A Sunday Cook-in

Hello Possums. We ran out of bread today. It was too hot to bother leaving the house so we made bread instead. Kathleen likes to make bread rolls in the shape of snails and Sally’s bread rolls are made as round faces with extra bits of dough to make the smiling features of the face.  I made a loaf much to the children’s surprise. I don’t think I have made a loaf of bread within their living memory. My loaf tin has been sitting unused for as long as we have been living in our current house (which is eight years). I took the loaf out of the oven and began cutting it while it was warm. The smell lured the children back to the kitchen. “Hey, that’s the best thing since sliced bread”, Kathleen quipped as she entered the room. She stood at the bench watching and smelling as fluffy warm pieces of bread fell away onto the cutting board. “Wow, that looks vaugely edible!”, she remarked with genuine surprise. 

Stirring Risotto

Hello Possums. Being back with the program has multiple benefits. I now have the head space to contemplate hosting dinner parties again. I started with a small one. There was a lot of work to do. We don’t have a separate dining room. We have one large room, elevated on our sloping block, with floor-to-ceiling windows at one end overlooking the Yarra River. The kitchen is in a corner of this room separated by an L-shaped bench. Along the wall diagonally opposite the kitchen is our ten-seater table made of a big slab of red gum. It is at this table that we eat family meals and entertain guests. Opposite this, on the other side of the big space are two large brown leather couches and a coffee table. I often read at these couches because it is a light spot, I enjoy the view out of the windows and it is quiet. The TV is in another part of the house.  I refused to have the TV in the same room that I spend most of my time.  When the TV is on it distracts me from my thoughts. I prefer to have peace or listen to music.  Chapter by chapter I have read Harry Potter and the complete Deltora Series to my children sitting on these couches. Much of our family living is done in this room too. Homework is done at the table, craft is done at the bench, toys are played with on the coffee table and couches. Consequently, prior to hosting the dinner party the room was a shambles: books and papers in piles on the table; pokemon figurines all over the couches; window art on the bench; notices from school all over the bench too, etc, etc. The kitchen needed a bit of a clean as well. However, I was in a good mood. I hadn’t hosted a dinner party for at least a year (well, maybe eight months). I was relaxed and in the mood for cooking. I turned my ipod on and took my time. I tidied and cleaned and completed the scene with some yellow snap dragons. Earlier that day at our local butcher I had purchased a boned leg of lamb marinated in lemon and herbs. It had been a coolish day. I felt as though I hadn’t warmed up properly all day. This often happens in summer. We get out of practise of needing a jumper. In the butcher’s I noticed the smoked trout and remembered a lovely dill and trout risotto I used to often cook for dinner parties. Risotto to me is a warming comfort food. I almost regretted ordering the lamb when it occurred to me that I could cook a plain risotto to accompany it. I felt inspired. Our holiday to Tuscany came back to me. I purchased crusty bread and fresh salad greens. Back in my kitchen I hoped that I still had some arborio rice. I found a packet of Italian rice given to me by my friends we travelled with. Whilst the leg of lamb roasted in the oven, I invented my risotto. I was surprised to find I was out of brown onions. Luckily there was one red one. I fried it up with some extra virgin olive oil and added the rice. Next a quarter of a cup of unwooded chardonay. I sipped on the rest of the glass of chardonay whilst I stirred. I added the stock cup by cup, stirring all the while. One of my friends, Harry, used to always cook risotto at dinner parties he hosted. I often think of him whilst I’m stirring. He said it is the stirring that releases the glutin to give the risotto a creamy texture.  He usually cooked risotto with porchini mushrooms. I hadn’t decided exactly what I would do but deliberated over this whilst stirring. I decided not to add the cherry tomatoes or olives I had because I wanted the kids to eat it. It didn’t need to be terribly extravagant because it was accompanying the lamb rather than being the main deal. I added some basil pesto and a spoon of roasted eggplant paste, tasted it, added a pinch of salt, tasted it again. It tasted good, but was missing excitement. I grated a decent handful of fresh Australian parmesan and little lemon rind, stirred these flavours in and tasted it again. Perfect! The good thing about risotto is a large batch takes no extra time. I can cook enough to ensure a quantity of left overs. I ate it for lunch the following day. Without the lamb the subtle flavours were more easily discernable. The hint of lemon was magic. The Italian rice had perfectly held its texture. … In writing this post I have been reminded of not only the dinner parties my friend Harry has hosted, but also the times I have tried to match-make him with my single friends. Each time was a disaster in completely different ways, but equally hilarious in hind sight.  I promise to fill you in later.

