Flabbergasted by Flummery

Flummery.

That fluffy white dessert of my boarding school days; comfort food and almost forgotten until I opened page 16 of Bloody Delicious! and read the recipe for pineapple flummery.

Perfectly suited to these hot days of summer and with simple ingredients, it should easily make the Ausfood list. It’s a long time since I have considered making flummery and this recipe uses the core and skin of a pineapple for flavour. What a good idea, extracting every bit of goodness from that part of the fruit that might otherwise be discarded.

I am inspired by this recipe and can’t wait to try it. I need a pineapple, sugar, water, lemon and plain flour - so far so good.

What else? Ah, gelatine. A trip to the supermarket this afternoon will find that ingredient which is missing from my kitchen cupboard.

Wrong!!

I am not able to find one gelatine product made in Australia in any of my local supermarkets.

There are two well known brands packed in Australia from imported ingredients, one familiar brand, Davis,  manufactured in New Zealand; three other brands are products of France and Germany, but nothing is made here in Australia.

 Not quite what I am looking for.

What happens to all the hides, bones, tissue and gut left after animals are slaughtered in this country?  I hope you weren't  too disturbed when you read the last sentence, but these are the facts ladies and gentleman.

I will look into this matter further.

Sea-lettuce in the kitchen

I am reading the first of the menus in Stephanie’s Menus for food lovers.

Steamed Oysters with sea-lettuce.

It’s not the word steamed oysters that stops me when turning the page; it’s the word sea-lettuce. Until I read this page I had no idea sea-lettuce existed, let alone the idea of cooking and serving it at the table.

I read on and I arrive at the key paragraph:

The next ingredient you must locate is sea-lettuce. This is a clear green seaweed, which grows in small clustered clumps. It is found in clean water by divers who collect sea-urchin, periwinkles and other shellfish. You can sometimes collect it yourself from rock pools. The name, sea-lettuce, describes it perfectly. It is lettuce-green and delicate in texture, quite unlike kelp or many other seaweeds. It is perfectly edible and has more of a texture than a pronounced flavour. It is crisp, with the fresh bracing aroma that will make you remember the smell of your favourite ocean beach in the winter. This entree was once described by an ecstatic customer as being like eating oysters at the bottom of the sea.

Now, while collecting this seaweed may not exactly be supporting Australian farmers, you cannot dispute the fact it is an Australian product; perhaps in the same category as salt, another product of the sea.There are alternatives; you can use dried seaweed (not likely to be Australian) or you can use normal lettuce leaves. Frankly, neither of these hold the same appeal for me as sea-lettuce.

I read on and find sea-lettuce is prepared and served by washing it carefully to remove all traces of sand. In this recipe the it will become the base on which the oysters rest while being steamed in a basket.

I consider the idea of oysters and the problems of opening them as instructed in the recipe and wonder whether it might be possible to use something else in the shellfish category.

However, to paraphrase Mrs Beeton, first collect your sea-lettuce.

Breaking the book buying rules - again!!

I have a new addition to my cookbook stash – so much for all those lectures I have delivered to myself about not buying any more books!!.

Nordliving, a local shop full of wonderful Scandinavian goods, has changed hands and at the weekend, the previous owner had a ‘garage sale’ in the shop. There were many boxes of books and there was one that took my fancy; a recipe book.

An Australian recipe book, written by an Australian for Australians and therefore eminently suited to Ausfood blog purposes. It is Stephanie’s Menus for Food Lover’s, written by none other than the redoubtable Stephanie Alexander. A birthday gift, it is a copy of the 1986 edition, in pristine condition and with the birthday card still affixed to the inside cover. Sofia didn’t want to remove the card as it might have damaged the book, so now I share, by default, a micro-moment in the lives of two other people. I like this idea; it adds another dimension to the book.

You might be thinking a cookery book, with recipes for dinner menus for six, is a little ambitious for a food blog in the hands of a basic cook using basic ingredients. You might be right in your thinking. It’s fanciful on my part to think I would ever turn out any of the menus that appear in this book.

