Cheap Wine

Those of you who read my blog regularly will know there are things that I believe in spending money on, and things that I don’t.

For instance, I don’t think you should ever skimp when it comes to: American Apparel tights (yes, I’m obsessed), cardigans, gin, lingerie, perfume, and tea.

But, you can, and should, expect to economise on the following: handbags, shoes, costume jewellery, socks, sunglasses, and wine.

As the title of this post indicates, it is cheap wine with which I am concerned at present. I can, grudgingly, see the point in spending a couple more dollars on a bottle of wine that’s intended for drinking, particularly if the bottle is pretty and it’s a thanks-for-having-me present. There is no place, though, in my reality, for using expensive wine in cooking. Nor do I believe in blaming the wine if your bolognaise or bourguignon doesn’t turn out as well as you had hoped. You are the cook, you wield the wooden spoon, and, as such, it’s up to you, and not the ingredients, to make your food work.

This sounds a little harsh, but, really, it’s empowering. Too long have our food magazines promoted this ridiculous upper middle class idea of throwing fashionable, expensive 'good quality', pre-prepared ingredients together on a big white plate, and garnishing it with sea salt, as 'cooking'. That’s arranging, not cooking, and I find it hard to take seriously the credentials of a magazine when half of the dishes are of that ilk.

That’s not to say simplicity isn’t a virtue in the kitchen. On the contrary, what I love about cooking is how simple things – flour, water, salt, oil – can be transformed, through care and attention, into something so much greater than the sum of its parts – sourdough bread, for instance, is the result of these four things alone. It’s like Durkheimian mechanical solidarity on a plate, and it’s beautiful.

But back to the cheap wine.

I feel, after the above rant, that it’s only fair I share with you my favourite recipe for alchemically turning that half-used skanky bottle of red lurking at the back of the cupboard into something you can be truly happy to serve to your friends at a dinner party (and eat any leftovers while you do the dishes, listening to Cheap Wine by Cold Chisel, bathing in the sweetness of your irony).

With a little care and attention, and trust in your palette, you can get away with cheap wine. Which is a blessing, really, when you’ve spent all your money on tights (guilty as charged).

Cheap Wine Pears with Walnut Praline

Serves 4 (ish)

For the Pears
4 brown pears, peeled, halved, de-cored
Brown sugar – to start with, about ¼ cup, but you may need extra, depending on the wine
2 bruised cardoman pods
2 cloves
2 star anise
Nutmeg
Vanilla extract
Juice of an orange (and/or a strip of orange peel)
¾ of a bottle of cheap, skanky red wine (I normally have shiraz lying around, but you could use any red you have to hand)

For the Praline
¾ cup of walnuts
1 cup sugar
A little water

1) Preheat oven to 160 degrees.
2) Place the pears, sliced-side up, in a baking dish. Sprinkle with the brown sugar. Add the wine, the spices, vanilla and the orange juice.
3) Bake, turning every half hour or so, until tender. This will largely depend on how firm your pears are. I find that an hour and a half softens even the firmest of pears.
4) While you bake your pears, make the praline. In a small saucepan, place the sugar and a little water – I would probably say a few tablespoons – over a high heat. Boil the sugar and water until thick and amber-coloured.
5) Line a baking tray with baking paper. Spread walnuts out on the baking paper, and carefully pour over the toffee (remember, sugar burns HURT). While the toffee is still liquid, jiggle the sides of the baking paper to ensure that all the walnuts are somehow connected to the great land-mass of toffee. To paraphrase Donne, no walnut is an island. Place in freezer to chill.
6) Check your pears. They should be tender. Remove pears to an oven proof bowl (save time and washing up by using the bowl you intend to serve from) and place the poaching liquid into a small saucepan. Cover the pears with foil and return to the oven (dropped down to 100 degrees) to keep warm. If you are making this dish ahead of time, you can put the pears, at this stage, into the fridge, and just reheat them in a slow oven about a half hour before you want to serve them.
7) Taste test the poaching liquid. It’s here where you need to exercise your palette. Is the sauce too tart? Add some more brown sugar. Is the sauce too tannic? Add some orange zest and vanilla extract (I don’t know why this works but it does). Heat the poaching liquid, taste testing and adjusting regularly, over a high heat until it’s bubbling thickly and has a glassy sheen. Pour into some sort of serving vessel (I like using a dainty little milk jug, juxtaposing the wine-dark sauce, but then I can be a bit twee sometimes), and set aside.
8) By now, the praline should be completely set. Place into a large zip loc bag and bash with a rolling pin until the praline is roughly broken up – you want some power and some chunky toffee-nut pieces. Transfer to a pretty bowl to put on the table, so people can add extra praline to their pears if they so desire, or simply nibble on the chunky toffee-nut pieces as decorum levels take a nose dive (it’s after desert when the truth comes out, I tell you).
9) Serve the pears, sprinkled with a generous amount of praline and drizzled with your dark, rich, cheap wine sauce.

