Ta-Re-Ma! Sung to the tune of 'Panama' by Van Halen

Maybe its cause it’s salty. Maybe cause it’s fishy, but I don’t think that’s solely it. Maybe it’s a combination of both with a finish of creamy unctuousness barbed with a whip-crack tang of acid, usually lemon juice. Either way, for me, it is a compelling argument for crowning ones pita bread with its floral shade of pink regality. A bowl of this, with a plate of pita bread (done in the Greek style, pan fried in olive oil until crisp) is my absolute fave beer food. In fact it has been the ENTIRE meal for me at times.
The power that this dip has over me is such that I never used to think of the origin of the fish nor its eggs that go into its making, so eager was I to devour it on site. Now though it’s all that I think about when devouring it & trying in vain to unlock its secrets.
Its questionable colour, blushing, so impossibly fake, didn’t dissuade me of its overtly fishy charms, nor did its smell, should it have emanated from a can of Pecks, would have had me running a mile.
The sheer, silky smooth wake that a searching & playful finger scythes through its naked pink surface beckons another caress, each fingered glob finding you mouth & hitting that spot with a building crescendo that only a bloated belly can halt. Such is its power.
It is in amongst trusted friends that I expound the glory of its giddy delights, where I can reveal my true passion & feel comfortable amongst my own kind, swept underground & made to feel that we cannot dare speak in the sunshine of our common bond, our muse & our mad love.
Like a pathetic deviant with a penchant for the unusual I have tried several times to replicate it in the confines of my cloistered kitchen, a few times coming maddingly close but never nailing its elusiveness. Still though, I am anxious & eager as always to enquire if it reached the expectations of the person who ordered it, those who also share its fascination.
I have made it from the commercial salted cod roe from Greece, Bulgaria or Scandinavia.
I have made it from salted scallop roes from Triabunna, from Bottarga & even from salmon pearls. Like the doctor who created ‘Milton the Monster’ I always add a ‘drop of tenderness’, in the form of a dash of sugar to balance out the salt, for without it, may be too overpowering.
It always has cooked hot potato, mashed to smooth, salted cod roe, lemon juice, slow roasted garlic(raw garlic is too harsh), pinch of sugar, fruity olive oil, water & enough bread crumbs to iron out any curdled appearance that it may develop when mixing. Oh, use a whisk on you Kenwood, not a paddle as it melds not spanks the dip.
Behold true love! Taramasalata be thy name

Vogue Produce awards 2008 Winners from Tassie

Congratulations to Tasmanian Producers Yves Ginat from Mielerie ‘The house of honey’ in Allens Rivulet & Roger Scales from The Woodbridge Smokehouse, Woodbridge who won the categories 'Best new product' & 'From the Sea' respectively in the Vogue Entertaining + Travel, The Australian Produce awards 2008. The third Tasmanian producer nominated was Spring Bay Seafoods of Triabunna, a past winner, made a worthy finalist. Well done all.

Also congratulations to Leonie & Nick on the arrival of their new baby boy!

Happy & belated Birthday wishes Dad.

Tasmanian Menu Dilemma-revisited

I posted this a while back on the old garrulous-Gourmet site. The talk of late has again focused on local produce so I thought I’d re-hash this one.

