• A single whole chicken is a thing of joy and wonder
• The Wye River food store, whilst very pleasant and a great place to take the kids, is really not that great
• The secret of poaching eggs is not to let the bubbles break the surface of the water
• Fried bread should be mandatory on Sundays

Let me explain. A couple of weeks ago I poached a lovely free range chook for the purpose of making a chicken and leek pie. Once the carcass had been stripped of its flesh, I returned the bones to the stockpot with stacks of fresh herbs, leeks, garlic, tomatoes and lemon rind and proceeded to make a (if I may say so myself) completely bitching chicken stock. It sat in the fridge overnight to allow the fat and impurities to rise to the surface. When I scraped the scummy layer of fat off the top, a rich red brown broth was revealed beneath. I had inadvertently made a consomme to remember and it did not deserve to be wasted on, say, my standard chicken and vegetable soup. Performance anxiety kicked in.

That afternoon we set off down the Great Ocean Road to the Wye River Food Store. I like this place because you can sit inside a lovely building and eat cake while the kids play just outside where you can see them at all times. Prior to this trip I had eaten there only once and was hugely disappointed by the quality of the food and the service. But people here  rave about it so I figured it was worth a second chance. It wasn’t. Don’t get me wrong – the weather was great, the company fantastic and the ambiance,well…ambient. But the menu was uninspired and my pork was dry and boring (although I did very much fancy the salty roasted baby carrots). And the consomme was on my mind.

I remembered reading a recipe for Zuppa Pavese from Elizabeth David’s 1954 Italian Food. I consider myself to have no talent for (and to be quite honest, no particular interest in) Italian food but this book has really got under my skin. It’s full of incredibly simple recipes with very few ingredients and it has completely changed my understanding of Italian food. Anyway, Zuppa Pavese is basically consomme with a poached egg and Elizabeth David suggests serving it with bread fried in butter and covered with shaved Parmesan. I made a couple of changes to the recipe -  most significantly I couldn’t bring myself to fry the bread in butter and used olive oil instead. This probably stems from the residual guilt I still sometimes feel when I recall the quantities of white bread fried in bacon fat I ate as a child.

It was just the perfect Sunday night dinner.  I have been trying to figure out the art of poaching an egg for ages and finally I figured out that you need to get the water to the point where the bubbles are just about to break the surface of the water but don’t. Then, of course, you make the whirlpool and drop the egg in. I’m sure there are people who can do multiple eggs at one time like this but I am not one of them. Each bowl therefore got served up separately as the eggs were poached which meant that by the time it was my turn I was sitting at the table with my glass of wine, my bowl of soup and my plate of fried bread and cheese all on my own. Bliss! Such simple,simple food and so much better than the mediocre plate I had payed good money for earlier.

Zuppa Pavese

• About 1 litre of good quality hot stock (any meat or vegetable stock would work)
• 1-2 fresh eggs per person – depending on how hungry you are
• Freshly picked leaves of flat leaf parsley
• 3 slices of ciabatta per person
• Olive oil for frying
• Shaved Parmesan

Bring a pan of water up to the point where the water is just about to boil but bubbles are not yet breaking the surface. Make a gentle whirlpool in the centre and carefully drop the egg in. Alternatively, use whatever poaching method works for you, unless its one of those evil aluminium poaching tins that turn eggs into bullets and gives you Alzheimer’s disease, in which case you ought to be ashamed of yourself. The egg only needs to be just, just set as it will continue cooking in the hot soup.

Sprinkle some parsley leaves in a soup bowl and ladle in some hot consomme. Season to taste. Carefully place 1-2 eggs in the soup.  Serve with the bread that has been fried until golden, removed from the pan and covered with shaved Parmesan.

My dad and I learnt this recipe at a cooking class we took at Laka Leke. It’s a great addition to a special banquet style dinner as you can prepare the chicken and dressing in advance and toss them together just before serving. If you can’t get the fresh tumeric (promise me you’ll try), you can substitute 1 tsp of powdered tumeric and half a teaspoon of saffron. To toast the shrimp paste, wrap it in a single layer of foil and dry toast in a hot pan until you can’t stand the stink any longer, then pound it into a fine powder .

