Retro Food For Modern Times

05
Mar
2019

Mock Food (And a Real Cocktail)

categories: Books, Cocktail, Tequila, Vintage Recipes

The Irish artist Francis Bacon once famously declared

Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends.

Today, friends we are looking at some sham or mock foods. And we may not have champagne but we have a cocktail that looks like this and tastes super delish!

We’ll come back to the cocktail later.

Believe me, we might need a stiff drink or two after the horrors I’m about to inflict on you.

So, I was flicking through the pages of “Possum Pie, Beetroot Beer and Lamingtons” and I noticed a trend for mock food.

STARTERS

MOCK OYSTERS AKA WHAT TO EAT WHEN THE WORLD ISN’T YOUR OYSTER

So what would you expect to be in a mock oyster? My first thought was maybe a mussel? Oysters are spendy. Mussels are cheap. Open your mussels, add some bacon, Worcestershire sauce and a dash of Tabasco sauce, pop it under the grill and you might have a fairly close approximation of a Kilpatrick Oyster.

Alternatively, why not give brains and walnuts a whirl?….

I don’t know WTF a mix of brains and walnuts would taste like (and I don’t ever want to know) but I’m willing to bet it isn’t oysters!

Not a fan of un-oysters? What about some delicious crispy fried non- whitebait?

MOCK WHITEBAIT BECAUSE EGGY CHIPS DOESN’T SOUND CLASSY

Okay, I think we can all agree that this is not NEARLY as bad as that brains and walnuts combo. But no one is going to be fooled!

MAIN COURSES

MOCK DUCK – FAKE FOOD OR REAL GANGSTER?

I’m just going to say this right now. This recipe makes no sense.

I kind of get the oyster thing and even the whitebait thing on a monetary level. Oysters are expensive. Whitebait not so much but eggy fries would be cheaper still. I totally understand why people might want to take a cheap ingredient and dress it up to taste like something a bit fancier. Now it may be different where you live, but here? Steak, good steak, is far more pricey than duck.

I also have absolutely no idea of what kind of 50 shades of bondage moves you would need to tie a steak into the shape of a duck.

And finally…I don’t care what shape you tie your steak into. It will not taste like duck

For a far more interesting Mock Duck, let’s take a trip on the way back machine to 1900 in New York’s Chinatown. Here, a “cherubic, ever-smiling, moon-faced Machiavelli” gangster called….wait for it….Mock Duck was terrorizing rival gangs. If you have ever heard the term “hatchetman” you have Mock Duck and his gang, the Hip Sing, to thank. The term was coined due to their practice of carrying hatchets with sharpened blades in their sleeves. Mock Duck was a total badass who wore diamond buttons on his shirts and a chain mail vest to stop bullets! More about Mock Duck’s Exploits can be found here.

MOCK SQUAB PIE – ITS A CONSPIRACY OF BAD TASTE

The word squab always reminds me of a scene from the movie JFK when Tommy Lee Jones says “Hope you like squab.”

Except, he says it with a Southern drawl so the A in squab lasts for like an hour.

Squaaaaaaaab.

Well, if you like squab but are having trouble finding some, look no further.

So squab tastes like meaty apple pie? In that case Tommy Lee, “No, I don’t like squaaaaaaab”.

SOMETHING ON THE SIDE

IMITATION SPINACH – IT’S NOT EASY BEING GREENS

I might be talking from a very 2019 Melbourne centric stance here. But spinach is EVERYwhere. I cannot think of a place where I could be where I was not in walking distance of a bag of spinach. Why you would then want to imitate it is unfathomable to me. No spinach? Have beans. Or cabbage. There are lots of other vegetables out there. We don’t need to fake spinach.

And also Pumpkin shoots? I have no idea where I would find any sort of pumpkin shoots, let alone tender ones. I guess you need a vegetable garden. In which case you could probably just grow spinach.

SHAM GINGER – WHAT NO COPYCAT MARYANNE?

This one is just ridic. Making sham ginger from cucumbers and ground ginger? Why not just use the ground ginger?

DESSERTS

LETS END IT ALL WITH SOME CHEESECAKE PUDDING

So, cheesecake…technically not a cake. But always containing cheese right?

Not so much.

Q: How disappointed would you be if someone told you they were making cheesecake for dessert and it turned out to be sieved potato with a smattering of sultanas?

I THINK WE ALL MIGHT NEED A DRINK!

In fact, it’s time to totally relax because all the bad food is behind us and kick back with a glass of the very appropriately named Tequila Mockingbird Cocktail! This is soooo good. Fruity, sweet, spicy and with a little kick of da da da da da da da…Tequila!

Tequila Mockingbird Recipe

I hope you enjoyed this little foray into the weird and…well…certainly not wonderful world of mock foods. Tell me? Do you have recipes for Mock Food in your collection? Have you ever made a mock food? And did it taste like the real deal?

Have a wonderful week!

