Secret Family Recipes!

This Tuesday I drove to my aunt's house where she, my cousin and I started assembling one of our family's traditional Christmas dishes.

It's one of those 'nobody ever writes anything down' sort of sets of recipes where you just have to keep turning up year after year to help until you start to remember how it's done.

You know how it's supposed to taste because you've been eating it every year for your entire life but it takes a while to work out how to get it right.

It probably would be easier to write everything down but where would be the fun in that?

All the rolling, blending, chopping, tying, stirring, tasting and seasoning is fun all by itself.

All the yelling at each other over the sounds of the kitchen, asking for consensus, making everybody else taste things and give advice and take turns at things is fun too.

This year only a few of us could make it for one reason or the other but it's different every year.

There's no set time, there's no set procedure.

Every year is different but every year is the same.

The recipes are secret not because it's that different from what anybody else can do.

There are probably plenty of similar recipes in cookbooks and being handed around by other families, amongst themselves and out to friends.

It's secret because then it's just something we do together.

It's secret because then it's special.

It's slightly different and it's all ours and it's just a hell of a day and damn if it isn't delicious every single year.

The Philosopher's Bowl

My parents did a fairly good job on educating me about food.

I knew from an early age that milk came from cows, eggs came from chickens, that delicious meat is actually made out of delicious animals, the names of all the vegetables and all the various things Jamie Oliver seems to be so nervous about kids not knowing these days.

But there was one thing I just did not realise for many, many years.

You can make your own soup!

Intellectually I knew it had to come from somewhere and contained, y'know, ingredients but for far too many years I just associated soup with cans.

I guess I knew you could make soup but I put that in the same category as certain pastries.

Sure, theoretically you could make a croissant but I can just about guarantee that without a few years of training or practice, what you'll get will not look like a real croissant. It'll look like a buttery smear of undercooked flobble.

I thought of soup making as a kind of culinary alchemy, only undertaken by the learned and wise.

However, spurred on by the surprising amount of Hourly Comics that showed people making soup (and declaring how delicious it was and how amazing it is that they could have wasted so much of their lives eating the inferior and more expensive soup from tins), I started experimenting with soup making myself.

Guys, did you know that you can just take vegetables, boil them in water*, blend them up and they turn into delicious soup!

It's amazing!

So far I've made a pumpkin and cinnamon soup, a broccoli puree, a cauliflower and leek soup, a hearty minestrone, and a bean and pearl barley soup**.

They've all been delicious.

Chop things up, simmer them for half and hour and you've got a week's worth of lunches just sitting there being delicious at you.

Tell me that's not magical!

Anyway here's the recipe I used for cauliflower and leek soup which is one of my favourites so far.

Ingredients
1 onion
1 small leek
300 g (11 oz) cauliflower
2 teaspoons of olive oil
500 ml (17 fl oz) milk
250 ml (8 fl oz) water
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Method

1. Peel and chop the onion.
2. Trim the leek, cut into thin slices and rinse well.
3. Separate the cauliflower into small florets and rinse in a colander.
4. Heat the oil in a large saucepan and add the onion and leek.
5. Cover and cook over a low heat for a few minutes to soften.
6. Add the cauliflower, milk and water, season with salt, cover and bring to the boil.
7. Lower the heat and simmer gently for 10 to 15 minutes.
8. Remove from the heat, allow to cool a little, then blend the soup until smooth in a food processor or with a stab blender.
9. Adjust the seasoning with salt a pepper.

Freaking. Delicious.



*Or a little stock

**I've made this one about 10 times, but I can't make it when my parents are coming around for dinner because English school lunches traumatised my mother so badly that even the sight of pearl barley triggers flashbacks.

Cooking With Ricochet: How To Make Lazy Chicken And Vegetable Pasta Bake

Serves about 4 depending on how ravenous your guests are.

Ingredients
1 can of condensed chicken and corn soup
500 g of penne
1/2 a barbecued chicken
1 zucchini
1 carrot
1 1/2 cups of grated tasty cheese

Steps

1. Decide you can't be bothered cooking, opt to have toast for dinner.
2. Remember your parents are coming over, give up and pull out a lazy recipe instead.
3. Preheat the oven to 200 °C*.
   
4. Put the 500 g of dried penne on to cook for about 10 minutes in a pot of boiling water, with a bit of salt. Probably too much. Damn. Drain it and put it aside.
   
