Secret seven: The Bulb’s top food travel picks

Jun 14, 2013

Last week, Sarah shared her memories of a time spent in an idyllic Italian village and the local cuisine that inspired a favourite dish. Judging by the response from readers to this post, food and travelling – that is, sampling amazing food while travelling – is something we all love.

So, this week we’ve rounded up some of our most-loved posts on just this topic to give you lots of ideas on both where to travel and what to cook at home to bring the world to your kitchen table. From passion fruit salsa in Mexico to smoked salmon in Iceland, to paella in Mallorca … Take a virtual trip and savour each bite – and don’t forget to share your favourite food travel (should we call it fravel?!) experiences with us!

The Bulb in Mexico: Oaxaca cooking class at Casa Crespo

At the Casa Crespo cooking class

The Bulb in Madrid: tapas at El Lateral

Pincho de solomillo con cebolla

The Bulb at Lake Como: discovering Italy’s best gelato

The Bulb in Stockholm: fika-ing in Mariatorget

Soaking up the cool at Stockholm’s Kaffe

 

The Bulb in Iceland: a smoked salmon adventure

Magical, snow-covered iceland

The Bulb in Turkey: eating for Istanbul

Megan explains the intricacies of pide

 

The Bulb in Mallorca: paella that keeps on giving 

Justino’s paella

 

Written by Laura

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WIN WIN WIN! ANOTHER SHAMELESS PLUG FOR THE BULB SURVEY

We have been blown away by the response to our survey – thank you so much to everyone who has responded so far. For the rest of you, it’s not too late to WIN WIN WIN (and help us with our plans for The Bulb along the way)!

To help us produce a new site that is beautiful, functional and of course, INSPIRING, we’ve put together a reader survey. It only takes three minutes to complete, but is already giving us valuable insight into where we’re going right (or slightly wrong). Please could you fill it out? In doing so you could win a copy of Rohan Anderson’s beautiful book, Whole Larder Love.

Go on! Three measly little minutes!

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TheBulb2013

Thanking you and lots of love,

Julia, Laura and Sarah

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Recipe of the month: Italian chestnut, pumpkin and chickpea soup

Jun 6, 2013

Don’t you just love thinking back to meals you’ve had while travelling? Those special times when the atmosphere was just right; the weather, just right. You may have wandered in to the restaurant by chance and, sitting down with a glass of wine, you feel that lovely unfolding sense of holiday contentment. It may not have been at a five-star restaurant with complicated offerings. It may have been simple fare, but there was something about the way it was prepared or the combination of ingredients that made it special. I have many happy memories of meals like that, which is why long after the tan has faded and the suitcase has been unpacked, I keep attempting to try to recreate the dishes I’ve experienced. The tastes and smells can be transportative.

There is one dish I’ve been trying to recreate since eating it in a little town called Soriano nel Cimino, an Italian village near the borders of Tuscany, Umbria and Lazio, in autumn 2001. Soriano’s streets were adorned in traditional decorations as it celebrated the annual Sagra delle Castagne festival, giving this pretty little village on a hill a 15th-century feel. The festival pays homage to the chestnut and events in history over ten days every autumn. The dish I experienced was a rich soup of chestnuts and chickpeas, which I’ve scoured cookbooks, online sources and my own memory to bring back to life. This is the tried and tested version I’ve arrived at. It takes me back to that beautiful medieval festival, roasting chestnuts over an outdoor fire …

Soriano nel Cimino, Italy

CHESTNUT, PUMPKIN AND CHICKPEA SOUP

The beautiful thing about this recipe is that the quantities of ingredients are not too important. Mix and match ingredients depending on what you have, and just go with the flow to create it to your liking.

INGREDIENTS

1 x small pumpkin (I used butternut squash)
1-2 cups chestnuts (score and roast your own like I did or buy pre-cooked and shelled)
2 onions
250g tinned chickpeas
1 tablespoon olive oil, plus extra for roasting and serving
2 stalks of celery
1/3 bulb of fennel (optional)
2 cloves of garlic
200 grams passata or canned tomatoes or a couple of tbspns tomato paste
1 bay leaf
1/4 cup of fresh herbs (I used rosemary, sage and parsley)
1.5 litres chicken or vegetable stock (approx.)

