Osso Bucco is a classical Italian dish from the western Lombard region which includes Milan and the surrounding province. Osso buco, meaning ‘open bone, refers to the big piece of marrow in the middle of the veal shank slice, which helps give the dish its rich taste.

The first time I had Osso Bucco was at La Fontana restaurant in the 1980s, later known as Caffe Norton, in Leichardt - Sydney’s Italian quarter. It was a perfect dish on a cold night - heartwarming, rich and flavoursome without being fatty. It had a dusting of gremolate on top - finely chopped parsley, garlic and lemon zest - adding zing and excitement, making it one of my most memorable meals. It is still among my favourite dishes.

Apart from good quality veal shank, the vital ingredients in Osso Bucco is a strong jellied beef stock, ripe tomatoes and gremolata. I found I had two recipes for it - a classic Cordon Bleu recipe and a ‘white’ version without tomatoes. I prefer adding tomatoes and some cayenne to make it slightly spicy and I brown the onions to give the dish a richer taste and deeper colour:

1. Bring the meat to room temperature. Mix the flour and cayenne and place in plastic bag with the meat and shake until the meat is covered. Heat half the oil in a deep frypan to meadium heat and drop in the butter, add the dry oregano, thyme. Turn up heat fry the meat on both sides until brown and caramelised. Remove and keep warm.

2. Meanwhile add more oil to the fry pan, turn up the heat and fry the sliced onion until brown but not burned. Turn down heat, add the carrots and celery and sauté for about five minutes. Deglace the pan with the white wine and reduce. Plunge the tomatoes in a bowl with boiling water for 1 minute. Squeeze out the seeds, remove seeds and chop roughly. Finely chop garlic.

3. Return meat to the pan and place on top of the vegetable mix, add tomatoes and garlic and the jellied stock. Scatter with parsley and place a bay leaf on top. Cover with a lid, turn the heat to very low and simmer for three to four hours.

4. In the meantime, prepare garlic and parmesan potato mash and gremolata:

5. Peel the potatoes and boil in salted water until they start falling apart. Drain and mash together with butter until smooth in a microwave dish. Add the garlic, parmesan and enough milk to cover the potato mix. Microwave for one minute stir for a creamy, light mixture - add more milk if necessary.

6. Heat four dinner plates. Chop parsley and garlic finely add grated lemon. Put a good spoonful of potato mash in the middle of each plate. Place one or two pieces of osso busso on top. Turn up the heat and reduce the juices in the pan until caramelized. Pour over the meat, dust with gremolata and serve.

Serves four.

It is not by chance that two-star Michelin graded Noma in Copenhagen is at the top of the S.Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. – up from 3rd place last year and 10th place in 2008. Rene Redzepi, partner and Noma head chef, is food ambassador for the Nordic Council of Ministers’ New Nordic Food program. Last year he won the Chef’s Choice Award, when the head chefs of 50 top restaurants nominated him the best.

Arctic Reaches

New Nordic Food signifies the “purity, freshness, simplicity and ethics” of the Nordic region, according to a manifesto drawn up by some of its top chefs and food professionals, who promote the use raw materials from as far north as the Arctic reaches of Greenland. In a few short years, cold-water fish for instance has taken the gourmet restaurants of France by storm.

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.

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.

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.

NFA released its first fraud indicator last week, estimating fraud costing Britons £30bn ($A54.38bn) a year, 58%, or £17.6bn, of which was public sector fraud, but Jim Gee, a director of counter fraud services at chartered accountants MacIntyre Hudson and chair of the Centre for Counter Fraud Studies, put it much higher, at more than £27bn.

He told Public Finance, a UK publication for public sector managers, the MacIntyre Hudson estimate was based on an average 4.57% shortfall across all public sectors,

Gee, who is former chief executive of UK’s NHS Counter Fraud Service, noted the NFA’s estimates of the fraud costs were ‘puzzling’ and the losses for the health service, which the NFA estimated at £263m ‘extraordinary’.

He said the fraud calculated by the NFA in UK’s National Health Services (NHS) was only 0.27% of its budget compared with a global average of 5.59% for health care systems, according to recent findings by Macintyre Hudson.

‘I would be very interested in how that was calculated. If we assume the NHS is at the bottom of the global range of losses and as good as or better than any other country then it should still be losing £3.3bn,’ he said.

Gee said the average losses to frauds in the NHS until 2006 when he left was just exceeding 4%. The NHS has not published figures of fraud losses since the end of 2006.

