Shinboners
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$2 to $3.50 per shank at the Queen Victoria market.
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After taking a few minutes to fill in a survey on restaurant service, I won dinner at Ezards at Adelphi. I've been to Ezards a few times, and it is a favourite restaurant of mine. However, I hadn't been there for about a year and a half, so I was looking forward to eating there again.
I started with an oyster shooter. My fiancee had the same, except that her oyster was replaced by silken tofu. The oyster/tofu is marinated in a mixture of ginger, mirin, and soy dressing, and it comes with a wasabi flying fish roe. You get a very nice hit of flavours in the mouth when you take the shooter. There are far worse ways to start a meal.
As an entree, I had a hiramasa kingfish tataki with ginger and black bean dressing, cucumber oil, and baby Asianc resses. I really love kingfish for its lovely firm texture and flavour. But this dish didn't quite work for me. Eating the fish by itself, and the flavour was fantastic. But eating it with the dressing, and the flavours overwhemled the fish. The dressing seemed to be too tart, and the balance of flavours wasn't quite right. I was disappointed by it.
My fiancee had the mushroom and herb tortelli with seared spinach, crispy taro, parmasan, and truffle oil. I had a taste of the mushroom and herb tortelli and it was stunning. The aroma of the mushrooms filled the nostrils and the flavour filled the mouth.
I have a general rule not to order the same dish twice running, but I will always make an exception for Ezard's crispy fried pork hock with chilli caramel, Thai basil, marinated beanshoots, and steamed jasmine rice. I really do believe that this is one of Melbourne's great signature dishes. My initial mouthful was disappointing. The meat seemed to be a bit dry and stringy. However, with subsequent mouthfuls, the joys of previous servings of this dish came back. The texture and flavour of the pork was a wonder to behold. There was that all important layer of fat that not only provided a degree of richness, but also provided the perfect partner to the crispy skin. Nonetheless, there was one persistent fault with this dish last night - the sauce was a touch bit too sweet. Like my entree, the balance of flavours seemed to be slightly out of kilter.
Meanwhile, my fiancee tucked into a Wagyu beef red curry with pumpkin, betel leaves, peanuts, lime, spicy hotand sour coconut salad and cucumber oil. It was a very good curry. The flavours were subtle and in balance. As you'd expect with Wagyu beef, the meat was tender - a melt in your mouth experience. However, I tend to wonder if there is any point in using something like Wagyu beef for something with flavours as strong as a curry. I feel that any other good quality beef that is slow cooked could do just as good (if not better if it's a more strongly flavoured cut of beef) a job than Wagyu beef. It should result in a dish that is just as good, but at a lower price. But then again, I guess that Wagyu beef is the fashionable thing to have on menus these days.
My dessert was the strawberry fromage frais cheesecake with butternut crunch and strawberry amaretto syrup. After initial thoughts that it was a little bit too sweet, I found it wonderful. It had the same texture as a creme caramel, firm but wobbly, and the flavour of the cheese and the strawberry were in balance.
The chocolate dessert is almost an inevitable choice for my fiancee, but the honeycrunch ice cream with toasted gingerbread, cinnamon oil, and sugar swirls is a happy exception for her. IT looked fantastic (as it always does), and she assured me that it tasted just as good.
The service at Ezards was, as in previous visits, top notch.
Overall, the food at Ezards was still very good, but there are flaws. Teague Ezard has been overseas doing other projects, but I hope that he starts to spend more time in his kitchen to iron out some of the problems I had with my dishes.
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New Neil Perry Cookbook
It's called "The Food I Love - Beautiful, Simple Food To Cook At Home". It's published by Murdoch in hardback, has 440 pages, around 200 recipes and lot's of pretty pictures. It's a really beautifully presented book. Readings have it in stock for $69.95, although I think the RRP is actually $85.
The book is in several sections; introduction, light breakfast, eggs, sandwiches, salads, soup, pasta and rice, seafood, meat and poultry, accompaniments, sauces and more, and desserts.
