Pumpkins and pumpkin recipes

It is, apparently, pumpkin time of year. My own ones haven't done so well, having been grown in pots and left to their own devices for a week and a half of the hottest part of summer, the plants disintegrated. But I have watched the prices in the shop drop from $4 per kg, to $3, $2.50 and now $1.89. For a household that usually eats at least a whole butternut pumpkin a week, this has been fantastic, and I think it's now at least 2 pumpkins a week. They are so wonderfully versatile - as nuts are currently excluded from my diet, and I'm trying to keep honey to a minimum, they are the basis of desserts as well as part of breakfast, lunch and dinner. So I thought I'd share some of the creations I've been enjoying with pumpkins recently (and my contribution to this month's Go Ahead Honey, It’s Gluten Free!).


Veggie mash


I've been getting a good supply of spinach from a friend of mine for the last couple of weeks, and it doesn't agree with me, other than in pureed form. However, pureed spinach always seems to me to taste more like dirt and less like spinach than any other way of eating spinach. So I've been pureeing it with other vegies to great effect.


1/2 butternut pumpkin
3 carrots
2 zucchinis
Big bunch of spinach


Cut the 1/2 pumpkin into 2 pieces and rub with a little oil. Roast the pumpkin at 180C for 40-60mins, or until cooked through.


In the mean time, peel the carrots, and cut into big chunks. Steam 15-20 mins depending on the size of the pieces. You want them quite well cooked, but not so much to that they disintegrate when you try to pick them up. Place in a large bowl.


Cut the zucchini into chunks and, when the carrot is done, chuck them in the steamer. After a couple of minutes, add the spinach to the water in the bottom of the steamer.


When everything is cooked, put it all together in a big bowl, and blend until smooth. Add salt and pepper to taste.
I eat this for breakfast, by browning some mince, adding some of the puree and serving in an omelette, or on the side of some fried eggs. It's also a convenient veggie side dish for whatever meat you are eating for lunch or dinner.


Sweet orange dessert soup


I find it is better with all things desserty if you don't put vegetable names in the title, but yes, this is a pumpkin dessert soup.

The theme of this month's Go Ahead Honey, It’s Gluten Free! is seasonal soups, hosted by Linda, the Gluten-Free Homemaker, and this seems like a fitting contribution. 

It's autumn here in the southern hemisphere, and we are already heading into the cold evenings, and early darkness of winter. So there is nothing better to come home to than a steaming hot bowl of thick soup, and better still that it tastes like dessert. I mean, you could have dinner first, but given it's just vegetables, why bother?


1/2 butternut pumpkin
3 carrots
Cinnamon
Nutmeg
Coconut oil to serve
Lightly dripped yoghurt/sour cream to serve
 
Cut the 1/2 pumpkin into 2 pieces and rub with a little oil. Roast the pumpkin at 180C for 40-60mins, or until cooked through.


In the mean time, peel the carrots, and cut into big chunks. Steam 15-20 mins depending on the size of the pieces. As for the veggie mash, you want them quite well cooked (In cse you haven't noticed, this is exactly the same as the veggie mash. I make them at the same time, and just double the quantity of carrot and pumpkin and use half for each).


Puree the pumpkin and carrot until smooth. Add cinnamon and nutmeg to taste, at a ratio of 1:1. Add water to achieve desired consistency. I like it fairly thick so only add about 1/2 cup of water to this much veg.


To serve, put a generous serving in a bowl, stir through a good dessert spoonful of coconut oil, and top with a blob of lightly dripped yoghurt (I drip my SCD yoghurt for about 30 mins - which tastes the tangy edge off a bit, and gives a lovely sour cream consistency)


Pumpkin soufflé/pudding


Another favourite dessert and snack of mine at the moment is this pumpkin soufflé and/or pudding (a slightly different method with the same ingredients yields a quite different texture. The soufflé is lovely straight out of the oven, while it is still puffed and steaming. They are also both great cold, which brings out the coconut flavour a little more, or reheated, for a warm and satisfying snack at work.


4 egg whites
2 cups of the dessert soup vegies (before you add any water - if you are doing the soufflé, it is also a good idea to sit the veggie mash on a tea towel for 15 mins or so to soak up some of the extra moisture, though this isn't absolutely necessary)
2 egg yolks
1/4 cup coconut oil


Whisk your egg whites until they form stiff peaks. (I highly recommend an egg white attachment for your food processor, or a mix master)


In the mean time (assuming you can wander off and leave your egg whites beating), combine the vegies, egg yolks and coconut oil and mix well.


