The Canberra Cook

I'm not dead yet (and Clafouti)

2012-01-21T21:18:00.005+11:00

I'm just resting.

Anyway, I was just chatting with a friend about clafouti, and I said that I would blog it if I were still blogging. So hey, why not? Hello strangers! Happy new year 2012, I aten't dead.

Clafouti is basically a light batter pudding. It's a really really easy thing to do for a fruit dessert, and for boring reasons, really really easy is all I do these days. And if you go and research clafouti, you will find a zillion recipes with wildly variable ratios of ingredients. Anything from 1 teaspoon of flour to 1/4 cup of flour per egg. Liquids may be creme fraiche, yoghurt, sour cream, cream, milk. I've tried a few variants recently and this is one I like - a more custardy texture than some, not too solid.

Generic Clafouti, Apricot Almond variety
400g fruit (chopped fresh apricots)
1/4 cup plain flour, sifted
1/4 cup caster sugar
2 eggs
1 cup plain yoghurt
1/4 cup milk
dash vanilla essence
2 tablespoons liqueur (amaretto)
flaked almonds to decorate

Preheat the oven to 180C
Lightly butter a small casserole dish.
Toss in the fruit, cut in bite sized pieces.
Mix together the flour and sugar, and beat in the eggs.
Add vanilla, liqueur, yoghurt, and milk, and whisk gently just to free from any lumps.
Pour the batter over the fruit.
Sprinkle with flaked almonds (optional).
Bake for 35-45 minutes, until done - a test skewer comes out clean.

Serve hot or warm, with a dollop of cream or icecream.

I use a 24cm round pyrex casserole dish. If you have a larger flan plate, which is more traditional, it will be shallower and so cook a bit more quickly. So this is very easy, and you can swap in frozen berries or other fruits to taste. Cherries are classic French. I've made this so far with frozen blackberries, and fresh boysenberries and tonight with the apricots.

Where am I?

2011-05-14T22:19:00.003+10:00

I'm not currently blogging about Canberra or cooking, because I'm not actually in Canberra at the moment. My friends and family know where I am, but for anyone else, here's a little guessing game. Based on the breakfast menu, where am I?

Breakfasts at various hotels have included:
* bread with fetta cheese, tomato, cucumber and olives
* olive stuffed pastries, and bread with butter and sour cherry jam
* bread with a boiled egg and olives, and yoghurt with peach preserves
* yoghurt with tahini and raisin syrup, and cheese pastries
* bread with butter and pine honey, and an orange
* bread with rose petal jam, and dried mulberries

They serve tea or nescafe, mostly. Although you can get very good coffee here, it's not usually served at breakfast. The bread is all lovely crusty white loaves, but by now I'm starting to crave a good chewy multigrain. Probably toasted, with vegemite. The bloke is very taken with the idea of olives for breakfast, so this may go onto the menu at home.

By the way, I'm reading a book published in 1950. It's an autobiographical memoir from this region, in which the author describes what this strange thing called "yogurt" is to his anglo readers. "A kind of sour junket", he says. These days, I'd bet that people are more familiar with yoghurt than junket.

One new thing...

2011-04-19T20:23:00.001+10:00

OK, so I have done one thing new in the last month, and that's this lovely recipe for dark greens. These bitter vegetables are terribly good for you, and I love the complexity of the huge flavours you get with the bitter greens, acid lemon, hot chilli and fruity oil. The bitterness is much mitigated by a bit of acid - unless you're a super-taster, in which case there's no chance.

I started with this recipe from Serious Eats. Basically, you pan fry your greens with olive oil, onion, garlic and chilli until they are well done. This takes a couple of minutes for spinach, a bit longer for silverbeet, maybe 10 minutes for Tuscan kale (cavolo nero) and 15 minutes for regular kale. When it's cooked, add a little acid - a tablespoon or so of lemon juice or cider vinegar for a regular bunch of greens.

And then it's ready - a good side dish. Or you can follow the Serious Eats idea and make quesadillas with it. I've done this using multigrain wraps, and it worked fine. You do need to include both mozzarella and fetta, though, or they won't stick together.

Tweaking recipes, Using Things Up

2011-04-17T13:46:00.000+10:00

One reason for my fairly sparse blogging has been a dearth of new recipes. When I'm busy at work, and travelling, and eating out, home cooked food tends to resort to the staples.

Now that it's colder at night, a hearty soup is a fine thing. The most recent one I made was a variation on this chorizo and lentil soup. I had a tomato glut, and used B1's mouli to turn it into passata, so instead of a bit of tomato paste and a litre of chicken stock, I used half a litre of chicken stock and half a litre of passata. And I blended the soup before adding the chorizo; the bloke likes his soups smooth. (Except laksa. The rules are complicated.)

Another variation came because I was out of cumin. I decided to use a 1/2 teaspoon of ground wattleseed instead, having discovered quite some time ago that this goes surprisingly well with tomato. It adds a dark caramel roast savouriness - but do be careful not to overdo it. The half teaspoon was plenty.

So that was good.

I've also been cooking a lot of old standards. This week's muffin was apple and cinnamon, with some older apples from the fridge. We've been eating keema and spag bol with mince from the freezer. There's been a chicken noodle stirfry, and a lamb curry with paste from the market and the last of the beans from the garden. Homemade pizza is good for finishing the odds and ends of ham, salami, olive, artichokes, etc. I've been roasting tomatoes to use in soup and curry and pasta sauce, and roasting rhubarb from the garden - the latest time with some plums and rosewater.

I've also cooked and frozen a batch of figs, with the intent of making jam later in the year. We're off on a big holiday soon, and have our usual Easter houseguests before then, so I have no time to be fiddling with pectin and jars. I can't believe I never thought of doing this before. It's B1's idea.

OMG, online at last!

2011-04-06T16:40:00.002+10:00

The Canberra Times is finally posting selected food and wine content on line, including reviews. Here it is. I tremble in anticipation.

Sydney feature, with New in Town in Newtown

2011-04-04T19:59:00.000+10:00

As I mentioned earlier, we recently had a weekend in Sydney. We stayed a night with some friends in Dee Why, who took us off to a Korean BBQ place up behinds the main street. It's called Let's Meat - and if you know Lizotte's, a kind of newish dinner-theatre style music venue, it's directly behind that. Lizotte's looks fabulous - they get some great shows through and have a classy sounding menu.

I can't (yet) vouch for Lizotte's menu, though I intend to try it sometime. But I can say that Let's Meat stands out above the usual Korean BBQ for their meat selection. The chef puts a lot of work into the marinades, including traditional Chinese herbal spiced pork and the classic beef bulgogi, as well as inventing his own. The plum sauce sirloin was terrific. It's a buffet style, with all the kimchi, salads and pickles you could want, and fried dumplings and spring rolls to start off with.

On our second night we stayed in a hotel in town, so we could easily walk home from the Tim Minchin concert - the main reason for this visit. Next morning we slept in until half an hour before checkout time, and went off to Newtown for breakfast. It's been ten years since we moved from there now, and North Newtown seems to have gone a step too far upmarket to be interesting. Enmore road and South Newtown is where the off-beat stuff happens now. As a rough generalisation, Enmore road is more goth and kink, while south Newtown is more retro and hippy.

We had breakfast at a place called "New in Town", located where the old Chocolate Dog cafe is no more. They did a decent coffee, and we ate fluffy ricotta pancakes (me, $11), and a lovely BLT in a crusty long roll (bloke, $7). They do Polish at night, says their sign, and there's Polish sausage options for breakfast if that's your thing. Then we went for a short stroll as the shop owners were blearily setting up for their 11am and noon opening hours. We browsed around some Turkish and Afghan importers shops, and picked up some amusing jewelry from Mink Schmink. There's a nice range there, mostly in the cheap and quirky vein. So, that was fun, and then it was time to go home.

Et tu, Flute?

2011-04-02T11:55:00.003+11:00

I had to go out to Fyshwick to buy a new dishwasher hose, so of course I had to drop in at the Flute bakery. I got a lovely sourdough loaf, of course, and also picked up some of their Easter range - the hot cross brioche. This is cute, but I don't really recommend them. They're a nice enough little roll of rich dough, but sadly under-spiced to be a proper hot cross bun substitute. The fruit is just sultanas. No currants, and then there's the vexed issue of the mixed peel. Sadly, Flute have gone along with the recent trend to eliminate it. It's just not right having a hot cross bun without that little bitter citrus tang. For the first time, I am disappointed in Flute.

However, on a positive note, That Bagel Place is now making hot cross bagels! I queued up for them in the market this morning, and was not disappointed with them at all. Nicely spiced, and with the odd dot of peel. Yum! It was their "bagel of the week", so we can't count on a re-occurrence. But I do hope they continue baking these until Easter - that would make sense.

Grandma's Little Bakery

2011-03-31T15:07:00.000+11:00

"Grandma's Little Bakery" looks like a misnomer to me. It should probably be called Ia-ia's or Nonna's or Siti's. This cafe, function centre and shop is located in the Fedra olive grove, just off the Federal Highway in the Collector region. They specialise in olives, of course, and other Mediterranean products, and they serve meals as well as selling foods. They seem to be doing pretty well - we dropped in on our way back from Sydney last week and the place was packed.

The shop is quite the treasure trove. You can find freshly made hummus, pestos, olive and ricotta dip, tapenade, and more. There's a range of home made nougats - the pistachio and apricot is great - and other confectionery. There's ingredients such as syrups of rose, date, and pomegranate, dry goods such as lentils and couscous, and a big range of spices, whole and ground including exotics like za'atar and baharat. But the spice tub sizes are a bit too large for me; they'd be stale by the time I finished. You can buy their specialty boreks packed frozen to take home. There's also fresh baked bread, bagels and pastries, and they stock the well-known Lynwood farm preserves.

We didn't actually stop for lunch or arvo tea, since we'd just had a big brunch in Sydney. But having checked the place out and enjoyed their produce, I hope to make it a destination sometime.

Slice

2011-03-27T14:19:00.001+11:00

"Slice" is a very useful generic concept for clearing out the fridge. It's so generic that it doesn't have a name besides just "slice". It could be spinach slice, or zucchini slice, or mixed veggie slice, or many other things.

The idea is that you locate all the non-watery veggies that need using up. Clean them and grate them or chop them or whatever. Spinach, chard, silverbeet etc should be lightly steamed, then squeezed and chopped. I find that zucchini can be grated then squeezed out to remove excess water. Some mashed pumpkin is good, or precooked cauliflower or broccoli. Defrosted frozen spinach can be used, too. But no tomatoes in the mix, they are too wet!

Anyway, you pop them in a big bowl. Add any odds and ends of cheese that you have, grated if it's firm. Cheddar, ricotta, and cottage cheese are good basics, but there's nothing to stop you using fancy bits of brie or gruyere. Then add some cooked rice - one of those sachets of precooked rice from the supermarket is handy here, if you don't have leftovers and don't have time to cook it. I like to make this with brown rice.

Chuck in some flavouring agents. I like to use plenty of dill and lemony herbs like sumac and lemon myrtle, and some chopped spring onions. But perhaps some fresh basil and garlic might suit your fancy better. I usually like to make it fairly mild, and then add some chutney or sauce to taste at serving time. You can add other little bits and pieces of stuff for an accent - leftover antipasti, a handful of pitted and halved olives, some chopped sun-dried tomatoes or roast capsicum. If you're not cooking for a vegetarian, some chopped ham or cooked bacon pieces could well go in.

Now have a closer look at your bowlful of stuff. Will it fit into your shallow casserole dish or pie plate for baking? If it looks like too much, then scoop some into a storage container to freeze for next time. If it's not enough, add another grated zucchini, or some frozen spinach or frozen peas or something.

To finish off, take 4-8 eggs, depending on the size of the dish. Break them in, and mix well. If they're a bit old, because this is also good to use up excess eggs, then break them into a cup first to check that there are no bad smells. Put all in your oven dish and top with sliced tomatoes if you want, maybe some breadcrumbs for crunch, and definitely some grated cheese - more cheddar, or some parmesan. Bake at 160C until the egg is set - 30-60 minutes depending on the depth of the baking dish. Don't rush it with a high temperature, or it will tend to separate and get watery.

Serve it in big slices, like a lasagne. This is a complete meal in itself, with veggies, protein and carbs all together. But it's good to have something else alongside for variety. That could be a nice crisp salad, or any side vegetable, or even a sausage for the meat-eaters, or a slice of smoked salmon - that's especially good if you've gone for lemon and dill as your flavours.

Pretty!

2011-03-19T12:13:00.006+11:00

Pretty colours!

Here's a sample from today's market. Early autumn produce - new season apples, plums, rainbow chard, a big fat leek, and more. Even bananas! These ladyfingers from Coff's Harbour were selling for only $7 a kilo, excellent value at the moment. This is actually a small collection I've put together for B1, who is back in Canberra at last but couldn't get to the market today. I've also got a couple of slices of very fine leg ham from Balzanelli - smallgoods people from Fyshwick. They specialise in Italian style pork products, from pork & fennel sausages to pancetta and coppa. They slice to order, so I have nice fat slices. Yum.

I didn't buy any tomatoes or beans or figs, because last week I picked a good kilo of beans and 2kg of tomatoes from my minuscule veggie garden. I can highly recommend these "purple king" beans to any neglectful gardener. All my peas and snowpeas died, but these beans just kept on going. I put in four seedlings on a wire obelisk, added a handful of fertiliser, a dash of snailbait. Helped along by plenty of rain, they are now producing about half to one kilo of beans a week. They're a pretty deep purple, but they turn green when they are cooked.

And while the figs on my tree aren't ripe yet, there are hundreds of them coming soon - if the birds don't get them first. So much as I love figs, I'm not paying $1.50 each at the market.

Spaghetti Squash!

2011-03-11T22:39:00.000+11:00

It's always exciting to try something new. I'd heard of spaghetti squash before, but never actually seen one in real life until just now. I found one in Choku Bai Jo, and I'm told that they grow quite well in the Canberra region. Since it's such an oddity, I've taken lots of photos.

So here it is in its original state, looking a bit like an elongated honeydew melon. There's a nice big avocado next to it for scale. The first step is to cut it in half, where it now looks like a cross between a melon and a pumpkin.

Now you need to cook it, and this is where the advice I found differs. Either you can put it in a greased oven tray, or on one with a couple of centimetres of water in it. Place it cut side down, and bake at 180C for about 30 minutes, until it's quite easy to pierce the rind with a knife. Take it out and scrape out the seeds. You can leave it to cool first, but I found holding it with an oven mitt and scraping with a spoon was fine.

And now, take to it with a fork and scrape lengthwise along the squash, and you will end up with a lot of strands, like angelhair pasta - that's very thin spaghetti. Serve it how you will.

Don't expect it to taste like spaghetti, no matter what the low-carb diet books say! It's definitely a squash, more like zucchini. But the texture is fun, and it makes for a nice light meal. Good for summer, tossed with pesto, olives and fetta, perhaps. We actually ate it with a tomato, olive, bacon and chilli sauce. It seemed to need cheese quite a lot. I've also had some tossed with tuna, chilli, peas and corn. It seems to leave me a bit unsatisfied, like having a salad for dinner. A hunk of nice bread would help complete it. Or it could be a side dish - I think it would be good in a gratin.

Hot Hobart Berry Cake

2011-03-08T20:07:00.000+11:00

A couple of weeks ago I was at a friend's place, and spent a little time browsing How to Cook a Galah by Laurel Evelyn Dyson. This is a fascinating book about Australian culinary history, with plenty of recipes. I copied down a couple of recipes to try out. This one is a sort of fruit sponge, originally titled Hot Hobart Mulberry Cake. Apparently the original cook had a friend with a mulberry tree.

The recipe is dead easy, with no fussy creaming of butter and sugar, just a simple stir through. I didn't have mulberries, but I did have some blackberries from the Borenore Hillside orchards and some boysenberries from my back garden, picked about a month ago and frozen. So here is my variant.

Recipe: Hot Hobart Berry Cake
450g berries
juice of one lemon
300ml light sour cream
1 tablespoon vanilla brandy
2 eggs
3/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups self-raising flour

Preheat oven to 180C.
Beat together the sour cream, vanilla and eggs.
Sift the flour and sugar together
Wash berries and dry well, then coat with lemon juice.
Grease a round casserole dish.
Stir the sour cream mix through the flour and sugar.
Turn out into the greased dish.
Pour berries on top.
Bake for 45min-1 hour, until sponge is done in the centre when tested with a skewer.
Serve warm, with cream or icecream.

Notes: There was no vanilla in the original, and of course the sour cream was not light. I'm also guessing that they used butter to grease a dish, rather than a spray of rice bran oil.

Vanilla brandy is what I have on my shelf, it's a small bottle of brandy with vanilla pods in it. Use 1 tsp vanilla essence and 2-3 tsp brandy for the closest equivalent. It's quite a thick batter, and I think the extra dash of liquid is helpful. Possibly the original cook's sour cream was thinner, or her lemons juicier or eggs larger.

It came out very delicious when warm. It did take quite some time for the centre to set - 55 min even in my fan forced oven. By that time the outer part was a little crusty.

It went very well with a scoop of vanilla icecream, and I think pouring cream would be a good option, too. On the whole I think this is better warm than cold, and even better with more berries. Luckily it microwaves up alright with 30-60 seconds a serve.

I have a problem with stone fruit

2011-02-22T20:41:00.000+11:00

I buy too much of it.

The Bloke doesn't eat any stone fruit, except for dried apricots. And yes, I can easily get through a couple of kilos of cherries in a week all by myself when they're in season. But right now the markets are packed with plums and nectarines and peaches and plumcots and I wander around thinking "I'll just get half a dozen of these" and "ooh, those look nice, how about I just buy four" and somehow I come home with far too much for me to eat in a week. Especially if I've bought huge punnets of blackberries, strawberries and blueberries as well.

And I have another problem with stone fruit. These days most of them are sold rock hard. Even the peaches from the growers market are too firm to be edible immediately. Stone fruit don't really ripen off the tree, no extra sweetness develops, but they will soften. Pop them in the fruit bowl for two or three days, watch like a hawk, and eat them when they are just softened enough. But if you leave them for even 12 hours longer, they start getting a bit wrinkly and too soft to be nice. And if you then put them in the fridge and leave them for a few more days, some will go off entirely, and some will get a bit squishy in spots.

Here's what I did to salvage the old fruit when I got back from Goulburn.

Recipe: White Peaches in Blood Plum sauce
3 white peaches or nectarines
4 blood plums
1 tablespoon vanilla sugar
1 teaspoon rose water
2 tablespoons water

Wash the fruit well.
Chop the plums small, removing stones and any nasty dead bits.
Chuck them in a saucepan with the sugar, rosewater and the water.
Bring to a simmer.
Cut the peaches in large pieces - halves, or quarters.
Add them to the plums, and let simmer for another 10-15 minutes.
Allow to cool slightly, then remove peach pieces.
Slip off the peach skins.
Mash the plum sauce, or if you feel energetic, sieve or puree it.
Return the peach pieces, mix well, and chill.

Notes: This was a really great outcome - the rose with the blood plum and hint of vanilla is a very good combination. It's obviously adaptable to other fruits; this is just what was in the fridge, but I think I lucked out here. The aromatic white peach holds up well against the sauce, and matches with the rose.

Peach skins are easy to slip off when the fruit is cooked. If you prefer, you can skin them like tomatoes, by standing then in a bowl of boiling water for a minute or two.

Eat these for breakfast - cold with Greek yoghurt and granola, or warm on porridge, depending on what the weather is doing.

Eating around the web

2011-02-19T13:29:00.001+11:00

I'm very erratic with food reading on the web. There's a few blogs that I check regularly, but otherwise things just seem to turn up. From links friends post on facebook or message boards, mostly. Or sometimes I google an ingredient, and find something on some totally random site. I've had the chance to try quite a few things recently; with this crazy weather anything from salad to porridge is an option.

I googled quinoa a while ago and found a nice quinoa porridge. At the same site, a recipe for quinoa pilaf took my fancy. Now, as the bloke hates corn and walnuts, I had to make a variant. But the general idea is very adaptable. Quinoa cooked in stock, then fried up with onion, spices, and vegetables. It's good with that dark Tuscan kale, but you could try spinach or silverbeet. I served it as an accompaniment to some quick grilled lamb chops from that new Dickson butcher.

And 35C one day, 15C the next, it's still possible to have porridge. I was quite intrigued by this idea, cooking brown rice in a crockpot. I almost followed the recipe, except that I used low fat milk instead of full-fat, and coconut milk and a 1/4 cup of sugar instead of the sweetened condensed milk. And raspberries on top instead of cranberries or raisins cooked in. So, yeah, almost the same. The result is, well, OK. The bran separates off, while the inner rice goes squishy, which gives it more of a porridge texture than a rice pudding texture. Also I think it needed less sugar. I couldn't put maple syrup on top since it was already quite sweet enough for me.

Serious Eats crops up quite a lot, since I'm a facebook fan. This American site has some wonderful discussions. Check out this hilarious recipe for boiled water, and don't miss the reader comments. These chocolate chip cookies are from Serious Eats. I made them before Xmas, and have two sausages of dough still in the freezer waiting for the next cookie occasion.

And then there's this chocolate cake. I simply could not resist making this, as it is just so very weird. It's gluten-free - it uses not chickpea flour but actual chickpeas. I liked the flavour in the end. The chickpeas add some flavour, but it's quite neutral tending to nutty - a reasonable match to chocolate. The texture was less of a hit. It came out quite dry. I found that it was OK when tempered with a dollop of icecream, and B2 liked it, but B1 did not. So, variable.

I did edit the recipe slightly for Australian measures, so here you go.

Recipe: Chocolate Chickpea Cake

1 tablespoon butter, softened
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
150g dark cooking chocolate
2 x 420g tins of chickpeas
4 large eggs
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
a pinch of salt

Preheat oven to 180C.
Grease a small loaf tin with the butter, and "flour" it with the cocoa.
Drain the chickpeas and rinse them well.
Weigh out 2/3 of them, and set the rest aside for some other use.
Put them in a food processor, with the eggs, sugar, salt, vanilla and baking powder.
Puree until very smooth.
Melt the chocolate, and blend it into the rest of the mix.
Pour the cake batter into the tin and smooth surface.
Bake at 180C for 45-60 minutes, until a knife comes out clean.
Allow cake to cool in the tin for 15 minutes before inverting to cooling rack to cool completely.
Dust with icing sugar just before serving.

Note: I used the extra chickpeas in a mixed veggie curry. You could also add them to a soup or a salad, or mash them up with garlic, lemon and tahini to make hommous.

I like to melt chocolate in the microwave - break it up into a glass bowl, zap it for 20 sec, stir well, and repeat until all is melted. Much easier than a double boiler, or the old bowl over boiling water technique.

Regional Goings On

2011-02-13T19:03:00.005+11:00

We've just got back from Goulburn, where we saw some amazing acts at the annual Australian Blues Festival. Pugsley Buzzard is a fabulous pianist, with a voice of gravel. Sorta kinda like a cross between Louis Armstrong, Tom Waits, Fats Waller and Nick Cave; always worth seeing. And we saw the Lemon Squeezing Daddies with new front woman, Perle Noire, who looks and sounds like she's out of Chicago but is actually a Londoner. In the one paid show we went to, Doc Neeson (of the Angels) walked on stage looking oddly like Matt Preston, and delivered a solid blues-rock set, with guitarist Mal Eastwick. New finds from this time are the young Shaun Kirk, from Melbourne and Luna, who it turns out are from Canberra, even though I haven't seen them around here yet.

In food news, we ate at the Tatts one night, which is pretty standard pub grub. They do a decent burger and a cook your own steak; the scotch fillet I had was great, very tender. The salad bar was decent, with good fresh greens but I'd steer clear of the curry coleslaw if I were you. The other night we ate at the Goulburn Workers Club, which is pretty standard club grub. A decent salt and pepper squid, a slightly odd caesar salad with whole lettuce leaves and no egg, and a big slice of garlic bread instead of croutons. Also no anchovies, but I don't even expect anchovies in a Caesar these days.

Cafe Book is our first choice option for breakfast, with a fairly standard bacon and egg breakfast. The menu is nothing remarkable, but the food is all fresh and hot and well cooked. You get service with a smile, and a huge wall of second hand books for sale. And enormous smoothies. The bakery up the road near the Big Merino is not bad, either, and do a nice sourdough and a good cornbread. In both cases, it helps to order the coffee extra strong. What is it with country towns and weak coffee?

Meanwhile, back in Canberra, the Handmade Upmarket is back next weekend. This thing just keeps growing and growing. It's a market for regional craftspeople, and the goods for sale include a decent selection of food, as well as all the jewelery, clothes, bags and so on. It outgrew the Albert Hall, then the Yarralumla Woolshed and the Kamberra Wine centre, and have now moved to the National Convention Centre. Saturday 19th February, from 11am. They're also running a shop, on the Boulevard near the former Electric Shadows, but the range there is naturally much smaller. As well as the crafty stuff, they stock some good chockies from Lindsay & Edmunds and the Curious Chocolatier.

By the way, pARTy cakes will be there, and donating 25% of their profits to ovarian cancer research. So get in there and eat cake. I've bought cupcakes from them before; they are very good.

Developments, mostly in Dickson

2011-02-06T11:21:00.006+11:00

The non-Dickson developments are that I've given the blog a super-quick facelift with a standard blogger template. And I've taken up twittering. You can follow me at @CathCanCook if you feel so inclined. I'm not tweeting a lot, since my phone doesn't currently support it, but definitely more than I'm blogging at the moment!

Here's the few new points of note around Dickson.

An Asian supermarket, Asian Quay, has opened on Challis St, where MalAdjusted used to be. If you're worried by this news, do not fear! Mal's lovely bicycle shop has just moved around the corner. It's now in the square behind Zeffirellis. You'll also find a new cafe/bar here, by the name of Dzire, where the much lamented TurkOz used to be. I haven't tried this one out yet, but I will try to get there soon. They have a website at http://www.dzire.com.au but it's just a stub at the moment.

Asian Quay is a bit different from the other Asian grocers around the area. They seem to stock a lot more vegetarian ingredients than most - veggie versions of instant noodles, oyster sauce, and fake meats from TVP to soy "duck necks". There's also a wider range of sweets, especially icecreams and other frozen desserts. But the veggie section is very minimal; Saigon is still far and away the best for fruit and veg.

Finally, there is a new butcher, imaginatively titled "The Butcher Shop". It's near Woolworths, in the square in the corner. From Woollies, go past the chemist and jeweler, and look to the right, across from the Shiny Things Shop. (Not its real name.) They're in the new tradition of butchers, with house-made sausages and ready made kebabs and marinated ready-to-go roasts. They stock King Island beef. I haven't checked all the details about what's local and what's free range yet, but I can say that the sausages, silverside and lamb chops that I've had so far have all been top quality.

Coo, lumme!

2011-01-12T17:24:00.000+11:00

Coo is a little Japanese restaurant on East Row, up the London Circuit end. It's run by the same people as Iori, and they seem to have maintained their tradition of hiring sweet, friendly but vaguely confused Japanese students as staff. They also share a website - here is Coo's section.

