Though this is such a simple dish, it has plenty of flavour. Try to use the sweet, juicy and plump South Australian mussels which need no scrubbing and preparing. This is a great dish for sharing, with a pan on the table, along with plenty of crusty bread for mopping up the sauce.
100g butter
125g speck bacon, diced
3 golden shallots, finely chopped
1 small onion, finely chopped
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
A few sprigs thyme, leaves picked
1 bay leaf
1kg black mussels, cleaned
200ml dry white wine
250ml PHILADELPHIA Cream for Cooking, a cream alternative
½ cup finely chopped flat leaf parsley
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Crusty bread, for serving
Melt butter in a large saucepan on medium heat. Cook bacon, golden shallots, onion, garlic, thyme leaves and bay leaf for 5 minutes until just soft. Add mussels, stir to combine and increase heat to high. Add wine and cook, covered, for 3-5 minutes or until mussels start to open. Stir through PHILLY Cream for Cooking and bring to boil.
Remove from heat, stir through parsley and season to taste. Divide between 4 large bowls or serve straight from the pan and let everyone help themselves along with the crusty bread.
Tip: Don’t season until the very end – it’s unlikely you’ll need to add salt because of the high salt content in the mussels and the speck or bacon.
Another tip: Don’t throw away mussels that haven’t opened. It’s really a hug waste and they’re totally fine. Just add closed mussels back to the pot for one minute. If they still don’t open, pry them open with a knife. They are FINE. Mussels will smell absolutely awful if they’re off, and they very very rarely are. I only every discard mussels that are cracked open before cooking.
Is that the time? For heavens sake the weeks and days and, yes, months have flown by. Japan, the sprawling city of explorable gastronomic nooks, was of course amazing, and Christmas too. Oh dear. Back on track and planted at my desk, I’ll start posting on the various skiing, food and travelling adventures. Meanwhile, thank you so much to blogger extraordinaries Jeroxie and Simon Food Favourites and Noodlies and Food, Booze and Shoes for their time and energy last weekend while I rambled about various food tips and made us lunch. We went along to the new Concrete Blonde in Kings Cross, where my healthy lunch was totally upstaged by a whole roasting lamb on the spit, and chatted about food styling and photography. I made three simple dishes – a tuna nicoise crostini, a beetroot and broad bean salad and mussels in a cream and speck sauce – and then we shot them. Me being an ambassador for Philadelphia, the gist of the day was to include the Cream for Cooking and cream cheese products into the day. I mainly just loved hanging out with the bloggers, using the incredible kitchen at Concrete Blonde, and sharing cooking and photography tips between some very clever people.
Jeroxie took a little video of me picking through a bunch of beetroot in search of some decent soft little leaves to add to our salad.
And this is Noodlies’, or Thang Ngo’s, much longer video of me making the mussels. Thanks for posting you two! I realise now why you were holding your phones and cameras so still – those pesky video cameras! I hope it makes sense, and hope it didn’t feel quite so rambly on the day.
Meanwhile, I’ll post the recipe for the mussels here post haste!
Mochi sweets, those glutenous rice balls, are traditionally filled with sesame paste, cream or red bean paste. But the wagashi parlour and cafe, Higashiya, has overhauled the culinary tradition, filling the doughy balls with the likes of peach, edamame paste and blueberry. Rolled balls of gelatinous rice are gem-like sculptured pieces, pretty morsels of silk and goo.
There’s pumpkin and cheese, mashed chestnuts and brandy jelly, ginger, orange and chocolate, sweet potato and black sesame butter, macadamia and sweet potato, rum and fermented butter, cashews in mashed sweet potato.
The powder-coated or polished bites are served with the spirit Shochu instead of the traditional thick green tea. Though eating any any of the stores still feels like some ancient Japanese tea ceremony.
A pretty collection of books for food lovers has been released by Penguin Books, giving makeovers to some of the world’s top food lit.
A Dissertation upon Roast Pig and Other Essays by Charles Lamb and Claudia Roden’s A Middle Eastern Feast can fill in the gaps of your foodie library. I’ve been told only certain types of women read cookbooks in bed, so I’ve taken to reading these instead. Agnes Jekyll’s A Little Dinner Before the Play extols the merits of a cheerful breakfast tray, and conjures up a winter picnic of figs and mulled wine. Frankly it’s divine.
I open, randomly, the chapter Meatless Meals:
“Here is a breakfast or high-tea notion for a busy worker on a long winter’s day, when time and thoughts race too quickly for more deliberate nourishment: A crumpet with lots of butter and salt; on it an egg, or maybe two, perfectly fried, the pepper-mill just going out of action, and all served piping hot in a warmed muffin dish. This is moderate cost, simple in preparation, nourishing and nice.”
To any dietary cookbook author, I plead you take this route instead of the joyous and manic “isn’t exercise fun” one. In her chapter For the Too Fat, Jekyll writes this.
