Glamorous night of restaurant awards - 900 guests, mood lighting, mirror balls, black table cloths, glinting glassware, ice-buckets heaving with beer, butter in pretty shapes,  spilt wine, extremely high heels and delicious décolletés.
​ 
Our food was uniformly excellent (900 guests!) with all pregnancies, allergies, glutards and possible phobias carefully attended to. It all worked. How do they do it?
​
That said, they must employ a bard of Shakespearian  virtuosity to write the menu. Our main course was a treasury, a plethora, a cornucopia, an abundance, a superfluity, a profusion, a torrent, a deluge, a surfeit of words, words, words.

"Herb-crusted lamb rack with pulled shoulder, skordalia, caramelised beetroot compôte, garlic-fried beans, pumpkin crisps and pinot jus."  (What about  salt and pepper? Which herbs? It could have been even longer!)

​Why do they do this?

All joking aside, I must say the dish was delicious and to use a cliché, cooked to perfection.  

​The hero, a small rack of lamb, was tender, and nicely pink inside, the pulled shoulder  an interesting contrast of texture.  The skordalia, (posh mashed potato with a hint of garlic) was a perfect foil for the beetroot in both flavour, texture and colour. The beans ensured we got our quota of greens as well as a verdant (posh word for green) component. The crisp pumpkin shavings gave a nice crunch. The whole dish was held together by a jus (posh for gravy) of balanced acidity and abundance.

It's a given surely that vegetarians will announce themselves beforehand, as will those allergic to say, seafood, gluten or peanuts.  How much do you need to know?

• ​Are we so afraid of food, we need to know every element on the plate in case we're slipped a stray roasted rutabaga, marijuana bud or devilled kidney?
• Is it to make it seem very, very, special?  No need.  It was delicious.
• Is it exalting the work of the chef? No need.  It was delicious.
• Is perhaps a surprise out of the question?
• If you don't like beetroot, could you possibly just push it aside?
• Does having a shopping list for a  menu, remove the element of wonder and discovery?

I was at one of the legendary dinners of the Symposium on Australian Gastronomy (1993) in Canberra where the menu was a simple list of words.

They knew their audience. We sat with an open mind and generous spirit of adventure. It wasn't at all scary and was impeccably produced.  "Bones" referred to a rich consommé accompanied by roasted marrow bones, "Milk" naturally was the cheese course, "Fruit" a course where the table was piled with grapes. I think I remember rightly that "Skin" referred to Atlantic salmon topped with crispy strips of seared salmon skin.

Would it have been too terrifying a challenge for today's food phobics? Would there be a worrying loss of control, knowing so little?

I recently came across the dish below at a local eatery, very different from my lamb rack or the Symposium dinner. Once again it was delicious.  

On the menu, it was "Compost".  Now that's a challenge.  Was it a hard or an easy  sell for a bunch of roasted vegetables sitting on "charcoal brioche soil"?  

This reminds me. We did "soil", in 2010. We got the idea from a book. The dish was called "Terroir". Imagine beetroot and chocolate soil, topped with a goats' curd sorbet, spears of baby asparagus poking through a snow of sorrel granita, assorted freeze-dried berries, and micro herbs (of course).  We thought we were pushing boundaries. You have to be able to laugh at yourself.

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Every now and then, a myth gets exposed.  Yes, wooden chopping boards are more hygienic than plastic. No, mama does not have to stand in the kitchen for three quarters of an hour stirring the risotto. 

Every now and then a dish based on an arcane tradition becomes a hit.  
Casio e pepe is the pasta of the moment.  Catch it now before it slips away like last year's turmeric latte, celery juice and smashed avocado.  The recipe below also plays with a new way to cook pasta.  Don't tell the Italians. They might not believe you.

Casio e pepe  - Pasta with pepper and cream
(Possibly my favourite plates - Czech Eichwald Porcelain until 1939, now Cesky Porcelain. Grateful for any more information.)

