The Elegant Sufficiency

Comfort Food

There just isn't the energy in these parts for much right now, except gratitude for Dad's potato soup, sister-in-law Jo's extraordinary chocolate cake, my mother's folk remedy of lemon, honey and olive oil to sooth a sore throat, and my niece's unstinting ability to leave a cheerful trail of crumbs in her wake. A surgeon sliced into my neck late last week to extract half a thyroid. Neck swollen and swathed in ice-pack and/or scarf. Voice husky. Brain anaesthetised. Self-pity extreme. Will attempt to return with something intelligent soon. Oh, and that chocolate cake recipe.

Reasons to Be Cheerful

Daylight saving ended overnight Saturday in these parts, shutting down summer and its restorative evening light. Leave the office tonight in damp gloom after my least-favourite day of the magazine’s monthly cycle; the day when we proof-read the “positionals” — PDFs of the completed magazine. The third or fourth time I’ve read much of the text. Tedious beyond belief. Energy-sapping. Tragic that the day’s highlight is to swoop on typos, red pen in hand.
Old people on the train, trumpeting such. “Let the old people sit down,” one cackles, as I make way. Bloody hell — could that be me one day? Too long since I felt carefree.
Am needy for something hopeful, light-hearted, optimistic. So, for you and for me — 10 reasons to be cheerful. Feel free to supplement my list.

1. My ice-cream maker still works. Thought it had died but it remains faithful, churning out this fabulous strawberry sorbet for me on the weekend. Must remember always to have the mix chilled when it goes into the machine — that, I think, helped it do its important work. The recipe was from Ices: The Definitive Guide, by Caroline Liddell and Robin Weir (Grub Street, 1995). 450g fresh strawberries, 375ml sugar syrup, juice of two lemons, strained, 1 egg white. Blend strawberries with a little sugar syrup. Strain away seeds if you prefer. Blend in remaining syrup and lemon juice. Stir. Chill. Churn. Ten minutes after you’ve started, add lightly whisked egg white. Am looking forward to making basil-flavoured lemon sorbet with the last of my summer basil, and lime sorbet.
2. An exquisite colour spectrum. When I converted the image above to a “GIF” file for use on a web page, the “colour table” in my Mac broke it down into the most exquisite colour spectrum — turquoises and aquamarines and pinks and oranges and reds. Confirms my thinking that reupholstering Aunty Amy's unsprunged, faded 1930s dining chairs (in 10 years when I can afford to do so) in a racy turquoise/aquamarine colour might just work with some of the existing red-hued interior features of my decor.
3. Lilies. With the weather as it is, the yet-to-open lilies I bought at Fox Studios Entertainment Quarter markets on the weekend might yet linger healthily for weeks.
4. A new crop of thoughtful, dynamic, expressive food writers might soon be born. Over three Saturdays in May, my friend John Newton will take a UTS-accredited food writing course at the NSW Writers’ Centre designed to show students a range of food writing and to introduce them to “the other branches of food writing that go beyond taste and flavour to politics and the environment”. (The far more interesting — and increasingly important — side of food writing.) Writers’ Centre members $330; non-members $360. No surprise that there’s a great recommended reading list, including Elizabeth David’s An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, Waverley Root’s The Food of France and Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking.
5. Early-morning starts. Now that the light has left the evening, but returned to the morning, I’ll be able to really seriously contemplate getting up to go to OzPaddle’s 5.50am kayak fitness training at Rose Bay. (On second thoughts, maybe that’s not a reason to feel cheerful…)
6. Blue cheese. The uninspiring-looking Kavil crispbread my mother bought last time she visited is still fresh and tastes just fine with a little St Augur blue.
7. Just a small cut. It’s only a little operation I have to have next week and the surgeon says it’s curable.
8. A mother's love. My loving, hoarding mother, who will arrive next week to serve me soup and mop my brow, continues in her op-shop quest to find me old cookbooks and her last find — The Australian Women’s Weekly Cookbook (I reckon it’s from the early ’50s, a very different beast to today’s WW offerings, and was under the direction of someone called “Leila C. Howard” — is that a clue for anyone?) — is a treasure. And thankfully I’m not relying on it to make ice-cream, as its “Homemade Ice-Cream” recipe calls for dry powdered milk, gelatine, butter and flavouring.
9. Creamy pasta. I fully intend to go to the kitchen now and cook myself my favourite comfort food — Marcella Hazan’s spaghetti carbonara — and I’m not even going to think about calories.
10. Eel. I’ve got smoked eel in the fridge.

