I was first introduced to this soup in Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book, but have more recently followed a recipe of Patricia Wells, which I adapt below.

The success of the soup as a summer tonic lies of course in the pistou. And the secret of a good pistou is a mortar and pestle, not a food processor. Patience Gray in her remarkable book Honey from a Weed has a whole introductory chapter on ‘chopping and pounding’. There she writes: ‘Pounding fragrant things – particularly garlic, basil, parsley – is a tremendous antidote to depression…Pounding these things produces an alteration in one’s being – from sighing with fatigue to inhaling with pleasure. The cheering effects of herbs and alliums cannot be too often reiterated’.

Before I get to the recipe, I just want to reiterate what a peculiar — in a good way — cookbook Gray’s book is. She co-wrote an earlier cookbook, published as a Penguin paperback, with Primrose Boyd in the 1950s, called Plats du Jour, then she absconded to Europe to make a life with a Flemish sculptor for the next forty or fifty years, living in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia: in effect, chasing the marble that a sculptor needs.

One remarkable aspect of her book lies in the subtitle: ‘Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cylcades and Apulia’. Not only does the word ‘fasting’ rarely appear in connection with contemporary cookbooks, but here it is given priority of place before the word ‘feasting’.

Many contemporary cookbooks on regional cuisines are embedded in some sort of narrative — explicit or implied — about The Quest for Authenticity. It is not enough to know that we are going to use olive oil in a recipe; we need to be told that the dish was originally tasted on a hiking trip near Carrara, using oil obtained from the first pressing from the gnarled trees of a domestic grove of a poor but honest Italian farmer and so on. This Quest for Authenticity along with a persistent nostalgia coalesces to give us the Mediterranean Diet as Culinary Pastoral. Yet what we today evoke as the Mediterranean Diet probably bears little relation to how most Mediterraneans ate for most of history. Up until relatively recently, the Mediterranean diet was one of long seasons of malnutrition, interspersed with episodes of famine.

Gray’s book is one of the few Mediterranean cookbooks to acknowledge this in its overall approach. She captures what the anthropologist Carole Counihan, writing about rural Sardinia, observed when referring to an ‘iron clad ethic of consumption: daily consumption took place within the family and was parsimonious; festive consumption took place within society at large and was prodigal’, there being a ‘rhythmic oscillation between these two different modes’.

So yes, Gray’s cookbook-cum-travel memoir does play the authenticity card, but without the reassurance and comfort and warm fuzziness that comes with most books of this genre. At one stage she watches, and describes for the reader, a Greek islander woman’s method of cooking fresh haricot beans into a soup over an outdoor fire. When Gray takes some of the surplus soup to a neighbour, the neighbour ‘believing them to be cooked by me and foreign in consequence, later threw them to the pig’. The Mediterranean diet, like Tolstoy’s ideal of love, can be a harsh and dreadful thing.

Anyhow, the promised recipe for La Soupe au Pistou:

If you have access to fresh borlotti beans, buy half a kilo which will come down to around 200 – 250 g shelled beans.

Warm some oil in a saucepan with chopped garlic and some thyme sprigs, parsley sprigs and a bay leaf or two. Add the beans and cook for a minute or two. Add a litre of hot water and cover and simmer for around ten minutes.

In another pot, start the soup: oil, onions and garlic sweated over a low heat. Add chopped carrots, chopped potatoes and again more bay leaves, some thyme and parsley sprigs. Saute all this for ten minutes or so, stirring regularly, to build depth of flavour.

Then add the beans and their cooking liquid to the vegetables with some diced zucchini and some tomatoes (fresh or from a tin, whatever’s at hand) and another litre of water. Simmer gently until all is cooked. Add some small pasta shapes and cook until the pasta is cooked.

Serve the soup hot, passing both pistou and grated pecorino or parmigiano cheese to swirl into the soup

Pistou:

For pesto or pistou, I’d go with a cup of basil leaves pounded together with a tablespoon of pine nuts, a clove of garlic, half a teaspoon of salt and four tablespoons of olive oil. Enjoy.

