I had offered to host my niece’s birthday party a month ago, after my family had celebrated my sister’s birthday at a garden centre cafe. While the garden centre’s cafe was perfectly fine, as we discussed Hannah’s forthcoming birthday, most of us still had memories of the over-priced outing that was my mother’s birthday a few months earlier: $45 for an average high-tea amongst some very pretty decor. The decor, while lovely, certainly wasn’t worth $15 dollars more than the usual price of a high-tea in these parts.

I’m not certain why my family has this high-tea obsession. Something to do with coming from England and wanting to play at being the Ladies we’re not, I suppose. Or perhaps it’s an excuse to eat way too many cakes, the sandwiches merely being a face-saving preliminary. Yes, the latter is more likely. Anyway, it seems the older members of this family have had a corrupting influence on the youngest member, since Hannah now associates all birthday celebrations with fancy, miniature cakes, delicate sandwiches and champagne-flutes of sparkling apple juice. When I volunteered to host her family party–her mother’s side of her family, anyway–Hannah put her own twist on the occasion and requested tiaras and sparkles. And since I’m a total push-over when it comes to my niece, I was determined to throw the best princess-themed party I could.

For the necessary preliminaries, before the sweet and cake consumption could begin, I fashioned two kinds of sandwiches with two variations to accommodate less sophisticated palates:

In addition to the sandwiches, I assembled–what I like to believe is my own invention–the salad skewer, consisting of Hannah’s favourite salad vegetables:

It only occurred to me afterward that I could have added carrots to the skewers (if they would go on) and call them Traffic Light Kebabs or something equally cheesy. Speaking of which, Hannah’s mother provided cheese and biscuits and Cheezles to round out the savoury course of the high-tea. Along with the savouries, the adults sipped sparkling wine, while Hannah had us all toasting along with every second sip of her sparkling apple juice.

While we changed the empty savoury plates for those filled with sweet things, I took orders for tea and coffee and Sippa straws from everyone.

Once we were settled again, we tucked into caramel and chocolate tarts made by my other sister, Hannah’s Auntie V, and some marshmallows and strawberries on toothpicks. For this course, my contribution was in the princess theme:

Of course, we all had to kiss the frogs to see if they would, in a puff of smoke, turn into handsome princes. Alas and alack! No such magic occurred, so we consoled ourselves by taking a digestive break and playing some games. Everyone got a present in the new-fangled-self-esteem-building version of pass the parcel: small stationery items from Smiggle. And then we all laughed uproariously as Hannah kept steering the cow she was riding in a game on Wii into trees and fences.

Finally, it was time for the birthday cake.

I didn’t take photos during its construction, but I snapped key moments in the decoration process:

In spite of my trepidation about decorating the cake, I’m very pleased to report that Hannah loved it along with the rest of the party. Her joy was infectious and I think we all had our best high-tea ever!

We are all high from a great afternoon, where I did not much more than stand and talk to most of the guests (I missed some, or pretty much anyone who didn’t push in and make themselves known)and take lots of kind and gushy compliments — but I was only able to do this because of this fabulous bunch of people. They cooked, chopped, plated (!), laid out glasses, poured, cleaned, washed and picked up. I’ve never been in the position to need that sort of back-up, and I can see how it could be pretty addictive [Naomi, aka Dr Sista Outlaw, requested that I mention that Underground Lovers are on in the background. Wow, so they are. The layers of sound in this room are amazing.]; I’m jealous of people who have agents and managers.

We are going to celebrate a successful celebration by eating. My initial thought was to go to a restaurant, since I thought everyone would be sick of kitchenwork, but generous Zoe wants to feed us all, so she’s whipping up a quick bacon & tomato pasta for the kids, and we’re having a mushroom and truffle risotto (she made me smell fresh truffle at the markets this morning… OMG). But we can’t eat too much because we have not one, not two but THREE full-size Christmas puddings to taste and discuss… three versions of the same pudding, cooked by BB, Naomi and Zoe, and the differences and quality will be taken very seriously.

