Coconutty Bread and Butter Pudding

Winter desserts: aren't they wonderful? And I've found a new one to add to my repertoire. It all started when I read about Malay Sweet Potato Donuts over at Kebun Malay-Kadazan girls blog. I like sweet potato, and I'm a sucker for sweet things, so I thought I'd try them and they were very nice, and very easy even for a frying-gumby like me to make. Then this recipe reminded me of a little book I have printed by Periplus called 'Classic Asian Cakes and Desserts'. I had a flick through, and the donuts happened to be in there, but I found another recipe I wanted to try: Coconut Bread Pudding.
I rummaged through the pantry and we had all the ingredients, so I made it - albeit quite modified - and we all tucked in and declared it Delicious (excepting MIL, who doesn't like bread pudding, but even she admitted it smelled pretty good), but I only remembered to take a photo towards the end.


Very glamorous...
So, being a good blogger and all, I needed to make it again (doesn't have anything to do with wanting to eat it again, and being home alone tonight so I can have a bigger serve, oh no, of course not...)

Here's the recipe as I made it (the original can be found in the book listed above):

COCONUTTY BREAD AND BUTTER PUDDING
Serves 4.

Ingredients
1 TB softened butter
2 eggs
1/3 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup coconut milk or cream
2/3 cup milk
1 TSP vanilla essence
6 slices of sour dough bread
1/3 cup sultanas
1 TB of white sugar for sprinkling

Method
1. Lightly brush the base and sides of a casserole dish. Preheat the oven to 180c (350f)
2. Butter both sides of the pieces of bread and set aside.
3. Beat the eggs and sugar together in a large bowl. Pour in the coconut milk, milk and vanilla essence, and mix well.
4. Add the bread and sultanas to the mixture and soak together for 20-30 minutes, stirring occasionally so that it soaks evenly.
5. Place the bread and sultanas into your dish and pour any excess milk mixture over it. Sprinkle evenly with the extra sugar.
6. Bake for 30-40 minutes, until it is golden and any custard around the edges is set.
7. Allow to cool for 10 minutes or so before cutting and serving with cream and/or ice cream.
8. Eat and Enjoy!


[I have to say, despite our masses and masses of Asian travelling, I have never seen bread and butter pudding anywhere in Asia yet so I'm not sure what is so 'classic' about this, but it's tasty anyway and a nice twist on an English traditional pudding]

Rambly renovation post

I thought it was about time I did a renovation update... not that there is very much to update you on. Autumn of 2011 in Adelaide was the coldest we'd had in 56 years, and one of the wettest as well. Needless to say, this impacted on how much work could be done since it's all still at an outdoor stage. Nevertheless, there has been some progress and the tank plumbing is very nearly finished! We are having the rain water plumbed into the house so in times of plenty we can use it inside as well as on the garden (the concrete is just there temporarily to stop the pipes floating away before they could be covered).


One day, this will be lawn and garden beds, and what a happy day that will be. Right now, as you walk across it, you get gradually taller as the clay builds up on your shoes.


Speaking of chunks of concrete...


I have had an idea, it's very environmentally friendly, but whether or not it will actually look good remains to be seen. I wanted to put in a path through the front garden rose bed, and I liked our old green-coloured concrete patio, and I thought I might be able to reuse some of the bigger broken pieces to make stepping stones. I especially liked this chunk, which features an engraved arrow (by FIL, for purposes known only to him).


I've been collecting up the remnants of the green slab, and laying them through the garden to see how they look. I think I like it. They're not in place properly yet, of course, I still have to finish dispensing with the gravel (FIL promises me he'll have somewhere to put it out the back very soon, to use in the retaining or something something). Then I'll set them down flush with the soil and plant some creeping, crawling, scrambling little plants around them to soften up the edges. Hmmm. Might work?

Winter Wednesdays

You just don't get this in Summer:
Lovely afternoon light, untainted by a bright sun, on yellowing wisteria leaves; they look like they are drifting under water.


For Hazel, for her Winter Wednesdays (it is still Wednesday for another hour, here in South Australia, and it was about 8 degrees here this afternoon, and icey cold on my feet because I was silly enough to walk on the grass barefoot in my quest find nice things outside!)

Good Morning!

Nothing quite like a hot cuppa on a cold June morning, is there?




[SP at 15+ months old]

No surrender!

