Lady Lunchalot

I can taste it. The flavours of spring are everywhere, and even though tomorrow is the first official day of my favourite season, Mother Nature came out of Melbourne’s hibernation a few weeks ago when the unidentified tree on the nature strip in front of my house erupted in a pent-up frenzy of pink blooms.

Right now, every breath of blossom-scented spring air holds the promise of a new season of dishes to cook.

To some people, spring is synonymous with snuffly noses and itchy eyes. To others, it means frocking up and going to the races. To me spring is all about lightly sauteed asparagus spears with pine nuts, and spring lamb with braised artichokes and broad beans. It’s fresh peas. It’s the first smattering of berries at the market. It’s early zucchini flowers from the back yard stuffed with herby cheese.

Spring is resting my aching muscles on the lawn beneath my enormous rose bush after spending a Saturday resurrecting the veggie beds after a winter of neglect. It’s coming home from Bunnings with a carload of seedlings, chook poo and an impossibly long list of well-intentioned weekend projects. Spring is being gobsmacked at the speed with which couch grass can grow. It’s waiting expectantly for the first passionfruits to appear on the vine on my back fence, and it’s keeping an eye out for the first mangoes at the markets.

Spring is baking cupcakes and icing them in girly shades of pink and pistachio green.

Spring is football crowds giving way to cricket matches. It’s sponge cakes and strawberries served in the garden. It’s a rash of pink and white blossoms spreading throughout my neighborhood, making me think of all the cherries, peaches and plums that aren’t too far behind.

Spring is hypercolour daffodils, tulips and freesias nosing their way up from the soil in my herb patch, their cheery scent mingling with sage, rosemary and basil. It’s crisp glasses of floral rosé and barbecued lamb chops with mint. It’s strutting out the front door into the sunshine without a jacket and it’s putting away my heavy winter overcoat until next year. It’s lamenting the toll that a winter’s worth of puddings, roasts, stews and casseroles has taken on my hips, and vowing to eat nothing but brown rice and carrot sticks until Christmas.

But most importantly, spring is here! So take off that jumper, grab your sunglasses and get down to your local market to see what amazing produce we get to enjoy for the next few months.

I came across a blog at The Traveller’s Lunchbox calling all food bloggers to write about our top five Things to Eat Before You Die. It really got me thinking.

It’s tough to narrow it down to five, but here’s what I’ve come up with in no particular order:

1. A crusty baguette straight from the oven smeared with chunks of butter.
2. Freshly baked chocolate cake with a thick layer of chocolate icing downed with a glass of cold milk.
3. Pavlova. A good pavlova should be light, fluffy, crunchy, creamy, sweet, gooey and fruity all at once. There’s nothing quite like it. In fact, I think I might be due for a pav again soon - kiwifruit is back in season!
4. A really juicy roast chicken with tarragon and butter cooked on a rotisserie. The sight of a roast chicken never fails to melt my heart.
5. A particularly deep-flavoured washed rind cheese. I buy one for myself every Christmas.

There are so many other things… fresh tomatoes and basil from the garden with a few slices of mozzarella di buffala… still warm passionfruit straight from the vine… just-shucked oysters… prawns… fresh crayfish… lasagne … mangoes… my mum’s spaghetti bolognese… the list goes on!

Zoeball has been going on and on and on about the amazing flavour of her sweet onion jam. I’m yet to taste her version (hmph), and yet to receive the recipe which she promised me for Blogathon a month ago… (double hmph)… so I decided to make up my own recipe in time for Sugar High Friday.

The theme of this month’s Sugar High Friday is preserving, however all those beautiful summer fruits that Northern hemisphere cooks are preserving at the moment are still a few months off down here. And while Sweet Onion Jam is not strictly a preserve (it only lasts a week or so in the fridge), it does have the word “jam” in the title, and would preserve quite well with a pressure canner if I had one - which I don’t. Besides, judging by the smell of it, it won’t last very long anyway, particularly if I buy a nice piece of blue cheese and bake a loaf of bread before O gets home from work.

