Rolled pavlova

Pavlova season (and eating-outside season for that matter) is pretty well over in Canberra as of this week; we turned the clocks back over the weekend, which means the sun is setting before 6pm. (Not to mention the 14 days of rainfall we had in March - twice the historical average.) So I'm filing this away for about six months from now, while those of you in the northern hemisphere can get ready to enjoy it.

I've written about traditional pavlova before, and rolled pavlova is just a variation on a theme - same ingredients, different presentation. The great advantage of rolled pavlova is that, unlike the traditional version, which needs to be assembled at the last minute, it is best done a couple of hours in advance and left in the refrigerator to rest.

I used the method outlined in this recipe from taste.com.au, a mammoth and consistently reliable Australian food website. I prepared and baked the pavlova base according to instructions (leaving off the almonds); once it had come out of the oven and cooled a bit, I turned it onto the prepared baking sheet, which I had dusted with confectioner's (rather than the suggested caster/granulated) sugar. Then I spread it with a thin layer of lemon curd, and filled it with whipped cream and my own choice of fruit (in this case, mixed berries) before rolling up and refrigerating for an hour (while we ate lunch). When it was time for dessert, all I needed to do was slice and serve: simultaneously stress-free and impressive, always a winning combination.

Enjoy! Meanwhile I'm thinking it's gotten just about cold enough here to break out the sticky toffee pudding.

Melbourne highlights

I wouldn't want you to get the impression, based upon yesterday's post, that I didn't have a smashing time on my Melbourne trip, because I did - even with tech struggles and unseasonably cold and wet weather and  occasional homesickness. Amongst all that, there were work sessions in cafes fueled by delicious coffee and cake:

A visit to the Yarra Valley, the wine region outside Melbourne, featured a trip to Healesville Sanctuary and an amazing show displaying some impressive Australian birds, including this gorgeous parrot:

And of course, the obligatory sleepy koala, which never gets old, no matter how many I get to admire (hint: not enough):

I also got to eat this indescribably delicious breakfast at another local cafe, which I had heard about from a friend pretty much the day I arrived, and finally procured on Sunday morning - a multigrain bagel topped with smashed avocado, crisp bacon, poached eggs, and chili oil. Totally transcendental:

I was also fortunate enough to be staying a block away from a cooking store I've been wanting to visit for years, after hearing about it from a friend and fellow cook on my way out of Australia back in 2009. (And it turns out there's one in Canberra too, o joy and impending bankruptcy!)

The Melbourne store is conveniently situated on the edge of Prahran Market, Melbourne's oldest food market and bursting with fresh food of all kinds. We had a long stroll around on Sunday morning, and I only wished that I could have come earlier and stayed longer - and had a stocked kitchen handy to do justice to the lovely meats, fish, cheeses, fruit, and veg I could only admire longingly.

To say nothing of the delicious sushi, felafel, homemade pasta, and Thai noodles I sampled at other meals - all within a block or two of my hotel  - and Melbourne hospitality that we experienced at every turn. You should all go and visit immediately, while I get on with Thanksgiving prep. (More on that tomorrow.)

Cheese chronicles

Anyone who has read this blog for any length of time will have come across me lamenting the cheese landscape in Australia. In fact, the very first blog post I wrote about food, some five years ago, was on this topic. The situation can be summed up as follows: imported cheese is pretty difficult to find, and when you do find it, it's eye-wateringly expensive.

Things haven't changed much, as I was reminded today. My local grocery store has undergone an extensive remodel, and now a has a much larger and swankier deli section, including an expanded selection of imported cheeses. I took a few minutes to browse through it and see what's available, and felt a momentary thrill when I saw comté cheese on the bottom shelf. I don't remember ever having seen comté cheese anywhere in Australia before, and I've been craving it ever since I had lunch in Paris last March. For a brief, shining moment, culinary visions danced in my head.

Then I remembered to look at the price tag. In case you can't read the fine print in the crummy phone-camera photo above, that's AUD$67 per kilo - that's about EUR$47 or GBP$39 per kilo, or USD$32 per pound, for those of you following along overseas. Or, in simpler terms, a short walk back to mass-produced Australian cheddar.

