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.

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

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.

Oxtail ravioli: short cuts versus cheap cuts

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.

The Great American Recipe: chowder

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

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.

Taking stock, making stock

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).

Pistachios, yoghurt soup and unchartered territory

Kitchen-wise, there are things I am good at. And there are areas in which I have, shall we say, room for improvement. Deep frying. Pastry making. Knife sharpening.

There are cuisines I am unfamiliar with, things I have never eaten before, ingredients I don’t use, techniques I haven’t mastered. For example: Turkish food, yoghurt soup, fresh pistachios, frying.

Cooking within the realm of the known creates a freedom to take risks. The basic flavours, structures, techniques are given. Garlic and olive oil for Italian, fish sauce and mint for Vietnamese, soy sauce and five spice for Chinese, butter and tarragon for French, paprika and tomatoes for Spanish. For me, comfortable innovation takes place within those pre-existing and familiar confines, like a variation on a theme.

The key is, of course, knowing what the parameters are. Being familiar enough with something to be able to define it, without slavishly recreating it.

I’d eaten a lot of Vietnamese food and never really enjoyed it and certainly never attempted to cook any at home. Until I took a holiday to Vietnam. And was utterly astounded by the flavours, the variety, the freshness. In situ, the food suddenly made sense. And tasted phenomenal. In Hanoi I took four days of cooking classes. I ate and actually enjoyed fried rice, of all things. I explored the produce markets with the teaching chef. I tasted, I questioned, I understood. I came home and cooked nothing but Vietnamese food for months.

Tonight I made what I think was perfectly acceptable yoghurt soup. I’m not sure that I enjoyed it. I am sure that I don’t understand it. I have no context for it, no benchmark, no sense of how it is supposed be consumed, what accompanies it. Despite a familiarity with the cuisines at the boarders of Turkey, I was surprised at how lost I felt.

The only things I know about Turkish food: eggplants, pistachios and orange blossom water.

Perhaps, a little ambitious then, to think I could just invent, out of this exceedingly low knowledge base, another little snack to bulk out the soup. And a little naive to expect that every new idea will always arrive, perfect and whole

I started with eggplant. Egg shaped striped pale mauve and cream and banana shaped dark purple eggplants. Originally I just planned to split them in halt, brush with oil and char grill. Then, I thought, stuffed eggplant. Genius. Which is where things started to unravel.

Genuine fresh pistachios, just picked from the tree, fleshy outer skin still soft and attached. Saffron. Orange rind. Mint. Dill. Fresh chilli. Toasted and ground fennel seeds. And shellfish – scallops and crayfish. Oh, I could have used ground lamb or goat. But the delicacy of the seafood to match the lightness of the yoghurt soup appealed.

This turned into a fiddly, messy and ultimately less than satisfying meal. Sticky filling that crumbled in the fry pan. Rounds of eggplant that started to burn before cooking through. The floral taste of saffron too sweet for the fresh sea water taste of the shellfish.

But in the remnants and debris spread across my kitchen is the possibility of improvement. I know now, a little more than I knew before. Bind the mince seafood with egg yoke. Where I shallow fried, I probably should have deep fried – this would have kept the parcels intact better, letting them float in bubbling oil whist they firmed. Eggplant takes longer than shellfish to cook – maybe slice the eggplant more thinly? Better next time, perhaps, to make little cigar shaped filo pasty rolls with the filling, and serve a separate plate of char grilled eggplant (which I adore with sea salt sprinkled over). Or stuff the eggplants with lamb, and cook in the oven until the lamb is cooked and the eggplant is soft?

I know more now than I did then.

Next time, however, I might follow a recipe. Just until I get the hang of it.