The Elegant Sufficiency

Links Wrap-Up

Alas, I’m well overdue in sharing some links, and they do pile up. Might end up being a two, or a three-parter… some good stuff though, despite older vintage of some. You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I start with this (from the website of European weekly magazine, Der Spiegel) — the Guolizhuang Restaurant in Beijing, covered by the BBC previously. Indeed, my colleague John Lethlean, a noted offal connoisseur, has written about this restaurant before. I wonder, though, if he’s seen Der Spiegel's photographs.
If you’re still with me, you’ll have the stomach to handle this in The Sydney Morning Herald, American artist Victoria Reynolds’ carnivorous art. As the story notes: “Indeed, meat has an uncanny hold for some in the artworld. Meatpaper is a quarterly magazine of art and ideas about meat.”
And then on to some great pieces about chefs and restaurants and meals I’d like to eat:

• Something else for John: The New York Times reports on the Montreal dining scene where “there has been a surge in quirky restaurants that are extensions of their chefs’ personal tastes and dedication to Montreal’s regional ingredients. At these restaurants, no part of the pig escapes the kitchen knife, whether it’s the ears (sliced and fried in a salad with frisée) or feet (braised, stuffed and roasted). And foie gras abounds, never far from marrowbones, sweetbreads and steaks so big they’d make a cowboy blush.”
• I've linked before to a story about Noma, a Copenhagen restaurant that set me thinking it was time I set off to explore my Danish ancestry. I’m thinking even more seriously about it thanks to Sunday's New York Times piece on Copenhagen Nordic cuisine — Noma again, plus Alberto K and Geranium (where they apparently smoke salmon at the table in front of you). A great slideshow here.
• The New York magazine covers, in almost interminable length, Alain Ducasse’s so-far unsuccessful attempts to conquer the city. “It could be that Ducasse, like a man trying to woo a distant lover, was simply trying too hard,” writer Alex Morris speculates.
• In an Independent newspaper blog, Australia’s own Terry Durack calls for a shake-up of the S.Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards (2008: El Bulli, 1, The Fat Duck, 2,Pierre Gagnaire, 3, Tetsuya’s, 9, Noma, 10, Alain Ducasse au Plaza Athénée, 18).
• And The New York Times again on restaurants in Bordeaux, where “where a cadre of experimental chefs have pulled Bordeaux into the 21st century”.
• In Slate, writer Lisa Abend asks of Spanish avant-garde cuisine — “isn’t anyone tired of this stuff by now?” She’s referring to “dishes” including “a fine plate of fish blood”, and chef such as “the Roca boys (who) painted swabs of truffle, hare, and dirt across a plate and called it "Winter." In Barcelona, Angel León used algae to clarify soup, Ramón Freixa turned liquid-nitrogenized pineapple into dessert, and Martin Berasategui talked about something called "synergetic elaboration."
• And finally for now, an "expose" on Iron Chef America. In The Village Voice, Robert Sietsema writes: “Iron Chef America is more bogus than even I had imagined.”

There, that’ll keep you busy … have a great weekend.

The Social Media Sommelier

Don't touch on wine very often here (another story away from the screen), but thought you'd find this video interesting. Apparently, the 32-year-old Gary Vaynerchuk is a "cultural phenomenon" in the States, a wine merchant who attracts up to 80,000 viewers a day to WineLibraryTV.com, his online wine-tasting show. He calls himself the "social media sommelier". Vaynerchuk's schtick wears thin pretty quickly but it's interesting what media commentator Jeff Jarvis on Buzz Machine has to say about him:

"This isn’t as simple as using online video to sell wine, though the family store is now a $60m-a-year enterprise. Vaynerchuk is also transforming retail and making it social. He has realised that a store should be a community and so he uses every tool available online — a social wine rating site called Corkd.com, his videos, his appearances on other popular online shows such as Diggnation, his ubiquitous presence on Facebook, and answering countless emails every day — to make and connect with as many fans as possible."

Vaynerchuk may be a merchant primarily, but he has also well and truly crossed into the world of wine media. And watching him and reading Jarvis's thoughts on him, it's not hard to crystal-ball a few years or so forward to see, as is the case with all other forms of conventional media, how the food and wine media landscape as we know it is going to irrevocably change — both in how information is delivered and who is delivering it. In his Guardian column in February, Jarvis wrote that camera-phones "may well change the job of the journalist in ways more radical than even I could ever have imagined". I'm going shopping.

