Kitchen Therapy

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Prosciutto, Feta and Ricotta Tarts

These are absolutely delicious! Golden, crispy, savoury bites that are incredibly satisfying fresh from the oven or straight from the fridge!

Ingredients

6 Sheets Filo Pastry
Olive Oil Spray
5 Slices Prosciutto or Ham, finely diced
1 Onion, finely chopped
1 Tbs Flat-Leaf Parsley, finely chopped
120g Ricotta
100g Feta
375ml Pouring Cream
3 Eggs

Method:

Preheat oven to 180C.

 

1. Lightly grease 12 hole muffin pan (we used Olive Oil spray).

 

 

2. Cut 12 x 1cm wide strips of baking paper and line each muffin hole so it extends beyond the rim so it’s easier to remove the tarts.

 

 

3. Stack 3 filo sheets (spray between each sheet with oil). Cut stacked filo sheets into 12x10cm squares. Spray one square with olive oil and place another square diagonally on top to form a star shape. Press into muffin hole and repeat with remaining 3 filo sheets until 12 tart shells are complete.

 

 

4. Combine prosciutto (or ham), onion, parsley, ricotta and feta in a large bowl then season with salt and pepper.

 

 

5. Spoon mixture into tart shells.

 

 

6. Whisk cream and eggs, pour over the ricotta mixture.

 

 

7. Bake for 25 minutes or until set. Stand in pan for 15 minutes before serving.


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Strawberry Cheesecake Cupcakes

 Oh My Goodness!

We have been working our way through the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook at our house.
We love the Banana Bread which tastes just like the slices you can buy in most of the nicer cafes around Sydney. The golden moist Blueberry Muffins disappear quickly in our house. The kids pack them in their lunch boxes and share them with friends.
Until now I’ve stuck to making the same few things from this book, but we’ve decided to live on the wild side and cook as many of the recipes as we can! 
So after a day at Manly beach, we came home and decided to continue our family time in the kitchen. We voted on which recipe to make next and these cupcakes were the clear winner. I didn’t really have any expectations and have never really been a cheesecake fan, I’m more of a European layered cake kinda girl. After dinner, I served these babies up and could hear the exclamations of delight as my family bit into these light and luscious morsels of heaven! The crumbed digestive biscuits on top have you convinced you’re eating a cheesecake, but it’s so much better than that!

Ingredients

120g plain flour
140g caster sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
a pinch of salt
40g unsalted butter at room temperature
120ml whole milk
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 egg
12 large strawberries, chopped into small pieces
200g digestive biscuits

For cream cheese frosting
300g icing sugar
50g unsalted butter at room temperature
125g cream cheese

Method

1. Preheat oven 170 degrees celsuis or 325 degrees farenheit.

2.Mix flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and butter on low speed until you get a sandy consistency.

 

3. Add milk and vanilla extract, beat on medium speed until all ingredients are well mixed. 

4. Add the egg and beat well for a few minutes to make sure it’s well mixed

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5. Divide the chopped strawberries between the paper cases.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6. Spoon the cake mixture on top and bake for 20-25 minutes.

 

My husband ate about a third of the mixture and I had to shoo him away! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

7. Put broken up digestive biscuits in a food processor and process until finely ground (you can see Emily’s rose cheeks after our beach fun!) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

8. To make cream cheese frosting beat icing sugar and butter until the mixture is well mixed.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

9. Add cream cheese and beat until totally incorporated. Turn mixer to medium and beat for another 5 minutes until frosting is light and fluffy but careful to not overbeat and make it runny! 

 

 

 

 

 

10. When cupcakes are cold spoon cream cheese frosting on top and finish with a sprinkling of the biscuits.

 

ENJOY!

(Recipe pretty much as it appears in Hummingbird Bakery Book) 

 

 

 

 


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Cafe Style Banana Bread!

                                                           
Love this Banana Bread!

It tastes just like the banana bread that can be bought in many of the nicer cafes around Sydney.
I add an extra banana to what the recipe calls for, it makes it moister and richer in flavour.
(The last time we made it with the kids we threw in an extra two bananas to what the recipe called for and it came out pretty wet and gooey, however by the next day it tasted fantastic!)

Don’t know about you but we always end up with mangy leftover bananas!
Since I’ve purchased the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook I actually get off on watching the last few bananas turn spotty and brown.
I feel like Nigella, the Domestic Goddess herself, turning leftover waste into something magnificent!

It is so easy to make, my almost 3-year-old son Jake, helps me measure all the ingredients and then I hand them over to him and he adds them in!
Seriously easy and delicious. The entire loaf is gone by the next day!

The Ingredients

270g soft light brown sugar
2 eggs
200g peeled bananas, mashed (200g measures about two bananas and I throw in an extra one as I like it more moist).
280g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp bicarbonate soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ginger (I never add this)
140g unsalted butter, melted

23x13cm loaf tin

Method

1. Preheat the over to 170 degrees celsius.

2. Grease and line tin with baking paper.

2. Put the sugar and eggs in a mixer and beat until well mixed

3. Add the bananas and mix.
  

4. Add the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate soda, cinnamon and ginger (if you are using it) to the mixture. Mix it thoroughly until all the dry ingredients have been incorporated into the egg mixture. 

