Are you in need of something ridiculously easy, melt and mix, niftily dairy and gluten free to make as treats for the holiday gifting/ just to help keep your own sanity in keel while you scoff it in the pantry? If so, I think I can help. This luxe rocky road has been helping with lots of things as of late. If you’re in need of the recipe, stat, skip straight to the matching photo at the bottom. If you’re after some chat and endorsements and a little apology for WHERE DID THE LAST THREE MONTHS GO (?), read on.

So, somehow it got to be December. We’re still here, I just haven’t much been here. Life got in the way. (Don’t fret. I don’t mean the creation of life. That factory is shuttered. We are two and done.) I mean more the daily fractious kerfuffle of solo parenting in large quantities, two children with a predilection for croup/asthma/bronchiolitis, an ongoing renovation saga that shall henceforth forever be known as #fencegate, preparing a small person for big school next year and two gritty back injuries that saw me hobbled and prone for extended periods, spending large amounts of money and time with a Thor-like man mountain of a physical therapist and now having to strap my hips for 40 minutes every night before I go to sleep, like some kind of trussed holiday turkey. (It turns out that the party trick I used to have of turning my feet backwards, thanks to some hilariously lax hip ligaments, when combined with two pregnancies, births, the hormone doses of breastfeeding and a new zeal for running are not friends). There will be no more running for a while. 

Hence, I’ve had to be turning to some other mood-stabilising devices. Like this Rocky Road. Let’s not start on the rant of the emotional labour that most often falls to women in this mad month of December. The magic that must be made, the expectations that must be managed, the end of year dance concerts (have you booked tickets?) and graduations (can you make sure he has a plain green tshirt for the performance?), the ‘we must catch up before Christmas!’ (do you have a spare night? Any chance you can find a babysitter?), the presents that must be cataloged for childcare workers and co workers and neighbours and ‘oh, did you remember that there’s a Kris Kringle at this party too?’ And the fact that for many small businesses, freelancers – this just happens to be one of the busiest periods of the year.  It can be a little crazy-making. So… exhale.

Hence, I present to you this Rocky Road. Make three enormous batches of it, slice it and stash it in the freezer. Buy some cellophane bags (or assign that duty to someone else). You can just take a bar out, wrap it and either gift it, or hide in the pantry and eat it yourself with some of the cooking sherry until you feel a spark of joy come back to you.

Meanwhile, here are some Christmas things I’m looking forward to. I’m looking forward to our family tradition of Christmas Eve carbonara (we carve off a little bit of the Christmas ham, serve it with fresh egg tagliatelle, egg yolks and a terrifying amount of parmesan) and a screening of ‘Elf’. I’m looking forward to Christmas morning with two small people who really understand what Santa is about, to spending time with family, to soaking myself in salt water and Campari (perhaps even at the same time). I’m looking forward to us stopping and spending time, before the year starts again with terrifying volition. I’m looking forward to reading, and writing, swimming and singing. 

I’m looking forward to returning to you. Hoping things are glorious where you are.

Nb, here are a few other things that are going on.

Visiting: The kids and I had the most delightful jaunt out to visit some of our oldest friends who have embarked on a tree-change to Orange, in NSW’s central west. It was glorious, particularly the afternoon spent at Philip Shaw winery, sipping pinot noir while the kids rumbled on the grass and we all ate cheese. 

Also a special call out to Sharon for her unblinking response to her delightful three year old son’s very specific brief for his birthday cake. He wanted a ‘green triangle cake, with a jug, a dragon and a light on it’. Nailed it. (The look of glee on his face when he saw exactly what he’d dreamed of is one of those sights I’ll hold tight for a long time). 

Reading: I’m in a bit of a female domestic novel glut at the moment. I’ve charged through Liane Moriaty’s ‘Nine Perfect Strangers’ (not her best, in my opinion, but then I do think it would be hard to top ‘Big Little Lies’).  Next was Meg Wolitzer’s  ‘The Wife’. I’m hanging out to see the film with Glenn Close in it (I would watch Glenn hang out her washing most days), but this short novella about a woman diverting her dreams and talents to the betterment of her other half is a cracker. “Everyone knows how women soldier on, how women dream up blueprints, recipes, ideas for a better world, and then sometimes lose them on the way to the crib in the middle of the night, on the way to the Stop & Shop, or the bath. They lose them on the way to greasing the path on which their husband and children will ride serenely through life.” Go Meg, go. There’s also a great interview with her on ‘The High Low’ podcast archives following the release of ‘The Female Persuasion’ (also a winning summer read). She mounts a great defense of the domestic novel, about why there is some nominal hierarchy that makes them seem trivial, just because they are concerned with the grist of women. 

Listening: As listed above; ‘The High Low’. An incredibly easy listen podcast from two English journalists about high culture, low culture, the intersection between the two, all done with the most nostalgia inducing, plummy London accents. Also, this fantastic three part series on the changing, never-more-important sands of consent in Radio Lab; ‘In the No’. And, if you have the stomach for it, the Ezra Klein interview with Rebecca Traister on how women’s rage is transforming America is fantastic. And if you’re up for a long drive, then Slate’s ‘Slow Burn’ season two on the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal is sobering listening.

Eating: In Orange after we had ingested our body weight in cheese on the first night, the second I pulled ourselves back from the brink on the second night. This is a version of the ‘steak tagliata with mushrooms and lentils’ which is in the blog archives, but is a great way to make up a family style platter and stretch one piece of meat for a crowd. 

>Sautee 2-3 thinly sliced garlic cloves in some olive oil, add chopped 1-2 courgettes and 1 – 2 chopped double handfuls of Tuscan kale to the pan and sautee until slightly charred and softened. Then tumble in 1-2 tins of rinsed brown lentils. Season well with salt and pepper. In a griddle pan, or on a barbecue cook your steak until medium rare. At the same time (or while your steak is resting) griddle 1-2 bunches of asparagus and one lemon cut in half, face down. Serve the lentils and greens with the charred asparagus, some crumbled ricotta and the caramelised lemon halves. Serve the steak thinly sliced over the top, or on another platter with some baby rocket and shaved parmesan. Too easy. 

Writing: These pieces on asparagus for Harris Farm (including a cracking recipe for shaved asparagus with manchego, lemon and mint that would make a lovely festive side for those in the Southern hemisphere) – see here, as well as these on greens – see here , just in case your holiday season indulgences need a little slaking. 

Drinking: I’m loving this red wine from Mexican Cellars. An online outpost to celebrate Mexican wines, this has been a very happy accompaniment to chorizo quesadillas in this house. (Also bonus, free shipping on any orders over $50). 

On the wish list: I’m itching to get into ‘The Power’ by Naomi Alderman, a piece of speculative fiction on what would happen if women had physical power over men. Me, with some large aperol spritzes and some quiet time in the hammock will report back from the other side. 

Gift inspiration: You’d be hard pressed to find someone who loves food who hasn’t got stuck into Samin Nosrat’s ‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat’, either in book format, or the Netflix series. But if you have, then a copy of the book, plus some quality olive oil, vinegar, Murray River pink sea salt flakes and a Le Creuset spatula would be the kind of Christmas present any food lover would swoon for. Also on my book wish list, Niki Segnit’s ‘Lateral Cooking‘. Her ‘Flavour Thesaurus’ was one of the best food books in the last decade, and this looks like an amazing companion to it.

Also on the to buy list; beautiful keep cups, beeswax food wraps, the ‘full focus planner‘ , Moo Goo sun cream and the ‘Who’s She’ guessing game for kids (get it here). 

Luxe Rocky Road

Luxe Rocky Road

This is a luxurious twist on rocky road that works well for gifts, or as a sweet treat for friends and family who pop in. You can swap the puffed rice/ rice bubbles for puffed quinoa if you like, but it’s worth putting one sort in, it brings a very fun crackle to the party. One tip is to use kitchen scissors for cutting the Turkish delight and marshmallows – they make prepping the ingredients a cakewalk. This is a good one to get the kids involved in. Just melt, mix and set.

Makes 5 bars, or 25 small pieces. Scales up easily.

Ingredients

400 g dark chocolate (minimum 70 per cent cocoa solids)
190 g packet of rose Turkish delight, snipped into small pieces
200 g packet pink and white marshmallows, snipped into quarters
100 g pistachios
100 g almonds, toasted
20 g puffed rice/ rice bubbles/ puffed quinoa
50 g dried cherries

Here’s how we roll

Grease and line a 23 cm square cake tin with baking paper, leaving an overhang to help you lift the rocky road out of the tin.

Combine all of the ingredients in a large mixing bowl.

Melt the dark chocolate in a microwave safe bowl in short bursts, stirring in between, or in a heat proof bowl over a pot of simmering water.

Pour the melted chocolate over the ingredients, stirring to combine. Pour into the prepared cake tin, being sure to pat down firmly into the corners and smooth the top as best you can.

Transfer to the fridge for two hours to set. Remove and use a very sharp knife to slice. Transfer to cellophane bags and tie for gifts.

This will keep in the fridge for a week, or can be frozen for up to a month.

The post Luxe Rocky Road appeared first on eatori.

So; first up. It’s been a while. Confession; I fell into a cooking rut. Deep into the ditch of it all. There wasn’t much that was coming out of my kitchen that was novel or interesting. I could blame it on the fact that my offspring thrive on familiarity and routine and one of them will still only eat the diet of a miniature sumo warrior (miso, salmon, avocado, rice, broth, fruit. Oh and pizza. And a rolled French omelette when gilded with kecap manis sweet soy. But only a rolled French omelette. Not scrambled eggs. Cue me desperately trying to find a youtube video explaining the process of making a rolled French omelette on date afternoon to send to our Argentinean babysitter after he roundly rejected her version of eggs. God help us all).

It’s hard to be enthused about cooking when you’re cooking for tricky, picky audiences, or for yourself.  There were a lot of nights in the past few months of ‘seared protein of choice, greens cooked in broth, with quick pickled onions’, plus red wine. Copy, paste, repeat.

Cooking lost a lot of its allure for me. It just became another one of the rather thankless domestic tasks, something that by rote had to be completed by the end of the day, another station of the motherhood cross, often performed with one child whinging and the other clinging to my shin. I once heard someone ironically refer to the kind of basic snack they make out of necessity for for a complaining child as a ‘hateburger’. It’s sandwich slinging, plain pasta boiling, toasted ham and cheese making, carrot peeling, brown bit of avocado removing, apple slicing monotony and it is a real thief of joy.

And by god, I’m writing this from a lofted position of someone who has made food my profession, my delight, who can perform those tasks with some sort of ease and efficiency. So I can only imagine how grating the whole night-after-night, day after day process must be for those who don’t have any affinity for food in the first place. (Mum, please accept my gratitude and apologies for all those years of service).

So, how did I get some mojo back?

Well, I forgave myself for a while. I removed the pressure to be interesting (and by default, post here). I just saw the season for what it was and hoped it would pass like inclement weather. Which in some part, it did. I put more of my mother-love into other bits of the day; assembling lego kits, jaunts to the zoo, trips to the library, starting to read chapter books and there were more nights of smashed avocado on corn crackers and rolled omelettes for all. The fun started coming back with company. We reinstated occasional Friday night pizza parties with Will’s friends. I try not to be too horrified when he insists on putting blueberries on his ham and cheese pizza, with the six veg, pear and pulse sauce .