Goodness, this is live-blogging. We earlier popped in to introduce S to the Bhutanese neighbours, who just then popped in and invited us to their party… I think we’re going to eat our first course and then take all the puddings over there, which will take the pressure off us to guts ourselves while the pudding is hot & fresh. Huzzar!

[Dr Sista Outlaw chimes in] is wonderful to be down here in Canberra, where the weather is chill and the vibes are warm. Zoe and Caren have slipped out for a fag [Zoe's fagging, Caren is abstemious] and Owen and Jeremy are working out how to keep the kids corralled in one space. The most popular solution is a DVD in the room I am sleeping in. That’s fine, so long as I don’t have to be there while the DVD takes place.

I am in my pyjamas already so am resisting entreaties to go next door to the Bhutanese. Piking, yes, but it’s been a LONG day. Zoe and I kind of overdid it last night, and have so far failed to find the person responsible for deciding to get the brandy out, although we are quite pleased we can barely remember watching a very old Duran Duran on TV. We got up at 6 freakin’ 30 a.m. and made it to EPIC markets, where we managed to secure the last truffle of the season, then came home to chop and fill the car with lovely food that Zoe has spent the week preparing. Onion tarts with chevre and thyme, a Szechuan beef stew with tofu tied in bows, lovely terrine, dips …

The launch of Ampersand Duck’s studio was entirely successful, with a great speech and with very fine company, but the boys are getting just a bit silly and parental intervention is now required …

[&Duck] The kids are cloistered with DVD in a separate room. We are underfed and descending into happy slurring drunkedness, except for Owen who seems to be in. control. The risotto is cooking and smells divine. S ducked next door to the Bhutans and hasn’t reappeared, which means he’s partying hard. I have my doubts whether we’ll be able to make it next door and have visions of us waking tomorrow morning, face-down in bowls of pudding and custard in our ears. Personally all I have eaten today is a couple of pieces of excellent Amore Cake for breakfast (port chocolate cake and pecan rhubarb crumble) plus a slice of terrine and a scraping of the red-cooked beef for a very late lunch. The amount of alcohol I have drunk since changing into some comfy jeans is outweighing the food substantially. Naomi and Owen are stars. Zoe just said ‘we need more wine’. I rest my case, we are having a pudding-off-face, not a pudding-off!

8:39pm: the risotto was stupendous. We are falling over ourselves to try at least one pudding, because apparently the Bhutanese lovelies are holding off their dinner until we can come & taste it, even though we have tried our best to dissuade them. What an overwhelming sense of polite hospitality! One child won’t go to bed without pudding, so we will taste one and then take the rest next door. I just hope they aren’t making themselves stupidly drunk waiting for us.

WOOT! pudding flames! I love the fact that Zoe’s computer is next to the dining table. First pudding is Zoe’s, made with butter not suet — vege friendly. Served with cream & custard. YUM.

The children are stoked and shovelling pudding down their gobs. This is classic kidlit eating, straight out of Enid Blyton. No complaints apart from some liking cream, others liking custard. We are trying to stop BB from explaining to the kids that the bases of Bunnykins plates have rooting rabbits on them.

We have decided to try all puddings quickly and take the leftovers next door. ‘Pudding is heaps better in winter than in summer’ says Owen. Right on…

Naomi’s, the original model with suet, is delightful. Zoe’s has big chunky fruit pieces and lots of alcohol. BB’s is the best shape, and has more citrus tones. No one is prepared to make absolute judgement, but the fine points are being discussed. Each child votes for their parental pudding. The consensus is that all are absolutely delicious, especially when smothered in burning brandy and sauces.

So now we must put the poor neighbours out of their misery! Actually, I’m sure they’re happily drinking, but the poor buggers need to eat.

[Dr Sister Outlaw] someone has to hold the fort while the others go and drink with the Bhutanese … I was already in my pyjamas so here I am, taking a break from the washing up. Zoe is putting the littlest to bed, but I suspect she won’t be emerging … my reward will be lying in guilt free in the morning while her and Owen get up and attend to their early rising children. Puddings were magnificent – very different – but the pudding off has shown the reliability of the recipe. Will be interested to see what the Bhutanese think … so, that’s me, signing off from Chez PDP. Have a good one!!

