Andrew Boyd reviews life, design, and Shiraz
It’s official: Amazon.com says that Aussie breakfast spread Vegemite tastes like crap!
Try this for yourself - go to Amazon and do a search on Vegemite. Look at the second search result - that’s right, it is a book called What’s Your Poo Telling You?
Australia should send a nasty letter to the UN, or invade Iran, or something… Obviously, some people have no taste at all 
Helen and I ate at Cream (Bunda Street, Canberra) last night. It was the most enjoyable meal I’ve had in weeks.
I needed somewhere relaxing after shopping for a while - we wandered past wagamama and wondered what else there was around. Helen had heard some good things about Cream, so we went in. It was fairly busy for early evening (6PM or so) - and with a central island serving area replete with a dozen different cakes on display and a variety of espresso machnery looked to be set up for the daytime coffee-and-cake set. The menu at the door looked tempting - I like the idea of duck risotto (and would probably eat duck icecream if you gave it to me!). I was willing to give it a go. Helen has an eye for design and spent the first few minutes distracted by the impressive layout and decoration.
The menu is impressive - for some reason the entree menu is the largest part of it, which I found appealing. For an entree, I had the Carpaccio of scallop and salmon - just enough to kill my hunger but delicious, washed down with Asahi beer (on tap at Cream, one of my favourites). Helen had one of the specials, prawn fillets and corn fritters in almond batter, very filling and very nice.
Helen had the duck risotto for a main, and loved it, although she said that the bok choi slightly overpowered the duck. The duck risotto is said to be one of their signature dishes, and my small taste of it confirmed that it is something that I will order for myself on a future visit. I had one of the daily specials, a grilled backstrap of veal served with caramelised onion on a bed of caramelised parsnips. I am not a big parsnip fan but the veal was really really good - I have to admit to sopping up the juices with some beer-battered fries that I ordered as a side dish. The fries were one of the many highlights of the meal - they come with two dipping sauces: a light sour cream and a fresh tomato and basil salsa (of the sort that you wish was served on bruscetta everywhere but never is).
Full as we were by this stage, we couldn’t face the idea of dessert, as tempting as they looked. We did fit a Belgian Top Deck hot chocolate in each, a mixture of white and milk chocolate, again very nice.
Service is important to me, and was excellent throughout.
The verdict? We’re planning to go again, and take friends with us next time. I’d book if going after about 6:30PM at night. It could be a wonderful place for a celebration, coffee and cake through the day, or a beer and fries after work to relax. Entrees ran from around $8.00 to $19.00 for the exotic, mains from around $14.00 and up, and the draft Asahi is $6.50 by the schooner.
It could be that as a relatively new eatery in an over-subscribed Canberra market, Cream are making an extra effort to provide a top dining experience. If so, I hope that they never lose the drive to be excellent - for excellent they are now. The only other reference to a review of Cream was not that positive - perhaps we caught them on a good night? I don’t know, even the best of places has their good days and their bad, and sometimes there are staff members on the tail end of their usefulness. For now, Cream is good.
Yesterday was Anzac Day. While the returned service men and women (and many members of the general public) commemorated the day with a few quiet beers, some of the people serving them were not getting anything extra for working the public holiday. This is a fact of life in the post-WorkChoices world.
Some restaurants add a public holiday surcharge onto your bill. Some of these restaurants are not paying anything extra to their staff for working that public holiday. I’d be interested to find out why - does the electricity and gas cost more on a public holiday? Do their ingredients cost more? My guess (and it is only a guess at this stage) is that it is profiteering - they bung on the surcharge because they can, because we as a restaurant-going public are used to the idea that the people cooking and serving our food are being paid more so we pay the premium.
What do we do about it? I am not sure that we should name and shame restaurants that do this - although it is tempting. At a minimum I think we are entitled to ask the staff if they are getting the benefit of the surcharge - what do you think?
This recipe is adapted from one that Stephanie Alexander wrote in The Cook’s Companion (one of my favourite cookbooks of all time). It serves two people as a main or four as an entree.
Brown a finely chopped onion in a tablespoon of olive oil. Add a 425gm tin of chopped tomatoes. Add whatever herbs you have from this list: basil, thyme, rosemary, oregano, as well as some salt and pepper, and cook until the tomatoes are a nice salsa-y consistency. To the tomato mixture add a chopped red capsicum, two cloves chopped garlic and two sticks of celery. Cook until the celery starts to soften.
