Happily, this article I wrote about the forest dessert at Sydney restaurant Sepia was published in The Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks back. Here’s the online version.
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chefs & cooks
If cooking with fire is going to be the big thing in 2012, and I have no doubt it will, then Al Brown’s book Stoked is going to be the hot cookbook of the year.
Labelling the barbecue an icon of Kiwi life, the book explores a vast range of cooking outdoors techniques, from grills to smoking, spits, outdoor ovens including tandoor and pizza, and how-tos on smoking and firing up the best barbecued meat. He forages for mushrooms and does whole pigs in underground spits, he does smoked duck. The book is a veritable (smoke)house of new cooking, or old cooking styles brought back in vogue.
There are more than 100 recipes, there’s an emphasis on fast and tasty, and there are recipes for bruschetta, burgers, pizza, fritters, chargrilled seafood, beef, lamb and chicken, ribs, plus slow roasted meats. There’s game including venison, duck and goat, plus salads and classic cake tin slices. How very New Zealand.
My father’s mother, a New Zealander (like my dad), used to make the most gorgeous slices, coconut and jam things I used to adore as a child. And I remember sitting as a toddler on the beach in Auckland, before it was the developed and upmarket place it is now. We’d pick pippies from the sand with our toes, then cook them on an open fire – me wrapped in terry towelling nappies and draped in (New Zealand) wool blankets on the beach, the billowing smoke curling around me. Having my happy sandy-footed family around me, and sucking pippies from shells, is one of my enduring childhood memories. I’m going to bring back family tradition with this book and start cooking open fire again.
There’s a gorgeous video to go with the release of the book, it’s enough to inspire you to hand in your Australian passport and cross over the Tasman for a simpler life. I’d do just about anything to traipse over there right now and do a day’s foraging and food exploring with this guy. My favourite part of the video is the last scene, a gorgeous labrador flop in three parts (sitting, elegant lie-down, and … flop), resigning to the atmosphere, an open fire, and no doubt exhaustion from a day’s outdoor exploring.
The book features stunning photography by Kieran Scott, shot in NZ’s amazing scenery, including the high country above the Wakatipu Basin in Central Otago; the rugged south Wairarapa coastline; hunting and fly fishing at the 8000-acre Ngamatea Station in the Central North Island; wild porcini mushroom gathering in Canterbury; an outdoor tandoor oven with Indian friends in Wellington, and a hangi up the Whanganui River. Buy the book, Bro.
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Little video I made about El Capo, a little place for Latin street food in Surry Hills. Our waiter brings grits with pork and an almond milk that’s supposed to cut through grease, and a kingfish ceviche with tiny white cubes of perfect fish. He talks of Oaxaca in southwestern Mexico, where you can eat anything from bugs to grilled perfect chicken street side.
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Anthony Bourdain, who I met last night for dinner (thank goodness for this incredible job of mine), chats about food writers and food critics. Insights into food reviewing, the current cooking and celebrity chef craze, his views on AA Gill, and the Sydney Writers Festival.
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A controversial and swear-ridden viral video featuring Aria chef Matt Moran has been making the rounds. In the iPhone video, on the set of an advertisement, Moran yells at a crew member who throws out some food Moran has plated up. Here it is.
It has been revealed though, that the video was in fact a hoax that aimed to shed light on the incredible wastage of food. Moran is asking us to think twice about throwing away food. He emphasises that billions of dollars of food is thrown away every year. Here’s the full video.
OzHarvest, the food-rescue charity lead by Ronni Kahn, provides a toolkit for regional communities to carry out the OzHarvest mission themselves, to collect excess food and give it to people who need it. Australians throw away $5.2 billion a year of good food, and 3 million tonnes of food is driven to landfill in Australia each year. Two million Australians rely on food relief at some point every year. 60,000 low-income working families in Australia go without meals at least once a day. It makes sense for a charity like OzHarvest to put two and two, or food and mouths, together. This viral campaign sees Moran launch REAP. For more info, click here.
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This cooking school is the perfect opportunity for beginners to get their hands dirty, writes Kate Gibbs.
It’s a wet, monsoon-like morning in the Adelaide Hills and at 9.30am I have shrimp paste pushed under my nose to smell. It’s followed by coconut milk, coriander and fish sauce, each scent more powerful than the one before. It’s a less on how to cook a Thai feast and a lesson in the virtues of spices to shock you out of a morning blur.
