Plum Financiers

50g almond meal
80g unsalted butter
150g pure icing sugar
5 egg whites
1 tsp baking powder
60g plain flour
3 plums cut into segments

Melt the butter until just golden and foamy and set aside. Pre-heat your oven at 190C and grease your financier moulds (you could also use a muffin tin for a round version). In a bowl combine the icing sugar, almond meal, baking powder, flour and stir to combine. Add the egg whites and mix together lightly, continue to add the melted butter while stirring until combined. The mix will be wet and gloopy.

Place a tablespoon full of mixture in each mould and place your plum slices on top.

Bake in the oven for fifteen minutes or until the edges of the financier are golden. Transfer to a wire rack to cool and dust with icing sugar to serve.

French onion soup, or in the case of MFK’s recipe, Parisian onion soup, usually has a beef or chicken stock but we have given the soup its richness through a mushroom stock. Be gentle and patient with this soup. The onions do take a long time to brown and caramelize and you do have to stir it regularly to make sure they don’t burn. But the reward is the most wonderful depth of flavour and such a warm bowl of comfort. Sarah made this for a small group of ladies who held huge, steaming bowls in their hands in my loungeroom, crunching on cheesy toast and sipping on wine between spoonfuls. It wasn’t really cold then, but now, just a month later it is and tonight I’m going to chop onions and stand by the stove stirring until they are sweet and brown.

French Onion Soup
Based on a recipe from How to Cook a Wolf, MFK Fisher ‘Parisian Onion Soup’

for the stock:
2kg of mushrooms roughly chopped for stock (A mix is fine- swiss browns are great. A few dried porcini doesn’t go astray either.)
6 strands of thyme
1 bay leaf
10 black peppercorns

for the soup:
2 tbsp good quality unsalted butter
2 tbsp olive oil
1kg brown onions (organic helps if you can) sliced finely and as evenly as possible in full rounds
3 tbsp plain flour
1 tbsp salt

to serve:
light rye bread
gruyere

In a large pot, place all the stock ingredients, cover with water - at least three litres, and bring to the boil. Simmer for at least an hour on low to moderate flame stirring occasionally - if you have time a couple of hours is best. Run the stock through a sieve and press the mushrooms to remove the liquid. Set the stock back on the stove and keep warm for your soup. You could also make this well in advance and freeze.

In another large pot melt the butter and oil together on a low heat - be sure not to burn the butter. Place your onions in the pot and stir until coated with the oil and butter mix. Cook on a low heat stirring every five minutes until the onions have reduced and are translucent as well as a golden brown colour. Make sure they have changed colour and are evenly coloured before you continue on to the next step.

When the onions are brown, place the flour and salt in the pot and stir until the flour is mixed in well. Add your mushroom stock and stir well. Cook the soup on a low heat until the onions are very tender. About half an hour. If the soup seems too thick add more water. Season well with salt and pepper to taste.

When ready to serve make your cheesy croutons. Toast the rye bread in thick slices, place the cheese on them and grill until the gruyere is just melted. Serve the soup in large bowls with big round spoons, placing the croutons on the surface of the soup so that the slices are soggy on the bottom, but crispy on top.

Serves 8 people

On Wednesday I took a little jar of jalapeños over to Sarah’s house and she made the most incredible Mexican feast. We were supposed to be talking baptism - we are going to be godparents to the sweetest little boy Murray, so excited we might just burst - but I can’t even remember what we all chatted about instead? Maybe just how good those tacos were, filled with deep fried vegetables in a light tempura style batter (recipe for this soon), which is a good vegetarian replacement for the fish in a taco, it’s got the same vibe. With a chipotle mayo, spicy corn, coleslaw, salsa verde. Alongside the usual black bean tacos that are a staple at both Sarah and my house. I get anxious if there aren’t beans in the house, either soaking, or on the stovetop, in the freezer, or all three at once. My new anxiety, that we’ll run out of jalapeños.

pickled jalapeños

(This is Sean’s recipe, and I had to press for ratios, he normally just pours in the vinegar and doesn’t measure the sugar, but these ratios will work well.)

500g green or red jalapeños
600 ml white vinegar
1 cup white sugar
2 tbsp brown mustard seeds
3 star anise
1 cinnamon stick

Slice the jalapeños into thin rounds. Use gloves, or be very careful to wash your hands repeatedly once you’ve finished chopping, and do not rub your eyes.