Easy is good, because I am not diligent in the garden (or many other places, if you really want to know). I am prone to fits and starts and sometimes ignore things. I’m not always cooking so I don’t get to things in time. In the garden, this forgetfulness can have spectacular results.

These Hollow Crown parsnips looked so pretty in the vege patch that I was loth to dig them up, but maybe I shoulda done it sooner, because they got a bit … large (that’s a full size 1940s sink they are sitting on). Notice the rather ladylike limbs on the top one? I did wonder if these were really mandrakes (or ladydrakes), but luckily they did not scream when cooked. Parsnips get a bad rap, as this story about Don Burke ripping Donna Hay a new one for daring to promote them reveals. He is wrong. Parsnips are delicious. Which doesn’t explain why I ignored them so comprehensively they grew legs.

But then my marrows got into a similar state, as you can see with this cucumber, modelled by my lovely assistant Aaron, who adores cucumbers but is not sure about this one.

I’ve blogged about the advantages of overgrown zucchinis before, but I love baby beets and slender parsnips, roasted with brown sugar and balsamic, so there’s really no accounting for letting things go to this extent.

Yet this neglect has had benign – nay, wonderful – results. OK, if you ever saw a parsnip the size and shape of the ones above in a shop, you would never buy it, and neither you should. It would be tough, woody of heart and bitter of taste, because it would have endured long periods in transit and storage. But when taken straight from the earth (with a giant fork and a lot of grunting), even massive parsnips are sweet, juicy and yielding. I casseroled some with a jointed chook, a cup of white wine, preserved lemon and a bit of sage and tarragon and the result was a sauce that looked like I’d added a cup of cream to it. I nearly died of pleasure eating it. I also made them into a vegan soup with vege stock and white wine – they smelled apple sweet. 

Same goes for the beetroot, which were so overgrown they stood up out of the ground but united heaven and earth when cooked into a soup with coriander and served with a dollop of tart yoghurt. But again, you wouldn’t buy beetroot like that in a shop. You’d surmise it would be past its peak of perfection, but you would be wrong.

It’s made me think a lot about how aesthetic notions of shop-ready produce lead to waste. What do the farmers do with the produce that does not meet Coles-Woollies specifications because it is too big, too small or looks like mandrake? I suppose some goes to canneries, but precious little would be returned to the earth via compost.

Growing to order can also afflict home gardeners, to their cost. If we only eat when vegetables reach a defined size, we miss the early tenderness of baby vegetables and shorten the eating season. If you cut the head off a cabbage or silverbeet or lettuce you kill it, but if you harvest outside leaves as you need them it will bear for months and months - over the course of a year a bunch of kale will become a palm tree. Peas and beans produce longer if harvested constantly, so it makes even more sense to pick early and often. If you leave things in the ground there is always something to salvage when you are hungry. And although most gardening books would tell you beetroots and parsnips take a lot of space, the fact is I’ve gotten almost six months of eating from stuffing a couple of dozen plants into a square metre of garden, and have not tired of either food. You see, even the instructions on seed packets guide you to producing shop-ready vegetables.

My slack gardening habits have led me to an epiphany. It’s time to break free from supermarket values. Don’t follow the directions on the seed packet but overplant and eat as you thin – the plants left over will fatten in the extra space and be there when you want them. Eat the leaf the caterpillar has chomped on, grow the artichokes to see their beauty, let the beets and parsnips stay in the ground until you are good and ready for them and save your harvesting energy for turning summer peaches into bellinis or racing the autumn frosts to tuck the tender things into the really deep freeze.

There has also been more than a little fiddling. My Brother Outlaw added cumquats to his, and Zoe has added port and figs and various other things. I could, if I was that way inclined, get annoyed at the traducing of the recipe, and suffer a fit of pique at the failure of my friends and family to, you know, fall into line and follow my directions. But a brief survey of my relationship history would reveal that I am not myself the sort of girl who likes to do the same old thing year in and year out and, in any case, I am outrageously competitive.

