Raspberries & Trumpets

Melt in the mouth slow braised pressed lamb

2011-04-28T06:24:00.000-07:00

Slow braising lamb is not exactly rocket science. Even so, I can hardly claim it’s my own invention. I pinched the idea off a cooking show. Definitely Rupert Rowley’s idea.*

I saw through his fancy-pants cheffery at once. Past the la-di-da herb crust and caramelised onion mousse and sous vide tender loin and poached baby vegetables and aligot (cheesy mash).

A shoulder of lamb, very simply braised on the stove top and then pressed under a weight overnight. Dense, meltingly tender, rich and sticky, reheated in the strained and reduced braising liquid.

Not rocket science. Not even Michelin Starred Science. Just a perfect idea.

After placating Little Chocolate Flavoured P- with the promise of apricot frangipane pie, I commandeered her wood panelled country kitchen. Stripped of complications, glass of wine in hand, I did absolutely nothing for six hours.**

Braising is nothing new. Just time consuming.

Squishing things after they’re cooked is probably not new either. But this technique I despise in commercially produced chicken nuggets and processed hams results in a moist gelatinous and impossibly dense slab of lamb, infused with the braising stock flavours and melt in the mouth succulent.

I craved, no, coveted, this lamb ever since I witnessed it via the magic of television. Worth the wait? Oh G-d yes.

* Hairy Bikers Tour of Britain, Derbyshire Episode. The recipe for the braised and pressed shoulder is unfortunately not included on the BBC website.

** Not, strictly speaking, true. For a little while I surfed the net looking at chocolate art, and I whipped up two frangipane pies, helped Bird with the pomme de terre au gratin AKA potato bake, roasted a leg of lamb, baked some sweet potatoes, made gravy and generally made a mess.

Rosemary infused braised, pressed lamb with lamb jus

Boned shoulder of lamb, approximately 1 kg (although size doesn’t matter)
3 medium carrots, peeled and cut in half
1 large brown onion, peeled and cut into eighths
1 medium leek, cut into four pieces
1 bay leaf
2 sprigs rosemary
½ bottle dry red wine*
3 cups good quality beef stock (or a couple of beef bones, roasted in the oven for about an hour)
Kitchen string
Parchment paper (greaseproof paper), cut into a circle just a little larger than the saucepan, and with a 1 cm hole pinched in the centre
Fry pan and medium sized saucepan (just large enough to snuggle fit the piece of lamb)

Using kitchen string, tie the lamb up like a parcel. There is a neat way to do this that is a little like a blanket stitch and a little like a mobius strip (see this Epicurious video). Or, you could just tie it up any old way. This works too. Or ask your butcher to do it.

In a small fry pan, heat a small amount of olive oil. Add the tied lamb shoulder, turning occasionally to brown on all side.

At the same time, heat about 3 tablespoons of olive oil in the saucepan and add the vegetables and herbs. Cook on a medium to high heat, stirring occasionally for about 15 minutes, or until the vegetables are cooked and starting to stick to the pan (but not burning).

When the vegetables are stating to stick, toss in half the wine and scrap around the pan to deglaze all the sticky vegetable sugars. Add the meat into the saucepans and deglaze the frying pan in the same way with the remaining wine, then tip that into the saucepan too. Add the beef stock (or bones) and add water (or wine or stock) to just the top of the meat.

Press the parchment paper onto the surface of the liquid and meat (like a second lid) and then place the lid on the saucepan. Turn the heat the lowest setting, and set to very gentle bubble away for about 5 to 6 hours. Check on it from time to time – make sure it does not dry out or burn onto the bottom of the saucepan, and gentle turn the meat over after about three hours.

When the meat is finished cooking, allow to cool slightly and then remove from the braising liquids and strain over the saucepan. Place onto clean parchment , cut the strings and discard, then wrap up like a Christmas present in the greaseproof paper. Tightly wrap this package in plastic wrap (I went several times around it all).

Place in a bake dish, then cover with another baking dish and then weight the top baking dish (I used a concrete statue of a cockerspaniel. You could use a brick). Leave overnight (food safety would probably dictate in the fridge, but I left it out on the kitchen bench).

Meanwhile, strain the braising liquid and discard the solids. Keep the liquid. That stuff is gold.

To serve: cut the lamb into neat portions. It is very dense and rich, so make them smaller than you think you might want.

In a small frying pan or shallow saucepan, heat a little olive oil and add the lamb portions. Add a few spoonfuls of braising liquid (which by now should have a lovely jelly like consistency), turn and add more liquid as it bubbles and thickens, until all sides of the lamb pieces are richly glazed. Remove the lamb ready to serve. Add addition liquid to make a sauce, heat through until thick enough.

Place lamb onto a bed of pumpkin puree, spoon over some sauce and enjoy.

* For goodness sake, only cook with wine you will drink. It doesn’t need to be great wine, but it does have to be palatable

Fire and ice: Thai beef salad

2011-04-10T01:39:00.000-07:00

Iceberg lettuce is seriously underrated. Eclipsed by fancypants rivals, bitter raddicio and spicy rocquette and sweet mache, iceberg, to paraphrase Dame Edna, is C-O-M-M-O-N. Cheap and ordinary.

It is the lettuce of my childhood, sweet and crisp and watery.

Whilst the cuisine of the West may currently not be on speaking terms with iceberg lettuce, having swapped our childhood salads of cubed cheese and grated carrot for frissee and witlof, Asian cuisine from China to Thailand has no such prejudices.

The crunchy bowl of an iceberg lettuce leaf is irreplaceable in Chinese san choi bao. Vietnamese chả giò are dangerously moreish, crisp deep fried pastries wrapped with mint and basil in iceberg leaves.

And torn chunks of iceberg hearts, tossed with sweet ripe tomatoes and thick slices of cucumber is the perfect cooling counterpoint to the volcanic combination of raw onion and chilli in Thai beef salad.

Thai beef salad

Serves 2

300 gm of the best steak you can get.

½ iceberg lettuce

1 small Lebanese cucumber

1 punnet cherry tomatoes, halved (or 3 medium sized field tomatoes, cut into thin wedges)

½ red onion, thinly sliced

½ cup coriander leaves, torn

½ cup mint leaves, torn (English mint is fine, use Vietnamese mint if available)

½ cup Thai basil (or sweet Italian basil)

1 or 2 hot chillies

1 crushed bulb garlic

1 tsp sesame oil

Juice and rind of 2 limes

1 tbsp palm sugar (or raw sugar)

4 tbsp fish sauce

1 tbsp soy sauce

Cook the steak to medium rare on a grill pan or barbeque (Make sure your steak is at room temperature when you cook it. For a thickish steak, an inch and half or so thick, cook for 4 minutes on each side).

Set aside to rest for about 5 minutes.

In a large bowl, whisk together the chillies, garlic, oil, sugar, rind, half the lime juice, half the fish sauce and the soy sauce. Taste. Gradually add fish sauce and lime until the flavours balance (you want something that has ‘zing’ and a nice salty finish, without being mouth puckeringly sour or drinking sea-water salty).

Slice the steak into very thin strips. Toss through the dressing to coat and remove.

Add the lettuce, cucumber, tomatoes , onion and herbs to the dressing, toss to coat.

Pile the salad vegetables onto a plate, scatter the beef over the top, and drizzle with the dressing.

Rustic baked beans

2011-04-06T03:49:00.000-07:00

I still have ham left over from Christmas.

In a characteristically excessive move, I procured a 9.7 kilo leg of beautifully cured ham for our very small Christmas gathering*, which I glazed with quince paste and cardamom and green ginger wine and lovingly studded with approximately twelve million cloves. We ate ham everyday for two weeks. And then I carved up the remaining five kilos, and packaged the slices and chunks and bones away in the freezer, dreaming of mid-winter pea-and-ham soups and ham and leek soufflés.

I don’t like waste. I ferret away kitchen scapes and old bones for stock. My freezer contains little zip lock bags of everything from stale bread crumbs to off cuts of potato and kohlrabi to a chicken carcass to prawn heads. You never know what you might need. Of course it’s frugal: throwing away food is the same as throwing away money. It’s also partly a political stance: when we waste food we are saying that the time and effort put into growing and rearing our food is disposable**. And it is so satisfying to make something delicious out of food that would otherwise be assigned to the trash.

Think of it as 3D Tetris for your tastebuds.

Ham. Diced carrot off-cuts. The first of this year’s tomato passata. Half an onion in the fridge. Celery. Celery powder. Half a bulb of fennel. Stolen rosemary. Tinned cannellini beans. Now I love baked beans. Not the sticky sweet navy-beans-in-tomato-sauce you can buy in a tin (although, to be fair, those bad boys are pretty healthy, providing you buy the low salt/low sugar brands). The old-school home-made kind, chunky and spicy and packed full of vegetables. It is my measure of a good breakfast cafe, the calibre of their ‘house-made beans’. And baked beans are precisely what the contents of my freezer suggests. All it needs it a little time to braise.

Best Christmas present ever.

* In addition to a two kilo turkey buff, and two chickens. Not to mention potato salad and zucchini and green bean salad with pangratto, and steamed carrots and four loaves of bread and roasted baby beatroots. For eight people. I have issues.

** You could argue that rather than saving money by not wasting food, we should just buy more food so that farmers are better recompensed. I say, let’s pay more money for food, thus better remunerating farmers and incentivising us consumers not to waste it. Food is way too cheap.

Rustic baked beans

1 tbsp olive oil

1 small red onion, diced

2 cloves garlic, minced 2 red chillies, minced (optional)

2 medium carrots, diced

2 stalks celery, diced

½ tsp fennel seeds

½ tsp coriander seeds

¼ ground all spice

3 cloves

2 tsp sweet paprika

6 very ripe tomatoes, diced (or 2 cups passata or 2 tins crushed tomatoes)

Sprig rosemary. Or thyme. Or oregano. Whatever you grow/can steal.

300 gm thick chunks ham (or a bit of ham bone or smoked pork hock or similar. Or leave out, just as good).

2 tins cannellini beans (or your favourite beans, butter beans are good. So are kidney beans.)

Saute the onions, garlic and vegetables (except tomatoes) in a large heavy based saucepan until soft, this will take about ten minutes. Add the spices, toast for about 1 minute, then add the tomatoes, fresh herbs and ham.

Bring to a simmer (add as little water if a bit dry) and cook for about half an hour to an hour, until thick and all the flavours are infused. Taste, and add salt if necessary.

Gently stir through the drained tinned beans (feel free to soak dried ones over night, I just love the convenience of tinned ones) and heat through.

Finish off with masses of fresh chopped parsley and a teaspoon of powdered celery leaves.

Serve over grilled polenta or thick sourdough toast. Soft yolked organic poached egg makes this transcendent.

Golden, crunchy chicken nuggets. Nutrition and sedition in the nanny-less state

2011-02-27T03:16:00.000-08:00

Some children will eat anything. The Pintos (my two nephews) will eat chicken, in nugget, ‘tuckey’ (that is, Kentucky Fried Chicken) and grilled form. That’s about it. And frozen vegetable mix with rehydrated mash potato. And ice berg lettuce. And ice-cream, chocolate, cake, ice-cream, cheese, chips (crisps and fries), pancakes with honey and bananas. Ok, so there are probably fussier children.

Home made chicken nuggets, crumbed with the crumbs of stale bread, baked and not deep fried, served with salad and vegetables manages to satisfy their limited appetites without destroying my principles.

Although I swear they can tell the difference. And to them, homemade is simply not as good. It lacks the salt and oil of pre-prepared chicken nuggets. The bread from which I make crumbs is multigrain, sourdough, denser and not as sweet or salty as a commercial crumb mix or batter. The vegetables are not as soft. The mash potatoes never as weirdly smooth as rehydrated powder (which I have never tasted and therefore cannot know how on earth I would emulate it).

And it’s hard work. Crumbing chicken (dip in milk, dip in flour, dip in egg, dip in crumbs ...), boiling potatoes then mashing them, dicing and blanching vegetables. I do this once in a blue moon. I get why countless parents don’t. It’s because they have something else to do with those several hours. Every day.

But what I don’t get is how chicken nuggets, of all things, became the food that children eat (also frozen fish fingers, a culinary abomination I cannot fathom). There are lots of things we could serve to children that take no time and do not come highly processed and swimming is sugar, salt and fat. And yet we, as a general culture, collectively facilitate frozen nuggets and frozen vegetables (which are actually not significantly processed, being snap frozen with little added to them) and pizza and packets of chips and muesli bars and cookies.

I’ll admit I don’t know the first thing about raising children. But the “food” we, as a society, now feed and make available to children, is also the food that we are collectively consuming as adults. Pre-prepared and packaged and frozen and take away foods. Foods low in nutrients and high in calories. Foods which don’t feature adequate vegetables and fruits. Foods with added fats and sugars and salts, well beyond what we need.

Our children may well recover from the food we feed them (although the stats are not encouraging. More children are more overweight than ever before recorded. Similarly, more adults. We will die fat but not alone). But we adults (on the whole) have not really demonstrated that we know any better. That we are able or willing to eat any differently.

Governments do little to intervene. Heaven forbid ‘they’ tell ‘us’ what to eat. But when say we don’t believe in the nanny state we are effectively saying ‘let us choose to make ourselves and our children sick’. When we compound this idiocy by further criticising ‘big taxes’ – which pay for schools and education programs and public health campaigns and hospitals – we are saying ‘please also make it impossible for us to treat the consequent illnesses’. No one is to blame, we are all to blame.

We buy convenient food because it is convenient. The price we pay – in dollars and in time – is simply not commensurate to the sugar-fat payload. Of course, there are healthy, cheap, quick alternatives. Salads. Lentils. Steamed vegetables. Brown rice. Fresh fruit. Porridge. Chickpeas. But they don’t taste nearly so sweet-salty-tasty (just like heroin is so much more effective than paracetamol).

Make it from scratch. Not every time, but once or twice. Know the effort that goes into making good food. Understand the ingredients. Read the labels. Read the nutritional information. If governments and business refuse to take responsibility for our health and wellbeing, and we refuse to let them, then let’s grow up and take responsibility for ourselves.

Crunchy baked chicken nuggets with sourdough crumbs

Serves 6

1 kg chicken meat, trimmed of skin, sinew and fat. Cut into bite sized peices
½ loaf stale sourdough bread
3 cloves garlic
1 cup milk
2 eggs
1 ½ cups cornmeal (ie, semolina or polenta)

Preheat oven to 190ºc. Line two baking trays with baking paper and lightly brush with olive oil.

Cut the bread into chunks and blitz in a food processor with the garlic until finely crumbed. Season with salt and pepper and a little paprika (optional). Emply into a large bowl or plate.

Beat the eggs together in a dessert bowl, add about 2 tsbp water or milk. Set aside.

Pour the milk into a separate dessert bowl, set aside.

Place the cornmeal into a large bowl or plate.

From left to right, arrange the milk, cornmeal, egg and breadcrumbs.

Dip a chicken piece into the milk, then coat in cornmeal, then dip into the egg and then press into the bread crumbs. Place on the baking tray, and repeat.

Cook in the oven for approximately twelve minutes, turn each nugget over and cook for a further three to five minutes. They should be golden and crunchy (to test if cooked, cut one in half. It’s not rocket science).

Serve with blanched vegetables and homemade tomato sauce.

Peaches and cream (and chilli and cheese) AKA salsa and saganaki

2011-02-22T02:47:00.000-08:00

Peaches are late summer. The tangy sweet-sour of yellow peaches and the fragrant sugariness of white peaches, fuzzy-furry skin and juices dripping down my chin: bliss (albeit sticky bliss).

I grew up on the remnants of a peach farm. I am never short of ideas about what to do with them*. Cut in half, drizzled with honey and scattered with flaked almonds, roasted in the oven for half an hour. Poached in sugar syrup for 30 minutes, then peeled to reveal the transferred pink tinge on the beautifully sweet and yielding fruit. Pureed and turned into sorbet (or better yet, into a Bellini). Sliced and tossed with jamon and buffalo mozzarella and rocquette. Cooked down into jam, like my mum used to make, with walnuts, served with cheddar. Atop a frangipane tart. In tea cake. The classic combination: peaches and cream.

So many temptations. Such a short season.

Cheese is just grown up cream. And peaches are peaches. Classic combination.

* I mean, after you tire of eating them fresh and ripe in the sun. As if you ever would. I bought a kilo and half this evening and ate one on the way home. Even though I knew I was using them for dinner.

Peaches in chilli syrup with fried haloumi*

Serves two for dinner or four as an starter

Drawing inspiration from Australian-Greek chef George Colambaris, who tops saganaki with figs in pepper and honey.

1 ripe yellow peach (score the bottom with a cross)
1 ripe white peach (score the bottom with a cross)
1 very hot red chilli, finely minced, seeds retained
3 tbsp sherry vinegar (or white vinegar)
3 tbsp honey
1 tbsp whole basil leaves
1 tbsp shredded basil leaves
1 small bulb fennel, finely diced
½ small red onion, finely diced
1 roasted red pepper, peeled and cut into small dice (about ¼ inch)
Eight spears asparagus
250 gm haloumi cheese, cut into 1 cm thick slices
2 handfuls rocquette
Olive oil

To poach the peaches: bring a saucepan of water to the boil. Carefully place peaches into the boiling water, simmer for about ten minutes. remove with a slotted spoon. When cool enough to handle, peel off the skin. Dice into small dice (about ¼ inch)

To grill asparagus: heat a grill pan to very hot. Brush asparagus spears with olive oil, grill until tender and char marked (about 5 minutes). Set aside (they don’t need to be hot when you serve the salad).

To make the chilli syrup: in a small saucepan bring the vinegar, honey and chilli to a simmer. Reduce by half. Taste. Add extra dried chilli flakes if not hot enough. Or substitue sweet chilli sauce. It's up to you.

To make the salsa: toss together peaches, basil, fennel, onion, red pepper. Season with a little black pepper and stir through two to three tablespoons of the chilli syrup. Taste. If too sweet, add a little lemon juice.

To fry haloumi. Heat a tbsp oil in a non-stick fry pan (or saganaki, the pan for which the named). When hot, add haloumi slices. Leave to cook until the slices are deeply browned (or until your smoke alarm goes off), then turn over and cook the other side. When cooked, squeeze over some lemon juice.

To serve: place a handful of rocquette on a place. Arrange haloumi slices and asparagus spears, top with peach salsa. Drizzle with a little chilli syrup if at all pretentious.

* Type of cheese. Texture kind of like rubber, but in really, really good, salty way. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloumi. In a pinch you could substitute fetta, if you dusted it with flour before frying (I have done this) – but be very careful as fetta melts much more quickly.

Something light. And healthy. Crunchy Lime and Chilli Chicken Salad

2011-02-17T02:27:00.000-08:00

Kitchen Helper, who I love*, has a well-honed and perversely indiscriminate palate. That is, an appreciation, certainly, of extremely tasty and fancy food, but also a willingness to eat just about anything. This makes experimentation, travel to weird and exotic places and my very occasional lack of effort** pretty much risk free, culinary speaking. On the other hand, Kitchen Helper is a rubbish muse. Primary contribution to meal planning? “Something light. And healthy”. Every. Single. Time.

We eat a lot of salad.

In between summer storms the weather is muggy. Of course, talking about the weather is so passé, so ordinary, so boring (a little like my muse's efforts). And yet with flash-floods and cyclones and violent and damaging storms it is impossible not to be hyperaware of the moisture in the air, the colour of the sky, the direction of the wind, flashes of lightening.

And Kitchen Helper is moping because of the weather, like a chocolate Labrador melting in the sun. It is, apparently, too hot today.

On days like this there is no need to consult (okay, on no days ever is it ever necessary to consult, given the uniformity of response). Because a salad is perfect.

But not just any salad. Oh sure, I love a good Caesar salad or salade Lyonnais or Greek salad, salty with olives and fetta. But tropical conditions call for tropical salads, sour and salty and spicy and so very, very fresh with ginger and lime zest. Bright and colourful and refreshing, just about any crisp vegetables (or fruit) that can be eaten raw can be shredded and tossed in. Snow peas. Green papaya or mango. Carrots. Celery. Just get the dressing perfectly balanced and go to town. The resulting pile is crisp and tangy and hot and pungent with stinky fish sauce and so absolutely right in 90% humidity. And light. And healthy.

* Deeply, passionately, always

** Yes, there are days when I really cannot be bothered. On those days we eat paella. I have no idea how paella became the standby dish of appathetic cookery, but it works out well, because routine as it is for me to cook now, it always tastes amazing.

Vietnamese(ish) chicken salad

Serves four

1 whole chicken, butterflied (with a sharp knife, cut chicken along backbone and open out flat)
Olive oil
Sea salt

Salad
2 medium Lebanese cucumbers, seeds removed and cut into julienne (or your nearest approximation)
2 carrots, peeled and cut into julienne
1 medium red capsicum, cut into julienne
1 small to medium kohlrabi, peeled and cut into julienne
200 gm bean shoots (about two handfuls)
5 long spring onions, cut into 7cm lengths and then strips
¼ cup unsalted roasted peanuts

Dressing
3 tbsp soy sauce
3 tbsp fish sauce
Juice and zest of 1 lime
Juice of 1 lemon
1 tbsp rice wine vinegar (or white vinegar, if you must)
1 ½ tbsp castor sugar
2 bulbs garlic, minced
1 inch ginger, crushed
1 hot red chilli, finely sliced
2 tbsp sesame oil

Preheat oven to 200ºc. Rub chicken with olive oil and sprinkle liberally with salt. Place into the oven on a tray, cook for 30-40 minutes (until juices run clear from a knife inserted into the thigh bone joint). Remove from oven and rest for 20 minutes (or do the day before, and have cold instead of just warm). If you like, you can glaze the chicken in equal parts honey and soy sauce before cooking.

When the chicken is cool enough to handle, remove the meat from the carcase and shred with your fingers into smallish strips. Remove the skin if you prefer (this makes it even lighter and healthier).

To make the dressing, whisk together all ingredients. Taste. Does it have a good flavour balance? Adjust – if too salty, add a little extra oil and vinegar, if too sweet, more vinegar and lime. Too oily? More fish sauce (go easy though). Way too spicy? A bit more sugar. The longer you leave the dressing to sit, the more the flavours will infuse and develop.

Toss chicken and all salad ingredients except peanuts through the dressing until coated.

To serve, pile portions onto a plate and scatter with roasted peanuts.

Vanilla and rose tea smoked duck

2011-02-12T03:31:00.000-08:00

If Delhi was lacking in clean water and fresh vegetables, it was also lacking in another equally taken-for-granted commodity: clean, fresh air. It is possible my lungs will never forgive me for breathing in the dirty smog, a mixture of burning coal and exhaust fumes and kerosene and wood fires servicing the needs of a city of 14 million people in 1500 square kilometres*.

Breathing in air that felt dirty, oily, tainted: it did not make for much of an appetite.

There is no doubt that there is a link between taste and smell**. We eat with all our senses. Ferran Adria, the mad genius behind El Bulli, is reported to on occasion serve dishes that are accompanied by recordings, (for example, of the sound of the sea) and to spray diners with specially concocted fragrances (like pine wood or autumn earth or sea spray) to enhance their dining experience. But nothing tastes as sweet as clean air.

It’s no wonder that every crowded Delhi corner hosts a chai wallah, dispensing milk-rich and sweetened spiced tea, a steamy aromatic remedy against the encroaching smog.

And no wonder too, that my usually endless craving for smoked and smoky food was also on holiday while I was in Delhi. The smoky, peaty notes in a good single malt whiskey are to be treasured only when the air is crisp and clear and cold. So too the flavour of wok tossed tofu, the incredible heat in combination with sweet soy sauce sending delicate curls of burning sugars around everything. The taste of barbequed spare -ribs, sticky with sweet-hot-sour sauce and infused with smouldering hickory wood chips. Smoked salmon and kippers and bacon and ham and muscles and chipotle chillies and paprika. Bonfires and toasting marshmallows and billy tea and damper and open fireplaces in winter and hot chocolates.

While cold smoking a ham is a) my dream, and b) beyond me in my current location (including our overly sensitive smoke alarm which is deeply committed to the saying that where there’s smoke there’s a fire); hot smoking small portions of this and that is as easy as steaming. In fact, the method is nearly exactly the same.

* At the end of the nineteenth century London was famous for her yellow smog, that gentle pollution which turned the great city golden and allowed her visitors to view her as if through a Vaseline smeared lens. Delhi, taking her turn at industrialisation on a truly epic scale, imitates – and I believe exceeds – the capital of her former colonial occupiers. India has its own path to follow, but I do hope it involves some version of the Clean Air Act.

** This is probably why, whenever I have a head cold, and therefore cannot smell, I attempt to exist on nothing but olives and chillies. Chilli marinated olives for preference, because the salt and heat at least registers on my tastebuds.

Vanilla and rose tea smoked duck

Serves two

1 large wok, with lid
Lots of tin foil
2 duck breasts, skin on
1 cup long grain rice
1 cup rose tea (black tea with rose petals)
1 vanilla pod, cut into 3 pieces
1 cup course sugar
Vanilla salt, optional

Gently score the skin of the duck breast fillets, taking care not to slice all the way through the fat. Rub a little of the vanilla salt if using. Place the duck fillets skin side up on a piece of foil.

Line the wok with four to five layers of tin foil. This is very important, otherwise you will destroy your wok.

Place the tea, rice, sugar and vanilla pod into the wok and stir to combine. Lightly place another piece of foil over the mixture. Cover the wok with the lid and place over a high heat. After about 5 minutes, the wok will be filled with smoke.

Remove lid and place the foil with the duck into the wok, directly on top of the rice and tea mixture. Replace the lid and smoke for about ten minutes (no more).

Heat a grill pan to very hot.

Remove duck from wok, and place skin side down in the grill pan. Cook for 4-6 minutes, until the skin is very crispy.

Remove from pan and rest for 5-10 minutes before serving and rest.

Toss through a salad of citrus and rose petals and shaved fennel, or serve with char-grilled broccoli and mashed parsnips.

Fresh vegetables poached in clean water

2011-02-10T22:14:00.000-08:00

Guide books for western tourists in India have two key and related pieces of advice: drink bottled water. And only eat well-cooked food. Preferably boiled or deep fried. Preferably in front of you. Preferably no meat.

Water is treated in major Indian cities, just not necessarily in the ways that Australian or Americans or the French are used to. So chances are tourists will react a bit adversely. And this links back to the cooking methods – sufficient heat will kill off those minor bugs, so better safe than sorry. And because electricity can be a bit hit and miss (and hence so can refrigeration) meat is best avoided.

Delhi in the middle of winter is pretty cold. Look at it on a map – it’s a long way north of the equator. The Himalayas aren’t that far away. It’s not exactly Birmingham in January, but even if you could safely eat the salad, chances are there wouldn’t be much of it around. It’s not in season.

What you do have on tap is dahl. Lots and lots of dahl. Which I happen to love. Thin soup like consistency, fire-hot on the spicy scale with idlies (streamed rice dumplings) floating in a bowl for breakfast. Thick dark lentils enriched with ghee and cream with whole wheat rotis. Parathas (a whole wheat unleavened bread) stuffed with thick paste- like dahl. All good. Breakfast, lunch and dinner.*

But the butter and oil and carbohydrates and general stodge takes its toll. Lightly steamed vegetables and salad and fruit and a really good steak** starts to have an appeal after a week or so.

