Day of the Sausage

Much more so than strolling through Bangkok in a pale flared Pierre Cardin suit and smoking Sobranie cocktail cigarettes, making sausages has always defined exoticism for me. There's been a sausage shaped hole in my life and on the weekend, I filled it - in abundance.

Simple principle - everyone brings their favourite meat mix, we make sausages and we eat them. The fact that no-one, including myself had ever made them before was no impediment. I had 30 metres of pig casings soaking, a kenwood mincer attachment and a long red funnel thing. The golden rule is fat - Vince Garreffa says 20% minimum and you listen to Vince. Roll the casings onto the funnel - like you might for an ambitious condom purchase, tie a knot in the end, pop a couple of holes in to let the air out, crank the mincer up and twist every sausage length in opposite directions.

And it's great. It's such an earthy thing to do. It's sex, it's death; it's shit, it's food; it's delicate, it's brute force. It's like Pasolini in pork. Bits of meat everywhere; someone pointing out that 'an animals been shitting in that all its life; instructions to roll as a man,not as a lady; the firming of flesh - it's not for the weak of heart or the repressed of spirit. I think we made about twelve kilograms of sausages with nearly as many different mixes. Sausages were cooked, enjoyed and magpies hung around our house for the next week.

Given that amateur sausage is a dying art for the amateur, I'm thinking that with quite a few kids around on the day, that at least that one of them might get me through to the next century as 'the person that made their own sausages'. It's the quiet hope of a mortality addressing near-forty year old. I also hope they remember the completely awesome birthday cake.

Macadamia Crusted Lamb Rack with other things

Clean-up of pantry (2006 was a busy year for shopping apparently) yielded a bag of macadamia nuts and hence.

Crust is equal parts macadamia nuts and breadcrumbs with some chopped parsley tossed in. Just press on top. You can brown, as I did, the rack beforehand if you like. Marinade is EVOO red wine vinegar, rosemary and smoked paprika.

Minikin is stuffed with couscous, butter, chicken stock, dried raisins, macadamia nuts and pepitas. Mixed together and placed in the cavity. As a handy hint; use a round biscuit cutter to cut a lid out of the minkin.

Underneath the lamb is slices of field mushroom and red onion.

All cooked in 180C oven for 25 minutes*. Rest the lamb rack for 5 minutes. Toss the snow pea shoots in some EVOO and good salt. Serve.

I was really just using stuff I had but it worked together nicely.

*Actually 25 minutes is more of an averaging, the pumpkins could go up to thirty and the lamb could get down to 15-17 if you were after something closer to rare.

Thai Fish Salad

Monday has been declared Marine Monday (or ultramarine monday if you like New Order).

My two serves of Red Throated fackmeIhadnoideaitwouldcostthatmuch Emperor unexpectedly had to stretch to three people. This causes issues; not because I'm a stingy bastard but because the more you've spent on a piece of fish, the less you want to clutter it up with other plate filling distractions and stodge. I thought the best way was a kind of Thai-ish noodle salad, with the nice fresh flavours lifting the fish rather than bury it. Here's the result and bugger me if it isn't fantastic and something you should make and enjoy.

400gm of white-fleshed fish - I used red throated emperor.

200gm packet of sen yai noodles (flat white rice noodles), cooked/softened to packet instructions

1 red chili, finely sliced
a handful of coriander leaves
a smattering of mint leaves
half a red onion, very thinly sliced (VERY)

2-3 tbs of brown sugar
2-3 tablespoons of fish sauce
juice and finely grated rind of a lime

two free-range eggs with dash of fish sauce and a pinch of salt - made into a thin omlette and sliced into thin ribbons
a cup of unsalted peanuts, pan roasted (and can I for once not burn the bastards)
2 lebanese cucumbers, julienned and drained of excess liquid
one lime, eighthed

1. Cut the fish into chunks, stir-fry in oil and then put into a bowl with the chili, coriander, mint, and onion; allowing the hot fish to mingle with the flavours - possibly handing out a few business cards and asking them to get in touch. It should be warm.
2. Give the noodles a quick stir-fry to heat through a little - not to cook
3. Put the noodles in a bowl, add the contents of the bowl with the fish , cucumber, peanuts, and egg. Add the fish sauce/sugar/lime dressing
5. Garnish with lime and extra bits of coriander.

Fabulous.

Unfortunately I don't have a photo of it, so here's a photo of Eva being opinionated:

AND LOOKING LIKE THE LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION

Tenth Anniversary Dinner

Can you knock off work, get to the shops, attend to jobs like bathing child, and bang out a very respectable 10th anniversary dinner? Yes you can.