Which brings me to another point. In the Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Living mag this week there was a story about some chick called Kirsty who invites all these women around to make puddings, according to her recipe. Apparently she’s been doing it for years and years. Obviously she is much better at getting her friends and family to fall into line and maybe serving them alcohol helps, but probably she associates with timid wilting types who would never experiment with a recipe and are happy to be told what to do. Like sheep, or members of the NSW ALP Right Caucus.

Well, I’d like to remind readers that here at PDP we value free speech, free expression, and opportunities to spread pudding goodness far and wide. We’ve had our very own virtual and real life pudding competitions. The results were inconclusive, but the eating was very good indeed (as was the drinking and company).

And so, in that spirit, I launch this open thread, where we can share pudding tips and recipes (it really isn’t too late to make one, trust me), and share our thoughts as to the results. I know that, as I type this, Zoe is cooking hers. I cooked mine this week as well. Traditionally, I add 900 grammes of fruit, which is mostly currants and raisins (360g each) plus a mixture of peel/ginger/glace cherries (adding up to 180g). I also add some hazelnuts. This year I did 300g currants, 300g figs and a combo of dates, cranberries, ginger and peel (to get up to 900g). Kind of Middle East meets Northern Europe, and, as I add brandy and hazelnuts (Central Europe) and Vodka (Eastern Europe), my pud is gonna be totally Continental.

What have you done? (And Zoe, what’s in yours?)

(Zoe adds – if you’d like to include an image in your comment, post a link to an online version or email a jpg about 380 wide and we’ll magic it up.)

It was on a cold and dreary night in November 1892 that I was first introduced to yet another of the singular talents of my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes, talents with which he was wont to so often surprise those that thought they knew him well.

The fire was blazing in our chambers at 221b Baker Street and I was seated comfortably in an armchair, browsing through the privately published memoirs of a Ruhr industrialist visiting Siam in incognito. Meanwhile Sherlock Holmes sat listlessly at his desk with his commonplace book open before him but ignored. Once again it was clear to see he was in the grip of one of his queer humours.

Looking across, I recognised of old that glint in his eye that signaled a brooding determination to break loose of his lethargy. I feared his gaze would soon turn to the drawer that held his vials of five percent cocaine solution, or worse still, to his violin case.

Suddenly Holmes leapt to his feet and began to pace about the room. “I feel like something spicy and gamey,” he ejaculated.

“Why my dear Holmes, whatever could you mean?” I murmured, rising to feet and closing a chapter on a stimulating account of nubile hermaphrodites in Indochine.

“The Devil’s Kidneys, Watson! That’s what I mean,” he curtly exclaimed.

“Good heavens! You’ve finally found the solution to the Case of the Missing Claret? I’ve always thought it was connected with the evening the Diogenes Club came back here after that show of photographic slides about fertility rites in West Africa-“

“No Watson,” Holmes vigorously interrupted, “I meant I could do with a spot of devilled kidneys right now.”

“A capital idea,” I remarked, for I too was feeling the pangs of night hunger, and I immediately rang the bell for Mrs Hudson. After waiting a minute I rang again as she had not appeared with her customary alacrity.

I looked at Holmes with a quizzical expression and said “Perhaps Mrs. Hudson is entertaining?”
“I’ve never found her so,” he replied with some asperity.*

At that moment, the door to our room was flung open and there stood Mrs. Hudson on the vestibule, clad in a blue and somewhat distressed flannel nightgown with her hair all awry and apparently in the grip of some strong emotion.

“It’s four thirty in the f_____g morning! What the f__k do you mad b_____ds want now?” Mrs. Hudson cried.

Holmes regarded this apparition with some amusement and then blandly remarked “Why Mrs. Hudson, I would venture a guess that you have recently risen abruptly from a deep sleep while reclining mainly -”

“Too f_____g right I was !” she replied with some passion.

