Rhapsody in brown

This is ECB Butternut Squash and Falafel Coronation, everyone's favourite vegetarian jubilee meal. I made it for a vegetarian-stacked family picnic and explained its back story on the day, which guaranteed it being eaten because everyone had to try it after that. It actually received quite positive reviews, though it did draw the revealing comment that it was "not like anything I've ever tasted before".

It was certainly a big step up from the riddle wrapped inside an enigma coated in breadcrumbs that was Peri Peri Breaded Tofu. It's strengths and weaknesses are well summed up by one of the other reviews: "like curried egg but with falafel".



About making it:

1. It's a bit cheeky to list roasted butternut squash as an ingredient outside of a "using leftovers" recipe, though that kind of thing is very much the norm these days. I roasted half a butternut pumpkin, which gave me just over double the recipe amount, and added the lot because it seemed right and I wanted it to go around.

2. The ingredients list chopped onion and garlic, which are then never mentioned again, so I decided to give them the most charitable interpretation and include them in the falafel mix after a quick soften in a frying pan with the spices.

3. The falafels themselves were good, and as with the breaded tofu, the dish's best moment was just before its final assembly, when everyone was still pure and innocent:

(Above shows the 150 g pumpkin quantity specified in the recipe: not enough to balance the falafel IMO)

Then the recipe says to break the falafels in half, which means they are no longer cute and they crumble even more when combined with the pumpkin and mayonnaise.

4. The falafel spice + Keens curry combo is more successful than the Peri-Peri + masala combo, but there's no getting away from the fact that this is another bit of slightly forced match-making between flavours not found together in nature - or in any living culture. That's why it gets the "unlike anything tasted before" response. It pains me to reproach these dishes on these sorts of grounds because arguments from nature or tradition are my least favourite thing in the whole world, but I'll still say it's the "fusion" element that makes it a worse dish than the same thing with, say, paneer or boiled eggs instead of the falafel.

The breaded tofu heralded a first test that was a big ole mess for the English and seriously corroded the morale of their team. If these dishes are predictors (allegories?) of Test results - and why not? why not a vego version of goat entrails? - then we have a better omen here for our guests, but not better than a draw I'd say.

Piri-Piri Dreaded Tofu

It's a long way (and long time) from rhubarb and custard Victoria sponge to commemorate the Royal Wedding to the English Cricket Board's official Piri Piri Breaded Tofu with Tomato Salsa.

It's the dish that launched a thousand snickers. Merv Hughes claimed it would make him dry retch for three days, which is surely an exaggeration, but it has certainly made my eyebrows knit for a good 48 hours or more since I had a go at it on the weekend. I'm fond of tofu, and also fond of items that have been "breaded" (crumbed) and fried, but they don't necessarily go together and the rest of it is shenanigan central.

A lot of it can be laid at the door of the "Piri-Piri" theme. Piri-piri is a kind of chilli and also a Portuguese sauce or marinade based on the chilli that also has things like garlic, onion, lemon juice and bay leaves in it. In the ECB recipe, it's a dry spice mix with a number of surprise ingredients like ground ginger, cardamom and cinnamon. I couldn't work out where these things were coming from until I found this blog recipe for a Piri-Piri Spice Mix inspired by a McDonalds french fries flavouring sold in India. The recipe ingredients, proportions and even the order they are listed in are identical to the ECB recipe, except that the ECB uses fresh garlic and oregano instead of dried, and dark brown sugar instead of caster. This can't be a coincidence. I'm guessing the cardamom and so on is the result of fusing Portuguese chicken seasoning with the local influence of garam masala - see this other blog describing the Maccas (India) Piri Piri spice mix as smelling "like Maggi’s masala".

