Lady Lunchalot

As if the great name and fantastic atmosphere weren’t enough, Cookie’s bar menu really melts my chocolate chips.

I’ve been popping in at Cookie for a few sneaky drinks for quite a while now. I’ve always loved their cocktails and the way the bartenders put so much care into even a simple drink, like vodka soda and lime.

But amazingly, it wasn’t until the other weekend that I’d ever tasted the food there, and now I am kicking myself for having wasted so many opportunities for a great meal.

The Thai-inspired menu is divided into three sections: small, medium and large dishes. It’s the perfect way to order when you’re out having a few drinks with friends.

With eight of us there on a Sunday afternoon (celebrating O’s and my engagement the day before!), we had the chance to try lots of different dishes. Chicken maryland, taro dumplings, massaman curry and tapioca dumplings. Mmm mmm.

Strangely enough, the best Thai food I had that week was at Cookie. Why was this strange? Considering I’d spent the week on holiday in Phuket, it was a little weird. I love Thai food, but a tourist hot-spot is not the best place to find authentic cuisine. Next time we’ll have to get a little further off the beaten track.

Dumplings are a reminder that for all the evils in the world, there are still some things that are good and pure.

Dumplings have to be one of the most delightful foods imaginable. These little gift-wrapped nuggets of deliciousness are seen in cultures all around the world, from spiced Chinese dim sum, to warming Jewish kneidlach, to Italian agnolotti.

Dumplings come in two varieties. There are filled dumplings, that consist of a filling enveloped by some kind of noodle-esque wrapping (think wontons, ravioli, dim sum). And there are dropped dumplings, which are the naked, unwrapped kind that are usually made from something starchy like flour or potato. These are the stodgy kinds of dumplings that I always associate with Eastern Europe, borscht, and words with too many consonants.

Personally, the filled dumplings are my favourite kind, because it makes me feel like I am being given a present every time I eat one. You never quite know what’s inside the wrapping, so there’s always an element of surprise.

I love Asian filled dumplings, like gyoza from Japan and Chinese wontons. I used to work near a sushi bar that I couldn’t walk past without buying a gyoza. Any time I am sick I crave wonton soup, otherwise known as short soup. I love how the loose ends of the wonton wrapper swim through the broth like mermaid hair. When I used to live in Chinatown in Brisbane, I once had a nasty bout of tonsilitis. I wandered down to my favourite Chinese takeaway to order some short soup, and as my tonsilitis voice had that deadened, closed-throat quality the woman (whose English wasn’t the best) made the logical assumption that I was deaf, so she yelled at me so I could hear her. I mean, if I was deaf, yelling probably wouldn’t have helped anyway. And she didn’t seem to understand my English very well either. I couldn’t seem to make her understand that I just wanted some short soup.

But I digress.

My other favourite dumplings are the Italian variety. But that shouldn’t come as much surprise - I love anything wrapped in pasta. There are so many types of Italian dumplings; agnolotti, ravioli, tortellini, even gnocchi. I once read a foodie crime novel that involved the mysterious death of a chef whose signature dish was ravioli with so many types of fillings it looked like a patchwork quilt.

Poland is very big on dumplings. So much so, they even have an annual dumpling festival in Krakow each August. I think the Poles have got the right idea. A dumpling festival must be one of the happiest places on earth (after Disneyland of course). How could anyone ever be sad while eating a dumpling?

Have a look at http://www.justhungry.com/2004/08/is_my_blog_burn.html for more info from a dumpling lover.

In typical Roman fashion technologically advanced grain mills were developed to produce finer quality flour. Wealthy citizens ate refined white bread, while the poor bought coarse heavier breads.

However bread has not been the lifegiving source to all cultures, and excessive dependence on bread has even led to widespread famine. Wheat fields require a great deal of space, and the same soil cannot be tilled year after year. Europe and the Mediterranean regions were not the best places to grow crops, so, under Roman instruction, Egypt and Africa became Europe’s wheat fields. As a result of the Roman passion for bread, it quickly a European staple. For centuries Europe was dependent on a crop which was extremely volatile. If grain could not be imported or produced, Europe starved.

France is perhaps the most famous example of a country left vulnerable to the whims of the wheat trade. Thousands of Parisian peasants revolted because of the lack of bread on their tables, leading to Marie Antoinette’s infamous expression, “Let them eat cake.”

