Herb Garden Show & Tell

Just planted...

...and two months on...

...We're using fresh herbs almost every day, and the veggies are thriving too. We have clusters of little green tomatoes budding all over the place...

...snow peas popping up too...

.... an abundance of spinach which I used for the first time last night making Spinach & Ricotta Cannelloni (see San Remo cannelloni packet for recipe)...

...and my pride and joy, a little baby watermelon.  Oh come on, look at that thing, it's just wrong for a fruit to be that cute.

You know, the garden seems to be going so well, but I don't do a thing except water it and pull out the occasional weed or two. It just seems all too easy somehow...

Ah well, let the good times roll, eh?

[My true pride and joy doing some herb-stomping].

Cake-Baking: "To Conquer Without Risk is to Triumph Without Glory"

My cooking weakness is baking. It's no secret. And look, despite my wonderful new man oven, I've had a spate of bad baking lately. Relationships don't always go according to plan.

One example of my recent baking failures is this attempted Donna Hay mud cake:

 

Looks fine, sure, but it was dry. With a dryness that may be likened to a bone. Not even a chocolate fudge sauce could save this dehydrated disaster.

After this fail I had pretty low cake-esteem, so I'm not sure what possessed me to offer to bake my adored friend's birthday cake for her upcoming party. I think it was partly my determined streak and partly because I like doing practical things for friends, especially adored ones.

The Adored One's favourite cake is Hummingbird Cake - like a banana cake with coconut and pineapple and a cream cheese frosting - and I decided that this was It; if I couldn't even get this simple, straightforward recipe right, then it was time for baking to join 'taking photos even with a digital camera on auto setting' on my list of Can't Do's. It all rested with this cake.

I bought the correct size cake tin. I bought the finest ingredients Woolworths had to offer. The party was in three hours. Nothing could go wrong.

Nothing was going wrong until my recipe didn't specify whether or not to drain the crushed pineapple before adding it. I ran to Google to check what other Hummingbird Cake recipes advised, and to my great alarm, some said to drain it, even "thoroughly", and others said to add the juice.

Panic. Rising.

I started trying to figure out an average ratio of wet to dry ingredients across a number of recipes, but I wasn't that smart and I didn't have time to get that smart. My whole cake-baking future was riding on this; to juicify or not to juicify?!? I was at an impasse.

As I held the can of pineapple in one hand and the mixing spoon in the other, I looked to the sky for inspiration.. and suddenly a bone-dry mud cake flashed through my mind. I felt those moistureless crumbs in my mouth, the parched cake flesh on my tongue.... 

In went the pineapple, in went the juice, and I spanked that cake into the oven before you could say "start over with a different recipe". It was done. 

Fast forward three hours:

Looks fine, sure, but the true test was to come after the Happy Birthday had been sung, and all the candles had been blown out... and with a roomful of guests waiting for cake, I picked up the knife and faced my fate.

I sliced gingerly through the frosting and  plated up a small piece... a bit crumbly... I took a deep breath... and gobbled.

It was moist. 

It was delicious!

Success was mine! Glory was mine! I would live to bake another day!

That day came the following week when I volunteered to bake a chocolate coconut cake for Mum's _ _th birthday.

Looks fine, sure, but I had to cut half of it off before I iced it because there was a major sink-hole in the top.

Perhaps I should just give up cakes.

Free Stuff

I usually ignore offers and requests from foodie sites because I'm not interested in fame and fortune (think, advertising), but I thought I may as well take this one up because it could get you a whole ten dollars worth of free food! Wow! Value! etc.

Menulog Restaurant Delivery Guide  www.menulog.com.au

Australia's largest restaurant guide (20,000+ restaurants)

Order home delivery online and get $10 off your first delivery order using this voucher code: 843F2D. Valid until Nov. 11, 2010 at participating restaurants on the site that have "accepts voucher" sign, for a minimum order of $20.

There are a number of options if you live in the Melbourne CBD, but if you're in Wezza like me it's So 'n' So's Chinese in Laverton or nothin'.

Not sure how much delivery costs. Probably more than ten dollars.

 

Cheers to Five Years

When I was engaged, people would enthusiastically say to me, "Marriage is wonderful!" and "Each year it gets better and better!" and something about the ageing process of good wine and maturing and something or other.