Recipes That Keep On Giving: Fusion Dahl

Fusion cooking, a blending of two culturally diverse cuisines, was an early noughties fad. Like many fads, the concept was good, the execution problematic, and the adoption by plebs too high to sustain lasting chic. See leggings, chai, flares and boho anything.

However, when fusion works, you find yourself in a land of culinary world peace, ebony and ivory living in perfect harmony on your plate. Or, in the case of the recipe I’m about to share with you, Anglo stodge and Indian spice combining in one of the best, cheapest and easiest dinners going.

The quickest way to take you on this journey is to get you to do the following. Imagine a full English breakfast. Imagine a bowl of dahl. Imagine if we merged the two. What would you get? East meets West. Stodge meets Spice. Fusion dahl.

The basic concept of replacing the beans component of a full English breakfast with lentil dahl was one that A Bite To Eat, a Canberra institution, trialled a number of years ago. (A full English, for the uninitiated, consists of bacon, sausage, egg, beans, toast, and some sort of fried vegetable, usually tomato, mushroom, or spinach, or all three. In my opinion, a full English is not a patch on a full Scottish, the latter being superior on account of the sheer amount and type of sausage on offer, but let’s leave that simmering ethnic tension for another post). On an evening when I was at the buy-the-two-cents-a-tin-cheaper-tin-of-tomatoes end of a pay cycle, I decided to turn my favourite poor-girl supper of red lentil dahl into an experimental cross cultural peasent feast, by adding crispy bacon, sausage, egg and toast. And that’s when I blew my mind.

Something about the combination of salty spicy dahl, salty meaty bacon and sausage, gooey egg, crisp toast, and sweet butter speaks of the best of multiple culinary worlds. Indeed, it was the dish I cooked, in a fit of Rule (Modern, Multicultural) Britannia, to eat whilst watching the royal wedding earlier this year. It has been on high rotation ever since.

Last night, I played with the formula some more. Conscious of the looming Christmas meatfest (and sugar fest, and grog fest, and general fest fest), I decided to replace the sausages with green veg, the toast with mashed home grown parsnips from PapaK’s garden, and loose the egg altogether. The result was incredible, all the more so for being a virtuous cousin to the nutritionally cheeky salt and carb overload of the original.

Recipes for the cheeky and the virtuous are supplied below. Pick according to need.

Cheeky Fusion Dahl

Serves 2 hungry people

1 cup red lentils, soaked in hot water
Butter, oil, for frying
3 cloves crushed garlic
2cm knob ginger, grated
Teaspoon garam marsala
Teaspoon tumeric
1 teaspoon massell vegetable stock powder
1 teaspoon massell chicken stock power
Hot water
6 Rashes bacon, rind trimmed
6 sausages
4 slices toast
2 eggs

Heat oil and butter in a medium saucepan until butter is frothy. Fry garlic and ginger, with a pinch of salt, until softened. Add spices, stir till aromatic. Drain lentils and add to pan, turning down heat to prevent catching. Sprinkle over stock powder, cover with hot water, and simmer over low heat until lentils are tender and dahl is at a dahl like consistency (if I were Nigella, I’d ladle in a couple of innuendos here, but I’m not, so I’ll go tautological instead).

