Beef bourguignon, or, more accurately, how not to make beef bourguignon...

Sorry for the absence folks. Had a business trip to the US where I had planned to not only cover off on the work I had to do, but also talk about food a bit.

Instead, I'm still recovering from the impacted bowel I always seem to get when I digest what passes for food in that forsaken land. There is good food in the USA, but you just happen to pay through the nose for it, and no matter what you pay, getting a good serve of vegetables, or bread without gallons for corn syrup, is nigh impossible.

Vancouver, which I also visited, is a foodie heaven, however. Awesome seafood, an understanding that vegetables are important, and a mighty fine understanding of how to make a martini.

But, long story short, I'm back. Now to try and get the hang of cooking for myself again after a week and a half of being waited on and making nothing more strenuous than black coffee.

So, let's drift back in time to a dinner party I hosted a little while ago, for a lesson in how far you can push a recipe and still make it work.

Beef in Red Wine, with boiled new potatoes

Normally I like to go through ingredients and do the whole nine yards recipe thing, but the truth is... I really consider this dish a pretty serious failure. So, basically, I'm not even going to suggest you cook it. But it's an interesting and illustrative failure, at least.

Beef bourguignon, which this is a bastardised version of, is a classic dinner party dish. Rich, hearty, and really easy to make ahead of time. In fact, many recipes call for just that - make it the night before, let the flavours intensify overnight, then reheat to the tasty amazement of your guests. The problem with that is simple - who has time to cook a meal that technically should be on the go for hours, put it aside for the next night, then make something so you can eat there and then? It's a time intensive dish, and like a lot of city dwellers, time's a serious commodity for me.

That said, there are some handy shortcuts, and I've made this dish before in about an hour, and it's super good. But when you're already shortcutting a recipe, the last thing you want to be doing is cutting any more corners, and that's where my last Beef and Red Wine really fell down.

The people I was cooking this for presented a range of interesting challenges, not the least of which was a serious dairy allergy. Another guest doesn't dig on pig (I know, it's crazy, but she's a lovely person), and I do believe there was even some gluten issues at hand.

The thing about cooking is that it's effectively science for your mouth. Any really good dish is a series of chemical and organic reactions, as well as complex interactions of mouth feel and flavour; messing about with any facet of a dish often has disastrous consequences. I know this. I knew it then, too, but I was so stuck with the idea of presenting a ballsy beef bourguignon, and cooking it in front of my guests (because, for me, cooking is as much about being seen to prepare good food as it is presenting that good food - it's a performance thing) that I just plowed ahead, and figured I could easily cook a dish that was already flaunting the recipe, and go ahead and remove butter, bacon, and flour.

Rookie. Fucking. Mistake.

Sure, it looks okay. But that's just what it wants you to think. Look closer, and the rich-seeming sauce is missing that all important shimmer of butter. That sauce is also being soaked up by the beef, because it's not been thickened by the flour.

And, when you taste it, it's lacking anything like the body it should have. Oh, bacon, why dids't I forsake thou?!

Because I'm an idiot, that's why!

The annoying thing is that this is dish I can really cook - and in just an hour or so. But it needs those important ingredients. The butter adds richness, a silky mouthfeel, and thickens the sauce. The flour should coat the meat when it's first browned, which transfers a magic amount to the pan, while also adding further thickness when the meat's added again later in the dish, not to mention changing the consistency of that meat. And the bacon - it's bacon! Rich, smoky bacon.

There's simply no stock rich enough, no demi glace ballsy enough (as Bourdain would put it), to make up for not having those important elements. What I produced was a flat, flavourless dish that if you got it in a restaurant, you'd send back to the kitchen with a sternly worded letter to the chef.

Of course, all this whining aside, the final irony is, well, kind of delicious. Everyone seemed to enjoy it, but one of my guests went back for seconds and thirds. He told me it was one of the tastiest things I'd ever cooked for him.

Then again, this is the guy who's allergic to dairy - what would he know*?!

* Actually, quite a lot, as he's a cook I quite respect in his own right. But nonetheless...

Just a quick observation...

It goes without saying, that good spelling and grammar are important. But it's doubly important when you are listing food ingredients.

