Olive and basil focaccia

This is very much a “day at home” thing as the dough requires three rises of about 45 minutes. But it’s basically: mix the dough, roll it out about three hours later, smash and apply the topping ingredients, put in the oven. Just think of all the washing and action-movie watching you can do in the meantime!

About the flour - regular, all-purpose flour has about 8% protein. Bread-making, or strong, flour has 12% or more. Think of the wheat protein (gluten) as the scaffolding of your bread. Once you get the bread to rise, the scaffolding will hold the shape so it remains soft and fluffy and doesn’t collapse back down.

Ingredients

Bread

• 600g bread-making flour
• 360g filtered water
• 1 sachet dry yeast (7 grams)
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

Topping

• Handful fresh basil leaves
• .25 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 3 cloves garlic
• 4 pitted kalamata olives

Method

In a mixing bowl, combine the bread ingredients. Kneed just enough to combine the ingredients into a consistent ball of dough. Cover with damp tea towel and set aside in warm place (or in the oven at 40ºC) for 45 minutes.

Now it will have doubled in size. Wet your working surface, and with wet hands stretch and fold the dough four or five times. Cover, and set aside in a warm place for another 45 minutes.

A good size baking pan for this is 20cm wide by 30cm long and at least 5cm deep.

Oil the pan bottom and sides.

Smash the topping ingredients using a mortar and pestle.

Now dry and lightly flour your working surface. With a rolling pin, shape the dough to match, more or less, the shape of you baking tin.

Place in the tin and push and stretch the dough to reach the sides of the tin, then and cover with the topping, smoothing across evenly with the back of a spoon. Now you want to make little indentations in the dough for texture. You do this with the fingers of both hands, like you’re playing the piano, working all the way down from the far side to the near side.

Cover again and return to warm place for another 45 mins.

Remove from oven (if this is your warm place) and crank up the heat to 200ºC. Once the temperature is reached, remove the damp towel and place the tin in the oven.

After 12 minutes, turn it around for more even browning and bake for another 12 minutes.

Once done, it needs to rest on a wire rack so the bottom doesn’t get soggy. To safely remove it from the hot tin, use the double-wire-rack flip technique.

Place the hot baking tin on a wire rack. Put another rack on top. Hold the two racks together with the tin in the middle, and flip. Take off the top wire rack and carefully remove the upside down hot tin. The bottom of the loaf will now be revealed, all golden brown. Put the wire rack upside down on top, and flip again.

And there it is - resting on a wire rack.

Before serving, sprinkle with grated Parmesan and a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil.

Eve’s pudding

I’m not a big maker or consumer of desserts, but this one is simple and delicious - and also great for breakfast!

Ingredients

• 1.5 cups self-raising flour
• 1 teaspoon brown sugar
• 2 teaspoons caster sugar
• Juice of one lemon
• 1 cup canola or sunflower oil (not olive oil, the taste is too strong)
• 6 medium Granny Smith apples
• .25 cup currants
• 4 eggs
• 1tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1tsp each ground cinnamon and ground nutmeg
• 60g butter, cubed

Method

1. Peel, core and slice apples
2. Place apple slices in a baking tray or casserole dish and toss in brown sugar, lemon juice, cinnamon, nutmeg and currants
3. Evenly distribute contents in the dish, and add butter cubes evenly
4. Preheat oven to 160º C
5. Break eggs into a mixing bowl and whisk. Add oil and whisk again. Then whisk in vanilla, caster sugar. Finally add the flour, salt and baking powder. Combine with whisk until it is a smooth batter.
6. Pour batter over the apple mixture and spread it over evenly.
7. Place in the oven and cook for 50 minutes
8. Serve warm or cold with custard

Last of the summer pork

I expected to have my kids this weekend (they are now teenagers and gigantic), but no. So it is slow cooker therapy for this bachelor dad!

I looked in my fruit bowl, I looked in my garden, I looked in my pantry and fridge - and came up with this - slow cooked fruity pork.

Ingredients

• 1kg diced pork
• 1 onion roughly chopped

• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 tablespoons tomato paste
• 2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
• 2 tablespoons light soy sauce
• 3 tablespoons brown sugar
• 3 small plums halved and pitted
• 1 lime sliced
• 3 cardamom pods, crushed
• Ground pepper to taste
• 3 tablespoons olive oil

Method

Use a slow cooker or a heavy based casserole dish with a well-fitting lid. I used my trusty slowy.

In the slow cooker place all the ingredients except the pork onion, and olive oil.

In a frying pan, bring the oil to a frying heat and fry the pork in small batches. You need space around each piece so that the juices evaporate quickly and you get lovely brown bits on the edges. Remove each batch to the slow cooker.

Once you’ve finished the pork, drop the heat to low and add the onion. Once again it’s brown at the edges you are looking for, and you cook until it’s half translucent.

Remove to the slow cooker, making sure you scrape up all the yummy brown bits with a wooden spoon.

I have my cooker set on auto, which does what you want - bring slowly to a high simmer, then drop to a regular one.

In a casserole dish, cook covered for 2–3 hours. In a slow cooker 6.

I would like to say I chose green chillies so that their bitterness would offset the sweetness of the fruit and sugar. It’s just that my chillies out back are green!

However bitterness does offset sweetness.

Bachelor dad, signing off.

Soup - short and long

Just spent a week or so with my teenage boys. The eldest (now seriously teen garbage guts) said the food I make that he can eat “infinite” amounts of are chunky beef cottage pie, spaghetti bolognese, roast butterflied chicken, homemade pizza. To which we can now add last night’s chicken, corn and won ton soup.

I’ve enjoyed cooking for my guys, and there is a lot of hype around food and food rituals and how important it is. But amongst the worry and fuss about food as metaphor, you forget the literal - food keeps you alive. Eating good, healthy food guarantees nothing - except that things would be worse if you didn’t.

Back to the soup… You can do this with a small tin of creamed corn and a larger one of corn kernels. But fresh corn is easy to come by, and cooking the corn gives you a flavoursome soup base from which to build.

Here we go.

Ingredients

• 3 sweet corn cobs
• 3 chicken thigh fillets
• 1 225g pack frozen won tons
• 2 handfuls fresh rice noodles
• 2 cups chicken of vegetable stock
• 4 cups water
• 2 teaspoons five spice powder
• 2 teaspoons onion powder
• 1 teaspoon white pepper
• 1 tablespoon peanut oil
• 4 tablespoons light soy sauce
• 3 tablespoons chopped shallots to garnish

Method

Remove husks and silk from corn. Trim stalk and tip. Place in saucepan just big enough to hold them, and the water and bring to boil uncovered.

Heat a fry pan with peanut oil to medium. Flatten out thigh fillets and fry one at a time, five minutes each side. Remove to a plate, and cover - including any pan juices for the final fillet.

Once the corn comes to the boil, continue boiling for another five minutes, then remove corn to a plate to cool.

Keep the water boiling until reduced by a third. Add stock, five spice, onion powder, pepper and soy sauce and, once it comes back to boil, reduce to simmer.

Take one corn cob and with a sharp knife slice the kernels off the cob. Pound using a mortar and pestle to a coarse mash. Add to the saucepan. Slice down the other two corns and put the kernels directly into the pan.

You’re not done with the cobs yet. Take each cob and, using a butter knife, scrape down the cob, held over the saucepan, so that the starchy juices are harvested for the soup.

Now coarsely chop the chicken a place in the saucepan along with the juices that have developed.

Turn up the heat until boiling, then add the won tons, continuing on high until boiling resumes.

Add rice noodles and boil for two minutes. Remove from heat.

Serve in generous bowls, garnished with shallots.