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JANUARY 2009 JACKIE FRENCH NEWS

In this month's news:

• Intro
• Wombat News
• Book News
• Other Books
• New Awards
• Schedule for 2009
• The January Garden
• The 'Wedding Day' Avocado
• Christmas recipes from Grandma and elsewhere
• Stuffed Roast Shoulder and Grandma's Gravy
• Other delights from Grandma
  • Banana Cake
  • Tea Cakes (with Apricot Jam)
  • Date Loaf
  • Zucchini Slice
• Cool Summer recipes
  • Bitter Lemon Cordial
  • Fruit Crush
  • Pineapple Crush

Introduction

Today is a diamond day, too bright to shatter. It's a day when I am simply happy, with every wish fulfilled and no clouds on the horizon, either symbolically or literally. The sky is a hard tight blue, the cicadas are singing, and the peaches hang heavy on the trees so full of juice that the bees are clustered about sipping from the stems.

Even the lyrebirds are singing, which they shouldn't, as it's 32ºC and lyrebirds shouldn't sing till autumn. I suspect that the mulch and good living in our garden has bred a colony of big dumb birds, who assume they can sit in the avocado branches and imitate currawongs, whip birds, chooks and the telephone all year round.

The last six months have been hard - family illnesses, other crises. But by December it seemed that miracles do happen. This Christmas and the family wedding that followed have been perfect. Simply, gloriously perfect.

I've been sitting here all morning too full of wedding and Christmas memories and happiness to start writing, just replaying in the scenes stored in my mind: Dad thumping his stick and making gleeful insults, dancing with Bryan (who never dances, but did that night), breakfast with my brother and his family, the sort of meal that goes on for three hours, swimming in the cascades up the creek with friends who have evolved into family, with Fabia laughing as she tried to angle her six feet of adult beauty down the slippery rocks as she had when she was four years old. (She managed it. Fabia can manage anything.)

So: this morning the hoverflies are dancing above the sage blossom, a brown snake is sun baking on the big rock below the garden, and Bryan has gone to town with a ute load of sheets and towels for the laundry (It would take us a week and a creek full of water to wash them all). And I'm sitting here with the garden full of glowing bursts of lilies and agapanthus, the grass still green despite the heat, with just this newsletter to scribble and then a book I've looked forward to writing for two years, and more books I can't wait to write as well. And just as I wrote this the black cockatoos arrived, enormous birds with yellow ear muffs screaming as they start to settle down by the creek.

Life's good.

Wombat news

'Mothball's around every night,' we tell visitors. 'No worries. You'll see her as soon as it gets dark, or in the late afternoon in winter.'

Except of course no one ever does. Mothball, being Mothball, refuses to emerge till every visitor has gone. Other wombats appear. But Mothball stays in her hole under the bedroom floor, only coming out when she can smell or hear that every intruding human has gone to bed. This Christmas, Fabia and Guido stayed up till 2 a.m. They saw a sugar glider, floating between the avocado trees. They saw wallabies, other wombats, a ringtail possum, a tawny frogmouth, varied frogs and, finally, Mothball, stomping out from her hole.  

And then the torch went out.

I'm not claiming Mothball caused it. Even Mothball can't drain a torch's battery ... can she?

Book News

This afternoon, or maybe tomorrow if this afternoon's too hot, I start on the second book in the School for Heroes series. The first book isn't out yet. (The artwork for the cover is still being done). But I can't wait to enter its universe again.

Lessons for a Werewolf Warrior (the first in the School For Heroes series) stars Boojum Bark, werewolf... sorry, were-puppy ... and ice cream delivery wolf, who saves Sleepy Whiskers from the infamous Greedle and is sent to Rest in Pieces, the retirement village for heroes. Old heroes never die, they simply rest in pieces, playing Wham Bam Bingo and eating tentacle muffins, and teaching potential heroes the art of Wham Bamming and Zooming. Boojum meets the mysterious Yesterday and her dinosaurs, Mug and his zombie spaghetti, Mrs Kerfuffle the librarian who is deadly with a dictionary, and Dr Mussels the Headmaster who'd be terrifying - if he weren't only 30 cm tall and a monkey. But he can do extraordinary things with a banana.

