Christmas and more excitement

So I had a whole series of posts planned but the last few weeks have just flown and not it’s boxing day! And in an hour we’ll be getting onto a bus to get to a plane and another one and another one and then in about 26 hours we’ll be landing in Melbourne to start our 4 week holiday! I’m so excited! Good friends of both Barry and me are getting married in Tasmania in January and we decided it was a great opportunity to catch up with them, see them on their special day, meet other friends who are attending and spend some time on what promises to be a fabulous island. So there won’t be so much posting done although I'll definitely be enjoying lots of nice food and wine. I hope you all have a fabulous New Years Eve and see you in 2008!

ps...a fab tip I found in one of my cookbooks, if you have any mulled wine left over, freeze it and serve it as a sophisticated granita

Minty Goodness

Another blog party, another great theme! For this edition Stephanie chose minty goodness which was very timely as the mint on my balcony is growing madly. I'm going through a bit of an Middle Eastern food phase at the moment and mint seemed to fit into that seamlessly. For the snack, I threw together these little chickpea, aubergine and pomegranate fritters topped with minty quark. Easy to make, easy to bake and very tasty with the warm nutty flavors of the chick pea flour, aubergine and zatar contrasted by the fresh and zingy mint and garlic. I also like the grainy texture of the quark which is very sturdy so stays well on top of the fritters. To accompany these, I mixed some little Arabic G&Ts by adding mint syrup (made with some leftover sugar from this recipe) and pomegranate molasses (my new favorite cooking ingredient).

For the fritters (makes 25-30)
Mix 200g chickpea flower, 1 1/2 tbsp oil, 1 grated medium aubergine, 1 tbsp zatar and seeds from 1 pomegranate (keep a few aside for garnish and the drink). The dough should be a little bit sticky but not too thin. Heat some oil in a pan and dollop little balls in there. Fry for a few minutes either side. In the mean time combine 4 tbsp quark, 1 1/2 tbsp chopped fresh mint and 1-2 chopped garlic cloves. Put a little bit on each fritter

For the drink
Melt 50 g of sugar with 25 ml water. Use either mint sugar or add some twigs whilst simmering the syrup. Leave to cool, then mix with equal quantities Hendricks Gin, tonic and pomegranate molasses. Pour into small glasses and add some pomegranate seeds and small mint leaves as garnish.

Summer snacks

A quick and short post for this months blog party which is not very social, I know. Specially not as it's the 2 year anniversary!! But life is terribly busy at the moment with grant writing for work and some other stuff in the pipeline too. So my entry is short but sweet: this watermelon refresher based on this recipe but spiced up a bit with some sparkling white wine and mint. To go with it there are little squigly squids (with legs for me, without for Barry) coated in flour with a bit of chili and stuffed with stirfried onion, chili, fish sauce, sugar and thai sweet basil (this is added at the end). Very very tasty and for me they capture the spritit of summer perfectly! And with the drop in temperature predicted (again!) I'm desperately holding on to that.

Finding Nemo, cocktail in hand...

So Blog party 23 hosted by Stephanie has the theme of Sci-Fi mixology. The inspiration I chose for this is perhaps not directly what you think about but somehow I couldn't get this image out of my head that I saw on a poster the other week. So my entry is based ona classic "science fiction" novel: twenty thousand leagues under the sea. Of course the famous captain Nemo was then reimmortalized by Disney a few years ago in the Finding Nemo movie.

So I use a pate brisee as a base, some egg whites flavored with lavender sugar (1 egg white-30g sugar put in a water bath at 100C in the oven for about 30 min) to make the ball and cut little fishes out of slices off peach. They were very easy to assemble and very pretty, if I do say so myself, although I think sweet finger food is perhaps not the best, they were more like petit fours.

The cocktail was based on this recipe made with homemade limoncello, sparkling white wine in stead of rose and I again used lavender sugar in stead of normal. This was really nice and I think, if the weather picks up we will be making this one a lot this summer.