Tacos. Grown up finger painting for the mouth

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.

Clear tomato soup

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.

Summer love: kissing tomatoes goodbye

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.

Myths about pasta

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.

Green Tomato Sauce

Once again I have a have a pile of unripe green tomatoes. All different varieties, in various states of perfection.

Green tomato sauce.

The concept is simple, the same basic method and recipe as for an ordinary home-made tomato sauce (or any chutney really): fruit, vinegar, sugar, spices. Cook.

What I wanted, desperately, was an iridescent green sauce, vibrant and neon. A sauce that does justice to the fresh tartness of the tomatoes. That invokes green fruit on green vines. A green colour that is dripping with the adjective ‘piquant’.

The sauce tastes beautiful – spicy and tangy with a strong sweet flavour just off-set by the bitterness of the unripe capsicums and tomato. But to my surprise, as the sauce cooked down, it gradually changed colour from the bright and dark greens of the fresh fruit to a murky military greenish khaki.

Why?

I have a couple of theories.

1 – The toffee theory

This sauce basically relies on cooking fruit for a long time with added sugar – ie, a kind of chunky sophisticated caramel. In other caramel culinary adventures I have observed that when heated sugar tends to darken in colour, achieving a certain toffee-like colour.

I felt this theory had some persuasive elements, but not enough to explain the whole phenomenon... Back to the lab.

2 – The chlorophyll theory.

Basically, plants, particularly the leafy part of plants, produce chlorophyll.* Chlorophyll is what makes the green part of plants green. And it is present in green (ie, unripe) fruits – like tomatoes and capsicums, as well as in green leafy vegetables and herbs such as spinach and parsley.

When you cook leafy greens (peas or beans, for example) too long they go grey. This is because something in the heating process starts to leech the chlorophyll out of the plant (actually what happens is that the heating somehow removes magnesium from the cells and replaces it with hydrogen, and the chlorophyll changes into something called pheophytin, molecularly speaking). Interestingly, this process also occurs during exposure to acid – ie vinegar.

So – observe: simmering green tomatoes and capsicum in vinegar for 2 hours. A change in colour.

Could the combination of vinegar and heat be responsible? I think yes.

I understand that practitioners of the dark arts of molecular gastronomy and food technology play with chlorophyll, using extracted essence of green to both flavour and colour foods. Theoretically I could use a kind of chlorophyll extract to ‘restore’ the green colour to my sauce.

But I think I’ll leave it the way it is. I think a sleight of hand to give a semblance of the colour these tomatoes once were wouldn’t do justice to them. My sauce is an icky brown colour because that is what happens when you turn home-grown mismatched tomatoes into spicy sticky sauce.

* Amazingly, chlorophyll enables plants to convert sunlight into food – that is the plant is able to turn the energy present in waves of light into useful energy for growth. The extra cool part? Light is technically like a rainbow – all different colours. Plants only ‘eat’ a certain part of the rainbow – the green part (or it could be the blue and yellow parts ... it’s all a bit tricky ...).

Green Tomato Sauce

Ingredients:
1.5 kg green tomatoes, chopped (for ordinary tomato sauce, use ripe red tomatoes)
200 g chillies, chopped
3 brown onions, finely chopped
3 green capsicum, finely chopped (use red ones if making red sauce!)
6 cloves garlic, chopped
2 cups sugar
2 cups white vinegar
½ tsp fennel seeds
½ tsp mustard seeds
½ caraway seeds
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon cloves, whole
Sea salt to taste

In a large pot, bring chopped tomatoes to the boil, simmer until starting to soften and collapse, about 10 minutes. Add the chopped chilli, capsicum and onion and simmer until soft.

Add ¾ of the sugar and all the vinegar and bring to a simmer for another 10 minutes. Taste – if too sharp or too powerfully vinegary, add remaining sugar.

Then add the spices and simmer gently for a couple of hours until it thickens.

Cool, puree with a bar mix and strain through a sieve.

