The Elegant Sufficiency

How Not to Open a Sea Urchin

So there's this bloke at work. I could tell he was special from the start. Tall and dark, yes, but it was the ginger and fig jam that first made me sit up straighter in my swivel-chair. He’d made it himself from a Sean Moran recipe we’d published. Brought it into the office for me — a little Vegemite jar of jam stashed in his bike-courier bag.
When he brought in his homemade lime pickles in a red-lidded honey jar I didn’t know what to say, where to look, so I straightened my Post-it note pile instead and sharpened some pencils.
I knew then that there would be pain ahead.
It arrived yesterday.

This time, there were two old Tupperware boxes in a supermarket plastic bag. Six sea urchins. Glistening black spiky creatures that set my heart racing. Gathered the day before from rockpools at a south-eastern beach. How did he know that I’d sell my soul and more for a sea urchin.
Mr Rockpool himself offered advice via Twitter. “take sharp scissors & cut about 2 inch circle around the opening. tip the water out and remove tongues and devour. Yum!” he wrote. “it is the bottom with what I call the mouth. it is the only place were the spines aren't covering. The bum i guess..ha ha”.
Two tweets, and I had a plan. Seemed straightforward enough.

The credits were rolling on Four Corners and my kitchen was strewn with broken black sea urchin spikes by the time I had worked out how best to thank Mr Perry for his advice.
Can I tell you a few home truths, Mr Perry: pink rubber washing-up gloves don’t ease the pain. Regular kitchen scissors won’t do the job. How-to-open-sea-urchin videos on YouTube, even playing on a laptop perched on the dish drainer as you tackle your urchin, won’t illuminate the process. You are courting disaster if you try to use your biggest and best chef's knife. Small sea urchins, less-than-palm-sized urchins, don’t have any roe. Even if you manage to crack the hard urchin shell to which the spikes are attached you will have made a god-awful mess — and those intoxicating little slivers of ochreish, tongue-shaped roe are still impossible to get at.

I persisted (by now, Q&A had started; I was briefly distracted by the glory of Malcolm Turnbull’s black leather jacket) and, slowly, with much prising and swearing, the two largest yielded up their treasures. Covered in gunk. Then, a painstaking process to wipe away sand and grit and other unpleasantness.

It wasn’t much but certainly enough to make a little pasta dish. Tomato, lemon zest, chilli, garlic, roughly following a New York Times recipe. Divine.
And the bloke at work? He’s let me in on this urchin-hunting-ground location. I don’t need him anymore.

Comfort Food: Macaroni Cheese

“It is pretty clear we are living in times that call for desperate measures. No mere $700 billion bailout will do, and neither will any ordinary comfort food,” trumpeted the New York magazine in an October edition. And that out-of-the-ordinary comfort food they’re talking about? Deep-fried lumps of macaroni cheese — seven to an order for $6 from the Dram Shop bar in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The bar that ordinarily specialises in “scotches, fine bourbons … and Tex-Mex-influenced pub grub” has joined the western world’s apparent march towards budget eating, comfort food, cheap cuts, waste-not-want-not.
In the UK, a parsimonious Delia Smith told Daily Mail readers last weekend how to “survive the credit crunch … (and) create a three-course meal for four people for less than £10 (about $AUD23).” Spotted dick (just what is that?) was her dessert suggestion.
Meanwhile, The New York Times posted a Savoury Mince recipe from the English chef Simon Hopkinson, while Food & Wine magazine has offered a sexy slideshow of “Hearty Stews”, including Kale and White Bean Stew, Scottish Beef Stew, Short Rib Stew, and Iraqi Lamb and Eggplant Stew. I’m not sure the word “stew” is one that any self-respecting food magazine would have dared uttered seriously until this year.
"Expense accounts are disappearing and three-martini lunches are dead for a while; people are looking for nostalgic, homemade food at a reasonable price," says the manager of the Wall Street Burger Shoppe, who’s now selling up to 1,000 $4.50 cheeseburgers a day, according to a New York Daily News article. “Meatloaf and mashed potatoes never go out of style,” says the owner of Junior’s, a “comfort food empire”, in the same article.
In the Times of London, Robert Opie, an author, “nostalgia expert” and the curator of the Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising, opined “nostalgia for the past has always been heightened by economic shift. In earlier periods of economic uncertainty — the 1930s, for example — people and brands responded as a number are today.” Does that mean we’ll be seeking out Aeroplane Jelly?
My contribution to all this, the comfort food I fed my father two nights ago during his stay with me when we both decided we couldn’t be bothered going out to dinner, was macaroni cheese. We consumed an alarming proportion of a large casserole dish between us and I’ve had the leftovers for the past two nights. Two nights too many. But that first night? Magic.

