The Elegant Sufficiency

John Newton's 10 Totally Unrelated Terrific Books

Brilliant meal last week with old friend John Newton, one of Australia's finest and most thoughtful food writers and author of books including Beppi's: A LIfe in Three Courses. We ate at Pello in Stanley Street, East Sydney — about the best restaurant meal I’ve had since touching down last year, and some of the best company.
We talked books: I lamented how little time I get to read anything other than newspapers, magazines and stuff online. John, I'm sure wisely, largely avoids all that to keep his nose firmly buried in books. I demanded names, and today he obliged with his list of “Ten Totally Unrelated Terrific Books”, in no particular order:

1. Fortunata and Jacinta: Two Stories of Married Women, by Benito Pérez Galdós: “Sometimes called the Spanish Dickens, if you like sprawling 19th Century novels.”
2. What I Loved: A Novel, by Siri Hustvedt: “Siri Hustvedt has written a novel of ideas, in which she tackles questions of how much of what we perceive is personal, how much shared, how much is fixed for all time and how much is liable to shift. What I Loved is a ferociously clever book that, for the first third, I thought I disliked.”
3. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon: “This is my 20-year-old daughter’s favourite writer; a wonderful tale of comics and their makers in early and mid 20th Century New York.”
4. The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, by María Rosa Menocal: “The story of the intellectual, artistic and scientific achievements of the Arabs in Spain between 1711 and 1492 – if you don’t want to get on a plane and go immediately to Granada and Toledo and Seville and Córdoba after reading this, you’re an incurable Franco/Italophile.”
5. The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan: “If you've read it already you can move on to his others — Second Nature, The Botany of Desire and the new one that I have yet to read, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto.”
6. Delizia! The Epic History of the Italians and Their Food, by John Dickie: “Interesting but polemical history of Italian food. Well worth the reading.”
7. A Late Dinner: Discovering the Food of Spain, by Paul Richardson: “One man wanders around Spain eating and talking about food with the Spaniards. As much about la cocina de siempre (the food of always) as la nueva cocina.”
8. Deep Economy, by Bill McKibben: “An absolute must; an exploration of why we can’t go on growing like this, and a way forward.”
9. Seeds of Deception, by Jeffrey M. Smith: “A history of the flawed science and political and corporate manipulations of  genetic engineering.”
10. Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me, by Javier Marías: “If you like page turners, fuggedaboutit! This leisurely writer turns ideas over slowly and examines them for pages on end in this book with its famous beginning. In fact I’m going to read it again."

NB: Sad to read today in Scott Bolles' Short Black column in Good Living that Pello chef/owner Thomas Johns has put the restaurant on the market. I get a strong sense he wasn’t supported by Sydney’s fickle and fashion-conscious diners. Their loss.

A Sydney Sunday

Caffe latte, made by a Melburnian, praise be, at Wall Cafe in Surry Hills.
Celebrity sighting 1: Hugo Weaving, scruffy, bearded.
Toasted pide with ham, cheese and tomato.
We caught the Watson’s Bay ferry from Circular Quay to Rose Bay.
Teasing her about her pushy New York habits as she elbows her way to the top deck.
Smoothed out our wind-crazed hair on the walk from pier to Pier.
At home in Victoria for Christmas, she wanted to smell the eucalpyts again; here it’s the frangipani.
I always want to smell frangipani.
Veuve Clicquot to start.
Oysters, from Camden Haven, astonishing, silencing.
Gossip: What was she thinking? Does she know what she looks like? Did you here about X? Someone’s pregnant and someone else has a new girlfriend and we just can’t understand why he’s still single.
She talks about New York. Gasps, and laughter, and mock-shock at her lifestyle, the stuff of movies. She tells me about the restaurants, her local diner, her favourite bar and favourite restaurant. Craft, We’ll go there when I visit later this year, she says. (She’s eaten ferns there — had never heard such a thing, could it be fiddlehead fern?)
I talk about oh, you know, stuff. So bloody good to tell it to someone who understands, cares.
Celebrity sighting 2: a tanned and very very svelte Mikey Robins.
How many French waiters does an Australian restaurant need?
A seaplane swings in to land, clouds gather.
The era of the $50 main course is well and truly upon us and we’re pushing towards $60. A bother when the marron is forgettable and the dory and the blue eye are overcooked, fractionally, and this is your favourite restaurant in Sydney.
But I haven’t seen her for a year and I’ve forgotten a tedious, common thing called credit-card debt and I understand that fish can be a bugger of a thing and it doesn’t take much to tip us over the edge, from a Chablis to the loveliest Vallebelbo Moscati d’Asti.
And the lychee sorbet and green mango+coconut salad is divine and disappears too fast, as does the afternoon that leaves me thinking that I could come to like this city.
If I get a second job.

Sydney Discoveries

I’m privileged to have a very close contact who works at the swish Sydney city restaurant est and who suggested I stop by after work last week to say hello, sit in the bar area, read a newspaper and enjoy some oysters. Oh, the joy...

