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Archive for the ‘Food & Friends’ Category

Weekend Feasting

Posted in Food & Friends, Recipes on June 11, 2013| 59 Comments »

A few photos from our weekend feasting!

A couple of weeks ago, Pete and I stopped at the Sydney Fish Markets on our way home from lunch at Youeni. While we were there, we bought a 2.5kg Tasmanian Atlantic salmon for just $14.99/kg (a discounted price because the fish weighed less than 3kg). Knowing that all of Pete’s family would be here for the long weekend, we stashed the fish in the freezer.

On Saturday morning, we somehow managed to fit it into our back fridge to defrost overnight…

On Sunday, Pete and his sister Penny stuffed the fish with parsley and lemon, then laid it on a bed of sliced potatoes and leeks, before roasting. They followed this Jamie Oliver recipe…

It was sublime…

We coated local Hawkebury River School prawns in flour seasoned with a little salt and Hungarian paprika…

…deep fried them until crispy…

…and then ate them, shell and all, dipped in a little homemade mayonnaise. My sister-in-laws’ technique was to pinch the prawn’s head, covering its eyes “so it doesn’t look at you”, then to crunch all the way from the tail up…

We grilled haloumi with ridiculous ease in the sandwich press, then served it with lemons from the garden…

While making room in the fridge for the fish, I uncovered an old bag of coarse burghul wheat, which became caramelised leek tabbouleh. We also had potato salad and Greek salad (brought my Pete’s brothers), Guinness and Treacle sourdough, garlic focaccia and a cheese plate…

I baked June’s Hungarian cottage cheese cake, using Pete’s Greek yoghurt instead of sour cream…

Pete ate four pieces (and then stopped counting)…

And to round the meal off, a chorus of dark milk feuilletine chocolate cane toads…

How was your weekend? I hope you had as much fun as we did!

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Queen’s Birthday Long Weekend

Posted in Food & Friends on June 8, 2013| 18 Comments »

It’s the start of a long weekend here in Sydney, and we’ve got a busy one planned!

I’m off to Haverick Meats with my friend Carol soon, and then Pete’s extended family will be arriving – his four siblings and their families. It’s been a hectic week and I’m waaay behind in terms of getting ready (they’ll be here in six hours!) – the house still needs to be cleaned, and I haven’t given much thought to what we’re all going to eat over the next three days, apart from a whole salmon that’s currently frozen solid.

Thankfully, there’s always plenty of sourdough bread in the freezer. We have Greek haloumi, some frozen fruit loaf for a bread and butter pudding, leeks and lettuces in the garden and oodles of deli offcuts. Hmmm…I think we’ll make pizza, roast a piece of belly pork and maybe deep fry some school prawns.

There’s lots to do, but I just wanted to quickly wish you all a fabulous weekend! I’ll probably be offline a bit over the next few days, but I’ll catch you all on Tuesday! ♥

PS. If you have a little time this weekend, please visit the kitchens of all my blogger friends. There’s already nineteen kitchens for you to peep into this month! (See toolbar on the right of this post.)

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Smash Palace Exhibition, White Rabbit Gallery

Posted in Cool Things, Food & Friends, My Photos on June 3, 2013| 48 Comments »

The White Rabbit Gallery, located in the inner city suburb of Chippendale, is one of the largest and most significant collections of contemporary Chinese art in the world. It closes twice a year for the installation of new exhibitions.

For those of you who don’t live in Sydney, we’ll try to visit at least every six months so that we can share this glorious treasure with you. If you do live locally, please understand that these photos don’t begin to do the artworks justice. I highly recommend an in-person visit to the gallery – they’re open Thursday to Sunday and, astonishingly, admission continues to be completely free.

Here are the highlights from our most recent visit.  These shots were taken with my iPhone and were somewhat limited by the low lighting. In addition, there are several audio-visual and dynamic pieces which simply couldn’t be captured in still photos.

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This first artwork is titled Under Heaven 20121018 by Xu Zhen’s Madeln Company. It comprises over seventy kilograms of piped oil paint. The piece was completed in October last year, and is still drying…

It made me want to rush home and bake raspberry meringues. According to the artist, the patterns reminded him of “cityscapes seen from space” – I saw similarities to coral reefs and from a distance, it looked like a large collection of swirly party ribbons…

. . . . .

If there is one piece worth visiting the exhibition for, it’s Mini Home (2005).

Artist Jin Shi recreates in half scale the home of a poor urban migrant couple – peasants who have come to the city in search of a better life only to find themselves trapped by the system. It is heartwrenchingly small, especially when you consider that the real “house” was only twice as big.