Macaroni Cheese with a Little Extra Something
(serves 4)

I reckon mac ‘n’ cheese is a dish that benefits from a bit of extra oomph in the form of mushrooms (I’ve used dried porcini here), or slivers of terrific smoky ham, or cubes of pre-roasted pumpkin. Please yourself.

40g dried porcini
1tbsp olive oil
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 small onion, thinly sliced
250g macaroni
40g butter
1tsp Dijon mustard
40g flour
600ml milk
200g good cheddar cheese, grated
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
50g Parmesan Reggiano, grated
50g breadcrumbs

Soak porcini in warm water for about 30 minutes. Get a big pot of water boiling for the macaroni.
Heat olive oil in a medium-sized saucepan and sweat garlic and onion until soft. Strain porcini and squeeze as much water out of it as you can. Add to onion and garlic and cook for five minutes. Remove onion, garlic and porcini from saucepan and set aside. Now might be the time to get your macaroni cooking, with some salt. Preheat the oven to 180ºC.
To make the white sauce, melt butter in the saucepan. Take it off the heat and stir in mustard and flour until it starts to blend with the butter. Add 100ml or so of the milk, still off the heat, and stir with a wooden spoon, pressing floury bits against the side of the saucepan with the back of the spoon until lumps have disappeared. Return saucepan to heat and add the remainder of the milk. Stir continuously over low to medium heat until the sauce starts to simmer. Cook for another five minutes — and don’t stop stirring. Turn off the heat and stir in about 170g of the cheddar as well as the onion, garlic and porcini. Season to taste.
Drain the macaroni and combine with the sauce. Tip into a large greased casserole dish, sprinkle with remaining cheddar, parmesan and breadcrumbs, and bake for 15-20 minutes until the top is golden and melted.

Five New Things I Know

Spent some time at Masterclass today and yesterday, two days of cooking demonstrations and classes that are part of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival. Local and international chefs demonstrating included Spain’s Andoni Luis Aduriz, London’s Sam and Sam Clark (Moro), New York’s Will Goldfarb (Room 4 Dessert), Rose Gray (one half of London’s River Café partnership), Vincenzo Cammerucci from Lido Lido in Cesenatico on the Italy's Adriatic Coast, Darwin’s Jimmy Shu (Hanuman), Adelaide’s Cheong Liew and Tony Bilson from Sydney.

1. The River Cafe Almond Tart with Berries (above)

Divine and, for a pastry klutz like me, seductively rustic. The beauty of this tart is that, according to chef Rose Gray, it can “take you through the whole year”. River Cafe partner Ruth Rogers broke a hip skiing just before Masterclass and was not able to attend, so a solo Gray talked about using plums on the tart in autumn, Seville orange jam under the frangipane filling in winter, blackberries in summer. Curiously, they use a cheese grater to grate the pastry into the flan tin, then press it in by hand – “we like it to look rough,” Gray said. This minimises the amount the pastry is handled. And they always use whole almonds rather than almond meal, which can be less than fresh.

350g plain flour
pinch of salt
225g unsalted butter, cold, cut into cubes
100g icing sugar
3 egg yolks
Filling:
350g blanched whole almonds
350g unsalted butter, softened
350g caster sugar
4 eggs
750g strawberries, washed and stalks removed, or raspberries
100g icing sugar

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Pulse the flour, salt and butter in a food processor until the mixture resembles coarse breadcrumbs. Add the sugar, then the egg yolks, and pulse again. The mixture will immediately combine and leave the sides of the bowl. Remove, wrap in cling film, and chill for at least an hour.
Coarsely grate the pastry into a 30cm loose-bottomed fluted flan tin, then press it evenly onto the sides and the base. Bake blind for 20 minutes until light brown.
Reduce the oven temperature to 150°C. For the filling, put the almonds in a food processor and process until fine. Cream the butter and sugar until the mixture is pale and light. Add the almonds to the butter and sugar and blend, then beat in eggs, one by one. Pour into the pastry case and bake for 40 minutes. Cool a little.
Cut the strawberries into halves lengthways, or quarters if they are very large. Push the strawberry pieces into the tart, standing them upright, while the tart filling is still warm.
Dust with icing sugar and serve with crème fraiche.

