Stomachs on legs are proud to present

For a man like me that really likes his meat, there are few things better than pig for breakfast.

This is particularly true when the pig is roasted pork shoulder, pressed in a Panini with chipotle sauce and coriander and toasted to perfection, otherwise known as the Cuban from Lonsdale Street Roasters.

link

There is an extensive range of panini here, spelled out on a charming blackboard with magnetic letters and a specials board to the side. ...Roasters also do dessert and a few other small and interesting things (muesli among them). And well there’s the main feature: the coffee. Served in those stylish old school brown cups, it’s rich, the milk isn’t overdone, and it’s sublime perfection really - so rare in this town. It’s got to be the best in the city. Or among the best. Harvest and Tonic are excellent too. But I’m going to say Roasters has an edge. A panini-themed edge at that

Link

I've been quiet on the blog front. Hock's been leaving the commentary to others while he focuses on improving the overall sandwich situation of Canberra in his first business venture.

So we have been living in Auckland since March when our plans to move back to Asia crumbled along side Thailand's aspirations towards democracy.

We are still working on "Plan B".

It's not so bad. The winter here is very mild. I go jogging around Mission Bay on sunny days and think that life is on the whole pretty good.

However, I am experiencing extreme, cross-Tasman national level food envy.

Let me explain. You know how when you go to a restaurant and order the wrong thing and wished you had ordered what your friend ordered and spend the rest of the evening eyeing up their plate? Well it's like that but on a national level.

I once thought that Canberra was at the ass end of all agro-food supply chains. How wrong I was. I've decided that New Zealand now takes that dubious title. Being an major agro-exporter to the world and extremely proud of its local food culture, I know that any New Zealander would argue that I am wrong until they are blue in the face. To which I would respond with a big fat "whateva". Yes we export a whole lotta milk powder...ngeah!

And I can say that because I am a bourgeois female – vanguard of the 21st century – the new working class male (Make way for a whole new type of chauvanism people!!! Possibly involving unbleached tampons) . I also think that most notable food critics and chefs agree with me. I've noticed in the local food press that journalists love to ask visiting food dignitaries such as Rick Stein and others what they think of New Zealand food. The overwhelming response that I have noticed is a slightly uncomfortable shifting in one's seat followed by the very diplomatic comment "it has come a long way from where it was before".

Which isn't really that far. Quite frankly I think the food here, the quality and the variety can be pretty second rate. Given the very small size of the local population, their limited spending power and generally unadventurous palates, top quality, interesting produce does not make much of a showing on most supermarket shelves or farmer's market tables (back in April, I was outraged on a fishing trip to Leigh that the local fishery there does not do any public sales and exports all of its catch directly overseas).

In the meantime, I have been endlessly taunted by Australian cooking shows. MasterChef Australia, SBS's Luke Nguyen's Vietnam and Food Safari have been goading me on cable tv. I have a serious case of Australian food envy. Sitting here in the living room eating yet more kumera, broccoli and chicken, I'm amazed to learn that the Maltese community of Australia is large enough that they make their own Gbejniet. Luke casually mentions that you can buy most varieties of mango and Vietnamese herbs in Australia now and I grimace (not in NZ tho). And to add insult to injury, histrionic Masterchef contestants get to cook with massive pieces of truffles (I asked for a truffle for my birthday but the NZ truffle crop rotted in the floods this season and of course no one imports them because NZer are just too poor to buy them, meanwhile Canberra had a bumper crop).

I love New Zealand, it will always be home. It will always be my birth place. But an unfortunate part of being a New Zealander is feeling like the poor and envious sibling of Australia. To bring it back to the intimate scale of a dining table. It's like always going out to dinner with the same friend who is richer, luckier, more worldly, interesting and louder than you and always gets the better meal...every single time.

Personally I hate vegemite. I would have used Marmite. But to Nickos credit he does use ifuckup 2.0 or better known as Vegemite Cheesybite. Oh and mild cheese and a pre made base adds to Nickos pizza which is most likey to get VPN status any day now.

Last weekend I hosted my friend Amrita's birthday party. Just eight people, seafood and drinks.

Amrita bought the centre piece of the party Nasi Kerabu

Despite her partner's comments that it looked like a Bangladeshi flood, full of rice, sticks, leaves and fish, it was not at all a disaster. Nevertheless we all liked the analogy so much it has now been renamed Bangladesh Disaster Rice.



