Vegan Bake-Off at the Black Rose

Ruby's life-long friend Georgina lives with us now. It's wonderful - she's a gorgeous girl with interesting, eclectic tastes, amazing fashion sense and great taste in terrible 80s and 90s cult movies. Although Georgie isn't vegan she decided to enter the Vegan Bake-Off being held on Sunday at the Black Rose Anarchist Bookshop in Newtown. She made a red velvet cake with a vegan cream icing. Other people had contributed a strawberry & passionfruit pie, and some oatmeal & choc-chip muffins. I trailed along to check it out & was quite overwhelmed by the wholesomeness of it all - quiet talk, reading of books, munching of vegan treats - nobody was even smoking! Young people these days, my oh my. I hope they save the world, I really do. See more photos here.

The sunset from Marrickville was gorgeous last night - very Rococo, I thought, slightly garish even, but with a gum tree flavour. You can see more photos here. The birds were so noisy along the river that Richard and I had to stop talking for a minute.

Isn't it funny how when you're busy doing blog-worthy things you don't have time to write, and then when you do get a chance you forget what you were going to write about?

Damn. Let me think. Oh yes, we had a lovely dinner:


We invited our dear friend Phil, who is Georgie's Dad. Georgie made place-markers (see mine, "Dr Jones"?) and a fantastically tangy lemon tart. Richard did zucchini flowers stuffed with ricotta followed by a pesto pasta that was almost jumping off the plate with flavour. I set the table with my favourite 1970s "scenes of Sydney" placemats & poured the wine.

I wrote a grant application, my first ever. I've been a little paralysed about them for a year or so - I think the cancer blew my confidence a bit so I just concentrated on what I knew - my teaching (hence the award, hehehe) and my writing. Anyway, I loved doing the application and will definitely do more now that I've broken the ice. This one is asking for just under $25,000 to do some research in Thailand about cosmetic surgery tourism - a logical next step from the research I did for my book - so fingers crossed! I won't find out until December.

My ex-step-father-in-law (work that one out) died last week. He was nearly 84 and had had a pretty wonderful life, crashing planes during WWII on the beach in Darwin, sailing around Australia, being married to two beautiful women (not at the same time) and having a loving, close family. Ruby and I went to Melbourne for the funeral, which was lovely - totally secular - standing room only - laughter along with tears. Vale Bert.

Lebanese Feast - kib'be a'raahib

Here's the Lebanese feast I made on Saturday night. It was pretty spectacular and really full of flavour, especially the lemon soup and the mackdouse (this is the stuffed pickled eggplant you buy in a jar). As we were eating Ruby asked me how I liked it and I said "I love it, I just wish someone else had cooked it." So we'll have it again, definitely, but Richard will take it from here... Recipes & pictures below.

By the way, it's vegan.

Lebanese Lenten kib'be (kib'be a'raahib -monk's kibbe)
This is enough to feed 8 people so adjust as necessary


Filling
2x small-med brown onions, fine diced
1-2 small red chillies sliced
1 tsp Lebanese 7 spice (baharat)
1 cup finely diced pecans or walnuts
Olive oil, salt to taste
Golden sultanas optional

Sauté onions in generous quantity of olive oil until just starting to caramelize, then add chilli and spice, then pecans, fry another 2-3 minutes on med-low flame, set aside to cool.

Potato dough (for ‘crust’)
2x Med small onions
Generous handful fresh basil leaves
1/4 tsp chilli powder
1 tsp cumin powder
7-8 Med-small potatoes boiled, drained and cooled
4-5 cups pre-soaked and washed burghul, (brown and fine - asmar ou nayaim)
Salt to taste

Process basil and onions in food processor until v. fine dice, not watery - smooth paste, but lumpy puree!!
No large pieces allowed!!
In mixer with batter attachment, mix potatoes, burghul, spices and onion mix together to make stiff dough. If too sticky, add more burghul.

Prepare large baking pan with light ‘oiling’. Divide ‘dough’ in 1/2. Fill small bowl with water and a pinch of salt. Wet hands with this water, and flatten handfuls of dough into large pancake discs across palm, and lay,( pat) into dish. Join these up one by one like putting together patchwork quilt, until they cover the bottom of the pan about 1/2” thick. Smooth seams with damp hand. Spread with filling, then use same procedure of patching together the top ‘crust’. Smooth seams, and gently score the surface with diamond pattern, to make easier to cut. Drizzle sparingly with olive oil.