26
Jan
2019

Lamington Layer Cake

categories: Australasia, Cake

The Lamington is a classic Australian Cake. New Zealand may try to claim the pavlova but there is no doubt about the origin of this delicious cake! It’s ours New Zealand and you can’t have it! Normally lamingtons are made in individual serving sizes but I made mine as one large Lamington Layer Cake meant to share. Because that’s what cake is for right?

On the downlow? Cake is also about eating it all yourself and not giving any of that sweet deliciousness to anyone else….

So what is a Lamington?

For a plain Lamington, you cut sponge cake into squares, dip the squares in chocolate icing then coat the squares in dessicated coconut.

Simple. Delicious.

My version sandwiches layers of sponge with strawberry jam and cream for a fancier version. My mum gave me a jar of the most delicious strawberry jam and I wanted to use it in the Lamington Layer Cake because when I was growing up, our local bakery always had raspberry jam in their lamingtons. So, me, you can’t have a lammy without jam!

Why Lamington?

The Lamington is named after Charles Wallace Alexander Napier Cochrane-Baillie (otherwise known as the 2nd Baron Lamington). He was the Governor of Queensland from 1896-1901.

One day, some totally unexpected guests dropped by Government House. And horror of horrors! All they had in the house to serve said guests was some stale sponge cake.

For a start…what kind of arsehole turns up at anyone’s house unannounced? If you turn up at my house unannounced, you’d be lucky to get stale cake. I’d pretend I wasn’t home until you went back from whence you came. Or maybe give you some Beetle Pie to teach you a lesson!

You turn up at the Governor’s unannounced?

Luckily for history, Governor Lamington had a French chef, Armand Galland, in residence who was less misanthropic than I am. Galland dipped the stale cake in chocolate and rolled it in coconut. The guests LOVED it and asked for the recipe. 😍😍😍

Lady Lamington was very impressed and asked Galland to make the cakes for all future official events. Over time these little cakes came to be called lamingtons. The first recipe for them was published in 1900 and people have been baking and rolling and dipping ever since! In 2009, the lamington was officially declared a Queensland icon in 2009.

Lord Lamington? Not a fan, describing them as “those bloody poofy woolly biscuits”. By all accounts though, he was a total dick who once killed a koala by shooting it out of a tree (whilst on a walk with ecologists to talk about conservation) so who cares what his opinion on anything was.

If you would like to join those guests in getting a recipe for Lamington Layer cake, look no further than the link below But don’t forget the jam!

Lamington Layer Cake – The Recipe

(From womensweeklyfood.com.au)

Happy Australia Day for those who celebrate it! Enjoy the long weekend if you’re in Australia and try to keep out of the heat! Everyone else, have a wonderful week!

21
Jan
2019

Lebanese Lamb Pizza

categories: Lamb, Lebanon, Modern Times, Pizza

My modern take on Lebanese food consists of what is probably my favourite fast food – pizza! The name for these pizzas in Lebanese is “lahembajin” which means “meat on dough”. Hmmm… what was I saying just last week about the wonderful poetic names for food in the Middle East? Never mind the pragmatic name though, this Lebanese Lamb pizza is delicious!

This Lebanese Lamb Pizza has some differences to the traditional Italian pizza.

First, the base is either pita or, to be more authentic Lebanese flatbread. There is also no cheese although you can top it with a dollop of labne just before serving.

The meat to base ratio is much higher than your typical Italian pizza, making the Lebanese Lamb Pizza more like a Meatzza!

The topping is minced lamb cooked with pomegranate molasses, onions and spices like cinnamon and allspice. Once cooked, the pizza is topped with toasted pine nuts, labne, herbs, chilli and another hit of pomegranate molasses. My recipe was a slight variation in the one below from the book Arabesque by Greg and Lucy Malouf.

My variations to their Lebanese Lamb were:

To use pita bread as my pizza base
I topped my pizza with labne (made by straining a dollop of yoghurt for about an hour)
I garnished my pizza with fresh coriander and chilli and another drizzle of pomegranate molasses

Now, please excuse me, I have more eating to do!

Have a wonderful week!

13
Jan
2019

This could get meze: Hummus and Tabbouleh

categories: 1970's food, 1970's recipes, Dip, Good Housekeeping World Cookery, Lebanon, Middle Eastern, Salad, Vegan, World Cooking

I LOVE Middle Eastern food. One of my favourite cookbooks is Persiana by Sabrina Ghayour and I also love all the Ottolenghi books. Maha in Melbourne is one of my favourite restaurants – their 12-hour slow cooked lamb is to die for! I also used to live in an area of Melbourne that is full of middle eastern restaurants and ate at one of them at least once a week. So I was very excited to see that the next chapter in Good Housekeeping’s World Cookery (1972) was for food from Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran. I was even more excited to see that there were recipes for two absolute classics of the region – hummus and tabbouleh. Both of which were in the Lebanese section.

Apart from the deliciousness, one of the other reasons I love Middle Eastern food is the amazing names for example, The Imam Fainted, and The Dervish’s Rosary. No other culture that I can think of has such poetic names for their food. My original plan had been to feature both of these recipes however, I recently discovered that I have an allergy to eggplant (aubergine), an ingredient that features heavily in both of these dishes.