Heat a separate pan - when hot add a tablespoon of olive oil. When very hot add 500gm scallops out of the shell (the Coles supermarket frozen ones, while not as good as fresh, certainly serve in this faux cuisine version) and sear for not more than one minute, turning gently two to three times. Pour in 1/4 cup white wine. Not more than a minute later, add the tomato/vegetable mixture and stir through, cooking for not more than one additional minute (in other words, the scallops are not cooked for more than 2 1/2 minutes total). Serve immediately in big bowls.
Stephanie recommends serving it with toast - we rarely eat carbohydrates of an evening so usually avoid bread, but I think it would be a good accompanyment. She also recommends making the tomato sauce from scratch using fresh tomatoes - this would be a nice touch in the summer/autumn.
This isn’t strictly speaking faux cuisine, as it is not faking anything (unless you wanted to use it as a Kari Ramen recipe? It might work!).
What it is though is easy. It’s Saturday morning, Helen is at work, I’m bored and hungry. Here it is!
Two spring onions chopped and lightly fried in some olive oil. Add a good tablespoon of curry paste (I used Patak’s Vindaloo this morning, extra hot!) and stir constantly. Add a chopped baby bok choi. When the bok choi is wilty (not long), add a couple of cups of hot water and maybe a teaspoon of chicken stock powder. Add small tin sandwich tuna and a tin of creamed corn, then a cake of instant ramen style noodles. Read emails and check blog stats for a couple of minutes. Serve.
As in all my recipes, your mileage may vary. If serving this to a wider audience I would probably use a milder curry paste, and maybe add an egg toward the end. Or not.
I’ve had a few emails back and forth with wagamama’s marketing department over the last week or so around the existence and availability of their frequent noodler cards.
I am very pleased to say that they are coming through with the card, and backdating our points.
Thank you, wagamama management, for helping me turn my rant into a recommendation
Best regards, Andrew
This is another in my “slackest” possible faux cuisine series
Laksa (a curry noodle soup) is a favourite of a lot of techy folks here in Canberra. There are two main types of laksa that I’ve been able to identify through research over the years:
I’ve eaten both sorts here in Australia as well as in Malaysia and Thailand. Being on a health kick currently, Helen and I prefer the Penang Laksa - contains more good stuff (the fish) and less fattening stuff (the coconut milk).
Real Penang Laksa involves a whole (sans guts) fish - usually mackerel - being boiled into a state of disintegration then further pounded/shredded into a paste (bones sometimes included - they get soft enough if cooked for long enough).
My slack version is to brown some chopped spring onions in curry paste (something mild like Massuman works well), throw in a couple of tins of sardines, then add some chopped Asian greens (like sam bok or bok choi). Add water, cooked noodles, some basil, and serve.
As promised - the Faux Pho recipe
Throw some chicken stock powder into hot water to taste. Add shallots, an onion, some five spice powder, cumin and cinnamon to taste. Cook over slow heat until the onion starts to soften. Add half a packet of pho (flat rice noodles) and a handful of holy basil. When the noodles are nearly cooke, add a handful of chopped beef. Add more basil to serve and consume while it is still warm.
This is definately not as good as a proper stock made by boiling beef bones for hours and hours. But it is good enough for a lazy slightly hung over brunch.
There is a wonderful Easy Beef Wellington recipe over at cooks.com - they call it “Individual Beef Wellington Steaks”. If you are carnivorous and like steak slathered in mushrooms and don’t mind the taste of pate you’ll probably love it.
Basically, you take trimmed tenderloin steaks (I used sirloin and it worked just fine), cook them in the oven for ten minutes, then chill them (I waited until they were a little cool then put them in the refridgerator). Onto a sheet of puff pastry, put a couple of tablespoons of cooked mushrooms (being lazy I used tinned mushrooms in butter sauce, it worked fine). Put the steak onto the mushrooms, slather pate over the steak, wrap the puff pastry around the whole lot, seal with butter, bake at 200 celsius until the pastry is brown and puffy, eat. Mmmm
I made this for breakfast this morning - it passed the “I’ll have that again!” test so is herewith recorded for posterity.
Place 1 cup cooked rice and a tablespoon of butter in a casserole dish. Add a tin of smoked kippers in springwater, a handful of fresh parsley, and half a handful of fresh basil leaves. Mix well. Crack four eggs over the top of it and bake at 200 degreees Celsius (basically, until the eggs are cooked enough for you).
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