Recipe Friday has a lot of zucchini in it.

[st_aurafina]

Oh, lordy, tonight's X-Files rewatch is 'The Field Where I Died'. It's, like, 75% a good episode, and 25% stubbing your toe repeatedly against a brick wall. Mulder's past life regression hypnosis scene is so painful and embarrassing I had to stick my fingers in my ears.



Gosh, when you miss a week, the recipes actually pile up.

Something I cooked recently:

Mango Cream Cheese Ice-Cream, based off this: Strawberry Ice-Cream

This was the actual recipe:
3 mangoes, which gives about 2.5 cups of pulp
2 blocks of cream cheese
3/4 cup of sugar (I'm still playing around with the quantities, and I think I could have used less.)
2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
1.5 cups of skim milk
A good squeeze of lemon juice


Blend the mango pulp. Add all the other ingredients. Blend more. Freeze in machine. I use the kitchenaid ice-cream maker attachment, and this pretty much perfectly fitted in the bowl. It made about 1.5 litres of ice-cream. And it's super, super tasty. I wasn't sure that the vanilla was a good idea, but it really was.

I'm always surprised at how little cream cheese taste this recipe has - it really doesn't taste like cheesecake to me. And my particular lactose intolerance handles this recipe a lot more gracefully than ice-cream made with cream or custard.


Coffee Jelly Or Jello, if you prefer.

I love this - it's an extremely dignified way to absorb caffeine on a really hot day. We ate it with a really nice vanilla yoghurt.



Zucchini Herb Bread

This is a bread machine recipe, and I don't have a bread machine so I make it by hand.



125ml tepid water
2 teaspoons honey
1 tablespoon olive oil
A really big zucchini or maybe four or five little ones
400g bread flour
Handful of basil leaves, shredded
2 teaspoons sesame seeds
1 teaspoon salt
1 sachet (7g) dried active baking yeast

Grate the zucchini, skin on, and press in a colander until as much of the moisture is removed as possible.

Dissolve the honey in the water, and add the yeast. Leave it for a few minutes until it goes foamy. Add the olive oil, basil and the zucchini.

Mix flour, salt, sesame seeds. Make a well in the centre and add the wet ingredients. Knead for about 10 minutes or as long as it takes to become elastic. I usually end up adding extra flour here, depending on the moisture content of the zucchini,

Put the dough in an oiled bowl and cover. Leave it in a warm place until doubled in size - an hour or so. Punch down, shape into a loaf and put into greased loaf tin. Cover and leave to rise again for an hour or so, until it looks nice and domed above the top of the tin.

Bake at 200C for about 40 minutes. It's cooked when it's nice and brown and it sounds hollow when tapped on the base.




Zucchini Sheet Cake

I found out, with a giant bowl of cake batter, that not only have I never made a sheet cake before, I didn't have anything to bake a sheet cake in. (For other Aussies, they're 13 x 18.5 inches, 2 inches deep.) So, I improvised and split the batter between two roasting pans, and it worked out okay.

So, I guess I made a cake, of sorts? It wasn't a real cake, though, it had a very unusual fudgy texture, thanks to the shredded zucchini. I wanted to try a different kind of icing/frosting, since lilacsigil hates buttercream and ganache is out because the cream is not good for me. I like this boiled milk icing in this recipe - it tasted good, and it's extremely convenient to be able to pour it on the hot cake. Will definitely try it again, especially as there is an avalanche of zucchini coming for us.


Something I have solid plans to cook soon:

Kindkit's Four Grain No-Knead Bread

I love no-knead bread cooked in a cast-iron pot! I don't have any rye flour, though, and the supermarket doesn't stock it. I'll try the health food shop in Warrnambool next week, but if I can't wait, I'll just tinker. Maybe substitute wholemeal wheat? Or I've got some spelt.


Baked Zucchini Chips

A ha ha, there are so many zucchinis coming. So very many. I don't have a mandolin - they scare me so much! - but I'm hoping I can cut these fine enough with the chef's knife. (It scares me less.)



Something I'm idly thinking about cooking in the future:

A real cake. One that you cream butter and sugar, add flour, etc. And don't over/under bake. Our plumber dropped by with a bag of plums, so maybe a plum cake? Maybe Gâteau aux Prunes? I have all the ingredients.


Work on a granola bar recipe. I've got a bunch bookmarked, here, and I'm hoping to hit the goldilocks zone of chewy but not gooey, toothy but not crumbly.


Oh, and this actual recipe that a customer gave me today. She wrote it down on the bottom of her prescription. It's for an apple slice. (For those who've heard me talk about my customers before, this is Mrs Lemon. She's a boss.





