1. Referring to food as naughty, sinful, etc. This isn’t the Dark Ages: I think we can stop tying values of good and evil to the freaking bread basket. These value judgements are not useful. Fer Christ’s sake — no, scratch that: for the sake of compassion, decency and, oh, hey, let’s go crazy, maturity, let’s chuck the whole “naughty” thing, okay? It’s twee, stupid, and gets me into a big angry foam. What’s that? Why? Well, I’ll tell you.

1. Guilt and eating. We can do with less of that. Unless you’ve been living at the bottom of a compost heap for the past thirty-odd years, you might have heard that there’s a few people out there with food hangups. Even if you dodge full-blown anorexia, orthorexia or bulimia, it’s possible to be pretty disordered about food, following unhealthy patterns of bingeing, self-loathing, self-reproach and jumbled thinking that leaves you frizzy with anxiety about the avocado on your sandwich. “I nearly ate a Milky Bar earlier today, but instead I went to my dubstep-treadmill class, so I’m a better person.” Food shouldn’t be about how valuable you are as a person, unless you’re Lucrezia Borgia. It’s hard enough to chill out in the middle of a crazy-busy working day without somebody looking pointedly at your goddamn morning tea and hinting that you’re a bad, less-than-worthy person because you happen to want a Tim-Freaking-Tam.
2. Identifying something as a sin means another agent is in the position of forgiving. If your eating is a sin, it’s because some external agent has identified it as such. So some external force also has to forgive you. No. No way, José. It is not up to another external agent to tell me whether my eating is right or wrong, morally acceptable or morally condemnable. I don’t require another person to accept what I’m eating. I eat it because I want to eat it and this shouldn’t be an issue. Driving your car to work is, arguably, a greater moral concern than eating a carton of caramels every day, but nobody calls that sinful, indulgent or naughty.
3. Branding particular foods gives people the social sanction to negatively judge you. If you see someone eating a wedge of cake, suddenly you’ve got the right to assume that action is an illuminating example of their weakness and overall poorer social worth as a person because cake is naughty or wicked. Stop that, it isn’t nice. What a rotten way to talk about people.
4. Equating pleasure with sin is weird. Unless you’re a seventeenth-century European Puritan, you’ve probably figured out that pleasure and living ethically are not mutually exclusive. Love playing soccer? Reading a good book? Jet-skiing? Playing with your kids? Why are those pleasures not wicked, sinful, indulgent? And if the foods that are wicked and sinful are so good — and let’s face it, you’re unlikely to ever see a recipe for a Truly Sinful Dressing-Free Cabbage Slaw, are you? — what are the morally acceptable foods? Is it bran? Vitamin supplements altogether removed from food sources?

This is a feminist issue — not exclusively, but significantly. Look at it this way: what kinds of foods are usually marketed and labelled as naughty and sinful? Chocolate, ice cream, cakes, desserts. Less frequently: cheese platters, mashed potatoes, filet mignon, risotto. None of those are particularly scanty on the calorie side of things, but it’s the girly treats that are branded sinful, wicked, etc.

C’mon, food bloggers: referring to something tasty as wicked is just stupid, cheap and immature. You can do better.

2. The expression “you won’t even miss the meat” (usually with an astonished exclamation mark). Here’s a news flash, broadcast on all channels: some people can struggle through life without the meat. Sometimes they even go without meat for, oh, days at a time. Some true freakazoids go years – YEARS – without meat. Somehow they still manage to cobble together a meaningful existence. Sometimes they even seem happy with their food, even take pleasure in cooking and eating. How do you think they manage? I’ll tell you: meat, frankly, is not obligatory. Even most dedicated meat-lover types don’t eat meat with every meal. You don’t see Cocoa Pops with “tasty enough to make up for lack of meat” on the side of the box, do you? Cheese boards don’t come with whispered apologies for the absence of sausages, do they? Fruit salad doesn’t need a “WARNING DOES NOT CONTAIN MEATS” byline on the menu, does it? What about apple pie? Guacamole? Crackers? It’s not just vegetarian foods that cop this kind of talk: you also see “you won’t believe it’s healthy!” on anything not-horrifically bad for you, which suggests that healthy food is never anything but some sort of drear obligation, endless chewing on flavourless chaff. For crying out loud, people, can we lighten up on this sheer amazement that something could not contain pork chops and still somehow manage to be enjoyable?

