Dear Mr Slater

Dear Mr Slater,

Your latest book Tender Volume 1 was on my Christmas present list and I have spent the last couple of unexpectedly wet days reading and making lists of what I am going to grow and what I am going to cook.

We have been in our house for four months now and the garden is still a wasteland. Like you we live in an inner  city Victorian terrace - akin to living in a tunnel. If you stand at the front window you get a clear line of sight through to the end of the garden. We do however have access to the rear lane through the garage so all the messy bits, the manure and the mulch, will not have to be carried through the house.

Once the layout is complete - pathways and garden beds - we will have two major growing areas each about 12 metres long running the length of the garden which is only 5.4 metres wide at the widest point. Cramming all the fruit, vegetables and ornamental plants I would like to grow into this space will be something of a challenge.

The garden faces north west and so most of the area gets sun for the whole day. Although it has rained steadily in the few days since Christmas and our water tanks are full, providing sufficient water to keep the garden lush and productive may yet be our biggest hurdle - it is highly unlikely that we will ever see the garden covered in snow. Foxes are not a problem in our part of Sydney, we are however prepared to be troubled by possums who have a fierce reputation for finding the tastiest morsels in any garden - grow something they fancy and they will find it. Late in the afternoon just at dusk we also often see fruit bats flying over so perhaps they too will find our new garden a temptation.

Already there are some plants in the ground - rosemary (a house warming gift from friends who already have a well established vegetable garden), lemon balm, thyme and rhubarb crowns which I have been keeping alive in pots for months while  the renovations to the house were being completed and we were moving from one temporary home to the next. Also in pots are lemon thyme, marjoram, sage and tarragon all waiting for their permanent home.

Reading about other gardens always makes me lament those plants our climate mitigates against such as apples, quinces, rasperries, and I can only hope for success with gooseberries and elderberries (what joy to be able to make elder flower cordial). On the other hand citrus and olives  and passionfruit should present few problems. For advice on what to grow and when to plant here in Australia my reference is Stephanie Alexander's The Kitchen Garden Companion. In the right position Stephanie promises as many as 30 aubergines per bush per season - all your wonderful eggplant recipes will be put to good use.

If all goes well we will be planting in late February in time for broad beans and beetroot and chervil and spinach and masses of salad greens. Like you I have always been something of a gardener with a few herbs and vegetables grown in various gardens over the years but this is our first attempt to establish a garden which is largely edible and organic as well as a pleasant place to relax. I hope we are well on our way to establishing our own little oasis on this side of the globe by the time Tender Volume 2 is available.

Thank you for your books - I have many of them on the shelves. They are always very seductive - beautifully written and presented -and endlessly inspirational.

Julia Child and thoughts on the demise of cooking

Most of the last month was devoted to Julia Child. I started off reading the special edition of Gastronomica devoted to Julia (Summer, 2005). This was my real  introduction to Mrs Child  and I was immediately charmed by her no-nonsense approach, her sense of humour and the wonderful relationship she had with her husband Paul. The magazine also includes some terrific photographs. I found her passion and enthusiasm and the obvious pleasure she gained from her devotion to good food both compelling and invigorating..

From there it was off to the movies to see what sort of a job Meryl Streep would do with this character. You probably don’t need to be a foodie to enjoy the film Julie and Julia but it certainly helps. I found it very satisfactory although I would have loved a bit more of Julia’s relationship with her husband and I could have taken a lot more of the gorgeous costumes.

From the cinema it was a very short walk to the bookshop but I have since been pondering how many others would be inspired to go home and actually cook some of the food they had seen on the screen. Nora Ephron, the director, is justifiably proud of the way the food looked in the film and it seems many people may have come away  feeling hungry but simply being interested in food and eating food are not the same thing as preparing food.

Of course I am not the only person in the universe who is pondering the paradox between the number of recipe books available, the number of food programmes on television and the decline in home cooking. Michael Pollan makes a much better job of presenting this conundrum that I could ever hope to do ('Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch' ). So how many people will sit down and take time to read what Julia Child took such care to write for us in Mastering the Art of French Cooking? ( Regina Schrambling suggests not many ). And this is a book which needs to be read – it is dense with information and light on pretty pictures in contrast to many of the more recent books on the shelves which are full of gorgeous, lavish photography (usually not just of food ) but seem to be a bit light on substance. Michael Pollan would argue that in fact most people who buy these books are more interested in the pictures than the recipes, more interested in eating food than cooking. This would seem to be borne out by the recent demise of Gourmet magazine. Yes it was a bit elitist but at least there was an attempt in a popular magazine to offer more than just recipes and advertising. Isn’t it more than a little ironic that in Julia Child’s new recognition is based on an internet blog? The internet is now where most people find their recipes. (This article makes interesting reading on the shift away from magazines and Gourmet in particular.)

