Salty, sweet, spicy, and simply divine.

This is what I did on my term break:

Went to bed late

Got up late

Had my heart broken by Wally Lamb (again)

Went to the Grampians for Easter (again)

Ate chocolate daily

Crocheted 3/4 of a beanie/beret thing

Worried over my youngest child, away on an arduous camp

Bought an AMAZING set of cheapskate knives

Celebrated my husband's birthday

Became addicted to kimchi

Are two weeks long enough to develop an addiction?  They must be, because here I am, craving mouthfuls of crunchy, salty, tangy, spicy, stinky goodness every hour of every darned day.  And not just any kimchi, but homemade kimchi, which is like nothing you get in either restaurants or shops.  Shop- or restaurant-bought kimchi is all right, but homemade is not anything you can call "all right" – nothing you can be ambivalent about.  It is either love with a violent passion, or completely turn away from.

This term break began with the discovery of Maangchi, whom I promptly fell in love with, for her skills, knowledge, warmth, sultry voice, and her honest and earthy enjoyment of everything she eats.  And it continued with trying a few recipes out here and there.  And then it culminated with my first batch of kimchi, made in desperation out of stuff I didn't want to throw away.

I came home from the Grampians (see What I Did on My Term Break, above), and had my usual shock-horror response when I saw the contents of my refrigerator crisper, which I'd totally forgotten about before I left. Even though I'd never made kimchi before, I decided to make it out of the things that most desperately needed using: a bag of discounted coleslaw mix I'd bought on impulse, a bunch of bok choy whose outer leaves were beginning to wilt, carrots, and a couple of bunches of spring (green) onions that were papery on the outside but still had sweet and tender centres.  

Obviously not a purist's kimchi, but it was good.  Even before fermentation it was like a million plus a million times better than any kimchi I'd ever had before:  the salting process totally removed the bitterness from the bok choy, and the flavours were rounded and full.  After a couple days' fermentation on the bench, the flavours had deepened and I now had something quite complex on the palate.

So I started me thinking: can you make kimchi out of anything? The nice people in Maangchi's forums assured me you could.  I had dreams of pumpkin and broccoli stem kimchi and all kinds of weird and wonderful things, but the first thing that came my way was a whole pile of Chantenay carrots on special.  I had this image of Maangchi munching on very crunchy cubed radish kimchi (kkakdugi) and I knew my time had come.

By this stage, I had availed myself of what is probably the most important ingredient making kimchi this way:  the chili flakes.  Now… I am the queen of substitutions, but after a few tries I have to say:  there is no substitute for Korean chili flakes here.

Chili powder won't do (it has too many foreign flavours), and ordinary dried chili flakes are too potent (plus they don't – at least in Oz – have the wonderful colour).  If you're happy to go to your closest supplier of Korean chili flakes, go, right now, and make this, straight after that.  And enjoy IMMEDIATELY.

See, this is the beauty of homemade kimchi, and an experience you cannot have when you're getting it in a restaurant or out of a box:  munching on freshly-made kimchi.  Yes, yes, fermented kimchi is delicious, but freshly-made is an absolute revelation.  Times like this, Maangchi says, all she needs is the freshly-made kimchi and a bowl of rice, and I can see why.  You just want to enjoy it straight away and have absolutely nothing come between you and it, except perhaps for the comforting earthiness of steamed rice.  I had leftover Asian-style broth from last night's noodle soup, so instead of rice, I made a delicious potful of fluffy ttukbaegi gyeranjjim to go with it.

It was Heaven.  Heaven, I tell you.  Go and make kimchi now.  It's quick, it's easy, you'll never be the same again.

Here's how.

You begin by degorging the veg in salt and sugar.

Look at all the liquid that's released after just 30 minutes.  You'll be draining most of this away.

Dump the other ingredients on top…

... and then just mix the heck out of it.  Hands are quickest and easiest, but wear rubber gloves.  I don't want to hear that you mixed this with your bare hands and then tried to remove your contact lenses and thought your eyes were going to melt off.  Not that I speak from personal experience or anything.

You can eat it right away or refrigerate it, or put it into a container to ferment for a couple of days before refrigerating.  Either way, it'll be salty, sweet, spicy, and simply divine.

