Why anyone buys tzatziki is beyond me. If push comes to shove, you can make it with nothing more than yoghurt, cucumber and garlic and still have it taste better than the bought stuff. I never really measure anything while I make it because I enjoy tasting it to see how it’s shaping up, so treat this as a guide.
Serves 8 as a meze
2 cloves of Australian garlic
a sprinkle of salt
1 Lebanese cucumber, peeled and coarsely grated
extra virgin olive oil (optional)
juice of half a lemon
around 750g Greek yoghurt
small handful of mint (or dill), finely chopped
Peel and finely chop the garlic. On the cutting board, sprinkle salt over the garlic and then use the flat of the knife to mash it into a paste. Having grated the cucumber, squeeze the water out of it between the palms of your hand or in a sieve. Place the garlic paste and drained cucumber in a bowl and mix well with a fork. I add a splash of seriously good extra virgin olive oil at this stage because I like the grassiness it adds, but don’t do it unless it’s oil good enough to take intravenously. Add two thirds of the yoghurt and a splash of the lemon juice and mix well. Taste (a subjective thing, but check for the balance between the garlic’s heat, the yoghurt’s cool and the lemon’s acidity). Add the rest of the yoghurt and lemon juice to taste. Add the mint, mix and taste again. Refrigerate or serve with bread to dip or as an accompaniment to a meal, especially something like roast lamb.
This is a favourite lunch during summer. The recipe gets tweaked every time depending on what’s in the fridge and, therefore, doesn’t always resemble a traditional fattoush. Indeed, on one key point I always fiddle with the Lebanese standard — the bread. Fattoush is traditionally served with toasted pita bread (khoubz) in the salad but because we tend to eat this salad by itself for lunch, with no other accompaniments, we tend to crave a bit of leavened bread in there, hence the Turkish pide. If you’re looking for a more authentic recipe, check out Tess Mallos’ seminal Middle East Cookbook
Serves 2
1 clove of Australian garlic
half teaspoon salt
juice of 1 lemon
60ml extra virgin olive oil
freshly ground black pepper
4 ripe tomatoes
1 Lebanese cucumber
half a red capsicum
half a red onion (or half a cup spring onion)
a few leaves of cos lettuce (optional)
half a cup parsley leaves
half a cup mint leaves
half a large Turkish pide
Make the dressing first. Crush the garlic into a measuring cup or jar and add the salt. Stir together into a paste and then add the lemon juice, oil and pepper. Stir to emulsify.
Chop tomatoes, cucumber and capsicum into chunks. Roughly shred the lettuce and finely chop the onion. Cut the pide open horizontally and place under the grill until lightly browned. Cut the toasted bread into bite-sized chunks. Finely chop the parsley and mint and toss all the above with the dressing in a large bowl.
Sometimes the lure of a minimal ingredient list really gets the better of me. This comes (barely adapted) from the River Cafe Cook Book and the brevity of it was appealing but I can’t say it’s something I’m going to make again. Not that it didn’t turn out well — it’s just insanely rich, quite stupidly expensive to make and essentially a great big flavoursome wad of fat on a plate (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Anyway, if that seems like a fun night out rather than Type II diabetes, carry on!
Serves 16 at least
400g bitter chocolate, broken into pieces*
900ml double cream, at room temperature**
cocoa for dusting
Line a 25cm cake tin with Glad wrap (if it’s a spring form, all the better). Slowly melt the chocolate in a bowl over simmering water. Don’t stir the chocolate and don’t let the bowl touch the water. Thanks to a coolish ambient temperature, the top of my chocolate stubbornly retained the shape of the pieces even though it was melted and the rest was liquid underneath. Rather than stirring the chocolate, I simply pierced the top ’skin’ with a skewer to check that the chocolate was liquid underneath. Once liquid, allow the chocolate to cool ever so slightly. Meanwhile, whip the cream in a large bowl until it can form very soft peaks (be careful not to over do it). Add a large spoonful of the whipped cream to the bowl of chocolate and fold in quickly until there are no white streaks visible. Then quickly transfer the contents of the chocolate bowl into the bowl of whipped cream and fold everything together. You should have a lustrous milk-chocolate-coloured batter to pour into the lined cake tin. Chill for at least 2 hours, then invert onto a plate or do a sneaky slide and pray if you have a spring form to get the top looking all swirly like I did. Dust with cocoa and cut with a sharp knife.