2. Why We Should Eat Australian Salmon

I’d never heard of Australian salmon and all of a sudden I’m hearing about it left, right and centre. Plus, I saw it at the markets (at Prosser’s seafood stall) last week for the first time ever, all gleaming and seaweedy. It is actually a member of the perch family, and no relation at all to salmon. Aliases include bay trout, blackback, kahawai  and sambo. It is commonly caught in the waters of Port Phillip Bay (the bay that gives Melbourne some pretty ordinary beaches). I’ve never tried the fish, but apparently it can be strongly flavoured and stringy.
At Masterclass, it came up in a discussion about sustainable seafood between Canadian chef Robert Clark, from Vancouver’s contemporary fish restaurant, C Restaurant, and Melbourne’s Paul Mathis (SOS vegaquatic restaurant). When Clark’s Australian sous chef heard that his boss was going to be cooking bay trout during his Australian visit, he was scornful. “We put it in crabpots and feed it to our cats,” the sous chef told him.
The point of the discussion was that Australian salmon is a sustainable species that we should be eating in preference to the many other varieties of unsustainable fish that we more commonly devour. Clark told the audience that he had cooked it all week during his guest chef stint at SOS, to some acclaim. “It reminded me of a sardine and I treated it like a sardine,” he said. That meant salting it to prevent deterioration, then brushing it with a quince jelly and caramelising it in a hot pan.
Next time I see it at the markets, I’m going to grab some. Perhaps I’ll cook it as Greg and Lucy Malouf suggest in Saha (Hardie Grant, 2005): brushed with olive oil, seasoned with salt and pepper, then grilled or barbecued and served with a lentil tabbouleh (lentils, lemon juice, mint, parsley, shallots, tomatoes, allspice, cinnamon).

3. Vincenzo Cammerucci's Gnocchi-Making Method

It’s new to me, but Cammerucci’s technique is based on a choux pastry and the result is exquisite (smart Sam at Becks & Posh wrote about this method a year ago). The Michelin-starred Cammerucci, known for his “New Italian and European” cuisine, was demonstrating “Gnocchi soffiati di zucca con sgombro affumicato rapa rossa” – pumpkin gnocchi with smoked mackerel and beetroot. I’ll leave it to you to come up with your own sauce.

250ml water
salt and pepper
100g butter
175g flour
5 eggs
225g pumpkin puree (steamed pumpkin, pureed)
2tbsp parmesan cheese

Boil the water with salt, pepper and butter. Put the saucepan to the side of the stove and add flour, beating quickly as you add it. Return the saucepan to a gentle heat and continue beating the mixture, extremely vigorously, until it falls away from the sides and the spoon. Add eggs one at a time and continue beating vigorously. You may not need all the eggs – you are looking to achieve a soft and smooth consistency. Add the pumpkin puree, cheese and season to taste.
This is the bit I like: To cook, bring a pan of salted water to the boil. Take a strong, clear plastic bag and slice a 2cm hole in one corner. Filling the plastic bag like a piping bag, take a strong grip on it in your left hand (if you are right handed), forcing the mixture into the corner. In your other hand, take hold of a good sharp knife. Start squeezing the mixture out slowly and, as it comes out, swipe the knife down to slice off a small disc of gnocchi, letting it drop into the water. Dip the knife in the boiling water every few cuts so the gnocchi cuts cleanly. Cammerucci did this swiftly, elegantly, and in a terribly sexy fashion. The gnocchi won’t take long to cook: it’s ready when it floats to the surface.

4. Tony Bilson’s Technique to Cook Fish

Bilson, whose Bilson's Restaurant at Sydney’s Radisson Plaza Hotel specialises in fine French food, told the session that he was reading Escoffier when he was 13. I suppose you have to pay attention to a man who claims that. So, his fish method: He heats his pan, then puts his fish, skin side down, on a piece of lightly oiled/buttered silicone paper. (“If you see it burning and it bursts into flame, you’ve got the wrong paper.”) The fish cooks on the paper in the pan and even browns through it. As you would if you were cooking it without the paper, you turn it over when the time is right. The benefits of this method? It doesn’t stick to the pan; you can cook several pieces of fish at one time on one larger piece of silicone paper and remove them all simultaneously; “the finish you get on the fish is incredibly clean”; and, if you’re using a barbecue plate, the method guarantees “no flavour transference” (from a dirty, or well-used plate). Similarly, you can cook a number of things on the same plate without flavour transference between the items. So there.

