Cat on the Bench

Love on Lygon Street

I like Valentines Day in theory and usually have big intentions of preparing a lavish feast for two or a pre-planned breakfast in bed.  This year, the plan was heart-shaped eggs on toast, using a cookie-cutter as an eggring, and something involving champagne for dinner.

But Barkly Square was all out of cookie cutters and a bottle of champagne the night before a day of articles interviews wasn’t the smartest move.  However, we thought we should celebrate the day somehow and the food on hand (frozen peas and oats) not being particularly love-inspiring, N and I turned to our favourite locals on the Brunswick stretch of Lygon Street.

For a quick weekday breakfast in East Brunswick (when time does not permit a trek to Ray in Victoria Street for baked eggs), I usually end up at Sugardough.  It has the same variety as Filou down the road in North Carlton, but it uses a sweeter and more eggy dough, which I associate with Italian pastries.  It doesn’t take itself as seriously as Filou either – duck-shaped biscuits sit alongside dainty hazelnut morsels, and the staff don’t mind if you dither over the selection.  On Valentines Day, I had my usual cornetto (a croissant-shaped pastry) with a long black, and N had a raspberry and ricotta muffin and a pot of ‘Tea-Party Tea’ served in crockery pinched straight from the pages of Alice in Wonderland.  We were given each other’s orders, but that’s inevitable when your boyfriend orders the girliest thing on the menu.

Love it.

We didn't have any dinner-related thoughts until 9:00, thanks to overtime and frantic exam study (or Mediterranean chic, depending on your perspective).  I was ready for frozen peas and sleep, but N thought dinner at Thaila Thai was in order.  I didn’t require much persuasion – Thaila Thai’s peanut sauce is perhaps the best (legal) mood-booster known to humankind.   

Love it, but so does everyone else. It was chockers with a queue down the street.  So was Matsumoto.  The frozen peas were calling me, but N thought we should try somewhere new. 

We found a half-empty Thai restaurant further down Lygon Street towards Brunswick Road called “Brown Sugar”. It was half-empty for a reason.  I tried to order and the waitress snapped she was too busy to take my order.  Eventually, we ordered some tom yum, a tamarind squid salad, a seafood grill, some rice and two beers.  The beers came immediately, but were warm.  The food didn’t arrive for two hours.  When it did, I got snapped at again when I asked for a spoon for the tom yum, and again when I asked if we could have the rice (she said no).    The tom yum was OK, albeit lukewarm.  N liked the seafood grill, especially the bits of deep-fried fish that looked like the gunk I used to strain out of the cooking oil in my fish and chip shop days.  I couldn’t eat the salad:  I like chilli but not when the salad consists of just that.  I couldn’t taste any tamarind, and the seafood wasn’t cooked through.

No love here.

My heart wasn’t on fire, but my mouth was.  Luckily the Gelobar was open and its passionfruit gelato sang a lullaby to my tastebuds.

Dan

A list of things I will remember about my mate Dan, whom the world was deprived of on 20 January 2006:

1. Our final meal together at the milk bar opposite the Law School  – a bag of chips and a potato cake for him and a double shot coffee for me. He was saving to travel to the Middle East in April with the lovely J and was living predominantly on rice and spuds in their various forms. We talked about the brave efforts of the Civil Lit lecturer to make the subject interesting, the effect of Whiskas on my cat, his new job writing submissions for the comparative constitutional law centre, how he had finally got round to reading the book I gave him for his birthday (“The Impressionist”) and the best live music we had seen last year. 

2. The last time I saw him – at a house party in Carlton. I was drinking red wine out of a camping mug and I poured him some into an empty glass jar that we found under the house’s sink (it was an all-male house who had compiled the music playlist for this party some three weeks before, yet overlooked the fact that their guests may require drinking vessels).  He had brought along two little bottles of cognac from a stash of mini-bottles that had been left at his house by the previous tenants. We talked about feeling older than the majority of the party’s attendees who were urinating and procreating in the alley, whether law firms would take offence to his increasingly Tintin-esque hairdo, J’s problems as an asthmatic getting a diving certificate and Dan's ambivalence towards frozen peas. 

