Entries Tagged 'Celebrity Chef!' ↓

Radio National’s Bush Telegraph has a “Food on Friday” segment which I adore. In fact I love the whole show and even the bits before it where host Michael Mackenzie flirts archly with Ramona Koval as she’s finishing up The Book Show.

In the segment, Mackenzie often talks to producers and other food industry people, but the program also looks at how communities, schools and other organisations are involved with food.

Today’s “Food on Friday”was on the subject of thrifty eating, and featured Stephanie Alexander who discussed her Kitchen Garden Foundation project, what she fed her kids and the many benefits of eating from large shared dishes at the table. The other interviewee was Pam Batten, President of the Country Women’s Association in WA. Her organisation’s cookbook, The CWA Cookery Book and Household Hints, has been in print since 1936.

The two previous programs – on farming rabbits (wild and farmed, breeding to size for restaurants, recipes from Sydney’s Bécasse) and heirloom beetroots can still be downloaded.

The image is from the Old Parliament House site via Philanthroparty – I struggled to find any more information about it. And as I’m mentioning OPH, do yourself a favour and check out Canberra House, an absolutely brilliant site on modernist architecture here in Canberra written by Martin Miles who looks after the OPH site.

I’ve always loved finding little things that it seemed I wasn’t supposed to, particularly photographs. I’m not alone there, although I don’t know if anyone else obsessively reads other people’s shopping lists found in the bottom of their supermarket trolley.

My camping reading this time was Marion Halligan’s Eat My Words, an entertaining although somewhat relentless memoir of loving food and cooking which I bought in a local second hand shop. And looky what I found inside –

Do you know this man? I wonder whether the place it shows is in Goulburn (about an hour north of here) – it doesn’t look local, but of course it could have come from anywhere.

It’s not just photos and shopping lists I love. I’ve never been one to really value books as objects, but I know many do and that they probably don’t share my love of marginalia.

It’s hard not to fall in love with the physical presence of Gay Bilson’s Plenty, though. And wow, can that woman convey emotional intensity and deep intelligence. I bet she’s a Cancer. I find it bizarre that one of the judges who awarded the book The Age Book of the Year prize in 2005 (see link on title) said:

A generous, hospitable book that offered reading as a slow pleasure, Plenty connected food and the intellect without emotion or nostalgia, says [historian and judge Clare] Wright.

“It is a memoir, yet it is not self-referential,” she says. “It is about the intimate workings of her mind, not about her emotions. It was a very brave book in a lot of ways and I quite admired the way she was able to keep herself to herself.”

I wonder why it was so important that the book not be emotional? Perhaps Wright is one of those historians who thinks that the intellect should trump emotion but knows that in real life and real kitchens it’s usually the other way around, or that in a certain kind of person the two are so entwined that it’s pointless to try and tease them apart (and I bet Wright’s a Virgo).

I borrowed the book from the library, but of course will have to buy it now. I’m considering stealing the aptly decorated post it note I found inside the library’s copy for myself. It’s stuck over a section describing Bilson’s 1993 Symposium of Australian Gastronomy dinner, which has become famous for a never-served dish of blood sausage made from the hostess’ blood.

To make sense of the note, you need to either read the text in the image, or know that Bilson and her chef Janni Kyritsis made a forty metre long tripe tablecloth for the dinner – Halligan said on the First Tuesday Book Club that it was the most beautiful tablecloth she’d ever seen – and that Bilson’s daughter Sido emerged in bandages from a mound of fruit at the end of the dinner bearing menus for the diners:

Aren’t they pretty? Owy ran in with them on the weekend, having found them growing in the neighbour’s yard after all the rain we’ve been having recently. He has been to a one day truffle growing course, so is a complete fungal expert. But I Doubted.

If you belong to that group of the countless thousands of the no longer young who have bought a ramshackle fixer-upper in an isolated and very beautiful French village, you can pop down to your local pharmacy where they will identify your foraged mushrooms for you. Probably with moustache-twirling and the whole bit, I imagine, but that may be merely the cumulative effect of my recent reading. I’m just about to finish Stephanie’s Seasons (scroll down to the out-of-print titles), which is a kind of a proto-food blog- it’s Stephanie Alexander’s culinary journal for 1992 which includes her month’s holiday in Provence. Also recently, I borrowed Mary Moody’s The Long Table from the library. I recommend The Long Table if, like me, you went to Uni with one of the author’s kids and will be charmed by the many entertaining pictures of her childhood. Otherwise I’d go for Stephanie.

Anyhow, who needs moustache-twirling French pharmacists when you’ve got the internet? (Although I suspect one would come in handy for the discreet supply of amphetamines which is, I’m convinced, the real reason French Women Don’t Get Fat.)