Pies are a great way to stretch a luxury ingredient a long way, although the traditional Tasmanian scallop pie might, by some, be seen as bastardisation. It consists of a flaky pastry case containing a small number of scallops smothered in a sometimes gelatinous bechamel sauce, flavoured with Keens curry powder and tomato sauce. Note that no connoisseur criticises the use of Keen’s curry powder, as it is intensely Tasmanian, but the tomato sauce is controversial – see my friend Scott’s scallop pie ratings for details. Of course they are magnificent if eaten on a cold day, on the end of a pier that stretches into the tannin-stained waters of the Huon and Derwent estuaries, when the flathead are biting. But it’s hard to translate the sensation this far from the sea, so I created this one to capture its essence.

All good pies start and end with the pastry and all good pastry starts and ends with good technique. Please bear with me while I explain my flaky shortcrust recipe and my special tricks. The quantities of ingredients you’ll need to fill a standard pyrex pie dish are: 180g of white flour, 125g of salted butter (100% dairy please), two tablespoons of water (or thereabouts). Rub the butter into the flour with your fingertips, taking care to keep it all cool, until it reaches the consistency of bread crumbs then add ice water. Forget that, grab the butter and flour and chuck it into a food processor. Hit blend, until you have a mix that looks like a pebbly beach:

Then add a tablespoon of water, and boisterously try to pull the thing into a ball. Add another tablespoon but go slowly. Think hard before adding more – a teaspoon at a time. You want a sticky, lumpy mass that will ball up, but only just.

Once you’re there, get some glad wrap, bind it up, then chuck it in the fridge until you are ready. After at least 30 minutes, but preferably two hours, grab a board or table top and some flour. Knead the ball quickly to coat it with flour but don’t overhandle it. Then roll it out lightly, just until it’s pliable and of even thickness.

You will not get a homogenous yellow pastry like you would in a supermarket. What you will get is a marbled, opalescent thing in which streaks of butter are clearly visible. You want that, because as the pastry cooks the butter will melt away, leaving air pockets that are the frames for the flakes.

Lay your sheet over a lightly buttered pie dish, right to the edges, and trim (cut the leftovers into 2cm wide strips). You need to bake blind, so it doesn’t puff right out of the dish. Prick the pie base with a fork a few times and lay a sheet of baking paper over it. Fill it with dried chick peas or kidney beans to weight the pastry down (particularly around the edges, which will pull) and bake for 20 minutes at 200C. It will shrink somewhat, and that’s okay. Sit the dish on a rack to cool.

You have prepared an unbeatable pie base. Next is the delectable filling … you will need:

A beer in your hand (Tasman Bitter, Cascade or Boags) or, if you are elevated, a dry white
300g scallops (with roe please – you can use frozen ones to advantage)
100-ish g flathead fillets, in chunks
a handful of finely sliced leek (I used half the pale bit of a giant leek)
a peeled, finely diced potato (Pontiac or Pink Eye please – if that is meaningless to you, a good boiling potato, not a waxy new one), boiled quickly until nearly cooked (blanched)
4-5 fresh sage leaves

Very gently fry the leek in some butter with the potato and sage. While you are doing that, put the scallops in a pot with the fish, taking care to include ALL the liquor from the scallops. Splosh some beer over them (about 100ml). Not too much! Just warm the seafood up a little until it releases some flavour. Strain them, keeping the liquor, then transfer them to the fry pan on a low heat – be very careful not to cook the scallops through because they’ll keep cooking in the pie. When they are whitened turn the heat off. Now the sauce …

Melt 50g butter in a heavy saucepan and add two heaped tablespoons of flour. Work it hard with the wooden spoon over a medium heat so that it goes pale (a classic buerre blanc). Add the liquor from the scallops/beer (about 1/2 cup). It will immediately go gluggy, so keep working it while you gradually add about 1/2 cup of milk. When that’s in, add a bay leaf and a big sprig of thyme. Keep cooking it until it smells fragrant and is creamy and thick (err on the side of thickness but add more milk if you need to – you want about a cup of sauce). Add a touch of salt, a big pinch of paprika and some cracked pepper, then combine with the fish/leek mixture.

