It's a love/hate relationship.

Although my collection would suggest otherwise, there are some things about Gourmet Traveller that I dislike.

Number one on that list is the branding of it as a "luxury" magazine.  I know the food is luxurious (although often not that expensive - the agar agar for the parmesan marshmallows was 80c.  An affordable experiment) but it irritates me that this translates to an expectation the rest of your life will be equally luxurious (and these extras do have the pricetag to accompany them).

Exhibit A:  This month's Gourmet has a section on champagne.  Oh Good, thinks I, who have been known to enjoy a glass (or two) of bubbles on the odd occasion (or even occasion for that matter).  So I turn to the section and find it really is a section on Champagne with a big C - the proper stuff.  The cheapest bottle featured is a steal at $85.  Most hover around the $100-$150 mark, but if you're feeling like splashing out, there is a $220 bottle (the 1999 Charles Heidsieck Rose Reserve, if you're interested).   

But ok, fancy pants wine can perhaps be expected - it is Gourmet Traveller after all.   And good wine and serious food are often a pretty good match.  (A bottle of $10 lambrusco and serious food can also be a pretty good match in my experience, but I suspect I am a wine philistine.)

So onto Exhibit B:  A piece on party invites for adults.  Instead of emailing or ringing your friends to invite them over to your house, why not drop them a note?  So much nicer in the age of instant communication.  And if it takes a $31 set of invitations, each enclosed in its $7.50 envelope (yes, that's per envelope) - well, so much nicer.

I don't have the money to spend on stationary like that - I'm too busy buying agar agar!  And king prawns, which did put a little more dent in the wallet than the agar agar.  A worthwhile dent though, because this brings us to the love part of love/hate.

The food.  When it all goes right, it is so wonderfully right.

Last night's dinner was this chicken, prawn and caramel coconut salad from a recipe from Longrain.  It was a perfect Thai recipe, a wonderful balance of salty, sweet, pungent, sour and hot.  

It wasn't the quickest recipe - the chicken had to be poached in a heady mix of coconut milk, stock (I used duck stock Tony had made a few weeks ago - very nice indeed), fish sauce, ginger, garlic, lemongrass and oyster sauce, cooled and then shredded.  The coconut caramel sauce was made with palm sugar, coconut (well, dur), shrimp floss, shrimp paste (lot of shrimp featuring here), fish sauce and lime juice.  Then the shredded king prawns, chicken and dressing was tossed with mint, coriander, julienned ginger and chillies.

It was AMAZING.  Cooking, I was a little worried - the dressing was very pungent, and I was afraid it would overwhelm the delicate prawns.  I shouldn't have been.  It all combined perfectly, and we polished off the whole thing.  Definitely a keeper.  And for the money I saved by not sending Tony an invitation in the mail on luxury paper, we can probably even make it again.

Soup, glorious soup

Every month, Gourmet Traveller has a section called Fare Exchange, where readers write in to request recipes of dishes they have eaten at a restaurant (Fare Exchange - geddit?  Because it's food, so it's fare, but it's fair - oh, nevermind).

The recipe we tried out last night was from this section, and it is Church St Enoteca's green pea soup with parmesan marshmallows.

This is how it looks in Gourmet:

And this is how it looked at our house:

We're missing the fiddly bits on top because we didn't have some of them, and after 2 1/2 hours of being in the kitchen (to make bread, soup and those parmesan marshmallows) I just couldn't be bothered with the bits we did have.  

The bubbles are there partly because we were celebrating - Tony was officially offered a job at UC - and partly because after 2 1/2 hours in the kitchen making bread, soup and those parmesan marshmallows they were deserved!

I should point out, the recipe suggests the prep and cooking time for this dish is 35 minutes all up, not including chilling of the marshmallows.  The recipe is wrong.  I'm not an overly slow cook, and I find all those estimations of time to be wrong, wrong, wrong.  I'm sure they work in a professional kitchen where all the fiddly bits are done ahead of time, and you have a dishwasher (both the person and the machine - we lack the machine and sadly the person as well) as well as staff to help out.  When it's just me in our tiny galley kitchen, cooking while Tony is doing the bed-boy-wrangling - well, things take longer.  Often a lot longer.

The parmesan marshmallows were fun to make, but I think they are a good example of something that is neat in a restaurant setting, but for a home cook the time-effort-result equation just doesn't work out.  

