A good egg

I think there is pretty much nothing that can’t be improved by a poached egg. Mushroom risotto? Spaghetti carbonara? Creamy polenta? A bowl of steamed vegetables? Top with a soft poached egg, and break the yolk, letting the golden centre ooze through everything. Perfection.

Eggs for brunch is one of my all time favourite things – with pan fried prosciutto and served with rocquette and avocado or with sautéed chorizo and roma tomatoes or on potato rosti with smoked salmon.

Plus, more and more eggs are considered amazingly good for you.* Studies from the ‘80s suggested strong links between problematic high cholesterol and egg consumption (as cholesterol does occur naturally in eggs, each egg has about 200mg). However, the link between egg consumption and ‘bad’ cholesterol which causes, amongst other things, heart disease, may not be as strong as once thought**. I have a general theory (completely unfounded in any experience, training or professional qualification in medical science) that most whole foods are pretty much ok if eaten in moderation. Ie, a couple of eggs now and again won’t hurt***

Basically, I think we can just eat the damn eggs and enjoy them without feeling guilty.

Except, eat ethical eggs. If for no other reason than they just taste better, eat free range eggs. Organic if you can be bothered/can afford them. Cage eggs come from caged chickens. Caged chickens are essentially egg making factories that never see sunlight and look like old mangy dogs. Chickens should not be treated like this. No animal should be treated like this. Caged chickens are most emphatically not happy chickens, and as a result do not produce happy tasting eggs. Do not eat them. Eat delicious, golden-yolked eggs. Beg them off friends who raise chickens in their backyard. Pick them up at markets in the country. Visit a free range farm and collect them yourself, warm and nestled in straw under a brown hen.

On the weekend, during the rain, I made fava bean puree, filling the house the aroma of the warm oniony broth.

Later that night we snacked on the bean paste as a dip, with crunchy heirloom cucumber and radishes I had picked up at the farmers’ market.

But earlier in the day, as soon as the paste was smooth, I smeared it across thick wood-fired sourdough and topped it with poached eggs.

* “Eggs ‘should be considered a superfood’, say scientists” 9 March 2010 (Although note that this particular study was funded by the British Egg Council. Also note that there is a British Egg Council, which is very, very cool)
** “Bad cholesterol: it’s not what you think” 14 February 2010
*** For goodness sake, consult your own health care professional if you have any concerns.

 

Perfect Poached Eggs

2 very fresh free range eggs. The fresher the eggs, the better the egg white holds together, making a firmer poached egg (the opposite is true for boiled eggs – eggs that are a little older have a little bubble of air between the white and the shell, making them easier to peel)

1 small saucepan, filled with about 3 inches of water (enough to cover the eggs)

1 teaspoon white vinegar. Vinegar helps the egg white to congeal - I sometimes like to use white wine vinegar or apple cider vinegar for taste.

Heat the water and vinegar until simmering (not boiling water – just simmering).

Crack the eggs into a saucer or ramekin, taking care not to break the yolks.

Using a slotted spoon, create a gentle whirlpool in the simmering water (this creates a centrifugal force, which I think helps keep the eggs round shape a little better).

Slide the two eggs from the saucer into the water. If the water starts to boil or froth, turn down the heat.

Nudge the water gently to continue the whirlpool effect.

Cook for 2-2 ½ minutes for runny yolks.

Remove with a slotted spoon.

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.

Comfort food: soft scrambled tofu

Some days are harder than other days.

There are days when you wake up tired and drag yourself through work and then home again. Days with headaches and not enough coffee and a vague feeling that a nice nap would be good.

Days when you can’t be bothered to cook much, despite the giant purple cabbage you were so excited about the day before and ideas for mustard roasted chicken and smashed potato with bacon.

For some, the appropriate balm for such trying times is cheese-on-toast, mash, macaroni-cheese, shepherd’s pie or chocolate ice-cream. The theme tends to be cream and carbohydrates.

All perfectly valid.

For me, I crave either one of two things: Indonesian chicken soup (sop ayam, the most blissful experience of chicken stock, vegetables, ginger, rice and chilli sauce) or scrambled tofu. I can’t explain why chilli features so prominently as comfort food for me.

Simply that the other night when I limped home, wrung out and ready to curl up in bed, it was soft tofu laced with fresh chilli, spring onions, garlic and ginger that I craved. The consistency of baked custard, salty with soy sauce and speckled with a sharp kick. Baby food for grown ups.



