Entries Tagged 'Notices and Announcements' ↓

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.

My laptop has finally turned up its circuits, and I will be offline for a while. During this time I shall be attending a lovely wedding in Melbourne where I am assured there will be a “bloggers lounge”. However, such graciousness notwithstanding, I will not be posting or commenting much for a bit.

Recipes from demystification day will be up as soon as I’m on my cyberfeet again. In the meantime …

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]

… or more accurately things picked up off the side of the road. It’s very late for apricots, but I found a boxful on the way home from dropping my son at school this morning. Not too ripe, and while a few are rust-marked they’re still fine to be cooked. Killer fact of the day: an average bike basket can carry just over 5 kgs of stonefruit.

And a hello to anyone who’s found there way here from The Canberra Times’ Food & Wine article today. If you’re new to blogs, you can use the sidebar over on the right there -> to check out some of the latest posts, or find your way around by looking up a particular ingredient or category of posts. The blogroll is a list of great food blogs from all over. The contributors tab up top lists all posts by each of the site’s writers and there’s a recipe index too. Don’t feel shy to leave a comment.

(image heavy post warning)

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.

Home from holidays a little early, and looky what’s in the garden:

In other exciting news, the first food blog I fell in love with, Though Small, it is Tasty, has has resurfaced. Go bookmark it and check the archives at the old site to get a feel for what we’re in for.

Looking forward to posting more soon, once I can persuade the children that 9 o’clock is not a reasonable hour to go to bed. A happy and safe new year to all.

Menu for Hope is an international food blogger fundraiser begun by Pim of Chez Pim and organised in Australia by Ed Charles at Tomato.

Go here to buy $US10 tickets and list the codes of the raffles you fancy. The money raised – $90 000 last year – will support the UN World Food Program:

This year Menu for Hope 5 again raises funds for the WFP’s school lunch program in Lesotho, Africa. This is the second year we are supporting this program, which assist the WFP’s efforts to supply the program by buying directly from local farmers who practice conservation farming methods. With this program, we help feed the kids (which keep them in school) and support their parents and community farming. This sustainable approach to aid is something we believe in and strongly support.

You can enter any raffle (but check if they post internationally/require you to travel). The full list is here, and the Oceania list here. It closes Christmas Eve, so be quick.

Some standouts for me in the local selection:

• Code AP19 – dinner and wines for two at George Biron’s Sunnybrae
• Code AP16 – a weekend for two at Chez Fur on the Mornington Peninsula, via Purple Goddess
• Code AP18 – two tickets to a cooking class with Tony Tan, via Thermomixer
• and finally (and linklessly) , code AP06 – a behind-the-scenes day on a food shoot with Gourmet Traveller

As for us, we’re off up the highway with a trailer full of toys wrapped in plastic and a geriatric kelpie. Have a safe and festive holiday and we’ll see you on the other side of the new year.

More info about the program.