April 2022 – MakeCookGrow.com

Luscious Tomato Tarte Tatin, Nigella’s Chocolate Cake and ‘The Labyrinth’

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tomato tarte tatin

We are heading towards the end of the tomato season in Western Australia so I decided to make a Tomato Tarte Tatin before it’s too late. I reread the recipe in Belinda Jeffery’s A Lunch of Sundays and used it as a guide for making one, too. I made my favourite short, crumbly pastry, although I’m sure Jeffery’s is lovely. I don’t know where I originally got this recipe for Pate Brisée but it is the best, easiest, quickest ever. For a quiche size dish, you need 250gm plain flour, 125 gm butter, 1/3 cp cold water and a pinch of salt. Tip all the ingredients into the processor, pulse until clumped together, smooth into a ball in your hands then leave it in the fridge for an hour. ( I chop the butter and if it is very cold, microwave it for 10 seconds on high before adding to the processor. If the pastry is for a sweet dish I use unsalted butter).

Olive oil, butter and balsamic vinegar, caster sugar and a pinch of salt for caramelising the tomatoes, plus the pastry. Grated pepper towards the end of cooking.

Jeffery’s recipe involves scraping the seeds and pulp out of the cherry or grape tomatoes using a teaspoon. I never do and the tart is still delicious. Find a recipe that suits your style of cooking .

I like this tart as it’s popular with vegetarians and everyone else at the table. It’s delicious hot or cold. There’s lots of versions in recipe books and online with added ingredients but I make the original.

I don’t like wasting food, even if it is a small ball of leftover pastry. I rolled it out, made a mini flan and filled it with sun dried tomatoes and snipped spring onion and baked it in the oven with the tart. It was delicious, too!

When I think of Italian cuisine I think of tomatoes. Recently, my husband read me a paragraph from the book he was reading which mentioned the introduction of the tomato to Italy in the 16th century. What! Tomatoes are to Italy what kangaroos are to Australia, surely?

Apparently tomatoes were introduced to Italy from the Americas. These early tomatoes were about the size of a cherry tomato and were yellow. They were called Pomo d’oro, or golden apple. These involved into the red pomodoro we know and love today.

nigella’s chocolate cake

Searching through my remaining recipe books recently to find my handwritten pastry recipe I found a a Nigella Lawson book I used quite often then forgot about. It survived the great ‘sort and discard’ which reduced my recipe book library by about half two years ago. Due for another purge as I tend to look up recipes online now or make old favourites.

Needing a part birthday cake, part Easter cake I settled on Nigella’s Chocolate Cake With Coffee Buttercream (p244) recipe from her book, At My Table. This is an odd cake mixture. The wet ingredients are added to the dry ingredients and the mix is very, very sloppy. Her recipe was baked as two cakes with a butter cream filling and icing. I don’t have two same sized cake tins so settled on a large bundt tin.

A most surprising cake! It cooked in about 30 minutes and was still moist and luscious days later. It was a very big cake! It looks good and tastes good. If I’d been thinking I would have cut it in half, one half for eating over the weekend and one half for freezing.

the labyrinth

This very engaging book by Amanda Lohrey is about love, loss and finding peace. This sparsely told story is about a mother, Erica, dealing with her revengeful son being imprisoned, but it’s also about her own developing creativity. She researches, designs and eventually builds a labyrinth along side the old, rustic house she buys to be near her son, who is in prison.

The descriptions of the landscape and the people Erica meets are richly described as this story evolves. Erica is scarred by her own mother leaving the family when she was small and then discovering as an adult that she’d died two years after leaving, so no chance of reconciliation. The father of her son had also disappeared when the boy was two resulting in anger and confusion. So, no happy endings, really, but a well written story.

ANZAC DAY

Australia and New Zealand commemorate ANZAC Day (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) on the 25th of April. Traditionally services were held at local war memorials and in capital cities, but Covid has changed that recently. Now, people stand at the end of their driveways holding candles and listen to the buglers playing the Last Post ( lights out) and Reveille (get up!).

red flower in macro shot

Image: Unsplash

We then sat on the verge enjoying coffee and a chat with our wonderful neighbours. This year we were better organised with chairs, a table and coffee machine and everyone brought food to share. Dawn broke with a pink and purple striped sky and a memorable, lovely picnic followed.

did you know?

