My mother, Gretta Anna Teplitzky, was born in New Zealand in 1929. She had Spanish-Jewish heritage on her mother’s side, and she had cooking in her genes – her great-grandmother was the chief recipe tester for Queen Victoria.

Gretta Anna married my father, David Teplitzky, an engineer, in Christchurch in 1953, and in 1958 they moved to Sydney because Dad had won a scholarship to do his doctorate at Sydney University. Mum got a job as a stenographer in the city and pursued her growing passion for cooking by attending Cordon Bleu cooking classes. The girls in her office started to show a keen interest in her endeavours, and one morning she announced to my father from the bath that she was going to leave her job and open a cookery school in their flat in Rose Bay. 

She started teaching a few of her previous work colleagues around the kitchen table, and, gradually, it grew from there, until the numbers had reached well over one hundred. In 1960 she offered to hold cooking classes at Johnnie Walker’s Bistro in the city, which he agreed to only after sending a delegation to her home to see her in action. As Mum’s popularity continued to grow, she soon needed her own space. She found suitable premises at the 680 Club in Killara, where she set up The Gretta Anna Teplitzky School of Continental Cookery, and my parents went into partnership in her first and only restaurant, Gretta Anna Grande Cuisine, just down the road. She was to run her classes from there for the next couple of years, teaching eager women the art of the perfect dinner party. 

Soon my parents moved to a house designed by Harry Seidler in Wahroonga to set up home with my newborn older brother, Jonathan. I was to follow eighteen months later and my sister Anna seven years after that. When they asked Harry to draw up plans to add a wing, he refused, saying that the house was perfect as it was. Eventually he relented and provided plans for an addition which would later house Mum’s cooking school, when she moved the school to the family home.

GRETTA ANNA: This is a simple family recipe that goes back to my childhood. It is one of my mother’s favourites. The veal is cheap and it will feed a large family. The gristly pieces of veal bone are delicious to chew and the stuffing is very tasty. Ask the butcher to cut a deep pocket in the veal for you, which you can fill with the stuffing.

GRETTA ANNA:  Apple tarts are made all over France. They are one of the national dishes. This one is truly special. It is very much ‘à la Normande’, smelling and tasting as it does of calvados, that wonderful brandy with a delicious apple bouquet. All through Normandy one sees cows browsing in apple orchards. No wonder Normandy is also famous for its butter, cream, cheese and cider.

All of us need to be able to make high-quality pastry for dessert tarts. Here is another slightly different version. If pressed into a tart tin it is short, delicious and rich. If, however, it needs to be rolled, add as much plain flour and iced water as is required and, when the pastry is rolled thin and cooked, it will be crisp and delicious. This particular pastry recipe is for double the quantity, as it is so handy to have sweet tart pastry in the refrigerator or freezer to call on at a moment’s notice.

MARTIN:  This is, quite simply, the best apple tart you will ever eat! There is nothing else left to say.

MARTIN:  This is a fantastic dessert or celebration cake. I make it a lot as it has become the signature dish for my cookery school, Take 2 Eggs. It’s nowhere near as scary to make as you might think, and the response when you bring it to the table makes it all the more worthwhile.

When you’re making meringue, I always think it’s a good idea to add a pinch of salt and a drizzle of cider vinegar or lemon juice to the egg whites. The salt will help firm up the proteins, giving better peaks, while the vinegar will stabilise the egg whites and help hold the bubbles created when beating. Also, make sure the egg whites are at room temperature.

Here are a few tricks you might like to employ when assembling the pavlova. First, place a dollop of the curd or cream onto your serving plate before placing the first meringue layer on top; this will stick it to the plate and make the spreading of the curd easier. Next, don’t be tempted to assemble it too far in advance (wait until no more than an hour before), as it will start to go soggy. Once assembled, keep it in a cool place (not the fridge). 

Now, I’m not going to lie to you – it is not the easiest thing to serve. Make the first cut as you would with any cake, but instead of serving a whole slice, which is much too big anyway, remove the top half of the wedge as one portion and the bottom half as another portion. Place a shard or two of the sugar stained glass into each piece and you are good to go.

The lemon curd should be made the day before to allow it to set properly. This recipe makes about 3 cups (750 ml) of lemon curd.

Maggie's Kitchen will soon be available again in paperback and to celebrate, we're sharing this fantastic recipe for jazzed up cauliflower. With just a few extra ingredients you can take the usual boiled vegetable to a new level with toasted sourdough crumbs and anchovies. 

Maggie says, 'Cauliflower is a vegetable I enjoy so much that I feel it actually needs nothing more than a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil and a smattering of sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to be utterly delicious. But if you want to serve cauli as a dish in its own right then go the extra mile, as I've done here, by adding the crunch of breadcrumbs and the pungent saltiness of anchovies.'

