Three Ways with Plums

I was at a meeting this week and someone made a (reasonably tasteless) joke about getting cancer from a power line.  People laughed awkwardly.  So did I.  I looked around at the meeting attendees and it struck me.  No one here knows I have had cancer.  And they can't tell by looking at me (although why they think I would choose to have hair this short I don't know but there are lots of women around with Voluntary Short Hair and they look great).  If there is one thing I have loathed over the last 16 months it is the occasional look of pity or shock or embarrassment I have received when people realise I am being treated for cancer (the wig was a giveaway).   This is a good place to be in, I can tell you.

Something I have done in the last five years which has improved my life by an amount I can even measure in percentage terms (I would say 5%), it would be using one of the duopoly supermarket people to home deliver all my heavy horrible groceries like milk, mineral water and nappies.

In an attempt to further limit pointless driving around I have just started using these people to deliver organic fruit and vegetables to me. The delivery includes a mystery box of what is in season (and presumably cheap).

I think this is something people do perhaps more in the US than here, but I am loving the surprise of it. So what to do with two huge eggplants? Or other vegetables I don't otherwise usually buy like mushrooms. Last time round I got a big batch of plums. Plums remind me of my childhood, I think the plums we had then we a bit different - purple inside rather than orange, but nevertheless, I love their juicy sweetness.

(chopped plums, mint, chilli and spring onions)

The first thing I made was plum tabbouleh, with burghul (ie the traditional way).  The plums contrast very well with the grain.  Lots and lots of olive oil and lemon juice and salt and you can eat a whole large bowl No Problem At All.

This idea came from Nigel Slater' Tender Volume II, which is a cook's guide to fruit.  I have written before about Nigel, and his brilliant cookbooks.  (Nigel is on my dream dinner party list. He would be joined by Anthony Bourdain, Ian McEwan, Malcolm Turnbull, Henri Bernard Levy ands the lead singer of Muse (yes, all men. Why not, it's my dream.)).

Then I made a pudding-ey cakey plum cake with cinnamon and honey.  This was okay but not amazing but I think I may have overcooked it.  A variant on his recipe is here.  

Finally, plum chutney.  Very easy - chopped up plums, onion, cover with splash of water, some malt and apple cider vinegar, mustard seeds and cinnamon.  Cook slowly for an hour. You may need to add more water and check at the end to make sure it is sufficiently sweet \ sour.

Brilliant with pork.

Happy chutney eating to you all. 

Tweet

End of Chemo Cake

I finished chemo last Monday.

When the nurses pointed this out to me, I frowned and said, yes but it is not my last intravenous infusion, because I will be turning up here every 3 weeks for 9 months to have Herceptin.

It was then I realised that my practical side was overwhelming the side of me that should have been saying HOORAY and THANK GOD that I have, six months to the day since my surgery, finished this nightmare experience.  Of course I realise that it is never really over.   But 'active treatment' as they call it, is now at an end.

In the last half year I have:

• gained a new and deep respect for the medical professionals in Melbourne.
• thought a lot about life and death.
• lost all my hair, most of my eyebrows and some of my eyelashes and gained my freckles back.
• read 43 books.
• confronted head on my very worst fear: getting cancer young. 
• spent a lot of time watching the children play and realised how much I still have to teach them. 
• continued to work at about half capacity which has been frustrating but well worth it. 
• felt so much gratitude for the support and wishes of family, friends, strangers, blog friends, acquaintances, the guy in the coffee shop, the stray business person I meet with who remarks on my 'lovely haircut', the mail man, the lovely girl in our local toyshop, the woman at Mecca Cosmetica, people in the oncology suite, the carpark man, the friend I haven't seen for 7 years who lives in Hong Kong who sent me the sweetest email last week and on it goes. 

So this weekend I:

* Baked a cake to celebrate:

Recipe from Delicious, a magazine which has really grown on me. So much more down to earth than Gourmet Traveller or Donna Hay.    It has cornflour in it and so is very very light and fluffy.

* Bought this book online (really cannot believe how cheap Book Depository is):

I wrote about Nigel Slater's memoir here. I have a small crush on this man.  I would love to cook for him.

* Made a 6 point plan for the next 6 months (more on that soon).

* Bought a painting. Yes it's dark and moody and that is why I love it.  By the Tasmanian Turner.   (It is of Bass Strait). 

* Picked some of these for floating in vases.  It really annoys me the way camellias don't survive in vases on their own.  We don't have as many picking flowers in our garden as I would like.

