The cast-off quilt cover and warm sun streaming through our window this morning reminded me that Winter was no longer with us. It’s almost time to pack away my fuzzy collared coat and say good bye to hearty soup purees. My favourite soup is pumpkin : pumpkin with bacon and chorizo, pumpkin and chickpeas, curried pumpkin,.. an endless list of permutations.

To celebrate Spring, it seemed a better idea to whip up something light and more weather appropriate. Enter the watermelon, which to me is the epitome of relief from hot weather. As part of the second annual Super Soup Challenge, run by Tami of Running With Tweezers, I present to you Chilled Watermelon Soup with Goat’s Cheese Napoleons. This soup, with its wonderful blend of sweet, hot, sour and salty, is like a breath of fresh air, taken against clear blue skies and copious amounts of sunshine. It’s somewhat similar to a gazpacho, and I might even go so far as to say it’s a cross between a gazpacho and a Greek watermelon and feta salad – both of which I love, so there’s no going wrong with this soup!

The recipe comes from a new-ish book by Paul Wilson, chef director of The Botanical in Melbourne. I had the opportunity to eat there early last year, and we liked it so much, we went back the next day. Quite a few of the dishes we had then, seem to have made it into the book, and so it is with great fondness that I’m able to remember (and possibly recreate) dishes such as the amazing soft polenta with poached egg and reggiano.

Chilled Watermelon Soup :
(serves 4, from The Botanical cookbook)

1 1/2 kg ripe seedless watermelon, rind removed
1 continental cucumber
1 small red onion
1 red capsicum
1 long red chilli
1 small garlic clove
1/4 bunch of basil
50ml cabernet sauvignon vinegar
2 tablespoons sugar
salt and freshly ground black pepper

Napoleons :

120g ripe seedless watermelon, sliced 2 1/2cm thick
1 x 160g goat’s cheese log, about 6cm in diameter, if possible
24 basil leaves
50g olive tapenade
1 punnet micro basil leaves or handful of small basil leaves
100ml extra-virgin olive oil

To make the soup, combine the melon with all the vegetables and basil in a food processor. Blend, then pass through a fine sieve. Season with vinegar, sugar, salt and pepper. Chill until required.

To make the Napoleons, use a 6cm biscuit cutter to cut out rounds from the thick slices of melon, then cut each round horizontally into 1cm thick circles. Slice the goat’s cheese the same way into rounds 1cm thick. Stack the watermelon and goat’s cheese on top of each other with basil leaves sandwiched in between to make 4 stacks. You should have a total of 4 melon and 3 goat’s cheese slices per stack.

Place the Napoleons into individual chilled bowls, top with a neat quenelle or mound of tapenade formed with 2 teaspoons. Decorate with micro basil leaves then surround the Napoleons with the chilled soup and some more basil leaves. Drizzle with olive oil and serve.

It’s coming up to that time of the year when things are incredibly busy at work, so I don’t think I’ll be getting as much of a chance to write about the restaurants I’ve been visiting, or the cookbooks I’ve been leafing through and recipes I’ve been trying out. By the time I make it home, I’d much rather be watching a little TV (So You Think You Can Dance had me in stitches this week. The ‘swing guy’ in particular, stole the entire show) or listening to Rufus in anticipation of the concert we’ll be going to in January!

Here however, are a couple of restaurants that we visited recently.

Salon Blanc

As I walk along the wharf, admiring the parade of restaurants, I am struck by a thought : any one wishing to open a restaurant in this precinct will surely have to compete with the ever increasing (both in size and wow-factor) complexities of light fixtures. Salon Blanc cleverly sidesteps this instead by having a wall, in a sea of white furnishings and coverings, featuring a most gorgeous and covetable Missoni print.

We don’t get to sit anywhere near the print. Instead, on a clear but chilly night, we’ve been persuaded by the maitre d’ to dine al fresco. He strategically positions some heat lamps near our table and as the evening progresses, checks on them occasionally to make sure we’re not too warm or too cold. As a bonus, every time I turn to my right, I can marvel at the explosion of colours on said Missoni wall.

With such a great start to the evening, you can’t help but like Salon Blanc. The food is beautifully presented and expertly cooked (highlights include the light but creamy Gruyere souffle) though I feel for my money (especially on Surcharge Sunday), I could be eating much better, for less or equal what the bill ended up being. The dessert menu didn’t really inspire, so to my sweet-toothed horror, the evening ended there.

Salon Blanc
2/6 Cowper Wharf Road
Woolloomooloo 2011

Oscillate Wildly

It’s not often I find myself in Newtown. A decade ago, a visiting journalist friend was told that she simply had to see Newtown because it was considered such an eclectic and artsy suburb. She obliged but was rather disappointed, finding it more depressing than exciting. These days, I think Newtown has been on the up, and has become the eclectic, vibrant suburb that it was always meant to be.

One reason to visit Newtown, apart from being home to Sydney’s only Taqueria, and the nearby Enmore Theatre where I’ve seen many great gigs such as Ross Noble’s Fizzy Logic, The Flaming Lips and Sigur Ros, is to eat at Oscillate Wildly.

All you have to do to get there, is firstly, manage to secure a booking. We had to book a table months ago, because of the long waiting list and I know someone who is booked in for November (the earliest date they could be fitted in). Then on the day, make your way in great anticipation, past the throng of black-clad bongo drummers, the APEC protestors handing out leaflets in front of the train station and the odd person walking down the street covered in fake blood (I hope), across King Street, down Australia Street to the small front door of Oscillate Wildly.

