ACMI Café – sweet but no sourdough!

Last weekend, E and I met my dad at 10am on Saturday for brunch at the ACMI café. It was early for us – but my dad had already had breakfast (especially early to see my mum off before she left at 6am for the airport to fly to Alice Springs), purchased a new car and a few CDs.

So my dad went for the ricotta pancakes with berries and icecream for his second breakfast (for anyone not familiar with second breakfasts, check out the Scottish hobbit in the Lord of the Rings film – can’t remember which of the trilogy but the idea delighted E and has stuck with us).

I have had the rustic baked bean before and decided to go with these again, and a couple of hash browns. I toyed with the idea of some other veggie but I know the beans are homemade with lots of tomato in them and I didn’t feel like any of the other veggies on offer. E went for the big brekkie!

I think my dad hit the jackpot. He was most pleased with his and when I had a taste I wished I had ordered the pancakes. E liked his but it was a bit big (well they don’t call it the big brekkie for nothing!). Mine was nice but the beans were bit intensely tomatoey. In fact, I think what I didn’t like so much this time was that I was served Turkish bread rather than the sourdough which was on the menu. The beans needed a more substantial bread. But the hash browns were wonderful and crisp, so no complaints there, except why can’t they be healthier!

All in all, a very pleasing brunch before we headed off for the Guggenheim exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. (A modern art exhibition is quite fitting really for a morning spent in some of the fine modern buildings of Melbourne.)

Update August 2015: cafe is revamped - had great chocolate cake.

ACMI Lounge Cafe and Bar
Federation Square
Flinders Street
Melbourne 3000
Phone: + 61 3 9655 1900
Open Monday to Friday 8.30am till late
Open Saturday & Sunday 9.30 am till late

Blues Clues Birthday Cake

My sister Fran is in the middle of party season for her partner’s kids and organized a party for Dylan on the weekend. It was a barbecue in the park – sausages and hamburgers on the electric barbie, and lots of bread and tomato sauce to eat them with (and veggies sausages for me!).

Fran chose blue as the theme and asked me to help her with doing a Blues Clues cake – she knows I love a fun cake and had found an idea on the internet. So on the Friday before the party, she cooked E and I a curry, and while the boys watched a dvd, we set to work on a plain sponge cake that she had prepared earlier.

It was the first sponge cake she had made – actually I call it a butter cake because my mum’s sponges are light and fluffy and not at all good for kiddie cake decorating. Fran had problems finding a plain cake recipe and ended up with an American one off the internet which is unsatisfactory if you are used to Australian measurements (I am always confused when I am asked to measure butter by cups rather than grams) so I will put the one I usually use here. It is not my favourite recipe so I often put in a couple of spoons of cocoa to make it a chocolate cake

Common garden butter cake
(from the Australian Women’s Weekly)
Makes one cake

125 g (4 oz) butter, at room temperature
½ tsp vanilla
½ cup castor sugar
2 eggs
1½ cups self raising flour
⅓ cup milk

Cream butter and vanilla, add sugar and beat til light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time. Stir in half flour and half milk, then other half of flour and milk. Only stir lightly. Spoon batter into a greased and lined cake tin – if you use a 20 cm tin it should take 50 minutes to cook in a 180C oven, but test with a skewer to check it is done. The Women’s Weekly give different times for different size cake tins, depending on the shape of the cake.

---

Of course, even without this recipe, Fran made a nice cake which, when the paper was peeled off, looked a perfect shape. She also had to make a few little cakes – I think we needed about 7. Our first task was to cut away some small bits from the sides of the large cake to shape the head, and then to place the little cakes to make the ears. It wasn’t perfect but looked ok (see my photo).

Then it was a matter of icing it all over with blue icing. Fran had bought some gel icing tubes for another cake. I’ve never used these before and was curious. They are useful for quite small amounts of icing but don’t seem to dry which I think is not so practical for cakes that have to travel (as mine often do) or sit around for some time (as this cake did). But they were quite good for shaping the nose. Fran thought it was an easy cake and it wasn’t hard but it was time consuming to ice around the edges of the ears. I made the mistake of thinning the icing a little to make it easier to spread but unfortunately it sort of pooled on the tray on which the cake was sitting which displeased me.