Have you ever wondered if what you see and call “green” is the same as what other people see when they see green? Yes, it’s the colour of grass and leaves and apples but is the green I see the same as the green you see?

I wonder about things like that all the time.

I’m super fun at parties…

Well, my experience with eggplant was a little like finding out that what I call green is what everyone else calls pink. I was talking to a friend of mine about eggplants (as you do) and happened to mention “I like the way they make your mouth go all tingly”.

My friend was like “No…no it doesn’t….” with this face:

Long story short, it turns out that not everyone’s mouth tingles when they eat eggplant and that tingle is actually an allergic reaction. Turns out I am mildly allergic to nightshades, particularly eggplant and capsicums.

So an eggplant heavy menu was off the menu. So, no great names today, just some damn nice food. Starting with…

Hummus

Luckily I have no allergy problems with hummus which is wonderful because I eat it by the truckload. And yet, I have never made it before. And I may never make it again. I’d read that for really smooth hummus you need to peel the chickpeas. This is not only utterly boring (even using the hacks that abound on the interwebs) but also oddly repulsive. The chickpea peels kept sticking to my fingers and pulling them off felt weirdly like removing my own skin. It even looked a bit like it too…

The hummus was lovely though. This was a very classic recipe but, you could jazz it up by adding herbs or other flavourings to it.

Here are twenty or so variations from my Appetizers spreadsheet:

You say Tabbouleh, I say Tabouli

For the love of Mike can we settle on one spelling and stick to it? I’ve seen this spelt so many different ways – Tabbouleh, Tabouleh, Tabouli, Tabbouli…..in the end, even Good Housekeeping gave up. They list this in the index as Mint and Parsley Salad!

Unlike hummus, which I buy pretty much every week, I never buy tabbouleh. Because store-bought tabbouleh is generally disgusting – soggy and bland.

Homemade? Delish!

Like the hummus, the tabbouleh recipe in World Cookery is fairly plain. But this will allow you to jazz it up as you wish. Next time, I will add a little sumac into the dressing to ramp up the zing factor. I am also very taken with the Ottolenghi idea of topping tabbouleh with pomegranate arils.

That variation and a number of others can be found here.

The Recipes

I used tinned chickpeas for my recipe. I also assumed that when they said sesame oil in the recipe for hummus that they meant tahini (given it is in the recipe title) and not the sesame oil you use in Asian dishes.

Also, I did not garnish with parsley as per the suggestion because I needed all my parsley for the tabbouleh. I used a sprinkle of paprika.

The tabbouleh recipe suggests that you eat your tabbouleh using lettuce, vine or cabbage leaves as scoops. I prefer pita as the scoop, and if that piece of pita happens to have a smear of hummus on it, so much the better!

You could add some other delicious Middle Eastern titbits (for inspiration see here) and make up a lovely meze platter with these. Or, you could do what I did and just have them, along with the pita bread for lunch.

For those who care about such things, this meal is vegan.

Have a wonderful week! But before we go, tell me, what is your favourite cuisine?

07
Jan
2019

Use By: Oven Fries with Marinated Feta and Rosemary

categories: Potato, Simple, Use By

One of my goals for the new year, inspired by Jenny over at Silver Screen Suppers is to cut down on my food waste. To that end, I spent a day or so over the break adding every item of food and drink in my house – of which I apparently have 530+ – ranging from Agnostura Bitters to Zulu Spice Mix into a spreadsheet.

Zulu Spice Mix? WTF? I don’t even know why I have Zulu spice mix. I also don’t know why I have 3 unopened boxes of cream of tartar (or even exactly it does) or two unopened jars of Char Sui Paste… But all of that stuff could wait. In the dairy shelf of my fridge (another Jenny inspiration), there was some very delicious (and also very expensive) marinated feta that absolutely positively could not go to waste.

So, then to my “Recipe Schedule” spreadsheet to see where I can use some marinated feta. Wow..I’m giving you all my spreadsheets!

Don’t even get me started on my spreadsheets. Because this will then become a blog about where and how to use a multi embedded what if scenario and not at all about food. On the other hand, if, like me, you are all about the spready, head over to my other blog www.tarynisexcellent.com* for all your spreadsheet needs, wants and desires. (*Not a real blog. Unless you want it to be…)

Back to my marinated feta and the concept of the “Use By” post. In each post, I will use up an ingredient that would have otherwise had to be thrown out. And will try to use that ingredient in a manner that does not entail buying several more items which will then have to be logged and “used by”…..

Yotam Ottolenghi’s latest book, Simple contains a recipe for fries with feta and oregano. I had feta, I had potatoes. I didn’t have dried oregano but I had fresh rosemary and I love rosemary flavoured roast potatoes so I subbed in the rosemary for the oregano.

Let me tell you, these fries are GENIUS!

That drizzle of garlic oil over the top takes them to next level. Add the feta and we’re talking eleven.

Being a philistine I also tried to add ketchup and vinegar to these fries Because normally, fries without them are useless.

These were fine without!

These are possibly the best home fries I have ever eaten!

And a super recipe for using up any leftover feta cheese you may have!