Get oysters from reputable fishmonger (shucked - unless spending that special night with a DIY stigmata is your thing).
Get a lime. Lop the ends off. Segment. And then trim off the central pith.
Buy goat's cheese and leave to soften on the bench.
Buy reputable smoked ocean trout. (tetsuya has just got some out)
Lay evenly on a piece of glad wrap.
Spread goats cheese over it.
Place it on a bamboo sushi mat and roll. The trick is peeling the glad wrap out of the way, for obvious reasons. Place it in the fridge to chill. And then slice into rounds.

Easy - impress your friends. In fact, if you had a nice bottle of sparkling chilling in the fridge and maybe cooked a few asparagus in butter to have on the side; you'd have a pretty special meal all in itself.

We had a bottle of 1998 shiraz (the fourth of six) so the match was a rib of aged Dandaragan Organic Beef. I stuffed this with few oysters by making a pocket with a boning knife and then sealing it with toothpick. Seared, then put in the oven to cook. Quick wine and cream jus made in pan. Zucchini flowers cooked in a little butter. Green things (radish sprouts? can't remember) tossed with a little very good EVOO and salt and pepper. And that's it.

Memo to me for dessert: use foil when blind baking tart shell to avoid having to dig out dried broadbeans.

Roast Rack of Pork

Umm last week. There was a tablespoon or so of fennel seeds, a couple of cloves of garlic, a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, a couple of tablespoons of Mallee honey, a few drops of Firehorse hot sauce, a tablespoon of finely chopped orange rind, and half an orange. I used one of them fancy Jamie Oliver flavour shaker thingies, which worked pretty well. First up was to crush the fennel seeds, then the garlic, then the olive oil and then add the rest.

Brush over the rack of pork and leave for an afternoon or so. Roast and baste with a mix of orange, apple and carrot juice mixed with some olive oil and honey.

Good. Really good. The sauce was mashed apple and celeriac parsnip and something else, maybe cream, quite possibly a bit of brown vinegar.


enjoy, Don Cake

not-Spanokopita

A lot of people have been asking me what I did with that tin of tin of Bulgarian not-feta that I bought a while back. Well the answer is nothing, but then I used some to make leftover sausage scrambled eggs (slice the sausage thinly, fry up in a bit of harissa and pretend it's chorizo) with not-feta. It's not-feta because it's Bulgarian white brined cheese. I'd assumed this was part of the Protected Designation of Origin Laws but the hot gossip is that feta was originally made in Trakia, Bulagaria and they call it sirene. I can't pretend to know how pissed off Greeks would be about this but according to this post at Balkanalysis.com suggests they've had an initially antagonistic start to their relationship in the 7th Century; a brief period of amity; complications when Greece discovered that Bulgaria was only going out with it because of a bet with Romania; and then finally "strong relations."
Read it all because it has the best bitchy caption about a British PM ever:

In 1912, British fixer J.D. Bourchier was honored with a Bulgarian postage stamp; today, Tony Blair warrants only a babushka in Sofia’s flea market.

It's a shame Crass aren't still around to write "How does it feel (to be not half the man J.D. Bourchier was)"

My own Bulgarian- Greek nexus occurred in 1989 (stop me if you've heard thins one before) when I visited Sofia. Fresh from eating my body weight in dishes with paprika cream sauce, politely drinking pepsi and red wine, and dodging tram fares in Budapest, I should have realised something was up when I became the only person with a backpack on the train. When I got off the train at Sofia station, someone made it their business to walk over to me and call me a "tourist" much like you'd call someone a variation of twat. I went there to catch up with the last known link with my family. I'm pretty sure the last visit to Bulgaria have been in the 1920's by my grandfather. The evidence being a black and white photo of a somber group of locals who may have been at a funeral, or a wedding; hard to tell.

The address was 234-64 something something Sofia and 64 referred one of the randomly placed Stalin-style apartment blocks around town. I wasn't deterred and had spent no small amount of time thinking about what it would be like to be welcomed back by my ancestors; the great-grandson of my great-grandfather who eloped with his fiance eighty years or so earlier. A kind soul, who spoke a little English and a bit of Russian and a bit of French and smoked Malborough Reds, found the apartment block for me and wished me well. I found the door and knocked. And knocked. And knocked. And then a neighbour came out, I said the person's name and then the neighbour made a driving gesture and indicated that she wouldn't be back for a few days.

In mandatory hotel room fees (with roof views) and compulsory currency exchange, Bulgaria was too rich for me and I decided to leave the next day. No pigs slaughtered; no young women giggling demurely while they worked how distant a relation, I really was if at all; and no lashings of yoghurt. I hung out in a bar in Sofia, actually it was more like a cafeteria selling beer, and the night life was surprisingly not good. The next day was shops are closed day except for the shops that didn't seem to sell anything except skis so bought my ticket to Athens for the equivalent of three dollars.

I shared a compartment with some holidaying Poles who gave me food and then when the ticket inspector arrived I found out, as everyone pulled out large bits of paper to my small stub, that the ticket was remarkably cheap because it wasn't a ticket but a seat reservation. The conductor thought it was pretty funny at least and rather than being turfed out in chains, I was able to buy a ticket to the Greek border with the money I hadn't been able to spend with two lev to spare.