ANZAC Day

This post originally appeared on April 27, 2009 and is re-posted here with slight modifications. 

Today, April 25, is ANZAC Day. It is sort of an Australian version of Memorial Day. But only sort of.

April 25 is significant because it marks the date, in 1915, when Australian and New Zealand troops (ANZAC = Australia New Zealand Army Corps) began their prolonged and costly assault on the beaches of Gallipoli alongside their Allied counterparts. The campaign in this part of the world was an attempt to break the stalemate that was already occurring in the entrenched lines of the Western Front, or at least to divert attention from it with an Allied victory. The initial ANZAC assault was marred by poor planning, which in turn led to flawed execution, at huge cost of life. The casualty rates are gruesomely familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of First World War history: nearly 45,000 Allied troops, of whom 8,700 were Australian.

Gallipoli has assumed iconographic status in the historical memory of Australians. The death tolls of those days in 1915, horrendous as they were, would be surpassed in later years in pivotal battles at the Somme and Amiens, but Gallipoli was the first: Australia’s coming of age in war. And every year, at the same dawn hour when the ANZAC troops began their amphibious attack, Australians gather, in small towns and big cities all over the country, to honor not only their service and sacrifice, but also the contributions of all Australian veterans.

Since I’ve been in Australia, I’ve visited the national Australian War Memorial here in Canberra, and also the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, both of which were originally constructed to honor the dead of the First World War. After having lived in England, I was familiar with the awesome and lasting impact of this war on generation after generation, but it was only in coming here that I have fully grasped the importance of such physical memorials: how Australians in particular, far removed geographically from where their loved ones had died, and with little prospect either of having a body to bury or of traveling to a distant grave, poured the energy of their grief into communal memorials, as a tangible reminder and commemoration of those they had lost.

I don’t think most Americans even know that Memorial Day originally existed to remember the dead of the American Civil War, and any communal celebrations that still take place are more likely to be of the parade variety. For most people, the only thing Memorial Day commemorates now is the first barbecue or weekend away of the summer season. And there’s plenty of that here, too, for ANZAC Day. But I admire a country that, more than 90 years after the fact, makes the time to reflect quietly upon patriotism, soldiering, and sacrifice: for those who were at Gallipoli, all those who have served since, and for every individual, military and civilian alike.

ANZAC Biscuits
These cookies are an Australian icon in their own right. The recipe was devised to create a biscuit that would survive the long journey to Australian troops stationed overseas, arrive intact, and still taste good when the homesick recipient opened his package. You can find commercially produced versions of them in every shop, and the biggest producer, as standard practice, donates a portion of the profits to veterans’ charities. They’re good out of a package—they do indeed keep forever—but, as (nearly) always, they’re better homemade. I haven't made my own (yet!), so I direct you to an online authority instead. For my first attempt, I definitely want the real thing that someone's gran was baking back when.

Spring pavlova

This is the Sunday lunch dessert I mentioned last week. If you are not familiar with pavlova, it is a (maybe the) quintessential antipodean dessert, claimed by both Australia and New Zealand and named after a Russian ballet dancer, Anna Pavlova. There are recipes for pavlova available all over the internet (here’s a good one), so I’m not going to re-invent the wheel. The important information to absorb is that meringue + whipped cream + fruit = pavlova, and that you can play around with the combinations.

Working with that formula, I decided to take advantage of what was in season and in my kitchen. So I used citrus sugar in both the meringue and the cream; chopped up fresh strawberries from the farmers’ market for the topping; and, best of all, spread a layer of cumquat curd between the meringue and the cream for an extra hit of fruit flavor. I can’t remember now where I read this suggestion, but I feel certain a layer of curd will be a non-negotiable step in my pavlova-making process from now on.

