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Too young to have participated, too old to be conceived then I really feel that I missed out on the summer of love. Now, the 40th anniversary of the summer of 1967, I enter what can only soon become my autumn of Viagra.
For now though I’m enjoying flower power.
Last southern summer while traveling in Cambodia and Laos my structured front garden of small hedges died. I didn’t like the design too much and replaced it with a 4 square metre vegetable patch.
At the centre are two copper semi-circular planters, a remnant of a recent flirtation with modern sculpture now planted with ripening strawberries.
Although fresh young beetroot leaves are my entry for Weekend Herb Blogging, invented by Kalyn’s Kitchen and this week hosted at The Expatriates Kitchen, they cannot sit alone from my summer supply of herbs - curry plant, sage, thyme, tarragon, Vietnamese mint and lemon grass. Of course, I’ve only just planted the tomatoes and basil. But the carrots, beetroot, silverbeet, cos, komatsuna (red mustard spinach) and various other lettuces are coming along.
I’ve a grape vine and have planted espalier apple, cherry, orange and kaffir lime.
My current joy is the pick a leaf from each lettuce and leafy vegetable for a quick salad, each with the kind of crispness you simply can’t find in the markets.
As is the vogue I toss is a few marigold petals, and the leaves and flowers from rocket (arugula), sage and thyme.
But the real heros of the home vegetable plot are the young leaves of silverbeet and beetroot. Too often these leaves are discarded rather than eaten. How stupid is that?
There is no actual recipe to what I do. Usually I simply coat a wooden bowl with a drizzle of walnut oil and some sherry vinegar, sometimes rubbing the surface with a crushed garlic clove. This avoids over dressing.
The actual combination rather than being a harmonious combination is more like jazz. The rocket offers a peppery note against the hot mustard of komatsuna. The beetroot leaves hold their own and add colour. It jars but keeps things interesting fighting palate fatigue in what night after night can be a boring dish of greens.
Here’s to my summer of love.

You can check out my progress here.

Design by Scott from the Garden of Eden.

Popularity: 10% [?]

There are two things that I don

Popularity: 20% [?]

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.

Popularity: 26% [?]

A heady aroma rises from the bag of truffles at Simon Johnson (12-14 Saint David Street, Fitzroy VIC 3065 +61 3 9486 9456)

This may seem extravagant but frame it within the cost of eating out. In Melbourne, in most decent restaurants, a main costs $30 to $40. It is difficult to find more than a handful of wines under $40. And a starter will cost somewhere around $15 to $20, give or take a dollar. That’s about $100 already.
So when I saw the sign below it wasn’t difficult to resist:

“A decadent truffle main course will cost as little as $40–$50. Go on on treat yourself!!!”

It was towards the end of my assignment reporting on the Foodies’ Bus Tour of Melbourne. I was up for celebrating the end of reviewing for The Age Good Food Guide and the Gourmet Traveller Restaurant Guide. The last few weeks I struggled through it with a terrible chest infection and tiredness that I couldn’t shake. I just wanted to stay home and eat something superb.

Plus I was on the hunt for something interesting for Weekend Herb Blogging, invented by the Queen of the South Beach Diet Kalyn, and hosted this week by Ellie at Kitchen Wench in Melbourne.

22 grams and $53 later (with the tour’s 10 per cent discount) I had my single chunk of truffle sealed – Tuber melanosporum, or black Perigord truffle, to be precise – in a small bag with some rice. That works out at about $2650 a kilo. The West Australian truffle itself was about half the size of an egg, with (the presumably manky) bits carved off. It looks like a dry dog’s nose in texture.

Store truffles with eggs which will absorb the aroma.

Soon the whole world is going to hear a lot more about this pungent little numbers. Adventurous Australian agriculturalists have been inoculating hazel and oak roots for years now. There are over 130 truffle farms in Australia with the first Australian truffle found in Tasmania in 1999 on the property of Tasmanian truffle farmer Tim Terry, five years after he planted his first trees. On the mainland, the first truffle was found at the Wine & Truffle Co’s Hazel Hill farm in 2003.

Since 1999 the Australian government has pumped $1 million into the industry in the form of grants to perfect the inoculation techniques which will help improve yields.

