Like any other person, I have favourites. In the literary world one of my favourite books of all time is The Poisionwood Bible, by Barbra Kingsolver, another is Roald Dahl’s Maltilda but I guess that is in a bit of a different category. In both, I loved the way I felt like I really knew the characters, that something so beyond the realm of my everyday experience was occurring and that well, the story was just very well told.
I had high hopes that this month’s Kitchen Reader book was Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver – it would be the perfect meeting of my love of food and of perfectly assembled sentences, paragraphs and storylines. The book tells the story of Kingsolver and her family moving from Arizona (which I had to look up on a map) to a farm at the base of the Southern Appalachians (which, after also looking up on a map I discovered was quite a way away from Arizona) where they would try grow or source all of their own food for a year. With some exceptions of course, apparently it is quite hard to grow coffee in the Southern Appalachians.
Kingsolver is charming, self deprecating and honest about the challenges of growing your own food. Although, on the whole, it seemed that on a little farm with some vegetable plots, reliable farmers markets nearby and a little community of chickens and turkeys, it was a fairly smooth ride for Kingsolver and her family. It all sounded a little bit too easy. Summer brought a bounty of tomatoes – enough to fill all the horizontal surfaces in the farmhouse, enough basil to make pesto and freeze to eat during winter and when I thought it might just get tough in winter, they found an extra turkey in the freezer and had enough frozen vegetables to get through comfortably.
I suppose I should be cheering, its completely possible to be self sufficient (in a loose sense, I’m pretty sure they sourced locally grown lamb and had to buy flour, as opposed to milling wheat on their own) without going nuts or foregoing some of life’s luxuries. But selfishly, as a reader, I signed on to read a book with a little drama, to balance out the warm fuzzies, environmental lessons and tips on sustainability it was doling out in spades.
It is almost impossible to be mistaken on where the book was written, or who its audience was. Things like a turkey for thanksgiving, a child going away to college and a reference to Kingsolver like any other mother, having to throw together a meal in half an hour on a regular basis were gentle reminders of how the Kingsolver family weren’t actually just a bunch of crazy hippies but just a family trying to do what was right and make a positive change in their lives. While at the beginning of the book I quite liked Kingsolver, by the end of it I’d had quite enough of her telling me how practical it had been for her to grow all her own food. Maybe I just had garden envy, as the eight pots of herbs on my balcony are clearly not going to last me the week.
If it sounds like I thought that Kingsolver ended up coming across as a self righteous, idealistic and unrealistic character, you’re probably right. In spite of this, I happily turned the pages and on the whole quite enjoyed the book.
The Vegetannual - which for us in the Southern Hemisphere would need to be turned upside down. I love the idea of it in any case!
It had two redeeming features for me. First, it was well written. Living in Sydney, where winter passes like a chilly breeze, frosts are unheard of and the change of seasons is marked almost only by the dates on the calendar rather than massive variations in temperature and garden conditions I grabbed hold of descriptions of the lean months of winter, and the bounty that came with summer. These evocative descriptions were balanced with a bit of sentimentality, I loved Kingsolver’s explanation of why she loves cooking (actually I just love it when anyone explains this) and lots of practicality how she planned meals months in advance (she planted enough for the family to have two onions per week) .
The other redeeming feature is that I think, in spite of a little bit of ‘preachy-ness’ she got me. I’m already thinking of when the next farmers markets are in my area, or how I can utilise more effectively my whole balcony space and I’ll make sure I ask my butcher where my meat comes from a little more often. I’m certainly not going to move to a farm, nor am I going to stop buying food from my very conveniently located supermarket on the way home, but I’ll think about it more and try to do better.
It seems like only yesterday that I was swapping salads for soups and slow braises, I was caught out without a really functioning heater and that I took up knitting. Now, before I can finish my first scarf and with about four boxes of stock in the fridge waiting for soups to be made out of them I am packing for a weekend away at the beach.
It might be a blowy, wintry affair, but the way things have been going lately I have caved into the little optimist inside of me and packed a pair of thongs and my swimming costume! I’ve been looking forward to this weekend for a while now. Winter 2010 has been marked by waves of overseas visitors (lovely but exhausting), the flu that gripped Call me Jose and cancelled our weekend away at the snow and lots and lots of eating.
