Pumpkin Puree and Sweet Roasted Seeds

Here is my long sought after pumpkin that my lovely husband bought for me at Sainsbury's.  It's beautiful and I think should have been named...

I follwed The Pioneer Woman's recipe and found it to be so simple. (And it made the house smell pretty yummy! Yankee Candle has some competition.) 


As you can see above I gutted Big Mama (I feel like I should be chewing on a blade of grass while saying this) and saved the seeds for munching later. 

(Oven should be at 350F/180C)

Voilà! 


Now for your seeds...


Rinse and dry them, and put them on a baking sheet covered with tin foil.  Roast for about 30 minutes at 350F (180C) or until browned.


In the meantime, prepare a bowl with 4 T of sugar mixed with 2 T of AllSpice (Ginger, Nutmeg, Cinnamon, Cloves).


Put a tablespoon or two of oil into a skillet and pop them in there.  Put in 2 T of sugar. Toss the seeds around in the oil until the sugar is melted.


Move the seeds into the bowl of sugar glory, and mix them up. Then eat them up! 

Food Baby Goodness

Since my last post, Starshine and I have been on what can only be summarized as a cooking frenzy.  It has gotten to the point where we daydream about owning our own restaurant...he can have his gourmet dishes alongside my baking adventures.  Big comfy sofas with furry carpet, a roaring fire in the winter, stacks of books, and always good tunage in the background.  Next door would be my yoga studio. I plan on opening one here someday as the nearest one is 45 minutes away! Dudes, I was spoiled living in Virginia Beach.  So many options! But now I am challenged with beginning a steady home practice. I love having my own time on the mat! But more on that tomorrow.  Let's get that flour on your face, kitchen floor, and the back of your jeans!

Weekend Gourmet with Gordon and Lucy

Menu

Sole en Papillote

Potatoes Boulangére

Honey Glazed Duck

Sole en Papillote

(Courtesy of Gordon Ramsey's Sunday Lunch)

Except we had to use Place.  A very meaty, tender fish.  I bought them fresh from our local fish market that comes every Friday.  Go for the whiter meat as it tends to be sweeter.  

4 servings

Heat oven to 200 C/Gas 6/390 F

Ingredients

2 small carrots, peeled

2 small leeks, white part only

3-4 spring onions, trimmed

4-5 garlic cloves (unpeeled), halved

few rosemary sprigs, leaves only

few thyme sprigs

8 skinned lemon sole fillets, about 150-175g each

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

few dill sprigs

olive oil, to drizzle

about 100ml dry white wine

1.Cut out eight large squares of baking parchment, measuring about 30x30 cm. (Or, if you're like me and lack any math skills whatsoever, trace the bottom of a medium-large mixing bowl. There's your circle!!) Thinly slice the carrots, leeks and spring onions on the diagonal.  Tip the vegetables and garlic into a bowl, add the rosemary and thyme and toss to mix.  Scatter the mixture in neat piles in the centre of four of the parchment sheets.

2. Season each sole fillet with salt and pepper and place a few dill sprigs on top.  Roll up the fillets, enclosing the dill and place two rolled fillets on each pile of vegetables. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper.

3. Place another sheet of paper on top of each parcel and using short folds, secure the edges to seal in the fish and vegetables.

When you've reached the last fold, carefully pour in a generous splash of white wine and a little water.  Seal the parcels and place on one or two large baking sheets.  Bake for 20 minutes or until the lemon sole feels firm in the middle.

4. Lift the parcels on to warm large plates. Gordon Ramsey suggests cutting a cross in the top to open them, Gordon Starshine simply cut them open and they were perfection.

This fish literally melts in your mouth.  The herbs bring out wonderful flavors.  The vegetables are delightfully crunchy. 

Eat me...eat me soon!

Boulangére Potatoes

(Courtesy of Joanne Harris and Fran Warde's The French Kitchen)

If you enjoy French cooking, or at least beautiful pictures of France and/or food, buy this book.  I've found it hard to resist cutting some out and framing them.

Preparation: 25 minutes

Cooking: 90 minutes

Serves 6

Heat oven to 180 C/gas 4/ 355 F

Ingredients

1 kg. floury potatoes, such as Maris Piper, Desirée, King Edwards, or Idaho

2 onions

25 g butter

300 ml hot chicken or vegetable stock

sea salt

freshly ground black pepper

1. Peel the potatoes and slice them very finely.  This works best with a food processor.  Slice the onions in the same way. Dry the potatoes as much as you can with a dish towel so they can get nice and crisp on top, and sooo soft on the inside.