Bottle and refrigerate (keeps about 1 month).

Eat with cheese, cured meats, barbequed sausages, hamburgers or poached eggs.

An abundance of tomatoes: pasta sauce

My mum has the most beautiful little vegetable garden. She just lives in a small suburban house, her backyard would be smaller than a tennis court. In amongst the camellias and gardenias she grows, depending on the seasons, cucumbers and tomatoes and kale and potatoes, garlic, leeks, cabbage, lettuce, chillies, basil, chard, celery, roquette, or carrots. She’s talking about planting kohlrabi and maybe even cardoons. She has a lemon tree and a lime tree, a bay laurel and olive trees in pots.

When mum moved into her house, just over a year ago, the yard was a lunar landscape. Uneven mounds of dirt, patches of grass. That was about it. The transformation in the last year has been magical.

One of her first crops out of the garden was little button squash. Picked when about the size of large strawberries, and served steamed with torn basil leaves, also from her garden, and a sprinkle of sea salt and olive oil, these were sweet and nothing at all like the bitter, soggy taste I used to associated with button squash. I couldn’t eat enough of her squash that first season.

She grows things just for the love of growing them, and as a result always has far too much all at once. This means that at least once a week I am given boxes of vegetables picked within the last hour. When her tomatoes started to grow fruit, and the spindly branches were heavy and unripe, she picked a selection of green tomatoes for me to play with (who could risk trying to make fried green tomatoes?). Now the tomatoes are ripening, and I have box after box of yellow grape tomatoes and green tiger stripes and black Russians and giant ox-heart looking ones she insists were called ‘mortgage busters’ on the seed packet.

I live in a shoe box city apartment. I don’t yet even have herbs in boxes on my coffee table sized balcony. A whole box of bright yellow and red and green smelling of summer, grown with love by someone who loves me? Pretty damn special, every time.

The latest harvest to arrive at my door was a box full of these tomatoes, chillies, tiny capsicum and basil. When we came home late, dinner was a matter of throwing the remanents of two different pastas into some boiling water, and then cooking down the tomatoes and capsicum and chillies with some chopped bacon (the only other thing in the fridge) and garlic. No water, no wine, no onions, just a little salt and pepper to help it along.

The bacon is cured a block away, by my wonderful old-school butcher. Everything else was fresh that day from the garden. It was not pretty or well-plated or delicate. It was sweet and spicy and fresh and thoroughly satisfying.

Pasta all'amatriciana

For 2

A dash of olive oil
6 short rashers of bacon, roughly chopped (or pancetta, about 10-12 thin slices)
3 clove minced garlic
½ kg super ripe tomatoes, any variety, roughly chopped
3 chillies, minced
1 small red capsicum, finely chopped
Handful chopped fresh basil
400 g dried pasta, any variety

Fry off the bacon in the olive for a few minutes, add garlic, stir and then add the tomato, capsicum and chillies. Cook for as long as it takes the pasta to cook to al dente.

Drain the pasta, and add to the sauce along with the chopped basil. Season to taste.

Serve with shaved parmesan. Scoff.

Panzanella, past and present

I am not very good at following recipes

I like ideas. I tend to treat recipes as a general guideline. Often I buy cookbooks just to look at the pictures. It’s an approach that has some draw backs when it comes to anything involving gelatine.

I struggle with the concept of ‘authentic’ food. That is, with the argument that unless a recipe is executed in a certain way it isn’t ‘really’ that food at all. I get very confused very quickly when I start down this line of thought.

It’s not that I dispute that certain foods have traditional execution, nor that certain foods have specific historical origins.

It’s more that I am uncomfortable with any tendency to essentialise culture. When we try to fix a food, really pin it down, deny change or innovation or variation, we are starting too, to essentialise the culture the food is connected to. In making the food absolute, we also start to separate the food from its immediate current cultural context (which changes), and fix it at a point in time, somewhere in that culture’s past. We are making all kinds of assumptions about what is real about a culture, about then being more real (and maybe even better) than now.

