Australian Gourmet Traveller Dec 2007
Yet another Christmas issue but also AGT’s ‘biggest food issue yet’ with over 90 recipes. It’s so frustrating when there’s plenty of gorgeous food to make but all of it summery OR to feed huge numbers.
Taking it from the top, Gourmet Fast has moved to the front of the magazine, but the only dish that took my fancy was a mint and chilli beef salad. Hardly the thing for a cold winter’s night. Fare Exchange was similarly oriented: pan fried garfish with eggplant tonnato and caramelised lemon dressing from Canberra’s Pulp Kitchen, passionfruit marshmallows from Rockpool in Sydney or seared tuna with a herb salad from Restaurant Manx in Brisbane. While they all sound delicious, they’re really the type of dishes you need to eat sitting outside on a warm evening …
Even more requisite of a hot evening is Perfect Match: squid and herb salad with caper and lemon dressing with Chablis. I was sorely tempted to ignore the weather and give it a go but held off.
Both Masterclass and Classic Dish looked towards Christmas, with Christmas cake, baked ham and Christmas pudding (Masterclass) and Stollen (Classic Dish).
There’s a solid list of books - floated as Christmas presents but now ideal for using up any vouchers - which includes Moro East
Author Tim Winton tackles the issue of sustainable seafood (one of my hobby horses). There’s a list of fish to ’say no’ to, and the Australian Marine Conservation society’s website has more details online. For those readers in the UK, you can visit Fish Online and query the sustainability of any species.
Of the regular writers, Leo Schofield has a go at the fad for foam on our plates - bubbles belonging firmly in the glass or the bath tub, A A Gill visists Madagascar and Max Allen takes to the Mornington Peninsula.
The food features are all about Christmas. There’s plenty of turkey dishes. Once you’ve recovered from your classic roast turkey think about lighter ways to use the remainder, such as turkey, fig and duck liver salad, turkey sandwiches, or pomegranate roasted turkey with cracked wheat salad.
There’s Christmas with the Melbourne-based chefs, the McConnell brothers, whose menu features a roast goose with pickled cherries, but also takes in grilled prawns with honey and preserved lemon, a baccalà, green olive and chilli salad, and Christmas pudding icecream.
For a less conventional approach to Christmas, head to the Caribbean with salt cod fritters, crab and green mango salad, jerked ham and (of course) a Caribbean Christmas cake.
If, after all of this, you haven’t got enough on your plate, there’s a whole feature dedicated to side dishes. The spiced brown sugar butter looks and sounds fantastic and I’m quite sure I’m not the only person who could justify eating it on bread and not worry about the Christmas pudding part of things. On a less heart-stopping note, there’s also fig and speck stuffing and a red cabbage, apple and celery salad.
There’s a pile of summery seafood recipes, such as fried whitebait with cumin salt and smokey mayonnaise, which ranges through mulloway, crab, trout, marron, sea urchin and prawn … all crying out for a hot evening.
There’s a selection of recipes from Greg and Lucy Malouf’s new book, turquoise, and the food section wraps up with, appropriately, ‘The Big Finale’: gorgeous puddings. Berry linzer torte, fig, almond and ricotta cake, passionfruit and banana mess, spiced ruit cake with brandy cream and finally, a stunning chocolate-cherry semifreddo.
After all of that, a very quick whiz through the travel section of the magazine: Canada’s Yukon, Dubai and the Atacama desert in Chile.
And what did I try from the magazine? Despite all the dishes that were too summery or for too many people, I opted for a short order idea from In Season: stuffed, baked nectarines. Aside from my struggle with the out of season nectarines, these were absolutely gorgeous and perfect for a winter afternoon tea. Though, when you come to think of it - they’d be perfect on a hot summer’s evening with a chilled glass of slightly sweet white wine …