Last Truffle season – they grow in Autumn and winter – I spoke to Dr Nicholas Malajczuk (for this story here published in The Australian) the resident truffle expert at The Wine & Truffle Co, based near Manjimup in Western Australia – the very place my own truffle came from. Dr Malajczuk, says: “Yields are quite variable. It’s related to climate, the soil conditions and so forth. That’s one of the things we’ve been working on.”

Now the Australian industry is coming of age and Terry’s and Dr Malajczuk’s plantations are exporting to the world. Last year at The Wine & Truffle Co’s Hazel Hill Farm in Western Australia, more than 100kg of the fungi was harvested from a 21ha plantation of 13,000 hazel and oak trees. Figures are flaky, but truffle growth in Australia appears to be exponential: in 2004 Hazel Hill yielded 4kg and in 2005 26kg.

To put this in perspective, and these figures are just as flaky, worldwide between 50 and 100 tonnes of truffles are produced, mainly in France, Spain, Portugal and Italy. In a bad year, production can fall to less than 10 tonnes.

As with many exotic foods the attraction is sexual. Traditionally truffles are sniffed out by female pigs because the truffle smell mimics a sexy pheromone excreted by male pigs, a sulphurous compound known as 2,4-dithiapentane (if I remember my university studies the two and the four indicating the position of the sulphur bonds) . Now dogs, which are easily trained and won’t eat the truffles, are used. And this is why I’m training these two just on the off chance we find some.

Incidentally, 2,4-dithiapentane is also the chemical in synthesised form that is found in that vilest of concotions, truffle oil, which bears little respemblance to the actual product and in my book has little use for anything but sexing-up pigs. Tins and bottled of truffles should also be added to this category. Their texture and essence bears no relation to the fresh product.

You don’t have to believe me on this subject. Bourdain, when he was last in town, told me:

“What is vile and disgusting and the single most overused ingredient in the repertoire of chefs is Truffle Oil. It must be stopped.”

RECIPE: Scrambled eggs

Overnight, I left the truffle in a bowl with five eggs. the aim being that they absorb some of the aroma, which is far more subtle and complex than the 2,4 compound alone. How simple can it be? Simply crack the eggs into a heavy pan. Add a splash of milk, a knob of butter and salt and pepper and stir continously over a low heat before spooning out onto a toasted slice of Baker D Chirico sourdough.

Then simply pimp it up!. Shave the truffles over the scrambled egg with a microplane.

The flavour was stunning and stayed on my back palate for about three hours. Yes, this was an extravagant experiment. But in my mind it was worth every penny. In fact, I keep getting flashbacks to the flavour memory.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Marsh samphire: first remove the woody stalks.

A few weeks ago I was seen leaving a restaurant lunch with a brown paper bag. It wasn’t full of money although you could call it a bribe. It contained a couple of handfuls of samphire, which sell uncleaned at about $25 a kilo to restaurants.
Samphire is a cross between a succulent and seaweed. It comes in different varieties some, called Marsh Samphire, which grows on salt flats and Rock Samphire, which grows on cliffs.

I’m not sure that anybody has used this weird source of nourishment yet in Weekend Herb Blogging, which this week is being hosted by Cooking in Westchester and is the brainchild of Kalyn of Kalyn’s Kitchen fame.

Samphire is one of those ancient very British foods that is just becoming fashionable in Melbourne. Shakespeare cited it growing on the cliffs at Dover. I and am sure I remember stories of Henry the Eighth having people abseil down cliffs to collect it. Off with their heads if they didn’t.
I first ate this is London years ago. In Melbourne it was only a few months ago at a dinner to celebrate all the wonderful produce from the Bellarine Peninsula on Port Phillip Bay that I rediscovered it.
A local chef, Nigel Pittman from the Ol’ Duke in Portarlington, had hand-picked some from Swan Bay. Both he and I upset a local environmental organisation, me apparently for encouraging people to pick it. Apparently, Swan Bay samphire shouldn’t be picked as it is in a protected zone. And besides, the orange-bellied parrot feeds on it. And I don’t want any dead parrots in this story. That would be far too much of a cliché.
I’ve noticed samphire since on the menu at local restaurants including The Botanical, Becco, Donovans, Interlude and even out of town in Daylesford at The Lakehouse. I suspect it all comes from the same source of my paper bag.

