This week I have been Reading
The 2011 Tour de France race guide.
Watching
An Idiot Abroad
Listening to
The xx
Discovering
(Or rediscovering) Hamlet - Nicki Greenberg's beautiful new version, thanks to the fabulous Snarkattack, who invited me along to see Nicki talk about the creative process behind the book.
Eating
- An enormous serve of bangers'n'mash and a nourishing pint of Kilkenny at the Town Hall one dismal Tuesday evening.
- A "Chachi" - chianina meatball sandwich - another brioche donut and some amazing chocolate tart at Beatrix, which Essjay has reviewed.
- A lazy Sunday lunch at The Crimean. The Polish hunter's stew (bigos) was just the thing to revive me after a chilly bike ride.
- Generous piles of fried food with oodles of chillies and sichuan peppercorns at Sichuan House
- Succulent suckling pig at Liberteene.
- An array of bright, zesty flavours at Chin Chin, where the only problem was having to choose only some of the items from what looks to be a menu that is all hits, no filler.
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By Injera, on May 21st, 2010% It’s Nutter time, although it feels like it’s been that all day today. Nevertheless, this is the real deal, with baked goods, not just ranting on street corners. What does the baking Nutter have in store for us today, apart from a lemon shirt?
“We’re barring mad” is Nutter’s introduction. He’s pleased with the phrase, so repeats it. I think is meant to sound like “barking” with an intense glottal stop. What it means is there will be bars, and we’re hitting the recipes right out of the gate. (I’ve just realised why this is such a surprise to me – I’m so used to the drawn-out start of Masterchef, that any cooking within 10 minutes of opening credits appears to be unseemly haste).
The bars, after the jump.
Continue reading Simply baking – a Nutter, bar none
By Injera, on May 14th, 2010% I wish I could get a MPG file of the Simply Baking theme toon. As soon as it comes on, it makes me bounce more than George Calombaris in the Masterchef kitchen. I’m going to do a YouTube search. I need this in my iPod – I think it will go well in a shuffle with Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.
Today I am excited to report that Nutter is wearing the bright orange shirt that could well be the one he was wearing in the first episode I ever saw. He is excited to report that he will be making cakes. With a Nutter twist, of course.
The Nutter magic, after the jump…
Continue reading Simply baking… cakes!
By Injera, on May 9th, 2010% Nadia Sawalha won Celebrity MasterChef in the UK. Who is Nadia Sawalha? I’ve no idea. Now, if it were Julie Sawalha, I’d be all over that, but Nadia is a mystery. Don’t you get up, though – I’ll google it myself1.
In Eating in the Sun, according to the TV guide,
Winner of Celebrity MasterChef, Nadia Sawalha, is sent to some of the most beautiful restaurants in Europe to cook for a mystery challenger. With her pride at stake she has just two days to perfect the complex dishes for her guest.
I had seen an ad for the show and thought it looked good, possibly because I was only paying scant attention to the details, so added it as a series link. It started on April 15 on Lifestyle Food, so the episodes are piling up as this is the first chance I’ve had to watch. I’m already disappointed, because I thought it was the real MasterChef winner, not the winner of the Celebrity version.
Continue reading Eating in the Sun, watching on the couch
By Injera, on May 7th, 2010% Today’s theme on Simply Baking is cheesecake. Our Nutter knows we’ll all be thinking with our sweet teeth right about now, but he’s changing it up a bit and starting with a savoury cheesecake (which some may prefer to think of as a quiche with cream cheese – I know that would appeal to me more than a savoury cheesecake). I’m hoping that he’s not going to be matching anything to the colour of this particular shirt today, unless he’s going to do a pea puree. Actually (it’s catching!), the shirt might be the result of the pea puree prepared earlier. I get the sense that today’s recipes might take a bit of time, given the speed at which Nutter is talking.
Let’s get baking!