Ayam Panggang Sambal Matah (Balinese Chicken Salad)

• 2oo gm chicken breasts
• thumb sized piece of fresh tumeric, finely grated
• 1 tablespoon coriander seed, toasted and ground
• Salt and white pepper
• 6 tablespoons light olive oil (or other lightly flavoured salad oil)
• 4 shallots, peeled and finely sliced
• 2 cloves of garlic (peeled and finely sliced)
• Half a teaspoon of toasted shrimp paste, ground to a powder
• Juice of one lime
• Inner white part of a stem of lemongrass finely chopped
• Finely sliced hot red chillies to taste

Place the chicken between two sheets of cling film and pound flat with a rolling pin. They need to cook quickly or the marinade will blacken so you want them not more than a centimetre thick. Combine the grated tumeric, ground coriander, salt and pepper and three tablespoons of the oil and coat the chicken. Marinate for 1 hour and then grill or BBQ the chicken and leave to cool. Combine the remaining oil and ingredients to make the salad dressing. When the chicken is cool, shred it with your fingers and then toss it together with the salad dressing. I like to serve it piled high on a plate garnished with extra chili, finely sliced kaffir lime leaves and some grated kaffir lime rind.

Pasta with Broccoli

You need to use the orecchiette or shell style pasta to catch all the garlicky oily yumminess.

• Orecchiette or shell pasta
• 2 heads broccoli
• 4 cloves garlic,finely chopped (do not use a garlic press)
• 6 anchovy fillets (drained and minced)
• Handful of black olives, pitted and lightly bruised
• Cup of breadcrumbs, fried in olive oil until golden brown
• Parmesan cheese.

Break the broccoli into small florets and blanch in salted boiling water until just cooked. Drain, splash with well flavoured olive oil and set aside. Warm a splash of oil in a low to moderate frying pan. Saute the garlic and anchovies gently until the garlic is fragrant and the anchovies have melted. Toss through the olives, stir for a moment and then add the broccoli. Toss the sauce through the cooked pasta and serve sprinkled with breadcrumbs and Parmesan.

Pasta with lentils and yoghurt

This (somewhat modified) dish comes courtesy of Jill Dupleix’s New Food. It may sound odd but is actually really, really delicious and well worth a try. 

• Cooked thin spaghetti
• 1 cup brown lentils
• 1 litre of water
• 1bay leaf
• 2 onions, finely chopped
• 1 clove garlic
• 1 tsp each of ground cumin and coriander
• generous pinch of smoky paprika
• About 1 cup of passata
• small tub of natural yoghurt
• Chopped coriander and parsley

Put the lentils in a pan with the bay leaf and cold water. bring to the boil and cook for around 20 minutes or until tender – DO NOT salt the water as this toughens the lentils. Drain, but reserve around a cup of the lentil water. Saute the onions in olive oil until golden, then add the spices, lentils and salt to taste – I need a lot of salt to make lentils work for me and would use about a teaspoon for this recipe. Add the passata. If it’s too dry, add either more passata or some of the reserved lentil water. Warm through and then toss with the cooked pasta. Stir through the yoghurt and serve with the coriander and parsley.

Having said that, I do have to tell you about this one particular produce moment.  Many years ago we spent a not so small fortune on an organically fed free range chicken from some guy’s back yard. It was a size 25, the colour of apricots and had a layer of fat as thick as my finger under the skin. I stuffed it full of orange quarters, fist-fulls of fresh tarragon and garlic cloves. I swear to god that the thing smelt like a pudding while it was cooking – just perfectly sweet and fragrant and the taste of the bird was utterly indescribable. I have not eaten chicken in a meaningful sense before or since this moment.

The produce problems of living in a small rural town would of course be considerably offset if I were a gardener. As much I would like to imagine myself flitting earthily around my fabulous garden plucking exotic mushrooms from the shadows and harvesting armloads of zucchini flowers, this really is another thing that just ain’t going to happen. Fortunately I do know a fair few gardeners who from time to time are generous enough to give us stuff. Recently one of Pete’s Kendo group dropped around some gorgeous white squash and a handful of fresh herbs. One of these herbs was an amazing little plant called Lemon Licorice Mint. I trust it’s flavour is self-explanatory. It’s an intriguing and really addictive combination of flavours. I cooked the squash with the herbs in our new-fangled recent addition, the “microwave”. A lovely partner to an orange and tarragon roast chicken.

