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

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

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

So many temptations. Such a short season.

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

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

Peaches in chilli syrup with fried haloumi*

Serves two for dinner or four as an starter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Fresh vegetables poached in clean water

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vegetables poached in beurre monte

Serves two people desperate for fresh vegetables

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

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

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

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

Raspberry and rosewater sorbet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Raspberry and rosewater sorbet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Makes 1.5 litres

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

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

I miss him.

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

I miss him.

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

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

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

Merry Christmas.

Christmas Salad: roquette, peaches, buffalo mozzarella and prosciutto

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

Serves 2

Love in the time of borage

I'm not into doing things because some consumerist zeitgeist dictates it.

For me Valentine's Day is just one of those days when I experience a general resentment of consumerism gone mad. I hate feeling like I’m expressing my deepest care and desire because a Hallmark marketing drive says so.

I ignore it, I dismiss it, and then am vaguely surprised when someone else suggests we do something a little bit special.

The suggestion was too, too seductive: no presents, not a candlelit restaurant table or a snugly little weekend away (I love all those things, I just get ridiculously resentful when it’s expected). Just a simple dinner at home. But a special one. Details were up to me.

So I went to market on Sunday to buy ingredients for the unplanned / hastily planned Valentine’s Day dinner. In my head (and indeed, requested of me) was an entré of chervil and Moreton Bay Bug salad (so sweet. so cheap).

But when you leave things until the last minute, and don't turn up to the market until closing time, your options are limited.

No bugs. No chervil. Some frozen crayfish tails, at $65 per kg. Not going to happen. At least I got hold of a couple of duck breasts for main course.

But what there was, at my favourite grocery stall which was packing up, was a $2 table. Including the last little box of borage flowers.

Sure it's a bit twee, a floral entre for St Valentine's Day. But also intriguing - I've never used borage before. You don't see it every day. And sometimes things that look a bit romantic are a bit romantic. And sometimes there's nothing wrong with being a bit romantic.

I’d seen a recipe that had borage flowers as a garnish for bug salad. Bugs weren’t on offer, but I thought maybe another kind of sea creature might marry well. The offerings were limited, but a mountain of tiny little whitebait caught my eye, much, much smaller than I’d ever seen. Each was half an inch long at best. So. Bait and weedy looking flowers for the day of love. It is, I guess, what you make of it that matters.

I came home and consulted the archives.

According to my herb and spice compendium*, the “whole plant is covered with fine bristly hairs, conjuring a ‘don’t touch me’ demeanour”. A nice irony for Valentine’s Day for the hostile.

The Welsh name for borage is ‘llanwenlys’ which means ‘herb of gladness’, and Pliny wrote that it eliminates sadness and makes a person glad to be alive. And it really is very pretty.

The book say it has a sweet slightly cucumber-like flavour. A quick rethink resulted in cucumber and borage flower salad with little crispy whitebait fritters**.

Sous vide duck breast with creamed corn and mushroom duck sauce***.

And dessert was a variation on a mille feuille - a stack a puff pastry with hazelnut, pistachio and almond cream and fresh raspberries.

With champagne of course.

* Spice Notes by Ian Hempill
** The whitebait fritters are simple (from February Australian Gourmet Traveller) - lemon rind, 50 corn flour, 250 g fresh whitebait. Mix. Smoosh into fritter shapes. Shallow fry in hot olive oil.
*** The duck was a recipe straight out of The French Laundry Cookbook (I substituted Swiss brown mushrooms for morels, morels being both unavailable and prohibitively expensive). Page 172 if you are interested.

Borage Salad

Julienne three very small whole cucumbers. Toss with salt, and a teaspoon each of olive oil and champagne vinegar, and half a tablespoon each of finely minced salad onion and finely chopped chives. Just before serving, toss through the borage flowers (about 1/4 cup).

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.

A tale of two meals: (over) indulgent butter sauce

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

‘We should order the salad’ .