Scrambled tofu

300g silken tofu
2 medium hot chillies, thinly sliced
5 shallots, thinly sliced
½ inch ginger, very finely chopped
2 clove garlic, very finely chopped
Salt and soya sauce to taste

Heat a little oil in a non stick pan. Add chillies, ginger, garlic and shallots and fry off for about 1 minute. Add tofu in a single piece and break up gently by crushing with the back of a wooden spoon. Shake pan gently until tofu is hot all the way through. Add salt and soya sauce to taste. Serve as is, or with steamed rice. Go to bed early.

Green Tomato Sauce

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

Green tomato sauce.

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

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

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

Why?

I have a couple of theories.

1 – The toffee theory

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

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

2 – The chlorophyll theory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Green Tomato Sauce

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

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

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

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

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

Bottle and refrigerate (keeps about 1 month).

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

Sausage rolls at the football

There is this guy called Peter Coombe. Back in the eighties (which, I admit, is the decade of my childhood) he produced sing along kind of cassettes (yes, cassettes) for little kids. I guess he was kind of like “The Wiggles” in a lamer, eighties way. Weirdly, he now does concerts in pubs for adults reprising his old albums. And is kind of, well, cool, now. In an odd, art-house / ironic way.

Anyway (and yes, I really do remember all of this, even now, no visit to youtube necessary) one of his songs was “Chish and Fips” and the basic premise of the song was that there were these five guys, tall and lean (you could say string beans), whose names were Chish and Fips and Rossage Solls, Somato Tauce and Riko Cholls. And essentially, every Sunday, these thin, tall chaps go to a shop to buy fish and chips and sausage rolls with tomato sauce, and a chiko roll*. All in a catchy twelve bar blues minor key.

This is important, because I cannot ever think of sausage rolls without the riff from this song going through my head. My father, I think, cannot even say the words ‘sausage rolls’ any longer: any mention at all will have him say “Chish and Fips” (I don’t even know if he realises he does this, it is that ingrained).

Ever since I decided to make sausage rolls to take to the football this Saturday I have been driven insane by this song playing on repeat in my head.

A pie and a sausage roll at the footy are a quintessentially Australian thing to do. Proverbially, you haven’t had a complete football experience unless you have consumed at least 1 cold pie, 1 lukewarm but soggy sausage roll and 1 warm light beer whilst watching your team lose in the rain. The whole experience must cost more than a night at the opera. This is fun.

Wanting to capture this important cultural ethos without suffering the all too common culinary pain, I decided to pack a picnic to take to the pre-season practice match between Melbourne and Essendon on Saturday afternoon.** The thing about my home-made sausage rolls is that they taste better cold than hot (I’ve never worked out why this is), are deliciously packed with vegetables (a bit like a Cornish pasty) and cost as much to make 1 ½ kgs of sausage rolls as a single sausage roll will cost to buy at the ground. Plus, I have a little tub of onion jam left over that will be just the thing.

The weather forecast: showers.


* I have never eaten a chiko roll. A chiko roll is made of boned mutton, cabbage, rice, barley, celery, carrot (and possibly corn??) and spices in an edible tube which is deep-fried. I understand they are uniquely an Australian experience, but so are many poisonous snakes, so don’t get excited.

** FYI: Essendon 18.12: 120 beat Melbourne 11.14: 80

Sausage rolls

1 kg sausage mince
2 large carrots, grated
2 medium zucchini, grated
2 onions, grated or finely minced
1 ½ tbsp dried mixed herbs (and whatever fresh herbs you have going – I like rosemary and parsley)
1 tsp paprika
1 egg
Pepper, to taste

Six sheet frozen puff or shortcrust pastry, thawed.
1 egg, beaten with a dash of cold water (to glaze).

Preheat an oven to 200ºC. Line several baking trays with baking paper.

In a large bowl, using your hands, squelch together the sausage mince, vegetables, herbs and beaten eggs.

Slice each sheet of pastry in half. Brush edges with egg.

Form the sausage mixture into long logs and place down the centre of each strip of pastry. Wrap the pastry around and pinch and fold over to seal. Piece the sausage roll with a fork at regular intervals. (At this point the uncooked sausage rolls can be frozen.)

Cut the sausage rolls to the desired length, brush with egg wash and place on baking trays.

Cook for 25-30 minutes until golden and firm.

Cool and take on a picnic.

Good with chutney, relish and tomato sauce.

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.

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.