Spicy Moroccan Butter

Dry leaves are swept up, swirled momentarily then tumbled among the debris around the yard. Magpies struggle, warbling in protest, to hold on to the overhead wires they pendulously grip. There’s an unmistakable icy bite in the air. Our lilli pilli tree, as sweetly a named native as one could hope, is dropping juicy bombs of pink that explode on the deck. The small, pretty fruit can be made into jams and jellies, an old fashioned kind of Australian cooking, but as most recipes seem to require shocking amounts of sugar to impart any actual flavour, I’m content to sweep the daily windfall away. The lemon tree, far more useful, is bearing loads of ripe yellow globes that are being squeezed into, and over, everything.

Poaching quinces with rosewater and dried cherries to sit atop morning porridge; layering vegetables in a dish, bathing them in stock and a dribble of oil; carving smiling wedges from a hefty pumpkin. Cool weather pleasures abound in the months ahead. There will be bracing dog walks on the beach, dodging the eerily blue jellyfish deposited along the shore by wilder, seasonal waves, and gnarled driftwood to collect along the way. Ours is an ever expanding pile. Winds that blow away the cobwebs; scarves and socks and not shaving your legs. Reading and writing in a sunlit room on a bright, cold day. The joy of running without muttering breathlessly about the ‘bloody heat’.

Some rain came this week and washed away the fragment of self doubt that’s been hanging around. I walked the dog during one of the exceptionally gorgeous breaks between downpours. It was only then that the flame reds and burnished golds of autumn were, finally, revealed. What can I say? It was beautiful. Back in the kitchen I realized that pumpkin wasn’t going to carve itself. Then Cindy reminded me that the combination of fennel and pumpkin is utterly inspired. I got out the Big Knife and merrily carved away.

So, what’s for dinner? I’m very glad you asked.

Pumpkin, fennel and olive pies – feeds 4-6 (makes 8)

Do I really need to tell you that what makes this so very good is the Spicy Moroccan Butter? It’s based, in part, on a Paula Wolfert recipe via Deborah Madison’s Savory Way. It has loads of uses, but roasted with a tray of vegetables it is exquisite. The rest? Well, that's all my own work. And yes, I do know that filo really is better when brushed with melted butter than oil. Do as your conscience and waistline see fit...

Spicy Moroccan butter/oil:

½ teaspoon of sea salt
4 spring onions, white part only, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 heaped teaspoon of smoked paprika
1 tablespoon of cumin seeds
1 teaspoon of coriander seeds
1 teaspoon of fennel seeds
½ teaspoon of hot chilli powder
Small handful of parsley, chopped
Small handful of coriander (cilantro), chopped
125g (½ cup) of unsalted butter or 1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil

Using a mortar and pestle, crush the sea salt, spring onions, garlic and spices to make a paste. Add the herbs, and pound until quite smooth. Chop the butter roughly and pound it into the paste until well combined. Form the butter into a log, wrap tightly, and place in the fridge to rest while you get on with the recipe. If you’re using the oil, blend in all together well and set aside. The butter, well sealed and frozen, will keep for months; the oil in a lidded jar in the fridge for 1 week.

The pies:
1 kilo (2 generous lbs) of pumpkin (winter squash)
2 fennel bulbs, trimmed, soft fronds reserved
Olive/macadamia oil
Spicy Moroccan butter (see above)
2 handfuls of kalamata olives
1/3 cup of pine nuts, toasted
1 packet of filo pastry (thawed if frozen)

Preheat the oven to 180 C (375 F).

Peel the pumpkin and discard the seeds. Chop into chunks and place in a baking tray. Quarter, core and thickly slice the fennel bulbs. Add to the pumpkin, drizzle over a little oil and dot with 2 rather generous tablespoons of the butter. Bake for 45-50 minutes, tossing once the butter has melted and twice more during the process.

Chop the reserved fennel fronds. Pit the olives and roughly chop. When the vegetables are ready, remove from the oven and toss with the fennel fronds, olives and toasted pine nuts. Roughly divide the filling into 8.

