And today I found out that I got ARC funding for 3 years so now I am suddenly relaxed like the floppiest thing ever.  Perhaps I can stop being a drama queen about my stress levels for a while!  Here was tonight’s really quite rocking dinner, serving 4, adapted from Karen Martini’s Cooking at Home:

 Rigatoni with roasted cauliflower, saffron, currants, pine nuts and caramelised onion

Slice 2 brown onions, and cook in olive oil in a large saucepan over low heat for 15 minutes.  Add 4 sliced garlic cloves and a handful of fresh thyme leaves, and cook for a further 15 minutes or more until everything is delightfully caramelised.

Cut a medium cauliflower up into florets, toss with olive oil, and roast at 180C for around 25 minutes, or until golden.

Cook 400 g of rigatoni until al dente; drain.

Add to the onion mixture 4 chopped anchovy fillets, 80 g of currants, 2 pinches of saffron threads, and half a cup of water, and simmer for 5 minutes. Add 70 g pine nuts, a dash of red wine vinegar, 150 ml white wine, the cooked and drained pasta, and a slug of olive oil.  Cook over low heat for another couple of minutes, until the sauce has adhered nicely to the pasta.

Check seasoning, add some chopped flat-leaf parsley and toss to combine.

Eat with lots of wine and a glorious, overwhelming, muscle-loosening feeling of relief.

I can actually feel the stress shredding my immune system.  My whole body aches, I grind my teeth so much it hurts, I just had a melt-down about MS Word being the piece of merde it is, and I still have four analyses on my to-do-list for this Sunday afternoon.  If I met academia in the street I would give that bitch the cut direct.

However.  It ought to be noted that it’s a lovely afternoon outside (though I am tethered to my desk).  We’ve also had a few simple but tasty meals recently that deserve recording.

Today for lunch, it was roast cherry tomatoes with thyme, eaten with a tin of decent sardines,  ciabatta toasts, and a mixed leaf salad.  Roast tomatoes and oily fish are a heavenly match.

Last month I made pesto in a mortar and pestle for the first time ever, using Marcella Hazan’s recipe. I was frankly amazed that it worked, and that I managed to pound a gigantic bunch of basil into a smallish amount of pesto, all inside the not-that-huge bowl of my stone mortar.  It was extremely satisfying and the texture was excellent, very silky.

And last week we were inspired by an asian chicken and purple cabbage salad at the Little Larder, and made our own version at home using tofu instead of chicken. A rough recipe is below.

Tofu with crispy cabbage and herb salad

Dressing
Mix together a couple of tablespoons each of fish sauce and rice wine vinegar, the juice of a lime, and  a tablespoon of grated palm sugar.  Stir to dissolve the palm sugar, and taste.  Now the tricky part begins.  If it needs more salt, add more fish sauce. If sweetness, sugar.  If sharpness, vinegar or lime.  You might need to add quite a bit of one or more ingredients to get it right - the proportions will depend on the strength of your fish sauce, lime, etc.  Keep going until it tastes good.

Salad
Mix together some very finely sliced red cabbage, chopped spring onions, and finely chopped red onion, and dress with half the sauce.  Set it aside for 15 minutes or so, tossing occasionally, for everything to get very slightly wilted. Just before serving, toss through some finely sliced cucumber and red capsicum, mixed tasty small lettuce leaves, and lots of picked mint and coriander leaves.

Tofu
Cut tofu into cubes and marinate in half the sauce, plus some fresh or dried chilli, for 20 minutes or so.  The fry the cubes, drained of the sauce, in a little peanut oil in a wok, stirring only occasionally.  Let the tofu get crispy and browned before turning.  Add drizzles of the sauce as necessary to prevent sticking. Serve the tofu on top of bowls of the salad and eat at once.