Now, I admit - I don't really give accurate measurements for my dishes. Mostly because I don't cook with accurate measurements, and much rather the 'cook by feel and taste' approach. But, if I were making something where measures are vitally important, they'd be here.

And that's not something you want to make a mess with. If you look up a recipe here and I've transposed a few digits, you'll be suitably cross. Like if I recommended putting, say, 23 teaspoons of chilli powder in a dish, you might well grow to hate me (once you wake from your coma).

But another area where things can go horribly wrong - as I'll soon illustrate - is in the unfortunate turn of phrase you may end up with by leaving an important word out. Not only can this be clumsy and make a recipe unclear and hard to follow, it too can lead to unfortunate cooking decisions.

Case in point: I point you to this otherwise fine-looking recipe for Stuffed Spatchcock, from the ABC's The Cook and The Chef. I think this will definitely inspire a recipe of my own, but I do hope that the recipe doesn't actually call for...

knob butter

But maybe it does! Perhaps Maggie Beer, delightfully foodie-type that she is, likes a bit of, well... sauciness in her cooking. For all I know, knob butter adds a silky finish, as it were, to the sauce that accompanies the dish. Or she's just an inveterate knob-butter-gobbler*.

Who can say.

Well, I can say one thing - be very careful when transcribing your recipes.

* Did I just call Maggie Beer a knob-gobbler? I think I did. Oops. Expect litigation and firebombs made from tasty food any day now.

What's in the box?

I've mentioned our little local food collective, called Feedbag, a few times, and since this weekend just past was Feedbag day, it seemed a good opportunity to share the awesomeness.

There's some onion and potato from a previous Feedbag run, but otherwise, that's everything we received on Saturday. Impressive, huh? It's effectively three boxes of awesome produce bought direct from Flemington markets at ohmigod o'clock. The brave souls who do the run are starting to get known out there, and are even getting some stuff discounted - remember, there are about a dozen other people in the co-op, so we get a lot of food.

Some of the market guys even thought the two girls who do most of the shopping were running a restaurant.

Anyhoo, here's the complete list of stuff:

Vintage Gouda
Dutch cream potatoes
Kipfler potatoes
Gold sweet potatoes
Button mushrooms
Broccoli
Limes
Mandarins
Baby cos lettuce
Daikon radishes
Yellow capsicum
Baby eggplant

Brown onions

Single clove garlic
Rhubarb
Grape tomatoes
Baby squash
Chinese cabbage (wombok)
Granny smith apples
Fuji apples
Diced goat
Carrots
Oyster blade steak

Spatchcck
Fresh coriander
Fresh mint
Fresh basil
Persian dried figs
Cardamom pods
White peppercorns
Spice mix for goat

See? Huge amounts of goodness, and all for only $50. It's more than enough to last the fortnight between shops, lasts wonderfully long (remember, this is literally market fresh, so it's not sitting in a cool room at a Woolies or something), and is a serious cooking inspiration. I find the surprise ingredients really pushes my cooking in interesting directions.

Like the spatchcock...

... and the figs, for instance.

Not stuff I'd normally consider purchasing or cooking with, but now in my kitchen and in need of a worthy cooking effort.

Feedbag - we hearts it, precious.

French Onion Soup

It's getting colder, and it's certainly been a wet week or two in Sydney. In other words, it's perfect weather for a nice hearty soup.

One of the things I love about a good soup is how easy they are - chop up your ingredients, saute a bit in oil or butter, add stock and herbs, and then let simmer away for however long you've got. Soup can be as structured or as freeform as your ingredients allow - it's a real wonder meal.

That said, there are some classics that really do deserve a bit more attention, and French Onion Soup is one of them.

Interestingly, for a lot of people the term 'french onion' was likely first associated with heavily creamed dips and Jatz crackers. As a kid, I devoured entire bowls of french onion dip at parties and BBQs. When my tastes started to broaden, and I moved out of home, I encountered the real thing. This taught me two important lessons:

1. French onion dip is a crime against food and likely humanity as well.

2. For true disdain and cranky service, you can't go past a pissed off Frenchman.

It was... some time in the early nineties, and the restaurant in question was a converted cellar in a Sydney laneway, called Le Guillotine. Sounds cheesy, yeah, but trust me, this place made a French Onion Soup that you'd gladly form a revolutionary government for. Most of the staff were either French or pretending, and man... they hated anyone who interrupted their busy Gaulish habits. You know - smoking, wearing berets, and wearing onions instead of cooking them.

