Raspberry coulis

I know you have already seen this picture of the Brown Sugar Custard - but I am showing it again as it displays my raspberry coulis beautifully!

Anyway, the recipe:

• 150g raspberries (frozen is totally fine)
• 3 tbs sugar
• up to 3 tbs water

Bring to boil, then simmer 'until thick' - but remember that it will thicken more once it cools.

Let it cool - strain through muslin or a super fine mesh if you don't like the seeds.

Currently craving: sugar thermometer

Now I have the rosette mould, now I need a sugar thermometer so I can follow Martha's recipe - G has promised a thermometer now that I have a reason to need one. 

Asparagus salad (with a poached egg)

Pretty simple meal for dinner really, but nice and quick.  Asparagus were ridiculously expensive at the greengrocer, so I bought a bunch of asparagus, and bulked the salad out with some snowpeas (already in the fridge) and tomatoes (in the fruit bowl).  Served with a poached egg, and a toasted english muffin with goat's cheese...

Not quite peach melba

I assume that the recipe is called 'not quite peach melba' because the peaches are grilled, not poached.  Anyway, it seems like a super easy way to do it, and I really liked it.

Halve the peaches, sprinkle with sugar, grill.  Serve topped with almonds (toasted with icing sugar in the recipe), ice cream and raspberry sauce.

Modifications? Many.  I didn't peel the skin off the peaches afterwards - they were too hot (although the recipe did say that was allowable).  The raspberry sauce was a last minute effort with some frozen raspberries mashed up (the grilling time for the peaches was not enough time to make and cool raspberry coulis) and I used almond ice cream, rather than the vanilla in the recipe. 

It tasted so good!

Egg poacher cups

G loves poaching eggs but often that means multiple sauce pans on the stove so he can poach each egg, and we end up eating breakfast separately.  So we bought these silicone egg poach cups - they are so cute, they have little faces on them (you can the little faces on the left).

Anyway, they should be sprayed with oil before you put the egg in, and then you have to lower them into a pot of simmering water (that you splash some white vinegar into first!)

They come out quite smoothly - though you have to tip the water off the top carefully before you then put the egg on the dish (in this case, an asparagus salad that I will be blogging about soon).

Rosette iron - update

Stalked eBay USA and got one!  It came with 4 cookie moulds, 3 tartlet moulds and a double prong and a single prong!

Yay!

Tomato and goat's cheese tart

So this heirloom tomato tart with edith's goat cheese has a pretty complicated name for what really is a rich, plain, quiche topped with tomato and crumbled goat's cheese.

It's pretty easy to do - mix up a rich quiche mixture (heavy on the cream, more egg yolks than whites) and season it with herbs, and pour it in to a blind baked tart shell.

The recipe includes the pastry recipe, but I cheated: pampas short crust pastry.  Too hot too make pastry quite frankly, and I did not read the recipe early enough in the day to make the pastry.  Too bad, tasted good.


I used the herbs that we add - dried oregano and rosemary and fresh chives and spring onions.  The trickiest part of the whole thing was pouring enough quiche mixture into the tart to make it a high quiche (no one likes lots of spare pastry except G) and yet not pour over the edge.  Poor G had to lower it very careflly into the oven - I couldn't even watch!

Anyway, into the oven until cooked and then back out - top the cooked quiche with goat's cheese and then tomato.  Another modification - just cherry tomatoes, no interesting tomatoes available at the green grocer!