* I need a break before I can recreate these in all their glory.

** I know, cows are sacrosanct in India. But when a girl craves steak she craves steak. Good, medium rare, organic heritage-breed eye fillet steak. With little criss-crossed charred marks and a melt-in-you- mouth texture.

Vegetables poached in beurre monte

Serves two people desperate for fresh vegetables

1 litre water
60 gm butter
4 baby carrots, peeled and cut in half length ways
4 brocollini stalks
1 fennel bulb, sliced into thin wedges
2 small yellow button squash, cut into thin wedges
10 cm piece leek, sliced lengthways into thin strips
1 small zucchini, sliced into batons
100 gm green beans, top and tailed

In a large deep fry pan, bring 1 litre of water to a rapid boil. Reduce heat to a simmer, whisk in butter, half a teaspoon at a time until emulsified (this make a very thin beurre monte). Add a teaspoon of sea salt flakes.

Bring back to the boil. Add brocollini and carrots. Simmer for about 3 minutes. Add remaining vegetables and simmer for another 3 minutes. Remove vegetables to a warm plate. Scatter with chopped herbs, sea salt and cracked pepper to taste. Serve with char-grilled steak.

For a simple sauce for steak, reduce remaining poaching liquid by half, and then whisk in approximately 1 tablespoon butter, half a teaspoon at time and a teaspoon of Dijon mustard. This should result in a thickish silky sauce, to be spooned over a perfectly cooked eye fillet.

Raspberry and rosewater sorbet

2010-12-29T02:01:00.000-08:00

Raspberries: fresh picked, sun ripened, deep crimson. They smell like fairy-floss, their sweetness giving only the merest hint of underlying tartness. I rarely cook with raspberries because it is far too satisfying to eat them in their natural state without interference. Their colour reminds me of sunburn and they taste like heaven and explode like midsummer in the mouth.

This year, like last year, Little Chocolate Flavoured P- arranged for a ridiculous quantity of fresh raspberries to be picked for Christmas lunch. My share – a half kilo of pure, uncut, just picked summer magic.

Like the roses to which they are related, rubus idaeus are not native to Australia, where this common European bramble is a luxury summer fruit (actually, there is a native Australian raspberry but it is not commercially grown and the fruit is not commonly available. Blackberries, on the other hand, are so abundant they are considered a noxious weed and cannot be harvested in the wild in case they have been subject to poison extermination spraying).

My childhood, which featured peaches and plums and apricots negligently and gluttonously consumed whilst perched in the branches of the respective trees was strictly limited on the berry front (with the notable exception of mulberries, as both my friend Louise and I had truly enormous mulberry trees, perfect for climbing and straining school uniforms).

And yet the mere mention of raspberries and I am four or five again, scrawny and corduroy-pinafore wearing, Strawberry-Shortcake knee-high socks and wispy never-neat hair.

The kitchens of Brambly Hedge were full of activity. Cool summer foods were being made. There was cold watercress soup, fresh dandelion salad, honey creams, syllabubs and meringues. The young mice had been up early to gather huge baskets of wild strawberries.*

It is the literature, not the reality, of my childhood that induces these flashbacks. With the iconic bramble borders, which shifted with the seasons – full-fruited or blossoming or bare and sprinkled with winter snow: Brambly Hedge. It is no real mystery that the books of Jill Barklem were so influential: cute and pink and floral, the beautifully illustrated stories of the little woodland dwelling community of mice, guided by Lord and Lady Woodmouse (and their slightly naughty daughter Primrose), with its dairy and flour mill, could not have been better targeted at small and dreamy little girls.

And most importantly: they featured meticulously researched exotic fairytale foods like roasted chestnuts and elderflower syrup and crabapples and sugared violets and bramble jelly and acorn coffee. Although all real (and apparently tested) traditional English recipes, they seem to me just as fantastic as the toffee pops of Enid Blyton’s The Magic Far Away Tree and the pepper-imps and chocolate frogs of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter. All these books shared nothing in common with what was normal in my childhood, like vegemite or kangaroos or summer bushfires or funnel web spiders.

In a blurring of make-believe, nostalgia and hard botanical fact, nothing is more obvious that the pairing of raspberry and roses, heady rosewater scented sugar syrup and pureed fresh raspberries, churned into a delicate and icy floral dessert.

* Jill Barklem Brambly Hedge Summer Story William Collins Sons & Co Ltd 1980

Raspberry and rosewater sorbet

1 cup castor sugar
1 ¾ water
Juice of one lemon
2 tsp rosewater
500 gm fresh (or frozen) raspberries

Heat the water and sugar together in a heavy bottom saucepan, stirring until the sugar dissolves.

Cool for half an hour or so, add the rosewater, lemon juice and raspberries and puree with a bar-mix (or decant into a blender and pulse).

Strain mixture into a bowl through a mesh strainer (to remove the raspberry seeds).

Leave to cool. Taste (if too sweet, add a little more lemon juice).

Decant mixture into an ice-cream machine and churn according to the machine’s instructions. Serve as soon as a soft sorbet consistency forms (or settle it he freezer for an hour or so until firm enough for your liking)

If you don’t have an ice-cream machine, you can freeze in a loaf tin in the freezer – take out every hour or so to break up the ice crystals forming by beating with a fork. Once the mixture hardens, scrape with a fork into a pile of shaved ice and serve as a granita (as it can be difficult to get the same smooth consistency as a sorbet without a ice-cream churn).

Scatter with mint or pistachios or sugared violets or rose petals to serve.

Makes 1.5 litres

Summer Christmas versus Winter Christmas (what my little brother is missing)

2010-12-24T03:58:00.000-08:00

Last Christmas I made (amongst other things) gravlax. A side of salmon, cured in sugar and rock salt and dill and juniper berries and gin. My brother, who shares my affinity for Bombay Saphire, proceded to eat the gin soaked curing paste as I brushed it off, preparing to thinly slice the moist, sweet bright pink fish. Unsurprisingly, it made him ill.

I miss him.

Soon to be professor-doctor-clever-pants in the world's most obscure and impractical discipline, he lives in Oxford, where it is very cold and people ride bicycles. He was here, with me, last year for Christmas. This year is another year when we are not spending Christmas together.

I miss him.

Not that he is much help at Christmas (although his bacon-sandwich making capabilities, possibly his only real culinary triumph, are to be respected on Boxing Day and New Year's Day, when fried breakfast food is generally welcomed). He does have an eye for Christmas decorations (insisting on a real tree last year, and hence improving the Christmassy-ness of the whole occassion). And he does know the words to most carols, even if he doesn't always sing them in tune (an allegation he would no doubt deny).

Last year (for a number of reasons that now seem ridiculous) I experienced a severe case of 'being-overwhelmed-at-Christmas', which manifested in tears about two barbeequed chickens (best not to ask). My brother just being here, in all his goofy, idiotic, and vaguely dada-esque way made it just a bit easier to cope. (How this involved purchasing pale blue silk socks is a mystery). We ate half a kilo of fresh raspberries to help us deal with the whole situation.

I shouldn't worry that he'll be lonely at Christmas (he has more facebook friends than I have recipe clippings, which is to say, a great many). He will be having the white Christmas I can only ever dream about. But he isn't here, and he'll miss all the summer fruit, the cherries, the cold beer and the cricket in the backyard. He'll miss the sunburn and the gin and tonics and the pimms cups and the ice-cream from my new ice-cream machine. He'll miss having people around him who have known him forever. If he mopes unreasonably, I won't be there to tell him to stop being an idiot. He'll miss me.

Merry Christmas.

Christmas Salad: roquette, peaches, buffalo mozzarella and prosciutto

Slice two very ripe yellow peaches into thin wedges. Toss with two cups (ish) of wild roquette. tear six slices of prosciutto and toss through with the peaches and roquette. Arrange on a plate. Break one ball of fresh buffalo mozzarella over the top, drizzle with olive oil and eat in Australia at Christmas time.

Serves 2

Spicy almond biscuits to warm the coldest of hearts

2010-12-17T23:11:00.000-08:00

There are bronze stars and red glitter-spangled baubles hanging from the ceiling above my desk at work. Silver stars and snowflakes and globes are strung from the banisters in my apartment and attached with paper clips to the small pine tree in the corner of one room. The house is filled with the scent of cinnamon and sugar.

Last night after yet another bellini* themed Christmas catch-up with yet another indispensible friend on my way to cook dinner for another different and equally valuable loved one, I stopped to buy a small Christmas gift for my mum. With a backpack full of dried fruit and nuts and Christmas cheer, a handbag containing frozen broadbeans, and an accumulation of several weeks worth of Champagne, I perhaps was not in the best frame of body or mind to browse in a crowded, tiny shop full of small gift type things.

A beautiful young man set aside a small something whilst I searched for additional perfect lovely things. I love Christmas, I hum carols, I adore that the world pretends to be shinier, more beautiful, more bearable for just the smallest window of time. To my very great shame, last night I got fed up and frustrated and walked out the shop before purchasing these gifts.

And the boy, who had so helpfully found the very last stocked item of a hard to find special something, ran out of the shop after me. He had already wrapped my pieces in Christmas paper. He was sorry it was so busy. He explained that it was Christmas. As if I didn’t know.

I couldn’t have felt more like Scrooge if I tried**. I walked back into the store.

This morning I made cookies. Something I have been meaning to do for weeks. To decorate the tree. To give as gifts. To just have the house smell like Christmas baking and holidays and love.

And this afternoon, I packed a brown paper bag with tissue paper and biscuits. I walked back up the street, intending to deliver them to the manager of the store I been so well and undeservedly served the night before. An anonymous gift. Except, the very same man who had been so patient the evening before was standing out the front of the shop. And he recognised me.

And there I was, with a bag of cookies. I explained that it was Christmas. As if he didn’t know. I couldn’t have felt more like Scrooge if I tried***. He walked back into the store. With the cookies.

* Fresh white peach puree, peach schnapps, prosecco.
** “He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.” Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol
*** “And it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us!” Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol

Almond spice biscuits

200 gm raw almonds (no need to have blanched ones, the skins are fine)
1/3 cup icing sugar
1/3 cup castor sugar
¾ cup flour
2 egg whites
3 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground cardamom
½ tsp ground black pepper

Heat the oven to 150ºc. Line several baking trays with greaseproof paper.

Put nuts in a food processors and pulse until the nuts are finely ground. Add everything else and pulse to combine.

Gather together into a ball. Roll out between sheets of plastic wrap (the egg white make it quite sticky).

Cut out with cookie cutters. Gather the scraps and roll out again, until no more dough is left.

Bake for about 20 minutes. Cool on a wire rack.

Decorate and share.

The rosemary thief, zucchini ribbons

2010-12-03T18:32:00.000-08:00

Spilling over the footpaths through wrought-iron fences, overgrown with Austin roses and lavender: rosemary. It is unkempt, scraggly, rough, woody, never pruned or disciplined or watered. This time of year is filled with the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle and roses and the sharp, piney smell of crushed rosemary, oils released on the wind and as you brush past and step on the ambushing bushes.

Grown first on the Mediterranean coast, the name rosmarinus means dew (ros) of the sea (marinus)*. This refers to the fact that rosemary can get by on the smell of an oily rag**, that is, the moisture carried from the sea spray to the sandy soils it spreads its roots into.

Set against a backdrop of artful and not so artful graffiti and aerosol art, bluestone gutters, warehouse conversions and factories and done-up and not-done-up terrace houses, the square mile that is mine is a mixture of old bones and new money and no money, designer and vintage and plain old second-hand. Cottage gardens and lace curtains and polished floorboards and discarded syringes and nightclubs and a brothel on the corner. And in the tiny front gardens of rental houses and trendy laneway offices, the plants that thrive on neglect, that have been in the ground since Federation (or maybe the sixties or seventies) have become wild, the wiry odd drought loving plants of the Mediterranean. Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.

Clad for a break-and-enter or maybe just random street violence, I execute my vaudeville burglar impersonation. The conspiratorial glance over the shoulder. The nonchalant sidle against the corner of the apartment block. The overly innocent stroll ten, twenty metres down the street***. The exaggerated feigned dropped item. Then, quick as a flash, the snicker-snack. The mass of forest green reduced by inches. The softest, newest tips slipped deep into the pocket of an apron or handbag, or in one brazen instance of daylight robbery, discreted up inside the sleeve of my anorak.

* Ian Hempil, Spice Notes p. 338. I am slightly disappointed with the Larousse entry on rosemary which indicates the etymology of rosmarinus to be ‘rose of the sea’. I am hoping that some enterprising Classics scholar (cough,νωοφ, you know who you are) may adjudicate on the matter.
** This is a particularly, and quintessentially, Australian saying. To say that something runs on the smell of an oily rag means it can survive on a bare minimum. One could use the phrase to describe a particularly fuel efficient ute, for example.
*** I would innocently whistle, but alas, I am incapable. Of whistling. Not of innocence.

Rosemary zucchini ribbons

Serves four as a side

3 tbsp olive oil
2 anchovy fillets in oil (or more to taste)
1 tbsp garlic, finely chopped (about 4 cloves)
1 tbsp fresh rosemary finely chopped
3 medium sized zucchini (courgettes) sliced lengthways into thin ribbons (about 400 gm zucchini)
Sea salt
1 tsp soft tips of rosemary to serve

Heat the oil in a large fry pan. Add anchovy fillets and stir until dissolved. Add garlic and rosemary and stir until garlic is soft.

Lay the ribbons of zucchini in the pan, cover with a lid and cook for about 3 minutes, or until the ribbons are starting to brown. Turn over, and cook for another 2 to 3 minutes. Taste, and add sea salt if necessary.

Scatter with rosemary tips to serve. Good hot and at room temperature.

What is a waldorf anyway, a walnut that’s gone off?*

2010-11-27T21:45:00.000-08:00

New York city: the Waldorf Hotel. Circa 1893-1896. Oscar Tschirky. Swiss. Not a chef.

Apple. Celery. Mayonnaise. Later addition: walnuts.

The Waldorf Salad.

Its genius lies in its simplicity. Like coleslaw, so very, very dependent on the quality of the ingredients. Like coleslaw, so easily and so frequently the victim of grave injustice.

The key is crunch and bite. The crisp clean taste of very, very fresh celery. Inner stalks only, with the tender pale green leaves retained for garnishing. Tart apples, preferably peeled. Granny Smiths are perfect, that hint of sourness to their juicy sweetness. And walnuts. Toasted. Some puritans insist that they are also peeled. I have never found this necessary.

Nothing is more important than using fresh walnuts. Or conversely, nothing is more rank than the taste of rancid nuts, the oils sour and foul. My preference is to purchase mine from a specialist nut-purveyor at the market. I know that they will be correctly stored and have frequent turn over. In a pinch I will buy them in vacuum sealed packets, sold in the supermarket next to the dried herbs and spices and sugars and salts (understandably my favourite aisle in the dreaded supermarket).

And then there is mayonnaise. At which point I give up. I am overly sensitive to what I consider a crime against both condiments and salad dressing: the mayonnaise jar. How a sauce so beautiful has become something so unredeemably fetid I cannot comprehend. I can usually find it in me to be at least a little understanding of food choices that differ from my own, but mayonnaise? Like the ungodly offspring of cream and industrial solvent, industrialised, commercialised, commodofied, squeezy-bottle mayonnaise has no place in the hallowed grounds of the waldorf salad.

I find homemade mayonnaise gentler and richer than any store bought jar (and I do grudgingly admit, some are better than others, and indeed almost edible). It is easier too, to tailor one’s dressing to the salad. A hint of mustard, a little walnut oil, thicker rather than pourable, the better to bind the ingredients without drowning them. A good discipline to learn: a basic emulsification, the miracle whipping of eggs yolks and oil. Less recipe and more technique.

And like every canonical recipe, the Waldorf Salad suffers from the non-canonical reinterpretation. So my secret: soak the apples in apple-cider vinegar for 15 minutes to enhance the sweet-and-sour qualities. A hint of cream cheese in the dressing. And slivers of shaved mouse-tailed pink radishes, hot and peppery and a pop of colour.

* Faulty Towers “Waldorf Salad”, 1979

Waldorf-ish Salad

Serves four as a side or light lunch

2 Granny Smith apples, peeled, cored and cut into 1 cm dice.
1 ½ cup celery, cut into 1 cm dice
1 tbsp apple cider vinegar
¼ walnuts, toasted (roast in a moderate oven for about 6-8 minutes)
½ cup mayonnaise (approximately)
1 tsp cream cheese (optional)
6 breakfast radishes, thinly sliced or shaved.
1 tbsp small celery leaves
1 tbsp extra toasted walnuts

Mix the apple and celery with the apple cider vinegar in a non-reactive bowl (ie, not metal) and leave sit for about ten to fifteen minutes (meanwhile, make the mayonnaise).

Mix the cream cheese (if using) into a quarter cup of mayonnaise, then toss with the apples, celery shaved radishes and toasted walnuts. If necessary, add extra mayonnaise until the salad is coated but not drowning.

To serve, scatter with extra walnuts and celery leaves.

Great with chicken or turkey.

To make mayonnaise:

2 very fresh egg yolks (keep the eggwhites for macarons or meringue or soufflé or something equally delicious. They freeze well too).
1 tsp Dijon mustard
2 tsp vinegar (white wine vinegar or tarragon vinegar)
250 ml oil (any kind of oil is fine. I like olive oil, which can have a strong taste. Sunflower oil or canola oil also works just fine)
Sea salt and white pepper, to taste

Make sure all the ingredients are at room temperature.

In a large non reactive bowl (I use pyrex for just about everything) beat the egg yolks with the mustard and 1 teaspoon of vinegar. Beat until smooth and creamy looking.

Drizzle in 1 teaspoon of oil, and beat until fully incorporated. Drizzle other teaspoon, and beat until fully incorporated. Continue this process, drizzling and beating in tiny spoonfuls of oil until about half the oil is combined. Then, drizzle the remaining oil in a very thin steam, beat constantly until the mayonnaise is the desired consistency. Taste, and add salt and white pepper if needed.

Can be made with a wooden spoon or hand whisk or even electric beaters. The trick is the very slow incorporation of the oil into the egg yolks.

Tacos. Grown up finger painting for the mouth

2010-11-21T02:48:00.000-08:00

Growing up, tacos were always a big deal in our house.

My parents owned a particularly lovely carved serving platter, made, I think, from the wood of a coconut palm, in the shape of a leaf. The smooth deep bowl of it was divided in to four smaller hollows, a perfect home for keeping the various taco fillings separate and yet all together. It was used almost exclusively for taco nights.

Tacos-for-dinner was a production, a matter of great ceremony and extra fuss. Tacos were purchased as ready-made corn-chip shells in a taco-kit box, to be crisped in oven for ten minutes prior to eating. It was a great test of skill and nerve to neatly stand each shell vertical, fold-up, balanced on the curved edges like little clog-clad feet. Important not to forget to remove from the oven, lest the shells overcook (or as I remember once, start to smoke).

The boy child and I did not eat tomatoes, capsicum, avocado or coriander. What we did eat was grated Kraft cheese, grated carrot, shredded ice-berg lettuce, sour-cream, sweet (store bought!) salsa and pan fried beef mince. Taco night embodied semi-rural Australia, which is a long, long way from Mexico.

And there was an art to preparing the taco: an intricate and personalised order in which the ingredients were added. My preference: meat, salsa, cheese, carrot, lettuce, sour cream. This, for me, was the only and most logical way to construct the meal: the salsa seasoned the meat, the warm meat melted the cheese, and the carrot (a vegetable able to consumed with equal enjoyment cooked or raw) acted as a thermal buffer, protecting the lettuce from wilting. Sometimes, towards the end of a taco eating contest (a contest between my brother and I, a contest between my present and previous consumption record), the final taco was snapped in half, with the messily discarded jumble of previous taco fillings scooped up and sandwiched in between the broken shell.

Tacos were fun, gluttonous, sweet and salty and crunchy and cheesy. It was hands on, messy, full of sharing and hording. It was impossible to finish the meal with anything other than mess smeared across our faces and dripping down our elbows. Tacos always preceded rather than followed a bath.

The gap between the taco-kits of my childhood and the Mexican tacos which pre-date European arrival is immense. Perhaps the only commonality is the yellow-corn-colour of the cardboard textured hard-shells.

Real tacos, homemade soft corn or flour tortillas, salsa fresh with coriander and lime, smoky marinated chicken or fish, are a revelation. If anything, the evil glee that making a mess while eating inspired is multiplied exponentially, as is the pleasure of a riot of flavours and delight of assembling it just so. I have flour in my hair. I have somehow managed to spill the juice of half a lime directly into my right hand pocket. I have dough stuck to my knuckles and finger nails. Coriander-chilli-ginger-garlic-lime-zest paste smeared along the inside of one forearm. And that was before I even started eating.

Soft corn-and-flour-tacos with lime and coriander chicken, salsa and roasted tomatoes.

Serves four

16 corn and flour tortillas (see below)
Lime and coriander chicken (see below)
Salsa (see below)
Roasted tomatoes (see below)
Sour cream

To serve: add a spoonful of each component to the warm soft taco in the order that makes the most sense to you. Fold in half and make a mess.

Corn and flour tortillas:

I realise that I am a novice when it comes to tortillas, and that usually you make either corn or flour tortillas, not a combination of both. I understand that in taco-profilic countries like America and Mexico there are things such as tortilla presses and more than one brand of maize flour. People have practice and opportunity there. Still, this beats the pants off buying taco-kits, and adding wheat flour to the maize flour helps the dough keep its elasticity.

1 cup maize flour (not corn flour, and not polenta. Maize flour).
1 cup wholemeal plain flour
½ tsp salt
1 ¼ warm water
1 tsp oil

Mix the flours and salt together. Make a well, and add 1 cup of the water and the oil. Mixed with a hand, and as the dough starts to come together, add the remaining water (as needed) – you should end up with a soft, warm slightly sticky dough. Knead lightly until just smooth (not more than 5 minutes). Break the dough into 16 ball shaped pieces (keep them covered with plastic wrap whilst working each ball).

Place a ball of dough between two sheets of baking paper and roll out with a rolling pin until about 20 cm in diameter. Peel one piece of paper away from the tortilla, leaving the other attached. Repeat for the remaining balls.

Heat a non stick frying pan to hot, brush with a little oil.

Place the tortilla paper side up in the pan – as the tortilla starts to cook, the dough will dry and the paper will peel away (this takes about 1 minute). When the paper is removed, turn the tortilla over, and cook the other side for about 30 seconds. Repeat with remaining dough. Set aside and wrap in a clean tea-towel to keep warm.

Spiced Chicken

In her book Fire, Christine Mansfield gives a beautiful recipe for Mexican chicken and lime soup. This recipe draws on the ingredients that make that soup so fresh and vibrant.

500 gm chicken breasts, sliced into thin stir fry strips
1 tbsp oil
¼ cup fresh coriander stems or leaves
1 tbsp finely grated ginger
2 cloves garlic
1 long red chilli (medium heat)
1 tbsp chopped red onion
1 tbsp chopped green onion
1 very ripe tomato
1 tsp finely grated lime zest

Puree the garlic, ginger, chilli, coriander, tomato onions and lime zest until a thick paste forms. Heat the oil in a large fry pan, add the chicken strips and paste. Cook over a high heat until the chicken is cooked through the paste is thickened. Set aside.

Corn and Capsicum Salsa

1 cob corn, kernels removed and blanched.
½ red capsicum, cut into 1 cm dice
½ yellow capsicum, cut into 1 cm dice
1 avocado, cut into 1 cm dice
½ cucumber, cut into 1 cm dice
¼ cup green spring onions, cut into 1 cm lengths
1 tbsp red onion, cut into 1 cm dice
1 tsp finely grated lime zest
Juice of 1 lime
1 cup torn coriander leaves
½ tsp sea salt

Toss all ingredients together.

Roasted tomatoes

1 punnet cherry tomatoes
½ tsp sea salt
½ tsp cracked black pepper
½ tsp smoked paprika
½ tsp castor sugar
1 tsp (approx) balsamic vinegar
1 tbsp olive oil

Heat the oven to 180ºc.

Cut the cherry tomatoes in half. Add all ingredient to a baking dish and toss to coat. Cook for about ½ hour or until the tomatoes are starting to caramelise but still retain their shape.

Artichoke, pimento, jamon and frozen pea salad. What junk food is not

2010-11-18T22:58:00.000-08:00

Just around the corner from me is a fabulous Spanish / Latin grocery store. It is packed with all kinds of goodies imported from Spain, Portugal and South America. Tuna and sardines, anchovies, jars of artichokes in oil and tinned hearts-of-palm. Chorizo and legs of acorn-fed jamon hang from the ceiling. There are bags of arroz and sacks of gabanzo beans. Vats of olives and litres of olive oil. Paella tins and dozens of varieties of dried chillies and spices.

Dried and bottled and salted and cured and frozen and vinegared Iberican abundance. Making dinner a matter of throwing together a random selection of whatever catches the eye.

Is there a difference between my colourful Spanish salad and a Krispy Kreme doughnut or KFC?

When does the act of preparing a meal become home-cooking? When does food become processed? And when does food become junk food? And why junk? Why a word connoting such worthlessness?

‘Junk food’ continually appears as a culprit in public debate. From banning the sale of toys with Happy Meals to government mandated standards for the food in school canteens to lobby groups opposing the advertising of ‘junk food’ during prime-time children’s television to public health studies and nutritionalist advice: junk food is a core concept in the contemporary public debate about food.

Junk food is shorthand. It’s used to describe everything from production to consumption practices, method of processing, readiness of availability, caloric content and nutritional value (or valuelessness), (high) percentage fat/sugar, (un)naturalness, cheapness, and social context. All terms and concepts themselves that themselves are difficult to pin down and already laden with all kinds of assumptions about what is good and bad food.

Beyond this is a debate that too quickly seems to be shorthand for blaming someone. Blaming governments. Blaming the media. Blaming big corporations. Blaming society. Blaming parents. Blaming us. And then judging.

Rather than focusing on an item of food in terms of its health outcomes or nutritional inputs or even consumption context (all of which are important), I think junk food is perhaps something we can think about as our broad relationship to eating. Food does not, inherently, have a quality of junk or not-junk. But our broad approach to eating may turn our consumption practices in ones that are more or less valued by us and valuable to us. That is, the way we eat, the way we think about food, nutrition, sustenance, satisfaction, contentment, fulfilment, pleasure and flavour may position food as worthless and junk-ful or as valuable. So for me, junk food is thoughtless, mindless, directionless, irresponsible eating. It is eating that fails to take into account the singularity of eating this thing, here and now, as a unique and unrepeatable experience.

My salad may have too high a quantity of sodium or oil or fat. It may inhibit or replace my ability or willingness to ensure I have, that day, met my recommended daily intake of certain essential vitamins and minerals, fibres or proteins. It may be primarily pre-prepared.

But it makes me think of Spain. And I shared it with people I love. And I chose the items with a sense of wonder. The act of eating is also an act of ritual: the table was set and the time we ate was time set aside for eating together. It may not be healthy, but it is not junk.

Artichoke, pimento, jamon and frozen pea salad.

