Sapote episodes - a short story

The promise of the chocolate-pudding fruit was irresistible. “Ready in two days”, the Cairns roadside vendor assured me, “when it’s soft”. I did a quick calculation of the timing of our route and figured we’d have ample time to eat the black sapote before crossing into the Northern Territory.

A few days later, as we neared the border, our fourth passenger, the black sapote, was as hard and shiny as it had been two days before.  I tried valiantly to distract my driver from the ominous quarantine road signs, but he was a law-abiding man on this occasion and pulled over at a roadside shelter armed with his pocket-knife. I thought I saw glimpses of dark treasure as the knife pierced the skin, but I was mistaken.  Instead we were faced with a green watery inedible mass and there was no hint of chocolate pudding in my first sapote experience.

My second sapote experience happened a few years later in Ho Chi Minh City on the breakfast table of the majestic Majestic Hotel.  It was the closest thing to a caramel pudding fruit I had ever tasted, this brown fruit with a fudge-like grain and the flavour of intense caramel. I returned many times to the breakfast fruit table and then bribed seven year old Jorge to return on my behalf. The memory of the fruit lingered all morning as we trudged through the humid and noisy streets into Ben Thanh Markets.  What delight as I encountered stall after stall selling this beautiful fruit, the brown sapote, peeled, sliced, bagged and ready to be eaten.

Today, I had my third sapote experience. A hard woody-skinned fruit resembling a sweet potato in size and shape, the yellow (Mamoy) sapote was on sale for $8.95/kg at Adelaide’s Central Market. Apparently there is also a white and yellow (not this yellow) sapote. Almost all the varieties come from Central and South America and are very popular in South East Asia. The Cambodian fruit stall attendant advised me that the sapote would not be ready to eat for several days, “when it’s soft”. I am due to return to Alice Springs in two days and want to avoid another disappointing sapote episode.

My senses are drawn to nearby group of people buzzing around a box of orange shiny fig-sized fruit. “Achacha”, according to the sign. This is the first year the fruit has been sold, and the achacha has become a celebrity in its own right, with its own website and television appearances. The name itself is new, derived from the original: Achachairu.  Another native of Central America, Bolivia, the achacha is covered by a shiny thick bitter skin that peels away easily to reveal a white fleshy layer around a large brown seed.  My friend, the stall-keeper, describes it as being “like a mangosteen”, not the most known of fruits. The flesh is sweet with a texture similar to custard apple but a bit more tang. I’m not disappointed, but it’s not quite the sapote pudding experience I was hoping for. Perhaps if it had been renamed: “the vanilla mousse fruit”, rather than the obscure “achacha” I might feel differently. I think I’ll buy that Mamoy sapote after all.

©  Rita Cattoni 2012

Gifts of Food.. continued..

I recently wanted to thank a friend, and her family for a very big favour.  But this friend was on a diet, as well as having an alcohol free month and my kitchen is still out of action, so I pondered what to give her.

I recalled a gift someone had given me in Yuendumu several years ago and it looked something like this:

And so I had a lovely time, buying all varieties of fruit I could lay my hands on, including: plums, nectarines, peaches, rockmelons, pears, strawberries, tangerines, grapes, passionfruit, lychees,  strawberries, tangerines, mandarins and longans...arranging them in  a box with a bit of cellophane, and the odd chocolate tucked underneath a bit of fruit for the kids.

Feedback was positive, and the only fruit the family rejected were... the longans.

A couple of tips: make sure all colours and shapes are covered, early February is a great time to do this due to the mass quantity of stone and tropical fruit available.

Valentine’s Day Sticky Rice and Mango

Photo courtesy of Paula Henry

Ingredients

1 cup of sticky rice

water

1/2 can coconut milk
1/2 teaspoon salt

2 tbsp palm sugar

2 tbsp condensed milk

toasted sesame seeds

Mango

Grated fresh coconut

Method

1.              Wash the rice in a bowl until the water runs clear.

2.              Place rice and 2 cups of water in saucepan and bring to boil.

3.              Boil from 3 minutes then strain immediately.

4.              Return pot to stove and put on a very lot heat with lid on for 10 minutes.

5.              At the same time, in another pot heat the coconut milk, salt, palm sugar and condensed milk until thick.

6.              Mix the sweet milks into the rice and stir.

7.              The rice should be thick, and the grains still intact.

8.              Pour rice onto a plate and shape into a heart.

9.              Sprinkle with toasted sesame seeds and serve with sliced mango and fresh coconut, grated.

Mangos

Photo courtesy of Paula Henry

Here in the NT, it’s the end of a blistering summer.  And while I often associate pyramids of cherries and plums and nectarines as the quintessential summer fruit, let’s not forget the less-than-humble mango.  And we have mangos in abundance and local in Central Australia.  You can buy a whole tray of Kents each Saturday from a truck at the local servo for $30.  They are grown in Ti Tree, about 100kms north of Alice Springs.  They are beautiful and fleshy, with no strings, but they’re missing something.