•    Catch Radio National’s The Media Report on Thursday morning (8.30am), to hear me interviewed by host Antony Funnell for a program that “explores the symbiotic relationship between food and the media”. Podcasts too if you can’t be near your radio.

The Packed Lunch

Stumbled on this fascinating New York Times blog post about "Smart Eating at Work". The passion and vehemence of the commenters responding to a list of nuts and brand-name granola and fibre bars, yoghurt and crackers, are as riveting as the post itself.
It's a subject that's on my mind: am smug that I took my lunch to work four days out of five this week to avoid dire cafeteria offerings — and limited lunch options in my office's neighbourhood. A leftover cannellini bean, roasted field mushroom, silverbeet and goats cheese salad of my own invention (a little odd to start with, didn't travel terribly well, I won't be sharing the "recipe", but at least I knew who had prepared it and what was in it); leftover meatloaf (now that was a fine thing; wish I could remember what I put in it); a chicken, avocado and um, mayonnaise sandwich on grain bread (can't go wrong with that...). And, of course, fruit and, in my desk drawer, roasted salted cashews (I guess if I'm serious about eating well I need to make a shift to unsalted raw ones?).
I'm on the hunt for more packed-lunch suggestions — throw them at me — and eagerly waiting for Lucy's promised ideas. The first one she shared with me was brilliant. Apart from the afternoon emissions.

A chickpea salad: canned chickpeas, drained, rinsed, drained. Chopped tomato. Chopped herbs (parsley, mint, basil). Grated parmesan. A little chilli. Lemon juice. Olive oil. Sea salt. Ground black pepper. Excellent.

Kitchen Stories and More

I’m a list person. Lists for everything. Books I want to read. Albums I want to buy. Perfumes I’ve read about that I want to sniff. Things I have to do for the blog. Blog entries that need to be written. Things I have to do for work. Daily lists. Weekly lists. Lists of films I want to see.
I was excited when I read that the ITunes store had started a movie rental download system — until I discovered it would be some time before it was rolled out in Australia. I don’t have a video-rental store terribly close to me now and, in any case, I’ve always found something a bit ghastly about them; they make me feel like donning dark glasses in case I’m spotted. So I went looking for alternatives so I could start to excise that list of films to see.
Bigpond Movies, I discovered, offers a download rental service and a DVD delivery service, but the download service is not available to Mac users. Its DVD service — free postal delivery and return, no late fees — seemed very expensive. Then I stumbled onto Quickflix. (I’m going to start to sound like an ad here…)
I’m now a convert. For $9.95 a month (more if you want to watch more) I get three movies sent to me. When I’ve watched them, I slip them back in the envelope provided and drop it in a mailbox. Quickflix then sends me the next available DVD on my list, which I now maintain on my Quickflix account page. That list is long, and getting longer, but finally I’m starting to see films that I’ve long wanted to see and which aren’t available in your garden-variety video store.
Kitchen Stories, for example. I knew it was Norwegian, and that it was about two bachelors. I had it in my head that it was some ironic contemporary thing, replete with Scandinavian design — blond wood, chic furniture, avant-garde architecture — ruggedly handsome Nordic men, and plenty of food.
Not quite. I must have read the review that spurred me to put it on my list after a few glasses of wine. The Kitchen Stories that Quickflix sent me was something altogether different. Norwegian bachelors yes, contemporary no.