And I’m forcing myself out of my comfort zone by putting some more creative thought into it. I always respond best to briefs. I’ll pick a protein (or make it vegetarian night) and a region of the world and then encourage myself to come up with something new derived from those two variables. It’s like scattergories for food.  So next time you ask one of your nearest and dearest what they want for dinner and they say ‘NOTHING’ or ‘I DON’T KNOW’ you could get them to do the same. Spin the wheel and see what comes out. Vietnamese Pork! French Beef! Italian Chicken! Vegetarian Indian! Southern Fish! British Lamb!

Or you could just say ‘well, fix your own gosh darn dinner then’.

Here are a few other things that are going on.

Reading: I’m half way through Meg Worlitzer’s ‘The Female Persuasion’ and loving it. (Evie’s pretty keen too). 

Loving: There is a new pastry and coffee shop in one of the laneways of Manly Corso that is a dangerous addition. Rollers has filled croissants that rotate whimsical, indulgent flavours and the coffee is good.  One of the folks behind it is Bo Hinzack, who was my favourite barista at Showbox Coffee (another great spot in Manly). On Sunday morning we made a family trip and had to hide the croissants from Evie (so mean of us). Will got a croissant with peanut butter crème patisserie and raspberry gel baked in its belly, I went with the ham, cheese, seeded mustard and pickle and the Hungry One got stuck into a dark chocolate and coconut bear claw. None of us regretted it.
https://www.facebook.com/rollersbakehouse/

Writing: This profile on sea changers Clare Marshall and Stuart McLaughlin and their transition from being directors in advertising, to living their best life on the south coast of NSW and running the innovative kids educational toy company Curious Columbus. If you’re tempted to pull the rip cord on your city life, it’ll definitely help give you a kick a long. See here.  (nb, if you’re after a unique and adorable present for a small person in your life, or need something to keep the kids occupied on a long car or plane trip, check out their stock, in particular their ‘My Big Day’ kits. https://www.curiouscolumbuskids.com/)

Also this piece for Harris Farm on some ancient grains that should be new friends. The amaranth harira soup is a cracker of a recipe. See here. 

Listening: I’m still on the train of the MasterClasses. There is some terrific content here (Margaret Atwood just launched hers!)  even if some of the assumptions of the male presenters on the way that people other than themselves would be able to exercise their creativity makes you want to bash your head against the kitchen sink. Why yes, David Mamet; leisure is a universal essential for good writing (SAID NO WORKING WRITING MOTHER EVER).  Or perhaps consider James Patterson, who insists that to be a real writer you have to write, everyday (can you imagine the luxury of that?) It just makes me recall the way celebrated Australian author Ruth Park produced her novels; on the ironing board in her house, because the desk was reserved for her husband, who did the ‘real’ writing. Or Glennon Doyle, who woke at 4 am each day to write before her children woke to work in the dark of her wardrobe (only problem being with the hours many/my children keep, you’d get in 30 minutes). Thank god for the Shonda Rhymes’ MasterClass, where she gives great advice, like investing in a pair of noise cancelling headphones, which have become her anchor for productivity. As soon as she puts them on- even if it’s outside her children’s classrooms while she’s waiting for pick up she knows she’s in the zone to write things like the scripts for Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal. As the author Bec Sparrow said; ‘most mother’s write in the hemlines of the day’.

Watching: Condor on Stan. It’s a tense CIA thriller, based on the novel ‘Six Days of the Condor’.  It’s got William Hurt in it. I would watch him fold his laundry, even today. If you liked ‘The Night Manager’ you’ll probably get a similar kick out of this.

Learning: We still don’t know if Evie is allergic to wheat as well as dairy. We went to Evie’s 18 month check up and vaccinations and it turns out there’s a difference between a big tummy and a (concerned voice) Big Tummy. Luckily after a barrage of other tests we’ve ruled out more sinister things, but we’re still struggling to get a blood test done to confirm the rest. Today we’re heading to the Kids Hospital for our third try of finding a tiny vein on her well-covered-with-flesh arms to draw blood from. Wish us luck please.  

Loving: If you’re having a crummy day, please just search Instagram for #hedghogsofInstagram . 

Black Bean, Chicken, Chorizo and Quinoa Mexican Soup

Shopping/foraging

1 chorizo sausage, skin off and crumbled, or if cured, finely chopped
2 large chicken breasts
2 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp dry oregano
1/2 tsp oregano
1/2 cup quinoa
1 x 400 g tin chopped tomatoes
2 x 400 g tins of black beans, rinsed and drained
1 tbsp chipotle chilli in adobo (you can always add more later)
1 red onion, peeled and chopped
3 cloves of garlic, peeled and sliced
1 ear of corn
3 cups of chicken broth
Salt to taste
Lime segments to serve

Optional: chopped kale to fold through at the end if you feel like you could do with some greens. 

Garnishes: fresh coriander, crumbled feta cheese, pumpkin seeds/pepitas, crumbled corn chips, diced avocado, diced peppers, diced tomato (choose your adventure. 

Here’s how we roll

Take a pressure cooker, or slow cooker. Turn it on. Add all of the ingredients, except for the corn and lime. Turn the pressure cooker on, seal the valve and cook for 18 minutes and allow to come back to pressure on its own. If you want to put it in the slow cooker then it should be ready in 6 hours on low or 3 hours on high.

Remove the chicken breasts and shred with two forks. Then return to the soup. Taste and adjust the seasoning. Add more chilli or salt if you want. 

Serve with any garnishes you like on top. If you cook out some of the liquid it also makes great fillings for enchiladas or burritos.

The post Black Bean, Chicken, Chorizo and Quinoa Mexican Soup appeared first on eatori.

How’s your winter going? Do you love it as much as I do? (insert sarcastic face here). If you’re in need of a hug-from-the-inside, warming braise, that happens to be dairy free, make your house smell like a ski chalet, puts to use those rogue swedes you saw at the market and can also be multi-tasked as a pie filling the next day, then this Beef, Swede and Stout stew might be just what you’re looking for. If you’re very busy and important, skip straight to the matching photo at the bottom for the recipe. If you have some time to kill, read on. 

Here are some things about winter that blow. Getting out of the shower and standing on freezing tiles. Blisteringly cold floorboards in the kitchen at 5 am (thanks kids. I really appreciate the early rising WHILE IT IS STILL PITCH BLACK OUTSIDE FOR HOURS). Getting your sleeve of your long tshirt stuck up by your elbow while you put on a jumper. Having this happen to a 4 year old and listening to their tirade of frustration. Trying to keep shoes and socks on an 18 month old, whose favourite thing do do is strip them off herself- and others. And then have well meaning biddies at the shops talk to her as though you were invisible and say ‘Why hasn’t mummy put any socks on you? It’s cold isn’t it!’. Also; wet hair at night. Dry quicks of your nails. Colds. Coughs. Croup. CROUP. Asthma. Emptying out humidifiers. Scrubbing mould caused by humidifiers. Queues at the medical centre. Spending all of your weeks at the medical centre. 

Here are some good things. Flannel sheets (get them). Red wine. Porridge (if you’re in need of some ideas of how to primp yours, there was this excellent piece I did for Harris Farm last year. The salted date caramel is worth keeping on hand for many, many reasons). Crumbles and proper puddings. Soup-for-lunch. The sight of small children in hats that cover their ears. Also; winter gives you an excuse to run away. Which we did. To Canggu in Bali, which is why this piece is so long in the coming.

It was hard to come home. Which is why this braise was born. It puts to use the dark beers that The Hungry One is so keen on in the colder months (a Guinness would be classic, but any dark ale is novel). It also leans on a swede instead of a parsnip/sweet potato or potato to help bulk it out. Swedes have a mild anise flavour, a kindly texture when slow cooked and are quite often, cheap as chips.

Make this braise on a Sunday afternoon. Put on ‘The Big Chill’ soundtrack and open a bottle of red wine. Start reading a book or play lego with the children for as long as your and their patience allows. Check on it as often as you would a fledgling fire, or a four year old left to their own devices with a friend in their bedroom. Then eat it with mashed white beans, cauliflower, buttered noodles, or mashed potato. 

And wait impatiently for summer.  

Here are a few other things that are going on. 

Loving: Canggu, in Bali. You know it’s a great holiday when you spend a decent chunk of it hypothesising about how you can quit your life, move there and open up a coffee roastery/ boutique brewery with some IT services and a yoga studio attached (insert self mocking eye rolling emoji here). But seriously, Canggu in Bali ticks every single box for a holiday for me. Villas to rent, so you don’t have to share a bedroom with your children? Great. Villas with swimming pools (where you can hire a pool fence for the week), so you don’t have to pack up like you’re going to war every morning when you go to the breakfast buffet, because the kids are going to want to swim straight afterwards, so you need changes of clothes, towels, pool toys, dry nappies, swimming nappies, snacks etc etc? Amazing hipster food (flat whites, green smoothies, smoothie bowls, raw bowls, sushi, pork ribs, smashed avo on gluten free toast with poached eggs etc etc etc) at 30 or so cafes within walking/ jogging distance at prices so cheap they will make you ashamed of how the global economy works? (Our favourites were Two Trees, Milk and Madu, Bali Bowls, Parachute, Nude, Ruko, The Avocado Factory and Peloton). Free yoga classes at 7 am on Tuesday mornings upstairs from Bali Bowls? Beach clubs with swim up bars where you can watch the sunset with acoustic music, rather than booming dance beats? Swoon worthy modern Indonesian food at Ulekan, fantastic Izakaya Japanese (where the kids eat free) at One Eyed Jacks, staggeringly good sustainable fish at Fishbone Local and some of the best pizza of your life at Luigi’s Hot Pizza. I’m so tempted to decree a fortnight in July every year and get everyone to just shift there so we can run in a wild tribe. Who’s in? Great. 

Listening: The Dave Chang Show. The Dave Chang Show podcast has some great ‘inside baseball’/ fly on the wall chat about the mechanics of opening his latest venture MajorDomo in Los Angeles in a series of episodes. His interview with Helen Rosner on #metoo in the culinary world is also a great one. But the episode that should be compulsory listening for any male, or anyone who has struggled with anxiety and depression is his deeply personal response to Anthony Bourdain’s suicide and candid admissions of how important it’s been for him to invest (a lot) in maintaining his mental health.  “One of the good things is that this is going to not make talking about this kind of stuff so embarrassing and so hidden,” he says. “The one thing I really suggest to you, if you haven’t had any help yet, or if you’re trying to find help, or if you need help, is don’t lose hope. You have to hope for a better day.” It’s episode 7, you can find it here. 

Wearing: ‘Jeans’ from Decjuba. Let’s be honest. When you realise how comfortable leggings are, when you know how comfortable maternity jeans are (ah, elasticated waistbands for life), when you spend an inordinate amount of time getting up and down off the floor playing with children/mopping floors/ collecting toys etc, then it can be hard to have a great day when wearing regular jeans. I mean, you can, but I’m telling you- your days can be better. I’m going to tell you about the  Riley Skinny Jean from Decjuba. They are stretch. Really stretch. And that includes at the waist. (SHHHH). Wear them with a long-ish top and nobody ever, ever needs to know. I won’t mention it when I see you, if you won’t when you see me. Deal? 

Cooking: I’ve discovered these konjac noodles – in the hipster health food section of the supermarket, and while they’re not quite as satisfying as a bowl full of steaming slippery carbs, they’re not a bad impression. The name is terrible (Slendier -shudder), and there is a strange-ish smell to them when they come straight out of the packet, but they’re gluten free (which is something we need to do for both my kids at the moment). We call them ‘jelly noodles’, which helps communicate a little about the texture. They stand in a lot better with Asian flavours and broths than in mock Italian. They’re often part of a quick post-daycare dinner, with shiro miso and chicken broth (or water) and if Will will let me, an egg beaten in for some extra protein. I like them with chicken broth, some kale, shredded chicken and tamari for lunch when I’m feeling a little feeble.

