The most-eaten vegetable in the world, according to a question on a trivia quiz I answered incorrectly on the weekend, is... the onion (I guessed potato). When you think about it, it makes sense. They're cheap, plentiful, available year-round and lend an amazing depth of flavour to so many different foods. They taste great caramelised, pickled, roasted, fried or raw, in soups and stir-fries, curries and casseroles, tacos and pastas and... tarts. Not sweet tarts, though onions themselves are wonderfully sweet. Which is why they're so perfect in the savoury kind. There's the traditional French onion tart of course, but in that the flavour of the onion is diluted with cream as well as cheese, and the rich, buttery pastry, built up around the sides of the dish as well as forming its base is, quite literally, a bit too much of a good thing. This simple, pizza-style Provençal tart is more my speed - a single layer of thin, flaky pastry (that you don't have to blind-bake), slathered with sweet golden onion and sprinkled with a salty punch of anchovies and olives. It's the kind of meal that works just as well in summer as a light lunch outside with a glass of white wine (though this is more the life of characters in French movies I've seen than my own) as it does in winter when you need something warm and comforting (that you can eat sitting on the couch under a blanket with the heater on - more familiar to me, especially right now). Onions! Of course.
There are a lot of brownie recipes out there. So if I'm going to post about something gooey, and chocolatey and square, it ought to be worth your while. And let me tell you, this is. It's not just any old brownie recipe, but one from a favourite place of mine in Sydney, the Bourke Street Bakery. There are a number of them now, but the original bakery café, on leafy Bourke Street, Surry Hills, is on my route to the office I've been writing at lately. Sometimes I stop in for a coffee and exercise all my self-restraint to not order something else to go with it.
And then, after all that, I come home and bake something from their cookbook. This week it was somewhat justified as I was going to the Sydney Film Festival with friends. There's not much time in between sessions, and limited dining options in the immediate vicinity other than popcorn, so indoor picnic supplies are called for. A brought-from-home sandwich or thermos of soup are all very well and good, but afterwards, what you need to power you into the next film, is an intense hit of chocolate. One that's easy to pack in your bag and eat with your fingers in the darkness of a cinema.
Brownies are the perfect portable dessert - at a festival or a friend's house, on a road trip or a picnic... or as far afield as your own kitchen, transported all the way from the tin to your hand (then your mouth). What sets these
brownies apart from all others - other than the sour cream, which imparts a smooth richness - are the prunes. Shiny, sweet and silky,
and impossibly soft and moist from three days of soaking, they're a perfect match with dark chocolate, adding an unexpected, exquisite, sophisticated texture to the familiar
dense, squidgy square.
In addition to being an architect and an excellent road trip companion, my dad does linocuts. A couple of Christmases ago, I asked him to make me a bookplate. It didn't turn up under the tree that year (largely because I vetoed his original concept of an image in my likeness - who wants to open up a book and see their own face staring back at them?) but this May, Australia Post delivered a lovely surprise to my letterbox.
Though I've lived in Sydney for quite a while now, I'm sentimental about my Queensland roots, so this depiction of the Glasshouse Mountains (along with the pineapple, an icon of the Sunshine State) was perfect. Ever since I received it, it's pulled me like a magnet. And so last week I headed north. To a place of green hills of timber and tin, high SPF sunscreen and... tropical fruit. I arrived to find my parents' front fence laden with passionfruit.
I could have made a pavlova but it felt all wrong to be eating that in front of a roaring fire, a bit like what northern hemisphere people feel about Christmas in summer. I could have made curd, but I'm still swimming in jars of lime from my baking adventure of a few weeks ago. So, with a morning tea organised for the Queen's Birthday public holiday, and my friends with small kids coming over, I made fairy cakes. Unusually, this recipe calls for you to strain the distinctive seeds from the passionfruit pulp, leaving only the sweet, bright orange juice to flavour both the cake and its frosting. This results in a beautifully smooth batter, a particularly perfect crumb and a glossy, glowing top. The flavour of the fruit is right there, in every bite. Modest, but unmistakable, just like the Glasshouses, and my home state.
I'm in awe of people who grow things. From farmers to backyard gardeners to kids and their school projects with egg cartons and potting mix... whatever your scale or skill level, it's utterly impressive to take a tiny seed and nuture it til it's something substantial for you to eat or admire. For now, I live in a big city, in a small apartment so soil - that vital ingredient in plant growth - is hard to come by. Or at least it was until recently. A couple of months ago, I got a window box. Three window boxes to be exact, spanning the length of my living room windows. They're north-facing, so are bathed in glorious sunlight all day long - perfect for growing herbs.
When it came time to decide which ones to plant I had to think about what I mostly commonly cook with. Rosemary was a given, especially with winter roasts in mind. Ditto thyme. Flat-leaf parsley for pastas. Sage because it's so amazing with pumpkin. And marjoram... for something I love to make (and eat) regularly that's as effortless as it is impressive and versatile.