Okay. Well, not okay really. As Chandler might say, could this derivation be more tortuous? And we haven't even thrown the tofu into the mix yet, conceptually or literally. Or rolled it in the panko. Or topped it with the salsa. There's a lot that seems jarring on the page (cardamom and... oregano, oregano and... tofu), which is what had me scurrying to the internet in the first place, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating, right? I'm not a food purist (that's a lie, I am a food purist), and at the stage shown in the photo below, when I'd made the spice mix (it tasted... ok) and was about to crumb the tofu, it seemed like the whole thing might be just so crazy it could work. I wanted it to work, because despite my desire to sledge the Poms, it was my dinner.

Reader, it didn't. It was not inedible, but it was weird and weird in way that I still find difficult to describe. Weird for all the a priori reasons you'd expect from reading the recipe, with an extra helping of a posteriori weird on top, a sort of lingering je ne sais WTF. The spices were strange to my palate and deeply unflattering to the tofu. Tofu gets a bad enough rap as it is, it doesn't need friends like these. The salsa also clashed. I served the whole thing with - what else? - some red quinoa I found in the cupboard, which was right on ECB theme but no help either. I felt unsatisfied afterwards, but I also had no appetite for anything else, as if my faith in food as a whole had been shaken. A disturbing dish. Don't do it. Not that you were going to.

PS. Note to ECB re your "the quantities must be followed, along with the ingredients listings... If availability is an issue please do not use an alternative or omit from the recipe": My tofu "cutlets" ended up being "fingers" that weighed 166.6666 g per serve (500 g pack of tofu divided by 3) and not 150 g. I also used sunflower oil instead of coconut oil and baby tomatoes instead of beef tomatoes. Is that okay? Or is that the kind of near-enough-is-good enough attitude that destroyed the Empire?

Royal Wedding Cake

A friend of mine suggested that the image of the royal family is being made over from a traditional aristocratic one (reserved, mad, kill things) towards that of the wealthy middle class. Perhaps nothing supports that idea more eloquently than the specially-created Middleton family crest, which contains white mountain-like chevrons, "to symbolise the family's love of skiing."

My own love of an occasion is symbolised on my family crest by a stylised firework, a giant asterisk that also symbolises my love of a qualifier. And that I'm not out.

So, I went to a friend's house to watch the wedding and offered to bring dessert. If only it were that simple. The act of offering to bring dessert nudges a little mental snowball off a hill in my head that gathers size, momentum and an assortment of debris. The question of the Right Dessert.

"Victoria sponge", I think, and I don't know I would have thought of that if there hadn't been a poll on the Taste.com.au site asking whether fruitcake, chocolate mudcake or Victoria sponge would be best for the big day. Chocolate mudcake was the front runner, which sort of horrified me, though it does turn out that alongside the traditional multi-tiered fruitcake, Prince William requested a "chocolate biscuit cake". I thought that might be something like a chocolate ripple cake, which would have been awesome, so 70s, like if he'd asked for French Onion Dip at the canapés do. Instead it's this.

Anyway, I decided a Victoria sponge would be the go, and then had to find out what a Victoria sponge is. Not much of a sponge as it turns out. Same proportions as a pound cake (ie equal weights flour, sugar, eggs and butter) and doesn't involve beaten egg whites. Traditionally filled with jam and cream.

I had everything in the house except jam, so I was going to have to make a trip to the shops, and if I was going to go to the shops anyway maybe it wouldn't have to be for jam? That makes no sense, but it's the way I thought. Indeed, I thought, since this is not Victoria getting married but the dawn of a new etc. etc., surely it should be something less traditional than jam and cream. Something like... (several mental steps edited out here) ... rhubarb-and-strawberry compote and custard.*

Which is what happened, and it went down well, though if I did it again I would keep the rhubarb and the custard apart. I didn't actually mean to mix them as much as I did, I got distracted. The rhubarb flavour overwhelmed the custard so there weren't two flavours in the middle, just a one-note "rhubarb creme". It also produced a very flat, retro shade of pink, but I guess you could say this is consistent with the slightly artificial allure of other "commemorative" dishes (have you seen the colour of Coronation Chicken?) and, I see now, the background of this blog.

