Let’s Get The Christmas Meal Right

Yes, it’s a couple of weeks away. Yes, you’re completely sick of hearing Christmas carols played over the loudspeakers of the shopping centres you dared to enter on a Saturday. While the sweat and bacteria and dandruff of a thousand desperate shoppers is lashed upon you as you navigate through the retail jungle, the words ‘joy’ and ‘jolly’ mock you like that snotty kid in primary school who always forgot to take his Ritalin. Yeah, I have a deep-seated hatred for Christmas shopping.

This post will shamelessly board the Christmas bandwagon to talk about what, for many of us, is most memorable of every Christmas – the food.

Now as we all know the Christmas festival was a European invention and the traditions surrounding what we eat at Christmas are European as well: turkey, ham, eggnog, chestnuts, pudding, fruitcake, mince pies, white-Christmas etc etc.

But what is nearly always forgotten is that Europe, on December 25th, is in the depths of Winter. In Australia on the other hand, we are in the midst of our notoriously hot summer – and Christmas day is very often (in Sydney anyway) a scorcher.

So Australians have begun to modify the Christmas meal so that now seafood plays a central part. All year I look forward to that meal with my family of whole fish, prawns, Balmain bugs, oysters and calamari. And when it’s over, I feel a little empty inside: like there’s a prawn shaped whole in my heart that only that Christmas meal can fill.

But I’ve started to notice that the traditional Christmas has begun to make a comeback. The recipe magazines feature more turkey and ham than seafood and you hear talk of people stuffing several birds inside bigger birds and roasting in a hot oven to present the ultimate insult to your vegetarian cousin.

So I want to call for a complete eradication of anything that has to go in an oven at Christmas time. And while we’re at it, let’s burn the eggnog and the mince pies so badly they’ll look like your grandmother’s fruitcake. Why a hot eggnog over that freezing cold beer? Why a fruitcake over a sorbet? Why on earth would you put more heat in the air on a Sydney scorcher by firing up an oven? Why would anyone surround a bird or a ham with root vegetables when those that your grocer sells to you at outrageously high prices have crossed the equator to get here?

We’re Australian. We’re Sydneysiders. We will not get a white Christmas. It’s time we woke up to our climate and our own seasonal food and rewrite our own Christmas meal.

Let’s keep working toward that revolution, comrades.

(Photo 1 from freefoto.com, Photo 2 from freedigitalphotos.net)

Terrifyingly Hot Chilli and Boutique Beer

“We want the hot-pot broth very hot” Said my friend Nick Gauci
The waiter replied, “Very hot, are you sure? Can you guys handle it?”
“Yes” said Nick, “Very hot”
“Last time a guy came in and said he wanted it very hot, we served it to him and it was so hot he cried, but ok, I’ll write down terribly hot”.

The waiter left and soon came back with this:

Yes, that is a pot FULL of red hot chilli. We ordered some tasty morsels to go in it too and, to be honest, it wasn’t as painful as we thought. However, i did dip in a little bit of green vegetable and when i put it in my mouth, the leaves touched the back of my throat, causing me to cough and splutter, and yes… cry. Embarrassing.

After two hours of all you can eat red hot chilli, we left. (The name of the chilli place is ‘Red Chilli Sichaun Restaurant’ in Chinatown Sydney – make sure you book for upstairs: the hot-pot room). After this, Nick wanted to show me a new beer place he’d found – ‘The Local Taphouse‘; a place that specialised in boutique and quite expensive, but absolutely delicious beer. This is not the sort of place full of young, Gen Y binge drinkers, nor old bar-flies, but this is the home of those who realise that a good beer can be one of the most delicious substances to ever grace your taste-buds.

This is a mug of Murray’s Dark Knight Porter; it was great! But it is the Dark Knight. Sitting there drinking old-style beer, on old-style couches, made us a feel a bit like this:

The Tagine of Love…

It’s the end of winter, but what a great way to end than with this sort of food.

Last month Pen and I went away on holidays with some friends. We were staying at Mavises Kitchen and Cabins at Mt Warning, a great place to eat and stay if you’re up that way. Great cabins but you also have free access to their organic vegetable garden.

We noticed when we walked in that there was a big unused Tagine sitting in the kitchen. It was cold, a bit wet, and some of us had just run a marathon (long story). While in Byron, my mate Michelle and I drew up the blueprint for a recipe in our heads. We needed preserved lemons, and as hip as Byron hopes to be, they didn’t have any. We found them in Mo-bah (Muwillimbah), a town about as hip as your grandma’s replacement one.