So, in lieu of Zoeball’s recipe, I scoured the web reading everyone else’s recipes for inspiration and then took the bits I liked and used the ingredients I actually had in the pantry to make up my own. It went something like this:

Sweet Onion Jam for Sugar High Friday

5 or 6 red onions (aka Spanish onions or salad onions)
half a cup-ish of malt vinegar
3/4 cup of brown sugar
some caraway seeds
a few gloops of olive oil
star anise
a generous sprinkle of cinnamon
a couple of cloves of garlic

Slice onions in half lengthwise, and then slice them up. Put in saucepan with a few healthy glugs of olive oil. Sautee on medium heat until transparent. Toss in minced garlic, vinegar, sugar and spices. Cook down for another 30-40 minutes with the lid off. Taste and see if it needs more vinegar or sugar. It should be a beautiful caramelly brown colour and have a nice balance of flavour between sweet and tart.

Put in jars and seal, and store in the fridge. It will last a week or so, unless you eat it sooner! Tastes great with a good piece of bitey cheese, fresh bread and roast chicken.

Footscray is Melbourne’s undiscovered culinary goldmine. Between all those fantastic Asian supermarkets, the continental deli legacy from the early days of “Foot-a-scry”, African restaurants, the mecca of the Footscray markets, and the back-to-back Vietnamese pho shops, it’s impossible to take a step down Barkly Street without finding something delicious to eat.

But as far as I am concerned, the jewel in Footscray’s crown is a tiny noodle shop tucked in the shopping strip around Footscray Markets. Amazingly it’s not a Vietnamese noodle place, but a Chinese one. 1+1 Dumpling Noodles (yes, that is its real name) serves some of the heartiest Chinese dumplings I’ve ever had.

It’s the kind of place where you grab your own bowls and chopsticks after ordering and sit next to the drinks fridge… and the veggie fridge. Don’t expect airs and graces here. But do expect some tasty dumpling soups, fried noodles and the best lamb skewers I have ever eaten.

The cuisine at 1+1 Dumpling Noodles is straight from the Xingjian province in western China, so you won’t find any of those Chinese restaurant staples, like lemon chicken or sweet and sour pork here. The food is meaty, spicy and slightly stodgy in a stick-to-your-ribs kind of a way, and has an exotic tang that makes me think of Genghis Khan and Hun warlords. I can imagine them chowing down on the same charred hunks of fatty lamb around their campfires in the Mongolian steppes.

The long ropes of noodles are made in front of you in a huge coil (just peer over the mirrored barrier at the counter to see how they do it) and the dumplings are created by hand with a deft flick of the thumb. You should see them pump out those dumplings!

The dumpling wrapper is thick – not the usual paper-thin wonton wrapper I am used to with Chinese dumplings. These are dumplings with real substance. They kind of remind me of the first time I tried to make ravioli and ended up with 5mm thick pasta sheets.

But the real piece de resistance is a mammoth dish known as ….. BIG PLATE CHICKEN! It’s a huge plastic platter about 30-40cm diameter filled to the brim with curried vegetables and pieces of chicken (you can choose either half a chicken or the whole chook), topped with a slithering pile of noodles. It’s big enough to feed a family of five, but the first time O and I went there we made the mistake of ordering this on top of dumpling soup, AND skewers!

We had lunch there last weekend; soup with dumplings, fried noodles with lamb, a few skewers each and a soft drink, and the bill came to the grand total of $23. Prices have crept up in recent months, but they’re still laughably low (soups around $7.50, skewers are $1.50 each - order one more than you think you’ll eat and you won’t regret it. They’re that good). It’s not often that two people can roll out of a restaurant stuffed to the gills with excellent traditional food for less than the price of two movie tickets.

If only I’d thought of this when I was single.

Babe is a single New Yorker who has figured out a way to “live a champagne lifestyle on a Budweiser budget”. Her blog Take Me Out For Lunch documents her quest to find the perfect man and the perfect meal. She believes that she can tell a lot about a man on a culinary rendezvous, so her blog invites potential suitors to take her out to lunch in some of New York’s finest restaurants. So far she seems to be doing quite well. (At the dining that is - the dating doesn’t seem to be bearing much fruit.)

In Babe’s words, “if your man can’t whet your appetite then it is better to wave him goodbye and move on to the next dish until you find one that truly satisfies your tastebuds.”

