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Spice Journey

24/3/2016

Shane Delia: Murdoch Books $49.99

THREE kitchen ingredients say “Easter” in Australian like no other: seafood, lamb and chocolate.
This year a plethora of fresh takes on that trio is offered in Spice Journey, the printed accompaniment to Shane Delia’s SBS TV series of the same name. In this beautifully illustrated book Melbourne restaurateur Delia documents his travels through the regions whose people played crucial roles in the creation of Easter as we know it today.
Delia starts his exploration in Malta, his parents’ country and an island with a culinary style coloured in the centuries immediately before Jesus’ time by its Phoenician heritage.
Heading east, he visits Lebanon (the ancestral home of his wife Maha’s family), Turkey and Iran. At the other end of the Mediterranean Delia finishes with tours through Morocco and Andalusian Spain.
All six cultures contribute dishes to Spice Journey, some of the most inventive of which have seafood, lamb or chocolate as their hero.
On the seafood front there’s cured salmon with beetroot mayonnaise, pumpkin puree and fennel vinaigrette; cornbread-and-fennel-seed-crusted sardines; and scallop-filled zucchini flowers with smoked-eel dressing and orange and coriander crumb.
Lamb comes in an array of incarnations: as kofte with eggplant yoghurt and a black bread garnish; braised with saltbush and caramelised rockmelon; and slow-roasted with garlic and Lebanese seven-spice powder and served with berry and toasted pumpkin seed yoghurt and nigella-seed bread.
What better to these mains than hot chips sprinkled with flaked almonds, Aleppo pepper, coriander and sumac?
The desserts too combine the best of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean flavours: mastic pudding with chocolate soil, blackberry sorbet and rosemary pearls; chocolate and pistachio m’hencha (coiled pastry); and smoked chipotle and chocolate fondant with Pedro Ximenez sherry and almond milk icecream.
Thanks to Delia, adventurous Easter dining at home this year is well within reach.

The Expatriates

18/3/2016

Janice YK Lee: Little, Brown $29.99

IN THE claustrophobic city that is high-rise Hong Kong, expatriates’ lives inevitably intersect. The men do business with each other, and the women – the “trailing spouses”, almost uniformly once-successful standalone individuals with their own careers indefinitely on hold – gather in select little social groups to do lunch.
As inconceivable as it seems, this metropolis of more than seven million people is in reality more fishbowl than ocean for its contract-focused foreigners. Their paths collide in the supermarkets, in the restaurants and cafés, even at the long-weekend-getaway resorts; their children attend school together, and in their leisure time they mingle at the same welcome parties and, several years later, the same farewells.
It is against this backdrop of seeing, knowing and freely commenting one another’s most intimate movements that novelist Janice YK Lee introduces three very different American women who share a vast acreage of common ground.
Hilary – an independently wealthy Californian – and David have been married more or less contentedly for 10 years but so far have not succeeded in adding a baby to the mix. With every passing month, Hilary, now 38, feels the pressure escalate.
Former landscape architect Margaret, conversely, is a mother of three. With her husband, Clarke, she is raising two of the children, the whereabouts of the third quickly establishing itself as the central theme that shapes this plot.
At 26, Mercy is the youngest of the trio, a Korean-American Ivy League graduate from Queens, New York, who should by all estimations be cruising into adulthood on the back of one of the six-figure salaries with which Hong Kong is able to take its pick from the international talent pool.
For all three, however, life is complicated, challenging, almost unbearable at times. Trapped in the microcosm of the expatriate lifestyle, can Hilary, Margaret and Mercy turn their fortunes around?

Bendigo Art Gallery and Twentieth Century Fox present Marilyn Monroe

11/3/2016

Tansy Curtin: Bendigo Art Gallery $35.00

FOR decades to come Bendigonians will remember the time when history’s most famous blonde occupied their city – and the current Bendigo Art Gallery exhibition’s accompanying commemorative catalogue is an exceptional keepsake for reading now and then passing down to future generations.
Compiled by the event’s curator, Tansy Curtin, in collaboration with La Trobe University senior lecturer Dr Susan Gillett and gallery director Karen Quinlan, it comprises a thoughtful potted history of the famous actress-singer’s personal life and Hollywood career interspersed with images ranging from formal portraits and promotional posters to candid snapshots and on-set stills.
In her introduction Quinlan puts into context the gallery’s interest in this American icon: “In the global world in which we live, Marilyn belongs to everyone and no one.”
The core of the exhibition is clothing (both on-screen and private), makeup, jewellery and documents now owned by two US historian-collectors, Scott Fortner and Greg Schreiner, and Maite Mínguez Ricart in Spain. Although these artefacts themselves are not reproduced in this book, many of its photographs of Monroe show her wearing the garments, and a full list of the 100-plus items on display is provided.
Readers can be confident that this account of Monroe’s life – unlike some loose biographies of the celebrity – is reflective, balanced, thoroughly researched and, perhaps most importantly, entirely accurate.
It portrays Monroe as a capable, savvy businesswoman who took the lead in defining herself as the world’s most recognisable sex symbol but who despite her phenomenal international success did not amass personal wealth, preferring to share her earnings with the people around her. Her generosity and outer cheerfulness are contrasted with the insecurity and self-doubt that overshadowed her adult years.
Featuring full colour throughout, this catalogue is an elegant, coffee-table-style, softcover memento of arguably the greatest Monroe exhibition yet mounted anywhere in the world.

March 04th, 2016

4/3/2016

Ulla-Lena Lundberg: Allen & Unwin $22.99

LIFE is at once bizarrely complicated and unnervingly simple in the Örlands, a Swedish-speaking cluster on the outskirts of the Åland islands. Scattered midway between Stockholm and the Finnish mainland, the archipelago is almost exclusively conservative Lutheran, made up of families who have lived for generations in the same few fishing settlements.
World War II is still subsiding across northern Europe when newly graduated pastor Petter Kummel and his wife Mona arrive in the Örlands with their baby daughter Sanna. It is the Kummels’ first posting, and together they must forge their young marriage virtually alone, cut off from their neighbours by water and, in deepest midwinter, almost-constant darkness and expansive sea-ice.
Mona – confident, competent, pragmatic and grounded – is the ideal complement for naïve, impractical, other-worldly Petter, she as blunt and workmanlike as he is trusting and whimsical. When the parsonage’s cows must be milked or its paddocks cut for hay it is Mona who takes charge while her husband counsels parishioners and studies for his theological exam. United, though, they face the everyday minutiae of an isolated existence a full day’s sailing by mail-ship from the nearest real town.
The winner of Finland’s most prestigious literary award in 2012 and just released in English for the first time, Ice is the product of Åland author Ulla-Lena Lundberg, whose experiences living in the islands enrich this novel with an astonishing depth of authentic grassroots detail. In keeping with local tradition, Lundberg applies Swedish-language names to Finland’s two major cities, Helsinki (Helsingfors) and Turku (Åbo), with cultural descriptions that give a genuine insight into the bipolar culture of this tiny outpost.
The distinctively Scandinavian sensibilities that shape the storyline – at times heart-warming and in the next instant tragic – keep this intimate small-town tale unpredictable and engrossing right to the final page.

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Spice Journey

The Expatriates

Bendigo Art Gallery and Twentieth Century Fox present Marilyn Monroe

March 04th, 2016

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