2. Butter an ovenproof dish and make neat, overlapping layers of the potatoes and onions, with seasoning sprinkled over each.

3. Press the last layer down firmly with the flat of your hand.  Pour over the hot stock.  Cut the remaining butter into little pieces and dot the top with them.  Cover with tin foil and bake for 1 hour.

4. Remove the foil and bake for another 30 minutes.  The potato will be soft all the way through, but crisp and brown on the top.  (Those are the bits I like to pluck off late at night, shhh!)

And last, our lovely quick and delightful Sunday lunch...

Honey Glazed Duck

I really need to find out how to make this separate link for a recipe thing so I can stop cluttering up my page so much! I will leave you to look at this one.  It's, as they say in Northern Ireland, dead easy! 

Tomorrow, I will post about my pumpkin puree adventures.  I won't be defeated by the lack of canned pumpkin now! Pumpkin Loaf here I come!

Singin' in the Rain...

The clouds and rain are back in Ireland. We were blessed with a crisp and sunny September, but now the skies are dark across the fields and it gets harder and harder to leave my cozy bed.  What else to do then but...make Snickerdoodles!!


Cookies are my biggest winter comfort food. Unfortunately. But oh so, so fortunately!  These easy cookies are a delight to most: simple, sweet, and easy to throw together.


Snickerdoodles


1 1/2 Cups White Sugar
1 Cup Butter, softened
1/4 tsp.Vanilla
2 eggs
2 1/4 Cups Plain Flour
2 tsp. Cream of Tartar (or like me if you don't have it, a tsp. or two of lemon juice)
1 tsp. Baking Soda
1/4 tsp. Salt


Topping
1/2 Cup White Sugar
2 tsp. Cinnamon


First mix the sugar, butter, vanilla, and eggs until all is nice and fluffy.  If your nieces and nephews are now stealing bits out of the bowl, you know you're doing good so far.


Mix the flour, cream of tartar, baking soda and salt in another bowl. Add slowly to the sugar mixture.


Roll the dough into small balls, I usually do about the size of a golf ball.


Roll the ball in the cinnamon sugar mixture until lightly coated.  Place on a cookie sheet that isn't greased!


Bake for 8-10 minutes at 325F, or 260C.

My niece Emily is quite the budding chef. Here are the mini quiches she made in school today:

She could teach me a few things!


I can't seem to get the lighting on a lot of my baking pictures right...they always come out too bright and garish no matter how many lights I adjust in the kitchen.

How did this stud get in here? Hmm....Tomorrow he is cooking stuffed Lemon Sole with Mint Roasted Potatoes. I love having a husband that enjoys spending time in the kitchen. 


What are you cooking this weekend?

Hump Day Bliss

My mom has been doing yoga since I was a young teenager.  I saw it transform her...at the time, she had a lot going on physically.  She was walking with a cane (covered with Tigger stickers of course), suffered from tremors, and was on over 10 medications.  Eventually everything was attributed to, of all things, stress! After seeing a new doctor, she was slowly weaned off her medication.  I would walk into the kitchen every morning to see my mom doing yoga, and noticed how much calmer she seemed. Eventually she became a teacher, and is now training for her level 500 RYT!  For years after I would try yoga tapes here and there, but personally could never get into it.  Finally I tried Hot Yoga. it took me a couple of classes to appreciate it. For some odd reason Hot Yoga made you sweat a lot...but I got over it. I was hooked. I began to realize where the stress points were in my body and because of this became more aware of the stress inside.  The person inside. She sent me this poem on Monday.

The Invitation

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.

I want to know what you ache for

and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are.

I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool

for love

for your dream

for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon...

I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow

if you have been opened by life’s betrayals

or have become shrivelled and closed

from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain

mine or your own

without moving to hide it

or fade it

or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy

mine or your own

if you can dance with wildness

and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes

without cautioning us

to be careful

to be realistic

to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me

is true.

I want to know if you can

disappoint another

to be true to yourself.

If you can bear the accusation of betrayal

and not betray your own soul.

If you can be faithless

and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty

even when it is not pretty

every day.

And if you can source your own life

from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure

yours and mine

and still stand at the edge of the lake

and shout to the silver of the full moon,

“Yes.”

It doesn’t interest me

to know where you live or how much money you have.

