Entries Tagged 'Ingredients' ↓

Installments one , two, three, four and five.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I ran into Camel Man’s Wife and begged for a fillet of camel to play with in the kitchen but to date they have yet to deliver. The camp dogs have done better, with the Camel Man’s Boys dropping off enormous sections of back bone at various places around the community for them to chew on. We had one little dog drag a stinking piece of hump fat at least twice his weight into the arts centre last week in an effort to keep it for his own exclusive pleasure. He was most indignant when promptly chased back out.

I have nevertheless managed to get my paws on a little bit of dromedary on the sly. A friendly sparky called Richard had been staying with the Camel People while working on various jobs around the community, including fixing our hot water system (we had endured over two weeks of luke warm showers). Over coffee one morning before the sun had much of a chance to warm the day he offered me some freshly dried camel jerky. Marinated in sweet chilli sauce and coriander seeds, it was among the most tender, tasty jerky I’ve eaten – and having lived in Namibia for a couple of years where biltong from all kinds of bush meat is a fav snack, I’ve tasted quite a bit. Nice work, Camel Man. I almost forgive you for being so tight about providing meat for the rest of us.

Ever wondered what a camel’s oesophagus looks like?

Despite the lack of camel there have been some other unusual menu items to get excited about. Roo tails are a favourite camping meat out here and can be purchased frozen at both the community store or road house for $7 a pop. Surprisingly there is considerable variety in the quality of tails – I am reliably informed by a long time connoisseur that the black ones sold at the road house are a little tough.
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A few weeks ago I did a session on things to cook with possibly unfamiliar things from the Asian grocery store for my women’s group. I came home and started to write it up, and then my laptop died and I am still resting between computers. On a borrowed laptop for the moment, and claiming the blog Amnesty originated by Eating With Jack and used to such great effect by Jackie herself, then extended by Claire of Melbourne Gastronome and enthusastically (and gratefully) joined by Ed from Tomatom and Sarah of Sarah Cooks. It’s twitter’s fault.

This is approximately how much stuff you need to demystify your average Asian grocery store, with the addition of a bonus Hairy McClary backpack full of nappies, wipes, toddler snacks and a cold drink. If your car is getting fixed, you’ll be needing a large hand truck. Fortunately I didn’t have far to go.

When you get there you’ll need tables to fill up with all manner of until-now mysterious things, like giant packets of fungus and small jars of stinky fermented tofu, bundles of greens, jars full of bark, tiny bottles of mustard oil so pungent it burns your nasal hairs, etc, etc.

I think one reason why some people are cautious about buying things from an Asian grocery store is that so much stuff is packaged, and if you don’t know what it is, or what the thing you want looks like, it gets confusing. So we ripped open all the plastic and set about rehydrating, sniffing, poking and tasting.

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An Australian institution. Note, we call them biscuits here, not cookies.

1 cup plain flour
1 1/2 cup rolled oats
1 cup “soft pack” brown sugar
3/4 cup dessicated coconut
2 tablespoons of golden syrup
125 g butter (half of a small block)
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
50 ml (2 tablespoons) boiling water

If you don’t live in Australia, I don’t like your chances of finding Golden Syrup* (not Molasses), which is pretty much peculiar to Australia, and I think the desiccated coconut is different too.

Anyway.

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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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So my women’s group tries to have one session each term run by one of the members because this is cheap called “capacity building” and helps the government justify giving us money.

I put my hand up to do a “demystifying what is in the Asian supermarket” kind of session, and I need your help, because it’s on next Wednesday and I’ve just remembered. For many years now I have been wandering home with random bags of things from the Asian grocery and I’ve lost track of what might freak out your average whitegirl. I don’ t know it all by any means, but I know where to find out and I’ve quite a few Asian cooking reference books. I’ll be concentrating on Chinese and Vietnamese foods, as they’re the cuisines I know best.

I should be able to get whatever groceries we need, and I’ll take a rice cooker, gas ring and wok. I’ll also set up a table with the reference books. Ideally, I’d like it to be part demonstration, part chatting, part Q&A.