Continue reading Cheesecakes, with a Nutter twist – Simply Baking
By Injera, on April 30th, 2010% And if it’s Simply Baking, then it must be time for my blog stats to jump dramatically, as fans of the Nutter search for the recipes they’ve seen on the show. Knowing how frustrating it is to search for one thing and land in something completely other, today’s post is dedicated to the recipes! (If, however, you are also interested in attempted analysis of recent junk food commercials, or exhaustive descriptions of crappy MTV/VH1 reality shows, please look around.)
Today Nutter promises classic French recipes. I hope my eyes can withstand the onslaught of his shirt, which is French-ish, I guess… possibly chartreuse? Anyway, let’s crack on.
Continue reading If it’s Friday, it must be Simply Baking
By Injera, on March 1st, 2010% …and it absolutely crawls when you’re not. February’s the shortest month of the year. It certainly didn’t feel like it this year because I decided to spend the month not drinking. Now, lest you start thinking that I have some sort of unacknowledged alcohol dependency, I don’t. And I offer the fact that I haven’t had a drink for 28 days as evidence for that. It’s just that not doing something that you normally do takes more effort than doing it. Instead of going out for a drink after work on Friday, what do you do? You either have to make a plan to do something else, or you do nothing, and doing nothing is dull.
January (well, December and January. Well, summer) was a time for afternoon drinks in the sun, evening drinks, long lunches – with drinks. I didn’t break any of my normal strictures, since you can’t drink on a work night when you’re on holidays, but I did feel that I was drinking more than what I’d admit to drinking when asked by a doctor. Or, should I say, given that I usually do some mental maths when answering that question, more than twice what I’d admit to. In other words, I felt that it wouldn’t do me any harm to give it a break.
Going out for dinner is fun. Going out for dinner somewhere where there’s a lovely wine list, and not being able to have a glass just feels arbitrary. Telling a waiter that you don’t need to see the wine list and then being presented with a range of sweet, fizzy alternatives that really don’t enhance the food you’ve ordered is disappointing.
The worst part of Febfast, though, was that without any other effort I lost a few kilos. This means that unless I’m prepared to have them back (which I’m not, really) I’m going to have to make some other changes now that I’ll be having those glasses of wine and gin and tonics. Boo.
By Injera, on February 7th, 2010% Remember the Seinfeld episode The Comeback? George is at a meeting and is scoffing some seafood and a co-worker snarks “Hey, George, the ocean called. It’s running out of fish!”1. Given the amount of fish and other ocean life we’ve consumed since starting the 2010 food routine (footine?) I’m expecting that comment directed at me any day now. Less surprising, I guess, is that the meatless day hasn’t escaped beyond Monday.
Meatless Monday
Last Monday did not catch me unprepared. Having checked the weather forecast over the weekend I’d already picked up a variety of mushrooms for a risotto. Determined to do it properly, I raced home from work and popped a pot on the stove for vegie stock. Stephanie Alexander suggests halving a tomato and an onion and bunging them in the oven until they’re “black”, which I did, albeit only to “brown”. While they were caramelising, I was sweating a bit more onion and some leek, then threw in a bunch of vegies rescued from the bottom of the fridge. The result was surprisingly nice, as was the risotto2.
Fresh Fish Thursday
The Ponytail, aka Neil Perry, came to the rescue on Thursday with his suggestion of a tomato, green olive and caper sauce to accompany snapper. Simple and gorgeous. I added some smashed kipflers that were fried off with sliced spring onions for a bit of zestiness, which I adapted from the Strodes’ Two’s Cooking3
No Booze February
One down, three to go.
I won’t be making this routine a habit. As soon as March hits, I’m having a glass of wine. It’s only been a week, so I can’t say “this is easy” because… it’s only been a week. Perhaps if I was feeling better and could trace the betterness to not drinking, I might consider taking it further, but I’m not, so I won’t. I was dreading going out for dinner and having to wave the wine list away, but Friday’s seafood feast at Esposito was not ruined by the lack of wine and I doubt that Wednesday’s Libertine bouillabaisse will be, either. Maybe it really is all about the food (and the company!).
