Cooking February

Ahhh, love

On Sunday night we hosted our second De Bortoli cook-in with Daniel taking the reigns as 'Chef' on that special once-a-year night for lovers and florists (not to mention all rampant Capitalists) everywhere, Valentine’s Day. On the subject of love, while Daniel is a great lover of eating, he's never been fussed on cooking. In fact, this was the first time he had cooked for a group of people in years. Even though Spaghetti Puttanesca is a simple dish, Daniel was having night terrors at the thought of having to cook for so many people. Such pressure.

Daniel shows how good he is at cooking

Pasta really is a 'more the merrier' sort of food, perfect for extended Italian families or, in our case, the extended so-called 'urban family' of good mates. And by Sunday night our group of guests had grown. The two artists and founding directors of artist-run gallery MOP Projects, Ron Adams and George Adams were also joining us for dinner, as well as another friend Phoebe Arcus. Daniel had prepared the spaghetti sauce the day before, so that the flavours of the tomatoes, anchovies, olives and herbs could deepen and develop overnight. (Really though, he cooked the day before so no one could watch him stumbling around a kitchen that increasingly resembled a car accident!)

Drew the kitchen control freak can't help but stir the pot

Friend and dinner guest, Elizabeth Stanton had offered to let us host our dinner party at her beautiful Potts Point apartment. On Elizabeth’s veranda, overlooking Fitzroy Gardens and King Cross’ famous El Alamein fountain, we toasted our second Cooking Your Calendar dinner party while torrential rain fell in sheets outside.

Proud Italian Elizabeth take over the spaghetti

By the time dinner was served, everyone was getting along famously. And it was a culinary success for Daniel because the meal was an unqualified homey hit. A delightfully messy affair of ropey spaghetti in the rich puttanesca sauce, Daniel topped the pasta with bitey Parmesan cheese. Elizabeth made a simple rocket salad and Daniel showed how good he is with a knife by cutting a crusty bread stick. (Though secretly he hadn't cut bread ever since sliced bread was invented so on the inside he was sweating bullets). The fruity flavour of De Bortoli’s Windy Peak Classic White was a perfect accompaniment to the meal. However, Ron and George broke the rules by following the white with a bottle of red they'd brought themselves - apparently white wine en masse doesn't agree with their tender constitutions.

Triumph

Over dinner we shared some hilarious stories about the 'dark' side of Valentine’s Day - perfect considering we were eating a spaghetti dish named after prostitution (a fairly unromanticised career path). These included tales of anonymous flowers sent to James by a suspicious ex-girlfriend trying to entrap him, as well as frightening love letters written to Rachel by a mentally unstable stalker to which she replied by filing a police report. On a more pleasant note, Elizabeth recounted a 'bodice-ripper' moment she’d had in Venice last year where she had been swept off her feet by a Venetian motorbike-riding maitre d'.

Cheers

Daniel had prepared an iPod playlist the day before, showing he's easily distracted by more curatorial activities than cooking. Basically he searched 'love' into his iTunes library and came up with songs like 'Computer Love' by Kraftwerk, 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' by Joy Division and 'Love is a Stranger' by the Eurythmics. Perfect ironic sentiments for Valentine's Day, he reasoned.

Sauced

The empty bottles were piling up by now and everyone was well and truly 'sauced'. Elizabeth had promised to supply dessert - which turned out to be a simple no fuss dish of store bought chocolate. Needless to say, desserts is 'stressed' spelled backwards so hats off to Elizabeth for being such a clever, gorgeous, stress free co-host.

See you in March lovers!

Announcing February

Daniel thinks he is probably better at pouring wine than cooking

January's inaugural Cooking Your Calendar event was loads of fun, and we've been inundated with 'offers' from friends to fill chairs at the dinner table for February's do. To keep each dinner interesting and varied we long debated how to approach it and who to invite. Daniel suggested we tie it in with his 35th birthday on the 25th but then got greedy thinking he'd never be able to cater for each of his 670 Facebook friends.

Our dear friend and neighbour, Elizabeth Stanton, offered her apartment for the event and suggested we link it with Valentine's Day. An inspired decision we thought, knowing deep down Liz was single and probably hoping we'd invite her future husband. That remains to be seen, but we can announce our invitees for February as reality television producer Jackie Martin, advertising & design director James Hossack, filmmaker Heath Davis, and of course curator and arts writer Elizabeth Stanton - our already mentioned hostess with the... you know how it goes.

Our Cooking Your Calendar team has three excellent cooks, as you saw with Pete's stellar effort this month. None of us, however, can claim professional chef status - despite Drew thinking he's professional by bloodline because his chef twin brother has cooked for big name international superstars. Daniel is the exception, freely admitting he'd rather organise an iTunes playlist, re-hang the art collection, set the table or pour the wine than have to ever cook. He last cooked something in say 1990-something-or-other. So to prove his opposable thumbs aren't entirely primate in the kitchen, he volunteered to cook February's recipe, which is Spaghetti Puttanesca by Leanne De Bortoli.

Speaking of Leanne De Bortoli, she actually emailed during the week to say "Great to see this project up and running. Even better that we didn't think of it ourselves". Leanne also mentioned that the history of the dish is quite amusing and worth Googling. Curiosity got the better of us and we learned via Wikipedia that spaghetti a la puttanesca is a "whore's dish"! Well, not exactly today. But the three potential origins for the dish claim it is made from the "odds and ends found in the larder... any kind of garbage". It also derives from the Italian word for whore puttana, and according to one chef quoted on Wikipedia, it was a quick cheap meal that prostitutes could prepare between customers.

Sounds delicious and mind the pun, pretty 'easy', which suits amateur chef Daniel to a T.

We promise not to take it this far with the "whore's spaghetti"

(image found thanks to Google Images)