Today the belly astrogourmet Lilith beamed down to the belly kitchen to talk Sagittarius for her regular "Cooking with the Stars" segment, we went around Australia to see what's in season in December, lots of fruit and veg as usual but a fish focus this month as it is so popular leading up to the holidays, lots of local events in our Belly Bulletin , and some of your holiday cooking and eating and drinking plans.

IN SEASON IN DECEMBER:

FISH AND SEAFOOD

All you need to know is on 2 really good websites - the Sydney Fish Market and the  Australian Marine Conservation Society (AMCS).

The Sydney Fish Market has a season guide, what's in peak season or good availability so cheaper,better fish that hasn't travelled the world to get to you.
Peak in December -Sydney rock oysters, school prawns (lovely Yamba prawns locally), loligo squid peak but southern calamari good availability, blue swimmer crabs - lots in local fish shops
Fish peak availability - atlantic salmon, tiger flathead, gold band snapper and big eye tuna, but unfortunately all problematic according to the AMCS - on their avoid list

The good news is that  on the AMCS better choice list,  there are lots of choices of fish and seafood in season:
wild australian salmon, blue mussels and blue swimmer crabs, all farmed oysters, school and bay or greentail prawns in NSW, the squids, farmed scallops, whitings and trevally

Lots of recipes on the fish markets site too.  And you can even find out how to tell the gender of a squid.  If you want to.

VEGETABLES

Asparagus, Hass avocadoes, beans, beetroot especially small young 'uns, broccoli, capsicum (skip the green ones, they are just unripe red and yellow caps), celery, cucumbers fat and thin, eggplant, onions, peas, radishes, corn, tomatoes hit full flavour, and zucchini and their flowers if the rain doesn't rot them all.  Try pumpkin flowers if you have a vine.

FRUIT

As we said in the bulletin, rain is really playing havoc this year, and not just locally for once.  But look for stone fruit now : glorious cherries and apricots,  berries (locally strawberries on their way out), blueberries in full swing, raspberries, rock, water and honeydew melons, bananas, mangoes, valencia oranges, passionfruit, pineapple, and starting a bit late, so maybe at the end of the month, lychees.

BELLY BULLETIN

Honu tells us the  Liberation Larder Christmas is on, free and veg and delicious at the Byron Community Centre, 12.30 on December 25th.  All welcome.

This Friday December 10 the Eat, Paint, Love art exhibition kicks off with plenty of real food and drink and music at Still at the Centre Art gallery on the Byron arts and industry estate.  But look closely at what you put in your mouth, as they have gathered more than 60 artists and 90 artworks all on, or around, food.  Table Manners  a ceramic installation by various artists will also be on for 2 days only, the 10th and 11th. Veet, will launch "Veet's Cuisine" her first cookbook with 100 Vegetarian Recipes and beautiful drawings.  The exhibition runs until the end of January.  For more info listen to Arts canvass on bayfm around 9.30 this Thursday.

Look out for a new local magazine, focused on Northern rivers cooks and food producers, a quarterly called Sample.  It is edited by the Echo's food writer Victoria Cosford, and produced by Remy Tancred of Lennox Heads, who was behind that handy guide to local restaurants, and record of many great girl nights out, Ate Phat Ducks.  You can find some tastes online, including a scallop risotto and an interview with the very successful macadamia producers from Brookfarm, at www.samplennsw.com

And wonderful Mullumbimby cook and food writer Belinda Jeffery has a new book out, called "the country cookbook".  In Belinda's own words, "This book... chronicles a year of my life in one of the most beautiful corners of Australia, the Far North Coast of NSW. It really is a celebration of the ‘Rainbow Country’ as it's called, and of the simple pleasures and food that mean so much to me."