Our apartment has been freezing at night for the last week or so.  It’s finally made me understand why there are doors on every internal doorway in the place - it’s so you have a better chance of corralling the draughts that whistle in round most of the window frames.  But even sitting on the couch with at least one and in most cases two closed doors between me and the external walls of the building, I still shiver.  So I am getting all old-school and sewing draught snakes, and in the meantime cooking depths-of-winter dinners, despite the fact that I sit outside in the sun at lunchtimes in shirtsleeves.

Yesterday afternoon we picked up a small leg of lamb, which I cooked last night in an ad-hoc way, vaguely based on gigot de sept heures and modified to suit the time and what else we had in the house (it had been a disorganised and ramshackle kind of shopping expedition). I browned the leg in oil in the Le Creuset on the stovetop, then added (for a 1kg leg) 1 can of tomatoes, very roughly chopped, a couple of cups of stock, and a large glass of red wine.  Also four golf ball-sized onions peeled and halved, four large carrots peeled and each cut into three or four pieces, two fresh bay leaves and a sprig of rosemary.  Put the lid on, then into the oven at 190 C (clear sign that I wasn’t thinking about what I was doing), realised OH SHIT about an hour later and turned it down to 120 C, at the same time turning the leg over in the pot in the hope of miraculously reversing whatever drying had occured by submerging the part that had been above the waterline during the initial roasting. Left it cooking for another 3.5 hours, then pulled it out to see the results.

The liquid had reduced by about two thirds to a shallow bath of delicious juices with a concentrated flavour of the vegetables, wine and lamb. The onions had come apart, and the carrots were braised to silky softness but still holding their shape perfectly. A butter knife sank into the lamb all the way to the bottom of the pot with no effort.  We ate it, lamb, vegetables and broth, in shallow bowls, together with bread from Chouquette spread with good butter.  It was delicious, and we weren’t cold anymore.

I have THE BEST pot of black bean chili on the stove right now.  It needs another 20 minutes or so of cooking but I just had to share the excitement immediately.

I threw ingredients in more or less at random but somehow it has coalesced into my perfect chili.  I think the secret is pot liquor.  I love that phrase (being a fan of liquor of many kinds). It’s the liquid that remains in the pot after cooking the beans.  In this case, I cooked up a big load of black beans this afternoon, and their liquor was smooth, matte,  the colour of melted dark chocolate, and, critically, very tasty.

When it came time to make the chili, I fried a couple of roughly chopped onions until they were golden and soft, added some chopped garlic, a teaspoon or so each of chili powder, cumin powder, cumin seeds and smoked paprika and cooked another couple of minutes until aromatic, then added a tin of tomatoes, about 5 or 6 cups of the cooked drained black beans, a couple of cups of the reserved pot liquor, and two fresh bay leaves.  I am currently in the late stages of simmering it for an hour, adding spoonfuls of pot liquor as necessary to keep it at the right consistency.  Shortly I will eat it in soft tacos with vegies roasted with chili and cumin, and guacamole.  I am sure I will make disgusting moans of enjoyment while doing so.  Can’t wait!

Yes, I’ve managed to survive grant-writing season, hurrah!  (Now we just wait for 8 months to see if funding will be forthcoming.)  I should be getting back to cooking soon.

In the meantime, here is a diversion for you: some of my favourite posts from Ada Lovelace Day (yesterday, 24th of March).

Jean Bartik, ENIAC programmer

Valerie Aurora, Linux kernal programmer

Hedy Lamarr(!), co-inventor of spread spectrum frequency hopping

Mary Somerville and Agnes Clarke, interpreters and communicators of science

Enid Mumford, sociotechnologist

Addison Berry, Drupal developer and mobilizer

Jane McGonigal, game designer and futurist

Karen Spärk Jones, computational linguist

Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) wrote the first computer programs, for Charles Babbage’s analytical engine. And Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to celebrate women in technology. You can track down loads of other ALD posts via Technorati or the Ada Lovelace Day Collection - many of them are worth a read.

We had good company tonight, and good pasta to go with it.

