A large salmon with several complications

Vince Garreffa tells us that you should cook every dish twice; once for yourself and then for your guests. Such careful hospitality is lost on me. I'm a 'sharing the journey' host.

Plan
One large salmon. Instead of merely poaching it, I'd make a court bouillon, freeze the court boullion, place the frozen boullion in a vacuum sealer bag with the whole salmon, vacuum seal the bag and then cook it sous vide. Remove gently cooked salmon from bag, remove skin and cover with cucumbers to resemble scales.

The logic was impeccable. The salmon would be gently poached in water but trapped in a sealed bag with a smaller volume of flavoursome stock. The genius part was freezing the court bouillon so it didn't end up being sucked into the pump of the vacuum sealer. It also meant it could be done well ahead of time without the fish marinating.



Reality
In retrospect, when the salmon was sealed in a bag with what looked like a pink urinal cake, it should have been a sign of trouble to come but it all came with sound reasons. The carrots, red onions and the white wine turned the court boullion into a pinkish shade. It was just unfortunate that I chose a flat bottomed pudding bowl to freeze it in.

Moving on. Three kilogram salmon are long. Long than any pot or dish you'll own and longer than any commercially available disposable roasting tray. I used the disposable roasting tray and it looked like a tall man who'd mistakenly booked in for a night at a hobbit bed and breakfast. The weight of the salmon slowly pushed down the sides and simmering water would leak out onto the burners until they filled with water and made a sad gurgling sound.

At this point I realised I had to either change tack or accept the fact that guests would have to suffer food poisoning. It was a tough call but I eventualy wrapped the half poached salmon in foil and tried to fit it in the oven to finish it off. It fitted at an angle, once I snapped the tail off and was eventually cooked at a gentle temperature.

Redemption
The good bit was that I sliced a whole burpless cucumber on a mandoline without losing any bits of fingers. Skin taken off the salmon and the grey bits gently scraped off and the cucumber 'scales' added - they hid the 'join' on the tail.
It was also damned tasty.


Notes: the court bouillon I used comes from here and adjusted - half a bottle of Semillon Sauvignon Blanc, a cup of water, a handful of parsley, a twigs of thyme, half a dozen peppercorns, 2 bay leaves, a chopped red onion, one sliced carrot, one sliced stick of celery with leaves, juice of half a lemon and a tsp of salt.
Simmered for half an hour and then strained.

A story that goes nowhere

Back when, I found an apple so I wents to my my mom and said "hey mom, I's got an apple."
And so she says, "apples are for hogs and you ain't no hog."
"That's true," I says. "But I ain't no hog and if I eats it, then it ain't so that apples are for hogs."

Two Sentence Cultural History Reduction - A New Year's Eve Party

I think this meal would take approximately one hour and a half to two hours to serve and eat, allowing for conversation.
While the hostess tidies the dining-room and kitchen the guests will have time to collect their coats and prepare to leave for the dance at approximately 9.30 pm

Mrs Roseann Johnston The Australian Hostess Cookbook (1969)

Melton Mowbray Pie

The good thing about Melton Mowbray is not only that it sounds like a place in Leicestershire, it actually is a place in Leicestershire. It's also modifies the noun 'pie' to make a pie from said town that uses fresh rather than cured pork. The addition of eggs makes it a 'gala' pork pie and if the first thing you thought of was Dali's wife, you'll probably enjoy this.

Melton Mowbray pie has EU Protection of Desginated Orgin protection so this, technically, isn't that.

The model recipe I used is the V-Tol Veal Ham and Egg Pie Recipe, which was made by Gordon Bedson, who also designed aircraft and the Mackson. Anyone like to drive a car built by Nigella Lawson? Didn't think so.

The recipe isn't hard but it does require doing several different things correctly. They are - making a hot water paste, boiling some meat, boiling eggs and making a jelly. The V-tol recipe explains the technical details well.

As I was using fresh pork (a bit of fillet) rather than ham, to bump up the flavour I marinated it for a few hours in white wine and a mix of bay leaf, thyme, parsley, rosemary, juniper berries and peppercorns.

The pork went into a saucepan with the marinade and herbs along with a small rack of veal and a pig's trotter. It was then filled with water to cover and simmered for 30 minutes - skimming as necessary. I kept the veal bones and the pig's trotter in there to make a heartier stock and boost the natural gelatine and simmer for another 30 minutes before filtering in a seive with some paper towel in it and reducing to just two cups.

By this stage you should have a pile of cubed pork and veal. Allow it to cool.

Take the reduced stock and add a leaf of gelatine that you've dissolved in a little heted sherry and white wine (actually it might have been calvados and white wine but I can't remember).

Make the hot paste. It's actually very similar to a choux pastry but with lard instead of butter and no eggs in it. The boiling water/lard combo smells but kneading the warm fluid dough to smoothness is surprisingly relaxing. Roll out and line a greased springform pan with it - reserving some dough for the top of the pie.

Boil the eggs - 10 minutes in boiling salted water and cool them under cold running water to stop the cooking.

So... a covering layer of meat, then encirlce the eggs around the middle and fill with meat. Place pastry on top, seal the edges with a back of a spoon. Decorate suitably with the excess pastry and brush with an egg wash. It's important to make a couple of breathing holes. Put a foil trumpet in them to allow steam to escape while cooking. These holes become useful later.