The routine here at lunchtime is that you rock up to the front counter, order and pay. The menu is posted all over the wall, and there's a lot more to choose than is shown on their website's lunch menu. You can have your lunch to take away, or eat in with no price difference. If you choose to eat in, you then go through the curtain, clutching a card with your table number, and also any bits of your lunch that have come out of the cold storage at the front. Behind the curtain there's a lot of small tables, a licensed bar with sake and Japanese beer and some odd fruity slushy mocktails. There's also more menu items on the wall, and a TV playing bizarre Japanese shows - while we were there it was Tokyo shock boys, pretty autumn travelogues, and sumo wrestling.

The sushi and sashimi plate ($8.50) is the normal variety you'd get from many a takeaway place. Tuna, salmon, some white fish, a couple of cucumber rolls, a cooked prawn, a piece of California roll. It was all good, and to my surprise a small cup of light green tea and a styrofoam cup of white miso soup turned up to accompany it. My friend had a white pork noodle soup - there are many to choose from, with ramen, udon or soba and a bewildering variety of stocks and accompaniments. To add to the difficulty of choice, you can have combos - a half serve of soup and something else like a tonkatsu, tempura, or sushi selection. Large bento boxes, whether eat in or take away, run at about $12.

The food is very good, and the lunchtime service very quick. We will definitely be back for more. I'm pleased about this, as I love Japanese food. Last year, when they had recently opened, we had a bad evening with ridiculously slow service. We tried to grab a quick bite of sushi before a show, but nothing arrived for 45 minutes! I can now hope that this was just teething pains - this lunch experience bodes very well.

Happy Easter!

2011-01-07T11:39:00.009+11:00

No, seriously, WTF are you thinking, Woollies? Hot cross buns for sale already? I'm barely over Xmas, and even though I didn't do the big dinner thing, we still have leftovers to get through. And seriously, EPIC is currently full of Summernats, not folkies. Your timing is just way off.

My main Xmas food discovery this year has been the Delicious recipe for fruit mince scrolls. Valli Little titles it the "Christmas Morning Crown". I made, well, not exactly it, but a variation of it for Xmas breakfast a couple of weeks ago. And then I liked it so much I did it again to host an arvo tea for some friends. And then again just because I got into a YEAST FRENZY!!!! In just one day I made the scrolls, no-knead bread, and some pizza bases. And then I ran out of yeast, or who knows what else might have happened.

I'm back at work now, so a frenzy like that is unlikely to recur for a bit. But the cool thing about the scrolls is that you can make them the day before you bake them. A little easy prep on Saturday, and then fresh baked scrolls on Sunday morning, oh my yes! The dough is a rich one and quite tender, since it's not really kneaded. It's also not a sweet dough, so you could even try a savoury filling. Ham, cheese, pineapple & jalapeno pizza scrolls, perhaps? Probably not with the icing, in that case.

Recipe: Iced Fruit Mince Scrolls

Dough:
225g bread flour
7g sachet yeast (1 teaspoon granules)
2 teaspoons sugar
a small pinch of salt
40g butter
1/2 cup warm milk

Filling:
1/2 cup fruit mince
2 tsp grand marnier
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 cup mixed glace fruit (chopped to half cherry size)
3 tablespoons soft brown sugar
45g softened butter.

Icing:
1/2 cup sifted icing sugar
1 - 2 tablespoons liquid (lemon juice, grand marnier, rosewater etc)

* Measure out the flour and add yeast, sugar and salt.
* Melt the butter, and mix in the warm milk, stirring well.
* Add the egg to the warm milk, and beat well.
* Make a well in the flour, and mix in the milk mixture, stirring flour in from the sides gradually to prevent lumps.
* Bring together in a rough soft ball, and cover with plastic wrap.
* Let rise in a warm place for about an hour. Or a not quite so warm place, for an hour and a half - until about doubled in size.

* While it's rising, prepare your chosen filling. For the fruit mince one, simply mix all ingredients together well, mashing the butter up with the fruit.

* Punch down, knead for half a minute, and turn out onto a floured surface.
* Roll or stretch it out to the size of a small oven tray.
* Spread filling out, leaving about 2cm space at the long edges.
* Roll up from the long edge so you have a filled sausage of dough.
* Grease and flour an oven tray, or line with silicone and flour lightly.
* Cut the sausage into 8-10 pieces, and arrange these in a ring on the tray. Keep cut side up, and let the sides just touch.
* Cover with a dampened teatowel or strong kitchen paper, and leave for another hour in the warm spot.
* Refrigerate overnight, if you want - bring back to room temperature before baking.
* Bake at 180C for 20 minutes, until golden.
* Cool for five to ten minutes before drizzling some icing over the top in swirls or zigzags.

Icing:
To make the icing, sift the icing sugar into a bowl, and add liquid by teaspoons, stirring well, until it is just liquid enough to drizzle.

Other filling options:
* 1/2 cup of your own fruit mix (currants, raisins and mixed peel), pre-soaked in tea or Grand Marnier, with 3 tablespoons soft brown sugar and 45g softened butter.

* Valli Little's original - 50g soft brown sugar and 85g softened butter, plus 1/3 cup sultanas, 1/3 cup mixed peel, 1/4 cup glace cherries, 2 tbsp chopped hazelnuts.

* Use your imagination. Jam, other dried fruits, chopped nuts, stewed apple or rhubarb, cinnamon sugar, spices etc.

Notes: The icing is also totally generic. Use a couple of drops of vanilla essence, plus water. Or Grand Marnier, lemon juice, lime juice, rosewater, or whatever you fancy. Spices can be added, too - I made one with 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon mixed in with the icing sugar.

Christmas and the Crazy Cake

2010-12-21T22:20:00.003+11:00

You might want to know that there is a pre-Christmas market at EPIC on Thursday 23rd, and then a break until 15 Jan. And despite the rains, there's still plenty of cherries to be had.

And the day is nearly here. This year it's a really weird one for me. Hardly any cooking - no relatives visiting; and we're going to a friend's place for lunch, then going to Sydney to spend some time with B1 & M. I have made a cake, and in a vague effort to get in the spirit, I made a turkey risotto tonight. Though with pre-cooked turkey breast from Woollies, and packaged stock it is nowhere near as awesome as a proper leftover feast.

There have been work Xmas parties - three, count them: my unit, our group and the whole institute. And there were musical events - my teacher's studio concert, and the St Phil carols. I've contributed cookies and fruit plates and cakes and pies, and eaten mince pies and old-fashioned white Christmas, and some amazing coconut sticky rice (Maneerat has promised to give me her recipe for that.) The tree is up and the kittens, now small cats, have pulled off the first decorations to roll round the room.

The piccie here is of a "Crazy Cake", cut up and decked with fruit ready for the supper at St Phils. It's a strange recipe, that I couldn't resist trying out. I don't even remember how I found it, but the recipe comes from a vegetarian site. Maybe one of my facebook friends mentioned it, or something. It has no egg and no dairy, and was apparently a depression era invention.

Recipe: Crazy Cake
1 1/2 cups plain flour
1/3 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup sifted good quality cocoa
1 very high heaped teaspoon baking soda (bicarbonate of soda)
1 pinch salt
150g chocolate flakes (Dutch dark vlokken)
5 tablespoons rice bran oil
1 tablespoon raspberry vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup cold strong brewed coffee
1 tablespoon icing sugar

Preheat oven to 180C (170 fan-forced)
Sift together flour, sugar, cocoa, salt and bicarbonate of soda.
Mix the water, oil, vinegar, vanilla and coffee together.
Pour wet ingredients into dry ingredients and mix well.
Pour into a baking-paper lined 22cm square cake tin.
Bake for 30-40 minutes, until a test skewer comes out clean.
When cool, dust with icing sugar to serve.

Notes: Seriously, amazing. It works. The vinegar is important to react with the carb soda for leavening, it does not end up tasting vinegary. It's an American recipe, so the tablespoons are 15ml. (And the flakes weren't in there originally. I guess they were about 3/4 cup.)

If you look at the original recipe you'll see I have changed a bit, using coffee instead of water, a different type of vegetable oil and vinegar, a lot more cocoa, chocolate flakes, and a smidge less sugar and salt. And I lined the tin - and would recommend that strongly.

But I've got nothing on the commenter who said "1)I used whole wheat flour, 2)I used applesauce instead of oil, 3)I used a cup of sugar-free raspberry preserves instead of sugar, 4) I used rice milk rather than water, 5) I added 1 cup of Sunspire Grain Sweetened Chocolate Chips to the batter, 6)Rather than greasing the pan, I lined my cake pan with Reynolds Release Non-Stick Foil, which worked perfectly" I mean, is that even remotely the same cake?

If you do read the comments, you'll notice lots of other variations, and a couple of things that worried me - some said it was dry and tasteless. Well, lots of extra cocoa would have sorted the tasteless. I suspect it might go dry if you leave it in the oven too long? Anyway, mine came out moist and very fluffy. I may have overdone the bicarb. It actually seemed better the next day, when it had settled and solidified just slightly.

Gloria in Excelsis Deo

2010-12-17T10:15:00.004+11:00

A quick plug:

Traditional Kings' College Style Xmas carols and lessons at St Phil's, O'Connor, Sunday 7.30pm. Plenty of old favourite singalong carols, and some very interesting and fun choral pieces. Supper in the courtyard (weather permitting). I will be singing. Come along! All welcome, and it's free!

Note that - also in wonderfully traditional style - our local government has decided that NOW is the perfect time to resurface the driveway leading to the church parking area! I mean, who would be wanting to use a parking lot at Christmas? So, it's street parking only, and in O'Connor at that. Bicycles and feet are highly recommended as transport.

PS to those unfamiliar with church vocab: "lessons" means readings from the Bible, not actual lessons in, say, Latin grammar, or how to do long division. I must admit that there is a *little* bit of Latin, but I promise there is no quiz.

(No actual "read more" content, it's buggy. I'll fix this one day. Next year when the moon is blue.)

A big day

2010-12-12T15:29:00.012+11:00

I had a big day of cooking today, turning out 2 dozen molasses cookies, an impossible pie, a pot of poached apricots, an arrabiata pasta sauce and a roast chook for dinner. The cookies are for a work morning tea on Tuesday, and I'm hoping the pie will freeze well, so I can take it to a Friday evening Xmas thing.

The pie is from a Kerry Greenwood book - if you don't know these already, I highly recommend her as a writer of delightful Melbourne based cosy mysteries. In the Phryne Fisher series, it is always and eternally 1928. Private detective Phryne is a poor girl turned rich, with sound feminist, socialist and anti-racist sentiments, and a love of fast cars, fine food and beautiful young men. The Corinna Chapman series is set in modern times, and stars a baker of ample size who lives in the a classical themed apartment complex with many other interesting characters. Several books feature recipes at the back. This impossible pie is from her latest, Dead Man's Chest.

Recipe: Kerry's Impossible Pie
1/2 cup plain flour
1 cup caster sugar
3/4 cup coconut
1/4 cup flaked almonds
4 eggs
vanilla essence to taste
125g melted butter
1 cup milk
extra 1/4 cup flaked almonds to sprinkle on top.

* Mix everything together thoroughly.
* Pour into a greased pie dish, and sprinkle reserved almonds on top.
* Bake at 170C for 35-45 minutes, or until it seems all just set.

If you have too much to go in the pie dish, the remnant can be baked in a ramekin or two. I did one today - you can see it sitting there on the festive green and red silicon baking sheets. This is a good idea anyway - that way you can have a test serve and check out the taste and texture before taking it to the party it's planned for. For me that's next Friday night. So I really really hope it freezes well! Serve this warm or cold, on its own or with some stewed fruit - perhaps poached apricots? Yes. By the way, poached apricots are very nice with a dash of rosewater and a sprinkle of toasted flaked almonds.

The molasses cookies were also nice and easy, and a great success. They're sweet but with complexity from the molasses and spices. I got this recipe from an American blog called "Not Martha". She has some wonderfully gorgeous stuff there, like mini gingerbread houses for perching on the side of a mug of hot chocolate, and miniature fruit pies.

Recipe 2: Sparkling Chewy Molasses Cookies, by Not Martha.
2 cups plain flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda (bicarbonate of soda)
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 cup sugar
3/4 of a 250g packet salted butter, softened
1 large egg
1/4 cup molasses, blackstrap works well here
about 1/2 cup demerara sugar

* Beat the butter, sugar, egg and molasses together well.
* Sift the flour, spice and baking soda together.
* Add the flour to the butter/sugar mix and mix well.
* Spoon out tablespoons of dough at a time, roll to balls in your hands.
* Roll the balls of dough in the demerara sugar.
* Lay them out on a baking tray, about 5cm apart.
* Bake at 170C for 12-15 minutes, until the edges are firming up.
* Let cool on the tray for a few minutes before moving to a cooling rack.

Notes: this is American, but keeping the same proportions is OK. Although I used an Australian tablespoon, and this may be why mine cracked more than the picture in the original. I also baked 2 trays at once in my convection oven. I made 2 dozen (yes, two are missing from the picture, how odd!), and froze the third dozen unbaked.

I have removed the salt, but used salted butter; and I used cassia, which is commonly used as cinnamon in the US. It's a bit hotter than true cinnamon.

Molasses is available from health food shops, or you could use treacle. Microwaving your jar of molasses for 20-30 seconds makes it easy to pour.

Demerara sugar is a light brown sugar made to a larger crystal than regular raw sugar, but you could use raw sugar if demerara is hard to come by.

Couscous porridge

2010-11-24T17:42:00.000+11:00

With winter passing into memory for another year, we've still had enough of a Canberra spring - warm and sunny one day, freezing the next - to feature porridge. This is another find from my recent Jamie Oliver book, "Jamie Does..." a couscous porridge with apricots. There are two good concepts here, one is the honey-sweetened couscous as a porridge, and the other is the fresh, uncooked dried apricot dish.

Recipe: Couscous Porridge with Honey and Orange Apricots
200g couscous
500-600ml milk
2 tablespoons honey
200g dried apricots
1 orange
Extra honey, nuts and cinnamon to taste

Prepare the apricot compote in advance.

Zest and juice the orange.
Chop the dried apricots finely.
Just barely cover the dried apricots and orange zest with boiling water.
Let soak until cool, then drain off a little of the water and add the orange juice.
Soak overnight, and mash roughly with a fork.

When ready for breakfast, make the couscous.

Put the couscous, 500ml milk and 2 tablespoons honey in a saucepan.
Bring to a simmer, and let simmer for 5-10 minutes.
Add a little extra milk or water if it's getting too thick; it should be quite wet.
Serve with a dollop of the apricot mix, a drizzle of honey, a sprinkle of cinnamon, and some toasted pistachios or almonds.

Notes: Of course it's varied from the original - I so rarely follow recipes these days. Jamie Oliver serves this with pistachios that have been toasted on the spot, and drizzled with honey. I'm not fiddling with that at breakfast time. And he purees the apricots in a blender, while I prefer a more chunky style.

Ave atque Vale

2010-11-20T10:16:00.004+11:00

Hail to the Spring! I got to the growers' market for the first time this season, and it's obviously spring. Fresh new asparagus, garlic, cheap new snow peas and sugar snaps, early heirloom tomatoes, broad beans, mulberries and blueberries - and the first of the stone fruits are in. I didn't queue for a tray of nectarines, but I did buy cherries and blueberries.

Today's breakfast: watermelon, rose petal and green almond jam (from Silo), on buttered sourdough, with a side of fresh cherries and a small fresh squeezed OJ. *bliss*

Farewell to winter. The last of the oranges were there in profusion, and a stall selling fresh squeezed juice. A young chap up the back of the stall was pouring it from the juicer into bottles for easy takeaway. Borenore still has lovely apples from the cold store; it will still be two months for the new season.

And while I haven't been blogging I've noticed a few good things pass. So I'll tip the hat in sorrowful farewell to them now. My favourite pho place, Huong Viet, is now long gone and replaced with a pizza place. The wonderful TurkOz of Dickson has gone, to my great sorrow - they did the best pide in town, possibly excepting Mawson which is a bit far for me to go regularly. And in Manuka, Ironbark has folded, so there's no more of their wonderful native Australian foods - if you want a boab shoot salad or a bunya nut felafel, you'll have to seek out the ingredients and make it yourself. I'm also sad about the departure of El Torogoz, with its authentic central American cuisine. Goodbye and good luck!

A very belated Happy Birthday to me!

2010-11-09T22:15:00.000+11:00

Happy Birthday to me! I'm a hundred and three! I look like a monkey, I'm sure you'll agree.

OK, not really, but it was a contender for Worst. Birthday. Ever. I spent it on the couch snorting and snuffling with a nasty sinus infection, looking at all my facebook messages (which was nice) and failing to get a doctor's appointment. Luckily CALMS had appointments, so I got antibiotics on the Saturday and felt improved enough to bake, if not 100%. Even so, I had to get 2 more rounds of antibiotics after that one.

But damn, why was I writing that tripe? Pathetic whinging has its place but surely the entire point of a birthday post is CAKE!!! So let us discuss CAKE.

*deletes worst of whining*

The custom at work is to take in a cake for one's birthday. Tuesday was the next working day, so I baked on the public holiday Monday. I intended to make a chocolate chestnut cake, but I couldn't find the recipe in my half-hearted search, so instead I made a chocolate raspberry cake from Chocolate and Zucchini - not the blog, but the book. This is one of those cakes that's more like a fudgy mousse. Almost solid chocolate.

It's pretty easy to make, and quite impressive.

Recipe: Clotilde's Chocolate and Raspberry Cake, Cath's minor variation.
225g (and a bit) salted continental style butter
225g good dark chocolate
200g raspberries (frozen is fine)
Extra raspberries, to serve, optional.
200g sugar
4 eggs
50g self raising flour

Defrost raspberries if needed, and mash well.
Preheat the oven to 180C (or 160C fan forced)
Grease a 25cm springform pan thoroughly with a little more butter.
Roughly chop the butter and break up the chocolate, and place in a microwave safe bowl.
Microwave for 20 seconds, then remove and stir well.
Repeat this procedure until all the chocolate is melted.
Set aside to cool for 5 minutes.
Pour into a mixing bowl, and mix in the sugar, then the raspberry puree.
One at a time, break each egg into a cup, mix with fork, then blend in to the mix.
Sift the flour over and fold in gently.
Bake for 30 minutes, then turn the oven off and leave to cool for 10 minutes.
Remove from oven, place on a rack, run a knife around the edge and then loosen the spring form.
Leave to cool for an hour, then cover and place in fridge overnight.

Notes: To serve, slice thinly as it is very rich. Add a dollop of cream and a raspberry or two if desired.

The variations I used were minor - salted butter rather than unsalted butter plus salt; 10g extra flour; self raising rather than plain. I added the little more flour because the mix was so sloppy I thought it would help. Using self-raising was an accident from vagueness, but it seems to have worked fine.

Smug mode, on!

2010-11-05T19:34:00.000+11:00

Wow, has it really been over 3 months since I last posted? I wasn't intending to quit, but it's been hard to find the inspiration. I was rather annoyingly sick over a lot of winter, and also away on holiday for nearly a month and then immediately sick again when I got back. I did write a birthday cake post back in October, but it was so full of whining that I never got round to editing it to a fit state for publication. But now the weather is warming up and I'm feeling some inspiration at last!

Tonight I'm feeling VERY smug indeed. I got home from work about 6.30pm, and while The Bloke was off helping B1 with a dodgy internet connection, I managed to whip up a lentil and chorizo soup and a "spinach and cheese" damper made with silverbeet from the garden - and have dinner basically ready for 8pm when they came back. And to top it all off, we can have homemade gingerbread for dessert. A three part meal with all parts cooked from scratch! Not bad for a school night, if I do say so myself!

The soup was a recipe from AB, with some slight variation. The damper was a generic damper tweaked around. I'd picked the silverbeet on the weekend, as it was running to seed, and cleaned and steamed it and chucked it in the fridge, thinking of perhaps a mid-week frittata. The gingerbread I made on the weekend, to take in for a work morning tea. It's a recipe from an old favourite book, Elisabeth Ayrton's Cookery of England. A gorgeous fat Penguin paperback from 1977 full of regional and historical recipes; it was the first cookbook I ever had with history. And it has a recipe for home made crumpets which now that I think of it, I must do again sometime.

But first, here is tonight's menu:

Recipe 1: Red Lentil and Chorizo Soup
1 medium onion
2 cloves garlic
olive oil
1 tsp sweet paprika
3/4 tsp cumin
1 bay leaf
1 cup red lentils
120g pre-cooked chorizo, chopped
1 litre chicken stock
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1/2 - 2 tsp balsamic vinegar, to taste.

Finely chop the onions and garlic, and fry in the oil until golden.
Add spices and fry for another minute, then add the lentils and stock and all other ingredients except the balsamic.
Simmer for 35 minutes, then mix well and taste.
Add the balsamic half a teaspoon at a time, stir, taste and continue until you are happy with the result.

Note: You could fry chorizo slices with the onion if you don't have it pre-cooked on hand. Balsamic vinegar varies a lot in strength so it's best not to overdo it. Also, AB's recipe has 2 finely chopped celery sticks and specifies 800ml homemade stock. I used a tetrapack of Campbells, sorry AB!

Recipe 2: Silverbeet and Cheese Damper
300g white self-raising flour
150g wholemeal self-raising flour
90g butter
300g cooked, cooled, chopped silverbeet or spinach
120g sharp cheddar, grated
about 100ml milk
salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 200C
Cube the butter and rub it into the flour.
Add the cheese and silverbeet and mix well.
Add the milk bit by bit, stirring well, until it comes together in a soft, but not sticky, dough.
Dollop onto a baking sheet
Bake 30-40 minutes, until golden and a skewer comes out clean.

Notes: Drain the spinach really well after cooking. Squish it down hard to get as much water out as possible. Also, this would be good with fetta and some spring onions, but I didn't have any.

Recipe 3: Yorkshire Gingerbread
300g self-raising flour
2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
120g chopped dates
150g treacle or golden syrup
120g dark brown sugar
90g butter
1 egg
3/4 tsp bicarb soda, dissolved in 3 tsp milk

Preheat oven to 160C
Heat the butter and syrup in a small saucepan until the butter is melted. Set aside to cool a little.
Grease and flour a 25cm square cake tin.
Sieve flour, salt and spices together.
Add dates and mix well.
Beat together the egg and sugar.
Add the butter/syrup mix in dollops, to the flour, mixing as you go and alternating with dollops of the egg/sugar mix.
Stir in the bicarb/milk mix, and add water if the dough needs a little softening. It should be soft but not sloppy.
Dollop into cake tin and smooth out top.
Bake for 1.5 hours or until skewer comes out clean.
Cool on a rack.

Notes: This is quite a dry
gingerbread, and goes very well sliced thin, and buttered. I used a mix of 100g golden syrup and 50g treacle. I varied it by adding 30g of finely chopped glace ginger to the mix, which I definitely recommend.

Easy fruit loaf

2010-07-25T11:39:00.000+10:00

This is the tag end of a date, ginger and walnut loaf that I made a few weeks ago, to a dead simple recipe. I've made it three times now. The first time I encountered it was as a dessert, when our Easter visitor AB served it hot with a scoop of icecream. Mostly I've had it as a breakfast or snack loaf, either with butter or just plain. OK, once with Nutella. It takes five minutes to prepare, then a little over half a hour to bake.

The funniest thing about the recipe that A left me is the handwritten corrections: cook for 35-40 minutes, crossed out, no, ~~33 mins?~~ 35-36 mins! Now this is not foolish - AB is one sharp cookie. I have also had problems working out the time in my own oven. The loaf seems cooked and I poke a skewer in it and nothing clings. Yet when I cut it, there is a little unbaked patch in the middle. I must be missing the exact spot. So, yeah, I think it must be 38 minutes. Perhaps I'll get it right next time.

Recipe: Yoghurt Fruit Loaf
1 cup self raising flour
1 cup Greek yoghurt
1/2 cup soft brown sugar
1 cup dried fruit, chopped if large
1/2 cup nuts, chopped roughly
1/4 cup dessicated coconut

* Preheat oven to 170C
* Grease or line or otherwise prepare a 22x8cm loaf tin
* Mix all ingredients together
* Dollop out into the loaf tin
* Bake for ~~33 mins?~~ 35-38 mins or until a skewer inserted dead centre (and not a little bit off-centre) comes out clean.
* Cool in tin for 5 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack.
* Serve warm, or later on, toasted.

Note: AB likes dried cranberries, and I do too. Especially with some glace orange peel. Raisins and currants and chopped dried apricot works well, too. Date and walnut and glace ginger is another good option, but don't leave out the dessicated coconut like I did this time. The texture isn't as good without it. Full fat Greek yoghurt is best, but low fat is OK too.

And in other news, the freezer-emptying project continues. I've made a quick pasta arrabiata with a tub of frozen roast tomatoes, and random muffins with frozen blackberries and raspberries this morning. I'm finding that adding yoghurt to the random mix helps to keep them moister when cold.

Drawing Down the Freezer

2010-07-22T18:22:00.003+10:00

Next week there's going to be electricity pole maintenance, and we're scheduled for an all day power outage. Yikes! In this weather, the ordinary fridge stuff will be fine in an esky, or just with a bag of ice in the fridge. But I have a stuffed freezer.

And in an added stroke of bad timing, I had just decided to cook up a huge batch of chilli con skippy. What I do with this is make a generic mix of the meat with onion, garlic, veggies and tomatoes, then freeze a batch to convert to Spag Bog later. Mix the rest with your chosen spices and kidney beans, and some more veggies, make an inauthentic but yummy chilli, eat it for 2-3 meals and freeze half for later. This is very efficient. But not so great, actually, if you are going to be without power to your freezer.

So I've started drawing it down. It's time to do a chuck out anyway, and there were definitely quite a few things to be tossed. Gone is that pack of frozen prawns that didn't taste so great, but I thought would be OK for a curry. The kittens can eat the frozen chicken mince that I bought to tempt Shadow, and then could not bear to eat later. The pack of kidneys can go out, too. I turned a bit against them when suddenly we had cats with kidney disease, and my doc was making me have a kidney function test of my own. (No problem, a false alarm.) I'm over it now and would cheerfully make devilled kidneys, but now they are old and freezer burned. And that chocolate cake is at least 2 years old. Out with it!

But most of it is for eating, or for finding a safe stash for the day. I started by making pea soup on Monday, which used up a couple of things. And then I discovered to my shock that MasterChef has stolen my recipe!

I bought the magazine to check it out, and there it was, my pea soup! Oh, they'd disguised it by making it vegetarian, and leaving out the butter and cream and leek, so mine is actually better. But still, it's close. The colour is the same very bright green as in their picture in the magazine, not yellowy-green like an old fashioned pea and ham soup with dried peas.

Recipe: Green Pea Soup
1 leek
1 tablespoon butter
600g frozen peas
2 cups chicken stock
100ml cream
2 tsp mint in a tube
150g chunk ham
* Wash and chop the leek and fry gently in the butter.
* Add the stock and frozen peas, and bring to a simmer.
* Simmer for 15-20 minutes, then add cream and mint.
* Whiz up in the saucepan with a stick blender.
* Thin with water to desired texture.
* Add diced ham.
* Serve with buttered rye toast.

