No. 4: A Farewell to Nathalie

The first recipe from the BBQ and Grill cookbook which I actually cooked myself, at home, on my own quasi-BBQ (of the cast iron plug-in variety), was in honour of my fairly new friend Nathalie, who was returning home to Europe for Christmas.

I met Nat through my brother Simon and sister-in-law Erina, who live in Sydney. Simon phoned me towards the middle of the year, knowing that I was soon to go off for four weeks' holiday in Africa. He told me about this young German/English friend of theirs called Nat, who was taking a year out to work and travel around Australia, and would shortly be heading to Melbourne and looking for somewhere to stay. He told me she was really interesting - bilingual, very bright, well read and cultured, and well travelled also. "I just know you'll really like her!" he said.

Based on this recommendation, I offered Nat the use of my apartment to house-sit for the month I was going to be away. We met up when she arrived in Melbourne, and she thanked me for the offer, given that I'd never met her before. "That's fine", I said, "any friend of Simon's is a friend of mine. How long have you known Simon and Erina, by the way?"

"It must be nearly a month now, I think," she replied.

"Oh! So how did you meet them?"

"I think it was at the pub," was the answer...

Anyway, Nat turned out to be every bit as nice and interesting as Simon had indicated, and we did a few things together in Melbourne before and after my overseas trip. I took her to her first AFL match at the G, which resulted in her deciding not to support my team (Tigers, as in "we finished 9th again, the Richmond Tigers finished 9th again", etc), but to become a Collingwood supporter instead (boo, hiss!) She also sang "99 Luft Balloons" in German at my karaoke-themed birthday party, to wild acclaim.

So after Nat had travelled across to SA, up through the centre to Darwin, spent a few months there, and driven down the East Coast with a friend, she returned to Melbourne for a final couple of weeks, and came around to have a little farewell dinner with Cody and I. The menu was lime chicken thighs with corn and green onions (page 56), and risoni and zucchini salad with lemon and parsley (page 70). I'd never made risoni salad before and it was really very nice, but possibly having a lemon dish with a lime dish may have been a citrus overkill. Another little mistake: the chicken marinade was very good and tasty, but I decided to cook thighs joined to drumsticks (are they called Chicken Marylands?), which the chicken man skinned for me, as Cody really likes drumsticks. But my grill wasn't really hot and powerful enought to deal with such big pieces of meat - or perhaps I simply didn't cook them for long enough - because they were a bit rare around the bones. So I recommend just sticking with the thighs. The corn was great, and the grilled green onions were a revelation - I'm not a great lover of big lumps of onion, and I didn't think they'd be very good to eat, but they had a completely different flavour - mild and smoky, and tasted really good.

So all in all, while not a triumph, it wasn't a bad meal. Cody took the photo below of Nat with her dinner - clearly the plate of food was too big to allow the whole of Nathalie's head to fit into the picture!

No. 3: All skewered out with Kim and Brian

On the weekend I went along, with a couple of other friends and my flatmate Cody, to Kim and Brian's place for a pre-Christmas BBQ. I accepted the invitation on the proviso that I could take along some Heart Foundation BBQ food to cook. Kim and Brian were very happy with this proposal, but Kim vetoed my plan to cook calamari with couscous salad, on the basis that her couscous salad is far better than anything anyone else could possibly come up with. And I have to admit, it is pretty good!


Kim heads up a national rural health workforce body, and has recently taken on WHO committee work which takes her to all corners of the globe, so she's only occasionally home and available for a BBQ. She's been called "the funniest woman in Melbourne - or possibly in the whole of Victoria". Brian is a psychologist who runs a suite of programs for the national depression initiative, and he's been called "a freakily good listener". Which is probably an excellent attribute, since he has a tendency to surround himself with women who are good talkers.

Kim and Brian live in a converted-chocolate-factory loft-style split-level New-York warehouse-type apartment in inner Richmond, but have a decent size balcony and a real BBQ. Well, more real than mine...


My offerings on this occasion were the scallops on rosemary skewers (page 32), and the Barbados chicken thighs (page 76) - which I also cut up and put on skewers. If you've been following my blog you'll be gathering by now that I don't always stick religiously to a recipe. Experimentation is a good thing and can often result in new and wonderful discoveries, as per the harissa/maple syrup combo I discovered in my first blog BBQ, which I've been repeating since - it was a huge hit at the housewarming BBQ, people were fighting over it. But I digress.


The scallops on rosemary skewers were fantastic - they're wrapped in proscuitto, and interspersed with lemon leaves and segments - which I substituted with lime leaves and segments, which made sense as Kim and Brian have a kaffir lime tree on their balcony. It may have been the best thing I've cooked from the book so far. Brian did insist on closing the BBQ lid to get the heat up, thereby burning the rosemary leaves, but what the final product lacked in appearance it more than made up for in flavour.


The Barbados chicken skewers were pretty tasty too, and apart from putting the chicken on skewers, I pretty much followed the recipe (except that I only have a limited number of vinegars in my pantry and near enough is good enough!) But I have to ask, why is there no garlic in the recipe? Didn't garlic come from the New World? And isn't Barbados in the New World? Bring on the garlic, I say! But it was very good anyway.


Kim and Brian provided some excellent dishes too, but I'm sure you don't need to hear about those. A convivial night was had by all, and I've posted a couple of pictures of Kim and I with Brian below (which unfortunately seem to indicate that it was those two who slaved away over a hot BBQ while I stood back and took the credit at the end!)

