mini meat pies

I've been an Australian expat for eight years now - with some much-needed months-long intervals at home - but this is the first year it's ever occurred to me to throw an Australia Day party. I think there must be something about Texas that inspired me. Also, this is the first time I've been the only international among a group of friends - my closest friends here are all American, and I love them very dearly, and I thought they needed to eat things like meat pies, sausage rolls, pavlova and lamingtons. I was also hugely impressed by their collective ability to produce decorative Australiana, which far outstripped my own. My favourite was the gorgeous map of my country, hand-drawn and beautifully painted, by a wonderful 6 year old friend.

So, back in January: the most kitsch Australia Day ever, but very delicious. I also served tiny hamburgers complete with beetroot (beets - an essential component of the Aussie burger), fairy bread (white bread with butter and sprinkles, which I cut into the shape of Australia, and which the abovementioned 6 year old was a big fan of), a green and gold salad, and a lime and coconut cheesecake with a macadamia crust (macadamias are native to Australia). And yes, there were prawns (shrimp) on the barby.



This is Australian Gourmet Traveller's recipe for mini meat pies - or party pies, as we call them - so they're all steak, shallots, garlic and red wine. The result is probably more French than Australian, but they're unbearably delicious, and you definitely don't need to wait for imperialist national holidays to serve them. The recipe suggests topping them with puff pastry, but I chose to make a double batch of shortcrust. Serve them with tomato sauce (ketchup) - AGT says "homemade or good quality", and I say Heinz or Fountain.

The filling takes some time to cook and cool, and is best made the day before you assemble the pies.



PS I know it's disgraceful of me to use props with Union Jack on them for an Australia Day post, but this gorgeous Emma Bridgewater plate was the closest thing I could find to an Australian flag.






Mini Meat Pies
from Australian Gourmet Traveller

2 tbsp olive oil
600g chuck steak, chopped into 2cm pieces
for dusting: seasoned plain flour
4 shallots, coarsely chopped
3 garlic cloves, coarsely chopped
200ml dry red wine
200ml beef stock
1/4 cup (firmly packed) thyme leaves
1 egg, lightly beaten

for shortcrust pastry:
240g plain flour, sieved
180g cold unsalted butter, coarsely chopped
1 tsp salt

Heat oil in a large saucepan over high heat. Dust steak in flour, shake off excess, and cook in batches until golden, stirring occasionally (3-5 minutes). Remove from saucepan with a slotted spoon and set aside. Add shallots and garlic to pan, saute until golden (3-5 minutes). Add red wine, reduce by half (3-4 minutes), then add stock and thyme. Reduce heat to low, add steak, cover and simmer until tender (2-2 1/2 hours). Uncover and cook until sauce is thick (30-40 minutes). Season to taste, set aside to cool, then refrigerate until cooled completely.

To make the pastry, process flour, butter and 1 tsp salt in a food processor until just combined. Add 80ml iced water, a little at a time, and pulse just until a dough forms. Form into a disc, wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate to rest (1 hour).

Preheat oven to 200°C / 400°F. Roll pastry to 5mm thick and cut twelve 9cm-diameter rounds. Line a 12 x 60ml capacity muffin tray with pastry and refrigerate to rest (30 minutes). Meanwhile, cut twelve 7cm-diameter rounds of puff pastry and refrigerate until required. (Note that I made two batches of shortcrust and didn't top the pies with puff; this meant I could make 18 pies from the amount of filling I had.)

Divide pie mixture among pastry cases, fold in pastry edges, then brush with eggwash and top with pastry circles. Press edges together and refrigerate to rest (30 minutes). Brush with eggwash and then cook until golden and cooked through (15-20 minutes). (As you can see, I made a small hole in the top of each pie. The hole allows steam to escape, and I like the way it looks.)

* The AGT recipe says it makes 12; mine stretched to 18.

bite-size tomato tarts

These tiny tarts are delicious and quick and people get very excited about them, which is the best kind of summer party cooking.

