The Elegant Sufficiency

Recipe Scout 10

Finds from my recent surfing, from orange-imbued French toast to a roasted shoulder of lamb.

1. Warm Butternut and Chickpea Salad with Tahini Sauce on Orangette.
2. Delia Smith’s Red Onion Tarte Tatin on BBC food.
3. Chicken and Ginger Dim Sims (Australian style) on George Biron’s Sunnybrae Restaurant and Cooking School blog.
4. Nourish Me’s Silken Tofu and Green Beans in a Lemongrass Broth.
5. Pierre Schaedelin’s Cream of Celeriac Soup with Arugula Flan on the Martha Blog.
6. Orange French Toast on Cream Puffs in Venice
7. Narasimhan's Sweet Potato, Eggplant and Spinach Madras Curry on A Life (Time) of Cooking.
8. Chocolate and Zucchini’s Slow Roasted Shoulder of Lamb Rubbed with Rosemary, Anchovy and Lemon Zest.
9. Callipygia’s Surprise Morning Glory Muffins on FoodChair.
10. Vietnamese Lemongrass Chicken on Rasa Malaysia.

Page Turners, Or Not

I lied.
A few posts back I said that it was a rare cookbook that enticed me enough to spend money these days.
Yet this month, two new Australian cookbooks have captivated me. (Australians among you probably have already pored through them hungrily … they’ve been out since before Christmas…) How lucky am I: in the mail this month I received a copy of Greg and Lucy Malouf’s wonderful Turquoise. (Thanks Greg…) Sub-titled "A chef’s travels in Turkey”, it’s a rare and beautiful thing. Lisa Cohen’s in situ photography (below) and William Meppem’s pics of Greg’s dishes, Lucy’s engrossing travelogue and, of course, his recipes, come together in a stunning package.

Photographs: Lisa Cohen, Turquoise (Hardie Grant Books, 2007)

Greg is a genius, a national treasure. Born in Australia of Lebanese heritage, he has spent his cooking career discovering and interpreting the food of his ancestors and the food of the Middle East. Through his Melbourne restaurants (O’Connell’s and MoMo) and books co-authored with my good friend Lucy (Arabesque, Moorish, Saha, Turquoise, all published by published by Hardie Grant Books), he has introduced these flavours to Australians and trained a generation of chefs.
From Turquoise, I’ll be trying: these crunchy zucchini flowers stuffed with haloumi, mint and ginger; spicy fried calamari with whipped avocado, yoghurt and herb sauce; sultana yoghurt cake; and pomegranate and vodka sorbet.
The thing is, every Malouf book adds something new to the canon of food literature — there’s no regurgitating or rehashing; instead, you’ll find Greg’s original recipes, the vicarious travel and discovery of a new place, Lucy’s lovely words, and, always, terrific photography. (I’ve heard a rumour about what their next offering might be, but I think I may be sworn to secrecy…)

Photograph: William Meppem, Turquoise (Hardie Grant Books, 2007)

And Turquoise isn’t the only Australian food book to have captivated me in the past few weeks: I’ve always loved Karen Martini’s recipes and her new book, Cooking at Home, is yet another treasure. Her recipes in the Sunday Life magazine are always fabulous and figure prominently in my collection of clippings.
But following the lead of a bevy of her cooking colleagues, Martini — or her publishers — has decided that her best marketing asset is herself. As with her first book, Where the Heart Is, there she is on the cover, generous smile and generous cleavage, handsome partner and baby in the background. Is this what food porn is really all about? (I’m endlessly fascinated by the photographs that accompany Martini’s Sunday Life column: let me count the ways to look coquettish…)
Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson, Alice Waters, Stephanie Alexander, Claudia Roden, Marcella Hazan, Julia Child, Patricia Wells … some of the greatest cookbook authors of our time have mostly remained faceless, ethereally drifting through the pages of their books, comforting, shadowy, modest presences.
And then there are the others. Karen, Nigella, Jamie, Kylie, Bill and their ilk. For amusement, if you ever have a few moments to spare in a bookshop, flick through Bill’s latest release, Holiday. Count how many photographs there are of Bill and his teeth. From memory, it’s in the double digits. I couldn’t care how wonderful his recipes might be, if I ever see another photograph of Bill and his teeth I’ll throw up into his picnic basket.
It’s not as if we need any more celebrities in our lives, or more published material to tell us how woefully inadequate and unglamorous our lives are, how plain our friends, how unsatisfactory our home décor, how limited our fashion sense. Countless magazines — even the one I work for — do that very successfully on a monthly basis. (Shall I tell you how much styling goes on to achieve those images you see?)
I like modesty, I like self-effacement — vastly underrated qualities that they are — and there’s something just a bit off about the celebrity-glamour thing overtaking the most fundamental area of our lives — food. Making the food look divine is one thing, but do the people who minutes before the photo shoot might have had their hand up an organic chicken’s bum need to look divine too?
Too much more of this and I might be re-revising my opinion and declaring again that the century of the recipe book is over. English author Michael Booth's thoughts on this dovetail rather nicely into my own. In an article in The Independent a couple of weeks back he wrote about his cookbook bonfire (a pre-meditated marketing stunt?) in which he burnt his every cookbook, his every clipped recipe, in his backyard. His reason? Recipes don’t work, we don’t need them, he reckons. He adds: “Meanwhile, rubbing your failure in your face are the glossy, art-directed photographs that make up half the pages in food books these days. If they were honest, the first line of most recipes would be: ‘First, take your food stylist and renowned studio photographer...’ ”
Booth continues: “Imagine, if we could be free from the tyranny of the TV chef and learn to cook by ourselves without their help. We could skip gaily through our local farmers' market or supermarket, choosing whatever is in season, on special offer or just takes our fancy and, once at home, create our own meals.”
I like his thoughts (never mind his wit) but surely they’re not going to help him sell any books?