• A dozen Port Stephens oysters. Sydney rock oysters … in heaven, these native oysters would be eaten for breakfast.
• Chef Peter Doyle’s extraordinary squab dish — roasted, boned squab, white asparagus, morels and chanterelles. A dish of perfection in its simplicity and immaculate ingredients. Brilliantly pink meat, a little liverish in the nicest possible way; pan juices, nothing else.
• White sesame oil: after some online searching, it seems Chef Doyle is one of the few to be using this oil, for which the seeds are apparently untoasted … at est, he puts it into a dish of yellow fin tuna sashimi, cucumber, wasabi, coriander and ponzu. Can find no evidence of other chefs using it, except Chicago’s Charlie Trotter. Found some references to his dish "Young-Coconut Pad Thai With Almond Chile Sauce” (from Raw, by Charlie Trotter and Roxanne Klein) . I didn’t try Doyle’s dish but will next time. My contact tells me the white sesame oil is available at Tokyo Mart (83 Sailors Bay Road, Northbridge). Given the overpoweringly hefty flavours of normal sesame oil, it might be a great discovery. Has anyone used it?
• It’s better for all of us if I don’t share my sketches with you. Just tried to draw this, but failed miserably. My words will have to do the job instead: leaving est, entranced by a “floral display” — a single fresh orchid flower in a test tube, the test tube sitting in a small timber picture frame, the frame on a wall near a lift. Gorgeous. Not so my sketch.

A Basque Country Restaurant

When you read about restaurants like this, you start to understand what might have been on expatriate Australian chef John Torode's mind when he said that he hadn't seen anything exciting in Sydney restaurants during a recent visit.
Read jet-setting blogger Chez Pim's review of Etxebarri here (from a visit last year), then look at the Basque restaurant's own website here. I'm transfixed and intoxicated and plotting my next holiday.

A Formula for Future Mediocrity

Interested to read in Australian Sunday papers of Australian-born, London-based chef John Torode's comments on Sydney restaurants. No one's doing anything exciting, he told reporters. "Nothing seems to have moved on and I had some very ordinary meals." He added: "Australians are in love with themselves about their cuisine but it seems pretty tired when you think about what is coming out of Britain and Europe at the moment."
Here, we call it "cultural cringe", the fear, the belief that our culture can't match other cultures overseas. It causes journalists particularly to scramble, parochially, embarrassingly, to ask international guests (and returning Australians) in any field of endeavour, from the arts and literature, to food and fashion, what they think of us. What do you like about Australia, journalists probe?
No wonder we're so quick to jump on the comments of visiting expats like John Torode.
I'm no expert on Sydney restaurants — that might change a bit by the end of the year, I hope — but I'd venture that Torode's comments could equally apply in Melbourne. OK, so I'm not eating out as much as I used to when I was a reviewer, but these days, when I do, I'm drawn to the rustic, those places that take seriously their cultural inspirations — the MoVidas, the Bar Lourinhas, the Rumis, the Hakos — rather than high-end places that try and do how-clever-am-I, fancy-pantsy stuff with a dozen or more things on a plate that a dozen or more hands have touched.
That may be my natural inclination, but I think it may also be because I just don't think that too much upper-end stuff here is all that inspiring. I reckon it's only a matter of time before some blow-in from overseas like Torode makes a similar comment about Melbourne food that gets splashed in the papers on a quiet news day.
And what I want to know is this: there are grumblings coming from respected Melbourne restaurant industry figures, but why aren't any of my media colleagues seriously exploring the effect that Crown Casino's restaurant precinct is having on the wider restaurant industry. I'd say that the precinct, surely little more than an attempt to bring a veneer of sophistication to a crass gambling monolith, would have to be sucking a degree of life out of it — taking restaurant customers and their money (not to mention chefs and waiting staff) away from the rest of the city. (Not to mention what else the casino might suck out of the city.)
There are at least five high-end "premium" restaurants on that south bank of the Yarra (the new Nobu, Neil Perry's newish Rockpool Bar & Grill, the Brasserie by Philippe Mouchel, Silks and Koko) and at least two more to come — Maurice Terzini's Giuseppe, Arnaldo and Sons, and Guillaume Brahimi's place. Several more premium places than a small city like Melbourne can support.
I'd suggest that when we spend our money in that restaurant precinct, we're doing a disservice to Melbourne's long-term food and restaurant culture. There simply isn't enough money to go round in this city to support too many more striking and exciting premium restaurants — especially ones that may want to depart in both location and formula from that spot on the river, or which aren't feted to do so.

The Apprentice

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.

Memories Are Made of This

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.

Getting Back on the Blog

Getting back on the blog … a challenge almost as great as that to get back on my bike (which, mercifully, the bike shop has pronounced to be less wounded as a result of my encounter with Melbourne’s tram-lines than I was!). Get out of the rhythm of posting something, anything, most days and it’s hard to get back into it. But, I’m trying. To summarise:

• Vue de Monde apprentice experience is now but a memory, a selection of Mark Chew's wonderful photographs (including one of me wielding a broom and a sulky expression), and a mere 10,000 words of notes in my laptop (that will give me a bigger headache over the next week to deadline than 1.6 kilograms of Brussels sprouts). Think I’ll be hunkering down at the State Library again to clear myself of distractions.
• Weekend just past in Sydney with family: the ever-blonder, sassier 17-month-old remembered me (oh, the warm glow!) and the silly game we played last time I saw her; my brother’s Sunday-night porcini risotto was a triumph, as was my second testing of a brilliant lemon tart recipe that will appear in this space at some point soon; our unscheduled trip to a hospital emergency ward with my father stressful, alarming, but the diagnosis after some hours thankfully fairly routine.
• Some memorable dishes out since I’ve been back: a sublime soufflé at VdM (dehydrated raspberries, reduced to a powder, mixed with sugar and coating the soufflé dish) during my first experience of the restaurant on the well-dressed side of the pass; and, at Paul Mathis’s new 100 Mile Cafe, some brilliant and conscionable flavours – smoked duck sushi, pan-fried Murray cod with steamed bok choy and a tomato and lime salsa, and another fine soufflé – a rhubarb one with a very striking camomile icecream.
• And finally, thought it fascinating that this morning’s home-page list of The New York Times’s “Most Popular” articles was topped by a piece headed "For the Gluten-Averse, a Menu That Works". (Beating “Top Lender Sees Mortgage Woes for ‘Good Risks” at number 2; “Harley Woos Female Bikers” at number 4; and "Study says Obesity Can be Contagious" at number 5.) The piece looks at the burgeoning number of restaurants catering to gluten-intolerant diners, including Greenwich Village’s Risotteria, which among other things, offers gluten-free breadsticks, cookies and pizza. Perhaps my I’ll-eat-anything attitude has blinkered me, but I was astonished by the number of orders with special dietary requests that came in every service during my time in the VdM kitchen: shellfish and nut allergies, lactose and gluten intolerances … I’m sorry, but I just can’t help being cynical. Are they all for real?

