Power of Mushrooms – Australian Mushroom Growers Association Dinner

- Alex Prichard Leave a comment

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Disclaimer: I was a guest of the AMGA at the dinner.

A little while back now the Australian Mushroom Growers Association promoted Mushroom Mania, which saw some friends and me head to the Highway Hotel for a mushroom themed dinner. As a result of this, the AMGA very kindly invited me along to its annual South Australian celebration dinner, which this year was held at Auge.

The AMGA partnered with the Adelaide Hills winery, Chain of Ponds, who provided all the wines for dinner, as well as some very generous raffle prizes. I’m not going to go into detail about the wines, but for me the absolute highlight was the 2010 Morning Star Pinot Noir.

Food wise there were, unsurprisingly, plenty of mushrooms on offer. After the canapés we sat down to the very generous antipasto platters. The lighting was not ideal for a ton of photography (at least, that’s my excuse!) but hopefully you will get the idea … We started with a selection of bread, cold meats, aioli and marinated mushrooms which was quickly followed polenta and sausage (and more mushrooms). For me, the polenta really set the tone of what was to follow. Polenta that has been cooked and then cut up for plating can be very dense but this was incredibly light and soft. This lightness of touch continued through on dishes that might otherwise be considered heavy or oily, such as the mushroom arancini and the squid. The squid was so popular at our table that a couple of people even ordered a second helping!

By the time the antipasto was cleared I was already feeling quite replete but the shared main courses quickly appeared, accompanied by some very good roast potatoes as well as salad and more mushrooms. We were treated to spatchcock, roast pork and salmon. I didn’t try any of the salmon and while both the spatchcock and the pork were good the beautifully moist spatchcock was definitely the highlight of the mains for me.

We wrapped up with a dessert tasting plate – zeppole on top of a mousse, chocolate brownies, some jellies … And yes, again those zeppole were perfectly light and not the tiniest bit greasy.

Throughout the meal we were treated to plenty of fun mushroom facts – obviously they are extremely healthy, low in both fat and calories and high in antioxidants but research is increasingly showing that mushrooms have a serious role to play in maintaining our health. There are links between mushroom consumption and reduced risk of various types of cancer as well as their ability to help lower cholesterol and maintain and control blood pressure. We were all encouraged to eat an average of three mushrooms a day and, to that end, sent away with our own pink jars of marinated mushrooms.

The AMGA and its partners very generously used the dinner as a fund raising opportunity. In between the lucky squares and a raffle the dinner raised approximately $1500 for breast cancer research, a figure which the AMGA matched.

It was a real privilege to be invited along to the dinner and not only was it a great opportunity to catch up with a few fellow bloggers, but also meet a range of people involved in different aspects of the food industry, from those who work with FoodSA through to nutritionists and dieticians and even mushroom growers.

Cooking Through the Year: a Smoky Aubergine and Lamb Stew

- Alex Prichard 1 Comment

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I’m ludicrously tardy in posting this recipe … the book from which it comes is due back at the library today (even after an extension) and Spring has landed here in Adelaide.  But yesterday’s wild and woolly weather reminded us that we are not quite out of the woods and there might yet be a chance to indulge in a bit of slow cooking.

The recipe comes from Cooking Through the Year. It’s a big book: big in dimensions, a solid cover and hefty. It is densely packed with recipes that are divided by season, with Summer and Winter both being split in two. Each section has a ‘recipe chooser’ covering vegetables, fruit, seafood and meat, as well as an overview of produce at its best at that time of year. It is an English book so not everything listed is going to be readily available (guinea fowl is pretty hard to come by as a rule, and the fish selections are, necessarily, regional) but it will give you an excellent starting point for creating interesting, seasonal dishes.

This is the type of recipe book I love. Lots of recipes: four to six recipes on a double page and light on pictures. This doesn’t mean there are no pictures – it’s just that the beautiful images there are are generally well chosen and add something to the recipe. Where the book is, appropriately, image heavy is in the instructive sections. There are clear shots of different types of lettuce or cherries or squash and step by step photos for butterflying a leg of lamb. The book is published by DK which always seems to have incredibly high production standards, so the paper is smooth and thick and the layout is easy to read.

So I feel I’m doing this book a disservice by having tried only one of its 1000 recipes but a scary back log of blog posts means that we’ll have to make do.

I chose the smoky aubergine and lamb stew because it was simple, one-pot-ish and used Sherry vinegar and we have some left over dry Sherry hiding in a cupboard. The recipe contains lots of our favourite ingredients (cumin, chickpeas, chorizo) and it would be the perfect thing to make early in the week for a complete meal on one of the days I work.

And it did not disappoint. One mistake I did make was that, so keen was I to not overcook the aubergine and turn it to mush, I slightly undercooked it.  Andy, who is not a mushy aubergine fan, said he preferred it that way, but had I been serving it to others I definitely would have cooked it a little longer.

I don’t consider this dish ‘one-pot’ as you have brown the lamb and so dirty a plate but it is easy and you don’t need to worry too much about complicated sides.  The book suggests couscous but you could easily go with mash, pasta or even a salad.  Naturally, left overs were marvellous for both lunch and a small, hungry person’s dinner.

