Tag Archives: lemons

Broad bean pesto with almonds and mint

Posted on November 5, 2012 | 2 Comments

Broad beans have taken over my mother’s vegetable garden. Literally. My brother-in-law Chris planted dozens of plants and they have all done remarkably well. They are crowding over the garlic, the silver beet and the beetroot. They are taking over. Not that I mind. Though my mother minds a bit. This is the first time broad beans have been planted in the garden and I don’t think she is used to the way they bend over the garden beds when they are heavy with beans.

I love broad beans. Especially baby ones, the ones that you can’t find in the shops because they are picked much later by growers. A few months back I posted about a salad I make with broad beans and burrata. But tonight, owing to the warm weather, I felt like something more like finger food, to have with a glass of King Valley Petit Manseng that we had opened on Saturday night. So with my ipad on my lap, I searched the internet and found a fabulous looking broad bean hummus.

Hummus doesn’t sound very Italian – but looking closer at the ingredients, it wasn’t Middle Eastern either. It contained items I had in the pantry or in the courtyard like mint, lemon, olive oil and really, those ingredients are Mediterranean, so not far off Italy. This hummus (or dip or as I call it, pesto), is fresh, green and perfect. I added almond meal to the recipe I had found and it made it richer, denser and somehow meatier. I served it with thinly sliced crusty wholemeal sourdough bread. It was lovely to eat sitting on my inner city terrace, on this spring night. Luckily my mother’s garden is full of broad beans as I know I will make this again very soon!

Broad bean, mint and almond pesto
180g double-podded broad beans (I counted about 200 individual beans)
juice of 1/2 lemon
10 fresh mint leaves
2 tablespoons almond meal
3 tablespoons of olive oil (a mild one is better)
salt to taste
1 teaspoon lemon zest
crusty bread to serve

To double-pod the broad beans, peel the beans then blanch them in boiling water for about 4 minutes (if you have tough old beans, blanch up to 8 minutes). Plunge the blanched beans in iced water so the inner beans retain their bright green colour. Slip the beans out of their second shell and wash. Reserve a few to one side for garnish.

Place the beans in a small blender with the lemon juice and mint leaves. Whizz until a puree forms. Add the almond meal and some salt and whizz until well combined. Next add the olive oil, one tablespoon at a time and whizz after each addition. Remove the dip from the blender. Stir in the lemon zest and salt to taste.


Serve with thinly sliced crusty bread and a glass of chilled white wine.

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Apricot and lemon Bundt cake

Posted on September 17, 2012 | 6 Comments

My mother has always had a Bundt tin – you know the ones, they have a hole in the middle. When I was little, she would often make a cake she called giorno e notte (night and day) – one half with cocoa and the other half without (half dark and half light) in the Bundt tin. The colours were swirled throughout. Back then I was fascinated by the fact that there was a hole in the middle of the cake and when you inverted it, a lovely pattern would be on the top. Mamma would dust the top of the cake with snowy white icing sugar and when you had a slice, you were never sure how much of the chocolate part you would get.

When I was at my mother’s on the weekend, we were looking at old recipe books (as we often do), and I found a lovely recipe for apricot and lemon cake that is made in a Bundt tin. I told my mother that I had never made a cake in one as I don’t have a tin. She was astounded. “I have a few of them”, mamma told me. “The Dr Oetker tin is the nicest and makes the traditional shape”. When she got it out of the cupboard, I oohed and aahed as I was taken back to my childhood when she would make the day and night cake with the hole in the middle. “Would you like to borrow it?” she asked.

So I borrowed the tin, copied the recipe and then made the cake. I didn’t make my mother’s “day and night” cake as I had a lot of glace apricots left over from the previous week and was wondering how to use them. This cake fitted the bill perfectly. It is unbelievably moist, due to the combination of glace apricots and a bit of ginger plus a small tub of sour cream. Of course it is not really italian, but at a stretch, the Bundt tin belongs to a gorgeous italian lady (my mother) and the recipe is in a book that is hers. Make this for afternoon tea to share with your family and friends – mine loved it when I served it up on the weekend. Finally I had made a cake in a Bundt tin – now I don’t really want to return the one I borrowed from my mother….

Apricot lemon cake in a bundt tin
185g butter, at room temperature
1 tablespoon lemon rind
250g caster sugar
4 eggs
50g glace ginger, finely chopped
150g glace apricots, finely chopped
200ml sour cream
250g self-raising flour

Pre-heat the oven to 155 degrees. Grease the inside of a 20 cm Bundt tin with butter then flour it. Make sure it is well covered as you don’t want your cake to stick as the appearance will be ruined.

Beat the butter, lemon rind and sugar with an electric mixer until creamy. Add in the eggs one at a time and beat well after eachaddition. Fold in the fruit and then the sour cream. Last of all, fold in the flour.

Pour into the prepared tin and bake for one hour. Place on a wire cooling rack. Invert the tin after about 10 minutes. When the cake is cold, dust with icing sugar. This will keep for 3 or 4 days or you can cut it up into slices and freeze for up to a month.

Where would we be without our mothers and the wonderful things they have taught us and share with us?

With mamma, September 2012

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Lemon, semolina and pistachio syrup cake

Posted on May 27, 2012 | 4 Comments

I have a medium sized terrace in my apartment in inner Melbourne. Although the terrace gets very hot in summer, I have selected plants that are well suited to the heat. In addition to succulents, there are a few olive trees and a lemon tree. These hardy trees and plants remind me of the parts of Italy where the hot sun beats on the earth and ripens gorgeous citrus fruit.