TUK slices

In the US, we call them “bar cookies”; in the UK, they are “tray bakes”. Here in Australia, anything you can mix up, spread in your standard square or rectangular pan, and stick in the oven for 30-40 minutes is known as “slice”. (As in, “That looks yummy, I’ll have a slice!”) And at the moment, it’s my default baking option, because pretty much the only baking implement I have in the TUK is a 9” x 13” (23 cm x 33 cm?) metal pan that I bought myself, rationalizing it as follows:

1. You can never have too many baking/roasting pans.
   
2. If I go more than two weeks without baking, bad things will happen.

It has turned out to be very useful, both in expanding my TUK possibilities and in preserving my mental serenity during transition. It gets used on a near-daily basis for savory as well as sweet cooking, and it has prompted me to expand my definition of what in my standard baking repertoire can be re-cast as a ‘slice’. I’ve already used it for congo bars, yogurt cake, and flapjack, along with the fridge cake I posted the other day. Now I’m trawling my own archives to see what else I can repurpose. I’m thinking these would all be good options:

 

- bacon blue cheese bread

- blackberry-applesauce cake

- chocolate-chocolate cake

- lemon poppyseed cake

- oat-fruit bars (ok, technically these are already a slice, I just haven’t made them in a long time)

What else? Recommendations? The only stipulation is that it must be able to be sliced neatly and eaten out of hand - suitable for coffee mornings, knitting groups, and playdates.

Children's movies

Miss B is on winter break from school – two weeks off in the middle of July between the second and third terms of the Australian school year. We’ve been alternating between lazing around the house (designated as “koala” days) and energizing ourselves to undertake vacation-suitable activities (“kangaroo” days). The other day we went to a matinee of Brave, which Miss B was moderately excited about seeing and I was about equal parts excitement and trepidation. Excitement because I still get excited about going to the movies, and this one was two firsts: the first time Miss B and I had seen a movie in a theater alone together, and the first Pixar film with a female protagonist. Trepidation because the reviews I’d read were mixed, and I dreaded another typical princess movie, with a few ignorant Scottish stereotypes thrown in for good measure.

As it turned out, my reaction to the movie was much stronger and more positive than I could have anticipated. Yes, it has its flaws, but they couldn’t change the fact that at the core of the story was a strong, intelligent and yes, brave female character who grew and changed throughout the course of the movie and didn’t sit around waiting for some prince to come along and sort things out. The scene at the tournament of the clans, where Merida takes matters into her own hands and demonstrates her archery skills, brought tears to my eyes. But what made them spill over was the fact that, in stark contrast to almost every other children’s movie I’ve ever seen, Merida’s mother is not only alive and well, but also plays a strong and positive role in her daughter’s life. Their relationship challenges – which, stripped of their fairy-tale hyperbole, are pretty typical of any healthy mother-daughter bond during adolescence – are central to the story. One commentator I read described it as a “mother-daughter love story”, and, as a daughter and a mother, seeing that onscreen in a children’s movie actually moved me to tears.

Miss B, on the other hand, continues to be bemused by how much time I spend weeping during children’s movies. (This was almost as bad as Up.) She enjoyed it, but her enthusiasm was tempered by being scared out of her wits by the bears. (Luckily we didn’t opt to see it in 3-D – she spent half the movie clinging to me like a leech as it was.)

And I bet you’re wondering how this all ties in to a recipe? Well – school vacations beget lots of hanging around with children – your own and other people’s. And, since school-age children are apparently always hungry, especially for sweet things, I’ve been experimenting with child-friendly desserts that I can concoct in my temporary, understocked kitchen (TUK). My latest trick involved making a batch of Mistake Cookie dough, rolling it into logs, and chucking it in the fridge until I needed it. Before I used it up, I had made two batches of sandwich cookies – one filled with chocolate ganache and one with raspberry jam – as well as a classic fridge cake.

Fridge cake

adapted from several recipes

Are these popular in the US? I had never encountered one until I lived in England, where they seem to be a fixture of childhood. Turns out the same goes for Australia. I was drawn to making this when I had promised to bring a dessert and the only time I could make it was 24 hours before the event; since it needs to chill in the fridge, it’s a great do-ahead dessert, and the minimal equipment required is perfect for the TUK.

 

210 g/7 oz dark chocolate

30 g/1 oz maple syrup

120 g/4 oz butter, melted

1 egg, beaten

5 g/1 tsp vanilla

210 g/7 oz Mistake Cookies (or other crumbly cookies of your choice)

60 g/2 oz coconut

Line a loaf tin with foil or baking parchment and set aside.

