Sweet Potato and Purple Potato Gratin

No need to adjust your colour calibration - some of the potatoes here are indeed purple. If you need to impress anyone, this dish will certainly do it. The contrasting colours and rosette-like appearance pack a punch when brought to the table in its baking dish, and it looks more complicated than it really is. In fact, if you have a mandolin, it can all be prepared in mere minutes. Just be careful not to slice your fingertips off - nobody wants bloody fingertips in their portion of gratin.

The dish was inspired by two events in close succession - the discovery that our local supermarket sold purple potatoes, as well as our recent purchase of Ottelenghi: The Cookbook from a secondhand bookstall in Greenwich Market. Ottolenghi's version calls for just orange sweet potatoes, but I decided we could possibly do one better. If you can't find purple potatoes, than 50% normal potatoes and 50% percent sweet potatoes, or even 100% sweet potatoes, would do just as welll. 

Sweet and Purple Potatoes Gratin 

(adapted from Danielle's Sweet Potato Gratin in Ottolenghi: The Cookbook)

Ingredients

about 750gms purple potatoes

about 750gms sweet potatoes

5 tbsp sage (roughly chopped), plus extra for garnish

6 garlic cloves (crushed)

2 tsp coarse sea salt

1/2 tsp black pepper (freshly ground)

250ml whipping cream

Directions

- Preheat oven to 200 degree C. Wash the potatoes but leave them unpeeled. Slice them into discs roughly 5mm thick.

- Mix the potatoes, sage, garlic, salt and pepper together in a large bowl. Arrange the potato slices in a medium-sized baking dish by taking stacks of them and packing them next to each other*. Any any remaining bits of garlic and sage from the bowl to the potatoes. Cover the dish with foil and roast for 45 minutes. 

- Remove the foil and pour the cream evenly over the potatoes. Roast, uncovered, for another 25 minutes. The cream should have thickened by the end of the cooking time. 

- Garnish the dish with sage, and serve immediately. 

*I arranged the potatoes by placing them first along the outer ring of the dish, then working inwards, to create the rosette shape. There's no need to be too precious about placing the different colours one of top of the other.

Ladies Courtyard Picnic

What do a bunch of unemployed girls do on a hot summer's day?

Well, they get together, dress like ladies, and sit around a courtyard eating dessert all day!

To celebrate our liberation from the shackles of working for 'Tha Man', Jojo, Googy and I hit upon the idea of organising a Ladies Courtyard Picnic (for unemployed ladies and gents only!). The plan was for us to eat lots of sweet things, drink some G&Ts (mumma's little helper...) and bake more sweet things.

Instead of baking Satan cakes like we usually do, Googy and I decided to try something new. Now that we're unemployed, we can bake anything we feel like baking...even things we've never actually tasted before! That's how you live life on the edge. Not being from North America and having never celebrated Thanksgiving before, neither of us had ever had a pumpkin pie. I mean, pumpkin is meant to be a savoury food, isn't it?

So we googled some recipes and pictures, and it turned out to be fairly easy to make. The first picture we found also made it look really, really disgustingly tasty. Like, so tasty but so sweet that your tongue would shrivel up and fall out. That sealed the deal for me - we would be making pumpkin pie. And, just to add a little more excitement to our lives, we decided to mix things up a bit by substituting half the pumpkin goo with sweet potato goo.

On the day of the picnic, Googy and I decided to ride to Jojo's. But on the way there, we stopped off to see the Tree Man.
There he is, in the background, sitting beside me. It's a shit photo, I'll try and get a better one the next time I go past him.

By the time Googy and I got to Jojo's, we were both sticky and sweaty and stinky from riding. Not very ladylike at all, I'm afraid. But at least I rode wearing a nice dress and headscarf. That always makes up for sweaty, sticky, stinkiness. Plus, I also had a nice little apron that I'd made the day before. All very ladylike (except for the charging-madly-around-town-on-a-BMX bit).
We were greeted by Jojo and Phoebe, and presented with a MOUNTAIN of baked goods - chocolate chip cookies, raspberry and white chocolate muffins, and shortbread. And also some smoked salmon sandwiches and very tasty curried egg sandwiches (yum...curried egg fart...).
After munching through a sizeable portion of the baked goods mountain, we thought it might be a good time to start flexing our muscles. Isn't that what all good ladies do after lunch? Then it was time to for pumpkin and sweet potato pie goodness. And sweetbabyjesus...was it good!

Here are some photos of the goodness, freshly unleashed from the oven. Also some photos of us in the kitchen looking happy and successful and greedy. Mainly greedy.
See that mountain of pumpkin pie? It's still sitting in my fridge. We made way too much. If anyone wants some, get in touch and I'll pass the tastiness on to you. Or you can just make it yourself. It's so easy I won't even post instructions or a recipe.

Ondeh-Ondeh

Greetings and apologies for a prolonged absence. I was visiting the family down in Melbourne over the last week, and of course, forgot the cable for my camera. Guess that means that I'll be posting a whole bunch of stuff over the next few days, then. It's a good thing I'm on holiday now...

My second day there, Tiffany and I went over to babysit our cousins. Well, they're not really babies anymore (Shannon will be 12 next month and Belinda 10 in March) but 'tweensitting' sounds fairly...odd.

Just before she left for work, my auntie got us started on making ondeh-ondeh, which are (I think) Nyonya dessert dumplings filled with palm sugar. Fairly easy to make, and it helped keep Belinda occupied for at least half an hour.

You'll need:
sweet potato
palm sugar
glutinous rice flour
pandan essence (optional)
grated coconut

As you can guess, we didn't work according to an exacting receipe. It still worked out fine, though. For those interested, here are some helpful pictures to go with the vague instructions:

1) Steam a heap of sweet potatoes (the amount will depend on how many ondeh-ondeh you want to end up with.)
When the potatoes are soft enough, mash them up roughly with a fork.

2) Grate a lot of palm sugar - you'll need more than you think. You can do this step while steaming the potatoes.











3) Once the sweet potatoes have been given a bit of abuse, mix them up with some glutinous rice flour. As I mentioned before, I didn't have exact quantities and pretty much guessed it all.
So...I guess, just mix in enough flour so that it all sticks together and forms a smooth dough without falling apart.
You may also add some pandan essence to the mixture at this point, if your heart (or stomach) so desires.




4) Grab a bite-sized piece of the dough, roll it into a ball then flatten it, to end up with a flat, circular shape.
Add about a heaped teaspoon of the grated palm sugar into the middle of the dough. Try not to put too much in, as the dumplings may burst when you put them into boiling water later.
Obviously, you can make a bigger dumpling if you want to, with more filling, but these were easier for little hands to handlle.









5) Roll them up into little balls, with the filling in the middle, so they look like...












6)...these.
You can add food colouring to the dough too, to make them more colourful. (I think the green colour came from the pandan essence, though.)














7) When you're done rolling them up, put them into a large pot of boiling water. The dumplings are done when they float up to the surface.
It's probably better not to put too many of them in at once, as they'll tend to clump together into a messy, doughy mass.








8) Put the cooked dumplings into a bowl filled with grated coconut, and roll them around to coat them in the coconut.











9) When they've all been coated, display them on a plate and they're ready to eat! They can be served both warm or chilled, but I think it's great eating them straightaway as the melted palm sugar oozes out and coats your tongue with it's sweetness.