Roasted Stonefruit Frozen Yoghurt

Stone fruit and icecream are two of the greatest pleasures of summer. A combination of the two is ultimately tempting, as I’m sure Deeba of Passionate About Baking knows. Her fruity desserts are tempting anytime, but it’s her Roasted Peach and Plum Icecream that has had me drooling for months.

Hung yoghurt is another of Deeba’s specialities. With a bit of patience, a tea towel and a seive, you too can turn plain yoghurt into a thick and creamy base for icecreams and dips. A damp tea towel is best for draining off the whey, and if you place it in a sieve over a bowl you can leave it in the fridge overnight to work its magic. The fabric of the tea towel leaves a gorgeous pattern on the hung yoghurt when you unwrap the curd.

Roasting stonefruit is very rewarding, because unlike stewed fruit it never boils over. Halve the fruit first, then sprinkle it with brown sugar and pop it in the oven. The brown sugar will bubble up and turn into a caramelly liquid. The roasting smell is just heavenly, and the temptation to guzzle the fruit instead of turning it into icecream is very strong.

Pureeing the fruit is the only fiddly part of this process, because you really do need to strain it through a sieve to get rid of the pieces of skin. The icecream won’t be smooth if the fruit peel isn’t strained out. Aside from this step the method is remarkably straightforward, and it is wonderful to be able to make icecream without separating eggs for custard.

Roasted Peach, Nectarine and Apricot Icecream came first. In this case I included cream as well as yoghurt with the pureed fruit. The flavour of roasted stonefruit was fragrant and sweet – just peachy. The addition of cream made the mouthfeel a little fatty though, and I decided to make the next icecream a frozen yoghurt.

Roasted Plum Frozen Yoghurt was the next recipe. Made with yoghurt rather than cream, and with a less sweet fruit, the dessert was much tangier. The mouthfeel was perfect, so I will stick to yoghurt rather than cream in future. The colour from the plums was a simply gorgeous deep pink. I’ll be making frozen yoghurt again, and the only question in my mind is which fruit to roast next.

Roasted Stone Fruit Frozen Yoghurt or Icecream
Ingredients
6-8 pieces of stone fruit
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 cups hung yoghurt (or 1 cup yoghurt and 1 cup cream)
1/2-1 cup caster sugar

Method
1. Set up your yoghurt to hang for a few hours or overnight in the fridge. Put 2 generous cups of plain yoghurt in a damp teatowel and sit it in a sieve over a bowl. Stand in the fridge for a few hours or overnight.

2. Halve the stonefruit, sprinkle with brown sugar and roast at 180 degrees Celcius for 20-30 min until soft and fragrant.

3. When the fruit has cooled, puree it. Then push the puree through a sieve to get rid of any large pieces of peel that remain.

4. Combine the pureed fruit with the hung yoghurt curd and 1/2 cup of caster sugar. Taste the mixture at this stage, because the sweetness will need to be adjusted differently depending on how sweet your stonefruit was. For my peach mixture 1/2 cup of caster sugar was sufficient, but for the plums I needed almost 1 cup. You’re aiming for it to taste a bit sweeter than you’d want a smoothie to be, because once the dessert is frozen it will taste less sweet.

5. Freeze and churn the icecream. I chilled the mixture in the fridge, then added 850mL of it to my 1L icecream machine (I drank the leftovers). In the icecream machine churn for about 40 minutes (until soft serve consistency). Then it needs to firm up in the freezer. If you have patience and a strong arm you can do away with the machine. You put the mixture in the freezer in a shallow tray and give it a good beating every half hour to keep the crystals small.

Hijazi’s Falafel

Eating with an expert is a great opportunity to learn, so when I was invited to eat Lebanese food with my mum’s Lebanese friend I was pretty excited. The Expert’s choice was in Arncliffe, which has a small set of shops including a Lebanese grocer, a Lebanese pizza shop that sells Zaatar pizza at lunchtime, and Hijazi’s Falafel.

