Savoury Steamed Custard

I saw this recipe in The Age Epicure last week and had wanted to prepare it for the family. Alas no-one seemed too thrilled about the idea of a savoury steamed custard except me (and I had my doubts as well) So tonight everyone else is sick, getting sick or getting better from being sick and I am left to prepare dinner for myself. I have decided to go ahead and make savoury custard for one.

I don't know why I had doubts, this was really good and quick to prepare... a lovely, simple pleasure. Thank-you to Elizabeth Chong for this recipe Age Epicure 26/9/2008.

Jenny Lee's Savoury Egg Custard (with a few small changes)

Ingredients

1 teaspoon dried shrimp

4 eggs

1/2 teaspoon salt

luke warm water

60 g minced pork

50g spring onion snipped into 4 cm lengths

Toasted sesame oil

Oyster sauce

250 grams of basmati rice

600-800 grams of brocolli florets (enough for four people)

Method

Chop the shrimp on speed 10 for 5 seconds, then add the spring onion and chop on speed 6 for 2 seconds or until it is chopped finely.

Add your eggs, minced pork and 100ml water to the bowl, beat on speed 3 for 5 seconds

Pour the egg mixture into four individual ramekins or small bowls and rinse out your Thermomix bowl with cold water. 

Fill your Thermomix bowl with 900 grams of water. 

Add the basmati rice to your steamer basket, wash under the tap and place the basket in the TM bowl.

Fit the Varoma onto the top of the Thermomix. Place the ramekins into the Varoma, you will probably have to take out the tray and place them in the bottom section.

Cook on Varoma temperature for 15 minutes, taste the rice, it should be done and if so remove it to your Thermoserver.

Put as much broccoli as will fit in the now empty steamer basket and the remainder in the lower section of the Varoma with the ramekins and steam for a further 5 minutes.

When the custards are cooked, serve them up with a good sprinkling of toasted sesame oil and a dessertspoonful dollop of oyster sauce. Unlike every other oyster sauce I have looked at, housewife brand has nothing artificial in it, so I use that.

Serve with rice as part of a larger meal as Elizabeth suggests, or if you want to do it how I decided to have it... with a big bowl of steamed broccoli and a bowl of plain rice.

Simple pleasure. (Serves 4)

Steamed Blue-eye with Chermoula

Make up a batch of chermoula and you'll find a million ways to use it. This paste of middle eastern herbs and spices is wonderfully fragrant and goes well in a variety of dishes whether they be roasted, baked, steamed pan fried or barbecued. Use chermoula as a marinade, a stuffing, curry paste, as a filling for bread scrolls or as a pasta sauce, it is versatile and completely delicious. This steamed fish is based on a Neil Perry recipe in 'The Food I Love' and is an impressive way to start steaming. If you haven't started using the Varoma you are really missing out, so get going with it. You don't have access to good fish? Use chicken breast fillets bashed flat with a rolling pin instead. For vegetarians, do warm chermoula  poured over steamed or roasted vegetables and rice. 

You need to steam this fish in a bowl of marinade inside the varoma, so make sure you select a bowl or flat dish that can sit securely inside the varoma without rocking or wobbling. The bowl can go either on the tray (up the top) or on the bottom with the tray removed. 

Chermoula

Ingredients

Rind of a lemon peeled with a vegetable peeler

10g cumin seeds

10g turmeric (ground)

1 tablespoon of chilli flakes

5 grams sweet paprika

1 teaspoon of seasalt

1 red onion

3 garlic cloves

70gram flat leaf parsley

40g coriander leaves stems and roots (washed well)

150g extra virgin olive oil

20g lemon juice

Method

Place lemon rind in the Thermomix bowl and grind for 20 seconds on speed 9

Empty the bowl and put the lemon rind aside

Add cumin seeds, turmeric, chilli flakes paprika and salt to the Thermomix bowl and grind for 30 seconds on speed  8 or until the spices are powdered.