Recently I was relayed a conversation between chefs & hospitality people that got me ruminating over a few issues. At the crux of the matter was, as chefs, some of us feel compelled, no more like bullied, into exclusively using Tasmanian produce. It seems that every time menus are written, there is an expectation that Tasmanian products must be used first. I am not clear whom exactly, generates this expectation. Is it the media? Possibly. Is it the customers? Maybe. Is it the producers themselves who feel jipped if the hospitality people don’t buy their produce? Could be. Another theory I would like to toss into the mix. I think that this ‘expectation’ is akin to the pricking of the conscience. An annoyingly ever present angel hovering on our shoulder, whispering into our produce buying ear. “Prawns”, it murmurs. “Why put them on if they don’t come from here?” ‘But the punters want them” you say out loud, raising the eyebrows of you colleagues. “What about all the other wonderful things that are available, cant you use them instead?” it soothes. “Well yes, of course I could” & you start to find alternatives. Perhaps this is motivated by guilt firstly but maybe a sense of pride in the Islands produce replaces it. To me it’s a little like the guilt some lapsed Catholics feel when they haven’t correctly observed some ritual or practice.
The fact is some of the world’s great food items are not made here. To not use them because of some mis-placed gastronomical xenophobia is ridiculous. Cheese is an example that immediately springs to mind. I know that I am touching a nerve when I say that there is no Tassie equivalent to a Parmigiano Reggiano for instance. That’s OK but I won’t use a lesser substitute just because it’s Tasmanian. Personally I don’t think we are obliged to use Tasmanian product just because it is there. However, if it is a quality product, then that’s a different matter entirely. For instance; the saffron from Terry & Nicky Noonan in Glaziers Bay is better than ANY saffron I have used, so I have no hesitation using it. Conversely, some of the cheese that is produced in the South of Tasmania doesn’t make the grade because of inconsistency, quality & availability issues & as a result I am disinclined to use some of them for these reasons.
Let’s take stock. I am not saying that just because I am passionate about my region, that those in other areas or cities must follow this lead. What they do is fine & what I believe in, is also fine. I do however believe though that one way to highlight produce from an area is to build a menu around what is available. If I had my way it would be 100% I don’t have complete control, so I must compromise.
Another interesting point was made. Do Tasmanian customers get fatigued from always eating Pink eyes, salmon & saffron? I think they do actually. I think that they often want the choice of prawns or bugs or yabbies on menus. This causes a dilemma for restaurants. Who, if anyone, do they pitch their menus to? If you believe the marketing machines devoted to Tasmanian Tourism you’d do the Tassie parochial thingy. If you are a realist concerned about attracting the locals in the dead of winter when the tourists have gone, you get stuff from the mainland & beyond. Either way you’ll paint yourself into one of two corners.
It does seem unfair that restaurants that choose not to bear the culinary food flag of Tasmania have to justify themselves & their place in the gastronomic landscape. My question is: Does every restaurant with high food ideals have to tip its hat to the produce available here in order to be taken seriously?

Fines for out of season fruit & vege!

It seems Gordon Ramsay has come up with another way to stay in the headlines. He has proposed that chefs & restaurants get fined for not serving fruit & vege that is in season. He used strawberries from Kenya as an example to suggest that British consumers should just wait until the English ones are good & ready. He also took a swipe at the General public for being lazy eater more concerned with fad & trends than anything of substance.
On the surface, I think making people aware of the seasonal difference in foods is a good thing. However most people are so disconnected from where their food comes from that it’s not really surprising that many of them & I’d say the great majority, couldn’t tell you when the season is optimum for one product over another.
In fact I was shocked a few years back when asking chefs in my brigade when they thought a particular vege was in season, none of them had a clue. This is more common that you might like to believe.
Go into any supermarket these days & you’ll see a vast array of food stuffs that seem to be available all year round. Go to Europe & it’s on an even larger scale.
Go down Lygon St & see how many Neapolitan restaurants that serve fresh tomatoes in the middle of a Melbourne winter, if they didn’t I’m sure Joe Public would be disappointed & possibly not turn up. We as consumers expect food to be available all year round. I don’t think many people stop to actually think that ordering a Caprese salad in July might not deliver the expected flavour sensation. This is ironic considering that many people now use the old ‘I haven’t tasted a real tomato since I was a kid’ tag line when lamenting the quality & standard of fruit & vege. It leaves me scratching my head that this connection is mostly overlooked. Yes many of us grow backyard tomatoes & corn but beyond this there is a great chasm of seasonal knowledge that seems to be dying with each generation. Thank goodness for our many varied immigrant populations whose injection of food culture has kept a thread of this knowledge alive.
Another interesting conundrum though with the eating seasonally & locally ideal is that for long periods the only thing that might be available is a small amount of the same produce. In Australia, I bet we would get very bored by having to come up with many ways to use the same produce available like they did & do in other countries.
It’s ironic that we love the Tuscan ideal of that particular diet or the simple way that in Asian countries they use what’s at hand regularly each year. The reality is that they have to, there’s no choice, seasons dictate what they cook. This fact alone makes their cuisine so identifiable, so rigid in its disciplines & so visible in the global landscape. It is also why its difficult to translate them here simply because we try to cheat by using ingredients that are not only in season but lack the specific ‘terroir’ to make them taste authentic.
Instead of fining chefs & restaurants perhaps we should just try to educate ourselves & buy/consume/grow accordingly?

Cakeage-The really big issue!-Not!