Set in the mid-’40s, it’s an initially slow-burning, ultimately engaging film about an upright Swedish researcher for the presumably fictional HRI — the Home Research Institute — and the Norwegian bachelor he is sent to observe as part of a study into the “kitchen habits of single men in Norway”.
The researcher, Folke, spends his days perched high on a wooden stand drawing diagrams, as his craggy subject, Isak, moves around below in his kitchen, and his nights in a little bubble of a lichen-green caravan parked outside Isak’s house. The men are forbidden to communicate, lest the study’s integrity be jeopardised. But, of course, eventually these two lonely men do. And it’s in their gentle, musing dialogues in which what is unsaid is more significant than what is said, that this poignant, whimsical film’s true treasures emerge.
There’s not much food but still, I love this exchange, coming after Folke has been fired:

Isak: “Maybe you could stay for Christmas.”
Folke: “That would be nice.”
I: “Since you don’t have a job anyway.”
F: “Thank you, but I don’t think that would be possible.”
I: “You probably have family to spend Christmas with.”
F: “Not exactly … except for my old aunt. The one that sends all the food. … what the hell… why not? Everything’s gone to hell anyway.”
I: What do your normally eat?
F: “Herring, of course. And Jansson’s Temptation. Pig’s feet, Christmas ham, and lutefisk. And bread and grease.”
I: “Bread and grease?”
F: “Actually, they mostly eat that up north. Not where I come from.”

I had to look up Janssons Temptation, and it’s not tempting me to rush off and eat it, but I did find myself looking at a bottle of herrings yesterday in a deli …
Meanwhile, I’ve added another film to my Quickflix list this week — The Secret of the Grain, a film about North African immigrants in the south of France. The grain of the title is couscous; the opening of a restaurant is a plank of the plot.

A Million Stories in the City

It's a long time since I've known my neighbours ... living in big apartment buildings tends to do that. But thanks to a brief conversation with my next-door neighbour in the lift this week, I think I know an alarming amount about her. Had noticed her before: an unnervingly skinny woman with a hard face, always in gym gear. I suspect too, that her apartment is the source of the regular doof-doof bass beat that drives me nuts. In the lift this week she was again in tight-fitting lycra and I smiled and asked her if she'd been out exercising. She volunteered more than I expected: "Yes, but I can only walk ... otherwise the baby jiggles too much," she said, patting her stomach. She hadn't put on any weight that I could see — there was no bulge at all — and I asked her how many months pregnant she was. Five-and-a-half months, she told me, then clutched at her non-existent chest and, grimacing in horror, said "and I've got boobs!" I think I shook my head sympathetically but my head was full of images of this malnourished woman pounding the streets, trying to throw off her imagined new breasts. I hope there's someone watching over her, and her unborn child. As a result of the encounter, I read this piece in The Age about eating disorders with more interest than I might normally.

The Sleepover

She's soundly asleep, teddy one side, dolly the other. I'm completely exhausted after play, park, catering and endless toileting. (Simply can't understand how anyone has the energy to do parenting permanently.) I gave her meatballs and spaghetti: onion, garlic, mushrooms and prosciutto fried 'til soft; that then mixed with grated carrot (insert vegetable wherever possible — isn't that what you do?), an egg, beef mince, pepper, grated nutmeg, a little chopped tomato left over from lunch, the last of some fontina and manchego, grated. All rolled into tidy little balls. Fried. Mini grissini sticks to keep her quite while I finished off — "needs hummus," she announced. All of two years and one month she is. Transfixed by the Wiggles. Batons of zucchini that she guzzled. Less enthusiastic about the beans and sugar-snap peas. She didn't seem to notice that there wasn't much of a sauce with her moist-as-anything meatballs and spaghetti ... that her aunt had neglected to stock up on canned tomatoes (how does that happen?) ... and that the homemade tomato relish really wasn't much of a substitute. The Sara Lee Absolutely Boysenberry a hit. There's still two-thirds of a tub of it left. Good thing my self-conceived, no-alcohol (19 days now) and now no-bread diet doesn't make mention of icecream.

Fit for a Princess

I may be responsible for preparing a two-year-old's dinner tomorrow night and my concerns about whether she'll sniff at what I serve her, as she did last time, have not been assuaged by stumbling on this absurd Guardian article about feeding fussy children. I want the little princess to want to come back, but I'm as likely to make her fresh pasta as I am to serve her truffles and foie gras and Krug. More on this Guardian blog on the subject, but I still don't have a clue what I'll cook her... ideas please!?