Ricotta is so good in sweet, delicate things - breakfast hotcakes, Sardinian ricotta cake... but if you swap the sugar for salt... and pepper, oregano, and chilli... and bake it in the oven for just a short while, just about as long as it takes to reach out the window, pluck some marjoram, wash it, strip its leaves, chop them up and cover them in olive oil, it transforms into a robust, savoury showstopper. One to smear on a cracker and graze on with a glass of wine, crumble over pasta (maybe with some slow-roasted tomatoes), or cut in thick wedges for a sandwich made with the leftovers from last night's roast (whether meat or veg). It's early days for me and my herbs. Wish us luck. We're going to need it - it's more accurate to say I'm green at gardening than possessed of a green thumb. We'll see how I go - any tips gratefully received - but this recipe is an excellent incentive for success.
I wasn't sure about quinces. With their pretty pale yellow hue and bulbous prehistoric form, they always seemed more ornamental than edible. Don't get me wrong - quince paste is just about my favourite thing on earth with a slice of cheese, however when you can buy a slab of that cheaply at your local deli, there's not much incentive to make it yourself. But I had a quince evangelist staying with me on and off for the last five weeks and - hailing from the northern hemisphere (by way of Newcastle, Australia) - she was keen to soak up as much autumnal fruit as she could before returning to summer. And soak she did, submerging fat slices of fruit in sugar syrup and baking them slowly til they turned ruby red and my apartment was filled with the fragrance of vanilla. One night I tried some for dessert. They were sweet, silky and swimming in the sticky scarlet syrup of their juices. I was sold.
Let me start by
saying that quinces are no fun at all to peel. Their irregular shape
with all its crazy contours makes a simple task utterly frustrating. What's more, in its uncooked state, the fruit is rock hard so if you can imagine coring a rock, well, you will appreciate that the next step isn't any easier. But once that's done, so is all the hard work. After that it's just a matter of slicing them up, tossing them into an oven-proof casserole with the other ingredients, putting the lid on and sliding the whole thing into the oven. My houseguest is gone now, departed early Monday morning on a flight bound for SeaTac. The last thing she ate before heading to the airport was a single slice of poached quince, leaving me with a Tupperware container full of sweet poached fruit with which to remember her... and autumn too.
So I had some sour cream to use up. A lot of the cooking I do starts this way. As an effort not to waste things. I can't remember now why I had sour cream in the fridge, but I couldn't let half a carton sit and spoil, no matter that it did cost all of $1.25 or thereabouts. I once made batch after batch of chutney just to empty a glass vinegar bottle, which - with its pretty embossed leaf pattern - I had designs on repurposing as a water jug. A good friend pointed out, quite sensibly, that I could have bought the bottle and just tipped its contents down the sink - but I just can't bring myself to waste anything. Besides, it's a good excuse to cook. So. The sour cream. I could have made cornbread. I could have baked a potato. But with all this glorious sunshine Sydney's been enjoying of late, I had organised a weekend picnic, so it seemed a cake was called for. This one I'd bookmarked from a blog a while ago, being a fan of all things orange, in colour and in cooking.
This recipe uses both the zest and juice of the fruit for a full-bodied citrus flavour. The sweetness of the orange is tempered nicely by the tang of the sour cream, which also gives the cake a stunningly smooth texture. It's light yet robust, and in its loaf form, eminently transportable - the perfect picnic cake. I'll be making it again (and again, no doubt as then I'll have the other half of the sour cream carton to use up).
In my professional life, I spend a lot of time waiting. For scripts to be read, decisions to be made, productions to be finished... It drives me crazy. I've never done one of those personality tests but I'm sure if I did I'd be classified as some manic crosser-off of tasks on a list, deadline-meeting type, and completely unsuited to my chosen career, which requires a lot of patience. Some things though, I don't mind waiting for.
Let me start by saying I'm a fan of baked beans. They're not for everyone I know that. There's a low-rent kind of quality to them, that's really (let's be frank here) just all about the can. And the sweet, gloopy, red sludge of sauce that binds together those mushy white beans. I'm sure if you bothered to read the nutritional information on the label you'd see they're full of sugar and salt and all manner of preservatives and things that are bad for you. But I love them anyway. There's nothing more comforting on a cold day than baked beans on toast. It's breakfast, it's lunch, sometimes it's even dinner. And a satisfying one at that. Particularly if that toast is not just toast but grilled cheese, or you add an egg (poached, fried, whatever you like) on top. So while I'm perfectly content with the instant gratification of opening a can, this recipe, which promised something similar in four hours (and that's just the cooking time!) intrigued me. I had a hunch that they were going to be worth it. And boy was I right.
Smoky
and sweet, with the subtle tang of vinegar, these are the kind of beans
that make you want to be a cowboy, or at least eat like one (alas my allergy to horses prevents me from considering this as an alternative line of work). But the taste is only the beginning of what's so good about them. The smell - as they cook slowly in the oven, infusing your kitchen with the heady aroma of bacon and onion, spices and garlic - is the very definition of warm and cosy. Waiting was never more wonderful.
