Nourish Me

Summer progresses

Our shed looms reproachfully at the end of the garden, a shiny, unused pitchfork propped against the wall, and bags of pea straw and manure wait, unopened, inside. Seeds that should now be thriving summer plants lie dormant, sealed in yellow envelopes, third shelf down in the fridge. A spicy stench of blood and bone is carried on the wind on warmer days, and, like the dog, I find it oddly alluring. The garden’s been calling.

Dark clouds are gathering this afternoon, and the tantalising promise of rain proper – thunder, so they say - hangs heavily in a still, expectant air. Waiting for the sky to rumble, then burst, on days of wading through humidity is something of a national obsession. My mother and I speak of rain in hushed, revered tones during phone calls. Rain is near religious. Rain is sheer bliss.

Tomatoes from the market have been spectacular this year, though my own are late to start. Nigel Slater says, ‘A tomato’s character is enhanced by a rough life, a certain negligence, a gasping thirst and the occasional drenching downpour’, most of which I’ve been able to supply in abundance as summer progresses. Unsure of Tender at first (though I think it photographer Jonathan Lovekin’s best work), thanks to two dishes, I’m coming ‘round.

The first was a dish of frankly beautiful pale green banana-shaped peppers, halved and stuffed very simply with nothing more than stellar cherry tomatoes, quartered or halved according to their size. Drizzled with oil and roasted in a furnace of an oven until their edges were charred, they were drowned, at the table, with a sauce of emerald green; handfuls of basil, garlic and oil blitzed to pouring consistency.

(Ganga has a beautiful version, here)

The second was even easier. Perfectly ripe, red tomatoes cut into large chunks, a bunch of basil leaves and a handful of grated parmesan. Tossed gently in a bowl with 2 tablespoons of olive oil, they get dumped in a gratin dish and baked at 200 C (400 F) for 25-30 minutes. It was stunning and stupidly simple to assemble, but somehow made the kitchen smell like heaven and me wonder why that particular combination, cooked in that particular way, had never occurred to, well, me.

Genius. And that, you see, is why we love him. However unwieldy the book.  

Kitchen light

The light in this kitchen make me inordinately happy. It shifts with the seasons and a glorious band of early evening light (above) arrives, illuminating the bench, a little to the left and a little later in January than it did at the beginning of December.   

Summer's a season of plenty, something I must try to remember when grumbling about hot days and nights. Tomatoes are spectacular; basil tastes of Mediterranean climes; and the garlic, unwilling to be parted from taught, rice-paper-thin skin, is purple and fragrant and cooked in heads rather than cloves. There's exciting news from the garden, too - the first of the jalapenos, dangling heavily on the lower branches, is turning a deep shade of red.

Think I'll stuff some and roast them in a hot oven. When the oven door is back on, of course...

* The potatoes above are the Home-made Wedges from the spring edition of An Honest Kitchen.  

An Honest Kitchen: Spring & Summer

Kathryn and I are very pleased to announce the release of the Spring and Summer editions of our eMagazine An Honest Kitchen. In fact, we're a bit silly with excitement over it - and the recipes are glorious.

Between the two volumes there are over thirty recipes, covering soups, main courses and desserts.

New to these issues - and due to some fabulous feedback from our editing team - we’ve included a key in the table of contents, showing which recipes are vegetarian or can be adapted to be vegetarian. Plus there are cooking notes, storage tips and countless other food suggestions.

You can download a FREE sample of the summer edition, here:

Download Summer SAMPLE

AND you can download a FREE sample of the spring edition if you missed it last year, here:

Download SAMPLE An Honest Kitchen Spring Ed

For a limited time, the Spring and Summer editions are available together, for one price: A$24.95

1. You can purchase the eMagazine through Paypal (see below). Once your order has been confirmed you will be sent an email containing a link to your download of An Honest Kitchen.
2. As individual copies of the magazine cost A$19.95 each, buying the bumper Spring/Summer edition means you save A$14.95.
3. The combined edition of Spring/Summer An Honest Kitchen will only be available until the end of February.

If you like what you see (and let me tell you, that tagine dish is magic), you can buy a copy by clicking on the secure Paypal button below:

Tea

Gorgeous day.

I ate well-chilled, leftover Ajoblanco in the sun for lunch today, hat and sunnies on, legs left bare.

