Nourish Me

new

Cheap peaches bought hopefully from South Melbourne market, too early in the season, and lacking proper pits, they disappointed, even though I knew they would. (Nonetheless, I still feel conned)

(New (city) sink = swoon)

This new place was, once, a proper worker's cottage, and, channeling some sort of old school vibe (man), I slice and chop on a butcher's block outside under the tin awning on warm nights; I feel it's a nod of sorts to the women who cooked outside over fire before electricity changed the world.

(Have I shown you my bird-and-bauble thing-y before? He never fails to make me smile) 

 And a quick radish salad, veg all our own, grown in the country, eaten in the city on a recent hot evening.

p.s. An Honest Kitchen, Seasonal Desserts is now available in print. It's beautiful. Just so you know...   

 

gold

If spring has a colour in these parts, it's not green, but yellow,

in every conceivable shade, from palest lemon to the deepest of cadmiums.   

On some afternoons, if you are very lucky, the light is actually gold, waxing toward warmer days ahead.   

Makes all of us in our little camp happy.

 

 

garlic shoots

If David Hirsh hadn't mentioned in his Moosewood Restaurant Kitchen Garden that, small cloves [of garlic] can be planted closely for garlic greens to be harvested in spring, I know, left to my own devices, that I'd never have come up with anything so ingenious. You know those tiny, tiny inner cloves? The ones you deem unpeelable and, therefore, practically useless? Plant them. In autumn, when they start to send out their inedible shoots. They take up very little space and, hey hey, it means that come pre-spring, spring and beyond, you chop, and use them as you might very stinky (in a good way) spring onions, et voilà. Fresh, beautiful garlic flavours without the need for the jarred stuff.

 

 

seasonal cook

Seasonal Cook, my arse. Stay with me, as I'll be brief.

While in Sydney last week, doing many pleasant things I'll have you know, I spent some time over breakfast on Saturday morning looking through the fluffy bit of the Sydney Morning Herald. The heading Seasonal Cook and the trusted name of Stefano Manfredi caught my eye, but I was rather surprised to read the ingredient list of his Spring Salad, one that included only 2 vegetables that are actually available in spring.

Oxheart tomatoes? Garlic? Capsicum, cucumber, basil? Those are summer ingredients, at their best in the latter half of that, for now, seemingly far away season. I'm not suggesting for a moment that I am beyond reproach seasonally, and yep, a-hem, that was me ranting on twitter the other day about people pontificating about their Seasonal Superiority, but come on...makes me wonder when chefs (the worst culprits, I find) are going to really grasp this seasonal concept properly, rather than paying it lip-service.

What crimes against the season annoy you? 

 

 

making it up as i go along

The recipes to which I am most drawn are the simplest, those that do not require a great deal of faffing to prepare, and which deliver every single time. Whereas once I had the knack of choosing complication over simplicity, those recipes that took hours to make, that developed skills, impressive in their many-ingredient-laden glory (i.e. show-off food), since my mojo upped and left, its more recent return means I've now a new knack that makes me happy: that of seeking out the sophisticated but wonderfully straightforward. Complicated still wends its way through my cooking, a recent tart involving sage and garlic-rubbed wedges of pumpkin, sauteed leeks and fennel, pastry making, custard-making (see? who really wants to read all of that within a recipe?) being an obvious example, but those sort of meals tend toward complexity because I'm making it up as I go along.

I don't set out that way. If I did, dinner might never - not ever - arrive. 

We planted loads of broad beans (favas, for my American friends) this year, mostly as a manure crop for the dry, empty bed that lines the pathway to the front steps, but also because I don't think there's a crop around that delivers more - visually, edibly - than the broad bean. Standing tall in their cane and string structure, they cheerfully greet visitors and birds alike, the latter using my connecting sticks as a worm-spying perch. I like them as a plant so much (and had so many seeds from the previous owner) that I grew another crop in the kitchen garden.

I think it safe to say we've a proper, PROPER crop on our hands.

The hunt for new recipes is underway. This weekend, I consulted the books (as you do) and this idea - beautiful for its brevity - from Anna Del Conte leaped out. I've no intention of rewording, by the way. Perfect as is. From her incredibly useful Amaretto, Apple Cake and Artichokes. 

pecorino con le favre

"This is hardly a recipe. It is the way Tuscans start their meal in April when the broad beans are still young and their skin is tender.