Each section opens with a couple of pages of personal observations of the food that the section is about. If you have "Rockpool" or "Simply Asian", you'll know what his writing style is like. If you don't, then I would describe it as very breezy and conversational. When he writes about a particular cooking technique, he'll slip in a few useful tips and hints. You may have read them all before, but if you're like me, getting a reminder isn't such a bad thing. He uses very little jargon. Then it's onto the recipes, and each one has more personal observations, followed by a list of ingredients, the method, and (I really do love this), variations on the recipe. There's probably not many recipes in this book that you wouldn't find in any other book, so on that score, you could easily live without it. But Perry's thoughts are always worth reading, and there is always value in that.
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I forgot to add that I also checked out the lunch and dinner menu prices at Bills2. They were very reasonable with plenty of dinner mains in the low to mid $20 range. I even saw a Wagyu beef burger at $18, although that makes me wonder just how thin the meat part of the burger might be.
Speaking of Wagyu, one of the Billy Kwong specials was a braised Wagyu beef brisket at (iirc) $39.
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Walking to the gates outside Tetsuya’s, a thought briefly crossed my mind that maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t going to belong in this restaurant. The gates are like those that you might find outside an embassy, and as they opened and we walked through, I could see men in dinner suits and I was thinking that I wasn’t dressed appropriately. But I was also feeling that we were going somewhere very special. Not much fazes me when it comes to restaurants, but I was starting to remember the times I went to Stephanie’s and Mietta’s, a sense of excitement and intimidation. The staff welcomed us, they were all smiles, and they quickly took us to our table. There are a few rooms at Tetsuya’s, and we were given a table in a small room. It had no more than six tables, catering to around sixteen diners. We could see outside to a beautiful Japanese garden, and our table was next to a built in set of cabinets. Inside the glass doors were pieces of pottery. Interestingly, the doors were numbered, with certain numbers missing due to Japanese superstition.
The menu:
Snow egg sandwich with caviar
Me: Tasmanian Pacific oysters with ginger and rice vinegar
Me: Tartare of tuna on sushi rice with avocado
My fiancée: Roasted peppers on sushi rice with avocado
Me: Tuna marinated in soy and mirin
Trevally with preserved lemon
Cold corn soup with basil ice cream
My fiancée: Char grilled tuna with tomato and olive
Soy glazed chicken wing with wakame
Cold corn soup with basil ice-cream
Me: Confit of petuna Tasmanian ocean trout with konbu, daikon, and fennel
My fiancée: Grilled barramundi with dwarf truffled peaches and bitter greens
Seasonal green salad
Ravioli of lobster and crab with shellfish essence
Twice cooked de-boned spatchcock with braised daikon and bread sauce
Grilled wagyu beef with Asian mushroom and lime jus
Musk melon
Orange and honey sorbet with black pepper
Strawberry shortcake
Blue cheese ice-cream with pear and sauterne jelly
Floating island with praline and vanilla bean anglaise
My fiancée and I had slightly different dishes, as noted. She would have loved to have enjoyed the same food as I had, but for the time being, we had to be careful with what she’s eating.
I really don’t want to go through the menu, dish by dish. Needless to say, the food was stunningly well executed. But I saw the evening as a journey on the possibilities of food. From the ridiculous simplicity of a slice of melon (a nice change from the sorbets many restaurants give to diners to refresh their palates) to the taste and structural brilliance of the confit of petuna Tasmanian ocean trout, the traditional oyster with a sauce (in this case ginger and rice vinegar) to the challenging blue cheese ice cream, you can only sit back and admire Wakuda’s mastery of his art. We did notice that a few diners set aside the odd dish, and for me, I wasn’t too endeared with the overly sweet floating island dessert. In many dishes, the tastes didn’t hit you right away, but instead, there was a far more satisfying slow opening up of flavour.
As strange as it may seem, but the one thing I remember the most about the dinner was the truffled butter. I have had truffles once before, and that was one thin slice amongst a dish of wild French mushrooms. Amongst my kid in a candy store joy over the mushrooms, I didn’t get the appeal of truffles. I have had truffle oil on dishes, but the flavour was too subtle for me to pick up. But here, I finally understood why people revere this food. Isn’t it ridiculous? Amongst all the joy of the food served at Tetsuya’s, my favourite was the bread and butter.