For the patches on the ears, I started with putting some black into a blue icing mix and it went a muddy colour so I threw it out and started again, this time with a darker blue I have in my icing colours which worked much better. We used marshmallows with a little black gel icing for the eyes (and used a teeny bit of icing to stick the eyes on). For the tongue, we cut out a wedge and place a pink iced wedge of little cake in there.

We were pleased with the cake – it is so easy to please kids with a bit of colour and novelty. The adults seemed to like it too. But I have to give a special mention to my mum who made a marshmallow slice for the party in advance, even though on the day she was visiting a remote Aboriginal community near Alice Springs – now that is dedication! (And an honorary mention goes to my dad and niece, Maddy, who navigated all sorts of road blocks for Melbourne University’s open day to bring the slice to the party.)

Midweek Mock Fish

This is a light meal I made last week on a day when energy failed me after a fruitless dash into town after work looking for a replacement dishrack because ours keeps falling apart.

I was wanting hot chips and thought some potato rosti might do the trick – crisp on the outside and soft and fluffy inside. I grated 3 medium potatoes, squeezed some of the water out. Then I melted about a teaspoon of butter in a non-stick frypan and placed the grated potato in it. I sprinkled a bit of salt on it for taste.

I would like to say I just left it to cook. But I can’t help a little bit of meddling. That is how I learnt to cook with my mum – poking a spoon in here and giving that a stir. So I keep pushing my eggflip (which some might call spatula?) under the mixture to make sure it wouldn’t stick. That was my main concern – that the mixture would fall to bits when I tried to turn it over.

Meanwhile my mum rang so I chatted to her while it cooked. When I told her I was cooking potato rosti, she said her mum used to make it on Fridays (her family being good Catholics who didn’t eat meat on Fridays) and they called it mock fish. She said they thought it was food for poor people and were surprised when potato rosti became a bit posh. Interestingly, according to the Rösti page on Wikipedia, this dish was originally eaten by farmers in Switzerland (I looked for mock fish on Wiki but they are yet to acknowledge that the potato-loving Irish had their own version). Rosti is something you can dress up or dress down but it is mercifully easy, and surely tastes much better than a wartime mock fish recipe I saw recently while browsing in a bookstore.

My mum told me I needed to squeeze the moisture out, and I was pleased I had, given that I had not consulted any cookbook. When it came to turning it over, it all flipped in one piece which seemed nothing short of miraculous but then I thought maybe some cultural memory was guiding me. I’d like to think so. In fact it was lovely and crisp – I had it over a medium heat for probably 40-45 minutes all up (can’t quite remember how much time each side) which I think was why it worked. I mustered all my patience to wait til it was golden brown on each side.

We ate it with chopped tomato and cucumber and a bit of yoghurt. Dinner was a bit light that night – probably would have served one rather than two. If I was to do this again, I would do a more substantial salad (chickpeas would have been good) and maybe more potatoes. Luckily we had brownies for dessert!

On the stereo:
Low Symphony: Philip Glass

Ruby Crumble of rhubarb and raspberries!

Once I got my Enchanted Broccoli Forest into the oven last Saturday when Kim and Jo were over, I turned my attention to the important issue of dessert! I often make cakes but I had initially thought I would make a rhubarb and strawberry crumble. I have seen a few berry crumbles on blogs lately.

Here is where I must pause to reflect on dessert. I grew up in a household where my mother made cooked desserts most nights. In fact I was always a little dismayed to just be offered a bought biscuit when I was at dinner with school friends! Yet I now rarely make dessert. If I have been baking, we have some baked goodies but I usually prefer fruit fresh rather than cooked. I love apples when in season but I am not a big fan of stewed apple that my mum would put in crumbles, pies and sponges. When friends come to dinner these days I often make cake.

But lately I have started to see sense in baking desserts. Firstly, when I was reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle, the family set out to eat locally and started out the year at the end of winter with virtually no fresh fruit. I kept wanting to tell her they should have had stewed fruit on hand. But I also have been craving fruit lately in a similar way.

I love seasonal fruit but I do tend to eat lots of fruit in season and then towards the end of the season I tire of apples or nectarines or mandarins or pears, and they aren’t tasting so good when they are no longer as fresh. It takes me a while to adjust to a new season. So lately, as we near the end of winter, I have wanted fresh fruit but not found it appealing. Cooking fresh fruit seems odd, but having fruit preserved to eat out of season suddenly makes a lot of sense. I now see just how much fruit my mother made us eat through eating desserts.