Place it all in a 200C oven for 80 minutes - just keep an eye on it to make sure the pastry doesn't burn.

Now you just need to pour the stock into the pie via the breathing holes. It'll take a couple of goes as it settles. Leave the pie in the fridge to cool and then serve as part of a low maintenance all meat cold buffet as illustrated below.

Baked Beans at Rottnest

With issue 15 away, I just had a family weekend at Rottnest and I couldn't recommend it more.
It's a rocky outcrop 12 miles off the coast of Perth that's covered with scrub and salt lakes and tiny rat-like kangaroos that shit everywhere.
Accommodation is ex-prison, turn of the century worker's cottage, post-WWII migrant camp, or 1970's unit complex for upper level Soviet bureaucrats. The only vehicles are service vehicles, two police cars and buses. One of them is an aboriginal tour bus and I wonder if they're too polite to mention that under the ground is the bones of their incarcerated ancestors.
Other than that, it's great. Crunchy white beaches just across from the balcony and low 20C sunny winter days.
Friends are next door or just down the road. You can walk or cycle everywhere without having to dice with traffic.
It's village life without the not from round here are you villagers. Dinners are shared, kids play together, drinks start at noon, books are read and windows are looked out of.
What's it like? It's like the idealised caravan park of my youth without the caravan and without the roller rink.
There's a lot of guff about Rottnest being the holiday spot for the average West Australian. It's not. It's actually filled with AB demographic Western Suburbanites slumming it. But it does retain some magic and it's this – holiday spots are now places for resorts or holiday homes. Resorts always feel like someone else's place and holiday homes are now more like the home you have in the suburbs. Get in the car, go to the supermarket, get back in the car. I'm just wondering why they can't create communities like at Rottnest, on the mainland.

Enough of that, here are the baked beans I made.

Baked Beans

2 cups of dried haricot beans
1 stick of celery
1 onion
1 glass of red wine
1 large tin of chopped tomatoes
a handful of chopped speck/pancetta
3 sprigs of thyme

Soak the beans for 5+hours and then cook in lightly salted water for half a hour. Finely dice the onion and celery and chop your speck up into small pieces - about the size of your front tooth (adjust accordingly, if you're a sabre-toothed tiger for example, you may want it a bit smaller - or not. Ooh look out, here's one now
: =
no it's OK, it appears to be dead.)
In a cast iron casserole pot, sauté the bacon over a moderate heat until slightly golden. Then add the onion and sauté for a couple of minutes, then add the celery and sauté until soft. Add the beans and mix well. Add the glass of wine, bring it to the boil and stir for a minute or so and then add the tin of tomatoes and mix well.
Leave to simmer uncovered until reduced to a sticky consistency or put it in a 150C oven to a similar point.
Season and serve on thin slices of toasted white bread.

Tajine

You can stop blurry photos like the above with a tripod, which is a three-legged thing. It's interesting to note that there are few naturally occurring three-legged things.*

Tajines, and stop me if you've heard this before, refer to both the lidded slow cooking dish and the slow-cooked braise that's cooked in it. English is reluctant to accept such ambiguity and if you've ever almost eaten a toaster, you'll know why.

There are more than a few recipes for a tajine but I really like adding dried, or fresh, fruit such as chopped apricots, figs, sultanas and dates. I also like using lamb necks but shanks and diced mutton also works well. They all just melt together; you can't identify the apricots and if you cook it long enough, you'll just have to fish out a few bones.

It's not dissimilar to a curry. The basic process is sautee the onions in olive oil /stir/ add the spices /stir/ add the meat and seal, then whatever fruit and veg you're using /stir/ then the stock /stir/ and cook very slowly for a few hours with the lid on.

For spices I usually use a couple of tablespoons of ras al hanout and add a few strands saffron with the stock; meat - as mentioned; fruit - ditto; vegetables - usually diced sweet potato and then a tin of chopped tomatoes and soaked chickpeas but yes they're pulses; enough stock - not so much to cover as to keep it all moist when lidded.

The spices are really only so much riffage on cumin and if you grind it fresh, you'll not go wrong. Cinnamon quill? Why not.

You can add some chopped coriander at the end to lift it as well as some chopped and roasted almonds.

Another technique is to marinate the meat overnight in a combination of the spices, olive oil, a finely grated onion, and a bunch of chopped coriander and then add the lot to the pan. Seal the meat and then move to the adding the fruit and vegetables stage.

The complete dinner was home made olives, kofta and kangaroo kebabs cooked over charcoal, lots of lebanese bread, hommous, yoghurt, and the tajine with mograbieh and a beetroot salad. Tasty cheese platter and delicious homemade apple pie made an appearance. Myatt's Field do a very nice tempranillo and eating the meal took the good part of five hours. Hot topics were iPods and children.

*I'll acknowledge that ants have two sets of three legs.

