Mother Foccacia

Baking, the hidden art.

2012-01-26T15:18:00.001+10:00

I don't bake much. Something about having to measure things out just doesn't seem like cooking. So I've steered right clear of it. I don't eat bought biscuits or cakes much anyway. Since Curtis has been born there has been lots of sitting around watching him (and cricket) and lots of cups of tea and for some reason I have been craving biscuits.

Last week I had a bash at some Anzac biscuits, replacing the coconut with chopped mixed nuts as I had no coconut. They were surprisingly good. So much so that yesterday I had a craving for some biscuits with sultanas. So a quick request of twitter I had a recipe (thanks Zoe!) and I had a go today.

They are a touch crumbly, but maybe I haven't let them cool enough. Pretty bloody good for me though. I now have two strings to my baking bow, scones and biscuits! Now for cake.

Lamb and Harissa 2.0, now with extra lamb.

2011-08-06T20:00:00.001+10:00

I love me some lamb. And when I started to realize that I couldn't put something with butter in it on every meal if I wanted to stay off biggest loser I became a fan of yoghurt on my lamb. Then I discovered harissa. Man those Tunisians know their shit. A teaspoon of that through some yoghurt on a lamb cutlet is about as close to heaven as this non believer will ever come.

The problem with harissa, for those of us that do not enjoy the inner city lifestyle is that it is about as easy to source as a (insert stupid sponsors name here who do not own the team) wallabies win at Eden Park. When you do find it you'll need that second mortgage because it sells for about $10 for a teaspoon.

I'm addicted to the stuff and yesterday it struck me that it can't be that hard to make, especially as there had been a fair chunk of difference between the bottles I had bought at various small boutique delis in Brisbane. So I fired up the magic intergoogle and found that it was actually ridiculously easy.

Take even amounts of chilli, dried and reconstituted, or fresh and garlic. Whack them in a food processor with a squeeze of lemon juice and pulverize. Toast off some cumin and caraway seeds, grind them up with a little salt and add them in. Pulverize more. Add some olive oil to loosen the paste. Done.

Because I have an inbuilt talent to avoid following a recipe, I added some lemon zest and a pinch of coriander powder, but from the reading I've done on harissa, I don't think it matters as every region had it's own little twist.

The reason for the harissa was the the Neil Perry slow cooked lamb shoulder. All it takes is a bit more of those same spices smeared over the lamb with oil, then put in a roasting pan with foil tent or do as I did and use my awesome Aldi French pan. A dash of white wine in the bottom and a cup of water then go away for seven hours. Three at 130 deg and 4 at 110 deg. I now have a new favorite way to eat lamb. The meat was so tender, lifting off along the muscle.

Served with some mashed potato and peas and covered with that harissa yoghurt, mixed with a dash of lemon juice, it was one of the tastiest bits of lamb I have had in, well almost forever. If only the rugby had been that good.

Just an little extra. We had a big day Sunday and I didn't feel like cooking much. So I whipped up a small batch of Maggie Beers sour cream pastry and lined a small pie tin. While that was happening I quickly boiled some potatoes. In a small frypan I threw in a couple of chopped handfuls of the cold lamb with a dash of butter. Once warmed through I sprinkled in a teaspoon of cornflour and cooked for a bit. Then I threw in some white wines and harissa for gravy and cooked it down a bit, threw it in the cooked pie casings and covered in mashed potato. Back into the oven and once there were little crunchy bits on the mash lid, out came possibly the greatest pie I have ever eaten.

- Lantanaland from my iPad

Location:'lantanaland'

Camping Feasts

2011-05-04T19:44:00.003+10:00

Being in the middle of nowhere doesn't mean you should settle for less than great meals. There is nothing better than getting in to camp after a hard days walking, paddling or whatever, and tucking into a good meal. There is nothing worse than getting in an eating a bland, tasteless meal that you only force down because you know you need to. Sometimes camping food can be like the midnight snack while you're on the turps. It tastes fantastic when you’re there, but if you eat it any other time it’s another story. Some camping trips you spend most of your time planning the intimate details of what your first meal back will be.

Its amazing what a little imagination and planning can do for a camping meal. I’m not talking about car camping, I'm talking about walking, cycling touring or kayaking, something where you have to carry it all with you in a bag, where weight and space are major issues. So the challenge is to come up with tasty dinner recipes for two hungry, active people. The criteria are:

1. The ingredients must not spoil without refrigeration

2. Preparation can be done before the trip, but must be minimal when doing the actual cooking

3. No frying, only boiling, or a really bad simmer. Most camp stoves have two temperatures despite any claims, it’s on or off.

4. It must be light, think about carrying it for week. If the ingredients are more than a kilogram then it’s probably too heavy.

5. The food must be able to withstand being squashed, and stuffed into a pack.

6. You can dehydrate things before hand. I can see the recoils in horror now… DEHYDRATE. Yes yes, it’s a necessary evil for this sort of thing though. Its like a lot of things, if you buy store bought dehy food its pretty ordinary, but home dehy stuff is actually not bad…..for camping.

7. You can use a maximum of two small pots to cook

To help give you some ideas some of our camping meals include laksa with noodles, Gnocchi with some dehy veggies and a tomato based sauce. A stir fry that is slightly more boiled than fried, or a home made bolognaise sauce dehydrated. I am interested to see what a bunch of gourmets can come up with, and very keen to try then on our next trip.

Have fun!!

Let's talk about vegetarian lasagna.

2011-04-19T18:04:00.001+10:00

I have to say I hesitated before writing about vegetarian lasagna. I mean, it brings up images of hippies, living in the country in some run down house on a ramshackle farm, milking the cows and collecting the free range eggs from their chooks and ducks and that's just not me...... Hmm, maybe I could have thought that opening paragraph through a bit more.

See I don't think that vegetarian and normal lasagna should be considered in the same space. I love meat based lasagna, the thick, rich, meaty, tomato sauce and the creamy layers in between. But my vego version comes from a different space. For a start there are no tomatoes. And it's a hell of a lot easier.

When I make a real 'I'm sure I have Italian blood in me somewhere' sauce for a lasagna, I like to cook out the meat and tomato sauce for hours, slowly simmering until my taste buds can take it no more. Of course, I don't always do this, sometimes I brown off some mince, wack in tinned tomatoes and layer up but it's not the same.

With the vego version all I do is throw a bunch of roughly cut vegetables into a roasting dish and slow roast. This time it was squash, garlic, cauliflower, carrot, mushrooms, zucchini and red onion but I also use eggplant, pumpkin, sweet potato, fennel and peas. Takes all of about four minutes to chop up. I'll lightly coat with oil and add some salt and other seasoning, cumin seeds or rosemary or thyme.

While that's roasting I make some pasta. It's not essential, but I have duck eggs and I find that duck egg pasta is the smoothest, silkiest, sexiest thing I've seen outside my marriage. But that's just me. Use the packet stuff if you want. Bash the dough in the fridge and make the white sauce.

I use lots of cheese with this. In this case that means a hunk of homemade camembert that is a bit strong to eat fresh, some homemade mozzarella and some cheddar. The more interesting and varied the cheese, the better the dish. That's one of the joys of cheesemaking, the mistakes you make can usually be thrown into a white sauce or onto a pizza.

Layer it up and bake until the white sauce is golden on top. I traditionally eat it after a three hour yoga session sitting in the lotus position, naked, under a full moon, but it will taste just as good fully clothed in front of the TV.

Enjoy!

MF from my iPad

Location:Lantanaland

Bush Fruit

2011-04-09T08:10:00.003+10:00

There is a native bush fruit you can get in TAS and some parts of NSW and VIC called the climbing blueberry. It produces little blue berries that look like mini capsicums, are blue to deep purple and no bigger than a small grape. Like a capsicum they have a firm outer skin, are generally pretty hollow (no flesh) and have plenty of seeds inside. They have a pretty bland, some people say slightly apple flavour and the seeds inside make it gritty, so its not really appealing to on its own. As Mick Dundee said "you can live on it but it tastes like shit", but you would probably struggle to find enough to live on. One thing it does do though is make really good jam.

My partner and I were at festival a couple of years ago and tried some blueberry jam. It was really different, very subtle flavour. We liked it so much we went out and bought some seedlings in the hope we could grow them ourselves and make our own jam. Unfortunately the local wallabies like the plant more than we do so they never grew big enough to fruit. a few weeks ago we saw a few plants on the side of the road so we went berry picking.

I went searching for a recipe but couldn't find anything, people didn't even realise you could eat it. Because the fruit was quite unusual I wasn't sure how the lack of flesh would effect the consistency, how much sugar to put in or if it would set on its own. So when I started I had a lemon and some jam setta ready. I added a couple of grated apples, mostly to bulk it out. The lemon juice was mostly for a for a bit of acid and some extra zing. I got lucky and the lemon juice was enough to set jam. I did have to use the stick blender as the fruit weren't falling apart.

The end result was lovely, very sweet (it is jam), with quite a subtle flavour. You can taste the apple, almost too much. As nice as it is though, it probably needs something else. For a first try with no real recipe to follow I was pretty happy. We tried another recipe with no apples, a teaspoon of vanilla and half a teaspoon of cinnamon, but the cinnamon was a little overpowering.

We'll have to wait until next summer to try again. The funny thing is we don't even eat jam. We did keep a jar but that will last us all year. Our mates liked it though. The plant is Billardiera longiflora or the climbing blueberry for those that want to know. The recipe is below. Enjoy!!!

450g Blueberry fruit
2 regular apples, peeled, cored and coarsely grated
450g sugar
Juice of half a lemon
1/2 cup of water

Cheesemaking

2011-03-27T19:48:00.001+10:00

I spent all weekend making cheese so I was pretty shagged when it came to Sunday dinner. Try this for a simple meal. Serves two, tired, not that hungry people.

Get a batch of ricotta, I used inari, a traditional Cypriot cheese made from whey, very similar to ricotta. I hade made it last weekend after making my best batch of haloumi, using the leftover whey.

Mix two eggs into the ricotta with a handful of finely grated Parmesan. I didn't have any, so I threw in some marinated feta for a bit of extra flavor. Whisk that up till it's smooth, adding a bit of salt and pepper to your tastes.

Get a sheet of puff pastry and quarter it. Spread the mix over each square leaving a 1cm border around the edge, about 1-2cm thick. Sprinkle over some sliced leeks and brush with melted butter. A few stripped thyme leaves and more cracked pepper and bake until the edge is nicely brown. Tasty.

I've been making more and more cheese for my Herdshare and for myself, learning along the way. But this was the real deal, a two day intensive course learning to make ricotta (whole milk and whey), cheddar, brie, chabichou, cheddar, mozzarella and quark. It was run by Graham Redhead an ex DPI guy who was raised on a dairy farm, has worked for a lot of big dairy industry companies and just, loves, cheese.

I was there thanks to The Wife, gorgeous creature that she is and the generosity of her family and one of my best mates who all chipped in for a Xmas present for me.

I was using a bit of Lantanaland milk so I was even busier than everyone else, as I was doing my thing and also helping out my partner on a lot of the cheeses. If definitely helped that I was the only person there that had made cheese before. I still had a lot to learn, especially about process and ways of getting stuff wrong. There are margins of error and there are definitely ways to err on the right side and it was good to know.

The cheddar and the mozzarella were the best. I'd made brie/camembert to a half decent level before, but had not really been that keen on cheddar, mainly because of the long aging times. But when you see the cloth bound wheels, you start dreaming of creating big ten kilo wheels of cheese that you can roll out at your leisure. I'm definitely investing in a cheese press.

Mozzarella was all about the confidence in the process. There are things that can go wrong pretty easily in the making but now I'm sure I can replicate a pretty good pizza cheese. And stretching and shaping the cheese is awesome fun.

All in all a great learning weekend that my herd sharers will appreciate for years to come I reckon. I am also going to hold a mini Cheesemaking day down here, to show off what I can do!

- MF from my iPad

Location:Some tafe training kitchen.

Sausages

2011-03-03T14:27:00.002+10:00

I like sausages, I don’t care what people say they put in them, lips and a$%^holes as one colleague puts it, not too mention the jokes that even if you’re a vegetarian you can still eat sausages because there is no meat in them. I think it comes from a childhood of going to BBQ’s and getting steak that was so over cooked it was impossible to cut let alone chew. When I am at a BBQ I still always go for the sausages first, I’ll still get steak too, but sausages first. Luckily I have the stomach to match my eyes.

The other night one of my mates who makes his own sausages brought over some home made salmon sausages. There were a couple of types on offer, a teriyaki salmon and plain salmon. Using a thermometer we poached them until the salmon was 60c (140 f). The plain salmon was nice, beautiful flavour but a little dry. It really needed something just to give it that moisture to really let it melt in your mouth. The teriyaki sauce gave the sausage the right amount of moisture to really set it off. It had the lovely taste of salmon with the spices really enriching the flavour without overpowering it.

The recipe and notes from the creator.

Teriyaki Salmon
1kg salmon offcuts from local salmon farm
1.5 meters of hog casings ~ 30mm diameter (doesn’t matter)(soaked)
Medium to large onion
Medium to large red pepper (capsicum)
Half a Small onion
Good chunk of ginger (thumb size?)
Several cloves of garlic
Soy sauce
Mirin
Sugar
Rice vinegar
Corn starch (corn flour)
White pepper

Dice the large onion and red pepper and then sauté in a pan with a bit of oil until cooked to your liking. Chill.

Dice small onion, ginger, and garlic, and sauté in a small sauce pan until the edge is taken off. Add soy sauce ( cup???), mirin, and a bit of water. Simmer for a couple of minutes. Taste and adjust as needed with rice vinegar and sugar. . .likely will need some of both. The mirin is not essential and can be replaced with more vinegar and sugar. When happy, strain out chunks and save. If already happy, strain it when you like the flavor. Thicken sauce with corn starch until quite thick and then chill.

Sausage: Combine and mix everything (plus add some white pepper and green onions if you like!) in with salmon meat cut in chunks suitable for the grinder. Grind. Knead ground mixture with hands for a couple of minutes to develop some stickyness. Cook a bit in a pan and test flavor. . adjust ‘til happy. .. but don’t eat too much of it.

Stuff it! Or make a log and wrap in several layers of plastic wrap. This you can then poach.

Have only made this once with, making it up as we went. The texture, especially when poached in plastic, was a bit crumbly. I’d possibly add an egg white to the mix, or mousseline a portion of the salmon.

Enjoy!!!!

Oysters at ten AM

2011-01-03T19:53:00.001+10:00

Even for someone who doesn't 'get' oysters like me, I recognize that a culinary adventure that starts with starts with 12 super fresh oysters at ten AM is probably going to end up being a good day

This was our trip to the beautiful island of Bruny, postponed for a day so I could battle a dose of super mutant Tasmanian flu and it actually started with my first caffeine in 72 hours at the ferry terminal. It was like giving the biggest coldest beer in the world to a man who'd been lost in a desert where the pubs only sold VB.

Straight off the ferry the first stop was Get Shucked. The Wife had declared them the best oysters she had ever had at Taste so a stop was seen as compulsory. We were the first customers of the day, she was still opening up and the oysters were again declared delicious. The way they were inhaled certainly seemed positive.

Next stop was my personal goal, Bruny Island cheese. We got to taste a fresh 'young' hard cheese, a smoked hard cheese, which they claimed was smoked for three months, but I think the girl at the counter was a bit confused. We also tasted their brie/camembert soft cheese, their one day old fresh cheese in olive oil and a raw milk cheese flavored and colored with saffron. All very tasty. I was entranced with their aging room, which is at 12 degrees. I should be able to replicate that with the second hand fridge I hope to score soon. Fired up about making some soft cheese.

After the cheese we did a bit of sightseeing to keep The Wife happy before stopping for lunch at the Hothouse. We shared a smoked salmon and salad wrap and a beef and guinness pie. Both very nice. Hothouse was a real homestyle cooking sort of place, great friendly staff, lots of fruit trees and veggies around the grounds. The girls had this great herb damper with butter and cheese, salmon and salad on the side. Yummo!

After lunch we struck out, food wise for the first time this trip. The berry farm had no berries! All the vine berries were done and we were too early for the strawberries. We skipped the fudge and headed back to pick up some cheese on the way home.

The day was completed with a nice free range roast pork and these great strawberry cream potatoes which I tried earlier in the week and had not gone great as mash. No matter, they made fantastic roast spuds, tinged pink all they way through. I used a trick a mate of mine had told me about the crackling, pouring a kettle of boiling water over the skin before oiling and salting it. It worked a treat, best crackling I've had in ages. Thanks Spud.

All in all a great day for those of us who travel through our stomach and a mixed berry crumble is being assembled as we speak!

MF from my iPad

Location:Bruny Islands

Taste of Tasmania.

2010-12-29T20:09:00.001+10:00

On our Tasmanian trip there was two objectives, lots of pretty scenery for The Wife to take pictures of and lots of good food for me to eat and cook. It kicked off last night in fine fashion, with potatoes I'd never even seen, let alone cooked with. They were strawberry creams, a starchy potato with pink skin and like a pink juice when cut. I mashed them, which was completely wrong, but I'm going to take some home and try them as a roast spud.

Today though was like speed dating for food, the Taste of Tasmania festival. It was blazing hot, so a beer with the best slogan ever (Moo Brew, not suitable for bogans) went down very nicely. We kicked off the food with a rosti, with mushrooms and goats cheese and chutney. The rosti could have been crispier but the goats cheese and chutney was fantastic.

We followed that up with some garlic mussels which everyone else said were very tasty. Seafood is a bit wasted on me, so I wandered off to get some real food, pork belly. Soft and succulent, with probably the best apple sauce I've ever eaten, it was very hard to share.

Maybe I didn't share enough, because Dave came back with a dozen oysters which The Wife claimed were the best she has ever had. The Wife has eaten a lot of oysters.

I went for more beers and when I returned Marj had braved the huge line for tempura mushrooms. They were nice, but I pride myself of being pretty good at tempura so wasn't blown away like I was with the pork belly.

After a walk to look at the maxi yachts and settle our stomachs down we got stuck into the fruit. A raspberry and ice-cream sundae just blew my mind, maybe because raspberries are not something we see a lot of in QLD, but these were BIG raspberries and so juicy and rich. We'll be visiting a raspberry farm tomorrow. The raspberry pudding was nice as was the waffle and mixed berries and strawberries and cherries and chocolate fondue. The chocolate fondue was very nice but Sarah was very disappointed that we didn't drink the leftover fondue straight from the cup like she had the day before.

All in all a great start to a culinary holiday!

- MF from my iPad

Location:Princes wharf, Hobart.

Dairy has endless possibilities.

2010-10-20T20:09:00.001+10:00

I have really only scraped the surface of making cheese and other dairy products. The soft cheese is on hold till I procure an old fridge to use as a substitute for the awesome railway tunnels and caves in use all over Europe. That or I bury a shipping container under Lantanaland and use half for cheese and the other half as headquarters to rule the world.

This week has been a bit pressed for time to make cheese, so I was after something quick and simple to utilize the available milk. Making yoghurt is easy, but fiddly to do in small batches. Yoghurt in a large batch is easy thanks to the dream pot, essentially a stock pot wrapped in a large thermos.

Sally Lynch, cooking school guru, herdsharer and tastetrekker makes labneh, a middle eastern soft fresh cheese from yoghurt and had mentioned how good it was made from Lantanaland yoghurt so I thought I'd give that a go. All you do is set the milk into yoghurt, which i do for 12 hours in the dreampot. Then ladle into a cheesecloth bag and let drain for another 12 hours.

The taste? Wow. A tart cream cheese. Fantastic spread on a muffin for a morning snack. I'm also wondering what it would be like in a set cheesecake. Or in a spinach pie. The possibilities are endless (and I'll take recipe ideas in the comments if you've got them).

It will definitely be a fixture in the fridge here from now on, that's for sure.

- MF from my iPhone

Location:Needham Rd,Luscombe,Australia

I Love My Job

2010-10-16T08:59:00.001+10:00

Sometimes you just can't believe how lucky you can get. For those that don't know, I work for a butcher supply company, which gives me access to a whole bunch of interesting small goods manufacturers and butchers, not to mention bulk spices and other things I can use in the kitchen at Lantanaland.

We have a small test kitchen at work, with a mincer, hand sausage filler, brine pump and slicer and I have enjoyed learning and experimenting with our products at work. The chorizo fresh sausage would have to be my favourite.

Recently we managed by a bit of good luck to score a second hand commercial oven, and the GM decided that it would be good for myself and Spud the machinery manager to learn how to cook everything that could be cooked in a smokehouse. This is the older model of the smokehouse we sell, so it would benefit the company greatly for us to have this knowledge, but I was not exactly reluctant to try everything out.

So far we have done, boneless ham, 4x4 ham, frankfurt, kabana, franksy (made when I acccidently combined the kransky and frankfurt mixes together), cooked mettwurst salami, smoked and brined chickens and chilli beer sticks.

Just because we had the smokehouse there, I've done two big batches of smoked tomatoes as well, which add a depth of flavour to lamb shanks, bolognese or a pizza sauce that has to be tried to be believed.

