Feel Good Food

My foie gras, might be your fatty organ. Where I see foam, someone else might just think 'snot'. My sublime fish, could be your stinky seafood. Where someone detects nuances of elderberry and high notes of lavender, I might just sneeze into my dinner. Taste is, of course, subjective; which means there’s a lot more to a “good meal” than just the quality of the food.  

When ascertaining what makes up a decent feed in a restaurant, there are many intricate bits and pieces, such as provenance (Was my cow happy? How the hell do you tell? A pre-slaughter questionnaire?), cooking technique, freshness of ingredients, presentation, music, décor, setting and service. But what all this boils down to for me, is how a restaurant makes you feel. Nothing tastes good on a stomach of welling bile - which is precisely what I experienced this week.

But first, the joyous opposite experience, which I had a couple of weeks ago at Italian and Sons, in the unlikely location of Lonsdale St, Braddon, ACT 2600 - sort of in the middle of Canberra where kangaroos are more common than humans at any time after the offices empty between 4 and 4.59pm. Everything feels just a bit weird in Canberra, and the location of Italian and Sons on a big wide boulevard better suited to car yards, is no odder than the other bits about Canberra such as the dominance of Soviet era-inspired residential architecture.

The stark location certainly provided a contrast to the sea of spectacular tulips we slogged through all day at Floriade, which, like Canberra, is a marvel of human planning – except that Floriade is beautiful. Departing the flower show, I sent the girls on ahead to Lonsdale St to ensure we kept our 6.00pm booking, while I ran the ruler over the magnificent ales dispensed from The Wig & Pen just around the corner.

When I’d finished my Rumpole Pale Ale and joined the others at the entrance of Italian and Sons, we had a couple of issues alerting the staff to our arrival (and existence); until we fell into the hands of an older gent, whom I assume is the “Italian” in Italian and Sons. And what he knows how to do, is to make you feel good about being in his restaurant. The non–Soviet style fit out helps:  blackboards, horizontal timber palings on the walls, industrial bar stools, piles of wood for the oven, the oven itself, and the hanging salumi, all contribute to the sensation that tonight, everything’s falling into place.

The food is excellent, with a limited offering concentrating on core Italian capabilities. As we sat down, the wood-fired oven just over our shoulder gave birth to to fluffy focaccia which lapped up the rosemary infused oil accompanying it. Shortly after, the oven disgorged the girls’ classic margherita featuring Victorian buffalo bocconcini (which I thought gave it the edge over my local favourite pizzeria Napoli in Bocca).

I had a quick cleanser of marinated sardines with pine nuts and currants, before my main course of milk-fed veal marsala with wild mushrooms and thyme. This was a tender, mountainous portion lurking precariously on the side of being too sweet, but I enjoyed it immensely. Tania was fortunate enough to have the roast suckling pig on the bone (with apple and sage ‘mostarda’- like a fruit condiment), which usually only trots to the table on Tuesdays. A side dish deliciously merged onion, red peppers and potatoes, and while I found our other side dish of braised flat beans a bit over-cooked, they were a valuable countenance to my marsala sauce. Excellent Italian wines by the glass (each recommended by The Italian) left me even happier to be in this culinary outpost on the streets of Our Nation's Capital. And while I was happy, I kept on spending, something my experienced host clearly understood.

For the final leg, the girls had gelati while I tucked into a Ligurian honey panna cotta and poached red wine pear (above). The espresso was as good as I’d hoped. All up, we consumed a large amount of largely very good (but not faultless) food, but I couldn’t have been made to feel better, and heartily shook hands with The Italian before plunging back into the twentieth century reality of twenty first century Braddon.

Having returned from Canberra, I also had an excellent piece of kangaroo in Sydney on Wednesday night, but the following day phoned the owner of this establishment and made my first ever call of complaint to any restaurant, anywhere - because we were treated like shit by the staff in the dining room of a pub where I’ve spent thousands of dollars over the last few years. I won’t be back, because whilst the food tasted good, the ultimate job of a restaurant is to make you feel good.  And nothing tastes good, when you feel this bad. Perhaps a quick tutorial in Braddon might be in order.

Spring Into Life - Fresh Vegies are Back

I recently sacked my greengrocer. He’s not the type in a leather apron, but a nice franchisee in a van for a high-profile national company delivering a weekly, mystery selection of fruit and vegetables. His role is less about vegies, and more about smiling and depositing boxes on doorsteps; but not ours any longer.