CHANTENAY CARROT AND RADISH KIMCHI WITH GARLIC SCAPES

I used to think that kimchi was just a condiment or side dish.  Well, it is, but it's so much more than that.  Think of it as one of your essential ingredients.  Once you realise that not only can you eat it as is, but also add it as one of your special touches to whatever it is you're making, you'll never go back.

Ingredients:

1 kg Chantenay carrots, small as you can get them

1 kg white radish or daikon

3 tbsp sugar

2 tbsp salt

4 spring (green) onions, chopped

1/2 bunch garlic scapes (shoots), cut into same length as carrots

6 cloves garlic, minced

1 tsp minced ginger

2/3 cup Korean chili flakes

1/4 cup fish sauce

What you do:

1.  Cut the tops off the carrots, and place in large bowl.  (If some carrots are extra large, cut in half.)  Peel radish or daikon, and cut into sections as long as the carrots.  Cut each section into six or eight wedges, and add to the bowl.  Sprinkle over sugar and salt, mix, and allow to degorge for 30 minutes, stirring now and then.

2.  Drain vegetables, reserving the liquid.  Add remaining ingredients plus 1/3 of the liquid you drained off, and mix well.  Your hands are best for this, but please – wear rubber or disposable plastic gloves!

3.  Kimchi is ready to enjoy straight away, but you can also ferment it (in fact, you may want to do half and half).  To ferment, pack into a sturdy container, jar, or large Ziploc bag.  Leave at room temperature for 1-3 days.  Kimchi will be fermented when it begins to smell sour; it may also display bubbles on the surface.  Once fermented, store in the refrigerator.

Yumbo McGillicutty!

Turning and Two-minute Toum

We've all wasted food, but let me tell you, you know nothing about wasting food until you've been in a professional cookery class on Turned Potato Day.

For those of you who are too young to remember Nouvelle Cuisine or spent the 80s trying to master beurre blanc, turned vegetables are vegetables – usually roots and tubers – that are "turned" into five- or seven-sided barrel shapes with a turning knife (or ordinary paring knife if you're a Turning Genius).  It is not something that is relevant any more (when was the last time you saw a turned vegetable?) or something that you can learn in a few hours when you've also got another six precision cuts to learn, but still, it's in the curriculum, so we give it a go.

I show the students a video.  Then I demonstrate.  Once.  Twice.  Three times.  These kids try.  And fail.  Fail so spectacularly.  They fear cutting towards their thumbs, they fear the long continuous cut, they fear gripping the veg.  One potato looks like Headless Yoda.  One student thinks the pile of trimmings she's got is the turned potato.  I send them to get more potatoes.  The pile of potato trimmings – not peel, actual potato flesh – grows and grows.

While they try and fail, I chop up the potato trimmings and throw them into a pot for potato soup.  While I chop, I remember when I learned to turn veg.  I'd already had the obligatory lesson on turning vegetables but the turning moment, so to speak, was during a week's work experience at Mietta's in 1993, when Mietta was still alive and her restaurant was one of Melbourne's flagships.  Mietta's had a traditional French kitchen brigade (read: arrogant, tough, and properly sexist towards women in the kitchen) and a traditional French menu.  No vegetable was ever served in its original form.  Spuds were sliced thickly and then cut into rounds with a scone cutter.  Perfect baby turnips were shaved.  And carrots were turned.  So my real lesson on turning veg happened when the sous chef pointed at a 10kg bag of carrots and said, "Turn those!"  By the tenth carrot, my turning was pretty damned perfect.  (And I suffered.  That amount of turning meant that I ended up with microscopic cuts all over my thumbs from the motion of stopping the turning knife.  Not a problem, until the sous chef got me to shell 10kg of Moreton Bay bugs immediately afterwards.  Ever had an infection on your thumbs?  Not nice.)

But I digress.  I hate waste.  I use up the potato trimmings for a soup that isn't altogether a success, and while I'm putting it in the coolroom, I notice the leftover falafel from a barbeque we catered a few days ago.  They won't see another day, the students prefer the leftover sausages for their lunch, so I decide to take them home for dinner.

They're pretty good falafels, but because they were made to not offend teenage palates, they are on the bland side.  So I decide to make some Lebanese garlic sauce to go with them.

