plate 5: italy

Pasta is definitely in my top five foods. Maybe top three. Actually, it could even make the top two. And, I didn’t know it was possible, but I fell even more in love with pasta this weekend when I made it fresh for the first time.

I was a little bit nervous to make the dough, I’m not 100% sure why, maybe it was because eggs were involved. But after many many many minutes of shaping and working the flour and eggs together, I ended up with a nice soft ball of dough. Then after many more minutes of kneading, it became as smooth as a baby’s bottom, which is just how the cookbook said it should be. I wonder if this is what my great-grandmother – who was born in Pisa - would have spent hours doing in her kitchen.

Using the pasta machine was pretty simple, especially following the fantastically detailed sketches in Marcella Hazan’s The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. I’ve been told she’s the guru of Italian home cooking, so I felt confident having her by my side. Her book showed me exactly how to feed through the portions of dough to come out with long rectangular sheets. After about an hour of drying them on tea towels (I don’t think I actually needed to wait that long), they went through the cutting rollers for fettuccine. It was such a joy to watch the long, thin strands magically emerge from the machine.

 

 

Equally pleasurable was making the sauces. Still following Marcella’s instructions, I made a classic tomato sauce with onion and butter. Super easy. All you do is cut a teeny cross at the base of the tomatoes, plunge them into boiling water for about 1 minute then cool them a little before taking off the skin. After that, just chop them up then cook them with butter and onion for 45 minutes. And in the pan sits a deliciously sweet, rich tomato sauce - no canned peeled tomatoes required. The other sauce was mushrooms cooked with shallot, ham, cream and, yep, more butter. In the words of my dinner guest - "a cracker".

I had so much fun this week. While making the pasta took me a little longer than expected, it was totally satisfying.  Set aside a good few hours if you plan on doing it - have fun.  x

plate 4: egypt

I have an affection for Middle Eastern cuisine, most likely because my mum’s parents were born and raised in Cairo. I spent many a weekend at my grandparents’ place indulging in all sorts of Egyptian delights, so the memories are what makes it special for me.  

This week’s journey started in the middle of the week when I took a trip to a Middle Eastern supermarket during my lunch break. MFC Supermarket (455 Gardeners Road, Rosebery in Sydney) is overflowing with spices, dates, olives, nuts, pastries and loads more. It’s like stepping into a food market in a foreign land – needless to say, I was in heaven.

Given I’m highly indecisive, I found it hard to settle on one dish this week so I chose three. It’s amazing what you can do when you have a full day off work and can spend it entirely in the kitchen.

You might recognise dish 1 as dukkah, but in my family we call it “doa”, which I think might have something to do with the Arabic pronunciation. However you say it though, this is seriously good stuff. I used my grandmother’s recipe, which unfortunately I can’t share with you - my mum pretty much has the family recipes under lock and key. I’ll tell you a funny story: a friend of mine got married a few years ago and for her hen’s we all baked a dessert and were to put the recipes in a scrapbook for her to keep. I decided to make my grandmother’s chocolate-covered, jam-filled biscuits. My mum informed me that her and my dad “had a discussion” and that she didn’t want me giving my friend the recipe. I was gobsmacked, especially since my parents have known this friend since she was born (our dads grew up together in Hungary). So that’s the reason you can’t have the doa recipe! Generally though, doa is a mix of seeds, and sometimes nuts, that are crushed together to form a fine powder. It can be sprinkled over dishes, used to coat meat before cooking, or the best way: used as a dip for bread – dip in olive oil first then in the doa. Amazing. I also love it with avocado on toast. You don’t have to miss out though – there are plenty of recipes online or you can just make up your own with whatever nuts and seeds you like. I’d never made my own batch of doa before and I was really happy with how it turned out. I made a huge amount, so it took me ages to grind it all up, but it was totally worth it.

Next up, the national dish of Egypt. Ful medames has been an Egyptian culinary custom for centuries. It’s often eaten at breakfast, but I’m more of a muesli-fruit-and-yoghurt type gal at breakfast, so I found it just as enjoyable as a side for barbecued lamb at dinner. “Ful” are fava beans or broad beans and while you can buy them dried and soak them overnight before making the dish, a cheat’s way is to buy them canned – it saves loads of time.

Lastly, Destination Degustation had a first this week: dessert. I tried my hand at making mochollobeya – pronounced “mo-hol-obey-a”. It’s a kind of custard pudding that uses ground rice cooked with milk and sugar. Rosewater, which the Egyptians love using in all kinds of desserts, is then stirred in at the end to give it a yummy, extra-sweet edge. I topped mine with chopped pistachios, too. The result? Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.