It still looks like a good time, I think. And the tartness of the rhubarb made it acceptable as a breakfast dish as well.

* A fair few of my mental trains of thought end in rhubarb-and-strawberry-compote and custard. And what do you know, a "rhubarb crème brulée tartlet" was served at the Lunchtime Reception.

In other news...

On the Easter weekend I decided to make "healthy hot cross buns", a recipe that contained wholegrain flour, walnuts, dates... very worthy. I thought they might also be nice but they turned out so worthy you could stone people with them.

Australia Day Breakfast K.O.

Sometimes I plate something up, as they say, and knock myself out. Just look at this. Delicious colourful Opera House goodness. Yellow-crested cockatoo on toast without harming animals. Red sails in the sunset, without the apocalyse! Is that toast shaped like Uluru?

Like my mother before me (and many others? most people? I lead an insular life) I am very fond of stone fruit on toast for breakfast: these are apricots. Buttered toast, wedges of fruit and an optional squeeze of lemon and sprinkling of sugar on top.

The toast under the egg is also, of course, spread with Vegemite, which is pretty much the only way I eat boiled eggs (apart from SCG Egg Sandwiches, of course).

And I choose to interpret the slight burning of the toast as a reference to the traditional charring of the Australian barbecued sausage.

SCG Egg Sandwiches

Completed Egg Sandwich, in kitchen (you make them before you get to the ground).

The saving grace of any day at the cricket, however dismal in other respects, is egg sandwiches. Egg sandwiches can raise doubts in the mind of some, especially as a packed lunch - "who opened their lunchbox?", I hear you say.

It's a reasonable objection. The keys to countering it are: plenty of mayonnaise and, I cannot stress this enough, lots of parsley. There are a few other pointers.

1. Fluffy white bread. This is not the time for your sourdough, your ciabatta, your multi-grain, or any other "good" bread. Go for the softest and fluffiest loaf from the supermarket (the most "whitebread" white bread, as it were), but not one where the slices are too small or thin, you need it to stand up to plenty of filling. Important note: do not allow the fluffy loaf to be squashed by the big bottles of lemonade and water you also bought for the cricket in your bag on the way home. A squashed fluffy loaf can never be re-fluffed and then where will you be?

2. This is however the time to go for a good mayonnaise. I like BestFoods, but any of those posh "whole-egg" ones would no doubt work.

3. Parsley: I think the old-style curly-leaf parsley is best suited to this dish and it is easier to chop up fine than flat-leaf parsley, which we also want. Personally I think curly-leaf parsley gets a bit of a bad rap.

4. The rest: hard-boiled eggs (look it up), butter (spreadable), salt and pepper and a little curry powder (Keens - naturally).

Making the filling

Chop up the parsley reasonably fine, like I said, so it's something that will really go all through the mixture and not be something you have to chew too much and get stuck in your teeth. Amount: I used about a third of a large bunch of parsley for 4 sandwiches. I don't know how big your bunches of parsley are, just grab a hunk and go. The main thing to keep in mind is that parsley is not just a garnish here, but an important flavouring and counter-egginess agent. Parsley, the "fresh-maker".

Mash the hard-boiled eggs (1 per sandwich) well with a fork with some salt and pepper and a bit of butter (1/2-1 teaspoon per egg). It helps to chop the eggs up a bit with a knife first.

Add the parsley and lots of mayonnaise to the mashed eggs. "Lots" probably means a dollop almost the size of an egg for each egg.

Add a little curry powder. Not a lot, these are not Curried Egg Sandwiches (unless you want them to be), but about a pinch per egg just gives a nice savoury undertone.

Taste and add more salt, pepper, curry powder, parsley etc if necessary.

I usually make this mixture ahead of time and keep it overnight in the fridge.


Making the sandwiches

Spread the slices of bread with a quite thin, even layer of butter, going right to the edge of the slice. This is not just an excuse to have more butter, it will help prevent the bread from going either soggy or dry (magic!). Even if you are using spreadable butter, it helps to take it out of the fridge a little ahead of time to soften it some more so you can do this easily without tearing the bread.

