Portobello and porcini mushroom soup

We've started a soup club at work, and this was my contribution.  I've tried to recall the weights of some of the ingredients after the fact, so you might need to tailor the measurements to your own tastes.

8 onions, finely diced
4 tbs olive oil
800 g button mushrooms, sliced
800 g portobello mushrooms, sliced
70 g dried porcini mushrooms
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
125 g butter
6 tbs plain flour
500 mL white wine
3 L chicken stock (recipe below)
2 L whole milk
2 tsp nutmeg
500 mL cream

Soak the porcini mushrooms in about 250 mL of boiling water for at least half an hour. When cool, reserve the liquor and finely slice the porcini. Cook the onions in the oil in a large pot, then add the button and portobello mushrooms and cook them down well, adding the garlic near the end. Meanwhile make a roux by melting the butter in a small saucepan and stirring in the flour off the heat, then cook the flour for about 1 minute.  Deglaze the mushrooms in the large pot by adding the wine, and then add the roux to the mushrooms, followed by the stock, milk, porcini (the sliced mushrooms and the liquor) and nutmeg. Bring it to the boil and it will thicken after a couple of minutes. Blend the soup well with a hand-held blending wand and then add the cream. Reheat carefully without boiling or the soup may split. Season to taste.

Chicken stock

1 chicken
2 onions
1 stick celery
2 carrots
2 bay leaves
8 whole peppercorns
salt for seasoning

Put the chicken in a large (6 L) pot with hot water, bring to boil, then discard the water and refill with cold water and the remaining ingredients. Bring to the boil again and simmer for a few hours. Remove the chicken and reserve for another dish, discard the veggies and skim the fat off the top, then boil down the stock to reduce it by about one third.  Season.

Classic half-pound venison burger

Someone gave me a big hunk of venison the other day, and I cut some into steaks and fried them up, but there was a remaining 500 g or so, so I decided to mince it and make burgers.  I'm not sure what cut it was, but I'm guessing it was rump. I've never minced red meat myself before, so thought it would be worth a try.  It turned out great.  The mince was less homogenous then bought stuff, but the texture was interesting nonetheless.

Serves 2

For the meat patties:
500 g venison cut into cubes
1 onion, diced
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
1 egg
1 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp mixed dried herbs
salt and pepper

Put all the above in a food processor and pulse on and off for 30–60 seconds. I just did it until it had chopped up all the meat and just started to form a ball.

Using wet hands, divide into 2 and shape each into thick patties. If you're not cooking them straight away, put them in the fridge.

To cook, season them, then fry in olive oil on both sides till just brown, transfer to a preheated (180°C) oven for about 15 minutes, or until done.

For the burgers:
Anything you like!  I used sesame buns that were warmed in the oven.  I stacked some sliced cheese (Swiss would be best), the meat, caramelised onion, sliced beetroot, some BBQ sauce and lettuce.

Enjoy!

Christmas Cake 2010

OK not much time to write this, but for the record, here's the Christmas cake I made this weekend. It's currently wrapped in plastic and I'll ice it in a few weeks.

Christmas Cake

1.5 kg of mixed dried and glacé fruit

I used the following:

• 320 g sultanas
• 320 g raisins, chopped in half
• 300 g currants
• 130 g glacé orange slices, chopped finely
• 165 g glacé red cherries, quartered
• 125 g glacé apricots, chopped
• 140 g glacé pear, chopped

125 mL orange juice (about 2.5 oranges)
125 mL brandy
140 g walnut halves
250 g unsalted butter
230 g light brown sugar
160 g orange marmalade
5 eggs
250 g plain flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground nutmeg

Pick over the fruit and remove stalks from sultanas and currants, and seeds from the raisins. Combine all the fruit, add the orange juice and brandy, cover with cling film and let it soak overnight, stirring every now and then. [Note: other fruits could include glacé ginger (not popular in our house!), mixed peel (also not popular, but I have compromised by adding the glacé orange slices, which have some peel on them). Glacé figs were available in the shop I went to, but figs have a gritty texture so I avoided them for the cake.]