Notes: Adjust the taste at the end - a pinch of salt, perhaps if you're not adding ham. A pinch of sugar if they're cheap overgrown peas with too much starch, but not if they're baby peas or sugar snaps. I did use a mixed bag which had some sugar snaps in it. Obviously fresh mint would be better, but that Garden Gourmet tube mint is OK in a pinch. Vegetarians can use veggie stock and use the MasterChef idea of Persian Fetta sprinkled on top instead of the ham.

So there we go. A frozen tub of chicken stock and a pack of peas gone from the freezer. And I had Maggie Beer lemon icecream for dessert - leftover from Easter, but still good. I took a frozen pasta leftover thing in for lunch at work today, and tonight we're eating sausages, oven chips and more frozen peas.

There's still far too much to eat before next Friday, though I will do my best. I still have roast tomatoes, several packs of rhubarb, some more icecream, some soy-cooked chicken, more chicken stock and turkey stock, and quite a variety of meat and berries. Oh, and some chilli and the makings of a spag bog.

Making the most of a truffle

2010-07-17T13:54:00.004+10:00

Yep, scrambled eggs.

So, as is becoming customary, I apologise for not posting much these days. I have been thinking of taking up tweeting, because that way I could have said stuff like "Hi all, truffles at EPIC market this week!" and "Hey, 40% discount on cookbooks at Borders this weekend" at a time when it was actually relevant. Like two weeks ago. Too late now. I intend to get a fancy new iphone sometime soonish, but meanwhile I am such a late adopter that I still haven't got round to net connecting my old Nokia.

So, sorry if you almost missed truffle season. There are still some remnants around - the Truffle Festival runs for the whole month of July, and there's truffle dinners still happening at Flint, Pulp Kitchen and Locanda.

My way to make the most of truffles is pretty much what I did last year. Buy a small piece, pop it in a box of risotto rice and fresh eggs, and let it infuse for a week. I only had about 15g, and by the end of the week it was a bit less. It dehydrates somewhat during the infusion process.

I used a third to add to about 300g of mushrooms, panfried in butter. Two thirds of these went into a simple mushroom and leek risotto, made with the infused rice and another third of the truffle. The final third went into the scrambled eggs, which were made with the infused eggs. And voila: truffled scrambled eggs, served with truffled mushrooms, sourdough toast and a fried tomato.

At that Borders sale I bought the new Jamie Oliver book - I'm not crazy about his TV personality, but I do like his cooking style and his recipes. This one is "Jamie Does...", based on a TV series that I haven't seen and probably won't. He goes to Fance, Italy, Morocco and more, and this is the recipe collection. He has a truffled omelet recipe in the French section, where he uses 5g black truffle for 3 eggs. I had more eggs, but they were infused.

And remember those lentils? They were from the same Jamie book. And just to make sure I didn't miss out on any truffled goodness, when I saved the mushrooms for risotto, I deglazed the pan with some Fino sherry and chucked that into the lentils. I didn't mention that last time, because it's not reproducible.

PS: No, I do not like Master Chef either.

The Best Lentils Ever

2010-07-04T19:53:00.004+10:00

According to Jamie Oliver, that is. And since I futzed around with them, probably not exactly, but they were damn fine. Unphotogenic, though.

I've just finished Sunday dinner in front of Dr Who, with a plate of slow cooked lamb on a bed of lentils, with home made mint sauce and roast potato, pumpkin, onion and fennel, and steamed broccoli. With a 1999 cab sav, Harper's Range by Seppelt. I went on line to look for it, and found it's still only $25 a bottle, so we didn't score very much by keeping it in the cupboard for almost a decade. Oh well. It's very yummy anyway, and at least it didn't go off.

I was very pleased with this. If you've ever made one of those lentil dishes with some fatty meat, you know you're supposed to add some vinegar to finish it. Balsamic, almost certainly. And if you are a roast lamb traditionalist, you will be thinking mint sauce. And if you are old enough, then you will remember fresh mint from the garden, chopped with sugar and doused in excessively potent malt vinegar.

Sooo... Balsamic or Malt? Hmmm... I've solved this: neither. Mint sauce old-style - but made with Homeleigh Grove Apple citrus vinegar. It's much more delicate, but still assertive enough to add the required sharpness to the lentils.

Recipe: Not Quite Jamie Oliver's French Lentils with Lamb
2 cups Puy lentils
2 carrots
2 onions
3 cloves garlic
1 small leek (2cm diameter)
1 medium potato
splash olive oil
splash brandy or cognac
1 litre beef stock
Bouquet garni
--
A small lamb roast
--
2 tablespoons mint leaves
2 tablespoons vinegar
1 teaspoon caster sugar

* Chop the carrot and onion small, and fry gently in a good glug of olive oil until onion is translucent.
* Add chopped leek and finely chopped or crushed garlic and fry another minute or so.
* Deglaze with a splash of brandy, then add in stock.
* Add lentils, chopped potato and bouquet garni.
* Cover and simmer for 30 minutes.
* Add lamb to the top of the lentils.
* Cover and bake at 150C for 2 hours.
* Uncover and give lentils a good stir, crushing the potato in to make a creamy base.
* Squidge the lamb down into the lentils, so it's mostly covered; skin side up and uncovered.
* Bake for another half hour uncovered.
* Remove from oven and let rest for half an hour.
* Chop mint leaves with the sugar sprinkled over (this helps to bruise them). Put in a small jug and stir in the vinegar.

To serve, remove lamb and carve up. Put a mound of lentils on the plate, top with sliced lamb and pour over a generous serve of mint sauce.

Notes: My bouquet garni was a generous sprig of rosemary and thyme, tied up in string with 3 fresh bay leaves. I used Australian Puy-style lentils, available from most gourmet delis. My lamb roast was a small leg - just 1.3kg. I can't remember who raised the lamb, but it was from one of the stall-holders at EPIC.

The half hour rest gives you time to turn up the oven and crisp up a tray of baked veggies - they can be started for an hour in the slow oven.

We have lots of leftovers from this meal, and I only made enough mint sauce for one go. I'll have to do more sauce for the re-heat.

Jamie's recipe uses parsley instead of rosemary, and duck fat instead of olive oil; and veggie stock instead of beef. For meat, he has confit duck added right at the end, instead of the lamb cooked in the lentils, and he adds a swirl of creme fraiche at the end. No mint sauce, of course - Jamie uses balsamic vinegar. His lentils only take 45 minutes, with no baking, so his is the quicker option unless you confit your own duck. But they won't be as richly meaty as mine!

Things I've learned

2010-06-22T11:47:00.005+10:00

Recently I was looking at cracked.com, that scary site of internet crack; it's second only to tvtropes.org in addictiveness. Just ONE more funny list. I'll just follow that ONE more link. No, OK just ONE more. Oh, I wonder what that next one is like. Hang on, how did it get to be 3am? So with due warning given, look at just this ONE list of the 10 most important things they didn't teach you in school. It's hilariously and totally true, all of it.

In the spirit of that, but on a very much lesser scale, here are some things I've learned recently.

1) You know when you cut yourself while chopping up food, and put on a bandaid really tightly, because you remember from first aid that compression stops bleeding? Always remember to loosen it within the hour. Ow.

2) You really shouldn't pot roast one of those heart-tick extra lean cuts of meat. It will come out much too dry.

3) An overly dry piece of meat can be turned into a rather good cottage pie, by chopping it very finely and adding tomato paste, herbs, stock, wine, carrots, onions, peas etc, then simmering together for an hour or so to meld. Then add a good topping of mash and bake until hot.

4) You don't have to peel your spuds under cold running water. Dunking them in a bowl of warmish water will do nicely, once to peel, once to rinse clean. It feels much better in midwinter, and it saves water.

5) Don't use a serrated knife to chop up cold (dry) meat. Use a chef's knife or carving knife. (See point one.)

On the importance of shopping

2010-06-11T19:15:00.003+10:00

It's almost a cliche now that the best chefs do their marketing in person. You have to get in on the ground to find the best and freshest, to get a nose for what's in season. You see this on TV shows from Iron Chef via Jamie Oliver to Rick Stein - and our own local Jan Gundlach actually has his premises right there at the Fyshwick market. Of course in reality, a lot of top chefs will outsource this task to trusted providores, but it's nevertheless true that to get a great meal, somebody has to have done a great job of the shopping.

It's even more true when you're not making stuff from scratch. I've made this same pasta dish twice now. And while it was from the identical recipe, the results were spectacularly different. One was sublime, the other just rated "meh, not too bad, it will do for a week night".

The recipe is from a little cookbook produced as a work social club fundraiser. I bought it on the day I started the new job. We have several keen cooks where I work, though why they insist on doing their Red Cross fundraiser bake sales on a Friday I don't know. I can easily bake stuff on a Sunday arvo, but Thursday night is beyond me. Just this Sunday past I made roast chicken in the Stephanie Alexander style (lemon and rosemary and olive oil) with accompanying baked veg; a beef potroast braised in Guinness with parsnips and prunes; a leek and potato soup; I got some tandoori chicken wings on to marinade; and I roasted tomatoes for a dhal. But Thursday? On Thursday, it's eat leftovers or eat out. Or I could make this pasta.

Here is the fantastic/meh pasta recipe.

Recipe: Tortellini with bacon and pesto cream sauce
1 packet bought tortellini (or ravioli)
1/2 cup pesto
3/4 cup cream
4 short cut bacon rashers
150g baby spinach leaves
A handful of pine nuts

* Cook pasta according to packet directions, in lots of boiling water.
* Meanwhile, lightly toast the pine nuts and chop the bacon.
* Drain the pasta and set aside.
* Spray pan with a little olive oil and fry the bacon for a couple of minutes.
* Add pinenuts, pesto, and cream, and mix well.
* Stir in the baby spinach and let just barely wilt.
* Stir through the pasta.

Serve with a sprinkle of good parmesan and a salad or steamed broccoli. It's quite rich from the cream.

The "Fantastic" options:
I used Wee Jasper Pasta spinach, ricotta and pinenut ravioli. These people sell their handmade pasta at the EPIC markets on the 2nd and 4th Saturdays of the month. And the pesto was made by chef Tom Moore of Gundaroo Grazing restaurant, with basil from their garden. I doubt he'll be making more until next summer.

The "Meh" options:
I used Latina fresh spinach & ricotta ravioli, and a pesto that I found in the supermarket. It's called "inspire", and it's really rather good for its genre. It does at least contain some pine nuts, which most supermarket brands don't.

Notes: to toast pine nuts, toss them in a dry frying pan on the rangetop, or a pie plate in the oven which you shake regularly. Watch closely, they will burn very quickly once they start to change colour. You want golden, not dark brown!

Handmade Food

2010-06-06T16:17:00.005+10:00

The handmade market was on yesterday. If you haven't discovered these already, you should check them out! I'm a huge fan. The market seems to have found a stable venue at the Kamberra Wine Centre, after outgrowing the Albert Hall and trying out the Yarralumla Woolshed. The next one will be 11th September - a great chance to start your Xmas shopping. But if you want to get in earlier, there's now also a shop in Civic which has a good selection of the various designers' wares.

The philosophy of Handmade is that the stuff it sells is, well, handmade. It is to local arts and crafts people what the Growers' market is to to local farmers and small food producers. You'll find cards, books, quilts and quilt supplies, felted gear, handmade clothes, bags, teapots, jewelry, slippers and much more. This is the first time that I did not come home with a piece of jewelry by cardog. But I did get a new top by Wendy Leigh - it's made of stretch dark green rayon ribbed velvet, with a black knit cowl neck and a small black lacy sequinned feature.

And then there's the food! Well, here's the full list. Most of them will be familiar if you go to the EPIC and Kingston markets. There's a mix of people selling things to take home and things to eat there. The large area out the back had plenty of seating, an entertainer making balloon animals for the kids, and lots of yummy food for sale. Gourmet pizza and sausages and muffins and more. Also, for the grown-ups, there's Zierholz beer, and local wines and spirits. I wasn't entirely persuaded by the Grog Shed, run by Wombat Heights Liqueurs. I'm not a fan of fruit wines, but if you are, why not give it the walnut rum and cherry port a try.

And scattered through the front open air markets and the indoor stalls were many other food producers. The Curious Chocolatier was there, and I bought a bar of dark choc with walnuts and honey. She makes mostly bars rather than individual pieces, in some very unusual flavours. Coffee and fennel, anyone? Strawberry and Szechuan pepper? There was Lindsey and Edmunds, too, and the Lime Grove and Homeleigh Grove people, and some people making popcorn and caramelised nuts (not together, though I must ask why not?)

And cupcakes - there was not one but two cupcake makers. The ones illustrated are amazing pieces of fondant and buttercream art, from Liz Wright at pARTycakes. I had to buy some for arvo tea - a friend was making a flying visit to Canberra for lawyer and accountant reasons, and a good cup of tea and a cupcake was clearly needed. (And a martini, but that's The Bloke's specialty.) The cakes are not just decorative, but also good to eat. Thankfully, Wright's fondant isn't so sweet as to make you gag, as some are. The cakes themselves are on the solid mudcake side rather than fluffy sponge, good moist rich chocolate and caramel flavours. At $25 for six, these are special occasion cakes.

The other cupcake seller's wares were a little cheaper at $4 per cake, and less dramatically artistic in presentation. They were topped with simple buttercream swirls. But they are good cake - I had a passionfruit one, also quite dense and moist. These are made by A Moment on The Lips, who will deliver you a dozen cupcakes, as well as do more arty things. Check out the gorgeous cupcake bouquets on their website! And they had a very cute fondant sculpted baby dragon and egg cake on display.

The other stuff that I bought was from Crankypants - I know they're regulars at Kingston, but for some reason I don't make it there often enough. I got some proper piccalilli, lemon curd, and smoky caramelised onions. The onions were great topping homemade steak sangers last night. Lemon curd on crumpets for breakfast, and a cheese, tomato and piccalilli sandwich for lunch. Yum.

Feijoa time again

2010-05-23T14:18:00.012+10:00

It's almost a month since I last posted. I don't have any major food news, since for a lot of that time I was sick - a nasty cold developed into an even nastier chest infection, for which I've been taking mega-antibiotics and using an inhaler of nasty tasting drugs. Bleah. What can I say? Tinned soups and spaghetti is pretty dull stuff, but at least I did get to eat my stewed quinces and apples - pretty good to perk up a tub of Le Rice. I like the caramel or vanilla flavours, heated up with the stewed fruit.

Meanwhile, the garden has delivered the last of the season's rhubarb, a bucket of feijoas and three mutantly huge butternut pumpkins. Well, stewed or roast rhubarb is lovely, and pumpkins make good mash, baked veg or soup. Or a sweet spicy pie filling, though not everyone agrees... But what is there to do with feijoas?

I've been eating the best of them for my lunchtime fruit, feeling very exotic as I stand in the kitchen at work peeling them and cutting them up onto a plate, along with a sliced persimmon. I prefer to leave them for a couple of days after collection, to soften a little before eating. The inside goes from greeny-white to cream, to pale beige, to deeper beige to brown as it ages. I find the cream stage is best, and I cut off anything past the palest of beige. I'm also not mad on the skins, so I usually peel them. But it is actually edible.

Last year I made a feijoa chutney, which I speculate was invented by someone who was very sick of feijoas. It was more like a Branston pickle, sharp, dark and malty, and I still have masses of it left. This year I decided to try a jam instead. And since feijoa isn't exactly my favourite fruit, I thought of zesting it up with some ginger for interest. This is my first attempt, based loosely on a recipe found on the net somewhere random. If I do this again next year, I'll add even more ginger.

Recipe: Feijoa and Ginger Jam
1.5 kg feijoas
2 lemons
150 g preserved ginger (glace or crystallised)
5 cups sugar

* Chop the ginger finely.
* Wash the lemons, halve and juice one half piece. Save the skin.
* Put the juice of half a lemon in a large bowl, with about 3 cups cold water.
* Peel and chop the feijoas quite small, dropping the pieces into the lemon water as you go.
* Transfer 375ml of the water to a large jam pan.
* Strain the feijoas and add them to the pan.
* Add the chopped ginger, the juice of the 1.5 remaining lemons, and the lemon rinds in large pieces.
* Bring to a simmer and cook for 15-20 minutes.
* Add the sugar and turn up the heat.
* Stir until dissolved, and then boil rapidly until set point is reached (10 minutes).
* Remove the lemon.
* Pour into sterilised jars, and seal.

Notes: To get 1.5kg of feijoas, you will need 2-3 kg of raw fruit, depending how bruised they are. They do say not to use bruised fruit for jam, to which I say - nonsense! Sure, don't use the actual bruised part, but just chop it off and use the good bit. Feijoas fall from the tree when they are ripe enough, and they often have a bruised portion if they land on hard surfaces like a concrete footpath. So here we see the upper one is brown and goopy - into the compost. Lower one, fine. Cut off bruised bit, at left.

Also, jam setting time is a little random. The lemons provide the pectin here, as well as a dash of flavour, but you could use jamsetta instead, and follow the packet directions.

I clean my jars very simply: wash them in the dishwasher and set aside in the cupboard until needed. Then pop them in a sink of very hot water and leave for 10 minutes. Then put them in a warm oven to dry off. Put their lids on when it's still hot.

Jam is really very forgiving; the sugar is a powerful preservative. Scare stories about bottling tend to be about preserving vegetables, with no sugar involved. Chemical sterilisation and very careful attention to detail is much more important there - and one reason among many why I don't actually do that. (Not often having a surplus of veg, and the existence of tins and supermarket freezer sections are other reasons.)

More Autumn Gold

2010-04-30T19:53:00.000+10:00

Pretty! Here are some quinces sitting in the dish, when I was testing them to see if they would fit. They cme from Pialligo, via Choku Bai Jo. The next step was to wash all the fluff off, and chop off the stem ends and get them ready for roasting. I put them on the bottom shelf of the oven, which I was roasting some tomatoes on the top shelf.

Recipe: Pot roast quinces
5 quinces
150ml honey
vanilla bean shards
Wash quinces well, chop off the tops and trim the tail, and place in a pot just the right size to wedge them all in upright.
Pour over the honey, and drop in the vanilla.
Add water to cover two thirds of the way up.
Bake slowly at 120-140C for two or three hours, turning a couple of times.
If it seems to be getting too dry, put the cover on the pot for the last hour or so.

Notes: the cooking time is quite arbitrary, they can go a very long time without disintegrating. They blush a pale pink when just done, and the longer you cook them, the darker this colour gets, all the way to a deep burgundy. You can eat the skins, or peel them off if you don't like the texture. But do cook them in the skin, it helps to enrich the juices.

Serve warm with cream or icecream (Maggie Beer's quince & bitter almond would be a nice luxury). Cut some up to go with porridge or yoghurt for breakfast. Cover with a sponge topping for an old fashioned pudding or scone dough for a cobbler. Whatever you like to do with stewed fruit.

I used up the remnants of the vanilla bean I'd used in the creme caramel, washed of course. And a large part of a jar of generic honey that I thought was a bit boring. I prefer my honeys powerful, like stringybark and ironbark, or interesting like lavender, coffee-blossom and orange-blossom. This was a good way to use it up.

Old fashioned things, and the importance of numeracy

2010-04-26T16:00:00.007+10:00

My good friend B1 has been out of town a lot, for personal reasons that I won't go into on this blog. Recently she was back, and hinted shamelessly at me about lamb shanks and creme caramel. So what could I do but comply? I even managed to put this together on a weeknight by dint of moderate planning ahead.

I didn't quite manage enough forward planning to get market lamb, so I had to get the shanks from Woolworths, who sell them as whole bones, not the easier to manage French trimmed version. They're not particularly cheap - they averaged about $4.50 a piece, which for the actual amount of meat makes it's cheaper to buy a hunk of rump steak.

I do actually remember when they were cheap - the offcut bit, good for a soup, or a cheap family meal, but not fit to bring out for company. That was before the revival of the slow cooked homestyle food in fancy restaurants. My Mum hasn't kept up with the trends, and a while ago was horrified when some visiting friends chose to eat lamb shanks at a fancy restaurant. To her generation, it sounds like ordering spam. But really, it's good - I remember trying to bags the shank end of the lamb roast whenever possible. Sticky, tender and full of flavour.

I more or less followed this recipe from allrecipes.com.au, which involves browning the meat & veg, then a slow cook in red wine, tomatoes and stock, with lots of herbs, and in my addition, some strips of lean bacon. For six lamb shanks, that's two tins of tomatoes and a whole bottle of red, then stock to top up. Then it's overnight in the huge cooking pot in a very slow oven (120) - my slow cooker was too small to take them. Simply reheat for dinner. I served it with mash, which I enriched with a little leftover cream, and frozen baby peas. Half the shanks minus bone, and most of the veg and sauce went into the freezer, to be a ragout later on. With the Italian tomato, garlic and rosemary flavours, it should go well with pasta.

I had leftover cream, of course, from the creme caramel. This is another easy one to cook ahead, I made the caramel on a Monday night, baked the custard on Tuesday and served them on Wednesday. In this case, I used a Maggie Beer recipe, from the Maggie's Harvest book. I looked up several to get the proportions, and decided to use the one with the whole eggs. I have too many egg whites in the freezer already.

The importance of numeracy comes in here. Check the recipe and see if you can spot the problem!

Recipe: Maggie Beer's Creme Caramel
110g sugar
125ml water
-
4 large eggs
125g caster sugar
250ml cream
300ml milk
1 vanilla bean

First, make the caramel. Put the sugar and water in a small saucepan and heat until sugar is dissolved. Continue to heat until it turns into a dark amber colour - watch carefully when it first starts to turn, because it can be quite quick to change. Pour the hot caramel into 4x120ml capacity individual ramekins, and swirl a little to get it around the edges. Leave to set.

Heat the milk and cream together with the vanilla bean and scraped out seeds. Bring to just off boiling, then remove from heat and let cool. Overnight is fine. Later, make the custard by beating the eggs, sugar and re-warmed vanilla infused milk together. Strain this into a jug.

Prepare a large roasting tin with a folded tea-towel on the base, then the caramel ramekins. Pour the custard into the ramekins in situ, then gently pour hot water around them to soak the tea towel. Fill up as high as you can manage around the edges of the ramekins, without getting water into the custard when you move it.

Bake in a 180 degree oven for 25 minutes, or until set. Allow to cool in their water-bath, then refrigerate until ready. To serve, run a knife around the edge of the ramekin and invert it onto a plate. The caramel will mostly have dissolved into a sauce, though if you've done a thick layer there may be some left.

Notes: Actually I reduced the sugar in the custard from the 145g in the recipe, and slightly changed the milk/cream balance because I had low fat milk in the house. (Hers: 375ml milk, 190ml cream.)

And did you spot it? If the eggs make up about 200ml, then what we have here is about 650ml of custard. This is not going to fit into 4x120ml ramekins! I spotted the need to get more ramekins - I used six. I also increased the caramel amount by half, which I think was unnecessary, since the caramel layer came out much thicker than it needed to be.

Making the caramel dark gives it a bitter-sweet sharp edge, which makes the dessert more interesting and less cloying. You can make it a bit lighter, if you prefer.

Achacha!

2010-04-15T22:56:00.000+10:00

Bless you!

Is it an egg? Was that an Easter display? No, actually this is a fruit. Though adding some tamarillos and some real eggs might make it into a good Easter display, it's unfortunately very tightly seasonal at the moment. February only.

It's from Bolivia, via Far North Queensland, with a last stop at Ziggy's, in Belconnen Fresh Food Market. I picked up a few to try, way back on some Sunday in February, and I was glad that I thought to check the web first. It came with a little leaflet explaining how you pop them open and slip out the fruit, but that didn't explain that you can infuse the skins for a drink.

Here's some recipes from the growers' website. It's quite a good website for a food supplier: real information, pretty pictures, recipes, no funky but unusable flash, no boring corporate speak. Well done, them!

The fruit is a relative of the mangosteen, and is called achachairu when it's at home. It's got quite large stones which the fruit clings to, and it's a bit tarter and less perfumed than the mangosteen, though with a very similar texture. And cheaper. I'll be looking out for them next year.

I ate them straight, and put the skins in a jar of water in the fridge to infuse. After 24 hours it was quite well coloured, and tasty. It's a little tart and fruity, but much lighter than a juice. More like an iced tea. I didn't think it needed sugar, but then I like my iced tea unsweetened, too.

What happened at Easter

2010-04-10T10:29:00.007+10:00

Plenty! Of course we had the Folk Festival, with our regular visitors A,J & C. Eight year old C was very taken with the kittens, and so we need another photo of them. (Any excuse, eh?) Here they are being uncharacteristically quiet and well-behaved. Archie on the left, Zeppo on the right.

Anyway, this means our annual dinner, and lots of fast food at the folkie. The festival food is actually remarkably good - plenty of fresh veggie options and good ethnic eating. With some junk if you want it, but why would you? The satay chicken and fritter people were my favourite this year. They had chicken breast (or tofu) skewers with thick peanut sauce, served on jasmine rice with a fresh beansprout salad; or zucchini, fetta & corn fritters with sourcream and smoky tomato relish - bacon optional. Spaghetti Junction is another favourite - I do love seeing the fresh spaghetti come spiralling out of the pasta machine. They do a very good vegetarian puttanesca - no anchovies, but with almonds - and their creamy walnut sauce is rather fine, too.

We had our dinner on Friday night, to which HH brought her terrific pot roast chickens in vermouth, with potatoes. I provided entrees, veggies and dessert. All was very successful. The chicken went on to make a few sandwiches and some rather excellent stock which I'm planning to use tonight in a risotto.

For entrees, I went modern and did goat cheese and caramelised onion tartlets set on a salad of rocket and balsamic dressed beetroot. I made up the recipe as I went along, and then I found that it's such a common idea that mine is pretty much the same as the one that's first up when you google. Delia Smith's, in this case. Though I used a plain shortcrust and no thyme, and I made half of them with blue cheese. The goat cheese was a very mild one that I picked up at Choku Bai Jo; the beetroot also from them, home baked then tossed with balsamic glaze.

For veggies, I did yellow pattypan squash roasted with olive oil and herbs (rosemary and bay from the garden). I also steamed some green beans, and tossed through a bit of butter and toasted slivered almonds to make them a bit more special.

And for dessert I wanted to make Key Lime Pie, but I don't know if you can even get key limes of lime juice in Australia. I used plain old Tahitian limes. I followed an Epicurious recipe, noting some suggestions from the comments. If you have a smaller pie plate than specified, the basic recipe could work. But if you have a deeper 25cm spring form pan, then double the filling quantity is definitely the way to go. It would look pretty pathetic at half the depth. I also added the zest of the limes, and used an entire pack of granita biscuits, and did not bother baking the crumb crust. The picture's not the best, but it's an idea. This is quite delicious, and I served shop bought icecream on the side - Maggie Beer's orange and lemon curd, and Serendipity blood orange sorbet.

I remembered near the last minute that pregnant people aren't supposed to eat uncooked eggs, and the pie does contain egg that is probably not heated enough. So I thought of an alternative, and made some poached pears for P. This was a very lucky, as it's a great favourite of hers. Here's the recipe I made up - very easy!

Recipe: Caramel Cider Pears
4 firm pears
375ml cider
4 tblsp dark brown sugar
1 cinnamon stick
Peel the pears, leaving them whole. Do not remove the stalk, but do cut off any fibre-y bits at the base.
Put the pears in a saucepan, with the cider, sugar and cinnamon.
Poach gently for 1 1/2 hours, turning regularly to get even coverage.
Leave the saucepan lid on for the first hour, then remove lid to reduce sauce.