To assemble, pile the fish into the pie shell and grate a good quality parmesan over the top. Lace the strips of excess pastry and press them down on the ends of the plate. Bake it for 40 minutes at 180C. What you will get looks like this …

It’s a creamy pie in a crumbling buttery pastry. The sweetness of the leek, bay and thyme embraces the scallop flesh and carries it through the pie, and the flathead and potato round out the flavour and add texture. I am truly sorry that I only made one. I will have to make it again.

Last minute PS: yes, this does have a lot of butter in it. This is better for you than the trans fat that Choice has found in packet pastries.

Update: I made my friend Scott go and get us a picture of the legendary Keen’s Curry sign in Hobart. This has been a landscape feature since Popeye was a girl, and probably has heritage status or something.

A gathering of disparate friends in a small suburban kitchen on a cold winter’s night (a thick frost had formed on the cars outside even before we had finished mains) was the perfect occasion to bust out a bit of beet action in the form of a borsch. What I love about this particular recipe is the degree to which each guest can nuance the taste and texture of their bowl to suit their mood. Feeling like a little tart? Add a bit more sour cream. Need to carbo-load for the ten minute walk to the shops in the morning? Add some potatoes. Your razor-sharp wit getting in the way of small talk with the cutie sitting next to you? Add a little dill. Served with a cheese board of cheddar, stinky blue, organic figs, dried apricots and roasted almonds, and a choice of fluffy white or fruit loaf, this went down a treat.

Two cattle dogs wrestling under the table and oodles of red wine added considerably to the pleasure of the borsch and the general chaotic atmosphere of the evening. The conceptual-artist-turned-art-blogger hypnotised my puppy, and then called the independent-activist-documentary-filmmaker on her paranoia about all things ‘nano’. At the other end of the table myself and another anthropologist grooved to some Italian lounge jazz, while an expert in Taiwanese art tried to get her head around the difficulties of building houses in remote Aboriginal communities being explained by a bureaucrat in a position to know. The only time the ruckus died down was when the historian of Jewish Lithuanian execution sites shocked us all with a detailed account of how to identify mass graves using ground penetrating radar.

If it sounds like I’m bragging about how interesting my dining pals were it is because I am. They are all ace individuals whose munificent friendship, along with the borsch and the wine, helped to take the chill off my winter blues for at least another day.

Luscious Borsch

Ingredients

6 beetroots
Veggie stock to taste
1 large onion
2 sticks of celery
Lemon or vinegar
Dill
Parsley
4 boiled eggs, chopped into chunks
4 boiled potatoes, chopped in to chunks
Sour cream
Salt and pepper to taste

Method

Trim and boil the beetroots for half an hour or so, until tender. Cool, skin and dice into small cubes. Brown finely chopped onions with celery, add beetroot and stock and bring to the boil. Season with salt and pepper. Simmer for twenty minutes. Add finely chopped dill and juice of one lemon, or a tablespoon or so of vinegar, and simmer for another ten or until done. Puree, and if too thick add a little water.

Serve hot. Provide sides of chopped boiled potato, sour cream, more dill, chopped parsley, and chopped boiled eggs (or anything else you think might go well – pickles? chives?) and add these to your bowl with generous whimsy reflecting the mood of the moment.

While I will never enter Masterchef, wanting neither a career as a chef nor a role in a reality TV show, I can indulge for a few minutes a happy fantasy about what I might cook given a similar challenge.

My fantasy joint is both local, and seasonal, so to start I would offer a little glass of creamy Jerusalem artichoke soup with truffle straws. It would look a little like the fennel/orange/truffle soup from this post at Helen’s Grab Your Fork, but homelier rather than foamlier. Jerusalem artichoke soup has great depth without weight. It also provides lots of opportunities to make comments about flatulence, which might get any first date awkwardness off to a flying start. FWIW I think the soup is so good it’s worth a fart or two.

