The shops may have started stocking Spring fashion, but I don’t give up so easily. While it’s still Winter, I intend to milk the weather for what it’s worth and bake as much as possible. Make hay while the sun does not shine so strongly, so to speak. Once Summer slips along in it’s lazy sandals, I’ll be tossing salads and using the oven solely as extra storage space.

Meanwhile, here is a tale of two tarts. Well, one is a pie really, but if we nitpick, I won’t have a good title to start the ball rolling with.

The first is a set of mince tarts. Historically speaking, these tarts are meant to contain minced meat, with dried fruit being included as a sort of filler. Over time, it appears to have evolved to the fruit based tarts we are more familiar with. And when making tarts these days, it’s easy enough to buy a jar of fruit mince from the supermarket, but I thought it would be interesting to have a completely home-made tart.

My only criteria when looking for a recipe was that it had to be a suet-free mince because I’m not a big fan of suet. It’s a bit too cloying for me, and there’s nothing worse than having to clean and grate the suet. My friend Cathy can vouch for that, when we once made a large batch of traditional christmas puddings. (She even offered Nicole $200 to eat a thumb-sized piece of raw suet. $200 out-of-pocket later, she should have realised not to challenge someone who grew up in a house with three brothers and who is probably immune to all sorts of gross dares. Nicole tucked into the suet like it was candy).

But back to the recipe. Although I like the look of Nigella Lawson’s “How to be a Domestic Goddess”, the book rarely gets used because I usually end up with varying degrees of success… or un-success. This recipe however looked very promising. It’s called “Hettie Potter’s Suet-free Mincemeat”. With a cool name like that, Hettie sounded like someone who would know a thing or two about fruit mince! Along with sliced Granny Smith apples, spices and the usual raisins and currants, I also included some dried cherries and lashings of Calvados. All the ingredients were placed in a pot and simmered gently to a resulting moist and spicy mixture. Easy peasy, with satisfying end results.

And while there are many traditions attached to the making or eating of mince tarts that we don’t abide by nowadays, there’s one little rule that I’m happy enough to retain – that is, you should always enjoy a mince tart in silence.

We are on a quest to find the best eggplant hotpot dish in Sydney. I don’t know what it is about stewed eggplant that tastes so great, but it all started at Chequers a while back, when we were dining with family. The mother of our hotpot quest, is actually called Grandma Hotpot; a dish we ordered on a whim, not knowing what to expect exactly. It came to the table all colourful and bubbly. The combination of silky eggplant strips and tender pork mince in a mildly spicy sauce was very comforting. I don’t remember what else we ate that night, but recall wanting to return the next day for more hotpot. From then on, we have tried several other types of similarly stewed eggplant.

Kam Fook in Chatswood does tasty eggplant hotpot, but it’s a little bit greasy. Choyan in Gordon (near the train station) has also served us delicious hotpot, upon request. Gateway to India, a restaurant also in Gordon, does a pretty good eggplant dish called Patiala Baingan. It’s described as “eggplant roasted in tandoor and stir fried with fresh tomatoes, onions, green chillies, ginger and fresh coriander”. It’s a rich, more-ish stew featuring plenty of both eggplant and tomato which we mopped up with naan bread – again the only drawback is that it’s also a little too greasy for my liking.

B thinks the best contender so far is the hotpot from BBQ King. Tonight, we had dinner with Calamari, who gave the Chequers’ hotpot a sizzling “4 out of 5 eggplants” rating. We also had excellent salt and pepper tofu (crispy and well seasoned on the outside, soft and pillowy on the inside) and a passable beef and black bean dish.

Chequers
Mandarin Centre
Level 2, Shop 220,
65 Albert Avenue
Chatswood 2067.

There’s so much to like about Fergus Henderson’s book “Nose to Tail Eating“. I love the whole waste-not-want-not idea of using every bit of the animal. He also writes simply, yet beautifully and very wittily. Take this comment for example :

Some Briny Thoughts
Your brine bucket (made of a non-corrodible substance) kept in the fridge, will become a nurtured friend, whose characters hould improve with time and should give delicious results. Think of a corned beef sandwich. Your bucket makes a very useful holding tank if you are trying to amass some of the less readily available piggy parts – ears or tails, for example.

I too want a brine bucket friend! Unfortunately, the only thing I had managed to cook from the book thus far was “Warm Pig’s Head” salad. Even then, the pig’s head that I ordered, arrived sans ears and tongue – the best bits, really, so I felt a bit cheated out of the whole experience.

Anyway, the book sat on my shelf for awhile after that, and it was a passing comment in another blog that revived my interest it. Flicking through it again, I somehow got really hooked on the idea of making Eccles Cakes. Never having eaten one before, I had to look it up and apparently it is a buttery pastry filled with sweetened currants, originally from the town of Eccles near Manchester. Other recipes I have seen around, use mixed peel as well as currants in their filling. The citrusy flavour of the peel is something I would definitely like to add, should I make these pastries again in the future.

But for now, I stuck to the recipe as closely as I could. The puff was dutifully made and rolled out, the filling mixed together and cooled, and finally, each circle was assembled. After brushing the tops of the pastries with egg white and sprinkling lightly with sugar, they were shipped off to their fiery conclusion, to the strains of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy”.

I quite liked the end result. Two of these in a paper bag would certainly satisfy any mid afternoon hunger pangs. Still, I can’t help but feel that these flaky numbers are merely my version of Fergus Henderson’s version of what Eccles Cakes should be like, so I can’t wait til I get a chance to try the real thing out when B and I go overseas in September.