“We are reminded in Scripture that ‘All flesh is grass,’ but, as a great artist once added reassuringly, ‘We cannot be sufficiently thankful that all grass is not flesh.’ No one likes to be fat; it is unbecoming, fatiguing, and impairs efficiency. And although the condition is often the result of defective metabolism than of undue or indiscriminate appetite, still the experience of the war years, with their scarcity of the flesh-making foods, shows that weight can be reduced by a diminished consumption of dairy produce, sugar, and starchy foods. Unfortunately, all the nicer things are on a weights and measures black list, and the annual advice of an eminent financial authority to ‘spend less’ must be paraphrased into a diminished consumption of all nourishment for those who would grow thinner…
“If that insidious enemy, soup, be held indispensable at dinner, at least avoid the vegetable purees and bisques made with cream, butter, root vegetables, and rich fish, also the savoury potage in which milk and flour figure.”
Penguin has made a large part of the collection available in Australia, and at the top of the pile on my bedside now is Buffalo Cake and Indian Pudding by Dr A.W.Chase. The author, a travelling physician, salesman, author and self-made man, traipsed around America in the late nineteenth Century collecting recipes and domestic tips from people along the way. There’s a recipe for Kansas Puffs and for Love Knots for Tea, which are little cakes folded over in the shape of “love knots”, to have with tea.
Elizabeth David is there too, of course, in A Taste of the Sun. These words you don’t realise you’re reading, but instead you travel with her and pour over a Lasagne Verdi, “large strips of pasta coloured green with spinach”. It’s enough to send a food writer’s heart aflutter.
Taken as a bite of one book or a whole feast of food writing, this is a collection of delicious writing.
Peking duck pancakes and the most incredible, sweet, soft coconut flesh laden drinks, and Vietnamese rice paper rolls stuffed with silken prawns. Yes, this was lunch, found at a Miss Chu stall at the MasterChef Live event in Sydney.
A production line worked away scattering Vietnamese mint, coriander, and pretty bunches of marinated tofu, prawns or a satay minced chicken inside the rice paper rolls. Queues of people waited patiently to grab the event’s heathiest lunch. Larger bamboo steamers filled with dumplings sat over boiling water, stacked and billowing the scent of Asian ingredients. The prawn rolls contained almost sashimi prawn, cooked perhaps in a squeeze of acidic lime juice and wrapped with crunchy bean shoots and green paw paw. A peanut dipping sauce, spiked with chilli, is the dish’s crowning glory.
The Masterchef Live event, which is on for three days and finishes Sunday, was absolutely packed on Friday, more than 20,000 people shoulder rubbing to get a view of their favourite chef, learn new knife techniques, how to cook perfect calamari, and the secret to cooking perfect fish (don’t overdo it!). I was delighted to see Miss Chu’s healthy Vietnamese rolls inspire a longer queue than one doing unhealthy pies and fried things.
Prawn toast, that greasy Chinese staple served in yum cha outlets across Australia, was taken to a new level at a cooking session held by Sydney chef Dan Hong, who reinvented the dish for the foodie crowd. Hong, of Lotus, Ms Gs and El Loco, demonstrated how to make the chopped-prawn and sesame on toast appetiser in one of a few hundred events taking place over the weekend.
Hong cooked a prawn and sesame toast with yuzu mayonnaise, a favourite on his Ms G’s menu in Potts Point. The dish involves finely chopping raw fresh, adding a drizzle of sesame oil and coriander, and then spreading that thickly over thinly-sliced toast. The open-sandwich is then sprinkled with sesame seeds and deep fried for several minutes, cut into fingers, and drizzled with yuzu mayonnaise.
“You want a thin crispy base, and heaps of prawns,” Hong told the crowd. “Prawns give it flavour, and who doesn’t love mayo?” Ms G’s does a combination of Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese cuisines, said Hong. There’s a mixture of herbs like mint and coriander, “there are no rules, it’s all about lots of flavour”.
Also appearing over the weekend are chefs such as Tony Bilson, Greg Doyle, Peter Doyle, Peter Gilmore, Matt Kemp, Kylie Kwong, Spanish-born Miguel Maestre, Jaques Raymond the French chef based in Melbourne, and Junior Masterchef’s Anna Gare.
Dan Hong and his prawn and sesame toast. All pics by Kate Gibbs.
Just love the light, airy, nordic style of photographer Ditte Isager, who hails from Copenhagen, Denmark. Inspiration comes from the Dutch Masters, storytelling, and the effects from motion pictures. The photographer shows that overhead food photography can be completely wonderful, and the use of soft linens and minimalist style is rich with texture.
I found the wonderful Ditte Isager via my friend, photographer Kristin Hove, whose Norway-based blog is a constant inspiration.
An old recording of when Snoop Dog visited the Martha Stewart show, and they both made brownies. In an amusing turn, Snoop does a rap about making brownies, while Martha, hip hop as she is, joins in to the awkward rap.
Snoop: “Trying to make some brownies, but we’re missing the most important part of the brownies.”
Martha: “Which is, which is, which is …”
Snoop: “No sticks no seeds no stems.”
Martha: “You want green brownies.”
Snoop: “Yes.”
Martha: “He wants green brownies. Brownish green brownies.”
