Smoked Eel Parfait and other amazing things to eat

Some things I have eaten so far in 2010:

• potato paper (this is potato shaved on thinnest possible mandoline setting and baked - so thin it melts in your mouth).

• earl grey tea ash (I only noticed this on the menu afterwards - it was a kind of grey dusty ash - tasted nicer than it sounds!)

• olive oil cubes (olive oil emulsified, mixed with setting agent like agar, frozen and then brought to a cool temperature in the fridge. You eat it with bread as it softens slowly at the table).

• almond jelly (with almond gazpacho and blue swimmer crab).

• pea crumbs (I think this is peas cooked, laid out to dry then crushed. These crunchy crumbs still kept their pea-ey integrity however)

• fish floss (I can't remember this that well, it was flossy and fishy).

• white carrot puree (self explanatory).

• mint, vanilla and buttermilk granita.

• campari and turnip (this appeared as small blood red squares on the plate, the turnip cubes had been soaking happily in Campari. As a contrast to steamed scampi it worked well but it was pretty out there, as they say).

And the above dish, consumed in a bar - restaurant in grimy down at heel Surry Hills in Sydney where the incredible kitchen produced a 7 course meal (for 50$ !!!) in an hour (the speedy timing was to kindly address the fact that we had two small hot curly haired impatient children dining with us).

It is smoked eel parfait, white soy, and seaweed salad. And I don't even like smoked things. Or eel. If you live in Sydney, you must go there. Thank you to the Bentley.

I am waiting for more hot weather so I can do an obsessive granita run and possibly a sorbet one too. The buttermilk and mint granita was an amazing and refreshing combination.

Oh how I love those Sydney restaurants.

Tell me - what is the most unusual thing you have eaten in the last year?

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A wallpaper wonderwall

I wrote here about my problem front sitting room and here about the chair I reupholstered for it.
Although I thought I had a completed corner I felt it still looked a bit naked. This is probably because of the high ceilings, which create lots of creamy blank space. Usually I like creamy blank space but the more I looked at, the more it offended me.
For the purposes of another project for this room I had obtained quite a few A4 sized wallpaper samples. I thought - why not frame them?
So that is what I did.
Ikea sells A4 unvarnished wooden frames. I bought 9 of these and then gilded them (in 'Antique Gold') with an amazing, super poisonous gilding paste I bought from a craft shop (an American product - have you noticed how all those clever products are always from the US?).
This is it. As you can see it is so easy to use that you can do your gilding with your hair done in a 1980's style wearing a white tunic top. (I didn't wear gloves so actually I found on completion that my hands were completely golden. I looked like a James Bond girl. Then I started to panic about whether I might die because my skin couldn't breathe. Then I remembered that that is only if your whole body is painted gold).
I then framed the samples I liked, and very inexpertly hung them on the wall. I could have triangulated the grid and got my protractor out and Pythagorused it but I just couldn't be bothered. Hanging is dangerous in our house because the walls are plaster and they tend to crack and crumble so I usually just do it really quickly and hope for the best.
This is how they look.

The wallpaper samples are from Florence Broadhurst, Zoffany, GP & J Baker, Graham & Brown and Little Greene Paint Co.



Given that I was going crazy with the gilding (in fact maybe the Rub'n'Buff had made my brain go weird) I then found this wooden frame I bought in Singaraja (northern Bali) and had never used and also gilded it. What I would really like to do is put a little round mirror in there but so far I can't find one. Where does one find little mirrors? I am having no luck.


All of this is really quite unlike my usual style. I don't like gold, I don't like flowery bibs and bobs, I only like minimalist lines. However, this is a room we don't use all the time, so I thought it would be a bit of a contrast. One can't be white, grey and straight-lined all the time.
And that is the moral of my story.

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John Olsen and a little boy's wonder

On our trip to Sydney we visited the Art Gallery of New South Wales. All state galleries have their good and bad points - this one has an excellent collection of 20th century Australian art and a wonderful little section on often overlooked women painters like Grace Cossington Smith.

