Nishiki Market in photos

We gathered up anything that looked interesting, and, if not eaten on the spot, took it all back to eat in the communal kitchen of our ryokan along with a longneck of Asahi from the fridge. And it was all delicious.

Trip

It started with this…

… and ended with this.

 While I warm up to using some of this haul, I’ll round up some good eating that was had in Kyoto, New York and San Francisco.

Green tea and black sesame macarons

I had several reasons for spending far too much precious time making macarons today:

1)   procrastination

2)   imminent departure for Japan (provided we don’t get bumped again, for then I should give up rearranging my carefully laid plans and take to a darkened room instead of beating my fists against Acts of God and sending several of Flight Centre’s International Travel Consultants on stress leave) where they use such things as matcha and black sesame – why yes, you’re right, that is a flimsy connection

3)   procrastination

4)   the discovery that all the little plastic containers taking up space in the freezer added up to 18 egg whites, thanks to my recent ice-cream-making obsession

5)   procrastination

6)   I named my blog for them, and what do I have to show for that so far?

7)   procrastination

I’ll briefly run through my method for this; thankfully no one reads this blog in order to be mislead – to skip to the end and get it out of the way, these didn’t work and I don’t know why. 

Green tea version first. Sift 110g icing sugar, 70g almond meal and 2 tablespoons matcha into a bowl. I’m no greater fan than Nigella of sifting, but concede it’s best not to skip this step – the almond meal especially usually yields a half-teaspoon or so of not-so-fine meal that needs to be discarded lest it roughen the surface of the macaron. If only that were the extent of the macaron’s worries.

In an electric mixer, whisk 100mL eggwhite* and a pinch of salt until stiff. Add the teensiest bit of green food colouring – I jabbed a wooden skewer into my Wilton gel and used what came away on it, that’s how miniscule I’m talking. That pack of colours will see me out, I think.

 *100mL = 90g or about 3 whites. Probably about 5 tablespoons, although it’s very difficult to measure whites that way – there’s always a glutinous chunk that likes to slip out and take the level down with it.

Re-sift the sugar/flour/matcha over the bowl of whites and gently fold in until the mixture has achieved a magma-like consistency. Fill a piping bag fitted with a 5mm nozzle and pipe as best and consistently as possible onto a silicon-lined tray, as if creating little snails, flicking back the nozzle at the last instant to avoid a snail with a … tail. 

 This is where I go so very wrong, time and again. I’ve watched Youtube clips, I’ve read up, I’ve steadied my hand, I cannot get the uniformity of circle I so want. And because I have a crappy small oven that only takes a tray of meagre size, I fall into the trap of putting them too close together – they will spread a bit, and often do as they rest. 

In spite of having been in this pickle before, I did the same again today and then thought better of it and scraped the ones most at risk of colliding back into the piping bag with a spatula, in the process injuring the adjacent ones and sending them the same route. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

I also chopped up some vanilla sencha and sprinkled that over them. 

Then I did the whole thing again for a batch of black sesame macarons, with about quarter of a cup ground black sesame seeds instead of the matcha. And no food colouring.

 

 The tray of circles or ovals or whatever then sit until their surface can be very lightly touched with the tip of a finger and not come stickily away on it. How long this takes depends on how warm and humid it is – a lot of recipes talk about half an hour, but I left these all day before they passed the touch test.

And then there is the baking of the macaron ...

So anyone anywhere with anything to say about macarons agrees that it’s a 150 C oven for 10–11 minutes. No more, no less. Well, that does nothing for mine. I bump it up to 170 and it still needs almost half an hour before any kind of hardening of the surface starts to happen. So I grow bored and walk away, and then they’re lightly browned, quelle horreur. And it gets worse.

THEY LACK FEET.

In fact, they’re nothing but flat discs with too much crunch. How do they not have feet? I don’t know the answer – I’m none too clear on how perfectly made macarons do form feet.

This lot are actually the worst macarons I’ve ever made, worse even than my first attempt. I really could do with one of those fabulously expensive weekend macaron workshops.

And there it is. Sunday Fail Part II.

I was loath to waste a perfectly good ganache on these sorry specimens, so I knocked together a buttercream filling with another 2 eggwhites, 100g castor sugar, 170g butter and some vanilla extract. The resulting sandwiches did have a good taste – the degrees of matcha and black sesame seemed okay, not too overpowering or subtle, so I might try these again. One day.

Silverbeet and spinach pie

 I set out to make spanakopita, but didn’t have filo or pastry or feta or sesame seeds, so sort of made this up from bits and pieces of sources, mainly Stephanie Alexander’s Crustless Spinach Pie in Kitchen–Garden Companion. Here it is, in its stages. It’s like lasagna, I should tell you first – it seems straightforward enough, yet by the time it’s in the oven you realise you just spent most of Saturday afternoon in the kitchen. Still, it’s a good slice-up-and-freeze-the leftovers option.