Serves 2 as a main meal

1 red onion, finely sliced
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 cup frozen peas, blanched and refreshed (of course, you could blanch fresh ones)
1 jar of roasted pimento in oil, drained, finely sliced, oil reserved (or you could roast your own capsicum – you’ll need two)
1 jar artichoke hearts in oil, drained and quartered
100 gm thinly sliced jamon, torn into strips
1 tbsp Spanish sherry vinegar or lemon juice

Heat a tablespoon of reserved oil in a fry pan. Add garlic and onion and sauté over a medium heat until soft. Add peas and toss until warmed through.

Remove from heat, toss through the remaining ingredients and vinegar.

Serve with crusty bread.

Jack and the beanstalk (warm bean salad)

2010-11-08T02:24:00.000-08:00

Beans and peas are so ubiquitous that it can be hard to think of them as anything special. That is in fact a driving narrative force in the whole Jack and the Beanstalk story. His mum dismissed those beans and tossed them out the window. The rest is history (or fairytale). Beans, I believe are valourised by this story.* Same goes for peas, cf: The Princess and the Pea.

Beans are magic.

Broadbeans, green beans, peas and sugar-snaps, butter beans. And purple-pink speckled borlotti beans.** All freshly podded or top-and-tailed or de-stringed, according to phylum-order-family-genus-species.

Sweet and crunchy and soft and earthy, fresh legumes are one of the luxuries of spring, a verdant and humble apology for a winter’s age of dried pulses.

* Yeah, ok, arguably the beans are only vindicated by virtue of the access they provided to the golden goose or whatever was at the top of the beanstalk. The moral of the story, to my rather myopic view, is: vegetables are really, really good.

** Tragically, they lose their spots when cooked. And they must be cooked, for at least ten minutes or they might kill you. See magic. Seriously - some beans contain quanities of a lectin called phytohaemagglutinin, which can be quite harmful to humans. Cooking reduces the harmfulfulness. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytohaemagglutinin

Warm spring bean salad

Serves 2

300 gm (unshelled) fresh borlotti beans (you should be left with about 100 gm of shelled beans)
300 gm (unshelled) fresh broad beans (you should be left with about 100 gm of shelled beans)
200 gm (unshelled) fresh peas-in-the-pod
1 bunch asparagus, cut into 5 cm lengths
100 gm green beans, cut into 5 cm lengths (or use a mix of butter beans and green beans)
2 tbsp olive oil
½ Spanish onion, finely diced
1 garlic clove, minced
2 tbps finely chopped parsley
Celery salt (or plain sea salt)
100g Soft goats cheese or curd or a goat’s milk fetta cheese.

Shell the borlotti beans. Boil in salted water for about 15 to 20 minutes, until tender but not mushy. Drain and reserve.

Shell the broad beans. Blanch in boiling water for about two minutes. Strain and remove the pale skins to reveal the bright green beans. Set aside with the borlotti beans.

Blanch the peas and beans for about three minutes, until just cooked. Strain and set aside with the other beans.

In a large fry pan, heat the olive oil and sauté the onions and garlic on a medium heat until translucent. Add the asparagus and cook for about three minutes or until the asparagus is just cooked through (but still has a nice crunch). Add the reserved vegetables, the parsley and celery salt and toss until all the vegetable are combined and warm through.

Serve with crumbled goats cheese.

Eating Aesop's Fables: or making a point about dieting through trout salad

2010-10-28T04:46:00.000-07:00

"... like those who dine well off the plainest dishes, he made use of humble incidents to teach great truths"*

The girls (Bird and Bean, specifically, but it could be anybody, really) are interested in healthy eating. And in looking fine (which they do). But not in boring eating. And dieting is boring. Health food is not fun.

And then my head explodes.

I am suspicious of thinking about losing weight. About how diets are always and necessarily antithetical to ‘normal eating’. About how becoming or being healthy is some kind of mortification of the flesh. About how, especially for women, there is this inherent judgement - self judgement and judgement of others – involved in how we think about ‘losing weight’ that carries a whole lot of unarticulated and often illogical and unfounded assumptions and conclusions – about the value of a person, morally, aesthetically and socially.

There is good food versus bad food and healthy food versus comfort food and lazy and blameworthy and ugly people versus fit and praiseworthy and attractive people.

Again and again we are reminded that in our Western, post industrial countries our problem is obesity: childhood obesity and obesity related diseases, the cost of this epidemic on our health care system, our health insurance. And certain bodies are idealised, not only or even as healthy but as desirable, as objects of desire. And it is easy to mistake a desire to be desirable for a desire to be healthy. And sometimes we use the language of health to disguise our longing to be desirable.** And this is damaging and dangerous: not necessarily or only to our health, but to our ability to see and create beauty and worthiness and desirability in an endless variety of people and bodies.

Bird and Bean recently expressed a certain amount of incredulity and a little bit of lust at the variety of food we eat at home.

What we eat in my kitchen is multiple and ever expanding varieties of food. And it is precisely this variety that makes the way we eat the object of covetousness.

It is mostly healthy – whatever that means. Fresh. Relatively unprocessed. Vegetable focused. But there’s cheese and olive oil and pasta and bread. There’s wine and sugar and butter – sometimes. Desserts (mostly fruit based, but not always). Mostly small meals, sometimes large meals. Occasional almond croissants. Pea and sherry soup. Bangers and mash. And everything changes – with my mood, my abrupt fascination with certain methods or regional cuisines, with the seasons.

It’s not endless possibility, but it is driven by a refusal to be bored and a refusal to be dictated to by routine. A willingness to make mistakes and a complete commitment to the hedonism and carnality of acquiring, preparing, eating – experiencing – food in all its messy, surprising, delicious uniqueness.

So the way I think about food runs alongside how I think about beauty. And diets. And desirability.

So I hesitate to say I eat ‘healthy’. I just eat. And it is all good.

* Attributed to Apollonius of Tyana, 1st century philosopher.

** I must, at this point, extract in full an account of this kind of thinking. Not my own, but sensibly, passionately, articulated by someone else inducing such a sense of familiarity that it must be repeated:

"I thought about this especially this weekend after getting into an intense (and cocktail-fueled) conversation about weight loss and body image with my closest girlfriends. These are precarious topics and my girlfriends all know me as “the feminist” (not that they’re not feminists, but it is not as all-encompassing for them, I think) and so they assume my stances on these things (like that I will be flat-out anti-diet). I tried to find a way to be supportive of what I was hearing while still encouraging them to see their struggle within the larger context of Shit That The World Does To Women. For example, one friend complained about how one reason she’d like to lose weight was so that she could fit into clothing at regular clothing stores. I have been there, and I could totally identify with that feeling, that awful “I’m not invited to the party” feeling. But it killed me to think about how she was turning this all inwards, as a moral failing of her own, rather than identifying the real culprits, i.e. the asshole industry that is so exclusionary, so normative, so hateful. In her language I also heard her equating a lot of very fair and serious concerns about her health with concerns about “fitting in” (see above), and I tried to gently point out that those are not the same things. Reorienting oneself to view things from a feminist angle certainly doesn’t solve the problem, but it does help one stop hating oneself, a goal which I think is pretty damn essential to being a functioning human being. And one that is hard for so many women I love, including myself". From the always amazing A of Accordians and Lace

Steamed trout salad

Serves 2

½ bulb fennel, very thinly sliced
½ red onion, very thinly sliced
½ frissee lettuce
1 cucumber, thinly sliced
½ avocado, cut into small dice
2 tbsp toasted blanched almonds
1 tbsp fresh mint, finely shredded
1 navel orange*
300 g ocean trout fillets (salmon would work equally well)
dressing
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp verjuice (or lemon juice)
Sea salt and cracked pepper to taste

To steam the trout (if like me, you don’t have a steamer, otherwise, just use the steamer). Chose a small deep plate or shallow bowl that can fit inside a lidded wok or large saucepan. Line with a piece of baking paper. Place the trout on the plate. Sit the plate in the wok, then gently pour water into the wok up to just below the level of the plate, taking care not to drown the fish. Cover with the lid and bring the water to a simmer. Once the water is bubbling, steam the fish for about 6 minutes. The fish is done when it flakes away easily.

Peel the orange with a knife, taking care to remove all the white pith. Cut into segments, avoiding the membranes.

Whisk the salad dressing ingredients in a large bowl until combined. Add the salad ingredients except for the trout and toss to coat. Season.

Break the steamed trout into flakes and gently scatter through the salad.

Serve.

* I’ve been buying these insanely good hybrids called Caras – cross between a navel and ruby grapefruit. Slightly salmon coloured and just gorgeous.

Clear tomato soup

2010-10-18T00:02:00.000-07:00

Abundance is a big, ripe, round word, almost onomatopoeic in its application to the mounds of more -than-ready-to-eat tomatoes tumbling into the market stalls as spring heats up.*

There is nothing I do not adore about the smell of tomatoes. Sugar and acid and that strange spicy scent of the stems and leaves.

There is a stall at the market which categorises tomatoes according to a range of juxtaposed and seemingly arbitrary taxomonies. Place of origin (Murray Bridge, Bacchus Marsh), variety (Aledaide*, roma, cherry, ‘field’), method of cultivation (field, trussed, hydroponic, magic), and ripeness (ready to eat, green).

And purpose: cooking. That is, soft, falling apart, two-days-past ripe, almost mushy with splitting skins. And at $2.50 per kilo, irresistible for someone whose winter stocks of passata and chutney and tomato sauce and paste are exhausted.

Tomatoes are sexy. Ther’s no denying the call to summer present in their lush, lush redness, like pouting lips, ready for the the hottest, wettest, tomatoiest kisses. Tomatoes are ‘come hither’. They’re anybody’s, everybody’s. They’re easy.

So in an effort to pour ice onto that tomato induced libido, chill. To make summer’s good-time gal an ice-queen, she has to strip. And strip she did*.

Blended, strained, frozen until the first ice crystles start to form, this blush-tinged tomato soup is a tomato flavoured slap in the face.

Still easy though ...

* Don’t be deceived. It snowed last Saturday. It snowed. It never snows but it snowed.

** which I thought was part of the ‘place of origin’ schema, but it turns out it is a variety of tomato – more pinkish than reddish, and very flavoursome, firm fleshed.

*** Note: the tomato, not me.

Clear tomato soup

Serves 4 as a light starter, or 2 for a meal with salad and bread.

1 kilo ripe, ripe, ripe tomatoes
1 cup fresh basil leaves
2 cloved garlic, peeled
2 ripe but firm tomatoes, de-seeded and peeled, cut into small diamonds
2 tbsp small basil leaves, to serve
Salt and pepper to taste

Place the tomatoes, basil and garlic in a blender and blend until smooth. Place a muslin lined strainer over a large bowl and pour in tomato pulp.

Place in the fridge to strain over night (at least eight hours). Do not press the mixture (this can make it cloudy).

The next day, taste the tomato ‘water’. Season with salt and pepper. (note – I reserve the left over pulp and add it to passata or baked beans or casserole – nothing goes to waste!)

Place in the freezer until ice crystals start to form at the edges. (you can also serve this hot – just heat until warmed through – wait until soup is hot to season it, as hot food generally needs less seasoning than chilled food).

Spoon into bowls or glasses, top with reserved tomato diamonds and basil leaves.

Choke on it, or, Not being perfect, as demonstrated by the artichoke

2010-10-13T03:14:00.000-07:00

There are people – they know who they are, and, in all honesty, I know who they are too – who are very, very good at food. They know it all. It’s old hat. No surprises. Who’ve forgotten how to be intimidated.

I am not one of those cooks. I forget to sharpen my knives and I don’t measure things. I can’t pronounce half the fancy French things I like to eat. I once dropped a roast leg of lamb on the kitchen floor in front of guests before serving it. I have set fire to my own saucepans making soup. I tried to make stock from the carcass of a shop-bought barbequed chicken and ended up with a pot full of mushy artificial stuffing.

Artichokes scare me.

It is unfamiliar, strange, unique. A thistle (a thistle flower bud, I think), for goodness sake. Kind of stringy and tough-ish. With a reputation for fussiness of preparation and eating. (Wipe it immediately with lemon to stop it browning. Remove the ‘hairy choke’ – whatever that is! Dip each petal in butter then scrape with the teeth). Expensive. The first time I ever even touched, let alone cooked, a live, real, fresh one (as opposed to the delicious deli-bought variety) involved potential public humiliation. The kind with internet video footage (which sounds way worse than it actually is, I garuntee).

Artichokes scare me.

But in this fear is what food is for me: constant wonder, constant interrogation of the edible world, never quite being assured or certain as the eater, the preparer, the sharer, the host. I will never master the artichoke. I will never become a chef or kitchen wiz. But I will cook it, and eat it, and serve it – differently each time. Sometimes better, and sometimes undercooked or too mushy or oily or salty.

And the fear will be something a little bit like love: the bottom dropping out of my stomach when I realise that the possibility of everything going wrong is also the possibility of everything going right.

This spring has been the spring of the artichoke. Guided in these first heady weeks by Maggie Beer’s homey and casual advice, artichokes braised in verjuice and olive oil*. With more confidence, cooked in lemon juice and stock. Set aside and eaten cold. Minced and used as the stuffing for ravioli. Or omelettes.

Little by little a familiarity has crept in. A cautious letting down of my guard. Not enough for complacency, but definitely a budding romance.

* I am in love with Maggie Beer, AOM, in much the same way as I am obsessed with the J Cheese building. The J Cheese building is a private residence in an inner city suburb, remarkable for no other reason than that the words ‘J Cheese’ appear, moulded into it’s high, art-deco facade.

And I desire the J Cheese building for no other reason than the appearance of these words. To own a thing – be it a building or a name – that immediate evokes the presence of some desirable, edible, substance (Cheese, Beer) – is a concept of great attraction to me. And salivation. It’s Pavlovian. Which also makes me think of pavlova. Which also makes me salivate.

Artichokes with leeks and pasta

Serves 4

2 lemons, juiced
1 tbsp olive oil
¼ cup verjuice
1.5 litre (ish) water or vegetable stock
4 large artichokes (pick big ones with very tight petals and long stems).
2 garlic cloves
1 leek, cut into ½ cm wide, 10 cm long strips
400 gram very good quality dried pasta (I like filei calabresi for this. I am pretty fussy about pasta, and only dried, very, very dense duram wheat semolina pasta will work for this)
1 cup freshly podded peas

Parmesan cheese, to serve

In a large saucepan or deep pan heat the olive oil stock, verjuice and juice of one lemon.

Half fill a large bowl with water and add the juice of the remaining lemon.

Now – prepare the artichokes. First, start pulling off the outer most petals – peel and snap in a downward motion. Keep doing this until you are left with petals that are mostly a creamy yellow colour (about a third of the petals will be discarded). Then, with a very sharp knife or peeler, trim the stalk and broken petal stubs until the softer inner part of the stem is revealed. Rub any cut surface with the inner surface of the lemon peel (to stop it browning). Cut the top part of the petals off, at least a third of the way down. Cut in half lengthways, and with a teaspoon, remove the ‘hairy choke’ – that is, you’ll notice that at the base of the artichoke, before the petals start to become petal-y, a kind of fluffy soft looking crescent. Slip the curve of the spoon in under this, press back toward to top of the petals and then slip out. If you cut the petal off the top back enough, you can also scoop this out from the top, leaving the artichoke whole to cook.

Cut in half length ways again, and place in the bowl of lemon water, while you repeat with the remaining artichokes.

Add all artichoke quarters to the pan of stock and bring to a simmer. Cover with a lid and cook for about half an hour. The artichokes turn kind of grey-ish, which seems unappetising, except I’m pretty sure they are supposed to be this colour ...

After half an hour, remove the lid and add leek strips and pasta. The idea is to cook the pasta in this stock by reduction, a little like making risotto. If the liquid looks like running dry before the pasta is cooked, add a little more water. The pasta will take around half an hour to cook.

Meanwhile, cook the peas in a pan of simmering water until just cooked. Strain and set aside.

When the pasta is cook, taste and add salt as required (I find that this befits from a generous amount of sea salt) – stir through peas, and serve, topped with a little grated parmesan cheese.

Mung beans and whole grains

2010-09-05T01:55:00.000-07:00

I recently saw a picture in a magazine of toasted whole wheat with a slow cooked egg yolk. Something about the dark crunchiness of the wheat appealed – I could imagine it’s dense, chewy texture, subtly enhanced with the rich gooeyness of the egg yolk. It looked simple. Basic. Impossible to tell, from the picture, if it was enhanced with something extravagant like truffle oil or handpicked wild micro-herbs. No recipe, just a picture amongst many pictures.

Whole-gains seem the terrain of hippies and health nuts, the food of anaemic and fashionable vegans and ultra-fit protein obsessed gym junkies. It sounds like a diet, or an extreme life-style choice. Which immediately conjures a sense of deprivation. Dieting seems to evoke a sense of loss of more than just weight. A world without sugar and fat and carbs and sweets and treats. A world without flavour. A world of rabbit food and cardboard tasting meal-substitutes.

And in all honesty, at the end of a winter that I dealt with primarily through laziness and comfort food, a reassessment of the healthiness of what I eat is probably called for. Not ‘a diet’, not a fad or a quick fix. Just a subtle realignment, now that my hostility to the season can be set aside for another year.

But there is something about toasted unprocessed whole grains, nutty and caramel, crisp and yielding, with a taste like the smell of cooking toast, that is homey and satisfying and comforting. On close inspection, toasted grains have nothing in common with deprivation. Despite the indisputable health and environmental benefits, whole grains are an unexpected treat, and now, more than a little bit high-end. Hence their appearance in a glossy magazine devoted to the valorisation of the chef’s arts.

I could have gone out and bought some farro, the oh so cool grain of the moment, some kind of ancient and original variety of wheat. Or whole wheat kernals. Or mixed red and black quinoa with onions and garlic and spinach. But I have barley in the pantry, set aside for adding to rustic soups. And what better to match it with than mung beans, that other shared bastion of the hug-the-earth-cum-health-kick movement?

There is something so terribly retro about mung beans. Reserved for the super-health conscious and hippies, they’ve hung around in health food shops and food co-ops with an endless seventies vibe, kind of overlooked and forgotten.

With English mint and plenty of salt, this was fresh and earthy, and a little bit pretty. And ridiculously healthy.

Toasted barley and mung bean salad

Serves two

½ cup pearl barley
1 cup mixed bean shoots (ie, mung beans, pea shoots, chickpea shoots)
¼ cup fresh peas
½ cup torn mint leaves
½ cup snow pea shoots (green part only)
2 tbsp toasted pine nuts
1 tsp olive oil
1 tbsp lemon juice
Sea salt
Pepper

In a large non stick fry pan heat the barley over a medium heat, shaking the pan or stirring to prevent the barley from burning. When the barely is a deep golden colour, add two cups of water or stock and lower the heat. Simmer for about half an hour, until the barley is soft and chewy (and most of the liquid is evaporated. Strain and add to a large bowl.

Bring a small saucepan of water to the boil, add peas and cook for about 5 minutes. In the last minute of cooking, add the mixed mung beans, just to soften a little. Add to the bowl with the barley and remaining ingredients and toss to combine. Season with salt and pepper.

Cinderella moment: roast pumpkin and the pig

2010-08-31T05:43:00.001-07:00

I am not all that fussed about pumpkin. I grew up relatively untouched by pumpkin. My father, a man who religiously grew choko vines for my entire childhood and expected me to eat them, boiled to a watery nothingness, was not all that fussed about pumpkin. If the stories are to be believed (and to be fair, few people remain available or willing to attest to their veracity) he grew up with an adamant refusal to eat pumpkin, boiled to a watery nothingness. And there is some indication that at some early stage he was most villainously deceived with ‘mashed yellow potato’.

We did not eat pumpkin in our house when I was a child. Lack of exposure led to lack of familiarity which in turn led to a benign neglect of pumpkin in my life.*

Halloween, harvest festivals and Cinderella also did not feature in my formative years, and so my lack of pumpkin exposure in the home was not challenged by a broader desensitisation via popular culture. A home-ec incident involving a Queensland blue pumpkin, a blunt knife and the tip of the middle finger on my left hand cemented my general impression that pumpkins and I moved in very different circles.

Had I , as a young child, seen the streets of Hoboken, New Jersey, in mid October, the steps of brown stone terraces artfully lined with bright orange spheres, here and there delicately and expertly carved into hobgoblin faces of glee and terror, I may have been more accommodating and more curious. I may even have been utterly charmed, as I was when well into adulthood I experienced the cultural grip of Halloween for the first time.

But as it was I came to pumpkin in a mechanical and mundane way. It was just another relatively common vegetable that is predicably very nutritious, cheap and colourful during the dreary winter months. It is good for you. Vitamin A and vitamin C. Potassium. Magnesium. Other technical sounding components. It’s a kind of melon, and like melons it has a ridiculously high water content (which makes it fabulous for soup, but certainly explains it’s tendency to become watery). It’s vaguely sweet, roasts nicely, purees well and looks a bit artistic in the middle of table. I made soup and curry and purees and even pies, sweet and savoury. And felt virtuous but never thrilled.

Then the inevitable occurred.

I wrapped it in bacon.

The home-cook’s fairy godmother.

* Which is utterly inconsistent with my near obsession with Brussels sprouts, another subject of childhood deprivation. I don’t get it either.

Prosciutto wrapped butternut pumpkin with thyme and honey

Serves 4-6 pumpkin eaters

1 whole butternut pumpkin, peeled, de-seeded and cut lengthways into wedges – between 10-12 wedges
1 tbsp melted butter
1 tbsp honey (use a good wild honey. It has more flavour)
1 tbsp boiling water
1 tsp thyme leaves, finely chopped
12 sprigs thyme,
12 slices prosciutto, each cut in half lengthways
Salt and pepper

Pre heat the oven to about 200ºc. Oil a baking tray.

Mix the honey with the butter and boiling water. Brush each pumpkin wedge with the honey mixture. Scatter with chopped thyme, salt and pepper. Wrap each wedge with strips of prosciutto, like a candy cane. Arrange on the baking tray.

Brush over any remaining honey. Arrange thyme sprigs over the pumpkin wedges.

Place in the oven and cook for about 30 minutes or until cooked (a tooth pick or skewer will insert easily when cooked). Cover with foil if the prosciutto starts to become too brown.

Moorish Stew (lamb tagine, by any other name)

2010-08-26T04:59:00.000-07:00

Some years ago I jotted down my work-in-progress recipe for ‘Moroccan Stew’ (even then I hesitated to call it tagine). This recipe – a very loose term for a list of ingredients and questions regarding possible variations, without any indication as to method or cooking time – is accompanied by a note at the bottom of the page which states: ‘potato emporium. idea. Why not have a shop that sells nothing but potatoes and potato related items, ie, peelers, mashers et cetera’. This page is sandwiched between an idea for ‘asian flavoured’ chicken mince kebabs made with left over boiled rice, fish sauce and coriander and my thoughts regarding the perfect blueberry muffin (consisting again of a list of ingredient and the admonishment that ‘hot! hot! The oven must be hot’). There are oil stains, smears of chocolate and what looks like an old, dried onion ring on the page. My life is filled with notebooks, folders, randomly sized slips of paper and cuttings from newspapers and magazines. The creative process is, well, creative.

I have an odd soft spot for recipes that bear the name of the vessel in which they are cooked. I think this is part of a broader appreciation of dishes that have names for themselves, and not merely a description of what they contain. Modern recipes, modern restaurants, will list for you dishes such as ‘pan-seared butterflied quail, with smoked fig, and liquorish sorbet’. Such nomenclature certainly conveys meaning but it denies the meal any independence from its components. The sum, in such a naming convention, is not greater than its parts. Not so for beef wellington. Or my perennial favourite, bouillabaisse. Or fairy cakes. Or spotted dick. Or lamingtons. These names speak of an existence beyond the ingredients – these recipes have independent identity.

And so for those fabulous meals eponymously named for their containers. Casserole. Hoppers. Paella. Saganaki. And tagine. The tagine is a two piece earthen wear cooking vessel consisting of a rimmed flat-bottom shallow pan and topped by a lid in the shape of an inverted flower pot. The tagine is the cooking vessel of Morocco. Think Divo, but rocking the Kasbah.

The tagine is suited to certain methods of cooking. And certain kinds of foods and flavours are found and appreciated in Morocco. So it makes sense that there is an identifiable and unmistakable family of dishes known as ‘tagines’. Earthy and spicy and slow cooked. Studded with sweetness and balanced with bitterness. Dates and figs and preserved lemons. Enhanced with almonds or pistachios. Lamb or chicken or fish, but never pork. And when you can hold that perfect, ideal, image in your head, it is possible to lift the impression of the dish – the smoky, soft, spicy-sweet-ness – and create a meal that is, in every respect except the one that counts, a tagine.

And because it tastes so good you might describe it as more-ish (pun approaching).

Moorish stew then, not tagine.

Moroccan lamb and vegetable stew, tagine style, served with scorched almonds in burnt butter with sour yoghurt sauce

Serves 6
400 g lamb pieces, large dice
2 tbsp corn flour
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp ground ginger
2 tsp cumin
1 tsp sumac
2 tsp paprika
1 cinnamon stick (or 1 heaped tsp ground cinnamon)
2 red onions, peeled and cut into thin wedges
4 cloves garlic, finely sliced
1 finely sliced red chilli (optional)
400 g tin of chickpeas
1 small red sweet potato, about 250 gm, cut into 1 inch cubes
400g tin of crushed tomatoes
1 Moroccan preserved lemon, finely sliced (otherwise, use the finely grated rind of a fresh lemon, lime or orange)
200 gm dried fruit (ie, pears, apricot, prunes, dates, figs or raisins – I like a mixtue of pears and prunes)
2 firm pears, peeled, cored and quartered
200 gm green beans,
1 red capsicum, cut into finger width strips
1 zucchini, cut into 1 cm rounds
(you could add cauliflower, eggplant, parsnip, spinach, carrot – pretty much anything)

Dust the lamb pieces with the corn flour.

Heat the oil in a very large heavy based saucepan. Add the spices and fry for about 1 minute. Add the lamb, and shake the pan occasionally until the lamb is brown on all sides.

Add the onion and garlic and chilli and cook until starting to soften (about 5 minutes), stirring to prevent the lamb or the onions from burning. Reduce the heat if necessary. Add the chickpeas and cook until starting to pop (you will hear them – sometimes they even jump out of the pan). Add the sweet potato and pear quarters and stir until coated in the oil and spices.

Add the tinned tomatoes and 2 cups of water. Bring to a gentle simmer. Add the dried fruit and preserved lemon and cook over a gentle heat for about40 minutes, or until the sweet potato is cooked and the lamb is soft.

Add the remaining vegetables and simmer for about 20 minutes, or until the vegetables are cooked but still firm.

Serve with couscous and scorched almond and burnt butter and sour yoghurt sauce.

Scorched almonds and burnt butter and sour yoghurt sauce.

100 gm blanched almonds
50 gm butter
1 cup low fat natural yoghurt
Sea salt

In a small fry pan, toast the blanched almonds until they are starting to appear scorched (some parts will be very darkly toasted and some will appear raw). Add the butter and reduce the heat. Cook until the butter is foaming and starting to turn a rich golden colour. Don’t actually burn the butter – you want it to taste toasty but not smoky.

