TWD - Freestyle Mushroom, Herb and Ricotta Tart

 This week’s Tuesday with Dorie recipe is Freestyle Mushroom, Herb and Ricotta Tart.

The base is made of a mix of plain flour and almond meal, blended with herbs, and rolled into a free form shape.

The cooked base is topped with a mixture of ricotta, yoghurt and herbs.

I can’t eat mushrooms, so for the topping, I used shredded chicken instead. I also subbed chicken stock in place of wine when cooking the topping. My herbs were basil, oregano and thyme.

I made a serve for one from a quarter of the recipe. This tart would have been nice served with a green salad, but I didn’t bother.

To see what everyone else made and their thoughts on it, visit the LYL section of the TWD website.

EwE - Lamb and Feta Pita Pizza - Pizza Night

This week, Margaret chose the theme of Pizza Night for Eating with Ellie.

I made Ellie's Lamb and Feta Pita Pizzas.  These comprise lamb mince, pinenuts, tomatoes and onion atop a wholemeal pita base.  They were quite delicious!

To see what the others made this week, visit the LYL section of the EwE website. 

EwE - Pizza Strudel

For Eating with Ellie this week, Margaret chose Pizza Strudel.  This entails a wholemeal pizza dough rolled put, filled with ricotta, baby spinach, tomato slices, basil and grated mozzarella.

I once again made my pizza dough as pre-made pizza dough doesn't exist here, as far as I am aware.

This is what the pizza strudel looked like fresh out of the oven:

I wasn't sure about this recipe when I read it, but the end result was delicious -  I really liked this one.

To see what the others in our group thought of this dish, visit the LYL section of the Eating with Ellie website.

EwE - Asparagus and Mozzarella Pizza

For Eating with Ellie this week, Peggy chose Asparagus and Mozzarella Pizza.  This dish involves a wholemeal pizza base topped with cheese and asparagus.

Bought pizza dough is not a thing here, so I made my own wholemeal pizza dough from this recipe.  I am not a big pizza eater, so I reduced the recipe by half to make a 6" pizza for one.

Because I used a smaller pizza base, I could not arrange the asparagus spears in spokes, as suggested by Ellie.  While I lost the visual wheel effect, it had no influence on flavour.

I quite liked this pizza as a light meal.  Asparagus is one of my favourite vegetables, and with the cheese, it makes a moreish combination.

To see what the other Ellie cooks thought, visit the LYL section of the Eating with Ellie website.

WWDH - Pumpkin and goats cheese pizza

I'll tell you what, what I have found
That I'm no fool, I'm just upside down
Ain't got no cares, I ain't got no rules
I think I like living upside down

 

Paloma Faith, Upside Down

 

Yup, those lyrics say it all.  Until Blogger stops rotating photos and/or provides a rotation tool, you will have to look at some photos upside down.

 

This week's Wednesday with Donna Hay recipe is chosen by Kayte, and is Pumpkin and Goat's Cheese Pizza from p78 of Modern Classics I.

 

I was in luck because I had a piece of pizza dough in the freezer that I could use to scale down the recipe to a single serve without making more pizza dough for this.  And the toppings - devine. Who doesn't like roast pumpkin, goats cheese and proscuitto?  I loved this pizza.

 

To see what Kayte, Margaret, Chaya and Sarah thought of this recipe, visit their websites.  

BWJ- Pizza with Onion Confit

Welcome to Baking with Julia for 2013!  Our first recipe is Pizza with Onion Confit, hosted by Paul of The Boy Can Bake.

I was in two minds about making this one - I am not a huge fan of onions, and I remember that the onion pizza from FFwD was a little meh.  However, I  needn't have worried - these onions pack a flavour punch, as the onions are slow cooked with red wine, red wine vinegar, cassis and thyme.

What can I say?  This was really fabulous straight out of the oven.  The crust, baked on a pizza stone in a very hot oven, was crispy and light, and the topping of onion confit, and in my case, goat's cheese (coated in ash) and cherry tomatoes was just the ticket.

My only tip is - don't leave this til the last minute, as the dough has two risings over three hours, and the onions are supposed to take an hour to cook (I ran out of liquid twice so I stopped sooner).

To see what the other BWJ bakers thought of this recipe, visit the LYL section of the website.

FFwD - Pissaladiere

This week's French Fridays with Dorie dish is something I have never heard of before - the Pissaladiere, the French equivalent of a  pizza, topped with a poignant mix of caramelised onions, anchovies and olives.

