Teething problems

Sorry! I have been away for so long. I decided to rip out my entire kitchen and put in a new one. This has taken longer than I had hoped because we needed to replace our fuse board among other major electrical issues as part of the renovation. 

I am loving the new kitchen. I have a dedicated spot for my Thermomix with its own power point and storage cupboards. It sits right between the fridge and on-bench pantry so everything is right in close range when needed. The chipbooks can stick on the side of my fridge so they are very handy.

We put in an induction cooktop and twin pyrolitic oven to enhance our new cooking experience. I didn't realise that you can't use these like your regular cooktops and caused an oil fire the first time we cooked on the new stove. Oops! 

What happened was I turned the stove on to heat up, it goes up to 15. The manual said not to leave it at 15 for too long, so after about a minute I turned it down to 10 and popped some oil in. Instant fire. Flames over a metre high.I grabbed the pan and was walking backward and forward with it in the kitchen trying to decide what to do with it. I knew you can't put water on it, and the lid was in the cupboard out of my immediate reach. I dropped it back on the stove and grabbed a teatowel, soaked it with water and threw it on top, I then put the lid on as well as an extra precaution. After it cooled, my husband used lots of elbow grease to remove the black burnt oil, but my beautiful new Scanpan frypan is now tarnished. We joked that it will be a good reminded of how quickly the new cooktop heats up!

We managed to cook our honey, soy tofu in a saucepan without incident, and the ThermoServer kept the sticky rice warm throughout the ordeal. So we still had a great dinner, it just took a little longer than expected, and we had a few laughs along the way.

So far, the oven is working great. Still working out the functions, but this morning I made honey date loaf for lunch. It cooked perfectly, I probably need a different tin to cook it in because the silicone one spread quite wide and it looked weird. It tasted great though.

Our smoke alarms did go off when we tried to set fire to the kitchen, but they were very quiet. Definitely not loud enough to wake people who are asleep. Replacing the batteries or the alarms themselves is high on our priority list this weekend. Have you checked yours lately?

Works in progress

I want to share what we have on the go at the moment. We are currently trying to finalize the recipes and get them to a point where I am happy to share. Most are almost there but the method needs a bit of tweaking. Others, the method is there but the flavour or consistency isn't quite right.

Anyway, here is what we have for now.

Honey soy tofu on boiled rice

This is something we have bought for a long time as a "packet mix". It was our go to quick meal, just pop the meal ingredients in the pan, throw a bag of microwave rice in the microwave and in about 5 minutes, you have a meal. Oh my goodness, the sugar content of those packet sauces is more than we need. So we came up with our own. We have tried letting the tofu sit in the sauce and marinade for a while before cooking as well as just popping it in the fry pan. We found that not leaving it to marinade actually yielded better results with flavour and texture.

This was served on the boiled rice (EDC), but we prefer the automated rice.

Oat flour waffles

Waffles have long been a staple weekend breakfast for us. My father-in-law makes amazing pancakes which are half oat flour and half wheat flour. Many years ago we took this approach to our waffles, and then at one point we dropped the wheat flour. We made these in our blender for a long time, but the thermomix does a much better and faster job. I think I have this recipe pretty much perfect, I just need to type it up. 

Nutella

There are many versions of a healthier nutella out there. This is ours. I decided we were going to make it one day and was sure that I had all the ingredients that I would need. When I went to make it what I thought was a bag of hazelnuts was actually a bag of macadamias. We opted to use cashews instead because we buy those 3kg at a time and always have loads. A few versions later and our recipe is almost perfect. In all honesty it doesn't taste like nutella, but they share no common ingredients, so why would it? As a nutty, chocolate spread it stands on its own very well though. Mr 3 asks for this one all the time.

Vegetarian sausages

Okay - full disclosure - these came about by accident. I was meant to be making hummus but without realising, I popped a can of pinto beans in the thermomix and blended them with some garlic. After we had a good laugh, Mr 3 suggested the mix looked like sausages so we thought we would try. We added some herbs and some GF flour then wrapped them - albeit not very well - and steamed them in the varoma. These are the sausages that came out of the varoma. We chopped a couple and fried them with a passata with basil and oregano and served them on some GF pasta. Definitely something workable here, maybe with more herbs/spices and better wrapping. We will keep working on these and have something in the next few months.

And here's the finished meal we made.

And of course, we have our lemon curd icecream from my last post. 

Lemon curd icecream

This is made with coconut cream and sweetened with honey or maple syrup. We are trying to work out how we stop it from freezing solid so we can serve it straight from the freezer.

Is there anything else you want us to add to our list for now?