My last week has been very busy with cooking.  I’ll be having some friends of French descent over this Friday night as a pre-Bastille Day celebration.  There will be 10 of us in total, and I want to make sure that the food is of a standard that my friends have come to expect from me.  I usually don’t make meals of the same ethnicity as my guests as I know that they will be comparing what I’ve made to what they grew up with. 

One of my pet peeves is the way how Italians crap on about food and their mother’s cooking.  So many Italians, I have met seem to think that not only their mothers are the greatest cooks in the world, but also that Italians are the only ones who know how to cook.  I am so over the idea of the integrity of ingredients and the simplicity of flavours that I hear so many celebrity chefs on television harp on about.  This Eurocentric chauvinism about food seems to deny the validity of complex flavours developed in the east, such as Indian and Thai cuisine.  I just won’t have it.

To all you Italian guys out there, who were always going on about your mother’s food, get over it and move out on your own!

This now brings me to the French. Sure enough, some French food is fantastic but to be quite honest, I’m not interested in eating so much offal and saturated fats.  I remember being quite shocked when I first looked in the bible of French cuisine “Larousse Gastronomique” at how much butter, cream and guts there was in so much of the so-called traditional French cooking. 

I keep on hearing about how the French eat these high saturated fat meals, and that they have a low incidence of heart disease in their country.  Some say it’s the red wine that is drunk with the meals that is helping ameliorate the effect of such a high-fat diet.  I think the reality is, that years and years of eating high fat food has killed off all the generations of the people who can’t metabolise so much fat and what is left is a country that is populated with people who are genetically engineered to efficiently process fat.

As for me, I have been genetically engineered to efficiently accumulate fat so my body can produce cholesterol and store it for hard times by lining my arteries with it.

Since I am getting together with my friends for, what is essentially a French celebration, I thought I’d put aside some of my fears and prejudices and cook them a French meal.

Whenever I cook a dinner for a large group I always test the menu two or three times beforehand to make sure I don’t have any surprises on the night. Since I wanted to avoid fatty foods I thought I’d cook fish dish of John Dory with shellfish, saffron and merguez broth. Sure enough there was cream in the recipe, but I used about a quarter of what was specified.

Quelle horreur!

The end result wasn’t bad, but I felt that merguez overwhelmed the lightly flavoured fish.

Since trying my hand at the French sea food meal, I was asked by a friend of mine who is a professional chef to help him with the preparation of some Indian dishes that he wants to serve at his wedding in November. So I spent the whole of Saturday with Mark at his place, cooking enough food to totally stuff 20 people.

 The idea of the dinner was to trial a variety of foods and then give a questionnaire to our 20 guests to see what they liked and didn’t like.

 There will be about 150 guests at this wedding and it looks like Mark has made quite the rod for his back considering that he wants to do all the cooking. I have foolishly offered to help. It looks like it’s going to be one hell of a day.

On Sunday, my wife and I had a really lovely day sitting out in the backyard reading the weekend paper and drinking vodka martinis. Although it’s winter here in Australia, it’s not that cold, and since we light up the chiminea, it’s quite comfortable to sit outside all day.

Because I have discarded the idea of serving fish for my French friends, I’ve latched on to the idea of preparing poulet chasseur (hunter’s chicken). I spent Monday, trying out a combination of recipes, and I think I’ve come up with something that my guests will hopefully like. I’ll post photos and the recipe after the dinner.

Over the weekend I’ve been listening to Bebo & Cigala on their album Lágrimas Negras

This last picture is in response to Pat Coakley’s question, What’s On Your Refrigerator?

The stuffed toy is the amazing, everlasting and very cantankeous “Magic Pudding” character from Norman Lindsay’s children’s book of the same name. The black dancing figure, magnet, is of Kokopelli a South Western American fertility deity, usually depicted as a humpbacked flute player who is also a trickster god and represents the spirit of music

I’ll be having a bunch of French friends over for dinner in two weeks time for Bastille day celebrations and I though I’d trail a meal I’m going to make for them, John dory with shellfish , saffron and merguez broth.

