A whole fish

photo by Darren Hickson at Shoot The Moon

I am a Pisces, what sign are you? Groan, I hear you, I do. Astrology is not for the cynical of this world. It is considered a kind of faith but to those that can suspend disbelief for a short time, it can be observed just like any other science.

I don't read my daily forecast, but I do consult an astrological oracle book, The Astrological Oracle by Lyn Birkbeck, that is a tome of wisdom and uplifts, advises, supports my growing world view, takes me deeper always pushing me to see the events of my life, the questions in my mind, from a bigger perspective: in the context of psychology, history, the ever changing.

It's funny how some people say they are vegetarian but eat fish. Like fish is not an animal but something else - a bit like being a Pisces actually. We are human, but we are something else! Considered the sum total of the human journey, Pisces long to dissolve self-ness into the one-ness that most will, or sense they will, experience at some stage. Like the brief flash of a silver tail sparking out from the ocean, this longing propels us to seek a kind of light, all be it fleeting. We usually act out this longing for wholeness through music, poetry, drugs and alcohol or, if lucky, through meditation and a natural zen-like harmony with the inherent nature of things.

I have tried them all.

There is an art to living that finds flourish in food. Pounding herbs with stone or stirring onions in oil, thinking about what you eat, understanding it's medicine, loving those you feed, buying food with care, touching it, sniffing, pressing the top of an avocado to check its yield, sifting flour from a great height and watching the dust settle in a perfect peak, growing, watering, washing dirt from a turnip, the scent of lime zest oil on your fingers, music in the kitchen, the abstract splash of spaghetti sauce on a baby's bib. This is the stuff that keeps us grounded, and yet expresses the highest aspects of ourselves.

Nothing says abundance, communion, and bounty like a whole fish.

Here's some rubs you may want to try, just get the fish monger to clean and gut your fish. Before cooking wash it with cold water, cleaning any blood that may be left in the cavity (this can make the fish taste bitter) and pat dry, then make 2 to 3 deep slashes across the body with the blade of your knife facing the head. Have your barbeque, or griddle pan on the gas, at a medium to hot heat level so that the skin chars nicely but doesn't burnt the minute you put the fish on. As a general rule, whole fish take 15 to 20 minutes per kilo to cook, starting on one side of the fish, then turning half-way through.

Oregano Pesto
(This paste is great tossed through pasta with some slow-roasted cherry tomatoes and Parmesan or smeared on bread with avocado and toasted pumpkin seeds - have a play)


A handful of fresh oregano leaves picked
Small bunch of parsley, washed and roughly chopped including stems
1 large or 2 small cloves of garlic peeled
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
Sea salt

Method:

Put the oregano leaves, parsley and garlic in a mortar, starting with half the amount if your mortar is small and adding more as the leaves reduce and pound together with a splash of the oil. Gradually add more of the oil as the mixture forms a paste, as fine or chunky as you wish. Season to taste. Rub into your fish, reserving some of the mix for pouring over when cooked. Serve with a nice salad.

Coriander, Chilli, Kaffir Lime and Ginger
(see photo)

Small bunch of coriander, washed and roughly chopped
1 red large red chilli, roughly chopped (keep the seeds in if you want it hot)
1 large kaffir lime leaf thinly sliced
1 lime, juice and zest (the little organic limes I buy have yellow skin)
Thumb sized piece of ginger, chopped
1/3 cup olive oil
Sea salt

Method:

Make the paste using the coriander, chilli, kaffir lime, lime juice and zest, ginger and oil, pounding with your pestle in a mortar until the flavours have infused. Season to taste. Reserve some the marinade to pour over fish when cooked. Cook as above and garnish with extra limes and zest, chopped chives and some more of the marinade. Steamed rice and a Thai-style coleslaw (julienne carrots, finely slice red cabbage, white cabbage another couple of kaffir lime leaves and red onion and dress with lime juice, rice vinegar, a little oil, a dash of fish sauce and honey) would make a feast of it. 

Greek Gods, hot Christmases and best friends forever

photo by Elaine Dunstan

Christmas in Australia is hot. Santa dads sweat beneath the scratchy nylon suits but often need no fake stuffing help with the jolly beer belly.