While dahl is simmering, cook bacon and sausages until crispy, keep warm on a plate in the oven. Fry eggs in bacon and sausage pan, at the same time toast your toast until toasted (tautology, again!).

Assemble as you see fit. My preference is: toast, buttered, topped with steaming mound of dahl, topped with runny-yolked fried egg, sausage to the side, bacon balanced delicately on top. And a sprig of coriander, for a token bow to greenery.

Virtuous fusion dahl

One quantity of dahl, as above
Good handful of parsnips, peeled, chopped roughly
Butter, pepper, salt
Green vegetables for two (I like kale and French beans)
4 rashers bacon

Make dahl as above, but place parsnips in a pot with water and set over high heat as soon as you start the dahl. Cook parsnips until tender. Drain, add a knob of butter to the pan, along with salt and pepper to taste, and mash until smooth. This improves if allowed to sit for five minutes. Cook bacon, as above, and toss your greens off in the bacon fat immediately before serving.

Again, preferences for assemblage vary, but I like a mountain of parsnip, foothills of greens, a volcanic flow of dahl on top and some precariously balanced bacon.

Of course, you could veganise this concept, if that’s your thing, by replacing the egg, bacon and sausage component with crispy fried tofu cubes, avocado, or oven baked mushrooms. Vegetarians can substitute haloumi for the bacon, or jut throw on some extra eggs. Whatever you do, it’ll be a brilliant, spicy, stodgy harmony.

Collective Wisdom

Does anybody else love ABC’s Collectors as much as I do? In the desert that is summer broadcasting, the lack of Collectors is something I’ve felt more keenly than other telivisual deprivations. (This post is going to get no less nana-ish, by the way, so if premature aging offends, tune out now). There’s something compelling about hearing stories of people who have spent their lives collecting Stuff. From the obscure (key rings) to the obvious (Wedgewood), from the ridiculous (paper napkins) to the sublime (art), I find people and their Stuff fascinating.

It’s become a trend to make the claim, however dubious, that one is ‘not materialistic’. The amount of times I’ve been told that true freedom is being able to fit all your worldly goods in a Kathmandu trekking pack is fast approaching triple figures. I once dated a boy, amazingly for quite some time, who refused to buy the correct sized sheets for his bed (a king single – bad design idea # 153) because he ‘didn’t want to be tied down with Stuff’. Given that I have rather a lot of soft, cuddly, freshly-washed-at-all-times high thread count bed linen, the relationship was clearly doomed from the beginning. The point that I’m trying to make, in a roundabout way, readers, is that it’s cool to not be Stuffed in the most literal sense of the word – to be without Stuff.

But I have a confession to make. I love Stuff. I love buying Stuff. I love tracking Stuff down in second hand shops. I love getting Stuff as presents. I love being given Stuff for any old reason. I love using Stuff. I love organising Stuff. I love looking at Stuff. I love passing Stuff on to other people when I no longer need it. There isn’t much about Stuff I don’t love.

The environmental and social ethics of consumption are things I might write about in the future, when there are several fewer deadlines looming over my head. In brief defence of my Stuff Loving, the vast majority of my Stuff is actually recycled – it’s on its second or third lease on life. Which allows me to add a new Love to my reasons why I love my (second or third hand) Stuff: I love saving Stuff from becoming landfill. In other defences, I bus to uni when possible, buy as little as possible in plastic wrap, and pay the extra monies for GreenChoice electricity.

But let’s leave the moral high ground relatively untrammelled, and get back to talking about the glorious business of Stuff.

For a while now, inspired by collectors and my enjoyment of Stuff, I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a collection myself. The question arose: out of all the wonderful sorts of Stuff out there, what particular item of Stuff should I collect?

My collectable Stuff, I decided, had to fit into some tight categories. Numero Uno: Inexpensive. Easy enough to understand. Numero Two-o. Useful. Out with collecting figurines, then. Numero Three-o. Must not take up a lot of space, be breakable, smelly, collect dust, or attract vermin. I’m a renter – again, easy enough to understand all of these specifications. And, Numero Final-o, it had to be something I like. After all, what’s the point of collecting something if you don’t?