Casio e pepe is cheesy and creamy without the addition of cream or oil, not that there's anything wrong with either.  The method is interesting and can be used any time for other combinations.
It's made from three ingredients. Three, if you don't count salt and water.
Pasta - Pecorino - black pepper - that's it.
The recipe is for two people.  It's best made just when you want to eat it and for no more than four people at a time.

Use good quality spaghetti (rather than say, lasagne) - one of the  brands with a rough, white, flaky surface. The pasta is cooked in a shallow pan, not in lots of boiling water.  This way, the starch from the pasta is more concentrated, and that makes the sauce.

Left: pasta cooking in my shallow fish pan.
Right: Tonging the pasta into the saucepan so as not to lose the cooking water.
​
Casio e pepe (Spaghetti with Cheese and Pepper) 
Serves 2 as a small main course.
180 gm good quality spaghetti
90 gm finely grated Pecorino
1 tbsp whole peppercorns (more or less - should that be more or fewer?)

• Have ready a shallow pan to cook the pasta and a saucepan to finish off the dish.
• Roast the pepper in a dry pan until the aroma starts to rise. Remove, crush coarsely, and set aside. (Roast ready crushed pepper and you'll sneeze all evening.)
• Place the pasta in the shallow pan. Cover with lightly salted water - approx. 3 cups.
• Bring the water to a boil, then simmer, moving it around occasionally.
• When the pasta is 3/4 cooked, (you decide) have ready the saucepan sitting on a low heat. "Tong" the pasta into the saucepan along with 1 cup of the cooking water.
• Stir gently and watch as the water becomes opaque. Check that the pasta is cooked to al dente at this stage. (Ladle in more water if you think you need it.)
• Add the pecorino and pepper.  Stir a few minutes until silky smooth and the cheese has become part of the sauce.
• Serve immediately.

The cheese of course can be your choice, but try Pecorino first. I've found it to be more nuanced than Parmesan. (Pretentious, moi?)

After I'd finished writing and "researching" this, I discovered Alex - Just a  French Guy YouTube
Highly recommended. This guy is HOT.  Introduce him to a beginner and get some cooking happening. The French Guy
Then follow with his next episode where he improves on the method and worries about the "Italian backlash".

By the way, I did tell an Italian.  Rosa thought my first dish was too saucy and preferred the one below. (Perhaps she prefers the plate.)

Try it and tell me how you go.

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What's the mystery fruit? They're large, like a mango and smooth.
They're Japanese quinces.
Given these by a friend from her tree, I had to make more quince paste. Perhaps it was the ripeness, but the pectin content was intense, making a very firm paste. ​

​This is a time consuming, heavy going and dangerous production (nothing wrong with that).  The only reason I'm a dab hand at it is that it's one of the few things for which I use my Thermomix.  No erupting molten paste, no risk of repetitive strain injury from hours stirring the pot.

The Spanish idea to serve quince paste alongside say, Manchego, (a firm, sheep's milk cheese) is now common to most  cheese platters.  But for cheese accompaniments that go beyond the usual...

​
​

• Think French-style with bread or British-style with crackers, Bath Olivers or my Ikea favourite, Knäckerbröd Råg.
• More and more people are drinking white wine with cheese.  Think sweet white with blue cheese, fortified (wine or muscat) for firm, sharp cheese.

These are all worth trying - and don't over-crowd the  cheese. Don't serve more than three varieties.  A single cheese is very elegant.
​
The rugged individualists can do as they please of course but I'd suggest pears or grapes over  strawberries (no!), dried figs over glacé fruit.

By the way, if you're offering a crisp "ficele" of a baguette (long, small, round, named after a pice of string), cut it on a slant rather than serve nasty little "knobs".

Pre-occupied with hospitality workshops, I missed two important dates, (three if you count World Chocolate Day, which hardly needs a memory jolt). 

Don't know how I could have missed last week's World Negroni Week.

I was led to the Negroni through Luca Turin's articles and books on the subject of scent (The Secret of Scent and Perfume: The A - Z Guide.) His writing is brilliant (but perhaps I say this because I agree wholeheartedly with his ratings). He gave up his "smellings" for a while due to the demands of his real job as a biophysicist, although occasional blogging suggest that the bug is still strong.

