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Always Ready to Give Thanks

I was very excited to be invited to my first ever Thanksgiving lunch, even though traditional Thanksgiving foods were eschewed. I thought I’d better contribute so I baked a peach küchen. What is a küchen? Küchen is German and also Yiddish for cake. Why would I bake a traditional Jewish cake for Thanksgiving, well why not? Or maybe because it’s quick easy and delicious.

And it was, yes those are little bits of mango as well.

I got this recipe from Judy Jackson’s The Jewish Cookbook. I’ve only used a couple of recipes from this book but they’ve been great.

This recipe is a one mix-bowl number – then you top with fruit and brown sugar. I used 2 large duck eggs, from my mate Emma. They were huge so I tinkered with quantities. This isn’t usually recommended but I’ve messed with this recipe before as the first time I made it seemed not to be as runny as the illustration so I added more milk, I also tend to reduce the sugar. Judy Jackson tells us to peel the peaches, but in this day and age I leave the skin on and it makes it more colourful. You could do this with any fruit you like, and this will make pretty muffins too.

Küchen

Beat till smooth:

¾ softened butter (unsalted)

2 eggs

3 cups SR flour

½ cup milk (I probably used 1 cup)

Pour into baking tin (20cmx20cm) lined with baking paper

Top with peach slices then sprinkle over ½ cup soft brown sugar mixed with ½ tsp ground cinnamon

Bake for 40 mins @ 180 °. Baking times are always dicey I find. Ovens have a mind (or at least a temperature of their own) so do the skewer test – I find it takes closer to an hour in my oven.

This cake really deserves whipped cream and so do you.

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It’s All Over Now

Do read this, at least some of it:

http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2014/august/1406815200/malcolm-knox/supermarket-monsters

Monsters indeed. This is why I put up with my local IGA supermarket. They don’t have a couple of products I like to use but I put up with that because it is owner -operated. I get help if I can’t find what I need, sometimes from people over the age of 16. I don’t wait for ages in the queue because they open an extra checkout when customers are lining up.

I buy my vegetables and fruit from the vegetable shop, the owner Tran grows much of it on his own farm and sells produce from neighbouring farms. Hell, I even go to the butcher for meat and have my favourite bakery. But that’s because I’m a latte slurping inner city, devil-worshipping, chardonnay swilling.. you know how it goes.

Don’t wait until Coles and Woollies take over the world before you ask what happened to all those great little shops you used to shop at, except that you didn’t, and now they aren’t here anymore.

These folks have ground our farmers into their own dirt, stuffed their shelves with processed foods that make us ill and cheap imports they promote over local brands. So while I am at it, a pox on both your houses Heston and Jamie. As the Rolling Stones once almost stated so well: “ I used to love you but it’s all over now”.

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“There is only baked cheesecake, everything else is pudding”

Invited out for dinner and asked to bring dessert I decided to reprise the “classic cheesecake” I used to bake in my old café days. This really is a great cheesecake. On receipt of this cake my friend said “ Oh wow is it a baked cheesecake”. To which I replied, “There is only baked cheesecake, everything else is pudding”.

Cheesecake is a staple of the European Jewish repertoire, along with blintzes, nudel kugel, high cholesterol and heart disease. And while the fridge versions may be tasty and certainly quick, they aren’t really cakes, because cakes, as we know, are baked.

My childhood in Sydney was enhanced by the fact that my one of my father’s customers had a fabulous patisserie in Kings Cross, the Croissant D’Or – and it still exists, though who runs it I don’t know. One or the other of my brothers would deliver orders to him, and it always seemed to be on a Friday afternoon. My dad never charged for this service but Karl Schader always handed over a cheesecake for the Shabbbos (Sabbath) table.

I’m not going to claim that mine is as good as Mr Schader’s – nothing will ever taste as good as such a memory, but this is a recipe for a very fine “classic” cheesecake. I have just popped cheesecake MK 2 (gluten free) in the oven for a special friend and coeliac sufferer. Just substituted gluten free flour and made the base with GF rice cookies.