This to me looks very like the Chanel camellia...

* Ate some macaroons which I buy at La Belle Miette 

In case you were wondering these flavours are strawberry and vanilla and violet and blueberry.  He also does an amazing Pimms and pomegranate version.


Isn't life fantastic?  So much to enjoy.  

Tweet

A Rainbow Gratin

My attraction to this dish could be to do with my obsession with rainbow things.  Or it could be because chard is a relative of silverbeet, and silverbeet is my first (green vegetable) love.

How beautiful does this vegetable look? I love it.

Anyway I am making a special effort to cook lots of recipes from Nigel Slater's Tender.  Rather than elaborate meat and sauce dishes, I am going through a little phase of plainly grilled meat with interesting vegetable dishes.   Last night, I cooked this gratin, with some Canary Island potatoes (kipfler potatos boiled then sauteed in their skins until wrinkled, served with mojo picon - a roasted capsicum sauce) and with a simple fried chicken breast.  Quite the reverse of my usual approach to cooking, at least with non-Asian dishes.  

Here is a rainbow chard gratin, which is easy, cancer beating (so they say but then by the time you find out it's too late isn't it), and makes me happy.

Ingredients
450g rainbow chard (leaves and stems)
1 cup thickened cream
1 tablespoon seeded mustard
Freshly grated parmesan

Method
Wash and chop the stems into little squares. Boil some water, lightly salt it, and cook the stems until just tender,. This step is super important because they must not be undercooked.  Dip the leaves into the boiling water until they wilt.  Drain the chard. If the leaves are huge, chop them a bit.  Mix the cream and mustard together in a bowl.  Put the chard into a buttered gratin dish, top with cream, mix gently, top with parmesan and then bake in 180 over until browned on top.

Divine.

Tweet

Two Perfect Green Courtyards and a Lemongrass Marinade

We do not have this kind of garden, but one domestic fantasy I have had is to live in a two or three up one across kind of house, with a little potted brick walled back garden.  To me, in Australia, this means a Victorian terrace, in the US a brownstone like the ones in New York, and in London, this means those Georgian houses which sit in a neat white row. 

So here are two divine examples, for sale in my area:

These little sheltered green boxes are perfect for edible gardens, and the best example I have seen of that lately is Nigel Slater's garden, which he depicts with love in Vol 1 of his opus 'Tender'.

These shots show his garden in each season.  It is hard for me to imagine gardening in the snow. 

This is a book to treasure with photos so exquisite I found myself having to stretch out a trembling finger to touch them.  It is a celebration of garden to table cooking, written with the verve and enthusiasm of a convert to something quite life changing.    (As it happens Nigel Slater could write a summary of the current Australian tax legislation including recent ATO guidance notes and still be interesting.  He is some writer, as I pointed out here). 

A vegetable garden is on my to do list this year, once I find the spot.   In the meantime here is my completely accidental lemongrass bush which I planted expecting it to die (as you do). Instead it has flourished.  I was so ignorant about lemongrass I didn't even know how it would grow, and whether the lemony roots would be entirely underground or visible. It turns out they stick up and out, and for a long time they looked like a weed.    I was tempted to yank them all out weeks ago but my mother cautioned me to wait until they were stronger and fully 'ripe'.

Today, a lemongrass and mint marinade, for lamb chops:

This requires bashing of the lemongrass with lots of mint, olive oil, garlic and salt and pepper.  Marinate for a few hours, then grill quickly.   A perfect Australian recipe. 

First I have to find some lamb chops, which may not be easy given it is a public holiday today and all the shops are closed.   

Here's to those brave ANZAC soldiers.

(Images: (1) and (2) Kay and Burton (3) NigelSlater.com (4)-(9) Jane (10) anzacsite.gov.au)

Tweet

Food Memories - Toast by Nigel Slater

I have just finished Toast by English chef and writer Nigel Slater (subtitled - the Story of a Boy's Hunger). This book is about his childhood and adolescence seen through the sometimes frightening, frequently sad and often funny prism of the food he ate. How he remembers is one thing of itself but the taste of the memory he manages to evoke by his food descriptions is quite something else. Remember, this is an era of trifles, salad cream, jam tarts, tinned salmon, mushroom ketchup, tinned ham, rice pudding and steak diane. His father wouldn't have Heinz sauces in the house because he thought they were 'common'.