Cauliflower with Toasted Crumbs

Serves 4 as an accompaniment or entree

1 small head cauliflower, cut into 2 cm florets
1 head garlic, cloves separated
1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons lemon thyme leaves
1 1/2 cups coarse sourdough breadcrumbs (made from about 1/2 loaf)
1x45g tin anchovies, drained
2 tablespoons coarsely chopped flatleaf parsley
1/4 cup grated pecorino, to serve 

Method

1. Blanch cauliflower in a saucepan of boiling salted water, then remove with a slotted spoon. Blanch garlic cloves in the same pan for 5 minutes, then drain and peel. 
    
2. Heat 1 tablespoon of the olive oil in a frying pan over low heat, then sauté garlic for 7 minutes or until golden and almost cooked through. Remove and set aside. Add remaining olive oil, lemon thyme and cauliflower florets to the pan and cook over medium heat for 4–5 minutes or until cauliflower is golden and cooked through. Add breadcrumbs and cook, stirring until golden and crisp, then add anchovies, parsley and garlic and stir to combine. 
    
3. Add grated pecorino, then serve. 
    

Maggie's Kitchenby Maggie Beer - Photography by Simon Griffiths

Growing up, I learnt one important lesson in life at the dining table – never to underestimate the importance of food in life. I am very blessed to have been brought up in a household where sharing food is never considered just as a means of sustaining life, but rather as an enjoyable experience that continues to create more stories. 

My parents were working in Saudi Arabia when they met. Mum was a nurse from Korea and Dad was an accountant from Egypt. After they’d married and had two daughters, first me and then my sister Eman, they decided to start a new life in Australia. They arrived here in 1989 with very little family or social support, ready to start the dream life, full of opportunities, in Sydney. 

Living in a foreign country, they found the daily discoveries of new social and cultural customs quite challenging at times. One particular challenge was how to get access to the ingredients they needed for their Korean and Egyptian dishes. Even if they were able to find the right ingredients, those ingredients were not always fresh and could be quite expensive. However, if there was one aspect of life that my parents held onto quite closely, it was cooking and eating the food they grew up with. Even today, my mother and father continue to cook the wonderful dishes that remind them of their homelands, and sometimes they tell us stories linked to the dishes they cook. 

As children, Eman and I would sit on the kitchen bench watching my parents cook and assisting with the tedious jobs, such as peeling garlic and onions or trimming beans. Observing my parents in the kitchen helped me to understand the different stages of cooking and the preparation techniques that I now feel so grateful to have learnt. 

I began to cook with more interest (and perhaps seriousness) halfway through high school. I loved experimenting with food, and it was a great way to get out of studying. I remember trying to make a ‘microwaveable’ cake when I was about fourteen – I somehow managed to blow up the microwave, and the cake was inedible. 

By the time I was at university, cooking was a must for me and a means of helping my parents, as they both worked full-time. It was one household chore that I really enjoyed! I was able to replicate some traditional Korean and Egyptian dishes at that point, and was also interested in learning about food from other cultures, including Italian, Chinese and Japanese food in particular.    

The greatest change that I have seen in relation to cooking our cultural food is that access to both Korean and Middle Eastern ingredients has increased tremendously throughout Australia. The ingredients are now so fresh and abundant that it has become much easier to produce Korean and Middle Eastern food that is true to the traditional flavours and textures. 

This crunchy, tangy and vibrant salad is closely related to the classic Turkish ‘spoon salad’. Everything is cut into very small pieces so that one spoonful of the salad excites the palate with all the different ingredients. I have been making it at home a lot over the last couple of years, especially as part of a weekend lunch spread. It is a great accompaniment to quail or red meat.

A few years ago in Fes, I was sitting in a beautiful riad (Moroccan residence with an interior courtyard), amazed by the architecture, waiting for dinner to be served. Suddenly, a beautiful terracotta tagine arrived at the table, and when the lid was removed the contents were revealed – chicken braised with preserved lemons and green olives. The aroma intoxicated me and that dish inspired this one, which is one of my favourites. I am very lucky – my mother preserves her own lemons from a lemon tree that has been growing in our backyard for over fifteen years. I love to use her preserved lemons in this recipe.

Maamoul is perhaps the most famous of Middle Eastern biscuits, especially popular for religious celebrations such as Eid and Christmas. You can be as creative as you like with the filling, as long as you create a tight seal to enclose it. You can buy a maamoul mould online or at a Middle Eastern grocery. Otherwise, the prongs of a small fork can help create patterns on top. The grooves will help the icing sugar stick to the biscuit. 