Thanks principally to television, food consumers are now well educated about ingredients and terminology which makes for confident ordering in restaurants and engaging conversations about esoteric ingredients but doesn’t seem to translate to getting their hands dirty. Michael Pollan suggests that there is no longer a sense that food preparation is a ‘gratifying, even ennobling sort of work’ or that there can be any satisfaction or pleasure to be gained from something as mundane as feeding ourselves. Cooking on television tends to emphasise quick results. Pollan argues our relationship to cooking has become voyeuristic – we enjoy watching people cook because we enjoy eating food not because we want to cook the food ourselves and that our relationship to watching food preparation on television is much like our relationship to watching sport. Not surprisingly there is an inverse relationship between obesity and the amount of time spent on preparing food.

Pollan also raises the serious issues of what our fast world, what loosing a culture of every day cooking is doing/will do to our civilisation if cooking really is the activity which distinguishes us from the animals. (Similarly Jamie Horwitz ('Eating on the Edge' in Gastornomica, Summer 2009) contemplates the changes in where when and with whom we eat.)

Like Carlo Petrini, the champion of Slow Food as the antidote for the fast life, Michael Pollan would argue that the best food is the food you prepare yourself from fresh ingredients. Not only our own personal health but the health of our society and of the planet (think environmental degradation, soil contamination, water usage, loss of biodiversity caused by modern farming practises) could all be improved if we simply spent more time preparing food at home.

But like most problems offering a solution is one thing actually making it happen is something else. Which puts me in mind of Stephanie Alexander and her Kitchen Garden Foundation. She promotes the idea of children being encouraged to learn about growing their own food but emphasises that the process is not complete until the children actually take the ingredients to the kitchen, prepare a meal and then sit down and share the food they have made.

Julia Child and Mastering the Art of French Cooking may not be to everybody’s taste. Perhaps it doesn’t matter if the audience doesn’t go away and cook any of her recipes. But doesn’t the film also carry the message that there is satisfaction to be gained in challenging ourselves and following through on those challenges? Wouldn’t it be good if just a few people went home from the cinema and decided to cook just one or two more meals a week and share them with their family and friends?

Waste not - Compost!

Whilst progress on the garden per se is slow to the point of being non-existent we have at least commissioned the compost bin. Over the months of moving from one temporary address to another we have been without a compost facility and therefore very aware of the quantity of fruit and vegetable scraps we have been consigning to the garbage bin. Our enthusiasm to get started was spurred both by recent articles in the newspaper about waste and by hearing Stephanie Alexander speak about her passion for growing her own fruit and vegies.
Discussions around the dinner table with friends last weekend convinced me that we are composters and not worm farmers. Worms appear to need care and attention, more animal husbandry, altogether more of a commitment. Compost on the other hand seems to require only the ability to collect suitable material and a degree of patience.
Apparently there are however things that can go wrong. Rats and other nocturnal marauders find compost irresistible so there needs to be some way of ensuring that creatures cannot gain access to the bin if you don’t want to encourage them. Balance also seems to be important – too many orange peels was a bit of a disaster I remember when we tried composting the remains of children’s school lunches – but I have discovered a simple formula for layering the bin. Thanks to Stephanie’s Kitchen Garden Companion I am layering green waste (all the peelings and trimmings from the kitchen plus anything else from the garden) with an equal amount of dry material – in our case leaves and shredded paper – all helped along with a cup full of blood and bone.
In the past we have accumulated the kitchen scraps in a bucket or some other container in the kitchen which hasn’t been especially successful – the contents attract vinegar flies and the container takes up valuable floor or bench space. Thanks to my friend Jan we have now implemented another method. Each day the scraps go into a bag in the freezer. The freezer is then emptied at the weekend and the frozen lumps go into the bin with the shredded paper and the blood and bone. Not only does this keep the kitchen clear of debris but the freezing actually starts the breakdown process and it is easier to keep a track of the ratio of green to dry material – not that I have ever been very rigorous about this in the past.
No doubt there is room for refinement but at least the compost has begun!