For those of you in Melbourne, I’ll be at the Out of the Frying Pan talk-fest on Monday (dear Melbourne, I'm coming home...). I’m moderating the panel on Recipe Writing (they might want to find another moderator after they read this) and a panelist on Web 2.0: How to Blog and How Not to Blog. For details, go here.

Crepe Comfort

Don't say a word about the ordinary photography — yes, I probably overdid the short-depth of field — but the point is not the photography but the crepe (yes, they're crepes, stupid...). Have been hankering for crepes, simple, with sugar and butter and lemon juice, ever since watching The Very Very Very Long Engagement last weekend. Then Shula goes waving pancakes under my nose, as if she knew that, without alcohol for a week (and counting), I'd be indulging a little more than usual in compensatory sweet things. And then, on top of all that, a source of comfort was needed: I have a very personal reason to participate in Barbara's Livestrong with a Taste of Yellow again this year. There are three letters in the alphabet that I have come to loathe: PSA. Darling Dad, only a few weeks now before I'll be making crepes for you to have next to your hot-cross buns. (Oh, I used a crepe recipe from The Cook's Companion — I think I need to practice a bit more ... more milk perhaps to get them thinner — but I'm sure you won't have any difficult finding a recipe yourself.)

Trick 1

Four days sans alcohol and counting. Have discovered one way of dealing with the deprivation: swill a dash of Angostura Bitters around in your best-quality wine glass. Tip out the excess. Add stacks of ice to the glass, then the best sparkling mineral water you can afford (and, for this exercise, I say, 'to hell with air miles'). Add a squeeze of fresh lime and a slice of lime and, voila! It won't make an average restaurant meal any better but at least you won't be casting quite so many sly, covetous glances at the glass holding the Italian pinot grigio on the other side of the table.

Canapes — Who Needs Them?

All I can say is this: without a glass of wine in my hand at interval, the canapes were a whole lot less appealing. Three days down. Lucy D. — you're on!

Around Sydney in 80 Canapes

So these are the excuses:

•    The two-year-old’s birthday party: a butterfly cake, fairy bread, watermelon, mini-quiches, a pink tutu from a proud aunt, a pink teaset from someone else, a pink music box, a pink hat and pink sunglasses from her mother. Are two-year-old girls genetically programmed to need pink, and are proud aunts genetically programmed to provide it?

