Aubergine and Green Bean Curry

Yup, no school run means more cookin'. Time to grill some auberine.

This time in wedges for a curry. I then made some curry paste with onion, coriander, cumin, garlic, lemongrass, turmeric, ginger, and a couple of mild chillis.

Have I mentioned I love my food processor? It's the kind of love that really lasts.

The paste and grilled aubergine went in the fridge overnight, because I was fed up with cooking at that point and my husband offered to cook something else instead.

So the next day, when we got back from our outing, I cooked the paste for a while, then put in the aubergines (5 in total).

In went a can of tomatoes and a can of coconut milk.

That went in to simmer for a half hour and looked like a gloupy mess.

I toasted some cashews. If you pronounce it Ca-SHOOOOO! you can pretend you are sneezing.

Once the curry had simmered long enough I put in green beans just long enough really to heat them through, a few minutes.

And I artfully chopped some cilantro/fresh coriander on a chopping board that was given to us as a wedding gift. It took us some 7 years to gather the courage to actually use it (it's real purdy), but we're over that now.

And finally, it all went together on some rice. All was well with the world, especially since there was enough left over to make another family meal for the freezer. Of course, when I say "family meal", I mean my husband and I will eat it, my eldest will force half of his down, and the other two will try to dig out the rice not touching the curry.

For the recipe, you can go here, or find it copied and pasted below:

For the curry paste
5-6 shallots (or 1 onion), peeled and finely chopped
6 garlic cloves, peeled and roughly chopped
2 thumb-sized pieces ginger, peeled and roughly chopped
2 lemongrass stalks, tough outer layers removed, finely sliced
5-6 green chillies (medium-hot), deseeded and roughly chopped
2 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp ground turmeric

For the curry
5 large aubergines
About 6 tbsp sunflower oil
300ml passata, or sieved roasted tomatoes
400ml tin coconut milk
300g french beans
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 handful chopped coriander leaves
75g cashews or almonds, toasted and coarsely chopped (optional)
Lime wedges, to serve

Put all the curry paste ingredients in a blender with a tablespoon of water; whizz to a coarse paste. If necessary, stop the motor a few times so you can scrape down the sides.

Cut each aubergine in half lengthways, cut each half into three lengthways, then halve each piece, so you end up with 12 wedges from each aubergine.

Heat two or three tablespoons of oil over a medium-high heat in a large, nonstick frying pan. Sauté the aubergine wedges in batches, until lightly browned, adding more oil as needed. As you remove each cooked batch from the pan, lay the wedges on kitchen paper to drain.

Heat a tablespoon of oil in a large, deep saucepan and add half the curry paste (refrigerate the rest for another use). Fry over medium heat, stirring constantly, for three to four minutes, then add the aubergines and stir for a minute or two until coated with the spice mixture. Add the passata and coconut milk, and simmer, partially covered, for 10 minutes. Add the french beans and simmer until tender – about five minutes.

Season generously, then stir in the chopped coriander. If using the nuts, scatter them over the top. Serve with lime wedges and rice.

Aubergine Parmigiana

The summer holidays are upon us once more. Once I got rid of the idea that I could be at all productive in my own studies during this period, I started to thoroughly enjoy myself. I do not have to currently rush my children out the door every morning, nor do I have to spend at least 3 hours of the day getting them to and from school and playgroup.

No, instead we have been on day trips to 3 different local beaches, to the zoo, to the Kelpies and the Helix, and, somewhat less excitingly, we have had a leisurely trip to Costco and Ikea where we were fairly self restrained in our purchases, investing instead in parenting smugness.

My husband works from home in our small flat, so the pressure is always on to get everyone outside, but today things outside did not look good. The forecast was rain, rain, and more rain. Not wanting to visit the museum AGAIN, and dealing with three kids who were still tired from outings earlier this week, we decided to have a day mostly at home, leaving the flat only to go to the shops for rations.

