FAUX FOIE GRAS

It’s hot. It’s steamy. It’s Tahiti. Well, Moorea anyway – one of French Polynesia’s many, many breathtakingly beautiful islands.

OK, we’re not even there. We’re actually on a motu (a coral island) off Moorea.

Our pareo-clad hostess has seated us at a rustic table on the sand, just a couple of metres from the water’s edge. And we’re about to deal with a huge platter of speckled ruby red coconut crab.

But before we start to hammer open the claws (forget regular crab tools, these fellows are whoppers: we have each been equipped with a small mallet and a block of wood to get at the sweet flesh) our Polynesian hostess, Maire, wife of French-born chef, JP, shows us an even greater delicacy.

“Before we prepare the crab we feed it on coconut for days,” she says, cracking opening a section as big as the body of a normal crab. “When we cook it, this – the crab’s liver – becomes our foie gras!”

Crab liver? Not force-fed goose liver? Could this be the South Pacific’s answer to an ethical dilemma?

At Maire’s urging we dip our knives into the creamy mass and spread it on crusty French bread. It turns out to be just like the real thing, too, but with the faintest hint of coconut, as you’d hope. Who cares that we never knew crabs had livers until this moment?

Coconut crabs are the world’s largest arthropod. That’s any beastie with a shell, not a spine. Technically they are in the same classification as spiders and scorpions and a whole host of other things I don’t want to eat and which probably don’t have livers anyway.

As you’d expect from its name, the coconut crab is happiest hanging around coconut palms, of which its habitat – the Indian and Pacific Oceans – has many. While they can climb trees, they wait until the coconuts fall to the ground before relishing them.

Just imagine how a quiet beach walk would turn scary if you encountered one of these individuals as they often measure a metre across and are said to weigh as much as 16 kilograms.

Predictably, coconut crabs eat coconut, which would be a problem for them if they were not strategically equipped with pincers strong enough to crack the shells and allow them access to the sweet milky flesh. Comparing my fingers, arms, legs to the toughness of a coconut, suddenly I’m glad the one I have encountered on this beach is safely cooked and glowing temptingly on my table!

As we get our mallets and stones to work on the flesh of the crab, it turns out to be tender, delicious and of course plentiful. Some say it’s an aphrodisiac.

I know I have certainly been smitten by its foie gras. Just my luck to fall for something so rare, so distant, I may never come across it again, I think.

Oh, well, that’s love for you, I guess!

ANYONE FOR A BIRD’S NEST?

Our Malaysian guide Ping Ping loves her food. We know this because she talks about it – a lot. When we walk on along the riverside in Melaka for a few minutes, she stays behind, and admits to us when we return that she has used her time well.

Call it reconnaissance if you like. Maybe research, but she’s been snacking on a special – ‘very special,’ she says – delicacy.

She quickly hustles us into the air-conditioned and spotless Yong Ann Birds Nest restaurant (www.yongann.com) where we are seated on wooden chairs. She urges us to taste the café’s specialty which, she underlines, has been harvested at great risk. We give in to please her, and Ping Ping orders a second helping of bird’s nest tart for herself.

The menu in this small unprepossessing café offers a range of dishes, all featuring this rare ingredient. Under Ping Ping’s close scrutiny we order some desserts and a ginseng birds’ nest drink. She has already half-consumed the last tart in the shop.

I feel she really doesn’t mind at all if we don’t like our choices as she will happily clean up the leftovers. Did I mention she quite visibly loves her food?

It’s only when, as the sweetly gelatinous substance slips between our teeth, that we are told what it really is, and realise queasily what we are eating. This bird’s nest is not exactly the bird’s nests, the bedroom and nursery built by tiny cave swifts. That had seemed bad enough. But it’s worse. It’s the bird’s own dribble!

Melaka is one of Malaysia’s oldest cities and perhaps the second most important tourist destination in the country after KL. The food here showcases Malaysia’s wonderful mix of Indian, Malay and Chinese, with a touch of Dutch and Portuguese and the magic fusion of Malay and Chinese in its Nyonya cuisine

But Ping Ping wants us to experience a Chinese delicacy- and we’re not sure we want to.

First some history. The shallow cup-shaped nests are built by tiny male swiftlets, and are usually stuck on to the walls of coastal caves in Indonesia. Harvesting these is perilous and, you could argue, ecologically wilful. They are said to be one of the most expensive animal products in the world. Regardless of this, the Chinese have been savouring this delicacy for at least four centuries.

Because these nests are not made from straw and hair and the usual bird’s nest building materials, the ‘interwoven strands of salivary laminae cement’ are able to be dissolved in water to give a silky texture to soups and desserts and to impart a certain flavour to ice creams.