For a starter, I would offer a tasting plate of charcuterie and preserved veggies. With the Mountain Creek Farm heritage breed meats I so love I’d make a rustic pork terrine, accompanied by a tapendade made with the oily black Homeleigh Grove semi-dried olives, and a little medallion of poached and pressed beef tongue topped with some of my home-pickled, home-grown plums from last summer. I’d serve it with a herby salad – radicchio, baby endive, parsley, hazelnuts and thin tangelo segments in a mustardy dressing made with new season olive oil.

Main course would be a perfectly baked free range chook (that means a LOT of butter, some garlic, lemon and thyme) with a cauliflower gratin. Yep, cauliflower in cheesy white sauce – it might be naff, but hands up who hates it? The chicken would be sauced with a very simple puree of eschallots and sorrel which had been sweated in butter and finished with splash of cream and OK, I never said the Heart Foundation loved me, butter. There’d be some black (aka Tuscan aka lacinato aka dinosaur aka most alternatively named vegetable available or what) kale braised with olive oil and garlic, and some sweet baby carrots. The chook might look a bit like this:

But that’s not all for you, don’t be greedy. For dessert, I’d make a more elegant (and smaller) version of this Skye Gyngell – sourced recipe I made recently for a dinner party at my dear friend Cath’s place in Elizabeth Bay. I would make her give me her dear old dead Nan’s golden edged plates to use again (that’s Cath, not Skye). Little meringues, gooey inside their crisp shells, with a quenelle of chestnut poached in milk with vanilla bean* and chestnut honey, poached prunes and runny cream. Pardon the horrible flash photograph but it was a lovely long dinner and by her own admission Cath has more wine than God:

Is that something you’d like to eat? And what would I be eating at your fantasy restaurant?

* Vanilla bean in Canberra I hear you ask? I’m not a purist on the seasonal and local thing – it’s a matter of emphasis, not a religion.

Read the full series

As I type this a gentle rain is falling on an empty vegetable patch in my backyard in Canberra. There is little evidence of the tomatoes and chillies laden with fruit that I left behind three months ago. The plants are gone and the soil has been turned over and the garden is now littered with the newly-chewed bones of a desert dog called Sailor, my sole companion during the four day drive home from the Lands.

The journey south was broken up by a week in Melbourne spent re-civilising my wardrobe and my palate. I dodged swine flu but not the inevitable hangover that accompanied a night of fine dining with the man you may know as Nabakov. Should any of you ever have the pleasure, take note: he doesn’t do sardines or tofu, or any combination of the two, and likes his Scotch neat and in large quantities. I would have written a review of the evening but due to my own excessive consumption of wine and whiskey, details have been lost and I am left with only fragments and vague impressions. I do recall the barramundi was excellent and the cognac expensive, and that I laughed rather a lot and probably too loudly in between smoking all of Nabs’ cigarettes.

When I first got back to Canberra I took a few days to unpack, catch up with friends and try to get my head around the fact that I now have to write a very large thesis. It wasn’t until yesterday when I baked a batch of muffins that I finally began to relax. Baking, I have come to realise, makes me feel at home. For what it’s worth, here are some other reflections related to my original motivation for this blog. Over the past few months I have been constantly struck by the great efforts that people go to in order to eat well when they are living in difficult circumstances. Good food is celebrated and treated with respect. In this generalisation I include not only the many non-Aboriginal staff I met who delight in devising elaborate menus from basic items, hoard special ingredients and pay outrageous amounts of money for fresh green vegetables, but also the many Aboriginal men and women, some of whom are greatly advanced in years, who continue to make the effort to walk great distances across country in pursuit of the foods that they love: tirnka goannas, yams, kangaroo, bush onions etc. Sure, we are all guilty of the occasional chicken wing-ding from the local roadhouse, but that’s just what you eat when getting the food you really want is just too hard or too expensive.

