Whip up something new - Faworki

Well. I can't believe how busy work has been! Between that and Shane and everything else I haven't had a single second to blog! So sad! But I have been cooking and I have been reading, so there are a few interesting things coming up on my side.

Today, I want to tell you about is a Polish carnival tradition, faworki. Carnival refers to the time right before Lent in Roman Catholic countries and is characterized by a lot of partying, eating and drinking. Which explains this Polish tradition - faworki are deep-fried pieces of dough with powdered sugar on top.

Making them is really easy - explaining might make the process sound more difficult than it is. :-)

Fill a glass with egg yolks. It doesn't matter what size the glass is, some sort of medium-sized variety. Measure out the same amount of beer. Put these in a bowl and add as much flour as is needed to make a dough. the dough shouldn't stick to your hands, but be careful not to put too much flour as then it'll be too tough. This part just takes practice.

Roll out the dough so that it's very thin. Cut into strips and then cut a line in the middle of each strip, like so:

Heat oil in deep-ish pan. It should be enough oil so that the strips of batter can be covered in it and the process can be called deep-frying.

Pick up a strip of dough, out one end through the whole in the middle, to get a shape like this:

Deep fry, turning once, until golden. Once the oil is hot, this goes really fast so it's best to have all your faworki ready to be fried before you start frying. 

Dust generously with sifted powdered sugar.

These are seriously, seriously yummy and they're not as complicated as I make them sound. The most difficult thing about them, I find, is getting the amount of flour right so that the dough doesn't get too touch. Oh and also having the patience to roll the dough out to be really thin, I almost never do.

I don't know why I forgot to take a photo of the finished faworki, but I did, so here is a photo of what they should look like, taken from the web:

And what to do with all the egg whites, you ask? Why, make meringues of course! Beat the egg whites on their own for a while, then add the same amount of sugar, slowly and still beating. Then add the same amount of sugar again, slowly and still beating. And a teaspoon of potato starch (but I've omitted this and the meringues have been fine).  Let them dry in an oven preheated to about 100C for a couple of hours. I always take mine out slightly early because I like them all gooey! Yum!

Go check out the other entries over at Trish's, she's the host in February. And it's actually already high time to find a host for March. Any takers?

Also, don't forget to regularly visit Beth at Beth Fish Reads - she has a great Weekend Cooking event each week!

Whip up Something New: Banana Cake and Vanilla Cupcakes

I had a blast cooking this weekend! Or baking, rather. Which means I have two recipes to talk about for January's edition of Whip up something new! and for Beth's Weekend Cooking. Yay me!

When I saw the first contribution ever to Whip up something new!, Elise's Old-fashioned Banana Cake, I immediately thought of the perfect occasion to try it - my Baby Shane's first birthday party! :-)

Yes, that's right, Shane is now officially a toddler - and toddle he does. The cake, with it's banana goodness and lots of moisture from the added sour cream - and let's not forget the cream cheese frosting - was a huge hit with kids and adults alike. Lovely for a Sunday afternoon, no matter what age group you've invited. Thanks Elise!

But - as you can from the photo, the banana cake is one of those 'proper' round cakes so I couldn't cut it open and see if it baked properly and all that... so I also made these vanilla cupcakes. It's a Martha Stewart recipe for plain cupcakes, which is just what I wanted. I frosted them with ready-made chocolate frosting and they were good, though not as good as the banana cake!

I am SO proud of myself for making Shane's first birthday cake from scratch. That's some serious Mommy behavior, I guess I'm growing into the part. :-)

Weekend Cooking: Lemon chicken with chickpeas

I recently realized that, no matter how good our intentions, it's simply not possible for us to cook meals on weeknights. Which means that either we live on frozen convenience foods like 'fish and chips' or we get take aways. The only solution for us is to batch-cook at the weekend so that we have nice things to eat during the week.

