Garlic knots

I got this garlic knot recipe from an extremely popular US recipe site called Simply Recipes.. Its a ridiculously easy little recipe, if a little time consuming due to the rolling out and rising parts. I've made these garlic knots about eight or nine times now, at the time of writing, and they cause silence in rooms. That or my coworkers seek me out to specifically tell me how good these are, on the third or fourth time I made this, some of the other nurses were interrupting handover to tell me how good they were.

I even gave some to Mama Pham and VGirl who told me that it was good, my Sixth Auntie also had some and she shyly asked for another one, so I know they are damn good.

The method is relatively easy, the only thing is that there are lots of little things you need to remember to watch out for with this recipe. Other than that, its just a bit time consuming as there is just a wee bit of waiting around for the dough to rise. At my slowest, I can crack out a batch in just under two hours on a cold (3-7C) winter night. When I first started making this in summer? Took me an hour in 30C, heat and humidity really affect this dough.

With making the knot part of the garlic knot, roll the worm sized blob of dough in some flour so that it doesn't stick to itself. Once you tie the knot, if its unfloured on all sides, it will eventually turn itself back into a weird blob shape once it rises again. The extra flour stops it from sticking and keeps its nice shape when baked.

If your dough isn't rising due to cold weather, briefly heat your oven up to a low temperature say 100C, for a few minutes until the oven gets warm. Then turn off the heat immediately and shove in your dough in a mixing bowl, and allow it to proof there. The top and sides might begin to cook a little bit if the oven is too hot, scrape it off if it happens and continue with the rest of the recipe.

Garlic knots

Ingredients:

For the knots:
2 cups of strong 00 flour
2 teaspoons of active yeast or a 7g packet of yeast
1 teaspoon of sugar
1 teaspoon of salt
1 tablespoon of olive oil


For the garlic butter
1/4 cup of finely chopped curly leaf parsley
3-4 cloves of finely minced garlic
100g of butter
1 teaspoon of salt

Almost expired parsley woo!

1. Heat up some water, it should be warm around 38-40C. Make it the same heat as you would for a baby bottle. Dump the yeast in and let it bubble away!

Bubble, toil and trouble!

2. Dump all the rest of the bread ingredients into a steel mixing bowl and wait until the yeast is ready.

Add caption

3. Its ready when it should smell like a bakery, very yeasty and beery. It should be cloudier than it is clear and full of little bubbles. Dump it all into the mixing bowl

Ooh yes

4. Either knead it/turn on your dough hook appliance until a smooth dough is formed and starts pulling away from the edges. Should take about 4-8 minutes in your dough mixer. By hand? Who knows! Maybe 8-20 minutes? Add more flour as required if it still continues to feel wet.

In it goes!

This was my Christmas present from VGirl!

5. Cover the top with some plastic wrap and place somewhere warm for however long it takes to double in size. The least amount of time it took me was 20 minutes, the longest? Almost 40.

This one is a bit floury

6. Give it a another brief knead and dust your favourite board with some flour. I didn't do it in this first batch, but the later batches did.

Something like this!

7. Pretending we have a floured board, pinch off a 50 cent sized piece of dough, or a 5cm rough blob.

Like so!

8. Give it a roll in the pretend floured board, once it gets to about 10-15cm or about the thickness of your finger stop!

Voile! A worm!

9. Make yourself a simple slip knot, over, under and through! The flour will help it not stick to itself. Don't squish it too hard or it will stop being so pretty. You should be able to give the dough a bit of a stretch if required to make the knot complete.

One!

Two!

Three!

10. Put them on a tray, brush with a little melted butter and allow to rise for another 10+ minutes until they puff up to twice their size. Meanwhile preheat your oven to 180C

So fat

Even fatter!

My second batch!

11. Bake in your preheated oven for 12-15 minutes, or lightly golden brown.

The blobby ones were made without flour coating the knots

For the butter.
1. Mince your garlic and parsley.
2. Melt your butter in a pot over a low heat.