According to one of the knowledgeable White Rabbit guides, the couple who lived in the space would take turns to sleep, with one sitting outside while the other rested. At the bottom left is a very basic lavatory, and all components of the artwork – down to the cups, saucers and television – have been reproduced at half scale.

I found this piece incredibly moving and came back to it several times during our visit…

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On the ground floor, the enormous Appeals Without Words (2006) by Jin Feng shows eighty-nine peasants queued to lodge corruption complaints to the central authorities. The subjects are painted in gold to resemble statues – a statement on the length of time their complaints can take to be heard – and their placards are blank, signifying the futility of the process. A beautiful, imposing and emotive piece…

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Bai Yiluo’s Illumination (2011) is a collection of antique oil lamps, an item which was commonplace in Chinese homes before electricity. It made me ponder how quickly items which we consider to be essential can become obsolete, and reminded me of Zhao Xiangyuan’s collection of soap in Song Dong’s Waste Not exhibition.

My friend Roz taught me that many contemporary artworks are delivered in pieces to be assembled on site. Sometimes the artist will be closely involved in this process; other times the gallery will decide how the pieces are to be displayed.  In this case, Bai Yiluo was happy for White Rabbit to lay out his lamps, and this circular display is the fourth arrangement they’ve tried since the exhibition opened…

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By contrast, artist Zhou Jie had very strict instructions for the layout of her porcelain city, titled CBD (2010).  Each piece arrived at the gallery beautifully packaged, numbered, and with clear directions for placement. The artwork reflects the layout of Beijing’s new CBD,  supposedly covered with pathological organisms to highlight the spread of buildings like viruses, and expressing the artist’s concern about urban growth.

To me, it was as if the city had sunk into the ocean and become part of a reef. This image was enhanced by the bed of rice on which the pieces were laid out…

The beautiful creamy porcelain was intricately shaped and detailed...

CBD was Pete’s favourite artwork in the exhibition…

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Ideality (2007) is a modern photographic series by Wang Guofeng based on the “ten great buildings” built in Beijing to mark the 10th anniversary of the 1949 Communist Revolution. After taking high resolution images of each building, the artist painstakingly photoshopped out all the cars and people…

…and inserted a tiny image of himself (to scale) into each large photo. As significant landmarks in the most populous country in the world, these buildings would never be deserted, so the idea of being the only person there must have been both eerie and intriguing (and somewhat post-apocalyptic)…

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On the top floor of the gallery, Even in Fear (2008) runs on a continually inflating and deflating cycle, with the weather balloon blowing up to what appears to be near exploding point before shrinking down again. Artist Zhou Xiaohu seeks to represent the materialistic drive so prevalent in China today, and the growing anxiety that comes with an expanding economy and subsequent wealth…

(Edit: The White Rabbit Gallery have just tweeted that the weather balloon has burst! It was meant to eventually, and the artwork was delivered with spares.)

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All the pieces for Wonderful City (2011) by Cheng Dapeng were created using a 3D resin printer. The light box presentation made it difficult to photograph them, but they were surprisingly detailed…

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As always, the White Rabbit gift shop is a treasure trove of old-fashioned toys and gadgets. I’m old enough to remember playing “elastics” at school…

I couldn’t resist a photo of this egg cosy…

As the gallery doesn’t charge an entry fee, we try to support them by buying something whenever we visit. This time we picked up a couple of their postcard books from the current exhibition (Roz, I have a copy for you).

The Smash Palace Exhibition will be on display at the White Rabbit Gallery until August 4, 2013.  If you’re in Sydney, it’s definitely worth a visit!

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White Rabbit Gallery
30 Balfour Street
Chippendale NSW 2008
+61 (02) 8399 2867
www.whiterabbitcollection.org
(website includes artists’ biographies)

Open Thurs – Sun, 10am to 6pm
Closed February and August
Closed Good Friday, Christmas Day and Boxing Day

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Our Week In Photos

Posted in Food & Friends, My Photos on May 24, 2013| 76 Comments »

Occasionally, life gets in the way of blogging.

Which is a good thing, because it means I’m out and about rather than sitting on the computer all day. Here’s a catch up on the week’s adventures!

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I often play around with chocolate on the weekends – my latest batch included these Drambuie-soaked Persian figs, dipped in dark Belgian chocolate. They’re quite potent…

On Saturday, I baked three giant focaccias to share with friends and neighbours (there was one more in addition to those shown in the photo below). We ran out of racks to cool them on! One slab went to stock Christina’s freezer, another half went to Dredgey, and the rest was divided up and shared around.