He extolled the allure of bitterness - in scents, in food and in life. A touch of bitter could be found in the perfumes of Bandit (Piguet), Knize 10 (Knize),  Bois de Violette (Serge Lutens) for example. One could imagine a life of of bitter greens, dark chocolate (of course), wafts of Chanel's Cuir de Russie,  a cello concerto by Shostakovich perhaps, and a Negroni, packed with ice. 

Playing with variants (or deviants) - Negroni week, Wilmott's, Adelaide.

They say it was invented in Florence in 1919 when a certain Count Camillo Negroni asked his barman to up the ante on his usual Americano (Campari, sweet Vermouth and a large splash of soda) by replacing the soda with gin.  This could be challenged by a General Pascal de Negroni in 1857 but you know how these tales escalate...

The concoction (equal parts Campari, sweet Vermouth, gin) is stirred, poured over plenty of ice and a large slice (or chunk) of orange.  The orange, with its peel, is essential.

It's the perfect pre-prandial cocktail, with the bitterness sharpening the appetite (not that I've ever found appetite a problem).

AND...
It's been a year since the passing of Anthony Bourdain and not a week goes by without a reminder of his down-to-earth, sensible and sensitive ideas.

"Basic cooking skills are a virtue.  The ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency should be taught to every young man and woman as a fundamental skill. It's as vital to growing up as learning to wipe one's ass (sic), cross the street by oneself, or be trusted with money."

BUT, in the kitchen and at the key-board this week, I've been all over cacio e pepe  (like a pitbull on a poodle, to quote Seinfeld's Library Cop). This is a pasta dish that is creamy and saucy without the addition of butter, cream, (and sometimes even oil), relying simply on exploiting the starch in the pasta cooking water. Brilliant.

AND, how "spooky", as Dame Everage would say.  Turns out this was Anthony Bourdain's favourite, all time, come what may, desert island pasta dish!

​Recipe to come.

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Bits and pieces before I go full bore in the next few weeks on what's not healthy with the lunatic fringe of so called health and wellness (IMHO).

John Baxter is Australian and married a French family.  He is a writer on film and biographer of directors such as Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel, Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen. Other books immerse you in the history, lifestyle, food and cooking of his adopted country. He also takes personalised tours of the city. https://www.johnbaxterparis
If you love film, history, France or food, you'll want to spend months with these books.  (They also kindle nicely.)

​The new brutalism...

Ruggedness is the order of the day in restaurant tableware and drifting into homewares, if the style influencers have their way.  Rarely plates but mostly bowls, these seem to be chiselled from igneous rock, drilled from reinforced concrete, hewn from granite or  gouged from cold volcanic lava. They are heavy, chip easily and must be hell to stack. (Do they offer weight bearing exercise for the staff?)
How I long for a bit of porcelain – clean, bright, tough, fine, durable.

Bowls are for toddlers, not adults.
Food nestled at the bottom of a bowl can look adorable but let’s be honest.  It’s awkward to eat, especially with the fork in left hand, knife in right hand method. No wonder we’re seeing some strange cutlery holdings. (Pasta is traditionally eaten with a fork only and the side of a bowl helps with the twirling action required.) In between mouthfuls or when you’ve finished, what happens? Your cutlery falls into the bowl. How I long for a flat plate, with an edge, an edge of at least 4 cm.

The dehydrated cocktail...

Sipping your Negroni, your nose deep in the glass, you appreciate the hint of orange peel from the generous slice of fresh garnish. You can go further and spritz out the oil from the skin. But what’s this? Jars of thinly sliced orange (preferably blood orange, for appearance) dried to a crisp, now decorate the bar and your cocktail. A modern fad but where’s the aroma? Cute but no subtle layering and interplay of scent and taste. 
Let’s have some fresh slices of orange or lemon, cucumber for the Pimms and celery for the Bloody Mary. These dehydrated slices also come half dipped in chocolate and they're not bad - but in drinks? Is it a case of the fad being more important than the whole?
How I long for the breakdown of all those bloody dehydrators.
​
Not all fashion fads need more than Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

Help me out here.  Tell me I'm dreaming, I can take it.
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 A glam and modern plating of a traditional Persian / Iranian dish.  Please don't call it healthy.  (It is, by the way.) Just call it delicious.

