Lady Lunchalot

Ok, some stuff has gone in the oven and some other stuff has come out of the oven.

I mixed the melted chocolate and butter, with the eggs and caster sugar and some flour and salt. The whole lot went into the pan and is now in the oven for about half an hour. You can have hot brownies with me next post!

I’ve also taken out the tomatoes and red wine for the lasagne. That’s about done now, so I’ll take a break and then get the rest of the bolognese happening.

It’s 3am here in Melbourne, and I am making chocolate brownies.

So far have melted the chocolate and butter (sooooo much butter, there’s no way I can eat one of these without thinking of the impending nuptials) and mixed 6 eggs with half a kilo of caster sugar and a generous slurp of vanilla essence.

And I have to recharge my camera, so no pretty pics for a bit.

Beetroot always makes such a statement. With that colour bleeding everywhere, it’s pretty difficult not to notice when there’s beetroot in a dish.

I’ve never actually cooked with fresh beetroot before, but I bought some at the Vic Market yesterday. While the oven is going with the tomatoes, I wrapped my beets in foil and tossed them in the oven, as per Stephanie Alexander’s instructions.

I think I’ll make a dip out of them once they’re roasted.

I like to go long and slow with my lasagne sauce.

So far I have chopped the heads of a few Roma tomatoes and am popping them in my big cast-iron pot with some whole cloves of garlic, red wine, onions, bay leaf, and an assortment of other herbs. This will be roasted until everything goes mushy - about an hour or so.

There’s nothing like a slow-cooked bolognese…

Lamb tagine is so easy and yummy. Just throw these things in the slow cooker:

• diced lamb
• vegetable stock
• a couple of cinnamon sticks
• a blob or two of honey
• some cloves, cumin, coriander, turmeric. I also threw in a couple of pieces of galangal, which I haven’t used in a tagine before
• some diced dried apricots
• fresh grated ginger
• a tomato, diced
• some whole cloves of garlic
• some pickled lemons (buy them at Asian or Middle Eastern grocery stores - don’t buy the expensive ones from gourmet shops. They charge about $8 for a tiny jar when you can pick up a huge jar for $3 on Sydney Rd)

Turn on the slow cooker and let it go for a few hours. Serve with couscous. Dee-lish!

The cooking urge took over last week when I spent a few days in Horsham. Something about that place makes me feel like a 1950s housewife, and my culinary adventures certainly had a retro feel.

I bought a huge bag of navel oranges for next to nothing (marmalade is on the horizon) so I decided to use a few for an orange upside down cake. I also baked a loaf of herb bread, a lasagne, a pot of chicken stock and made apricot chicken for the freezer. Apricot chicken… how nanna can you get?!

My orange upside down cake went something like this:

A few tablespoons of butter
1 cup of brown sugar
a sprinkle of allspice, nutmeg and cinnamon
1.5 cups of SR flour
pinch of salt
150g butter
2/3 cup of castor sugar
2 eggs
½ cup buttermilk
1 tsp vanilla essence
zest of 1 orange

Melt a few tablespoons of butter over a low heat. Mix in brown sugar and spices. Stir over the heat for a few minutes.

Peel and segment an orange or two, making sure to remove all the white pith.

Pour the sugar/butter mixture into a greased cake tin and place the orange segments in the mixture. Make a pattern by ensuring all the segments face the same way and overlap slightly, but don’t let them touch the sides of the tin.

Cream butter and sugar in a separate bowl until fluffy. Add eggs.

Sift flour, salt and spices together in a mixing bowl. Stir half of the flour into the creamed butter. Add buttermilk, zest and vanilla essence. Mix in the rest of the flour.

Pour gently into the cake tin, making sure not to disturb the pattern of oranges. Bake for about 45 minutes.

When the cake is ready and has cooled for about 10 minutes, put a plate over the top of the tin and flip it upside down. And voila! Lovely gooey, sugary orange upside down cake!

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.

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.

Last weekend I finally made a dish that I have cooked and eaten in my mind a thousand times.

Cassoulet is a traditional French dish made with pork, sausages, chicken (or probably, traditionally speaking, any scraps of meat you can lay your hands on) and beans.

I’ve only eaten cassoulet once before about five years ago at a fantastic French bistro in Sydney called Tabou. I went there with Kathryn when we were both single girls on a date drought, and we lamented that we never got to eat at any decent restaurants because no guys were asking us out. Anyway, I’d always wanted to taste cassoulet and that meal at Tabou left an indelible mark on my tastebuds. I’m amazed it took me five years to make it for myself.

Start by taking about half a kilo of dried white beans, like cannelini beans. Soak them in cold water overnight.

In a heavy pot (one with a lid), sauté onions and garlic and a few thick chunks of kaiser fleisch, throw in the beans and cover with water. Then mix in any herbs you like (fresh thyme is nice) and season.

I just chucked all this in the slow cooker for about 8 hours, but if you don’t have one of them just put the lid on your heavy pot and let it go on a low low heat until the beans are cooked but not mushy (probably 3-4 hours).

In an oiled lidded casserole dish, place a layer of beans about one knuckle deep. Then place a layer of pork chunks, fat slices of kaiser fleisch, chicken pieces and pork sausages (Not a layer of each, just one layer mixed). I use an amazing bratwurst from Andrew’s Choice in Yarraville, who make, without a doubt, the best sausages I have ever tasted in Australia.

Place another layer of beans, another layer of meat and top with a layer of beans.

In a cup of boiling water or stock, mix tomato paste, a blob of vegemite (not very French, but if gives such a nice depth to meaty dishes!) salt etc. Pour over the top of the beans. Then sprinkle a generous handful of breadcrumbs over the top, and a bit of cheese (I don’t think the cheese is very traditional though).

Bake with the lid on for another hour or two. If it looks a bit dry pour a bit more water or stock in. Take the lid off for the last half hour of cooking so the breadcrumbs brown.

Bon appetit!