MP fights restaurant 'cakeage' charge
Posted Wed May 7, 2008 10:19am AEST Updated Wed May 7, 2008 10:23am AEST

A MP is crusading against restaurants which charge diners for cutting up and serving their own cake.
South Australian MP Chloe Fox says she was asked to pay $20 last weekend to have staff cut up and serve a cake she had brought to a venue.
She said she had offered to cut it herself and use serviettes instead of plates to avoid paying the charge.
The MP says she has investigated further and found that some restaurants around Australia are charging as much as $10 a head to cut up and serve cake which diners have brought for a special occasion.
"I think it's greedy because things are getting tougher for most people out there," the MP told 891 ABC Local.
"You know, petrol costs more, food prices are more. I think there are a lot of people who are probably hesitating about whether they go to a restaurant or pub to celebrate something at all.
"And there is this sort of Australian tradition of bringing a cake for your kid's birthday or for mother's day or whatever it is and eating it and people are now being charged for that because restaurateurs are cross because you're not eating their $15 dessert."
Sally Neville, the chief executive of the Restaurant and Catering Association, disagrees.
"Restaurants and hotels run a service business - what you're paying for when you visit those businesses is the service," she said.
"You're paying for the seat you're sitting on, you're paying for the lights you turned on, and you’re paying for staff, which is a large percentage of the ... running costs of that business to serve you, to clean up after you, to be standing around waiting for you to go basically."
Ms Neville had a message for those unwilling to pay for the comforts of the restaurant.
"You might as well go and eat it in the park and have a picnic."

This article sums up the disconnect that many people have on how much money there is realistically to be made in restaurants. What would most business minded people feel the chances of a venture surviving that is combating high staff & food costs, an intangible & elusive customer base, seasonal & fashion trends not to mention the ever present specter of media opinion, both paid & unpaid? It’s safe to suggest that they would feel that the chances of survival are slim. Certainly articles like these suggest that the popular sentiment is that restaurateurs are making a killing. Am I living in another plane cause I don’t see this at all?!

Staff Meals-Where are they now?

Desperately seeking, the whereabouts of the staff meal.

Years ago (why does it seem that all my posts of late start with this line?) when I were a lad in restaurants, it seemed that you could always count on a few things to remind you that all was well with the Force.
One was the wrath of the owner if you didn’t perform your duties well enough, two was the knowledge that customers would always come if the meals were good enough & three was the staff meal being served at 5.45pm every night.
Back then, when the great divide between the front & back of house was at its widest it seemed that that the staff meal was the great salve, the Calamine lotion or the Stingoes that cooled this chasm like a much needed release valve. It was here that apprentice chef passed the serving tongs to the maitre’d, the head chef sliced bread for the kitchen hand & the owner served the waiter. Occasionally a little vino greased the wheels of conversation which fleshed out the person behind the position, another dimension, not seen by colleagues, enough to make them human. I loved those times, always aware like any person in hospitality, that the clock is ticking with service imminent so very mouthful, comment & understanding, precious. It was during these times that one heard of the stories of past experiences & different times, from our tribal elders around our metaphorical fire. Sadly this doesn’t seem to happen anymore.
There were restaurants I worked in where the week would end after a Sunday lunch & we would all retire to the dining room into the wee hours feasting on left over’s, grog & a pocket full of pay & tips, all of us with the prospect of having two glorious days off in a row! It was a great way to end a working week.
These days with most places open seven days, communal staff meals are a thing of the past with different shifts, timetables & needs. Nowadays they are most likely taken alone, without the comfort of the disused dining room but still, all the same rushed.
More than ever there is a disconnect between generations of hospitality workers, perhaps the sharing of something as basic as a meal together was a snapshot of a time before the notion of time & motion became more important than people.

Drug company Love-in

I was listening the other night to Phillip Adams show & his guest had just written a book on the Multinational drug companies & their power to lobby, particularly in the US.
For every six GP’s in the States there is one sales rep dedicated to convincing them to prescribe, endorse & recommend the particular drug they want pushed.
This sort of lobbying practice is not allowed in Australia.
How do they do this, you ask? They lavish the doctors with a smorgasbord of special conferences, dinners & junkets. If you believe that old adage, ‘Nothing in life is for free’ you must be left thinking that the doctors partaking in these numerous events are kind of obliged to spruik for the Drug companies. I mean if you don’t, surely you wouldn’t get an invite to the next one?
There are over 500,000 events like this every year! That’s right 13,888 every day! That’s a whole lotta business for someone. You can imagine that some canny operators have stitched up a sizable share of this morally questionable business, especially when you consider that it equates to $$$!
Lets say that each event attract 100 doctors at a conservative amount of $100 each that $1.388.808 Mil per day! And this is a conservative figure.
It’s an almost un-imaginable amount of money generated for the hospitality industries.
With that amount of money at their disposal for what is in effect a massive PR exercise surely this should/could be used to make drugs cheaper for consumers & aid those in developing countries to don’t have access to them at all?
Also a point to consider is the questionable effect that it may have on the restaurants in terms of staffing. One would like to think that the restaurants & conference centres are passing on this good fortune by way of better pay & conditions. You’d be wrong though, hospitality staff in the US are amongst the lowest paid workers.
Perhaps if we in this State all take a collective Moral Amnesia pill (Bought to you by Glixo Schmidt Klumph), we could attract the drug company lobbyists over here, get ‘em to wine & dine our doctors (all three of ‘em) in our restaurants, don’t worry with a nod & a wink we’ll get it legislated, no worries & we’ll have turned around our hospitality woes in no time.
Actually, come to think of it, not all of us would have to take one of those pills.