If you are making the soufflé, mix about 1/3 of the egg whites through the pumpkin mixture, then carefully fold in the remaining egg white.


If you are making the pudding, add the pumpkin mixture to the egg whites and beat until just combined.
 
I like taking these to work, so I make them in a combination of 250ml pyrex dishes, with lids, and in slightly larger ramekins and 500ml dishes for home. 


Arrange your dishes in an over tray, and add mixture to dishes. This makes about 8 small serves. Place tray in oven and pour water into tray around dishes to come about 2-3cm up the sides. Bake at 180C for 40-50 mins, until turning golden on top and slightly firm to the touch (they won't be solid, but they need to cook until they are no longer liquidy).


For those of you following SCD, these are all pretty early stage recipes. Just remember to add the spices as individual foods one at a time. Earlier on in the diet, I boiled the carrots and pumpkin with whole spices tied in a piece of muslin, so I wasn't eating the solids of the spices - not as nice a flavour, but a pleasant change from chicken soup.

Enjoy!


(159(!) days and counting...)

Very belated health update (and cheesecake photo - no recipe though)

I've just discovered I've had this post sitting in draft since mid-Feb. I didn't post it straight away because I was waiting to upload a photo to go with it, and then it just got lost, and the cheesecake was not fantastic... so no recipe... anyway, excuses, excuses. I have been meaning to post a health update, and this sets some context, so I figured I'd post it now, and the cheesecake photo is pretty cool: 

Wow, it's been almost a month since I last posted. Life has been pretty hectic and I haven't had a Friday at home since... not sure... until today anyway. First there was Tora Week, a week of crazy amounts of karate, getting too little sleep and generally torturing ourselves. I was a bit stressed about being on SCD for the week (see my previous post) and went a bit overboard with the planning. I took good morning breakfast bars from the cccibs cookbook, magic lemon bars from Straight into Bed Cakefree and Dried, and my larabar themed energy bars.

I had been studiously avoid nuts in the leadup to the week, trying to get some post Christmas symptoms under control. But at the first sign of nuts, I started bleeding again. After a brief panic and then realising that there was no pain and no D, I figured I'd live. I needed the nuts and honey to make it through the week, so I wasn't giving them up unless there was no alternative. Fortunately, after a couple of days, my colon got over its initial shock and calmed down, and once I worked out that I needed 6-7 serves of vegies for dinner to keep my energy levels up, I coped pretty well.

All in all, the week was pretty good. I learned a lot, got a bit fitter and stronger, and our club now has another black belt. Since then, it has been work, lots and lots of work. I had to work one Friday for a sick day I took earlier in the year (yes, I'm a public servant and ran out of sick leave. But at least I have another years worth now - fingers crossed it lasts me a year. Do not want another one like 2010).

I did get to have today off though, which was good because I managed to capture the energy and enthusiasm of Tora Week before it wore off, and decided I'm going to go the the gym and do some karate every Friday morning, and actually did it too.

Then I came home to try out a cheesecake idea that I've been mulling over for a couple of days. White chocolate and raspberry. It's inspired by a cheesecake from what was my favourite patisserie in Canberra pre-SCD, which does a few really excellent chocolaty desserts. While most of them are far out of reach (chocolate ot being permitted on the diet), I have been considering that a white chocolate version using cocoa butter may be possible.

The risk with such things is that the flavour of the SCD yoghurt will overpower the more subtle flavours that one is trying to infuse into dishes, and all you can taste is yoghurt tang. So I started by adding some melted cocoa butter to some sweetened yoghurt to test whether it could pass a chocolaty, and it did, so I decided to give it a try. It's a mixture of a few recipes, some for SCD cheesecake and some for regular white chocolate cheesecake - I hope it has worked. It's still in the oven cooling down, so I can't give a verdict yet, but can verify that the batter was really tasty.

I leave you for now with a photograph from before it went in the oven.

I promise a recipe soon, all going to plan.

A moth invasion (and red wine reduction)

Life has been busy, and I haven't had a weekend free to sit at home and do whatever I want to in ages. That is, until the weekend just gone. I'd had plans to read my new book (The Paleo Solution, a book I bought on the recommendation of someone who responded to my post about doing intensive exercise on SCD and what to eat), write a blog post, and just generally relax and unwind. It didn't happen - it very rarely does, I suppose - life always gets in the way. But it was a good weekend all the same, apart from the moth invasion.