Pour over the yoghurt and sprinkle with sea salt.

Nothing in the world quite like home-made scones, straight from the oven

2010-08-08T01:30:00.000-07:00

Flour. Butter. Milk. Jam. Cream.

No need to complicate things. No need to buy a packet of biscuits in which the packaging probably cost more than the contents, and probably has fewer unappetising additives. No need to fuss for hours, turning out the most delicately shaped and flavoured colourful tiny petits fours. No need to worry about whether the sponge cake will rise or if the cheesecake will set.

Nothing compares to sitting down at the kitchen table and enjoying a mug of tea (not a cup, not a pot, a mug, preferably with tea-bag still in) and having a good chat and a hot, slightly misshapen scone. No high-tea or trendy cafe can ever replace the gentle satisfaction of doughy steam and flour streaked hair. The comfort of not caring, and just enjoying.

The perfect scone is light and fluffy, without a golden blush on the top. Less than ten minutes to get it into the oven and less than ten minutes in the oven. Unpretentious.

Best served with what is generically known as ‘little-old-lady-church-jam’ which can be procured from any country market or church fete, usually sold in jars of varying sizes that used to contain tomato paste or pickles, topped with gingham-checked circles of cloth, with each different coloured mop-top indicated a different flavour of jam (flavours will include passionfruit and tomato jam, grapefruit marmalade, peach and walnut jam, carrot and lemon marmalade and cherry chutney). Cream, whipped, is not optional.

Simple scones, no fuss

This recipe is remembered from the now fallen-apart Commonsense Cookery Book. The Book is still in print, although updated. Mine was published in the 50s.

2 cups self raising flour
50 gm butter, cold, diced
1 cup milk (curdled with 1 tbsp lemon juice, optional)

Preheat oven to hot – about 220ºc. Line a baking slide with greaseproof paper.

Sift flour into a bowl. Toss in cubed butter. Rub through the butter. This mean very lightly with your finger tips crush the butter cubes into the flour. Do not use your whole palm – you want the butter to be crumbled into the flour but not melted. Rub in under the mixture resembles very fine bread crumbs. Alternatively, put the flour and butter into a food processor and pulse until fine crumbs form.

Make a well and pour in three quarters of the milk. Mix together with a butter knife until a loose ball of dough forms – adding more milk as required.

Turn out onto a board or bench lightly floured (with self raising flour) and knead lightly until a smoothish dough forms.

Roll with a rolling pin until about 2cm thick. Cut with a scone cutter (do not twist the cutter as you cut – this will seal the scone edges and they won’t rise as well). (re-knead any dough after you have cut and roll and cut again, until the scone dough is used up)

Place the scones on to the baking slide, brush the tops with a little milk.

Bake in the hot oven for about 10 minutes, until puffed up and springy.

Serve immediately with whipped cream and your favourite jam.

A Winter’s Tale: a pantomime of slow roasted garlic crusted lamb.

2010-08-06T03:21:00.000-07:00

Act I

In which there are mistaken identities, long lost twins, virgin births, nativity celebrations, joyous nuptials, duels, mischief, tragic and mysterious deaths, feasting and nothing is explained.

Scene I: A kitchen, mid-winter.

Enter our heroine (me), carrying a quarter of a sheep. Or, as it were, a giant boned-out shoulder-leg-shank of lamb, weighing approximately 3.5 kilos. It is clear that some serious feasting will, at some time, in the not-too-distant-future, transpire. It is not clear, as this stage, whether the piece of meat will fit into the kitchen’s adequate and yet not giant oven.

The meat is set aside, and head after head of garlic are peeled and crushed. Soon a not-insignificantly sized bowl of garlic paste is amassed. Toasted cumin seeds and lemon rind and salt and sumac are added. The strong smelling paste is then applied to the surface and every crevice of the lamb. The lamb is then wrapped up and set aside.

Scene II: The same kitchen, several days later. Morning.

We observe our heroine placing the lamb into a very slow oven. Over the course of several hours she bastes the lamb with the juices spilling into the very crowed baking pan.

Much later, in the evening, she turns off the oven.

Scene III: The same kitchen, several days later. Evening.

Enter our heroine, carrying a large parcel wrapped in bright blue paper and tied with silver ribbon. Accompanying her are a Princess, a Vicar, an Officer and a Clerk of the Court. It is clear they have been at an ale house, and several of the party are carrying bottles of wine.

The heroine returns the lamb to the oven, along with potatoes. Various other items are set to cook including green beans in tomato and onion sauce and dried legumes and chard with garlic. The lack of olives is lamented, and wine is decanted.

As more wine is consumed the smell of cooking lamb wafts through the gathered party. Noses twitch and mouths water.

Finally the heroine presents the with a flourish the meltingly tender slow cooked marinaded lamb. The garlic crust is dark, dark brown and bitter and sweet from the long time in the oven. The meat is pink in the middle and so soft it falls apart at the touch of a spoon. The potatoes are golden and crunchy and nutty with oregano and thyme.

Later, pastries dripping with honey and filled with nuts are gluttonously consumed.

More than one birthday has been celebrated and all go to bed merry and sated.

Eats roots and leaves: nose-to-tail celery and celeriac soup*

2010-08-03T03:59:00.000-07:00

Wastefulness. At one end of the input-output spectrum we throw away millions of tonnes of perfectly edible food every year.

At the other end of the spectrum, we limit, and therefore waste, the options available as food. Our environmental impact is such that species are become extinct at an alarmingly exponential rate (they ate dodos people. And don’t even get me started on the implications of bee extinction**). In terms of food production and consumption we are also voluntarily limiting the variety of species that we chose to eat***. And even more so, we are choosing only to consume a very small part of those species that we do choose to eat.

Homo sapiens, the smart men, need to eat smarter. Nose-to-tail eating is a brilliant slogan for us carnivores. ‘Eats roots and leaves’ captures this for the herbivores among us. It’s true that not every part of every plant is edible. Some are in fact harmful. But beetroot leaves, broccoli stalks, grape vine leaves, and pumpkin seeds – all edible. Orange rind and pineapple skins make beautiful marmalade. Watermelon rind can be turned into pickles.

And pretty much every part of celery can be devoured.

Most of us are familiar with the stalks – the crunchy light green part, great with hummus or peanut butter (that may be my particular fetish ...). Wash, cut, throw away the leaves, right?

Alternatively – eat it all. Young celery leaves are lovely in salad. Older leaves can be blanched like English spinach or oven dried as crunchy snacks or even powdered for a concentrated celery flavoured dust. Even the tiny seeds are edible. As is the root.

Celeriac is a knobbly, bulbous root of a variety of celery. It has a subtle celery flavour and can be eaten raw (for example, julienned in French remoulade, a kind of mustard mayonnaise salad), roasted or fried (a little like potato, but less starchy) or steamed and pureed (try: half potato, half celeriac, significant amounts of butter, delicious).

Which all leads to soup: with a light creamy texture and a fresh celery taste, it is all the comfort of winter with all the promise of spring. Using every part of the celery plant.

* For those with a one track mind, the incorrect insertion of a comma can make all the difference. See Lyn Truss’ excellent work on gramma, Eat, Roots and Leaves

** In a nutshell, bees fertilise flowers. Fertilised flowers grown into seed producing fruit. See producing fruit are a) edible, and b) the basis upon which other flower-producing plants grow. Fewer bees means reduced fertilisation, which impacts on crops. Bees are a big deal for the farming sector. And bees are very sensitive to environmental change.

*** This is more complicated, because on one level this is being limited for us by the agricultural and retail sectors, but en masse, we-the-human-race are limiting our choices.

Thick celery and celeriac soup

1 bunch celery
1 brown onion
1 garlic clove
100 gms finely chopped bacon (optional)
1 celeriac (about 500g), skin removed and roughly chopped
1 lt vegetable or chicken stock
2 small potatoes, peeled and cut into ½ cm dice
Salt and pepper to taste
Sour cream to serve

Celery powder (in advance)*

Preheat oven to 50ºc.

Remove celery leaves. Spread out on an oven tray, bake in oven for around 45 minutes, or until dehydrated. When completely dry, blend in a food processor until finely powdered. Remove any spiky bits of stalk. Store in an airtight container (as with other dried herbs and spices, usually good for about 6 months).

Celery and celeriac soup

Finely dice the onion and 3 celery stalks (eat remaining stalks as a snack with peanut butter or hummus or tzadziki) and mince the garlic.

Combine with bacon in a large heavy based saucepan, and cook over a low heat until the onion is starting to soften. The low heat will melt the bacon fat – if not using bacon, add a teaspoon of olive oil.

Meanwhile, in a separate pot, blanch the potato dice in boiling water until cooked through (about 5-10 minutes).

When the onion is soft, add the celeriac and half the stock. Bring to the boil. Once boiling, add half the remaining stock and continue to cook until the celeriac is soft enough to smash with the back of a spoon. This takes about 25 minutes.

Blend the soup in a food processor or with a bar mix until smooth. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Return to saucepan and add remaining stock. If the soup is too thick, add a little water. Stir in the cooked potato and heat through.

Serve with a dollop of sour cream and a generous sprinkling of celery powder.

* I started making celery salt and got side-tracked - and voila, celery powder.

This porridge is just right. Food that your grandmamma would recognise

2010-07-27T05:13:00.000-07:00

Porridge is immensely satisfying. Warming, sweet, sticky and filling: it is busting with the goodness of whole grains and fibre and yet it tastes like gooey breakfast pudding.

With dried and fresh fruit and nuts and natural yoghurt and honey and nutmeg and cinnamon - it is decadent and over the top and basically just really, really good for you. Unlike eggs and bacon or waffles or pancakes or coffee and a croissant, eating porridge for breakfast entitles me to walk around with a smug, self-satisfied look on my face. It’s ridiculously healthy and pretty basic yet in no way hints at any kind of deprivation.

Food doesn’t need to be complicated or sugary or buttery to taste good.

And food shouldn’t be boring or uninteresting or restrictively-limited in order to be good for us.

So, in the words of Michael Pollan, lets “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”.

Like most things that are truly healthy, porridge is not overly processed (for rolled oats the oat-groats are hulled and rolled flat. ‘Quick oats’ are then also pre-steamed to hasten the cooking process). My deluxe version incorporates lots of fresh fruits. It has a variety of ingredients, all of which are pretty basic (that is, in or very close to their natural form). It is low in fat. Low in sugar, and most of the sugars are in their most natural, unprocessed form. It’s good and it’s good for you.

So when Pollan offers the nutritionally and environmentally sound advice that we “don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise” this porridge rises to the challenge. It’s food that looks like food. But more than that – it’s food that conveys a certain sense of nourishment beyond the sustenance it offer. It’s nurturing, wholesome, culturally centring food.

It’s food that looks like home. Even if you’ve never seen a farmhouse, you know that this is what you’d have for breakfast there. It’s the food of childhood stories and winter mornings and the countryside. Even if, like me, you don’t have a grandmother to make it for you and share it with you, it’s food that the archetypal grandmamma would make.

This porridge is just right.

Porridge that is just right

For each serving:

½ cup rolled oats
1 cup water
½ tsp brown sugar
1 tbsp sultanas or chopped dried fruit
¼ tsp each of nutmeg and cinnamon. Ground ginger is also lovely.
1 cup chopped fresh fruit (or mix in with frozen berries) – ie, pear, apple, passionfruit (banana and mango is delicious in summer)
1 tbsp low fat natural yoghurt
1 tbsp nuts (ie, walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, pecans)
1 tsp honey
¼ cup low fat milk

Bring oats and water to a simmer in a small saucepan and cook until the porridge is thick and the oats are cooked (usually about 10 - 15 minutes).

Pour into a bowl. Sprinkle with sugar and dried fruit. Top with fresh fruit, then yoghurt and nuts. Drizzle the honey over, and pour milk around the edge of the bowl.

Oxtail ravioli: short cuts versus cheap cuts

2010-07-22T03:46:00.000-07:00

Idiosyncratic is probably a good word to describe someone who lovingly and painstakingly slowly braises, strains, cools, shreds and portions two kilos of oxtails over seven hours, and then uses frozen wonton skins as ravioli wrapping.*

Idiosyncratic is also a pretty good description of someone who sees this same lengthy and messy exercise as a somehow saving time.

Idiosyncratic, too, to spend all this time and effort to create what is essentially oxtail soup despite having overwhelming memories of avoiding at all costs an offering of oxtail soup as a child.

Consistency is the sign of small mind.

On any animal, the harder working the muscle, the tougher it’s going to be. On a cow, the hardest working muscle is always going to be a tossup between the cheeks (constant chewing) and the tail (constant flicking).

The lazy muscles result in incredibly tender cuts of meat, the most well known being filet (aka tenderloin, fillet, eye fillet etc - which is taken from along the spine). Even in organically reared, grass-fed, happy cows, fillet is a little bland in flavour. Quick-cooking, oh-so-soft, brilliant raw for steak tartare and Carpaccio. It’s a trade-off: texture versus taste. It’s a premium cut. Very expensive.

Because people and supermarkets have rocks in their heads tender cuts are almost universally preferred (consistency, as I said, is the sign of a small mind). And yet the idea of their being ‘premium cuts’ strikes me as a bit silly. It’s all from a cow, right? If we’re going to kill the beast, we may as well eat more than the softest quarter of it.

Particularly when the real flavour is found in the hard working ‘economical cuts’. Bring on the skirt steak and the shin. Pork and lamb necks. Beef cheeks. Hocks and brisket. And oxtail.

It’s cheap. And packs a punch of flavour. But it is often sinuous. It’s attached to tendons and bones and often has marrow in its near vicinity. All good for flavour, if a little tough.

Time to work the magic of braising.

Any idiot can burn a fillet steak. But it takes an even bigger idiot to screw up braising. The genius of braising is that there is no genius required. At its most very basic, a braise is a cross between a poaching and a steaming process, with meat (or vegetables) first seared / browned and then partially covered in liquid, covered and cooked over a very low heat for a long time. And the beauty of it is that whilst you can undercook it, it’s almost impossible to overcook it. It takes a long time, but it’s not really time consuming. Mostly it’s just a matter of being vaguely around to make sure it doesn’t bubble over or run dry or that the gas doesn’t go out.**

Slow cooking oxtails results in a sticky, gelatinous mess of soft-as-butter dark fibrous meat. Rather than serving with equally rich creamy mashed potato or risotto, shredded, wrapped up in ravioli sheets and poached in consommé made from the left over strained braising liquid, wine, water and bottled tomatoes, sprinkled with a little gremolata, zesty and garlicly and fresh, the resultant soup is light and lavish, meaty and yet not too indulgent.

So the trade off for cheap and flavourful is that is takes forever. But the short cut is that you can make it all in advance, in bulk, and freeze it. Straight from the freezer? Cooks up in about ten minutes.

* The frozen wonton wrappers have as the listed ingredients: flour, eggs, salt. That’s it. This, I think, is pretty good. Plus they’re the right size, thinness and so terribly convenient. And I don’t have a pasta machine. Pasta dough is easy enough to make (it has flour, eggs and salt in it). But you try rolling it with a rolling pin.

** I’ve heard it’s even more foolproof with a kitchen gadget known as a crock-pot.

Oxtail ravioli* in tomato consommé

Serves 8

2 kg oxtail pieces (or other beef on the bone, like osso buco or short rib)

Plain flour (seasoned, for dusting the oxtail)
¼ cup oil olive (roughly)
2 brown onions, diced
2 large carrots, diced
375 ml dry red wine
500 ml veal or beef stock without salt (or water)
Herbs – 2 bay leaves, sprigs of rosemary, thyme, oregano and parley
2 pack frozen wonton wrappers or ½ kg fresh lasagne sheets (bought or homemade)
1 egg, lightly beaten

Dust oxtail pieces with flour (shake). Heat a couple of tablespoons of the oil in a very large saucepan, and cook the pieces in batches until brown all over.

Heat another few tablespoons of the oil and add the onions and carrots, cook until starting to brown.

Deglaze the pot with the wine, stirring to remove any pieces stuck to the sides of the pot. Bring to the boil and cook until the alcohol is cooked off (a couple of minutes).

Add the oxtail pieces back into the pot, add the herbs and stock (it should cover about ¾ of the meat and vegetables. Cover with a parchment lid, and then place the pots lid securely on top. Place over the very lowest heat and gently cook for about 4 hour (it should be just barely a simmer, remove the lid if it is cooking too rapidly). By this stage the meat should be falling off the bones (if not, cook a little longer).

Remove the oxtail pieces, and when cool enough to touch, shred the meat and discard the fat and bones.

Strain the braising liquid and reserve. Add the strained vegetables back in with the shredded meat (discard the herb stalks and bay leaves).

Taste the meat and vegetable ravioli filling, and add salt and pepper to taste.

Place 30 wonton wrappers on the bench, brush the edges lightly with egg wash. Place a small spoonful of filling in the centre of each, and then place another wrapper on top, pressing to seal. You can freeze, refrigerate or cook at this point.

To cook, add to consommé and cook until the wrappers are cooked and the filling is hot. When frozen I just throw then into boiling water frozen and cook.

Serve in a bowl of tomato consommé, sprinkled with gremolata and parmesan cheese.

Tomato consommé

Reserved strained braising liquid.

For each 250 ml braising liquid:

1 tin chopped tomatoes (no added salt or added anything is preferable)

500 mls water (or half water, half red wine)

Boil all ingredients together until reduced by half. Strain. Season. Pour over ravioli to serve.

Gremolata

Traditionally, this is made with equal parts finely chopped parsley, finely grated lemon zest and minced garlic.

I have been known to use grapefruit zest, minced olives, and capers as substitutes and enhancements ...

* Based on a recipe by Elizabeth Egan and Domenic Pipercelli of Becco restaurant in Melbourne published by Australian Gourmet Traveller.

Eating the Winter garden

2010-07-19T03:29:00.000-07:00

My mum’s garden is the source of all things tomato during summer. But during the winter months (and the cold that I am only just starting to come to terms with) she grows the softest, sweetest spinaches and chards, harvesting only a few leaves at a time, hence allowing each plant to continue to produce and grow. Bok choi too, and little green cabbages the size of a fist.

Cruciferous vegetables (chards and spinaches and cabbages) have a reputation for bitterness, but these leaves, straight from earth to plate in a matter of hours, are sweet and full of flavour. Not at all bitter or dull or watery. Thinly sliced and then very briefly sautéed in just a hint of olive oil, the leaves resembled a pile of seaweed or wet grass, deeply green with hints of purple and red. Just brimming with iron and vitamins and an overwhelming sense of freshness and vitality so lacking during the winter months.

Yesterday was icy cold, and I desperately needed the whimsy imparted to my day by two tiny brassicae: a minature Romanesco broccoli and a little purple cauliflower. These were a spur of the moment purchase at the market – it’s hard to resist the impulse buy when the merchandise is so utterly charming. And healthy. Nestled into a tangle of sautéed home-grown greens, accompanied by Brussels sprouts, these little steamed flower heads were delightful to look at and delicious to boot.

These was nothing particularly fancy about the meal. Finished off with a light grating of parmesan cheese and finely chopped curly parsley (the very essence of green - also from my mum’s garden), the whole thing was wholesome and fresh. There was a healthful goodness that the rich braises and roasts of winter sometimes hide. And yet there was a rightness, an earthy crispness that settled this very simple meal firmly in Winter’s heart.

All in all, a perfect Sunday supper.

An Edible Winter garden: sautéing and steaming

Sautéing is a method of cooking in which food is cooked super-fast, super-hot and all-at-once (in a little oil or butter). It’s a brilliant way of sealing in nutrients, as the food is cooked quickly, and nothing leaches out into water. It’s important not to overload the pan with too much stuff, as this reduces the heat, and therefore extends the cooking time. Because it is so quick, it can make more sense to split the amount you have to cook into two or three batches.

Sautéed winters greens

For one person: 2 cups shredded raw winter greens. As fresh as you can get. 1 tbsp olive oil.

Heat olive oil to very high in a large pan or wok. Add greens. Shake the pan or toss with tongs until cooked. This will take about two minutes. Season with a little salt and pepper.

Steamed tiny brassica

1 whole miniature cauliflower or ¼ cauliflower

Fill a large saucepan with about 2 inches of water. Place a microwave-proof breakfast bowl in the saucepan, so that the water comes two thirds up the sides. Place the cauliflower in the bowl. Cover the saucepan with a lid and bring to the boil. Cook for about five minutes, until the cauliflower is tender (will yield to a skewer). Carefully remove the cauliflower from the bowl, sprinkle with sea-salt and pepper to taste.

Layering for warmth: chicken curry with black spices and cashews

2010-07-17T00:00:00.000-07:00

Curries are like ogres. Which is to say they are like onions. Which is to say: curries have layers.

To begin with, the word ‘curry’ seems, in the West, to stand as a description for nearly all food of ‘the other’. For the western world, curry has become an almost universal appellation for any vaguely spicy ‘Asian’ stew, where ‘Asian’ encompasses everything from North African to Middle Eastern to Thai, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Mongolian, and, of course, Indian. The word is stretched in a way that seems to flatten the cuisine of these diverse countries into single homogenous layer, an effort reinforced by the ubiquitous presence of row upon row of ‘curry sauce’ in supermarket aisles.

But curry is like a Mandelbrot image: not matter how ordinary and singular the ready-to-serve army of jars might render it, it is infinitely repeated and replicated, multiplying and becoming more specific to each country, then region, town, then household. And unlike the Mandelbrot, each fractal repetition is subtly and uniquely different. Curry is like an army of ogres.

The most likely point of origin for the term ‘curry’ is in India, but between the Tamil words kaikaari (spiced vegetables) and karee kolambu (meat with spiced sauce) and the Punjabi word khadi, there no clear ground zero from which the word sprung**. And in India, where curry has now been readopted as a general description, no two curries are ever the same.

And so, from the general to the particular. In ironic contrast to the linguistic obscuring of the layered complexity of the social and cultural uniqueness of each and every example of cuisine termed ‘curry’, the only commonality (from what I can tell!) is that Indian curry is made by a process of layering. Indian curry is a complex and quite esoteric process of cooking, adding, frying off and recombining different whole, ground, dried and fresh spices in endlessly different quantities and arrangements in an almost mythological balancing act. Each layer releases flavours, heat, sweetness into oil and then develops over time, settling in and combining with the next layer. Not all curry is spicy-hot, but all curry is spiced, even if delicately, and the result of layering the spices in the cooking process is that when you eat a really good curry, each layer of spice sneaks up on a different part of your palate, rolling over and around your taste buds. It enters your nose while you cook it, and makes you lips tingle and your tongue dance.

And that’s before you even think about meat or vegetables or legumes. That’s just the sauce. Of one curry.

* Shrek, 2001, Pixar Animation
** Camellia Panjabi 50 Great Curries of India 1995 London Kyle Cathie Ltd

Chicken curry with black spices and cashews*

Makes enough for 8 servings

100 gm desiccated coconut, mixed with 2 tbsp coconut cream + 2 tbsp water
1 bulb of garlic, cloves peeled
1 inch ginger, peeled and roughly chopped
2 ½ tbsp coriander seeds
1 ½ tsp cumin seeds
6 whole dried red chillies or 2 tsp dried chilli flakes (optional - without chilli, this is a very sweet rich curry, but I think it lacks bite).
10 cloves
1 cinnamon stick
250 gm cashew nuts
1 large onion, roughly chopped
¾ cup water
5 tbsp oil
750 gm chicken thigh pieces
500 gm chicken drummets (separated wing pieces, bone in) or other chicken on the bone

In a large fry pan or wok, toast the garlic, ginger, coriander, cumin, chilli, cloves and cinnamon over a low heat for about 5 minutes. Then add the coconut mixture, onions and 25 gm of cashew nuts and cook, stirring occasionally, for about 10 minutes, or until the garlic and onion is soft.

Remove mixture to a blender, allow to cool. Add ¾ cup water and blend until smooth.

In a mortar and pestle, crush 50 gms cashew nuts with a little water until a smooth paste forms.

Heat oil in the wok and add the blended spice and coconut mixture. Cook over a low heat for about ten minutes. Add half the cashew nut paste and salt to taste, cook for a further couples of minutes.

Increase the heat and add the chicken pieces, fry for about five minutes. then add 1 litre water, lower heat and cover and cook for half an hour.

Add the remaining cashew paste and remaining whole cashews, cook on high heat until the curry sauce is thick and dark. Serve immediately with rice, or refridgerate overnight and reheat the next day, which always tastes amazing.

* from Camellia Panjabi 50 Great Curries of India 1995 London Kyle Cathie Ltd. Ms Panjabi in turn credits Mrs Shirodkar of Bombay with the recipe.

Red wine braised cabbage

2010-07-10T00:34:00.000-07:00

I detest winter.

What I want is mangoes, pineapples, coconuts, a mojito and a banana lounge. With an ocean view. And the scent of frangipani on the breeze. Every year, without fail, at this time of year, I start yearning for sunshine. Fiji, Vanuatu, New Caledonia. Phuket. Bali. Hoi An. I am desperate for warmth.

What I’ve got is the coldest day on record, and root vegetables. And cabbage. And onions. Red cabbage, oh so slowly braised in red wine, cooked until meltingly soft and sweetened slightly with honey, is all that is keeping me from rapid escape to a tropical island.

A pot of stock, simmering all day on the stove, fills the house with steam. All day braising in the oven heats the room. It’s not tropical humidity, but it is warm and savoury and comforting.

Winter, seasonally and metaphorically, has a place and a point. Winter is about slowing down and resting and waiting, and being patient. Winter, with its biting wind and bitter cold, demands we stay put and relax. There is a more than one way to hibernate. It took a little bit of sulking, but I reminded that for me, hibination is rich with casserole and soup and steamed pudding and curry and roasted joints and stock. Putting things on the stove and forgetting about them and having a nap.

Vegetables don’t, strictly speaking, require the long cooking times and gentle low heats that really benefit sinuous cuts of meat. But the slow, slow cooking breaks down the cabbage, rendering it silky-smooth, and the grated potato releases sticky starches, contributing to a result that is soft and rich, without being cloying or heavy. Opening the oven while it is half way through cooking releases a cloud of wine flavoured steam, heady and inspiring.

So while the cabbage does it magic in the oven, I pour a glass of wine, curl up with a book and a hot water bottle, and wait. I may be dreaming of summer: but this too is part of winter. Daydreaming and waiting.

Braised cabbage

I came across this recipe in the French Laundry Cookbook and was surprised that it was simple, healthy and just perfect for winter. I’ve changed the quantities around to allow for more sensible, family portions (Thomas Keller is a bit keen on the ‘tasting menu tiny portions’, which is a great for a restaurant but less cool for eating at home).

1 tbsp olive oil
1 medium sized red onion, finely diced
½ red cabbage, very finely sliced (technical term: chiffonnade)
240 ml red wine
2 green apples, peeled, cored and grated
2 tsp honey
2 medium sized waxy potatoes, peeled and grated
Salt to taste

Pre heat oven to 170ºc.

Sauté the red onion over a low heat on the stove top in an oven proof casserole dish (or in a saucepan and then transfer to a casserole dish. Stir in cabbage, apples and red wine. The red wine will come about half way up the vegetables.

Press baking paper to cover the cabbage, cover with a lid (if you have one, or foil instead).

