anyresemblance

Dinner

Dinner with the mother of the bride, who is in town tonight, and another old friend. We ate delicious slow roasted lamb and cauliflower and pomegranate salad at 86 and drank Lark Hill Shiraz, they rather more than me, as I was designated driver. Early start tomorrow and a rare day in the office.

 

If it's good enough for Tom...

I ate dinner at Din Tai Fung last night, Michelin starred dumpling chain and as endorsed by Tom Cruise. What more could you ask?

On the road again

I'm in the lounge waiting for my flight to be called. Today's special is smoked salmon and ricotta. It's really good. See you on the other side of the sea.

Consider the oyster

I've not been writing much this week, mostly because I have been enjoying the company of my children and doing stuff with them. Back to the factory for all of us tomorrow. It's been a quietly domestic week. I have cooked a lot. Yesterday I made the boston cream pie. It was pretty easy - even making creme patissiere which is normally the sort of thing that has me frantic that I'll end up with a saucepan of scrambled eggs (as after all, I did manage to burn a saucepan of spaghetti oops tonight). I think I should have poured the chocolate ganache on sooner as it did not gracefully drip over the sides as in the picture but it tastes pretty yummy and I am currently converted to plainish Victoria sponges. I also made bread and added some polenta to see if I could get that yellow wheaten effect of Irish flour but it tastes like grit so obviously that ain't it. Miss S and I went to see King Arthur on Friday morning. What a load. Still, she loved the horses (natch) and the Xena like garb of Guinevere. My favourite line "I am a Roman officer, you're safe now". Friday night I went to a fundraiser cocktail party at the Library. Since they are a client of ours I considered this a company expense and obligation. The sponsor was Paspaley pearls and man, those pearls were divine. There was a big cabinet of fabulous necklaces and ear-rings and a very weedy looking security man. Paspaley are currently featured in the recent acquisitions of the Library which includes some beautiful pearls from their first harvest in the 1950s, golden and lustrous. The chair of the library council, who introduced the proceedings, is Sir James Gobbo. Unfortunately, I can not escape the image of the naughty goblins from the Noddy stories, Sly and Gobbo, and fully expected to see him rubbing his hands together gleefully over a bag of stolen sixpences. Still, it was a cut above Enid Blyton, moet champagne and the best canapes I had ever eaten - green apple muffins with blue cheese souffle topping; blue eye cod wrapped in vine leavs with a coriander dipping sauce; rare lamb fillet, quince paste on a kataifa base. I regret I did not win the door prize but I thought my own grey tahitian pearls measured up to those on display. Anne asked why I didn't mention Nigella and Nigel in my last post. I do cook from Nigella's books but I think she is a better writer about eating than she is about cooking. She used to write a restaurant column in the Spectator years ago, in those days her brother was way more famous than she as the young editor of the Speccie, and I enjoyed her writing more then than her celebrity prose of today. I always like Nigel Slater but I notice I only have his stuff from the Sainsbury magazines not his newspaper writing. Kitschenette asked me about Arabella Boxer. I think her best book is out of print though I don't think it's hard to get hold of a copy - A Visual Feast with photographs by Tessa Traeger. This is a collection of her Vogue pieces but arranged around the months of the years. The photos are stunning - still lives, most of them. It's one of my favourite pieces of bed time reading. I also have her Herb Book (also out of print, I think) which is also excellent. I have a very old paperback copy of MFK Fisher, The Art of Eating, which was published by Picador with an intro by WH Auden. It includes Consider the Oyster (fitting given my current pearl obsession) and the Gastronimical Me. The latter includes her 1936 essay, Define This Word, which is one of the best pieces of writing I have ever read.