Civilisations from each continent have developed their own types of breads. Today at supermarkets and bakeries we can choose between baguettes, bannock, brioche, panini, pumpernickel, challah, lavash, and foccaccia. We eat naan bread with curries, tortillas with burritos, and pitta with kebabs. Regardless of the variety of food modern societies have access to, history has made bread an invaluable staple; a food which provides nourishment and comfort to almost each one of the earth’s cultures.

In the late 90s, Australia’s politicians were in hot debate about how to introduce a tax on goods and services. One party wanted to slap a single tax on everything, including food, the other didn’t think we should have one at all, especially not on food.

They ended up meeting somewhere in the middle,with some foods being exempt, while otherwise weren’t.

For weeks Australia’s Parliament House was a hotbed of culinary contention as pollie after pollie ferociously argued about which foods should be taxed and which shouldn’t. Parliamentarians were waving barbecued chickens and paninis around all over the place.

So there were some staples that would be exempt from the tax, but, which would would they be? Bread was declared a basic necessity of life, but how were these political gourmets going to classify what was a bread and what wasn’t? Should a chapatti be taxed when a loaf of multi-grain isn’t? Is a bagel any less a bread than a hamburger bun?

With so much food available to us today, I like that the humble loaf of bread is still considered crucial to our survival. Our language is littered with expressions that highlight the starring role bread has played in our evolution. Man cannot live by bread alone. When we have no money we are out of dough. We go to work to earn our bread and butter. Pregnant women have a bun in the oven. Handy inventions are the best things since sliced bread. When we dine, we are breaking bread. The primary income-earner in a family is the breadwinner.

Autumn’s wet weather is the perfect time for mushrooms. Try buying mushrooms at a market or mushroom specialist - they have so much more flavour than the bland supermarket ones.

Mushrooms were once thought to be a food from heaven - and it’s not hard to see why. The mysterious overnight sprouting of wild mushrooms must have appeared as though it was a gift from the gods, and many cultures have treated them this way. Egyptian hieroglyphics dating back more than 4500 years tell us that only Egyptian royalty were allowed to eat them. Mushroom rituals have been held throughout history in parts of the world as diverse as Russia, China, Latin America, Greece and Mexico.

But the world had to remain content with wild mushrooms for another 3,700 years until Japanese farmers managed to cultivate shiitake and matsukame mushrooms. Europe didn’t taste its first homegrown mushroom until 1678 when the French discovered the fungus’s magical technique of reproduction which enabled mushrooms to be farmed in Europe.

Despite the advances made since the first mushroom was cultivated on European soil, cultivation of the most prized fungal species continues to elude fungus fans. The noble truffle, the undisputed king of mushrooms, has never been successfully farmed despite extensive experiments stretching from its native homeland of France to the furthest reaches of New Zealand.

Fungi facts

• More than 40,000 species of edible mushrooms grow throughout the planet, but only a fraction of these are sold in western supermarkets.
• Throughout history, popes and kings have been assassinated by eating poisonous mushrooms.
• Buddha died from eating a poisonous mushroom.
• Many cultures have eaten magic mushrooms, fungi that contain mind-altering chemicals, to achieve mystical insight. Other cultures just eat them to get stoned.
• Some primatologists claim that magic mushrooms could have provided the spark which led to the homo-erectus and homo sapiens evolving from the apes.
• The 5,300 year old “Ice-Man” discovered buried near the Austrian and Italian borders was carrying polypore mushrooms.

Veal with creamy mushroom sauce

This dish is delicious served with lightly steamed asparagus.

• 2 veal scallopines or escallopes
• 1 cup of sliced mushrooms
• 500 ml of cream (For a lighter dish substitute cream with 400g ricotta cheese and 100ml reduced fat milk– remember you will get a different texture)
• 3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
• 1 small onion, finely chopped
• A tablespoon of butter or olive oil
• A pinch of salt

Pan fry veal on low heat until brown on both sides. In separate pan, sautee mushrooms, onion and garlic in butter or oil until mushrooms are soft. Add cream and salt and simmer on low heat for five minutes. Pour sauce over veal and simmer until veal is cooked.