However I had some problems thinking about doing a strawberry and rhubarb crumble. I wanted to do it but was feeling ridiculous about using out of season strawberries. Then at my recent farmer’s market outing, I bought Di’s rhubarb for the crumble and some of her rhubarb and raspberry jam. The combination made sense as soon as I saw the frozen raspberries for sale at another stall. I would make rhubarb and raspberry crumble.

Next challenge was finding the recipe. I knew I had seen recipes for rhubarb and strawberry crumble but couldn’t remember where. Unfortunately it wasn’t til the next morning that I remembered Holler had an excellent recipe on her blog. But I had remembered that Tara had a recipe for a strawberry and coriander crumble which interested me because it had a very oaty crumble. One of my guests, Kim, has a gluten free diet but can eat a little gluten. I had looked for gluten free crumbles and not found any to inspire me so I thought this recipe with mostly oats (which my reading tells me can be eaten by some on gluten free diets) and a tiny amount of flour, might be the next best thing.

So I used the ingredients from Tara’s recipe but instead of her method of freezing and then breaking up the crumble, I just did my usual method of rubbing the butter into the ingredients, which seemed to work fine. By the time I was making it I didn’t have time for fancy freezing techniques. I also couldn’t decide on if I should cook the rhubarb first or not. I found a Vikki Leng recipe for stewing rhubarb using honey and lemon which I used rather than sugar. But quite a lot of recipes didn’t precook the rhubarb so I thought I could get away without it.

The crumble was lovely with all the oats. (It was ok although probably not ideal for Kim). But the rhubarb was only just cooked – it kept its shape and even the occasional crunch rather than being the stringy slush that we know and love. Next time (as my mum has advised after the event) I will cook the rhubarb first, so I have amended the recipe to reflect this. But it still was a great dessert with brilliant colour, great texture and wonderful flavours. Jo said it tasted like a really good muesli which I thought was a great way to describe it. It indeed did feel more healthy than my usual cakes.

I forgot to take a photo so the photo of the actual dish is from the next morning but the one of the fruit is before I put it in the oven when it was such a divine ruby red! Here is what I did.

Update: for a more satisfactory rhubarb crumble - see my rhubarb and pear crumble - I think it works better to cook the rhubarb first from this experience.

Rhubarb and Raspberry Crumble
Serves 4

400g bunch rhubarb, topped and tailed, and chopped
⅓ cup honey (I used a bit less than ½ cup and found it a bit much)
Juice of one small lemon
350g frozen raspberries

Crumble:
3 tbsp brown sugar
1 cup rolled oats
3 tbsp plain flour
¼ tsp cinnamon
100g butter, chopped

Cook rhubarb, honey and lemon approximately 10 minutes til rhubarb is just done. Cool a little while you make the crumble.

To make the crumble, rub the butter into the remaining crumble ingredients til mostly mixed – mine wasn’t quite mixed and seemed ok.

Add raspberries to rhubarb mixture and stir. Place in greased baking dish and top with crumble. Bake at 180ºC for 30 – 40 minutes or til crumble is golden brown and crisp. Serve with cream or yoghurt or (an excellent idea by E after the event) custard!

On the stereo:
Seeds of Happiness, part 1: Jeffrey Roden

The Enchanted Broccoli Forest

A forest in my kitchen does indeed seem magical! This is exactly what this recipe for the Enchanted Broccoli Forest promises. It is the recipe of the title of the excellent Mollie Katzen book, and I think I can say it is one of the most inspired recipe names I know.

I made it last Saturday (oh yes I am having a little blogger backlog!) when our friends Kim and Jo came for dinner. It seemed like a fun and delicious meal, and gluten free for Kim.

It is made with broccoli florets standing in a bed of rice but lest anyone think this is a wholesome but dull old-school vegetarian meal, check out the interesting ingredients: garlic, dill, mint, swiss cheese, pepper and chilli.

