Party Food + Hidden Vegies!!

It is birthday party season in these here parts, and when a tray of food is requested or required to assist the party hostess, I always make these - Pizza Rolls.

I love them! They meet all my essential kids' party food requirements:

- they are easy to prepare beforehand, freeze, and then reheat

- you are always left with an empty plate (adults like them too!)

- they are low in fat (provided you use reduced fat ingredients, of course!)

and, best of all in my mind,

they contain Hidden Vegies!!!

In the 5 years I have been making these I haven't been following a recipe but an idea a friend gave me. These amounts of ingredients are what work for me - by experimenting with amounts and different fillings, you can adapt this to work for you too. One piece of advice about the cheese, though - don't put in too much or it just melts out of the roll and onto your baking sheet or oven floor! Trust me!! 

Pizza Rolls

makes 24 rolls

3 sheets reduced fat puff pastry
1/4 cup tomato paste
1/4 cup tomato sauce/ketchup*
1 1/2 cups finely grated carrot
1 1/2 cups finely grated zucchini
2/3 cup grated mushrooms
1 1/2 cups grated reduced fat cheddar cheese

Preheat the oven to 200°C fan forced. Line a baking sheet with baking paper.

Without removing the plastic backing, thaw the pastry just enough so it is no longer solid - you will need to roll it up, so the pastry can't be too hard or too soft. Place one of the pastry sheets on a chopping board.

Combine the tomato paste and sauce in a small bowl. Spread the pastry sheet with 1 heaped tablespoon of the tomato sauce mix, leaving about 2-3 cm of the upper edge of the pastry free of sauce, and 1cm on the lower edge, as can be seen in the photo below.

Take about 1/2 cup of grated carrot and spread it evenly over the tomato sauce.

Take about 1/2 cup of the grated zucchini, squeeze out the excess liquid into a spare bowl, and then spread it over the carrot. Follow this with some of the grated mushroom.

Finish with about 1/2 cup of the grated cheddar cheese and use your hand to flatten it all down, still leaving the upper and lower edges of the pastry free from filling, as in the photo below.

Now it's time to start rolling your pastry. I use the backing paper to help me, removing it as I roll. It takes a bit of practice but it is possible!

Once the roll is complete, pinch along the edge to stick it to the wall of the roll so the whole thing doesn't come apart in the oven and spill out every where! You could also use a pastry brush to apply lightly beaten egg along the join to stick the pastry but, given the number of children with food allergies, I prefer just to pinch it together.

Using a serrated knife, cut the roll in half, cut these pieces in half again, and then once more. You should end up with 8 pieces. Place these on their sides evenly spaced on the lined baking sheet.

Repeat these steps for the second and third pieces of pastry.

Once all the pieces are placed on the baking sheet, bake in the oven for about 14 minutes or until golden and cooked.

Remove from the oven and cool for about 10 minutes before eating. Yum!!

Now, if you want to freeze them for a later date, only bake them for 11 or 12 minutes. Cool completely to room temperature, place in an airtight container and freeze for up to two months. When you want to reheat, remove them from your freezer and thaw to room temperature before placing in a 200°C fan forced oven for about 6 minutes or so.

Yum Yum Yum!!!

Pizza Rolls, anyone?

Sam xx

 * I like to use my homemade spicy tomato sauce

Apple Butter Cake

One of my favourite jobs to help with in the garden is pruning the fruit trees - and that's what we did this weekend.

Yesterday we picked the last of the Lady Williams apples, stripped the remaining apple tree leaves, and pruned the branches ready for the new fruiting season.

And today, after we juiced the apples, I made Apple Butter Cake. Yum!

Apple Butter Cake

185g butter, softened

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2/3 cup caster sugar

3 eggs

1 cup self-raising flour

1/2 cup plain flour

1/3 cloudy apple juice

1 Red Delicious apple (I used Pink Lady)

1 tablespoon demerara sugar (I used brown sugar)

1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Preheat oven to 180°C (160°C fanforced). Grease and line a 20cm springform pan.

Beat butter, vanilla and caster sugar until light and creamy. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well between each addition. Gently stir through flours and apple juice in two batches until combined. Spread the mixture into cake pan.

Cut apple into quarters and remove core. Slice into very thin strips. Place apple slices in two circles around cake so that they overlap each other. Make sure that the centre is well covered. Sprinkle apples with combined demerara sugar and cinnamon.

Bake in oven for about 1 hour or until cooked when tested with a skewer. Allow to cool in pan for 5 minutes before turning out.

Serves 8

( Recipe from P41, The Weekend Australian Magazine July 23-24 2005)

Did you have a beautiful weekend?

Sam xx

Winter Salad

I was feeling the need for a bit of salad yesterday, so I was delighted when I ventured out to the vegie patch to discover that our lettuce is booming..... that is, the lettuce that Miss M didn't rip out when she 'harvested' last week!

