If there were to a quote of the month summarising my ruminations, this would be it:It’s not the size that matters, it’s how you use it. Since we are all fairly aquainted with this saying, so I will get straight to the heart of this month’s affair: let’s talk about keeping firmer and less limp, growing larger and lasting longer and most importantly, satisfying that voracious hunger. Best of all, let’s have a lesson how to heat things up and get a great boost of endorphins to boot. If this sounds like the void that’s built walls within your life and started to charge you rent, then you’ve come to the right place.
Christmas truly makes December a coveted month because it brings food, family and friends together and closer to our hearts than any other time of the year. Cooking by recipes endemic to the season is a perfect example of how we celebrate the spirit of togetherness, for we bring down the once-a-year cookbooks from hibernation, oil the baking tins and ready pouches of flour, punnets of strawberries, ladels of sugar and bundles of eggs for the sweets our guests will enjoy. As a child, the first day of December traditionally meant I could put the hedonism switch on for all the hard work was done already, the presents and food were on their way and the laughter came easier than any other time of the year. I distinctly remember the simple joys of decorating and celebrating, in hanging candy canes from the highest reaches of our synthetic tree, storing bonbons from the ends of branches, draping tinsel and hooking nativity scenes and the golden star upon the top point of the tree. It was a tree we loved, even for its fatal flaws; it was awfully unstable and unpleasant tree, supported on the base by a cast-iron clamp and a few dirty bricks concealed with a tablecloth, with unsightly power-coated bristles and branches that would cut, scratch and itch the skin. But it was well worth the effort since it involved plucking carefully hidden chocolates from inside the tree.
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This post contains a cheeky surprise – something overwhelmingly vivacious, perhaps something slightly audacious and saucy, conjuring dazzling images of succulent culinary delights — lasagne is, undoubtedly, my personal favourite dish, a meal that I am most confident in preparing. And yet it a dish I learned to make and perfect by observational learning in the kitchen of my mother and grandmother. No amount of recipe books purchased, however detailed and exquisite, were able to impart their wisdom to me. So if you have been too shy to build a pasta masterpiece in the past, take note of the fact that lasagne is fiendishly difficult at first, but like moulding clay, becomes easier and more malleable with time has the potential to become a creative medium to accommodate your imaginative whims. Thai chicken lasagne? I’ve heard of it before!
In the writing and the preparation and photography of the dish, I had placed upon the table many awful, soggy excuses that were barely passable as a final product. With a grimace, my housemates would assure me it was edible and praised the effort. But not meeting one’s personal potential in culinary adventures is I decided to get right into the nitty-gritty, rolling up my sleeves and rolling out the sheets and spreading over the sauce. I spent hours on quiet contemplation with a mental scouring brush, seeking recollections of family moments crowded around the gas stove, as the dented steel deep-dish overflowing with lasagne bubbled under the gas flame and oozed a crimson river of mozzarella and tomato.
Forget your preconceptions of lasagne as difficult, time-consuming and hardly filling: as I don’t believe in the widely propagated image of ‘the perfect lasagne’, I set out a mission in this post to present a time-and-trial tested recipe and tout it as the best and easiest home-made version, that is certain to keep you coming back for more.
As a child, I was a mortal enemy of this “gross” cake, because it was decorated with “shiny red things” and was full of “yucky tasting” dried fruits (glace cherries and dried fruits). That didn’t stop me from sticking my fingers into the batter and trying it for myself, however. It was a dense and brothy mixture, mildly bitter and slightly creamy that just hit the spot with a seven-year-old, who is perpetually hanging out for something sweet and oily to please the palate. If the time and scene was right, I would also stuff my face with a helping of the dried fruits, sifting through to make sure that I had collected only the juiciest raisins, dates, sultanas, cherries, citrus rinds and papaya pieces. It seems fairly silly that I enjoyed the dried fruit and the cake batter, but not the final product itself. When we’re young, these treasures of good times are scarcely truly appreciated, and I am thankful that I have grown to admire this traditional recipe and to hold its oath by presenting it here for you. My earliest recollections of this recipe include a large cauldron of bubbling, foaming syrup with swirls of candied fruits and the measuring container that always had to be precisely measured with the quantities of caster sugar, unsalted butter and vanilla essence. My mother would repeat to me the same things time and time again; she would tell me to stir it vigorously or it will burn, to calibrate the measuring device before using it, to grease the pan carefully and a reminder to make a bain marie out of the kitchen sink with cold water, not boiling hot.
