Eggs Benedict

Whenever we go out for breakfast to our favourite Coffee Club, Teena usually gets the Eggs Benedict.  She absolutely loves it!  So yesterday morning, I decide to make her some as a special treat.

To make the Hollandaise Sauce, I use a recipe from www.Taste.com.au.  I follow the recipe exactly and the sauce always seems to work perfectly.  I've had it go bad once when I was busy trying to cook other things at the same time.  It was easy to fix though with 1 tablespoon of lemon juice and 1 tablespoon of the bad mix in a different bowl, then adding the bad mix back gradually.

I made some Turkish Bread to go with the breakfast as that's how it's served at the Coffee Club.  They usually have ham or salmon as well but we didn't have any.  It still tastes great with just eggs and Turkish Bread anyway.

It's a little bit time consuming to make Eggs Benedict, especially when you're hungry.  I think it's worth the effort though!  Here you can see Teena couldn't wait for me to finish taking pictures and had to taste it straight away.

Nothing goes to waste either as Teena scrapes every last drop into a jar to store in the fridge.  It makes a really tasty spread on bread or toast later on.

Turkish Bread

Our bread machine got another work out this morning.  Just before breakfast I popped downstairs, quickly threw all the ingredients in the machine and started it up.

Just over an hour later it beeped several times to let me know it had finished.  So later when I came downstairs, there was my dough ready to use.

Teena and I both like Turkish Bread, but it's not something we have very often.  Probably because it's expensive compared to other bread.  I had planned to make Teena Eggs Benedict this morning because it's her favourite breakfast dish, and thought some Turkish Bread would go really nicely with it.

Ingredients
180 ml water
1/3 cup olive oil
1 tbspn sugar
1 tspn salt
300g flour
2 tspn dried yeast

That's the ingredients for my machine anyway.  It may differ for others I suppose.  Anyway, once the dough is ready, turn it out onto a lightly floured surface.  Divide it into three equal quantities, then shape each one into an oval and place them onto some backing paper. Using your finger, poke holes in the top of each one.  Cover with a tea towel and place in a warm spot for 15 minutes.  Preheat oven to 230°C.  Place baking trays in oven to heat them up.

Now...  this part I had a little bit of trouble with.  Supposedly, after the 15 minutes, you are supposed to carefully pick each one up and stretch it out to 30-35cm.  Mine was a bit too sticky though and I had trouble getting it off the baking paper.  The recipe said not to add extra flour as it should be nice and soft.  I had even sprinkled some flour under each one before I put it onto the baking paper.  Part of the problem may have been the cheap baking paper we have as I've had problems with it before.  Teena has promised to get some better quality paper for next time.

I managed to stretch it out in the end, though one of the portions was way too sticky and I had to reshape it once I got it off the paper.  It still came out ok though.  Once stretched, brush or spray with some olive oil, and sprinkle with salt.  Place the bread and baking paper onto the hot oven trays and bake for 10 minutes or until golden brown.

I baked each one separately as I was also making Eggs Benedict at the time.  For the last one I sprinkled some dried basil leaves on it for some extra flavour.

They turned out really nice, very soft and tasty.  It was really nice with the Eggs Benedict, but I will post about that later!  We had some for lunch later on as well as it makes a really nice sandwich.

Anzac Biscuits

We love these Anzac Biscuits.  This recipe is a little different to the usual recipe, using honey instead of golden syrup as we don’t usually have any golden syrup and some added ginger which gives them a really nice flavour.  This batch I made with cashew nuts, but you can use any type of nut really.  They are especially tasty with Macadamia nuts.

Ingredients

• 75g cashew nuts
  
• 3/4 cup plain flour
  
• 1 tsp ground ginger
  
• 1 1/2 cups rolled oats
  
• 3/4 cup caster sugar
  
• 1/2 cup desiccated coconut
  
• 2 tbspn boiling water
  
• 1 tbspn honey
  
• 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
  
• 125g butter

Preheat oven to 160°C.  Line two baking trays with baking paper.  You can roast the nuts for about 5 minutes if you want, I didn’t bother with this batch though.  Chop the nuts roughly into smaller pieces.
Combine flour, ginger, oats, sugar, coconut and nuts in a large bowl.  In a separate bowl, mix the boiling water, honey and bicarb.  The mixture should froth a little, then add the melted butter.  Pour into the flour mixture and stir well with a wooden spoon.



