There are two things that I don

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Tskui recovering from a hit and run driver is well enough for biscuits now and won’t keep still

I’ve been meaning to bake dog biscuits every day this last harrowing week. It all started 6pm last Saturday when in Elwood a firework display was set off.

Jak was on the beach with the dogs. Tskui, the older sensible one, bolted and Mungo followed. She made it across one lane of traffic and then bounced unconscious off a car onto the grass on the central reservation.

So, yes, if you thought you hit a dog on Jacka Boulevard at a few minutes past six on Saturday 21st July, you did. When Jackie arrived Tskui lay there bleeding and having shat herself. Mungo was sitting next to her.

A kind couple stopped traffic, got some blankets and lent Jackie their phone. I was in a panic. I ran down to the beach but couldn’t find them. (If you are those people who helped please contact me because I’d like to thank you properly).

Within 30 minutes we were at the Port Phillip Animal Hospital in Middle Park. Luckily, there were no broken bones but there was concussion. Three of Tskui’s legs were stiff, one floppy and there was internal bleeding, especially in her lungs. It was touch and go and neither of us could sleep properly (although four bottles of wine helped).

Sunday she recognised us but couldn’t stand up and whimpered as we left. To add to the humiliation her cage was sandwiched between cats.

Monday, soaked in urine, she hopped into the hospital’s reception. At least she was walking. Tuesday she came home. She hopped from the back of the car into the front which made me feel confident.
For most of the week she lay heaving for breath on a new bed I bought her, too stiff, and possible too depressed to move even though I was hand feeding her poached chicken. I slept downstairs on the sofa so I could help her out the the loo at night (surprisingly frequently in the first few days back).
She looked to be improving when we visited the vet on Friday although there is no feeling in her floppy front left leg. Saturday she was back at the vet with the worst upset tummy I’ve seen. She spent the day listless on her bed.

Finally, today we took a picnic blanket to the park. She sniffed the air, hopped around caught a ball and bollocked, Mungo, the naughty dog. Her ears pricked up and it helped temporarily to bring her out of her depression. Her tummy appears to have improved.
In the next month or so if she doesn’t recover feeling in the leg it will have to come off. In the meantime, we’ll be taking her to acupuncture in the hope that we can save it.

For now she can enjoy these biscuits (and I even pinched one).

Again thanks to everyone, Craig the vet, and our neighbours Jacqueline, Sue and Floyd (who gets a coupleof biscuits) for comforting us last Saturday.

Cinnamon and allspice dog biscuits (adapted from Bone Appetite)

Two cups whole wheat flour
One cup Pollenta
Water
6 tablespoons olive oil
One egg
One teaspoon brown sugar
One teaspoon vanilla
Two tablespoons cinnamon
One teaspoon allspice

Mix everything together and add the water until it comes together in one lump. Cut into shapes 2cm thick (I believe cat is a favourite). Cook at 180C/350F for 45 minutes.

Mungo, the bad dog, steals Tskui’s biscuits.

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Fresh wasabi: ugly but health giving

Fresh Wasabi with the perfectly cooked salmon. It’s all about chemistry really.

I’ve been eyeing-up the fresh Tasmanian wasabi from the potato man at Prahran Market for a while now and finally bought a $10 knob of the stuff.
It’s a scrawny, black warty root with diminiative leaves and it came wrapped in some damp paper. It doesn’t look anything special at all but is worth over $300 a kilo.
It’s quite difficult to grow, the best grown in cool running streams rather than in the ground.
It is a member of the cruciferae or brassica family which includes Horseradish (its nearest relative), mustard, cabbages, brussel sprouts and the sputnik-shaped kohlrabi all of which cost considerably less.
Under the knobbly black skin the flesh of the wasabi graduated from pale green to white.
On it’s own this plant is nothing. But when a cell is destroyed – when it is cut, for instance – two ripsnorting sinus-clearing chemicals are released the natural pesticides sinigrin and myrosin. The same thing happens when horseradish is cut or black mustard seeds crushed.
When you buy a tube or jar of wasabi it is unlikely that you’ll be tasting the real stuff. Often it is a mixture of horseradish and/or mustard and dyed green to get the right look.

