Pumpkin Lasagne for you

It's a good thing to eat seasonally but inevitably there will be a glut of one kind of vegetable or fruit and at the end of two weeks you are ready to vow that you will never eat it again.  It is pretty hard to escape the pumpkin at this time of year. That and cabbage.  Last week I headed East and made a Pumpkin lakhsa. Next week I'm planning to make Pumpkin and Ginger cupcakes but this week we ate pumpkin Italian style. I'm sure the Italians would be horrified at this deviation from the original version, but to the Italians credit the lasagne is a very versatile dish. You can make as many variations of it as there are cheeses in France. (That's a lot in case you were wondering!) 
I was talking with my girlfriends last night and not surprisingly the conversation turned to food. One of them confessed that lasagne was her comfort food and begged for the recipe.  So here it is, just for you Helene.

a little something for starters...

Having done a cupboard inventory recently I realised that I had a large amount of cupboard space devoted to spices. I buy my spices in bulk and then need to store them in accumulated glass jars of various shapes and sizes.  Because they are different shapes they often don't sit side by side uniformly on the shelf, hence the reason they take up a lot of room.  I found my jars of seeds and so I was pleased to stumble across this recipe in the Saveurs magazine where I could use them.

We had a surprise birthday party for one of our friends recently. I baked these biscuits for the soirée because I had almost everything in the cupboard. After a quick dash to the supermarket for the cheese they didn't take long to whip up.  The recipe calls for Mimolette cheese. It's a semi hard cheese that is traditionally made in Normandy and Holland.  You could however use any hard cheese. Mimolette cheese works nicely because it is slightly orange and adds a lovely colour to the biscuits. 

Because it's not often that you find biscuits like this they are suitable impressive. And for the extra 2 minutes it takes to roll them in seeds you receive a healthy dose of compliments for your work. 

Cheese Biscuits

200g flour

80g mimolette cheese (or another hard tasty cheese if you can't get your hands on Mimolette)

70g butter - cut into cubes

1 egg

3 pinches of salt

2 tablespoons of sesame seeds

1 tablespoon of poppy seeds

Finely grate the cheese.  Mix the flour, salt and cheese together in a bowl.  Rub the butter in with your fingers and work the ingredients together until it resembles breadcrumbs.  

Beat the egg and then add it to the mixture.  Add 1 or 2 tablespoons of water so that the mixture holds together.

Shape the dough into a cylinder approximately 30cm long.

Sprinkle your work bench with the sesame and poppy seeds.  Roll the biscuit cylinder over the seeds, pressing lightly so that the seeds stick to the mixture.

Wrap the cylinder in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 180°C.

Unwrap the biscuit sausage and carefully cut into slices about 7mm thick.  Try to keep them all the same size so that they cook evenly.

Place the biscuits on the biscuit tray (buttered or lined with cooking paper) and cook for 20 minutes. 

They are cooked when they have turned a delicious golden brown colour and the cheese is sizzling.

Serve cold as part of an apéro selection.

The comfort of Rum and Raisins

I made this cake for my husband who has a particular weakness for anything rum and raisin flavoured. He stops at nothing - ice cream, rice pudding, semoule au lait and we discovered Les Petits Muffins raisin au rhum from Bonne Maman the other day. What a treat!

It inspired a baking session after work one day not long after. I started with a recipe for a date, ginger and honey cake and ended up with the most popular cake in our house so far this year. It fills the house with the most wonderful warming smells that you will want to make it again just to make your place smell good.

We are two, and we ate this cake within 3 days. It featured in every meal including breakfast. I can testify that it is terrifically good with a cup of tea.

Rum and Raisin Cake

250g self raising flour

150g butter

90g sugar

1 tsp vanilla essence

2 tablespoons honey

3 eggs

125g raisins

100mls approx. rum

Preheat the oven to 180°C.

Pour the rum over the raisins, and microwave for 1 minute to encourage the raisins to soak up the rum (that's where the flavour is). Cover and leave to macerate while you make the rest of the cake.

Beat the butter and the sugar until pale and creamy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well between each egg. Add the vanilla essence. Add the flour and honey and mix well. Check that your raisins are nice and plump. If not, zap them in the microwave to hurry them up. Drain the rum into your cake mixture. Shake 1 tablespoon of flour over your raisins so that the raisins are covered in flour. This stops them sinking to the bottom of the cake while it cooks. The raisins may look lumpy covered with flour but it will all disappear once cooked. Now add the raisins to your mixture and stir well.