Kitchens, the new black

Ed recently posted of the kitchen paraphernalia that people treasure & of the sad items that get buried in the darkest recesses of the cupboard or the garage or even the shed.
It’s not the appliances that I am fixating on today but more the kitchen. Your kitchen reveals a lot about the person you are or at least how you use the space.
To me, like the best cookbook, they are scuffed, well thumbed & possibly scarred by the stains & splashes of errant cordons of juice, gravy or salsa’s. Our poor old kitchen, my recently visiting MIL (And no I didn’t leave the F out! It’s Mother in Law) commented, ‘Looked tired’. Purring contentedly, her self-satisfaction evident, she positively glowed with excitement at the thought of her own freshly minted kitchen back home.
‘Of course ours looks bloody tired, it gets hammered every friggin’ day slaving for these ravenous locusts’ I said a bit too snappily sweeping my arms toward my munching children. She was right though. Closer inspection revealed the congealed matter collecting where the kick boards should be, the chips in the wood veneer accumulating crumbs, splodges & drippings. The old wooden cupboards dulled by a thousand steam clouds from the pasta pot, the walls grimly trying to repel the splattering droplets from many a bubbling sugo that no amount of spray & wipe could ever hope to remove.
It was all quite depressing & a tad embarrassing really. For a moment I worried uneasily what the guests at our house had privately thought when sitting amongst the grime in our rustic cucina? Come to think of it, many haven’t returned. Hmmm.
It has become apparent that the only answer is to renovate. Now I have done this before & got sucked in last time by trying in vain to recreate a professional kitchen in the home. The fact that we tried to do this on a tight budget didn’t help. Also at the time I wanted my home kitchen to shout out ‘Everybody, I am a chef! No really I am, look at my brand new semi-professional kitchen!’ How pathetically sad!
These days I would be happy with a modest domestic version & considering the costs these days, it will be all I can afford. I can’t believe how much money people shell out these days for the flashest, brightest & well applianced & if you believe the popular theory, the flashier the kitchen, the worse the cook, their must be a loads of bad cooks out there!?
It seems that a heap of people these days see the kitchen as a status symbol. This is curious when an increasing number of people don’t really cook. Yes they might do the usual busy-life-food they we all do when leading our increasingly frenetic lives but I mean really cook like long slow braises, preserves, time consuming preparation or even baking. Some kitchens end up looking like museum pieces as a result, never used & devoid of any evidence that lives were nurtured within their confines. Perhaps their owners have second kitchens for the actual cooking & the show one is for, well, show?
Like the ironic situation of having a front room reserved only for ‘guests’ which consequently never gets used, perhaps this might be a new trend?
I’ll end by describing my ‘Moon under water’ kitchen.
It will be a jumble of cupboards & re-claimed benches with ample space in which to lay out many plates at one time & to bone, pick, mix, chop & co-exist with the other members of the house without fission.
It will have a deep ceramic sink, a reliable but prosaic stove, a cofetiere with a good pour & a window from which to ponder life, the universe & everything whilst doing the dishes or peeling the spuds. Access to the herb garden & wood fired oven outside is through two clackety French Doors. It would be filled with cooking smells, laughter, high spirited discourse & the groans of many a laden table.

The Doner Kebab Vs Shawarma grudge match!