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1. For a recap of the whole episode, Wikipedia has this article. It’s very detailed, but… convoluted.
2. Full disclosure: I thought the stock was so nice that I was actually dancing ’round the kitchen singing “I am the stock queen! I am the stock queen!”.
3.This book has been getting a bit of a workout. The recipes are straightforward and reliable and perfect for weeknights.
By Injera, on January 31st, 2010% Since starting the new routine, we’ve been eating a lot more fish than before. I’m attributing that to the fact that I’m spending more time browsing for recipes so I’m prepared for my Thursday and am fired up by all the options I’m uncovering.
Meatless Monday
For the first two weeks of this I was thinking ahead, with a number of alternatives to choose from. For some reason last Monday seemed to catch me by surprise (perhaps it was the public holiday on Tuesday? The back-to-work on Wednesday?) and I felt completely uninspired by the thought of having to shop on a non-market day. I put a call out online and Daniel came back with this suggestion for a simple soup.
Usually you’d make this soup with pork/chicken stock and put in slices of thinly sliced pork into it, but I reckon it would work just as well without it.
You’ll need vegetable stock, silken tofu, peas (frozen will do), seaweed, and 2 eggs.
Cut the tofu into small cubes. Heat up the stock until it’s boiling, then turn down to simmer. Put in seaweed and peas and let them cook through – you don’t want them green, you want them kind of dark green and mushy to bite. Then the tofu goes in and let that warm through in the soup. Finally, beat the eggs, and then slowly put in into the soup in a thin, steady stream. You want the egg to congeal into threads.
The soup, a dish of Chinese broccoli or similar vegetable, and a bowl of rice, and you’ll be happy.
Let me know how you go if you give it a go.
This appealed to me straight away, however I was too lazy to make some vegie stock (I know! How lazy can a person be?) so I decided to use some red miso paste. Thinking about miso put me in a slightly more Japanesey frame of mind, so I picked up some enokitake when I popped into Minh Phat for the tofu. In the end, I skipped the eggs for a couple of reasons. For a start, I figured that the miso, tofu and enokitake provided enough protein and the eggs might be a richness too far. I was also unsure of how the eggs would affect the miso – I love the way miso soup separates and develops little grainy clouds and thought the eggs might bind it a bit too much. No scientific basis for this fear, but I decided to skip them anyway.
It was good to give the rice cooker another workout and the soup served over the rice was a really satisfying – and super simple – meal.
Continue reading Another week in food
By Injera, on January 26th, 2010% So, it’s January 26, which is celebrated with a public holiday across the country for Kim Hughes’
birthday1 Australia Day. As seems traditional for this time of year, the media has been trying to reinvigorate that most important discussion dealing with identity and inclusion: what is Australia’s “national dish”?
I can’t be arsed talking about the flaws in the idea of a “national dish”. The idea of promoting a single dish, or ingredient, as evoking this country is ridiculous. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy talking about food. I do! Preferably while eating it. It’s just that I want to eat what I want to eat without considering whether it’s a statement of national identification or not.
No, what I really feel coming on is a short rant about the opposition of some to the fact that Kraft has recently gained Halal certification for Vegemite. In the “news” story about this, the Herald-Sun planted its flag with the headline “Vegemite becomes politically correct“, because obviously Kraft was thinking in PC terms rather than in terms of expanding its customer base. Professional prat Family Council of Victoria secretary Bill Muehlenberg is firmly in the they-done-it-to-be-PC camp:
Why do we have to keep bending over backwards to please minority groups? There are only 300,000 Muslims in Australia out of 22 million people, which is a very small percentage. Of course, there’s a case for making allowances for different cultures, but aren’t we getting a bit carried away with political correctness here? It’s ridiculous.
“Bending over backwards”? From what I can understand, Vegemite has always fitted within halal guidelines, but it hasn’t been certified as such, so conscientious muslims have had to make a judgement on whether they should eat it or not2. Kraft hasn’t changed the recipe, they’ve just had it confirmed that Vegemite is halal and have added a small icon to indicate to those interested that it is. That should fit firmly into Bill’s definition of “making allowances”, shouldn’t it? It’s not New Coke; hell, it’s not even iSnack 2.0.
