The day I stopped to crystallise some rose petals...

I wasn’t really sure if I was going to post this.

It is really more of a technique or a project than a recipe and certainly not a dish in its own right.

But then I looked at it in a different way; this was one of those occasions when I was able to pause, close my mind to its daily niggling preoccupations, and chill out.

It was a couple of days after Christmas and I was staying with my parents when I found this rose. Knowing that it had grown with no nasty pesticides, it would be perfect to crystallise. So I escaped from everyone for a couple of hours out on the deck to start my little project.

I probably sound a bit naff writing about how in this day and age we all need to make space in our day for ourselves and the usual blah, blah, blah (especially as I don’t have a high flying/highly stressed job or kids), but looking at these photos really made me feel relaxed as I remembered that small moment in time that was just me and some rose petals.

I remembered that I was almost in a trance while painting the petals with egg whites, then sprinkling them castor sugar and finally placing each petal on a rack to dry. It was the quiet, dainty, repetitiveness that I remember being so calming.

Now that the year is in full swing, sometimes it can be hard to find the time to get into that mode; we all have responsibilities and worries and it is all relative to the lifestyle we lead. Maybe dipping rose petals in sugar is not your bag, or maybe it is - all I know is, it made me feel wonderful that day and now I have a jar of them to do with what I please, as well as the happy memory of that moment that was mine and mine alone. 

Crystallised Rose Petals
Only use rose petals that you know have not been touched with pesticides.
You will need:
Pesticide-free fragrant rose petals
1 egg white, lightly whisked
Castor sugar
A clean paint brush or in my case, a pastry brush with soft, natural bristles
Cake rack placed on top of a baking sheet


Carefully paint the egg white on to the petal, then dip the petal in castor sugar. Set the petal on a rack to dry. Repeat until you have crystallised all of your petals.
Leave the tray somewhere cool and dry overnight. Once your petals are hard and dry, store in an airtight container in a cool, dark place. Will keep indefinitely, use to decorate desserts.

Pork Ribs With Sticky, Sweet and Spicy Plum Sauce

So, as you can see from the lead photo, I made ribs. They are pork ribs with a sweet, tangy, sticky and spicy sauce over them and they were delicious with a beer. The best part is, I made the sauce without a recipe*. How did I do this, you ask? Well, curious reader, let me tell you.
It started during my trip home from work on Friday, trying to think up something to cook for our Saturday night in. I also thought it might be fun to do something inspired by Chinese cooking since it is nearly Chinese (or Lunar) New Year. I had also made an internal promise with myself to try and make at least one dish with each of the stone fruits that are in season (cherries, peaches: tick!) this summer, so it was going to be a choice between nectarines, plums or mango. Plums won this time. While I was deliberating on this I also decided that I was going to make ribs. Yes, my brain was working very hard for a Friday afternoon. 
After many years of reading cooking magazines, watching cooking shows, and reading cooking blogs, I decided to pool all that knowledge that was lurking in my brain and just wing it. 

So, I thought, if I were to make a sauce for my ribs, surely it can't be more difficult than making some sort of a compote using sugar, water and chopped plums? Then to give it a Chinese flavour, just add in some wonderful spices like star anise, chilli flakes and cinnamon, certainly not forgetting the flavour twins: ginger and garlic. Some of the plums were almost over-ripe and some were this side of under-ripe, and I was hoping the under-ripe ones would lend some sourness to the sauce.  

After cooking it down for around half an hour, the colour changed from those beiges and browns you see above to a bright red! It reminded me of that sweet and sour sauce that you dip your spring rolls in at your local Chinese takeaway joint. I loved that stuff as a kid. Now my palate is a little more mature and I prefer other sauces for my springers, but that red sure made me happy.

After a while I just started prodding at the plums with my wooden spoon to help to break them up. After this, I passed the sauce through a wire sieve to get out all the spices and lumps of garlic and ginger. The result is what you see in the white bowl in the lead photo. I don't think it could have become any more red. And let me just say that the taste was nothing like the sweet and sour sauce of my childhood; there was sweetness from the plums but the combination of all those other flavours took this sauce to another level. 
Next I took about a quarter of the sauce and added it along with the ribs to a ziplock bag to marinate in the fridge over night. 
The next day I put my ribs on a wire rack in a baking dish and baked them until they were burnished and brown, all the while basting them with the plum sauce. I served them up with a stack of steamed greens drizzled with a little sesame oil and jasmine rice.
These ribs were pretty spicy but if you don't want the spice, you could just leave the chilli flakes out. However it is going to be the year of the dragon, so a little fire in the mouth is pretty apt if you ask me. Kung Hei Fat Choy everyone!

