Family fun and Crusty pull-apart bread

It’s the weekend. We have guests coming over. I’m making the dinner and some treats as it’s somebody’s birthday too!

I made the truffles in the morning (and I got the right ratios this time for the orange intense truffles! And I’m quite pleased with myself 🙂 )

They’ve asked me for the spicy bisque style shrimp fettuccine so I’m working on the sauce.

And in the midst of this my son asks for a pull-apart bread!

I hadn’t made that in a while and I did have a gorgeous sour dough loaf on the counter, so why not?

It’s easy, yummy, delicious and it takes about 20 min prep…the same amount of time I’m sitting around waiting for my sauce to finish simmering!

I’d first come across this in an article hubby sent me. 29 Ooey Gooey, Cheesy, Chocolatey And Delicious Pull Breads To Make…the title itself is amazing!

Just looking at the photos made my mouth water and we tried one and it was awesome!

Since then I’ve played around with the “toppings” as I love the garlic/cheese/mushroom flavor combination but you can dress it whichever way you want! Even make it sweet not savory!

Use store bought bread or make your own loaf, either way it turns out delicious!

Here’s the link to the original recipe I adapted from “Very Culinary”

The great thing is you can prep it and just leave the adding butter and baking bit till you want to eat. It only takes 25min in the oven.

This is sharing food at its best, yummy and messy 🙂 eaten with hands, not a knife & fork 😉

But sharing with loved ones, who cares about messiness?  🙂 Dig in and tear out the bread “fingers” and enjoy!

Which is exactly what we all did!

Yum!

Crusty yummy pull-apart bread

Cheers!

Sweet treats and chocolate truffles experiment

Last time I made truffles I used the leftover ganache from my chocolate torte and filled it with left over caramel from the torte filling.

I rolled them in crushed roasted almonds and they were delicious though a little rich.

Today’s chocolate truffles were made differently. I wanted to try a flavored chocolate. I picked up a lindt, orange intense it’s called, and it’s flavored with orange and has small pieces of candied orange  and almond slivers. It tastes divine so I assumed it’d make a divine truffle.
Well I was both right and wrong. …

The finished truffles taste amazing and are lighter than the ones I made before using dark 70% chocolate. The downside? Flavored chocolate has a lot less cocoa solids 😦
Why is that important? It’s the combination of fats in the cream and solids in the cocoa that make the ganache set firm in addition to the chocolate -cream ratio.
The lindt had a minimum of 48%, way below the 70%.
So with so much less cocoa solids, my truffles were too soft.

Ganache was too soft when working with it 😦

They hold their shape and all but when you pick one up you feel it could just melt if you don’t pop it immediately into your mouth! I fixed it by placing them in the fridge and as long as you eat them within 10 to 15min after taking them out they’re amazing!

So the lesson is, add flavorings to a ganache made with chocolate with 70% cocoa solids! And don’t shortcut your way through it!

Or maybe mix in high cocoa content chocolate with the flavored chocolate and play with the cream ratio? That’s my next experiment for the weekend!

And once I get it right you’ll be the first to know!

Cheers!

Roz Maamar (Baked rice with beef and cream)

My mum used to make us this dish on special occasions. It’s different than typical rice as it comes out a bit soft and a bit creamy in the middle and the rice grains are not separate like in regular rice. It’s cooked in broth and milk and is finished off with a layer of cream. The result is creamy and lucious rice with nuggets of tender beef cooked inside it.

While traditionally its made with veal I think beef gives it a deeper yet still subtle flavour

It’s easy to make and if you cook the beef in a pressure cooker you’ll shave off about an hour of the cook time.

Use medium grain round rice similar to arborio. I use regular egyptian eldoha rice and if that’s not available around you then arborio should work.

Enjoy!

Roz Maamar recipe

More of the pasta & semi carbonara with Basterma

The beauty about pasta is it comes in so many shapes and sizes and matching them with different sauces, toppings and fillings makes it a dish where the possibilities are endless!

It does freak me out though how people can actually ruin such a simple and amazing ingredient!

My rules for non ruined pasta are easy:

• Boil in lots of salted water! Duh!
• Don’t rinse it under the tap! (Unless your going to leave it for hours! Which you shouldn’t anyway!)
• If for some reason you will cook the pasta and leave it a while, then cook it a little less, then after you strain it, rinse it quickly in cold water to stop carry-over cooking. Reserve all the cooking liquid. When you are ready to serve, bring the reserved cooking water to the boil, and add your pasta back in. It shouldn’t stay in the boiling water for more than a minute or two since you’re just reheating it.
• Add your pasta to your sauce while it’s hot immediately after you strain it! (If you’re making a lasagne give it a min to cool but keep it covered so it doesn’t dry out)
• Always always keep some of the cooking water! It’s starchy and is great to use to adjust the thickness of your sauce & helps the sauce cling better to your pasta.
• Oh and of course never over cook it! Time it! Usually it cooks aldente between 5 to 10 min based on the type.

So now we’ve covered the basics, here’s one of my fav pasta dishes.

I call it semi carbonara since it has a little cream and no bacon. And beef bacon, at least what we have here, is more akin to shoe leather than bacon!

My substitute of choice is basterma 🙂 A middle eastern (armenian???) preserved lean meat, it’s salted then covered in a beautiful spice paste and hung to dry.

The paste hardens into a rind while the meat stays beautifully tender.

Just remove the rind before using it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Adds good flavor, usually sliced wafer thin and can be crisped up if you want to beautifully.

Hope you enjoy!

Fettuccine Semi Carbonara with Basterma

Cheers!

