Smokey the Magnificent

Well, the sad, melancholy news is that I am not the Best Home Cook in the Waikato.

The consolatory news is that, despite my lemon dipping sauce going totally off its rocker, forgetting to put the thyme in said sauce and running out of time to use the arty skewers I bought for $6.49… I am the Runner-Up.

I have a large, framed certificate to prove it. I’m not sure what to do with it. Either I’ll chuck it in the bin or keep it enshrined on the wall of the throom with mood lighting and laser security. I also have a $200 gift card for Farro, which is much less problematic.

The panna cotta chap won, as could be expected - he made a very fancy fish dish with lemon fondant potatoes (why are they called that? I’m gonna try them, anyway, though not with preserved lemon). Many people liked Tiny Miles. I educated the viewing public on the harvesting methods of saffron, which is more interesting than I probably made it sound. I bought a disappointing milkshake and some incredibly nommy spiced nuts. Helpdesk Man bought fudge, cider, a mango mocktail and two pizzas. (Helpdesk Man 1, Diet 0.) An old lady in the audience heckled one of the other contestants, but left (thankfully) before I went up. Another contestant borrowed my chef’s knife. A man demonstrating cheese-making borrowed my frying pan. The Indian guy gave me his spare plate of curry and couscous. The MC read out bits of my application email, which was embarrassing. Half a bulb of fennel fell on the floor while I was setting up, but I didn’t need it. A lady in the front row was nervily arguing with a contestant over whether her chicken would be undercooked. The pig heard my name being called out and said excitedly “Ooh, Mummy, what are you going to make?”, proving she has been absent in spirit for the last seven days. Miles emitted a rank, sulfurous stench just as the MC was saying “Some wonderful smells are coming from the stove right now”. One guy simply called his dish “Lamb Fusion”, which sounded a heck of a lot artier than my “Well, um, I’m making chicken tender thingies with a lemon dipping sauce and bits of stuff, oh, and cream cheese balls”. I should have flung glitter into the air and said “I present to you… ZELDA!”, or summat. Also, I had to wear a headset. And I accidentally made a joke about Martha Stewart being a felon, but I don’t think anyone noticed,

But on to weightier matters. You know Patch Adams? Well, the film was based on the life of a real chap, Hunter “Patch” Adams, who was indeed a doctor and believed in the power of ‘aving a larf, but was not Robin Williams (three points to him, really). I read his book once. In it he described the model hospital (or “healing centre”, or something vaguely hippieish, I forget) he would have built if he had ever had enough money, but he did not (and his wife left him - it’s not as cheery a read as you might expect).

It sounds like a pretty neat theoretical facility - he planned the whole grounds in the shape of a clown, so as to terrify pilots, and he had pottery sheds and vegetable gardens and counselors and basketweaving stations and things, so if someone was suffering from the blight he could just toddle down the well-raked gravel path and throw a pot, and feel much better. Holistic, innit. But one rather questionable innovation was the Death Room.

Patch Adams wanted death to be a joyful experience, you see, and he thought that the dying - in much the same way that pregnant women choose candles and essential oil and Enya CDs for giving birth - could choose the ambience surrounding their death. So he planned out this room with a dome-shaped ceiling, on which you could project images of stars or childhood photos or whatever you wanted; and the idea was you could choose a fragrance and have your family around and eat cookies and generally go out in style.

It’s not hard to see the flaws in this plan.

“Are you almost done in there? Mrs Jenkins in Ward 17’s going a bit blue.”

“Wait a minute, the Death Star’s almost reached the Rebel base!”

“Weren’t you in here last week? This isn’t IMAX, you know.”

“I was dying.”

“You were watching Avatar.”

“That’s a very significant film for me!”

“Well, do you think you could pop off before the end of the credits? I have to hastily Photoshop a picture of Mrs Jenkins riding on a unicorn with Leonard Nimoy.”

“Mrs Jenkins?”

“She’ll surprise ya. Now look, that’s my pager; are you coming or going? She’s got a three-page deathplan, she’ll be furious if she misses out.”