Pork Ribs With Sticky, Sweet and Spicy Plum Sauce
Makes 2 standard racks of ribs - for 2 you will have leftovers, will serve 4 comfortably
* I said there was no recipe, so I wrote what I did for you!
2 racks of American-style pork ribs
8 blood plums - I only used 7 as one was not so healthy but go with 8
1/2 cup of brown sugar
1 cup of water
3 star anise
2 cinnamon quills, broken in half
2 tsp chilli flakes - or more if you please
3 cloves of garlic, cut in half
1 knob of ginger the size of a thumb (note: I have a small thumb), roughly chopped
1 tsp of corn flour mixed with a little water to form a slurry
Soy sauce to taste

1. In a heavy based pan, bring all the ingredients except for the soy sauce to the boil for about 10 minutes, always stirring.
2. Reduce the heat to medium and simmer for about 20 minutes, always stirring.
3. Marvel at the red sauce you have created.
4. Taste the sauce, add some soy, taste again and add more soy to reach your desired level of saltiness.
5. Add the corn flour slurry and stir in - this will thicken the sauce. An idea I must have picked up from watching chef Martin Yan on Yan Can Cook as a child, I loved that show.
6. Break up any lumps of plum with your spoon and simmer for another 5 minutes.
7. Take the pan off the heat and set it aside to cool a bit.
8. Pass the sauce through a metal sieve into another bowl. Press down on the lumps to extract all the flavour.
9. Take your ribs and put them in a zip lock bag and pour about a quarter of the sauce in, rub the sauce all over the ribs through the bag and marinate over night, but if you don't have time, at least for 1 hour.
10. The next day, preheat the oven to 180C and place the ribs on a rack in a large baking tray.
11. Bake for 45 minutes to an hour, turning the ribs every 15 minutes or so and brushing them with the sauce.
12. When they are ready, cut the ribs into pieces and serve with steamed greens tossed in a little sesame oil, rice and your favourite Chinese beer.

Garlic Soup - Using my own garlic!

If you have been following this since the birth of The Littlest Anchovy, you would know that I have been (very patiently, for me) growing my first ever crop of garlic. Well, I am here today to tell you that it is finally ready to eat. Around mid-December the stalks began to fall over in its pot. At first I began to think that all that ant murder was for nothing and that a garlic-loving ant was what karma had in store for my next life. So after consulting my veggie garden guru, I was informed that hers had also fallen over and it was time to harvest them. “I would pull them out now”, she said, but sometimes I am not the best receiver of advice and instead I attempted to prop them up with sticks to try and get them to grow a bit more for another week. Yet still the plants broke free of their splints and lay down flat.

The outer leaves had become papery and after much deliberation and consulting many

conflicting sources, I decided that it was time to yank them out. We were having some foul weather in December and I was worried that they might rot.

So they were a bit smaller than I thought they might be but I don’t think they would have grown much bigger (they had been in the ground for well over 9 months) and just as any mother would look upon their own offspring, I thought they were perfect.

It was now time to hang them up in a dark, airy place to dry out. I was happy to wait for this to happen, what with Christmas and New Year’s happening.  Then the other day I checked on them and it was time. They were all dried out and ready to be devoured.

For two of them, their fate happens to lie in a restorative garlic and sage broth, spooned over some good sourdough and a poached egg. Restorative, simple and amazingly flavoursome. The recipe was given to me by a friend who found it in the the New York Times online.

I was a little skeptical as to what sage and garlic broth would be like; I either thought that the garlic would leap up and punch me in the face considering you use around 16 cloves and the cooking time is really not that long, or that it would not taste like much at all, leaving me cursing the recipe for making me waste 2 of my bulbs. Instead, as I continued to eat, this feeling of well-being crept up inside me. This is what people should eat when they feel sick or just plain unhappy. The garlic and sage mingled together and were subtle (no punch in the face here), yet there was definite flavour. The article that accompanied this recipe claimed that you would swear that you were having chicken broth when you taste it, and I tend to agree with it.

One of the best things about this broth is that I have some left over which I have frozen. I plan to top it up and use it as a base for other creations (like a master stock).

So if you are feeling a bit down or a bit under the weather, give this a go. It is as cheap as chips and it is certain to put a smile on your face...

