My life in 10 dishes

A few weeks ago, Jill Dupleix did a piece in the Sydney Morning Herald about a food biography. I liked the idea so I've decided to make it the topic for my post today, tracing my history through the foods that defined certain periods of my life.

 #10: Sherbet straws and coffin candy
Sweets were a staple part of my diet as a kid, and half my pocket money used to go to feeding my sugar frenzy. I particularly loved those really big sherbet straws that would clog up from saliva halfway through, and the candy shaped like skulls and bones that came in a small plastic coffin.

#9 Canned spag bol
It's a poor start to my food biography, but I used to be addicted to Leggos bolognese in a can. As hungry kids, when the parents weren't around (they were often at work), we'd just pop open a can of spag bol and nuke it for sustenance. This was actually a treat amongst the other rubbish I used to eat, like tomato sauce spread on bread, mayo spread on bread, tomato sauce and mayo spread together on bread...

#8 Fried sashimi
I know, it's an oxymoron... but so was I (har har). When I was a teenager, on special occasions, my parents would go to the fish markets early in the morning and bring home a fresh kingfish or salmon and slice it into thin sashimi pieces (long before sashimi bars became the popular urban choice they are today) that they, my brother and sister would devour with wasabi and soy sauce. But me: raw fish? Yuck. I would fill my plate with sashimi, dip them in egg and flour and then fry them, much to the chagrin of my family.

#7 Proper spag bol
I think this was the first dish I learned to make properly when I moved out of home. What a revelation to discover that if you threw in garlic, sundried tomatoes and red wine, it tasted even better than the canned stuff! Needless to say, this dish ended up on rotation almost every week for the next 10 years.

#6 Vietnamese chicken rolls
I fell in LOVE with these simple rolls that you can buy at any Vietnamese bakery many many years ago, and the love affair hasn't ended yet. These rolls are AWESOME and come with the added bonus of being cheap. My favourite was from the bakery on Burwood Rd - just down the street from where I used to live in Burwood in our little flat with diarrhea-brown 70s carpet. Even now they remind me of those days of youthful poverty and make me smile.

#4 Roast beef
I felt like a 'real' cook when I conquered roast beef and three veg. It was so delicious I decided to follow up with an encore presentation, which flopped because I wrongly bought silverside, being on a budget and knowing nothing about beef cuts back then. Things haven't changed THAT much, but I do know now that silverside tastes like salty spam on steroids.

#5 Maccas french fries
Not only do I love these little strips of deep-fried deliciousness for the taste, but they also have a good connotation for me because I shared my first kiss with my now-husband over a pack of these. Was it the fries that made the kiss so delicious or the other way around? It's a matter of the chicken or the egg, really. Both were great :)


#4 Sticky-date pudding
The first time I tried it (the Sarah Lee version), I thought I'd died and ended up on a different astral plane. I have very strict ideas about vegetables sticking their nose in where they don't belong (carrot cake, I'm looking at you), and although dates aren't a vegetable, I hated them with an intensity that even celery can't muster in me. Yet, in a pudding... it was transformed. And so was I. I mark this as the occasion that my palate grew up.

#3 Koshary
Imagine this: two girls in the busy city of Cairo, wander into a local restaurant a day before their adventure tour begins and order a bowl of who-knows-what. What we ended up with was a delicious lesson in cultural discovery. A combination of macaroni, lentils, rice, fried onion and a mouth-watering, tangy tomato-based sauce, koshary introduced me to the delight that is Egyptian cooking, and now has a special place in my heart and my recipe folder.

#2 Dragonfruit
I love dragonfruit not only because they look so pretty, but I love their subtle-sweet taste, especially the red-flesh variety. It always reminds me of Cambodia, where I tried it for the first time, and I remember sitting in the tuk tuk with Jinah coming back from the Russian markets, each holding a big red dragonfruit and devouring it like a banana with their skins peeled and hanging off the side, with red juice dripping down our arms in the sweltering heat.

