At the best of times, a cheesecake (or really any item of food) hailing from “Ye Olde Crusty cellar” would not sound tempting. However, these are not the best of times, (these may well be the worse of times) and desperate times call for cheesecake! Have I ever mentioned how much I love cheesecake? Next to ice cream, it is probably my favourite dessert. Also, Fridge, Freezer, Pantry week has come around again and I had half a tub of cream cheese icing I wanted to use up. I did not want to make another cake with cream cheese icing so I thought I could hide it in plain sight as it were by mixing it with more cream cheese, sugar and lemon.
(Don’t ask me what look I was going for with the fruit decoration!)
The recipe for Ye Old Crusty Cellar’s Cheesecake came from the book 100 Fabulous Cheesecakes by Ellen Sinclair of The Australian Woman’s Weekly (1971). It is a real shame about the name because the Ye Olde Crusty Cellar cheesecake itself is delicious!!!
Ye Olde Crusty Cheesecake – The Recipe
I did not copy the recipe for Ye Olde Crusty Cellar Cheesecake exactly though. I changed a few things to suit my personal taste. You can decide if you make this whether to follow the OG version or mine. Here is the original with my notes on the crumb crust.
Here are the instructions on what to do with those ingredients to turn them into a crumb crust:
The two changes I made to this were:
I did not add any additional sugar as I thought an entire can of condensed milk would be sweet enough
I did not add the egg yolks. Largely because I could not understand what they were doing there. I totally understand eggs in a baked cheesecake but not in an unbaked. The only thing I could think that they provided was maybe an additional richness to the mix. Again, for my taste, cream cheese and sour cream are rich enough.
I was a bit worried that leaving them out would somehow mean that the cheesecake would not set. But the mixture firmed up beautifully in the fridge overnight to cream a filling that was both light, luscious and not too sweet!
Ye Olde Crusty Cellar – History
The Ye Olde Crusty Cellar was a wine bar opened at 255 George Street brSydney in 1931 by winemaker Leo Buring.
It was described as having:
“the head of Bacchus…to guide guests in and out’ with ‘shaded lights’ and a feeling of ‘cloistered gloom’.
Hmm, not sure cloistered gloom would be the ambiance I would be seeking were I to open a wine bar. But it worked for Leo! The “Crusty” was a destination venue, attracting crowds of visitors, many of whom would have sampled the cheesecake!
Sadly the “Crusty” closed in 1974 but luckily the recipe for us, it’s signature cheesecake lives on!
I have been wanting to make a Gribiche Sauce ever since I first read about it in an old edition of Gourmet Traveller which teamed it with some deep-fried Artichokes. The other day in the greengrocer I saw some gorgeous artichokes that prompted my memory of this dish.
These looked so beautiful…but first, let’s talk Gribiche. Gribiche is a French sauce…kind of like a tartare sauce with hard-boiled eggs. It is really tasty. I love the way the creaminess of the eggs offset against the sharpness of the vinegar, cornichons and capers. These are my flavours!!!
And I also adore artichokes, but hardly ever cook them because let’s face it, they are not the most user friendly of veg are they? Even if they are one of the prettiest!
These were so fun to eat. I can just imagine, after the ‘rona, when we can entertain again, having a row of these down the table with little dishes of gribiche for people to dip into! But wait!!! The fun doesn’t stop there. These are also incredibly fun to make. Watch the leaves as they fry…
They move!!!!
How cool is that! Have you ever seen anything like it? Also apologies for the sound of my podcast coming through – I was so excited and wanted to capture these moving leaves that I didn’t have time to turn it off! And if anyone else out there listens to Kim and Ket Stay Alive – Maybe, Hey! How are you! I am a fellow fan!
The recipe for the Gribiche Sauce in Gourmet Traveller is pretty fancy in that it contains both chervil and tarragon, neither of which are currently available, it being the dead of winter here! Also, I’m not sure if chervil has ever been available in the shops. I feel it is something you need to grow. And I used the last of my homegrown tarragon for Meredith Baxter Birney’s Tarragon Chicken. So, I fried the artichokes according to the Gournet Traveller recipe but I made the Gribiche Sauce using this recipe from the New York Times. I did have a little dill in the fridge which I added because I thought it might help to give a slightly aniseedy flavour which would have been present with the chervil and tarragon.
