Corn and Spinach Muffins

- Alex 2 Comments

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Personally, I am not really into savoury muffins at all. However, what I am very much into at the moment is food that is portable, self contained and freezer friendly. This means that, with minimal planning, I always have something I can feed to the Eating Machine (that’s the baby) at relatively short notice.

So I now love savoury muffins because I can pack all manner of stuff into them and they take only a morning to defrost.

I’ve been doing quite a lot of experimenting and have found that many recipes end up being a little heavy. However, this recipe, cribbed from the back of a pack of Coles own brand frozen corn*, produced light muffins that froze well.

The recipe claimed it would make 12. Coles’ home economists must make giant muffins because I halved the recipe and ended up with 9 regular muffins.

Another good thing about muffins is that they don’t require the use of the food processor (so you can make them while babies are asleep without any fear of waking them!) – and in fact it’s imperative to keep your mixing as light and as minimal as possible. Overwork the batter and then you will indeed get heavy muffins.

Perfectly good while still warm, but even better when frozen and thrown in the nappy bag when heading out for a coffee!

* Please note that this was AUSTRALIAN corn. Always check your frozen veggies for country of origin – you could well be shocked – and don’t forget to buy Australian.

You can either print this recipe, or download the pdf. And if your little ones are enjoying this recipe, please share it with your friends!

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Corn and Spinach Muffins

Ingredients

    dry ingredients
  • 1 cup self raising flour
  • ½ cup frozen corn kernels (straight from the freezer)
  • ½ cup spinach (again, from the freezer, but you'll need to defrost so you can mix)
  • ½ cup grated cheese
  • small handful of chopped sun dried tomatoes
  • salt & pepper to taste
    • wet ingredients
  • 1 egg, beaten
  • ½ cup plain yoghurt
  • ¼ cup light olive oil

Instructions

  1. Preheat the oven to 180° fan and lightly grease your muffin pan.
  2. Mix the dry ingredients and wet ingredients in separate bowls and then mix the wet ingredients into the dry.
  3. Don't over work - mix until they are just combined.
  4. Spoon into the muffin tray and bake for 15-20 minutes, or until golden.
https://eatingadelaide.com/corn-spinach-muffins/

Pakoras

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pakoras

When buying kitchen gadgets we generally adopt the approach of buying a cheap, entry level model first up to see if we actually use the toy, with the intention that if we hammer it and it breaks, we buy a better one and if we never use it we’ve not parted with two much cash. Invariably what happens is that the cheap model lasts and lasts and lasts. That’s what happened with our espresso machine and also our deep fat fryer.

We’d been talking about buying a fryer for ages before we actually bought one. We use it more than we thought, but not as much as we feared: we’ve not turned into little deep fried dumplings ourselves!

One of the things we’d like to perfect is the pakora. I’m a huge fan of chickpeas in all their forms – but turned into batter and deep fried? What could be better?

You barely need a recipe for pakora batter – it’s just chickpea (also known as besan) flour with spices and some water. As chickpea flour is gluten free, this recipe is suitable for coeliacs (and anyone avoiding gluten for whatever reason).

But here we go. I based my approach around the recipe on India Snacks (probably a site I should visit more).

Take 150g of chickpea flour and add: the juice of one lemon, ⅓ tsp baking powder, ½ tsp ground chillis (or chilli powder – and obviously this is ‘to taste’ – you could leave it out altogether), ½ tsp turmeric, 1 tsp garam masala, 2 tsp ground coriander and a generous ½ tsp of salt. Mix all these dry ingredients together well before adding a generous tablespoon of melted ghee and finishing the batter with enough cold water to make … a batter.

Set it aside to rest for as long as you are able (batters are always better if you can leave them overnight).

You want the batter to be reasonably thick because it needs to support all those vegetables you’re going to put in it. We added plenty of spinach, some finely sliced onion and some grated potato (if you’re using potato, don’t grate it too finally and make sure you get the excess water out before adding it to your batter). Because I’m lazy it all went in the same bowl, but there’s no reason it has to. You could use cauliflower or broccoli florets, slices of aubergine, mushrooms, even chicken goujons. Really – anything that will taste good battered and fried!

Heat your oil to 180°C and fry spoonfuls of your mix until golden and cooked through. Drain on kitchen paper and serve. In my case – serve with plenty of hot lime pickle, but raita and mint chutney are also popular. This mix made more than enough for two greedy piggies for dinner.