Garlic Soup with a Poached Egg
Adapted from a recipe found in the New York Times online. The original recipe can be found here
I made this for 2 people with a lot of broth leftover.

2 bulbs of garlic, or around 16 medium sized cloves
2 tbs olive oil
About 12 sage leaves - I used around 16 as my sage leaves are quite small
6 cups of water
2 fresh eggs
2 day old slices of rustic bread, toasted
the smallest grating of Parmesan cheese - this is optional 
salt and pepper to taste
Chopped parsley,chives for garnish.- I used chives

1. In a deep saucepan or pot over a medium heat, fry the sage and garlic in the oil until fragrant, be careful not to brown them. Season to taste.
2. Fill the pot up with the water and bring to the boil. Then lower the heat and simmer for around 20 minutes.
3. Toast your bread, when it is ready, place the bread into 2 serving bowls and lightly grate with the Parmesan.
4. Ladle some broth into a shallow pan so that it reaches about 2 inches from the bottom. Bring the broth in the pan to a gentle simmer.
5. Crack your eggs into the simmering broth in the pan and poach for about 3 minutes until the whites are cooked but the yolk is still runny. I ladled some of the poaching liquid over the eggs to help with the process.
6. When the eggs are done, remove them with a slotted spoon and carefully place them over the pieces of toast.
7. Ladle the broth from the pot over the eggs and serve with the chopped chives.

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January Vintage Cocktail: The French 75

A few months ago, The Bearded Gamer and I were away with some of his lovely friends for a weekend up the coast. One of these friends was quite the mixologist and brought with him all manner of boozy delights (ever tried orange bitters? I hadn't) with him to make cocktails for everyone. The moment I was handed an Old Fashioned and took a sip, I was hooked. Not hooked in the "Hi, My Name is Anna...." way, but hooked in the way I used to get when the new Harry Potter book would be released (confession: I took the day off work to read the final book).

The long and the short of it is; I had to learn how to make cocktails. And not just any cocktails, they had to have a history to them.


Each month I will be posting a new classic cocktail (no jugs of Illusions here, let's leave them in 1996 where they belong) to share with you and hopefully impart some of the history and romance behind each drink. 


Many of the cocktails will come from Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails: From the Alamagoozlum to the Zombie 100 Rediscovered Recipes and the Stories Behind Them by Ted Haig which I downloaded for Kindle. This book is serious cocktail romanticism at its finest, full of historical anecdotes with a smattering of humour. I read it from e-cover to e-cover in two nights.

The first cab off the rank for 2012 is The French 75. The reason why I chose to make this first is because it contains two of my current favourite drinks; champagne (or sparkling white wine) and gin. You will need to make a sugar syrup for this. This is a simple as adding equal parts water and sugar to a saucepan and heat until the sugar is dissolved.

The French 75 was named after the mainstay weapon in World War 1; The French 75mm field gun. Because of the precision and quick-firing ability of this advanced piece of artillery, the French 75 mm continued to remain in service throughout World War 2. The  French 75 cocktail was created in 1915 by barman Harry MacElhone at The New York Bar in Paris but the first printed recipe was found in The Savoy Cocktail Book in 1930.

"Hits with remarkable precision"

-Harry Craddock, The Savoy Cocktail Book

There was much debate as to whether the drink should contain cognac instead of gin (cognac being French and all) however, the original printed recipe states that gin is the spirit of choice for the French 75, and as I didn't have any cognac handy, gin was the natural choice for me.  This drink is so smooth and delicate to drink, but on the other hand it does pack a serious punch, I came over all warm and fuzzy after this. I have only just begun and I think this is going to be my favourite!

And on that note, I give you:

The French 75

2 fl oz gin

1 fl oz freshly squeezed lemon juice

1 tsp sugar syrup

Sparkling white wine - seriously, there is no point pulling out your best bottle of bubbles here, you will never tell the difference.

Ice cubes

2 strips of lemon rind (without the pith) trimmed and wrapped around a chopstick to make a spring, for garnish.

Pour the gin, syrup and lemon juice into a cocktail shaker, add about a tray's worth of ice cubes and now shake.

Pour into either a tall glass or champagne flute (I used my favourite champagne coupes here) and top with the sparkling wine. Garnish with a twist of lemon peel.

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In other news: I have finally joined the land of Facebook! Just click on the link in the top right hand corner to check out my page. I will be posting all my blog updates as well as showcasing some of my favourite blogs and other foodie-related material. Go on, you know you want to....

