Banana-Honey Bread

Anyone who's been reading Freshly Ground for a while will know that I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with that curious breed known as the Celebrity Chef. And by love-hate, I don't mean that I love to hate them, or even that I hate them at all. Most the time, I am inspired by their dedication to good food and nutrition and taste, and sometimes it's just that they are such a world beyond what I will ever be as a cook that it bugs me.

So, in order to give the Olivers and Ramsays of the world a fair go, I've also made an effort to document my humble attempts to replicate their luscious-looking dishes in my own small kitchen.

My last try was not terribly successful - there must have been something in the Italian air that I was missing. (Either that, or, as the Alligator said, I just didn't follow the recipe, so it was my own darned fault).

This next one, however, hit the mark perfectly. To be fair, I've made this before, and it worked back then too, so I came into the process with anticipation rather than foreboding, which may have helped.

But how hard could making bread with the banana and the honey built-in be?

Another Jamie Oliver recipe, this one is from his second book, Happy Days with the Naked Chef, and is a real winner. Especially if you have bananas that look like this stinking up your fruitbowl:

The key difference between Oliver's recipe and my interpretation of it is that I'm lazy: mine just goes straight into the breadmaker to do all the hard work.
Jamie Oliver's Banana and Honey Bread
(1 Loaf)

Ingredients:
500g Strong Flour (Hi-Grade)
1t Salt
2t Sugar
2T Breadmaker Yeast
3 Ripe Bananas, Pureed (see picture above)
4 T Honey, either runny or melted until it's runny

Dump all the ingredients, reserving half the honey, into the breadmaker pan. Turn onto a dough cycle.
I'm just going to pop this photo in here gratuitously, because I like it.
When the cycle is done, turn the dough out onto a floured bench and gently shape. With a long knife, cut the dough into six roughly equal sized pieces. Then, if you like, you can score them into fancy shapes. Place in an oiled baking tray and put into a warm, dry place for one hour to rise.

Drizzle over the remaining honey and place into the oven at 200C, for 18-20 minutes.
Remove from the oven and allow to cool - but not too much.
With a bit of butter, you won't find these last long enough to get cold.

So Jamie, this one's a 5-Star winner. That's just Pukka.

Jamie Oliver's Ball Thingy (Or, Honey-Spice Crusted Lamb Roast)

Those Celebrity Chefs, sometimes I love them, sometimes I...don't love them.

But I'm always willing to cut them some slack. So when my lovely Dessert Chef presented me with this contraption:
...I had to give it a go. It's a Jamie Oliver thing, apparently, and it's sort of like a mortar and pestle, but in a jar. Sort of. That's a plastic two-part screw shaker, and the little white ball is ceramic. The theory goes that you can use it to whip up rubs, sauces, and suchlike with hard and wet ingredients in a jiffy, using less energy than it takes to drive a mortar and pestle.

I guess.

Thus presented, I decided to give it a whirl.

I had a lovely little roast of lamb, and I decided to coat it with a glaze of honey, paprika, almonds and some other stuff. So here goes.

Honey-Spice Crusted Lamb Roast

(Serves 4)

350-400g Rolled Lamb Forequarter Roast
Whole Peppercorns and Rock Salt to taste
Freshly Grated Nutmeg
1t Slivered Almonds
1t Paprika
1t Avocado Vinaigrette
1t Honey
1 Onion, cut into 1/8ths
Roasting Veges, peeled and seasoned and tossed in oil

Start with your hardest ingredients, in this case, rock salt, peppercorns, nutmeg, and almonds. Put these in the bottom section, add the wee ball, screw the top on and shake vigorously.
Hand off the hard work to a keen young helper.
Unscrew the cap and add the rest of the ingredients; the vinaigrette, honey, and paprika.
When it looks something like this, scoop it out with the little rubber spoon (Yeah, there's also a little rubber spoon, for just this purpose. Here's a photo of it).
Spread it over the roast.
Ooh, look, veges! See that pumpkin up there? I grew that.
Place the lamb on top of the sliced onion and arrange the veges around it.

Cover in foil and roast for 1 hour at 190C, or shorter if you prefer a rare cut.

Remove the foil for the last 15 minutes of cooking to brown.
Remove from the heat and allow to rest for 8-10 minutes before carving.
Slice and serve.
What do I reckon? Well, it worked for me. Easy to use, easy to clean, easy to store. I'll be interested to see how well the rubber seals last, and of course keeping the neat little ball away from the 2-year-old is a challenge too.