Serve these warm with some Maggie Beer burnt fig, honeycomb and caramel icecream if you can!

Notes: I used corella pears, and a stubby of strongbow dry that someone had left behind at a party sometime - we're not cider drinkers. And also, on the night, I included a somewhat old golden delicious apple, which completely fell to bits and made the sauce a bit thicker and more apple-y.

We Have Kittens

2010-03-27T21:38:00.004+11:00

Kittens! Two of them! We're still thinking of names, though the dapper chap with white shirt and spats is probably Archie. The other one isn't Misty or Smoky or Hazy or anything so trite, but we're not sure what he is called. For a placeholder, he's Silver.

Plummet isn't happy about it, but we expect he'll adjust. There's been a bit of hissing and sulking. It's going to be a bit complicated for a while, especially since we have houseguests arriving in a few days for the folk festival, and the kittens are bivouacked in the main bathroom. Perhaps we can move them to the bar.

I was thinking of making a key lime pie for our annual co-operative dinner, since I have a bag of limes, but I seem to have got it mixed up. I thought key limes were the small West Indian ones, but now that I read more, they seem to be more closely related to the Tahitian kind, except smaller. Oh well, I can make some sort of lime tart anyway. And I can buy some Maggie Beer Lemon curd icecream, since I will be working Mon-Thurs and not have much time to do anything fancy.

Tomorrow, by the way, is the Handmade Market. Always worth checking out, this time it's at the Kamberra Wine Company just up the road from me.

O hai, I can has weekend?

2010-03-21T20:13:00.012+11:00

I haven't had many at-home weekends recently. I've been madly gadding about like a mad gadding thing. I've been to the Goulburn Blues Festival; Corinbank; a friend's birthday (staying away the night); visiting a friend in Sydney; and last weekend I was off to the global atheist convention in Melbourne. It's been fun, but exhausting - this sort of schedule doesn't mix well with full-time work. But yes! I have finally had a weekend at home! And I even have another whole free weekend before we have our Easter houseguests.

For a while I was feeling a bit guilty about not blogging, but I got over it. It's supposed to be some fun for me, not an obligation. I do keep thinking about it, so I don't think I'm over the whole blogging thing yet. Plummet decided to wake me up at 4.30 this morning, so I'm feeling a bit ordinary. But nevertheless I've had a good go in the kitchen, and am feeling quite proud of my production, and feel like telling the world.

Hello, world! Today I made roast tomatoes, stewed rhubarb with mixed berries, Thai red curry pork with veggies, and a spinach and cheese potato bake. The spinach and spring onions in the potato bake, as well as the rhubarb were from the garden, so that's extra gratifying. And yesterday I took a cake baked in the octopus shaped tin along to Skeptics in the Pub, where PZ Myers was speaking.

The curry was just from a paste, Mae Ploy brand. I used some lean pork, and added eggplant, green beans, red capiscum and bamboo shoots. And I used light coconut milk, not the proper rich coconut cream kind, so it's a bit thin. It's OK for an easy dinner, though it's a bit hotter than I intended! My previous tub of Thai red curry paste was Maesri brand, which I now know is milder.

The spinach bake is a trifecta of virtue: home grown veggies, using up some things that were on their last legs, and preparing for the work week in advance. Can you actually see my halo? *ting*

There's no recipe per se, but this is what I did.

* I mixed together a tub of low fat cottage cheese, some leftover fetta marinaded in olive oil & sumac, and 7 eggs. All of these were very close to their use-by dates.
* I ground in some pepper and chucked in some extra sumac, pine nuts, a handful of grated parmesan, a couple of crushed cloves of garlic, and three chopped spring onions from the garden.
* I picked lots of spinach from the garden, washed it and chopped it roughly. Microwaved it to wilt it, then wrung it out and chopped it up.
* I decided there wasn't enough spinach for me, so I defrosted about 250g of frozen spinach and added it in.
* Oiled a cake tin that seemed about the right size. (It's silicon, but I'm getting less trusting about the non-stick qualities of that where eggs are concerned.)
* Washed, peeled and finely sliced up four large potatoes (Dutch cream, they really are quite yellow).
* Layered it the cake pan - potato, spinach, potato, spinach, potato, spinach, potato.
* Took a picture part way through the layering.
* Baked it at 150C for half an hour, then added a bit more parmesan on top and baked it for a further twenty minutes.

And that's it - I made it up as I went along. I don't know yet exactly what it tastes like, since I haven't cut it open, but I'm sure it will be fine. It's hard to go wrong with spinach and cheese. And it will come in very handy this week. It can be reheated in wedges in the microwave, as cafes often do with their frittatas, or in a slow oven.

Reasons for not blogging

2010-02-20T12:21:00.004+11:00

* Too tired, because I'm not getting enough sleep, because Plummet wants to show off his mice at 2am and 4am.
* Getting used to 5 day weeks again.
* Out of town for the Blues Festival.
* Out of town for a friend's birthday.
* Moving all my stuff from one computer to another, so I could give my old one to B1, who is stuck in Sydney for the long term.
* Manually rebuilding all my photo libraries, contacts, bookmarks etc since Migration Assistant didn't do it right.
* Trying to get ahead with my Canberra Times stuff, so the editor can have a break.
* A new Mystery Case Files game.

I haven't actually given up. I have a few plans and partial posts waiting in the wings. Now that I've got my phone resynched and my camera connection reset, I can upload the photos to go with them. But now I have to go shopping. It's time to get the weekend food prep underway, and I need to buy some cream to fatten the cat.

ONA Coffee

2010-02-10T22:35:00.000+11:00

This has been popping up all over town recently, but the home site is in Belconnen, obscurely tucked into the Benjamin Offices, Aqua building level 3. It's open to the public and a walking ramp goes up there from the big carpark up the back. Ostensibly a normal Public Service lunch spot, this is actually something quite special. Great coffee! In Canberra!

They seem to have quite a big business going - apart from the cafe, there's roasting and distributing coffee complete with cafe fitout, and office lunch catering. The cafe has some flyers which are, sadly, very desperately in need of a good proof-read. Even their slogan "Pure Decadence" is spelt wrong. And who knew that a coffee company might need barristers? Their baristas have been winning awards, for espresso as well as for coffee art, but their barristers' achievements seem unsung. And don't get me started on the apostrophes and the cemicals and the ceaser salad.

Oh well, with coffee this good, what more do they need? Apparently, a curry chef! There's a curry of the day ($10) every weekday, and it's made in house from their own fresh ground spice blends. I had lunch there on Monday with infoaddict, who had a red beef curry - not a Thai red style, it was more rendang like. Thick, rich, spicy, with a nice chilli bite, it was terrific. I got her to pick me up a takeaway on Tuesday, which turned out to be a green Thai veggie curry - again rich, thick, and with enough chilli to bite back. Perfect to reheat for an instant dinner. Yum.

Internet blackout week is over

2010-02-08T21:36:00.008+11:00

...and I'm going to pretend that's why I didn't post last week. Not that I was too busy playing games, or drinking too many martinis, or going to work, or too busy doing Canberra Times stuff or anything. Not at all. Lalalala internet blackout week.

Last week's food highlight was that I finally managed to visit Ellacure. For a couple of years it's been a favourite of several people I know, and yet I never got there. But now it's just round the corner from me. I had lunch there with infoaddict last week, and this pic is my amazing green veggie risotto with pesto and spinach and asparagus ($18). It was very delicious, as long as you enjoy a light style - not so creamy and cheesy as risottos often are. But lots of good strongly flavoured bits and pieces.

Infoaddict had the open chicken BLT ($16), which came with some rather nice chips and a mustard aioli. We had coffees ($3.50), and they are also pretty good, especially by Canberra standards. It's not the cheapest place, but it's a nice spot, with quite a long winelist and a smart casual look. There are bigger meals up around $30, and fancy desserts around $14 - fine dining prices!

The Canberra Times last year mentioned it as being a spot to check out the AIS students. It is near the AIS, on Braybrooke & Battye Sts, Bruce. But I think the AIS crowd must be there on weekends, when they have a breakfast menu. On a Wednesday lunchtime, it was rather full of middle aged public servants, mostly female. Sadly no young lycra clad extra-fit chaps on show.

The service was good - quick enough for a work lunch, and when I didn't like my Virgin Mary they remade it for me without any fuss. Seriously, does this look like tomato juice to you? It's their house style, the waiter said - so the bartender must just absolutely LOVE Worcestershire sauce. I've never seen such a brown one before.

Anyway, it was nice and I'll cheerfully go back for a moderately special lunch, like a birthday or something. Pizza, pasta and risottos all come in around $15-20. And the breakfasts seem quite appealling, though not overly different to the usual cafe. Free range eggs, bacon, haloumi, chorizo, banana bread, french toast, that sort of thing.

Autumn gold

2010-01-31T20:21:00.004+11:00

Wait, what? It's January. But yes, these are new season apples. They are Early Golds from the Borenore Hillside orchard, the largest fruit stall at the EPIC Growers' market, and one that I find consistently reliable. These new ones are so crunchy and juicy - just fabulous! Obviously they are related to Golden Delicious, a supermarket staple which is pretty reliably horrible, unless you are lucky enough to find them fresh in season. Apples are one fruit that I simply won't buy from the supermarket any more.

And there were these large yellow figs. It's always interesting to go to the market after a month away and see what's changed. I was hoping for early figs, and there were some though not very many yet. Plums, peaches, nectarines and berries galore, and rhubarb and melons too. The fruit was amazing and I may have over-bought. The most notable veggies were beetroot and cauliflower, but I didn't need any. Next week, perhaps.

I've eaten the figs, and made some slightly dodgy muffins with fresh blueberries (too much baking soda, oops). Tonight we've eaten steak and salad, made with another market purchase, a Homeleigh Grove apple vinaigrette. This is made with their fruity olive oil and a light, sweet cider vinegar. It's a nice simple one; I like it. Tomorrow's breakfast may feature fresh blackberries with yoghurt and granola. Sounds like a good start to a Monday.

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Sherry Berry Trifle

2010-01-29T22:00:00.000+11:00

Blueberry, that is. I contemplated a Sherry Cherry Trifle, but who has time to pit cherries right before Xmas? A trifle, though, is traditional for Christmas, and it's quite useful. It's a dessert that can be made in advance, with whatever is on hand, and yet is quite festive. It's also a traditional way to use up stale sponge cake - though that's not a common thing in my house.

They can be pretty dire, when made from the supermarket jam roll soaked in Aeroplane jelly with tinned fruit and packet custard, and a splash of wino's cheapest sherry. Though if done with care, even that can have nostalgia value. But there's plenty of room to improve on any or all of those options without much effort. Even packet custard can be tweaked into something rather better. And since the packet kind sets, it's actually a better option than a proper egg yolk custard sauce, if you're planning to put it in a large bowl and empty it over a couple of days. And I do still like to have jelly, even though I'm grown up.

Recipe: Sherry & Blueberry Trifle
625g blueberries
3 tablespoons vanilla sugar
150ml water
1 sachet gelatine
--
1 250g sponge cake
1/2 cup medium sweet sherry
--
750ml custard
300ml cream

* Tear up the sponge cake and put it in the serving bowl.
* Drizzle the sherry over the cake.
* Wash 500g of the berries, and pop them into a saucepan with the sugar and water.
* Bring to a gentle simmer and stir well to make sure the sugar is all dissolved and the berries are a bit broken.
* Remove from heat immediately.
* Drain berries, reserving juice.
* Sprinkle cooked berries over the cake.
* Make a jelly with the juice and the gelatine, topping up with water if necessary to make 500ml liquid.
* Pour the warm liquid jelly over the cake and berries, and refrigerate to set.
* When set, top with cold custard.
* Top that with whipped cream, and decorate with fresh berries.

Extra Copious Notes

Cake options -
Make your own sponge, and spread it with a good jam. Make your own swiss roll. Buy a bakery or supermarket one - the quality need not be too high, since it will be soaked.

Soaking options -
A decent sherry matters here, and you want at least a semi-sweet, not a fino. Pedro Ximinez is lovely, if expensive, for a chocolatey one. Or for fruity options, an Amontillado style or premium cream sherry. Other kinds of soaking liquid can be used to taste. Port is traditional, but you could also consider muscat, tokay, a dessert wine, a liqueur or for the non-drinkers, a fruit juice. Or hmmm, how about black coffee, or earl grey tea, or chai?

Fruit options -
Go for cooked fruit (including tinned) unless you are going to eat it very quickly. Fresh fruit is nice, but much less so after a couple of days. You can use frozen berries to make the cooked part, but fresh will still look better as decoration on top.

Custard options -
I made a custard from packet custard powder, you may be shocked, shocked! to learn. But I used 750ml of full cream milk, with powder enough to set 500ml milk, and also added two whole eggs, well beaten, into the mix. This is much less likely to split than a straight egg custard, too. Bought custard could be used - the premium Paul's variety is pretty good for a dollop.

You can probably improvise for the rest. Use your favourite Aeroplane jelly from childhood, or a wine jelly, or no jelly at all. Top with soft thick cream dollops, or whipped cream, use any fruit or nut or even lollies for topping decorations... It's a bit of fun, not a rigid haute cuisine recipe.

I'm sorry I didn't take a picture. I got a bit otherwise preoccupied during Xmas. I will say that it looked very pretty, with a ring of whipped cream around the edge, dotted with fresh blueberries and some maple toasted pecans from the market nut sellers. The pecans didn't age well, though. The sugar coating dissolves, and the nuts start to soften. That would be a same-day decoration option, not good for 2-3 days.

Revisiting

2010-01-27T21:50:00.002+11:00

There's a few places that I've avoided for some time, not liking either their food or their attitude. But I revisited a couple of them last week, and was pleased to find improvements.

Carlo's at Watson is one of them. I had a very pleasant pre-rehearsal brunch there with B1, and enjoyed a mango & passionfruit frappe ($5) and a "half" breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon and tomato. The food arrived in good time. The radio in the kitchen wasn't set to deafening levels, and there wasn't even a powerful smell of cooking oil! Even more miraculous, the waitress was polite and helpful, and she even went and organised an off-menu side order for B1. Incredible!

I shall put Carlo's back on my list of possibles. OK, the breakfast was a tiny bit overdone - the scrambled eggs were a bit watery - but I like my bacon crisp and my tomatoes well done, so no great harm. Carlo's has usually had pretty good food - I like the buckwheat pancakes particularly - but in the past I've had such terrible service that I haven't gone back in 5 years. This was such a huge improvement on my previous experiences there, I'm quite delighted. They still won't split bills, though.

The other place I revisited was Taj Agra in Dickson. In their case, the service was never a problem, it was the food. I had a couple of very oily and bland curries,from them shortly after they opened. One also had very gristly meat. I was completely put off, and even a second try didn't improve it, so I crossed them off my list.

But last week the Bloke and I decided to give them another go for a quick post-rehearsal dinner, and they are now back on. We ordered a beef saag and an aloo cholay, with naan and raita, and it was very nice indeed. We asked for medium heat, and that was pleasant for us, but also the cholay (chickpeas) were interestingly spiced under the heat. The beef was lean and tender, if a little bit dry, and its spinach puree sauce was tasty. Neither sauce was at all greasy. I still think that Bollywood is nicer - a bit classier presentation, a bit better cooking. But they are also a bit more expensive, and often full.

Summertime, salad time

2010-01-26T12:59:00.002+11:00

Hot sunny days have been good for these little grape tomatoes. They are "honey grapes" that I got from Bunnings, and they are well named. They're amazing little bursts of sweet tomato goodness. I have them in a self-watering pot, which makes sense considering what a slack gardener I am. These and the Russian Brown have survived the heat well.

I'm also still getting plenty of rhubarb, and a bit of spinach, and lots of herbs, but not much else at the moment. My lettuces went to seed, and I didn't replant the hydroponic thing after removing them. My beans died in the heat, maybe because I didn't water them enough. Or was it snails that killed them? Or both. Whatever. There's a butternut pumpkin vine and some Kipfler potato plants, and a lot of figs coming on the small tree, but they aren't ready to harvest yet.

In this heat, salads are welcome. Here's one I made on the weekend - cured salmon, avocado, mixed greens, cucumber, and a simple dressing of good olive oil and lemon juice. So there's another use for that avocado. I would have added some grape tomatoes, but I ate them all after I took the picture. I'm now waiting for the green ones to ripen - and the plant has some flowers too, so there's even more to come.

Avocados, please

2010-01-25T15:32:00.003+11:00

Avocados are expensive right now. Yesterday I did a big Woollies shop to restock after my last week of being too busy to cook or clean up. And it's nearly $4 for an avo - $3.98 each (or whatever, it's close). And then I spotted the organic ones - a two-pack for $3.42. Ahahahaha!

And did you know that the organic avos are packed on a nice recycled cardboard tray, not that styrofoam tray kind of thing that they pack meat on? Any other pre-packed veg is on one of those trays. I don't often buy much F&V from Woollies, so I haven't noticed this until now. What's the point here, I wonder?

While I was there, I did my good deed of the day by advising a small group of young women in the meat section that chuck steak is for casseroling, not grilling.

I don't really have any formal recipes to add here. But avocado smushed on rye toast, with a good sprinkle of lime juice, is an excellent breakfast. Cayenne optional. Also, while I'm handing out tips, never cook avocado! It goes very nasty and bitter with prolonged heat. If you want it on a pizza or in a pasta, it's OK to add it at the last minute so it just warms gently.

Concert tonight!

2010-01-23T10:43:00.007+11:00

I nearly forgot! I haven't been cooking or shopping this week because I've been far too busy getting ready for this!

Details here: http://www.theq.net.au/pages/eventdetail.asp?id=132

A program of Spanish choral music, at the Q in Queanbeyan tonight. It will be amazing - Red Book of Montserrat medieval stuff; Victoria Missa Ave Maris Stella; Lauridsen Nocturnes; Catalan folk tunes.

If you only go to choral music once every seven years, make it this one! You very rarely get such a solid bass and tenor sound in a choir. Not to mention the mix of youthful energy and bright voices with the older and more experienced full voices.

(Damn, gotta fix this HTML, there is no read more.)

Ramz at Dickson, and other things

2010-01-11T22:16:00.003+11:00

On Saturday I was off at my favourite Asian grocer, Saigon, buying bean sprouts and gai lan and such. It's my favourite because they have great fresh veggies and fruit there (deliveries Friday and Tuesday arvos, IIRC). I got some weird looking pink fruits, that I think are Australian water-roseapples. And almost next door, there is a new grocery called Ramz Spice Mart.

Ramz fills a gap in Dickson. We've got plenty of Vietnamese and Chinese grocers, and they tend to stock other south-east Asian goodies, but this new one is an Indian specialist. It's run by a Fijian Indian family, who are new to Canberra, and I wish them success.

They stock every kind of dahl you could want, several of them in flour form, too. And huge bags of rice and a great array of chutneys and pickles and spices galore, of course. And the odd things Fijians seem to want, like tinned corned mutton. There's also a freezer with Fijian reef fish and goat meat, as well as samosas and other snacks, and a good selection of frozen vegetables. There's drumsticks and mehti leaves and karela and other more common things. And paneer in the fridge. (See recipe at end.)

It's not a huge shop, like the supermarket in Belconnen, but they still have room for a few oddities. There's a small rack of shiny sequinned bags and sandals and clothes up the back; and some cosmetics and cookware on the shelves.

Speaking of Dickson, Woollies seems to have finally finished their "upgrades". I'm not thrilled. It's bigger since they've moved the grog shop out, but the aisles are narrower. And they've got those annoying self-checkouts replacing most of the old express queue. I would not mind those so much if I didn't have to get help every damn time I use them. I tend to commit sins like not putting my two mangoes down at exactly the same split second, or trying to use a non-standard bag. I find them very irritating. Also irritating is the change to coin-op trolleys. I've never stolen a trolley before, in fact I never even thought of it. But now I really really want to. I have no idea what I'd do with it, I'm just a contrary type.

Now we've got that out of the way, what do we do with paneer? Mattar paneer is a classic, and the paneer packet had a recipe on the label. But because I had spinach (half from Woollies and half from the garden) I made a mixed Mattar Saag Paneer. So there.

Recipe: Mattar Paneer with extra greens
250g Sharma's Kitchen Paneer (or any paneer)
2 medium onions
5 cloves garlic
large thumb sized knob of ginger
1 tblsp coriander seeds
2 green chillies
1 tin tomatoes, crushed
1 cup plain yoghurt
1 tsp cornflour
1 tsp turmeric
2 fresh green chillies, or chilli powder to taste
pinch salt
4 bay leaves
1 1/2 cups water
1/4 cup ghee or vegetable oil
250g frozen peas
4 cups fresh spinach, chopped
chopped coriander leaves

* Puree one onion, the fresh chillies (if using), garlic and ginger and the coriander seeds, with just a dash of water.
* Soak the paneer in hot water for a couple of minutes, then cube.
* Heat the oil and fry the paneer until golden.
* Remove paneer and drain.
* Add the second onion, chopped, to the pan with the bay leaves, and fry until golden.
* Add the puree and the turmeric and fry until oil starts to separate.
* Add yoghurt, tomato, cornflour, chilli powder (if using) and salt and stir very well.
* Stir constantly until it returns to a simmer.
* Add paneer and the water.
* Simmer gently for 20 minutes.
* Add peas and spinach, and return to a simmer for 5 minutes.
* Sprinkle with plenty of chopped fresh coriander to serve.

Notes: I wanted to link to the website, http://sharmaskitchen.com.au but they seem to be down right now.

Anyway, this isn't very much modified from the original. I added the extra greens, as I mentioned. Also, the cornflour is mine - it helps to stop the yoghurt curdling. And the option of chilli powder instead of fresh chilli. I also reduced the oil from 1/2 cup to 1/4 cup, and I'm not quite sure that was right - the paneer stuck to the pan a bit.

But it was yummy, and also very creamy despite the fact that I used low fat Greek yoghurt. Definitely worth doing again.

A Curry Dinner

2010-01-10T21:26:00.003+11:00

Here's last week's curry dinner from the freezer, in its earlier incarnation when I first made it before Xmas. The vegetables are large yellow beans - which look a little like penne pasta in this picture - red capsicum, and green spinach.

It was based closely on a Madhur Jaffrey recipe called "Palag Ghosht". I have actually cooked this before, and last year even blogged it here, but I like this variation even better. In this updated edition, it's a bright and fresh flavoured thing, with the spinach just barely cooked. The original recipe has the spinach cooked for 45 minutes, which makes it a bit more the spinach puree types that you usually find in Indian restaurants. I also added some extra vegetables.

Recipe: Lamb and Spinach Curry
600g boneless lean lamb
a thumb sized chunk of fresh ginger
7 cloves garlic
2 tblsp whole coriander seed
75ml sunflower oil
1 medium onion, sliced in fine half-rings.
1/2 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup natural yoghurt
300g spinach
300g mixed vegetables

* Grind the coriander seed, finely grate the ginger and crush the garlic.
* Cut the lamb into 3cm chunks, and mix in the coriander, ginger and garlic.
* Mix well and set aside for an hour.
* Heat the oil and fry the onion until golden and crisp. Do not let them blacken.
* Remove the onion with a slotted spoon, and blot off oil on kitchen paper.
* Add the lamb and its marinade, with the turmeric, cayenne and salt to the remaining oil.
* Stir well and cover.
* Cook for ten minutes, lifting the lid to stir every couple of minutes.
* Add the yoghurt a tablespoon at a time, stirring well and allowing to simmer before adding the next spoonful.
* Add the fried onions.
* Cover and simmer for 45 minutes, or until the meat is just tender.
* Add sliced beans, capsicum and simmer for ten minutes.
* Add finely shredded spinach leaves, stir well through and cook until just wilted.

Notes: I used hoggett chops - this is old lamb, not quite mutton yet, and you need a specialist butcher or meat grower to get it these days. A few of the market sellers have it in season. It's a little tougher, a little more strongly flavoured, and takes a little longer to cook than lamb.

I use an old cheap blade-cutting coffee grinder for spices. We upgraded to a proper burr grinder for the coffee, and it really makes a difference.

And the final gadget is a newish toy: a mini food processor, about 1 cup capacity. It's excellent for chopping the ginger and garlic, as well as for herbs.

Back again

2010-01-08T21:50:00.001+11:00

We've finished the first week back at work, and tonight we're celebrating with a G&T or two, a scratch dinner of leftovers, and Children of Earth just finished on the telly. An early night with a book to follow - the bloke has a Mike Carey and I have a Robert Harris. And a sleep-in tomorrow. It's been a hard Xmas, and parts of it were rather horrible, so I'm pretty glad it's over. Even if that does mean going back to work.

The week in cooking has been quite minimal - a curry from the freezer, a bolognese spaghetti sauce from the freezer, hot dogs with coleslaw, and a quick bite at Tien, a Vietnamese place in Dickson that opened late last year. The curry was very nice - I'll put more about that up for my next post.

Tien was rather good, too. I had the pancake stuffed with prawns and minced pork (about $14). Tasty food, the pancake is more eggy than a western style pancake, almost an omelet. It came with lots of fresh salad including some Vietnamese herbs that I don't know the names of. The Bloke had a chilli basil chicken stirfry - very fresh and light, with lots of crisp onion and carrot. We'll be going back there, for sure. In fact I have a cunning plan involving their steamboat...

I haven't managed to get myself moving very fast in the mornings yet, and I've been eating breakfast at my desk around 10am. Bring in some fruit and a peanut butter sandwich, and I'm set. Or failing sandwich making time, eat a muesli bar from the stash at work. But I exhausted that stash on Thursday, and I tried to restock at As Nature Intended at the Belco market.

I was out there having lunch with infoaddict at Beppe's - a favourite cafe of mine, they serve one of the best coffees in town. It's a drive rather than a walk for lunch, but Momo and Plunge are both closed this week. I picked up some good fruit from Wiffens, but the muesli bar shopping did not go well. The range at As Nature Intended is very small, probably because it's all organic. I bought one box from each brand, the Norganics blueberry and the Aribar raspberry.

Norganics is available widely in supermarkets, and I find them tolerable. A bit too sweet for me, but still it has chewy oats, dried blueberries and an appley tang, and it's made in Australia. I give it a credit grade. The Aribar, on the other hand... utter fail. The ingredients of wholegrain brown rice and raspberries sound fine. But I really should have checked more carefully. In the fine print, all is revealed. Norganics: 16.1g sugars/100g. Aribar: 32.8g/100g. Yes, it's unbearably sweet, and on top of that, it's made in Canada. Shipping right across the world, what a waste! Not that I'm a total local food purist; I am happy to buy imports of true specialties like real maple syrup. But there was no point to this import at all. I could easily have made a batch of chocolate crackles at home, to very much the same effect. And no, I wouldn't want them for breakfast, either.

Internet Salmagundi, Special Xmas edition

2009-12-28T13:00:00.000+11:00

This is not exactly how I did my turkey, though mine did also involve a bacon wrap. But it sounds even more awesome. Though there isn't any stuffing and I'm not sure if you'd get good pan juices for gravy. Perhaps it could be modified.

A while back, some people were discussing raw milk - here's a good article on the subject.

And some funnies:

Atheist Holiday Traditions

The War on Xmas

And look.. it's Santa Cephalopod!

