Oh I know, I may have scared you with the mere idea of this salad but hopefully you’ve already seen it in cookbooks (Nigella has a version using olives) and at restaurants. A friend of mine Nic tried Nigella’s version and pronounced it unpalatable so I was put off eating it for the longest time although I had never tried it myself. Until one blisteringly hot night we had this at Perama in Petersham and it seemed the answer to all of our culinary prayers.
After my Duck Off adventure which was preceded by a 10 course Japanese meal, I needed to compensate for my unholy ingestion of food by balancing it with seven days of salads. When we holidayed in Thailand a few years ago, we were told that Thai women turn to this Som Tum salad when they want to lose weight as it’s healthy, high fibre and low fat. They use tiny dried crabs which are things that I don’t particularly go for (and I had no idea where I would find them). I was also told that the secret to the petite and slender Thai figure is that Thai women infrequently have the coconut laced curries and if they do they eat small portions of it whereas whenever we eat Thai foods, we go straight for the delicious but calorie laden foods.
I was sent some gorgeously sweet and fresh Crystal Bay prawns and I knew that these would be the perfect substitute for those tiny crabs. I’m used to seeing Crystal Bay prawns on restaurant menus – you know when they’re something to write home about when they name the origin or brand of an item and they are reportedly used by Tetsuya and Neil Perry.
The first thing I should say about this recipe is that while it looks fancy enough, you can have this all done in about half an hour including cooking time. Secondly – and this may be a biggie depending on how you feel about strong flavours or how Vampirish you are, but don’t be scared off by the addition of raw garlic. However I will preface it by saying that for this dish, find the best possible garlic you can. I used Patrice Newell garlic which is a biodynamic, organic garlic grown in the Hunter Valley of NSW that is only available for a short while online as it sells out so quickly and is used by Kylie Kwong and Damien Pignolet. The better the garlic, the better the flavour of the sauce and it will lack the acrid burn of raw garlic. Dare I say that if you can’t source a great quality garlic, you may need to saute it for a few minutes but if you can, dig in with gusto. This garlic was delicious and sweet and unmistakeably garlickey in flavour.
Patrice Newell garlic
Most garlic sold in Australia is imported from China and at 99c for 5 bulbs it is often a very attractive option. However after tasting this garlic it’s hard to think that I could go back to that. There was even a note letting me know that once the bulbs start to shoot I could plant the cloves to get my own bulbs in the Summer months. The garlic also makes the most divine garlic bread.
Once upon a time, my mother made some BBQ Pork buns. She told me that they turned out perfectly and she saved the recipe so she could make them again. However, like most mums, she became too busy to make these from scratch and would take advantage of the BBQ Pork Buns available in the freezer section of Chinatown grocery stores and we’d get our fill of them at Yum Cha. I was always naughty and ate the filling leaving the fluffy bun behind. Then one day recently she dug up this old recipe and straightened the paper reflecting on her batch made a long time ago “Would you like me to make these for you?” she asked me and without a moment’s hesitation I said yes and thus began the saga of the BBQ Pork Bun and the tale of the three attempts.
How was your weekend? Good I hope 
If yours was like mine, it was furiously busy with a whirlwind of activity. And although I was frantically busy, a part of me (perhaps the insane part) thought that making my own cheese was a good idea. The cheese that I wanted to make was Mascarpone. For one, it’s usually quite expensive to buy with a 250g tub retailing for about $7.50 – a kilo of ricotta by comparison is about $7 a kilo and reason two, it’s delicious. Then one day I came across the wonderful Deeba’s post on Passionate About Baking where she made mascarpone and it looked so easy and yet beautifully creamy that I bookmarked it straight away knowing that I would be making my very first cheese soon.
Mascarpone is similar to a cream cheese although more creamy and voluptuous and less “solid”. A speciality of Lombardy in Italy it’s a double or triple cream cheese which is denatured by using tartaric acid or a lemon or lime juice. It’s then drained of its whey and the resultant cheese is sublimely rich and creamy. Simply mixing it with some rose syrup and some fruit and it’s an amazing but simple dessert on it’s own. It’s also the cheese that happens to be used in Tiramisu so you know it can’t be bad right?
Draining the whey off
The process was straightforward and the key was simply to heat it up to the right temperature. After that it was simple and the time taken was just in waiting and like making bread from scratch, I found making my own cheese very rewarding an experience too. You’d think I’d just split the atom such was my pride at my voluptuously creamy mascarpone (and sadly there was no-one around to High Five). “Try it!” I later said to everyone within a spoons’ reach. My 900ml of cream made 700grams of mascarpone and even then I was proud of having created something that would cost me about $20 to buy for a fraction of the price and not only that, it beyond fresh.
Last week I received some amazing news too! I was tweeted the news by the SMH’s Simon Thomsen that I had made it into the new The Sydney Morning Herald “Foodies Guide to Sydney 2010″ book! I was one of two bloggers featured in there (the other being The Elegant Sufficiency). For overseas readers, the SMH is the foodie newspaper and they put out an annual Good Food Guide with restaurant reviews and a Foodies Guide to Sydney. I was amazed and the very next day I got my hands on a copy. I opened it up to the index and squealed “I’m in the index!” to my mother who gave me an amused look. I flicked to the page and there it was. My own feature – and they got me. Yes they really understood me and what my blog was all about which was so rewarding.
My very own feature! Click to enlarge
So how did I celebrate? By going to the World Chef Showcase (story to come this week), a dinner at Rockpool Bar & Grill and a lunch cooked by Martin Boetz and Peter Gordon at Longrain, all stories to come. Many years ago I would have bought a bag or some shoes but now it’s all about food and I couldn’t be happier (woe to my waistline though 
).
So tell me Dear Reader, how do you celebrate good news?
As seen in the Foodies Guide 2010
Receive daily updates via email. Just enter your email address and press Subscribe.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 Australia License.
What is NQN up to now?
NQN on Facebook
RSS