So I wouldn't write it off as a waste of money and drawer space yet. I've used it again since and it has served its purpose well.

So good on you Jamie. This one's a winner.

Olive(r) Stew

I've made noises here about celebrity chefs before, and a little while ago I posted a meal I cooked out of a Gordon Ramsay Cookbook that I picked up at the Food Show.

Now, the guys at Kamikaze Cookery (Link junkies: Language may offend. You've been warned) have taken it upon themselves to expose the glaring discrepancies between what most people are capable of cooking compared with what the Ramsays and Olivers of the world think we can manage, so I won't try to outdo them on that count.

Instead, I thought it worthwhile documenting my own attempt to pull off a recipe for Peposo - famous hunter's peppery beef stew - out of Jamie Oliver's book, Jamie's Italy. I like to think of myself as a slightly more accomplished home gourmandiser than the average kiwi bloke, so I was not daunted by the challenge.

Perhaps I should've been.

Admittedly I was trying to cook about 600g of beef rather than the 2.5kg in the recipe (I mean, who really cooks 2.5kg of stewing steak at a time? There are only 2 1/2 of us, after all!), and I was using normal stewing steak rather than beef shin on the bone, but you work with what you've got, right? I made the effort to use real french red wine, at least. And anyway, the first thing you do according to the recipe is take the meat off the bone, so why not just use deboned meat to start with?
Simple enough. Meat, onions, rosemary, garlic, bay leaves, salt and pepper.
Layer it all up in an oven dish and cover in wine, topping with water to cover the meat if necessary. Then bring to a boil and place in the oven at 150c for 6 hours. Yes, I did all this. Sounds simple enough, doesn't it?
Then at the bottom of the recipe (not at the top, not at the "when you're layering the dish" part) it says to skim off the fat and remove the bone. Aah. I see. So the bone was meant to go in? That bone I don't have? Right. Well, I didn't. Not only that but my dish didn't have any fat to skim off. It had virtually no moisture at all. Apparently it should have.
Yes, this was quite intensely flavoured as Jamie promised, and the meat was falling apart, if a little over-dry. I wonder if I had a small army to feed rather than my modest family, and I had cooked this in the five-fold quantity suggested by JO if this might have come out better. I can only guess so.

I dished it up on buttered slabs of fresh bread (also Jamie's recipe from his first book - I tried it once and have made it that way ever since), and we agreed that it was good that we had some nice bread for dinner.

So it's worrying that if even I, with my extraordinary powers of making stuff up on the fly and trusting my instincts to salvage the various disasters that arise from my untutored approach to cooking, can be derailed by a Jamie Oliver recipe that seems so straightforward, then how much paper is being wasted in this world in the printing of celebrity chef recipe books that people will simply never use? Or if they do, they'll be disappointed, and thus the book will sit on the shelf forever gathering dust?

I make an effort to make something from one of my many cookbooks every month or so, trying to learn new things and bring a dash of variety to our meals. But if the people who sell the most cookbooks on the planet - I'm looking at you, Jamie, Gordon and Nigella - can't come to terms with what average folk are really looking for in a recipe and capable of achieving in the kitchen, then I worry that even more innocent trees will die as a result.

Please, celebrity chefs. Take a moment to consider the trees. Then pull your heads our of your @rses and give us recipes that we can cook, damn it.

Report from the Front Line: The Food Show, Wellington

Since today was Mother's Day, I took Dessert Chef to the fabulous Food Show at the Stadium in Wellington.
OK, it was her idea, and I ate and drank a whole heap more than her, so really, she took me. In fact, since I tasted countless wines and she drove home, it really was her taking me out than the other way around.

Not to worry. Here's the up-to-the-minute review of New Zealand's biggest gastronomic event, as experienced by Yours Truly this very day. Yes, for once, my blog post won't be months out of date. It's good to be on the cutting edge.

Speaking of cutting edges, the highlight of the show for me was not actually any particular food or wine; it was the knives. Not just any knives, but ceramic knives. I have some great knives (a wedding present from my Mum, and still going strong), but these blades just blew me away.