Next morning, preheat oven to about 160°C (150°C fan-forced) and bake the walnut pieces on a baking tray for 8–10 minutes until lightly browned. Let them cool, chop them up, and add them to the fruit. Put the softened butter, brown sugar and marmalade in the large bowl of an electric mixer and mix until it's light and creamy, then add the eggs one at a time, beating well between each one. Transfer this butter/egg mix to the largest bowl you have.  Sift together the flour, bicarb and spices, and add 1 tbs of this flour mix to the fruit (this makes the fruit a bit sticky and gluggy and prevents it sinking in the cake). Then alternately add the flour mix and the fruit to the butter mix, beginning and ending with the flour (so that's 1/3 flour, half the fruit, 1/3 flour, remaining fruit, remaining flour). Combine it well but don't overdo the mixing.



Put the mix into a double-layer lined and greased 20 cm square tin. Drop the tin on to the bench a few times to dislodge big air pockets, smooth over the top with wet fingers and then wrap the sides of the tin with a few layers of newspaper tied with string. Sit the tin on more newspaper in the oven and bake for 3–3.5 hours. I'd recommend testing it after 2.5 hours, as I used a larger tin so it cooked a bit faster than I would have liked. When the tester comes out clean, take it out of the oven and splash some more brandy (around 1/2–2/3 of a cup) over the top. Cool the cake in the tin, then turn it out, remove the paper and put in an airtight container until it's ready to be iced.


I left the icing far too late—in fact I iced it the day before our work Christmas party—but luckily it turned out OK anyway.  I bought marzipan (without almond essence—yuk!) and Royal icing from the supermarket.  I trimmed the top of the cake to remove the raised edges, then turned it upside down on to a tray. I filled the holes formed by sunken sultanas with little bits of marzipan, then glazed the whole thing with warmed, strained apricot jam. I rolled out the marzipan on a bench dusted with icing sugar to a fairly thin layer (about 3 mm I'd say) and smoothed it over the cake. Then I left it uncovered on top of the kitchen cupboard (out of the way of cats) overnight.  The next morning I rolled out the Royal icing in the same way, this time making it about 7 mm thick (I'd do it thinner next year—it was a bit too sweet).  I washed the marzipan with whisked egg white, smoothed the Royal icing over the top and down the sides, and trimmed the edges with a sharp knife.  It was a last minute icing but I think I got away with it.  A few weeks later the remains of the cake were still really delicious—in fact I think it was getting moister and the layers of icing had really begun to stick together well.

Cheese on film!

This video is a couple of months old now, but I thought I would put a link to it here. I was asked by talented University of Otago Science Communication student Nicole Schafer if I would participate in a video she was making about cheese. Most specifically the video was about the charismatic "Evansdale cheese man" and his family, who sell delicious cheese at the Otago Farmer's Market. I demonstrated the cheese making process by making haloumi and ricotta in the lab, and I talked about some of the microorganisms involved in cheesemaking, including Brevibacterium linens (which forms the smelly yellow rind on wash-rind cheese), Penicillium (forming white and blue mould on some soft cheeses like brie and blue cheese), and Propionibacterium (gives holes to Swiss cheese). It was pretty good fun, but as is the nature of these things, about 4 hours filming me and my cheese making was tamed into a couple of minutes of cheese film goodness. I hope you enjoy it!


Cheese from Nicole Schafer on Vimeo.

Eating simply?

Something of a shock to realise that the last three posts were about fried food. OK healthy eating starts this week!  In the meantime (and to brighten up this otherwise brown set of photographs on the blog so far!), here is a culinary going-on in the garden today.

