A SweetFest for sweet tooths

It’s Good Food Month here in Sydney and on Saturday I decided to indulge myself by going out for a day of cooking demonstrations and sweet treats.

There were many stalls selling incredibly tempting sweet treats, but I managed to restrain myself to just one cloud cake to bring home.

I also got to meet one of my baking heroes, Dan Lepard an Australian-born baker who now lives, bakes and teaches in London.

I turned into a bit of a groupie for the day and took in my copy of his baking bible,  Short and Sweet, and got him to sign it.

It’s a fantastic book if you are interested in baking. It has easy to follow recipes, plus some science to help you understand why things work (or why not) with a bit of old-fashioned wisdom as well.

 

If you like baking bread he also has several great books on handmade bread.

Hmm … I feel the urge for a sweet treat coming on!

Fundraising for our furry friends

It was the annual RSPCA (Royal Society for Protection and Care of Animals) Cupcake fundraising day on Monday so my work team and I baked up a delicious selection of treats to sell to our colleagues.

The RSPCA has a special place in my heart because that’s how Pepe and Cosmo came into my life. I adopted them after they had been rescued from an unkind home.

They decided to keep me company when I got up early in the morning to bake some savoury muffins. Of course the muffins had to have their own special cake tin with a suitable cat theme for the occasion!

After causing many sugar highs and lows during the day we managed to raise over $420 for a very worthy cause. Our waistlines won’t thank us, but many animals will.

A pickled pleasure

Our local primary school has recently started a farmers’ market on Saturdays and I paid it my second visit over the week-end.  It is much more agreeable than doing my weekly vegetable and fruit shopping at one of the large supermarkets.

We had a 3 day week-end in Sydney so I decided that I would use some of the extra free time by making some pickles with the veggies that I bought at the market.  After a 2 hour game of tennis I set off to a friend’s house (she has a wonderful kitchen with a long bench) to spend a leisurely afternoon slicing, dicing and pickling. Unfortunately my tiny kitchen doesn’t encourage such endeavours.

First up was was pickled cabbage – a mixture of white and purple cabbage.  Isn’t the colour of these leaves just glorious? If I’d thought ahead I would also have tried some natural dyeing with them.

After slicing up a huge bowl of cabbage I made the spiced vinegar and then tightly packed the drained and squished cabbage into the jar.  I was surprised at how much cabbage ended up in just one medium jar.

Next up was pickled fennel and carrot – originally intended to be just fennel, but that didn’t fill the jar so I added enough carrot to fill it up.  I like the look of the combination; I just hope it tastes good!  Now I have to wait four weeks to try them out.

After being so industrious I was feeling virtuous when I went home so I decided to tackle a clean-out of the pantry cupboards (another task on my simplify list!).

It was shocking to realise the food we waste!  As someone who mostly cooks meals just for myself it is almost impossible to use up some foodstuffs before the use-by date.  Packaging sizes are made for families, or for at least two people, yet statistics show that in Australia at least, if not elsewhere, that many more people are living in single person households. Most of the jars of herbs and spices were badly out of date so they got tossed, however, I don’t know of anyone who ever manages to use a full jar before the expiry date. Do you?

I’m in a pickle

Well not actually me, but heaps of wonderful seasonal veggies!

I spent yesterday afternoon at a Preserving for the Season: Pickles & Chutney workshop at Cornersmith Picklery over in Marrickville, Sydney.

 

 

 

The Picklery is owned and operated by Alex Elliott-Howery and James Grant who also run a very successful cafe just up the road which recently won a Best Cafe award. It is a real part of the community with locals bringing in spare produce from their gardens in exchange for some of the finished produce.

Marrickville is an older working class suburb of Sydney where lots of Greek migrants settled post WW2 and more recently by Vietnamese migrants. It’s a bit run-down but has some lovely old buildings.

It was a lot of fun, plus I made some Pear, Lemon and Rosemary Chutney, some Fennel Pickle and some Flavoured Vinegar to take home.

That’s my jar on the right!

I’ve always loved the sweet/sour taste of pickles and really fell in love with pickles when I travelled through Lebanon about 10 years ago.  Middle-Eastern and Turkish food has a fantastic range of pickled vegetables  I can’t wait to make some more for myself and for Christmas gifts.

The Picklery also has classes in Fermenting (which seems the rage at the moment following on from  Sandor Ellix Katz’s book The Art of Fermentation: An In-depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World ) and Bread Making and Sweet Preserving.

I’m going to do a Home Cheese Making course next, I love ricotta and labneh. Yummm!