For you non-cognoscenti out there merguez are a sausage from North Africa that are popular in France. I make my own merguez from scratch and I thought you may want to try making them sometime, since most of you live overseas and are unlikely to ever come to my place for dinner.

The music I was listening to as I was making my merguez was my new favourite CD, Amadou & Mariam on their album Dimanche a Bamako

Ingredients

1 kg lamb
2-3 teaspoons harissa (you can test how hot you want it by frying up a little mince and tasting it)
5 large cloves garlic
2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons fennel seeds
2 teaspoons cumin
2 teaspoons ground coriander
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon paprika
1 teaspoon smoked paprika (pimenton)
1 teaspoon ground allspice
250ml iced water
 
Thin sausage skins
 
Method

Try and use whole spice for recipe as the flavours will be more intense. Put all the whole spices into a dry frying pan over medium heat. Keep the pan moving so that the spices are evenly heated. Take off the heat when the spices start smoking and grind them up in a mortar and pestle. When the spices are fine, add the garlic and pound it all together.
 
The meat should be cold.
Trim any skin from the lamb, but leave a good proportion of fat and cut it up into chunks.
 
Toss all the ingredients (no, not the skins as well) into a food processor and mince. Then spoon the mince into either a sausage maker (not necessary) or, the way in which I do it, a cloth reinforced piping bag (the sort of the used for icing cakes). Place the sausage skins over the end of your filling device of choice and fill them up. Easy!
 
Cook sausages slowly on low medium heat and don’t prick them, the fats inside help the meat cook and the flavour will be better.

I didn’t bother putting any photos of the merguez up because they just look like ordinary sausages.

Pat Coakley has created a fantastic image on her site “Single for a reason” of what “Dinner at Razzman’s house” would be like based on my posts. Go and have a look, it’s got fires in it that I’d love to sit around.

For a bit of contrast here’s an image (taken last night) of what “Dinner at Razzman’s house” was actually like.  The woman cradling the dog is my neighbour (the best in the world), Sandra. Engogirl (my wife) is the guardian of the chinmea making sure I don’t succumb to my pyro tendencies.

There are sometimes that I feel so disassociated from the rest of the society that I live in.  Like one of the androids in Blade Runner once said, “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe” and I feel some of those things that I have seen, separate me from most other people in the way how I cope with stuff that doesn’t go my way.

I am constantly amazed at the whingeing that I hear in this prosperous and fat first world country that I live in.  It seems to me that some people are living in some sort of antiseptic bubble that insulates them from the rest of the world.  It blows me away to think that some people (here in Australia) think that it’s acceptable to complain about water restrictions, and the fact they can’t wash their cars in the time of a drought. Or that it’s okay to harp on about not getting financial assistance from the government in the form of the baby bonus when you’re earning over $150,000 a year.

“HARDEN THE FUCK UP!” 

I’ve also noticed that a lot of Bloggs, that I’ve been reading lately have been discussing idiosyncratic eating habits.  It just goes to show what prosperous lives many of us lead in that we can be so choosy about what we eat.  There was a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald about people who falsely claim to have allergies to foods.  Apparently real food allergies are very rare and can be life-threatening, but it would seem that some people like to claim they have allergies as it is an attention seeking ploy that sets them apart from the mainstream.

“HARDEN THE FUCK UP!”

I’m hardly without sin in this area myself as I hate and won’t eat pumpkin, cucumber, watermelon, or any offal. I’ve been thinking that on an evolutionary level it’s not a very smart strategy to be a picky eater.  We’ve spent millions of years developing a taste for eating just about anything that ever lived. 

“HARDEN THE FUCK UP!”

My stepfather (Manfred), who was in Germany during the Second World War as a teenager, and in the Hitler youth, always likes to say “you can shit on my plate and I’ll eat around it”. Manfred has told me stories about the deprivations that he and his family went through at the end of the Second World War, when they were forced by the occupying Russians to leave what was once the German part of Prussia known as Upper Silesia (now a part of Poland) and walk to Berlin with no supplies.  When I was a teenager and I used to peevishly complain what was for dinner, Manfred used to remind me about how he and his family had to live on grass soup for two weeks and that I should be just grateful for what I have in front of me. 

“HARDEN THE FUCK UP!”