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Smoky Aubergine and Lamb Stew

Ingredients

  • 500g lamb leg/shoulder, cut into chunks
  • 1 large aubergine, chopped into chunks
  • 1 tsp smoked paprika
  • 1 onion, roughly chopped
  • 1 chorizo, chopped
  • splash dry sherry (or sherry vinegar or white wine vinegar)
  • 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
  • pinch of cumin
  • 1 can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
  • sprigs of fresh thyme
  • vegetable stock (approx 600 mL, but enough to cover the meat)
  • olive oil

Instructions

  1. Heat some olive oil in a casserole dish and add the aubergine and paprika. Cook, stirring, until the aubergine begins to colour. You'll probably need to add more olive oil as you go.
  2. Remove the aubergine from the casserole and set aside.
  3. Now brown the lamb, in batches if necessary. Set the lamb aside but keep it separate from the aubergine.
  4. To the casserole add the chorizo, onion and garlic and cook for a couple of minutes. The chorizo will start to release its oil and the garlic and onion will soften. Add the sherry and increase the heat. Cook until the sherry has evaporated, scraping the bottom of the pan all the time.
  5. Reduce the heat and add the cumin then return the lamb to the pan, followed by the chickpeas and thyme and then cover with the stock.
  6. Bring to the boil and then reduce to a gentle simmer. Cook, covered, until the lamb is tender. Be careful not to boil. Check on the thickness of the gravy - you may want to cook uncovered towards the end to help thicken the gravy.
  7. About half an hour before serving, return the aubergine to the pan and cook until tender.
  8. Serve with your favourite starchy option.
https://eatingadelaide.com/cooking-year-smoky-aubergine-lamb-stew/

Four Pillars Gin

- Alex Prichard Leave a comment

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Disclaimer: I was invited to the Adelaide trade launch of Four Pillars Gin.

For me, gin is synonymous with summer – and here in Australia more so even than a Pimms. It’s a common unifying theme amongst many of my friends and we even have our own lime tree. Really, all I need is for our local shops to sell decent tonic water and then I would be set for whatever heat waves summer could throw at me.

I’ve worked my way through a few gins over the years (does that sound bad?) – as a uni student much was at the less glamorous end of the spectrum, but as a proper grown up I’ve been able to dabble in Bombay Saphhire, Tanqueray, other people’s Tanq 10, Hendricks and even the Boudier Saffron Gin – yes, it really is radioactive orange. To me, that list looks a bit anaemic – I’ll have to fix that! And the whole ‘distill your own gin’ experience at the Plymouth Gin Distillery is very much on my to-do list.

So an invitation to the launch of Four Pillars Gin, a new but already award winning gin from Victoria’s Yarra Valley, was accepted greedily.

The launch was held at Mother Vine – somewhere I really need to head back to and investigate in serious detail. For the purposes of today … trust me that, if you drink, it’s somewhere you NEED to go.

Anyway, let’s get back to the important things … and that’s the gin. We started with a gin and tonic – but they were served with either orange or ruby grapefruit. Mine (not the one in the picture) came with ruby grapefruit which worked really well. I know it’s not lime and it’s heresy but … there’s a reason for it working well.

All gin must have as its principal flavour, juniper. I suspect that most people learn to identify the taste and smell of juniper by drinking gin – I know I did. But after juniper, the distiller has free rein. This is what leads to much greater stylistic variation in gins than you will find in many other spirits. The chaps behind Four Pillars (Stuart Gregor, Cameron Mackenzie – the distiller, and Matt Jones) put in some serious research when deciding what to do with their gin. And by serious, I mean they headed to the US to sample the latest in boutique gin production and then they came home, ordered what can almost be considered a one-off German still and got experimenting. They needed to maintain the ‘gin’ character but also wanted to add their own edge. Some of that edge comes in the form of uniquely Australian ingredients, such as Tasmanian pepperberry and lemon myrtle but they also added in some orange. Rather than using dried peel they settled on boiling up whole fresh organic oranges in a ‘botanical basket’ and using this as one of the principal flavour components. So serving a Four Pillars G&T with a slice of orange (or grapefruit) makes sense and, most importantly, works well.

Next up we got to try a martini and we followed this up with a negroni (no, I wasn’t driving) while the staff at Mother Vine brought out some very tasty morsels. By far my favourite (which says something, as some crispy pork belly was on offer) was the braised mushrooms with Taleggio and dill – sadly, my photo of that is too awful even by my low standards!

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The Four Pillars range consists of three gins – the rare dry (which was used in the G&T and martini), the barrel aged (used in the negroni) and the just released Gunpowder Strength, which clocks in at a scary 58.5% abv. Apparently, fearing that it was being dudded with watered down gin, the British Navy devised a test to ensure that the gin was strong enough. If the gin could used to be wet gunpowder and the gunpowder still lit, it was deemed acceptable. In the Gunpowder Strength gin, the orange is still present but reduced to make way for finger lime. What is very impressive in this gin is that you would not know how alcoholic it is: it is super smooth. I tried some just on its own and was stunned by how pleasant and smooth it was to drink.

The Rare Dry gin has already picked up a double gold medal that this year’s San Francisco World Spirits Competition, outscoring competition such as Hendricks (which came in with a bronze).

There’s limited availability of these gins – you can buy on line through the Four Pillars site (Rare Dry is $70, Gunpowder Proof is $95) but you might also spot them at good bottle shops such as East End Cellars.