Typically, the health-conscious Chinese believe that eating these nests (which are high in calcium, iron, potassium, and magnesium) provide health benefits. It seems that after this our digestion, concentration, immune system, and, yes, of course – the old standby­ ­– libidos, will improve.

There are both red and white nests, and a red sells for about five times the price of a white one. To one side of the café there are shelves holding packages of bird’s nests products and they are certainly not cheap. However, even if the flavour or cost or ethics don’t stop me buying one as a souvenir (and they do), I am pretty sure my own country’s quarantine restrictions would.

So what does it actually taste like? I nibble some mango bird’s nest ice cream before pushing it across the table to the helpfully available Ping Ping.

Hmmm, unremarkable, I decide. Sweetish. Nice texture. Certainly not worth the danger for the harvester or the loss of a home for the swiftlet family. And, although it’s a possibility that perhaps I need to have consumed more, I just don’t feel markedly healthier afterwards.

Perhaps Ping Ping does. She’s smiling and looking very content. But then she’s possibly put away three or four good helpings today!

NATIONAL LAMINGTON DAY

Like most Australians, I probably met my first lamington before I can remember it. Kids love them.

And let’s face it, there has to be something about a country that has such a thing for stale sponge cake covered in chocolate icing and furry with desiccated coconut! There’s even a National Lamington Day – and today is it!

Over a hundred years ago, a French chef in Brisbane – now there’s a cultural divide to begin with – first knocked up an impromptu batch for some guests having afternoon tea with Lord Lamington, the second Baron of Lamington and Governor of Queensland from 1896 -1901.

No doubt wanting to keep his job, on the spot the chef obsequiously dubbed them ‘lamingtons’, and undoubtedly the good Lord did nothing to let the guests know that they weren’t biting into the results of an ancient family recipe handed down throughout the centuries along with his title.

The concept of lamingtons is simple: cut stale cake into large cubes, dip these carefully into thinnish chocolate icing, then toss in coconut. Please note: the pertinent word here is ‘simple’.

The one and only time I tried to make this staple of all good CWA cooks, P&C mothers and fundraising organisations (think, lamington drives) the word ‘simple’ was a long way from my vocabulary, which turned shorter and pithier as I became more and more coated with the major components.

Unless you have done this several dozen times, the whole crumbly cake, sticky icing, coconut routine is NOT simple. I had icing on my hands, face (well I had to lick my fingers!), cake rack, floor, clothes, cupboard doors, bench tops – ditto the coconut. Everywhere, it seemed, except on the cubes of cake which stubbornly sprouted bare spots as the icing refused to adhere and began to drip off onto my hands, cake rack, floor, clothes, cupboard doors, and bench tops.

In a clever example of role-reversal, the bowl of icing became crumbier, as an exchange plan between it and the cake cubes came into effect.

Despite my shambles of an effort, lamingtons remain a favourite of mine. A staunchly Aussie food icon they are available in every cake shop and supermarket and sold in dozens for charity. My private guess as to why they sell exceptionally well is that they are so tricky for the not-too-talented-and-coordinated home cook to execute.

Me? I’ll buy any number for a good cause. I am just happy to let the experts make them, rather than go through another ordeal like that.

National Lamington Day today – go buy a few dozen!

More information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamington

THE KING AND I

Durian, known as the 'king of fruits' in south-east Asia has, to put it mildly, a distinctive odour. ‘Dis-STINK-tive’ would be more appropriate, many might say.

“How can you put something that smells so bad in your mouth?” a non-durian lover once asked me. “Well, what about washed rind cheese?”, I countered. “Or cooked cauliflower. Or gorgonzola.”

Durian has some pluses though. It makes up for its ugly look – picture a pineapple on a really bad hair day – and whiffy aroma, with a creamy sweet flesh. In fact once people know the taste-sensation in store, many quickly go from 'ugh! what's that dreadful smell?' to 'durian! where is it?'.

On a recent trip to Penang, Malaysia, as we leave Batu Ferringhi on the north of the island we know what we are craving. Durian. But it’s a problem. If we buy one of these huge thorny khaki beauties from a roadside stall the hotel will never let us inside with it. If we eat it in the rental car, the company will possibly add a surcharge.

Around the north-western tip of this lovely island, often called the Pearl of the Orient, the jungle is tangled with creepers, denser than on the eastern hugely-developed side. Here, nets hang hammock-like beneath giant jackfruit and durian trees to catch the heavy fruit, and somewhere in the shadows grow nutmeg and clove trees.

We drive on, past crude wooden roadside stalls sheltering mounds of this thorny football-sized fruit and are finally rewarded with the answer to our craving.

The 10 hectare Tropical Fruit Farm at 250 metres altitude, overlooks deep jungled valleys that disappear kilometres away into a glimpse of water and the haze of Georgetown, the capital, on the east coast. It should be called Eden because almost every known tropical fruit grows here.

