Most tourists who travel to Tasmania don’t see the logged coupes, tracts of trees are kept at the edges of the roads. Tourists are directed from National Park to National Park so that they never know about the battle for the forests of Tasmania, that is happening between these small sections of protected land. Our friend Anna Krien has written a book about this battle: Into The Woods. It’s out this week, and we’re so gosh darn proud.

When Sarah and I were there, we cooked this rustic apple pie, (with organic apples,) and tried to pull as much rope as we could from the sand.

Apple Pie

Apple Filling
1kg organic apples, washed, peeled, cored and sliced into large hunks
raw caster sugar - to taste
1/4 cup of water

Pastry
185g chilled butter
185g flour
a pinch of salt
30g icing sugar
1 free-range egg
1 free-range egg whisked lightly with 2 tbsp milk for the pastry

Sift flour, salt and icing sugar together. In a food processor, or with your hands combine flour and butter until it begins to look like bread crumbs. Add egg and knead/process into a dough. Add a tspn cold water here if it doesn’t come together in a ball. Rest pastry in the fridge for one hour in two balls, one a little bigger (for the bottom) than the other in cling wrap.

While the pastry is resting, place the apples in a saucepan with a 1/4 cup of water and cook on a low heat. You can add sugar if your apples aren’t sweet enough or if you like a very sweet pie. When the apples are ready you will be able to just poke them with a knife, they will be tender enough for the knife to pass through, but they should keep their shape and not fall apart.

Roll out the top and bottom of the pie to about 5mm thick. Put the bigger into the pie dish and blind bake for ten minutes or so. When the blind baking is done, trim the edges of the pie if any pastry is falling over the edge and place the filling into the base. It should come to the top. Try not to scoop up too many juices, otherwise your pie will go soggy. Just the firm apples.

Place the other rolled piece of pie pastry on top of the filling and base and tuck in the edges, so there is no apple at the corners.

Brush the top and edges of the pie with the egg mixture, just lightly, there should be a light film over the top, not a soggy mess. Bake the pie in a 180C oven until the pastry is golden brown and the smell of apples fills the kitchen.

Serve with pure cream.

We ate them at the long table at our Fitzroy house sitting house that Sarah had a lend of just for the weekend. The wisteria in the courtyard was bare-armed and bony, but the weak winter light made it further into the kitchen.

I like the ritual of making pizza, how they come one at a time from the oven, with waiting in-between. The smell from the oven keeps appetites sharp and the kitchen warm. There’s plenty of time to drink wine and dinner can go for hours. It’s much more fun than the formality of a three course meal, that signals with desert and coffee, ‘the end’.

POTATO AND CARAMALISED ONION PIZZA

1 packet active dry yeast
1 tbsp honey
1 ¾ cups warm water
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
3 ½ cups all purpose unbleached flour
1 cup semolina flour
1 tablespoon flaky sea salt

5 potatoes boiled and cooled, sliced into 5mm thick rounds
5 onions chopped finely into rounds and cooked very slowly on a low heat in 4 tbsp of olive oil, two bay leaves one tsp sugar and 5 whole black peppercorns for 20 mins stir regularly
1 ball good quality mozzerella
Sea Salt to season
4 Sprigs of thyme

In a bowl place the warm water (can be from a kettle with a little cold water added, make sure its not too hot) and honey and mix til honey is dissolved.Sprinkle the dry yeast on top of the watery mix and wait 5 or so minutes to be sure it is activated (foamed). It will look like sea foam, or the foam at the top of your beer. Add the oil into the yeast water, and mix with a fork. In a kitchen mixer with a dough hook, (or by hands, this will take a bit more time), mix both flours and salt for a minute, then slowly add liquid ingredients over dry ingredients and mix on lowest speed for 10 minutes, until a single dough ball forms. Allow dough ball to rest for 20 to 30 minutes in the bowl covered by a damp kitchen towel. A warm room helps this process along. The dough should double in size.