If you are into learning to grow and cook with plants suited to our sub-tropical environment, check out the Starseed Nursery website or see them at a Farmers market.  They sound like they are doing really interesting projects, and we plan to get them on belly soon.  Lotus, mushrooms and papaya are all upcoming workshops, as well as the fabulously named coconut day.  This weekend, 11 and 12 December, they are cooking in and with bamboo, exploring bamboo and fire, and making bamboo bio-char which is a soil conditioner. It's a 2 day workshop with food and music.  www.starseed.co

In national news, cereal company Kelloggs has been crowned Australia's most misleading junk food advertiser for the fourth year running in this year's Fame and Shame Awards.  They are organised by advocacy group The Parents Jury, which fights against junk food advertising to children.  Kellogs won both the pester award for their LCM snack bars, and the Smoke and Mirrors Award for claiming Nutri-Grain is good for aspiring athletes.

If your favourite Christmas food is fruit, be ready to pay more and accept slightly damaged fruit.   Australia's wettest spring on record and a rainy start to summer threatens fruit and grain harvests all across the south-east.  Hail and rain has wiped out 80 per cent of some cherry crops at Young in New South Wales.
Mango growers in Queensland and the Northern Territory are also badly affected.Trevor Dunmall from the Australian Mango Industry Association says the wet conditions are damaging what was already a light crop. He says there will be fewer mangos around this season, and those that make it into the supermarkets will be slightly damaged. "To pick mangos you really need dry conditions, the rain can damage the skin and leads to easier marking and blemishes ... so the appearance may not be ideal," he said.
The National Farmers Federation says fruit and grain harvests across the south-east are under serious and continued threat.

But we like to finish on a positive note, so if you are on social networking site facebook, you may soon be getting slices of virtual pizza.  And if your facebook  friends send you enough virtual pizza you will be able to redeem it for slices of real pizza.  Well sort of...real major chain fast food pizza.  And of course you can find the branches with the GPS on your mobile phone.

And if your food dreams are more of the fancy restaurant variety, you don't need to go all the way to France to eat in a 3 Michelin star place.  There are now as many 3 star restaurants in Japan as in France, 26.  Japan also has more than twice as many restaurants as France, roughly 500 thousand to 200 thousand.  So just pop off up the road to Japan and make a start.

Lilith is cooking with the Stars : Sagittarius

the bellysisters did not draw this, it was an imaginative person called Eoghanacht, who thinks the sag constellation looks like a teapot. Which it kind of does, so you Saggies are free to call yourselves teapots. Or just have a cuppa.

 

SAGITTARIUS

Its time to wish happy birthday to the zodiac’s adventurous and travel-happy Sagittarian superchefs, who usually love nothing better than packing their
bags and getting the hell outta the kitchen into their real love, the great outdoors ­ because Archers ideal meal would be something they’ve just hunted
or caught, cooked over a naked flame in some pristine wilderness with the wind in their hair, while urban Saggies love barbies, picnics and any kind of al fresco dining.

Being a fire sign, they do fire up easily and British chef Marco Pierre White, enfant terrible of the contemporary British restaurant scene, regularly threw customers out if they annoyed him.  When one asked for a side order of chips, White personally hand-cut and cooked them and charged him £50.  He knifed open the jacket and trousers of a young chef who complained about the heat, but still retained a stellar cast of apprentices
including Heston Blumenthal and Gordon Ramsay, who he famously reduced to tears.

Born to an Italian mother and an English chef, Marco left school and arrived in London at 16 to study under Albert and Michel Roux at Le Gavroche.  The
first restaurant he opened won two Michelin stars, and with his second, Restaurant Marco Pierre White, he became at 33 the youngest chef to be awarded three Michelin stars.

After working relentlessly for 17 years, Marco decided he could either be a kitchen prisoner slaving six days a week, or charge high prices for meals he didn’t cook, or return his Michelin stars, spend time with his kids and
re-invent himself.  Which he then did as dining consultant to the P&O cruise line which he says is the best value holiday in the world, sailing the
Mediterranean in summer and the Caribbean in winter without the aggravation of flying.  In his leisure time this true Sag can be found hunting and fishing.

Bad boy chef Anthony Bourdain claims Marco’s autobio White Heat inspired a new generation of young chefs with its photos of the man all haggard, stubble-jawed and debauched as a rock god.  “We dreamed of looking just like him and not like Paul Bocuse.”

