The business of self-publishing…

…has been consuming my energies and time of late, hence the slow rate of posting. That will change soon, as I have been cooking (thank goodness!) in amidst the number-crunching and setting up of publication processes. So I’ll be back soon to post some foodie stuff.

Tortillas

© Clare Richards 2009 The last remaining bite of my first tortilla

Genuine (as opposed to supermarket shelf and chain restaurant) Mexican food is not that common in Australia.  The best Mexican food I’ve ever eaten was at the end of a trip to California, Arizona and New Mexico.  I’d only managed to find horrendously cheesy, carbohydrate loaded tortillas and burritos for most of the trip.  As I headed out of the country there was time to spare so I stopped at a South LA Mexican restaurant near the airport, tucked in under the dank street lighting.  Inside it was warm and comfortable, and I had Mole Poblano, which was filled with all the earthy, savoury chocolate flavours I’d hoped for.

Queensland and Mexico cover similar stretches of latitude either side of the equator.  Queensland stretches from around 10 degrees latitude in the Torres Strait down southwards to around 28 degrees at the border with New South Wales.  Mexico stretches from around 15 degrees latitude at the border with Guatemala up northwards to around 32 degrees at the border with the USA.  Cairns is at 16.51 S and it’s latitudinal sister city is Acapulco at 16.51 N, so Far North Queensland relates climatically to Southern Mexico.

Why the notes on latitude?  I am interested in seeing produce grown here that suits this climate, and I am delving into the tropical cuisines of the world in the process of writing my cookbook.  So, because I want to cook with local ingredients, and I want to cook food from the tropical cuisines of the world, I want to see these ingredients grown here in Far North Queensland.

Inland from Cairns on the highlands of the Atherton Tablelands maize and sweetcorn grow abundantly in the fertile soils.  It is a great pity, then, that there is no Australian manufacturer of the Mexican maize flour, masa.  Masa is the particular flour required to make tortillas, tamales and many other classic Mexican staples.  I can only presume that the flour used in all those supermarket Mexican products is imported.

So for now I’ve sourced three companies for my Mexican culinary experiments, having bought masa from Aztec Products, various chillies from Monterey Mexican Foods, and a tortilla press (to come next week) from Mayan Legacy. I’m ever hopeful that within the next few years I’ll be able to get all the ingredients I need here in Cairns from local sources (including my garden, as I’m about to plant a new lot of chillies).

Today I made my first batch of tortilla dough with yellow masa flour, and then my first tortilla which, to my delight, worked.  I need to improve on the cooking time and temperature to get some searing / browning on the tortilla, but flavour-wise it was very good, with that sweet nutty aroma of maize.  I served it simply with sliced avocado, finely diced red onion, a smear of chilli paste, and some perfectly ripe tomato.  I followed the recipe from Monterey Mexican Foods website, but halved quantities as this was a test run:

1 cup masa flour

1/8 teaspoon flaky salt

2/3 cup warm water

Mix water with masa flour and salt to make a firm cohesive dough – neither too crumbly and dry or too wet.  Rest for 30 minutes, then press out tortillas.  I don’t yet have my press, so I pressed the tortilla by hand on a piece of baking paper, then once it was thin enough, placed another piece of baking paper over and gently rolled it until as thin as possible.  I regularly lifted the paper and tucked the edges of the tortilla back together as it started splitting at the edges.  I then cooked the tortilla for a few minutes either side in a medium-hot pan with a tiny bit of olive oil, then served it wrapped around avocado, finely diced red onion, tomato and a smear of chilli paste.

A final note: I made another batch with white masa flour for dinner, and cooked them on the highest heat of my contact grill, and this did a far better job at getting some lovely browned spots on the tortilla.  Sorry, no photos of these ones, we ate them all too quickly.

© Clare Richards 2009

Master(ing) home cook(ing)

I rarely watch commercial television as the regular blaring, disruptive ads drive me crazy.  In addition to this aversion, the last house I lived in had very poor reception for channel 10, so for both these reasons I missed the first series of Masterchef.  However, I was not oblivious to it, as almost every stranger who found out in the course of conversation that I am writing a cookbook commented “oh. you’ll have to go on Masterchef!”.

