An unplanned trip to Munich

Food bloggers are planners. When food bloggers go on holidays, they pride themselves in researching places to eat and formulating strategies in order to best cover the gustatory highlights of the area of visit. Reservations are made where permitted, forming the rigid pillars of an eating schedule, with less formal dining slotted in at remaining times.

All that forethought is thrown out the window when you find yourself booking tickets to Munich only a week ahead of departure (and getting suitably excited as you’ve never been to Europe before – yay!), and there are more pressing issues as taking an extended work lunch break to get to a bank to make sure you have some Euros up your sleeve before you go.

Monsieur Poisson recently started a new job with a German firm which requires its employees to visit head office to get a better feel of main operations as well as to meet members of their overseas team. As accommodation and his flights are provided, coupled with a normally tough manager being sympathetic and granting me leave, I jumped at the opportunity to tag along.

The husband’s company flies all of its employees business class (not just upper management, ha!) which meant I sat separately in economy on both legs of the journey here. With business tickets costing 3.5 times the price of economy, the choice of potentially having more spending, and eating, money was definitely more attractive. So what does the luxury of a business class ticket buy you?

Danks Street Depot (again!), 9 Jan 2010

There are some friends whom you are more likely to dine with at ‘special’ places. By special I don’t necessarily mean fancy or expensive, but rather places that do certain things particularly well or who source particular ingredients which you know only some friends of yours will appreciate. There is nothing worse than excitedly taking friends to a place you deem ‘special’ only to have them be all blasé about it. Luckily, between Monsieur Poisson and myself, we have many friends who appreciate the finer details of food. Two of these friends are Weirdo and Ms Sourdough whom we decided to have brunch with at Danks Street Depot to celebrate their newly married status after having returned from holidaying overseas.

Ms Sourdough has heard me rave about Danks Street Depot previously but unfortunately has had limited opportunity to dine out in Sydney due to having been based in Canberra for work for the past few years. So now begins not only a new phase of life together with Weirdo, but hopefully some newfound food adventures in Sydney as well!

We are lucky to score a table in the corner of an otherwise packed out café not long after some people leave. Ms Sourdough and Monsieur Poisson both decide to have the ‘Poached eggs with bacon hash, herbed tomato and sourdough toast’. The eggs are nice and soft but the bacon hash is pleasantly not quite what we expect. Instead of the commonly seen grated potato ‘pancake’, this is a fry-up of chunky potato and big cubes of bacon – very hearty indeed.

Weirdo gives in to our slight persuasion (read: pressure) to order the ‘Pepperonata with eggs and lamb merguez sausages’. There’s just something so attractive about a one-pot dish involving sauce with eggs cracked in at the end. The sausages are spicy and firm but not too ‘lamby’, to borrow Weirdo’s words.

I’m not feeling terribly hungry which is most unusual so I order a serve of ‘Garlic bread with nut brown butter and fresh parsley’ for the table to share as well as the ‘Saucisson sec with cornichons’. The garlic bread is from Brasserie Bread and is studded with whole cloves of roasted garlic which are sweet, mellow and earthy. Combined with the nutty butter and deep green parsley, this is heaven on a plate and – I would like to theorise – a perfect cure for a hangover.

The ‘Saucisson sec with cornichons’ is like part of what makes up a Ploughman’s lunch but done French-style. I have a long standing love affair with cured meats and this salami-style sausage with its visible globs of fat and whole black peppercorns does not disappoint. Cornichons, in my book, apart from being rather cute to look at also provide a much needed tartness to cut through the fattiness and strong flavours of most cured meats.

We enjoy some further conversation following our food but, despite us all claiming that we’re full, decide to drive up to Bourke Street Bakery for a bit of a look-see…

Danks Street Depot

2 Danks St (cnr Young St), Waterloo NSW

Tel: (02) 9698 2201

Opening Hours:  Mon-Wed  7:30am-4pm

Tues-Sat  7:30pm-10pm

Sun  9:30am-3pm

happy eating!

Epicure Recipe Card #28: Risotto all’Arrabbiata

I had good intentions of following this recipe card to the letter in order to have a resulting dish that resembled the intended, instead of the multitude of variations that I seem to keep putting all the other recipe cards through. However, this was not to be as I scanned through the list of ingredients and came across pancetta. This is not normally an issue as it’s easy to substitute with bacon but – oh, horror of horrors – for the only time in as long as I can remember there was no bacon in my fridge or freezer. Yes, you read correctly: NO BACON! The perfectly good explanation for this is that the butcher from where I normally purchase bacon is undergoing renovations and I just haven’t been able to bring myself to buy either packaged stuff or overpriced bacon from particular supermarkets or delis.

So my brilliant idea was to use chorizo. Which then made me think of prawns. And with these two incorporations, the risotto in the end was no longer an all’arrabbiata. It was tasty nonetheless and is one of the two better risottos I’ve made over the years. I think my past problems have been taking too literally the instructions that say ‘wait until all stock is absorbed until adding further’ and I suspect I’ve been allowing the risotto to dry out a bit too much in the process. This recipe card actually instructed to ‘keep the rice wet’ which helped immensely in my case. Any thoughts, tips or pointers in this area?