Pre-heat your oven to 220 degrees (very hot).

When the dough has risen, knock the air out of it with your fist and tip onto a floured surface (knocking the air out of the dough is one of my favourite parts of the process).

Divide dough into four equal parts, form into tight dough balls and set aside. Each ball of dough makes one pizza.
With floured hands, knead your dough a little on a floured surface. Roll out your dough to your desired thickness (I like mine about 3mm thick) and to suit the tray you are using. I highly recommend a tray with no edges, that way, when the pizza is cooked, the stress associated sliding it off the tray is lessened. Wipe your tray with a bit of olive oil on some paper towel, dont drench it, there should just be a fine flim so the base of the pizza is crisp and doesn’t stick.

Place your rolled out dough on the tray and stretch it out to evenly cover your tray.

Place potato, caramalised onion, cheese, salt and thyme on the dough (in that order) being careful not to overload it, especially in the centre otherwise it will become soggy. I think a perfect pizza should have a bite of everything on every slice, but you should still see spots of golden dough through the cheese!

Cook in the oven until the edges are golden and the centre is cooked through too. Around 10 mins depending on your oven.

I was worried I wouldn’t be able to find the soba dipping sauce here, but the asian grocer provided. Put the chopped spring onions, and wasabi in the dipping sauce, which is kind of like soy, but sweeter and more fragrant, almost lemony, and dip the noodles in with each mouthful. It’s perfectly cool and refreshing and something I want to remember for the 40C days ahead. I was just swooped by a magpie – spring must be nearly here!

Cold Soba Noodles

250g soba noodles,
wasabi
spring onions, sliced finely
soba noddle dipping sauce

Cook noodles as per packet instructions, run under cold water and set aside. Assemble on a plate with wasabi, spring onions and dipping sauce.

Now my mum cooks these pancakes on a day to day basis, not as a special occasion. When I visit her there is always a large bowl of mixture in the fridge, and it’s there ready when you wake. It’s served with just a juicy hunk of orange that’s squeezed over it. I love the nutty flavour the buckwheat flour gives, it adds a slight bite to the texture too. With just a squeeze of orange the pancakes, which are such a luxurious breakfast, feel wholesome and easy.

Buckwheat Pancakes with Orange

1 cup buckwheat flour
1 cup plain flour
pinch of salt
2 ½ cups milk (can substitute a little water here if milk is running low)
2 free-range eggs
a little butter, to fry
an orange, halved

Sift flour and salt into a large bowl, mix. Make a well in the centre and add milk gradually, stirring with a wooden spoon, scraping a little of the flour into the wet well with each addition. Continue until all the flour and liquid is combined. I don’t normally measure the liquid, I just add until the mixture has a consistency of runny honey – watch it run off your wooden spoon to see. Whisk this mixture to make sure there are no lumps and then add the eggs. Whisk until combined.

Make sure your pan is hot. Add a little butter to the pan – it should sizzle – then enough pancake mixture to cover the pan thinly. Twist and turn the pan to cover the surface. Fry until bubbles appear and pop in the pancake, and it’s golden brown on the bottom. Flip. Fry until golden brown. Repeat the process, again with a little butter. Warm the finished pancakes on a plate in a very low oven.

Serve with a halved orange to squeeze.

These pancakes are more like crepes, very thin and delicate. The mixture should last up to four or five days, covered in the fridge, for quick weekday pancakes.

VICE PHOTO ISSUE 2010

Photographer: Lauren Bamford
Styling & Art Direction: Romy Ash, Sarah Trotter

Trotski & Ash & Bamford did a still life for Vice Magazine a couple of weeks back. Here it is! We did two, but ‘Green’ (our homage to 70s cardboard kitchen art) has been picked up by Vice internationally. If you are overseas and have access to Vice and we are in it, contact me and I’ll get you to send me a copy (I can send you something in return, an exchange if you will). Sarah.

