Get all your bits together.

Chop all the veges.

Add oil to pot, sauté onions, capsicum, celery, garlic, oregano, and (not pictured) add the remainder of chopped vegetables.

Crumble the vegetarian burger patties.

Add pattie crumbles to pot.

Add bay leaves, wine, beans, chilli flakes, cumin, and tomatoes. Stir well and bring to the simmer.

Simmer, stirring occasionally. The longer you can give it the better, I like to give it at least 90 minutes to 2 hours.

I like to serve with rice, cornbread, sour cream, and hot sauce (this recipe isn’t particularly hot, I usually make it for potluck dinners, and unfortunately not all of my friends like it hot).

Great on toast the next day. (Great on everything the next day. Mmm-hmm.)

• 1/2 cup of basmati rice.
• 1 cup of cold water.
• olive oil or butter.

You can easily increase the quantities, just make sure you measure everything and use precisely double the volume of water as rice, 250ml rice = 500ml water, 500ml rice = 1000ml water. Simple, just make sure you measure it accurately.

Rinse your rice very well under the tap – it’s easiest to do this by putting it in a sieve – drain well.

Heat oil or butter in a pot on the highest temperature setting on your stove, add rice and stir constantly while it sizzles, a touch of toasty brown on a few of the grains is the target, but go no further.

Pour in the water, stir well making sure no rice is stuck to the bottom or sides of the pot. If the pot was hot enough, and the rice sufficiently well sizzled, the water will start boiling very quickly.

Once the water is at a rolling boil, turn the heat down as low as possible (you want it to be barely on, in fact if you’re using a sufficiently heavy pot, you can remove it from the heat entirely), and put on the lid.

Now set a timer for 15 minutes and leave it alone.

Don’t take the lid off.

Don’t stir it.

Don’t even look at it.

Try to avoid even thinking about it.

You see, your sizzingly and boiling were really just a practical majick to entice kind hearted spirits into your pot, they do the job of the cooking and puffing up of the rice, and if you bother them, they’ll all run away.

After 15 minutes, the kind spirits will drink up all the water, and leave, you’ll find a bunch of little holes, that’s where the spirits were lying while they did their work.  Fluff the rice up with a fork so any excess moisture on the rice steams off.  Unless you cheated (or estimated, against my advice) your water & rice quantities, there will be no spare water in the bottom of the pot.

Your rice is now ready. Easy. Delicious.

[Note, this is essentially the same as the rice recipe I posted to this site in 2006, edited for style, as I realised that my rice recipe was kind of buried, and had a crap title, and referred to a more complete dish which included meat, so no longer suits me.]

One fresh sliced tomato, whisk an egg with some milk and a nicely aged sharp cheddar, a good grind of salt and pepper, now oven bake in a ramekin, on a high shelf, until golden brown. (Whisk it up nicely and it’ll rise a bit like a soufflé.)

A very good time of year.

Rinse and separate the florets, steam and drain, saute 5 or 6 chopped garlic cloves in olive oil, add one chopped tomato just before the garlic overcooks, sprinkle on some sesame seeds, add the contents of a can of four bean mix (red kidney beans, green lima beans, great northern beans, garbanzo beans), stir beans into tomatoes & garlic, stir until well heated through, then stir through the drained broccoli.

Season to taste, serve with a dollop of sour cream and a drizzling of tamari.

• Bread.
• Butter.
• Vegemite.
• Aged cheddar, grated.
• Decent mayonaise.
• Jalapeños.
• Sun-dried tomatoes.
• Feta.
• Plum sauce.

Method

Toast the bread – if you do it under a grill rather than in a toaster, you can make sure you toast one side much lighter than the other, if you then put the toppings on this side you won’t need to worry so much about the bread burning around the sides when you grill the cheese. Spread butter and vegemite as normal, next smooth on some mayonaise, then plant a few slices of jalapeño, followed by a single sun-dried tomato, and a few small pieces of feta, lastly sprinkle cheese over the top and place under the grill until the cheese bubbles and begins to brown.

Optional: A healthy dash of plum sauce, or if that’s not available taco sauce, or if that’s not available nothing, or if you don’t have nothing tomato sauce.

