I do not like banana. My mother claimed this is because she fed me too much of it as a baby. She had a lot of weird theories so I've no idea if this is in any way accurate but for whatever reason I've long steered clear of banana bread, banoffee anything or that "one ingredient" ice-cream people swear is just like the real thing but to me tastes only of its one ingredient - blended up frozen bananas. Blechhh. But I had this tin.
It was my grandmother's. I can't remember what she made in it. Possibly nothing in my lifetime. By the time I came along, she'd retired a lot of her repertoire and mostly stuck to scones. But I always remembered the tin, which Mum inherited - specifically having to fossick around it in the cluttered cupboard full of bakeware to get to the more regular round ones. But there comes a time in your life when you yearn for something different. Something cylindrical. Something showcasing what you've eschewed for an eternity.
To say I've been converted would be a bit much. In truth, you can't taste the banana at all in this and for me, that's all to the good. What shines through strongly are the dates and the walnuts - caramel and crunch in one perfect mouthful. The banana binds it together, keeps it moist. It has its place and I wouldn't think of substituting it. Not when it works so well. Especially sliced thickly and slathered with butter.
Food presents are my favourite. Among the best I've received in recent years: vanilla beans from Bali, a catering-size container of corn relish from Tasmania, biscotti baked in one hemisphere and mailed to another, home-roasted coffee beans, a dozen hot cross buns from my favourite Hobart bakery, a tin of homemade biscuits to last through Christmas and beyond, my mother's green pawpaw chutney (which I'm lucky enough to have a lifetime supply of thanks to her obsessive need to bottle everything she ever grew), and last week, a huge haul of premium grade cocoa from my American cousin Amy, transported across the Pacific Ocean and lugged halfway around Australia by her parents, who've been out here visiting. To thank them for being such good-natured cocoa-mules, I wanted to make them something with it to say thank you. I wanted to make something the gluten-free giver of the gift could eat, even if she wouldn't get to taste this particular batch (her folks are heading home on a three week cruise). Something to showcase the cocoa, in all its dark, bitter beauty. Happily I had just the recipe. It required only a handful of ingredients, all easily available: dates, orange, walnuts and cocoa. Blended together, rolled in extra cocoa to make an elegant truffle that just so happens to be gluten-free and dairy-free too. There's no refined sugar but the natural sweetness of the date and the orange in combination with the richness of the nuts and the cocoa create a taste not unlike the very best dark chocolate... which if you've recently OD'd on supermarket-grade milk chocolate Easter eggs, you will appreciate all the more. Just like a thoughtful gift*.
* special shout out to my friend George too, for the beautiful plate these truffles sit on, which may not be edible but makes anything that goes near it infinitely more so.
I've never been big on salad. It can't compete with a sandwich in the lunch stakes and I'm too lazy to whip up a whole separate dish to go along with whatever I'm making for dinner. It's not that I don't eat vegetables (though the name and focus of this blog might suggest otherwise), I just incorporate them into whatever I'm cooking - a soup, a pasta, a curry, risotto, thrown under a roast chicken... But! Along come a new breed of salad which is forcing me to reconsider my long-held position. These salads are robust, verging on hearty. They are colourful and crunchy. Best of all, they're the sort of thing you can make on a Sunday and have on hand for the week ahead. They're all about texture and contrasting flavours - soft, salty fetta, sweet dates, crunchy cabbage, toasted sesame seeds, bright lime...
I'd had this recipe bookmarked for months but was prompted to finally make it following the enthusiastic endorsement of my friend Joanna, who extolled its virtues as a store cupboard salad. Red cabbage keeps forever in the fridge, and the other ingredients I usually have on hand, so it can be made at a moment's notice. And only takes moments to make.
