Saturday, December 16th, 2006

Time

Event

7:41a

Cooking gourmet stuff at Christmas One of the things which traditionally happens here at Christmas is the digging out of illustrated recipe books. We have dozens, and they go back for at least three decades. The favourites are those from a series by the Australian Woman's Weekly. See here. Many Australians would be familiar with them. There are dozens of titles. Some for us have had be replaced because they have had so much use. The one on Chinese cooking comes particularly to mind. Most of our collection of this series came to us as Christmas presents from my mother, but she is now deceased and so we have to buy them ourselves. For all this expertise at our fingertips we are not very good cooks. Pretty ordinary really. The book pictures look terrific, but scrutiny of the ingredients' list usually reveals that we don't have them in stock or they are too expensive. Generally, most things we tackle from these cook books are a compromise. Ingredients are almost always substituted and so most things never turn out like the picture. But yesterday I came close. It was a simple recipe. Thick sausages, boiled for ten minutes, then split to take a lining of seeded prunes. Then they were wrapped with a rasher of bacon and secured with a toothpick for barbecuing later to crisp up the bacon. I had announced my intention to do this experiment last night for our family no matter what. In the afternoon we did some shopping. I needed thick breakfast sausages and prunes. Now breakfast sausages always come in two varieties - thick and thin. Every Australian knows this. They have the same stuff inside them though, a mysterious emulsification of ears, lips, cheeks and other unmentionables from some awful abattoir. But yesterday there were no thick sausages to be had. Well not of the breakfast type. We tried Coles first and then Woolworths. But Woolies had thin sausages on special for about three dollars a kilo and so this initiated a culinary compromise. They also had some very nice fresh bacon in the deli department for $5 a kilo, which is about half of what it normally costs in a packet. Preserved prunes were easy. We'd picked them up at Coles. They had several varieties. We took great care to check they were made in Australia. We are going off Coles these days because they seem to be going to great effort to displace Australian products with stuff of foreign origin. Even so I made a mistake. The ones I bought were not pitted. Back in our kitchen the snags were put onto a ten minute boil. Then after they cooled down a bit came the surgery. My wife pitted the prunes with her fingers - not difficult. She was also the chief surgeon and did the snag splitting. The sausages also had to be cut in half because there were long and thin instead of short and fat. This reminds me, I read last week that the world's standard size of condoms is too large for Indian men. Apparently they need much smaller ones - I suppose like the little finger from a rubber glove. But back to the gourmet kitchen. My job was prune packer and bacon wrapper. By an amazing stroke of luck I had also remembered to buy toothpicks. Working as a team we soon had the job done. They looked terrific, just like in the book. With the help of the kids we cooked them up on the outdoor gas barbecue and had them with a fresh salad. The youngsters expressed their appreciation by dismantling out efforts and removing the prunes. I told them they couldn't do that at a table if they were ever invited to eat with the next Australian Prime Minister, Mr Rudd. Tomorrow morning we are hosting a Christmas breakfast in our back garden for our extended family. There'll be a crowd. We've got the bacon, we've got the snags, we've got the eggs, we've got the champagne and orange juice. It should be a pretty good event. Oops, just remembered, gotta sort out the music - French cafe style maybe? To go with the champagne - the foreign champagne. © MMVI Paul R. Weaver. About the writer Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write a couple of million words. Technorati Profile Who links to me? (Comment on this)

<< Previous Day

2006/12/16 [Calendar]

Next Day >>