In the farm shop we discover dried and fresh fruits, bunches of rambutans and mangosteens, pineapples and tiny bananas in crates and there is a whole stand of local nutmeg oils and balm. In a chilled cabinet, spotted and weirdly coloured Vietnamese dragonfruit and other fresh fruits are laid out ready to combine on fruit platters.

A spiky mound of durian lies on the floor to one side, and instantly we know what we will be ordering. The durian season runs from the end of February to August. It’s April, so we are in luck.

We select a top-grade one for under A$5 and the assistant chops it open to reveal smooth yellow segments buried in cavities inside. The rest they can leave to us. Seated outside at shaded picnic tables overlooking that magnificent view we pick out the creamy flesh slowly, eating with our fingers and dropping the seeds into a basket below the table. Bliss!

The smell? Well, it’s been described as eating first class custard in a sewer, but that’s too extreme, we decide.

“They smell like hell, but taste like heaven,” says someone else. Despite this, durian’s name has nothing to do with either. It just means ‘thorny fruit’.

It’s pungent, it’s exotic. Faintly redolent of rotting onion with a slight tang of sulphur. Not what you normally associate with fine fruit, but this is Malaysia. We’re in the tropics and this is durian.

And – for us – we are indulging in truly the king of fruits!

RIVER WINE

‘I call this Gordon River chardonnay,’ says my new friend, David Goodfellow, holding up a glass of golden liquid.

I sniff it. Nup! Not like any chardy I’ve ever tried. I taste it. Definitely not a chardonnay.

Bewildered, I ask: What is it?

Well, it turns out I am drinking river water. But not from just any old river. This is the famed and fabulous Gordon River in western Tasmania, passing through a World Heritage region of the highest order.

The air is clearer here than possibly anywhere else in the world. We are in a pristine wilderness rainforest environment. It’s pure. It’s green on green. And constantly dripping with some of the couple of metres of rain that falls each year here.

So what’s with the brown water? You see, now I know it’s not chardonnay, it looks more brown to me, rather than golden.

‘It’s tannin,’ says David, ‘from the buttongrass. It stains it.’

And what does it taste like? Absolutely nothing, I have to admit.

I guess he could call it rainforest ‘tea’, then, if he wanted to, although it is not being marketed as anything yet. No one has caught on to the obvious sales pitch of ‘World Heritage Water’ or some-such, which is a surprise as Tasmanians are an entrepreneurial bunch. After all, someone on King Island in Bass Strait to the north of the island captures rain and markets it as Cloud Juice!

I doubt anyone has analysed this ‘chardonnay’ to get at its properties, but I am guessing antioxidants could be there, which might make it attractive to healthy types.

Right now the only place you’ll ever be able to taste this is on a cruise along the river from Strahan, a delightful picture book village about halfway down the west coast of Tasmania tucked up on the inner edge of the vast Macquarie Harbour which – get this – is over SIX TIMES the size of Sydney Harbour.

David Goodfellow is the manager of Gordon River Cruises, a company which offers passengers an unforgettable escape along one of the world’s quietest, most breathtaking and serenely beautiful waterways.

Funny thing, the water we are travelling on looks dark blue in the sunlight, but in my glass it is undeniably brown.

Oh, OK David – maybe it’s a bit golden. Perhaps it is a little like chardonnay!

SINGING HINNIES

Last year, on a trip to the UK, we visited a country fair in Northumberland, way up in the north-east of England. For the past six hundred or so years there has been an annual Goose Fair in the tiny town of Ovingham (pronounced, we learned later, after having said it wrong several times – Uv-ing-jum).

Long ago, flocks of geese were herded to this place for sale, but the practice lapsed and on the day we attended, despite its name and history, there were just two token birds in a cage on one side of the fairground.

The small field was packed with families and colourful displays, and we felt a little as though we were bit-players in an episode of Midsomer Murders. If you’ve watched this UK murder mystery series, you’ll know that one often features and can be a pivotal part of the story-line.

This one in Ovingham had no murders though, for which we were grateful, but it did have all the quintessential elements of an English fair – Morris Dancing, dunking contests, coconut shies, donuts, chips, hoopla – and soaking rain!

Despite the latter, we did what the Brits do and just ignored the drizzle, taking shelter when it pounded down occasionally, and continued to happily squelch our way around.

Finally I found what I had hoped I would. In a far corner some ladies in spotless white mob caps were set up at a stand making singing hinnies, a traditional dish of the area. These dried fruit-studded flatbreads are delicious, and I was hooked at first bite. They have a toasty buttery flavour from contact with the pan, and sweet bursts of currants as you bite into them.

Singing Hinnies are a traditional currant griddle scone, and perhaps as a food they are not so unusual – but the name certainly is!