In April I planted garlic in both my veggie garden, and in MIL's, and it was quickly swamped with my 'love to hate' weeds: soursobs, and back then I wondered how many times I would have to weed out this crowding green fiend. Today makes weeding #2, and you're about to see why.
These plants are something else, they really are. These shots are from MIL's garden.
Somewhere in this mass is garlic:


Here's the whole bed from a distance. There's also coriander and capsicums tucked away in the background.


The coriander has managed to rise above the soursobs (it's actually trying to bolt but it's too cold), it's doing fabulously; so lush! We need to make lots of luscious SEAsian food to use it up.


The rainbow chard in the next patch over also needs some attention.


This morning there was a gap in the clouds so I was able to clear the garlic section of the bed. When I say 'clear,' I mean 'rip out random handfuls of weeds, leaving lots of roots and bulbs in the ground ready for round 3 in a few weeks.' Then it started to rain so this was as far as I got.But I will not give in! I refuse to surrender to the green hordes!



But, weeds aside, I did something positive in the garden too. I collected a whole heap of dried Nigella pods (and a couple of green ones for luck). Nigella, or Love-in-the-Mist, is one of my cottage garden favourites. I've looked high and low, but couldn't find either seedlings or seeds in any stores, so I have to do it properly (ie not cheat and buy it in a packet!).


I crushed up all the pods and took most of the big bits out of the bowl, and was left with at least a table spoon of seeds, masses for 1 minute of pod collection, and 30 seconds of crushing! I think I'm going to sprinkle it in my rose garden and down the fence line and let it go nuts. It self-seeds readily (or at least it does here at MIL's) so I'm hopeful of a lifetime of those soft and frothy blue and green flowers.


PS. I have some exciting news relating to plants and gardening, but I have to be a bit Secret Squirrel about it for a little while yet (but as it's Australian plant related, perhaps it should be Secret Bilby instead?) Stay tuned :)

A list of good things from yesterday and today (to keep my spirits up as the wind picks up outside and the rain moves towards us from the west)

• Pruning 7 out of the 24 roses (then I ran out of room in the green bin, so the rest will wait for another week or two until it's emptied)
• Finding The life and times of Michael K, by JM Coetzee, for sale in my local second-hand bookshop, AND Claudius as God, by Robert Graves. Not one, but two books off my hit list! I like giving unwanted books a second chance, funny smells and browned pages and all (fellow gardeners, I recommend you seek out Life and times of Michael K, it is a good book on many levels, but for me as a gardener it was particularly special and I couldn't get it out of my head for months after reading it).
• Mid-season clearance sales allowing me to buy jeans reduced from exorbitantly expensive, to reasonably priced (my first new jeans since before being pregnant with SP over two years ago! Now that's frugal...)
• Watching the ducks and eating fruit salad with SP.
• Camellias blooming bright and early
• 
• A zonked SP
• 
• And lastly, finding the camera battery charger, after it's been missing for weeks and I have used up all three spare batteries completely, so next post's photos may be of better quality than those from my phone!
  

Winter Pledge

Every Winter I've ended up curled up in a ball on the sofa, heater blasting, watching terrible daytime TV and moaning about being cold.
Well, not this year. I have realised several things. Firstly, I need to harden up. This is Adelaide, it's hardly the Arctic. Adelaide winters are kind of damp and enervating, a little bit soul-sapping. A bit like I imagine a London winter must be like. It doesn't snow, our water pipes don't freeze, leaving the house each day should not be a challenge. Secondly, I have a high-energy toddler now. Sitting inside every day, while she bounces off the walls around me, is not an option any more.
So, what am I going to do about it?

I pledge to leave the house if it isn't raining; to find something every day that's good about winter; to limit my complaining; to not let winter get me down.

Starting today.
So today, SP and I played in the garden and then went for a walk. We saw clear blue sky with high drifting clouds, we heard the swish and crunch of pusher wheels and feet in bright autumn leaves. We gathered late white iceburg and pink carabella roses and penstemon and made a scruffy, unkempt bouquet with them, and we were treated to a spectaular sunset where the whole world seemed to blush.





Little edit, because I forgot to mention these people earlier, but I must mention posts from Hazel Dene, Veggiegobbler, and Fat Mum Slim who are all thinking along similar lines to me as we Aussies head out into the cool of June :)