What have you been eating?

[The Seamstress]

How did you make the apple streusel thing? It sounds tasty

I just made a little bit of dough mixing flour, sugar, butter (I measured nothing, just eyeballed it, but it was approx. 3 tablespoons flour, 1-2 tablespoons sugar, and a ~8x3x1.5 cm piece of butter), then kneading it until everything was, uhm, doughy... then putting a little bit into the (buttered) bowl & forming a base layer. On top of that, two small apples cut into chunks, these I mixed with ground almonds (1-3 teaspoons), cinnamon, cloves, a little sugar and bitter almond flavouring, then on top of that, the rest of the dough in streusel-form. Then baked it at 200°C until it looked good. :-D

[Spritelady]

I'm always so impressed by people who eyeball recipes for baked goods! I can do that with a few things (estimating a tablespoon of butter for instance, possibly the silliest measurement type for butter and yet hideously common...) but for the most part I have to follow a recipe or I'm incredibly likely to make a mess!

[The Seamstress]

I'm not that good at eyeballing either, actually, but in this case you can't do much wrong - too much flour, add butter, too much butter, add flour... just make sure it's got a slightly crumbly texture so you can make the streusel. I wasn't aiming for a specific outcome regarding the amount of dough, so I just went "whatever", lol. Usually I follow a recipe and measure things, too!

[Spritelady]

November entry for me! Reece and I made bao buns from scratch, steamed them and then ate them with homemade pulled duck (basically just slow cooked duck with garlic, ginger and hoisin sauce) and some veggies. A pretty successful first go at making any form of steamed dough.

We have also now added a steamer to our Christmas list, as we didn't own one and had to improvise.

 

[Jubal]

The bao buns look great!

I've been really unimaginative with cooking lately - probably partly life feeling a bit upended. Hopefully soon I'll be back to it.

[Jubal]

Some recent food:

I made some bread for the work Christmas event. It wasn't great! As so often with me and bread it just didn't rise enough and was a bit chewy and dense. Possibly I rushed it a bit. Anyway it looked ok even if it was not great (and on the cheese ones the cheese countered the heaviness of the bread).


This is a basic pasta but with hazel and pine nuts, onion, and kohlrabi - first time I'd really used the latter, I added a bit of lemon juice while frying it and that seemed to work really well.



And this was from the Exile Princes launch event - basically just a cheeseboard but I also made canapés with a mini pastry and three tops, one with mint-mixed cottage cheese, one with soft cheese as a base for dried tomato and salami, and the third with wild garlic butter/cheese and topped with walnut.

[The Seamstress]

My own experiments with bread baking also never really succeeded, sadly... The end result with cheese doesn't look bad, though? What kind of dough did you use?

[Jubal]

Just regular flour, yeast, warmed milk, and salt, kneaded and left to rise. It probably needed more warmth, darkness, and time?

In other news I used a roll of pastry I needed to finish up and just rolled up cheese, passata and tomatoes into it and gave it a glaze, it was nice

[Spritelady]

Is darkness an important component to rising dough? I always assumed warmth and time were the key factors but I likewise always have issues with it rising enough...maybe that's where I've gone wrong!

[Jubal]

I mean it's ideally meant to be covered I think - it's probably more the sealing than light having an impact though, you're right.

[Spritelady]

Final entry for 2024 in the food challenge I set myself! To round off the year, I made a South African recipe with a real South African (Reece's mum, Gail)!  we made koeksisters, a doughnut-like pastry that's deep fried and then soaked in a lemon vanilla sugar syrup.



And thanks to Gail being much more inclined to take photographs than I am, we actually have some photos of the cooking process as well as the final result!