Paper Palate

Summer might be drawing to a close in Australia but you wouldn’t know it from the current weather or from large number of sunny, blue-sky shots in the latest AGT. As if that’s not annoying enough for those of us in the northern hemisphere who are struggling towards summer, you also get plenty of late summer food.

The cover stars this issue’s Classic Dish: lemon meringue pie. AGT’s take on it is very impressive, so if you’re not feeling quite up to those kind of aesthetic standards, there are suggestions on where to purchase an equivalent.

Fare Exchange, where readers request favourite recipes from restaurants, features dishes from Annie Smithers’ Bistrot (Kyneton, Victoria), The Manse (Adelaide), Stokehouse (Melbourne), and, a dish which almost made my recipe selection, a delicious looking crisp pork hock with roasted almond and chilli salad from Nu’s in Sydney.

Another dish which I almost made was the bacalao tostada from Perfect Partners. While I thought my local wine merchant would probably be able to help me with tracking down the albarino wine, I wasn’t so confident about my ability to source salt cod. Maybe next month a recipe from Perfect Partners will be able to star …

After this point, it’s time for the summery nature of the magazine to kick in, with a spread for a lazy summer lunch: the duck rillettes look delicious, and there are some interesting vegetable dishes for treviso, cavalo nero and globe artichokes. But while those of us in the northern hemisphere might have to wait a few months for al fresco eating the seared fillet of beef with garlic looks fantastic but is also very simple. And for dessert: create an impression with a meringue stack with raspberries and cream.

Also summery is the large selection of crab recipes. The article features a handy ‘how to’ guide - with which crabs to buy, how to buy them and how to prepare them humanely. There are so many different ways of cooking crab presented that you would be hard pressed to find one you didn’t like: crab cakes, crab soup, crab dip, even a crab sandwich … and crab noodles.

Noodles also feature in this month’s MasterClass. The MasterClass covers a variety of hot, cold and even sweet noodles dishes: from a fiery bahmi goreng, which proved to be easy to make with vibrant and distinct flavours, to cold soba noodles with prawn tempura and even sevian kheer, a noodle dessert dish from the Indian subcontinent. There’s a brief description of each of the different types of noodle (egg, bean thread, rice, wheat, buckwheat and even a sweet potato starch noodle, dang myun, from Korea) followed by a matching recipe.

From the big south east Asian focus of the MasterClass the magazine moves to the very different flavours of America’s Deep South. All the dishes you’d expect to see are here: fried chicken, whipped potatoes, barbecued ribs and even corn bread. There’s even a recipe for iced tea and, naturally, pecan pie for dessert.

On a slightly lighter note, there’s a selection of recipes from George Calombaris of Melbourne’s The Press Club. It’s a very modern Greek-Australian collection of dishes, ranging from baklava-stuffed baby squid to a saganaki martini. I made the barbecued lamb neck with beetroot tzatziki and fennel salad, which, while it created a fair bit of washing up, was a wonderfully filling dish with a lot of clear flavours. Calombaris’s dessert offering is a set passionfruit tzatziki, but if that isn’t quite up your street there is a whole article featuring passionfruit goodies. These are all very typical Australian dishes: passionfruit vanilla slice, passionfruit yoyos with white chocolate and passionfruit ganache … how delicious does that sound?

The travel wrap up this month is exclusively Australian, and does a good job of covering a fair portion of the country - ranging from Darwin and the Northern Territory, moving on to Stradbroke Island off the coast of Brisbane, finding hideaways in Melbourne and finishing up in South Australia’s McLaren Vale, and more excuses for photos of blue sky and sunshine!

If you wear yourself out with all the tempting recipes and can’t make it to Australia for the last of the summer sunshine, you can at least console yourself with the travel section.