Good food equals love, bad food equals…?

Last week would probably count as one of the craziest of my life, up there with packing my belongings in my car and driving across Australia with a guy I’d only known for a few months… luckily 11 years later he ended up becoming my Permanent Dining Companion –PDC. So I got a good thing out of that craziness, but I am still trying to figure out what good thing I got out of last week… and trust me it wasn’t a foodie experience, though perhaps it was meant to be…

Without going into all the gory details (you can read about that on other blogs –just google!), I realised the cold hard truth about my relationship with food. Apart from thinking about it for a living, I treat good food, the food I feed myself, family and friends, as evidence of my love.

For example, if I was to have you over for dinner, I’d plan a meal that I know you would like because of your personality, i.e. a busy person, with not enough hours in the day would appreciate a 12 hour braised dish. A friend that doesn’t get out to as many restaurants as they may like (god, who does!!) may enjoy a reproduction from my favourite restaurant.

Good food, takes thought and love to get right. I also realised that the food I feed myself allows me to be me; if I eat well, frequent my green grocer and fishmonger, chat at the bakery and get enough exercise I feel well, healthy and satisfied. If I don’t… well last week will happen.

So, I spent the week in Sydney as a guest of a fancy television production company – yes, you can no doubt work it out – one that is making, what I thought was a cooking show for amateurs.
Fantastic I thought as I applied, a chance to talk about food to a wider audience than PDC, my friends, work colleagues and you my beloved Eating with Jack readers. (ok yes, I do talk about food a lot, but thought this may give me the opportunity to talk with more(!) people about more(!) food)

But the sad truth was that I have never, for longer than I can remember, felt more dis-attached from food than when I spent that week in Sydney, supposingly working on a food program.
I think I have worked it out though, there was no love; we ate badly, doing long very boring hours, doing no exercise apart from frequent toilet runs (to cut the boredom!) and just felt like cattle bussed in and out, with very little contact with the outside world. And wait for it – shock horror – no phones as well!

Now, you may well blink and miss my presence on the program when it goes to air in a few months, as no doubt I was not interesting enough to cry and freak out for the cameras, or slice my fingers open with a knife or throw hot oil down my chest (a great plan though, now thinking about it! ;) But since this is my food blog and I like to share with you the stories about what I eat, I chronicled my meals at the stone face of reality tv… so here it is (but remember if you want to apply next year – and why not, you may have that certain little something more than me - make sure you byo everything!)


Day 1- Sunday
Breakfast out with PDC, before he ships me off to the airport at 10am
Economy airline food, “no thanks but can I have some water please”.
A post briefing beer at a local pub, as I watch some of the younger ‘contestants’ hoe into a bucket of KFC. The food snob in me is already out, but if I’d known perhaps I would have stashed a piece for dinner the next night!
Early dinner/late lunch at Spice I am, you can see my post from last year here and soon I’ll post images from this experience, needless to say as good as its always been.

Day 2- Monday
Rise at 5.30 to preen for the cameras, breakfast to be served at 6.30 before the bus departs at 7am. Well what a debacle for the poor hotel. Obviously they hadn’t been told that 50 plus hungry anxious people would be arriving for breakfast at the stroke of their opening time.
Very little food on display, no plates and bug-eyed staff running around. I’ve been there, I felt sorry for them and grabbed what I could and headed around the corner for a coffee from a chain store. (1st out of character foodie experience of the trip…many more to come) Mental note to self, must remember that I am in Sydney and ask for strong, warm lattes at all but a few known ‘safe’ destinations.
Lunch served in our little retreat room was the best of the week. Individual lunchboxes, with mountain bread wraps, frittata and Caesar salad. Served with a very large basket of debaucherous chocolate bars of every kind, enough softdrinks to sugar high a primary school and a basket of fruit that was barely replenished during the week. An urn for instant coffee and tea bags in paper cups sat in the corner mostly unused.
After lunch I headed down to the internal café (unfortunately run by the same catering company) and ordered my Sydney latte (ie “a small, strong caffe latte, just warm please”) not scaringly bad but a life plummeting jump from my usual Wall 280 one everyday.
Dinner was a disappointment in many ways, especially the thought that they were feeding us so we could keep filming; the hotel was not a likely destination anytime soon. As we queued into the room we were offered “lamb, or beef curry” on closer inspection, as I stood aside, the options were actually labelled ‘lamb rogan josh’ and ‘beef curry’ so much for choice. Two very similar dishes, served on plain steamed rice with under-done carrot and zucchini chunks in a plastic takeaway container. I looked at mine with despair, ate the cubes of brown meat in brown sauce, the crunchy, unseasoned vegetables and pushed the rest aside. The basket of chocolates and lollies doing its evil work on the room, as kit kats and cherry ripes replaced the bland dinner so many people pushed aside. As a martyr to this blog, I selected the other meat option as a taste comparison, ate the dull vegies and made a cup of plastic tasting tea. From the highs of lunch and the first day of filming to the lows of dinner and many more hours in the studio to come, we finally departed for the hotel at 12 midnight, a cheeky 17 hours under-our-belts for the first day. A kitchen worthy effort.

