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Stories from the kitchen....
 | Buying a New BBQ  |
| The Big Risotto Debate |
| Japanese Food gone mad? |
| Nigella Lawson Food as the new porn |
| Meals Make us Human |
| Washing Up and other tales |
| Starting a gourmet club |
| Your contribution |
Buying a New BBQ
After 17 years of service, old faithful was showing signs of wear and tear, and was no longer big enough for entertaining requirements - the typical BBQ event now being 8 adults and 10 kids. Having read that you can now spend $4,000 of a big stainless steel jobby, I started research with fear and trepidation. Hood to no hood, enamal or stainless, how much grill, how much plate. And a time limit - most of the hot food for a 100 people party was coming off the BBQ.
The slightly unconventional solution was to actually get 2 BBQs, a 3 and a 4 burner, and build them in side by side. That way, we have small and large, 1.5 metres of cooking space (no available BQ offers that much), two hoods to go with a variety of cooking options.
The party was a great success, but as you can see from the after shot, the BBQs worked hard on the night. The mess is nearly cleaned up.
Click on the thumbnails to see the full glory.
Just Installed Very Used
The Big Risotto Debate
"That Risotto is the most overrated food ever". Sydney Morning Herald, January 2003
FOR, by Sam Kekovich
Comrades, it's my duty to speak out against the over-inflated status of rice stuffed with water and coated in cheese.
Italian peasants enjoyed risotto for centuries, but they were making the best of long snow-bound days in humpies.
Australians are busy people and spending five hours stirring rice that turns to stodge is madness.
That was until the 1990s, a decade so banal that it believed Bryce Courtenay profound, when some ponytailed marketing executive wrote off a two-week chianti and cocaine orgy in Tuscany by selling the idea that the antidote to a cruel world was to boil rice slowly.
Lightly bearded feminists will have you believe that was designed to keep mum enslaved to the stove. But it was men who jumped at the idea of finding nirvana in risotto. Once, they would gather around the barbecue arguing whether the snags should go on before the T-bones. Now they discuss the best serving temperature of pinot while stirring imported arborio rice in $300 deep-bottomed fryng pans that guarantee the authentic flavour of the impoverished backstreets of 16th century bubonic Nalpes. PoncesAGAINST, by David Dale
If you say risotto is overrated, you're really saying rice is overrated. And that puts you up against only 60 million Italians, but billions more in China, India, Pakistan and Japan.
Risotto is the original multi-cultural dish - the bridge between the survival ingredient of Asia and the favourite flavourings of Europe.
How can a mix of rice, butter, onions, stock and parmesan be less than wonderful? Forget the anal retentives who demand a particular type of rice, and tiny pours of stock and constant stirring for 22 minutes, etc. This is all you need to know risotto: no matter what you do to it, even when it's too mushy or too crunchy, it's still the best comfort food ever invented.
And it's the ideal delivery system for more expensive ingredients, if you insist: mushrooms, prawns, herbs, quails, asparagus. Some people have stirred in strawberries, so it becomes a dessert.
But please - enough with the truffled oil! It's giving risotto a bad name. If a lot of Syndey chefs are wankers, that's not risotto's fault.
Japanese Food Gone Mad?
With Australians taking to Japanese food, the strict "raw fish" contents of sushi has been branching out lately to some fairly non-traditional items. But here's some things we DON'T want to see on the menu of a Japanese takeaway.
| Sushi roll with
| ||||||
| Chiko roll in a bowl of udon noodles | ||||||
| Sashimi topped with a slice of sausage roll | ||||||
| Miso soup with meatballs | ||||||
| Tempura beetroot | ||||||
| Teppanyaki mixed grill | ||||||
| Meat pie containing teriaki chicken | ||||||
| Bento Box with spag bol, prawn cocktail, party pies, chips, mushy peas and garlic bread | ||||||
| green-tea-a-cino | ||||||
| A pine-lime splice with wasabi |
Nigella Lawson
The First Page Test. Can you judge a book by its opening page? This week Megan Gressor looks at Forever Summer, by Nigella Lawson.
Sydney Morning Herald 19 Octoer 2002, Spectrum, p2.In the ideal world inhabited by the chef, there may indeed be a place for the lyrical insistence on using only those ingredients that the month on hand offers up to the market place, but my kitchen, my home, the way I cook, resist such purist structures. For much as I love the idea of wandering out to the shops, basket dangling from my arm, to gather each season's ripened produce, I have neither the time to shop that way, not the discipline - and frankly, I baulk as such loftily imposed contraints. I shop and cook much as I wat, with greedy opportunism.