Mom’s spicy bamia (okra)

My mums spicy bamia (okra) recipe and it’s a crowd pleaser:-) !

The addition of lemon juice prevents the sliminess of the okra. The addition of a hot chilli pepper gives the sauce a good kick and the “tasha”, which is a blend of garlic, coriander and ghee, added at the end, adds a depth of flavor and spice.

Choose bamia that are very short in length (size zero) but not chopped!

Don’t let the cook time fool you, it’s either simmering away on the stove top or in the oven and you are free to do what you want!

Serve with rice or pita bread or both and some extra lemon halves on the side.

Mom’s spicy bamia recipe

Cheers!

Note: The pic above is not my photography, “borrowed” from Google.

Fast food and a thai inspired chicken curry

Hubby is away travelling and I’ve been handling all the errands this week. The result is I’ve been ordering in for dinner 😦
While I do actually enjoy fast food, it’s heavy and it’s a drain on the wallet too.

Yesterday, coming home after my son’s play day, I was dead hungry! Call up delivery again? I felt sick to my stomach and honestly I was too hungry to wait for 45min!

And then it hit me, I could probably make a delicious dinner quicker than what it would take to order & wait for a pizza or KFC! & that’s exactly what I did! Stormed into the kitchen and made a curry!

In a fix, I guess most of us think fast food is the quicker option when really most simple pasta dishes and a curry like this one take less time and are much, much better in both taste and nutrition. So think about that the next time you’re in a hurry and want to order in 🙂

The steamed rice and thai inspired chicken curry took exactly 30min to make from scratch. Well almost scratch, I had a tub of ready made green curry paste in the fridge. That’s the only short cut!

And if you follow the shesimmers blog or Kasma Loha-unchits site you’ll understand that ready made shop bought curry paste is completely acceptable if you can’t source all the right ingredients to make your own paste! In Cairo that’s impossible anyway!

We don’t have fresh shallots or galangal or kaffir lime leaves for example. Gourmet sells dried galangal and kaffir lime leaves but expensive and dried, not fresh 😦

And when I do make my own paste, I rely on produce that my husband gets me when he’s travelling and I freeze them until ready to make a batch.

Maybe there’s a hidden thai store somewhere in Maadi, but I have yet to find it! So until we do have a real Asian grocery store here in Cairo, shop bought is perfect!

Quick & easy Thai inspired chicken curry

Cheers!

The Ghorayeba recipe…Egyptian shortbread

Finally its here…the ghorayeba recipe! Taken a bit due to my technology handicap but now its done!

So in a nutshell, ghorayebas are a smoother textured cousin of the scottish shortbread and are silly easy to make! Amazing to eat a long with your evening tea or morning coffee…

‘Nuf said!

Melt in your mouth ghorayebah

But you need to use ghee, not butter. Ghee is 100% fat while butter is about 85% and also ghee gives a richer flavor than butter.

Try it and tell me what you think,

Egyptian Ghorayeba

Cheers!

Chocolate Torte with coconut, pecan & caramel filling

I have finally written up the recipe for the torte!

I currently hate my iPad and am crying for my laptop which is being fixed but it’s taking ages.

The result; it took me 2 days on the damn iPad which kept crashing to finally get the recipe written, pics uploaded and bullets and numbering correct!

I took a day off to calm down and actually made 2 more chocolate test cakes which turned out yummy!

So here you are…intense, rich and moist chocolate torte with a coconut, pecan and caramel filling!

Enjoy!
Cheers!

Mom’s birthday. …The cake, the truffles & the verdict!

It worked! It worked! It worked! The cake came out beautifully. …moist and dark and chocolatey! Tasty! The crumb tight and moist (but I’ll make it a tad moister next time) Can’t tell how much of a relief it was when it was sliced! Stood grand 🙂

The caramel coconut pecan filling worked beautifully with the cake and the ganache. And the ganache itself wasn’t sweetened so balanced everything out!
And my mum loved it and that’s all that matters 🙂

The leftover caramel filling and ganache, I turned them into truffles rolled in crushed roasted almonds.
The almonds gave the crunch and the caramel some sweetness but as the centres were small & the chocolate was very dark, it needed more sweetness so next time I will add a tad of sugar to the chocolate ganache itself. Other than that it was heavenly.

But hey it was a party and it ran late so I want to sleep…

So recipe updates tomorrow 🙂

Cheers!

Mums birthday and day 7 baking…

It’s mum’s birthday tomorrow and I’m baking the birthday cake!

And I decided to put what I’ve learned in my cake baking quest to the test!

I’m making a Germans chocolate cake but using my own recipe calculations!

I used to make Aliyyah Baylors cake recipe and Bobby Flays cajeta recipe sans the goat milk.

It took ages and usually the cake batter would be too thin and the cajeta took hours to get to a thick filling consistency. The results were great, don’t get me wrong, and everyone loved it, but I needed to make it simpler.

So I used the base cake recipe I used before with a few modifications for quantity & to account for the amount of cocoa I was putting in.

For the filling I just made Dulce De Leche in a can and mixed it with brown sugar and coconut milk. It took all in all about 40 min.

The cakes are out of the oven and look chocolaty and nice 🙂 the batter tasted great but I have no idea how moist the final product is…more on that when we actually eat it tomorrow.

Will get cracking on finishing the pecan caramel coconut filling…This I’m where I’m at…

Still missing the pecans and a bit more caramel…

Keeping my fingers crossed that my experiment works in the end!

More updates tomorrow and if it’s a success the recipe will follow !

Wish me luck:-)

Cheers!