The marvellous slow food market is on at the Convent today — get a rhubarb tartlett from the rhubarb lady, a strong coffee from Lentil as Anything, a loaf of bread from the bakery, and stock up on unbelievably good home made panforte for Christmas presents.  But take your own plastic bags, or baskets. And there’s an open day at the Convent besides, where you can go inside the buildings, check out the artists’ studios, the ‘wellbeing studios’, and probably even the most beautiful ‘cello shop in the world.  Market finishes at 1 p.m., open day goes till 4 p.m. 3MBS is running tours.

The Age has reviewed a bar that I like, the Abbotsford Convent’s Handsome Steve’s House of Refreshment. I never seem to get there though. This could be the prompter.

I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy new year, and warn you that this post has nothing to do with Abbotsford; it just explains the absence of blogging recently. I went to Broken Hill and Mildura from Boxing Day for a few days (and, on the way between the two, to Dareton, where I snapped the pictured marvel). How we thought we could fit in a 5 course dinner at Stefano’s the day after Christmas Day (and two days after my mother’s Christmas Eve dinner) is a mystery. But the food was superb while I could still fit it in.

In Broken Hill, I went to Bell’s Milk Bar, twice, and the second time was able to have an apricot fizz. That involved apricot syrup manufactured on the premises to a secret recipe from the 1950s, vanilla ice cream, soda water, and ice. It was good, in the Hemingway usage of that expression. I convinced the dreadlocked vixen formerly of Ballarat behind the counter to sell us some ice cream to have with the quandong pie we bought at the Silverton Tea Rooms. She said that after two years, she was still regarded by the locals as being “from away”.

Those tea rooms are definitely worth a visit too: the lady owner used to cook for shearers for a quarter of a century, and still serves up the same gear at reasonable prices. So too is the Silverton Hotel, even though the horse which used to wander through the front door for a beer every day passed away a few years ago.

But the highlight of the trip to Silver City was a show at the Art Gallery by Peter McGlinchey, “Tin Can”. His creations made from found objects made for one of the best exhibitions I have seen. I loved them.
Goannas ambled across the Silver City Highway, father emus strutted around with their flock of half-sized children, roos and wallabies were everywhere, some spinifex was spotted, I was reminded of the marvel of paddy melons — the cockroaches of the plant kingdom, which manage to grow amongst truly and insidiously green foliage on the dusty sides of outback roads where everything else is grey or at best olive — and I thought we came across a herd of 20 feral camels, but it turned out they were property of the Silverton camel safari across the road and down a bit.

I looked at the hire car contract we had and noticed to my astonishment that we were not restricted to sealed roads. Rather, we could go on “gravel roads” as well. So we took off down the less well frequented of two roads from Broken Hill more or less following the Darling River, which obligingly had a sign at the start of it which said “gravel road” — I couldn’t believe my luck given the large expanse of what appeared to be red dirt in front of me — and with some further luck, managed to navigate to Bindara Station through scarily unsignposted roads in a long stretch of country where my mobile was unexpectedly useless. I had found out about Bindara at the Broken Hill tourist information office only as a result of getting a map from a crowd which has only been going for a couple of years, Outback Beds. I recommend them. The station was once named Netley Station, a one million acre sheep station in the heydey of the paddle steamers with a staff of 200. Now, the homestead sits on 1,000 hectares of freehold, surrounded by 10,000 hectares of Crown lease, and is run by Bill and Barb Arnold.

On the way, we stopped off briefly at the historic woolshed in Kinchega National Park, a beautiful example of a kind of building I was only familiar with from Tom Roberts paintings such as “The Golden Fleece”, and just a wonderful place to walk through.

Bill and Barb have been at Bindara about 25 years. Not only are they delightful people and outstanding hosts, but they are switched on: they power their generator with bio-diesel Bill makes from spent fish and chips oil collected from Mildura, they dabble in the stock market (as well as supplying beef to the other stock market), pump water pursuant to their riparian rights from the Darling with a solar pump, and have a market garden of organic vegetables which they eat and supply to the most up-market restaurants in Broken Hill. I ate beautiful carrots deracinated not two minutes earlier, and went gaga over some tomatoes I fried up with liberal amounts of butter. Those tomatoes were the best I have eaten, plucked fresh from the vine, better even than the tomatoes I ate mid-year in Italy. Bill told me the secret was a litre of molasses mixed with a watering can full of water poured over the soil before or after planting (prevents the formation of nematodes). He and Barb poured scorn on the ridiculous collection of chemicals on offer in nurseries for the suburban gardener, especial mirth being reserved for a spray for lawns they saw recently. These are people with a good grip on lawn gardening: a perfect patch by the side of the homestead’s beautiful verandah, festooned with edible grape vines, is a marvellous achievement considering the scratchy dusty red and grey country beyond the garden fence.
The Arnold kids were schooled by School of the Air, and when I punctured my hand on a snag on the bottom the Darling River, I got to see inside the huge first aid kit supplied by the Royal Flying Doctor Service: containing hundreds of medications, scalpels, and no doubt, some opiates like morphine.