Then I made tea, as you do, after cleaning out the pantry, doing what Nigel Slater calls 'the lentil shuffle'. Lemon verbena, a few crusty slices of dried ginger and a fat pinch of licorice steeped for three minutes. The licorice was just right, so it's been shuffled to the front again. Fennel and a rice pilaf for dinner, with lentils on the side, cooked with fennel seeds, star anise and cardamom.  

This friday evening

There's a chicken in the oven, one I, yes I, spatch-cocked using a large pair of scissors and a curious eye, a chermoula-rubbed test recipe from the summer edition of AHK. Flesh-recipes are best photographed when the flesh-eaters are actually here. It's a full house, tonight.

There's the almond cake above for later, a simple but astounding one with dried apricots from Nigel Slater's Appetite. The book I'd save in a fire, that one. In place of raspberries, there are poached peaches, fat yellow-fleshed ones, perfumed with vanilla, their bottoms blushed pink. I found a stash of vanilla pods at the back of the pantry, so our kitchen smells rather good this Friday evening. 

But what I really dropped in to say is that I'm developing a huge crush on Matthew Evans. Best telly all week, is he. Only thing worth watching. Brilliant.    

Happy weekend.

Not quite

Not quite 'home' yet, though home is exactly where I am, having a nice, quiet lie down and trying to ignore the rising mercury. Been away for what feels like an age. In reality, it's only been three, maybe four weeks. Dazed and confused nonetheless, with a touch of explosive food poisoning to round things off nicely.

Still not quite right. Urgh.

Photos, ye shall have, then. Of Sydney town. As I know her. 

Loved mum's snowflake cookies.

She did a grand job.

Happy 2010

May it be filled with everything you want. Then some. 

Raspberry season

Two $5 punnets of biodynamic - yep, I said, biodynamic - raspberries, grown in the so-close-to-Melbourne-that-it's-practically-a-suburb Yarra Valley came home a few weeks ago. Unbelievably good. With raspberry season well underway, think it's high time I shared a little summer raspberry love. 

It's uncomplicated; hardly what you'd even call a recipe. Which is good. The less reading during food prep the better, I say. Leaves more time for loading up the Pentax. Just the way I like things, these days. 

 

Raspberry sauce

Based on a recipe in Tamasin Day-Lewis' (not-quite...it's a bit too idiosyncratic to be deemed Biblical...but nonetheless extremely useful...) Kitchen Bible for Uncooked Raspberry Jam. Kinda untrue as there is a tiny bit of cooking involved, but it's not of the boiling, foaming kind. Halting myself from swiping a slow finger through each time I passed the bowl proved tricky. I will add that Rapadura sugar - evaporated cane sugar - is seriously good here, but ordinary caster sugar will behave perfectly well.

Weigh your raspberries. Measure 1/2 of that weight in sugar. If your raspberries are tart, add more by all means. Oscar licked the spoon for a full 2 minutes, so clearly teenagers and adults like it less sweet, though younger ones may not. Only you will know.

Pour the sugar into an ovenproof bowl and add the fruit to another. Warm the oven to a moderate heat - 150 C is perfect, no pre-heating required - and pop both bowls in for 20 minutes. Remove, scrape the sugar into the fruit and stir for 10 minutes, slow as you like, but constantly. Rest for 10 minutes and do it all over again. Cool, avoiding the urge to strain. The goo around the seeds is the best bit.

Ideas on what to do with it, to come.

A little housekeeping

A little early December tidy is in order before we rush (madly) into the downhill stretch of 2009.

I've been head-down for the last few weeks, busily putting finishing touches on a few Honest Kitchen projects and, given it's the 7th of December, think it high time I shared some great links (and an offer) which have caught my eye over the last couple of weeks:

One of the most exciting visual projects I've come across all year, 52 Suburbs explores Sydney's suburbs in absorbing, beautiful detail.

Christmas gift-shoppers fall into two camps. Those who love it and those who do not. Gill Stannard's excellent post offers both clever advice for stress-less giving and a gentle reminder of what really matters at this time of the year. 

The house next door is set to be demolished soon. I've been slipping through the gate, raiding the long neglected grapevine under cover of dark and making these Middle Eastern-style nori rolls from @silverbeet's lovely new blog.

Really, really good.   

