Category: cooking

cooking · gardening · pecan nuts · recipe

Pecan Pie Anyone?

Joanne6 Comments

This year my pecan tree has had a bumper crop. Now, the weather has turned cold and the once green leaves are changing to brown and dropping to the ground, but not before we collected bucket loads of nuts!

In a previous post, I have already waxed lyrical in total admiration of my garden, (yes, I do that sometimes, nature just gets to me), and you can see here the beautiful nuts growing happily away in my garden. Clicking on the photos will enlarge them.

In the days when I first made pecan pie I didn’t have a pecan tree in my garden, I simply bought a packet of pecans off the supermarket shelf. Now I have a beautifully matured tree and I personally find it is a far more satisfying experience to grow, collect and shell my own!

Being the creature of habit that I am I have used the same pecan pie recipe forever. I know there are other recipes out there, but what can I say? When I make up this recipe I could eat the whole pie to myself! Okay, maybe a slight exaggeration there. 😉

As far as comfort food goes, this is up there with the best of them!

Pecan Pie

Preheat oven to 200 degrees C.

Pastry ~ ½ cup shelled pecans

160g butter

1/3 cup caster sugar

2 cups plain flour

1 egg, beaten

Grind the pecans to a fine meal, in a food processor fitted with a steel blade, being careful not to over process the nuts to a paste.

Cream together the butter and sugar and stir in the ground pecans and flour. Add the beaten egg and blend together to form a soft dough.

Wrap the dough in plastic film and refrigerate for 20 minutes, roll out and line a greased, fluted, 20-23cm flan tin.

Filling ~ 190g butter

1 cup brown sugar

½ cup warmed honey

6 eggs

¾ cup of shelled pecans

Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, then add the warmed honey and eggs, beating together thoroughly.

Pour the filling evenly into the pastry case and sprinkle the whole pecans over the top of the egg mixture.

Bake for 10 minutes at 200 degrees, then reduce heat to 190 degrees and continue baking for approximately 20 minutes extra, or until filling is set.

Decorate the tart with 90g of melted chocolate and serve with cream or ice cream.

The memory of the day I was given this recipe by an old friend has just come back to me and in this day and age is rather amusing!

As I am copying the recipe to share here, from a stained, yellowing sheet of paper, I am reminded of my friend letting me try out her latest office gadget, on loan from her boss, to type out the recipe.

It was a marvellous gizmo, which had a tiny screen above the typewriter keyboard, showing the words as they were typed into the machine. When satisfied there weren’t any mistakes, a simple hit of a button would type out your work….

It was an early day word processor! Can you believe it? (Okay, you can stop laughing now…it wasn’t that long ago…really!)

cooking · gardening · recipe · soup · winter

Lunch In The Garden…Pea and Ham Soup

JoanneLeave a comment

The chilling winter’s air froze my skin, as I headed into my garden yesterday morning. Rugged up in layers of clothes, wearing thick socks and ankle height wellington boots, I knew the chill would soon leave me.

No matter how low the temperature is, the cold air is easy to tolerate when I am gardening. The cooler days are such a refreshing change…we have been enjoying eleven degrees Celsius morning and night recently, warming up most days to around 20 degrees.

As lunchtime approached, I remembered the big pot of pea and ham soup I had prepared the day before…warmed up for lunch, it would taste even better than it did last night!

This is yet another one of my Mum’s recipes, although I use the word “recipe” extremely loosely here, as there has never been any official recipe for this soup.

It is so easy to prepare and quantities can be judged to suit yourself also. Firstly, I soak about 1 cup of split green peas and half a cup each of pearl barley and dried soup mix in boiling hot water for an hour or two.

This batch of soup was made in my slow cooker although I usually cook it up in a large stock pan. Either way, it will bubble away all day if you wish, on a low simmer.

When the dried peas, barley and soup mix have softened a little, I drain off the water, place them in the pan and half fill the pan with water. Add 500g of meaty bacon bones or a large bacon hock and 300g of diced bacon. Turn on the heat and start cooking.

The vegetables that I usually add are one or two sliced onions and three of each of the following, all either diced or sliced ~ potatoes, carrots, celery sticks, parsnips and turnips. Top up the pan with extra water, after all the vegetables are added.

And that’s it! I wouldn’t even add herbs, salt and pepper, unless of course that suits your taste. Once the soup is well cooked, the water turns into beautiful bacon stock, as the chunks of bacon fall off the bones and the split peas go “mushy”, which thickens the stock.

Toast is a wonderful accompaniment to pea and ham soup.

I do not recall ever having enjoyed this soup more than I did yesterday, outdoors, with the cool bite of a winter’s breeze on my skin.

And as usual, my beautiful little “helper” hardly left my side! 🙂

birthdays · cakes · cooking · daughter · Mum · recipe

Coffee Sponge Cake

Joanne3 Comments

For my birthday last month, my youngest daughter made a beautiful coffee sponge cake.

I love it that she has always enjoyed cooking with me. Even as a toddler she would climb up on a little stool to see what I was making and would “help” by stirring the contents of the bowl occasionally.

As she has grown, (she is now 17 years old), she has made her own choices of new recipes to try out, adding interest to sweet treats the family enjoys.

When my Mum was here, she had a theory; it was a very rare person who could make both a light sponge and a good batch on scones. She was the sponge maker in our household of years gone by; I was the scone maker, so it worked out well for us.

Now, we have discovered that my daughter is an excellent sponge maker! She has whipped up a sponge many times, with such great ease that I envy her talent, as I did my own mother’s.

Well, today being my mother’s birthday, I decided it would be a very appropriate day to share my daughter’s recent sponge treat, made for my special day.