Growing in Summer: Jude's Veggie Garden

So, as you all might have gathered, I have somewhat of an interest in fresh, seasonal produce; especially growing your own. My own growing projects are limited to pots due to the shadiness of my backyard. This is a perfectly acceptable way to grow and I think more people should do it. Any available space: be it a window sill, a balcony or a patch of ground can have something growing on it. At the very least if you have some soil and a plastic pot you can grow. If I can keep a pot of parsley alive, anyone can.  However this post is not an update on my little patch of potted paradise, this is a post about a vegetable garden, one that is so fantastical and wonderous that it deserves a post all of its own.  

Baby pumpkin, purple string beans, baby butter-nut squash/pumpkin

This is Jude's Garden, Jude is my aunt and I have mentioned her a few times on this blog. She is also my growing guru. She is the person that gave me the garlic cloves to grow my own (there will be a future post on this) as well as countless cuttings of herbs, she has also given me advice on anything from the care of my citrus trees to how to eradicate gross little critters that are destroying my (now second attempt) at growing radishes. I have since found out that it is slugs (the little bastards).

Zucchini flowers, mixed lettuce, snow pea flowers 

As also mentioned in previous posts, this garden is in Orange, I don't know what is in the soil there but these veggies are perfect, don't you think? The area receives a decent amount of rainfall and does not get the humidity that Sydney has which can bring about all manner of pesky little creatures. The winters are cold enough to make you run screaming for the nearest fire and mulled wine but all those wonderful winter brassicas seem thrive here. This garden doesn't rely on harsh pesticides and Jude keeps things as organic as possible. A lot of time and care goes into this garden. I am very lucky to be able to visit and taste the wonderful veg that results from it. 

Unripe plums, one ripe plum, Harry The Lab hoovering the fallen plums

I wasn't able to show you all the veg growing in this garden as I know how busy you all are and you're probably reading this at your desk when you should be concentrating on that fascinating Excel spreadsheet. Needless to say that there are beetroot as big as your fist, a carpet of wild rocket, fennel that has been left to go seed to be collected for growing again, rhubarb that shoots back up as soon as you have cut it and an old metal garbage bin that has rosemary spilling out of it. If you run your hands through it, the oil sticks to your hands and you can smell rosemary for hours afterwards. See what I mean? This is a fantastical and wonderous place.

Baby seedlings, nearly ready for planting. The toilet rolls are such an awesome idea, I might just use this!

As you can imagine, there is little need to go to the grocery shop having a garden like this. Jude gets very creative when it comes to making sure that nothing grown in the garden goes to waste. The below frittata was beautiful and was lighter than most frittata's that I have eaten. It is a dish that can be made at any time of the year with whatever is in season - grown in a pot, in the ground or bought from the shops, whatever you want. As I mentioned, I will give you an update on what I have been growing (here's a hint!) at home soon, just let me see if I can rid myself of a few feral slugs first.

Jude's Veggie Frittata with salad topped with a balsamic vinaigrette. The only thing that was bought from the shops was the avocado! 

Jude's Veggie Garden Frittata

This involves no strict recipe. In fact, here is the email that Jude sent to me when I asked her if she would mind giving me the recipe for this post...

Hi Anna

Sorry I did not get to this yesterday. I have been busy in the garden and I forgot.

What I did the other night was:

Roast carrots, potatoes and red shallots with thyme and olive oil. Use two to three cups in total depending on how full of veg you want the frittata. You can use any sort of veg you like. Baby spinach is good and you don't need to cook it. You would need quite a bit of this as it wilts down. You can also put other herbs such as chives or parsley. I have added handfuls of parsley on occasions and it is great.

About a cup of chopped ham or other cured meat of your choice (eg bacon)

About half to a cup of grated cheese if you wish.

Mix all this in the thing you are going to cook it in. A lasagne dish works well.

Mix six eggs, about a cup of ricotta, cream or cottage cheese depending on how virtuous you are and about a cup of milk. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Pour over veg mixture and cook at about 180C for about 45 mins to 1 hour.

As I told you this is about what is available, not a strict recipe. Great for cleaning out the crisper when it needs it or what ever you have in the garden.

I forgot to mention the half cup of self raising flour to be mixed with the eggs. A lot of recipes say a cup but I find you get a much lighter fluffier frittata if you don't

Talk to you soon..