But that soup stuck with me, and when I was recently staring at the large amount of onions in our pantry, it seemed the kind of thing that an onion would be proud to be a part of.

French Onion Soup

In the classic French style this is a dish that started out as simple peasant fare, but has now become more of a dinner party staple. Say to someone that you're cooking up a pot of French Onion Soup and they're likely to go "Wow, that's cool" instead of "You poor peasant sod." But that's the genesis of this dish - in many regions of France onions are plentiful, grow all year round, and are easy to come by.

It is, in effect, the inland version of bouillabaisse, though far easier to cook, at least.

ingredients

Eight medium onions

Goose fat

Beef stock

Sprig of Thyme

Sprig of Flat Parsley

Bay leaves

Dry white wine

Salt and pepper

Brown sugar

Crusty bread

Gruyere cheese

That's a lot of onions.

The first step is to get chopping those onions up. You'll want to make sure you've got a good sharp knife on hand, too - it'll not only make that much work a lot easier, but the onions need to be sliced as regularly as possible, so that it cooks as evenly as possible. After skinning the onions, I chopped each in half, then sliced away, producing one hell of a mound of onion, and making myself cry like a two-time Oscar-winner.

Once sliced up, add two large scoops of goose fat to a heavy bottomed sauce pan, introduce a medium heat, and toss in the onions. Toss the pan a couple of times, cover, let sit for about ten minutes. This essentially steams and softens the onions for the next phase - caramelising.

This is where you need to be a bit careful. The onions will need constant attention to stop them from starting to overcook; you'll be stirring every few minutes for about fifteen to twenty minutes. It's slightly more intensive than making a good risotto, but soon you'll see the mass onions reduced by about half, a lovely thick yet clear fluid start to build up in the pan, and the onions should be lovely and golden, and smell ever so sweetly.

Add a dash of wine to deglaze the pan, stirring vigorously to make sure you scrape all the tasty stuff up and into the dish itself. Then pour in the stock, and add the herbs and salt & pepper to taste. Turn up the heat to get a good boil, then reduce to simmer, covered, for about ten minutes.

When that time's up, uncover, add a teaspoon of brown sugar, and keep simmering uncovered for about a quarter of an hour. Technically, this is a dish that deserves a lot of time, but it can be made fast with a few tricks - that's where the brown sugar comes in, as it adds a further caramel texture. It's a cheat, but I want tasty food and time to enjoy it, dammit!

After this time you should have a lovely gold brown broth, and the attention of any partners within smelling range. Take off the heat and set aside - time for some cheesy toast!

Slice roughly centimeter thick chunks of bread - I used a fresh baguette - and sprinkle on some grated gruyere before placing under the griller. Technically, you should place the bread on the bowls of soup, sprinkle the cheese, and toast the whole lot, but I don't have oven proof bowls, and this is again a good shortcut. When the cheese is melted and just starting to brown, add soup to bowls, and top with the bread. Sprinkle a bit of spare gruyere into the soup itself, add cracked pepper, and you're done.

And oh... Gods... the tasty.

There's almost more solid onion in this than liquid, but it's rich and smooth without any bite. The goose fat adds a delicious silkiness to the soup, too, one that you just can't replicate with olive oil or butter, which is what most recipes call for. Really... you want the fat.

The toasted bread and gruyere adds great mouthfeel and flavour complexity, too. It's such a heartwarming meal, too - you just can't feel down enjoying something like this. And the brown sugar cheat works a charm - the caramel complexity of the dish is just about perfect.

In future I'll be keen to add some more authentic embellishments, like preparing my own veal stock beforehand, and investing in some properly rustic (and ovenproof) ramekins for an even better plating experience. But even as it stands, this is a keeper.

Roast vegetables on couscous with Moroccan tomato sauce

Sometimes all you can manage when you stand in front of the kitchen is to assemble food, rather than really cook it or get too fancy. On the week that the magazine I edit goes to press (ie, the dreaded... deadline week!), that pretty much sums me up as a cook.