Now, for Book Two ...

Other Books

2008 was a bumper book year...

New Awards

Did I mention last year that Pharaoh was shortlisted for the ACT Book of the Year, and Diary of a Wombat was shortlisted for the UK Roald Dahl award for Funniest Book. Bruce and I are working on the sequel to Diary of a Wombat, have been working on it, will be working on it ... It'll come out in November, the result of three years concentration by the whole Shaggy Gully team, which includes Lisa and Jennifer and Natalie and Liz as well as Bruce and me, and 35 years of living with wombats. We knew it'd have to be special to top Diary of a Wombat, but ... well, watch this space.

Schedule for 2009

Please forgive me if I can't come to your town, school or event - it doesn't mean I don't want to. I only have two hands and 24 crammed hours in a day, and have to allot precious time to those gatherings with at least 200 audience members, to get the word around as effectively as possible.

The January Garden

Damn it, it's too hot to garden. If you planted in spring you'll be guzzling now. If you didn't, wait till the end of February or the next cool spell. Today is better spent drinking home-made lemon cordial from the tree you planted last year or the decade before, spitting out peach or apricot stones, and picking tomatoes and sun-warmed basil for tonight's salad, so fragrant from the heat Bryan can smell both as I carry them through the front door.

The 'Wedding Day' Avocado

This is the perfect avocado. Okay, I'm biased. But this one is special.

It's big, pear shaped, with a small stone and the creamiest flesh you've ever eaten. The skin is slightly rough, black with a hint of green when ripe, hard and thin as an eggshell so it peels off like an eggshell too - the unsquishiest avocado you've ever tried.

It crops just before Hass, which is the perfect time for an avocado to ripen as most other varieties aren't ready then. We ate our first 'Wedding Days' for Christmas, and more over the days of the wedding too, and there is still one on the tree now, bigger than my hand and shiny as a teapot.

This is the first year that 'Wedding Day' has fruited. (I said it was a perfect day today). I've been trying to breed an avocado like that for years, with no success. And I didn't even notice that this seedling was bearing until Christmas Eve, when one bonked me on the forehead as I walked down to pick asparagus - the fruit were so heavy the branch was weighed right down.

The tree is still too young to take lots of cuttings from. But by winter 2010 there should be bud stock for at least another fifty trees, if anyone cares to send a stamped self-addressed envelope this time next year.

I'm not going to patent the new variety - I don't believe in patenting living things. Fruit trees are a gift from the earth, not a possession, and new varieties a gift to the next generations. And this one was an extraordinary Christmas and wedding present, the rich fruit dangling there so surprisingly from the tree.

Christmas Recipes from Grandma and elsewhere

After a month of cooking I am never going to cook again - not for a week, anyhow. The fridge is still full of lemon chicken, orange and basil chicken, honey-baked ham (which I don't eat, but cook once a year for Bryan), cold potato gratin, capsicum and eggplant caponata, leftover salads, champagne, beer, five sorts of dips, six sorts of cheese, and other things crammed into corners.

There's Christmas cake, a spare Christmas pudding, two thirds of a gluten-free apple cake, a box of cranberry and macadamia biscotti, two half boxes of rich chocolate and ginger slice, a few leftover parsnip crisps, plus enough peaches, apricots, cherries, early grapes, early apples, greens and cucumbers and tomatoes to feed Genghis Khan's hordes in the unlikely event they'd be tucking into a salad. Not to mention the legs of goat in the freezer along with shoulders of lamb - with bone. You can't make Grandma's stuffed shoulder of lamb with a boned shoulder. I have a feeling even Genghis Khan's horde would have stopped rampaging if someone fed them Grandma's stuffed roast shoulder of lamb. They'd have sat there happily waiting for their apple crumble and custard then had a nice doze.

So the following recipes are for things which I shall not be making, not until the cooking urge descends again, and I start dreaming of another horde to feed.

Stuffed Roast Shoulder and Grandma's Gravy

NB: A hogget is a 'teenage' sheep - halfway between lamb and mutton

Grandma cooked the best mutton I have ever eaten. I took this for granted when I was a kid without much experience of good cooking.