There's no recipe, really: I cut circles from ready-made puff pastry with a 2 inch circular cookie cutter, and then topped them with a mixture of salami, cherry tomatoes, thyme and goat's cheese. Here are the combos I made (and it was nice to have a platter full of slightly different flavours):

* Salami & roast cherry tomato: I cut the salami to the same size as the pastry with the same cookie cutter. I cut the cherry tomatoes in half and roasted them for about half an hour before arranging them on top of the salami with a few thyme leaves.

* Goat's cheese & roast cherry tomato: I mixed some soft goat's cheese with a little salt and pepper and some thyme leaves, and topped with roast cherry tomatoes.

* Sweet cherry tomato: I didn't pre-roast these cherry tomatoes - instead, I cut them across-ways into small, round slices. I put a tiny bit of brown sugar on top of the pastry, then arranged the round slices of tomato in a circle and sprinkled with salt and pepper. I think these were my favourite flavour - the tomatoes stay quite firm and fresh, just beginning to melt, and the sticky sugar gives just the right hit of sweet. You can see one in the lower right hand corner of my last photo.

I baked them all on top of parchment paper in a 400°F / 200°C / Gas Mark 6 oven for about 25 minutes.

feta & mint triangles

I'm envious and admiring today of people with houses and gardens and vegetable patches; of the pleasure they must feel at this time of the Northern Hemisphere year, when just three days of bright, hot weather can make all the difference to their sprouts and seedlings. Suddenly, we have blossoms and magnolias, buds on the barest of winter trees, and birds singing late into the evening. This tangible sense of the world's turning still astonishes my sub-tropical soul. It also makes sense of a great deal of poetry.

These crisp filo pastries filled with tart feta cheese and bursts of mint are just right for eating out of doors with a green salad and a glass of white wine some sweet, late-April evening - like this one.



Take the sheets of filo pastry out of the refrigerator only when you're ready to use them (they dry out quickly). Work with the pastry as fast as you can for the same reason. Brushing with the melted butter will soften areas that have hardened, and don't worry too much about neatness.

It's also quite difficult to explain in words how to form the triangles themselves. I've included some photographs of the process, but the need to work quickly so the filo won't tear made that difficult. It's much easier and more intuitive than it looks; once you're in the thick of things, the next step will feel obvious.



Feta & Mint Triangles
adapted from Claudia Roden, Arabesque (US, UK)

7 oz feta cheese, mashed with a fork
1 egg, lightly beaten
3 tbsp chopped mint
1 tsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
salt & pepper
8 large sheets filo
1 stick (8 tbsp) butter, melted (yes, this feels like a lot of butter, and I didn't use it all. You might want to begin with half a stick and gauge what more you think you might need.)

To make the filling, mash the feta cheese with the egg, chopped mint and lemon juice. Season with a little salt and pepper.

Preheat the oven to 300° Fahrenheit / 150° Celsius.

Just before you're ready to use them, cut the sheets of pastry into four rectangles measuring about 12 inches x 4.5 inches and put them in a pile on top of each other. Brush the top piece of pastry thoroughly with melted butter.

Take about a tablespoon of filling and place it in the upper right hand corner of the top sheet of pastry. Fold this upper right hand corner across the filling in order to form a triangle, leaving about a 1 cm strip of pastry free (see photographs below).




Fold this free strip of pastry over the edge of the triangle, brushing with butter and tucking the excess at the very top underneath. Now you should have a folded triangle of cheese-filled pastry with about 2/3 of the filo rectangle still visible. Brush with more butter and then lift the highest tip of the triangle and fold it down over the pastry once; brush again with butter, and fold again until you have a neat triangle shape. There should be a little excess pastry, which you can neaten by brushing with butter and folding over the edge of the triangle.