A tip if you’re making the mochollobeya: cook it over medium heat for quite a while. The recipe says to cook until the mixture is like a thin custard, but I think it needs to be a little thicker. Bil hana wish shifa’! – Enjoy your meal!

All in all, Egypt was a success and not just because of the food. This week I had no meltdown in the kitchen, just a burn on my arm.

plate 3: france

Even though my mum was born in Paris, French cuisine was not something I grew up on. Middle Eastern food is what reigned supreme in my mum’s and grandma’s kitchens, but more of that in the coming weeks.

This week, my nerves had been building up for the French plate, mainly because French cooking is well-respected for being elegant and first-class – everything that my cooking is not. The exact reason why I chose a refined and quintessentially French dish – soufflé au fromage (cheese soufflé).

Some say that a cook’s worst nightmare is a sunken soufflé, but the main reason I’ve been shit-scared all week is because the soufflé technique hinges upon whisking egg whites, and my Achilles heel of cooking is separating eggs. I’ve read that any yolk in the white can cause problems creating beautiful snow-white, voluminous egg whites. 

So how did it go? Miserably. I bought a dozen eggs instead of the required six, just in case, and lucky I did, too, because I ended up smashing a few into the sink when they didn’t work outpouring obscenities as I went. Having no eggs left after a number of failed separation attempts, I had to make do with what I’d done – if it didn’t work, I needed to keep telling myself “c’est la vie”. How appropriate.

By some form of miracle, beating my egg whites into “stiff peaks” actually worked - the bonus here being that I gave my biceps a workout at the same time - and I managed to get my soufflé mixture into the oven without any real hitch. The only major problem was that the mixture was supposed to fill my soufflé dish three-quarters full, whereas mine only made it to just halfway. But, no matter – I was determined to get the dish into the oven no matter what.

I thought once it was in the oven I’d have no other issues, but alas I faced yet another one – my broken oven light. I had no idea whether my soufflé was rising or flopping, browning or burning. After the stipulated time (25-30 mins) I squashed my face up to the oven door trying to sneak a peek. I didn’t want to open the oven for fear of reducing the temperature so much it would cause deflation, but I had no option. A quick look inside revealed it had risen, but not sufficiently, so I left it a tad longer …

Finally it browned and was ready to be pulled out. Sadly I achieved no rise. I know a workman shouldn't ever blame his tools, but I'm seriously thinking I may have used the wrong size dish. Thankfully it didn't ruin the mood - I’d set the table with a few candles, poured some wine and was able to relax. This was even more blissful than usual because AJ and I spent the entire weekend renovating our kitchen floor, so food and wine were to be savoured regardless of what was in front of us. For a first effort though I was pretty happy with the soufflé - although the texture could've been a little fluffier on the palate, I’d never beaten egg whites with a balloon whisk to stiff peaks so that was my main achievement. And while I guess with a soufflé the rise is the prize, the prize for me was the awesome cheesiness of the dish coupled with a glass of pinot.

Recipe this week is courtesy of the 1968 cookbook Recipes: The cooking of Provincial France

If you're feeling brave enough to try to cook a souffle, I recommend following these tips - I didn't find them until after all was said and done, but they're definitely worth a look. Bonne chance!

plate 2: hungary

plate 2: hungary

The second stop of Destination Degustation was a little daunting. My dad, and my mum paying homage to my dad’s heritage, have been making this ripper of a dish for decades. And in case you're wondering, no, it's not goulash. Chicken paprika is what the Hungarians adore.

I adore it, too, not only for its rich paprika and tomatoey deliciousness, but also because when you only need four ingredients – chicken, onion, paprika and tomato puree – it’s easy to cook, too. Or so I thought when I set to work on it.

If you know me well, you'll be well aware that at the Jacqui Fisher school of cooking, the method is pure  pedanticism: ingredients are measured to the exact gram and instructions are followed to the letter – some have said this is potentially hazardous to my culinary creativity, but bugger you all, I'm doing it it my way. So, when my dad handed over his prized family recipe I was aghast to see there were not many ingredient measures and, perhaps even worse, no instructions on what heat I needed to cook the dish. Gulp. I would have to feel my way through it.

