If you can't find goat's milk fromage blanc...

It's time I moved on from my rant about alot [sic]. I could begin this entry with a foray into my town's Eagle Boys and their pizza's on special (brandished across a sign perched beside a busy roundabout, thus increasing my chance of death by ectopic apostrophe). But it's late in the evening and I should be sensible with my heart rate.

The spotted apostrophe monster makes me angry. Quite often. A lot. This makes it such a joy to read a glossy magazine with all its apostrophic morsels intact. And it is from such a magazine that I'm going to share a little something which all ended in tears. Joyous tears of the hysterical, body heaving variety. Let us go back nearly seven years to when I am in Melbourne. Of course, it is wet. Winter is vile with seeping cold yet, as ever, heady with culture and cheap takeaway. It is on such cracker black, bruised and soggy nights I cosy up in my Box Hill kitchen, unable to sleep, to pore over recipe books or posh, high-end travel and entertainment magazines (stolen from my psychaitrist's and doctor's waiting rooms in general. Oh, and once from the mechanic at the end of the street). In such an environment, it is easy to indulge in recipes you know you'll be able to find the ingredients for, if not visit the chef's actual restaurant over the next weekend. I believe such heady reading late at night is, as a good friend of mine puts it, 'food porn'. I've spent a significant proportion of my late night adult life fondling the folds of recipe books and gourmet magazines. No fuss (no mess) no calories. And all those deliciously onomatopoeically charged words such as the portly portabello mushroom, fennelguk? fennelgeek? And caperberry.

So here I am now, nearly seven years on from abandoning my rainy post in Melbourne and running out of money in Karratha - not necessarily completely unserendipitously, the spot in Australia most diametrically opposed to Melbourne - a vast outpost and timeworn rock shop. This place is Hot. Red. Separated from the known universe by the horizon. Which is to say, if you walk to the end of my street, you will fall off. Not the sidewalk, but the end of the universe.

Karratha, gateway to awesome natural wonder, awesome landscapes and awe ore (one might call this region a Chinese fortune cookie), is in close proximity to an array of yearned for features, such as the long drop wonder of Karijini gorges, limitless space crowded only by saltbush and good drying days, and that stunning midnight glitterati - our not so humble, multi billion dollar gas plants.

Sadly, however, there is other stuff we can't boast of. Take, for instance, this food porn folly. It's all well and good for me these days to pick up a gourmet travel magazine (sure my dentist doesn't mind) or a fancy schmancy food glossy. It's another thing to find half of its contortionesque ingredients lists in our shops. I once managed to salivate myself into a puddle over a wagyu beef burger recipe with organic this, hand fed that, and pickled whatsihooses. And subsequently did the hard yards to build the thing. But with our range of grocery options extending to Cs and Ws, the burger was yummy. For a burger. Beef - beef. Bacon - not organic. Cheese...tasty. Not gruyere. Etc. Beloved loved it. He loves anything he doesn't have to cook. So, on my cooking nights (the 364 days of the year we don't eat a tuna sandwich) I am exulted and praised beyond Anne Tenney's wildest imaginings. Amazing how loved one can feel when one places microwaved boxed barra with hot chips and vinegar on the humble dinner plate.

But, back to the porn. It's Sunday night. All on my lonesome. On the couch. Begin canoodling with a five year old copy of Vogue Entertaining. It's plastered with mini Italian gelatis, coated in pastel chocolate and always worth a drool. My old favourite mag. And I indulge, flick through luscious culinary exploits. Then I am halted by a crazy, if not ironically logical thought: after all these years, isn't it about time I cook something out of this magazine rather than just licking the pages?

Flicking through, I arrive at a comfortable page. One whose recipes correspond with a delightful tale of fresh, tropical summers and nostalgic ocean breezes. Close enough to home I thought. Except we have mudflats, strong winds and the occasional cyclone to decrease summer nostalgia and electricity supplies on occasion (although not this year). Anyway, it felt right, this fare. So I grabbed pen and paper and began to peruse the ingredients list of a simple looking salad with green beans. It incorporated seven ingredients, the easiest of which to source were salt and pepper. Lemon peel was also fine. Lemon infused olive oil - could even manage that in Karratha (I know this because a couple of weeks ago I thought everything I stirfried was off because it would suddenly take on this heady left-in-the-pantry-for-a-decade whiff in the wok. Nope. Took me a while to work out I'd accidently bought lemon olive oil rather than the plain variety and, in a fit of pique, binned the lemon olive oil in melodramatic ferocity for its clever tactic of destroying several of the previous week's meals.)

But with Pilbara eyes rather than market extravaganza Melbourne ones, things went a little haywire after this. I was offered options for the beans: Roman beans, round beans or runner beans. Hmmm...I mused...then there are my options: slightly bruised from the truck beans, frozen beans or, out on a limb here, baked beans. I was tending towards the latter if for nothing but the joy of feeling I was pushing the culinary envelope just like this Vogue. Ok. So, we're going baked beans rather than Roman ones. Tick.

Now, what to do about the stoned olives (is that really the phrase? Like they've been marinated and bottled in weed for a year or two?). The recipe asked me to use Niçoise or Ligurian olives. Now, first of all, any ingredient with a word containing a squiggled cedilla ç was bound to be unnatainable in the Pilbara. I mean, we're talking about a place where such beautiful French street names as Legendre are necessarily pronounced 'Legendah. Mate.' And what does a Ligurian olive look like? More to the point (and this is getting weird now) what does a stoned Ligurian olive look like? I hear that and I'm thinking of an imported roadside worker, melting in the heat and out to it after a big night at Trawlers (No kidding, that's was the name of our nightclub. Thank goodness, they've just renamed it). Again, my choices for olives were less...exotic: Bottled or unbottled. And less onomatopoeically luxurious than stoned, I could buy them pitted...or unpitted.

Then we're down to the final ingredient. And here's where my spiral into a mise en abyme of possessed hilarity gained its ultimate and final momentum:

Please use '80 grams of goat's milk fromage blanc.'

Fromage blanc. Is that like creme fraiche? Or cheese? I wondered if I might be able to find some goat's milk Fruche. Even if not goat's milk flavour, would strawberry Fruche do? Or lemon lime (to complement the olive oil)? Or, what about that pomegranate Fruche I'm sure I saw? Suffice to say, Karratha and goat's milk fromage blanc - not a happening thing.

BUT -

Joy of joys, this ingredient was suffixed with an friendly little *. The Asterisk of Hope in my baked bean, black olive and pomegranate salad. This asterisk would hopefully offer me a fair trade. So I'm thinking...creme cheese? Marscapone cheese even? Or maybe just Bega? So I scan the page, hunting down directions for assembling this salad until I reach the recipe's end. And there it is, in a flourish of italics, my salvation. Awaiting confirmation of the simpler option, I read the asterisked postscript:

*If you can't find goat's milk fromage blanc, substitue for marinated Persian feta...

WTF?

Suffice to say, I laughed. Aloud. A lot. Then I closed my Vogue Entertaining and toddled out to the kitchen pantry for a late night snack. Baked beans, of course. Followed by a punnet of Fruche. And I went to bed, spent and satiated. And slept soundly, dreaming of stoned Persian goats nibbling on olive pips somewhere far, oh so very far, from here.