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 cheese, shrivelled carrots, leftovers with a now greenish hue… The number one trick for keeping the fridge smelling nice is to avoid leaving food in there for too long. Your fridge should have a fast turnaround. If it doesn’t, chances are you’re buying too much, or the wrong things – or you’re not using up leftovers.
If you’ve cleaned it out and you want to freshen up the fridge anyway, try an orange spiked with cloves, or a cotton wool ball soaked in vanilla essence (left in a little dish or egg cup). Some also swear by the value in keeping a natural sponge in your salad drawer to keep fruit and vegies fresh longer.
Wipe the insides of the fridge down with 1 tablespoon bicarbonate of soda dissolved in 1 litre of warm water – about weekly.
Store cheese in an airtight box with a sugar cube in to keep it fresh.
Store eggs pointy side down – it makes them last longer.
Store milk and eggs in the fridge body instead of the door as it’s colder.
Raw meat, poultry and fish should be stored wrapped in paper or in a sealed (not plastic) container so it won’t drip on other food.
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 but we’re all trapped indoors in this cracker cold Sydney weather, so I booted myself to the Sydney Fish Markets this morning with the view to making this. Oh damn I forgot the Champagne..
It’s easy sneezy to make this. I am making it for two (or so), so bought just a large fillet of trout , picking the most evenly thick piece I could find so it cures evenly. But Martin’s Seafood in Rozelle (and the Fish Markets) will also fillet a side of trout for you, which will serve a bunch of friends for a cocktail party or similar. It’s lovely served thinly sliced on the side of mini grated potato fritters, seasoned and packed tight, then fried in rice bran oil until crispy. I used Apple Schnapps today, instead of vodka. You can use other clear liquors but go for something with a clean, almost crisp flavour. To make this, you’ll need to start it 24 hours in advance …
300g fillet of trout, skin on
1/2 bunch dill, finely chopped
2 tbsp white sugar
2 tbsp sea salt (get a good one..)
2 tbsp vodka (or I used apple schnapps)
Combine all the ingredients, except the fish. Rub the mixture over the fish fillet, packing it on to both sides. Cover with plastic wrap, ensuring the plastic wrap is contained inside the dish (or you’ll end up with a fishy mess inside your fridge). Refrigerate for 18-24 hours (max for a larger fillet).
The next thing, 24 hours later, is to make sure the Champagne is chilled (so what if it’s not Christmas!), and thinly slice the trout – slicing through at a slight angle from the top, and pulling it away from the skin when your knife hits the bottom. Serve with slices of baguette, offering condiments like horseradish or pickles, little potato rosti or shots of vodka (go on..).
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 [...]
I found freshly picked crab at this little place in Port Douglas – so perfect I wasn’t sure whether I should make a souffle or just a simple pasta. The votes were in for the latter, plus it’s much less fussy when you’re not cooking in your own kitchen. I used breadcrumbs to give it [...]
Don’t you love it when you can peel prawns on your own, dip them in salt, squeeze them with lemon and eat them all by yourself? Such a satisfying lunch today on the inlet in Port Douglas. Sat by the water with a bottle of beer and a bowl full of ice and prawns. A [...]
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.