Strictly typing

I've been pondering the manual typewriter today. A friend wrote to say that her holiday book choices were being vetoed by one of her travelling companions as he contended that she only read typing. I love the sound of a typewriter - it seems to convey industriousness, after all the point of most office work is to look busy and nothing does that better than the clacking and ting of a manual typewriter. I've been having a delightfully slothful week. I answered a mysterious "private number" call on my mobile this afternoon. "hello, anyresemblance, this is Toby from SuperTalentQuest . Do you have time to talk?". I told him I was having my nails done and he asked me what colour. This seemed remarkably flirtatious for someone who'd only known me for 15 seconds but such are the ways of the recruitment industry. Anyway, he softened me up by telling me that I was highly recommended to me by a former colleague but when he told me who, my heart sank. My recommender is someone who ran up huge expenses and won no business and walked before he was sacked. Someone who is so clearly full of shit that you'd think this guy would have seen right through him - given that he didn't appear to have made me question his judgement, right? Anyway, this job is pretty high profile but, as ever, I can think of the 3 things that don't qualify me instead of the 27 ones which do. The girls have been having a good week, too. They have both had activities every day which have kept them away from each other and I have been enjoying the one on one time with each of them. Tonight, Miss I has gone for a sleepover and Miss S and I ate thai takeaway and watched Charmed. Miss S went to an art workshop today and made a great Alice in Wonderland diorama. I had a home office organising day and did 6 months worth of filing and started my tax return (desperate cash flow issue). I also organised all the cut out recipes in my file by putting them in those plastic wallets. I was about 16 when I started cutting recipes out of newspapers and magazines. Although I learned a heap about cooking from my mother she had some strong opinions on food - she didn't like pasta or lamb, she boiled vegetables to surrender and believed all meat should be well done. I learned about food mostly from reading and the recipes I cut out chart my culinary history. At 16, there were a lot of desserts and what I guess would be described as dinner party food. At university I was a complete food snob and despised the student attempts at spaghetti bolognaise or chilli or 100 other appalling things to do with cheap mince. Instead, I shopped in Marks and Spencer's food hall and lived on deli salads. But it wasn't until I was in my early 20s that I really learned to cook. In sorting through all the recipes it was interesting to see the different hand writing on scraps of paper of things I'd eaten with friends and family that they had then given me the recipe for. I think the oldest thing in the file is for Diane's Christmas Pudding which is from my sister who is custodian of the family recipe. There's my sister's chocolate sauce pudding from when I was 16, my oldest daughter's favourite, much stained with cocoa. Then there is a recipe for bagels which I ate at the house of a friend in Nebraska in 1983. I understand she is now a professor at smart east coast college but I lost touch with her a long time ago. On some pink filofax paper I have a recipe for soda bread which I think might be from Anne's sister, Tricia. This has been my culinary failure. I have never managed to recreate the yellow fleck you get in the wheaten bread in Ireland. I've pondered if I should add some cornmeal but I haven't crakced it yet. There's the chicken with preserved lemons and olives that Jacqui gave me. I have her giant jar that she preserved lemons in which she bequeathed to me 6 years ago when she went to London. She's been back about 18 months but I still have the jar. I notice there is a lot of stuff clipped from the Observer which shaped a lot of my food thinking and Vogue when Arabella Boxer was food editor. I've said this before, but she is woefully underpraised as a food writer. I read her before I ever read Elizabeth David, in fact reading her led me to Claudia Roden, Elizabeth David and MFK Fisher. There's stuff from Jennifer Patterson when she was at the Spectator and Sophie Grigson at the Independent. I have nothing clipped from Australian newspapers. I don't know if this is because the advent of food magazines has meant that the weekly press has little new to offer in food writing or if there just isn't anything worth reading but I still look to Arabella Boxer for the artless combination of social history, sustainable farming, effortless prose and quiet promotion of good food, simply prepared and eaten with pleasure.

Piece of cake

Inspired by Lucinda's not one, but two creative birthday cakes, my own children have been discussing what cake for this year. Their respective birthdays are 5 to 6 months off you understand but they go in for long term planning for their birthday celebrations. I sometimes wonder if wedding planners should be on their list of career choices. I have had my share of disasters - the year Miss S requested a cake that looked like a beautifully wrapped present I tinted the icing a delicate pale pink, unfortunately it was a cheap colour and by morning the cake looked more like something wrapped in cheap brown paper since the colour had gone off. Or the year she wanted the cakes like individual houses with chocolate roof tiles - it was 30 at 11pm the night before as her father and I tried to get the bloody tiles on without the chocolate melting all over our fingers. Then there was the year she chose the wildy ambitious "bush babies" cake from the Australian Women's Weekly Fantastic Cakes book and my pal, Karen, was co-opted to fashion possums, koalas, wombats and gum leaves from fondant icing. "It's easy to make an authentically Australian menagerie" trilled the instructions. Well, only when you ply your best friend with lots of wine and beg her to stay and assist. Actually, they were all delightful in the end but much effort went into their execution.

