Isolation Long Lunch
For as long as I can recall, making and sharing food has been an important part of life; at very least others making and sharing food is something I was aware of from an early age. I remember sitting on the kitchen bench watching my Mum slather Watties tomato sauce over the top of a meatloaf soon to be baked and served with a mountain of mashed potato and boiled broccoli. Midweek dinner time, an event more often than not enjoyed together, heralded that most exciting of daily punctuations for my sister and me: Dad arriving home. I remember standing next to my Dad at the barbecue on Saturday evenings watching him chase freshly shucked buttered scallops around the hotplate while our family and friends gripped glasses of chilled chardonnay, waiting in anticipation. The scallops would be heaped on a wilting paper towel and acknowledged by words of encouragement: “compliments to the chef.” Food fashions may have changed but good food is good food and they remain some of my favourite things to eat.
What I learned from watching my Dad thank my Mum for another delicious meal and from watching friends eagerly stab toothpicks at hot scallops is that so often what makes food important is the process of sharing it. It is that idea which prompted Sophie and me to start this website. Dinner parties in isolation, however, present a conceptual challenge; if there is no-one to share food with what, then, is the point in putting in the extra effort?
We often succumb to dinner being marked by an unreasonably large bowl of popcorn, a bottle of cheap verdelho, and a political drama dredged up from the depths of Netflix. Alternatively it is a hastily made tomato and anchovy spaghetti greedily eaten forkful by large forkful and washed down with a Côtes du Rhône, or some sesame-heavy dan dan noodles from our local noodle shop paired with a perfectly unremarkable Tsing Tao beer. There is, and always will be, a time and a place for that kind of unpretentious, unfussy, and slightly gluttonous eating but there is also a time and a place for putting in a bit more effort, for making something with a few more steps, and cooking for the sake of cooking, eating for the sake of eating.
Sophie and I were recently inspired by our good friends Grace and Phil who have taken to holding Sunday isolation lunches. With a compulsorily quiet Sunday we decided that we would host our own isolation lunch - just for us.
A few years ago I had a particularly memorable lunch at Black Estate winery in the Waipara Valley. My entree was a superb leek and goats cheese tart that I have been pondering ever since. Although the view from our Northcote dining room is not quite as remarkable as the Southern Alps viewed across vines on the Black Estate Home Block I thought I would attempt to replicate the tart as I remembered it. I used an amalgamated recipe for the filling drawn from Nigel Slater’s wonderful book, Appetite, and Angela Redfern’s Ripe - A Fresh Batch. If you are not familiar with either of those books I recommend you take steps to remedy that; they form a cornerstone of the cooking in our house. I caramelised leek and several types of onions over the course of about an hour which made the tart lovely and sweet. The filling was finished by mixing together a couple of types of slightly funky goats cheese and it was encased in a gritty polenta pastry. It was textural, sweet, unctuous, and deeply umami.
I also took inspiration from Liza Queen (a chef who often features on Munchies and in the New York Times) to make brick chicken as our main course which I paired with a herby pan sauce, a kind-of salsa verde made from god-knows-what I yanked out of our herb garden, and slices of grilled oranges. For those unfamiliar, brick chicken is a skin-on boned chicken which is cooked by placing the bird skin-down into a pan and setting a weight (hence the brick) on top of it. Rather than turning the bird, the meat cooks from the skin upwards which, done well, creates exceptionally tender meat with shatteringly crisp skin. We also made Nigel Slater’s small slipper loaves of bread, and Sophie helped us to finish strong by making Alison Roman’s free-form apple tart which we ate with icing sugar and mascarpone.
The event started at about 11am when I dissected the chicken and began cooking and it finished with Sophie and me falling asleep on our couch at about 5.30pm. The day was passed by dancing in the kitchen to Michael Jackson’s greatest hits, plenty of plonk including a rather exceptional Elephant Hill Viognier, and permitting ourselves to relish in the pleasure of cooking with no one to serve and nothing but time. We cooked for the sake of cooking and we ate for the sake of eating. Oh, and we had a bowl of popcorn at about 9pm for dinner.