Evidently they were originally made long ago on flat iron griddles over open fires in all the area’s small country cottages. Children haven’t changed, and the tantalising smell would have had each mother’s many children clamouring for them.

‘Mother, when will they be ready? Can I have one now?’ one country mother was supposedly asked, so the legend goes.

’Not yet. They’re just singin’ hinnies,’ she patiently explained – hinnies being the local word for ‘honeys’, her Geordie endearment for them. By ‘singing’ she meant, of course the squeak and sizzle of the butter and cream as it melted from the batter onto the fiery plate.

These words somehow kept the waiting children quiet for the few moments until the next cake was ready to be scooped off, buttered quickly, cut into pieces and dropped into their eager hands.

So ‘singin’ hinnies’ they became – and here is how to make them from the recipe given out by those mobcapped ladies who were making them at the Ovingham Goose Fair.

NORTHUMBERLAND SINGIN’ HINNIES

If you don’t have an open fire and a griddle, make these in a heavy frypan on top of the stove. Some recipes also suggest adding sour cream to the liquids.

2 cups self-raising flour

75g butter

75g lard

110g currants (about 3/4 cup)

pinch salt

2 tablespoons milk mixed with water (more if needed)

oil or butter for the griddle

butter for spreading

Rub the fats into the flour, add salt, currants, and just enough milk and water to make a soft dough. Roll out into rounds on a floured surface and bake each one on both sides on a hot griddle until golden brown. Spread immediately with butter and cut into quarters, serving immediately.

Makes about four rounds. Double or triple the mixture depending on how many ‘hinnies’ you have!

BITTER FAREWELL

‘Bitter’ is not a flavour many of us favour. Or think we do. When you get down to it, bitterness is essential in many dishes and often our favourite foods – think dark, dark chocolate, tonic water, marmalade, beer, some olive oils. Get my drift? The stomach welcomes it too. Bitters and herbal tonics such as Swedish bitters are said to help the digestion, getting everything get back to normal after a meal.

But a bitter dessert?

Come with me to a restaurant tucked away down a side street in East Sydney.

La Mint has been here four years, owner Leanne Lai told me. Sydney has a large Vietnamese population, but mostly situated in other suburbs to the south and west. Leanne and her husband wanted to reflect Vietnam’s French history – and little wonder when at least that colonisation brought fresh yeast breads and sauces and a style of cooking which worked well with fresh herbal local dishes.

In the dead-end of Riley Street they have created a little piece of Hanoi with candles, rattan backed chairs and elegant banquettes. On one wall a disconcerting gaze of a golden Buddha follows you wherever you go and we watched, amused, as diners walked back and forth in front of it to test it out.

The crowd here was not the pho-slurping youngsters, the students you might find in Bankstown. These diners were Anglo, affluent, and executive. They were picking the golden pavé de pork, pork belly with chilli sauce, and enjoying it’s melting tenderness as much as we were, I am sure. We passed on the escargot, though, and went for the more trad ‘shaking beef’.

Relax, vegetarians! The name refers to the cooking technique of tossing the eye fillet rapidly in a pan – not its mental state at execution. Despite not being marinated it was remarkably tender too, and served with an addictive lemon and green pepper sauce. But enough of our meal – read the menus on the website www.lamint.com.au

I am here to tell you about the dessert.

Bitter melon looks like a squash or a marrow or even a light-skinned cucumber with a particularly bad skin condition. Its wrinkled, pitted, warty exterior gives little hint of its flavour or what is inside.

In Vietnam, raw bitter melon slices are often eaten with dried meat floss. But that’s another story. The melon may be stuffed with ground pork and used to make bitter melon soup. Or it can simple be stewed. That dish is usually cooked for the local Tết holiday because of its name – a reminder of the bitterly desperate conditions experienced by Vietnamese people in the past.

And so we order La Mint Pudding – as the name suggests the restaurant’s signature dessert, and cast on the menu as ‘exotic bitter melon jelly pudding and coconut milk’. Chef-owner George Lai, Leanne’s husband devised this dish using the juice of the bitter melon which turns the jelly a rich bottle green. It is mixed with cooked sago, set into a mould, and then at serving time drizzled with coconut milk.

It looks luscious, with the shine and colour of a satin evening dress. My tongue hunts for bitterness. There is just a little, a subtle tickle at the back of my tongue as each spoonful slips down. Yet it has not been laced with sugar either to mask the flavour. It is refreshing, elegant and sensuous. Most importantly it tastes nothing like the bitter melon looks.

And I imagine it has done wonders for my digestion.

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La Mint Restaurant & Bar, 62-64 Riley Street, East Sydney, 02 9331 1818, (www.lamint.com.au) has a cooking class on the last Sunday of each month. Maybe, they will teach you how to make this dessert!