Notching up the achievements

2009-12-23T09:04:00.000+11:00

Done massive supermarket shopping trip
Done smaller market trip for pudding and salmon
Put salmon on to cure
Made bottom half of trifle
Decorated cake
Made panforte
Made brandy butter
Took cat to vet to be put to sleep
Made breadcrumbs for stuffing
Collected first batch of relatives from the airport
Cleaned out part of the fridge (more to do there)
Written lists for final market and supermarket trips

Still to go before the day:
Wrap all the presents
Do final market and supermarket trips (twilight EPIC market tonight)
Organise relatives to get the turkey & ham & bacon while I'm at at work Xmas eve
Make rest of stuffing
Finish trifle

One of these things is not like the others. It's not so easy to be festive at the moment.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

On the countdown

2009-12-19T12:52:00.001+11:00

Last weekend before Xmas!

I was just looking back on my blog to see what I did before, and I realised that I have not done a proper Xmas dinner at home since I started writing here. My basic reference is Delia Smith's Christmas book, which I use for things like turkey timing and assorted inspiration. It's not ideal: being British, Delia assumes we'll have winter seasonal fruit and veg. Now I have bought Margaret Fulton's Xmas book, after nobody gave it to me last year despite copious hints, but I haven't had a lot of chance to read it yet.

And now there's less than a week to go, and we'll have eleven people to lunch on Friday. Two of us, seven relatives, and two friends - B1 and M. With my new job, I'll be working up to the 24th, so I'll be buying more than I usually do. I've been to the market this morning, where I bought a huge macadamia and brandy Christmas pudding from Pudding Lane - expensive, but I had a sample and it's awesome. I also got a few mince pies from the "bush breads" people. If I like them, I'll get more at the twilight market on Wednesday. I've tried several supermarket brands, and most of them are easily beaten by a spicy fruit roll biscuit.

I usually make Delia's cinnamon icecream, and sometimes I make a frozen yule log with that as the filling in a chocolate sponge roll, but this year I'm just buying premium cream and icecream, and B1 is bringing a non-pudding dessert. I may even buy pre-made custard. The ham and turkey are on order at Eco Meats, and I'm planning to dispatch some of the relatives to collect them while I'm at work. Luckily B1 is bringing veggies, so there's another thing not to worry about.

This morning I bought a kilo slab of salmon to cure, which I've just now got started. I also have blueberries, which I'm using for a trifle. So far I've stewed them up with vanilla sugar and water. Expect more on that later. For now, here's the salmon, ready to go in the fridge for a few days cure. And now it's time to get on with the next jobs: decorating the cake, cleaning out the fridge, tidying the house, wrapping the presents... weekends are too short!

Oh, Diana!

2009-12-18T22:37:00.001+11:00

Here's another back-post from the "drafts" queue.

Diana Lampe writes the vegetarian kitchen column for the weekly Canberra Times food and wine pages. She's a very nice person and I usually like her recipes. Back in October, she had a recipe for "Anglesea Eggs", a recipe from north Wales. You can tell that it's Welsh, because it has both Caerphilly cheese AND leeks in it! I not only have Welsh ancestry but I also had some nice leeks on hand, so I decided to make it. And I have to say - never again!

It's not that it's bland, though it is. It's warm cheesy comfort food, and you don't usually want that sort of thing to be highly spiced. (Or if you do, then some chutney, HP or chilli sauce at table will do well.) The problem is that you really don't want to use so many saucepans, or do so much prep, to achieve just a simple bit of comfort food.

Recipe: Anglesey Eggs
2-3 medium leeks
500g potatoes
6-8 eggs
1 tablespoon olive oil
20g butter
1 round tablespoon plain flour
300ml milk
100g Caerphilly cheese
2 tablespoons fresh breadcrumbs
nutmeg, salt, pepper
butter to grease baking dish

* Hard boil and shell the eggs. (saucepans: 1)
* Peel the potatoes, and boil them, then mash them. (saucepans: 2)
* Clean the leeks well, and cut into slice about 1cm thick.
* Saute them gently in the olive oil. (saucepans: 3)
* Add a pinch of salt, a dash of water, cover and stew gently until soft.
* Remove lid and reduce liquid.
* Combine leeks with the warm mashed potato, and season with salt and pepper to taste. Add a dash of milk if it's too dry. It should be soft, but not sloppy. Enough to hold a shape.
* Warm the milk. (saucepans: 4)
* Melt butter over a gentle heat, and stir in flour to make a roux (saucepans: 5)
* Remove from heat and add the warm milk gradually, stirring well each time.
* Return to heat and cook, stirring often, until thickened.
* Add all but 2 tablespoons of the grated cheese, and stir well to melt the cheese.
* Grease a baking dish, and spoon in the leek mash mix. Flatten it and hollow it out in the centre to make a sort of pie shell shape.
* Halve the eggs and lay them on top of the mash.
* Spoon over the cheese sauce.
* Grate on a little nutmeg, and sprinkle remaining cheese and breadcrumbs over the top
* Bake at 180C for about 30 minutes.

Final count: 5 saucepans, one baking dish. Of course you can reduce the saucepan count by re-using the egg pan (which needs only a quick rinse) for the spuds. And a jug in the microwave works well to warm the milk. But don't forget you've also peeled hardboiled eggs and potatoes and washed and chopped leeks, and grated cheese and made a mornay sauce. And maybe cooked some bacon strips to add to the mash, like I did. You can just see them in this part-way picture. So that's six saucepans! All that for a homely simple meal. As I said, never again - unless I happen to have a lot of leftover mash and veg from some other meal.

Diana suggests serving this with baked asparagus on side, which is an excellent idea.

She also suggests cheddar instead of the Caerphilly. Now, Caerphilly is quite hard to find, though one of the Belconnen delis gets it occasionally. It's a slightly sharp firm white cheese, which will crumble rather than grate. White Leicester is not a terrible substitute, especially if you mix it with a quarter amount of fetta to add some sharpness. Cheddar is just different.

By the way, if you're reheating this for another day, pop it in the oven. Or remove the eggs before nuking. Microwaves make hardboiled eggs go rubbery.

RRRR-Rhubarb!

2009-12-15T18:45:00.003+11:00

Rhubarb may be in at the market, but I'm not buying any. I'm getting about half a kilo a week from my plant, and like last year's, it's still green. The first batch of the year was nicely red, but then after that it's not coloured up again. A neat trick with this is simply to cook it with something red.

Last January I tried a raspberry and rhubarb sago recipe, which came out to something that wasn't what I had wanted. The raspberry was far too dominant, and the sago was pointlessly minimal. I haven't worked out a sago recipe, but I have worked out a better balance that lets you still taste the rhubarb.

Recipe: Roasted Red Raspberry Rosey Rhubarb
500g rhubarb
100g raspberries
2-3 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons rosewater

* Wash and slice up the rhubarb, and place it in a shallow baking dish.
* Stir through the raspberries.
* Sprinkle over the sugar and rosewater.
* Bake at 180C for 20 minutes, or until done to your taste.

Notes: Frozen raspberries are fine. You can use different oven temperatures, if you have the oven on for something else. Slow is no problem, and very fast is OK as long as you keep an eye on it and stir it so the top doesn't scorch too badly. A little scorching is actually fine, and adds some nice toasty toffee flavours, but you don't want a lot.

Redcurrants do rather well in this, too. And Americans love the strawberry & rhubarb combination, but I'm less fond of cooked strawberries. Try it if you like, though.

It's good for breakfast, with yoghurt. Or add some whipped cream or icecream, and have it for dessert. Maybe with almond bread.

Marketing again

2009-12-13T19:23:00.001+11:00

I made it to the Growers' Market again yesterday. They now have flyers with the times. There are two markets left this year:

* Saturday 19th December 2009 8am to 11am; and
* Wednesday 23rd December 2009 Twilight Market 4pm to 7pm.

And then next year they resume on 16 Jan.

In stock at the moment, there is lot of stone fruit, especially cherries. Some early peaches and apricots are out. New season garlic is also in, with big braids of purple, white, Russian and elephant garlic featuring all over the place.

I stocked up on cherries, and bought a few plumcots. Otherwise, I mostly bought bread and meat and salad, as I have too many veggies in the crisper needing to be used up. A good veggie curry seems like the plan for that - and I bought some hoggett chops to make a meat one. I'm also planning a noodle stirfry with fresh beansprouts and the remains of last week's herbs, and I picked up some frozen ravioli. I've got the old tomatoes and a head of new garlic in the oven to roast for a sauce.

I'm intending to go to the Xmas twilight market for a big stock up on Xmas fruit and veg. Maybe flex off work a little early if I can manage it. (Ooh, the novelty of flex!) I'll have family in town by then, so I can take them along, and nonchalantly point out Lindsay and Edmunds, and Robin Rowe...

Ask a Question

2009-12-12T14:41:00.000+11:00

I keep seeing people asking questions on really old posts. I don't have an alert for that, and anyway they're often not relevant to the post. So here is one you can use for general questions, that I will check more often. I'll link it up the top right with the indices and spam reporting things.

A New Start, A New Cafe

2009-12-12T13:02:00.000+11:00

The first week back in full time work, after all this time off, has been a bit of a shock to the system. I'm lucky in that I have flextime, and my supervisor is quite happy if I start work at 9.30am. Also, I never got into terrible late night habits during my time off - a lot of the time builders were arriving at 7am. But I'm out of the habits of planning meals and doing some dinner prep in the morning.

So last week we had simple dinners. One leftover curry; one mixed grill with steak, sausages and oven chips; one quicky pasta with a pre-made tomato sauce and some cauliflower, capsicum and sausage pieces chucked in; one pide from the Dickson TurkOz - the best pide in town, IMO!

And I bought lunch three times, all from Cafe Momo. This little cafe is right next to my new job, less than five minutes walk away. It caters to a range of tastes, with a hot box of chips and pies and such; a sandwich bar; and a sit down cafe with some full meals and a short wine & beer list. There's inside tables, a pleasant little deck out the back, and a small room that can be closed for a private group of maybe a dozen. There are some pictures on their website; I snaffled one showing the approach that I take, walking in from the back. Pretty!

The prices are very reasonable compared to town. Once I had a chicken and avocado salad sandwich ($5.50 I think) which was nicely fresh and well filled. Another day I took in some fruit, and supplemented it with a pepper steak pie ($4). It was a good pie, made in house, with big chunks of lean meat and a lovely golden pastry top. The pastry bottom was a bit soggy, though.

And I had a sit down lunch with my friend F, who works across the road. She had a Thai beef salad ($16), and an iced chocolate heaped high with cream. I had zucchini fritters ($14.50), which you can have with smoked salmon or roast capsicum. I chose salmon this time, and the serve was generous. The fritters are those standard blobby shaped ones, Turkish restaurant style, drizzled with yoghurt and served with mixed leaves. They were cooked well - no soggy insides. F's salad looked good, too: plenty of beef and beansprouts, and made a bit substantial with noodles. I'll try that one sometime soon.

I also bought a muffin one day when I missed breakfast. That was due to chasing down our wandering sick cat, and then making him take pills and coaxing him to eat. But I wasn't rapt with it - too cakey for my taste. I don't like muffins to be too much like cupcakes, I prefer less sugar and a more solid style, given some guts with bran or wholemeal flour. Cake for breakfast is just wrong. Next time that happens, I'll just get a vegemite sandwich on wholegrain.

I'm pretty pleased with Cafe Momo, despite its minor flaws, and I'll certainly be a regular there. The coffee is decent, too. It's not the greatest, but it's not too bad. A little on the weak side, it's overly light and sweet in flavour. But hey, at least it's not burned or cold or obviously stale. Canberra is not strong on great coffee, unfortunately. I count myself lucky to find a drinkable one out here in Bruce.

Cafe Momo is at 14 Thynne Street, Fern Hill Park, Bruce. They are open Mon-Fri 7.30am to 4.30pm, and Sat 8am-2pm.

The Lazy Way

2009-12-05T13:31:00.002+11:00

I know it's all uncool, and serious cooks make their own pasta sauces and curry pastes; and do all their own meat & veg prep from fresh; and blend their own spice mixes from whole spices; and all that sort of thing. But I'm quite a sucker for a nice looking sauce being sold at a market stall. Or a good name on a product in a supermarket. Sometimes this works really well; sometimes it's just OK and a useful time-saver. And sometimes you just want to tip it in the garbage and pretend it never happened.

On the "works really well" scale:
1) Frozen baby peas. Shelling fresh peas is one of those jobs that you need to do in company, or at least with the radio or TV on. I was reminded of this recently when I bought a kilo of peas in the pod from the market. Shelling peas isn't unpleasant work, but compared to the ease of just chucking some frozen peas in the microwave, it's ridiculously laborious. And the frozen ones are more reliable. I was sampling as I shelled (of course) and while some were beautifully sweet, some were insect attacked, and some were mealy and tasteless.

2) Tubs of Thai curry pastes. Honestly, many Thai people use these too. On the advice of a Thai chef, I usually buy Maesri or Mae Ploy brands. Find them in most Asian grocers.

3) Crankypants Adobo marinade. Yum! It doesn't seem to be listed on their website, so I hope they haven't discontinued it. Find them at the Kingston Sunday markets, and the Handmade markets.

4) Herbie's spice and herb blends. He knows what he's doing. Find them at Cooking Coordinates, Manuka Fine Foods and many other places.

5) Ameet's Homestyle curry sauces. I bought a jar of Kashmiri Masala from a lovely young Indian woman with a thick plait of dark hair down her back, at the Growers' Market last week. I fondly imagine that it's her mother or grandmother's recipe, but anyway, it's a small Australian company. There's so artificial colours or preservatives, and it was very delicious. I used some Galloway chuck steak in it.

Less successful things follow.

Reasonable for rush hour:
On the "it's OK" level of the scale, there's a lot of things. Some good examples from the supermarket include:
* Patak's Indian curry pastes
* Some of the Paul Newman and Five Brothers jarred pasta sauces
* Some of the San Remo and Latina refrigerated pasta sauces - the plainer tomato ones, mainly.
* frozen "oven chips", spinach and green beans - but only if the beans are for a longer cooking time, they won't be crisp. In a veggie curry, for example.

Got very close to tipping in the garbage
Foodlover's macadamia satay sauce - to my taste, it is thin and harsh, and the nut flavour seemed artificial, like in those flavoured coffees. But I added lots of peanut butter and lime juice and chilli, and it turned out OK. Hmm, but now I think of it, so would water.

Ainsley Harriot's "citrus kick" couscous - this seemed to be very heavy on citric acid and dried onion in flavour. Not nice at all. If I hadn't had a lot of chilli to cover it up, I might have tipped it out. I never bought it again, and won't now try any others in his range.

Actually tipped in the garbage:
This almost never happens, as I'm against waste. I'll still eat food that isn't very good. It's got to be seriously dire to go uneaten into the bin. That usually means badly burned, or gone off, or well past its use-by date. But one product made it to the bin: Jamie Oliver's tomato and chilli pasta sauce. This tasted to me like tinned tomato soup with a dash of tabasco. And I had such lovely ham and olives waiting to be to put in it that I couldn't bear to spoil them. An ordinary tin of tomatoes was a much better choice.

Fauzi's dinner

2009-12-03T11:54:00.055+11:00

I have no idea who Fauzi is or was. But I consulted a friend who speaks several languages, and she explained that the title of this dish, Masak Fauzi, is the Indonesian and Malay word "Masak" for "to cook", with "Fauzi", a name. The recipe comes from a 1970s pamphlet called simply "Curry Recipes" put out by Community Aid Abroad, who are these days known as Oxfam. This is one of the first ever curries I cooked, when I was in my teens, but I haven't made it in, oh, at least a decade. I rediscovered the pamphlet in a recent tidying phase, and decided to give it a try.

And of course you need some greens for a balanced diet, so I tried a veggie dish from the booklet, too. It involves cooked lettuce, which may seem weird but is really quite alright. It's a nice bright look, so that's the photo. Fauzi's yummy brown sludgy thing looks like a brown sludgy thing. Not so photogenic.

Recipe 1: Masak Fauzi
1 lb (450g) meat
5 onions
10 dried chillies
2 tablespoons oil
2 tablespoons raisins
2 tablespoons tomato sauce
2 carrots
salt and sugar to taste
Slice onions and fry with chillies and a tablespoon of oil, until quite soft.
Pound them to paste.
Brown the cubed meat in the other tablespoon of oil.
Add the onion paste and tomato sauce to the meat.
Simmer until meat is tender and onions are reduced well.
Add raisins and chopped carrots and simmer for another half hour.
Add salt and sugar to taste.

Notes: This is quite sweet, even without adding any sugar, and reminds me a little bit of a sauerbraten with that mix of meat, raisins, vinegar. It's not a normal curry, as there are basically no spices. I used 550g of lamb. I tipped my onions into a bowl and used the stick blender to make the paste instead of a large mortar and pestle. Ah, technology.

If you feel tomato sauce is just too appalling, you could use a tablespoon of tomato paste, a tablespoon of vinegar and two teaspoons of sugar.

Recipe 2: Pea and Lettuce Sambal
2 teaspoons sunflower oil
1 small onion
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 teaspoon grated ginger
1/2 teaspoon cumin
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1/4 teaspoon cardamom
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
4-6 large lettuce leaves, shredded and rinsed
1/2 medium capsicum
1/2 cup peas
1 tablespoon dessicated coconut
salt, lemon juice to taste

Chop the onion, and fry it in the oil until translucent.
Add the crushed garlic and ginger and continue to fry for 2-3 minutes.
Add the spices, stir for a minute, then add a dash of water and stir well to loosen it up.
Add the peas and capsicum, stir, then add the wet shredded lettuce leaves on top.
Cover pan and simmer 5 minutes.
Stir in the coconut.
Add salt and a dash of lemon juice to taste.

Notes: This is a good use for those larger outer leaves of a cos lettuce, that are a bit strong and tough for salad. Iceberg outer leaves work, too. If you hate the idea, you could try using spinach instead. I used red capsicum, and a few extra green beans, in the pictured one.

By the way, this is a blog post that I had underway two months ago, before I took the break. I made the green veggie sambal again recently; it makes a good side dish for any meat curry. The second time I used fresh peas, and green capsicum.

Well, I'm back.

2009-12-01T10:05:00.087+11:00

Happy December, everyone!

We're on for the count down to Xmas, and all the foodie stuff that goes along with that. I've ordered a free-range turkey and half a ham from Eco meats; the cake has been soaking up its weekly dose of brandy for almost two months now; and the Farmers' market special Xmas times have been scheduled. I'm annoyed that I forgot to pick up a leaflet, since they haven't posted hours on their website. I'm pretty sure there's an evening market on 23rd Dec.

In the market, it's cherry season. You pay from $6 to $12 a kilo, depending on the variety and quality. So I simply have to go to the market every week for a couple of kilos. I have sweet black rons and sharper bright red merchants in the fridge right now. So good! Blueberries are also pretty good, though not as cheap - I got 500g for $12. I've been eating them straight, and I made some blueberry muffins on Sunday.

The garden's doing alright. A few things got crisped in the week of 30-38 degree heat, so I've replanted a bit. I've been picking rhubarb and herbs, and the apricot, tomatoes and boysenberries are setting fruit. A few redcurrants are nearly ripe, though there won't be enough of those to do anything with except maybe adding to the breakfast cereal. Or perhaps to the rhubarb.

In personal news, I'm starting a new job next week. The Public Service has got me at last! It's actually my first preference out of all the public service jobs I applied for, so I feel pretty lucky. I got the job offer officially on 19 Nov, and we went off and bought a new car the same day. I'll be working in Bruce, near Cafe Momo and Ellacure, neither of which I've managed to get to yet.

So hey, I'm not DOOOOOOMED to useless unemployment and depression (well, duh). I have recovered some cheerfulness and enthusiasm. Recently I've been thinking of blog posts that I should write. I'm planning to get back to this more regularly, maybe twice weekly or so.

The cats are OK. Plummet is cheerfully getting fat on his renal diet food and Shadow's leftovers. Shadow is still alive, bright eyed and bouncy, though he's taken up a few odd habits. Sleeping under the car is the most annoying. He has to be coaxed to eat, and won't touch anything but real meat and tuna. He got some fillet steak trimmings a week or so back, and I was thinking how extravagantly cat-tragic a thing that was. And then I worked out the price of the k/d tinned food that Plummet is supposed to eat. The steak was cheaper. Lucky I've got that job, now.

So, how's it going?

2009-10-22T14:50:00.003+11:00

One does adapt to circumstances. After our initial scare that Shadow might have to be put down immediately, it was a great relief that he's responded well enough to his treatment to be able to come home. So now we merely have kittehs with a terminal disease, one very far advanced. They also have very silly haircuts. We're trying to get Plummet to accept the renal diet, which he's kind of almost OK with, except that he can smell the tuna and meat that Shadow is getting. Shadow won't eat anything else, and since he won't last long, he may as well enjoy his last few months.

That renal diet is expensive! About ten times the cost of whiskas. The vet gave me a list of recipes to make your own, which I was quite keen on until I read them. I'm pretty sure they are American. Cans of clams aren't exactly standard fare around here. Oh well. As long as he's eating moderately well, that's the main thing. They're both bouncing around the house seemingly as healthy as horses. That's kidney disease for you - all well until sudden collapse.

In other news, I'm still feeling a bit down and slightly off my food. The job situation is getting to me, even though I know that the Public Service processes are very slow. Not very much music is happening either; my singing teacher is down with a very nasty shoulder injury. Too much facebook game time is going on. Hey, wanna be my friend, and play cafe world and fellowship and that zoo game thing and farmville and treasure mania and bejeweled blitz? Hmmmm. Could be slightly excessive there...

Well, I'd better look more on the bright side. I'm still reviewing for the Canberra Times, so I get to go out for fancy dinners even while unemployed, yay! And it's springtime and the garden is doing well. I planted Kipfler potatoes and they are up and flourishing. There's spinach and rhubarb coming along and my hydroponic lettuces are growing quickly. Perhaps too quickly, they're stealing the water from the other plants in the box. The baby apricot tree is setting fruit, the fig tree and the new cherry tree are sprouting leaves. And we've had a lovely display of irises, too.

I have cooked a few things, mostly simple repeats like the pulled pork, brown bean sauce noodles, spag bog, and grilled meats and sausages. I have a half finished post on a curry dinner that I made before all this fuss. I should finish that one off, I suppose. I've also made an egg and leek and potato dish that won't be reappearing on the menu because it needs too many saucepans. I've also made the annual Xmas cake, and I used my gorgeous new birthday cake pan to make the orange cake that came on its label. This is it - photo is not ideal, and some icing would enhance it, but I think it's clear enough to work out what it is. Cool, eh?

I've also been out for a few meals. We've done pre-theatre quick dinners at several places. The Wig & Pen - great beer, tolerable pub grub - is an old standard and close to the Street Theatre. Tosolini's is pretty good food, convenient to the Canberra Theatre. Entree sized pastas are enough if you have bread and salad, too, and it's pretty quick. And we also tried out Coo, which had terrible, terrible service. We only ordered sushi, and though you'd think that would be quick, only two of our 4 items actually made it to our table in 45 minutes, and then we had to leave. It is very new, though, so I'll be giving them another chance some time. And the food we did have was delicious, and they apologised a lot.

See you later

2009-09-30T13:19:00.001+10:00

I'm feeling much too upset to do the cheerful voice of this blog. One of my cats (Shadow) is dying of kidney failure, and his brother (Plummet) has a 50% chance of having the same genetic disorder. He's being tested tomorrow. I'll edit this with an update, but otherwise I'm calling a short break.

---

Update 1/10/09.
Shadow has polycystic kidney disease. He responded well to his rehydration and antibiotic treatment and is now back home with us. He may last for weeks, or a few months. Plummet also has the disorder, but in his case it is much less advanced. He goes onto a special renal diet, and needs monitoring. His life expectancy is obviously shortened but there's no saying by how much. They are just 7 years old.

Rocksalt and freekeh

2009-09-25T11:30:00.000+10:00

B1 has been sick for some time, but she's finally out of bed. To celebrate her recovery we had lunch at Rocksalt in the Hawker shops. It was terrifically good, and I'd recommend it highly. It's modern Australian fine dining, with a relaxed casual edge.

Actually, we've liked this place for a long time, and I've been a little puzzled by the occasional bad reviews online. Perhaps the service was erratic in the past, and we were always lucky. If you had a bad time before, do try it again - the management is new this year. Co-owner and maitre d' Geoff is a charming character. We chatted with him quite a bit yesterday - the lunch trade was very light, so he had time.

We started with light meals, to save room for dessert. B1 had a beetroot and kipfler potato salad ($18), B2 went for the crispy tofu with green salad. (Both $18 in small sizes, mains for $28 I think, I didn't record it.) I had a goat ragout with housemade gnocchi, last chance before the spring menu changes come in. I'm quite attracted to wintry food at the moment. I've been making baked puddings, for instance. It must be that "last chance for the year" effect.

We all enjoyed our mains very much. They were well-balanced and interestingly complex without fussiness. I had a lovely Tasmanian pinot noir with mine, and B1 and B2 split a glass of Innocent Bystander pink moscato - and yes, Geoff was happy to split a one glass serve into two glasses. He's quite the wine buff, and an enthusiast for the Canberra region wines. When we had dessert, he gave us a sample of a local sticky - and again I neglected to record what it was. Maybe the Lerida Estate Botrytis Pinot Gris? He's trying to find the best match for B2's dessert - a divine pannacotta with banana walnut bread and caramel sauce - and was keen to get our feedback.

It was a good match, and I thought it went pretty well with my hazelnut creme brulee, too. I was impressed with that - I love a good creme brulee, but I find that fancy flavoured ones can often be overdone. This was beautiful - a rich custard with a good clear unfussy hazelnut flavour. A sprinkle of hazelnut praline on side, and a house-made frangelico icecream were excellent complements.

While you may not get quite the same level of personal service when the place is busier, I'm sure it will be good with Geoff at the helm. And they make a very good coffee, too. Ah, coffee - there's one advantage to going out to lunch. I can't drink coffee at night, so I always miss it when I review. And the final note, a little melting moment petit four was delightfully melting and lemony.

Our gud wimminz day out to celebrate the rising of the near-dead continued after lunch, with a spot of shopping. We went to Jammo, where B1 bought some new skirts at Cassidy's and B2 picked up a few cheap plants from Aldi. And we toured a new food shop. Fresh Mart offers middle eastern foods, including fresh baked goods. The young man at the counter was the baker, and he gave us a sample cookie. I was a bit full to appreciate it properly, but it was light and lovely.

The grocery range includes the fresh baked middle eastern pastries and biscuits, and several breads - Afghan, Turkish, Lebanese. There's a hot box of roasted nuts and seeds, and interesting cheeses in the fridge. Plenty of pulses, both bagged and tinned, and syrups of rose, date, tamarind and more. It's not quite the Aladdin's cave that you get in Mawson at Cedars of Lebanon, but it's definitely worth a visit if you're a northsider.

I resisted the temptation of the baklava and almond shortbread and bought some novelties. A Lebanese honey of orange blossom and spring flowers from Jabal el Sheikh, and a box of freekeh from Jordan.