When I think about what would be the most useful things to show someone who was starting to learn about cooking Asian-style food, this is what comes to mind for me:

• why you shouldn’t spend a lot of money on a wok and how to season one properly
• light soy sauce and dark soy sauce, which are very nearly the same shade of black although that’s not the point
• what “hot” means (hint: fucking hot)
• that stir fries are much better if they have one or two ingredients (not counting oils or seasoning)
• bottled sauces that are worth it (eg toban djian, aka broad bean chilli sauce) and those that are not worth anything at all (black bean, plum, lemon, etc, etc, etc)
• how to make aromatic oils to dress veggies, etc, with
• the logistics of cooking a Chinese/Vietnamese dinner

I might pre-cook a red-braised dish, take the rice cooker, and do a veggie stir fry and maybe another dish – perhaps the insanely good steamed chicken from Fuchsia Dunlop’s Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. Enough for the 15 or so people to have a taste of a few different styles

I’m also wondering what “novel” ingredients it might be most useful to spend some time on – maybe fresh rice noodle sheets, jicama (aka Mexican yam bean, often used as a water chestnut substitute). dried black beans, kang kong (aka water spinach, aka water convolvulus), frozen edamame and ….

I’d be interested to hear any good or bad experiences you’ve had with Asian supermarket shopping, and what you think it would be useful to teach some noobs. If you and I were wandering through the Asian grocery, what foodstuffs would you be asking about? Would you just be so excited to use the word “foodstuffs” that nothing else mattered?

[Disclaimer: I am 5'11" and of frecklishly obvious Irish heritage]

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I looked at the (sadly ornamental) cherry tree in the front yard this week, and worried that its leaves were yellowing – some kind of deficiency, I thought. But it’s only a deficiency of summer, and all around me the leaves are starting to turn – the oaks, the Virginia Creepers, the plums and apricot. Summer is escaping, and as proof I’m typing in my trusty ugh boots.

I can’t get too sad about it, autumn brings the best eating of the year with the lush overblown end of the summer crops – tomatoes, giant zucchinis, eggplants, okra.

Our tomatoes were disappointing this year, apart from the plague of volunteer yellow cherry tomatoes. They’re a bit of a disappointment in themselves, being 98% seed and 2% bitter skin. They’re OK dried slowly in the oven, or in a salad. Just OK. Barely OK. I had been hoping to preserve a tomato sauce in the Fowler’s Vacola I borrowed from Ampersand Duck’s Best Beloved, but I’ll need to go and buy a box of proper tasty tomatoes from the markets to do that. Fortunately the Autumn weather is more conducive to keeping a huge cauldron bubbling away than the 40 degree days of early February.
 
Googling around for Vacola wisdom, I found this from Mountaingirl’s Musings in October last year:

I think I have worked out why the tradition is dying – and it isn’t that the preserving is hard, or that tinned fruit is so plentiful, it is more a case of buying fruit negates the purpose of preserving it to a large extent. And with smaller land parcels, and busier lives, few of us have the orchard in the back yard so access to “free” fruit is virtually eliminated.

Canberra, or at least the inner north where I live, has abundant fruit trees. Our rented house has a plum, apricot, crab apple and pear (which bore a record two four fruits this year). The best year we had for apricots was when we tied a kid’s swing on one of the branches. It seems that the stress on the tree helps it fruit heavily, but it’s an old tree and not yet recovered from the loss of all the dead wood we had to cut out last year.

Still, I have managed to put up a few things for winter. Chutney, sauce and pickled plums made from yellow-fleshed and blood plums for comparison purposes. A lone bottle of apricot sauce. Peaches, rhubarb and more plums in the freezer. Fortunately once people know you like preserving, they’re willing to share. It saves them another night of bottling until 1 am.

I think your chances of throwing together a good pantry dinner are greatly increased when there are a few jars of pickles and sauces tucked away. There are some things I always have – Fuchsia Dunlop’s sweet aromatic soy sauce and Just Hungry’s “Japanese flavour essence“. In the fridge at the moment are tiny pickled turnips, preserved with a few batons of beetroot to colour them intensely pink like the Turkish pickles I love. A big fat jar of preserved lemons,always. A jar of cumquats pickled to Stephanie Alexander’s recipe in the out of print “Feasts and Stories” that we ate last weekend with a Wessex Saddleback pork forequarter braised in milk. I lived in Brazil once, where I first ate quince paste with soft farm cheese, which they call “Romeo e Julieta”, and the huge pile of scrumped quinces is heading that way.

