I seem to have infected my friends with the charcuterie virus. What started with the occasional foray into a simple pork and garlic sausage is now ending in converting garden sheds into full-sized smokehouses to smoke lanjager and prosciutto. I had a recent discussion about the feasibility of airing ham beneath your average Australian home.… Continue reading Cold smoking at home: Convert your Weber for $10
Category: Australia
Mekong on Swanston St: The meaty taste of disappointment
I’m starting to become accustomed to the sense of betrayal that I feel after eating once again at old favourites in Melbourne. Most continue to please (or at least, meet expectations). But Mekong on Swanston Street in Melbourne, to use more common language, has gone to shit. Well before I left Australia for Cambodia, Mekong… Continue reading Mekong on Swanston St: The meaty taste of disappointment
Vue De Monde, Melbourne
When Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Future Yet Come decides to take me out to dinner, he’d probably take me to Vue De Monde to wallow amongst the Baby Boomer dugongs in suits and pearls. That crystalline vision into how my life would transpire if I spent the next twenty odd years focusing upon crapulence would… Continue reading Vue De Monde, Melbourne
Usufruct in Fitzroy
Usufruct, the right to derive benefit from the property of others, is generally best (and in most societies, only) displayed by the example of picking fruit from trees that overhang the boundary of a private property into public space. A Google User named kirsten has begun compiling a map of all of the overhanging fruit… Continue reading Usufruct in Fitzroy
Does Gordon Ramsay write his own extrafood column in the Herald Sun?
Gordon Ramsay’s Humble Pie was a 2006 bestseller but it was the award-winning feature writer Rachel Cooke who quietly wore out the “f” key on her laptop. Then again, she can afford a new computer, having pocketed a rumoured £100,000 share of Ramsay’s rumoured £750,000 advance. From “Literary Haunts”, The Times, November 12, 2007. Surely… Continue reading Does Gordon Ramsay write his own extrafood column in the Herald Sun?
Beer Flaw Tasting
“T” is for Taint If there is one thing that evaluating beer in Cambodia has primed my tastebuds for, it is tasting bad beer. I never particularly dwelt upon the reasons behind their badness because I was too busy trying to find synonyms for “watery”. I had never approached badness in a systematic way. So… Continue reading Beer Flaw Tasting
One-plus-One Dumplings: Uyghur-licious
Chinese food in Australia is for the most part, awful, but it is an awfulness within which you can revel. Steak and black bean sauce, paint-liftingly acidic lemon chicken, your-meat-of-choice stir-fried with cashew nut and cornstarch. Fried rice with peas in it and those little prawns (jumbo krill?) from a can that only exist to… Continue reading One-plus-One Dumplings: Uyghur-licious
Bánh Mì Xiu Mai
Bánh mì xiu mai is the ultimate culinary mashup: a strange interpretation of Cantonese food in a French baguette via Saigon. The banh mi is your average baguette filled with a slap of pate, pickled carrot and stalks of coriander. The xiu mai part is utterly bewildering. Picking the xiu mai from the sauce The… Continue reading Bánh Mì Xiu Mai