There have been sad losses over the last few months. I begin to understand that one can be slim, trim, energetic, positive, clever and still get Parkinson’s, die of cancer or have a stroke.  One can smoke heavily, drink cola, eat fast food, avoid fresh water, watch Channel 7, be a grumpy bugger and live well into your late eighties and beyond.
 
But what an incredible apparatus is the body! It continues to detox our system (with our wonderful liver) without any outside "juiced" intervention, keeps us laughing, moving, thinking.

Nonetheless, people continue to be obsessed by "health",  filling their lives with fear, ritual and self-denial. I am involved in an on-line forum answering questions on food, cooking and ingredients, which is fuelling my cynicism. For some reason, I have been chosen and channelled over to the "nut-case" and lunatic fringe of so-called "health". Ah, how little they know me! 

See below a random selection of questions. I am choosing to abandon my involvement rather than wait for them to ban me for my  sarcastic responses.

• Would my health improve if I drank a cup of olive oil every day for five years?
• How unhealthy does a salad have to be before you can no longer legitimately call it a salad? 
• Is pizza healthy if I just eat the toppings & cheese and throw out the crust? 
• Can you eat very unhealthy and then eat fruit to cancel it out?
• Is canned spray cheese gluten free?
• What are good ways to sneak more vegetables into your diet?
• What personal health benefits have you experienced from kimchi juice? 
• Is it true you can get sick from eating fish and an orange at the same time?
• Is it true that eating star fruit can damage your kidneys? 
• Does eating a rock cause hardening of the arteries? Salt is a rock, not a fruit, vegetable or plant. People who do not eat salt, do not get hardening of the arteries. 
• How much exercising is safe while on a 3 day fast? 
• ​What are the pros and cons of an all smoothie diet?
• How many calories are in the average blueberry ( 6-9mm in diameter/ or 1/4 to 1/3 of an inch)?

They're selling Turmeric Lattes in Woolworths, for heaven's sake! Perhaps a mug might calm me down after my kale, kombuchu & chia smoothie.***
​
​That said, you may be feeling a depletion of energy or health. You might need a genuine and massive ingestion of leaf greens. Try Kuku Sabzi, below.

Kuku Sabzi
(What is a bunch? A bunch of violets or a bunch of peonies?  Impossible to measure recipe quantities like this.  So I’ve done the hard work for you and weighed.)
 
200 gm silver beet, washed and trimmed of some part of stalk bottom. 
60 gm spring onion, finely sliced, green included
20 gm dill, main stalks only removed
60 gm coriander, main stalks only removed
60 gm parsley, main stalks only removed
2 tsbp ground turmeric
teaspoon of salt
6 eggs
 
You are aiming finally for roughly 500 gm.

• Trim the herbs of the tough centre stalks but no need to “go to the wire”.  Because of the fine chopping, you can leave some stalk.
• I’ve measured  - more accurate than “bunches”. The mixture is variable, and depends on what you have. 
• Whisk the eggs and pour onto the chopped herbs.  Add the turmeric and salt.
• Arrange in a buttered tin, about 20 cm diametre
• Bake in the oven about 25 minutes at 175˚C
• To serve, decorate with walnut halves and slice.

 
Purists may be horrified but I got help with the chopping – a bit of a short whiz in the Magimix, then finished by hand, chopped with a knife.
Mine were also cooked in 12 individual muffin tins and served on a creamy bed of walnut sauce and cucumber.

​***Disclaimer - I never drink from a mug.

Traditional serving  - cut into slices (note how a circle is cut in the centre).
Served at room temperature, perfect for a party or buffet.
​
Now, you know how Popeye got his strength.

Making canelés - Cadillac market, near Bordeaux.  (Note silicon moulds.)