Speaking of vine leaves, A.O.F. and I had a great time rolling dolmades a few weeks ago, something we're keen to make an annual event of. You can read about this year's success, here.

And this photo, from Clinkerboy, which is the cleverest Christmas tree, ever.

All of which brings me to the offer I mentioned earlier.

Jules of Stone Soup's gorgeous, loving tribute to her late mum's cooking, 'And the Love is Free', is a great little Christmas gift idea. The book features Jules' signature (stunning) light-flooded food photography and traditional Australian recipes, the kind that brought on a wonderful sense of nostalgia for me, having grown up on things like Apricot Chicken and Caramel Slice myself in the 1970's. Last night, with an almost empty fridge, I picked up Jules' book and made a tofu version of her mum's Chinese Chicken. It was simple, fuss-free and absolutely delicious.

"When I made this recently to test the recipe and photograph it, I was very pleasantly surprised at just how lovely it tasted. It's a bit amazing how soy sauce, honely and ground ginger can produce such an authentic feeling Chinese dish."  

It is amazing.     

Jules is very generously offering a 10% DISCOUNT for Nourish Me readers who purchase her cookbook 'And the Love is Free' before Christmas. Order at www.thestonesoup.com and use the discount code 'Christmas' or you can call Naomi Clancy on 0407 014 232. Free postage anywhere in Australia.

A lovely way to support a local and much-loved Australian blogger.

Never the same, twice

Toward the end of the phone call, one in which Jo, composed but ever droll, reported a significant personal breakthrough over her weekend, things turned to dinner; “Do you really, ‘never cook the same thing twice’?” 

Truthfully, no. It's not intentional; rather, I enjoy cooking and find there’s room for improvement in almost any recipe. I seem to spend a fair chunk of reading time noodling through cookbooks, too. At lunch, over breakfast with tea, and even, very occasionally, before bed. (Though I think the latter terribly bad form and have, this year, finally put a stop to it.) I’m often found marking pages in cookbooks – naughty, dog-eared corners-turned-down marking because, ultimately, the cookbook should be a working object – and making notes of my own all over the margins.

Sometimes, I even catch myself thinking about the next meal, staring wistfully out of the window whilst washing dishes from the last. All of this informs rather than dictates the cooking. A dish may be so good that it crops up frequently, but it's never the same, twice. I'm often braising a dish of baby carrots, or fennel, or celery (or all three) before I know it, as if the contents of the vegetable drawer switch on some kind of kitchen autopilot, but I cannot help myself. Tinkering is one of lifes little pleasures.

I do, however, want to cook this simple dish again in almost – almost – the same way. The grape, olive and herb topping is very clever; a gratifying combination of sweet-salty-bitter just made for the kind of can’t-be-fussed summer cooking we’re rapidly approaching. I’ll be serving this often over summer with a loaf of good bread, a salad of snappy greens, a bottle of something cold and some stone fruit to finish. The cicadas are already trilling out there. Summer's upon us.   

Baked ricotta with grapes & olives

If my habit of bookmarking is naughty, Karen Martini's liberal use of olive oil is damnation on a stick. I love it – cooking without it would be unimaginable - but don't want to drown in the stuff. If you’re feeling underweight (ha!) by all means, follow her excellent recipe. I have a hunch that it may work with fresh silken tofu, though I am yet to try the idea. 

 
Take 250g of fresh ricotta cheese* and drain it very well. An hour in a colander over the sink should see you right. Preheat the oven to 200 C.

Using a little olive oil, lightly grease a small ovenproof dish. Slice the drained ricotta thickly and push it carefully into the base. Take a handful of seedless grapes (red, green, whatever) and slice them into rounds. Pit, if you need to, and roughly chop 2 heaped tablespoons of cured olives (black, green, cracked, whole, whatever) and chop a palmful of fresh thyme and a larger palmful of fresh oregano. Scatter the grapes, olives and herbs over the ricotta, add a little salt and pepper and drizzle the top with a tablespoon, maybe two, of delicious olive oil. Bake for 25 minutes, or until the ricotta is firm and golden at its edges. Cool before devouring as per above.   

*Do not attempt this with the ricotta stacked in the supermarket fridge – it’s simply the wrong texture and you will be seriously disappointed. Ask for a wedge at the deli counter instead.