Satisfying Cravings and (Late) New Year's Resolutions - Basic Cornbread

At the end of the first month of 2014 worked out that my new year’s resolution is to eat more cornbread. I love it so much, but it’s one of those things I forget about. It’s not often on menus in Perth, so it tends to go off my radar as eating it usually equals cooking it myself. But I went to Miss Kitty’s Saloon in Inglewood for brunch with my husband and sister-in-law a few weekends back and the stand-out dish from what we ordered was the steak benedict. Ignoring for a second the delicious jerk potatoes that it came with, the steak benedict was perfectly created. It was a thin marinated skirt steak, with a tart pink peppercorn hollandaise sauce on top of sweet and juicy caramelised onions all on top of the most melt-in-your-mouth buttery cornbread I’ve ever tasted.

I have a recipe for cornbread floating around somewhere that includes bacon and Cajun spices. I’ll try dig that out again now that it’s my new year’s resolution. But in the meantime, I wanted just your basic cornbread. Given that I’ve spent the last month drooling over the Treme cook book I got for Christmas, I thought that’d be the perfect resource for finding cornbread. And I wasn’t wrong. I’ve only made two small adjustments to their recipe. I used buttermilk instead of normal milk – because shouldn’t that always be a thing in southern style baking? I halved the salt and replaced it with a Creole spice mix. And I used olive oil instead of canola oil. Just because I like olive oil.

I served this as a base for the wonderful mushroom sauce that Alejandra from Always Order Dessert posted last year. And voila! Dinner. Just me and my baby.

There’s a recipe for jalapeno cornbread that might need to be tried now.

Oh, and they included Cane Syrup Butter in their cookbook as an accompaniment. Personally, I’m all for Maple Butter. Just whip a tablespoon or so of maple syrup into 50g or so of some delicious room temperature salted butter. I served this with my lemon and olive focaccia and it did not take long to be eaten!

Basic Cornbread
adapted from Treme
1 cup cornmeal plus 2 tbsps
1 cup plain flour
1 tbsp. plus 1 tsp baking powder
1 tbsp. raw sugar
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp Creole spice mix
1 cup buttermilk
1 egg
2 tbsp. melted butter
1/4 cup olive oil

Preheat the oven to 200C

Grease a skillet or dish that can go in the oven, and place in the oven to warm.

In a large bowl, whisk the 1 cup cornmeal, flour, baking powder, Creole spice mix, salt and sugar. Add the wet ingredients and stir until just well mixed and smooth. Do not overmix.

Remove the hot casserole dish from the oven, sprinkle the extra 2 tbsp. cornmeal over the bottom and cook in the oven for 2 minutes.

Remove from the oven an gently pour the batter over the top of the baked cornmeal. Cook for around 20 minutes until golden on top. Serve immediately.

Happy Birthday Skamp's Kitchen - Ricotta, Hazelnut and Fig Cake

Skamp’s kitchen had it’s anniversary on the 4^th of February. Yay! I put the call out on my facebook page – how should I celebrate my blogiversary? The overwhelming response was cake. Especially if that cake was shared with my fans! So, there was nothing for it, but to make cake when I got home from work. One friend had the good idea of making a fig cake, given that I was posting a bunch of fig recipes lately, and it just happened that I had a few left.

 

I decided to make a gluten-free cake, so that when I took the leftovers to work, a few co-workers who can’t eat gluten could still have a piece. And seeing as we were just coming out of January when everyone was still being good with their new years’ resolutions to eat healthier, I also made it with no processed sugar and all healthy fats from ricotta and hazelnuts. The result was a delicious, healthy, moist and nutty cake that didn’t last too long in the work kitchen.

 

But because I was celebrating, when Lance and I ate ours, I added an extra drizzle of honey. And some melted chocolate. And ate it with chocolate ice cream. Delicious. A dusting of icing sugar would also be a nice touch.

 

Ricotta, Hazelnut and Fig Cake
(adapted from Taste.com.au)

250g ricotta cheese
4 eggs, separated
1 vanilla bean, cut and seeds scraped out
½ cup honey
250g hazelnut meal
1 tsp ground ginger
6 figs, sliced into rounds
Optional – chocolate or honey to drizzle

Preheat oven to 150C, grease and line a springform cake tin

Beat the ricotta, egg yolks, vanilla and honey until smooth. Add the hazelnut meal and ginger, mix until fully incorporated.

Whisk the eggs in a separate bowl until soft peaks form. Gently fold the egg whites into the hazelnut mixture. Pour the mixture into a cake tin, and spread with a spatula. Gently press fig rounds into the top.

Bake for 40 minutes until a skewer comes out clean. Allow to cool 10 minutes before removing from the cake tin to a wire rack.