Setting aside a few hours at the weekend for cooking doesn't always work, but we try. This weekend we managed and this lemon chicken with chickpeas is one of the things we made. This is my entry into this week's Weekend Cooking event hosted by Beth Fish Reads, as well as my first entry into January's Whip up something new! challenge. Did you make anything yummy this weekend? Blog about and post a link!

This came out very good and I'm looking forward to having it with some rice some evening this week. Plus it takes no time to make, such a plus! The recipe is out of my stash of pages torn out of magazines, though this one is glued into a notebook, inspired by Trish. It's likely to be from BBC Good Food magazine, I almost always buy that one.

Lemon chicken with chickpeas

Serves 4, suitable for freezing

1tbsp sunflower oil
1 onion, halved and thinly sliced
4 skinless chicken breasts, cut into chunks
1 cinnamon stick, broken in half
1 tsp each ground coriander and cumin
grated rind and juice of one lemon
400g can chickpeas, drained
200ml chicken stock
250g bag spinach

Heat the oil in a large frying pan and fry the onion gently for 5 minutes. Turn up the heat, add the chicken and fry for 4 minutes, until golden. Stir in the spices and lemon rind, fry for one more minute, then tip in the chickpeas and stock. Put the lid on and simmer for 5 minutes. Season, then tip in the spinach and re-cover. Leave to wilt for 2 minutes, then stir. Squeeze over the lemon juice just before serving.

Random thoughts... and a delicious cake!

I lost my voice. And am home sick for the rest of the week. I could have done without tonsilitis during this particular week, I have too much going on at work, but that's the way the cookie crumbles I guess. I had a Christmas concert yesterday, it's only afterwards that my voice went completely, but I have another next Saturday so I hope it comes back!!!

We had our first Christmas celebration on Saturday! Joe's daughter Helen was over for the weekend and we did Christmas because we're not seeing each other for the 'real' one. It's really amazing what you can accomplish when you put all your energy into it; we were all really surprised at how Christmassy it was! Everything was exactly as it should be, with the tree, the presents, the yummy Christmas dinner, the drinking starting in the afternoon...  We are Irish and Polish after all! ;-)

Helen gave me a gorgeous cook book - all cakes and other sweet stuff - that I'd never heard of. Red Velvet Chocolate Heartache by Harry Eastwood. Do any of you have it? It's a beautiful, beautiful book with lovely photos and wonderful writing. Clearly, Harry loves her food. She (yes, she) also loves creating healthy versions of things we love to eat, like brownies and cookies and cakes. The recipes in this book all have some strange ingredients, such as grated potato, butternut squash or parsnip. And they use rice flour or spelt flour, plus ground almonds, although you can use the same quantity of regular flour if you prefer. I was intrigued that I immediately made the Banana and Toffee Sticky Cake and my oh my is it good! If the rest of the bakes in here are this yummy then we'll be living on a strict diet of cakes for a long time!

I leave you with a photo of my cake - sticky and moist and very, very more-ish. This book makes a brilliant present, maybe one of your family friends would appreciate it?

Recipe: Quick Courgette Lasagne

That post title is going to look weird among all the book titles! But what the hell, I've been talking and thinking and talking some more about using this blog for more than just books for a while and it's time to do something about it. The main reason for my wanting to shift the focus a bit is that I'm not reading enough to post as regularly as I'd like. Since Shane was born I have other things that I'd like to share with you. Some even overlap with stuff I've read on other book blogs - watch out for my upcoming rant about gender-biased toys. ;-)

I've been feeding Shane ready-made food up until now, but he's ready to try some of the food we're eating. I've been leafing through Annabel Karmel recipes for weeks now and couldn't decide on how to start etc so I just went to the supermarket and bought a bunch of vegetables and small pasta shapes. I still didn't know how to start but now I had these giant courgettes in the fridge and they had to be saved. So I made Shane some sort of courgette pasta and found this recipe for Quick Courgette Lasagne for us.

It was easy to make and perfectly yummy, definitely to be made again. Let me know if you try it!