My mother who grew up in post-war England during the time of rationing had very little patience for any sign of picky eating.  My mother’s standard response to any question about what was in a meal was “Shit with sugar on it!” “What do you think this is a restaurant?” “Shut up and eat it!”

“HARDEN THE FUCK UP!”

The woman in the picture above is a beggar that I saw in 1974 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia during the war. There were so many pathetic beggars in Phnom Penh at that time.  It was a regular freak show of maimed soldiers; orphaned children; refugees, lepers and war widows, not attractive enough to become prostitutes. In short, people with REAL problems.

I saw the woman in the photograph nearly every day, and one day I saw her on her hands and knees vomiting onto the sidewalk.  Her whole body just convulsed with spasms as she retched up what little food she had in her stomach.  When she had stopped being sick she scooped up the vomit and re-ate it. She obviously was too poor to be able to waste food by leaving her vomit on the footpath.

This brings me to the whole concept of contrast.  Chiaroscuro is an Italian word describing light and shade. It’s a term that one will see quite often in books about art and in particular, the Renaissance era.  By varying the tone of a drawing by simulating highlight and shadow, an artist can create the illusion of three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface. A bit of contrast makes things in general, more…….. “real”.

As I go through life and get older, I’ve come to realise that the old adage “whatever doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger”, has a lot of of truth to it.  I think that the bad things that have happened to me in my life have helped me appreciate to a greater degree, the good things that happen to me.  I also think that because I’ve had such an extreme range of highs and lows that I am better able to deal with life’s little disappointments. A little chiaroscuro serves me well.

When ever I have some difficulties, I just reflect on some of the really negative benchmarks that I have, in my stupidity, accumulated. I was nearly killed when I came under mortar fire by the Khmer Rouge. I’ve been beaten up by the police and a mob in Morocco, nearly had my foot torn off on a train, smashed my car in the desert nearly killing my wife and I, and last but not least, lost 10 kg (22lbs) in two months when I had malaria and was starving in Phnom Penh.

To lighten the mood of this rant, I’ve put in this little video, titled “Harden the fuck up” by Ronnie Johns (an Australian comedian), impersonating a famous Australian criminal and murderer called Chopper Reid (the subject of the excellent movie “Chopper” starring Eric Banna).

I haven’t posted for the last little while, because my sister (Penny) and her friend (Jennie) came to visit me all the way from Canada.  Jennie is in the catering industry and won an all expenses paid trip to Thailand for her and a friend, through her job.  Because Jennie is associated with a large hotel chain their stay in Thailand was very luxurious.  From what I was told, their time in Thailand was a blur of company organised cultural events and feasts.

Since Penny was in the general area, she came to visit me here in Sydney.  We don’t get to see each other, very often, because we live so far apart, and the last time I saw her was about two years ago, when I was working in Vancouver, Canada.

Penny and Jennie arrived on Sunday morning a week ago, and I organised a large welcome lunch with some of my friends. 

 I cooked a Sicilian lemon chicken dish for the main course and for the desert I made a panpepato (sort of like a rich brownie made with figs and raisins that have been soaked in marsala and mixed with cinnamon, roasted walnuts and cocoa), with a tangy lime, mint and pineapple sorbet over it and topped off with a jelly of blood orange juice and Campari with a garnish of dark chocolate and mint.  

Our welcome lunch went well on into the evening, and much wine was drunk.

During their stay in Thailand penny and Jennie took some Thai cooking lessons so last Thursday they cooked my wife, her parents and I a delicious meal. 

 Since we were having Thai food, I thought it would be a good opportunity to introduce my sister to the excellent sauvignon blanc’s that come from the Marlborough region in New Zealand.  So in the name of wine education we went through five different bottles of delicious Kiwi wine.

Most of the artworks that I own are way too expensive for me to actually buy and the only way that I can afford to own them is to do work for artists and receive their work as payment. Since my sister has been very generous to me in the past I wanted to return the favour by giving her a painting by Mai Long. Mai owed me two paintings as payment for some work I’d done for her a couple years ago, so on Saturday (the day before my sister was to go back home), we went around to Mai’s place and my sister and I picked out two paintings. Penny selected a work from 2000 called “Mateship” for herself and I picked out a painting called “Water sports”, from 2003 for my wife and I.