Nasi kerabu bottom left

Phil's mouthful this week brings us musings on why everyone hates the new vegemite product

Over the weekend, Kraft announced the results of its attempt to generate a new name for its new Vegemite with spreadable cheese product: iSnack 2.0. It sent Australians with an internet connection into alternate paroxysms of disbelief and pure schadenfreude. Ruth Brown from Crikey neatly summarises the initial tsunami of contempt:
...folks from every conceivable community and sub-culture were united by their shared hatred of the name: skiers hated it, club kids hated it, Mac fanboys hated it, footy fans hated it, homosexuals hated it, foodies hated it, gamers hated it, body-builders hated it, the British Army hated it, highschool students hated it, mums hated it, stock traders hated it, and Delta Goodrem fans hated it.

its so hated in fact it spawned this.....



although I'm half suspicious that this may have been created by Kraft itself in an effort to avert the PR disaster and inject some self-deprecating humour into the furore...fuhrer furore....ha ha ha...ummmmm nup

thnx milosh

sorry I haven't blogged for a while. I don't really know who I am apologising to exactly and whoever you are I'm sure that you'll think apologies unnecessary

nevertheless....I am moved today to alert you to this outrage in the Sydney Morning Herald...

Wake up, Sydney, and smell the lemongrass. Do you know what's under your collective nose? Anyone who has lived away from this city for any time suffers withdrawal symptoms for Thai chicken curry, deep-fried snapper with sweet chilli sauce, pad thai noodles or Thai beef salad, whether from Longrain, Chat Thai, Spice I Am, Sailor's Thai or (insert your favourite local Thai here). Even Sydneysiders who have moved to Thailand suffer post-Sydney-Thai-fabulousness syndrome.

Slap hand to forehead...pad Thai???? sweet chilli sauce.....ugh

This particular piece of dribble was written about Sailor's Thai which I had the displeasure of eating at some years ago. I made the further blunder of taking some Thai relatives there who are in the restaurant business in Thailand. I was embarrassed by the food and humiliated by the price, $300 for four people.

It was flavourless, bland, and fussy.....the bill was like rubbing salt in an open wound.

Sydney Thai food as good as Thailand...give me a fucking break....only if you spent your 2 week holiday in Thailand eating in shitty tourist stalls and being completely over charged.....maybe you went to Phuket...maybe you got in a fight....maybe you were drunk most of the time....or maybe you have the palate of a garbage disposal

Sometimes when you're so drunk and kinda tired, you can still manage to crawl into a genius snack-viewing vantage point. The next problem is, how do you reach that can of beans on the pantry shelf - let alone get it open?

Photo taken by me mate Dan Feary in Sydney.

Dan writes: "Fu on the light night creep, hitting the fridge & the pantry at the same time. I don't think you remember this moment Fu, so I took this shot for posterity."

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has poked fun at himself while laughing off claims he's gone overboard with his efforts to sound blokey.:

Mr Rudd has copped flak in recent days for his use of ocker expressions.
Including

"fair shake of the sauce bottle, mate"

"Don't come the raw prawn with me, George."

"Or, coming from Queensland I'd say you'd get the rough end of the pineapple, but enough of that."

Australian Male with Meat Pie, June 2009, Canberra

I just read this cute blog on Blue Lotus about a person who has never liked raw oysters, trying one fresh in Hokkaido and becoming a convert. I like this story. I like it when people try something new and change their opinion. It always fills me with hope.

Except I know if I was her friend and there with her, she would probably still hate oysters. This is because of the way I embarrass and harangue people into trying new food.

I'm a bit of an old nasty hag, you see. I know that.

I recently berated someone I like very much for never having eaten a raw oyster. Our common friend had a dinner party and bought fresh oysters which he shucked himself. A real treat. I happily downed my allotted two and then turned to my friend D and enquired as to why he wasn't eating them?

"I've never tried them before"

"let me guess, you grew up in some inland rural town of Australia"

"yes" he said relieved that I understood that raw oysters were not native to him

"yeah, but you're 31 now and how long did you live in Melbourne? I'd understand if you were 18 and fresh from the bush, but goddamit your 31 and you still haven't even tried one? What the hell is wrong with you"

So then, ummm, yeah. He tried one. I patted him on the back and he gave me a look like I am evil.

I know I am. I like to point out people's sore points, give them a hard time, see if they'll crack under pressure. If I had not said anything maybe he would have tried one, decided he liked it and ate another. But having eaten one under such trying conditions, I'm sure that he was left with a bad after taste, raw oyster or not.

I guess that makes me a not very nice person.

But really the story of raw oysters and me is not really a very nice one to begin with.