A Slow Boat to Tasmania

Sometimes, personal correspondence is so good it just has to be shared. Great email landed in my inbox the other day from an old friend and colleague, Matthew Evans. A month or two back Matthew left Sydney for a Tasmanian sea change. Former editor of The Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide and Good Living restaurant reviewer, long-time Good Weekend food columnist and author (Never Order Chicken on a Monday and the Weekend Cook), he’s now learning to make cheese, slice abalone from rocks icy Tasmanian waters and spear flounder. An edited version, with Matthew's permission, reproduced here:

“I arrived in Tassie the slow way, on an overnight boat, with my car buried in the hold. I travelled with Nick, my cheese maker mate, and Ian, the other cheese maker. We filled the wee bunkroom with the smell of washed rind and red wine and I slept like the deceased.
Awoke to a brilliant Tassie morn and drove straight to Sheila’s house. A friend’s mother, she was expecting us and had the bacon and frypan at the ready. Jar after jar of preserved fruit filled the room, and after runny eggs we raided the back yard. Two types of nashi, so small they’d fit in a toddler’s palm, filled our crates. We picked hundreds of tiny apples and then gorged ourselves on mulberries. The result was three grown men, giggling like schoolgirls at the flavour, the stains on our hands and shirts giving us the appearance of the criminally insane.
After that it was down to Bruny Island. Here’s something I jotted down: Monday and it’s salt bush lamb chops, simply pan seared then grilled with rosemary and olive oil. The potatoes are unpeeled whole baby pink eyes with a scattering of Bruny Island’s Tom cheese, like a French tomme but with an Aussie accent.
I cook lamb again later in the week, this time a rack, seared in a hot pan and bunged in a hot oven for a few minutes. I boil quartered Dutch cream potatoes until soft and toss them with crushed garlic and a knob of butter while steaming hot.
Come Sunday, we go abalone diving. It’s two blokes, one snorkel, one knife, one weight belt and a kelp forest shielding the abalone from view. Despite the lack of equipment, in an hour we prise seven abs from the rocks, five of legal size. I feel giddy from the exertion and need to eat. Blackberry brambles line the path back to the car and we drop the wetsuits and greedily fill our faces, our hands and mouths stained to deep purple.
A mate drops in to share some of his 50 hand-dived scallops. He reached his bag limit in 23 minutes. It’s the first weekend of the season, so it’ll be slimmer pickings in weeks to come. You need a tank to get deep enough for scallops, and a scuba licence.
In the absence of a big steamer we barely grill the scallops until plump. The abalone is chopped 1cm thick and wok tossed for a few seconds with garlic and chilli. The only accompaniments needed are riesling and rice.
After dinner the wind drops and we go floundering. We wade hundreds of metres from shore on a long sand bar, towing an old surfboard. It holds a milk crate for the catch and a car battery hooked up to a torch on a pole. The beam of the torch spreads out underwater; the flounder, near the channel’s drop off, can be seen as vague lumps in the sand. You have to be fast, and accurate, to spear them using a metal rod with a barbed spike on the end. Ten flounder later, with the water lapping at my comfort zone, it’s time to head home. We pop the fish in the fridge and have a nightcap of 12-year-old Glenlivet with walnut shortbread in the shape of a pear.
Did I tell you about the phosphorescence when we went floundering? Or the free range eggs at the CWA shop that are blue from silky bantams and are tiny wee things that cost just $2.50 a dozen? Or the mist on Mount Wellington, that strange monolith that overshadows my new life? Have I mentioned chocolate crackles as big as a child's head or a tarte Tatin with quinces as dark as a Bruny night and as fat as a fist? Or Ross's unctuous scrambled eggs on sourdough with wood oven roasted Snug butchery bacon and slabs of buttery sourdough bread on the deck? Did I tell you about the milk spewing from the van after I pressed the wrong button as we pumped it from the dairy into tanks, and that Nick had forgotten to put the lid on the milk pod, so not all the slops were my fault I probably did, and I'm boring you.”