PS: In response to Jaden's comment on my last post, I went searching for the origin of the word offal. It comes from “off”-“fall” – that which falls off a butcher’s block.

Bloody Brussels Sprouts

If life is too short to stuff a mushroom, it's almost certainly too short to painstakingly disassemble a Brussels sprout, leaf by leaf, so it can be reassembled, leaf by leaf, with chicken mousse as a binding agent. Three hours it took me, to disassemble 1.6 kilograms of Brussels sprouts without breaking those bloody leaves. By the end, I was convinced I had arthritis in my hands. And imagine my shame when an apprentice later told me how much time, I mean, how little time, the task takes him.

100 Favourite Food Memories

I’m celebrating 100 posts on Elegant Sufficiency with a list of my 100 Favourite Food Memories. I don’t want to sound like a wanker here… I know I’ve been incredibly fortunate (and spent way too much money eating!). But what started as just a list has become a far more curious exercise, bringing back tastes and sensations and emotions and wonderful and difficult memories. (This list, which is in no particular order, would not have been possible without my crazily obsessive Virgo characteristic of filing systems and extensive notes.)
To mark this milestone (although my boss rather took the wind out of my sails when he told me that the author of one of the world’s most popular blogs about gadgets has written 6,500 posts), there’s something special at the end here that might interest you: If you’re yawning at my meandering memories, skip to the bottom.

Liqun roast duck restaurant

1. Peking duck at Beijing’s Liqun Roast Duck Restaurant – including a heaped plate of duck liver.
2. Crab-filled xiao long bao dumplings at Nanxiang steamed buns restaurant, Yu Yuan Gardens, Shanghai – to bypass the queues running out the door, on my visit here with my parents I had no option but to tell the waiters that my father was very unwell and needed to sit down urgently. Which, at the time, was a long way from the truth.
3. I can’t remember the details but Greg Malouf's AMAZING tongue salad at Mo Mo.
4. Pulled noodles at a streetside stall beside Yue Hu (Moon Lake), Ningbo China. OK to be honest, I was terrified of its hygiene levels, but I was with my plucky 60-year-old godmother who was teaching English in Ningbo at the time, and her enthusiasm for the noodles and the local beer was infectious.
5. The extraordinary vacherin with fine layers of meringue, Syrian apricot ice-cream and orange praline sorbet made by clever Alison Wall, the former pastry chef at Greg Malouf’s Mo Mo.
6. Loch Fyne oysters – eaten in a chill breeze blowing off the lake on the west coast of Scotland.
7. Mrs Wang’s zha jiang mian – the ubiquitous northern Chinese noodle dish. My godmother and I stayed with Mrs Wang and her family in their Beijing hutong courtyard house.
8. My first taste of green chicken curry in Bangkok with a man I loved – at a backstreet stall with kittens crawling over the tables.
9. Corned beef with parsley sauce: the first dinner Grandma would cook when we’d arrive at my grandparents’ place for holidays after the 12-hour drive from Queensland to Sydney when we were children. (Are we there yet?)
10. Sydney rock oysters at the miraculous Pier restaurant in Sydney; a teary, bonding meal with my brother.
11. Cold tofu cubes in the lightest wispy garlicky sauce, alongside the crisp deep-fried mutton at Shui Hu Ju restaurant (68 Peel Street, Hong Kong.)

Those buffalos and me, I mean, I

12. My first taste of Australian buffalo mozzarella in the Western districts of Victoria.
13. Wonton noodle soup on my exhausted, emotional, uncertain and lonely first night living in Hong Kong. (89 Hennessy Road, Wanchai.)
14. Crisp roast pork served the next night by the very kind Raymond Sinn at Hong Kong’s Tai Woo Restaurant. (27 Percival Street, Causeway Bay.)
15. Crème de Chou-Fleur, Truffes et Pain d’Epices Grillé – an intense cauliflower soup with slices of truffle and grilled spicy bread at Guy Savoy’s Les Bookinistes restaurant in the 6th – with Megan and Meaghan. How I miss them.
16. Tea-smoked duck at Bamboo House.
17. Sally Cuthbertson’s lasagna: layers of spinach, basil, tomato passata, provolone, ricotta, mozzarella, white sauce and pasta after a hard morning bottling tomato sauce under my ex-boss, her husband Slattery’s, exacting eye.
18. My 30th birthday meal at Mezzo in London – roast wild salmon with white beans and pistou, with Veuve Clicquot, my brother and his ex-wife, the self-centred Austrian sex kitten.
19. Spaghetti vongole on the terrace of an Amalfi restaurant with my mum and my brother.
20. Thai stuffed omelette with chilli fish sauce and jasmine rice at Meera Freeman's old Kin Kao in Prahran, Melbourne.
21. Paul Wilson’s poached egg, truffle and soft polenta – at Georges, at Radii and at the Botanical.