Delicious!

3. Throw in the garlic once the butter has melted and allow it to cook off in a low heat for 2-3 minutes or until the garlic is fragrant.
4. Toss in your parsley and salt, and try a little bit.

Mmm garlic and parsley

5. If you're civilized and don't want to kill yourself with butter, paint on the garlic butter onto the garlic knots. If you don't care, do what I do and throw it in the same bowl as the garlic knots and toss to mix. The best bit is scraping more bits of garlic butter onto your roll.

Serve warm! Eat immediately! Also good the next day, but best right now!

I got contacted about promoting the James Street Food and Wine Trail, currently in its 3rd year and running from the 31st of July to the 3rd of August. Read the media release below and if you're keen I'll see you there! I'll keep updating this and posting it to the bottom of my posts until the day of the event :)

Spicy Peanut sauce for noodles

I can't remember how I first started making this sauce. I had a basic peanut butter sauce that I had made ages ago that I remember having as a cold entree at several Chinese restaurants. This one is a mix of different recipes I got online as well as what I've found to have worked several times. I've made this about four times at the time of writing, three batches for myself and one for my sister.

The very first time I bought this into work, it was just vegetarian with red capsicum, onion, garlic, cabbage, carrot and noodles. K.O., watched me enviously when I ate it, and kept remarking that I should add hot water to it to rehydrate it. She kept nagging and nagging me, insisting that just a little more would help the consistency. After about five minutes of this, I gave in and let her do what she wanted.

She loved it, slurping away at the noodles and I have to grudgingly admit that it did get a lot better. K.O., had eaten all her dinner but I got full really quickly so I gave her my dinner. M for Megababe came in for dinner and she and K.O., shared the rest of my dinner. The pair of them couldn't stop talking about the peanut sauce and demanded I give them the recipe.

Since then, everyone has happily made their own version of this recipe. Its one of those good vegetable user upper type recipes. The peanut sauce goes with a heck of a lot of ingredients. M for Megababe says that she enjoys it as a hangover food, so she makes a big batch for the weekend and eats it warmed up. I prefer it cold to be honest. You can use whatever noodles you want. A lot of the traditional recipes use thin egg noodles, Hokkien noodles, but I wanted to use up these Korean sweet potato noodles that I had in the pantry for japchae. 100g of dried noodles makes a good amount for about 4-6 large serves.

I've played with the proportions a bit but it seems to be 2 parts peanut butter/ soy sauce/ hot water to 1 part sweet soy sauce/ sesame oil with Sriracha and lime juice or vinegar to mix. You want a thick, rich, salty, tangy and spicy sauce, mix it to taste but that's how I like it. The hot water is to thin out the sauce of course, the noodles tend to suck up all the sauce especially after a day in the fridge.

Ingredients for a large batch of peanut sauce:
2 tablespoons of crunchy peanut butter
2 tablespoons of soy sauce
2 tablespoons of hot water
1 tablespoon of sweet soy sauce
1 tablespoon of sesame oil
Sriracha sauce and lime juice or vinegar to taste

I have a lot of sauces

1. Mix the soy sauce, sweet soy, peanut butter and oil together until a thick paste is formed.

2. Thin it out with hot water and season to taste with Sriracha sauce and lime juice or vinegar.

An example of what to put in your noodles:
100g of dried Korean sweet potato noodles, whatever that equals cooked
1-2 large julienned carrot
1 cup of shredded cabbage
1 medium capsicum, cut into strips
1 large onion
3-4 cloves of garlic
 1/2 kilogram of cooked chicken, I pan fried mine and shredded it

1. Cook the noodles in boiling water until al dente.
2. Stir fry all the vegetables, onions, garlic first. Then carrots, cabbage and finally capsicum.
3. Pan fry your chicken until cooked through, shred with a fork once cooled down.
4. Mix everything into the peanut sauce.