METHOD

1. Pre-heat oven to 200 degrees. If roasting your own chestnuts, score and roast them for 20 – 25 minutes. Once cooled, peel and set aside. (This process takes longer than you might think. It is much easier to buy prepared chestnuts but the experience and the results are quite different.)

2. Peel and chop pumpkin into 2 inch pieces, mix with a little olive oil and roast for 20-30 minutes until cooked but still firm.

3. Meanwhile dice onions, fennel and celery and finely chop the garlic and herbs. In a large saucepan heat oil, then add onion, garlic and celery and sauté for about 3 minutes. Then add chicken stock, chickpeas, passata or tomatoes and the bay leaf. Bring to boil. Once boiled, add fresh herbs, pumpkin and chestnuts and cook for anywhere from 10 minutes up to a few hours. It will be edible in 10 minutes but this soup – like many Italian things – improves over time.

4. There are a number of ways to finish this soup. I like to purée about a third of it and mix that back in with the chunky stuff. It also thickens up as the pumpkin breaks down so you may not want to purée any. It scan also be completely puréed if you prefer that texture. Add salt and pepper to taste.

5. To serve, it can be topped with parmesan cheese, olive oil, parsley or other herbs. And some crusty bread is a perfect companion.

Want to act on this inspiration?

Read: “My Umbrian Kitchen” – Umbrian-Australian chef and advocate of eating and living by the seasons, Patrizia Simone shares the traditions, rituals and family recipes from her childhood in rural Umbria.

Learn: Hire an Italian chef to teach you and some friends their own family recipes or something of your choice.

Host: Celebrate the best of seasonal produce and the joys of cooking for friends by having your friends or family over for a dinner party or long lunch.

Tell us: About a memorable meal you had in a different place. What made it special? And do you have the recipe? Do share!

(Written by Sarah)

* Image courtesy of Trip Advisor

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SHAMELESS PLUG: THE BULB SURVEY

We know we keep banging on about the plans we’re making for The Bulb, but really, nothing we do means anything unless we know we’re giving our readers what they – you – want.

To help us produce a site that is beautiful, functional and of course, INSPIRING, we’ve put together a reader survey. It only takes three minutes to complete, but is already giving us valuable insight into where we’re going right (or slightly wrong). Please could you fill it out? In doing so you could win a copy of Rohan Anderson’s beautiful book, Whole Larder Love.

Go on! Three measly little minutes!

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TheBulb2013

Thanking you and lots of love,

Julia, Laura and Sarah

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Feeling bookish? Our best-read book posts and literature festival picks

May 22, 2013

Our literary hearts are aflutter on both sides of the Equator. In Australia there has been a flurry of good stuff coming out of the Sydney Writer’s Festival and this coming weekend in Melbourne the Williamstown Literary Festival kicks off.

At the same time, surely the world’s longest-running of its kind, the London Literature Festival, has started. We can go and see some of our writing heroes speak – from the brilliant, bolshy Catherine Deveny and Julia’s talented ex-colleague James Button at Williamstown, to The Gentle Author of Spitalfields Life fame or Orange Prize winner Barbara Kingsolver  in London.

Alternatively you might like to enhance your own writing skills with masterclasses on how to become a journalist or songwriter at Williamstown, or a Poetry Butcher or Creative Writing School session in London.

Before you head off, we thought we’d pull together our best-read posts on books – to get you in the mood for some festival fun …

The Bulb’s top book posts:

How Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way changed my life

David Mitchell’s Linguistic Mastery in Cloud Atlas

Enlivening history: E.H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World

Bob Carr, Australia’s best-read man

Jolts of literary inspiration from Jeffrey Euganides’ Middlesex

We need some new books to read! What are you or your book club reading at the moment?

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The Bulb debuts on Head Butler with a tribute to Paul Kelly

May 22, 2013

I may be happily married, but I can openly admit to having had an intellectual crush on Jesse Kornbluth, creator and curator at Head Butler, for some time. The man has excellent taste and knows music, the arts, books and movies like few others I’ve come across; his brain is like a cultural encyclopedia. Jesse, who lives in New York, has written and edited for everyone from The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and The New York Times, as well as being clever enough to write sensible, substantial books on business, sport and art.

