Nourish Me

knowing how

We've been away, and just now, I'm off again, but over Easter - in the midst of being on holiday in the country - I realised that for many Australians the supermarket is the only fresh food option. In the city I avoid the supermarkets simply because I can. Last Saturday, I came away from a rural branch of a big name supermarket with gorgeous red peppers that roasted beautifully, the best of the season without a doubt. Knowing how to make the most of what you have to hand is as good a reason to learn to cook as any.   

bounty

from this,

to this

in just six months. it's an extraordinary planet we share.

(inspired by tea)

brick oven: part 2

There are no rules for building the base for your oven, so you may as well demonstrate whatever skills or talents you possess, using whatever materials you choose or have handy.

(Russell Jeavons, Your Brick Oven)

We're living and learning.

Peter drew up what I suspect may be one of the trickier bases to get right, and I was a little sceptical, but part of the excercise - in fact, a very large part of the excercise - is developing Peter's large scale sculpting skills.  His design? An egg-shaped curve of a brick wall, one filled with rubble, levelled off, then concreted flat (um, flattish) on top. I love that my partner's not afraid of rules, that he likes to just get on with it, whatever the it may happen to be. More tortoise than hare myself, but I have to admit that the hare approach here gave things the very swift kick in the behind they required. We built the wall in one sunny weekend, making it up as we went along, he buttering bricks with mortar, squishing them into place, I tapping and levelling and filling in the gaps behind.

It's taken us a little longer than anticipated, and may just be the teeniest bit wonky, but the base (a-men) is done.

 

Incredibly labour-intensive work building things, even on a smallish scale like this and I'm feeling much stronger, far more capable in the physical sense, for having been actively involved. Aching in places that initially make no sense has been most amusing. Case in point:  I moved a tonne of bricks two-by-two across the lawn on the afternoon that they arrived yet it was my bum, and not my arms, that hurt the following day.  The next, too, but who's counting?

In the process of making all this happen we've found the guys at the Renovators Goldmine in Trentham to be outstanding. A neatly ordered warehouse of the old, the odd, the recycled, the repaired. We asked, they delivered. In spades. More on them as things progress.

On to the dome itself next week, the part that means that soon enough we will actually be cooking in the thing, indeed the step that is the entire point, and that is pretty damn exciting, people.  

constants

Mum's kitchen, late last year. The space between visits gets larger the longer I choose to live 900-odd kilometers south of the city I used to call home, but things rarely change in my absence, a fact that makes my heart feel happy.

That windowsill arrangement is pretty much just as I remember it 20 years ago, new plants replacing tired ones from time to time perhaps, but mum's blue kitchen and that sill that looks out onto the hills hoist and their beautiful cottage garden, eucalypts towering behind it all, is one of the constants in my life. 

keef's bangers and mash

It seems that everyone, even ageing rock stars, wants to talk food these days. Keith Richards devotes four pages - four pages! - to cooking in his autobiography Life, including a philosophical take on shepherds pie - Nobody touches the shepherds pie until I've been there. Don't bust my crust, baby - and an odd but oh-so-Keef story, related by über rock chick Kate Moss, about how he chased a man from his house with two swords for making off with his spring onions one evening.

Not a man to take things lightly in the kitchen, clearly.

Now. When I was 15, I wore a locket around my neck with a tiny, tiny heart-shaped cut out of Keith inside, a photo taken from the poster inside my copy of Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass) being, as I was, obsessed with the 1960's (how else was I gonna ride out the 1980's?). So yes, I have a soft spot for Keith and the bio, well, it's horrifying and hilarious by turn. Highly recommended. 

