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Daylight saving starts this Sunday, but the weather has been a bit unpredictable and colder than a couple weeks before this amazing red dust storm hit Sydney.
When I woke up that morning and saw orange light coming through my bedroom windows, my instant thought was that a war had broken out like in the film, War of the Worlds, and the weird orange colour was lights reflected from tanks, fire engines and ambulances passing by to rescue people. Even when I was walking through the city in a red haze, I had no idea what was happening, until I arrived at work and someone told me it was a dust storm. There are amazing photos of Sydney covered in red dust on this website, so check them out if you are interested.
Since I had been away most of the winter here, I hadn’t had many chances to cook, especially, the nice winter comfort food such as risotto, stew and curry. Instead, I had the wonderful experience of being cooked for by my generous French CS hosts. Every single French guy I had come across during my trip was such a gourmet cook and passionate about food.
Delicious food cooked by lovable French men, which not only melted in my mouth but also melted my heart …
Everything was seriously delicious and they seem to know how to put flavours together. I was especially impressed by their presentation skills and knowledge about pairing food and wine, too. Then I started to wonder where their passion for food comes from and whether there is a national system in France to teach males how to win a girl’s heart through gastronomic competence. The word, gastrosexual, is how I describe French men.
Baking at 2.30am – giving up sleep to make someone happy
It doesn’t matter what time it is. They will cook for a girl any time of the day or night with their charming accent. Cooking is a way of expressing your emotions and it is such a joy to cook for people who you care about and whatever you make for them taste better than when you cook for people who you don’t like.
Now that there is no need to cook for someone every day, which I miss so much since it used to be a great excuse to go shopping and buy lovely fresh produce at the markets, I don’t cook much at home any more, so my poor camera is sitting by my desk collecting dust.
So I decided to treat myself and made two shopping trips. I planned to make something with whitebait, something like a crispy whitebait cup made with the mixture of potato and pecorino cheese, like this…
but the whitebait they had was too big for my recipe. So I had to go for the conventional way of deep frying.
Deep fried Whitebait on the bed of fennel salad
It proved to be an excellent combination; peppery fish with a hint of hot paprika, refreshing fennel salad with fresh garlicky lemon aioli. I threw in some chicory left in the fridge and its bitter flavour happened to be quite a nice contrasting matching with everything else, just hitting the right spot.
Try wrapping a couple of fish and some salad in radichino. It just tasted heavenly and I could hear my body saying ‘This is what I needed!, calcium!’ I felt my bones getting stronger and the pain in my knee disappearing as I was chewing the little bones and heads. It doesn’t sound very appetising, but whatever it takes to keep my bones healthy.
After the healthy lunch, I prepared for my dinner, which required a hour long simmering in red wine and herbs.
Lamb Stew de Provence with Balsamic&Dijon
I adapted a recipe from a cooking show on TV under the title of French girl’s night in and added balsamic vinegar to give a bit of sweet, tangy flavour. This dish is so aromatic infused with bay leaves, orange zest and rosemary that every one can tell that it is one of the best soul warming food to snuggle with on a cold, lonely night.
It is a very simple dish to make in the sense that you don’t need to keep an eye on the pot or keep stirring and adding things. Once you have sautéed some chopped celery, onion or shallot and garlic, and add any meat of your choice with generous amount of red wine, bay leaves, rosemary or thyme and orange zest, then as soon as it starts to boil, turn the heat to the lowest and go have a bath, watch a DVD or chat with your friends. It will just simmer away for an hour, turning all the ingredients nice and tender, and when you’ve done what you had to do, throw in some vegetables such as carrots, eggplants or potatoes (I didn’t put in potatoes since I have creamy potato mash on the side ) and cook for further 20 mins or so.
I did a bit of an experiment with making potato mash. I wanted something more interesting than just plain potato flavour. I thought about blending it with peas or carrots or pumpkin, then I went for pinto beans, which I always have in the freezer.