Spareribs, Silk Road style

22. The Silk Road flavours of the fried lamb spareribs with sliced chilli sauce at the crazy Old Beijing Zhajiang Noodle King restaurant.
23. Steve Szabo's “tarte tatin” of braised beef cheek + glazed root vegetables with parsley and truffle oil during his old Jimmy Watson’s days (I’m embarrassed to admit that I wrote “incredible orgasm” next to this on the menu I’ve just found from the night!).
24. Rudderfish in smoldering cedar bark at a special wine dinner for Mountadam Vineyards at the Grand Hyatt cooked by Kyoto chef Yoshihiro Murata.
25. Suckling pig in the town of Mealhada, Portugal.
26. Suckling pig at the Flower Drum for a Chinese New Year banquet: Gilbert Lau sliced the poor little piglet’s rouged skin into meticulous little squares and served them, if I recall correctly, with a little bun and some sweet sauce.
27. Jeremy Strode’s pig trotters – stuffed with sweetbreads and a wisp of ginger – at the now-defunct Pomme in Toorak, Melbourne.
28. Steamed black sesame paste dumplings in ginger soup in the back streets of Bangkok’s Chinatown.
29. David Thompson's red curry of minced Murray perch with shredded ginger green beans, Thai eggplants and basil – at a special dinner at the now-defunct Blakes restaurant in Melbourne.
30. Oeuf à la neige, crème anglaise et amandes at Le Petit Bofinger in Paris.
31. Caramel and meringue gelati at Massimo’s Gelati in Noosa. (I just asked my father to get in the car and drive 10 minutes’ up the road to check that I had this description right and, what would you know, he couldn’t be bothered! Ungrateful man!)

Purple-tipped water spinach in southern China

32. The purple-tipped water spinach stir-fried with garlic and mushrooms at a little restaurant in the Guangdong home town of Gilbert Lau during a trip with the former Flower Drum restaurateur back to his home village – his first trip there since he left in the late ‘50s. A wonderful story for another day.

The Shunde fish dish

33. Freshwater fish with Chinese olives and Yunnan ham in a restaurant in Shunde in the Pearl River Delta with Gilbert.
34. Fenouil confit, sorbet citron et basilic at Le Clos des Gourmets in the 7th arr. – intense sorbet with confit fennel.
35. Bresse chicken with foie gras sauce and truffles under the skin at Alain Ducasse in Paris (loved the stool beside my chair for our handbags).
36. Fried minced beef with onions and carrots cooked over a campfire during my Grade 10 school camp at Maroon Dam in Queensland.
37. Crème brulée at the Bibendum Oyster Bar at Michelin House, SW3.
38. Frites cooked in goose fat at Bistro Vue, Melbourne (pity about the completely naff design).
39. Tung Po pork at Liu Yuan Pavilion Shanghainese restaurant (54-62 Lockhart Road, Wanchai).
40. Tempura prawn soba noodles at a rickety stall near Tokyo’s Tsukiji Central Markets.
41. Spinach and mozzarella tramezzini sandwiches in Rome near Piazza Barberini.
42. My first taste of sushi in Japan – at Azuma restaurant in Asakusa, Tokyo.
43. Spaghetti alle cozze e pomodorini on Christmas night at the very local, very hidden Osteria Anice Stellato in Venice’s “Ghetto”; at the end of a misty walk through calles and over bridges following Veneto winemaker friends.

A hutong breakfast

44. An early-morning breakfast in a Beijing hutong – braised meat of an indeterminate variety, chopped minutely with coriander and green chilli, and served in a bun.
45. Life-threateningly spicy dan dan mian noodles at the hole-in-the wall Q Sichuanese restaurant in Wanchai.
46. An oyster omelette with tomato sauce in a Taipei street market. I was in a huff with a Chinese dissident poet.
47. Frank Camorra’s white gazpacho with grape granita at MoVida, Melbourne.
48. Bellinis at Harry's Bar in Venice. My diary recalls: “A woman pulls off a fine cream leather tan-trimmed glove and reveals a perfectly manicured hand and diamonds – immense”. Someone in my party stole an ashtray. We were much younger then.
49. Andrew McConnell’s smoked eel carpaccio, gewürztraminer jelly, dill and crème fraiche at Circa the Prince in Melbourne.
50. Mum’s lamb curry with sambals – most often cooked for Labor Party fundraisers when I was a child.
51. David Thompson’s miang som – pomelo and lobster on betel leaves.
52. Fresh sea urchin tossed through spaghetti at Cafe di Stasio in Melbourne.
53. Uni eaten out of a little wooden box with wasabi and soy with a dear old friend at her Hong Kong apartment.
54. Chu-toro, o-toro and uni sushi at Hong Kong’s Sushi Toki with that dear old friend. (Shop G1015, G/F., Yiu Sing Mansion, Phase 10, 14 Taikoo Shing Road, Taikoo Shing.)
55. That same dear old friend’s Danish open sandwiches with pickled and curried herring. How do you stop your heart breaking when, without explanation, that dear old friend stops returning your phone calls?
56. Kanom krok – coconut-milk-based street food snacks in Bangkok.
57. Juicy barbecued chicken with sticky rice served in a little basket and sweet chilli sauce at the Issan restaurant Krua Rommai. (16 Sukhumvit soi 36, Bangkok.)