“Please calm yourself my good woman,” Holmes crisply replied. “As you can see, Dr Watson and myself are perfectly safe and sound. Although perhaps not in such animal spirits as we would prefer. Could you pray prepare some of your delicious devilled kidneys and we shall feel whole again in a trice.”

“Oh f__k a fishwife with a Tilbury bunt! I’ve put up with a lot from you two I have. I never complained about the b____y bullet holes over the mantelpiece, I never said a word about Mr Holmes’s used vials littering the landing and I always turned a blind eye while cleaning to the Doctor’s folios of “artistic studies” left all over the b____y place. I’ve opened the front door to those f_____g Irregulars of yours at all hours more times that I care to remember and thrown some of them out again when you was passed out from that coco juice s__t, I can tell you. The things they get up to with your makeup case! And why only the other night I had to let the both of you in at three in the f_____g morning, reeking of cheap gin and even cheaper cologne – all dressed up as b____y Haymarket trollops.”

“Ah yes, the affair of the Dollymops and the Duchess of D________” Holmes languidly interrupted. “Thank you for the loan of your undergarments Mrs. Hudson as their appearance of verisimilitude proved invaluable at a certain crucial point in our investigations.”

“Loan my a__e! You pinched them from the b____y washing line! Now you want me to cook at this f_____g hour! Well, you can shove that right up your Khyber!”

With these parting words, Mrs. Hudson slammed the door shut with a resounding crash and left down the stairs with further and thankfully now inaudible imprecations.

Holmes turned to me and dryly remarked “I fear the absence of conjugal companionship these past fifty years since Sergeant Hudson failed to return from Afghanistan is finally taking its toll on his other half. ** Never mind Watson, we can fend for ourselves this just this one. It should be no hardship to an old rough campaigner like yourself.” ***

“What in the devil’s name do you mean Holmes,” I replied.

“I mean devilled kidneys and that is what I mean to have right now. Unwrap that parcel of eight lambs’ kidneys reposing on my desk that I bought to further my research for my monograph on penknife wounds inflicted in second-class carriages leaving from the Metropolitan Underground Railway station at Aldgate during Bank Holidays. **** Now hasten to the bath room and under running water, peel the filmy skin from these kidneys, remove anything else that is white in colour or gristly in texture and then cut each kidney into no less than three pieces but of no more that this length. As you do so, I shall assemble the other ingredients.”

When I returned from the bath room with the kidneys prepared as Holmes instructed, he briefly sniffed the organs before returning to the absorbing task of weighing various items on his scales.

“Look what I have here Watson,” he said with some pride. “I have accurately exacted the following measures. They are: three tablespoons of worstershire sauce; one heaping tablespoon of Coleman’s English mustard powder; one tablespoon of freshly squeezed juice of a lemon; half a table glass of water; one two-ounce canister of Fullers Earth, one substantial tablespoon of cayenne pepper; a heaping pinch of ground black pepper; and four drops of Tabasco sauce.”

While Holmes was distracted by the task of lighting up the Bunsen burner, I deftly removed the canister of Fullers Earth from his desk as I knew full well from the affair of the Radium Éclairs that my friend was often perhaps too dazzled by reports of the immediate effects of new but not sufficiently tested scientific compounds and elements.

“Now Watson!” Holmes urgently blurted, “The game is afoot. As I briskly blend the materials I have just assembled in a china bowl, you must place a saucepan on the stand just above the Bunsen burner and dissolve into that pan two ounces of fresh and unsalted butter. You will find adequate quantities stored in the toe of my Persian slipper*****. When the butter reaches liquefaction then cast in the pieces of kidney and stir until their colour turns from deep red to umber.”

I did as Holmes dictated and soon a powerful odor filled our chambers, followed shortly by the thumping of a broomstick on the ceiling below our floor, accompanied by muffled cries of protest. The scent emanating form our efforts carried some faint but perceptibly unwelcome reminders of the all too earthly functions of the originating organs.