Changing the Subject Now

Moving right along now... two brief articles from The New York Times health pages that might interest. As I throw back a coffee and wonder why I'm feeling so exhausted, I'm reading that new research has confirmed the value of exercise over say, coffee or energy drinks, in combating fatigue. The other article — on a topic that's on my mind right now — is about binge-drinking. Touching on cultural differences, author Benedict Carey writes: "In a Japanese island village, Takashima, people knew a drinking occasion had gone completely off the dials if villagers began to sing or, wilder still, to dance." He adds that western cultures "are more likely to excuse binge drinking as a needed mental vacation" and quotes Brown University professor Dwight Heath: “An awful lot of cultures have institutionalized bingeing as a kind of time out like Mardi Gras or New Year’s Eve, a culturally recognized period where a certain amount of acting out is acceptable." In Australia, as our Prime Minister has identified, that culturally recognised period seems to have no limits. Just come walk the streets of Surry Hills with me any night of the week.

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?

An Obscenity

Could there be a more extraordinary, obscene irony than the fact that one of the first ads in the ad break between installations of America's Next Top Model is a World Vision ad about starving African children? Why is World Vision spending their money with this channel?

You're Still in the Running...

I'm watching, embarrassed to say so, the finals of America's Next Top Model. Can't believe how morally corrupt this show is. Has anyone seen this appalling thing that a million or more teenagers must be watching right now?

A Sunburnt Country

Australia Day long weekend and an outing to my new favourite place: the McIver's Ladies Baths at Coogee. Throw 20 cents through the caretaker's security-grilled doors and it's yours for the day. A few hours here and you can solve the problems of the world.
My blue heaven.

A Sydney Sunday

Caffe latte, made by a Melburnian, praise be, at Wall Cafe in Surry Hills.
Celebrity sighting 1: Hugo Weaving, scruffy, bearded.
Toasted pide with ham, cheese and tomato.
We caught the Watson’s Bay ferry from Circular Quay to Rose Bay.
Teasing her about her pushy New York habits as she elbows her way to the top deck.
Smoothed out our wind-crazed hair on the walk from pier to Pier.
At home in Victoria for Christmas, she wanted to smell the eucalpyts again; here it’s the frangipani.
I always want to smell frangipani.
Veuve Clicquot to start.
Oysters, from Camden Haven, astonishing, silencing.
Gossip: What was she thinking? Does she know what she looks like? Did you here about X? Someone’s pregnant and someone else has a new girlfriend and we just can’t understand why he’s still single.
She talks about New York. Gasps, and laughter, and mock-shock at her lifestyle, the stuff of movies. She tells me about the restaurants, her local diner, her favourite bar and favourite restaurant. Craft, We’ll go there when I visit later this year, she says. (She’s eaten ferns there — had never heard such a thing, could it be fiddlehead fern?)
I talk about oh, you know, stuff. So bloody good to tell it to someone who understands, cares.
Celebrity sighting 2: a tanned and very very svelte Mikey Robins.
How many French waiters does an Australian restaurant need?
A seaplane swings in to land, clouds gather.
The era of the $50 main course is well and truly upon us and we’re pushing towards $60. A bother when the marron is forgettable and the dory and the blue eye are overcooked, fractionally, and this is your favourite restaurant in Sydney.
But I haven’t seen her for a year and I’ve forgotten a tedious, common thing called credit-card debt and I understand that fish can be a bugger of a thing and it doesn’t take much to tip us over the edge, from a Chablis to the loveliest Vallebelbo Moscati d’Asti.
And the lychee sorbet and green mango+coconut salad is divine and disappears too fast, as does the afternoon that leaves me thinking that I could come to like this city.
If I get a second job.

Happy New Year. And It Will Be.