Freekeh? Wut? Well, I have seen this mentioned on the internet and SBS, but I have not until now seen it in real life. It's roasted green wheat, and can be used as a side dish like rice or couscous. The instructions on the box are in beautiful Engrish. The idea is that you wash it, pan-fry in butter for a few minutes, then add twice its volume in stock and cook on "calm fire" for half an hour. Then "serve the FREEK in rather big plate putting the meat or chicken on the top.Then throw roated almond or pine on the surface." Nom? We will see, sometime soonish.

The World's Greatest Puddings

2009-09-23T11:52:00.000+10:00

Well, that's arguable. Lemon delicious is top, without any doubt, and I won't take arguments! But what's next? Sticky date? Sussex Pond? Christmas? Marmalade roly-poly? Spotted dick? Self-saucing chocolate is a fine candidate, and it even seems to be an Australian invention. Last weekend and the previous one we had a friend round for a casual dinner, and I made puddings.

The self-saucing chocolate pudding didn't come out perfectly. I found a recipe on Taste.com that had a different technique than my old recipe, and I tried that with my recipe's ingredients. The more modern one has you melt the butter, rather than rub it in. It came out a bit too fluffy - it fell apart - and with not enough sauce. So I'll give you my old recipe instead.

Recipe 1: Self-saucing Chocolate Pudding
1 cup self-raising flour
4 tablespoons cocoa
75g butter
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 tablespoons milk
1 cup boiling water

Beat eggs together in a cup.
Cream butter and half of the sugar.
Slowly add in eggs
Sift flour and half of the cocoa together.
Fold flour/cocoa mix into the butter/sugar/egg mixture, adding milk and vanilla as you go to keep the mixture soft.
Turn into buttered baking dish.
Sprinkle over the remaining half cup of sugar and 2 tablespoons of (sifted) cocoa.
Pour over boiling water.
Bake at 180C for 30-40 minutes.

Notes: Serve with vanilla icecream, or plain pouring cream. I used a couple of nips of that vanilla vodka, and correspondingly less water. And I think I needed to reduce my oven temperature a bit. My oven is very fast, even without the fan setting on.

And now for the lemon pudding - this was good. Very good. The top is maybe a tiny bit browner than I'd wish, so perhaps I should have reduced heat a little. But it's light and fluffy and there's plenty of sauce. It doesn't really need any icecream or cream, it's fine all by itself.

Recipe 1: Lemon Delicious Pudding
1 oz butter (30g)
3/4 cup caster sugar
2 eggs, separated
1 tablespoon grated lemon rind
2 tablespoons plain flour
1/4 cup lemon juice
1 cup milk
small pinch salt

Cream butter and sugar together.
Gradually beat in egg yolks and lemon rind.
Fold in flour.
Mix in lemon juice.
Slowly add milk.
Whisk eggwhites stiff with the salt.
Fold eggwhites through.
Pour into pudding dish.
Place dish in baking pan of water, and bake at 175C for 45 minutes.

Notes: Do not be alarmed that the mixture is very liquid. This serves 4, or as we did, 3 generously. You could serve with vanilla icecream, cream, or better yet, some of that Maggie Beer lemon and orange curd. But it's fine just as it comes.

Followups and repeats

2009-09-22T09:19:00.000+10:00

So yes, I have been cooking without blogging. It's been repeats, along with a couple of pudding that I have assigned to a new post. I have recently made a ham and olive arrabiatta style pasta sauce, a "bolognese" pasta sauce, a keema, a roast chook, a risotto with leftover chicken; steak & salad; a massaman curry from a tub of paste; and sausages and salad. When I started this blog I was wondering how long it would be before I ran out of ideas, but it seems the answer is not too soon. Even though the Canberra Times has taken a lot of my review writing options, I still experiment with new ideas and techniques. Truffles and duck featured recently, as you may recall.

And I do follow up some of the ideas I spot on the net. Here are a few followup notes:

1. I made Alton Brown's granola, though I decided to use golden syrup. Maple is so expensive, and I do really like golden syrup. I also chucked in a half cup of sesame seeds. It's fine, but I still prefer Nigella's. Alton's is less sweet, which is good for me, so I will reduce the sugars on that next time I make hers. I had a problem with the cashews, too. 250F is only 120C, but even so they were starting to burn, especially the ones sitting around the edges. I reduced it further to 100C after that, but there are still some over-scorched ones. Since I caught it early, they are dark brown rather than black. But be warned - toasting cashews takes a lower temperature than almonds.

2. The vanilla essence proved disappointing. It darkened to a nice medium-weak tea colour after a couple of weeks, which was encouraging, but then it stayed put. It's more of a strong vanilla vodka than a real essence. I am now using it as a flavour, in cases where you need quite a lot of liquid so you can splash it in generously.

3. Those devilled kidneys. Let me remind you of the quantity for eight kidneys. You need two ounces of butter, and:

“I have accurately exacted the following measures. They are: three tablespoons of worstershire sauce; one heaping tablespoon of Coleman’s English mustard powder; one tablespoon of freshly squeezed juice of a lemon; half a table glass of water; one two-ounce canister of Fullers Earth, one substantial tablespoon of cayenne pepper; a heaping pinch of ground black pepper; and four drops of Tabasco sauce.”

Holmes was being sloppy here. It's "Worcestershire" sauce, and Fuller's Earth is basically fine clay (in the story, Watson surreptitiously removes this). There's also an amusing contrast between the substantial tablespoon of (potent!) cayenne pepper and the mere four drops of (mild) Tabasco.

I can only assume that Holmes' cayenne came in a slow ship from India, and it sat in warehouses for a year or two, and then on a grocer's shelf for another year going slowly stale. However, my cayenne comes from the Indian grocer and it is knock-your-socks off hot. I used a heaped teaspoon instead and it was still very potent. I had to go eat a tub of yoghurt for dessert, just to cool down.

So, well, use your judgement about your hot foods. I find that the heat comes off the mustard quite a lot with cooking, so this amount is fine. I used Keen's, since that's what I have. And water? Really? Just say no. The kidneys release quite a lot of juice, so you don't need much extra liquid. A tablespoon of brandy is the ticket here.

Hot Tip!

2009-09-21T13:10:00.001+10:00

If you are a lover of L'Occitane products, pop in now. If you spend $75 including a rose product, you get a little gift box with a couple of extra rose items, and... drum roll.. a two ticket pass to see Julie & Julia! SQUEEEEE!!!!

If you're not familiar with L'Occitane, you can find their shop on level 1 of the Canberra centre. They are a French company, who sell handcreams and perfumes and shower gel and that kind of stuff. It's a bit pricy compared to supermarket brands, but they are very nice. I've been using their moisturisers, as they work well on my rather dodgy sensitive skin. And a few soaps and hand lotions are always handy for Xmas presents. (Speaking of which, eeek! It's nearly time to start the cake!)

Oh, and another tip - fresh raspberries, $5 a punnet, Woolworths. NOM.

Internet Salmagundi XV

2009-09-19T12:19:00.002+10:00

Food
Flags made from food! The Australian one is a meat pie, of course.

Supposedly the 50 best foods on the planet, and where to eat them. No Australians, but then the selection is rather highly debatable. It has best milkshake and burger and pizza, and trendy high end items, but no best kangaroo steak. Nor anything but the most famous of non-Anglo ethnic foods.

Speaking of Anglo ethnic foods, 'tis the season for devilled kidneys. Lamb kidneys $3 for 6 in that Civic butcher whose name I can't remember. Progressive Dinner Party has a hilarious Holmesian story and recipe, which I think I must make soon.

Notes on the food revolution - an article at Salon about this new book, Cook Food by Lisa Jervis, that I WANT MUST HAVE GIMME NOW PLS!!eleventy!11! Who is Lisa Jervis, you may ask? Well, she's awesome, but not commonly known as a food writer...

Not Food
Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Yarrr.

The UK government has apologised for the appalling treatment of Alan Turing. A surprisingly good statement from Gordon Brown, there.

My favourite biology/atheism blogger, PZ Myers is coming to Australia next year. I'm tempted to go, and naturally wear my octopus shirt. Also there will be Richard Dawkins and Sue-Ann Post. Fangrrl swoons.

You think your internet connection is slow? Try the pigeon test. In case you're wondering, this is not why I haven't written anything for a week - that's more due to job panic, plus a bit of can't-be-arsedness, plus no really notable cooking or eating to report. Hmm, maybe I'll do a backlog of the repeats next.

Market Report

2009-09-12T17:06:00.000+10:00

The Handmade Upmarket, that is. And look - they had beer! So the bloke was happy. He and I have just got back, though with very little loot. Just another bit of food-themed bling from cardog, which I might designate as a birthday present if anyone gives me moneys, and some Crankypants pickled onions, and some Xmas cards. I almost bought some cute purple underwear, but the stallholder did not take cards and I was at the end of my cash.

The market has moved to the Yarralumla Woolshed, and the food has increased hugely in variety. We got there a bit after 2pm, after running some errands in connection with the Bloke's new bike. (The old CBR1000 has now gone, after thirteen years of faithful service. The new one has yet to arrive.) As we approached the woolshed, there were cars parked out on the verges. It was huge! We were almost going to turn around and go home, until we spotted a lucky park.

We started with the food outside in the sunshine. The woodfired pizza place was closing up, but the Mountain Creek sausage inna bun folks were going strong. They were fabulous - a gourmet snag in a good substantial crusty white roll, with pumpkin and onion and relish and salad ($9). A Zierholz pils (middy $4) helped wash it down nicely. There was quite a queue at the Alchemy slushy place and the icecream by Ross, but I did get a little tub of Ross' rather good chocolate icecream ($4.50) a bit later, just before we left. Most flavours had sold out. No wattleseed, choc-chilli, black sesame or fig left.

Inside there was a Crankypants cafe - pie oven, hot food and so on, with tables and chairs - and again most was sold out. They had a stall for their jams and pickles and marmalades. I am resisting buying chutneys and pickles and sauces, as I have far too many that need using up, but some pickled onions seemed like a good idea. They're using plastic jars now, which seems a little odd but I suppose must be lighter to carry around. I see they've also just started a website, which is as yet not much use.

And there were local wineries, and coffee carts and cupcakes and chocolates and many more good things. Not to mention all the gorgeous scarves and jewelry and photography and pottery and clothes and handbags. I am so pleased that this market has taken off as it has. It's such a great thing to be able to support local craftspeople as well as the local growers. If you missed this one, don't worry - there's one more coming before Xmas. There will be a twilight market on Friday 20 November 6-9, and the main market Saturday 21 November 10-4pm.

Scum Mushrooms and Magnificent Bikes

2009-09-09T12:55:00.000+10:00

We've been to Sydney. The key reason was to go to IKEA, but of course other things fit in. We visited our friends with the orange tree, and the Bloke's family. And I got in my required Galaxy and Abbey's fix. I came home with only 8 new books - quite restrained of me, I thought. The Bloke didn't get to test ride his proposed new motorbike because the shop stuffed up, but at least he got to gaze in wonder at some amazing classic and custom bikes. And we got a new kitchen table.

In addition to mind-numbingly enormous selections of shelves, beds, tables etc etc, IKEA also stocks smaller things like kitchenware and food. The kitchenware is right at the end, and my mind was too numbed to comprehend it. I did have a scant quarter of a brain left for food, and since it was right there next to where we had to wait for our table to be got out of the warehouse, I browsed around and bought Swedish food. Because IKEA, as any fule kno, is Swedish. I skipped the refrigerated stuff and got lollies, cloudberry jam, and a bread mix. If I get a chance some time, I'll buy some cheese and caviar and pickled herrings, but frozen meatballs seems a little silly when they're so easy to make. I half wish I'd got to the cafe and had princess cake or real cinnamon rolls, but we were pretty full from brunch.

Anyway, these Skumkantarell lollies are quite inoffensive, despite the funny name. Actually, "skum" means foam - and "sylt" means jam. They are cute little white mushrooms with pink caps who - according to the packaging - like to wear glasses and take baths. The actual lollies are not anthropomorphic, so you don't have to worry about biting their heads off.

When you open the pack, the chemical raspberry essence smell hits you. They're very much like our milk bottle sweets, only raspberry flavoured and slightly softer. The other lollies I got were fruit gums, and they were also mostly harmless - except for the salmiaks. It's hard to describe salmiak to the uninitiated, but salted ammonia licorice comes close. I'm not a fan. Luckily these are easy to avoid, being a distinctive black.

We ate at several places, of course. On Friday night, we were at The Harp in Tempe. Their bistro has a fair amount of Irish-style food as well as burgers and such. We sat in a booth in the main bar, and I drank Guinness. For dinner, I had the pork knuckle ($20), which was delicious - mash, red cabbage, apple sauce and cider gravy with a huge lump of roast pig. Actually it's mostly bone, like a lamb shank, but it looks impressively enormous, and the meat is similarly gelatinous. Plus bonus crackling!

Saturday brunch was at Deus ex Machina, in Camperdown. This place is completely awesome. It was my second visit - I had a weekday lunch there about a year ago, and it was pretty quiet then. But Saturday late morning it was packed. I had a huge breakfast of poached eggs, bacon, tomato, mushroom, asparagus and toast ($17), all generously portioned - half a dozen fat asparagus spears, yum. And a rather good coffee. The space is a converted warehouse, and the hugely high ceiling makes it feel very spacious.

It's a gorgeous space with amazing art works, especially featuring bikes both motor- and push-. There's an associated bike shop adjoining, and we browsed around there without actually buying anything. I admit I was tempted by the polka dot open-face helmet, but it would look rather silly on my Kwaka with my boring practical body-armoured jacket. The Bloke picked out half a dozen retro and vintage styled bikes that he's going to get any day now, just as soon as we win lotto.

We had dinner with The Bloke's family - BBQ lamb and salads, and a classic chocolate mousse with cognac. The Bloke used to make this mousse, long ago before he got so out of practice in the kitchen. One day I must make it again; I see it's been a very long time and it is very good. The key thing about the mousse that it's made purely of eggs and chocolate, and a small splash of grog. There is no cream or butter or anything else filling it out, although a bit of cream is good to have with it.

And we tried to go out for brunch, but it was Fathers' Day and our preferred Cherrybrook cafe was running a fixed menu, which was excessive for us. We shared a pretty decent pizza next door instead. While we were in the shopping centre, I also visited the kitchenware shop and the lovely deli. I bought some fabulous pistachio & amaretto stuffed dates at the deli - not cheap at $2.60 each, but they are large and very well-stuffed. The Bloke's Mum gave me a very fabulous early birthday present which came from that very kitchenware shop. But I am not going to show it here, or even play with it, until closer to time. Three weeks to go!

Icecream and Jelly

2009-09-04T09:32:00.002+10:00

I've had an orange jelly in mind ever since my houseguests gave me some oranges from their backyard Sydney tree in late July. They came with a warning that they were very sour, which on an early test was proved to be true. A sprinkle of sugar was necessary to finish the wedges I'd cut. Then it took me a month to get round to it, by which time I'd had to throw three out for being moldy. But I got a cup and a half of juice from the remainder, which was enough.

And then I was toying with the title option: "Icecream and Jelly" or "Cold Jelly and Custard" since I had both options. Which would it be? The custard is just a Dairy Farmers, bought for my sloppy food phase last week. If I'd made a nice custard, things might have been different. The icecream is also a bought one, but it's pretty special. It's a new one from Maggie Beer: lemon and orange curd. Wow, it's a good one - very smooth, tangy and not too sweet, a nice pale lemon colour with no artificial extras, and some little dots of candied orange peel. A grown-up icecream to have with your grown-up jelly.

Recipe: Orange Jelly
1.5 cups orange juice
0.5 cups boiling water
10g (1 sachet) gelatine
30ml cointreau
2 tblsp caster sugar

Pour the boiling water into a small jug or mug.
Sprinkle the gelatine over, and stir very vigorously to dissolve.
Add the sugar and stir well until that also dissolves.
Leave for a couple of minutes and stir vigorously again.
Add the juice and cointreau, stir well, and pour into a bowl or mould.
Refrigerate to set.

Notes: You can use a bit less sugar if your juice isn't sour. Or more if you like it really sweet.

The double stirring bit is just because I find that powdered gelatine can be tricky to dissolve. Sometimes you think you've got it, and then there are lumps after all. You can even heat it up in the microwave to soften it again if it starts to set, and you find lumps. But I wouldn't do this is it has the juice in it. The freshness of the orange juice would be spoiled.

I know the foodie magazines often say to use leaf gelatine, not powdered, but this is one case where I don't buy it. Gelatine is a simple protein, there's no difference in taste, just in ease of use. And looks, and price.

Here's some more information on gelatine at taste.com.au. Oddly, they say that boiling can destroy gelatine's ability to set. But I've certainly never encountered that with a chicken stock!

N is for Narrabundah

2009-09-02T16:15:00.000+10:00

I've let this series fall into disuse, by accident. But on Monday I found myself off in Fyshwick picking up upholstery fabric for the kitchen banquette seat. It's going to be purple microsuede. Because, that's why. So, of course I had to go to The Flute for bread. And Narrabundah is so close, why not drop in and resume the series?

It turns out that Narrabundah is absolutely packed with food choices. We have D'Browes and La Cantina for upscale dining. I have had La Cantina on my 'to review' list for some time but I fear that Bryan Martin may pip me to the post on that one. It's classy Italian, and looks totally gorgeous with white table linen and red brick walls. D'Browes is also supposed to be good, though I haven't tried it. Bryan got to that one a year and a half ago, and rated it 14 - which is a pretty good score, though not outstandingly brilliant.

There's also an Indian restaurant, the Kashmir House, with a fairly standard North Indian menu. There's also a nameless hamburger place, a coffee shop and a bar. The bar is Das Kapital, and I've been there a couple of times. They do OK bar snacks, nothing thrilling but not bad, either. I was going to grab a coffee at the Rouge Espresso Bar to check that out, but they are closed on Mondays.

In retail food, there is a medium sized IGA. They have no deli counter, but they stock refrigerated cold cuts and olives and so on, and they have nice things like free range chicken and Maggie Beer products. The fruit and veg section is small and limited in choice, but everything looked very nicely fresh.

There's also an old-fashioned bakery, Danny's, with a tattooed baker there selling pies, lamingtons and vanilla slices as well as an assortment of breads. They do sourdough bread, in white and multigrain, so I bought a couple of rolls to test. And a vanilla slice, which was your basic classic style, well done. I enjoyed it. The rolls were a little bit disappointing. They were lacking in that robust sourdough sourness and chew. Clearly not an artisanal sourdough, but a bit denser textured than your regular bread. They were rather nice, actually, as long as you weren't set on a Silo bread.

Three at once

2009-08-30T18:33:00.000+10:00

So I've risen from the sickbed, considerably improved but still not feeling overly creative or energetic. In an attempt to save work, I've got going on three at once. To the rear, looking quite orange, we have a keema, made with much less effort than the one in the link. It has 350g lean beef mince, a tin of tomatoes, garlic, ginger and some of a jar of Patak's Madras paste. There will be frozen peas to finish. We can have it on Monday with some leftover rice, naan and dahl from our dinner out yesterday.

And to the front, in more purple tones, we have a bolognese sauce, with mushrooms, zucchini and quite a bit of leftover wine that wasn't stored well enough to drink. It's two bottle ends, a shiraz and a tempranillo. It has the other 350g lean beef mince from the packet, and alos some onion and garlic and herbs. The bloke is actually quite keen on mince, so two mince based dishes in a week are quite fine by him.

And I set some of the mushrooms and onion aside to do a quick tossed together pasta tonight. One of those ones where you cook the pasta, then mix all the bits through rather than making a separate sauce. It's going to be sort of a carbonara, with egg and ham and Poacher's Pantry smoked tomatoes.

While I was making the bolognese, I tried a comparison. I used two tins of chopped tomatoes, one Woolworths' Select and one Home Brand. There was very little difference in colour or taste. There is a consistency difference: for 30c more, you get a slightly thicker product. The juice was a little runnier in the Home Brand kind, but not very much. I think Home Brand comes out better value for money.

Under the Weather

2009-08-29T09:28:00.003+10:00

I haven't been posting this week, because I haven't been cooking or shopping much. And when I did shop it was no gourmet experience, since I'm down with a lurgi. I actually drove to the shops to pick up my prescription, which is a first in the seven years we've lived here. It's a whole 500m walk. So while I was there, I stocked up on slops, and the dreaded tinned pasta and soup have featured strongly in my diet. Why does tinned soup taste so tinny?

The better stuff has been pulled turkey leftovers from the freezer, and home delivery from the fabulous Yum Thai at Dickson. I also bought myself some sticky rice and red bean pudding from Saigon, my favourite Asian grocer. I was there because I had to go to ACTPLA. We need to rebuild the fence, since it blew down in that big wind on Monday night. I wanted to check the plans for our block to see where an easement goes, and Saigon is just round the corner.

And I've defrosted some of last summer's rhubarb, and bought some custard. It's an adventure defrosting it - will it be the spicy ginger one, or the rosewater and vanilla version?

Spinach and cheese pide

2009-08-24T19:54:00.007+10:00

I made a spinach pide. It was not bad at all, though not up to TurkOz standards. But it was fun, and probably a bit healthier since I used light ricotta. I got the recipe from the Taste website: here it is. I did mangle it a little, but not very much. And I have some comments on how it went, and the lessons learned. Basically it's a stuffed pizza, much like a calzone but differently shaped, so you need a pizza dough recipe and a filling.

Recipe: Spinach and cheese pide filling
150g good fetta
250g light ricotta
4 eggs
450g spinach
Steam or microwave the spinach, and then let cool.
Squeeze out as much water as possible, and chop roughly.
Mix in crumbled fetta, ricotta and eggs.

Notes: The spinach was 2 bunches from Choku Bai Jo; and the 450g was the trimmed weight after discarding stalks and before cooking. It came down to 300g after. And I really don't think I squeezed out enough water. The filling was just a little too liquid - as you can see in the assembly photo, it's a little runny round the edges.

Here's how it looked at assembly. I made 4 long pieces, rather than the six suggested in the recipe. I also found that it was best to allow an hour for the second rising, after filling. Half an hour might do in summer, or if you prefer a thin crust.

Recipe: Pizza dough for pide
375g (2 1/2 cups) plain flour
1 tsp (7g/1 sachet) dried yeast
1 tsp salt
250ml lukewarm water
1 tbs olive oil
Plain flour, extra, to dust
Sesame seeds

Combine flour, salt and yeast in a bowl, and make a well in the centre.
Add the olive oil and water, and stir well with a wooden spoon.
Turn out onto a floured surface and knead for 3 minutes.
Roll in a ball, brush with a little oil, return it to the bowl.
Cover with gladwrap, and leave to rise for an hour in a warm place.
-- wait an hour --
Punch down, knead briefly, then divide in four pieces.
Roll each piece out into a long oval.
Fill, then pull edges of dough in to the centre and squeeze together.
Lay out on baking paper lined baking tray.
Brush with egg or oil, and sprinkle with a few sesame seeds.
Let rise again for 30-60 minutes.
Bake at 200C for 20 minutes, swapping trays around half way to keep the baking even.

Notes: this is the recipe at taste.com.au; but it has different quantities. I've done what the pide recipe said, and altered the quantities while keeping the technique. You can leave a strip open at the top, instead of enclosing totally. if you prefer.

I kept the flavours very basic - but when I do it again, I'll probably put some lemon or dill in with the filling mix. We added some olives and jalapeno slices on the side. It was pretty good, except that the filling was too liquid, and after the rising it had oozed out a bit. I drained most of it off before baking, but there was still a bit of messy egg making the base a bit soggier than it should have been. Oh well, whatever. It was edible. And did I mention that it was fun?

Save the Fringe!

2009-08-23T11:06:00.003+10:00

You may have heard that the Fringe Festival is being de-funded. In the goverment spin, this is presented as funding the National Folk Festival to host Fringe, and allowing the multicultural festival to focus more on our local cultural diversity. Yah, right. As long as it's very traditional cultural diversity and not postmodern gypsy punk eastern European storytelling, I guess.

I got this letter from a couple of people who have been involved as performers and organisers, and are very concerned about this direction. Please read and take what action you can.

Dear Arts lovers,

As you may know by now the Fringe Festival in Canberra has been defunded with a small portion of the previous funding being re-allocated to the National Folk Festival to do something "fringey". The Canberra Times is taking a big interest in this so please take the time to write your opinions down in a letter to the editor.
Points to think about:

* $30,000 is a mere fraction of the amount of money required to put on the grand scale we've seen in the last few years
* The folk festival is expensive, not free like fringe was and attracts a limited demographic
* The folk festival is a music festival with very little focus on theatre and visual arts which the fringe has always promoted evenly
* Local artists have relied heavily on the fringe as an affordable way to produce art and reach the wider canberra audience that only comes out of the woodwork for large scale free events in the middle of the city
* The folk festival is not central

Letters to the editor must be 200 words or less and sent to letters.editor@canberratimes.com.au

You can also send a letter online at http://www.canberratimes.com.au/content/letterstotheeditor/

I also suggest writing to Jon Stanhope, whose full contact details are at http://www.chiefminister.act.gov.au/page.php?v=28. Or his email is stanhope@act.gov.au

My take on it, as a regular of both festivals, is that the Folk Festival is too big, too focussed, and too isolated to do this well. Do you host it onsite at the National? It's already overcrowded out there, what venues will they use? And how much overlap in the audience will there be anyway? Fringe fans are not going to want to pay steep entry fees to the Folkie to see their shows. It's $85 a day if you buy at the gate. We usually buy season tickets early, which will be $166 this time.

And if you put it in town, that won't work well either. Folk fans from around Australia stay onsite in camp grounds - they won't go into town to watch their shows, especially not with our appalling public holiday bus schedules. How involved can the Folkie management possibly feel, in dealing with something offsite and well outside their usual audience's interests? They run on volunteer labour already; an extra job that few of their patrons care about is not likely to be done well!

And Easter is a bad time to attract audiences anyway. We all know that locals use the last warm long weekend of the season to go out of town. It was working well, but this is a mess. Why take a successful event and nobble it?

I did it again

2009-08-21T09:33:00.000+10:00

That goulashy thing with dumplings. Also, I made chicken stock out of the remains of a shop BBQ chook. And pizzas with bought ingedients - bases from Baker's Delight, sauce & pizza cheese from Woollies. I made one with pesto, fetta, dried tomato and capsicum, and the other one with tomato, olive & jalapeno. This is the sort of stuff I don't usually blog.

Marmalade Time

2009-08-19T17:44:00.004+10:00

The Sunday before last, I dropped into the Belconnen Fresh Food Market, after a trip to Bunnings for more house fixity things. The Bloke has now fixed the leaky dishwasher, hurrah! On advice from Infoaddict in a comment here, I checked out Wiffen's. I'm mostly a Tom's fan, but I'm really happy that I did this. Wiffen's had some good things, including persimmons and mangosteens at $1 a piece. I grabbed a few of those, because I adore mangosteens and hardly ever have them. And I picked up some generic salad & veg stuff that I needed since I didn't make it to the EPIC growers market that Saturday. Green beans, tomatoes, pumpkin, a $2 bag of parsnips. Useful things.

The best of it was that they had Seville oranges! I am excited yet again, as I had run out of marmalade. I've been buying it, but I have yet to find one that to my taste is anywhere near as good as my own. Even the Lynwood Seville, star of the great jar opening saga, is not bitter enough for me. Crankypants' grapefruit was pretty good, and the lime was OK - nicely sharp, but not the bitter I really want. Cumquat isn't bad, either, but nothing beats Seville for me. And now I have made eleven jars! Yay!