Ian, Lisa and Caroline came over for dinner, and we all caught the bus to New Farm from Toowong together.  So there was no time for fussy cleaning up or doing dinner preparations before people arrived.  But we’d planned for this, and I am growing less concerned about mess as I get older, so there was no drama.  We arrived, cracked open beers, and set out olives, brie, grilled eggplant and crusty bread, to sit and chat for an hour.

Then I headed into the kitched to make the main meal.  Two big pots of water on the boil, one for pasta and one for green beans.  Some cherry tomatoes halved and put in the oven for a quick roast.  Wash a big bag of baby spinach, flake about 300 g of smoked salmon fillets, take the zest and juice of one lemon, chop a bunch of dill. Put 500 g of pasta on to cook.  When it comes off, drain it and put the pan back on the heat.  Add the spinach, wilt for a minute, then add back the pasta, together with the salmon, lemon, dill, a couple of spoonfuls of baby capers and several spoonfuls of creme fraiche.  Stir over low heat until the creme fraiche is melted.  While doing this, chuck the green beans in to cook for 3 minutes, then drain and refresh under cold water.  Pull the tomatoes out of the oven and dress with garlic oil, salt, pepper and the leaves from a bunch of oregano.  Serve up the pasta, and on the side the roast tomatoes and the blanched beans.  Open the third (or fourth?) bottle of wine and dig in.  Pretty good for less than 20 minutes’ cooking.

Afterwards, retire to the lounge room for more wine and, a little later, gelati. Think about how lovely your life is and how much you like your friends.  Enjoy.

Tedster and I went out tonight for dinner in the Valley before going to see Frost/Nixon (excellent, by the way).  It was clearly an evening of all-round fantasticness, because the food was exactly what I was after too.

We had deliciously hot duck larb, crisp and cooling green pawpaw salad, and sticky rice.  It was perfect.  Food for two plus one beer was $33.  The rest of the menu looks good too - lots of things I’ll go back to try, like black pickled egg salad, and other things I may or may not work up the courage for, like steamed boneless chicken feet salad and spicy soup with ox liver and tripe.  Discovering this place has made me intensely happy - I have been searching Brisbane for good Thai ever since we got back.

The deets: Thai Wi-Rat, Thai/Lao food, 20 Duncan St Fortitude Valley, 3257 0884.

I’m compelled to blog tonight’s dinner, not only because it was quite tasty, but primarily because if I do so I will have blogged at least one meal a year for 10 years and I hate breaking that kind of streak.  So let me tell you about how, after spending the afternoon in 35°C heat thinking that a salad for dinner would be perfect, I ended up eating at 11 pm after pot-roasting duck legs in half a kilo of lard for three hours.

A couple of years ago, when we were in Dublin, we had a fantastic dinner at Carolin and Dave’s place, of soft tacos with duck, black beans, feta and pomegranate seeds.  It was the kind of meal that sticks in your memory and I’ve always wanted to recreate it.  They made duck carnitas by cooking confit duck legs on the stovetop until they were falling apart, and although this involved slightly more cooking than the salad I’d initially been thinking about, I figured I could deal with it with the help of an electric fan and two or three cold margaritas.

That of course required me to be able to find duck confit in Toowong or New Farm at 4.30 pm on new year’s eve.  Not a chance.  Even Rayner’s butcher, with their cabinet full of a dozen different cuts of duck, couldn’t provide. In that insane state that I sometimes get into when food is concerned and the shops are on the verge of closing, I decided that I would just buy fresh duck legs and semi-confit the bastards myself before making the tacos.  Naturally!  After all, it was only 30°C by then.

Despite this somewhat snarly lead-up, it actually worked out pretty well.  Pot-roasting doesn’t require you to be in the same room as the oven, which is a big plus, and the long cooking time meant that we could sit on the couch drinking the aforementioned margaritas and chatting for a good chunk of time.   I modified a recipe for duck carnitas and roasted peach salsita from the book Mod Mex by Scott Linquist and Joanna Pruess, which I found on Google Books (bless them).