Cook in the oven for about 2 hours (longer is fine).

After two hours, remove from oven, stir through the honey and grated potato. Cover again with baking paper and lid. Cook in the oven for another hour.

Remove from oven, season with salt to taste. Add a little vinegar if preferred.

This a great side dish with chicken, pork, ham or fish. It’s probably a bit sweet for lamb and beef, but don’t let me stop you. Mustard or a mustard sauce complements this wonderfully.

Cabbage will keep in the fridge for up to a week.

Lumpfish caviar. An ugly truth.

2010-06-30T05:56:00.000-07:00

According to the United States Custom Service, ‘Caviar is the eggs or roe of sturgeon preserved with salt. It is prepared by removing the egg masses from freshly caught fish and passing them carefully through a fine-mesh screen to separate the eggs and remove extraneous bits of tissue and fat’.

Caviar is a textbook example of the way food exposes the gap between, and the intersection of, ethics and aesthetics. This can be summarised by the phrase: ‘it’s wrong, but it tastes so right’.

It’s not just that it comes from an endangered species* or that is has been periodically banned from importation (and hence illegal) in several countries or even that the roe is extracted by a process which can be described as involuntary-fish-abortion**. It is that caviar costs about £6000 / $US 10,000 per kilo***, which, to pick a country at random, is roughly equivalent to the average annual income of someone living in South Africa, home of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, or ten times the average annual income of someone in say, Nepal****.

Caviar is a nutritionally pointless food, used mainly as a garnish and status symbol. Pretty, shimmery, salty, food-bling.

The lumpfish (Cyclopterus lumpus), by most accounts, is not a pretty fish. “Benthic species dine upon sessile invertebrates and mollusks. Pelagic species target prey they are capable of overtaking, namely slow-moving jellyfish and ctenophores.”***** That is, they don’t really swim that well so they kind of just hang around sucking on the bottom of the ocean. They also don’t really have scales. Think of them as the marine equivalent of being directionless, balding and middle aged.

In their favour is where they fall in terms of sustainability. Whilst the statistics on biomass are sketchy, these are fish that eat low-ish on the food chain, and are caught in coastal waters, mostly by small fishing boats.

Enter the strange world of caviar substitution. Of course, fish other than sturgeon have salty, pop-in-the-mouth, shiny eggs. Affordable, visually stimulating and an easy addition to canapés.

By every measure, caviar is ethically questionable. But lumpfish caviar? Not so much - very clever and a little bit fancy – tiny little piles of coloured lumpfish caviar on fried potato rosti with sour-cream. I was going to buy smoked salmon, but the little jars of roe were the same price and would have the same sea-saltiness that matches so well with potatoes.

Once you get over the deep unattractiveness of the fish, the fact that their ovaries are essentially surgically removed (after death), the double processing (involving a doubling in production related transportation), the addition of artificial preservatives, additives, colourants, the high salt content and the fact that this, like caviar is an imported, nutritionally-valueless, flavourful garnish, lumpfish caviar is brilliant.

More honestly: the more I have explored the whole ‘caviar substitute’ concept the more dissatisfied I have become. Reading the label, I discovered emulsifiers and thickeners and preservatives, and of course, artificial black and red colouring. I don’t buy jam, for goodness sake, because of the added gelatin (what, pectin not good enough now?) or corn chips because of ‘anti-caking agents’ – what on earth was I buying the fish-egg equivalent for? And the food miles? It’s from the Atlantic, ie, the other side of the globe. The whole enterprise was clearly idiotic.

But more than this: I’m left with the feeling that I’m in buying into the whole tiny-sea-water-popping-spheres-is-cool-and-luxurious lie, and this becomes, I think, a validation of the inherent class distinctions involved in caviar consumption. Acceptance and desire for the obtainable emulation of caviar somehow reinforces and justifies the fuss – the legend – around caviar caviar.

And that is an ethical choice that no amount of culinary-glitter should obscure.

Next time I’ll buy half a dozen local fresh un-shucked oysters for about ten bucks.

* ie http://www.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=17916.
** Note that I am pro-choice, but I am not sure that fish are able to exercise choice, and at any rate, I believe that the production of caviar occurs without sturgeon consultation. Weirdly, most sturgeon caviar production does not involve killing fish as the roe producing fish are far too valuable to kill. They do perform this kind of fish abortion – mostly surgical, but increasingly less invasive methods of roe-sack extraction are being used.
*** This is for beluga caviar, according to Wikipedia
**** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
***** http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Lumpsucker

Resources:

The book by Jon Johannesson Lumpfish Caviar – From Vessel to Consumer (FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION OF THE UNITED NATIONS Rome, 2006) is an excellent resource on lumpfish. Possibly the only such resource on lumpfish.

For information on sustainable seafood http://blueocean.org/seafood/seafood-guide is great (if you’re in North America at least), and they also outline their ranking methodology, which can help you make decisions about species not on their list.

On how quince paste melted my runcible spoon*

2010-06-23T04:52:00.000-07:00

Quince. Botanical name: cydonia oblonga. Fruiting plant. It is the is the only member of the genus Cydonia. Turns the most fabulous brilliant deep red from its raw creamy-yellow when cooked over a long period. Naturally rich in pectin and tanin. Perfect for jam and jelly and stews.

No one really knows what a runcible spoon is**. Conjecture abounds: possibly it is like a spork, with bowl and prongs, or a splade, with serrated sharp edge and scoop. Or shallow and long handled. Or wooden.

Like the word runcible, quinces are unique. Unlike the word runcible (which is made up) quinces are an ancient fruit, grown since time immemorial, unchanged and unchanging. The Akkadians ate them, as did the Persians, classical Greeks and Romans. Apicius gives recipes for them (baked in honey or stewed with leeks), and Song of Solomon mentions them.

To my mind, this is a runcible spoon, capturing a sense of both runny and dribble, both of which describe the woeful melted plastic that occurs when you FORGET TO REMOVE THE DAMN SPOON WHILST BOILING QUINCE PASTE ON THE STOVE WHICH IS VERY STUPID.

Melted plastic does a grave disservice to any kind of conserve or jam-like substance. Thankfully, I did manage to remove all traces of the spoon from the quince paste, although the spoon itself is unsalvageable and has been consigned to the rubbish bin. Perhaps the wooden spoon would have been a wiser choice.

And still: I continued to persevere with the quince paste. Yes, I am even going to eat the damn stuff. It took me hours and hours to even get to melted-plastic point.*** Not to mention the 1.8kg of beautiful, misshapen, just-ripe quinces that I bought on a whim at the market just because they are in season, and divine-smelling and so terribly old-fashioned and retro and grandma-y and well, cool, in the same way that an original 1950s prom-dress is cool when you just happen to find it in a vintage shop and it fits and is made of silk and is fabulous.

Quinces even smell old-fashioned, a deliciously sweet musky perfume that reminds me of the powder-puffs that classy old ladies use.

Quinces are vintage, and vintage is in.

And quince paste is the quintessential quince recipe. Sweet and floral and tangy served with a cheese platter, or equal tasty as a jam, it is nanna-ish and more-ish. Have it with sherry.

* It is a universal law that whenever anyone ever eats, cooks, smells, looks at, thinks about or in any way is exposed to quince that they must think about the Owl and the Pussycat. This, of course, is because the Owl and the Pussycat ‘dined on mince and pieces of quince’.
** Edward Lear’s poem continues: 'Which they ate with a runcible spoon'. This was one of the many words he invented. Poets are allowed to do that.
*** I may have misunderstood the phrase “weekend herb blogging” which I now believe means, ‘write about it over the weekend’ not, ‘spend all weekend engaged in cooking it and then melt a spoon in it’. I assume that Cook (almost) Anything at Least Once would encourage my attempt to cook the spoon itself, and Chris at Mele Cotte might focus on the quince and not the spoon as the requisite ‘herb or plant ingredient’.

Quince paste

Quinces. Water. Sugar. Roughly half as much sugar as quince, by weight. I used 1.5 kg quinces (raw) and 800 g sugar.

Rub the quinces to remove any of the dusty fine hairs on the skins. Quarter.

Cook the quinces in water, lid on, for about 45 minutes, until the quinces are softish. Strain, reserving about 1 cup water.

Mash the quince through a china cap. Discard the seeds and skin. (Some recipes suggest peeling and coring, and then adding this to the pan in a muslin sack – I have no muslin, so I discarded that stuff in the straining process, but if you do have a neat muslin sack, you can just discard it and then use a blender to pulp the quince, which is easier).

Weigh. Add an equal weight of sugar.

Return to a saucepan, with reserved liquid.

Simmer for about four hours until thick, goopy, and dark, dark red. Remember to scrape the bottom of the pan regularly, but also remember to remove the spoon from the pot. When thick enough that you can still see the bottom of the saucepan after you pull the spoon through, pour into a greaseproof paper lined tin and bake in an over at 50ºc overnight to dry out (6-7 hours should do it).

Cool, cut into pieces, wrap in greaseproof paper. Refrigerate. Eat with delicious cheese. Or spiced mince. Or spread on toast or scones. Serve with equally quaint and old-fashioned elderflower cordial.

Hazelnuts: also edible (especially with butter and Brussels sprouts)

2010-06-21T02:50:00.000-07:00

The hazelnut is charmingly winter-blooming and pollinating, with fresh fruits harvested in the summer. Like most nuts they store perfectly in nature’s packaging (the shell, silly) and hence can be enjoyed in mid-winter, while the trees trail long blossoms on bear limbs.

And yet. The hazelnut, in literature and cultural tradition, occupies an ambiguous position.

Despite evidence that hazelnuts were cultivated and harvested on a large scale as early as 9000 years ago, the hazelnut features not as tasty treat, but symbolic riddle.

For Hamlet, only bad dreams stood between him and reign over infinite space, as defined by the bounds of a nutshell.* Elsewhere in Shakespeare, Queen Mab rides around in the some empty hazelnut shell, perpetually in motion distributing, one suspects, those same bad dreams.** Julian of Norwich had visions that the whole of the universe is a hazelnut in g-d’s palm***, Grimm’s fairytales suggest they keep us protected from snakes and vipers and all venomous things****, and Druidic legend suggests that a particular hazelnut-fed salmon imparts wisdom to the person who in turn eats the fish.*****

From Druidic folktales to Grimms’ fairtales, the mystic writings of mediaeval Saints to Shakespeare, the hazelnut repeatedly represents a profound metaphysical and moral contradiction.

Over and over, the edible is rendered inedible, and the physically real, metaphysically impossible. How could we think to eat the whole of creation? How can something real, tangible and mundane also be said to be infinite space? How can the whole of the universe be observed from a standpoint outside of the universe? Why fish-enhancing or reptile-repelling?

Why not just eat the damn things? Butter, salt, sprouts, hazelnuts.

No fairy queens, no troubled princes or wizards, no mystic saints or salmons or mothers of g-ds. Just brown butter sauce and toasted hazelnuts and braised Brussels sprouts.

* Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II. Scene II:
[Hamlet]: O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a
king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
** Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act I. Scene IV:
[Mercutio]: Her chariot is an empty hazelnut,
*** Julian of Norwich The Showing of Love Chapter V
**** Jacob Ludwig Grimm and Wilhelm Carl Grimm The Hazel Branch
***** The bradán feasa

Braised Brussels sprouts with brown butter and toasted hazelnuts

Serves 4, as a side

100g hazelnuts
400g Brussels sprouts
60g butter
½ cup water
Sea salt

Toast the hazelnuts in large pan (or roast in a moderate oven) until golden. Remove from heat and rub with a tea-towel to remove the skins. Set aside.

In a large non-stick pan, stir 20gs butter into the water and bring to a simmer. Add sprouts and a pinch of sea salt. Cover and simmer gently for about 10-15 minutes, adding a little more water if the pan dries out before the sprouts are cooked through.

Remove the Brussels Sprouts and set aside. Add the remaining butter and hazelnuts and cook over a low heat until the butter is brown. Return the sprouts to pan and coat with butter sauce. Serve with roast chicken or grilled salmon.

Fool’s marigold – winter risotto, with mushrooms and leeks

2010-06-15T04:28:00.000-07:00

“Winter tarragon ... is more often than not incorrectly sold to the unsuspecting as French tarragon”.* I, reckless and naive buyer of herbs, may have unwittingly stumbled upon a fake-tarragon fencing racket.

Over indulgence at the market had led to a basket full of winter root vegetables, brassicas and herbs. In amongst more purple radicchio, broccoli, English spinach, cauliflower, celeriac, sweet potato, quinces and Brussels sprouts than it is perhaps sane to purchase lay the even more indulgent acquisitions. Buddha’s hand lemons, French sheep’s milk cheese. And odd sweet smelling spikey herbs with yellow flowers, at which I had pointed without having a clue what they were.

“Tarragon” yells the girl, across piles of mushrooms and Jerusalem artichokes.

Not tarragon. Whence the long elegant dark green smooth tongues? And whither the delightful soft petalled bright egg-yolk coloured blooms? The scent was rich and liquorice-like, with spicy hints of cinnamon or nutmeg. Like, and yet unlike, tarragon. And what of its uncharacteristic mid-winter appearance?

As ever, when confronted with the alarming and the unknown, I came home and consulted the archives.*

French tarragon is a spring-through-autumn herb, which withers during the coldest of the winter months. It has a gentle and subtle liquorice flavour that is easily over-powered.

Tarragon, for the unwary, is a labyrinth of false trails. Beset on one side by ‘Russian tarragon’, a giant washed-out version, in colour and flavour, of French tarragon; and on the other by the mysterious plant “known as winter, Spanish or Mexican tarragon, which bears bright-yellow flowers, is sturdy and neat-looking with firm, dark-green leave and has a reasonably strong, spicy aroma similar to French tarragon”.*

Apparently, winter tarragon is a variety of marigold, and a perfectly safe and delicious substitute for tarragon. Finely shredded and mixed with avocado and fresh ricotta, it was lovely with poached eggs. And dehydrated in the oven and generously crumbed over mushroom and leek risotto, it enhanced the earthiness and creamy starches of the rice.

I may have been duped by the fines herbes equivalent of a fake Gucci bag, but I will always be a sucker for anything so pretty and unusual, and its flavour, rather than some preconceived notion, is what mattered in the end.

* Spice Notes by Ian Hempill

Mushroom and leek risotto with tarragon

The trick to risotto: constant stirring to release the starches around the rice, giving it that ‘creamy’ texture without adding actual cream. Make sure to coat the rice in the oils of the pan before adding liquid, add the liquid gradually as it is absorbed, and try to have the liquid at the same temperature as the risotto.

Serves 4

1 brown onion, finely diced
1 leek, washed and finely sliced (I use the green parts too)
50 g butter
1 tbsp olive oil
12 medium sized field mushrooms (about ½ kg)
1 cup risotto rice (I use Vialone Nano, a particular variety of risotto rice, but aborio or carnaroli are also perfect)
5 gm dried porchini mushrooms, soaked for 10 minute in ¼ cup warm water
2 cups English spinach
1 bunch winter tarragon, or French tarragon (if no tarragon is available, try 2 tsps finely chopped thyme or rosemary) – fresh or dehydrated.
Salt
1 litre water, warm to just simmering (you could use chicken or vegetable stock, but I find it’s not necessary)
50 gm finely grated parmesan

In a large heavy based saucepan over a medium, melt the butter and heat the oil. Add the onions and half the leek, stir until starting to soften. Add one third of the mushrooms, stir until softening.

Add the rice, and stir to coat. Add the porchini mushrooms and their liquid, and a ladle full of warm water, stirring constantly.

As the liquid is absorbed, add more warm water, stirring constantly.

Continue until the rice is almost cooked (this takes about half and hour). The rice should have a firm yet yielding texture, and the risotto should have a loose and sticky consistency. Add sea salt to taste.

In a separate saucepan, cook the remaining leeks and mushrooms in a tablespoon of olive oil, with half the tarragon. Set aside when the mushrooms are just cooked. (I do this so that some of the mushrooms and leeks retain a firmer texture when the meal is served).

When the rice is cooked, rapidly stir through the remaining mushrooms and leek, the English spinach and the grated cheese.

Spoon into deep dishes and scatter over the remaining tarragon.

Gnocchi: like it or lump it

2010-06-02T03:25:00.000-07:00

The first time I made gnocchi was a disaster. Wanting desperately to impress a potato-mad paramour, I was left with a disintegrating collection of potato flavoured lumps. To be fair, this is what also happened the first time someone tried to make me gnocchi – a chef, and admittedly a very good one, that I happened to date, sought to impress me with the delicate Italian potato dumpling, and proceeded to produce a glue-textured and glue-flavoured bite-seized failure. (The idea behind that, however, was genius: cooked, and then pan-seared with pan-sweated baby spring-vegetables and French butter – it would have been delicious). Turned out as badly as the romance.

I have attempted gnocchi with and without eggs, flour, ricotta, all to varying degrees of failure.

Until recently I was taught, under pressure conditions, by a master*. And managed to produce something that was both flavourful and beautifully chewy with a light consistency. Turns out you have to fail a few times to get a real feel for the dough. So I tried again, with a recipe from a magazine** (which, as usual, I neglected to read correctly, and omitted the egg) – and succeeded in producing light, fluffy and sticky gnocchi that held their shape and absorbed the surrounding flavours.

And then again, mid week, capitalising on my success, I just whipped up gnocchi with caramelised bitter radicchio and peas and vanilla-and-rose-tea-smoked smoked duck. If I sound a wee bit cocky it’s because of the series of failures (romantic and otherwise) that preceded the triumph.

Moisture is the enemy: all the times I have succeeded, the potatoes have been individually wrapped in foil and oven roasted in their skins. I have pressed the potato through a sieve, without mashing (I do not have a ricer). I have kneaded lightly whilst still warm. I have not used eggs, I have not added liquid. I have been serious about avoiding overworking the potato so as to not stretch the starches too much. I have cooked in boiling water, at first one, tested and tasted, and then the remainder, whilst will slightly warm and soft. I have drizzled with olive oil and cooled, and then pan seared in olive oil and butter until slightly caramelised and hot again. I have snuck mouthfuls of just-cooked gnocchi, spinkled with sea salt, as a pre-dinner snack (quality control!).

Apparently, in Italian, the word gnocchi means ‘lumps’, which at once both accurately describes and deflates this incredibly fickle dumpling. I love their rustic lumpiness, their unevenness and general lack of elegance. And yet, when well-made, there is a velvetness, a simplicity that speaks to the richness of clay and the superiority of learned technique. So sublime a goal, I know I have many more years of romance and practice ahead to master the lump.

* Thank you, Matt Moran. You are a bald genius.
** Australian Gourmet Traveller, Annual Cookbook 2010

Gnocchi

Serves 4

2 medium sized potatoes, approximately 300 g total
150 gm full fat ricotta cheese
50 g finely grated parmesan cheese
120 g plain flour
Sea salt, optional, to taste.

Pre heat oven to 180ºc. Wrap each potato separately in foil, bake in oven for approximately 45 minutes, or until cooked through. Remove from oven and set aside until just cool enough to handle.

Peel potato and press through a metal sieve. Press ricotta through the sieve, add flour and parmesan, (and salt if using) and mix together with hands until just combined.

Cut into four pieces. Working with one piece at a time, roll into a long sausage shape until approximately ½ inch diameter. Cut into 1 inch lengths, pinch slightly. Repeat with remaining peices.

To cook – add batches of gnocchi to rapidly boiling water. The gnocchi will sink to the bottom. As the pieces rise to the surface, remove with a slotted spoon and set aside on a lightly oiled tray.

You can eat then like this – just add sea salt, cracked pepper and little grated parmesan. Or ...

Sauté one finely sliced onion, two crushed cloves of garlic and one finely minced chilli in a little olive over a medium heat until caramelised. Turn heat to high, add 1 small head of torn raddichio and 1 cup of steamed peas and cook for about 5 minutes until soft. Add 50 g butter, melt until foaming. Add cooked gnocchi and cook, tossing pan occasionally, for 3 ish minutes, until caramelised and warm. Serve, with or without smoked duck.

Savoury carrot tartlets with vanilla salt

2010-05-29T00:12:00.000-07:00

The carrot is the orange constant, always just there and never really seen. Versatile, sweet, crunchy, easy to cook (steam, bake, poach, stir-fry) and delicious raw, useful as an aromatic in stock and in a sofrito base for risotto and ragu. Yawn. It is a vegetable easily taken for granted, eaten without thought or admiration.

It is a fact not generally acknowledged that carrots are a seasonal vegetable. Carrots are of course a remarkably resilient root crop, and will grow with good humour all year round in almost any conditions. But they really do come into their own in late autumn, which seems fitting as the beautiful rich orange of modern day carrots seems to fit so elegantly with the orange-red-gold-brown-purple of the autumn leaves and the dusky watercolour skies.

Modern day carrots, because like so make fruits and vegetables, the carrot has been subject to a process of long-term selective breeding, a natural genetic modification whereby the most delicious and desired crops are selectively chosen and reproduced*. Farmers markets and home vegetable patches continue to reveal heirloom varieties in yellow and red and purple and creamy white.

With their universal availability and their universal versatility, it is easy to let the carrot take a back seat, filling in the space around the main event, providing the background depth of flavour to a more interesting meal. Switching my thinking around to what goes well with carrot, as opposed to what will carrots go well with. The carrot at the centre and not just a side dish or base ingredient. What freshness is needed to offset the sweetness? What method of cooking meat will yield something soft and strong enough to enhance and showcase their woody earthiness? Can carrot truly shine on its own?

Carrot puree reduces carrot to the essence of carrot flavour. Without the characteristic shape or crunch, this method narrows the focus of the palate onto taste and taste alone. Healthy, unusual and visually striking. It is incredible just how intense the carrotness is: light and fluffy, it is beautiful warm as a sauce smeared underneath a thick slice of grass-fed eye fillet cooked sous-vide. Or with parsley and almond meal crusted pan fried fish. Or as below, chilled and used as a filling for savoury tartlets. In tart form, the carrot is on its own, entirely. It would have easy to enhance it with cumin or corriander or even maple or honey. But I wanted a pairing at once more subtle and more uncommon. Something that demonstrated the elevation of carrot from the background to star-status.

Hence vanilla: both carrot and vanilla, away from their familiar and comfortable surrounds. Not to be taken for granted.

* Rumour has it that our homogenous orange carrots are in fact the result of a preference in Holland for breeding vegetables in honour of the royal family (the house of Orange). However, the orange carrot, along with purple, red, yellow and white varieties is known to have been actively cultivated for thousands of years, across the Middle East, continental Europe, Asia and North Africa. The World Carrot Museum has a wealth of information regarding the origins, cultivation and use of carrots, as well as the history of carrots in art and world events.

Carrot tartlets with vanilla salt

These tartlets were inspired by the recipe for vanilla salt from Not Without Salt, and the throw-away suggestion that the salt can be sprinkled on glazed carrots.

Carrot puree

Serves 4

4 or more large carrots, peeled finely grated
50 g butter or 2 tbsp olive oil

Melt butter in a large saucepan until foaming. Add grated carrots, stir. Reduce heat to very low, cover and let steam for about half an hour, stirring occasionally. Continue to cook until the carrot has collapsed (it is dissolve when squeezed between thumb and finger). Do not add any water – the idea is to concentrate the carrot flavour.

Let cool slightly, then transfer to a blender and blend until smooth and fluffy – the carrot will change colour sightly, turning a slightly lighter shade as more air is incorporated. (For the tarts below you can add ½ tsp scrapped vanilla if you like, otherwise season to taste and serve with poach vegetables or steamed fish or lightly poach beef fillet or grilled chicken).

For tarts shells:

1 packet phyllo pastry (8 sheets will make approximately 40-50 miniature tart shells)
¼ cup olive oil

Preheat oven to 200ºc.

Working with sheets of phyllo pastry, brush a sheet with olive oil, then place another sheet on top, and brush with oil, until four sheets are layered

Cut into squares big enough to make a rough little tart shell inside a muffin tray. Line a muffin tray, cook for about 5 minutes, or until brown and crisp. When cool enough to touch, remove and let on a rack to cool. Tart shells will stay crisp for about 25 hours (but will start to soften in contact with moisture, including a filling).

For carrot tarts:

Just before serving, fill each tart shell (I used a piping bag – it’s neat and quick). Sprinkle generously with vanilla salt, serve within half an hour.

Sugar and spice and all things nice: Siena cake

2010-05-26T03:15:00.000-07:00

As a small child I refused to eat cake. Christmas cake was the worst, being cake, with sultanas, and alcohol and without icing.

Birthday cake was also off the agenda: for the twelve years or so of childhood birthday parties I had ice-cream cakes. Or baklava. At some point I discovered chocolate mud cake, a barely set, gooey pudding like cake rich and fudge. This was acceptable. We bought a croquembouche for my twenty-first birthday.

I still dislike sponge cake, with its dry polystyrene texture and melted polystyrene flavoured fake cream. I will still most likely turn down cake when offered. I’m not on a diet: I just don’t like it.

And then I discovered panforte – a highly spiced very dense fruit cake also known as Siena cake. Siena cake was made in Siena as early as the 13th century, and was even an official part of the tithes paid to an order of nuns in region. Made sweet with boiled honey and dried fruits, this cake basically set itself up for sainthood when chocolate was brought back from the new world. More toffee-like than cake-like (the name literally means “strong bread”) this is cake I can get to know and love. It is rich, dense, nutty, spicy with cinnamon and pepper, and not too sweet.

Perfect for a grown-up after dinner sweet, with a little liqueur and very strong espresso. And I know I would have loved this as a kid: no icky dryness, no fake cream and no sultanas.

Chocolate Panforte

This recipe was originally from www.taste.com (note that I have tinkered a little with the quantities + ingredients from the original, but the method remains the same)

Olive oil (for greasing the tin)
100g whole blanched almonds
100g whole hazelnuts
200 g mixed dried fruit, roughly chopped. I like mixed peel, dried apricots and dried figs in about equal quantities. You can also use candied melon or dried cranberries or dried cherries. Even sultanas, which I don’t really like ...
100g (2/3 cup) plain flour
2 tbsp cocoa powder
1 tsp cinnamon powder
½ tsp powdered ginger
½ tsp ground cardamom
¼ tsp nutmeg
¼ tsp cracked black pepper
¼ tsp powder chilli powder (optional)
100g good-quality dark chocolate (at least 75% cocoa solids), chopped
125ml (1/2 cup) honey
55g sugar
Icing sugar (or gold powder, which I use at Christmas), to dust

Preheat oven to 180°C. Brush a 20cm (base measurement) springform pan with melted butter to lightly grease. Line the base with non-stick baking paper.

Spread the almonds over half a baking tray and spread the hazelnuts over the remaining half. Bake in preheated oven for 8 minutes or until toasted. Place the hazelnuts on a clean tea towel and rub to remove the skins. Reduce oven to 170°C.

Place almonds and hazelnuts in a large bowl. Add the chopped dried fruit and stir until well combined. Sift over the combined flour, cocoa, cinnamon and mixed spice and stir to combine.

Place chocolate, honey and sugar in a small saucepan and stir over medium-low heat until sugar dissolves and chocolate melts. Bring to the boil. Reduce heat to low and simmer, without stirring, for 2 minutes or until a candy thermometer reaches 116°C or 'soft ball stage' (If you don't have a thermometer, drop 1 teaspoonful of syrup into a glass of cold water. If the syrup becomes a soft ball it's at soft ball stage.)