Bake in mod-hot oven until golden brown.

Serve it with lemon lentil soup, green salad, pickled eggplant (mackdouse) and radish relish.

Lemon soup


Boil one generous cup of washed lentils till tender - skim water often, add 2 med diced potatoes, boil till tender, then top off with water and lemon juice to taste. (several lemons!, or supplement with citric acid- milleh leymun)
In mortar and pestle grind 2 garlic cloves and large tablespoon fresh chopped coriander, sauté in 2 tblspns olive oil, when almost golden tip on to soup, and add 2 bunches rough sliced spinach or equivalent silverbeet, stir and simmer till wilted.
Add salt to taste and serve.

Radish relish


2 bunches radish, well cleaned
Lemon juice
Salt

Fine dice radish in small food processor bowl. Do not Puree.
Transfer to serving bowl. Pour over juice of 1 – 2 lemons, salt to taste.
Add small tablespoon to top of each kibbe slice on serving platter or on individual plates

Shop of the Week - The Curry Tree

The Curry Tree isn't strictly a shop, but nor is it merely a market stall. It's a few bicycles with attitude and some passionate vegetarian curry makers. Paul customises the bicycles and tricycles (some are electric, some require pedal power) himself, adding trailers and trolleys and various cooking and serving attachments to them. A retired film caterer, he is now vehemently car-free and maintains his cooking passions with an exclusive market stall (he doesn't sell anywhere except the Addison Rd Markets). His partner Fiona, who works full time, and fourteen year old daughter Katlyn, work with him on Sundays.

Their little Jack Russell, Buster, waits patiently for things to start happening.

We tried their South Indian Banquet, for which the selection changes each week. Today they were serving a fresh chutney full of ginger and coconut, a gooey rich vegetable curry, a channa (chick pea) dhal and a nice dry potato masala with lots of curry leaves and mustard seeds, all topped with a superb yoghurt made here in Marrickville, some grilled roti and a handful of fresh rocket. This cost nine dollars and was heaps for me and Richard to share. We even accidentally dropped one quarter of the roti, which Sailor charmingly gobbled up, vomited, then re-ingested. This spectacle in no way put us off this beautiful meal.

Paul has osteo-arthritis and believes that keeping active is good for his health. He tells me that he serves "Rubies", not curries - this is English slang - Ruby Murray rhymes with curry - so if you feel like a curry you say "Anyone fancy a Ruby?"



You can also buy, for only six dollars, a paratha dosa - Indian bread topped with the channa dhal, the potato masala and a big dob of yoghurt - I dare you to compare that to any burger or kebab!

Glory, the grape

We noticed a tang of richness, bordering on decay, on our back deck on Saturday. It was the grapes from our vine, only planted two years ago, ripening a little too much (regular readers know that lately my garden has been neglected).

So, what to do with kilos and kilos of grapey fecundity? We ate as many as we could. Then I found a recipe for grape jelly. This wasn't something anyone was really happy about, except me, as I've been known to be an enthusiastic but haphazard cook and in fact I've never had jam set. Richard appeared dubious & hovered about. I promised to follow a recipe and not go my own way (a public service psychological exam once said I was neither a team player nor a leader).

First, boil the grapes (2 kilos) with three sliced lemons, until the grape peels start to come away from the flesh.

Then strain the mixture through some cheesecloth, overnight. Overnight! Outrageous. I like things to be instant. Oh well... now, I couldn't work out how to get the fruit-hammock dangling over a bowl, until I remembered this post from Ampersand Duck. The wonderful blogosphere to the rescue! So I inverted one of the kitchen stools, dusted its legs, & set up this contraption:

It dripped away all night and in the morning I boiled the 8 cups of liquid with 6 cups of sugar. Boiled it until "setting point" which I've always been hopeless at. So I kept boiling and boiling and testing and testing, by dripping liquid on a saucer to see how thick it was, until finally I lost interest, drifted away, and it boiled over rather dramatically. Ruby rescued it but set a tea towel on fire in the process (at that point I had to put the camera down so no photo).

