My Favourite Things

Hey everyone!  And welcome to a special edition of An's Country Cooking Misadventures!  It's been my last two weeks in Wangaratta, and because I love this town so much, and also because I've been too lazy to cook anything, I wanted to share with you all of the amazing places I've been to in Wangaratta and the Great North East.  Unlike Oprah, I won't be giving away any plasma TV's or espresso machines, but you might discover a few nice places to visit if you're ever up this way.

Flagpole (The Corner Shop)

It's only appropriate that I start with Flagpole because it was the first place I fell in love with in Wangaratta.  Conveniently located across the street from the Wangaratta ED, the corner shop is the perfect place to go for a long lunch and a decent coffee, much better than the swill they serve in the hospital cafeteria.  Silvanna the store owner can make any type of sandwich or roll you want, and is often very generous with her fillings.  And today there was a delicious true Italian style home-made lasagna on the menu that made everyone else in the department insanely jealous.  Though I haven't had much of a chance to do it this year, my fondest memories of working here will always be of sitting with my team outside the corner shop on a sunny Wangaratta day.

Your friendly neighbourhood milk bar

The Bead Shop and The Idyl Book Cafe

For a REALLY good coffee in Wangaratta there is only one place to go.  The Bead Shop near the Wangaratta train station is actually two stores in one: it is a retail outlet for Bead & Bauble, a Wangaratta-based bead and jewelery making company, which also houses Cafe Derailleur.  If you don't mind being surrounded by hundred upon hundreds of beads and kitsch  jewelery (and hey, you may like it), then you can enjoy the best coffee in Wangaratta.  In fact, I think it stands up to anything that's served in Melbourne, including all those big name roasters (I'm talking to you, Seven Seeds).  Plus, their desserts are legendary.  Have a coffee and a vanilla slice.  You won't regret it.

It looks a lot crazier on the inside

For a different kind of cafe experience, try The Idyl Book Cafe on the north side of town on Faithfull St.  A cafe and second-hand book store, The Idyl Book Cafe makes obvious my affection for multi-purpose meeting places.  Complete with great coffee and comfy couches, it is a lovely place to spend a lazy afternoon with a good second-hand book.  And the staff won't berate you if you don't end up buying anything.

Bargain basement books!  And coffee!

Espresso On Ovens and Intermezzo Cafe

If there was one good thing about doing night shifts in ED, it gave me the opportunity to go out to breakfast with my fellow night team members.  Affectionately (and unimaginatively) dubbed 'The Breakfast Club', we would go out most mornings and rotate through all the breakfast cafes, most of which are conveniently located on one street.  My top picks for a Wangaratta breakfast are Espresso On Ovens (on Ovens St) and Intermezzo Cafe (also on Ovens St).  Espresso is a cozy little place that does an amazing Eggs Florentine with mustard hollandaise, and they have a great selection of freshly squeezed juices.  Intermezzo is a much more spacious venue with a dynamite Big Breakfast.  The view of the cathedral from the outdoor dining verandah gives a nice spiritual touch to the whole breakfast experience.

Espresso On Ovens.  The bar by the window is a great place to people watch

Intermzzo Cafe.  It was raining that day, but usually outdoor seating is choice

Parker Pies

Drive north past Wangaratta for about half an hour and you'll hit Rutherglen, a historic Victorian town that is home to Parker Pies.  With a menu that boasts lamb cooked in mint and rosemary sauce, or venison flavoured with juniper berries and orange, Parker Pies can easily claim to having the best pies in Australia.  In fact I think that might even be an official title.  I did see a plaque in their store that said something to that effect, though I can't remember the exact wording.  Regardless, Parker Pies is worth the trip out of town, and you can even buy frozen ones to take home.  Just make sure you bring as esky.

All Saints Estate

All Saints Estate in Rutherglen is one of Australia's oldest wineries, and one of the prettiest places you will see in Victoria.  A sweeping, picturesque estate, complete with castle, lake, and tree-lined driveway, it is the kind of place that I imagine would be perfect for a wedding.  Actually, according to their website you CAN have your wedding there.  The Rutherglen region is famous for its heavy reds and fortifieds, so be sure to sample as much wine as you can.  There is also an outdoor dining terrace that serves lunch everyday and dinner on Saturdays.  I enjoyed a suckling lamb braised in All Saints Durif with mashed potatoes and roasted zucchini and capsicum, accompanied with the Family Cellar Durif.  If all their weddings are catered like this, I may just have my own wedding up here.

A little castle and a big tree

It's OK to have wine with lunch, right?

