Food@RSO

I was going to save this recipe for some cooler weather, but it was just nagging at me to make it already, so I decided that I'd make use of the fridge and freezer's ability to slow down the activity of the lively yeast that provides the leavening, and give it a crack over a few days.  First, I had to come to terms with the sheer AMOUNT of chocolate, butter, and sugar in the recipe.  It didn't really hit me until I converted the measurements to metric, and then I was all, 1 kilo of chocolate?!  I hit Sweet As to see what kind of chocolate I could pick up in quantity, and ran with the idea of using dark chocolate Toblerone.  X was a little bit up and down fevery all day, but he let me wheel him around the shops to gather the rest of the ingredients, and when he was down for his afternoon nap, the dough was made, the chocolate was chopped (yay for the food processor!), and the crumble topping also came together. 

My comprehension skills were kind of a bit frazzled, because I ended up chucking in three whole eggs, instead of just two with the two extra yolks, which explained why my dough was so ridiculously sticky and impossible to handle, until I added some extra flour to compensate.  Not having had real babka before, I couldn't say whether this drastically altered the desired texture/taste, but it seemed to work out OK, with an appropriately sweet-buttery-eggy bread and insane amounts of chocolate filling!   I also have no idea why I've decided to learn about baking with yeast as leavening agent by picking these crazy recipes involving lots of extra stuff (maybe not as much extra work as such, just extra variables to potentially wreak havoc), instead of trying with something nice and easy (and potentially less wasteful if it turns out to be a mess!), but it didn't turn out to be a disaster despite my efforts, and I've still got 8 mini-loaves waiting to be baked!  At least, the reviews of many babkas over at Serious Easts at least reassures me that what I baked at least bears a passing resemblance to the real deal - I might well try again when the weather's more appropriate!  (AND I'll halve the recipe so I don't end up with babkas everywhere!). Hmmm, better stop rambling and get on with the recipe before I fall asleep on the keyboard!

I am not entirely certain what I was looking out for when I stumbled upon this lime and coconut slice recipe, but seeing as I had rather a large amount of lime juice (both frozen, and not yet juiced), compared to the amount of lime zest (in its intact form), *and* I had condensed milk, and everything else that the recipe was asking for - it was kind of like the recipe was daring me not to make it!  I did increase the amount of lime filling by another third, because I had one third of a can of condensed milk left from making the week's batch of rice pudding with a reduced quantity of the sweet stuff, but I won't go and list the situation-specific quantity adjustment here, or you'll be left with 2/3 of a can of sweetened condensed milk to use up. Having said that, it would be a really good excuse to make some dulce de leche in the oven...  Anyways, the recipe was a doddle to throw together - easy enough that I didn't mind getting it done after X had gone to bed for the night.

I wasn't entirely sure how to take a pic of rice pudding and make it look like food, so I decided that having X in the shot would be a useful diversion *grin*

This was based on something that Decay sent over to me, and the amalgamation of a bunch of google-fueled research, and it was made in the last week because we had a surplus of milk to use up in a short amount of time.   And because we decided to make it in the rice cooker, we had a minimum quantity to make as well, so it wouldn't dry out in porridge cooking mode, so we've been eating rice pudding for many breakfasts this week.  X of course thinks this is a brilliant idea, given how much he is a fan of rice, but we've both enjoyed it too (:   If anything, it could stand to be less sweet than it ended up with a whole can of sweetened condensed milk making up one of the 6 parts of liquid in total.

This was dinner on Wednesday night, just as it went into the oven for some cooking time.  There are no pics of the finished or plated dinner, because we were all too hungry for me to remember to get the camera out and snap some pics before we dug in *grin*

I picked this recipe because we had a bunch of milk to use up - I'd picked up some milk, but didn't notice the use-by date was in only four days til after we got it home.  A bunch of milk was used up making rice pudding in the rice cooker, and a bunch more milk was used to make this dish.  I quite like dishes where there's a little bit of prep, and then you get to chuck it in the oven and leave it alone to do its stuff - small amount of work for a reasonable payoff.  Lumpy was over for dinner as well, so most of the chicken (served with peas, and I guess what could be called a warm potato salad) was had for dinner. 

What was left over became dinner with pasta and capers and sundried tomatoes on Friday night, and the cooking liquid (after straining to remove the solids) has been used as stock to go in both Thursday night's savoury mince, and Friday night's pasta.   The chicken got a whole bunch of colour and flavour prior to the milk bath in the oven from a shallow fry in a fair amount of butter with a glug of olive oil, which meant that the in-oven shot was rather better looking than it could have been with raw chicken (:   

It had been two weeks since the weather had cooperated enough for me to bake something on a Wednesday; those at work on diets/lifestyle modifications/whatever the current term is, were possibly OK with the removal of one source of temptation.  However, I was getting itchy baking fingers, and needed for some baking to go rather more smoothly than the pull-apart loaf that was ok despite my non-attempts at actually following directions!   So, Donna Hay got another spin.  I went with using a vanilla bean, rather than using extract, because it had been a while since I'd had a go at splitting a bean down the middle and scraping out the seeds with the back of a knife.  Cake in the oven also has calming properties to X - he woke up from his nap not long before the cake was due to come out of the oven, and although he was a bit grumpy at having woken up, he was much happier when I showed him what was in the oven! 

The recipe for this loaf pretty much had 'BAAAAKKKE MEEEEEEE' written all over it when I saw it about a few weeks ago, but it's taken the best part of a month to have weather, time, and availability of citrus fruits in our house to get happening.   Despite quite a few recipe mis-steps (forgetting to add the water, not managing to roll out the dough so it was more evenly rectangular, over-baking due to a mis-calculation of conversion from Fahrenheit to Celsius), this was good, and worthy of a retry, when I have enough citrus fruit to zest, and perhaps also used up some of our freezer stash of lemon juice and lime juice.  The recipe originally had sugar with lemon and orange zests sandwiched between the layers of dough, but seeing as there was a bit of a special on limes when I went to stock up on lemons, I went with the lemon and lime combo instead. 

This was dinner on Wednesday night, because I was looking for something that I could prep and then leave to cook for the afternoon so that X and I could get out of the house for a bit of a shuffle around the suburbs.   We had chuck steak in the freezer, and most of the ingredients in the house, and I improvised the herbs and flavourings.   It smelled mighty tasty while it was cooking, but it needed a little adjustment once it was out of the oven - a little bit of a flavour boost from some of Decay's not particularly secret ingredients, which might've made some French dudes turn in their graves, but it did let us get dinner on the table not too long after Decay was home from work!