Kitchen reports, continued

[ellarien]

Tonight's dinner: beef and parsnip stew. I sliced a largish parsnip fairly thin, and diced up four mushrooms, a couple of tomatoes, half a green pepper, a couple of thick slices of eggplant, and half a medium-sized red onion. Everything except the onions went in the biggest casserole dish with a squished clove of garlic, a good shake of dried tarragon, and a sprinkle of ground oregano and black pepper, and some hot water. The onions and beef I stir-fried until the beef was brown, then added them to the casserole, and stuck it in the oven at 325 for a bit over an hour. That was enough for a generous plateful, with about three cups left over for later.

Notes for future reference;

1) Get the shelves arranged before pre-heating the oven, preferably.

2) The parsnip made it worthwhile. I could probably have skipped the eggplant and used the other half of the onion, but it was my first raw onion ever and half if it looked like an awful lot.



Cake: I couldn't find my mother's sponge-cake recipe, but the recipes in my book suggested that an ounce of sugar, flour, and fat to each egg ought to work, so that's what I did, on a one-ounce scale; I think the family recipe was a one-step thing, but other half-remembered recipes suggested creaming the fat and sugar first, then adding the egg, beating it a bit, and folding in the flour, so I did that, then mixed in a quarter-teaspoon of vanilla extract, dolloped the batter into a well greased and lined six-inch cake tin, and baked at 350 for about twenty minutes, at which point the toothpick test suggested it was done. (I have no idea why I had toothpicks handy, but I found a box when I was trying to rationalize the cabinets this afternoon.)

Notes:

1) One oz flour is approximately a quarter-cup, so I gave it a half-teaspoon of baking powder.

2) Next time, maybe I'll remember to save the trimmings of the greaseproof paper for greasing the tin.

Comments

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I don't care for parsnips, but I think a nice big root vegetable of some sort would have added extra yummy flavour to my soup. Perhaps a yam.

I'll make up batches of gingerbread from scratch, but I don't think I've done cake in years.

[ellarien]

I'm really harking back to my childhood with this; parsnips in stew -- or roasted with the Sunday leg of lamb -- were one of the nicer things about winter. (That and mincemeat. I wonder if I could get mincemeat here?) And my mother must have baked a twelve-slice sponge cake every week for about fifteen years; we'd have a slice each at the end of dinner/tea for three days, and then scones or jam tartlets or buns (cupcakes) the rest of the week.