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Great title - Good food on bad plates

"Fish and chips always tastes better when eaten out of a newspaper; Pad Thai seems so much more authentic in a polystyrene tray bought from a street vendor." Miranda and Ashley/Good Food on Bad Plates


Yes it's another website that pops up now and then but not all the time. The photograph is from a Mother's Day dinner at Colin Fassnidge's house - a top Australian chef for those of you not in the know. His comment on the picture which appeared on his Facebook page is - "Mother’s Day dinner!

The mismatch of plates sums up our family !!!!!! But great food !!" Lots of exclamation marks and lots of meat - but then I think he is famous for his meat. This picture is here because I had to look for a picture as the website itself has a header picture of good food, but no plates - or even polystyrene trays. No - this (below) is their Home Page look:

But I completely digress - just looking for a suitable picture to match the tantalising title of this website. It's the title that got it on to my list after all, although it actually deserves a more than a perfunctory look. I really can't remember how I came across it now.


However, let me digress a tiny bit more to explain why I find myself visiting this website today, rather than any other day. In the Smitten Kitchen newsletter this week there was a link to an article in Eater, about how the writer (Jaya Saxena) had recreated one of Martha Stewart's 1980's party menus at home and had used a whole lot of mismatched stuff to serve it on:


"I used what I already had: a piece of fabric my grandparents got on their honeymoon in Mexico that I always use as a tablecloth, platters my partner and I received as wedding gifts, a midcentury modern coffee percolator repurposed as a vase. Nothing new, but never before in this arrangement, never with so many small, delightful offerings overflowing on my table like jewels from a treasure chest."


Sort of bad plates again - although more likely mismatched, which is a bit of a fashion trend as shown below - I doubt these plates could be called ordinary however. A topic to pursue perhaps.

So a kind of coincidence that reminded me of this, the next website on my list and coincidences should be paid attention to.


Where was I? A website with an interesting name. So who are the authors of this website?


"Known collectively as ‘Mash’, we are Miranda and Ashley: two food-obsessed, young(ish) people with an unnecessarily large collection of cookery books, constantly dreaming of a bigger kitchen in our South London home."



She was an Australian teacher, and he an English engineer when their About page was written and they may well still be so, but there are two young children now and in a more recent picture of Ashley he had greyish hair. Their archives go back to 2014, so the website is ten years old, and their introduction implies that there was a previous website. They also talk of a house in South London, but their latest post - written in October, this year says:


"Now we’re in a new kitchen, in a new house, in a new country. We’re still figuring out where everything goes and where we need to stand to take a photo that doesn’t cast a shadow (basically nowhere… plus now we eat most of our meals outside on the deck where the lighting is really terrible)." 


So did they emigrate to Australia? It's obviously warmer where they are now. I cannot tell from flicking through recent posts. They don't talk about 'decks' in England.


Enough of who they are. What do they do on or for the website? Well this is more interesting and has similarities to some of my own writer's block get arounds except that they are much more determined and more consistent than I:


"Having already set ourselves the challenge of using each of our 114 (more now!) cookery books at least once in the space of a year (and completed it successfully), we are now combining our love of food with our love of travel and cooking our way around the world in the style of the Blockbuster board: once we’ve cooked a traditional dish from one country, our next one must be from a bordering country, until we end up back where we started."


Which rather puts me to shame, although it shows that we are all attracted to the notion of gamification in the kitchen - setting oneself challenges in order to make cooking dinner (and writing blogs) more interesting. The difference between them and I is that they follow through on their mission by cooking something, and I do not - well mostly I do not.


I do not know whether they recorded their cookbook challenge, because their very first post on this Wordpress website is the first on their journey around the world. But before I go there I will say a few words about the cookbook challenge.


My cookbook challenge takes two or three forms. The first that I devised was the lucky dip thing whereby a book is chosen at random from the shelves and a page within also chosen at random, in the hope that it will be inspiration for a post. These days I ask David to choose the book because I realised I sort of knew what book I was choosing - so hardly random. I still choose the page however and I think I have only rejected the choice once or twice. However, I rarely cook the dish on the page. Maybe I should make myself do it, although then again it could be something repulsive or something David won't eat. I will give it a go next time - Charmaine Solomon's Encyclopedia of Asian Food and two pages on lentils. Lentil and vegetable soup perhaps.