Next week we will be trying a full leg ham and for an experiment, lamb ham, a pumped cured and smoked leg of lamb. Cant wait for those sandwiches next week.

Yep. I love my job.

- MF from my iPhone

Location:Vadals Test Kitchen

My Own Personal Beef Week...Jesus!

2010-09-04T19:14:00.007+10:00

Greetings, gentle readers. It's been a while, I know. I've been busy saving the world, one sausage at a time. But I thought y'all might like to know of a recent trip I took to Rockhampton.

Now you might recall this is not my first trip to the Beef Capital of Australia. My last trip was in Beef Week in 2009. You can read about the best carpetbag steak ever, here.

This time was just a day trip, unfortunately. But after some wheeling and dealing in the morning your correspondent clocked off and took a long lunch at Cassidy's, a local steakhouse. Here I sampled the very excellent local Teys Brothers Black Angus rib fillet, cooked to a perfect medium rare and didn't it go down a treat with a New Zealand Pinot? Well, yes. Resisting the urge to have a post luncheon Highland Park from the extensive choice of single malts at this fine establishment, my colleague and I made our way cross town to Wiggo's fine meat emporium at Allenstown shopping centre, where I stuffed a Woolies esky bag full of about 8 kgs of beef and a couple of kilos of ice. Craig Wiggo looked after me like an old mate (which he wasn't. Although one of my brothers used to buy his beef there when he lived in our nation's beef capital) and salted my ice down and chilled my meaty selections down in the freezer for half an hour while we downed a couple of beers at the pub before our long flight(s) home.

Resisting the urge to sneak said beef onto the flight as hand luggage, I fessed up to the check-in chap. Unfortunately (and here is the really important moral of the story folks, so read up, get yourself educated and BE PREPARED) the way to ship any foodstuffs like raw meat or seafood is to bring it in a foam box with a lid, but leave the box unsealed. The ground staff are happy to do the packing and sealing for you, but you must check it in and it has to be in a foam box. This left me with a problem, as I had no foam box. So I left my colleague behind and raced out to the taxi rank, where a local cabbie agreed to drive me to a fruit and veg store to find me one. Sure enough, after explaining my predicament to the checkout chap at Tancred's fruit and veg, I was just about to buy the broccoli box he produced when my colleague rang from the airport to tell me that the helpful Virgin Blue guy had found me a polystyrene box.

Sweet, I thought, as I raced back to the waiting cab, leaving the checkout chap somewhat relieved (5 minutes of tapping on his machine had not revealed how much he should charge me for an empty foam box) and $30 later I made it back to the airport, where I was greeted by the beaming Virgin Blue man again, proudly holding the world's smallest polystyrene box.

The look on my face must have been priceless when I revealed the 8 kilos of beef I had stashed in my little esky, as I told him I HAD HAD THE RIGHT SIZED BOX IN MY HANDS ONLY 5 MINUTES PRIOR at the fruit and veg store.

Luckily, he agreed to have another look out the back and to my great relief, he returned 5 minutes later with the right box. He then proceeded to pack my beefy package and I made it into the departure lounge with about 5 minutes to spare. I still don't know whether the whole song and dance routine was just to terrorise the shiny bum visitor (and to stimulate the local taxi industry) or whether he was just trying to be helpful, albeit a little slow (given he had seen the size and weight of my esky).

Anyway, the first leg of my homeward journey was uneventful and I could feel my blood pressure returning to a more reasonable level. Later, in Brisvegas, I watched the baggage handlers loading up the luggage for the Canberra flight. They must have heard from their collegue in Rocky, as they saw me watching them and pretended to make off with the well marked and well wrapped box of food. They must have thought it was a great joke to see me jumping up and down upstairs behind the glass as they kept putting the box on the loading device and taking it off. Putting it on. Taking it off. Over and fucking over.

Eventually they took pity on me and packed my fucking meat.

After the world's longest 80 minute flight I made it home with said meat. God knows how I didn't get a speeding ticket driving along Pialligo Avenue, but all was fine as the meat was still chilled when it arrived home some 5 hours after leaving Wiggo's house of fun.

Now after tonight's roast rib fillet of Black Angus yearling from Nolan's, served with roast chats and carrots, and a pear, rocket, parmesan and balsalmic salad, I'd have to say all the hassle was worth it.

I still have a little bit more meat kicking around the bottom of the fridge...some Nolan's eye fillet, supposedly from their Brisbane Exhibition display (not sure if it was from the 'before' or 'after' display, as I was too excited to ask Wiggo) and some Nolan's Black Angus rib eye.

Not to mention some 3.5 kilos of Teys Brothers Rib Eye, which I'm planning to roast up for a dinner party in the coming weeks. (BOTTOM)

So there you have it, folks. If you're planning on flying with beef, remember to take a polystyrene box and some double bagged ice to the airport. The check-in staff have all the big bags and gaffer tape you need and will want to pack it themselves to ensure you're not carrying a dismembered body. So learn from my own mistakes how NOT to do it, gentle readers. And save your blood pressure for eating the beef, rather than just getting it home. Mind you, I've always wanted to conduct a public auction in an airport terminal, but I guess that can wait for another day!

Rockhampton Beef: Good enough to make a man blog again!

Food for the ill

2010-08-28T11:35:00.001+10:00

I was pretty crook this week, with a virus or flu or something similar. I didn't bother to check. It was bad enough that I went five whole days without wanting a coffee and considering I think a blood/caffeine balance of about 50/50 to be appropriate I gauged I was pretty damn crook.

The funniest thing with me is my appetite when ill is almost nonexistent. All week I lived off a variant of Flinthart's awesome Asian soup/broth that he uses for wontons. Some sort of chicken, chilli, ginger, fish sauce, a sugar (I use honey), salt, onion, carrot, garlic, bay, lemon or lemongrass, bring to a simmer and turn the heat off and let infuse.

I use a whole chook and just tear the poached chicken off at the end. That was dinner, and lunch, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday I felt a bit better so I roasted off some pumpkin and used the leftover broth to make pumpkin soup.

What scares me is the lack of appetite, the lack of willingness to cook and explore flavors. It's such a big part of my life that the thought of ever having a terminal illness or something that took my hunger away for a long period of time is truly frightening.

I know a few crook people through twitter and my one week with a virus made me reconsider how much of a struggle it must be, just to deal with those little things that we all take for granted.

- MF from my iPad

Location:Riverside Dr,Tumbulgum,Australia

Duck season

2010-08-08T19:00:00.002+10:00

Dr Yobbo here. Duck is usually something I'm all over if I see it on the menu on my now-rare restaurant sorties. Amphora in St Lucia used to do (probably still do) an excellent one, likewise a short-lived but awesome place in Yamba called Beachwood. My Italian farmer relatives from up the back of Lismore also used to put on some fantastic duck dishes when we had the inevitable family get-together barbeques up at theirs. Never actually had a crack at prepping roast duck myself, so when the local supermarket had them on special I figured why the hell not. Now, obviously, this being a Serious Food Blog, using frozen duck is blasphemy and you should be getting only free-range, organically farmed fresh-killed duck raised on a diet of love and sustainably grown tofu, but as usual we've taken lazy shortcuts, so frozen duck it is. Looks a quality bird though, raised on a farm on the Canterbury Plains. Just like half of the current All Blacks. Works for them. This size 17 bird was $20, reduced from a budgetarily implausible $30. No idea what it'd be in your part of the world. Probably less.

Now the thing you need to remember about duck is that it's not chicken. That's not entirely the cretinous statement of obviousness that it looks. Ducks are longer and thinner of frame, carry more fat under their skin as waterproofing insulation (being waterfowl), and less bulk about them around the breast compared to chooks. As such you need a bigger bird to feed the same number of heads. They also dry out more easily, so you need to baste them regularly to retain the moisture. Beeso confits his. As with most cooking stuff there's a bunch of recipes on the web, including this one from Hugh Fairly-Twattingballs from River Cottage Thingie, but the general process is about the same. I'm actually going to do mine at a lower temp than Hugh, then ramping up in the final phase. Reason for that is I want to use that rendered duckfat runoff to roast some 'taties, but I don't want to have to leave the duck out to get cold and old while I do it, not for too long anyway.

Preheat oven to 220 C. This will only be used for the fat-rendering part of the roast, not the main cook which will be around 160. Have seen anything from 190 down to 120 (250 F) suggested. The latter for VERY slow roasting (3-4 hours).

Prep the bird. Rinse and pat dry, remove any large fat deposits, and pierce or score the skin (only lightly, not through to the meat - just enough to allow the fat to run off.) Am actually using a Stanley knife for this. Season with salt and pepper. I'm also sprinkling over some wild rosemary the old man recently discovered in the garden, because I can, and we have shitloads of it.

Render the fat for around 20min in the 220 degree oven, then take it out and turn down to 160. Baste the bird with the runoff. Do the same for the next 2 or so hours every half hour or so. For some reason my lads like souveniring my silicon basting brush from the second drawer, so even finding the bloody thing is an achievement.

Parboil some potatoes, just to get ahead of the game and shorten the final roast time. I like red jackets with golden flesh (is that the right term for potato innards? for the taste, the texture and the aesthetics of them. Lop them into rough cubes - I tend to leave the skin on, partly for the health benefits, partly because I can't be arsed peeling them - chuck them in boiling water - you know the rest.

Duck season? Rabbit(oh) season. I mentioned we ran the Tigers down last night? Yeah? If not, we did. 34-30 with a try in the last minute of golden point. After trailing 28-12 midway through the second half. Every All Black cloud has a silver (or coachwood and myrtle) lining.

Anyway - strain the runoff, combine with a bit of crushed garlic and chopped rosemary, over the parboiled 'taters and into the dish the duck came out of. Fire it up to Crispy Temp (220-250). Serve with Something Else. In our case corn because the eldest monster refuses any meal that doesn't include corn. Seriously. We had to order a kiddie-sized corn pizza on Friday.

Verdict: Excellent. If a bit fatty. Actually, a lot fatty (still slightly queasy.) Can't underemphasize just how lardy duck is. Which, I suppose, is why it tastes so fricken AWESOME. Give it a crack, if you can find it at an agreeable price, just keep it moist and avoid too much of the lardiness. It's a winner. As voted unanimously this evening - the only thing left over on Monster v1.0's plate at the end was... corn.

The Doctor is OUT.

Food Bloggers Assemble! At Moo Moos

2010-07-29T15:41:00.001+10:00

The latest catch up of the Brisbane food bloggers was at Moo Moos, a fairly upmarket grill inside the Marriot hotel in Brisbane city. As most people who read this blog know, I'm not that big on restaurant reviews, mainly cause I just love doing the cooking, partly because I forget the incredible amount of work that goes into a kitchen like this and get snippy over small things.

Nights like the food bloggers nights and the Burger meet ups are massively enhanced by being surrounded by people who just want to discuss and dissect food, tech, current affairs, you name it. It's never boring. Neither was the entree, a tasting plate with four small portions gracing it. I'm not a big seafood fan, but i had to do a double take at the scallop, it was so soft and pleasurable it was like eating flavoured textured air. Divine. The pork belly was excellent, wouldn't make my top five, but that is a very, very long list. There was a superb piece of dry cured meat on a cracker and a deep fried zucchini flower filled with goats cheese. I love these and this one was done beautifully, creamy and crunchy.

The main course was a sirloin on mash with asparagus. Now I'm going to say up front that I'm stupidly hard to please when it comes to beef. I work in the butcher industry and I know how to cook a nice piece of beef. Don't always get it right, but I cane myself just as hard when I don't. Because beef is something that when you do get right, is mind blowingly good. This sirloin was OK. The mash was just OK and the asparagus was pretty tired. Again, I have my own asparagus patch and no restaurant can ever compete with the fresh picked stuff, but this asparagus was not that fresh. I could have had the fish, but why go to a grillhouse and have fish?

The dessert however was on another planet. There is no way I'd be able to cook that at home without a bit of practice. A small chocolate brownie, topped with some vanilla ice cream and dusted with crunchy, tasty honeycomb, with a little side dish of hot fudge ready to be tipped over at the last second. It was the tastebud highlight of the night for me, a non sweet tooth.

It was great to catch up with all the different people that I interact or watch on twitter and in blogland, the conversation was sparkling and interestin and I'm looking forward to the next one already.

Awesome food blog

2010-07-20T17:01:00.000+10:00

Crash Test Kitchen was recommended to me by some friends a while ago and it is definietly worth having alook at...

Brunch on weekend

2010-07-19T11:52:00.001+10:00

I went to brunch at my mate Nick's place on Sunday - he and his wife don't have a television so while we are sitting around watching Masterchef - they seem to spend a whole of their time actually cooking and baking...

I forgot to take a photo of the bread they had made but apparently this book has changed their life - it is called Artisan breads in five minutes a day - they bought it off the interweb and they said that it is totally awesome - well worth buying. The bread they made certainly backed up that claim because it was better then a lot of the so-called artisan bread you can pick up down here.

This was the other special delight of the day a BABKA - apparently an old Jewish recipe - a yeasty baked treat with heaps of chocolate and nuts and totally delicious. The closest thing that I could find online was this recipe here.

New Toy

2010-07-19T11:38:00.001+10:00

I picked up this slow cooker on weekend and left it at home full of lamb shanks, red wine and various other bits and pieces on a low heat - I put it all together this morning and then headed off to work.

I hope that after 9-10 hours of cooking we get something very yummy out of it when I get home...

I will keep you posted.

Warm chunky soup.

2010-07-02T17:28:00.001+10:00

Hey, gees, cough, how'd it get so dusty in here. Open that window. Have we got some onions? Yes? Garlic and carrots? Oh well, we'll make do, let's get cooking.

My apologies for the absence. Lantanaland has been taking up a bit of my time, but this weekend, against all sanity, we are going camping in the rain and the cold ( for QLD) on North Stradbroke.

The Wife has requested a soup I do in the dream pot for this sort of camp. For those of you who don't know the dream pot is a big pot that has a case like a thermos. You cook up some soup or stew and put it in and it loses heat very, very slowly. I have had soup from it too hot to touch ten hours after it came off the stove.

This is a hearty thick peasant soup. Sweat off some onion, carrot, celery and garlic. Add water and some bacon bones from a butcher that smokes his own ham. Cook until all the soft bits have fallen off the bones. Remove the bones and add a cup of dried soup mix and a cup of pearl barely. Stick it in the fridge. All the excess fat will solidify on the top and you can easily remove it.

Chop a few potatoes and mushrooms up and add to the mix along with a bottle of dark beer or white wine, depending on your tastes. Cook slowly for as long as you want and serve with good fresh bread and lots of butter.

Hope it keeps me warm.

-- MF from the iPhone

Sunday Ceviche Sessions

2010-04-16T12:53:00.008+10:00

Sunday Ceviche Sessions

It is a gorgeous day. A beautiful blue sky contrasts gloriously with the golden sun, as a pacific sea breeze sweeps gently across your skin. Your anticipation has been building for days, although it seems much longer. A deliberately tiny breakfast has left you wanting. It is your first time. He stands before you with a knowing smile. And with great pride, places their crowning jewel before your eyes. Tentatively you lift your fork and slowly, ever so gently, place a piece into your mouth.

It´s fresh, sharp, yet cool, with a subtle chili kick. It literally melts in your mouth. Time stands still as your stare absentmindedly into the opposing wall, with a ridiculously stupid grin on your face. Welcome to a new world. You may wonder what has just happened, if it were a dream, perhaps a vision. No. It was real. Behold good people, the Ceviche experience. Welcome to Lima and welcome to Peru the reigning food capital of Latin America.

There are numerous food wonders to be experienced in Peru. I could waffle endlessly about tacu-tacu (a rice and bean mix usually served with fresh seafood in ricotta source...yum), sushi (it is amazing here), lomo saltado (a traditional meat, tomato and potato stir fry dish...a fusion of traditional Chinese Peruvians cuisine (note: a large number of Chinese people have been immigrating to Peru since the 19th Century) and tres leches (a simple yet addictive desert, satisfaction guaranteed). However for me, it´s all about the Ceviche, the most amazing seafood experience in the world, simple, fresh and perfect.

In order to be able to replicate this experience for myself, I enlisted the help of a local Ceviche addict to mentor me in the ways of the Ceviche. And so under the blue Arequipan sky, Ceviche Sunday was born.

On a basic level Ceviche is raw fish marinated in a lime based mix and served cold and fresh with boiled sweet potato and corn. Traditionally, Ceviche is a lunch dish and as such it´s an early rise for the freshest ingredients...First stop...Pascados Mercado's (fish markets). There are a number of fish varieties which can be used in Ceviche such as, Perico, Langueard, Corvina or Ojo de Uva. For those of you not living close to Latin American piscados, basically you need a fish (corvina, halibut, sea bass, tilapia, sole) with a strong texture, that won´t fall apart too easily and light flavor (so the fishyness (technical term) doesn´t overpower the lime/chili flavors). A trick is to cut the fish pieces (cubed approx 2 x2 cm) on an angle. Experts and addicts’ believe this assists in the absorption of flavors. Other ingredients include, a whole lot (about 10 limes) of freshly squeezed lime juice (3/4 squeezed, apparently you don´t squeeze the last bit of juice out of the lime as this is too acidic), garlic, red chilies (please remember to refrain from any none Ceviche related activities before washing your hands ;), a red onion, coriander, aji-no-moto (found in all good Chinese superstores) salt, pepper and boiled sweet potato's and/or corn to serve. While not going into the finer details of the recipe, I would strongly advise to drop via Lima (numerous restaurant recommendations can be provided) and taste before attempting this at home. I´m delighted to say that Ceviche Sunday was an absolute success! A very leisurely Sunday afternoon was spent on the rooftop of an inner city Hostel; gazing out onto the nearby snowcapped volcanoes, while enjoying ice cold beers and mountains of delicious Ceviche. Yet again the power of simple fresh ingredient's combines to create a national food obsession.

Note: Please excuse food presentation in all photos, as on each and all occasions I was unable to refrain from eating long enough to take a before shot.

Icecream

2010-04-15T18:50:00.001+10:00

Considering how anal I can be about where ingredients come from and taking things back to first principles (irritatingly so), I completely suck at measuring for recipes. I just can't seem to grasp the idea. But with icecream I tried, I really did. I could think of nothing better than home made icecream, every person who'd made me icecream was held with the same acclaim as Greek Gods and it was all fantastic. I however, suck at icecream. Can never get the right consistency, never get in frozen enough, just not right.

So The Wife s away adding to the greater knowledge of the world this week and I felt like some desert. Comfort food. I threw a few egg yolks and some sugar and a touch of cornflour into a bowl and whisked it up. While the potatoes boiled I put another a dish over the top and heated some cream. Mixed it all together and put it back over the potatoes. As I mixed it thickened nicely and I threw in some sultanas, feeling some unnatural optimism in the way it was all progressing. There was some dark chocolate in the fridge so that went in too. It was really nice thickness now so I took it off the pan and whisked in a touch of rum.

I then reclined on the couch and sampled some of the awesomeness that is Jason Statham taking his shirt off every five minutes to kick some badguys arse. I took the custard out of the freezer every ten minutes or so and gave it a bit of a stir. Heaps less stress than using an icecream machine. Strangely I seemed to be able to easily pick up the plot of the movie despite my absences.

Just before bed it looked to be just right. I tasted. I fell to the floor in rapture, thanking the O mighty Crema, goddess of puddings and sorbets, who must have been watching over me.

It was that good.

-- Post From My iPhone

-- Post From My iPhone

Food & Wine blogging tips

2010-04-06T14:01:00.000+10:00

Apparently the recent Melbourne Food & Wine Festival included amongst its many offerings a special get-together for food-bloggers. While I only made it to a few token events (mainly the freebie ones) and definitely didn't get to this one - they do have some of the presentations available online thanks to the amazing interwebby thingie...

Just click here!

Get some pork on your fork

2010-04-03T12:45:00.003+10:00

FRIDAY, APRIL 2
Doc Y here. I do a fair amount of weekend roasts because they're cheap, they're simple, and let's face it, the weather in the Deep South of NZ is usually conducive to it. The folks and bro are over here at the moment and I have a big leg of pork to do today, but the standard issue roast pork/gravy/apple sauce/roast veg combo isn't really doing it for me. Even crackling isn't selling it to me, even though once a man is tired of crackling, he is tired of life. So I'm going to have a stab at doing it Chinese style. Never done it before. Little idea how. It's another train wreck in slow motion from our series (if a series of one previous entry counts as a series) where Dr Yobbo liveblogs the assembly of dishes he has no idea how to make and everyone ducks and hides from the flying shrapnel.

This is a mashup of a bunch of Chinese roast pork dishes on the Magical InterGoogle; the authentic Cantonese dish is siew yuk (which sounds like a three year old's response to boiled sprouts) and is usually made with nice lardy pork belly. Here I'm also lacking a few other authenticators like rice vinegar and red fermented bean curd - your local Asian supermarket or the international randomness aisle of Woolies should see you right if you want to go proper legit like. I'm just going with the traditional Macgyver School Of Cookery approach where we bodge it together from whatever stuff is in the cupboard.

