Thai Duck Curry

Long time no posts but I am determined to cook better currently.

I have just joined www.myfooddiary.com to keep an eye on what I eat a bit better. I like it cos I can add the stuff I actually eat rather than having to guess the american and/or gluten filled versions.

Anyway on to the cooking. Made a very nice Thai duck curry from a magazine called Fresh, the September issue and it isn't even August yet!. Used green thai paste and it came out very mild and flavoursome. Did some baby corn, borocalli, and peppers with garlic, chilli, fish sauce and soy as an extra and I did a rice noodle, chicken, cucumber and seasame salad in case the smalllest one didn't like the curry. As it was he was too tired to really want to eat anything especially as he had eaten an apple earlier to keep him going. plus of course rice. Apart from the small one not being interested it went down well and there is plenty left for lunch tomorrow.. such a shame :)

Forgot to take pictures.

Macarons

First attempt at macarons. Used the recipe from Tartelette. Worked quite well. made a filling from creame fresh, sugar, a bit of lemon juice cos I put to much sugar in and some rose oil.. tasted like turkish delight. Think it was a good first attempt, possibly should have whipped the egg a touch more so they were a bit less flat. I want to experiment with other more stable fillings as I would like to make several batchs so we can fill the cake stand in the previous post and serve them at the next maelstrom event.

Yoink

Yoink - to aquire an item of friends or family that they had sitting around which you feel would be better off living with you.

In this case a cake stand which did belong to Tom's sister.

It is actually a lot closer to the colour of the kitchen units than it seems in the picture, possibly one shade different at most but the shiny cupboard compared to the matt finish on the cake stand combined with a flash changed the colour balance quite a lot. The colour of the cake stand is the more accurate one.

It will come on roleplaying events with us to hold biscuits and flapjack and the like and also be used at home i am sure. I think i need to get or make one to go with it which has flat layers too so we can have cupcakes and the like which would do less well in the basket style this one is..

Plum and Walnut bread

Got a couple of punnets of plums from the market at closing time so they were going cheap. I was going to make banana bread but the bananas were to far gone even for that so i decided to use Plums.

Found this recipe so tried it using Dove Farm gluten free flour.

Very nice. the texture was a bit crumbly and it's really a teabread/cake. cake itself is fairly sweet but the plums added a tartness to it and the walnuts added texture.

Cheesecake

Experimenting with Cheesecake as himself promised to make one for work and there is at least one gluten free person there.

That said there is really only the base that needs changing. This one is a biscuit base with a cooked top. Looks great though very homemade, partly cos the tin is very old so i lined it to stop sticking.

Looks great. tastes OK.

The base was nice though I couldn't really taste the cinamon even though it looked loads when we put it in. Biscuits were a GF rich tea which worked well. The top was nice but a little bland. Texture good though so should be easy to improve the taste by adding a little more lemon or some vannila or similar.

Flutterby Cakes

We, as in the small one and me, made these last week but I forgot to upload them.









Recipe from the Big Cook, Little Cook cookbook, made with Dove farm gluten free plan flour (plus Baking powder) .

Very nice they were too.

Pumpkin and Noodles

I got given some pumkin by a friend yesterday which is not something we have really used much so we decided to try soup. I cooked off some onion, pumpkin and garlic in a little oil, added some fresh curry paste and then covered it all with veg stock and let it cook down. When everything was soft I thought I'd add some rice noodles to make it a little more substantial. What actually happened is the noodles soaked up all the liquid and we ended up with noodles in pumpkin sauce.

Worked really well and I couldn't have come up with it if I tried ! Probably helps that the pumpkin has flavour this time unlike the only other time I tried. Moral of that story is the ones they sell in the super market to carve may look similar but they are not woth eating!