In the kitchen

I have been challenged to cook entrees for fifty people at tonight’s progressive dinner at the yacht club. I went into the club at one o’clock today in order to prepare the ingredients for my noodle salad served with chili seared chicken breast before hand. After four and a half hours I am happy to report that all is going to plan. On the way to the kitchen I stopped at the local supermarket where I was relieved to find fresh bean shoots and some fresh chilies, which weren’t there the other day. In the kitchen I found two sturdy pans to cook the chicken in,

 

a massive pot in which to cook the noodles

 

  

and posed for a cheesy self-timer shot (to show off my new hair colour, which is not really necessary to this story – the lighter tips are just noticeable). 

  

My daughters helped me prepare the salad ingredients. Here they are making carrot ribbons (difficult to catch them being serious in photographs). 

Our view across the dining room and out over the balcony was magnificent. Conditions for sailing were great. Unfortunately this was not relevant for us today. We were busy in the kitchen.

We have come home for a rest and a swim in the sea. All I need to do before heading back to the club is to make up a little more dressing.  In an hour or so we will go back to assemble the prepared ingredients for serving.  I’ll be back in the kitchen and the girls will act as waitresses. They are choosing matching outfits to wear as I write. Oh and I almost forgot. I need to pick an outfit. Women have to wear a splash of red tonight. (I don’t know why).

The trial run

 

Well Possums, I have decided to make the noodle salad with chicken instead of kangaroo as entree for the yacht club progressive dinner tomorrow night. I found out that the main for the progressive dinner was barbecued lamb and decided kangaroo followed by lamb was too heavy. For my trial run (above), I cooked the chicken breast in a hot pan with olive oil, soy sauce and sliced chili, sliced it diagonally and placed it on top of the noodle salad. Its hard to see from the photo, but I have garnished it with fried shallots and crushed peanuts. Hot mint is a strong flavour within the salad.

I was pleased to find a pot of the hot mint plant at a local market and locally grown snow peas. The ingredient I will have the most trouble finding down here before tomorrow is bean shoots (I bought the last pack at the supermarket for this trial run yesterday - fingers crossed they get some more in!).

The noodle salad is a favorite recipe of mine. It is flexible because you can add as few or as many ingredients as you have at hand. I was given the recipe for the dressing many years ago by a beautiful friend who is a chef. Even though I have made this salad many times, I have never had to cook it for a crowd of sixty before. Therefore the trial run was necessary to calculate quantities of ingredients. Using the proportion above I worked out that I will need fifteen chicken breasts and five packets of each type of noodle (rice and egg).

I have decided to serve it cold. This way I don’t need to cook the chicken immediately before and keep it hot in the oven. I will be able to go to the yacht club during the day tomorrow and prepare everything in advance. I’m looking forward to it. The yacht club has an excellent industrial kitchen. Last time I took a CD player in but this time my ipod will come with me to provide the compulsory music to cook by.

I have lined up my four girls to help me as waitresses. After the entree is done, my job will be over. Someone else will look after the following courses and I will be able to relax and socialize.

Looking for inspiration

Hello Possums. Here at the beach for the summer holidays, the yacht club social calendar is hotting up. Friday night is kids movie night with the bar open for the adults. A bush dance is the theme for Saturday night. Next Saturday is our progressive dinner, when it will be my job to cater the entrees. I have started to focus on this challenge and I’ve just been down the club to discuss numbers. My budget is about five dollars per person and we are expecting fifty people. Originally I thought I’d make gourmet mini pizzas, but my latest idea is an asian noodle salad topped with a choice of marinated prawns or seared kangaroo steak. I reasoned that I could make the salad before hand. It would then be an easy thing to sear and slice the meat… Of course we do get up to a bit of sailing along the way, but right at the minute my mind is on this catering. I will need to make a decision and source ingredients early next week. 

No shortage of things to do

 

There is no time at my place to mope around. Sally and Emma have finished school and the holidays have begun. Kathleen and Rosie have come home from the last carols performance with their choir for the week. The only commitment we have left before leaving for the beach house is a party tonight that the whole family is invited to.  There is no time here to worry about young male teachers who are fickle about women. No, not at all. These diversions are best ditched and filed under “not worth it”. Bindi, file that away as a note to yourself. There are children who need your help to make ginger bread men and to write them lists so they can pack for the holidays. And when you have finished this, phone a friend. Under no circumstance are you allowed to mope about falling out with this particular acquaintance. Good Girl.

We have the technology!

Hello Possums. Here at my place, dancing in the kitchen has never been easier.

