Bean Burgers - RGB

this week's musical accompaniment (to the cooking): Camera Obscura - My Maudlin Career

So I reckon this counts as the first full post of the blog; cooking and music. This week's culinary treat was bean burgers with homemade chips:
As you can kind of see there, the burgers didn't quite hold together. They tasted pretty good, but I think they were missing something (dunno what that something is, though...). The chips though were gorgeous! Far better than I was expecting, given they actually tasted like chips, unlike my Mum's chips which just taste like roast potatoes. Not that there's anything wrong with roast potatoes, they're just not what I think of as chips...

No cake this week, unfortunately, as I had a cold come on on Sunday, and sneezed in the cake mixture, so I didn't want to pass it on to Craig. It wasn't a particularly exciting cake anyway - the recipe sounded kind of interesting, but it just came out like a Christmas cake without the icing. It's not a bad cake, but I can't imagine anyone getting excited by it.


Musically, this week we started on a new song, tentatively called RGB. The way we seem to work is to come up with a basic sketch one week, and then fashion it into something more coherent the next week. So this is the raw ingredients...

Download RGB.

It's very fuzzy (too fuzzy, imo) and it's a bit clunky, but I can see where it's going. I'm going to try and add some percussion over the weekend in preparation for next week's meet up. Given the name, I also want to make it neon-sounding, though I still have no idea how to make something sound like an abstract visual quality (my PhD was clearly in vain...).

All mp3s are released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License, btw.

Now, I'm going to try and hide the recipes behind this cut (I wish blogger gave you a button to do this automatically):

More...
Bean Burgers
(adapted (slightly) from The Vegetarian Bible cookbook)

• 1/2 tbsp Sunflower oil, plus extra for brushing
• 1 Small Onion, finely chopped
• 1 Small Garlic Clove, finely chopped
• 1/2 tsp Ground Coriander
• 1/2 tsp Ground Cumin
• 58g Button Mushrooms, finely chopped
• 1/2 425g Tin Red Kidney Beans, drained and rinsed
• 1 tbsp Fresh Flat-Leaf Parsley, chopped
• Plain Flour for dusting
• 1/2 tsp Cayenne Pepper

1. Heat the oil in a frying pan on a medium heat.
2. Add the onion and cook for 5 mins, or until softened.
3. Add the garlic, coriander and cumin, and cook for 1 min.
4. Add the mushrooms and cook for 4-5 mins until all the liquid has evaporated(?).
5. Put the beans in a small bowl and mash them.
6. Mix the beans with the mushroom mixture and the parsley and cayenne in a bowl.
7. Shape into 2 patties.
8. Brush with oil, and cook under a preheated (medium-high) grill for 4-5 mins on each side.

Chips

• 3 Potatoes
• Celery Salt
• Sunflower Oil

1. Heat the oil on a baking tray in the oven (200C).
2. Chop the potatoes into thin-ish strips.
3. Add the potatoes to the tray, cook for ~45 mins, turning occasionally.
4. Season to taste.
   

Flyer No.1

So I reckon I've finally finished the first of our flyers looking for band members. The text is perhaps a bit clunky, and it's a bit weird having Kim Pine's Scrapbook in the list of influences now that it's the name of the blog/email address, but it's taken me so long just to finalise the thing that I think I'm just going to leave it as it is.


Done with a 4B pencil on plain 80gsm copier paper.

Curry and Cake

(this week's musical accompaniment: Sa-Ra Creative Partners: Nuclear Evolution/The Age of Love)

The 'and' is important here. This is NOT a cake made of curry. That will be next week.

This week's treats were firstly a curry and secondly a cake. But they were two separate things. Seriously, next week - curry cake.

So the curry - aubergine, tomato and cashew nuts, served with a mixture of brown and wild rices and some pupupupuppodum. Recipe can be found here.

Pictorial evidence:

Cake-wise, this week's offering was a world exclusive, the Orange Death Cake:
So-called because it is so orangey there is a 66% chance your first bite will cause you to experience extreme orange trauma and drop down dead, leaving a Tommy Sheridan-esque corpse.


The recipe (adapted from the Orange Victoria Sponge in Mary Berry's Ultimate Cake Book):

• 225g margarine
• 225g caster sugar
• 4 eggs
• 225g self-raising flour
• 2 tsp baking power
• 5 oranges
• some more margarine
• some icing sugar
• 150g more icing sugar
• 3 orange Fruit Pastilles
• 2 orange Opal Fruits
• 2 orange Chewits

The sponge:

1. Pre-heat the oven to 180C, grease 2 20cm sandwich tins.
2. Put the margarine, caster sugar, eggs, flour, baking power in a bowl, along with half the zest of one of the oranges.
3. Beat well until thoroughly blended.
4. Divide among the tins, and bake in the oven for about 25 mins.

The butter icing:

1. Cream the some margarine.
2. Add icing sugar until the butter taste stops being overpowering.
3. Add the rest of the zest of the orange.

The orange water icing:

1. Juice the oranges, strain to remove the pulp.
2. Put the 150g icing sugar in a bowl, and add the orange juice until you get the right consistency (fairly thick, not too runny).

Putting it all together:

1. Sandwich the butter icing between the two cakes.
2. Add the water icing to the top.
3. Chop up the Fruit Pastilles, Opal Fruits and Chewits, sprinkle them over the icing.
4. Congratulations, you have created orange death in cake form!

Conclusions/reflections/digestions/stomach aches:

The curry was tasty indeed, but very very mild - lacked a punch. Perhaps more chilli or spice? While we survived the cake (only mild Oompaloompaness occurred) it was perhaps just a little overpowering. We blame the Opal Fruits (mainly cause they're now called Star Burst - why!!!!!!! 15 years and we still can't come to terms with it. Opal Fruits was by far the better name. Star Burst?!?!? What the hell does that even mean? How does a star burst? Does it go 'pop'? It is more explosive? And how does that relate to a tasty fruit flavoured chewy sweetie? Opal Fruits - now that was a name you could hang your hat on. You knew where you stood with Opal Fruits. "Packet of Opal Fruits my good man" you'd say, and you knew what you were getting. Blah.).

Next week, music too!