My lemon tree on the terrace went through a terrible winter last year – its bark was severely damaged, probably by a possum. I went to the local nursery to find out what to do and was told that the tree would die. So every night, Mark brought the lemon tree into the apartment until we were sure that the possums had gone. When I started leaving the tree out at night, I wrapped the trunk in a thick layer of plastic, which I removed every morning. However by that time it was very sad looking and had hardly any leaves. After about 6 weeks, I started to leave the plastic off at night. I pruned the tree back and slowly the bark started repairing itself. Leaves grew and tiny white flowers bloomed and turned into lemons. Today I picked the first of six lemons that it produced. I was terribly excited – my tree had survived and I was eating its fruit.

In celebration of the lemon tree I made a lemon, semolina and pistachio cake drenched in lemon syrup. The cake has a sweet citrus tang and is dense and moist. It is lovely served with creme fraiche or Greek yoghurt. It lasts for days in the fridge. You could make it gluten free by substituting the semolina for super fine polenta and the small amount of flour with gluten free. It is lovely with a coffee on a cold afternoon.

Lemon, semolina and pistachio syrup cake
For the syrup:
1 cup water
240g caster sugar
50ml lemon juice
2 teaspoons lemon rind, finely grated
For the cake:
170g pistachios, shelled, unsalted and finely ground
140g self raising flour
100g fine semolina
150g butter at room temperature
150g caster sugar
3 large eggs
1/2 cup of Greek yoghurt
extra pistachios for serving
extra Greek yoghurt for serving

Heat oven to 175 degrees. Line and grease a 23 cm cake tin with a removable base. To make the syrup place all the ingredients in a small saucepan on medium heat, Stir until the sugar is dissolved. Simmer about 10 minutes until the liquid thickens into a syrup. Remove from the heat and set aside.

To make the cake, place the dry ingredients (flour, semolina and nuts) in a large mixing bowl and stir until well combined. Set aside.

Beat the sugar and butter until thick and pale (I used a KitchenAide but a hand held beater will do). Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. The next part you need to do by hand. Gradually incorporate the wet ingredients by thirds to the bowl of dry ingredients and mix well after each addition. Then add the Greek yoghurt and fold through until well incorporated. Place in the prepared tin and cook for an hour.

Syrup soaking into cake after removing from oven

In the meantime, strain the syrup to remove any thick lemon zest.

After 55 minutes, start checking the cake – it is cooked when a skewer comes out clean. Once it is cooked, remove form the oven and place on a wire cooling rack. With the skewer, place lots of little holes in the top of the cake. Pour on the syrup so that it runs into the cake through the holes. Let it cool in the tin. Serve with Greek yoghurt and scatter on some roughly chopped pistachios.

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Sorbetto al Limone (lemon sorbet)

Posted on January 3, 2012 | Leave a comment

Lemons are pretty hard to find in Melbourne at the moment. The Victoria Market was selling them today at 3 for $2.00. I had a craving for chilled lemon sorbet probably due to the extreme Melbourne heat, so I decided to buy some beautiful waxy yellow lemons with which to make this icy delight.

Lemons are used to make a popular drink called Limoncello which is sold on the most improbable street corners in tiny towns in southern Italy and and it is the perfect chilled drink to quench your thirst in the summer heat. But beware it is alcoholic, though that is kind of nice when it is hot and you are in Italy on holidays! I am not sure how they get away with selling it from small rickety stands by the side of a narrow road, but then again, it is Italy, no one follows rules very much.

The other gorgeous way to use lemons is in sorbetto al limone (lemon sorbet). You can have sorbetto between courses as a palate cleanser. If you want to be really grown up about it, you can add vodka for a delightfully boozy refreshing dessert to have after your meal. This what I did today – made sorbetto al limone with candied lemons. The preserved lemons are sweet, slightly sour and bitter all at the same time, and look beautiful sitting on the sorbetto.

Candied lemons

The recipe is easy – you need sugar syrup, lemons, sparkling mineral water and egg whites (and vodka if you want the alcoholic version). If you don’t have an ice-cream churner you can do it the old fashioned way. You will just have to start making it a few hours earlier.

Sorbetto al limone

Sugar syrup – 400 g sugar and 400g water. Place in a saucepan on low heat and simmer until the sugar is dissolved. Remove from the heat and place in the fridge until it is completely cold.

Rind of 2 lemons (finely grated on a microplane), 250ml fresh lemon juice (strained), 250 ml chilled sparkling mineral water (I used S.Pellegrino) – add these to the sugar syrup and place in an ice-cream churner. Churn until it is almost completely set. Remove 2 or 3 tablespoons of the mixture and add it to an egg white. Beat these with a hand-held electric beater and return the mixture to the sorbet in the ice cream churn. Add 50-75ml vodka if you are making the alcoholic version. Continue to churn until it is the desired consistency. It should be like a soft gelato.

Sorbetto al limone

If you don’t have an ice cream churner, place the sugar syrup and lemon mixture in the freezer in a metal container. Remove after 30 minutes or so and give it a good hard whisk to break up the crystals. Add one egg white (beaten to soft peaks) to the mixture, fold it through and place back in the freezer. Remove it after another 30 minutes, whisk in the vodka (50-75 ml) if using, and replace in the freezer. Check after about an hour to make sure it has reached the desired consistency. If it hasn’t, leave it a bit longer.

Candied lemons – these make the sorbetto look fancy. Slice a lemon into discs 2-3 mm thick. Heat 100ml water and 100g sugar in a small saucepan. When the sugar has dissolved and is simmering, reduce the heat, add the lemon slices and simmer about 10 minutes. Allow to cool and place in a glass jar in the fridge. Arrange one or two pieces of candied lemon on your sorbetto, which I like to serve in special dessert wine glasses.

It’s like having a little bit of Italy at home.

*adapted from recipe by Gary Mehigan

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