I end up asking around for ideas hoping someone has this brilliant spark of an inspiration – one that’s not pork or duck because, well, I can think of them – that will having me clicking the heels and heading to the kitchen. However all I’m getting is stuff like quinces, feijoas and something called umeboshi which I thought, given my increasing vagueness, was a Japanese character from 70’s Monkey Magic TV show. Remembering all the sage advice buried in this pretty strange show “When what is indestructible meets what is irresistible, the female all too often wins”? It’s even more bizarre that I seem to have 20/20 recollection of anything that happened back then but can’t remember where I put the remote, weird.

So I end up asking people on the street “Hey crazy lady out front of the supermarket, if I did give you my spare change, tell me would you buy a feijoa or a quince?”

Horses for courses is all I can say. Like my wife just went all the way to Melbourne and then Bendigo to see a Grace Kelly dress exhibition, yes, I’m with you, why? And when I come back from the Jaycar store with an Aquapod plastic bottle rocket launcher, she is querying my direction in life.

I’m sure there are many things that you can do with a sub-tropical fruit like the feijoa, in fact I’m positive that you can probably make wine or beer out of them but just because you can doesn’t mean I should. There are people out there way moré qualified to talk on such matters so I feel I should stick to things I know and or grow and failing that pork.

I head outside for some inspiration. Into the garden that is looking pretty neglected and wild.

Weeds a meter tall, I grab a machete and charge around to see what’s still edible. Besides some butternut pumpkins – soup right? – there are just some strange weeds that look slightly poisonous. Poking out of the old chook yard, a tuft of bright deep green spiky leaves capture the late autumn sun, the tell tale sign of some stinging nettle that survived last year’s Glyphosate blitz.  Nettle is like New Zealanders, you think it’s all gone except for one small outpost. If you don’t keep track of it, you find them talking over again.

Yes, I’m starting to get inspired now and begin to look more enthusiastically and energetically, like I need a theme song. Surely there is something that will go with nettle. Then I find a little collection of herbs, thyme, parsley and discover a little patch where I remember there’s some as yet un-dug spuds, all the while the theme song from the original Rocky is building in my head. Yes – “Gettin’ strong nowww” – I have the plan and it’s a good one – “Won’t be long nowwww” – a winter dish to be sure – quieter, “getting’ strong nowww” – and I know I wasn’t going to mention pork this week – louder “Gonna fly nowwww” – but I reckon some nettle gnocchi served with a sauce made from fresh sausage and tomato passato – “flyin’ high nowww” and fading out – with the herbs will be a pretty outstanding result. And try getting that inspirational song out of your head now. It could be worse, I was going to weave in the song from Rocky three “It’s tha eye….”

Obviously if you don’t have access to a farmer who has stinging nettle rampant on the property you could use spinach.

Gnocchi of stinging nettle with sausage sugo
Gnocchi stuffing
500g stinging nettle leaves, soaked in cold water
2 cloves garlic, smashed and chopped
Mixture of herbs: parsley, thyme, basil
2tbsp butter
2tbsp olive oil
salt and pepper

Bring a big pot of salted water to the boil. Cook the nettle in this for 5 minutes, drain well. Heat the butter and oil in a large frypan, once hot cook garlic for a few minutes and add cooked nettle, try and cook out a bit of the moisture, season and blend to a fine puree, cool.

Gnocchi
2-3 cups plain strong flour
500g potato, medium sized, peeled
2 eggs, beaten

1/2 cup parmesan or salty pecorino, grated

Gnocchi stuffing

Bring large pot of water to the boil, cook potatoes in this until quite soft but not falling apart. Pass through a potato ricer and cool slightly. Make a big pile of flour, scoop out the centre so it resembles Mauna loa. Into this crater add the potato, scoop this out towards the edges and add into the new crater the egg, stuffing  mixture and cheese. Start incorporating the potato first and then the flour with a fork. Once you have a thick loose dough that will hold its own start to knead it lightly, you are just after a substance that you can work with. Cut into four pieces and roll each of these out into a thick 2cm diameter cord. Cut into 3cm long pillows for the gnocchi. Keep dusted in flour and covered until ready to cook.