Other Ways To Use Gribiche
If you happen to have some Gribiche sauce left over after making this, you can use it up in the following ways:
With Asparagus – this seems to be a very popular combination. I love toast so this recipe caught my eye!
No, this is not one of Agatha Christie’s little known cases but true-life kitchen drama. Do you think there is such a thing as Covid brain? Because I feel I have become increasingly scatty over the last few…how long have we been in lockdown now? Oh, that’s right, it doesn’t matter how long because we have just gone back into it for another SIX weeks. 😕 For the love of God, people of Melbourne stay TF away from each other. Most of you aren’t even that attractive, why anyone in their right mind would want to get in your personal space is beyond me!
Ok. Rant over. Deep breaths and let’s talk about Vegetarian Scotch Eggs. And explosions.
Oh, these were so good!! The idea from them came from me making Diana Henry’s Baby Pumpkins with mixed mushrooms, leeks, grains. This was also totally delicious and I can heartily recommend making it!
But, after making this, I had a lot of the stuffing mix left. This is no disrespect to Diana. I’m sure had I wanted to stuff 8 eight baby pumpkins her quantities would have been just fine. I was cooking for one. There are usually only a certain amount of times you can divide a recipe before becoming nonsensical. You can generally halve quantities. Sometimes quarter them to no ill effect. Trying to cook to an eighth of a recipe makes no sense. So I guesstimated what I would need for one pumpkin which left me with a lot of leftover filling. The filling was delicious so there was no way I was going to waste it but what to do with it?
My first thought was arancini. But why stop at arancini when you can also put an egg in it? And thus the ideal of my vegetarian scotch egg was born. I popped an egg onto boil, intending to have the perfect four minute boiled egg in the centre of my scotchie. Then went back to work. So, about half an hour later I was drawn out of some intense concentration on a particularly fascinating spreadsheet by what sounded like a bomb going off in my kitchen. First, there was a massive bang, very closely followed by something hitting the window so hard I’m surprised the glass didn’t shatter. The water had dried out in the pan so much that the egg had actually exploded!!!! There was egg shrapnel all over my kitchen. It was like eggmageddon in there!
Like this but on the stove:
Vegetarian Scotch Eggs Take Two
You know how when people who can’t cook say I can’t even boil an egg? So, after the first egg EXPLODED, and I’d cleaned the kitchen and taken a few sedatives because the goddamn thing sounded like a bomb and my heart was pounding like a jackhammer it was time for egg number 2.
On the positive side…this one didn’t explode.
But I did kind of wander off mid-cook to take a call and lost track of egg time. I could tell while peeling it that it was hard-boiled and not the beautiful runny yolk I wanted. But I wrapped it in the mushroom, leek and barley filling regardless. This is the year of not wasting anything remember.
Sure we lost an egg in some explosive collateral damage but you know …I blame Covid for that. I have no rationale for that blame. It’s fucking everything else up so it can also take the blame for my exploding egg. And you know if I hadn’t been working from home and been distracted from cooking it by…errmmmm…work…
Let’s swiftly move away from that one.
Egg 2 turned out pretty delish even though hard-boiled.
Vegetarian Scotch Eggs Take Three
I had a little of the mushroom filling leftover after wapping egg 2. Third-time lucky right? Right! This time I did not take my eyes off that pan for the entire four minutes. I barely blinked. And voila the perfect 4-minute egg as per the pictures above and below
Because it was still so soft it was a little harder to wrap in the filling than the hard-boiled egg. I was terrified I would press too hard and cause the yolk to ooze out before I could get it crumbed and fried.
It’s a bit hard to give you a recipe for this because it was based on the leftovers from the Diana Henry recipe which is here:
You need to judge how many eggs your leftover filling wil cover. To crumb and cook the Scotch Eggs, see my recipe for Pakistani Scotch Eggs. To get your eggs the way you want them, see below:
In lieu of a proper recipe this week, here is a little list of what is currently floating my boat.