This isn;t a cookbook intro, it's a manifesto. Not about food, but aout Nigella; like her name, it;s a branding statement. Just as fashion houses craft personas to create distinctions between essentially identical products, so with the cooking trade.
In fact, it's spawning archetypes on a poistively Jungian scale, from Earth Mother (Dorinda Hafner) to the Quester (Rick Stein), the Schoolmarm (delia Smith) to the Wild Man (Ainsley Harriot) or the Lad (Jamie Oliver). And now there's the Tempress (Nigella), the finger-licking avatar of the sins of the flesh, of which eating is about the last remaining to us.
Yes, food is the new sex, gastronomy is the new porn, so it makes sense to serve up a va-va-voom vamp to preside over the bacchanal. Eat, drink and be merry, because life is too short to wait upon the season's "ripened produce"; that's the message underlying the hell-with-the-rules-apoligia above. Not for Nigella - or us - and "ideal worlds", "purist structures" or "restraint", just the good old unbuttoned pleasures of the table.
"Greedy opportunism": in those two worlds alone are volumes awaiting decontruction. Greed is good, gluttony is better; far from being a deadly sin, it's been elevated to a pagan rite. And Nigella is an opportunist, all right, one who has carved out a niche in the crowded pantheon of celebrity chefs.
As her website (http://www.nigellabites.com) points out, she "looks more like Elizabeth Hurley that Martha Stewart". So she does, and that's the point; a point she keeps reinforcing with recipes called "Slut-red Raspberries in Chardonnay Jelly" and descriptions of herself as "too much of a slattern" to diet.
It's rubbish, of course; she must have "discipline" in spades to have made it in the cutthroat world of culinary journalism. It may be tongue-in-cheek but it's all carefuly calculated, down to he sobriquet, the oxymoronic Domestic Goddess, with its hints of Dionysian revels and forbidden pleasures.
They're echoed on the cover of Forever Summer which features a shot of Nigella slumped back in a convertible in what is either a post-coital glow ot a bad case of sunstroke. Fun in the sun, of course, goes down a treat in teh UVA-deprived Northern Hemisphere, as does her general projection of wanton indulgence. It's no coincidence that the celebrity chefs are almost all British; they're the collective id, as it were, of what stitched-up island race.
It's a far cry from the traditional Betty Crocker stereotype of food writing, and probably just as well. Because commonsense cookery makes for poor entertainment, whereas Nigells and co offer a multimedia package guaranteed to please. She is indeed dishing up her "kitchen", her "home", complete with her two moppets who double as props on her shows. Forever Summer is the book tie-in with her latest TV series of the same name.
The title originates in a lyric from the muscial Singing in the Rain, as she explains overleaf, "not because I believe there is nothing but endless, unclouded blue sky in Nigellaland, but because I still believe the kitchen is not a place you escape from, but the place you escape to". Nigellaland? That's the happient kingdom of all, in which nothing succeeds lke excess.
Meals Make us Human
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto Never mind obesity, it's the loneliness of the fast food eater that matters
Saturday September 14, 2002, The Guardian
Fat can be fatal. Obesity is the great new global health scare. Heart disease and late-onset diabetes grow out of the grease. The danger is baffling because it is paradoxical. For ours is the most diet-conscious era and diet-obsessed culture in the history of the world. We think thin and we get fat.
This is more than a cultural peculiarity: it bucks the whole trend of human evolution. Our species has long been conspicuously more successful in absorbing fat than any other land-based animal - why is that going wrong now? The experts' favourite explanations are all ideologically biased. Some blame capitalism for forcefeeding us sugar and starch, or industrialisation and urbanisation for distancing millions from healthy food. Dieting, say others, makes you fat by disturbing the metabolism and encouraging faddish eating. Some blame poverty, some blame abundance. Some of these explanations are wrong; the rest are inadequate. Really, fat is a function of deeper disturbances in our eating habits. It's the outward and visible sign of a profound social disaster: the decline of the meal. We have to face this threat if we want to face it down.
