Sunbun & Kate, now so cherubic

As you may or may not know, Sunbun and Kate went to Limerick! 

Here are just the food & drink bits:

Day 1:

Lunch:
Fishy Fishy was soooo delishy.

Oysters to start. My mouth is watering again.

Clockwise from top left: Surf&turf--scallops and black pudding;
salmon with basmati rice; pan-seared yellow fin tuna; Hake over beetroot salad

Our trip to Jameson Distillery in Midleton, but this is mostly just to exhibit Google's 'Auto Awesome' feature that gifs your pics when you had multiple takes...
                                   
Dinner: Joan's Thai red curry with rice and Lauren P-D's Kahlua cake. D. licious.

Day 2: 

Lunch: Hog roast at the Limerick Show

A stop off at Molly's Bar before heading up Knockroe 

  

Dinner: Mrs Power's super yummy chicken, potatoes (roast and dauphinoise) and salad, followed by lemon tart AND apple cobbler. Heaven.

  

Day 3: Today we had 5 meals...

Meal 1: Eggs in baskets!

Meal 2: We stopped at Adare Golf Manor (where I'll be joining Eric in a couple months' time!) and just had some ham and cheese toasties, because why not. They weren't great, but they sated our hunger.

Meal 3: Oysters at Durty Nelly's. Oysters. Lemon juice. Tabasco. What more do you need??

Meal 4: Lunch with Mrs Power at JP Clarke's -- Sunny and I split a rack of ribs, but got our own desserts :) White chocolate cheesecake with Bailey's ice cream for me (yummy) and Maple & passionfruit creme brulee with hazelnut ice cream for sunny (also yummy)

Meal 5: Airport pub food. Not the best way to end the day, but oh well.

Oh yes and then actually I got home and ate leftover rice, dal and keema. So yeah. 

Rhubarb Strawberry Pecan Crumbpie (and its pre-course-ers)

This year's Langridge BBQ meal consisted of... 

The delicious monkfish-shrimp with mango-pineapple salsa starter

And an amazing steak with homemade cucumber relish,
roasted potatoes and a kind of Greek salad

Now! Time for dessert! Sarah and I have made this a few times, and people seem to love it.

Full disclosure, I did not make this recipe up, (here's the original) but I love it and I have made some tweaks over time. The only cha[lle]nge this time, was that I needed to make it celiac-friendly.

NOTE

To make the recipe gluten-free, I substituted corn flour for all-purpose flour. It turns out a bit stickier and a bit less crumbly, but people still loved it!

YIELD

1 9” pie (see below for adjustments for 6 ramekins)

INGREDIENTS

Pie crust

• 1 cup (125 g) all-purpose flour
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 1/3 cup (75 g) chilled butter
• 2 tablespoons (30 ml) cold water, or more as needed

Filling

• 1 1/4 cups (250 g) white sugar
• 1/3 cup (40 g) all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon (1 g) ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 2 cups (245 g) rhubarb, sliced 1/2-inch thick
• 2 cups (330 g) sliced fresh strawberries
• recipe: 1/3 cup me: 2/3 cup (recipe: 35 g) (me: 70 g) chopped pecans

Crumble

• 1 cup (125 g) all-purpose flour
• 2/3 cup (135 g) white sugar
• 1/3 cup (75 g) chilled butter

DIRECTIONS

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C).
2. Whisk 1 cup of flour and salt in a bowl. Cut 1/3 cup of butter into the flour mixture with a pastry cutter or your fingers until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Moisten with water, 1 tablespoon at a time, just until the mixture holds together. Shape the dough into a ball, and roll out into a 12-inch circle on a floured work surface. Crust will be thin. Fold the dough gently into quarters, and lay into a 9-inch pie dish; unfold the dough and center the crust in the pie dish. Trim the crust to 1/2 inch of overhang, and crimp or flute the edge of the crust. Press pecan pieces into the bottom/sides of the crust. Refrigerate crust while making filling.
3. Mix 1 1/4 cups of sugar, 1/3 cup of flour, cinnamon, and nutmeg in a bowl until thoroughly combined. Mix in the rhubarb and strawberries, and pour into the crust-lined pie dish.
4. Mix 1 cup of flour with 2/3 cup of sugar in a bowl, and cut 1/3 cup of butter into the mixture with a pastry cutter until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs; sprinkle the crumb topping evenly over the pie filling and sprinkle with pecans. Cover the edge of the pie with strips of aluminum foil.
5. Bake in the preheated oven until the crumb topping is golden brown and the filling bubbles around the edges, 50 to 60 minutes. Remove foil for the last 10 minutes of baking to brown the pie edge.