It's been going on for a couple of weeks now, these tiny little moths, fluttering around the kitchen and hallway, and occasionally in the cupboards. The kitten loves them - she watches them with the intensity of a hunter, with concentration that she doesn't have for anything else. And when they sit on the ceiling or high up on the walls and she can't reach them, she runs back and forth, making this little "aackaackaack" noise. Then when they come within her reach, they are pounced and devoured, and she looks around forlornly, wanting to know where the fun went.

Mid Sunday afternoon, I discovered the source of much kitten-fun in my pantry, in packets of nut meal, jars of nuts, cocoons in corners and under shelves. So Sunday afternoon turned into kitchen spring (or more technically correctly, autumn) cleaning. Those nuts that could be salvaged have now been soaked and dried, packets have been removed and cleaned, shelves and walls have been washed, and contents have been restored, to reveal much more space in my cupboards than I knew I had. So not all bad really.

The other exciting event of the weekend was making a red wine reduction that a friend of ours served at dinner last year, delicious with blue cheese and dried pear, or brie and dried peach, or I'm sure any other cheese you care to think of. I've been meaning to try it since then, and a 10% voucher, and discovering the same bottle shop had some $2.99 bottles of red (ghastly stuff, but it doesn't matter for present purposes) finally instigated action. So 6 bottles of cheap, nasty red in had (plus a dozen good drinking bottles!), we headed home.

The directions we had were to add some spices (we went with 1 cinnamon stick, 6 cloves and 6 allspice) and to steam, not simmer, the wine over a low heat until it reduces. The consistency is like a thick molasses, and took almost 8 hours to achieve. We started out in a huge thick bottomed pot, keeping the temperature at around 80C, and when we got down to about 1L of liquid (still quite liquidy at this stage) transferred it to a smaller pot. We took the spices out after maybe 4 hours. Once it started to thicken, a quick taste made mouths pucker, so we started adding some honey. Then some more, and a bit of salt, then some more honey. In the end, we had about 300mls of syrup, containing maybe 150mls of honey (though that would have reduced somewhat too) and about a tsp of rock salt. 

There were several test pieces of cheese over the course of the afternoon, and when the reduction was transferred loving to a storage container and the fridge, a trip to the supermarket yielded some Tasmanian brie. The verdict: quite delicious, if somewhat pricey. If you can find some really cheap red, it is well worth the effort, and I expect the 6 bottles of wine to last much longer than the 12 bottles for drinking!

Valentine's Day (and February's Go ahead honey it's gluten free)

Valentine's Day was lovely. I'm rather cynical about the whole buying roses and chocolates (not that I can eat them now anyway), but it's a great excuse to eat a nice meal, have a glass of wine or two, and relax and enjoy each other's company.

My UC has been playing up a bit lately, so I'm eating fairly carefully, so we decided to have dinner at home.

The evening started with a glass of red and brie. No crackers, because I'm off nuts, and we didn't have any crackers for Ben either, though there was my mum's home made quince paste to go with his cheese.

Then we had steak - a lovely locally grown, hormone and antibiotic free steak - with mushroom sauce, and a side of roast vegies, and another glass of wine, of course.

I've recently got into eating mushrooms - I've never liked them in the past, but a friend of mine told me I had to try this lovely recipe of hers, and I was converted. 

And finally orange yoghurt jelly, topped with candied citrus peel and white chocolate.

Yum.

The mains are staple SCD meals for us, tried and true, but the dessert is something I've been playing with for a little while, and it worked so well this time that I've put to forward for the February Go Ahead Honey its Gluten Free with it's suitably Valentine's theme, love potions and charmed foods.


Missing chocolate is something I'm sure every SCD'er can identify with, and with its rich and creamy, melt-in-your-mouth sweetness (and, of course, traditional Valentine's connection) I couldn't resist a little bit in the dessert.


But more than that, it is about sweet fresh citrus, and thick creamy yoghurt, for a thoroughly indulgent and very healthy dessert.

All of the evening's recipes are below, and head to Naomi's fab blog for all of the GAHIGF recipes later this month, or by 24 Feb to get involved.