I have other quibbles, such as the ubiquitousness of bacon and sriracha in every single food-related discussion anywhere on the Internet and the swarm of Oreo-stuffed baked treats that seems to be sweeping across the blog-o-world (seriously: how busy are you that you can’t take the time to eat your cupcake and then your Oreo?) — but honestly, those are quibbles about other people’s preferences and they don’t really impact me, except my slightly increased risk of eye-roll strain. But the other two are seriously bothering me. If you’re writing about food, think about the language you’re using: think about the messages you’re sending and the judgements you’re making. Yeesh.

Big Red Pot

Okay, maybe not more. The wok and the enormous mixing bowl probably are equal contenders. But I love that dern pot. Originally bought for the purposes of making no-knead bread (you heat a big, cast-iron core like this baby in the oven for a while before the bread dough is ready, then sling the dough in and the lid keeps the steam in and you end up with a beautiful crispy crust) (note to self: cook that bread ASAP), there is very little this pot doesn’t do now. Couscous, pasta, soup, rice, curries: it does it all. Stovetop, barbecue, oven, anywhere good times are had. Lately it’s been getting a lot of exercise serving my other big red love at the moment:

Rat-a-tat-red

Ratatouille. Through an odd set of circumstances we needn’t go into right now (although it involved a gnome, some compromising photos and me being in the right place at the right time), I ended up with an abundance of zucchini and eggplants. When life gives you lemons, you make preserved lemons. When life gives you shitloads of the nightshade family, you make ratatouille. My ratatouille recipe is beautifully simple: roughly chop eggplants, zucchini, capsicum and onions and tumble into your big red pot. Add a cup or so of pitted olives if you have them. Then add two tins of tomatoes, and a generous mix of the herbs and spices that fire your big red love. If you’re me, it’s paprika, cumin seeds, white pepper, salt and more paprika; then you go out and snip some thyme, basil, parsley and marjoram from the garden. Quantities are a little vague: chop up enough to stop said herbs going to seed. Mix well, then add more spices and herbs because you’ve just realised how much ratatouille you’ve made. Seriously, one eggplant, one zucchini, one onion and one capsicum doesn’t seem like much until you get chopping, then it pulls some weird loaves-and-fishes shit and BAM you’ve got a big red pot of big red everything.

Mix well — throw in an empty-tomato-tin’s worth of water for good measure — and put the big red lid on your big red pot. Bake it for about two hours or until you have to go do something outside the house and switch the oven on. Once hot, my big red pot will keep on baking for quite some time after the oven is switched off.

I’ve been making truckloads of this stuff. It freezes really well, so an awkward abundance is magically transformed into stockpiled provisions. We’ve used it:

• puréed as a pizza sauce;
• tossed with pasta;
• mixed with black beans and chillies for burrito frijoles;
• tossed into shakshouka;
• as a cold salsa on wraps;
• served with crusty bread as a fantastic meal all by itself.

Seriously, about twenty minutes’ chopping, then ignore it in the oven for two hours, and you’ve got meals for over a week. Awesome. Tonight I came home and M had taken it to the next level of big red glory:

Oh my big red stars...

Layer ratatouille with lasagna sheets and cheesy sauce, then top with cheese and bake for an hour and you have a lush hot lasagna fit for a bethini.

A brief snap before the elusive lasagna disappears into its natural habitat...

Holy crap, so awesome. You wouldn’t believe how lush, flavoursome, cheesy and delicious this was. The noodles cooked to a firm perfection, the provolone savoury and stringy, the ratatouille thick and rich. Big red love.