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YIELD

6 ramekins

INGREDIENTS

Pie crust

• 1 cup (125 g) all-purpose flour
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 1/3 cup (75 g) chilled butter
• 2 tablespoons (30 ml) cold water, or more as needed

Filling

• 3/4 cups (125 g) white sugar
• 1/6 cup (20 g) all-purpose flour
• 1/4 teaspoon (1/2 g) ground cinnamon
• 1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 cup (125 g) rhubarb, sliced 1/2-inch thick
• 1 cup (165 g) sliced fresh strawberries
• 1/3 cup (35 g) chopped pecans

Crumble

• 1/2 cup (62.5 g) all-purpose flour
• 1/3 cup (67 g) white sugar
• 1/6 cup (37.5 g) chilled butter

DIRECTIONS

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C).
2. Whisk 1 cup of flour and salt in a bowl. Cut 1/3 cup of butter into the flour mixture with a pastry cutter or your fingers until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Moisten with water, 1 tablespoon at a time, just until the mixture holds together. Shape the dough into a ball, and roll out into a 12-inch circle on a floured work surface. Crust will be thin. It is often difficult to cut a circle and put it into the ramekins without making holes in the crust, so I find it easier to just put some dough into the ramekins and mold it, filling in holes where they appear. Press pecan pieces into the bottom/sides of the crust. Refrigerate crust while making filling.

3. Mix 3/4 cups of sugar, 1/6 cup of flour, cinnamon, and nutmeg in a bowl until thoroughly combined. Mix in the rhubarb and strawberries. Pour fruit mixture into ramekins.

L: End of step 2; R: End of step 3

4. Mix 1/2 cup of flour with 1/3 cup of sugar in a bowl, and cut 1/6 cup of butter into the mixture with a pastry cutter or your fingers until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs; sprinkle the crumb topping evenly over the pie filling and garnish with a pecan. Cover the pies with aluminum foil and refrigerate if not baking right away. It's a good recipe to make the day before and just put into the oven the next day (without the foil).

5. Bake in the preheated oven until the crumb topping is golden brown and the filling bubbles around the edges, 50 to 60 minutes. I don't seem to have any pictures of the finished product that aren't half-eaten...it's too good!!! Best served with vanilla ice cream!

Sooooooooo delicious! sCRUMBtious, even! :D

Cream colored ponies and crisp...fish fry

I love Indian food. But I didn't really make the effort to learn to cook it until I was deprived for it for almost a year and a half. Because I never had to! I lived 3 hours from home and went back once a month. Mama made me all the Indian food I wanted!! Silver spoon in my mouth. With homemade mango pickle on it. Why would I make it myself when Mom's is delish!? Oh right, because I'm an adult and independent yadda yadda and oh yeah now I live a little under 5000 miles away, so once-a-month trips home aren't an option. THEN I took it upon myself to [email my mother and beg her for recipes so that I could] cook all that goodness myself.

I started with avial, a Kerala dish, that's kind of like a vegetable stew:

 

Before 

After

Back when I made the avial was also my first try at making pappadums...

I failed.

James the White did better than me :( :(
BUT YAY pappadums and also YAY I CAN
DEFLECT THIS RESPONSIBILITY

My mom recommended that I use this recipe for the avial...yes, that's a youtube link.

It was really good, but I haven't really made it since. Probably because it was a bit more work than I realized and there are other things I like better. Instead, the staples I now make pretty often and can't live without are:

Fish fry!!!!!! I usually use sea bass. 

Mango. Pickle.

Palakkura Pappu aka Spinach Dal

The only keema pic I could find!! Sometimes I like to
throw eggplant into the mix. And I usually use
ground turkey.

Again, not the best picture.
Technically, it's Mummy Dara's chicken curry, but
I like to add some of this and that
and make it Mummy Dara's Aloo Gobi Chicken curry.

A few recent trials/one-bite-stands har har har have been:

Kerala Meen Curry and beans thoran. I'll definitely do this again, now that Mummy sent me back with
the secret ingredient last time I went home. 

Morcurry on the left and egg curry on the right

For the egg curry, I used this recipe. It was a bit spicy for me, haven't decided if I'll do it again.

These are from the dosa trial day...

As you can see, it didn't go perfectly...

Will need to try again from scratch, used a box that time, shh. Also want to try appam. 

K that's all bye!