Let's just say this caused a few tiny tantrums and almost led to a phone call to the fire brigade. When making the chicken, nowhere did it say "cover the saucepan" during cooking, so my sauce became a little burned, nothing a little water and extra tomato puree couldn't fix. When it was time to start the side of creamed spinach, I was too busy draining the spinach to notice that the kitchen was filled with smoke: oil was burning in the saucepan. I also overcooked my nokedli - tiny flour dumplings - so they became a tad sticky, but were fine after I tossed them in a little hot oil - thank God I didn't burn it this time round.

Profanities and problems aside however, the dishes turned out not fantastically, but fairly well: the chicken had a delightfully delicious sauce that didn't taste burned; the nokedli was not as sticky as first feared; and although the creamed spinach was a gluggy green ball rather than being the desired consistency (thick but runny), the flavour was pretty good - must have been the mass of garlic.

Lessons learned after plate two: don't be so hard on myself and when friends give me the thumbs up, the doubts of my cooking ability are dissolved - for the short-term anyway.

Here are the recipes - have fun x

Chicken paprika
Heat 50g (1/3-1/2 cup) oil in a saucepan over high heat. Cook 1 onion, chopped, until browned and soft. Stir in 1 tbs paprika. Add 1kg chicken thigh fillets (or 1 chicken, cut into pieces) and stir to coat. Stir in 2 tbs tomato puree. Add a little salt and water or chicken stock. Reduce heat to medium-low and cook, covered, until tender.

Nokedli
Put 250g plain flour in a large bowl. Add enough water to form a dough that can be worked with a spoon. Stir until smooth. Cover and place in the fridge overnight. The next day, add 1 egg per 250g flour, a little salt and keep working the dough with a wooden spoon until smooth and bubbly. Force the dough through a spatzle into salted boiling water. When they rise to the surface, remove with a strainer, rinse with cold water and throw into hot oil.
NB: Don’t overcook or they’ll become sticky and gluggy. Also, keep adding more water if the flour mixture is too thick, but make sure it’s not too runny – it should resemble really thick pancake batter.

Creamed spinach
NB: I used 2 x 250g packets of frozen spinach, but needed to add more cream and even then it wasn't as runny as I wanted, so I reckon you should use less flour - maybe half the amount.

 

plate 1: australia

What do servos and sporting matches, corner shops and construction sites all have in common? Perhaps many things, but one of their culinary commonalities is the humble meat pie.

The beauty of these little pastry cases that house a meaty filling of beef cooked with onions, sometimes vegies, sometimes Vegemite, and always topped with a squirt of tomato sauce is that they’re so versatile.

That’s why I’ve decided to cook it for a low-key Monday-night tea with my lovely boy AJ. Meat pie in one hand and a VB in the other – ah bliss.

In Australia, the meat pie dates back to the early 20th century, although some research has found its origins in medieval Europe where it was a way of preserving meat. Details, details. Fast forward a century or so and we Aussies have well and truly claimed it as our own. Apparently every one of us eats 12 meat pies a year and, since that’s one a month, I’m not wasting any time to start my quota for 2010.

Type “meat pie” into Google and a plethora of recipe possibilities are at your fingertips. More traditional versions use mince meat while some gourmet choices are cooked with chunky bits of beef, but I couldn’t go past one that featured Vegemite as an ingredient because a meat pie is, well, as Aussie as Vegemite.

Cooking the mince mixture was delightfully pleasant. Wafting through the kitchen was the smell of, not surprisingly, a meat pie filling, even though it did resemble bolognaise. With a smell this good, I'm surprised I waited the hours till dinner.

I'm proud I restrained myself though - it was well worth the wait. The filling was deliciously rich and the pastry was fabulously crispy and golden. But quite possibly the best part was that I discovered another location to eat this you-beaut meal - on a picnic rug on my balcony with the backdrop of the sun going down.

Make your own pies and devour them wherever suits you - enjoy! x



Pushing in the pastry cases


I heart the finished product


What more could a girl want?

a beginner's guide to tastebud travelling

It's polite to introduce yourself, so hello, I'm Jacq and here's a little bit about me. I was born in Australia to a dad born in Hungary and a mum born in France who were born, respectively, to parents born in Hungary and parents born in Egypt who were born, respectively, to parents born in Hungary, Italy, Spain and Palestine.

Added to my recipe is my boyfriend who was born in Australia to a dad born in China and a mum born in Australia. Thrown into the mixture are my dear friends who have links to Greece, Switzerland, India and South Africa and … well, you get the idea and you’ve heard it all before: us Aussies are a diverse bunch.

That’s why I thought it would be a fun, and delicious, challenge to try one dish from a different country each week and document the tastebud travelling. Final boarding call.