I had a really bad day Friday. The sort where one thing rolls into another and somehow by late afternoon you've managed to lock yourself out of your apartment. Fortunately I have a lovely neighbour, who let me use her phone, and a good friend with a spare set of keys who drove heroically across town in peak hour traffic to my rescue. Fortunately, when I got back into my apartment, this was waiting for me in my fridge.
Tarte tatin is
one of my favourite desserts. Root vegetables lend themselves well to
this savoury version - sweet potatoes in particular, especially if you
can find them in a variety of colours. At my local fruit and veg shop, I
was able to get purple and white varieties as well as the familiar
orange. Sliced thickly and roasted, along with carrot,
parsnip and red onion, they make a gorgeous patchwork of colours, their
natural sweetness enhanced by a lick of caramel, offset by
chopped herbs and goat cheese and complemented perfectly by a rich, all-butter pastry.
The kindest thing you can do for yourself when you're feeling low is feed yourself well. And ideally, share that food with someone, like I did Friday night with a good friend who came around to cheer me up. Sitting on the grassy headland at Coogee, watching the sun set and the waves break, drinking red wine from plastic cups and nibbling tarte tatin from an alfoil package, the day ended so much better than it began. And that was enough.
This week, it got cold, and I got a cold. Let me start by saying I am no good at being sick. By this I mean I am not stoic in suffering. Because I know this, and don't like to be around sick me as much as anyone else, I throw everything I can think of at getting better. This means gargling with salt water, drinking copious amounts of ginger tea and grapefruit juice, swallowing spoonfuls of Manuka honey and raw garlic, dabbing dots of tea-tree oil at the back of my throat, steaming my bowling ball head with Vicks Vapour Rub, and soup. Lots of soup.
The restorative powers of chicken soup are well-documented. It's clear, and comforting and well, clean, which, when your body feels like it's been overtaken by germs, is no small thing. This recipe, by Australian cookbook doyenne Margaret Fulton, poaches a whole chicken in an onion-infused water or broth, then takes it out to remove its skin and bones, chops its white flesh into bite-size pieces and adds it back to the pot with fat rounds of leek and carrot. With a bit of parsley torn on top and a few grinds of black pepper it's simple and satisfying and just feels like it's making you better. At the very least, it makes you stop, and sit and savour, while you peruse the official FIFA World Cup Guide and decide which team you will support after Australia (Argentina!) and flip through cookbooks deciding what you will cook when you get up at 2 and 4am for a month to watch matches. It's going to be a busy June/July. Lucky I got the cold out of the way. And some soup in the freezer. Whether you're sick or well, or just crazy enough to forgo sleep for four weeks of football once every four years, it's always good to have on hand.
It is my firm belief that vegetables do not belong in cakes. But, according to my father, you have to change your mind sometimes to prove you have one. And so I made a carrot cake. I figured any recipe from the Bourke Street Bakery was not going to disappoint. And on this score I am pleased to say I was totally right. This cake is unbelievably light in its crumb and, incredibly, in its frosting (no mean feat when the primary component is cream cheese!). It's fragrant with spices, studded with walnuts, and flecked prettily with orange. In fact, the carrot component makes it wonderfully moist, which means its flavours deepen nicely over time and that it keeps well. Or at least I imagine it does - there were no leftovers to test this out on when I served it up at a picnic last week.
This cake is by no means complex but it does involve a few bowls and benefits from being made in a stand mixer - unless of course you enjoy the dead arm you get from manually beating egg whites. There are certainly other more straight-forward recipes out there but I venture they wouldn't have the wonderful lightness of this one. A lightness that comes from separating and aerating the eggs, the extra light olive oil, small amount of flour, and modest quantity of frosting, which is used to stunning effect to separate the two layers. The resulting cake resembles nothing like the dense, dumpy loaf slices you see suffocated in plastic wrap in bad cafes worldwide, but is sleek, sophisticated and utterly scrumptious. Here's to open minds.