Meanwhile Mrs Jenkins, being wheeled down the corridor by an orderly:

“Where are we going?”

“I just thought we’d take a little stroll. Get some fresh air.”

“This isn’t the way to the gardens - wait a second. You’re taking me to the Death Room, aren’t you?!”

“What? Of course not. Maybe just a little trial run. Your Aunty Edna’s flown in, and your high school drama teacher.”

“They flew in for a trial run?”

“Of course they did, sweetie. Everybody cares about you.”

“I’m not dying! I feel fine!”

“And you look lovely. How about we pop your old wedding dress on over your shoulders, now?”

“The doctor said I was going to be out of here by Tuesday!”

“Dr Adams? Oh, he’s a lovely man, isn’t he. Likes his little jokes. Now, look at that, Chef’s made your favourite dessert. Aren’t you in luck!”

“Is that my grandmother’s perfume I smell?”

“Probably just the angels, sweetie. Now oop, here we go, onto the couch. You just lie there and look at Mr Spock on the horsie. We’ll be back in the morning to pick up the - I mean, you have fun. Make the most of this.”

I mean, dude. I’d totally do it, though. I’d have a big flashing countdown, just to see what would happen. Can you psychosomatically induce death by expectation? Probably.

1. We have had another fatality. While inspecting the veggie garden for ripe tomatoes (negative), the pig squeaked and pointed out a stiff, stark rat lying on a pile of mulch. Helpdesk Man picked it up by the tail and threw it over the fence, because he is Manly. The pig was intrigued by the cause of death - “Maybe it ate a bit of smulch?” - but I was more worried about whether or not it was Howard Harley. For the sake of naming simplicity we decided it was merely one of Howard Harley’s friends-and-relations, but it must be said we have not seen him since. Dennis the Quail-Bird is becoming more friendly, though, since I left a piece of bread in the front yard.

2. Tomorrow is the cooking competition. This morning I panicked and redesigned my dish, which is either the moment of inspiration that causes the scrappy underdog to rise to the top, or the sign of a wavering and feeble mind. Incidentally, fennel is vile. I have been cooking variations of it all week - steamed in chicken stock, roasted in duck fat, pureed with garlic - and the only way I can stomach it at all is raw and finely minced. Well, and roasted and pureed with six cloves of garlic, but only because that just tasted of pureed roasted garlic.

So anyway, the idea is: chicken tenders in a preserved lemon and honey dipping sauce (preserved lemon is growing on me, kinda - I won’t buy it again, but it’s OK), with flat green beans ever-so-briefly roasted with a honey glaze, and olives with rosemary, garlic and caramelised balsamic vinegar garnishing it all. Then cream cheese balls made with chopped raw fennel, saffron (had to stick it in somewhere - probably not the most nuanced use of the spice ever, but again, I really don’t like the taste) and cracked pepper; three balls a plate, two rolled in toasted pinenuts and one in chopped fennel fronds, perched in a corner on a couple of basil leaves.

Helpdesk Man assisted with the arrangement - I called him for dinner and he came over, stared at the plate and said “Needs more whitespace”, before moving ramekins around and poking beans for a good ten minutes. I had never realised web design translated so well to chicken tenders, but he was right.

So anyway, I’m supposed to be writing an article about milk donation right now, but I’m mostly running through lists of ingredients in my head. The potential for things going horribly wrong is enormous - we have to bring all our own ingredients, all our utensils - pots, pans, crockery for plating up - everything but a chopping board, which for some reason they provide (but I’m bringing a glass one anyway, for chicken-pounding purposes). And we only get 45 minutes to make the dish from go to whoa, which is cutting it pretty fine, especially because we have to plate up two servings (one for photographing, one for the judges. I don’t know why they couldn’t just hold off a tick before hoeing in, but whatever).

Incidentally, I found out about the mysterious fourth contestant. She was told the wrong time and/or place for the semi-finals, and it was All Their Fault, so they felt the only pukka thing to do was to let her through to the Finals. To which I say, hmph.

