Today is the final day of our holiday. I’m actually writing this at Narita airport (albeit struggling a little bit with the keyboard) while waiting for our flight. A couple of days ago, we had the most memorable meal of our entire trip, at Kikunoi in Kyoto. This restaurant located at the foot of a hill, according to the description I read somewhere, really redefined the Kaiseki experience for me, especially after having had a decent but relatively unexciting (and frankly, frighteningly expensive) Kaiseki meal earlier in Tokyo. Now I understand what the fuss is all about. Highlights of this meal included a Maitake mushroom ‘tea’ served in individual teapots with a wedge of lime, and Ayu, grilled over pine needles; their stomachs slashed to reveal a bulge of eggs, and one of the dessert courses, a brown sugar jelly with chrysanthemum leaves.

Photos and more details to come, of course, though the pictures will never do the real dishes justice.

Things I will miss when we leave Japan include, heated toilet seats (porcelain thrones redefining the excursive toilet going experience), Kyobancha, the many flavours of KitKat (peach, green tea, rockmelon, vanilla bean, chestnut and caramel) including KitKat icecream, rice crackers (especially the large ones, wrapped in nori and served warm), and cakes galore. Generally speaking, Tokyo leaves Sydney for dead as far as sweet treats are concerned. Not everything is great, but there’s more good than bad, and a lot more variety. Just when you think you’ve seen it all, each shop will have at least one unique item that really stands out from everything else you saw before it.

We ate a lot of cakes and really unhealthy streetfood like takoyaki and yakitori, but also did a lot of walking which evens everything out, I guess. We walked at least 10km on our second day in Kyoto – the effort of which was quickly negated by a visit that evening to a Tempura restaurant for a Tempura degustation.

Which reminds me Chef, next winter I really want to put a pear and chestnut number on the menu. Sydney doesn’t really celebrate chestnut season they way Japan does. I can just see it now, if I manage to translate the image in my head to what you get on the plate. It will be like Autumn on crack – spiced poached corella (baby) pear with soft chocolate cake, chantilly cream and montblanc, and a really deeply chocolate sauce. A spoonful of crisp air, falling red hued leaves, twigs snapping under your feet, and chai flavoured kisses. I’m not usually a huge fan of mont blanc, but I had a cake at the Manga Museum Cafe in Kyoto that tasted average, yet had a lot of potential in the idea itself.

Leaving Tokyo does have it’s good points though: I’m certainly not going to miss CNN (the only comprehensible things to watch on TV in the evenings – this is despite there being a Japanese gameshow on the other day where contestants appeared to be engaged in a farting competition) or miss taking photos (we’re nearing the 1000 photo mark (but with a lot of duplicates), so it will take awhile to sort through all of them before I can start posting about our holiday in detail).

Now that our holiday is at an end, I’m actually starting to think about work and am wondering how our little plants at home are faring….

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.
–Donald Rumsfeld

(Donald cracks me up.)

Drew asked me a question at work the other day, that I couldn’t remember the answer to. After a bit of research, it turns out that the reason why we don’t cover a pot of boiling water while cooking vegetables is because an acid released by the vegetables builds up in the water rather than evaporating. This acid then reacts with the chlorophyl in the vegetables, causing them to change to a less attractive shade of green.

I brought in my copy of McGee’s book the next day for him to have a look at. But while I was browsing through my shelves for the book, I also came across another book I had forgotten about. I happened to read Letters to a Young Chef at a time when I was feeling a bit over the whole chef-ing thing and regained some inspiration from it. It was like a novel version of that REM song; the chef’s version of which would go something along the lines of “..When the day is long and the night, the nights are just as long, When you’re sure you’ve had enough of this job, well hang on. Don’t quit your job, ’cause everybody burns and everybody hates service sometimes…”

Sometimes I wish I’d had a chance to read Letters.. when I was starting out in the industry. I’m even amazed that I decided to get into it in the first place.

I’d just graduated from uni, studying something unrelated to food. When I got out, I decided I wanted to learn how to cook professionally. My first job was at a busy cafe in Crows Nest. The floor was always understaffed so I usually found myself waiting on tables, in between washing lettuce leaves. My second job, which I consider to be my first true cooking job, was at a restaurant further up the road. At this point I still had absolutely no idea about the industry or what was expected and turned up to my trial (and later when I got accepted, on my first day of work) without a uniform or knives. I did everything the way I used to at home, so there was a lot of learning to be done. When they eventually decided that they wanted to keep me, the owner/chef gave me a few of his spare knives and told me to enrol in Tafe. Having started in the industry much later than most people would have, I’ve always felt like I needed to catch up quickly. It took until the last year of Tafe for my teacher to finally say one day, “You’ve made an improvement. Good work.” The comment actually caught me my surprise because I thought I’d been doing ok all along. 😀

I still have that chef’s spare knives. They aren’t the best quality but they are my favourites amongst the F.Dicks and Globals that I now also own, and I use them every day.

