"Welcome Back Daniel!" or "I come from the land down under..."

My brother Daniel came home from Japan today! Yay! My parents went to pick him up at the airport at, like 6:00am, and I was woken up about an hour later with him running into my room and joyfully yelling, "SARAH! Wake up wake up wake up wake up!!!". I woke up.

If you have a look at the bottom my last post, you'll see that last night, I was hunkering down for an intense late night essay-writing session. And I didn't get to bed for another 3 and a half hours after writing that post. So naturally, I was tired. But not too tired to whip up some "welcome back to Australia" sandwiches as Daniel unpacked and showed us all the kick-ass Japanese stuff he bought. SUGOI!

392. Marmite Sandwiches (Feeding Babies and Small Children)

These appear in the Party Food section of the Kiddies' chapter, and are so easy to make. The point of the recipe is not the ingredients, (I mean, who needs a recipe for marmite sandwiches?), but Nigella's method. She instructs you to cream butter until soft, and mix it with some marmite (before you ask, I used vegemite, of course).


Mmm... mushy - I made the butter-vegemite mix dark and salty, as I usually don't even have butter with vegemite.

The soft, creamy mixture is then very very spreadable, which is useful when you have to make dozens of sandwiches, quickly and with plastic white bread. (I used Wonder White, in the delightfully comic-book-camp pink packet). You'll need to slice the crusts off and cut them into quarters.


sandwiches

These are GOOD. Even my mum ate one and liked it, despite not having acquired the taste for vegemite during her Malaysian childhood. I'm not exactly sure why, but they taste miles better than normal vegemite-on-toast. After the sandwiches were made (I only ate 1), and Daniel had finished showing us his awesome stuff, I went back to bed. When I woke up, everyone had polished off the remaining sandwiches, which made me very very happy. Ee... oishii sandoichi! SAIKOU!

Best Sandwich Ever!

***Don't forget to post any questions you may have for me regarding the project here***

Hello deliciousness!

The best sandwich ever consists of two slices of lightly toasted sourdough bread, between which lie cold slices of ham-in-coca-cola, microwaved sweetcorn pudding, dijon mustard and cornichons.



DROOL.

One more post about leftovers...

Last night Aunty Wendy and Uncle Francis came over to hang out, and Mum offered Aunty Wendy one of my star-topped mince pies. She had one and said, "Hey, this is good". I thought she was just being polite, until 5 minutes later when she looked at the jar again and said, "ooh I think I might have another one!" Score.

Later that evening I was quite hungry, but had no idea what to eat for dinner. So I grabbed some more turkey, and placed it between two slices of plastic white bread, with cranberry sauce, mayonnaise, Dijon mustard, lettuce and some slices of tomato. Then I toasted it, and ate it. It totally rocked. This might sound like a silly thing to say, but fresh turkey is so much better then the processed stuff!


turkey sandwich

And, as I later found out, my dad enjoyed the leftover turkey meat as well - in a bagel. He had it with bread sauce, cranberry sauce, mustard and lettuce I think. Bread sauce! In a sandwich! How inspired!

Super Size, Super Size, Super Size Me

I have discovered that with this project, often the difficulty lies not in the cooking, but in the eating. It's not just the logistics of getting everyone together to eat, (challenging though that is), but also physically eating all the food I've been making. We all know about Nigella's more-than-generous portioning - which can, sometimes, give a wonderful feeling of celebratory feasting. In my everyday life, however, I just end up feeling like I'm the bloody Super-Size Me guy. (You know that guy who ate nothing but crazy quantities of MacDonalds for 30 days?) Admittedly, I'm eating food of infinitely better quality, and much greater variety, but still, a vague feeling of resentment (towards myself and my inability to portion control), always threatens to settle each evening as I carefully gladwrap yet another serving of food which, trust me, will die a slow and mouldy death in my fridge. More than halfway through my project, I'm JUST about starting to learn how to adjust the recipe quantities to suit my own appetites and budget.