In a double boiler, melt chocolate, maple syrup, and butter together over medium-low heat, stirring regularly. When melted, set aside to cool slightly, then mix in the egg and vanilla.

Coarsely chop cookies and place in a medium-sized bowl, then sprinkle coconut over. Pour over chocolate mixture and fold together gently, then spread in prepared tin. Place in the fridge to chill for at least 4 hours to set, or for longer if need be.

When ready to serve, remove from fridge and turn cake out onto a board. Peel off foil or paper and slice. Serve just as is, or with some form of cream if you want to fancy it up. 

Have plenty of wipes or damp paper towels on hand for cleaning up chocolate-coated children and adults following consumption.

Carpe-ing practice

I worried a little bit that Friday’s post might come across as mawkish or proselytizing, especially since I wrote it to myself as much as anyone else. I have a deep-rooted tendency to perceive the glass of life as half-empty (or maybe it’s that it’s half-full but cracked?), and recalibrating that perception is an apparently never-ending ongoing self-improvement project.

Respecting tradition

We were back in Jervis Bay this weekend, this time to rent a cottage on the beach so that we could give our US visitors a glimpse of the Australian coast. The mild temperatures were a surprising and welcome change from frosty Canberra, and the water was warm enough to permit paddling—not bad for the middle of winter. We played on the beach, got close to some wildlife in its native habitat, and sampled the cottage’s extensive DVD library. I was in charge of organizing meals and showed great self-restraint (I thought) in bringing only two bags of food.

Knowing that the cottage would come equipped, as you’d expect from any self-respecting Australian beach house, with a grill, I was determined to cook at least one meal on it. I mean, you couldn’t really call it a beach weekend otherwise, right? I have minimal experience with grills of any kind; we used to have a Weber when we lived in the US, but DP was always in charge of that. This one was a gas grill, as most grills I’ve encountered here have been, so I figured it would be like a bigger and better gas stove, and that this would be a good opportunity to try grilling myself.

Well, we had a little trouble getting it going, and we almost gave up, which would likely have meant a spell of sulking by yours truly. Luckily, I double-checked the instructions, figured out where we had missed a step, and got it going in time to cook a beachified version of one of our regular dinners: Italian-style bangers and mash. Spicy Italian sausages (brought down from our butcher in Canberra) cooked on the grill (a little bit scorched on one side before I figured out how to regulate the heat); potatoes with oil; and a warm salad built on a big pile of grilled zucchini.

Beach house grilled zucchini salad
2-3 Tbsp olive oil
7 medium zucchini, quartered lengthwise and cut into 1 in/2 cm chunks
1 punnet cherry tomatoes, halved
3 scallions, sliced
salt & freshly ground black pepper
½ cup vinaigrette dressing

Toss zucchini with olive oil, then cook on a hot grill until tender but still a bit al dente, about 15-20 minutes, turning frequently. When cooked, remove to a large salad bowl. Immediately add tomatoes and scallions, season with salt and pepper, and toss to combine.* Add dressing and mix thoroughly. Serve hot, warm, or at room temperature.

Serves 3 adults and 2 children, with leftovers.

* I took out portions for the kids at this stage, before I added the dressing, since they both like vegetables but dressing not so much.

Breakfast BBQ

It takes the Australian mind to bring together two great Australian traditions: the barbeque and the full cooked breakfast. Eggs, bacon, sausage, plus a vegetable medley: tomatoes, mushrooms, peppers, and onions (the last two contributed to the mix by yours truly--not traditional). Sourdough toast on the side (the only thing not cooked on the grill).

Simple, yet brilliant. And delicious. I'll be copying it on my own grill at the first opportunity. I think you should too.

My supermarket

I’ve previously expounded upon my love for farmers’ markets in general and the Canberra one in particular, but, given my lack of a car and the market’s limited opening times (three hours every Saturday), there’s not much possibility that it can be my main source of food. For everyday supplies, I rely on my local supermarket. It’s probably the place I’ve spent the most time besides my apartment since arriving in Canberra (including one memorable day during our first week here when I went three times), and I’m becoming very familiar with its little quirks.