A day later I made it to Athens to find the last two thousand years hadn't been quite as grand as the previous two and that if you go to the Parthenon, don't look at your watch with a carton of orange juice in your hand, and if you got to visit the Oracle in Delphi, wear a jumper.
Anyway, the recipe is here. I used a bunch of silverbeet and a bunch of spinach (60/40 greens to cheese ratio) and finely diced a zucchini and when you rinse your greens in, make sure you lift them out of whatever you're rinsing them in rather than pouring them, along with assorted grit, into a strainer. Then wash them again.

Two deliveries and a sale

It's been quite a big fortnight for me and I mean quite big in the same way that a werewolf Sean Connery would be quite hairy (although not on top, which would raise the possibility of a combover werewolf; terrifying yet also funny in a sad kind of way. "You know you're not fooling anyone...aiiiieeeeeeee")

Anyway two weeks ago Eva was born and it does not so much turn your life upside down as create its own space in your brain that squashes everything else out of the way. Although not in a way that creates a large bulge in my forehead and the urgent need to take a piss every thirty minutes. She's also absolutely adorable and makes me laugh, which are great qualities to start life with.

We also managed to get issue 10 of SPICE off to the printers. Well when I say we, I mean everyone else and me distractedly checking commas and apostrophes and asking if it'd kill us if we got it out on the 7th instead of the 1st.

The other thing was the family farm's clearing sale, last Friday. A clearing sale is a kind of garage sale but with heavy machinery and drinks afterwards. It also means that the family farm is sold and so ends my father's forty years on a wheat and sheep farm and my family's 80 year ownership of the wheatbelt property.I grew up there and it was as a good a childhood as anyone could want - I was rarely priveleged. By my teens, the appeal had waned; it became holiday farm work through uni; and by my twenties I'd supplanted my home town of twenty with the 14 million person megalopolis of Tokyo. Although things changed on the farm there was always something I could relate that linked to some part of my life. On the day, most of theses things were lain out in straight lines in the paddock and all that was left in the workshop were the neatly painted labels of where the tools once went.

It was a hot day, the wind blew with dust all day, my first car struggled to raise $50, and I've never enjoyed a can(s) of mid-strength beer so much. The sale went well beyond all expectations, I only got one 'why didn't you take over the farm' question, and a lot of people weren't shy in saying how they'd miss my Dad.

I took two things with me; the Cramphorne wool bale stencils and a leg of lamb from the freezer. This was from one of the sheep on the farm and, as they aren't there anymore, it's the last of the lamb. I roasted it old-style with garlic and rosemary stuffed into slits in the meat and we had our Sunday roast together. Eva didn't quite make it up to the farm and she's a few months away from solids but whatever Toni eats, she gets eventually. And so in an odd, indirect way, the farm became part of her.

A small person

As a believer in music as the companion of all good things　in life, I've always been taken by Californian friend and how on the day his child was born, Beautiful Day by U2 came on the radio and he started crying. As I drove home in what would be a quick stop on the way to hospital the iPod gave me What's Inside a Girl? by the Cramps. Three and a half hours later I found out.
It's another girl.

Cowboy Pie

Sure it's not your 'Gordon Bleu' but when Toni comes back at t minus three weeks and wants shepherds pie even though its in the mid- thirties, then it gets made. Unfortunately she bought beef mince which means its technically cowboy pie. Traditionally you would make it using leftover roast lamb or mutton and wiggle your eyebrows lasciviously every time you said 'Shepherds Pie'.
There's no particular magic in the recipe here - just the usual ragout principle of cooking the liquids out before adding new ones. Lightly brown the mince, then add some chopped mushrooms to soak up the liquids. Add some rosemary thyme and pepper. Then cook out a good splash of leftover white wine. Add some kidney beans and a jar of tomato cooking sauce and simmer until reduced. You want to be able to eat it with a fork but at the same time have some gravy to latch onto the mash. Season to taste.
Meanwhile boil the spuds, mash and then stir in a mixture of hot milk and butter. Spoon over the top of the ragout. I just used the cast iron pan I cooked the ragout in. If you use a spoon, you can tease up little peaks like on a meringue.
Brown off in the oven.
Don't slack off on the salt - it likes it. Them's good eatin'!

FOR TRAGICS: Name that cast iron pan.

OTHER SHEPHERD'S PIE THOUGHTS: If you get Supergrass's "In it For The Money" Bonus CD there's a bit that deadpans "A year's supply of shepherd's pie" which I just really like and it makes me laugh just thinking about it.
Funnily enough, in Zappa's similarly titled "We're Only in It for the Money" there's also a deadpanned "Creamcheese". Admittedly Creamcheese isn't a pie but it does feature in cheesecake which is similar to pie. Did you know Lincoln was riding in a Kennedy?