The NFA said their new indicator was the most accurate and comprehensive yet, but admitted that it was ‘likely to underestimate the full financial impact of fraud’, particularly in the private sector because figures were not available for some industry areas or data only included reported losses.

‘As improvements are  made in the quality and availability of fraud loss estimates, it is likely that the overall fraud estimate will increase,’ Anne Jefferies, NFA head of measurements and analysis, said.

Andrew Davis, Experian head of public sector fraud, said fraud in local authorities was much more widespread than implied by the NFA indicator, which concentrated mainly on social housing tenancy and single person council tax discounts.

Further Reading:

Read the story in Public Finance

Coles is the last of the major supermarket chains (MSCs) to introduced a national pricing policy after Aldi introduced it in April 2008, followed by Woolworths last year.

Ian McLeod, Coles managing director, said today the retailer would introduce the new measure in response to customer feedback that charging different prices on the same grocery item was “unfair”.

“From February 1, Coles will apply its lowest prices to more than 8000 grocery products including meat, seafood, dairy, deli and bakery products across the country and the remaining grocery products will be matched to our lowest prices in each state,” he said.

For the about 17,000 remaining products, Coles pricing would be made uniform within states to reflect supply arrangements, which were often made with statewide rather than national suppliers, the company said.

Tom Daunt, manager director - buying Aldi Stores, said there was no reason why people should not have clear and transparent information to make informed buying decisions.

“The practice of inconsistent pricing has been in place in Australia for far too long and we believe this is unacceptable,” he said.

“Aldi was able to introduce national pricing after just a few short years and there is no reason why the other major supermarket chains can’t follow our lead.”

He cited the 2009 CHOICE supermarket survey which found Aldi was 25% cheaper than its closest priced competitors. “And that is in the current environment of inconsistent pricing,” he said.

“Once all the MSCs have rolled out national pricing, Australian consumers will be better able to see how they can get the best value for money.”

He said Aldi had led the industry in a number of initiatives such as unit pricing, which it introduced in November 2007 before legislation forced the MSCs only introduced it.

Further reading:

Read the story in The Australian

The figures show the public sector accounted for most of the fraud - 58% of the total figure - while the private sector generated 31% of the fraud losses and fraud against individuals, 12%.

Tax fraud was by far the highest single area of fraud loss, estimated at £15.2bn - more than half of the total loss. At the Department of Work and Pensions, fraud loss was estimated at £1.1bn or 0.8% of total benefit expenditure.

In the private sector, the financial services industry acounted for the highest loss to fraudsters, estimated at £3.8bn of which more than £2bn was lost in insurance fraud and £1bn, to mortgage fraud. Fraud in credit cards, online banking and cheques accounted for most of the remainder.

Information provided by UK’s Association of British Insurers (ABI) reveals that, although the industry ’saved’ £730m by detecting fraud in 2007, between 3% and 5%, or £29.2m, was still paid out before the fraud was dedected.

Add to that, undetected fraud, which ABI estimates at £1.9bn - up 24% on 2006, and losses of £348m from organised insurance fraud, namely staged motor vehicle accidents, for a total of £2.08bn.

The consumer goods and manufacturing industries are estimated to have lost £1.3bn and £1bn, respectively. The technology, media and telecommunications industry recorded losses of £948m. Credit and debit card fraud was estimated as low as 0.1% of total transactions.

However, the estimates relating to private and voluntary sector fraud are likely to underestimate the total private sector amount.

The true extent of the fraud in the UK private sector relies on the availability of data and willingness to share the data with NFA’s fraud measure.

NFA noted fraud losses in the mortgage sector in particular during 2008 were much higher than the £150m the industry initially supplied to the NFA survey.

Subsequently, industry experts engaged by NFA agreed mortgage fraud in 2008 amounted to losses of at least £1bn.

In 2009, two mortgage lenders alone, Bradford & Bingley and Chelsea Building Society, which together hold only 4.8% of the UK lending market, identified fraud in their own organisations of up to £81m.

Accounting firm KPMG’s 2009 Fraud Survey 2009 predicts unprecendented levels of government spending “may usher in record levels of fraud, waste, and abuse”.

The survey reveals nearly two-thirds of US executives in the public and private sectors expect some form of fraud or misconduct to rise in their organisation.

And for those companies operating outside the US, increased investigation and prosecution of anti-bribery and corruption laws meant “employees and agents may trigger risks like never before”.

The KMPG European Fraud Survey 2009 shows more than half of executives, or 55%, expect corporate fraud to increase over the next few years.