My other observation is that it is the most temporary of places with the most transitory clientele that suffer the most from lack of care about food: the roadhouse restaurants along the 800km stretch of the Stuart Highway between Port Augusta and Alice Springs; the cafes at Yulara resort servicing the many thousands of tourists visiting Uluru every year; and the make-do meals I prepared for myself when spending a night camped on the side of the road.

One final recipe to share from my travels. During my last week in Lands I finally managed to secure the meal I had so greatly desired and long pursued without success. In their humble Warburton home, made cosy with a mix of boho Melbourne decor and wild desert paintings, the lovely Kate and Ben served me a fabulous feast of roast of camel. Our humped friend had been secured by the local camel hunter and did not disappoint: tasty without being overwhelmingly strong, firm but tender, no stringy bits and very little fat. Meat doesn’t get much better than this. With half a million feral camels wandering around Central Australia, I have to wonder why we aren’t eating more of it. Let’s get more humps on tables, I say.

Mr Fox’s Roast Camel

Embed numerous garlic cloves deep in the flesh of a large fillet of camel, preferably obtained from the back strap under the hump. Baste with red curry paste and top with bacon and other stuff as takes your fancy. Cook for a couple of hours in a slow oven – the longer it is cooked the more tender it will be. Serve with sides of baked polenta, rocket salad fresh from the garden and a spicy green tea. Yum.

For starters, there’s the wonderful MFK Fisher’s Alphabet for Gourmets at Gourmet magazine, via Metafilter. Here’s part of “C is for cautious”

A complete lack of caution is perhaps one of the true signs of a real gourmet: he has no need for it, being filled as he is with a God-given and intelligently self-cultivated sense of gastronomical freedom. He not only knows from everything admirable he has read that he will not like Irish whisky with pineapple chilled in honey and vermouth, or a vintage Chambertin with poached lake perch; every taste bud on both his actual and his spiritual palates wilts in revulsion at such thought. He does not serve these or similar combinations, not because he has been told, but because he knows.

So if I decline something because it will upset my spiritual palate, you won’t be upset, will you?

Via 101 Cookbooks I’ve found a very promising new Australian food blog, wholefood cooking, by West Australian wholefoods chef and author Jude Blereau. Her illustrated explanation of how to make puff pastry is fantastic.

Locally in Canberra, the ANU Food Co-op re-opens for the year on Wednesday. Come down on Tuesday to help clean up after the Co-op’s Christmas shutdown and get your credits (and consequent big discount! yay!) updated. Much ado in the garden at home, planting seeds of beetroot, zucchini, green and purple sprouting broccoli , okra, leeks and amaranth and harvesting chard, rhubarb, tomatoes and many herbs.

We’re using our little charcoal bbq/smoker a lot since we worked out that “heat beads” are evil and will make you sad but that “hot rox” are great and will make you deeply happy. Most recently (tonight) we smoked some fresh sardines with hickory chips and a little apricot wood from the backyard tree (you would already know this if you lived within five kms of us), turning these healthy and more sustainably fished little critters from this:

into these:

We’ve also used it this week for skewers of chicken marinated in yoghurt, lemon and paprika and these little middle Eastern lamb patties which we ate wrapped in organic Mountain Bread with labneh and salady goodness:

As for future food, I’m all, as the post title says, AUSSIE AUSSIE AUSSIE KUNG HEY FAT CHOI! for Australia Day and the Lunar new year today (Monday) and looking forward to making a stupid amount of food for family and some dear friends tonight.. A happy and prosperous year of the Ox to you and your family.

Finally, via Nabakov, images of love in a bento box – the totally awesome Where the Wild Things Are bento by Anna The Red, for her boyfriend’s lunch, posted with her permission:

Check out too her amazing bento design sketchbooks at her blog and the many detailed images at her boyfriend’s Flickr page of her lunches.

And in case you thought I was one of those nasty food show offs who were profiled at The Elegant Sufficiency, you should know I’m off down to the local swimming pool this afternoon to celebrate my youngest son’s 2nd birthday with supermarket sausages on plastic bread, followed by packet cake and bought icing.