I was eating oysters in the womb. I kid you not. My mother reckons that when she was pregnant with me she constantly craved raw oysters, even though she herself doesn't like them. Nonetheless she gouged on them, swearing it was me demanding them. Pregnant women are not supposed to eat raw oysters, or raw anything for that matter as a bad one can give you such violent food poisoning that it can kill your baby. So perhaps I was so demanding of raw oysters in the womb that it was impossible to resist, or maybe she was trying to abort me from the start. And given that my mother and I have never really gotten on, I sometimes think it was possibly a little of both.

Sometimes I like to think being fed raw oysters in the womb has given me some sort of bad raw oyster immunity

Today, happily alive and blogging, my raw oyster fetish continues unabated. They haven't killed me yet. However on a recent trip to Sydney to see my sisters, I'm now a little more wary of the true dangers of oysters. As per family tradition, we all trundled down to the Sydney Fish Markets and I bought five dozen oysters. 3 trays of Sydney Rock oysters (small and sweet), and 2 trays of pacific (larger and salty).





They were pre-shucked. It was the last day of the Easter holidays. We ate them and a few hours later my little sister was in agony out both ends.

I stayed up the entire night with her. Bought her glasses of water and kept a watchful eye to make sure she didn't cark it. She survived the night and the next morning was driven to the airport, placed in a wheelchair and flown back to New Zealand.

She has made a full recovery, but is unlikely to eat a raw oyster for a very long time.

I'm so glad that it wasn't her first time eating an oyster. I'm glad that she wasn't my friend D and that on top of being harangued into eating an oyster he wasn't nearly killed doing so.

I swear to the Flying Spaghetti Monster that the next time I tease someone into eating something they've never tried it will be fresh, cooked and unlikely to kill them.

A toasted muesli by any other name would smell as sweet...

In New Zealand and Australia, I became convinced that food down there is suffering a P.R. problem. The problem is that the P.R. department is on overdrive.

At some point in the '80s, it became hip to talk about food poetically, and the more foreign the description, the more artisanal the approach implied, the more moolah people became prepared to pay.

Somehow, good food became a status symbol in the new world, and fine foods emporiums sprang up selling passable sour dough bread for eight dollars a loaf, and bags of gnocchi imported all the way from Italy for 14 whole dollars.

When did gluggy lumps of potato begin to triple in value when prefixed with the adjective 'Italian'? Is nobody in the southern hemisphere able to make a decent batch of gnocchi?

This is not just a question of food snobbery. The absurd part is when people pay top dollar for something that's not even close to wonderful. Antipodeans need to say no to false advertising.

Stopping through Sydney a couple of weeks ago, I became a bit depressed at how rarely foods lived up to their descriptions. Browsing in a nice-looking deli-style store, we bought wild honey spice muesli, roasted carrot and tomato soup, sour dough loaf baked in the Californian tradition, and yoghurt with bush honey.

Yum, right? That's what we hoped, but in the end only the yoghurt could be described as delicious. The rest would have been more honestly described as toasted oats with cinnamon, a pretty average loaf of bread that was still better than any of the other bread we ate down under, and soup that could've come from a supermarket. A bit watery. Hardly any discernible carrot flavour.

Guess those descriptions wouldn't have looked so good on the label.

In NZ the situation can be just as semantically obfuscated.

We had lunch at a restaurant somewhere near the Kapiti coast. The menu talked about crusted this and reduction of that. I was a bit disappointed when my roasted potato turned out to be an oily hash brown.

Studies at the University of Illinois last year showed that when food is described in evocative terms, people are more apt to find it delicious
, but surely this ruse can only be taken so far?

It's not like you can't get delicious prepared food down under. There's much more on offer than the lovely fresh figs, jewel-sized plums and batonga pineapples, don't get me wrong - but the wordsmiths need to chill out a little.

People shouldn't pay through the nose when a spade is not called a spade, but instead called an 18th century wrought-iron jersey potato forager.

Fruit growers whose crops haven't been destroyed by fire are now worried their harvest won't be picked.
General manager of Fruit Growers Victoria, John Wilson, saysthat at Stanley in the state's north-east, growers have ripe fruit that needs to get to market.
"We've had reports that we can't get pickers into the area because of road blockages or debris on the roads, and at the moment we need to get people up there to pick some raspberries."
And in New South Wales and Victoria, farmers are worried the news that many crops are heat-stressed will keep workers away.
In New South Wales, labourers are needed to plough in ruined vegetables, cut burnt flowers and pick damaged fruit in orchards.
Victoria is facing a similar problem, as sunburnt fruit still has to be picked because of orchard hygiene policies.
Grower associations say they'll need plenty of harvest labour this season.

Source: ABC

Growers are requesting that Australian consumers accept lower fruit standards this season.

