Everything I know about cooking I learned on the road while living or travelling abroad.

My first experience was in Paris after leaving high school, when I was perfecting my French at Alliance Francaise. I lived in a starving-poet style garrett in the 17th Arrondissement, near Champs Elysees, for free in return for some light household duties for my landlady - a divorcee and single mother with two teenage children and who was a fashion buyer at the famous Galeries Lafayette department store.

Part of the deal was that I make lunch for her children who used to come home from school for lunch. I thought I would get away with making them sandwiches, but my lack of culinary skills was discovered when I was told to prepare a ’simple steak, frites et salade’.

Shocked to find I did not know how to cook a steak, Madame Cochery took me in hand and I was soon cooking steak to perfection for my two charges.

This simple recipe for four can be expanded and refined as the occasion demands:

1. Dry the steaks on a paper towel, turn them in the olive oil, garlic and pepper and leave out until they have reached room temperature. Straight out of the fridge, the cold steaks will cool down the pan and the steaks will end up stewing instead of the juices sealed in. Add salt just before searing the steaks. Since I cooked my first steak, I have discovered that adding soy sauce really helps bring out the meat flavour.

2. If making pepper steaks, crack the peppercorns beforehand in a mortar or on a wooden board with the bottom of the frypan and cover each side of the steaks with the mixture.

3. Heat a ridged griddle pan (or use a BBQ) on high until smoking hot, add the steaks to the pan - two at the time if the pan is not big enough - and cook for one to two minutes on each side, depending on desired doneness. Place the steaks on heated plates at very low heat in the oven, while preparing the rest of the meal.

4. If making sauce, use a flat pan and deglaze the pan after removing the steaks with red wine or cognac and set it alight, add the cream, stir in the mustard and garlic, season and continue cooking for a scant minute until the sauce thickens. Pour over the steaks.

5. If adding mushrooms, remove stalks and wipe them outside, toss in the olive oil, soy sauce, garlic and pepper before adding them to the pan on their ‘heads’. Leave sizzling until juices start forming inside the cups. Place a mushroom on top of each steak. When cutting into the steak and the mushroom, the mushroom juices will flow and blend with the steak’s juices, making a very rich, flavoursome meal.

6. Alternatively, remove the mushrooms and slice thinly on a cutting board reserving the juices. Make the sauce and add mushrooms and their juices at the end.

Frites

‘Frites’ are simply thin cut chips or better known as French fries. These days, you can get good quality French fries from the supermarket freezer which can be cooked in the oven, following the instructions on the packet.

When making French fries from scratch, use a potato cutter which can quickly turn out fries from one potato at the time. I calculate one medium-size potato per person:

1. Rinse the chips in cold water and dry in a paper towel. This will remove the high glychemic starch which affects diabetes and glucose intolerance. Heat up oil in a chip pan. Test the heat by putting in one of the fries and when the oil immediately starts to froth around the potato, put in the rest of the fries in a chip basket and lower them into the oil, leaving them to fry until just coloured.

2. Lift out the basked, shake off excess oil and leave it resting raised out of the oil while preparing the steaks. Just before serving, plunge the chips back into the oil for a second time and cook until golden. Line a bowl with paper towels to absorb the excess oil, empty the chips in the bowl, sprinkle with salt, shake to distribute the salt, pull out the paper towel, leaving the chips in the bowl and serve.

French Salad

For this simple salad, use  mignonette lettuce or a packet of any mixed green leaf lettuce leaves which blends deliciously with the herby French dressing.

1. Wash the lettuce thoroughly, tear up the mignonette lettuce leaves into bite size pieces and dry on a paper tower or in a salad spinner.

2. Make salad dressing: In a salad bowl mix vinegar and mustard with a fork or small whisk, whisk in salt, pepper and add the oil gradually, whisking until the dressing thickens, add the herbs. Add lettuce leaves to the bowl and toss the salad just before serving.

3. Alternatively, make up several batches of salad dressing, omitting the herbs, and keep in a jar in the fridge and drizzle over salad with the herbs just before serving.

4. Serve with the steak and French fries.

Serves four.

One of my favourite dishes from the Scandinavian smorgasbord is gravlaks - variously called gravad lax or gravlax - not to be confused with some commercial varieties which is just dill flavoured smoked salmon.

Grave means to bury in English and originally, in the Middle Ages, Norwegian fishermen would bury the salmon - or laks - in the sand just above the high-tide mark, where it was left to ferment before it was eaten with dill known among the Norse for relieving gas.

But these days gravlaks is raw salmon which has been dry cured i salt, pepper, salt, sugar and dill in a lengthy process taking about four days.

However, one Christmas my mother came visiting from Norway she brought with her a recipe which she said was a quick way of preparing gravlaks, taking only 24 hours. The secret ingredient was bock ale or bitter ale.

Rather than dry cure the salmon, we marinated it in salt, pepper, sugar and dill and two cans of Victoria Bitter which produced a wonderfully melt-in-the mouth gravlaks with all the flavours blending perfectly into the best gravlaks I’ve ever tasted.

I have since experimented and found that using ocean trout and a wooded Australian chardonnay instead of beer gives the gravlaks an extra depth of flavour.

Because ocean trout is generally a smaller fish, I usually end up buying the biggest I can find from which I get two whole side fillets. This requires fiddly removing of bones with tweezers from the front part of the fish.