* I went with good 70% cocoa Fair Trade stuff … there’s no point skimping on quality when there’s only two ingredients at work.
** none of that half-arsed thickened cream, this is all about having at least 50g of fat per 100g serving … check the “nutrition” information on the cream tubs.
The blueberry glut has largely been dealt with. Many of them have been eaten fresh and some have been frozen for later use. AF made some muffins yesterday and methinks I’ll concoct a clafoutis for tomorrow night. But today was all about jam.
Almost 5 years ago, I tried making lemon marmalade with a swag of lemons I ganked after climbing a neighbour’s fence. Alas, I cooked it too long, not having a thermometer, and I renounced jamming there and then. Nevertheless, the call to jam was undeniable and I took time to consult the oracle … but the CWA cookery book doesn’t have a single effing entry on blueberries. Anyway, this is approximately what I came up with…
Makes about 7 cups jam
6 cups fresh blueberries
4 cups sugar
juice of 1 lemon
40g pectin
Don’t wash the blueberries but do remove manky looking ones, stems etc. Crush or blitz half the blueberries, then put them in a very big pot (jam bubbles up like crazy when it’s cooking so you don’t want the ingredients to sit even halfway up the walls before cooking). Add the other blueberries whole along with the rest of the ingredients. Heat slowly til the sugar has dissolved then crank up the heat and boil them intensely for 5-7 minutes depending on how runny or set you like your jam. There’s plenty of thorough info on all the vagaries of pectin, jars and sterilisation on the web and on the back of pectin packets, so I won’t go into that here.
We picked around 12kg of blueberries today from a friend’s property. The blueberry bushes have been there for decades and are now completely untended, unwatered, unpruned and unsprayed. With dozens of rows of bushes, we barely scratched the surface. Having eaten around 2kg with our hands, the next few days will involve trying to work out how the hell to use them all. Stay tuned.
A great market day lunch. Straight from the monger to the pot. It all takes 15 min tops.
Serves 2 to 3
a big splash of extra virgin olive oil
4 cloves Australian garlic chopped finely
1 can diced tomato
1 kg fresh Tassie mussels debearded
plenty of chopped parsley
bread to mop up with
In a deep stainless steel pot, fry the garlic in oil until just golden, add tomatoes and cook for a minute or two until that tomato is practically krumping with bubbles. Add the cleaned mussels in one go (not too violently) and slam on the lid. Leave for 6 minutes. Add chopped parsley at the end, stir through and then ladle mussels and the attendant juices into big bowls. Provide napkins and a bowl for shells, it’s gloriously messy stuff. If you have enough bread, you could eat the whole dish without cutlery.
Best banana loaf recipe ever. Baked New Year’s Night as a treat for the W’town and Glenlyon crews. Massive props to the Penmans for sharing. You can halve the quantities to fit into a standard bread tin, just reduce the cooking time to 45min.
Serves plenty, unless you’re a fatty
225g butter
2 cups sugar
1 cup honey
4 free range eggs
5 or 6 bananas (tip: put overripe bananas in freezer and then thaw them, they come out pre-mashed)
3 cups plain flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
a sprinkling of Australian walnuts
Cream the butter and sugar. Mix through honey, then eggs one at a time, then bananas. Sift flour, salt and baking soda together and mix into batter. Pour into a greased or lined cake tray of about 25×40cm, top with walnuts and bake at 180°C for 60min.
My first go at baked eggs happened impromptu for New Year’s Day breakfast. Taking my cue from a half-remembered dish at Birdmann Eating, this could pass as an eggy riff on puttanesca though the feta adds a pleasingly Hellenic touch.