Mangos are a fruit that need to be smelled as well as eaten.  I have never been able to get over the scent of pesticide on mangos being sold in Australia’s fruit-fly free zone.  It is an absolute compromise, and almost worth a trip to the NT or North Queensland (or Broome) to experience a pesticide free mango. However, my most disappointing mango experience was purchasing one from an African man in the metro in Paris. I was feeling home-sick at the beginning of a European winter, and it was as far from a mango as I had ever eaten. It was one of those defining moments when I realised I needed to return to Australia.

Growing up in north Queensland, I have often found it difficult to reconcile the price of mangos in the fruit-fly free zone with the rotting mangos littering our school grounds as a child.  They may have been turpentines, a variety of I haven’t seen for years, and one with a big aroma!

There are mango groves throughout north Queensland, planted by the kidnapped South Sea Islanders who worked on the cane fields.  My mother was often finding secret groves and collecting green mangos for her annual green chutney.  Apart from a green mango, the aroma of a mango is an essential part of the eating experience.

So, we now have a glut of mangos, and they’re ripe, not green, and don’t smell as pungent as I’d like. So, what do with them?  My Italian Nonna would make a beautiful mango jam that I would eat by the spoonful, but I recently tried a new sticky rice with mango recipe and it was a big success.  The recipe came from my sister while she was in Cambodia over the Christmas break, visiting schools for orphans and taking cooking classes in her spare time.  I had previously tried to steam sticky rice Laos style, with very disappointing results.  This recipe and process is much easier and tastes great.  Thanks Pauly

Kitchen Renovations

I purchased a beautiful new red stove over two years ago, and since this time it has functioned as a useless piece of living room furniture waiting to be installed into my too small galley kitchen.  Due to the size of the new oven, it was never going to be a simple fit.  So, I’ve had to wait, what I consider an inordinate amount of time, for its installation and the necessary evolution of the surrounding kitchen.

Well, it’s finally underway, and that’s good news.  What isn’t such good news is the surrounding chaos and the absence of a kitchen in our lives for an undisclosed amount of time.  I have table-cloths and tea-towels in my bedroom, glasses, plates and food containers on every surface in the living room, rarely used kitchen items in the garage, and I’m on the verge of taking a load to work to sit in my office.  I’m amazed by what I have amassed over my adult lifetime (yes, I have some favourites dating back to my 18^th birthday) but more-so by how much I’ve managed to pack into a small kitchen, and yet keep accessible within one or two paces.  I’m thinking I need a new house, not just a new kitchen.

Jorge, the renovator

Without a functional kitchen, my weekends are a little lost.  I have started visiting friends, rather then be visited. Friends and colleagues are offering me their kitchens, but I’m not interested.  My kitchen is filled with items I’ve carried from one part of the country to another, each with its own story and I’m usually lost in a strange kitchen. I have continued to read about food, but am uninspired without the means to cook it. And I’m reading cookbooks I would never have considered a short while ago. For example, a dear friend, sensing my crisis, gave me the Caravan Cookbook for my birthday.  I was inspired at first by the one-pot sausages in cider, but once the recipes start requiring ovens, I’m lost.  There are many similarities between caravan cooking and renovation cooking, but there are also some differences:

• I have no preparation area;
• The distances between barbecue, burner and fridge seem enormous and are filled with many obstacles such as ladders and dogs;
•  I can’t find anything;
•  All utensils, pots, plates have grown a fine layer of cement dust;
• I don’t have an oven.

Yes, we’ve even had to revisit and renovate our barby! Now, call me a good Australian, but don’t call me a fan of the barbecue!  I have never really understood the point of grilling meat in an outdoor setting, a sausage surrounded by white sliced bread, the flies, the heat, the men at one end of the yard with the meat, the women at the other with salad and bread.  I’ve perused the ‘gourmet barbecue’ instalments in endless food magazines, but I am never inspired, never!  However, this position is up for renewal. For dinner tonight, I grilled wagyu burgers, sautéed onions and toasted white burger rolls  on the barbecue and then filled them with tomato, beetroot, lettuce and some expensive shiraz relish from the local butcher.  I am not a convert, but I am finally beginning to understand some of the benefits of barbecue cooking.

There’s the washing, or lack of, to begin with. There’s a general lack of fuss or fine-tuning.  And then there’s the time factor.  I managed to cook a whole batch of pancakes in one go, on our griddle. This would normally have taken almost 20-30 minutes, much needed time with a nine-year old who has a tendency to drift in the mornings. I have come to consider that some of my less-flexible attitudes towards food and cooking could be up for review. Not that I think there is anything wrong with insisting on table-cloths at every meal, rejecting all pre-prepared pasta sauces, mincing your own meat, making your own fillo and only using home-made stock, but I am prepared to concede that under certain circumstances, it’s OK to buy and cook pre-prepared pork spare ribs, wagyu beef burgers, frozen (butter) puff pastry and even to eat the odd take-away! But only if you have a good excuse like me!