Toum, toom, or zait b'toum is the Holy Grail for garlic lovers.  It's what aioli should be but isn't since it's been discovered and reinvented for non-Spanish palates.  It is garlic extreme – there's not even a drop of olive oil to detract from the garlic flavour – and in my house, I have to stop people pouncing on it with a spoon.

For many years, I relied on my Lebanese friend Lily for it, because every time I made it, it would curdle, to the point where even though my children would still eat it, they would call it Garlic Fail.  Until the fateful day when I found Fouad's recipe and I was able to turn out an entire canister full of Garlic Win.  The family rejoiced and grabbed spoons.

Fouad's recipe is foolproof, and ideal for when you need a large amount of toum – I'll keep on using it for the rest of my life – but despite the food processor, it takes considerable care and time.  It is the only thing I make in the food processor that actually heats up the motor.  And Fouad has since posted a quicker and easier way to make toum for smaller quantities, but after a recent article on mayonnaise in Serious Eats, I suspected - sorry, Fouad! - that I could do better.

I did.  Last night's toum took two minutes flat with the stick blender - including the time it took to gather ingredients and peel garlic.  And it was full of win.  Not just garlicky, but white, perfectly fluffy and of such enviable texture that I could have cut it with a knife.  The leftover falafels went from being falafels to Those Little Round Things We Can Put Garlic Sauce on.  No waste.

  

TWO-MINUTE TOUM

No joke – this toum will take you two minutes flat, if that.  You're after a light, fluffy texture, and this recipe will give you that without any effort whatsoever.  No streaming oil in, no stress about how the emulsion will happen.  Just put the stick in and watch the magic happen.  The technique is easy, but if you're nervous, check out the Serious Eats video.  

(Makes 1 cup approx.)

Ingredients:

6-8 cloves garlic, peeled

1 tsp. salt

1 egg white

1 tbsp. water

1 tbsp. lemon juice

1 cup (250ml) neutral oil (not grapeseed)

What you do:

1.  Put the garlic and salt into the canister of your stick blender (immersion blender, stab mixer – whatever).  Stab a few times to process the garlic to a paste.  Remove stick blender, pour in remaining ingredients, and allow to settle for about 15 seconds.

2.  Put stick blender back into canister, resting it on the very bottom, and switch on.  Mixture will begin to emulsify from the bottom up.  When it's 2/3 emulsified, slowly begin lifting out the stick blender.  By the time it reaches the surface, all of the mixture will be completely emulsified and fluffy. 

Yumbo McGillicutty! 

Self-raising flour: what it is, how to make it, and other questions on which the world hangs. Or not.

A bag of self-raising flour is a common sight in pantries across the UK and Australia, but the mention of it tends to send cooks elsewhere into a bit of tizz.  What is this strange and mysterious substance?  

What it is is no mystery.  Neither is how to make it.

SR flour is flour with a leavening agent added, so that whatever baked goodie you’re making won’t require baking powder or baking soda/bicarb-plus-an-acid-component to make it rise.  It’s very handy to have lying around, but if you can’t buy it, or if you run out, you can make yours in a trice.

The proportions are:

2 tsp. baking powder for every cup of flour

Sift together a few times, or if you’re a hard case like I am, just whisk it all vigorously for a minute or so.

Make it in bulk to have it ready to go when needed, or make as much as you need for what you’re making at the time.

OK, so I realise this is a piker’s post.  After all, it’s the last day of the year and I am in proper vacation mode right now.  More or less, I am:

a) not cooking, just subsisting on AWESOME leftovers

b) sitting in front of the telly watching all the DVDs I got for Christmas

c) crocheting

d) reading thick summery novels, and/or

e) any combination of the above.

So it’s like… yawn... Yumbo McGillicutty?  Whassat?

In my defense, however, this is a well handy hint, and I’ll be posting some recipes requiring SR flour soon.  So there.

Happy New Year everyone!  May 2012 be full of all good things for you and yours.

Weeds and herbs and everything perturbed

Sit down and let me tell you a tale.

Up until the time I was 14, we lived in apartments.  When we moved into our first-ever house in Aonach Street, Clayton, I was overjoyed:  I could have pets (or rather, the pets I had could now move around)!  We wouldn’t be sharing walls with other people!  We could have a garden!