We went home.

We had an organic vegetable garden we could take from.

We had time.

We had friends.

Most importantly, we had love.

Looking at that last comment now, i think i should explain it. We had time to love the cooking and have fun with it. And so despite the two of us having next to no experience in cooking Moroccan food, it was a ripper (if i do say so myself).

We ate it with pleasure and still talk about it way too much. Hence why I’m hoping that the medium of writing will for some reason justify an extraordinary amount of self-congratulations. But after all, it is the Tagine of Love…

Michelle even made a speech about it (and a few other random things as well):

The beauty of the dish is that you buy a whole lamb leg and use the bone to make a stock while the Tagine is cooking. The stock then flavours your cous cous.

Here’s the recipe as far as a i can recall it (Michelle, feel free to send me corrections if i get something wrong):

1 kg lamb leg (bone in)
1-2 onions
5 garlic cloves
2 400g cans of tomatoes
1 cup red wine
1 cup pitted, chopped dates
4 preserved lemon quarters, flesh removed
a handful flaked almonds, roasted briefly in a pan
chopped parsely
chopped coriander
3 bay leaves
cous cous
1 sweet potato cut into small cubes
olive oil
And most importantly, a whole lot of love

Preheat oven to 200C. Bone lamb and cut meat into large cubes. Place bone in boiling water with any vegetable pieces you need to use (carrot, celery etc). Keep bone boiling throughout cooking process, topping up with water as necessary. Put sweet potato on a tray, cover with oil and salt and pepper and cook until done. Remove and set aside. Meanwhile Heat oil in Tagine and brown meat then set aside. Add some more oil, cook onion until soft, add garlic and cook for a couple of minutes. Add tomatoes and wine. Boil until wine is reduced by half. Add lemons, bay leaves and prunes. Return meat to sauce. Add enough water to cover, close lid and place in oven. Cook for 2 hours, occasionally stirring and topping up water if too dry. Just before it’s ready, prepare cous cous using the lamb stock and when ready mix it with the sweet potato. Season Tagine with salt and pepper, then top with chopped parsley, coriander and almonds. Serve with cous cous, friends, and a glass of wine (as the following diagram demonstrates).

Master Chef Finals Week

Can’t believe the finals of this show I originally called stupidly romantic but have now become addicted to. The two best cooks on the show (Julia & Justine) got booted off early in the week and now they chose Julie’s plain lamb and potatoes over Chris’s quail, beef cheeks and trotters. So the only contestant out of the bottom two with any ideas just lost to a failed lamb roast. What’s the deal? My guess now is Julie’s going to win and we will all die of culinary boredom.

I Suck (at cooking poached) Eggs…a breakfast recipe.

I love poached eggs. There’s nothing better for breakfast than the runny yolk to flavour your bread. The problem is, I’ve never learned how to do it. So I set out to learn a couple of weeks ago. I looked up my cooking Bible; Stephanie Alexander’s ‘The Cook’s Companion’ and she said that to poach eggs you’ve got to spin a pan of boiling water with a spoon to create a whirlpool, then drop the egg into the centre and out pops a perfectly poach egg. Problem was, when I did that, my eggs didn’t stay in the centre – they ‘went with the flow’ and spun around and lost most of their white. I tried one egg without the spin trick, and it lost just as a much white.

So… If you do know how to poach an egg, I’d appreciate a comment explaining how I can do it.

Here’s the recipe I was making. The eggs were editable, but they were really just good yolks with a thin layer of egg white. Besides that, it’s a pretty good, healthy, and slightly gourmet breakfast option.

Smoked Salmon, sauteed mushrooms and poached eggs on toast

4 slices thickly sliced, good quality bread. I used Ciabatta.
4 slices smoked salmon
three handfuls of selected gourmet mushrooms, sliced
4 sprigs thyme
1/2 sprig rosemary
6 small tomatoes, halved
4 eggs
1 big knob of butter
2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley.

To make the mushrooms, heat the butter with a little olive oil in a fry pan. Sautee mushrooms with the tomatoes, rosemary, thyme salt and pepper until cooked. Poach eggs (the above method might work for you, but check comments for a better one (hopefully!)). Toast bread, top with smoked salmon, mushroom mixture and eggs. Then garnish with parsley. Serves 2

Chargrilled Salmon Fillet on Chinese Broccoli with Oyster Sauce

My sister recently got me some new ’scanpan’ gear – a wok and a grill pan. They’re great! I love being able to barbeque in winter without having to die of frostbite. And one of the most beautiful sites in any kitchen or on any table is grill lines.