Reading: ‘Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine‘. A compelling read that suckered me in from the second page. Lovely skewering of the insane things that women do in the name of making themselves more palatable to others and a fascinating protagonist. One of my favourite passages; “But, by careful observation from the sidelines, I’d worked out that social success is often built on pretending just a little. Popular people sometimes have to laugh at things they don’t find very funny, do things they don’t particularly want to, with people whose company they don’t particularly enjoy. Not me. I had decided, years ago, that if the choice was between that or flying solo, then I’d fly solo. It was safer that way.” I’m hoping someone turns it into a terrific film. I’d love to see Emily Blunt in the main character. Any other thoughts? 

Still: Running. And it’s all thanks to Hugh Jackman. I can only run fast on a treadmill for the length of time it takes to listen to all of the good songs out of ‘The Greatest Showman’, very loud in my ears. These days I can do about 4.5 km in that time and I’m trying to do it 4-5 days a week. Which for anyone who ever knew me as the 11 year old who purposely hid half way around the cross country track until I slipped unseen back into the second lap, or has seen my feet (more akin to flippers than something with structure or shape), this is kind of miraculous. 

Endorsing: Masterclasses. I’ve spent the last week listening to the wisdom of Aaron Sorkin on screenwriting, Judd Apatow on Comedy and James Patterson on writing, all thanks to the Masterclass online program. (See here.) I’m hanging out for Margaret Atwood on writing and think that some of the cooking ones look great too. The first week is free, so next time you’ve got the flu, dive in.

Beef, Stout and Swede Stew

Feeds 6, with cauliflower mash or white bean mash

Ingredients

1.3 kg well marbled chuck steak, cut into pieces size of a matchbook (can also substitute for beef cheeks, or stewing beef)
2 tbsp olive oil
1 brown onion, diced
1 red onion, diced
3 ribs of celery, diced
3 carrots, peeled and diced
3 bay leaves
2 tbsp tomato paste
2 swedes, peeled and cut into pieces size of a playing dice
1 head of garlic, cloves peeled (kept whole)
1 x 375 ml can of stout/porter/dark ale
500 ml beef stock, chicken stock or water
Salt to taste

Here’s how we roll

1 Preheat the oven to 150C/300F. Add 1 tbsp olive oil to the bottom of a large dutch oven, or a roasting pan that can happily sit on the hob (mine stretches across two burners). Sear the pieces of beef in batches (this gives the beef a chance to brown, not stew). You want to ensure a good crust and caramellisation on the beef. This is the basis of so much flavour in this braise, so if you’re going to put time into any step, put it into this. Remove the beef and set aside.

2 Add the remaining olive oil to the bottom of the pan and sautee the onions, carrot and celery for 7 minutes, until the onion has softened. 

3 Add the and to the bottom of the pan to deglaze and bring to a boil, stirring to rescue any flavour that’s clinging to the bottom of the pan. Transfer everything to a large roasting dish and add the tomato paste, bay leaves, then the whole peeled garlic cloves, pieces of swede and enough water or stock to come 4/5 of the way up the side of the meat and vegetables. You don’t want them to be completely covered. Cover with foil and place in the oven for 4 hours. 

4 After four hours, check on the braise. The swede should be soft and the meat starting to fork apart. Remove the foil and place back in the oven for the remaining hour to reduce the sauce, checking on it occasionally to stir. If it starts to get too dry, take it out of the oven and allow to rest, or add some more water or stock. Taste before serving and add salt if it needs it. Serve with cauliflower mash, white bean mash, mustard and a dark ale.

The post Beef, Stout and Swede Stew appeared first on eatori.

Straight up confession;

Is anyone else sick up to their back teeth of trying to get their offspring to eat a vegetable? For the love of heaven, give me strength. They say if you want to make God laugh tell her your plans. I say, be a food writer and then have a selective eating child. That’s a situation properly ripe for humour. 

I cannot do any more ‘I’ll fall of my chair’ charades at the sound of you crunching a carrot/ folding up spinach leaves to ‘post a letter down your gullet to a Superhero’. I’m tired of julienning them to hide in noodles only to have them identify a scrap of green of a zucchini and refuse to eat one more bite. Yes I’ve taken him shopping to fresh produce markets. He’s actively involved in the selection and preparation- he just won’t eat it without a Dayton Accords level of negotiation. I’ve served them cold and hot and in different textures, with different dipping sauces and we have star charts and rewards for ‘brave tasting’. I’ve gone through phases of ignoring the issue completely.  I’ve put the vegetables on his plate every night for consistency and eaten more crudites of futility than I thought possible.  I’ve assumed the scary Mum voice every once in a while that sounds a lot like Gollum after a hard night on the tiles who just says ‘THIS. IS. DINNER. EAT. IT” and then grimaces like a vexed chimpanzee, a little close to her offspring’s face for comfort. But guess what? I never win. Genetics is karma and I am parenting myself, circa 1985, without the Punky Brewster braids, or knee high socks. My offspring will just hiss back and then won’t eat it. And then wake up up 4 times a night telling me they’re hungry. 

I mean, it’s not always like that, but sometimes I wish there were just a few more things in the rotation beyond salmon sashimi and nori paper with avocado rolled up into ad hoc sushi that were greeted with ‘yum! Great Mum!’ rather than a battle.

Enter this red sauce. 

Once upon a time I discovered that a red sauce that slicked a deep dish pizza we ate in Chicago was gifted depth and sweetness care of a pear. It changed how I thought about red sauce since that day. I will often lob a blitzed pear into all bolognaise/red sauces when it’s in season since then. It helps temper the acidity of the tomato without the need for refined sugar.  So what if you had a sweet-ish red sauce that also managed to smuggle in the goodness of leek, onion, celery, carrot, sweet potato, tomatoes and red lentils? What if you could use that in place of passata or tomato paste on pizzas, calzones, noodles, or as soup to dip quesadillas into?

What if you made it in such terrifying bulk that you could stash your freezer and know that dinner that wouldn’t be a battle was only a few minutes away?

Well, you might just give yourself a pat on the back. And pour yourself another Campari. May the force be with you. 

Here are a few other things that are going on. 

Visiting: We had a glorious long weekend out in Orange a few weeks ago, to visit some of my oldest friends who have just shifted there. Four hours drive over the Blue Mountains, Orange is a piece of regional NSW idyll. There are vineyards and orchards, great coffee, booze and some cracking spots to eat while the kids rumble in fresh country air. Current endorsements: The Greenhouse – a fenced, kid safe rooftop retreat with great pizzas and roast vegetable sides made from local produce, cubby houses and an indoor kids’ play room. Heaven is getting to sit and have a real conversation, beginning to end with friends over wine in the sunshine while the kids happily bob about, perfectly contained and entertained. Also; Heifer Station winery. Farm animals to visit, large sandpits to play in, enormous cheese tasting boards and a very quaffable local pinot to sip make for a very easy way to spend a few hours. Plus it’s just down the road from an orchard where you can pick your own Pink Lady apples and take atmospheric photos like this one (please excuse the take away coffee cup. I think we have now reached the tipping point where they are no longer socially acceptable. We remembered everything but the kitchen sink and our Keep Cups to take to Orange). 

Reading:’The Motherhood edited by Jamila Rizvi; Australian women share what they wish they’d known about life with a newborn’. This is a great baby-shower/ initiation to the ‘hood present. It’s some real talk from well known Australian women, including writers like Em Rusciano, Zoe Foster Blake and Rebecca Sparrow about their experiences in the first flush of life with their first child. It’s raw and revealing, with some searing stuff about post natal anxiety, illnesses, breastfeeding and family dynamics. I found particularly illuminating the essay by Carla Gee about how assuming a new role as a mother ‘ put into stark relief her cultural identity. She writes; “Dear Carla, ‘How to Deal With a Postnatal Racial Identity Crisis’ isn’t a chapter in What to Expect When You’re Expecting but, oh, how I wish it had been”. There is one premise of the book that doesn’t quite land for me though; a lot of it is written through the prism of ‘how to survive the first six weeks’- as if things are going to get magically easier once you turn the calendar through to week seven.  But don’t let that stop you from buying it. I’m just waiting for the next edition; ‘The Four Month Sleep Regression (where you contemplated walking into the ocean with a baby strapped to you because at least it was quiet down there)’, or the sequel ‘Motherhood once again; backwards, with a screaming toddler on your hip’. 

Writing: This piece for Harris Farm all about onions. It also includes my default recipes for beer braised onions (have with sausages and white bean champ), quick pickled onions (have with roast pork belly tacos with coriander and black beans) or balsamic roasted eachallots (there are some crottins of goat cheese that are crying to meet these).

Also this interview with Tree Changer Will Davies, from Australia’s first neighbour to neighbour car share community; Car Next Door about how he makes it work living in Berry and his work hacks to achieve the enviable goal of Inbox Zero (I didn’t tell him I currently have 15 587 unfiled emails). 

Listening: The podcast ‘The Habitat‘ ; the true story of six volunteers who live for a year on a fake planet, in a continuing experiment to deduce the impact of human group dynamics and isolation on a manned mission to Mars. Great stuff, perfect for a long drive. Some really interesting transferrable lessons about why people can stomach a grinding, isolating situation for about six months, before really starting to spit the dummy (transfer that reasoning to any situation that’s relevant; tricky jobs, housemates…parenthood). 

Watching: ABC’s ‘Back in Time for Dinner’; worth it for Annabel Crabb’s wardrobe alone. An Australian rendition of a UK series where a suburban family are taken back into history and have to live with the furnishings, social mores and foods that were the norm of the time. There’s only been one episode so far, starting in 1951. I think the major takeaway is; nobody wants to be a 1950’s housewife. Nobody. 

Also: Solo. Ignore the reviews. It’s glorious. Anyone who grew up with Star Wars in their childhood who isn’t a men’s rights fan-boy should love this. Just think; the origin of Han and Chewie as friends! A droid equality plot line! Donald Glover as Lando! Emelia Clarke’s eyebrows! Lando’s capes! You know you want to. 

Crafting: I am not a craft-mum. My nightmares often involve a furious perfectionist four year old having a meltdown because he needs to make a PJ Masks CatBoy flag for the back of his bike, but the one that he’s made won’t stand up straight. Yet the other day I found myself spending a good hour making fake ice cream with Will for colour mixing/sensory play that wasn’t nearly as foul as the slime he wanted to make and didn’t involve borax. Simply mix together 1 cup of cornflour with 1/2 cup of the cheapest hair conditioner you can find. Then colour with natural colourings and add a little water if the texture isn’t quite right. It should feel silky, not chalky.  Then scoop, and play until the child insists you put it into bowls, pretend to bake it, you then throw it out and they lose the plot because you didn’t preserve their precious creations. 

Cooking: I’ve been making a lot of spelt and coconut banana bread at the moment. It’s the weather for it. Plus it’s hard to find one out and about that’s dairy free for Evie.  This is my default recipe. Nb, tip for the day, if you’ve got bananas that are snappy and fresh and not black and scary and you still want to make banana bread, you can quickly transform them by putting them on the oven tray while you preheat the oven. Pull them out when they’re black all over and squidgy. Then make the banana bread from there.  You need; 450 g ripe mashed banana (approx 4 bananas), 2 eggs, 125 g honey or rice malt syrup, 125 ml liquid coconut oil, 2 teaspoon ground cinnamon, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 3 tbsp chia seeds, 175 g desiccated coconut
175g wholemeal spelt flour (or oat flour). Optional; chocolate chunks, frozen raspberries/blueberries. Preheat oven to 170 c/340 F. Grease and line a loaf tin. Mix together wet. Fold in dry. Bake 1 hour. Let cool for 15 mins in tin. It’ll keep happily in the fridge for a week.

