A Taste of Yellow!

Barbara from Winos and Foodies is hosting an annual LIVE STRONG with a taste of yellow blog challenge. The idea is to create something yellow and blog about in order to celebrate those who have battled and are battling with cancer. Live Strong is promoted by Lance Armstrong who of course, had his own battle with cancer. Incidentally I saw him when we followed a bit of the tour de France in 2004. He is a machine!!

My aunty is actually battling cancer at the moment, but so far it looks like a successful battle!! She is just about to finish her chemo and the outlook is good!! Aunty Margaret lives in Dunedin, so she couldn’t get to eat the yellow food, but this blog entry is dedicated to her!

I debated for a while as to what to make for the taste of yellow challenge. Something lemony seemed obvious and we were having friends over for dinner on Saturday night, so I thought a lemony pudding would be good. Also, I wanted to use my ice cream maker again, so the perfect option was this lemon rice pudding with cinnamon ice-cream, a Ray McVinnie recipe from Cuisine.

For nibbles we had some lovely ciabatta with olive oil and pesto (store bought, Naked Organics brand – I love it!), some green olives I had roasted and marinated and little pastries using the one sheet of puff pastry I had left in the freezer, topped with quince paste and blue cheese.

For the main, I rubbed a large piece of Scotch fillet with balsamic vinegar and horseradish and roasted it in the oven and served it with red wine sauce, little crunchy roast potatoes (trick to these was using Agria potatoes – my favourite floury variety, lots of chopped rosemary and a sprinkling of semolina which gave a lovely crusty outside) and a rocket salad with spiced nuts, apple and a drizzle of walnut oil.



Then for the yellow food! Pudding was delicious. The rice pudding was a baked one and had lots of lemon zest plus lemon juice drizzled over at the end. I had only made rice pudding in a pot before and I think once in little ramekins in the oven. I remember my grandma making baked rice pudding and sago in the oven and I always used to hate the skin that formed on top. I tried to stir my pudding a lot so that it didn’t form a really obvious skin. The pudding was lovely – the rice had melted into the mily custard and the cinnamon ice-cream was the perfect accompaniment. The recipe called for half milk and half cream, but I used all whole fat milk.



The ice-cream was a basic egg yolk, cream and milk mixture except you didn’t have to cook the custard before churning. The addition of cinnamon was delicious. To serve with the pudding, I drizzled over some of this delicious cinnamon and apple syrup which I bought at the Lyttleton farmers market last year. The lovely lady who makes the syrup also does a selection of other delicious syrups, jams and pastes and markets them under the name peninsular preserves. The syrup is absolutely delicious, capturing the flavour of cinnamon apples in a liquid! Really beautiful on the ice-cream even without the rice pudding!

Unfortunately I didn’t get a good photo of the finished result, but if you look at the recipe on the cuisine web site you will see a lovely photo and that is just what mine looked like.

Thanks also to Morven from Food, Art and Random Thoughts for sending me the yellow LiveStrong bracelet!