Mushroom sauce, two ways

1 tbsp olive oil

1 tbsp butter

1/4 medium onion finely chopped

2 cloves garlic

4 medium cup mushrooms

1/4 cup of yoghurt or 1/8 cup red wine

parsley

Melt the butter, together with the oil, over a medium heat, then add onion and garlic and saute until soft. Add mushrooms and saute until cooked.

Just before serving, add the yoghurt or wine and the parsley, stir through and serve - as a sauce on steak or a side. Don't heat again at this stage if you use the yoghurt as it will seperate.

Roast vegies

Olive oil

2 carrots

1/4 butternut pumpkin

2 zucchinis

1/2 eggplant

1/2 punnet of cherry tomatoes

6 cloves of garlic

1 tbsp finely chopped rosemary

Preheat oven to 200C.

Cut all of the vegetables into chunks about the size of cherry tomatoes. Add a good splosh of olive oil to a roasting pan and toss through the carrots. Roast for about 15 mins.

Add pumpkin and roast for another 5 mins. Add zucchini and eggplant and cook for 10 more minutes. Then add tomatoes and garlic and cook until everything is done (at least another 10 minutes).

5 minutes before it is done, sprinkle overe the rosemary.

Orange Yoghurt Jelly

125g honey

grated rind of 1 orange

120ml cold water

2 tsp gelatine

160mls freshly squeezed orange juice

40mls freshly squeezed lemon juice

370mls yoghurt

Heat the honey, orange rind and 60mls of water and allow to simmer for a minute then remove from heat.

Soak the gelatine in the remaining water while doing this, then add the soaked gelatine to the hot honey mixture and stir until dissolved.

Add the orange and lemon juice and yoghurt and stir thoroughly to combine. Pour into 4 small bowls and refridgerate for at least 4 hours.

Top with a spear of white orange chocolate and candied peel.

Citrus White Chocolate

55gms cocoa butter

1tbsp butter

2tsp creamed honey

Piece of vanilla pod

tbsp of candied peel

 

Melt cocoa butter in a double boiler over medium heat. Add the butter, creamed honey, and seeds scraped from the inside of the vanilla pod. Heat until the butter and honey are melted, pour into glass bowl and put in fridge. 

After about 10 mins, remove from fridge and beat with electric beaters. If mixture separates when left to stand, return to fridge for another 5 mins. Once mixture holds together, mix through candied peel (as much or as little as you like) and pour onto a piece of greeseproof paper. Store in the freezer.

Candied peel

Peel of 2 oranges (or other citrus fruit)

Honey

Cut the peel into small chunks (approx 8mm square). Put peel into small saucepan and cover with water. Simmer peel for about an hour, adding more water as necessary.

Pour honey over the peel to about half way up and return to the heat. Simmer until honey is absorbed, and pour peel onto greaseproof paper. Depending on how sticky you like it and what you want to use it for, you can either bottle it once cool, or dehydrate in a food dehydrator.

SCD and intensive exercise

I have an intense week of karate coming up in a couple of weeks time - a solid 7 days of training 3-4 times a day, with days 2, 3 and 4 starting with a 6am run and training session. This is traditionally followed by a BBQ breakfast and beer.

The seminar is held in Hobart, and I stay at a hotel (with full kitchen facilities) with my husband and usually between 4 and 7 students. It is always a lot of fun, as well as physically and mentally exhausting, and I'm torn between excitement and dread at its impending arrival.

This will be the 9th such seminar I've been to (thankfully it only happens once a year!) and first one at which I've been following SCD. Normally the week involves massive amounts of carbs and sugar - four slices of toast with nutella for first breakfast, bacon eggs and more toast for second breakfast, pasta for lunch, rice for dinner and as much junk food as can be fitted in between without throwing up during training, because we know we're burning off the calories faster than we can eat them.

But this all has to change for me this year. Somehow I have to survive on meat and fruit and vegetables, cheese and yoghurt, and nuts. I'm not up to eating legumes yet, and even nuts aren't completely agreeing with me.

I've been reading a bit about sports nutrition over the last few weeks. All of the information I have found is based around a normal carb content diet, so it isn't particularly easy for me to use, but I've taken some pointers about what to eat and when and started putting together a plan.

