Manna from Heaven

With my new found enthusiasm for reviewing books (my review of Kitchen Garden Companion has been published on Gastronomer's Bookshelf!) I borrowed Rachel Grisewood's Manna From Heaven from a friend to practise on.
The title of this publication is also the name of Grisewood's business – she manufactures cakes and biscuits which are sold fairly widely throughout Australia and even turn up on Qantas flights. A brief web search suggested that her products are well known but I can honestly say that I have never knowingly eaten either of her 'iconic' (surely there is a better word?) products – that is Chocolate Crunch and Lemon Polenta Cake – before making them according to the recipes in her book. More of that later.

On first appearances Manna from Heaven is very appealing. A bright fuchsia pink and orange cover, lots of vivid orange and purple, bright pink and lime green inside, 'hand written' titles and line drawings, minimal photography all conveying a feeling of fun and perhaps a touch of eccentricity. The organisation of the book is also a bit quirky – each section is organised around a theme and tells a story based around Rachel's experiences as a chef, as a business woman , a mother and a friend. The chapter 'Everything but the kitchen sink' for example includes recipes for a variety of dishes from 'Braised chicken legs with star anise' to 'Andrea's Pineapple Upside-down cake' sandwiched together with musings on kitchens and cooking equipment. Whilst much of what the author has to say is reasonably interesting somehow the words don't quite live up to the vitality promised by all the colourful exuberance and for me some of the personal detail got a tad tedious.
There is a preponderance of recipes for bakery items here, since these are clearly Grisewood's first love, which means that this is not a book for the non-baker. Although there is a broad enough range of other dishes – main meals, salads, desserts – to make this a useful book there was nothing that struck me as terribly exciting or new. In a chapter entitled 'Words on Food' the author discusses her favourite books and writers, a fairly predictable list including Elizabeth David, Claudia Roden, Marcella Hazan, Richard Olney and Nigel Slater. Manna from Heaven might be a good investment for anyone who does not already have the seminal works by these authors on their shelves, and in fairness I assume that Grisewood does in fact intend that her book should appeal to a younger audience who may not have already discovered these classics for themselves.
Although it didn't take me long to determine that this was not a book I needed to add to my own collection I did give it the acid test and attempt some of the recipes. I should make it clear that I am not a baker. I don't like having to fiddle about carefully weighing ingredients so over the years I have accumulated my own repertoire of foolproof cakes and I am rarely tempted to torture myself with further experimentation.

Grisewood's Chocolate Crunch however is almost nothing more than shortbread biscuits embedded in rich dark chocolate. Even I was able to make this and the result was pretty much what I expected. Mine even looked like the photograph in the book in as much as it was dark brown and had clearly visible lumps of biscuit. On closer inspection however Grisewood's biscuit pieces were somewhat more uniform in size and shape and arranged much less haphazardly than mine.

Manna from Heaven?

Emboldened I proceed to the next 'iconic' recipe – Lemon Polenta Cake. I have in fact made a similar cake before using an almost identical recipe clipped from a magazine. The ingredients are few and the method straightforward. I complicated things slightly - rather than making one large cake or 24 smaller ones I made  only twelve small cakes and one medium size- in a 7” tin (it is an old cake tin which I inherited from my mother so it is very much measured in inches and not centimetres).
This is one of those super simple bung-it-all-in-together-and-mix recipes which appeal to me. The resulting large cake certainly looked good but my mini cakes steadfastly refused to allow themselves to be removed from the pan (serious greasing and baking paper not withstanding) and I needed to add considerably more than just a couple of teaspoons of lemon juice to make an icing out of 225g of icing sugar. The general consensus from the tasting panel was a definite thumbs up which means that this cake is worth attempting again. Another characteristic in its favour is that it is rich and moist and keeps well.

In a former life I worked in product development for a company which manufactured a wide range of flour based products including cake mixes. Those experiences taught me the litany of variables - oven temperature, the type of oven, the position of the cake in the oven, size of the cake tin, weight of the egg, how long or how little the batter was mixed for, the accuracy of all the weights and measurements, the strength of the flour etc – which bedevil bakers. Grisewood does address some of these issues – she gives both the number of eggs and the weight of egg, she specifies the type of butter – but to be really foolproof the recipe still has to work assuming that the cook has taken absolutely no notice of any of this information. When I made the Lemon Polenta Cake I didn't weigh the eggs; I used ordinary, everyday Australian butter; I used coarse polenta not fine and the scales I had available were only accurate to the nearest 20 grams – on that basis then this recipe would appear to be a pretty resilient. And on reading the fine print I discovered that the author does specify the 'the icing sugar is always pure' which would explain why icing made with 225g of icing sugar mixture requires much more than a teaspoon or two of lemon juice.
Take note, if you do buy this book remember to read pages 12 and 13 before proceeding further.