Just tapping in “identify edible mushroom Australia” took me to this very helpful (pdf) guide from the Western Australian Agriculture Department which provided exactly the excuse I wanted not to eat these beautiful looking mushies. I’m happy to eat wild mushrooms gathered by someone knowledgeable – last year for instance, the bloke who runs Li Shen exotic mushrooms very briefly had some foraged saffron milk caps at the Farmer’s market that were fan-bloody-tastic. But we’ve had death caps grow in our yard before and I don’t crave excitement like I used to. (Commenter dylwah, a dear old friend and exalted mushroom identification guru, may testify to my youthful enthusiams.)

I figured that what Owy had found was some Agaricus xanthodermus or “yellow stainers”, because the stem discoloured yellow a little when it was cut. Of course I’m not sure now whether they would have been fine, and after reading the magnificent UK site Wild Mushrooms Online maybe they were – I didn’t notice the distinctive off smell they talk about, but I was ignorant of the test of popping them in a bag to concentrate the aroma that is suggested there.

I have been doing some more prosaic foraging, though. My (as of today, and happy birthday darling!) 6 year old locked us out of the house yesterday, so I did some gardening while we waited for my sister to rescue us. We grow “wild” rocket, which tolerates our cold winters beautifully and has overtaken what was once lawn near the bed where it was first planted. Now that it’s established on it’s own, the hundreds of tiny self seeding plants in the veggie bed need to come out so they don’t crowd out the new things we’ve planted there. This is what they call “micro herbs” up the big end of town, and a couple of hundred of them makes a great salad.

Jill Dupleix is a smasher, and she certainly seems to like smashing things – she had a recipe in The Age the other day which called for smashed garlic cloves. She published this recipe, also in The Age, as the very prosaic “Roast Boiled potatoes”. Recently, I saw a reference to it by the foodie John Lethlean, under the much more satisfying name of “Jill Dupleix’s Smashed potatoes”.

This recipe is going viral. I found Dupleix’s original recipe here, via this wee Scottish blog (love the header), and another one on a Brazilian blog, the Technicolor Kitchen. In this incarnation it’s called Crash-hot potatoes.

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Happily I managed to make it to this work-in-progress talk by Visiting Fellow Associate Professor Donna Lee Brien at ANU yesterday, sleeping toddler in tow. She gave a survey of her work, looking at some of the big names in Australian food writing since the 1960s and examining how they have been agitating for culinary – and social – change.

I used to work at the CCR, now part of the Research School of Humanities where Professor Brien is visiting (and I’ll be back on Mondays next week, as part of a project investigating the war rugs of Afghanistan). One of the great strengths of the CCR is the variety of the work the scholars there are doing. They come from many different fields and share a commitment to interdisciplinary and collaborative work. They’re also committed to innovative forms of research presentation. I don’t think anyone’s done an interpretive dance yet as part of their PhD, but I am happy to be corrected on that. So the audience of about thirty or so was lively and interested. And very heavily female dominated, as it happens.

The whole area of “Food Studies” is pretty new to academia, as the somewhat graceless introduction Professor Brien was given made clear. But she’s such an engaging speaker, and it’s such an interesting field that the she’d converted the graceless one within an hour. Also she had brought really quite superior chocolate crackles.

Her work is to an extent mapping out the territory – there’s been little academic attention to the field in an Australian context, and it seemed from this gathering that every nearly conversation can spark a new possible line of enquiry.

Two points she raised in her talk particularly resonated with me. The first was in relation to criticisms that cookery and food writers reinforce the domestic enslavement of women. As a mother who’s been at home for an eighteen month stretch twice in the last six years, and often sometimes struggled with it, I responded to the idea, traced to Margaret Fulton, that cookery could provide an island of creativity in a day otherwise structured to the demands of others. (There’s an excellent post on the view that there’s something necessarily oppressive about a woman cooking for her family from chef Barbara Fisher of Tigers & Strawberries.) The whole idea of female amateurism/male professionalism was raised, including mention of the ABC’s “The Cook and The Chef”. It shits me a bit, because Maggie Beer has been a restaurateur and in charge of a professional kitchen for a bloody long time. Anyway, I’ve had my spray about that elsewhere.

The second point I connected with was Professor Brien’s consideration of how we incorporate what we read in food media into what we do – how we cook and eat – which becomes part of what we are, in both the literal and metaphorical senses. Part of the context is the massive commercial success of publications about food and cooking – a spend in Australia of around $60 million per year.

It was an interesting counterpoint to some of the questions from the audience which seemed based on the conviction that People didn’t cook and what’s more People Who Consumed Food Media didn’t really make the food in the magazines or books. Apparently that is the only thing that cookery writing is for, beyond what you might call the performative function of displaying taste. (I did mention it was an academic audience ;) One woman went so far as to say her many travels in the US had led her to the conclusion that “Nobody there cooks.”

That’s just wrong, and I was surprised how very cranky these statements from the audience made me. I have as little respect for Donna Hay as anyone, and OK, it may be bourgie to have a bunch of fancy cookbooks on prominent display in your house*, but how does someone else determine whether you’re entitled to display them or not? Is there a magic ratio? Need the pages be sufficiently splattered? How precisely need the recipe be followed? Piss off!