If I know the answer I’ll tell you the answer, and if I don’t, I’ll just respond, cleverly.
— Donald Rumsfeld

The macaroons in the picture above were made for an American function we catered for recently. My favourite is the Lemon Poppyseed macaroon, but I also made something more in the American spirit, a Peanut Butter and Jelly macaroon – a peanut butter ganache from Andrew Shotts’ book, piped into a circle on the base macaroon, with some rhubarb jam piped into the middle of the circle. The third macaroon flavour, not pictured, was Vanilla Rose.

I’m off to Tokyo for a couple of weeks of food and fun, so there will be the sounds of silence on this blog until I get back. Hopefully there will be more than enough photos and stories to share with you by then.

The last time I was doing a bit of shopping at Macro Wholefoods, I spied an artisan soda bread by Bowen Island Bakery which I immediately snapped up because it reminded me of Irish wheaten bread. B and I had it that evening with a spicy tomato stew, and both agreed that it was a good bread. It being on the pricey side, I was reluctant to make this a regular purchase, and decided I should return to making my own, which I did once, as part of World Bread Day last year.

Things seem to have come full circle. During a casual flip through one of my current favourite baking books, a recipe for pumpernickel and polenta soda bread caught my eye. I loved the rustic look of the loaf, and the use of rye flour in the ingredients, and resolved to give it a go. Rather happily, it turns out that this bread is not only delicious, but it also tastes remarkably like wheaten bread! And I think it’s an improvement on my previous recipe, so much so that I’m going to stick to this one from now on. If you love Irish wheaten bread but haven’t been very successful in reproducing it at home, I urge you to try this recipe out.

This bread is so easy to make, I’ve been baking it every Sunday morning since : wake up, put the dough together and pop it into the oven, run back to bed until the timer goes off, then have freshly baked bread for breakfast.

Note: I made a few changes with the recipe, due to various circumstances. The first time I made it, I couldn’t get any caraway seeds or molasses, and so omitted the seeds altogether and substituted the molasses with treacle. The loaf will taste more authentically Irish without the caraway seeds anyway. In a bid to also make this a bit more B-friendly (he’s lactose intolerant), I did away with the buttermilk. If you make it and decide to stick to the original, I would love to know how the bread turned out for you 🙂

Pumpernickel and Polenta Soda Bread :
(makes 1 small loaf; recipe by Belinda Jeffery)

fine polenta, for dusting
120g stone-ground wholemeal plain flour, plus a little extra for dusting
75g unbleached plain flour
60g rye flour
40g fine stone-ground yellow polenta (cornmeal)
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1 teaspoon sea salt, crushed
1 teaspoon caraway seeds, plus extra, for sprinkling
1 1/3 cups (330ml) buttermilk
1 tablespoon honey
1 tablespoon blackstrap molasses

Preheat your oven to 210’C. Lay a sheet of baking paper on a baking tray and dush the paper with a little polenta.

Tip all three flours, the polenta, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, sea salt and caraway seeds into a large bowl. Whisk them together for a minute or so with a balloon whisk. In a separate bowl, mix together the buttermilk, honey and molasses. (If you gently warm the honey and molasses they will mix into the buttermilk more easily).

Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients and pour in the buttermilk mixture. I usually start mixing this with a wooden spoon and then resort to using my hands when it gets too sticky. The one thing you don’t want is to overdo the mixing as this toughens the bread (which, to be confusing, is the opposite to yeast breads, which require lots of kneading). Bring the dough together so it’s soft and sticky, then tip it onto a floured bench.

With floured hands, knead the dough very gently so it just comes together, then shape it into a little football. Sit the “football” on the prepared baking tray and, with a serrated knife, make 4-5 very shallow slashes diagonally across the top of the dough (if they’re too deep the loaf opens out a bit too much while it bakes and is drier than it should be). Sieve a fine dusting of flour over the top and sprinkle with extra caraway seeds.

Bake for about 30-35 minutes or until the bottom of the loaf sounds hollow when you tap it with your knuckles. Leave the loaf on a wire rack to cool for about 1 hour before slicing. Unlike many soda breads, leftovers keep well for 1-2 days in a sealed plastic bag.

(Or for my version of Irish wheaten bread : No caraway seeds and subst. buttermilk for 2 heaped kitchen spoons (or eating spoons, whatever you call it!) of European/Greek yogurt, and top up with lactose-free skim milk to the 300ml mark. Mix this with kitchen spoon each of the honey and treacle. Proceed with the recipe as stated above, mixing the dough with a large wooden spoon until it is just combined, then tip the dough onto the lined tray. With wholemeal-floured hands, pat the dough into shape and make the slashes with a floured knife. 30 minutes in a fan-forced oven is sufficient cooking time. It’s not a pretty looking loaf, but it’s damn tasty! One recipe is enough for the two of us to have for Sunday breakfast, and I usually take the remainder with me to have at work the next day).