Manna From Heaven. Cooking for the people you love.
Rachel Grisewood
Allen & Unwin,  Crows Nest,  2009
ISBN 9781741757286

Birthday Dinner

I do most of the cooking in this household (sometimes this statement would read 'I do ALL of the cooking around here!'), with the exception of the odd breakfast (usually at the weekend) and weekday lunches (which generally involve raids on the left overs). Part of my role as head chef is to prepare something special for birthday dinners. I enjoy making a bit of a fuss for birthdays so the birthday person is allowed to have whatever they would like (within reason) and usually chooses a favourite dish but sometimes something we haven't tried at home before. For the next birthday at the end of the month the special request is steak and kidney pudding which is a far cry from the fancy cakes and fairy bread of the past.
Last weekend it was my birthday and the tables were turned. What did I want cooked for me on my birthday? I had no idea.
I have actively encouraged my family to take an interest in the food they eat and they are all quite capable of preparing a meal. All I had to do was provide them with a recipe and some of the ingredients. This wasn't meant to be a 'Masterchef 'challenge – I needed to choose dishes that I knew they could manage and ideally didn't need either too much preparation or too much last minute attention. The final decision was less about what I wanted to eat and had more to do with what I thought was achievable.

In the end we had braised lamb shanks with couscous, more or less according to The Cooks Companion, followed by rice pudding and baked quinces. And it was terrific!

However as they were preparing and I was enduring an excruciating banishment from the kitchen I decided we would do things differently next year.

Because I cook for four of us every night usually my first conscious thought every morning is along the lines of 'what are we going to have for dinner?' Although I often ask for guidance the responses aren't always helpful with the result that most nights we eat what I want to have for dinner – either simply what I am prepared to make, something that has tempted me when I've been shopping or just something new that I want to try. In that sense every day is my special day because I make the choices.

Preparing food for someone else is an act of giving. Every meal requires at the very least the giving of your time and your attention in one form or another. For me preparing meals for my family every day is both a necessity – we all need to eat – and an act of, mushy though it may sound, love. (It might be instructive to draw up a relationship between what we eat each night and what sort of mood I am in!)
When I prepare something special for someone on their birthday it is really just a way of giving them a more personal gift – this meal is first and foremost for you, we are just sharing it with you.

When it comes to my birthday next year I want my family to cook for me and to give me what they want to prepare, what they want me to have. I don't want to make a choice, I will be more than happy with whatever it is they make – sausages from the barbecue, cheese on toast, bacon and eggs - because it will be what they want to give.

Month in Review - April 2010

Harvested at Sunnybrae

For a long time I have been fascinated by the restaurant kitchen. I don't ever really want to work in one but I've often wanted to be a fly on the wall, actually in there feeling the heat and smelling the food rather than just watching bits and pieces of the action on television. I'm intrigued by the whole process of getting food onto the table from knowing what to prepare ahead and how much food to have on hand right down to making sure that it gets to the table hot enough. And I'm fascinated and awed by the dedication and enthusiasm of those who devote their professional life to cooking for other people.
Anyone can learn how to cook – basic stuff like boiling water, frying an egg – and how to follow a recipe. But for me to be a really good cook requires innate ability and almost an obsession with experimenting and learning and creating. A good cook understands ingredients, can read food by the way it looks and smells and mixes flavours and textures the way an artist might mix colours to get just the right combination. I regard myself as a competent home cook rather than a good cook. I'm a little too afraid of failure for one thing and tend to be more of a recipe follower than a generator of ideas – although I have often been heard to lament that most of my real failures have come about because I have followed the recipe rather than my own instincts. I don't think I was born with any great talent for cooking but I do find it a satisfying and enjoyable creative process and I'm always on the look out for inspiration.

Which leads me to the highlight for this month – cooking with George Biron at Sunnybrae. I have made no secret of my enthusiasm for all things Sunnybrae and it was a simple matter to convince myself that a day or two in Victoria was exactly what I needed as an early birthday present. George's Mondays are less of a cooking class – although there is plenty to learn – and more of an opportunity to cook together, to try some new techniques, to experiment with new ingredients and gain a little more understanding about food and cooking. Anyone who attends can request a particular ingredient or technique that interests them and George structures a menu around these requests based on his philosophy of using locally sourced, fresh, seasonal and sometimes unusual ingredients. There's a lot to take in and trying to take some notes while watching, listening and doing required a good deal of concentration so that sitting down to enjoy the food we had helped to prepare was very welcome at the end of the day.