#1 Vietnamese rice paper rolls... Korean-style
The epitome of awesome, these rice paper rolls are healthy and delicious. Slam dunk.They're easy to make too, just time consuming because of all the vegetables you have to wash and cut up (Korean-style means you add vegetables of every colour plus a variety of meats and a kick-ass sauce). The crowning glory is the sauce - the best I've ever tasted and now continue to make goes like this: in a food processor, blend together coriander roots, raw garlic, small hot red chillis and canned pineapple. Once blended, add fish sauce, the juice from the canned pineapple and a good squeeze of lemon juice. It. Is. Di. Vine.

Do you have food that defines your life? Is this topic as fascinating as I think it is or am I just obsessed with food?

The great Quorn experiment

So lately, the treatment of animals prior to their death in order to nourish our bodies, has been weighing on my mind. I read a book that described the treatment of chickens on a UK battery farm and it was very disturbing. I haven't (and don't plan to) read Jonathan Safran Foer's apparently very excellent book Eating Animals because I know it will haunt me and quite frankly, affect my meat-loving self.

My position is that I would be happy to pay more to know that the animals whose flesh I'm eating had been treated well before their death. It's the least we could do, right? (The most we could do is to NOT EAT THEM but I'm not a freaky vegetable-lover thank you). To this end, I've weighed in on the comments sections of articles discussing this issue and also tried to reduce the meat intake in our house as a small protest against the mean meat factories (goodbye Steak Sundays).

... then along came QUORN, a British meat substitute that was apparently created by scientists in response to potential future food shortage. It's high in protein, consists mainly of fermented fungus and is much lower in fat than actual meat. I was excited to hear about it and finally tracked down Quorn mince at our local supermarket on the weekend.

At $6 for 300g, it's almost double the average price of mince, but it could simply be that it's much lighter than real mince, because quantity-wise, 300g seemed much like the mince meat equivalent of 500g or possibly even a little more.

Hubster had flatly refused to eat it previously, but since he was out at the pub last night for after-work drinks, I thought I had a pretty good chance of sneaking it past him. First, he'd be hungry from the delayed dinner, and secondly he'd probably be slightly fuddled by alcohol.

When he walked in the door, there I was like a good wife stirring a pot on the stove top.

What evil lurks beneath that smile?

Him: Hey, that smells great!

Me: Yep, it's spag bol.

Him: (suspicious face) That's not....

Me: Don't worry, it's just mince (technically not a lie, since it's called 'Quorn mince'), I found it in the freezer (which is where I put it after shopping... ha ha).

Him: Okay cool.

Skip to after dinner...

Me: (Looking at his empty bowl which has practically been licked clean) So tell me honestly... did you even notice the difference?

Him: What? (looks in his bowl, looks at me slightly aghast) You lied to me!

Me: I didn't lie! It is called mince and it was in the freezer. But could you tell?

Him: (after an ardent meat-eater's hesitant pause) No, it was actually really nice...

Verdict: WIN FOR THE QUORN

Easy delicious pasta with prawns

I made this the other night when some friends came over and it was a hit. It's doubly great cos it's easy too. To serve 4-6, you'll need:

500g prawns (beheaded and deveined)
3-5 cloves of crushed garlic (my level keeps vampires away for good)
2-4 chopped hot red chillis (adjust for heat)
2 tomatoes, de-seeded and cubed
a handful of basil
1/2 cup of good quality olive oil
sea salt and pepper to taste
1 pack of spaghetti

Method:

1. Boil water and cook spaghetti according to directions. While that's happening:
2. Heat the olive oil in a pan (heavy-base is best)
3. Add the garlic and chillis and allow to brown but not burn
4. Add the prawns and let them cook till they go from translucent to opaque and red
5. Add the chopped tomatoes and tear in the basil
6. Add salt and pepper to taste, then turn off the heat and mix the sauce into the freshly cooked spaghetti.
   
7. Serve, sit back and receive your accolades.
   

I guarantee you it's tasty and it'll take less than 30 minutes to make. If you have any leftover (not likely) you can eat it cold the next day and it's just as great.

