Ingredients

• 1 & 1/4 cups red lentils. (Brown lentils are a fine substitute, or yellow split peas if you must, but green lentils won’t soften properly.)
• 3 & 1/3 cups water.
• 1 & 1/2 tsp salt.
• 3 tbs butter.
• 1 tsp ground cumin.
• 1 tsp ground turmeric.
• 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon.
• 1/4 tsp cayenne.
• 1/4 tsp ground ginger.
• 1/4 tsp ground coriander.
• 1/2 tsp mustard seeds.
• 6 whole cloves.

Method

Rinse the lentils well in cold water. Drain and repeat once or twice. The first time through you’ll note that the water gets quite milky, you want to wash them until the water is fairly clear.

Add to pot with 3 & 1/3rd cups water and the salt.

Boil until very soft, the water will be mostly or entirely absorbed.

Once the lentils are bubbling away and well on their way to cooking down, melt the butter in a separate pan.

Add the spices. Your house will start to smell reallllllly good. (Don’t be mad, I’m not saying it doesn’t now, just that it’ll get even better.)

Once the lentils are all cooked down (note how much the colour of the red lentils has changed), carefully add them to the spices & butter.

Mix the butter & spices well with the lentils.

Cook until very thick, stirring frequently.

Serve with rice (I suggest basmati) and a big dollop of yoghurt. This dal can be a bit hot for some people, the yoghurt goes a long way to defusing that – and it’s really delicious, so why wouldn’t you?

I find it a very warming, comforting dish. Particularly great on cold winter nights.

Ingredients

• 1 cup cornflour
• 2 eggs
• 1/4 cup oil (I use olive oil)
• 1 & 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 tbs baking powder
• 1 cup sour cream
• 2 cups grated cheese
• 1 cup (or so) capsicum, sliced (I use roasted red peppers)
• chillies (optional, to taste)
• 1 can of corn kernels, drained

Method

Preheat oven to 180°C.

Add eggs, oil, & sour cream to mixing bowl.

Blend until smooth.

Add corn flour, baking powder, & salt.

Add sliced capsicum (and optional chillies).

Add most of the grated cheese (save a little).

Add drained corn kernels.

Mix up well.

Add to cake tin or baking dish.

Sprinkle on remaining cheese.

Bake at 180°C until the top is golden brown and a skewer or sharp knife inserted into the middle comes out clean. In this dish it’s about 45 minutes, in a wider diameter & thin walled baking tin it’d be more like 30.

The corn bread will be very moist and flavourful.

Ingredients

• 3 tins of quartered pears in juice. (You can use fresh pears if you wish, but you’re giving yourself a lot more work for little reward.)
• 250g raw sugar.
• 225g self raising flour.
• 175g butter.
• ~6-8 teaspoons vanilla extract. (This might seem a lot, but it’s quite a large dish.)

Method

Preheat oven to 180°c.

While the oven warms up, take a large caserole dish…

… Add drained quartered pears – save the juice. (You can slice them further if you wish, these pears were fairly small though.)

Add about 1 cup of the juice back over the pears. (This might seem round about, but if you used all the juice you’d end up with a terribly soggy mess.)

Spoon about 150g of the raw sugar over the mixture.

Drizzle vanilla extract over the pears – the specks you can see here are vanilla seeds. 

LET’S GET READY TO CRUUUUMMMMMMMMMMMBBBBBLLLLEEEEEEEEE.

Add the flour into a large mixing bowl.

Make a divot in the flour, then add the soft (microwave softened if you’re lazy like me) butter.

Add the remainder of the sugar.

Crumble the mixture. It’s fun to do it with your hands – and I think you end up with a better, slightly more dense, crumble – but it’s also possible to do it with a spoon if you don’t feel like getting your hands coated in this delicious mixture.

Carefully distribute the crumble over the top of the pear mixture.

Until it’s nicely covered. You can press it down a little, but it should be a fairly loose covering. It will be quite a thick layer.

Bake until the crumble is golden brown, and some of the juice has bubbled up around the edges and caramelised. This will take at least 45 minutes. But the longer you can leave it beyond that – just as long as the crumble doesn’t burn – the better the result will be, this one was cooked for about 60 minutes, and I only took it out of the oven because I had to take it to dinner with friends.

The crumble will end up tasting something like shortbread, and the fruit, juice, & sugar will cook together into a wonderful peary caramel.

It’s that delicious fruity caramel that requires the longer cooking time, it takes quite a while for the mixture to heat up and start to cook through – the longer you give the sugars in the fruit & juice the more they’ll change into caramel. The best result I’ve had was after about 80 minutes of baking, and I assure you that it was worth the wait – unfortunately there’s seldom time to cook for that long.

It’s optional, but preferable, to serve it with custard – and perhaps even a little scoop of nice French vanilla ice cream as well.

Serves 10 lovely people, who will happily gobble it all up.

Enjoy.

Stewed pears and vanilla seed, only have a shot of the pre-crumbling version, as things got quite busy (I made an apple & boysenberry, and apple & apricot at the same time). All of the delicious pear juice (and a hefty measure of raw sugar) cooked up into a deliciously decadent caramel flavour  bomb.

Will put together a recipe next week, when I’ll probbaly be making a fullsize version. (Only made a strange little 1/4 size one this time, so not yet certain about ideal quantities or cooking time.)

The crumble was about as perfect as it can be in a gas oven, I think – almost like a shortbread.

If people knew how much butter went into it, well let’s just say they might savour it even more.

But no one can resist.