The last of my summer strawberries

Not that strawberry season is over but the ginormous-to-me basket of berries I bought at the market last week is no more. It will be a few weeks until I get out there again, so I'm afraid the berries will be gone by my next visit. Yes, I suppose I could get some at the bigscarymegamart, but they only seem to have imported berries...

I wasn't terribly inventive with my prized July possessions--you saw the cake and the sauce. Mostly they were eaten fresh, plain or dipped in yoghurt. or mixed with yoghurt and granola.

But the last few hundred grams are a different story.

One of my favourite flavour combinations has always been strawberry-banana. Love it in ice cream and frozen yoghurt; when teamed up with orange, it's a preferred juice blend.

Well, apart from not having any oranges, I wasn't in the mood to make my own juice and my freezer still doesn't have enough room for my ice cream maker's freezer insert, so those concoctions were well out of the question.

So, what's a girl to do with a few hundred grams of hastenlingly overripe strawberries and a banana that needs to go to a better place?

Let's just say it was time to hope, pray, light a candle, spread a little incense and hop on one foot for luck. Yup...Beelzebub would be called into service: I decided to bake muffins...and I didn't feel like making them in my parents' unairconditioned kitchen.

Well...something must have worked because Beelzebub behaved himself. You read correctly. He didn't ruin my muffins.

None of his usual games. No "No, I don't feel like turning on" nor any hint of "I'm teasing you, making you believe that I'm actually 350F when in fact I'll start at 200F and end at 450F." He didn't even try the old "Oh, you are sooooooo fetching in that apron, I'd love to get together with you and give the central air a reason to turn on" as a ruse to turn my offerings to charcoal.

Did I tame the beast? Have I won him over with my womanly wiles? Did I beat Lucifer at his own game? Have I been lulled into a false sense of security believing I actually have a stove that I can trust? Will Charlie Daniels immortalise my feat in a fiddle-sawin', fruit-chawin', baked-goods jawin' tune?

All I know is that I didn't have to toss any of them out. They all had a muffinny texture and a crunchy-sweet-sticky top. I'm not questionning it.

Strawberry Banana Muffins
Yield 18

For the muffins
110g butter, melted
150g brown sugar
2 beaten eggs
mashed bananas with enough vanilla yoghurt to fill a 250ml measure
250g chopped strawberries
300g plain flour
25g whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp vanilla salt

For the streuselly topping
10g butter, melted
75g brown sugar
40g roalled oats
15g pinhead oats
nine large strawberries, hulled and halved (optional)

Preheat oven to a moderate heat (180C/350F) and line 18 buns of two 12-bun muffin tins with papers.

Sift together the flours, baking powder, bicarb and salt; set aside. In a separate bowl, mix together the streuselly topping and set that aside as well.

Mix together the egg, melted butter and vanilla and banana-yoghurt mixture. Stir into the flour mixture. Do not overmix: what you want is the batter to barely hang together (lumpy is good). Lightly fold in the chopped berries.

Portion into the muffin papers and spoon about a teaspoon's worth of the topping over the wet batter. Top with the half-berry.

Bake for 20-30 minutes, or until an inserted skewer comes away cleanish.

cheers!
jasmine

In a crunchy but slightly mushy mood

As a run-up to Mmm...Canada, this week's posts will feature Canadian foods and food products. Today's post uses oats.

About two months ago, when I outted myself as a pinhead, I mentioned my sudden craving for granola.

Our dearest Ivonne visited me about a year ago and brought with her a parcel filled with homemade granola. It was so good--sweet and crunchy, studded with cranberries and blueberries--I had it with milk, yoghurt and ice cream...I was even grabbing handfuls as snacks. Wanting to satisfy my craving, I emailed her for the recipe and she obliged.

That's one of the things I really like about being a part of the food blogging community. We can ask each other for hints, recipes, techniques and even the occasional ear or opinion and it's generally freely given. No questions asked.

We visit each other's pages and riffle through their recipe books and pantries. We ooh and ah at intricate pastries and commiserate over horrible casseroles. Our dishes span many cuisines and courses, not to mention lifestyles and preferences. We dare each other to expand our horizons and invite one another to create new foods.

We can say "Hey! I want to do an event featuring my home country and I want you participate--you don't need to find it on a map, or have visited or anything, but I just want you to join in on the fun."


And for the most part they'll say "Hey! I can find it on a map and YES I'd love to take part."

Better yet, we can say "Hey, I'm going to be in your neck of the woods...wanna hang out?" and you can usually find a dining companion...


And like many RL communities, word spreads about our joys and our pains. We find little gifts in our mailboxes (real and virtual). We support freely and we are supported unexpectedly.

Most of this without ever meeting each other face-to-face.

Fruit and Nut Granola
adapted from Stonewall Kitchen Favourites

125g rolled oats
55g pinhead oats
50g sweetened shredded coconut
50g sunflower seeds
50g pumpkin seeds
50g whole almonds
35g brown sugar
1tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp nutmeg
½ ginger
75ml maple syrup
60ml oil
1tsp vanilla extract
100g dried fruit

Putting it together

1. Preheat oven to 150C/300F and line a baking tray with foil or parchment
2. Mix all the ingredients together, spread evenly on the prepared tray and pop into the oven for 30-40 minutes. Stir every 10 minutes or so, so the granola doesn't clump together. The granola is ready to come out of the oven when it's a lovely golden colour
3. Remove from oven and put the tray on a cooling rack. Stir once or twice until cool
4. Keeps in an airtight container for up to six weeks.

cheers!
jasmine

There's custard...