3. The last meal he cooked for me – a rice pilaf based on Stephanie’s CC recipe (which Dan called “that big book”).  He omitted the saffron and almonds from the written recipe and instead used turmeric, ginger, cardamom and cumin seeds, sprinkled from little jars lovingly labelled by his housemate Hannah, who maintains the best-stocked pantry of any student house I’ve seen. 

4. The last meal I cooked for him – late night hot chocolate with cinnamon and nutmeg, whisked until frothy, and supped as we watched Napoleon Dynamite and he pretended not to detest my cat. 

5. India, 2003. By day, I would attend four-hour yoga classes and lectures, and Dan was taking tabla lessons and practising his almost fluent Hindi (he taught himself from a tape and was fluent after about three weeks in India so he started teaching himself Sanskrit). By night, we would feast on aloo gobi, various dahls, palak paneer, milk-skin pudding, curd, chapattis and endless cups of chai.

6. A conversation late last year:

To contextualise, during our time in India, I noticed that Dan either went without breakfast or would eat the same thing he had eaten for dinner the previous day.  He said that breakfast food was boring and it made more sense to skip directly to the more gastronomically interesting parts of the day if hunger required it. When we returned to Melbourne, I took him to my favourite breakfast haunts - Ici in Fitzroy, Gluttony on Smith Street (when it was still good) and Big Harvest in Carlton - hoping to convince him of the merits of my favourite meal of the day.

Last year, I called Dan late at night with yet another question about obscure legal theory as I attempted to construct an essay conclusion.  I thanked him profusely for his help and promised to bake him a cake as soon as everything was handed in, as it was very unlikely he would ever require me to teach him anything academic. 

He replied  “but you taught me how to love breakfast”.

Christmas x 4

Yes, four Christmases. It would have been five if my boss hadn’t cancelled the work Christmas party, or six if you include Christmas-eve beer and chips in Fed Square with the girlies. Perhaps the rise of obesity in Australia correlates with the increase in broken families and the consequential need for a plethora of Christmas events. Hmmm . . .

Christmas number 1 was a lunch at my dad’s place near Bendigo. The V-line train line to Bendigo has been out of operation for over a year now so visiting my father entails a four-hour tram, train, bus and car/taxi expedition. Our stepmother wanted everyone to bring something for the meal so my sis and I racked our brains for dishes that could withstand such a journey. I settled on the caramelised apple cake from The Paris Cookbook and Nigella’s chocolate macaroons. My sis had been out clubbing until six that morning, but had come home and set some balsamic-drizzled beetroots on to roast while she had a cat-nap. She brought these with an orange and a bag of baby spinach and made them into a gorgeous salad.

We started with little bowls of nibbly things – marinated octopus, dolmades, olives and the dregs of my bro’s birthday ham (he asked one parent for a ham for his birthday and the other for a knife, then proceeded to have a ham party for his mates). Next came baked trout rubbed with spices and stuffed with lime, my sis’s salad and a lettuce and tomato affair that my dad had made from his new vegie garden. We finished with coffee, cake and the macaroons. I had made the cake a few times before – it is mainly apple with a tiny bit of batter that has lots of raising agent in it so it sets more like an airy baked custard around the apple than a cake. Halfway through the cooking time, you pour a mixture of sugar, butter and egg over the top of the cake though which sets to a chewy caramel that offsets the tart apples.