Place a small handful of the mixture onto the prepared trays and flatten them slightly with a fork.  They will flatten more during cooking and spread out a little, so give them plenty of room.
Bake in oven for about 15 minutes.  If you take them out a little bit earlier they will be chewier and if you leave them in for a bit longer they will be crunchier.



Remove from oven and transfer to a wire rack to cool.  There’s usually a few missing by the time they have cooled in our house though!  Enjoy.

Chicken with Peas and Pasta

I wanted to make something like a chicken pot pie with the chicken fillets we had, but I didn't have enough time to make the pastry.  So I figured I would just make the base and see how it turned out.  I was looking at some chicken recipes in my Kylie Kwong cookbook, but most of them were just chicken with a sauce.  We like our vegies though so this is what I came up with.

Ingredients
500g Chicken Fillet
2 tbspn Olive Oil
2 Onions
1 Capsicum
1 tbspn crushed garlic
5 button mushrooms
2 carrots
2 potatoes
1 cup frozen peas
1 tin cream of mushroom soup
100ml vegetable stock
Dried pasta

Heat oil in a large fry pan.  Chop all vegies into bite sized chunks.  Cook onion and capsicum until soft.  Add mushrooms and garlic, stir for another minute.  Add carrot, potato and peas.  Cook for 5 minutes, stirring often.  Cut chicken into bite sized chunks, add to pan and cook for another 5 minutes.

Add soup and stock to pan, bring to the boil then reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes.  In a large pot of boiling water, cook enough pasta to serve with the meal.  I used 250g for the two of us. 

I started cooking a bite late, so Teena was very hungry by the time I'd finished cooking.  This is her sampling the meal while I was taking pictures.  It turned out pretty good, the sauce could have been a bit thicker, but I think it would have made a nice pie.  Maybe next time when I have some chicken and some more time...

Beef and Cabbage Stir Fry

This is sort of like a Chow Mein without the noodles.  We had a large cabbage half in the fridge that needed to be used and there's just about always some beef mince in the freezer and carrots in the fridge.  Carrots are always cheap, so it's not often we don't have any carrots on hand.  This is a bit of a budget meal actually, but it was very tasty!

Ingredients
2 tbspn olive oil
500g Beef Mince
1 large onion
1 green capsicum
2 carrots
2 tspn crushed garlic
1 tbspn oyster sauce
2 tbspn soy sauce
Half a large cabbage
5 button mushrooms, sliced or quartered

Heat oil in a large pan.  Fry onion and capsicum until soft, add garlic and stir for another minute.  Add carrot and cook stirring for 2 minutes.  Add beef mince, cook until mince has browned.

Stir in oyster sauce and soy sauce.  Add mushrooms and cabbage and sir through for a couple of minutes until the cabbage is wilted slightly.

Serve with some white rice or noodles.

Beef Goulash with Dumplings

Teena bought some blade steak with yesterdays shopping.  I wanted to make a stir fry or stew of some kind, and after a bit of searching I found a recipe for Beef Goulash at Simply Recipes.  It sounded nice but I didn't have the exact ingredients, so I had to modify it a little.  I also changed the quantities as the original recipe served 4-6, and there's only 2 of us.

