This is our decision, to live fast and die young.
We’ve got the vision, now let’s have some fun.
Yeah, it’s overwhelming, but what else can we do.
Get jobs in offices, and wake up for the morning commute.
–Time to Pretend, by MGMT

We live in a very conscientious building. Every now and then, we would get notes slipped under the door, notifying us in advance of upcoming disruptions to the general peace of the building; someone new moving in their furniture, someone renovating their bathroom; everyone always apologising for the noise and inconvenience. Tonight, this is the note we should have written to our neighbours : “Hello, our names are B and Y, and we apologise in advance for the noise we’re going to make on Friday at precisely 11:15pm when we will suddenly decide to jump up and down, and around the room, to the tune of MGMT’s Time to Pretend. Much love.”

If that doesn’t work, maybe I should send them some biscuits. Such as these little numbers I made recently, to stave off the doom and gloom of the neverending rain Sydney seems to be suffering from.

Not to be seen scraping the bottom of the parenting barrel or anything, but if biscuits were children, I’d be taking this one aside, putting gentle arm on crumbly shoulder and saying, my dear Lemon and Poppyseed biscuit, of all your brothers and sisters, you are my favourite. You are a versatile recipe that I’ve been using for years now. Not only are you light, buttery and oh-so-melt-in-the-mouth, but given the occasion, you can also be plain vanilla, vanilla with chocolate ganache, passionfruit with passionfruit buttercream, chocolate on chocolate, and matcha with white chocolate.

As for the filling, I seem to have channelled Aran a little, with the use of crushed candied violets and violet syrup to make a violet buttercream. All I need now is a fresh cup of tea and a new song…

Base recipe for the biscuits :

180g unsalted butter, softened
60g icing sugar
180g flour
60g cornflour

Cream the butter and sugar until pale. Sift the flour and cornflour together. Add the sifted ingredients to the butter mixture and mix until just combined.

Roll the mixture into small balls, weighing about 14g. Indent the top of each biscuit with a fork. Bake at 180’C until golden, about 15 minutes. Allow biscuits to cool before sandwiching with filling of choice.

(Things you can add to your biscuit mixture when at the mixing stage include : vanilla beans, freshly grated citrus zest, spices, poppyseeds, cocoa powder, matcha, dried flowers such as lavender buds or crushed rose petals… but not all at once, or you’ll have a very confused biscuit! 🙂 )

It is usually with great regret that we sometimes find ourselves eating out with friends in Castle Hill. This suburb seems to suffer from a lack of decent dining options – a lack, in my opinion, of places that I would happily return to. I’ll never forget for example, the cold pizzas at a now defunct Italian restaurant in the Castle Towers forecourt, and their “Turkish Apple Tea” which tasted like they had run out of said tea and had just heated some apple juice in a pot instead, hoping that no one would notice.

So when my mother said one day that she had found a place serving excellent Italian food in Castle Hill, I was initially cautious, then eventually excited. Cibo e Vino, located opposite the dreaded Castle Towers forecourt turns out to be a bit of a gem. So much so that I wanted to write about it, even though I neglected to take any pictures when we visited, and haven’t really been bothered to write anything about other good places we’ve eaten at of late.

The chef, fresh from a stint at London’s The River Cafe, is ticking all the right boxes; delivering food that you’d want from your local Italian restaurant : delicious, rustic food with an emphasis on fresh produce and flavour.

We start with shared plates of assorted fritters and piadini. The crispy fritters (my favourite being the chickpea one) come with aioli and a wedge of lemon. Simple, and so good. A perfect, unfussy entree that paves the way for our mains which are equally impressive.

I don’t usually order gnocchi because often you get served quite a hefty, heavy dish that leaves you feeling like you just ate your weight in potatoes. The potato gnocchi at Cibo e Vino however, are incredibly light, and paired with chestnuts, sage, pumpkin and goats cheese, it is also a very tasty dish with heart-warming (but not heart-clogging) flavours. Even if it does look very beige. Braised rabbit is soft, moist and suitably tomatoey, even if a plate of shredded meat piled on top of mash looks a bit like something you could eat through a straw.

Which is probably my only criticism of this restaurant. It could do with maybe a tiny bit of effort on the presentation front. Most of the dishes we were served looked like something I would have carelessly plonked onto a plate for dinner at home. Also the bare tiled floors and generic plastic furniture lend a kind of ‘temporary’ air to the place. And it’s loud. It’s so loud (due to lack of any sort of noise absorbers) that I could barely hear what my dining companions were saying.

But it probably doesn’t matter all that much, when you know you can go to a place on a regular basis and know that you will be served decently priced, fabulous food. So when we finally settle back into our chairs, lingering over cups of coffee and complimentary pieces of cute, stubby biscotti, I can’t help but smile. Smile, because I know that at last, I’m in a restaurant in Castle Hill that I can’t wait to come back to.

Cibo e Vino
Shop 2, 299 Old Northern Road,
Castle Hill 2145.