Kid Approved Six Vegetable, Pear and Pulse ‘Red Sauce’

Makes a freezer-load.

Shopping/foraging

2 tbsp olive oil
3 cloves of garlic, peeled and thinly sliced
2 red onions, peeled and finely chopped
1 leek, root and green part trimmed, then halved, rinsed to remove any dirt and cut into slim half moons
3  carrots, trimmed, peeled and diced
2 ribs of celery and diced
1 pear, cored and cut into chunks
1 medium sweet potato/500 g  peeled and cut into chunks
700 g tomato passata
3 1/2 cups/ 875 ml water
1 cup of red lentils/200g rinsed
Salt to taste
2 large rinds of parmesan (you can buy these at many delis, or else save yours in a ziplock bag in a freezer. They add an enormous amount of flavour, so do try to get them. Also, if you reuse yours you’ll feel doubly thrifty)

Method

1)  Add the olive oil, garlic, onion and leek to a large heavy bottom Dutch oven or slow cooker. Sautee for 7-10 minutes until they have softened. 

2 Add the diced celery and carrot and sautee for another 5 minutes until they have begun to soften.

3 Add the sweet potato and  pear  into a food processor or blender. Blend until they are finely chopped. 

4 Add the tomato passata and blend until smooth.

5 Add the tomato/vegetable puree to the sauteed vegetables as well as the rinsed red lentils and parmesan rinds. 

5. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 30-40 minutes, stirring often to stop the lentils catching on the bottom, or slow cook for 4-5 hours on low. The lentils should be soft pliable and the rest of the stew smooth by then. Taste and season with salt. 

6. Remove the parmesan rind before serving. Either serve as is, as a rustic soup with garlic toasts, or kale folded through with chilli and parmesan on top or blend until smooth and use as a sauce for pasta, pizza, or thin with water or stock soup to have with cheese toasties. 

The post Kid Approved Six Vegetable, Pear and Pulse ‘Red Sauce’ appeared first on eatori.

Are you after a twist on osso bucco to add to your arsenal? Do you need something to put to use the tub of olives your four year old insisted you buy in the grocery store, but has since refused to eat? Do you need a rib sticking, comforting slow braise that can easily satisfy paleo/dairy free/ gluten free folk and pure carnivores alike? Do you need a multi tasking meal that can hold its own with cauliflower puree for a dinner party, then reinvent itself as ragu with pasta the next night (and possibly taste even better?) If so, I think I can help. Skip straight to the matching recipe at the bottom. If you have the appetite for a bit of waffle and some endorsements, read on. 

I’m all about the multi tasking meal. Some things certainly taste better the next day. And you can give it a fancy name like ‘batch cooking’ or ‘meal prep’ if you want, but to be honest, sometimes you only have the wherewithal to do one big cook- so best make it a useful one. 

Maybe you’re flying solo. Maybe your kids have got croup again (CAN I PLEASE TRADE IN THE LUNGS ON BOTH OF MY CHILDREN). Maybe you’re realising that it’s been far too long between drinks with close friends/trips to the dentist/ hairdresser/physio. Or maybe it’s suddenly turned freezing outside and all you want to do is eat squishy warm things out of bowls, while wearing tracksuits and watch ‘Masterchef’ with your four year old curled up on the couch next to you and make him repeat ‘tarte tatin’ again and again because you love the sound it makes coming out of his mouth. 

If any of these apply, make this osso bucco. To be honest, this was not going to be osso bucco. It was supposed to be pea and ham soup. Except the butcher didn’t have any ham bones and I was too scared of the Jenga tower in my freezer to go fossicking for ours from Christmas. Instead there were osso bucco bones. The genius part of osso bucco is the marrow in the centre of the bones. If you want to be greedy, then after slow cooking fork all the meat from the bones and return it to the pot. Then take all the marrow-stuffed bones for yourself and create a cook’s perk of a snack; scoop the marrow out and have it on toast with chopped parsley, capers, onion and olives and pretend that you’re at Fergus Henderson’s St John in Smithfield (you should probably follow it with some eccles cakes and Lancashire cheese). 

This is essentially a simple braise, bulked out with wilted greens at the end (#eatmoregreens!) and the zip and lift that you would normally apply with a gremolata is replaced with black olives and rosemary. There are tricks to making a great braise; firstly pat the meat dry before you brown it, then season with salt and then brown it heartily. Don’t try and turn the pieces until a crust has formed and they are released by the bottom of the pan. Do not crowd the pan otherwise they will stew rather than sear. Use a hearty bottle of red wine. And taste the braise at the end and adjust the seasoning, add a little more salt, a little sugar, or a nip of red wine vinegar or balsamic vinegar if it tastes flat. I like to serve it over cauliflower puree, but pureed white beans, mashed potato, pearl barley, rice or quinoa would all work. The leftovers are grand shredded with a fork and tossed with gnocchi. They’re also great in a toasted sandwich with mozzarella (or work well for fancy baby food with sweet potato puree and quinoa). 

The leftover red wine from the bottle is also pretty great for adult morale too. Promise.

Here are a few other things that are going on:

Reading: This piece on Medium that my sister sent me about ‘Performative Parenting’ and some of the implications of sharing a domestic life online. “This is performative parenting: a version of motherhood that positions itself before an audience seeking a reward, an identity, beyond motherhood itself.” Ooh. My sister was careful to send it with a caveat; it’s not intended as criticism, just food for thought. That it is. For me; the balance has always swung to the positive when it comes to sharing (that’s why I still do it – but also, once an over sharer, always an over sharer). So much of parenting is done in silos. Like the author; “I’ve seen how the internet can be a “village” for moms/mums in its own right, brimming with opportunities to learn and connect with other parents as we all figure out motherhood together.” I choose to look for the good and ignore the nutty. I don’t have the energy to ‘curate’ a social media profile of my children towards a particular brand identity (good god, can anyone imagine having the time to do that?) My instagram is just as likely to share the highs (cute moment of Evie sneaking warm cookies while I’m photographing them), as the lows- and the support that comes during those lows has far outweighed any judgement or loss of self. And the online parenting forums are worth it for pearlers like this from the Northern Beaches alone; ‘Mums, how do people stop their diamond earrings from scratching their iphone screens?’ Oh how I chortled over that one. Worth a read and a ponder. 

Anne Lamott’s Stitches. I’m going through a bit of an Anne Lamott phase at the moment (see my previous endorsement for revisiting ‘Bird by Bird’. Her small book ‘Stitches’ is ostensibly on hope and repair. It’s got nuggets that make you reach for a pencil. Back when I was doing my university exams I’d have post it notes with quotes put up around my desk. If I was quarantined again for a while I’d be tempted to put up ones like this; ” It is what it is. We’re social, tribal, musical animals, walking percussion instruments. Most of us do the best we can. We show up. We strive for gratitude and try not to be such babies”. I’m not religious, but; Amen. Motto for the week; sorted.  

Also: ‘The Museum of Modern Love‘ by Heather Rose. Buy it for anyone who loves art, great writing and a transcendent story. I couldn’t put it down. 

Listening: Amelia Morris, of BonAppetempt has just launched a podcast; ‘Mom Rage’. It’s an honest and window-opening conversation about parenthood (but also, more specifically motherhood) by two savvy writers in California. The angle is an interesting one. There’s one topic that gets cautiously broached in intimate circles of women with two or more children ; and it’s rage. It’s not the first topic that you crack open in a catch up, but gosh, when you do there’s often a lot of grist for the collective mill. To be brutally honest; I had never known my potential for the volcanic fury like I experienced after having two children, and keeping it under control is sometimes the most challenging thing /the thing I’m proudest of (and ashamed of when I fail). This is not a house in which adults yell. Yet the inability to turn small people off, to step aside, to have peace, cleanliness, civility; coupled with the constant clamour,  physicality of having multiple small people pawing at you, feeding off you, NEEDING you, dismissing you, hurting you, insulting you, irrationally demanding things ( we need to make a cubby where can hide from bears NOW), soiling things both precious and disposable, hurling things from on high while you subjugate your own desire for rest, food, creative and intellectual stimulation… all while loving them and feeling that at some measure, you’re inevitably failing them. This is the stuff that can produce occasional spurts of unpredictable…. rage. This is the stuff we don’t talk about. (This is probably what drove our grandmothers to Bex). This is Amelia and Edan’s jumping off point as they then explore a whole bunch of issues around contemporary motherhood. I listened to two episodes back to back while doing washing, folding washing, making snacks, cleaning up snacks, keeping my daughter out of the tupperware drawer, sweeping the floor, mopping the floor, wiping down the kitchen, disinfecting blocks that had been in the bath when my daughter befouled it and sat with a satisfied grin on her face and later, sitting on the side of a soft play park. If you feel like a little solidarity while doing any of those tasks, give it a listen. 

Also: ‘This Movie Changed Me’ podcast. Particularly the episode on ‘You’ve Got Mail’. My schlocky taste in films is vindicated as ‘Harry Potter and the Sacred Text”s Casper ter Kuile talks about why it meant so much to him as a 14 year old, and why it helped shape the vision of the man he was going to marry. What he doesn’t go into is the troubling power dynamics of the film (how could she really love a man whose end game was destroy her business?), its transphobia or why Meg Ryan set up impossible standards for what a woman with a withering head cold would look like. But it does remind us of some of the great, great lines of the film and how it’s really a love letter to New York. 

Reminiscing: With the royal wedding (the sequel) on the horizon, I’m reminiscing about being in London for the last one and the menu we designed for it, with the dishes inspired by each of the main players. I think my favourite was the Prince William Pork Wellingtons, with Spicy Carrot and Ginger Relish (for Harry).  Recipe here. 

Wearing: 

I have one great weakness in this world (besides coffee choux pastries, pink wine and Nora Ephron films). It’s leisurewear. I’ve now reached the age where true luxury to me is being comfortable, cosy and having a jumper that covers my bum without advertising to the world that I’ve given up. Enter, this genius piece from Lululemon. It’s cost-per-wear for this winter is going to pay for itself in three weeks. Why? Because it’s stretchy and cosy and cut in a way that’s slightly slouchy and insouciant but casual and it dips low enough at the back to keep your kidneys warm and allow you to wear leggings without having to be too thoughtful about what pants you chose to put on that morning. AND; it’s reversible. One side is pale pink, the other a deeply nostalgic marle grey. If you roll the sleeves you get a hint of pink. If you have a propensity to spill coffee/food/ or have other people that like to use your clothing as a handkerchief, this two-sided thing might be handy. Yes, Lululemon can be a troubling company. Yes it’s crazy money to spend on a tracksuit top but BY GOSH it’s making me smile right now. Check it out here. 

Watching: ‘The Good Fight’. If you’ve held off on watching “The Good Fight” because you never got around to finishing or watching “The Good Wife”, stop. It is far, far superior. Christine Baranski is a force to be reckoned with. The second season is holding a mirror up to crazy times and it’s the kind of show that makes you wish you had the flu so you could just hole up and binge watch it all. 

Writing: This profile on tree-changer Amy Manton. Her Stand Tall retreats on the South Coast of NSW look glorious. If you fancy a change, need some time out or a chance to recharge and move on; I’d book in fast. 