...and then there's custard.


I'm not going to sugar coat things or wax too nostalgic about My Darling One: the man was an unwilling cook who relied heavily on Bachelor Chow: big box frozen foods, insta this and canned that. Don't get me wrong: when he did cook from scratch, it was very good -- spaghetti, lasagne, chicken oporto, and I'm told his trifle (I never got to try any as there was never any left for me to try--he took a full bowl to the office at Christmas, and it came back disappointingly empty). Those dishes appeared every so often, but mostly, if he made me a meal, it was usually what is known as Bachelor Chow.


When time came to clean out his pantry, a bachelor friend took much of the BC, a few things were kept (rice, pasta, oatmeal) and the rest was binned. One of the few things I kept was a cannister of Bird's Custard--a staple of the aforementioned trifle.


As someone who's only made...um...real custard, I was curious about this white cornstarchy mix that's famous for transforming into an unnaturally yellow pudding and sauce. I mean, how difficult is it to make custard? (Answer: Not very, as is evidenced by my ability to turn out a pretty yummy vanilla ice cream.).


Well...I made some to go with some individual apple crumbly crispy things.


Would I sound terribly boastful to say my home made custard is yummier--richer, vanilla-ier and, well, oomphier than the powdered purveyance? The colour didn't help matters much--I don't think mine comes anywhere close to that particular shade (unless I dribbled in some colourant).


That's not to say that the cannister will find its way into the bin. I have a few recipes that call for a spoon of custard powder here and there to flavour fillings or cookies...and besides, sometimes truly instant pudding is what a soul needs.

The individual apple crisps were the main point of dessert, no mere vehicle for the sauce. I don't really follow any real recipes when making them: half to a whole tart apple, peeled and sliced, with a spoon of jam or maple syrup in each ramekin.


The topping is really easy (and uses pinhead oats)--this amount was fine for six individual ramekins. Please note I'm pretty free-wheeling when it comes to making this...sometimes there's more flour and less oats, sometimes put spices in sometimes there's barely any butter...it all depends on my mood...and my pantry:


25g plain flour
100g brown sugar
40g rolled oats
15g pinhead oats
50g soft butter (or more, or less, depending on your mood)



Rub the topping ingredients together and spoon over apples before baking.


cheers!
jasmine

I'm such a pinhead

Or...how crunchy turned into mushy

Or....don't go shopping when you're hungry.

Or...read the ENTIRE label before you commit something to your shopping trolley...or better yet, before you take it home.

And no, I'm not intentionally jumping onto the pinhead/steelcut/Irish/Scottish oats bandwagon. I accidentally fell into it.

A few weeks ago I was in a crunchy mood and wanted to make some granola. Unfortunately, I was weak with hunger when I went shopping and and didn't read the cannister label carefuly enough: I saw "oats" on the label and simply found a home for the can in my shopping cart. It was only when I got home when I saw the error of my ways.

It wasn't a lovely container of rolled oats (quick cook or regular). It was a can of pinhead oats.

I suppose another sort of person would simply get back into her car and sheepishly exchange it for what she really wanted.

Not I.

It would have been, in some weirdly inexplicable way, admitting defeat. I mean pinhead oats are a perfectly wonderful foodstuff so why should I return them?

Yeah, I'm stubborn.

And my crunchy mood was pushed aside to figure out what to do with something I think of as...mushy.

I was also a pinhead virgin. Before now, I've only eaten oatmeal made with rolled oats--and usually the instant kind (peaches and cream, if you're interested). My dad, who eats a tureen of soupy oatmeal every morning, also limits himself to rolled oats, so he wouldn't have been of much use.

Did I mention that these things have a nine-year shelf life? I was bound and determined to put them to use before 2017.

Thank goodness for the Web. After paging through what seemed like an unending list of porridgy variants, I found various other uses for these pelletty pieces, including

• rice substitutes,
• baked goods
• burgers and stirfries

But with all these choices, what did I do?

I made porridge--not just "any" porridge, but Duncan Hilditch's porridge. If I'm going to learn how to make a good porridge, it might as well be using the directives of a porridge making champion.

I'd like to say that I wanted to try it in the way it was supposed to be eaten, but in fact I read somewhere that I could make a pot of it, stick it in the fridge and then microwave servings in the morning. In other words, an instant, homemade, hot and healthy breakfast. I was also weary of muffins, scones and other bready baked goods and needed a bit of a break.

Each morning that week, I spooned a serving into a bowl, microwaved it and poured buttermilk on it and stirred in a spoon of marmelade.

Maybe it was the vague similarities to the cream of wheat my mum made when I was little(r), but I think I actually prefer pinhead oats over rolled oats: it was nutty tasting, with a tapioca pudding-like texture (and I really, really like tapioca pudding).

Needless to say, you may notice steel cut oats showing up in recipes over the next little while.

Which only means...I'm a pinhead.

cheers!
jasmine