This is really easy but I don’t recommend doing this on a school night – with fried foods like this you simply can’t be in a hurry to get them on the table. Because you’re cooking in batches (and quite likely quite small batches) you could well feel like you’ve been in the kitchen for hours. Best off saving this for a lazy weekend lunch or dinner when you don’t feel on a schedule.

And while they might be deep fried – pakoras do contain plenty of vegetables, so they’re healthy too!

Lucky Lupitas

- Alex 1 Comment

 

LUCKY LUPITAS HAS NOW CLOSED.

date of visit: takeaway Saturday 10 March 2012, dine in Saturday 24 March 2012

Up front, I would like to say I have no idea about Mexican food. I have not been to Mexico and I have not been to the parts of the US that are famous for their Mexican food. I don’t think I’ve ever even read a Mexican cookbook.

Lucky Lupitas seemed to take ages to open. It’s in the small group of shops on South Road by Flinders Medical Centre. It’s been a pretty dull group of shops but things are changing – Maru, a Japanese and Korean restaurant opened last year, and it looks like a Greek restaurant is on its way too. This is something of a bonus for us, because it’s all nice and close to home. We spent ages watching Lucky Lupitas turn into a restaurant and we stalked its facebook page, willing it to hurry up and open.

And open it did. I think it’s only been open now a month or two and we were down there ordering takeaway before its menu appeared on its website (thankfully, that’s been rectified). Andy popped out a Saturday night to source the food. It was probably around 7pm and apparently the restaurant was packed, with people queuing out the door, so he ordered quickly and rushed home with the food.

Unfortunately, ordering quickly was something of a mistake, as we ended up with two entrées as the total sum of our meal! For takeaway food it was beautifully presented: my chicken and mushroom quesadilla was decorated with coriander garnish and wedge of lime and Andy’s smoked chicken empanadas came with all the requisite salsas. It also tasted very good – so much so that it was inhaled before there were any photo opportunities. And then we sat around looking a bit sad and feeling a bit hungry.

Of course, we now had a menu so we could look over it and imagine what might have been.

A baby free evening gave us a window to pop in to Lucky Lupitas and try a bit more food. Unfortunately, LL doesn’t take bookings – you just have to chance it. This is not something I’m a fan of but I can see how a booking system just wouldn’t work at Lucky Lupitas.

This is not a restaurant you go to for a long, relaxing meal. It’s noisy, it’s busy, it’s packed full of people, the kitchen is open. The idea is that you head in, eat your food, drink your beer and then you head out.

We arrived just after 6pm (which is when I thought Lucky Lupitas opened – but it actually opens at 5:30pm), and walked straight into a table for two. Which is lucky, because I don’t queue. Now, I was there to try the beef ribs (Adelaide’s first and only slow cooked smoked beef ribs, apparently) so imagine my disappointment when the beef ribs (supplied by Feast Fine Foods) were already sold out! I decided to try the chicken empanadas and revisit the quesadilla. Andy, not being difficult, started with a taco and followed that with a hamburger and chips.

Order placed, beer in hand, I was pleased when our waiter came back and said that the next batch of ribs would be ready for me to have them as a main course. Hooray! Ribs with chimmichurri sauce for me!

Again, the entrées were beautifully presented and still tasted just as good. Our main courses arrived – and let me tell you, beef ribs are quite large. I never really think about how big a cow is but actually, they are quite big and their ribs are quite big. As in, pretty close to the size of my forearm*. Two monster ribs sat in front of me, smothered in chimmichurri sauce, nestled on a bed of rice with a bit of fresh, crunchy slaw on the side.

Before I even started I knew I was defeated. So I ate my way through the larger of the two ribs and then made Andy eat the other. Smoky, tender, tons of flavour.

Andy’s burger and chips looked pretty good (I was so full there was no way I was going to even ask for a bite) – in my opinion the burgers are really sensibly sized. They’re not your typical massive pub burger, laden with 100 toppings, one of which is a suspect meat patty. You will need to order the chips to go with it. But don’t worry as you won’t leave hungry.

So – the food at Lucky Lupitas is awesome. It is, however, a restaurant you need to go to with the right mind set (for example, I would never take my dad there – no matter how much he’d love those ribs he’d never queue and the noise and hustle and bustle would drive him insane). I’d also not recommend taking any really little people there – there’s no room for high chairs and there’s certainly no room for children to run amok. But as Lucky Lupitas offers take away (and there is even talk of a delivery service) you can just ring up and eat your ribs/tacos/quesadillas in the comfort of your own home.

And if you are eating in – GET THERE EARLY.

* I am not a very big person, admittedly.

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