I shall call her "Talina"

A drastic change in financial circumstances and plans has occurred.
In the month since the last post, the pursuit of the machine became more earnest, vision was re-cast, strategy was reconfigured, I set out to hunt it down and I won!
Or lost.
Or gave in.
Or something.

Isn't she just lovely?

Like most other things in my possession, she needed a name before I could put her to work.  Apparently Talina is Norse for 'hard working', and Hebrew for 'home' (though I don't remember learning that).  According to the same dodgy names website it is also Latin for 'temptress', which might also be apt.
Tomorrow, once I have reclaimed my kitchen from the mountain of dishes from making a birthday cake, she will be given her first run - probably CADA, maybe Almond milk, vegetable stock, soup, risotto, sorbet, sugar-free chocolate, cake for morning tea at work... oh my goodness... the hopes I have for this little friend of mine!

Banana bread

It's freezer clean-out time.  Mum taught me that over-ripe bananas could be stuck in the freezer as-is, and used later in banana cake.

A while ago my home-chef buddy P gave me a great recipe for Banana Bread.  It's very buttery, but feels just a tiny bit healthy because it has almond meal in it.
1.5 cups plain flour
0.5 cup of almond meal
2 teaspoons of baking powder
0.5 teaspoon of bicarb soda
2/3 cup of caster sugar
2 eggs, lightly beaten
125 g butter, melted and cooled.
3 mashed bananas.

Sift flour, almond meal, baking powder, bicarb together.  Add sugar, eggs, butter and beat for 3 minutes.  Fold in bananas.  Put into a lined / greased loaf tin.  Bake for 1 hour at 150C.  (This was a hand-scribbled recipe so I hope I didn't miss anything in the method.)

Anywho, the dishes are the usual array of awfulness, but, the keen-eyed follower may recognise something which The Machine would never allow.

Lick-able beaters.

Yes, I caved and bought a small electric beater for use in my "Can I live without The Machine" experiments.  I now have whipped cream in my fridge, and shall soon have well-mixed banana bread, and home made bread rolls (yes it has a dough hook attachment) and probably pancakes and sponge cake and pavlova.... any suggestions for savoury and healthy food to be made using this new implement would be most welcomed!

After my first few plays though, I have sighed as I've had to wipe down the stove-back, and pick up little bits of cake mix off the surrounding benchtops.  The Machine would never allow beater-spatter.

Sugar, sugar

The Machine can't make toffee.
Until tonight, neither could I.
Just sayin'.

Fun food

I am just a little bit fascinated by the fun Heston Blumenthal has with food.  It's particularly exciting when he makes a savoury dish look like a sweet, or vice versa.  It's about tricking the eyes, and disarming the tastebuds.

This is why I was delighted to find a recipe for some "burgers and chips" which I saw at a Kitchen Tea party recently.  They are actually made entirely from cake.

I think my attempt, adding some baked custard as a cheese slice, is a bit classier even! (If you ignore the fact that I had a minor disaster with my chocolate cake.)

Now, you might be asking, what has this to do with the Machine?

Nothing really.

But I did wonder as I went through just about every dish in my cooking cupboard as well as crockery, whether the Machine could have saved me any steps.  I hand-creamed the butter and sugar for the "chips", I hand-stirred the cake mixes ignoring all instructions to use beaters.  It would have saved me a lot of time and stress in those areas.

But the Machine would not have helped at all with my undercooked chocolate cake or putting the honey glaze on the top of the "buns".

I wondered... because I had a lot of time to think while I was making them... and I knew I wanted to blog about the fun of this idea, so I had to link it in somehow!!!

By the way: This recipe is probably not recommended as a kid-friendly cooking exercise.

Anyone want to help me with my dishes?

Swings and roundabouts

There was a day, some week or so ago, when I had the best experience borrowing S's Machine.  I think it was New Years Eve.

I lobbed at her place with lemons, flour, sugar, CADA ingredients, and walked away with home-made lemonade, breakfast for a week and perfect pizza dough for 4 pizzas - all in 25 minutes from start to finish including washing up. Costing...? between $2 and $5 maybe?  It was magical.  I left on a huge high and thoroughly enjoyed every mouthful of what I had made.

Tonight I've been chopping, boiling, slicing, whisking since about 10:00pm to make a frittata.  I can't seriously think of any way the Machine would make this job easier.  Sure it might steam the veggies quicker than my boiling did, and so I would only have to swish out the steamer and bowl.  Sure it would be able to chop cheese up and whisk the egg and milk mix together.  But I just can't think of any way the Machine would have reduced the time or workload associated with this healthy, all-ingredients-in-one-mouthful, dish.

I guess sometimes you just have to put in a bit of effort. 

Steeping

No Machine required, other than a kettle.  This is fun.  Teabags, fresh ginger, cinnamon stick, cloves, lemon juice, sugar and hot water.

Merry Christmas!!

Christmas goodness!

There is something about we humans and the way we like to celebrate great events with a range of traditions.  I believe they give us a sense of belonging within our heritage and community, and are an excellent way of conveying the importance of the event to the next generation as well as to those around us.

The traditions of Christmas are particularly lavish.  I like to think this is because the event of the birth of Christ has conveyed such heart-trembling hope that we have always looked for ways to out-create, out-give and out-serve God in praise to Him for His gift which who changed the world.  I know that's a little idealistic, but it feels nice.

So this is why I find myself each year, plaintively hoping Mum will crank out another million shortbread biscuits so our family can gather together for a great icing festival - usually squeezed in between end of term madness and the respectable dates at which one can hand out said biscuits as gifts.  The stress of producing these biscuits is pretty massive, but it's so important to our family.

I am always looking for new 'traditions' to start, new beautiful ways of creatively rejoicing in the internal joy of Christmas, but also displaying it through the external blessings we have.  Which is why this year I thought I'd go with my Nan's beaters from the 1950s as the machine of choice for making Gingerbread dough.

Didn't go so well.  The beaters worked fine, but I had to hold the base machine steady so it didn't go spinning off my cook top onto the floor, which meant I wasn't able to hold the bowl, so ended up with an uneven motion of the ingredients piling up on one edge.  It sucked.  Big time.  I don't know how Nan ever used the silly machine!

So it didn't help when, a few days later, I visited a friend's place to find a joyous party of nougat-makers on their third or fourth batch in only a couple of hours... with The Machine working like a trojan, and no spinning off table in sight.

Sigh.

I am yet to make the dough into anything... but at least I know any baking difficulties can't be blamed on my lack of Machine.