I thought it would be a good thing for my sister as a tourist to Australia to meet Mai, who was featured in the “Lonely Planet”, DVD (Lonely Planet Six Degrees Series 1: Sydney)of Sydney. Mai has been very busy producing work for her next exhibition of “Aquamutt and Dag Girl”, and her apartment was absolutely stuffed with unfinished colourful papier-mâché dogs and mutant girls.  In the photo below you can see the painting “Mateship” on the floor to the left and up on the wall behind Mai’s head is a painting by Reg Mombassa of Mambo fame.

Since Saturday night was the girls last evening in Sydney I cooked up some roast lamb on the barbecue, and we got stuck into some very nice Shiraz. As the night wore on, and more wine was drunk, the music got louder and my wife and I’s collection of silly costumes came out.  It wasn’t very long before nearly everybody was nearly wetting themselves with laughter. 

Penny and Jennie’s trip ended on a really nice high note, and the only real drag was that we had to get up at 4 a.m. on a Sunday morning so they could catch their flight back home.

My wife and I’ve had a very sociable weekend that started off with a dinner at my friend Peter’s place on Saturday and finished with a birthday party at another friend, Tim’s place on Sunday.
 
Dinner at Peter’s place is always a joy as he is a good cook, an excellent conversationalist and to top it all off he collects wines and enjoys sharing them with his friends.  Normally I am not a fan of lamb, and when Peter said that he was cooking lamb shanks my heart sank a little, but needless to say, the meal due to Peter’s skill in the kitchen was fantastic.  Peter slow roasted the lamb shanks in wine, and the meat just fell off the bone, it was really excellent.  The standout wine of the evening that Peter shared with us was a bottle of 1990 Penfolds Bin 28 Kalimna Shiraz.  It was a beautifully smooth, full flavoured (as one expects from Australian warm climate Shiraz) wine that perfectly complemented our meal.  If you think you might want to try this wine here are some tasting notes for it (that I lifted from an on-line wine catalogue):

“Deep red in colour, 1990 has established itself as a classic Penfolds vintage. There are intense dark chocolate and sweet berry aromas, complex, revealing many characters in the glass - raspberry, prune, fruitcake, exotic spices and roasted chestnuts. Spice and demi-glace secondary notes add to the aromatic interest, flashes of liquorice, white chocolate and cinnamon arise with a swirl. Medium-bodied and mouth filling, plummy, berried fruits mesh with dark chocolate, mocha and spice notes.”

Due to Peter’s love of wine, and his generosity with it, we always find ourselves staying up late into the evening whenever we go over to his place, sampling the various delicious treasures from Peter’s cellar.  Of course, due to the amount of wine that we drink in an evening at Peter’s we always sleep over so we don’t have to drive back home.
 
After a quick breakfast at the cafe near Peter’s, we headed up to the Blue Mountains (100 km west of Sydney) to have an extended lunch with our friend Tim and his wife Em with a bunch of their other friends to celebrate his birthday.  Tim’s wife Em is a vegetarian, so instead of the normal meat fest that passes for Australian cuisine, there were quite a few delicious salads that were the perfect antidote to the previous night’s dinner.  The highlight of the afternoons repast was a delicious beer cake with a saffron mascarpone filling covered with a raspberry icing made by Tim’s cousin, Kristin.

It was really a great weekend, with fantastic company and excellent food.  When we arrived home, I checked my e-mails to find that Kent Davis who has made contact with me through this blog and I have spoken to over the telephone, had a very lucky escape on the 17th.  Thanks to a smoke alarm, Kent and his wife Pa were woken up just in time to get out of their house, with nothing but what they were wearing as their house quickly burnt down.

In his e-mail to me, Kent had this to say:
“We have lost absolutely everything but our lives. We are wearing clothes from the neighbours now. Our good friend next door has an apartment and has given us a place to stay. The other neighbours have clothes for us. Life is good! Being alive is even better! (-: The important thing to know is that we are alive, in love, and that we are very, very lucky.”