There are several reasons I have no interest in going on Masterchef.  In no particular order, they are:

I have no interest in getting into the restaurant trade

I have no interest in competing over food, my love is in sharing it

I enjoy being relaxed while I cook, and I enjoy the rhythm of moving around my own kitchen, and so am not interested in cooking under pressure in an alien kitchen

Beyond this disinterest in competing on the show, there has been something else nagging at me about it which is only starting to crystallise, and I think in essence it is about the cult of the chef and the cult of the high end restaurant.  Let me be clear that my concerns are not about the existence of great chefs and great restaurants – it is a joy that such passion exists and gives us such memorable and sensual experiences if we are lucky to eat their food.  Neither am I offended by the show itself.  When I did catch an episode, the judges, all incredibly experienced and passionate, expressed no gratuitous nastiness but rather were constructive in their criticisms and assistance.

My concerns have been crystallised by the phenomenon of Masterchef, rather than being about it per se.  If a nationwide Gallup poll were to ask a representative sample of the Australian population questions such as

has watching Masterchef taught you useful techniques? (hopefully yes)

have you used those techniques in your home cooking? (hopefully yes)

does watching Masterchef increase or decrease your confidence in your own cooking? (hopefully increase)

do you use recipe ideas from Masterchef in your home cooking? (hopefully yes)

and if all answers were affirmative, then maybe I’d drop my concern, and be happy that it is part of a reawakening of skill and passion for cooking amongst Australian home cooks.  But the thing is that home cooking is an entirely different creature to high end restaurant cooking.  It has a lot more in common with the many wonderful mostly plain cafe style ethnic restaurants that fill our cities and large towns, where flavour sails high above the altar of presentation.  A plate of cleaved roast duck in the local pub Chinese restaurant was so perfect (and so cheap) that if they hadn’t moved on I would have started to resemble a duck myself.  The visual joy was in the sight of the burnished crispy skin, but certainly nothing about the jumble of chunks on the plate resembled food art.

And to talk of home cooking…most of the key food memories tucked away in my brain are of encountering flavours and textures of home cooked food.   Feather-light sponges, scones, ribbon sandwiches, caramel tarts, boozy trifles on offer at community functions when I was a kid; Gran’s perfectly roasted chicken; the moist pleasure of the family chocolate cake, and the gooey decadence of the family chocolate pudding; my first Beef Wellington late at night out on Veni’s farm; my mate Pete’s mum’s Peroggi; slow roasted tomatoes, and roast beef studded with garlic and basted in red wine; the moment when my sister Ness perfected the PWMU golden syrup dumpling recipe by adding way more lemon juice and lemon rind…the list goes on, and on.

Another memory, from the top end of the restaurant scale: quail consomme arriving before me at the age of 10 in Mietta’s restaurant in North Fitzroy.  The consomme was a clear deep brown, with a minute poached quail’s egg resting on its surface.  The simple visuals echoed the flavours – a wonderful balance of deep burnished caramel, saltiness and smooth velvet texture.  It still ranks as one of my food epiphanies, an experience that has remained crisp in my food memory.

Back to the ethnic restaurant memory bank; at Thy Thy Vietnamese restaurant in Victoria St Richmond, where I sampled my first ever Vietnamese coleslaw.  Thy Thy is a cheap cavernous restaurant closer in appearance and rowdy efficiency to a cafe or canteen.  The mix of textures and flavours of the Vietnamese coleslaw was entirely different to anything I’d eaten thus far in my life (I was about 18 at the time); an arresting mix of saltiness, crunch, pungent fish sauce and Vietnamese mint flavours, chilli heat, soft bite of poached chicken, and the cool sweetness of raw shredded cabbage and carrot.  My visual memory remains also, of a generous pile plonked on the plate.  However pedestrian the presentation, if I call up that image I start salivating.  It’s delights impelled me to learn how to make it myself, and now I can savour Vietnamese coleslaw in my own kitchen.

Similarly, the boisterous bonhomie of nights spent at Alaysa Turkish restaurant with uni mates consuming vast plates of varied dips and fresh pita bread inspired me to learn how to make these delights myself.  There is a sense in many ethnic restaurants in particular of eating in the home – the food is largely what the restauranteurs eat at home (along with many more delicacies that don’t make it to restaurant menu lists), and it is often family serving and cooking for you.  It is easier to translate these dishes into home cooking because it is clear that they are dishes that have been cooked in millions of homes, sometimes for thousands of years.  The best of these often cheap, often vibrant ethnic restaurants engender a sense of cross-cultural fraternity, a sharing from one home cook to another.  I have had many a conversation in such restaurants with staff who have generously shared, often in great detail, the methods and ingredients involved in making the dish in question.