I had just listened to an audiobook in which one of the characters has ceramic knives, which are worlds beyond any steel blade. So sharp that they don't blunt, lighter than steel - and of course never picked up by metal detectors, which is very helpful - I hardly believed it. Then I got to hold one, and cut with one.

*gapes*

They're great. I could slice a tomato literally paper-thin. At $110 on special for a small one, however, they're beyond this humble food critic's reach. but if anyone out there has that sort of money to spend on knives, I'd seriously recommend checking them out.

The other highlight was the Freedom Farms Bacon, purely on the basis of ethics and taste. I've talked often enough about getting more humanely farmed meat products into the mainstream, and as well as tasting delicious, this seems to be a step in that direction.

I learned a lot about different rice bran oils, and olive oils, and avocado oils, and tried probably three dozen or more (*gurgle gurgle* - quiet, tummy!) and disliked as many as I liked. I was surprised to learn that rice bran oil, which we think of as a terribly healthy option, is in fact a hydrolised product that is run through a chemical process before it gets to us. That's a shame, but we'll still use it - for now. I also discovered that avocado oil, which I've never eaten because of its hefty pricetag, tends to taste like overripe avocado. Yuk. I love avocado, but not once it's turned. There were some good ones, but they were really expensive. So hard to strike a balance.

I also tried numerous wines from several different regions and vineyards, and was surprisingly not blown away by any of them. That was also a shame. I wanted to buy wine, it's something I like to do because it means I get to drink wine. Oh well. Thinking about it now, though, I did drink wine, so that's probably OK. I didn't discover my next favourite Pinot Gris, though. Darn.

I've talked before about celebrity chefs, and while I err on the side of appreciating their passion for food even while I dislike the reality TV they have succumbed to, I have to admit a proclivity for snapping up their cookbooks if they cross my path at the right price. Dymocks Booksellers had a stand at the Food Show, and I grabbed a copy of Gordon Ramsay's Cooking for Friends for the bargain price of $20 (NZD). This book is not a "look at this great food that you'll never be able to cook" sort of a book. This is GR's family recipes, the stuff his kids make. And to celebrate this find, I dove straight in and cooked a recipe out of it tonight.

I know, it's unheard of. I'll be posting a meal that I've cooked on the same day as we ate it. I don't think that's happened since Day 1. But there you have it.

So, summing up the Food Show: Good. Yeah, lots of nice free stuff to eat and drink, as you'd hope (barring the $20 entry fee, of course, but I'm pretty sure we both ate and drank more than $20 worth of food). There was plenty of variety, and I even learned a few new things. It seems that nothing has made me sick, although my tum was telling me that I might have had just one too many lugs of olive oil by the time we left. Next year, I'll forgo breakfast to make even more of the delicacies on offer. Gordon Ramsay's Pasta with Baked Pumpkin and Rosemary
(With minor adjustments, just because I can)

Serves 3Pumpkin courtesy of our garden, no less.

Ingredients:
1 500g Pumpkin, deseeded and sliced into thin wedges
3 Rosemary Sprigs, chopped into 2cm lengths
4 Garlic cloves, peeled and halved
Lots of Olive Oil
50g Grated Parmesan
Drizzle a roasting tray with olive oil and sprinkle with freshly ground pepper and salt. Scatter the rosemary and garlic around, and drizzle with more olive oil and seasoning. Place into a preheated oven at 210C. Turn after 12 mins, then again after another 12 mins, until soft on the inside and lightly caramelised on the outside.
Set aside to cool. Discard the garlic and rosemary but reserve the oil. When cool enough to handle, remove the skin.
Place the pumpkin flesh and oil in a pot. Add a little more olive oil (I think I used a lot less to cook this than GR intended, as I had very little to reserve) and some water or vege stock to loosen it up. Blend with a hand blender or run through a food processor.
The pureed pumpkin should be more of a sauce than a soup, thick enough to coat the pasta but not runny. I think that I'd make mine a bit wetter next time. I wonder if UK pumpkins have more moisture content that the ones I grow out the back.

Keep the sauce warm while you cook a pot of pasta, steam some veges, and cook up your sausages or whatever, if this isn't your main course.
Drain the pasta and mix in the pumpkin sauce and the parmesan. Dish up hot, with freshly ground pepper, a grating of fresh parmesan, and perhaps a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil.