5. Jimmy Shu’s Sichuan Salt

Came in late to Jimmy’s session but was intrigued by an idea he threw out – Sichuan salt. In a mortar and pestle, pound one part Sichuan peppercorns to five parts sea salt. Jimmy suggested sprinkling the resulting salt over salads, or over Chinese ban ban chicken (I know it as bang bang chicken), or using it as a dip with olive oil.

Hunting and Gathering

I’m wondering if there’s some sort of pippie alarm system. As I ground my feet into the Sunshine Beach sand yesterday afternoon in glorious sunset solitude and calm, I wondered whether there was some sort of high-frequency pippie alert echoing through the sand under my feet. As I spotted one telltale, air-bubbled ‘V’ mark-in-the-sand after another, hauled up one pale gleaming-shelled pippie after another, I even found room for some guilt. I wonder if pippies feel pain, have foresight? Did they know they were destined for my mother’s best frying pan and olive oil and herbs from her garden.
I’ve always been a bit wistful and regretful that I didn’t come from a line of hunters and gatherers. Envious of the old schoolfriend whose father had a boat and came home with an ice-chest of fish and his beaming photograph in the local paper with his catch; and of the friend who took me diving for abalone right outside his Flinders beach back-door and, efficient and lean in his wetsuit, sliced the mollusc clean off the rocks without having to flail and grab desperately at sea reeds to stay in one spot, and hack at the poor things; and of those with gardens and chickens and eggs and fruit trees instead of a concrete balcony.
But here was my chance to join that fortunate, earthy clan.
A Saturday afternoon and I had taken my cake to Dad in hospital (baked in my mother’s disgrace-of-an-oven … Kleenmaid … words fail me ... some days after I first mentioned the cake … more to come soon on that minor triumph in the face of any number of odds); had read The Australian while he slept, wandered the hospital gardens with him (he is calm, finally, and sleeping deeply, after heaven knows how long, and prepared for the treatment ahead). Then it was my time, finally.
Picked up towel and sarong and sunglasses and Toni Morrison’s disturbing Pulitzer-winner Beloved; took the beach path below our house; stopped under the sheoaks to watch a pack of frenzied feeding rainbow lorikeets; and staked my claim to a patch of white sand on a near-empty, mile-wide, kilometres-long beach.
The surf lifesavers were having weak Queensland beers now in the clubhouse; the shallows on this often treacherous beach, heavenly. Lying on my back, studying my feet and their dying pedicure protruding from the water, backgrounded by a softening sky. Lying on my front then, the final breaths of the waves even-tempered and transparent, the microscopic shards of shell and sand grain each almost a character unto itself. Digging my hands into the sand and feeling the pain as the grains forced themselves up under my fingernails, grabbing at pippies as they tipped themselves vertically and shot down through the thick sandy depths.
I think this is what my Dad has to recapture, and it comes too rarely for me and, I suppose, most of us; the moment, a stop, a pause. No what-do-I-have-to-do-now or rushing or worrying or pushing and shoving or writing lists or thinking about deadlines or housework or bank accounts and bills or is-my-career-on-track or other fears and arrangements and whether-my-boss-likes-me-or-not and does-it-matter or can-I-afford-that or do I need to wash my woollens. Just sitting, lying, not thinking, feeling a breeze, listening to the sea, looking at a tree, a bird, an ocean.
I have to grab at moments like this: right now, sitting and writing on a windswept deck with a full moon shrouded in cloud looming up behind Norfolk pines, and the sound of the waves and a cheap white wine beside me and my mother in there cooking my dinner.
Oh, and the pippies? Toni Morrison was ignored. The hunter-gatherer in me emerged. A littered plastic bag that might have suffocated a dolphin filled with water. One haul of pippies after another dumped into the plastic bag. An onlooker might have seen a mad-eyed woman in a blue swimsuit with a neglected bikini-line grinding her feet into the sand and kicking a spray of it into the air, then scrabbling for the molluscs that were too slow.
The satisfaction of a kilogram of them! A kilogram of them, I swear!
A final wallow in the shallows. The sun down now, the beach deserted.
And, you know, I reckon those pippies do have an alarm system of their own, a defence force of sorts. Rolling from back to stomach I felt a sting … my face throbbed, I thought of Steve Irwin, I clutched at my face, I felt a tendril. It came away in my hands, a long, jellyfishy thing, pale blue, and my face still throbbed. The pippies had their revenge. My face streaked with welts.