Case in point - the roast pork. After Thursday's pork fest, I have two big bowls of cold roast pork sitting in the fridge, and I have a sneaking suspicion that most of it will not get eaten. Ever. Mum and I did have a good go yesterday, though, for our lunch.



I made sandwiches on sourdough bread, with roast pork, the rhubarb-horseradish sauce, some lettuce and onion mush, and served them with packet chips. (It's an English thing, I'm told).


Sandwich and crisps - very nice.

I made a pudding 2 days earlier, for the simple reason that I was home alone, I was free, and I needed to get through some recipes. Furthermore, I knew that this particular pudding wouldn't need to be eaten immediately. Rather, we could just take a more drawn-out approach of picking at it whenever we felt the urge.

194. Baked Aromatic Spiced Plums (Cooking in Advance)
195. Barbados Cream (Cooking in Advance)

These plums are a favourite pudding in Nigella's household, she writes. And, as a bonus, they can be kept in the fridge for 2-3 days, or frozen "with impunity". To make them, you cut some plums in half, removing the stone, and layer them cut-side down in a dish. Then, pour over a syrup made of red wine, cloves, bay leaves, cinnamon and honey, and bake, covered, for an hour. After they're cool, you can just leave them in the fridge until you want them.


Plums

The Barbados cream, Nigella's suggested accompaniment, is equal quantities of double cream and Greek yogurt, mixed together and thickly sprinkled with brown sugar. She says to use 300ml of each, but I cleverly only used 200ml of each. How's that for portion control?!

After the stipulated 48 hours in the fridge, the sugar on top melts into a thin brown layer of sweetness.


Barbados Cream

So Mum and I ate this for dessert on Friday lunch. It was.... ok. The cooked plums were very sour (easily rectified), but they also had this kind of weird taste to them. (After having eaten them again today, I realised that it was the bay leaves... yurgh!). The cream, however, was good, and the bland fatness of it was the perfect foil for the sharp plums.


Dessert

As I said, I did have these plums again today, and they definitely improve with more time and sugar. I don't want to freeze them, because impunity or not, they will be forgotten about. I'm just going to have them for breakfast with yogurt and other fruit.

Wednesday Night Dinner

32. South Beach Black Bean Soup (Cooking in Advance)
33. Mushroom-Steak Sandwich (One & Two)

I started cooking the soup at 10pm on Monday night, after an ace episode of Desperate Housewives.

Step 1 – Boil black beans for 1.5 hours.



Step 2 – Sautée up some onion, garlic, shallots, and capsicum with spices.



Step 3 – Blend vegetables



Step 4 – Add veggies to black soup, forming an intensely BROWN sludge.

My dad walked into the kitchen at this point and said, “Mmm… something smells good!” Then he looked into the pot and said, “What the hell is that?” Thanks, Dad.

I left the soup, off the heat, in the pot for two days, and we ate it for dinner tonight, Wednesday.

We had some field mushrooms left over from the Steak and Kidney Pie filling (tomorrow’s lunch… watch this space!), so I decided to do the Mushroom-Steak Sandwiches as well.


South Beach Black Bean Soup - served with diced red onion, chopped coriander, sour cream, tabasco and lime juice (from a carton, because limes are expensive right now!)

This soup's really good, despite its ugliness. It tastes kinda Mexican, because of the spices. It's pretty hearty too.

For the sandwiches, you cover some field mushrooms with a mixture of butter, garlic and parsley, and bake them for 20 minutes.


Mushrooms in oven

According to the recipe, you should then wodge them in a ciabatta or baguette with some lettuce, lemon juice, and Dijon mustard. However, I was out shopping all day today, and forgot to buy any bread. We had some Turkish Pide in the freezer, but when defrosted, it was amazingly both rock hard and soggy at the same time. So plastic white bread it was. It tasted good though. The mushrooms were incredibly flavoursome, and have a great, chewy texture. I am totally making this again, and with proper bread next time.

The sandwich recipe is actually also in Nigel Slater's Real Food, and ever since I got that book, I've been dreaming about it. It did not disappoint.


Sandwich