Had to share this little gem on a sunny Friday. Happy weekend.

keith richards' bangers and mash recipe

1. First off, find a butcher who makes his sausages fresh. [the italics are Keith's, not mine]
2. Fry up a mixture of onions and bacon and seasoning.
3. Get the spuds on the boil with a dash of vinegar, some chopped onions and salt (seasoning to taste). Chuck in some peas with the spuds. (Throw in some chopped carrots too, if you like.) Now we're talking.
4. Now, you have a choice of grilling or broiling your bangers or frying. Throw them on a low heat with the simmering bacon and onions (or in the cold pan, as the TV lady said, and add the onions and bacon in a bit) and let the fuckers rock gently, turning every few minutes.
5. Mash yer spuds and whatever.
6. Bangers are now fat free (as possible!).
7. Gravy if desired.
8. HP sauce, every man to his own.

(Cannot agree at all with Keith's instruction to add peas to mash, and I really do wish I knew who the lady on the telly is/was, but it's kinda genius, right? Right? The instruction in point #4 to "let the fuckers rock gently" made me laugh so loudly that I woke the dog last night. Farking hilarious.)

the day started out looking pretty bad. it's ended remarkably well, all things considered.

looking forward to an evening of relative calm.

(taken on the west lake, hanoi) 

bean curd

Silverbeet (chard) continues to self-seed in our vegetable patch, huge heads of the stuff sprouting from unlikely pockets, leaves the size of palm fronds, stems as thick as an adult hand span. Armloads come back with us as we return to the city, armloads that hardly make a dent in the crop and fill the back seat of the car, greenery poking out here, there, everywhere. I happen to like it like this. A lot.

Whenever possible, I also happen to like it, a lot, with Madhur Jaffrey's ginger-garlic bean curd. You'll need that old hippie standby of nutritional yeast here, easy enough to find in health food shops. According to Jaffrey, it simply cannot be made with either fresh ginger or fresh garlic. Knows her stuff, does Ms Jaffrey. Not willing to take a foolish chance, so addicted am I. Besides, the garlic's already looking tired at the market, sprouting those nasty green shoots that suggest it's almost time to get planting. Autumn's really here.

enough for 2-3 people with other bits on the side.   

ginger-garlic bean curd (tofu)

from madhur jaffrey. i rather like that jaffrey calls tofu bean curd. it's a far more apt descriptor than tofu to the anglicized tongue, explains the process and what to expect of the stuff in two simple words. the recipe is given (by me) in teaspoons rather than tablespoons not to be annoying, but to offer a more universal measure. a teaspoon is a teaspoon is a teaspoon the world over. the tablespoon a trickier beast entirely.   

pour 9 tsp of peanut/sunflower/rice bran oil into a frying pan. set the heat to high. cube 500g/1lb of firm tofu and arrange it on a clean tea towel, drying off a little excess moisture. when the oil is hot, carefully add the tofu and stir-and-fry until golden on most sides.

add 1 tsp of powdered garlic and 1 tsp of ground ginger to the pan, turn the heat down a fraction, and stirfry for 1 minute.

pour in 6 tsp of tamari, and turn the heat to low. keep stirring the tofu around the pan for 2 minutes. (nothing worse than burnt tamari.) remove the pan from the heat and sprinkle over 3 tsp of nutritional yeast, stirring well. serve hot, scraping the crusty bits off the pan as they, naturally, are what you'll be fighting over.   

sweet

Spent the morning making candied grapefruit peel, propped on a stool in the kitchen sipping tea and reading Jane Grigson, a surprisingly enjoyable thing to do on a clocks-back autumn Sunday. The peels - drying on a rack before me - taste of Campari, a medicinal balance of bitter and sweet, a taste I happen to really love. got distracted halfway through by Stephanie Alexander who boils hers in 6 or 7 changes of water, a little worrying when you've done yours in only 2, then I remembered that Stephanie, much like Nigella, likes a lot more sweet than I in recipes. (Stephanie's Lemon Delicious pudding actually hurts my teeth.)

Grigson was writing in 1982, 2 years before I got to high school, and I'm convinced that our collective tastebuds have shifted since then to sweeter and sweeter (and beyond). Mine'll be just fine then.