No.2: Warming the house

Last weekend my daughter Amy and her boyfriend Kent had a housewarming BBQ which provided an opportunity for me to try out some more recipes from the book.



Their house is up at Thomastown and they've bought it and moved in more than six months ago, so the housewarming's taken a little time to organise, but hey - better late than never. They're both very much into gardening, of the 70's hippieish permaculture variety (think "The Good Life"), which is slightly challenging since they're on a subdivided block and have no back yard. So they've dug up the front yard and replaced it with heavily mulched veggie patches interspersed with fledgling fruit and olive trees, and a few flowers. It's really fabulous - everything's booming, and it's so good eating home grown organic produce. The most excited I've seem Amy and Kent - and Cody - was a few weeks ago when I arrived at a moment when they'd just discovered a crop of new potatoes. They were all up to their elbows in dirt, feverishly pulling spuds out of the ground, and if they'd been gold nuggests they couldn't have been more pleased.



So, back to the housewarming BBQ. Knowing that most of the guests would be in their 20s and some (including our host) would be decidedly blokey, it seemed appropriate to go for something tasty and substantial. My contributions were chicken tenders with coriander pesto (page 72), pork cutlets with rhubarb strawberry sauce (page 84) and avocado, cucumber and tomato salsa (page 80).



These selections were all pretty darn good and well received by the multitudes. Mind you, I did request Kent to hold off from cooking the cheese kransky and other naughty things until after the low fat options had been offered (which he kindly did, ignoring the mournful cries of "but where's the kransky?"!) I doubled the quantities for the chicken and the pork, and also doubled the pesto and rhubarb/strawberry sauce accompaniments - with the result that the meat and chicken got eaten, but there was heaps of pesto and sauce left over - the quantities are huge already! Everyone seemed to really like it all, but I do have a couple of suggestions for improvements. The pesto is really nice, and also works well as a dip for crackers, but I think would be even better with a little ginger in it. And I halved the amount of sugar in the strawberry/rhubarb sauce recipe - thought it might come out like jam. Half seemed about right.



For some reason we didn't manage to get any really good shots of my food (a poor pic is available on request just to prove I really did cook it!) So I've decided to share with you a photo of the desserts, none of which I made and none of which meet Heart Foundation requirements. But then, the Heart Foundation does say that we need to distinguish between "everyday foods" - like those in the BBQ cookbook, and "occasional foods" - like these desserts. A little of what you love - occasionally - is OK and possibly even good for you. So here's a great pic of Amy's childhood friend Alexandra, who came down from Canberra for the housewarming, with Amy and Kent's gorgeous though a little old and slightly incontinent dog, Cookie, whom they saved from certain death at the dog shelter when they moved into their house. Cookie has brought a lot of happiness into their lives, and all she craves is love and affection - and maybe just a smidgeon of that dessert!

No. 1: Kicking off the cook-off

Just to get any potential lawsuits out of the way early, I should acknowledge that the idea for this blog came from my friend Kim. After a trip to the movies, Kim suggested to me that in my role as head of the Heart Foundation in Victoria, I should cook my way through a Heart Foundation cookbook, and blog about it. "Hmm, that's original," I thought, "I bet nobody's every cooked their way through a whole cookbook and blogged about it before..."


So the seed of the idea was planted. After a bit of thought, I emailed Kim to say I'd decided to take up her idea, and that as the Heart Foundation had just come out with a new "BBQ and Grill Cookbook", I'd have a go at cooking my way through that over the summer. "Have you even got a BBQ?" she emailed back. "Define BBQ?" was my response. It's true that I live in a fifth floor apartment with a small balcony, and don't own anything that most Aussies would recognise as a dinkum barbie, but I do have an electric cast iron contraption with grill bars and a plate that will cook up a mean barbie for a limited number of people. And more importantly, I do have a number of friends and family members with real true blue BBQs, so this summer they can expect many visits from me, esky of prepped food in hand, ready to throw on their barbies. What are friends for?



So in this spirit, for my first barbie of the blog I turned up at my friend Mike's place with the first meal in the esky all ready to go, and with my flatmate Cody (11) - he's my grandson, actually - in tow. I decided for the first meal to have a go at the meal shown on the cover page of the book: olive and coriander lamb patties with cummin, served with turkish chopped salad (page 102).


The patties grilled up in no time and were great. They were prepared using a technique I've never used before - soaking the mince in lemon juice to tenderise and flavour it. They had plenty of herbs and spices, so while they were meaty enough to appeal to the boys, I liked them too. The salad was nice and fresh, but I departed from the recipe a bit because it listed two final ingredients - harissa and pomegranate molasses, both as optional additions to the salad. I thought they might overpower the salad and noticed that the picture of the meal showed what looked like that mix as a relish on the side, so being unsure of the author's intent, I decided to do the harissa mix as a side dish. Funnily enough, I didn't have any pomegranate molasses in my cupboard, and what's more my local deli doesn't stock it either. So I used Canadian maple syrup mixed half and half with harissa paste, which made a truly fantastic hot and spicy sauce for the meat - can really recommend this one!

As the audience for this culinary experiment were both sweet freaks (and so am I to some extent, I must confess), I also had a go at a dessert from the book - caramelised plums with honey yoghurt (page 138) - but no plums being available at my local shop, I used nectarines instead, which worked a treat. Really easy and yummy dessert.

Stay tuned for further instalments...

Kathy