Orange and tarragon roast chicken

I often find it hard to get fresh tarragon.It’s perfectly OK to just sprinkle the inside of the bird with some dry tarragon.

• 1 chicken – get the best quality you kind find and/or afford
• knob of butter
• 2 oranges.
• 6 cloves of garlic
• few sprigs of fresh tarragon
• approximately 1 tablespoon dried tarragon
• Olive oil
• Salt and pepper

Preheat your oven to 220 Celsius (200 if your oven is either particularly hot or fan forced). Rinse your chicken and pat it dry. If using dry tarragon, sprinkle it inside the chicken now. Cut one of the oranges into quarters and stuff 2-3 of the pieces into the cavity, along with the garlic cloves and fresh tarragon, if using. Gently ease up the skin of the chicken where it separates from the breast and ease some butter between the skin and the flesh. This step is not strictly necessary and is probably quite inadvisable for health reasons,but it does make the breast meat richer and more moist.

Now give that chook a good rubbing down with the olive oil and the juice of the remaining orange quarter. Season liberally with salt and pepper and sprinkle with dried tarragon to taste. Place the chicken breast side up on a rack (if you have one)  in a roasting pan and place in the oven. Roast for 20 minutes and then remove from the oven and turn breast side down. Squeeze with juice from the extra orange and baste with any pan juices. Return to oven. Roast for 20 minutes, remove and turn breast side up, basting again with pan and orange juices. Roast for another 20 – 30 minutes (until juices run clear),basting every 10 minutes. Let the chicken rest for 10-15 minutes out of the oven before carving.

You can do a standard roast dinner with this. It makes a lovely gravy if you roast some garlic cloves in the pan and push the mushy insides into the gravy. I, however, especially like this chicken with a simple green salad, some crusty bread and maybe one vegie dish, such as:

Vanessa’s squash

• 4 large or 8 small squash (or replace with zucchini)
• Fresh minced herbs (I used lemon licorice mint and lemon verbena)
• Black pepper
• Splash of water

Slice the squash and place in a microwave safe dish. Gently toss through the herbs and pepper and add a splash of water. Cover with plastic wrap. I have no idea how to give microwave cooking instructions for truly they are the work of the devil but I’m guessing I did 2-3 minutes on high and then let them stand for another minute or two before removing the plastic wrap.

It has to be said, however, that in the early days he was constantly telling me things that I didn’t want to hear. This is probably largely because Chinese doctors seem to have an uncanny knack of knowing exactly what you have been up to and there is nowhere to hide from their cunning diagnostic techniques. Anyway, my first consultation memorably included a ‘massage’ with hot cups and spoons which made me look as if I’d lost a fight with a tractor and advice to give up the chili and garlic. The advice was far more painful.

These instructions, delivered in a fairly offhand matter, utterly panicked me. Actually, it also panicked Pete. At the time I literally used chili and garlic in everything I cooked.  I mean, what the hell were we meant to eat? And, you know, I’m a hedonist and overall seeker of pleasure and (especially 15 years ago) tend to be disinclined to give things up just because they are bad for me. Anyway, we did it. We gave them up almost completely and in the process discovered a whole new world of home style Chinese and Japanese cooking. I do a lot of braising and poaching these days and the recipe that follows is a beautiful and homely hotpot. I believe that they are called lions head meatballs because the cabbage spills out around the meatballs like a lion’s mane. Pretty.

We went pretty much cold turkey on the garlic and chili for about 10 years. Although we very rarely eat chili now, the garlic has crept back in. I console myself with the knowledge that the fact that we live by the ocean apparently means that we can tolerate spicier food a wee bit more. Hurrah for the alchemy and balance of Chinese medicine! Either that,or my lack of self discipline is showing again…

Visit: Rosanna Traditional Chinese Medicine Clinic.

Lions head meatballs

I think you’re meant to make these with pork but I do tend to get through an awful lot of pig so I do them with chicken. If you are braising these in a packet stock from the supermarket, water it down so that it is 50 / 50 chicken stock and water and add some ginger slices and a spring onion to the pan.  