Ingredients
Goulash

• 2 tbspn extra virgin olive oil
• 2 onions, thinly sliced
• 1 tbspn sugar
• 2 tspn minced garlic
• 1 tspn ground cumin
• 3 tspn paprika
• 1 tbspn fresh marjoram leaves
• 1 tbspn dried basil
• 2 tbspn tomato paste
• 2 tbspn balsamic vinegar
• 2 cups vegetable stock
• 500g Blade Steak, cut into small cubes
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 tspn ground black pepper

Dumplings

• 1 cups plain flour
• 1 tspn baking powder
• 1/2 tspn salt
• 100ml milk
• 1 tbsp melted butter

Heat the olive oil in a large pan, cook the onions and sugar over a low heat until caramelized (this could take up to 30 mins!).  Add the garlic and cumin and cook, stirring for one minute.  Add the paprika, marjoram and basil, stir through for another minute.

Add the tomato paste, vinegar and stock.  Stir well, then add pieces of steak and season with salt and pepper.  Bring to the boil, then reduce heat to a simmer.  Cover and cook until meat is very tender, about 1 hour or longer if possible (I had a hungry woman to feed, so could not wait that long!).  Stir occasionally, and once the meat is tender, taste and season with salt and pepper if required.

 

For the dumplings, combine the flour, baking powder and salt in a large bowl.  Melt the butter in a small bowl, then add milk and stir lightly.  Add to flour mixture and stir until combined, add a little extra milk if it's too dry.  After the stew has cooked, drop small handfuls of the dumpling mixture into the stew (just let them sit on top).  Cover and cook for 15 minutes.  Do not remove the cover until the 15 minutes are up or the steam will escape.  After 15 minutes, test the dumplings with a toothpick or skewer.  If it comes out clean the dumplings are done.

I've made dumplings for other dishes, but they usually have some herbs mixed through the dumpling mixture.  This sauce is nice and spicy though, so the plain dumplings were nice as they were.  Teena loves these dumplings, so I usually make them whenever I have a dish like this with lots of sauce.  The Goulash turned out well too, not a true Goulash perhaps with the missing ingredients, but it tasted great all the same.  We served it on a bed of white rice.  I think I'll be making this one again!

Two Pizzas

Home made pizza is just so much better then the stuff the big pizza places churn out.  We don't buy pizza from them anymore, if we ever feel like pizza we just make them ourselves.  No more bases soaked in oil or pizzas with next to no toppings on them.

I use our bread machine to make the dough, it takes most of the hard work out of making pizzas or anything that requires dough really.


Ingredients
180 ml water
1 tbspn oil
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
300g plain flour

You just pop all the ingredients into the machine and press start.  An hour or so later you have your dough ready to be kneaded lightly and rolled out.

Sprinkle some flour on your working area, give yourself plenty of room.  Knead the dough lightly, it doesn't need much though as the bread machine should have done some already. 

Divide the dough in half, there's enough to make two pizzas.  If you like thick bases you could probably use it all to make one pizza.

I made two pizzas.  The first one I rolled out to be slightly larger then my pizza tray, then folded the sides in to make a thick crust.

The second one i left a bit thicker and put onto my pizza stone.

 I'd already prepared all my toppings earlier, ready to assemble.  I'm not going to list them all as you can use whatever toppings you like or whatever you can find in your kitchen. I also lightly brushed both bases with some olive oil.

 I decided to make the first one with chicken and mushrooms, with a barbecue sauce for the base.

The second one I made with a tomato base.  Half was sausage and mushroom, the other half was Feta and Olive.  Teena likes olives, I'm not a big fan of them.

So now you have two pizzas ready to be cooked.  Preheat oven to about 180°C.  I only have one pizza stone so the second pizza is just on a pizza tray.  Both work fine, though the stone tends to give a crispier base.

 And here they are fresh from the oven.

The Chicken and Mushroom Pizza.  The rolled up sides puffed out to make a nice big crust.  You can easily fill the crust with cheese before you roll them up if you like a cheesy crust.

The Feta and Olive Pizza half on the left and the Sausage and Mushroom Pizza half on the right.  I'd never used Feta on a pizza before so I wasn't sure what to expect.  I thought the Feta would melt a little though.  Teena said she would have liked some grated cheese as well as the Feta on the Feta and Olive half.  I'll have to remember that for next time.  They were both delicious and we'll be having left overs for lunch or dinner today.