Add garlic cloves and process for 3 seconds on speed 6

Add coriander and parsley, onion, olive oil and lemon juice processing for 15 seconds on speed 5 or until a smooth paste has formed.

Scrape the resulting chermoula into a bowl, leaving 100g in the Thermomix bowl for the Blue-eye marinade.

Steamed Blue-eye with Chermoula

Ingredients

100g Chermoula

30grams of honey

10grams of lemon juice 

100g water

Grated lemon rind (reserved from chermoula recipe)

2 Blue-eye fillets 200g each

200g basmati or jasmine rice

Broccoli and snow peas

Method

Combine all ingredients except the lemon rind in the thermomix and mix on speed 3 for 5 seconds. 

Place your fish fillets into a bowl or plate, pour the chermoula mix over the fish and top with grated lemon rind. 

Measure 200g rice into steamer basket and rinse under running water

Measure 500g water into the Thermomix bowl and place the basket of rice in on top

Close the Thermomix lid and place the varoma on top

Put your bowl  of fish into the varoma and on with the lid

Cook for 15 minutes at Varoma temperature on speed 4

When there are eight minutes to go, being careful not to spill the fish marinade, add brocolli florets to the varoma and allow to steam, then add the snow peas in the last 2 minutes.

Neil Perry says a flat fillet of fish will only take 4-5 minutes to steam and this has also been my experience. So if using flat fillets rather than chunky ones, leave the bowl of fish out of the varoma until the last 6 minutes of cooking time.

Serve on a bed of rice with marinade poured liberally over the top, place broccoli and snowpeas on the side. Magnificent!

Cashew Nut and Vegetable Stir Fry

Neil Perry says that "the art of stir frying is the art of organisation". Yep that would be right and there's my problem. Why do so many things in life have to revolve around being organised? I think I would be much happier if the art of mild to moderate chaos and disorder was more highly valued in society. Sure I can be organised, I just need a little more time than ordinary people to get things that way. So the fast art of stir frying demands something from me that I can find difficult to give. Thermomix to the rescue!

It's one of those things that seems unlikely-the Thermomix stir fries vegetables?  This isn't 'authentic' stir frying, the action isn't frenetic, the oil isn't overheated, there is no smoke, you can't taste the sizzling Wok in the finished product and for some people this might be a disappointment. However if you want to taste the vibrant flavour of vegetables simply cooked without overheating and to stir fry without being the master of organisation then this is for you. 

With this dish you need to chop the vegetables by hand, rather than by Thermomix, so that you get nice textures and shapes that encourage the vegetables to cook at a similar rate

Wombok however can vary in texture, from fine and lacy at the top, to more solid and chunky as you reach the base of the cabbage. The finely textured tips of the leaves require less cooking and so I add them to the Thermomix in the last two minutes of stirfrying. 

The choice of vegetables nuts and sauce are up to you, use this recipe as a starting point and move on from there. If I am feeling like meat, I marinate chicken breast in honey, soy and oil then cook in a pan while  the vegetables are stir frying.

Cashew Nut and Vegetable Stir Fry

Ingredients

30g Macadamia oil (olive oil will do if that's all you have)

1 Garlic clove

2 pieces of ginger the size of a 20 cent piece

50g Red capsicum cut into batons

200g Broccoli cut into florets

15 Snow peas sliced on the diagonal into thirds

250g Wombok (chinese cabbage) shredded

1 Dessertspoonful of Oyster sauce (Housewife brand)

Raw cashews

Basmati or jasmine rice

Method

Set some rice cooking on the stove or cook it in the thermomix and keep separately in the Thermoserver until ready to serve.