Well, last month was our fifth wedding anniversary, and the occasion for our annual Running Away, and we ran off this time to the city for two nights of being young and free.

The first night we ate Thai at Cookie Eating House and Beer Hall on Swanston Street. I'd made sure to book one of their little balconies overlooking Swanston Street that are just big enough for a table for two.

We had complete privacy, with French doors sectioning us off from the rest of the restaurant (which was loud and packed) with our waitress popping in every now and then to check on us.

The menu at Cookie is divided into three columns - small, medium and large dishes - which I thought was a nice versatile way to be able to order. Our waitress had lots of advice and recommendations and we ended up starting with a small dish of drunken prawns in a sweet whiskey broth, followed by two large dishes to share of soft shell crab and five-spice chicken, washed down with a Mount Fishtail Sav Blanc.

Portions were generous, service excellent and atmosphere superb. We ate and drank the hours away as a chilled-out day turned to a memorable night, with good food, good wine and five-star company.

The next day, between activities, we pigged out on our fave trash food - which for me includes Sausage 'n' Egg McMuffins and Mrs Fields Fudge Brownies, and for him, Krispy Kremes - and we ventured out for a midnight dinner at 24-hour Greek restaurant Stalactites on Lonsdale Street.

It was meat, meat and more meat, and the two of us barely got through a mixed grill for one. Hearty and fast, it's all hustle-bustle, and decently priced with a big menu to choose from.

We'd been planning this weekend away for a while, and all the great things we were going to do together, and you know the kind of occasion you look forward to so much it becomes completely idealised and overblown in your head, so that even if the reality does turn out to be pretty good, it still doesn't live up to the picture in your head, so you end up being disappointed in the end?

This wasn't one of those occasions.

It was a celebration fitting for five extraordinary years with an extraordinary guy. And as for those aforementioned enthusiastic individuals: those people were right! Cheers to that!

Cookie

Disco, Eating House & Beer Hall

First Floor, 252 Swanston St

Melbourne

Mains $18 - $32

Ph. 9663 7660

www.cookie.net.au

Stalactites

Greek Restaurant

177 - 183 Lonsdale St 

Melbourne

Mains $13 - $28 

Ph. 9663 3316

www.stalactites.com.au

The Birth of the Herb Garden

When we were looking for a house to buy last year, people would enthusiastically say things like, "It'll feel so different being in your own place!" and "You're gonna love it!"
Those people were right. It does feel different, and we love it. After many moves, rent rises and perpetually broken fixtures and chattels (not to mention evil ovens) I feel very grateful be standing on our own little patch of earth.

This patch of earth of ours came with a garden bed in the back corner that looked like this:

So when my husband led me outside on Christmas morning to see this:

 

it was a case of garden bed + herbs + my incessant talk of planting a herb garden for three months prior =  a lot of mini glee-jumps and exclamations of, "Yesssssssss!! Herb garden!!" The idea of fresh herbs at my fingertips anytime I wanted? Amazing. And with 10 different herbs, plus veggies, surely my natural black thumb wouldn't be able to kill off all of them.

Soon after Chrissy, the planting began, with the help of my ourdoorsy-type bro-in-law-to-be, who sourced some redwood railway sleepers for decorative and standing-on purposes:

                                  

 We (ie. they, while I read my herb manual and gave helpful tips and directions) planted 10 herbs, tomatoes, snow peas, watermelon, strawberries, a bay tree and a much-wanted lemon tree my grandparents-in-law gave me for Christmas: 

So there you have it, the very first newborn pictures of my botanical baby. You can be assured of further progress updates detailing its growth and development, and don't think you're gonna escape the 'cute' stories and photos in your face...

The Mill

I've heard suburbia can really get you down. The house, the car, the kids and the white picket fence... it could all make a person feel like they're living a cliche. But there's a reason something becomes cliched. It's because lots of people like it. And that's generally because there's something good or universal or relatable about it. If that's supposed to be depressing then there must be something wrong with me.

Perhaps the bad rap suburbia sometimes gets is due to that egocentric contradiction in human beings - we all want to fit in, and yet at the same time be special, and 'special' sometimes gets  translated as 'unique to the point of transcendence'. I know of only one person so truly unique they actually did transcend the rest of us, and you know, I'm starting to think belonging, relating and being a part of something bigger than yourself is not the most horrendous thing imaginable.