I can vouch for that. On my first date with O he told me that he was a construction manager and mentioned that had always wanted to build a house around its kitchen. And that was before he even knew that I cooked! Naturally, he had me then and there.

Suze at work is such a trooper. Despite being under the weather, she whipped up this amazing carrot cake for Lisa’s birthday, and even talked her partner into dropping it into the office because she was unwell.

Now that is what I call a true commitment to cake. And it was a triumph!

Great job Suze!

Suze’s Mum’s Carrot Cake Recipe

*Bananas are in short supply in Australia at the moment after Cyclone Larry wiped out our crops a few months ago. You basically have to mortgage your house to buy a bunch of ‘nanas right now.

I can clearly remember the first hamburger that really blew me away. I was about seven years old and we were visiting my Uncle Ross who lived in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney. We stopped at a local burger takeaway to take some lunch back to my uncle’s place, and I ended up with a beautiful fresh hamburger that was bigger than my head.

The juicy patty was piping hot and the lettuce was crisp. The bun was as soft as a pillow and the beetroot juice trickled in a fuchsia stream down my arm and stained my t-shirt. I ate every bite of that mammoth burger (which was no small task for a seven year old girl) and kept on talking about it all the way back to Sydney.

Homemade hamburgers were a relatively regular feature on our family menu after that.

For some reason yesterday I was remembering this burger, and thinking about the myriad of gourmet burger joints that are now (almost) as ubiquitous as, well, McDonalds outlets. It’s great that kids now have burger options other than the Big Mac. A fresh home-made hamburger is actually a very healthy nutritious meal. You’ve got meat, cheese and fresh raw vegetables all packaged together in a tasty bun. That’s four of the five food groups covered in one hit!

So last night I decided to relive that first burger moment and cook up a few burgers for dinner.

Patty

• Leanish mince meat (known as ground beef to our North American friends)
• A handful of breadcrumbs
• Tomato paste
• A clove or two of garlic
• Half a finely chopped sauteed onion
• A light sprinkle of cumin
• Half a zucchini, grated
• Half a carrot, grated
• An egg

Mix it all together with your hands and shape into patties. I like to sautee the onion instead of using it raw as it enables the onion to caramelise a tad and adds an extra level of sweetness to the burger. The grated veggies also add some moisture to the patty without being too fatty.

On the subject of fatty patties, I quite like a little grease in my burger, however my waistline doesn’t. If I was one of those waifish women who could eat whatever I wanted, I would not use lean beef in my patty. But seeing as every calorie packs a brutal punch with me, I sacrifice a bit of juiciness and use diet mince instead.

Pop onto a hot plate or frying pan with some thickly sliced onions. I also sliced the leftover zucchini and put that on the grill too.

Toast some soft bread rolls under the grill. I spread some of my quince and apple chutney on the base. I would also generally use a good whole egg mayo or avocado, but once again, my hips are not allowing it right now. Layer the patty with cheese (next to the patty so it melts), thick slices of tomato, onions, iceberg lettuce (for extra crunch) and fresh grated beetroot (much better than the tinned stuff). Yes, Australians love beetroot on our hamburgers even though the rest of the world thinks it’s kind of strange. Personally, I think a hamburger is not worth looking at unless it contains beetroot.

I would have also fried up an egg but I couldn’t be bothered dirtying a frying pan, and I already had to dislocate my jaw to bite through this formidable tower o’ burger anyway.

The other day O stepped off the bathroom scales and sadly announced that he has gained 8kg since we met 18 months ago.

It’s all my fault. I take full responsibility.

You see, I have the unfortunate habit of showing my affection for people through food. So when O and I met I went into major cooking mode. He likes to eat, I like to cook - we’re a match made in heaven!

But it wasn’t just O who suffered. My waistline had a pretty bad blow-out of its own. I was 57kg when we met in April and had billowed up to 65kg within ten months. It was just all too easy to get carried away in cupid’s culinary wonderland of cosy dinners for two.

