Mirepoix (or, aromatics cooked in fat)
Every food culture has its own combination of vegetables cooked in a fat or oil until their flavours meld. These combinations become the foundation of a dish, on which it can build all its other flavours.
In Louisiana Creole it's 'the holy trinity' of onions, green capsicums (bell peppers) and celery. Italy has their soffritto of garlic, leeks, fresh herbs, celery and onions, sauteed in olive oil. Spain uses onions, garlic and tomato. Thai curries use pounded pastes of red shallot, chilli, onion and ginger. Sichuanese dishes use a of stir fry garlic, ginger, chilli and fermented soy beans.…
New Cooking Classes, a very special mailing list, and 20% off if you tell me...
The westerlies have arrived, I've fallen in love with my hot water bottle and I'm fantasising about chocolate soup (and chocolate cookies, choc marble cheesecake, chocolate self saucing pudding, chocolate babka...) at quite inappropriate times.
Winter must be here!
This means a whole new set of cooking classes to make the most of this too-short cold season of ours. There's a spicy pickle class, a marmalade and fruit butter class, a tofu and tempeh class (of course- it just keeps filling!), a pressure cooker class, a meat stock class and a vegetable stock class. Feel wintery enough to you?…
A Good Compost Heap
I've always been a slack composter.
Sure, I know the rules, but lack of time, materials and general laziness have encouraged me to cut composting corners. Enthusiasm for planting, impatience, SOMETHING definitely overcomes me when I'm in a gardening mood. I'm all in for immediate results. I'll do a sheet mulch style bed, but never add enough material to make up for the uncompelling substance masquerading as soil on this inner city block (most of our backyard being gravel back fill sitting over a clay plug).
But things are changing. My composting habits are reforming.…
Rosella (Wild Hibiscus) Jam
Rosella Jam is the simple sweetheart of this subtropical gardener.
In early spring she buries rosella seeds in a sunny corner of the garden and forgets about them.
The jam stays in her heart all spring and summer, while the little rosella plants turn into big rosella bushes, bullying neighbours out of their way. But the gardener doesn't mind. She leaves things be, and waits and waits, and when the sun throws long shadows, she returns to the spot and, with secateurs and a big bowl, goes to work on the…
Learning for the Soybean Masters Cooking Class THIS SATURDAY
Hi everyone, there's just a couple of spots left in this Saturday's cooking class at Taste.
In this class - the first in a series offered in 2012 celebrating authentic vegetarian dishes - we’ll make tofu from scratch (a tofu that will blow all other beancurds out of their slightly rancid water baths!), we’ll experiment with the fermented delights of tempeh, and we’ll use both tofu and tempeh in a series of dishes direct from the soybean masters (Indonesia and the Sichuan Provence). For more details, see my cooking classes page.
(And if you want to know if my…
Gari (Pickled Ginger), Christine Manfield style
Ginger is so young and juicy at the moment, I'm making pickling a priority. Homemade pickled ginger refreshes, gets taste buds salivating and bites. Something very dreary must happen to the store bought stuff, which often tastes bland and only nibbles.
Gari (or pickled ginger) is traditionally eaten as a palate cleanser between sushi, sashimi or grilled meats, but I love using it as a last minute seasoning in many dishes, particularly those which incorporate ginger in other ways as well. Like a stir fry, where ginger's been added with other aromatics early on, or in a…
Banana, Walnut and Quinoa Cake
Yesterday, in a state of hanger (that's hunger + anger, or, what happens when I forget to eat lunch), I took a bag of sausages from the freezer and fast thawed them in a bowl of hot water. Not the best of kitchen practices, I know, but hanger makes you do stuff like that.
They turned out to be peeled bananas. Once we'd blown our budget on burgers and chips down the road, I returned to the bananas and saw their true boon: cake!
I actually need little excuse to make banana cake (or bread-…
Pimientos de Padrón and Midyim Eco Produce
I've been fantasizing about Pimientos de Padrón since Barcelona last year. I first tried this dish at a little Catalan bar, Bar del Pla, and I figured the cook must be some kind of genius. The flavour of these charred chillies was sweet and savoury, the texture soft and slippery with oil. I needed nothing else besides a clean cold beer. I'd made my way through a whole plate of the humble looking peppers before Mathew'd finished chasing Oliver across the cobblestones, so I ordered another before he noticed and tried harder to share.
I thought I'd…
Eating in Rome c/o Elizabeth Minchilli
Bad wifi connections and illness have silenced this blog for far too long. Enough. I'm pulling myself out of a post illness stupor to post some brief memories. Hopefully sharing these will help dissipate the cold, vomiting virus and final flu flogging that have been clouding my holiday recall.
One of the best things about travelling in Italy with a young child is Italians (here's Oliver with his cheeky devil friend, Naoise). Italians seemingly love babies as much as they love food, and embrace their chaos with smiles and exclamations like 'bella!' (everyone thought Oliver was…
Dry tofu with peanuts (hua sheng dou fu gan), and travelling with toddlers
I'm almost too ashamed to tell you: we're in Hong Kong. On our way to Italy. Life's spoiling me, with all this travel. Luckily, I've a reality check in place: his name's Oliver, he turned 18 months on Saturday, and he gave us a little world of hell on the way to Hong Kong. We're the family that kept everyone up. Poor little Ollie. (Here's a picture of Oliver at home, at his finest, eating cherry jam.)
Trawling dark aisles with our screaming baby felt like dragging everyone's teeth along bitumen. We found a wedge of respite up the back…