Unfurl the pastry on a bench and place a clean tea towel on top. Brush the first sheet with a little oil and top with another sheet. Continue oiling and layering until 6 sheets thick. Using a sharp knife, cut the pastry in 2 widthways. Spoon the filling in the centre of each filo sheet, top with a little more butter if you dare, and gently bring the sides up. Pinch to make a ruffled ‘purse’. Brush with a little more oil, place on a lightly oiled baking tray and continue with the remaining pastry and filling to make 8.

Bake for 30-40 minutes, until golden and shatteringly crisp. Serve with a salad of bitter leaves dressed with grain mustard and red wine vinegar.

Fennel

Fennel, for a pasta sauce.

Caramelized with onions, garlic, saffron, wine-plumped currants and golden pine nuts.

Two huge handfuls of parsley at the end.

Rich with grassy olive oil and redolent of warmer days.

Fennel and a visit

Friends from Sydney were in Melbourne over this gloriously-weathered Easter weekend. Good Friday was spent lazing around in the sun reading and thinking, the Artist painting in the background, before slowly making my way into the kitchen for a simple, favourite meal for two very dear friends.

Emma was the first person I met on that first, agonizingly scary day of art school. She wore stripy leggings and an over-sized bright green shirt. I wanted to be her friend immediately. Luckily, though others have wended their way in and out of our lives, Em and I have always remained close.

We’ve shared two homes together, at very different times in our lives. Firstly in our early twenties in a three storey, rambling house in the inner west, then in our late twenties we shared a small, calm flat near the eastern suburbs beaches. Then the Artist turned up at a conference and before I knew it I was living in Melbourne. Em has taught me many things – how to laugh hysterically; how to knit a scarf when I gave up smoking. She’s always been a huge, positive force on my creative life.

Nowhere is that more evident than in the kitchen.

Emma and her lovely partner Will, raised as a vegetarian, are vegetable lovers. And so, what better to cook on a frosty autumnal night than a dish of wine-glazed lentils and tender, caramelized braised fennel?

They loved it. I am very lucky indeed.

Wine-glazed lentils – for 4

This is adapted from Deborah Madison’s ‘Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone’. The lentils are also known as ‘Le Puy’. I’ve never had any trouble finding them – let me know if you do. These can be prepared a few hours ahead.

1 ½ cups of French green lentils, sorted (of little stones) and rinsed

Sea salt and pepper

1 fresh bay leaf

2 teaspoons of olive oil

1 onion, finely chopped

1 large carrot, cut into tiny dice

1 stick of celery, cut into tiny dice

1 garlic clove, very finely chopped

1 tablespoon of tomato paste

1/3 cup of red wine

1 tablespoon of Dijon Mustard

2 tablespoons of butter or extra virgin olive oil

2 teaspoons of chopped parsley or tarragon

Place the lentils in a saucepan with 3 cups of water, 1 teaspoon of sea salt and the bay leaf. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat to a lively simmer and cook until the lentils are tender but still hold a little texture, about 25 minutes.

Meanwhile heat the oil in a medium-sized saucepan. Add the onion, carrot, celery and ½ a teaspoon of sea salt and cook over a medium heat, stirring frequently until the vegetables are browned, about 10 minutes. Add the garlic and tomato paste and cook for 1 more minute, then add the wine. Bring to the boil, lower the heat and cover with a lid. Simmer gently for 10 minutes until the vegetables are tender and the liquid is syrupy.

Stir in the lentils with their cooking water and the mustard. Simmer the whole lot until the sauce is mostly reduced, then stir in the butter and season with pepper. Serve sprinkled with the parsley.

Braised fennel – for 4

Fennel is my favourite vegetable; here it is cooked in a way that will convince anyone of its culinary virtue. It’s very easy – don’t let the long method fool you.

6 bulbs of fennel

2 tablespoons of olive oil

2 onions, peeled and finely chopped

2 cloves of garlic, peeled and finely chopped

1 fresh bay leaf

A few sprigs of thyme, leaves only

Sea salt and pepper

¼ cup of mirin (sweet Japanese cooking wine)

1 tablespoon of unsalted butter or 1 tablespoon of good olive oil

Choose the biggest sauté pan you have. It must have a lid for this to work, though you can fashion a make-shift one out of kitchen foil.