Snoop: “The greener the better!”
This is a tweaked version of a recipe that was published in The Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Living yesterday, in my column The Minimalist.
Braised lamb is a quintessential spring dish that can be a real celebration of a new season, or unbearably heavy. The difference has a little to do with the lamb, and a lot to do with the vegetables and other additions. Here, cinnamon and eggplant turn would-be lamb stew into a spiced, light dish that sings in the new season. I had a version of this dish in Morocco, where the vinegar-drenched sweetness of raisins cut through the richness of the lamb, while lemon juice and fresh mint kept things positively joyous.
One of the great paradoxes of the modern grocery shop is that the best cuts of meat are sometimes the cheapest. The fat-marbled lamb shoulder cut is forgiving for being able to cook more or less forever and still be soft enough to cut with a fork. Most pantries are stocked full of the basic spices used here, which are worth having on hand.
The challenge in this dish comes with the browning of the lamb, essential for any flavoursome one-pot meat dish. Most braises begin with browning, and this is no different. The addition of stock also bumps up the flavour. The easy technique comes in the long slow cooking, and once all browning is done the dish can be left alone for more than one hour to do its magic.
1/4 cup raisins or dried apricots, chopped2 tbsp red or white wine vinegar5 Lebanese eggplants2/3 cup extra virgin olive oil500g lamb shoulder (boneless meat)2 large onions, finely chopped2 garlic cloves, finely chopped1 x 400g can tomatoes1/2 cup chicken stock1 tsp ground coriander seeds1 tsp cayenne pepper2 tsp paprika1 tsp ground cumin1 tsp ground cinnamon1/2 bunch mint leaves, roughly choppedMint leaves, to garnishJuice of ½ lemon
Marinate the raisins in the vinegar in a bowl, set aside. Cut the eggplants into 2cm thick slices, then sprinkle with sea salt and let stand for half and hour in a colander to draw out the bitter flavours.
Heat half the olive oil in a heavy-based frying pan and fry the eggplant in batches until golden on all sides. Drain on paper towel and set aside. Trim the lamb, if your butcher has not done it for you, and cut into 4cm dice. Heat the remaining oil in a heavy-based saucepan with a tight-fitting lid and lightly brown the lamb in batches. Remove lamb from the pan and set aside.
Sweat the onion in the same pan over a very low heat for about 10 minutes, or until soft and translucent. Add the garlic and some sea salt and cook, stirring for a minute, then add the tomato, raisin mixture, browned lamb, stock and spices. Bring to a very gentle simmer, cover and cook for 1 ½ hours, or until the lamb is soft and easily pulls apart with two forks.
When ready to serve, add eggplant, lemon juice and chopped mint to the pan, and toss together until well combined. Divide the lamb among 4 large bowls, garnish with mint leaves, and serve immediately with cous cous.
Fresh off a one-star Michelin nod in 2010, Longman & Eagle, a restaurant that does snout-to-tail pork and all meaty good things in Chicago, decided to start its own hotel as well – as a place to sleep off food comas perhaps. Jared Wentworth is the chef here, and he offers a regularly changing menu that [...]
The Barbican in London has recently launched the Food Hall and Book Bank. Market stalls, a deli and sweet counter contained in this extensive arts centre, which has more than 18 different stores and nooks. There’s also a Book Bank – a bring-and-take-away bookstall stocked by Pan Macmillan. The formal restaurant upstairs boasts a macaroon [...]
A sweet little sweet potato experiment done by a young girl obviously into the idea of organics. Informative and gorgeous. Great to see kids asking questions about the food we eat, and taking it into their own hands.
Sweet little kicky retro Friday video reminding us that summer will return. And then we can all just jump about on lawns with pastel coloured trinkets, macarons and best friends.
The Kitchen Inc. blog is written and edited by Kate Gibbs - a journalist, author and cook.
Food, travel, design >> How, when entwined together, these things inspire our daily culinary experiences >> The Kitchen Inc. covers food, kitchen-based inspiration, and workable design as it impacts our dining, eating, cooking lives.
Kate Gibbs writes a weekly column for Good Living in The Sydney Morning Herald on cooking with kids: Kitchen Cadets. She is the restaurant reviewer for Sunday Life magazine in the Sun Herald. She is a regular contributor to the SMH on food and travel.
Kate is a co-author of The Foodies Guide to Sydney 2011 and 2012 and is a contributor to SMH Everyday Eats 2011 and 2012 and Good Cafe Guide 2012. Kate has 10 years' journalism experience and has written for Russh, Australian Gourmet Traveller, Frankie and others. The interest in journalism began at London's The Evening Standard newspaper. Her first cookbook, The Thrifty Kitchen, was published in 2009. Kate's mother Suzanne Gibbs and grandmother Margaret Fulton are also in the food business.
In The Kitchen Inc, Kate writes restaurant, bar and cafe reviews, and shows the most interesting and inspiring places to eat and gastro-explore. Kate reviews new food-relevant design and books, she writes about new trends in cooking, how different ingredients are being used by our top chefs and cooks, and how to use these ideas at home.