In my past, Saturday night meant bevy night & usually for me this also meant ending it with some sort of food event. This could be Chinese at the Supper Inn, it could be a burger from Danny’s, a falafel wrap from Tibbas or if the memory goes back, Shawarma from the old Mr. Squeeze on Toorak Rd.
This place has been forged into my memory. Swaying from toe to heel & memorizing my order in my head, having counted out the exact change in order not to engage in any superfluous communication, not because I am rude but because I might embarrass myself with my inebriated slurrings.
‘One Yiros please mate’ & pre-empting the guy behind the counter, ‘Yes, extra chillie sauce thanks.’ I would watch mesmerized as deft tong wielding hands picked from the overflowing tubs of freshly shredded lettuce, tomatoes, sliced onions, herbed tzatziki & the fiery red chilli sauce. All the tubs overflowed & all looked very fresh, even with my Duff glasses on.
The place really bustled with people all bought together by a common love of the Gyros & err, booze. There were Nite club types, suits, big haired & padded shoulder women, swamp-a-billys & shift workers. It seemed that this shop promoted quite a healthy menu, lots of fresh fruit chopped up for juices, salads, grilled meats & falafels. Curiously, all the Lebanese blokes who staffed it were chubby?
The Gyros, the Shawarma & the Doner kebab are all variation of the same. Marinated, skewered & rotisserie meat on a spit. It is traditionally lamb, boned forequarters that have been heavily marinated & layered on top of each other & cooked for several hours on a rotating almost always vertical barbeque. The meat is sliced off in downward strokes & placed onto the awaiting pita bread with assorted other fillings, before being wrapped as tightly as a new born baby in its first trip home from the hospital.
It was at Mr. Squeeze that I first encountered the use of pickled turnip as one of the fillings & I have only ever encountered its use in Lebanese shawarma shops thus far. It is coloured with a brilliant purple hue from being doused with beetroot juice I am told & I love it, as it brings a tangy piquancy to wrap. I return to Tibbas routinely when in Melbourne for one of their shawarmas primarily in order to eat that pickled turnip which is remarkably invisible in the Middle Eastern culinary landscape that is Sydney Road.
My London experience of the Doner kebab was not a good one & memorable for the wrong reasons. Eager to experience life as a local, in this case a larger swilling Essex lad, I found myself at a Doner kebab shop after pub closing time. The rotating Doner was a perfectly symmetrical cone of turning meat matter. It didn’t have any of the scraggy bits or un-evenness that boned forequarters have. Instead it was a conical shape of congealed, pre-shaped & fat speckled meat of indiscernible origin, no doubt fashioned in a factory somewhere staffed by illegal immigrants from Middle Europe.
Mesmerized I watched the spinning Doner & a pattern eventually jumped out at me like on of those 3D pictures just in time for me to be handed my wrapped package & escape to the street. I still remember how sour it smelled to this day & I also recall the little warning bell inside my head going off as I knew that eating this may not be good for my health. Less than 6 hours later I was right.
I have never been so badly food poisoned in all my life taking me out for nearly a week.
Could two doner/shawarma experiences be so different?

Anzac Day & the Sunday Lunch

It’s Anzac Day, a time to remember & celebrate the men & woman who have become entwined in the notion of who we are as a nation. The echoes of their time long ago, reach us now as a gentle whisper & as each year draws to a close, it becomes fainter.
With it, the traditions that once squatted like cornerstones, dim in our memory also.
One of these is the Sunday Lunch. Without sounding trite, I feel a practical way to remember the Anzac spirit is to make time for the Sunday Lunch that has all but disappeared.

Years ago, we ate Sunday Lunch. Perhaps everyone did? At least I thought so. It was if
time stopped throughout the suburbs, the lawnmowers silenced in unison as if by the flourish of a conductors baton & the wafts of a thousand roasted joints permeated the air.
In our family it was a big deal. The momentum started to build by Thursday when I would overhear Mum & Dad discussing the weekend’s arrangements. Friday it went up a notch as my Uncle & Auntie would call to ask what needed doing at the oldies house (Grandma & Grandpas) & what to bring.
My Sunday lunch would reach a crescendo after we got to the grandparents at about 10am. I was soon dispatched outside to rake up all the lawn cuttings that my father would cut with the Victor, for my Grandfather.
After this I would be free to watch ‘Point of view’ with Bob Santa Maria, World Championship wrestling & bit of Epic Theatre before I was duly summonsed to the table.
The lunch, always a roast & followed by a dessert of some sorts, would last the better part of Sunday & we would regularly get home after dark, tired & with a full belly, sleep always coming easily on those nights!
Who does this anymore? I ask because we certainly don’t, our weekend is far too busy for a long languid lunch. My family have been eating too many ‘arranged meals’ lately. By this I mean; meals that are very quick & easy to fit into the 15 mins prep time before the children turn from Mugwamp to Gremlins. It seems that we are spending less & less time preparing food as we used to. The runaway success of the self published book, ‘Take Three Ingredients’, has resonated with heaps of people, offering a sort of quick fix for those finding themselves in this bind. Whilst I applaud the author’s idea & incidentally their tenacity in getting this published after many rejections, it is also a bit sad that we have been shoe-horned into only allowing such a short time to prepare our meals.

Yes times change & traditions become whittled with age however I would like to think that we continue to see the value in the shared meal & the time it gives us to reflect, take stock & remember.