Optional: if you don't want to use that much olive oil, you could always use a few tablespoons to cook the garlic, chilli and prawns, then add 1/2 cup of white wine instead, and cook until it's heated through and the alcohol has evaporated. If you like a bit of texture, add 2 handfuls of breadcrumbs to the oil when the prawns have cooked, and they'll go crispy and delish!

Other food favourites:

• mussels in white wine, garlic and chilli
• beer can chicken
  

Christmas celebrations round #3: girlfriends

On Sunday night we had a 10 year reunion with a group of girlfriends we had Christmassed with in 1999. Changes between 1999 to 2009:

• 4 out of 6 of us are now married
• one of us currently lives in Geneva although the rest are still in Sydney
  
• we all have our own bedrooms now (10 years ago, only one of us did)
• we all have full-time jobs (actually it was probably only Jenny and myself who lived like hobos back then, but we can't say we didn't have fun!)

On the menu:

Beer can chicken (with roast vegetables)

Quick directions for the beer can chicken: buy a good sized fresh whole chicken (organic if you can). Take the entire lid off a can of beer and drink half (you'll need it to steady your nerves for what comes ahead), or alternatively, transfer half a can or bottle of beer into a mason jar (or clean ex-tomato paste or other glass jar).

Throw a bunch of herbs and spices into the remaining beer, like rosemary, cumin, paprika, cinnamon, Moroccan spice mix (love this stuff), chilli, cayenne pepper and cloves. Separately, create a spice rub using the same spices mixed with 2 tbs olive oil and 2 tbs softened butter. Lay your chicken down and rub the spice mix all over the skin and get your fingers right under the skin to also rub the spices into the flesh. Tip: don't apologise to the chicken. Personifying it will only make it harder. Just grit your teeth and remember that if you cook it right, it won't have died in vain.

Pick up the chicken and impale it onto the can or jar of beer, standing upright on a baking tray. Pop it into a pre-heated oven or BBQ at 180 deg C for 60min. It comes out delicious - 360 degrees of crispy spiced skin and juicy flesh flavoured from the internal workings of the beer.

Moroccan cous cous with roast veg and rocket leaves

Chop pumpkin and sweet potatoes into 1cm cubes and roast in the oven until slightly browned. While they're in the oven, add 1 cup of cous cous to 1 cup of hot vegetable stock, add some Moroccan spice, mix with a fork and cover. Wash some rocket leaves and chop a handful of mint and parsley leaves. Fork through the fattened couscous grains until they separate, then add the baked vegetables, rocket and herbs. It's ready to serve and a delicious accompaniment to any meal.

A side of garlic asparagus

A really simple but delicious side dish is garlic asparagus. Chop off the woody ends, wash and dry the asparagus. Heat a pan, add some olive oil and when it's nice and hot, throw in around 2-3 cloves of chopped garlic for each bunch of asparagus. When the garlic is slightly brown, throw in the asparagus. Toss until it starts becoming a nice bright green, then grind some salt over the top and serve. Easy.

The evening did have a purpose other than eating though... ten years ago we'd written down a list of 10 things we wanted to do before we died and placed it in a very fitting time capsule: a VHS case. After dinner, we sat around with some delicious French pastries and read aloud our lists one at a time. They were hilarious!

The points that had been accomplished included:

• travelling (for most of us)
• Mia owning her own studio
• Glenda meeting the man of her dreams
• I woke up before 6.30am at least once in my life (probably never again after the first time)
• Glenda and Ron watching a live grand slam tennis match
• Jenny conversing with her biological mother

The points we laughed over:

• both Ron and Andie wanted their own rooms (at the time they were sharing)
• Jenny wanted to do something fearless like acting in a movie or interviewing strangers
• I wanted to 'write a best seller.. or at least a pretty decent book... or at least something that gets published'

I can't remember all the points, but afterwards we wrote a list of 5 things we'd like to do, be or have in five years time, along with a snapshot of our lives now. My 5 things:

1. To potentially have another Bloom Training Centre set up, either somewhere else in Cambodia or in another country.
2. To have happy, well-adjusted kid(s) - either our own or adopted - and a great family.
3. To have my own business with freedom and flexibility.
4. To have a good wardrobe I can wear anything from and look good (hey, I'm a girl!)
5. ... can't remember the fifth one. Guess I'll find out in 2014!
   