5. Grate the zucchini and the carrot, congratulating yourself for not grating your fingers off whilst your parents sit on your couch and flick channels on your TV.
6. Shred the barbecued chicken, carefully not eating any of it before you put it in the bowl.
7. Mix the soup, zucchini, carrot, shredded chicken and penne together and pour them into a baking dish. Accidentally drip a bit on the cat who then runs away and hides under the bed and refuses to come out so you can clean him off. Give up as the other cat runs in and starts enthusiastically cleaning soup and chicken off the first cat for you.
8. Sprinkle the cheese on top of the pasta and bung it into the oven for about 20 minutes.
9. Put on your oven mitts, pull out the baking dish.
10. Decide the pasta bake may be cooked but will be more delicious if you grill the cheese a bit.
11. Take off your oven mitts to turn the grill on.
12. Blithely pick up the baking dish, turn around to put it under the grill.
13. Something's burning.
14. IT'S YOUR FINGERTIPS, YOU IDIOT!
15. Manage somehow to dump the piping hot straight-out-of-the-oven baking dish onto the cooking range instead of the floor.
16. Ask your Mum to put the baking dish under the grill whilst you hold your fingertips under cold running water, reminding her first of the importance of oven mitts.
17. Serve up the deliciously golden brown cheesy, chicken and vegetable pasta bake with some salad.
18. Keep swapping hands between eating duties and a cold pack during the meal.
19. Two days later notice that you miraculously don't have any lasting damage, blisters or any indication apart from a callous on one fingertip that you almost burned your stupid fingerprints off.
20. Cancel planned crime spree.
    

*That's about 390 °F

Cooking With Ricochet: How to Make Peanut Cookies

Makes about 28, depending on how big you like 'em.

Ingredients
125g (4oz) butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
1 1/4 cups plain flour, sifted
1 tsp baking powder
150g (5 oz) raw peanuts

Steps

1. Look at your beeping phone and wonder why it is beeping.
2. Read the reminder that has popped up to let you know there is going to be another pointless morning tea at work celebrating the ongoing march towards entropy that only take place because a handful of people would get shitty if nobody sang them Happy Birthday after 'Everybody else got a morning tea!'
3. Grumbling in a resentful fashion, preheat the oven to 180 °C (350 °F).
4. Thunk a bowl down on the counter and cream the butter and sugar. If you can be bothered, use the electric beaters and get a bit of a fluffier mix, if you are feeling cranky and don't feel like it the mixture turns out just as well if mixed by hand.
5. Slap the egg in. Grind it into the dust, I mean batter!
   
6. Fold through the flour, baking powder and surprisingly hard to locate in the supermarket raw peanuts. I mean you'd think peanuts in the shell would be an easy bet to be raw but no, they're roasted too! And BBQ flavoured!
7. Shape tablespoon sized chunks of mixture into balls and press them down a bit onto a baking paper covered baking tray. Imagine they are the faces of the most immature of your mid-50s co-workers.
8. Bake for 10-13 minutes or until they look particularly golden delicious and then cool on a wire rack.
9. Eat half the biscuits with coffee because you've earned them dammit and everybody else will stand around talking about how they really shouldn't because they're already so fat and on a diet and blah blah blah blah.
10. Take a deep breath and get over it. Until the next morning tea.
    

Cooking With Ricochet: How to Make ANZAC Biscuits

Makes... I can't remember, somewhere between 12 and 24... They don't usually last long enough to count them.

Ingredients
1 cup rolled oats
1 cup plain flour
1/2 cup sugar
3/4 cup dessicated coconut
2 tablespoons golden syrup
125g butter
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)
1 tablespoon hot water

Steps

1. Remember that it's April.
2. Realise that means ANZAC Day is coming up. Spend some time thinking about the Australian and Kiwi men and women who have served their countries before guiltily beginning to obsess about ANZAC biscuits.
3. Preheat the oven to 160 °C (320 °F) and then carefully knock over all of your baking trays. Twice.
   
4. Place the oats, flour, sugar and coconut in a bowl. Pick a baking tray that hasn't been on the floor and place some baking paper on it.
   
5. Answer a knock at your door, say G'day to your 70 year old landlord, accept some free cucumbers out of his garden and blink politely when he explains he has a shard of glass in his foot and asks you to dig it out.
6. Dig a shard of glass out of your landlord's foot with a needle, say thanks for the cucumbers and stare in bemusement at your door for a while after he cheerfully bids you good day.
7. Wash your hands. Twice. Maybe three times. You are cooking after all.
   
8. Place the golden syrup and butter in a saucepan over a low heat, allow butter to melt and blend with the golden syrup. Resist the urge to drink what is essentially deliciously scented fat and sugar.
   
9. Mix the bicarbonate of soda with the hot water and add to the butter mixture. Giggle in a very grown-up and not at all dorky fashion at the way the butter mixture fizzes up.
   
10. Pour the butter mixture into the dry ingredients and mix well. Continue to not eat the mixture. Well, not all of it.
    
11. Roll the mixture into balls the size of walnuts and then squish into biscuit shapes and place on a tray covered with baking paper that you have successfully continued to keep off the floor.
12. Bake for 10 minutes or until golden brown. Cool on racks.
13. Make a cup of tea and go mad on those biscuits. Eat the heck out of them.
    