One of my favourite salads at the moment is one that I threw together myself when playing with the ingredients I had available one day last summer. This is its winter form, as in summer I include a luscious yellow peach or two. Nectarines also work well. But the winter form is yum, nevertheless, and this is the ingredient combination I always come back to.

Lettuce greens

mini Grape tomatoes (I think these taste so much better than cherry toms)

red capsicum

thinly sliced red onion

rocket (it grows wild in out garden, now!)

crumbled danish feta

sultanas

Yummy yummo!

Excuse me, please, while I have a little munch!

Sam xx

No more buns for this oven!

On afternoon Friday I was super organised - fruity beef casserole prepared and in the oven, three lots of bread ingredients measured and ready to go, one already mixed, kneaded and rising, and the potatoes for the mash washed and ready to cook.

Right. It's just after 5, the casserole should be bubbling away nicely. Let's just check it to see how it's doing.......except, it's not. Doing anything. It's just sitting there and hasn't cooked!

Hmmmmm. Don't panic. Yet. Check the dials. No, they are set to the right positions. Has there been a power failure? Of course not - the clock is still working.

Oh.

My oven is dead!

Okay. Decant casserole into slow cooker for dinner tomorrow night (it was yummo, by the way!). Rustle up carbonara for tonight. But what about the bread?

Wait a minute! Why not flatbread, a la River Cottage bread man? Remember that little book I referred to in this post? It's the River Cottage Bread Handbook which I have lovingly read. It's very thorough and I have been using some of his techniques but not yet his recipes. Time for more technique - flatbread technique!

And the technique, you can see, is rather simple. We set up a production line and, in the end, Miss M was running the show (with supervision on the side from me, of course. She is only 5, after all!).

We had hot flatbread for breakfast - with butter and honey. Yum! Flatbread for lunch - did you know it turns into pockets like pita bread? Ours did, anyway.

Double Yum!

I'll be making more flatbread tomorrow morning, too, while I prepare for discussions with Mr Ovenfixitman. However, while we may have stove-top bread, it seems unlikely that there are any more buns for this oven! Ha!

Sam xx

P.S. I hope, if you are from WA, that you had a great Western Australia Day holiday today, and a fabulous long weekend. We went camping. More on that tomorrow. After I get some sleep!!

So much Chocolate!!

It's Easter Sunday - and it's also G's birthday which means a cake is required.

I know, I know. We only just arrived home from camping but I'm still going to make my beloved a cake. Only problem is, he likes chocolate cake and, if it's going to be a birthday cake, it has to be chocolate. Funnily enough, chocolate is something I seem to have a lot of today. We even found some hidden away in the cupboard from last year!

So, I made my no-fail, ever-faithful chocolate cake recipe which you can find here and here. And I used good chocolate - good chocolate Easter Eggs! See it in the photo? But the cake mix didn't seem to do well - it seemed to separate.

Hmmm. What to do?

Persevere!! No time to dither. Parents are on their way here for husband's Birthday Celebration. Get On With It.

There. The cake is ready to go in the oven, covered in Easter Eggy chocolate chunks.

When the decorated cake is presented I tell my mother that the ingredients didn't amalgamate as well as usual. See? See how buttery it is? Not as successful. The cake isn't anywhere near as good as it usually is.

Not it isn't.

It is BETTER! It is really, seriously good; moist, luscious, dense. Mmmmmmm. Chocolate!

You just have to wait until it is totally cool - the next day is best!

So I can safely say that the recipe for the Melt-and-mix chocolate chunk mud cake is truly a Very Good Recipe.

What are your fail-safe go-to recipes?

Having lots of chocolatey fun,

Sam xx

Spicy Tomato Sauciness

This summer I have made 4... no, 5 batches of this brilliant spicy tomato sauce. As I have declared to all and sundry, my girls absolutely love love love its homemade tomatoey goodness, made more gorgeous by the fact that we have used our homegrown tomatoes, onions and garlic. G went crazy with his tomato plantings this year and we had the best crop ever!

The recipe came to me from the lovely Leonie, and it came to her from one of her friends. I have tweaked the recipe to suit our tastes; still spicy but not too hot for the little people to tolerate, with no way near the salt level originally recommended!


Leonie's Spicy Tomato Sauce

Makes 7 - 8 medium size jars

4 kg tomatoes
1 kg sugar
60 g salt
1200 ml apple cider vinegar
60 g whole black peppercorns )
15 g cloves                               ) place peppers and cloves together in a cloth bag
3/4 tsp cayenne pepper - more, if you like the heat
750 g onions
1 clump garlic

Cut tomatoes, garlic and onion into slices.
Put all ingredients, including the spice filled cloth bag, into a pan and simmer 3 - 4 hours.
Rub through a sieve or blitz with a stick blender. (I blitz!)
Bottle in sterilised jars.
This lasts for over a year if properly bottled.

Edit to add: Don't forget to remove the cloth bag and squeeze out the spicy juices before blitzing the mix. I know, I know; it seems obvious, but......

This sauce is also a great pizza sauce. Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.
We go through a bottle a week. At least.

Have fun!

Sam xx