The main points of what I've read seem to be to eat carbs (the form of fruit and vegetable is good) and protein a couple of hours before and within a couple of shours after exercising, and eat a snack of something more sugary like an energy bar or a banana or trail mix half an hour before exercise. I've also heard that milk after exercise is a good way to get back some of what you've lost. And of course hydration is really important. I lost almost 4kg the first time I did one of these seminars, and I think it was almost entirely through fluid loss.

So here are the basics of my plan. I'd appreciate any feedback or comments anyone may have to offer.

Breakfast
- pumpkin soup (basically roast butternut pureed with cooked apples, and cinnamon, nutmeg etc) - for carbs
- topped with date and cashew whip (soaked cashews pureed with dates) - for sugar
- also topped with some banana smoothie to thin the soup a little

Followed by training session 1 for the day: either 6am or 10 am

Straight after training session 1
- banana smoothie


Second breakfast (only on the days that start at 6am)
- beef rissole and fried egg - for protein
- ratatouille - for carbs (I would have sworn that I had posted a recipe for this, but I can't find it. Anyway, eggplant, zucchini, tomato, red onion, capsicum, and herbs)

Lunch (after training session 1 on the civilised days, after session 2 on the 6am days)
- salad - carbs
- with chicken/tuna - protein

Afternoon snack (after training session 2 or 3)
- avocado

Afternoon snack 2 (before training session 3 or 4)
- energy bars

Then after the last training session of the day, we take it in turns to cook at the hotel. There are a few people doing things I can eat, like mushroom strogonoff (mine with SCD yoghurt) and Vietnamise salad with rissoles/sausages. I also always cook a huge pot of bolognaise at the start of the week, so I can have that with vegies on the nights when people are cooking food I can't eat.

And finally, I'm taking some supplies for extra snacking (like the chewy macadamia cookies from CCCIBS which is my favourite cookbook, ever, not just SCD) and my mum is making labna and knowing her will probably also me a cake or something too. Something sweet is essential to slip into my bag for our regular strolls to North Hobart for coffee, otherwise the cravings for danish pastries, florentines and blueberry house cakes might kill me.

Plugging what I know I'll be eating into Nutrition Data comes up with 2195 calories a day, and from Free Dieting's calorie calculator I know I need 2630 calories a day (based on daily exercise plus physical job), so once the random snacking is added in, I should be getting an adequate calorie intake.

My carbs:fat:protein ratio is 30:40:30. There's some pretty varied opinion out there about what these ratios should be, from 60:30:10 from the USDA guidelines, to 40:30:30 from the Zone diet, so I really don't know what to make of this one.

The food plan has an estimated glycemic load of 72, below the recommended maximum of 100, and an inflammation factor of 372, well above the recommended minimum of 50. It's a little low on the various B vitamins, but I take a supplement for that fairly regularly anyway. So overall, I'm fairly happy with the plan.

But I'd really appreciate if anyone with some more knowledge and experience of sports nutrition has some pointers for me.

SCD snacks

I've been experimenting with some new snack foods, incorporating dried fruit and nuts, recently, and it has got me thinking about sugar and what I've learned in starting the diet again. I think part of the where I went wrong on the first attempt at the diet was over-consumption of legal but advanced foods, and also fruit more generally. While many fruits aren't listed as advanced, the sugar content is high, which promotes inflammation.

This time through, I've spent more time thinking about snacking and rationing my intake of fruit and nuts. Snacks seem to be the hardest part of the diet for me - breakfast, lunch and dinner are meat and veg, lots of different combinations, which isn't that different to what I used to do. I was never big on sandwiches, and mostly took leftover dinner to work for lunch. But snacks... I would usually bake a cake or biscuits on the weekend to last the week, take a couple of pieces of fruit, occasionally a fun size chocolate bar or a packet of chips.

I carried this pattern into the SCD with me - basically replacing the cake/biscuits and the chocolate bar/chips with SCD legal baked goods, and the fruit stayed too. I also got into the habit of taking a 250ml container of nuts and dried fruit to work to snack on over a couple of days, but it would only ever last a day. So 4-5 fairly high sugar snacks, and 2-3 with a fair bit of fiber etc from the nuts.

So I thought I'd write a post on what I've done differently this time through. (I started this a fair while ago, being quite organised and going through week by week. Then I forgot about it, so I've just added a random bunch of subsequent things since then. And all the recipes are right down the bottom).

Week 1: intro diet - not much to say here, given the limited range of foods. Boiled egg, jelly, and yoghurt (I decided to do dairy from day 3 because it had never given me problems before and given all the prednisone I've been on, I'm a bit paranoid about calcium intake and bone density).

