Padron peppers: are you game? A box arrived in the post, a big one, packed with padron peppers. They were plump, bright green ones, picked the day before by Garry Crittendon, the pioneering winemaker on the Mornington Penisula, who first planted vines there in 1982 at the age of 28. These padrons were far larger and more vibrant in color than any I’ve seen for sale in some of the better food stores and in Melbourne’s markets. They looked and […]
Cooking
Modernist Cuisine and how to buy cookbooks
There are plenty of reasons to buy Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking. The trouble is that all Australian retailers rip us off so I would, when it becomes available, buy it online If you are unfamiliar with the book, it is the brainchild of former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold who holed himself up in a 1670 sq m warehouse with assorted chefs, geeks, scientists, cheffy geeks and food journalists to create the definitive six volume […]
Last of the summer jam
It’s late in the season and the blackberries are almost over. I love this time of year. It’s a time for blackberry and apple pie. And jam making, a wonderful way to preserve any fruit. We used to stomp through blackberry bushes making prickly mazes, hooking far flung fruit with walking sticks collected from dead relatives. We’d return home grazed, pricked and with purple fingers and lips from scoffing the sweet fruit. Jam making should be simple – for most […]
The great Easter bun hunt
I love this time of the year because I can indulge in hot cross buns. I love their spiceness combined with the sweetness of raisins on soft buns. Naturally, things have come a long way since I first ate them as a kid toasted, spread with a thick chunk of butter (we always at Lurpak slightly salted in those days) with home made blackberry jam and indoctrinated by Catholic brothers. Nowadays there are so many variations from chocolate chip to […]
Simple beetroot, carrot and goats cheese salad
A salad fit for @tammois’ pagan house burning tonight. One of the secrets of good cooking is to know how to pack flavour into a dish. In the bad old days of my childhood the school dinner lady boiled the crap out of beetroot and doused it in some kind of industrial vinegar. Needless to say I hated this particular root vegetable. But now I’ve come to love it. First, I don’t cook it but roast the beet, which concentrates […]
The top 10 Australian cheeses
Billy the goat cheese This is a guest post by Laurie Gutteridge. He runs the Taste Cheese website and blog and the splendid cheese room at Innocent Bystander in the Yarra Valley. You can also follow him on Twitter as taste_cheese. (If you have something on value to say I’m open to guest postings – send an email. Ed) My criteria when looking for a cheese? It starts with the understanding that a holistic view encompassing everything from the farming […]
Curry: At lunch with Atul Kochhar
Spice crusted scallops, grape and ginger dressing You can’t beat a good curry. The question is in Australia, where can you find a good curry? Some 15 years ago there were hardly any curry houses and even though now they are spotted around everywhere, few offer a really great dining experience. Usually what we are served is anonymous cuts of meat in generic curry sauces heated up to order. It’s miles away from the wonderful dining experiences of other ethic […]
Heirloom – one foam too far
Heirloom looks great but the food needs to be simpler. The best French chefs are Japanese nowadays, they say. But they aren’t French they are Japanese. They are just cooking French-style with the addition of Japanese ingredients. Meanwhile, the best French chefs are now open in Japan. They rock. Or at least Michel Bras does, the man who is one of the inspirations for local, sustainable super-natural cuisine several decades before Noma had even been dreamt of. And now this […]
Simply garfish
These garfish, with their long beak-like noses are stunning glistening, shiny fish. There aren’t the cheapest in the markets but at under $17 a kilo right now they aren’t the most expensive fish either. The white meat is delicate and the best way to cook them is to keep it simple. Here we rolled them in seasoned flour and pan fried them. That’s all. And they were served with a squeeze of lemon, the new season’s asparagus, herbed butter and […]