All you have to do is buy 450g (1lb) of pecorino, preferably seasoned and Tuscan, and 1.5kg of young broad beans. 

Cut the pecorino into wedges and put them on a dish. Put the unpodded broad beans in a bowl and let everybody get on with it. The drink must be red wine; a good Chianti Classico would be perfect."

Ideal for when my beans are a little further along, just in time for the holidays. The essence of simplicity, to be eaten on our dilapidated red table beneath the spreading arms of the oak tree out the back while the sun shines. I think a big block of feta would work here, too.

Of course, there are other edible uses for this long-cultivated plant. You need to pinch out the tops when pods begin to form, and, in an act of waste-not want-not, let me tell you, they are a revelation when stir-fried with new season garlic and stuffed into the folds of a fat omelette (an idea gleaned from Colin Spencer and Jamie Oliver's gardener, Brian Skilton (who I may just be a little bit in love with)). And then there's the fact that they fix nitrogen to the soil, look stunning, make me happy...what more could one ask for?  

bounty

from this,

to this

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

(inspired by tea)

Town mouse...

 ...or country mouse?

Country mouse for sure.

It's taken a while for the dust to settle, longer still to find my feet again, but find them I have, for now anyway. Probably time to fill you in, right?

This September, we bought a modest house in the country. A small wooden building set in the middle of 1.25 acres with lots of sheds, a slate-floored studio, and a dam that rises with the water table. When we began looking our plans were grander, but practicality and an established orchard won in the end, for it will be only part-time for a while, and 5 acres (or more)? That's a LOT of work, people.

I've begun at least a dozen posts about the place and abandoned each mid-way because it's difficult to explain how it all makes me feel. New light, new subjects, new life. There have been many new lives over the years, but few have been so permament, so consuming and not one of them allowed for long-term projects.

This head is now full to brimming with them.

In truth, it's still hard to write up, particularly as we search for a rhythm to it all, but there are good things to share. Like the wonky tap in the laundry that I love, and the afternoon light that its accompanying silver sink soaks up. There's beetroot a-hoy which, thanks to my friend Ali, I like best shredded and tossed with horseradish and coriander. (Eaten by the bucketful, thank you) There have been killer rhubarb crumbles and simple meals, the kind the weary gardener falls upon early in the evening.

Cooking on the wood stove was Saturday night's frankly thrilling discovery, the roaring fire within the best I've built yet. I roasted cauliflower with mustard seeds, lazily chopped garlic and olive oil inside the oven and wilted lush, snappy greens in a pan on top, breaking duck eggs - all of it bought from a real farmers market - into divets in the greenery. An all day deluge and rapidly dropping temperatures made it feel warm and snug and, best of all, like home.       

Spring roses

There are all kinds of pretty happening in my tiny front garden. Long-stemmed roses, old-fashioned fragrant varieties, ramble among camellias, hydrangea (pruned just in time), geraniums, a magnolia tree trained years ago into a heart shape and a thick carpet of violets. I'm trying to honour the old lady whose romantic house this is by tending her garden as if it were my own.

Turns out I love roses, which is good, 'cos our country garden has approximately 3 million of them.* When they finish blooming and send out their glossy red hips, this Rosehip Sherry is the first recipe I'm going with.

Any other ideas you'd care to share?

*(only a slight exaggeration...far out...) 

Skies

Of early spring. 

Silly (but incredibly good)

Interminably silly though the accompanying photograph is (what on earth is going on with the tiny nest of eggs in the bottom right corner? And the safety pin? I mean, really? Just the sort of food styling that does my head in...) the Pumpkin, pearl barley and miso braise from Gourmet Traveller's excellent website is incredibly good. Incredibly.

Little was changed from the recipe, torn out of the Masterclass pages months ago, shoved into my recipe folder, then promptly forgotten. Wish I'd made it sooner. I peeled the pumpkin - there's something nasty about an inch-wide wedge of tough skin to my thinking - and disagree that 1/2 a pumpkin weighs in at 750g, but it's a wonderful, soothing, healing sort of dish, perfect for this time of year, whichever hemisphere you happen to reside in.