Lady Lunchalot

Fresh Crystal Bay prawns last weekend at Bondi Beach on a 25 degree day. Life just doesn’t get any better than that.

It’s been a while since my last entry, mostly because I haven’t eaten anything very interesting over the past week or so. I went to Sydney for a wedding on the weekend and it made me realise that with only 67 days until my wedding day, I really must start paying some attention to my waistline, otherwise my wedding photos will haunt me until my dying day. So I am reduced to eating rabbit food for the next couple of months in a somewhat compulsive attempt to be a size ten bride.

You see the problem is, I have a love-love relationship with food. And it was a match made in heaven until my hips decided to join in the party and turn the romance into a menage a trois.

So I’m thinking of the next couple of months as a trial separation for the three of us: (food, me and hopefully my muffin-topping hips).

But it’s not all dietary doom and gloom. I have had some foodie highlights over the past week.

1. Last night I FINALLY bought a Fowlers Vacola Preserving kit on ebay. I’ve recently discovered preserving and can’t wait to bottle lots of yummy things this summer. It was an absolute bargain at only $22.

2. I discovered an excellent Spanish restaurant in Sydney. Encasa (I think it’s in Pitt St) is the place to go for authentic tapas that doesn’t break the bank. There were about ten of us, and we drank and ate A LOT, and the bill came to the whopping sum of $30 a head. Many thanks to Zaloa the Spanish Princess for introducing us to such a find.

3. Zaloa also introduced me to a lethal caramel-flavoured Spanish liquer called Licor 43 (aka cuaranta y tres). This drink really packed a punch (I think the “43″ must stand for the percentage of alcohol it contains) and after dinner O and I ended up at Zaloa and James’s place singing Beatles songs until all hours. I also have a fuzzy recollection of running through Queens Park barefoot in the middle of the night. Hmmm…

But I do remember that Licor 43 was made from herbs, and it was sweet and delicious, so I’ll find out more about it this weekend when they will be visiting Melbourne.

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!

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.

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.

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.

I once found a Maltese restaurant and I was so excited. I had never seen a Maltese retaurant before, and having grown up knowing quite a few Maltese dishes, I thought it might be fun to try some Maltese food that hadn’t been cooked by a relative for a change.

I was unbelievably disappointed. I ordered ravjul, which is a big Maltese ravioli, and it was overcooked, sludgy, and the sauce tasted like it had come out of a bottle.

I guess there’s nothing like nanna’s cooking.

Here is a naked lasagne. She is now in the oven getting dressed in a cheese coat ready for when the next batch of guests arrive. I did have the webcam on the oven before, but I thought that was a bit voyeuristic so I moved it.

Isn’t she pretty?