I had been wanting to make Nigella’s macaroons ever since I had the amazing chocolate macaroons at Baker D Chirico on Fitzroy Street, St Kilda. I even bought an icing bag especially. My macaroons ended up a bit bigger than the little chocolate jewels I first tasted but they had the same chocolate intensity (I think because I used 70% chocolate for the insides and a good cocoa for the biscuits). I was a bit annoyed with Nigella because her recipe for ganache (to sandwich the biscuits together) made about three times too much, and was also very runny and difficult to work with. However, I realise now that when the recipe stated to “cool” the ganache, it meant to put it in the fridge until it is cold, and not just cool it to a point when you are able to touch and work with it. It solidifies as it cools and you can then spread it like butter, rather than trickle it like icing. I had forgotten to ice two of the biscuits and when I spread them with the cold ganache I got a lot more icing on the biscuit.

I had made chutney for everyone’s presents – chunky pear and walnut (from a Good Weekend recipe) and peach (from Stephanie). I didn’t have enough left over to keep test jars for myself but people have given me good reports so far.  My bro and his girlfriend had made zucchini pickle and mango chutney for everyone, so most people went home with at least two jars.  And my sis gave me a book of chutney recipes.

Christmas number two was a Thai restaurant in Chinatown with my mum and the siblings. It was standard Thai fare with prices reflective of our post-Christmas shopping bank balances.

Christmas number three was on Christmas morning with my mum. We were planning to have champagne and pastries on St Kilda beach but had forgotten to purchase either beforehand. I called around a few places but was told to either try Chinatown (been there, done that) or the hotels. The Prince were only serving for guests but the Hilton and the Sofitel were both offering their full breakfast buffet. My mum squealed with happiness when I suggested the Hilton. She told me about the last time that she had breakfast there: thirty years ago when she was handling the PR for the Moscow Circus’ Melbourne tour, there was a breakfast meeting at the Hilton to deal with the problem of the elephant trainer who was threatening to quit unless he got a pay rise!

It was $32 a head for the full Hilton buffet – unlimited coffee, eggs as you like them, bacon, hash browns, mushrooms, tomatoes, fruit salad, Bircher muesli, yoghurts, stewed fruits, nuts, toast, muffins, pastries, pancakes, waffles, cereals and even a juice machine where you could make your own fresh juice. Arguably a bit steep for breakfast but I reckon we ate our money’s worth (or at least drank it in coffee!).

Christmas number four was a late lunch on Christmas Day with N’s extended family in West Brunswick. I rode my bike their in an effort to speed digestion of breakfast. There were prawns (and spinach pie things for the vegetarians), cold turkey and cranberry, cold ham and mustard, potato salad, greek salad, tomato and mozzarella salad, cold roast vegetables with a mustard dressing and for dessert, N’s grandma’s famous Christmas pudding that she had been feeding with brandy since August. This came with a choice of ice cream, cream, brandy sauce or brandy custard (of which N’s little sis had all four).

I rode (slowly) home then collapsed with a Berocca and snuggled up with Nigel Slater’s new book The Kitchen Diaries, a present from my mum (which N had also bought me and hidden in his sock drawer for me to find on Christmas morning, but had to unwrap and return when he found out that my mum had bet him to it!).

Merry Christmas everyone!

Pre-festivities festivals and the quest for balance

The opposite of late-night study with a coffee plunger and a cat for company is open skies, crazy dancing, cold beer, happy people and a drumbeat.  Creek-swimming and pensive chats over cups of chai also don’t go astray.   

So what is a burnt-out student to do but take herself to a music festival? Or two.  One for each exam, she justifies, not excessive at all. Equilibrium requires it.  And it could have very easily been three if I had been sufficiently organised to get tickets to Meredith or sold my firstborn to join themfolks about to trek north for the superlative Woodford.

My chosen two were the three-day Folk Rhythm and Life festival in Eldorado, and the one-day Meredith spinoff Carpark Festival in Chinatown. They were very different and I’m not going to hide the fact that I far preferred the former.  The Carpark Festival had bigger acts (Sons and Daughters, The Kills and the Avalanches, although they didn’t really play anything special, just chucked on records and let their friends dance on the stage) but it lacked that escapist hedonistic merriment that, to me, maketh a good music festival.  You would have thought that everyone being crammed into a stinking hot carpark would have created some sense of togetherness through adversity but it just didn’t take off. 