Like many – another outspoken female comes to mind here – I will read a number of things around an ingredient or recipe and fashion a version to suit my tastes and what’s in the fridge. Tonight I made a roasted vegetable frittata, using the roasted cauliflower I’ve been nuts for since this post at Gastronomy Domine and this one for faux mashed potatoes at Diet, Dessert and Dogs. Although I just think of it as a warm dip and have the goddam potatoes if I feel like them.

I read food memoirs and criticism in bed – in fact I’m working my way through what you might consider the English language “canon” of food memoir and the parallel one of behind-the-scenes restaurant life. (Suggestions for good reads gratefully received, btw.) I’m also now in the habit of taking a neglected cookbook from the shelf every time we go on holiday; last time we had a week at the beach it was with Rosemary Brissenden’s South East Asian Food to read. I didn’t cook from it while we were away, just read it. On the little road trip we made before that one, I’d taken Fuchsia Dunlop’s Sichuan Cookery (Land of Plenty in the US edition), which I read cover to cover three times before I cooked a thing from it.

Professor Brien is eager to talk to people who write about food, and I’ve said I’ll pass on the details of interested food bloggers (rather than put her email address up). Leave a note in comments or email to crazybraveATgmail.com if you’re keen.

* guilty! But the living areas are one room really, so where would it be truly tasteful to put them?

My friend Jonesie tipped me off on an interesting looking free lunchtime talk at ANU next Tuesday, 5 August:

Enabling New Ways of Thinking about the World?: The Australian Food Writer as Activist

Food writing makes up a significant proportion of the books, articles, weblogs and other texts written, published, sold and read each year in Australia. While the food writing in cookbooks, magazines and other publications is often thought of as providing useful, but banal, practical skill-based information, recent scholarship has begun to suggest that food writing is a more creative, and interesting, form of cultural production.

As part of a biographically-based study of Australian food writers, this work-in-progress seminar focuses on the roles the contemporary food writer plays in an environment where food is the subject of considerable scholarly, policy and personal interest and anxiety. In such a context, a number of contemporary food writers engage with issues around food production and consumption. These issues include sustainable and ethical agriculture, biodiversity and genetic modification, food miles and fair trade, food safety and security, and obesity, diabetes and other health issues. In this activity, the Australian food writer is, moreover, not only a media commentator on these important contemporary concerns, but is, at times, a forward-thinking activist, advocating and campaigning for change.

Donna Lee Brien is the Associate Professor of Creative Industries, and Head, School of Arts and Creative Enterprise, Central Queensland University. She is the author of John Power 1881-1943 and co-author of the popular self-help books Girl’s Guide to Real Estate: How to Enjoy Investing in Property and Girl’s Guide to Work and Life: How to Create the Life you Want. Donna is widely published in the academic areas of writing pedagogy and praxis, and collaborative practice in the arts. She is the founding co-editor of dotlit: The Online Journal of Creative Writing and Assistant Editor of Imago: New Writing and Imago: Online. Donna is currently an Associate Editor of New Writing: the International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing (UK), and is on the Board of Readers for Writing Macao. She is the President of the Australian Association of Writing Programs and in 2006 was has awarded a Carrick Institute Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning.

If I can find someone to sit on the one year old I’ll be there. Full details and contact info here.

Like Mr Perry in last night’s BBC Emma (go here to discuss!), I am not altogether against eggs. We’re lucky enough to keep some chickens which crap free range all over the yard. Despite having pretty much the best eggs available to humanity, I’m not a huge fan of the breakfast egg. In fact while I love eggs in quiches, frittatas or a nice spanish-style tortilla, I almost never face off an egg straight up.

We often have two breakfasts on weekends. The first is emergency carbo loading of early waking children, usually porridge, often at an inhumane hour. A hour or so later is still a very long time before morning tea, let alone lunch. This weekend’s second breakfast was baked eggs, from a recipe in the Sydney Morning Herald/Age weekend colour magazine last month by Andrew McCo. I ripped the end of his name off, poor love, and the paper doesn’t seem to include the weekend recipes on their zhuszhy site. So sorry, Andrew.

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Do you remember in Bridget Jones’ Diary how her attempt to impress a boy with leek and potato soup failed when the string she’d used to tie the leeks dyed the whole soup a lurid blue? This is how Bridget would make a nice rice custard.

She’d follow the directions for Jill Dupleix’ excellent version down to the letter.* Just a minute or two before it was ready she’d have to rush out to pick up her son from kindy, so she’d put a piece of plastic film over the surface so it didn’t form a nasty skin. Being somewhat of an environmentalist, she’d spurn purchased plastic film and re-use a plastic bag. Because she is an utter nong she’d reuse a bag with lovely pink writing on it.

I have made this a hundred times and I can still stuff it up. Never mind, scrape the pink shit off and top with lots of ground cinnamon.

So what’s the most stupid thing you’ve done in the kitchen lately?
 
 

* I have the hardback Old Food, since reprinted as a softcover called “Favourite Food: New Ways with the World’s Best Recipes“. I liked the old title better myself.