I almost always enjoy grocery shopping, and try to visit supermarkets even when (or especially when) I’m a tourist. I’m perennially interested in what other people are eating, and supermarkets are a great window into other people’s food culture—and culture generally. And I’m not just talking about snooping in other people’s baskets (as much fun as that is), but about what’s on the shelves and how the place runs. Since I’m still more of a newcomer than an old-timer here, I’m still noticing things that distinguish my Canberra supermarket from its Boston and Oxford counterparts.

Interesting things I’ve noticed about my local supermarket which may or may not be true of Australian supermarkets generally
1. Fascinating new varieties of familiar items: Bonza apples, anyone? How about a nice Nashi pear?
2. New names for familiar items: we’ve already talked about how scallions/spring onions are known as shallots down here. There’s also capsicum (red pepper), the supersized silverbeet (a giant variety of chard), and the misleading pumpkin (which seems to apply to any kind of winter squash).
3. Produce items I’ve never seen in any supermarket before anywhere, or maybe I just wasn’t looking hard enough, and am not sure what to do with: fresh lychees, “drinking” coconuts (which have had their hairy outsides removed and been cut into points on the top and bottom), and, just recently, persimmons.
4. Frugal practices: there’s a special rack near the entrance to the produce section where you can get packaged produce super cheap. From my past experience, I would expect this stuff to be damaged or past its sell-by date, but a lot of the stuff here is in excellent condition, just can’t hold its own in the produce bins—loose grapes, teeny zucchini, that sort of thing. They wrap it up and sell it for a buck or two. For the grapes especially, this is an amazing bargain, since we’re now moving into the time of year when grapes go above $10/kg, but preschoolers continue to hoover them up like candy. They also sell half- and quarter-cabbages, in case you don’t really need one that’s bigger than your own head, and at the butcher counter you can buy just about any portion of a chicken carcass you can put a name to, with or without meat on it.
5. An idiosyncratic selection of imported brands and items: Oreos, Special K, and maple syrup, check. HobNobs, golden syrup, and Heinz baked beans, check. Molasses, tomatillo salsa, and cranberries (other than dried): no way José.
6. Australia-centric packaged foods: including my personal favorite, ready-made pavlova bases. Because when I saw them I finally understood why the first Australian I made pavlova for in England asked me, “Wow, did you make the base yourself?”

Totally nuts

Did you know that macadamia nuts are originally from Australia? I didn’t. I’d always associated them with Hawaii, probably because of those jars of Mauna Loa salted macadamias that were often floating around when I was a kid. They were delicious, but pricey, so I didn’t get to eat them very much, even when I got old enough to buy my own nuts. I was pretty pleased when I started looking at nuts in the supermarket down here and saw how reasonably priced they were—for nuts, that is. Then I saw some for sale in an Australian souvenir shop and realized it was because they’re local. This prompted me to do a little more digging (mostly on Wikipedia), and I present here, for your edification and entertainment, some macadamia trivia.

1. Macadamias are the only plant food native to Australia that is grown and exported in commercial quantities.
2. They became popular internationally after Hawaiian farmers began cultivating them in the early twentieth century.
3. There are nine different species, but only two are commercially produced, because the others contain toxins or are otherwise indigestible to humans.
4. Indigenous Australians have been harvesting macadamia nuts for thousands of years, and have developed processes to use all the species.
5. Their European name is in honor of Dr. John MacAdam, a scientist and secretary to the Philosophical Institute of Australia, by his friend, German-Australian botanist Ferdinand von Mueller, in 1857.
6. Among their recorded indigenous Australian names are gyndl, jindilli, and boombera.
7. Macadamia nuts are very high in monounsaturated fats, and macadamia oil is a valued ingredient in skincare products for its high concentration of Omega-7 acids.

As far as macadamia nuts are concerned, I have totally gone native. My snack food of choice these days is a salted macadamia-and-cashew combo that is sold under my local supermarket’s in-house brand (ie, cheap!), and I’ve recently switched over to a macadamia-oil-based moisturizer that is making my skin very happy, especially here in super-dry Canberra.