Quince (Cydonia oblonga)

The quince is so pretty isn't it? Give it a few months and it will be laden with big fat yellow pomes, and I'll have to try making some quince jelly. I made quince paste a couple of years ago, and that was great (but somewhat dangerous—it was like cooking lava!), and last year we stewed them up with the pears from the neighbouring pear tree. This year I think jelly is on order. I won't repeat the quince paste recipe here as it was a few years ago now and I can't really remember what I did. Stephanie Alexander's Cook's Companion would be a good place to start.

Whitebait fritters

After my earlier post about mock white bait, I thought I'd try making the real thing. Today our local supermarket had, for the first time as far as I've noticed, fresh whitebait. There was about 80 g in a polystyrene tray, for just under $8—so that's $100 a kilogram for these little delicacies. The 80 g converted into enough mixture to make 5 whitebait fritter (pattie) sandwiches, and I can buy one of those pre-made from the Otago Farmer's Market for $5, so I've converted $8 of whitebait into $25 worth of sandwiches—now that doesn't sound so bad does it?!

Whitebait fritters

80–100 g fresh whitebait
2 large eggs
125 mL milk
1 tbs plain flour (optional)
Salt and pepper to taste

2 tbs butter or oil for frying

Buttered white bread
Wedges of lemon
Additional salt to serve

Heat the butter/oil in a heavy frying pan. Rinse and drain the whitebait in a sieve or colander. Whisk the eggs with the milk, flour and seasoning. If the batter is lumpy, strain it before you add the whitebait. Add the whitebait to the batter and mix gently. Fry spoonfuls of the mix until golden on one side, then flip and fry the other side—it only takes a short time. Serve on the buttered bread with a squeeze of lemon juice and a generous sprinkle of salt.

Saffron milk caps (Lactarius deliciosus) on toast

Saffron milk caps are wild mushrooms native to Europe that are commonly collected in Australia in pine plantations. They have been introduced into New Zealand too, but at the moment they are quite rare. The saffron milk cap is an ectomycorrhizal fungus, which means it grows on the roots of trees in a symbiotic association. The fungus gains sugar from the plant roots, and the plant in turn gains phosphate and other nutrients from the fungus, so everyone benefits! In the autumn, the fungus produces pretty pink–orange coloured mushrooms that bruise green, and bleed a saffron-coloured milk from the gills when damaged (hence the name). In Australia, you can purchase these mushrooms from markets in the Autumn. I am lucky that my partner's family have some trees on their farm that produce an annual crop of these fungi, and this year I cooked them up for dinner one evening when I was visiting.

NOTE: There are many different species of fungi that grow in pine plantations, and some of these may be deadly, so DO NOT EAT any fungi you've collected yourself unless you have had a competent expert identify every fruit body for you. There are many reports of people being poisoned by mushrooms because a "friend told them it would be OK", so don't become one of those casualties!

Saffron milk caps on toast

5 fresh saffron milk caps (Lactarius deliciosus), sliced, cleaned and picked over to remove pine needles etc
1 clove of garlic, crushed or thinly sliced
Juice of half a lemon
1 tsp butter
1 tbs olive oil
2 slices crusty bread for toasting (I like a white bread as I don't want to overpower the flavour of the mushrooms)

Put the bread in the toaster or under a grill. Heat the oil in a heavy frying pan over a high heat and add the saffron milk caps. Fry until they are soft (try to get them to brown a little by ensuring the heat is nice and high, and try not to stew them). When they are almost done, add the butter and garlic and cook for another 30 seconds, then add the lemon juice and toss to mix. Pour the mushrooms and their juice on to the toast (no need to butter as the juice does the job!) and serve. This is nice with a glass of white wine.

An interesting fact about these mushrooms is that they turn your urine a pale pink colour! If you happen to notice this, don't panic—it's normal and won't last long! I've heard that some people find these mushrooms a little bit indigestible, but I've never had a problem, and many people (especially Eastern Europeans!) think these are the really tasty, so if you're unsure, try a small amount at first and see how you go.