“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
Tag: Melbourne
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
Guerilla Gardening: How to compost a whole cow
The guerilla garden continues apace with one rude surprise. The bamboo has been chopped down and left aside to mulch as much material as possible before I call in the council to remove the woodier stalks. The rude shock is that beneath the thin ground cover of rotting bamboo leaf and years of accumulated trash,… Continue reading Guerilla Gardening: How to compost a whole cow
The most useless kitchen item that I own
Ed from over at Tomatom has started an interesting thread on the least useful kitchen items that one owns. I tend to veer away from any single-use item – I wrote about this in Cambodia as a rare victory over acquisitiveness. Buying kitchen gear does not make you a better cook. Spend your hard-earned cash… Continue reading The most useless kitchen item that I own
Travel Writing 101: Date the embassy “chick”
Amazon.com Widgets Welcome to hell, Lonely Planet. “They didn’t pay me enough to go (to) Columbia (sic),” “I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating – an intern in the Colombian Consulate. “They don’t pay enough for what they expect the authors to do.” Thomas Kohnstamm,… Continue reading Travel Writing 101: Date the embassy “chick”
F-Shed at Queen Victoria Market, Melbourne
At 8:30am this morning, in the moment before the sun rose above the cloud cover
The outing of Camy Shanghai Dumpling House’s secret
When salmonella went feral a few years ago at a favorite Turkish restaurant, hospitalising a wardful of unlucky diners, I felt the urge to eat there out of solidarity with the owners but sadly, the health inspectors had put paid to my plans. The joy of returning to a previous favourite restaurant is built entirely… Continue reading The outing of Camy Shanghai Dumpling House’s secret