Happy birthday, Mum….

Coffee Sponge Cake

4 eggs, separated (at room temperature)

Pinch of salt

1 cup of caster sugar

1 tablespoon coffee essence

1 cup of plain flour

4 teaspoons of arrowroot

1 teaspoon of baking powder

4 tablespoons of milk

1 teaspoon of butter

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C and grease and baking paper line two 20cm round cake tins.

With an electric mixer, beat the egg whites and salt until soft peaks form, then gradually add the caster sugar, beating continually.

Add the egg yolks and continue beating the mixture until it is light and creamy. Add the coffee essence and combine into the mixture.

In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder and arrowroot. Repeat the sifting process three times. (My daughter assures me that the triple sifting is what gives the sponge its “lightness”).

In a small saucepan, heat together the milk and butter. Carefully fold the butter and milk into the sponge mix.

Pour half the mixture into each of the prepared sponge tins and bake for 20 minutes.

Decorate as desired.

cooking · soup · winter

Welcome Winter The Minestrone Way

Joanne1 Comment

I can’t think of any better way to welcome the winter. A steaming hot bowl of minestrone soup on a cold winter’s night really hits the spot!

There are numerous versions of minestrone soup around and there seems to be no hard and fast rules on the exact ingredients to be used. That is the beauty of this dish; you can use whatever you have in the fridge.

Typically, minestrone should at least contain pasta and beans. The rest can be improvised.

This particular recipe is the one that I have settled upon, after a number of experiments of my own. I have used both chicken and beef stock, however the beef stock produces a heartier flavour.

Adding meat is not necessarily typical of minestrone, but what can I say…the meat loving men in my family can’t seem to last one night time meal without the addition of meat!

One of my favourite aspects of this soup is the use of my fresh, home-grown tomatoes, parsley, basil and oregano. 🙂

Minestrone Soup

1 tablespoon olive oil

2 brown onions, chopped

4 cloves of garlic, crushed

2 carrots, diced

1 potato, diced

250 g zucchini, diced

¼ cup chopped fresh basil

1 tablespoon chopped oregano

2 large bay leaves

750 g diced tomatoes

5-6 cups good quality beef stock

125 g green beans, cut into 2cm pieces

125 g pasta, such as penne

2 cups of cooked and drained borlotti beans

300 g diced bacon or ham

Grated parmesan cheese and parsley to garnish

In a large stockpot, heat the olive oil and add the onion and garlic. Cook until the onion is soft, about 5 minutes.

Add the carrots, potato, zucchinis, basil, oregano and bay leaves. Cook for a further 5 minutes.

Add the stock, bacon pieces, green beans, borlotti beans and tomatoes and continue cooking for approximately 20-30 minutes, or until all ingredients are cooked.

Remove the bay leaves. Ladle into soup bowls and top with grated parmesan and parsley.

cooking · pumpkin · recipe

Never Say Never…To Pumpkin Soup!

JoanneLeave a comment

I’ve never met a child yet, or adult for that matter, who enjoys every single food item offered to them. Children in particular will favour certain foods over others and simply refuse to eat some things.

As a child, I absolutely refused to eat two vegetables; brussell sprouts….and pumpkin. They were two food items on my list of I-will-never-ever-eat-those!

That isn’t to say that I don’t admire the growing process of pumpkins. There is no more a homely site than seeing a pumpkin vine growing, twisting its leaves, branches and tendrils up and over a backyard garden shed, leaving a newly growing pumpkin or two firmly atop the roof!

Therefore, knowing my lifelong dislike of pumpkins from a first-hand point of view, you can imagine my surprise when my own sister suggested we make up a pan of pumpkin soup for our dinner one night, whilst on an overnight visit to my home!

In my efforts to show myself to be an agreeable hostess (but totally against my better judgement) I agreed on a trip to the supermarket to purchase the required ingredients. There were obviously no stray pumpkins lying around in my kitchen, waiting to be transformed into a pot of soup!

My sister and I worked together, preparing what she assured me I was going to enjoy…..I made no promises to that effect!

By the time my sister began ladling the blended concoction into bowls, I must admit that the smell of this soup wasn’t as bad as I had imagined.

Maybe just a little, tiny, weenie taste….

To cut a long story short, I have enjoyed pumpkin soup from that day to this! I have even ventured as far as baking pumpkin in the oven, along with other vegetables, on nights we have a roast for dinner.

The moral of the story? Never say never…especially to pumpkin soup! 🙂

Pumpkin Soup

3 teaspoons butter

1 brown onion, chopped

1 clove of garlic, crushed

1 stalk of celery, chopped

1 whole butternut pumpkin, peeled and cubed

4 cups of chicken stock

2 teaspoons of finely chopped marjoram

1 bay leaf

Pepper to taste

1 cup of buttermilk or milk

Parsley to garnish

Melt the butter in a large saucepan over medium heat and add the garlic, onions and celery. Cook about 5 minutes, until the onion is soft.

Add the pumpkin, stock, marjoram, bay leaf and pepper. Raise the heat slightly and bring to the boil. Cover the pan and simmer gently for approximately 20 minutes, or until the pumpkin is soft. Remove the bay leaf.

Allow the soup to cool for a few minutes and puree the soup, either in a food processor or with a hand held blender. Return the soup to the pan.

Add the buttermilk and stir through the soup until blended. Heat gently, without boiling. Ladle soup into serving bowls and garnish with parsley.

**Tip** If you wish to freeze the soup for later use, do so before the buttermilk is added. When thawed, heat the soup, add the buttermilk and gently reheat again.