Xiao long bao dumplings

58. Magical xiao long bao (“little dragon dumplings”) at Liu Yuan Pavilion Shanghainese restaurant – the original soup dumplings. (54-62 Lockhart Road, Wanchai.)
59. Raclette with boiled new potatoes at the home of Swiss friends in Bern.
60. Homemade bircher muesli with the same Swiss friends, including raspberries from their garden.
61. Sausages in white bread with tomato sauce outside the Prahran Market for a Country Fire Authority fundraiser.
62. With David Thompson, a stir-fry of catfish, curry paste and holy basil at Bangkok’s Tha Chang pier on the Chao Phraya River, dirty water sloshing up on the wooden boards underfoot.
63. Hoy tod – crisp mussel pancakes with bean sprouts – at Spice I Am in Sydney’s Surry Hills.
64. Unagi sushi at Kenzan, Melbourne.
65. The suckling pig my brother cooked in his father-in-law’s pizza oven, Christmas 2005. A niece-in-waiting.
66. River prawns with nahm pla prik at the riverside Phae Krung Kao restaurant in Ayutthaya with David Thompson (followed by a salad of deep-fried frog).
67. The oysters my brother shucks every Christmas.
68. Tony Tan's beef rendang.
69. Every Tony Tan dish that I’ve ever been lucky enough to eat.
70. My first taste of Jamón Ibérico, standing in the middle of a Valencia market. Swooning.
71. Kumamoto oysters from Oregon at Grand Central Station’s Oyster Bar.
72. Oyster omelette with chilli jam at the Flying Vegetable restaurant in Phitsanalok, Thailand.
73. Macaroni cheese at Bubby's Pie Co. in Tribeca with my friend Abby. It’s time I got in touch.
74. Mum’s pressed ox tongue. (Future post coming on this.)
75. McDonald;s Filet-O-Fish for the hangover after my 35th birthday.
76. Chilled lobster and corn chowder at Lever House at Park Ave. and 53rd.
77. Karen Martini's gorgonzola pannacotta with a salad of asparagus, radicchio, witlof, apple and aged balsamico.
78. Warm lamb’s tongue and potato salad with saffron potatoes and honey-lavender vinaigrette at Gary Danko in San Francisco.

Crab in Lockhart Road

79. Steamed crab with garlic at Yuet Wah Wui Crab, Lockhart Road, Causeway Bay.
80. Little gem lettuces with green goddess dressing and roasted beets at Chez Panisse downstairs.
81. Puree of summer pea soup, riesling, scallop carpaccio and peperoncino oil at L'Impero, New York.
82. Jeremy Strode’s free range eggs “sur la plat” with creamed mushrooms at the now-defunct Pomme.
83. Mum’s lambs brains in white sauce.
84. My friend Jane’s goats cheese salad, served at her old Paris apartment.
85. Crisp riesling, or fino sherry, at Ricky Ricardo's in Noosa as the sun goes down over the river, fried stuffed olives and aioli at the side.
86. Foie gras and cured pork on lentils at Jeanty at Jack's, San Francisco.
87. Robiola cheese with great tomato, bought at Peck food store in Milan, eaten at a truck stop with Mum and Dad after driving through a scary tunnel in northern Italy.
88. Cold Shanghai noodles served in a tumble in the middle of a platter, surrounded by little dishes holding condiments including chilli oil, vinegar, hoi sin-style sauce, pickled vegetables and ground peanuts at Kung Tak Lam Organic Shanghai Vegetarian Cuisine. Mix and match the toppings to create a personalised noodle dish. (31 Yee Wo Street, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong.)

Rut & Lek, Bangkok

89. Fried rice with crab and egg + Singha beer at the sidewalk Rut & Lek in Bangkok’s Chinatown (Yaowarat and Soi Texas): toilet paper rolls are on the table if you need a napkin.
90. Mum’s baked chicken with mayonnaise: a (bizarre) family favourite in the late ‘70s.
91. My first taste of a Parisian baguette – with unsalted French butter.

Bangkok street food: I need a name?

92. The Bangkok street food (above) that I can’t remember the name of: little sweet, soft, translucent pastry pockets with pork and I think peanuts in them. Can someone help?
93. The incendiary, chilli-oil-smothered pork dumplings at Man Jiang Sichuan restaurant. (1/F 482 Hennessy Road, Causeway Bay.)
94. The weisswurst or bratwurst from the deli-hall stall at Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne. No sauerkraut please.
95. My first taste of fresh horseradish – whipped through cream and served with roast beef and Yorkshire pudding: a meal I cooked while “studying” at Le Cordon Bleu in London.
96. The fresh fish served at a long-table, flame-lit, tropical-sultry dinner on the Fijian island of Vatulele.
97. A farmers-market and garden-generated meal at the Bay Area home of friends, cooking teacher Linda Hillel and her husband, Jon: okra, brushed with olive oil and sprinkled with kosher salt and barbecued; sautéed millet and bulgur wheat with red Russian kale, olive oil and garlic; tomatoes from the garden and basil; and Cypress Grove Humbolt Fog blue cheese.
98. Braised tripe at yum cha at Victoria Seafood restaurant, Wanchai, Hong Kong.
99. My first taste of rucola – after descending from the Roman ruins of Tiberius’s  "Damecuta" villa on Capri.
100. Strawberries from my late grandfather’s Sydney garden with icing sugar and cream at the big antique table with the lace cloth. It's now my Melbourne desk.

