Lady Lunchalot

I received this gorgeous email from Kathryn’s Mum today:

Hello LML (like minded lady)…  Kate passed on your blog, and have to report how impressed I am with your interest, energy (all those meals to devour and digest, then to be able to regurgitate all the details of what you ate for PLU’s, people like us). Quite a feat. Do you carry a notebook and look like a food writer when in eateries? Or can you commit all to memory?

LLAL: The truth is Judy, I only remember the meals that are truly amazing, or amazingly terrible. The dishes that are in between I don’t bother writing about - unless I cooked them!

John and I make a pilgrimage to Stef’s for the cheese on toast whenever in Melbourne. Then John loves to visit Will Studd’s fromagerie. He and his mates have a box of cheeses sent up by air especially to take on their annual fishing trip to Fraser Island. He just loves dairy.  I have also discovered the Italian grocery shop you mention in Brunswick. Little Italy in a barn…

LLAL: This is a couple who really knows how to have a holiday.

Have you read a book titled Food in History by Reay Tannahill. Quite interesting tho a bit dry. Good to dip into for little known facts.

LLAL: Haven’t come across this one, but I can also recommend The Cambridge World History of Food. It’s a ridiculously expensive book that I’ve always drooled over, but have only come as close as borrowing Volume 1 from the library. 

We introduced K and T to Gorgonzola Dolce last weekend.  We devoured lots when in Italy and have only recently discovered it here, since changes in import laws. It is wonderful and runny and great with walnuts, pears and sourdough. Yum. 

LLAL: With suggestions like this, I am doomed never to fit into my wedding dress.

Have you discovered Herbies spice blend Chermoula.  It is great dusted lightly on chicken before BBQ or pan tossing. Finish with a good squeese of lemon or lime. It has a wonderful smokey flavour.

LLAL: Mmm… sounds great! 

Thought you may find the following quote from Francis Mayes book Under the Tuscan Sun, of interest. You may already be familiar with the content:“Figs reveal water. On the terraces they grow neat the stone chutes we discovered. The natural well has webby roots crawling down into it from the fig above. I’m mixed on figs. The fleshy quality feels spooky.

“In Italian, il fico, fig, has a slangy turn into la fica, meaning vulva. Possibly because of the famous fig leaf exodus from Eden, it seems like the most ancient of fruits. Oddest, too - the fig flower is inside the fruit.  To pull one open is to look into a complex, primitive, infinitely sophisticated life cycle tableau. Fig pollination takes place through an interaction with a particular kind of wasp about one eighth of an inch long. The female bores into the developing flower inside the fig. Once in, she delves with her oviposter, a curved needle nose, into the female flower’s ovary, depositing her own eggs. If her oviposter can’t reach the ovary (some of the flowers have long styles), she still fertilizes the fig flower with the pollen she collected from her travels. Either way, one half of this symbiotic system is served - the wasp larvae develop if she has left her eggs or the pollinated fig flower produces seed.

“If reincarnation is true, let me not come back as a fig wasp. If the female can’t find a suitable nest for her eggs, she usually dies of exhaustion inside the fig.  If she can, the wasps hatch inside the fig and all the males are born without wings. Their sole, brief function is sex. They get up and fertilize the females, then help them tunnel out of the fruit. Then they die. The females fly out, carrying enough sperm from the tryst to fertilize all their eggs. Is this appetizing, to know that however luscious figs taste, each one is actually a little graveyard of wingless male wasps? Or maybe the sensuality of the fruit comes from some flavor they dissolve into after short, sweet lives.”

LLAL: I will never, ever look at figs the same way again. Wow!

good eating fellow foodie

fond wishes
Judy (Kathryn’s mother)