After spending three hours playing monopoly (where I was not, I confess, able to hold myself back, even with a five year old pouting) I set to work on this baby, a rainy day meal to be sure:



The vegetarian meal that doesn't feel vegetarian, and is available in every respectable good Italian restaurant: Aubergine/eggplant Parmigiana. A meal, as Mr River Cottage dude says, is somehow greater than the sum of all its parts. And it is simple, if it does take ages. Don't kid yourself, grilling those aubergines/eggplants always takes a while, and is a big pain the the backside, but it is worth it if you have the time.

I sliced 5 small ones and gave them a dose of olive oil with my pastry brush then put them on to grill.

They came out in various shades of doneness; this was part of the first batch to come out:

It took 3 batches to finish them, taking quite a while to cook through.

The sauce was put on while they cooked - just a simple affair of tinned tomatoes, garlic, onion, salt, pepper, and some fresh basil thrown in once it had sufficiently thickened.

Then three layers went into a baking dish: aubergines, then sauce, then fresh mozzarella and parmesan, and this was repeated three times over.

After forty minutes in the oven, it came out looking like this:

And smelled amazing. I served it with garlic bread. Look at that precision, how carefully the lines were cut, how beautifully the bread was shaped.

Yeah, that's because I bought it ready-made from Lidl. 

I can't give you their recipe for it, but I can give you the Aubergine one:

INGREDIENTS5 small eggplants (about 2 pounds)
4-5 tablespoons olive oil
2 balls buffalo mozzarella (about 4ounces each), torn into pieces
About 1.25 ounces parmesan, hard goat cheese, or other well-flavored hard cheese, grated
For the tomato sauce:2 tablespoons olive oil
2 onions, chopped
2 garlic cloves, chopped
2 (14-ounce) cans plum toamtoes, coarsely chopped, any stalky ends and skin removed
Good handfull of fresh basil
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
a little sugar

METHOD

Trim aubergines and cut into thin slices lengthwise. Heat your grill/broiler to high heat, then brush each slice with olive oil and grill on each side until browned. Remove to paper towels and continue until all are cooked.

Meanwhile, make the tomato sauce. Heat the 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a very large, wide pan over medium heat.
Add the onions and garlic and saute gently for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally until soft. Add the tomatoes with their juice. Bring to a simmer, then simmer briskly, stirring often, for about half an hour, or until the sauce is thick and rich. Season well with salt and pepper and a little sugar to taste, then add basil and leave to infuse.

Preheat the oven to 180C. Lay a third of the eggplant slices in the bottom of an ovenproof dish, 8 by 10 inches and at least 2 inches deep. Cover with a third of the tomato sauce. Dot a third of the mozzarella over the sauce, then scatter a thin layer of grated cheese over that. Repeat with the remaining ingredients so you have three layers in the dish.

Bake for about 30-40 minutes, until bubbling and golden on top. Serve with lots of fresh green salad – and bread, if you like.

Carrot Cake

When my brothers and I were little people, my mom used to cook and bake for us a fair amount, making a variety of different dishes and treats. As the years passed, and she returned to full time employment, she continued to cook regularly but the baking, well the baking held little interest for her anymore. She had other things to get done, quite frankly. 

But there was one treat she used to make occasionally, and never from a box mix: carrot cake. Oh, we tried the box mix, but it was far too inferior to the real thing to consider even calling it by the same name. The carrot didn't look like real carrot, and it certainly wasn't real cream cheese in the icing. A poor imitation to be sure.

Whenever my mother's rota came at work for her to bring in a treat for the staff room she always made this. We were always slightly resentful of this fact, because she would slave and swear over it, being out of the habit of baking now, but we would rarely get to taste it. The completed dish would be put in the fridge overnight and whisked away to the teacher's lounge at her school the next day. She would bring the empty carcass of a dish home the next day, smiling triumphantly. "It disappeared within a couple hours!" she would boast as she put the pan into the dishwasher. We vultures hoping for crumbs would slink away upstairs, cursing the teachers who had stolen what we considered to be OUR cake.

The recipe was from a battered old book from my nursery school, a fundraising effort by the mothers when they asked all the mums to contribute their favourite recipe. A slim volume, we lost it several times but eventually found it again. When the 21st century arrived, I made sure to have this recipe emailed to me so as not to ever lose it again.