Stuff about eel

Unagi looks like the hiragana character for 'U' in Japanese, making it a handy mnemonic. There's no equivalently useful food in English.
There's a special day reserved in Japan for eating stamina-giving eel, which I referred to as 'unagi day' but is in fact called doyo no ushinohi. If you wanted to make a joke, you could call it doyo no ushirohi, which is eel buttocks day, which is actually pretty funny. This site not only has much more information but also has an amazing number of tiny gif characters.
There's a handy hole punch like thing that you use to nail the eel's head on a board so you can fillet it.
In a three stage process the eel is grilled, steamed and grilled again.
This removes much of the eel fat, which instead drips down onto hot charcoal and is transformed into smells. Tasty ones.
Above is an unagi donburi (or unagi don (or unaju-). It's grilled eel with a sweet teriyaki style sauce on rice.
Japanese don't use teriyaki to anywhere near the extent that we've been led to believe they do.
The rice has been mixed with a kind of sushi vinegar, which was sugar, rice vinegar and dashi. It's also good plain.
The black things are soft konbu furikake.
I bought the eel ready-to-go at Seafresh in Innaloo.
Yes it is on the floor, but they're nice floorboards, no?

OBSERVATION Has this blog got skinnier or have screens become wider? Because there's like all this space on the sides.

The Gurniad gaurds the Gurdian

As the first forkful of scampi sidled gingerly into his mouth, my friend's head snapped still in surprise, then began to oscillate gently in ecstatic bemusement. "I can't believe it," he whispered. "I didn't give the place a chance. When the waitress said, 'Is there anywhere you'd like to sit?' I wanted to say Melbourne. Or Belmarsh. Anywhere but here. This is bizarre."

Firstly, forkfuls of scampi don't sidle any more than turds flush; angrily or no. Secondly, what's wrong with his friend's head? Thirdly, 'ecstatic bemusement'?; was 'hysterical contemplation' busy that week? Fourthly, friends don't let friends become esprit d'escalier proxies. Fifthly, an unexpectedly good restaurant is a 'nice surprise'. Bizarre is a Fortean stick mag for gothy youth.

It wanks on and on (with erratic repetitiveness) and the world of dining, and indeed the entire world, is a worse place for it. I'll now sigh in a disappointed fashion.

Issue 13 of SPICE

Ooh issue 13 of SPICE - Western Australia's only non-lifestyle magazine. Cracking cover photo by Craig Kinder of Riki Kaspi of Blakes Cafe in Mt Lawley.

I'm still riding the roller coaster of emotions in making a mag from 'I don't think I can do this' to ' when will this issue ever be finished' to 'if I could just spend a few quiet days with my playstation and not think about it' before soaring to 'well that's a pretty cool issue but I wish I'd done a better job on the headlines'. Like most things worth doing, it's interminably frustrating but ultimately rewarding involving good people and a large amount of laughs.

This issue is filled with good but my particular fave is Vince's heartfelt terror of deep frying a whole turkey going horribly wrong and that we've hit the magical sweet spot between Gourmet Traveller and the Countryman. You can also play 'spot my daughter' - it's a bit trickier this time.

It'd be remiss of me not to suggest that a subscription would make an ace christmas present for the food lover(s) in your family and that this presents the opportunity to win a holiday for two in Mauritius, staying in the 5 star Constance Le Prince Maurice resort - wooh!

A sauce for pasta

what a salmon and cream pasta might look like were it a pig-shaped mosquito coil burner

Olive oil, thinly sliced clove of garlic, two slices of chopped smoked salmon, juice of half a lemon, splash of sherry, finely chopped rind of a lemon and a handful of fennel leaves, 200ml of cream, and pepper. In that order in about 30 second intervals in a frypan. Mix in with linguine with parmesan cheese. Ain't rocket science but you'll like it.

Oh and facking right-wing Labor hacks:

Before I forget

venison pate with sourdough baguette and olives

mashed potato and hazelnut pesto with black pig prosciutto, asparagus and broad beans

duck, forest mushroom and chinese greens risotto

2002 Peacetree Cabernet Sauvignon in a Bulgarian crystal decanter

tart fine aux pommes

local cheeses with oatcakes and fennel crackers

laphroaig quarter cask with ice



Further notes:
Duck, being fatty, doesn't really lend itself well to poaching but I thought I'd try and squeeze out a bit more stock for the risotto regardless. White wine, duck stock, peppercorns and thyme. Duck legs removed and then fried in leftover lard until crisp and then shredded. Using the soaking liquid for the mushrooms also provides additional stock.

Gabrielle Ferron's risotto packet recommends a no-stir 15 minute technique and I have to agree to the point where I'm convinced that the whole stirring thing is an artifact of Italian patriachy.

Just the shiny green inner pods of the broadbeans. Blanched and then reheated in olive oil with some of the prosciutto. I ended up paying $10 a kilo for them because I was chatting with the farmer and he forgot to give me my change and I was too polite to ask.

Where have I been?

I've been in 70s, researching the feasibility of pine as a material for constructing kitchen cupboards. Fortunately, an eddy in the space-time continuum opened up due to the Large Hadron Collider allowed me to return to the present. Anyway they've got these things called Chicken Kiev and if you mash up a couple finely minced garlic cloves with some sage thyme and parsley and a splash of tabasco into some butter and then insert it into a pocket made with a boning knife in a chicken breast, then dust, egg, and crumb; brown in a pan and finish in a hot oven - then you'll have it.
Cook the veges in any leftover garlic butter.
We're using panko.

Keith Floyd - not at all dead

Keith Floyd - he's alive! ALIVE!! Sure we were curious as to what happened to that large boulder and were dead impressed when he offered us to pop our fingers in the wounds all the while casually emptying a couple of bottles of Pouilly Fume but really we were just happy to have him back. What we really liked about him (apart from being the only person apart from Mark Oliver Everett that can wear a bowtie and not look like a berk) was his humanity. A weakness for booze, rubbish at finances, and a deep and sincere need to be loved. He also had the improbably rock star name shared with greats such as Keith Richards, Keith Moon and Keith Urban.

