Entries Tagged 'Feasting' ↓

In Tasmania you have to work hard to find land that is not regularly kissed by salt air, so it is no surprise that our national dish is the scallop pie. Scallops are cute, lively shellfish that skitter and flutter along the sea bed, particularly in estuaries, and are delightfully easy to pick up with a trawler. They were overfished to breaking point in the 1980s and the fishery was closed, but valuable lessons about sustainability were learned and now, while lots of other people around the world also snap them up, we Tasmanians can, once again, put them in our pies.

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.

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Tuesday’s Masterchef this week featured the remaining contestants (other than Lucas and Julia) being given an opportunity to make a three course meal that they would love to serve in their own restaurant/cafe. There’s much entertaining to-ing and fro-ing about the structure of the program, etc, at Reality Raving. I for one assumed that they’d been given some notice so that the ingredients they wanted – unusual in Chris’ case, unseasonal in Sam’s – could be organised.

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.

Instalments one , two, three and four.

I’m in lovely Warakurna community at the moment, located at the base of the Rawlinson Ranges in Western Australia. The remote Giles weather station, located just up the road, was built in 1956 and was the first permanent colonial occupation of the area for hundreds of kilometres in any direction. Many older people living at Warakurna now were children at the time, their families living independent existences centred around the myriad of rock holes and hunting grounds scattered throughout the ranges.

By virtue of its tenure as a piece of Western Australian Aboriginal reserve excised by the Commonwealth government fifty years ago, the weather station is the only place in the entire Ngaanyatjarra Lands where alcohol can legally be consumed, and officially only by the station’s six employees. Have I considered dropping into the weather station to say hi and flashing my big blue eyes in the hope of a cold one? Not for a moment. My research permit is far too valuable. Luckily for us, Coopers make a convincing birell (brewed without alcohol) that tastes great straight out of the freezer. While barbecuing steaks over our fire pit on Saturday night, for a brief moment I almost forgot it wasn’t the real thing.

With some time on my hands over Easter, some of the ladies organised to go out hunting for tirnka (little goannas). Armed with crowbars as digging sticks and billy cans as shovels, 8 women and 2 dogs packed into a troopie and made our way to tirnka country.

Tirnka country

We wandered through the bush for a couple of hours, stopping to dig at holes where there was evidence of recent action. It was a very successful hunt in the end, with eleven (!) tirnka bagged. We made a fire, sat down with a cup of tea and proceeded to cook up the catch. The preparation process involves removing gut then burning off the skin in the open flame for a couple of minutes. The lizards are then buried in coals and left to cook for about twenty minutes. The cooked flesh is delicious – pale white, smooth and tasty –hints of chicken (!) and fish and just a little bit smoky. No salt required. We got back to town on dusk, the ladies subsequently missing the Easter Sunday prayer meeting and making me three hours late for a sausage sizzle being hosted by the neighbours. Not good manners, but at the end of the day I think we were all where we really wanted to be.

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ETD 7 days…

As the day of my departure looms closer, signs of pre-trip anxiety are beginning to leak out of me and forebode a chaotic week ahead. As if irrational dreams and inexplicable tears are not enough, this morning I put my expensive Italian stove-top coffee maker in the microwave (instead of on the stove top where it rightly belongs). I zapped it on high for at least a minute before I realised what I had done. Amazingly only the plastic knob suffered, now resembling a charcoalled marshmallow.

The plums are rotting on the tree and the yard is beginning to smell like cheap Spanish wine. No time to jam myself (!), so I salvaged what I could and took them over to Mother to deal with.

Family farewell lunch today, during which I ate enough carbs to see me through to Alice Springs. This blog could be over before it even began. My contribution to lunch was a bakers dozen of some banana walnut muffins (no maple today, feeling a bit povo). They’ve come out rather nicely – good to know that even when all else goes to shit my muffins still rise to the occasion. Mother’s chocolate cake was delicious, if a little wobbly. And yes, those are Ken Done place mats…

(Click photos to embiggen)

Obama tattoos are old news already, so why was I surprised to see Obama Foodorama, “A Daily Diary of The Obama Foodscape, One Byte At A Time”? The intertubes really does have space for everything.

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?
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I’ve been missing not posting here, but all my computer face time at the moment is being taken up doing work contributing to the new Kitchen Garden at my son’s school (setting up a blog and wiki, in fact). To keep myself going, here’s some snapshots of what’s been happening.

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.

What a wonderful opportunity for temporary insanity a child’s birthday party throws up for the modern parent. Eleven months of the year I could care less for the making, baking and lunchbox fussing that is supposed to come with child ownership, but a birthday party is SHOWTIME. It’s when you get all your crafty ya yas out because, dammit, people are watching. And if I could make one other parent think for just a second that I enjoy nothing more than making sugar paste effigies of Garfield and sewing up darling little costumes then it’s all been a worthwhile charade.

This year, Isaac (recently 6) decided upon a Transformers party. The theme, IMO, just gives you something to work with for cakes and invitations and is a good cue for presents when parents find themselves standing bewildered in the Kmart toy aisles. So a Transformers cake was planned, and it was at some very early stage of the cake planning that a mental picture of the sort of cake you can only realise with fondant was formed in my mind and nothing could be done to dislodge it.

I’ve been quietly obsessed with fondant cakes since forever. It’s food! But it looks like modelling clay! And you can make anything out of it! Then eat it! You could make a futuristic miniature city out of fondant then go stomping through it like Godzilla, randomly taking a bite out of people and buildings as the mood takes you. Despite visiting the Royal Melbourne Show for years just to see the decorated cakes and having unfettered access to all the relevant retail outlets, I had never actually taken the next step: I had never planned and created a fondant iced cake. It had just never occurred to me.

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Today my sister, her partner Anne and their kids Ciara and Reece joined us for The Eating of The Hare. They took our bigger boy out to lunch and Owy went to cricket, so I had a couple of hours of uninterrupted kitchen time to potter while our smaller boy slept. There is nothing nicer than feeding people that you care about, and to be feeding them food which they’d been responsible for increased the pleasure. Anne is a bit of a spoiler, so things kicked off with spiders made with sexy ice cream and Cascade soft drinks:

I’m not sure if that’s sharing or territorial pissing that you’re seeing in that picture, but that’s five year old boys for you.

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