A Late Livestrong Submission

Long past deadline, but there you go, I’m good at that. You want excuses? Where do I start? Still, hope Barbara at Winos and Foodies might give me some credit for my efforts.
This post is a contribution to her annual A Taste of Yellow blogging event in support of Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong Day on May 13, an initiative to raise awareness and funds for the cancer fight. (You can donate here to my chosen cancer charity, the Mater Medical Research Institute in Brisbane, which is doing some really amazing work to find a prostate cancer vaccine.) 
Barbara's A Taste of Yellow demands of its participants that they cook and photograph something yellow with a yellow Livestrong band in the photograph somehow. “Please join me again as we remember those loved ones who are no longer with us, support those still fighting and celebrate with those who have won the fight,” Barbara wrote on her blog when she launched the 2008 Taste of Yellow a month or so back.
Dad is very firmly still with us and, if I have my way, he’s not going anywhere soon. (Although, if he were to eat this as I have done today — straight out of the jar — a heart attack would get him before the prostate cancer does.)
Well, what else are you to do with very very runny mandarin-lemon curd but slather it on sourdough toast as you would honey?
One of my roles at work is to be the editor of Sean Moran, of Sean's Panaroma. The lovely Sean writes a monthly column for us called “Fresh”: a seasonal ingredient, how to select it and store it, and what to do with that ingredient. Next column coming up in our June edition is about mandarins and one of Sean’s recipes is for mandarin curd. Loved the idea, thought it might be perfect for A Taste of Yellow.
Pity though, that I have a sad history of wrecking anything involving cooking eggs slowly into a dish. Custard, crème brulee — you name it, I mess them up. Impatience, incompetence — who knows? (Have been saving up the story of making crème brulee for the Belgian countess during one of my cooking jobs after finishing a Le Cordon Bleu course: my crème brulee was as eccentric as she was. But really, a temper tantrum over a curdled crème brulee? For heaven’s sake!)
Couldn’t get the ferocious, crazy Countess de la Laing out of my brain as I embarked on my mandarin curd. You’ll have to wait for the next the(sydney)magazine for Sean’s recipe, but suffice to say that, when my egg yolks very deliberately started to solidify in my butter-sugar-juice mixture, I could feel the countess’s wrath descending all over again.
Remedial measures were called for. The saucepan off the heat; the mixture strained to remove the cooked bits; a new egg yolk deployed in the now cooler mixture to compensate for the egg lost; back to the stove. Well, I wasn’t going to waste all that mandarin zest. Do you know how hard it is to zest a mandarin?
Of course, it was never going to be perfect, was it? One egg yolk wasn’t going to do the trick, and eventually, reluctantly, I admitted defeat, took it off the heat, poured the runny mixture into jars.
Sean’s recipe wasn’t at fault — my vagueness and impatience were the problem. The tangy, two-citrus flavour is divine and I’ll be attempting the recipe again soon, but in the meantime, I just can’t keep away from that jar in the fridge.

Price Check 2

Wanted to slam this up fast... prices change depending on supply, demand, time of the season, of course, so in a few days' time these charts may be moot. Thanks for all your help gathering prices. I think the results are interesting enough even if the methodology might have Roy Morgan spluttering in his cornflakes.
In Sydney, I wanted to get to Fratelli Fresh and Harris Farm, but ran out of time, and I haven't had the time to study these prices in depth, but these are the things that strike me as most worth pointing out. Probably no surprise to most of you:

• If you want to save money, go to the markets! Even farmers' markets seem cheaper, which surprised me;
• I'm amazed that the markets in the centre of Sydney, the most expensive real estate in the country, have the best prices in this lot. How good are those Paddy's Market prices? (I could have got 10 limes for $2...)
• It follows then, that if you're in the business of saving money, shop where Asian-Australians shop such as Paddys Markets and Campsie: they won’t put up with overpricing;
• No surprise that you'll always get better prices when you buy greater quantities: for example, three avocadoes for $6 at La Manna in Melbourne, as opposed to $2.50 each.
• The hair-raising price of organics at Queen Victoria Market (do they match other organic outlets?);
• Interesting the consistency of many of the prices at different locations for Coles and Woolworths outlets.

Have I missed anything worth pointing out?

•    In a couple of places here where I haven’t been sure of what you’ve told me, or you didn’t get the price, I’ve put n/a — doesn’t mean the shop doesn’t stock it.

