Prick With A Fork

Congratulations, Le Canard Enchante!

Incongruously given our voting patterns, we Pricks can be just a little bit hippy-dippy when it comes to our food. As such we have all the “right” attitudes about the big supermarket chains (for dog food and paper towels only, thanks), want our eggs laid by chooks who have plenty of activities and enrichment programs to fill their days, and firmly believe Saturday mornings are for sleeping in and growers’ markets, not sport. Thank Christ the Little Pricks agree.

But despite all that we also know our place on the food chain. This includes the Little Pricks:

Thus the happy confluence of a long weekend, the discovery of our newest, favourite-ist meat market of the moment Feather & Bone, and a few recipes we’d been meaning to try got the better of us, turning the Queen’s Birthday into a festival of carnivorousness.

On the Sunday, for a bit of a family barbeque we knocked up some chicken wings from David Chang’s Momofuku cookbook: It’s a helluva long recipe that involves brining, cold-smoking, confiting, and finally pan-frying. Good, possibly not quite worth the effort, but really just fun if stacking up a lot of techniques for a plate of bar food is your bag (it is). Next time we’ll deep-fry, and have more of a sauce on the side.

Speaking of sauces, the tare (mirin, light soy, a few other bits and bobs) that went with the wings turned out to be just the thing to dip these guys into:

Suon nuong, or Vietnamese pork ribs. I never got to take a picture of the finished platter because three kilos were gone in two minutes. Make this recipe for your next family gathering, picnic, wedding, funeral, bar mitzvah. Well, maybe not bar mitzvah. But it’s still one of the easiest crowd-pleasers you’ll find.

The main event was a couple of slabs of brisket – about three kilos worth – which I got going in the smoker at around 6 that morning and let cruise up to 95 degrees C in an applewood haze for about eight hours:

The idea came from a recipe sighted in Meat & Co, a little freebie magazine given away in butcher shops by Meat & Livestock Australia and contributed by fellow New Yorker (albeit upstater!) Gregory Llewellyn of Hartsyard. Kingsley Amis wrote that one should never distrust even the little recipe tags on booze bottles as mere advertising tatt because the men who write them know what they are talking about and will hear about it if they don’t; I’d argue the same goes for meat-related promotional goodies.

Certainly it was hard to argue with the result:

Meanwhile a stack of short ribs had been doing their thing in the sous-vide at 60 degrees for the following night’s meal (they’d go for 48 hours, all up).

These were, again, being done according to a Chang recipe, and happily I’d managed to more-or-less lick the problem of sealing the poaching liquid, a combination of sake and mirin and soy and assorted other goodies into the bags with only a vacuum sealer (short answer to how it was done? Carefully.)

Add a bit of blanched spring onion and some kombu-poached daikon, et voila – family dinner, Prick-style.

Yes, there should have been a strip of pickled carrot, and yes, I should have worked the sauce harder to make it cleaner. But the ribs – finished by cubing and frying in oil at 185C – were the best ribs ever to come out of the kitchen at Stately Prick Manor.

Pack your bags, kids, we’re going to California:

A doughnut filled with foie gras mousse will  be given away for free at two bakeries in San Jose and Campbell, California, on  Friday, also known as National Doughnut Day.

The unusual treat, which is topped with a  sprig of sage and injected with a pipette of fig, honey and balsamic gastrique,  has attracted a lot of attention since Psycho Donuts announced its arrival –  both positive and negative.

While some have heralded the ‘Foie Bomb’ as a  ‘gastronomic delight’, others have slated the bakery – which also sells vegan  products – for promoting animal cruelty.

Fantastic. This may be the greatest gastronomic innovation since, literally, sliced bread:

‘You have the unctuous fattiness of the  mousse, in the center of a yeasty raised doughnut hole,’ [Psycho Donuts owner Ron Levi] said.

‘The fattiness of the foie and the  herbaceousness of the sage. . .it’s an experience the whole way  through.

While the predictable protesters have been out in force, many particularly piqued by the fact that Levi also serves vegan donuts, he’s not backing down:

‘How dare you tell people what they can and  cannot eat?’