Ambrosia

Beetroot pesto. Man, it sounds vile, doesn't it? Let me tell you, it is food for the gods. My friend, P, brought it down with her to the beach house and it was divine. The ingredients said beetroot, macadamia nuts, oil and salt. I would have taken a picture but I was too busy cramming it into my mouth. This was before we ate the salmon roasted in prosciutto, spinach with youghurt, french beans with roasted red capsicum and kipfler potatoes. Not forgetting the apple crumble. I had to crawl into bed as I was so full. Baby Y was an angel and slept through from 7 to 5 giving his mama some well earned rest. I had a relaxing time at the beach. I would like to tell you I saw whales swimming in the bay which I did this time last year but alas no spectacular sights this weekend. The weather was balmy, the bird life was spectacular and Miss I was as sweet as can be. Gosh, it is restful when she doesn't have her big sister to compete with. Miss I and I went to Mogo Zoo on the way home. It's a tiny zoo focusing on endangered species. Miss I and I like exactly the same animals - the snow leopards with impossibly long tails, the red pandas flopped over branches as though it were 40 degrees and they were too hot to move a muscle and the otters racing up and down the pool and hiding in the hollow tree trunks and jumping out on each other.

Rough puff

Friday night I ate not particularly good Indian food with my step-son and his girlfriend. It rained which was a gift after months of nothing but dry. Manuka was packed with a very dreary crowd. My step-son was waxing at great length about eco diesel and a get rich scheme but though it all sounded plausible, experience has demonstrated that he is strong on ideas and weak on execution. It's a continuing financial sore that I am still, via my marital obligations, funding his education at 23. He's a nice young man but this drives me nuts. Saturday morning I was up early to drive down to collect my children. I bought a flat white and an almond croissant in Silo and hit the road. The temperature dropped and the sky got more leaden the closer I got to the high country. I began to worry that my fleece was not going to be enough warmth for standing in a paddock watching a mini-horse trial. As I cut across country outside Cooma I could see traces of snow on the mountains. Fortunately, the horse people had decided to exempt us from pony parade. I was so happy to see my children. They were predictably tired and grubby but full of horse gossip. It's a great environment with lots of emphasis on safety, respect for others and personal responsibility. The winter activity of the horse people is in breaking in brumbies from Kosciuszko. Both of my girls want to ride in the Jindabyne gymkhana in two weeks so I agreed they could do it since the horse people will lend them horses. By the time we got back home it was still only around 12C so we lit the fire and moved the tv into the sitting room and snuggled up and watched movies all the rest of the afternoon. On Anzac Day I knitted a scarf for Miss S in a yarn I bought at Kingston market. It's shades of pink and flame and a twisted mohair. I spent the afternoon knitting a cobwebby sort of affair. I half hoped she'd reject it so I could keep it but alas she likes it. She had been to her friend's and brought home the most divine fudge choc chip cookies they had made. Today was a cooking day. We made a beef, thyme and anchovy stew adapted from nigella lawson but with mushrooms instead of celery; a bolognaise sauce to see us through those evenings when anything more arduous than grating cheese will induce a fit of the vapours; lemon biscuits from the Stephanie Alexander and Maggie Beer Tuscan cookbook. I also made a wholemeal loaf from Sophie Grigson's recipe - you add a crushed vit c tablet and although I don't know the chemistry for this it really seems to lighten the loaf. I am still in pursuit of the flour to make wheaten bread the way I tasted it in Ireland. I have, in the past, brought the flour back with me. I recall it having yellow flecks in it and wonder if it's cornmeal. I tried mixing polenta with my flour but have never really managed to reproduce it. We also made risotto again for dinner. I've worked out that the ritual of ladling in the stock is one my older daughter likes. In fact, she loves the predictable all round. We made this one with lemon again but this time added some sauteed zucchini. Pretty damn good. Of course, the glass of Cloudy Bay sauvignon blanc tossed in at the beginning may have added to the overall deliciousness. Kitschenette had a supplementary food blog. She asked me about my formula for rough puff pastry and I failed to post this. This won't make mille feuille but it's good for sausage rolls and pies. 500g plain flour 250g butter (it needs to be very cold, you can put it in the freezer to do this) iced water Put the flour in a bowl and grate the butter into it - keep dipping the butter in the flour if it starts to stick on your grater. You need to use one with large holes. Using a flat bladed knife, stir in enough cold water to make a dough. Turn out onto a flour board and roll into a rectangle. Fold in the bottom third and then top third. Give it a quarter turn, roll out gently again and repeat. I do this about 10 times. In classic pastry making, I think you are supposed to let it rest every 3 turns but give me a break. Let it rest in the fridge for 30 mins then use. Easy peasy. Note 1: I think my mother used half butter, half lard but I can never find lard in my supermarket. Note 2: lest anyone think I am too precious, I once went to a cookery demonstration by Sophie Grigson who was asked about how she made her puff pastry. She looked incredulous, "I buy it in Sainsbury's, like any sane person" she replied.