Pork
Leg thereof, a bit over 2.3kg. Around 6 grownups to feed, less one conscientious objector - it's Jesus-On-A-Stick Day after all. As such I've managed to annoy the Catholics, the Jews and even (given that this isn't particularly halal) the Islamabads with this dish, so if you have any friends with imaginary friends to cook for today, I might be giving this one a swerve.

Smashing together a marinade around midmorning - just in the baking dish the pork will eventually roast in, for want of a better location. It'll rest in the fridge most of the day. These are large volumes because it's a large slab of oink, reduce proportionally for smaller cuts.

3/4 cup soy sauce - half dark and normal, since that's what I had
1/3 cup honey
2/3 cup hoi sin sauce
1/4 cup sweet chilli sauce
2/3 cup dry sherry (here subbing for the rice vinegar, should result in a more caramelized flavour)
1 tbsp crushed garlic (say 3-4 cloves)
2 tsp crushed ginger
1 1/2 tsp Chinese five spice powder

Whisk it all up and drown the bastard. Chuck in the fridge, turning every hour or two.

Have a coffee while you're waiting.

While that's marinading I'll tell you about a recipe I bashed together with help from the old man the other day. By help I mean... well, we had plans to make a big lasagne and he said he was bringing over some Italian sausage to use for the meat. What he brought over was Italian flavoured supermarket sausages. Hmmm.

Worked, though. Helps that NZ supermarket mystery bags are actually pretty bloody good (as they'd want to be at $10 a kg or more.) The Italian ones are mostly beef (ish) with lots of garlic, chilli and spice in them. Grilled them for a little while just to firm them up enough to dice finely, then threw them in the electric wok with some finely diced onion, zucchini (bit of random greenery for fibre) and portabello mushrooms. Bit of mince to bolster the snaggage. Set all that aside, reduced some canned tomatoes with some pasta sauce and half a cup each of leftover cab sauv and pinot noir, reintroduced the goods, bit more chilli and garlic, chopped capsicum and fresh herbs as late as I could get away with, then once that was more solid than liquid, layered out a lasagne using a commercial bechamel (you can make your own if you want to waste your time pointlessly), Barilla lasagne sheets and grated cheddar/mozzarella, with a bit of grated parmesan to crisp up the lid.

Bloody noice.

I'll be back to finish the Chinese roast pork story later today or tomorrow, but til then - The Doctor is OUT.

_______________________

SATURDAY, APRIL 3
Howzit. Dr Yobbo here, taking up the story from where we left off yesterday.

So, get your big slab of pork out. Of the fridge. Drain off the marinade, keep it for basting purposes. Get the oven preheating - you'll need to keep the roast temp down a little to account for the burnable sugars in the marinade, it'll inevitably blacken a bit but if you shove it in at 180 it'll look like the BBQ snag which fell into the campfire and was forgotten until sunrise. 165-170 (Celsius) should do it, figure 40 mins per half kilo at that temp, basting regularly with the residual marinade. You can reduce it down into a glaze for serving if you want to.

Vegies to go with? I went with red kumara, which I understand isn't as common in Australia as it is over here (or as is the more prevalent orange varieties.) This has a deep brown-red-magenta skin and a creamy yellow flesh, often with purple vein structures through it. It's a little less sweet and starchy as the orange varieties, and tends to be cheaper as well. Given that the pork locked us in to a lower roast temp than maybe you'd want, I went for fairly large bits, basically just halving them. Gave them a bit of a slosh-around in some oil with paprika and salt - more typically I'd go for olive oil, garlic, rosemary etc but didn't figure that'd work with the Asian elements of the pork - and in for about an hour or so. That, and some nice broccoli to offer a bit of greenery.

Verdict: Went well. If I was to do it again I'd probably roast it at lower temp for longer - outer edges were quite dry, yet not entirely cooked at the bone - and add vinegar to the marinade to aid penetration and bitter-up some of that residual sweetness. That said, there were no complaints. Put it this way - even the conscientious objector decided to forget it was Good Friday for the purposes of this lot. Mother Focaccia - food worth going to hell for.

The Doctor is OUT.

Fat Belly Everyone

2010-03-30T08:10:00.008+10:00

The Wife's dad turned 60 last week and we all headed off to Brunswick Heads to stay together in a house, drink beer and coffee, eat and generally celebrate the occasion in a low key way. At least thats what Neil wanted. The Wife knows how much he likes seeing his family and friends though, so using the fully operation awesome power of Facebook, organised for them all to be in Brunswick for dinner on the Saturday night.

The Wife organised dinner at fatbellykat, which by pure fluke happened to be across the road from our house. Kat's is a greek resteraunt, with a strong emphasis on shared food, so after much consultation The Wife decided on the following menu.

Entree
1. Natural Oysters
2. Hand-made Spring Onion Flatbread with Dips
3. Smoked Fish Fritters with Tomato Marmalade + Creme Fraiche

Main
1. Layered Dish of Marinated Pumpkin, Eggplant Chips + Herbed Sheep's Milk Labna
2. Confit Duck & Kipfler Potato Dolmades with Orange Yoghurt
3. Shredded Lamb Filo Pastries

Dessert
1. Kataifi Crema topped with mastic flavoured custard and finished with cream, cinnamon and almonds
2. Greek donuts soaked in honey syrup served with hand-made vanilla bean icecream and praline
3. Chocolate Mousse

At this point i'd like to point out that The Wife, who after 10+ years of scientific training can make a chinese military unit look disorganised and the head of the spanish inquisition feel like he can't get a question in, was very impressed with the level of service and the speed of response times. Little things like a suggestion to change from on big cake to three small desserts showed an attention to detail and understanding the individual customers needs, that you don't always get.

On to the food!

Having grown up with oysters straight off the rocks, I don't have the love affair with them that some people do. The consensus was that they were very fresh and had great flavour. The fish fritters were light and very tasty, but the winner of the entree and for me, the whole night was the flatbread. The texture! The flavour! The dips, mmm oh so garlicy. I will be having a crack at flatbread again and again till i get it right, because i could think of nothing better than having a few mates round with some cold beers and getting stuck in to a plate of this.

The mains sharing plates came out and i hit the only down note of the entire evening. I love pumpkin, especially when you slow roast in and caramelise all those natural sugars. I'm not sure what the marinade was but it just didn't sit well with the pumpkin, though to be fair this might be traditional greek combination and other people on my table loved it. The duck confit dolmades were a win, but then you'd be pretty hard up if you ruined something with confit in it. I loved the soft lamb in the crunchy filo pastries, though a few people weren't fans, but i thought they had a great balance of flavour and i love the texture of a good filo done right.

By the time dessert came around I was pretty full, but the dainty three desserts on the plate were tempting enough to dig in. The mousse was first and it was light and rich, then i tried the honey soaked donut. WOW. I need that recipe. It was something else, not sickly sweet, with a fantastically doughy texture, I polished it off and sadly the custard was left behind.

The staff at fatbellykat were superb, there is no other word for it. When i ran The Alley and we were on form it was like this, the staff genuinely wanted to make your night as enjoyable as possible, Damian made sure that we had everything we needed and it all ran smoothly, he even encouraged The Wife to get up and do a speech. We weren't the quietest bunch, but the staff and owners obviously enjoyed the communal atmosphere, there were no dirty looks or a feeling that we should tone it down.

The food was great, thanks Kat, the staff and the night were likewise, if you are in that part of the world, check it out!

Comfort Food

2010-03-23T20:28:00.002+10:00

I have a new Asian cookbook, purchased to find the recipe of the legendary Sichuan Crispy Pork Ribs. Unfortunately it didn't contain the right recipe and the whole book is freaking me out a little, mainly because I have about one in ten of the ingredients and can recognize about four in ten. With The Wife invalided with the flu and feeling the start of it myself I went with something for dinner that I can cook blindfolded, comfort food.

Comfort food is a pretty broad church. Could be a uplifting Asian broth or fried eggs on toast. As long as the flavours and experience are like and old treasured coat, welcoming and soothing of the soul.

I cooked lamb meatballs in a tomato sauce. Lamb mince, with thyme, ginger, garlic, a blitzed bit of bread, onion, an egg, lots of cumin, chilli, tomato paste and salt, all mixed up into little balls then fried off in a heavy casserole dish until brown. Take them out and whack in a diced onion and some mushrooms, sweat off a little then hit it with a good slosh of red wine. Put the meatballs back in and a tin of tomatoes then bake for half an hour. Tear some mozzarella over the top and turn the heat up in the last five minutes. If you have access to buffalo, spend the money on that beautiful silky cheese. Serve with mashed potato.

Best when crook or living in Tasmania or NZ.

MF from the iPhone

Looking at cooking...

2010-03-18T15:45:00.003+10:00

I haven't posted anything here for a while, what with moving house and everything. However the big move across town has meant a couple of delightful changes.

One thing is that we are now able to drop into Footscray pretty regularly for a big bowl of pho (pronounced 'fur') at a huge range of Vietnamese places. To date our favorite is called Dong Que VN on the main drag there - it has that really authentic feel without being grotty. There are always a couple of older guys sitting there eating who look like they were ARVN regs who escaped the fall of Saigon on the last chopper out as well as some babealicious younger Vietnames hotties. Plus you just can't fault a place when their spring rolls are just totally awesome. The pho is delicious as well, coming out with a huge pile of bean sprouts, fresh basil and chopped up chili and lemons that you add to your fragrant beef broth.

Another is that we are also very close to the fantastic Station Hotel (also in Footscray) which has to have the best steaks in Melbourne. I had the most enormous and delicious angus t-bone there on my birthday in February, washed down by some very nice Torbrek shiraz.

The best thing though is that after having 'made do' with an electric stove for the past 2 years we once again have a gas cooktop. We still need to put some time, effort and money into building a new kitchen but we decided that we could probably live with the existing 1930s-40s era cupboard size set-up for a while. We needn't have worried - the old stovetop puts out a ferocious heat and works a treat. I don't know how I lived without gas for so long - it just makes cooking better somehow...

On the weekend I went to the Footscray Markets and picked up some fresh salmon and prawn meat and then we went to a pretty fabulous farmers market at Williamstown, so I don't think we will be suffering in the food supply department.

Unfortunately the new homeowner cash flow situation has meant that I haven't been able to take in as much of the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival program as I would like. There are a few freebie events but most of the activities require an outlay ranging from 50-100 bucks per person and we can't justify that at the moment. We have a weird installation type thingie in front of work and had a pretty good event today with a bunch of people talking about different eras in food in Melbourne. Guy Grossi from Florentinos was ths stand-out talent, I went to his restaurant last year for Sweet Thang's birthday and it was truly excellent.

On another note I thought that this sounded like a pretty good cookbook (pictured) for the person who has everything - although I have to admit that I still haven't cooked anything from my Kinky Friedman cookbook - so never sure how useful a novelty cookbook actually is...

A nice surprise.

2010-03-11T09:56:00.003+10:00

Last week we went out to dinner for a mates birthday. I knew we were going out to a restaurant but had no idea where it was or what type or quality. Turns out it's a restaurant that I've always wanted to visit, from the old days when it was Tables and in it's current incarnation as Brents.

I don't eat out that much, partly because I sink all our extra cash into Lantanaland, a night out might buy me eight fruit trees or half a cow and partly because I back my own skills in the kitchen.* But it's good to go out, to be inspired by truly exceptional cooking and to spark your own inspiriation. Brents was such a night.

There was 21 of us so it was a simple three choice menu. I moved my napkin to have a look and immediately said "I know what I'm having". The Wife had a look and laughed, because the first line read "crispy pork belly" and I didn't need to read past that really. It came with a mustard ice cream and that worked amazingly well, the cool icecream worked really well with the tender crispy pork belly.

They then had a nice little pallette cleanser after all that tasty, tasty fat, a passionfruit sorbet. It was simple and delicious and one of the girls passed hers over and I doubled up it was that good. The main choice was not quite as easy. Normally I would jump on duck confit with pork belly swiftness, but I was tempted by the slow cooked beef cheeks, mainly because fellow food blogger Natascha Mirosch was so passionate for it a few weeks back. I went with that and I'm glad I did, beautifully cooked meat, falling apart with a smooth mash. I'd usually share a taste with The Wife so we can sample all the dishes but I'd cleaned my plate before she could even offer some of her salmon. I did manage to snaffle a bit of confit from one of the boys and it was also very, very good but I was glad I went with the beef cheeks.

Dessert was a lovely cream brûlée. The serving throughout the night but I doubt anyone would have walked away even a little hungry. Check out the cheese board that some of the crew got to finish off with, great cheese and a superb quince paste.

All in all a fantastic night, Brents would have made a bit of cash from the drinks bill, which I hoped made up for the fact they had to ask us to keep it down a touch about three times. Anyone who says that the Brisbane food scene has nothing worth going out for is kidding themselves. Both Brents and Grasshopper Kitchen are top class feeds and if you are getting poor food or service then you need to do your research better and support the places that do food like this.

*if I come off as being a bit arrogant about my cooking, considering I have no chef training, I had my faith in my skills reaffirmed this morning at breakfast at Mooloolaba. I got my favourite eggs benedict. For some reason there was four muffins, they need to find a supplier that sell decent ham and it doesn't have to be five layers thick and their "home made hollandaise" curiously had no flavour at all. If I served that to you at my place I'd be embarressed. But I wouldn't, because I've never made that dish that badly. The cafe wasn't that busy so it wasn't like the chef would've been snowed under. Of course when the waiter asked if I was enjoying my meal I said yes. Doh.

MF from the iPhone

Fresh is Best II

2010-03-03T14:11:00.003+10:00

After 4 years of living in a shoe box in Brisbane when I moved to Hobart last year, my girlfriend and I had a list of 3 things we wanted in a house. Sunny position, sunny position, and a garden.

I wouldn’t say I love gardening in itself, but I do love growing my own food. Apart from the freshness, you can’t get any fresher than picked and walked straight to the kitchen and the satisfaction of knowing what you are eating is from your own hard work. The taste is incredible.

We planted Pink Eye potatoes last spring and have been gradually eating our crop since around mid December. Now I like spuds, any spuds, I’ll eat them any form, chips, crisps, roasted, mashed whatever. When we had our new pink eyes, they were by far the best tasting spuds I have ever had. So much so that we have only eaten our own spuds the one way. Lightly steamed, so they are cooked but still firm, with some butter and chopped oregano (also from the garden). The taste of the potatoes was so nice that we wanted to enjoy the taste of the potato itself rather than mixing it with too many things. I had not tasted a spud like it. Maybe next year when we grow some more we’ll do a few more things with them, but for now its just enjoying fresh tasting spuds.

I have a friend that tends to grow the vegies that are more expensive in the shops. Spuds are really cheap in Tassie, but I will be growing spuds every year, no matter how cheap they get. Fresh definitely is best!!

Davey
Not from an iPhone

Fresh is Best

2010-03-03T14:06:00.003+10:00

Fresh is best! We have a new contributor here at MF, Davey from Tasmania, making Tassie by far the biggest segment of our writers. Until he gets his permissions all sorted, here is his first post....now posted by him above

Pumpkin Soup

2010-03-02T19:33:00.001+10:00

If you live in south east Qld you'll have noticed it's been raining a bit in the last month. A bit! My shiny new ride on has barely been touched and the grass grows and grows, time for some geese as a fall back plan I think. The problem with all this rain has been the heat that has come with it. Sticky, humid heat.

Because what I really crave in this weather is comfort food, big hearty roasts and warm soup. With the last lot of rain the temperature has plummeted to about a hot Tasmanian day, just enough for me to do pumpkin soup.

Dice a fair chunk of pumpkin into about 5 cm chunks. Cut the bottom of a whole head of garlic. Deseed a few chillies. Toss the lot in a very light coat of olive oil, salt, cayenne pepper and rosemary or thyme. Bake in an oven about 130 deg until the pumpkin is soft and a little caremelised.

Melt one of your blocks of pork trotter stock in a pan, add the pumpkin, chilli and squeezed out garlic and blend with a stem blender, slowly adding pure cream until you have the consistency that you want. Keep on low heat until hot, try not to boil.

In the roasting pan, fry off some cold smoked belly bacon finely diced, then add diced bread, fry until crisp, spoon over soup with some finely chopped chives.

If only we had a real winter.

MF from the iPhone

Triple Link - the dark art

2010-02-19T12:15:00.003+10:00

Butchers will triple link their snags, but most home sausage makers struggle so I did a quick video of me doing it, verrrry slowly, for @silverbeet on Twitter. The trick is to make an indent in the sausage before you loop it back under.

MF from the iPhone

I got the pox from what's in the box with the dots

2010-02-04T16:25:00.001+10:00

The Italian migrant diaspora has given us a lot of things. Decent coffee, for example. Or Your Correspondent for that matter. However, the influx of Italian migrants into America hasn't been quite so packed full of win. Italian-American society has taketh away far more than it hath giveth. (Sorry about the thpeach impediment, I have a blogged node.) For every Joe di Maggio or Mario Andretti they giveth, they also giveth us Madonna, bad Mafia films, Jersey Shore and crappy American pizza.

There are few greater travesties - few more heinous examples in cuisine of Europe giving us something wonderful and America ballsing it up - than crappy American pizza. Aside perhaps from crappy American coffee, but that's a post for another time. Deep-dish, cheese-slathered, inch-thich-base oozing with emulsified lard, lined with processed mystery meats, dubious sauces and Things That Cannot Be, slung into a soggy cardboard box and delivered lukewarm to your household in 30 minutes, or the projectile gastric's free. There is no place for American-style pizza in modern Australian cuisine, aside from out the back in the skip. Particularly because decent pizza is an absolute piece-of-piss-a (see what I did there?) to make. Now, as with many things in a culinary 'space' I'm a rank amateur at DIY pizzadom compared to the likes of Flinty, but I do know what I like, and the following is it.

Decent pizza, to my way of thinking, needs a couple of simple elements. (They're elements which completely escape any pizza joint I've found in Dunedin, but that's another story.) One, it needs a thin base. NOT one of those big fuck-off lard-sponge jobs and definitely NOT infused with liquid cheese impersonating polymer. Two, less is more. It needs as few toppings as you can get away with. Three or four different ingredients, well chosen to complement each other, is perfect. And the same goes for the cheese - less is more. Unless it's less of course. In which case it's still more.

What I've just actually described in the above is the blessed output of what was always my favourite pizza joint in Brisbane, the Schonell Pizza Caffe at the Uni of Queensland. And not just because you could order them at the uni bar bistro downstairs and they'd bring them down to you, piping hot, while you smashed ales by the jug and talked absolute crap with your peeps. They were brilliant, authentic bits of gourmet gear. Sure the menu itself was a tad on the wanktastic side - each pizza was named after a particular director, actor, film or other element of Italian cinema, in tribute to the indie art-house cinema which the Pizza Caffe was attached to - but each was brilliantly conceived. And the place was licenced, much valued during the long, dark period of black-evil-crap-ed-ness between the closure of the Rec Club in the late Nineties and the opening of the new uni bar with the series of stupid names (then Red Room, now the 2nd Degree or some minging shite) in the early Noughties. And pizzas were only eight bucks for students! Of course at this point someone older and crustier than I, with UQ alum status that dates back beyond the turn of the century, will point out they were five bucks back in the day, or two, or free, and the Rec Club would sell you a dozen pots for a buck fifty, and it were all trees roon' here lad, aye. Good on you, and good to see the elderly getting out in the community. $8 pizzas were pretty fricken sweet back in the Noughties. Personal faves were the K (Killer Fish - the pizzas inevitably became known by their initials rather than their slightly punishing names), a marinara pizza lightly dusted with chilli; P (Pasolini), a compelling combination of pancetta, potato and rosemary; and Q (fuck knows, can't remember), which was prawns, tomato and fresh basil leaves. Simple flavours, simple ingredients which set each other off brilliantly. That, my friends, is pizza. Not a quintuple cheesegasm lardmeister super supremo from Pizza Slut that looks like a melted puddle of Jabba the Hutt.

And so to the practical component of today's lab class, which is: recreating Pizza Caffe WIN in your own home. Here I've had a bash at the Q and P pizzas, because I could. Obviously, commercial bases and a standard kitchen oven aren't about to recreate the win that homemade dough and a proper pizza oven would, but stuff that.

Commercial base, commercial pasta sauce with a bit of crushed garlic blended through.

RHS - Quo Vadis replica; tomato, basil and prawns.

LHS - Pasolini replica, which sounds more like a '70s Ducati than a pizza; proscuitto (pancetta not available in the Anglo white-bread stronghold of D-town), thinly sliced new potatoes and fresh rosemary.

Ready to roll. With probably too much cheese, given the above rantage. Oven cranked to As Hot As It Will Go.

Waiting. It's thirsty work.

Not ready yet.

More waiting then.

Finished.

Demolished.

And good it was too. Not as good as the genuine arsetickle, but the latter's as much a ghost of the past as KB Gold and flared slacks. You'll notice in the above that all references to the FKNAWSMness of the Pizza Caffe's work are in the past tense. This is deliberate. The last time I went there, about two years ago, the uni beancounters had been through. Prices had been jacked to Christ and, worst of all, inferior ingredients had started slipping into the pizzas. The marinara mix used for the K pizza was worthy of burley, little more. The pancetta tasted like Woolies ham, and the fresh basil on the Q pizza was freshly shaken out of a Master Foods bottle. EPIC FAIL.

