Food food and more food

So it's been a while since I last posted about food... at least a week, lol. So here is some more food related pictures

1) Mushroom subs for those of you how are vegetarian.
Last week for one of our meals we decided to make some mushroom subs.

There are super easy to make. a portabello mushroom and half a red pepper grilled  makes 2 nicely stuffed sandwiches. I made a total of 4 mushrooms which lasted us a good long while.

I also added some sweet chilli sauce and green onions as well as some home made mozzarella.
This was based off a recipe from Jamie's 15 minute meals but I realized I didn't have all the ingredients so I just made this super simple version.

2) Egg pizza omelette.
The other Saturday Talia asked me to make an omelette for her. I have done this a couple of times and she always seems to enjoy it, but I wanted to try something different. Rather than folding the eggs over on top of the toppings as I normally do I decided to make it a kind of pizza shape.

Recipe (as best as I can remember)
4 eggs
couple mushrooms sliced
small chunks of home made mozzarella
finely sliced chilli pepper
green onions

After frying the chilli and onions I beat the eggs and put them on top. I then sprinkled the mushrooms and cheese on top and let it set. As the egg was so thick I found that the bottom and sides where cooked well before the top so I popped the omelette out of the pan and into baking tray. I them put it under the broiler for about 5 minutes and when it came out it was perfect.


3) Macaroons
Those of you who have my facebook will know that I wanted to make macaroons. This mainly because Talia calls them "instant happy". Whenever she is having a bad day we walk through the path to the stores under the bay near Queen and Yonge. One of the shops is a little gourmet chocolate and other delicious sweets shop and we invariably get 2 macaroons. Now their macaroons are amazing and since they always manage to cheer Talia up I decided to try my hand.

I was following the directions from a food blog I recently found (http://sortedfood.com/) and it really didn't seem that hard.

Step 1: separate the egg white from the yolk and beat the crap out of then.... my favourite thing to do...

I did learn one interesting fact about separating and beating eggs that I didn't know before. Apparently even the oil from your hands can impede the whipping process so its advisable to touch the whites as little as possible. Perhaps that is why beating these whites didn't seem to has hard as the last time.

Step 2: add a ton of sugar and ground almost. I think it was about 75g of castor sugar, 125g of icing sugar and 125g of ground almost. First the castor sugar was whipped into the egg and then the icing sugar and almost where folded in gently

Step 3: flavour (and colour but I didn't add any.
So this step is when you add the flavouring and the colouring. I didn't have any colouring but I did specifically go out and get flavouring. I was kind of appalled when I went to the bulk food store and found out that almost all of their flavourings were artificial. Eventually I found a "pure lemon" flavouring but I still wasn't super happy. I decided that when I got home I would make one batch with the lemon flavouring, one batch with natural lemon zest, and a third batch with simple vanilla.

Step 4: make the shapes.
In order to do this I specifically got a proper piping bag complete with tips and everything. Unfortunately the only basic straight tip proved to be too small for the ground almond and got clogged almost immediately. This cause some delays in making the cookies as I had to get a spoon and pull the batter out of the piping bag. Using the spoon I then tried to make the cookies but as you can see in the next image they turned out kind of derpy.

The shells on the left were my first attempt using the spoon. After that I switched to a larger tip and they started to come out properly. These shells are the lemon zest on the left and the lemon extract on the right.

The vanilla ones. I think I was finally starting to get the hang of the piping bag by the time I finished

I had a little batter left over so I made a giant one :)

Step 5: let set, drop, and bake.
So in order to get the nice "foot" on the macaroons you actually let the shells sit for 15 minutes or so until the top has started to set. Then you lift the tray up about a foot and drop it. That's right, you drop it. It makes a horrible clang but it apparently does something to cause the foot to form.

Baking  was the easy step as all I had to do was sit back and watch. Sadly I forgot to take pictures of all of them but I did get my giant shell baking

Step 6: Let fool and then fill

So here they are after they have cooled. You can see that some of them cracked and even a couple collapsed. The one that looks like it imploded was actually my crushing it while taking it out of the oven.

I didn't have any filling because my custard that I tried to make (next entry) kind of failed to set so I ended up filling them with raspberry jam instead.

Everyone agrees that the lemon zest were by far the best tasting although that may have simply been because I didn't add enough lemon extract to the other ones. Next time I will add some more and see which people like more

4) Custard
So after I had made my macaroons I had 3 yolks left over. While I was waiting for the macaroons to set I was busying myself by watching more episodes of sorted food and I came across their entry for custard. I had the yolk, why not try it. So I did.

Step 1: beat the yolks which some sugar. about 2 tsp I think.

Step 2: Take some whole milk and a vanilla pod and bring to a boil.
Now I didn't have whole milk but I did have left over cream from our ice cream adventures with Tashy so I mixed some of that with our 2% milk and used the seeds of half a vanilla pod. The reason for half a vanilla pod was because I was only making a half batch (since I only had 3 egg yolks instead of 6)

Step 3: poor the boiling milk into the egg yolk while beating and then put it back on the stove.
Sadly I don't have pictures of this :(

Step 4: once the milk/yolk mixture begins to thicken pour it through a strainer into an ice cold bowl and leave to set.
The problem with this is that I don't know how "thick" it should be. I had watched the YouTube video and I took my best guess but as it turns out I took it out too early so it didn't set completely. It still tastes amazing but its more of a liquid that a pudding. Depending on what is happening this weekend I may bug Tashy for her ice cream maker and make custard ice cream. Shhh, don't tell her yet. I haven't asked her ;)

Wow, that was an epicly long blog and that only covered cooking for 2 days.
~(' ')~