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Breakfast at Bills2
We went there twice over the weekend, both times for breakfast. On Saturday, much to my surprise, we got straight in, whilst on Sunday, we had to wait for half an hour. I'm a fan of Bill Granger's cookbooks, and I'm very happy to say that his breakfast food matches up to those glossy pictures in his books.
On Saturday, I had the ricotta hotcakes with bananas and honeycomb butter. It also came with maple syrup. Normally I'm not a fan of sweet breakfasts because of that metallic taste that can set in your mouth for half the day when they use too much sugar, but in this case, it wasn't a problem. The hotcakes were soft and creamy, and the fruit and butter made great companions. The food wasn't overly sweet, and the serving ensured that we didn't have to eat again until dinner. My fiancee had the corn cakes, which were one of her favourite breakfast foods when she lived in the United States. I had a taste and they were great, with the corn kernals being nice, plump, and sweet. It came with a serve of bacon, and something else that has skipped my mind right now. The orange juice was excellent, but the coffee (Grinders) was good without being great.
Onto Sunday and we both went for the scrambled eggs on toast with sides of bacon and spinach. I know that Bills is famous for their scrambled eggs, and they didn't disappoint. They were nice and fluffy, melt in your mouth kind of stuff. The bacon was good, it had a nice layer of fat, a little crispy around the edges, but the bacon flavour wasn't as strong as I prefer. The bread was very good, two thick slices on the plate. And the spinach was excellent. They were wilted in a little bit of olive oil and sprinked with some sea salt. Add a drop of two of lemon, and it was the best breakfast spinach that I've ever eaten. The coffee was much better this time around, so much so that I had two cups.
Both times, breakfast cost just under $50 for two. The service was efficient and very friendly.
We did take a wander around the area. Billy Kwong's is just a few doors away from Bills2. The place is tiny. I thought it would be small, but not as small as it was. I checked out the menu, and it looked a little bit pricey to me. Entrees were pushing $20, mains were over $30, the specials were within touching distance of $40. Of course, if we ate the food, we might think differently. There was another restaurant a few blocks away (I can't remember the name) that has taken its cue from BKs in its design and feel. We also found XO, and a glance at that menu had me disappointed that we didn't have an extra night or two in Sydney. The prices were more than reasonable with most entrees around $15 and plenty of mains in the $20 to $28 range. I did see one dish that I had at Rockpool, slightly modified, and on offer for $34.
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Anyone see last night's show? Surely Melbourne have to be eliminated now. It's unbelievable that they could run such a filthy restaurant, It just defies common sense, and with the recent food poisoning incidents at Alasya and Sofia's, you would have thought they would have been perfectly aware of hygene issues.
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Jamie's Kitchen was the better balanced show. The Ramsay show was fascinating but excruciating at the same time. I saw the first episode with an interesting collection of chefs - and all were agog/aghast at what they saw (this was the one with the young git calling himself a head chef who couldn't cook an omelette).
That Ramsay show was "Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares". I saw that one where the "head chef" couldn't cook an omlette. The woman that ran that restaurant tried to sue Ramsay because her restaurant didn't flourish after that episode was shown on TV.
Anyway, the Ramsay show I was thinking of was "Boiling Point". It was a behind the scenes documentary showing how Ramsay ran his restaurant.
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I went into Readings today and there are two re-releases. Christine Manfield's "Spice" is now out on paperback and Luke Mangan has combined "BLT" and "Luke Mangan Food" into one paperback edition. The prices are $50 and $35 respectively.
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Either just bung it in a hot (400F/200C) oven for about an hour and a half; let it then rest for half an hour.
I reckon resting the roast is a seriously underrated part of making a good roast. I've been to many of dinners where they did a roast, but it turned out dry as they didn't let the meat rest properly. Not only does it waste the meat, but it wastes all the preparation work.
Seven hour leg of lamg: the long time low temperature cooking results in super tender juicy meat, evenly cooked all through.Mmmm....seven hour leg of lamb....that is probably my favourite way of cooking a leg of lamb.
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Okay, okay - it's trashy tv, .
Not sure where you are going with this but my thoughts are for reality TV its got some legs.
I just have a general view that most reality tv shows have a large trash element to them. Put some unprepared people in front of a camera to try and prove themselves to a panel of experts and let's all laugh at the abuse they cop.