You can never go home again.

The Doctor is OUT.

Recipe In Progress

2010-02-02T12:59:00.003+10:00

It's Natalie's birthday today. No, I'm not gonna mention her age. That would be telling. But those of you who know me will be aware that for her birthday every year, I try to come up with a brand-new scratch-built recipe. Something nobody's done... at least, nobody I know about.

Past years have given us ricotta and pepperberry quiche; Yashmak Prawns (prawns slathered in a spicy coriander sauce, then wrapped in phyllo pastry with their tails sticking out, baked until the pastry is golden); Chilled Crab and Avocado Soup, and a bunch of others. Sometimes it doesn't work -- the scallops stir-fried with Cointreau were a bit ambitious, for example. Other times I get a real classic: Duck and Three Mushroom Pie, which I actually sold (as a recipe) to a Noosa restaurateur.

This year, I'm tackling a dessert. I'm calling it a Chocolate Mousse Slice, and so far, it works like this: you make a chocolate cake -- not too light. Has to have a fairly dense crumb. Slice it about two cm thick, lay the slices on a tray, drizzle with Frangelico. (Or Kahlua. Or maybe Baileys. But I like Frangelico.)

Meanwhile, you make yourself a wicked chocolate mousse -- all dark chocolate and eggwhites, with just enough cream to help it fluff up and stay together. Next, you chop your cake slices into rough pieces, and you fold the pieces into the mousse. Pour the whole lot into a springform pan with some baking paper across the bottom.

Theoretically, this will set up into a rich, soft mousse/pudding with moist, crumbly bits of liqueur-flavoured cake all through it to enhance the texture and flavour. In practice? Well, it's sitting in the fridge right now, hopefully setting properly to be served this evening after Natalie's favourite Thai Beef dish.

I'll keep you posted as to how it works out. I've got a few ideas on how it might be improved or enhanced - but I'm always open to suggestions!

EDITED TO ADD:

No. Fuck it. No changes. I'm going to be immodest here -- instant classic. The moist cake crumbled in the mousse, giving the dish a texture a bit like cookie-crumb ice cream. It was bloody brilliant. Rich as hell, but smooth and chocolaty and with the liqueured cake bits all through the thing, it was definitely something special.

Quicky

2010-01-22T14:48:00.003+10:00

Completely forgot about this. Was having a discussion about fresh pasta on twitter the other day after i posted that i can't understand dried pasta anymore. A lot of people think fresh pasta is too much effort, but its a very, very easy thing to learn and to become quick in making it.

I'd definitely have this one on the table before your takeaway dinner made it to the door.

In a bowl put, the zest and juice of one lemon, a big handful of freshly fine grated parmesan, dash of olive oil, salt and pepper. Roughly mix with a fork. Cook fresh pasta, it takes about 1 minute. With the tongs, grab your pasta and dump on top of the sauce, you want a little of the water off the pasta. Toss, bit of chopped parsley on top, eat.

To Bluetiggy, there it is and whats more, with fresh pasta, it is beyond good, it it fantastic.

Serves 2

Do we eat ugly fish

2010-01-15T08:30:00.002+10:00

I found this article at an interesting website called Straight Dope (which is now on my favorites) but do we really care whether we eat ugly fish or not? Although even I would draw the line at ordering something called the Slimehead...

Then again do fish care whether they eat ugly people?

Market value

2010-01-03T18:25:00.003+10:00

Hi folks. A recent trip to Australia, and the food emporia thereof, reminded me that the very southern part of the world I live in is a culinary white-bread wasteland. Sure, you can get good coffee, decent Kalamata olives and quality chorizo, if you look hard enough, but you will pay through the fundament and will have less range than a plug-in electric car. However, there is one shining light, gleaming like a stream of bat's piss in the darkness, amongst the dour Scottish Presbyterianism of the deep south's palate. I think I strained a metaphor there. The one shining light is the markets.

Here I'm not talking about the sort of markets besmirched by cheap tat, random shite, tawdry trinkets, aura-aligning crystals and dodgy pirated DVDs flogged out of the boot of someone's Datsun Bluebird. I'm talking local produce markets. And in the case of D-Town, the Otago Farmers Market at the magnificent old railway station. Of course, fresh produce is old hat if you, for argument's sake, have a farm. But for the rest of us it's a novelty. And when you have a strength like the local producers of Otago, it's something to be celebrated.

It's simple stuff. New potatoes from Oamaru. Fresh cherries and stonefruit from Central Otago. Berries from Outram. Fresh fish off the boat in Port Chalmers. Free range eggs. Free range pork, lamb and beef. Venison salami. Fresh baked ciabatta. Gourmet pies. Artisan cheese from the factory in Evansdale. Craft beer from Green Man in the old Emerson's brewery in George St. Throw in hot steamed pork buns, grilled lamb kebabs, and bloody good coffee from the mobile van run by the flamboyant French dude, cast to type. Even on a relatively quiet Saturday-after-New-Years morning, with maybe a third of the stallholders absent, there's still a lot of gold. And more than the usual number of carparks. We went home with some farmhouse brie, ciabatta, fresh cherries, strawberries and raspberry jam, Jersey Benne potatoes, and fresh ground Sumatran-Bolivian coffee, all for well under the asking price at NZ Supermarket Of Choice (which, surprisingly enough, is itself less than the asking price at Australian Supermarket Of Choice, based on recent experience.) And the best part: no carneys selling tat. Just lots of good quality, certified local produce. That's almost never a bad thing. We're by no means regulars - usually Saturday morning swim lessons for the lads conspires against attending - but when there, we rarely get away without dropping a decent handful of cash. And rarely regretting any of it.

In short: visit your local farmers market. Unless it's run by carneys selling tat. In which case keep your hands in your pockets and GTFO.

The Doctor is OUT.

Well howdy

2009-12-30T17:57:00.001+10:00

I have many weaknesses. Asian cooking. Growing potatos ( stop laughing Mr Flinthart, this isn't Tasmania.) Keeping up this blog, judging by the date on the last post, I mean Xmas is about food, you'd think I'd have enough material. And bread.

I've had a crack at bread from a few books, but never satisfactorily. During a recent back and forth over sausages or vege's or something food related with the knowledgeable Silverbeet from Twitter I was recomended this. The Handmade Loaf. And joy upon joy I got it for my birthday. At Xmas, but then that's the way things go when you're born in December.

Imagine breadmaking as religion. Breadmaking as I'd known it was like catholicism, very hands on, lots of to and fro. Well Dan Lepard's method is the buddism of bread. Put it together, go away and contemplate the state of the universe. Knead very lightly and leave until you have found inner peace. Knead very, very lightly and leave to rise. Invent a new form of Kung Fu...... Maybe I've pushed this too far.

The fact remains though that this method is much, much less kneading and pushing around of the dough. It requires precise measurements, something that binds and constricts my soul but I have made the best bread that I've ever made, still not what I'd call top quality but good enough that I'll keep on trying. The sour dough starter will be ready in a day or two and in keeping faith with the blog tonight I am going to make ham and mushroom foccacia!

MF from the iPhone

I'm ba-ak

2009-12-11T20:49:00.002+10:00

Ok gentlemen - sorry for the break in transmission there for a bit. You know, work etc.

However, I have a mission for you if you choose to accept.

I have purloined a duckling. I need the best damned duck recipe you have - with the exception of confit - time is of the essence here - lunch on the weekend.

Your time starts now.

Ahh grasshopper, take the spring roll from my hand.

2009-12-01T13:42:00.003+10:00

Two restaurant reviews from me in a few weeks, something is going on. The something in fact was a late game of footy and a lovely balmy Brisbane Monday evening gave me an excuse to try out a new Asian restaurant in Tenerife, Grasshopper Kitchen.

For those of you who follow chefs like celebrities in who weekly, check out the proper food reviewsfor all the essentials, I was simply interested in the food, especially the Chinese BBQ pork I'd picked from the online menu, still longing for the crispy pork ribs I'd had at Sichuan House. But I was denied, it had been dropped from the menu after the chef and owner weren't satisfied with the final dish. While I admire the ruthlessness of menu selection it left me searching the menu fir more porky goodness.

Since The Wife and I were both playing footy in a few hours we were only after starters, which was a shame, there was some beautiful sounding mains. We settled on the starter dish and some Asian greens in soy. We got four little serves each. Each was perfectly presented and a discussion between The Wife, our host and myself broke out on what to start with.

The kingfish was first off the rank, diced bits of fish with a beautiful gazpacho sorbet on top. I thought I could taste little explosions of citrus and wondered if they were using the fantastic Aussie ingredient, finger lime. The gazpacho was bursting with flavour, I wanted to lick the small bowl out. The Wife declared she'd happily come back and have that as her main next time. The finger lime suspicion was confirmed when we moved to the scallop, which had a small mound of green finger lime bubbles on top. If I could make a suggestion it would be to find the finger lime with the pinkish flesh. It has larger segments and more of a taste explosion when you burst the little balls. They were silky smooth and with subtle flavour, I'm not a scallop fan but these were delicious.

A shot glass full of peking duck consomme with shitake mushrooms and a green soy bean in the bottom was next up and straight down the throat it went. I love duck, to the point where I raised and killed my own and this was top notch stuff. The last dish was Sang choi bao, pork mince on shredded lettuce. It was packed to the brim with flavour and out of all the ones we tried it was the dish I would most like to replicate at home.

The food was delicious, real restaurant style, with great care taken on presentation and the balance of the ingredients. In fact the food was much better presented than I was, dressed for a football game, but i felt relaxed and comfortable on the wide cool deck with the breeze off the Brisbane river. In fact the styling is spot on, the funky lime green decor matches the tone of the food and surprisingly doesn't clash at all with the reassuring solidity of the woolshed in which its housed.

It was a Monday and 530 pm, but our host was more than happy to chat with a scruffily dressed customer about the food and what was good to eat, you couldn't have asked for better service. In fact, they were so slick that by the time I had left the mistake on the starter menu had been fixed on the website. Now that is on the ball.

Like I said earlier, I'd only bother to replicate one of the meals at home, but anytime I want a fresh vibrant and interesting feed of asian inspired food, I'll be back to the Grasshopper.

MF from the iPhone

A relationship through food.

2009-11-22T17:10:00.002+10:00

I'm no fancy food critic so I'll let these photos tell the story of our dinner.

Before

After

The Wife and I went out for dinner on Tuesday to celebrate 8 years of being married. Not too shabby. When we first got married for our anniversary we would go to somewhere like Maleny or Montville, get ourselves a lovely little cabin and relax for a weekend.

A feature of the weekend was food. Because the money for the trip was tied up in the cabin, I would try and cook something special. I think the best dish I'd ever cooked was some Spatchcock, stuffed with new potatoes. I'd picked this recipe because rather than the traditional oven all this cabin has was a toaster oven. I showed some mates on the back deck the night before we went. "what the FK are those?". "Baby chickens". The boys fell on the deck laughing at my tender little birds but they tasted delicious.

Once we purchased lantanaland the need to go for a weekend away with beautiful natural views and a spa dissipated somewhat, considering that sums up our place nicely. So we started going out for dinner someplace nice. Songbirds up the mountain at Tambourine was our first pick and it was a spectacular meal, with a setting and service to match.

This year I returned to a restaurant Birmo had suggested for a place to take some clients to for lunch, Fellinis. It's on the water just near seaworld and the view with the lights over the boats, with the flicker of lightning in the distance of the massive storm on it's way was very romantic. The service from the middle aged Italian gentlemen was polished beautifully. I loved the way he politely dealt with the typical coastie wannabie high flyers by gently rebuffing them for trying to scam a window table "those are reserved sir, perhaps here would do." He was then treated like a blow in. "I've been on the coast 14 years and never seen you mate!" "well sir I have lived on the coast for twenty years and I've not seen you either."

We got some duck ravioli to share as entree. I always worry when I make ravioli that the pasta on the edges are too thick texturally, but they are exactly how the chefs here did them. The butter and sage sauce was devine and they took the edge off nicely.

My spatchcock and The Wife's veal with mozzarella and eggplant was for mains. This spatchcock could only be described as brilliant. It had a salt and pepper crust and had been cooked in some type of press but was still fantastically succulent. I devoured every bit except for the one which I swapped for the veal. The veal was tender and the eggplant and cheese silky. I immediately wanted to come back to have that as well.

In fact Fellinis is like that, one of the places I read the menu and not struggle because there is only one or two things I like, but I struggle because I'd need a week of dinners to have the things I MUST try. I like trying new places, but if I just want to take someone out for a nice feed, I'll be coming back here.

The night was finished off nicely with an insanely thick and rich mocha from the chocolate cafe next door. Worth every overpriced cent of six bucks!

MF from the iPhone

An Odd Ingredient

2009-11-11T21:49:00.003+10:00

I've got a mate who lives for the fishing down here in Tas. He is, not to put too fine a point on it, mad for the trout. Loves it.

The thing is, he loves stalking the things and catching them more than he loves eating them. Not that he's averse to fanging the odd salmonid, no -- but that sometimes, he hooks one or two more than he can readily eat on his own.

Thus it was that this morning, roundabout 0930, my mate John E swaggered proudly into Chez Flinthart bearing a plastic shopping bag with a couple fish in it. One of the two was a respectable half-kilo or so of trouty goodness. The other was a very fine kilo-plus piece of fish, and John was of the opinion that there was no way he'd be able to do justice to the big bugger.

So, for the price of a decent cup of coffee and some friendly conversation, I acquired one very fresh, wild, lake-bred Rainbow Trout. I promised Natalie I'd cook it for her that evening, after I got back from ju-jitsu training. She was well chuffed.

Unfortunately, I forgot we'd raided the larder heavily for the visit from Dave Sag the night before, so I had to improvise a little. And yet -- when the regular ingredients aren't to hand, is that not when the really good cook starts to improvise?

And so I repaired to the herb garden:

That would be nasturtium, right there. A beautiful, vividly coloured flower that grows rapidly in many climate conditions, on a creeper endowed with broad, flat leaves. The flower itself is edible, as are the leaves, which possess a very nifty sort of peppery, lemony kind of flavour. It's quite strong on its own, but you can do all kinds of things with it if you're careful to balance it out.

I grabbed a half-dozen leaves or so. Then I pulled some lemons off the tree, and went back inside. First, I threw some basmati rice in the cooker, with a little turmeric for colour and flavour. Next, I chopped up an avocado, a few leftover roma and cherry tomatoes, a little chili, and a nice spring onion. That lot got mixed together with a bit of balsamic vinegar and just a dash of sesame oil, and set aside.

The fish itself, already nicely cleaned by John, I stuffed with a mix of shredded nasturtium and spring onion, and a layer of lemon slices. Then I lay some nasturtium leaves on a piece of aluminium foil, and put lemon slices on that. I salted the fish nicely, and lay it atop the lemon slices. More lemon slices on top of the fish, and more nasturtium leaves over the top. Wrap the foil around nice and tight, pop the fish in the oven to bake at about 170 for... umm... long enough, and the result?

Well, I peeled back the foil and the fish smelled fantastic. The nasturtium leaves had formed a tight wrap, holding the lemon slices next to the fish itself, helping to steam the whole thing. The pepper flavour of the nasturtiums combined beautifully with the salt, the lemon and the spring onions to provide a really fine lift for the tender, flaky fish itself. Placed on a bed of yellow rice, topped with a generous helping of the improvised avocado salsa... and yes, I had just enough leftover Dalrymple chardonnay to wash it all down.

Life's good. Grow nasturtiums: they're cool.

Belated Melbourne post

2009-11-09T08:34:00.002+10:00

Been very, very slack on the writing front, so much so that I hadn't written up one of the best meals I have ever had. I had to go to Melbourne for work, we ran a competition for some butchers and they had a day of touring shops and manafacturers in Melbourne and I hit up some Burgers for a meet, greet and feed that night.

Guru Bob and Barnes suggested a little Sichuan Chinese place in one of Melbournes iconic laneways, convinently placed about ten metres from our hotel. When we got there Barnes was jumping out of his skin with excitement, promising hot and spicy dishes galore. The butchers were not so sure, they liked anglofied Chinese, but this seemed a lot more challenging. Naut arrived about the same time as the first beers and we got down to ordering.

If like me, you like spice and pork, you would have been in heaven. There was a lot of pork on the menu and I think we ordered four differrent types. Slivers of warm pork in a soy and sesame dipping sauce was a revelation, just warmed through and beautifully tender. The milder twice cooked pork was a favourite of my butcher mates and the dried fried beans were popular with everyone.

However the top dog was the spicy pork ribs. Tender in the middle with a crisp cumin and chilli crust it was unlike any pork I have ever had and I've eaten a lot of pork. Barnes and I tucked in like zombies at Stephen Hawking's house.

I've had a good surf of the web and can't find a definitive recipe. One of the folks on Twitter suggested a recipe but I must be missing something because my attempt was a long, long way from what I had in that little laneway.

It was fun to see the Burgers, even though Havock quarintined himself, unsure if contact with my long hair and beard would give him a dose of QLD FKN FERALS disease.

The next day I went for a wander though the Viccy markets. Wow. I can see why Melbourne looks down its nose at us when it comes to food. Brisbane has nothing like this, not even close. Most of the delis at the markets looked like they had superior range than most Brisbane delis, at least in the area that I can comment on, smallgoods. The fresh fruit and veg was of the standard of the Powerhouse markets, but this was an ordinary Thursday morning, not a Saturday. Having this type of standard would definetly foster a greater food culture, hell I found it inspiring after a 14 hour day and four hours sleep.

The one thing that dissapointed me about Melbourne? The coffee. It wasn't bad, just no different to Brisbane. The best one I had was almost as good, but not quite as what I'd get at the hole in the wall at the Merlo factory. And I went to a coffee shop reccomended by Bob and another local coffee nut. Where was my liquid gold in a cup dammit!

MF from the iPhone

Good Food Blog to watch

2009-11-05T08:41:00.003+10:00

I know the person who writes this one and she really knows her nosh...

Brisbane bloggers, assemble.

2009-11-02T06:49:00.003+10:00

When I ran the live music venues I would talk the ear off anyone about live Australian music. Blah, blah, blah, if you weren't into music I'm sure I was very boring company. Last Tuesday, EatDrinkBeKerry organized a meeting of brisbane's finest food bloggers at Bar Barossa and the people running it are as passionate about wine as I ever was about live music.

Kerry and Darren had organized a great night, a winemaker, Marco, and a wine wholesaler ran us through about eight wines, talking about the type of wine, why this wine differed from others in the same category, what winemakers looked for in their grapes and in their wines and other tasty little tidbits. I was much more interested in the fact that Marco and his family make their own prosciutto, which I am very keen on trying to do myself, despite the challenges of a qld climate.

To me honest Kerry and Gastronomy Gal have a much better write ups on the wine than i can attempt. The food was OK, nothing in the same league as the Sichuan Chinese i had the next night (more on this later), but it was the passion for the grape that will keep people coming back to this venue and if have any, any interest in wine, than make the time to visit, chat to the staff and be prepared for a lively discussion.

It was great to meet the varied group of people interested in food and writing about it. We all came from different angles and have different ideas but the shared ethic of sitting round a table and eating is pretty strong. I've put some of the blogs in the blog roll so check them out if you are into food and if I have forgotten you, let me know and i'll add it in.

Heres to the next meeting, Natascha Mirosch has already suggested a field trip!

MF from the iPhone

Food Of Wanaka

2009-10-27T14:23:00.009+10:00

The night on the Cold floor was matched in culinary terms by the thing Air New Zealand like to call a shepherds pie. I mean, it shouldn't be hard to get right, some half decent pastry, lamb mince, but no, it was so bad it didn't even come close to the "pie at the footy" standard. The beer failed the same standard, being lukewarm and in a redbull can for some bizare reason. Perhaps airlines think if they can crush the spirits of terrorists with the food, they won't bother doing anything.

By the time we had got to Wanaka, about an hours drive out of Queenstown, I was tired enough and hungry enough to almost, but not quite, be happy to see another Air NZ meal. Thankfully we found a great little cafe, Lago, just in behind the pubs and I got stuck in to one of my alltime breakfast favourites, eggs benedict. I can be pretty harsh on these when i buy them out, mainly because I can make a great one at home, my own duck eggs and smoked salmon give me a certain edge i'll admit. This one, maybe because of the hunger, was 10 out of 10 good, not to mention a coffee i inhaled. Oh, and they had these great little rostis too, loved them.

I had a few hours before the bucks party, so we decided to go check out a local mediterranean foodmarket and the local butcher, with the nip in the NZ air i had a hankering for lamb shanks. The foodmarket was everything the waitress at the cafe had promised, I bought one of the best loaves of soy and linseed bread i have ever had the pleasure to smear unhealthy amounts of butter on. One of the other things i love about NZ is that they treat the potato with the respect it deserves. I could have bought heaps of different varieties, but they also had four different types in these big 10kg paper bags. A whole weeks worth of potatoes!