I was inspired whilst staying with friends in Tuscany earlier in the year to set aside time to download my music collection onto my ipod. In our Tuscan villa, we selected music to dine, cook or relax by from our friend’s entire music collection, at the convenient touch-twirl of a dial and click of a button. With a little set of travel speakers, he was able to provide good quality music for us anywhere in our villa.

Last week I accomplished the transfer and was amazed to see just how little of the coloured-in ‘capacity sausage’ my entire music collection took up. Upon completion only a few milimetres of the sausage were coloured in!

I set my ipod up in the little travel speakers I got for my birthday in the kitchen and I’m very pleased with the result. This little technological gadget has revolutionized singing and dancing in the kitchen here. I have discovered the ‘play all songs’ option and have begun playing my entire collection alphabetically. Today whilst preparing chicken shaslicks I was up to C and got half way through D when dinner was ready to be served. How strange it was to listen to songs from my music collection out of sync with their usual albums! For example in C, we had ‘Chain of Fools’ by Aretha Franklin followed by ‘Chunky, Chunky Air Guitar’ by The Whitlams, ‘Close to Me’ (INXS) and ‘Come Fly With Me’, Frank Sinatra!

Holiday Highlights 3: Rude Food (and food in general).

Hello Possums. Traveling in Italy and France recently for the first time was truly a gastronomic experience: from a cooking lesson with two Tuscan chefs from Kitchen chez nous, to dishes served to us at restaurants, to cooking for ourselves using fresh local produce.

The Tuscan chefs visited our villa near Florence to teach us to cook a four course meal of Italian classics. The menu for our cooking lesson was stuffed zucchini flowers, home made spinach ravioli in a sage and butter sauce, peposo and panacotta with peach sauce:

The zucchini flowers were stuffed with buffalo mozzarella and anchovy, and fried in a light beer batter. The beer batter drew the oil away from the flowers and complemented their texture by adding crunch. The kids and adults adored them.

The pasta for the ravioli was made with strong durum wheat flour and required half an hour of constant kneading before going through the pasta machine. But the result melted in your mouth – heaven on a stick! Here I am with our finished ravioli taking a break whilst the peposo simmers along on the stove in the background. The peposo recipe called for a cup of red wine and, because it was quite a tasty Chianti, of course we got stuck into it too. Here is the Peposo Recipe (as promised to Charlotte):

700g muscle of veal taken from the shin bone (or if you prefer to use beef, go for stewing steak or beef osso bucco)

7 cloves garlic

3 tins peeled tomatoes, the Italian brand CIRIO or similar was recommended (or 400g peeled fresh tomatoes)

1 onion

1 carrot

1 stalk celery

1 glass red wine

extra virgin olive oil

2-3 tablespoons black pepper

salt

~

Saute finely chopped onions, carrots, celery, galic cloves with olive oil in a deep thick bottomed saucepan. Add the meat cut into large cubes. When meat is sealed add pepper and the tomatoes. Cook medium temperature for 10 minutes. Add the red wine. Season with salt. Cover it and allow to simmer slowly for about two hours over a low heat.

~

At the end of our 2 week stay in Tuscany we went to a local restaurant that was walking distance from our villa. There was no menu. Instead the chef asked us to choose our meals from verbally recounted dishes of the day. There was a choice of four different entrees and the only choice for the main course was the type of meat, which was served with set accompaniments. I chose pigeon for my main course and was served a meal that had us in hysterics:

Well I made the choice to be adventurous, and ended up with food that has to be described as rude!

In the south of France we ate duck every day because it was always on the menu. My favorite dish was Margaret e Canard, the most delicious example of which I found at a lovely cliffside restaurant looking across to Rocamadour:

Here’s the view of Rocamadour from the restaurant:

And here’s a view of inside the restaurant:

Rosie and Emma in the foreground so that we could discretely take a pic of the pooch under the table behind – in a restaurant! What the…?

 

 

 

 

 

 

In love with Peposo

Possums, do you agree that if you cook for someone it is a way of showing love? There are many ways to show love. But the feeling can be quite intense when you are crushing garlic, chopping celery, tasting to make sure things are just so, adding spices or herbs and that dash of red wine to a sauce. Whether the gesture is interpreted this way is another thing entirely.

When I was in Italy recently I learnt to make a delicious Tuscan beef stew called Peposo. Our cooking teacher, Ginny introduced us to this recipe as a Tuscan classic. It is slow cooked for two hours in a stock of the classic threesome: tomato, celery and carrot, with Spanish onion, a healthy dose of good quality red wine and black pepper. In fact the recipe for four people calls for three tablespoons of black pepper! Ginny’s comment on the dish (in a thick Italian accent) was:

It is for the men-a. The men-a, they love-a their meat and they love-a their pepper. This dish is for the men-a.