My marmalade recipe comes from a former workmate, Airlie Moore. She was the office administrator at the company I last worked for in Sydney. Airlie was raised on a farm, and later raised her own kids in the country. She's one of those wonderfully tough, no-nonsense women without whom executives would crash and burn in chaos. I imagine if she'd been born a decade or two later she might have been PM, or a high-flying CEO or something. And she was also kind and friendly, and very easy to work with as long as you were sensible. Airlie gave me this recipe, which is the best ever. You can see it's an old country recipe from the non-metric ingredients.

Recipe: Airlie's Seville Orange Marmalade
2 lbs Seville Oranges
4 lbs sugar
4 pints water
1 large lemon

Wash the oranges first.
Put whole oranges and water in a large pan.
Cover, and simmer gently for two hours, then allow to cool.
Remove oranges from the water and slice finely, saving the seeds. (see notes)
Add seeds back to the water, and also add the juice and pips of the lemon. (see notes)
Bring to boil and boil rapidly for 5 minutes.
Strain out pips, and return orange slices to the pan.
Boil to reduce by about half.
Add sugar and boil rapidly for 10 minutes, or until set by your preferred test.
Turn off heat and let stand for 15 minutes before jarring.

Notes: The 15 minute stand is to allow a partial set, so the peel can be evenly distributed. Use one lemon per kilo of oranges, and adjust quantities to suit your orange supply simply keeping the ratio. It works out in metric to 2.4 litres/kg. But given the boiling down to "about half", there's no need to be scrupulously exact. I had six oranges, a total of 1.7kg, and used 4L water and 3.4kg of sugar. When you add the sugar, this bulks up a lot - I needed my largest stock pot. You want at least 10cm clearance, and more is better. It froths up a lot as it boils, and can spit a bit.

When you get to the point of slicing the oranges, you can just keep the peel and discard the innards, or you can squeeze the insides through a sieve to get pulp. With the seeds, I like to wrap them in a bit of muslin for easy removal. My oranges this time had no seeds at all, but the lemons were very seedy indeed so that helped. You could use some Jamsetta for pectin, if you like, instead of fussing with seeds.

My preferred set test for jam and marmalade is to put a couple of saucers in the freezer. Drop a quarter teaspoon or so on the edge, leave for a minute, then push on it to see if it wrinkles. Or, if you have a jam thermometer, 105C is the canonical temperature measurement. I tried that and it seemed not right. The wrinkle test actually passed at 108C - which may mean that my thermometer is a little inaccurate. The moral is: don't just trust meter readings, without adding common sense and experience.

In terms of jars, I like to use old vegemite jars. They accumulate easily. I rinse them and their lids in very hot water, then dry them out in the oven. A jam funnel eases the filling procedure remarkably - that's one gadget I use over and over.

Apart from the brilliant result, I also love this recipe for the simplicity of preparation. Anyone who's made marmalade the regular way knows how much of a hassle it is juicing and/or slicing the fruit. When it's soft from the boiling, though, it is dead easy. It's also quite useful because you can do it in stages. Boil oranges one day, cool, add pectin and reduce next day - and if necessary, add sugar and do the jarring the next day after that.

Now, did you see what I did there? There were 13, not 11 jars in the top photo. Did you spot the ringers? Here are the two ringers again, with a new one for comparison. Of the two extras, the part-eaten one is the Lynwood that I decanted into a different jar. The other is from the same recipe, but it is six years old - not even from my last batch, but the one before. It was hiding in the top cupboard stash, behind a lot of jars of chutney. It is almost totally black now, but like wine, marmalade ages well. I detect notes of treacle...

Cauliflower and/or Macaroni Cheese

2009-08-18T18:16:00.010+10:00

This is what we had for dinner yesterday. As I was making it, I remembered that a white sauce or bechamel is sometimes seen as a bit tricky and off-putting, yet there I was doing it entirely by eye. And it worked just fine. Which means not that I am a super-genius chef, but really that it's not all that hard.

Cauliflower cheese is one of those old stock favourites, simple old-fashioned comfort food. So is macaroni cheese. My Mum used to make cauli cheese when I was a kid, and she'd usually serve it with some bacon or fried mushrooms on the side. Combining the cauliflower with macaroni is my idea, though. Sometimes I use a light white sauce for it, much the same as the light parsley sauce that goes with corned beef.

Recipe: Cauliflower & Macaroni Cheese
1/2 medium cauliflower
250g macaroni or other short pasta
Cheese sauce made with about 600ml milk (see below)
30-50g finely grated cheddar or parmesan, to top.

Boil the macaroni until barely al dente.
Split the cauliflower into florets, and steam or microwave until barely done.
Combine the two in a deep casserole dish.
Make a cheese sauce, and pour it into the dish.
Stir to make sure everything is well coated with the sauce.
Sprinkle grated cheese over the top.
Bake at 140C for 1 & 3/4 hours.

Notes: I've often baked it shorter and hotter, but this slower cooking works better. The sauce can split (separate) at the hotter temp. This was also perfect timing to put it in oven, go to dance class, and then come home ready for a hot dinner. I popped in some large chunks of pumpkin, and when I got home all I had to do was microwave some frozen peas. And there's plenty left over for another dinner and a lunch or two.

Not Recipe: Cheese Sauce
OK, if you want to see a proper bechamel, you can find it on the web, or in most basic cookbooks. Your classic cheese sauce is just a bechamel with grated cheese mixed in. You do this mixing off the heat, after the sauce has thickened. Stir well to melt the cheese into the sauce, add a smidge of nutmeg, and you're done. Here's a Delia Smith version.

The good thing about doing it properly is the flavouring of the milk with the onion and parsley. Stodgy old British plain cookery tends to skip this nicety. The bottom line basic is the plain white sauce - here's a site with measurements. What I did this time was much closer to the stodgy Brit version than the French, though I did add some extra flavour.

I whacked a large spoonful of margarine in the saucepan. I was all out of butter, so I had to use the Bloke's anti-cholesterol marg that he keeps for his toast. Which, judging by the sputtering, contains quite a bit of water. Melt it, then stir in about twice the volume of plain flour. Stir over the heat until well mixed. Pour in about 600ml cold milk all at once. Stir very well - in fact, use a heat-resistant whisk. Keep stirring until it thickens. If it's still lumpy, whisk it some more, but it's best to get the lumps out before it gets hot enough to thicken. Add two tablespoons of sherry and half a teaspoon of mustard and stir well.

If it's too thick add a little more milk. If it's not thick enough, a teaspoon or two of cornflour dissolved in a little water will fix it up. A thin pouring custard is about the idea, not one of those premium heavy ones.

Remove from heat and add plenty of grated cheese - I used 50g of parmesan, 50g of sharp cheddar, and about 75g of "pizza cheese". Stir well until cheese is melted and mixed in well. Taste, and add a pinch of salt if you like. I usually add a little nutmeg, but I forgot this time.

This is good for using up loose ends of cheese. Remnants of ricotta or cream cheese can go in as well as the hard cheeses.

Maple Apricot Scones

2009-08-15T11:18:00.005+10:00

This was a nice easy breakfast for a weekend morning. I found the basic recipe in Delicious, labelled as "Buttermilk Scones", suggested to accompany a soup. What appealled to me most is the complete lack of any butter. I do love a good scone, and my friend B1 makes the best date scones ever. But I can't be bothered with that rubbing fat into flour first thing in the morning. That's why I like muffins so much. The technique is simply "dump stuff in bowl, stir". I can do that before my coffee.

Recipe: Maple Apricot Scones
2 cups self raising flour
pinch salt
1/2 cup chopped dried apricot
1 cup buttermilk
2 tblsp maple syrup
a little extra flour
Mix the flour, salt and apricot in a bowl.
Mix the maple syrup into the buttermilk.
Combine the mixes, and stir well.
Dump onto a flour-coated baking tray, turn over to cover the top with flour.
Pat it out to a rough circle, and cut into 8 triangles.
Brush top with a little extra buttermilk (the scrapings from the measuring jug will do.)
Bake at 180C for 15 minutes.
To serve, split in half and butter if desired.

Notes: The original recipe does not contain fruit, and suggests more kneading. And cutting in rounds. Of course you could use any fruit you like - sultanas, dates, currants. I had a packet of chopped dried apricot, and the bloke does not like dates. I also found this mix to be too sticky for easy kneading. So I just dumped it out on the tray and cut triangles. Fussing with cutters is also not for pre-coffee times, and anyway, the less you knead a flour-based dough, the more tender it is.

These are even low fat, since buttermilk does not contain butter. It's a cultured product, very like an unflavoured drinking yoghurt. Traditionally it's made from the leftover milk after the butter has been extracted. I wonder now if it would work with wholemeal flour, to be even healthier. Next time, perhaps.

Finally, Cassoulet

2009-08-13T20:26:00.005+10:00

Well, the end result is here. Cassoulet can actually be made with a huge variety of meats. Stephanie Alexander's, in her book Feasts and Stories, features pork neck, pork belly, pork hocks, cotechino sausages, preserved duck legs and veal stock. Julia Child's has a loin of pork, toulouse sausage (for which she gives the recipe), bacon, and a shoulder of lamb or mutton. She mentions variations including goose, turkey, veal and polish sausage.

So really, you can do what you want. The basic concept is white beans cooked in stock, with a variety of cooked meats mixed in, then baked with a breadcrumb topping. The flavours are classic French parsley, bay, thyme and garlic - plus, of course, all the meat juices.

Recipe: Cath's Canberra Cassoulet
375g haricot beans
a batch of duck stock
2 cured duck maryland pieces
500g toulouse sausage, cut in half lengths
1 tin chopped tomatoes (or equivalent fresh)
2 onions
2 carrots
2 cloves garlic
2 cups breadcrumbs, made from a baguette
pinch salt, black pepper
parsley

Soak the beans overnight in plain water.
Chop the onion and carrots quite small.
Drain beans, add them to a large pot with the onion and carrots.
Add the duck stock, and simmer for an hour.
Add the tin of tomatoes.
Simmer for another 15 minutes, or until beans are just tender.
(Do not discard liquid)
--
Meanwhile, rinse the salt cure mix off the duck, and pat dry.
Pan fry it until golden.
Remove, and brown the sausage well in the duck fat.
Remove, leaving any meat from loose ends behind in the pan.
Strip off the skin and fat from the duck, and chop skin into small dice.
Fry these duck cracklings until crisp.
Add two cloves of crushed garlic and the breadcrumbs to the pan.
Fry until golden brown.
Mix in chopped parsley, salt and pepper
--
Mix the meats and beans in a casserole dish.
Top up with stock to barely cover.
Sprinkle crumb topping over.
Bake, uncovered, at 170C for an hour.

Serve!

Notes: Boil the stock down a little if need be, rather than discarding any excess. The duck cracklings in the topping is not traditional - that idea came from the Epicurious recipe.

A simple vinegary green salad and a few slices of proper French baguette is a good match. My baguette was not the best - the bakery I went to had run out - so I sprayed a little olive oil on the cut surface and toasted it in the sandwich press.

I'm quite pleased with how this all worked out. The beans, sausage and crumb topping are excellent. We've got two dinners out of it, and some freezer stock. The crumbs won't be as crunchy later on, it will instead thicken the bean mix quite a lot. I plan to add some extra tomatoes or wine when I eventually reheat them. The duck I'm less thrilled with. I'm not very experienced with cooking duck, and I found that both of the duck meals came out a little tougher than I'd like. Not bad, just not great.

The Cassoulet Project Continues

2009-08-11T12:27:00.000+10:00

We need some stock to cook those beans, so here it is just getting started.

Recipe 1: Duck Stock
1 duck carcass and wings
3 bayleaves
a handful of parsley
2 large garlic cloves
4 cloves
1 tsp thyme
1 carrot
1 onion
Cover with water and simmer all together for 3-4 hours.
Strain, and refrigerate the liquid.
When cold, skim fat off (save for other uses).

Notes: Save the fat for other uses. You don't need to be too scrupulous with the skimming, some fat in the beans will help make things even tastier. But a whole cup would be way too much.

Recipe 2: Cured Duck Legs
2 duck maryland pieces
4 bayleaves
Black pepper
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup salt
Mix the sugar and salt, and rub into duck.
Grind a good amount of black pepper over it.
Layer with bayleaves in a non-reactive container.
Store for 2-3 days in the refrigerator.

Notes: This recipe is from Stephanie Alexander's big book, labelled as "Cath's sugar-cured duck legs". Mine! She suggests roasting then for an hour at 180C until golden brown, and serving with cabbage. I intend to pan-fry them to brown, then finish the cooking with the cassoulet.

So the cassoulet isn't ready to eat yet, but we're moving along. Tonight, perhaps? Or later? I get home late on Mondays, so yesterday we needed quick reheatable meals. This time we ate from the freezer - a Moroccan casserole made by our Easter houseguest A. I added some microwaved green beans, and a quick couscous with lemon. On Wednesday evening I have my first wine tasting class, so it might be better to do it tonight.

Launching the Cassoulet Project: Duck!

2009-08-10T16:02:00.001+10:00

I want to make cassoulet before winter is out. And so last time I was in Woollies, I looked for the dried beans. Nope. Not there. No haricots, no kidney beans, no cannellinis, no chickpeas, except in tinned form. They did have some dried split peas and lentils, for soups, but no other pulses. Luckily my local IGA was much more useful, so I didn't have to drive off to the Indian grocery.

I have a duck which needs using up. I bought it frozen, thinking of cooking it last Xmas, but I never got round to it. I intend to use half of that, and some very tasty Toulouse sausage from the "Bangers" stall at the market. The other half was Sunday dinner - see recipe below.

Now possibly some purists are thinking "She's not really going to make proper cassoulet, is she?" and they are dead right. I have been consulting the Julia Child and Stephanie Alexander recipes, and the authentic cassoulet is a major production, involving many days, many steps, and enough food to feed a small army. I'm making something much simpler, but still keeping the basic idea. The epicurious recipe is closer to what I have in mind.

To start with, I am not going to confit two duck legs. To make a confit, you cook the meat very slowly in fat. And this preserved it for the winter, in a pre-refrigeration era. Now I simply don't have that much duck fat to go around and I'm not going to buy it. Nor am I going to buy one of those tins of goose fat from the Essential Ingredient. And I am not going to use a full kilo of haricots, a whole leg of lamb and a pork hock.

What I am going to do is cure the duck legs, and make a proper duck stock from the carcass. I got the duck out to defrost on Saturday, and I have used my expert chicken jointing skills (as learned from Christophe last month) to split off breasts for dinner, marylands to cure, and a carcass for stock.

I have soaked 375g of haricot beans. The next step will be to finish cooking them in stock. Meanwhile, we still needed to eat. I just happened to have a couple of duck breasts - a Sunday duck dinner with cherry sauce and smashed potatoes and something green sounded like an excellent plan.

Recipe 1: Roast Duck Breast with Cheat's Cherry Sauce
2 duck breasts
salt, pepper
1 teaspoon olive oil
--
1 orange
75g "Ham Jam"
1 tablespoon brandy

Preheat the oven to 220C.
Slash the duck breast skins, and pan fry in the olive oil until golden.
Transfer to a baking dish
Bake for 7 minutes; remove and rest for 10 minutes before serving.

While duck is resting, mix the cherry jam with the orange juice and brandy. Heat to bubbling, and stir well.

Notes: The sauce can be heated in a microwave, or a small saucepan. You don't need much oil - duck is fatty. Save the fat, it is good. Brush it over some potatoes. And what, you may be asking, is Ham Jam? This is Ham Jam. It's a savoury cherry jam, and contains no ham whatsoever. It is, however, good with ham. Use cherry jam and add some vinegar, cinnamon and cloves if you don't have it.

The duck breast technique, and the idea for the cheating sauce came from Anthony Worral Thompson at the BBC food site. Orange from P&R's backyard tree.

Recipe 2: Ducky Smashed Red Potatoes
Small red potatoes
Duck fat
Pink Murray River salt
Preheat oven to 220C
Parboil potatoes until barely done, about 15 minutes.
Grease a baking tray with duck fat
Put the potatoes on the tray, and squash each one down with a potato masher.
Brush with melted duck fat and sprinkle with salt.
Bake for 20 minutes, until crisp and golden.

Notes: The smashed potatoes are, of course, a variant on Jill Dupleix' recipe. I'm not very experienced with these, but I find that it's important to whack the potatoes briskly with the masher rather than gently squish them. They're a little hard at that stage.

Controversy Ahoy

2009-08-09T22:57:00.004+10:00

I started this last week and kept not finishing it off to post properly. Sorry. I've got a lot of posts coming up this week to make up for it. It's a little controversial, so let's just bite the bullet and get those points out of the way first.

1. Organic food is not better for you.
2. Michael Pollan is a bit of a dickhead.

Wait, what? Well, these two topics have been floating round the intertoobz recently.

First, organic food. Ben Goldacre has a good article on the topic. Basically a couple of studies came out in the UK that showed no nutritional benefits to organic food. There is no measurable difference in chemical composition or in health benefits.

I'm actually not surprised by this one little bit. I've never been a fanatic about organic foods - I place fair trade, low food miles, and free range much higher in my priorities. I do buy organic quite often, though, and I'm not to going to stop. I'm pretty sure that a lot of the organic farming practices are better for the environment, and long term sustainability. I'm not convinced by all of the methods - old and traditional isn't automatically better. For example, what's with copper sulphate being considered organic? High school chemistry should tell you that it's an inorganic compound. It was my favourite in my chemistry set - such a pretty blue. I'm not saying it's actually bad or good; I am completely ignorant on this topic. It just makes me go "huh?"

I am also fairly sure that some of the "heritage" varieties of plants are better for you than the modern breeds - another question not addressed by these studies. We humans have been busily breeding our foods to be sweeter and fatter for millennia. We've changed that in the last century to selecting easier to transport and store, and lower in fat. But some of those bitter and sulphury compounds are the ones that are good for us; and the less intensively bred variants tend to be much higher in antioxidants and other nutrients. Australian bush foods are a prime example - super high in various nutrient levels, they are surely bound to one of the next faddy "superfoods". Oat bran, wild blueberries, wheatgrass, gojiberries, pomegranates... How about Kakadu plum, Davidson plum, akudjura or finger lime? Ooh, look, Kakadu Juice! Sounds good - get in early and beat the trendy price rises!

But these points are not at all what is addressed by the studies, and no amount of yelling "look, over there!" forms any kind of rebuttal. I really love how Goldacre phrased it; I could not imagine writing it better.

The emotive commentary in favour of organic farming bundles together diverse and legitimate concerns about unchecked capitalism in our food supply: battery farming, corruptible regulators, or reckless destruction of the environment, where the producer’s costs do not reflect the true full costs of their activities to society, to name just a few. Each of these problems deserve individual attention.

But just as we do not solve the problems of deceitfulness in the pharmaceutical industry by buying homeopathic sugar pills, so we may not resolve the undoubted problems of unchecked capitalism in industrial food production by giving money to the £2bn industry represented by the Soil Association.

So - what's up with Michael Pollan, our ethical foodie hero? Plain old unthinking sexism is what. His latest column on the merits of home cooking is mostly pretty good. But he blindly assumes that cooking is women's work, and blames feminism for its decline. Read the Salon commentary here. And Pollan's NYTimes article here. ORLY, Michael? What, you maybe think men do not need to eat? Or do you think all men should come equipped with a personal chef as a birthright?

To be fair, he does actually think that men should learn to cook. Where he goes off the rails is in ascribing the downfall of home cooking to, of all things, feminism. It's as if Betty Friedan all by herself persuaded 1950s middle class housewives that they were unhappy. Because every educated woman before Friedan just LOVED being forced to quit her job to cook, clean and care for children and wait on her husband. The intellectual joys of scrubbing the kitchen floor were unquestionable until Evil Betty hypnotised us all! And working class women are just dumb, and were totally taken in by this. Instead of spending hours making casseroles, they chose to go and work for the money to feed and clothe and house their families. Imagine! How silly! They ate macaroni cheese from a box instead of making a proper boeuf bourgignon, and baking apple pies. What could they possibly have been thinking?

Actually, my bloke does have a personal chef (hi there!), and he is very happy about it by all accounts. But that's us individually. He trades cleaning duties for the shopping and cooking. He seriously hates shopping. Cooking is OK, though he's out of practice. He used to be quite good at whipping up a pasta dinner, and unlike me he actually got the knack of steaming rice on the stovetop. He's crap at BBQs, though, which has got to be bad for his Bloke cred.

Cooking can indeed be creative and fun - obviously it's one of my own joys. And I quite agree that a certain level of it is an essential life skill for all of us. Nobody should have to depend on fast food and microwaved readimeals. But ALL of us should have the basics, independent of our plumbing. The complexities may safely be left to those of us who enjoy it - also independent of our plumbing.

By the way, one thing I'm very glad to learn from this is that there's a film of Julia Child's life, mashed up with the Julie/Julia project, coming out soon. VERY EXCITED OMG WHEN IS IT OPENING HERE?!!! *Ahem* Sorry, getting carried away. VERY EXCITED VERY EXCITED VERY EXCITED! Australian release date 08-Oct-09, US release date 07-Aug-09 WTF? DOWNLOAD DOWNLOAD DOWNLOAD. *oops, management does not endorse any naughty illegal stuff, treely ruly.*

Boozy Fruit

2009-08-09T10:43:00.003+10:00

My mate B1 brought a boozy fruit compote to dinner recently, and it was so delicious that I decided to try making one of my own. The part I liked best about it was her use of glace orange, which adds that bittersweet citrus kick to it. You can have this warm, with icecream or yoghurt, or dolloped on porridge. Since the alcohol component of the booze is actually cooked out, it's fine to have it for breakfast. You could add a little dash of brandy or liqueur back for dessert if you like.

The true recipe is one of those not-recipes. Put whatever dried fruit you want in a bowl. Add some honey and some (milkless!) tea and some booze, whatever you fancy. Soak overnight. Simmer for a while to reduce liquid down.

Recipe: Boozy Fruit Compote
300g mixed dried fruit, large chunks
75g glace orange slices, chopped roughly
50ml marsala
50ml metaxa (a sweet muscatty Greek brandy)
50ml vanilla vodka
100ml strawberry champagne
300ml black chai
1 cinnamon stick
2 tablespoons honey

Assemble all in a glass bowl and soak overnight. Next day, toss in a saucepan and simmer for half an hour or until liquid is reduced to a small amount. Eat.

Notes: For fruit I used dried apricots, dried pineapple, prunes, dates, baby figs, and raisins. The strawberry champagne was a leftover, from last week's houseguest P. Chai made from a teabag from the Indian grocer.

Also while I was writing this, I kept typing compost instead of compote. DO NOT THROW ON GARDEN.

It Aten't Dead

2009-08-08T15:00:00.004+10:00

One week on and I still haven't killed it. Though the butter lettuce and rocket are looking alarmingly limp. Let us hope that today's feed and water picks them up.

This is a home hydroponics box from hydropantry, that I bought at the EPIC market last week. It is nifty. You put it in a frost-sheltered but sunny spot, and change the water once a week. Add 40ml of nutrient solution, and it's done until next week. You pick what you want from it as you go.

There are three kinds of lettuce in my planter, plus rocket, spring onions, curly parsley, continental parsley and coriander. We've used some of the red and cos lettuce already. It seems to be doing OK so far, just sitting on the table on the back deck. I think it's quite picturesque - adds a nice dash of green.

When you change the solution, you can put the old water on the garden. It's nice and clean, not smelly like the water from a week long neglected flower vase would be. Which makes sense when you think about it, since there's live roots hanging in there, not cut stems. I used the first batch of leftover water on my new cherry tree, which I am still excited about.

The garden is starting to look spring-like already. It's pretty in the sunshine, even if not exactly warm: the prunus is budding, and bulbs are sprouting among the hellebores and violets and cyclamens down the side that we've paved recently. And the wattle is starting to flower. Alice the wonder-gardener has pruned the trickier things for me and instructed me to feed the citrus. I'd better go do that while I remember.

Dinosaurs for dinner

2009-08-03T16:13:00.002+10:00

This pulled pork recipe works really well with turkey. And since we can now get turkey legs and wings at Woollies, I've done this a couple of times. (Without blogging it, oh naughty me.) My slow cooker is not quite big enough to hold them. I always think it looks like something out of the Flintstones. Giant dinosaurian drumsticks. And since it seems probable that birds are dinosaurs, I'm not so wrong.

It's quite simple - skin the legs, and follow the pulled pork recipe. Let it slow cook for six hours or so, turning the drumsticks occasionally - especially if any bits are sticking up above the liquid as they are in this picture. Cool it down, and then pull all the meat off the bones - note that turkey has some extra cartilage struts compared to chicken. Defat the stock if needed, and return the pulled-apart meat to the tomato/vinegar sauce.

I varied it this time - I used a third of a bottle of Disaster Bay's chipotle sauce instead of the plain chilli flakes. And I added in a batch of cooked black-eyed beans - it's easier to cook separately. Served with coleslaw and fat slabs of sourdough bread - yummy. The Bloke approved.

(BTW, I'm guessing these turkey hunks from Woollies are not free range. Hmm. Again with the consistency problems.)

I finally clicked that "Monetise" tab

2009-08-01T16:22:00.008+10:00

So now we have google ads. I have no idea if this will make me any money, or if my readers will instead form a tiny lynch mob with flaming torches and drive me off. So far it seems to be producing sensibly food-related ads. And if you're using firefox & adblock, I'm pretty sure you will see nothing of it anyway.

I'm told that if anything offensive turns up, I can ban them. But I haven't fully learned to drive this thing yet, and my readers may not see the same ads that I do. Let me know if there's anything terrible, and I'll do my best to get rid of it.

Edit: This is amazing - I seem to be getting a lot more page views that I expected. I'd avoided counting before because I didn't want to feel intimidated by a large audience or disappointed by a small one. (Yes, I can be hard to please.) And you guys are clicking on the ads! I actually want to click on a couple of them, but I'm not allowed.

So I now feel, like, all responsible. I've added a link to this post to the top of the left column, as "Report a Bad Ad". Anything that looks nefarious - junk weight loss spams, quack miracle cures, mailorder ~~slaves~~ brides, whatever - please post the URL here as a comment, and I will put it on my ad filter list for bannination with extreme prejudice.

NOTE: Don't bother reporting it, if it appears on this specific page. Talking about dangerous weightloss spam brings it on like Beetlejuice.

Howto note:
My account -> AdSense (wait for load) -> AdSense Setup -> Competetive AdFilter.

Sausage, Egg & Chips - with TRUFFLES!!!

2009-07-30T19:01:00.000+10:00

Because I can.

And because the bloke's resolution for more vegetables doesn't seem to have lasted. And because I really wanted to use up the eggs. I decided to bake them with silverbeet, as I'd originally planned, but instead of having the cauliflower side dish, we have little low fat chipolatas and oven chips. And HP sauce.

