I love a road trip. Wind in your hair (or airconditioning in your hair), music strumming, a gorgeous destination and a boot packed with chilled nibbles for the route. It was this idea that inspired the latest The Perfect column in Sunday Life magazine. My New Zealand grandmother Marion used to pack homemade sausage rolls for my parents in their twenties as they headed off on some road trip to the South Island, or up to the Bay of Islands. My parents still remember these morsels, and I’ve always wanted to do them myself. Using shortcrust pastry instead of puff pastry is important – they hold together better, and taste so much better cold. The meat is chopped rather than minced, which I much prefer – there’s a real texture instead of the spongy sort. Soft chicken sandwiches, sliced almonds giving a pleasing crunch, are perfect palm-sized snacks for the road.
Preheat oven to 200C. Line a baking tray with baking paper. Combine meats in a bowl, add nutmeg, zest and thyme, season with pepper and mix well. Place pastry on a floured bench top, cut each sheet each in half. Divide and shape meat mixture into 4 sausages, each as long as a pastry sheet, then roll each in parsley. Place 1 sausage along the edge of a pastry sheet, brush pastry edges with water. Fold pastry over filling to form a long roll, open at the ends. Repeat. Cut each roll into three, place rolls on baking tray, brush with milk and sprinkle with poppy seeds. Bake for 25 minutes, until golden.
Chicken, almond and caper tramezzini
Soft Italian chicken sandwiches for the perfect pit stop.
Cover 1 x 320g chicken breast fillet with water in a saucepan, season with sea salt and peppercorns, simmer 10 minutes. Turn off heat and leave in water for 10 minutes, then remove and let cool. Use hands to finely shred chicken, then combine in bowl with 3 tbsp mayonnaise, 2 tbsp almond slivers, 2 tsp capers, rinsed, and ¼ cup chopped parsley. Season to taste. Pile mixture on 6 thick slices white bread, crusts removed, top with 6 slices. Cut into square quarters, wrap and pack.
A feast of colourful foil-wrapped eggs and golden bilbies were the chocolate prizes of excited garden hunts on the weekend. Now it’s the adult’s turn, try this chocolate tart with Italian coffee icecream. These two recipes were published in my new column in Sunday Life magazine on Sunday, did you catch it? This tart is totally simple to make, and the coffee icecream is a perfect pairing. The Perfect column in Sunday Life is all about situational perfect occasions. We match the perfect wine with the perfect meal and the perfect playlist for the perfect occasion. Check out the next column this weekend.
Chocolate tart
Why should kids have all the fun at Easter? Rich chocolate in a most decadent form, light and oozing on a biscuit pastry base.
450g sweet shortcrust pastry
150g dark chocolate
125g unsalted butter
5 eggs
1 cup caster sugar
½ cup plain flour, sifted
Blind bake shortcrust pastry in a 23cm diameter round tin according to packet instructions. Preheat oven to 180C. Combine chocolate and butter in a bowl over saucepan of simmering water, stir gently until melted. Set aside. Combine eggs and sugar in a bowl over saucepan of simmering water and whisk until thick, about 10 minutes. Ribbons should form when whisk is lifted. Whisk chocolate mixture into egg mixture, then whisk in flour. Pour mixture into tart case and bake for 15-20 minutes, until just set and still wobbly. Serve at room temperature with coffee ice cream. Serves 8-10.
Italian coffee ice cream
Spoonfuls of velvet melting coffee give an adult note to the indulgent feast.
Whisk 6 egg yolks and 3 cups cream in a heat-proof bowl. Add ¾ cup roasted coffee beans and place over saucepan of simmering water for 10 minutes, stirring until thick enough to coat back of a spoon. Remove from heat, add 1 cup caster sugar, stir until dissolved. Cover, refrigerate for 2-3 hours to infuse. Turn freezer to coldest setting. Use ice cream maker and follow instructions or strain custard into 10x20cm loaf tin, cover and partially freeze. Transfer to bowl, beat well, then return to loaf pan and freeze overnight.
THE PERFECT.. playlist: Ethereal and boppy in one, with a twinkling Australian accent, Holly Throsby’s record Team.
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!
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.
1. Blahblah cushion: Maybe it appeals for its literary cool, but the graphic is also quite quaint. 2. Missoni Home cushion: scatter-worthy in the most pretty colours ever. Pick up at Missoni or from Selfridges, as with the other cushions, online. 3. Some days you just need a pillow that says it all for you. 4. Castle & Things, and things. 5. I’ve discovered this new thing, it’s called caviar. Have you heard of it? Awfully pricey to be sure but a lovely treat with the champagne. And when it’s all gone I shall keep the tins to keep other precious things. 6. Lights on please. All of them. Their cords are all so pretty I want them all sparkling.