A Surry Hills Girl

Just finished reading Ruth Park's The Harp in the South (the title apparently refers to Irish immigrants in Australia), which is set in my once desperately poor Sydney neighborhood — Surry Hills. Love to walk city streets here, anywhere, and try and catch in my head how they might have been in the past. (The Herald's 100 Years of Herald Photography has been quite brilliantly helpful in that...) In Surry Hills, the remnants of old signage (love the Paramount movies sign on the Deco building in Brisbane Street), the crooked narrow streets lined with mean terraces, the old factories (now apartment conversions, of course), and the corner pubs, all tell a story. But Ruth Park does it better. I won't be able to walk these streets now without seeing ghostly, grubby barefoot urchins disappearing around corners, hat-wearing drunks weaving their paths home after the Six O'Clock Swill, and frumpy, weary housewives in aprons sweeping frontsteps.
Hilarious too, to read of the "Surry Hills girl". Says the pawnbroker Joseph Mendel to Hughie, when the drunk father attempts to seek some redress for the loss of his (pregnant) daughter Roie's honour:

"You are perhaps aware that a Surry Hills girl finds it difficult to obtain a position in the city. She may be educated; she may be more highly moral that similar young ladies in more prosperous suburbs, but her address is against her. Most Sydney people persist, somewhat biasedly, perhaps, in thinking of Surry Hills in terms of brothels, razor-gangs, tenements, and fried fish shops."

Have been wondering what that red light in the building across from me is... (have been told that my neighborhood is home to swingers groups and sex clubs...) And love too, Park's prose on the family's Christmas pudding.

"Now Hughie had, long ago, been a shearers' cook, and could make a curry hot, sweet and luscious, with surprising bits of chopped-up date, green peaches, and sliced banana floating mysteriously in it. And he could make soup, and brownie, and the curiously named sea pie, which is nothing more than a stew with an oversize dumpling roofing it. But, best of all, he could make a boiled pudding, dark as midnight and rich as Persia, and containing so many dates, prunes, cherries, sultanas, and currants, that, as Hughie himself modestly said: 'You couldn't spit between them'."

Ruhlman on Trends

Interesting stuff here: Michael Ruhlman called for readers to share with him what they thought were the next food trends. The return of lard, growing your own food, and making your own charcuterie, cheese and preserves were frequent suggestions. Can we add any here?

Price Check

Listen, this is an exercise in convalescing-induced curiosity for me as much as anything, but it’d be much more interesting if y’all chipped in from wherever you might be — Gundagai to Goondiwindi, Prahran Markets to Perth and Penrith, Noosa to Nedlands, Alphington to Ulladulla and Ipswich — hey, even Toronto, Brooklyn, Zurich, Glastonbury, Nairobi and Nauru. (I’ll even do the currency conversions for you.)
I’d like to work out some sort of chart that gives some sort of indication about comparative fresh produce prices.
Sparked by a range of things including, but not limited to:

• My need to shave some expenses from my blown-out expenditure in preparation for my Japan holiday and my consequent interest in where I’m better off shopping;
• My curiosity about whether I’m being budget conscious if I shop at better fruit and vegetable shops in inner-city Sydney as opposed to supermarkets — as, of course, any food-loving person prefers to do;
• The headline news: in the Herald this week, front-page news about the Federal Government’s intention to make it easier for foreign supermarket chains to enter Australia, so increasing competition;
• The sense I have that everyone is tightening their belts (a meatloaf post is to come) and the fact that we seem to be entering a new era of food shortages;
• My brothers’ recent rantings about one of the two major Australian supermarket chains — can’t remember which one it was, Coles or Woolworths, but he was passionate in his disdain for it … I’ll get back to you on that. Suspect others may share similar antipathy towards the chains.

As you’ll see here, I’ve chosen some fruit and vegetable items to focus on. I’m going to have a look at a couple of places this weekend and add to the list of prices. I’d like then to add up the cost of a shopping basket of the same items from each place. Not very scientific I’m sure, but maybe a little indicative, a little useful, a little interesting. Throw your thoughts at me if you’d like to contribute… email me or comment with prices for the following and maybe we’ll have a conclusion to muse over at the end of it all. (Any organic shoppers out there? Talk to me!)

Food in Film

You have to wonder who has time to do this. But I'm terribly impressed and grateful nonetheless. And maintain that Ang Lee's Eat, Drink, Man, Woman should be at the top of the list. Oh to have such an ability with a cleaver.

Comfort Food

There just isn't the energy in these parts for much right now, except gratitude for Dad's potato soup, sister-in-law Jo's extraordinary chocolate cake, my mother's folk remedy of lemon, honey and olive oil to sooth a sore throat, and my niece's unstinting ability to leave a cheerful trail of crumbs in her wake. A surgeon sliced into my neck late last week to extract half a thyroid. Neck swollen and swathed in ice-pack and/or scarf. Voice husky. Brain anaesthetised. Self-pity extreme. Will attempt to return with something intelligent soon. Oh, and that chocolate cake recipe.