The soup however - the soup was magnificent.  Clean, fresh and yet incredibly rich and flavoursome.  The only problem I had was it needed to be strained to acheive the light end result, which meant a lot of the pea mush that cooked in all the good stock and butter and so on was going to be discarded.  How wasteful, I thought.

And then I looked at the green pea mush.  Hang on... peas.  Mush.  Soft.  Cooked vegetables.

That looks like baby food to me!  

 

And as it turned out, Toby agreed.

So we all ate Church St Enoteca's green pea soup, in one form or another, and all enjoyed it very much.

Goodbye Aliens, Hello Food.

(Subtitled:  It's still Monday in America.)

Yes, Magazine Monday came and went and I was caught up with the last week of teaching and marking and baby juggling and other boring things like that.  So today is transatlantic Magazine Monday - we're fine by LA time.

We had a bit of a foodie weekend, which will not be surprising for those people who know us.  In fact, most people who know us will be asking "Aren't all your weekends foodie?".  Well, yes, I do tend to orientate this way.  But this weekend was particularly so.  We went to the Canberra Farmers Market at EPIC, which was celebrating its 5th anniversary.   Among the celebrations were cooking demonstrations by local chefs using produce bought at the markets.  We watched the head chef from Grazings make a salad using Poacher's Pantry smoked duck, and tasted his macadamia, chive and fetta pesto (yummy indeed),

And then we went home to get a jump on this week's magazine.  Introducing - a week of eating courtesy of Gourmet Traveller!

I was lucky enough to be given a subscription to Gourmet Traveller last Christmas.  I read it every month, usually drooling, but ever since the arrival of destructo-boy - uh, I mean my son - I haven't been cooking that many complex recipes.  

This will change!

The first recipe we decided to try was a simple David Thompson one.  We own, and love, Thompson's classic cookbook Thai Food.  Every recipe in it we have tried is amazing.  It is, however, not an easy cookbook.  To do the food justice, you need to set aside a full afternoon (or sometimes a day) and be prepared to be precise, fastidious and meticulous.

The recipe we tried on the weekend was from his new book, Thai Street Food.  The recipes are described as 'easy' and 'fresh'.  And, for David Thompson, it was relatively simple.  A simple assembly of ingredients:

I said relatively.  There were only two things we had to buy specially (well, three if you count the duck eggs but you could use chicken eggs) and the rest we had in the pantry. 

It cooked up to quite a decent Pat Thai (David Thompson says Pat instead of Pad, and I'm not going to argue!):

No meat, just tofu and dried shrimp instead of fresh which gave it a nice, chewy, gusty edge.  A little chilli and garlic oil at the end punched it up to where we like it.  And the leftovers were great for lunch the next day.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go hunt down suppliers for agar agar powder so I can make Parmesan marshmallows for our next recipe.

Charting my Course (Ain't Nobody Going to Read my Mind)

One thing I noticed while reading UFOlogist is that the contributors seem very fond of charts.

Very fond.  The chart option on Excel has a lot to answer for.

Inspired, I decided to join in the fun.

The labels are probably too small to see, unless you move your face about half an inch away from the screen and squint.  I just tried that and I still can't really read them, plus I have a headache - so I wouldn't recommend that course of action.

Each of  the colours is the magazines we've had so far.  UFOlogist is green, Shop 4 Kids is red and in a completely unsuitable turn of events, Classic Tractor is neither John Deere green or Massey Ferguson red but is stuck with blue.

The categories are, from bottom to top, Craziness, Educational Value and Enjoyment of Activities.  So Classic Tractor was a low craziness (even with the sombrero-wheel-tractor-paint-fumes debacle), high educational value and relatively high enjoyment (mostly because of Toby's toy tractors).

UFOlogist, you may notice, actually wins the enjoyment of activities category.  Why?  Well, what better thing to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon with your 11 month old than make tin foil hats?

That's right, nothing.  

They're reading my posts!

After my expose on the National Australia Bank logo (well, ok, my mocking of the expose in UFOlogist), it appears the big banks are listening.

ANZ announced today that it was changing it's logo.  The old logo is the one at the top, the new one down the bottom:

News.com.au describes the new logo as 'blue blobs' but I am more savvy than that.  Two eyes, a mouth and antenna later:

ANZ has clearly joined the herd.   The Australian banking industry welcomes the new alien overlords!

Actually, sometimes it's just paranoria.