All last year I pondered what it is I should collect, but nothing seemed to be quite right. Until, after unwrapping my Christmas presents from Kitty Gillfeather and Clementine Kemp, the perfect Stuff to collect dawned on me.

Tea Towels.





(Don’t laugh, you were warned that this post involved premature aging).

When I sat back and though about it, it made perfect sense. Tea towels are inexpensive – even the top of the range Irish linen ones rarely go for more than $30. They are highly useful – everyone needs a tea towel within grabbing distance in the kitchen. They are compact, and, if laundered correctly, don’t smell, and don’t collect dust or little creatures. Tea towels, although humble, combine two things I really love – kitchen stuff and textiles – in the one practical object, and, are a fabulous blank canvas for all sorts of beautiful designs, cheeky slogans, and cheesy touristy gimmickry that I so love. Furthermore, there’s a nice sense of legacy in collecting tea towels – MamaK always keeps a large family of tea towels in rotation.

Popping Kitty and Clem’s presents into the linen cupboard – a funky Babushka print and a Hamlin Fistula Hospital charity design respectively - it turns out I already had a fair start on a good collection of tea towels.




Over the years, they’ve persistently found their way into my Christmas and birthday piles, and, in an almost subconscious gesture to what I knew I myself loved, I have always been one of those annoying people who gives tea towels as gifts, welcome or not.

Oh, and if I may allow myself to edge a toe onto the moral high ground? Tea towels are biodegradable.

Farmer’s Market Fashion

My dear friend Mimi Goss and I have a standing date every Saturday morning with the Canberra Region Farmer’s Markets, to stock up on lovely fresh fruit and vegetables for the week.

Have you been? If not, you are missing out on, amongst other things, the cutest and most kitschy cherry bags. See below.



Apart from being fantastic fun, the markets are the best place in town to go to for cheap, excellent produce from the local region. Without going too far into the area of ethical consumption – that’s more Virginia Boots’s area – it’s a nice feeling to know that the dollars you spend at the markets are going straight to the farmer who grew the produce you’re buying, rather than your dollars going to Mr Coles or Mr Woolworths and a few measly cents to Mr Farmer.



But there are a few downsides to the markets. Firstly, you need to get there early, because the hipsters invade after 8.30am, complete with babies and baskets and ironic glasses, and with endless comparisons of the ‘Can-Bra’ markets to the ‘Mel-Bun’ markets (Mel-Bun, of course, being unsurpassable in the hipster stakes). Secondly, you will have to carry all of your fruit and veg to the car, which, by the time I’ve stocked up for the week, is a heavy task. Finally, you will have to work out, at a very early hour on a Saturday, What To Wear To The Markets.

In a combined solution to all three of the above problems, Mimi and I have developed a strategy of getting in early, with cute carry bags, and in outfits that, whilst not entirely hipster, are hip enough to trick the invading hipster hordes into believing that, although we may not be one of them, we’re certainly formidable enough in our style to warrant not being taken out by a side-swipe of an organic wicker basket. In short, dear friends, we’ve perfected Farmers Market Fashion.




As you can see in the above picture of some of my favourite Farmer’s Market Fashions, there’s a strong emphasis on jersey –just as comfortable as pyjamas – which is an important thing to consider at 7.30am on a Saturday. Washability is also paramount, as organic produce oftentimes means wash-it-yourself produce-which-likes-to-dirty-your-clothes. A burst of colour, a cute pattern, or some funky stripes will help keep you visible, particularly when you are re-grouping with your shopping buddy at the HOT bakery, where the tastiest…croissants…hang out.

Complete the look with one or two canvas totes with funky prints, and you’re in clover.




The Canberra Region Farmer’s Markets run every Saturday from about 7.30am onwards, at the Epic Markets, off the Federal Highway. They will be open next Saturday (18 December), but will be closed until 15 January for the holiday period. This post, although gushy, was in no way a paid advertisement or endorsement of the Farmer’s Markets – just a suggestion from one savvy shopper to another! Enjoy!