Tasmania has the cleanest air in the world?

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An Interesting Day in Pinjarra

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Pinjarra, a country town on the banks of the Murray River, is 82km (51 miles) from Perth. It is one of the earliest settlements in Western Australia. The name Pinjarra is thought to be a corruption of the Aboriginal word beenjarrup, meaning place of the swamp.

Early settlers met with resistance from the local Aboriginal people. In 1834 this resulted in the Battle of Pinjarra, one of Australia’s worst recorded massacres.

In 1974 Alcoa established a major alumina refinery in the area greatly increasing the population of Pinjarra and nearby Mandurah on the coast.

We’d often pass through the town heading south but hadn’t stopped to explore for many years. It was an easy drive from Perth to Pinjarra on the Forrest Highway.

the evandale complex

Arrived at the well sign posted Evandale Complex, a group of buildings once belonging to the McLarty family. We parked and headed off to the first building. The garden above faces the main road into the town and is in front of the old school master’s house and the school. The school master’s house is now the home of the Murray Districts Historical Society.

The garden at the front of the School Master’s house is mainly planted with roses, including this stunner. Unfortunately, there’s no labels or site maps identifying the names of the roses. A site map for the entire complex would have been so useful! The lady in the shop thought they had one, but couldn’t find it.

Beautiful, well established roses and no signs of chili thrip!

Classic country school, designed by George Temple Poole (1856 -1934). He was responsible for designing many public buildings in Western Australia including Post Offices, Courthouses, Police Stations, Hospitals, the original Art Gallery in Perth, the original Museum, the Swan Brewery (now offices, apartments and a restaurant.) There are schools just like this one all over the state.

There’s more information about Temple Poole’s public buildings on this blog about Beverley, another old settlement in Western Australia. https://www.makecookgrow.com/2019/08/visiting-beverley-western-australia/

This spacious and fully restored four room school building is now the home of a group of patchworkers. Many of their beautiful works are for sale. There’s also interesting photos on the wall showing groups of former school children.

Autumn began eight weeks ago in the southern hemisphere, but this was the first real sign for me! Bulbs germinating in a garden bed near the carpark. Lovely.

The Art Gallery featuring works by local artists. This building, Liveringa, was built in the 1860s and is one of two homesteads on the property.

I did as directed: I drank coffee! Did I do stupid things? Not saying.

The museum is absolutely full of fascinating relics from another era when so many things were made at home. This is an Aladdin’s cave of treasures. Much of the machinery on display is still in working order. Most of the collection originated in the local district. We were accompanied throughout the workshop by a guide. She was so well informed and interesting.

Onto the shop featuring arts and crafts made by locals. Lots of treasures.

The shop and on the right, the end of the meeting room adjoining a big pottery area. So many areas for craft men and women to work, store their materials and display their products. So many interesting crafts people working at this site.

The original homestead built in 1888 and featuring wide verandas to protect the rooms from the harsh sunlight. It is now set up as tearooms. The rest of the building seemed to be storage and more meeting rooms. There are more tables at the back of the house, too.

This is the tearooms. It is where we had lunch, sitting outdoors overlooking a beautifully maintained garden leading up to the main road. There was a light breeze and it was pretty and peaceful.

I enjoyed a very good traditional quiche with not traditional chili dipping sauce.

My husband settled for a pot of tea and a scone with jam and cream which he really enjoyed. There is a limited menu with salad rolls and sandwiches, pies, cakes, hot chips and the wonderful quiche.

Then we set off to look around the town. I enjoyed visiting the new shopping centre. My husband sat in the car and read the paper.

Other buildings of interest include the old post office, on the main street, another Poole designed building. There’s several cafes offering lunch and snacks, some of the usual fast food places and some interesting shops along the main street.

DID YOU KNOW?

The Australian Alps get more snow than the Swiss Alps.

Eighty percent of Australians live on the coast of Australia.

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Tortilla Española, Reading, Lucky Bamboo and Rosemary.