Sugo
4tbsp butter
2tbsp oil

1 red onion, diced

2 cloves garlic, chopped
500g Italian style sausage, skins off and broken up
1 cup dry white
1 cup thick tomato passato
stock or water
Salt and pepper

Heat butter and oil, cook in this the onion and garlic until translucent, add sausage mince and cook for 5 minutes, deglaze with wine and evaporate most of this off then add tomato puree, cook this for an hour adding water or stock as you go. Near the end check and season appropriately. The sauce should be thick but pourable.

To serve

Chopped parsley

2-3tbsp butter

1/4cup parmesan or pecorino

Bring a large pot of salted water to the boil, have the sauce at a serving temperature. Add gnocchi to boiling water in a fairly constant stream, once they rise to the surface scoop out and add to a bowl with butter in it. When the gnocchi are all cooked and buttered, toss with half the cheese and serve in a bowl topped with sauce, parsley and some more cheese

Don’t worry I haven’t deserted you, in this your time of need, just filling my commitments as a father and spending some quality time with my 12 year old. Getting to know him and his interests, which are mainly U.S. sports it turns out. So we are off on a 3 week sporting trip catching some live action of NBA, NHL and NFL along with tours of such places as the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders change rooms in Texas. I know it sounds creepy but no joke you can do this, and we are/did, on a VIP tour of the Dallas Cowboys stadium through Ticketmaster. I presume the likes of Alyssa, Amber, Amelia, Angela et al will not be actually using the change rooms at the time but it’s a good story he’ll take back to his first year of high school anyway, I can see the applause.

Australia day for me is filled with slightly strange yet fond memories and despite being away for many of them over the years there always seems to be a theme that links to my home country. Like just two years ago, sitting in a small, back alley restaurant in Valencia Spain, singing “I come from the land down under” with the Aussie waiter over a plate of pretty good paella and a glass of albarino. Or a very long time ago, like mid-80’s, in Covent Gardens London with almost no cash in the pocket drinking pints of English bitter on a cold night with a boisterous group of ex-pat aussies wondering where exactly I was going to sleep when Barry Humphries arrives to rev up the crowd. Two years later, the Bicentenary, sitting on the balcony of this palatial slightly Greek house on Point Piper watching all the ships and fireworks and coming to the realisation that, firstly my circumstances had changed, and that the girl I was hanging out with my actually be the one.

So I’m away again but will be thinking of you all, back here celebrating yet another year of occupation. If I was to think about what food I’d have to fully enjoy the holiday a few things come to mind. Kangaroo obviously, looks like we are staying so we may as well eat the wildlife, I’m thinking smoked roo, in homage to the English American tobacco company flogging Winnie’s in France with a kangaroo on them and the slogan “An Aussie favourite”. Just fantastic stuff, you can’t make this up. However, I’m thinking more along the lines of a good old fashioned roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, clearly not a real aussie meal but a favourite none the less.

Firstly you are going to have to choose a cut. There are many and it really depends on how many revelers are coming for lunch. I still have bad memories of these huge rump roasts we used to feed the coaches full of tourists in Tasmania, dry at best, almost flavourless but once smothered in jugs of gravox sort of OK. Sirloin is a good cut to use, you can just choose the length and it’s a fairly easy roast to get right. Again, I find it underwhelming and probably better as steaks than a roast. So, moving up toward the head, for me the best roast is the rib eye, on the bone but it’s not a huge cut and if you just have four or so, the centre section of the rib, based around the 3^rd to the 5^th rib, is king. This cut will include the thickest section of the rib cap, the so called spinalis dorsi which is a lovely cut on its own, used a lot in Argentine cooking.