- I was given a blowtorch as a belated birthday present by the Frenchies and I’m not afraid to use it. It’s been wonderful for searing the top of brulees which were eaten before I could get a photo of them but also tres useful for searing my, pretty badly sliced, salmon. Sorry Japanese people, I don’t do your food justice. At least I’m not charging $6 it though – yes, poor and overpriced sushi restaurants for people who don’t know good sushi (read: TOKO Oxford St, Paddington I mean YOU).
- I digress, though as in the end, the freshness of the salmon won out over my poor slicing and the flavour was good even if the presentation was lacking and anyway, how fun is using a blowtorch? You know the answer.
- What is winter without a good hot chocolate? We took the Frenchies visiting French (how surprising) relatives out for breakfast at Bills Darlinghurst and hit up the hot chocolate with callebut ($4).
- It is my pick of hot chocolates this winter….and believe me I’ve tried many.
- Family bonding is the best when it involves a food expedition. We drove down the road to Cabramatta where I made up for all the sub standard $4 Buns (the Vietnamese Pork roll) in Sydney CBD by happily handing over $4 for this beauty. We shared it while waiting in line for Tan Viet.
- After having a little taste of the Bun, my heart skipped a beat at the longan, grass jelly drink at Tan Viet over the road…not to mention the crispy chicken and egg noodles which are not to be missed.
- These are my two favourite internet finds of the winter.
- Have you ever felt that adult tasks like cleaning, replying to emails, doing your banking etc are all too hard, a little bit annoying and just getting in the way of fun…..then you must must MUST read this. Clicking on the image will also take you there.
- He really gets going at about 0:19!
- Thanks to my Knitting Coach for the first and to Yes and Yes for the second.
Happy weekend everyone ! Hope you celebrate the end of winter (or summer depending where you are) in style. I’ll be thinking of you, from my beach retreat!
Like most avid home cooks, I am slowly but surely amassing quite the collection of cookbooks, some are given as gifts (a safe present for me) and some I buy as gifts to myself. My newest favourites are these beauties gifted from Kate after she helped clear out her Grandmother’s book collection. They’re part of a TIME magazine collection from the 1980′s.
I was so taken by their matching spines…
Aren't they wonderful?
Their pretty inside covers…
They would make great framed kitchen decorations don't you think?
The cooking techniques I had never heard of before, nor tried.
A whole volume devoted to preserving? Well, as the introduction says ‘Nothing in the realm of cookery comes closer to alchemy than preserving’ before launching into a detailed history of why food spoils, (enzymes apparently), how ‘man learned to prevent spoilage’ (Pasteur etc) and storing and using preserves (‘your devotion must not end merely with the food processed and securely packaged or bottled’, um, ok if you say so).
In case you were not sure, this recipie is for "ingenious shapes of melting tenderness" - a little bit of hyperbole never hurt any one....
They are just so interesting to read, it seems as much then as it may be now, the goal was to cook as much like a professional chef at home. In the confectionery volume it explains how to make a fondant from scratch (no store bought packets here!) and how to “acquire the professional’s skills” as far as dipping and moulding goes..interested in trying your hand at home made liqueur chocolates? Then this is definitely the book for you.
I’m not entirely convinced that the recipes are ones I want to try, as much as I have been enjoying reading about them. I love the glimpse into the food fashions of the time they offer (although, I was a child of the 80′s and I must say there was no homemade peanut brittle, marzipan, madelines or sauerkraut in my hosehould!
There are a couple of recipes that have piqued my interest, perhaps its the huge amounts of butter or chocolate they involve, so I’ll let you know how well or how badly I go with them…for now though, these books will remain mostly in the “reading” rather than “every day use” section of my bookshelf.
It’s been made pretty clear to me that baking is not one of my strengths in the kitchen. It requires really strict adherence to the instructions in the recipe and doesn’t allow for the adding of salt for absolution of the sin of failing to follow the recipe….and certainly, there is only the smallest of margins for one of my favourite cooking techniques of substitution of ingredients when I may have forgotten to buy them all at the supermarket.
I knew macarons were going to be hard, they were no flourless chocolate cake or lemon tart (my now fall back baking recipes). To prepare I spent hours researching macaron recipes online, watching a giant macaron tower be constructed on reality tv (not so much preparation but part of my addiction to last season of Masterchef) and generally getting swept up in the mania which has hit Sydney over the past year, for these puffs of sweet, crunchy, chewy goodness. For the record, the macarons available at Bacco Pasticeria in Chifley are great, try the pisachio, and at $2 a pop they are a macaron bargain.
Anyway, with all of my preparation and the wealth of information available on the interweb I was destined to succeed, that was of course until I began the macaron making process.