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tortilla española

A blogger I follow likes to go through her extensive collection of recipe books every month. She selects one book. Then she makes one or two things from the chosen book. I decided to do the same. I’ve been reading Belinda Jeffery’s new book A Year Of Sundays. She describes this book as a “cookbook, a conversation and reflections on the world around me.” She writes about her cooking school, growing fruit and vegetables, trialing recipes and sharing food.

I chose to make Tortilla Española (p195). I remember we enjoyed this in Barcelona and I had all the ingredients in the fridge or cupboard. You need eggs, onions, potatoes and some oil. It’s a tasty alternative if you’ve given up meat for Lent. I used to make tortillas for picnics as they travel well and taste even better when they’re cold. I thought we’d enjoy this for lunch with a small salad. I was right!

Making the tortilla took quite a while as the potatoes need to cook for about 20 minutes with the onions, in hot oil. Then the potatoes and onions sit in the lightly beaten egg for about half an hour to absorb the egg flavour. I used this time to make the Homemade Mayonnaise (p175). I’d already separated the eggs, keeping the yolks for the mayonnaise and adding the whites to the tortilla mix. You know I hate to waste food!

My version and Jeffery’s version in the book.

While the potato and onion mix was absorbing the lightly beaten egg flavour, I started on the mayonnaise. None of Jeffery’s romantic balloon whisking for me! No lovely French ceramic bowl for mixing in, either. For years I have made mayonnaise in the food processor but today I made it using a Barmix and a jug. I used a blend of extra virgin olive oil and olive oil, as Jeffery suggested and I like the flavour. Dripping the oil slowly into the mix meant the whole process took about 25 minutes. The resulting mayonnaise is thick and creamy. This recipe makes a lot of mayonnaise!

Belinda Jeffery’s A Year of Sundays has recipes arranged to reflect the seasonal fruit and vegetables available. The recipes are accompanied by beautiful, inspiring photographs and generally rely on ingredients which are commonplace. I found lots of recipes I’d like to make, including her version of Tomato Tarte Tatin, a new favourite.

reading

I’ve really enjoyed reading Daniel Klein Travels with Epicurus. After the author is advised to have the teeth on his lower jaw removed and replaced with implants he begins contemplating the battle to fight off signs of ageing. Is it better to be forever young? Looking for answers, the author travels to the Greek Island of Hydra where he spent a gap year as a teenager. Here he observes and talks to the old men who gather daily to reminiscence about lives well lived.

It is not the young man who should be considered fortunate but the old man who has lived well, because the young man in his prime wanders much by chance, vacillating in his beliefs, while the old man has docked in the harbour, having safeguarded his true happiness.

EPICURUS

Klein intersperses his observations with Epicurus’s quotes about the way to live a good life. We often relate Epicurus to epicurean style dining, which the great man himself eschewed for a bowl of lentils, eaten in the company of friends. He did not promote excesses in any area of life. Friendship was important and discussing the meaning of life was more important. Klein compares this relaxed way of living to his retiring American friends who have bucket lists, lengthy lists of goals and are driven to be frantically busy, but most of all, to look young. I think these are common goals in many societies.

Not what we have, but what we enjoy, constitutes our happiness.

EPICURUS

His insights are based on the beliefs of Epicurus and other philosophers. This is philosophy ‘lite’ but thought provoking and interesting. An easy, good read.

lucky bamboo and rosemary

A few weeks ago I wrote about propagating new lucky bamboo stems, pruned from an old, dying (over fertilised) very large parent plant. They have done very well. Only one stem didn’t ‘take’ but the rest have healthy roots and are growing new leaves. I have planted them all in a pot in soil as they last longer than those growing in water. In a few weeks I will divide them into two pots.

Last Anzac Day, the 25th of April, I made Anzac Biscuits for the neighbours and added a piece of rosemary ( for remembrance) under the ribbon tied to each box. I also put a leftover piece in water. When it had good strong roots I planted it out in a pot. As it grew I began removing the growth on the lower part of the stem to create a topiary rosemary tree. It is going very well!

Have you begun Easter preparations? No controlled borders for us this year so we are really looking forward to our son coming to spend the Easter break with us!

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