• 750g pork or chicken mince
• Couple of slices of peeled ginger finely chopped
• 3 spring onions finely chopped
• 1 tablespoon shao xing or dry sherry
• little splash of soy sauce
• little splash of oyster sauce
• Pinch of salt
• 1 tablespoon cornflour and extra for rolling
• 1 wombuk (Chinese cabbage) soaked in hot water until softened.
• peanut oil
• approx 2-3 cups of chicken stock (preferably home made and asian style).

Put the meat, ginger, spring onions, shao xing, oyster and soy sauces, salt and tablespoon of cornflour in the blender and blend well. Shape the meat into generous sized meatballs then roll them in the extra cornflour (making sure to dust off the excess) and fry them until light golden brown in the peanut oil. Wrap each meatball in a softened cabbage leaf and pack tightly into a heavy based pan or hotpot. They need to be packed in tight to keep their shape so make sure you choose the right sized pan. Add the stock, cover with a lid and bring gently to the boil. Drop them down to a simmer as soon as they boil and cook gently for around 40 minutes. Serve them with steamed rice and splash with soy sauce and/or black rice vinegar for seasoning.

This recipe is for a dish I’ve been making for some years now, vaguely inspired by (although nothing like!) an avocado curry I once had at a Balinese restaurant. It’s very simple, very tasty and great for meat-free nights. Best of all, it’s totally adaptable. Basically it’s steamed rice surrounded by a few different ingredients and smothered in a sweet curry sauce. I use slices of mango,  avocado halves and deep fried blocks of tofu. You could also use hard boiled eggs, slices of tomato and cucumber or whatever else you fancy. I guess it’s basically a nasi campur style of eating – a buffet on a plate and so the joy of it is that you can chuck whatever ingredients you want on the plate and everyone gets something they like. My kids will only take a small amount of the curry sauce, but that’s just fine for now.

Look, I just completely made this dish up so please consider this recipe a guidleine only. Put whatever ingredients you want on the plate and whatever spices you want in the curry sauce. I can’t imagine that I’ve ever made this dish the same way twice but I do like to keep the spices on the sweet and fragrant side as they go so nicely with the fruit.

Mango rice with sweet curry sauce

• 1 onion, finely diced
• 2 ripe tomatoes, finely diced
• half a teaspoon of tumeric powder
• quarter of a teaspoon dried galangal powder
• 2 cinnamon sticks
• 6 cloves
• 6 cardamon pods
• Kaffir lime leaf
• 1 teaspoon good quality curry powder
• stick of lemongrass, bottom part only, bruised
• tin of coconut milk
• Tablespoon fish sauce
• 2 teaspoons palm sugar
• 1 – 2 ripe mangoes
• 1 – 2 ripe avocados
• Block of firm tofu cut into 1 cm slices, each slice cut in half to make a square (does this make sense??!), dried with kitchen paper and sprinkled with salt, fried in 1 cm of hot oil until golden and crispy on both sides.

Gently sweat off the onion in small pan with just enough oil to stop it from sticking. When it’s starting to soften, add the tumeric, galangal, cinnamon, cloves, cardamon and curry powder, give it a stir for a minute or two, and then add the tomato. Fry this gently for a good ten minutes until it’s a sticky pink mess and then add half of the coconut milk (reserving the rest), the kaffir lime leaf and the lemongrass stalk. Simmer for another 10 minutes. Add the fish sauce and sugar, stir well and simmer for another couple of minutes. Taste and adjust the fish sauce / sugar balance accordingly. Strain the sauce through a fine sieve, pushing the pulp through with a fork. Set aside – this can be made well in advance. Just before you are ready to serve, reheat the sauce, adding the remaining coconut milk (this just freshens it up nicely and allows you to taste the coconut).

Remove the mango cheeks and score the flesh into 2cm slices along the length and gently remove. Halve the avocado, remove the kernel and skin. Starting about 1.5 cm down from the skinny end, slice each half in 2cm along it’s length. If you leave it intact at one end you can then fan it out into a nice attractive shape.  Put a neat round mound of rice in the centre of a plate. Place an avocado half, slices of mango and pieces of tofu in little separate piles on the plate. Douse the whole lot with spoonfuls of the curry sauce. Fresh herbs and crispy fried shallots make a delicious little mouthful of extra fun on top if desired.

