Vanilla ice-cream

From Spice by Christine Manfield page 284

Possibly the simplest recipe in the book. Its been a while so I thought I'd go easy on myself.

I have an ice-cream churner which literally hasn't been used in years, so I was a bit concerned the machine wouldn't hold up after sitting in the bottom of the cupboard for so long. It turns out it did hold up and chilled better than expected, which resulted in the opposite problem.

Home made ice-cream seems pretty straight forward. Start with simmering the milk and adding the flavourings. In this case I used the genuine article - vanilla bean pods.

Then get the egg yolks ready and add the prescribed amount of sugar.

Whisk the egg yolks and sugar together, and then add the strained milk mixture.

Cook over a bain-marie (water bath) until the mixture turns to custard coats the back of a spoon. That is, if you run your finger horizontally against the spoon, the mix wont drip into the mark you made. If it does, keep cooking.

Then add into your ice cream churner.

So it turns out my ice-cream machine had the opposite problem to what I expected - it chilled too effectively. The mixture began to ice up on the base and sides of the churning container jamming the paddle, so I found myself churning it manually with a whisk.

The mix seemed to be coming together, then I tried to get the churner to do the rest of the work, by turning the chilling function on and off intermittently. It didn't quite work, and the mixture began to soften more than when I was churning it manually.

I thought it would be a good point to try completing the churn and seeing how the end result worked out. I poured the mix into a container which went in the freezer.

Not quite ice-cream but more of a semifreddo in the end. Not that the customers were phased, it had all the taste of a great vanilla ice-cream.

More ice-creams are the one way, a chance to hopefully perfect my churning process.

Happy cooking!

Black Truffle and Porcini Risotto

From Spice by Christine Manfield page 224

Slight correction to the recipe name. It was more of a 'Black Truffle and Swiss Brown Mushroom Risotto'. I didn't have a lot of luck finding the dried porcini - and my desire to cook and eat outweighed my desire to continue on my ingredient hunt - thus the substitution.

Mind you - compared to dried porcini - black truffles are much harder to find. Funny what you can get at Aldi from time to time though!

I also managed to get some truffle oil there as well. It looks pretty genuine with truffle slices in the bottom of the bottle.

Introducing my general list of ingredients...

This time the glass of wine went in the dish!

I couldn't find fresh tarragon at the time, so I substituted some of the dried herb. The flavour of the tarragon seemed to complement the flavour of the truffles. Yum!

Happy cooking!

Salsa!

Salsa - Spanish for 'sauce', seems to have become a favourite dip for corn chips across the western world. A colleague dropped a collection of chillies at our desk, so after halving the bounty with a fellow chilli lover, I came out of the deal with a number of yellow birds-eye style chillies (not exactly sure of the type) - oh an a couple of Carolina Reapers.

Initially intending to make a south east Asian style sauce, I decided I was in more of a Mexican mood. So my ingredients were: a green capsicum, one red onion, garlic (5 cloves), two limes, two tins of whole tomatoes, one bunch of coriander, Mexican seasoning, salt and sugar to taste, and the chillies.

First, dice up the capsicum then red onion...

Then garlic and then yellow chillies...

Then (very carefully) finely dice and add the Carolina Reapers.

Then with the coriander I separated the stalks from the leaves, and diced up the stalks (I add these to the cooking a little later).

Heat some oil in a pot / pan / whatever you have on hand - and add the diced ingredients except for the coriander at this stage.

Now that the chilli is cooking - set the rangehood to its highest setting (last time I cooked chilli like this I had family members in separate parts of the house coughing within about 2 minutes).

Stir... keeping your face a safe distance from the fumes.

Once things have started to soften I added in the coriander stalks and cook through.

(feel free to omit the coriander if you're one of those people who doesn't like it, and also click here, but don't feel bad - apparently about 10% of people can't stand the stuff and it's wired to our genes)

Then add the Mexican seasoning.

Stir through briefly to activate the flavours in the spices. Be careful not to burn and then add in the tinned tomatoes.

I cooked through for about another 10 minutes before adding the coriander leaves, lime, and seasoning for flavour.

Even though it was way too hot for the smaller members of the household, it came with the thumbs up.

It made about a litre. I brought it to work to share with my chilli grower a few fellow chilli lovers, and though it was really hot some of them came back for seconds. I made it part of my lunch and after a few minutes experienced a little 'chilli high'. Nice.

Yellow Curry Chicken

I recently added a small chilli garden out the front of the house. One of the small plants I bought was loaded up with yellow chillies, so I decided to relieve the plant of its chillies and make a yellow curry chicken.

Starting with the dry spice mix - the usual suspects including cumin and coriander seeds.

When making the curry paste I find that its best to begin breaking down the ingredients in the mortar and pestle. I don't have the stamina or patience to grind the ingredients to a paste, but on the other hand putting ingredients straight into a food processor doesn't seem to do the job. The ingredients are chopped rather than crushed. Anything fibrous - particularly the lemongrass - stays fibrous with that approach.

So... with each ingredient I chop it up, give it a good whack...

...then it all goes in the food processor...

Lemongrass, fresh turmeric, shallots, garlic etc.

There was quite a bit of paste in the end. Enough for a couple of meals, though I couldn't resist using the whole lot in one curry for the extra flavour. There wasn't a lot of heat in the chillies (which I de-seeded) - so it was family friendly.

Fry off the paste, then add coconut milk and a few kaffir lime leaves for added flavour. Cook the paste in the coconut milk for a little while.

Add chicken legs and slow cook so they become tender. Cooking on the bone adds extra flavour to the meat as well.

I added carrot first as it takes a little while to cook through.

Then finally snow peas. These don't take long to cook. I prefer if they're slightly undercooked so you still get a little bit of crunch.

Season the curry with the usual sweet / sour / salt. In this case palm sugar / lime juice / fish sauce. Get some jasmine rice ready in advance and dinner is served.