The perfect sandwich

My father had many talents. Born in 1919, he was an old-fashioned gentleman who strove all his life to be current. He wore clothes like a dandy - apple green suits with feathered hats in the 1940's, silk shirts deeply unbuttoned with a gold Buddha at his olive-brown neck in the 1970's. When he died my mother counted some 200 shirts in his closet. He wrote radio plays before television was invented, then moved on to directing cult advertising commercials for Coke in the early 80's along with music clips for AC/DC and the first cooking videos for Australia's original celebrity chef, Charmaine Solomon.

He was a hopeless romantic, or else a bit of a Lothario. He was married three times before meeting my mother who was some 30 years younger than him. I was his first child, born when he was well into his 50's.

Dad taught me how to grab onto life, to be excited by it, and to never stop learning. He would sit at the end of my bed, a glass of scotch clinking in his long fingers, and improvise whole essays on art, literature, war, Greek mythology, the colonialistation of Australia (I did very well at school). He spoke fluent French, played piano, was a fine drawer and a writer of many (unpublished) crime novels.

But, foremostly, my father's motto was "I don't eat to live, I live to eat". While my mother churned out beautiful meal after meal all throughout my childhood without much fuss or performance, my father hogged the culinary spotlight, writing an Italian cookbook that took us all over Italy as guests of the best restaurants in each province.

But the one project that he never got off the ground, that was dearest to his gourmet heart, was his plans for a book in search of the perfect sandwich.

A good sandwich is very hard to find. I was lucky enough (or fated, it seems) to work in one of Sydney's most fashionable and favoured cafes - Latteria in Darlinghurst  - back when the press-down sandwich maker was still quite new to Australia. My boss was Italian. He used only the best ingredients: huge rounds of pecorino cheese hung from meat hooks, mayonnaise was made by his mother each night, mellow mortadella was imported from Italy, and the bread came hot each morning in a taxi from the Turkish bakery in Surrey Hills. We offered only 5 things for lunch. But they were 5 perfect sandwiches. And the recipe I am about to give is for the sandwich I ate every single day for over a year when working there. It's all to do with proportion - the proportion of each ingredient is paramount. And good bread of course. I have yet to find a brilliant sandwich in Manchester - it's all industrial mayonnaise slathered around defrosted caterer's chicken strips, tinned corn mushed in with bucket-loads of grey tuna. I'm sure it's different in London. I recently had an amazing courgette, smoked ham and taleggio pizza (which is, in essence, an open sandwich) at Story - a deli that reminded me of the kind of food and atmosphere I miss, that reminded me of what great cities can offer.

So, here it is, for you Dad: my perfect sandwich.

Tuna, pickled veg, parsley and mayonnaise


Best quality tinned tuna - I use Serena in Australia and Rio Mare in the UK
Pickled veg mix - or green olives
Parsley - leaves picked or chopped
Good mayonnaise - Helmans or home-made
A little lemon juice (optional)
Maldon salt, ground black pepper
Either light rye or Turkish pide

Method:

The thing is, not to use too much tuna - just cover the bread in one layer, rather than a great mountain of it., Make sure there is enough mayonnaise to moisten the whole thing, but not to make it gluggy and bland.
You can go crazy with the parsley - no-one ever felt sick from too much parsley. The pickles should be in nice small pieces, dotted evenly amongst it all. This sandwich also works really well in a hot sandwich press - press down hard so that the oil from the tuna and mayonnaise sneaks out a bit and turns the top of the bread gold and crisp.

Saigon monastry tofu and lemongrass

photo by Elaine Dunstan

In the wet season the rain in Ho Chi Minh City comes without warning. One minute the streets are their usual craze of millions of motorbikes beeping and darting like a swarm of crazy wasps, then suddenly, from nowhere, riders and passengers are covered in flimsy plastic cagoules, flapping like so many wings.

I lived in Vietnam with my husband and then two year old daughter for six months some years back. Standing at the balcony of our arrival hotel I lift my girl up to view the street below. Beep beep beep. Scooters perform a  mad dance; the small heads of babies wedged between parents as families of four cram on one bike. Dotted along the wide boulevard is stalls selling everything from noodle soup to t-shirts, cigarettes to french crepes. Women in pyjama suits of wildly patterned nylon crouch on corners peeling pineapples, cooking waffles, shouting 'manicure, pedicure, massage'.  

We have been warned about drinking tap water and the threat of bird flu hovers like some reckless fate - I decide to return to my vegetarian roots. 

We move into a typical two story concrete house with balcony opposite the local Cao Daism monastery. The street is its own kind of village, with laneways worming off from it. A hairdressers is set up in the downstairs of one house, a local kitchen sells breakfast of barbequed pork with fried egg, rice and pickles that the owners spend the rest of each day preparing. They sit outside on upturned buckets, hammering the meat on chopping boards on the path, meticulously sorting through each grain of rice. 