For some reason, even though I am not, never have been, and never will be anything that can even loosely be termed a gardener, it was this last point that most excited me.  The backyard had already been divided in half, and one of the halves was – as befitted a neighbourhood with such a huge percentage of Italian and Greek migrants – a well-fertilised and turned-over veggie patch that only needed some seedlings for it to completely transform into a suburban Horn of Plenty.

Parsley and basil sprouting under the artichokes

Like Mary in The Secret Garden, I asked mamá for “a bit of earth” and she agreed.  The bit I chose was underneath the juvenile pine, and for it I got a packet of mixed flower seeds that came with the Disney imprint and an illustration of Bambi, Thumper and bluebirds gambolling in fields of snapdragons and bluebells.   I planted them, I watered them, they grew, and it made me happy.   And that was the last time I had a garden – a bit of earth – that I considered completely and totally mine.

Oh – there were other gardens, but none that I ever considered mine.  For reasons too various, personal, and let’s face it, boring to list, I was unable to put much of a permanent stamp on any of the places I lived in the following 25 years, and despite having bits of earth for veggies and herbs, I never considered any of those gardens mine.

This variety is new to me.  Anyone used it before?

That is, until a few years ago, when I found myself making a new start in a new house.  The pull of this place was so strong that even when we’d only been in it three days and were still chin-deep in boxes, one of my sons said, “It feels like we’ve always lived here!”  I had arrived somewhere I’d always wanted to be.  And outside was a garden.  And not just any garden.  I recognised it immediately:  my garden.  Finally I GOT why gardeners rhapsodise about gardening.  I got the satisfaction, the feeling of being at one with Life, the Universe, and Everything.

My garden is already established and I don’t touch it much, except for the one area at the very back, the one that flourishes under my touch:  the herb patch.

Now… in saying that I’m not gardener, you have to understand that it’s more than that.  I actually kill things.  It’s distressing, particularly for someone who actually thinks plants have feelings and respond to humans (more on this later), so I stopped trying.  But the one thing I know I can grow is herbs, and here in this garden, they have grown like never before.  They have grown lush – so lush that the oregano bush grew as big as my arms curved towards each other to make a circle, so lush that the mint leaves were as big as my hand, so lush that weeds barely get a look-in, except for winter, when most herbs go dormant and weeds go, “Whoo-hoo!” and take over. 

The kaffir lime

And that’s where my story begins.

Some weeks ago, it is the end of winter, and my garden is a bit of a mess.  I make a call to Khel, the gardener who helps me whip the garden into shape a few times a year with the stuff that’s too gardenerly for me to do.

Khel comes in on Friday while I am at work.  No biggie, he’s often done that.  Saturday morning I go into the garden with My Baby, start poking around, surveying my domain, except… WHERE ARE THE HERBS?

My heart starts pounding.  Every single weed is gone, but so is almost every herb.  I’m not talking cut back, I’m talking GONE, roots and all.  The rampant, cheeky mint, gone.  The massive oregano bush, gone.  Half the thyme.  The chives.  The rosemary.  All that remains are the freakin’ nasturtium.  I start taking every single deity’s name in vain.  I can’t believe it.  I start fighting back tears at this point, and I do something I try to never do, and ring someone while upset.

“Khel?  You came in yesterday?”

“Yeah… I cleaned up as much as I could… Did the weeding…”

“Where the %^$@! are my herbs?”

“Ohhh!... I thought I smelt something!...”

“You thought you smelt something?  What the *&#@!??”

“Not all of it is gone…”

“$@*&!  You uprooted them!  The oregano, the mint… They’re gone!”

“The mint will be back, don’t worry about that.”

“And what am I supposed to do about mint in the meantime?”

My mother used to say that my father had Basil Fawlty moments, and I’m sorry to say that this is one of the not-so-admirable things I’ve inherited from him.  If you want to truly get a mental picture of what happened then, all you need to visualise is Basil Fawlty beating up a dead car, or howling because he’s lost money he’s won on a horse, or digging through a trifle to find a duck.  Khel – or should I say The Murderer – had left a pile of weeds.  They were fragrant with the scents of at least six different herbs, and I started digging through the pile with my bare hands, weeping, crying out, “Where are you?  WHERE ARE YOU?”