Our Expert lead us in to Hijazi’s, and took us up to the counter so we could see the food. It’s worth taking a look at what’s on offer before sitting down with a menu, because you might spot something you wouldn’t have fancied otherwise. We discovered the fried cauliflower this way. It certainly went well with the hommous and babaganouj. The good news from the Expert was that the cauliflower isn’t normally floured before frying, and so was likely to be gluten free.

Lebanese food is perfect for sharing, but if you don’t have a big group Hijazi’s offers a mixed plate. It comes with three skewers, (lamb, chicken and kafta), dips, salad and tabouli, so it’s the way to taste everything. The hommous wasn’t very garlicky, but the babaganouj was a winner, being neither too smoky nor too bland. The meals are served with bread, which smelt beautifully fresh.

For a bigger group there’s a series of family feasts that you can order by the kilo. The half kilo feast provides six skewers with sides, and the one kilo feast has nine skewers. If you’re really hungry there’s even a kilo and a half feast, which is marked on the menu with a warning that it’s extra large.

Don’t forget the falafel either. Ours was pretty good reheated the next day, but I wish I’d tasted it fresh. Since it’s Hijazi’s specialty it would be worth a return trip. This falafel had no cracked wheat, but it’s worth checking since the Expert reports that it is a common ingredient in Turkish falafel even though it’s rare in Lebanese versions.

As we walked down the street, resisting the temptation to snaffle our take-away falafel, the Expert commented that she never feels uncomfortably full when the food is so fresh. I can’t say that I wasn’t full, but I was impressed with the food.

Hijazi’s Falafel
53 Wollongong Road
Arncliffe
NSW

Ratings (out of 5 snorts)

Price	5 snorts
Taste	4 snorts
Service	3 snorts
Atmosphere	3 snorts

Take a Walk with Pearl Couscous

When on longer bushwalks, one is always looking for some tasty morsel to finish the day with.  The contents have to be light so as not to weigh down your pack and not too bulky, that is where the idea of using Pearl Couscous came about.

Zip locked dry Couscous mix with vegetables

We received a sample pack of Pearl CousCous in the mail, this is what Alloronan used to make her Pinenut and Cumin Beef on Blu Gourmet Pearl Couscous.

In my recipe the couscous formed the foundation with a mixture of additional items added. I threw in some dried vegetables from Tinderry Tucker, chinese mushrooms, vegetable stock powder, and some sultanas, the ingredients are flexible, it depends a bit on what’s in the cupboard and what you have left over from the last walk.

Dinner simmering on the camp fire

To cook you can wait until the flames die down and the fire is reduced to coals, then place your billy straight on the coals, making sure to stir regularly to keep it from sticking.  The hardest part is waiting for it to cook, as after a strenuous days walk you’re always famished. Tasting every now and again to see how it is going only makes it worse as you get a tantalising preview of the wonderful flavour being produced.

Dinners ready to eat

Yum, now to the eating, sit back against a tree and listen to the river run, whilst the setting sun paints a moving pallet of golden colours on the western horizon.

Jim Jim Creek, Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory, Australia

My wife and I used some of these meals whilst on our sixteen day walk in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory of Australia. It’s a tropical area with some stunning scenery with lots of aboriginal art works hidden under rock overhangs, quite an adventure.

Slow Food with Carlo Petrini

A bowl of penne seems puny compared to a fast food giant like McDonalds, and such a stark contrast is an excellent way of making a point. Slow food and fast food are opposites. Fast food is a product of an industrial food chain, while the Slow Food Movement supports food that is good, clean and fair. That means local food chains rather than industrial ones.

The juxtaposition of traditional penne with globalised hamburgers is a poignant one, and Carlo Petrini has an amazing ability with these kinds of examples. The leader of the Slow Food Movement is an inspiring speaker. His talk at the Sydney International Food Festival went for more than an hour, and he was so energetic he only sat down once. The rest of the time he was speaking passionately in Italian, gesticulating intensely, and somehow managing to leave gaps for his talented translator to give us the message in English.