Sinigrin, it turns out, is one of those miracle chemicals now thought to kill pre-cancerous cells, especially in the colon. To some degree all brassicas contains these chemicals which give them a unique flavour.
Until this weekend I didn’t know that all these vegetables were related. Butt it may explain why I’m crazy for all of them and many children aren’t.
So to any mums and dads out there whose children won’t eat their sprouts I would suggest you explain the consequences of colon cancer, not least the discomfort that I am told is felt after a visit to the proctology department.

RECIPE: Molecular salmon with fresh wasabi

One of the problems in cooking fish is not to overcook it. A simple waay to the perfect piece of fish is to cook it at a lower temperature, in my inaccurate oven somewhere between 60 and 70C.
This technique is building on my previous experiments with molecular cuisine or gastronomy slow cooking lamb chops and beef. I simply bathe it on olive oil. The scret is to keep checking the texture. When the lawyers of muscle start to seperate it is done.

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Yabbies: those beady little eyes watched me to the end.

Children, the elderly and the emotionally unstable should stop reading now as this is about the death and destruction I have brought upon the animal world, sometimes with my bare hands (in the case of game).
I am a fan of my produce being fresh (but dead) and if I can get hold of certain live ingredients I will. I

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It is perhaps apprpriate to kick-off with this one which I found in The Futurist Cookbook, first published in 1932. I particularly like Elizabeth David’s opinion on the slim volume as a “publication of preposterous new dishes”.

by futurist Aeropainer Diugheroff:

“Roast a chicken emptied of its insides. As soon as it is cold, make an opening in the back and fill the inside with red zablione on which are laid two grams of silver hundreds and thousands. Attach cockcombs all around the opening.”

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The future of cooking: In the kitchen at Interlude 

A couple of weeks ago I spent the afternoon in the kitchen of Robin Wickens and his chefs at Interlude. He was developing a new lamb dish which involved spraying coffee in the air while eating it (you may recall later that night I sucked on the glass straw). This weekend my account of that afternoon and subsequent meal was published in The Australian.

Local chef George Biron points me towards Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, a fascist and founder of the Futurist movement, who published his manifesto of cookery La Cucina Futurista – futurist cookery – in 1932. Apparently, the book had stuff like a meal where while dunking salami in coffee, you stroked a cat and had perfume sprayed in the air to the sounds of Wagner.

Marinetti’s thought diners were weighed down by pasta which filled stomachs. he also thought it made people placid and sceptical if it was eaten too frequently. In short pasta was subversive stuff.

According to Ask Oxford:

“This absurd gastronomic religion, he said, must be abolished immediately.”

“Predictably, these ideas provoked uproar in the Italian press and among the general public. In every restaurant and in every home there were arguments about the benefits or otherwise of a diet of pasta. The Mayor of Naples declared that vermicelli al pomodoro was the food of the angels; Marinetti’s reaction was that, if that were the case, it simply served to confirm the boredom of life in paradise.”

Everything was prescribed to be sensual. Ingredients included flowers, exotic fruit, coffee, raw eggs, and cloves and perfumes were to be sprayed in the dining room.

“…and the diners were given materials of different textures such as velvet and sandpaper to stroke with their left hand. Sweet was combined with savoury to produce startling effects, and bitter and sour tastes were given their place: sardines with pineapple, mortadella with nougat, cooked salami with coffee and cologne. An aphrodisiac cocktail was devised, consisting of pineapple juice, eggs, cocoa, caviar, red peppers, nutmeg, and cloves…”

I’ll leave the fascism alone for now. But I have a cat, Wagner and an atomiser.

More experiments in futuristic cooking coming soon. In the meantime, anybody got a copy of Marinetti’s book for sale?

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