Apple Slice

2 cups of self-raising flour
1 cup of sugar
1/4 of a pound of melted butter (113g, which I believe is a stick of butter in US terms)
1 beaten egg
3 apples
Cinnamon to top

Mix flour and sugar, toss apples to coat. Add beaten egg and butter. Press into tray. Sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon. Bake in moderate oven (around 180C) for 30 minutes.




Now we're watching the Canadian broadcast of the pairs figure skating short routine. One of the Canadian skaters looks an awful lot like Natale Morales, which has given me a Middleman plotbunny that is not an ice-skating AU so much as it is an ice-skating case fic. *makes note to include the German team's giant cow bell*


Think of us tomorrow. It's going to be a billion degrees. We will surely dry.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

"And you were there, Scully! And you! And you! And you!"

Still, we do get our first appearance from Lara Means and I will never, ever forget that Millennium episode.

[st_aurafina]

When suddenly Johnny gets the feeling he's being surrounded by
horses, horses, horses, horses

brb hiding and crying

[killing_rose]

How're you with cream cheese frosting? It works fairly well with the two of us with lactose issues in our house.

[st_aurafina]

I'm okay with it, but lilacsigil doesn't like it. Mostly I don't ice any of our cakes, but this was something new that actually worked.

[kindkit]

You can make the bread without rye! Just add 2 tablespoons each of cornmeal and oats. That's how I made it the first time and it's still very good that way, although better, I think, if you do have rye.

[st_aurafina]

Yay, I will do! Rye is oddly difficult to get hold of here. I can get it off ebay, but I have this (probably illogical) worry that we'll get ergot poisoning from internet rye.

[musesfool]

Have you tried this buttermilk cake? It is the best, easiest cake, and you can put any kind of fruit in it, or none at all and it's still good.

Also, I'm glad the cream cheese ice cream works. That is always popular when I make it with strawberries.

Also, also, coffee jello! I need it! Must try!

[st_aurafina]

I will definitely check out the buttermilk cake - though we don't use buttermilk as much as in the US, I think? It's a bit of an exotic ingredient. Gosh, it looks nice, though.

Thank you a million times over for linking the cream cheese ice-cream - we live near a strawberry farm, and I make it over and over through summer while the strawberries are in season.

[musesfool]

though we don't use buttermilk as much as in the US, I think? It's a bit of an exotic ingredient.

Huh. I did not know that. But you can make your own at home for baking purposes - 1 cup of milk + 1 tbsp lemon juice or white vinegar, then let it sit for about ten minutes. It's gross, but it does work, at least for adding moistness. The actual buttermilk can also provide a tang to the flavor like yogurt or sour cream. Either of which could probably be subbed into this recipe, actually. It's very easy and forgiving.

[kindkit]

Some yogurt thinned out with regular milk to a pourable (but still quite thick) consistency is, I think, the best substitute for buttermilk.

[tree]

TFWID is very pretty, but, yeah. painful. although i must say that the monster of the week comic for it is the first time i've actually liked one of her comics for a while. so there's that!

i thought a mandolin was a musical instrument and was very confused until i looked it up in the dictionary. oh english language you are so wacky with your words that mean two entirely different things!

[st_aurafina]

Sitting in the kitchen, strumming on my lute! (Do you strum a lute? Or a mandolin? I get these things confused.) I was watching a cooking show once, and saw a guy slice his finger open on the mandolin and I just knew that I was going to do that to myself one day so I never bought one. It's like destroying all the spindles in Sleeping Beauty.

[laurenthemself]

That and 'Dod Kalm' are literally the worst episodes, in my humble and completely subjective opinion. I had to take them both off the rewatch list.

I had, once upon a time, a list of how many times I'd watched each XF episode and how many times I'd watched each Red Dwarf episode. They seem to have vanished in the move, but my highest watched were anything involving Darin Morgan (well, not so much 'The Host'), and 'How the Ghosts Stole Christmas'.

Also, MIDDLEMAN. I need to watch more of it (sad, I know, considering how little there is; I need to just sit and marathon), but I mentioned it on Twitter and Natalie Morales tweeted 'art crawl!' at me, which was cool.

[st_aurafina]

The make-up in Dod Kalm is almost bad enough to make me not hate that episode. Almost. lilacsigil is making us watch all of the episodes, even the one with the shapeshifing wolf. Even the one with David Duchovny's girlfriend of the day as a blood drinking maybe vampire lady. She is cruel.

Middleman is the best. I love it so much! Wow, Natalie Morale tweeted you? Internet famous!

[lostdragonfound]

Now I want to watch Middleman again! I know we have it on DVD around here somewhere!

[st_aurafina]

Middleman! Art crawl! French cuisine kills bunnies!

I love this show so much.

[redcirce]

Oooh, all of these zucchini recipes look really delicious, thanks for sharing. I think I'm going to try the herb bread one this weekend...