Mind you, the whole point of having good ingredients on hand, such as organic veg, high quality olive oil and a good supply of fresh herbs is that even the most simple of dishes is going to be pretty tasty. Or at least good for you...

Since this has been that very week, I present to you my latest assemblage!

Roast vegetables on couscous with Moroccan tomato sauce

There are four very simple components that go together to make this, and you'll end up with a hearty, filling, tasty and very likely nutritious dish that looks a lot fancier than it is. You've got roast vegetables, a bed of couscous, the tomato-based sauce, and some greens to add visual interest and in this case a really interesting flavour and mouth feel.

ingredients

Two kipfler potatoes

Two carrots

Four single clove garlic

One garlic clove

One whole beetroot (reserve the leaves)

Green beans

Ripe tomatoes

Coriander

Small red onion

Ground cumin

Ground coriander seeds

Cup of couscous

Half a cup of chicken stock

Salt & pepper

Olive oil

Tackle the longest step first - chop up your veg for roasting, peel the single clove garlic (don't bother chopping) and toss through some olive and season with salt and pepper. Get it going at normal roasting temp for your oven, and move on to the other ingredients.

For the tomato sauce you need to get a three tablespoons of olive oil heating in a pan, and then add finely chopped red onion. As it's starting to soften, add more salt and pepper, the ground cumin and coriander, and chopped fresh coriander. Finely chop up the tomatoes - about three medium size will do you - and add to the pan.

Add a touch more oil if the sauce is looking too dry, and cook the tomato down.

When that's done, transfer to a bowl and put aside. Next!

The couscous can take a little time, so get that going next. Simply add a cup to a sauce pan, and then pour over a cup of hot water out of the tap and the stock - so that's half a cup of water, half of stock. This needs to rest, and let the couscous soak up the liquid, so get cracking on the greenery!

You could use english spinach here, but since we've got the leaves from the beetroot - and they are edible - there's no sense in wasting them. Chop the crunchy stems up into inch long sections, add to the pan you've just removed the sauce from, along with a bit more oil and some sliced garlic. Roughly tear the leaves into two or three pieces, and after a minute or two add them to the stems. When the leaves start to wilt, the stems should be cooked but still crunchy, and garlic should just be browning. Take off the heat, and arrange around two plates.

Brush the green beans with some olive oil, and toss on top of the roasting veg.

The couscous is ready to heat now, so add either some rancid butter, olive oil or a dash of blue cheese. Rancid butter is traditional, but not something you can usually sell your friends on ("It's rancid-fresh!") - even traditional cooks tend toward the blue cheese option these days, and it delivers a similar complex flavour. Olive oil will do, and since you've used stock the couscous will be tasty regardless.

Warm the couscous over a low heat the stove, mixing whatever ingredient you've added thoroughly. Stir constantly, as you don't want it to stick and burn on in the ban. Taste test, then plate it up in a mound in the center of the plate.

Your veg should be done by now, so take it out of the oven and make a tasty stack on top of the couscous. Pour the tomato sauce over the veg, and the job's a good 'un.

And pretty tasty, too, though I really did wish I had some blue cheese on hand for the couscous - there are some very heavy, stolid flavours in this dish and the cheese would have given the meal some needed bite.

The big success, however, were the beetroot leaves, which have a lovely fulsome nutty flavour. It's not dissimilar to spinach, so I suspect the leaves would be even better with a dash of nutmeg. My friend Blu has an excellent warm beetroot leaf salad with crunchy croûton that I'm going to have to try some time.

Otherwise this a great meal after a long cold day - warming, filling, and pretty damn healthy to boot.

Lemon Roast Chicken

Ah, the roast.

It's one of those dishes that a lot of us grow up with, and then tend to end up taking for granted and ignoring once we start cooking for ourselves. Which is kinda dumb, as roasting a piece of meat - be it bird, beef or whatever - introduces a whole mess of flavours you otherwise can't replicate, as well as whole lot of cooking methods to explore.

