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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Recipes of the Orient: rustic Indonesian chicken soup

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.

Glazed and confused

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.

Being humbled by pie

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).

Chicken cacciatore: food for when it rains

I live here because it doesn’t snow. I love summer, humid weather, cotton dresses and Pimms cup. And as my city was hit by devastating and spectacular hail storms over the past two days I started to dread the long steep decent into autumn and winter, and the all too short thawing of spring. It may not snow here, but for nine months it is pretty damn cold.

Weather is evocative of food: summer is stone fruit and mangoes and seafood and salad and pineapple sorbet. Autumn is always mushrooms. The last of the tomatoes and the start of slow cooking. Dried beans and chard, potatoes and apples and pears. This is the stuff that keeps me going as the weather turns nasty.

We had invited people around for dinner on Sunday night, but with flooded roads and predictions of more wild storms, we started calling around asking our friends not to travel. Ordinarily this might seem an over-reaction, but I had seen for myself how the storms ripped through from the north into Melbourne on Saturday. My train back from a short visit to the country had been stopped an hour out of town, and the replacement coach took nearly four hours to get back. The bus depot was flooded, ankle deep in water. Roads were closed. Piles of ice lay at the sides of the road. Under the circumstances, not everyone came round. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to have been far from home last night.

All I wanted as the rain and wind whipped our windows was old fashioned Italian comfort food, the kind that simmers all day on the stove, making the house smell like onions, then tomatoes, then wine, then herbs, then just warm and savoury as it bubbles away.

In fact between the chilli chocolate soufflé cake* I cooked in the morning (filling the house with the scent of melted chocolate) to the fava bean dip (slowly cooked on the stove in onions and celery and thyme)* and the aroma of chicken cacciatore, I could just about bear the onset of winter.

I realise that cacciatore is a dish that has significantly changed over the centuries, but at its base it is the dish cooked by hunters, out in the forest, bulked out by the ingredients to hand: wild mushrooms, wine, cured meat, rabbit or chicken, wild herbs.

It’s a dish perfect for the start of autumn: rich with pureed fresh tomatoes, just starting to be squishy and overripe (picked up at a country market stall), cultivated mushrooms made more rich with the addition of dried porcini, a generous dash of red wine and smoky rich bacon from the organic pig farm I visited on Saturday morning. Served with slow cooked polenta, rich with sheep’s milk percorino. Cosy, warm and safe.

And plenty of left-overs.

* see http://www.exclusivelyfood.com.au/2006/07/flourless-chocolate-cake-recipe.html for the recipe. I added 1 teaspoon of ground chilli, ½ teaspoon cinnamon and ¼ ground ginger, and left out the vanilla. Tip: make sure you use very finely ground almond meal.

Chicken cacciatore

Generously serves six

12 chicken drumsticks, skin and knuckle removed
¼ cup corn flour
Salt and pepper
2 brown onions, diced
150 gm really good bacon
300 gm carrots, diced
300 celery, diced
4 cloves garlic, minced
4 sprigs thyme
1 sprig rosemary
200 ml red wine
1 kg fresh tomatoes, peeled and pureed
1 kg mushrooms
5 gms dried porcini, soaked in ¼ cup water for about 20 minutes.

Coat the drumsticks in seasoned cornflour. Heat olive oil in very large saucepan, and cook the drumsticks until browned all over. Remove and set aside.

Add more olive oil to the pan, add the chopped onion and bacon and cook for a couple of minutes, until softening. Add the celery, carrot and garlic and cook until soft and starting to caramelise. Add the red wine and boil off the alcohol (the smell of alcohol will disappear). Add the pureed tomatoes and herbs, heat through. Return the chicken to the sauce, reduce heat to a slow simmer, and cook for an hour or so.

Half an hour before serving, add mushrooms and porcini (discard water).

Serve over slow cooked polenta or pasta or rice.

To market, to market

I do this all year round. In summer, when it’s sometimes like a sauna, even at seven in the morning. In winter when it’s still dark when I leave home and I wear a ski jacket and gloves and a hat and boots and a scarf. On days when we’re lucky enough to have rain and I get soaked and have to dry off and change when I’m done.

Before work. On the weekend. Sometimes I sneak out in my lunch break, for a quick fix.

The market* is both familiar and unexpected. Predicable in its seasonal rhythm, the static location of the Meat, Fish and Rabbit Building, the Deli Hall and the open air fruit and vegetable aisles, the familiar faces of the regular stall holders and providores**. Unpredictable in so far as the seasons are a little unpredictable – blink and I’ll miss the five week season of the cox’s orange pippin, my favourite apple in the whole world. Fickle in that stall holders will carry hot-housed out-of-season produce (oh the horror of mid-winter tomatoes). Surprising: the unusual and uncommon – salsify and purple Congo potatoes and fresh pistachios and rabbit and guinea fowl. Pine mushrooms and slippery jacks. Red wine washed manchego. Rabbit and prune ravioli.

When I first moved here, a little over four years ago, the market was first place I saw that little flash of recognition in someone’s eye. In an unfamiliar city full of strangers and new things, in a new house without even a coffee table, I felt at home at the trestle tables stacked with green things and the glass cases full of cheese and olives. The day my kitchen ceiling fell in, after the bathtub exploded (it was a serious leak) I went to the market before I called a plumber.