Oh, while we’re talking about big red loves:

Red red red red red red red

Recycled Red Redux rolls readily on! Nearly up to the waist already.

And so the legend was born. Inspired by Napoleon Dynamite, a friend of the awesome ilk invented the Dang Quesadilla.

Take yourself some tortillas — homemade unless you’re a lazyboneroo, and I’ll get to that in a sec — and spread half with chopped banana and a crumbly sharp cheese. Fold each tortilla over itself and fry or grill until the cheese is hot and melted and the banana hot. Then top with tomato salsa and sliced avocado and tangy yoghurt (if you’re not me, you can go right ahead and have sour cream there: if you’re me, sour cream = puking).

Sweet quesadilla skills

Take a bite. Holy cow, that’s some good quesadilla right there. The sweetness of the bananas mixes with the sharp salty cheese and adds depth to the salsa and avocado. And the textures are an incredible blend: melted cheese, soft banana and avocado, salsa and crunchy tortillas. It’s crazy-happy-good stuff. Seriously delicious. Do it! Do it nooooow! And make me one.

Now, about those tortillas: why aren’t you making your own, dag-blast-it? They’re super easy and a gazillion times better than store-bought, I’m telling you. For two really big tortillas: take a cup of plain flour, a teaspoon or so of baking powder and a generous teaspoon of salt. Add boiling water, a little at a time, working it into a dough. You want it damp enough to keep together, but not so damp that you get bits of dough stuck to you while handling it. Adjust with a kiss more flour if you need to. Knead it on the bench for a wee while, until it feels thick, cohesive and even: the longer you knead it, the more likely you’ll end up with soft, chewy tortillas. Leave it to rest for a bit; maybe ten to twenty minutes. Then divide into two balls and roll them out super-flat and super-thin. (Pro tip: spray a bit of cooking oil on the bench before rolling them out — it makes the super-thin target just a bit easier.) Dry fry, until those distinctive dalmation spots come up: flip and fry the other side. Give your tortillas a second on a plate wrapped in a plastic bag, or wrapped up in a teatowel — they’re a bit stiff when you first get them out of the pan, and the steam will soften them. Aw yeah. The only real disadvantage is that once you start making your own, you discover the store-bought ones smell weird. Seriously.

Make yourself a Dang Quesadilla!

Now, I hear or imagine you asking, what if you’re the sort of poor unfortunate who is sans cherries? Or, as the French say, sans cerises? Say, for example, the cherry season has ended with its usual suddenness. Now making Clafoutis is no longer a clever way of indulging in the abundance of cherries you’ve got cluttering up the fridge, it’s a million-dollar luxury (note: cherries now cost a million dollars). So what do you do, what DO you DO?

Why, those aren't cherries!

Don’t pop your monocle, bro: that up there is the start of a Flognarde. (Current crowd favourite for best word EVAH 2012.) A Flognarde is a Clafoutis made with anything other than cherries.

Delicious close up of non-cherries. And also some cherries.

Word got out among the bird community that the cherries were ripe: I picked a kilo bag, and then five days later went back and only got nine cherries. Nine. Those birds work fast when they want something. So I pitted my nine last cherries and then moved on to the next abundant fruit in my fruitiverse: the plums. Last year was our first summer in the house, and I was delighted, nay, ecstatic, to discover half a dozen plum trees: greengages, red plums, mirabelles (I think), and a mysterious mini-plum. This year I knew where to stand when the plums started to fall. The mirabelles — yellow skin and flesh clingstones — are particularly abundant, so into the bowl they went, chopped and pitted. I sprinkled the lot with sugar and sherry and let it stand while I had lunch, then poured the custard batter over it: 3 eggs, 60g flour, 60g sugar, dash of vanilla essence, teaspoon of baking powder, and ½ cup of soy milk. Mix it all up and pour over the fruit. Sprinkle some chopped toasted almonds over the top and bake for around an hour:

Pronounced: flog-NAARRRRD

And there’s your Flognarde! If you use moo milk instead of soy milk, use more: I used less because soy milk thickens differently and more slowly. The original recipe, from Athena Plichta‘s blog, uses 300ml of moo milk. I found using that much soy milk made it damn near impossible to set — soy milk lacks the slight fat content of moo milk, which contributes to the setting process as it cooks.