According to the World Wide Gourmet:

“Originally “sampiere” from the French “Saint Pierre”. Samphire - the word is a corruption of St. Peter - was named for the patron of fishermen because it grows in rocky salt-sprayed regions along the sea coast. It can also be found in coastal marsh areas.”

“Samphire is known for its digestive and anti-flatulent properties. Culpepper wrote in the 17th century that samphire was useful in curing ailments relating to “ill digestions and obstructions,” while being “very pleasant to taste and stomach.” It also contains diuretic and depurative properties and is rich in iodine, phosphorus, calcium, silica, zinc, manganese and vitamins A, C and D.”

Preparation

Remove the woody stalky bits. The best parts are the young shoots. Older shoots can have stringy bits inside them. But as we were eating at home we didn’t mind this such is our love of samphire. We just sucked the flesh off the string.

The younger shoots can be served raw in a salad. As I have a mix of old and young I simply blanched the lot in hot water for 30 seconds to one minute.
You don’t need to add any salt because it tastes so salty, like the essence of the sea, which is the taste of Iodine (as with Oysters).

I served it with a simple grilled flounder and served with a simple beurre blanc. Because of the strengthof flavour of the samphire very little additional seasoning is needed.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Salted capers: the essential ingredient.

The beef was a bit chewy and thick and still retained some chill from the fridge. The tuna mayonnaise was slightly too runny.
The restaurant was a Melbourne icon, the grill room at  Grossi Florentino  (although one dish alone made up for everything and will be elaborated upon on another day). It took my mind back to other more delicate vitello tonnato (veal with tuna mayonnaise) and I thought it would be left at that.
The next day when I was choosing between a bargain bucket-sized jar of capers or a jam jar-sized plastic vessel my memory was re-ignited. The shop, The Essential Ingredient in Prahran, provided a postcard that told me more about these strange buds that are usually preserved in brine.
And, having been stuck eating out for most of the week rather than cooking I realised capers should be my entry to Weekend Herb Blogging. This weekend Kalyn’s Kitchen has passed the hosting mantle to Anna’s Cool Finds in California.
We chose the salted variety of caper.
According to the postcard, the best ones are small, crunchy and piquant. They should not be bitter. And to dilute saltiness they can be soaked in milk.
So what? What I spotted on the card is that a classic use is in vitello tonnato.
The caper bush is native to the mediterranean and it bears fleshy leaves and big pink-white flowers (and yes, Wikipedia is my source). There isn’t too much to add.
First I roasted a rolled cut of veal at a low temperature, to about 110C until, according to my meat thermometer, it was pink. I cooled the veal and sliced it thin with an irresponsibly sharp knife.
Next came the home made mayonnaise; two eggs yolks,mustard, salt and pepper and vegetable and oil drizzled through a erratic and violent hand whisk.
The Magimix takes a tin of tuna, several anchovies, a handful of capers, chopped flat leaf parsley, white wine vinegar, lemon juice and the mayonnaise. I adjust to taste.
My twist to the concoction was the thin slices of pink veal are piled with a celeriac ( as a change from kohlrabi) and spilled over with the tuna mayonnaise.
Rustic, yes, but good.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Stone cold sober, this vegetable does pass for Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite sent into the earth’s orbit. The only thing is that Sputnik was 23cm in diameter, this veggie is about a quarter of the size. Sputnik was metallic while the kohlrabi comes either in a light green or purple variety.
According to Wikipedia (BTW I spotted the Sputnik thing before I looked it up) the name comes from the German words kohl (cabbage) and rabi (turnip). There there we have it, the cabbage turnip which is not actually a root vegetable but a brassic (cabbage) and grows half in and half out the soil.
When I looked-up the vegetable in excellent Antonio Carluccio’s Vegetables (there is one used copy available on Amazon for US$95!) he made reference to it being one of those Eastern European vegetables that are usually boiled up, a bit like turnips I suppose. The cabbage turnip is not a herb but it is well within the Rules of Kalyn’s Weekend Herb Blogging hosted this week by Ulrike of Kuchenlatein.
Now I have no idea if the Soviet engineers who put Sputnik into orbit were Kohlrabi nuts. Perhaps, as a vegetable ,it summed up their love for both cabbage and turnip. But I believe Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union after Stalin died who is fame for banging the heel of his shoe on the table during negotiations , ridiculed the American effort – the Vanguard satellite– as a grapefruit. Something must have grated.
Unlike Kruschev, I don’t actually personally hold anything against grapefruit and very often will eat a ruby one for breakfast. But to be quite honest I don’t really want any kind of grapefruit in this particular salad.
Thi salad is about Kohlrabi, usually julienned or put through a Japanese mandolin rather than grated. Sometimes a couple of my fingers go into the salad with the kohlrabi but usually I prefer to substitute a couple of firm young carrots and some crisp apple.
Now it’s time to toss through some dressing. I keep it simple with a little salt, cider vinegar (wine vinegar will do) and perhaps a macadamia or walnut oil (somehow olive just doesn’t seem right).
Ah, and today I will mix in some homemade mayonnaise.

