the fritters:

in a bowl mix
4 heads of corn kernels
a handful or so of soft tofu
a few tablespoons rice flour
a tablespoon white miso
half a cup rice/soy milk
a few chopped spring onions
half a cup of dried cranberries
salt and pepper

add more flour or milk to get it to a good fritter consistency

put half cupfuls into an oiled fry pan and cook till golden on each side.

served here on rye toast, with a slice of the huge, amazing beefsteak tomato sef brought over, mushrooms fried in nuttelex and thyme, and a home grown tomato and garlic salsa. with the mango chutney i made last week from anthony’s mangoes on the side.


i’ve been spending a lot of time at home lately.

lots of morning time at least – it’s difficult for me to leave the house before midday, given the delivered newspaper, the company, the cat, the outlook onto the street, the sunshine streaming in. and it’s probably me trying to hold onto some sense of order in the crazy disordered and manic life i’ve fallen into at the moment. most nights are out seeing bands or friends or at home entertaining, and it’s pretty tiring. and hard to keep up with the other things i should be doing.

last sunday morning i made french toast for me and paul. this is my adapted version of the recipe i found on frolic blog – i didn’t make the butters, used rice milk instead of cows milk, and bush honey yoghurt instead of heavy cream. but i did use a pandoro, which mila had left behind before xmas and has been hanging round our living room for a while. there’s still lots left, which might turn into a bread and butter pudding tonight.

the stone fruits are amazing at the moment, as per usual in sydney. and we have managed to grow herbs on the back deck – not much else survives out there in the heat. the mint has started to flower which is beautiful and surreal, and made me realise i’d never seen a mint flower before.

here’s to a new exciting year, full again of travels and adventures in whatever city i’m living in. there’s lots of words to be read and written this year, and i’m looking forward to the time i spend with them.


paul screwed up his nose (virtually, over chat) when i said this, and so i had to clarify it wasn’t really.

not-meat pie (aka leftover pie)

soak a small handful of tvp in boiling water

chop 3 golden shallots, a clove of garlic and a carrot, saute in olive oil.

chop 5 or 6 mushrooms and add to the onions etc.

chop half a block of tempeh into small cubes, add to the onions.

fry for a little while

add a tin of chopped tomatoes, stir through

add a bunch of chopped spinach. drain the tvp and add it to the pot. add half a tin of chick peas (or whatever is left in the fridge)

add a few chipotle chillis and a teaspoon of cumin, stir through.

simmer for 10-15 minutes

while it’s simmering, blind bake (of sorts) a sheet of puff pastry in a pie dish. when the pie filling has simmered put it into the pie base, put a piece of pastry on top and bake in a hot oven until golden.

served here with green salad and my homemade beetroot chutney!



i scribbled this out on request, after a tasty friday night dinner. it was also great for breakfast (according to emma) and made for super tasty mini pies that i took to knitting club on sunday.


containing

24Oct09

more on the cumquat project: the process of containment and storing the transformed fruit.

(as a recipe aside, at this point i’d added a few tablespoons of grated fresh ginger to the simmering pan of fruit, sugar and water, as per the recipe. so this is now officially ‘cumquat & ginger marmalade”)

once cooled a little, the marmalade mixture needed to be put into jars. over the years i’ve lived in the house there’s always been a steady collection of jars under the sink. a reluctance to recycle something that can be reused i suppose, and often they are filled with little treats from the co-op, or the bigger ones with flours/beans/nuts. and a lot of jam gets eaten in the house, so there’s a great selection of ‘appropriate’ jam jars.

one of the key steps that recipes emphasise in preserving is the sterilisation of the containers. in the past i’ve been fastidious, boiling jars in water for 10 minutes, drying the, not touching the inner glass. this time too i was fastidious, but relied on modern technologies to sterilise for me – they went through the dishwasher, and then i half filled each one with water and put them in the microwave for 5 minutes. the water boiled, the jars were clean and fresh, and left to cool on the bench. the cleanliness of the container so as not to contaminate the thing being preserved inside; the same way an archive box is clean, empty and meets archival standards.

so the sterilised jars are filled with the marmalade, and left to settle into the jar (and cool a little) before the lid is screwed on. most of them even worked to ’suck’ the press button of the lid back in, indicating an unopened jar of jam (‘just like you get at the shop’).

and now all 9 of those jars have been sitting on my kitchen bench for over a week, waiting to be labeled and put in the cupboard, or given away to people (most are promised already). and in this project of endurance, of the length and effort involved in preserving things for the future, i still have a while to go.



part of the cumquat marmalade making project was about endurance. following things through, taking the time to do something well. following the instructions but also improvising where required.

