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.

Sometimes when I’m baking at home, the hardest thing about starting is trying to select some music to listen to. Two birthdays ago, B bought me an iPod with a cute set of speakers, as my kitchen sound system. What I did prior to this was to turn up the volume of the speakers in the lounge room, so that I could hear the music while in the kitchen, several walls away. Of course, the arrangement I have now is much better.

While B has quite a large CD collection that I can pick and choose from, I find there tends to be just a few albums that get played repeatedly when I cook. If I’m chopping or kneading, it’s usually something by the Chilli Peppers. Lately, if I’m doing any baking, I’ve been listening to Sufjan Stevens or Neko Case. This cake was made entirely with her album Fox Confessor Brings the Flood :

There’s a packet of dates (purchased eons ago) that has been staring me in the face every time I peek into the pantry. They are looking very dry now, so I didn’t fancy eating them straight from the packet.There are always some things that you find are way out of *date*, but in your mind you’re thinking, “it’s still good, it’s still good” (…this applies to several items I own, including a jar of vegemite that is two, almost three years out of date, and that I’m still working my way through). So I’d been saving these dates for a time when I felt like making some kind of date-y dish. The most obvious thing that comes to mind is sticky date pudding. But rather than proceed with the same recipe I always use, I thought it was time to try something different. In her Book of Baking, Sue Lawrence calls this a “warm date cake with fudge topping“. The sauce is made and poured over the cake half way through the baking process, and the result is a beautifully moist cake with a little something extra that sets it apart from the bog standard sticky date pudding : I don’t know if this was intended as part of the process, or maybe it happened to me by accident, but some of the sauce that was poured over the cake, formed a little chewy toffee layer around the edge of the cake, which I absolutely love.