 

5. Pour in the melted butter and beat until all the ingredients are well mixed. Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and smooth over with a knife. Bake for about 1 hour or until firm to the touch and a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. Leave the cake to cool slightly in the tin before turning out onto a wire cooling rack to cool completely.  

ENJOY!


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Cooking for the Pleasure of it! Greek Spinach Pies (from Tessa Kiros’ new book)

I bought Tessa Kiros’ new book, Food From Many Greek Kitchens and was really looking forward to trying out some recipes, however with work, 3 kids, Halloween, sleepovers and life in general, I only had time to steal brief glances through the book here and there. Knowing that soon I’d have the time to cook something from her book instead of turning to my usual meals out of ease, I planned my project and savoured the anticipation. In the end I realised I was kidding myself and there would never be a good time so I decided to pass on a lunch with some of the mums from school to stay home and play! 

I’ve watched my mum turn dodgy looking ingredients that you’d swear were on their last legs into a meal that tastes so good you can’t bring yourself to stop eating! She just slaps things together and there is never any waste or lack of flavour.

I grew up eating Yugoslav food. Manja with peas or potatoes, burek, grav (pasulj) which is a stew with beans, my mum would then throw in salty smoked pork ribs that melted off the bone and added just the right contrast to the sweet beans. (Now I’m not sure if I am doing these dishes any justice here with my writing, in fact, I would probably look at these foods in a cookbook from a foreign country and pass them by as I searched for something familiar while telling myself I was looking for “authentic” foreign dishes!)

When I was a kid, I thought everyone cooked and I ate like we did! As I got older I was embarassed when friends came over because our house always smelled on whatever my mum had going on the stove. I was too busy trying to fit in to hear my friends saying “I love coming over! Your mum feeds us the best food!” I think I took it all for granted until I married a man who was raised on meat and vegetables, he raved on and on about how great everything tasted. I then realised that I was lucky growing up in a house where cooking and flavour were valued! I have also realised that as a result I have much higher expectations from food than my husband does! 

I don’t have my mum’s flair for cooking (I think it got buried in my uptightness!) But as I’ve mentioned in my previous posts on finding youself and finding happiness, I found trying to be “perfect” (whatever that meant!) and “people pleasing”  were not working for me (funny that!). It made me an anxious, miserable, mess! So I’m letting go of how I thought I “should” be and am discovering who I actually am. And who I am is someone who loves to stay home and cook! It’s such a creative process that gives me so much satisfaction and I am finally giving myself permission to indulge in it. 

I love mediteranean, mexican and south american food and have decided I am going try to create as many “authentic” dishes as I can. Just the idea of this fills me with joy and an almost unbearable amount of butterflies in my stomach. (A few years ago I would have thought Aha! This gets me excited! So then I should follow my passion and become a chef! I thought that’s how this finding your purpose/meaning/happiness thing worked!)

Today, I can follow my interests just because they make me happy. Not judge them as possible pathways to fame and fortune. Just accept that this is what makes me happy. This is what makes me want to get out of bed this morning. What better reason could there be!

SPINACH PIES (SPANAKOPITA)
by Tessa Kiros from her book Food From Many Greek Kitchens

(the photo is my end product!)

Ingredients

27 filo sheets (23x25cm squares)
olive oil for brushing sheets

5 tbs oil
180g green onions
700g spinach leaves
20g dill
200g greek feta
2 eggs lightly beaten

Method (in my words as I don’t have her cookbook with me while I write this!)

  • Heat 5 tablespoons of oil in a pot large enough to fit all the spinach leaves and then cook the onions over medium heat until they are soft.  
  • Add the spinach and cook with lid on until spinach wilts, then take the lid off and simmer until all the juices disappear (my juices didn’t disappear so I just took it off the stove after a while and drained the spinach).
  • Once it cools, add the grated feta, dill, eggs and season.
  • Next is the tricky bit, pulling off the filo sheets without tearing (impossible but I just accepted the holes and kept going!) Put one sheet down, brush the oil over it, put down another sheet, oil it and then the last sheet.
  • Then put 2 heaped tablespoons of the spinach filling at one of the square and spread it in think line to the other end leaving a centre our so around the side and top edge.
  • Finally roll the sheet over the filling tightly and continue until you have it all rolled up. Lightly brush with oil on top. 
  • Now do the same thing 8 more times and line them up in baking dish and bake for 30 mins at 180C.

The satisfaction of cooking this was fantastic! My husband and kids were very impressed with the taste and the smell. I thought the actual taste of it was ok  (probably needed to season it a bit more). But as I said I grew up spoilt with flavour so I while I was hoping for something more, I was still pretty happy with the result!

(I am going from memory so I hope it makes sense and I do it justice!)