Sam Miranda Winery and John Gehrig Winery

These are just a couple of wineries in the region that I wanted to highlight.  Sam Miranda Winery is only about 5 minutes west of Wangaratta on the way to Milawa, and is famous for its 'cool wines' or refreshing whites.  They also do a fantastic lunch, which you can enjoy with a great view of their estate.  They probably do the best pork belly in Victoria, at least of all the pork bellies I've had, which is a lot.

John Gehrig Winery is a tiny boutique winery in Oxley, which is also on the way to Milawa from Wangaratta. There is not much to the winery itself, and I only mention it because I have fallen in love with their Pinot Noir. I have probably bought more than a case of this stuff over a few trips.  If anyone does decide to head this way, can you please pick up a few more bottles for me?

Michelle and The Milawa Mustard Shop

There are plenty of famous attractions in Milawa, including the Milawa Cheese Factory and Brown Brothers Winery, but I always find myself coming back to this humble little mustard shop.  Perhaps it's because Michelle, one of the store managers, was so nice to me and gave me a whole bunch of free herbs a while back.  They also have huge assortment of seeded mustards ranging from very mild to super super hot, as well as a variety of other locally made produce.  It's worth a visit between Brown Brothers and the Cheese Factory, even if only for a friendly chat.

And that's really all I wanted to say.  Of course there are plenty of other attractions around here.  Beechworth have their famous bakery but also three top class restaurants (Provenance, Warden's and Gigi's) which you need to go to if you're staying in the area.  The Indian Tandoori Restaurant in Wangaratta is always good for take-away if you're stuck, and I've heard good things about Chips R Us and their gravy chips.  Personally I'm not a gravy chip fan, but give it a go if that's your thing.

Before I finish off I wanted to make special mention of some of the medical students here who invited me over to their place for dinner a couple of times.  Will, who coincidentally went to the same school as me in the year below, cooked up a roast lamb with potatoes, carrots, pumpkin and onions which went down great, proving that sometimes all you need is a roast and three veg to make a great meal.  The next week, Amy, who obviously doesn't read my blog, made a Donna Hay chicken curry which actually turned out OK.  It definitely had a heap more flavour than my sorry attempt.  Perhaps Donna Hay isn't to blame.

Will is excited about his dinner

Oh and I also made some brownies this week.  I got the recipe out of Delicious and made good use of my silicon baking kit.  The mixture made too much for my cake tray so I had to put the extra mix into the muffin tray which made excellent little brownie muffins.  They tasted very chocolately but I think I may have overcooked them a little because they turned out a little bit hard and dry.  But a blast in the microwave helped bring them back to some warm chewy goodness.

A stack of brownies

My brownie muffin, with Connoisseur ice cream

And that's all from me folks.  I have to wrap this up quickly because it's 1:40am and I have to catch a flight to The States at 9:30am tomorrow/today.  I just REALLY wanted to get this done before I leave, that's how committed I am.  As a final word, I wanted to thank everyone in Wangaratta who made my time there such a pleasure.  I really love that town and everyone in it, and I'm sure I'll back again soon.  In the meantime, I'm not sure what the future holds for this blog now that I'm not in the country anymore.  An's City Cooking Misadventures just doesn't have the same ring to it.  I should have some food photos from my trip to New York and London though so look forward to that.  Until next time!

Back To Basics, Christina Aguilera Style

Hey everyone!  Yes, even though I said I would put up another post soon, I bet none of you thought it would actually happen.  Hell, even I had my doubts.  The PS3 sitting here in front of me is begging me to push its buttons, but instead I'll sit here typing away, at 12:30am on a Tuesday night, listening to Paul Anka belt out swing covers of classic rock songs whilst I lounge around in my home clothes.  I'm not sure if everyone knows what home clothes are, but they are very loose, very comfortable, very daggy clothes to bum around at home in.  I don't understand why people would choose to keep on all that suffocating going out apparel.  And shoes!  Shoes?  Indoors?  Seriously, free those feet.

Alright I seem to have gone off on a bit of a tangent there and its only the second paragraph.  Let's get back on track and head on a journey that will take us through some of the very core dishes that I think every cook should know how to make.  As the title suggests, over the last few weeks I've tried to steer away from anything fancy-pantsy and instead concentrate on some very basic dishes.  When I first started this thing, I really just wanted to be able to cook a few things:

• Lasagna
• A Stir Fry
• A Curry
• Some sort of cake or tart, ooh or brownies
• A good roast/casserole type dish

I also wanted to be able to replicate some of my mum's food.  I didn't notice so much when I was growing up, but after eating out at Asian restaurants I realise now that my mum is an amazing cook.  However as much as I want to fry up a plate of Banh Xeo or whip a huge vat of Pho, Asian food is often so involved and uses so many different ingredients, most of which you can only get at specialty Asian grocers.  It's definitely not anything I can attempt in my little isolated corner of Wangaratta.  Perhaps I will try something once I get back to Melbourne.  Look forward to An's Asian Cooking Misadventures in the near future.