The Descent Into Madness (Now Available In Cinnamon Flavour)

Oh Lord save me, I have succumbed to food porn.
I don't mean some fetish corner of the adult entertainment industry where people pelt each other with blueberry muffins whilst flashing come-hither glances, I mean I just can't stop looking up recipes and making long and complex lists of ingredients.
And it's going to kill me.

I'm either going to end up the size of a house or chasing after people holding surplus dishes, screaming 'Eat it! Eat it!'*

So many recipes.
I don't eat enough meals a week to actually make all of them.
And they just keep accumulating.
And what if I find something I like?
If I make it again that pushes back making something new even further.
And some of these recipes are similar but not quite the same so they warrant their own run and...
Oh the logistics!

This has unfortunately expanded to include baking which has made me a little unpopular in the workplace.
Whilst I like cakes and biscuits, if I make them I'm not able to finish them all before they start going Extra Crunchy^TM so I take them into work for people to have with their coffee and whatnot.
And everyone at work is on a diet.
Everyone.

One person went on a diet and then another person went on a diet and then all of a sudden everyone was bringing salad and celery sticks and sachets of brown rice into work and looking slightly disappointed with cups of herbal tea.
Meanwhile I'm sitting here with a plate of biscuits and a cup of coffee.
And my lunch-time portions of food porn.
Things have gotten a little frosty.

I don't know how it's going to happen - coronary, exotic spice overdose, being choked to death by a coworker with some organic low-fat wheat noodles the texture of Hessian because she just can't take it any more - but if it's inevitable I might as well enjoy the time remaining.

Now if you'll excuse me I have to go remember how to use Excel so I can make a needlessly complicated spreadsheet.
It might even include a pie-chart.
Oh man, pie...



*And that should be a few years off at least. I'm pretty sure you have to actually reproduce before that gene is activated.

Cooking With Ricochet: How To Make Kourabiethe Biscuits

Makes about 40 biscuits.

Ingredients
250 grams* butter
2 cups of icing sugar
1 egg
2 teaspoons of vanilla essence
1/2 cup of toasted almonds
2 and 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon of backing powder
Whole cloves or or ground cloves or ground cinnamon

Steps

1. Whilst staring out the window at your neighbourhood being lashed by an overly enthusiastic rain storm, decide that you want to make biscuits and spend 10 minutes trying to remember where you hid the mixing bowl.
2. Gather your ingredients, utensils and measuring bits and bobs and find the biscuit trays whilst you're at it. Marvel as the rain manages to get even heavier.
   
3. Pre-heat your gas oven** to 160 degrees Celsius*** and put some baking paper onto the biscuit trays.
4. Sift the icing sugar into a mixing bowl, pop the chopped or slivered almonds under the grill and go to give the butter a quick zap in the microwave to make it more compliant if it is straight from the fridge.
5. Come racing back into the kitchen and quickly pull the almond slivers out from underneath the griller before they go from toasted to charcoal.
6. Cream the butter and icing sugar together.
7. Blink stupidly as the power goes out and you are plunged into complete darkness, except for the gentle glow coming from your pre-heating gas oven****.
8. Bump around the place for a bit locating that torch you are sure you bought a while ago and the candles for your oil burner. Light a bunch of candles, turn on the torch and stick it under your bra strap***** so that it is pointing at the mixing bowl.
9. Add the egg and vanilla essence and beat well, tilting your shoulders every now and then to redirect the torch beam from the mixing bowl to the recipe.
10. Add the almonds and stir through.
11. Read the direction to sift the flour and baking powder twice. Remember that you are using your only mixing bowl. Sift the flour and baking powder into a saucepan, and then into another saucepan.
12. Mix the flour lightly into butter mixture and knead until smooth. Almost drop the torch into the dough.
    
13. Take pieces of dough the size of walnuts and shape. You can either just roll them into a ball and flatten them with a fork or roll them into a tube/cylinder shape and then curve them into a crescent.
14. Press a clove into the top of each biscuit, or one on each half of the crescent, or sprinkle ground cloves or ground cinnamon over them instead. Drop some of the cloves in the darkness for standing on barefoot later.
15. Put the biscuits in the oven to bake for about 30 minutes. Realise that your mobile phone battery is almost flat and it cannot be used as a time keeping device, that your alarm clock is not on as there is no electricity, that you still haven't bought yourself a new watch despite regularly declaring that you are going to since last April then wonder if you are going to have to count to 1800 before remembering that you have a wall clock that runs on those old-fangled batteries. Hazard a guess as to how long all this intellectual reckoning took and then take note of the time.
16. When you go to take them out of the oven the biscuits will have puffed up a bit and will still seem soft but will dry out as they cool. As long as they aren't shiny and smooth but lightly dry looking when you take them out they should be OK. If you leave them in until they 'seem' cooked they will be harder, crunchy and more biscotti-like when they cool. So whatever you prefer.
17. Allow them to cool, remove the cloves and then dust them with icing sugar so that everybody can experience the joy of dropping icing sugar down the front of their shirt whilst they're eating them.
18. Treat yourself to a celebratory biscuit and a cup of tea/coffee/cocoa/whiskey made by boiling water on your gas stove-top****** or a glass of whatever takes your fancy. Congratulate yourself on having freed yourself from the shackles of electricity dependence. Decide this must have been what it was like in the old country back in the day, despite the fact that the people in the old country back in the day probably didn't do damn fool things like try to bake in the dark. If you don't have an old country or can't remember which one it is, the first country that pops into your head at this point is now your 'old country'. No you can't swap, it's too late, birthrights are like that. Raise a glass/mug/bottle/whatever to your possibly newly acquired heritage and feel smug.
    