Amen to that. There’s hope for California yet. Funny how so many people who claim to be “pro-choice”, aren’t.

Here at Stately Prick Manor we sometimes play a cheese course game called “Literary Restaurant”. The idea is to come up with puns for dishes at a literature-themed eatery. Thus, “Would you like still, sparkling, or tap water for chocolate?”

When customers sit down, the waiter brings “Catcher in the Rye bread”.

And players might imagine the “Old Man and the Seafood Platter”.

You get the idea. It’s a moderately above-average IQ dad joke.

But wouldn’t you know it, someone has actually gone and opened a functioning literary restaurant, sort of. Andrew McConnell of Cutler & Co (we loved it last year) and Cumulus fame and one of the Pricks’ favourite chef-restaurateurs, recently added another string to his bow in the form of Moon Under Water, an ethereal little dining room off the back of the Builders Arms Hotel in Melbourne’s Fitzroy – a bar that once upon a time was known for its all-in brawls at closing time.

Continue reading →

This, apparently, is a thing:

When some future Gibbon sits down to pen The History of the Decline and Fall of Western Civilisation, this ought to merit a chapter somewhere around the middle of Volume III.

People, can we have a little talk about martinis? I know, I know. This is a naff and clichéd topic. Has anyone had a new insight on the drink since, oh, Dorothy Parker? Probably not. The writers of The Simpsons, back when they were still funny, nailed it when they had Bart get caught with an old Playboy magazine bearing the coverline, “Updike on the Martini”.

But at risk of being a bore, this needs saying: For whatever reason, there is an epidemic of bad martini-making going around, spread by people who are working at places where everyone should know better.

I’m not just talking about the martini the Prick had recently at the apocalyptically vulgar Revesby Workers’ Club in far-western Sydney. Now this thing could not have been wetter had it fallen off side and been dragged back over the gunnels on a boathook, but it was always going to be awful. Hell, it was only ordered as a vague gesture of New Class-solidarity at the launch of old mate Nick Cater’s book The Lucky Culture after local MP and club supremo Daryl Melham called the Prick a snob.

Nor am I talking about the various abominations like espresso martinis (though Mrs Prick finds them yummy) or “raspberry-vanillatinis” or anything else that is comes in a stemmed cocktail glass and is given the misnomer.

I’m talking about shaken, soggy, soupy numbers unbefitting their name.

Last night the Prick was camping out at the otherwise lovely Olsen Hotel in Melbourne and in need of refreshment after a thirteen-hour day. It was raining. The good bit of Chapel Street seemed a mile away when in real life it was only about a nine-iron. The hotel’s in-house restaurant, Spoonbill, looked fine. There was a steak on the menu. Let’s do this thing.

Martini #1’s brief was simple: Tanqueray, dry, straight-up, olive. I knew we were in trouble when I heard vigorous shaking coming from the bar. What was brought was lukewarm and stank of vermouth and had little chips of ice floating on the top like it was the North Atlantic.

Oh, and there was a tasty finger of a porterhouse:

That pat of butter was about the size of a 50-cent piece, for scale. The steak was $36.

Despite the advice of confrères on Twitter to send it back, the drink was manfully consumed and the order foolishly tried again.  “Can I get another, but this time, a lot drier, and stirred, not shaken?”

Naturally, what came to the table next was a warm glass of gin. Yum.

This happens more often than one would think. There’s a busy, hip food and cocktail place the Prick attends regularly on Crown Street, Surry Hills, but only one or two bartenders know what they’re doing in this department. The rest cast their mind back to bartending school and come up with a martini that can only be called, at best, “workmanlike”.

The martini is the gruyere omelette of drinks. It is not an everyday food, but  nor is it something that is particularly complicated. It is as much art as recipe and it reveals character both in its creation and its consumption. Cooking an omelette and making a martini and doing both well are skills every gentleman, indeed every cultured individual, bartenders included, should have in their personal toolkit. And one more thing: There is no such thing as a vodka martini. Sorry.

