What is it?

In the spirit of the Slow Food Gastronomica Trivia night on Monday -that I unfortunately missed- I stumbled across a very interesting piece of produce at the market today.



I had no idea what it was, do you??

PS No, its not a frazzled underdeveloped tomato (like the ones in my garden!) or a fancy Thai eggplant...

Please leave guesses in the comments!

Eclectic produce this week

Fresh nuts are one of the most beautiful things, just like the almonds a few months ago, the flavours are delicate and colours bright. I am usually also surprised at how inexpensive they are, perhaps people don't understand how much of a special delicacy they are and how little time they are around for. These are brand named kiwi berries, essentially just that, mini kiwis with no fury skin, just pop them straight in your month, oh and incredibly cute!
The erratic weather has made my watercress go crazy, it's now trying to grow out of the base of the bay tree pot and into the wild of my untamed garden. Not enough yet for a salad, but a very pretty garnish or a grazing nibble while watering the herbs.
Enjoy the weather while it lasts!

Pretty purple kale

Perhaps a bit early in the year, yet I couldn't resist these pretty purple kale leaves from South Melbourne markets. I love it just sauteed with some garlic and chilli, incredibly healthy -high in iron, vitamin C and calcium.
A beautiful bouquet in the corner of the kitchen is also a remarkable tribute to food and produce.
Jack

Christmas with Jack

I had a quiet Christmas at home this year, PDC had been working like crazy, so I decided to prepare a modern Aussie style Christmas lunch for the two of us.

One of the difficult things about working out what to serve is that a lot of otherwise beautiful produce is usually so over demanded at this time of the year, that what is available is generally of poor quality. Take seafood for example, there are only so many fish/prawns/oysters etc to be caught and sold over that period so the chances of getting good produce over the other thousands at the market (no matter what you are prepared to pay) is slim, as the retailers will stretch themselves (and their prices - why were raspberries $6.50 a punnet last weekend, yet $4.00 the one prior, when the season is actually getting better?) to supply as much as they can sell.

Therefore my mission was to create a special, 'Christmas feeling' lunch without using the produce that everyone else wanted and would be easy to 'finish' on Christmas day and partially prepare the day before.

Therefore, the menu...

Entree
San Daniele prosciutto and seared scallops with saffron and manzanilla braised leek, peas and their tendrils

Main
Rare venison fillet and quince sauce with anchovy and asparagus stuffed zucchini flowers and taleggio polenta chips

Cheese
Chaource with pecans and bread to dip (actually on the menu but postponed until dinner...)

Dessert
Black cherry and almond clafoutis with eggnog crush

So the entree (scallops, fitted my requirements as some of the best ones comes frozen from Canada or Japan) - served on a glass plate that you can't see here!

The San Daniele ham is my new favourite thing, I can't believe I have been getting by eating the plastic Australian stuff for years. After eating in Spain earlier this year and my new palate for Spanish jamon, I can confidently tell you this is truly up there!
The entree was matched beautifully by PDC with a fancy white burgundy, 1996 Bonneau du Martray Corton-Charlemagne.

You can tell its summer when the zucchini flowers are at the market.

I (or PDC actually) stuffed the flowers with a very quick combination of a finely sliced asparagus spear, a couple of chopped anchovies, a blob of goats curd, lemon and S+P. The flowers were panfried and then finished in the oven, the stuffing leaked a little when i turned them but still offered a powerful flavour punch that you could not miss.

Pre cooked and set buckwheat polenta, cut into 'chips' to be seasoned and panfried.


The cherries before the batter... (and during PDC's nap - hence time for a few extra photos)

They were large cherries, but not plum sized as they look here... And then...

Baked... yes trust me it tasted as delicious as it looks here (I was very proud!)

We ate this with what I ended up calling eggnog crush, essentially my recipe for eggnog that I froze some of this year, in the hope of turning into a rough ice cream, yet as I discovered my taste for booze in the eggnog also stops it freezing hard, so we ended up with s slushy consistency for the 'crush', but the flavour combination was outrageously good.
The incredibly interesting thing about the clafoutis was that if I had not cooked it myself, I would have argued about the fact that I could DEFINITELY tell that the cherries had been soaked in Amaretto. But since you can tell from the first photo there was no soaking just beautifully plump, fresh, fat cherries, the flavour had come from the seeds, the exact reason why they are traditionally left in this dish. I love it, and love the way the best understanding of something comes from doing it yourself.

I hope you also had a very merry christmas
Jack

Fresh almonds

Wandering through South Melbourne market yesterday, I stumbled across these...

Stephanie Alexander tells me that the season is December and January, yet here they are. And a bargin at $7.99 a kilo.

Now what to do with them??

Jack

Guess what I found at the market!

Look what I found at the Prahran market!

I made an effort to look for these at various european markets, as I thought I could not get them in Australia. Then as soon as I am home, look what I stumbe across on my local organic shelves.



So... what is it?


Jack

Percebes (!!??!!)

Weird looking little suckers aren't they!
Before the recent trip to Spain, I was doing some research on Chez Pim and came across an image of these in one of her posts. They instantly went on my must-do food list, along side looking at a broccoli romanesco, eating some northern waters fish (posts to come) and eating as much unpasteurised cheese as possible (hey look, Australian Government, I'm still alive...!)
Any way... After seeing the percebes at the Barcelona food market, La Boqueria and a few other Spanish markets that I dragged PDC through, I knew I had to find them on a menu sometime before we left the country.
Percebes are a Spanish delicacy, also known as a gooseneck barnacle (food nerd, I know!), they grow on rocks on the north-western Spanish coast, and apparently are quite dangerous to harvest.
Up close the percebes are quite scary looking, perhaps like a small clawed leg from a strange bird, with a hard shell at one end and a leathery tube that attaches to the rock.
They are typically steamed or flash boiled (I read a beautiful story that locally the women cook them in boiling water for as long as it takes to say the Lords Prayer).

The correct way to eat them is to squeeze the leather tube right near the shell and then twist, and suck the flesh out. We didn't know this at the time and because we couldn't ask our intimidating waitress, there was no way to find out how to eat them once they were in front of us. So I just dived in, knife in hand and prised open the shell like a oyster and then just torn it apart to get to what I assumed must be flesh of some kind inside. After a few I had developed a technique to suck them out once breaking open the shell.
Since I had insisted on ordering them (at 110€ a kilo! -about $200AUD) I guess PDC decided to sit back and watch me go first with the breaking open and eating. Slightly warm from being cooked, the flesh looks like a soft mushroom with a strange filament thing on top. The taste was quite intriguing, some what like a fresh briny oyster with the texture of a clam or mussel. The overriding memory is of a delicate fresh sea taste and trying not to get the squirty juices all over me.

We shared 300g of these over a bottle of Veuve Clicquot as an entree and found them messingly interesting and perfect with the champagne, but 300g was definately plenty. A fun food adventure that I look forward to eating again next time I'm in that part of the world.
Jack

Clafoutis as it should be

Just had to share this image of a market snack the other day, while we were in Lyon.

Clafoutis is a traditional 'pudding' for lack of a better term, it is served in a modern Australian sense with any type of fruit and a cake-style batter poured over the top and baked.

In the traditional sense, as pictured it is black cherries, stones in as they impart their own level of flavour intensity, and the batter is a very basic crepe or pancake batter.

The pictured clafoutis was amazingly texturual with the soft, seasonally beautiful black cherries, the firm yet slightly savoury batter and the seeds to be spat out as you go...

Jack