What makes this particular boiled fruit cake special is all given in how light but filling the final product turns out. Many experiences with store-bought Christmas cakes, from $15 to $45, find that they are full of unnecessary ingredients, emulsifiers and fats, on top of being overcooked and laden with sugar, which collectively make for a parched-dry, sour and bland slice. It is my personal belief that our Christmas cake turns out so well because it contains only the simplest ingredients of the kitchen, the most basic of baking methods and a liberal application of fun, festivity and love. This recipe stands as a crux upon other Christmas cakes and treats because of the tradition it is backed by: a dedication to pouring in the good things and being versatile enough to accompany the winter and summer Christmas seasons by either being served cold (with a dash of icing sugar or, preferably, without) or served warm, with a generous helping of warm brandy or rum custard.
In the spirit of the season, my mother and I would bake several of these same boiled fruit cakes to give to family and friends as presents, who would have placed an order with us as early as a month before. On baking days, the oven would be set to a high temperature and all the windows and doors would be open, meaning that we sweltered in a Sydney summer over the stove, the countertop and still managed to pour our festivity into every mixture. We would serve them in baking paper to preserve the aroma and advise them to not eat it all as soon as it arrived — it was much harder than it sounds! To this day, my grandmother places her order in before anybody else and usually orders two or three cakes instead of one: that way, she can devour the first, serve the second to her friends and keep the third one in an air-tight container so that the ageing process would mature the sugars and cream and make for a sumptuously moist, crumbly and fluffy cake. In fact, at the time of writing I am preserving my fruit cake in the cupboard in an air-tight container… though I have been less successful than my grandmother this year, given that I have been too impatient and decided to have a few slices now and leave the rest for later!
It all began, as my mother says, in home economics class. As she had been paying attention as studiously as possible, this recipe has withstood the test of time and as the teacher promised, brought many, many returns now and into the future. Of course, a few important rules need to be followed when making this cake as great as it is: when popping the mixture in the bain marie, a common problem is letting the egg to ‘cook’ in the flour and fruit mixture before it has been given enough time to cool down.At high temperatures the egg, water and flour bond and begin to coagulate in a stubborn, sticky mess. The vanilla essence always goes into the cold mixture, not the cooking mixture, as the flavour is lost rapidly over the stove. Finally, without the best quality of ingredients, including the most expensive and close to natural (meaning sulphite-free if possible) dried fruits are necessary — too many times have we tried to get away with substandard brands for our fruits and been disappointed with the result. Timing and consistency are the key to this recipe being a success, time and time again.
Time, passing, history and a hopeful dose of nostalgia. So often are these elements found bordered within the smallest of confines; as small as, say, a suburb backdating some one hundred and fifteen years. Who would have thought to consider their local neighbourhood and its unspoken story of adaptability and reformation; the winding timeworn roads rendered by the broken backs and dime-a-day ethic of our forefathers, the period-style freestanding homes whose facade changes with every successive generation of family or the scrawlings of high-school nothings into the streetside paths leading into the heart of the metropolis. Approximately nine kilometres from the Central Business of Sydney, the unassuming suburb of Dulwich Hill, Sydney has quietly seen the ebb and eddy of aimless immigrants with little more than a few cheeky, broken words of English, a charming demeanor exemplified in their roughly woven, patchwork suits and their skills for building their homes upon Australia’s stable earth. Countless times have my family repeated to me the story of ‘afterschool beatups’ that were supposed to happen down by Caves Lane, the noble five cents that could buy the biggest bag of sweets known to a seven year old and the arduous mile-long stretch of road that lead, unwinding and unrelentingly, from their doorstep to the promenade of their school.
Through the tree-lined streets whose ancient, aching roots have lifted the gravel road like an old folk stretching his tired limbs, the behemoths of an era past stand perched upon that gently curving hill, breathing sighs as the westerly winds pass through their corrugated iron roofs and tamper with the brickwork; the work of labourers whose hands and hearts are long retired from their love of European-descent homes. Many amongst us (apartment-dwellers) are awed by the size of the private backyard, many of which containing their own garden as my my grandmother does. Following a carefully planned seasonal rotation roster, the best yielding fruits and vegetables are grown, from strawberries, mangoes and lemons to zucchini, broccoli, eggplant and string beans high enough to reach beyond the clouds. But after all this, we are not concerned with one single residence but the magic of the history of the shops and the suburb it resides in…
The Wild Thyme and Sweet Pea project found its roots when it was plucked excitedly from the garden, washed briskly in a basin of water and lovingly left out to dry in a soothing marinade of vision and ambition ... More »
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