December and January are - in Australia anyway - associated with one cake. Though it's often called Christmas cake, fruit cake straddles the summer. For me it's evocative of catching up with rellies in between present shopping and menu planning in the lead up to the 25th, and of morning teas in rest areas on road trips in the new year. It goes as well with bone china, as it does with tea from a thermos. My grandmother Irene, who I've talked about here before, many times, was famous for her fruitcake. When she died, my mother took up the tradition, and now, this year, it falls to me. In mum's cooking files, I found my grandmother's original handwritten recipe. Curiously, it listed only the ingredients, and no mention of method, but after a little internet research I was able to take a stab at how they combined. The key point of difference in any fruit cake, it seems, is whether or not the fruit is boiled. From what I gather, the boiling is a shortcut to allow you to make the cake the day you want to eat it, speeding the softening of the dried fruit. My grandmother did not believe in short cuts, so I elected to take the long road and soak the fruit the night before. Really, this took no time at all and required nothing more than a bit of measuring out. The next day, it was just a matter of combining the plumped, boozy fruit with the remaining ingredients to form a rich, robust batter, pouring it into a tin and baking it for three hours in a slow (low) oven. Though I didn't have either of my senior fruit cake advisers on hand, I did have the help of my dad's 16 year old neighbour William, a keen baker with 2nd and 3rd place wins in the fruit cake division of the Brookfield Show behind him. On the lookout for a prospective 1st place recipe, he offered his services and I gratefully accepted. I'm pleased to report it was a win for both of us, the cake pulled from the oven as good as I remembered my grandmother's and my mother's: deep brown, moist, and fragrant with citrus, dried fruit and the memory of those who'd made it before me.
There's something incredibly comforting about a loaf cake you slice and slather with butter. Perhaps because they remind me of my childhood. Of picnics with my grandparents. Of thermoses of tea and dinted metal cake tins. Of long socks and Lion's Parks on road trips. This weekend, with the weather rainy and cold, I wanted one.
This is an incredibly economical recipe, using just one egg, and a relatively modest amount of butter and sugar. All the flavour comes from the dates, their deep caramel sweetness cut with the freshness of orange zest and crunch of pecans. The spices mellow everything out, as does the wholemeal flour, which I threw in in place of half the amount of plain, which seemed right, and it was. This cake keeps amazingly well, and days later, tasted just as good as when it was fresh out of the oven. I could have kept eating and eating it but, showing remarkable restraint, stashed half in the freezer for another rainy day.
On Tuesday I travelled to Newcastle, a port town 160km or so north of Sydney. My train left at 7.15am. The friend I was meeting was making me breakfast on arrival at 10am. I didn't want to set the alarm so early to make myself a pre-breakfast breakfast. I didn't want to spoil my actual breakfast with some overpriced, underbaked muffin from Central Station. So I packed a granola bar, for a snack as good as the view.
Sure, I could have bought one, but making them (the day before) had the advantage of using up all the bits and pieces of dried fruit and nuts I had in my pantry. Plus, these taste way better than any that come out of a box. You might say, on reading the recipe, that that's because of the butter and sugar involved, to which I'd say - wouldn't you rather know what you were eating rather than puzzle over some indecipherable chemical on the side of a packet? You might say, don't those mystery ingredients make them last longer? But I'd say the homemade sort freeze beautifully and defrost quickly. Not that you should rush to that storage solution - if you're a regular snacker, these will last at least a week in an airtight container out of the fridge. Provided you don't eat them all at once, as you may well be tempted to do.
You can use
whatever combination of fruit and nuts you like. In this batch I tumbled
in almonds, pepitas, dried apricots, dates, shredded coconut and
raisins. The chunkier ingredients I chopped roughly. Feel free to
improvise any way you like. Swap fruit for dark chocolate or cacao nibs,
nuts for chia or sesame seeds. Put in peanut/almond butter or leave it
out. It's entirely up to you. And that's the best reason of all to give them a go.
A few weeks ago, I was in the United States. Every place I went, grain bowls were everywhere. I did not want a grain bowl. I was in the United States. I was on holiday. I wanted burgers and doughnuts and pizza and pancakes and pie. And Mexican food. I came home after eating all those things and I wanted a grain bowl. So I made one. Grain bowls are the new salad. As the name suggests, instead of lettuce or greens, they're built around grains: brown rice, quinoa, barley, rye, freekah and, in this case, farro. To this sturdy base, are added all sorts of different flavours and textures - salty, sweet, crunchy, chewy, spicy... You don't really need a recipe, but because I'm a recipe-follower, I found one, and liked it so much I've made it a number of times now. Fennel is a particular favourite of mine. I like it raw as much as I do braised but I'd never had it caramelised before. It turns out it couldn't be easier - just roughly chop the bulb into bite size pieces, tumble them into a skillet with a bit of oil and a sprinkling of sugar and watch them turn from white to deep, delicious coppery-brown. Add this to the cooked farro along with some sharp, salty fetta, chopped, toasted pistachios (for crunch), lemon and mint (for freshness), harissa (for heat) and dates (for sweetness). It's salad that's healthy but hearty, and packed with flavour. Better for you than a burger, and just as good.
