Smooth

I bought this blender. It was on sale at Myer, I had a gift card and it has essentially the same specs as a Vitamix or Blendtec. It has a large jug standard and the smoothies I have made with it have an excellent consistency, it does 'choke' a bit when you're using larger chunks of frozen fruit like pineapple. When this happens you need to add more liquid and use the baton to push the fruit into the blades; there might be some other way around this - but I haven't worked it out yet.

I typically use one type of frozen fruit or ice in my smoothies and use the 'ice crush' or 'smoothie' pre-sets on the blender depending on ratio of frozen and unfrozen ingredients. All recipes make around 1 Litre.

A green one

1/2 cup of water

1/2 cups coconut water

50 g almonds

2 cups of spinach

1 1/2 cups pineapple

1 banana

Use frozen banana or pineapple, add extra water or coconut water to get the consistency you like.

An 'all year' fruit one

2 cups of pineapple

1 1/2 bananas

Juice of three oranges

Add 1 cup of ice if non of the fruit is frozen or 1/2 cup water if using some frozen fruit.

A summer fruit one

2 peaches

1 cup of blueberries

1 cups seedless green grapes

1 cup of ice

October Leftovers

October is a great month for garage sales in Canberra. The Willow ware collection is swelling and it's probably best we just don't talk about the accumulation of French preserving jars. In the kitchen, October was a cookbook month, although all the recipes for bunmania were sourced online. Otherwise:

*google directed me to Gordon Ramsay's caramelised bananas and rum which I made to accompany some hotcakes (can't comment on his hotcakes as I used a different recipe). I did something a bit wrong as my caramel also contained delicious chunks of toffee, definitely worth revisiting when there are too many bananas and another mysterious bottle of rum appears in the pantry.

Korean Stone Pots

When I travel I like to bring home cooking souvenirs; a palella pan, saffron, and many tins of paprika from Spain, duck fat and preserving jar rings from France, Marlborough flaky salt harvested from shallow pools near the Archivist's Grandad's house in the South Island of New Zealand; cookbooks too. A trip to Korea is not on the cards any time soon, so a mission to Koreatown at the south end of Sydney's Pitt St was necessary to acquire some new regional cooking tools.

After visiting every Korean grocer between Golburn and Bathurst Streets, admiring fermented stuff and purchasing a variety of chilli products, I finally found two stone pot bowls, made of smooth Korean granite, $25 a piece. Pressed for time I carted my booty to the Opera House to enjoy Brian Eno's 77 Million Paintings and then back to Central Station for an uneventful bus trip to Canberra.

The stone pot is essential for making the delicious scorched rice that characterises dolsot bibimbap (돌솥 비빔밥); a current food obsession of mine. My Korean cookbook - The Korean Table by Taekyung Chung and Debra Samuels - advises that you can also get crispy rice by preparing bibimbap in a pre-heated cast iron pan - but this isn't such a great solution if you want individual servings and to enjoy the ritual of breaking the egg yolk and stirring the artfully arranged namul (나물) through the rice as it sizzles.

Preparing the Stone Pot

To season the stone pot before it's fist use, fill the bowl 1/3 with salty water and heat in the oven at 200°C until the water boils. Then carefully remove the bowl from the oven, tip out the water and place the bowl on a heat proof surface. Paint the inside, rim and outside of the bowl with sesame oil or any other edible oil until oil no longer permeates the stone. Wipe off the excess oil with paper towel.

To make dolsot bibimbap, preheat the oven to 230°C, then heat the bowl for 30 minutes. Remove from the oven, brush with sesame oil, press cooked rice against the bottom of the bowl and assemble the dish.

DO NOT put hot stone pot into cold water, granite is sensitive to sudden temperature changes and will fracture.

For bibimbap topping ideas and assembly instructions check out these videos

Pins, Pans, Jugs and Tins

Mostly thrifted

Fine Slice Ratatouille

Ratatouille made with fresh eggplant, green and red capsicums, zucchini, and onions cut into fine slices. Crushed garlic and tomatoes, salt and freshly cracked black pepper.

The finely sliced veges make this version of the Provençal classic a great pizza topping and the prep is super easy when you use Benriner slicer. The Benriner has been getting a lot of use this summer for slaws, it's really simple to use - especially if you are a rebel like myself and discard the useless finger guard. People seem to harp on about the dangers of this device, but as long as you pay some attention it's fairly difficult to cut yourself.

The blades are carbon steel, so make sure you dry the Beriner off completely before you pack it away. I sewed an ugly towel pouch to keep the slicer and the blades safely confined in the utensil drawer.

Pitting

Cherry pitting is slow and messy with a hand held tool like mine. I bought my Avanti cherry & olive pitter at the Salvation Army some time ago since with a plan to make cherry jam in summer. At first it only saw some scant action on olives, it really isn't much good for olives - it forces out a cylindrical plug of flesh and seed - you lose less olive by crushing the fruit with the back of your knife and peeling the flesh away from the seed. I used it to pit cherries for the first time Sunday, it's better at cherries than olives, it's easy to target the seed and I was able to pit a kilo of fruit in about 40 minutes, it would have been faster if the tool didn't lock in the half-open position so frequently. If I pitted cherries more than once a year I'd be looking for a better designed tool.

I could be convinced to make a lot more jam if I had one of these


And this is how the pros do it