Bed, breakfast basket, lunch materials fresh from the vegetable garden, and dinner for two cost an astonishingly reasonable $95 a night. The bed was comfortable, everything was clean, and the accommodation was the old boundary rider’s accommodation. Sitting in the flywired verandah and looking out over the banks of the river a few metres away, a plethora of birds — outback parrots, dry country pigeons, bee eaters, apostlebirds, magpies and piwis, water birds including pelicans, swallows, willie wagtails, tree creepers — could be seen at any particular moment through a screen of outrageously beautiful river red gums. Some birdwatchers came to stay and counted over 170 species, but the Arnolds know there are more when the other seasons’ birds are taken into account.

A very reasonably priced family holiday could be had in the two double and two twin rooms with large attached kitchen. We twice dined with them on nosh cooked up by Barb, and for breakfast were treated to Barb’s home made jams, bread, stewed apricots, fresh fruit from the orchard, good tea, the aforementioned tomatoes, and cereals. You should go.

A belated report on the A Taste of Slow Festival at the Abbotsford Convent a few weekends ago, now that I have found the cord for downloading photos from my camera. The last few photos of the bakery are from the first, temporary, opening for the Festival. The festival attracted 16,000 people, triple the numbers at last year’s festival. I paid a flying visit, which was no doubt completely the wrong thing to do, but the place was pretty much in gridlock as pointed out by today’s Epicure. That aside, it was good to see the Convent buzzing with crowds, the great majority of whom no doubt were having their first introduction to the hidden treasure of the Convent.There was a great big refectory where you could collect one of three meals from the counter in return for a ticket purchased outside for $15 at one end, and wine, if you liked, at the other. It was in Rosina, the Convent’s theatre. The slow food crowd has some well-heeled elements, and that’s as polite as I can be. (One woman exhibited behaviours which made me think an electric fence should be erected around Malvern, Armidale and Toorak. A more repulsive creature is hard to imagine. Blonde and bejewelled, her fluffy dog no doubt waiting outside in the double-parked Range Rover, she asked the harried but winsome bakery girl who was engaged in satisyfing the despicable creature’s desire for a croissant whether she had deliberately painted lines of mascara on her eyelids or whether it had just rubbed off, then giggled to her lady friend “I just wanted to wreck her day”.)

Then, in Rosina, two older women sulked with the most dramatic petulance while standing waiting, admittedly for a very long time, for their meals in the refectory. I so wanted to point out to them that it was a slow food festival, but I restrained myself.
Quite unexpectedly, the beef cheeks on parmesanny polenta I ordered was poor. I kept pinching myself to check that something that sounded and looked so good could be so tasteless. Cooking slow food for 16,000 people must be trying, and when I was there the people behing the counter were very tried, but my particular dish just wasn’t up to it.

I do like lasagna, a feature of a palindrome of some quality (“Go hang a salami; I’m a lasagna hog”), and the ultimate comfort food. Is it the quintessence of Italian cuisine though? Wikipedia says the recipe was published in England’s first cookbook and eaten in the English court of the 1300s and may have originated there. Now we are to be taught how to cook it as part of the Slow Food Movement’s A Taste of Slow Festival at the Abbotsford Convent on Saturday week (9 September). The Age’s Epicure’s hymn to lasagna, by the person leading the demonstration, is here. Thanks to Nicolas of Bobigny France for the photo.

The Age’s Domain section’s featured suburb today is Clifton Hill. Like its neighbour Abbotsford, it is a small suburb. Amazingly enough, in the year to mid-August 2006, 10 people shelled out more than $700,000 to buy houses there, including 2 $1 million homes on the Esplanade. They recommend Flowers of Sorrento:

“Spensley Street, a friendly, well-stocked, family-run grocery with an interesting Italian influence, also has consistently fresh fruit, vegetables and herbs, a small meat section and flowers.”

and Marshal Meats:

“27 Ramsden Street has extraordinary variety for a butcher hidden away from passing trade. A specialty of the house is lamb smoked on the premises. Crays and other seafood are sold along with fresh meat and some deli meals.”

and Cafe Quince, 43 Spensley St, described as:

“a true neighbourhood meeting place with boards advertising babysitting and lost cats, a box of toys to keep the kids amused and plenty of magazines. At weekends the casual room is filled to bursting with chatty groups tucking into full English breakfasts or variations on the theme. New owners will continue to serve breakfast and lunch seven days a week, the cafe is licensed and the coffee is very good.”

I had known of it for a long time but the premises had such an unhappy past (Ruby Red) that historical prejudice had blinkered me, for years. They’re open for lunch on weekdays, for dinner from 5.30 p.m. Monday to Saturday and they have a tiny beer garden and a happy hour, and a bottle shop, open from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.