So if you want to throw caution to the winds and eat likes it’s 1970, this is for you.

This recipe came without a base – a very basic cheesecake but I make a base with biscuits, Marie or arrowroot:

Baked Cheesecake

In a food processor blend ½ packet plain biscuit with 1 T butter.

I use a spring-form baking pan – and just press the mixture down evenly with your knuckles.

Beat:

225 g cream cheese

225g ricotta cheese

2 lg eggs

½ cup white sugar

till very smooth

Add:

2T melted butter

1 ½ T sifted SR flour

1 ½ T cornflour

1t vanilla essence

Best till smooth then fold in

1 cup sour cream

Pour it onto the base – don’t grease the tin – into preheated oven @ 160°

Bake for about an hour till golden.

Then turn the oven off and leave it in there for 2 hours.

Remove it and when cool it goes in the fridge – and don’t worry about any cracks that appear – part of the charm (although the ones from the Croissant D’Or weren’t split.

I recommend eating this as is – whipped cream is always nice but is it too much? I think so. Now all you need is a good cup of coffee to go with it – oh Vienna!!

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Barley Soup for David

I should be sharing the joys of my week in tropical Darwin, but it’s cold and raining and I’ve just had a great chat with my brother regarding soup. His household in the cold Blue Mountains have feasted on a batch of homemade minestrone for some days. He suddenly realised that soup had been a missing ingredient in his past life.

No, I don’t believe Mothers should be the only providers of nurture, but his ex did have “domestic goddess” aspirations, unfortunately they did not extend to comfort food. So when I told David I’d just made barley soup he requested the recipe. My barley soup tastes somewhat like my mother’s, except that being a lazy baby boomer if I make a pot of barley soup, that’s dinner. Not for my Mum who regularly provided three course dinners, midweek, and yes, she went out to work. Here she is with her grandchildren and one great grandchild – she’s looking pretty good from 90 years of homemade soup, as are her descendants.

So, some years ago, driven by nostalgia I figured this would work – and it does, though I doubt Mum used lamb shanks, though they were so cheap back in the day, damn our new found cosmopolitanism! Back then my father couldn’t give away the massive tuna he caught. But those were the days, when men were men and squid was bait.

Now be warned I have no accurate measurements for this soup– only estimates and you will add or subtract whatever you do or don’t like, beef bones can be used instead of lamb, but for me the soup should be thick with cabbage. I blame it on my Eastern European ancestry but recognise that not everyone likes cabbage.

Barley Soup

In a large pot sauté:

Olive oil as needed (not that my Mum would have used olive oil)

A few bay leaves

2 lamb shanks

1 large chopped onion

2 cloves chopped garlic

*½ large diced capsicum

*2 celery sticks finely sliced

then add

2T ground coriander

2t ground paprika

Then add ¾ cup of barley that has been soaking at least 2 hours

Cover with water or stock of your choice and ½ cup of wine.

Add 2 diced carrots

*2 diced potatoes

Bring to the boil reduce to simmer and cook for approx. 2 hours till barley is tender and lamb is falling from the bone.

At this point I season with salt and pepper.

Finally I add half a coarsely chopped cabbage, I like big hunks and just submerge it in the soup till cooked through, I like to keep the crunch.

You may remove the lamb from the bone if you like or provide a shank in bowl, obviously more shanks can be used.

Enjoy.

*these are optional and to taste, any vegetable can be used really but I try and avoid cauliflower when using cabbage, because sometimes you can have too much roughage!

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Time for Chicken Soup

Monday night is the beginning of Passover, what we Jews call Pesach. The festival commemorates the hasty flight from Egypt, the Exodus.Pesach is a celebration of some duration — eight days in fact and as such preparations begin long before. There are various tasks which are performed even in a secular home such as mine. For me these involve mainly extended shopping expeditions, but it is not so easy for Orthodox Jewish women. In Orthodox homes preparations begin with the removal of all chametz or leaven, from the home. Leaven is literally the substance that makes bread rise, yeast most commonly.