Mealtimes are our oldest rituals. The companionable effects of eating together help to make us human. The little links which bind households together are forged at the table. The stability of our homes probably depends more on regular mealtimes than on sexual fidelity or filial piety. Now it is in danger. Food is being desocialised. The demise of mealtimes means unstructured days and undisciplined appetites. The loneliness of the fast-food eater is uncivilising. In microwave households, family life fragments. The end of home cooking has long been both tearfully predicted and ardently desired. The anti-cooking movement started, rather feebly, more than 100 years ago, among socialists who wanted toliberate women from the kitchen and replace the family with a wider community. In 1887, Edward Bellamy imagined a paradise of kitchenless homes.
Workers would order dinner from menus printed in newspapers and eat them in people's palaces. Twenty years later, Charlotte Perkins wanted to make cookery "scientific": in effect, eliminating it from most lives, while professionals in meal-making factories maintained energy levels for a world of work. It would have been insufferably dull - institutional eating can never beat home cooking. But at least it was nobly conceived, with socialising effects in mind.
Now capitalism has succeeded where socialism failed. We are facing a nightmare version of Perkins' vision: a dystopia in which cooking has surrendered to "convenience" and family break-ups start at the fridge. The eateries Bellamy imagined have materialised but they are supplied by private enterprise in fast-food outlets, serving uniform pabulum. The scientific cooks Perkins predicted are now found in processed food factories, stuffing tinfoil with gloop. People still eat at home - but mealtimes are atomised: different family members choose different meals at different times.
People no longer learn cooking at home. They need Delia to show them how to boil an egg and instruction from Nigella on How to Eat. Mealtimes have adjusted to new patterns of work. In Britain and America, they are vanishing from weekday lives. Lunch has disappeared in favour of daytime "grazing". People eat while they are doing other things, with eyes averted from company. They snack in the street, trailing litter, spreading smell pollution and dropping fodder for rats. Office workers forage for impersonal sandwiches, grab ready-made from refrigerated shelves and bolt them down in isolation. Before leaving home in the morning they do not share breakfast with loved ones. Family breakfast has been crowded out of daily routines. In the evening there may be no meal to share - or, if there is, there may be a shortage of sharers. Latchkey kids come home alone and fall ravenously on instantly infused pot noodles or beans eaten straight from the tin.
Microwaves erode society. In these machines, eaters can heat up whatever ready-mades are to hand. No reference to community of taste needs to be made. No mummy or daddy can arbitrate for a whole family. No one in a household has to defer to anyone else. This new way of cooking reverses the cooking revolution which made eating sociable, and threatens to return us to a presocial phase of evolution. Part of the result of the snacking society is undermined health, as eating disorders multiply. People alienated from the comradeship and discipline of the common table starve and stuff themselves into extremes of emaciation and obesity. The obesity pandemic has coincided with the decline of the meal. A new kind of malnutrition has emerged - engorgement on deadly diets and lethal lipids. The new eating habits multiply microbes while spreading fat. When foods are mass-produced, one mistake can poison many people. Every time prepared foods are unfrozen or chilled meals heated, an eco-niche opens for microbial infestation.
The raw food movement is not a healthy alternative. Raw food freaks seem to prefer ruminants to humans. This is psychologically unhealthy - however salubrious bean sprouts may be: romantic primitivism allied with ecological anxiety. Modern urbanites head for the raw bar seeking readmission to Eden. When the African-American elite dumps the fat-rich dishes of Southern tradition - collard greens suppurating with pork fat, pigs' feet with black-eyed peas - in favour of the raw vegetables of the "new soul food", a sacrifice of culture accompanies a loss of girth. The raw movement is not a solution, but part of the threat, dividing families by taste and diet.
So the family mealtime looks irretrievably dead. The future, however, usually turns out to be surprisingly like the past. We are in a blip, not a trend. Cooking will revive, because it is inseparable from humanity: a future without it is impossible. Communal feeding is essential to social life: we shall come to value it more highly in awareness of the present threat. There is bound to be a reaction in favour of traditional eating habits, as nostalgia turns into fashion and evidence builds up of the deleterious effects of snacking. The advertisers are already beginning to re-romanticise family feeding. Some convenience foods can be adapted as friends of family values: fast preparation time can make fixed mealtimes possible.
A return to the table is inevitable because, as Carlyle once said, "the soul is a kind of stomach, and spiritual communion an eating together". We seem incapable of socialising without food. Among people who like to enjoy other's company, every meal is a love feast. We eat to commune with our gods. The discreetly lit table is our favourite romantic rendezvous. At state banquets, diplomatic alliances are forged. Deals are done at business lunches. Family reunions still take place at mealtimes. Home is a place which smells of cooking. If we want relationships that work, we shall get back to eating together. Along the way, we shall conquer obesity: if we stop grazing, we shall stop gorging.
