Entries Tagged 'Contributors' ↓

Nigel dropped out of medical school to study art and spent much of the 1970s as a Maoist conceptual artist in New York. How cool is that? He has been having more fun than he really should have ever since. His visually obsessed blog is artwranglers and he’s my boss, so behave.

Pamela Faye is a nice girl with a great appetite for the simple pleasures of life. A careless but passionate cook, her culinary specialties tend towards the northern Americas, and she regularly inflicts delights such as pumpkin pie and banana/walnut/maple muffins on those in her immediate orbit. What she lacks in biting wit and gourmet cooking skills she makes up for with lashings of enthusiasm, sincerity and saturated fats.

Pamela Faye also loves a road trip. Her passionate obsession with recording the back-stories of historical films and photographs is the justification for her present journey, which will be taking her from Canberra to Alice Springs, and then off the bitumen and into to the Aboriginal communities of the Ngaanyatjarra Lands in Western Australia.

Inspired by the thought that there may be some as yet undiscovered relationship between digestion and direction, Pamela Faye will be documenting her eating encounters along the way. If a food-frontier exists somewhere to the north-west of the truffle-oiled, baby-rocket fuelled, organic goat-cheesy world of south-eastern Australian gastronomy, she’s determined to find it.

Pamela’s journey begins here.

ETD 7 days…

As the day of my departure looms closer, signs of pre-trip anxiety are beginning to leak out of me and forebode a chaotic week ahead. As if irrational dreams and inexplicable tears are not enough, this morning I put my expensive Italian stove-top coffee maker in the microwave (instead of on the stove top where it rightly belongs). I zapped it on high for at least a minute before I realised what I had done. Amazingly only the plastic knob suffered, now resembling a charcoalled marshmallow.

The plums are rotting on the tree and the yard is beginning to smell like cheap Spanish wine. No time to jam myself (!), so I salvaged what I could and took them over to Mother to deal with.

Family farewell lunch today, during which I ate enough carbs to see me through to Alice Springs. This blog could be over before it even began. My contribution to lunch was a bakers dozen of some banana walnut muffins (no maple today, feeling a bit povo). They’ve come out rather nicely – good to know that even when all else goes to shit my muffins still rise to the occasion. Mother’s chocolate cake was delicious, if a little wobbly. And yes, those are Ken Done place mats…

(Click photos to embiggen)

Obama tattoos are old news already, so why was I surprised to see Obama Foodorama, “A Daily Diary of The Obama Foodscape, One Byte At A Time”? The intertubes really does have space for everything.

For starters, there’s the wonderful MFK Fisher’s Alphabet for Gourmets at Gourmet magazine, via Metafilter. Here’s part of “C is for cautious”

A complete lack of caution is perhaps one of the true signs of a real gourmet: he has no need for it, being filled as he is with a God-given and intelligently self-cultivated sense of gastronomical freedom. He not only knows from everything admirable he has read that he will not like Irish whisky with pineapple chilled in honey and vermouth, or a vintage Chambertin with poached lake perch; every taste bud on both his actual and his spiritual palates wilts in revulsion at such thought. He does not serve these or similar combinations, not because he has been told, but because he knows.

So if I decline something because it will upset my spiritual palate, you won’t be upset, will you?
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Pottering around the kitchen on Wednesday afternoon I heard Joanna Savill talking about restaurant reviewing on Alan Saunders’ By Design. (And so did Rita of Eating Hobart).

Savill is Co-Editor of the The Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Food Guideand has actually had dinner with a food blogger. Fancy that! But what does she mean by “a food blogger”? I transcribed the relevant bit of the interview, starting after Alan Saunders asks her if she takes notes at the table: she reacts strongly, saying no despite the fact that “half the world is a food blogger these days and people seem to be all around me taking notes and photographing and doing everything else with their meal. I think that discretion is the better part of valour“.

(Where valour comes into the role description of a restaurant reviewer is not exactly clear, but I’m snarking now.) Savill says that if she’s desperate to remember something precisely she’ll send herself a text or sit hunched in the loo scribbling into her moleskine. The conversation continues:

Alan Saunders – Yeah, well, I know people who do that [take notes at the table]. I take the view that if you and I are having dinner and I take out a notebook, well this could be a business meeting, I could be keeping notes not to do with the food.

Joanna Savill – Look, absolutely. But I can tell you I once went to dinner with a food blogger, you know people who, who, go out to restaurants and photograph it and then write all about it online, put it online, and there’s a huge community of people doing that these days, and he proceeded to photograph everything that moved in the restaurant and to take notes at the table and we had the whole restaurant galvanised. (Alan exhales!) And I was just – I wanted to hide under the table, actually, you really don’t want to stand out, that’s the bottom line.

Phil Lees of The Last Appetite opened his recent post on food blogging as Wunderkammer by saying:

More than occasionally I wonder what is food blogging and how can it continue to differ (and differentiate itself) from other media.

It’s going to be pretty hard for that differentiation to occur in the minds of food mass media professionals, it seems. It seems that they only see two kinds of food blogs – the cheese sandwich variety or sites that review restaurants but don’t need to observe the same kind of strictures that professional journalists do (other than legal ones, of course).

To me the issue is clearly one of differentiation – if it hasn’t happened already, there’s a whole taxonomy of food blogs that will make a nice thesis for someone one day. I wouldn’t mind it being me, but I can’t come up with the $27,500 that the University of Adelaide and Le Cordon Bleu charge for their Masters degree in Gastronomy. Yes, $27,500.