It was a shame to part company with this chap, but no matter how much pumpkin soup and how many pumpkin scones I manufactured, I simply couldn’t utilize Halloween quantities of this one vegetable every seven days.  Combined with 1500kg of left-over onions each week - even after I’d produced a vat of French onion soup, and fried sporting-ground-hot dog-volumes of onions - I was forced to acknowledged I was flogging a dead horse. Perhaps he thought the year was 1770, my name was Cook, and scurvy was a real threat, but combined with the emergence of Spring and the resurgence of life in my vegetable garden, his redundancy was a fairly straightforward managerial decision.

His other problem, was that the weekly 5.30pm Wednesday delivery was often a culinary saviour when I was working full time, and domestic provisions usually bottomed out at this precise moment. It’s not his fault I’m currently semi-retired and consequently should be able to squeeze in a visit to the greengrocer.

So once more, my supplier of choice is Galluzzo (est. 1934) on Glebe Point Road. I can fill a box of my previously delivered provisions at half the price and still afford all the produce I actually want. Their wares are straight from Flemington Markets, unlike the van network which I suspect has fallen foul of the warehousing requirements burdening our supermarkets. This seems to undermine the franchise group's claims to freshness and seasonality of the selection. Alarm bells started ringing for me when oranges with the taste and texture of honeycomb tripe started cascading through the letterbox in March and April.

Reverting to my traditional procurement strategy is providing me with fresh produce again (and the proximity of Galluzzo to Glenmore Meat and Sonoma is another bonus), but parking on Glebe Point Rd is the Achilles Heel of the plan. So I have back up arrangements. I’m not precious about sometimes buying fruit and vegetable from Australia’s double-headed anti-Christ, Woolworths and Coles, as the yoke of offspring has forced me to ditch the old system of buying hardware from the supermarket, and then the fresh stuff from Harris Farm or Norton St Grocer. This lovely old idea was great pre-children, but now it just doubles the duration of the shop and I’m not prepared to make the sacrifice.

The truly delightful aspect of my current produce-sourcing blueprints, is that the sun is back - and this means I’m a producer again. My vegetable garden is forced into hibernation during the colder months, when the sun is unable to muster sufficient altitude to bathe the garden in its life-giving rays. During this period everything puts on about 1cm per month at best, and I burn more calories walking three metres from the kitchen to the garden, than my meagre harvest is able to put back into my feeble body.

Over the last few weeks things have changed, and the sun’s angle of incidence is now sufficient that me and my vegies are back in the money. It happened quickly. Suddenly everything emerged from its winter funk. Spinach mitts capture the sun thrown at them.

Seemingly perennial endive has actual leaves, rather than just being a tight frizz. Cos lettuce are no longer miniaturized. Purple cabbage  has taken on the form one would expect of the mature version, rather than being an umbrella for nothing bigger than a fairy.

 French Breakfast radishes are now launching themselves from the soil.

Alpine Strawberry flowers are transforming into dimpled little fruit.

Sweet peas are not just a floral adjunct, but will die down and inject valuable nitrogen into the soil where I’ll be raising rat-inducing tomatoes.

The herbs are back. Rosemary leaves are soft and fleshy. Their aroma lingers from the slightest touch. Thyme, with its deep and rounded scent, is growing long, soft stems, replacing its winter woodiness.

That weed-like herb mint, which  I’ve had in the same pot for about a decade, is more luscious than the newest and over-fertilized enticement you’ll ever see in a nursery.

Sun loving sage has floppy, pungent, rabbit-eared leaves again, and its neighbour, marjoram, has also been restored.

Young, malleable, yellow-green bay leaves augment mature, hardy flavour-bombs from this most important and practically indestructible tree.

Tarragon is pining for chicken.

Optimistically, I bought some basil a couple of months ago. Somehow it survived and is now on a quick path to pesto - assuming the caterpillars don't digest the spoils first.

After only producing lemons this year, it's a relief to see the oranges, mandarins and blood oranges are decorated with flowers, hopefully heralding the magnitude of the next citrus season. The lime tree is in the worst spot, facing south and espaliered hard up against the fence. Only now that it’s into its third season and has breached the lattice, is it experiencing any direct sun for the first time - and it's celebrating with an explosion of fruit foetuses.

The star performing lemon is sprouting siblings large and small.

Which all means the man in the van is out of a job, and I'll persist with the quasi self-sufficiency, real greengrocer, and occasional supermarket plan. The strategy will be up for revue when the sun once again prepares to descend into its winter depression.