SOMETHING SPECIAL: OOH LA LA, A COMPETITION!

It’s your turn: I’d love to hear some of your Favourite Food Memories and, to encourage you to stop lurking and come out of the closet with them I’m running a little competition. Post a comment here with your Five Favourite Food Memories by Sunday, May 20, and I’ll send a prize to the person who writes what I judge to be the most fabulous. The prize (which I’ll post anywhere in the world) is a copy of the luscious and award-winning Saha: A Chef’s Journey Through Lebanon and Syria, by Greg and Lucy Malouf (Hardie Grant, 2005).

Recipes for Good Luck

Thanks for your kind, warm comments – public and private – in response to yesterday’s melancholy. I can’t tell you how much they have been appreciated. I have resumed my long march today with gym, yoga, lots of fruit (including the divinest fresh lychees bought at Cameron Russell’s organics stall (stall 83) at the Vic Markets yesterday) and a volume of housework that only a Virgo could use as a salve at such a time. Washing, making chicken stock, dish-washing, changing sheets, spot-cleaning the landlord’s bloody (stupid) cream carpet and washing last year’s winter woollens.
Am I the only one to follow her mother’s vintage household-management habits? The woollens-washing task has been haunting me since the end of the southern hemisphere winter last August. They’ve sat there, staring at me, week in, week out: One pale blue ribbed sweater, a watermelon-coloured one with three-quarter-length sleeves, another in turquoise, two skinny slim knits in beige and chocolate which highlight, in an unfortunate fashion, certain areas around my midriff that I prefer not highlighted (but which may be gone by autumn if I continue my gym diligence), a green cardigan, a charcoal turtle neck. A charity shop will probably get the turquoise sweater, which makes me look like a grandmother; the rest I’m ambivalent about. Except the charcoal turtle neck, a soft old Country Road number that has been a loyal friend. Yeah, guess which sweater the moths attacked? And it wasn’t the matronly turquoise one.
That’s what happens when you don’t listen to your mother’s advice, you see. It’s what happens when you don’t dunk your woollens in wool wash the moment there’s even a whiff of Spring, follow that with a quick spin-dry in the machine, hang them out to dry, finish things with a light pressing, then fold them neatly and store with mothballs in a camphor trunk.
But moth holes aside, I’ve cleaned out my household for Chinese New Year. Although, strictly speaking, I’m a little late with my cleaning to really get brownie points with the Chinese Gods, I hope that I’ve swept the bad luck of the past year away enough to turn things round – for Dad at least. To maximise the family’s fortunes for the Year of the Pig, I’ve been having some discussions with Alex Tseng at Chinatown’s Bamboo House and, in little more than an hour, 10 of us will be hoeing into a fine northern Chinese New Year banquet.
Kung Hei Fat Choi

Listening To My Body

“You have to listen to your body,” my new personal trainer tells me. I don’t tell him that if I was listening to my body, I wouldn’t be floundering like a dugong on a gym floor doing ridiculous things with my legs and a Swiss ball early on a Saturday morning; instead, I’d be at Babka having a strong café latte and the café's brilliant casalinga BLT (I’m sure they make their own mayonnaise), or at Balzari where I’d order the “triple cheese toastie” (grilled cheddar, fontina and fior di latte mozzarella on toasted sourdough) with the Saturday papers. I tell him instead that I have been listening to my body – after wearing insanely high heels to work two days ago, followed by even more insanely high heels to a black-tie awards ceremony that night, my body, my feet, are telling me very clearly that they won’t be tolerating that conceit again for some time.
My new personal trainer is trying to explain to me why I might have hit the wall with training this week. A week ago I was a demon on the cross-trainer: tapping the incline and resistance levels higher and higher, turning the volume on my iPod up higher and higher (I’ve found The Cat Empire's Two Shoes and The Cloud Room's anthemic Hey Now Now to be fine, crescendo-ing tracks for cross-training purposes), and watching with great satisfaction as the calorie count and my heart rate increased. But the past two days? Bang. Not a scrap of energy. Complete exhaustion.

I Know About Diet

My new personal trainer asks me about my diet. Oh, I know all about diet, I tell him smugly. I may not always be disciplined about it, but I know all about diet, I tell him. What did I eat yesterday, he asks. I think back. Coffee and two slices of sourdough with Vegemite for breakfast. (I was running late for work; no time to cut up the fresh fruit in the fridge.) A cheese and tomato toasted sandwich and some yoghurt with fresh berries at lunch. (No cash and had left my cashcard at home: the simplest work-caff lunch was all that I could afford.) For dinner, a can of sad, sad, smoked oysters, two glasses of white wine, and an after-thought salad of cos, tomato and fetta. (I was exhausted when I got home from work. Not a scrap of energy to do anything else.) My new personal trainer studies me. And I realise I’m hopeless. Where’s the energy for a new fitness regime in all that? All bread, and all of three “serves” of fruit and vegetables (if you can even call them “serves”).
I’ve got to work harder at this.
My thoughts turn to lentils. Vegetarian Action's website tells me: “Lentils are an excellent source of protein, iron and zinc and a good source of dietary fibre, pantothenic acid and potassium. They also supply vitamins of the B complex and various minerals.” According to my neglected WeightWatchers Points Guide, 75g of lentils is 3 points (WeightWatchers allows a total of 20 points a day, give or take a few). As a point of comparison, 50g of rice of any description is 2½ points. Even with my disgraceful mathematics, I can see that, point-for-point, the lentils are looking good; that I’d get brownie points from my new personal trainer if I had a simple but substantial lentil salad for dinner the night before a session with him.

Lentil Salad, Poached Egg, Fetta and Roasted Garlic Dressing
(serves 1, or 2 as part of a meal)

15 cherry tomatoes (or 8 slightly larger tomatoes)
1 bulb garlic, halved
1 tbsp olive oil
sea salt
100g Puy or high-quality brown lentils*
1 onion, quartered
1 bay leaf
sprig thyme
sea salt, ground black pepper
1 tbsp white wine vinegar
3 tbsp walnut oil (or olive oil)
1 red onion, finely diced
1 small hot chilli, sliced
½ cup mint and parsley, chopped
80g fetta, crumbled
1 egg, poached
rocket

Roasted garlic and tomatoes: Preheat oven to 180ºC. Put tomatoes and garlic bulb in a small casserole and toss with olive oil and sea salt. Roast tomatoes until they are soft, but still holding their shape – about 15-20 minutes. Remove from oven and set aside. The garlic bulb halves will need a little longer – around 30 minutes. Remove from oven when the garlic inside is squishy.
Lentils: Thoroughly wash lentils, checking that there are no stones or grit among the lentils. Place lentils in a saucepan with onion, bay leaf and thyme and cover with cold water. Put a lid on the saucepan and bring to the boil. Reduce to a simmer and cook for about 20 minutes. (*It’s easy to overcook them, so make sure you watch the clock and check them as they get close to done. Save your supermarket-bought lentils for soups or dahl – a lentil salad needs something finer. The French Puy lentils seem to be hard to get in Australia but Simon Johnson sells high-quality, well-graded Australian lentils.) When cooked, drain lentils in a colander, remove onion, bay leaf and thyme and set aside.
To make dressing: Scoop the squishy garlic out of one bulb half. Mash in a bowl with the back of a spoon until it is creamy. Mash in salt and pepper. Stir in white wine vinegar, then whisk in walnut oil until dressing is emulsified. Taste to check you’re happy with the vinegar-oil proportions and the seasoning.
To assemble: In a large bowl, combine lentils, dressing, roasted tomatoes, red onion, chilli, mint and parsley and fetta. Spoon on to a serving plate. Poach an egg and put on top of the salad with a pile of rocket leaves. Serve with remaining garlic bulb half at the side. It's all just gorgeous when the egg yolk dribbles over the lentils.

Danish Design

I’m looking for a cheap flight to Copenhagen. Not just because I desperately want an Arne Jacobsen Egg chair. And not just because I’m currently waging a campaign to convince my mother than I really do need the Georg Jensen cutlery set she received 40 years ago as a wedding present and which languishes, unused, in a sideboard at home.
I want to visit Copenhagen to eat at Noma, a Michelin-starred, tantalisingly beautiful restaurant in the Danish capital that showcases Nordic cooking using regional food.
From the Noma website:

“We view it as a challenge to play a part in bringing forth a regeneration of Nordic culinary craft … we have been finding a number of simply phenomenal ingredients that we have flown into town for our use: Horse mussels, deep-sea crabs and langoustines from the Faeroe Islands, which are living right up until the moment they are served to our visitors. Halibut, wild salmon, cod and seaweed and curds from Iceland. Lamb, musk ox, berries and the purest drinking water from Greenland.”

In what is a pretty inadequate review, The Guardian writes of Noma dishes such as beef tartare with a tarragon emulsion and wood sorrel; "klipfisk", a warm variation on salt cod brandade, with a truffle broth and toast; and homemade muesli with sheep's milk yoghurt sorbet. The Noma website, which includes some extraordinary photographs of the restaurant and dishes, is more illuminating – to a point. The sheer foreign-ness of the dishes and their ingredients is intriguing: Seared lobster and celery, tapioca and elderberries; cooked leeks and truffles from Gotland, bread salad and sautéed langoustine; glazed musk ox and caramelized apple, beetroot and woodruff.
Please, if anyone has eaten at Noma, I'd adore to hear more. Should I buy that air ticket to Copenhagen?

The Hungry Thing

Elegant Sufficiency,

You have become a hungry beast that needs almost as much feeding as my seven-month-old niece who is starting to discover the world of solids. I don’t have a Catholic bone in my body, yet for some unknown reason have more guilt than a cathedral full of Catholics. On holiday in Sydney with the family, you, and my neglect of you, and the long list of posts I want to write for you, were a constant haunting presence. As I watched my niece experiment with the finger-painting possibilities of mashed banana, I thought guiltily about the post I have in my head about an odd banana cake recipe from a 1948 Women's Weekly and about how the laptop had not been opened for days and about how I really wasn’t sure I’d got my imperial-to-metric conversions right anyway, because it was a very odd cake.

Rolling around on the floor with her, blowing raspberries into her belly, neck, feet and face until she screamed with laughter, I mulled over the post I really want to write about the latest awful reality show on Australian television, Jamie's Kitchen, Australia. A sugar-coated, shallow, self-congratulatory piece of idolatry. I can only imagine how the many dedicated people who have been working, unheralded, with substance abusers on the streets of Melbourne for decades might have reacted to the show’s enthusiastic promotion of comments made by “Catherine”, one of the young recruits to the Fifteen kitchen who is on a methadone program. “Melbourne couldn’t admit it,” she told Jamie Oliver on a video hook-up to London. The implication, complete with soft background musak and cut-aways to Oliver’s nodding, sympathetic face, was that until he rode in on his white charger, no one had lifted a finger to help drug users in the city.
As I watched my niece’s mother feed her a rather disturbing puree of fillet steak, I wondered guiltily when I’d have time to cook and write about an interesting dish I had copied out of the cookbook I had just given my brother for his birthday – Braised Beef Brisket with Field Mushrooms and Mustard Sauce from Let It Simmer, the first cookbook of Sean Moran of the brilliant Sean's Panaroma in Bondi (270 Campbell Parade, Bondi Beach, tel: 02 9365 4924).
And, as I went back for seconds, and thirds at Spice I Am (90 Wentworth Avenue, Surry Hills, tel: 02 9280 0928), competing with my father for the last of Thai chef Sujet Saenkham’s exquisite hoy tod (crisp pan-fried mussels with bean sprouts and chilli sauce), I wondered guiltily how I’d ever find the discipline to keep this hungry beast called a blog going?

A Past Life

10 Things I Don’t Miss About Being a Restaurant Reviewer

1. The four out of five average (or worse) meals a restaurant reviewer has to eat.
2. Sitting in the toilet for suspicious amounts of time scribbling notes.
3. The struggle to write something, anything, about the mass of colourless, just acceptable restaurants out there. (So much easier to write either a scathing or a superlative review.)
4. Fuzzy memory syndrome: did Restaurant X have polished timber floorboards or carpet? What the hell was that garnish on the hand-picked crab and lobster salad with green mango foam? Were the waiters in Armani or Helmut Lang?
5. Ruining yet another restaurant’s crisp white tablecloth with pen marks by attempting to write notes covertly under the table without watching.
6. That morning-after-beached-whale feeling after what might be the third or fourth rich, three-course meal, with wine, in a week.
7. Being recognised and either a) having to put up with some gasbag proprietor pulling up a chair and turning a setting for two into one for three; b) getting sent out a procession of unordered dishes that ‘the chef thought you might like to try’ and then being told ‘the meal is on us’ and having to fight to pay the check as ethical reviewers do.
8. The impossibility of conducting a conversation with your guest on the other side of the table while simultaneously writing notes describing the angle the lamb fillet has been sliced at, the texture of the mushroom soy dressing, the flavour of the saffron pappardelle, the mood of the dining room, the degree of stubble on the waiter’s chin.
9. Never having a night in to cook my own food, with my own hands, with ingredients I have bought.
10. Never being invited to friends’ homes for a meal.

It came flooding back last night. Melbourne held its gala, much-hyped, anxiously awaited restaurant awards, which bounce off the contents of the influential annual Good Food Guide, sponsored by the city’s broadsheet newspaper, The Age. The egos, the strutting, the looking-over-shoulders, the drunks, the interminable speeches that no one listened to (or could hear anyway), the so-so sparkling wine, the back-stabbing, the gossip. And the old faces, like stepping into a dusty photo album.
I edited the book for three years until 2001, twice with co-editors and once on my own and it nearly killed me. Last night, two former colleagues, the Melbourne versions of Frank Bruni and Ruth Reichl, except recognisable, stood on the stage in their Sunday best and handed out the awards. I nibbled on canapés, and sipped my wine, and listened to the chefs and hangers-on around me carry on, and thought about restaurant reviewing, and reviewers, and the ethical minefields they trip through, and then my mind wandered off to more interesting things.

Such as how to improve my photography (and styling abilities). I’m often constrained by the need to photograph at night thanks to my day job, and I’ve quickly discovered that dishes that might not have a strong shape or a central focus point, such as a bowl of pasta, or a risotto, or a curry, need to acquire one. If I were to reshoot this dish, for example, I might consider leaving aside some of the trout, cutting it in larger pieces and splaying it across the top of the salad. Perhaps I might also add a handful of leaves such as cress, or rucola. Any other photography-improvement tips will be most gratefully received.
So to the salad. It’s incredibly simple and tasty and, after a couple of indulgent detours, brings me back on the course of exploring how I can eat well and eat wonderful flavours without increasing the number that shows on the scales.
I asked Greg, the chef who was once more than just a good friend, about burghul. He spat out the Arabic name for it that sounded something like “burrual” and said that it’s important to look out for “undesirables” such as weevils or clusters of eggs in your burghul before buying it. “Teta, my grandmother, would buy fresh wheat and cook it, and dry it outside on blankets in the sun,” he recalled. “Then she’d smash and thrash it in the mortar and pestle.” There are, I have belatedly discovered, two types of burghul: coarse and fine. The coarse variety is usually reserved for pilafs and stuffings – it needs to be cooked. The fine variety doesn’t need to be cooked and is used for tabbouleh or a salad such as this.

Cucumber, Ocean Trout Sashimi and Burghul Salad
Serves 4 (as an entrée or part of a meal)

½ cup fine burghul (cracked wheat)
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 tbsp lemon juice
½ tsp ground coriander
½ tsp allspice
½ tsp ground cinnamon
1 fresh birds-eye chilli, deseeded and finely chopped
400g piece ocean trout, skinned, pin-boned and cut into 1cm cubes
½ cucumber, seeded and cut into 1cm cubes
2 green onions, finely chopped
¼ cup flat-leafed parsley, finely chopped
¼ cup coriander, finely chopped
Sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper

Cover burghul with enough cold water to cover and leave for about 10 minutes. Drain  and squeeze out as much extra water as you can. In a large bowl, combine burghul with remaining ingredients, adding more lemon juice if needed. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Divide salad among plates and serve immediately.