Bumped into a friend last night who told me her daughter had been "playing around" with using bees wax in her canelés moulds. Never again! She had blocked her drains!  Use butter. 

BUT, this story is  too good not to share.
​Adam Wynn sent this minutes after the post Sweet Mysteries of Life "went to air".

"Ah… Canelés plucked at my heart-strings.
I was introduced to them in Bordeaux 40 years ago. Once available only in Bordeaux, they’re now everywhere. They are super popular in Japan at the moment and even suburban and country bakers and cake shops carry them.
 
As for origins, I actually know the true history, away from the myths. The main ingredients are intricately tied to Bordeaux's history.

People think that the great wealth of Bordeaux and its merchants came from wine. True, Bordeaux has done rather well out of wine over the years, but the real solid, massive wealth of the Bordelais came from slavery. Its dirty little secret, brushed over now, trying to be forgotten, is that Bordeaux was the port négrier of France, its Liverpool.

The massive amount of valuable goods from France's slave colonies came in through Bordeaux. The huge wealth this generated allowed for the building of grand wine estates and the complete renovation of many a mouldy castle.
 
The main ingredients of canelés were goods from slave-labour, from overseas territories-  and one from the wine industry.

• Rum from Martinique
• Vanilla from Madagascar 
• Sugar from Haiti, Martinique etc.
• Eggs yolks from wine making.

 
The traditional way of fining or clarifying a red wine was to use eggs whites, about six per barrel. For a Château with perhaps 200 barrels, there would be 1,200 eggs yolks left over. This is still a problem and I can attest to the fact that the workers get fed a lot of quiche and omelettes, rather rich ones at that.
 
As to which nun or baker came up with the recipe we’ll  never know. The murky history of the place is buried in that very recipe. 
 
Perhaps now canelés are getting a little over exposed. I agree that copper moulds are best. I got a large bank loan and bought some. I have stainless steel ones as well but they are not as good."

Adam Wynn
Wine maker & Honorary Japanese Consul-General, Adelaide

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Someone was making muffins for a morning tea. To make them “healthy” she wondered about using alternatives to castor sugar such as agave, coconut sugar, honey or maple syrup. This got me thinking of our history with sugar.
 
Until very recently, sugar was scarce enough to be kept for very special occasions – feasts, galas, religious festivals. The same could be said also of deep-fried food. (Think sugar coated donuts filled with red jam.) On scanning my books, the very special foods for special occasions were sweet. The ingredients were saved up, stored, put away for a massive, often communal bake.
 
Now, we have desserts, cakes, pastries and donuts whenever we want and that means generally every day.  How quickly did the very pretty, heavily iced, little cup-cakes take off! No wonder we look at sugary foods with trepidation.
 
If you’re having a morning tea or say, a dessert for a birthday celebration, you’re going to use sugar. Forget the alternatives. Sugar is sugar is sugar – forget the shape it takes, the mystery of coconut sugar, the romance of maple syrup, the longevity of honey, the fake “health" benefits of agave. It’s all sugar and that white stuff is the only one that really makes a good cake!
 
Now, treat yourself to a canelé.  These appeared in Paris patisseries about 25 years ago and the story goes that they’ve come out of Bordeaux but with a confused and long history "dating back hundred of years".  Stories range as far afield as artisan barrel makers and convent nuns to apiarists and Jewish bakers.  My cynicism tells me it could be “fake news” but a fraternity of bakers in Bordeaux has been formed to safeguard the purity of the canelé.
 
They’re a seemingly plain little cake but totally irresistible. Baked in special copper, fluted moulds, they are crisp on the outside and chewy, custard-like inside. Dare I risk saying they’re a little bit like a sweet Yorkshire pudding!
 
The cost of the moulds is ruinous and the sort of thing you only buy with heady, devil-may-care abandon on holidays. Silicon moulds are now available at a fraction of the cost, standard size and mini. The “crust” is not as crisp but…
 
They do contain sugar (hence the crispy exterior) but just eat them now and again.  As Michael Pollan (my food hero) reminds us, you can eat fast foods such as waffles, hamburgers and chips (French fries), just make them yourself.  This will take time and prevent you from having them too often.