I mentioned this observation to Holmes who replied with some spirit.

“Why this is why I am mixing together these compounds. They will completely hide your disapproval of the smell and yet subtly and indeed paradoxically play off against what olfactory and other traces linger. Now let me decant what I have stirred together over the kidneys that I assume are now the colour of your oxblood brogues. Yes they are and away we go. Whee-hee! Observe as I stir briskly using the wooden handle of that lethal edged souvenir of yours from Khandahar. Now I strongly urge you to place some slices of bread on the toasting fork and retire to brown them by the fire. When they are done, butter them well. If my calculations are correct, only five minutes should have elapsed since the kidneys have simmered, while being occasionally stirred, at half-full heat in the sauce I have prepared. Now if you please Watson, the hot buttered toast on the plate. I place the kidneys, with a generous dribble of Holmes’ Personal Effusion of Borneo Lavage, like so atop the toast. Et voila! Now perhaps you could remove the cork from the bottle of the Cockburn’s 1880 that I see there weighing down your medical bag and we shall feast. If it will taste as I suspect, I must send a telegram to Mycroft insisting that this be on the menu for the next supper meeting of the Diogenes Club.” ******

I did as Holmes instructed and then we ate with great good appetite and before long we were feeling quite sated. I rang for Mrs. Hudson to remove and wash the dirty dishes and cutlery.

“A marvelous dish to welcome the start of a new day, “ I observed to Holmes as rosy fingered dawn stole through the windows. ******* “However, it is curious is it not that a dish based on the mammalian glands of purification and extraction should prove so delicious?”

Holmes looked up keenly from the divan on which he was now reclining as he filled his pipe with shag tobacco and added a few grains of some opium-based tincture.

“Why my dear Watson. We have just consumed the concentrated essence of the organs that process food and drink. Sweetbreads, offal, call it what you wish. I have always found the consumption of such dainties when well prepared to be both a savoury experience and a very sensual summation of how all life is basically meat. Why, allow me to predict that within several decades, the manager of an establishment in Zurich that projects onto a screen moving photograms will attempt to artistically render in print the emotions and speculations that we have just enjoyed by consuming the parts of animals necessary to the passage of food throughout themselves.” ********

“Astounding Holmes! How do you do it?”

“Alimentary, my dear Watson,” Holmes replied and reached for his f_____g fiddle.

* A great one-liner from “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.” 1970. Feature film. Colour and sound, Co-written and directed by Billy Wilder, natch!

** Sergeant Hudson died fighting at Piper’s Fort, Afghanistan in 1842 – according to the first volume of the Flashman Papers.

*** Doctor John H. Watson was a military veteran of the second Anglo-Afghanistan war where the Afghans again handed the Brits their arse on plate. If you think of Watson as an affable late twenties Vietnam vet sharing digs with a brilliant high bohemian post grad student of similar age that’s also a well connected covert Empire fixer, then the whole Baker Street ménage and general mise en scène starts to come into focus a bit more, n’est-ce pas?

**** The Bank Holidays Act of 1871 specified in law the days when both metropolitan and country wage earners could take time off at the same time to attend major matches between regional cricket teams.

***** Holmes was documented as using his footwear as a storage medium for valuable and/or perishable commodities. See “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual”, 1893. The Strand Magazine. B&W.

****** Mycroft was Sherlock Holmes’ older brother – sometimes perceived as perhaps too smart and well fed for the Empire’s long term good. His possible involvement in instigating the latest ill-fated Mesopotamian excursion by HMG remains unproven.

******* I spent some serious time working how to integrate that classic piece of Victorian innuendo naturally into this text. In the end, as you can see, I just gave up and blodged it in where I could.

******** James Joyce – regrettably Irish – who discussed at length the pleasures of eating kidneys and other sweetbreads and organs in the opening chapter of “Ulysses”. 1922. Book. Colour, sound, smell and taste.