Sarah made me these butterfly cakes with lemon curd. They’re the sweetest little things. Light and pretty. We need to have another ladies’ afternoon tea. A get together for all the creative, wonderful women we know, for them to get to know one another too. Let’s.

Lemon Curd (Stephanie Alexander, The Cooks Companion)
4 egg yolks
2/3 cup caster sugar
60g unsalted butter
2tsp grated lemon zest
100 ml lemon juice

Whisk egg yolks and sugar until well combined but not frothy. Tip into a heavy-based non-reactive saucepan, add butter, zest and juice. Stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, bring to simmering point over a medium-high heat (around 5mins). As soon as bubbles appear, remove from heat, still stirring. Allow to cool.

Cupcakes
180g unsalted butter, softened
200g caster sugar
1tsp vanilla extract
3 large free-range eggs
200g self-raising flour
25g cornflour
3-4tbsp milk
icing sugar to dust.

Pre-heat oven to 180C degrees. Line a muffin/cupcake tray with your patty pans. This mix should make just over a dozen medium sized cupcakes.
Cream butter and sugar until very light and fluffy, a electric beater is kind of essential for this recipe. Don’t be impatient, let it get all white and light before you continue the recipe. Add the vanilla and the eggs, one at a time. After each egg place a spoonful of flour in. Fold in the rest of the flour in, followed by the cornflour. When all is combined, add the milk until the consistency is not too runny but smooth.
Spoon the batter into pans about half to three quarters full. Bake for 25mins until cooked through- when a cake tester comes out clean. Set aside for 5 minutes in tin. Remove cup cakes from pan onto wire rack. Set aside to cool.
When ready to serve, use a sharp knife to cut out the tops of the cupcakes. Cut into the top, the knife vertical to the cupcake, and cut out a small dent in a circle shape. There should be a dimple in your cupcake and you should have a little cone of cupcake left over.
Fill the dimple with curd, cut your cone shaped bit of cupcake in half and place on the curd in a wing-like arrangement (see picture).
Dust lightly with icing sugar and serve.

trotski & ash are the new food contributors for Yen Magazine. We are delighted to be in PRINT! Take a look at our recipes for Honey Jumbles and Rosewater Meringue Trifle. Yum.

Sitting in the gutter with a group of Portuguese surfers – quick friends – drunkenly discussing, in English, our inability to speak Portuguese, we forgot about the Prego Rolls. They said, “Learn Spanish, Portuguese is like poetry: much too difficult.” When we walked back to where the drum had been set up there were simply empty plastic cups covering the streets and not a delicious roll - or even a drug dealer - to be found. Devastating.

This year, Sarah and I made these on a sunny afternoon as an early dinner. Cooking made the kitchen smoky and hot and the steaks tasted so beautifully of bay leaves, garlic and wine. Year long craving – satiated!

Portuguese Prego Rolls
from Piri Piri Starfish, Tessa Kiros

2 x 120g pork steaks or sirloin steaks (about 5mm thick)
3 tbsp of red wine
2 fresh bay leaves
2 garlic cloves, peeled and squashed a bit
30g butter
2 tablespoons of olive oil, for frying
2 Portuguese bread rolls
piri piri sauce (or a little chili), to serve

Marinate the steaks in the wine, bay leaves and one of the garlic cloves for a couple of hours, (or even better – overnight) before you cook them.

Heat the butter with the other garlic clove in a small pan until the butter turns a bit golden. Season with salt and pepper and take off the heat.

Shake the meat out of its marinade and pat dry with kitchen paper. Heat the olive oil over high heat in a non-stick pan that will fit both steaks. When the pan is very hot, add the meat and fry quickly, turning once.

Remove to a plate, keep warm and add a sprinkle of salt to the meat while it’s resting. Meanwhile put the halved rolls under the grill until very slightly crisp and warm. Pour the marinade into the pan and let it bubble up well. When it has thickened a bit and tastes good, dip the cut sides of the rolls in to soak up some sauce. Put the bottom half of the roll on a plate, blob some of the garlic butter on and then the steak. Pour on any juices from the steaks when they were resting and drizzle the piri piri or chilli sauce. Put the top on the rolls, squish together and serve at once.