Later in his e-mail, Kent said this:
“Typing is slow because my eyes are filled with tears… Before the fire was out our neighbours gave us so many generous commitments for food, shelter and clothing that we truly never felt “homeless” for a moment. As dawn arrived more food, clothing, help and housing offers came. As the day went on, dozens and dozens more friends came to help.”
 
Epicurus said that all we really need to be happy is freedom, food, friends, shelter and a life free from pain. Although Kent and Pa lost their shelter and many things of sentimental value, I suspect that they are so rich in friends that they will be back on their feet in no time.
 
I truly feel that our lives are defined and enriched by our friends. Therefore it’s very important to cherish and maintain our friendships as they bring far more joy and strength into our lives than any material possessions.

Last weekend my wife and I went to Cabramatta in western Sydney with my friend Peter and his friends for lunch.  Although I have lived in Sydney for many years I had never been to Cabramatta before and I had heard that it was a great place to have Vietnamese food.
 
Cabramatta has the mixed reputation as being the centre of heroin distribution and Vietnamese culture in Australia.  Up until recently, smack was sold to junkies, fairly openly in the streets there.  Once a few of the tabloid television shows started running stories about how easy it was to buy heroin in Cabramatta the police finally got their fingers out and started to do something about it.  Heroin dealing has now gone underground, and is no longer a common scene on the Cabramatta streets.
 
Cabramatta has become almost a tourist attraction, because of its large Vietnamese population and the plethora of Asian businesses and restaurants.  On Saturdays Cabramatta is very busy as the streets fill up with people who have come to buy Asian vegetables and eat at the restaurants.

It came as quite a surprise to me when I asked several of the locals for directions to an automatic teller machine, that none of them could speak English very well to the point that they couldn’t understand what I was saying, and I couldn’t understand their replies.  It would seem that the Vietnamese population in that area of Sydney is so large, that people can live there without having to learn English. 
 
Now this isn’t going to be a rant about “foreigners must learn English if they want to live in Australia” because I know what it’s like to live in a foreign country that speaks a different language than I do. 
 
I speak enough French, Spanish and Japanese to get around, but not enough to have anything other than a childlike conversation in those languages. I think that many people don’t realise that when one learns a second language that it is so difficult to have mature conversations with any depth and that is why many non-English speaking immigrants in English-speaking countries tend to stick with their own kind so that they can speak their own language.  I lived in Japan for a year and had a Japanese girlfriend at the time so I learnt enough Japanese to be able to get by, but I found it far less taxing to speak English with native speakers as I could express myself more fully, easier.
 
Every day I accompany my wife to the train station when she commutes to and from work because there are quite a few unsavoury characters about, plus I don’t like the idea of her walking home alone at night.  The area that I live in is mainly populated by blue-collar Caucasians with a sprinkling of Southeast Asians and Sri Lankans, and it is in the process of being gentrified as the price of home ownership is sky rocketing here in Sydney forcing first-time home buyers further westward.  It’s very interesting to see the division in education, when one looks at who is standing on what platform at the train station in the morning.  The people on the platform heading east into downtown Sydney are all in office clothing reflecting in general a higher level of education than those people standing on the westbound platforms, heading out into the more industrial areas.  In general, the people heading east tend to be from a broad ethnic background, look cleaner and well groomed than the mainly caucasian people heading westward who are generally scruffy and display far more jail tattoos than I’m comfortable with.  The contrast between the people occupying the eastbound and westbound platforms is quite stark and to me it displays a cultural polarization. 
 
There seems to be a shift in Australian culture at the moment, with the population becoming better educated and employed in white collar jobs but there still is an element that seems to be in love with the whole concept of being an “outlaw”. A sort of white-trailer-trash-biker aesthetic.  I think many of you would know what I mean.  Homemade tatts, long greasy hair with long beards and black grease under the fingernails, with of course, the obligatory earrings.  To me that whole scene is so anachronistic, and it belongs to a section of Australia, that looks backwards rather than into the future direction that Australia is heading.
 