So when the opportunity arose to write a guest post for Head Butler I grabbed it with both hands and offered the best I had: Paul Kelly. What a thrill to discover that not only had Jesse never heard of Kelly (who is currently midway through a tour of the US and Europe), when he opened the first YouTube link I sent him – “They Thought I was Asleep” – he immediately burst into tears. Boom. Here’s hoping that Head Butler’s readers, and you, react the same way to my tribute to my favourite Australian singer.

Read the post on Head Butler here.

(Written by Julia)

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The Woman in White and novels that stand the test of time

May 15, 2013

There are exciting times ahead at The Bulb, with plans underway to relaunch it as a more focused and accessible online publication. So while we are busy brainstorming new designs and content ideas we will be cutting back our posts to once a week instead of two. This will ensure we have the time and energy to create while also doing the brainwork on a great, new publication!

We will of course keep you posted on our progress and would love to hear from you on how The Bulb can become even better. 

Anyway, on to today’s post.

Writing a novel that stands the test of time is a feat that many budding or seasoned scribes aspire to. While I admit to holding this long-term dream myself – very much as an aspiring novelist – at this stage I am content to be a reader of novels that have stood the test of time. A recent inspiration in this department has been The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins.

Penned in 1859, The Woman in White weaves intrigue, love, tragedy, cunning, blackmail, good-hearted heroes and treacherous villains into an epistolary novel set in Victorian England. It begins with the appointment of young drawing master Walter Hartright as tutor to two sisters in Cumberland, and his chance encounter with a mysterious woman in white. These two events open the reader to a plot that twists to unexpected places and events.

What captured me most about The Woman in White, and why I think it has stood the test of time, are the characters. Despite the huge social, political and religious differences between today’s world and that of Victorian England, most of Collins’ characters live on the page. They are multi-dimensional and surprising.

While the romantic leads Walter Hartright and Laura Fairlie are suitably virtuous and therefore a bit bland, it is Laura’s determined but “ugly” half-sister Marian Halcombe and her nemesis, the chilling genius Count Fosco, who light up the page. Both start on the sidelines of the novel but develop wonderfully as characters in their own right and as rivals in a game of intellectual endurance and wit.

Collins’ introduction of Marian in itself is memorable; a description recorded in the diary of Walter Hartright.

“She left the window—and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps—and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer—and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly!”

What Marian lacks in beauty she makes up for in intelligence, pragmatism, resilience, adventurous spirit and even a touch of early feminism. (Don’t we all want a few of those characteristics?) While Laura faints at her husband’s harsh and drunken behaviour and becomes ill, Marian creeps out on to a veranda at midnight in the torrential rain wearing nothing but her nightgown to eavesdrop on the conversation of the two men who hold the fate of her beloved half-sister in their hands.

Just as I cheered and hooted for Marian, I jeered, booed and I think even at one point gave the evil eye to Count Fosco, one of the creepiest villains I’ve ever read. His evil lies in the way he destroys lives with charm and perfect planning.

Despite the brilliance of the characters, readers do have to remember that the prose is typically heavy, but also richly, Victorian. The novel was originally written in about 40 instalments, each with its own mini cliff-hanger, so be prepared for an abundance of sometimes unnecessary suspense.

The Woman in White was a sensation when it was first published in Charles Dickens’s weekly magazine All Year Round in 1860. It is considered to be among the first mystery novels and the first “sensation novel” – in which dramatic events were set in familiar or domestic settings. Despite disliking the “ponderosity” of the work, contemporary novelist Henry James acknowledged that the book had “introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors”. It’s inspired many stage and screen adaptations and even an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.

I read The Woman in White on a 24-hour plane journey after buying it the airport by chance when getting rid of loose change. While that was less than a year ago, the characters are luring me to another read shortly because they, like the novel, stand the test of time.

Which books, and characters, have stayed with you?

(Written by Laura)

*Images from Lulu’s Bookshelf, A Book Review for You, andrewlloydwebber.com

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