And they were charging $5.50 for a VB (which for my English readers is a nasty nasty beer that makes urine smell like Chanel). Either the organisers were just sadists (there are perfectly acceptable beers available for the same price), or they were doing the Vice Magazine-esque (anti)-reasoning thing, i.e. “VB is a ‘don’t’.  If we say VB is a ‘do’, this differentiates us from the masses.  We are inherently different from the masses because we are painfully trendy Vice people.  Therefore, we will drink VB and of course the masses will want to follow us. Let them drink VB!”.  Similarly, the only food being sold on a stinking hot Melbourne afternoon was Polish sausages, casseroles and donuts. ?!?!?

Not wishing to partake in their culinary irony, we got passouts and went to the Lounge on Swanston Street for a jug instead, pausing on the way for spanokopitas from the Greek bakery on Lonsdale Street, and didn’t return until the sun and the filler acts had died down.

The Folk Rhythm and Life Festival, however, was bloody marvellous.  The music was great but there was no one particular act that I was going to be heartbroken about if a swim in the creek went longer than planned.  That said, my highlights were probably Those Bloody McKennas, Skin, Sophie Koh and Pablo Discobar.

The beer was good and fairly priced (Carlton, Guinness or Cascade), especially since N and I worked on the bar the first night and were given a weekend’s worth of drink cards for our efforts. It was too warm to eat much during the day but when the sun went down, I feasted on homemade samousas with tamarind chutney (which I sang the praises of to everyone who would listen until they sold out and I had to find another food sources), buttery cobs of corn, chai, a slice of a puckery rhubarb meringue cake, organic apricots and carrots, and a not-very-organic white bread bacon sandwich at 3am on Saturday night.

Bacon, beer, bass and a bit of a boogie: a recipe for balance.

Studious salads

I spent the majority of the exam period studying with N's brother, S.  This worked well for everybody - S doesn't have a computer or a desk, N only uses his desk as a laundry rack and I got human company without having to get out of my study pyjamas.

I love N more than I love slow-roasted tomatoes (i.e. a lot) but his little bro has a certain endearing quality that I doubt N will ever possess: the ability to utter that magical sentence "I could really go a salad for lunch, write me a list and I'll go to the shops".

As I trenched through the mysterious wonderland of fiduciary relations and S compiled his cramsheet on the mating calls of various species of tree-frog, our tummies were sated with:

• Salad Nicoise a la Stephanie, with four-minute eggs and anchovies (S is a vegetarian but he's not too precious, bless him)

A Lettuce and Parmigiano creation, compiled of the only lettuce my garden has produced in six months and the dregs of a trip to the Mediterranean Wholesalers

• Tomato and Red Onion salad with pita bread and home-made hummus (mashed by hand because I couldn't be effed washing the blender, yet managed to splatter the whole kitchen and the cat with tahini in the mashing process)

• A glorious creation inspired by three separate recipes from last month's Gourmet Traveler that I didn't have the ingredients for - roasted balsamic red onions and their juices, chickpeas, peeled orange segments, fresh black olives from the Barkly Square fruitshop, and rocket, all sprinkled with ground almonds (the bits deemed too coarse to go into my still-to-be-blogged pear cake)

In hindsight, there was probably a bit too much rocket. But too much green never killed anyone, and the salad provided a much-needed tangy/salty/peppery/sweet flavour explosion to wake tired palates and minds (so much more pleasurably than sugarfree Red Bulls!)

And I didn't even need to get out of my pyjamas.

Our heroine returns from the dark depths of tertiary education . . .

I'm back - exams over and big mofo essay handed in.  Apologies to those 217.62 lovely people who dutifully checked in whilst I was in 'rights-theory' land - I will be a much better blogger now, I promise . . .

I have also screwed up the design of this site and have lost my pretty little cat picture so sorry sorry sorry for that too.