And a tip of the bowler to Sidney Paget for the original Strand Magazine illustrations with which I fear I have taken some liberties.

I knew there was no huge rush to cook it, as the meat hadn’t been aged for long. It was firm, with barely any smell, so I bagged it up and set about investigating what to do with it. With meat so fresh, and a beast so young, you can really cook it like a Spring lamb, but I wanted something goatier. The kid was small, so I figured I could make one dish from the leg, and one from the shoulder.

Indian is an obvious choice as most Indian “mutton” recipes actually refer to goat meat (or so I read). However I ruled that out as we’d just finished the leftovers of a delicious Raan, an Indian spiced leg of lamb. The recipe, from the Foods of the World India book, involved briefly marinating the leg in a paste of ginger, garlic, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, cumin, turmeric, cayenne, salt and lemon juice rubbed into slashes in the leg. It then got a prolonged – two day – marinade in a puree of almonds, cashews (substituting for the original pistachios), raisins, honey and yoghurt. Then a saffron bath before a slow roast. It was, as you would hope after all that time and sixteen additional ingredients, utterly sumptuous, but I fancied something other than a curry.

I was shocked – shocked! – at my difficulty in turning up goat/kid recipes. I’ve recently written about my extensive cookbook problem collection, but it’s got some big gaps. Big goat-shaped gaps, as it turns out. Finding nothing in Stephanie Alexander’s Cook’s Companion was a sad portent of what was to come. I knew that many African cultures enjoy goat meat, but I have only two African cookbooks (by Dorinda Hafner and Tess Mallos), neither of which had any goat recipes. After pottering through a number of other books, and failing to find anything, I hit food blog search which trawls 3000+ food blogs, and twitter.

Jackie of Eating with Jack tweeted that she’d found a similar difficulty, and developed her own recipe for roasted goat shoulder, inspired by a meal in Spain. That was the shoulder sorted then, and I decided on a Birria do Chivo from a newly-discovered blog, Masa Assasin for the leg.

We ate the shoulder first. Jack’s recipe requires slowly cooking the browned shoulder on a bed of aromatic veggies with wine and stock then uncovering it and finishing the salted joint under high heat. She used suckling goat and the piece she used weighed 1.5 kilos; mine was barely a kilo, so obviously extremely young. I reduced the cooking time a little, and we ate it with a very creamy mash.

It was sensational. Incredibly tender, but any beast that age and size would be. The flavour was delicate but with the definite richness and slightly gamey flavour of goat meat. Thanks to Jackie for the recipe – we will definitely be having this again.

Sadly, the Birria was not so successful. It was tasty, but not exceptional. I think the first mistake I made was to use such young meat for a dish that has very long, moist cooking. We lost the texture that was so pleasurable in Jackie’s recipe and the meat didn’t have the intensity of flavour that an older beast lends to such a preparation.

Checking out the original recipe will make it obvious why I had been so excited. Mike, the author, has Mexican and Cuban heritage and lives in San Diego, just a whisker above Mexico. His expertise is obvious, and the site is fantastic, with descriptive unfussy photography and nice clear instructions. But I’ve never eaten a Birria of any kind, and had no palate memory of what I was doing. And I lacked some of the chillies used, which are quite hard to find here. If I had eaten the dish before, I would have known whether using the chillies I had already – a mixture of dried Ancho, chipotle and habanero – was a sensible one. The smell of them toasting:

was extraordinarily good. After that you reconstitute them and whizz them with vinegar, garlic, allspice, pepper and oregano, and tiny quantities thyme, cloves, cinnamon and cumin. The meat sits in a splash of vinegar overnight, is browned and then cooked in a big pot in a broth with onion, bay and the strained chilli paste. Not knowing any other use for the goat’s rib cage that I’d been provided with, I thought that its collagen and gelatin might go some way to making up for the goat’s head included in the original recipe.