Shopping at the market makes some things easier. We hear about ‘eat local’ and ‘organic is better’ and ‘think about food miles’. Sure, not everything sold in markets is local or organic or ethically produced. And I’m not a slave to these principles. But if and when I do think about these things, the personal interaction between me and the stall owners makes it easier to make informed choices. I can ask where the tomato / cheese / garlic / lettuce is from and the person behind the cash box can tell me because they know. Chances are they bought it from the person who grew it. Unlike at the supermarket, where the person behind the cash register often can’t even identify the vegetables for the purpose of scanning it for price***.

Occasionally I go with an idea of what I want to make only to be completely flummoxed when whatever it is I want isn’t available (what, no watercress? But it was here last week! No zucchini flowers? Only on Saturdays? Dill? Just sold out...). But mostly I go without a shopping list, without an idea of what I’m going to cook. I’m really not a very methodical person. I walk there, I browse, I connect, relax, unwind and find inspiration. I buy enough food for the next few days, knitting together in my head a menu, mentally adding up the cost (much cheaper than the supermarket. And so fresh!)

When I get home from the market, I spread everything out on the bench, and survey my horde.

Today: a bunch of radishes, smallish and red; Italian flat leaf parsley and dill and mint; five very small zucchini; lemons; navel oranges; two bulbs of fennel; shallots; red pepper; small cucumbers; sheep’s milk feta cheese; a small chicken; natural yoghurt; unripe pears; six ripe tomatoes; mixed olives.

Ideas:

1. Finely slice zucchini into rounds. Pour over boiling water and then refresh in ice water. Drain. Finely chop parsley, dill and mint – about 1/3 cup in total. Toss zucchini with herbs, sea salt and a dash of olive oil and lemon juice. Pile into a shallow bowl and crumble over a little feta cheese.

2. Shave fennel, radishes and pears with a mandolin. Toss with olive oil and finely chopped dill. Season to taste and serve scattered with shaved parmesan or pecorino cheese and poached chicken.

3. Make Greek salad. Roughly chop into similar sized pieces: cucumber, tomatoes, capsicum and red onion. Toss with torn parsley, mint, dill, olives and crumbled feta. Drizzle with lemon juice and olive oil. Season. Eat.

And in a few days time, when the fridge and the fruit bowl are empty, I’ll walk back over and do it all again.

* It is always the market. I do live in a city of many open air and covered markets, but this particular market is my market, the closest and most familiar to me, therefore it is ‘the market’. I have been to other markets, including the giant pan-Asian markets that are half an hour away by bus and the posh more expensive ones south of the river. When I have serious cravings for Vietnamese food in particular I will stock up on dried lotus beans and Thai and Vietnamese herbs and green pawpaw and mango, banana flowers and other bits and pieces less easy to find at the market.

** I have a poulterer. I love that I have a poulterer. I have a cheesemonger. Cheesemonger is such an old fashioned word. Is it because there are hardly any cheesemongers anymore? Is there a better word that I have just forgotten?

*** I’m told I can be a little snipey with the checkout staff sometimes. But it’s not like the things they sell in supermarkets are even that exotic. It’s broccoli for goodness sake. BROCOLLI.

Pear and fennel salad

2 just-ripe Williams pears
1 1/2 bulbs fennel
4 small salad onions
1 tbsp white wine vinegar
1 tbsp verjuice (verjuice is a bit sweeter than vinegar and lemon juice)
1 tbsp olive oil
1 cup frozen peas
1 tbsp finely chopped dill
1 tbsp finely chopped parsley
2 poached chicken breasts (I poached a whole chicken the day before*)
Pinch sea salt
Shaved parmesan cheese

Quarter pears , remove core and finely slice lengthways. Quarter fennel , remove core and finely slice lengthways (if you find the taste of raw fennel a little strong, blanch by pouring boiling water over and then drain). Halve onions and finely slice length ways. Toss in a large bowl with vinegar, verjuice and oil.

Cook frozen peas, drain and add to salad, along with the sliced poached chicken.

Toss through herbs and sea salt.

Serve, scattered with shaved parmesan. I finished mine off with a little parsley oil.

* To poach whole chicken, place chicken in a large saucepan and cover with water (you can add chopped onion, carrots, celery etc if you like, but not necessary. Do not add salt). Bring to the boil, and then lower to a slow simmer. Cook for about 20-25 minutes, then turn off heat and cover with lid. Cool until just warmer than room temperature – remove flesh from chicken. I retain the cooking liquid and carcass to make stock. Or just poach chicken breasts – simmer in water or stock until cooked, about 10 minutes.

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.

Cycles of Cool

Like fashion, food has a varying cool factor. Giant plates, towering constructions, tiny servings, set menus, no menus, share plates. Like acid-wash denim and shoulder pads, what is ‘in’ comes and goes. Sun-dried tomatoes were the new black, then semi-dried, then fresh, then heirloom*. Tomato sorbet, tomato powder, tomato foam.