Having said that though, I reckon Matt Moran and Caterina Borsato are genuinely interested in helping the competitors with constructive criticism, but Patrick Collins is nothing more than a boor.
The new series has a much tighter and more interesting format. If there is an upside to reality tv - it has to be that it educates (usually by osmosis than intention) - and I think that the show can educate people a bit about food & the restaurant business.Yeah, that's a fair point. I thought Jamie's Kitchen did a good job of showing how hard it is to run a kitchen and start a restaurant. Whilst I haven't seen it myself, but some friends say that Gordon Ramsay's tv series was similarly as good.
As for the various teams - the ones that stand out at the moment as the last two standing are Adelaide & Brisbane (which is where the first round $ went)Those two teams have the advantage of having people who have worked as chefs. I'll be following the Brisbane team. I was very impressed at how the guy in that team not only did his own work, but helped and encouraged the non-chefs in their work when they did the "working in a professional kitchen" show. That won me over.
And as for the 'singles night' concept? Under which rock do these people dine?I was taken aback by that idea, but on reflection, it may not be too bad. If they do something like "speed dating", it might work. But putting four strangers on one table for the whole evening leaves too much chance of that table not enjoying the evening and never returning to the restaurant.
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Okay, okay - it's trashy tv, but I was too lazy to do much during Saturday afternoon. Anyway, they showed 2 episodes back to back, and in the first one, each team had to pitch their restaurant idea to a panel of 3 judges.
On the panel is Caterina Borsato from Cucina e Bar. One of the Melbourne team members starts his pitch with the comment that Melbourne's Italian restaurants weren't any good. Needless to say, it wasn't a good way to start.
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yes is'nt it amazing what people put up with. i brought in some of the peaches to work today to 'educate' some palates and try and get these people to try abit harder....
Stephanie Alexander had the issue nailed with her essay in the re-issuse of the Cooks Companion.
But I'm fairly optimistic that attitudes are changing for the better. About ten years ago, the Queen Victoria Market was struggling, but over the last five years or so, it has thrived. The number of street and farmers markets has surged, and I think that this indicates that people want to get closer to the original sources of their food. I also think that one surprising aspect of the markets is the number of young people that shop at these markets, and they do take the time to speak to the sellers about their produce. My fiancee and I love our time at the markets - we love chatting to, and learning from, the people that run our favourite stalls. Besides the great food at great prices, there is a sense of community and friendship that no supermarket could ever provide.
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Today's Epicure also had a feature article on meat and butchery, with a few comments on the Wessex breed of pig.
For those who can't get a hold of Epicure, here's the article:
http://theage.com.au/articles/2005/02/07/1107625102383.html
Feed them meat
February 8, 2005
Rare breeds, old breeds and whole, magnificent beasts: the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival celebrates flesh in all its forgotten glory. By Richard Cornish.
The pleasure of flesh seems to be attracting an increasing group of devotees. Slowly but surely, demand is growing for better-quality meat with more flavour and superior texture.
Recent years have seen the emergence of organic butchers, the appearance of old-fashioned "rare breeds" on restaurant menus and direct-to-the-door delivery of pre-packaged meat from the farm gate.
While these developments are still basically at cottage-industry stage, there appears to be plenty of people willing to explore and support diversity in the meat industry.
The focus of this new breed of meat lover, however, is not on the gluttonous consumption of huge quantities of animal flesh but rather on investigating issues of quality, respectful husbandry, provenance and traditional meat preparation and curing skills.
"Globally, there's a move back towards meat," says the creative director of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival and Epicure columnist, Matt Preston.
This year, 14 major festival events are based purely on meat, with many others containing a serious meat element. Enthusiastic chefs are creating tailor-made workshops and special dinners.
"In the US, for example, they are celebrating the blokey, meat-eating, unapologetic carnivore," Preston says. "What we have in the festival this year are events that get people thinking about meat. Why, for example, do some steaks cost $35 a kilogram and others $8? Where does our meat come from?"
Healesville chef Richard Hauptmann agrees with Preston. "We've lost that contact with our animals. Most of us eat prime cuts out of a plastic tray from the supermarket," he says. "As a kid, I watched the farmhands slaughter and butcher the sheep and cattle, then I'd watch Grandma cook the animals for the family and the workers. She had to use every part of the animal - there was not a scrap of waste."