I’m serving it with a rare griddled tuna steak and leaving the not insignificant task of bringing the cabbage turnip and grapefruit together in perfect harmony for another day.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Overwhelmingly dill seem to be the favoured herb this week although thyme, chillis/peppers and olives also seem popular.

And what have we learned? Perhaps most importantly that dill relieves gas (who me?), colic in babies, induces sleep and wards off witches. Also it is possibly to make soup without onions.
I might also add that we have (I think) five entries from Melbourne, testament to this city’s obsession with food as well as its multicultural roots.
And wow, who can believe we are 67 weeks into Weekend Herb Blogging and I’m lucky enough to be the overlord this week. I’m afraid pictures disagreed with my particular set-up of Wordpress – as did the WHB logo. If anybody has been left out or any links don’t work (something weird has been happening with some) please let me know.

Sandeepa at Bong Mom’s Cookbook’s email went AWOL but she’s in now and has found a site dedicated to cilantro (coriander) haters even though she loves the stuff. She uses it in the masala for a Spicy egg bake, a recipe from her husband, a quinessential “Bangal” – that’s a Bengali whose ancestors can be traced to East Bengal – being a great cook. “Coriander has been used as a folk medicine for the relief of anxiety and insomnia in Iranian folk medicine. Experiments in mice support its use as an anxiolytic. Coriander essential oil showed a delay in E. Coli growth, suggesting possible agricultural anti-bacterial applications.”

Kate from Daily Unadventures in Cooking was the first entry to Weekend Herb Blogging with one of those marriages made in heaven, a salmon and caper salad. The recipe was inspired by the Barefoot Contessa cookbook and also uses plenty of fresh dill. “This recipe spotlights dill which is a classic combination with salmon. I tried growing dill myself last year, but was not successful. With a little bit of research I have just learned that there is a specific kind of dill which only grows to 18 inches called Fernleaf and is suited to indoor growing.”

Sue from Coffee & Cornbread finds another way to use dill in her dilly meat and dumpling soup. This is a nourishing soup based on a chicken stock. “Dill is thought to help relieve colic in babies. I wish I had known that several years ago, but entering and research for WHB has supplied me with the info in anticipation of my grandkids.”

Asha at Aroma is making a red lentil dill soup with dill cream as her first ever contribution to Weekend Herb Blogging. A warming dish for cold day.
Sometimes a vegetable needs a bit of help to come alive. “The name “dill” is thought to have originated from a Norse or Anglo-Saxon word ‘dylle’ meaning to soothe or lull, the plant having the carminative property of relieving gas.”

Glenda at A Fridge Full of Food gets that help with some chicken stock, pecans and bacon with Not your momma’s glazed carrots. “I had a wild craving for glazed carrots the other day which surprised me because as a child I loved my mother’s glazed carrots but when I made them years later as an adult they seemed like squishy orange yuck drowned in maple syrup. Don’t get me wrong. My mom was a fantastic cook. It’s just that everyone used to make glazed carrots basically the same way: cook the carrots and add butter and brown sugar. Fini.”