And, since I don’t like odd numbers, I’ll round off with my personal favorite bit of trivia gained from my reading:

8. Chopped macadamia nuts apparently regularly masquerade as crack cocaine in drug stings because they look so similar.

Australian Easter

from top: chocolate bilby; Miss B's first take-home cooking project from preschool--decorated Easter biscuits; Easter cupcakes; supermarket shelves stocked with candy; Italian pizza chiene (meat pie); Italian Easter tarrale

Well, I thought having Christmas in the summertime was weird, but having Easter in the autumn is weirder still. Even so, we enjoyed a day full of holiday goodies, Skype chats with family, and warm autumn sunshine. I hope that you and yours have had a Happy Easter, Happy Passover, or just a happy and relaxing weekend.

Farmers' Market

I finally made it to the Canberra Farmers’ Market last weekend. (It only took six months.) This is one of the things that I want to do here that is difficult to do without a car, since it’s several miles north of the city center, and it’s only open from 8-11am on Saturdays (farmers are busy people, you know). Difficult, but not impossible; it is on a bus route, and now that I’ve scoped it out, we’ll see just how devoted I am to the Farmers’ Market (FM) ethos when I have to schlep all the way up there on a bus and lug all my produce home on my back.

The Canberra FM may well be worth all that effort. It is by far the biggest FM I’ve been to, with a couple of dozen stalls in a big open shed selling produce, meats, fish, cheeses, baked goods, plants, flowers, and more. Even having gone by car, I still didn’t have enough time to see everything I wanted to (I’m not sure even three hours would be enough), but I still managed to do plenty of damage.

Of course I was thinking the whole time about how excited I was, and how I was going to blog about it, and taking pictures, etc. But then afterwards I was thinking, what is it? What is it about the FM that would drive me (a seriously lazy person, as anyone who knows me personally can attest) to get up early on a Saturday morning and spend an hour each way on public transport to buy potentially more expensive versions of the same things that I can find at the supermarket? I know everyone talks about buying organic, buying local, buying seasonal: and those are all good, compelling—even noble—reasons for going to FMs. But none of them adequately explains the sense of excitement, of possibility, of rightness that I get every time I walk into one.

Five Reasons Why I Love the FM
1. There is no better way to see what is actually in season where you live. When you go to the supermarket, you can buy pretty much the same stuff all year round. The only way you can tell if something is in season is that it gets cheaper (assuming you notice that sort of thing).
2. Things that are in season are not necessarily more expensive at the FM. In fact, when they are at the height of their season, they are quite likely to be cheaper, as farmers will have a glut that they want to get rid of.
3. Much as I enjoy food shopping in any form, there’s no question that the supermarket is a pretty sterile environment. Sometimes, even standing in the middle of the produce aisle, among all those shiny, perfect displays, it’s hard to imagine or remember that someone actually grew the stuff. Not so at the FM: often the produce is still dirty, the displays are haphazard at best, and chances are good that the person you are buying it from is also the one who pulled it out of the ground or off a plant early that morning.
4. You can find things at the FM that you will probably never, ever see at the supermarket. My find of 2008 was a basket of sour cherries from the Greenfield (Mass.) FM. On this, my first trip to the Canberra FM, I found finger limes (see above), an indigenous Australian variety that I had heard about but not yet seen anywhere.
5. FM food just tastes better. It hasn’t been shipped as far as supermarket food, so it’s fresher; it hasn’t been bred to look good, travel well and last forever, at the expense of its flavor; and it’s grown in small, specialized varieties and quantities, rather than mass produced.

**********************

PS: I know I sound like a broken record, but I have to reiterate yet again how good roasted rhubarb is, and how amazing it is mixed with fresh peaches. I made it again this week with some of my FM booty, and this time I added cardamom as well as cinnamon (and sugar). It was so good I nearly floated away. I've already eaten it twice today. Those of you in the northern hemisphere, please make a note for when there's some seasonal produce handy. As far as I'm concerned, this leaves the time-honored strawberry-rhubarb combo in the dust. And not just because of the Fail Jam incident. Although I did think, when I was eating this, "Why would I bother trying to make jam again when this is so much better?"