One of the founders of Nouvelle Cuisine,  Sagittarian French chef Alain Senderens also handed back his three Michelin stars, claiming he couldn’t charge affordable prices while maintaining the  standards that Michelin stars require.  After returning them Senderens says his customers now pay a third of the former prices, come back more often, and his business profits have
quadrupled.

Displaying the typical Sagittarian qualities of luck, love of learning, generosity and energy to get ahead, fourth generation Irish-American chef Bobby Flay dropped out of school at 17 to work in a pizza parlour and
Baskin-Robbins.  When he progressed to salad making at Joe Allen’s Restaurant in New York’s theatre district, owner Joe Allen found Flay’s natural ability so impressive that he paid his tuition at the French
Culinary Institute.  After graduating, Flay adopted Creole and Cajun cuisine as his culinary style, and went on to become executive chef of 10 restaurants in the US and Bahamas, while hosting and featuring in TV cooking
shows like the Great Chefs, Iron Chef and The Main Ingredient, and also established the annual Bobby Flay Scholarship to the French Culinary Institute to give other disadvantaged talented chefs in the making the
chance that was given to him.

Adventurous Sagittarian palates are always ready to sample tastes from faraway places – foreign food that gives them an excuse to launch into
outrageous travel tales, and anyone who’s ever met a Sagittarian knows how they love to talk!

Which leads us to our final Sagittarian kitchen cowboy John Burton Race, the controversial Brit Michelin-starred chef who modestly described himself to
an interviewer as “a television natural, discerning author, shrewd businessman, eloquent orator, culinary genius and a big softie at heart” ­ and to another journo as a “loud-mouthed, disagreeable, arrogant git”.

Born in Singapore, Burton Race spent his early years travelling, which allowed him to experience food from all round the world.  After working his way up the kitchen chain he took over the London hotel The Landmark, winning two Michelin stars, and gained a third with his own hotel The New Angel in Dartmouth.
Star of TV series French Leave, Return of the Chef, Kitchen Criminals and I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here! his fiery temper caused blazing rows
with unadventurous fellow contestants who refused to eat kangaroo, crocodile and possum.  It was during this Australian leg of the program that his wife
Kim closed down his Dartmouth restaurant and dismissed the staff when she found out about Burton Race’s two year old love child with his agent’s PA.
His typically Sagittarian response?
“If you’re attracted to the madness of a chef, the excitement of him, why spend your life trying to mould him into someone else?  Get another bloke.”
Ever irrepressible,  he claims his next TV project will be Round the World in 80 Recipes, where he attempts the most extreme ethnic recipes in situ, like cooking a camel in the desert.  Go Saggie!

And as a parting piece of astro trivia, did you know it was a Sagittarian who invented the Sandwich?   Sagittarians are known to love a flutter, and when the English Earl of Sandwich was on a roll at the gaming table and way too excited to take time off, he ordered his servants to slap two loaves
round a slab of venison and lo! the sandwich was born.

My want list Xmas pressie:  Margeurite Patten’s Spam Cookbook.

CHRISTMAS SPECIAL ON BELLY DECEMBER 20

You don't do Christmas?  We are happy to hear about whatever you like to use as a reason to get around a table with loved ones, and most importantly, what you will eat!  As I type this I remember the Christmas phonecalls to grandparents, in the dark days before skipe or cheap calls of any kind.  One of the first questions was always : "What are you eating?"  And the longest, most detailed answers.

So now everyone within radio or computer or phone range can join that conversation.  So go on, tell your bellysisters, what are you eating this year, and who will be around your table?  (don't do tables?  that's ok too)

Sister T

MELLOW SUMMER TUNES (rain? what rain?)

Watermelon Man, sung by Les Mc Cann
Summertime, delicious version by Angelique Kidjo
Distant Shore by Chieko Kinbara
Sarah Vaughan with Gotan Project - Whatever Lola Wants