Serves 2
drizzle of olive oil
1 teaspoon Carmelina Spaghetti Condiment (a shortcut way of adding chilli and sundried tomato flavour … if you’re in Melbourne, get it at Mediterranean Wholesalers)
1 can diced tomato
1 gregarious tablespoon of capers
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
4 free range eggs
a wad of Dodoni feta
parsley to garnish
sourdough toast plied with extra virgin olive oil
bacon (optional)
In a cast iron frying pan heat the first five ingredients on the stove top until the tomatoes have reduced and the whole thing looks the colour of a British tourist in Dubrovnik. Take off the heat and crack the four eggs on top of the sauce, then crumble the feta on too. Put in a preheated oven of around 200°C (I played around with the temperature as I peered through the oven door, so don’t take my word on it) and leave in there until the egg whites are semi-cooked (keep an eye on them, we’re talking a few minutes here). Fry some bacon while all this is going on and toast some bread, you know how to do that. Then put the eggs and tomato under the grill to finish off. The idea is to have the bottom cooked, the top cooked and the centre on its way, so that the yolks can still break free once you spoon them over your toast. Chop some parsley for prettiness and season for saltiness.
It is a truism to say that Hofesh Shechter’s dance pieces are as much about music as they are about choreography—in the double bill of Uprising and In Your Rooms, Shechter is credited with creating both. Indeed, his interest in their combination is hardly novel ground for dance, but his capacity to synthesise their impact on an audience together with a cinematic sense of imagery is the key to his popularity.
Uprising begins with a steady slightly metallic beat, a bank of spotlights tilted towards us and haze swarming portentously across the empty stage. From somewhere behind the lights emerge seven male dancers heading downstage with a determined gait. The air is menacing but Shechter subverts the expected and just as the men can go no further, they arrest their charge by lifting a leg to their other knee and holding themselves in a sweetly balletic stance. The line is ordered and controlled—a display of technical acumen certainly—but the image it presents is only a whisper away from collapse. These men are vulnerable in their balancing act.
As the beat continues to drive on, the men slide out of formation looking dejected, defeated even. Shechter reportedly created Uprising in response to the 2006 riots in Paris, though thematically it feels more like a response to the banlieue riots of 2005, which were more palpably and brutally linked to the ennui of disaffected young men. However, to see Uprising as a political statement is problematic. The real source material is testosterone and, as it does in life, it peaks at puberty. Uprising is less an investigation of men and militant outrage than it is a celebratory omnibus of adolescence. Yes, the dancers show us forms of violence, rebellion and manhood, but they are mock displays, the simulated games of boys testing their own limits and not to be taken too seriously—the pants are khaki but the label is American Apparel.
The music is a propulsive assemblage of percussion that whips the choreography along rather than merely accompanying it. In the words of one of the dancers, Chris Evans, Shechter “liberates the dancers from chasing a meaning around” by using music to set the tone. The result is a physical language that, in being both persistent and simple in its intention, is remarkably legible without dipping too often into literalism. The dancers respond with powerful abandon: throwing their arms back as they run head down, breaking formation in fits of individualism, using their hands to slink across stage like simians, wrestling and caressing. Throughout, flashes of popular dance genres emerge—the negation of the lower body typical of breakdance, the bopping kick of skank—as does the unmistakable urban dubstep of Vex’d with their track Thunder.
With a barren stage and a highly structured beat, Shechter has to find both engaging imagery and fluidity in the bodies on stage. Lee Curran’s sharply focussed spotlights provide pools of visibility that the dancers slide in and out of. Trios and duos flicker past each other in discreet frames like spatial cross-dissolves. When dancers are shrouded in darkness one feels that they have not exited so much as briefly moved out of frame. And when Shechter has all seven dancers working in unison, he is amplifying the human form as a cinematographer might do with a close up. The result is spare but extremely beautiful.
