5-Second Marshmallow Spread

Unfortunately my camera is broken. Will provide a photo once it’s fixed. Basically, I had a lump of old bread in the house and wanted something different on its toasted slices. There also happened to be an opened bag of marshmallows on the table, so I just stuck one into my housemate’s microwave for about 5 seconds and had instant marshmallow spread! I’m sure you can make a nicer spread, but can you make a faster one?

PS: This might also work if you hold the marshmallow over a flame and toast it soft – this should then have an additional smoky flavour!

Balcony Feasts

Yey – more stuff from my balcony is growing into tasty shapes! I also have developed cravings for chinese-style noodle soups, so I’m trying combine the balcony harvest with noodly experimentation! I’m not quite satisfied with my stock yet, but I shall report once I am! (any suggestions?) My favourite Chinese restaurant does a delicious stock for their noodle soup – I’m not sure whether I’m detecting a gentle hint of ginger and peanut!

One thing I am very satisfied with is my ‘baby balcony salad’! (Yes, I have some bigger carrots than those in my pots! )

Fennel Bake

One of my favourite things to make is fennel bake (that even rhymes!). This dish will probably not be able to exist in the future as it requires hours of slow baking, which with the current gas prices and all is turning into an excessive luxury. The recipe is simple enough:

Chop 1 fennel and 1 onion (or 2-3 shallots). Also use the ‘green frizzy bits’ on the fennel.
Pour over a can of tomatoes or any tomato-based stuff you’ve got in the house.
Season (e.g. salt, pepper, garlic, chilli – or just leave it very ‘fennelly’ with not a lot of spices).
Bake until everything is tender and the tomato stuff is reduced to a darker colour (usually about 2 hours at low heat). You can make it less soft and leave it in the oven for only 30-60 mins. That also tastes very nice.
Put a layer of grated cheese of some kind on top (parmesan, cheddar or even several weeks past the best before date ‘cheapo’ camembert will do, as you can see in the picture).
Bake some more until cheese has formed a delicious crust! If you don’t have cheese, don’t worry. The dish also tastes nice without it – it even tastes nice cold (e.g. with some bread).

Sweet Potato Muffin Crossover Experiment

I’m having a 50s housewife day and have so far engaged in floor scrubbing, hoovering, doing the washing up from the last few days and using up leftovers in the form of baking! I originally got some sweet potatoes from the market to make a sweet potato bake or a soup, but I actually had no appetite for any of this stuff last week. So in order for it not to go to waste, I decided to make some baked goods for me and my friends, while using up some more random ingredients…

I based the ‘experiment’ on a recipe from an American website, but because I lost patience with the quantity conversions and doubted some of the quantities (1 whole table spoon of nutmeg? That could be truly mind-expanding! ), I just made up my own recipe with the usual bizarre additions. In the end, I made two batches with slightly different spice combinations.

Basic recipe:

3 medium eggs or 2 large ones
175 – 200g brown sugar or whatever you’ve got handy as a sweetener
8 tbsp cooking oil of some sort
vanilla flavouring
4 tsp baking powder
300g plain flour
2 large, grated sweet potatoes
a generous dash of salt
raisins
some kind of nuts or almonds (the recipe said walnuts, I only had coconut flakes, almond flakes and crushed Chinese almond biscuits with beanflour)
ground allspice, cinnamon, nutmeg, pepper and tumeric

For the alternative batch I added ground coriander, cardamom and ginger.

Bake the fantastically wormy-looking dough with some almond flakes on top in 24 muffin cases at medium heat for about 30 mins.

Especially the second batch tastes very wacky. Sort of American-Chinese-Indian… I’m normally not too much into muffins, but I do like those a lot, and they are very nutritious. Already had two! Go on, make some and take them to your local lido!

Mutant Soup Noodle

I am a great fan of clear soups with ’starchy stuff’, whether the ’stuff’ is rice, oats, noodles or rather more obscure ingredients. Again, my fellow blogger donated some German alphabet noodles to the London kitchen, and look what I found! What kind of letter is this? A jellyfish, a pac man, a ghost, some sort of primitive harp or even the Call of Cthulu? Ha! But then I had the brains to turn it round by 90 degrees, and it kind of started to look like a Euro sign. Is that the case? If not, I’ve found a rather superb strain of mutant noodle! Hmh, I actually prefer to be it a mutant jellyfish letter… aaah, no money for the creative!