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Recipe: pasta with haloumi

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Having to use up some fresh ingredients often makes for interesting new recipes and flavour experiences:

  • haloumi cheese (home made in my case), cut in to small slices, fry separately in virgin olive oil, set aside.
  • red onion
  • chopped fresh garlic
  • zucchini (courgette)
  • roma tomatoes
  • cracked pepper
  • some rosemary
  • toss haloumi in to the mix.
  • serve on pasta.
None of it needs much cooking, keep it fresh and quick!
Careful adding any salt, depends a bit on how you do the haloumi. A bit of lemon juice can also be good.

Arjen’s Chilli Chocolate Shortbread

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Ingredients

A batch of Arjen's Chilli Chocolate Shortbread cookies

  • 250g baking butter (variety with salt and cream), softened
  • 2/3 cup icing sugar
  • 2 cups plain flour
  • 1 cup gluten free flour (contains tapioca as well as rice flour), this will create a nicer texture compared to the usual plain rice flour!
  • 1 tbsp cacao
  • 1 tsp chilli powder

Instructions

  1. Mix all ingredients together until the texture of the mixture resembles breadcrumbs – food-processor or hand-held electric mixer work best.
  2. Form dough by pressing together.
  3. Roll a decent chunk of the dough out on board dusted lightly with flour (approx 5mm thick, but more will work fine too although it may affect baking time).
  4. Cut out shapes, transfer to baking tray(s) also lightly dusted with flour. Works best if you grab the off-cuts from the outside rather than from the side of the shapes.
  5. Recycle off-cuts (via step 2) until all dough used.
  6. Bake at 160’C for about 30 minutes. Cookies should be dry and firm but not gone dark.
  7. Cool on wire rack.
  8. Keep in a metal cookie tin to keep fresh – although I’m quite sure they won’t last very long ;-)

Notes

  • Quantity: number of cookies of course depends entirely on shape, size and thickness.
  • Vegan: use vegetable based butter (such as Nuttelex) – you may need to add a pinch of salt.
  • Gluten-free: substitute the regular flour with same amount of gluten free flour.
  • Recipe neatly in line with Arjen & Stewart’s essential food groups ;-)
  • Best not nibble the dough, uncooked tapioca (cassava) contains toxins. It’s fairly dry anyway, so quite unlike cake mix it won’t really stick to the processing equipment. Just bake and enjoy!
  • Creative Commons Licence This recipe is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Almond Pie

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At the end of another ABC program, I saw a short item from 2004 called Wicked about chefs’ favourite dessert recipes. It had actor and food author Vincent Schiavelli telling about a recipe from one of his friends back home in Sicily. It’s in a book of his “Many Beautiful Things”. The recipe is also at http://www.lifestylefood.com.au/recipes/10987/crostata-i-miennuli-almond-pie. It’s a shortcrust pastry with marmelade at the bottom then topped with an almond paste filling, and blanched almonds on top. So, this is a Sicilian recipe (almonds were introduced there about 1200 years ago from the Orient and have spread as far as Scandinavia since).

Now what’s really intreresting is variations of this pie are very common in The Netherlands for food around the time of St.Nicholas (early December). I can buy it at the local Dutch shop, but as you know I try to cook most things myself these days, so I know how it’s done. I know of two main variations, one is “filled speculaas” which is essentially two layers of gingerbread (with lots of cinnamon and cloves added) with an almond past filling in between. But the other one is more interesting: a roll of pastry, with almond filling inside, and generally on top: marmelade, blanced almonds, and optionally glace cherries. The shape is either a stick (resembling the staff of St.Nick) or curved in to an S (for Sint). It’s called a “banketstaaf” or “banket letter”. But isn’t the resemblance of these recipes remarkable… it’s like the pie has been adapted into another shape for the festive purpose!

By the way, it’s completely yummie. Not least, of course, because it’s full with sugar and butter, not to forget the almonds ;-)

And on that note, when I first made the stick recipe and ate some straight out of the oven, it tasted different from what I was used to. When I’d let it cool and warmed it again later to have more, it tasted exactly like I remembered from NL. So whatever I’d ever bought before had never been “fresh” out of the oven. Funny. But, the cooled-reheated actually does taste better! And guess what, the pie instructions also note that you should leave it cool/rest for about a day after baking. So there you go.

I don’t yet know how this fits in terms of the etymology of the Sinterklaas recipes, but there’s bound to be a connection somewhere…