Sujet Saenkham of Sydney's critically acclaimed Spice I Am restaurant stable, was born in a remote village in Central Thailand, where he learnt to cook treasured family recipes at his mother's and grandparents' sides. After switching from an accounting degree to studying science with a major in chemistry in Bangkok, in 1985 Sujet ventured to Australia and loved it so much, he decided to make Sydney his home. Here he studied hospitality, and his long-held ambition of becoming an executive chef was realised in 2004, when  he opened the doors of Spice I Am in Sydney's Surry Hills. This simple hole-in-the-wall space was immediately adopted as the Thai restaurant of choice for the city's food media, and since then the restaurant empire has expanded to include a more sophisticated restaurant in Darlinghurst, an offshoot in Balmain, House: North-East Thai Food, which specialises in Issan dishes from the north of Thailand, and most recently, in 2014, Surry Hills Eating House, showcasing the regional cuisine of southern Thailand. This is Sujet's first cookbook.

In this much anticipated cookbook Sydney-based Thai chef Sujet Saenkham shares his family recipes for the fresh flavours of regional Thai cooking so you can enjoy authentic Thai food at home.  Leave the Thai takeaway menus in your kitchen drawer, as you learn how to make restaurant favourites such as Sujet's signature stir-fried crispy pork belly with basil, roasted red duck curry with eggplant, tomato and pineapple and crispy prawn and lemongrass salad, as well as traditional classics like pad Thai, fishcakes and a massaman beef curry from scratch. Throughout, Sujet offers practical advice on finding the ingredients and mastering the cooking techniques you need to create  your own Thai feasts at home.

I was born in 1964 in Nasamor, a small rural village in the Ratchaburi province in central Thailand. Most of the people in my hometown were extended family on my mother’s side, and were of Laos ethnic background, speaking Lao and practising Thai-Lao culture. Many of the old-style houses were made from lathed bamboo, although some families had solid teak houses. My family was poor, but my father had worked in logging when he was young, and he’d collected enough timber over the years to build our own small teak house. Although life was simple, with no heating or electricity, I have fond memories of those early years. 

We grew food on our own land surrounding the house. While rice was the major crop, we were lucky to have lots of different vegetables and herbs growing wild by the side of the rice paddy, so we often foraged for food. This bounty meant we rarely had to buy food from town, except for sugar and salt, which we used to ferment and preserve foods grown in the rainy season to use during the dry season. 

I clearly remember the day an Australian visitor came to our house at the start of one rainy season, when the paddy was filled with water. As we walked home I noticed bubbles on the water, so I quickly put my hand underneath and caught some small freshwater crabs. My mother was very happy as we didn’t have any meat or fish, and she used them to make her delicious tom yum crab. The visitor was really impressed with what we could cook from ingredients collected from the field and garden. I have happy memories of the times Mum and I went out into the bush at the end of the rainy season to search for local white shiitake-style mushrooms – they were hard to find, but we knew they grew in the same place every year. Considered a delicacy, they were expensive, so we sold them to increase our income.

There wasn’t much food during the dry season, so Dad worked in the forest and Mum often went with a group of women from the village to search for freshwater fish in the nearby waterways. My grandfather provided bamboo coops and containers for them. We’d wait for Mum to return – if she was late, our dinner was late, but if we were lucky, we had dinner early. Mum made the best tom yum mud-fish I’ve ever eaten, and my grandfather supplied the dry-roasted chilli the adults added.

Every day I walked three kilometres and back to a primary school in a neighbouring village. Soon after I started high school, my dad set up a chicken farm and, being the eldest, it was my job to get up really early, wake my brother and sister, and give water to the chickens, then feed them before heading off to school. My siblings weren’t happy about this, but it meant we were well-fed. Another bonus was that the manure fertilised our farm, so we always had plenty of home-grown vegetables. We worked hard and were always busy, but this was a prosperous and happy time for my family. 

As the oldest, it was also my responsibility to help out at home, so I learnt to cook when I was eight. My mother and grandparents taught me to use whatever ingredients were available to make a tasty meal. My first lesson was how to cook rice over charcoal heat – later, we used an aluminium steamer and cake tin over charcoal or a gas burner. Mastering a simple stir-fry was next; even now, this is the style of dish my family enjoys most, especially my basil minced chicken on page 79. 

When the work in the rice fields was done, we needed other sources of income. Mum and I cooked and sold food at the local night market, particularly during festivals and ceremonies at the temples. We sometimes worked from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. and were well known for having the best desserts and popular sweet snacks, such as banana fritters.

After completing the equivalent of my higher school certificate in mathematics and science, I studied accounting at a university in Bangkok, which I must confess I didn’t like. Without telling my parents, I moved to an open university and studied science with a major in chemistry – I really wanted to study food and cooking, but there were no courses in Thailand at that time.