How sweet

A couple of years ago, back when people were just starting to raise questions about high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), my sister C. sent out an email highlighting some of the concerns about the correlation between HFCS and obesity, and about the quantities of HFCS found in soft drinks. I was living in the UK at the time. I remember sitting at my desk in Oxford and reading it, and then looking guiltily at the can of Pepsi sitting on the desk next to my computer. I picked up the can to read the ingredients list and found…sugar as the sweetening ingredient. I went home and checked our stash of processed foods (ketchup, store-bought cookies, cereal); all of them said the same: sugar.

The drumbeat of concern about HFCS has gotten steadily louder since then, and just over the last few weeks I’ve lost count of how many times it’s popped up on food blogs and newspaper feeds that I read regularly. Prompting me to do another check on my recently-established stash of Australian processed foods (as above). Only to find the same thing: sugar as the sweetening ingredient in everything I checked.

I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing the reason for this is that neither the UK nor Australia has enough of a corn industry to make HFCS a cheap and easily available alternative to other sugar sources. The UK has a domestic beet sugar industry (as do most other European countries), and Australia produces cane sugar. Wikipedia says that "HFCS is somewhat cheaper in the United States due to a combination of corn subsidies and sugar tariffs", and also says that its greatest use is in the US and Canada.

I have mixed feelings about this information. On the one hand, I’m just as happy not to be finding HFCS in every packaged food I buy. On the other hand is the fact that obesity rates are going up not just in the US, but also in the UK and Australia, and, apparently, everyplace else other than sub-Saharan Africa. If only the US and Canada are consuming this stuff in any quantity, then clearly there is more to the problem.

Lately it seems as though we have a new nutritional scapegoat every year or so: the thing to eliminate from humanity’s diet that will "cure" the worldwide obesity epidemic. This year looks like HFCS’s turn. Before that it was trans fats. And let’s not forget carbs.

If science and medicine don't know the answer, then I certainly don’t. But, given that pretty much everything to do with food is a complicated tangle of nutrition and emotion, I’m betting it’s not as simple as that.

Good advice

Following good advice makes life so much easier sometimes. Especially when it comes to dinner.

It all started with 5 second rule’s useful post about managing your greens. Reading it was like hearing a voice say, “Hey, you! Yeah, you, trying to stuff that giant bunch of silverbeet in your fridge? Why don’t you try this instead?”

(Silverbeet is Australian for chard. It’s two feet long. That’s it in the picture. I put a regular-sized Popsicle stick next to it to give you some scope for comparison.)

The post provided detailed instructions for how to prep your greens when you buy them, so that they a) fit in your fridge and b) are ready and waiting when you want to eat them.

Having followed these recommendations on Friday afternoon, I sat back in a glow of quiet contentment, thinking about how easy preparing Saturday night’s dinner would be. Then I started to get cocky: how could I make it even easier? How could I make an absolutely fabulous dinner that would also be quick and simple?

Road trip

We haven’t gotten around to buying a car yet, because a) we’re lazy and b) our garage door is jammed shut and until we figure out how to get it open, we have no place to put a car anyway.

It’s not really a pressing need yet; DP’s work, Miss B’s school, and the city center are all within walking distance, so anything we need on a daily basis, we can get on foot. There’s also a decent city bus service in the event we want to go further afield. We never owned a car during our two stints in the UK, so this is more normal than not for us.

Among the things that are within walking distance is a car-rental office, so we’ve been renting a car once a month or so, and using it for whatever we might need a car for. This weekend we had a Sunday evening dinner invitation in a suburb about 11k from us, so we rented a car for the weekend and did a few other things too. We didn’t have much planned for Saturday, so we decided to take a road trip to nowhere.

One of the favorable things I’ve discovered about Australia is that you generally don’t have to resort to fast-food chains when you’re on a road trip. We’ve taken several now, and more than once have picked a random town off the map to stop at lunchtime. Every time, we’ve found a nice café or restaurant with decent, if not downright delicious, fresh food made on the premises and reasonably priced. On Saturday, we ended up in Boorawa, which seemed to be having a sleepy Saturday; but even so, we noticed that the bakery café was doing a brisk business and wandered in. We ordered sandwiches—nothing fancy: ham & cheese for DP; chicken for me (I had packed a lunch for Miss B)—a plate of chips (which turned out to be HUGE), and a drink. The whole thing cost us about AUD$12.00 (USD$8.00/GBP5.50). Probably cheaper than a trip to the Golden Arches, now that I think about it.