Soy or moo: dude, it’s goooood.

Somewhat squished from enthusiasm, but good.

It’s not a Clafoutis, so don’t expect it to taste like one. It’s a Flognarde, baby! It doesn’t have to meet your Clafoutis expectations! It’s busy being fantastic ALL BY ITSELF. I think this would be Flognarde Aux Prunes (Avec Cerises), but now we’re just being fancy. Perhaps too fancy for our own good.

You could do Flognarde with lots of fruits: any kind of berry would be fantastic; tropical fruits like mango might be a little weird; apple might be a little boring but okay. I think this would work really, really well with apricots: oh man, yes, that would be terrific. I’m dribbling a little just thinking about it. (I also dribble when I’m not thinking at all, so it can be hard to tell. Don’t feel bad.)

Need something tasty? Why not FLOGNARDE?

This gets a million thumbs up. Or it will soon: please send your thumbs to Million Thumbs Up Campaign, GPO Box 230000, Spoonfullyville.

A happy corridor of baked-ery

Fucked if I know, but it was fast, easy, and they taste good. Plus I revelled in my independent adulthood and ate the jam straight from the jar. Stand back, bitches.

Jam. It's got what bethini needs.

Don’t mistake me, I don’t regret a moment of it: all the food I’ve had has been fresh, delicious, homemade stuff. But there was just. So. Much.  Plum  pudding. Roast onions. Hokkein noodles. Clafoutis (that’s mostly my own fault: I have a neurotic twitch that means when cherries are near me I must turn them into clafoutis). Potato and rosemary pizza. Spicy black bean quesadillas. Carrot cake. (Ooooooh M’s carrot cake.)  See what I mean? There were, of course, seasonal treats available: where there’s socialising, there’s nibbles. Roasted macadamias, chocolate-covered sultanas; cherries (see also: clafoutis, above) and plums; wine, lots of wine; cheese…yeah. See? A lot of food., lush and tasty and over-abundant. I’m not one for penitent self-deprivation: but I reach a point where instead of going “a glass of wine! yes please!” I go “ah, wine again, is it?” It’s not so much detox as a blessed relief. I can hear my liver creaking like an old chair, begging for a break. The surrounding organs could use a holiday too, come to think of it. So, how to recover? After you take the initial step of eating less, which comes as a relief, three curative steps.

Part one. Compliments of the season, a friend brought over just what I needed:

Those fuzzy workers know what they're about.

That right there is a wedge of fresh honeycomb, wax and all, oozing fresh honey onto my yoghurt for breakfasat. Say it with me: honey and yoghurt. Fresh honey, homemade yoghurt. Oh yes. It’s as good as it sounds — it tastes heavenly, smooth and clean and fresh and nourishing.

Nourishing part two (of which there are no pictures because  it’s all frozen in tubs): ratatouille. Slow-cooked ratatouille is the total bomb. Chopped eggplant, capsicum, zucchini, onions (didn’t have any capsicum for this round), mixed with a couple of tins of tomatoes, a little water, and whatever spices and herbs are closed to hand. This batch got parsley, marjoram, thyme, paprika, cumin, the last spoonful of tapenade from the bottle, and a huge blob of chilli jam. Roast for a couple of hours, then eat hot or cold. I’ve been known to puree leftover ratatouille for pizza sauce, and it’s pretty good cold on tortillas. I’ve got enough stockpiled in the freezer for weeks.

Part three: go for a really long walk. If your life is as awesome as mine, you’ll go for a drive with some mates to the beach and go on a fantastic bushwalk for an afternoon. You’ll clock up a couple of k’s and see a brown snake and a goanna, and when you come home you’ll feel tired and clean and goooood. Moving around after a few days of, well, not, felt mighty fine. Powerful fine. Pass me my yoghurt, I’m feeling better already.