The following is a backlog of food adventures from the past few weeks.  I was able to cut back on recreational internet use, but cooking and caffeinating? Never.

Moving on

My mum is in the final stages of moving from the town we grew up in to a tiny studio flat in St Kilda. She has been living in St K for the last few months (under a license agreement in which I inserted a “cat clause” clarifying that she was allowed her cat) and has been spending weekends moving up as much stuff as will fit in her little shoebox and allocating the overflow between her three kids.

It has been quite an effort. Three weeks ago we hired a truck and clad in our wife-beaters, we trucked down the highway with Jimmy pumping, stopping of course for a sausage roll. All went smoothly until we actually got to packing and discovered that it was going to be a lot more difficult to move ‘adult’ furniture than my hard rubbish collection. So my mum went into the pub next door and offered a slab to anyone who wanted to help two women pack a truck. Half the town’s male population put down their beers and we were packed in no time!

There were no probs unpacking in St K after a few hasty text messages to friends with biceps. But the next week my mum had some terracotta pots that she couldn’t carry up the stairs, so she went into the Saint and made the same offer she did the week before. No one would even make eye contact. She ain't in Kansas anymore.

Anyway, yesterday she made the final carload and arrived on my doorstep with a vacuum cleaner, her Kenwood mixer that she used when she ran her breadmaking stall at the local market, and a suitcase full of papers.

I was pretty excited about the first two, but bemused at the third. She said she had had a peek and thought it was my old music and to watch out for spiders.

Once she had left I opened the suitcase and found:

• a feckload of sheet music that I had forgotten about
• folders in which I had systematically filed school certificates, handwritten recipes and letters from boyfriends (including a pressed corn chip packet that I had shared with a crush - dated to go off in 1993). Destined to be a secretary, some would say.
  
• school reports which I had absolutely no idea that my mum had kept. I had a look through, and the highlight (and requisite food angle of this story) would have to be Mrs Gleeson’s comments for year 8 Food Studies:

 “ . . . a very enthusiastic cook but she would get better results if she paid more attention to the recipe and spent less time talking. Her cleaning skills are also below average.”

I'm not sure what to make of that!

Here’s a recipe found within for what I think was an attempt to make non-alcoholic mulled wine.

(Sorry - no idea how to make it any bigger . . . you aren't missing much!).

A Romalpa clause risotto

A Romalpa clause is a clause in a contract for the sale of goods that reserves rights of title in the goods in the vendor until a certain event occurs. If the purchaser becomes insolvent before this event occurs, the vendor is in a better position than general creditors because she has a proprietary interest in the goods. Justice Kirby doesn’t like Romalpa clauses because they cannot be registered with ASIC and thus operate as a form of secret security for the lender that is detrimental to commercial certainty. They are usually found in cases about aluminium manufacturing but now and again they pop up in my kitchen.

For example, N’s parents came over on the weekend with a big bag of asparagus, parsley and lemons from their garden, some eggs from their chooks and a block of cheese from the market on the condition that these goods were to be shared between N and his siblings (i.e. it wasn’t a contract for the sale of goods as such, but I suppose our hospitality and detriment suffered from pausing study somewhat constituted valuable consideration, and there is always an intention to create legal relations in a house full of law students). 

The asparagus was thick and meaty and I was dribbling in anticipation of the golden rich yolks of freshly laid eggs. However, if the parcel was to be split three ways, there would not be enough for more than a boiled egg and two spears of asparagus each - a delicious dish in its own right but one that would probably require toast, of which I am increasingly tiring.

So I proposed that the siblings leave all the asparagus to N and myself, and I would make an asparagus risotto for everyone to eat that night. That is, they would reserve their rights of title in the said asparagus until I made the risotto and they could then gobble up their proprietary rights to their hearts’ content.  After warning them that my risotto would not be featuring on the securities register, we headed separate ways and reconvened later night.