Everyone looks forward to the meal eaten on the first night – the seder, the central set piece of the celebration of Passover..  “Seder”, comes from a Hebrew root word meaning “order”, and indeed the meal will progress in an orderly fashion, each piece of the story represented by a food item.

There was no time to allow the bread to rise and so we eat matzo, flatbread. Tracey Rich adds that: “It is also a symbolic way of removing the ‘puffiness’ (arrogance, pride) from our souls”

So the flattened matzo sheets are used instead of bread. After 8 days there may be uncomfortable digestive repercussions. Matzo is also ground and rendered into flour (matzo meal), fine medium or coarse. The finest matzo meal is used for baking cakes and biscuits. I use coarse ground for my kneidlach, (matzo meal dumplings) since fine meal would make the kneidlach too solid. There are many families who like them that way, I’m told.

As Oded Schwartz has observed:

There are two opposing schools of thought about the making of these simple, delicious dumplings: one maintains that they have to be ‘as light as a feather and quiver under their own weight’ and the other, which is almost as popular, insists on a heavy, substantial kneidlach ‘which will sink to the bottom of the plate’. (94)

My mother’s recipe should produce “light as a feather” dumplings.

Mum’s Kneidlach

Beat well:

2 eggs

2 tablespoons oil

2 tablespoons cold water

pinch of cinnamon

salt and pepper

Then add coarse matzo meal, one tablespoon at a time until the mixture drops from the spoon, loose but not runny, should make a ‘bloop’ sound as it drops. Refrigerate for at least an hour.

Roll into little balls (use about a teaspoon of mixture) with wet hands, drop into rapidly boiling, salted water and cook for thirty minutes, or until cooked through. This quantity will make 12- 15 kneidlach.

Serve with clear chicken broth and cooked carrot rings. Add shredded chicken if you want to make it a meal.

Enjoy!

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Of veggies: fresh and pickled

My enthusiasm for all things outdoors has not abated. But it’s been so hot in Perth that just keeping the garden alive is a challenge. I recently had my garden mulched – a new idea for me, though obvious given the sandiness of Perth’s soil. Yes, you got it, I employed a young person.

Everything is looking happier, even these unauthorised arrivals:

They simply appeared after I tossed some spoiled tomatoes in there.

These capsicums were given to me by my departing neighbours – they’ve probably grown too tall having been in pots, I’m expecting the capsicums to fall off after replanting, but after 2 days they look like they may survive.DSC04775

But the Lebanese cucumbers have given me cause for celebration.

Will my corn be so lucky or did I plant too late?

Maybe I should start growing dill as my childhood neighbour used to. An elderly Hungarian woman, she made pickled cucumbers that we kids literally fought over.

If you are not of Eastern European Jewish extraction  (Ashkenazi) you may think I exaggerate. But pickled cucumbers are to my lot what olives are to Italians. A necessity. They brighten the most mundane of sandwiches (cheese!). And their place on my table is well assured now that I have a commercial option.

I recently found these on the shelves of Princi’s my local Italian deli.

And the bread? The Wine Store in East Freo. Quinoa and Linseed. I’m hooked on this bread.

Sometimes when I’ve ventured into one of the major 2 supermarkets (I try to avoid this) I’ve found Eskal pickled cucumbers. Eskal are good if rather hot, but these “ Pri-Chen” are the closest thing to Mrs Schwartz’s cucumbers. Good commercial pickled cucumbers are Israeli. Please don’t speak to me of Polski Ogorki. – they are edible, no more. Never sweetened pickles !

Why are we so obsessed by pickled cucumbers? As John Cooper points out, my forebears existed largely on a diet of black bread, bitter and sour due to its lactic acid content. The pickles helped to make the black bread digestible.

Not sure that I will try to improve on these pickles – but I will certainly be eating cucumbers.