Trim the tops from the fennel, reserving the feathery fronds and then discard any badly bruised outer leaves. Finely chop the feathery bits. Carefully trim the root end, leaving it in tact. Cut in half from top to bottom and set aside.

Warm the oil in the pan over a medium-high heat and toss in the onions. Cook, stirring frequently, for 5 minutes before adding the garlic and herbs. Cook, still stirring, until the onion just starts to brown.

Push the onions to one side of the pan. Add the fennel, cut side down, in a single layer. Spoon the onions around the fennel, sprinkle in a little salt and pepper then add one cup of water. Cover tightly with a lid (or some foil if you’re sans lid), lower the heat to medium and cook until the liquid has mostly off (about 10-12 minutes).

Give some of the onions a stir, taking care not to move the fennel. Add ½ cup of water, pop your lid back on and bubble away for 15-20 minutes. It should be tender but still a little firm when pierced with a sharp knife.

Remove the fennel from the pan to a plate. Pour in the mirin and ¼ cup of water. Add the butter and scraping the caramelized bits from the pan as you go, stir well. When it’s reduced by roughly half, add the chopped feathery fennel tops.

Place a mound of lentils on four plates, distribute the fennel, cut-side-up and spoon the sauce over the top of the fennel.

There was also a salad, dressed with red wine vinegar and an orange-scented olive oil.

There was a dense, Passover-friendly cake too.

Cake, later.

Salad for two

I am not a natural salad maker. Never have been. Don’t get me wrong, I love a salad, well-dressed, tossed at the last possible minute and arranged with love, and will happily eat a whole bowl completely on my own. It’s just that often a salad in itself doesn’t quite seem to be enough and I find myself opting to make something a little more complex, as though a salad just isn’t enough work.

But something has changed. Maybe it’s the weather. Maybe it’s attempting to eat as many vegetables as possible every day. Whatever it is, salads are appearing on our table as complete meals on their own, much to my surprise and delight.

I bought some beautiful organic blueberries from the market on Saturday morning and found a rather sad-looking bulb of fennel lurking about at the back of the fridge on our return. This salad (doesn't it look spunky?) was what we ate in the afternoon.

Look, this salad goes against one of my old principles – that fruit and vegetables should not play together – combining the incredibly unlikely combination of oranges, blueberries (rich in antioxidants) and wafer-thin slices of fennel (a source of gentle, crisp bitterness in our overly-sweet Western diet). What can I say? It’s luscious. It comes, with a little adaptation by me, from Nadine Abensur’s ‘Crank’s Bible’. And it looks so beautiful.

Salad of fennel, avocado and blueberries

Serves 2 for lunch, or a light dinner

For the dressing:
Juice of ½ an orange
1 small clove of garlic VERY finely chopped
A small handful of fresh coriander, finely chopped
½ tablespoon of good olive oil
2-3 drops of balsamic vinegar
2 teaspoons of tamari (or soy sauce)

Mix all of this together and set aside.

For the salad:
1 small bulb of fennel, sliced wafer-thin
2 oranges, peeled, seeded and segmented
1 ripe and gorgeous avocado, peeled, stoned and sliced
A small handful of fresh blueberries
1 tablespoon of walnuts, broken up with your fingers

Combine all of the ingredients in a shallow salad dish and toss very gently with the dressing (maybe not all of it, especially if your oranges were as juicy as mine) and serve immediately with extra coriander sprigs if you can be bothered.

Happy Passover and Happy Easter

How wonderful that these two festivals fall at roughly the same time this year. My partner, The Artist and my two teenage step-sons, The Actor and The Musician are Jewish so for them this week or so is all about traditional Ashkenazi eating. Chicken soup with matzoh balls, matzoh pancakes, matzoh for breakfast...not a lot of variety when you cut out wheat and grain products really. So, in honour of the fact that as a family we are not all Jewish, nor are we all that traditional (in any respect!) we have decided to eat the Sephardic way. Rice, corn and lentils, all forbidden to Eastern European Jews during this period are going to be consumed in copious amounts and this fits really well into a wholefood kind of lifestyle anyway.