Grease and flour (or line with paper) a loaf tin. Pour in your cake mix and cook in the oven for 20 minutes. As usual, the cooking times vary with each oven. It's cooked when you poke knife in and it comes out clean.

Cool the cake in the tin before tipping it out and enjoying it - but I reckon you won't be able to wait that long!

Soup it up

It's autumn and autumn means soup. Whenever the weather turns colder I discover a childlike adoration for hot soup. There is something about coming in from the cold and being warmed up from the inside out with a bowl of soup. Soup is usually filled with vegetables and vitamins which adds to it's appeal. I feel like I am 'souping-up' my defenses against winter illness.

Here is a tasty number that I whipped up the other day. It has a delicate flavour of vegetables, so think china teacups and silver soup spoons.

Autumnal Green Soup

1 onion

1 potato

1 carrot

20g butter

850mls vegetable stock

1 head of lettuce

100ml cream

salt and pepper

Diced the onion, potato and carrot into small cubes. Heat the butter in a large pot and sweat the vegetables for 10 minutes without colouring.

Add the vegetable stock and cover. Simmer for 25 minutes or until the vegetables are tender.

Finely slice the top 2/3's of the head of lettuce, leaving the harder whiter part of the leaves behind, and add to the soup. Cook until the lettuce has just wilted, about 2 minutes. If you cook the lettuce any longer you will lose it's bright green colour and your soup will become dull looking.

Cool the soup a little and purée. You can either do this in a blender or with a hand held mouli.

Adjust seasonings and add the cream.

from the store cupboard

I had a tin of carrots living in my cupboard. I'm not sure why I bought them because I'm not usually into buying tinned vegetables. The other night I decided to add them to our dinner menu of pasta (late night dinner after a long day at work). I took down the tin of carrots waiting for some inspiration on how to eat them.....

What transpired was a rather delicious asian flavoured dish of healthy vitamins. Here I kept it rather simple but I do think a dash of freshly grated ginger could work very well.

Asian Carrot Salad

1 x 400g tin of baby carrots

1 tablespoon sesame seeds

Dressing

1 tablespoon olive oil

several splashes sesame oil

1 tablespoon soy sauce

dash of oyster sauce

pinch of salt

pinch of sugar

fresh ginger

Mix the dressing ingredients together and test for seasoning. Adjust if necessary. Pour the dressing over the carrots and then sprinkle the final dish with a tablespoon of sesame seeds.

Eat with or without chopsticks - you choose.

the knitters

Look at these beautiful girls having a go at knitting. A group of us got together, some could knit, some couldn't. By the end of the afternoon everyone left home with something accomplished. It's given me inspiration to finish my vest that has sat, for the summer, in my knitting bag.

Waiting for Perfection

I have been waiting for Perfection. And now I'm giving up. Perfection is late and I must get on with things. I have been kept waiting long enough.

As a good friend of mine, Grant Erskine, pointed out tonight, perfectionism is to be focussed on the way or the manner of doing something. I have discovered that this more 'task focussed' style of thinking actually drains some of the fun out of life.

I am henceforth choosing to live Excellently. I will no longer passively wait for Perfection to arrive but I will proactively seek the company of Excellence. I like Excellence because she is already with me. I don't have to wait for her. She is a choice and she lives in my thinking. Because Excellence is being focussed on who you are doing your things for, not on how you do them. I like Excellence because she values people. I like Excellence because she likes to do things a little more than the expected.

So - my blog, in fact my life, will not be perfect. Because lets face it - I'm not perfect (surprise surprise!). I get grumpy when I'm tired, I am impatient when I have to repeat myself and sometimes, (but not very often), I do steal the covers on the bed.

I have made plenty of gorgeous looking and tasting dishes over the long months of my absence from my blog. I wasn't having a complete break down. But because I didn't consider them perfect (well, it was mainly the pictures I didn't like), I did nothing. Perfection never coincided with my inspiration.

So, I'm making way for Excellence. My dream may not be finished being dreamed but I can do what I can excellently as I discover what the meaning behind my passions and talents. I am no longer waiting for Perfection in order to act.

Here are my excellent Speculos that I made for an afternoon with the girls when they came over to knit. Check out the fun we had. Some complete beginners left with some seriously good knitting in hand.