So the Keith Floyd tribute dinner of Smoked Trout and Cucumber Souffle with Rice Pudding based on second-hand Cornish scuttlebutt was not so much a time for mourning but celebrating. He had, much more so than my souffle, risen. While the miracle of birth is one thing; forgetting what it was like being a kid and being genuinely surprised when you actually woke up is another; it's to have, to lose and to get back that's the real trick.

Here's his Real Rice Pudding recipe - it's simple so don't skimp on the vanilla pod, the milk or the cream. It's an unseemly luxury for its simplicity.

3tbs short-grain rice; 600ml full cream milk; 1 vanilla pod; 25gm caster sugar; 150ml of double cream - whipped until softly peaky

Bring all the ingredients, except for the cream, to the boil and then put in an ovenproof dish with a lid and cook at 150˚C for 2 hours. Remove the pod, allow to cool slightly and then fold in the cream.

Day of the Sausage

Much more so than strolling through Bangkok in a pale flared Pierre Cardin suit and smoking Sobranie cocktail cigarettes, making sausages has always defined exoticism for me. There's been a sausage shaped hole in my life and on the weekend, I filled it - in abundance.

Simple principle - everyone brings their favourite meat mix, we make sausages and we eat them. The fact that no-one, including myself had ever made them before was no impediment. I had 30 metres of pig casings soaking, a kenwood mincer attachment and a long red funnel thing. The golden rule is fat - Vince Garreffa says 20% minimum and you listen to Vince. Roll the casings onto the funnel - like you might for an ambitious condom purchase, tie a knot in the end, pop a couple of holes in to let the air out, crank the mincer up and twist every sausage length in opposite directions.

And it's great. It's such an earthy thing to do. It's sex, it's death; it's shit, it's food; it's delicate, it's brute force. It's like Pasolini in pork. Bits of meat everywhere; someone pointing out that 'an animals been shitting in that all its life; instructions to roll as a man,not as a lady; the firming of flesh - it's not for the weak of heart or the repressed of spirit. I think we made about twelve kilograms of sausages with nearly as many different mixes. Sausages were cooked, enjoyed and magpies hung around our house for the next week.

Given that amateur sausage is a dying art for the amateur, I'm thinking that with quite a few kids around on the day, that at least that one of them might get me through to the next century as 'the person that made their own sausages'. It's the quiet hope of a mortality addressing near-forty year old. I also hope they remember the completely awesome birthday cake.

Macadamia Crusted Lamb Rack with other things

Clean-up of pantry (2006 was a busy year for shopping apparently) yielded a bag of macadamia nuts and hence.

Crust is equal parts macadamia nuts and breadcrumbs with some chopped parsley tossed in. Just press on top. You can brown, as I did, the rack beforehand if you like. Marinade is EVOO red wine vinegar, rosemary and smoked paprika.

Minikin is stuffed with couscous, butter, chicken stock, dried raisins, macadamia nuts and pepitas. Mixed together and placed in the cavity. As a handy hint; use a round biscuit cutter to cut a lid out of the minkin.

Underneath the lamb is slices of field mushroom and red onion.

All cooked in 180C oven for 25 minutes*. Rest the lamb rack for 5 minutes. Toss the snow pea shoots in some EVOO and good salt. Serve.

I was really just using stuff I had but it worked together nicely.

*Actually 25 minutes is more of an averaging, the pumpkins could go up to thirty and the lamb could get down to 15-17 if you were after something closer to rare.

Thai Fish Salad

Monday has been declared Marine Monday (or ultramarine monday if you like New Order).

My two serves of Red Throated fackmeIhadnoideaitwouldcostthatmuch Emperor unexpectedly had to stretch to three people. This causes issues; not because I'm a stingy bastard but because the more you've spent on a piece of fish, the less you want to clutter it up with other plate filling distractions and stodge. I thought the best way was a kind of Thai-ish noodle salad, with the nice fresh flavours lifting the fish rather than bury it. Here's the result and bugger me if it isn't fantastic and something you should make and enjoy.

400gm of white-fleshed fish - I used red throated emperor.

200gm packet of sen yai noodles (flat white rice noodles), cooked/softened to packet instructions

1 red chili, finely sliced
a handful of coriander leaves
a smattering of mint leaves
half a red onion, very thinly sliced (VERY)

2-3 tbs of brown sugar
2-3 tablespoons of fish sauce
juice and finely grated rind of a lime

two free-range eggs with dash of fish sauce and a pinch of salt - made into a thin omlette and sliced into thin ribbons
a cup of unsalted peanuts, pan roasted (and can I for once not burn the bastards)
2 lebanese cucumbers, julienned and drained of excess liquid
one lime, eighthed

1. Cut the fish into chunks, stir-fry in oil and then put into a bowl with the chili, coriander, mint, and onion; allowing the hot fish to mingle with the flavours - possibly handing out a few business cards and asking them to get in touch. It should be warm.
2. Give the noodles a quick stir-fry to heat through a little - not to cook
3. Put the noodles in a bowl, add the contents of the bowl with the fish , cucumber, peanuts, and egg. Add the fish sauce/sugar/lime dressing
5. Garnish with lime and extra bits of coriander.

Fabulous.

