The Mezzanine

Recipe #32 was Apple Pizza!

It's like apple pie, but pizza. Which is so much cooler than pie. (And yummier, in my opinion. I definitely prefer pizza crust to pie base.)


There are three layers: the crust (which is normal crust but with apple juice mixed in), the "sauce" (apple puree, raisins, sugar, and cinnamon), and the topping (apple and sugar).


REALLY NICE DESSERT. I haven't had anything like it in a decade, and it was even better than I remembered...

I made lemon slice!


It's my sister's recipe, which I fell in love with a few weeks ago. Quite easy to make, too - lots of crushed biscuit and butter, and some condensed milk.

Anyone who feels like stopping by for a piece is most welcome...

Recipe #27 is chocolate mousse!

Really really yummy - or at least the un-refrigerated mixture is. I can't try the actual proper mousse until tomorrow evening. Not that hard, either. If it ends up working, I'll have to make it again.


I can't quite believe I've never made any of these desserts before...

I made pumpkin-and-potato soup in my slow cooker!


A bit of variation from the recipe: it wanted me to use chicken stock, but I had this leftover duck carcass, so I boiled up duck-and-cherry stock, and ended up with soup that had a hint of cherry...

Quite nice. Unusual, but nice.

Recipe #23 is pastitsio!


My recipe book says that "pastitsio is to the Greek kitchen as lasagne is to an Italian cucina". Which certainly looks reasonable so far - it's got pasta, meat sauce, and cheese sauce. It's just... different.

Instead of flat lasagne sheets, the pasta is... macaroni.

Instead of standard meat-onion-tomatoey stuff, the meat sauce has... wine and cinnamon.

Instead of regular old cheese sauce, it has... egg yolk.

(There's also egg in the meat sauce and in with the macaroni. Very eggy recipe.)


It's still in the oven, but based on the smell - and on the small amount of cheese sauce that I couldn't help tasting - it's going to be extremely yummy.

Recipe #20 is jam donuts!

Some internet friends have been discussing their ideal kind of donut lately, which has been making me hungry...


I had to make donut dough (using huge amounts of yeast), and then cut out little dough circles. You sort of squash the jam in between two circles like a sandwich, and smoosh the edges together to trap the jam inside.

VERY yummy. And I now have oil splashed all over my kitchen.

Cooked recipe #17 tonight, with background entertainment of Batman the movie, and then a royal wedding. I'm not sure which one suited the apple crumble more, thematically speaking...



Most of the ingredients were already in my pantry, but I had to go and buy the apples, and some cream. Picked them out very carefully, checking for bruises and other random marks... and then dropped the whole bag onto a hard floor within metres of the cash registers!

Disaster! Apples covered in sudden bruises, apples covered in cream, plastic bag covered in cream, cream suddenly much more whipped than it was supposed to be! Horrors!

All was well, though. Interestingly, bruises don't seem to affect the taste of the apples at all, in the end.

A jam roll!




(Mine does not look like this.)


Currently I am eating up the yummy part that cooked properly, while subjecting the rest to several more minutes of cooking.

It would have worked better if I were* any good at folding flour into fluffy mixtures of whipped egg. Unfortunately, I am not, and when I dumped the flour into the fluffy eggy stuff, it did something like... ~~~Flurbt~~~ and had this lumpy bit in the middle that sneered at me and my laughable expectations of getting it to rise properly.

Silly folding. If I ever have enough money to employ a professional cook, I'll do all the fun bits, and he can do the impossible stuff, like folding.


At any rate, my jam roll (despite not looking like the picture) is very yummy, and I must make it again sometime.



* My grammar guide informs me that "if I was" is perfectly acceptable in all circumstances except those deemed impossible. So you'd say "if I was hungry", but "if I were a flying pink unicorn".
When I say "if I were any good at folding flour", I use the "were" intentionally.

Recipe #13 was Butterfly Cakes.

What you do is, you make little cakes in patty pans - vaguely muffin-shaped - and then you cut out the top bit so there's a small hole in the top of each one. And you fill the holes with jam and cream.

Then you get the bits you cut off, halve them (to make wings) and put them back on top. So the cakes look like they're little jam-and-cream flowers, with cakey butterflies perched on them.

Kind of like this:

...except I did the jam differently.



It's interesting: I hate devonshire tea, which is scones with jam and cream. But I love butterfly cakes, which are cake with jam and cream - and broadly the same kind of thing.

I think it's because, for some reason, the texture of the scones makes me see them as a savoury thing (hence I love cheese scones), so the sweet jam and cream just doesn't fit.



Anyway... butterfly cakes!

We had them at the housemate's kitchen tea, which was very fun.

A kilogram of spinach is a LOT of spinach.

Really. A lot. It's a huge quantity of spinach.

But recipe #11 - spinach and ricotta cannelloni - specified a kilogram of spinach, so I duly went forth and came home with massive amounts of it.
...too much, in fact, to fit in my saucepan. I had to spend an hour and a half rotating bits of spinach in and out of boiling water, so that it'd all get properly cooked.


Eventually, it ended up sitting soggily in a big bowl, where I was supposed to wring the rest of the water out of it by hand.

Aaaaand that's when I found out just how long it takes boiled spinach to cool down enough to not burn your hands when you pick it up and squish it. (Approximately an hour, taking one teeny handful at a time.)


Of course, getting squishy spinachy gunk is not the end of the recipe: I had to combine it with cheese, eggs, and herbs, and smoosh it around the bowl some more - also with my hands... which were getting pretty messy by this point.

Mind you, mushy green gunk is pretty fun to play with.

Which is good, because I had to play with it a lot.


(On reflection, I can see why the first thing the recipe says is "You don't have to cook it right away! It can stay in the fridge all night!", because once you've actually finished making this thing, you're completely sick of the sight of it.)


Anyway, post-mushing, I had to get all the mush into the cannelloni.

Unfortunately, my piping equipment gave up halfway through and stubbornly refusing to keep piping anything that wasn't icing. So I had to push the rest of the spinach into the cannelloni tubes by hand. (Or rather, by finger.)


I am now sitting down to an astonishingly late dinner - of meatloaf; the cannelloni's for tomorrow - which will be followed by an even later bedtime, and I still haven't even finished cleaning up the kitchen. But I don't really care, because... cannelloni! I MADE CANNELLONI! SPINACH AND RICOTTA CANNELLONI! ALL BY MYSELF! I ROCK!




(If I wasn't so stupidly ambitious, I'd happily get through my 52 recipes with mashed potatoes and scrambled eggs and stuff like that. That'd be so much less frustrating. But then again, if I wasn't so ambitious, I wouldn't be doing this whole recipe thing in the first place...)