Neil from At My Table, who lives just around the corner from me in St Kilda, makes Lecso, a dish made out of pure vitamin C thanks to all the capsicum/bell peppers used – ideal for all those iced-up northern hemisphere bloggers fighting off wintery colds. “When Hungarians say paprika they could mean two things, either the fresh pods of the pepper plant or the spice obtained from drying and grinding the pods. Outside of Mexico from where peppers, or as they are better known chillies, first originated, it is hard to think of a country that values both the heat and flavour of peppers as much as Hungarians do…”

Claudia at Fool For Food is serving Gorgonzola-Polenta mit Spinat und Steinpilzen which translated means polenta with gorgonzola, spinach, cepes and chives.

Yich of Sim Cooks uses one of my favourite ingredients lemongrass which chops up and bashes with the back of her knife to make Tom Yum Goong (Prawns) Soup. “Lemon grass is also known by the name Citronella. Citronella oil is used in soaps, as a mosquito repellent in insect sprays and candles, and also in aromatherapy. It is known to have a calming effect that relieves insomnia or stress.”

The Chocolate Lady – that’s Eve I Believe – is using her new Japanese contraption to “help your cooking fast joyfully with wonderful edged strings”. I want one! Anyway she’s making a salad with torn shreds and I believe may be dabbling in dill as well a cilantro and parsley. “Even when it is this cold (We got down to nine degrees Fahrenheit in New York this week, and it was thirty below in Deering, fifty-two below with the wind chill, or “below fifty-two” as they say up there) you still sometimes need salads.”

Ros at Living to eat! has set her font to rhubarb colour and is even cooking with the stuff – Duck with ginger and rhubarb compote. It turns out she is a fruit and duck nut. “Yay, pink! \o/ The crazy pink colour of the compote was enough to get Goon to try some. The gingery flavour alonside the tanginess was enough to keep him eating it. Who needs artifical colours and flavours when you’ve got stem ginger and rhubarb?”

Carolyn over at Field to feast the African is inspired this week comes in the form of a well-herbed couscous from a well loved cook book. The book in question is Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian – Madhur Jaffrey is also one of my favourite cooks. “This recipe, a Tunisian dish, attracted my attention with its use of four fresh herbs – cilantro, dill, parsley and arugula – but it remained untried simply because I could never accumulate all of the ingredients at one time.”

The News from my kitchen – Helene’s at least – is olives or in German oliven. “Almost forgotten the olives rested in salted water for a while. But now after the first frost I will combine them. The theme is colourful: dark red the olives, red the pepper, green lime and olive herbs.” Take a look, I think the font may be olive-coloured.

Still on olives, Gattina over at The Kitchen Unplugged is rustling up green olive artichoke pizza. “The day when I made this pizza, there were two young kids (I do baby-sitting occasionally, that’s how I got my little model to hold that heart candy) totally crazy for the crust that dizzled with this oil allover.”

Ceviz at Only Turkish Food is a new Melbourne food blog to me. This week’s offering us Turkish red lentil balls. “These red lentil balls originate from eastern and south-eastern regions of Turkey. They are easy to make, and are delicious. Wrapping them in lettuce leaves brings out the flavours.” She also has another foodblog written in Turkish.

Astrid at Paulchen’s Foodblog is chomping on Rosemary-tarragon potatoes & roasted coriander-cumin cauliflower. “Rosemary has been found to be a stimulant and mild analgesic, and has been used to treat headaches, poor circulation, and many ailments for which stimulants are prescribed.”

Zoe at Puku – it’s inside that counts – is making a tropical fruit salad. in her first flood blog event. She’s nervous but shouldn’t be as she’s picked the strange and interesting dragonfuit which actually come from a cactus. I didn’t know that although I’ve been stuffing myself with it for the past month. Puku is another new Australian blog from Townsville in Queensland – that’s up near the great Barrier Reef. Just to confuse things Zoe comes from New Zealand: “The puku is the belly. the word is te reo Maori the language/tongue of my homeland and one part of my whakapapa (ancestry).”