Fish
1 500g salmon fillet, halved length ways into two narrow fillets.
200ml light soy sauce
4 tablespoons shaved palm sugar (preferably the brown sort).

Put the palm sugar in a mortar and pestle, add 1 tablespoon soy sauce and pound until soft. Add the rest of the soy sauce. Taste: make sure it’s balanced – neither too sweet, nor too salty. If it is one or the other, adjust with either more soy sauce (salt) or sugar (sweet). Put salmon in a bowl, mix with marinade, and cover with cling wrap. Marinade for 30 minutes (or whatever you have time for).

Preheat oven to 220C. Heat a grill pan (or oven suitable fry pan) on stove with some oil, until very hot. Fry salmon skin side down for 1-2 minutes, then turn. Put grill pan/fry pan in oven for about 15 minutes or until salmon is cooked.

Broccoli
1 bunch chinese broccoli, washed and cut into 10cm chunks.
Vegetable oil
4 spring onions, cut into 5cm chunks
4cm piece of grated ginger
3 garlic cloves
3 tbs oyster sauce
1 1/2 tbs light soy sauce
1 tbs Shaoxing rice wine
1 teaspoon honey
1 1/2 teaspoons sesame oil
125ml water
3 teaspoons cornflour.

Place broccoli in a large bowl and cover with boiling water. Let stand for 2-3 minutes, then drain. Mix sauces, honey, sesame oil, water and cornflour.  Heat oil, fry garlic, ginger, spring onions for a couple of minutes. Add sauce mixture. Cook for a couple of minutes. Serve.

Serve on rice. Dish serves 2.

New Recipe: Hoian Hot Pot

First of all… sorry. Haven’t bloged in ages. I’m training for a marathon which means I’m eating lots but not spending much time cooking. But I have three new recipes ready to go. Here’s the first:

Pen recently went on a trip to Vietnam. This was a dish she learned while she was in one of the southern cities, Hoian. It’s a great, simple and versitile dish, that is surprisingly packed with flavour. You could cook this with fish, chicken, beef, pork, or vegetables. This version uses fish and eggplant:

Vegetable Oil
1 clove garlic
2 tomatoes, quartered
1 lemongrass stalk – dice white part, chop stalk into 10cm chunks
3 spring onions, cut into 5cm chunks
1 small eggplant, cubed
1 fillet fish, about 350g, cubed
1 small red chilli, diced
1 1/2 tbs fish sauce
1 teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon crushed fresh tumeric (or substitute with 1 tsp ground tumeric)
10 white peppercorns crushed
4 basil leaves sliced
3 tablespoons coriander, diced

First, mix tumeric with fish sauce, pepper, sugar and 1 cup water. Heat oil in medium clay pot or saucepan. Add spring onions, garlic and chilli and fry for a couple of minutes on low – medium heat. Add tomato and lemongrass, including stalks. Simmer for a couple of minutes. Add tumeric mixture. Bring to the boil. Add eggplant and cook for about 10 minutes. Add fish and cook for another five minutes, or until cooked. Serve on steamed rice with herbs as a garnish.

To make this with chicken or pork, follow these directions but cook some chicken thigh fillet or pork fillet in the sauce for about 15 minutes or until cooked. For beef, slice some beef fillet thinly and cook for about 1-2 minutes in the sauce. For a very tasty beef version, add big chunks of stewing beef, 2 star anise and 1 cinnamon stick to some stock and cook for two hours. Drain, reserving one cup for the hot pot sauce, then follow directions as normal. Serves 2

Master Chef Australia: Romanticism on a Plate

I watched the show last night. I felt like i was back in the 19th century sniffing edible flowers, inventing words and polemicising reason with Lord Byron, the Shellys, Wordsworth, Blake and my personal favourite; Keats.

Don’t get me wrong, it was certainly entertaining. Especially with all the exciting music. And surely, the fact that reality TV has been successful for this long shows that watching others make fools of themselves is always depressingly great fun.

But there was more romanticism in this show than blood plasma in a Big Ben pie. I mean could you imagine a reality TV show called ‘Master Carpenter’, or ‘Master Bricklayer’??