And when it comes to roasting a lovely free-range organic chook, the thing that's really going to set the stage for the food itself is the choice of stuffing. Always important in terms of flavour, it's also very important in the technical sense. A good stuffing both stops the bird from drying out during the cooking process, and shapes it as well, making for much easier serving and slicing.

Plus, if you're a highline glutton like me... it tastes really, really good.

Lemon Roast Chicken

This is essentially Stephanie Alexander's excellent roast chicken recipe, though some small changes of my own have crept into it over the years. And I'm also a much lazier cook than her, so essentially cheat on some of the steps.

But it's still tasty!

ingredients

One realistically scaled organic chicken (so much smaller and tastier than the hormone monsters you normally get in supermarkets)

One lemon

Kalamata olives

Goose fat

Salt & pepper

See? It's such a simple recipe you don't even need to see a photograph! Also, this was meant to be a meal that my partner was cooking, since I was stupidly tired, but I did my usual trick of performing a drive-by take-over of the kitchen, and we worked on this together.

So once your partner realises what's happened and goes off to play World of Warcraft in between chopping vegies and brushing stuff with tasty, tasty fat, you need to stuff the bird. This sounds rude, and feels even ruder - you are essentially shoving stuff in the hollowed out bottom of a dead animal. But it's for a noble purpose.

In this case, we're using a lemon, cut into quarters. Take one quarter and rub the bird down vigourously with the fleshy side, then get stuffing. You want to place the quarters so that the rind is innermost to the body cavity - this insures that the juice of the lemon will cook through the chicken as it roasts. Add the olives as well, sliced up roughly. This adds a wonderful savouriness to the chicken, and let me tell you - they also taste great as you graze over the carcass after the meal!

Then, all you need to do is taking a basting brush, and brush the bird with the goose fat. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and you're ready to roast! This is where I get lazy; if you're really serious about roasting, you should turn the bird once every ten to fifteen minutes from side to side, top to bottom, so that it ends right way up for the final bit of cooking. I just left it on the roasting tray.

You can also add whatever veg options you want. In our case, we chopped up some kipfler and congo potatoes, added a couple of small onions, and sliced the top off a head of garlic, and surrounded the bird with it all. All the veg also got a liberal splash of fat. Finally, while the bird cooled, we steamed some broccoli.

So, after about 50 minutes of cooking you should end up with this:

Which when carved and plated should end up like this (and also end up with your mouth watering):

The real beauty of this method is that you don't need to baste the bird during cooking at all, making it a really easy dish to make even after getting home from work. The chicken's flesh is tender and lemon flavoured, with just a hint of saltiness from the olives. The skin is also just about perfect - the goose fat (trust me, a whole entry is coming on goose fat soon!) crisps the skin beautifully, and the lemon rub goes even further toward making the skin the most indulgent part of the meal.

Except maybe for those olives... *drools*

My other half's a baker

As you can likely guess, I like food. I don't consider myself a great cook - I know too many actual great cooks to be that vain! - but I'm very pleased with what I can put together.

But one thing I've never really grokked is the art of baking.

You see, I love all the processes of the things I cook. The slow concentration of a risotto, the expectation of waiting for a well-loved piece of steak to rest. Even the careful consideration of a good chicken stuffing, or discovering a new recipe is a secret thrill. But the process of baking, and of sweet or desert cookery in general, just leaves me uninspired*.

Not so my common-or-garden-girlfriend. Or fiance. Or Moogle. Or whatever she is. She's recently discovered a real love of flour and almond meal, of making sweet treats and clever icings. Bless her for it, 'cause she's making tasty stuff, but now that I'm privy to the making process, it still doesn't do much for me.

But when the end result is something like these great little cupcakes with royal icing, who's going to question things.

Man, these were good. Ever so subtly lemony, and that frosting... well, yeah, it's royal for a reason. Silky and white, it looks a treat, and the eating's not bad either.

And yes, that bowl of icing didn't last long.

So anyway, I guess it's a good split. For serious dinnering, I can knock off a solid entree and mains, but my partner can handle desert. It's almost like it was meant to be...

* There is one desert I love preparing. Calling it cooking seems bit of a stretch, but it's certainly a crowd pleaser, and something a little different. Keep an eye peeled.