Pour the hot chocolate mixture into the fruit mixture and, working quickly, stir until well combined. Spoon into prepared pan and smooth the surface. Bake in preheated oven for 30-35 minutes or until just firm. Remove from oven and set aside to cool. Will keep for about two weeks.

To serve, dust with icing sugar (or gold dust) and cut into thin wedges.

Rosé veal with rosé sauce and tiny toasted flower buds

2010-05-22T00:32:00.001-07:00

I love the soft, sweet flavour of veal. I love the gentle pinkness of rosé veal, the only kind of veal I can bring myself to eat.* From there it is all word association and day dreaming with me.

Given how perfect white wine sauce is with veal, it is only a short step to matching a dryish rosé. I’m not a wine snob (as evidenced by my choice of wine to cook with solely on the basis of whim and colour). Rosé veal with rosé wine sauce just sounds clever.

In my culinary fantasy-world I imagine a dish scattered with rose petals or perhaps preserved or jellied rosehips, sweet and sour and floral. I’m imagining Heston Blumenthal type presentation, with little petals cut out of veal scaloppine arranged like a flower on the plate. It’s twee and arty and probably has fennel pollen scattered on it.

Setting aside my rose coloured glasses I instead make something much simpler. In the real world dinner takes fifteen minutes to cook. It is light, easy and tasty. Tenderised veal scaloppine, lean and quick cooking. Browned on both sides in a very lightly oiled non stick pan and then removed. I deglaze the pan with a glass of rosé. Boiled, reduced. Add the veal back in. I could strain it, but seriously, I am firmly back in the real world. Simmer, whilst steaming some vegetables. Five minutes later, it’s ready. Tip onto a plate – rosé veal with rosé sauce. Clever, quick, delicious.

Except: I can’t resist. In the wiped out pan, I heat some olive oil to sizzling. And I scatter in some little caper buds, preserved in white wine vinegar. They start to pop and crackle, brown and turn a little crispy. Little tiny toasted flower buds, scattered over the top. Not roses, but a savoury-sour floral flavour addition, pretty and nearly as clever.

* I know that, like my reticence regarding rabbit, many people struggle with the idea of eating veal. There is veal and there is veal. Rosé (or pink) veal is the kind that involves a more ethical and humane treatment – or at least avoids the worst treatments that have been traditionally associated with veal rearing. Please, please talk to your butcher about the origins of all your meat.

Rosé veal with rosé sauce and toasted capers

[Edited 24 May 2010] When Helen emailed me, from the other side of the world, I was a little surprised. I had sent her a recipe in response to her “Blogger Secret Ingredient Challenge” (capers) because there, in London, England, was a cook and writer and thinker who though things I would like to think and cooked things I would like to eat. To win, an even bigger surprise.

Serves 2

1 tsp olive oil
2 large veal scaloppine, tenderised
100 ml rosé (or dry white wine)
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp capers in white wine vinegar (you could used salted, but rinse well first), drained and pat dry

Steamed or sautéd vegetables, to serve

Heat a non stick pan (big enough to fit the veal all at once – if your pan is only big enough to hold one piece, cook one at a time) to very hot. Add a teaspoon of olive oil. Sear the scaloppine on each side until quite brown and cooked through. Remove from pan and set aside.

Add wine to the pan – it will foam and boil almost instantly. Boil for a couple of minutes, until reduced and thickened slightly. Add the veal back to the pan and cook for a further five minutes. place a piece of veal on each plate and drizzle with remaining sauce.

Wipe out the pan (or use a clean one, it depends on how much washing up you want to do) and heat the olive oil. When hot, add the capers. Cook for about a minute, shaking the pan to prevent from burning or sticking. Scatter over the top of the veal.

Serve with a glass of rosé.

If you want dessert, try this.

Prosciutto wrapped roasted lapin: bunnies, bunnies, it must be bunnies*

2010-05-18T20:30:00.000-07:00

This week has been marked by a restlessness: a desire to push my comfort zone and tackle the odd and the unknown.

The foray into rabbit, whilst not exactly a disaster, revealed for me the personal operation of a cultural taboo around food consumption. In short: I found this confronting. And I was surprised to be confronted. After all, I have autopsied calamari and daintily eaten a tichy-tiny whole quail and cooked live mussels and plucked a chicken and eaten raw horse. I have been offended when guests refuse to eat veal. I am not squeamish nor fussy.

Except: the consumption of the hoppity back legs of a little bunny: a bridge too far. It should have been delicious: wrapped in prosciutto, pan-seared in foaming butter and roasted in thyme and sage, served with pumpkin and parsnip puree and a reduced jus of wine and rabbit stock.

But there were tendons and unfamiliar bones and above all the little voice in the back of my head which kept saying ‘BUNNY’ over and over. The strength of my reaction was utterly unexpected.

I was reminded, both of Anya in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and her dreadful fear of rabbits*, and the introduction to the Orders of Things*, because I found myself face to face with the laughter that shatters and the stark impossibility of eating that.

The question underneath this for me is: what other assumptions and cultural preferences am I blind to? Is irrational food avoidance (ie, not consciously chosen and without foundation) any different to other kinds of prejudice? And am I already too comfortable (and well fed) to even notice?

* For example: Episode 7, Series 6, Once more with Feeling: “Bunnies aren’t just cute like everybody supposes, they’ve got those hoppy legs and those twitchy little noses. And what’s with all the carrots, what do they need such good eyesight for anyway?”. (Directed by Josh Whedon).

** “This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.” Michel Foucault The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences Pantheon Books 1970

Melt-in-the-mouth oven-roasted duck breast

2010-05-12T04:46:00.000-07:00

There are lots of fancy ways to cook duck – sous vide, confit, whole-roasted, red-lacquered, tea-smoked.

Except, on the whole, most people don't cook duck. In fact, most people don't even eat duck.

Canada, so far as I can tell, is the only English speaking country with reliable statistics on the consumption of duck. Canadians consume around 200g of duck meat per annum.* That is: less than or equal to the daily (combined) consumption of pork, beef, lamb and chicken. One serve, approximately once a year.

Duck consumption isn’t even a blip on the statistical radar in America or the UK or Australia.** If we’re not eating it, we’re also not cooking it. And if we’re not cooking it, we aren’t learning how to cook it.

It is clear we have a general reticence to eat duck. Or indeed, any kind of meat you won’t find on a McDonald’s menu.*** It isn’t widely available, therefore we don’t eat it, therefore it is unlikely to become easily available.

I think some of this reticence is also about a fear of flavour. One of the most fabulous and misleading descriptions of not-so-common meat is that it is ‘gamey’. Which is fine, so far as it actually communicates anything. For those of us who have never actually tasted wild game, this makes no sense. What does ‘gamey’ taste like? Is it strong? Pungent? A bit sweaty? Rank? Nice? Compared to what?

In a sense we have been so gastronomically acculturated to tasteless meat (mass produced, heavily processed, fat-removed and salt enhanced) any hint of any flavour whatsoever can seem a little confronting. So what does duck taste like? Silky, rich, sweet, meaty, delicate and soft. A clean oiliness (like a lovely roasted chicken has around the drumsticks). Basically, quite delicious.

Because it is rich, duck goes well with citrus and vinegars and spices (as these cut through the richness). Because of the layer of fat between flesh and skin, high heats and/or long cooking times are also kind to duck. Peking Duck enhances its sweetness by marrying crispy roasted duck with a sweet and sticky hoisin sauce, and confit of duck involves overloading its richness, preserving the marylands by slow cooking in duck fat.

But the very, very easiest way to cook duck is to treat it almost like a really good steak. Sear, roast, rest.

* http://www.agr.gc.ca/poultry/prindd5_eng.htm

**http://www.allcountries.org/uscensus/1370_per_capita_consumption_of_meat_and.html

*** Bacon, beef, chicken. http://mcdonalds.com.au/our-food/menu/#/

Duck breasts, medium-well done

Serves 2

Preheat oven, 220ºc

2 duck breast fillets, skin on.

Season skin side – salt, pepper.

Very hot cast iron grill pan on high heat.

3 minutes skin side down.

Turn.

1 minute skin side up.

Oven, 8 minutes skin side up.

Remove.

Rest, 4 minutes.

Eat with this, because it is delicious. And steamed green beans, because they are healthy and delicious.

The Great American Recipe: chowder

2010-05-09T03:55:00.000-07:00

America is not exactly renowned for contributing to the great cuisines of the world.

Lots of accomplished chefs, but more famous, perhaps, for hot dogs and doughnuts and frozen pizza and TV meals. For adopting imported culinary traditions – ergo the California roll, the apple pie, the pastrami sandwich. For showcasing the food of the world in some of the best restaurants in the world. But not for offering its own unique food tradition.

Scratch the surface, however, and you find food that is informed and shaped around the immediate environment, local produce and climate, people and history. Perfect regional cuisine.

The New England clam chowder is a perfect example of a definitive regional cuisine. Incorporating key ingredients that are local (corn, potato, clams), chowder, whilst inspired by European fish soups, is quintessentially North American. Rich, sweet but also restrained and economical, this soup captures the New England terroir, warming in the cold, cold winter and fresh in the humid summer.

God bless America.

Seafood, corn and potato chowder

Serves 4

¾ cup dry white wine
300 g green tiger prawns
350 g mussels
350 g clams
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp butter
1 carrot, cut into ½ cm dice
1 leek, white part only, cut into ½ cm dice
½ brown onion, cut into ½ cm dice
1 small bulb fennel, cut into ½ cm dice
2 rashers really good smokey bacon, cut into ½ cm dice
3 cloves garlic, very finely sliced
1 bay leaf
750 mls water
2 small waxy potatoes, peeled and cut into ½ cm dice
Kernels of 1 cob of corn
2 tbsp pure cream
2 tsp finely chopped fresh thyme
2 tbsp finely chopped parsley

Heat a very large pan with the lid on until hot. Add wine and seafood and cover. Cook for about 5 minutes, until the clams and mussels are open and the prawns are pink. Strain the cooking liquid and reserve. Set the seafood aside until cool enough to handle.

When the seafood is cool enough to handle, peel the prawns and remove the clam and mussel meat from the shells. Coarsely chop and set aside.

Heat butter and olive oil in the pan, add carrots, leek, onion, fennel and bacon. Cook on medium low heat for ten to twelve minutes until the vegetables are soft. Increase the heat and add reserved seafood cooking liquid, water and bay leaf. Bring to the boil.

Add potatoes and corn, reduce to a simmer and cook for about ten minutes until the potato is cooked through. Add cream and reserved prawns, clams and mussels. Stir until warmed through.

Serve scattered with thyme and parsley.

Recipes of the Orient: rustic Indonesian chicken soup

2010-05-08T05:31:00.000-07:00

In the early seventies my parents travelled to Java for their honeymoon. My mother made two crucial mistakes during this trip (not counting the whole motorcycle in the rice-paddy incident). The first: purchasing a bowl of “noodles” from a street stall. She struggled through a giant bowl of shredded steamed tripe. The second: made wise by her tripe experience, she purchased, in the twilight of an outdoor food market, a plate of long green beans. The first forkful revealed her error: each long, green bean was a whole chilli. This didn’t, however, deter her. The best food is always found by the side of the road, bought from makeshift ‘kitchens’, cooked right in front of you. The risk is tripe and chillies. The reward: fresh, local, flavourful, authentic deliciousness, the kind that defines a region or country or town.

When I was sixteen my mother took my younger brother and me on a holiday to Java. From Jakata to Jogjakata, she manoeuvred two children through language barriers and nine hour train trips without air-conditioning in tropical heat and strange food and upset stomachs and terrible hotel rooms.

This was an extraordinary experience. Ancient temples, magical palaces, tiered tea plantations, noise, stench, serenity, being-attacked-by-monkeys, religious shrines and rituals, military monuments, a live volcano.

Unsurprisingly my strongest memory* of this holiday is the temporary street stall that arrived at dusk outside out hotel and packed up when the last of the food disappeared. Comprising a single gas burner, a large pot, stackable plastic chairs and table, a tarpaulin canopy, and a shrivelled tiny ancient Indonesian women and her equally ancient and shrunken male counterpart, this stall purveyed chicken and vegetable soup.

The soup appeared to consist of nothing more that a truly ginormous pot, filled with ginger, garlic, onions and many whole chickens, which had simmered away until the chicken fell off the bones. The carcasses remained in the stock. When someone requested a bowl of soup (in my case, by pointing) various chopped vegetables were added, cooked and the soup served with a scoop of boiled white rice.

The make-shift tables were laden with various mismatched bottles of soya sauce, ketchup manis** and sweet chilli sauce, fresh chopped chilli and vinegar.

Relying on a combination of observation and Recipes of the Orient (published in 1968 and bought by my mother following her return from the honeymoon) my mother and I managed to develop a recipe which evokes (although never exactly captures) sup ayam in the twilight by the side of a Javanese road.

* other that the whole monkey incident, which occurred due to a misunderstanding about a breadfruit I had stashed in my backpack. Once I surrendered the fruit, the monkeys let me be.

** a lightly spiced and heavily sweetened soya sauce syrup

Sup ayam (Indonesian chicken soup)

Serves 6

1 whole chicken, free range. At least 1 kg (note – a 1 kg chicken will make enough for 4 people. For more serving, used a 1.5 kg chicken, or add additional vegetables)
3 inches ginger, grated (you can use less if you are not a big ginger fan, but it is a key feature of the soup)
6 cloves garlic, minced
2 onions, chopped into 1cm dice
2 tablespoon soya sauce
2 potatoes, cut into 1.5 cm dice
1 small head broccoli, cut into small pieces (use the stalk as well – trim and dice)
2 carrots, peeled and cut into 1.5 cm dice
½ head cauliflower, cut into small pieces
1 bunch bok choi or choi sum or similar

Boiled white rice and sweet chilli sauce, to serve

In a very large pot, add chicken, garlic, ginger and half the diced onion. Cover the chicken with cold water, bring to the boil. Reduce heat and simmer for about half an hour (essentially this poaches the chicken)

Remove chicken and set aside. Top up the chicken stock with additional water (you could use chicken or vegetable stock, but I don’t bother) and bring to the boil. Add 1 tablespoon soya sauce. Taste. If required, add remaining soya sauce and/or sea salt. If I’m being fancy, I skim and strain the stock – but it’s really not necessary.

When the chicken is cool enough to handle, remove and discard the skin, and shred the meat. Set aside. (This is both messy and time consuming. Alternatively, use 750 gm chicken mince, brown in a small amount of peanut oil, then add water, ginger etc).

Bring the stock back to the boil. Add potatoes and cook for about 5 minutes. Add remaining vegetables and onion, bring to the boil and cook for a further 5 minutes. Add chicken meat and heat through.

Serve with a spoonful of rice and sweet chilli sauce.

Summer love: kissing tomatoes goodbye

2010-05-03T05:22:00.000-07:00

I have finally admitted the tomatoes are done until next summer. Between now and then I will live on dried, bottled and preserved tomatoes, lamenting my loss until I can consummate my lust with the ripe, firm, sweet juicy globes grown under the summer sun, drenched in warmth and olive oil. Goodbye to bell peppers, zucchinis, big purple eggplants and long skinny brinjals.

The supermarket, well-lit den of vice, will call its siren call. Like a corner-standing, trench-coat-wearing pimp, the supermarket whispers lies of eternal access and pleasure. Of constant supply. Of seamless, timeless, endless shiny foodstuffs. It is easy to be seduced. It is easy to be naive or forgetful - beneath the fluorescent lights and climate controlled air-conditioning and immaculately clean floors and shelving and plastic wrapped packaging - that our food grows in dirt according to the rhythms of the seasons and the turning of the earth.

On days when food is just fuel I do succumb. Of course I have eaten tomatoes in the dead of winter. I have bought imported cherries. Stored pumpkins and cold-storage apples and hot-housed cucumbers. But I remember one calabrese salad in August that was so distressingly tasteless that I couldn’t eat it. I picked out the bocconcini and left the basil and tomatoes. I should have known better. The supermarket quickie is not satisfying.

Seasonality is not about permaculture or organic farming or slow food or being a 'locavore'. It is almost inherent in all these things, but it is much, much more simple. You can eat seasonally shopping in your local supermarket. Seasonality is the idea that plants (and animals, really – although this is a bit complicated), when left to their own devices, naturally flower, fruit, ripen and grow in certain ways at certain times.

The secret of seasonality is that things taste best when allowed to grow according to this natural rhythm. The rocquette from my Dad’s veggie patch was the most peppery, fresh, flavourful rocquette I have ever eaten. My Mum’s tomatoes cannot be highly enough praised. Peaches warm from the sun? Mulberries eaten whilst climbing the mulberry tree? Pumpkin soup on the first day of winter? It just tastes right.

It’s not that tricky to work it out. Educate yourself. Get a list. And refer to the list. Try Seasonal Cornucopia (it’s for the north west coast of America, but I make adjustments for being on the other side of the globe – where the seasons are reversed) – or this pdf for Australia. Ask questions. Visit farms. Look at price and availability. If it’s cheaper or there’s heaps more of it, chances are it’s in season. Things grow best in their natural season, therefore there is more of it, and (basic supply and demand) therefore it will likely be cheaper.* Try trial and error (I like this way best) – observe and trust your own senses. Taste things, remember how they tasted (you could be organised and keep notes, but seriously, who does that?).

And so: I admit that the tomatoes are over. But they tasted good while they were here. And we had time for one last steamy fling.

* This of course lead to the great asparagus over-indulgence of 1999 (which in turn lead to the great asparagus avoidance of 2000-2006).

Ratatouille

Ratatouille is a French vegetable stew or sauce (depending on how long you cook it and how finely you cut the vegetables) made with vegetables from the tail-end of summer – and lots of garlic and olive oil. It is similar to the Italian caponata and the Catalan samfaina. It works well on its own, with grilled fish or meat, over pasta or rice, with chickpeas or other dried legumes, or crusty bread.

Serves about 8. Make a lot and freeze it.

½ cup olive oil (plus more to serve)
2 heads of garlic (or to taste), 1 head minced and the other peeled but left whole
2 red onions, roughly chopped into large dice
5 long thin aubergines (or 2 medium sized eggplants), sliced into ½ inch rounds
5 zucchinis, sliced into ½ inch rounds
1 red capsicum, roughly chopped into 1 inch pieces
2 yellow capsicum, roughly chopped into 1 inch pieces
1 kg really ripe tomatoes, blanched, peeled and chopped
Handful of green beans (optional)
½ cup roughly chopped parsley, to serve

Heat oil in a large saucepan over a medium heat. Add onions and whole peeled cloves of garlic and cook for a couple of minutes. Add minced garlic and cook until soft but not browning. Add eggplant and cook for three to four minutes. Then add zucchini and capsicum, stirring gently until softening.

Add chopped tomatoes and cook until the vegetables are very soft. Check for seasoning – add a generous amount of sea salt and pepper (I sometime like to add fresh chillies along with the capsicum for a bit of kick).

Add green beans (if using) and cover and cook until just cooked through (you could add them with the tomatoes, but I like my beans quite crisp, so I add them at the end – it’s a nice textual balance to the mushiness of the rest of the vegetables).

Serve scattered with chopped parsley.

Beetroot Caramel: a work in progress

2010-04-28T05:17:00.000-07:00

Beetroot caramel – possibly as crazy as it sounds

It doesn’t take much to amuse me. For example, this add* reduces me to fits of laughter. Every. Time. And the surprised kitty? I can watch that on a continuous loop and weep.

I like to laugh, and I like to make people laugh. I have a very good friend who is a boxer and personal trainer. He is probably one of the funniest people I know. It’s a bit of a challenge for me, to try to find something that will make him laugh. Because he’s not just funny, he’s really good at keeping a poker face. No matter how funny something is, he’ll rarely crack a smile. I think this is because he knows that people will laugh even harder, and joke around even more just to try to get him to give in.

One of the things I like to do is say outrageous things to him, just to try to shock him into giggling. Just a bit. Mostly though, he just laughs at me when I’m not trying to be funny. This is devastating, because he still wins. He’s still the funniest, because this isn’t about me being funny, but about him finding the funny in a situation.

A little while ago we were talking about beetroot. And the joke, finally, may be on him.

It started out serious: the merits of tinned versus fresh. I, as ever, the advocate for fresh. Sure, steam, boil and/or pickle if you feel the need, but start with the fresh b’root. I argued for raw-grated, whole-baked-in-foil, unpeel-steamed, juiced and borscht (yes, I even bought up the borscht). He, as ever, remained underwhelmed by my passionate defence. Refused to rise to the emotion of the debate. Refused to even concede there could be a difference (he wouldn’t even defend the primacy of the tin. Just that it made no difference!).

And then it popped out – beetroot caramel. Dessert beetroot. The ultimate in the absurd. Finally, he cracked, a little, a tiny, miniscule crack. And then, the poker face reasserted. He questioned the sanity of such a suggestion. Claimed it just wouldn’t work.

Challenge accepted. Less a case, now, of ‘can I make him laugh?’, and more a case of calling his bluff. What was a whimsical throwaway line was now a serious challenge.

I’ve played around in my head with different ideas for how this beetroot caramel could work. And it does make sense – beetroot is already sweet, and already a delicious dessert purple colour. We make pumpkin pie, and yam pastries. I have been known to consume sweet potato with condensed milk (don’t ask). It’s not so ridiculous after all.

Ideas have included: mandolin sliced beetroot, sprinkled with confectioner’s sugar and baked in the oven until crisp (with coffee); grated beetroot, air- (or oven-) dried, mixed with toasted pine-nuts and then drizzled with burnt sugar caramel (a little like a praline in my head – serve with yoghurt or ice-cream); whole roasted beetroot, cubed and then dipped in caramel like a toffee apple and sprinkled with sea salt (with dessert wine or port); beetroot crème-caramel, with pureed steamed beetroot blended with cream and eggs topped with a orange-chilli caramel sauce.

At some point I clearly forgot that I have no particular talent for making anything sweet.

My first attempt at beetroot praline looked fantastic (or at least better than I expected)– however, I burnt the caramel, which made everything far too bitter, and the sweetness and colour of the beetroot was lost in the dehydration. But I was not ready to give up on this idea yet.

Beetroot-toffee-apples: also a miserable failure. The beetroot went soggy. And the caramel wouldn’t stick.

Spicy beetroot custard pie with toffee crisps was the closest I’ve come yet. Chocolate and orange rind shortcrust pastry, custard spiced with copious amounts of cinnamon and cardamom, enriched with strained mashed roasted beetroot. Topped with sugar lace, just melted in the oven then hardened. The trouble was – not beetroot-y enough. Also, my pastry technique is pretty much non-existent.

I maintain however, that it’s not insane at all.** The key? Balancing the sweetness of the beetroot with that almost bitterness that a good caramel can impart, and balancing the texture of the beetroot – soft with hard, mushy with crispy. I just haven’t managed it yet.

* I don’t even watch the show. I don’t even eat this product. It’s just insanely funny to me.

** And imagine my surprise when I saw, on the menu of a fantastic restaurant recently ‘mango bavarois with caramel beetroot’. Of course I ordered it. Only to be informed that the chef had taken the beetroot off the dish – turns out, the caramel melts in their tropical heat. I ordered the dish anyway – the caramelised slice of lime and coconut and chilli sambal more than made up for the disappointment!

Taking stock, making stock

2010-04-26T02:13:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the world moves too fast. Everything is instant, super-fast, last-minute, instant-success, immediate gratification, ready-made.

Some things simply take time. Dough rising. Wine aging in oak barrels. Cheese maturing. Figs ripening. Peppercorns drying in the sun. Even thinking about the necessary and inherent slowness in these processes slows me down. Waiting, waiting, then satisfaction.

We’re all familiar with the concept of food miles: that is, the distance food travels from production to plate. This is linked in which the concept of carbon footprint: the total amount of carbon-dioxide emitted during the production, storage, processing, transportation and preparation of a food-stuff.

Like good Einsteinians, we should perhaps turn our minds to the other element of the space-time continuum: the temporal aspect of what we eat. An appreciation that what arrives on our plates has travelled an enormous distance through time, from seed to plant to tomato-fruit to sugo. From egg to duck to confit. Grass to sheep to milk to curds-and-whey to cheese. That raw ingredients transform over a period of time as various arcane processes are applied: aging, salting, brining, curing, braising, marinading, peeling, chopping, sautéing. That the skills to apply such processes are a result of acquired skill, of knowledge developed over generations, of technique remembered and communicated, written down and distributed. Slow food.

And the time poured into a meal can make all the difference to how it tastes. There are lots of short cuts, even short cuts that don’t involve buying pre-made components: butter, cream, salt, sugar (msg!). And there are lots of things that are easy to throw together in a couple of minutes. But a sauce made from concentrated stock? Soaking and cooking dried beans rather than tinned? Resting a syrup cake over-night? Draining yoghurt to make labne? Curing your own gravlax? Simple, but time intensive. It can take a good meal to another level.

I love having stock on hand. For long grain rice and soaked borlotti beans cooked by reduction in chicken stock – a rich and savoury and slightly oily flavour. Sticky and more-ish on its own, or part of a more balanced meal with steamed vegetables or crispy pan-fried kale. As a base for polenta. For poaching hand made dumplings or vegetables, for a light soup. As a braising liquid for oven roasted chickens or duck or goose. For adding to casseroles or pasta sauces or mashed potatoes. As a sauce for homemade ravioli.

I know you can buy pretty good premade stocks – some butchers are even selling them now. But I had a whole day to myself at home, this don’t require a lot of supervision. And it cost me about $10 to make 5 litres (which much cheaper than buying it) - $6 for 2kg of chicken bones from my butcher, and $4 for 2 carrots, 2 onions and a leek. Good quality pre-made stocks can cost between $6-10 per 500ml.

Homemade stock is economical. A little time-intensive in the skimming and straining but really not difficult. It requires a gentle nonchalance, a vague watchfulness, and care that the liquids do not boil, just simmer ever so gently. Time passes and is marked with an increasing richness of wafting steam and deepening colour.

Simple stock:

Stock making can be as complicated or as simple as you want. The trick is mostly to use lots of bones and not to boil the liquid. I find that ox tails and a cow’s foot is an excellent addition to veal and beef stock. Chicken’s feet and necks are perfect for chicken stock. The more bones, the more gelatinous the stock will be – thicker and more flavourful.

Using left over cooked bones (like the remnants of a roast chicken, or ox tail bones left over from braised ox tail ravioli filling) or brown raw bones in oil for 20 minutes.

Cover cooked bones with wine and water. Add chopped vegetables and a bay leaf (I like leeks, carrots and onions, sometimes celery and sometimes I add mushrooms in the last half hour).

Simmer gently for two or three hours. Read a book. Strain several times. Stock will freeze for several months or last in the fridge for about a week.

To make a simple sauce, boil the strained stock until the desired thickness. Season with salt (you could also add tiny diced vegetables or porcini mushroom powder or vinegar or mustard for flavouring at this stage).