The other unusual substitution I had to make was for the tinned tomatoes which were stipulated. I didn’t want to open the 800g can in the pantry to use only 300g of it and have to think of something else to do with the remainder in the near future (I know, serious laziness). You’ll see in the ingredients list that I’ve used a medium tomato chopped up, tomato paste and some tomato passata instead which worked quite well. The only thing missing in the end was some chopped parsley to sprinkle over the top for both colour and taste, but I really can’t handle having dying herbs in my fridge.

Risotto with Chorizo & Prawns (serves 2)

(adapted from The Age – Epicure 50 Best Recipe Cards, recipe by Jill Dupleix)

Ingredients:

·         1 tbs olive oil

·         1 chorizo sausage, sliced into rounds

·         prawns (as many as you like), split in half lengthways

·         1 garlic cloved, crushed

·         ½ onion, finely diced

·         1 cup risotto rice, unwashed

·         700mL hot, simmering vegetable or chicken stock (you may need more or less than this)

·         1 medium ripe tomato, roughly chopped

·         1 tbs tomato paste

·         ½ cup tomato passata

Method:

1. Heat oil in a heavy saucepan over medium-high heat and cook chorizo until almost crisp. Throw in prawns until opaque and curled. Remove from pan and set aside.
2. Reduce heat to medium then add garlic and onion to the pan. Cook until onion is soft and translucent before adding rice. Stir rice to coat well before adding two ladles of stock. Allow to absorb almost completely before adding more stock, a ladleful at a time. Stir gently and keep adding enough stock to keep the rice wet.
3. Take a grain a rice and check for doneness – it should be soft and sticky but still retain a little bite. When rice is just about ready, throw in the tomato, paste and passata. Cook until most of the liquid is absorbed and the tomato is broken down. Season to taste.
4. Add reserved chorizo and prawns back to pan and stir until well combined and heated through. Serve risotto topped with chopped parsley and black pepper, if desired.

happy cooking!

Five days in Brisbane: Jan Power’s Farmers Markets, 21 Oct 2009

Ahhh, glorious sunny Brisbane weather! The perfect kind of day to amble through farmers markets that happen to be right in the middle of the city. Every Wednesday, Jan Power’s Farmers Markets descend on the space at the top of Queen Street Mall next to Conrad Treasury Casino. As the seasons were definitely taking a turn for the warmer weather, the produce was vibrant and there was colour everywhere.

There were cherry truss tomatoes, massive punnets of plump strawberries, huge mushrooms, bags of unshelled macadamias and a stand that sold many varieties of potted herbs and leafy vegetables. There were samples of chocolate fudge and mango. There were stands selling macarons and large cannoli for only $3.50 (which I forgot to go back and get!), and a stand selling mini lemon meringue pies and fruit tartlets that wouldn’t let me take photos… But there was too much food to be had to dwell on that sour note, although it did mean I didn’t go back to buy a sample box of their products before we left.

Monsieur Poisson and I did the rounds before deciding what goodies we’d be picking up for lunch. We started with a traditional Cornish pastie as the line was not too long there. For $6, we were rewarded with neatly-pleated crumbly pastry holding a hot filling of meat, potato and carrot bound together by a light sauce.

Next stop was for a knackwurst roll. This was by far the most popular stand with a queue weaving down one side the whole time we were there which coincided with the office lunch hour. We chose a spicy knackwurst for $5 which included grilled onions and your choice of sauces to add at the end. Mmmm, smoky spiciness enclosed in a frankfurt casing.

We smelt the aromas of buttery pastry before we even saw the stand shrouded in a black tent, which turned out to sell baked French bread and pastries. We came away with a chocolate croissant and apple Danish for $9.70 thinking we would have them at the end of lunch, but ended up being so full that we had to take them back to the hotel room for eating much later. The wonderful part was that the pastry was still lovely and flaky even after many, many hours.

By this stage we were in need of some refreshment and I had something perfect in mind. We had seen a fresh lemonade stand and I have an extreme soft spot for the lightly fizzed tanginess of fresh lemonade. What’s more, they were promoting a new frozen lemonade product called ‘kwiish’. A large cup cost only $4.50, was frangrantly lemony and so thirst quenching after eating that knackwurst roll under the direct heat of the sun.

Our last stop was a Turkish bakery stand that smelt wonderfully garlicky. Several goods are baked onsite, including pide, so we got to try a meat and cheese one that was extremely fresh. The pide was warm and slightly crusty with a light and doughy centre. The best part was that we found some seats looking at the back of the stall where we got to witness all the action of the cutting up and rolling out of dough. Several large buckets of dough sat nearby, silently rising and pushing off their lids.

I love markets. And if I lived in Brisbane, I’m sure I would have bought things to take home for cooking. But, with this not being the case, I had to be happy with trying the prepared goods from several stands – and we were more than happy do so.

Jan Power’s Famers Markets

Bridge end of Queen Street Mall, next to Conrad Treasury Casino, Brisbane QLD

Opening Hours:  every Wed  10am-6pm (please check website for other locations and times)

happy eating!