I have adapted it over the years, but at its core it remains the same. I added pineapple where none existed originally and spiced it up a bit further, and I do have to adjust it slightly to fit UK ingredients. The original recipe works great in North America, but we are unable to get block cream cheese here so more butter is necessary in the icing in order to ensure it does not end up too runny, I also find it ends up denser here with UK flour than in in the USA - I have no idea why. 

On this occasion I was making it for a church gathering, so my 9 X 13 dish was more suitable to make it a tray bake like affair, but you could make it in a couple 8 inch round pans and stack them on top of each other. The choice is yours.

In order to have everything in grabbing distance, I assembled the goods. This isn't a recipe I make on a whim, as I usually don't have sufficient carrots, cream cheese, and pineapple to make it without shopping specially for it.

First I made up the flour mix. I used to skip this step, wanting to save on washing up by just adding the dry ingredients all together later and stirring them into the egg mixture. However, occasionally I encountered an unsavoury problem: green carrot. After a day or two, some of the carrot in the cake would go green, making it look slightly alarming and toxic. This would happen even when I stored the cake carefully in the fridge. Eventually, thanks to nigella.com, I learned this is what can happen if you have either too much baking powder or it isn't distributed evenly into the mixture: it's just a chemical reaction between the raising agent and the carrot, nothing poisonous, just freaky looking. So now I make sure to be real careful like when measuring the raising agents for this, and I do the flour mix ahead so I can be sure to mix everything together. So in went flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and a few spices, one of which was allspice. I find it confusing that allspice and mixed spice are both sold and are completely different. 

Once I'd mixed that I set it aside and thought I'd be real clever by putting the pineapple through the small grater on my food processor. This was not as smart an idea as I thought:

So I put in the blade to mash it up a bit more. You could just buy a small shredded pineapple if you are stateside, but I've not found it here so it becomes a DIY job.

That's better. I then put it into a measuring cup. No, I didn't rinse the cup out first.

Then I peeled and shredded carrots until I had 4 cups of shredded mixture. It's important to get your five a day.

Finally it was time to move on to the oil and sugar. For some reason it looks like a gooey green monster here.

I added four eggs.  And yes, stir them in one at a time, because in a controlled experiment Cooks Illustrated found it was actually better for your cake to do so. Here went the first.

And then went the others followed by just a touch of Costco vanilla.

And then in went the flour mix to be folded in.

Last but not least went in the carrots, pineapple, and some sultanas that I tried to, er, chop with the food processor. I managed to chop some of the shredded carrot still in the food processor but not the sultanas. Oh well, at worst they all sink to the bottom of the cake.

Some people put nuts in their carrot cake. They are wrong.

It makes an ungodly looking mixture, but baking will make it better.

It might be necessary to repeat that to yourself a few times as you put it in the pan. I put loads of paper up the sides to make it easy to pull out and slice later.

See, it looks better now, doesn't it?

The next morning I made the icing. I would have liked to do at soon as the cake was cooled, but there wasn't room in my fridge to put the completed product in overnight, and I didn't want the icing sitting out overnight. I did, however leave the ingredients overnight at room temperature, as coldness is the enemy of this icing. You'll soon see why...

All I did was combine icing sugar, butter, cream cheese, and vanilla and stir them with my hand mixer.

And look what I got! A lumpy mess. I have come to realise this is a result of things not being quite warm enough. Even left overnight, my kitchen was too cold for things to happily blend together. Into the microwave it went for a ten second blast.

My adoring fans looked on.

After that quick burst of heat, it blended up all creamy like. I had a LOT of lumpy batches of icing over the years before I figured out that trick.

"Mama, you one clever lady!" is what he meant to say. It came out as "AAAM!"

Now time for the two parts to meet. As you can see, the cake came out of the tin easily in one quick lift.

Which made it easy to cut into slabs.

And easy to lift these slabs into their tins en masse. Here they are, nestled inside.

Now I could have iced them, then cut them and put them in, but that ends up a bit messy. So instead, once they were in the transportation tin, I put the icing into a ziplock bag.

And then put a blob of icing on each of the pieces. It could have been prettier, to be sure, but I had to make a batch of cardamom buns as well so I was in a bit of a rush. Anyway, it means they transport easily and are easy to remove without sticky hands everywhere.