You eat the Birria in a bowl, with corn tortillas and a range of traditional side dishes – oregano, chopped onion, limes, radishes, coriander and salsa:

It was tasty, but didn’t compare to the shoulder the night before. The wikipedia link to Birria up there says it’s known for it’s variety, as different cooks use different peppers, but my combo lacked some depth of flavour. I’d love to hear what any experienced Birria cooks or eaters out there use, or alternatively find a steady supply of fancy dried Mexican chillies.

* Sounds best if you put on your Barnsey voice.

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.

Recently returned to a single state, I have resolved that I simply have to devote as much attention to cooking nice things for myself as I do when cooking for other people, or I will become lardy and unhealthy. As we know, being lardy and unhealthy is inimical to dating but, more importantly, leads to permanent ill-health and it’s hard enough to meet a bloke in Katoomba without confining yourself to the hospital grounds.

But enough about non-dating in the Blue Mountains. This post is about how virtuous I am for cooking even though I didn’t really feel like it, how I managed to work dukkah into the meal without overdosing on the stuff, and how it’s important to just get going and do stuff for yourself, because the results are really special. And it doesn’t take much effort, or cost much.

This week, I made a VERY yummy celeriac and parsnip soup, which was dead easy. You just take a celeriac – a funny lumpy vegetable that manages to be like celery, potato, cauliflower and ginseng all at once – and chop the tops and bottoms off it. Then you quarter it, eight it, peel off the skin and chuck it in the pot with two quartered onions, two or three cloves of garlic, some water, some dry white wine, two peeled parsnips, a bay leaf and some thyme. Cook it until the veges are soft (about 20 minutes) and then blend it to bejeesus, add some soy milk or stock to get it to the consistency you want and warm it through with some salt, pepper and a vege stock cube if it’s not savoury enough. Serve it with some crumbly parmesan on the top and drink the rest of the wine while you eat.

But the nicest dinner of the week incorporated green veges AND enabled me to eat dukkah. I just love simple pasta dishes like grated zucchini or pumpkin tossed through spaghetti. Tonight, I fried an onion with some small pieces of sweet potato, garlic and a finely sliced piece of preserved lemon (my most specialist secret ingredient). When that was rocking I shredded a small bunch of silverbeet into the frypan, tossing until the colour brightened. I mixed it up with some fetta, a bit of butter, a smidge of cream and a small handful of coriander leaves. Then I mixed it into hot, fairly wet pasta (so the pasta water made a kind of sauce) and sprinkled dukkah over the top.

It came out lemony, with plenty of bite in the silver beet and the salt of the feta and nuttiness of the dukkah hanging perfectly off the sweet potato. I even had enough left overs to ensure that I don’t have to buy lunch tomorrow, which is good in these global financial crisis-ridden times.

I am really interested to hear about other people’s eating vices so invite PDP readers and writers to share their sins against fine dining. However, to ensure we honour the goals of this blog, perhaps it’s best to temper stories of vice with tales of how we have managed to redeem ourselves by cooking clever and artful food, even when we is by ourselves. So, c’mon contributors and commenters, share.

A very seasonable recipe based on litres of tradition and extensive hands on research. Works fine with all hats.

First catch your flu.

Blend half a bottle of fine coloured spirits – preferably brandy, whiskey/hy or rum, with a couple of glasses of fishpiss (water) in a saucepan and bring to fingerhurting but not boiling heat.

Then flake in a cinnamon stick the size of Donald Trump’s real dick, half a dozen cocktail-sized lemon slices, a pinch of hammered cloves and some grated nutmeg if the mood takes you..

Now add a big swingeing tablespoon of unsalted butter from happy cows, another equally butch dollop of honey from busy bees and simmer, stir occasionally and sneeze for the length of four good 60s pop songs.

Decant contents of saucepan into thermos flask. Recline on bed or sofa with flask and glass to hand. Place hat on foot and starting imbibing your hot toddy.

When you can’t focus on the hat anymore, that’s when the hat flu cure is kicking in.