Osso Bucco with Olives and Kale

Serves 4-6

Ingredients

1.3 kg osso bucco (approx 5 pieces)
2 tbsp olive oil
3 carrots, peeled and diced
2 red onions, peeled and diced
1 large rib of celery, trimmed and diced
3 cloves of garlic, peeled and sliced
3 sprigs of rosemary, chopped
1 x 400 g tin of chopped tomatoes
250 ml/ 1 cup of red wine
100 g of pitted olives
5 stems of Tuscan kale, chopped
Salt to taste

Method

1 Prepare your mirepoix, by chopping your onion, garlic, celery and carrot. 

2. Heat a large cast iron pot or dutch oven (or if you’d like to cook in a slow cooker, then a frypan). Pat your osso bucco pieces dry and season with salt. Add one tbsp of olive oil to the pan and heat until shimmering. Add the osso bucco pieces and sear until they release from the pan and are well browned (this is the base of much of the flavour in the braise. Don’t skip this step). 

3 Set the meat aside. Add the remaining olive oil to the pan and sautee the mirepoix for seven -10 minutes, until they are softened 

4 Preheat the oven to 120 C/ 250F. Add the red wine to the pan and bring to a simmer. Use a wooden spoon or spatula to scrape up any flavour that’s clinging to the bottom of the pan. Return the meat to the pan and nestle around the vegetables. Add the tin of tomatoes and 1 sprig of rosemary. Bring to a simmer. Clamp on the lid and place in the oven for 4 hours. 

5. After 4 hours check the braise. The meat should be forking apart. Add the kale and use the residual heat of the braise to wilt it. Add the olives and remaining chopped rosemary. Taste the sauce and add a little more salt if necessary to balance it. Serve with  cauliflower puree, or your carb of choice. 

The post Osso Bucco with Kale and Olives appeared first on eatori.

Do you need a new lunch box snack in your life? Do you need something that is nut free/ dairy free/wheat free/ refined sugar free and manages to sneak a sly vegetable into whoever is consuming it? If so, I think I can help. These date and sesame bars may just be what you’re looking for. They’re politely sweet and sturdy enough to quell the 10 am hungry yaps. They work well as a breakfast on the fly. And if you’re one of the folk who can’t abide baked bananas (yes, I know you lurk among us), they also manage to lean on another source for pliability (mashed sweet potatoes, I”m looking at you). If these sound like something you’re in need of, stat, then skip straight to the matching photo and recipe at the bottom. If you have the wherewithal for a bit of navel gazing, updates and endorsements, read on. 

I wrote something on Instagram a week or so ago. I might have spooked a couple of people out about the state of my mental landscape. I was ruminating while sitting on the side of a soft play park, watching one of my offspring totter and tumble. It had been a rough week. I may have forgotten to eat breakfast that day.

Motherhood tastes like:
The nub of a sausage, abandoned on a plate.
Crudites of futility (batons of carrot and cucumber pushed to the side of a melamine plate with a cartoon face that you salvage while piling cups into the sink).
Fenugreek.
Chocolate eaten in secret in the pantry.
Cold apple juice sipped through a straw on the floor of an emergency room’s triage, while two nurses try to insert a nasal gastric tube into your floppy, yet flailing daughter.
Crusts of $17 organic stoneground sourdough toast with avocado that your child ate three bites of.
Ground pepper that you licked off the top of the toast to induce them to eat some of it.
Mango, banana and pear infant squeezies found stashed in your handbag and sucked in a hangry haze straight from the pack, while a child stealth-naps in a stationary car.
Warm pink wine, drunk from paper cups at the park on Friday afternoons.
Meatballs. The same you made in bulk as a shared cooking project with a four year old; lovingly squelched and formed. That the child then refused to eat, because he can see a speck of green in one.
The sudsy mint of Rennies.
Slices of apple, slightly brown on the crest.
Cherry paracetamol syrup, spilled all over your chest.
Licks of strawberry ice cream, to dam the tide of it as it melts down onto dimpled sticky hands.
Double shot lattes, with a side of guilt, because you forgot your re usable Keep Cups, once again.
Cold tea.

There had been a lot of cold tea that week.

It turns out simple sniffles can turn scary in little ones quickly, as they slide from boisterous barky coughs, to limpish in your lap. Bronchiolitis was not a word I knew how to spell before this year. Now I’ve got it down pat. And somehow the universe knows to invite this house guest across the threshold just as my spouse steps onto an international flight.

Here’s something I know about adrenaline. It’s a master that believes in compound interest. The full impact of holding my daughter down for twenty minutes with the weight of my body while two nervous health professionals struggled to insert a tube down her nose and into her stomach and she screamed and her brown eyes pleaded at me to make them stop wasn’t felt until a full week later. We were some of the lucky ones in the fluorescent light of the isolation ward in pediatrics. We got to come home from hospital after a day. That’s the thing with little ones. As quickly as they fall, the bounce back. Fluids, oxygen, rest and affection. Often they don’t need much more than that. It’s just a breathless day, long rattly night and a crash course that teaches you pyjamas that allow access to small feet will be most useful in hospital, so bleeping monitors can be attached to their toes. After that; she’ll be right. 

A Trauma Teddy that is hand knitted in fuchsia and aqua wool now sits on the mantle of her room as the main legacy of her stay. On we came home, retrieved her brother from the kind care of friends and cut off her identifying bracelet we beavered on with the week we planned;  a day of shopping and baking and writing and packing. A night drive down south for my mother’s birthday (cake in tow), to parties, then home to another bloated week and more house guests. 

Yet the fear and adrenaline of it all came flooding back at the side of a soft play centre with the smell of a neighboring plastic bottle of apple juice with a sippy cap top. It was apple juice that one of the nurses gave me to sip when the walls narrowed, the horizon tilted, my brow beaded and I slid down to the floor when they called for a consult to confirm if they had accidentally inserted the tube into her lungs, instead of her stomach.

I don’t know what the taste of motherhood really is. I’m just stabbing in the dark. This is a degustation and I’m not even past the cold courses at the start. 

So all of that may help explain why there are no apples in this slice, though I suspect you could just as easily substitute apple puree for sweet potato in this recipe. Instead it’s chock full of sesame- both in tahini and the seeds itself, which is an excellent source of calcium for those who need to be dairy free. It’s also brimming with dates and oats and chia seeds (known for some unknown reason as dragon seeds in our house), all because Evie likes them.

And really, right now she can have anything she darn well likes. She’s right as rain now. And I am too (nearly). 

Here are a few other things that are going on

Watching: ‘Younger’. It took a full season for me to drink the Kool Aid that is ‘Younger’. Initially the premise was noxious (Forty something woman who takes time out of workforce to raise children, then discovers on divorce that the only way she can be reemployed in publishing is to enact a charade where she is 26 years old). Hillary Duff was a postcard from my own youth and Darren Starr’s rendering of  female friendship occasionally jars. Yet, by the middle of season two I got hooked in a guilty pleasure way.  There aren’t that many good 22 minute shows around (the perfect length of time for the treadmill etc). The aping of the trends and pratfalls of contemporary publishing is fun and the support characters are glorious. And the real life instagram account of one of the main characters is one of the best pieces of performance art/lived comedy I’ve ever born witness to. (It has to be all an act. It HAS to. Check out his wedding photos) Thanks to my lovely friends Alice and Alex for sending them my way. They made my day. 

Writing: I’ve been moonlighting on the side crafting some profiles of members of the South Coast of NSW’s best co working place. I’ve so far had the pleasure of interviewing WorkLife Berry’s Founder Kate Dezarnaulds, and members Rich Mills and Amy Bowe on what motivated their tree changes from the big smoke to this heavenly hamlet two hours south of Sydney. They’ve chatted to me about everything from how they actually make the finances of ‘choosing life’ possible, where the best spots to eat around there are and what their side gigs are (designing and selling revolutionary kitchen bin chutes being one of them). 

Reading: Or re reading that is; ‘Bird by Bird‘, by Anne Lamott. It’s ostensibly a book about writing and it’s got some great shining coins of insight about character, plot, habit and techniques for collating information and inspiration. But what it’s more of is grist for life, if you’re ever feeling a little introspective. This bit was one that made me reach for an HB to scrawl in margins and draw stars. It also helps explain why sometimes the wellspring on inspiration remained dry for a while. To write she claims, is to give. 

“You are going to have to give and give and give, or there’s no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver. Your work as a writer, when you are giving everything you have to your characters and to your readers, will periodically make you feel like the single parent of a three year old….Your three year old and your work in progress teach you to get out of yourself and become a person for someone else. This is probably the secret to happiness. So that’s one reason to write. Your child and your work hold you hostage, suck you dry, ruin your sleep, mess with your head, treat you like dirt, and then you discover they’ve given you that gold nugget you were looking for all along’.(p 203)

Listening:  Lenka’s ‘Atune’. I met Lenka briefly at a glorious children’s birthday party a few weeks ago. Never has a rendition of ‘Happy birthday’ accompanied by a ukulele sounded so diaphanous. I’m loving her latest album ‘Attune’, particularly the lead track ‘Every Bird that Sings‘. Get it for lazy Sunday mornings with crumpets topped with an impolite quantity of both butter and honey.

‘Ladies, we need to talk‘ is a great podcast by the ABC about issues that women often only broach after their third glass of red wine. The latest episode on women who cheat is a cracker; particularly when they delve into women’s motivations for (as one of the psychologists so delicately puts it) ‘pushing it ‘F’ it button in their life. Listen here. 

On the ‘to buy’ list: ‘Amateur Hour: Motherhood in Essays and Swear Words’ by Kimberly Harrington. It looks like my kind of fun. More here. 

Keeping in the car: An emergency ’emergency’ bag. As in; a bag of things that you’ll need if you have to whisk a kid off to the emergency room in a hurry. You’ll thank yourself later. Contents include; a phone charger, toothbrush, make up wipes, tracksuit, warm socks, cosy clothes for the offspring and a spare comfort object/fluffy bunny/unicorn. 

Making: A new lunch staple is a mix of a poke and a fish taco bowl. Finely shred some green cabbage. Top it with finely diced cucumber, avocado and salmon sashimi. Add a handful of diced coriander, then dress it all with soy, lime juice, sesame paste and a good squirt of kewpie mayonnaise. A dash of hot sauce also wouldn’t go astray. Be sure to mix it all well with your fork just before eating. 

Date and Sesame Squares

Makes 8 bars, or 16 squares. These will keep in the fridge for a week and freeze well.

Ingredients

75 g pitted dates
1 cup mashed sweet potato (approx 240 g). Peel and cut the sweet potato into pieces the size of playing dice. Microwave with 3 tbsp of water for 5-6 minutes until soft, then puree, or mash until smooth. Or else, make a bigger batch, use it as a base for sweet potato hummus/ sweet potato mash to have with steak or lamb and use the leftovers to make these.
3 eggs
1 tbsp tahini
3 tbsp sesame seeds
3 tbsp chia seeds
1 1/2 cups / 150 g oats
1/2 cup/ 30 g shredded coconut
generous pinch of salt

Method

1 Preheat the oven to 180 C /350 F and grease and line a 20cm square tin.

2 Blitz the dates in a small food processor until they are finely chopped. If you have a larger food processor you may need to add in the eggs to help the food processor get traction to chop them all.

3 Combine the chopped dates with the mashed sweet potato and tahini. Stir or whisk well to combine and distribute the dates throughout all the mix.

4. Add the eggs and stir until smooth.

5 Add the remaining dry ingredients and stir to combine.

6 Press into the prepared tin and press down with a spatula to make flat. Bake for 30 minutes until brown and firm to touch. 

