Eggy cooking: Poaching an egg

Almost all the cooking shows I’m watching has someone poaching an egg at some point. I also saw it in Julie and Julia (or was it the other way around?)

Not only that, but I have a surplus of eggs at the moment. I never seem to remember that I have them at home when I spot a new carton in the supermarket. Before my experiment with poaching, that meant we had 28 eggs in the refrigerator, and some were moving towards their Best Before Date.

Clearly some cooking had to be done with eggs.

And then the notion of attempting to poaching them came to mind. The sister was encouraging (but wanted no part other than as an observer, which was fair enough.) My Norwegian cookbook from the early 80s and Delia Smith’s How to Cook both said the same thing (and Nigella did not even mention poaching an egg in her How to Eat…) to put a small amount of water in a frying pan, put it to boil, and down to simmer and crack a fresh egg into that.

Well, that was nothing like what I was seeing at the telly. Apart from the water and the egg, it was two separate worlds entirely. So I tried with a mix.

It was not very successful. Well, to a certain degree, it did resemble a poached egg. And the yolk was runny when I poked it. But it just did not look like anything we wanted to eat.

And it has taken me two days to recall why it was not tempting me at all (something I should have thought of before I started the experiment): I have never been a fan of eating runny egg yolks.

Instead we used a frying pan and fried four eggs instead. That was yummy. But while the sister had hers sunny side up – I ended up frying mine on both sides.

My New Year’s Eve Menu

Never mind that I’m nearly three months late in posting this. I was hit with something just before Christmas, and was tapped for energy almost all through January.

On New Year’s Eve, though, I managed to find enough energy to be creative in the kitchen. Together with Sister S, we scouted cook book, blogs and recipes online to find the perfect meal. I’m glad to say we did.

We faffled back and forth on what we would make, but ended up with Sweet & Sour Chicken, with Jasmine rice and vegetables. The recipe we found at the Brown Eyed Baker’s.

We made our own adaption:

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Cakes: Redcurrant or blackcurrant cake

Before the Christmas baking set seriously in, my mother had to have a birthday cake. Mum does not particularly care for cream cakes, so this was an easy choice to bake. It first came into the family when Sister started Home Economics in sixth grade and it has been with the family since then. Especially since we usually end up with more redcurrants than we can reasonably eat. (Personally, I’m not a big redcurrant fan, but I like them in this cake.)

It is a quick and easy cake to make, and if you don’t have blackcurrants or redcurrants, I would think you could substitute with blueberries or other similar berries. Given the season, it might not be easy to get fresh berries, so frozen berries work perfectly.

I ended up making double the size to fill a Bundt pan. (Otherwise, it is the recipe for two 22 cm round cake pans)

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Norwegian cooking: Sitronfromasj

Or, lemon mousse in English, of which there seems to be oodles of recipes on the internet.

I think the first time I really made this dessert, was back in home ec. in seventh grade. I remember it, because the other dish my group had to prepare, boiled fish of some sort, ended up being inedible, and so it was really pure luck that the lemon mousse turned out splendidly.

This time around, many things seemed to go wrong, and it did not turn out perfectly in consistency – the mousse refused to set properly. But as it tasted absolutely delicious, and tart, I’m still sharing

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Healthy Cooking: Carrot patties

After really binging this weekend (why, oh, why?) I felt the need for something healthy for dinner today. I landed on carrot patties – made from the same principle as hamburger patties, I guess, but without meat.

If you have a food processor, this is not a time-consuming recipe. If not, like me, you’re going to be spending some time shredding the carrots and potatoes.

Carrot patties (gives about 6-7 patties)

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Literary cooking: Miss Trunchbull’s Chocolate Cake

For this year’s Halloween bash, it was a goal for us to have a thoroughly gross fare on the table.

We borrowed Roald Dahl’s Revolting Recipes by Felicity Dahl and Josie Fison, illustrated by Quentin Blake (in Norwegian) from the library and glanced through it. While a lot of the recipes were decidedly revolting, there was also a limit as to what could be done easily, and what was really suitable for a party for adults…

We ended up making the chocolate cake from Matilda. It’s called Bruce Bogtrotter’s Chocolate Cake in the book, but I wonder if the more accurate name would be Miss Trunchbull’s Chocolate Cake?

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Norwegian cooking: Pearl Porridge

Growing up, I always loved going to my grandmother’s to eat. Not just the Sunday steak, where dinner was followed by dessert, which in turn was followed by coffee and cakes, but also for some of the more everyday meals. One of those meals was sago porridge, or pearl porridge as we used to call it.

According to Wikipedia, an ever reliable source, I know, the sago is “a starch extracted from the pith of sago palm stems, Metroxylon sagu.” It is a small, round grain, looking like a pearl, that apparently can be substituted for tapioca pearls.

This weekend, my sister and I decided to see if the porridge was as tasty as what we could remember from what we were younger, or if we just were idolizing the memories.
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Announcement

With the recent upgrades over at The Royal Twist, it seemed like the time to do something here as well.

I’m definitely going to try to be more present, and publish more stuff here.