I think even Channel 44 would reject it.

There is something about being a chef in popular culture that brings forward connotations of vibrancy, artistic flair, youth, open-mindedness, radicalism and sensuality. I think the popular mind imagines chefs constantly tucked away in a kitchen full of fresh, organic and exotic ingredients, spending all day creating dishes that wage genocide against tastebuds with an affinity to traditionalism.

If you’re wanting to be a chef, i don’t want to break your heart, but i reckon the job sucks arse. I grew up in a restaurant and every chef or cook i came across was more highly strung than a Bouzouki.

And no wonder.

They work in a restaurant packed full of people, highly volatile people with too much money who have come to have a good time, and if their food is late, or if it’s got flavour in it, and they’ve had a few drinks on an empty stomach, they get angry, the waitstaff agree with them and the chef’s the one that gets beaten with the wooden spoon. But it’s not just the stress, they work the most depressing hours of any job – when their friends and family are off work, they work. Good luck in having a life. Sure you can cook great food, but you’ll be too depressed and lonely to taste it. And the idea that chefs spend all their time creating dishes is a load of dog food too. You create a menu, if you’re lucky, a seasonal menu, and pretty much stick to it. Sure a dish every year or so will change, but the vast majority of the time, you’re cooking the same thing, again and again. And that’s if you ever get to be a head chef, if you’re not a head chef, then you’re just cooking your boss’s same thing, again and again. And as an assistant chef, the hysterical ramblings of the customers will stop with you, making you feel like you’re constantly stewing in a scapegoat curry loaded with so much chilli it makes you cry. Finally, restaurants are highly risky businesses. So many of them fail, and even if they have found a niche, they are the first to be hit by economic recessions and changes in fashion. This means, any idea of job security for a chef is an idea floating in the acrid mist arising from the organic compost of this stupid romanticism.

What a rant. Felt good.

For a great post on ‘How to get a reality TV judge to like you’ check out the fountainside.

Dunch

You’ve heard of ‘brunch’, now there’s ‘dunch’. A meal between lunch and dinner.

Genius.

I ate dunch with friends everyday over the easter weekend. Please use the term and do duncheon as much as possible, I would love to see it used as much as ‘brunch’ is.

More info:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dunch

(I didn’t write the entry above, and I don’t really agree with the strictness of the content of the dunch meal in that entry)

Getting the most out of Stovetop Espresso Machines

Mystery surrounds them, kitchen cupboards are full of them, tongues have tasted their pleasures and their tortures, folklore speaks of their glory yet their use requires intense concentration, discipline and skill.

They’re not that hard.

But, like any quality coffee made in any style, there are a plethora of factors which contribute to a coffee that tastes like the resin scraped from the inside of your sewrage pipe or one that tastes… good.

The tips from this post come from my personal coffee Rabbi – Andrew Beitsch.

Coffee
The first thing that will contribute to either a good or bad coffee is the quality of your beans. Cheap beans will nearly always taste bitter, or in the very least will be stale. Coffee goes stale after roasting quite quickly so it is important to buy beans that are roasted locally. I buy my beans from a friend who runs a local roasting business; and he supplies great beans at a great price: http://threebeansroasters.com/.

Grinder
The second major factor in using these machines is the grind. It needs to be medium-fine and consistent. The only way to really get a consistent grind is to use an expensive burr grinder. To be honest i don’t have one, i have a cheap blade grinder, it works fine, but it means i waste coffee because the water is only extracting the coffee from around the largest pieces of the grind. I don’t have one, but i want one.

Heat
Thirdly, heat is important. A few tips here. You will improve your brew significantly if you boil the water before you put it in the stovetop machine. This  prevents the machine overheating and burning the coffee. Once the boiled water is in, move quickly.

As soon as you see the coffee change colour, remove the machine from the stove and plunge it into a bowl of cold water. You will get a world of bitterness from the creamy coloured foam that comes at the end of a brew and this trick reduces that evil foam.

Thirdly, a gas stove, as opposed to electric, makes an incredible difference. On electric the heat gets too high and the stream becomes too aggressive, causing bitterness. Gas is controllable and gentle and helps dramatically.

In the end they are great machines. You will probably get a better espresso out of a stovetop using a few of these tips than you would out of many home espresso machines, and even at times, better than your local cafe. The other thing is, they last forever. The only perishable part is the rubber seal in the machine which costs 50c to replace.

Drink up!