after the cumquats were sliced and de-seeded, they soaked in water for 8 or so hours. then i boiled them in soaking water until tender, added a huge amount of sugar, and kept the mixture simmering until it set to a jelly-consistency. the recipe book said this would take about 20 minutes. in reality, i think it took about 2 hours; two hours of fearing i might burn the marmalade (as i have done in the past, recalling a winter as housewife in whitstable), or that maybe the pectin (released from the seeds i saved and soaked) wasn’t good, or there wasn’t enough of it. but eventually, many hours and taste testing later, the marmalade set enough (on a cold saucer, fresh from the freezer) for it to be time to put the transformed fruit into containers.

transformation

this idea of transformation is what i love about the process. we still call this cumquat marmalade, referring to the original fruit that i bought at the greengrocer (that many others planted, tended, pruned & picked & packed & transported to glebe) but it has been transformed. but eating the marmalade (i imagine) will still invoke the sense of cumquat, or the ‘feeling’ of the fruit (not the literal touch-sense-feeling, but a more affectual sense of feeling)


lost bread

23Oct09

one of those rare occasions where you tear out a recipe from the weekend magazine and actually cook it. this is french toast, with croissants instead of bread. and cherries, stewed apple and yoghurt. so decadent for a friday morning.

the recipe called it ‘pain perdu’ (hence the lost bread). but it’s basically your everyday french toast recipe, just using the croissants (sliced through the centre) to soak up the egginess instead of bread. fried in a little butter and voila.



coming home worn out and seeking comfort on a monday night, i set about baking. these are a big adaptation of the moosewood vegan chocolate cake.

mix together:

1.5 cups of wholemeal plain flour
1 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 apples, cored and cut into small bits
6 or 7 bits of preserved/sugared ginger, chopped into small bits
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp bicarb soda

in another bowl, mix together:
1 cup cold tea (i used traditional afternoon tea)
1/2 cup vegetable oil
vanilla (i used 1/3 of a vanilla pod)

add the wet to the dry, mix together until combined well, then add 1-2 tablespoons apple cider vingear.

put into muffin tin and bake for 20 mins or so at 200 degrees (in my gas oven…). this made 10.


on monday i was coming home from an appointment in glebe, and stopped in at a little green grocer on glebe point road. amongst the fresh garlic, roti and rocket i bought, i also came home with two bags of cumquats. they were out the front, $2 a bag, and irresistible.

at home they sat on the bench for a couple of days. this morning the painters came at 6.50am, and i decided to use the hours of the day that i’d found to start my cumquat marmalade making project.

i sat and chopped 800g of miniature oranges (although, as the women’s weekly fruit and vegetable book says here, they are “not a true citrus fruit”).

as i sliced the cumquats and removed the seeds (putting them in a separate bowl) i had a lot of time to think.

endurance

i’m struggling with my study at the moment. i can’t read the volumes of pages i really want, and need to read. i sit, start, and then get distracted. i have extremely low endurance for most things at the moment, reading and writing included. i tire or bore easily, even when it’s really exciting stuff th read. so as i sat and started slicing, i realised this was going to take me a while; i had to do it otherwise the marmalade wouldn’t get made, and the cumquats would go to waste.


(watch the video here if it doesn’t work)

so i persevered. got distracted here and there, but endured the slicing to the end. and now there’s a big bowl of sliced cumquats and 6 cups of water sitting on the bench, alongside a smaller bowl of cumquat seeds in a cup of water.

preservation

maybe you know about my phd project, maybe you don’t. in a nutshell though, i spend a lot of my time at the moment thinking about archives, and the spaces outside of the traditional archival institutions that also make and collect memories. maybe it’s a bedroom, maybe it’s a diy infoshop. but to think about these spaces i also need to think about the traditional spaces, and what archiving is all about. i tried to even be an archivist for most of last year, but some of the issues i’m looking at now really got to me then. inspired the project even.

one thing that archivists and archives do is preserve. artefacts, objects, memory, history. and i sat there, slicing the cumquats and removing the seeds, realising that i was preserving. i was an archivist of sorts all over again. it all started to get a bit wanky here, but i really did have one of those moments where it all made sense, where the cumquat marmalade becomes a metaphor for the object in the archive. preserved. transformed. in a different form, but still a cumquat. out of context. in a container.

whole | sliced

the seeds are removed, soaked in water, the water strained of the seeds and added to the sliced fruit as a setting agent. the pectin in the seeds has been soaked out and reused in a different form. like taking the staples out of  a zine before you place it in the plastic sleeve to go inside an archive box.

decay

if you don’t preserve something, it will decay, rot, go to waste, not be usable anymore. preserving fruit and vegetables mean their life can be extended and we get more out of them; out of the superfluous produce at certain times of the year. we preserve with good quality fruit, not damaged ones, and the fruit that makes the jam or marmalade that we like the taste of. in an archive, we preserve those things of quality, whether physical or historical quality. we extend their life, and find other uses for them. we make decisions about what to preserve (‘appraisal’) and they become the things that we find our history or memories in.



the festival, not the friend. full of little recipes and interesting quotes. and lps.

email me if you want one, i’ve got loads, printed with love at the rizzeria.




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