My best friend Belinda's father is Greek. I remember his straight nose, running almost parallel to his face. It gave his profile the kind of mythical grace seen in marble statues of the Gods. He held himself like a mythical God too, casting his cynical appraisal of our human foibles: my died red hair that "looks like you've dipped your head in beetroot", driving me and Belinda to a nightclub, his eyebrow arched, that stern nose flaring it's nostrils as we infused his car with the smell of our cigarette and champagne breath.

As a teenager I was always a little scared of Tony, his uncensored wit. He came in and out of their lives in a mysterious manner - here for a week then gone. Belinda's German/Australian mother Jan ran the house with an unceasing energy. It was a mock-Spanish double story house, flamboyantly and wonderfully kitted-out with Jan's garage-sale finds set amongst a wild tropical garden of palms and creepers and unnerving spider webs. Jan fanatically cleaned the swimming pool of fallen leaves each day and if I turned up when she was gardening with her hair in rollers she would always say "oh God, don't look at me!" and would emerge later with a perfectly coiffed blonde bob and beautifully made-up eyes.

Jan loved cigarettes and stout and having people around. She loved me like a daughter, always ready to praise and acknowledge my attempts at finding myself - despite all the foibles she witnessed in me along the way from when we first met at 12 until her death just a few years back.

I loved going to Belinda's house, and Christmas was always celebrated together at some stage of the day. Jan would have the music up loud by the time I arrived, and a glass would be thrust in my hand. Dogs would be yapping, Jan's best friend Pat would be at the kitchen her red lipstick on, a cigarette fuming in the ashtray, helping in a calm and constant manner giving Jan the space to be the exaggerated personality: dancing to Tina Turner, cooking up a storm, putting roast garlic into mashed potatoes, barking at Tony to check the roasted pumpkin.

I always felt the Greek influence in Belinda's house even when Tony was gone. They ate feta salads for lunch when everyone else was having ham sandwiches. That garlicky mashed potato! They had a way with food that was somehow foreign - they picked at things, little plates of this or that, nuts or olives or even just a clementine, but there was a sense of occasion to it, something was different in their approach to eating that I admired.

Belinda and I were best friends from 12 to about 21, something wild, intensely curious and slightly damaged in both of us, drawing us into connection, a friendship that still feels today, after nearly 20 years of separation due to location, like a sisterhood.

One Christmas it was so hot I remember feeling the unbearable furnace of my car's steering wheel as I drove this time to Pat's house for the big lunch. Pat made tzatziki and salads and Tony had bought a whole lamb that he was roasting on a spit, brushing it with rosemary branches dipped in olive oil, a Christmas cracker-hat sitting wonky on his rippled hair. I was vegetarian at the time, but i got drunk and Tony cajoled me into eating his lamb, mocking deep Greek offence at my initial refusal of the meat. It was the best lamb I've ever had.

My beautiful friend Belinda is a mother now, living in Brisbane, so far away from me our Christmases never collide. I miss you my Belle, thank you for making me a part of your family, and a little bit Greek.

Here is recipe for the Greek classic Spanakopitta, something I ate every day straight out of the paper-bag from a take-away bakery in Rethmynon on our recent holiday to Crete.

Spanakopitta (adapted from Claudia Roden: A new book of Middle Eastern Food)

(serve with salads of cucumber, red onion, tomato, olives and dried oregano and shredded lettuce and white onion both dressed with extra-virgin Greek olive oil and lemon juice)

1 kg fresh spinach

120g butter

120g crumbled feta (or a mix of feta, ricotta and grated Parmesan)

a pinch of grated nutmeg (optional)

a small bunch of parsley or 1 tablespoon chopped marjoram (optional)

salt and pepper

8 to 10 sheets of filo pastry

Method:

Carefully wash the spinach (if using the hardier silver beet cut off any hard stems). Drain and chop then cook gently in a large fry pan in 2 tablespoons of butter and season. Cook until just tender and when cool enough to handle, squeeze out the excess juice.

Add the spinach to the cheese, mixing well, and season again adding the nutmeg. You can now add the chopped parsley or marjoram to the mix.

Butter a large, deep baking dish of any shape. Fit four or five sheets of filo in it, brushing each sheet with melted butter and folding them up so that they overlap the sides of the dish.

Spread the spinach and cheese mix over this base layer and cover with the remaining sheets of filo, brushing melted butter between each layer and on the top.