Guava paste

I love quince paste. Love it. Make it every year. Hunted all over town and stood in front of my stove for 8 hours while 39 weeks pregnant and in the grip of some bizarre hormonal quince madness making the damn stuff. You know what? I’d give it all away for guava paste. This sweet, crazy goodness came in a satisfactorily large tin from Casa Iberica in Fitzroy. Oh and it brought friends – a truly gorgeous hard goats cheese that completely lacked that sometimes confronting goatiness, some lovely ham and (bliss!) chorizo. Wrap it small goods, smear it on bread, cuddle it up with cheese, feed slabs of it to your kids. Think of it constantly and try to resist its sweet, sweet siren song. Dare you.

Prawns stuffed with pork

The tastiest wee creatures of the sea stuffed with the tastiest wee creatures of the land.These delights were stuffed with a very simple paste of pork mince, coriander, black pepper and fish sauce, dredged in a mixture of rice flour and plain flour,dipped in egg and deep fried. Smear them in a commercial sweet chili sauce – good, good,good. I served these up with a zinging and blisteringly chili-hot green mango salad and an incredibly simple sweet and sour pineapple curry. One of the best all round spreads I’ve plated up in a while -we sweated and giggled for a solid half hour.

Campari and orange

My drink of the season. Not much to say- it’s the taste of summer. The Campari is dusty and bitter and strange and the orange is refreshing and easy and it won’t get you too tanked. My husband doesn’t like it. I try not to be judgemental about this.

Sage and onion stuffing, Christmas cake and flaming puddings

As my northern English grandparents start to age and I evidently start to mature (!!), certain secrets are being passed down. I witnessed the making of the Christmas cakes and now know the sage and onion stuffing that for me is the only thing worth putting up a turkey’s bum. Grandad’s piece de resistance is always the Christmas pudding, however. It is dense with fruit but somehow maintains that spongey soft steamed pudding texture. Drenched with brandy and ceremoniously set on fire before being bathed in custard and hard lumps of mum’s brandy butter, I’ve never had better.

Tim and Jane’s leftovers

My brother and his family arrived at our folks house from Singapore on boxing day and stayed a week – great to see them.  They are GOOD at food. I rocked up at mum and dad’s on new years eve, hungry and with a lot of  cooking to do. And,  joy, they had heaps of leftovers from the previous night’s dinner. All very middle eastern – lovely strips of polenta crumbed calamari, tartare sauce made with yoghurt and tahini instead of mayonnaise (therefore kind of healthy and easy to eat lots of) and a yummy salad. There is little more delightful than a fridge full oflittle bowls of fantastic leftovers that need to be eaten.

I haven’t even got to the balinese seafood satays, the lentil salad or the five spice roast chicken but I’m spent and the guava paste is calling…

Chinese New Year soon – better get my skates on!

Asian style pork patties and pineapple salad

• 1oog pork mince
• Handful of fresh pineapple pieces
• Handful diced cucumber
• Handful of fresh mango pieces
• dash of soy sauce
• dash of oyster sauce
• splash of fish sauce
• pinch of sugar
• squeeze of lime juice
• Steamed rice to serve

Mix the pork mince up with the soy and oyster sauces and form into little patties and whack into a non-stick frying pan on moderate heat until cooked. Make a salad out of the fruit and veg,  lime juice,fish sauce and sugar.Serve with rice. It’s a no brainer.

We used to go there when Pete was working as a projectionist at a City cinema. We went there when we were both working for a law firm. I went there with a colleague, fresh from excavating at the Old Melbourne Gaol and covered in filth. Nam Loong at one time fed our working lives and there were many delights to choose from which used to give you great change from 10 dollars. They make my favourite char sui bau and the best Singapore noodles. They can provide you with a plate of roast duck on rice for the kind of change you can find in your couch. But the dish that I find it almost impossible to go past is the Salted Chicken. This is a gently poached white cooked chicken with a spring onion and ginger sauce. Its a standard Chinese classic with many minor variations however I have cobbled together a recipe which replicates the Nam Loong Salted Chicken experience at home.