It was many years before I worked out why Grandma cooked mutton worked so well.

My first attempts at mutton cooking were from my first cook book - one on French cooking. Back then everyone just knew that the French were the best cooks in the world (Chinese cuisine was still seen in Australia as sweet and sour possum; Thai was unknown, and Italian and Greek cooking was mostly found in the home. Cafés (most of which seemed to be called the Royal or the Paragon, never the Zeus or the Olympus) concentrated on basic British cuisine - a choice of three roasts (pork, chicken or lamb), apricot pie and custard ...

I dutifully poked holes in my leg of lamb, prodded in slivers of garlic, added a branch of rosemary, cooked it fast and hot, served it rare with the pan drippings simmered with a little good red wine ...

It was important to do it 'right', (i.e. the French way). In those student days a leg of lamb was a birthday only luxury. We ate a lot of brown rice bought in bulk from the student co-op, and home-grown veg, mostly bulking up a 'hot pot' in which a tiny amount of beef was simmered long and slow in a big brown pot with herbs and whatever veg were successful in the heat of Brisbane:, carrots, tomatoes, zucchini ... and baked to go alongside the pot. With the plentiful (free) supply of herbs those hot pots had a golden clarity of juice and flavour which set my palate up for another few decades of good eating ...

But back to the mutton, which although generally good, if somewhat tough in drought years, never had the flavour, the 'meltingness' of Grandma's. No matter how many herbs went in, it still tasted strongly of sheep.
And then I spent a Christmas holiday watching my mother-in-law cook sheep from the family property. She cooked it the same way Grandma had, long and slow. And somehow the cheap cuts of meat turned out to be far more extraordinary in her hands than the expensive legs.

I remember one meal, when her husband had casually announced at lunch-time that a guest was coming to dinner, one revered in his profession and obviously worthy of a good and formal meal.

Like most farm families a sheep - or two - had been killed that week. Some of the meat went to the farm workers; the rest to the family. And by that night the leg, shoulder, crown roast - the elegant mutton bits - had all been eaten. All that was left was the flap, the fatty bony bit around the ribs, with the nice little chop bits already cut off and eaten with fried eggs and tomato and toast and marmalade for breakfast.

The lack of an impressive sheep leg didn't faze her. She sent me out to pick some herbs - two handfuls of thyme, a few leaves only of sage, a handful of savoury, which I'd never used before. We chopped the herbs, added garlic and onion sautéed still soft in butter, grated lemon rind, two eggs, fresh breadcrumbs. Wrapped the flap around the stuffing and cooked it at the lowest possible oven heat till 8.30.

By then the meat had just enough strength left to hold the stuffing. The gravy was pan juices with red wine, thickened with a little red currant jelly. And it was beautifiul.

Finally, I think, I know not just how to turn mutton into magic, but why it works.

First, consider the meat you're working with. Mutton is old and tough and usually fatty. But it has more flavour than any young spring lamb.

Very young lamb, tender lamb that's done no more than bound through grass pastures can be cooked fast and served red (or at least pink), still dripping with its juices. Fast cooking keeps its succulence and retains all of its (mild) flavour.
Tough fatty meat needs something else. It needs long slow cooking to melt all the fat, so it seeps through the flesh, moistening it and sweetening it and finally leaching into the baking dish, so that the meat keeps its taste but the fat has gone. Cooking with stuffing adds to the flavour.

This long slow cooking also melts all the gristly bits that make the meat tough, or hard to carve. Cook them fast and they toughen even more. Cook them slowly and they just melt away, adding to the flavour and the juiciness.

The dry heat of a slow oven also dries the outside of the meat, so that all the juices stay in while the fat evaporates.

Then an hour or two from the end of the cooking you add the vegetables. And suddenly the oven is filled with steam, making the meat more succulent and adding to the gravy juices as they condense.

It's a style of cooking that doesn't suit the 9-5 worker. It was created by women who worked around the house - or could put the roast on before they went to work outside. It evolved for big families - or extended families with farm workers at the table too with big appetites after a long day of hard manual work. With big muscles that needed fuelling. It was a meal that gave the maximum of flavour with the minimum of preparation time - the work was done by the oven, not the cook.