Stay tuned…!

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Festive Frying

I’m rather shamed to admit I’ve been busy eating rather than writing – poor show. But what a month December was! December always begins early for me with the simchafreo Chanukah party, which I usually host. So, simchafreo http://simchafreo.info/index.html is the Fremantle Jewish community group Ari Antonovsky. Ann Marie Medcalf, Mark and Lea Zweir, and I established five years ago with help from all sorts of sundry “freojews”. More of that another time.

Chanukah is probably the best-known Jewish festival – at least amongst non-Jews. On the Jewish calendar it doesn’t qualify as a “High Holy Day”,  but with increased secularisation, i.e., the pressure of Christmas, Chanukah has become more important.

Chanukah commemorates the miracle of the oil. http://www.jewfaq.org/holiday7.htm– the story goes that having overcome their oppressive Greek conquerors the Jews found only one jar of oil to relight the candles in the Temple, that is, enough for one day. Miraculously it burnt for the 8 days required to produce fresh olive oil.

Jews commemorate the occasion with games, small gifts, lighting the candles over 8 nights, and…eating friend food. What’s not to like?

So we meet each year, serenaded by local klezmer band Gems, we eat our share of fried food – in this case – latkes (see below) and terrific donuts (sufganiyot) provided by Abhi’s organic bakery – delicious donuts, fried but not greasy. I ate too many.  (http://abhisbread.com.au/)

A Recipe for Latkes

Latkes are a very typical Ashkenazi (Eastern European Jewish) food. Very much like a potato rosti they are potato cakes.

So you grate about 1 med onion and 2 med potatoes. You will need to strain the potato in a tea towel to remove the starchy liquid – but you should always keep a little liquid in case your mixture gets too dry and claggy.

The potato and onion is added to 2 beaten eggs, salt and pepper. Mix it well and then add about 2 tablespoons of flower (self raising or not..)

Just enough to bring it all together.

Then you heat your oil – and don’t bother with olive oil – you need peanut or safflower oil. Drop a tablespoon in and flatten it with a spatula or the back of a spoon.

Cook them till they’re brown and then drain  on paper towels. Latkes are such a treat that in my family the word signifies anything rather good. So for example my Dad’s winning cards in a bridge game would be referred to as “these little latkes”.

They don’t look elegant, but then Ashkenazi food has little to do with elegance and everything to do with taste. Potato, onion and oil, what can go wrong?

I have served them up with turkey for an interfaith Xmas. So how was my Xmas? Delicious thanks, but perhaps a little less of that from this Jewish Mama!

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Peranakan Fair – Be there!

Peranakan Fair

The Peranakan (or Baba Nonya ) community produce the best cuisine I’ve tasted. Really. I’m no expert so do go to their facebook page for the drum on this facinating culture and cuisine.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Peranakan-community-of-Perth-WA/173911992698690

I do know that Peranakan refers to the fusion of Chinese and other cultures. The Chinese being the consummate traders and travellers have developed various cultural offshoots as the settled and intermarried in new lands. It’s a similar story to the intensely varied regional  cuisine of the Jewish Diaspora.

I am most familiar with the Malaysian/Chinese fusion.

The Perth Peranakan community is holding an all day fair on Sunday 24th Novemeber where you can find out more about this culture and purchase  food, clothes and artefacts as well as sharing the experience.

I’m familiar with dishes like Penang Laksa ( more sour and redolent of tamarind than the Singaporean version we are familiar with); and Nonya chicken curry – fragrant, hot and rich with thick coconut milk.

I’ve been lucky enough to attend a couple of their functions thanks to my colleague at Murdoch Uni and fellow foodie Christina Tan.

The first was a lunch. Here are my colleagues Erika Wright and Kai-Ti Kao  and my daughter Zenna suitably blissed out on the fragrant spiciness of this divine homemade food.

Several women provided their special dishes – as in 200 serves each. We were treated to about 8 main courses. Just imagine the best family meal ever and shared with a couple of hundred strangers. Love was in the air!