Alternate version: And much more necessarily elaborate, with it. Subtract the feta & sundried tomato, making for a somewhat more focussed flavour combination. (The Unnecessarily Elaborate Cheese Toastie is delicious, but perhaps a bit much for what really needs to be a simple, comforting meal.)

• 1 & 1/4 cups red lentils. (Brown lentils are a fine substitute, or yellow split peas if you must, but green lentils won’t soften properly.)
• 3 & 1/3 cups water.
• 1 & 1/2 tsp salt.
• 3 tbs butter.
• 1 tsp ground cumin.
• 1 tsp ground turmeric.
• 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon.
• 1/4 tsp cayenne.
• 1/4 tsp ground ginger.
• 1/4 tsp ground coriander.
• 1/2 tsp mustard seeds.
• 6 whole cloves.

Method

Rinse the lentils well in cold water. Drain and repeat once or twice. The first time through you’ll note that the water gets quite milky, you want to wash them until the water is fairly clear.

Add to pot with 3 & 1/3rd cups water and the salt.

Boil until very soft, the water will be mostly or entirely absorbed.

Once the lentils are bubbling away and well on their way to cooking down, melt the butter in a separate pan.

Add the spices. Your house will start to smell reallllllly good. (Don’t be mad, I’m not saying it doesn’t now, just that it’ll get even better.)

Once the lentils are all cooked down (note how much the colour of the red lentils has changed), carefully add them to the spices & butter.

Mix the butter & spices well with the lentils.

Cook until very thick, stirring frequently.

Serve with rice (I suggest basmati) and a big dollop of yoghurt. This dal can be a bit hot for some people, the yoghurt goes a long way to defusing that – and it’s really delicious, so why wouldn’t you?

I find it a very warming, comforting dish. Particularly great on cold winter nights.

• 1 cup cornflour
• 2 eggs
• 1/4 cup oil (I use olive oil)
• 1 & 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 tbs baking powder
• 1 cup sour cream
• 2 cups grated cheese
• 1 cup (or so) capsicum, sliced (I use roasted red peppers)
• chillies (optional, to taste)
• 1 can of corn kernels, drained

Method

Preheat oven to 180°C.

Add eggs, oil, & sour cream to mixing bowl.

Blend until smooth.

Add corn flour, baking powder, & salt.

Add sliced capsicum (and optional chillies).

Add most of the grated cheese (save a little).

Add drained corn kernels.

Mix up well.

Add to cake tin or baking dish.

Sprinkle on remaining cheese.

Bake at 180°C until the top is golden brown and a skewer or sharp knife inserted into the middle comes out clean. In this dish it’s about 45 minutes, in a wider diameter & thin walled baking tin it’d be more like 30.

The corn bread will be very moist and flavourful.

• 3 tins of quartered pears in juice. (You can use fresh pears if you wish, but you’re giving yourself a lot more work for little reward.)
• 250g raw sugar.
• 225g self raising flour.
• 175g butter.
• ~6-8 teaspoons vanilla extract. (This might seem a lot, but it’s quite a large dish.)

Method

Preheat oven to 180°c.

While the oven warms up, take a large caserole dish…

… Add drained quartered pears – save the juice. (You can slice them further if you wish, these pears were fairly small though.)

Add about 1 cup of the juice back over the pears. (This might seem round about, but if you used all the juice you’d end up with a terribly soggy mess.)

Spoon about 150g of the raw sugar over the mixture.

Drizzle vanilla extract over the pears – the specks you can see here are vanilla seeds. 

LET’S GET READY TO CRUUUUMMMMMMMMMMMBBBBBLLLLEEEEEEEEE.

Add the flour into a large mixing bowl.

Make a divot in the flour, then add the soft (microwave softened if you’re lazy like me) butter.

Add the remainder of the sugar.

Crumble the mixture. It’s fun to do it with your hands – and I think you end up with a better, slightly more dense, crumble – but it’s also possible to do it with a spoon if you don’t feel like getting your hands coated in this delicious mixture.

Carefully distribute the crumble over the top of the pear mixture.

Until it’s nicely covered. You can press it down a little, but it should be a fairly loose covering. It will be quite a thick layer.

