Lady Lunchalot

Just quietly, I’m quite excited.

I went out into my backyard to get a lemon (for a well deserved post-house-cleaning glass of Frangelico) and I spotted something I’ve been wanting to see for aaaages.

A flower on my passionfruit vine!

It’s been a long time coming. I planted this vine about 18 months ago and have seen two summers come and go without any flowers, which of course, means no fruit. Only months after planting it, the vine grew and grew like something from The Day of the Triffids - from the feeble baby stalk I once planted it now sprawls all over our back fence like a lazy teenager with an Xbox. Does this mean my little Nelly Kelly vine has finally hit puberty?

In other exciting news (stay with me here) today I discovered that the crabapple tree in my front yard is not a crabapple tree at all. The apples are actually quite delicious if they are left to ripen properly on the tree. You see, with all my extensive horticultural knowledge, I had been picking the apples when they were still green (thinking they were green apples) and they tasted terrible, so I thought they must be crabapples.

Genius, I know. But they never seemed to survive the birds or the wind to stay on the tree long enough to ripen!

Today, however, I spotted a bullheaded little apple that just wouldn’t say die. A lone cheery splash of colour high up in the branches! I managed to knock it down with a broom and cut off a piece. Tasted just like an apple should!

I guess I should have realised that if the birds were eating the fruit, they must be on to a good thing.

Does anyone know how I’d find out what kind of apple tree it is?

I admit, I’m a bit of a kitchen nazi, and definitely prefer to cook alone. So when I boot O out of the kitchen, he usually takes himself off to the shed.

If you’d like to check out what O gets up to while I am cooking, check out O’s new blog. He’d love to hear from you, so remember to say hello and leave a comment!

This year I decided to get in touch with my Maltese roots and make figolli, a traditional Easter biscuit.

When I was a kid, one of the highlights of Easter time was making the trip over to my nanna’s house to get our figolli. Every year nanna would make 16 elaborately decorated figolli, one for each of the grandkids, and as it was a case of first in best dressed it was a crucial Easter strategy to get in early so you could pick one with the most icing or the biggest Easter egg.

Figolli are traditionally enormous shortbread style biscuits sandwiching an almond filling. They’re decorated with icing in over the top patterns, and always always always have an Easter egg stuck on them somewhere.

I remember figolli as being huge - way more than even the most enthusiastic seven year old could get through in one sitting. Consequently they took days to eat and had to be jealously guarded from older brothers who ate much faster than you. Nanna would always make them in very non-gender specific shapes: cars and boats with blue icing for the grandsons, hearts and stars in pink for the girls. If you’re a figolli purist, a fish shape is probably going to make an appearance too.

But I decided to put a modern twist on an old family favourite. I made mini figolli at a normal cookie size. Unfortunately my sweet tooth has faded from what it was when nanna was making figolli, and my patience with a piping bag isn’t quite up to her standards, so my sparsely decorated figolli would have certainly been the last left on the kitchen bench after 16 grandkids had made their choices.

Figolli recipe
Biscuit
200g caster sugar
400g plain flour
200g butter
Grated rind of 1 lemon
3 egg yolks

Filling
300g caster sugar
3 egg whites
Grated rind of I lemon
1 tsp orange flower water
300g almond meal

Make the pastry first. Mix the sugar and sifted flour, and rub in the butter until it looks like breadcrumbs. Add the grated lemon rind and the egg yolks and knead into a dough. You may need to add a little water. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for about an hour or overnight.

Next, make the almond filling. Mix the almond meal with the sugar, a few drops of orange blossom water and the lemon rind. Mix in the egg whites.

Roll out the pastry and cut into fish shapes, hearts, or whatever you like. You’ll need two shapes per biscuit as you’ll need to make a little sandwich with them. Be careful of shapes with pointy bits, like stars. It’s hard to sandwich the filling into the edges. Mama Lunchalot told me that Nanna used to have some big templates that she used year after year.

Place a teaspoon of almond filling onto each shape and sandwich with another shape. Seal the edges. You might want a wet pastry brush for this. Bake for about 20 minutes until golden brown.

Cool and decorate with different coloured icing and small easter eggs.

No, I’m not pregnant, but here’s a question for you. What do you get when you pour a kettle of boiling water down a rabbit hole?

Hot, cross bunnies of course!

Even though hot cross buns have been in the supermarket since Christmas, I’ve managed to restrain myself from buying any, knowing full well just how much butter I will feel compelled to slather all over them. My hips can only handle that much butter for one weekend a year - no use drawing it out any longer than that.

So today is Good Friday, and I decided to make my first ever batch of hot cross buns. Mama Lunchalot was flying in from Queensland this morning, and I know that she would like nothing more than to be greeted at the airport with the news that I had a bun in the oven, so who am I to disappoint?

O was dispatched to the bakery first thing this morning to pick up some fresh yeast. Many thanks to the friendly bakers at Yarraville Bakers Delight who were more than happy to give O some yeast for my baking, on the house.