Lunch consisted of bread fresh from the woodfired oven, home made taramasalata, a vegetable strudel made with yufka pastry, a tomatillo salad, and a green papaya salad with farmed prawns followed by braised beef ribs served with potatoes salardaise and a sweet and sour cucumber and tomato salad and finished off with crème brûlée and persimmons, pomegranates and ground cherries in a lemon verbena syrup served with star anise and lime flavoured ice cream.

Taramasalata, tomatillo salad and the wonderful fresh bread straight out of the oven

I came away full, happy and reinvigorated and reminded that good food, good cooking is also about generosity – being generous with ingredients, with knowledge and ideas and with your time. Many thanks George.(My family should thank you too because they have already been treated to the beef ribs and the tomato and cucumber salad.)

After Sunnybrae we drove along the coast road to Adelaide. I am no fan of driving holidays but the coast road is a bit of an exception because the outposts of civilisation are reasonably frequent and the scenery was magnificent. The only real disappointment was a distinct scarcity of lobsters in the lobster capitals of Robe and Kingston which we should have anticipated as it is the end of the season and the quota already accounted for.
Being away from home food becomes even more of an obsession than usual- it is no longer just a question of what to eat but where. Scouting for restaurants and eating three meals a day purchased from unfamiliar sources and produced by unknown hands gets a bit tiresome. I don't know how vegetarians cope when they are away from home but I was desperate for something green and crunchy by the time we reached Adelaide.

Eating wasn't our main reason for being in Adelaide;

we were there for the Special Olympics National Trials to cheer on the lovely Lisa who was competing in Bocce. She came away with three medals including the Gold Medal for the teams event!

Gold Medal Winners!!

However after the competition finished we did indulge in a trip to the Adelaide Central Markets – a wonderful place to be on a Saturday morning, full of life and tempting goodies (including this amazing selection of glace fruit)  - and we spent a day in the Adelaide Hills home of my latest favourite cheese Paris Creek Nuage Blanc (which is the best cheese you will ever buy in a supermarket gorgeously oozy on the outside, firm and crumbly in the middle) AND of Woodside Cheese Wrights  AND Udder Delights  – so much cheese, so little time!


Back home and eager to get back into the kitchen I was interested to read Michael Ruhlman's 'Message to food editors: What 30 minute meals really mean' (and see also here) because there really isn't any good excuse for not eating well – fresh, seasonal produce, prepared with a bit of care. Which does not mean buying the white asparagus from PERU which was available at the green grocer this week!

Reviewing cook books and the Gastronomers Bookshelf.

from Punch  14 November, 1951

Last week I discovered the Gastronomers Bookshelf  a site dedicated to reviews of books about food. Given my on-going gripe about recipe books not getting the attention they deserve in the main stream media I was thrilled to discover that someone takes these books seriously enough to put the time and effort into maintaining this website.

I immediately decided that my mission in life was to help Duncan and Mark and make my own contribution to their efforts. So I launched myself into a review of Stephanie Alexander's Kitchen Garden Companion. A week later I am still writing.

Initially I was wildly positive about this book, carried away in part by my own enthusiasm for starting a vegetable garden and in part because I had been very impressed when I heard Ms. Alexander talk about her Kitchen Garden Foundation . It is hard not to admire her determination and dedication. I even went as far as to describe her book as 'inspirational, indispensable and irresistible'! (I've always been a fan of alliteration.)
A good review however needs to be at least somewhat objective even allowing for the reviewer's admission of their own bias. It wasn't until I really tried to see this book through someone else's eyes and tried to summarise why I liked it and why I thought others should buy it that I realised there were flaws and omissions. In fact in the end I found it hard to know who I would recommend it to, especially given the price tag (in excess of $A100) and seriously began to question why I had bought it myself!

Part of the problem of reviewing the Kitchen Garden Companion lies in
1.clearly defining what the book is about - Is it a gardening guide? Is it a recipe book?
and
2.defining the intended audience - adults? Children? Families? Gardeners? Inexperienced cooks? All of the above?
The book has grown out of the author's experience of establishing her own vegetable garden and her work with school children and combines gardening information with recipes and instruction on how to involve children both in cooking and gardening. Much as I admire Ms. Alexander I suspect that she tends to have a bit of an authoritarian, take no prisoners approach which manifests itself here in an uncompromising confidence in children's latent enthusiasm for gardening and cooking, their abilities with kitchen equipment and their predisposition to appreciate sophisticated flavours.