Look, there’s not much to say on this one, except that I’m not sure at which of the many many stages where failure is possible in the macaron making process, I failed. My best guess is that I didn’t whip the egg whites enough, then I didn’t let them rest on the tray enough and there was a failure on my part with oven tempreatures and the like.
So anyway, they ended up coming out looking much like this.
The first batch, nice and brown on the bottom with no "foot", also there seems to be a massive gaping hole in the middle of the macaron, is it obvious?
And this.
The second batch, I added coca to the shell, but apparently they not only failed to rise, they took over the baking tray like some kind of amorphous blob. Fail. Fail. Fail
So I had a couple of trays of tasty (even I can’t stuff up the flavour that results from the combination of icing sugar, almond meal and caster sugar) disasters in front of me and absolutely nothing to bring to an afternoon tea! Luckily a punnet of blueberries and a dollop of rosewater cream later I was back in business.
Saved?
Although I might wait a while before having another go at the macaron challenge and maybe I’ll do it in a class.
I’m pretty well behaved on the lunch expenditure front. I utitlise monoploise the work toasted sandwich maker, am an avid fan of leftovers and frozen portions of things like soups or pasta sauces but sometimes everything just gets a little bit on top of me and I trundle off to work sans packed lunch.
On these occasions, at about midday, absolute panic hits me. I’m sitting at my desk and have totally devoured the contents of my snack drawer (maybe one day I’ll show you that) and I have no lunch! I work in the city so my options for a quick feed are mostly food court based. I often wander around the David Jones Food Hall, or if I can find a friend to slurp with me pick up some laksa from my favourite laksa shop in the city (plus every five weeks they make assam laksa!). The other day though, I didn’t really feel like either and then remembered that about 100m from my desk is the Nippon Club. Read a review of the place here.
Not bad huh?
I’d been there previously for dinners and such, its a tiny club hidden on the basement level of a building on Macquarie St which also houses medical specialists, barristers and is next door to a Court?! Its got pokies and a tiny bar, which is full at midday when I arrive and the bistro section serves a selection of sushi, sashimi and Japanese mains. The best value is the sushi special of the day which comes in at $14…be warned though, the rest of the menu is a bit pricey – with chicken katsu is about $17 and a perfectly presented, but by no means filling, sushi and sashimi selection can set you back anything from $9 (for 9 pieces of sashimi) to $31 for a mixed plate.
I got it in takeaway form but it consisted of a tuna (with tiny bits of kingfish and prawn) and avocado spicy sashimi salad, a ginger and tuna dish, a salmon and cucumber salad, a radish salad, steamed rice and miso! Much better than a $10 sandwich from a food court, it was enough food for me for two lunches. I may have a new favourite lunch haunt.
Other things I have been enjoying this week:
- Matthew Caldicot from Masterchef has a blog!Well, he protests it isn’t a blog, but seems pretty close in any event. Matthew was Call me Jose’s favourite until he got the boot. I think Call me Jose was a fan as soon as he saw the massive burger he made for the burger challenge. Blog or not, it is good to have another foodie to share sydney eats with. You can find Matt and some of the other Masterchef 2010/Season 2 contestants on twitter too!
- I love these jars from Jamie Oliver…even if I don’t really really love him, I get it, he’s good, he’s just not my favourite. Put your pitchforks away people! The jars would look so lovely on my kitchen bench but alas they are available here but only ship to the UK and the US , not all the way to the antipodes. Besides, they are a little exxy for my liking.
Blue?Pink?Green - Not at the Jamie Oliver Store, its duck egg blue, sorbet and pea green to you!
- Um an IKEA 2010 Season Preview?? YES PLEASE! thanks to this fabulous site.
- This is one of my current favourite sites. It’s called A Collection a Day and every day there’s a post, with a different collection, vintage photos, old spools of twine, buttons? I loved these jugs…
Well it is an American site, so they're "pitchers"
Happy weekend people!
Monday mornings are always hard….I always get into work a little later on a Monday morning than any other day of the week. I usually forget to bring something I need, like my wallet, or my phone or my swipe pass for the office. It usually takes me till about mid monday morning to get into the swing of things!
Are you are like me, staring at your to – do list with horror and dread? What are you looking forward to? What’s keeping you going?
Last week I had a bit of a shocker and this little beauty from a local shop lifted my spirits immensely.Unlike many of the trendy trendy cupcake shops in the city, which I think fail on the making a good cupcake front, the cake portion of these little beauties never fail to impress.