Bake in a moderate oven 160 degrees Celsius for about 45 mins then increase the heat for the last 5 to 10 minutes to 220 degrees Celsius or until the top is golden and crisp and the base is cooked through rather than soggy.

Deli goods

I don't know what I would do without the Barbakan Deli in Chorlton, Manchester. It's not trendy, but all the hip people go. It makes and sells great food but is not on an ego trip. Sometimes I do wish it had the polished concrete floors and industrial reclaimed benches, the fashionable magazines for browsing on the communal table kind of vibe that makes you think about what you're wearing before you go, makes you watch and be seen, fret that your turn-ups are the wrong height on your wrong-coloured jeans. If this place was in Sydney or Melbourne, or North London for that matter, it would be like this. But it's not. It's in South Manchester, and if there is one thing northerners scorn, it's pretension. So, I humble my inner fashionista and adore the Barbakan for being exactly what it is: a fabulous continental deli, complete with beige/lemon and burgundy uniforms for the staff, no music, a crammed and heady interior of heaving shelves of panatone, aborio, saffron and Polish noodle soup sachets, with a number system for queueing and a freezing outdoor patio of wobbly aluminium tables for dining (but I will never forgive the polystyrene cups for the coffee!).

 It would be a gargantuan job just to open this place each day. There is hundreds of cheeses to portion and display, every kind of continental meat to slice and pack, fresh salads like potato and dill, Russian salad, falafel and parsley to make, caramelised onion and goat cheese quiches to bake, take-home packs of (ridiculously cheap) Greek mezze and antipasto to assemble, and that's not including the bread. The Barbakan makes the best bread in Manchester - from perfect bagels to the lightest, best-toasting German rye and huge flat rectangles of herbed foccacia. On the weekends they set up a barbeque on the patio and cook French and Polish sausages, onions and sauteed potatoes. Needless to say, the place is always rammed. Victor, a Sanskrit scholar and the Barbakan manager, has the measured grace of the theosophical thinker. Victor is never huffy or ruffled, he manages to wax lyrical about Tibetan Buddhist literature, ask about the Aboriginal predicament, listen with calm and total attention as I natter about my work and life, suggest salami or a recipe for baked cheese with thyme and sweet wine (see pics) and play silly games with my son. And if he ever stops stocking my Italian tuna, well, I just don't want to think about that.

These next few shots are ones I did with the talented Darren Hickson from Shoot The Moon for my food styling portfolio. The breads, baked cheese, pasta and deli goods come from The Barbakan.

Orecchietti with sprouting broccoli, anchovy and chilli

(serves four and takes seconds!)

400g orechiette pasta

1 bunch of sprouting broccoli (or 1 medium head of normal if unavailable)

2 cloves garlic sliced

6 anchovy fillets

2-3 tablespoons e-v olive oil

1-2 teaspoons dried chilli flakes (or 1 fresh red chilli finely chopped)

a knob of butter

freshly grated Parmesan

Method:

Place a large pot of cold salted water on to boil. When rapidly boiling, add the orecchieti and stir to avoid clumping together.

While the pasta is cooking, trim the ends from the broccoli stalks and chop into 2cm pieces, including the dark green leaves, leaving the small florets whole (if using normal broccoli, cut the florets from the base of their stem into smaller portions and reserve, cooking them in with the pasta at the last 2 minutes).

Heat the oil in a heavy based frying pan on medium. Add the anchovy fillets and mash with the back of a wooden spoon until they start to dissolve. Add the broccoli, garlic and chilli. Turn up the heat and stir, cooking for a few minutes or until the stalks have become tender, being careful not to burn the garlic. 

When the pasta is done, drain and reserve a splash of the cooking water. Add the orrecchiete to the broccoli with a little butter and a small handful of Parmesan. With the heat on low stir to coat the pasta thoroughly - add a tablespoon or so of the water if it is too dry - and season to taste. Serve with extra Parmesan. 