Bake until the crumble is golden brown, and some of the juice has bubbled up around the edges and caramelised. This will take at least 45 minutes. But the longer you can leave it beyond that – just as long as the crumble doesn’t burn – the better the result will be, this one was cooked for about 60 minutes, and I only took it out of the oven because I had to take it to dinner with friends.

The crumble will end up tasting something like shortbread, and the fruit, juice, & sugar will cook together into a wonderful peary caramel.

It’s that delicious fruity caramel that requires the longer cooking time, it takes quite a while for the mixture to heat up and start to cook through – the longer you give the sugars in the fruit & juice the more they’ll change into caramel. The best result I’ve had was after about 80 minutes of baking, and I assure you that it was worth the wait – unfortunately there’s seldom time to cook for that long.

It’s optional, but preferable, to serve it with custard – and perhaps even a little scoop of nice French vanilla ice cream as well.

Serves 10 lovely people, who will happily gobble it all up.

Enjoy.

Stewed pears and vanilla seed, only have a shot of the pre-crumbling version, as things got quite busy (I made an apple & boysenberry, and apple & apricot at the same time). All of the delicious pear juice (and a hefty measure of raw sugar) cooked up into a deliciously decadent caramel flavour  bomb.

Will put together a recipe next week, when I’ll probbaly be making a fullsize version. (Only made a strange little 1/4 size one this time, so not yet certain about ideal quantities or cooking time.)

The crumble was about as perfect as it can be in a gas oven, I think – almost like a shortbread.

If people knew how much butter went into it, well let’s just say they might savour it even more.

But no one can resist.

The video clip I mentioned the other day is all done and dusted – at least as much as it’s ever going to be. I’m still feeling a bit weak from my food poisoning and get quite light headed very easily, so I’m just not going to edit this sucker anymore. And it probably needs a bit more cutting. I think it’s funny as is, but still overlong by probably 3 minutes.

About ‘Earth Sandwich’

Ze laid a challenge on his site to create the first Earth Sandwich, this is a piece of bread on opposite sides of the globe placed on the ground. I placed mine in my front yard, the opposite happened to be on land (which isn’t true of most of the entrants who placed their bread in North America – resulting in a sandwich that needs its other half in the middle of the Indian Ocean) in Spain.

Some really cool guys (Canadian brothers Jon & Duncan from Scourist.com) flew from London to Portugal, then drove into Spain and with the aid of their GPS handset found their way to the exact opposite side of the planet, where they placed their half of the Earth Sandwich. They released a clip of their escapades, and I didn’t want to be left out so I made a clip of my own – even though my expedition was far, far less exciting or cool.

Amazingly, by our powers combined, we beat everyone else on the planet.

Even so, to make up for the un-cool-ness of the placement of my half of the sandwich, I had to resort to farce, sound effects, and speeding up my footage.

I think it’s hilarious, but I’m very very sick right now, so you’re free to disagree. (Either way, leave a comment, it’s fast and easy.)

About this clip

It’s pretty big, so if you’re not on broadband, it might not be worth the wait. It’s encoded to MP4 so it could be worse. Quicktime will play the file nicely, as will VLC, or I guess Windows Media Player might be able to do it if you keep quite up to date.

Any further hypothetical video clips will certainly be a lot shorter and smaller.

Baguette Recipe

500g flour
4 tsp yeast
300ml warm water
3 tsp salt

Mix the flour and yeast in a large bowl until evenly distributed, then add warm water and mix well for a minute, finally add the salt and knead well for about 15 minutes.

Roll out into 2 or 3 rough baguette shapes, place on a lightly floured baking tray, then cover with a cloth and put somewhere warm for 20 – 30 minutes to raise. (I put mine in the hot water cupboard.)

Score each baguette 5 or 6 times with a sharp knife, then bake in a pre-heated oven at 240c for about 30 minutes. Keep a good eye on them, you’ll notice that while I said mine looked good, they were actually pretty dark brown (but they really were very delicious). I’ve cooked this recipe a bunch of times, and our oven seems to have some difficulties maintaining the even temperature, so it hasn’t been quite the same twice.