Frankie making saffran pasta.
So on the first night Frankie was still frantically rolling out the pasta when the first guests arrived. There was a hectic 5 minutes with me being my usual bossy self and getting one of our lovely helpers to deal with the guests. Another to do a speedy clean up.
Tags: Australian Tapestry Workshop, food design, Francesca Unsworth, Melbourne, pop up, State of Design 2010, underground
Some insprirations: weaving yarns dyed in house at the Australian Tapestry workshop
After a stopovers in Dubai, Colombo (Sri Lanka) and Singapore it was finally touchdown in Melbourne on Saturday 17th July. The cold came as bit of shock with having gotten used to the humid heat in Singapore and Summer having kicked off in Paris , but there was no time to warm myself up by a cosy fire. It was all go go go from the start with my partner in crime, Frankie having flown in on the same day from Sydney. We hadn’t seen each other since the Edible Immigration Tales in March and even though we had been skyping and emailing regularly our ideas, cooking experiments and designs. It’s still not quite the same as having a face to face conversation.
Tags: Australian Tapestry Workshop, Design, Edible Tapestry Tales, Melbourne, Mollydooker, pop up, State of Design 2010
‘Finger food’ : deconstructed eclairs – raspberry and vanilla pastry cream with eclair choux pastry fingers which had to be worn in order to be dipped into the cream, created for the vernissage of an exhibition at the Slott gallery in June this year.
Tags: Art, finger food, food design, Paris, Photography, Slott, vernissage
On the 3rd of June I held my first clandestine dinner in Paris. Never to be one to do just a ’simple’ dinner party I had make it more of a culinary event and decided upon doing something fun with the 80s and French food. The 80s are not one of the decades to be known for it’s culinary delights which I discovered after hunting down some beautifully food styled (the more food or props they could fit in one photo the better) 80s recipe books.
The menu kicked off with a Tom Cruise inspired shaken cocktails (red berries, limonchello and gin) which fit perfectly with the summer evening and was accompanied by some 80s coloured savoury macaron (cream cheese & wasabi and green olive tapenade – Pierre Hermé started his macaron experimenting in the 80s).
First course was edible pacman with pâté powerballs and confit cherries. I had wasted considerable amount of time playing pacman in the name of research. Second course was twisted bacon and a two toned tartiflette, a kind of deconstructed version with the use of sweet potatoes and some peppery roquette to balance the Reblochon. Tartiflette was created in the 80s by the Reblochon producers to promote their cheese.
Homage to 80s power dressing and those big shoulder pads: main course of Power puff pastry shoulder pad with a boeuf printanier (slow cooked spring beef stew).
A cold war soup: communism watermelon gazpacho and cucumber capitalism sorbet was served as a palate cleanser. And to finish off a 80s Paris Brest (the 8 was filled with a praline pastry cream and the 0 with a salted butter caramel cream).
The first 4 dishes were accompanied by red wines recommended by my great local caviste who matches all my wines for me as I’m hopeless. He also recommended a lovely caramel/light Irish whisky to go with the dessert.
Special thanks to myprivatedinner for providing the apartment, Jay-P for an awesome 80s music mix, my lovely culinary assistant Bernadette, Sten Pittet for taking some pictures for me and my lovely guests for coming!
Tags: 80s, clandestine, foodie, fun, myprivatedinner.com, Paris, theme
Ask first © 2010 R Khooks, Rachel Khoo. All rights reserved.
Last week I started to dabble in with sourdough. I got a crash course in sourdough bread baking but was still a little dubious as my track record with looking after living things isn’t that great. Maintaining a starter felt all too much like having to take care of a plant or a beer smelling tamagotchi. My last attempt of growing rosemary and thyme ended up in the bin. Luckily Clotilde from Chocolat & Zucchini has been doing a great job writing about sourdough with plenty of recipes.
Ask first © 2010 R Khooks, Rachel Khoo. All rights reserved.
Sourdough or a natural starter is a combination of fermented flour, water, wild yeasts and friendly bacteria which is used to leaven bread. It’s a tradition to name your starter, so I decided to baptise mine “Lucca” as I’m testing and researching sourdough bread recipes for some culinary workshops I’ll be doing in Tuscany near the town of Lucca.
I went about feeding my starter every day (organic white flour and filtered water). I accidently put it in the fridge and it froze but I managed to bring it back to life. It’s quite warm in Paris (Spring has finally kicked off) which is just the kind of temperature Lucca likes. A week of feeding and I thought it was about time to put Lucca to a test. I used the 1 2 3 sourdough recipe which is pretty fool proof. I went for a mix of wholewheat and white flour with a sprinkling of seeds. I made my sponge early in the morning, gave it 6 hours and then made the dough in the afternoon and left it to rise for a further 6 hours and by 10pm I had a fresh loaf. I must say I’m very impressed with the crust which is made by putting the dough in a oven proof dish with a lid to bake. The water evaporating from the bread creates steam and makes a very crunchy crust. Another plus with sourdough is the bread keeps really well. Even a week later toasted it still tastes great. More beer smelling tamagotchi tales to follow…
Ask first © 2010 R Khooks, Rachel Khoo. All rights reserved.
Check out Clotilde’s well documented basic sourdough recipe for further information.
Tags: healthy, homemade, natural starter, retreat, sourdough