Christmas celebrations round #2: friends

So after the mostly successful Parkside Family Christmas Lunch on Saturday, we followed it up with our Kris Kringle Friends' Christmas Dinner. Most are married young couples now and there are two kids in the group - one a gorgeous one year old Korindian and the other a terrible-two year old Eurasian. We're a mixed bunch.

The menu was pot luck, and the dishes I brought to the table were:
Mussels in white wine, garlic and chilli for starters.

Quick directions: buy 2kg fresh mussels (local ones are best) and pull off beards just before cooking. In a large pot, heat up some oil and add around 6 cloves of chopped garlic and 3-4 small red chillis (less if you can't handle the heat). When it starts to get fragrant and a little brown, add the mussels into the pot. Pour a can of chopped tomatoes and a cup of white wine over the top. Stir and put the lid on. When the mussels start to open, add a good handful of chopped continental parsley, a little salt (not too much) and stir again. Replace the lid. When all the mussels have opened, served in a nice big bowl with plenty of broth. It's delicious and a surefire way to get the party started.

Turkish Lamb Pizza

Quick directions: fry up one chopped onion, 3 green chillis and a dash of cumin and paprika in a little oil. Remove from the pan and cook 500g lamb mince until brown, and drain the juice. Add the fried onions and chilli to the minced lamb and add 2tb of tomato paste.

Spread the resulting lamb mince mix thinly onto any base you like: pre-bought or home-made pizza base, Lebanese bread or Greek pita bread. Chuck it into a pre-heated oven at around 160 deg C for around 10-15min until the edges are browned. Serve with wedges of lemon. Yum!!

Also on the table were really delicious and naturally sweet prawns with a lemon dipping sauce, marinated chicken, a complicated but beautiful Chinese chicken salad, fresh sashimi salad with a yummy sesame-base dressing, and for dessert, tiramisu and black forest cherry cake.

It was a good night on the whole and fun for everyone - especially when the kris kringle gifts came out - but some lessons learnt:

1. Ambience is important. Consider lighting, music and mood beforehand to set the scene and make it feel 'Christmassy'. Break out the candles and when desperate, pull out Mariah Carey's Christmas CD.
   
2. Punctuality makes a difference. There were some stragglers and it just kind of deflated the mood that night. One or two coming unavoidably late is ok, but when most of the party is late... it's just a bit lame. Answer: don't serve dinner too soon - start with drinks and a few snacks and go as long as it takes until everyone's arrived.
   
3. Large groups need something to hold it together. If it's a massive party then it's totally cool when people break off into smaller groups to chat, but when it's a cosy one, try to keep the group together. Board games or charades or something that keeps everyone laughing together work great, even if it takes a little persuading to get everyone involved.
   

Christmas celebrations, round #1: family

Christmas celebrations started off on Saturday 19th December with our Parkside Family Christmas lunch (my sister Glenda is now a Chang and I'm a Gomez, but we can't forget our Park roots). Attendees: my parents (who squeezed it in between a funeral and a wedding - they're so popular), Simon and Liz (brother and sis-in-law), Glenda and Juan (sister and bro-in-law), nephews Christian (15) and Reuben (13) and niece Hannah (3), Nathaniel, myself and Elena (sis-in-law).

On the menu:
Seafood platter

The traffic going to and from the Sydney Fish Markets was CRAZY but the resulting seafood platter was worth it. By the way, the platter pictured is a representation of my intended presentation rather than the actual presentation, which was much better but I hate to boast. Not. On the platter: fresh salmon sashimi, Sydney rock oysters, and delicious grilled prawns.

Quick directions for delicious grilled prawns: 30min before cooking, take prawns out of the fridge and marinate with chopped garlic, chopped continental parsley, olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper. Let it sit before grilling on a BBQ or hot plate. Yum.

Sirloin roast with gravy spread

Quick directions: Buy a good cut of beef (mine was a 2kg sirloin which cost freakin' $80!! More than any of the presents I'd bought for my family! Tip: ask your butcher how much per kilo before asking for 'the best cut for roast' and blithely agreeing like you know something.