•    Lovely Bell Shakespeare production of As You Like It at the Opera House. Saskia Smith’s Rosalind, Ed Wightman’s Touchstone and Philip Dodd’s Corin all wonderful… as were the crab sandwiches at the after-party, Gough and Margaret Whitlam’s stately, ageing presences and a couple of delicious wine-related lines picked up along the way:

The loyal servant Adam:
“Though I look old, yet I am strong and lusty:
For in my youth I never did apply
Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood.”
Act ii. Sc. 3.
(Pity I can’t say the same… more on this later…)

Rosalind: "I pray you, do not fall in love with me,
For I am falser than vows made in wine.”
Act iii. Sc. 5

•    A bit more swanning around … the Australian Chamber Orchestra and its 2008 season opening (am I sounding like a tosser yet?) … a Haydn symphony, a Mozart piano concerto and a bit of Schubert. Very fine fresh prawns at the after-party. And Richard Tognetti is very handsome.
•    Oh, yes, then there was the David Jones fashion parade. Awful, just awful, and I'm not talking about the fashion. I couldn’t start to tell you because I wouldn’t know where to finish. But the Moet and the fresh oysters were very fine indeed.
•    Very well, if you must know, the season opening night of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Buckets of Ravel for Valentine’s Day that moved the tubby Maestro Gelmetti so greatly that, at one point, we thought it highly likely that he might fly off his conductor’s podium and hover above us in the Opera House’s concert hall in the manner of Uncle Albert and Bert in Mary Poppins’s I Love to Laugh. Nice spinach/fetta pastries at the after-party.
•    Back down to earth and a brilliant discovery (at least for someone who walks through Chinatown every morning to catch her train, and again at the end of most days, and who has lamented this city’s lack of markets and accessible fruit and vegetable merchants): can someone please, please tell me why, in all the years I have been reading about Sydney food, restaurants, shops, chefs, I have never yet once seen anyone, I repeat, anyone, mention the fact that at the back of the old Paddy's Markets (hideous souvenir-tat trap it is now) there is still a working food market. Small and unextraordinary, but a WORKING FOOD MARKET nonetheless. It can never even begin to replace Melbourne's Queen Vic Markets in my pining heart, but it is, indubitably, a food market. There’s no deli hall — merely a sad meat stall or two and a couple of fish stalls. But there was skate (and I can’t remember the last time I saw that), and good-looking rainbow trout and snapper, and the normal roll call of salmon fillets and — how’s this — a couple of bloody great conch shells with their pearly-white meat flopping out wantonly. And, in the fruit and vegetable section, there waiting for me was the best sweet corn I have had since Hong Kong, and longans, and affordable lychees, and every conceivable Asian vegetable and herb my heart could ever desire. A five-minute walk from home and open seven days and I am happy, so happy. But I have to ask: do Sydneysiders consider it beneath them to shop at such a place? And why doesn’t Lord Mayor Clover Moore take a good long look at the markets and try to imagine how they could thrive again — especially given the increasing population of city residents?

•    Another momentous find, my acupuncturist’s very savvy recommendation (lifting 17 boxes of books last year during my move was not such a great idea): my best Sydney coffee so far — at Peaberry (166 Riley Street, Darlinghurst). Cool little café with a very decent big breakfast and very little pretension. What a pleasant change.
•    Oh how I could go on about why I have been so absent. … It was a very, Very Long Engagement indeed, lying on my couch watching Amelie’s Audrey Tautou in a wonderful story full of wit and whimsy and humour — and heart-wrenching pathos. Once I felt sure that she would find her lost, war-damaged love Manech, I was able to concentrate on all the wonderful bits of food scattered across her rotund aunt’s scrubbed timber kitchen table.

Says a defiant Mathilde (Tautou), convinced Manech is still alive: “He was taken prisoner and stayed with a German girl with braids and big boobs.”
Adds her aunt: “A Breton boy eating sauerkraut, impossible…” Later, she tosses crepes in the pan for her husband, who rolls them up and dips them in jam. The couple despair over the girl's pining ways. “She must eat, she’s making herself ill,” says the aunt. “Leave her the marrow bone,” says the uncle, slurping from his soup bowl, a man who clearly recognises a treat when he sees one.

•    Oh yes, there have been other events and commitments and deadlines, but there’s really only one final vital piece of information I must leave you with today: I’m off alcohol. For five weeks. Five weeks without a crisp riesling or complex chardonnay, without an interesting little drop from the Rhône valley or a boutique Yarra Valley pinot noir. Not a cold beer after a swim in the ocean, nor a tinkling gin and tonic on a balmy evening. No, five weeks, I swear. It’s simple really. Yesterday, waiting to be served in a queue at a café, I eavesdropped on the conversation behind me. “I’m off the booze,” he said — a nice-looking man holding a little girl. “Five weeks it’s been, and I’ve lost five kilos,” he told his friend. FIVE WEEKS AND FIVE KILOS…. I can do that. Hold me to it, for God’s sake! But how am I going to manage at tonight's opening night when the canapes start circulating?