All beef is not the same, so there is a huge difference in what breed is used, what they were fed and how the meat was treated after slaughter. There are many breeds around, obviously waygu is becoming synonymous with quality but Angus and Hereford can be easily as good. I’m a traditionalist and always associate quality with grass feeding, back in Tasmania, Cape Grimm are doing great things with grass fed beef, hard to get here but there are a few on-line butchers who deal with it. The more common feed source is grain, they’ll be given a period before slaughter to eat up on highly nutritious grain, puts on some decent marbling, sometimes up to a year. In the New England area you’ll find Ranger’s valley, they supply such restaurants as the Rockpool group with their grain fed beef. I can say from personal experience that it is equal to grass fed, we did a fairly indulgent tasting of the two cuts a while ago and the ranger’s valley was pretty darn good. Aging is the final quality control point and some would say the most important. Cyrovacing or wet aging is the norm but old fashioned dry aging on the bone is by a long way, the superior aging process.

Vics meats is an on-line butcher that supplies some of our best restaurants in Canberra like Italian and sons and Lantern rooms with quality beef, you can check them out on www.vicsmeats.com.au they don’t supply direct retail to Canberra but if we all get together and hassle them they may or you can make the drive up to Sydney and grab a 300 day grain fed dry aged rib on the bone for around $70 a kilo.

Slow roasting is the best option for this cut, it’s going to be tender, 130C is a nice temperature and if you have a thermometer, the internal temperature should read around 55C for a nice medium rare roast. To achieve a good charry crust you can have the oven set at flat out first and cook for the first 20 minutes then open the door, turn down the heat and continue at 130C.

Another way is the caramelise the outside on a griddle or thick based frypan or even take to it with a blowtorch. Some recipes will have you do this at the end. I like the second option, smother the roast with good salt and pepper, sear it over a very high heat and then wack it into the oven. As a guide, a 1.5-2 kg rib roast on the bone treated as such, will be cooked to medium rare in 2 – 21/2 hours at this temperature but experiment yourself.

A pan gravy with red wine or Borledaise is the traditional sauce along with a little horseradish cream and of course Yorkshire pudding, which is really just a pancake batter cooked in the rendered beef fat from the roast, yummmmy!

Roast rib with Yorkshire pudding and horseradish cream.
2kg rib roast on the bone
Olive oil
salt and pepper
1 lemon
3 tbsp finely chopped French shallots
2 cloves garlic, smashed
a few twigs of thyme
2 carrots, finely diced
1 stick celery, chopped
1 tbsp flour
50ml brandy
½ bottle of dry red
1 cup rich beef broth or water
50g butter, diced and chilled
salt and pepper

Rub with oil, season well and sear the roast all over and place bone down in the oven set at 130C, cook to medium rare, about 21/2 hours. Once cooked, squeeze over lemon juice and wrap in layers of foil, turn off the oven and leave there with door ajar.

To serve slice this at the table, you cut along the bone to remove the entire fillet, then slice this into thick, juicy steaks, serve with the bones on the side, the puddings and sauces along with vegetable you think worthy.

Bordelaise sauce
Pour off most of the rendered fat, use for puddings. In the little fat that remains, sauté the vegetables and herbs adding a little more fat if it looks dry, once they have a singed and cooked look, add flour and cook until it is the same, add brandy and red wine, reduce by a half and add stock or water, cook down to a sauce, strain and when ready to serve heat to a simmer and stir in butter off the heat, season.

Horseradish cream
½ cup thick pure cream
a splash of sherry vinegar
2 tbsp finely grated horseradish
Salt and pepper

Simply mix all this together a few hours ahead of serving the roast

Yorkshire pudding
1 cup plain flour
3-4 eggs, beaten
300ml milk
salt and pepper
50-60ml rendered fat or you can use any of your favourites here
Whisk all this up a few hours ahead or the night before if this is lunch. Have the oven to flat out, in here heat the fat in a pan that will house the batter about an inch thick, muffin tins work well but don’t over fill them just make more. Once the oil is hot, pour in the batter and straight into the oven, they are cooked when the puff up and have a bready baked look, brush with extra beef fat is so you desire.