According to Reuters, the Rudd Government’s revised scheme still remains far from certain while opposition parties remain deeply divided and some conservatives vow to vote against the laws regardless of the deal and some moving to delay the vote until February 2010′.

In a bid to secure the Opposition’s vital support, the Rudd Government put forward a compromise carbon-trading scheme which boosts compensation to big carbon emitters, coal companies and electricity generators while reducing the incentives to households.

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong said the additional expenditure measures would increase the cost by $7.01bn to 2019-20, while the household package will be reduced by $5.76bn.

The Australian Greens will oppose the scheme. During the debate in the Senate this morning, the Greens continued to criticise the Rudd Government and slammed the compromise scheme as a ‘dirty deal with dirty polluters’.

Green senator Christine Milne accused the Rudd Government for selling out. “It is payday for polluters today,” she said. “There is no commitment to 350 parts a million or getting rid of coal…(in fact) there is a determination to lock in coal till 2020.”

Australian Greens Leader, Senator Bob Brown said in the lead-up to the Senate debate: “The Rudd Government’s targets have failure written all over them. Yet the ETS legislation will lock them in until 2020 since any increase will trigger compensation claims worth billions of dollars.”

Ian Macfarlane, chief Opposition negotiator, said today the amendments to the scheme would help protect Australian jobs.

“We have got a very good package and I think we have an exceptional package. It’s a deal that will protect jobs and the environment in Australia,” he said this morning.

But the opposition’s former climate change spokesman, Andrew Robb, is understood to have told his colleagues the deal should not be supported, The Sydney Morning Herald reports.

Further reading:

Grass-root action against pollution lobby

Details of proposed CPRS changes

Read the story in The Sydney Morning Herald

The Rudd government, which was elected on a policy platform which included action on climate change, has proposed the introduction of a carbon trading scheme from mid-2011 in an effort to curb emissions, but laws for the scheme have stalled in the Senate.

GetUp, describing itself as ‘an independent, grass-roots community advocacy organisation’, is asking supporters for donations to pay for the ad which says 500,000 jobs are waiting to be ‘unlocked’ by the ETS.

The group says the ‘pollution lobby’ acting for the country’s biggest polluters are swamping parliament with over 100 lobbyists. It accuses the lobby for undermining Australia’s transition to a clean-energy economy and ’strong-arming’ politicians into giving them extra tax-payer funded handouts.

The Opposition is hopelessly divided on the issue, putting any meaningful action by the Australian Government on climate change at risk and leaving the possibility open for a double dissolution of Parliament.

In a deja vue of when he led the republic movement, Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull is plagued by a polorised flock. Ian MacFarlane, Opposition spokesman on emissions trading, is in despair over the National Party’s refusal to agree on any ETS, contrary to the National Farmers Federation which has been urging the Opposition to support it.

Any deal on a trading scheme now needs majority support of the Liberal MPs, who themselves are divided between those supporting action on climate change and those who believe it is a left-wing myth as revealed at ABC’s Four Corners program last week by Senate leader Nick Minchin.

One Liberal frontbencher was cited in The Australian, saying Senator Minchin ‘came across as a complete fruit loop’, while Western Australia Liberal Mal Washer said the senator ‘wouldn’t have a clue’ about what most Liberals thought about the issue of man-made climate change.

The government, which needs seven more votes to pass the scheme, is in talks with the opposition over amendments and according to The Sun-Herald of today, it has signalled preparedness to exempt farmers from the ETS in the hope this will enable the laws to pass before the Copenhagen summit.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd lashed out at the climate sceptics in his address to the Lowy Institute in Sydney, warning vested interests were hampering global action against climate change at the Copenhagen climate summit.

‘They are a minority. They are powerful, and invariably they are driven by vested interests,’ Rudd said. ‘They are powerful enough to threaten a deal on global climate change both in Copenhagen and beyond.

‘Their aim is to erode just enough political will that action becomes impossible. By hampering decisive action at a national level, they aim to make it impossible at an international level.’

The Opposition wants a vote delayed until after Copenhagen. Rudd said negotiations were continuing in good faith, but slammed the Opposition for delaying its final position seven times since late 2007.

‘It is an endless cycle of delay, and I am sure that with December almost upon us, the eighth excuse cannot be far away, which will be to wait until the next year or the year after until all the rest of the world has acted,’ Rudd said.

Further Reading:

Read the Four Corners transcript

Read The Australian story

Read The Sun-Herald story