If a New York sports cartoonist almost a century ago had known how to spell “dachsund”, the hot dog would not be called a hot dog.

Sausages are one of the oldest processed foods, with records stretching as far back as 900 B.C. Most corners of Europe had developed their regional sausage specialties by the Middle Ages, but the first true frankfurter wasn’t eaten until the late 1600s. Johann Georghehner, a German butcher, is most often credited with creating the first frankfurter. Back then, these sausages were often referred to as “dachsunds” because of their distinctive curve that looks like a dachsund dog’s posture.

Incidentally at around the same time a similar sausage recipe was being developed in Vienna, Austria. Like the German sausage, the Austrian version was named after its birthplace. Today Americans still refer to frankfurters as wieners.

German immigrants bought their dachsunds (the sausages, not the dogs) with them when they arrived in New York City and sold them on the streets from carts. However, hot dogs hadn’t yet been dressed in a bun, and roadside snackers often found the naked sausages a little too hot to handle.

Enter Arnold Feuchtwanger, an enterprising hot dog vendor at the St Louis World’s Fair in 1904. He hit upon the idea of lending his customers gloves while they ate their dachsunds to prevent them from burning their fingers. It was a great idea, except his customers had the unfortunate habit of wandering off with the gloves. Luckily Feuchtwanger’s brother-in-law was a baker, so he whipped up a batch of elongated rolls, which were the perfect blanket in which to nestle a steaming dachsund.

So where does the cartoonist with bad spelling come into it all? Thomas “Tad” Dorgan, a sports cartoonist for the New York Journal was hiding from an imminent deadline at the New York Polo Grounds one chilly April day. He heard the vendors’ cries of: “Get your red hot dachsund sausages!” and a bolt of inspiration hit as he scribbled a cartoon of neat little barking sausages snuggled into their bread rolls. Unfortunately (or fortunately) Dorgan didn’t know how to spell “dachsund”. So he gave the cartoon the hasty caption, “hot dogs” instead.

I like to ask myself the really BIG questions in life. Like, if I were a food, what would I be?

After much deliberation, I decided I would probably be a big plate of osso bucco.

Why osso bucco?

It’s hearty. Full of flavour. European. Great with a good bottle of red. Definitely a winter dish. Best cooked long and slowly, and can’t be hurried. Sticks to your ribs (and *ahem* contains a little more fat than it probably should…). Rustic, yet tasteful!

What dish would you be?

Saturday night was looming. Kathryn and Tim were coming over, and, inspired by this month’s issue of Gourmet Traveller, I was in an Italian mood. O finished up his job on Friday, so it was a great cause for celebration.

This occasion called for a timpano.

If you’re musically inclined, you’ve probably heard of a timpani. They are those big kettle drums you see in orchestra pits that look like huge bowls with skins stretched over the top. A timpano is the culinary version of one of these drums - it’s a huge big bowl of pastry filled with pasta, meatballs, salami, olives, and any other delicious Italian thing you can think of. This dish caused a bit of a culinary stir in the mid 90s after it was the centrepiece of the foodie movie Big Night.

It takes the best part of the day to prepare, so this is a dish that is worthy of a drum roll.

Timpano is also a Maltese dish (though in Maltese it’s spelled “timpana” and is not quite so elaborate as the Italian version), so it felt good to cook something with ties to my own heritage.

My day started with a trip back to the Mediterranean Wholesalers in Brunswick, where I stocked up on passata, olives, mozzarella, salami, and other items that make life worthwhile. I wanted a wide variety of pasta to choose from, as the texture of the pasta in timpano is very important. You don’t want pasta that is too big or small, as it will squish down under the weight of all the other ingredients and become too dense. You can use any type of cylindrical pasta for timpano: bucatini, rigatoni, penne, even maybe big macaroni. I chose a ridged diagonal penne where you could actually see the fold in the pasta rather than having one smooth tube.

The components of my timpano were as follows:
1. Bolognese sauce (not too runny)
2. Bechamel sauce
3. Pasta
4. Pastry for the shell
5. Polpette (little walnut-sized meatballs… possibly the cutest-sounding word in the Italian language)
6. Hard boiled eggs
7. Other ingredients like olives, hunks of mozzarella, salami, capers, peas etc

As you can see, it’s a pretty time-consuming dish to prepare. I think I used every pot in my kitchen twice.