7 Allow to cool in the tin, then remove and slice into bars or squares.

The post Date and Sesame Bars appeared first on eatori.

Are you searching for a sneaky way to get some more vegetables into the people you love? (Even if that’s you?). If you’re looking for a fudgy, chocolate cake that fits happily in the palm of your hand (or a lunch box) and manages to sneak a smudge of three extra veg into your diet stat- skip straight to the matching image and recipe at the bottom. These date, carrot, zuchinni and beet cakes (hipster heaven; dairy free, wheat free, refined sugar free etc etc) may be what you’re looking for. If you have the patience for context, some battle-worn hacks on getting veg into four small people and the usual endorsements read on. 

I never thought I’d be the sort of person who would be sneaking veg into cakes and snacks. PAH. “I shall feed my children nutritious food. They will come to appreciate the bounty of the plot. We shall lovingly shop for the season’s best together and then transform them into nutritious soups, stews and fritters. They shall revel in all the colours of the rainbow and snack happily on crudites until the cows come home”.

Show me someone who speaks like that and I’ll show you someone who I hazard has never had a three year old. Or whose nanny is lying to them. 

I have done some ridiculous things to try and encourage my Japanese-at-heart four and a half year old to eat his five a day in the past few years. (If he still had his way, he would exist every day on salmon sashimi, avocado, nori papers and cake). 

I’ve cut up pieces of nori seaweed into little postage stamps to eat as chips. I’ve rolled up nori papers with mashed avocado into rice-less sushi and cut it with scissors so it looks like little hosomaki rolls (I’ve tried this with cauliflower ‘rice’ and it was definitely a bridge too far). I’ve drunk a green smoothie in front of him made from kale, spinach, cucumber, mint, pineapple, banana, chia, coconut oil and water every morning for 9 months and poured him a small glass. After 8 months he will now consent to occasionally take a sip- but only because one of his current favourite cartoon characters ‘Geko’ is green too. I’ve frozen said green smoothies as popsicles. This sometimes works. I’ve made a variety of hummus/dips (beet hummus, carrot hummus, cauliflower hummus, sweet potato hummus, roasted pepper hummus) and we use carrot sticks to dunk in the dip then ‘fish’ for peas or pieces of corn to try and get them to stick to the carrot and dip. We fold up baby spinach leaves into the shape of envelopes and ‘post’ them into his mouth, as letters to everyone from the Easter Bunny to Hulk. He ‘catches’ coins of carrots in his mouth on the swing, as if he was a dolphin at SeaWorld (but with less sadness in his eyes). We even had a stage where I made him show me his muscles after every bite of broccoli and I had to faun over how much bigger they had grown.

Good god. Just writing that makes me want to knock my head against a desk. Wouldn’t it be lovely if you just put nutritious food out and they ate it? WOULDN’T IT? 

So, if you’re in the market for another way to get some veg into the small fry, might I suggest these?  These are dense, fudgy little chocolate cakes. Carrot in cakes is not new. Neither is zucchini (it has helped keep many a loaf cake plump and moist). And beets offer a definite red velvet lilt. The key here is to really blitz them until you can’t see any lumps or bumps. The other key is to bake them with a thirsty flour, like oat flour, add cocoa and dates for the winnable choc/caramel flavours and to bake them in muffin tins, so they cook all the way through.

Now, let’s be honest. These will be a slight vegetal scent to these. You could add a shedload of sugar to mask that, but then, I think you’re talking about a wash of effort and reward. We’re currently running at a 70% hit rate with small people, dependent on how attuned your child is to the real deal of chocolate cake. True aficionados will know that something is afoot. But for the young, hungry, gullible and uninitiated; well, to them I say with love; ‘gotcha’.

These cakes will keep happily in the fridge for a week and freeze well. Just pull one out and defrost in a lunch box in the fridge overnight. 

Here are a few other things that are going on. 

Watching: I’ve had a couple of rough weeks in the solo-wrangling game. We’ve had bronchiolitis and croup, some tricksy behaviour from a four year old, plus Evie is working on some big teeth and is literally chewing walls. Finding this interview with Lin Manuel Miranda (of ‘Hamilton’ fame) with Oprah on his creative process and how he believes that empathy is the cornerstone for any burgeoning artist (or decent human) was just delightful and helped to completely turn the day around. Watch it here. 

Reading: This piece from Nigella in Lenny Letter on why she thinks home cooking is a feminist act. This is a bit that called to me. “Of course, there’s a reason why the home cook has always been seen as a lesser creature: traditionally, chefs had been male and paid; home cooking was “women’s work,” unwaged and taken for granted, sentimentally prized but not essentially valued or respected. There was a time when denigrating cooking and insisting on how hopeless you were at it were ways of establishing distance from the role of domestic drudge. And yet I have always felt that to disparage an activity because it has been traditionally female is itself anti-feminist.”. Another great take away. Nigella published her first cookery book; ‘How to Eat’ when she was 38. It calls me back to a piece from Jenna Price that I really need to have posted next to my desk, whenever I get impatient and fretful about being currently mired in the cul de sac of caring; ‘We have time to play this out. It doesn’t all have to happen at once.’

Listening: I always refer to my oldest pal Alice as my cultural concierge. She’s the one to blame for my current ‘Hamilton’ obsession. She’s the one that points me the way to some of my favourite tv binges. And she’s the one who told me this week that I should be listening to the latest album from Kacey Musgraves ‘Golden Hour’. She’s right. It’s just the right mix of mellow and plaintive and the right sort of music for slow ambles and sipping wine and tea to. I may have even got a little misty once or twice while listening to ‘Rainbow‘ while washing up after a pretty wretched evening alone with the kids. 

Cursing: Daylight savings. Whoever invented that DID NOT HAVE A 15 MONTH OLD BABY WHO THEY HAD JUST TAUGHT TO SLEEP TO A DECENT HOUR. We had 10 days of 3.45/4.30 am starts. We had a lot of coffee. We’re coming back to the light now. But seriously. SERIOUSLY. 

Cooking: Spanish Shakshuka. 

This is it if you need an easy ‘brunch for a group’ option, which isn’t an avocado-toast bar (Nb entertaining can be that simple. Just good bread, smashed avo and everyone toasts their own and adds a variety of toppings, from smoked meats or salmon, herbs, crumbled feta and sliced tomato). But back to the shakshuka. Cut two red onions into very slim half moons. Sautee them in a good glug of olive oil until they are caramellised, checking on them every now and again. Remove them from the pan. Meanwhile roast 12 roma tomatoes, cut in half lengthways, drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with salt and placed cut side up on a lined baking dish at 150C/300 F for 1 hour, until they have begun to dry out and pucker. This can be done the day before. In fact, everything can, except for cooking the eggs. Then take three fresh chorizo sausages and remove the casings. Cook them in a wide saucepan or casserole dish, breaking them up with a spatula until you have little nuggets of spicy, delicious sausage. Return the onions and the roast tomatoes to the pan and any juices. Pour in 300 ml of tomato passata and then taste the sauce. At this point you can also add in some chopped marinated red peppers, or a tin of drained chickpeas or cannellini beans if you want it heartier.  Season with some extra smoked paprika, cumin, chilli flakes,  salt and potentially sugar until you have a rich, spicy, balanced tomato sauce. Bring the sauce to a simmer, then gently crack in 4-6 eggs. Add the lid to the pot and simmer until the whites have set but the yolks are still soft (approx 5-10 minutes). Top with chopped parsley/ mint and or coriander. Serve with warm bread and extra chilli on the side. 

Loving: ‘Veronica Mars’. Somehow I missed the boat on this back in the late 1990s. It’s great fun. And while it looks like a teen murder mystery, it’s wise beyond its years (and has stood the test of time). Kristen Bell can do no wrong. She’s glorious. 

Chewing Over: Ruby Tandoh’s ‘Eat Up’. This is a small book with some big ideas. Ruby was a delight to watch on ‘The Great British Bake Of’f a few years ago, and wrote this searing piece on the Clean/Disordered eating for Vice. ‘Eat Up’ is a treatise on the pleasures of eating and cooking and in many ways is a great call to arms, from someone who spent a good portion of her adult life in fear of food and what it would do to her body. Her prose is lovely, there are some great citations and ideas and she’s all for democratising the joy of consumption and creation. Yet, please can some people go read it and then come chat to me about it; there’s an awkwardness in its overarching ethos of ‘let’s appreciate all food (no matter who/what corporation made it and at what cost) that I find difficult to swallow.  Book club anyone ;)? Get it here. 

Date and Three Veg Cakes

Makes approx 16 cupcakes

Ingredients

200 g pitted dates
1/4 cup/ 125 ml boiling water
1 tsp bicarb soda
60 g coconut oil (or butter)
3 eggs
60 g cocoa powder/ raw cacao
1 zuchinni (approx 160 g)
1 medium raw beetroot (approx 280 g)
1 carrot (approx 120 g)
2 cups/ 200 g of oat flour (made by blitzing oats in a food processor or powerful blender until you have the texture of flour)

Method

1 Preheat the oven to 180C/350 F and line 2 muffin tins with 16 patty cases.

2 Add the veg into a food processor and blitz until it is pulverised. 

3. Transfer the blitzed veg into a large mixing bowl. In the blender combine the dates, boiling water, bicarb soda and coconut oil. Allow to steep and soften for 5 minutes, then blend until you have a smooth puree.

4. Combine the blitzed veg with the date puree and whisk in three eggs until smooth. 

5. Sift in the cocoa powder, then fold in the oat flour. Stir well to combine.

6. Transfer into the patty pans.

7. Bake for 35-40 minutes until a skewer comes out clean. Allow to cool in muffin tins. These will have a fudgy texture and will keep in the fridge for up to a week. They freeze well. 

The post Date and Three Veg Cakes appeared first on eatori.

Do you need a complete fail-safe, hands off way to feed a crowd easily and elegantly? If so, I’ve got a solution for you. This five hour lamb shoulder is my default dinner party/lunch party answer- and I think it might soon be yours too. If you’re in a hurry for how-to, skip straight to the matching photo at the bottom. If you’ve got the wherewithal for chat, and context, read on. 

This is not the first recipe for lamb shoulder on this site. But it is the one I keep making again and again. I make it because it is the perfect equation of results trumping effort.  It takes care of itself in the oven. The meat is pliant. It forks apart graciously at the table, allowing for an easy family-style presentation. No need for carving, or querying if your leg of lamb is going to be blushingly medium rare, or well rested so it doesn’t weep pink juices over the plate. This is supposed to be slow cooked until as soft as your favourite fleece. It’s well-cooked nature means it’s also perfect for pregnancies and the mildly squeamish. And if you’ve got any leftovers, you can easily freeze them in portions for the meat and three veg bowls (see the previous post), braise it in tomato sugo with some fennel seeds and dried chilli for a praise-worthy pasta sauce or shepherd’s pie base, or simply top it with pastry and have a forkingly delicious lamb pie with mushy peas.

You can take this dish in any direction. It can be classically English, and served with mint sauce, braised greens, and roast potatoes (cook the potatoes for some of the time in the oven with the lamb, then allow the lamb to rest and crank up the temperature of the oven to finish off your roasties). You can take it on a tour to the Middle East and serve it with cumin roasted carrots dabbed with labna, or tahini yoghurt and dukkah, some beetroot puree, babaganush, flat breads and a zippy green salad. You can give it an Italian lilt with wilted cavalo nero and peas, and another salad of cannelini beans, marinated artichokes and wafts of parmesan. You could make it French with a potato dauphinoise and a simple salad of butter lettuce, shaved fennel and radish and a Dijon dressing. 