Unfortunately I don't have a photo of it, so here's a photo of Eva being opinionated:

AND LOOKING LIKE THE LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION

Tenth Anniversary Dinner

Can you knock off work, get to the shops, attend to jobs like bathing child, and bang out a very respectable 10th anniversary dinner? Yes you can.

Get oysters from reputable fishmonger (shucked - unless spending that special night with a DIY stigmata is your thing).
Get a lime. Lop the ends off. Segment. And then trim off the central pith.
Buy goat's cheese and leave to soften on the bench.
Buy reputable smoked ocean trout. (tetsuya has just got some out)
Lay evenly on a piece of glad wrap.
Spread goats cheese over it.
Place it on a bamboo sushi mat and roll. The trick is peeling the glad wrap out of the way, for obvious reasons. Place it in the fridge to chill. And then slice into rounds.

Easy - impress your friends. In fact, if you had a nice bottle of sparkling chilling in the fridge and maybe cooked a few asparagus in butter to have on the side; you'd have a pretty special meal all in itself.

We had a bottle of 1998 shiraz (the fourth of six) so the match was a rib of aged Dandaragan Organic Beef. I stuffed this with few oysters by making a pocket with a boning knife and then sealing it with toothpick. Seared, then put in the oven to cook. Quick wine and cream jus made in pan. Zucchini flowers cooked in a little butter. Green things (radish sprouts? can't remember) tossed with a little very good EVOO and salt and pepper. And that's it.

Memo to me for dessert: use foil when blind baking tart shell to avoid having to dig out dried broadbeans.

Roast Rack of Pork

Umm last week. There was a tablespoon or so of fennel seeds, a couple of cloves of garlic, a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, a couple of tablespoons of Mallee honey, a few drops of Firehorse hot sauce, a tablespoon of finely chopped orange rind, and half an orange. I used one of them fancy Jamie Oliver flavour shaker thingies, which worked pretty well. First up was to crush the fennel seeds, then the garlic, then the olive oil and then add the rest.

Brush over the rack of pork and leave for an afternoon or so. Roast and baste with a mix of orange, apple and carrot juice mixed with some olive oil and honey.

Good. Really good. The sauce was mashed apple and celeriac parsnip and something else, maybe cream, quite possibly a bit of brown vinegar.


enjoy, Don Cake

not-Spanokopita

A lot of people have been asking me what I did with that tin of tin of Bulgarian not-feta that I bought a while back. Well the answer is nothing, but then I used some to make leftover sausage scrambled eggs (slice the sausage thinly, fry up in a bit of harissa and pretend it's chorizo) with not-feta. It's not-feta because it's Bulgarian white brined cheese. I'd assumed this was part of the Protected Designation of Origin Laws but the hot gossip is that feta was originally made in Trakia, Bulagaria and they call it sirene. I can't pretend to know how pissed off Greeks would be about this but according to this post at Balkanalysis.com suggests they've had an initially antagonistic start to their relationship in the 7th Century; a brief period of amity; complications when Greece discovered that Bulgaria was only going out with it because of a bet with Romania; and then finally "strong relations."
Read it all because it has the best bitchy caption about a British PM ever:

In 1912, British fixer J.D. Bourchier was honored with a Bulgarian postage stamp; today, Tony Blair warrants only a babushka in Sofia’s flea market.

It's a shame Crass aren't still around to write "How does it feel (to be not half the man J.D. Bourchier was)"

My own Bulgarian- Greek nexus occurred in 1989 (stop me if you've heard thins one before) when I visited Sofia. Fresh from eating my body weight in dishes with paprika cream sauce, politely drinking pepsi and red wine, and dodging tram fares in Budapest, I should have realised something was up when I became the only person with a backpack on the train. When I got off the train at Sofia station, someone made it their business to walk over to me and call me a "tourist" much like you'd call someone a variation of twat. I went there to catch up with the last known link with my family. I'm pretty sure the last visit to Bulgaria have been in the 1920's by my grandfather. The evidence being a black and white photo of a somber group of locals who may have been at a funeral, or a wedding; hard to tell.

The address was 234-64 something something Sofia and 64 referred one of the randomly placed Stalin-style apartment blocks around town. I wasn't deterred and had spent no small amount of time thinking about what it would be like to be welcomed back by my ancestors; the great-grandson of my great-grandfather who eloped with his fiance eighty years or so earlier. A kind soul, who spoke a little English and a bit of Russian and a bit of French and smoked Malborough Reds, found the apartment block for me and wished me well. I found the door and knocked. And knocked. And knocked. And then a neighbour came out, I said the person's name and then the neighbour made a driving gesture and indicated that she wouldn't be back for a few days.

In mandatory hotel room fees (with roof views) and compulsory currency exchange, Bulgaria was too rich for me and I decided to leave the next day. No pigs slaughtered; no young women giggling demurely while they worked how distant a relation, I really was if at all; and no lashings of yoghurt. I hung out in a bar in Sofia, actually it was more like a cafeteria selling beer, and the night life was surprisingly not good. The next day was shops are closed day except for the shops that didn't seem to sell anything except skis so bought my ticket to Athens for the equivalent of three dollars.

I shared a compartment with some holidaying Poles who gave me food and then when the ticket inspector arrived I found out, as everyone pulled out large bits of paper to my small stub, that the ticket was remarkably cheap because it wasn't a ticket but a seat reservation. The conductor thought it was pretty funny at least and rather than being turfed out in chains, I was able to buy a ticket to the Greek border with the money I hadn't been able to spend with two lev to spare.