Even as I write this, tears well, when did this happen, one minute you are cruising along not thinking at all about the path ahead, living in the moment oblivious that there’s an entire industry devoted to track that leads to the end of the road. To make it worse we head to EPIC in the same car that everyone else seems to be driving. It’s not ours, a temporary replacement for my wife’s car I recently cowed and she is still dealing with the pleasant people who look after the insurance. I imagine these individuals as being the human form of a vulture, they must sit by the phone, on a corpse of a recent claimant, planning how many excuses they can find to delay paying you one cent. So the car we have is a Toyota, Nissen or something like that, the model sounds like a female body part. It’s like you’re driving around in a car that’s a cross between an armchair and a coffin, all this polished wood work and everything is engineered; reversing camera, no key to loose, a GPS plus mirrors that move to where its thinks you should be looking,  there’s possibly even a cigar cutter. Well they are popular, we parked in a row of them and headed to the leisure and pleasure show along streams of other boomers.

As confronting as the car was, it was nothing as to what we found inside. I had no idea that the entire retiring population is going to live in a mobile house and have a spa. These incredibly complex mobile homes, trailers and caravans are everywhere, wow, so this is the future, roaming around the country in some sort of Stephen King-esqu world trying to find the last powered site before night falls and the un-homed zombies come out of the bushes to prey on the tardy.

I guess your interest in this as a lifestyle choice is inversely proportional to the square of how long you have been trapped behind a slow moving retired couple who have their names scrolled across the back of the slow moving van and the rest of their lives to get there. Me, I descended into a deep, dark depression. Inside the pavilions – away from all the vans, tented trailers and these spas…what is it that makes sitting in a bath with thousands of discreetly directioned jets so desirable – we find another version of hell. People selling everything from the surprisingly numerous versions of mop and broom, pain relief, gutter guards, vegetable shredders, container sealers to retirement planning, community villages and prawn peelers.

I need to sit down, but not in a personal massage chair or swing that looks like it’s made for a huge parrot cage, put up my feet, but not with any sort of orthotic help, in the shade of anything other than a fruit salad tree. I don’t won’t this amount of planning for the little time we have left, it’s like everyone is either on the verge of retirement or making something to sell to them.

At my lowest point I ran into an old friend, he did some house remodeling  for us years ago when the family was expanding and is now on the verge of, you guessed it, retirement but I knew the he would be doing something interesting, not traversing the Nullabor in a luxury mobile home, towing a spa. Peter has a love of the unusual and we got down talking about his trip of goats he is trying to unload onto unsuspecting folk, and special breeds of chicken, plus, what I’m trying to find to add to my new chook enclosure, guinea fowl.

It’s a personal thing, the type of chook house you build, some, like a Gen Y type I know of, looks it up on the internet, spends a lot of time planning the chicken version of the Taj Mahal and then subsequently looses interest, other’s look for devices that will make their chook yard complete. Like a solar powered door that comes from England and closes when the sun goes down, leaving the dumb ones out in the wilds of the night in a strange Darwinian chicken world. Me, I just converted the kids unused cubby into a pretty good chook house, they even have chairs to sit on, a desk if they need it. Surrounding this I’ve recreated the Howardian detention centre look, Tony Abbott would be proud, nothing comes in or out, we are all safe.

So Guinea fowl are an unusual bird, sort of look like a small turkey and they roost up trees but when you find them can make a particularly fine meal. The flavour is more like chicken than game, stronger though and they have an affinity with cabbage and pork fat. So, I cheered myself up a bit, maybe I’ll go into game bird rearing or even just set up a my own stall here next year. There’s a certain fungus that only grows on the Tibetan plateau, Ophiocordyceps sinensis or the caterpillar fungus. It colonises the larvae of a certain caterpillar, eventually springing out of its mummified head, like a scene from The Thing. Once harvested, dried, ground and mixed with deer penis, it makes a particularly strong libido increaser amongst other things, I reckon it’ll go like the clappers here.