Week 2: as for week 1 (but I couldn't stomach jelly anymore) with the addition of half a mashed ripe banana or some apple sauce with the yoghurt.

Week 3 saw the addition of avocados with macadamia nut oil dressing and small pieces of matured cheddar cheese.

In week 4, I added some sultanas to my apple sauce when cooking it, and stopped pureeing the apples. So sick of eating mush! I also added some cooked strawberries, and also started eating the occasional dried apricot with almond butter.

I got a bit more adventurous with the dried fruit and nuts in week 5 and made black cake (see earlier post for recipe and explanation of the name), and also started playing with energy bars.

It all started with this page, which give a great pictoral guide to the textures you are after at the various stages, and the ratio of fruit and nuts you want. I remembered back in my wheat and sugar days these lovely date and orange wontons, deep fried and dusted with lots of icing sugar, and decided to try to capture that flavour in bar sugar free form. That, and I'd just bought some orange oil I wanted to try out.

What I came up with was so good I've made it about 4 times since then. I used fresh dates, but have been wondering if I could get the same effect with dried dates - much cheaper.

That said, I did some number crunching and even my most expensive creation (cranberry and pistachio) only works out at $1 for a 45g bar.

I've put some of the combinations I've come up with - the good ones - at the bottom on this post.

Another thing I like to snack on is veggie sticks with labna (yoghurt cheese - see below), or just dunked in the macadamia dressing.

And cakes. Cakes are good too. I particularly like this one from Naomi at milk for the morning cake - I've done it a couple of times, one with pear and raspberry, and once with pear and mulberry - cherries never lst long enough in my house to make it into a cake!

If you have any SCD snacks you'd like to share, please add them as comments.

(I think it is a sign of how well I'm feeling that I had to check my diary to see how many days since restarting SCD... 83 days and counting)

Macadamia nut oil dressing

½ cup macadamia oil

1 tbsp honey

1 tsp Dijon mustard

½ tsp grated orange rind (don't add this in early on in the diet)

1 tbsp lemon juice

2 tbsp apple cider vinegar

dash of cayenne pepper

dash of salt
Energy bars
follow the method here for the following combinations:

Christmas pudding:

1/8 cup raisins
1/8 cup currants

1/4 cup sultanas

1/8 tsp spice blend (cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, cloves 45:45:5:5)

Date, orange and walnut:
1/4 cup chopped dates
1/4 cup sultanas
1/3 cup whole walnuts
A drop of orange oil


Cranberry and pistachio:
1/4 cup chopped dates
1/4 cup cranberries
1/6 cup walnuts
1/6 cup pistachios
1/4 tsp cinnamon, and a splash of rose water

Labna (yoghurt cheese)
1.5L SCD yoghurt
a few cloves of garlic (or a few more, to taste)
salt and pepper
chopped fresh herbs (or dried)
good quality olive oil

Either crush your garlic raw, or roast it and mash it, depending on whether you like the tang of raw garlic. Or leave it out if you aren't a fan of garlic at all. Add the garlic and salt and pepper to your yoghurt and drip it for around 8 hours. You want it to be really thick because the next step is to take spoonfuls of it and shape them into little balls and roll them in the fresh herbs.

A combination of oregano, rosemary and parsley is really good, but you can do any combination you want, or have spare.

Place the balls into a jar and fill with olive oil. Having done it with cheap olive oil a few times, I can verify that the oil makes a big difference.

As well as a great dip, this makes a lovely spread. I used to eat it on crispy white toast with these lovely sweet chillies (marinated in massive amounts of sugar I'm sure, and stored in sugar syrup). When I have some chillies again, I'm going to have a go at making something similar with honey...

Perfect evening out

It's been a while since I've posted, not for any particular reason, just getting caught up in the rush that is pre-Christmas shopping and socialising. But I had to find time to post about dinner on Ben’s birthday. It was his 30th last Friday. 

After banana and orange hotcakes for breakfast and present opening, we drove to Sydney and met up with Taylor (Ben's sister) and Dave (her fiancée) who live in Canada. The Sydney trip has been planned for a while. I'd booked tickets to see the Australian Ballet perform the Nutcracker early in the year but meeting Taylor and Dave was a pleasantly unexpected late edition, as was getting a table at Tetsuya’s. I tried to book for the 4 of us about 8 weeks earlier, with no success; but about a week ago, got a call offering us a table.