There were no survivors. I get a LOT of requests for this recipe, so here it is:

CARROT CAKE

Cake:

2 cups plain flour

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

1/4 tsp allspice

1/4 tsp ground nutmeg

pinch ground cloves

1 tsp cinnamon

1 1/2 cup caster sugar

1 cup vegetable oil

4 eggs 

1/2 tsp vanilla

1/2 cup shredded pineapple

3 1/2 cups shredded carrot

1/2 cup sultanas

Icing:

225 g cream cheese

140 g unsalted butter

2 cups icing sugar

2 tsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 180C/350F and position rack in centre of oven. Line a 9"X13"pan or alternatively line two 8" round cake tins. Sift flour, baking powder, soda, salt, and spices together and set aside. In large bowl, beat sugar and oil together. Add eggs one at a time. Add vanilla. Fold in dry ingredients then stir in carrots, pineapple, and sultanas. Pour into pan and start checking at 30 minutes, though it may need as much as 40. 

Once cake is cool, blend icing ingredients together with electric beaters if possible and spread on cake as desired.

Quick Dinner Rolls

"Do you still do that cooking blog?" asked someone recently.

"Er...no...but I will," I feebly replied. But when? I guess it has been a while. I've still been cooking, and trying new things, but you know, there's three little people living with me, two of which are running around naked as I write this, and they somewhat get in the way of things.

But I had a good weekend and am ready to attempt this bloggy thing once more. Good because we weren't rushing everywhere trying to do lots of things, we just stayed in for the most part and yesterday Robert skipped his nap and went to bed before seven and ohmygoditwasamazingIhadaneveningtoactuallyjustsitandread!!!!

To celebrate this good fortune, we decided to make burgers today. My husband is usually in charge of the burgers themselves, and he volunteered to make them today, so my job was just to make a side dish of taboulleh and to make the rolls for the burgers. I googled the internet for a quick roll recipe that I could make before picking the kids up from school and came up with these.

If I had been paying attention I would have cut out the sugar, but I wasn't, so I didn't. So instead here's what I did.

Some water, yeast, oil, sugar, and water went into a bowl. Just easy blend yeast, because it takes the pressure off. It's a whole lotta yeast, enough to raise the dead. I've never seen fresh yeast for sale here, but hopefully will find it one day.

This cute guy was there to watch.

After ten minutes, the mixture was officially alive in a freaky Frankenstein's monster kind of way.

So in went 2/3 of the flour, salt, and an egg. I think the egg and oil helps it be more bun like rather than crusty.

It was an unappetizing gloopy mess.

So I put in more flour. That would hopefully make it less gloopy.

Magically it began to look more bread dough like.

So onto the counter top it went for a bit of kneading.

 I lost patience after about five minutes and left it. It did look smoother and felt a bit tougher, but I had a fractious toddler on my hip who wasn't down with me kneading.

I was ready to let it rise as a huge ball but then I checked the recipe and it said to cut into 12 pieces, so I done did that there then like so.

I'm not verra good at making them into perfect spheres. Here they are after 10 minutes of rising, ready to be buns in my oven.

And after a few minutes, voila! Dinner rolls for da burgers! I think they could have done with a couple minutes more, but Paul Hollywood wasn't there to tell me off and we ate them anyway.

Here they are in all their sliced glory.

And here they are with the other schtuff...except for the burgers, as they were cooking behind me when I took the photo.

And if you want to make "30 minute dinner rolls", just do as KitchenMeetsGirl suggests below:

Ingredients

• 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons warm water
• 1/3 cup oil
• 2 tablespoons active dry yeast
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 egg
• 3 1/2 cups bread flour

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
2. Combine the warm water, oil, yeast, and sugar. Allow the mixture to rest for 10 minutes, until it is frothy and freaky
3. Mix 2 cups of the flour, the salt, and the egg into the yeast mixture. Add the remaining 1 1/2 cups flour 1/2 cup at a time, kneading it in until you get a workable dough
4. Shape dough into 12 balls and place on a baking tray. Let dough rise for 10 minutes.
5. Bake for 10 minutes or until tops are just golden brown.