Watching
Crazy Delicious – an amazing cooking show on Netflix. Think Heston done by home cooks, a magical ingredient garden, a delightful host in Jayde Adams, oh and Heston is one of the judges!
Dead Pixels – another British show, this time a comedy about the lives of three people obsessed with a video game.
Searching For Sugarman – this was our most recent film club choice. It’s so touching and warm-hearted and as an added bonus, the sounds track is awesome! There has not been a DAY since I watched it when I have not listened to Rodriguez’s Cold Fact at least once!
Reading
I just finished reading “One of Us is Next” which is Karen McManus’ follow up to “One of Us is Lying”. I didn’t love it as much as the first book but it was still a good fun read.
Podding
My current fave is Season 4 of Slow Burn by Slate. I loved Season 1 & 2 of this which covered Watergate and The Clintons respectively. I have not listened to S3 which is about Biggie and Tupac yet but I am going to start it in the next few days. Season 4 is about David Duke who is a total dick a white supremacist politician from Louisiana, and formerly a grand wizard poobah double dragon something from the KuKluxKlan. AKA a total f**king dick..
Here’s Topher Grace brilliantly playing him in Black Klansman.
Please send me your recommendations for books, tv, pods, films, music something, anything to keep me entertained over the next few weeks!
Life Update
Just to make us all feel a little bit better about the state of the world, here is a picture of Holly being adorable. This little dog has absolutely captured our hearts in the last 6 months. She has gone from a timid little thing who was scared of everything to a cheeky little girl who is confident and happy in her life. Being able to give such a lovely girl, who has had such a terrible life, a loving home for the last chapters of her life is the best thing we have done for a long time!
If anyone is thinking about adopting an older dog or a dog rescued from medical research please reach out. I am happy to share our experiences.
Have a great week everyone! Have fun, stay safe, and please, send me your recommendations for books, films, podcasts, tv, etc!
Does anyone know / remember The Libertines song “Music When The Lights Go Out”? The hook line in this piece of indie-pop boy love runs “All the highs and the lows and the to’s and fro’s, they left me dizzy”. That is exactly how I felt when making John Hillerman’s Paella. No doubt about it, this was a tough cook. But oh boy did it pay off!
The Lows
Converted rice? Not available for love or money.
Clams in clam juice ? Nada.
Bottled clam juice? No, nay, never.
Polish Sausage…probably could have bought some but I had chorizo in the freezer which seemed more paella-ish anyway
I made this during the height of the ‘rona lockdown. But I honestly feel that my inability to get hold of these ingredients were not limited to that insane time of food shortages.
So, had this been one of my recipes? I would have ripped it up and we would have never more heard of it. But this was was not my recipe, this was John Hillerman’s Paella recipe that I was testing for Jenny for her Murder She Wrote Cookbook so onward and upward it was.
The To’s and And The Fro’s
I didn’t have converted rice. I didn’t have clam juice. Which meant I could not follow the first step of the recipe.
I had:
Bomba paella rice.
Fresh clams.
Frozen fish stock.
This meant that if I found another recipe that got me through that first step of cooking the rice, then the rest should fall into place like one of those Rube Goldberg machines I have become obsessed with during lockdown.
The recipe I used was this one. I followed all the directions for cooking the rice per that recipe. But then switched back to John Hillerman’s Paella recipe from the step where he says to “saute the chicken in olive oil”.
Here is John’s recipe:
I was literally toing and froing between the two recipes and the pan and the ingredients, making sure everything cooked properly!
The Highs
Have you seen the photos? This dish was lush!!! It was so pretty, so colourful, so full of joy!
It looked gorgeous, smelled like heaven and tasted even better.
John Hillerman’s Paella brought the smell and taste of Spain into a very grey wintery Melbourne day. It was seriously like a ray of sunshine!
I LOVED this!!!! So, so, so good!!!!! The end result made it all worthwhile!!!
Thank you Jenny for the recipe! This is the best paella I have ever made and I will be sure to make it again! When travel opens up and we can spend time together again, this definitely needs to be on our menu! In my imagination, we are sitting in your garden with Mr R and Battenberg Belle and having a lovely long lunch of paella, great conversation, lots of vino, and some great tunes courtesy of Mr Rathbone. Some ’60’s bossa nova maybe?