3. The pig is a clever child; she thinks about things. Recently some of our resident sheep were shorn, or “furred off” as the pig calls it; and we were discussing the whys and wherefores in the car, when she said “But goats have lots of fur, and they don’t get furred off”. And I was like, that is true. (Although sometimes it isn’t - angoras, for instance. But still.) And when we saw a cute little yellow Beetle-type convertible the other day, she stopped raving about its beauty long enough to ponder, “But what happens when the rain comes in?” I don’t think I would have been as practical at that age. Nor would I have known nearly as much about the makes of cars, how babies come out of their mummies’ tummies, or (possibly because the parenting gene skipped a generation) zombies. Or superheroes, actually. Someone held up a copy of the Captain America DVD to the pig at Christmas and said “Do you know who this is?”, and she said “The star-spangled man!”. I have never been so proud. She was using one of my new dresses as a Superman cape the other day and I reflected I could make her one, but then Helpdesk Man put a spanner in the works by saying “You couldn’t be Superman though pig, you’d have to be Supergirl”, and while I was saying “Bosh, she can be Superman if she wants to” the pig said reflectively “No, I think I’ll be Wonder Woman. Can you make me the clothes, with the panties and the top and the boots?” And we hastily changed the subject.

Plus, she does schoolwork. We do worksheets together - I make them up, because it reminds me of playing school as a kidling - and she fills them in with great officiousness and a sunny spirit. If things go awry, she will say cheerfully “That was not my best R ever. Oh well, never mind!” She does tend to go a little off-track - when I ask her to draw, say, a line of Ts, she will usually end up drawing a Mummy T and a Daddy T and a whole row of little baby Ts - and if unsure of a letter, she treats P as a kind of wildcard, which does not work; but still. She drew a rat the other day that was breathtaking; it had ten legs.

1. Today the electrician came round to fix a socket in the kitchen that has been shorting out. When he unscrewed the plate from the wall, the skeleton of a mouse fell out.

2. The other day a waxeye flew into our window and killed itself.

3. While oosing round the orchard (or “orchwood”, as the pig calls it, which is rather lovely) yesterday, I noticed a lamb lying in a hole, breathing heavily and covered with flies. I alerted the landlord, whose tender response was “Oh, it hasn’t carked it yet? Yeah, I should’ve drenched them earlier.” This morning, it had most definitely carked it.

4. We had duck for dinner tonight, as a treat. The pig watched us prepare it, and suddenly inquired “Was that a REAL duck, like that swims in the sea? With eyes, and a smily face? …Did it talk?” I answered her quite factually, hoping it wouldn’t pitch her over into veganism; but the next minute, she was calling Miles “Duck Fat” and cheerfully pretending to cut his head off.

Country living is educational. That is all.

Well, the bad news is, I might start charging a pay-per-post for this blog. It is not often that common mortals get to read words thunk up by a Finalist in the Farro Home Cook Competition, after all.

The other bad news is, in the excitement of the competition I knocked my beaters off the bench, and now they don’t sing no more. Killing beaters is becoming kind of a Thing with me. Next it’ll be stand mixers, then cement mixers, and then I’ll end up in a padded cell while a sadistic nurse amuses herself by dangling a whisk in front of my frothing mouth.

Anyhoo, it was an exciting evening. There were only five contestants - would have been six, but one didn’t show up, probably because Wintec doesn’t exactly go out of its way to advertise itself. There were also a gaggle of judges and reporters - the owner/chef of Palate, a writer for Nourish magazine, and a reporter and photographer from the local paper. The latter was somewhat bored, I think, and ended up taking about seventy pictures of me doing arty things with toffee. She was nice - she took some of my extra ginger cakes home for her fiance.

The other contestants included a sweet, mumsy lady who had been entered for the competition by She Knew Not Whom, and made a slightly underwhelming apple shortbread; an Indian chap who’s halfway through a three-month fast, but concocted a chicken curry with rice and lassi nevertheless; a young, sprightly woman I didn’t see much of, who made stuffed capsicums; and an older man who emitted a faintly aggressive, in-it-to-win-it vibe that made me nervy. In fact he was perfectly nice - lent me a whisk and everything - and certainly knew his way around a kitchen, but still. He made a coconut panna cotta which didn’t quite set up in the time allotted, but the judges sent him through to the finals anyway. It seemed inevitable.