The base of the pissaladiere is a thin pizza type dough, and is quick and simple to make.  However, I was not such a fan of the topping - I adore anchovies and olives, but concentrated doses of onion are not for me.  However, this base could be easily used for other toppings.

To check out other views on the pissaladiere, check out the LYL section of the FFwD website.

Nigel Slater's Christmas Pudding; Cheese Update

How are your Christmas preparations coming along? Do you like to make food for gifts? Do you have traditional plum pudding, and if so, do you make it yourself?

I like to make food for gifts each year, as I have done for the past 4 years. I haven't made a pudding every year, but on a personal level, it wouldn't feel like Christmas if we didn't have plum pudding and custard for Christmas dinner. Sure, it might be 30 degrees Celsius with blazing sunshine outside, but to me, there is nothing like the smell and taste of plum pudding. Because it is only a once a year treat, it is extra special.

I made my plum pudding back in October so that it could mature and smell all spicy and boozy by Christmas, but you don't have to make it that early. My pudding will mostly be divided up and given to friends in Christmas gift boxes, but oddly, my Mum has asked if I could save a piece for her this year. I am happy to do so, but am curious because she has never asked for some before.

This year, I chose to make Nigel Slater's Christmas pudding from The Kitchen Diaries. You can also find the recipe online here. I only made a half recipe, as I didn't want two puddings. Nigel's pudding uses suet, which I have not used in plum pudding before. I just used boxed dried suet, as getting fresh suet is almost impossible in Australia.

Nigel's pudding is unusual in that it is quite light in colour - I am used to dark plum puddings. As to taste - I can't tell you about that just yet, but if you are interested, let me know and I will give an update in due course.

This pudding requires three and a half hours to steam, so you need to make it on a day when you can be at home the whole time to make sure that the pudding doesn't boil dry. Although Nigel says that you can reheat it for eating the same way, I recommend just cutting it into slices and microwaving it for 30 seconds or until heated through - especially if you are in the Southern Hemisphere for Christmas and the thought of steaming up your house is not appealing.

Nigel says he steamed the pudding using china bowls with paper and string tops, but I used a much more modern metal steamer with a clip-on lid.

The pudding looks like a beauty, so I can't wait to try it.

On a different topic, you may remember that I made camembert in a cheesemaking class recently. Finally, after 15 days of changing the ice almost daily in an esky "ice cave", here is my camembert, covered with downy white mould:



I worried about the wrinkly top, but my research shows that this is OK. As an educated guess, I understand that it is to do with the geotrychum used to encourage the growth of the penicillium, and the fact that the temperature in the esky may have been a little warmer from time to time than was ideal, encouraging the geotrychum to grow more quickly than the penicillium. Certain cheeses are actually supposed to have this wrinkly "geotrychum" rind, so as far as I am concerned, all is well.

I have transferred the camembert to the fridge, wrapped in baking paper and alfoil, to ripen for at least 5 weeks. That means no camembert for Christmas!

I also used the mozarella to make another pizza - this time, I brushed the pizza base with olive oil, sprinkled it with salt and pepper, and topped it with chunks of mozarella and gorgonzola and thin slices of ripe pear, followed by more seasoning:


This pizza was fabulous! I can't choose between this one and the Hawaiian version.

Stay tuned - more Christmas baking ideas will follow over the next couple of weeks.

Finally, I wanted to add a quick note to remember the 30th anniversary of John Lennon's passing. I am a huge Beatles fan, although the Beatles split up before I was born. I would love to know what John might have been doing musically if he was still with us. RIP John.

Baked cheesecake and homemade pizza

Although my cheesemaking class was last weekend, the beauty of it is that it doesn't stop there. I have a lovely selection of cheeses to use now, and others that I am tending dutifully until they ripen. I am especially proud of my Camembert, which is growing a perfect silky white mould on it, just as it should, despite my "cheese cave" being an esky with ice in it.

I wanted a recipe to use up some of my soft fresh cheeses while they were still in their prime, and after a quick Web search, I found this recipe for a Fromage Blanc Tart on a beautiful blog that is new to me, Know Whey by Sue. Sue is from Vermont and began making cheeses when she moved there, and her earlier posts are about cheesemaking and cheese recipes.

Sue's recipe uses 2lb (~900g) of fromage blanc; instead, I used 300g fromage blanc plus 300g of quark and 150g each of whole milk and whey ricotta. The end result was a beautiful creamy cheesecake which was smooth and silky on the tongue:

I liked the fact that the cheesecake shell was a pastry rather than the crushed biscuit base which is more usual with cheesecake - I thought that the pastry housed the filling beautifully while letting the flavour of the cheese shine, rather than dominating it.

