I am aware that the picture above is a healthy stand of broad beans and NOT an asparagus bed but I've some asparagus-related news from the trenches, just in, that I kinda couldn't wait to share: you know how, at the shall we say bathroom visit end of the incredible human digestive tract, asparagus makes our wee smell funny? Well. If you harvest the stuff from your own garden then cook, and eat it straight away...no smell. NO SMELL! One never stops learning.
Seems I have, at long last, kicked the deepest and darkest of daily coffee habits that was wreaking havoc on my digestion. From the other side, things feel good, feel...cleaner? spring-ier? Better most definitely. Less anxious, more at ease. An infusion of roasted dandelion root steeped in one of my tiny Japanese teapots for 2 minutes, strained and then topped up with rice milk is the drink I can say, as of this very morning, is the perfect haute hippy substitute. Just bitter, as good coffee should be.
I've put some work in a group show, one that opens tomorrow night. Two watercolours - small things, sink things. If you're in Melbourne, p'raps you'd like to see the show? It's at Linden in St Kilda, where Anselm first taught me to meditate years ago, and runs from the 19th of September - 21st of November.
Linden New Art : 26 Acland Steet, St Kilda
Yep. More at ease. A good place to be.
Each of us who cooks has the one task that drives them nuts in an otherwise enjoyable pursuit; for Kathryn, it's skinning and de-seeding tomatoes, a task I actually quite like. Me? Creaming butter and sugar. What a bloody faff. With a kitchen whose thermometer reads 6 degrees this morning, the butter, even when carefully softened by the fire, curdles. I deliberately seek recipes that avoid this dreaded task, but sometimes it's unavoidable. Things always end in a mess, even if the offer of a quiet(ish) moment to stare out the window into the mist that shrouds the hill, watching the currawongs singing, then drinking - note to self - from the blocked drain of the studio justifies the investment of energy. So, creaming. That's my thing.
Nigel Slater's simple stuff is where he excels, I reckon, and his latest book, Eat, is a welcome return to form. I've made his Root vegetable tangle 5 times in as many nights, varying the vegetables and, in the interests of getting things to the table faster, using a mandoline rather than a peeler. The rosemary and onion are essential; so is the large quantity of olive oil, I'm afraid, and the pepitas are absolutely non-negotiable but otherwise, play. I like it with a poached duck's egg (god, and how) as much as I like it with pan-fried tempeh or a spoonful of yoghurt.
Claudia Roden's The Book of Jewish Food has served me well over the 13 years I've spent living with my Jewish blokes: she has put festivals into context, provided recipes that are anything but simple despite their seeming simplicity. There's a tried-and-true thing going on with her writing that I feel really drawn to, tried-and-true 'cause Roden recorded recipes from (mostly) women in communities that cook a lot. Many reviews on Amazon criticise the book for being light-on for Ashkenazi recipes, for being too heavy on the Sephardic food, but this is a plus, especially for someone who has vegetarians to feed. Sephardic food is very sexy - think Ottolenghi - and Ashkenazi food is...well, kinda dull. It's never cold enough in Australia to eat cholent.
Of course the word salad here is used in the context that we not of the Levant find difficult to accept. It's like a North African mash made with equal quantities potato and carrot that are boiled then mashed before being dressed with some fairly punchy flavours. This is gorgeous, something I made often during the just-passed Pesach.
claudia roden's boiled carrot and potato salad
Peel equal quantities (350g or 12 oz) of potatoes and carrots. Cut into large pieces and pop into a pot of cold water. As the pot comes to the boil add salt and continue boiling (at a simmer is better) for about 20 mins, 'til they are very tender. Drain then mash - you may like to leave it a little chunky (I do). Whisk together the juice of 1 lemon, 4 tbsp of olive oil, 1/2 tsp of ground cumin, 1 tsp of paprika, a pinch of cayenne and 3 crushed cloves of garlic and some salt to taste. Mix well with mashed vegetables and serve hot.
Very, very good.
On Friday (the 13th) the nbn arrived. It was followed, that night, by a much-needed, much-desired storm. Rainfall up here has been poor this summer, dry but weirdly cool; it's a lucky day when you get that much rain in one hit and the garden sighed contentedly. Today is a warm, high summer saturday, st valentine's day (a bloke who was clubbed to death by the Romans, so, not quite so romantic a day in my book). We picked 17 kilos of apples this morning; a jelly of windfalls sits cooling on the kitchen bench but I don't have enough sugar to do much with the remainder. Writing sugar on the shopping list felt wrong given how little we use these days, but jelly requires tonnes of the refined stuff. It will, mostly, be for gifts anyway.
This is the first year we've had good amounts of fruit that the birds haven't got to - enough mulberries to make a decent stash of jam (rice-syrup-and-chia-seed-set, a la Belle Gibson's Whole Pantry); a freezer stacked with bags of blueberries (we also ate them by the handful, fresh); and then there's those apples of which, due to some careful netting, there will be more as the season develops. Lucky. That's how I feel.
My dessert repertoire, alas, grows ever smaller: a (mostly) waning interest in sugar and wheat means you'll get either Lesh's chocolate and date balls or the chocolate cake from Supper For A Song. BUT here it is, cherry season already and occasionally what's required from the kitchen is something more celebratory, something that feels like a proper dessert. Simple and untaxing if possible given it'll probably be hot. A cherry pie at some stage between late December and January feels right; fits the bill rather nicely.
Pitting cherries is, I admit, a chore, but you're probably on holiday somewhere anyway if it's cherry season. Pitting over the kitchen sink could be viewed a kind of meditation, no? Bloody juices a part of the (beautiful) deal.