The other finalists were myself and the Indian fasting guy. The Palate chef chap critiqued our dishes, and I was happy to hear that his only complaint about mine was that I plated it up with too much whipped cream. I would totally have eaten that much whipped cream, myself, but I didn’t wish to come across as gluttonous and argumentative, so I nodded sagely while he praised my Balance of Flavours and Really Nice Texture. The toffee nest on top turned out to be a good thing, too - it showed Technique. I was hoping it would. The marks sheet had five points allotted for Knife Skills, and I don’t know how I did there, as my dish didn’t really require any; but nevertheless, I got through. So that was pleasing.

Then we three finalists had more photos, standing in front of our dishes (which by now were mostly eaten and looked distinctly unphotogenic). We were supposed to grab spoons and taste things, but the Indian chap was fasting and the old chap simply refused to do it; so tomorrow’s Times will feature a photo of two men learnedly discussing food, while the woman in the corner stuffs her face. Oh well. The aggressive chap praised my dish, in a faintly challenging “I accept you as a worthy opponent, and come the day of battle I will CRUSH YOU LIKE A BUG” way; I responded by complimenting his panna cotta, which I didn’t much like. It was a bit odd.

Anyway, the Finals are next Saturday. In the meantime, we have a Farro gift card with which to buy three out of four ingredients to incorporate into our next dish. They are preserved lemon, chorizo, fennel and saffron. Not what I would have picked - I only have a nodding acquaintance with fennel, have never used saffron and don’t have a clue what to do with preserved lemons, other than buying them in large jars and displaying them in kitschy country cafes. Any ideas? I was thinking maybe a risotto with chorizo, fennel and saffron - maybe some caramelised fennel on top, or something. Or is that too obvious? Fennel’s good in soup, but it’s really not the weather for soup. I shall have to Google.

So, yus. We cleaned up under the stern eye of the Wintec hospitality course guy, who bawled out one of the contestants for putting dishes back wet and told me sternly that I should have worn trousers, because if I had spilled caramel on the two inches of bare leg between my boots and my skirt it would have been “very hot - it gets very hot, you know”. (Dude.) Then Helpdesk Man drove me and the pigs home. They had all been shopping while I was cooking, and he bought me a pita bread thing for dinner; sadly, it contained something extremely spicy he swore he hadn’t ordered, and I had to get a chocolate milk at the petrol station on the way home to keep from hurling it back up, but then he drove round a corner really fast and it sort of backfired, and I have spent the last two hours in a queasy fug, wondering vaguely if Panna Cotta Man poisoned his coconut cream in order to eliminate the competition; in which case, I guess Fasting Indian Guy really put a crimp in that plan, now didn’t he?

1. The baby can crawl. This would be good news, except it has gone to his head; he has decided that sleeping is for chumps.

2. Helpdesk Man has begun a vigorous exercise regime, otherwise known as “jogging to the letterbox and running back”. It’s not quite as weedy as it sounds, our driveway being both long and filled with exciting potholes; but in truth, it’s almost as weedy as it sounds. Anyway, this morning he was jogging away diligently, and I was offering wifely support in the form of standing at the end of the driveway in mismatched pyjamas shouting “MUSH, MAGGOT!” when the landlord’s sister emerged unexpectedly from the trees, walking her dog. It was a difficult social situation to navigate.

3. I am risking my ego once more on a cooking competition. This one, thankfully, does not involve pavlovas. In two days’ time I have to slope up to the Wintec cooking school, with pre-measured ingredients in hand for the making of my favourite dish, and concoct it in front of judges in 60 minutes flat.Other hopefuls will be doing the same, and the three skilliest of us will end up facing off at the Food, Wine and Jazz festival in a week or so, making food out of a box of mystery ingredients.