19. Blink stupidly as the power comes back on and you realise that you are standing in the middle of your kitchen with a shirt front that is a sweetly flavoured constellation of icing sugar and crumbs with a torch jammed in your bra strap.
20. Abandon your new found self-sufficiency in the face of adversity and disdain for electricity and check if there's anything good on TV/put on some music/fire up your Tesla coil. Whilst eating a biscuit.
    

*A little over half a pound, 0.55 pounds according to the internet.
**Yes, fine, the recipe does work with electric ovens as well but this is important in this instance, trust me.
***320 degrees Fahrenheit
****See? I told you it was important.
*****If you don't have a bra strap you could stick it into the neck of your shirt or your mouth or something.
******If you haven't got a gas cooking range by this point I really can't help. Oh and you needn't heat the whiskey unless you want to make yourself a Hot Toddy.

Cooking With Ricochet: How To Make Rissoles

Serves about 4 (depending on how big of an eater each person is)

Ingredients
500-700 grams minced meat* (usually beef or lamb or veal, whatever you prefer)
2 or 3 tablespoons of tomato paste (puree)
1 large onion
1 teaspoon of oregano (or as much as you like)
1 teaspoon of sweet Hungarian paprika (once again, you like paprika, go nuts)
Milk
Plain Flour
Eggs (at least 6)
Breadcrumbs

Potatoes (enough to make mashed potato for everyone - I dunno, 6 large 'tatoes)

Steps

1. Go home for the weekend to see your family and get roped into making dinner.
2. Take the minced meat and stick it in a mixing bowl with the tomato paste, the chopped up onion, the sweet Hungarian paprika and oregano. Start squishing it all together with your hands in a gross, glorious, squidgy mess.
3. Find out that the refrigerator system at the supermarket was a little overenthusiastic and that the mince is actually semi-frozen when you start losing the sensation in your fingertips.
4. When your mobile phone starts ringing in your jeans pocket, run into the lounge room and scare the bejesus out of your sister by jumping up and down and jiggling your hip at her and yelling that you can’t answer the phone because your hands are covered in meat.
5. Roll your eyes when, once she has fished out your mobile phone and answered it, you discover that it’s your mother calling to check that you still remember where everything is in the cupboard. From the other end of the house.
6. Take four large pasta bowls. Half fill each of them: one with milk, one with plain flour, one with egg and one with breadcrumbs.
7. Roll a ball of mincey-meaty-onion-tomato stuff up into the size of an egg and squish it flat. Then dip it in the milk, roll it in the flour, dip it in the egg, roll it in the breadcrumbs and put it on a large plate to await cooking.
8. This will take a while and you will have to have another plate on standby to scrape accumulated milky, floury, eggy, breadcrumby goop off your fingers onto.
9. As you are scraping crap off your hands yell at your sister that what she really really wants to do is peel the potatoes and stick them in a microwave safe casserole dish and nuke them for about ten minutes and then mash them with a bit of milk, margarine and salt.
10. She will disagree but you will be very convincing. She will be very convinced that she doesn’t want milky, floury, eggy, breadcrumby fingers wiped all over her nice shirt.
11. Once you’ve finished rolling and dipping and scraping, wash all the gunk off your hands, pour an oil of your choice (canola, vegetable, olive… whatever gloopily floats your boat) into a frypan and start frying rissoles at a sort of medium high temperature (I dunno) until they’re golden brown on the outside and cooked on the inside. About 2 minutes each side should do it.
12. Serve with plenty of mashed potato, tomato sauce** and pointed comments along the line of how nice it is to come home and see everyone and be given the opportunity to refamiliarise yourself with the family kitchen. Mouths will be too full to allow verbal ripostes so expect the 'talky talky' hand signal and grins.
    
    

*possibly known as ground chuck elsewhere in the multiverse (Who is Chuck and what did he do to you?) - Oh and 500 - 700 grams is about 1.1 to 1.5 pounds

**ketchup, catsup, tomato relish, whatever.