Food@RSO

We recently went on a holiday to Hong Kong, and we flew Cathay Pacific.  Me being me, I took photos of the food we were served on the plane there and back, because actually, for plane food it wasn't too bad!

So, in the last week, I've made three batches of ice cream base, and have successfully churned two of them.  Last one will get a re-churn tomorrow sometime during the late morning or early afternoon, once the bowl gets a chance to refreeze.   This one gets first post on the ice cream recipe front, because it was that easy to make - no eggs, no custard-making, nope - just chuck everything into a bowl!  Gotta thank Not so Humble Pie and her smarts for providing the recipe!
 

So for whatever reason, I got it into my head that I should have a go at making caramels, seeing as I've managed to make Scottish Tablet probably 5 or 6 times since that first attempt, which is why it ended up that I made a batch of caramel on Christmas Eve, Decay helped me chop it into appropriately sized chunks, and I ended up wrapping the remaining 124 of 128 little caramels with baking paper well past midnight into Christmas Day.  I reckon these would be nice as mint caramels, and Decay is imagining them enrobed in a shell of chocolate.

So, waaaay back at the end of August this year, after catching up with friends for a tasty brunch after running the Defence Lake Attack, it was decided that we would block out a date to get together for some pre-Christmas foodery.  Jul was heading off to the Big Apple over the Christmas break, so we decided the weekend before this was a good date to aim for.  After the success we'd had with the spit roast lamb and chicken, Decay really wanted to try tandoori-style chicken, so then we had a theme to go with - Indian!  See pictures after the jump; recipes possibly to follow, once I get a little bit more caught up!

These were made what feels like about an eon ago, but the datestamp tells me it was really only three weeks ago - I think I just wanted to make use of some lemons, and figured the guys at work wouldn't mind having some lemony cake-lings to eat (:  

Apologies for the radio silence in these here parts ... Let's just say it's been at ridiculous levels of busy in the last month or so.  Hopefully I'll be able to catch up on this bit of a backlog I seem to have created for myself - the twitter feed on the side of this page seems to have been the only thing seeing action here recently.

Anyways, we decided that before next week, when Decay's workmates descend upon this house for some team of the quarter celebrations, we should give the spit roasting of meats a test run.  Here's some video, with more pics (extra words to follow when I get another moment) after the jump.

Because I had an eggwhite leftover from making a batch of some Butterscotch cookies (which I haven't written up yet ...) I went looking through my bookmarked recipes for something that might be able to make use of it, and also didn't use up all my braincells trying to adjust ingredient amounts.  I'd had a cookie bar/slice recipe bookmarked from a while back, where some of the comments suggested that the meringue top could do with having another egg white involved, so I ran with it, and replaced the choc chips suggested in the original, with some jam.  It happened to be black cherry jam this time, because that was our non-standard jam choice last time we needed to restock - we always seem to keep a red jam (either strawberry or raspberry), and some other jam (whether it's marmalade, black cherry, blueberry, fig, lime and ginger - it's whatever catches our eye at the time) about. 

So, I sliced most of it up into X-sized bites (the above was slightly larger pieces for the photo op), and brought the containers to work.   They kind of went a bit quick - the first layer was gone by 10am, and the second layer was gone not long after 2pm.  This was while we were two people down in our team, and the usual suspects around the building weren't around to drop by and sample either.  A small box of these also made it to one of our interstate offices, because if everything had fit in the one container I suspect it would've all been eaten by workmates here!  I have no idea why they're called halfway cookies - a quick google suggests no-one really knows for sure - I thought halfway because the egg whites are in one half and the egg yolks are in the other half, meeting in the middle with whatever filling you chose;  others thought because they're halfway to being a cookie or cake.  Doesn't matter - they're easy to make, and really easy to eat too!    

I'm not entirely certain why I keep making lemon slice recipes, but it might have had something to do with the MFL of lemons from the gardens of both DKtE and Gran (and various others at times, hi G & M34tB4LL!), and also that lemons, and lemony things happen to be a flavour that my workmates rather like, so I keep finding, and making variations on a theme to see if there is one that is better than any other, even if they're nothing at all like another workmate's mother's lemon squares!  Anyways, this one was different from some of the others I've tried recently, in that the filling is cooked so it thickens on the stove, and then it gets a theoretically brief time in the oven to set up.  Having said that, the two times I've made this, it's taken more than twice as long as suggested to get the topping to thicken in the stovetop cooking, and probably three times as long as suggested to get it appropriately set in the oven.  Maybe if I was happier with the topping being more jiggly, it would only be just on twice the suggested oven time for setting, but I didn't want stuff sliding all over the place making it hard to dish up, so it got a reasonable amount of setting time!  And then there was the whole thing about when I brought this in to work the first time, the last handful of pieces ended up faceplanting on the carpet near my desk, because I knocked the container (with its lid only precariously balanced rather than snapped on securely) off my desk by swinging my gym bag through my desk area ... oops! 

So, this recipe, from Momofuku Milk Bar, has taken me the best part of 6 months to get all the ingredients together, and get with the baking.  I'd seen dried blueberries at our sort of local shopping centre, but they were just too expensive for such a small amount for me to justify making the purchase, so I was going to just substitute dried cranberries instead.  And then I spotted a large bag of dried blueberries at costco on one visit, and I made sure that I budgeted enough to bring home a bag the next time we went.  I also had to spread out the purchase of white chocolate, glucose, and milk powder, because those things aren't a part of our standard pantry items.  Anyways, the stars FINALLY aligned themselves and some tasty cookies got made, and now I think I'm going to have to make another batch because they're quite the tasty thing!  The only thing I had issue with was this first go and converting to metric mass measurements, and wrestling with glucose even with greased measuring/dishing implements.  That problem will go away once I cut out the having to measure a volume and just chuck it straight into the mixing bowl ... mostly!