Take the meat out of the fridge around 1.5-2hrs before you plan to roast to bring it down to room temperature. Rub spices all over it (I used a Moroccan spice mix, paprika, cumin and whatever was in the cupboard), sear in a hot pan (or better still, in the baking tray) and place in a pre-heated oven at 220 deg C for 30min. Lower to 160 deg C and if you can manage, ladle the pan juices over the roast, then back to the oven for another 15min per 500g.

Brief directions for gravy spread: Make the gravy as per usual while the roast rests, using 2 tbs of the meat juices, 1 tbs flour, 1 cup of beef stock and salt and pepper. Then let your husband take over the cooking while you go upstairs to do your make up. By the time you come down, he'll have added another tablespoon of flour thinking you read the recipe wrong, and voila: gravy spread. Seriously, you couldn't even shake it out of the gravy boat (which is really a milk jug but who really knows the difference, right?).

I also served my famous ('famous') Thai-influenced marinated chicken skewers, with recipe to come.

A platter of summer fruit
There's nothing better than summer fruit like watermelon, mangoes, strawberries and cherries. Yum!

Everything was eaten in fast forward because everyone came late and my parents had to rush off to a wedding in an hour and we all wanted to get to the gifts.

So when we were done, my parents took their new GPS and personalised calendar chocka block full of pictures of their kids and grandkids and toddled off to their wedding. Christian wouldn't take off his new sneakers and Country Road bag. Reuben insisted on 'testing out' his new iPod speakers so we had Blasting Benjamin or My Chemical Romance or whatever blaring over the top of the Christmas music. Hannah immediately put on her inflatable floatie and hugged the in-built palm tree (to provide shade) and wouldn't take it off despite the fact that it squished her sideways on the beanbag. Then she and Glenda had a deep and meaningful conversation:

Hannah: Hannah doesn't have a penis. Isaac has a penis.
(Isaac is Hannah's friend, also aged 3)
Glenda: Where is Hannah's penis?
Hannah: (thinks for a while) It's at home.

Julie and Julia, movie review

Julie and Julia is a lovely drama that crosses back and forth between the lives of cooking whiz Julia Child (who started her cooking career in Paris in the 40s and 50s) and modern day blogger Julie Powell, who challenges herself to cook all 500+ recipes from Julia Child's book in one year.

The real joy in the movie comes from Meryl Streep's performance as Julia Child - her life is large in every way, from her love of food to her love of her husband. She's slightly ditzy without being dumb, and has a falsetto and zest for life that simply draws you in. By contrast, Julie Powell is a modern girl in New York stuck in a menial job who wants desperately to be a writer. When she takes on the challenge to cook from Julia Child's book, she learns more about herself through her non-personal interaction with Julia Child, and begins to learn life lessons from this matriarch of French cooking. Amy Adams does a respectable job in this role, but Meryl Streep really does take the cake. She's simply divine.

Julie and Julia is a light-hearted movie that benefits from the ambience of 40s Paris and 00s New York, and the two very charming leads - not to forget their uber-supportive husbands. It's a great chick-flick and if this doesn't trigger a hankering to cook something exotic and French, nothing will.

Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly is a rivetting read because it covers a lot of ground: Bourdain's personal journey through drug-addiction to maturation as a chef, his love and obvious passion for food, and the ugly yet strangely charming (in a very crass way) unseen machinations behind the industry of fine dining. And to top it all off, it's written with wit, warmth and honesty that you can't help but appreciate.

He describes his cohorts in the kitchen - those who deliver dishes of utmost perfection - endearingly as:

wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts, and psychopaths.

He obviously loves them, loves his job, loves food and is passionate about the industry - and all of that really comes through. Although I started without even the slightest interest in the New York fine dining scene (the book was a gift), Kitchen Confidential gave me a real appreciation for the passion, talent and dedication of those involved in the craft. There's nothing more enjoyable than having a whole world opened up for you by someone who knows all its ins and outs and who can write - absorbingly, engagingly - about it all.