Somehow I have three jars of marmalade in my fridge. I can explain. My mum makes cumquat marmalade, so there's one of hers that made its way south sometime in my carry on baggage. Inspired by a burst of bright orange in the midst of grey winter I recently tried my hand myself with tangelos. And, a few weeks ago, I was gifted a jar of mandarin marmalade (laced with brandy!) by my friend Amy's mum (a wonderful cook), made with fruit from her backyard tree. There's only so much toast you can eat. Or cakes you can make. So it seemed a good time to give this recipe a go. Especially in a week in Sydney when temperatures climbed to mid-summer levels in early spring. When you don't feel like cooking, when the only things you want to eat are cold, when you don't necessarily want to eat that much at all... Dates are delicious all on their own. Caramelly and dense and sighingly sweet. But when you combine them with some sharp citrus and pretty pale green pistachios, they are elevated into an effortless, elegant dessert. Three ingredients, two bites, one spectacular sweet for spring, summer, any season really.
A while ago, I bought some pomegranate molasses. It was so long ago I'm now no longer able to remember what I bought it for but it had been languishing lonely in my cupboard for some time, so when I happened across this Karen Martini recipe in the Sydney Morning Herald, I knew I had to make it. But not just because of the pomegranate molasses. The list of ingredients sounded intoxicating - orange, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, coffee, sesame seeds, dates... all the flavours of the Middle-East combined in a cake.
Dark, dense and deliciously sticky, this is a Middle-Eastern take on the traditional date loaf (if you want a recipe for that, go no further than Elizabeth's). The pomegranate molasses shellacked glossily on top gives a tart kick that balances the sweetness of the cake, blends beautifully with the spices, nuts and fruit within, and adds a touch of glamour and mystery to what would otherwise be a pretty plain looking loaf. If you don't have any pomegranate molasses in your cupboard, head to your nearest Middle-Eastern food store and pick up a bottle. Or two. Once this is in your repertoire, you'll need them.
I eat everything - meat, dairy, gluten, sugar... everything that is, except what those with food allergies, dietary restrictions or particular ethical beliefs routinely eat (and enjoy) because they can't eat those things. I'm squeamish about soy milk. I'm suspicious of margarine and other chemically-manufactured substitute products (though I'm grateful that whatever that is my dad spreads on his toast is lowering his cholesterol). To me, TVP sounds more like a disease than something I'd ever feel like tucking into, and as for tofu ice-cream, I'm not the slightest bit curious. Quite possibly this prejudice of mine is a problem. But I'm not inclined to work on it - not even remotely - when there are recipes like these featuring everyday, natural, wholly delectable ingredients that allow me to cook for the people in my life with dietary restrictions and myself at the same time. We all win.
These truffles contain neither butter nor cream yet they're
rich, decadent and delicious while still being gluten-free, dairy-free
and even vegan. A lactose-intolerant friend tried one and remarked that it
tasted "like it should be much worse for you than it actually is", which
was about as high a compliment as it could have possibly received. So go on, have another. I'm going to.
Even if this cake had wood chips in it (it doesn't) I would have made it. The name alone was enough. I've long harboured not-so-secret fantasies about living in a cabin in the woods. Recently, I was lucky enough to realise this dream during a six week writing residency in New Hampshire, working and sleeping in a wooden cabin surrounded by tall trees, falling snow and the brightest of bright stars. I had a fireplace, a rocking chair and deer grazing outside my windows. Unlike a lumberjack, however, I had a lunch basket delivered to my door each day, along with clean linen and a ready supply of wood for the fire. Not to mention central heating, running (hot) water and a grand piano. Not that I'm complaining. My hands were not made for hewing pine, but for tapping on a keyboard and, clearly, making this cake.
So what does a lumberjack put in a cake you might ask, if not wood chips? Well, pantry staples like dates, flour and sugar for a start. Little luxuries like a single egg (they're not for wasting), one apple or pear (whichever you might have come by in your travels), and butter (a fair whack of it to be honest, but who ever heard of a vegan lumberjack?). The wildcard ingredient, the one you really wouldn't expect though, is coconut. Just half a cup of snowy white flakes, enough to give the cake a bit of added interest, something to contemplate while enjoying a slice with a cup of black coffee after a morning's work in the forest, or on your laptop.