The difference between Mietta’s – and in contrast Thy Thy and Alaysa, and my seminal home cooked food experiences – is probably in what I might term accessible flavours.  The quail consomme at Mietta’s was such a work of culinary perfection that I have no doubt that hours of time, attention and technique went in to creating it.  The Vietnamese coleslaw at Thy Thy was evidently a quick, fresh compiled salad that, given some simple knowledge about ingredients and techniques, one could make at home.  Ditto for the dips at Alaysa, where I learnt that charring the eggplant was the magical process that produced the lush smoky flavour of the Baba Ganoush.  Ditto also for the grilled seafood or Casuela at the Robbie Burns Hotel’s Spanish kitchen, and many other ethnic eating experiences that have shaped my palate and what I cook at home.  And I still hold a clear memory, from about the age of fourteen, of the first time I ate a crispy skinned baked potato loaded with generous amounts of butter, sour cream and finely chopped chives at Annie and Ian’s home.

As a passionate home cook, my concern is that more home cooks cook real food and enjoy doing so.  That is why I am writing a cookbook for home cooks.  It is why I am involved in the local food movement.  And it is why I am keen to see far more people enjoying the delights of their own kitchen garden, and produce that has been grown locally rather than imported from half way around the world or from the other end of the country.

I have some reservations that the celebrity chef phenomenon, and the rise of concepts such as Masterchef, create a sense that ‘good’ cooking is something that is far too complex or time consuming to achieve night by night at home after a day’s work.  I wonder whether there is a food culture out there in homes where staple weekly fare includes a lot of things out of bottles, tins, freezers and take away shops, fitfully punctuated by a special dinner party or from-scratch home cooked meal.

I personally am not interested in us being a nation of aspiring chefs and restauranteurs.  I am certainly interested in us being a nation of fantastic home cooks, equipped with the techniques, tips and tricks that make producing great food every day of the week easy, with knowledge of and access to locally grown seasonal produce and the skills and recipes to utilise it well.  Homes full of seasonal flavours, simple fresh foods, happy cooks, happy eaters.  Home kitchens that do not feel eclipsed by the world of fine dining, but enjoy the experience of fine dining as an experience in itself, supplementary to the daily delights of the home table.  I thus hope that the rising interest in chefs and restaurant style food is part of a wider embracing of the simple joys of good food, and not a phenomenon that alienates people from the simple and accessible possibilities of delightful, flavoursome home cooking.

© Clare Richards 2009

Papaya and prosciutto

…a simple tropical take on the classic combination of rockmelon and prosciutto.  Slice papaya into slender wedges (about 2cm at their widest point) and wind a finely sliced piece of prosciutto around each slice.  For small bites to have with drinks, dice papaya into 2cm squares and wrap each in some prosciutto, secured with a toothpick.

For love of roast chicken

Roasting a chook when you have a rotisserie in the oven (as I am fortunate to have in my current home) is the best way to eat chicken in my book.  Succulent inside, crispy skin outside and cooked to perfection in both the breast and legs.  Last night I had friends for dinner and cooked a chook on the rotisserie that had been rubbed with baharat spice mix (my version that I’m still experimenting on) and filled with a carrot, oregano, baharat, garlic and couscous stuffing.  The juices of the chicken dripped down onto the roasting pumpkin and potatoes below, leaving them caramelised with soft centres and crispy edges.

There will be a section in my cookbook about roasting chicken, and so far I have over 20 recipes for different ways to stuff, rub and marinate a roast chook, so I may need to do some editing….

© Clare Richards 2009

Jam cheesecake

© Clare Richards 2009 Frozen orange marmalade cheesecake

The nature of recipe development means things don’t always go to plan or work out perfectly first time.  There is experimentation, adjustments, experimentation, adjustments until either the idea is ditched, or it works.  I’ve been playing around with making strawberry jam without adding commercial pectin, and without using additional fruits that don’t grow here in the tropics (eg. apples).