Our landlord and his wife - The Vans - sit in the lounge room on our first day of lease, eating plain rice from small bowls. A neat line of shoes is at the entrance. They have invited all the neighbours to come and have a peek at the newly decorated house and it's foreign tenants. Mrs Van takes me on the back of her bike to the local supermarket and picks Mickey Mouse sheets for Phoebe's bed as a house-warming gift.

The soundtrack of my life in Vietnam will be this: endless piano scales from our neighbour's son, 5 am and 5pm gongs and chants from the monastery, the schwip schwip each morning from the streets outside being swept by all the good wives, the echoing call of street sellers through the winding lanes of our village.

Each morning I share strong sweet coffee with the novice monk Ngoc, as he sits outside stirring huge pots of  beans on an open fire.

Ling, who works in the monastry kitchen, teaches me how to cook like a local; fried rice needs sugar and salt. We go to the supermarket and she chooses the right brand of soy sauce, the better rice. We are joined by Fin who sometimes lives in America and says he will interpret for us because he is my friend and "this is what friends do".

Fin is shocked at how much I buy, the careless way I have shopped. At the counter paying he remarks, "this means nothing to you, the cost of this shopping". I have spent about £15.

At home, Ling cooks tofu on a low flame, slowly turning each piece over with chopsticks, over and over until they are gold. I watch her transfixed, her every move is deliberate and measured. She pounds fat sticks of lemongrass down to a pulp and adds it to the pan with pepper and chilli and delicately places it all on a plate of finely sliced tomato and white onion.

I offer Ling some money to come over once a week and later that day a woman from down the lane comes knocking at my metal gate saying she is a much better cook than Ling and will have the job, and any spare clothes of my daughter's for her grandchild too please. Fin comes back in the evening asking for money for interpreting and gives me Ngoc's shoe size to buy him some new shoes. The Vans soon hear of my domestic industry and send around their daughter to do the ironing and cleaning. She asks for about £4 for a half day's work and yet still there is whispers I am paying too much.

Ngoc disappears. I miss his wide eyes through the gaps in my gate each morning waiting for coffee, his smooth hands reaching into the folds of his pale blue robe for a single orange to offer. I used to count this blessing like a gift from the Buddah himself. I never see him again. I never got him those shoes.

Everywhere I go I sense the subtle shift in posture, as women squatting at their open doors follow my passage through the village. I smile and say hello, rats scurry to drains below.

It's the middle of the day and the heat makes going outside unbearable. Children are being called inside from play. The piano finally ends its flow of rising and falling notes. A padlock clinks shut on our neighbours door. Smoke from the monastery incense makes a lazy arc to sun whitened sky. My daughter sleeps naked on the couch. I sit inside our little concrete house watching white lizards dart on walls. The sound of this silence like solitude, anonymity.

Ling's tofu and lemongrass

(I recently had a great version of this classic Vietnamese vegetarian dish in London, Hoxton at Cay Tre http://www.vietnamesekitchen.co.uk/  Thanks Brian!)

1 packet firm tofu, sliced into pieces about 2cm thick

2 stalks of lemongrass, outer layer peeled off, pounded

1-2 small red chillis chopped

1 tsp tumeric

generous splash of soy sauce

pinch of salt/pepper to taste

1/4 c groundnut oil for frying

2 medium tomatoes thinly sliced

1-2 white salad onions finely sliced

Asian basil leaves for garnish

Method:

Fry the tofu in hot oil, turning with chopsticks until gold on each side. You may want want to pour some oil from the pan off before making the sauce.

Add to the pan the lemongrass, chilli, tumeric, stir a few times then add the soy and sugar and let bubble and combine flavours. About 3 mintues.

Place the tomato and onoin on a flat plate and pour the hot tofu mix on top. Finish with some basil leaves and serve with rice and/or some crunchy spring rolls, iceberg leaves and Vietnamese mint.

An altar to the fig

Lately, the perfect form of figs have been haunting me from their marked-down tubs at Tescos. Turkish sirens reduced to 50p for three. There is something almost taboo about their bruised black skin and fleshy inners. It seems a violation not to buy them before they fade.

Figs are needy little beauties requiring some form of devotion, at the least, some tender respect. The only recipe I knew off the top of my head was a salad made with jamon, butter beans, baby cos and quartered figs. But it's not salad weather.

Last winter, by the end, as I crawled out from the cave of my ubiquitous parka and into the glaring light of the (don't tell anyone) tanning salon for just a few sessions, to get some vitamin D, I stared in horror at my naked reflection. My wobbly tummy and thighs. I vowed not to let this happen again, to stop squirreling the winter away with dashes of cream, mountains of parmesan and mid-morning croissants.