Bananas are too precious to waste

A bowl of brown mottled skin and heavily fragrant bananas sat next to the digital radio all last week. It's quite strange to have spent bananas in this house. We eat a bunch every two days. My top-up shopping list is always: milk, bananas, biscuits. But here they were: four bananas getting funky and I couldn't bring myself to throw them away, especially after Australia. Our last visit home came at the tail end of a series of natural disasters: flooding, cyclones, fires, and that, paired with an obnoxious economy sticking its finger up at the rest of the world, made the price of bananas comparable to caviar. ONE kilo of bananas was $13 - which would equate to about $39 per week just for bananas in our house. I might spend that on wine, but bananas?

It's a strange paradox, this life I now live. One the one hand, I come from a country of great wealth and beauty. A life of privilege; a childhood pottering in rockpools, teenage years diving into waterholes, early twenties sunbaking on Bondi Beach, zooming on the back of a motorbike past endless fields of sugarcane, not even knowing that the great high I was riding was that of freedom, innocence and trust. I remember a wet season in Cairns, tadpoles turning into frogs and jumping across my barefeet. I lived simply and with no concern for money. I experienced the events in my life mythically, attuned to synchronicity, without compromise. It doesn't mean I was always happy.

And here I am, in England, in post-industrial Manchester. My children potter in rain puddles, not rockpools, and yet I have never felt so abundant. Things are coming together. I live with many compromises, many demands and few excursions into freedom. But there is something to be gained from restrictions. Like I am learning the craft of living by necessary restraints - a kind of Haiku for the life. Yes, I mourn for my country, for my children's lost childhood of river banks crowned by gum trees and holidays in caravan parks near coastal towns where every day is meandered between the beach and milkshop for golden gaytime icecreams. The flip flop of thongs soundtracking their steps, squirming beneath my zinc covered fingers as I protect their freckling skin. Oh god, don't get me started. I mourn for my country.

But their is an acute heightening of the senses that occurs when you are exiled. And exiled I am - there is no job for my husband in Australia and as things are at the moment, we couldn't afford to buy a house there. I have surrendered: I have to find beauty here or go mad.

Right now, listening to Radio 6, Inner City Life by Goldie plays and the haunting, urban drum and bass and harrowed gospel of the vocals is tearing at my soul - it works because I am in a city, an old and dirty city; a city that has it's triumphs and losses, it's loves and tragic stories. I have the lights on because it's so dark during the day now, the sky outside is bleached grey. I hear sirens and aeroplanes overhead. Winter is coming. Beneath my feet in parks is the vast tapestry of autumn leaves, looking up, the branches they have left behind form a filigree of black lace in the sky. I bought foot warmers for my shoes for £1.99 and today, on the school run, I trialed them out. It was like walking around with a mini heater in my shoe. I think I will make it through this winter. I really do.

This cake tastes great with a coffee and a good tune to listen to.

Banana loaf cake with brown sugar and walnut topping

(adapted from Stephanie Alexander's the cook's companion)

125g softened unsalted butter
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 eggs
1 cup mashed (very) ripe banana
few drops pure vanilla
250g self-raising flour
1/2 cup buttermilk or 1/2 cup milk with a few drops of lemon juice added

For the topping combine:

3 tablespoons self-raising flour
3 tablespoons coarsely chopped walnuts
100g softened unsalted butter
3 tablespoons brown sugar

Method:

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius.
Butter and flour your cake tin (I used a long skinny loaf tin but a 20cm square cake tin is recommended in the original recipe) and line the base with baking paper.
Cream the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy (it takes a while, be patient).
Beat in the eggs, banana and vanilla.
Sift the flour and add to mixture, alternating with buttermilk.
Spoon into cake tin and top with walnut mix.
Bake for about 45 mins - check to ensure the walnutty top is not burning about half-way through cooking and cover with foil if it's getting too brown - burnt walnuts taste foul.
Cool the cake for a few minutes before turning out.

Cardamom on my tongue

Cardamom is one of my favourite flavours and it pops up in unexpected places. Cardamom ice cream like they make in India is a revelation. I was recently swooning with delight on the windswept street of Curry Mile in Rusholme, as I sucked a long thin cardamom and pistachio ice cream, a kulfi, bought from an old robed man with a stall that I've never seen again. Cardamom spiced tea is sublime. In my hippy days at the Confest festivals, the chai tent was the place to chill on an embroidered cushion with a pottery mug of honeyed spiced tea and a bearded friend to chat with. I brewed cardamom with lots of white sugar in strong black coffee for my ecclectic friends in the share-house on Ruskin Street, and now, I can be found pottering in my quiet house while the kids are at school baking cardamom and courgette cake with lime zest cream cheese icing thanks to Jamie Oliver. Mostly however, I use cardamom in curries for it's unique and intriguing flavour.