Spread half the slices with a thick, even layer of egg filling, again going right to the edge of the slice.

Place the other slices on top. Cut sandwiches in two.

Packaging the sandwiches

I usually stack each cut sandwich on top of each other in stacks of 2 or 3, alternating the direction of the slice in each sandwich (if that makes sense) for more structural integrity, then wrap them in one or two layers of plastic wrap. The important thing once again is that they not squash, so find a way once again to protect them from those bottles of lemonade. If you have a plastic container that will fit them, perfect. But they will still taste OK even if they are squashed.

To drink with the sandwiches

The SCG now only sells swill in beer-form. We take "special lemonade" which is a lemonade bottle filled with gin and tonic. It will not occur to the security guards checking your bags that someone carrying such beautifully-prepared egg sandwiches could also be - in SCG parlance - a "lout".

X in the Hole

I’m feeling fine, but in the space of a few days I have made 2 dishes called “... in the hole” and in these parts that counts for newsworthy. Blogs have been based on less. You have to start somewhere.

“… in the hole” #1: Toad in the Hole

What? It’s sausages baked in Yorkshire pudding, aka pancake batter.

Why? You’re already having sausages for dinner – hooray! – and now you are pouring carbs over sausages. See how that works?

No, why is it called Toad in the Hole? I don’t know. The “toad” = sausage analogy is OK, sort of, but the “in the hole” part is blowing my mind. There are entire journals devoted to the question of whether a “hole” is defined by emptiness or the bit around the emptiness. Here the “emptiness” of the so-called “hole” is not only filled, but were it not filled, no hole would exist – because the “surrounding” bit starts as liquid – and so the hole comes after what is referred to as “in” it. Next you’ll be telling me it’s actually the sausage that’s the Hole and the Toad is the batter.

More modern, less paradoxical alternative:

• Han Solos in Carbonite

Or, obviously, now I look at my drawing:

• Turds in the Bowl
• Och, Nessie!

How? Make a standard pancake batter, which is 1 egg + 1 cup flour + 1.25 cups milk and a little salt (since it's with sausages, you could add pepper, herbs etc). Mix together (sift flour and salt, make a "well" and add the egg + milk and gradually draw the flour into the egg-milk) and then you’re supposed to “rest” the batter for half an hour. Preheat the oven and brown about 500 g sausages. While browning, put a couple of tablespoons of oil in a baking dish and put it in the oven so that the oil and dish get nice and hot. Arrange sausages in the dish, pour over the batter, put into the oven for half an hour. Salad and onion gravy would be nice with it.* This amount was supposed to serve 4.

* Allow me to remove the ambiguity: I mean "onion gravy and salad".

“… in the hole” #2: Wombat in the Hole
(with thanks to Aunty Carmyl)

What? It’s an egg fried “in” a piece of bread.

How? Take a piece of bread and make a hole by removing a piece about the size of a 50-cent piece from the middle. There are two schools of thought on what happens next. You can fry the piece of bread you have taken out of the middle along with the rest of the piece when you come to the next stage, or you can put it into your mouth. The first school is probably the better option, on reflection, but by the time you have reflected you realise that while you were reflecting you were also chewing. Next time! Melt some butter + oil or some margarine in a frying pan, add the piece of bread, and then either break the egg into the hole in the bread or break the egg into a cup and pour it in. Once the piece of bread is brown on the underside, turn it over to brown on the other side.

Why? There are a couple of advantages that an egg fried in a piece of bread has over a fried egg on a piece of bread. Firstly, fried bread. But secondly, the bread acts as a protective cushion around the yolk so that when you flip it over, the yolk doesn’t break, which can be problem when turning over fried eggs “out in the open”. Also, no rules of logic are harmed in the naming of this dish, for which one has to be grateful by this stage.