0. Preheat oven to 180°C.

1. Cherries. Traditionally, you leave the pits in: they keep the cherries juicier and impart a slight almond flavour to the mix. They’re also an hilarious challenge to unsuspecting consumers. So I pitted them. Pile your cherries into a baking dish, making sure you at least cover the bottom.

First you do this.

Some recipes suggested soaking the cherries in kirsch, but I decided against doing so for the following two reasons: (1) I have no kirsch; and (2) I have a huge bottle of cooking sherry to use up. So I drizzled the sherry over and left it to soak in while I took care of the rest.

2. Toast some slivered almonds. ‘Nuff said. Didn’t even bother photographing this bit.

and then this happens!

3. Make some batter:

• 3 eggs
• 300mL milk (I used soy milk because we’re running low on moo)
• 60g flour
• 60g sugar
• tsp baking powder
• generous sploosh of vanilla

Whisk all the batter bits together until it’s really smooth, then pour it over your waiting cherries.

3b. (optional) You might, at this point, discover you have more batter than you need: you really want some fruit peeping out the top. So you could bake the remaining batter in another dish, or make it into pancakes, or fling it over a rainbow: but if you’re me, and don’t want to make more washing-up for yourself, you’ll simply top up the dish with all the remaining cherries and pour the entirety of the batter in.

4. Top with toasted almonds and pop in the oven.

Clafoutis goes in...

5. Yay!

Let your clafoutis cool: it’s nice warm, but I don’t know about hot. Plus I was still full from dinner, so I wrapped it up to cool on the bench overnight. Clafoutis for breakfast. Yessir.

Sleep tight, clafoutis! mwah mwah mwah

When you take it out of the oven, it will still be slightly wibbly in the middle: it should deflate and set as it cools. Mine was still a wee bit squidgy when it came time to cut it. Next time, I’ll cook it in a bigger, shallower dish, since I had to nearly double the cooking time for it. I also suspect using soy milk instead of moo milk has an effect: I think the higher fat content of moo milk makes it set better, but I’m only speculating (read: talking out my arse).

And I will definitely, definitely be making this again: how easy is it? Fruit; batter; almonds (optional); cook. Unexpected bonus: if you make it with anything other than cherries, it’s called a flaugnarde which is incredibly fun to say. Try alternating it with “plotz”, as in “this flaugnarde will totally make you plotz” and you will win friends and influence people. Trust me.

I’m not used to big, chewy, sugar-and-butter-laden, chocolate-chippified snacks. I’m typing at the speed of sound while doing a bidding war on eBay for something I don’t want while Skypeing with my Nan and singing along to Depeche Mode. I’ve never felt so ALIVE!

Oh, now I’m sad. Another cookie, please.

Let’s talk about this.

1. “Kitchen Sink Cookies“: biscuits with heaps of things added. “Kitchen Sink” as in “Everything but the…”. Can be applied to soups, stir fries, casseroles, bakes and the like. How does this not conjure up images of soggy biscuits covered in used tea leaves, squashed under dirty cutlery and plates with bits of dried egg? Is everyone else using their kitchen sinks for something far more dainty and neat than I? Have I been committing a huge faux pas all this time, using my kitchen sink for dirty dishes? I wouldn’t want to eat anything named after that zone.

3. “Garbage Quiche/Soup“: in application, very similar to the “Kitchen Sink” approach. Scraps and leftovers from the week revived in quiche or soup form. I am totally behind this practice, but the name…Imagine it: your friends show up one evening, bearing a much nicer bottle of wine than you’d usually buy for yourself, and you say “Fantastic! That will go really nicely with the Garbage Quiche!” The name suggests you scraped out the scungy stuff from the bottom of the crisper and the lid of the compost bin and slapped it in a pot. Eat up, chums.

