Picture this. It’s a grey, drizzly Sunday evening. Friends and lovers (or both) chat among themselves in your living room. You’re all hungry, horny, and in need of a hearty meal to feed your guests.
Enter Good Food & Nice Nudes, a 92-page cookbook featuring sticky, saucy, sensual food porn from Melbourne sex worker Peach Kreamer.
“In another life I was Martha Stewart,” Peach says. And while it is difficult to picture the US cooking icon decked out in a leather strap-on sucking a banana, Peach does emphasise the joy of food and friends. The book highlights the love language of many bright young (and not so young) things: sharing meals with hardcore abandon.
Take this beef and mushroom pie, for example, with its (elaborately decorated) golden crust and a deliciously moist, meaty filling. It’s the perfect meal when you’re expecting company, or to savour by yourself.
Beef and mushroom pie
Prep time: 15 minutes
Cooking time: 2.5 hours
Ingredients:
Pack of dried porcini mushrooms
1 1⁄4 cups of boiled water (to soak the porcini boys)
1kg chuck beef, cut into cubes
A generous splash of vegetable oil
1 onion
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 bunch celery
4 carrots (1 diced, 3 cut into chunks)
1⁄3 cup of flour
Just over half of a big can of Guinness
2 cups of beef stock
Shitload of thyme (a few sprigs)
Bay leaves
Couple of handfuls of diced bacon
Swiss brown mushrooms (just cut in half)
Enough puff pastry to cover pie (2–3 sheets)
1 egg yolk
Method:
For the filling, place porcini mushrooms in a bowl, add hot water and leave to soak for at least 30 minutes. Strain mushrooms and reserve soaking liquid. Roughly chop up the porcini mushrooms.
Sprinkle beef with salt and pepper. Heat oil in a large, heavy-based pot and add half the beef. Sear all sides, then remove and repeat with the remaining pieces. Set beef to the side.
Turn the stove down to medium-low. If the pot is looking dry, add more oil. Add onion and garlic. Cook for a couple of minutes then add finely chopped carrots and celery, and cook until all soft and sweet. Add carrot chunks and cook for another few minutes. Add flour and stir through. Add ale and beef stock and stir to dissolve the flour. Add thyme, bay leaves, chopped porcini, the reserved porcini soaking liquid (don’t tip in gritty bits that have settled at the bottom though) and the seared beef.
Turn the heat up slightly, mix, bring to a simmer, then cover. Adjust heat so it is simmering gently. Cook for 1 hour and 45 minutes or until beef is tender.
Meanwhile, cook bacon over high heat until golden. Remove and keep those gorg bacon drippings in the pan. Add mushrooms and cook until golden all over. Return the bacon bits and toss to coat mushrooms, then stir through the stew.
Simmer stew, uncovered, for 15 minutes or until mushrooms are tender. Then remove from stove and cool.
For the pie, preheat oven to 200°C.
Pour stew into a pie dish and top with puff pastry. Brush pastry with egg yolk, put a few slits in the surface and do your decorations, then bake for 30–35 minutes, until deep golden.
Rest for 5 minutes or so before serving.
Good Food & Nice Nudes ($120) by Peach Kreamer is available now via Big Cartel.
