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It seems I have an affinity for hard-to-cut things.
The last time I picked up a new (to me) vegetable at the farm, I wrestled it into submission, and finally got wedges of creamy butternut squash tossed with pine nuts and parmesan.
This time, I spotted a misshapen guava like fruit. I had an inking it was quince. It felt like a pear and smelled somewhat like an apple and maybe a wee bit like guava. I bought one fruit to experiment with. I started to peel the fruit – it felt like peeling one of those extremely tough Indian pears. Next, I quartered them by thrusting all my body weight on the fruit with my knife.
What should I make? I’d seen recipes for quince jelly, but that didn’t excite me too much. Not when I’ve 4 jars of Nutella, 2 jars of Speculoos spread, and 1 jar each of chestnut jam and fig and walnut jam on my kitchen shelf. Plus, it’s not something you do with a single fruit.
Baking quince sounded like a never-ending wait (2 hours!), so that wasn’t an option. Thus, I discovered a whole new delicious world of poached fruit crumbles. Of course, like everything else this week, it got a good drizzle of the best caramel sauce in the world.
This is an extremely simple recipe where you poach the quince with some spices until it’s soft, then slice them up and place them in a dish, and top them with crumbled biscuits – cinnamon loaded like Speculoos or the spicy gingersnaps. The tender fruit being the perfect contrast for the crunchy spiced biscuits. Easy.
You could do the same with pear or apples. Pear + red wine is gorgeous.
Poached Quince Crumble Recipe
Prep Time: 5 minutes
Cook Time: 15 minutes
Total Time: 20 minutes
Yield: 4
Ingredients
- 2 quinces, peeled, cored and quartered
- 1 stick cinnamon
- 1 star anise
- 1/2 cup sugar
- water, enough to cover the quinces for poaching
- 6-8 spice biscuits (Speculoos, gingersnaps), crumbled
Cooking Directions
- Place all the ingredients in a pan and let it simmer on a low flame for 12-15 minutes. Check for doneness with a knife - it should pass through without much resistance. Cook for an additional 5 minutes if required.
- Remove from the water, drain and then slice them up.
- Place the sliced quince in a dish and then sprinkled the crumbed cookies.
- Let it sit for a little while (10 minutes or so) for some of the biscuits to soften and absorb flavor from the poached quince.
- Drizzle with caramel sauce. Serve warm.
You can probably tell that I have a huge fig fixation looking at the number of photos of it that I clicked at La Boqueria. I love how they look – deep purple with streaks of green and a shimmery pink jewel-like inside. Whenever I buy them, I almost always eat them straight out of the box or them bake into a fig and frangipane tart. (It’s a sorry state with just one recipe to rely on, I know. Point me to a recipe that will blow my knee-high autumn socks off?)
But back to the goat cheese stuffed figs. I’ve always wanted to make them, but somehow I never had figs and goat cheese around at the same time. That’s mostly because I’m not the kind who plans out a ten minutes recipe ahead of time and puts it on a shopping list (unless it’s a dinner party - then you must put figs and goat cheese on list right away(!)). A few days ago, I was in luck. A plump punnet of Turkish figs from the market was sitting on my table and a wheel of fresh goat cheese wrapped in paper was waiting to meet its fate in the refrigerator. Finally.
You need 4 ingredients to make this: figs, goat cheese, honey, and the fourth is where you get to play with flavors: thyme, toasted walnuts, pine nuts, or coarse black pepper (my new favourite – perfectly pungent to balance the sweetness of the honey and figs). There’s no recipe here, really. Simply slit the figs until you’re 3/4th the way through and stuff with the goat cheese. Lay it on a baking tray and pop it into the oven preheated at 180C/350F for 10-12 minutes. Once out, sprinkle with coarsely ground pepper and a happy drizzle of honey. Eat warm.
If you like, you can also wrap the figs in proscuitto before popping them into the oven.
Toasted coconut, cinnamon, bananas and chocolate – slightly warm, with pieces of melted dark chocolate playing hide and seek. Oh, yes. You are going to love it.
I’ve been eating a lot of this coconut-ty banana goodness lately. In the past two weeks I’ve consumed dozens of bananas (and I’m not a banana eater) and just this morning I was checking my stock of ground cinnamon to make sure I’ll have my new favourite easy dessert for lunch.
Making this is really easy. It takes me all of ten minutes from the time I peel the bananas to the time I put a big spoonful of caramelised coconut-ty banana dotted with melted chocolate in my mouth. It’s the coconut that takes a little prep work.
My coconut story isn’t a pleasant one: I tried breaking the coconut into half – I couldn’t do so without getting the skin on my palm pinched between the cracks of the coconut shell. I tried scraping the coconut with a rotating coconut blade, and I wasn’t half as efficient as my mom was with the dangerous coconut scraper she swears by. Dangerous, because whenever I’ve tried using it, I’ve ended up with some nasty scratches. My mom on the other hand is a pro at such things. She’ll break a coconut into half with two taps of the pestle and scrape an entire mound of fluffy coconut in the time it takes me to upload 5 photos to the website. So, conveniently, I ask her to scrape a large coconut for me each week so I can freeze it and use it whenever I feel like eating this toasted coconut banana manna.