Pre meat

Delicious chicken

Spanish style sausage rolls

Oh by the way, do you know why I call my blog Ugly as Sin, Tasty as Hell? Cause I make hideous things like this, that taste amazing.

Cream cheese icing doesn't make for pretty icing ):

   
This was a dark mocha cake that I shaped into Australia for Mr M for Megababe's Australia themed going away party. He threw this party as a farewell before his three month holiday overseas, his new Australia Citizenship, finishing Tough Mudder and finishing his nursing post-graduate certificate. The cake was delicious and so was the cream cheese icing. The decorating job, not so much so.

I made quite a few different things for that party and this was one of the biggest hits, my Spanish style sausage rolls. DJ Kez and D., found out I had made a kilo worth of sausage rolls and they steadily continued eating them until they were all gone. I made a spinach cobb loaf and my dark mocha cake of course, just undecorated. I've already put up a post about the dark mocha cake and the spinach cobb loaf wasn't super awesome, so I'll ignore it.

The recipe was based on this one. However, I rarely have any chorizo floating around my house so I just changed up a few ingredients. I subbed in pork mince, added paprika and garlic to make up for the chorizo flavour and bulked it up with a few other ingredients like sun dried tomato and bread crumbs.

This sausage roll is a very, very flavoursome one with sun dried tomatoes making it seem a little healthier and giving it a nice tang. I also did my usual trick with soaking bread crumbs with milk which made the sausage rolls extremely soft, so much so that DJ Kez was able to have some. Her teeth were aching from having her braces tightened and she said that was pretty much the only thing she could chew on.

The ingredients are very vague, the definite proportions are there for the mince, onion, bread crumbs and milk. The milk, garlic, puff pastry and sun dried tomatoes, I'm not so sure about. I just normally wing it and choose different amounts. The sun dried tomatoes are something I am definitely never sure of because I normally dice them into 3-5cm chunks and mix them up in the mince until there is a bit of tomato in every bite. The same thing happens with the paprika, I normally scatter it all over the bowl in a thin layer. The milk or water seems to help the puff pastry puff up a bit more.

Spanish style sausage rolls

Ingredients:
500g of pork mince
1 medium sized onion, finely diced
1 egg
125g of cream cheese
1/2 cup of milk or water
1 cup of fresh bread crumbs
2-4 cloves of garlic, finely minced
1/2-1 tablespoon of paprika
3-6 sheets of semi-thawed puff pastry
Sun dried tomatoes, I dunno, 1/2 cup chopped into 1-2cm bits?
Salt
Pepper

Optional:
100g of grated cheese
Melted butter/egg wash
Sesame seeds/poppy seed 

Instructions:
1. Soak the bread crumbs in the milk or water until it absorbs all the liquid. Preheat your oven to 180C.
2. Mix all of ingredients up together, keep mixing until the milky smears of the bread crumbs are no longer easily seen. Keep mixing some more until the meat turns sticky.
3. If you want regular sized sausage rolls, cut your puff pastry sheets into quarters. Otherwise for mini sausage rolls, cut your puff pastry into halves.
3.a. For regular ones, grab one of the four squares and make a log of sausage mince against the edge and roll it around until the other edge seals on the bottom.
3.b For mini ones, grab one of the halves and do the same thing as with the regular ones just cut them with a knife until you are happy with the size.
4. Brush the tops of the sausage rolls with either egg wash or melted butter and top with a few seeds to make it pretty.
5. Bake for 15-20 minutes until golden brown. The cream cheese does make it weep a bit of fat so line your baking trays!

Ethiopian Lentils and flatbread

Have you ever been so enamoured of your recipe that you crow about it to everyone you meet and continue to eat it for days on end? I'm the kind of person who can't eat the same meal more than twice in a row. I ate this lentil and flatbread recipe for a record nine days before I stopped. I can't eat Mama Pham's pho for any more than three MEALS in a row

I have no idea why I wanted to cook lentils, however the first recipe from one of my friends at work, S.,. She also gave me the mustard seeds for the recipe which also included cumin seeds, tumeric, tomato paste, onions, garlic, red lentils, stock and chilli. That seemed like a pretty easy recipe as I had all of that at home barring the lentils and the mustard seeds.

