For the next 10 weeks of the challenge, I'll be going through this Mini Cookbook Collection. This set of books was a collection released by The Herald Sun. I don't read that propaganda paper, but my dad is a big fan of it. So he picked up the collection for me.
It features a bunch of recipes from these cook's actual recipe books, meant as a teaser to encourage you to buy the real thing. At $2 a pop, it was hard to resist the little taste test,
Cheesecake is one of my boyfriend's favourite things, but I don't make it very often. I'm always forgetting to grab cream cheese when I do the shopping, and when I finally do I often fall short of inspiration and forget to use it. I was wondering around the supermarket picking up some random items when I came across some savoiardi sponge biscuits on special and recalled this cheesecake I'd been intending to make for a while. So I grabbed some cream cheese and some mascarpone cheese and headed straight home to whip this up.
This cheesecake comes from one of my all time favourite books: The Australian Woman's Weekly's "Cupcakes, Cheesecakes and Cookies". It combines their three separate books into one, and as a bonus is cheaper to buy than buying the other three books separately. It's full of delicious recipes. I've baked so much from this book, whether it be the whole recipe or just a portion of it. One day I will bake it cover to cover.
Julie Goodwin's cookbooks are amongst my favourite. This is her second. They are littered with personal stories, quotes from family members and delicious recipes that come from her family. The last chapter is left blank so you can fill it with those from your own family.
The recipes themselves are always so homely. Nothing new and fancy and designed to push the envelope. Just heart warming, delicious meals whose sole aim is to accentuate good times spent with loved ones. Her methods are written in a conversational style, often explaining aspects that may be new to a reader, or adding notes about serving suggestions or how much of the dish can be prepared in advance to allow more time with guests.
Along with Julie Goodwin, pavlova is another of my favourite things in the world. For the uninitiated, a pavlova is a meringue-based dessert that is a staple amongst Australian and New Zealand national cuisine.
A good pavlova meringue has a crispy exterior but is soft and marshmallowy on the inside. It is then typically topped with cream and fruit, but it is open to additions. Additions that usually involve some form of chocolate. I like adding broken up Flake or Peppermint Crisp to it, preferably by folding it through the cream. It's such a delicious, refreshing dessert and always the first thing I make a bee line for.
This weeks book is one of the cook books that I have no idea where it came from. It was either one of the many cook books my mum decided not to take with her, or another op shop gift from dad. Either way, it's been sitting around forgotten about until I dug it out for the challenge.
It's written by Alison Holst and is called "The Best of Home Cooking". It's very old school, and I find a lot of the directions to be either irrelevant or too vague to follow. But it contains a wealth of great ideas and tempting flavour combinations, so even when I can't follow the recipe, I can usually take the idea away and fill in the blanks myself.
This weeks recipe is "Mushroom Mounds".
The Big Book of Beautiful Biscuits used in this weeks challenge boats 128 pages of classic biscuits, old recipes without the flair and twist. It feels almost like a surrogate nanna – I never met my grandparents so never had the opportunity to learn from them in the kitchen.
One classic biscuit I love to death but have never made at home is shortbread. I have no idea why it took until now to make it, but I'm so very glad I did.
Home made is always amazing…
Unlike almost every other week of this challenge, I actually have no idea where this recipe book came from. It may have been another op-shop find from years ago, or it may have been one my mum had and never used and ended up leaving for me. It's so tiny that it was hidden amongst my much bulkier books, long since forgotten. But while digging through recipe books looking for one to try this week, I found it and decided to have a flip through.
This one is Margaret Fulton's "Book of French Cooking". After a few savoury challenges, it was time to pursue the dessert section once more.
I didn't get much further than the Mousse à l'Orange. A sweet mousse without chocolate?
I was intrigued…
This weeks recipe comes from the second book mentioned in my CBC post last week that was full of epicness:
I've cooked several times out of this book already. I love it.
The one I am choosing to share for the cook book challenge is Chicken and Banana Squares.
Does that sound as repulsive to you as it did to me what I first saw it? Couple with the fact I hate cooked banana – why would anyone want to eat that with chicken?
It sounded so gross it made me insanely curious. I just had to try this.
The result was surprising.
I'm not really a believer in New Years resolutions. But if I came close to having one, it was that I was definitely going to keep up to date with the Cook Book Challenge. Well, it's nearly the end of Feb and I'm yet to do it once.
I guess the reason there is that I basically haven't been home to cook. I've been so flat out that I pretty much skipped dinner in favour of sleep. My now my schedule is starting to slow down (i.e. working from home rather than doing 16 hour days on top of a 3 hour commute) so I've been able to return to cooking over the last week.
This coincided with my dad giving me yet another two books from the op-shop. Both these books had so many appetising recipes inside it really got the desire to cook returning.
Admittedly, this cook book challenge was one I did some time ago. But time is escaping me and so I am only just posting it now.
A little while ago my boyfriend's sister-in-law gave me this book. "The Asian Cook", By Linda Doeser. She'd somehow ended up with two copies, and so I was more than happy to take the extra off of her hands when offered. She's told me that it was full of scrumptious recipes, and she was not wrong. It was difficult choosing a dish to make and it is certainly a book a shall return to time again.
This time, however, it was Pineapple Fried Rice…
If you have a list of sauces in your repertoire, you can turn any basic meal into something a little more special. This satay sauce recipe the The Australia Woman's Weekly's "The great chicken cookbook" serves that purpose. This sauce is made with common pantry ingredients and is <i>far</i> from traditional – served with marinated chicken shaslicks, it's perfect for those nights of zero inspiration.
Cakecrumbs 