Alright moving on now to the aforementioned Basic Foods of the Week!  True to my word, the first dish is a basic lasagna which I got out of 'The Cook's Companion'.

Stephanie Alexander's Lasagna

I really do love a good lasagna.  There is something about the combination of a lovely rich bolognese and creamy white sauce in between soft layers of pasta that just makes you feel good inside, like you're home again.  My lasagna started out really well.  I was so proud at finally making a bechamel, and my bolognese was looking fantastically thick and rich, and tasted great.  However when it came to constructing the actual dish things quickly came apart.  For one thing, I didn't have a proper lasagna tray, so I had to make do with a deep circular dish thing that I assumed was OK to put in the oven.  I ended up having to break up all my pasta sheets so they all fit, which I'm pretty sure is OK coz I've seen it done before.  The second problem was the order of my layering.  Though I'm sure it's mostly my fault, some of the blame has to go to Stephanie Alexander herself.  Her recipe explicitly says that the lasagna sheets should be on the outside i.e. beginning and ending with pasta sheets.  However I think that she was using fresh lasagna sheets, while I only had Leggo's instant lasagna sheets at my disposal.  Consequently, the top of my lasagna became hard as a crisp, and no amount of re-heating could take away that yucky rubbery texture.  But beyond that, everything tasted pretty good!  I thought it was going to be a lot harder to make than it was, but those sauces weren't too involved at all.  I just need a spare hour to let the bolognese reduce properly, and another 40 minutes to an hour cooking time, so all up a 2 hour dish that will always be a house favourite.  And next time I'll get the layering right.

Well that doesn't look like much

Bechamel and Bolognese.  I don't know why that other pot is there.

Layering

More layering

That dastardly top layer

It may not look it, but it tastes OK

Stephanie Alexander's Apple and Cinnamon Muffins

Part two of my basics cooking misadventure had me itching to bake something using the silicone baking gear I bought off Catch of the Day a while back.  Unfortunately, that baking set didn't include a cake tin, so I would have to make do with tarts, muffins and loaves of bread.  Having already made banana bread (which I never posted up here unfortunately) and not game enough to make a pastry, I decided to take a stab at a muffin recipe from 'The Cook's Companion'.  I'm loving this book at the moment.  Not only does it sort recipes by ingredient, Stephanie Alexander provides a whole bunch of 'base recipes' such as this muffin base, and then tips on adding all the extra bits.  Thus, Apple and Cinnamon Muffins.

So from a batch of 12 I kept three for myself and took the rest into ED to share around.  They went down great and I got a lot of compliments, from mothers no less, and you can't get much better praise than that.

Donna Hay's Red Thai Curry with Eggplant and Pumpkin

Blergh.  I don't want to talk about this dish too much because it turned out to be a bona-fide disaster.  Probably the worst dish I've made since those zucchini fritters circa 9 months ago.  I should have known it was going to turn out bad when the only spice on the ingredients list was red thai curry paste.  And on my end, I left the vegetables to cook for too long so they all broke down into a mushy paste.  What resulted was a flavourless slop of a curry that tasted worse than it looked.  The majority of it ended up going into the trash. And I will never trust a Donna Hay curry ever again.

Nigella Lawson's Pasta Puttanesca

So after a week of triumphs and tragedies in the kitchen with my basics experiment, I was back on night shifts in ED yet again.  This of course meant going to my fall back of cooking a big pot of pasta for the week, but rather than cheat again with stir-through sauce I instead took a recipe out of Delicious for Pasta Puttanesca, or 'Whore's Pasta' as Nigella calls it.  I don't know why she calls it that, but I can definitely imagine her describing it in a very sexy way.

A very oily sauce

More of that swirly pasta thing

This recipe called for a lot of oil, a lot of garlic, a whole jar of anchovies and a container full of olives.  It tasted great, and lasted me most of the week, but I don't think it did my breath any favours.

Well that's all for this week guys.  It's Saturday already and I have to head back up to Wangaratta tomorrow for the final two-week stretch in this rotation.  Even though its taken a few days this post still feels kind of rushed.  Obviously I've had to stop and come back to it a few times, and more often than not I was typing while concurrently watching Dexter in side-by-side windows.  But that's no excuse for poor quality posting.  The next post will be my final one from Wangaratta so I'm going to try and highlight a lot of the town itself before I leave.  Looking forward to it.