The second, which came later was the First recipe thing whereby I am working my way methodically through my cookbook collection and trying to write something around the first recipe in the book. Again I do not often cook the recipe, and it can sometimes be a bit repetitive as most cookbooks - especially the older ones always begin with stock and soup, or starters. Lastly, whenever I aquire a new cookbook I try to sort of review it. Sometimes this does indeed lead to me cooking something, sometimes not. And you would have to wonder whether the book is worth keeping if I cannot find anything worth cooking within. Next first recipe - well the last of Nigel's Essentials, which in this case is marinades and a miso marinade - yes I could happily do that.


But back to Mash and their journey round the world. The list of countries they have 'visited' is huge. Much longer than mine, and I am currently a bit stalled because of being somewhat daunted by the prospect of America - huge country, huge number of cuisines, both regional and ethnic. They chose for their American selection Meatloaf and potato salad, which they said: "tasted overwhelmingly like a much-improved version of a McDonald’s cheeseburger."


For Australia, where they married, they chose Spinach and feta damper because although:


"obviously, neither spinach nor feta was a traditional ingredient, but the two seem to be a ubiquitous combination across Australia in pastries and bread products, and they certainly liven up the plain bread."


And there I was thinking spinach and feta was ubiquitous everywhere. And so reassuring to see that their photographs are just as accomplished as mine - which is not very, but also not really, really terrible.


I felt bad as I wrote about not cooking the recipes I found in my lucky dips, but I feel even worse about not cooking my 'round the world' dishes. They even cook an entire meal rather than just one dish. Their latest effort was Morocco - Moroccan bread, Marrakchi bean tagine, Berber lentils and mint tea:



Of which they said:


"We’ve come from a big gas cooktop to a tiny electric one. The heat is impossible to tweak (it is very much all or nothing) and the surface is so small that you can barely fit two pans on it, despite it having four rings. It frustrates us daily.


Yet… We are back to the blog. Back to the blind optimism and total chaos of following no less than four different recipes whilst wrangling two kids. Back to leaving out the chilli for the sake of someone who doesn’t even eat it (for the record, they both ate the bread, both hated the tea, Little refused to touch the beans and lentils but Big did actually eat them both). Back to finding new dishes that we wouldn’t otherwise have tried (we were impressed with the ease and effectiveness of the bread, enjoyed both the beans and the lentils and loved the nostalgia of the tea whilst trying not to think about how much sugar was in it). Back to something sort of resembling normality.


In a funny sort of way, this Moroccan food made this house feel a bit more like home."


It's an endearing website - and I almost forgot the link - here it is. I admire hugely their dedication to the task in hand - actually cooking something from every country in the world - and yes that includes every little island in the Caribbean for example - whilst also writing friendly little pieces about their world, their occasional travels and whether the food was good or not - for it was not universally good.


I suspect it's one of those hidden corners of the web and a site that many fewer than millions visit and yet they have built something they should be proud of. Where to next? They seem to have missed Tunisia somehow, but have done everything else in Africa I think. Over the Mediterranean to Spain perhaps. That and many other European countries do not seem to be on their list.


Now I should tackle America. And I should also vow to actually make something from the country I'm visiting. I have been a coward so far. Maybe I should go back to them all and cook something I talked about. A batter covered mars bar from Scotland? I think not.


POSTSCRIPTS


At the end of my piece on croissants yesterday I meant to include this photograph of a croissant from Lune - Melbourne's much lauded purveyor of croissants. So lauded that you would think that nobody else can make a croissant like them. Who knows? The food critics don't visit little patisseries out in the outer suburbs. This one is from the CBD - but it does look beautiful. It will cost you $7.10. Apparently it takes 3 days to make. In France they generally cost 1 euro.


YEARS GONE BY

November 14

2022 - Weeding

2021 - Panko

2017 - Nothing

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