I welcome the arrival of fresh NZ King Salmon on the market where the tail - the best end of the fish - can easily produce two fillets of about 1kg:

1kg fillet of NZ King Salmon

55g salt

50g sugar

35g freshly ground white pepper

1 cup freshly cut dill or 1/2 cup dry dill

2 cans Victoria Bitter (or a wooded chardonnay)

Brandy

1/2 cup freshly cut dill

Mustard sauce for gravlaks

Blinis or Melba toast (for appetisers)

young salad leaves for garnish (for entree)

Scrambled egg for Gravlaks (for entree)

Dill for garnish

Preparation:

1. Scale the fillets then pierce the skin throughout with a needle to allow the marinade penetrate to the flesh. Mix the dry ingredients together; cover a shallow glass or ceramic dish with half the ingredients; place the salmon fillets on top, skin side down; cover with the rest of the mix; and pour the beer (or chardonnay) over until the fish is just covered. Cover the dish with plastic wrap and put in the fridge for 24 hours turning the fillet every six hours. Another option is to use a large leak-proof snaplock bag and turn the bag every six hours.

2. After 24 hours, remove the fish, rinse under running cold water until the spices and dill are removed and dry gently on a paper towel. Place fillets, skin side down, on a double sheet of aluminium foil big enough to wrap each fillet, moisten with brandy and cover with the freshly chopped dill. Wrap up the fillets and leave overnight in the fridge or freeze until needed. The gravlaks will keep up to a month in the freezer.

3. Just before serving slice the salmon thinly on the slant and serve with mustard sauce - either as an appetiser or as an entree with cold scrambled egg (see below).

Mustard Sauce for Gavlaks

2 tbsp  sweet mustard

1 egg yolk

33ml vinegar

1 tsp icing sugar

100ml light olive oil

2 tblsp light sour cream

1/5 tsp white pepper

½  cup of fresh dill

Preparation: Mix together mustard, egg yolk, icing sugar and vinegar. Blend in oil a little at the time to ensure the sauce does not separate. Add sour cream and dill and season to taste. The sauce is best when made a few days beforehand and kept in the fridge before serving.

Scrambled egg for Gavlaks

2 tblsp reduced fat butter

4 eggs

3 tblsp reduced fat cream, or milk

1 tblsp Champagne or sparkling wine

1/2 cup chopped dill

Freshly ground white pepper

Salt to taste

Preparation:

1. Place butter in a mircowave safe bowl and cover, melt on high for 10 seconds; break the eggs into the bowl and add the cream and Champagne. Adding Champagne or sparkling wine will make the scrambled eggs very light and fluffy. Return to microwave for one minute on high, stir, breaking up any cooked eggwhite around the edge, return for 30 seconds to the microwave and stir again and repeat if necessary for another 30 seconds.

2. If the eggs are still runny, return to the microwave for another 20 seconds. Add the dill and leave to cool and season when cold.

1. For an appetiser, place a slice or two of gravlaks on blinis or tiny pancakes, melba toasts or crispbread halves, drizzle mustard sauce over it and garnish with snipped dill scattered on top.

Alternatively, serve as an entree by placing salad leaves in the middle of each place, pile two tablespoons of cold scrambled eggs on top, drape four to six slices of gravlaks over the scrambled eggs, drizzle with mustard sauce and scatter snipped dill on top and serve.

New Zealand king salmon, the biggest of the salmon species and the richest in Omega-3 oil, will soon go on auction at the Sydney Fish Market

The Sydney Fish Market (SFM) is negotiating with suppliers to introduce New Zealand king salmon at its weekday auctions, providing stiff competition for locally grown Tasmanian salmon and ocean trout.

Graham Turk, SFM managing director, said Tasmanian suppliers did not go through the SFM but distributed their products directly to Australian distributors.

He said distributors in Sydney had expressed preference for buying king salmon through the SFM Dutch clock auction system.

SFM has been using the Dutch auction since 1989. Held from 5.30am every weekday, the Dutch auction is a silent auction which begins at the highest price and drops until a bid is made.

NZ King Salmon is already exported and sold in small quantities directly to distributors in Australia under the Regal Salmon brand which is supplied by The New Zealand King Salmon Company.

The sale of NZ king salmon through the Dutch auction at SFM, the second biggest fish market in the world after Tokyo, is likely to increase sales volume, bringing more king salmon products to the restaurants and homes of Sydney.

The NZ King Salmon Company processes about 7300t of salmon a year, making it one of the biggest global producers of farmed king salmon. About 66% of production is exported.

Also called Chinook or spring salmon, king salmon is a premium eating fish, native of the northern Pacific Ocean. The biggest of the Pacific salmon family, it can get up to 57kg.

It is a firm-fleshed fish with an attractive orage-red colour and can be served in a wide variety of cuts from fine fillets to steaks, portions or whole fish.

Known for its big size and flavorful flesh, the king salmon is the state fish of Alaska and a popular game fish.

King salmon was first introduced to NZ for game fishing as far back as the 1850s but it was not until fish bred from imported Californian eggs were released into the South Island rivers that they started to return from the sea to spawn in the late 1800s while king salmon farming did not start until 1983.

The commercial NZ King Salmon typically weighs between 3.5kg and 4kg - about double the size of Atlantic salmon from Tasmania - and has the highest natural oil content of all salmon.

A 150g portion of NZ King Salmon is said to provide the complete daily requirement of Omega-3, sough for its health properties.

Omega-3 is said to provide protection against heart disease and certain cancers, alleviate arthritic pain and boost the immune system.

The variety of cuts is a chef’s delight. Rich in flavour, the fish is perfect for sashimi or for baking, grilling and hot or cold smoking.

The salmon are harvested 52 weeks of the year, processed quickly and can be transported to Australia within 60 hours of harvest.