My first batch tasted great but was quite runny – not so runny as to qualify as strawberry sauce, but still a bit too runny to be a jam for using on toast.  So it occurred to me to play around with making a cheesecake or ice cream with it.  I threw together what I thought might be a good combination of ingredients, and it turned out beautifully.  I guess you could use a well set jam to make this, but I’ve been making it with various runny jams (strawberry, orange, cumquat) in my pantry, and it works well, so here’s the recipe:

Jam cheesecake

600ml thickened cream

250g cream cheese

1 1/2 cups sweet jam, or 2 cups tart jam (eg. marmalade)

1 tbsp gelatine powder dissolved in 1/2 cup boiling water

Dice the cream cheese up into smaller cubes and add to the bowl of a food processor along with the jam.  Process until well combined.  Dissolve gelatine into 1/2 cup boiling water over heat and keep stirring until all lumps and gone, then add to food processor and combine.  Whip cream to firm peaks then add to food processor and process until well combined.  Pour mix into a container and refrigerate.  Once cooled you can also put this into the freezer if you want, in which case it becomes a semifreddo style ice cream dessert.

I serve this dessert in slices.  I set the mix in two 750ml rectangular containers.  With the frozen version I slip the block out of the container and onto a plate and cut the slices needed with a bread knife, then return the remainder to the freezer.  With the fridge version I cut slices directly in the container and then coax them out with the tip of the knife.  Great to serve with a tumble of fresh fruit on top.

© Clare Richards 2009

Wild harvest III

© Clare Richards 2009 Pippis

Yesterday The Plumber and I went to one of the local coarse sand beaches to gather pippis to make fettuccine alla vongole.  This particular beach has an abundant population of pippis.  We started scanning the tide line on the lookout for their little air bubbles in the sand or to see them tumbling in the wash of the tide, and found a patch almost immediately.

I’ve found the best way to work is in a team, with one person standing just below the high wash mark and shuffling into the sand with their hands or feet, and the other person standing below them.  This way, the top person can grab any that are dredged out of the sand beneath their feet / hands, and the second person can grab those that get tumbled into the water by the wash.

So, within half an hour we had a good haul of pippis to take home.

The next phase is cleansing them of sand so you don’t end up with a crunchy meal.  Do this by putting them into a bucket of fresh water as soon as they’ve been gathered, and fill another bucket with sea water to take home.  Leave them in the fresh water for an hour or two, then drain it off and leave them dry for an hour in a cool place covered by a damp towel.  Then place them back into sea water, and they will then open up and suck lots of sea water in and out and so cleanse themselves.  Finally, place them into the fridge in their sea water until you are ready to cook.

Pippis are mostly used for bait here in Australia and some people can’t be bothered with them because of their small amount of meat.  I love their sweet sea flavour and they make the most divine pasta sauce, which tastes all the better for having gathered them yourself on a blue sky day from the local beach.

© Clare Richards 2009 Fettuccine alla vongole (pasta with pippis)

Fettuccine alla vongole

(equipment: need one pasta pot, one deep sided frypan or wide saucepan, and three bowls for sorting cooked pippis)

for two generous serves

enough uncooked pasta for two people

about 2 kg (7 – 8 cups) fresh pippis in their shells

1 cm slice butter (about 50g / 1/4 cup)

1 tbsp olive oil

2 heaped tbsp fresh thyme

2 tbsp finely chopped Italian parsley

2 tbsp finely chopped fresh tarragon

2 finely sliced cloves garlic

1 tsp salt for cooking pasta

1 cup dry white wine

3/4 to 1 cup sour cream

Melt butter and add olive oil, then add garlic and thyme, cook briefly until garlic softens but before it goes golden or brown, then immediately add a batch of pippis and a glass of dry white wine, turn heat to high, put on lid and hold down to increase heat and steaming.  (Meanwhile, put a pot of water on to boil for the pasta.)  Steam pippis for 1 – 3 minutes in small batches, just until all pippis are open, then remove each batch from pan with a skimmer into a bowl and place the next batch in the pan.

Put pasta into boiling water with 1 tsp salt.  Keep an eye on pasta while completing the next step of removing meat from pippis.  Remove pasta from heat and strain when al dente, reserving some liquid (in case it is needed at the end to thin the pippi sauce).

