books, recipes, parenting & other things
How awesome is this grasshopper’s camouflage? He looked just like the dried eucalyptus leaves that were lying on the verandah next to him.
Wildlife of Greater Brisbane says that he is… wait for it… a Dead Leaf Grasshopper! Of course, why didn’t I guess that? Otherwise known as Goniaea australasiae.
This is a lovely creamy soup with a beautifully smooth rich texture and sweet flavour, and very quick to make. It’s a recipe from the August 2007 issue of delicious magazine, which I altered slightly to make it a little lower in fat. It didn’t detract from the creaminess of the soup – in fact, the Husband declared it was a little too creamy for his taste. Served with crunchy garlic croutons for contrast, this is a delicious soup to start a meal with, or for a light meal on its own with some salad.
ingredients:
50g unsalted butter
1 onion, diced
1 caulifower, broken into florets
2 cups of chicken or vegetable stock (go for the reduced salt version if you’re buying stock)
300ml skim milk
additional 150ml skim milk
2 tbsp low fat sour cream
1/2 small cobb or vienna loaf
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 tbsp chopped parsley
Melt the butter in a large saucepan, then add the onion and cook gently for a couple of minutes.
Add the cauliflower florets, and cook for a minute or so. Pour the stock and milk over the cauliflower, and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat, and cook for about 5 to 8 minutes, until the cauliflower is soft.
While the soup is cooking, break up the bread loaf with your hands on a baking tray, and sprinkle with garlic. Bake at a high heat, say 200C, for about 5 minutes until golden and crunchy. Sprinkle the parsley over the mixture.
Leave the soup to cool slightly, then blend (either with a handheld blender, or pouring the soup by halves into a blender).
Return the blended soup to the saucepan, and stir in the additional milk and sour cream. Taste, and season with salt and white pepper.
Serve hot, sprinkled with the bread, garlic and parsley mixture. I found that larger bread pieces gave a nicer crunch than the smaller crumbs, and contrasted nicely with the smooth creamy soup.
A block of wild bird seed on the verandah has been attracting the local lorikeets, and a pair of king parrots have been turning up recently to feed. They’re such pretty birds, so vibrantly coloured – I keep wishing they would drop a feather or two.
This week’s books were a mixed bag. I finished the excellent When Will There Be Good News, a Christmas present, polished off a mediocre audio book, From Dead to Worse, and had a couple of books from the library – the terrible Hold Tight, and the decent Origin in Death.
Hold Tight is the first Harlan Coben I’ve read, and I definitely won’t be heading back for more – terribly wooden writing and similarly inanimate characters. The paragraph below is how Coben handles the dramatic “reveal” moment towards the end of the book – Hester is a lawyer, LeCrue and Duncan are cops.
“The room pretty much exploded then. There were tears, of course. Hugs. Apologies. Wounds were ripped open and closed. Hester worked it. She grabbed LeCrue and Duncan. They all saw what happened here. No one wanted to prosecute the Bayes.”
Wounds ripped open and closed? What the hell?
When I moved onto JD Robb’s Origin in Death, which I’d previously thought of as crack in the form of a book, I was a little surprised to realise that Robb was a far superior writer to Coben – crisp writing and vivid characters, and this book also features clones. I love clones. Robb’s books may be crack, but they’re healthy well-balanced crack.
From Dead To Worse hardly bears mentioning – it’s the eighth (and at this point in time, the last) book in a series that I can’t stop myself reading, and am mostly reading in any case because of the fantastic TV series based on the books, True Blood.
I love Kate Atkinson’s books – When Will There Be Good News is the third of her books featuring Jackson Brodie, private detective, and as usual features several connected storylines which gradually draw together over the course of the book.
Coolest book link of the week? The Guardian’s series of 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read, selected in themes over seven days (love, crime, comedy, family and self, state of the nation, science fiction and fantasy, war and travel). Some great selections and I’ve got a couple of books out of the library based on the recommendations – Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train and Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.
In 2007, I read 173 books. I was aiming, in a vague sort of way, for a total of 200 books in 2008 (just for the pleasure of the round number). However, I didn’t quite make it – instead I read 183 books in 2008, including audio books.