For those of you outside the southern hemisphere, Tetsuya’s is one of the most famous and arguably the best restaurant in Australia. They serve a 9-10 course degustation set menu, which I had thought would be a problem being on SCD, but the chef's were wonderfully accommodating. I'd expected never to eat dessert at a restaurant again, but I got to eat all three courses of dessert! Yum!

The food was amazing. I wish we'd had a camera to take photos of every dish. The presentation in itself was very special too, so I'm a bit sad not to have captured it more exactly than with my imperfect memory. Also, it got a little blurry in the middle and I can't exactly remember what I ate. I'm blaming it on the many dishes and the long day, but the wines may have had a little something to do with it! Fortunately Ben and I decided to share the set wines - because neither of us would have been able to walk if we'd had one each.

The first course was a chilled cucumber soup, bright green and served in a martini glass. It was slightly vinegary and served with 6 individual drops of unidentified oil (it tasted slightly nutty, possibly walnut) on top. The others had a small dollop of sheep's milk ice cream on top.

Next, everyone other than me had kingfish sashimi with soy sauce, and a glass of chilled sake. It was served on a very rustic looking glazed stoneware plate. I had a cherry tomato salad, with the earliest tomatoes from Tetsuya’s garden. It was swimming in a delightfully fresh salad dressing, garnished with pretty little flowers, including a cucumber from the garden.

The last entree was the most intriguing of the evening. Taylor and I were served a 'carpaccio' but told that it was not meat. It was garnished with some small green leaves and lots of little flowers, and we were told we had to guess what it was. It was reddish pink, rather chewy and slightly difficult to cut through. It also had a bit of crunch to it, like apple sliced very thinly. We sat and ate it thoughtfully in tiny little bites, and jealously shared a small amount each with Ben and Dave (they were eating scampi tails in an avocado soup topped with caviar). We ended up guessing tomato or capsicum with much trepidation; I didn't really think it was either, but could think of anything else it might be either. The waiter gave us a hint that it was a fruit, and which point Dave came out with ‘watermelon’, which turned out to be correct. It is skinned; frozen; shaved; smoked; and dehydrated. I wished that I had a bite left to be able to taste it again knowing what it was, but it was not to be. Maybe next time…my 30th in a bit over a year... (hint hint)

I lost track of the wines well before I lost track of the food, but I recall drinking something cold and white and fruity with this.

I recall that there were two more fish dishes to start the mains, though I’m not sure of the order in which they arrived. We all had something with a crisply fried skin, served with a little blob of something like homemade mayonnaise, which was just lovely. I had a piece of yellowtail kingfish, much softer and more delicate, while the others ate Tetsuya’s signature dish: confit of ocean trout.

Next was a slice of lightly cooked duck with a baby leek curled in the bottom of the bowl, which was served with a glass of Pinot Noir (of course).

The mains came to an end with a nice strong glass of Shiraz with crispy pigs tail, something lobster-like the name of which I didn't catch, and prosciutto. It was pleasingly salty, which matched the rich Shiraz quite nicely.

Dessert started with a pallet-cleansing blood orange and black pepper sorbet for the others and stevia granita for me, served in a double shot glass. It was served with a stevia leaf, of which we all ate a piece: very sweet and slightly herby tasting. It also came with various different berry concoctions. Mine was berries with raspberry puree, I think the others had jelly and/or ice cream with theirs (by this time the wine was really kicking in, and I have no idea what they had next). We had two different dessert wines, which I smelled at greedily, and allowed a little drop to touch my lips.

The second dessert course (multiple dessert courses is just a wonderful idea) was yellow peaches, with zabaglione and ameretti. The combination was lovely, the peaches were a little tart and slightly crisp, the zabaglione was sweet and the ameretti was pleasantly crunchy.

And finally, I had an almond pudding, extruded into a long thin oblong swirled across my plate, with fresh figs and honey meringue, which seemed to have been blow torched into a sweet crispness on top. Ben was brought out something quite chocolaty-looking, with a little candle on top, which was a lovely touch. With this, we all had decaf short blacks, served in cute little glazed terracotta cups, deliciously fragrant and perfect with the sweet meringue.

We wandered back to the hotel, pleasantly full and just a little drunk, bringing Ben’s 30^th birthday to a perfect close.