Remove all flesh from the pippi shells and reserve flesh into a bowl.  Strain cooking juice through muslin in a sieve to catch any remaining grit.  Pour strained pippi juices into frypan and bring to a rolling boil, add wine and reduce to about 1 cup liquid.    Reduce heat to medium and add half of fresh parsley and tarragon then 3/4 cup sour cream and mix until incorporated.

Add pippi meat and heat for another minute or so until pippis are warmed.  Taste for salt and season if needed (shouldn’t need to due to sea water in the pippis).  If the sauce is too thick add a little bit more white wine or some cooking water from the pasta.  Then add fettuccine to pan and mix through until well coated with sauce.

Remove from heat, serve into two bowls, garnish with remaining parsley and tarragon and serve.  Can add some finely grated parmesan, or a little bit of finely sliced fresh chilli, but I generally find the flavours of this dish are perfect without adding anything further.

© Clare Richards 2009

Wild harvest II

A new batch of figs this afternoon from the same tree, which may be the last as there are few left on the branches.  There are now more fruit on the ground than on the tree; a mottled purple and brown carpet of decaying bounty.  Across the grass is another tree with fruit coming on, so I will be supplied for a while longer.

© Clare Richards 2009 Rainforest fig and strawberry jam compote with yoghurt

This week I had a wonderful afternoon gathering green mangos with a friend.  Mango trees are everywhere in Cairns.  Some were planted originally by cane farmers or households long gone, some by public authorities, others feral survivors that have sprung up from the fruits dropped by fruit bats, or tumbled down seasonal creeks by the rush of wet season waters to sprout life away from their parent.

Because we have such a wet Wet season, Cairns is criss-crossed by wide drains, permanent creeks and seasonal flow channels.   It is most often in these places that the mango trees grow, providing seasonally abundant crops to the public.  To me, the scent of masses of overripe and rotting mangos is one of the signature aromas of the wet season, drifting in amongst the smell of rain and wet foilage as I walk streets and green spaces.  Word is that we may have an early and big wet season this year, so the rain may be here soon.

© Clare Richards 2009

Wild harvest

I live at the base of the forested range that sweeps up from coastal Cairns to Kuranda at the ridge and then out across the high plateau that is the Atherton Tablelands.  So across from my home, just past the few blocks not yet carved up and sold, the forest begins, rainforest.

© Clare Richards 2009 Under the canopy

At night I am sometimes half-woken by the sound of dingoes howling across the range to each other, and mid-afternoon this week when a brief shower of rain swept through, they starting calling out to each other.  I walk daily on the edge of this wilderness, keeping an eye out for taipans and wild pigs as I go, and looking for wallabies coming out onto the open ground to feast on the grass.

© Clare Richards 2009 Fig tree

Yesterday I noticed that the indigenous fig trees (I’m sorry I don’t know their proper name, when I have it I will post it here) were in fruit, and the fruits were ripe.  I dodged the green ants to try one.  Apart from the robust amount of seed they contain, they have a lovely flavour, subtle, and between fig and strawberry.

So today I returned to do some harvesting, mindful of the highly protective green ants, spiders, and as always keeping an eye out for signs of snakes.

© Clare Richards 2009 Green ants and figs

So now I have my harvest…

© Clare Richards 2009 Fig basket

…and I will be trying them stuffed with a few different things for dessert tonight.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

PS. Stuffed with strawberry jam and cream cheese, or chilli sambal and cream cheese, or on their own (sans seeds) they are very more-ish.

© Clare Richards 2009

Introducing The Plumber

I thought it might help to formally introduce The Plumber, as he will feature regularly in my posts due to his vital role as informal but highly useful and refined taste tester, and bringer of quality steaks.  In fact, just this week he popped over with two grass-fed T-bone steaks from Marsh’s butchers in Stratford, not just one of the best butchers I’ve known but also one of the happiest.

We grilled the steaks quickly on my contact grill and threw together a sauce of chicken juices (some left from the chicken roast), flaky salt, lots of freshly cracked pepper, red wine and sour cream, and reduced this to a smooth consistency, then added at the end a drizzle of juices from the resting steaks.  Served with peeled and sliced baked kipfler potatoes, crispy from the roasting juices (I was simultaneously preparing another meal) it was a perfectly satisfying meal.