Or you could do a modern-Australian feast like I usually do. I place the lamb on the table along side a large roast vegetable and quinoa salad (which takes into account any suprise vegetarians who appear at the table). I’ll add a green salad with shaved zuchinni and fennel. I’ll roast some sweet potato fries. And I’ll roast some dutch carrots and dab them with a salsa verde I’ve made from the carrot tops, almonds, anchovies, capers, apple cider vinegar and olive oil. 

I’ve made this lamb for Easter Sundays when small children have fossicked in our backyard for chocolate eggs while the adults have cracked the third bottle of red wine. I’ve made it for my Dad countless times. I’ve made it in holiday houses (which is how we discovered the hard way that lamb fat when poured down a drain will congeal and block the drain). And a few weeks ago I made it to celebrate my 10th wedding anniversary. I served it to two of my bridesmaids (one who had just returned back from a long stint overseas and the other is just about to move four hours away). The lamb sat patiently in the oven while we fed small people and ushered them off to the front room to watch a film. We sat around our table and shared stories and adventures, memories and mild regrets; reaching back over each other to fork for a little bit more as we went for seconds and thirds. 

I’d hoped there would be leftovers. There weren’t many. It really is that good. 

Here are a few other things that are going on. 

Reading: I’ve fallen into a reading lull. I needed to get back into the habit of reading a novel before bed, rather than just scrawling through Instagram. An easy page turning story is always the best way to do that. I just finished Kevin Kwan’s sequel to ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ in two days. ‘China Rich Girlfriend’ is a similarly hilarious romp through the outrageous behaviours of the stratospheric wealth in Singapore, Shanghai and beyond. It’s got a touch of Jane Austen in its droll take on social mores and the footnotes from the author on everything from translations of filthy take downs, to reprimanding the school tutor who caned him are highly entertaining. An excellent holiday read. 

Also; this piece on ‘The Invisible Work of the Stay at Home Mom‘ . It’s a short piece that had a few great truth bombs in it. Like this one. “The problem with stay-at-home mothers is that they are often graded on the same scale as those that work outside the home…There are no spreadsheets, no reports written, and often, the results are counter-intuitive to what one would think a successful day looks like. I must remind myself that building character is often invisible. Words read from a story book can’t be seen. Compassion, hugs, reassurance, warmth, and full bellies are lost under a veil of unfolded, yet clean clothes.”. Helpful to re read whenever you or someone in your orbit might need reminding of the worth of what they’re doing.  

Watching: I’m already sucked into Rise. Yes, it’s exactly the plot of High School Musical and seems to be an extended infomercial for Hamilton and I think after the finale of How I met your mother it’s still too soon to see Ted Moseby on a small screen, yet I’m in. If you love a musical and miss Friday Night Lights  then get into it. 

Listening: The ‘Making Obama‘ podcast by the same folks who made ‘Making Oprah’ is well worth a listen, particularly if you’ve got a long drive (or need to deep clean the house because you live with a 14 month old whose favourite thing to do is hurl food from her high chair like a blender without a lid on). 

Eating: I’ve got a new nomination for my favourite burger in Sydney/favourite Sunday afternoon date. Go have a swim at Curl Curl beach at 3.30 pm in the afternoon. Lots of families will be heading home around then, so you can usually get a parking spot and the beauty about North Curl Curl is that it’s protected, so even when the swell is big, it’s delightful. It’s also underneath a rocky outcrop, so there’s shade. Then have a shower there and zip around the corner to the Four Pines Truck Bar in Brookvale. In an industrial park adjacent to a Hillsong Church, indoor rock climbing, cross fit and a gin distillery, the Truck Bar has an actual 1960’s Dodge Pickup truck inside. It does fantastic burgers, fries with aiolli and spicy fried chicken wings. The Hungry One is very partial to one of their tasting paddles of a selection from one of the 21 Four Pines beers they have on tap. I’m pretty happy with a glass or two of wine. And on Sunday afternoons from 5 pm they have a live band. Life is pretty great. 

Dreaming: We’re off to Canggu in Bali in June and I cannot wait. The brief for a holiday involves not flying for more than six hours with small people in tow. Access to a beach with surf. Access to good (dairy free/hipster) food. Access to great coffee. Preferably a villa, so we’re not sharing a room with the kids. And a pool would be great.  I think we cracked it. Canggu is just north of Seminyak and from all intensive research, looks like an outpost of Byron Bay, that’s been transplanted to the island of the gods. If anyone has any tips, they’re gratefully received. 

Five Hour Lamb Shoulder 

Serves 4-6 with sides

Ingredients

1 x 2.5 kg lamb shoulder, bone in.
Three cloves of garlic, cut into slivers
3 sticks of rosemary
1 cup of rose wine/water
Salt

To serve
2 tbsp pumpkin seeds/pepitas/ a handful of fresh herbs – parsley/fennel tops, mint are all lovely.
1 quick pickled onion (cut a red onion into the slimmest half moons you can manage, season with 1 tsp salt and use your fingers to scrunch the salt into the onion slivers. Then cover with 2 tbsp apple cider vinegar, cover and leave to steep while the lamb is cooking. The onion will turn fuchsia, soften and sweeten). 

Method

Preheat the oven to 220C/450F.

Use the point of your knife to make approximately 10 slits in flesh of the lamb, evenly spaced. Place a sliver of garlic in each slit. Salt the top of the lamb generously.

Place the rosemary in the bottom of a heavy bottom roasting dish. Place the lamb over the top. Place in the preheated oven and roast for 20 minutes. Turn the oven down to 130C.

Remove the lamb from the oven and pour the wine or water into the bottom of the roasting dish. Cover the lamb with the lid, or snuggly with some foil and return to the oven and bake at 130C for 5 hours, or until the lamb is pulling apart with your forks (nb, some ovens are unpredictable when you put them under 150C, if you don’t have complete faith in your oven, then give yourself extra time to roast the lamb, just in case it needs longer to be fork tender. If it’s ready earlier, it will happily rest covered in a warm, low oven until you are ready to serve) . 

After 5 hours the lamb should be shirking off the bone and shredding easily with a fork.  Remove the lamb from the roasting dish.

Pour out the majority of the liquid from the bottom of the pot into a spare jar or container and place it in the fridge (you do not want to pour it down the sink. A lot of it will be lamb fat and that will clog your sink. Once it has hardened in the fridge you can separate the fat off from the liquid underneath, which will probably be jellified stock, which is great to use to moisten any leftovers, or use to braise greens in, or as a base for soup). 

Shred the lamb a little with forks and tongs to make it easy to share at the table. Top with the pickled onions, pumpkin seeds and herbs. Serve with some salads, breads and a salsa verde sauce. 

The post Five Hour Lamb Shoulder appeared first on eatori.

These bowls are what I often make when I’m doing the solo thing.

(Nb, I am well aware of my privilege and think it’s useful to acknowledge upfront that solo parenting for any spell is a VASTLY different and easier kettle of fish than single parenting. Ok. Glad I got that out of the way). 

While it can be tempting to live like a teenager while The Hungry One/spouse is away, I learned the hard way that some things are essential for morale. For one; eating a proper meal with lots of veg, some broth and a little bit of protein helps stop me getting sick. And considering how CONSTANTLY snivelling daycare germs streak into this house, that’s a good thing. Because this my friends, is a job without any sick leave. (The day my children are old enough to fix their own breakfast and bring poorly Mum a cup of tea in bed in the morning, I’ll be tempted to break into a rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus).

Here are some other hard-earned lessons for anyone flying solo for a spell.

Keep a few Netflix series which are bookmarked just for you. That way you don’t have to worry about ‘cheating’ on your spouse by watching ahead (and pretending when they return that you didn’t. The technology will always rat you out). 

Make an effort to tidy the main living area of the house for five minutes before you go to sleep at night. It’ll make the mornings a lot less grim. 

Keep a spare phone charged somewhere in the house. You don’t want to not have a landline, have your phone bizarrely go on the fritz and be alone in the dark with a child with asthma. It’s not great for morale.

Get out. Particularly on the weekends. Ballsily invite yourself along on other people’s weekend plans. Or invite people over. Cooking for a crowd is much easier than staring down a solitary Sunday with two tempestuous small-fry. 

Get cosy with star charts. I’m not just talking about an occasionally-helpful-behavioural-modification tool to encourage children not go to the dogs if one parent is absent. I’m talking about for you. Did you make it through a week without distractedly getting speeding fine in a school zone while you were lobbing a teething rusk at the howls in the backseat of the car? Did you manage not to lose a child at the supermarket? Not lose your cool completely at a child in the supermarket?  Star, star, star. At the end of the week if you’ve got five, crack a bottle of the good red. 

Treat yourself to a babysitter. Get out of the house and see a movie/have a swim/go eat cheese with a friend. At some point you’re going to need to do this. 

And make yourself some real food. My default one pan wonder is to either buy a piece of quality protein; a piece of nice fish, a small steak or a pork chop, or delve into the freezer for portions of slow roasted lamb shoulder or pulled pork that I’ve divvied up in preparation just for weeks like this. You’re going to want some broth. Sure, if you’ve made you’re own broth, that’s terrific. But if you haven’t then these days there are some pretty great broth-concentrates that you can buy in hipster organic food stores that will keep in the fridge and quickly add collagen and other immune boosting goodness, plus a great punch of umami flavour into your veg. My current favourite is Best of the Bone. 

You’re also going to want at least three veggies; because everything is better in threes. My go to are Tuscan kale and courgette/zucchini and onion. Two of these are going to be sauteed and braised with some garlic. The other is going to be thinly sliced and quickly pickled with some apple cider vinegar and when kept in a tupperware will instantly add zip and sparkle to most of your meals for the week (try it with smashed avo on anything). 

Then you’re going to want a condiment. I find making (or buying) some roast beetroot hummus at the cusp of the week is a great headstart to many a thing. To make it simply blitz together four small roasted beets (or vacuum sealed cooked beets) with a drained tin of chickpeas and a tablespoon of tahini.

To make it all come together simply cook or warm your protein and while it’s resting sautee and braise the veggies in broth in that same pan. Add the protein to the veggies, adorn with the beet puree, pickled onion and top with seeds. Eat out of a bowl. Pour yourself a glass of wine. Sleep well (ha. At least try to). And repeat. 

There are endless ways you can vary this formula. Swap the Tuscan kale for Swiss chard, Chinese greens or kale. Switch the courgette for fennel, mushrooms or peppers. Add spices like smoked paprika, or ground coriander and cumin. Swap the broth for miso and take it in a Japanese direction. Add some soy and sesame oil for Chinese. Swap the pepitas for almonds, walnuts, pistachios or sesame seeds. Pickle some finely sliced radish or fennel instead of onion. But what you want is a comforting bowl of broth-softened veggies, a palm-sized portion of quality protein, a condiment, a pickle and something for crunch. That my friends, is my greatest hack for keeping on, keeping on.

That, and working internet. Without it, most bets are off. 

Here are a few other things that are going on:

Celebrating: Some of the woman I love most in the world are currently expecting their first babies. With that in mind I’ve made ‘Poppyseed to Pumpkin’ the app, free on the app store for a spell. Send it to any of your expecting friends with a promise to make them something for the freezer (like the banana choc oat cookies, or the apple pulled pork, or butternut squash and black bean chilli), or just download it so you’ve got some of my favourite recipes on your phone at any point in time. See here. 