However it is not just about fine food; it is also about organisation in your kitchen– a page that seems to fall open every time I open the book – plus lots of good advice about making use of every part every single ingredient that might come through the kitchen door.

And then I read the very first menu; it fired up and fed my imagination, setting up a train of thought for another post.

Bloody Delicious!

This is not my opinion about the meal I cooked tonight, though it may well be an expression eligible for permanent entry into my food appreciation lexicon.

Bloody Delicious is the title of a book written by Joan Campbell, former food editor for Vogue publications, and published in 1997. An Australian book, about Australian food written by an Australian; all qualifications indicating it might be compulsory reading for anyone writing a blog in support of food produced by Australian farmers.

I obtained a copy of this book through the Victorian library service and it has been sitting in my yellow library book bin for a couple of weeks. Finally I have found the time to do more in-depth reading and in line with my developing standards to be applied to Australian produced food, I see in the early chapters many ideas and some recipes which might be contenders for the 2014 Menu list.

As I read through Chapter One I also note, with some misgiving, a number of recipes where the ingredients may not be produced in this country. Three weeks have passed since I started serious label reading and already I am aware that it is essential to read the ingredients listed; this applies to something as simple as self-raising flour which may pose problems. The upside to reading carefully through the recipes in Bloody Delicious is being made aware of possible modifications to recipes I have on hand and being reminded of recipes that I might search out from the back of the recipe drawer, or ones hidden somewhere in the depths of the Trash Palace archaeological dig.

I put Chapter One under the magnifying glass and find a handful of recipes which will happily fit into the Ausfood Menu; they are basic and use simple ingredients and although they may not be contenders for MasterChef, they will suit my purposes and will be very welcome at the Trash Palace dining table.

I also find a number of recipes with sticking points when it comes to the Ausfood factor. These sticking points are ingredients to be found in many kitchen cupboards but are they produced in Australia? Here is a selection of ingredients from Chapter One which will require further investigation.

• self raising flour
• vanilla beans
• vanilla extract
• dates
• nutmeg
• cayenne pepper
• mustard powder

The above listed items are all specific recipe ingredients which  might prove difficult to find; I will either have to look for an alternative or simply abandon the recipe idea for the blog.

However, in this first chapter, there are two recipes which will definitely appear at some stage (oh, traitorous thought) on the non-Ausfood days; Glad’s Yum Yum Cake and Mrs Dobell’s Upside Down Pineapple Cake.

This has been a step in the right direction of tried and true Australian recipes, handed down through generations, and I have only one last question regarding this book.

What dirty, lowdown, no-good person ripped pages 29 and 30 out of this book?

As Queen Victoria might have said “We are not amused.”

Loose Leaf Piling System

I’ve just spent a few minutes sorting through a small clutch of recipes I keep in my filed in my loose leaf piling system. You will all be familiar with this system I’m sure. I am also sure that you would never stoop so low in kitchen carelessness as to actually use this system.

However it works well enough for me and there the recipes sit; ready and waiting to offer advice about what to shop for next and how to put everything together once the shopping is done. They are a motley collection of scraps cut out of papers and magazines, written out by hand while waiting in the doctor’s surgery and happily copied from books borrowed from the library.

They are the good old standbys, not the sort of recipe you might find on MasterChef, but reliable and easy to put together. As I looked through them I could see there might be any obstacles ahead.

One of my favourites is a recipe for curried sausages. Sausages. There’s a minefield; how would you know the ingredients in a sausage and where they might come from?  And curry!!  There's more chance of finding a hen with teeth.  All too hard I decide. Even banana cake is not without its problems. And what about spaghetti bolognaise? I’m not sure it is easy to find tomato paste made from Australian tomatoes.

The more I look the more discouraged I become. I can see that I will have to arm myself with the magnifying glass and the recipe ingredients, grit my teeth and trudge around the supermarket shelves and see what I can dig up.