Glazed and confused

2010-04-21T04:53:00.000-07:00

I wanted to make salad. Chicken and spinach salad. Thrown together with whatever was available and not completely disastrous looking at the 24 hour supermarket on the way home. Sweet potato, orange and earthy. Giant mushrooms. With walnuts. And roast capsicum. And fetta cheese dressing. Maybe olives? Just something really quick, really simple. Week night: long day.

I am easily distracted at times.

Glass of wine. Maybe caramelise the walnuts? With orange rind? That would use up the orange that’s been sitting in the fruit bowl since I decided a few days ago that I needed more vitamin C (you have to eat them, not just buy them ...)

Then – balsamic vinegar. Something a bit sour to balance the caramel? With mushrooms? Roasted in the balsamic vinegar. I overcooked the sweet potato. So I pureed it. With olive oil.

Just pan fry the chicken. Easy. Then – why not add fennel seeds? Then – why not add the juice of the orange? Instant glaze.

Much like my expression.

This does not look like salad.

Orange and fennel glazed chicken with balsamic roast mushrooms and sweet potato puree.

Serves 2

For the puree sweet potato, cook the 300 gms sweet potato (I peeled, dice and blanch) until soft.

Mash with enough olive oil to make a smooth yet thick puree, and set aside.

Balsamic roast mushrooms

These mushrooms are great with salad, accompanying meat or as a killer vegetarian main served with white bean puree.

Olive oil
2 large flat field mushrooms
Balsamic vinegar

Pre heat oven to moderate (180ºc). Oil a baking dish. Place mushrooms stalk up in baking dish, drizzle ½ balsamic vinegar into each mushroom. Roast for about ½ hour until soft but not falling apart.

Orange and fennel glazed chicken

2 tsp olive oil
2 chicken breasts, skin off
1 ½ tsp fennel seeds
Juice of 1 orange

Heat olive oil in a non stick pan. Add chicken breasts and cook on one side for about 4 to 5 minutes. Turn breast over. Add fennel seeds. Cook for 3 to 4 minutes. Add orange juice. Move the chicken around in the juice to coat, then turn over and coat on the other side. The juice will turn sticky and make the chicken shiny. Turn off the heat and cover (this will keep the chicken warm until serving).

Caramelised walnuts

¾ cup walnuts
2 tsp icing sugar
Rind of 1 orange, finely grated
Pinch of salt + pepper
½ cup oil (I use olive oil, but vegetable or canola would also work)

Blanch walnuts in boiling water for 3-4 minutes (this softens them a little – makes them soft in the middle and crispy on the outside after you finish caramelising them).

Drain and shake off excess water. Toss through with icing sugar, rind and salt and pepper.

Heat about 1.5cm oil in a small pan until bubbly. Add coated walnuts and fry for about 1-2 minutes until browning and crispy. Drain off oil and cool. (this can be done in advance – the walnuts store in an air tight container for about a week. They make a pretty good snack too).

To serve – place a dollop of sweet potato puree on a plate, top with chicken and mushroom, scatter with caramelised walnuts. Serve alongside a green salad.

Brussels sprouts, bacon and boar taint

2010-04-20T04:58:00.000-07:00

If there was ever a vegetable guaranteed to divide opinion, it is the Brussels sprout. Like all members of the cruciferous family, Brussels sprouts are naturally bitter. Not only bitter – but sulphurous. And not only naturally bitter and sulphurous, but more bitter and more sulphurous when cooked. Particularly when over-cooked.

Taste buds are fickle. Just ask the three bears about their porridge preferences. Taste is one of those profoundly philosophical problems: it is uniquely and specifically subjective. Are Brussels sprouts disgusting or do some people just experience them that way?*

On the other hand, there is an increasingly detailed body of scientific research about the chemical and physiological nature of taste (technical term: “gustation”). There are chemical markers that determine whether something is sweet or salty or sour or bitter. We have discovered “unami”, chemically distinguishable (ie, monosodium glutamate – the dreaded msg) and sensed as savoury –occurring naturally in some seaweeds and soya sauces and meat for example. Not all flavours can be physically tasted by all people.** Some –supertasters - are very sensitive, almost prohibitively drawn to bland food. Some – non-tasters – need ‘excessive’ seasoning and spices to taste food at all.

For example, Brussels sprouts are particularly unpalatable for children who have a much stronger sense of taste than adults.***

Like sprouts, pork is tricky. Setting aside the well articulated religious reasons for foregoing pigs, you run into a more amorphous minefield of personal preference and pernicketiness. Pigs have a pretty bad reputation for being dirty. For eating garbage and wallowing in it.

Not only this, but a significant percentage of pork is affected by something known as boar taint. Boar taint is an odour and associated flavour that affects some adolescent pigs. Boar taint results in that oily, sweaty, dirty taste that pork is sometimes known to have. Pork is now selectively reared to avoid this, and using immature and female pigs can help in minimising the risk. Still, pork is not universally loved, and it takes trust, love and care to put it on a plate and expect people to eat it.

An idea forms: pork and sprouts. Given their shared outcast status, pairing them makes sense. No. Bacon and sprouts. Crazy sense.

It's not really that extraordinary: bacon and cabbage is a reliable fail-safe recipe. And Brussels sprouts are really just tiny wee cabbages when it all boils down to it. Not so intimidating or icky after all.

Rather than boil or steam the sprouts – I slowly caramelise in a pan, develop what natural sugars they have, letting the sprouts draw in the smoky sweet bacon flavour. I tasted this, about half way through the cooking process: I was surprised at how sweet the bacon and caramelising made the dish. As the idea takes form, developing a meal that will appeal is a matter of balancing, tasting and re-balancing the flavours, like a mantra: salty (bacon); sweet (apple); bitter (sprouts); sour (mustard); savoury (pork).

These sprouts were not too salty, not too bitter, not too sweet and not too sour. In the words of Goldilocks, these sprouts were just right.

* To paraphrase Donald Davidson, the phrase ‘food is tasty’ is true if and only if food is indeed tasty.

Donald Davidson is a brilliant philosopher of language. See also the works of Tama Coutts on Davidson.
** Danielle R. Reed, Toshiko Tanaka, and Amanda H. McDaniel; ‘Diverse tastes: Genetics of sweet and bitter perception’ Physiol Behav. 2006 June 30; 88(3): 215–226.
*** Except me. I loved Brussels sprouts as a kid. Not so my mum: bought up on sprouts boiled until mush, she refused to cook them.

Caramelised and braised sprouts with bacon

Per person:

6-10 small sprouts, trimmed at stalk and cut in half
1 middle rasher of bacon, rind removed and diced into 1 cm dice
1 tsp grain mustard
40 ml white wine

Heat a tsp or so of olive oil in a heavy pan. Toss in bacon and sprouts. Cook at a high heat for a few minutes, shaking the pan occasionally, until the bacon and sprouts are starting to brown. Toss in half the wine, deglaze the pan (ie, stir around the pan to scrape off all the brown bits). When the alcohol cooks off, add the mustard and the rest of the wine, reduce the heat and simmer for about 5 minutes or until the smell of alcohol is gone and the sprouts are just cooked (they should be soft but not soggy).

(For the vegetarians out there: there are lots of non-meat related ways to make sprouts interesting. For example: Steamed, halved, smeared with blue cheese, drizzled with honey and under the grill is also sensational.)

Feeling crabby

2010-04-17T05:01:00.000-07:00

Crabs. Sweet, succulent, tender. There is not enough food-porn terminology to describe just how groin-grabbingly good fresh crab is*.

From crab and corn dumplings at yum cha to deep fried soft shell crab in Far North Queensland to chilli mud crab in Singapore: crab is irresistible on any menu. Why then, despite buying octopus and squid, mussels and sardines and Moreton Bay bugs, have I never purchase whole crab? Jewel coloured and art-like, I have always overlooked them. Not overlooked: avoided.

Little return for too much hard work. A disparity between effort and reward.

Cooking crabs is as simple as any other seafood. Despite the bad reputation, seafood is relatively easy and relatively forgiving. It is better to undercook than overcook. I have found that seafood never suffers from being returned to the heat. The theory behind cooking crab is just like any other shellfish: plunge into boiling water, return to the boil, cook for a ‘bit’ (that’s the part that is a little tricky**), refresh in cool water***.

There the simplicity ends.

It took me, with kitchen-helper assistance, 45 minutes to extract the flesh from the claws and body. Whole blue swimmer crab yields about a third of its weight in meat (this is pretty standard for all whole crab). So my three little crabs gave us merely a handful of crab meat. Paltry would be an accurate assessment.

And messy. Very messy. It is not exaggeration that we flicked crab all over each other, the bench and the floor. We missed the ceiling. Probably. I had to have a shower before I returned to the kitchen. “Crabby” would be an apt description.

After the harrowing 45 minutes flesh-extraction process, we wound up with a small pile of wobbly undercooked meat.

Luckily, I remembered that Thomas Keller deliberately does this with lobster, finishing off the cooking process by poaching the undercooked meat in beurre monte just prior to serving. Situation saved. This does make the meat a little richer, but the butter enhances the flavour and keeps the flesh soft.

Delicate and rich, I needed something to cut through the butter and yet not over-power the crab. Salad: a dressing made with the juice and rind of home grown limes. Peppery rocquette. Shaved fennel and cucumber. Avocado and green onions. But something extra. Experimenting with a Belinda Tuckwell recipe, I finished the salad with green-tea salt.

In all honesty, given the time, effort and resultant scrubbing of self and kitchen, crab is indeed more work than it is pleasure.

On the other hand, the kitchen-helper gave it seven thumbs up. Even after the industrial clean up.

* The Simpsons, “Guess who’s coming to criticize dinner”, 1999 (Season 11, Episode 3)
** Which is fine, once you have a good idea of how long it takes to cook a crab (this thing is, it differs from crab to crab depending on variety and size). Boil a 300 g crab about five minutes is a good rule of thumb. I got this wrong.
*** All things keep cooking with residual heat even after you take them away from the heat source. With shell fish this is even more pronounced as the shell retains the heat. Plunging into ice water stops the cooking process.

Crab and green-tea salt salad

Serves 2

1 tbsp sea salt flakes
1 tbsp green tea leaves
Finely grated rind of two limes
4 blue swimmer crabs
50 gm chilled butter, cut into 1 cm cubes
2 tbsp olive oil
Juice of two limes
2 long green onions, finely sliced
1 bulb fennel, quartered and shaved
1 cucumber, thinly sliced into rounds
1 avocado, diced
150 gm rocquette (three large handfuls)

For the salt: finely grind salt, tea and rind in a mortar and pestle until a fine powder. Spread on foil and place in a moderate oven for 5-10 minutes to dry. Remove and set aside.

For the crab: bring a large saucepan of water to the boil. Add 4 tbsp salt. Plunge crabs into the boiling water. Return to the boil. Cook crabs for 5 minutes, then plunge into iced water. To extract meat: press down on the ‘tail’ and peel the carapace from the crab (the hard shell of the body). This will strip away icky internal organs. Rinse under cold water. Extract the meat. Tricky, and messy. The body will have some meat, as will the large legs and claws. Crack the shell and gently pull the flesh from the shell. (Alternatively, use prawns or grilled fish or buy the meat already stripped).

If the crab is not fully cooked, or to enhance the flavour, make buerre monte. Heat 3 tbps water in a saucepan. With a whisk, incorporate the butter piece by piece until all melted and combined. Add the crab and heat through for three to four minutes, until opaque and cooked. Turn off the heat (the crab can rest in this mixture for around 15 minutes without losing heat or over cooking). Just before serving, strain the crab.

For the salad: Whisk the oil and lime juice together until emulsified. Add the spring onions, fennel, cucumber and avocado. Just before serving, toss through the rocquette.

To serve: Pile the salad onto a plate. Top with crab meat and sprinkle with green-tea salt.

Virginal tarts

2010-04-13T02:49:00.000-07:00

I love the hidden depths of history and mystery that lie behind even the most simple of foods.

Last Thursday I left early for work. This resulted in me running behind schedule (there is a weird logic to this) and hence foregoing coffee on the way to the office. Later that morning, when I escaped to quieten my caffeine withdrawal symptoms I had the misfortune of arriving in the cafe at the precise moment a tray of Portuguese custard tarts were removed from the oven. Bubbly and patchy with caramelisation. Puffed up and buttery. Goopy.

In my weakened state I was powerless to resist. Like the selfish caffeine addict that I am, I purchased a single tart all for myself and practically inhaled it before the coffee was half empty.

Arguably, pretty much anything straight from the oven is guaranteed to smell and taste 10% better than anything else, ever. But I have a particular soft spot for the pastel de nata.* And I’m not the only one. I remember visiting no fewer than four cafes with a colleague one afternoon to satisfy her very specific and ultimately unsatisfiable craving.

Pastry. Egg custard. Done. Nothing could be more basic. But the Portuguese custard tart is a little like the Holy Grail. “We already got one” cry the custard tart makers of England (with their short-crust pastry and nutmeg sprinkling) and the French (with their egg enhanced crème pattisierie and glazed fruits).** Not so: this custard tart is truly divine. A heavenly blending of light puff pastry that cracks as your teeth hit each layer of air pocket followed by flaky crispness; and dense and sticky custard, skin blotched and blistered, custard smooth and thick. Somehow the custard remains un-curdled and yet the pastry achieves crispness: a miracle given the tendency of custard to split at high temperatures and pastry to remain sulkily chewy in anything less than a scorching hot oven.

No wonder, then, that this tart was born in a convent, bought to life, as the story would have it, by nuns (or possibly monks) of the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos in Belém district of Lisbon. Exactly when they were first made it is not known. What is known is that the Monastery sold the tarts to the local people and travelers and developed a loyal – or possibly addicted - following. Following the 1820 revolution, like so many others, the monastery was closed (probably around 1837). The recipe, however, was a commodity: sold to the local bakery, who secretly guards the original recipe to this day.***

Fine: but what happened to the nuns? Having sold their recipe (for how much?), where did they go? Curiosity eats away at me, more maddening that chasing the caffeine dragon. Their recipe: fixed at a point in time, still sold by the same bakery, in the shadow of the Monastery. The buildings of the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, world heritage listed. But the lives of these original bakers: puff, like the pastry they perfected.

I have never eaten Pasteis de Belém. I may constantly settle for the Portuguese custard tart of the cafe-near-work. But I will be unsettled by the idea that these black-habited pastry makers drifted out of history. Anyone who has seen Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade will know that the journey is more important than the destination: searching for the Holy Grail is about the things we find out about ourselves, not the cup itself. So it begins again: with a virgin tart maker.

* Apparently, this is the Portuguese term for the Portuguese custard tart. As such, it is possible the most important phrase I know in Portuguese. Also the only phrase.
** It is vitally important that you try to imitate the atrocious French accent affected by John Clease in Monty Python and the Holy Grail when saying “we already got one”.
*** Their tarts are known as Pasteis de Belém (ie, pastries of Belém). The rest of us survive, when we can score, on the wonderful imitation: pasteis de nata (pastries of cream).

Pasteis de Nata: Portuguese Custard Tarts

Makes 12

Ingredients:

Pastry.
Egg custard.

I followed the recipe given at Not Quite Nigella (originally a Bill Granger recipe), as adapted below. Note – I thought this a little sweet, so next time I will play around with less sugar. I would also be interested to up the egg count. Note that Ms Elliott quite sensibly suggests using good quality bought puff pastry. I attempted to make my own.

Pre-heat the oven to extremely hot. I had mine on fan forced at 240ºc.

For the custard

3 egg yolks (as suggested by Ms Elliott, I used 2 yolks and 1 whole egg)
115g caster sugar
2 tbsp cornflour
230ml cream (I used cream, Ms Elliott successfully substitutes additional milk)
170ml Milk
2 tsp vanilla extract
300g rolled puff pastry (or one sheet of puff pastry)
3 strands saffron (my addition)
¼ tsp grated lemon rind (my addition)

Whisk the eggs, sugar and cornflour with beaters until smooth. Whisk in the milk and cream. Pour into a heavy based saucepan, add saffron and lemon rind. Gently heat until it starts to thicken to the consistency of thickened cream (I don’t like to boil custard, as I am terrified of splitting it, even when stabilised with cornflour).

Strain through a sieve into a heat proof bowl, then continue to heat the custard over a saucepan of simmering watering (ie, your basic “baine marie” or double boiler set up) until thick like, well, store bought custard or cake batter.

Set aside to cool (cover the surface with plastic wrap to stop a skin forming).

When cool, fill the pastry shells.

Pastry

If using a block of pastry, either store bought or home made, roll out so it is longish and narrowish. If using a square pastry sheet, cut in half and place one half on top of the other.

Roll the pastry into a cylinder along the long edge. Chill. Then slice into 1.5 cm rounds, then roll each of these rounds into a very thin flat circle, about 10-12 cm diameter . This gives the signature spiral pattern on the pastry shell. Line a muffin tin.

Fill the rounds to just below the rim with custard.

To cook

Place the tray in the top of the oven and cook for about 20-25 minutes. Do check – when the pastry is crispy and the tops have patches of brown they should be ready.

Important: leave to cool for a little while, so the custard can set.

Rough puff pastry

2010-04-12T15:15:00.000-07:00

I have never before made pastry. I know there are chefs out there who laugh with derision at anyone who says this. There are home cooks who insist that you really must make real puff pastry, not (sneer) rough puff pastry. However I am humbly just a little bit pleased with myself for attempting even rough puff pastry (which was plenty challenging enough). It’s not difficult, just a little fiddly and quite time consuming. I tried a recipe from Maggie’s Harvest (by Maggie Beer) – paraphrased below.

450 g plain flour
450 g unsalted butter, chilled (cut into cubes, about 1.5cm)
250 ml chilled water
Pinch of salt (which I forgot)

Clean your kitchen bench. Then dump all the flour onto the bench (you will need to clean the bench again afterward).

Using a pastry scraper (which I don’t own, I used the blunt side of a butter knife, far from ideal) “cut” the butter into the flour. This essentially means, dump a few pieces of butter into the flour, mash/cut them into the flour with the “scraper”, then add a few more. Don’t be temped to use your fingers, this apparently melts the butter and opens a portal to the underworld. Repeat until all butter is used.

When all the butter is combined, add about 180 ml of water and quickly form into a dough. It should be quite firm. Do not “overwork” or let it get warm. Add a bit more water if you are really struggling to make it all come together.

Chill – ie wrap in plastic wrap and put in the fridge (or the freezer, if like me you are impatient. But this really isn’t a great recipe for the impatient. Unless you are trying to cultivate patience).

Cut the pastry into quarters or in half, depending on how much you need for your recipe. Working with one quarter (return the rest to the fridge/freezer) – roll out between two sheets of plastic wrap or baking paper into a longish strip (the length should be three times the width). This is easiest if you roll in one direction only. Fold in a ‘book fold’ – more pamphlet like (just look at the picture). Turn 90º, repeat. Turn again, repeat. If it starts getting soft, re-chill. After three turns(I may have gotton carried away and turned it four time) wrap up and chill.

(Then pour a drink or make a cup of tea and put your feet up).

To use, roll out the desired quantity of pastry to the desired thinness (again, between sheets of baking paper or plastic wrap - this also makes it easy to lift and drape over your pie tin or tarte tatin).

To cook, make sure you use a very hot oven (I crank mine to the hottest it will go, fan forced at 240ºc). A trick – pre-heat the oven (really, really pre-heat it) and also pre-heat a baking tray int he oven – sit the pie tin on top of the baking tray – it conducts the heat better to the bottom of the tin, helping to make it crispier. Cook pastry for about 20 minutes (maybe a little longer).

Cassoulet

2010-04-09T05:50:00.000-07:00

I don’t mean to alarm anyone, but there is a secret society, based in France, dedicated to the art and mystery of cassoulet.* As reported in no lesser a publication than Time Magazine, the Académie Universelle du Cassoulet is a group of chefs dedicated to cooking traditional cassoulet across Languedoc and beyond.

Named for the unique cooking vessel, the cassoulet is an alchemal combination of legumes, cured meats and herbs. Mysteriously transformed by a long cooking process, the resulting amalgamation of fats and salt and starches is astonishingly rich and luxurious without being at all pretentious.

Is it true that cassoulet was born during the siege of Castelnaudary during the Hundred Years' War? Did it fortify the soldiers to victory? Are rumours of coveted secret recipes and undying ever-replenished mixtures of beans and meat true? Is it true that the power of the cassoulet defies the chef and blesses the home kitchen? Is cassoulet the last bastion of the Knights Templar, and the subject of a forthcoming book by Dan Brown, in which cassoulet is revealed to be an anagram of osculates, which means both to have three or more points coincident and to kiss, which clearly refers to the marriage of Jesus (ie, the Trinity and kissing, silly); as well as an anagram for Sauce Lots, which refers to the ability to soak up the stock with rustic French bread? And before you think I made this up***: chef Prosper Montagné decreed in 1929 that "God the father is the cassoulet of Castelnaudary, God the Son that of Carcassonne, and the Holy Spirit that of Toulouse."**

It’s just a fancy way of saying baked beans. Now, of course, there are lots of different varieties of baked beans. Boston beans, for example, rich and sweet with molasses. Heinze Baked Beans, oddly metallic flavoured and weirdly sweet. The tomato and basil baked beans which are made by the coffee shop near work and then spread into a jaffle with haloumi and toasted (unbelievably delicious). The Greek style beans (technically braised) that my mum makes, with tomatoes and garlic and olive oil and green beans and dried beans.

All good.

But the Grand Master of the baked bean fraternity is the cassoulet. It may not be nobility, but it is a master artisan amongst good men. It must be made of the best ingredients: humble and honest ingredients; but the best quality. The nobility is one of the inner spirit: the best cured hams, the most carefully made sausages. Carefully dried and stored beans. Fresh and pungent herbs. Like the home grown garlic and organic thyme and locally reared heritage-breed hasselback-pig smoked bacon I managed to hoard for myself last weekend. Bless the generosity of home gardeners and the industry of artisan farmers. Admit only the best past the threshold of the cassoulet vessel. Submit those who pass to a test of silence and endurance and fire. Break the skin that forms a ritual seven times.**** Remove the candidate from the forge (ok, take the dish from the oven) and serve.

* Note that this isn’t the first secret culinary society that I have come across in the past year. The Cabonari, as alluded to here are not a figment of my imagination, and nor is the speculation connecting them to spaghetti carbonara.
** Reported at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1697005,00.html#ixzz0kVnaNkcU
*** which I did
**** seriously: this is superstition that actually exists in relation to cassoulet. With the cool head of reason I suspect is actually works: mixing back in the caramelised outer layers would enhance the flavour.

Very simple baked beans

Serves about 6.

This is an incredibly inexact recipe – cassoulet really is something to get a feel for, not scientifically produce. Use the very, very best cured quality cured meat you can.

500 gms dried white beans, soaked overnight (or 750g of tinned beans)
Lots of garlic (I used 3 heads), peeled and left whole
Lots of thyme. Or oregano. Or a little rosemary.
About 400 gm streaky bacon, cut into small pieces. I bake the rind as well and then remove on serving.
The grated rind of one lemon (or half a preserved lemon)
2 medium sized Spanish onions (or leeks or brown onions), roughly chopped
1 tbsp olive oil
350ml chicken stock (or water)
Sea salt

You can add in good sausages or duck confit or ham hocks or a leg of mutton or smoked game or chopped carrots and celery and fennel if you like. Some recipes include duck fat – which is particularly good if you are using confit of duck in the cassoulet. But I just like to keep it simple.

Mix everything in a large cassoulet (or oven proof dish). Cover with baking paper and cook slowly in a slow oven all day. At least four hours. Break the skin and stir seven times. Leave uncovered for the last hour of cooking, to develop a tasty crust. Serve with fresh chopped parsley and warm sourdough bread.

Salt cod

2010-04-02T21:46:00.000-07:00

It’s all about preservation.

Salting has always been a way of extending the life of many food stuffs: olives, capers, ham, cheeses – in days before refrigeration, the introduction of salt allowed for the extended storage of food, particularly throughout winter.

The preservation of cod by drying is known to have occurred as early as the tenth century. This method of preservation, as practiced by the Vikings, was a combination of open air drying, where cod were hung to dry freeze in the arctic conditions, taking on salt in the atmosphere, and releasing moisture as they dried. Basques improved on the Vikings’ efforts: they introduced salting before drying, creating a product with an even longer shelf life. Records indicate that in the fourteenth significant amounts of salted cod were imported from famine struck Norway into Mediterranean countries, particularly Spain, in exchange for base commodities such as flour, salt and malt.

According to Kurlansky, Basque sailors made a fortune selling salt cod in the fifteenth century.* The edicts of the Catholic church forbade the consumption of meat on certain holy days (ironically known as ‘feast days’) – which accounted for over a third of the year. However, fish (along with frogs and snails) were not considered ‘flesh’ and therefore were able to be consumed. Basque sailors recognised their opportunity and capitalised by making increasing quantities of salt cod (bacalao in Spanish and bacallà in the Catalan language) available for sale. According to Kurlansky, some of these wily Basques travelled as far as the as yet undiscovered America to source their cod, which was ever-diminishing in the Atlantic and Mediterranean waters. In order to protect their secret supply, the Basques kept the new land a secret (only to have it discovered in 1492 by Christopher Columbus, who insisting on letting the whole world know).

In modern times, refrigeration and deep-freeze have all but eradicated the need to preserve by salting. The feast days proscribing meat have drastically shrunk: or at least, observance of the prohibition is less and less stringent. And modern production has slowly but surely embraced modern technology. Where cod was traditionally hung in open air to absorb salt and dry out, curing is now most likely to take place indoors, aided by electric heaters.

Cod, like ham and bacon, is now produced for preference rather than preservation. In the absence of traditional production methods, the consumption of salt cod is a tenuous link to the practices of the past: a truncated preservation of culture and practice. Good Friday represents perhaps the last widely observed day of salt cod, a ritual standing in for Religious observance in an increasing secularised post-industrial world.

And there is a third preservation at stake: that of the cod itself. Kurlansky quotes Alexander Dumas in 1873: "It has been calculated that if no accident prevented the hatching of the eggs and each egg reached maturity, it would take only three years to fill the sea so that you could walk across the Atlantic dryshod on the backs of cod." And yet: cod biomass is declining. This is fancy way of saying there is less and less cod.* A combination of ongoing overfishing and climate change has resulted reduced numbers. American, Canadian and British fisheries authorities have all expressed concerns regarding shrinking stocks. Various environmentalists have placed Atlantic cod on ‘best to avoid’ list.**

Which leaves me torn: preservation of the cultural tradition of salt cod may be at odds with preservation of the fish itself. There is no getting around diminishing numbers (climate change believer or sceptic, the data is as follows: the sea is warmer and the cod are fewer. Make of it what you will). The good news is: cod is indeed, as Dumas observed, prolific. Sustainable fishing practices and cod-farming are being pursued. The people of the world demand cod. We demand eternal cod, cod to last the ages. Cod for the now, and cod for the future. Cod must be preserved if we are to continue to preserve cod.