Anh is also from Melbourne and and has some great Vietnamese recipes on her blog, Food Lover’s Journey. Today though she’s chosen a tasty Chickpea and lamb stew. Everybody assumes it is hot in Melbourne but the reality is that it is unpredictable and this is an ideal meal for a cold summers day. “Although the stew uses varieties of herbs and spices, I would love to feature about chickpeas (or garbanzo as called in the US) for this edition of Weekend Herb Blogging. They have a beautiful nutty flavour and a crisp texture. The beans are high fibre and protein. Highly nutritious, chickpeas are also low in fat and most of their fat content is monounsaturated.”

Apparently it is amazing what Genie at The inadvertent gardener will do for a good tomato. I’m afraid I’m a rather rotten one.
Her quick turkey soup is made from the detritus of Thanksgiving usually. “This year, in the madness that was Thanksgiving clean-up, the turkey carcass didn’t survive. But I did end up with four cups of dark and light turkey meat in a container in my freezer, and last weekend, took advantage of a snowy day to stay inside and make a quicker version of the famous soup.”

Back to Turkey as in Turkish with Burcu’s Almost Turkish Recipes. We are talking Kaygana which is a turkish omelette. “There was a small authentic restaurant that served only Black Sea region food on the way to Sumela Monastery, in Trabzon province, and they served us kaygana along with other numerous delicious local food. Since I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with eggs, I was reluctant to taste it at first. But then it became my favorite egg dish. After our trip I couldn’t find kaygana anywhere else, and that’s why I believed it was a Black Sea dish; however, from Marianna Yerasimos’ 500 Hundred Years of Ottoman Cuisine I learned that kaygana is an old Ottoman dish.”

Ulrike at Küchenlatein is tempting me with Chicken curry with scallions, peanuts and parsley. She not a fan of coriander – cilantro – so substitutes it with parsley. A neat trick.

Katie at Thyme for cooking, the blog is cooking Salmon en Croute with Tarragon Cream Sauce which features, you didn’t guess it, dill. “The seeds, which are actually the fruit, are a must in dill pickles. The leaves or fronds, are, for some obscure reason, known as dillweed or dill weed. It’s medicinal use was to help induce sleep and it’s practical uses were as a ward against witches and (very important bit coming up) to fend off the ‘evil eye’. I, personally, am going to start wearing a garland of dill whenever I work on my computer.”

Andrea over at Buy Organic tells us about silver foliage herbs, the top five being sage, lavender, variegated society garlic, silver thyme and catnip. “Silver foliage herbs are some of the most beautiful, tasty, and useful herbs. They make great displays, either planted en mass or used as hedges. They have many culinary uses but also play an important role in an organic garden as companion plants.”

Sherry from What did you eat? has chosen a hearty vegetable soup featuring thyme. “The thyme, rosemary and bay leaf all worked together to give the soup a wonderful flavor, but I chose thyme as my herb of choice. I’m quite fond of thyme. Last year, I planted common thyme in my garden and it’s flourished there.” She’s lucky. Last week mine died.

Rachel’s Bite this week is Creole sausage and shrimp which uses thyme. “My normal practice is to chop the herbs stems and all. Those thyme stems are some tough suckers! I kept chopping and chopping and they wouldn’t break down fine enough. I brought out the knife but they just weren’t cooperating. So my advise is to take the time to pull the leaves off of the stems when working with thyme.”

My kitchen: my laboratory’s Angie doesn’t really like tomatoes, apart from the cherry ones. Still she’s chosen them as her topic for Weekend Herb Blogging. “Anyway, these little fruits make a healthy snack, just wash and pop them into your mouth. But I prefer them slightly cooked, whereby when you bite into them, the skin just gives way to a mouthful of fresh tomato juice. How can you beat that?”

Ruth at Once upon a feast goes Mexican-style. “…although I do love quesadillas, I’m not sure if the ones I make are authentic. There is one truly Mexican dish I adore though - Mole de Pollo (chicken stewed in a rich, spicy, chocolate gravy). I first had it on my honeymoon in Mexico and I drool every time I think about it.”