Reading: This piece on what the contemporary science says about how to handle an unruly kid. We’ve had some challenges with Will in the last few weeks. Yes his Dad’s away. He’s started a new kindy. His asthma medication makes him pretty bonkers. His little sister is no longer a squishy log, but tries to steal his toys and likes to chew on our shins for kicks. I’m aiming for more empathy, more positive attention, less time out. Wish us luck. 

Watching: There’s been a lot of Netflix in the past few weeks. I inhaled the entire first season of the new ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’ and wept in every episode, bar one. It’s the loveliest reality TV since ‘The Great British Bake Off’. I’m also loving David Chang and Peter Meehan’s ‘Ugly Delicious’ (except I feel a bit conflicted about Azis Ansari’s presence in it, but am also loving the way it uses food as a tool to unite, rather than divide us). Similarly I loved  ‘Seeing Allred’, about the life of firebrand feminist attorney Gloria Allred and her campaign against Bill Cosby (among others). 

Listening: In Australia the ABC has just launched a kids radio app. The storytime section is great, but it’s the ‘Quiet Time’ section of soothing classical music that’s getting the most airplay over here. Thanks ABC. You’re grand. 

Loving: I was given some Dharma Bums leggings for Christmas and I’m a convert. I’ve since got myself another pair, in the Asian Gardens print. I never thought I’d be a printed leggings kind of girl (well, not since I wore them with scrunchy socks, hiking boots and a thigh length jumper in 1995), but what do you know. They’re cheerful and oh-so-comfortable.  See them here. (Nb, the sizes are SMALL. Go big). 

Eating: Far too many hipster-honey joys. I made a large batch of them for a friends’ kids’ birthday party. I promptly forgot to take them to the party (numpty), so I’ve been making my way through 24 honey joys in the last few weeks. These ones are made with coconut oil, honey, a little bit of sea salt and cornflakes and are OUTRAGEOUSLY good when consumed with some dark chocolate and some dried cranberries when you’ve finally got the kids in bed.  They couldn’t be easier; to make 12 just line a muffin tin with 12 patty cake liners. Preheat the oven to 160C/320 F. Melt together 100 g of coconut oil or butter with 4 tbsp of either honey or rice malt syrup. Mix it through 5 cups of corn flakes and add a good pinch of sea salt flakes. Portion into the muffin tins and bake for 10-15 minutes until golden, then allow to harden in the fridge until serving. 

Meat and Three Veg Bowl

Serves one (but easily doubles)

Ingredients

70-100 g of cooked protein (pulled pork, shredded slow cooked lamb shoulder), or a small piece of salmon, sea bass, lamb backstrap, pork chop, steak etc)
1 tbsp olive oil
1 garlic clove, peeled and cut into slivers
1 small courgette/zuchinni, cut in half lengthways, then into slim semi circle coins (can swap for a double handful of mushrooms, half a fennel, half a red capsicum etc)
1 cup chopped Tuscan kale
3/4 cup of chicken or beef broth
2 tbsp beet hummus (or regular hummus)
1/4 red onion, cut into slim half moons and steeped in 1 tbsp apple cider vinegar and a pinch of salt for 10 minutes (or kept in the fridge for up to 2 weeks)
2 tbsp pepitas/pumpkin seeds (or other nuts/seeds)

Method

1 To make the quick pickled onions scrunch the onion slivers with the salt in your fingertips in a tupperware. Pour over the apple cider vinegar and scrunch some more. Put the lid on, give a shake and set aside until you’re ready to serve. 

2. Season your protein (lamb/fish/pork/steak etc) with salt and cook  in the fry pan until medium rare, ( if you’re using pre-portioned lamb shoulder or pulled pork you stashed in the freezer from an earlier, canny time then warm it), then set aside to rest while you prep your veg.2 Chop your greens and the rest of your veg into small, forkable pieces. 

3 Add the olive oil to the base of  your large fry pan. Add the garlic and the courgette and sautee for 3-4 minutes until the courgette takes on some colour. 

4. Add the kale and sautee quickly to soften.

5. Pour over your broth and allow to come to the boil. Cook for a few minutes until the broth reduces and coats your veggies. 

6 Transfer the veg and broth to a bowl, top with your protein. Add the beet hummus, pickled onions and seeds. Eat. 

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Do you need a grain free/ dairy free salad to take to a pot luck? Do you need a strapping side dish to sit happily alongside a slow roasted shoulder of lamb, barbecued side of salmon, or spatchcocked chickens? Do you want something that’s going to use up some of the sumac you bought a few years ago and has sat in your pantry, or the figs that are suddenly on sale for a song? If so I can help. Skip straight to the matching photo at the bottom for the recipe. If you have the patience for prattle, context and endorsements, read on.

This salad is one that now lives in the annals of ‘do the prep before’ recipes. All the mis en place can take place hours before, meaning that when it’s time to serve all that’s required is a quick jumble together. This is helpful. It’s helpful because you might have a sunny afternoon down at the beach on the cards. You might be prepping birthday cakes, or planning on squeezing in a trip to the cinema before hosting friends. Or you might be wrangling two increasingly defiant small people through the poisonous hours between 4 and 8 pm and need something you can quickly throw together and feel like a shadow of your once civilised adult self, rather than only having the energy to consume two glasses of pink wine and some hipster corn chips for dinner (I mean, I feel like that could be something someone might do). 

You can serve this salad as it is. You can substitute any other ripe stone fruit for the figs; peaches, nectarines, apricots and plums would all work well. You just need something sweet to balance the piquancy of the sumac, that bracingly citrus tasting, perky crimson powder that comes from a powdered berry. You could bulk it out further with some chickpeas. You could replace the kale with swiss chard and substitute the sumac with a variety of other spices; smoked paprika or ground cumin would take it in other directions. Yet I like it exactly as it is. It’s a study in textures and form (useful for those who don’t get out to galleries nearly as much as they once did). Some of the onion is slivered and quickly pickled for zip. The rest is diced and sauteed for a jammy contrast to the burlap sturdiness of the cauliflower. The kale is there so you can have some more greens. But the cucumber plays a vital role in textural crunch. Having it diced and shaved into ribbons keeps it interesting on the fork. Then don’t forget the mint and the pistachios. They pretty much make everything taste good. 

I had forgotten how challenging I find this stage of parenting (and that was back when I just had one small person to wrangle). I’m talking about the 13 month-18 month ‘still a baby, but behave more like a tiny tottering, drunk soccer hooligan’ stage. It’s when they hurl food from high chairs with helicopter arms. They smear things, just for the joy of the sensation. They pull hair and hoot and dash off without a backward glance. They make you ache for civility and silence. And then sometimes they do things that make your heart swell. Last week Evelyn Grace finally tackled the stairs in our house. She had eyed them off for weeks. Unlike her older brother who climbed up and tumbled down as soon as he could move, Evie has been cautious. Then last week she took off. She climbed one, paused on the landing, then deliberately shuffled her leading leg down and sat squarely on the floor. She grinned to herself with satisfaction. Then she tackled two stairs. Two up, then two down. Then three up, three down, four up, five. Not once did she ask for help. Not once did she injure herself. She was somehow wise enough to know that she would not go up any further than she could safely come down.  I merely sat off to the side and marveled. Oh my. The future just might be female. 

They are both so different my children.  But they are united in some things. Chief among them; neither of them would touch this salad. And for once I didn’t mind at all. All the more for us. It’s nice to be an adult. One day they’ll learn that too. 

Here are a few other things that are going on:

Reading: This piece from the Good Weekend ‘Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing’  that puts #MeToo in a galvanising wider context. We need more pieces like this, written by good men. 

Listening: I’m a little late to the party on episode 271 on The Dollop (if you can get past their own intense bro-banter in the first 10 minutes) is a compelling and and brutal history of  the inner frat-boy misogynistic nastiness of Uber and its founders. I’ll be thinking twice about what kind of ride sharing/ food delivery mechanisms I use in the future. Listen to it here. 

Writing: I wrote this piece for Harris Farm about green smoothies that actually taste good, including a magic ratio for making them work every time. Read it here. 

Eating: Last week I went out on the town to celebrate one of my best friend/bridesmaid’s birthdays at Dear Saint Eloise in Potts Point. It’s an achingly cute and hip wine bar with a list to swoon over and some serious food being served. The chef Hugh Piper’s Peruvian heritage shines in the mulloway crudo with aji amarillo, fingerlime and quinoa. A cracker of a dish. 

Loving: Sarah Wilson may be best known as the author and founder of the ‘I Quit Sugar’ juggernaut. But her most recent book (soon to be published in the UK and US) ‘First we make the beast beautiful; a new story about anxiety’ should almost be mandatory reading. Read it if you have anxiety as a co pilot (raise your hand with me now). It’ll give you solidarity and some techniques to help manage it; everything from diet, to breathing, to reducing choice, to sleep habits. Read it if you have friends with anxiety. It might help you be a more empathetic person and understand why if sometimes they ghost on you, you might need to gently step in to help pull them out – and when it’s ok to just let them be. Read it if you have kids with anxiety; it’ll help you realise how to let them reframe it as a potentially positive part of their personality matrix. The best take away for me; rebranding the sickening butterflies I often get inside not as panic, but as excitement. Sure, it’s not always true, but if I say it to myself, it helps bring me down from a ledge. ‘I’m not panicky, I’m excited. This is exciting’. Maybe it’ll be the same for you too.  

Cooking: Sarah makes the point that a steadying, low sugar meal, often with pork, root vegetables, broth and greens is her go-to supper when her anxiety is spiralling. So that’s what we’ve been doing a bit in the last few weeks.  Pork, sometimes slow cooked, sometimes in chops, with greens that I’ve sauteed in broth or miso and some root vegetables are often in high rotation. These braised pork neck hunks with fennel, pear, garlic, kale and a salsa of orange zest, rosemary and olives were a winner (and the step by step for them is in my Instagram stories). 

Cauliflower, Sumac and Fig Salad

Serves 2-3

Ingredients

1/2 cauliflower (approx 320g)
1 tbsp olive oil
1 red onion, finely diced
1/2 telegraph cucumber, or 1 lebanese cucumber
2 ripe figs, cut into 6ths
1/3 cup mint leaves, chopped
2 cups chopped kale
2 tbsp pistachios, roughly chopped
1 tsp sumac
1 tbsp apple cider vinegar
Goat curd (optional)

Here’s how we roll

1) Use a food processor or a box grater to blitz the cauliflower until it is in small pebbles, like quinoa or rice. 

2. Take 1/4 of the onion and slice it into slim half moons. Steep the half moons in the apple cider vinegar to lightly pickle, cover and set aside for 10-15 minutes. Finely dice the remaining red onion.  In a large fry pan sautee the finely diced red onion in the olive oil for 5-7 minutes until soft and sweet. 

3) Add the blitzed cauliflower and the shredded kale to the onions in the pan, add a generous pinch of salt and sautee all together until the kale has wilted and the cauliflower no longer tastes raw. 

4. Transfer the onion, kale and cauliflower mix  to a large bowl and allow to come to room temperature (you can do this part ahead). This is just so you’re not mixing hot cauliflower with cucumber- it will wilt the cucumber and it will lose its crunch. 

5. Use a vegetable peeler to make ribbons out of half of your cucumber. Finely dice the remaining. Toss the room temperature cauliflower mixture with the diced cucumber. Sprinkle over the sumac, pistachios and mint. Top the salad with the fig segments, cucumber ribbons and pickled onion slivers, drizzling over any apple cider vinegar that’s been in with the onions. 

Serve on its own, or with goat’s curd crumbled over the top. 

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