You can find an excellent detailed recipe from Gourmet Traveller, May 2006, but basically you make the pastry first and chill it in the fridge until everything else is done. Then get your bolognese going. While that is simmering and reducing, hard boil your eggs. Then make your meatballs and pan fry them until brown. Next, make a big pot of bechamel sauce. Mix the pasta with half the bechamel and the bolognese. Roll out your pastry and fit to a huge dish (I used my biggest springform pan - I highly recommend this strategy). Make sure there is lots of pastry overhanging on the sides. Place the pasta mixture in the bottom, then layer the other ingredients, including a drizzle of passata here and there. Work in the rest of the bolognese and bechamel. Make sure you include some generous chunks of mozzarella here and there. Next time I will also beat a few eggs together and drizzle some raw egg through it too.

Fold the overhanging pastry over the top and bake for a couple of hours.

Now, the next step is VERY important.

If you make your timpano in a springform pan, don’t be tempted to tip it upside down as is traditionally done when it is baked in a pot. A timpano full of this many ingredients is pretty heavy, and as it is quite exciting to see a dish like this after working on it for several hours, it is very easy to get carried away and accidentally drop it on the kitchen floor in front of your dinner guests.

Everybody was looking at me as though my head were about to explode.

But I honestly believe the joy is in the cooking, so while I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get to slice through it and see a cross section of Italian garlic-laced goodness, I wasn’t too upset. We resurrected most of it and ate it anyway. It tasted great (though it lost a little something in the presentation). Luckily I was able to get a photo of it before I dropped it.

When I was a kid, my brother’s friend dropped a plate of mum’s spaghetti all over the floor. For years afterwards we had a family joke about “spaghetti alla floor”. So I guess it’s kind of fitting that such a traditional dish should end up on the floor too.

Today I realised that I am developing a bit of a dependency on the cafe downstairs from my office that stocks milk chocolate chunk cookies from the Byron Bay Cookie Company. I love those cookies, and it got me thinking about the different foods that I just can’t get enough of. You know, those foods that you could keep on eating until you think you are going to explode.

After much thought (and a slow afternoon at work), here’s ten that came to mind. Leave a comment and let me know what items you just can’t get enough of:

1. Pavlova with a really crunchy crust and lots of marshmallowy goodness in the middle. Must have passionfruit.
2. A perfectly ripe washed rind cheese. I buy myself an embarrassingly large hunk every Christmas from the Cheese Room at the Richmond Hill Cafe and Larder.
3. Pretty much any kind of pasta. Spaghetti Marinara. Fettucine al Funghi. Penne Matriciana. Lasagne. Or (now that I think of it) any combination of pasta, bolognese and bechamel. It all makes me feel so happy!
4. Home made chocolate cake with sinfully thick chocolate icing and a glass of cold milk.
5. Fresh prawns with a squeeze of lemon eaten on the beach
6. A piping hot parma, with chips, a crunchy crust, dripping with cheese and napoli
7. Chicken. Barbecued chicken. Stir-fried chicken. Roast chicken. Chicken casserole. Chicken soup. You get the idea.
8. Panacotta gelati from Manarola, Italy. When I was there a few years ago I actually changed hotels to be closer to this particular gelateria. I won’t tell you how many I had.
9. Mandarins when they are in season (Like right now! I’ll eat them one after the other like lollies!)
10. Thick slices of pasta dura bread still warm from the oven smeared with so much butter that it looks like a cheese sandwich.

I have a confession to make.

I am a grammar nazi.

I am horrified by spelling mistakes, and creative uses of the words “its” and “it’s” is an unending source of torture for me.

So when I read John Lethlean’s Epicure article in The Age last week (Arise Sir Loin of Beef), I was glad to discover that I am not alone in the being a tad pernickety about spelling and punctuation. Particularly when it comes to restaurant menus.

John cited examples of misspellings and creative uses of gastronomic grammar on restaurant menus from around the world that ranged from the bizarre to the seriously confused. Some highlights included “been with oil”, “roast suckling duck”, “profiteer rolls” and the hands-down winner, “steak of the day with an accompanying jew”.

I spotted another great example of an international menu gone awry at Foodgoat’s blog. Anyone for some carbon-burned meat?