A day later I made it to Athens to find the last two thousand years hadn't been quite as grand as the previous two and that if you go to the Parthenon, don't look at your watch with a carton of orange juice in your hand, and if you got to visit the Oracle in Delphi, wear a jumper.
Anyway, the recipe is here. I used a bunch of silverbeet and a bunch of spinach (60/40 greens to cheese ratio) and finely diced a zucchini and when you rinse your greens in, make sure you lift them out of whatever you're rinsing them in rather than pouring them, along with assorted grit, into a strainer. Then wash them again.

Two deliveries and a sale

It's been quite a big fortnight for me and I mean quite big in the same way that a werewolf Sean Connery would be quite hairy (although not on top, which would raise the possibility of a combover werewolf; terrifying yet also funny in a sad kind of way. "You know you're not fooling anyone...aiiiieeeeeeee")

Anyway two weeks ago Eva was born and it does not so much turn your life upside down as create its own space in your brain that squashes everything else out of the way. Although not in a way that creates a large bulge in my forehead and the urgent need to take a piss every thirty minutes. She's also absolutely adorable and makes me laugh, which are great qualities to start life with.

We also managed to get issue 10 of SPICE off to the printers. Well when I say we, I mean everyone else and me distractedly checking commas and apostrophes and asking if it'd kill us if we got it out on the 7th instead of the 1st.

The other thing was the family farm's clearing sale, last Friday. A clearing sale is a kind of garage sale but with heavy machinery and drinks afterwards. It also means that the family farm is sold and so ends my father's forty years on a wheat and sheep farm and my family's 80 year ownership of the wheatbelt property.I grew up there and it was as a good a childhood as anyone could want - I was rarely priveleged. By my teens, the appeal had waned; it became holiday farm work through uni; and by my twenties I'd supplanted my home town of twenty with the 14 million person megalopolis of Tokyo. Although things changed on the farm there was always something I could relate that linked to some part of my life. On the day, most of theses things were lain out in straight lines in the paddock and all that was left in the workshop were the neatly painted labels of where the tools once went.

It was a hot day, the wind blew with dust all day, my first car struggled to raise $50, and I've never enjoyed a can(s) of mid-strength beer so much. The sale went well beyond all expectations, I only got one 'why didn't you take over the farm' question, and a lot of people weren't shy in saying how they'd miss my Dad.

I took two things with me; the Cramphorne wool bale stencils and a leg of lamb from the freezer. This was from one of the sheep on the farm and, as they aren't there anymore, it's the last of the lamb. I roasted it old-style with garlic and rosemary stuffed into slits in the meat and we had our Sunday roast together. Eva didn't quite make it up to the farm and she's a few months away from solids but whatever Toni eats, she gets eventually. And so in an odd, indirect way, the farm became part of her.

A small person

As a believer in music as the companion of all good things　in life, I've always been taken by Californian friend and how on the day his child was born, Beautiful Day by U2 came on the radio and he started crying. As I drove home in what would be a quick stop on the way to hospital the iPod gave me What's Inside a Girl? by the Cramps. Three and a half hours later I found out.
It's another girl.

Cowboy Pie

Sure it's not your 'Gordon Bleu' but when Toni comes back at t minus three weeks and wants shepherds pie even though its in the mid- thirties, then it gets made. Unfortunately she bought beef mince which means its technically cowboy pie. Traditionally you would make it using leftover roast lamb or mutton and wiggle your eyebrows lasciviously every time you said 'Shepherds Pie'.
There's no particular magic in the recipe here - just the usual ragout principle of cooking the liquids out before adding new ones. Lightly brown the mince, then add some chopped mushrooms to soak up the liquids. Add some rosemary thyme and pepper. Then cook out a good splash of leftover white wine. Add some kidney beans and a jar of tomato cooking sauce and simmer until reduced. You want to be able to eat it with a fork but at the same time have some gravy to latch onto the mash. Season to taste.
Meanwhile boil the spuds, mash and then stir in a mixture of hot milk and butter. Spoon over the top of the ragout. I just used the cast iron pan I cooked the ragout in. If you use a spoon, you can tease up little peaks like on a meringue.
Brown off in the oven.
Don't slack off on the salt - it likes it. Them's good eatin'!

FOR TRAGICS: Name that cast iron pan.

OTHER SHEPHERD'S PIE THOUGHTS: If you get Supergrass's "In it For The Money" Bonus CD there's a bit that deadpans "A year's supply of shepherd's pie" which I just really like and it makes me laugh just thinking about it.
Funnily enough, in Zappa's similarly titled "We're Only in It for the Money" there's also a deadpanned "Creamcheese". Admittedly Creamcheese isn't a pie but it does feature in cheesecake which is similar to pie. Did you know Lincoln was riding in a Kennedy?

Prawn and Chicken Water

If you're like me, you've probably boiled a chicken and thought 'What am I going to do with all this chicken water?'. Well don't chuck it out.

Mash the chopped whites of a couple of spring onions in a mortar and pestle and then add a teaspoon of cracked pepper and a couple of tablespoons of fish oil. Then add the meat of half a dozen tiger prawns and mash it lightly. Leave for ten minutes.