* The aptly named Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, Kurlansky, Walker and Company 1997
** Fishing, climate change and north-east Atlantic cod stock by Nova Mieszkowska, David Sims and Steve Hawkins May 2007; and Marine Biological Association of the UK, Plymouth; and US National Maritime Fisheries Service http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/fishwatch/species/atlantic_cod.htm
*** For example: http://www.eartheasy.com/eat_sustainable_seafoods.htm

Bacallà fritters

Serves six

750 gms salt cod
500 ml milk
2 red onions, finely chopped
4 cloved garlic, crushed
1 kg waxy potatoes, peeled, boiled and mashed
½ cup chopped spring onions
3 eggs, separated, whites whisked to stiff peaks
250 ml vegetable oil

Soak, soak, soak the cod. For up to 48 hours, but definitely no fewer than 24 hours. Change the water every four or five hours.

Mix the potatoes and spring onions in a large bowl.

In a medium sized saucepan sauté the onion and garlic until soft. Add to the potato mixture.

In the same saucepan, add the cod, milk and enough water to cover the water. If the cod doesn’t fit, just cut into two or three pieces. Bring to a simmer, and cook for about ½ hour or until soft.

Remove the cod and rinse. When cool enough to touch, remove the skin and bones and shred coarsely into the potato mixture. Stir through the egg yokes until combined. Gentle fold through half the whisked egg whites, and then fold through the remaining eggs whites. The cod is very salty. Do not add more salt. Seriously.

Heat vegetable oil to medium hot (it should sizzle gently when a piece of bread is added). Add heaped dessert spoons of the mixture to the oil, carefully spacing the fritters out (do not add too many to the pan at once, as the heat will reduce and they won’t cook evenly). Turn gently and cook on the other side. Remove and drain while the rest of the fritters cook. Repeat with remaining mixture.

Serve with steamed cabbage and fennel or salad, and garlic aioli or crème fraiche.

Put your muffin where your mouth is

2010-04-02T02:59:00.000-07:00

I tend to dislike muffins. Too cakey. Too big. Too brick-like in the stomach. Stodgy. Too sweet. A generally unsatisfying snack.

I find it odd that people apparently like to eat them for breakfast.

But behind the pre-mix and bulk package monstrosities (I refer to both their hideousness and their size) hides the Platonic ideal-type muffin. This muffin has a softness and slight springy-ness about it. A crunch at the edges and a yielding denseness at the centre. It has a loose crumb, and a flavour that is more complex than simply refined sugar. It has a lightness that doesn’t taste like baking powder.

This muffin is lucky to last five minutes out of the oven.

I have discovered the secret of yoghurt.

There are lots of tricks and tips for making muffins. But addition of yoghurt (or buttermilk or sour cream) is genius. It acts as a leavening agent, particularly effective when combined with baking powder (or good, fresh self raising flour). The mixture tends to foam ever so slightly, like a yeast starter for bread, if you let it sit for twenty minutes or so before you put it in the oven. (A good thing to know, given that I forgot to preheat the oven, and had to wait anyway ...).

The result? Perfectly fluffy, slightly sticky-with-fruit, steaming soft muffins.

Impossible to resist, even for a harden muffin sceptic like me. Hot, and topped with a dollop of whipped ricotta or a generous smear of faintly sour butter.

For afternoon tea, not breakfast.

Yoghurt muffins (featuring chocolate chips and banana)

Makes 2 dozen.

4 mashed bananas (or about 3 ½ cups of chopped, mashed or grated fruit. Apple? Peaches? Plums? Mango? Berries? Probably not melon or citrus.)
2 cups natural yoghurt (no added sugar) – goat or sheep yoghurt gives a beautiful flavour (or use cows’ milk yoghurt)
1 ¼ cups oil (I use extra virgin olive oil)
2 eggs
3 ½ cups self raising flour
1 cup raw sugar
½ cup dark chocolate chips (optional)
½ cup chopped pecans or walnuts (optional – try difference nuts with different fruits. I love almonds with peaches)
½ tsp nutmeg
½ tsp cinnamon

Preheat oven to 180ºc. Grease muffin tins (I use silicon muffin trays, which don’t need greasing).

Mash bananas with yoghurt, oil and eggs (you could even put it all in a blender).

Roughly stir in the rest of the ingredients – do not over mix or beat. Just use a folding action to make sure there are no lumps of flour.

Spoon into muffin trays – fill to just below the top of the trays. Cook for about 25 minutes or until brown on top and firm when poked. Allow to cool for about 5-10 minutes, then turn out on a cake rack.

Eat at least 1 immediately, warm with whipped ricotta, honey and nutmeg. Or butter. Or a spoonful of sweetened yoghurt.

Being humbled by pie

2010-03-27T19:52:00.000-07:00

Pie is easy.* You can buy it frozen and pop it in the oven. That pie is humble: it doesn’t ask for much, doesn’t expect much, doesn’t particularly offer much either, just sits quietly in the freezer, then the oven, then disappears quickly without much comment.**

Eating fancy meals can be demanding: there is an extra attentiveness we tend to approach a glamorous dish with, as opposed to the unwinding we allow ourselves when we sit down for a traditional home cooked meal. Something intimidating, something attention-grabbing about a restaurant meal. It is special food for a reason. We hesitate, we pause, we pay that momentary respect, that intake of breath, that thoughtfulness.

The direction of the breath we take is pivotal, I think, in defining the difference. Restaurant food: intake. Wonder. Home cooking: exhale. Relaxation.

A few weeks ago I attempted a recipe from Thomas Keller’s cookbook The French Laundry. It was pretty complicated, involving making duck stock and then a reduced duck sauce. Creamed corn, which involved pureeing fresh corn kernels, then straining them, then cooking them, then adding whole blanched corn kernels. Oh, and blanched silverbeet wrapped skinned duck breast, cooked sous vide (ie, wrapped in plastic then poached).

The meal took a whole day, and was an exercise in peeling, precision dicing, watching, skimming, straining ... The end result was delicious, but damn, it would want to be for the effort it took to produce one dish.

Taking this recipe as a starting point, I thought about pie. What if you took the basic components - duck, mushroom, corn - and made pie? Mixed everything up together? Mushrooms fried with roughly chopped leeks and thyme. Poached the chicken (that way, if it doesn’t work, I’ve only lost my investment in chicken, and not a duck). The diced brunoise is transformed into diced vegetables. The creamed corn and reduced poaching liquid from the chicken becomes the binding gravy. From fancy restaurant food to rustic, home-style comfort food.

Easier to eat.

Not easier to make.

It took me nearly as long to make the pie as it did to make the Keller recipe. Poaching the chicken the night before. Reducing the stock. Chopping the vegetables. Cooking the sauce. Frying the mushrooms. Pulling the chicken off the carcass. Baking the pie. (Thank goodness for store-bought pastry!).

But there was a gentleness about the process – a shift in the expectation. This pie didn’t need to be perfect. It didn’t need to wow anyone. It didn’t have to look like a jewel, be perfectly sized or shaped. It didn’t really rely on split second timing. When we sat down to eat, we breathed out.

* ‘Easy as pie’ doesn’t describe the ease of creation, but rather the pleasure of eating, the idea being that good things are also easy to like – easy on the eye, for example. ‘Easy as pie’ comes to us from American English (check out Mark Twain and all the pie references).

** Humble pie is little bit older – from the old English ‘numble’ or ‘umble’ pie – pie made from deer offal. Perhaps also eaten by the lowly of station. By a phonetic slight of hand: ‘umble pie (think of Michael Cain saying it). Humble pie. Numble pie eaten by the humble.

Chicken, corn and mushroom pie, a play in four acts

Act 1: The poaching of the chicken (the day before)

2 1 kg chickens (whole or with thighs removed – depend what fits into the pot)
1 carrot, cut in half
1 brown onion, peeled and cut in half
6 sprigs of parley
10 sprigs of fresh thyme
2 bay leaves

Place all ingredients in a large saucepan. Cover with cold water. Bring to boil, simmer for about 20 minutes. Cover with a lid and turn off the heat. Allow to cool, then refrigerate overnight (I put the whole saucepan in the fridge.

The next day, scrape the fat from the top of the stock. Remove the chicken, discard the skin and pull the meat off the bones. Shred the meat and set aside.

Strain the poaching liquid and reserve.

Act 2: A kernel of corn

Poaching liquid from the chicken
Kernels from 3 cobs corn
2 carrots – cut in ½ cm dice
200 g celeriac – cut in ½ cm dice
1 leek, white part cut into 1 cm dice
¼ cup polenta

Bring the chicken poaching liquid the boil in a medium sized saucepan and reduce to about 4 cups.

Puree the 2/3 of the corn kernels with a cup of poaching liquid. Strain and discard the solids. Return the puree to the stock, add the polenta and slowly cook until it starts to foam. Add the remaining corn kernels and diced vegetables and continue to cook until the sauce thickens and the vegetables are just cooked.

Set aside.

Act 3: Mushrooms

½ kg mushrooms (I used field mushrooms, but any combination will be fine), thickly sliced
2 leeks, chopped into 1 cm dice
2 tbsp chopped thyme
1 tbsp chopped oregano
1 bay leaf
2 tbsp olive oil

Throw everything into a non stick fry pan and cook until the mushroom are soft, shaking the pan occasionally to prevent sticking. The mushrooms will release liquid, which will evaporate.

Act 4: the assembly of the pie

Shredded chicken
Thickened corn gravy with vegetables
Fried mushrooms
Pastry (enough to line and lid your pie dish)

Heat the oven to 180ºc

Mix the shredded chicken, mushrooms and corn mixture together. Taste and season (note – nothing has had any salt or pepper added yet).

Line the pie dish with pastry, fill with the pie filling, cover with a pastry lid. Brush with egg wash or milk.

Place into the oven, and cook for about half an hour (if the top starts to brown, cover with foil whilst the pastry base continues to cook).

Moules mariniere (mussels in white wine)

2010-03-25T02:02:00.000-07:00

I speak terrible French. More accurately, je ne pas parle Francais. I cannot pronounce even the most important of the words I do know (vin).

As if a long haul flight via Singapore via Heathrow to Dublin is not punishment enough, I arrived in France after an over-night sea voyage from the south-east coast of Ireland. Travelled from Roscoff by bus as the train was not running.

Through vineyards and fields growing artichokes and cauliflowers. Past old men on bicycles, one with a loaf of bread in the basket. I suspected these were plants by the French tourism authority.

To arrive at the top of a soaring nineteenth century viaduct. Then, according to Google maps, my hotel, charming and balconied, was only a short walk away. What became apparent was that this short walk was a devious and twisty path, and mostly a direct decent down about four thousand steps. Having missed breakfast, I was ready for lunch.

My first meal in France was a baguette with a selection of charcuterie and chevre purchased from a market, and a glass of vin rouge, ravenously consumed after the epic journey to the bottom of the valley. A picnic in bed. This was the view.

I surrendered to the cliché.

I stayed four days in Morlaix, on the coast of Brittany, pretending I could in fact read the menus. Eating everything but mussels: coquilles Saint Jacques (a delicious pot of scallops in white sauce with mushrooms and cheese), saumons fumes (smoked salmon), fruits de mer (a giant plate of mixed crustaceans and fish), huître (oysters, fresh with nothing but lemon) – all divine, but the French word for mussels eluded me.

And then: moules mariniere. A deep bowl of small mussels, steamed in garlic and onion and white wine and butter, served with pomme frittes. A bottle of rose, crisp, dry.

Nearby, middle-aged Frenchmen with easels resting on cobble stones made pastel drawings of the sail boats bobbing on the river. Overhead rose the spires of the gothic Eglise Sainte-Melaine and the arches of the nineteenth century viaduct. C’est la vie.

Moules mariniere

Serves two people as a main meal, or four for a light lunch or entre

1 ½ kg mussels
75 g butter
White part of two leeks, fined diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 bay leaf
6-10 stalks of thyme
½ tsp cracked pepper
120 ml dry white wine
½ cup chopped parsely

2 tbsp white wine vinegar

Clean the mussels (scrub them and with a sharp knife, remove any barnacles – most fishmongers will have already done this. Pull the fibrous thread off each one. Don’t use any that are broken). Set aside.

Melt half the butter in a very large pan. Add the leeks, garlic and herbs. Cook until soft. Add the wine and bring to the boil (this will be almost instantaneous) Cook off the alcohol (about a minute).

Add the mussels and cover with a lid (if you don’t have a lid, cover with foil or grease proof paper to trap in the steam). After a minute or two, you will notice the mussels are starting to open. As each mussel opens, remove with a slotted spoon to a warm bowl until all are open. This won’t take long – maybe five minutes. Some mussels just won’t open – discard them, just in case (I like to give then a good chance to open, leaving then in the heat a bit after the majority are open).

The mussels will have release a lot of liquid. Pick out the thyme stalks and bay leaf (some recipe suggest you strain the sauce, but I like the taste and texture of the leeks). Add the rest of the wine and the vinegar and bring to the boil. Cook for about a minute, then rapidly whisk in the remaining butter. Taste, and season if necessary (I don’t add salt to mussel because they are so salty naturally). Stir in the parsley.

To serve, fill a large bowl with opened mussels. Pour over sauce. Serve with pomme frittes (French fries) or crusty sourdough bread to soak up all the sauce.

A is for Apple, B is Boring, C is for Crumble

2010-03-21T03:23:00.000-07:00

Apples are credited with keeping doctors away, impressing educators and proving the effects of gravity. Although mythological credited with the fall of man – or more precisely, the fall of woman, nothing is more mundane than the apple.

A sensible, serious fruit.

Perhaps contributing to the boringness of apples is the fact that they almost never feature as the stars of haute cuisine. Apples-as-dessert tend to be home-cooking’s domain: apple snow, apple pie (oh, tarte tatin), apple crumble, stewed apples, apple butter, apple tea-cake. Cooked apples are for eating in the kitchen by the fire with a cup of tea.

It is difficult to imagine the apple being an object of excitement or desire – presented alongside option such as figs or mangoes or strawberries, the ever-available, the cold-storage apple is likely to be eaten without thought. So someone (we’ll call her Eve) jumping up and down, squealing “COX’S ORANGE PIPPINS” over and over again would probably be a bit weird. And embarrassing for the people around me. I mean Eve.

Despite their year-round availability, apples are seasonal. Most varieties arrive at their peak during the autumn months – and some of the rarer varietals have very short season indeed. Hence the excitement about the Cox’s Orange Pippin – the most common ‘red’ apple in the UK, it is almost impossible to find in Australia (not at all suited to our growing conditions). When fresh, it is crisp and sweet and tangy and quintessentially the perfect eating apple. It does not store well, and is therefore to be jealously and joyously consumed for the few short weeks of its season.

Of course, we live in a world where everything is available all the time, and everything is grown for green-picking, bruise-free transportation, long-storage and slow ripening. Our fruit is harder and sweeter than nature intended. Stored apples tend to lose their crispness and tart edge-of-sourness. Yawn.

‘So’, whispers the snake (in a place where the supermarket is mysteriously also the garden of Eden) – ‘the autumnal apple is the tastiest, the crispest, simultaneously the sweetest and tartest apple you will find. The fruit at the other times of the year will not satisfy the same way this new-season apple will. The supermarket tricks you with the ever-present cold-storage apple. Eat the apple as God intended’. Possibly heresy, but the apple deserves to be made sexier, more mysterious, more desirable.

There is something honest, something wholesome, about home-made apple crumble. It’s rustic. It’s old-fashioned. It’s stupidly simple to make and won’t win awards for beauty. Apple crumble is about home and homeliness.

Don’t make a small amount – there’s no point. Fill a deep, deep pie dish and top with spiced crumble. Fill the whole street with the smell of cooking apples and brown sugar. Entice your neighbours in for a cup of tea and a bite of the apple.

Apple Crumble

Home-cooking classic, with a hint of exotic spiciness. Serves 6-8.

Filling
1.5 kg apples (use a hard and very tart green skinned cooking apple)
1 lemon – juice and rind
¼ cup castor sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp ground cardamom
½ tsp nutmeg

Crumble
100 gm unsalted butter
¼ cup mixed peel
1 cup flour
2/3 cup rolled oats
1/3 cup chopped blanched almonds
1/3 chopped pecans
1/3 cup almond meal
2/3 cup brown sugar
1 tsp ground cardamom
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp mixed spice
½ tsp nutmeg

Grease a large baking dish with a little butter.

For the filling: peel and quarter the apples, then slice thinly (about ½ cm). Toss with the sugar, spices, lemon rind and juice. Tip into baking dish.

For the crumble: with a bar mix or food processor, blend the butter with the mixed peel.
In a large bowl, mix the butter mixture with the dry ingredients (I use my hands) – be careful not to over-mix, the idea is to have a very crumbly mixture – hence the name apple crumble.

Sprinkle the crumble mixture over the apple filling.

Bake in a moderate oven for about 40 minutes, until the topping is crisp and the apples cooked through (some will retain it’s shape and the outer edges will go mushy, that’s part of its charm).

Serve with a cup of tea. And custard or ice-cream.

Crumbed milk-fed pink veal, white wine sauce and the ethical debate

2010-03-19T02:54:00.000-07:00

Let me state upfront: veal comes from baby cows.

Lamb comes from baby sheep.* Most pork comes from baby pigs. Most chicken for sale is nine weeks old.

Those of us who choose to eat meat (and those who eat it without any thought at all) clearly choose to eat it young. The taste of veal is not at all like its older incarnation of beef, but lighter and more subtle. Veal is a unique flavour, sweet and slightly sour from being milk-fed. Soft, with hardly any fat. In short: delicious, but it comes with a seriously bad public image.

Horror stories abound. Calves deprived of sunlight, denied iron in their diets, kept in fully enclosed ‘veal crates’, unable to even turn around or even stand up**. All this to render ‘beautiful’ white muscle.

If there is an ethical dilemma beyond ‘should we eat meat’, it is not in the youthfulness of the calf, but in its treatment.

I firmly believe that if we make the extraordinary decision to take life, we must not be indifferent to that decision. To take away life is one thing. To cause unnecessary suffering as we do so, a step too far. It leaves far too nasty a taste in one’s mouth.

Veal crates are now unlawful in the United Kingdom, the European Union and several States in the USA.

In Australia we do not eat veal deprived of iron and sunlight, reared in tiny unlit boxes and partially starved. White veal is not available in Australia. Veal produced in Australia is pink, reared on whole milk and a small amount of grain. Pink veal (or rosé veal, as it is known is the UK) is sweet and soft and has a delicate flavour. Cooked well, not medium (unlike the beef it will become, it tends to be a little tough if under cooked), crumbed or in sauce, to protect it from the heat, it marries beautifully with acidity – a squeeze of lemon, tarragon vinegar, white wine sauce.***

* depending on your definition, usually less than a year old.
** http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/food_matters/veal.shtml

*** Try with a sauce made of white wine and capers-in-vinegar

Crumbed veal with white wine sauce

2 veal escalopes
¼ cup milk
Plain flour
1 egg
2 cups stale breadcrumbs, seasoned with a little salt and pepper
4 tbsp butter, and 1 extra tbsp
12 sage leaves
6-12 thyme sprigs
250 mls dry white wine (I used sauvignon blanc)
1 tsp corn flour
1 heaped tsp grain or Dijon mustard

Flatten the veal with a mallet (or ask your butcher to do this). Dip into milk, then dust with flour. Whisk the egg into the remaining milk, dip the escalopes into the egg mixture and then press firmly into the breadcrumbs to coat both sides.

In a large fry pan, melt two tablespoons of butter with the herbs. When the butter starts to foam, add the escalopes. If the sage leaves start to get crispy, remove and set aside.

When the escalopes are golden on one side, add two more tablespoon of butter and turn the veal over. When the veal is crispy and golden on that side, it is cooked. Remove and set aside.

Turn the heat to high, add the wine and mustard. Mix the corn flour with a little water to form a paste, and add to the pan. Cook until the alcohol is burnt off, and the flour is cooked (one to two minutes) – the sauce should have just started to thicken. Strain (it will probably have little bread crumbs and bits of thyme stalk in it!). Wipe the pan and return strained sauce, whisk in the remaining butter, strain again.

Spoon some sauce onto a plate, and serve the veal on top of steamed vegetables. Scatter over some crispy sage leaves. Eat with a contemplative conscience.

Myths about pasta

2010-03-15T03:42:00.000-07:00

Myth 1: Marco Polo invented pasta / bought it back from China. Not true, according to Oretta Zanini De Vita, who cites records indicating that Italian pasta was adapted from wheat and semolina dumplings introduced to Italy by the Arabs in the ninth century*. Way before Signore Polo.

Myth 2: Fresh is always better than dried pasta. It depends. I have a beautiful recipe for drunken pasta, which is dried spaghettini, cooked by reduction method in a bottle of red wine flavoured with garlic and thyme. As the dried pasta cooks, it absorbs the red wine, turning purple and acquiring a rich tannin flavour. Fresh pasta would fall apart. Dried orrechette with crumbled pork and fennel sausages and fresh peas and grated parmesan. Homemade fresh gnocchi? Brilliant. Fresh paparadelle with olive oil and goats curd? Lovely. Fresh lasagne sheets any day (although that is pure personal preference). It depends.

Myth 3: pasta makes you fat. Nonsense.*

Myths 4, 5 and 6: Carbonara sauce has cream in it, marinara sauce has seafood in it, and pasta spaghetti alla puttenesca means ‘spaghetti in the manner of whores’. False, false and ok, kind of true.

Spaghetti carbonara, as eaten in Italy, is parmesan, pepper, egg yolks and guanciale (cured pig’s cheek). Was is named for the appearance of charcoal that pepper gives? From a black colour given by squid ink or soot? Because coal miners made it? In honour of the Carbonari, a Dan Brown-esque secret society? Who can say? Cream is a delicious American-Italian addition.

Apparently, marinara is Italian for mariner – and marinara describes your basic-est of basic sugo – tomatoes, garlic, onion. Italian seafarers bought tomatoes back from the new world, and the resulting sauce is hence named ‘sailor’s sauce’. And puttenesca was probably known to a few saucy sailors - its name is indeed derived from a derogatory Italian word for sex worker, puttana, which can also be used to describe un-valued or left-over things – like the tomatoes, black olives, anchovies and capers that make up the sauce. Plus quick for a working girl to throw together. I add chilli, for a bit of extra spice. Think of it as cheap and easy.

* Encyclopedia of Pasta, 2009, University of California Press

** Eating more energy than you expend makes you “fat”. And I put this in inverted commas because I think we make too much of “does this make me fat” and not enough of “am I healthy, happy, fulfilled, loved and excited by life”. A standard serve (about 150g) of dried plain pasta has about 225 calories. Which, with vegetables and fruit and protein and conscientious home-cooking and informed choices about food and fun and walking the dog, is part of a healthy life. Pasta does not make you fat.

Spaghetti al nero de seppia del Mare

AKA spaghetti pescatore AKA squid ink pasta with seafood sauce NOT AKA spaghetti marinara

For 2

300g good quality squid ink pasta (ie, spaghetti al nero de seppia)
Basic sauce from the chilli mussels recipe (ie, onion, fennel, tomatoes, capsicum, fennel seed chillies, white wine).
500 g mussels
200 g firm fleshed white fish fillets, cut into bite sized chunks
1 calamari hood, cleaned and cut into rings
Olive oil
Sea salt

Basil

Cook the pasta sauce (onions, garlic and fennel first until soft, then tomatoes, chillies, fennel seeds until softening, then wine). Set aside until ready to eat.

In a large pot, boil lots of water (I use a 5 litre pot), add a generous about of salt (about 1 tbsp) and bring to the boil. Add the pasta, bring back to the boil, stir and cook for about 10 minutes (most pasta packages indicate cooking times – just keep an eye on it, and take out a strand to check – I check by taking a bite). When cooked, strain and return to the pot and douse with olive oil – this stops it from sticking together, and buys you time to concentrate on the seafood.

Bring the sauce to a simmer. Add the mussels and cover. As the first ones start to peek open, throw in the fish. As the fish start to turn white at the edges, thrown in the calamari rings, cover and turn off the heat. (You could add scallops, prawns, clams or any seafood you like really – just note the difference cooking times and be careful to add in relative order, so that everything is nicely cooked, but not over cooked).

Place a spiral of black pasta into a shallow bowl, and top with spoonfuls of sauce and seafood. Scatter with torn basil leaves and fresh cracked pepper.

A good egg

2010-03-09T23:11:00.000-08:00

I think there is pretty much nothing that can’t be improved by a poached egg. Mushroom risotto? Spaghetti carbonara? Creamy polenta? A bowl of steamed vegetables? Top with a soft poached egg, and break the yolk, letting the golden centre ooze through everything. Perfection.

Eggs for brunch is one of my all time favourite things – with pan fried prosciutto and served with rocquette and avocado or with sautéed chorizo and roma tomatoes or on potato rosti with smoked salmon.

Plus, more and more eggs are considered amazingly good for you.* Studies from the ‘80s suggested strong links between problematic high cholesterol and egg consumption (as cholesterol does occur naturally in eggs, each egg has about 200mg). However, the link between egg consumption and ‘bad’ cholesterol which causes, amongst other things, heart disease, may not be as strong as once thought**. I have a general theory (completely unfounded in any experience, training or professional qualification in medical science) that most whole foods are pretty much ok if eaten in moderation. Ie, a couple of eggs now and again won’t hurt***

Basically, I think we can just eat the damn eggs and enjoy them without feeling guilty.

Except, eat ethical eggs. If for no other reason than they just taste better, eat free range eggs. Organic if you can be bothered/can afford them. Cage eggs come from caged chickens. Caged chickens are essentially egg making factories that never see sunlight and look like old mangy dogs. Chickens should not be treated like this. No animal should be treated like this. Caged chickens are most emphatically not happy chickens, and as a result do not produce happy tasting eggs. Do not eat them. Eat delicious, golden-yolked eggs. Beg them off friends who raise chickens in their backyard. Pick them up at markets in the country. Visit a free range farm and collect them yourself, warm and nestled in straw under a brown hen.

On the weekend, during the rain, I made fava bean puree, filling the house the aroma of the warm oniony broth.

Later that night we snacked on the bean paste as a dip, with crunchy heirloom cucumber and radishes I had picked up at the farmers’ market.

But earlier in the day, as soon as the paste was smooth, I smeared it across thick wood-fired sourdough and topped it with poached eggs.

* “Eggs ‘should be considered a superfood’, say scientists” 9 March 2010 (Although note that this particular study was funded by the British Egg Council. Also note that there is a British Egg Council, which is very, very cool)
** “Bad cholesterol: it’s not what you think” 14 February 2010
*** For goodness sake, consult your own health care professional if you have any concerns.

Perfect Poached Eggs

2 very fresh free range eggs. The fresher the eggs, the better the egg white holds together, making a firmer poached egg (the opposite is true for boiled eggs – eggs that are a little older have a little bubble of air between the white and the shell, making them easier to peel)

1 small saucepan, filled with about 3 inches of water (enough to cover the eggs)

1 teaspoon white vinegar. Vinegar helps the egg white to congeal - I sometimes like to use white wine vinegar or apple cider vinegar for taste.

Heat the water and vinegar until simmering (not boiling water – just simmering).

Crack the eggs into a saucer or ramekin, taking care not to break the yolks.

Using a slotted spoon, create a gentle whirlpool in the simmering water (this creates a centrifugal force, which I think helps keep the eggs round shape a little better).

Slide the two eggs from the saucer into the water. If the water starts to boil or froth, turn down the heat.

Nudge the water gently to continue the whirlpool effect.

Cook for 2-2 ½ minutes for runny yolks.

Remove with a slotted spoon.