Carlo Petrini believes that food is valuable, and not merely a commodity. He described the top down photographs of food in magazines as being like corpses, and reminded us that these photos of food are at risk of becoming like pornography. There is more to food than recipes and presentation. Food should taste good, it should be enjoyed in good company, and it should be produced sustainably.

Today we spend approximately the same proportion of our incomes on mobile phones as we do on food, but perhaps we have our values misplaced. Carlo explained “When I eat a piece of prosciutto, it becomes Carlo Petrini”, and he patted his stomach. “But this thing”, and he waved his mobile phone in the air, “is always outside of me”.

Embellishing this point, he told us about the owner of a famous mountaintop restaurant. When asked why she was only open for lunch she replied that she did not want to be the richest person in the graveyard. She valued her food for its quality, not merely its worth as a commodity.

In the case of food, what is logical from an industrial perspective is not necessarily logical for local communities, or from the point of view of common sense. Carlo’s example of this was his visit to a famous capsicum growing region in Italy, where he ordered peperonata at a restaurant. The sauce was flavourless, and when he asked where the peppers were grown he discovered they had come all the way from the Netherlands. Worried about the local capsicum growers he was reassured that they were making a living growing tulip bulbs in their greenhouses.

These kinds of ironies of industrial agriculture are surprisingly common, and Petrini had plenty of examples of them. Modeling farming on factories leads to a kind of uniformity that just doesn’t necessarily make good food. Carlo talked about the loss of a breed of cow (whose milk production was relatively low) leading to the loss of a type of cheese. This demonstrated how local cuisine and biodiversity go hand in hand.

To support local tastes and agriculture we have to be prepared to pay a higher price for produce that is locally and sustainably produced. In addition to this Carlo suggested supporting school and community gardens, which can make local produce accessible for lower income families. Running out of time Petrini finished his lecture on a good note. Since we were in the Sydney Opera House he sang us a snippet of opera – in Italian of course.

More about Slow Food
Slow Food Australia
International Slow Food Movement

I’d like to thank Lorraine from Not Quite Nigella for sending me a ticket to this lecture.

Stardust: a recipe to celebrate Catsplat

The fizzy sherbet and sparkling colours in this recipe are to celebrate the completion of our new iPhone App Catsplat. It’s a cute game, where you tilt your iPhone to keep the cats from eating the fish. You can also pin a cat with your finger, and if another cat hits it they explode into sparkling colours. That’s why sherbet seemed like the perfect analogy.

These easy to make sherbet parcels are the perfect recipe for a kids’ party, and that’s where I first encountered them. It was a Star Wars party in the park, and the lovely cellophane packets of sherbet stardust were easy to eat by sucking through a straw. Ideal for a snack between battles of the girls versus the boys.

You have to admire a mother who has the patience to make these though. It’s a fiddly job if you want to make a lot of them. You can crush your Fruit Tingles using a mortar and pestle, but a food processor makes the job quicker. After that making the individual cellophane parcels is simple even though it’s time consuming.

This stardust is for James and Alloronan, who have worked hard on Catsplat. James is the programmer, and Alloronan is the graphic designer. Our musician friend Daniel even made a tune for us. If you’d like to admire their work, take a look at our video of Catsplat in action. You can find out more about the game at the TopDog Dev website, and download it from the iTunes App Store.

Recipe for Sherbet Stardust
You Need:
Fruit Tingles (I used 2 mini rolls per bonbon, so a pack of 8 made 4 bonbons)
Cellophane
Drinking straws
Rubber bands

Method:
1. Crush the Fruit Tingles in your food processor or with a mortar and pestle until they become stardust.
2. Cut a square of cellophane and spoon a portion of stardust onto it.
3. Bring the corners together and insert a drinking straw (or half one) into the package.
4. Secure your bonbon with a rubber band (stretch it over the filled end rather than the straw).
5. They look lovely massed together on a tray.