The lamb shanks went into a big steel pot with some tinned tomatoes, carrot, onion, garlic, a bottle of Montieths Apple Cider and some mushrooms and was whacked into an oven that had the least useable interface i have used. I took me 20 minutes of beeping to wrestle it on at the right temperature. After running round firing weapons with the bucks, a few beers then a nap, lamb shanks in front of a wood fire went down exceedingly well. Mashed potato of course.

The next day, rested and refreshed, we were wandering down into town for a coffee when we noticed a little odds and ends shop, Jumping Tangents that also sold chocholate. We tasted a whole heap, lime and chilli dark chocolate, sea salt chocolate and they were all really, really good stuff, enough that i shelled out for lime and chilli dark chocolate. Cathie also shared her fabulous hot chocolate recipe with me.

In two litres of milk add a few bay leave and some chilli. Bring to just under a simmer and leave to infuse. Make a ganache by melting 200g of the best dark choc you can buy in 300mL of cream. Strain the milk into the ganache and mix. That's it! No sugar needed or added. She told me the incas used to add a flour to thicken, as they used it for their armies as a type of energy drink when marching, but she like the normal consistency. It was very warming, with just the hints of the bay and chilli, a subtle added note. Delicious

We also did go for a coffee and i was drawn straight to the kitchen and these 80+ year old copper cookware hanging up. The chef told me that in all the time she had worked there i was the first to wander over and have a good look. Cookware like this is part art, part functionality, but I was disappointed to learn that they never cook with them.

We had a roast chook for dinner, a huge bird that must have won a chicken body building competition before going to the butcher and then the wedding on the saturday. Wedding food can be a funny thing but the food at this wedding matched the quality of the venue, the weather and the bride and groom, top class! Good sushi, rare roast rib fillet, new potatoes in butter, salmon, risotto and asparagus. I could go on, but my mate Davey sums it and the whole Wanaka food experience up much, much better.

Recycled Meals 101

2009-10-05T09:39:00.004+10:00

A culinary challenge I like to set myself is to see if I can get two different meals out of one cooking effort. No, not because I'm lazy in the kitchen; on the contrary, I find cooking a complex dish quite relaxing after a long week in the salt mines. (I don't cook much during the week, but during the weekend I do the bulk of the cooking in my household.)

It's partly because I like the economy aspect. I think it is something I picked up working at a large multinational food company that prides itself on not wasting anything. (Apart perhaps, from the souls of the hapless munters who find themselves working there long enough to get excited about products like canned dogfood. No, I'm not kidding.)

Anyway, any by products or seconds / rejects from the manufacture of one product would become an ingredient for another, known as "rework". So the best products, from the company's perspective, are the ones that can share key ingredients with another. This is why the nougat inside a Milky Way bar (the Australian variety), seems vaguely familiar - it's a reworked Mars Bar (again, the Australian variety) that didn't quite make it.

Unfortunately, they never found a way to recycle those sickly strawberry flavoured Milky Way bars, other than to sell them cheap to the hapless munters toiling away at the sister company's dogfood cannery at the other end of the state.

So armed with this insight into economical food production, I like to find ways of reworking leftovers into meals that are as different as possible. So, I'm not talking about leftover taco mince becoming mince on toast, or chopping up leftover roast dinner and frying it up to make bubble and squeak, although those things are good. I'm talking about a different meal.

Example one. Leftover risotto isn't just good for spackfilling the cracks on your stucco walls. If you have any large inclusions (pieces of meat, vegetables, etc), hook them out and chop them finely. Then add back to the risotto, along with some finely grated hard cheese like a parmesan or reggiano. Next, make the risotto into small balls, wrapped around a small piece of the same hard cheese (about 5mm cubed). Then crumb the balls (you can take a short cut here and use Krum-in-one or you can do it the old fashioned way. You decide.) and deep fry them until golden brown. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Arancini. Serve hot, with a cold Italian beer like a Peroni or a Moretti.

Example two. Yesterday I slow cooked some lamb shanks in an Italian-style sauce with a tomato base, which I served with mash. They were scrumpdiddlyumptious, and after 8 or so hours in the slow cooker the meat was fall-off-the-bone tender. I had a few shanks left over, so this morning, I whipped up a quick and easy white sauce, chopped up the remaining lamb shanks and the carrots keeping the lambykins company in the slow cooker and made a lasagne. Its in the fridge at the moment, ready to whip out and stick in the oven for about 30 or 40 minutes tonight, when the hungry hoards arrive. I plan to serve a cheeky lambrusco with it, for the alliteration value alone.

That's how I roll, gentle readers.

Random thoughts.

2009-10-02T14:09:00.003+10:00

Been over at Fraser Island this week, which brings out a subset of a subset of cooking, camping cooking but without a fire. It worked out pretty good, including a lamb and pork roast in camp ovens for fifteen people. The highlight was getting up at half past five on Tuesday morning to go to have a chat with the fantastic Mr Birmingham during his local ABC gig. You can get the audio here. Many thanks to Birmo for getting us on. Apologies to Abe, the producer attributed the English Breakfast post to me, once again i steal his glory!

Once I got home and chilled out I was hankering for smoothies, one of my favourite things in the whole of the food kingdom. After waiting for Sunbeam to replace part of my stem blender for the last four months I gave in and bought a new one. It created this.

Mulberries off the tree in the duck pen, banana, yoghurt, ice, ice cream, milk and lantana gold honey. Mmmmmmmm it was a mighty fine breakfast. Of course as soon as I had used the new blender the part for the other one turned up.

MF from the iPhone

Best Full English Breakfast Ever, Except Maybe for the Next Day's

2009-09-24T19:34:00.005+10:00

Greetings, gentle readers.

I have been travelling recently, and my travels took me to the Ol' Dart. When in Rome, I like to eat cotechino, as the Romans do. So what else could I do in England but try the Full English Breakfast (FEB)? In the space of a week I managed 3 FEBs. All in the name of research (and for the make good of the glorious sausage empire back home) of course.

The first of these FEBs was at the Mountbatten Hotel in Monmouth St, Covent Garden. It just happened to be free, in compensation for my room not being ready when it was supposed to be. And just as well it was free. A feeble buffet jobby, barely kept warm and with black pudding that had the taste and consistency of sawdust, so the less said the better.

The second and third were from the same venue, Brown Betty's in St James Street, Nottingham. You see the first one was SO good, I had to go back the next day to see if I had just managed to fluke a good result - a flash in the pan, if you will.

But the second was a carbon copy. The only difference was that I asked the chef to make the black pudding a little crispier and he happily obliged. That and it came with a bit of lip after the night before's cricket result at Trent Bridge.

Imagine my surprise when I checked out the BB website to find that the sample pic of their FEB looked EXACTLY like the meal I had. It wasn't put together by a stylist, but a good ol' fashioned English cook who really knows what he's doing and doesn't mind obliging travelling Aussie cricket fans who like their black pudding bronto crisp.

Anyway, the FEB consists of toast, bacon, sausages (a nice English pork variety), black pud, stewed tomatoes, baked beans with onions and more bacon, fried potatoes and mushrooms. Plus tea or coffee for all of a FIVER. A FIVER, I tells ya!

And it is HUGE. In fact, if you are heading off to Trent Bridge for the cricket, I STRONGLY recommend that you load up with a Brown Betty's FEB before heading off, to save yourself getting bent over the table for a GBP 6 grotty roast pork roll!

And if you're really lucky, the motherly proprietor of Brown Betty's (I'm guessing her name is Betty but I didn't ask) and her two sons will keep you entertained with their friendly bickering and impromptu singing and dancing to the radio. They told me the Aussie cricketers eat there too, so it must be good, although I didn't see any of them on my two visits. And they were staying around the corner from all reports. (Betty's Boys thought I must have been a fan of Merv Hughes, given my moustache was an obvious homage. Right again.)

So when next in Nottingham, take a short stroll from the main square towards Maid Marian Way along St James Street and tell 'em Kevin sent you.

(They kept calling me "Kevin" as I was wearing my KEVIN 70,000,000,000 t-shirt. I tried explaining, but it didn't really work, so I agreed that Kevin was my name and that 70,000,000,000 was my popularity rating.)

Quick And Dirty Dessert

2009-09-18T08:31:00.003+10:00

Desserts, so far as I'm concerned, serve one major purpose: they are used to bribe small children into eating properly.

Not every dinner needs to have a dessert, no. And most nights, if they're pining for some post-dinner treat, you can either tell 'em that they should have eaten more of their nasi goreng if they're still hungry, or offer 'em a piece of fruit.

But it pays to keep the little bastards off balance, so a repertoire of easy, tasty desserts that you can pull out of your sleeve at short notice is incredibly valuable. Once, maybe twice a week, you listen to the inevitable barrage of complaints about whatever you've put on the table... then you arch an eyebrow, shrug, and say "Oh, well. I suppose you won't be wanting any dessert, either."

Heh. I admit it. I love watching the conflict on their faces at that point.

Anyway, last night was one of those nights. We had another long day of rain and fog, kids trapped indoors. They were pretty well behaved on the whole. We put up some insulation in the shed. There was practice of musical instruments. There was extensive dishwashing and laundry. There was Wii gaming, and reading of books. And come dinner, Elder Son asked about dessert.

Well, I hadn't planned anything. But I did have a few croissants, and some dark cooking chocolate.

The French do this thing they like to call petite pain aux chocolat. The Yanks call it a chocolate-filled croissant. I like to use the nancified French label just to see my kids try to wrap their heads around it. But the truth is that it's so quick and so deadly simple to do that it's almost an embarrassment -- except that it tastes marvellous.

You slit your croissants. You stuff in three or four squares of good dark chocolate. You wrap the pastries in foil to prevent burning, and put 'em in a moderate oven for about five to eight minutes.

When they come out, the croissants are soft and moist, and the chocolate has melted into a divinely gooey mess. It's absolutely fantastic -- and the kids will line up and jump through flaming hoops for it. You could probably get creative, pair it up with some sliced fruit and whipped cream or whatever... but why bother?

Melted chocolate. Warm puff pastry. It doesn't get better than this.

Mission tart

2009-09-16T19:14:00.003+10:00

MISSION - to make a dessert to use the following ingredients. Duck eggs (I have heaps at the moment). Half a tin of caramelised condenced milk that I had left over.

THE PLAN - make a caramel, choc and walnut tart.

As has been mentioned before, I have not the temperement for cakes and desserts. Too half arsed. So I approached this a little scientifically, not what The Wife would call scientifically, I didn't go out and sample a whole bunch of people who have my half arsed approach to measure cooking. No, I read a few different recipes to try and get a feel for the chemistry involved. I then made some of Maggie Beers most fantastic sour cream shortcrust pastry. Then I washed up. The bloody kitchen was a mess from the dinner prep and The Wife gets testy if I leave it ALL for her.

Once it was chilled down, rolled out and in the dish I blind baked it for a bit. Then I tipped in the tin of caramel and scattered the walnuts in and returned it to the oven. Now for the experimental bit. I creamed equal parts of sugar and butter. While that was happening I melted some old dark cooking choclate I had in a cup of milk. I then slowly beat in three duck eggs to the butter/sugar mix, then a tablespoon of corn flour and about half a cup of plain flour. This was followed by the melted chocolate mixture. I was going for that texture that's between a cake and a cheesecake, with the layer of sticky caramel and nuts between that and the crunch and crumble of the shortcrust.

I pulled out the tart base, the caramel had bubbled and spread over the base and slowly poured in the choc mixture. Dropped the heat in the oven and baked for about ten minutes until firm.

Unbloodybeliveable. It came out perfect, just like I had imagined it. I thought all this cake stuff was all perfection and ratios. Maybe I just got lucky but I would have to check, check and check again to achieve that result normally.

MISSION ACOMPLISHED!

MF from the iPhone

Something without numbers

2009-09-08T21:22:00.001+10:00

Girlclumsy had a little rant today on Twitter about News Ltd (evil TM.) and Fairfax both running fairly tabloid headlines regarding women on their websites. The News one dealt with the rise of the "bigger" model and whether this was actually an unhealthy role model as well, the gist of it being "see, she's big I don't need to exercise I can sit on the couch and eat another pie." It lead to a bit of a chat about BMI ( body mass index) and whether it's a useful measurement for what's healthy, compared to using the dress size method of healthiness.

It also allowed me to complain that exercising six days a week and a ten month absitence from hungry jacks ( I gave up on all the other chain takeaways a decade ago, but couldn't kick the HJ habit) had not dropped a ounce of weight off my body. Sure I've changed shape but no weight loss. The Wife looks at me with the moral superiority of a doctorate and tells me that it's my diet. To which I reply, bullshit. You see The Wife is a child of science, tempered in the long, long fire of university and thus she places faith in that witchcraft they call dietetics. I however take a different veiwing of science and in particular the way dieticians peddle their beliefs. (if you ever meet my wife, aak her about the patented apple test for randomization of a sample into two groups.)

Take tonights dinner. Pasta with pesto, feta and mushrooms. If you bought all that from the shop it would differ wildly from the meal we had tonight. Why? Because my meal had no numbers. I made the pasta. I made the pesto. The ingredients were all whole foods with no preservatives or emulsifers or stabilizers. People have been eating whole foods for years but most of the chemicals that replace fat or sugar or increase shelf life have been around a very short time and we really don't know what they'll do to our health in the long term. Yet a dietician would veiw my pasta no differently to a pasta and pesto frozen lean cuisine.

Right.

Another mate of mine reckons I'm not getting enough numbers. He's currently living off fitness supplements and is dropping weight like breadcrumbs in a fairytale with a wicked stepmother.

The Wife might have a small point on my diet though. My dad was passing through on the weekend and being Fathers Day I made him this in honour of his love of sweets. Lime and caramel tart. Only 100g of sugar, but 8 eggs and butter and cream and mmmmmmmmm.

Lantanaland from the iPhone

Ginger Beer Trick

2009-09-04T10:33:00.004+10:00

The Wife has entered me in the Masterchef thingy. Which is cool, despite me despising reality TV in general and having watched about 20 minutes of Masterchef this year in particular. The chance to accelerate my learning in the kitchen and get exposure for the possible commercial future of Lantanaland is not one to pass up for simple snobbery,

The Wife did all the entry forms and they questions they asked and the bit I did watch this year leads me to believe that I would struggle in one key area – accuracy. I mean that in presentation and in recipes that require minute accuracy and attention to detail I just fall over. This is why the beer brewing kit that The Wife bought me has sat there unused for four years, because beer requires accuracy and attention to detail to be any good. It is just chemistry.

This early summer weather though has wakened a desire from the last year of high school. No I’m not chasing anything that moves in a short skirt and knee high socks, but if The Wife wants to dress that way I won’t complain. In the last year of school my mate Motts and I brewed the most fantastic ginger beer you will have ever tasted.

We used the traditional bug method, which as I found works off a different bacteria than a yeast based brew, using lactobacillus cultured from leaving some fruit free of pesticides in water out in the sun for a few days. You then add sugar and ginger every day for a week to create the liquid gold for your flavour base. When we made it in high school we loved experimenting. More lemon, less sugar, opening the bottles half way through brewing and adding a shot of rum, we tried it all. Of course we had the explosions that anyone who brews ginger beer experiences. The last bottle that we left behind was opened by Motts dad, it exploded across the yard behind the bottle top and in true loony tunes fashion he tipped the bottle upside down and a single drop came out. I shudder to think what might have happened to Gladstone’s best surgeon if the bottle had succumbed to the pressure before he knocked the top off.

In keeping to form though, I am going to replace the sugar in the recipe with Lantanaland Gold honey, and will balance that with limes instead of lemons. There is nothing better than a mildly alcoholic ginger beer on a hot day and this bloke even has a few tricks for getting round the exploding bottle problem. Read his tips here and I’ll report back with the results!

Organic Lamb

2009-08-16T12:32:00.002+10:00

Wednesday was show day in Brisbane, but I have to say it wasn't the hardest days work I've ever done. I took a couple of my customers from Silverwood Organics lamb to lunch at an Italian restaurant at southport, the fantastic Fellini.

Silverwood is run by Andrew and Maree King and if I am accused to giving them a bit more time then I'll happily stand guilty. I've only ever talked to them on the phone but over lunch discovered that they have the same practical approach and attitude to food as I do.

In the middle of the drought things were so bad they had to put down most of their existing Merino stock. The wholesalers were offering to take the sheep at no cost, basically because they knew the primary producers were in such a hard place. Determined to break free of this cycle, they went in to Dorper sheep, a hardier, slightly larger breed that drops it's wool rather than having to be shorn. They also bypassed the wholesaler and sold direct to the public online.

I'm a big fan of this, because you can ask questions of the primary producer that your local butcher in most cases won't be able to answer. It's good gear too, evidenced by their blue ribbon at the Royal Brisbane show.

The lunch went down fantastically well. I've been mining JB for tips for eating out, as I rarely do it and on this he was spot on. I had a crusted rack of lamb, which led to Andrew and Maree striking up a conversation with the owner, which might lead to their lamb making it onto the plates at the restaurant.

So if you live in QLD and you like lamb, check these guys out, because primary producers like these deserve every bit of support we can give.

MF from the iPhone

Beginner's luck

2009-08-02T18:30:00.002+10:00

In keeping with Your Correspondent's theory that cooking is really just experimental science, and with my philosophy that if an experiment's worth doing it's worth doing once, dodgily, and published before anyone asks too many questions, we present a new semi-regular (if not highly irregular) series on the MoFo entitled Beginners' Luck, when unfamiliar dishes will be attempted for the first time and quasi-live-blogged in Almost Sort-Of Real Time so you can watch the disaster unfold before your very eyes.

I've always wanted to have a bash at a paella. As distinct from having a bash at a pinata. Anyway that's a shit joke so I'll move on. Paella is a Spanish rice dish, not too far from a risotto, which originated from the Valencia region which had the key ingredients of (a) nearby ricefields (b) sources of seafood (c) excess cured extract of pig and (d) the intent and willingness to combine the above in the pursuit of Culinary Win. You can make paella out of pretty much anything - other than cardboard or old car tyres, though some Spanish restaurants have presumably tried - but the most familiar form to most folks is the 'mixed' paella of seafood, chicken and pork. This is my shot at it - not necessarily what you should do, but what I did.

Key ingredient: paella rice, specifically known as calasparra or bomba rice, which is a very short grain rice originating from the Valencia region which can absorb three times its own volume in liquid. You'll probably have to go looking for it and it'll cost a bomb, but it's worth it. You could probably try substituting some other form of short grain rice instead, but only if you want to fuck it up.

Key weapon: the paella pan itself, a big fuck-off cast-iron jobbie designed to be fit for purpose. Which you won't have, so substitute any big fuck-off cast-iron pan, whether flat-bottomed or wok-shaped. Or anything big enough to take the volume. The following was attempted using an electric wok. Which limited one's options ref. finishing the bugger off in the oven, but you get that on the big jobs.

Ingredients
As ever, quantities are an estimate, a best guess or just a complete bodge.
500g paella rice (bomba or calasparra)
3 chorizo sausages (~160g) cut into chunks
300g chicken breast fillet, diced
300g bacon pieces - Kiwi bacon is less cured than Aust, any combo of cured oink would do (pork, bacon, pancetta, proscuitto etc)
400g prawns/shrimps, shelled and deveined, preferably precooked
500g (8-10) greenlip mussels in shell, precooked
2 cans whole cherry tomatoes in juice (any canned or fresh tomatoes will do)
1.5-2L liquid - made up (in this case) of:
500mL chicken stock
375mL fish stock
375mL dry white wine (used a NZ sauv blanc)
- plus the various liquid phases of the canned tomatoes, mussels etc
large handful fresh parsley, shopped
1 tbsp crushed garlic (~4 cloves of fresh stuff)
1 tsp crushed chilli (less if cooking for kids)
1 large red onion, chopped
1 each red and yellow capsicum, seeded and chopped into strips
tbsp each of paprika and thyme
2 tsp fresh oregano
100g frozen peas for colour
Vast quantities of GOOD olive oil. Spanish if you want to be picky about it

Battle plan
Panfry onion in decent splash (1/4 cup) olive oil, chilli and garlic until soft.

Add chicken, cook until just no longer pink.

Throw in bacon and chorizo, cook through.

Then likewise with capsicum.

Take this lot out of the pan and set aside. (Not essential, just makes getting the rice underway a bit easier.)

Add more oil (>100mL) and bomba rice. Sautee until rice is coated in oil and translucent.

Then add liquid - fish and chicken stock, white wine, juice from canned tomatoes, liquor from mussels.

Bring to low simmer.

Add meat/onions/capsicum mix, prawns, tomatoes, herbs, peas.

Keep on low heat while rice absorbs liquid. Will take 20-30 mins depending on temp.

Towards end of absorption add mussels and chopped parsley.

Be astonished at how much liquid this stuff can soak up.

Serve with lemon wedges, or if you can't be arsed with that, just whatever's left of the dry white.

Verdict
Pretty bloody decent. Except the dry white, that was a bit arse. Though what do you want for six bucks a bottle on special at New World. Subbed off for something a bit less astringent.