I am not going to detail how I made the risotto, save that for the mantecura (the goop that you stir through at the end of the cooking process to enhance the creaminess, usually butter), I used the zest and juice of a lemon, an egg yolk and some grated parmesan, whisked into a hollandaise-like sauce.  I then stirred through the blanched chopped asparagus and some torn parsley, then let it rest for five minutes.

It was eaten too quickly to take photos but here is a balsamic mushroom risotto from a few weeks back made with the same mantecura.

Would you like toast with that?

After a month of too many birthdays, bills and 'busive phonecalls from the Bank, and only managing to pay rent yesterday after cleaning out all my handbags for loose change, I do not have much to report in the way of culinary excitement.

N had foresight and stocked the freezer with bread a few weeks ago, so the week's meals have been toast with a random permutation of ingredients already in the fridge, the highlights being:
- frozen peas smushed with sauteed onion and garlic on toast
- tinned sardines with diced onion and tomato on toast
- cinnamon and sugar toast dipped in Milo
- toast with tahini and ground linseeds and a drizzle of honey (this is gluggy as hell and you won't feel hungry again for at least a week)
- welsh rarebit made with the remains of old blocks of cheese, mustard and beer, melted until bubbly and poured over, you guessed it, toast
- fried egg on toast with homemade chutney
- toast dipped in eggy milk mixture (there was only one egg and two people, and this seemed the fairest way forward) cooked on the grillpan with jam dregs on top.

If I had time, I would soak some legumes and get some carrots and marked down vegies and make a soup or something. I do honestly believe that you can eat healthily on ten/twenty dollars a week if you have the time to go to the market late on a Sunday and soak beans and buy wholesale and split between ten people and slowcook shitty bits of meat. But with exams pending and the craziness of work (why does family law pick up in the springtime? relationship springcleaning? the thought of another Christmas with their partner's family?), my meals are basically limited to something that can be put together in the time it takes for the kettle to boil for another cup of tea.

But it hasn't been without cause. For N's birthday, I got him two tickets to the mini-Meredith that the festival peoples are holding in a carpark in Chinatown on the Sunday that the real Meredith finishes. Cut Copy won't be there but the Avalanches and Sons and Daughters will, and its going to be the most wonderful summer Sunday afternoon of dancing and merriment.

I might drink to that thought with another cup of tea.

This is what love tastes like

A meal for one, sourced from the love of many.

Asparagus and broad beans with olive oil, lemon juice and pecorino.

Pod the broad beans that you bought from the CERES market on an expedition with your brother which culminated in long blacks, a pile of weekend papers and a quarrel about the Family First party. Boil the single-podded broad beans in boiling salted water for about three minutes. Remove with a slotted spoon keeping the saucepan on the stove, rinse under cold water in a sieve, then “double pod” the larger of the beans. With homegrown broad beans, normally only about 30% will need double-podding, with Coles Homebrand Frozen, about 80% will. It won’t kill you not to double-pod – they will just be a bit chewier and more fibrous.

Take 5 or so spears of asparagus from the bag of vegetables grown and delivered by N’s parents. Cook in the boiling salted water for about three minutes until they turn a delicious green. Do not rinse with cold water as this will impact the eventual flavour. This is normally done to stop the cooking process of vegetables (or to cool them down to enable podding, as above), but I don’t think it should be done with asparagus. It is better to allow for some cooking after removal and cook it for a minute or so less than you would otherwise. On this note, drain the asparagus then put it back in the saucepan with the broad beans, on a lower heat than before.

Drizzle with the best olive oil you have (for me, a birthday present from the step-mother), the juice of a lemon (from N’s grandmother’s tree), salt that N hand-ground in the mortar after I gave him a serve for buying salt crystals when we don’t have a salt grinder, and black pepper. Quickly toss, then put in bowl and grate pecorino on top (parmagiano if it's on special or Homebrand tasty if it’s rent week).

You could add the cheese whilst it is in the saucepan but it will set like glue and make for stressful washing.

Sit, eat and feel the love.