Eventually my old jeans were relegated to the back of the wardrobe and all I could fit into were my fat pants. You know, these were the jeans I previously saved for events like seafood buffets on the Gold Coast with my mum, or consoling a girlfriend over a breakup and eating my own body weight in icecream. They were my post-Christmas-lunch pants. My feeling-bloated-PMT-pants. My no-one’s-looking-so-I’m-going-to- eat-all-the-leftover-chocolate-pudding- straight-out of-the-pan pants.

It got so bad that any time I wore a vaguely low-cut top my friend Stuart started saying things like “Taking the puppies out for a walk tonight, are we?”. I explained my dilemma. O and I were both stacking on the pounds because I have the nasty habit of expressing my love through food, and let’s face it, I had fallen in love big time.

Stu told me not to worry. He said it was just happy fat, and that the extra couple of inches muffin-topping over the waistband of my jeans were more than offset by the happy glow of being in L-O-V-E.

That sounded pretty good to me. “Happy fat” became my new mantra as I dressed every morning, so I went with that theory until it dawned on me that Stuart had barely weighed more than 70kgs in his life and knew NOTHING about how it felt to be… cuddly. He would even go as far as to pinch the skin on his hip into a teensy fold and complain about his love handles. Ergh.

So I tried to be good, and eat more salads and soups instead of casseroles and stews. I’d be a saint for a week and then we’d invite friends around for dinner on the weekend, and before you knew it I’d whipped up a roast rack of pork with apple sauce, crackling and creme brulee for dessert, and any thought of watching my waistline had flown out the window.

And then, O unwittingly came up with the only thing that could possibly motivate me to shed those kilos of happy fat.

A diamond ring and a wedding date!

Within a few days I had rented an exercise bike.

Within a week I had unearthed my weight watchers recipe books.

And within a month I had lost 4kgs!

I’ve still got a few more to go, but at least the puppies don’t get taken for walks like they used to.

So much for cheap website hosting. My server crashed and burned, and I have been blogless and emailless for a few days. It’s strange how cut off from the world I felt, with my communication being restricted to just a mobile phone, landline, two other email accounts, Australia Post, the rest of the internet, and a good old-fashioned fax machine. I don’t know how I managed to survive.

But the time away from the blog gave me a chance to… you guessed it… do some cooking!

Last Friday I became fixated on roasting a chicken. Roast chicken is the best soul food I can think of. And I don’t mean pork ‘n chitterlings style soul food, I mean food that nourishes your soul when you cook it as much as it does when you eat it.

I never fail to be moved by the sight of a whole chicken dressed and ready for the oven. I think it’s one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen. Chicken must have been a pretty strong symbol of satisfaction throughout history. Even Henry IV, the King of France in the 1500s, promised a chicken in every peasant’s pot each Sunday as proof of France’s prosperity.

There are so many ways to roast a chicken and I love them all, but my favourite way is on the rotisserie in my oven. I chop a lemon into quarters and pop it in the cavity with a few fresh herbs. Or you can also mix some herbs (tarragon, parsley etc) with butter, make a pocket between the breast and the skin with the underside of a teaspoon and spread it inside. As it roasts on the rotisserie the butter spreads all through the chicken, basting the skin and making it go all crispy, herby and juicy. That’s the great thing about a rotisserie - it ensures that all the juices are spread throughout the meat, and evenly bastes the meat as it turns.

If you are using a rotisserie for the chicken, make sure you string up your chook properly otherwise you’ll end up with dry wings and legs. The first time I used my rotisserie I didn’t use any string and it looked like my chicken was doing the YMCA every time it turned on its side. The aim is to try and make the bird into a compact, even shape, so you string the ends of the legs together and tie the wings in nice and close to ensure the bird cooks evenly.

If you want something sinful to spread on your toast over brekkie, give this a go.

• A tub of cream cheese
• A couple of shallots, finely sliced
• A couple of generous teaspoons of sweet paprika
• A sprinkle of mustard powder
• Some finely chopped pickled baby cucumbers
• A clove of crushed garlic
• A handful of chopped chives
• A sprinkle of caraway seeds

Mix together. It should go a great shade of pink. Spread it on toast or rye bread and speak with a Hungarian accent.

If you’re looking for something that’s semi-sinful for your toast, mix it with some quark cheese to cut down on the Philadelphia calories.