Lady Lunchalot

This is my official last post in Blogathon 2006. I’ve written a blog entry every 30 minutes for the past 24 hours. I haven’t slept (except for a quick 20 minutes of shut-eye a couple of hours ago) and I have thought of little else except for all things culinary for most of this time.

I have written 49 food blogs in 24 hours.

I have cooked and shared the following dishes:

• Lamb tagine with quinces
• Quince and apple chutney
• Spinach, ricotta and parsley pie
• Bagels
• Roasted beetroot dip
• Lasagne
• Chocolate brownies

I have raised $1,158.40 for World Vision Australia (officially $990.40, but a few people are yet to verify their pledges).

I’ve met lots of wonderful people all blogging to help their selected worthy causes. And I seem to have made a lot of them hungry!

I also have a lot of dishes to do : (

I am exhausted. It’s 11pm Sunday night. I am going to bed now.

Bon appetit.

My culinary career has not exactly been a series of five-star performances. I thought I’d share some of the near-lethal lowlights of my time in the kitchen. Thankfully it has been many, many years since I have almost killed anyone with my cooking!

A near-miss with mercury poisoning:

When I was a kid I stuck our family thermometer in a bolognese sauce because I wanted to see how hot it was. It shattered, leaving glass and a slick of mercury floating in the sauce. I almost gave my entire family mercury poisoning because I was so scared I would get in trouble for breaking the thermometer that I didn’t want to tell anyone!

Surprise breakfast:

I remember being quite little and making bacon and eggs for breakfast as a surprise for my mum. The bacon wasn’t turning out just like mum’s (I was undercooking it) so I kept on feeding it to the dog and trying another few rashers until I got it right. I never got it right, and I ended up feeding about 2kg of bacon to our golden retriever, who vomited the whole lot up all over the driveway. Needless to say, Mum loved the surprise.

Tin can projectiles:

When I was 15, I blew up a brand new stove. Yes, I actually exploded the whole thing. I left a can of something boiling in water, and the pressure built up in the can until it exploded, ricocheting off the ceiling (where it left a can-shaped indentation in the plaster) and shattering the glass top of the stove. The explosion was so loud I thought a car had driven through the front of our house.

I think these stories are a great testament to my mum. She taught me how to cook, and you can see that the woman has the patience of a saint. (Though you should have seen that vein in her neck bulge when I blew up the kitchen).

Cooking is one of my greatest pleasures, and it’s the type of pleasure that I can share with others. If I hadn’t been encouraged to keep on cooking and learning about food (despite the heavy-metal poisoning risks, trips to the vet, and unexpected kitchen renovations) there’s no way I would have as much fun with it as I do today.

It’s incredible how easy cooking is really. I’ve always been surprised when people compliment my cooking. I’ve never considered myself a good cook. It’s just that I am a person who actually cooks and gives it a go, rather than just thinking it all seems like too much work and never trying in the first place.

And of course, the more you cook, the better you get. You learn the rules of the game over time, which teach you how to correct yourself if one of your meals starts to go astray. Like today, I was melting the chocolate for the brownies over a very low heat even though the recipe didn’t say that, because I know from bitter experience how easily chocolate can burn.

So my advice for people who want to cook is to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty in the kitchen.

I adore cookbooks. I rarely follow the recipes, but I just love flicking through them.

Some of my tried and true favourites are:

• Gourmet Traveller Magazine. O bought me a subscription last Christmas and I love it.
• Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion. This is the Australian cooking bible.
• Nigella Lawson’s How to Be a Domestic Goddess, and Feast. I think Nigella is just the best thing ever. I am sooo jealous of her pantry.
• Delicious Magazine
• Cuisine Magazine, from New Zealand. This is a truly outstanding food magazine.

Pies are one of the most comforting foods around. There’s nothing you can’t out in them: sweet, savoury, or anything in between. Here are a few pies I’d like to make:

• Pecan pie
• Guiness beef pie
• Traditional English pork pies
• A good old fashioned apple pie. Though I have made these thousands of times before. Dead easy and quick.

I’d intended to make a pie today, but exhaustion got the better of me. This Blogathon has really rekindled my love of a good cookup (not that the flames had burned that low or anything) so I think maybe I’ll have a few themed cookups in the not-too-distant future.

American recipes really stand out to me. I often have trouble relating to them. I don’t know whether it’s because I don’t recognise some of the ingredients, or whether the flavours just seem different to an Australian palate.

In American recipes the ingredients seem so pre-packaged and branded. I remember looking for a recipe for an orange cake recently and finding a recipe that listed “one packet of yellow cake mix” as the first ingredient.

And the flavour combinations generally seem so much sweeter than for an Australian palate. Has anyone else had this experience?

Ok by now with only 3 hours to go, i must admit, i’m getting a little tired. Having now been awake for 26 hours, i feel like Big Brother is watching me through the screen making sure that I dont fall asleep, mind you i am looking very glamourous… Not!

Bed is looking and sounding soooo good, I cant wait. Hopefully work will be sympathetic to my 24 hour crusade over the weekend, and allow me to sleep in the meeting room, or the liftwell… Thanks Martin

Im not counting the following:

• The number of hours I have left of the blogathon
• The number of hours that Alex the cat has slept in his lifetime
• The number of calories I have consumed in today’s frenzy
• The number of dishes I will have to wash following a couple of hours sleep
• The number of times I viewed the webcam and thought to myself ‘oh my hips’

However I am counting the following:

• The number of children and families that we have helped with all of the donations that have been made - thank you everyone
• The number of people that have logged on and been part of this site and this competition
• The number of comments that people have left during the blogathon and beyond
• The number of hungry and hungover bellies I was able to feed today
• The number of people who rolled out of the house after lunch

Only four hours to go and yes that’s about enough time to do the dishes that have piled up for the whole day. Do I have any volunteers? If we bring forward the renovation by three months it would make it so much easier. Then there’d be a dishwasher.

So what do we have left?… a very small amount of lasagne, five very small pieces of brownie (thank you everyone for taking away that temptation), spinach and ricotta pie, enough to last the week of frozen dinners, tagine, well no one has touched that, which means that I will have an alternative to spinach and ricotta pie for the week, hmm mixed with some cous cous; sounds inviting in the distant future when I regain the need to eat again.

Poor Zoeball, with all the hype and build up of the 24 hour cooking frenzy and blogathon, she gets a cold 2 days before! meaning that she couldnt taste the food properly, but it wasnt enough to curb her appetite for (vegetarian - coz these cows only ate grass) lasagne and brownie. Well done Zoe, one for the team!