It’s all terribly exciting, although I’m hampered somewhat by the 60-minute rule. Nothing can be pre-prepared, and it turns out most of my favourite dishes take some time to make - days, in many cases. Ice cream is out, as is panna cotta; I can’t do any cake that requires icing, because it wouldn’t cool in time, or anything that needs to cook for too long; chocolate mousse is no good, or butterscotch mousse, or pie, or steak, or roast chicken.

So instead I’m doing a recipe I discovered quite recently, which isn’t really my favourite by any stretch of the imagination, but it is good - David Lebovitz’ fresh ginger cake. As of my second trial run tonight, I’m baking it in a friand tin (I splashed out for the purpose, which will no doubt rankle later on if I don’t recoup the cost in Farro vouchers), and serving it as a mini-cake in a puddle of caramel sauce dotted with white chocolate ganache, next to a pile of whipped cream and some grilled nectarines, and (time and humidity permitting) some kind of fancy toffee doo-hickey. I’m hoping it ticks several snobbish-food buttons - ganache, caramel, ginger, seasonal fruit etc - but after the Pavlova Incident, I am remaining cynical and dubious.

4. The snortlepig has changed her name to Rapunzel. We let her watch Tangled once too often.

5. In keeping with his Information Highwayman motif, Helpdesk Man has themed us. The snortlepig is his trusty sidekick, Dingo: “Come on Dingo, let’s ride”, he says, although recently I heard her saying to herself as she hopped on her motorbike, “Come on Flingo, let’s fly”, which is infinitely more awesome. I am Bandit, camp cook; and the baby is Outrider, Dingo’s loyal friend. So… yup.

6. Howard Harley is becoming quite social. We see him sneaking around the front deck a couple of times a day - and sometimes the back deck, which is worrying, as we don’t know if it’s Howard Harley himself or one of his friends-and-relations. Dennis the Quail-Bird, on the other hand, is pretty coy. We hear him a lot, but haven’t seen him for weeks. We do seem to have acquired some chickens, though. They escape regularly from next door and loiter around the garage, furtively trucking off as soon as we approach. There’s a very handsome rooster and one black chicken whose tail goes like that.

7. There is a cockroach on my computer screen at this very moment.

8. Aww man. It was too wily for Helpdesk Man, and skittered down the back of the desk.  I think I will go to bed.

9. Wait, now it’s up on the wall. Assuming that’s the same one. We’re averaging about two a day. I’m becoming slightly numb to the horror of it - rather like blood tests during my pregnancy with Miles - but not numb enough to actually deal with them solo. Although I had to, the other day when Helpdesk Man was out. It was on the ceiling - I didn’t even know they could do that - and I sprayed it and it plopped sickeningly onto the floor, where I left its foam-covered corpse until Helpdesk Man returned home. I might have just let it slink away, but it was near my sewing machine, and ever since (some years ago) I found a cockroach leg in the inner workings of the machine, I have been wary.

Anyway, Helpdesk Man caught this one on the wall, if you were wondering. Squish. Bye.

1. Other than “agua” (Spanish), “K’Plagh” (Klingon) and “dada” (ingratiating),  Miles has not said much of note. His first English word is, however, promising. It is “indeed”.

He even uses it in context. “Aww, aren’t you cute?” “Ndee!” “Are you talking to me like a clever boy?” “Ndee!” “Would you like some milks?” “NDEED!”

He is a pleasing child.

2. Miles has also taken up a sport. It is called Squelchy Belching, and he is its champion.

3. Tonight we had a housewarming, for no good reason. Most of the attendees had already visited the house, and we (sadly) had no major milestone to celebrate, like finishing the painting or unpacking all the boxes; but we had it all the same. Sadly the canister from the ice cream churn went AWOL, so the ice cream sandwiches turned into cookies dipped in chocolate and yoghurt; but worse things can befall a shindig. (Zombies, dysentery, demon possession, plague of bees… I don’t know. I don’t get invited to many parties.)

Anyway, as it does as such gatherings, the question came up: would you rather wear a burqa for the rest of your life, or go naked? (One vote each way with one abstention, all females.) Thoughts?