Of course when I went to cook the lentils, I found that my cumin seeds had gone missing, courtesy of VGirl when she was making falafels. Then the tumeric was gone from when we last made banh xeo, Vietnamese tumeric savoury crepes. Well that was me well and truly fucked, I'd have bailed but I had already pre-soaked my lentils and had no idea what to do with it.

I decided to be courageous and wing it with a spice mix. I had to choose between a powder madras curry or my new berbere spice mix that I had picked up. I went with the berbere, the premade one I had didn't have the ingredients listed but Wikipedia helpfully tells me that it usually has at least chili, garlic, onion, ginger, dried basil, Ethiopian cardamom, rue, nigella, fenugreek as well as ajwain or radhuni. I have no idea what Ethiopian cardamom, ajwain or radhuni taste or smell like, so there was no way I was going to try and make berbere from scratch. From the smell of it, mine has paprika and nutmeg in it too. Feel free to make your own if you want.

I actually can't remember what brand of berbere I got, except that I got it from Pennisi Cuisine, a whole sale deli store in Woolloongabba and they don't even have it on their website. Its comes in a little rectangular packet though . . .

Anyway, I also decided to make some flatbread with it. I stole Julie Goodwin's recipe for it, when I made it though, I made about 20? small pieces rather than 8 large ones. Each flatbread piece only ended up being about the size of my hand, a good 20cm or so in diameter. I prefer my flatbread quite thin and crispy though, so that might why I had so many.

I was very proud of both the lentils and the flatbread and made lots of people eat it at work. H., adores it, and I kept making her a little box of lentils and lots of flatbread to scoop it up with. Di really enjoyed the flatbread too and asked for the recipe. While K., who was on a bad financial stretch also vowed to cook this, until I took pity on her and made her a batch of sausage rolls to stretch it out until pay day haha. Oh Gill and I also do a dinner swap and she owes me a bag of lentils to cook her a batch.

Julie Goodwin's Flatbread

Uses: Bribing H., to do work for you.

Ingredients:
4 cups of flour
1 teaspoon of salt, 1 tablespoon if you're a salt fiend like me
100g of butter
375ml of milk, I used soy cause I never have normal milk handy
Cooking oil

Soy sauce is not involved

Instructions:
1. Heat the milk and butter together until the butter is just melted. I nuked mine in the microwave for about 30 seconds. Microwave strengths may change.
2. Sift the flour in a large mixing bowl with the salt and make a well in the centre. Gently mix until the dough comes together.

Like this

3. You should have a soft stretchy dough that doesn't stick to the board. If it does, continue to add flour until it stops being a pain. Knead for about 5 minutes until soft and stretchy.

Squishy

4. Cover and rest at room temperature for about 30 minutes or so.

Squish squish squish

5. Heat a large saucepan on a steady medium until hot, splash in some oil and begin step 5.
6.  Pinch off a blob and roll out as thinly as possible, lifting off the the board several times and rerolling until you are satisified. Throw in the pan, and start rolling out another piece while the flat bread cooks. It takes about a minute or so.
7. Once the surface begins to bubble and the edges curl slightly, flip over and continue playing around with your flatbread.

Rustic is a nice word for imperfect cooking

8. Continue frying flatbread until you have enough to eat for your meal.

So crunchy and buttery

Ethiopian lentils:

Uses: eating vegetarian for several days

Ingredients:
2 cups of uncooked red lentils
4 cups of water or stock
1 medium onion, finely diced
3-4 cloves of finely diced garlic
1 tablespoon of berbere spice
1 tablespoon of black mustard seeds
1/4 cup of water
400g can of diced tomatoes
1-2 tablespoons of tomato paste

Salt/pepper/sugar/chopped chilli to taste

Mmm lentils

1. Soak your lentils for about 30 minutes before cooking, also fine to cook straight from dried lentil. This recipe is very flexible. If you do decide to not soak the lentils, use an extra cup of water when cooking to compensate for water absorption. Chop up all your garlic and onion.