That being said, I like to shake off suburbia every so often and don me now my gay apparel, and a girls night out is a fine way to do it.

One of the many great things about my personal slice of suburbia is it's only half an hour's drive from one of the best cities in the world. As a fabulous friend and I sauntered down bustling Hardware Lane to The Mill, I started feeling delightfully metropolitan, even more so when we were seated upstairs beside a big open window overlooking the laneway. The soft ambiance of the restaurant interior contrasts with the buzz rising up to the window from the crowds below. A breeze meanders in steeped in jazz music. Our waitress pours water while we wait for our friends. It is, in a word, ideal.

Complimentary bread with olive oil and salt started us off (er, special rock salt from the Murray River, no less). We chose seared Altantic salmon, rosemary lamb, and ricotta gnocchi, which was melt-in-your mouth cheesiness that left me wanting more.

You really need two courses to feel satiated, and we plunged gleefully into the cheese menu, going with the Meredith Goat Blue and the Delice de Bourgogne, which we couldn't resist when we read it described on the menu as having a "texture similar to that of ice cream". Supersoft, creamy; loved it. One cheese order suffices for two and is accompanied by plenty of bread, fruit, nuts and a delicious date paste.

The thing I liked best about The Mill, aside from the ice cream cheese, was the service; attentive, but not hover-y; meticulous, but surreptitious. Our wine never got near the bottom of the glass before it was topped up. It was the best service I can remember that wasn't in the US, where you can never be sure whether they're smiling at you or smiling at a big tip.

The Mill, and the adjoining Charlie's Bar downstairs is ideal if you're into a bit of Melbournian laneway action (apparently the jazz band plays in the lane Thurs - Sat) or an intimate, classy dinner in the restaurant upstairs... or if you just want to escape suburbia for a night.


The Mill
Upstairs, 71 Hardware Lane, Melbourne
Ph.  9600 1454
Mains $23 - $39

www.themillrestaurant.com.au

Learning to Trust Again

I’m an average cook, and I like cooking, but mainly because I get to eat home-cooked food at the end of the exercise. Hit-and-miss might be a good way to describe my kitchen exploits, but I'd give anything a go, and if it didn’t work I’d shrug it off and pull out some pre-packaged processed glop, like ‘Easy Mac’, which I’d enjoy anyway.

However, over the last few months, I’ve had a Crisis of Cooking Confidence. It started the day my oven went psycho, ‘my oven’ being our ex-landlord’s oven, and our ex-landlord being Mr. Never-Fix-It.
On that fateful day, my oven - an unpredictable rebel who’d always lived by his own rules - decided black was the new golden brown and turned my lasagne to charcoal within minutes and set the smoke detectors howling.

It became a tumultuous relationship from then on, and many burnt muffins, blackened casseroles and embarrassing hosting moments later, I knew he wasn't good for me, but I just couldn't walk away.

He even started coming between me and my friends. Example: One day when a pal dropped by for lunch, I made his favourite pasta dish (see recipe for The Best Pasta Bake in the World), but five minutes after putting it in the oven, the smell of burning filled the house, and when I opened the oven door, I saw black. When the black smoke cleared out of my eyes, I saw more black. When I pulled the pasta bake out of the oven, I realised the black was the top of the pasta bake. It wasn't a pasta bake, it was a pasta incinerate.

He had become a monster.

If you're familiar with Disney's Beauty and the Beast, recall the scene where the mob is storming the castle and the oven rears up out of the shadows with burners blazing. 

Eventually I knew I had to leave what I realised was really just an investment-property-quality appliance with no long-term prospects. I made do with unsatisfactory stovetop cooking and meaningless takeaway for some months. Was it him? Was it me? I became a vulnerable shadow of my former confident, average-but-jolly-cook self.


Finally I became strong enough to walk away. We moved on, into our brand new home, where I met my new, middle-of-the-range oven named Simpson. I flipped nervously through my cookbooks then ordered takeaway for the whole first week. It was only through watching my husband bake a perfect batch of delicate meringues that I felt like I was ready to learn to trust again...

Today I baked a batch of Anzacs, just like in the good ol’ days, as a thank you gift for someone who did us a favour:

Looks like the start of a beautiful friendship.