I do read some review-type blogs, and some recipe-type blogs, some cook-the-book blogs, some food-history blogs, some just-because-they’re-local and some smart-people-obsessed-with-food blogs. And about eighty others, from time to time. What keeps me coming back is snappy writing and a clearly considered point of view. There’s not a lot of that about in the broadsheet lifestyle inserts.

As for reviews – I almost never do them here because with two small kids I don’t eat out much. However I can offer some advice from Saturday night’s dinner at Sammy’s Kitchen in Canberra – Do Not Order the Ma Po Tofu. It’s shocking.

You can download or stream the By Design program here. Skip forward to about 43 minutes for this segment (then go back and hear about designing Orang Utan enclosures).

Fluffy As A Cat is a disgruntled worker bee who secretly harbours a dream in which the whole world simultaneously realises she is the Earth planet’s only hope for survival. Her superpowers include a naive fearlessness of all things tech related, the ability to turn a jumbly chaos of things into an organised and pretty arrangement of things, and a staunch refusal to admit that there will one day be an occasion where she falls off her motorbike.

Since discovering Facebook, Fluffy has become an ex-blogger, but you can still experience the culinary joy at gut feelings, the gardening joy at A Rake’s Progress and the joy (or otherwise) of spa sex at Reasons You Will Hate Me. She still writes at DAMNdotcom.

Fluffy’s piece Fondant Icing: More Than Meets the Eye first appeared on Facebook.

Francis Xavier Holden is the best named blogger in Australia. If you don’t agree, you find me a better name than that.

He is the chief cook in his family, and describes his style as “what I call mainly Interesting Urban(e) Peasant. Not too fussy but tasty and originally designed for a family with teenagers and friends and people dropping in. Although teenagers have left and aren’t even teenager any more.”

Fortunately for him, one of the ex-teenagers now lives in Taiwan, where he gets to visit and eat. He blogs on matters ranging from his great musical loves to how much three quarter length pants piss him off at From a LAN Downunder, where his recipe for Red Meat Curry first appeared.

Even though it’s spring time and the salads are getting a flogging and the BBQ is all cleaned up ready to rock and roll the nights are still cool enough to allow for the odd curry or soup or other winterish type dish – before we pack away the casserole pot for another 6 months.

It was 16 degrees this arvo when I decided “Bugger it – I’ll do my Red Meat Curry”. So off to Box Hill market I went. The kilo of rump already chopped was $9.90. It was chopped a bit smallish for me – I like bigger chunks in this dish but it would save me the slicing when I got home. I bought it from the Italian guys down the end as I don’t reckon the Asian butchers have got the beef under control. Worse with the lamb – I reckon the Asian guys don’t know anything about lamb and I suspect they don’t even like it. When it comes to pork and especially belly pork I head straight to the Asian guys. But tonight it’s Red Meat Curry. I have tried lamb as a substitute for this dish and it works ok. But beef is better.

Setup: Usually I would put Dr John Naw’lins on the speakers up loud while I’m cooking but tonight it was PM on Radio National.

Four medium brown onions roughly chopped.
Melt them down in a big pan on top of stove – a bit of brown don’t hurt just don’t burn them. When they are melted down a fair bit throw in about four good cloves of chopped garlic and a whole lot of chopped ginger. Continue to melt down for a while.

Have ready on a plate the spices:
2 teaspoon cumin seeds
2 teaspoon coriander seeds
2 teaspoons of turmeric
1 teaspoon of chilli powder
12 curry leaves
1 teaspoon of ground black pepper

Throw all these spices in the large saucepan on medium high heat and stir to brown off onions and melt them and toast up the spices and mix them.

When ready shovel out onto a plate and wait.

Slop more oil in the saucepan. I use Rice Bran Oil . Until exactly 5 minutes ago I thought it was healthier than Peanut Oil – now I’m not so sure. Get the oil hot – drop in half the red meat – not too much or it will stew. We are seeking to brown it here. Brown it. Then tip that half out on plate and brown other half.

Meanwhile you will have been warming the casserole bowl in the oven at around 220 degrees.

Throw meat and onions and spices into casserole and place in warm oven.

Get a large tin of Coles brand diced Italian tomatoes and open it up. Pour it into the saucepan used to brown the meat and smoke the spices. Deglaze the bowl and heat tomatoes. Grab about half a beef stock packet – I usually have half ones frozen in the freezer – and plonk it in the mélange. It’s not strictly Gunga Din but I like to splash a bit of salt in at this point. Depending on your tendencies you might like to chuck in a dollop or two of tomato paste – I don’t.

Slop a small amount of water in. Then pour it into the casserole dish what has the meat in it. Then whack it in the oven somewhere above 220C for two hours. Give it a stir every now and again.

I hardly need to tell you that this is best cooked slow and then left overnight before eating. That will make it taste mature and well integrated. But if your ungrateful unwashed unfed are like mine hanging around the kitchen saying “When’s it ready” then, like me, you will roll your eyes heavenward and sigh and you’ll serve it up on the night it’s cooked too.

OK. It goes with basmati rice. Plonk a measure for each person in the rice cooker and 1.5 of water for each measure. Sometimes I put frozen peas or sultanas in the rice mix prior to cooking. Squeeze a lemon into the rice cooker.

Ok it’s ready. Rice on plates with meat curry alongside it – not slopped on top please, some Patak’s Lime Chilli Pickle on each plate, a big drop of ordinary mild chutney on each plate as well and a big dollop of fresh Greek yoghurt. Or you can plonk it all on the table in separate serving bowls and yell out “It’s ready”.

All that’s needed is a fork and mouth.