Dinginess is death to a writer. Filth, discomfort, hunger, cold, trauma and drama, don’t matter a bit. I have had plenty of each and they have only encouraged me, but dinginess, the damp small confines of the mediocre and the gradual corrosion of beauty and light, the compromising and the settling; these things make good work impossible… So it seemed to me in those days of no money, no job, no prospects and a determined dinginess creeping up from the lower floors of our rooming house, that there had to be a centre, a talisman, a fetish even, that secured order where there seemed to be none; dressing for dinner every night in the jungle, or the men who polished their boots to a hard shine before wading the waters of Gallipoli. To do something large and to do it well demands such observances, personal and peculiar, laughable as they often are, because they stave off that dinginess of soul that says everything is small and grubby and nothing is really worth the effort.
–Introduction to Oranges Aren’t The Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson.

The above quote doesn’t really have anything to do with this post. I picked up Oranges recently and fell in love with the introduction. The rest of the book doesn’t disappoint either.

We were discussing a future function at work the other day. It’s a massive function – which I won’t actually be around for, now that I’m leaving this place. The major issue for the pastry section was how to go about making the 60 or so full-sized lemon tarts that comprise half the menu for that particular function. That’s 60 lemon tarts to be made, in a single oven that comfortably holds maybe 7 tarts at a time, each batch taking at least 2 hours+ of oven time. BossMan was all for ordering them in. I told him that if it were up to me, I would attempt to make those tarts. Easy for you to say, when you’re leaving, the roll of the eyes said.

But I think a lot of people in my position would want to do the same. I hate having to buy things like tarts in. It annoyed me when we had an order for 1000 muffins a couple of months back, because I knew there was no physical way I could fulfil the order within the required time. Given the opportunity, my ultimate job would enable me to produce everything on site – from crackers and bread for cheese, to making my own ice-cream and puff pastry.

When I started working at my current job, I was surprised to see that the hot kitchen bought in things like sushi rolls, dumplings and even tempura prawns. These tempura prawns are 80% batter, reminiscent of the battered “scampi” B once had at a pub in Belfast. If there was scampi in that fry basket, you would’ve needed a magnifying glass to identify it. I was also disappointed to discover how frequently my work area would be left in a mess overnight, after a function. I’m talking about little things like finding whole meals sitting in the sauce-spattered microwave, equipment dumped in a corner, rather than being put away properly, a deep fryer with dirty oil that is often only cleaned when it is actually needed, the stove near my area that is used on a daily basis, but isn’t broken down and scrubbed on a daily basis. I used to complain and gripe so frequently about it to D that he would probably have been relieved to see me finally go, if not for the fact that he has already left himself!

Most of the time, I’m probably making mountains out of molehills, but sometimes I find it frustrating because I see it a gradual erosion of standards. First you’re shaking your head and laughing at the chef who supposedly makes Minestrone from a packet mix, or the one who orders his mashed potato in, premade. Then suddenly one day you find Gordon Ramsay knocking on your door, running his middle finger across your stovetops, and throwing up noisily in your bathroom after tasting your food; all this this while a camera crew is snapping at your heels.

That said, I just realised again today what an amazing guy the BossMan is. He is Martha Stewart, Santa Claus and Yoda all in one. He is creative and very resourceful (without having done time in prison a la Martha.. or not that I know of anyway!). Give him any request/demand by a client, and he will manage to create an amazing function out of a vision in his head. One of the most treasured possessions in my kitchen is a large drinks fridge which I use to store all my prep. He managed to wrangle this hugely important fridge for the section, at virtually no cost to the business. Like Santa, he is also capable of being tough on those who displease him and generous to those who work hard at meeting his expectations. Today, in the most clever way imaginable, he was also able to utilise the force to finally oust and elicit a confession from a thief that has been in our midst. And he mostly manages to accomplish all this from a tiny room, at the end of a corridor, which is aerated by nothing more than a struggling metal fan and which is filled to the brim with paperwork and the overspill of excess equipment and dry goods. Genius, he is.

Grand Marnier truffle ganache:
(adapted recipe from Chocolates & Confections, by Peter Greweling)

250g heavy cream
80g glucose
660g white chocolate, unmelted, untempered, chopped
80g Grand Marnier

Combine the heavy cream and glucose syrup in a saucepan. Bring to a boil.

Pour the hot cream mixture over the chopped chocolate and let sit for 60 seconds, to allow the chocolate to melt.

Using a spoon, stirrer or spatula, stir the mixture in small vigorous circles in the center of the bowl until it emulsifies.

Stir outward in larger circles to spread the emulsion throughout the bowl, checking to see that all the chocolate has melted. If necessary, place the ganache over a warm water bath (not exceeding 34’C) to melt the chocolate.

Stream in the liqueur, stirring the mixture until it is homogenous.

Pour the ganache into a tray, covering the bottom of the tray with a thin layer. Place plastic wrap directly on the surface of the ganache. Allow the ganache to rest at room temperature until it reaches 25’C, or slightly lower, approximately 20 minutes. The cooled ganache should be of a thick but fluid consistency to properly fill the white chocolate truffle shells. (Yields 125 truffles)