What are the essential food and drink experiences in London at the moment? I arrive back for the first time in four years, and the first as a food blogger, on the 10th September, leaving on the 22nd (Right now I’m sweating it out in Dubai for some reason). Part of my visit is for work to conduct some interview for a book but so easily it can become entwined with pleasure. But it’s a whirlwind tour where I also […]
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A Quiet Achiever
From SBS Food For something that is more or less an underwater snail, the humble abalone has done pretty well for itself. Twenty years ago a Chinese grocer would pay a few dollars for a barrow load of the ugly blighters known as ‘Muttonfish’ picked out of Port Phillip Bay. Nowadays this mollusk, or to be more precise Haliotidae, is prized by chefs to the extent that many regions including South Africa, the Middle East and California have overfished and […]
Trunk stop
From GQ Australia How does a heritage-listed synagogue become one of Melbourne’s hottest new restaurant-bar venues? Ed Charles finds out from Trunk’s Nick Kutcher. It was the irresistibly enticing site that drew Nick Kutcher into the restaurant business, a block big enough to build a skyscraper on, half of it open land. But the site on the corner of Little Lonsdale and Exhibition streets – with a heritage listed 1859 synagogue – was bought for its charm rather than its […]
Web application driven by a need to remember
From The Australian, Entrepreneur THERE are many reasons to start a business. Some people are driven by money. Others by passion. But for Omar Kilani, of Sydney, the Remember The Milk web application came about simply because of a personal need and his passion for programming, which he has followed since he was 13. He wanted to organise himself, and his business partner and fiance Emily Boyd was an enthusiastic user of to-do lists. In 2004, Kilani relished the programming […]
Crowd-sourcing can help with content, design, feedback
From The Australian, Entrepreneur TO some extent, Web 2.0 or the read-write web as it is known, is all about crowd sourcing. The idea is that the crowd can create content for you, give feedback and even have a hand in designing products they really want. It’s a tricky concept for many companies to master but the latest generation of crowd-sourced websites such as 99designs and Gooruze are making it safe for businesses to participate. There are many definitions of […]
How to cook like a chef
Cover Story: Herald Sun extrafood Top chefs tell Ed Charles their secret tips on how to cook like a professional. Cooking a meal by simply following a recipe is one thing,but turning it into a masterpiece by adding a few secret tips and tricks can take your cooking to another level. As extrafood discovered, sometimes it’s the most obvious things – such as properly preheating the oven – that can make the biggest difference. We’ve managed to get some of […]
Confessions of a cheese judge
First off I was late, dawdling this rainy morning. I missed the briefing and my lab coat was too small even for a ten year old child. On a bright note though, the hairnet was just perfect and I was wearing the correct all-terrain underwear and cashmere socks. I’m at the 2008 judging for the Melbourne Specialist Cheese Show (open Sunday 17th August 2008 at Crown) run by the Australian Specialist Cheesemakers Association. I admired chief judge Ian’s red hairnet […]
The Strangest Food in China
From SBS Food Ed Charles takes a tour of Beijing’s culinary underbelly and uncovers the seven strangest foods you’ll find in the Olympic City. You can encounter some pretty weird food in Beijing. But mostly it is designed for tourists more than the locals. “For westerners going to China for the Olympics, if they want to they can go and eat silk worm cocoons and go and eat penises and snakes,” says author and Chinese food expert Fuchsia Dunlop. “But […]
Black gold
From SBS Food The hunt is on! Ed Charles joins Victorian truffle farmers as they seek out the heady aromas of this most mysterious funghi. Spice, is two weeks from pup, but the two year old Australian Shepherd, whose pedigree name is Mazasuka Star Struck, wants to do the job she was trained for. That is to sniff out the tuber melanosporum or black Perigord truffle, an exotic fungi that lives symbiotically with the roots of oak and hazelnut trees […]