In the past, I used to see Australia as a cultural backwater but lately; I feel that we are at the forefront of cultural policy.  For the last 30 years Australia has had the forward thinking  policy of “multiculturalism” in which we have seen a shift from a predominantly Anglo-Celtic culture to a far more ethnically diverse culture. Thirty percent of the people who live in Sydney weren’t born in Australia.
 
There are many people of Anglo-Celtic background, who are concerned by the racial and cultural shift happening here in Australia as they feel that many foreigners come from less than ideal philosophical backgrounds and that they will somehow contaminate Australian culture and degrade it in the process.  I think that what a lot of these people don’t realise is that most of the people who have come here to Australia, did so because they thought Australia had something to offer that their homeland didn’t and they don’t necessarily have an agenda to change Australia into a version of their homeland.
 
One of the distressing things I’ve noticed is how some people think that because they are white they are somehow better than people who aren’t. 
 
One evening while I was waiting for my wife at the train station, I saw an old Sikh man make the mistake of asking directions from a dirty and scruffy tattooed youth with bad teeth and the mandatory sports clothing with logos plastered all over them (so beloved of white-trash).  The old Sikh asked his question to which the youth replied loudly, “WHAT?!” The old man would repeat his question to receive the same loud WHAT?!” This cycle happened four or five times until the youth exploded with “WHY DON’T YOU LEARN HOW TO SPEAK FUCKING ENGLISH?!” Then he just stormed off yelling racist epithets at the old man. The poor old shocked Sikh came up to me and then asked his directions again.  Sure enough, his accent was very thick and not that easy to understand but I hung in there and was able to help him out. 
 
The whole experience left me feeling very embarrassed, as I have never been treated in the way that the old man had been treated when I’ve been overseas in countries where I don’t speak the language.  I would say that in general, when I’m overseas, everybody I’ve ever asked directions from has been universally helpful and polite.  It really pisses me off that some ignorant lowlife scumbag thinks he’s better than someone else just because he is white. There are many people of an Anglo-Celtic background here in Australia who would do well if they took the time to learn about other cultures.  In no way am I saying that foreign cultures are better, but I am saying that we should be eclectic and take the best from every culture.

I saw the guy in the photo below eating some pineapple on a stick that he’d bought from a street vendor.

It was a hot day so I went and bought a piece for myself. I wish I had’ve known that the Japanese put lots of salt on their pineapple. Japanese taste is so different to what I’m used to.

I used to live in Canada with a Japanese woman that I met when I lived in Japan and the lunches she used to make for me were always a surprise. The lunch that sticks in my memory (or should I say throat) was banana sandwiches with lots of hot English mustard. She must’ve thought it was the closet thing we had in the cupboard to wasabi.  What we take for granted in the west as “normal” flavour combinations are not so normal to the Japanese.

De gustibus non est disputandum is Latin for “there is not to be discussion regarding tastes” or more simply but less literally ”There’s no arguing taste” 

We had a good crop of beautiful organic tomatoes this year. We had both cherry tomatoes and beefsteak tomatoes and we grew way more than what we could eat so I decided to semi dry and preserve them in olive oil.

Ingredients 

Tomatoes
Light olive oil (enough to cover the tomatoes)
3 cloves of garlic
1 Table spoon of salted capers
1 Teaspoon of dried basil

Method

Cut the cherry tomatoes in half and the larger tomatoes into 1cm (about a third of an inch) slices.

Dry the tomatoes in a dehydrator for 12 hours at 60 degrees C (about 140 F).

Place enough jars and their lids in a oven heated to 120 degrees C (about 250 F) for 30 minutes. Leave the jars in the hot oven until you are ready to use them.

Heat up the olive oil with the three cloves of finely sliced garlic, a table spoon of salted capers and a teaspoon of dried basil. Heat the oil until it starts to cook the garlic then it take it off the heat. You don’t want to really cook the garlic, it’s heated just to help infuse the flavours into the oil and help with keeping things sterile.

Pour a little of the hot oil with the garlic, basil and capers into each the hot sterilised jars and then place the semi dried tomatoes in the jars a little at a time, covering them with a little more hot oil as you fill up the jar.

If you try this, I’d suggest that the oil pouring is done in the kitchen sink in case the jar breaks. Needless to say, hot oil can cause very serious burns so take care at all times.