Tonight I cooked Peposo for the first time since I have been back home in Melbourne. Instead of stewing steak, I decided to use beef osso bucco. Osso Bucco is the hub’s all time favorite meat. Kathleen, our eldest, also loves it and like her dad relishes picking out and eating the marrow.

Dinner was slightly later than usual because of the longer cooking time. Poor Sally, who is only seven, has trouble waiting the extra time for her meal.

Mum can I have something to eat? she asked when there was still an hour of cooking time to go.

Oh, OK. Usually I wouldn’t let her eat at that time because it would spoil her meal but made an exception tonight.

Our kitchen is quite tiny – there’s really only room for one person working in it. But Sally is small. She made me smile as she ducked and weaved underneath and around me to fix herself a snack. All the while she sang the song I had playing on the CD player. She has heard my Dido album so often now that she knows all the words to the songs. She sings in tune and has a beautiful voice. Un-selfconsciously she sang:

Listen and think when I say,

Oh listen and think when I say,

Who makes you feel the way that I make you feel?

Who loves you and knows you the way I do?

Who touches you and holds you quite like I do?

Who makes you feel like I make you feel?

Who makes you feel like I make you feel ?

I watched her working away and singing. Her little touch was gentle and soft on me as she moved in and around me whilst I cooked. She made her snack and took it off into the other room and I was left with a lingering feeling of love for my beautiful child.

I do love to cook for my family (and if I cook for you its because I love you too).

 

First Impressions of France

We took the Eurostar fast train from London to Paris for the last two weeks of our European holiday in France. After a week in London (read previous London posts here & here), and getting around everywhere on the underground, we were back to driving hire cars again from the Paris station. The train travel was a novelty to us because we don’t have a comprehensive underground system in Melbourne. On the way over we bought our lunch at the shop on the train and were served yoplait in a ceramic pot!

We were all pretty excited and the week in London had been relatively restful due to the wet weather, speaking English and not having to navigate narrow Italian roads whilst driving on the “wrong” side of the road (from an Australian perspective), having the driver on the “wrong” side of the car and the gear stick and rear vision on the “wrong” side of the driver. I did get the hang of this, and now I believe I can do anything!

At the Eurostar station in London the police, or gendarmes, doing the passport checks were French: The six of us step forward together as usual and I hand over six passports and say We are a family of six. The girls crowd around the checking booth and the gendarme smiles, as they usually do (in any country). Actually in Rome the female passport checker looked at the girls counted them and smiled warmly at the hub. He generally recognises this as a cue to act out the underrepresented male. But this didn’t cut it with the woman in Rome. She kept looking at him with admiration, as if he was some virile specimen! Note to self: if I ever need to sell him off, look no further than Italy.

So the gendarme began to read out the children’s names one by one and they identified themselves to him. His silky French accent caught me by surprise. The way he said Rosemary was enough to make any woman swoon. Impressions of France: all good so far!

Once across the “border” the cafes served fresh French bakery items. I bought six yummy looking large croissants and sat down with a coffee, minding the bags while the others browsed the souvineer shops. These croissants were the best I had tasted up until that point in my life. I ate one and stole half of someone else’s (they were taking so long!). Another tick for France!

We drove past the Eifel Tower, then out of Paris on wide streets and motorways to a converted barn near the village of Vodoy en Brie. Here we met the kids’ English cousins and my brother and sister in law. We had separate apartments in the same barn there (two of seven). The first afternoon we pooled our resources and cooked a wonderful barbecue on the veranda of one of the apartments overlooking a horse shoe shaped dam that flanked the barn and across to a freshly harvested field and beyond to more fields and forest right out to the horizon.

We seared the fillets of salmon, purchased that day in Coulommien, quickly on the hot plate. It was the most fresh and moist I have tasted! The salad was just as good as you could put together in Melbourne (that’s pretty good), and the Rose we drank with the salmon was pretty good too. Guess how much for the Rose? Said my brother-in-law. We both guessed up around 15 euros using our subjective measures of an Australian equivalence. Nope, one euro eighty!

Wait, it gets better!

That evening the kids spotted fish and an otter in the dam. As the sun set, the field took on a pink hue, just like Monet’s Haystacks – the originals of which I saw recently in Chicago. Through my Rose-coloured glasses I watched the scene before me as the sun set slowly and I was filled with expansive love for France.

Here is a photo I took in the Chicago Art Museum without a flash. I can understand why Monet painted the same haystacks multiple times in changing light. You just can’t get enough of it.

And now for your enjoyment (eighties style – sure to make you laugh):

Just Can’t Get Enough, by Depeche Mode.