Chuck the prawn shells and heads into the boiling chicken water and simmer for 5 minutes. Remove the shells and cook the prawn meat for a minute. Place a wedge of lime and coriander leaves in each bowl and ladle in some prawn and chicken water and serve at the start of a meal.

the chic of cheesin' begets munsters

Well it seemed pretty damned nice in the cool confines of the Simon Johnson cheese room but in the light of day we described it as a combination of a well lanolined shearer's crotch with the appearance of leprosy.

Happy New Year btw.

Rack of Veal Cooked in Milk

I've just been painting the nursery (no not the one with the lamps) with this natural paint that's entirely mineral based and cuts down on the associated non-biodegradable toxic waste. Unfortunately it's like painting with coffee. It flies everywhere and after two coats it still looks like an undercoat (it takes three). I've often wondered what painting in the 17th century was like, know I know. On the plus side it avoids the speckled history of the paint industry, washes off easily enough, and doesn't smell.

Much easier is this veal dish I made a couple of weeks ago. Not only is it easy, but it's about as close to a perfect meal you could hope for. It's a big call I know, but it uses a few simple ingredients that compliment the feature ingredient, is unfuckuppable and you get that elusive feeling of a really special meal without having tried to hard.

There was one minor hitch. It was in a French magazine that I get every quarter in a swap with Gracianne. It means bodgy translation from French by me and this time I found out that Cocos de Paimpol, wasn't 'something coconut' but a kind of white bean from Paimpol and my friends were saved from veal cooked in coconut milk.

The veal is non-bastard veal from White Rocks Veal and cooked as one piece.

two onions
one stick of celery
six button mushrooms
1 litre full cream milk
600ml cream
rack of four veal chops

250 gm dried cannellini beans, soaked overnight
three sprigs of thyme and a bay leaf

Brown the veal in a little hot oil - to the brown that you'd like to serve it at..
Sautee the onions, celery and mushrooms in a little oil in a heavy casserole. Add the rack of veal and then filled with the milk and the cream to cover. Allow to very gently simmer, covered for one hour.

Take out the veal to allow it to rest. Strain the cooking liquid and then reduce it to a sauce/one-coat roll on paint like consistency. Reducing in a wide frying pan will hasten things.

The recipe suggests cooking the beans in water for about half an hour. I thought of adding them to the casserole dish at the 25-minutes-from-finish point but ended up finishing the beans in some of the cooking liquid.

Carve the chops and serve on the beans with the sauce. See if you can manage, unlike me, to get the garnish in the middle.

Tastes fabulous, cooks perfectly, and is really only about half and hour of actual kitchen work. Don't forget the bread.

Steamed Buns and Peking Duck

Just because I think that a month or so is long enough for a picture of a box of broadbeans.

Here are some steamed buns I made for a dinner party a month or so. They have been on the list of things to make and haven't been because they've always seemed something suspiciously white and fluffy. In Japan where they're sold as surrogate pies in 7-11's as nikuman they're not unlike a meat-filled marshmallow in texture if not sweetness.

They are actually quite easy to make of you're comfortable with making bread dough. Once risen, it's simply a matter of rolling out rounds, filling with stuffing and then lifting up and sealing. Much less fiddly than dumpling or spring rolls. The filling is a combination of hard-boiled quail egg, some shredded slow-cooked pork hock from a Kylie Kwang recipe and [racks brains] shiitake mushroom, finely minced ginger and spring onion whites.

This recipe is the one I used for the bun dough.

With the meal was peking duck. I made the peking duck and bought the pancakes but in retrospect I would have been better just to buy the duck [does anyone else habitually type dick when they mean to type duck"] and make the pancakes. Unless you particularly like having a raw duck hanging around the house. It worked but, not enough to justify the effort and I'd happily pop down to a BBQ house and not felt I'd shirked. It's also a nice idea to wear an apron when carving to avoid hot jets of duck fat.

Dessert was... I can't remember. No wait it was tapioca with something. Anyway the conversation was good, the wine with fine and it finished with Guitar Hero II being dragged out. Success.

Something to put under a steak

Broad beans are in season. I was reminded of this when a red faced man came in to an art exhibition I was at with a box full of them. I couldn't understand what he was
saying, but the other people could. This made me wonder if they really did understand him, or if they'd just got used to pretending to understanding him, and that if thats what I sounded like by the time I got to double digit drink figures. There's always a look down like they'd written down what they were going to say earlier but couldn't find it and then a blurt. He couldn't understand what I was saying.

If you've struggled to reattach the choke cable on a bike's carburettor or tried to send a text message, you'll like broad beans. Broad beans are like peas but for people with big hands.

The pods also have a fetching green velvet interior. This may trigger issues. The broad beans will peel once more, revealing a smaller, shinier bean.
Starting with about half a kilo of broad beans,
Remove the broad beans from their pod and boil in salted water for five minutes
remove the outer skin from 20 of the larger beans to allow the inner beans to be scattered around as decorations.
Chop the remaining outer beans.
Peel and chop an equivalent amount of japanese pumpkin into bite sized pieces and roast in olive oil/vegetable oil until soft. Allow a little browning. Mash and add to the chopped beans
Sautee half a finely chopped spanish onion and add.
Roast some pepitas in the oven and add. Pepitas are pumpkin seeds and if you were being especially resourceful, you could have saved them from the pumpkin. They add a bit of crunch interest to what's otherwise quite soft.
Season.
Shape into patties and fry on either side.
Place under a steak.