Plus, we made a new friend—see picture.

Bright lights

Canberra isn’t really a city. It’s very nice: lots of greenspace, plenty of good shops and restaurants, well planned and mellow. It’s also the capital of Australia, so a lot of things that are important to the country happen here. It has a population of about 400,000 people. But despite all that, it doesn’t feel like a city to me. More like a big town.

We went to Sydney this past weekend. Sydney is a city. Skyscrapers, trains, traffic, energy--and possibly the nicest city harbor going. (Just seeing the ocean might have been the highlight of my trip.)

This was my second visit, and confirmed the favorable impressions I remembered from my first trip six years ago. We had fantastic weather, wandered past some of the more famous sights, caught up with some friends, and ate a lot of good food.

We drove up on Saturday morning, reveling in the fact that we were on a road trip to Sydney. The trip took about 3½ hours, including one stop, and we arrived in mid-afternoon. We dumped our bags at the hotel and headed off to see friends in Balmain. The kids built a giant train track on the living room floor, and we drank champagne and shared news. They cooked us dinner: roast pork on the barbie (of course!); scalloped potatoes; Croatian cole slaw (the method for which I attempted to memorize after I don’t know how many glasses of wine); salad; lots more wine. Dessert was a passionfruit cream sponge from their local bakery that I might be able to replicate with the right tools and about six months of patisserie training.

Sunday morning we headed off to find a likely breakfast spot. On our first visit, we had stayed in Camperdown, near the University of Sydney because I needed to be there for work, and had liked the neighborhood so much that DP booked us in there again. So we knew if we headed towards King Street we’d come across something good, and it took us about five minutes to find a place called HoochieMamma’s Café, with tables on the sidewalk and inviting smells wafting out. We had no trouble getting a table (a four-year-old in tow means eating breakfast a lot earlier than most university students) and not long to wait before generous plates of food appeared: a full traditional cooked breakfast for DP, ricotta hotcakes for Miss B, and Eggs Benedict (on French bread instead of English muffins) for me. The keeper recipe from this meal was the ricotta hotcakes: more chunky and substantial than regular pancakes, but still fluffy and delicious. They were served with butterscotch sauce, but I think I’ll try them at home with Miss B’s favorite blueberry maple syrup.

After breakfast we found a parking space (free! all day!) for the rental car, and then it was off to Newtown station so Miss B could commune with her beloved trains on a ride into downtown. (No trains in Canberra, which is a sad deprivation for my little trainspotter, whose favorite afternoon activity in Oxford was standing on Hinksey railway bridge, waving at anything on rails.) We got off at Circular Quay so we could goggle at Sydney Harbor Bridge and the Opera House (one of the most amazing buildings ever), then walked across the Botanical Gardens to meet my friend L. and her family for a picnic.

L. and I became friends when we shared an office in Oxford, and she was a huge source of help, support, and information to me during Miss B’s bumpy start. I had only seen her once since she left the UK 3 years ago to return to Sydney, shortly after Miss B came home. It was great to see her and her husband and kids (who of course are now gigantic), and they had brought a delicious antipasto spread, complete with chilled wine and featuring an enormous pile of king prawns (aka jumbo shrimp--an Australian Christmas tradition, apparently). They even had finger bowls for cleaning up after peeling off the shells! We stretched out on the grass overlooking the harbor, eating prawns and other goodies and chatting to our hearts’ content, while the kids devoured all the chips and dip, between bouts of playing ball and crashing the wedding taking place down the hill. We enjoyed ourselves until mid-afternoon, when real life resumed and we went our separate ways, they to a Christmas party and we to get on the road home.

It was a great weekend, and a reminder of all the benefits of a sojourn abroad. Most of the time, for me, no matter where I’ve lived, daily life is pretty much the same: parenting, work, running a household, lots and lots of cooking. Most of the differences I notice are negative: things I can't find at the supermarket, vagaries of utility companies. But every so often, I get a day or an experience, special and memorable and particular to its time and place, that reminds me: this is why I wanted to come to Australia.