My breakfast lifehack: Trouble spreading hard butter from the fridge? A cheese slice produces thin sheets that can be easily spread. Banal but effective.
Recent posts
The naked winemaker: Pierre Naigeon
If you go down to the Yarra Valley today… Well a couple of months ago you may have seen this Frenchman stark bollock naked jumping out of a vat full of Shiraz. He was cherry red. As he described this to a lunch of wine journalists, plus flamboyant society hairdresser Lillian Frank, nobody flinched. That surprised me. Australian winemakers have become the masters of vast steel vats, mechanical agitation, or at least having the modesty to don a wetsuit before […]
In The Black: Share and share alike
When workers own shares in their companies they are motivated and loyal. So why are Australian companies failing to catch on? From In The Black November 2005 Power to the people. Get them to buy shares. Even better, give them shares in the company for which they work. The staff are no longer revolting. They’re quite nice now, work harder and everybody is richer. That’s how it works in the UK and the US, where employees are raking it in. […]
My first blog book: Julie & Julia
Until she died, I’d never taken too much notice of Julia Childs. And I’d cerainly never heard of Julie Powell even though I had more than a healthy interest in food and blogging. That was until I tripped over Julie & Julia: 365 days, 524 recipes, I tiny apartment kitchen. What surprised me was how much I enjoyed this book. Julie, 30, embarks on the challenging of cooking every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year. […]
Tomato flu
Confused? Achy nose?You could have Tomato flu.
The Australian: Emitch
Original unsubbed copy for The Australian. October 2005. In business timing is everything. During the dot.com boom it seemed like the best idea ever to launch agency specialising in buying advertising space online. Emitch, a spin-off from real world media buyer Mitchell & Partners, listed on the ASX in March 2000, and soon after the market crashed. Its shares fell 27.5 per cent to 87 cents then plunged. The next three years were spent with its share price bumping along […]
The Bulletin: Whose restaurant rules?
My story about the egos and clashes behind the restaurant awards season appears in The Bulletin (that’s our local version of Newsweek) today. The brief agreed with news editor Tim Blair was end of restaurant awards guide season, bruised egos etc. Innocent questions stimulated an interesting response from the people behind The Age (our local daily broadsheet) Good Food Guide. Shannon Bennett’s Vue de Monde I’d heard was upgraded from two to three hats but The Age had only checked […]
The Bulletin: Whose restaurant rules?
My story about the egos and clashes behind the restaurant awards season appears in The Bulletin (that’s our local version of Newsweek) today. More background to this story over at Tomato. Flaming egos and acerbic critics. Why, it must be the annual restaurant awards. Ed Charles reports. Melbourne chef Shannon Bennett won’t be banning the critics. But he might ban you. Especially if you don’t keep a reservation or are rude or shove his staff. Bennett is the hottest chef […]
Cooking the old fashioned way: pasar gato por liebre
Image pinched from the Humane Society International.For obvious reasons I don’t have my own picture for this entry for the Cooking the Old fashioned way quarterly event. I’ve long been fascinated by the kinds of old-fashioned foods that we no longer bother eating.At mama Tomato’s, in country England not too far from the university city of Cambridge, almost everything is for the picking. Plums are eaten from the tree and eventually made into jam and chutney. Sloes and sugar are […]