Today's featured article from UFOlogosit is by Jon Wyatt, who postulates that many corporate logos hold hidden messages of welcome to alien visitors.

          

The first one isn't a logo so much, as an ad promoting Connex's new sms service:  a fact Jon Wyatt does acknowledge, but adds 'but is it also welcoming any ET commuters?'.

Sure.  In the same way that ET was a giant conspiracy to make humans welcome our alien overlords as cute little creatures...  hang on a minute.  Maybe there's some truth in this alien conspiracy thing!  Or perhaps I've been reading UFOlogist a little too much lately.

Jon Wyatt continues.  Now I can give him that the Optus, Telstra, Powertel and Orica logos look a little spacelike.   Even the old Telstra logo (bottom right, first picture) could look, as he suggests, like a 'an ET with large hollow eyes gazing at us from a star field'.  If you squint and turn your head on the side.

The predominance of telecommunication companies represented gives rise to a query though.  If Optus, Telstra and Powertel really do have the technology to be in contact with alien beings, how come I still can't get a mobile phone signal in parts of Canberra?   You'd think that transgalactic communication would mean consistent coverage across the nation's capital would be easy stuff.

When the attention turns away from the telcos, things get a bit iffier.  Take the National Bank logo for instance.  It's a red star.  John Wyatt says it 'may symbolise the Planet Mars with the orbits of Phoebus and Deimos, its two moons, indicated by two notches'.  Ok, first off, Mars?  Doesn't look like a 6 pointed red star.  Mars looks like this:

Though, it is true that Mars is sometimes referred to as the red planet, and there is a Project Redstar which has released a video entitled 'Martian Genesis' which offers, apparently 'incontrovertible evidence of an extraterrestial base on Mars'.  The link is here - but don't go if you value your eyes.  

So perhaps the red star link can be justified - by use of a conspiracy theory.  Sure, using a conspiracy theory to prove another one, that's solid logical ground!  My debating coach would be so proud.

Taking the National Bank logo as welcoming the Martians causes some concern though.   There may be life on Mars, it's true.  But NASA tells us it would most likely be 'very small, bacteria-like life forms'.   National Australia Bank has designed its logo to make the alien bacteria feel at home?  

Good thing I'm with Commonwealth.

Now to give John Wyatt his due, he does present his findings in a not altogether serious manner.  (Which is good, because the RMIT logo looks less like a 'fiery object entering the Earth's atmosphere' and more like a sideways Pac Man baddie to me).   But I thought it would be worthwhile to see if anyone else had come up with the link between corporate logos and hidden messages to aliens.

What I found is 

1.  A lot of people suggesting a link between a 1967 sketch of UFOs and the XBOX 360 logo:

    

2.  If you google "alien conspiracy theories corporate logos", you're asking for everything you get.  (Apparently the Google UFO logo and Masonic/Illuminati conspiracy theories rule the roost (I blame you, Dan Brown!)).

Aliens of the world unite.

You know what's disappointing about UFOlogosit?  The lack of pictures.  Most articles are text heavy

and the one article that does have pictures, the photos aren't of aliens at all but planes.  Regular, run of the mill planes.

If that's an UFO, our recent trip to the USA was a lot different than I remember it being.

The lack of pictures is a pity, because if there were pictures, it would be a veritable multicutural plethora of aliens.   In one issue of UFOlogist, we have:

• Underwater aliens in Russia - 'mysterious underwater swimmers, very human-like, but huge in size (almost three meters in height!)'
• Dog or gorilla shaped aliens in Brazil (the accounts differ) - 'an enormous swift-moving ape that moved on all fours with large red eyes', 'a colossal dog that reeked of carrion'
• Cat shaped aliens in France and Spain - 'a hideous feline shape that darted into the surrounding darkness'
• Humanoid aliens in England (Finally! I was begining to think the animal aliens were taking over) - 'three very tall humanoids... their silver suits had no zippers, buttons or seams'

Given that UFOlogist hasn't given me pictures, I went in search of my own, with varying degrees of success.

The dog/gorilla alien could be from Alien 3:

The scuba diving aliens seemed to have combined with the cat aliens (which, let's face it - feline shape disappearing into the night?  Sounds like your standard backyard moggy to me):

But my greatest success was with the humanoids.  Tall, shiny tight silver suit, no zips?  Oh my god, they found Seven of Nine!