Heat the vinegar, sugar and spices until the sugar has dissolved. Then allow to cool. Place sliced jalapeños into sterilised jars. Strain the spices from the pickling liquid and pour the pickling liquid over the jalapeños until they’re covered. The pickling liquid should taste sweet and tangy. You can eat jalapeños straight away but they will improve a little in flavour as they pickle.

This should make about three small jars.

Please don’t tell my neighbours, and please forgive me (I guess they’ll know soon enough, when they take the net down) but I’ve cut a little hole in their net and have been secreting ripe figs over the fence. They are such grand purple figs, the size of my palm and I just couldn’t stand the torture of watching them ripen without me.

I reach my arm through the little hole and way up into the tree to find the ripest fig. And they should be very ripe, (remember they don’t ripen off the tree). So ripe they’re almost bursting, splitting at their bums, so that the flesh inside is almost caramelized from the sun. Eat them just like this, or with the chèvre they are just lovely. Wrap them in a little coat of prosciutto if you are feeling fancy.

ripe purple figs with goats cheese

6 very ripe purple figs, sliced in half
200g chèvre goats cheese
a drizzle of fruity olive oil
pepper and sea salt

Lay the sliced figs on a platter. Gently give each fig half a little slice of cheese. Drizzle with olive oil and a generous crack of black pepper and sea salt. Serve as a starter with a fresh cold drink. We’ve been drinking Aperol spritzers and Negronis.

Sarah and I have had requests for recipes using zucchinis from friends who have an absolute glut of backyard produce. Zucchinis have this mischievous ability to hide under leaves and turn so very quickly into marrows. This cake is made from a giant marrow that was allowed to grow unchecked on our friend’s roof garden. It was half a foot long and as round as a melon. Somewhat overwhelming, and I’m sure not as sweet as it would have been if picked as a finger long baby zucchini. This is the perfect way to use a marrow. The zucchini gives the cake such a beautiful moist crumb, somewhat in the way of a carrot cake, but the zucchini itself almost disappears. It’s almost chirstmassy in its spice, and play around with amounts if you want it a little subtler. And my favourite bit, the icing and it’s crazy accoutrements. Pepitas, currants, nuts! I love how wild it looks, and gosh, it is yum. Make it now with the very last of the zucchini crop.

Zucchini Cake

¾ cup plain flour
¾ cup wholemeal flour
1 ¼ cup Castor sugar
1 tspn baking powder
1 ½ tspn cinnamon
2 tspn mixed spice
2 cups zucchini, grated
½ cup walnuts, chopped
3 free-range eggs
1 cup fruity olive oil (or sunflower)

Grease a 20cm ring tin and pre-heat oven at 180C. Place all ingredients in a bowl, and mix together. Place mix in tin. Bake for approximately 65 minutes, or until a skewer inserted, comes out clean. Cool on rack.

Cream Cheese Icing

250g cream cheese
1 cup icing sugar
1 tspn vanilla essence or the seeds scraped from a vanilla bean
1 lemon, juice and zest

Mix all ingredients until smooth (we used a food processor). Spread onto the cooled cake. Garnish with dried fruit, seeds and nuts.

We used:

2 tbsp currants
2 tbsp pepitas, toasted and cooled
2 tbsp walnuts, toasted, cooled, chopped

Salad with purple chive flowers, the pop of finger limes, bitter leaves and sweet citrus. Finger limes are a native Australian fruit, grown in northern NSW and southern QLD and they’re in season now. Open out the fingers and inside they look like caviar, with their blush of pink. They taste similar to lime. The salad is to accompany scallops in their shells. The pearlescent pink of the scallop shells looking so good with the dainty salad. Oranges are, of course, not in season, but this is a salad made for northern hemisphere readers. For those in the south, leave out the orange and tone down the bitter leaves, adding pea shoots or sweet greens. The salad was in part, inspired by this salad by the ever beautiful cannelle et vanille.

The picture is of our prepped ingredients. For the recipe head to the Svbscription blog. This is not just for valentine’s, cook a meal for someone you love any day of the week.

Thanks so much to Mr Kitly for the props used in this shoot.