Guinea fowl with braised cabbage, prune and bacon
1 guinea fowl, split down the back.
salt and pepper
½ small red cabbage, shredded.
8 small red shallots, peeled but left whole
4 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed
2-3 thick slices good quality smoked bacon
500ml homemade chicken stock
Bundle of herbs: thyme, tarragon, parsley
10 prunes, with pits

In a pan large enough to hold all, fry off the bacon to release some fat, remove and in this rendered puddle of goodness gently fry the seasoned guinea fowl, skin side down, remove and cook the shallots, garlic and cabbage until they are tamed somewhat, tuck back into this the two meats along with the prunes and herbs, add enough stock to half cover the brew, not too liquid, cover with foil or lid and cook in a lowish oven, around 150C until the bird is cooked, around 45 minutes. A particularly fine meal served with steamed chats and something in pinot mold.

Our 2009 Shiraz picked up 4 trophies: Best shiraz, best canberra district shiraz, best red wine and wine of show. This follows a god showing at the 2011 Winewise SVA. Last 80 cases on sale now before we move onto the elegance of the 2010 shiraz viognier

RNCAS wine show results

look at the WISS website to fully appreciate the effort of these guys.

Wine industry smallgood smackdown

You feel the slight warmth in the air and look around to see all the winter’s jobs still wanting, a wheel off here, pile of rubbish there. You would have noted all the advertising running up to our day based solely around hardware shops and car accessories. Now I’m as intrigued at car parts and brushcutters as the next bloke and like many I stood in front of the Makita bus parked out front of Magnet mart just before dad’s day in thrilling embrace of both awe and amazement. This super sized, flash bus kitted out like a Republican presidential nominee hopeful was a true sight to behold. All these tools and machinery which for the world looked like a repair centre for the next Transformers movie, if fact the entire bus could well be the promo for the first movie of the second trilogy and in the split of an eye transform in a cybertronian and rage havoc on all the terrified and slightly jealous dad’s hanging around.

High on my list of potential gifts was a sleek looking bandsaw and mini-lathe, wow I haven’t seen any of these (or actually thought of needing them) since high school where we rampaged weekly through the woodwork class on these old machines without one thought of occupational health and safety or HACCP, which hadn’t been invented yet, making our rolling pins and warped magazine racks. If I could get my shed set up with this gear I could , well, cut stuff out, the wife would be in her own awe and amazement at my manliness but in truth, don’t tell anyone, what I really want is a new moulis de legumes to replace my 20 year old beaten up well used food mill.

Late winter, early spring is a rather dull time for fruit and vegetables, betwixt and between you could say, the exotics haven’t arrived yet and all you can really find in abundance is cabbage in all its forms; Kale; spinach; sprouts; cabbage itself; wombok what is that?; cavalo nero, no that’s still kale etc. They really don’t inspire a lot of thought when confronted with a huge display of them but seeing as the weather is on the change but still clinging to winter’s cold evenings an Italian bean soup is of the order.

For me it’s a cross between a stew and a soup, based around dried beans, this year’s olive oil which has just finished settling, maybe some home cured pork, (Actually to be exact Award winning home cured pork, aka Ravensworth country ham: top air dried class 2011 WISS  http://wineindustrysmallgoodssmackdown.blogspot.com/) the trimmings or bone from this winter’s project, the last jar preserved tomato passato from the back of the cupboard, you know there’s one left and then whatever is available, a big mix of leafy late winter vegetables. It ends up being a huge pot but will last the week, getting better and thicker, well up to a point and then it will resemble my next project KimChee. You can set up the outdoor setting with a heater and herald in spring in all its glory.