Since when does allowing everyone to enjoy something have any impact on the original product-lover’s affection for it? How does enabling people’s access to something frequently touted as “a national icon” lead to Islamisation? Shouldn’t we be thrilled that people whose communities are marginally more recently settled here than “ours” are willing to embrace a product that many find challenging?
No, clearly some people are so insecure in their own identity as Australian that they can’t bear the idea of non-(what, exactly? Descendants of convicts? Ten pound Poms? Snowy Mountain scheme veterans?)AussiesTM stealing their icon. How will they stand out as just like all the other Contikitourists true blue if… everybody’s carrying a tube of the black stuff in their carry-on?
Well, they’ll probably stand out because they’ll be the ones being dickheads on a Turkish peninsula around the end of April, but just in case, there’s a petition. Yes – somebody wants the bloody gubmint to stop this creeping Islamisation “through legislation if necessary”.
Because nothing says “young and free” like demanding legislation against allowing people to make informed choices.
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1. Happy birthday, Kim!
2. I think this is one of the best things I’ve seen on the interwebs – a forum from last year where Australian Muslims discuss whether or not they should be eating Vegemite. I like the fact that #2 feels confident to swear a certain allegiance to the yeasty goodness, but #5 is the comment that really rocks (and gave me my post title, with an added emphasis, ‘cos the brewers’ discards don’t discriminate).
By Injera, on January 22nd, 2010% It’s still early days, but the new programme seems to be going well. Better still, it feels as though it could be easy to maintain.
Meatless Mondays
Week two and the weather had gone from hot-damn-hot to warming-stews within a matter of days. My options for our second meat-free day were therefore not restricted by a need to limit oven and stove use. Madhur Jaffrey’s Ultimate Curry Bible has a range of spicy goodies, but I wanted something one-pot and not coconutty. This led me to re-discover Jane and Jeremy Strode’s Two’s Cooking and I opted for the sweet potato and lentil soup.
The Tiger rice cooker has been idle lately and I’ve been craving rice. I adapted the recipe as suggested to turn the soup into a stew to serve over rice, and I also added some chickpeas to add a bit of variety. This also extended the meatlessness into Tuesday, as there were delicious leftovers to be had.
Fresh Fish Thursdays
As I’ve said before, Lifestyle Food tends to be white noise here. This works out well sometimes, as it did on Wednesday when I caught an episode of The Cook and the Chef. Simon cooked a fish curry and a roasted barramundi. The curry looked tasty, but it was the simple barra dish that caught my eye. The Vic Market fishmongers were well stocked with barra, so that’s what we had – easy and delicious!
No booze weeknights
I’m managing the alcohol free weeknights, although I feel as though a glass of Laurent-Perrier at Pearl with my duck curry followed by a chardonnay was cheating a little bit. Thanks to the twitterfolk who reassured me that lunch was not a night (but, seriously Daniel, your suggestion that “night” was “dark” almost defeated my best intentions!). It’s also easier when it’s not roasting hot. Hopefully February will be as cool as the BOM is predicting, because afternoon G&Ts are hard to resist.
Workout Tuesdays
C was in Sydney on Tuesday night, so I missed my workout (okay, so what I really missed was my Kopitiam Mamak roti and nasi kandar). I made it to the gym on Thursday before the market and I’m wondering whether I’ll make that a regular part of the routine – it was so easy! The early morning crowd had gone by 9.15 and by the time I got to the market, shopping was a breeze.
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Side benefits of the new routines:
- Using the cookbook library
- Better planning, therefore shopping more efficiently (budget and time)
- It’s extending into the rest of the week (that is, the set days are minimums and are making it easier to be in a fish/veg frame of mind for the rest of the week)
- Leftovers! (Not so much with the fish, of course)
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