Mixadventures in bread, potato cakes and apple crumble

Potato cakes

The next thing I made in my Thermomix were the potato cakes from the Basic Cookbook. I’d had my eye on these for a while as a potato rosti/hash brown kind of thing for breakfast. I figured I would cook a up a batch, eat a couple and freeze the rest.

The recipe essentially involves throwing everything into the Thermomix (potatoes, onion, egg, other stuff…), blitzing then shallow frying in a pan. I found I didn’t need to use too much oil, and I cooked them kind of like mini pancakes. I suppose it took about half an hour to cook them all, but the whole thing was extremely easy.

I made 12 in total and they froze extremely well. I’ve found the best means of re-heating is to grill them from frozen. They go great with eggs and my beetroot relish.

There are only two left in my freezer, so I’ll need to make another batch soon. Might try a variation with different vegetables (maybe some carrot? sweet potato? Broccoli?). Yum!

Bread!

Others in my family have been baking bread for ages, so I thought I’d give it a go. I’ve never been particularly enthused about getting my hands dirty, so the whole Thermomix-doing-the-kneading thing was fairly attractive.

I like grainy bread, so I headed straight for the five-seeds loaf from the Basic Cookbook. (The basic cookbook is rather comprehensive!) I already had linseeds, sesame seeds and sunflower seeds in the pantry, so I headed out to buy pepitas (pumpkin seeds), poppy seeds and… yeast.

Oh, the excitement! The Thermomix kneaded for a whole two minutes (as per the recipe), then I transferred the dough into the tin, sprinkled seeds on top (as directed) and waited for it to rise… (I should mention I set aside an entire Sunday afternoon for my bread-making venture.)

When I couldn’t wait any longer, I threw it in the oven to bake. It could maybe have risen more, but I was still fairly ecstatic with how it turned out.

I mean… LOOK!

This is pretty much what the picture in the book looked like. Not bad for my first attempt. Right?!

As far as the eating goes, it was maybe a little sweet, most likely due to the inclusion of honey. It was also very dense and crumbly. To the point that pulling it out of the toaster can cause it to break. Not sure how to counteract that.

Because I don’t really eat all that much bread at home, I sliced it the next day and froze it in my reusable bread bag. This works for me, since I always eat it as toast. (It’s way too dense for sandwiches, anyway.) I still have a couple of slices left, and then (maybe even this weekend) I’ll make another loaf of bread — not sure which recipe I’ll use next time.

Baking bread is ticking two of my current boxes: 1) making food from scratch and 2) eliminating single-use soft plastic (although once I get into the act of buying bulk foods, this will be even better). Onwards!

Apple crumble

Last weekend I was doing some vegan catering. I had some apples I needed to cook up, so I decided to make apple crumble.

For this recipe, I hit the recipe community and picked one that 1) was vegan (or could be made vegan) and 2) could be made from ingredients residing in my pantry already. The one I ended up making was this ‘healthy apple crumble‘.

Usually, I cook up apple in the microwave, but this time I cooked it in the Thermomix (10 minutes), and I blitzed it briefly once cooked to chop it up a bit. (The ability to do this might have converted me.)

The crumble recipe contains walnuts, almonds, coconut, oats and honey. I wasn’t sure whether honey was OK for vegans, so I substituted brown sugar instead. Once again, it’s a case of blitzing all these together and sprinkling on top of the cooked apple, before shoving in the oven.

Unfortunately, I completely forgot to take any photos, but it tasted yummy, and got the thumbs up from my vegan friend. She, alas, did not get to eat it with cream… but I did and it was good. (And there were leftovers.)

I can see me making this apple crumble for myself, because it is actually really healthy. Especially if I add yogurt rather than cream. Heh.

Then again, we’re coming into custard season…