Tuscan bean soup with kale
Olive oil
500g dried cannellini beans, soaked overnight
200g piece of prosciutto, left whole
2 fresh bay leaves
1 bunch parsley, leaves and stems separated
2 red onions, diced
4 stalks celery, diced
1 tbsp dried hot chilli flakes (more or less)
1 cup white wine
6 cloves garlic, 3 crushed, 3 left whole
1 each bunch silver beet, cavalo nero, any other spinachy looking vegetable, stems separated from leaf
1/3 red cabbage, chopped
1 cup of chopped fresh beans (any will do)
700ml handmade tomato passato or two tins of diced Italian tomato
½ bunch basil, leaves only
Salt

Drain beans and rinse well, cast off any that are discoloured or weird looking, place in large pot with 4 liters of water plus prosciutto, bay, some parsley stems and 3 whole cloves of garlic, add a tbsp of salt. Bring to simmer, skim and cook for 1 – 1 ½ hours (Beans should be just getting soft not falling apart, cooking time will vary on age of beans) Remove the beans, reserve and cool, fishing out any flavourings and spent herbs as best you can.

In a big pan, heat the olive oil, more than a drizzle, like a couple of splashes, lots basically and sauté onion and celery until just starting to soften, add parsley leaf, chilli and chopped garlic, cook for a minute then add the silver beet stems plus any thick stems from the other leafy vegetables, cook until it just starts to gain colour, deglaze with white wine, reduce and add whatever tomato arrangement you chose, add a cup of the cooked beans.

Cook this down for about 15 minutes, until its nice and soft. Pass through a mouli back into the strained reserved bean cooking stock and bring back to the simmer, skim again if necessary, adding the rest of the cooked beans. Add red cabbage and chopped fresh beans along with the leafy bits you have left. Cook this for 10 minutes or until all the vegetables are nice and wilted and cooked through, season with more salt if needed.

To serve, toasted and garlic rubbed sour dough, more fresh olive oil, chopped basil leaves and a bottle of sangiovese, which is made for this sort of food. Want a good one, look for Greenstone sangiovese from Heathcote, a partnership between one of Italy’s greatest producers, Antinori, a UK importer and Mark Walpole, a Victorian viticultural hero. Shows how good this savoury variety can be when grown in the right location and with some serious dough behind it.

Australian Wine vintages “The Little gold book” Top 100 2012 BUY THIS WINE NOW!

I’m not normally this taken by morning temperatures. In fact, I live half the year in fear of frosts with acres of grapes, but today in early winter there’s nothing more important to the day’s activities than a season of deep, penetrating frosts. We’re off a-truffling down Braidwood way.

People that get into these subterranean orbs of joy don’t really know exactly why they produce this fruiting body. It’s linked to soil pH, friability, drainage and structure, and of course to the host plant whose root system these fungus cling to. But what is generally agreed upon is that you need a good series of deep frosts for the truffle to bloom and ripen at the right time to produce big, stinky black fruit.

This year, we’ve had a good amount of frosty mornings, and thus I am happy that today it’s a frosty brass-monkey morning that will evolve to a brilliant winter’s day for our hunt at the farm of Peter and ­­­­­Kate Marshall.

The trip out of Braidwood is a roundabout affair. This could be something to do with our hosts’ other business interests, which involve a couple of field cannons and factory full of military clothing. Being an avid reader of mystery novels, my senses are on high alert. Is there something else going on here? Will I finally get to have my Jason Bourne moment that I still believe my life is leading to?

Alas, no. Besides having to scratch our heads at why a group of tree fellers manages to get its truck so bogged in an area where a truck has no business being, the day unfolds without the need for me to revert to my alter ego and save the fair maiden from a devilish plot.

After a nice lunch and briefing, we head to the truffiere, a mixture of hazelnuts and oaks, all quite young, but already having proven themselves with a couple of neat orbs last year. The dog, Sal, doesn’t waste too much time and unearths a monster 365g black truffle in minutes. Being pretty well dumfounded that it was so easy, I reflect on my choice of dogs for my own much awaited truffle experiment. Will Pooka, a wide-eyed, can’t-focus bundle of hair, be able to so willingly and precisely find one of these in future years?

