Inner Solace

{086} or 365.

Apple tarte tartin.

Oozy, dribbly goodness.

{085} of 365.

Berry and custard dessert thing[1]

Ingredients:

• Custard
• Puff pastry
• Berries
• 1 Tbs jam

Method:

1. Cut puff pastry into shapes of your choosing.  Brush lightly with egg or milk and sprinkle with a little sugar.  Bake according to package directions or until puffed and lightly browned.
2. Buy, prepare or otherwise obtain custard of your choosing.  This one is a Thermomix vanilla custard.
3. In a small pot, add a bunch of berries, and a tablespoon of jam.  Mash a couple of them to get a little juice out.  Heat until warmed through and the berries soften just a little.  Make sure it’s mixed well.
4. Layer the puff pastry with custard and berries to your liking.

[1] Not very good at naming things, sorry.

{076} of 365.

Cookie dough ice-cream shake.  Was kind of cheap ice-cream, won’t be buying that again. :P But the concept was sound.

{073} of 365.

Grilled salmon with a mushroom and olive tapenade on broccolini.

Yes, too much DOF.

{053} of 365.

Miso and Green Tea Soba Soup

Ingredients:

• 1 tsp miso paste (white or red)
• 1 Tbs dried wakame (or to your liking)
• 1 Tbs of firm tofu, dice small
• a large pinch of dashi granules
• 200mL hot water
• 1/4 portion of green tea soba

Method:

1. Break the soba in half (if you like) and cook according to package instructions.
2. Mix the miso with a little hot water to form a loose paste.
3. Add everything else and mix well.
4. Give it a minute for the wakame to rehydrate, then eat.

Photos will continue to look crap while I feel the same. :P

milk liqueur - day 19

Filtration success!  It took about 7-8 coffee filters, and a couple of days, but it worked!

1 3/4 cups each of vodka, raw sugar and milk (1 cup lite, 3/4 cup full fat lactose free) produces about 2 1/4 cups of liqueur and just barely fits in a small Choya bottle[1].

I’m not entirely sure what is making the liquid yellow. It could be the lemon, it could just be what happens normally.  I’d need to understand the science behind what the process does before I can figure that one out.

At the time that I bottled this, I couldn’t smell or taste anything much, and the drop I tasted tasted like sweet lemony syrup.

Eric has had a couple tastes on the day it was bottled, as well as the weekend just past and he said the lemon flavour has mellowed out a bit.  It seems that it tastes like dissolved milk sweets with a twist of lemon.  I guess I can deal with this.

I still have a bit of my cold and my face is a bit blocked up still, so I have to wait a bit longer before I tuck into the liqueur, but the response seems positive. :)

I think this went quite well, and was pretty easy once I figured out that you needed the acid for the reaction.  I’ll definitely be making this again, although I might try a chocolate or chai flavour next time.

Note: If you’re making it yourself and want to maximise the filtration output with your coffee filters, I found that you could get one pour and one top-up out of each coffee filter before the milk residue makes it take too long to process much more.

Once the filter gets down to about the last tablespoon or so and it looks like sludge, you can just transfer that filter into a small bowl and make sure that it stays upright so the sludge doesn’t spill out.  It’ll still keep filtering at a much slower rate but if you come back to it an hour or so later you’ll find quite a bit at the bottom of the bowl that you can bottle and toss the filter.  Meanwhile you can keep filtering with a fresh filter.

The environmentally conscious could use a cloth or metal coffee filter.  I’m sure it does the same thing.

[1] Apparently the small Choya bottle is 430mL but it’s definitely about 2 1/4 cups based on the volume of that measuring jug.  So no idea what’s going on there.

{048} of 365.

One day old half a lime and a freshly added half a lemon in the milk liqueur.  The lime did nothing to thicken the mixture. Let’s hope the lemon does.

I’m not actually sure what it is that makes the colour or the flavour.  Some other people were asking that to figure out if they could use the bi-products for cheese-making or something else.

I’ve stuck in a half lime and a half lemon now and it’s thickening nicely.  It hasn’t separated the way it had in the original recipe, but then it looks like that kind of separation happened when they mixed the alcohol and before they added the acid.

Think I’ll try to filter a small quantity with the coffee filters in a couple days.  If it works out and it’s good enough to keep making more (mmm… flavours) I’ll definitely look into the beer filter cartridges. Nice tip that, thanks!

I was actually wondering if one of these metal one-cup coffee filters would do a similar thing though.  It’s tempting to go nick mum’s for a couple days to see if it does the job.  Would certainly be easier than using the disposables or cloth.

Oh, I also thought about cheese related things to separate it.  That was last resort type thinking. :) But it’s definitely a back-up option.