Oh, yeah.  I had an insane moment.  And because My Baby knows better than to argue with Crazy Lady (or Crazy Hippie Lady, as he would have it), he joined in, minus the tears and ranting.  I found a rootlet of mint, and My Baby found a whole clump of chives.

We talked about not paying The Murderer, we talked about never employing him again, we talked about me going to visit him with my Whacking Stick, but when the fire of my grief and anger had cooled down to embers, I knew that only one thing could make me feel better:  replanting.  So I went to the nursery and spent a small fortune on herbs.  A few weeks later when I had a birthday, friends and family who knew of my predicament brought in beautiful gifts of herbs, and one day when I was at work, Khel snuck into the backyard and left a few little pots of thyme.

And they’re coming along.  They’re coming along.  The mint rootlet I rescued totally regenerated (and yes, like Khel predicted, other mint is coming back elsewhere).  The chives that My Baby discovered are now so happy they’re flowering.  These pictures are of a herb garden that’s happily recuperating.  It’s not yet as lush as it was, but it’s getting there.  The herbs are happy.  That they are happy is puzzling to me – all I do is water them, give them worm castings, and OK, have a little chat to them – and I just find the whole thing so humbling.  So much reward for so little effort.  I am also humbled by the people who commiserated with me when this happened, who understood my insane moment, and brought to me pots full of green and fragrance.

The Vietnamese mint that Kylie brought, going insane under the Laserlight

So, with the parsley my sister gave me, and the new oregano bushes, I share with you a recipe that is indispensable to me:  chimichurri, the Argentine barbeque sauce.

Variegated and common oregano

Alicia's parsley and mint

Now… as indispensable as chimi is, I don’t have it on everything.  Argentines, as a rule, don’t, and this is something you should keep in mind as recipes for chimi become more and more bastardised, and as chimi is presented to you at a restaurant as a dip for bread.  Bizarre.  Chimi is, and always shall be, a traditional condiment for barbequed and grilled meats.  I only ever use it as a marinade for matambre, which benefits from the strong flavours (since its cooking method is poaching) and the tenderising quality of the vinegar.  I can’t go past Asado Argentina’s excellent treatise on chimichurri, but I just really want to highlight that any recipe telling you to strive to keep the fresh green colour of the sauce is just wrong, wrong, WRONG.  While there’s nothing bad about serving a chimi that’s just been made, the best chimi has actually matured and mellowed in the refrigerator for days, weeks, or months.  It is the reason why I make nothing less than huge quantities.  (Also wrong is any chimi that adds herbs more familiar to Mexican cuisine, such as coriander/cilantro, but really, to read the full rant, go to Asado Argentina).

While you do, I'll be firing up the barbeque outside and thinking about how lucky I am.  Dogs, walls not joined to anyone else's, a garden, friends who understand when you go nuts… yeah.  Life at 45 has much in common with 14.

  

CHIMICHURRI

This is my recipe, adapted from mamá’s, which is one of many.  You can tweak it… but not too much.  Here are the things you can tweak:  the amount of chili is up to you.  The oregano need not be fresh.  The bay leaves are optional.  Remember that this is not an emulsified sauce, and that’s OK, because not all the sauces in the world are French.  You put it in a pretty bowl or sauceboat at the table with a spoon, and each diner stirs it up before spooning it over their meat.  Chimi will keep, refrigerated, for up to a year.

Ingredients:

3 bay leaves

1 cup boiling water

I cup finely chopped parsley

1 tbsp. dried crushed chili

1 tbsp. chopped fresh oregano

6 cloves garlic, minced

1 cup good quality cider or white wine vinegar

1/2 cup olive oil (not EVOO - if you don’t have olive oil that’s not extra virgin, combine EVOO and vegetable oil, half and half)

salt and pepper to taste

What you do:

1.  Place bay leaves in a small bowl and pour over boiling water.  Allow to cool to warm while you proceed with recipe.

2.  In a bowl or jar, combine parsley, chili, oregano, garlic, vinegar and olive oil, with salt and pepper to taste.  Whisk together with a fork, or put the lid on the jar and shake.  Add the bay leaves, and enough of their soaking water to temper the taste.  The amount you use is up to you, but remember that chimichurri is meant to be quite perky and tangy.  It is definitely NOT subtle. 

Yumbo McGillicutty!