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto is a professorial fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, and author of Food: A History comment@guardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,791966,00.html
Washing Up and Other Tales
And after dinner, we scoured the table for a likely scrubber
Sydney Morning Herald, June 25 2002
It's rude to let a guest do the dishes. And it's rude not to do them if you are the guest. Dirk Flinthart gets lost in the wash-up.
We had a dinner party the other night, and very nice it was, too. I ran up seared salmon steaks with lemon aioli and a garden salad, and finished things off with an American-style pumpkin pie. Sitting around afterwards, belching gently, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself until my wife dug me in the ribs and pointed at one of our guests.
"Don't let her into the kitchen," she hissed. "She'll wash the dishes."
"So what?" I said. "Somebody's got to. Why not let her, if she wants to?"
Milady pinned me with that special look of scorn reserved by women for men who have disgraced themselves beyond measure. "It's not right," she snapped. "She's a guest."
Message received. I scuttled into the kitchen and thwarted the fiendish dishwasher's plans by hurling myself in front of the sink as a human shield. On reflection, it might have been a slight overreaction, but in my defence let it be said that I was frightened. I didn't exactly know what the consequences of allowing our guests to wash up might be, but I knew I didn't want to find out.
A few nights later, we were dining out on the return invitation. Of course, it was only a beef casserole with ice-cream to follow, but not everybody is a culinary Genghis Khan like me, and it's the thought that counts anyhow. Besides, it was designer double-choc ice-cream with little bits of marshmallow and hazelnut in it. Afterwards, I thought I had the situation covered. Being a guest, I put my arms behind my head and stretched out my legs, secure in the knowledge that I had no post-dinner obligations.Suddenly, there was a searing pain in my shin, as of a sharp and brutal kick. I sat bolt upright just in time to be nailed once more by that paint-stripping glare.
"Don't just sit there," hissed my beloved. "Go into the kitchen and wash the dishes."
What?
Help me out here: what am I missing?
Blokes just don't behave this way. All the times I've gone round to Mr Jay's place to watch late-night Jackie Chan flicks with the lads, we've never fought over who was going to vacuum the Doritos out of the carpet, nor come to blows over the right to get the beer stains off the ceiling.
Come the end of the fun, we just round up the empties, find blankets for those too tired and emotional to drive, eat anything left over, and bag the rubble. Then we all say goodnight and leave, knowing that one day, when he's good and ready, Mr Jay will wash and tidy up, and in the meantime, it's best forgotten. That's the way Mr Jay wants it. That's how it is between blokes.
So what is it with women? That washing-up crisis was not an isolated incident. The other day, our friend, Sally, came by.
I turned around to make a pot of tea and when I turned back she'd steam-cleaned the inside of the oven, ironed the towels, completely wiped out my collection of early Victorian cobwebs and was just about to French-polish the cat. All of this would have been just fine, except that somehow, my beloved's sixth sense (or maybe eighth, counting the one that identifies the origin of stains, and the one that detects impurities in the toilet water) went off when she came home. Sure enough, I was in trouble again. Apparently, I should have chained Sally to the dining table to keep her from carrying out her mission of terrorist house-cleansing.
I can't live like this, you know. It's not civilised.
Maybe there ought to be some kind of police negotiator to sit down with women before they go to dinner so they can plan who gets to wash the dishes. Maybe they need Kofi Annan to work out some kind of diplomatic treaty dividing up the domestic chores between guests and hosts.
You know: "On even days of the month, guests wash cutlery and cooking pots, except when hosts have made a white sauce as defined in section b, sub-paragraph 11 of the protocols on prohibited food substances ..."
Or maybe not. Maybe women just need to drink more beer and watch more Jackie Chan videos.
Starting a gourmet club
Establish a group of foodies with a sense of adventure and different cooking styles. 8 people ideal. Decide on a frequency of meeting (monthly, quarterly), and set the dates for your dinner parties well in advance.
For each event, the group takes turn at making starters, entree, main and dessert. Surprise is a good thing, but a little cooperation would also be good to avoid ingredient overload.
Decide how the whole wine thing is going to work.
Your Contribution Welcome!!
Submit your Essay Idea.
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