PS: How on earth do you get the sand out of pippies? An overnight soaking and many changes of water later and my pippies were still gritty.
PPS: Are pippies sustainable seafood?

Desert Island Ingredients

I'm not eating much pasta these days, especially at night (suspect I'm not alone in that) and when I do, I'm eating so much less … perhaps that behaviour is more typically Italian than eating jumbo-sized bowls as I once did? (If I go for seconds of pasta I invariably feel bloated and disgusting pretty quickly.) Still, one Italian brand or another of pasta remains a pantry staple.
I was pondering my desert-island ingredients as I prepared dinner tonight (I had Greg's ingredients on my mind ... sauerkraut for heaven’s sake??) and, despite my limited intake, pasta would still have to be there under the coconut palm with me. As would fresh chilli, lemons, olive oil, sea salt, garlic, eggs and maybe a pot or two of herbs. (I’m always curious to know what ingredients would be under other people’s coconut palms?? Please share... )
Then, into my inbox tonight, landed the regular e-letter I get from American Public Media’s Splendid Table, written by Lynne Rossetto Kasper. This one talks about the “great classic beloved by 90 percent of Italy's harried cooks” and by me – Spaghetti Aglio-Olio (garlic, olive oil and pasta, simple as that). Just had to share the tip Rossetto Kasper passes on:

“The trick is to add some water, broth, or wine just as the garlic takes on a light golden color as it sizzles in the olive oil. The liquid prevents the garlic from browning and softens and mellows the taste of the garlic, resulting in a sauce that clings nicely to the spaghetti with bits of almost delicate, nutty-tasting garlic.”

If you can bear another thing in your inbox, her e-letter frequently has some great recipes and always features Rossetto Kasper’s own really helpful tips.

Two Ways with Tomatoes

The heaters are on high. I’m speaking in a voice that I hope sounds husky like Dietrich but fear sounds more nasal like Kermit. The tissue box beside me is emptying as quickly as the bin fills. I’m sneezing. I’m about to return to the kitchen, on my mother’s long-distance urging, to heat equal quantities of honey, lemon and olive oil. (Should I add rum?) I’ve checked the forecast and there’s snow in the mountains and frost in the morning.
Yet for dinner, I’ve just thrilled to the best tomatoes I’ve found in a year. All through our southern hemisphere summer, as my carefully tended tomato vines struggled, then died, I searched. The tomato specialist at the Queen Victoria markets. Through farmers’ markets and caring greengrocers. Nothing. I gave up on finding a decent tomato. Then, on a drive out of town on the weekend, the car heater on, there they were. At a roadside fruit barn, little hydroponic tomatoes that could almost have been mistaken for cherry tomatoes. They looked divine. Smelt divine. They danced in that big wooden crate as though they were characters in a children's picture book begging to come home with me. It seemed wrong and I hesitated but the decision was out of my hands.
Two lovely, simple dinners. No recipes needed.

1. Roasted Rare Salmon with a Simple Salad: The salad can include fresh sliced tomatoes, Lebanese cucumber, Ligurian olives, shaved fennel, freshly ground black pepper, sea salt, excellent olive oil. Preheat your oven to 200°degrees. Brush each side of a fillet of salmon (one fillet per person) with good olive oil and season with sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. Bake for 5 minutes if you like rare salmon. More if you like it cooked through. Toss the salad ingredients together. Perhaps squeeze a little lemon juice over the top of it all.
2. Summer Tomato Pasta: Fundamentally, it’s hot pasta with an uncooked tomato sauce. To make your tomato sauce, roughly dice tomatoes (perhaps 200g per person), toss, generously, in the best olive oil you can afford (perhaps 2-3 tablespoons per person), add crushed garlic, freshly ground black pepper and sea salt to taste, scatter in torn fresh basil leaves. When pasta is cooked (you should use the best durum wheat spaghetti you can find and cook it in frenzied boiling salted water), drain, and toss with the tomato mixture. Sprinkle with real Parmigiano Reggiano.