Later, I spent six years in the south of Thailand, where I really enjoyed learning about the local cuisine from my partner’s mother and sister – I’ll never forget how much they taught me. Southern food includes dishes with Buddhist and Islamic influences and is very different from the food I grew up with. Turmeric is a common ingredient, though it’s not used much at all in the rest of Thailand, and I found this, along with the frequent use of super-fresh seafood and freshwater greens, really interesting. Southerners also use more coconut cream and coconut milk, and they favour the spices used in the neighbouring countries of Malaysia and Indonesia.

Here, the fried coated chicken becomes crispy and absorbs more flavour from the basil-infused sauce. The high heat at the end of cooking makes the sugar adhere to the crispy chicken, giving it a lovely caramelised finish. You could use beef, prawn or crispy pork belly instead of chicken.

Probably the most well-known Thai noodle dish, pad Thai is really easy to make at home even though it has lots of ingredients. The balance of sweet, salty and sour is very important, and I suggest that you use the amount of chilli you prefer. Some people worry about the quantity of dried shrimp, but don’t leave it out, because not only is it key to the flavour of this dish, it also provides protein.

Prawns and lemongrass are a heavenly match – just be sure to take the time to finely slice the lemongrass or it won’t be that nice to eat. The fragrant, citrus flavour of lemongrass also goes well with other seafood, so you could use fish instead of the prawns, if you prefer.

Every day is a journey, whether your bags are packed and you're off to see the world, or you're simply following your usual nine-to-five routine. Let artist Meredith Gaston set you on a path of wonder, joy and mindfulness with her new book, 101 Inspirations for your Journey. This collection of Meredith's favourite quotations from famous writers and thinkers will spark your sense of adventure and inspire gratefulness, curiosity and delight as you journey through life. Illustrated with Meredith's charming and whimsical drawings, this follow-up to 101 Moments of Joy and Inspiration is the perfect gift for travellers of every kind.

Dearest Travellers,

No matter where we may find ourselves right now and how we have chosen to travel life's path up to this very point, we have all been journeying together.

From the moment we wake up in the morning until the stars start their twinkling at night, our days are rich with unique experiences, feelings, and possibilities.

The way we think about ourselves, others, and the world around us creates our daily realities. The laws of attraction are very simple and very real - wonderful, positive thoughts can create wonderful, positive lives!

With this in mind, it makes sense to choose happiness because it is so good for our health and wellbeing!

Indeed, the journey so many of us embark on to 'find' happiness in our day to day lives is about seeking wellbeing - about feeling good. Our richest moments are when we feel pure joy buzzing within ourselves, and a sense of connection to other travellers and the world around us.

These wonderful little seeds of joy, moments ever-present in daily life and visible to the mindful heart, start to grow and blossom. Soon our inner gardens become so devine and verdant they will extend beyond ourselves and bring joy to the lives of others.

This book is about inviting ourselves to live the most abundant and joyous journeys imaginable. I have gathered beautiful words of wisdom from far and wide to inspire and delight us, and to encourage us to travel thoughtfully and with love for ourselves, life and each other.

To embrace curiosity and gratitude, and to keep our hearts open from moment to moment, makes us rich and happy travellers upon this earth.

So when you are ready, turn the page and let your very own adventure begin!

With love,
Meredith x 

Need to impress someone special this week? Maybe you just need some inspiration for a dinner party on the weekend? Whatever the reason, here's a Middle Eastern-inspired menu we've prepared just for you, full of flavour and sure to be enjoyed by all.

Maybe you'd like to start with a Chargrilled capscium, walnut and pomegranate dip from Almond Bar by Sharon Salloum - Photo by Rob Palmer

Or a Cracked Wheat and freekeh salad with preserved lemon and barberries from Cumulus Inc. by Andrew McConnell

You'll have everyone salivating at these Chicken breast rolls filled with spinach, rice, pine nuts, almonds and raisins from Abla's Lebanese Kitchen by Abla Amad - Photo by Simon Griffiths

Serve that with a great big platter of Candied lemon and barbecued haloumi with baby chard and pumpkin seeds from Simon Bryant's Vegies by Simon Bryant - Photo by Alan Benson

Lighten the mood with some Middle Eastern rosewater custard from Sweet by Alison Thompson - Photo by Sharyn Cairns

And to finish, end on a sweet note, with these Turkish delight filled doughnuts with rosewater honey from Maha: Middle Eastern Home Cooking by Shane Delia - Photo by Sharyn Cairns

Hope this has inspired you! 

Author Talk and Book Signing with Dee Nolan

Join Dee Nolan for a discussion of her latest book, A Food Lover's Pilgrimage to France at My Bookshop in Hawksburn. This is a free event and you are encouraged to arrive early. 
Contact corrie@mybookshop.net.au
P 03 9824 2990