First thing I did was ditch the crustless aspect, referring to the flan pastry in Michel Roux’s Pastry. How can a pie be allowed to lack a crust?

500g plain flour

250g cold butter, chopped into bits

2 teaspoons castor sugar

½ teaspoon salt

2 eggs

80mL combined water and iceblock

Put all ingredients except the water in the KitchenAid, and combine with a dough hook on slow speed until grainy-looking. Slowly add the ice water until it all clumps together. Scrunch it all together in the mixing bowl a bit, and divide in half. Shape the halves into flattish discs, wrap in cling wrap and refrigerate for at least half an hour.

Sorry if I just tricked you into making a double quantity – it’s true that only one disc is needed for this here recipe, but why not make another for future reference with no more trouble? It’ll keep in the fridge for a few days, or freeze against the winter. It can be used for most pie situations that call for a nice rich buttery crust.

After it’s chilled and rested, roll out on a floured board and line a greased pie dish. Stab it with a fork and line with foil before pouring in pie beads or split peas and blind-bake for 20 minutes at 180 C. Remove the baking weights and bake for another five minutes. Set aside to cool.

2 onions, chopped

several cloves garlic, chopped

bunch silverbeet, leaves shredded (save stalks for a gratin or soup)

bunch spinach, leaves shredded

Soften onions and garlic in a little olive oil over a medium heat, add silverbeet and cover for 5 minutes until wilted a bit. Add spinach and stir until it’s all cooked. Leave to cool. Add dill. A little dried mint is another good addition I didn’t think of until now.

500g ricotta, give or take

3 eggs

grated nutmeg

salt and pepper

[gratuitous unmoulded ricotta shot, thank you for your patience]

Mash all this together in a bowl as thoroughly or roughly as you like (personally I like to come across the odd chunk of ricotta when slicing the pie) and combine with the greens. Pour into the prepared pastry case. Sprinkle over:

chopped kalamata olives

lightly toasted pinenuts

grated parmesan [whatever quantities you feel like for all these]

Cook at 180 C for about half an hour until there are browned bits on top.

Pear-chocolate tart

It’s not all wine and dessert at my work, much as we may try. We do have a healthful regime, in the shape of a weekly fruit delivery from the people at CERES. Sadly, the end of every week finds the furry brown bosc pears unloved and unchosen, softening in the corners of the plastic tub, inexorably passed over for the peaches.

I know how they feel. I relate to those pears. I remember what it was like at school whenever competitive sports teams involving balls and other such horrors were chosen. I didn’t even want to be in a stupid team, any more than a pear wants to be quartered and eaten, but being last-picked every time, and then only grudgingly and because the teacher insisted … well, it rankled. I’m not bitter though.  

Anyway, so I took the rejected, humiliated, demoralised pears home, and brought about their meeting with dark chocolate and pastry, and, well, it was like they’d cast off their spectacles and found Clearasil. Judging by the state of the plate not long after they were returned to the kitchen at work, they’d have no trouble whatsoever getting a deb ball partner in Year 12. But before this analogy runs any further off the rails, let me consolidate here the many online sources I consulted.

Gluten-free crust adapted very loosely from Gluten-free Girl and others

1 cup rice flour

½ cup potato flour

¾ cup cornflour

3 teaspoons icing sugar

¼ teaspoon salt

120g unsalted butter, fridge-cold

1 egg

2 tablespoons white wine vinegar

¼ cup water once 1 iceblock is in it (does that make sense?)

You’re supposed to use a pastry cutter or fork to work the butter into all the dry ingredients that precede it, but the thought of going anywhere near all that squeakily super-fine substance makes me come over all funny-like and goosebumpy. So I let the KitchenAid take care of that with its dough hook, but it didn’t really take care of it and I had to unhitch the bowl and get into all that dustiness with a fork after all. Awful, it was. I’m still washing my hands a day later like Lady Macbeth.

Once it had started crumbling a bit I returned it to the KA, adding the egg and vinegar. After a few-scrapings-down of the bowl it had started to form the desired crumbliness, and tentative additions of ice-water soon produced a ball of dough. It was flattened between two sheets of baking paper and went into the fridge to chill and relax.

Pears:

Most recipes seemed to go for halving the pears so that they could form a ring of turtle-like humps, but I felt this to be too much pear at once for my pear-shy colleagues, and quartered them so they could be arranged in more of an overlapping fan. Some bits had gone a little far in the ripening and had to be cut back, which meant a not-very-uniform array. Then they were poached for about 15 minutes in a litre of water with 250g raw sugar and a split vanilla bean, and left to cool in the syrup.