Serves 2.

To accompany the films, and in a nod to all things American, Sarah made fresh cinnamon doughnuts. Yes, I know it’s horrific, but we have a deep fryer. My auntie gave me an old seventies one, that is of course brown, but really it’s just a pot with heated oil in it. These donuts can just as easily been made on the stove top. This recipe for doughnuts is a dough style – not a wet mixture. It proves twice and what starts out as flat rolled out dough becomes round doughnuts with a light as air interior and a perfectly sugar encrusted, crunchy crust.

They’re exactly what an American mum would give their kids in Over The Edge, right before the kids leave the kitchen table to break into unfinished building sites, shoot guns and have underage sex. Their lips would still be sugary sweet.

Cinnamon Doughnuts

4 teaspoons active dry yeast
¼ cup lukewarm water
1 cup lukewarm milk
3 tbsp caster sugar
100g unsalted butter, melted
4 ¼ cups plain flour
3 eggs
vegetable oil, to deep fry
1 cup caster sugar mixed with 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon, to coat

Place the yeast, water, milk and one tablespoon of sugar in a bowl and set aside for 10 minutes. The mixture will start to foam, indicating that the yeast is active. Add the butter, flour, eggs and remaining sugar to the yeast mixture and mix with a butter knife until a sticky dough forms. Bring the dough together by kneading on a lightly floured surface. Place the dough in an oiled bowl, cover with a tea-towel and set aside in a warm place for 45 minutes or until doubled in size. Knead the dough on a lightly floured surface for five minutes or until it feels smooth and elastic. Roll out the dough on a lightly floured surface until about 1cm thick. Use a cutter or a small glass to cut the dough into rounds. Place a tray lined with non-stick baking paper, cover with a tea-towel and set aside in a warm place for 30 minutes or until risen. Heat the oil in a saucepan until the temperature reaches 180C. Cook the doughnuts a few at a time until golden. Drain briefly on paper towel and toss in the combined sugar and cinnamon.

This recipe for lemony lamb (Arni Lemonato) has been passed from friend to friend – Michelle made it for a winter wedding feast this time last year, but it’s only this month that Sarah and I have been making it for ourselves. The lamb cooks for two and a half hours on the stove top in lemon juice and fresh oregano until succulent and you can pull it apart with your fingers. The potatoes added in the last hour are infused with the lemon flavour. We served the lamb with sautéed rainbow chard for opposing freshness and colour and ate hot lemon potatoes to remind us of Brisbane on a grey Melbourne afternoon.

Lemony Lamb
Adapted from Raw Materials, by Meryl Constance

1kg boned leg of lamb, (ask the butcher to bone it for you)
2/3 cup lemon juice
2 tbsp fresh oregano
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1kg small new potatoes
salt and pepper
1 tbsp olive oil

This recipe also works well with lamb shanks, breast or best end of neck. If you do use these fattier meats make the dish a day ahead, refrigerate it and remove the fat that coagulates on top. If anything the dish gains added depth of flavour when made ahead and reheated.

Trim skin and all excess fat from a boned shoulder or leg of lamb. Open out the meat and rub both inside and outside surfaces with some of the lemon juice and sprinkle with salt and pepper. On the inside surface of the meat, sprinkle a tablespoon of fresh oregano. Roll the meat up and tie securely with twine. Heat a tablespoon of olive oil in a pot large enough to take the roll comfortably and brown the meat on all sides. Turn the heat down to low and add the rest of the lemon juice, the garlic, and the remaining oregano. Cover the pot and simmer very gently, turning occasionally, for about 2 and a half hours till very tender. Add small new potatoes to the pot about an hour before serving. To serve, remove the string and slice the meat into the centre of a heated serving platter. Surround with potatoes and pour lemony juices over the meat.

(Serves 4)