Springing Into Action

It’s official, spring has begun! And today felt exactly what you imagine a perfect spring day should be. The morning started off with a little rain, but then made way for the sun to peer through the clouds and dissipate all the dreariness.

Even though the weather had already bade winter farewell a whole week ago by offering Sydneysiders a premature glimpse of what was to come with unusually temperate conditions, the weekend was the ideal time to soak it up. According to the weather bureau our temperatures have been about 10° above average the past couple of weeks, which apparently is unprecedented. I don’t know if global warming has anything to do with it, but these abnormal weather conditions do have slight advantages, even when they are a little short-sighted.

How, you might ask, did we spend such a genial spring day?

Well firstly we made a trek to the Prymont Grower’s Market, which occurs on the first Saturday of every month in Sydney. It’s a real crowd puller and pleaser, and even though I had my camera at the ready to take photos, the rain dampened my eagerness to whip out the lens and take some shots. Much of the trading did stop for a few minutes with many punters ducking for cover under one of the many umbrellas in the park grounds. But this didn’t stop us for every long.

I know this because after about 45 minutes of shopping, my mother and I had pretty much no cash left in our wallets, we knew we had spent up, big. Most of the wares were for a hamper we were making for my dad, for tomorrow- Father’s Day- manly foodie presents, like venison sausages, lamb patties and mountain muesli. We also indulged our sweet tooth with a selection of goodies from Manna From Heaven, a must-stop at these markets.

I also ended up going home with a 15kg bucket of honey from my friends at the Harden Honey (also known as Australian Honey Cellars) stand- a generous gift in exchange for taking some photographs for their website. Now, this proved to be a quite an aerobic exercise lugging all our stuff, including the 15kg bucket of honey back to car. What would have typically been a pleasant 5 minute stroll became an arduous hike of Tour de France proportions. But we made it back and I must say a big thank you to De and Kye, for organising the honey.

I usually stop by and gawk at the beautiful cheeses at the Formagi Ocello stall but I never like to endure the long wait to actually buy, because it’s a brutal wait, especially if you aren’t tenacious enough to assert your place in the “queue”. But after finally getting to buy some Gorgonzola last visit, I decided to buy some more Gorgonzola- this time the dolce, and also a 450g block of Taleggio- can’t wait to get stuck into that.

Gorgonzola Piccante (left) and Dolce (right)
The piccante is harder and has a stronger flavour while the dolce is sweeter and is soft inside.

I only bought a small sliver of Gorgonzola as I had some left over from last time and I wanted to have enough cash left to buy a bigger chunk of Taleggio, something I’ve only had once before. Who knew cheese could be expensive? That said, you probably already know what we ended up making with the gorgonzola and the leftover vegetables in our fridge- pizzas for lunch!

Nothing beats homemade pizza on a warm, sunny afternoon. After we had worked up such an appetite hauling our wares, it was only high time to enjoy ourselves a little bit of carb-filled action. The pizzas mostly came from a little bit of improvised luck and the ingredients were what we already had on hand, so the pizzas are quite rustic and unadorned. But I don’t like my pizzas hampered down with too many flavours anyway, so it was wonderful.

I don’t exactly have a recipe for the pizza dough as my method this time was, well, let’s just say it wasn't scientific. It was basically a mixture of “00” flour, yeast, water, salt, sugar and olive oil, and it was more fortuity that made it work than anything else. So here are some examples of pizza dough recipes that I think would be great to try out:

Basic Pizza Dough from The Silver Spoon
Heidi’s Best Pizza Dough Ever
Pizza Margherita from cuisine.com.au

We made two different pizzas, both with mushrooms, as we had a surfeit in the pantry- one was a mixed mushroom- (oyster, shitake, porcini), tomato and gorgonzola pizza (pictured first) and the other was a mixed mushroom, anchovy, garlic and parmesan (pictured below).

It’s recommended that you buy a pizza stone to bake your pizzas on in the oven. They make the under crusts of your pizzas crusty instead of soggy which makes them taste a feel a lot closer to the kind of pizza you would get from a restaurant that is typically wood-fired. And the great thing is that they only cost about $20. Well worth it for a perfect crust on your pizza.