Their gnocchi al ragu, at $13.50 for a perfectly filling entree size, was bloody fantastic, and a $16.50 entree sized linguini marinara was equally good. I was delighted when they bought me a glass of champagne when I asked for a Cooper’s Sparkling and then invited me to drink the error on the house, promptly bringing me a bottle of — oh well, I said — Cooper’s Pale.  There’s something not-quite-there-yet about the place: weird location, unhappy past not-quite-yet-erased, no bread on the table, too much space, and slightly amateur waiters, but the food is really good, the ambience pleasant, the prices good value, and they are prepared to deliver for just $2.50. Despite the size, the place was almost so busy on a Friday night that we could not get in without a booking at 7 p.m., and people were enjoying themselves.

Books for Cooks is a beautiful double-fronted Gertrude St shop full of 15,000 cook books and books about food and wine more generally. Its proprietor Tim White spent a decade at what is generally regarded as Melbourne’s leading law firm, Mallesons, and is not the most ebullient shopkeeper in the world, but his and his wife Alison Schulze’s labour of love is undoubtedly our gain. They have a newsletter which you can sign up for at the website, and their bookmarks are useful for having metric-imperial conversions set out in a fashion helpful for consultation mid-recipe. They’re open 7 days, 10-6 p.m. (11-5 Sundays) and their number’s 8415 1415.

Here’s an interesting Age article about the Australian cookbook publishing market.

I bought a translation of Nikko Amandonico’s La Pizza; The True Story from Naples and learnt that the two truly authentic Neapolitan pizze are the marinara and the margherita, but marinara has no seafood at all. Elsewhere in Italy, the marinara is often called Napoletana. It owes its name to “the times when fishermen, after a night at sea, would stop off at the bakery and, extremely hungry but in a hurry to get home, would ask for a pizza that was light and quick” — tomato, garlic, oregano, and oil.
The story of the margherita is that it was born on 11 June 1889. The Queen, briefly down in the uncouth South for a stay in the palace down there tired of the over-elaborate French-style recipes that the court chef cooked, and expressed “a wish to taste a local speciality about which she had probably heard some lady-in-waiting or domestic staff raving” and summoned Don Raffaele Esposito. With his wife, he progressed to the palace by donkey and cooked up three pizze, one with small whitebait-like fish, one with olive oil and cheese, and one with tomato, mozzarella and basil.  The Queen liked the last and the story now goes that he told her he had invented it for her, combining the three colours of the Italian flag, and that it should be known as pizza Margherita, much as Escoffier devised Peach Melba for Dame Nellie, presenting it to her in an ice sculpture of a swan. Pizzologists tell us though that the recipe was printed years earlier.  The Queen’s letter is framed on the wall at Pizzeria Brandi.  The bourgeoisie then got in on the act and the modern pizza phenomonem was born. Till then, certain monarchs had eaten pizza incognito, but the beourgeoisie had thumbed their noses at it, the first take-away food, and the first fast food delivery in history (or so Nikko Amandonico claims; I wonder whether Bombay’s tiffin box system was not then well in existence).  Originally, pizza salesmen wrapped cloth into a doughnut shape on their heads and walked around with a metal box on top containing shelves of cooked pizze which they would sell when they found a buyer, unfurling the little fold-up table they also carried. The punters would chomp it hot and runny with their hands, folded in half. Then punters started turning up at the pizza kitchens, and chairs, then tables, then cutlery followed from the start of the 19th century.

Naples as the birthplace of pizza relies on the combination of the doughy baked disc common to many ancient cuisines with the tomato.
Recipe for pizza margherita: 25g fresh yeast, 250 ml lukewwarm water, 400g unbleached strong plain flour, 1 tsp salt. Dissolve the yeast in 25 ml water. Add 2 tblsp flour. Mix to a smooth paste. Leave to rise under a cloth for 30 minutes. Make a crater with abobut 350g of the flour, with as deep a hole as possible in the middle. Pour the yeast liquid, salt and th rest of the water into the hole. Work the ingredients together carefully with well-floured hands.  Knead continuously for about 10 minutes.  When the dough is elastic, form it into a loaf and then cut it into 4 pieces of the same size.  Form the pieces into balls and leave them to rise under a cloth for about 2 hours or until they have doubled in size.  Use one ball for one pizza.  Kenad for a couple of minutes.  Press out and flatten the dough with the palm of your hand into a thin, round circle.  Use a rolling pin to make it really thin.  Finally, press with your knuckles about 2 cm inside the edge to make the raise edge. Then take 200 g of one of * cherry tomatoes, halved * san marzano tomatoes (pictured) cut lengthwise into 5 mm clices * whole canned tomatoes and in every case crushed by hand to get rid of their juices, and drained thoroughly in a collander.  Then spread the tomatoes evenly over the dought leaving the 2cm raised edge alone. Spread a clove of garlic, thinly sliced, and sprinkle 1 tsp dried oregano over the lot. Sprinkle generously with about 2 tbsp olive oil and season with salt before baking at 275 degrees Celsius for 10-12 minutes (or if, as is likely, your oven will only go up to 240 degrees, after pre-heating for half an hour, for 15-20 minutes) on a pizza stone or an unglazed terracotta tile.  The trick then is to eat it as soon as it is out of the oven.