Guest chef Kelly Lord, head chef at Noosa’s Spirit House, is leading the Thai Feasts for Friends class at the Sticky Rice Cooking School.
He explains the five elements of Thai cooking: hot, sweet, salty, sour and bitter. Above him, a wall is scrawled with the autographs of chefs who have gone before and in front is an impressive array of gnarly roots and fragrant herbs, 18 sharp knives, 18 plastic boards, 18 aprons and 18 eager students.
[FULL STORY here: 8 February 2011, The Sydney Morning Herald]
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This time last year I was in the extraordinary New York City. Today, a year ago, I was making chocolate souffles at the Institute of Culinary Education, perfecting my beating and work with chocolate, then tasting other groups’ apple and calvados variations, wondering how cointreau would go in mine.. Cooking magical things in the snowy city, crunching ice under long boots back to my wood-floored and high-ceilinged room in mid town, pulling my hat down low and my scarf over my cheeks as I leaned into blusters and swung open the doors to gilded department stores. And then I discovered Anthropologie. Oh bliss. And the elaborate window displays are just the beginning. I sit here now with an Anthropologie cup filled with camomile tea next to me. I washed the dishes tonight and dried the plates with anthropologie towels. I wrapped a pretty floral apron around my waist as I pan fried a thick-cut sirloin, I timed the potatoes in the oven with a turquoise clicking binging timer on my fridge. A mass consumer I am not, but things remind us of where we have been, and where we must return.
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If Sydney’s Japanese restaurants’ menus could be lined up in a row, we might be excused for thinking it is a case of the usual suspects. Salmon avocado rolls, crispy fried soft-shell crab rolls, beef teriyaki.. sigh. But a New York style Japanese fusion restaurant, Monkey Magic, is setting a new agenda. Suzuki jewfish with dashi and lemongrass consomme (below), a salted caramel semifreddo with pineapple chip … New head chef Shea Crawford (above, right) has joined the restaurant having worked at New York’s acclaimed Nice Matin and Oceana Restaurant, where he worked under the tutelage of Andy D’Amico.
Now as head chef at Monkey Magic, Shea has collaborated with Tsuboi and head sushi chef Michiaki Miyazaki to create a new menu flush with European influenced Japanese fusion fare. The so-named Crab Leaves is crab meat bedded on a betel leaf with a touch of ginger, chilli and lime, not a bad thing to go with a tall lemongrass julep (above), a gin and lemongrass cocktail. The slow cooked pork belly is braised and served with apple and ginger puree, salad of fennel, chinese cabbage, orange and chives ($27).
The usual suspects are still here, but the soft shell crab roll ($15) comes with flyingfish roe, tomato, mizuna, fried leek and spicy mayonnaise. And then it can be followed by the wonderfully unusual silken tofu cake (above), with white lemon sorbet and tuille ($13) or the sugar cinnamon beignet, which comes with a chai latte and sweet cream ($13).
Monkey Magic: 3&4, 410 Crown St. Surry Hills (02) 93584444
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Adriano Zumbo, of course. Theses oatmeal and ylang ylang macarons are soft and chewy on the inside, and crispy on the outside, again, of course. But even more amazing were the rice pudding and the coconut and pineapple macarons, the first with that creamy pudding flavour folded into to the not-too-sugary macarons. Pretty clever mister Zumbo.
Pictures by Kate Gibbs, taken using tiltshift.
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Next year I’m going to Spain. Sometimes you need to write these things down. Spain is not just paella, as the very talented foodie Gwyneth Paltrow, whose blog Goop I adore, has pointed out.
“There are tons of A-MAZING foods there. And when it’s done properly it’s the best food in the entire world. There is one episode where we were in Barcelona and we went to this tapas bar called Inopia. The meal still stays with me. It’s one of the best meals I’ve ever had.”
Here’s the menu from this incredible bar, only half of which I can decipher. Or check out the little short film from the insides of this uber cool bar as well.
My darling friend Kristin Hove has just returned home to Norway from Sydney, but when she was here she’d collect all these wonderful people to her flat and cook for us – or get us all to bring a plate with a certain theme guiding our culinary hands. As I converse, one way, with Gwyneth on the merits of Spanish cooking, I might plan a Spanish feast for friends, with these olive oil drizzled anchovies and super fresh seafood doused in oil and laden with garlic and spices and chargrilled.
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