Creamy Potato&Bean Mash
I might have infuriated potato mash purists, but we need people like me who are willing to push the boundaries and expand culinary diversity. We never know what you would end up with as there were many iconic food items created by either mistakes or bold attempts such as chocolate, cheese, waffle cones, potato chips, etc.
As far as nutrition goes, my mash has more fibre and other vitamins and minerals than just potatoes on their own. 
To justify my mix-mash action, a scientific study suggests that eating food rich in fibre, in other words, resistant starch, such as lentils and beans helps to reduce the risk of bowl cancer by helping to grow beneficial bacteria in our gut.
It is more sensible to eat a bit of everything than to avoid things that are said to be bad for health, then let our body do the magic inside.
Home-made Marinated Goat Feta
My dish was missing one thing, which was green; I could have put in some peas if I had had some, then I saw a bunch of beetroot leaves sitting in the corner looking sad. So I figured that the quickest way to whip up the greens was to sauté them with olive oil from my home-made marinated goat feta since the oil already had all the flavours. Nothing goes to waste in my kitchen. Voila!
Provençal Lamb Stew with Sautéed Beetroot leaves
When I look at all the photos of food I took on my trip, I start wondering how I’m going to get them sorted and put on my blog; a) make a few photo collages and put them all in one post, b) categorise photos by theme or country and write in several posts, c) find photos that match with food I cook and weave stories around it each time, d) ….. (any other ideas?)
Well, I’d always thought ‘a’ would be the most efficient way to do it until the idea of having my holiday stories stretched out by savouring them over an extended period came along. Hopefully, I will be ready to go on my next adventure by the time I’ve gone over most of my holiday photos.
(Pizza + Wine) x 2 + Trevi Fountain = Love
Pizza + Trevi Fountain x 2 = Sick
Yes, I had a lot of pizza and panini for sure. The quickest, easiest and cheapest meal of all time. What makes pizza in Italy so different from one you eat outside Italy? How can pizza go wrong? How do you define the good pizza? Some say it is dough and some the quality of mozzarella. What about the combination of flavours?
It might be true that anything you eat at a beautiful piazza would taste good because it is the view you pay for that makes it taste so good. Eating through your eyes!
The pizza in Florence was definitely better than Rome as was everything else, more generous and fresh toppings, and in large rectangular shape. Florentine cuisine seems to be simple and solid- no frills like the people there?
Some say pizza in Naples is simply the best, with its fame of being the birthplace of Pizza Margherita symbolising the Italian flag: red (tomato), white (mozzarella cheese), and green (basil), but I’m not sure if no cheese means the best, then it deserves it. Neapolitans are certainly not big cheese eaters. I regret not having tried many pizzerias in Naples, though, I was getting tired of pizza as I travelled down to the south from Venice. However, the point where I the excitement of finding good pizzerias went out the window was after my street snatch incident. Two young guys on a scooter shocked me by grabbing my bag while driving by, but I managed to hold onto it and saved everything I had including my precious camera. From then on, I got scared of walking around alone and I couldn’t risk getting into trouble again.
Two days later, however, I decided to give it another go and started off toward one of the most famous pizzeria, Da Michele, which serves only two types of pizzas, Margherita and Marinara. I always thought marinara sauce contained some kind of seafood, but the origin of marinara sauce is that it is the sauce that was made in Naples for the sailors when they returned from the sea. There seems to be a huge emphasis on how good pasta is defined by such simple sauce.
In my opinion, the secret of a good pizza lies in its crust; fresh, hand-tossed, thin but not crispy like biscuit (not Domino’s Thin n Crispy type), light and airy crust. Then a good combination of fresh ingredients comes next. My attempt to make the first pizza since my return crumbled when I found that the yeast I had kept in the fridge past its use-by date. Would it still usable? I wasn’t sure, so I quickly thought out an alternative dough recipe that didn’t require yeast, but self-rising flour, milk, olive oil and herbs. I used whole wheat flour, though.