Drizzle drizzle drizzle. My days are again encased by the bleak weeping cloud that is the Manchester sky. What to do with these figs?

A galette. Pastry, really good pastry. It seems like the perfect, decadent yet fragile altar to the sexy little figs. Because I only had 5 figs, I added some slices of apple and that damson jam I made. And already I am dispersing nibbles with sit-ups. One slice equals twenty sit-ups, twenty squats, ten leg lifts.
Perhaps it will work.

(Also, I made the tart with beautiful new season heritage apples as there was enough pastry to make one small tart (the fig) and one large (the apple). I paired the apple galette with some Bon Mamman peach jam.

Fig, apple and damson galette

(To make one large tart, serve with optional sit-ups)

1 1/2 c plain flour

2 tablespoons sugar

1 tablespoon fine polenta

pinch of salt

170g unslated butter cut into small squares and chilled briefly in the freezer (French President is brilliant)

6-7 tablespoons iced water

smear of damson jam (or any you fancy, marmalade would work)

about 10 figs, cut into slim wedges

some slices of apple (with a squeeze lemon juice to prevent browning)

sugar to sprinkle

Method:

Combine the flour, sugar, polenta and salt in a big bowl.

In a food processor, with the blade on, put in flour mix and add butter. Don't mix for too long, just until it forms crumbs, some larger bits of butter can remain.

Put the mix back into the bowl and add the water, one tablespoon at a time, combining with a fork until it forms a dough.

Shape the dough into a ball and cover in plastic and refridgerate for one hour or overnight.

Heat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius.

Line a baking tray with parchment.

Roll out your pastry on a lightly floured surface into a roughly round shape about 30cm in diameter.

Transfer the pastry onto the baking tray and smear some jam in a circle leaving a 5cm edge for folding later. 

Working from the outer edge of the jam circle, place slices of fig then apple until you get to the centre.

Fold the edges over and sprinkle the exposed fruit with a little more sugar.

Bake for 40-50 mins.

My favourite little cafe

Like so many people I have the dream of owning a cafe one day; although I'd probably have to open it on some small Mediterranean island customed by locals with relaxed attitudes to consistency. I want the freedom to close for a day at the beach when needed, or to change the menu daily. I would amble to the market in the morning, have coffee and a chat to the charming barissta then reverently choose my produce while planning what to serve. Then I'd cook all day to music and put fresh flowers on the tables. Oh, and I'd only open for lunch: simple, tasty plates like polenta with browned mushrooms and parsley, broadbean pesto on sourdough with some leaves or tuna, green olive and artichoke pasta. My kids could do their homework sat at the bar munching on peaches, drinking hot chocolate in the mild winter.

I made something for lunch yesterday that I'd definitely put on the menu: ricotta and zucchini crostini. I decided to keep the Australian zucchini rather than courgette as I say now in England, because it rhymed nicely with crostini. It takes about 2 minutes to make and yet it comes across as something rather special and refined, the delicate creamy flavour of the ricotta is clean against the crisp richly oiled bread and peppery courgette.

Ricotta and Zucchini Crostini

(serves 4 for lunch or as a classy little starter)

75ml extra-virgin olive oil

8 slices of good bread (I used Chorlton sourdough from The Barbikan deli)

2 medium courgettes thinly sliced on rounds

8 tablespoons ricotta

lots of ground black pepper

a little maldon sea salt

Method:

Heat the oil in a fry pan and add the bread, as many slices as you can fit without overlapping. Cook the bread on both sides until it had turned a pale gold.

Cook the courgette slices in the same oil and season with pepper and salt. Toss pan around so that both sides of the courgette get browned.

Spread the crostini with the ricotta and top with courgette and a little more pepper.

***

Another thing I made recently as part of a tapas with friends was cannelini beans, cornichons, egg and peppers. It was something we had on the tapas sharing plate at De Los Santos and I really like the combination of colours and textures; the smooth round beans (white) and tangy crunchy cornichons (green) melded with crumbly egg (yellow) and a lemon dressing. The addition of (red) peppers was an after-thought of mine as I had a jar bought back from Spain by my friend Marie-Noel.

Cannelini Beans with cornichons, egg and peppers 

(Serve as part of a tapas)

400g tin of cannelini beans drained

2 tablespoons of cornichons thinly sliced

1 organic egg hard boiled

1 red pepper roasted, skin removed and sliced

a dressing of lemon juice and extra virgin olive oil seasoned and shook-up

You can dress the salad a few hours before serving and it keeps in the fridge for a couple of days, but tastes best served at room temperature.