I’d looked at a few recipes on the web, and it seemed to come down to a showdown between Delia Smith and the BBC. A few other bloggers gave Delia’s recipe the thumbs down, so I decided to stick with the BBC’s traditional hot cross bun recipe.

First I crumbled the yeast into a mixture of egg, sugar, flour and water and let it sit for half an hour while I vaccuumed the house. There was a cleaning frenzy afoot this morning, so I was letting the dough rise in between cleaning sessions.

Next I mixed in flour, spices, butter, sugar, lemon zest, salt and dried fruit and kneaded it with the dough hook on my wonderful Kitchen Aid. I didn’t have any mixed spice, so I followed Sam’s suggestion from Becks & Posh and mixed together a couple of teaspoons of nutmeg, allspice, ground cloves, ground ginger and cinnamon. It gave the buns just the right kick.

I let the dough rise for an hour. Yeast recipes always advise letting the dough rise in a warm place. In winter I always put dough by the heater, but it wasn’t cool enough to turn a heater on, so I put the dough on the ironing board next to the dryer in our poorly ventilated laundry while my washing dried. That room gets like a sauna. Perfect!

Next, I knocked it back and kneaded it again until the dough was nice and elastic. Kneading dough lengthens the strands of gluten that gives yeasty breads their lovely texture, so it’s important you knead it for long enough.

After this, I put another load of laundry in the dryer and let the dough rise for another 30 minutes before shaping each bun and cutting a cross in the top of them with scissors. After that I put them on a tray to… you guessed it, rise again.

After about 30 minutes I mixed a paste of flour and water and piped a cross onto each bun with a piping bag. I’d always wondered how they made the crosses on hot cross buns. Now I know! Then I baked them for about 10-15 minutes until brown.

The recipe included brushing the buns with golden syrup, but I didn’t have any so I mixed some treacle and honey and glazed the buns with that instead. It was a little darker than ideal, as it dulled the whiteness of the cross, but it tasted great. And there were no complaints from O or Mama Lunchalot. We’d scoffed seven of the sticky suckers within minutes of pulling them from the oven!

Roast chicken is one of my favourite things to cook and to eat. A baked chook filled with stuffing has to be one of the most beautiful sights ever seen.

Unfortunately I’m always so excited by the prospect of eating a roast chicken that I’ve never managed to take a half decent photo of any of the chickens I’ve cooked, so my pics never really do justice to one of my all time favourite dishes.

On Saturday, I roasted two chickens. One was a weight watchers friendly version, with slices of lemon and sprigs of fresh parsley tucked between the skin and the breast, and a quartered lemon placed in the cavity with some herbs. The slices of lemon are a handy way of protecting the breast meat from drying out.

The other chicken was a little more decadent. Ok, a lot more decadent. I mixed a cardiac-arrest-inducing amount of butter with garlic, fresh parsley and tarragon and stuffed spoonfuls of it it under the skin on the breast. The herby butter melts throughout the chicken as it cooks, crisping up the skin and keeping the meat deliciously moist.

I also made a great stuffing, inspired by Paul’s excellent stuffing recipe that I tasted about 4 or 5 years ago and have never forgotten. Thanks for giving up your secrets Paul!

Sautee a finely chopped onion with a couple of rashers of chopped bacon in another wodge of… butter. *Gulp*.

Mix a cup or two of breadcrumbs with some thyme, crushed garlic, sage and fresh chopped parsley. Mix in the onion and bacon, a sprinkle of pine nuts and a squeeze of lemon juice. Mix in enough water to make it clump together, and then stuff it into the cavity. I like to overstuff the bird a bit, as it makes it look more plump when it comes out of the oven.

Don’t tell anyone, but I also had a leftover nugget of garlic butter so I buried it in the middle of the stuffing inside the chook.

Ooooh, my poor hips.

I’d planned to roast my two beeyootiful birdies on the rotisserie in My Wonderful Ilve, but with the all those veggies in there as well, I’d run out of room. So I popped them straight on to the oven rack with a pan underneath to catch all the juices.

Ok, ok, I also made gravy from the drippings. But I only ate a spoonful of gravy. I promise.

*Double gulp*.

Recently Kathryn and Tim dropped around to our place bringing with them one of my favourite things.

A craving for cheeseburgers!

Tim is a Canadian of the mais oui variety, and his hankering for cheeseburgers was on a truly North American scale.

So our two friends arrived on our doorstep bearing gifts of mince meat, hamburger buns, barbecue sauce and of course…. cheeeeeeese.

Tim made the gargantuan-patties and O manned the barbecue. I didn’t do much other than set the table, which was fine by me. It’s so nice to be cooked for in your own home!

The cheeseburgers really hit the spot, particularly when drowned with that delicious smoky barbecue sauce that seems next to impossible to find in Australia. I wolfed mine down in an embarrassingly short amount of time, which made me feel a little like Popeye’s friend, Wimpy.

Thanks Kathryn and Tim!