I made the chicken soup the Ashkenazi way (with a lovely organic, free range chook) to please my younger step-son the Musician as he particularly seems to require things in their more traditional state, and used Claudia Roden's The Book of Jewish Food, something that has proven invaluable to an outsider like me for making things like matzoh balls and is a joy to read. The soup was delicious, but next year will be different - I'm working on a fabulous chicken soup with chickpeas, saffron and cinnamon with my own stamp.

So last night, I made an absolutely delicious and wholesome dinner for the Artist and myself. Good Friday always requires a great fish dish, so we had ocean trout fillets (they were farmed I'm sure, but tasted great) with garlicky lentils and braised fennel. The lentils and the fennel I'll give the recipes for - the fish was just baked in a hot oven for 20 minutes with a coating of finely chopped parsley and fennel fronds. I can't claim the fennel or the lentils as my own, though they have been tweaked a bit to fit my style of cooking. They come from Nadine Abensur's book Enjoy, one of the best and most inventive vegetarian cookbooks ever.

Garlicky lentils

These lentils make enough to serve 4, but if you're cooking for 2 make the full amount and eat the rest for lunch the next day. All beans and pulses need to be cooked with no salt. Salt will toughen the skins and then you'll never have a tender lentil, so add salt only right at the end (though you won't need much - all that garlic makes it very savoury anyway).

1 tblsp olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
250g of puy lentils (I used the TLC Australian ones)
2 cardamom pods, bashed with a knife
1 star anise pod
1/2 tsp of dried chilli flakes
4 cloves of garlic, peeled but left whole
2 cloves of garlic, peeled and finely chopped
500ml of water
80ml of sherry (I used the 'Pedro Ximenez' Spanish type)

Heat the oil in a saucepan with a lid and add the onion, spices and all the garlic. Fry until the onion is soft, then add the lentils and the water. Bring to the boil, clamp on the lid and lower the heat to a gentle simmer. The lentils should not lose their shape and texture, but they must be absolutely tender (your digestive system will thank you for it) so cook them for at least 40 minutes but probably closer to 1 hour. When they are cooked, and there is only a small amout of liquid left in the pan add the sherry and simmer for another 10 minutes or so. Serve hot.

Slow braised fennel

I know that many people claim to not like the strong aniseed taste of fennel. Neither did I until I learned how to cook it well. Now I like it even when raw! Fennel is great for digestion, thus its pairing with the lentils. This is the MOST wonderful thing to eat.

Serves 2

1 tblsp of olive oil
2 bulbs of fennel, or 4 baby ones
1/2 tsp of fennel seeds
1 clove of garlic, peeled and finely chopped
Sea salt
vegetable stock (a stock cube is fine, but try to get a good quality one eg. Massel or Marigold Swiss)
50 ml of sweet Spanish sherry ('Pedro Ximenez' is ideal)

NOTE: You'll need a juicer for this recipe, but see below for another way to do it.

Cut the tops off the fennel, reserving about 2 tablespoons of the feathery fronds. Cut away the very base of the bulb and tear off any tough outer layers (the first one is usually enough). Juice the tops and the outer layers to make a beautiful bright green liquid.

Quarter the fennel bulbs from top to bottom. Heat the oil in a frying pan in which the fennel quarters will fit cosily. Add the fennel, the fennel seeds, the reserved fennel fronds, the garlic and a little chilli if you like along with a pinch of sea salt and gently fry, moving around occasionally until the fennel has 'caught' on the bottom of pan in places, turning an attractive golden mottled colour. Cover with the juice and some stock - it's difficult to say how much, but the fennel needs to be almost covered by the liquid. If you haven't got a juicer, just use stock - it is just as delicious and less fuss too! Cook at a fast simmer until the fennel is tender and covered in a small amount of sticky sauce. It helps to make sure that the cores of the fennel are immersed in the stock for longer that the outer layers, so turn the fennel as you need to. It will take about 30 minutes to reduce, so will be ready when the lentils are (hopefully!).

Add the sherry and simmer until all is reduced and sticky as before. Serve hot with the lentils and the fish if you like, or plain rice would be lovely to make a perfect protein meal for vegetarians or vegans.

This braising method works well for celery and carrots also.