In the end I think I have decided that anyone wanting to start a kitchen garden, whether planning to involve children in the process or not, would probably be better off buying a more comprehensive gardening guide. For example, Lolo Houbein's One Magic Square covers most of what you would ever need to know and offers all sorts of sensible, practical advice – like raising seedlings in the cardboard cylinders from toilet rolls. Anyone interested enough to start growing their own food probably already has a reasonable selection of recipe books and anyone wanting to teach children the basics of how to cook would want recipes less complex than those in the Kitchen Garden Companion. Stephanie's book makes a worthy attempt to be two (perhaps even three) books in one volume but for less than the cost of the Kitchen Garden Companion, you could actually have two books.

Along the way I also compared the Kitchen Garden Companion with another book in my collection, Nigel Slater's Tender. Although we have long been advised not to judge a book by its cover, book designers are there to try to persuade us to do just that. What struck me when I looked at these two books side by side was how each reflects its author, not just in the writing and the recipes but also in its physical look and feel.

Stephanie Alexander's book is big and weighty (running to 771 pages and weighing in at 3 kilos)– it looks authoritative. The photographs are bright and clear and the layout is neat and regular so that flipping through the appearance is very sunny, very primary colours, very clean and precise, very no-nonsense. There's almost a feeling that this is educational and good for you even before you start reading.

Tender – the very title suggests something fragile and delicate – is almost the antithesis of authoritarian despite also being a hefty tome. There's a fuzziness and an unpretentiousness to the photographs here and the whole book has a sort of greyness and softness to it– the recipes are in fact printed on grey paper and there are one or two shots of snow – which has the effect of somehow making it seem very English in contrast to Alexander's book which seems very Australian. Even the titles of the recipes 'A tomato salad …', 'A mildly spiced supper …', A stir-fry of broccoli …' suggest a certain hesitancy, a desire to share ideas rather than instruct. I've only ever seen photographs of Nigel Slater but he always looks a bit dishevelled and unkempt (as though he hasn't combed his hair) and slightly whimsical which is, to me at least, exactly how this book presents itself. He calls himself a cook who writes and here even his words are tender - romantic and seductive. (Some might even say that some of his writing verges on the erotic!) There are a lot of words here so there is a sense that you need to spend time reading this book to really understand what it is about – time that is well rewarded. Just to tempt you, how about this:

'I regard a baked onion as a fine but humble supper. It will probably have been steamed first to keep its flesh juicy, then left in a low oven to bake with a little butter and salt until its translucent, golden layers are at the point of collapse. Its edges may have caught and even blackened here and there, and the juices may come embellished with a little cream and grated pecorino ...There will be hand-torn bread, and maybe some lightly cooked spinach at its side. Oh and a glass or two of wine, something velvety, would do nicely.'

I'll have what he's having thanks.

See here  for a very interesting piece on what's involved with establishing a school kitchen garden under the auspices of the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation and here for my final review.

Artisanal Preservation - Tomato Kasundi

Sharing food with friends is one of life's great pleasures. Making food with friends is right up there too as a wonderful way to spend time together and end up with something useful that you have all helped to create. Thanks to a cheap box of tomatoes three of us got together yesterday to make tomato kasundi (from the recipe in Charmaine Solomon's Complete Asian Cookbook). We had far more tomatoes than we had jars to fill. Undaunted we then decided to make tomato sauce (from the recipe in A Year in a Bottle by Sally Wise) as well.
Then we needed to hunt around and find another pan so that we could have three huge pots bubbling away on the stove together.

Our next decision was to make twice the quantity specified in the  sauce recipe. After a lot of chopping we  realised we had mis-read the scales and had weighed up the tomatoes in pounds rather than kilos. This explained why our 16 kilo box wasn't emptying as fast as we had anticipated.
We were stalled for a moment while there was much discussion and reweighing and a bit of back and forth about who had added what and how much. Our deliberations were complicated somewhat becasue the sauce was being cooked in two pans so the recipe was being 'doubled' (although not really) and halved at the same time. Fortunately we discovered our scaling problem as we were about to add the salt to the sauce but not before we had added the sugar, some of which had to be carefully retrieved.
Part way through we also realised we didn't have all the ingredients for the sauce and perhaps not quite enough of some so a little improvisation was necessary.
Miraculously the kasundi proceeded without any set backs once we worked out how many more tomatoes we needed to add. (For your information it would appear that there are around five Roma tomatoes to the pound.)

Thanks to both good recipes and good old commonsense the end results tasted fabulous. Is this what you would call artisanal preservation? The products are certainly unique - we couldn't reproduce them even if we tried.