Its the Meal that Matters

The thing about TV Chefs is not that they're arrogant, or that they don't grasp the fact that most real people can't co-ordinate poaching and grilling and reducing and glazing all at once, or that they're not nearly as witty or good-looking as they think they are, or that what they think of as affordable often seems somewhat governed by the ridiculous sums of money that they earn for being TV Chefs. What makes these folk worth the time they take up on the airwaves is that they inspire.

I haven't watched a single episode of anything that Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson or Gordon Ramsay have presented without being struck by the way they just LOVE FOOD, and that they want people out there in TV Land to love food like they do.

This is great. They try to make cooking look easy and satisfying and rewarding, no matter how many years of professional cookery they might have under their hats. They try to fill simple plebs like me with the idea that I too can stuff a chicken with bacon and garlic or entertain 6 dinner guests without breaking a sweat while enjoying a nice chianti. The trick for someone like me is to believe it, and then when it all goes pear shaped, to remember that I just have to try again and change a few things and eventually I'll get it sorted out. With time and effort, I'm not necessarily any closer to having my own TV show, but I seem to keep the dinner guests happy even though I have yet to enjoy a good chianti.

What is important about these people, however, is not that they fill us with aspirations that fit their own delusions of grandeur. What matters is how much they care about what they cook. It MATTERS to them that they have the freshest possible ingredients. It MATTERS to them that the food they put on the plate is as good as it can possibly be. It MATTERS that their food will be enjoyed to the utmost, and not just be scoffed down unnoticed as yet another pile of uninteresting muck. And by having these grand illusions and rising to the height of Celebrity Chef, they gain the power to fill ordinary people with these same dreams.

What MATTERS, at the end of the day, is the MEAL. It's an idea I've touched on in the past, but never had a chance to come back and explore here. We are so lucky to live in a country where food is plentiful and safe and wholesome and delicious. In many parts of the world, people are far less fortunate. But for most of us, who can't join the UN to go and fight for justice where it's so terribly lacking, one of the things that we can do to take a morally responsible attitude towards our good fortune in the face of others' suffering is appreciate and respect what we have. We have a duty to keep our waste to a minimum. We have a responsibility to enjoy what we cook and to share with others. Food should be more than just the stuff we put in our mouths; it should be the social glue that holds us all together. Its the Meal that Matters.

When we were growing up, we always ate dinner at the table. It's just what we did, unless it was a barbeque. And at the table we talked, and caught up on our days, and hung out like a family. After I left home and went flatting, meals became something chowed down while sitting on the couch watching the great brain-puree box known as TV (mentioned above). By the time I came to own a house and find myself raising a family, it took a determined effort to break that habit and to win back mealtime as a family time. I realised how many meals I had cooked and eaten but never tasted because I was absorbed not in the food and the company, but in some mindless stream of garbage coming out of the box.

Don't get me wrong, I still watch my fair share of garbage, although these days I do it all off HDD and thus do so in my own timeframe and sans advertising. But the point is that what has come to matter is getting to the table and being together. I highly recommend it.

Coming back to the idea that we have to be responsible for our actions, here's a quick list of what you might be able to do to make the most of your food (some of this is likely to have appeared in previous posts, but think of it as the good stuff that drains off the worms after they've digested all the rubbish):

• No vege scraps should ever be wasted. Either freeze them for making stock, or compost them, or start a worm farm;
• No pasta, bread or rice leftovers ever need be wasted. If there's not enough to freeze and use later, hang an ice-cream tub in a tree and feed the birds;
• Anything else apart from meat and cheese can usually go onto the lawn, if you have one, to feed the hedgehog, if you have one;
• Learn how much you really need to cook, so that you don't have to throw anything away. Remember that meat and dairy take about 7 times as much energy to produce and get to you as you'll ever get from them in return, and any that you throw away will only attract rodents and cockroaches and flies;
• Share meals with friends often. The shared energy of cooking and the goodwill you'll generate will help restore the planet's balance;
• Recycle, and remember to sort it out rather than just bunging it all in the bin and letting them do it at the other end. Keeping recycling costs down will become a major factor in all our lives in the coming years, so you might as well get into good habits now.

Most of this stuff is really easy, its just a matter of forming new habits. So how did we go from celebrity chefs to worm farms? It's what happens when you draft a post over several days as the ideas bubble up. But it all matters, and what matters more is what you take from it. The world is changing. Life is to celebrate.

Its the vibe, your honour.

Cheers.