Lentils in stock!

2. Cook your lentils on a steady low simmer until soft and melting. While this is happening continue with the other steps.

Is it red yet? If so, done.

3. Put in a tablespoon of berbere spice and mustard seeds together in a hot saucepan. Stir until the mustard seeds begin to pop and smoke.

4. Add in the additional 1/4 cup of water and stir until the water has all evaporated again, this normally takes a minute or two. This gives the berbere and mustard paste additional time to cook. It gives it a really odd taste if you don't cook down the berbere paste so keep at it.

Lean away and turn on your exhaust fan

Pretty much done

4. Toss in the garlic and onion and cook until the onion has begun to brown and caramelise, 6-10 minutes.

Sorta hard to tell with the colour though

5. Blob in your tomato paste and cook for a few seconds to sweeten the mixture.

This is what you want

6. If you're brave, pour the lentils into the saucepan, if not, pour the spice mix into the lentils. If you go lentils into the saucepan, it will seize and spit at you for a bit, so have a lid handy.

Bubble bubble, toil and trouble!

Almost there!

7. Add the canned tomatoes and season. I normally add at least a tablespoon of sugar, salt and hot chilli powder. I prefer this curry a little sweeter to be honest and the spiciness of hot chilli cuts through nicely. Heat to simmer and allow to cook for a further 5-10 minutes, until the colour brightens and the lentils thicken slightly.

Delicious

Cooking with Mum: Red Tofu Braised Chicken

Here is my favourite everyday recipe for red tofu braised chicken. It's made out of a very hard to stomach fermented bean curd mixture, which has an extreme alcoholic pungency and eye watering taste. Considering the mild taste of every other soy product, fermented bean curd tastes like a roundhouse kick to the face. Once cooked however it turns extremely mild and makes a wonderful sauce. If you like blue cheese, you'd probably like this stuff.

Don't worry about this stuff going off, the longer it lives, the more delicious the flavour, I've had a jar for three years that was absolutely delicious. Just keep it in the fridge with the lid firmly screwed on, upside down to prevent mould growth.

With the vague proportions for the sauce, I recommend start small, maybe 4-6 cubes and half a cup of water. Once you start to dissolve the sauce down, you can thin or thicken it up as much as you want. I normally use 10-12 cubes and a cup of water, since I love the sauce on rice.The bean curd we use, normally comes with chilli added, so we don't add any extra.

Red Tofu Braised Chicken

Vague Ingredients:
1-2 tablespoons of sugar for the caraml
1/2 onion, finely diced
2-3 cloves of garlic, finely minced
500g chicken
Fermented bean curd
1/2-1 cup of water
Sugar
Chopped red chilli

1. Heat up a pot on a steady medium, splash in a tablespoon of oil and once that has heated up, throw in some sugar.

Creating the caramel, essential to thit ko

2. Continue to stir rapidly up the colour changes to a shade of caramel you find agreeable.

Woah! Action shots!

A little bit darker than this

3. Take off the heat immediately and stir in the garlic and onion, stir briskly for about a minute or two, until they have begun to soften and smell fragrant.

Go go go!

4. Throw in the chicken and cook until no paleness shows.
5. Throw in the sugar, as much bean curd as you can stand and the water. The more sauce you want, the more water and bean curd you should put. Add in a little of the liquid that the bean curd was preserved in as well for extra flavour.

So much bean curd

Give it a mush

6. Put on a lid and allow to simmer for 20-30 minutes, until the chicken has cooked through. Taste at this point and add extra bean curd, if you want a stronger taste, or more sugar if you need to balance out the flavours more.