I blink, innocently. I am of course trying my hardest to imply that it’s healthy, it’s light, refreshing. I have been to this restaurant before. I know what I like. It is healthy, it is light, it is refreshing. ‘And the pork belly and the duck and lychee coconut curry, some rice. Oo – and some ho mok to start. That should be enough for the two of us’.

The salad is healthy. This is not my primary motivation. The salad is gai larb, and this restaurant does not hold back on the chilli. In fact, all four dishes are heavily laced with chilli and measure around 9 on the Richter scale.

My dining companion finished the evening with sweat pouring down his face (yes, I did in fact order all that food for two people. And we ate it).

I have a fondness for very spicy food.

Gai larb is simple, fresh and deadly. A traditional Laotian dish that has migrated to Thailand – at its most basic, ground meat, chilli, mint, chilli, vegetables and chilli, with a lime and fish sauce dressing.

Sometimes when I make it, I remember to de-seed the chillies before I mince them. Sometimes I forget.

Last night I forgot.*

Rough justice.

Tonight, in an effort to atone for the eye-watering larb, I turned to the French, who have a far more peaceful culinary tradition. Blanched vegetables, boiled shellfish, beurre blanc sauce. To my peril, I made the same error as the French aristocracy, mistaking my desire for uninterrupted gentle richness for a protection against harm. Like a cross between Julia Childs and the Maquis de Sade I feel coated in butter (and not in a good way). This much butter is a long, slow walk to the guillotine. And there will be no mercy.

Despite my adoration of fancy food, I rarely cook or eat meals with lots of cream or butter or cheese. I just generally prefer my food light and fresh. And so I reaped the results of my decadence.** Even though I used less than half as much butter as the recipe said.

It is true that fat is a flavour carrier and a flavour enhancer. I often splash a little olive oil over steamed vegetables, or brush a little onto grilled meat after cooking. Not spoonfuls, but a tiny drop, enough that the flavour and the silkiness is present. The butter did enhance the sweetness of the Moreton Bay Bugs, the beurre blanc subtly cut through and heightened by the sourness of the wine and vinegar base. But for my palate, a single cube or two of butter, whisked into the wine and vinegar reduction, would have been just as flavour enhancing.*** And possibly more life-preserving.

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.

* Sorry

** I was sopping it up with a piece of bread. After I finished eating. After I knew that I had reached the point of excess. I admit it. But it tastes so good.

*** The recipe originally called for 250 grams!! And I only used about 90 g.

Recipe: Summer vegetable and Moreton Bay Bug salad

500g Balmain or Moreton Bay Bugs (renders about 200-250 g meat – you could substitute crab or lobster)
6 baby yellow squash
10 spears asparagus
Bunch watercress
A handful of butter beans

Beurre Blanc Sauce
2 tablespoon salad onion very finely diced (I used spanish onion, which turned by sauce a little pink - nice against the bug meat - you could call it beurre rose sauce)
½ cup white wine
¼ cup white wine vinegar
Between 125 g butter, cut into ½ inch cubes and chilled in the freezer for ½ hour.

For the Salad –

Blanch the each kind of vegetable separately and refresh in iced water. Drain and pat dry. Toss with a drizzle of olive oil and a teaspoon of white wine vinegar, sprinkle with sea salt. Set aside.

Boil the bugs for about 8 minutes, until red. Refresh in ice water. Apply pressure to the joint between the tail and head, ease away the tail. Pick out the tail meat and shred with your fingers. Set aside in a bowl.

For the beurre blanc sauce –

Rapidly boil the wine, vinegar and salad onions together until reduce down to about 2 tablespoons of liquid. Reduce heat to lowest possible. With a metal whisk, briskly whisk in one or two cubes of chilled butter at a time, adding additional cubes as each is incorporated, until all butter is combined. For a lighter sauce, double the amount of wine and vinegar, reduce to about 1/3 cup, and add about 25g of butter.

To serve – arrange salad vegetables on a plate, drizzle the beurre blanc around the edge of the place and place the bug meat over the top.

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