Uprising finishes with a spurt of bathetic triumphalism. The men construct a limp flag-waving human pyramid equal parts French Revolution, Soviet agitprop and summer camp. In some respects, the finale makes sense as the antithesis of the opening image—asymmetrical and multi-tiered rather than a strict line. But it also feels like a cheap shot. The preceding dance has already done the work of dismantling order and control, but rather than living up to or even coveting the title of Uprising, Shechter shies away from revolution and delivers a safe implication of delinquent folly.
A similar whiff of shyness was sensed next door at Look Mummy I’m Dancing, written and performed by Belgium’s first transsexual Vanessa (Van Durme). Adapted from her own book of the same name, the show is a sort of staged Bildungsroman that tells the story of Vanessa’s transformation from a troubled boy into a troubled woman.
For a show based on a very fundamental questioning of gender, Look Mummy I’m Dancing manages to shy away from questioning traditional gender concepts. Vanessa begins her monologue with a story of a couple at a checkout line. In both subject matter and delivery it feels like the anecdote of a stand-up comic pointing out the banal universal tropes of married life for us to both recognise and find funny. One expects this cliché of binary gender absolutes to then be undercut by the subsequent story. Yet, save for a few moments of inner conflict, the tone never really shifts. The writing constantly finds ways of being relatable, hackneyed, earnest and predictable.
Occasionally, often in moments of dark, visceral humour, a real theatrical tension is evoked between Vanessa’s delicate aspirations and the staggering pitfalls of her life. And one might argue that it is not her role to do anything but tell her own personal story, rather than speak to the conceptual or the societal. However, too often, the narrative metes out to incidental players the same one-dimensional characterisations that are supposedly the bane of Vanessa’s own existence and skirts across stories with nary a sideways glance at insight.
A similar problem befalls Anna Tregloan’s The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. Taking the art of public transport eavesdropping and mashing it with the Dadaist penchant for collage, Tregloan has shaped a piece of theatre out of verbatim transcripts of one-sided conversations on trains. The concept itself is cheekily promising, with non sequitur humour and pathos possible at every turn, but the various components never quite slot together.
Tregloan takes advantage of the Meat Market’s extraordinary depth by creating a train carriage out of rows of chairs but, in spite of her design credentials, the set is otherwise underdeveloped and lacking in detail. Tregloan’s 2007 work, BLACK, with its refractive centre of characters, was as much a spatial installation as it was a performance, and that level of attentiveness to the audience’s relation to space was sorely missed in The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. The unhindered distances around the performers created an unfocused, centrifugal effect that compounded the fractured nature of the narratives, leaving the audience to forage for meaning from afar.
Wrapping up many people’s Festival experience this year was Le Salon from the Belgian company Peeping Tom. Partly borne out of the Belgian powerhouses Ballets C de la B and Needcompany, Peeping Tom are a collective of artists orbiting around the central creative partnership of dancers Gabriela Carrizo and Franck Chartier. Each of the performers, including a mezzo-soprano and an actor, bring their own idiosyncratic talents and foibles to bear. This, combined with the very real emotional relationship shared by Carrizo and Chartier, creates an onstage chemistry not dissimilar to that of an amiably dysfunctional family—sometimes pulling in very different directions but inextricably rooted in the same mire of history, experience and artistic heredity.
Le Salon is the middle section in a trilogy of work that loosely follows a family through a cycle of generation and degeneration. The gently decaying wood panelling of the set is at once an allusion to a bourgeois grandeur of the past and a presaging of the characters’ internal declines. With only a sparse use of text, the theatre, humour and intelligence of the piece is in the bodies and the music. And both, while brimming with technical mastery, are also able to seethe with the signs of downfall. Though at times it threatens to undermine itself with overplaying, Le Salon beautifully delivers what it sets out to do—to intimately make flesh the fear of loss, the fear of death and the fear of not noticing it arrive.
This article originally appeared in print in RealTime 94, December-January, 2009-2010, page 4, and is reproduced with permission.
http://realtimearts.net/article/issue94/9630