All Sal needs is a pat on the head and some attention, and in an hour she finds a crop with a potential street value of $2000! As opposed to the money sink our spoodle has become, requiring a weekly visit to the vet to remove half a cup of grass seeds from the ears and falling victim to the local animal coppers’ ongoing revenue raising round of Murrumbateman.

So at the end of a very nice day, a huge hunk of this first truffle sits before me back at home. What to do? The aroma has been tormenting me all the way back – even though it’s wrapped in a bag, the sweet, earthy, sulphidey aroma permeates the cruiser. The kids, when I pick them up, wonder what I’ve been up to.

While I’m thinking, I lightly toast some Silo bread, add lashings of butter and 30g of shaved truffle. This gives me a clue – keep it simple. This is really good toast and I wonder whether you can overdose on tuber melanosporum.

A while back, I was out at the refurbished Fyshwick markets. While I was snapping up a nice bit of cheese for the night at the Mart Deli, the owner, a Frenchman, gave me a nice bit of advice. The wooden box of Fromager des Clarines, a slightly ripe mountain cheese from Haute-Savoie, is perfect for heating up. So that night I warmed it on the barbecue with half a glass of white wine poured over it. The cheese expanded slightly as it warmed, and served with good bread it was a beautiful fondue of sorts with a slight mushroomy character already. At that point, I thought, if a truffle comes my way this year, and it has, I would re-create this fondue with thin shards of fresh truffle wedged into the cheese before heating.

So tonight, having no idea how much truffle to use, I aim at about 50g. On to the barbecue with a splash of marsanne, which I think is the perfect savoury cheese wine.

Simply served with a salad of super-fresh celery, crispy green apple and chopped hazelnuts, this is an early winter meal I can happily call brilliant. The aroma of truffle is intensified enough so as not to be intoxicating, the salad refreshes the palate, and all is well with the world.

Truffled Clarines fondue with apple and celery salad
1 box of fresh fromager  des Clarines
50g shaved black truffle
2 stalks celery
half a granny smith apple
handful toasted hazelnuts
white wine

‘I’m a human, God damn it! My life has value!’ So I want you to get up now go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!!’

It’s Monday 22^nd August and if the threat has been realised there should be and stream of angry people charging down the nearby Barton highway, I want to say in the ‘caravan of courage’ but that something entirely different, the procession of discontent..no-confidence that’s it, the convoy of no confidence.

But first, continuing my probable misquote from Network “I’ve gotta get mean, I gotta dig deep” but now I’ve gotta take the dog for a walk. And here I find it hard to keep some sort of anger brewing. My dog, one of those poodle-cross things that the pet shops are full of, has this amazing coat of hair, can’t see his feet, eyes or mouth, just a mop of tangled ginger hair, so I took him off to Yass for his usual clipping. Well when I picked him up I was sure they gave me a different dog, because this, now female looking arrangement with fluffy tail and ears, eyebrows much like Sam the sheepdog, surely isn’t Pooka. In a word ridiculous so strolling down the lane it’s hard to keep the fires of uncontrolled rage that I’m meant to be feeling today burning, with this silly looking dog bounding around after rabbits.

I’m thinking that there’s more to this than people not wanting a tax on carbon, windmills and a national broadband network. Maybe, just maybe, the anger is to do with diet and, sit down, a detox might be cathartic, might heal the soul. I’m feeling that way myself, I was all set to charge into Canberra and rage against the machine when I thought hang on, I actually don’t feel strongly either way. Being not one iota a political animal having being blessed with parents who felt strongly about cancelling each other’s vote out, I have never once voted for the political party who gets in. I mean Mark Latham seemed reasonable?

So here’s my plan, cleanse the body and hopefully the mind but which detox diet will works it magic on my countenance? Googling away its easy to find heaps to choose from: Green smoothies diet, na sounds like wheatgrass and that bird has flown; fruit flush diet, seems reasonable until you see that you have to buy expensive protein drinks off an old weightlifter; the lemonade diet, well seems to work for the kids; the you are what you eat diet…don’t get it, that would make me a deer/duck/ham.