As it turned out, it had more like a cross between tart and pizza, which was quite interesting, let alone quick and easy, yet tasty!
I threw in leftover Spanish ham, which my CS guest bought for me the day before, but it baked it for too long and came out way too crispy. *Disappointed*
Ham, Cherry Tomato, Rosemary Tart- like-Pizza
But the next one came out well and the smell was just mind-blowing. There is no need to mention about the taste…..:) It is absolutely a beautiful combination.
Caramelised Fennel&Onion, Spinach, Goat cheese Tart-like-Pizza
It’s funny to see the spiral fountain at Darling Harbour without kids in it. Why do kids love it so much, I wonder. Why do they take the long way around it to get to the core when they can just walk straight across to it?
In the end, it’s all about the walk and pleasure itself rather than GETTING THERE; You might see or feel something interesting or even meet someone special along the way to enrich your life, though it might take longer than others to get to where they might want or need to be. But how long it takes doesn’t really matter, does it? We are heading in the same direction after all. No hurrying or rushing. It is so true when it comes to cooking.
I’ve been watching French shows lately to prepare myself with the knowledge of European cooking and learned the art of rolling, which end up on restaurant menus with the French word roulade. As I watched the chef elaborate with chicken fillets by stuffing them and then rolling them with spinach leaves and then again with pastry, I thought to myself if a dish involved that much of effort before landing on a plate I would eat very slowly appreciating every bite of it with ‘Umm’s and ‘Wow’s.
<Pepitas Pesto>
I had some extra time one weekend and, inspired by the cooking show, thought I might put my rustic cooking aside and make something more intricate and artful. Sole Roulade! To start off, I made pesto with pepitas instead of usual pine nuts, which I really liked, and I made a cheese and tomato sandwich with it to take to work for the next few days. It makes great sauce for pasta dishes as well.
The choice for fish was ling fillet, which wasn’t the right sort that I had in mind for the recipe because it wasn’t wide enough to roll, but I didn’t see any other suitable fish that day at the market. Then after some brainstorming for the stuffing, I settled for zucchini and carrot, so I shredded them and pan fried them slightly. Then came the rolling part and it wasn’t a complicated job for me at all; I have years of experience in rolling sushi and kimbab. The one thing that went wrong in making this was that I forgot to cook the rolled fish before rolling in filo pastry, so the juice oozed out during baking and made a bit of a mess.
<Sole Roulade>
This dish was surprisingly satisfying, bursting with flavours, and the texture of the fish was so meaty that one could mistake it for chicken. I’m not sure if i would have liked it as much, if I had used more delicate fish. The prominent flavour here was basil from the pesto and I think that rather gave away more Italian feel than French, so I might use thyme next time and see how differently it works with fish. Although the outer filo layers add crispiness and crunchiness, therefore extra character, to the dish, you can skip it if you think it is a bit of hassle.
Pepitas Pesto
a bunch of basil
1/2 c slightly toasted pepitas
1/3 c extra virgin olive oil
1 glove garlic
1/4 c parmesan cheese, grated
salt&pepper to taste
Put seeds and basil in a food processor and pulse until finely chopped , and add the rest and process it.
Sole Roulade
3-4 fillets of white fish
filo pastry (one sheet for each fillet)
spinach leaves(optional)
For the filling
1 zucchini, shredded
1 carrot, shredded
1/2 onion, finely sliced
Pan fried all until it just turns soft and set aside to cool
For the lemon butter sauce
3 Tbs butter
juice of 1 lemon
1/4 c white wine
chives chopped
Spread the pesto over each fillet sprinkled with a bit of salt and place filling, then roll it.
Continue the same process with the remaining fillets and bake them for 5 mins at 180 ‘c.
Cover each fillet with spinach leaves before wraping it in filo pastry.
Bake it at 180′c for 12-15 mins until gold.
Serve the whole fillet as a main dish with the lemon butter sauce or serve it sliced as an entree or capanes.
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