I was most taken with this John Olsen painting:

'Five Bells' oil on canvas (1963)

(my son admiring the Olsen. Or possibly the 'castle' in the foreground)

I have a theory about artists (which I believe only applies to visual artists and certainly not to writers and modern musicians although Keith Richards may prove us all wrong).

My theory is that because artists are essentially doing what they want with their lives, and also expressing their inner selves at a very basic human creative level, they tend to live for a very long time. If one can avoid the decadence, drugs and other addictions which sometimes follow (or indeed are required for) creative endeavour, a truly Okinawan life can be yours.

For example:

Henri Matisse (died in 1954 at 84)

Georgio De Chirico (died in 1978 at 90)

Salvador Dali (died in 1989 at 83)

Georgia O'Keefe (died in 1986 at 99)

Michelangelo (died in 1564 at 88)

Camille Pissarro (died in 1903 at 73)

Edgar Degas (died in 1917 at 83)

Jean Auguste Ingres (died in 1867 at 86)

Claude Monet (died in 1926 at the age of 86)

Maurice de Vlaminck (died in 1956 at the age of 82)

Robert Rauschenberg (died in 2008 at 82)

Cy Twombly (still alive and working at 82)

And these men (and the one lady) did not necesarily have easy lives painting in little wooden studios overlooking a field of flowers. They saw and were victims of war, poverty, forced migration and other horrors.

Of course, for every one of these there is an Amedeo Modigliani (died in Paris at age 35 in 1920 of tubercular meningitis).

Anyway, the point is that John Olsen, born in 1928, is alive and still painting. Here is a recent work:

'Bondi the Rose Fingered Dawn' (2007) (timolsengallery.com)

An artist whose style is difficult to categorise, John Olsen spent time in Europe in the late 1950s and has also been influenced by Far Eastern art. His abstract expressionist style - with its characteristic 'squiggles' and expert use of watercolour (not an easy medium) has not, to my eye at least, changed significantly over the last 50 years.

Finally, here he is at work (image courtesy clivejames.com photograph by Ken McGregor):

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What Jane Did...

An inordinate amount of vacant staring at the maple tree forest:

(Our garden looking relatively lush)

A new sewing machine (my first ever, and what a revelation) produced this for my daughter:

(and a whole new online obsession - fabric. This one is by Saffron Craig)

Made a little diorama to display and keep tiny boy things in:

(from an otherwise useless Ikea CD container. Who listens to CDs anymore? I don't)

And lots and lots of this:

(from Thai Street Food by David Thompson)

Oh, and a bit of this:

(Gallery of New South Wales 19th century Australian Art room)

Happy New Year and let's hope 2010 brings us all health and what we need (not want).

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Christmas Merry-go-round

(French wreath on our front door)

(Danish reindeer tree decoration from the Christmas tree)

(felt snowman from Kyrgyzstan)

(gingery - clovey Christmas candle from the UK)

It would not be Christmas in Australia be without some multicultural festive items thrown in.

I don't go down the lobster, oyster and prawn path which many Australians follow at Christmas time.

Partly because Christmas Day in Melbourne has been known to be wintery, and partly because the queues at the fish market on 24 December are horrendous. I have better things to do than queue for Mysteriously More Expensive Than The Week Before seafood on Christmas Eve. Like glaze my ham, make trifle, set the table, set the children's table, polish the silver, bleach the napkins, buy pots for the gardenias, write out a military precision timetable for Christmas morning turkey cooking, and all of those types of things.

To all readers, speedy flash visitors accidental or on purpose, followers, commentators and thinkers I wish you all a Merry Christmas.

Thank you for all your thoughts and lovely lovely wishes.

Back in January after a little holiday.

xoxo

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My favourite things of the Year Part 2 - Food

Favourite restaurant - Mo Vida, the quintessential Melbourne restaurant and bar, in all its incarnations, including the one (Aqui and Terrazza) which opened opposite work in early November. To understand the significance of this, bear this in mind: when we moved offices 5 years ago, we moved from what is called the Paris End of Collins Street to what is known as the Beirut End of Bourke Street (apologies to all Lebanese people). An area largely bereft of good coffee and anywhere much to eat lunch with a few notable exceptions.