Seems a pretty simple, robust sort of dish. Ingredients regimen could handle quite a bit of buggerising about with, so off you shoot and let me know how you get on.

The Doctor is OUT to sample more of the proceeds.

Same old, same old.

2009-07-28T18:14:00.000+10:00

You know, I can go weeks without cooking anything particurlarly groundbreaking or new. Little variations on lamb cutlets or Flintys wonton soup or lasagne. I mean I cook these things very, very well and they taste good, so what's not to like?

Then I get in a mood like last weekend. It started when I was driving along and was struck with the mood to make marmalade. The mood was infectious, beacause I dropped into the fish wholesaler on Friday and came away with these instead of the three steaks I was going to buy.

I figured I'd whip something up with the smoker, so I cut my fresh pieces off, then lightly cured the fillets in salt, brown sugar, pepper, dill, garlic and ginger. I left it overnight and it extracted a surprising amount of liquid. I then patted them dry and popped them in the smoker for a day.

My plan was to blend the smoked salmon up with a bit of cream cheese and sour cream and lime juice, with a spoon of guacomole on top, to have as pre dinner food with drinks in the spa. The results were ok, until we introduced some crackers, then it was nibbles heaven.

It was a bit of a seafood night. We also had ryanos favourite dill and butter prawns on the BBQ, a bit of squid and some scallops.

The next day I had the salmon paste on those lunch bikkies, with sliced tomato, avacado and worcestershire sauce. Then I had it again and then some more, then just another one. Wish I'd had a bit of fresh chilli.

I have three of these left in the fridge, they were smoked a full 24 hours more and this week I am going to have a bash at making some cream cheese at home to go into my salmon spread. Looks like the mood hasn't left me yet.

The cold smoker is quickly turning into the best food project I've ever done.

MF from the iPhone

Marrrrrmalade.

2009-07-25T22:04:00.001+10:00

We have all these glass jars. I asked for donations when we got the bees and they've just kept something. There is something in my personality that says if we say "enough", we'll never get them again, so I keep taking them. Besides, they are useful things to have, in case you are driving along and have a random and sudden desire to make marmalade.

I think it was because the last marmalade I bought was a bland, consistent, boring mass. That not to say I am gaurenteed to do better because jam, like cakes, needs a degree of measurement and I missed that gene when I was born.

So I juiced 3kg of oranges, two limes and five or so red grapefruit. I chopped up half the orange peels and the limes and grapefruit. I also added a thumbs full of ginger chopped finely.

To that I added about a litre of water and boiled for two hours. The rinds were chopped very unevenly but I was unsure whether it would turn out at all so I wasn't worried overly.

Once the rinds were nicely soft I added two kg of sugar and 25g of jam setta as I have no ability at all to naturally set jam.

The results are fantastic, a beautiful taste with varied textures from the rough chopped pith.

Bring on breakfast!

MF from the iPhone

More money shots

2009-07-22T12:43:00.018+10:00

Recently one of my favorite Melbourne restaurants featured in Anthony Boudain's food show in the USA - the deadly Dainty Sichuan apparently made one of its heated appearances. It also had a sign up on the front door recently announcing that it will be moving from the CBD to the more 'well-to-do' suburb of South Yarra. So here are some images from this den of iniquity and some other Melbourne food shots...

The ever dapper Struggers and Barne's hand and chopsticks at the Dainty Sichuan.

A huge bowl of chillies with some chicken included (actually this is very mild compared to many of their dishes).

The anipasta tray at Florentino's (upstairs) where we went to celebrate Sweet Thang's birthday in style.

The only way to eat tofu - bury it in pork and chilli at Dainty Sichuan.

Some fresh sangers and rolls at GAS in South Melbourne.

Marshmallow Madness

2009-07-19T12:47:00.002+10:00

What the FORK is wrong with you, O manufacturers of marshmallowy goodness? Have you lost your senses? Are you simply deranged, or is there a deeper, more sinister plan at work here?

Um. Wait. Slow down.

Okay.

I quite like vanilla. The flavour is subtle and strong and elegant, and the scent is — well, I knew this woman once... she didn’t wear perfume. Just a dab of vanilla essence on her wrists, and behind her ears. And oh, my: I could have, would have eaten her alive if the opportunity had presented itself.

Vanilla smells good.

Now, coming into this from another angle here: it’s winter. And in Tasmania, at least, winter is worth celebrating, particularly on a dim, dark, dreary day of rain and fog and icy mist. It’s a fine, fine thing in its own right, and it only gets better when you crank up a wood fire and make yourself a dose of deliciously decadent hot chocolate — with real dark chocolate melted into cream and hot milk and brandy, all perfused with cinnamon, with whipped cream on top and shaved chocolate and nutmeg and one, just one, lovely, soft, tasty-sweet gooey marshmallow melting gently amongst the creamy goodness of it all.

A goddam VANILLA marshmallow. Not one of those pink cancerous-looking globs that tastes horribly like eau de toilette. Not — and this is an adamant absolute — one of those piss-yellow hunks of phlegm that smells like something a Barbie doll would shit, if they ever manufactured Shitting Barbie. (Barnes! Are you reading this? You’re a chemist, you bastard. Go into your lab and INVENT A BETTER ARTIFICIAL BANANA FLAVOUR! The one they’ve got tastes and smells like the Nazis won the war and made Ersatz into a mother-humping RELIGION. I’m sure you can do better: I mean, you could hardly do worse without Homeland Security arresting you for the manufacture of WMD, so go for it, baby. If you can create anything that tastes more banana-oid, there’s bound to be a fortune in it.)

So why not just go and buy some vanilla marshmallows? Because I FARKING CAN’T, that’s why. All they sell any more are those packets of stomach-churning Mixed Nasty. You can get packets full of vanilla and tumour-pink. You can get packets of vanilla and tumour and pus-yellow. (I assure you, those are the proper IUPAC names for artificial strawberry and artificial banana.) You can even get packets of vanilla and tumour and pus and Bile-Vomit Orange (which is meant to be some kind of artificial orange flavour, I think. But you really, really don’t want to know what I think of their efforts at synthesising an orange flavour. How can anything be so completely unlike oranges without actually BEING a combination of axle grease and S-bend?). But you know what you can’t buy around here?

A single goddam packet of plain, wonderful, ordinarily delicious VANILLA GODDAM MARSHMALLOWS!

Can’t you just eat the white ones and give the coloured crap to the kiddies? I hear you ask.

No. No I can’t. Aside from the fact that I’m constitutionally opposed to poisoning my children even when they’ve been bad, the fact remains that they, too have palates. They won’t eat the marshmallows that taste of tumour, pus and bile. They just look at me with their big, tear-filled eyes and beg: not the coloured ones, dad! Please, no! Anything but the coloured ones. (Anyone overhearing the conversation would swear they were little KKK Dragons in the making.) Even the Mau-Mau, who will eat or wear almost ANYTHING that is vaguely pink in colour, spits out those tumorous globules with a look of venomous hatred.

Worse: vanilla is, as I said, a subtle and lovely thing. Artificial strawb, banana and orange — these things are not at all subtle. They are pungent. They are penetrating. They are hideously putrescent. The poor little vanilla bastards, left in a sealed packet with all that creeping, Lovecraftian evil, become... contaminated. Unclean. Vile! They become zombie marshmallows, doomed to reek eternally of the unholy chemistry with which they have been imprisoned. Eating them is like eating all those other version of nasty at once: disgusting beyond my meagre powers of description.

Of course, I can make marshmallow. It’s easy: bit of gelatine, bit of sugar, bit of vanilla, some water, maybe some powdered sugar and cornstarch, and off you go. Thing is, even though it’s easy, it takes time. And it’s sticky, and messy, and the cleanup sucks. And I don’t want to have to manufacture a half-kilo of marshmallow every time I want a cup of hot chocolate — but every time I do make real marshmallow, there’s no hope of saving it because my poor marshmallow-deprived children hoover it up and scream for more.

The situation is intolerable, I tell you. Something MUST be done. Bring back the good old days: practice Marshmallow Apartheid once more!

Mister Flinthart’s Unspeakably Decadent Hot Chocolate:

This recipe makes enough for two, because it’s too hard to combine all these ingredients in one small serving. Beware: contains calories.

Three cups whole milk. (There is no place for low-fat, skim, soy, or any other such bullshit in hot chocolate. If you imagine for an instant you can do this recipe with any of that watery crap, go and hit yourself over the head with one of those giant-size souvenir blocks of Toblerone until you recover your senses.)
One cup whole cream: half to help with melting the chocolate, half for whipping.
One pinhead-size drop of purest cinnamon oil
One teaspoon of vanilla-seed gel, or one vanilla pod.
One dessertspoon brown sugar
One half cup of decent brandy
Whole nutmeg for grating
100gm dark chocolate for melting
50 gm or so dark chocolate for grating
One plain VANILLA marshmallow.

1) Divide the cream into two parts. In a small clean saucepan or double boiler, put half the cream along with your melting chocolate, properly smashed up. Put them over a low heat, and turn to the next task

2) Whip the other half the cream with some brown sugar, and half a teaspoon of vanilla gel. (Or the seeds, scraped from the vanilla pod. And save the pod.)

3) In another saucepan, gently warm your milk and brandy, and add your tiny drop of cinnamon oil. Plus the rest of your vanilla gel. Or the vanilla pod, if you’re doing it that way.

Now: when the chocolate has started to melt in the cream, stir the stuff until all the chocolate is combined with the cream to make a rich, dark chocolate ganache. Keep it over a low heat — NOT TO BOIL! — until the milk and brandy have reached your optimum drinking temperature. Gently pour the ganache into the hot milk, whisking all the while. As soon as the mixture is an even colour and texture, decant it into your drinking mugs.

Put a marshmallow into each mug, and top with a dollop of whipped cream. Grate chocolate and nutmeg over the top. Drink. Exclaim over the wondrousness of a universe in which such diverse substances can come together into a marriage of elements surely fore-ordained by some kind of beneficient uber-chef on high -- a sort of Celestial Jamie Oliver sans appalling Cockney accent, or maybe a Heavenly Nigella, except with better hooters and the ability to remain very, very quiet when not in use...

Notes:
Can’t get cinnamon oil? Meh. You should. One tiny drop will perfuse the entire creation with cinnamonly glory. But if you can’t then just... I dunno... sprinkle cinnamon powder over the top, with the nutmeg and the chocolate. Don’t bother putting cinnamon quills in the milk while you warm it up — the milk won’t get hot enough, and the quills won’t be there long enough.
Can’t get vanilla gel? Don’t care to spend the bucks on a vanilla pod? Yeah, okay. Substitute a little vanilla extract, then. But use the alcoholic kind. The other kind sucks.
Not chocolatey enough? Okay, fine. Increase the amount of dark chocolate you melt with the cream. But it’ll take a bit longer to melt, so be careful with your timing. You really don’t want to boil the hot milk/brandy mix.

Bacon is smallholder heaven

2009-07-18T17:08:00.001+10:00

Out of all the food projects I've done at Lantanaland, for pure pleasure, you can't beat the satisfaction of home cured and smoked bacon. It is the slow process that the bacon demands that gives me such a thrill.

Like all my cooking it's never been done the same way twice, but here are the consistent bits. Into some salt I mix brown sugar and a pile of herbs and spices banged in a mortar and pestle, juniper, bay, fresh rosemary, Tasmanian pepper, fennel seeds, whatever takes me at the time. The spice blend/sugar is mixed about one to five with the salt, then rubbed into the pork belly. This then goes in the fridge for ten days, with more salt being rubbed in and the liquid drained off every couple of days.

The next step is firing up the cold smoker. This time I am using woodchip from work but any sawdust free of chemicals will do. The first time I used the woodchip I bought from the tree contracters who pushed back the trees from the road and mulched it. I'm also going to try and get some sawdust from a mill that does ironbark trees.

The bacon gets smoked for four days relatively non stop. I fill it up before work and then when I get home. The cold smoking gives it a much stronger, dryer flavour, unlike any bacon you could buy. After the smoking it goes in the fridge for a few days before I take it to a freindly butcher, slice it and cryovac it.

This gives me a good supply of an ingredient that will change any recipe that has bacon in it to a class above. Quiche, filos and especially breakfast will never be the same.

All in all it's about a 18 day process and you get more than amply rewarded for time put in. The only way better is to raise your own pigs.

Wanna sell me a pig?

MF from the iPhone

Drug Paraphenalia

2009-07-07T17:23:00.002+10:00

One of the things which tea drinkers get to enjoy but which us bean addicts miss out on is all of the paraphenalia and ritual associated with drinking tea properly. There is the tea pot, the strainer, the extra hot water etc etc. Admittedly there is none of that if you are the sort of person who likes their tea in a bag, but when you drink it while out and about there is usually some sort of extra equipment required in order to just drink the stuff. It is probably just to make you feel better for paying three or four bucks for something which you could brew yourself for two cents a teabag...

For us coffee drinkers there is none of that hoopla - you order your flat white and it comes out in a cup and if you are lucky you add sugar - no longer no we have paraphenalia of our own...

I recently read about the supposed phenomenon of Siphon Coffee in the local rag and lo and behold what do I find the next week at a new spot we were trying out for brekkie - but the very equipment on offer. Of course being a long-addict of the bean I had to try it out for myself.

The result was described by the 'barrista' as nutty, honey smoked blah blah blah...

Overall it was an okay cuppa - missing some of the bitterness of expresso and definitely an improvement on that awful stuff that comes from those machines in offices and American cafes.

However I am still ambivalent about whether it is worth all of the time and effort of a small scientific experiment....

Mullet II

2009-07-01T12:15:00.001+10:00

I had the mullet frames from the filleting the other day, the chooks, cats and ducks got the guts, but always hesitant to waste stuff, I made a Flinthart inspired Asian fish stock.

Last night I fried off a teaspoon of cumin and fennel seeds in oil, then sweated off a diced carrot and onion. I added all the fresh tomatoes I had in the growbed, plus a tin of diced tomatoes, filled up the pot with the stock and gently simmered.

The way Flinthart does that stock really makes a soup like this and it was a beautiful, light, tasty soup. It was not as fish flavored as I expected either.

Leftovers at it's best.

Hook em and cook em from the iPhone

Mullet

2009-06-28T18:18:00.001+10:00

Went away to the Sunshine Coast for the weekend and ran into a bit of good luck. The Wife and her mate went for a walk and saw some guys fishing for mullet. While I'm unsure of the sustainability of dragging for mullet, five fresh mullet for five bucks is hard to pass up.

I scaled and filleted them, then dropped them in a marinade of soy, lime, oil, zest, chilli and brown sugar, then grilled them on the BBQ. Tasted bloody fantastic. You just can't beat having a line straight to the guy getting it off the land or sea. Knowing someone like Squire Bedak for a cow or even just a neighbour who gives you a few eggs, well that's ten times better than knowing your bank managers name.

Mother Foccacia from the iPhone

Very important news

2009-06-22T21:30:00.002+10:00

Those of you who haven't seen the most important food news of the year, go here, now

The Best Meal Ever (warning, contains vegetables)

2009-06-19T18:21:00.003+10:00

JB started a nice freindly rant on his Blunt Instrument blog the other day about vege's, which was continued on Twitter. Much disparaging comment was made, including a paritucarly harsh comment was made about asparagus. Being a man of principals, I had to interject. Excuse me sir, I tweeted, but my best ever meal contained asparagus.
Well.
My parantage was called into question. It was suggested that I perhaps had been let out of the asylum a touch early or that my blood alchohol levels were too low or too high. I forget which.

The fact remains and there is a simple explanation for it. You see asparagus, unlike a good bottle of red, does not like being stored. In fact the ideal time for transporting asparagus is the time it takes to walk from your asparagus patch to the frypan or saucepan full of boiling water. Any longer and it turns into a different vegetable. Asparagus, like corn, starts packed with natural sugars, but the minute it's picked, those sugars start converting to starch. Nasty floury starch, which is why most asparagus you buy tastes like cardboard flavoured with cats urine.

So to the recipe. What I did see, is dreaming of a future Lantanaland I was reading a lot of permaculture, cooking and gardening books in anticipation and desire. Asparagus takes about three years to really start producing and I saw a bedragled seedling at a nursery and bought it and potted it up. Every time I passed that pot I thought of what sort of place I'd like to make it's permanent home. (10 acres of Lantana was never envisioned, but there you go.) After two years in the spring I got a crop of about ten usable spears. I wandered up the back and got four eggs from the Chooks. I put on a pot of water for poaching eggs and made up a hollandaise sauce. I melted some butter in a pan. I went an picked my aspargus spears and while they were gently frying in the butter I poached my eggs. Aspargus spears, poached egg on top, bit of hollandaise on the side.

My god, the TASTE! Sweeter than an fresh snowpea. Un-belive-able. Since that day the plants have been found a permenant home near the kitchen and this year I should get my first real crop. I tell you, spring is a good time to drop in on Lantanaland.

Mother Foccacia from the iPhone

Good gravy

2009-06-18T11:00:00.004+10:00

I don't know how you guys all feel about this silly looking guy who appears on the television all the time, but I have to admit that his recipes in his last two books have actually been bloody good. The Jamie Oliver at Home one is full of some great feeds and may also have some appeal to our more rural members such as Flinthart, Squire Bedak and Ms Hughes with it's romanticised look at rural rustic cookery and the Ministry of Food is just chockers with good old fashioned nosh up meals.

The weather down here in sunny Melbourne is partuicularly cold and crappy at the moment and lends itself to the old Sunday roast so on Sunday I tried my hand at this gravy recipe from the latest book, which had taken my imagination.

It was truly awesome - I can't stand the old tinned gravy powder stuff and always make a gooey hash of it when I try to make it the traditional way. What you do for this recipe is add an extra layer of veges underneath the roast as a 'trivet' and then after you have cooked the meat, put it aside to rest, take out the veges you want to include in your meal (I actually cooked them seperately) and then mash the hell out of the ones that have been sitting right underneath the meat - in my case that was a lot of old garlic, onions and a couple of taters. Add flour, mix in some wine and put over the heat - you then add some stock and cook until it all thickens up. Stain the liquid through a strainer and hey presto you have the most awesome gravy ever...

It ain't rocket science as they say - although you do end up with some mushy mess to chuck in the compost.

If you want a truly amazing roast meal try this recipe as well - although you need a good oven and lots of time...

Kitchen Kit

2009-06-13T10:40:00.008+10:00

When we were looking at houses two years ago, we had an upgraded version of our share housing checklist. The share house was a simple list, must have a deck (The Wife) and must have a gas stove (me). They were the deal breakers. We once moved in with two likely lads that brought their own, a wooden toilet seat and a tin roof for listening to Brisbane's summer storms. Since i'd been cooking in the worlds smallest kitchen, with a dodgy oven to boot, I started a new checklist, one of large expansive kitchens with bench space and pantries and ...... Alas not to be.

I managed to move into a house with an even smaller kitchen and a electric oven. Damn. Considering the trade off, 10 acres of land, fantastic view, I'm not that unhappy, especially as a realization dawned on me. "this kitchen has no redeemable features, its small, uneven, the sink is the wrong size, no bench space, no storage space and if it was a ships galley in the 1700's the cook would have led a mutiny." But that means that it gives me a perfect excuse to tear it down and start again, which has led to many a daydream, what would my perfect kitchen have, given no financial or guilt constraints?

The Bench - I do a lot of pasta and pizza, so half the bench tops would be marble or stainless for kneading and rolling those brilliant floury creations. The other half would be end grain hardwood timber, something that i could use as one giant chopping board. I already have a home made butchers block that is similar, you can see it in the pasta clip and it is the best thing I've ever made.

The Knife - I have ok knives, the best is one i gave to my mate and steal back every time i sharpen it for him, but I'd really like one of these. I've handled one and it's not just pretty looks, the balance and feel is extraordinary.

The Oven - I cant decide between this or an ex commercial oven. This looks pretty sweet, but they are way over priced. With a decent oven though I can teach myself to bake so I'd need a...

Mixer - I know that some people find this a bit wanky, but i love a bit of kit that you can leave out as art instead of having to put away. These Kitchenaid mixers are bloody well built, but check this out, its taking it to the next level.

I've also been looking at some old cream separators on ebay that would fall into that category. Beautiful

The Larder - I'm hoping to start the cheese crusade this year, so a big walk in, earth sheltered larder for storing home made bacon, cheese and prosciutto in.

The Coffee Machine - Got this one, a nespresso, because it pumps out quality, consistent coffee without me having to do a barista course.

Hanging Rack - If possible I'll have as much as i can up top. Its so much easier to get to. A mate of mine a pretty handy with a welder, so it will be a spec job, which will probably end up a tenth of the price of one off the shelf.

I already have my commercial grade pots, a good nonstick frypan would be handy i guess.

The Wife - No, i have a wife and she works quite well, but she wants a dishwasher and microwave. I can concede the dishwasher, but I hate microwaves, but not so much I'd risk the wrath of The Wife. Besides, if I can hide it in some tricked up cupboard, I'll never know its there.

There is heaps i would have forgotten, so toss some ideas in the pot for me, what would you like in your kitchen?