Back to the chilled pastry, which was rolled out between the sheets of baking paper. As is its wont, the paper started to crease up under the expanding dough after a while and I peeled one sheet off to apply the rolling pin directly to the dough, but that was to take a wrong turn, let me tell you. It was a very delicate and not at all flexible pastry – the edges started to crack and break off with very little provocation. When I’d lost patience – after about a minute – and once it was only about 4mm thick, I pressed it into a greased loose-based tart tin, sticking back the broken-off bits around the sides. Back to the fridge to rest for about half an hour, then blind-baked in a 180 C oven for about 20 minutes, then another 5 or so without the split peas to dry and firm it up a bit more. It didn’t shrink at all – I guess because it lacked the gluten.

Filling (mostly lifted from Jamie Oliver. If you go there, don’t look at the comments. Although I suppose it’s nice that Young People Today are looking at recipe sites instead of having food fights in the Home Ec room…):*

125g ground almonds, scattered over a tray and toasted in the oven until golden

2 eggs

125g butter, softened
95g caster sugar
185g dark chocolate, zapped in 20-second bursts in the microwave and stirred until just melted

Mix everything together and pour into the pastry case, then arrange the drained pears in a ring on top and into the oven at 170 C.

Jamie’s 170 C and my 170 C are clearly very different things – doubtless our ovens are barely related ­– as hardly anything was happening after the recommended 45 minutes and its central regions were still sticking damply to the skewer after an hour and a half, although I think it overcooked closer to the edges.

I failed to provide the suggested crème fraîche or indeed anything at all, though it would have been nice with. 

*That’s not an emoticon, thank you very much. It’s the correct way to close a parenthesis before a colon.

Rhubarb upside-down cake

Sometimes when I have to use up something to free space in the fridge – say a bunch of rhubarb – in searching for a suitable end I stumble over many enticing options, then am compelled to go and get more of the same. It seems I need about five bunches of said rhubarb now, what with the newly found tarts and meringues and orange syrup partnerings clamouring to be made, but this time I made Fresh Rhubarb Upside-Down Babycakes from Cooking with Julia (Julia Child, Dorie Greenspan 1996), adapted a bit. 

I happened not to want babycakes, so turned to the magnificent Konstantin Slawinski silicon cake pan kindly given to me by the Saucemaker.

I’ve made a rich flourless chocolate cake in this cake pan, and very dramatic and architectural it looks, but I felt the pan would really come into its own in showcasing an upside-down-cake application such as this. It didn't keep its shape quite as beautifully as I'd hoped – I should have foreseen that the caramel would abandon its pecans and run off when inverted. I couldn't have gone past the caramel-enrobed pecans, but without it the peaks of the cake would have been unadulterated rhubarb pink and more fabulous to look at.


It’s a big pan, and needs a double quantity of most cake recipes, but I thought it’d be a good fit for this one – this recipe recommended a 12" cake tin if making a whole cake, which is one big cake tin. As it turned out, though, twice the batter could have been used, which would have allowed higher slices. Not sure I agree with the recipe's recommendation there.

1 2/3 cups plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon sea salt
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
300mL carton sour cream
180g unsalted butter, room temperature
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon bourbon
2 tablespoons chopped pecans
bunch fresh rhubarb, trimmed and cut into 5cm lengths, roasted with a cup of sugar and some lemon zest under foil for 20 minutes or until soggy and syrupy
1 cup white sugar
2 eggs

Preheat oven to 180 C. Whisk flour, baking powder, and salt together; set aside. Stir vanilla into sour cream and set aside.

Melt 60g butter, add brown sugar and bourbon and cook over medium heat until the sugar melts. Stir in pecans and turn off the heat. Pour into silicon cake pan or into a greased 24cm tin. Arrange rhubarb over caramel as desired; set aside.

Beat sugar and remaining 120g butter in mixer on medium-high until light, fluffy, and pale. Reduce speed to medium and add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Alternately fold in dry ingredients and sour cream. Spoon batter over the rhubarb.

Bake for about an hour or until a skewer comes out clean.
 

I’d do this one again, especially as quite a few variations are offered, one in particular involving sage leaves. The cake part was great –very dense and a good foil for the syrupy rhubarb atop it. The Labyris Bearer was trying to work out what the tart custardy element was, which we decided must be the carton of sour cream.  

Elizabeth Taylor and Sunday-night roast chicken

 Watching Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in honour of the late great Elizabeth Taylor and that chicken leg feels like the thing to do tonight.

Plus roast chicken with a generous layer of tarragon-lemon-and-garlic butter eased and smeared under the breast skin. And potatoes tossed in semolina, the better to soak up residual fat and oil for all the more crunch.