All looks like too much work so I’ll just make it up myself. Blood oranges are in season at the moment and it doesn’t take too much time to see that these are natures perfect fruit, not only super high in vitamin C and A, but loads of folic acid, calcium and packed with anthocyanins, natures own anti-oxidant. So here’s what I’m going to do, get a heap of them and see if it helps the demeanour, if so I’ll patent the idea and make a squillion like the buff weightlifters, if not excuse my behaviour at the next rage against the government.

Here are five things to do with blood oranges

1. Simply add them to the morning juice, mixed with normal oranges, carrots and a spike of ginger, you get the day going it the most positive way, love the colour here.

2. At the other end of the day that make a fantastic addition to a range of cocktails (Yes, it is an hypocrisy to detox with alcohol, but there you have it) It is the perfect companion to Campari; mix two part of good gin with 1 of Campari, a splash of vermouth (Kina Lillet if possible) over ice and rub the rim with the skin of the orange and top with 3 parts blood orange juice.

3. A simple salad, cut segments of blood orange and mix with baked baby beetroots, raw rhubarb, red onion and parsley, dress with good olive oil and serve with a dollop of crème fraiche on the side, see you probably feel better just thinking about that.

4. Another salad, a bit more work. Sicilian blood orange salad, this is where the oranges apparently come from, the slopes of Mt Edna, the volcanic air giving rise to the colour, use the very dark and bloody, sanguiniccio.

Sicilian blood orange salad
3-4 blood oranges, segments, use juice too
1 small red onion, finely sliced, soak in chilled water to tame
A pile of rocket as a bed
½ cup of Kalamata olives, pitted plus half a dozen sliced for garnish
Full flavoured olive oil
Handful of goats or sheeps milk feta, crumbled
6 dried figs, chopped
½ cup of day old bread, broken into rough shapes, cooked in olive oil until crispy

In a warm oven drizzle olives with oil, bake until dark, soft but not burned, puree with extra olive oil to a pouring look. Drizzle the puree onto a plate with an artistic flare, toss everything else together and pile up on top, more oil to dress, add crouton last.

5. Sashimi of king fish with blood orange and ginger vinaigrette
A lovely recipe from Tetsuya, one of the best ways of serving this fish fresh.
120g Kingfish, sliced thin, skin off
1 blood orange, segmented, pith free
A mixture of chopped chives, parsley, coriander, some mixed baby lettuce and finely sliced spring onion

Ginger vinaigrette (mix together just before serving)
1 drop of orange oil
1 drop of Banyuls vinegar, a light red wine vinegar will work
¼ tspn each of grated ginger and garlic
1 tspn salty soy
Salt and pepper

Arrange the fish and segments, dress and sprinkle with herb mixture. Done.

Steamed blue-eye with pickled vegetable noodles and ponzu
2 250g plump fillets of blue-eye, skin on (or use another big fish)
200g brine (35% salt)
Oils on hand: grapeseed and sesame
Vegetables: a mixture of cucumber, daikon, carrot and wombok (Asian cabbage)
2 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp salt flakes
Steamed sushi rice

Garnish, toasted sesame seeds, chopped spring onions

Ponzu dressing
60ml light soy sauce
40ml citrus juice (see above)
5ml rice wine vinegar
10ml mirin
60ml dashi

Pinch of minced ginger

Mix together

First prepare the vegetables, cut them all into a long julienne, you can get little hand shredders that do this, use about the same quantities of each vegetable. In a bowl season with sugar and salt and leave for 20 minutes, drain off any collected brine. Steam the fish for 8-10 minutes over barely simmering water, once almost ready heat a pan with a splash of both oils until it just starts to smoke. On a plate, have the fish skin side up, scatter spring onions and pour over the sizzling oil, this sears in the flavour a slightly crispens the skin, serve on a bed of vegetables, rice and dressing on the side, sprinkle all with sesame seed and extra spring onion.