Money shots

2009-06-12T17:11:00.006+10:00

Curry platter at Flora after the Dali exhibition opening...

The tira misou at the Public House in Richmond...

Spag Bob on the boil at Sutton Grange.

Tasty, but fattening.

2009-06-08T08:54:00.004+10:00

In a further addition to the post on just bashing together some ingredients and hoping, here is my dinner from State of Origin night. The pears were slow roasted in a bit of oil and balsamic vinegar and the sauce was a reduction of the marinade, with some lemon juice and butter. The pork was grilled on the bbq to finish.

It came out fantastic, the only change i'd make is to cook the pork slower and longer, but the footy starts at 730pm no matter what, so thats what i could do!

Breakfast of champions

2009-06-04T19:37:00.006+10:00

Dr Yobbo here. I'd like to talk to you today about the art of eating for hangovers. That is, eating to both avoid hangovers, and eating to ameliorate their effects. The former is the reason for the existence of the late-night kebab shop, the less said about which the better. The latter has also spawned its own bespoke foodstuff: the all-day breakfast.

Because as we age, bacon and egg McArses don't cut the hangover mustard (or the grease) quite the way they once did - and because as we age the frequency of our hangovers necessarily lessens, with a concomitant exponential rise in their ferocity - most cafes around and about the place will do you a fairly serviceable breakfast of a weekend even once the sun is well over the yardarm and the Stella taps are a-calling once more. The epitome of which is what could generically be called the Big Breakfast - though usually slapped with a grandiose title specific to the establishment in question - and which generally parallels a high-end version of the traditional, time-honoured Anglo-Celtic morning fry up. Bacon, sausages, eggs of some format to be determined by the recipient, toast, possibly mushrooms, possibly beans, possibly roast tomatoes for some semblance of vegetation, probably hash browns, almost definitely indigestion, and a steaming flat white in the largest serving vessel the joint can provide.

But the problem with the Big Breakfast is this: it's almost always just a little bit shit.

It's always something. Not helped by being, shall we say, usually of limited patience due to certain over-indulgences the eve prior, but it's not just being a grumpy hungover bastard that's causative here. It just seems that what should be the easiest schtick on the menu - a big bloody fry-up - always gets buggered up in some way. Flavourless, powdery beige sausages made from innards and the stuff they make Gyprock out of. Not enough bacon. Ludicrously poncy toasted ovoid crusts of ludicriously poncy southern European breads, far too small to actually scrape any of the gluggy, watery egg onto. Hash browns leaking oil over everything like a starchy scale model of the Exxon Valdez. Not enough bacon. Or, as was the case the morning after the Highlanders/Shihad double bill at the 'Brook earlier in the year, turning a vibrant shade of Munter Green in the fifteen minutes between ordering and receiving one's meal, and being left to watch grimly as sleeting waves of nausea led to an untouched $18 breakfast becoming resolutely cold and inedible in front of one's own yellowed, bloodshot eyes.

Bloody awesome gig though. Ears rang for days. AND we stuffed the Crusaders, sux-nul, in possibly the worst game of rugby ever played.

Anyhoo I digress. Put all that on pause, because the search for the Big Breakfast Of The Ages (or at least of Dunedin's burgeoning cafe scene) is over. End Of. We can declare a winner.

Eggs: free range. Poached, perfectly, just so the white is done and the yolk still soft and malleable.
Toast: generous rounds of grilled ciabatta, crunchy and yet spongy.
Bacon: heaps. Enough to make an impromptu eggs benedict with, courtesy the...
Hollandaise sauce: an interesting variation. Creamy, saffron-yellow, not too bitter, just so.
Beans: absent. Thankfully.
Tomatoes: usually go straight in the skip but these were just right. Not broiled until catastrophic failure, not given the Niki Lauda treatment, just singed lightly.
Sausages: the trump card. No floury beige turds here. Rust-red chorizo, sliced diagonally and grilled. Bloody gorgeous.
Coffee: excellent. Not a 'name' supplier, but roasted well and barista'd very competently.

Finally, the perfect All Day Big Breakfast. So where, I hear you cry, can one find this stunning azimuth of breakfast deliciousness?

I give you the Mega Breakfast. The name's a bit of a giveaway, as much as the location is unlikely - the quasi al fresco cafe parked in a glassed enclosure within Mitre 10 Mega's garden section. Seems it's more than just the weekend sausage sizzles that the big box hardware stores are getting a gastronomic reputation for. After all, where else would you be able to get a big breakfast, a decent flat white AND a 12V Bosch cordless drill for under $140? That, as they say in the classics, is win frosted with more win.

The Doctor is OUT.

Pasta Mk II

2009-06-03T18:24:00.002+10:00

Here is a short vid of me making pasta.....

Thanks to Mr Pollock

That will be 100 bucks thank you very much...

2009-06-02T16:50:00.004+10:00

My sister came to town on the weekend with her designer packaged husband. Now she is an excellent cook and used to own a little inner-city cafe-deli thing in the land of bridges and opera houses. Nowadays she is pretty much a full-time Mum though and an excursion to Melbourne without the kids is an opportunity to have some fun and there is usually a hell of a lot of eating and drinking involved...

They arrived on Friday and hubbie had to go off to some conference dinner or something so Sis met up with Sweet Thang for drinks and then I joined them later for dinner after my own work related drinkies.

So I was slightly sloshed by the time I arrived at the evening's dinner venue which was Fifteen. However that didn't matter because they were even more inebriated. So sitting down with a ravenous hunger we looked at the menu and ordered a range of things including the Steak Florentine (pictured).

Now this is one of those dishes that you see in cooking magazines, television shows and restaurant menus and never really order, but which has been on my mind quite a lot. It should be a huge thick T-bone steak that is covered with an anchovy based paste and then grilled to perfection and is usually served for two people. Apparently the place to order it here in Melbourne is Grossi Florentino Restaurant where it is the house speciality.

At Fifteen it came out and looked pretty impressive (better then the photo makes it look actually) and tasted great, but the price tag was pretty enormous as well. I can only claim that if I had of been thinking straight I wouldn't have ordered a steak that cost 97 dollars in a million years...

Which is probably how long it will take to pay off my credit card after this oppulent weekend.

Free Your Mind

2009-06-01T21:31:00.002+10:00

A good mate of mine, who can cook stuff that matches anything I pump out, stayed with us at Lantanaland last week. It lead to an interesting conversation about something that I cooked for dinner. When pressed on the ingredients and the make up of the dish I gave a vague list and amounts. Kate thought this was a bit strange, she declared that she didn't have the confidence to play with the ingredients.

The thing is, every since I started cooking it hasn't been confidence that has taught me flexibility, it been bloody forgetfulness. Time and time again I forget something that I need and then I have to improvise.

It does free your mind a little and lets you experiment and reach beyond your recipes in your fancy cookbooks. It will have its downside, sometimes things will go horribly wrong and it's not a good habit to get into if you want to bake, where precision is god.

So here is what I had for tonight’s dinner, when I forgot the pine nuts on the way home. It would've probably been nicer with pine nuts, but there you go.

Pasta with pesto

Step 1. Go out the back and measure up your backyard. If you can fit a chook tractor in, go and buy chooks. If not, go down to the farmers market with the highest tree hugger population and befriend someone with chooks. Ducks are even better. Fresh homegrown eggs are the best for this as the flavour of the egg determines the flavour of the pasta. Even free range eggs from the store will be grain fed, whereas your own will feast on scraps as well.

Step 2. Buy a pasta machine. Don't be scared, fresh pasta is the easiest thing to make in the world and even if you buy 50c pasta at the shops this will be cheaper.

Step 3. If you can, hit your local baker up for superfine flour. This will save you lots of money.

Ok

In a bowl crack a few eggs and add a dash of olive oil and a pinch of salt. Start adding flour in and mixing until it forms a dough. Keep adding a bit more flour and knead until it stops sticking to your hands and feels like elastic. Wrap in clingfilm and wack it in the fridge.

In a food processor add a big handful or two of basil, some parsley and chives, toasted pine nuts ( or cashews or macadamias if you forget to buy pine nuts on the way home), zest and juice of one lemon and a small handful of pitted olives. Pulse. Add a big handful of grated parmesan or pecorino. Pulse. Slowly add and pulse olive oil till it looks like pesto.

Put a pot of water on to boil. On your bench put a small pile of flour. Get you pasta ball and cut in half. Flatten and dust with flour. Put through the machine on the biggest setting. Fold in half and put it through again. Fold and put through a third time, then dust the outsides and work your way down the thickness settings. Don't worry that your pasta isn't a nice rectangle. When you get to the second last setting lay your pasta out and dust the top very well with flour. Fold in half and repeat until it's a rough rectangle slightly longer than wide.

Look at the cutter blades and put them in the back of the cupboard, in case you one day feel the need to make spaghetti. Cut the pasta into strips with a sharp knife, not caring about perfect straight pasta, then pick up and shake loosely, they should fall apart. Drop into boiling pot.

Place pesto in bowl and once pasta has cooked for one minute, lift into bowl with tongs. Don't drain it first, you want a little of the pasta water to loosen your pesto.

Toss and eat.

Now this post took longer to write than that did to make. If my mate can get his camera here this week I'll try for some video as well.

Mother Foccacia from the iPhone

Baby Food

2009-05-29T16:54:00.002+10:00

There's about a zillion different opinions as to when baby should cop to his (I'm gonna stick to the masculine. Hell with the progressive PC stuff. I'm tired.) first so-called solid food. I don't care to argue with the medical community on this, so my official formal advice is: consult your doctor or paediatric nutrition specialist, eh?

But informally? You'll know when it's time. The little bastard will be sitting on your lap at the table, and he'll be watching every... single... bite... you... take. Every one, from the plate all the way to your mouth. His beady little eyes won't miss a moment of the action, and if that cutlery gets anywhere near the increasingly wild waving of his stubby little arms, you and he both are gonna wear a forkful of lasagne. Or whatever.

Likewise, there's about a million things that apparently you shouldn't feed baby too early. Take bourbon, for example: who would suspect that an 18-month toddler would be so fast off the goddam mark that between putting your glass on the table in full view of six adults at same table and turning back with the ice in your hand, said toddler could seize the glass and gulp a mansize mouthful? I certainly didn't expect it, and none of the people at the table were actually quick enough to intervene -- not even his mum.

He blinked, and coughed a bit - but luckily, I was drinking Wild Turkey, so he didn't get the full pencil-shavings-and-methylated-spirits effect which makes cheap bourbon such a delightful experience. Anyhow, that's off the track. Point is, apparently kids shouldn't get into gluten too early. And honey's full of allergens. And dairy products can cause all sorts of issues. And so forth.

Once again: consult your paediatric nutrition specialist, okay? This particular item is aimed at achieving two things. First, it will help you produce baby food your child will actually eat and enjoy. Secondly, it will set you on the path to raising a kid who isn't afraid of different foods -- one of these nigh-mythical 'not picky' children who eats fruit and veg and fish and nuts and all the good stuff without blinking an eye, or demanding a free pass to McFoodland in exchange.

From experience, the sooner you can start your kid on eating food that tastes like food, the better. The kids agree with me on this, by the way. You can test this hypothesis for yourself: go buy a jar of baby food -- something involving chicken and corn ought to do -- and present it to the new eater in spoon form. The universal first reaction is a pursing of the lips, followed by a spectacularly wet raspberry which distributes pureed chicken and corn across the scenery. This may or may not be accompanied by wild arm-flapping, but since such arm-flapping is the regular response to any new event, I wouldn't be too concerned.

What has happened is simple: baby has rejected his first solid food. What happens next is vital. Some folk recommend that you spoon a bite into your mouth, smack your lips, and say "ummm!" to encourage the little beast. My personal recommendation? Spoon a bite into your mouth. Screw up your face. Blink once or twice. Turn your head and spit the hideous, tasteless pap violently into the nearest receptacle while coughing violently. Put the lid back on the jar and hurl it into the garbage, swearing never to abuse your child in this fashion again.

That's how it went for me, anyway.

Wanna know something which is apparently a secret? Babies like flavour. No. Really. Baby food manufacturers apparently think otherwise, because though I tried about five different brands and a dozen different flavours during the course of raising my three little creatures past this initial stage, I never found one that actually tasted of anything other than cornstarch and blended rice. (Oh, there was the 'World Traveller' series, which purported to have chunky tandooris, curries, laksas, etc.... several of them had a vague hint of tomato, and once I think I caught a whiff of turmeric, but I may have been mistaken.)

You wanna feed your baby well? Throw away the commercial baby food. The stuff looks like somebody ate it once already, and it tastes like it.

Buy yourself a decent hand-held blender-on-a-stick. Get some ingredients. Go crazy.

You're going to have to obey those health rules, naturally. Plus any other rules you've decided you're going to impose. (Ha. Like they're gonna last. Enjoy your illusions while you got 'em.) And naturally, really strong or spicy flavours are going to distress your baby. But within those parameters, go wild.

Elder Son's first meal was an entire ripe avocado, mashed with a little lemon juice and a little salt. He sputtered at the first mouthful, but that was because he didn't yet have a grip on this 'mastication' process, not because of the flavour. The instant he hooked into that yellowy-green goo, he was like one of those laughing clowns at the show -- the mouth open, the head going from side to side, following the spoon. I used to play 'remote control baby head' games just to make Natalie laugh... cruel, I expect, but damned funny.

Early favourites? Cherry tomatoes. Spring onions. Tinned salmon. Tinned tuna. Mild coconut-curried chicken. Coriander. Rich bolognaise. Roast capsicum. Raw capsicum... in fact, just about anything that Natalie would let me put through a blender went down the kid's neck.

Mostly, you start with a base of rice. Overcook the rice so it's gluggy. In the beginning, I went with about 70% rice, 30% flavoursome ingredient, but that very rapidly dropped away to 50%, and then even lower. By the time Elder Son was a year old, one of our Tasmanian friends used to wait until the boy had finished his evening meal, then snaffle the remainder so he could use it as a sandwich spread. Flavour, folks. It makes a world of difference.

Here's a few recommendations for your blenderfying enjoyment. In all cases, add enough overcooked rice to the mixture to satisfy yourself that the kid's getting his carbs. Otherwise, simply adjust by taste. And remember: if it tastes like bland, boring crap to you, you'll probably wind up wearing it when the kid gets ahold of it.

1) Salmony Happiness: small tin of salmon. Four or five cherry tomatoes. Two spring onions. Four bushy coriander seedling things. Half a teaspoon fresh-ground black pepper. (Yes. I'm not joking.)

2) Chickeny Capsicum Goodness: roast one capsicum, peel the skin. Add a squeeze of lemon juice, a little salt, two or three onions, and a little garlic. Sprinkle a breast of chicken with smoked paprika, salt and pepper. Put maybe half the chicken into the mix. Put the other half on a sandwich, and steal some of the blended capsicum stuff as a spread. You can get really hungry doing this stuff.

3) Fishy Wonderful: small piece of white fish, steamed or grilled. Turmeric powder. Half-cup coconut cream. Squeeze of lime juice. Teaspoon brown sugar. Half a spring onion. Salt to taste.

4) Vegetable Va-voom: Put a little olive oil in a heavy pot. Coarsely chop in a capsicum, four cherry tomatoes, half an onion, a couple of mushrooms, a little garlic, half a zucchini, and some baby fennel. Fry them, stirring, until they're nicely soft. Add a wee bit of salt and some pepper, and maybe just a touch of tomato paste before you blend hell out of the mix with your rice goo.

As you can see, there's really nothing to it. Trust your palate. Play with your favourite ingredients. If you stick to tasty, fresh, healthy items and you don't over-season or over-cook (except for the rice) you can hardly go wrong. And believe me: it's worth every second of the work. Knowing exactly what goes into your kid's food in advance is brilliant -- it saves any amount of time and effort looking up different preservatives and colourings, and wondering whether 'Food Enhancer 666' is monosodium glutamate or just some kind of Satanic prank.

Plus, of course, the look on other people's faces when they taste the food your kid is eating is bloody priceless. Especially when they look back down at their own dinner, and kind of whimper, just a little. I love that.

Creepy crepes?

2009-05-27T12:10:00.002+10:00

This is a poached pear and custard crepe from this little place attached the to GPO centre in the middle of Melbourne. I gave in to the urge to eat something sweet at lunchtime yesterday and the siren call of this crepe lured me into its dark embrace.

I have a friend who claims that she dreams about the crepes from this place and every time she is down from Brisbane we have to go and get one.

There are few meals which I would feel are worth driving a couple of thousand kilometres in a truck for (which is how she gets here) but apparently these crepes are one of them?

My memories of crepes are usually associated with late night visits to the Pancake Parlour in Brisbane when my friend Richard used to work there. They certainly didn't have the allure of this place...

Starting Right

2009-05-27T10:48:00.002+10:00

Been meaning to do this for a while, but I've been kind of busy. As in 'lacking two consecutive minutes to call my own'.

Your man Beeso has assembled a right crew here. I'm downright intimidated by the sheer culinary power of this fully operational death star... I mean food blog. Yeah.

Anyway. I figured I might start at the beginning, myself, and address one of my primary interests, issues, and problems in cooking: my kids. Your kids too, if you have any.

Cooking for kids and feeding kids is a bastard of a job. You can produce the best, most interesting, most nutritionally perfect meal in the world, and the kid will push it around the plate like a large, ugly toad had just died there. And they'll do that even though the love every single individual ingredient of the meal, dammit.

It's as though the act of assembling all those tasty ingredients into 'food' suddenly turns them into Kryptonite for kids. Raw capsicum? Love it. Pickled capsicum? Love it. Roast capsicum? Delish. Capsicum on pizza? Whoa, Dad! Back the fork up there, for a moment, big fella -- I'm not eating that! It's poison!

Anyone ever tells you cooking for food critics is a tough gig, give 'em a knowing smile. Food critics rate you in stars. The better your food, the more stars you get. And sure, getting all three or four or five or however many your local food critic likes to award could be trick. But if your food is basically good and served well, the critic will acknowledge that.

Kids have only two settings: all or nothing. Either it vanishes off the plate, or it's a battle royale to move even a scrap. And I don't think I've ever heard of a food critic who was willing to whine, scream, cry... or stuff peas up his nose in the hopes of being allowed to leave the table.

So. By and large, I'm gonna talk about feeding kids around here. My expertise? Well, I've got three of my own, and they delight in: fresh vegetables of all sorts, all kinds of fruit, fish, squid, pickled octopus, mild curries, Vietnamese food, Thai food, Chinese food, Malay food, sushi, cous-cous, and so forth. The children are eight, six, and three years of age. Their tastes have changed as they've grown, and I expect them to keep changing. I still have my battles with them, but I'm happy to say that on the whole, they'll try 'most anything foodish at least once.

That's the intro, folks. Next time you hear from me, I'm gonna talk baby food. Believe me: that's a thing which needs a whole lot of work.

Best Cheeseburger in Canberra

2009-05-24T16:02:00.016+10:00

A few months ago, a little red caravan appeared without fanfare in Bowen Park, Barton (just Southeast of Kings Avenue Bridge). As I zoomed past on my way home each day I thought at first that gypsies had moved in, but as the little van was lit up with fairy lights each night, I subsequently figured it unlikely to be populated by vagabonds, as in my experience, they tend not to draw attention to themselves with brightly coloured caravans adorned with flashing lights. So recently I plucked up the courage to investigate the strange goings-on on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin and was pleasantly surprised with the best burger I've had in yonks.

This was no flash in the pan, however, as today after a nice stroll around to Reconciliation Place, the Frellmans sampled cheeseburgers and chips from the rather quaintly-named 'Brodburger' van. The Boss Lady and I tried the beefburger with swiss cheese and the mini-Frellmans tried the chips. Now the burger was an old fashioned beef burger that I had long since given up on finding again anywhere other than in a country town milk bar. It came on a beautiful crusty roll that really made it sing in my mouth. Although the beef patty might be one of the best you'll find too (outside of Chez Bedak of course). Nice and meaty. Yum.

The chips were just something else. These were nice thin french fries - nearly as thin as McDonald's chips, but that's where the similarity ended. These puppies were beautifully cooked and seasoned and could be the second best chips I've ever had. (The best were sitting next to a steak I had in Paris about 5 years ago. But that's a long way to go for chips, granted.)

I'll go out on a limb and predict that we are witnessing a Canberra legend in the making. In years to come I predict no trip to Canberra will be complete without a trip to Brodburger, like no trip to Sydney was complete without a trip to Harry's Cafe de Wheels in times past. I also predict that once the journos and pollies discover it, no Wednesday night in parliamentary sitting weeks will be complete without a late night Brodburger binge after a few dozen lagers.

My only complaint is that they seem to struggle with volume. Once more than three or four customers have their orders in they seem to not want to take orders until they get on top of the queue. This can be a little bit of a pain when it's cold outside - it would be far better if you could put your order in and then wait in the warmth of your car while it's cooked, Arnold's style. In fact, if they had a little light-board that they could put order numbers up on when they were ready to be collected, I'm sure most people wouldn't mind waiting in their cars a little while, listening to the radio and watching the moonlight dance on the lake.