Hauptmann is co-host of festival event Cure the Rare Beast (Sunday, March 13, 1pm), part of the program of Yarra Valley Slow Food events.
His partner for the day is Healesville butcher Ken Boeder. They plan to help revitalise old-fashioned butchery skills that were once common practice on farms and in butchers' shops throughout Australia.
Hauptmann and Boeder are starting with an old-breed large English black pig carcass, breaking it down and then curing three cuts.
"First we're going to pickle the neck," Hauptmann says. "It has great texture, especially when simmered in a stock with mirepoix, cider vinegar and spices. We'll then chill it in the stock to suck back in the juices. We're then going to slice it and serve it with pickles and bread."
They'll then move down the pig and salt and lightly smoke the pork belly. At the end of the day, they'll "clean up the scraps" by making a few coarsely ground Italian fennel-and-garlic sausages. "You don't want to waste a skerrick of these amazing old-breed pigs."
Another chance to sample old-breed pork will be at Bokchoy Tang with Real Taste - Traditional Meat (Wednesday, March 23, 7pm). The Melbourne arm of Slow Food, in conjunction with the Rare Breeds Trust of Australia, is highlighting the importance of genetic diversity in the Australian food industry by serving three endangered breeds of farm animals.
Anthony Dufty, from the Rare Breeds Trust, explains: "Rare breeds are farm animals that are no longer farmed in commercial quantities, so they are in danger of becoming extinct.
It may seem anathema to eat endangered species, but if we don't give the farmers a financial return for their animals, then they won't have an economic incentive to maintain long-term sustainable herds and flocks. The other notable fact is that these animals by and large taste so much better than commercial breeds."
Bokchoy Tang owner and executive chef George Qing is using rare-breed Wessex saddleback pork to make his hallmark dish, steamed Chairman Mao-style mussels and organic pork.
"It is so much more intensely and better flavoured than commercial pork. It has a distinctive, rich taste and a luscious fat component that is essential in highlighting the subtle nuances of the dish," he says through a translator.
Joining the kitchen on the night is guest chef Alan Harding, of Kenloch, a man familiar with rare-breed animals. He says: "The focus really needs to be on the meat, so I always cook these animals simply. The Lincoln breed of lamb I will be cooking has an amazing sweetness and a flavour that reminds me of lamb when I was growing up. This is real lamb."
He will be braising the shoulder whole and seasoning the meat with mushrooms and sweet vinegar.
The other guest chef, Anthony Fullerton from Paladarr, already has a whole side of rare-breed Scottish Highland beef dry-ageing in the cool room and will be preparing a four-way tasting plate including a braise and a carpaccio.
Up in the Central Highlands, near Daylesford, another two events have rare-breed animals on the menu.
Big Shed Wines at Glenlyon will be grilling various prime cuts of Scottish Highland beef on the barbecue (Sunday, March 20, 12.30pm-4pm).
Meanwhile, across the hills at Bullarto, the gates are opening for the Fernleigh Farms Open Day (Sunday, March 20, 10am-4.30pm), with chef George Biron supervising the spit-roasting of a rare-breed Dorset Downs lamb as well as rare-breed pork and beef.
Guests will be invited to see how rare-breed Wessex Saddleback pigs are raised for the table, and then wander through the organic carrot and potato fields or take a walk through the surrounding eucalypt and blackwood forest. Lunch will be a picnic-style affair under the eucalypts - bring a blanket. Buy lunch from the rare-breed spit-roast and salads made from organic vegies grown on the farm.
Just down the road in Daylesford is Cliffy's Smokehouse Day (Saturday, March 19, 11.30am). Details have yet to be confirmed, but a variety of poultry, fish and smallgoods will be smoked and eaten on the day.
Further north, in Rutherglen, is Grazing on Beef (Saturday, March 12, 6.30pm). This dinner is the result of a beef carcass competition held by the Royal Agricultural Society of Victoria and the Department of Primary Industries.
Sixty-three cattle are presently in a feedlot on a 65-day fattening regimen. In two weeks' time they will judged on the hoof, slaughtered, and judged again as they hang on the hook.