When I was a kid, I remember my grandma would use up over-ripe bananas this way. The smell of over ripe bananas is very strong, so I’m happier using bananas that are firm and just right. Cinnamon takes the bananas to the next level, and in this dish there is no such thing as too much cinnamon.
Whenever I make this, I usually eyeball the ingredients, just the way grandmas usually do. That’s how I’ve learnt it. Just so you have exact measure, I made sure to weigh the ingredients on my scale before popping them into the pan. Sorry, no cup measures for this one. But that’s no deal breaker.
My next project: making a cake version of this. Can not wait.
Banana Breakfast Recipe
Banana Manna
Recipe Source: Grandma inspired bananas taken up a notch with cinnamon and chocolate.
Total Time: 10 minutes
Yield: 2 servings
Ingredients
- 0.5 0z/ 15g butter
- 1.5oz/ 45g freshly grated coconut
- 1 oz/ 30g brown sugar / demerara sugar
- 1 tsp ground cinnamon
- 4 bananas, cut into pieces
- a handful of dark chocolate chips or a mix of dark and milk
Cooking Directions
- Heat a pan. Add the butter.
- Add the coconut to the pan and keep stirring until golden brown, fragrant and toasted. About 3-4 minutes. Make sure you stir it constantly; else it will stick to the pan and burn.
- Add the sugar followed by the cinnamon and keep stirring.
- Once the sugar melts a little into the coconut mixture, add the bananas. Stir gently to coat the bananas with the coconut and turn off the heat immediately.
- Transfer to a bowl and sprinkle with the chocolate chips.
Ever since my friend sent me candied orange segments from one of Madrid’s oldest sweet shops, I’ve been on a wild goose chase to find that flavour. I tried candying segments, but that didn’t work as I imagined. I ended up with sticky yet delicious syrup that I could add to drinks, but had to toss the segments. Next, I bought candied orange segments from Dalloyau when I was in Paris. Hardly a match for the Madrid ones. While I didn’t want to repeat my candied segment disaster, I thought I’d start with something relatively simple: candied orange peels.
Too petrified of messing things up, I followed the steps for candying orange I found on Smitten Kitchen made with simple syrup. At first, the candied oranges were a little firm and chewy, and I told them off on the first day. Surprisingly, the texture changed for the better after two days of sitting in a bowl of sugar, and I had myself some mighty fine candied oranges that I couldn’t stop nibbling on.
- First, cut 6 oranges into 4 segments. Carefully, turn the pulp out.
- Now cut each quarter orange peel into 6-8 strips, depending on how large your oranges are. This, I found was the way to get even strips.
- Next, blanch the oranges in boiling water for a few minutes. Repeat this 2-3 times. This helps get the bitterness out of the pith, as well as makes the orange peel more receptive to absorb the sugar in the next step.
- Finally, prepare the simply syrup 245g. (8oz.) caster sugar and 245g (8oz.) water and bring this to simmer. Add the blanched orange peels to this and let it cook for 30-40 minutes, util translucent. Make sure to stir it every now and then, or you might end up with some burnt strips (which I did).
- Once cooked, lay the strips of candied orange on a cooling rack in a tray (that will hold the excess syrup dripping off) and let it dry for 2-3 hours. I left mine overnight. It’ll still be pretty darn stick.
- Now toss this some caster sugar until it’s well coated.
Tip: You can add some additional orange zest into the leftover sugar from coating the candied orange to have flavoured sugar!
There are some things that are so easy to make, and yet look and sound incredibly fancy. Poached pears fit right into that category.
With a bottle of Merlot and happy looking pears at hand, I set out to make some poached pears. Within minutes, the whole place was filled with the aroma of cinnamon simmering away in red wine. The intense fragrance tells me that other spices like star anise and cloves added to the red wine will be magical too.
While I poached the pears for about ten minutes, the poaching time may vary depending on the type of pears you have. The hard Asian pears can take a lot more time, and in my experience, taste rather gritty. The pears when poached should be tender yet firm. By this, I mean that they should feel soft to the touch, but still be able to sit pretty on a plate and not fall off clumsily.
I especially adore this recipe because nothing’s wasted. The remaining wine mixture can be reduced to a thick, unctuous sauce redolent with cinnamon. You can spoon this over the poached pears or even spread it on toast the next day (wine for breakfast!) If I weren’t in the midst of my dentist visits (all the sugar finally made my teeth scream), I’d sprinkle some candied walnuts on them. The contrast of the crispy walnuts and the tender poached pears is sublime.
Poached Pears in Red Wine
Serves 4
4 pears (ripe but firm, peeled)
1 cup red wine
1 cup water
1/2 cup sugar
2 cinnamon sticks
Equipment: Saucepan
- In a medium saucepan over high heat, bring the red wine, water, sugar and cinnamon stick to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for about 5 minutes.
- Add the pears to the saucepan. Cover and poach the pears for about 10 minutes, until tender but still firm. You might need to turn the pears over so that they cook evenly. For this, use a silicone spatula because a metal spoon will bruise the pear and it won’t look as pretty when plated.
- Transfer the pears to a large platter.
- Now continue to simmer the poaching liquid from the saucepan until reduced by half and slightly thickened. This is your sauce.
- Cut the pears into half and then slice them up to serve with the reduced wine sauce.