Finally, after about 2 hours of cooking, it began to set, hooray hooray, it seemed like magic (how did white grapes produce red jelly?) & I felt like a domestic goddess. I'd even sterilised some jars... and guess what, it tastes as good as it looks, so Nigella move over.

The humble dinner

I've just read a great post by Laura over at Sarsparilla about, in part, dinner parties of the 1960s. They don't sound that different to the dinner parties we hold now - consisting of similar levels of stress about preparing something fancy, scrubbing the bathroom, looking nice, worrying about who will talk to whom, buying the right alcoholic beverage, etc etc... in short, usually resulting in a host or hostess too tired to enjoy their own party.

Last night we sort of did the opposite - my wonderful parents were visiting from Melbourne so we knew they'd be here for dinner. Richard just felt like cooking (actually, he always feels like cooking) so he spent the day preparing an Indian feast of sambal, rasadar aloo, chana masala & paratha... we also had rice & lots of condiments. Then Hugh asked if his friend Tristan could come for dinner... then Ruby announced her friend Jo would be here, then she added in Chris and Brendan and Deon. So there were ten of us! Amazingly, there was plenty of food for everyone, and then leftovers too (which we're having right now). And because of the way it unfolded there was absolutely no stress involved.

We went to Liverpool...

Where there isn't no trees, no scented breeze
no fields of waving corn.

Richard was looking for a mookudulu (or tawa) - one of those round flat iron things for cooking Indian breads - so yesterday we headed out to Sydney's Liverpool. The trip on the M5 and then the Hume didn't take long from Marrickville, about 25 minutes I think (I did fall asleep on the way back). After two scorching days in Sydney for Spring - mid 30s - it was relatively cool and we enjoyed the cloud cover. Liverpool was packed, with queues filling up some shops. Most people were Indian, the women all in saris. We had forgotten it is Festival of Light time so I suppose the crowds were much like our Christmas. I took lots of photos and was asked in one big grocery store by an Indian with a very distinguished set of moustaches what I was doing. I then felt like an inner-city dickhead for the rest of our outing.


On the M5


Yes, a Bollywood Chinese Restaurant.


Beautiful Gods - this statuette was thick plastic, about the size of my hand.


There were boxes of plastic fruit & veg (notice the potatoes?) and gorgeous real eggplants.


And piggies, hippos and elephants - some of my favourite creatures.

Day of the Triffids

I've just read a lovely review in the London Review of Books of Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker and Apprentice to a Butcher in Tuscany, written by Bill Buford. The reviewer is Steven Shapin and he offers a great little history of our relationship with food as well as a critique of how we eat and cook now. I'm going to buy the book - I love the quotes from it, the interchanges between Buford and his pasta mistress best:

"...just when he thought he'd cracked the secret of working the dough with the matterello, she announced her disapproval with a blow on his shoulder: 'You look like an old woman... You will never learn if you roll it out like an old woman.' "

Buford, former fiction editor of the New Yorker, went to Tuscany to "learn meat".

"...by the time he returned to Manhattan, he was able to schlep a whole still-bleeding pig (only recently bereft of life) from the farmers' market back to his apartment, taking it up in the lift - together with an unamused Wall Street banker - and butchering it in the traditional Tuscan way: a tub of pork confit, chains of salsicce, a rosticiana, an arista (the aristocrat of roast, herbed rolled pork), vast quantities of ragu, brawn: 450 servings of food from one animal, skilfully dismembered."

This getting in touch with the sources of food is utterly admirable, but not for the faint-hearted, or those like me who don't eat pork for ethical reasons. The pig may have been lovingly carved up, but its life was still most likely absolutely misery, especially if it was female. I'll do my bit for the slow food movement by continuing to tend my vegie patch.


Remember when I put it in, not even two months ago? (see before shots)


We have lettuce galore - butter and frilly, which is more bitter. They're a great combination in a salad.


I never knew brussels sprouts grew like this, along the stem like parasites... I picked these and ate them on Sunday, lightly boiled then tossed in butter and a little white wine vinegar.


The broccoli head, still only about 4cm in diameter, is protected by this huge fan of bluish leaves. I wonder if the leaves are edible? It seems such a waste if they're not.

And... I looked for a pic of a triffid but only found out that John Wyndham's full name was John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris.