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Beautiful trip.
Beautiful babies. Have come back with an idea: a photographic book, "Beautiful Chinese Babies". Well? It would certainly be prettier than the hilarious photographic coffee-table book in the hotel lobby of our Kunming hotel — Chinese Pigs. Seriously.
A day out of town with friends.
The destination: Rye on the Mornington Peninsula. The host's surname: Athanasopoulos. I'm 10 kilograms heavier. Mrs A. is a generous genius. At 1pm, serving lunch: salads, kebabs and these golden nuggets (dolmade imitators — zucchini flowers stuffed with short-grain rice, onion and dill, and folded in upon themselves before being baked, a little oil). At 5pm, after naps, some wondrous sweet thing of filo and custard. And then, for heaven's sake, cakes. At 5.30pm, back on the highway, nodding with sleep all the way back in the backseat.
See you in a couple of weeks.
S
For those of you who are interested, here's my Vue de monde story, as seen in theage(melbourne)magazine a couple of weeks ago (a glossy released with The Age newspaper once a month). It's an article about the life of an apprentice in a high-end restaurant's kitchen: I spent four days in chefs' whites trying to get a sense for it. And me and Brussels sprouts — well, we're just not friendly anymore.
THE APPRENTICE
On the bench in front of me, 1.6 kilograms of brussels sprouts. In my hand, a devilishly sharp paring knife. On the wall next to me, a timer counting down 45 minutes. My task: to remove the most curvaceous leaves from 1.6 kilograms of brussels sprouts in 45 minutes without tearing them, the bloodshot eyes of four top chefs on me.
Trimming the base of the sprout with the knife and tearing off blemished outer leaves is just the start of the task. The leaves underneath, which are to be later reassembled as “handmade” brussels sprouts, overlap in a protective grip. It’s a long slow haul of gently prising the leaves free of each other to release them unscathed. On day two of my four days working as an apprentice, of sorts, in the Vue de monde kitchen, it takes me 90, hunched-over minutes to get a small bucket of leaves — and painfully cramped fingers.
This is what apprentices (and their seniors) do at restaurants such as the idealised and idolised Vue de monde. Spend up to 16 hours a day on their feet repeating, at a sprint, fiddly, minute, exacting, menial tasks to create any number of elements for an executive chef’s vision of a highly engineered whole. They’re the factory workers pumping out the nuts and bolts and panels and motors that contribute to the car designer’s dream.
My brussels sprout leaves and the handmade sprouts they have become will be one small part of a hare dish. It’s not until “service” later, when the kitchen is gripped by adrenalin, frenzy and focus, and hundreds of dishes move from open kitchen to dining room, that I understand to what end I spent 90 minutes of my life bent over brussels sprouts.
Here's one that goes straight into the Favourite Food Memories file: a wondrous, mouthful of a dish at Pearl.
Sukiyaki of Moondara beef with tofu, shiitake, enoki and daikon, shiso and chrysanthemum shoots, quail egg and a dashi broth added at the table.
Chef Geoff Lindsay's carefully anotated menu notes that "Moondara beef is from Tajima strain grass fed Wagyu beef grown on the Prentice family farm at Moondara in the Gippsland Mountain Rivers District". (For the non-Australians among you, we can't walk five paces here without stumbling over a piece of Wagyu: chefs are going crazy for it.)
Damn, that beef was silken (I was ever so happy to hear some know-it-all in the dining room pipe up at one point during the special dinner and claim that Wagyu beef has good fats, not bad). Waiter poured over a fine broth, lots of shoots everywhere, cubes of daikon, and the sweetest little quail egg on top.
So I escape my desk just for a bit, trying to pretend I don't have to finish a whole lot of work before departure. Bank, post office, nice little shop in Gertrude Street where I buy a nice little dress I've had my eye on and which, it has to be said, is just a little bit tight but thinking that trekking up and down astounding mountains in China will fix that. And what do I go and do? In a fit of wistfulness and misty-eyed I'm-going-to-miss-Melbourne sentiment, stop off at Melissa Greek cake shop in Smith Street for an obscenely oversized piece of spanakopita. And I was a no-show for an appointment with my trainer this morning. And I've got a work dinner at Pearl tonight that will surely involve large volumes of rather lovely food. Hopeless. And deeply superficial Sydney full of waifs with sticks for arms and wardrobes full of size 6 to be my new home.
Charles Conder, Coogee Bay, 1888
Things have been brewing, directions have been agonised over, decisions have had to be made. I'm a bit wistful about it all, because I love Melbourne, but really, it's the right decision for so many reasons. In about six weeks, I'll be moving to Sydney. To a great job at theage(melbourne)magazine's sister publication, the(sydney)magazine, which comes out with that city's major newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald. Same position — deputy editor — but full-time in the office. Suits, heels, serious career-woman stuff again. Farewell to my precious Mondays and Tuesdays in pyjamas and, sadly, less writing. And Sydney does SHOCKING coffee. (And property and rental prices — Oh my God!) But beyond the great job opportunity, there's an 18-month-old niece there (favourite words: "the ball" and "the park") and a nephew on the way, and that bloody beautiful harbour and beaches and the sea baths at Coogee and my favourite favourite Thai restaurant and ...
Meanwhile, there's a holiday to think about first. Depart for Hong Kong next week, then onwards to China's Yunnan Province. The trip was a last-minute decision, so still planning bits and pieces, but hope to get some trekking in — particularly to the famous Tiger Leaping Gorge.
Posts will be few and far between in the next few weeks I'd say but will try to show off pics, food etc of Yunnan on my return.