Serve drizzled with extra honey, or melted chocolate. Or both!

Quick Meals - Purple Cauliflower Cream Cheese Pizza with Lamb and Honey

Sometimes when colleagues see me eating leftovers at work, they ask if I have kids. When I say no, they then ask why I “hide” so many veges in my dishes. I don’t deliberately hide veges, I just like veges and try to include lots in my dishes - and processing is a lazy way of prepping them! But, if you do struggle to get your kids to eat veges and need to hide them, this pizza is a really good way of doing it. Pizza in general is a great way of doing it, because I’m yet to meet a kid who doesn’t love pizza. Check out my pizza sauce with beans here. But the vegetables in this pizza are 100% hidden in the sauce. It gets the wonderful pinky-purply colour from a purple cauliflower, but you can use a regular cauliflower. I know I’ve only ever come across the purple cauliflowers once in Perth!

The tortilla crusts were because I had leftovers. Sub in real pizza bases or lebanese loaves.

 

This is a great midweek meal, because it is super quick and easy to prepare. Everything is done in the food processor, then 10 minutes in the oven. 15 minutes total and you have a delicious meal.

Cauliflower Cream Cheese Pizza with Lamb and Honey 

¼ head cauliflower

200g Philadelphia Cream Cheese
2 tsp za'atar spices
2 tomatoes
2 lamb steaks
honey
parmesan
Tortillas or Lebanese loaves

Preheat your oven to 180C

Break the cauliflower into large florets and place in a food processor. Pulse to ‘rice’ it. Add the philly cream cheese, spices and tomatoes, then process until evenly chopped and combined, scraping down the sides as necessary.

Spread onto tortillas, slice lamb steaks thinly and scatter on top, top with grated parmesan, drizzle with honey.

Pop in the oven and bake until base is crispy and the parmesan is golden and melted

 

Party Inspiration - Camp Molloy

 

In Perth, we’re coming up for a long weekend, and I know hundreds of us WAliens flock Down South for a lovely and relaxing break. What a perfect time to reminisce over my 30th birthday – an American Summer Camp Themed week-long adventure in the Augusta/Margaret River region we dubbed Camp Molloy. Maybe inspire a few of you on day trips and activities in the area. Opportune timing also as I haven’t gotten around to processing any food photos lately (don’t blame me, blame the new Donkey Kong)

Molloy Island is a small residential island in the Blackwood River, accessible via a 4-car barge. I’ve been going to Molloy Island ever since I was born and I love it. My husband has grown to love it, too. I learnt to ride a bike there, got proposed to there and spent a month there on my honeymoon. I absolutely love this area of my state. It only made sense that my 30th should be there, too.

Given that it was a week holiday, Lance and I designed and made the invitations early to give guests ample opportunity to take time off work and things like that. The invitation I am still particularly proud of. It consisted of 4 parts. A postcard written from Lance and I, telling people we had discovered this camp. A ‘brochure’ outlining the details of the camp, including activities planned, rules of the camp and a few joke paragraphs. A permission slip and an invitation for my actual birthday “dinner” on the Saturday night, for people who could only make it down for the weekend.

 

 

Despite the fact that it was a group ‘holiday’, we treated it like it was a camp in terms of organisation. It’s really hard to get a bunch of adults to make decisions, so we planned all activities and running schedule so that the time away was used to maximum enjoyment! And everyone going had expectations of what they’d be doing. It worked really well. A few weeks before my birthday, we sent a detailed itinerary.

For the activities, we went to the beach, played archery, had a limousine brewery tour day, a limousine winery tour day, Halloween happened to fall during the holiday so we had a dress-up mini-golf and maze day. Lance planned a quiz night one night, we played tennis and we had lots and lots of good food and wine.

Some of my favourite places and businesses we visited on Camp Molloy are:

Cape Naturaliste Winery – my favourite winery ever. Ever.

Margaret River Venison Farm - Venison Chorizo, need I say more?
Vasse Virgin Olives
Eagle Bay Brewery
Cheeky Monkey Brewery
Cruising the Cape Limos
Amazen
Woody Nook WInery - definitely worth hitting for a good lunch spot on a winery trek

Vasse Felix Winery

Peacetree Estate Winery

Voyager Estate Winery
Leeuwinn Estate Winery

Margaret River Dairy

The Berry Farm

 

 

And a whole bunch more I can't currently remember. Shoot me an email if you are interested in anything in particular. Or check out MargaretRiver.com 

 

Have you ever planned a road trip party? What did you find that worked really well? What were the struggles? Would you do it again? I'm hoping to plan a foodie weekend down south soon!