Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Share your Summer favourites

First hint of summer

I spent five years growing up in the desert. My father, a financial controller, was transferred from Sydney to Kalgoorlie to manage a goldmine in the early 1980s and the rest of the family went with him. So, from the age of seven I felt as if I was living an almost eternal summer. It was fantastic.

We lived in a rambling Federation house. Its verandas were covered in grapevines that produced more fruit than we could ever eat. We had pomegranates, cumquats, apricots, grapefruit, oranges, lemons, tomatoes, pumpkins and a bountiful herb garden. With all that sun, you just need to add water.

My mother is a city girl at heart and she had to make quite an adjustment. To keep busy, she started a catering company with a girlfriend and brought tabouli, coriander, spinach and feta triangles to Kalgoorlie. I used to help, sometimes folding filo triangles or rolling curried meatballs and it was during this time that my love affair with food began.

So each year, at the first hint of summer - the trill of a cicada or biting into a perfectly ripe, deep-red tomato warm from the sun - I get to revisit my youth and those long, hot, dusty days under the cloudless West Australian sky.

Jane Strode

Posted by Monika Jansch at 10:04 AM | Comments 0

Favourite Italian dishes? Share yours.

Inspired by a trip to Perugia, these recipes are a twist on traditional Italian dishes.

Inspired by a trip to Perugia, these recipes are a twist on traditional Italian dishes.

As an admirer of Patrizia Simone's cooking and her generous nature, I knew I would be in for a treat at her recent residential school in Perugia. Patrizia's parents, aunties and cousins all live in and around our villa and the highlight of my 10 days were the times the house party joined the family - for a pizza evening, a Sunday picnic and our final farewell party.

The Simone family (Patrizia, husband George, and son Anthony) are obsessed with food. There were early morning outings to collect: a smoked goose neck from a nearby chef; some specially harvested red-skin potatoes; a "back-up" of eight kilos of handmade tortellini Patrizia's mother had made (just in case); and some special brodo (a light soup). I also visited the pastry shop to make sure I had my fill of bomboloni, the gorgeous custard-filled doughnuts popular at breakfast.

Other outings took us to the remote hilltop village of Castellucio - its altitude making it perfect for drying smallgoods. The local sheep are all for milking; the blond horses are for eating. The wild chickpeas and lentils had all been harvested, the hills were bare and stony and there was a smell of mint in the air.

We travelled to other hilltop villages - Norcia, Trevi, Assisi and as far as Greve in Chianti to taste traditional dishes made by chefs and aunties: pasta with a percentage of semolina to add texture; ribollita (soup) so thick it was ladled over bread in each bowl and eaten with a fork and spoon; torta testa the cheese-flavoured damper-like bread cooked on an iron plate over a wood fire; potatoes baked in the ashes and served split and doused with olive oil; goose stuffed with pigs liver and braised slowly for hours and served as a crostini; a sciachiatta thickly studded with wine grapes and walnuts; and modern interpretations of traditional combinations such as eggplant rolled with roasted peppers around mozzarella and grilled; rabbit stuffed with olives; and stunning pasta with grated zucchini.

The pizza night had all the women lined up making the toppings - slicing potatoes, peeling capsicum, slicing eggplant, grating truffles, slicing porcini. Giant pillows of risen dough were shaped and thrust into a brick oven. In less than five minutes we were helping ourselves. Pizza cutters are unknown; the women used scissors. There were some astonishing conversations between the Italians and the Australians despite there being no common language but there was lots of back-slapping and laughter, and a few glasses of Alberto's homemade wine.

The family has built a permanent shelter and brick oven and fireplace at its own picnic spot on land bordered by scrub oaks and broom, with the ridged Apennines in the distance. I was intrigued by the barbecue procedure. They shovel the coals from the huge oven to a flat bed of concrete and settle iron grilles right down onto these white-hot coals and fan the coals as the food cooks. The grills contained skewered chicken, ribs of pork, sausages and chunks of pig liver wrapped in pancetta. While the meats cooked, the women served pasta to 35, cooked all at once in a copper-sized pot on a portable gas jet. Once lifted into serving bowls - gigantic - it was tossed with a generous mix of grated parmesan and Umbrian summer truffles.

After lunch, the food lovers in the group went truffle hunting with a local expert who later turned out to be a pastry chef. The dog found three truffles in several minutes.

The final party was back at the villa. We had porchetta and salads and cakes. There were strings of lights in the courtyard and a local trio with keyboard. Everyone danced from the eight-year-olds to the 70-year-olds and I waltzed with an older gent and wondered when I had ever been whirled around a floor (and a brick floor at that) with so much skill.

We were so privileged to have been invited into a warm and loving family and made so welcome.

A million thanks to Patrizia, George and Anthony - my perfect hosts.

What are your favorite Italian recipes?

Posted by Monika Jansch at 10:02 AM | Comments 0

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Kids in the kitchen, what are your kids favourite recipes to make?

Children develop a taste for good food when they grow and cook their own, writes Stephanie Alexander.

Much of my time over the past six years has been spent establishing the wonderful kitchen garden at Collingwood College. At the school, every child in years 3 to 6 spends 45 minutes a week tending the organic fruit and vegetable garden and then 11/2 hours cooking delicious "real" food with the harvest. They then sit down and eat with classmates, teachers and the volunteers who have become essential to the program.

Throughout these six years, I have been approached almost weekly by other schools, parents and community groups, all wanting to know more. The questions they asked mostly related to the nuts and bolts. How did it happen? Where did the money come from? How did we convince the staff that the project was important? And as the years rolled past and the garden and kitchen became more established, the most common question became, "How can we do it too?"

So with the book Kitchen Garden Cooking with Kids, we set out to write a realistic blueprint that we hoped would inspire others to contemplate a kitchen garden in their own school.
I believe the earlier children are helped to experience all aspects of good food in an enjoyable way, the more likely it is they will develop an interest and appreciate the wide range of textures and flavours that are available to everyone. But they need to be encouraged and they need practical skills.

So our students know about worms, compost and heirloom varieties, and they also know about the surprising range of salad leaves and how to stuff freshly made pasta with ricotta and silverbeet, how to saute and how to chop with proper chefs' knives. Children can do most things as long as there is a bit of sensible adult supervision where sharp shovels, secateurs or knives and boiling water are concerned.

Every recipe in the book has been cooked by a student aged 8 to 12 and, just as importantly, has been enjoyed by those same students.

Posted by Monika Jansch at 9:44 AM | Comments 0

Pepper is the most regularly used spice in the world. Share some of your recipes.

Pepper (Piper nigrum) is the most regularly used spice in the world and one of the oldest. It is referred to as the common spice and the king of spice.

The pepper plant grows best close to the equator and is a perennial vine indigenous to India. A climbing plant, it is sometimes encouraged to grow around living trees or up framework. After three to five years, the plants fruit from white flowers which then turn into slender clusters of red berries. It will continue to fruit every three years for up to 40 years. The berries turn green and are then picked by hand, sorted and stems generally discarded.

To produce black pepper, the berries are dried in the sun and raked several times during the day until they are black and wrinkled. This takes about a week. To produce white peppercorns, the berries are harvested a little later and then packed in sacks and soaked in running water for a week. This allows the outer husk to be removed, leaving the whitish seed. White peppercorns are not as pungent as the black and have a cleaner, subtle flavour that I prefer when seasoning dishes. Green peppercorns are the unripe seeds of black pepper and are only available fresh occasionally. Thai cooking uses green peppercorns and they also complement duck and game dishes. They are just as hot as black pepper but the flavour is lighter.

Posted by Monika Jansch at 9:41 AM | Comments 0