mexican or Thai) coriander, Vietnamese mint, garlic chives and Asian basil to name a few. Today we made a salad with rocket, young winged bean leaves (which have a mildly bitter foretaste and a green pea aftertaste, very pleasant) and a generous and finely sliced mix of all of the above, excepting wild pepper leaves as the mosquitoes were too virulent at sunset in that part of the garden.

Mixed with some soft fetta cheese, diced tomato and hard boiled eggs it made a great salad.  Oh, and also bits of diced winged bean root too.  First time I’d experimented with it.  It peels like cassava, having a thick but pliable bark-like skin, needs a while to cook (the small sections we boiled needed at least 1/2 hour), keeps a crunchy waterchestnut texture and has a mild nuttiness to its flavour.

I’ll add a photo tomorrow…

© Clare Richards 2010