Turkish pizzas with pomegranate, feta, spinach and pine nuts

These are a great variation on the more typical Italian pizzas.

The recipe is from "Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons" by Diana Henry - a great book on food from the Middle East, Mediterranean and North Africa.

The spinach is cooked down with red onion until all the free moisture is gone and the spinach starts to dry.

I need to have gluten free food, so the bases are not from the book (though the method is the same). I replaced the standard wheat flour with a mix of 60% off the shelf gluten free flour mix and 40% chick pea flour.  This works fine, so long as you are careful with rolling them out as they are more fragile.  I tend to just make smallish bases and just push and pull them in to shape with my hands. I pre-cooked the bases in a hot oven for five minutes before putting the spinach and feta on.  I usually do this with pizzas as I find standard ovens lack the fire power to cook pizzas as quickly as they really should.

I even used homegrown pomegranates!

Ang Ku Kuih

OK, this is my second ever Blog Post - twice in 24 hours!

I am submitting this post to Chinese New Year Delights 2013 hosted by Sonia aka Nasi Lemak Lover.

This time I (together with daughter) made a favorite of ours - Ang Ku Kuih.  I'm not sure that it is particularly a CNY food, but we love it and thought it was a good thing for CNY.  We tried these in Malaysia in 2010 and loved them so much we went hunting around for recipe books!

We used the recipe in the Nonya Flavours book published by Star - as we have done before.  The only change we made was to add some extra sugar to the mung beans - last time we made it some Australian friends thought it wasn't quite sweet enough.  In hindsight I think the original recipe is probably just fine as it is.


Steaming the mung beans with pandan:
 

Cooking the steamed mung beans with sugar:

Steaming the sweet potato:

This is the dough (glutinous rice flour with sweet potato), the mung bean, sugar and pandan filling and the kuih mould (bought in Penang when on holidays), ready for assembling together, which is much easier than you would think:

Ready to be steamed:

Steaming away:

 

 

 

The finished Ang Ku Kuih:

 

The Verdict:

Great!  The recipe works perfectly.  While it takes a fair while to make, it isn't very difficult.  They taste fantastic - especially when very fresh.

Ours turned out rather orange, which may have been a result of the mix of food colouring we used (we didn't have the exact colour).  A Taiwanese friend said they have red ones in Taiwan, so thought ours should be red.  Looking at images on the net there are all sorts of colours but some are very red and some are very orange - rather similar to ours.  So maybe our orange colour is as it is meant to be.

Kuih Bangkit

My first ever blog post!

I am submitting this post to Chinese New Year Delights 2013 hosted by Sonia aka Nasi Lemak Lover.

Having never tried making Kuih Bangkit before, nor even eating it until I bought some from the shop to see what I was meant to be making, and not being Malaysian (but loving Malaysian food), I decided to make these for CNY and enter them in a competition!  A little bold (and odd), perhaps!

I used a recipe cobbled together from several sources, including Rasa Malaysia, Kimmy Cooking Pleasure and the Nonya Flavours book published by Star.

I couldn't seem to locate genuine arrowroot flour in Perth, Australia (most of it is actually just tapioca flour) so I couldn't go with the Nonya Flavours recipe pf arrowroot and cornflour.  I had some bought Kuih Bangkit made with tapioca flour that tasted good and melted in the mouth, but left a chalky dry feeling.  I had another brand that was made with sago flour that was very crunchy, less chalky, but didn't melt in the mouth - more like a standard western biscuit.  In the end I thought that half tapioca and half sago might be a good way to go (which was one of Kimmy's suggestions).

Some recipes had a little butter, some didn't.  I decided to leave it out.

So this was my recipe:

250g Tapioca flour
250g Sago Flour
5 Pandan leaves, chopped into small lengths
125g Icing sugar
175ml (approx) Coconut milk
2 Egg whites (extra small)
2 Eggs (whole) (extra small)

I used our own bantam eggs, which are very small compared to regular chook eggs.

First, I "cooked" the flours and pandan leaves over medium heat in a wok - until the pandan was very crispy and the flour seemed, well, "cooked".  I found it a little hard to judge the timing - but about 40 minutes.

Second, I sieved out the leaves and let the flour cool overnight.

Third, I creamed the sugar and eggs and egg whites together until creamy and thick (and a little yellow as our chook eggs are extra yellow because they eat lots of greens!)

Fourth, I added the coconut milk, mixed it some more, then slowly added the cooked and cooled flour a bit at a time until I got a dough mixture that was thick and not too sticky.  I needed the dough by hand for about 5 minutes, then let it rest for a while under a damp cloth.

Fifth, I made the dough into shapes using floured wooden kuih moulds (bought in Penang when on holidays).  I tried 2 sorts: tiny little animal shapes and a larger shape.  The animal shapes were very cute, but they were so small that it would have taken forever, so I swapped to the larger shapes after I had made a hundred or so (I may be exaggerating).

Sixth, I baked them till done, around 20 minutes for the small ones, 25 for the larger ones. I let them bake until just a little browner on the bottom.  

The Verdict:

Pretty good for a first attempt!  They looked great - the moulds created great shapes with lots of detail.  They were crisp and delicate, but didn't fall apart at all.  The larger biscuits cracked a little on the top - not sure why.

They tasted great.  They had a great "melt in the mouth" feel, without being very dry or chalky.  I'm not sure if the mix of sago and tapioca flour helped with this, but the texture was better than both the bought ones I tried, so perhaps it did.

I shall try again next CNY!