Oh, also for those of you like me who do not know who John Hillerman was? His best-known role was as the incredibly suave Higgins In Magnum PI but he also appeared in Blazing Saddles, Chinatown (high on my must-see list), Murder She Wrote (obvs), and A Very Brady Sequal among many, many other films and tv shows!
Have a fabulous week friends!
Stay safe, eat paella, watch John Hillerman on the tv and listen to The Libertines!
Sounds like a pretty good way to spend the weekend to me!
These cheese-stuffed chillies are based on a recipe from the Ceylon section of Good Housekeeping’s World Cookery Book. So…I know a little bit about Sri Lankan cooking and never have I ever heard of a cheese-stuffed chilli. Never. Not once. Just in case I am not being entirely clear – no one in my family, not my grandmothers, not my mother, not my aunts, cousins, no other writers of Sri Lankan cookbooks have ever made or even mentioned cheese stuffed chillies in the context of Sri Lankan cooking.
Until now.
I became a little obsessed with this recipe because I started wondering if this was the original Jalapeno popper. Turns out the term jalapeno popper came to prominence in Texas in around 1972 so the recipes are definitely contemporaneous in time if a continent or two apart in space.
The recipe was vague about the type of cheese to use. Mum said that in Sri Lanka when she was growing up the only types of cheese available were Kraft cheese in a tin and Edam. Neither of which I happened to have on hand.
I did have some goat’s cheese and I remembered that my friend Leesa once brought an amazing dish to cookbook club that was feta baked with thyme, honey and walnut. Which also accounted for the other thing that was bothering me which was the inclusion of sugar in the recipe.
Hmm…so goat’s cheese to sub for the cheese in a tin, honey to sub in for the sugar. Looks like a recipe is coming together!
These cheese-stuffed chillies were delicious!!!!
There was some heat from the chillis, creaminess and a little bit of salty tanginess from the cheeseand the mustard, sweetness from the honey, crunchy toastiness from the nuts and a hit of herbiness from the thyme.
Perfect drinking snack!!!
I could have eaten a dozen of these with an ice-cold beer on a sunny afternoon. And I would have been in total bliss! They were also nice with a glass of red wine on a cold winter’s night too!
A Digression in the World of Major League Eating
Which reminds me. I found this amazing factoid on Wikipedia when doing some research on the origin of the jalapeno popper.
“Joey “Jaws” Chestnut holds the Major League Eating record for jalapeño poppers, eating 118 in 10 minutes at the University of Arizona on 8 April 2006.”
This of course took me down a path of Major League Eating. Turns out our boy Jaws (known on the MLE site as “the greatest eater in history” and “the apex predator” does not restrict himself to the jalapeno. He also holds records for downing Chicken Wings (both long form and 12 minute), pulled pork sandwiches, hot dogs, meat pies, donuts, eggs, asparagus, corned beef sandwiches, pork ribs, Philly Cheesesteaks, funnel cakes, fish tacos, mutton sandwichs, traditional tacos, shrimp wontons, pulled pork, horseshoe sandwiches (???), pulled pork sliders, long form burritos, short form ramen, gyros, Twinkies, boysenberry pie, tamales, gyoza, gumbo, ice cream sandwiches, grilled cheese sandwiches, poutine, shrimp cocktail..there are more but I lost the will to live whilst typing that lot out.
Sadly, the prize for French cut green beans (2.71 pounds in six minutes) went to Joey Jaws arch-rival Crazy Legs Conti. Shine on you Crazy Legged Diamond!
Cheese Stuffed Chillies – The Recipe
I also put my stuffed chillies under the grill to melt the cheese, toast the nuts and get some nice roastiness on the chillies. But you could serve them as is per the recipe if you wanted.
The ultimate verdict on these cheese-stuffed chillies is that they are not at all Sri Lankan but are totally delish! Just don’t invite Joey Jaws Chestnut over if you plan on making them. Or make a LOT!
Next stop on the good Housekeeping World Cookery Tour is China! Let’s see what inauthentic food we can find from the land of dragons and emperors! I’m hoping for some dumplings!
