Peppermint Patties and Kina

Before this ends up becoming Pete's Food Blog, I had better get some of my own culinary conquests posted.  This week's project for me was to cook up some sweet treat for our coffee group visitors.  I was thinking churros until I came across this recipe for peppermint patties on the website of Saveur, my all time favorite cooking/food magazine.  I haven't dabbled much in candy making but it seemed simple enough so I went out and bought the ingredients required.  It wasn't until I got home that I actually read the recipe.  Get out your marble slab, it says.  Great, no marble slab here so a baking sheet will have to do.  I must say it was very simple to make; no stirring involved, just boil up the ingredients and with the help of a candy thermometer dump it all out onto your slab when it hits soft-ball stage.  Because I used a metal baking sheet, I'm not sure if the texture would have been different because the marble would have cooled it down much faster.  Saying that, they were excellent!  Pete ate about 5 the first evening and my coffee group friends gobbled down another 15 at least.  We still have plenty left to enjoy after our evening meal for the next few nights. 

So voila, I have been cooking and it's been damn good. 

Not to be outdone of course by Pete's most recent kaimoana experiment: kina scrambled eggs.  Kina aka sea urchin.  While he was out "working", he managed to pick up a few kina on his dive.

Thanks again to Al Brown's book Go Fish, Pete found a simple recipe for scrambled eggs with kina.  I can't even show you the photo of the finished product because it looks so disgusting but Pete reckoned that this dish is the bomb.  Try it if you like but I think I'll leave it to him to eat these weird and wonderful sea creatures.

And on a totally irrelevant side not, my nearly 4 year old daughter just said to me, "whatever mate" as only a true Cali-Kiwi could say.