Despite frozen pipes and heavy snow Kalyn – who as the architect of all this Weekend Herb Blogging needs no introduction – is offering Tomatilla soup with the dreaded cilantro (coriander). I must admit I’ve never cooked with a Tomatilla and probably never eaten one. Kalyn says: “I just love the flavor of this intesting fruit which is called husk tomato, jamberry, husk cherry, mexican tomato, or ground cherry in different parts of the world. It’s easily recognizable from the husk that surrounds the fruit. Tomatillos are the key ingredient in fresh and cooked Latin American green sauces, and the flavor is sharp, slightly lemony, and tart.”

Arfi from Homemades in New Zealand has some wonderfully rustic looking garlic. “My favourite herb is allium family, which is both considered as vegetables and herbs…It’s known that this genus consists of over 700 species which can be grown all over the world in temperate climates, which have similar appearance and smell.”

Freya is Writing at the kitchen table, has no onions left and wants to make soup. “No onions in the house is a very poor state of affairs and a state that no one should ever be in. Thank goodness I had a couple of rapidly shrivelling leeks left. There was no carrots, no peppers, just a bunch of celery. So, with the celery and leeks in mind, I flipped through Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book. Straight away I am enticed by the Celery and Blue Cheese Soup recipe although I could have gone for Celery and Dill too.”

Among Anna’s cool finds is tropical okara granola (aka muesli). As a person politically opposed to manufactured breakfast cereals this especially appeals. “As you all know, I am having fun and health making my own soy milk and that leaves me with a lot of OKARA - the bran left over from the beans! Okara was taking over my refrigerator, so it was time to come up with another recipe.”

Anna’s scattered selection of thoughts at Morsels & Musings include Camarones en Pipian, a spicy prawn (rather than shrimp) dish made with ancho chillis created especially for Australia Day. “Ancho chillies are dried poblanos and are dark in colour. They have a sweet, smoky, coffee and cocoa flavour (some people think they taste like dried fruit too) and are quite mild on the chilli heat scale. They are used in many traditional recipes like Camarones en Pipian - a Mexican recipe that I, a first generation Australian, cooked for a Japanese friend.”

Little spatula’s Katie, meanwhile, made a Shrimp risotto with sweet peas with leeks. “The leeks are spotlighted in this wonderful risotto and the opportunity to use a variety of herbs such as parsley, chervil, and basil make it fun to prepare. The leeks in this dish lend a delicate onion flavor.”

A 2005 Bolla Soave makes a perfect match for a basil rich Pasta puttanesca over at Wine outlook. Farley says: “It’s fast and fun to make, I usually have the ingredients on hand, and it’s helped launch at least one or two relationships. With a great story, to top it off. I love how the kitchen immediately smells fantastic as the anchovies and garlic sizzle on the stove and I adore squishing the whole tomatoes between my fingers, tearing them apart. Yet I always hesitate to make it if I don’t have any fresh basil.”

More tomatoes, this time ripe romas from Haalo at Cook Almost Anything Once. She’s pulled together recipe from a couple of local Melbourne chefs to create an impressive pressed tomato soup with basil ice cream. “Tomatoes these days are being heralded as a potential disease buster due to the presence of Lycopene. It’s actually one of the few plants where cooking actually increases the Lycopene content. Lycopene is an anti-oxidant and is thought to help lower the risk of cancer and heart disease.”

Virginie from Absolutely Green is pitching the exotically named Litchis rôtis à la crème de marrons – roasted Lychees with chestnut cream. Apparently this dish is easy to make with the lychees simply fried is sesame oil before mixing them with the chestnut cream.

Cooking in Westchester - the practical, spicy, flavorful way from Rinku is also picking on tomatoes – in a watercress soup with ginger. Watercress appparently is one of the top ten detox foods. “I love soups this time of the year and actually all the year round. There is a quiet simplicity about them, yes, we can make them fussy but overall a few little flavors, a good base and you have a comforting bowlful.”

“Last week my husband mentioned about one of his old Bulgarian friend and later kept bragging about one of the appetizers he had tried at his place and what a delicious combination of flavour it was. So I asked him ”how is it called ?”. He described it as fried zucchini’s with a yogurt dip.” And so Sushma from Recipe source went out in search of Bulgarian zucchini yoghurt dip and found it.