(except for those little teaspoons which were my grandmother’s)

And now, for the new year, when it’s too hot to cook really, we have giant jars of strawberry jam. Notice how the form of the cut strawberry still holds in the jam. Slathered with French butter on leftover panettone, I can still see the little sides of the strawberries, so pink and speckled. A sweet toast feast for the first days of the year.

HNY to y’all, and if you’re in need of a calendar, there are some still available.

Strawberry Jam

This recipe has been heavily adapted from the book Out of the Bottle by Sally Wise.

1.5 kg whole strawberries, cleaned, tops removed and rinsed
2 lemons worth of juice
800g caster sugar
⅓ cup of water

Place the sugar in a moderate oven on a tray and warm it until its hot to the touch. Take care not to melt the sugar or have it in the oven too long.
Once you have cleaned all the strawberries, and rinsed them well, place them in a large heavy bottomed pot with the lemon juice and water and bring to the boil. The strawberries will start to break down. Simmer until the fruit collapses a little and you can start to see the liquid come to the top. This will take around ten mins.

Take the sugar out of the oven and carefully spoon the sugar into the pot. Bring to the boil and stir until the sugar has dissolved.

Cook the jam on a low to moderate heat for around an hour, or until the jam reaches setting point* (see tips for setting point below). The jam will take awhile to do this but its best not to stir too often, if at all. You will need to keep an eye on the colour of the jam, you want it to stay pink, and not go brown at all. You can start testing for setting point whenever you like, but its usually when the bubbles are starting to get thick and the jam looks viscose (like a boiling cauldron) it is ready.

Also, you might want to hang around in the kitchen as the jam could froth up and overflow! While you’re keeping an eye on your jam, sterilize some jars, washing them in soapy water, rinse and then let them dry in the oven. When jarring your jam, remove the jars from the oven and spoon the jam, while still warm, into the hot jars.

*There are a few ways to test setting point, I like to do both just to cover my bases.
Keep a saucer in the freezer place a teaspoon full on the very cold saucer. Set down for a minute and after that time draw a line through the jam with your finger. The jam should stay either side of your line. If its oozy, it needs more time.
The other way is to place your jam on a saucer and place the saucer in the fridge for one minute. Bring the saucer back out of the fridge and if the jam wrinkles on top when you poke it with your finger it is set.

Also, we have a calendar giveaway to announce. We are giving away five 2013 t&a calendars. To win, make a comment with your favourite t&a recipe from this year, on this post and we will select names at random from here and our FB page, at the end of business tomorrow. Exciting!

passion fruit and apple juice popsicle

6 passion fruits, cut in half and pulp scooped out
200ml apple juice

Scoop passion fruit pulp into the popsicle moulds. A little for each popsicle. Top up with apple juice. Freeze. Pop in a half chopstick when they are half frozen, for a handle.

Also announcing the bureau of meteorology’s prediction of 37C for Saturday in Melbourne. Best go to the beach. Best go to the beach with a raspberry chardonnay popsicle. With those raspberries hanging suspended in the boozy juice. Best release their jeweled flesh with an icy bite.

See you next week when the cool change has come, sand on our feet, with a tower of calendars ready to post.

Raspberry Chardonnay Popsicle

1 cup of raspberries
150ml cloudy apple juice
1 cup of chardonnay

Place raspberries into the popsicle moulds. Mix apple juice and chardonnay and top up the popsicle moulds with this mixture. Use some wooden chopsticks trimmed to size for the popsicle handle. Freeze.

Trotski & Ash are selling their beautiful 2013 wall calendar.

Limited edition. Get in quick!

Each month has a full-page colour photograph,

seasonal information (Southern Hemisphere only)

And a seasonal specific recipe.

Tied with a coated paper twine.

At the end of 2013 the calendar can be deconstructed.

Each month becomes a recipe card.

Size 180 x 234 mm, it is bigger and more luxurious.

The calendar is printed on FSC paper.

For an extra $4 we will gift-wrap the calendar.

With brown paper, tied with twine

Stamped with a T&A stamp.

To receive in time for Christmas

order must be placed and payment finalised by 18th December

(Australia only).

Remember to check your address in paypal.

(Will send orders out, starting Monday the 10th.)

Postage and gift wrapping options

+ postage within Australia $24.00 AUD + postage within Australia + gift wrapping $28.00 AUD + International postage $27.00 AUD + International postage + gift wrapping $31.00 AUD