So, to now have Mo Vida so close is excitement itself.

I wrote here about a dinner I had with Mo Vida food and Spanish wine. The new Mo Vida Aqui, an industrial space behind a bank, with views to the Supreme Court, is up to Mo Vida standards.

Having had a many coursed meal there last week, it satisfied all my requirements, including one I barely knew I had, namely for an octopus terrine with smoked paprika and potato salad. Here it is:

Favourite wine - is wine a food? Yeah, sure. The heatwaves last February which led to devastating bushfires in South East Australia had one good outcome - in combination with heavy rain in mid December 2008, an outstanding 2009 riesling vintage.

This is really mostly what I have drunk this year.

Favourite packaged food: Pineapple and vanilla bean jam.

Generally speaking I do not like pineapple. To paraphrase Dr Seuss:

I do not like it in a tin

I do not like it on a pizza

I do not like it in a burger

I do not like it with ham

Not in fruit salad

Not in a muffin

Not on pavlova

Not under upside down cake

Not in a salsa

Not in a pie

I do not like it

One little bit

But this jam, which manages to smooth the sharp spikiness of pineapple with pungent vanilla-eyness, is quite something else. Perfect on toast.

This jam comes from Phllippa's Bakery, a place of such temptations we were compelled this year to buy a coffee machine to avoid our weekend trips there for takeaway coffee, as these visits always involved us also returning home laden with unnecessities like French butter, gingerbread stars, peanut butter biscuits, tomato kasoundi, creme fraiche, costly spiced nuts, raspberry cupcakes, little hand shaped dinner rolls and so on.

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Bona Vista - Melbourne life in 1885

This is Bona Vista, built in 1885 and located in South Yarra.

It is now for sale. It is very unusual for a property in inner Melbourne to have this much land, let alone a lavender field:

and a lake:



and a turret and a ballroom (used by the owners as a kind of panelled games and trophy room, which made me feel a bit despondent).

So, I realise I can't afford this house (and trust me, it requires Quite a Lot of Redecoration Inside) but it did make me wonder what was happening in 1885 in Melbourne.

Elsewhere of course it was a stellar year for war torn boys own literature. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Germinal by Emile Zola, Arabian Nights by Sir Richard Burton, A Tangled Tale by Lewis Carroll and H Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines were all published.

And in Melbourne, were you to be invited to a wedding in West Melbourne you might just receive this invitation for dancing at 8 o'clock:

And the divinely seraphic Ruby Lindsay was born, sister to, and overshadowed greatly by her brothers Norman (who wrote The Magic Pudding), Sir Daryl (married to Joan Lindsay, see my post on these two here), Sir Lionel (influential art critic, illustrator, etchings artists) and Percy, all literary and artistic lions of the age.

I must say Percy, whom I had not previously heard of, sounds like the pick of the bunch. He is described in the Australian Dictionary of Biography thus:

"A charming Bohemian who enjoyed the company of convivial friends, Percy was the least ambitious of the Lindsays and the most competent painter in the family."

Ruby had some artistic talent too, and illustrated a number of books and theatre notices (like the one below) and also produced charcoal drawings.





(very rare and for sale for $6,500)

Tragically she did not live to receive either the acclaim or the equivalent to the nubile ladies and knighthoods which rained down on her brothers. She died in Ireland in 1919, one of the many victims of the Spanish influenza epidemic.

On a brighter note, 1885 saw the birth in Sydney of Frank Hurley, intrepid explorer and photographer with a clean modern eye:

and Dorothea MacKellar, author of the poem 'I love a sunburnt country', which is, I think Australia's national poem and makes me feel like crying when I hear it. You can read it here.



(Images etc (1)-(3) Bona Vista (4) National Library of Victoria (5) catalogue.nla.gov.au (6) Picture Victoria (7) bsbgallery.com (for sale) (8) Shackleton-Endurance.com (9) Artnet.com (10) DorotheaMackellar.com)

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