One dish I’d not tried before was fish that had been baked into an eggy/fishy loaf. Wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea but satisfied my desire for something completely different. It just reminded me of gefilte fish – a festive Jewish dish not widely appreciated.. a bit like vegemite!

Then we attended an afternoon tea which was informal but also great. Held at a now defunct café in the Langford shopping centre, we were happy to be the only non-Nonyas there as our new Nonya pals took us under their wing, carefully explaining and providing critique of all the dishes.

We began by fighting over the Singapore style noodles till we realised we were meant to eat a whole plate each.

But along with this, curry puffs (delicious, not oily, in fact great flakey pastry) and some fine spring rolls. Then the sweets, gorgeous jellies bright  green with pandan leaf and rich coconut flavour.

We couldn’t eat it all,  we took away.

The Peranakan fair which will be selling lots of these foods. You can buy tickets in advance – $5 tasters and I guarantee value and flavour you won’t find anywhere else in Perth. This is how I see it. When offered food we can sometimes take it or leave it, but when I’m offered something “my mother made”, anyone’s mother,  the only answer is yes. The fair will be overflowing with food that someone’s mother cooked – just say yes!

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Feeding People

This week our Food For Thought lectures dealt with food choice and sustainability. It’s all about the competing messages from slow food exponents and fast food purveyors. It’s easy to tell from some student’s body language that we don’t tell them what they want to hear, as though we will tell them it’s good to eat a highly processed, high fat, high salt, high sugar diet.

If Slow Food and fast food are in competition, it’s a David vs Goliath struggle. Slow food began in Italy in 1986 to resist the opening of a MacDonald’s outlet near the iconic Spanish Steps in Rome. Slow Food want to help preserve traditional farming and cookery practices and to keep people alive to the wonder and joy of fresh food. (tomato pic)

I’d like to think I’m what Michael Pollan calls a “conscientious omnivore”. That is someone who eats a broad range of foods, including meat, but who tries to do so in an ethical fashion. So we know that red meat is not “sustainable” for a number of reasons including the methane emissions of cows, the amount of grain needed to feed those cows, land clearances and on it goes. Industrial farming, feedlots and caged chickens aren’t seen to be sustainable or ethical, so sustainability and ethics are inextricably linked.

In my second lecture I look at so-called alternative methods – including biodynamics. I offer Cullen winery as an example – to show them that organic, and indeed biodynamic farming (think moon charts and soil preparation) is not as left of centre as they may think. And so this morning I find an article in the West Australian that Cullen Diana Madeleine 2011 cabernet has been judged the WA wine of the year.

Some students glaze over as soon as we discuss these concepts – or indeed the idea that we all need to think about what we eat, what we waste and how we can better feed ourselves and the world.

Most of our students enjoy the material we present and try to improve their own eating. In truth we can all make changes that will bring us better health and improve the world’s situation. Not wasting food is top priority. Sure that rotting lettuce in the back of the fridge can’t be packed up and sent to Sudan, but many students refuse to accept that their behaviour may have consequences at all. We argue that if the developed world wasted less food there would theoretically be more food available – to donate, to sell, to distribute. If you don’t believe food waste is a problem, watch Supervalue: A look at food miles and food waste.

We can and do have an impact on global food production every time we go to the till. This month saw Jamie Oliver becoming the new face of Woolworth’s: they get the Jamie razzle-dazzle, he gets to see more sustainable and humane food supplies from a major food supplier.

Are Woolies doing this because of their ethical concerns? Of course not. They have found an excellent way to build on their “Fresh Food People” branding by becoming the sustainable food people, at least in their advertising. They are responding to public sentiment. The case of free-range eggs and indeed chickens is an excellent example. When I first began buying free range eggs about 10 years ago, they were twice the price of cage eggs. Now the difference is far less because the demand has increased. There’s money in those happy chooks, just as there is in organic produce.