Watching produce being created builds up an appetite, writes Kate Gibbs.
It’s milking time at the station and children are counting the sheep. This is culinary adventure tourism on Kangaroo Island, where you can walk with the animals, talk with the producers and watch soil, sea and man turn things into food.
A litre of milk, taken from each ewe every morning and mid-afternoon, is transferred to a refridgerated vat in the factory to be pasteurised and turned into Island Pure fetta, haloumi, Kefalotiri and yoghurt, either plan or swirled with local Ligurian honey.
This paddock-to-plate theme is the general premise of the island’s gastronomic attractions. The tourism mainstay of farmers and food producers is showing visitors exactly what they do and then how it tastes.
[FULL STORY here: 8 February 2011, The Sydney Morning Herald]
Ahh …. The English seaside in the late 1960s … fairgrounds and pebbled beaches, long piers that have since burned to ashes, and stalls selling pots of shrimp and jellied eel from tiny cups. This picture is of my mum Suzanne Gibbs, also a food writer (we wrote The Thrifty Kitchen together). I love her long heavy tweed skirt with the white shirt tucked in, and the cute little pointed and booted toe. She’s bought the jellied eel, something that was still a little out there even back then, an unusual choice compared to the much more common prawn cocktails, scampi, cockles and crabs. But the ever-adventurous foodie went for something I still have never dared try. But she regretted it hours later. The eel made her “the sickest I have ever been”, she tells me now, and the story has become family folklore. “Remember that time with the jellied eels…”
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.
Incredible cheese, all from Farmgate Cheese. The selection changes regularly, not that you’d need it to. The melty Woodside Charlestone Jersey Brie, when ripe, is just about the softest and earthiest thing you can imagine eating. And the best part is you can order the cheese online, ready to be stored away for your next dinner party (or cheese need moment).
1. Gorgonzola Piccante: a cow’s milk blue cheese from a region north of Milan.2. Livarot: cow’s milk washed rind cheese from Normandy, France. Possibly the strongest of the Normandy washed-rinds.3. Hampers: home delivered cheese, possibly the best idea since … bread and cheese. 4. Queso Manchego: made in the La Mancha region of Central Spain from the milk of sheep of the Manchega breed.5. Woodside Charlestone Jersey Brie: the moulds ripen the cheese from the outside in, a process that takes around six weeks.6. Truffle Pecorino: Boschetto al Tartufo is a mild semi-soft cheese made using a blend of sheep and cow’s milk, loaded with white truffle shavings. 7. Tarago River Strzlecki Blue: a goat blue from the Gippsland region of Victoria. 8. Milawa Goat’s Camembert: from the the Gipplsand region of Central Victoria.9. Ossau Iraty: New seasons milk of the Manech ewes is collected from the bergers of the Ossau Valley and Iraty region in the Basque, between France and Spain.
The contents and layout of your fridge can affect how you eat, how you feel about eating, and obviously how much waste there is. After writing The Thrifty Kitchen, and researching how the way the coolest part of the house is laid out impacts what we eat, I put together this shortlist of tricks. Furry [...]
This pink and green Scandanavian cured fish is, to me, Christmas. The smell of the dill and the sugary cured trout (which I find less strong in flavour to salmon), with that hint of vodka, is what comes out with Champagne for breakfast on Christmas morning in the Gibbs house. It’s may not be Christmas [...]
One fashion and food enthusiast is bringing the drama into photography. Luxirare writes about Macarons and Scorpions, edible Crayons and turquoise blue parfait, even Egg Nog. But it’s the photography that leaves us spinning. Her post on Sushi Handrolls is awesome. Sure the use of dry ice may be a bit over the top, but [...]
It was just yesterday I was there but, like it melts you when you’re there, the tropics melts away quickly. But the colour – on my legs, my nose, and the garish brightness of the market stalls -remains. Green oranges that smelled like orange tictacs when they were squeezed, white creamy-centered coconuts, bright toys for [...]
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 experience >> 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 Sunday Life in The Sun Herald called The Perfect... She is a regular contributor to the SMH on food and travel. She writes food features for The Wall Street Journal.
Kate writes for The Foodies Guide to Sydney, The SMH Good Cafe Guide and SMH Everyday Eats. Kate has 11 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 by Penguin in 2009. Kate's grandmother Margaret Fulton is 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.