Best Nostalgic Journey
I start re-reading the Chalet School books by Elinor Brent-Dyer, a mammoth series of books that runs to about 60 volumes. I began with The School at the Chalet, and got to book 26, Carola Storms the Chalet School, only skipping a few rare volumes I couldn’t get hold off. My enthusiasm for the books has waned the further I go on in the series, particularly as new characters are introduced who are exact echoes of the first characters. I rather prefer the first characters to those who come after, but alas, they all grow up, get married, and usually vanish from the storyline.
Best Book with a Mission
Scarlett Thomas’ PopCo might be a book with a message, and a wee bit moralistic for my taste, but it’s also a fantastic story about cryptography, marketing and ethics for the modern age. I enjoyed it so much it led me on to No Logo, Naomi Klein’s book about globalisation and marketing and the rise of sweatshop labour.
Worst Book
I read several dreadful fantasy novels, but the hands-down worst novel I read in 2008 has to be Breaking Dawn, the final book in Stephenie Meyer’s best-selling series. One of the worst cases ever of an author inserting her religious and personal moral message into a fantasy book, of all things. I mean, who decides to use a book about vampires to create their perfect Morman marriage? The plot development and characters are also laughable. Any book that makes you visibly cringe while reading goes on the Worst Book of the Year list.
Best New Author
There were a few new discoveries, including Ellis Peters and his Brother Cadfael novels, Patricia Briggs’ novels about werewolves, and Patrick Rothfuss’ debut novel The Name of the Wind (which I loved despite its use of fantasy cliches). Oh, and Tana French’s debut, In the Woods, a brilliant mystery.
Most Long Awaited
The Stone Key, of course, the penultimate book in practically the longest running series of all time, Isobelle Carmody’s Obernewtyn Chronicles. I was terrified Isobelle might die or something before finally writing an ending to this very convoluted tale – and although it’s not the most brilliantly written book, I loved it all the same.
Best Guilty Pleasure
Hands down, Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels, which I picked up after getting hooked on True Blood, the recent TV series based on the books. They’re pretty trashy and Charlaine needs a better editor, but I love ’em. I’m reading through the series way too quickly.
Best Audio Book
I really enjoyed The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, a creepy mystery written in the 1860s that went for about 20 CDs. It’s the perfect sort of book to listen to though – you can let the language roll over you, and the narrator of the version I listened to did a great job, particularly with soft voiced Count Fosco.
And for next year? I’m going to continue plunging on through the volumes of Chalet School books, as I’ve had a few months off and I feel ready to venture back in. My mother introduced me to JD Robb at Christmas (Nora Roberts’ futuristic-thriller persona), so I think I might be reading a few of her books, and I’ve got several non-fiction books about brain function on hold at the library, just for fun.
We spent Christmas at the farm in Daintree, the whole family (in a way). I don’t know if we still call it the farm, as it’s hardly an accurate description – but “at the nature refuge” doesn’t have quite the same ring.
It’s been many years since we were all together for a celebration up north, and it was a particularly special time, I think, filled as usual with a lot of hysterical laughter. I got given Balderdash, which I had never played before, and currently it’s rating up there as a particularly awesome present and most fun thing to do on Boxing Day.
I wanted to do something a little different to accompany some chicken breasts, and settled on the idea of a herb pilaf from the ever useful Cook’s Companion by Stephanie Alexander. I didn’t follow the recipe exactly as, frustratingly, I didn’t have quite enough of all the herbs – I suspect the proper amounts of ingredients would result in a more prettily green-flecked dish.
ingredients:
1 tblsp olive oil
40g (about 8 tsp) of butter
1/2 cup finely chopped parsley
2 tblsp finely chopped coriander
2 tblsp finely chopped watercress
1 cup finely chopped spring onion (including greens)
2 handfuls finely chopped baby spinach leaves
1 cup long grained rice
1 1/2 cups of water or chicken stock
salt, pepper, fresh parmesan
Heat the oil and half of the butter into a medium sized saucepan. Add the herbs, watercress, spring onion and spinach, and cook for a few minutes, stirring. Add the rice, and stir until the grains look shiny and are well covered with the greens. Add the water and salt, and bring the mixture to a boil. Turn the heat down low, cover, and simmer undisturbed for 20 minutes.