Hmm ... makes me wish I hadn't sold the Sandman.

Anyway, try Brodburger- open for lunch and dinner, Tuesday to Saturday. On Sunday they're open for lunch only (but until 4pm for the late starters).

The new "Tomahawk" beef cut

2009-05-23T09:04:00.003+10:00

As the bulge in my trackie-dacks attests, not since I invented a thing called the "Eight-Sided X Steak" have I been as excited about a cut of beef as the new "Tomahawk". Unlike today's batch of rural advertorial types, I don't simply adapt a press release and pass it off as my own work in order to sell the odd quarter-page of advertising space. No. Here at Mother Foccacia you can read every glorious blood-dripped word from the blurb yourself.

22 May 2009

MLA releases the 'Tomahawk' – a cut that hits you right between the ribeye

A new experience in shared eating known as the ‘Tomahawk’ was launched by Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA) this week in Adelaide.

The Tomahawk is one of the largest rib eye steaks in Australia, weighing from 1.3 to 2.5 kilograms, and takes its name from the 30 centimetres of rib bone that is left on the meat while cooking.

According to Bill Lindsay, MLA’s South Australian Business Development Manager - who co-hosted 87 of Adelaide’s finest chefs and food media at the lunch launch - the steak is designed to be brought to the table, then carved and shared between four to six people.

“We hope that chefs will take it up as a piece of theatre and some fun in their restaurants,” Mr Lindsay said.

“Because it is a new concept, consumers should ask their butchers and restaurants to order the special cut. It would make a great conversation piece for a dinner with friends.”

Lachlan Bowtell, MLA’s Marketing Manager – Trade, said it was a case of tackling the current economic climate head on.

“With the Australian foodservice sector experiencing a bit of a downturn due to the global economic crisis we are taking the bull by the horns (or the ribs) and adding some excitement to the beef scene.

“We already have a firm commitment from South Australian several outlets looking to menu the item, along with wholesaler support. We are also talking to a number of processors to get the specification in the boning room changed to accommodate the increased bone length, and so far we have received some real encouragement by two processors in particular.

“So in these times of ‘a selling down’ attitude in foodservice, we have done the opposite with a novelty steak giving the customer what they want – nutritious, delicious beef coupled with a unique experience.”

Puffy Crumpet

2009-05-20T14:10:00.001+10:00

Being a drought-fucked cattle-baron (for at least the rest of this week at any rate), provides one with the chance to explore the insides of many fabulous hotel restaurants. Sometimes, even as a diner rather than a lurker with a knife waiting to slice the fat throats of eco and agri politico types.

Permit me to qualify my remarks from the outset. I'm of the Tism point of view on most things, but most, most decidedly on matters BFW or Big Fucking Whoopee. A great BFW Tism-ism correctly observes,

"When you can sit around on your crapulent crack and lazily whine on about someone else's cooking, then you have reached the very acme of the BFW shitheap."

This observation is very true. But more so for telly than the written word. And neither come close to being there.

The itchy violent projectile vomit of an asparagus roll towards one's hostess, has, once scratched, much more impact than a cutting bitch about a half-a-chef's-hat as determined by some pulseless prick, except Birmo, who still works for the Herald, Age or insert wanna-be ACP magazine. As such wankers usually marry or partner those involved with real professions, so they tend to have the luxury of focusing on style rather than substance. Not that anyone other than the disposable income, sodomy-and-opera set listens to their mayfly flutterings anyhow.

The essence of the Acme of the BFW Shitheap remark is also the universe of difference between the greatness of the late Sam Orr of the late Nation Review and the dickwit Pyney pettiness of A.A.A.Gill. But who or what instructs our unclean ears to hear the pitch of the more pretentious food-fucker, than the occasional wisdom of the cabbie or drunken letch at a bus-stop waiting for a bunch of blonde fifteen year old girls to get off?

We urbane Australians now too easily insist that the uncultured slob is incapable of discernment. The old lunchtime Pie Beer & a Root for $50 has been replaced with working through lunch hours, tweeter-searching masturbate in the hope of some cold vicarious entertainment, and smoked eel california rolls at three bucks per ambphibous morsel delivered by the office christmas beetle.

Paying to gain the information we defer to must also play its part. Studies have been conducted demonstrating that we generally dig the stuff we pay more for. Why? Also, genuflecting to an expertise makes us feel better that as canteen beasts, the cocksuckers describing which beaujalais is best used in a coq au vin has earnt our buck-and-half fair and square.

This is especially true when the information is stolen and the price is paid with goldtoothed rat-cunning.

I am reminded of a secret advertising agency I used to run with a few mates which involved us targeting highly-specialised parts of Sydney CBD to have our conversations overheard. We dressed up to look like our prey and stalked them into lifts, bars and bus-stops. We got people into theatres that would otherwise have been empty and did our bit to get stocks to move this way and that.It was a secret advertising agency I ran in '93 called 'Woman'..which stood for the Word of Mouth Advertising Network, but I digress.

Is my cattle-baron's view of beef any better than the chick flipping burgers at the Gumly Gumly truck stop, or the trucker who lives on burgers? Can having a vagina somehow dictate that secret ability of making the perfect souffle? In a complicated world, yes probably up to a point. Yet when you're eating, the last thing you want to discuss with your mouth full is the food.

Which brings us the long way around to where I wanted to be discussing and recommending something involving the simplest of simplest pleasures.A winter's sunset just after rain? The Collingwood supporter just after losing to Carlton? Eating a mango on packed bus? Nay. I wish to sing the praises of something so simple, that next to kippers or oats it's one's preferred brekky of choice.

As stated, simplicity's the key.

Possibly, my favourite fuck off garcon just bring me what I want brekky by way of a pair of Buttered Crumpets with salt & pepper. The ritzier the resturant, the greater the impact.

It will never be the next jus de jus in a ragout of jus if properly marketed. But that's the bloody point. It's probably little better than army rations, but can somehow rise through the ranks. Salt and pepper crumpets are so genuinely good fare which is so utterly fucken ordinary in its creating, they're unarguably the pinnacle of good taste. Try it. Crumpet with butter. Salt & pepper. Eat. Don't like it? Fuck off. Do like it? Get another. Simple.

Admittedly, this tucker is to the casino buffet brekky what the a guy in a chamois safari suit is to a Gen-Y BMW saleschick handing out out watercress on water-crackers. But could such a 70s deity get a Ronny Coote simply by asking the FTV babe if she's got any Jatz & cheddar?

Probably not if he's interested in paying for anything less than an M5, but I think perhaps optimistically, any pair of undies can be yours for the taking with a Chocolate Paddle Pop dessert provided you're smart enough, rich enough, sincere enough, or all three. An experienced salt and pepper crumpeter could easily pull it off, whereas salmon omelette brekky guy still has elements of try-hardiness no designer stubble could ever overcome.

Unless he already has the new Bentley of course.

Trust me gents. Salt and pepper is to crumpets what the puffy nipples of any hippy chick was to the 1970s bedroom poster. Timeless, near costless, a thing of wonder which can be pondered during the silences in your mind when your accountant starts discussing Family Tax Benefit B with your wife and your mind wanders helplessly.

What was I talking about again? Oh yes. Crumpet. Oh yes. Oh yes.

Pasta alla Yobbo Grande

2009-05-19T19:10:00.001+10:00

I am part wog. In fact, 51.25% Italian* by my maths, which is majority ownership by most measures. Pasta was the first thing I learned to cook properly, and if a clueless pre-pubescent muppet can learn to make decent spag there's no reason you lot of scruff can't either.

Now you'll see a lot of pasta served in a lot of poncy nosheries swathed in complicated creamy sauces and drowning in oil... see, nah. That's not how we roll. Pasta is simplicity. Good ingredients combined correctly is everything Italian cooking is about. Emphasis on good. Almost everything good in Italian cooking is based around good quality olive oil and good quality garlic. Likewise pasta - the Home Brand stuff might be a buck cheaper but the proper Italian stuff is Worth It. Head to your local Italian deli and stock up on the unpronounceable genuine article. Or if you're unlucky enough to live in a Godforsaken Anglophile white-bread backwater like Tamworth, Ballarat or (ahem) New Zealand, wait until Barilla comes on special at Woolies. Fresh pasta is great but not really worth the massive premium over top notch dry stuff in my rarely humble opinion - unless you make it yourself of course.

Breakfast of champions
Bacon and eggs? How about spaghetti carbonara? Forget the cream sauce. Leave that amateur crap to Fasta Pasta. Believe me, this works. Particularly as a hangover cure.
300-500g good pasta - any shape but fettucine or tagliatelle would be my picks
200g bacon, chopped into matchbox slivers
3-4 free range eggs (depending on size), warmed to room temp
heaps of grated parmesan
ground black pepper
1-2 crushed cloves garlic or jar-derived equivalent
splash of olive oil (just enough to dampen the garlic)
Heat the oil and the garlic, fry the bacon until it begins to 'reduce' (i.e. the fat renders and liquifies). Cook the pasta. Beat hell out of the eggs, throw in the parmesan, grind a bunch of black pepper through it. Drain the pasta, then quickly thro the bacon and oil, and the egg and parmesan at it. Stir like buggery. The egg will cook just enough and the cheese will melt just enough to serve as a just-creamy-enough sauce. The single most beautifully conceived concept Italy has produced since Maria Grazia Cucinotta.

Something a bit more complicated
For a basic tomato-based sauce, panfry your new best friends olive oil and garlic with finely chopped onion, then simmer through a can or two of chopped tomatoes. That sounds so simple as to be trivial but I promise you it ain't. You can use that simple sauce as the basis for all manner of death-defying acts of derring-do, or even derring-don't-but-sounded-good-anyway. Such as:

Panfry peeled prawns (or calamari, or even marinara mix) at ludicrous temp in olive oil, garlic and chilli (teaspoon or two each per 300g ocean bounty) - as dry as you can keep it, don't let them stew in excess liquid - then add your pre-simmered tomato base and freshly cooked pasta for astonishingly good garlic chilli prawns. If this doesn't get you laid you are rubbish and should join a monastry, if only for the beer.
Thicken up your sauce with half a jar or more of commercial pasta sauce (Dolmio et al - it's not cheating, honest) for a bit of extra body in a spag-bol-on-steroids - 250g each beef and pork mince, some portabello mushrooms, and a good cupful of drinkable red, preferably something smooth and round like a cab merlot. Remember - and I do mean this - never to cook with wine you wouldn't be prepared to drink. If it tastes of arse in the glass, it'll taste of date on the plate.
Tonight's effort (for those taking notes): 400g premium beef mince, bit of bacon, bit of chopped Milano salami, panfried in olive oil, set aside. Do yer tomato sauce thing - two cans of chopped tomato, rinse can residue out with glass or so of red, use remainder of red to improve own world view. Cook pasta. Throw together. Grate parmesan thereover. Eat. Write about it on internet.
Don't be afeared of playing around with your combinations and your variations. Try adding olives, more chilli and spicy salami for a punchy arrabiata style sauce. Or more tomato and roughly torn-up fresh basil. Or Romano cheese grated into the simmering sauce to smooth out the sharp tomatoey edges. Just don't try on everything you've bought at once, like the culinary equivalent of a Double Bay trophy wife.

Good luck with it, and as the Italians say... [makes series of obscure and possibly obscene thrusting gestures before being led away by La Polizia]

The Doctor is OUT.

*There was a Swiss-Italian great-great-grandsomething somewhere on the old man's side. Apparently.

Consider the Oyster

2009-05-16T18:07:00.002+10:00

Sorry I've been remiss guys - flat out. But I thought I'd send you to a site I love - How to shuck an Oyster is by Australian fiction authorine Charlotte Wood (who is totally brilliant BTW). There's plenty to trawl through there.

Off you go then! Click Click.

My kind of Drive In Food

2009-05-15T17:07:00.001+10:00

Off to a double header at the drive in tonight, Star Trek, followed by Wolverine. This lets me indulge in one of my favourite picnic style treats. It's a Jamie Oliver classic and I'll pull a variation out whenever I get the chance.

Chicken in Bread

One whole free range chicken
Lemon
Salt and pepper
Some type of woody herbs, thyme or rosemary
Plain flour
Olive oil
Garlic

In a bowl place the flour, chopped herbs, dash of oil, zest of one lemon and salt and pepper. Add water until you have a pizza dough consistency. You can pretty much put whatever seasonings you like in the dough. Roll out to about 2cm thick. Prick the lemon and place in the chook cavity. Wet the edges of the dough, then wrap the chook up in it so it's sealed. Bake for 2 hours or so depending on the size of the chook at 180 degrees.

This will stay hot for up to about four hours out of the oven. To eat, just tear off some of the bread crust and a bit of chook, add some salsa and sour cream and eat. It'll be the softest, most scented chook you'll ever eat. Crack it open in the middle of a picnic miles from the nearest oven for maximum credibility.

Mother Foccacia from the iPhone

Corned beef

2009-05-13T19:30:00.001+10:00

If you know of a good butcher that does Wagyu Beef, ask them to try getting in some wagyu silversides for corn beef. I love this stuff, the slow gentle cooking renders that lovely marbling into the meat to give you the most delicous piece of comfort food you've ever had.

Wednesday night is footy night and I'm looking for food that The Wife and I can eat at seperate times, as I can't eat before playing. So stuff like stew and lasagna are the go on Wednesdays.

I had a butcher who I was getting this king of corned meat off, but I got the shits with him and had been looking round for another supply, but today down The Tweed, Jack Spratt Butchers were doing that and some other pork goodies that I'll write about later.

So what I do is very, very complicated. I bring my dream pot, a type of slow cooker used by campers, to the boil with the water just covering the corned meat, once boiling whack in the carrots, new potatos and onions or sweet potato or whatever veg you want. The dream pot then keeps it at just below boiling for up to four hours if I can get in early enough.

Just before I serve it out I make a white sauce, but instead of milk I use the water from corned meat and teaspoon of hot english mustard and big dollop of sour cream.

For such a simple meal this is one of the best payoffs I can imagine. The last tip is to let the meat cool in the water for the best cold meat the next day.

I love this dish and especially as Lantanaland is getting down to temperatures like a Tasmanian summer, this is a great autumn dish.

Lantanaland from the iPhone

Why blokes should cook

2009-05-11T21:40:00.001+10:00

Thanks heaps to Beeso for the invitation to contribute.

Anyway I've never really understood the mentality that girls should cook and guys shouldn't. Cooking's at heart an experimental science, and men, history tells us, make fairly decent scientists - whether because of the global patriarchal conspiracy keeping Tha Sistahood out of the lab-coated higher-ups, or just because we fullahs tend to be more into busting stuff up to see how it works, having a fiddle about to see if we can improve it, then hiding all the leftover broken bits under the couch and pretending we didn't break it in the first place.

And that's cooking (sort of) - the combining of stuff in some sort of quasi-random order until it starts tasting less rubbish than previously, as determined by the grown-ups involved. This was the general philosophy passed down to me by my old man, who took over the family kitchen after he'd packed in teaching. He married a second-gen Italian girl but after years of trial and error cooked better Italian than most of his in-laws, largely based on a plan of throwing unfeasible amounts of garlic and olive oil at any problem he came across. Following on from this, I have adopted, adapted and improved upon his methodology in my own way.

Tonight's recipe from the Australasian Yobbo's Weekly Test Kitchen: hoisin pork chops. Which go a little bit like this.

Pork loin or forequarter chops, 3-4, > half inch thick, keep the rind on (you're a man dammit.)
Marinade/glaze - combine the following in Some Sort Of Order. This is for you to figure out by your own volition, but ballpark proportions:
4 tbsp hoisin sauce (any brand of supermarket hoisin sauce but the Asian-sounding stuff's best)
2 tbsp plum sauce - if you don't have any, substitute something else fruity and sugary - even orange marmalade can work (tested this evening, worked surprisingly well)
2 tbsp sweet chilli sauce (brands as per hoisin comments above)
Splash of sherry - decent Spanish stuff if you can get it, domestic OK, just not Golden Gate Cooking Sherry as preferred by your seediest mate at high school parties back in the day. The sherry is there to add flavour and sweetness but also to help penetrate the meat (ooh err Matron.)
Splash of lime juice - unless you're Uamada - or soy sauce depending on whether you want it saltier or sweeter - or sesame oil or anything you fancy really
1 tsp ea of crushed ginger and garlic - out of a jar is fine
1-2 beers - for marinating the chef

Glaze the meat repeatedly with the marinade - that is get a brush and smear the stuff all over it. (Hence don't make it too watery or it won't stick.) If no brush just dole it on with a spoon and smear it over. Make sure you get that stuff all over the rind because what you want to do is crispify and reduce the rind - could even take a bit of the marinade, mix in some salt and put this direct on the marinade to get that crunchy pork crackling effect. Salt draws moisture out and will help 'reduce' the fat of the rind.
Preheat your grill. This can be anything from a BBQ grill to the grill in your oven, depending on what you have. If the latter, >200 deg Celsius preferable. Not Fahrenheit. Celsius.
Grill the bastard, checking semi-frequently to top up the glaze as it burns. You want it to burn, a bit anyway. It's full of sugar so it'll caramelise and blacken up nicely without burning the meat under it - this is a bit delicate ref. timing so don't bugger off and check the cricket score while this is going on, keep an eye on it and take the batteries out of the smoke alarms otherwise the bleeping will incite you to violence. Once the glaze is blackened, flip and repeat process for the other side. Don't over-do it obviously. Noone likes dried out, overcooked, nasty old pork. Well, maybe Hef's girlfriends.
Serve with Something Asian. Zhang Ziyi preferably. Mmmm. If not available at your local supermarket, steamed Asian greens, stirfried bok choy in oyster sauce, or even instant fried rice out of a packet will do if you can't be arsed with anything complicated.
Put the batteries back in the smoke alarms.
Eat.
Steal the rind off your girl's plate cos it's the best bit.
Let her take you to bed to reward you for being so fricken awesome etc.

To conclude on my original point, cooking combines all the things we as blokes pride ourselves on being good at. It's a creative process, it's experimental, it rewards ingenuity, bravery and inventiveness, it involves the burning of meat on a heat source, and it's a bloody good excuse for drinking beer. And besides, the ladies dig a good chef. And if, like Your Correspondent, you have a head like a smacked arse, you need all the assistance you can muster.

Baking, though... baking's for chicks. Definitely.

The Doctor is OUT.

Eat you heart out, Ian "Beefy" Botham...

2009-05-10T07:35:00.008+10:00

I have just arrived home to chilly Queanbeyan, from God's country (Queensland), where I spent Saturday wandering around in a t-shirt and shorts. While I had some great ribs on the Gold Coast at an early mother's day celebration, the gastronomic highlight of the week was undoubtedly a carpet bag steak I had in Rockhampton on Thursday night. More on that soon.

Yes, your intrepid sausage correspondent was in Rockhampton this week doing some research that just happened to coincide with Beef Australia 2009 - or "Beefweek" to the locals. Beefweek is one humdinger of a trade fair. It only happens every two or three years and it leaves other regional fairs I've seen, like the Henty Field Day or Kalgoorlie's Diggers and Dealers, for dead.

Why?

Because you can't eat dirt and/or gold.

Yes, it's all about the meat. And not just any meat. But the king of meats. Beef.

Am I wrong, Mr Bedak?

Imagine, 50,000 or so like-minded foodies, committed to producing the best beef they can, crammed into a town of 70,000 people for a week. Now slap on a few thousand Akubras and enough RM Williams to shoe an army and you're getting close.

As for the steak? Well, it was a rib fillet taken from a Laglan Pastoral Co. Brahman, stuffed with half a dozen fat Pacific oysters, drizzled with a red wine jus and served with vegies and mashed tatties at the Great Western Hotel. What an absolute cracker of a steak. I just had to wave my knife in its general direction and a slab of gelatinous goodness would fall away faster than a Treasury Department revenue forecast. Sure the vegies were a bit on the overcooked side, and the mash was a little lumpy, but let's face it, the vegetable items were there either for decoration or to assuage the Catholic guilt that comes from eating 400g of pure ecstasy-inducing, buttery, beefy goo.

So when next in Rocky, I can't commend to you strongly enough to get along to the Great Western, where you should order the biggest steak you can find. You can't miss it. It's the big pub on Stanley St that has an indoor rodeo arena attached for your viewing pleasure. Next time, I'm sampling the place on a Friday, to see the bullriders in action... that's what I call an interesting take on "paddock to plate".

Welcome, Welcome

2009-05-09T15:04:00.002+10:00

Those that know me even a little bit know that I am obsessed with food. However through correspondence with Mr Flinthart in the last few months my culinary palate has expanded considerably.

Thats the thing about food, it needs that interaction, that spark from other like minded people. So here you'll find a loose group of people who are interested in food, how to grow it, cook it, eat it, kill it and find it.

Those refugees from JSpace will recognise some of the names here. Flinthart, Bedak, Abe Frellmen, GuruBob and Hughesy. But there will be others dropping through as well, starting with my mate Mr Bailey.

There is an open invitation here, if you love food, bookmark us, come visit and comment, to keep that food spark kicking along