Soft and fluffy cake, icing is not too buttery....and its opposite my bus stop!
Now I’m not saying that I need one right now, but it’s nice to know that with neighbours like these, a weekday mood lift via cupcake is never far away….
I don’t usually ask Call me Jose what he wants for dinner. Actually, I rarely even consult with him as to what he feels like eating in any given week or on any given night, unless we are picking a restaurant to go out to. I’ve got a pretty solid menu monopoly.
This system has worked pretty well for us for a little while, I take mental note of things Call me Jose likes and they work their way up my mental arsenal of recipes.
After I had totally booked out our weekend with My Dad’s never ending birthday celebrations and a weekend away with some of my favourite friends I thought it was only fair if I offered to make Call me Jose something he wanted for dinner on Sunday night.
Before I go on though, I must say that this was about my most well fed 24 hours away from home in recent history, thanks mostly to the Hostess. It’d been a few years since I’d visited the Hostess’ family beach hideaway about an hour north of Sydney. I had fond memories of late nights, glasses of gin and tonic and that sense of invincibility that comes with being 22 there. A few years later, the gin is muddled instead into a lychee cocktail (which didn’t survive long enough for a photo shoot) and the air of invincibility exists only when we crack out the Spicks and Specks boardgame.
Homemade pasta, home made ricotta...what a treat!
I had been fed so well by her before, but this weekend’s menu blew me away.
Sourdough bruschetta, even better when someone else makes it for you
We had freshly made pasta (my hands were either holding a lychee cocktail or rolling pasta during its making so I don’t have any photos of that), bruschetta on some pretty tasty sourdough, an amazing sponge, ricotta and candied fruit cake (or Cassata to those in the know) and to top it all off in the morning, a scrambled eggs with fetta, with generous servings of bacon on the side of course.
The Hostess is making a friend's wedding cake, that means lots of fondant kneading practice for her and cake eating practice for us!
Sorry, where was I? I must have got caught up in the food reminiscing. Tonight’s dinner….that’s right, in the morning I mentioned to Call me Jose that we would have pulled pork soft shell tacos for dinner that night…but then when we got waylaid on the way home from the Central Coast at a Book Fair (I might have been browsing the collection of Women’s Weekly magazines there) ……and then a homewares shop (our new couch needs cushions right?)…… and then at an Asian supermarket (Kimchi cravings wait for no woman!) …well there was no time left for the slow cooking that pulled pork required.
Luckily Call me Jose is easily pleased and was happy with the regular mince meat chilli mexican fare so we stopped in at the grocery store to pick up the necessary ingredients. In order to assauge my lazy cook guilt from buying a bottle names “Taco sauce” – surely I could have made this myself, in a far healthier and more flavoursome way? I refrained from buying the soft torillas that would accompany our meal, and resolved to make my own at home.
I’d spent the last night watching the Hostess and her able kitchen hand and long time pal La Profesora, kneading pasta dough and fondant so I was full of hope that they had somehow, transferred their skills to me. I used this very easy tortilla recipe, halved the proportions, my nod to a weekend of gluttony, and got kneading.
Making the tortillas proved super easy, just a mix of flour, water, oil and a little salt and baking powder – kneaded together for five minutes (count them and don’t get lazy, it really helps to make the dough roll-out-a-ble). I then cut it into small portions (I got 11 from the recipe) and rested the dough, covered, for at least half an hour.
The combination of the kneading and the resting gave me a really easy to work with dough. It rolled out without incident onto my lightly floured surface (read: benchtop with splatterings of flour) into a variety of oddly sized and shaped tortillas. I have to seriously work on making circles. I don’t even know what to call my shapes!!
My first tortilla as it hits the pan, first time for everything!
They puff up quickly once they hit the hot pan, and no oil is needed at all. It only takes about thirty seconds to cook each side of the tortilla.
After about fifteen seconds on the pan...
Within minutes I find myself with a stack of freshly made, if mismatched, tortillas. Success. So far, so good.
Its all about the flavour right?
Upon eating, I was so happy with these, they were light and fluffy and not even gluggy or gooey when re-heated the next day for leftovers.
Loaded up! Doesn't everything taste better with lashings of sour cream?
Maybe I should let Call me Jose choose the menu more often!