Dave from The serendipitous chef intrigues me with some lusty fruits that are smaller than an orange but smaller than cumquats and pretty sour. “Apparently, unlike kumquats, the skin of the orangquats edible but not really intended to be eaten. And they seem to be more sour than a kumquat. But that could just be this batch of them. The kumquats we got from the same stand were more sour than I expected as well.”

And finally there is me with a basic Greek salad which simply has to be made with dried oregano. “…the name origanum comes from the greek words oros and ganos meaning ‘joy of the mountain’, the fragrant herb growing on mountain slopes.”

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The Weekend Herb Blogging round-up will be posted soon. Phew, it’s a lot of work!.

Meanwhile, vote for the Breakfast Blog as the best Australian/New Zealand blog in the Bloggies – it’s up against some tough hot nude gay action although I won’t link to it.

The thing about the Breakfast Blog is that is has the guts to focus on a single subject. Vote now.

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Everything seems mundane. I miss the sights and the sounds of Asia – the smell of lemongrass, BBQs, leaded petrol and the honking of motor scooter horns. The strange, noisy cats in Laos.
I can’t get my mind into gear despite lots of exciting writing projects and I can’t even decide where next to go on holiday let alone what I am going to eat.
At least for the Australia Day weekend I can BBQ something. But somehow piles of charred meat turn my stomach after a month of eating in Asia.
I’m bereft of ideas and can hardly blog Pim’s excellent Pad Thai recipe which will be given a second outing tonight.
It is boring but there is something very comforting about a barbecued rack of lamb with a Greek salad. The salad contains the herb element for Weekend Herb Blogging of which Kalyn has kindly made me the overlord of this week. This is the second dish I have prepared since arriving home and one of those default dishes that I pick when my mind is feeble and my body weak.
And while there may be less than a gram of oregano is this salad – Ian Hemphill’s Spice Notes tells me a 5ml teaspoon contains 0.7g – it is my herb of choice this week. Apparently Oregano is related to Marjoram both growing around the Mediterranean. According to Hemphill the name origanum comes from the greek words oros and ganos meaning ‘joy of the mountain’, the fragrant herb growing on mountain slopes.
The rules
1. One large ripe tomato or two smaller ones. It must be ripe and not the rock-hard cardboard supermarket variety. Cube.
2. Use lebanese cucumber over the long boring variety. Skin it before cubing
3. Greek fetta cubed. It must be Greek. There are many eastern european and Australian pretenders but most are about as tasty as chalk. Choose greek.
4. Thinly sliced hoops of red onion, which has a less aggressive edge than the regular varieties.
5. Unpitted olives which means you approach each one knowing that there is a hard pip inside. This is important unless you want to surprise a weak tooth with a pip and finance the dentist’s next golf safari.
6. Dried oregano. Fresh oregano is too subtle for this salad. By all means use fresh but you’ll also need the concentrated aromas of the dried stuff.
7. The best extra virgin olive oil in the house, preferably Greek.
8. A squeeze of lemon juice BUT absolutely no vinegar. Don’t even think about it.
9. Salt and pepper to taste.
10. Mix it up.
11. It’s not worth keeping this salad in the fridge as leftovers. Either eat it all up or chuck it out. No discussion will be entered into.
Of course for the lamb rack – actually half a rack between two of us – you need an astonishingly large, shiny and expensive BBQ. I would say that you should spend at least $5,000. And whatever you do ensure it is a gas BBQ. You really don’t want to be messing around with charcoal and the smoky flavours it imparts to the meat.

Only a real man–  preferably the whole Australian cricket team – can handle one of these machines.
Switch on the and ignite the afterburners. Simply toss the meat onto the BBQ and leave until it becomes a grotesque misshapen charred blob.
Repeat with large slices of cow, long soft pink cylindrical containers of hooves ‘n lips…and some fish for the ladies.
Wash down with a tin of a slightly sweet mid-strength beer, a rather large overbearing shiraz or an oaked “labrador” chardonnay.
Welcome to the Australian dream. (Blogger dragged away screaming)

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