Food & Drink. Travel. Est. 2005
I’m here with two friends who once (or twice) a year fill their freezers with antelope and warthog. They are not trophy hunters and no antelope horns adorn their walls. They are nose-to-tail eaters who will also cure skins for the floor and use the intestines for sausage casings. The killing of animals for meat is an emotive issue. Most of us shop at Supermarkets and buy neat bright read packs of meat produced in industrial quantities presented on polystyrene […]
lemon polenta (or maize, mielie, mealie or grits) porridge is simple and nutritious and a brilliant way to start your day served with fresh berries, yoghurt and toasted nuts.
Custard tarts – pastel de nata – are deeply embedded in Portuguese culture. They are everywhere. Bakeries around the world try and replicate them. And even home cooks have a shot. I’ve eaten them in Melbourne but they never enchanted me like they did in Portugal. Spending a month chilling out in Lisbon, barely a day went by when I didn’t have one or two of these tarts. It became my personal mission to find the best in town. These […]
Have you ever wondered about the fish you buy? Where it comes from and how it all works. The Thursday before Easter I arrived at the Melbourne Wholesale market to see it in action. The cover picture is of tuna, the tail cut so the buyers can check the colour of the flesh, the key sign of quality. In the Sydney market the fish are auctioned electronically. Here the traders set the price and haggle with the buyers via text, […]
I’m going to give you a list of my top 7 truffle recipes. But first I want to tell you about my first intoxicating, dense and aromatic truffle of the season. Unexpectedly on Sunday Simon and Bernie from the pop-up truffle shop Madame Truffles (re-opening June 22 2012) returned from foraging in NSW with a giant truffle larger than an iphone and a pretty decent sized one as a gift for me. They were straight out the ground as fresh […]
Which of the above cheese aren’t you allowed to eat? If they were made from raw milk then none. But if proposals put forward by Food Standards ANZ (FANZ) go through only the hard and semi hard cheeses. And you won’t be able to buy (legally) raw milk altogether. The world is divided as to whether unpasteurized milk products are dangerous or not because all sorts of allegedly nasty bugs live in it. Really though it isn’t necessarily a problem […]
Check out on Youtube how the cutaways were made. Finally, $484.60 9including postage) and after a three month wait Modernist Cuisine has arrived. I’ve bought it so you don’t have to but also to add to my collection of books by Peter Barham, Herve This and Harold McGee that examine the science of cooking, as I mentioned in May. Out of all of them McGee’s On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (which you can buy […]
Donna is the winner of Ed’s KitchenAid competition. She blogs at Donisbaked and here puts her shiny new machine, which was supplied thanks to Kitchenware Direct, a whirr. So me winning a KitchenAid is old news, but what is new is the pure pleasure using the machine at home is. I’m getting out all my “shelved” recipes that require lots of aeration and creaming etc etc and lining them up ready to bake. If you are thinking about buying a […]
A: It didn’t used to but increasing in Australia we are buying into the idea of Fairtrade, as these charts show. This week Harriet Lamb director of the Fairtrade Foundation in the UK is visiting Australia, a leader in certification of the ethical sourcing of products. The fact is that Europe has been leading the world in sourcing Fairtrade goods for some 18 years while in Australia in the past five or six years we have only come to buy […]