Month in Review - March 2010

At last autumn is in the air - it is fractionally cooler, not quite so humid and daylight saving is about to come to an end. Time to give the salads a bit of a rest and actually start eating cooked, hot food again.
Herewith a summary of foodie happenings this month -
1.Every year I wait less and less patiently for the arrival of figs - and finally they are here, although not many! I've managed to make Fig Cake a couple of times already and have stored away some more figs in the freezer.
2. And quinces are available at last. Yesterday I baked some magnificent specimens which I bought at the Kitchen Cabinet  a little shop selling local produce attached to the restaurant at Old Parliament House.








I also bought some tomatillos having sampled them at Sunnybrae. We had some of them in a salad with avocado and cucumber which was very good but I have yet to decide what to do with the rest.



We were in Canberra to visit the exhibition of masterpieces from the Musée d'Orsay at the National Gallery. And it was worth braving the crowds to see these works in the flesh - although I would have been more than happy to wait to see them sometime in Paris.

Paul Cézanne Kitchen table (Still-life with basket) (La table de cuisine (Nature morte au panier))

3. March was a very good month for reading. First there was the Griffith Review No. 27 entitled 'Food Chain' which as the name suggests was devoted entirely to writing associated in some way with food. Can recommend the article by Margaret Simons 'Sustaining a Nation'. 
Then the latest edition of Gastronomica arrived in the mail with more interesting and thought provoking reading - Why are there no Great Women Chefs?, and who would have thought that Sylvia Plath liked to cook.
Finally I got hold of a copy of Frank Moorhouse's Loose Living in which he chronicles our Australian hero's adventures in Europe. This is an odd little book but parts of it are absolutely hilarious.

4. Apart from the very good lunch we had at Cafe in the House in Canberra we also managed dinner at two local restaurants.
 Glebe Point Diner is consistently good but because they have two sittings for dinner  I was very conscious that mine wasn't the only bum that had been on the seat that night. Perhaps it is just me but there is a sense here that this is very much a business and although the food and wine are very good the atmosphere is a bit sterile. (And isn't $15 corkage for BYO just a little bit over the top? although it must be admitted that the wine list here is extensive and varied.)
At The Codfather (83 Percival Street, Stanmore) on the other hand the service was friendly and attentive, the food was excellent and the corkage on our BYO very reasonable. And you have to love the name.

Blogs and Blogging

During the month I've been doing a bit of Blog maintenance- changing things around a bit and adding some new favourites to the list of blogs I follow. All of which has given me pause to think about blogs and blogging in general.

I started one crumb at a time largely as a vehicle for my own writing about food. I wanted to hone my writing skills and improve my computer skills. I also wanted the discipline of writing on a regular basis and having to put my thoughts into some sort of logical order. As it has developed the broader idea of the blog as a diary and a record, a place where I can store ideas as well as photographs and art works, record events and references, has become just as important.

The blogs I follow obviously reflect my interests. In general I'm not interested in blogs devoted almost exclusively to recipes – I would sooner keep up with Nigel Slater in the Guardian or consult my own collection of books. I would rather read about the history of the dish and/or the ingredients or perhaps comparisons of versions of the same dish or even critiques of different recipe books (and in fact these are some of the areas I want to explore myself in the future). Nor am I excited by restaurant reviews – where the 30-somethings are eating, what they ate and who they shared it with isn't always riveting reading. (And where do they find the time and the money?) I am by no means against restaurant reviews and I do like to keep up with what's new and popular but  for general reading I would sooner Jay Rainer or Alan Richman or A.A. Gill even if there is little or no chance of ever visiting the restaurants they frequent. I also worry a bit about the trend to taking photographs of what we eat rather than taking the time to describe the food, that bloggers are spending too much time documenting and not enough time thinking (and I am not alone - see here).

The blogs I do enjoy reading are not cluttered with advertising nor do they confuse with too many extra pages and diversions. If I am going to take the time to read I like something that is well written and/or something that is thoughtful and informative. And so the blogs I reference here are ones that are updated fairly regularly (if not daily) and offer something of interest.

This month I have also started another blog  called Recipes for my children which you might not be too surprised to learn is a record of recipes I want to hand on to my children along with some family history and general, I hope useful, kitchen information.
As far as I can tell no one has read either of my blogs. I don't know that I would welcome comments anyway - certainly not if they are along the lines of 'great photo' or 'loved the recipe'. On the other hand genuine interaction, thoughtful comments which could lead to some sort of on-going conversation, would be appreciated.
In the meantime I'm not interested in advertising or making money -  I am more than happy to entertain myself with my own little on-line project.