It sounds like generosity on my part, but it really isn’t – as all my breadbaking friends know, there is something so joyous and so rewarding about producing bread in large quantities, that we’re always delighted when anyone gives us the slightest excuse to bake…

We cut up a large piece for our Saturday night dinner with Will and Bethany. Their little poppet stood up on her tiptoes and peered longingly at the bread – we laughed ourselves silly and then dubbed our cocktails the Baby Grace in her honour…

With the two egg whites I had leftover from making Greek pasticcio for dinner, I baked a huge tray of meringues…

Waste not, want not – just two egg whites and half a cup of caster sugar produced a mountain of crunchy sweet treats…

. . . . .

On Sunday, a giant tromboncino and our final eggplant of the season went into the wok with a Spanish onion, jalapeño chillis and a tin of tomato pulp..

…and came out as two large boxes of garden ratatouille. We eat it cold as a sandwich filler…

. . . . .

A day trip out to Castle Hill to visit our friends at the Youeni Foodstore is always a treat. This time we were meeting up with Rick, who had not only made the epic trek on public transport from the other side of Sydney, but had also grown a beard for the occasion (as one does).

The food was fabulous and interesting, as always. I had a vegetarian pearl barley risotto…

…and Pete had chorizos and white beans on Damien’s delicious new sourdough bread…

Lovely Chris who owns the store brought us his latest Brussels sprouts creation to taste. I liked it so much that I asked to take the leftovers home. Neither Rick nor Pete are fans of the dreaded green vegetable, but both tried it, with Rick declaring it to be “the best Brussels sprout he didn’t like”…

And…ta-dah…the beard-off! Chris (on the left) is a seasoned beardsman, but Rick grew his just for the occasion. He shaved it off that night!

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On the way home, Pete and I stopped at the Sydney Fish Markets. The produce at De Costi Seafoods is always amazingly fresh…

I came home with a kilo of green Hawkesbury River school prawns, which had been “jumping” that morning. Green prawns are usually frozen and then defrosted for sale, which makes me reluctant to stock my freezer with them. That certainly wasn’t the case with these, and I added half my “catch” to Hokkien noodles for dinner that night (and yes, Chicago John, that is tromboncino you can see at the bottom of the plate!)…

What have you been up to this week?

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Cocktails

Posted in Food & Friends on May 19, 2013| 60 Comments »

I am not, as my husband likes to tell people, a single event learner.

It took me three separate attempts at drinking Gin before I realised that it made me weep. I would happily drink a G&T one night, then another one the following evening, only to find myself bawling at breakfast the next day.

And I’d completely forgotten that Tequila is not my friend. It makes me quite paranoid – after a couple of Margaritas, I find myself ringing family members to check everyone’s still alive. I seem to forget this phenomenon every five years or so, and buy myself a bottle, despite Pete’s very vocal protests.

My most recent purchase was a Margarita pre-mix from Costco, and it was divine. It took just two glasses for me to remember exactly why I don’t drink Tequila, and then I was left wondering what on earth to do with the rest of the 1.75 litre bottle I’d bought (17½ standard drinks, the label boasted).

Thankfully, my friend Words came to the rescue (Tequila apparently only makes her indignant, rather than neurotic), although I did receive an sms from her this morning complaining of a sore head and beseeching me not to buy any more Margarita mix.  Clearly, she is a single event learner.

The problem is this: I adore cocktails. When I was a young adult in the 80s, they were hip, fun and exciting. They’re also highly potent, with each glass hiding up to two standard drinks (it used to be more, but liquor laws in Australia now limit the allowed alcohol per glass).

Cocktails can be very calorific, not to mention expensive, and I’m loathe to stock my pantry with liqueurs just so that I can make a very occasional mixed drink.

Thank goodness for my blogging mates! Last Friday night, gorgeous Sally from My Custard Pie tweeted about champagne cocktails, just as we’d opened my birthday bottle of Bollinger (which had been languishing in the fridge for months). I didn’t have the ingredients for her recipe, but on her assurance that using Bollie for a mixed drink was perfectly acceptable (after all, she’d had solid gold in her last champagne cocktail), I added a half nip of our homemade blood plum brandy to my glass.

May I present…the Baby Grace…

The Baby Grace is sweet, elegant and completely charming. She is also delicious, although it’s hard to justify opening a bottle of French champagne every time I want a cocktail.

My sweet, elegant and completely charming friend Anne from Life in Mud Spattered Boots, who is also just a little bit wicked, suggested using cider instead. The Dirty Granny blood plum brandy blend proved to be an absolute winner!

And in Anne’s honour, we’ve named it…The Muddy Boot…

Tell me, do you have a favourite cocktail?

And do you find certain sorts of alcohol affect you in strange ways?

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