So instead of feeling glum about the tomatoes, I collected together some pictures of my store-cupboard treasures, from this summer and seasons past. Clicking on any of the thumbnails will enlarge the image.

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.

The food and wine section of The Canberra Times had an ad last week which piqued my curiosity:

It reads:

Red Hill Butcher Shop

If you are after something special from your local butcher shop, make sure you visit Red Hill. The owners smoke their own hams on the premises, have Certified Angus Beef and moisture-infused pork and sell a variety of home-made meals and treats.

They even have a selection of wines from Mount Majura and Lerida Estate Wineries to perfectly complement that medium-rare steak.

Moisture infused pork, hey? In the olden days, when pigs were fat, they didn’t need any moisture infusions. And wasn’t there a moisture infused ham scandal a while ago? So I called the butcher to find out what they meant. For those outside Canberra, Red Hill is one of the oldest and fancy-pantsest suburbs in town, full of large homes on large blocks and lots of very long established money residents.

Tony the Butcher was at pains to point out that they were advertising the “moisture infusion” not just because they had to for legal reasons, but because they wanted to establish it as a defined product and that Australian Pork Limited, the industry body, was eager to see it marketed as such. He said that the meat had two additives, Potassium lactate (326, acidity regulator, humectant, bulking agent) and Sodium acetates ( 262, acidity regulator). (Those descriptions are from the Food Standards Australia New Zealand list of food additives and their properties.) I found him very helpful and happy to answer questions and volunteer information. Full points there.

He said that he’d been selling this pork for 12 months, and his pork sales had quadrupled in that time. He sells mainly cutlets and loin steaks, ie lean cuts that need fairly quick cooking.

Tony said that the meat is marketed as “Murray Valley Pork”, which a quick google shows is “the premium retail fresh brand of QAF Meat Industries, which is Australia’s leading producer of pork for the domestic and export markets.”

They’re certainly pushing the premium angle, appearing at the Sydney Good Food Affare (shame about that name) where they’re described like this:

Murray Valley Pork, Corowa, NSW
Succulent and absolutely delicious Murray Valley Pork from the Riverina and Murray Valley region is a premium range developed in 2005 exclusively for quality retail butchers. Moisture infusing ensures that Murray Valley Pork is always juicy and tender and its neutral flavoured brine has been specially developed to provide customers with a consistently high quality eating experience.

No mention of QAF Meat Industries and their rather unpremium business name there. But checking
QAF’s site will tell you they “now supply 20 per cent of pork to the domestic market and account for 30 to 40 per cent of all farmed pork exports from Australia. We employ more than 850 people at 10 sites across Australia, with our largest site and head office for the group located at Corowa in the Murray River basin.”

I only eat premium pork, because what I found out about industrial pig farming was so horrible I couldn’t face supermarket meat anymore. (A hat tip to Noodlebowl for sending me off on that journey – thank you.)

It must be very difficult for the real premium producers, like the wonderful Mountain Creek Farm that we buy our meat from, when industrial giants prey on the ignorance of consumers who don’t know how to cook a particular cut of meat, and are afraid of a bit of fat. You don’t have to eat the fat, you know, but it really helps your cooking. And a little bit is good for you.

I found Mountain Creek Farm by emailing the Free Range Pork Farmers’ Association and asking. If you want a moist pork, I suggest you do the same.

(PS – Michael Croft of Mountain Creek Farm keeps a terrific blog (unfortunately no RSS) where he describes the farming life, the principles behind the farm, his recent trip to the Terra Madre artisanal producers’ conference in Turin and how a man who was a vegetarian for seven years became a beef and pork producer. I have since met an ex-vegan couple who are now his enthusiastic customers – that’s how good the meat is. The farm will be featured in the 10 December issue of The Canberra Times’ Food & Wine section. Sales details are on the website. And I have no connection with them, beyond being a really happy customer.)