It would be dangerous for me to have this in the house for too long, so I took it to work and shared it. It went down like a house on fire - it's good to know that there are many fellow cheesecake lovers among my colleagues.

With the mozzarella from class, the obvious choice was to make pizza! I used the Daring Bakers thin crust recipe taken from Peter Reinhart, which Zorra had kindly divided down into a two person recipe which was a more friendly quantity for me to use.

I used one of the resulting two pizza dough balls to make a Hawaiian pizza - tomato paste, mozzarella, shredded ham and drained pineapple pieces:

Looks pretty good, yeah? I took the pizza to work for lunch over two days - it made a great change from my usual toasted sandwich.

In closing, I want to thank Marcellina of Marcellina in Cucina for awarding me the Lovely Blog Award:

For the 15 blogs to pass the award on to, I would like to take this opportunity to highlight some great Aussie blogs that I read on a regular basis:

Not Quite Nigella

Eat Almost Anything

Almost Bourdain

Gourmet Green Giraffe

Leave Room for Dessert

Vicious Ange

Audax Artifex

Hold the Beef

The Cake Mistress

Lemonpi

Winos and Foodies

Trissalicious

The Island of Dr Gateaux
For the Love of Food

Melanger

To enjoy some fine Aussie food blogs, you can't go wrong if you visit these sites. Trissa's last post is the recipe from a Sydney restaurant for their take on the Weiss mango fruit bar - check it out!

Daring Bakers - Pizza

When the moon hits your eye
Like a big pizza pie
That's amore

Jack Brooks

This month's Daring Bakers challenge is pizza, chosen by our host, Rosa, of Rosa's Yummy Yums, in honour of Sher, who was to be her co-host with Glenna before tragedy struck.

The challenge was to make our own pizza dough using Peter Reinhart's recipe, and to attempt to toss it to make the base for a pizza. You can find the recipe for the dough on Rosa's site. I had never made pizza before, let alone tried to toss the pizza dough, so this month's challenge was once again a learning exercise for me.

The recipe made enough for 6 small pizza bases. I made two pizzas and stored the rest for a rainy day.




I did try the tossing method to make the bases:





but unfortunately it did not quite turn out as planned:




Not being the patient sort, I then turned to the rolling pin to flatten out the bases.

My first pizza was an Aussie classic - the Hawaiian, with tomato paste as the sauce, topped with shredded ham, pineapple pieces and grated cheese:



The second pizza that I made was a tandoori chicken pizza, with a mango chutney and yoghurt sauce, topped with caramelised onion, chicken strips marinated in yoghurt and tandoori curry paste then cooked with the onion in a frypan, zucchini strips, capsicum strips and grated cheese:

Both pizzas were delicious, but my favourite was the Hawaiian. (There are critics who say that pineapple on a pizza is just wrong - they don't know what they're missing!!)

I subsequently made a beetroot and pumpkin pizza, using yoghurt and mango chutney sauce, cubed baby beets, cubed roasted pumpkin and fresh coriander:

Thanks to Rosa for hosting this month's challenge. You can check out all the other great pizza topping combinations, and have a laugh at everyone's attempts at tossing the dough, here.

Blog Party #32 - Pizza Party - Proscuitto, Potato and Goat's Cheese Pizza Squares

It's Blog Party time again over at Stephanie's Dispensing Happiness, and this month's theme is Pizza Party. That's right folks - bring along a bite-sized pizza and a matching drink to join the party.

I had recently found this great recipe by Ray McVinnie for proscuitto, potato and goat's cheese pizza from Stuff.co.nz, so Stephanie's choice of party theme gave me the perfect opportunity to try it. I changed it a little by spreading some barbecue sauce on the pizza crust over the egg glaze (I highly recommend doing this with your choice of sauce - it makes the pizza moister), and substituted kumara (sweet potato) for the Agria (huh?) potatoes. For context, this was the pizza before it became Blog Party pizza squares (I use the term "squares" loosely):

Now as everyone knows, beer and pizza makes a great combination. Unfortunately, I didn't have any beer in the house, so I have brought along stout - Guinness nonetheless - to accompany my pizza squares instead:

Thanks to the hostess with the mostest, Stephanie, for hosting Blog Party, and I look forward to the party roundup later in the month.