If you eat regularly at my house you will have had salted chicken. If you are invited for a meal at short notice there is a 50/50 chance it will be salted chicken. If you want to call me and invite yourself over for a salted chicken you can almost bet I’ll say yes. It is one of my kitchen standards. It is ridiculously simple to make but you must,must,must follow 2 rules:

1. DO NOT boil the chicken. Do not even think about boiling the chicken.If you do boil the chicken give yourself a good spanking and abandon the salted chicken and use the poor bird for something else. For those uninitiated in the process of poaching a whole chicken, do not let your fear of the method get the better of you. It wants to cook by basically sitting in a hot bath and you need to let it.
2. DO NOT use a blender to make the sauce. This gives it an unpleasantly mucousy texture. Use the method described below. If you do not have a mortar and pestle, you simply put the sauce ingredients in a jar and mix by shaking.

Salted Chicken

• 1 free range /good quality chicken
• 2 spring onions for the stock
• 4 slices of fresh ginger for the stock
• tsp salt for the stock
• sesame oil
• 2 tablespoons very finely chopped spring onions for the sauce
• 1.5 tbsp grated ginger for the sauce
• 3 tbsp vegetable oil for the sauce
• 1.5 teaspoons salt for the sauce

Rinse and dry the chicken and place in a stock pot with cold water to cover. Add the two spring onions, 4 slices of ginger and salt. Bring almost up to the boil but do not let the water get so hot that the bubbles do anything more than just barely break the surface of the water. Simmer very gently like this for 10 minutes then put a lid on the pot and turn off the heat. Leave for 45 minutes and then very gently put the chicken in a bath of iced water for a minute or so (until the water starts to warm up). This does nice things to the fat under the skin. Remove the chicken and gently brush with sesame oil. Put in the fridge while you make the sauce.

To make the sauce, pound the spring onions and the ginger together with the salt with a mortar and pestle and then add the oil and mix to a paste. To serve, chop the chicken chinese style and arrange on a plate with the sauce in a separate dish on the side for dipping. Eat with rice.

I find this a joy to make (vegetarians read no further). It’s very physical to prepare, rubbing the stuffing mix into the flesh, trussing the wee beastie up and rubbing salt into the skin. You need to blast the roast in a hot oven to get really crispy crackling, so you get to listen to that glorious bubbling and splattering for a while which always reminds me of the sound of suet in the pan that accompanied my grandparents’ roast dinners.  Then you drop the temperature back to moderate for a few hours – so you get a whole afternoon or morning of porchetta aromas in the kitchen. You need to have no fear-you will not overcook it. The meat is best left to cool to room temperature or eaten out of the fridge the following day. This way the meat and stuffing mix sort of settle in together and get real friendly with each other.  This is a test of endurance. Pete and I always lurk with intent around the meat and it’s a relief when its wrapped in the fridge and safely out of temptation’s way.

Porchetta

• Pork loin,boned, fat and skin still on (this recipe will do fora 1 -2 kg piece of meat)
• 3-4 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
• 2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh rosemary
• 2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh sage
• 1 tablespoon fennel seeds
• Generous amount freshly ground black pepper
• Sea salt
• Olive oil
• Cooking string

Heat oven to around 220 degrees Celsius. Score the skin of your pork. This can be a tricky job but try and get the score lines as close together as you can as once the skin gets really crispy the meat will be hard to carve except along the score lines. Mix the garlic,rosemary, sage and fennel seeds with a small amount of olive oil to make a paste. Open out your loin and lay it skin side down. Grind a VERY generous amount of black pepper on the meat and then rub the herb and garlic mix all over the meat. Take a short end of the loin and roll it up tight like a jam roly poly. Tie it securely with cooking twine so that it makes a tight roll.Rub some oil into the skin and then a good whack of salt, making sure you get salt into the grooves of the score lines.

Place the meat in a roasting pan and cook in hot oven for 20 mins to half an hour to get the skin going. Take the temperature down to 160 degrees Celsius and cook for a further 3 hours. Baste occasionally with pan juices. Remove loin and let sit for at least half an hour before serving. Can most happily be made a day ahead and served cold.