The land is scorched, the fruit is burnt, koalas are thirsty and I'm sunburnt even though I put on sunscreen, lay under an umbrella and wore a sarong last weekend in Sydney. And just as everyone and everything is feeling a bit singed, the temperature drops. In Canberra tonight its 9 degrees and I have on wooly socks and a cardigan......WTF

Oh so cute.

So I'm at another anthropology talk fest. Auckland University this time. There's not a lot in the conference program that interests me. It's mainly a lot of academics bleating on about cultural heritage and "identity". Issues that never cease to bore me senseless. I'm presenting tomorrow in a "development" politics panel, but am aiming to try and get to the panel entitled "Appropriating Rurals" and although I should probably be sitting in a lecture theatre on gender or LAND.

IF I'm feeling flippant I might try and get to the talk by Adrian Peace from the University of Adelaide called: "Barossa Dreaming: food, fetsivals and fetishism in rural Australia"

Abstract

It is difficult to imagine a rural region of Australia more thoroughly integrated into the world economy than the Barossa Valley in South Australia. Dominated by a handful of transnational corporations, the wine industry is as thoroughly incorporated into the hegemonic system of global commodity flows as any other part of the country. It is therefore somewhat paradoxical to find that images and representations of heritage, tradition and the authentic community figure pervasively in the intense commodification of the Barossa. In this paper, I detail the representational and discursive processes by which food and festivals are fetishized to constitute the Barossa Valley as a site of nostalgic dreaming. I argue that the advent of the Slow Food movement is the latest addition to these processes. But it is equally important to recognize what is strategically omitted from view.

If I get to go I might ask him some annoying questions on why the words "global" and "hegemonic" are so often conjured in food systems "discourses" and other annoyingly nitpicky academic questions of no particular consequence.

I'm pretty keen on the whole recent anthropolgists schtick of unpicking rural food tourism in general though

I'd also like to see what this presenter has to say...perhaps I'll treat myself

Gifting the Self: the metro-rural idyll and ideal reflexive individuality

Abstract

'I think I'll treat myself.' 'Go ahead, treat yourself.' 'This holiday is a treat to myself.'

These are familiar refrains that may be overheard in the cafés, craft shops, and vineyards of Martinborough - a popular weekend tourism destination for the new middle-classes of nearby Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand. These narratives emphasis - personally and socially - notions of gifting the self (Howland 2008) and thus give insight into the calculated reflexive individuality of Martinborough's tourists. Specifically they highlight a reflexive awareness of the self as an object that may be subjected to self-assembly and development regimes. They also underscore an attentiveness to multiple, context-specific selves as evidenced by notions of reward or compensation of the 'working self' to the 'leisured self'. In addition, tourists routinely cast Martinborough as metro-rural idyll - an enchanted, performative setting of leisured consumption that draws upon pervasive notions of the vernacular rural idyll to provide a moral foundation for their urbane consumption activities, social distinction negotiations, and pursuit of ideal reflexive individuality.

Anthropological analysis of kinship-orientated societies often situates reciprocal gifting as the principal mode of economic exchange and vital to social integration and cohesion (Mauss 1972). By contrast, analysis of post-industrial societies often casts commodity, market-based exchange as primary and socially alienating (Carrier 1994). However, gifting the self clearly articulates the hegemonic ideologies and practices of ideal reflexive individuality and as such contributes to the reproduction of the dominant social structure of the 'second modern' (Beck 2002) - namely the institutionalisation of individualism

Peter Howland (Victoria University, Wellington)

So now that I am settled into Canberra to finally knock my thesis over (two chapters to go and then it will be Dr. Maytel to you), I've started a summer vege garden in my back yard.

To date I have planted, lettuce, rocket, mizuna, basil, Thai basil, lemon grass, Vietnamese mint, common-all garden mint (from seed even), artichokes, Italian parsley, strawberries, bok choy, silver beet, tomatoes, cucumber, chillies, garlic chives, eggplant, squash. This adds to what my landlord/co-supervisor/next door neighbour/ department professor planted, which consists of sage, chives, English parsley, marjoram, oregano, thyme, lemon thyme, rosemary, habeneros, capsicum, bay, lemon.


Note: Photo was taken last year in the beginning stages of vegetable garden establishment. Current garden is far more impressive but I am without a camera.

I had a search online to see if there were any good online Canberra gardening blogs, but all I found was a vaguely racist discussion board that had this advice on corriander.

Coriander is a pain to grow. Doesn’t like the cold, but the minute it warms up, it bolts ot seed! I hear that crafty asian gardeners just keep planting seeds every week or so, to have new plants coming on to replace the one that just went to seed. They are like ferns, they like light, food and water

Link. Emphasis added.