The last things in my old oven: sourdough focacia
and sour dough bread... oh, will I ever cook in my own oven again.

My poor  old oven...

In praise of school lunches - help needed!

After five years of creating gourmet, uneaten lunches for my son, now nine, I have decided to make use of some plastic fruit I have held on to for way too long and pack this for lunch for him every day.  I am thinking plastic pear for Monday, plastic mango for Tuesday, plastic banana for Wednesday – not sure about Thursday, and Friday he has takeaway from the Tea Shrine (a local vegetarian Asian café.)  Usually something nutritious like coloured steam buns!

This way, I will finally have accepted that I have failed dismally as a parent!  Because being a good cook is integrally linked with being a good parent (??) I have watched other children bite into their uneaten rolls while waiting for their parents, and have wondered what I am doing wrong.

For a start he (Jorge) refuses any sandwich, in any form.  Sometimes he will accept a roll, but it usually comes home uneaten. I suspect my mistake is that once I get onto a winner, I overdo it an within a fortnight, and he refuses to eat it ever again.  Here are some of the foods we’ve tried:

Nori wafers

Pizza

Polenta

Soyaroni

Smoked kangaroo

Olive oil and fennel

Julienne vegetables with dip

Salami and bread

Bread and dip

Garlic bread

Crackers of all varieties

Cheese pies

Spinach pie (with home-made fillo)

Vietnamese springs rolls

Nori rolls

Papa

Minestrone

Corn bread

Corn and rice cakes

Watermelon (ok)

I can’t quite understand that given my near obsession with food, I have a son who refuses to eat anything I prepare for lunch.  I am equally distressed when I ask him if he likes any of the lunches the other children have he says he likes Sarah’s lunch, which turns out to be a meat pie each day.  I am in a dilemma.  Do I concede defeat and give him a meat pie, or do I just give him plastic fruit and a square meal when he returns home?

Post Christmas.... Vanilla Slice

I'd attempted this once before, with not much luck,.  However this time I was determined to succeed given that I had the right size pan, a strategy to deal with the awkwardness of cutting through the puff pastry and few exuses for failure.  Why Vanilla Slice?  Because it was served at our Christmas Day lunch and we took some home and couldn't stop eating it.  I particularly love the challenge of keeping the pastry crisp and the custard intact. 

This recipe is based on one in the  Women's Weekly "Old Fashioned Favourites" Cookbook with only minor variations.

Ingredients

2 sheets puff pastry - make sure you get the butter puff.

1/2 cup (110 gm) caster sugar

1/2 cup (75gm) cornflour

1/4 cup (30gm)  custard powder

2 1/2 cups (625ml) full-cream milk

30gm butter

1 egg yolk

1 vanilla bean

3/4 cup thickened cream

Passionfruit icing

1 1/2 cups (240gm) icing sugar

1 teaspoon soft butter

1/4 cup passionfruit pulp

1 teaspoon lime juice

Method

1. Preheat oven to between 240 and 260 degrees (Celsius), and line a square 23cm cake tin with foil. (Or alternatively butter the cake tin and carefully line with baking paper.)  Extend the foil or baking paper about 10 cm over edge.

2. Place two sheets of puff pastry on breadboard. Measure and mark out 24 rectangles of the same size. (These should be around 4 cm X 5.5 cm). Place on baking tray lined with baking paper.  Cut through the markings.  Repeat with second sheet of pastry, making sure it is cut exactly the same as the first.

3. Bake in oven till brown and crisp.  Allow to cool and gently place your hand over pastry to crush out any large flakes.  Place two sheets of pastry in baking tin to check that they align.  Trim as necessary.

4. For custard, combine sugar, cornflour,  custard powder  and scraped vanilla bean (and bean) in  medium saucepan and gradually add milk.  Continue stirring as the mixture heats up to prevent any lumps forming.  Add butter and stir through.  Take off heat and stir through egg yolk.  Strain custard through fine mesh strainer into a tray or pie dish.  Cover top completely with plastic wrap and place in fridge till cool.

5. Whip thickened cream and fold through cool custard.  Keep in fridge till you are ready to use.

6. For passionfruit icing, place all ingredients in heat proof bowl and place over saucepan of boiling water, making sure the water does not tough the bottom of the bowl.  Sitr through until icing is spreadable.  Turn off heat and keep icing warm.

7. To assemble the Vanilla slice, place one layer of pastry on the bottom of the 23cm cake tin.  Pour in custard, then place the second layer over custard, making sure the pieces align.  Spread passionfruit icing over tip.

8. To serve, sprinkle icing sugar on top.

Mine turned out absolutely fab, and I am drooling just remembering eating them.  Might be time to make another batch.