Much of the pleasure of reading Nigel Slater lies in his choice of words. Good recipe writing is an artform, one I can only aspire to, and his recipes are excellent writing full stop. Of the pastry Slater uses to top a plum pie (and I chose to cover every single fruit pie I make) he says, "The crust is very short, and it really doesn't matter if it tears as you lower it over the fruit. Some of the juice will probably erupt through the crust as it cooks anyway. At least I hope so."
I toss pitted cherries in a teaspoon of cornflour and a palmful of whatever sugar is to hand in the base of an enamel pie dish. I then make the pastry using roughly equal measures of oat and barley flours in place of the plain flour he uses to make an even shorter crust, one I squash with the heel of my hand into a thick circle, gently lift on top of the fruit and press out with fingers to the lip of the pie dish. It's very forgiving and very, very good.
Happy holidays, peoples! Three mad-busy shopping days to go, so, be nice to all the sales staff out there and, if you're stuck for what to buy someone tricky, buy a damned book. One you've loved. Best bloody gift there is, a book. xxx
At some stage during the long, hard winter that has, thankfully, passed, a piece of news - delivered with barely disguised glee - stopped me in my tracks. Western medicine had, the newsreader declared, at last debunked homeopathy. What?, I thought. Huh? What's with the 'tude? Without a homeopathic tradition – until very recently the study of herbs was the sum of all we had available to us medicinally - Western Medicine as it is known and practised today would simply not exist.
All day it stayed top of mind. Sue and I discussed it at some length, and I spent the first few hours of werk throwing, from time to time, all sorts of herbal questions at google. Granted, Bach Flower remedies are pretty damned out there (and I say this as a person not at all afraid of esoterica) and yes, there are some nutty claims made, but how, I wondered, could anyone doubt the effectiveness of slowly steeped thyme tea for soothing - notice I don't use the word curing - a persistant cough? Olde doesn't necessarily equate to bad. A sadness about the 21st century human stayed there, stuck in my chest for some time.
I come from a family of dedicated, outer-suburban gardeners. There are many things I absorbed as a child simply by watching what my grandparents and parents did in their respective plots, how they developed ideas and fulfilled creative aspirations, overcame challenges and soothed nerves. The garden was a source of employment, both mental and physical, and above all a place of great joy. I've written before about a long-held desire to be a small scale herb farmer, and looking back at that post just now I'm happy to say I've come a long way toward that goal. The entire garden may be devoted to food, but the herbs are the most interesting plants growing there.
In turn my own garden has become a teacher, shown me things about plants, seasons and patience that I did not know I needed to learn. By establishing a rhythm to the ongoing tasks of weeding, sowing and pruning, and breathing deeply (and often) while diving deep into the natural world, I’ve come to know the self better. A surprising yet pleasing revelation. Therapist, meditation and workout all rolled into one very tangible activity, the garden is also, increasingly as I learn, my healer.
All of which is to say that I am writing a small book, quite a personal one, something I've kept quiet as quiet is, mostly these days, how I feel. Hopefully it will be useful - I feel sick about it being thought of as just pretty. It's not too far from completion - the pesky words part, anyway - and the photographs are slowly coming together. Can't thank my kinesiologist* enough for the swift kick needed to get it happening some months ago.
Going to share it over the coming months, parts of it, to flex my creative muscle. Thanks, as ever, for reading people.
P.S. We now have bees. Bees! Fascinating. I lay in the grass next to the hive for 20 minutes on the weekend, listening in to their collective hum. Beautiful creatures. Beautiful noise.
*Yep. Not at all afraid of a bit of weirdo esoterica, me.
Matt came by on Saturday morning, pulled up in his hulking truck to show us how to properly use a chainsaw. He's one of those people it's hard not to really like and as he was trying to avoid going car shopping (groan), we ended up chatting at length. Being both an arborist and a CFA volunteer, he had some interesting, nay terrifying, things to say about how trees are falling over as they halve their root systems due to drought and (the CFA bit) about the run up to fire season. An old bloke he knows who keeps reams of weather records told him that conditions, this year, are slightly worse than they were back in '82. Yep, that'd be Ash Wednesday, people.
So, this is a little ritualistic sort of reminder to myself, and maybe you, to give thanks to the CFA for the skilled work they do.
Kristy's much needed European jaunt means that on werk days I've become chief unpacker, hefter of boxes and receiver of stock. As bookselling tasks go it's always been a favourite, particularly as the new releases arrive. Sydney chef Matt Moran's new kitchen garden cookbook turned up this morning in its green and glam cover, but a quick flick through at the back counter - browsing is product knowledge, I'll have you know - proved it was just as fluffy as I'd suspected. Moran's commitment is obvious and heartfelt but I'm a bit over being lectured to by chefs about how glorious it is to grow one's own. I know. There ain't no garden staff to tend mine either. Sometimes all the ducks have left you is the damn kale, shitting on what's left of the beetroots while they forage through the rest, to say nothing of the cockatoos who have been playing in my garlic crop. And when I use the word playing, what I mean is destroying.
What I'm saying is that it's not glamorous growing food. Fun, yes, edu-ma-cational, and life-enhancing definitely, but hardly glamorous. Moran has a pretty little handwritten note in the book that made me giggle:
Remember when a leafy salad was green and nothing but green? The variety of colours and flavours you can get these days makes the whole salad scene much more interesting.
Clearly there's a whole Scene I wasn't even aware of...and it's just that sort of comment from a bloke who chefs for a living (as opposed to a woman who has to get dinner on the table every night) that makes me long for a salad that's all green. Nothing wrong with a plain, old fashioned green s'lad as far as I'm concerned. I'm contrary like that.