Food, glorious food!

I made myself Eggs Benedict for brekky this morning. I don't know why I've never made this at home before, because it's not hard to whack together, and it tastes so much better than what you get at a lot of cafes. I went to a cafe with a friend the other week, which I had read some good reviews about, and was shocked when my caesar salad arrived - the poached egg was unrecognisable. It was basically an egg yolk with a thin layer of rubbery-looking egg white twisted around it. The salad was like, almost $20 by the way, so you'd think they'd atleast get a poached egg right. Oh well, atleast I know it's not frozen from a packet (I was told that one of the popular local cafe chains use ready-made poached eggs - how lazy can people get?!). But anyway, back to my eggs benedict! - the recipe says to make the hollandaise sauce in the food processor, but because my kitchen is tiny and cluttered, my food processor and blender is stored in the garage, which I'm sure you'd agree is too much of an effort to lug to the kitchen when a single recipe calls for it (okay, PLUS I'm too lazy to manouver heavy things around). So anyway, I thought it would be the same if I used my electric hand-held beaters to do the job. My goodness! I beated the mixture for aaaaages! I thought the sauce would never thicken up! It did eventually, but it was rather thick, and was probably more like super soft lemon and herbed butter than hollandaise sauce! It still tasted alright though. I wonder what I did wrong? In the old days, people didn't have food processors and made all their sauces by hand, so surely it's do-able!


I love poached eggs, because it's easier to achieve an oozy egg yolk than with other cooking methods. This dish, by the way, is a recipe by Bill, from his latest cookbook! Same with the roasted tomatoes (which is featured in his previous books), which I always make, because they're sooooo juicy and yum!

This arvo, I tried making macarons. I've made macaroons before with success (in that I achieved the characteristic 'feet', or pied. This time, however, I followed a recipe from a macaron book to the T, and didn't manage to get any 'feet' on any of the macarons! :'( I don't know if it's because of the extra mixing, what the author calls 'macaronnage', which may have toughened/dried the mixture, or because I left the circles of batter for too long to dry before baking them. Or I guess it could also be because I didn't use 2 identical baking trays, one on top of the other, to bake them... They ended up hollow in the middle, but they still tasted good! I was out of butter, so I made a chocolate ganache to sandwich them together instead of buttercream.

I sprinkled cacao nibs on a few of them just to try it out. The cacao nibs taste quite unpleasant raw, but after toasting in the oven, they're actually quite palatable, and I love the extra crunch it imparts! And let's not forget how good these are for us! An excuse (though probably a bad one) to eat more sweet almond biscuits! haha!

They may not look like the proper things, but they're still quite tasty! So tasty that before I knew it, I had overindulged. I felt really guilty when I looked at the two cooling racks, and saw that it had like only a quarter of the batch left!

While I'm talking about baking, here's what I made yesterday:

Chocolate chip and pecan cookies (also from Bill's Basics by Bill), and...

Iced Cinnamon Snail Rolls (from Bill's Sydney Food). The cookies are delish! I've never made cookies so crisp before! Yum! But these are best eaten on the day of baking - I stored these in an airtight container, but when I tried one today, it was not quite as crispy as it was the day before. Definitely a recipe I will use again though! The buns tasted quite good yesterday - moist, soft, sweet and sticky. Not quite the same story today though. But I guess that's the same for most baked goods. My dad said that he microwaved a bun today for lunch and said it tasted really good. I wonder if this will still be the case tomorrow...

A few days ago, I tried the savoury version of Bill's scone recipe - cheese and chive scones. They didn't rise as high as the plain ones, maybe because of the cheese content..? They would have probably tasted nicer had I buttered them with salted butter, instead of unsalted, since the scone batter does not use any salt at all. Maybe next time I could try sprinkling some Maldon salt flakes to the tops before baking, to enhance the flavour.

Enough about cooking, here's an update on my knitting projs!

I went to a yarn sale the other day and bought the following:

Actually with the Patons Sorrento, I only bought the mauve coloured balls - the others I bought some time ago. I bought the mauve, because I thought it would also make a nice Spring/Summer scarf, which is what I intend to make the other colours into. I was never big on accessories, but there's always a time to start. The other yarn is to make 2 garments from the Patons Mist pattern book.

I actually made this bolero in black, to match a dress I wore to a friend's wedding in September this year. Because it's a midnight black though, you can't really see the lace pattern, which is a shame, since that's the part you have to really keep focus on when knitting! So I've decided I will knit it again in the colour used in the book - deep magenta. It's not a colour I am particularly fond of, but it works very well with this bolero. One of the haberdashery shops I went to a few months ago had this same bolero displayed on a manequin in the shop's front display window, in this same colour, and it looked fab. That was probably when I decided to get the pattern book and knit that bolero. Anyway, here's some pics of the bolero I made. The length seems a bit different from in the book - I wonder if it's because they knitted at a looser tension than me... or maybe it's to do with how they slip-stitched the collar on? I thought about maybe knitting at a looser tension for my next bolero, but since the sleeves fit perfectly, if I do that the sleeves might end up too baggy. Oh the dilemma.

The white yarn is to knit this other pattern at a later stage. Maybe closer to Autumn next year. I seem to wear a lot of black, so the white would be a nice contrast.