Bloody hell. Too long between posts, and apologies for the lack of Christmas and New Year’s cheer in my last rant. I have to say, it’s a time of year that, if you ask me, is vastly overrated. A high-pressure system waiting to explode.
On the eve of Christmas Eve I nearly belted a couple of carollers in a food court. Their’s would have been a silent night indeed if I’d let my bad temper out of the bag.
On Christmas Eve, as I have previously ranted, I joined the unseemly, gluttonous riot at the seafood markets.
On Boxing Day I discovered one of the city’s most exquisite and uncrowded beaches, Lady Bay Beach (or Lady Jane Beach) near Watsons Bay, a beach I should like to spend a great deal of time on — but for the leathery, wobbly naked men dangling their willies left, right and centre. The miserable, outrageously overpriced fish and chips my parents and I had at the Palace Hotel beer garden after our walk were not that much less off-putting.
On New Year’s Eve I collapsed with exhaustion and was in bed by 9.
On New Year’s Day I discovered the extent of my Christmas over-spending. I’ll be discovering it for some months to come.
But then there was Christmas Day. The first I’ve hosted. A palm tree with a few last-minute red and silver balls subbed in for an elaborately decorated conifer. A corked bottle of Billecart-Salmon laughed off with some good Australian riesling. A chaotic, rebelliously untraditional series of dishes through the day (my brother’s latest favourite recipe — his wonderful stuffed and fried zucchini flowers; a huge bowl of prawns with my mother’s special dressing; a whole baked ocean trout; salads; Aunt Mabel's Christmas pudding; my sister-in-law’s wicked Cherry-Ripe-style slice). Afternoon naps for all (but me toiling in the kitchen). A two-year-old niece who especially loved her aunt’s present: a miniature baking set of quiche pan, rolling pin and cookie cutters. A new nephew who nestled for an age in his grandfather’s arms.
And then there was New Year’s Day. A picnic in a park overlooking the Tasman Sea. My parents’ last day in town before heading home. A fine bottle of Billecart-Salmon and barbecued chicken torn off with our fingers and stuffed into white rolls with aioli. A grandfather walking hand-in-hand towards the sea with his granddaughter. ‘Pa,’ she calls him, really the designated term for her other grandfather, but no one’s arguing that point with her. And next year, the nephew will be getting to know more about him than simply the warmth of his heart.

And so to 2008: I hope to be here this year often — with thoughts, recipes, photographs, rants, whatever. I’ll do my best to be here often because doing this gives me nourishment I could never have imagined it would. But for me, it’s going to be a big, busier year and I hope you’ll keep stopping by to check up on me if I'm silent for a while.
As for you — I hope 2008 is your finest, rich with family and friendships, for those are the most important things, and full of triumphs large and small, stimulation and challenges, and good health, good deeds and, of course, good food.

An Australian-Style Christmas

Could there be an uglier thing to witness, a sadder indictment on who we are in 2007, than the Sydney Fish markets on Christmas Eve. Australians' love for seafood gone mad, The overweight and the greedy and the rude, the pushing and the shoving, the queue-jumping and the viragos and the gluttons, the cold bags stuffed with the plunder of the sea, the 4WDs in the carpark, the television cameras, the six million prawns we will consume this Christmas, the "give me the biggest you've got", the plastic bags and packaging, the Salvos waiting gratefully for spare change, the St John ambulance tent waiting for casualties, the farmed kingfish and salmon and ocean trout, the New Zealand snapper and Indonesian fish fillets and Vietnamese prawns, the obscene amounts of money.
But alas I'm a hypocrite, for there is a bulging bag of prawns and a fat whole ocean trout in my fridge now to feed five tomorrow and a hole in my wallet.
I did catch the train there though. And I won't be returning next year.

Happiness is...

Happiness is only ever as far away as a David Jones food hall (think Dean & DeLuca, think Peck) ... and Sydney's is inestimably better than Melbourne's. In the face of that wicked abundance, what do I buy? My comfort food — weisswurst (to be eaten with my own tomato relish and a baked potato and green beans for dinner), and cognac pâté to be taken to my brother's place tomorrow night (if I don't midnight-snack on it before then).
In the face of jamon and wagyu and you name it, that's about all my indecisiveness could settle on as I lurked and swooned in that basement on the corner of Market and Castlereagh. (And when I should have been Christmas shopping.)