Stir the remaining butter through the rice, season with pepper and serve as a side dish with the fresh parmesan to sprinkle over.
When I cut into this banana bread, still warm and steaming from the oven, and had my first exploratory taste, I decided that this could possibly be the best banana bread I’ve ever made. Some banana breads are too dry, some are too oily, but this banana bread was just, absolutely right.
It’s essentially Nigella’s recipe from How to Eat, with a few substitutions. If you have some overripe bananas, give it a go – you may fall in love just as I did.
ingredients
100g chopped dates
75mls rum (a leftover bottle I use for cooking as it was declared by the Husband, whom I bought it for, to be the wrong brand)
1 1/2 cups plain flour
2 tsps baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarb soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup butter, melted
2/3 cup sugar
2 eggs
4 small ripe bananas (about 300g without skin), mashed
1/2 cup dried cranberries
1 tsp vanilla extract
Put the chopped dates and rum into a small saucepan and bring to the boil. Take off the heat and let sit for an hour until the fruit has absorbed the liquid. I left it on the heat for too long and the dates soaked up the rum immediately, which worked fine as well.
Preheat the oven to 170C. Mix the flour, baking powder, bicarb soda and salt into a medium bowl. In a large bowl, mix the melted butter and sugar and beat until well blended. Beat in the eggs and then the bananas. Then stir in the soaked dates, cranberries and vanilla extract.
Add the flour to the butter mixture, one third at a time, stirring well after each addition. Scrape the mixture into a greased and lined loaf tin, and bake at 170C for 1 to 1 and a quarter hours. When it’s ready, a skewer should come out mostly clean. Leave to cool in the tin until you can bear it no longer and cut yourself the first slice.
I found this recipe at the always inventive Baking Bites – I’ve never had a failure with her cookie and cupcake recipes, and as she described, these cookies were moist and slightly chewy without being cakey or overly dense.
I’d never actually used pumpkin in a sweet baking recipe before – it’s more of an American cooking quirk than an Australian one, although we do have pumpkin scones here in the Antipodes. I usually eat pumpkin in salads, and when I read this recipe I had just roasted some small pieces of pumpkin, skin on, to have for lunch during the week. I simply scraped a cup full of the soft pumpkin from the skin, and used that pumpkin in this recipe – I think the roasting gave it the biscuits a bit of extra warmth.
I didn’t use the optional nuts mentioned by Baking Bites as I didn’t have any in the cupboard, but I think they’d give a nice crunch to these soft biscuits.
ingredients:
2 1/2 cups plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cloves
pinch nutmeg
1/2 cup butter, room temperature
1 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup pureed pumpkin
1 cup dark chocolate chips
Preheat the oven to 180C. Line your baking trays with baking paper, to prevent the biscuits sticking.
Sift or stir together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and spices in a bowl.
In a large bowl, cream together (either with an electric beater or by hand) the butter and sugar. Beat in the egg, vanilla, and lastly the pumpkin. Add the flour mixture and stir in by hand until just incorporated. Stir in the chocolate chips.
Drop tablespoonfulls of the biscuit mixture onto your baking trays, and baking for 12-14 minutes at 180C until slightly browned at the edges. Don’t worry if they’re a little soft – they will continue to cook and firm up as they cool on the tray.
This soup is so gorgeous – tangy, chunky tomatoey goodness. And it barely warrants being called a recipe.
Take about 1.5 kilos of very ripe tomatoes. Cut them in half or quarters, depending on the size, and spread out on a baking tray. Drizzle with olive oil, and sprinkle over salt. Roughly chop two onions into wedges, and place in among the pieces of tomatoes. Peel about half a head of garlic and drop the cloves in with the onion and tomatoes. Bake at about 200C for 45 minutes to an hour (depending on whether you forget about them or not as I did.)
Leave the baked vegies to cool a little. Pour everything on the tray into the food processor, and proceed to whiz until you’re getting a reasonably smooth consistency. You’ll probably want to add a little hot water to dilute the soup a little. Serve with parsley and perhaps some fresh parmesan or croutons.
o frabjous day! 