What you get when you cross the threshold is a cosy little restaurant (the dining area seems to be the size of a modest living room), with very warm and friendly service and innovative food created by Chef Daniel Puskas. At $55 for 3 courses, it’s also incredibly good value.

A sense of fun pervades the dishes. The use of ‘soils’ and foams in particular, create a sense of wow with every dish that arrives, and the unexpected textures and flavours have you playing a guessing game with its components. I liked my main of venison with broccoli heart, pumpkin soil and amaretto-spiked pumpkin puree. It works well together and the colours are great. My only criticism would’ve been that there wasn’t enough sauce on the plate, and seeing as I’m not a great rationer, I ended up with nothing else but several slices of rather raw venison and no other flavour to help me finish the dish.

The dishes we liked best were the muesli-crusted lamb entree and the complimentary dessert taster which paired chocolate and passionfruit – something I’m not usually fond of, but in this case, upon a single spoonful, sparked pictures in my mind of a dark chocolate button and a passion fruit seed skipping hand in hand across my tongue. Bliss.

Oscillate Wildly
275 Australia St
Newtown 2042.

Nu’s

Last weekend, we found ourselves at Nu’s for a family dinner. Despite it being a Sunday night, Nu’s was packed with groups of diners. Clearly a place that has been well and truly embraced by the locals – always a good sign!

I had read criticisms of this restaurant in the past, in particular, the chef’s tendency to mix (unsuccesfully) Thai flavours with French and Mediterranean influences, but didn’t really see any of that in the menu or in the dishes we had, this evening. Apart from the oddity of naming the appetisers, “tapas”.

Our choice of dishes ranged from crisp and crunchy salads (soft shell crab with green papaya, and fat juicy prawns with shredded mango) to a curry (green curry with wagyu beef) and something a little inbetween (snapper fillets with soft rice noodles). The common factor in all the dishes we sampled was the use of quality ingredients. Although in the case of the green curry, the use of wagyu beef seemed a bit redundant as the meat had been well cooked to the point where it was somewhat lacking in all the tender and juicy characteristics usually associated with wagyu. The balance in flavours was also tilted towards a tendency to be quite sweet, like most suburban Thai restaurants, and could have done with a little more heat. Unlike most suburban Thai restaurants however, the dishes were alive with vibrant lime and fresh coconut flavours that were pleasingly light, rather than rich and heavy.

For dessert, I would quite happily revisit the simple yet tasty dish of Banana fritters with palm syrup and vanilla bean ice-cream – one of the better versions I’ve come across, in fact.

The explosion of flavours that I have come to associate with Thai food, isn’t quite there, at Nu’s, but it’s still a very good restaurant.

Nu’s
178 Blues Point Rd
McMahons Point 2060

Going Local for SHF #34 was going to prove problematic, I thought. Sure, we have Lamingtons, Pavlovas, TimTams and Vegemite – some of which have contentious origins, as far as being “Australian” goes. Apparently the first pavlova recipe was made in New Zealand, for example, and one of my favourite biscuits, the Anzac, appears to have come from parallel origins.

As there really is no reason to recreate something already as perfect-from-the-packet as the TimTam (unless of course you want to pimp that snack), I present to you, the humble Anzac Biscuit (originally an oat biscuit, now renamed to commemorate the ANZAC forces). My love affair with these deliciously chewy biscuits, stem from their simplicity in being cobbled together (one pan, one bowl, one spoon). These biscuits have no egg in them; rather, they are bound together by the inclusion of golden syrup, which based on the history of their origins, is partly due to the fact that eggs were scarce during the war. Aside from the great taste golden syrup lends, the lack of egg also enables them to stay fresh for longer. But like Belinda Jeffery says, it’s not often these popular biscuits would last that long in your house anyway.

It is also worth checking out this interesting article about the “Anzac Biscuit Myth”. And while you’re at it, why not whip up a batch of these biscuits. We can argue about where they come from, but there’s definitely no debate about where they’re going to end up – down the hatch, with a good cup of tea!

Anzac Biscuits :
(Recipe from Belinda Jeffery’s Mix & Bake)

90g rolled oats (not quick cooking oats)
50g shredded coconut
150g plain flour
165g castor sugar
125g unsalted butter
2 tablespoons golden syrup
2 tablespoons boiling water
1 1/2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
whole blanched almonds (optional) for topping

Preheat your oven to 160’C. Line a couple of large baking trays with baking paper and set aside. In a large bowl, thoroughly mix together the oats, coconut, flour and sugar.

Put the butter and golden syrup into a small saucepan over low heat and warm them, stirring occasionally, until the butter has melted. Remove the pan from the heat. Add the boiling water and bicarbonate of sodar and stir them in briefly; just be a bit careful as the mixture froths up. Pour this buttery liquid into the oat mixture along with the vanilla extract. Quickly stir the two together until they’re thoroughly combined.

Roll the resulting sticky dough into walnut-sized balls, then flatten them slightly and sit them at least 5cm apart (as they spread quite a bit) on the prepared baking trays. Press an almond, if using, into the top of each biscuit; the almonds are really just a bit of window dressing to make them looking a bit different, so you certainly don’t have to use them. Depending on the size of your oven, you may find you need to bake these in batches.

Bake for 16-20 minutes or until the biscuits are deep golden brown but still soft, then remove them from the oven. Leave them to cool on the trays for a few minutes, then carefully transfer them to wire racks to cool completely.