It’s important that we realise that we do have choices and our food dollars have power. There are a number of ways that you, yes you, can be a more conscientious omnivore.

Avoid or cut down on processed food, redolent with salt, fat, sugar or fructose in the form of corn syrup. Refined grains like white flour and white sugar give you a quick energy hit followed by a big drop. They also make you fat.

Generally eat locally sourced produce in preference to imported – less fuel is used to get it to you, you support your local farmers and in the case of fruit and vegetables it should be fresher. That means eating seasonally and nature provides well for us in this regard. After all, why do we get abundant oranges, mandarins and lemons in winter…?

Cook from scratch whenever you can: Michael Pollan says almost anything you cook for your self will be more nutritious than fast food, packaged and processed convenience foods. I say that the exception might be Elvis-style deep fried peanut butter and jam sandwiches.

Grow something to eat – anything! One of the principles of permaculture gardening is that you should always obtain a yield.  Community gardens are appearing all over as are school kitchen gardens. I may be the world’s worst gardener, but a major breakthrough for me was realising you had to water regularly. I have a veggie garden thanks to my green thumbed ex. Insects continue to thwart me, as does lack of time and energy, but the mandarin tree I transplanted when we moved is thriving. The miserable mulberry tree that my mother potted from a sprout from the original years ago has followed us to the new house. Replanted it’s now almost thriving, but my proudest effort is the blueberry – now in its third year it is producing whole handfuls of sweet berries at a time with my first crop being a single handful. If you have a small garden you can grow in pots as our students do for their “home garden” assignment. Or you can just grow some fresh herbs on your window sill. If you have a lemon tree why not put a big box full on the verge with a help yourself sign as some kind folks in my street have done? Take these ideas a little further and anything can happen. Do take  the time to listen to the remarkable Pam Warhurst: How we can eat our landscapes

No-one needs to be a martyr to the cause of culinary correctness. But we can and should eat better, we can all contribute to feeding the world.

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Of Mothers

I love this photo of my mother, taken sometime during WW2. Mum joined the Land Army and grew food for the nation. My mother was a mother of the old school, no canteen lunches for us. Breakfast at the table and a packed lunch. Most days she went to do the office work in my Dad’s fishing tackle shop. She was always home when I got back from school. She would usually be on her bed with the paper and the dog, having unpacked the shopping. When I came home she would get up and make me something to eat and then begin dinner.

Dad got home most days in time for the 6 o’clock news. When it finished we would eat. We usually had three courses. My mother didn’t really take to the industrial food products of the sixties, though she did have an ongoing fixation with packet mushroom soup. Thus we were spared instant mashed potato but I dreamed of rice-a-riso imagining it to be spicy and so much better than Mum’s soggy rice.

But I had a Jewish mother so we entertained with chopped liver and chopped herring, made from scratch, no French onion dips in our house. My parents entertained a great deal and Mum cooked everything. We had barbecues every Saturday and while my father indulged his pyromania I would set the table while Mum produced mountains of potato salad, sweet corn, pickled cucumbers. Her offerings were not “plated” in restaurant fashion, but they were delicious and bountiful.

Jewish holidays were celebrated without recourse to the Synagogue but with chicken soup and matzo balls, smoked salmon or whatever was called for. I was blessed to have a proper Jewish mother who had been raised in an orthodox community by her unorthodox mother Zena , my gloriously eccentric Nana. My best memory of Nana’s cooking was her pot roast but she was also famous for her taiglach. Taiglach are incredibly hard biscuits which have been boiled in a thick syrup and then Nana rolled them in coconut. Only Lithuanian Jews cook them.

I have learnt to make all my mother’s Jewish dishes, the way her mother made them. I do not have her dedication though; I’ve only made gefilte fish once. I have taught my daughter to make matzo balls. She is yet to master chicken soup. We were cultural Jews and it was the food we ate, cooked with love and dedication by our long suffering brown-eyed Yiddishe Mama that led me here.