I get excited at the greenness of it, and yet after baking it, the broccoli went a little brown, despite being covered with foil. I think I felt less paranoid because I have a dim memory of this happening last time I made it (many years ago) but I am still willing for someone to let me know it is something I did rather than the recipe. Maybe barely cooking the broccoli might help. And it tasted great anyway, especially with the swiss cheese giving it a particular sweet nutty flavour.

It actually felt a bit like gardening when I had to make the holes in the bed of rice to ‘plant’ my broccoli trees in it. So when E asked for more risotto, I was black affronted he thought my enchanted forest was a mere risotto and took great delight in asking if he wanted more trees or more undergrowth.

I served it with a simple salad on the side: tomatoes, avocado, red capsicum, basil, lemon juice and pepper. It tasted fresh and looked great, especially the sweetest tomatoes from the Farmers Market. (But I got too caught up in conversation to photograph the salad in the forest when I served dinner!)

The Enchanted Broccoli Forrest
(From Mollie Katzen)
serves 6

400g bunch of broccoli
2 cups brown rice
3 cups water
1 tbsp butter
1 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, crushed
Generous pinch of salt
½ tsp dill weed
Lots of black pepper
Chilli flakes, to taste
2 eggs
¼ cup fresh parsley, finely chopped
1 tbsp fresh mint, finely chopped
1 cup swiss cheese (approx 100-150g), or cheddar
Juice from one lemon

Place rice and water in small to medium saucepan. Bring to the boil, lower heat and cover. Cook til just done – about 20-30 minutes. Fluff with a fork.

Cut broccoli into little trees with a couple of centimetres of stalk still on (as you will need this length to plant the broccoli). Steam broccoli til just done (I suspect I overdid it by microwaving on high for about 5-6 minutes).

Meanwhile prepare other ingredients. In a medium to large saucepan sauté onion and garlic in butter over medium heat, stirring til onions are soft and translucent (8-10 minutes). Add remaining ingredients (except lemon juice) and rice and stir well.

Spread rice mixture into a greased 10 x 6 inch pan and smooth out. Use a skewer or end of a fork to make holes at regular intervals. Place broccoli in the holes. I don’t know I did this quite right as my broccoli was quite floppy – maybe it was too well cooked or the stems were too long but it still looked fine. Squeeze lemon juice over broccoli. The recipe suggested using mixed lemon juice and butter but I decided to leave out the butter.

Cover with foil (Mollie says gently but firmly) and bake at 180C for 30 minutes.

On the stereo:
Le Pavillon Témoin: Mathias Delplanque

BBoM Raspberry Brownies for Two

It sometimes seems that some recipes are waiting for the right ingredient to appear in my kitchen. Buying frozen raspberries for my crumble on Saturday (oops this post is still to come) seemed such a luxury in winter that I had to make the most of it. I have had a Donna Hay recipe for raspberry brownies that has interested me for some time but the raspberries have never appeared at the right time … until now!

Well they are named brownies but are not brownies as I know them. I think of brownies as slabs of chocolate that is chewy, even a little undercooked in the middle. These are actually cooked in a mini muffin pan and are more cake-like than densely fudgy.

Nevertheless, what appealed to me about the recipe was it seemed quite small. A lot of recipes seem to cater for a small army which is fine if you are cooking for lots of family or work colleagues or friends. But, in a household of two, it is a relief to find a recipe that is small enough to eat without feeling gluttonous, and shamed into loading up the freezer or taking food to whoever will eat it! It is also a useful recipe for when you don’t have many ingredients on hand (or if you wanted to use GL flour so you could take a small amount of gluten free cakes available at a party).

These brownie muffins probably felt more of a treat in winter with the hard to come by raspberries. I loved the wonderful scarlet splodges throughout them. E told me that he found them pleasingly light because some of my baking is just too much chocolate (blasphemer!). But I can’t help agree they tasted good with the berries giving off little tart explosions that go nicely with the rich chocolate taste.

I am sending this to Myriam at Once Upon a Tart for the Brownie Babe of the Month event. If you are feeling like a chocolate fix, go to the full list of brownies at the round up.

Donna Hay Raspberry Brownies
(makes 12 small mouthfuls)

50g dark chocolate, chopped
60g butter
½ cup brown sugar
1 egg
¼ cup plain flour
¼ tsp baking powder
1 tbsp cocoa powder
¼ cup fresh raspberries

Preheat oven to 180C. Melt chocolate and butter in large bowl. Mix in remaining ingredients except raspberries. Fold in raspberries.