We may eat the same food our grandparents ate, but we eat it for a different reason, in a different time, sometimes in a different place.

Take this too far, however, and we run the risk of losing what is special and meaningful about food and its place in our cultures. We risk making what we eat empty of any symbolism at all – a thing completely independent of any context, other than flavour.

I think of recipes as being an expression of concept: the way of living in a certain culture, a certain time and place. To me, what is important about a recipe is the motivation, the story behind the ingredients and method, not the ingredients and the method themselves.

Some of my favourite ‘recipes’ originated as a direct response to the immediate local environment. Most are grounded in seasonality, availability and practicality. Abundant, fresh and diverse seafood? Make bouillabaisse. It doesn’t matter to me that I don’t have scorpion fish (the local fish of the port of Marseille, where the recipe originated). It will still be bouillabaisse for me. You prefer hard boiled eggs to poached eggs and don’t like anchovies? I think we can still make Caesar salad.

Yesterday’s bread and a basket full of ripe tomatoes? It can only be Panzanella, regardless of whether I have basil (I don’t), whether I toast and/or soak the bread or whether we’re in Tuscany (although this last one would certainly improve matters).

The recipe represents the past and the timeless. The act of cooking expresses the practical reality of what it is in the fridge right now. Somewhere in between the two we are creating, maintaining and continuing the cultures within which we eat.

In the following and the not following of a recipe we have an opportunity to remember the past and another place, and at the same time tell a story about how we, here and now, actively bring that past with us into the present.

Panzanella, as made for lunch today*

Serves 2

1/3 loaf left over bread. In this case, a green olive white flour loaf.
250 g cherry tomatoes
½ red onion, sliced into very thin wedges
½ bulb fennel, very thinly sliced
1 cucumber, peeled, de-seeded and thinly sliced
1 clove garlic, crushed
Juice ½ lemon
3 tbsp finely chopped parsley
Good slurp oil oil
About 1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
Sea salt

Tear the bread into largish chunks (about 1 ½ inch cubes). In a large fry pan, toast bread with a little olive oil until a bit crunchy on the outside but still soft-ish on the inside. Set aside.

Cut the cherry tomatoes in half, and squeeze the juice and the seeds of each half into a bowl. Throw the squished tomatoes into the (now empty) frypan and turn off the heat (I find the residual heat is enough to bring out the sugars of the tomatoes a bit more).

Add balsamic vinegar, olive oil, lemon juice, parsley, garlic, onions, cucumber and fennel to the tomato juices and season with sea salt, allow to marinate for about 5 minutes. Toss the tomatoes and bread through and serve.

* Recipe may change next time I make it.

Convenience food

I’m not a complete food snob. Or, more to the point, I’m less of a food snob than I was.

But I don’t really like ‘fast food’ from ‘restaurants’ that have iconic signage in bright colours.
You won’t find pre-made foil sealed cartons of stock in my pantry. No store bought ‘simmer sauces’ and salad dressings. No pre-packaged pizza bases or cake mix. No microwave pre-cooked rice and dehydrated macaroni cheese. But there’s tinned chickpeas and tomatoes. Cans of Italian tuna and sardines and a bottle of anchovies. We have jars of mayonnaise and mustard in the fridge. Sweet chilli sauce and tomato sauce. Capers. Olives. Plenty of fast food. Plenty of convenience. Plenty of processed food. Not everything is ‘from scratch’.

Not everything I cook is fancy. Not everything that looks fancy is that difficult.

Some nights dinner is just eggs on toast.

Sometimes I just need things to be easy.

Chicken. Easy. Quick.

This takes less than a minute to pull together – yes, then you have to wait half an hour for it to cook.