And I also have to thank Stephanie Alexander for finding Giovanna Garzoni who is responsible for the wonderful painting at the top of this post.

Long live the cook!

Found time last week to sit down and watch the last episode of ‘The Cook and the Chef’. Whilst not entirely a Simon Bryant fan – you can only hear him say ‘I love it’ so many times – Maggie Beer’s enthusiasm for food is intoxicating. And how inspiring to see a real person cooking food in what at least appears to be a real domestic kitchen. Obituaries and tributes to Keith Floyd made reference to the way he reduced the distance between the ‘chef’ and his audience. In Floyd’s case it usually involved him consuming large quantities of alcohol resulting in what the Guardian described as ‘cheerful mayhem’. All of which led me to think that what we need, and not just on television, is more cook and less chef. Although that would seem to be out of step with what is actually happening with a series of ‘Celebrity Masterchef' about to be foisted upon us.
Thanks to a friend I have just finished reading through The Food Life. Inside the world of food with the grocer extraordinaire at Fairway by Steven Jenkins – the grocer extraordinaire.(Harper Collins, New York, 2008) .Fairway ("Like no other Market") for those who don’t know is a grocery store, well now five stores, in New York which claims to be the busiest food store in the world. Jenkins is a food enthusiast extraordinaire with the motto that ‘no edible is so precious that it should be cloistered as if one needs an appointment to regard it’. His whole adult life has been devoted to sourcing wonderful ingredients starting with cheese and working through just about everything else in the deli section. He believes we should spend less time and money in restaurants and more time entertaining at home using the old tools and the old recipes. He is against food fads and believes that ‘the more somebody messes with a foodstuff, refines and improves it, the less good its going to be. The recipes in his book are provided by Mitchel London who runs restaurants of his own and for Fairway. His motto is ‘very simple, very fresh and very delicious'. How soon can I be on a plane to New York?
Which brings me to the programme for the Sydney International Food Festival due to roll out next month. The number and range of events is very impressive and there should be something here for anyone with even a passing interest in food and eating. What concerns me a little is that there is a big emphasis on eating out with restaurant dinners of one sort or another and brunch and lunch deals (which do represent very good value and the opportunity to eat at places you might not be able to afford otherwise). The highlight of the month is the World Chef Showcase which is meant to ‘give serious food lovers an insight into the best from the global food scene’. I am prepared to be proved wrong but it sounds more like this event will give serious restaurant goers insights into the global restaurant scene and what chefs think we should be eating. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t very much like to hear what Fuchsia Dunlop and Sergi Arola and Sebastien Bras might have to say I just can’t justify spending $285 for the day and risk being disappointed.
I had hoped to go to the Food Blogger’ Secret Dinner but that was booked out before you could blink! With luck we will get to the 100 mile meal at Mamre Homestead and I have booked myself in to hear Stephanie Alexander talk about her new book Kitchen Garden Companion. My putative vegetable garden is still a pile of rubble which covers the area between the back door and the garage but one day it will be, well, at least productive. My inspiration is Lolo Houbein’s One Magic Square (Wakefield Press, Kent Town, 2008) – no one could read this and not want to rush out and grab a shovel. And I was interested to read extracts from Nigel Slater’s new book Tender: A cook and his vegetable garden - can’t wait to actually be growing something again rather than just reading bout it!

A Supermarket-free week

One of the great joys of moving house is that I am now within walking distance of a terrific local shopping ‘village’. We are also in easy reach of two farmer’s markets which run every Saturday rather than the second Saturday of every month with an ‘r’ in it or some such other complicated formula which means that you both forget when it’s on and you can’t possibly survive without having to top up the fruit and veg. supply in between times. So I can record that I have gone for a whole week without setting foot in either a Coles or a Woolworths supermarket. I have had to make a few trips to the local IGA for t-bags and milk and the like but surely that doesn’t really count as a trip to the supermarket? At the IGA on the corner you can actually speak to the owner and the staff are cheerful and friendly and know you by sight if not by name. At the local Coles or Woolworths you can do all your shopping, go through the self-help check out and never have to talk to a soul – if indeed there were any souls with whom to converse.
These fabulous mushrooms were at the Everleigh Markets last weekend – how could you resist?