I want to know if you can get up

after the night of grief and despair

weary and bruised to the bone

and do what needs to be done

to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know

or how you came to be here.

I want to know if you will stand

in the centre of the fire

with me

and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom

you have studied.

I want to know what sustains you

from the inside

when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone

with yourself

and if you truly like the company you keep

in the empty moments.

-Oriah 

Wow.  Awesome!!

The pose you see at the top, courtesy of Yoga Journal, is One Legged Pigeon Pose (Eka Pada Rajakapotasana). It is my absolute favorite hip opener!! I experience a lot of tightness in my hips (thanks mom!) and I often struggle with Half Moon (Ardha Chandrasana).  Do you ever feel a ball of tightness in either hip? That's the lovely Piriformis muscle located deep within the hips and gluteus. It helps keeps things connected and can get very tight.  I've noticed that when I'm stressed, bam, I lose flexibility there.  While doing Pigeon, the Piriformis can be a bit cantankerous.  It takes about a minute just to relax. When it does...yogi bliss! If I can manage later I will get some mini photographers to do a yoga photo shoot...

Oh honey, honey...

As I said in my last post, I was going to 'attempt' Baking Bite'sBaklava Loaf. Attempt. Key word. Yep. It started off fine...

I combined my cinnamon, ground cardamom, brown sugar, ground walnuts and almonds to make an extremely yummy smelling filling. So far so good!

Then why, you may ask, is my husband holding oven cleaner over bits of tarred crusty things on the stove?

We all know that women are, or at least like to think they are, the queens of multitasking. It is supposedly embedded in our genes from the womb. Why else would one of my best friends from home have a bumper sticker on her car that says, "Caution: Driver applying makeup." ?

As my honey syrup was left to boil for five minutes, I busied myself around the kitchen getting into Aurora mode, singing and tidying minus the harmonizing birds and other forest creatures. I heard the 'ssssssssizzle' in the background and the air quickly went from Disney-like to rated R. Needless to say, I had to open every window and door in the house to air it out. Luckily my husband was not actually home at this time, but unluckily he came home to a very grumpy wife. Not only did I lose some syrup, but I discovered a fan oven is hotter than a normal oven.

The top browned quite quickly, and was very hard when I took it out. I still pierced it, quite a bit as I don't have a very large one, and poured over what syrup I did have left. It was very thin at the end, and I'm not sure if it should have been more like actual honey? Some absorbed, but not a whole lot. Overall, it didn't taste terrible, but the texture was a bit harder than I'd imagined. I'll just have to try it again!

At least Starshine's Moroccan Roasted Mackerel turned to be divine. He even cooked the entire Sunday Lunch yesterday! He is a budding Gordon Ramsay, and I am Lucille Ball of the kitchen. We're a perfect match!

Welcome!

Hello world. As of late I have had a lot of time on my hands. I have just moved to Northern Ireland in June to be married to the most wonderful man in the world. Of course I'm biased, but what do you expect when you're in love?

The visa I currently have doesn't allow me to work which leaves a lot of...time. Starshine (hubby) is a teacher but hasn't been able to find a full-time position since coming back from England in Jan. 2008. Thankfully he had a 9 month maternity cover last year, and just got another couple of months - hopefully more - at the same school. That's wonderful and I am so, so happy for him! Unfortunately for my end of things, that means many days alone. We still live with Starshine's wonderful parents, and I am so grateful. But, I need to occupy myself with more than a good cup of tea in the morning.

I want to use this blog to document my adventures in cooking, specifically baking. I. Love. Dessert. As my mother always says, 'Dessert' is simply 'Stressed' spelled backwards! I grew up in a very versatile kitchen...with my mom being Portuguese, many of her dishes are filled with spice and warmth. When it comes to her baking though, psh, she rocks! My dad cooks up a mean egg sandwich, and, when you ask him nicely, a PB&J. Starshine is a wonderful cook with a love for sauces. He tends to a sauce pot like it's his baby - carefully and lovingly with a bit of those Emeril Lagasse "BAM!" movements added in here and there when he doesn't realize I'm watching. My in-laws are traditional Irish meat and potatoes people, and I have loved eating those stick to your rib dishes! Lately though, it's cupcakes, bread, cookies, pastries, and pies that have called my name...I still have a lot to learn, but that's what I hope to use this for.

I would love any suggestions! Now...my next project.

Baklava Loaf!