Nigel Slater did not have the happiest childhood. His mother (who couldn't cook) died when he was young and his father remarried. He spent a lot of his childhood feeling unwanted. And yet he is not bitter, and this makes the book completely addictive. Here is his description of one of the many tinned products they eat:

We lived in a world of tinned fruit. There were tinned peaches for high days and holidays, fruit cocktail for every-day and tinned pears for my father who said they were better than fresh. On one occassion we tried mango but my father said it tasted fishy. I wasn't allowed to try. 'You wouldn't like it'.

And here he is in the kitchen with his stepmother :

'You can call me Auntie Joanie if you want to' said Mrs Potter. I walked straight past her and round to the kitchen door. 'I told you' she snapped at my father. 'Just give him time, he'll be all right' said Dad. There was a cake on the spotless kitchen table. A home made cake, with a thin line of raspberry jam in the middle, the top dusted with caster sugar. A perfect cake, three inches high and as light as a feather, the criss-cross of the wire cooling rack etched into its top. The kitchen smelled of baking and Dreft. Two pairs of my underpants and my school pullover hung on a wooden airer with some tea towels still warm from the iron. Mrs Potter rushed in behind me. 'Come on I'll put the kettle on. Why don't we make some toast?'.

It made me think about how I would describe my life (if I had to) by reference to, say, my top 10 food memories. And once I started thinking I couldn't stop. This is what I came up with, divided into three sections of my life:

Ages 0 to 17

1. Egg Sandwiches - okay, I know these repulse many people. And I am not so keen on them myself these days. But when I was a bookworm 9 year old my very favourite activity involved lying on the floor of my bedroom in the sunshine, reading the latest Enid Blyton book and munching on my egg sandwich. In fact, I recently found a list of every book Miss Blyton had ever written and I can honestly say I have read them all!

2. Spaghetti Bolognese. I may have previously mentioned what a great cook my mother is. And trust me, spaghetti bolognese was about as exotic as it got in my childhood. And even that would have been considered to be 'on the edge' by many. She made the sauce correctly with veal and pork, simmering slowly for hours but the cheese we sprinkled was that grainy powdery 'Parmesan'. Nothing like the big wedges we hand grate these days.

3. Snails in garlic butter. My father owned a restaurant for parts of my childhood. We ate out quite a bit. And this was my favourite dish (still is a favourite). It brings back memories of stained glass, bluestone and indoor plants and other 1970's decor features.

4. Paradise pudding . Sounds better than it is. Our school had a health food tuckshop. Pretty advanced for the 1970s. So whilst my brothers were eating Sunnyboys* and Twisties for a living I was eating health food. Paradise Pudding was a paper cup filled with layers of granola and natural yoghurt.



Ages 17 to 30

A reasonable amount of this period of my life was taken up by studying, travelling or having lowly paid jobs. It follows that my food choices were more constrained.

5. Chicken parmagiana and lukewarm tea. This is what I lived on in college at university. And it is no exaggeration to say I have not touched a chicken 'parma' since I was 24.

6. Baileys Irish Cream. Okay this is not a food. But it provided me with a lot of sustenance at university. And it does have carbohydrate, right? And I know you don't need to see a picture.

7. Singapore noodles. I worked for 2 years as a public or civil servant. Theo's cafe was in the basement of the building and every day almost without fail, I would have singapore noodles from the bain marie with lots of chilli sauce. My mouth waters just thinking about these!

Age 30 onwards

8. Venice. In 2001 we spent an amazing 2 weeks in an apartment in Venice. We drank ombras in the bars, had lunch at the Cipriani, and trawled the Rialto market for creatures from the lagoon to cook in our ill equipped kitchen. I still remember grilling some unnamed crustacean and trying to prise it out of an unforgiving shell.

9. Degustation. I admit it I am sometimes a gourmand. I have been lucky enough to have some lovely meals in various places. Most memorable perhaps was a meal at the Grande Vefour in Paris, 12 courses (including white dove, I know its shocking isn't it). We framed the bill.

10. Chilli-world. Since 2000 I have been obsessed with Asian food of all kinds, but particularly Chinese, Thai and Indian. I can't go more than two days without a chilli hit.

* Sunnyboys were in the same family as Razzes and Glug. They were basically frozen ice pyramids in lurid lime or raspberry. I think but I am not certain that they are an Australian food item? Does anyone know?

Images (1) Luis Melendez 1772 NGA (3) Wisebread.com (4) Flickr (5) The HungryCyclist.com (6) Upstate Harvest (7) BBC Good Food (8) Travels with a Gourmet (9) Channel 4 (10) Sunnyboy

Tweet