　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　

Month in Review - August 2009

If a blog is supposed to be an on-line diary then it isn't much use unless there are regular entries. Nothing is more frustrating than following someones blog where nothing happens for weeks at a time. That is of course unless they have a good excuse.
Well my excuse is that we have been moving house. In fact we have been on the move since the middle of May. Three months camping in other people's houses with one saucepan and a rice cooker and far more boxes of 'essentials' than we really needed have finally come to an end.
Although still surrounded by unopened boxes, with no door to, nor shower screen in, the bathroom and a potential vegetable garden which is a wasteland I am at least using the 'perfect' kitchen which we spent so many hours designing.There probably isn't a perfect kitchen - there can never be enough bench or cupboard space. And by the time you factor in all the limitations of size, plumbing, electricity and gas connections, and then add up the cost most ideals of perfection suffer a fair degree of modification. Nonetheless I am thrilled with the result and especially my new stove.
My criteria for the perfect stove were simple

• gas cook top with plenty of burners and room for big saucepans


• electric oven - preferably two ovens so that it would be possible to cook a roast dinner and a sponge cake simultaneously (this is not something I plan to do often but I need to know that I could)


• a separate grill! What has happened to the separate grill? I still fondly remember my mother's eye-level grill on our gas stove at home. And even my Early Kooka had a separate grill.


• something which looked attractive - practical but not too agricultural - and was easy to keep clean


• and of course something which would fit the space we had available. It needed to be reasonably compact - I didn't want to take up valuable cupboard space to get an extra oven and I couldn't afford to give up bench space for extra burners.

Believe it or not there is such a gem - a Falcon Toledo 90! It is gorgeous- looks fabulous, has the best simmer settings ever and works like a dream.

But the news this month isn't all good. I had had my heart set on doing a postgraduate diploma in Gastronomy at the University of Adelaide but because of all the house moving I had put this on hold until next year. So it was very disappointing to discover that the course has been discontinued. Lack of interest? Lack of financing? Who knows but they are not accepting any more enrolments and I am on the lookout for some other intellectual stimulation.

Month in Review - July 2009

No doubt I am not the first to discover that starting a blog is much easier than keeping it up to date. I am very good at making lists of things that I should/could write about but finding the time to do so is a bit problematic. So herewith a summary of what happened in my food life this month.

1. The end of the first Australian Masterchef series. Was I the only person who didn't really get into this? What is the fascination about food as competition?


2. On the subject of television I have had access to cable TV for the last couple of weeks and was very excited at the prospect of the Lifestyle Food channel and seeing Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in the flesh only to discover that the series on offer had been made in 1999! And people pay to see this stuff? Also came across something called 'Come Dine with Me' - more food competition involving a very unlikeable crew.


3. A birthday dinner at Bird, Cow Fish -cod brandade with a salad of celery leaf, parsley and lemon followed by Coorong hanger steak with a sweet and sour garlic, anchovy, oregano, raisin and veal jus sauce. Alex Herbert is a bit of a gem.


4. Bécasse Producers Winter Forum Lunch. Introduced by Simon Marnie, food by Justin North which included Coffin Bay pacific oysters, Woodbridge smoked trout, local prosciutto, prawns from Kinkawooka (Spencer’s Gulf Prawn Fishery), duck from Cornucopia (in the Upper Hunter on the Patterson River) washed down with beer (more specifically Organic Pale Ale) from Redoak, chardonnay from Lakes Folly and coffee from Single Origin Northern Rivers. Can't wait for the next one.


5. Living temporarily in Petersham within easy walking distance of Sweet Belem and their addictive tarts.


6. Another dinner this time at Abhi's Indian restaurant with friends. This is a great local restaurant, very popular and very good.


7. Received the latest edition of the Art of Eating (number 81). Edward Behr might be a tad opinionated but there is always something thought provoking in his little magazine. And its arrival led to my perennial complaint - why isn't there a good, locally produced food magazine - of any sort? Not one chock full of recipes and celebrity chefs but one that really talks about the who, what, when, how and why of eating and food production. Think Gastronomica and even the Observer Food Monthly.

And that's it for this month