Do the same with the remaining strips of pastry and cheese filling. Place the triangles, seam side down, on a baking sheet and brush the tops with melted butter. Bake for 30 minutes or until golden. Serve warm.

mushrooms under glass

Mushrooms under glass were all the rage in the early 20th century. I first read about them in Mary McCarthy's novel The Group, in which a coterie of Vassar graduates trip through 1930s New York drinking cocktails called Clover Cup and Silver Fizz. Intrigued, I found them again (via google) in a 1918 novel by Mary Roberts Rinehart, memorably titled 'Twenty-Three and a Half Hours' Leave'. (The frontispiece of this novel is an image captioned with the words: 'In the elevator she said out of a clear sky: "You'll have to take that raincoat off, of course".') In Rinehart's book, a general eats his mushrooms under glass with broiled squab at "the best restaurant in the city".

The basic recipe is a circle of toasted bread topped with mushrooms, butter and cream. This assemblage is covered by a glass dish and cooked slowly in a low oven. 'How to Cook Vegetables' (1909), by the uncannily named Olive Green, offers four Mushrooms Under Glass recipes: with parsley butter and a little cream; with stems fried in salt, pepper and nutmeg; with nothing but fresh uncooked mushrooms; and with pre-sautéed mushrooms. 'The French Chef in Private American Families' (1922), by Xavier Raskin, recommends mushrooms of the Campestris variety, and suggests one large mushroom cap upended on the toast and stuffed with its stem, butter and cream.

I don't know when mushrooms under glass fell out of fashion. Maybe it had something to do with being able to reproduce a similar effect with aluminium foil, or even in a microwave. But the theatrical whimsy of the dish appealed to me, and I knew where I could buy some cheap glass butter dish covers.



I updated the recipe with goat cheese rather than cream and mixed thyme and lemon in with the butter. Make sure you use thick-cut bakery or homemade bread for the crouton base: thin, spongy supermarket bread won't hold up. You need to be very careful when cooking with glass because abrupt changes in temperature can cause it to shatter. Don't preheat your oven, and don't place the dishes too close to the heating element. When you remove the glass covers from the dish, don't place them on anything too hot or too cold.

The result is something like serving your guests very, very good mushrooms on toast. The mushroom flavour intensifies with the slow cooking, but the mushrooms remain shapely and firm. This means that very ordinary button or white mushrooms will work perfectly: the long cooking time gives their flavour a chance to shine. The herb butter and mushroom juices keep the bread moist in the oven, so it still tastes just-toasted when you bring it to the table. The best part is removing the glass cover in front of your guests: the aroma of mushrooms, previously trapped under the dish, rises suddenly with the steam. It's like an earthy, rich terrarium of yum.

An ebay search for bell jars, glass cloches and glass butter dish covers shows how expensive these things can be. These garden cloches from Smith & Hawkin would be dramatic piled high with mushrooms. Keep an eye out for glass covers in thrift stores - I bought mine at a local antique store for $2 each. Xavier Raskin offers this hint for those dealing with larger Private American Families: "If more convenient use one large bell oven glass, arranging all the mushrooms as above under the one bell glass."



Mushrooms Under Glass

Serves 4

12 medium-sized button/white mushrooms
4 tbsp unsalted butter, softened
1 tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
2 tsp fresh thyme leaves
salt and freshly ground black pepper
4 thick slices of bread
40g / 1.5oz firm goat cheese

Remove the stalks from the mushrooms. Chop stalks finely.

Using a fork, mash the thyme leaves, lemon juice and a little salt and pepper into the softened butter.

Cut out rounds of bread to the size of your glass cover. Toast bread. Spread one side with herb butter and place the bread, buttered side down, on a baking dish or plate. Spread more butter on top of the bread rounds. By this time you should have used about 3/4 of the butter.

Mix the chopped mushroom stalks in with the remainder of the butter, and then stuff each mushroom cap with these buttery stalks. Arrange 3 caps on each piece of toast. Crumble goat cheese over the mushrooms. Add salt and pepper generously.

Place glass covers over each round. Place the baking dishes/plates in the oven. Set the temperature to 200°F/100°C (do not pre-heat oven). Cook for 40 minutes. Serve immediately, removing glass covers at the table.

green onion pancakes

There is a restaurant in Sydney called Mother Chu's Taiwanese Gourmet. It's an unassuming place, almost clinical (except for the bright red lanterns hanging from the eaves), and serves food that's quickly made and eaten. It sits on Dixon St, the main pedestrianised street of Sydney's inner-city Chinatown, which lacks the atmosphere it used to have before good Chinese food was available in unexpected neighbourhoods all over the city, like Hurstville and Burwood.