Fortunately after the previous night’s experience, Melbourne came good with a tasty business lunch at a little corner shop in the CBD by the name of Three Fold which was turning out duck confit and Reuben sandwiches and venison lasagnes for the office crowd:

Deer me, that’s good venison lasagne…

Which brings up the issue of why Sydney’s downtown is an infestation of food courts while Melbourne’s is full of lovely places like the above. But that’s a question for another day.

Years ago (but not that many, thank you very much), when Mrs Prick was just a junior burger of a solicitor getting ready to start her scramble up the greasy pole, she lived in a number of places around Balmain and Rozelle in the company of a little dog named Sooty. Now Sooty was a fox terrier and as anyone familiar with the breed knows, they are escape artists extraordinaire: a three-metre  Colorbond fence is nothing to these creatures.

What made Sooty special, though, were his adventures once he got over the wall. In those days Mrs Prick would regularly have to explain to senior partners that she had to leave work to collect her dog who had (to take one example) been caught trying to board a bus to Leichhardt without a ticket.

One particularly cherished memory involves a mid-afternoon call from the Three Weeds Hotel in Rozelle. Sooty had rocked up to the bar and would she like to come and retrieve him, thank you very much? When she arrived she found the dog seated on a stool, happy as Larry, with three old-timers and their middies who laughed and cackled, “He can’t go yet! It’s his shout!”

This photo was taken in a “pea shoot”

Sooty was, in Mrs Prick’s estimation, a “loveable shit of a dog.”

It was with that story in mind that I turned to Mrs Prick in the taxi heading home from a recent dinner at the Three Weeds – much revamped since Sooty’s day – and asked, “So can I call that a loveable shit of a restaurant?”

“No, no, no!”, she said. “That’s far too mean. And it’s certainly loveable. But, well…”

Well … we went for a meal at the Three Weeds’ revamped restaurant where Lauren Murdoch has lately been turning out some much-heralded casual fancy-pants cuisine. And without giving away too much too soon, it was not all for which we had hoped.

Which is a shame because the Pricks had enjoyed Murdoch’s cooking when she was on the pans at the Paris-by-way-of-New York bistro Felix down in the Merivale theme park on George: Her skate with brown butter was the best in town. After the Three Weeds picked her up, Mrs Prick had a girls’ night at Felix and came home to report the kitchen had lost its way in her absence.

Thus when a couple of local law-talking mates with an infant had a sudden attack of the babysitters and called looking for a double date Saturday night, Three Weeds was top of the list of places to try to snaffle a table.

We liked the looks of the menu and the general vibe of the place – cozy and informally elegant, it’s a clubby little Chairman’s Lounge of a room tucked off to the side of the pub’s more raucous halls – but a delicate and well-composed tortellini of peas starters with guanciale, lemon, and chili was artful on the plate yet didn’t go the distance on the palate. There was no heat to be found; slim shavings of pork weren’t present enough to add richness or saltiness and did nothing to lift the dish. A great idea, the tortellini were gossamer thin and delicately constructed, the peas snappy, but somehow it just never came together.

Mrs Prick had a similar experience with her cauliflower soup, which was likewise under-seasoned and even shavings of scallops couldn’t elevate the dish (why not really sear and caramelise some lovely fat numbers and serve them on top whole? Or some chorizo? Or something?). It would have been nice with a sandwich or a roll for a simple lunch on a cold day but was not the sort of thing that should be coming out of a kitchen flirting with hat-dom. Our mates had better luck with their kingfish carpaccio and special tuna crudo.

A main course pork belly and chorizo “crepinette” was frankly confusing.

This is not the pork you are looking for.

Yes, it’s a sort of meat-in-caul fat affair, but when sliced, it burst forth a bounty of little cubes of filling, but these flavours which should have again been big and bold were muted even as the accompanying radicchio salad stood over everything else on the plate, almost to the point of being overwhelming.

It’s a funny trick of the brain that I sometimes “hear” flavours as sound, and will sometimes think of a dish having a rumbling basso profundo or a tripping pizzicato. Perhaps the hotel’s neighbours experience a similar synaesthesia leading them to complain about the noise; on our visit all the flavours were turned right down.