Last week I talked about my father. This week my long suffering mother needs some love. Poor mum! My father was such a blaze of attention-grabbing energy, that my mother is a shadowy figure in my early childhood memories, reduced to a series of images: throwing her head back laughing with friends on a sunlit balcony, her hands placing a ribboned cake before me on my birthday, a sense of her body always near, moving around me, in the car seat before me arguing with my father about directions. I remember her striped sundresses, her rows of shoes that I wanted to wear, her make-up box of red lipsticks and blue eyeshadows, and her glittering jewels in various patterned boxes that never failed to fascinate me. I spent hours on her bed, just touching them, placing beads around my neck and claiming them for my own one day. She smelled of Miss Dior or Nina Ricci with a faint whiff of Benson and Hedges. She was sometimes very cross and it made me desperate to please her.

After dad died it was like he made a space for mum. We grew closer, sharing our grief. We drank too much together and revealed things that only the best of friends would ever share. I realised that my mother was a poetic and complex soul - that she had taken on the role of mother with great fervour and almost neurotic need to be perfect, juggling running our home with flamboyance and precision with a demanding career firstly as accounts manager at my dad's production company, then as a freelance food stylist to film, television and print, and finally, when the stockmarket crashed, taking much of their savings with it, my mother became the family provider as dad was approaching 70. She bought a fruit and vegetable shop and went to the market every morning at 4am. I was in my late teens by then and I remember those years as they transformed her from a glamourous mother who entertained and travelled the world, to a woman with calloused hands from cutting pineapples and stacking spuds. She cut her hair blunt and short, wore no make-up and worried alot.

Eventually she sold the shop and soon after, her best friend, her great love, her treasured and passionately admired husband died.

Mum eventually emerged from the grief with such grace and beauty, like a butterfly shaky at first with freedom. She wrote poetry to share her feelings, showing to me in delicate increments, the woman she was deep inside, beyond mother and wife. She went on to have a successful career again in food styling and gathered around her a vibrant and fun community of women who love to party, play bridge, travel and paint.

I always thought it was my father I was most like - thinking that my desire to create, to write and express, to feel life so keenly - came from him. But I realise now that my mother was as much of an artist as him and that her flexibility, will and pragmatism are traits I could do well to emulate.

This is one of my favourite food memories from my youth: my mother's cardamom spiced beef rendang, taught to her originally by Charmaine Solomon.

Mum and Charmaine Solomon's Malaysian beef rendang (with cardamom)

(serves four with, hopefully some left-overs because it tastes even better the next day)

1.5 kg casserole steak cut into strips

4 medium potatoes cut into mouthful sized pieces

2 onions chopped

2 tbs chopped garlic

1 tbs chopped ginger

1 tbs chopped galangal (if unavailable use more ginger)

6 red chillies, deseeded

400 ml coconut milk

11/2 tsp salt

1 tsp turmeric powder

2 tsp chilli powder

3 tsp ground coriander

1 tsp ground cumin

3 cardamom pods, crushed

1 stalk lemongrass, bruised

1/2 c tamarind liquid

2 tsp sugar

Method:

Pre-heat the oven to 170 degrees Celsius.

In a heavy based casserole dish, fry the beef in a little oil till lightly browned.

To make the paste, put the onion, garlic, ginger, galangal, chillies and 1/2 a cup of water into a blender and mix until it forms a smooth paste.

Pour over the meat and add the remaining ingredients except for the tamarind and sugar. Bring to the boil.

Turn off the heat and add the tamarind and sugar and put the lid on the casserole. Put into the oven and cook for at least 1 hour or until the oil has separated from the gravy and the gravy has dried up.

Serve with rice and coriander - I like a bit of Greek yoghurt and lime with mine. 

I must admit, as a mother with two jobs and a blog to attend to, I often cheat and use a pre-made spice mix for my curries. As long as I add some of my own ingredients: extra fresh garlic and ginger, a stick of lemongrass, a squeeze of lime and a dash of fish sauce for green curries etc, I find them totally satisfactory.