Jaffamisu (Orange and Dark Chocolate Tiramisu)

One difference I found between French and Italian cooking is, the Italian approach seems to be assembling the best ingredients available, with minimum fuss, whereas french processes can seem to sometimes border on alchemy.

One example of such pragmatism is Tiramisu. This famous dessert is one of those which are deceptively easy to make, never fails to impress, and will leave you thinking that it’s tragic that the Italians never quite mastered mechanical engineering in the same way that they have food.

When I arrived in Pisa, I was immediately whisked away to lunch in a little Circolo in Calci, and the hour or so there set the tone for my too-brief stay in Tuscany. Dessert was a Strawberry Tiramisu. I’d always associated Tiramisu with coffee, and the revelation that the concepts can be applied to any flavour combination was a bit of an ‘Ah-ha’ moment.

Naturally, upon return to Brisbane, I set out to replicate this experience, but seeing as strawberries are out of season, and hideously expensive at the moment, I thought about alternatives. As it so happened, I found some extremely sweet, succulent oranges at the markets, and what complements orange better than dark chocolate? This is the thinking that gave way to Jaffamisu!

Ingredients

• 200-250g Savoiardi biscuits
• About 500ml strong coffee for dipping
• 4 eggs, separated
• 250g marscapone
• 300ml cream
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 3 good sized oranges. Navels are good.
• 400g or so dark chocolate, coarsely chopped.

Method

1. Use a grater to zest the orange. Set aside.
2. Peel the oranges and dice (around 5mm³-ish)
3. Beat egg yolks and sugar until mixture turns pale.
4. Add marscapone, cream, and orange zest. Beat until combined.
5. With clean beaters, beat the egg whites until soft peaks form. Fold into marscapone mixture.
6. Assemble Jaffamisu by layering:
• Savoiardi dipped in coffee
• Diced oranges
• Dark chocolate
• The cream
7. Chill for a few hours, and you’re done!

So now you know how to make a Tiramisu. Go forth and explore making your own flavours!

Just Quickly... Tuckeria (Fortitude Valley)

Decent mexican is hard to come by in Brisbane. I am so glad that this little place has opened up next to Grill'd in the Valley.

A friend of mine described it as a 'glorified taco stand'. A somewhat fair cop, but that's not a bad thing. With it's roots harking to San Francisco's Mission District, Tuckeria serves one of the most delicious burritos I've ever had. They don't look like much, but they are just packed full of flavour, and are filling, even after a session at the gym.

First time visitors are well advised to study the technique behind eating a burrito, for ensuring maximum flavour and mess-containment. (Short version is peel a bit of foil, squeeze a bit of lime, squirt a bit of sauce, take a bite, repeat)

The Skinny:

• Shop 13, Central Brunswick (42 Brunswick St)
• Open 7 days. (till late on nights that matter, I've been told)
• Mains $10-15.

Just Quickly... Little Malaysia (West End)

I've been on a Char Kway Teow kick lately, and it was kind of by chance that I wandered into this place in West End.

If the quality of the Char Kway Teow is anything to go by, this place gets the Tuna Ranch Seal of Approval; Nice blend of heat in the chilli, and sweet in the egg. They clearly know how to stir fry, and it comes out hot, with some cooldown time needed. The seafood was also quite good. Prawns were de-head-and-tailed, calamari didn't feel like rubber. All in all quite good.

This seems to be a good place to go to, and undo the last hour spent at the gym :D Now, to see if their prata is any good.

The Skinny:

• Shop 2, 156 Boundary Street
• Open 7 days for lunch and dinner
• Halal
• Mains $10-15.
  

OSGi Pipe Dreams

So OSGi has been on my radar for a while. I got a chance to have a good play with it, and I don't think I actually came out on top. So rather than bore you with my tales of woe, let me describe my OSGi Utopia:

Effortless builds

Ideally, I'd be able to declare bundle in my maven pom and that would be the end of it. That's right. No messing around with bnd or bundlor configuration. As a total newbie, figuring out what should go in the manifest was arguably the hardest part. A lot of that info is contained in my maven pom, so why do I need to specify it again just for the manifest?

Effortless deployment

With a classic war, I can simply run 'mvn jetty:run' and bang!, my project is deployed to a jetty instance that magically materialises out of no where. No dicking around. Not only that, I can tell maven to start up and deploy to an embedded jetty instance which runs in the background for integration tests, and tear down that instance later. Again, with near zero configuration. I might have to give it a config file that declares my data sources etc, but that's about it.

Effortless provisioning

Again, I'll look to the maven ecosystem for a good example. Maven repositories, (I rather like Nexus in particular) can be taught about other repositories, and it can download artefacts from these repositories on the fly.

I only played with DM Server, so your experiences may vary, but as of the moment, it looks like DM Server can only look at other DM Servers for remote hosted repositories. There's an issue to get support for the main EBR, but really, why can't I just point it at our local Nexus installation, which knows how to find aforementioned bundles for my build. Why is it so hard to find the same bundles for runtime?

Another big promise of OSGi is the end of classpath hell. That is another area where DM Server has unfortunately fallen flat on it's face. It was quite easy to screw up DM Server's boot classpath, and I managed to do so by trying to shoehorn my local maven repo into DM Server.

Granted, DM Server 2.0.0 is only a milestone release, but I really don't want to place bets on something that might not exist by the time a project goes live.

In summary…

OSGi does promise a lot, but the compromises needed to make good on those promises are just not worth it, with current tools. I can live with having to fudge around manifests, or do manifest-first development, but not being able to quickly provision an environment for my bundles to run is an absolute deal breaker.

Pizza Margharita

Pizza Margharita, originally uploaded by tunaranch.

Pizza Margarita, with onions just because I felt like it.

The star is the slow roasted Roma tomatoes, and I cheated by using Lebanese bread for a quick thin base.

Not counting time spent roasting tomatoes, this would have taken about 5 minutes to assemble and finish under the grill. Seriously, you have no excuse for eating two minute noodles any more.

Vanilla Bean Semifreddo with Strawberries

If Strawberries and Cream were to evolve, it would probably turn into something like this:

 

Home-made vanilla bean semifreddo, with sugared strawberry slices.

I learned how to make these strawberries (layer of sliced strawberries, sprinkle castor sugar, another layer of strawberries, more sugar ad nauseum) at a pancake breakfast at a friend's place. You'll end up with some really nice sweet, yet tart strawberries, with a nice pool of juice at the bottom.

This is a very simple, do ahead dessert that is guaranteed to impress.

How To Cook Poppadums (Properly)

I was asked by a friend recently for tips on how to cook poppadums. Well, the short answer is you have to fry them. If you want the long answer, read on.

Now, let's first consider how not to do it: Microwave. Don't even think about it. Yes, I know that the packet contains microwave directions, but it's nothing more than a marketing ploy for lazy people.

So now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's talk about how to do it properly. I.e., fry them:

1. Heat some oil, about 1 cm deep.
2. Chuck in a small piece of poppadums. When it crisps and rises to the surface, your oil is hot enough to fry.
3. Fry papadums, one at a time. They should pretty much go in and out. Take it out as soon as it's done. (It'll brown ever so slightly, and possibly curl, depending on the type). This should take seconds.

That's pretty much it. You can go through a whole packet in a matter of minutes. I prefer to break them in half, makes them a little easier to handle.  If you have chopstick skills, this can be a good time to make use of them.

Note that these instructions don't apply to North Indian poppadums (the type you get at tandoori restaurants). These big, white poppadums with seeds in them just need to be toasted on a pan. Again, do not microwave!

Enjoy.