The winning carcasses will be aged, butchered and served in a five-course beef dinner for100 people. One of the dishes confirmed at this stage is carpaccio of scotch fillet of beef, cool-smoked over redgum, served with olive tapenade and Rutherglen wines.
Another advocate of using the whole animal is George Calombaris from Reserve. He's basing his Breaking Down the Beast (Monday, March 14, 7pm) dinner on memories of family Christmases in Cyprus.
"It was a family experience - of sharing and eating together," he says. "We'd roast a whole lamb stuffed with quails and sausages. What wasn't eaten on the day was made into sauces."
Calombaris is commemorating these convivial experiences with goat cooked five different ways. Dishes include air-dried goat-and-fennel sausages on polenta injected with mascarpone; and loin of goat with sweetbreads wrapped in prosciutto with a salad of cold, pickled goat's tongue. All dishes will be matched with classic, rustic Italian wines.
The big issues of air-ageing and grain versus grass will be covered by Ian Curley at The Point on Albert Park Lake in his session Meet the Meat (Saturday, March 19, 5.30pm).
Starting with 100kg of beef hind and forequarter, he will break down the joints into their respective cuts, showing the carnivorously curious exactly what to look for when buying really good meat.
"Don't be fooled by bright-red steaks - they can be tough," he advises. "Meat that is darker around the edges will probably be aged and therefore will be more tender."
Curley's meat session will be followed by a two-course meal including a whole sirloin - roasted medium-rare - served on a bed of mashed potato with roast bone marrow, a red wine jus, a choice of mustards and wine.
Langton's Austrian-born chef, Walter Trupp, started working in the family hotel in an Alpine ski resort at the age of 14. In the summer he worked in a butchery. In the intervening 20 years he has constantly practised and developed his meat knowledge.
"Meat is muscle, and different muscles do different things on the animal," Trupp says. "Some are tougher and need braising - but often these have the most flavour. Some of the other muscles do less work, are naturally more tender and can be grilled, roasted, fried and served pink."
Boning and Filleting (Saturday, March 19, 10.30am-2.30pm) will help meat lovers gain knife skills as Trupp bones a chicken four ways, a duck three ways and a rabbit two ways. Lunch will be whole chickens stuffed with a parsley mousse carved at the table and served with madeira sauce.
Serafino Di Giampaolo is another European-born chef keen to pass on his knife knowledge to the next generation. Participants at Knife Skills (March 12 and 19, 9.30am-4.30pm) will use 15 types of knives to slice, dice and julienne their way into better knife confidence.
Although not purely a meat event, the skills learnt at this course will be indispensable to any serious cook. In Di Giampaolo's words: "Proper slicing will not only add to the presentation of meat, it actually improves the flavour."
For those who want their meat served to them in a more laid-back environment, consider The Great Game Sausage Sizzle at the Albert Park Hotel (Sunday, March 13 and 20, 4pm-7pm).
Each week, chef Sacha Pascual laboriously makes 200 sausages by hand. He even goes as far as enriching his sausages with duck fat to give added succulence and uses only quality imported salt.
Guests at this value-for-money event will be able to choose six small snags from a list of pheasant, pork, venison, rabbit, wagyu beef, lamb, scallop and bacon, kangaroo and chicken, washed down with a pint of ale and a glass of durif.
Slightly more hands-on will be the Belgian Beer Cafe's Beerfun, Eat with Your Hands (Sunday, March 20, 12.30pm-4pm) at which barbecued sausages and free-range chicken will be served at shared tables, with beer, in the tradition of the European beer hall, a cutlery-free event that Matt Preston describes with delight as being "Brueghelesque".
"This year, an amazing array of people are coming out of the woodwork to share not just their love of meat," Preston says, "but their bodies of knowledge in handling, cooking and preserving meat.
As Stefano De Pieri once said, 'There are a handful of people in this world who are standing up against the supermarket food culture. They are like the monks in the Dark Ages who maintained the seeds of knowledge and literature while the barbarians destroyed everything else around them.' I think we got most of them to do events in the 2005 festival."