Now the bit I don’t understand in the recipe is the instructions to cut 10 x 10cm rounds of paper to line 12 x 25ml hole mini muffin pans – seems to me it would just fill the holes with paper but maybe that is my limited imagination. I just used mini muffin papers.

Spoon into mini muffin pan (actually I used an 11 hole pan and it seemed fine to fill each hole!) Bake 20 minutes or til set.

On the Stereo:
Life: Inspiral Carpets

Collingwood children’s farm – peppercorn trees and part time vegetarians

On Saturday morning, E, Will and I went to the Farmers Market at Collingwood Children’s Farm. My current book, Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle, is making me think a lot about eating locally, and needing to visit farmers markets. I confess to always feeling a little overwhelmed by such abundance of good food and unsure what I need, but I am getting better at buying at such places.

The day started well with a parking place presenting itself – which in that area makes you feel truly blessed (although admittedly it would be nice to have a farmers market in walking distance)! The market is always busy. You enter down a little path past leafy garden plots and chook pens complete with preening roosters. E was the first to be distracted and left us to indulge in coffee and porridge while he read the paper and people-watched in the café.

Will and I continued past the pancake stall in the barn, past the fruit trees stall to the clearing where a circle of stalls is surrounded by gum trees. It was a fine sunny winter day, although there was one incident with the awning of a stall dancing in the wind a little too dangerously with stall holders chasing after it. Many stall holders were wise to the wind and held onto their tent frames.

There were all sort of delicacies on offer: olives, spices and even nettles. I am always interested in tasting all sorts of food – falafel, apple and lemon juice, cheeses, and blood oranges. Will and I decided to stop for some great Turkish bread with spinach and fetta in them (see my pic of it on my knee) which we enjoyed on a couple of damp haybales. We watched them being chargrilled on a little grill and ate them fresh and warm out of the paper bag.

I enjoyed buying lots of yummy food and some chatting with stall holders. Our favourite stall holder was the man selling eggs. Will, a fellow vegetarian, asked the difference between free range, vegetarian and organic eggs. He was told that hens are carnivores and can only go vegetarian for weeks or they stop laying eggs. As long time vegetarians, Will and I were a little unsure about buying eggs from part time vegetarians.

After the shopping and Turkish bread (which E had managed to join us for so he could share mine) we returned to the café for drinks and cake. I had organic ginger beer and a lovely fresh dark chocolate and blueberry muffin. Will chose a very cute looking cup cake. (E again shared mine). All very pleasing, if you don't mind a wait for coffees. It is an outdoor café with wooden seats and benches, umbrellas to keep shade and rain off, and fine peppercorn trees around us. It gave us time to spot peahens, mull over if we are secondary carnivores when we eat eggs, and wonder what sort of children were farmed at a children's farm (and I will spare you the more nerdy details of the discussion)!

Here is what I bought – probably a little more expensive than the supermarket but such a nicer shopping experience: Vegetarian eggs (laid by part time vegetarian hens!), Maffra red Leicester cheese, rhubarb, falafel, broccoli, parsley, frozen raspberries, tomatoes, a mint plant, Di’s rhubarb and raspberry jam, St Andrews olive bread and a fruit scroll.

'Local' in inner city Collingwood actually means local to the state rather than the suburb but the stall holders seemed like decent hardworking people producing quality goods that hadn't travelled too far to my table. I felt blessed indeed as I left with my bag of goodies!

Update April 2008
Visited farmer's market again and was impressed at range of fruit and vegetable stalls. Got the last punnet of strawberries for my gluten free niece, had lemon and apple juice, corn on the cob, dried fruit, and ice cream. Bought rhubarb, heirloom pumpkins and Hope Farm wholemeal sourdough bread. Then visited the animals with my mum, sister and nieces - chooks, geese, cows, goats, horses and pigs. But no rabbits for Maddy!

Update May 2010:
Still love going to the children's farm. For more photos and stories of visits go to:

• Our visit on mother's day 2010 including our wander among the animals
• Honest soup inspired by farmer's market - including our brunch

Collingwood Children's FarmSecond Saturday of the Month
St Heliers St, Abbotsford
44G5 in the Melways
http://www.farm.org.au/