Start with a clean, dry Thermomix bowl. Add garlic and ginger to the Thermomix bowl and chop for 5 seconds on speed 7

Scrape down the sides of the bowl with your spatula so that the chopped garlic and ginger are all down the bottom on the cooking surface of the Thermomix

Add your oil and saute on varoma temperature for 3 minutes

Then add all of your vegetables except the wombok and cook for 6 minutes at 100 degrees, reverse and speed soft(that's the spoon symbol) 

You may not believe that the vegetables are going to circulate down to the cooking surface and up again, but they will. Try not to spend all of your time gazing into the Thermomix

After 6 minutes, add the Wombok cabbage and oyster sauce, cook for another 2 minutes at 100 degrees reverse and speed soft (spoon symbol). 

Watch the Brocolli to see when it has become the vibrant green that signals perfectly cooked. You may have to stop early or add another couple of minutes to the cooking time to get it right.

Aim for slightly under, rather than over cooked, remember the vegies will continue to cook slightly as you serve them up. 

When you are happy, pour the stir fry over a bowl of steamed rice and sprinkle liberally with raw cashews.

Sticky Black Rice

There's a book called the Spiritual Nutrition and the Rainbow Diet where the author Gabriel Cousens says that you should try to eat all the colors of the rainbow every day. Activate your base chakra with red food, the solar plexus with yellow, some other one with green, the next with pink, some other ones in between and then the crown chakra with purple food. I love this way of looking at nutrition, but not all purple foods can be equally spiritual. I just can't see myself walking into heaven with an eggplant in my hand. However, I am totally willing to believe that I can eat my way to Nirvana with a big batch of sticky black rice. Well maybe two or three batches. Because it's not really black is it, I'm sure it's purple, in that burgundy kind of way. So put the purple cabbage aside for a moment and accelerate your spiritual growth the Indonesian way.

Get your glutinous rice, pandanus leaves and palm sugar from the Asian supermarket. Despite its name glutinous black rice contains no gluten, I am absolutely sure. Pandanus is a strappy leaf, the Asian equivalent of vanilla, that imparts a pleasantly sweet fragrance to the rice, you can leave this out if you like, but it is worth chasing up in the freezer or fresh at the market. Palm sugar is sold in compressed cylinder shaped blocks, you can substitute dark brown sugar if you like. 

Are you worried about the fat in coconut milk? Well the fats in coconut aren't as unhealthy as we have been led to believe in the past, just don't overdo it.  There are some nasty coconut milks out there that are worth avoiding, I use Ayam brand,  certainly don't go with light coconut milk, it contains things that are unhealthy despite the light label, always check the ingredients. 

For me a cinnamon stick is preferable to ground cinnamon, not only because the flavour is better, but also because you can fish it out at the end and suck it clean, YUM. Is that disgusting? Sorry, I love cinnamon.

Sticky Black Rice with Coconut Cream

Ingredients

280 g  Glutinous black rice 

110 grams palm sugar 

750 g water

2 pandanus leaves

1 cinnamon stick

3-4 slices of fresh ginger size of 50 cent piece

270 ml can coconut cream

Method 

Remove the measuring cup (MC) 

Place a medium sized bowl on top of the Thermomix and set your scales to zero

Weigh 280g of glutinous black rice into the bowl,  cover with water a leave to soak overnight.

The next morning discard the soaking water, it will be a spectacular bergundy. 

Bash your palm sugar with a rolling pin or something heavy to break it up and weigh 100g into the Thermomix bowl.

Pulverise the sugar on speed 9 for 5 seconds

Add the soaked black rice, cinnamon, ginger and pandanus leaves (knot the leaves into a ball so that you can get them out easily after the cooking is done)

Add 750g of water

Cook in reverse at 90 degrees for 60 minutes, speed 1.5

At the end of the hour the mixture should be thick and soupy, transfer to the thermoserver and stir in the coconut cream. 

Fish out the pandanus, cinnamon and ginger replace the Thermoserver lid and allow the rice to cool.

Or pour yourself a big bowl and enjoy warm 

Transfer the leftovers to the fridge where it will set. 

Serve with sliced banana, mango or papaya.

Serves 4