Winter isn’t very long in Sydney, even if it feels like it is. It’s a couple of months of cold mornings and nights, and cold days in between…but its nothing compared to Northern Hemisphere winters or the winters that my more inland living friends are experiencing. There’s no snow and when you stand in the sun, it still has the power to turn you cheeks from cold plates (or inverted bowls in my case) into ones that have been warmed slightly in the oven.
Having said ALL of that, I still use winter as an excuse to eat a little bit too much, to exercise a little bit too little and to catch up on TV series which I have fallen behind on. I’ve been making lots of soups, stews and variations of potato & cream baked in the oven. Warming and comforting of a dark stormy evening but when the sun popped its head out the other day, Call me Jose and I called for something new for a weekend lunch.
I’m a big sammich (or sandwich) fan. We picked up some fresh sourdough from Kirribilli Markets one Saturday morning and walked home. I can’t say for sure, but I’m almost certain that I was the only one on our walk who spent most of the 20 minute walk thinking about what to top the sourdough with.
I went with home-made chicken schnitzels, non home made mayonnaise (tut tut!) and home grown rocket.
Bite me!
The schnitzels were perfectly freshly fried and warm, juicy on the inside and crunchy on the outside and sat comfortably between some rocket, mayo and sourdough. Not very wintry I know as I sat on my balcony, chowing down on this fairly large sandwich, I knew the sun had come out for a reason….
Hello dear readers!
I know its been almost two weeks since my last post, I promise I’m still cooking and eating but its taken me a bit of effort to get to the computer to do my blogging…..so very sheepishly I’ve got some news to share.
I’m this week’s featured foodie on SBS Food!
What a highlight (I mean for my little blogging "career", not so much for SBS!)
You can click on the image above to take you through to an interview with yours truly …or if you click here you’ll go to the SBS food site. If you’re wondering why the big smile on my face in the photo? I just finished a delicious dinner at Etch Dining in Sydney.
Like one of my favourite broadcaster sites, SBS Food is home to some seriously useful cooking tips and recipes. I’m thrilled to be featured this week – thanks for having me SBS, what a perfectly timed reminder of why I blog, to share my food related stories!
I’m no masterchef, in fact I made Call me Jose a chocolate mud cake for his birthday sans sugar. Baking fail, but I’m not afraid to share it all with you….good, bad and ugly.
So my promise to you is….there’s more to come! Please come and visit again!
I love bandwagons, they’re so easy to hop onto and they come around so regularly.
This is how I find myself well into World Cup 2010, I’ve even got a game on in the background as I type up this post. I don’t usually watch Football, soccer whatever you want to call it, I don’t understand the rules but I’ll happily get out of bed at 4am to watch the socceroos play. Well I did anyway…maybe that had something to do with the Boss’ offer to make me brekky after the match.
One crushing defeat (and a generous serving of pancakes and bacon) later and I’m looking for other world cup related things to pique my interest (and to tide me over until the next Australia game). I was crushed that the Socceroos lost but became a fan of the Canadian maple syrup and Bacon. Pity they’re not playing ‘cos they might well have become my back-up team!!
Here are my highlights from the week…it was a big one on the interweb!
- Anyway, in the spirit of the world cup but with no football content I found this great World Cup Beer competition, you can vote for your favourites, cool huh? Better than letting a bunch of mugs decide your country’s sporting fate….although Foster’s for Australia?? We’re doomed!!! In this world cup, I’m going for the I-talians, Per-o-ni!!
A healthy side bet?
- How about another Downfall parody? Click here for Hitler on the Vuvuzelas… Thanks @simonthomsen for this one.
- A great article on prawns..who knew there was so much to them?
- I’ve been watching my rocket, broad beans, pea and beetroot plants sprout as part of the winter planting season. Maybe I’ll have better luck with them than I did with my tomatoes over summer, at the moment they’re looking promising and convincing me that I might just have the tiniest of green thumbs.
These are my pea shoots, I can't wait for peas but I'm also looking forward to eating the shoots in a salad!
- This week, apartment therapy provided some great articles on growing herbs and vegetables, especially in small spaces like my tiny apartment balcony. Find them here and here.
- Finally, I’m also on the masterchef (and the #masterchef) bandwagon. Luckily the tears have dried up but some of my favourites, like Matthew, have now gone too. Wah! This bingo board looks like the fun-nest bingo I’ve seen in ages, but would also make a great drinking game, dontcha think?
You could also add - Matt refers to the "hero" of a dish, George misprounounces a word "can-na-pay" George, not "Canopy" and the list goes on...but Masterchef I still love you.
Have a good weekend kiddos! More next week!
