More use…

I’ve been busy with my life. Too busy to blog about what I’ve used my TM for.
However, here’s a quick recap, not to mention that it is finally time to make more of the TM Vegetable Stock Concentrate.

I’ve used the TM to

• make pizza dough with the TM recipe – two batches at a time – one pizza is not enough!
• cook plenty of risotto using the lesser amount of rice in the TM recipe (470g) and an addition of 4 pieces of short cut rindless bacon. This makes a veryfull containerful of risotto
• make red-bean blended ice – just like at EasyWay but cheaper – frozen red-bean soup, ice, and a bit of water
• mince beef – my little girl still struggles with eating beef, so I use the TM to turn my beef, whether frozen or thawed, but usually still raw, into pretty much a mooshy paste.
• mince carrots – this is a winner – I add it to our bologonese sauce (which I do not make in the TM, nor do I use the TM recipe), but after seeing Gary “hide” carrots in the Sausage Rolls with Hidden Vegetables and labouriously grating the carrots, I thought to myself “hey! I have a TM to do that ‘grating’ for me”
• cream butter and sugar – I’ve used the TM twice to do this now. I’ll have to get my mum’s opinion on whether it’s as good as the KitchenAid, or the Kenwood, but it has been sufficient for my purposes – chocolate chip biscuits and a treacle pudding
• icecream – I’ve been making lots of the mango icecream recipe that came in a TM newsletter.
  

  300g mango, frozen in chunks
  300g milk, frozen in cubes
  50 g cream
  50 g sweetened condensed milk

  I changed the recipe somewhat as I’m lazy to always have cream, so I up the condensed milk anywhere from 80g to 100g and then add some fresh milk to compensate for the liquid component – 20g to 40g. YUM!

• smoothies – frozen blueberries, frozen strawberries, greek yoghurt, a weet-bix, and some milk – my little girl loves them.

I did also encounter my first error. “Err 52”. The user manual did NOT specify what it was, nor how to resolve it. I was quite unhappy, but fortunately, the internet came to my rescue. It was because condensation had dripped down the pins of the TM bowl and into the machine where the pins are inserted. Gave it a day or two to dry, and then I was back in business. Phew!

The other interesting thing to note about using the TM… my little girl thinks it makes the best noise, and when I recently made some pizza dough she would demand it make more noise when it would pause while in “Interval Mode”. Which, of course, it would. Perhaps that could be a new selling point – “entertaining for demanding children”. 😉

A thermomix dinner

The other weekend, we had a few of my aunties visit. There was a desire from one of them to eat the TM Mushroom Risotto. She would be providing the mushrooms. It was muchly enjoyed by all.

It was not the only thing we made with the TM that night though. Things started in the afternoon. Mum brought her TM over as well, so we had two TMs going at once.

We started with Soy Milk. The aunties were impressed.

Then we experimented. The aunties had been to China and they had tried a Sweet Corn drink. The uncles were roped into de-husking the corn and cutting the kernels off the cobs.

We experimented with the following, based on the Soy Milk recipe

300g corn kernels
100g water

Blend at speed 10 for 1 minute
Cook at 100C for 6 minutes (speed 4)

We ended up adding another 200g water to make the drink less thick, and the aunties were very impressed that the resultant drink was smooth without needing to strain it.

We then proceeded to make Mushroom Risotto. Afterwards, we made the TM Lemon Custard. I made it to the recipe in the book, but it turned out excessively thick. I think I will put less cornflour next time. It was still very yummy.

All in all, a successful evening.

Restaurant Quality

An interstate friend visited us tonight. I decided I’d make Thermomix Risotto – it’s what we now call the Mushroom Risotto. Nice, easy and no fuss. I added 8 rashers of shortcut bacon to saute with the onions, but the rest of the recipe stayed the same.

“Oh, wow! This is restaurant quality!”, exclaimed our friend.

If that’s not a success, I don’t know what is. 😀

Mushroom Risotto a success!

I tried the mushroom risotto again tonight. And I followed the recipe properly this time.

Success!

Risotto failure

We decided, now that we have the Thermomix, that we’ll make risotto. Mum loves risotto, but doesn’t like having to stand there and mix. Yeah, yeah, it’s meant to be the “love” that goes into it, but honestly, who has the time to do that? There’s so many other things to do!

So, we figured we’d add chicken to the recipe… I think that was part of the mistake that lead to failure.

Half a medium onion
50g olive oil
470-500g arborio rice
100g white wine
2tbsp TM vegetable stock concentrate
200g fresh mushrooms sliced
1100g water

Chop onion on speed 7 for 5 seconds
Add oil and cook for 2 minutes on 100C at speed 1
Insert Butterfly. Add rice and wine and cook for 2 minutes at 100C on reverse and soft speed
Add stock, mushrooms and water and cook for 16-17 minutes at 100C on reverse and soft speed

Cook without butterfly using reverse and speed 1-2

The onion didn’t get chopped up as evenly as we would have expected – we pushed the big bits down again and tried to chop it up again, but ended up pureeing some of the smaller bits. We moved on.

I decided we’d try it without the butterfly. That was ok for step 3 because I put it at speed 1-2. After I added all the chicken and mushroom, however, I’d forgotten I didn’t have the butterfly in and did it at soft speed. It wasn’t until about 10 minutes in that I remembered it should have been at speed 1-2.

Result? Uncooked rice, chicken and mushrooms at the top, and smooshed rice at the bottom.

How did we attempt to fix it? I scooped it out into the Thermoserve, then put the butterfly in, then put the uncooked bits back into the bottom of the Thermomix bowl, with the moosh at the top. I set it to cook for another 10 minutes. It turned into “grandma rice”.

Oh well. We’ll just have to try it again, and this time, actually follow the recipe!

Thermomix Demo

An up close and personal demonstration.

Everyone arrives late, but once it gets going, there’s no stopping what the Thermomix creates!

We made strawberry sorbet, peach bellinis, bread rolls, garlic and herb dip, mushroom risotto, coleslaw and lemon custard – all from the recipe book.

The things we didn’t like:
the raw garlic and the raw shallots in the dip
watching all the powdered sugar and flour waft through the gap created by the MC and into the kitchen – ugh – I detest mess!

But overall, it was all yummy and easy and fast.