In the few years I cooked for farm workers here we ate sheep twice a day - the roast at night, cold meat at lunch, or even a roast twice a day, the first put on to settle and sizzle in the big wood fired oven before I put on breakfast. It was a meal that was not just cheap, but free, made from the sheep we reared ourselves, and vegies that we grew. And even better, the workers - mostly volunteer 'woofers'- regarded a roast meal as a luxury.

I have to admit though, that Grandma's and my mother-in-law's roasts were still better than mine. I could say (sentimentally) that it was because they were served with love. OR (honestly) that perhaps they just seemed better because they were cooked and served by someone else. Or maybe it was the surroundings, the polish of their tables, the gleam of cutlery, the formalities of eating that they still took for granted, including the absolute necessity of dessert at the end of both the midday and the evening meal.

Ultimately, the truth was that both women had decades of experience judging the size, the fattiness, the colour of their meat and veg. They knew almost instinctively exactly how much cooking each piece needed, how much seasoning. Mutton in a dry season (when sheep comb each hill desperate for a nibble of something green) needs different cooking from the same joint in a lush year, when the sheep only walk a little, and just keep munching till they're full, then doze among the thistles.

I am, and always will be, an amateur mutton cooker and eater - these days I cook sheep perhaps twice a year, when we're given a piece as a present from a farmer. I eat meat perhaps once a fortnight, mostly from feral animals like goat, or free range surplus rooster. The quality of most meat at the butcher's now is poor - tough lamb, badly cut, that has been through the terror of the abattoir and transport trucks, smelling of manure and fear. The sort of sheep the cooks of the past took for granted was killed swiftly, with no lingering fear; hung well, butchered expertly. Butcher's lamb is just a hint of memory now, of what meat used to be.

PS: I make an exception for anything been cooked by someone else as a gift of love or friendship. Relationships with other humans are as important as relationships with the other creatures of our planet.

A Basic Roast Shoulder Recipe

Ingredients:
1 unboned shoulder of lamb, hogget or mutton
1 cup breadcrumbs or even bread, crusts off
2 tbsps butter
juice of 1 lemon
1 tbsp fresh thyme, or winter savoury
1 branch rosemary
6 cloves garlic (my addition, not Grandma's)
1 chopped onion

Make a narrow slit in the meat parallel to the bone. Wiggle your hand in to make the hole bigger with your fingers while keeping the opening as small as possible.

Place the garlic in the pan with the rosemary. Mix other ingredients and stuff into the meat. Place on the garlic and rosemary. Bake in a slow oven - no more than 150ºC, or even 100ºC for at least four hours, till all the fat is off. Add hunks of pumpkin, parsnip, potato or other veg in the last two hours around the meat - the crispy bits will flavour the gravy.
When ready to serve drain off all possible fat, and make the gravy as below. Turn off the oven. Keep the meat in the oven till the gravy is ready. This long resting will magically make the meat even moister.

PS: It's not easy to carve a stuffed shoulder. You need to attack it from the side, not the top - you'll see what I mean when you begin. But it's worth it, even if you can't get the long thin slices you get from a leg. This is the best possible thing to do with sheep meat - a true and absolute luxury.

Gravy with Grandma

There is a packet of Gravox in my cupboard. I bought it years ago, to demonstrate how easy it is to kill aphids. Gravox gravy will suffocate them, as will a mix of Easter egg and water. (A much better thing to do with Easter eggs than eat them - life is too short to waste calories on bad chocolate, and Easter eggs are mostly solidified fat that will keep its shape and taste, what there is of it, for months or even years.)

I would never waste good meat drippings on Gravox.

Grandma's gravy had enough goodness to raise a TB patient from their sickbed; enough flavour to satisfy any palate in the country, and so little fat that even if the plates had been left till next morning (they never were) the last of the gravy wouldn't have congealed.

Grandma's gravy lightly coated the vegies, adding flavour, moisture to their crispness, but solid enough so it never made them soggy.

Made by a three star chef, Grandma's gravy technique would have been accepted as haute cuisine - certainly both the technique and the result deserved it. But like her other staples - her date scones, her apple tea cake - Grandma's gravy has been placed in the 'domestic cooking' category, and its brilliance ignored.