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If you want more reference info - I'd suggest Jill Norman's Herb & Spice published by DK - full colour, lots of useful info (culinary, scientific, gardening etc) together with spice rubs, blends, etc at the back
I use Jill Norman's book more than Hemphill's book. Whilst Hemphill's book is superb for its writing and background information on herbs and spices, Normans' book is superior in that it has full colour photographs of the herbs and spices, and in the various versions in which they can be found - it's very useful when trying to find a new herb that you've never used before (especially ones at Asian supermarkets where the fresh herbs are almost always not labelled).
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We had a fine shopping day at our street market in Richmond. We got peaches for $2/kg, blood plums for the same price, a case of mangoes for $8, new season apples straight from the tree at $2/kg, canteloupes for $1, some lovely baby zucchini - no wonder I always have a quiet chuckle when I watch people buying their fruit and vegetables at Safeway or Coles.
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And i picked mine up on a bargain sale table for $20.
I have managed to track down a copy, but the guy selling it wants $90 for it (not his fault - something about having to get it from overseas).
I think I'll keep looking through the 2nd hand book shops.
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It's really weird with the Est Est Est cookbook. For a long time, I saw it everywhere. Then when I wanted to buy it, I couldn't find a copy anywhere.
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Also anything new and notable cookbooks published recently?
I remember reading an article by Tim White in Tomato where he said that 80% of cookbooks are released in the time leading up to Christmas. So on that, I'm not expecting anything new anytime soon.
If anything, I'm going to look for some older cookbooks and food writing - Julia Child, MFK Fisher, and the like. And I'm going to see if I can track down a copy of the Est Est Est cookbook too.
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i dont know that much about it, but i dont think it is that rare anymore - it is being raised in every state in the country. i believe it is the fast growing breed in Oz at the moment. and as you say, it is all for export. and you certainly see it on alot of menus now.
Wagyu beef has also been making an appearance in cookbooks - the Kylie Kwong and Teague Ezard cookbooks come to mind. It may also been mentioned in the Shannon Bennett cookbook too.
i believe there was a women raising rare or old breed pork near bendigo, or central highlands i thought. but you dont see any public profile anymore. so i dont know where that got too.bangalow pork is the darling of the restaurant world at the moment. you cant go anywhere in nsw without seeing in on menus. understandable so... it tastes great! but that 'brand' does not have the corner of good tasting pork.
Speaking of pork, does anyone know of any really good suppliers? I usually buy my pork from a Vietnamese butcher at the Queen Victoria, but I'm keen to try some high quality pork.
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Thanks for the review Dim Sim.
I've been very keen to try The Brasserie, but like a few others here, I've been wary due to its proximity to the Krown Kasino. I think I may give it a try sooner rather than later.
May I ask how much the dinner cost (without wine)?
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PCL has it with all the key markets.
You could always visit some of the farmers markets - my fiancee and I do our fruit and veggie shopping at a street market in Richmond. There are farmers markets just outside of Melbourne.
It's also worthwhile taking a walk down Victoria Street in Richmond and checking out all the Asian grocery shops.
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No crispy fried pork hock with chilli caramel and salad? That is one of his truly great dishes.
Just thinking about it is motivating me to try and get back to Ezards sometime this year.
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- rumour has it that CUB (the owner of Fosters only has one beer - it just puts them in different tins)
Just like the Duff Brewery in the Simpsons.
Although in defence of Fosters, they do make the special effort of watering down the beer for sale at the footy. So much so that you could almost be forgiven for thinking that you're drinking American beer.
<ducks head>
I need advice on buying a new oven
in Australia & New Zealand: Dining
Posted
Okay, maybe I'm being unfair because I haven't actually used the oven in my new house. But it seems that the oven in my new house is a fairly basic electric one, and it sits underneath a gas stovetop (3 burners including one lovely big one for the wok). Anyway, I'm keen on changing the oven as I want a gas one, but I'm open to using a very good electric one (like the one my sister has in her brand spankin' new kitchen).
So, I figure I can spend about $4,000 to $5,000 on an oven. I'd be happy to get a new oven and stovetop for that price - I could probably work well with 3 burners, but I'd prefer 4. Can anyone out there offer some advice? What brands? What should I look for? What questions should I be asking?