Mrs Prick’s confit Maryland of chicken (and why Maryland? Why not a Delaware or a Virginia of chicken?) was lovely, though judging from the size of the leg this bird never reached voting age. Meanwhile our companions’ medium-rare steaks crept toward the medium. And, in an odd hiccup for a night where the service did much to redeem the experience, no steak knives were offered.

Honeycomb ice cream … the bee’s knees

I say odd because service was otherwise friendly and knowledgeable, professional and almost European, yet without any hint of aloofness. A brief but solid wine list, not unreasonably priced and clearly put together by a sommelier who knows what he’s doing was a big help as well. Our foursome had a great time on some Austrian grüner veltliner and a luscious but silky Chateauneuf-du-Pape. Some Paul Girard cognac, after some very redeeming desserts (honeycomb ice cream, that is all one needs to say) and a decent little cheese plate, eased the anxiety over the approaching bill which all in all was pretty reasonable, coming in well below ICAC’s threshold for “lavish”.

None of this is to say we had a bad time. We laughed, we talked, we drank, we ate, and we still generally love the idea of a slick pub restaurant like they have in Paddington just down the road. If we lived within walking distance we would be there once a week. Perhaps in six months we’ll give Murdoch’s kitchen another burl as previous experiences at Felix suggest that ours may have been an off-night, or that the menu either needs to settle down or undergo some tweaking.

On a whim, added a tin of really nice anchovies to tonight’s lamb shank braise. For anyone thinking asking lamby lines, this is a good idea. Especially with a lot of red wine and stock in the pan (cooked down to make a sauce) and some ridiculously creamy pommes puree.

Meet nine-year-old Hannah Robertson:

McDonald’s needs kids more than today’s kids need McDonald’s.

Perhaps no one knows that better than CEO Don Thompson, who was seriously put on the hot seat by a 9-year-old girl at Thursday’s annual shareholder’s meeting in Oak Brook, Ill.

For a few moments, Hannah Robertson — whose mother, Kia, is a kid’s nutritional activist and creator of an interactive children’s game on nutrition called Today I Ate a Rainbow — stood and lectured the CEO of one of the world’s biggest brands.

“There are things in life that aren’t fair — like when your pet dies,” said Hannah, whose voice never wavered. “I don’t think it’s fair when big companies try to trick kids into eating food. It isn’t fair that so many kids my age are getting sick,” she said — blaming McDonald’s for unfairly targeting kids with advertisements for food that isn’t good for them.

Hannah ended her time-limited comments, made during the meeting’s question-and-answer session, by pointedly but politely asking: “Mr. Thompson, don’t you want kids to be healthy so they can live a long and healthy life?”

It’s actually unfair to call young Hannah appalling. Her mother, who surely put her up to this little stunt, should however probably be brought up on charges: If playground bullying is bad, why is moral bullying OK, and even applauded?

None of this is to give support to McDonald’s, mind you. The Three Little Pricks have been taught from birth that save for the occasional road trip Big Mac the stuff’s pretty cretinous. The six-year-old still believes that if you eat too much of it  you’ll grow a rat’s tail.

But the boys also understand, unlike Hannah’s mother, that individuals still do, and should continue to, have the power to control not only their choices but their appetites.

UPDATE: Ann Althouse on using nine-year-0lds for political purposes. It’s not OK, even when the target is the loathsome Rahm Emanuel:

I’ve watched the video, and my reaction is: Adults taught him a speech. He’s being used as a political puppet. I’ve seen far too much of the use of children in politics — click my “using children in politics” tag — and I don’t like it. I think it’s especially bad to teach a child to yell angrily at another person and to exhibit hostility, and it’s bad for us to express enthusiasm about a child who’s good at giving the scripted performance. This is not how children should be taught. Ironically, the topic under discussion is education.

I’ve seen this before, in Wisconsin, with children taught to chant or sing the adults’ hostility toward Gov. Scott Walker. I don’t like when children are used to sing the praises of a politician either. We all know the absurd children’s choirs singing about Barack Obama as if he’s a divinity. But teaching children to perform hatred is another matter. Children need to learn about policy and politics over time, so that they understand the substance of the issues and can make their own choices.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

A rare victory for common sense:

Good question.