The thing that most distinguishes Mother Chu's is the spring onion pancake: a hot, flaky cake that releases steam with every bite and delivers, along with the flavours of oil and salt, an intense taste of diced spring onions.



When I say spring onions, I mean the long, slender stalks that are basically the same length the entire way, but begin firm and white at the root and end in thin green tubes. I'm being specific because spring onions confuse me, name-wise. In Australia we call them spring onions, but when I moved to England I discovered that spring onions were the ones with swelling white bulbs at the ends. I switched to the UK term, green onions, because it seemed so sensibly to refer to the object it named. Then I moved to America and found they were called scallions, a name I like because it implies a slightly mischevious character.


Figure 1: rolling & coiling the dough

Now that I live in a small town in New Hampshire, a very long way from Mother Chu's, I have to make my own green onion pancakes, and I do that using this recipe from the wonderful blog Tigers & Strawberries. The result isn't quite the same - you can watch Mother Chu's nimble-fingered chefs roll paper-thin, perfect pancakes at the front of the restaurant, and theirs are larger, thicker and flakier than mine - but it's the closest I can manage in snowy New England.



The recipe has a lot of stages. The various rollings-out and shapings are all necessary to create the oily-yet-flaky texture, so that the pastry tears irregularly when you pull the pancake apart. My flakiest pancakes were the ones in which I did as little rolling as possible after the final coil of dough. Less handling keeps the air pockets intact.



I made only one third of the Tigers & Strawberries dough recipe, yielding 8 pancakes.

Green Onion Pancakes
from Tigers & Strawberries

1 cup flour
1/3 cup hot water
1/2 bunch green onion (spring onion/scallion) tops, sliced thinly
1/2 tsp sesame oil
salt and ground pepper mixed together
peanut oil for frying

waxed paper

Put flour in a medium sized mixing bowl, and add water all at once. Mix until most of the flour is mixed in, though the dough will seem quite dry.

At this point, lightly flour or oil your hands and turn dough out onto a silpat or a lightly floured surface and knead for about ten minutes until a very nice, smooth dough is formed. Wash out your bowl, dry it carefully, and put the dough ball back into the bowl. Cover it tightly and allow it to rest for at least thirty minutes.

Put sesame oil in a small bowl, and salt and pepper together in another small bowl and green onions in a third small bowl.

When your dough has finished resting, take it out and roll out into a long snake shape, about one inch or so thick. Cut the snake in half, then cut into 1 1/2 inch pieces.

Roll each lump of dough into a round and flatten slightly. Put all of them back into the bowl and cover, except for the one you're working with.

Take your flattened disk of dough and using a rolling pin, roll it into a circle, about 1/8 of an inch thick. Dip two fingers into the sesame oil, smear the surface of your rolled out dough with it. Sprinkle a pinch of salt and pepper over the surface of it, and then take up a scan’t 1/2 teaspoon of green onion slices and scatter over it.

Then, lift up the edge of the dough circle closest to you and roll it up like a cigar. Pinch the seam down the long side closed, and pinch the ends closed.

Now take the rolled up dough and make a snail-shaped disk out of it by coiling it on itself. Pinch the seams closed, then flatten it with the heel of your hand into a disk.

Next, take up the rolling pin and roll it into a flat pancake. Set the pancake on a piece of waxed paper and lay another piece of paper down over it. Repeat until all of your lumps of dough are used up.

Heat a shallow layer of peanut oil in a shallow frying pan until the oil bubbles when you put a bamboo chopstick’s tip in it. Slide in as many pancakes as the pan will hold and fry about a minute or so, or until golden brown on the bottom, then flip it over and cook until done on the other side–about forty-five seconds or so. When done, drain on paper towels. Repeat as necessary. Serve hot.