How to make Grandma's Gravy
Start with the pan of roasting mutton, hogget or lamb. By now the vegies are browned and savoury, the meat with a firm yet tender crust, and the whole thing smells heavenly.

Turn the oven lower, if you can. If it's a good solid oven that retains heat you can turn it off. Put the meat on a carving dish then back into the oven. Put the vegies on other oven-proof dishes - NOT with the meat, as any steam from it may turn the crisp bits soggy.

Pour off most of the fat into a mug. Put the cooking pan on a cold surface. This will immediately cause the rest of the fat to partly congeal, and you can scoop it off, either with a spoon, a gravy strainer (ask at a cooking shop for this cunning device) or by wiping the top of the juices with a crust of bread. Be careful with this last one though, or you may take too much fat off.
There should be several tablespoons of meat juice still in the pan, with a slight glaze of fat, and lots of burnt crunchy bits ­- garlic, rosemary, crusts of pumpkin, tiny ends of parsnip. Leave these. They are the foundation of the flavour, along with the scent of caramel from the flour.

Add about 1 tbsp of plain flour or corn flour. (It's a rare giant joint that will need more flour than this). Turn the stove to low, and push the moist flour around vigorously until it's brown. Not pale brown, not burnt black brown - a sort of mid-brown, a bit lighter than milk chocolate.

Now add quickly about 1 litre of cold water. Don't add hot water, or the flour will turn lumpy. Even better, add a litre of water that vegies have boiled in, for extra flavour, or stock made from boiling the shank or mutton bones. Don't add commercial stock of any sort, or your gravy will taste like stock, not gravy. Have faith! Browned flour, pan scrapings and water make the most delicious gravy.

You can now add about 2 tbsps red or white wine, if you have some handy. Grandma never did, and I rarely do. The flavours are too strong for the more subtle meat, herb, garlic and veg scents. But sometimes the wine flavour is good, especially if there is a lot of meat juice to counter balance the wine.

Stir madly, then simmer for about 20 minutes.

Again, do not panic! Your gravy will look and smell anaemic at first. This will change. The longer you cook the more everything will caramelise.

Keep adding water, and keep stirring, till the gravy is fragrant and actually looks like shiny, rich brown gravy. This will never happen in less than half an hour. Add salt at the end only, or you may end up with an unbearably salty mess. (Adding bits of raw potato is meant to counteract this. It doesn't.)

Serve the gravy separately in a warmed jug. Some people, like me, prefer it only over the meat. Others, like Bryan, like their veg to swim in it. Serve mint sauce in another jug. The gravy goes on first, and THEN the sauce.

Other delights from Grandma

Grandma's Banana Cake

Ingredients:
1/4 lb butter
3/4 cup sugar
2 mashed bananas (really ripe ones are best!)
2 eggs
1 generous cup of self-raising flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda dissolved in 2 tbsps hot water

Cream butter and sugar. Add mashed bananas then eggs, SR flour and lastly the bicarbonate dissolved in water. Bake about three quarters of an hour.

Ice with lemon icing, or cut in halves and insert whipped cream. Week old slices are also great toasted and buttered.

Tea Cakes

Grandma served these for afternoon tea, sliced still hot, with butter and jam. Two-hour old tea cakes are boring; fresh ones with butter and jam are a delight, if you have the sort of life that gives you time to cook them and savour them immediately.

Ingredients:
1 egg
1/2 cup of sugar
1 cup milk
2 1/2 cups SR flour
1 dsp butter
Pinch salt

Mix salt and sugar with the flour; sift two or three times. Rub in the butter, beat the egg, add the milk and mix the whole to make a soft dough. Grease a deep dish, a pie tin will do, and bake in a moderate oven 20 minutes or half an hour.

Apricot jam

You do of course need decent jam to eat with a tea cake. Grandma's handwritten recipe says: Wash 1 lb apricots well, let soak in 3 pints water overnight. Boil the fruit in the water in which it has soaked for 20 minutes. Avoid too much stirring. Add the sugar (amount not specified, but see hint below). For this amount of apricots, I add 500 g. Boil for thirty or forty minutes.