I haven't tried them in a plain mould e.g. muffin tin or dariole, but it's worth a go.

Like a pancake batter, this mix needs to rest overnight and can even go longer. You can make up a jug-full and cook them day after day.  (But that defeats Michael Pollan's maxim.)  The inside of the mould should be coated in bees' wax, helping the dark caramel-like exterior of the cake but this is cumbersome.  I've tried it and now just butter them.

Canelés - 
(This is easily done either by hand or with an electric mixer or Magimix.)
Let batter rest for 6 hours or better still, make it the day before.
2 eggs + 1 yolk
500 ml proper milk (not low-fat)
225 gm castor sugar
50 gm butter (+ extra for moulds)
100 gm plain flour
Vanilla (*real but your choice of medium)
2 tbsp dark rum

• Heat the milk with 1/2 the sugar to just under boiling.
• Off the heat, add butter, vanilla and rum.
• Beat eggs and remainder of the sugar until pale.
• Sift over the flour.  Gently fold in.
• Pour on the milk and blend.
• ​Put the batter in a jug, cover and rest in the refrigerator.
• When ready to bake, chill the moulds and paint the inside with melted butter.
• Set the oven at 175˚C. fan.
• Fill moulds 7/8 full. The batter will rise. (Keep left-over batter for another day.)
• Bake for 50 mins.  They can be allowed to get quite dark.
• Best eaten that day.

*I use a good French vanilla paste.  You can also be a purist and put a vanilla bean in the milk to infuse and scrape out the seeds.

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ckfood@ozemail.com.au
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Nibbles to be passed around to guests at an Art Gallery opening  - tiny bocconcini sandwiched between cherry tomatoes, "drizzled" with basil oil.
Nice, but these are not canapés.
What do we call small, light morsels of food passed around to standing guests or to friends not yet seated, to entertain them possibly, while waiting for others to arrive?

Pre-dinner nibbles, appetisers, pre-prandial snacks, hors d'oeuvres, amuse-gueules, amuse-bouches, canapés?

In French, un canapé is a couch or a sofa, so a canapé acts as a little "couch" for a morsel of tasty food on which to nestle.  It could be a round of rye bread topped with smoked salmon & sour cream, it could be a sliver of pineapple topped with spiced pork, it could even be a humble Jatz cracker with cheddar and a pickle.

We were always trying to find different "canapés" to build on - a round of cucumber, a small square of crisped polenta, a finger of toast, a blini, a ball of pressed rice - all to inspire us to match a topping.
​
So baby bocconcini and cherry tomatoes are nice, but they're not canapés. Canapés are pre-prandial snacks/appetisers but not all pre-prandial snacks are canapés.
​

L. to R.
Cocktail glass - prawns, mango, mayonnaise, whatever & perhaps with a prawn off the side. ("Vintage" dressing - equal parts ice-cream & tomato sauce.)
Ethnic - deep and moody, comfort food, any garnish will be "old school". (Jasmin restaurant.)
Stacked - layered, tall as possible (salad helps), generally circular, must be "deconstructed" to eat.

L. to R
Meat and Three Veg - homely, ticking off the five food groups.
Rustic - delicious gnocchi and mushrooms, artfully "plonked" on an earthy plate. (André's Cucina)
Verrine - Food piled in a glass (or even more on trend, in a preserving jar).

L. to R.
Zen - conscious simplicity and perfection - C.M.'s Peach Melba 
Take-away - when the going gets tough. (Just a personal social experiment, of course.)
Geometric - Raspberries and Pistachio - Paris, Le Grand Véfour, my spiritual home.

L. to R.
Linear - a string of ingredients rather than a recipe!
Scatterings - bits of this and that, arranged...
Spoons - for tiny morsels of deliciousness - cocktail food, pre-prandial nibbles, canapés. (Never anywhere to put the empties.)

Do you remember any others?  
​What's trending now?
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