2. “Chockablocks“: What a whimsical little name! Definition: biscuits with loads of extras: oats, sultanas, nuts, chocolate bits, etc. They are chock-a-block with extras. GET IT? If you’re more than eight years old you have no excuse for employing twinkly twee twiddlesome names like this. You start with chockablocks, then you move on to snickerdoodles, suddenly you’re wearing a flouncy apron, ironing your colour-coordinated tea towels and crinkling your nose if the dog hasn’t been washed in the past hour. You’re probably the kind of person who sees nothing gross about the name “Kitchen Sink cookies” because your kitchen sink smells like cinnamon and is so shiny it keeps the neighbours awake at night.

4. “Icebox Cake“: after seeing a bunch of recipes on foodgawker labelled “Icebox Cake”, I had to look it up. I mean, I know what an Icebox is — an old-timey word for frij — but I didn’t understand its relevance to the recipe. Now I get it: it’s because you leave the cake, once assembled, in the icebox overnight! CLEVER. I’m going to start calling everything I make by its preparation or storage equipment. Can I offer you another bowl of Tupperware Container Soup? You can have some Pantry Crackers and Crisper-First-But-Then-On-The-Bench-For-A-While Cheese to go with it.

5. “Impossible Pie“: this is one I learned from Aunts and Grandmothers (misc.). It isn’t always pie, but the “Impossible” part of the recipe name is essential. It’s an Impossible Pie because…wait for it…it’s IMPOSSIBLE to stuff it up! Hah! I assert that it is completely unnecessary to have a joke in a recipe title. I further assert that, if you’re going to make that sort of claim, you’d better have the balls to back it up, mate. I hear that recipe name/punchline, and I think “impossible, you say?” Believe me, I will dedicate myself to fucking up that recipe, ruining your joke, wasting the ingredients and swearing at the children.

Right. Feeling much calmer now I’ve got that off my chest. Strozzapretti, anyone?

Where was I? Oh yes, breakfast. Breakfast rocks: you know all the health stuff, so I won’t wave that around too much (all I can say is, yes, a healthy breakfast is completely fantastic and you’re a fool if you don’t do it, but it’s not going to undo the damage if all you eat the rest of the day is chips and crystal meth). The other thing to remember is how delicious it is. Breakfast gets the best foods. Today’s evidence: muesli. I’m a sucker for toasted muesli, but the other day when I was out for breakfast with M, I ordered untoasted muesli in the café. Well. Yes. It was bliss.

This is my attempt to recreate The Gods untoasted muesli. The most heavenly arresting thing was the coconut and almonds, so that’s what I focused on. Unsurprisingly, it was really easy to make: I just filled up the jar with each layer until the proportions looked about right.

bottled goodness

Contains:

• 420g untoasted rolled oats
• 100g untoasted, unsalted slivered almonds
• 130g untoasted, unsalted pepitas
• 75g untoasted, unsalted sunflower seeds
• 90g untoasted, dried, shredded coconut
• 150g sultanas

Method:
Seriously? Mix in a jar. Scoop into a bowl or eat straight from the jar. I don’t care, I aintcha Mum.

While running a while ago, I hurt my leg/hip/arse in a very enthusiastic manner. (I am nothing if not thorough.) It has left me hobbly and cranky for weeks, only just managing the walk from the car to the house, nevermind running. The other night I dreamed I was running again. I was so happy. What made me super happy was this: as I ran, I shovelled oats into my mouth, by the fistful, from my hip bag. I take this as a sign. This untoasted muesli is going to make me big and strong and get me running again! Yeah! Because there’s no better medical advice than that dispensed by the borderline-pyschotic unconscious mind during the vibrant hallucinations of sleep.

Close-up deliciousness!

Tomorrow this will be my delicious filling healthy breakfast, with fresh apple and soy milk. Since it would take some sort of bizarre cosmic coincidence (or simultaneous cohabitation) for you to also enjoy this tomorrow for breakfast as well, I can only wish you well as you dine on your pencil shavings and frozen peas or whatever you people who don’t make muesli eat.