The carnitas were great - the flavours of the roasting liquid really permeated the meat, and it was very tender.  I changed a couple of things in the recipe: I only used a tablespoon of condensed milk rather than the cup called for, which struck me as a weird addition; I used half duck fat and half lard because I am moderately skint at the moment; I also cooked the meat for a bit over two hours and reckon it would be even better cooked for three, rather than the one and a half they say).  If I’d had the time and energy I would have cooked the mole they suggest to go with it, but since I had neither I just made the peach salsita, though using yellow-fleshed nectarines because I couldn’t find any ripe peaches.  When I make this again (and it will be when, not if, because it was great) I won’t add the orange juice and honey they call for at the end - it tasted superb before they were added, and was much too sweet (and too soupy) after they went in.

So, for future reference and tweaking, here’s the version I would start with next time:

Duck carnitas
Preheat the oven to 150°C . Take 4 duck legs, salt them liberally, and place in a bowl for 1 hour to remove excess moisture.  Pat them dry (and brush off any obvious salt clumps) and place them in a lidded ovenproof dish. Add 500 g of duck fat and/or lard, 12 black peppercorns, 6 bay leaves, 6 peeled cloves of garlic, 6 allspice berries, 2-3 arbol chillies, 1 stick of cinnamon, 1 cup fresh orange juice, 1 cup of light Mexican beer, and 1-2 tablespoons sweetened condensed milk.  Heat on the stove until the fat has melted, then cover with the lid and place in the oven for about 3 hours, or until the flesh is very tender and almost falling off the bones.  Remove the duck legs, let them cool, then pull off the skin and throw it away, pull out the bones and put them in the stock bag of fowl bits in the freezer, and shred the meat.

They say to then cook the duck in a skillet with some oil for 2-3 minutes until it’s browning and crisping.  All I managed to do during this stage was make the duck stick horribly to the frypan - I really wish I had the faintest idea how to deal with meat - so I’m not sure I would do this part again.  The duck looked and tasted pretty damn good even before this step.

Peach salsita
Fry a finely chopped small onion in olive oil for about 8 minutes over low-medium heat, until translucent.  Add two finely chopped garlic cloves and half a finely chopped serrano chili (or to taste), and saute for 1 minute more.  Add 3 ripe peaches (or 6 ripe nectarines), pitted and chopped into medium dice.  Continue cooking for 5 minutes or so, until the fruit is soft but still holding its shape.  Remove from heat and let cool. Taste the salsa, and if it needs sweetening add a squeeze of orange juice and/or honey (it may well not need either if the fruit started off sweet).  Add a pinch of salt to taste. Fold in a good handfulof chopped coriander leaves.

Use small tortillas to make soft tacos with the carnitas and salsita, together with whatever other ingredients take your fancy.  I think you need something a little moist and sticky to hold it all together - we used guacamole but sour cream or mole sauce would also work.

Ta-da, made it by midnight!  Happy new year chaps!

Don’t get excited! You know I’m only here because it’s between Christmas and New Year and I’m kidding myself that I have time for this in my life.  But let’s see - maybe if I don’t have to code the bloody RSS feed by hand I might actually drop by now and then.  You never know.

There won’t, however, be many photos of food.  The sun sets in Brisbane at afternoon-o’clock all year round, so we rarely eat dinner in daylight, and food photographed by electric light is actively un-appetising.  I take hope from the fact that one of my long-term favourite food blogs, Hungry Tiger (currently offline?), is also infrequently updated and photo-less, and yet remains inspiring to me.

Finally, after this ungracious re-beginning, a very genuine thank you and apology to all those people who emailed me over the last year or so asking where I was, and received no reply.  The answer was that I had my head up my academic posterior, alternately panicking and blissfully enjoying myself (kinky!).  I anticipate lots more intra-posterior insertion in the year to come, but I will try and extract myself now and then.