new place to buy wine

I am very excited about the new Dan Murphy's which opened in QV today. It means that I no longer have to travel far to get wine or pay ridiculous prices at Safeway Liquor. On the way home from coffee, reading, writing and also being distracted by arguing about the state of the world at Mr. Tulk with my partner we stopped to check it out. I couldn't leave without a bottle of Elderton Shiraz to drink before going out tonight.

my partner made an excellent cypriot-style leg of lamb

The meal began with a rocket, parsley, cherry tomato and fried halloumi salad dressed and seasoned with olive oil, lemon, salt and pepper.

I wasn't allowed to read the recipe but I understand that it comes from one of my cookbooks called "Cooking from Cyprus" by Nearchos Nicolaou. The lamb was undercooked according to the recipe and how I remember meat being cooked back home but then again I had to wait through most of my youth before I lived abroad and got the opportunity to try how much better meats like lamb taste when they aren't overcooked. I was apprehensive about the wine, an unfinished bottle of Earth's Portrait, 2006 Chardonnay from the other night, but it worked well for me.

fast-forward five years to the present

I've obviously skipped over so much to get here but I was anxious to get to the present. This was tonight's meal. In the first picture you can see leeks, onions and garlic cooking gently with butter and olive oil.

The final result seen here is a heavily blended potato and leek soup with smoked salmon, poached egg and garnished with parsley.

I got the recipe from Philip Johnson's book 'Classic Ecco' and I was a bit nervous about the combination at first but it was exceptionally good with the Tasmanian salmon I used because its flavour wasn't too over-powering.

My partner chose to have it without the salmon and egg. She went with the parsley though and I thought it was beautiful how the parsley looked like a butterfly.

The freshly cracked pepper added the necessary, fragrant dusting to make for a meal that won't be forgotten on what was a special day for us.

bugs, broccolini and cucumber salad

Morton Bay Bugs are my partner's favourite crustacean. Here they're pre-cooked and then marinated briefly in a lime, olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper mixture then grilled on super high to get those full charred smells running throughout the meat. The broccolini was steamed and then dripped with melted butter. The cucumber salad was dressed with the remainder of the marinade.

my memory fails me but I can still smell the meal

I've actually forgotten exactly what this is but I'm going to try describing it anyway. I know that I cooked the potatoes in some kind of broth and then drizzled them with a saffron sauce. The asparagus was grilled with butter, salt and pepper on very high heat so that its surface could be crunchy, the outer layer soft and the core still a bit fresh tasting. The fish if I'm not mistaken is barramundi and there's some kind of salsa on top.

bacon, oh beautiful bacon

Speaks for itself

speaking of olive oil

I couldn't resist, I just had to share this. It was a label that came along with Jingilli olive oil, which by the way is pretty good.

radicchio, walnuts and blue cheese

Also at my parents place, I remember this day we found really fresh radicchio and I decided to make this salad. The title says it all, the only thing I needed to add for dressing was a little bit of olive oil.

I grew up in Cyprus and at Easter time we eat flaounes. This is a picture taken about a year after I arrived in Melbourne. This is at my parents place and as you can see the focus of this picture is the flaounes.

steak and bacon-wrapped scallops

I begin way back in 2002 when I was living in Washington Heights, NYC. I was teaching in Manhattan at the time and if I'm not mistaken this was shortly before I left the States for good. In this sequence you'll see a very simple but always successful combination of bacon-wrapped scallops and steak.

let the wanting begin

I'm not going to waste too much time here embellishing my writing. This blog has been a long time coming and my first few posts are going to be catching up for years of absence. I want to try to do the following things here:

• represent worthwhile moments in my own cooking
• capture other eating moments that should be shared
• find out what it might mean to represent smell

I have named the blog 'olfactory desire' because I have always been fascinated by how we tend to rank smell so low on the human hierarchy of senses. The desire will hopefully become obvious through the posts themselves. I close here by saying that I'm wishfully thinking right now that I will actually find the time to make this worthwhile. I know that more likely it will be an abridged version of what I am initially hoping for but at least it will be something.