I'm yet to get crafty with my coriander, but I've been trying to let only a few heads bolt to seed on the chives and sage. I've always loved vege gardening (as Hock can attest, even when I was a party girl in my twenties I grew my own tomatoes) but I've yet to cultivate my innate asian craftiness (no my Chinese father nor any of my ancestors were ever market gardeners). So if anyone has any recommendations for good gardening sites or blogs for Canberra, lettuce know!!!

According to the Melbourne Age

FOUR days spent steering a motorbike north from Chiang Mai along the Burmese border along dangerously snaking roads must have made food blogger Phil Lees challenge his actions. Surely, he questioned the madness of making a white-knuckle, eight-day return trip through bamboo-covered mountains to slurp one bowl of khao soi soup? In a word, no.

"I think, at some point, in the trip it just tipped over the edge," explains Lees, creator of Cambodia's first street food blog, http://phenomenon.com.

After three years in Asia, he recently returned to Melbourne and now writes a food blog, Mouthful, for SBS online. "Suddenly, we weren't going to see anything any more. We were just going to eat."

So when a Cambodian friend tipped him off that some of the tastiest khao soi came from a nondescript joint near the entrance to Mae Hong Son's market "a few lazy days on a motorcycle away", well, what choice did a culinary crusader have?

To this day, Lees says, that bowl of coconut creamy curry served over flat egg noodles and melting-off-the-bone-tender beef, with a tart complement of pickled cabbage, stands uncontested as the best bowl of noodle soup he's eaten. Welcome to the world of the food warrior. No dish too abstract, no taste too challenging and no geography too impassable, these obsessives hunt out the best of the regional, the seasonal and the unusual in their journey to uncover the heart of foreign cuisines. Leave the guide books to the masses, they say, donning their metaphoric khakis - there's a whole world of food experience out there and we're going to hunt down every delicious bite.

I wonder if this is the same as Hock dragging me half way across town to eat a crappy diner breakfast at Joe Juniors in NYC just cause he's read about it being good by some hack on the intertubes....does half an hour on the subway and digesting half a pound of pure fried American fat at 9 am in the morning count as hardcore? Can we join the food warrior club too?

Exhibition of old Australian cookbooks now on at the State Library of New South Wales

SYDNEY (AFP) - An exhibition of historic Australian cookbooks has revealed the tastes of the country's pioneers, including recipes for bandicoot, kangaroo brains and black swans.

The curator of the State Library of New South Wales exhibition, Pat Turner, said the cookbooks showed how local cuisine developed from early days, when most Australians relied on British staples with a few curiosities thrown in.

"It's been very popular," she said. "Lots of people are very interested in cookbooks, even if they don't do much cooking themselves."

In "The Antipodean Cookery Book", first published in 1895, Mrs. Lance Rawson has a stew recipe with listed ingredients including a dozen parrots "well-picked and cleaned."

Even less appetising is a recipe in Australia's first known cookbook, dating from 1864, for a dish called "slippery bob", consisting of kangaroo brains mixed with flour and water then fried in emu fat

Indeed, if Australian's reflected on this and changed their eating habits back to kangaroos then agriculture here would probably get a whole lot more sustainable. As Gary Paul Nabhan book, “Renewing America’s Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent’s Most Endangered Foods” revealed eating local species is actually a great way to protect them.

Link

Spotted on the shelves of my local supermarket in Canberra...



Some people had obviously agreed cause there was only one packet left. I only hope that they bought it to cook their mother a meal with rather than gift wrapping it and presenting it to her.

Answer: when its dim sum

On a quick, work related dash to Melbourne (sorry to those of you who I didn't manage to meet up with) I managed to hit up The Oriental Teahouse in Prahran where I had some pretty unspectacular dumplings and good tea. It was a bit of a middle class gentrified food experience, obviated by the fact that they describe what they do as Chinese tapas

WTF

what the hell is wrong with the name "dim sum"?

I also managed a stop in at Borscht, Vodka and Tears in Windsor/ Prahran and had an excellent meal of what they described as "Polish Tapas"

And I thought...."Oh now you're just taking the piss"

What is with this newfound Melbourne proclivity to call any food served on a small plate "tapas"

Or is it a global phenomenon? Who gave the Spanish naming rights over small plates of food?

Songkran or Thai New Year in Thailand equals five fun filled days of extreme heat, water fights and general tom foolery

Songkran in Canberra however is a much more sober affair, which involves cold weather, some dodgy food stalls with some not so tasty hoy tod, chanting monks and the ubiquitous fruit carving


Hoy Tod