Chicken – marylands, drumsticks, thigh chops – as many as you want to eat.
1 tub / jar of olives (I used un-pitted green Sicilian olives – any good quality olives, black or green would be fine)
1 punnet cherry tomatoes (about 300g)
1 tbsp capers (I prefer in brine, but rinse capers-in-salt work too)
Lemon rind
Garlic cloves, skin on
Olive oil – about 2 tbsp

Throw everything in a baking dish and cook in a moderate oven until the chicken is cooked, about half an hour.

Serve with bread.

Or go all out and serve with roast potatoes and salad.

Five dollars a kilogram

Simple. Cheap. Easy. The fishmonger at my local market sells live black mussels at $5 per kilo. Even taking into account the fact that 1 kg of live mussels yields just over ½ kg mussel meat, that’s a pretty generous seafood meal for two people at a next to nothing cost.* And by lucky coincidence, locally farmed. And healthy. Brilliant.

Mussels have been a formative food experience for me. I love tinned smoked mussels (it’s my deep dark secret) – with a little lemon squeezed over, and fresh cracked pepper, I believe smoked mussels on water-crackers validly constitute a meal. The first time I ever tried a fresh mussel was in New Zealand, and I chose one so enormous that I nearly choked on it. I repeated this experience recently in an Italian restaurant, eventually tactfully spitting out the giant bivalvia mollusca into my napkin. That night I consumed a bowl of mussels that was bigger than my head.

Just after I finished high school I spent several weeks being a vaguely ineffectual volunteer at an children’s home in Fiji. During this Christmas period the orphanage received gifts to assist with care of the children – of particular note: barrel upon barrel of live fresh water mussels. We ate mussels every way imaginable and then some – raw, steamed, cooked in coconut milk, fried, curried, boiled. Every meal, every day for a week. It was years before I could bear to eat shellfish again.

Between the near-death-by-choking experience and the all-you-can-eat-and-then-some experience I am vaguely surprised how much I still love to eat mussels. And until recently, I was too intimidated to cook these at home, and paid instead for spaghetti pescatore and boullibaisse and moules et frites.

There is something inherently scary about cooking live seafood. Overcooking, undercooking, the possibility of ‘bad’ shellfish, complicated cleaning.

But really – it’s so easy. And so damn cheap!

*I’ve also noticed packets of vacuum sealed fresh mussels in the local supermarket (not nearly so well priced, but still much cheaper than the chicken/beef options otherwise available for protein choices).

Chilli mussels

1kg black mussels
2 small bulbs fennel
2 small brown onions
2 cloves garlic
2 teaspoons fennel seeds, toasted
1 medium chilli (or more to taste) - minced
100ml dry white wine
½ kg very ripe tomatoes
Olive oil

To clean the mussels – most mussels you buy in fishmongers will be pre-cleaned – if not, using a very sharp knife, chip away any barnacles. To ‘beard’ a mussel – grab hold of the little fine ‘hairs’ sticking out and give a short, sharp yank.

Trim, halve and core the fennel bulbs, then finely slice. Finely slice the onions. Mince the garlic.

Roughly chop the tomatoes.*

Heat a generous slurp of olive oil in a very large deep fry pan or big pot (about 3 or 4 tablespoons). Sauté onions, fennel and garlic until translucent. Add fennel seeds and minced chilli/s. Cook for 1 minute.

Add tomatoes and wine, cook off alcohol (bring to a rapid simmer and cook for a few minutes, until the smell and taste of alcohol disappears).

Now – magic: add the mussels to the pan. Cover with lid and simmer for 5-10 minutes, until most of the mussels are opened. (If there are any un-opened mussels after this, I like to cook those ones just a little longer – about 2-3 minutes. Discard any un-opened after this). Spoon the opened mussels in deep plates or bowls with lots of the tomato sauce and a squeeze of lemon.

Serve with fresh crusty bread (for dipping) and really nice white wine. Or red wine. Or beer. Enjoy.

Note that I don’t add salt to this dish, as the mussels have a lovely ocean taste.

* You can use tinned tomatoes, same weight. When using fresh tomatoes, I prefer to peel and de-seed. This is fussy, and really won’t matter if you don’t.