Recipe: Baked Eggs on Winter Greens

4 truffle-infused eggs
1 bunch silverbeet, leaf only
1 bunch beetroot, tops only
1/2 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 cup cream
nutmeg

Chop the greens coarsely, and wilt them down in a frypan with the olive oil.
Press out any extra water and place in a shallow baking dish.
Pour over most of the cream.
Make 4 hollows in the greens, and break an egg into each one.
Drizzle a little extra cream over the top, and dust with nutmeg.
Bake at 180C for 10-15 minutes, until egg is set to your liking.

Notes: OK, so this is quite a standard dish if you use normal eggs and less cream. You can use any greens you like - kale, spinach, whatever, but I prefer not to have large stalks mixing up the texture. (They can go in the soup!) I like using the beetroot greens: it makes things go a bit pink.

And honestly, it was a bit hard to tell if there was any truffle flavour. The eggs were 3 weeks old, but the whites still clung together like very fresh eggs. They were the last of my latest batch from Fi's chooks, which she gave me back at the truffle cooking demo in Bungendore. They were very tasty, very delicious - but was that truffle, or just the result of happy insect-scratching chooks? I'm a little disappointed in these, as I'd hoped the truffle would be more obvious.

Meals from the market

2009-07-29T13:19:00.007+10:00

Monday dinner was the slow roast hoggett, with plenty of market veggies. The hoggett was beautiful - meltingly tender. As mint sauce is traditional with lamb, and red currant jelly with mutton, I offered both. Neither were made by me: the mint was from a market stall sometime, and the jelly made by B2 from her home grown currants. I made the gravy. B1 brought us a wonderful dried fruit & booze compote, heavy on the oranges, and some good vanilla icecream. Houseguests P&R bought a cherry pie from Kingston market. A good feed was had by all.

I did a tray of roast fennel and beetroot, another tray of roast pumpkin and potato, and I steamed some broccolini. It was a little tricky and the timing didn't quite work right for the potato/pumpkin tray. The pumpkin was a tad overdone and the spuds were a little underdone. I cut the pumpkin too small, and the start with the 125 degree slow roast, followed by half an hour on 180 wasn't quite enough for the spuds. Oh well. The smallest ones were OK and the rest have been cut up and tossed in the soup.

What soup? The leftover roast soup, of course. I used the shank to make stock for the gravy, and then topped it up with the bone - there wasn't much meat left on it after feeding six. I'm having it for lunch now, in between typing this. I also chucked in the leftover stock and the soaked porcinis from the risotto.

What risotto? Tuesday's dinner was a mushroom risotto using the truffle scented rice, with swiss brown mushrooms, and a stock made from Monday dinner's leftover white wine (thanks, M), some frozen homemade chicken stock and soakings from a few dried porcini. Mushrooms and the accompanying salad were from the market.

And tonight I've got a baked egg & silverbeet thingy in mind, perhaps with a side of baked cauliflower. I need to use up the last four truffled eggs ASAP, while they're still good.

Recipe: Slow roast hoggett
1 leg hoggett
500ml red wine
bay leaf
mixed herb/salt rub

Sprinkle the hoggett all over with the herb rub.
Put the hoggett on a rack over a baking pan, with the wine and bayleaf in the pan.
Cover well with foil.
Put into a 125 degree oven. Leave for 5 hours, removing foil and basting once an hour or so. Top up liquid with water if running dry.
Take foil off and return to oven for another hour.
Remove from oven and wrap well in foil to rest in a warm place for half an hour.

Notes: It will fall apart when carved; I prefer to present it in a bowl for people to serve themselves. No neat slices. For the herbs, I used a native herb & salt rub that I bought in Byron Bay. It has lemon myrtle and mountain pepperleaf, among other things. You could make up your own - I was thinking of a lemon zest, garlic & rosemary one, but I was out of garlic. The rich wine and meat juice mix makes excellent pan gravy.

Recipe: Mushroom risotto
180g truffle-infused arborio rice
1.5 litres liquid (see notes)
1 medium onion
1 clove garlic
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
200g swiss brown mushrooms
75g grated parmesan

Heat the oil and butter in a large pan.
Saute the finely chopped onion gently until just barely golden.
Add the finely chopped garlic and sliced mushrooms.
Saute until mushrooms are wilted, then add the rice.
Stir around for a couple of minutes until it begins to look a little translucent around the edges.
Add a ladleful of warmed liquid, and stir well.
Continue to add the stock mix a ladle at a time until the risotto is done to your taste. This will take 20-25 minutes.
Turn off the heat, stir through the grated parmesan, and let it sit for 2-3 minutes before serving.

Notes: In this case I had 400ml white wine, 500ml chicken stock (at a guess, I had condensed it before freezing), and 600ml water in which I had soaked a handful of dried porcinis. For a veggie version, just use veggie stock. But it's best to taste it as you go, and if it seems too strong or salty at the 15 minute mark, add some water instead. You may not use all the liquids - I chucked my leftovers in the soup.

This was another stealth truffle dish. It's not strong, but it just makes everything that bit better. The Bloke loved it. There's more rice left, so I'll probably repeat this soonish.

Not Recipe:
A variation on leftover roast something soup.
This is a standard use-up, irreproducible, and this one came out brilliantly good. I must have another bowlful.

This variation:
* Stock made from the hoggett shank, leg bone and veggie trimmings, bayleaves and parsley stalks.
* Leftover gravy from the hoggett roast dinner. I couldn't deglaze the roasting tin into the stock, because I'd already used it to make the gravy.
* Stock made from a previous roast lamb dinner, from the freezer.
* Stock, wine and porcini left over from the risotto dinner
* a good handful of pearl barley
* a diced carrot, some frozen green beans, and diced leftover roast potatoes
* the few shards of meat from the shank and bone.

So simple: simmer the barley & carrot in the mixed stocks for half an hour, add the other veggies and meat, simmer until veg all cooked. Eat. Yum. Tragically I have to eat it all myself since the Bloke objects to soup with bits in. But he got the leftover risotto, so he's not suffering.

More on Byron

2009-07-27T13:12:00.000+10:00

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been in Byron Bay recently. Sunshine, water views, long walks, blobbing around reading, blues bands in the pub, a couple of fancypants meals, and no computers. Excellent. I had a hot stone massage, which was lovely, but I resisted the temptation to get my chakras rebalanced, auras rotated, meridians rewired, inner fairy photographed and all that.

We had a small apartment to stay in, and we knew it was the right place for us immediately we arrived. The entry way looked like this! Byron Central Apartments are, well, central. And the place was comfortable without being ridiculously luxurious, and the management were lovely. We had a late flight out on Thursday and they let us use a spare room for the day. Our "studio loft apartment" had a small but complete kitchen equipped with a coffee plunger. It was good to have this - we could make coffee and have a cereal and fruit breakfast without having to get dressed and showered to go out.

And now I'm home, and sadly the kitchen had not magically tidied and restocked itself while I was away. Half the pantry supplies were still in boxes in the bar. And after our indulgent week, we both want to eat a bit more fibre and vegetables and fruit and all that sort of healthy stuff. A market trip on Saturday morning helped. And I defrosted the tomatoes that I roasted before we left, to make a roast tomato and red lentil soup, so that's a good start.

Some of the things we did in Byron... included a walk to the famous lighthouse, which was lovely, but featured a bit more uphill and stairs than my calves were prepared for. The icecream seller at the top of the hill is onto a good thing: I really felt as if I'd earned it! And we blobbed around our "studio loft apartment" sleeping late and reading books. We also walked out to the Arts & Industry Estate, which is an odd sort of place - art galleries and craft shops interspersed in the more usual light industry. We got to sample Byron Gourmet pies at the factory, and buy jewelry from the Hammer and Hand collective, and flourless pistachio and orange cake at Luscious. And we are considering buying some engraved glass art to renovate our front entry way.

We spent several evenings at "The Rails", aka the Railway Friendly Bar. It's a pub next door to the station with a bit of a train theme, and live music most nights. We saw four different blues acts there, and ate several meals. If the seats had been more comfortable I would have been happier - sadly, over-tall wooden benches made it a bit uncomfortable for a long haul. The food wasn't bad - I had a large chicken salad with cranberries and rocket and almonds, a decent burger, and a rather good rare tuna pasta dish which would have been terrific in different weather. Tossing hot pasta with cold salad ingredients to get a lukewarm dish is nice in summer, but it was a bit too cool for the winter evening. Yes, it does get cold overnight in Byron. I was forced to buy a nice warm shawl and some red velour trousers just to cope. Forced, I tell you!

We had a lovely lunch at Fishheads, which in an odd freak of planning overlooks the carpark adjacent to the beach. It's the closest you can get to the water without buying takeaway and sitting on the beach. I'd class it as casual fine dining. It's BYO and they have takeaway at the city end of the building, but the restaurant is quite nicely decked out, with wicker chairs and Aboriginal art on the walls. I had a delicious mixed seafood pasta dish ($29) with chilli, garlic and preserved lemon. The seafood was top notch, fresh and buttery, though it was rather light on the chilli. And I followed it with a rather swish chamomile poached pineapple with macadamia icecream and honeycomb toffee shards ($13).

Orient Express sounds like a cheap takeaway in a mall, but it absolutely isn't. It serves mixed Asian and Asian-inspired dishes, in a setting with a big buddha, red walls and funky wooden furniture that like the menu is an eclectic assortment of Indonesian, Japanese, Chinese and more. We had peking duck pancakes ($16.90) and Vietnamese crabcakes on sugar cane sticks ($12.90) for entrees, and a gado gado salad ($8.90) and "tuna two ways" (illustrated, $28.90) for mains. The tuna was fantastic - the sashimi in the salad was good, but the char grill rare fish was out of this world. I would have loved to try a dessert - pannacotta with red date and goji berry compote, perhaps, or the classic black rice pudding, but I was too full.

We also went to the Balcony, and had a spiffy cheese plate. And O-sushi, which was very good indeed despite its unpromising location. Next to a supermarket in the strip mall, you'd expect some ordinary sushi chain, but this was top class. We had a mixed sashimi and salad plate and some fried chicken dumplings. And sake and genmai cha. I loved the sesame dressing on the salad, and the fish was exceptionally good. And one night we went off to the Buddha bar for a Dr Sketchy's anti-art night! I practiced my appalling life drawing skills on the burlesque models, and we ate the very reasonable pub grub.

We had a great time, and we want to go back. There are several reputedly good restaurants that I missed out on (Olivo, Whynot, Dish) and it's just a very relaxing place. I'd like to do some beach walking, and try another of the many different styles of massage and spa, and sample the organic doughnuts and the Earth & Sea pizza. Byron is not a high pressure, high activity kind of place, as long as you avoid the schoolies and the music festivals. The Splendour in the Grass crowd was just starting to arrive as we left, and I'm told it gets very hectic and crowded as the town population quadruples overnight. We got an upgrade on our transfer service on the way home - all the minibusses were booked so we had to have the limo. The low end limo with no bar, but big comfy seats for the 3/4 hour drive to Coolangatta airport was no hardship.

Marketing, twice

2009-07-25T11:49:00.011+10:00

In case you were wondering, I've been in Byron Bay. And of course I went to the Farmers' Market, which is on Thursday mornings from 8am-11am. Since we flew out on Thursday night, I couldn't buy very much there, but I did have a lovely time wandering around and chatting to the stall holders. (More photos below the fold.)

I made up for it this morning with this glamorous array of winter produce, as depicted against the new tiles and benchtop. OK, OK, so it would have been a lot more glamorous if I'd taken them out of the plastic bags. We have beetroot, silverbeet, pumpkin, cauli, carrots, apples, and a few hothouse tomatoes and salad mix. And also a leg of hoggett, which is something I haven't seen in decades. A slow roast on Monday seems just the ticket to farewell our guests who arrive this arvo.

I was tempted by some Robyn Rowe chocolates, but it was one of those post-indulgence days when vegetables seem more interesting than choccie. Robyn is from Murrumbatemam, which brings our local chocolatier count back up to four. Her chocs are all mixed boxed sets, in varying sizes, but you can pre-order specific ones if you like. Her dark is a 52% cocoa, not too sweet. I rather fancy the Clonakilla muscat and the cherry port - next time, perhaps. No website, but she does take telephone orders (62275064).

Byron was quite the contrast, though of course it's winter there too so there are some commonalities. There were masses of citrus fruits - limes and lemons and oranges of many varieties, including this Buddha's Hand citron. There were tropical flowers, avocados, custard apples and pawpaws, and fresh ginger, galangal and turmeric. There was a man pressing fresh sugar cane juice, and several stalls with locally grown coffee. There was even locally grown rice - brown, of course, a dry highland variety that doesn't need paddies. And it's not all for vegetarians: there's several local meat growers with organic and free range pork and lamb.

They also had a few bakeries, including some with sprouted seed breads and spelt breads. The woodfired Heart Breads chocolate brioche was very delicious, as was the apple. There was quite a lot more of the "biodynamic" stuff than we have in Canberra. And there was wheatgrass and energetic sprouts, and a weird raw foods place, and guitar playing aged hippie buskers singing about peace and rainbows with dolphin stickers. The pixie moondust does come on a bit strong at times, as in the rest of the town, but mostly it's your regular organic and local produce market.

I bought just a few items to take home. Some of the rice, and some coffee, and also some honey roast macadamias and a jar of Davidson plum jam from the native produce specialists. Their wild lime marmalade and lillipilli jam were also fabulous. Rainforest Foods is their name and they do mail-order. I kept purchases to a minimum since it had to go in the suitcase. And much as I might like a dragonfruit tree, I'm sure it would not have liked this morning's frost!

The Last Resort

2009-07-20T12:41:00.000+10:00

How to get a stuck jar open:
a) use a cloth, grip mat or similar. I used to wrap a rubber band around, but the tupperware mat is more convenient. This simply allows you to use more force on the jar, by increasing the friction so you don't slip.
b) run metal lid under hot water for a minute. It should expand, making it easier to remove.
c) both a. and b.
d) ask handy bloke to open it, enhancing his chances with a, b, and c as required, or any other set of grips from his shed.
e) whack jar lid edge firmly against benchtop (potentially breaking an airlock).
f) poke a hole in the jar lid (definitely breaking any airlock).
g) buy a special jar opening tool with a handle - this adds leverage.
h) see picture.

I got up to f, then skipped on to h. The ingredients are
* 1 recalcitrant jar
* 1 sharp pointed knife
* 1 meat mallet
* 1 spare, clean jar
* 1 clean spoon
* 1 knife sharpener

Method: hold knife point down on jar lid. Whack with meat mallet. Keeping knife in the hole so created, use it to cut a line. Repeat a couple of times, creating a rough N shape. Use the knife to lever back sections of the lid - caution, edges will be sharp. Use the spoon to extract the contents of the jar to the spare jar.

This is not good for your knife. Resharpen afterwards. And do look out for any metal shavings from the edge: they are not good to eat.

Of Fungi and Sherry

2009-07-15T21:58:00.001+10:00

I had a fabulous truffled mushroom dish at Rubicon recently, which gave the illusion of not containing truffles. The truffle is a fellow fungus, and the flavour blends exceptionally well. It doesn't shout "HELLO LOOK TRUFFLES HERE!"; rather it seemed as if the mushrooms were somehow transmogrified into super-mushrooms, powerfully flavourful, more mushroomy than ever before, capable of leaping tall buildings with a single bound and all that.

So with that in mind, the last 7g of truffle went into a creamy mushroom sauce for pasta. Mushroom, sherry, truffle, cream, garlic, egg, parmesan - brilliant. Do use good sherry, though. I'm a fan of a good sherry. You don't have to get the original from Jerez, though it's good if you can. There are several decent Australian ones for around $15-30 a bottle. If you haven't tried it before, do give it a go. This is not your Nanna's sweet cooking sherry, nor the wino's nail-polish remover-y stuff. Fino and Manzanilla are the dryest styles, Amontillado is a touch sweeter. And there are some good sweet ones, too, though the restaurant industry seems to have snapped up all the Pedro Ximénez supplies.

If you haven't any sherry, a splash of cognac will be fine instead. And while I'm at it, this is a time for proper Italian parmigiano reggiano, too. No skimping on anything. I did think of adding some Bundewarra free range ham, as this is kind of a carbonara-inspired dish, but I decided not. It would have been gilding the lily. I had a nommy ham and tomato sandwich for lunch instead.

Recipe: Truffled Mushroom Fettucine
200g small swiss brown mushrooms
5-10g black truffle
2 cloves garlic
1 tblsp butter
1 tblsp good olive oil
50 ml sherry
100 ml pouring cream
pinch salt
black pepper to taste
2 truffle-infused eggs
200g fettucine
parmesan to taste

Melt the butter with the olive oil.
Add the sliced mushrooms and finely chopped truffle.
Saute for a couple of minutes, then add the crushed garlic.
Saute for another couple of minutes, then add the sherry.
Simmer down for 5 minutes, or until almost gone, then add the cream.
Simmer down to about half volume.
Add salt and pepper to taste.
Meanwhile, cook the fettucine, then drain it and return it to the pan.
Add the mushroom sauce on top of the pasta.
Beat the egg in a cup.
Working quickly, toss the egg over the mushroom sauce and pasta, and mix well.
Add parmesan to individual serves at table.

Notes: Serve with real parmesan to top, and a simple green salad. You can mix the fettucini, egg and sauce in a large pre-warmed serving bowl if you want to take it to table, but we tend to serve from the pan unless there's a dinner party.

The Bloke was enthusiastic: "That's good pasta", he said, "No, that's really good pasta. Luxurious." And it was.

Allons, Enfants!

2009-07-14T21:36:00.009+10:00

Omelette aux truffes, salade verte, fromage de chèvre, tarte au citron.

Well, it was 14th July, so it seemed appropriate. The omelette recipe was a minor variant on the one handed out by the truffle sellers; the salad simple mixed leaves with an olive oil and lemon dressing. We followed it with a small cheese course of Hobbit Farm ashed chèvre with oatcakes and quince paste. Dessert was a lemon tart from the Jamison sourdough bakery - it was pretty good, a crisp sweet shortcrust and a fluffy mousse filling. I think this is a very honorable meal to restart the cooking with.

Yes, I used the stove! The tiles behind it are dry; there's not much left to do except painting. Since I won't be cooking much with drop sheets and paint fumes everywhere, this is an interlude. But normal service isn't far off now.

Recipe: Omelette aux Truffes
6 free-range truffle infused eggs
15g truffle
2 tablespoons butter
2 tsp cognac
75ml sherry
a pinch of salt
Shave the truffle and chop finely.

Put one tablespoon of butter, the truffle, the cognac and sherry in a small saucepan. Bring to a simmer then cover and let reduce slowly until just a tablespoon of liquid remains.

Beat the eggs well with the salt.

Heat up the other tablespoon of butter in a frypan until sizzling. Pour in eggs and stir a little, lifting the edges to allow uncooked egg to run down.

Mix in the truffles while egg is still quite liquid so it can spread evenly.

Fold over while centre is still moist, and serve immediately.

Notes: the original recipe has more truffles, but this was plenty. The sherry was a very nice Hanwood Amontillado style, and the cognac Remy Martin - this is no time to use the cheap stuff. And the eggs were from Fi's chooks, which is why they're such a stunning rich yellow.

I don't think $50 omelettes are going to be regular fare around here, but it was very good. And I still have some truffle-infused eggs and rice, and another 5g of truffle. I plan to use the truffle in a pasta tomorrow.

My very own truffle

2009-07-11T10:10:00.004+10:00

Even though there will still not be very much cooking going on, I made it to the EPIC growers' market at the unusually early time for me of 8am. These truffle sellers were out there with their stock sitting under glass. I tried to take a picture of the huge one that would sell for over $1000, but my crappy phone camera didn't do so well at that. They are happy to cut the truffles up for you, though - they didn't think anyone would actually buy the big one. I've got a 22g piece at $66; friend Fi has twice that much.

I thought it might be a little bit frustrating wandering round the market and not being able to buy much. But actually it was rather fun. We have a short trip planned, and we still need to paint the kitchen and clean up the problems, so I'm only buying the most immediate things. I haven't been out there for a while, but there haven't been very many changes since my last time. Poachers Pantry have a van there now, and I think the gentleman selling Tsakiris Greek sweets is quite new. He has proper baklava with walnuts, and wonderful honey fritters. Yum!

I bought just a few things - half a dozen bagels, a jar of stringybark honey, a punnet of swiss brown mushrooms, four quinces, a bunch of tatsoi, and some slices of Bundewarra ham. We'll use all these very soon. I'm putting the quinces in to bake now - they are perfuming the kitchen wonderfully.

And here is the truffle back home in action. I've put it in a box with a dozen week-old free-range eggs from Fi's chooks, and a packet of arborio rice. Now it can sit for a few days in the fridge just doing its scent thing. The rice will keep for some time, but the eggs and the truffle itself will need using sooner. I'm thinking of making simple omelettes for Bastille Day, perhaps.

This piccie also provides a very tiny sneak preview of the kitchen. The white sparkly benchtop is just visible in front between the fabric sample bundles. And there's some of the teal and white mosaic splashback tiles in shot, too. Hmmm... Purple cushions for the built in seat, perhaps?

Cheesy!

2009-07-09T16:08:00.004+10:00

I'm on a roll with these short excitable titles.

Anyway, I am feeling rather pissed off with Perfect Italiano cheese for their new (to me) and repulsive "perfect man" ad. That slimy git who practises his "listening face" needs a good kick up the arse. Or more specifically, since the git is imaginary, the advertising agency that thought of that sexist bullshit and the executives that approved it need a good arse-kicking. I wish I hadn't taken their free cheese the other month. I shall now buy Millel instead.

And while on the topic of cheesiness, the kitchen renovations have dragged on a lot longer than planned. And so the takeaway and microwave have been in more use than I had hoped. TurkOz pide is a very fine thing, especially the spinach and cheese, which is brilliantly cheesy in exactly the right way. And I have discovered that a sandwich press is very good at reheating pide slices.

Also, I have recently eaten Weight Watchers frozen cannelloni and Healthy Choice lasagna. (They were on special, OK?). The weight watchers one is bland and curiously empty-tasting. It's much improved by a lot of extra grated cheese and a splash of chilli sauce. The Healthy Choice lasagne is a bit better - still bland, but more creamy and mouth-filling, somehow. It's probably all gums and flavourings, since it's 3% fat. I'm just not going to read the label.

I'm having vague fancies of what to do when I get the kitchen up and running again. Truffle risotto, duck cassoulet, truffled eggs...

Truffles!

2009-07-07T22:37:00.012+10:00

Saturday lunch was in Bungendore, at Le Tres Bon. We had a hands-on demonstration of truffle preparation, and put together a lunch of truffled chicken with Périgueux sauce and mash, followed by a truffled crème brûlée. It was a sweet deal - $100 for a two hour demonstration and talk, the amazing meal and a couple of glasses of rather good wine.

Mostly chef Christophe did the cooking while we watched, but we did get to bone the chicken and help with peeling potatoes and separating eggs and such. And he shared his crème brûlée recipe with us. I asked permission to pass it on here, and Josephine said yes as long as I gave him full credit. It's not his bitter almond one, though. You will have to go there to eat that. And I'd encourage you to do that, the food is great and they are lovely people.

The truffle came from Braidwood. Yes - this is true local food! In case you missed seeing all the ads recently, the Truffle Festival is on. The local climate is perfect for truffles, and there are now around 30 growers in the region. Aussie farmers are using dogs to scent out the truffles, rather than the traditional French pigs.

We actually started with the brulee, since it needed to bake and cool. A few of us separated eggs, and then Christophe whisked the yolks up with cream, vanilla and sugar. He put a couple of julienne slices of shaved truffle in each ramekin before pouring on the custard mix. And then it was off to oven in the bain-marie.

The main was chicken and the lightest, fluffiest mash I can ever recall. There's no formal recipe for the mash. Basically all you do is boil the potatoes, then pass it through a veggie mouli - this lightens it a lot, compared with the old potato masher. Then beat in some milk, melted butter and a smidge of nutmeg and salt. And pipe it out onto the plate with a cunning swirly action.

The chickens were local free range organic birds. We split them into four quarters, saving the frames for stock, and boned the thighs. Each quarter was folded around a truffle shaving, sprinkled with salt and white pepper, then tied up with string into a neat bundle. They were pan-fried in a mix of olive oil and butter until pale golden, and then Christophe dredged a little flour over them before adding chicken stock, white wine, chopped onion and carrot, a bay leaf, rosemary sprig and parsley stalks. And so they were left to simmer gently for an hour. Check occasionally to see if the stock needs topping up.

The sauce - well, it was amazing. I've seen Iron Chef French Hiroyuki Sakai, the Delacroix of French Cuisine, do the "perry-goo" on telly, but I've never had it in real life. To make this, we used the pan juices from the chicken. These were brilliant to start with, and when strained into a pot and enriched with cream and duck foie gras and butter and a goodly amount of truffle - well, it's heaven. Time didn't actually permit a proper reduction, so Christophe showed us his sneaky trick of thickening it up with - bog standard cornflour and water! So in theory his sauce should be even better, but that is very hard to imagine.

And here's dessert.

Recipe: Christophe's Truffled Crème Brûlée
15 egg yolks
1 litre cream
a splash of vanilla
200g caster sugar
30g fresh truffle shavings
white sugar to sprinkle

Whisk up the eggs yolks with the sugar, then whisk in the cream and vanilla.
Make sure you have a slice of truffle per serve set aside. Julienne the rest of the shavings and add a couple to each of 12 small ramekins.
Line a deep baking tray with paper, then add the ramekins, then pour water around them.
Bake at 130C for 30 minutes, until just set.
When cool to room temperature, sprinkle each with sugar (a scant teaspoon per serve).
Caramelise it with a kitchen blowtorch and while the sugar is still bubbling, add on the reserved truffle shaving.
Serve immediately.

Notes: Christophe actually made twice this quantity. He notes that if you are not using truffle, then brown sugar is better for the caramelising. The paper in the baking is to stop the water bubbling if it boils - splashes of water could spoil the smoothness.

This sounds a bit gimmicky, and reminiscent again of Iron Chef - an eggplant dessert! A fish icecream! But really, the truffle works surprisingly well in this. There is a mushroomy flavour, but it does not clash. It's a complex flavour, highly aromatic, and plays well with the egg and caramel.

I'm quite tempted to go look for a truffle now. They can be bought at EPIC markets if you get in early enough, and while it may be around $3 per gram, you don't actually need a lot. You can perfume rice or eggs with it, just by leaving the truffle with them in a sealed container for three or four days. Don't try making truffle oil, though - one thing we learned is that the Perigord style black truffles will not flavour oil in any lasting manner. Truffle oil as sold in gourmet shops is either artificially flavoured, or made with Italian white truffle.

A truffle should be kept wrapped in a damp cloth in a sealed jar. It will last up to two weeks, but remember that it is a fresh product. You should have enough time to scent your eggs, rice or cheese, but basically it's just a mushroom, with high water content. It will go off if left too long.

The Credits
Recipe: Christophe Gregoire
Photos: Fred Harden from the Australian Capital Country Truffle Festival. The first one depicts a truffle being shaved, but it's not Christophe. It's Jan Gundlach from SENSO, aka Flavours in Fyshwick. The second is an actual dessert from this demonstration: Fred was there with camera.

The Onion!

2009-07-03T11:35:00.001+10:00

OMG, the Onion is having a special food issue. It is hilarious! (BTW, link is to front page, I can't find a permalink but it's the July 2 edition.)