Additional notes: Roasting pumpkin makes it sweeter, as does sauteeing the red onions, the outer bean is a little bitter so there's your balance right there.

Extra bonus broad bean pasta sauce:
-pan fry some sliced chicken breast in olive oil with seasoning and a squeeze of lemon and reserve.
-add some more olive oil and fry large some chopped up bits of mini-japanese tomatoes with a couple of finely chopped garlic cloves and a chopped red chilli. Let them cook and reduce a little and you can pick out any bits of skin if you're bothered
-chop up some broccolini and baby courgettes. Dunk them in the boiling pasta water for a minute or so just to take a bit of the rawness off. Add to the frypan. and stir through.
-take the broad beans out of their pod and boil for four minutes. Add to the pan and stir through.
-return the chicken, making sure you add all the collected chicken juices.
-place on pasta (the sauce isn;t that saucy so you might wnat to mix a little EVOO in with the pasta after its drained) with parmesan.

Everything I know about food in the context of a stodgy looking plate of lamb and green lentils

Technically it's a braise and that's often the cooking method of choice for cheaper and tougher cuts but that doesn't exclude other cuts. The temperature is lower than an oven but the heat conductivity of the water, which surrounds the meat, is much more efficient. The connective tissue and collagen is broken down with cooking time is transformed into gelatin. Gelatin will thicken the sauce and give it mouthfeel. Bones are also good. So for this reason I grabbed some lamb chops out of the freezer and complimented them with shanks.
Dust the meat with flour and brown them quickly after or the flour goes soggy with juices. Much is said about sealing the meat but the browning adds flavour to the meat by a process known as the Maillard reaction which is a chemical reaction that occurs with amino acids and heat (like sugars and caramelisation) . I'm not entirely sure if the same happens with the flour the meat is dusted with but the flavours will disperse with the flour and the flour acts as a thickener. I've also heard that with fish, a dusting of flour will 'dry' the exterior so the fish sears in contact with the pan rather than steams. Remove and drain off any excess fat, much of the flavour is still stuck to the pan and this can be deglazed with a little stock and some scraping.
The similarity with a stock means that there's a flavour base of aromatics - garlic, onion, celery and carrots. This is referred to in French as a mirepoix. The mirepoix was softened gently or 'sweated' in olive oil until soft. The size of the mirepoix depends on the length of cooking. A brief half hour fish stock will need small cubes but a longer cooking process can allow larger pieces which add to the biteable elements in the dish - celery and onion not so much but carrots yes.
The flavour gets a boost from adding half a litre of chicken stock and then topped up with water. You could do without it but a watery taste is to no-one's liking and ther should be something for the lentils to soak up. The other flavour comes from a traditional bouquet garni combo of thyme, bay leaf and parsley. Personally I find popping out to the herb garden a wee bit special.
Added to the mix are kipfler potatoes, which keep their shape well. Potatoes are often mixed to stews for their carbohydrates but their starch also acts as a thickener.
Bring to the boil and skim off the scum and place in a 180C oven for an hour or so. The lid will increase the efficiency of cooking by raising the boiling point in a mild facsimile of a pressure cooker. It'll also mean that the cooking liquid doesn't reduce but that's OK because you'll need it for the lentils.
Lentils have long been a source of suspicion for transgression of established barriers on protein and meat (pace tofu). Green lentils, unlike other legumes,don't require soaking before cooking just needing a rinse and then cooking until tender. This can vary but half an hour is good balance between chewy and mush. Add the lentils and continue cooking - if there's excess liquid you can crack the lid open to allow steam to escape and the liquid to reduce.
At the same time, the dish lacks a bit of acidity and this could be wine (didn't have any) or lemon (ditto) so I went with tomatoes. Just some cherry tomatoes pan fried with olive oil and basil until broken down for extra taste and mixed in at the same time as the lentils.

Spice Mountain

The fruit of my labour is a big pile of randomly stacked boxes. Spice Spring issue is out and details are all here. You should get one, it's broadranginglicious

Speaking of 'fruits of' and 'labour', a tiny person is due late February.

Assorted things to show and tell

I've been meaning to show off my highly desirable damascan steel Shun cleaver. It's been a torrid three month's and I don't want to kiss and tell but lets just say "cabbage" "all night long" of you know what I mean and I think you do. It's a sharp metal testament to the fruits of blogging thanks to the Kitchen Warehouse ad rightwards (thank you clickers).

If any of you have been wondering what Spice magazine is actually like apart from my rambly blurbs and can't get access to a paper copy, you can have a butchers at some sample pages here.

I was at a vertizontal tasting today (2004! 2007!) and was asked in front of a group of twenty people what I thought of a 2001 shiraz. It was a year 10 algebra what do you think x is Georgeff? moment. I think I've got a repertoire of 1.4 intelligent things I can say about a given wine before bouncing the question on. I'm actually pretty happy with this amount, winemaking is an enormously complex process and 1.4 is about what I deserve. The more I learn the more respect I have. That said, I was reading about a South Australian winery that named their wines after rock albums. It's a swell idea with lots of potential - Paranoid Pinot Gris, Master of Puppets Mourvedre, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back Sem Sav and the 2003 1984.
They chose Joshua Tree.
God weeps.
Some say Gram Parsons died at Joshua Tree, I say it killed him.