Food memories

Ok. I know he's gay, but I so want Thom from Queer Eye to be my boyfriend. I mean, in last night's episode he walked into an empty Ikea. How does he have the power to make that happen? Have you ever seen an Ikea car park with less than a hundred cars? And everything in stock? Even in my single days in North London, the Ikea on the North Circular Road represented everything stressful in shopping. There's no Ikea in Canberra so last year I made a trip to Sydney with my girlfriend as she wanted to stock up on nursery furniture. Crowds, no stock, insane purchasing system (get a ticket from one desk, take it to another desk and then drive to other depot 5 minutes away to collect). I filled in a complaint form but it made no difference - blah, blah, we endeavour to ensure that stock is available but popular items, blah, blah. Yesterday I knitted the umbilical hat from Stitch'n'Bitch for a friend's baby. This after having accidentally knitted a mobius band on Saturday night. The father of my children is a frustrated mathematician so they are obsessed with mobius bands. In grade 4, Miss S gave her class speech on "My favourite.... Greek Mathematician" and is obsessed with Sophie Germain. Note this does not extend to any particular genius in maths but makes for interesting trivia. I'm working on my links and adding the food writers that I turn to most. This cook was writing about making naan from Madhur Jaffrey and I was remembering that I learnt to cook from her Eastern Vegetarian Food and Claudia Roden's Book of Middle Eastern food when I lived in Libya. I had become a vegetarian on arrival since I was too squeamish to eviscerate a chicken. Despite the Libyan supermarkets only selling out of date Russian tuna and bottles of harissa, my friend, Rose and I found nearly everything we needed to cook out of these books equipped only with 2 hot plates. Some Algerian Berber friends taught us to char grill vegetables over a flame to make salat mechouia. An Egyptian man with a Glaswegian wife taught me how to make falafel though he insisted only Israelis used chickpeas and that "ful" were the correct beans with lots of dill so they were bright green inside. The Polish people on the floor below had a still which they fed with tinned tomato paste. Most of the time the lack of alcohol was ok but I recall one week in February when we had no electricity for 5 days and it poured with rain - by day three we were knocking on the door of the Polish engineers prepared to flirt with men with bad teeth for a stiff drink. A bloke from Belfast showed us how to brew our own beer with was less temperamental and less risky.

Chacun a son gout

Domestic life seems to have overwhelmed me the last few days but I'm back now. Tonight we cooked. I forget what pleasure it gives me to cook with my children until we are in the kitchen together. My oldest daughter went on a school exchange to Noumea in October last year. She was desperately home sick for the first few days but was staying with a wonderfully kind family who cossetted and cared for her and she had a fabulous ten days in the end. She also came back with expanded food tastes and tonight made baked stuffed tomatoes as Madame Limonier had made them. She carefully scooped the seeds out of roma tomatoes, chopped garlic finely with basil, mixed with breadcrumbs, some salt and moistened with olive oil and baked for about 12 minutes in a hot oven. They tasted great and we ate them with lamb cutlets we cooked on the heavy cast iron griddle pan and the last of the asparagus. We often cook out of Nigel Slater's Real Fast Food and Real Fast Puddings (his clafoutis recipe is foolproof) I think of him of the advocate of a style of food that seems to so familiar now - the best ingredients, eating seasonally, simply assembled - but was startlingly in the late 80s when he was writing for Marie Claire. Of course, the Elizabeth Davids, MFK Fisher, Jane Grigson and the like had been writing about food like this for years but somehow it had all seemed so elitist until Nigel Slater showed that you didn't need to know the provenance of the olive oil to be able to cook well. In relation to the visit to New Caledonia, my children attend a bi-lingual French/english school here, so the trip was to demonstrate that french is actually spoken by real people in a real country. It's not a private school though it does receive some support from the French government. I appreciate I live in a town of relative affluence and a well-educated population supporting their public schools but what is Howard on about in this interview?

Parents are moving their children out of government schools because the state system is "too politically correct and too values-neutral", according to Prime Minister John Howard.

Where on earth is the evidence for this? The parents I know who have put their children in the private system are doing so because either a) they think the private system offers more opportunity for individual attention to their children or b) they're getting them into the "network" early. I support parental choice but I don't see why it needs additional tax dollars to subsidise it.