Grandma of course would expect anyone reading the recipe to know you need the same weight of sugar as fruit in most (but not all) jam recipes, and that once you added the sugar you would need to stir till the sugar has dissolved before you heat it again, and skim off any froth (and feed it to your grandkids).  Then put a drip in a saucer of cold water; when the drip sets enough to hold together the jam is ready to pour into clean jars, placed on a wooden chopping board so they don't crack, topped with cellophane brushed with vinegar and held on with rubber bands; as the cellophane dried it shrank, making an airtight seal.

Grandma's Date Loaf

Ingredients;
1 cup chopped dates
1 cup brown sugar
2 oz margarine
1 cup boiling water
1 3/4 cup self-raising flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 tsps vanilla

Put dates, sugar in mixing bowl. Slice margarine into it. Pour over the boiling water; stir till margarine melted. Add sifted flour, soda, beat well and put into loaf tin (8 and a half inches by 4 and a half inches by three inches deep). Bake in a moderate oven 45-50 minutes. Serve in buttered slices.

Zucchini Fruit Slice

Ingredients:
185 g butter
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 3/4 cups plain flour
1 1/2 tsps baking powder
1 tsp mixed spice
1 cup chopped dates
1/2 cup chopped sultanas
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1/2 cup coconut
2 cups grated raw zucchini

Cream butter and sugar; add eggs; mix in other ingredients. Spread into greased and floured tray; bake at 200ºC for 30-40 minutes. Test with a skewer. Cool a little before turning out of the tray. Cut into slices with a sharp knife while still warm, but out of the container, to help prevent crumbling.

Cool Summer Recipes

Bitter Lemon Cordial

Ingredients:
10 lemons
sugar
3 tsp tartaric acid

Slice lemons thinly. Mix in a large bowl with the sugar - about half lemons and half sugar, but there is no need to be too exact. Leave overnight; stir a few times before you go to bed.

Overnight the stuff will turn liquid as the sugar draws out the juice and citrus oil. Strain all the liquid into a saucepan; press with a wooden spoon a bit to get out the last of the juice.
Add the tartaric acid to the liquid. Boil 5 minutes. Bottle.
PS No, I didn't forget to add water. You'll end up with a very thick syrup. Stir the glass after you've added water to the cordial to get it well mixed. Should last at least a month but throw out if it looks or smells different or bubbles.

Fruit Crush

Ingredients:
1 cup sugar
1 cup water
juice of 1 lemon
1 tsp tartaric acid
3 cups ripe fragrant strawberries (quarter them if they're large) OR
3 cups ripe fragrant pineapple, chopped (not canned) OR
3 cups squishy ripe mulberries OR
3 cups very ripe raspberries (pick out all beetles)

Put fruit and other ingredients into the blender, give it a whiz and freeze the fruit FAST - i.e. don't bung it in a crowded freezer, or all bunched up together. Place fruit in a plastic freezer bag and freeze in a single layer. Use with two days or the fruit will lose a lot of its fragrance. If possible, use as soon as it's frozen.

Pineapple crush

Grandma made this by grating the pineapple - definitely a labour of love. In these happy days all you need to do is bung it in a blender. Don't be tempted just to use pineapple juice - you won't have the same almost granular texture.
     I used to eat as much of this as I could get hold of when I was a child. Come to think of it, I haven't made it for ages... it really is exquisite, the sort of perfection you only get in the simplest of recipes, like green salads and bread and jam and fruit salad, where each ingredient is distinguishable but the whole is something more.

Ingredients:
1 pineapple

Core and peel the pineapple. Add sugar to taste only if it's pale yellow - you should be able to smell a good pineapple at arm's length. (Most pineapples we get down here aren't fragrant at all, and do need sugar, but rich scented ones can still be found in Queensland.)
Blend the pineapple till it's as liquid as possible. Freeze till it's almost frozen; beat with a fork till it's mushy. Either refreeze till needed, or pile into a tall glass and sip from a spoon. It should be very slightly fibrous - that's part of the pleasure.

For more information from Jackie, please go to her website: www.jackiefrench.com

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