My aunt recently complained that you rarely see cheesecake for dessert in restaurants anymore. Sure, it’s in cafes and supermarket freezers, but somehow it’s just not cool enough for places with tablecloths. On the other hand, once considered the domain of the children’s table, selections of ice-creams and gelati are appearing back on menus, at adult prices.

The prosciutto melon antipasto staple of, well, Italy since the Roman Empire, and the early 1980s everywhere else, has experienced a long and unjustified exile from the tables of the cool. More justifiably shunned is the shrimp/mango combination of the 90s, pineapple and ham in any combination (yes, including on pizza), fish with passionfruit sauce. Possibly the direst example of this is any salad featuring tinned fruit and/or tinned fish/meat. Like acid wash denim and leggings, some things will never, ever be cool in my book. Pairing fruit with meat is a risky and slightly naff thing to do.

And then, resurgence – the Moroccan tagine (my favourite combinations include lamb with both dried and fresh pears), Vietnamese green papaya salad with mackerel, Indian curries with pickle and Thai green mango salad with prawns or pork or chicken. Never really on the agenda, and therefore never really off it, are the placeholders like roast pork and applesauce, turkey with cranberry, ham and chutney.

I think that one of the things I find difficult about fruit and meat combination is that the sweetness of fruit, especially when cooked, can be cloying – far too sugary for my tastebuds’ savoury expectations. So the sweetness would need to balance with salt and sour and sharp – which is what the Thai and Moroccan and Indian fruit/meat combinations achieve so well. Something also achieved so perfectly with the Italian melon wrapped in prosciutto served with dry prosecco. The problem is – whilst it tastes great, it still sounds so uncool**.

Which completes the cycle – can it ever be cool? Modern, European inspired cooking that features fruit alongside protein? The answer is yes - in the hands of the masters. One example – Thomas Keller, genius behind the French Laundry, includes on the current tasting menu combinations including foie gras with apple relish; clams with pomegranate and rabbit with apricots***.

So I think maybe it’s ok to experiment a little with meat and fruit (if Thomas Keller is doing it, it must be cool). Besides which, I adore fruit. Especially summer fruit. Especially stone fruit. I have a theory that if you stick to what is in season, then pretty much everything you pick will go with everything else (this is also kind of like my approach to fashion, which is: providing everything in your wardrobe would be worn by Audrey Hepburn, then everything will go with everything. Frequently not on trend, but always approaching stylish).

And since I’m rushing headlong into what might be the kitchen equivalent of being a fashion tragic, I might as well add the culinary leg-warmers to my ra-ra skirt, in the form of roasted red capsicum. The cycle is complete.

* on this, I have a theory that people in Italy laughed at us the whole way through this experience – sun-dried and semi dried tomatoes traditionally being a way to preserve the abundance of summer over winter. Necessity and commonsense, not a fad.

** Also, devils on horseback. Dried prunes, wrapped in bacon (bacon, not something fancy like jamon) and then grilled until crispy. I recently went to friend’s place to play cluedo and consumed an entire plate of these. Which probably firmly establishes once and for all where I sit on the cool-uncool scale.

*** The fruit / seafood combination is one that I expected would never, ever, be made to work (except in limited, Asian inspired combinations, where I think the presence of ginger and/or chilli makes everything magical). However, a restaurant I am remarkable fond of serves an entré of smoked trout and thinly sliced nectarine and salmon roe, which is sweet and salty and altogether lovely.


Turkey and peach salad with roasted red peppers*

Peaches and capsicums are abundant in the market at the moment – the fennel is
not properly in season yet, but I craved the aniseed crunch to complete this flavour combination. On reflection, finely shaved celery tossed with toasted fennel seeds would be an excellent substitute and would keep the ingredients to fruit and vegetables at the height of their summer perfection.

2 for main course or 4 as an appetiser

2 yellow peaches (note that slip-stone peaches will be easier)
2 white peaches
1 red onion
1 red capsicum
1 small bulb fennel
Balsamic vinegar
Olive oil
1 ½ cups shredded cooked turkey (I slowly braised a 1 kg rolled turkey breast in the oven in white wine and verjuice for about 45 minutes, then rested it for 15 minutes. Smoked chicken or roast duck would also work)

Cut the peaches in half, slip out the stone, and then slice finely. Finely mince half the red onion. Combine with the peaches, gently toss with olive oil and balsamic vinegar until coated, season with sea salt. Set aside to marinate.



Roast the capsicum whole at 180ºC for about half and hour, until the skin is starting to blacken. Remove and allow to cool. When cool enough to touch, pull out the stalk and slip the skin off. This is very messy. Finely slice the capsicum.

Finely mince the remaining ½ onion, toss with strips of capsicum, olive oil and balsamic vinegar and sea salt.

Finely slice the fennel (you could use a mandolin). Toss with olive oil, balsamic vinegar and sea salt.

Arrange the peach slices on a plate, lay strips of capsicum on top, then place shredded turkey and carefully pile shaved fennel on top.

* With much drawn from Thomas Keller’s ‘Salad of Black Mission Figs with Roasted Sweet Peppers and Shaved Fennel’ in the French Laundry Cookbook