Days 3-6 to come. Including a small victory in the lunch room, many, many more lollies. Oh and wait for it... what did the judges eat while we ate this? And a hopeful contender for my dish of the month.

Next installment in a couple of days. Promise.

Catch up...

Well, my planned postings have not eventuated. But that does not mean I haven't been thinking about it; I have a camera full of images and a mind full of posts, and now its catchup time.

Yum Cha or Dim Sum is a favourite past time at home, so in Hong Kong it was a must. I had loss sleep in the lead up thinking about it; where is the best place? Will it be as I expect? Will it be carts? I'll explain further in my Hong Kong piece, but this was my favourite dumpling of the trip. A vegetarian number with mushroom, bamboo shoots, water chestnut and chives.

A great way to start the day, a Vietnamese coffee with 'milk' - condensed milk and ice. Not quite a caffe latte at The Wall in St Kilda (we miss you!!) but pretty delicious and a definite coffee kick. A snorkeling boat tour lead to an interesting offer, fresh sea urchin that the divers would collect for us. Probably illegal and perhaps a little unethical but a proposition that we could not deny. A plate of raw urchin some onion and a lime and salt pepper mix. Intensely rich and a hedonistic treat.

After holidaying in Vietnam three years ago, I was eager to have one of these creme caramels again. Generally available at carts in the evening the better ones are from the little dessert shops with access to ice. There the caramel was turned out and topped with crushed ice, a coffee syrup and condensed milk straight from the can. I could eat five if it didn't seem greedy.
A very pleasant surprise was the Louisiane Brewhouse on Nha Trang beach. Beers are brewed on site by an Aussie and served in several styles. I enjoyed the ginger beer (alcoholic of course, it is holidays!) flavoured with fresh ginger and a little lemongrass. Great ginger beer in a style that fits with the local food, perfect.

In Dalat, in central Vietnam, we undertook a regional tour that included one of the many coffee plantations in the area. This is ripe bean (yet harvest is not until November), the red outer hides two halves of the green coffee bean. An extended post about all the sights is on the way with highlights as wide ranging as coffee and tea, to some very hungry silk worms, mushroom farms and beautiful flowers.

I promise to work on the Dalat and Hong Kong stories, I'm really looking forward to sharing it with you. Must pop off now for some fiery Thai for dinner and hopefully not too many tears!

Escape your world for $3, going out for coffee

Going out for a coffee is not a big thing, jeez it costs about $3 and is a cheap way to feel worldly for 20 minutes. A bargain in my book.

But the catch can be if you don't trust who is making your coffee; if you haven't been there before and don't have a credible reference point. Do you know of the owners 'coffee pedigree'? Has the barista has been around the good coffee traps? Or does it just seem right?

It can end up being a disaster. Your expecting a small break from reality yet you get a burnt, over extracted glass of hot muddy milk instead of a latte. The dilemma then gets worse - you really can't just leave it in the glass - you need to either, hold your nose and scull it, find a way to very discretely make it 'disappear' or worse, feel bad as you make a thin excuse, leave your gold coins and run from the cafe as fast as you can, never to return.

I hate being in that situation, so as a result PDC and I are pretty fussy about where we go for coffee. There is probably a dozen places in Melbourne were I would happily have a coffee, luckily this list is growing, but it's a bit scary taking that first trusting step into a new cafe.

Recently, we went to Dino's Deli in Chapel St for the first time. It's been open for about 6 months and seems to be reasonably busy, (a good sign) yet we were still a little scared until I saw a familiar face, that has made me fantastic staff coffees many, many times.
Hallelujah, a safe house!

I'm pleased to also report that the breakfast at Dino's is just as good as the coffee. A new favourite is the shaksuka; a piperade (tomato, capsicum, onion and garlic, lightly scrambled with egg) set into the bottom of a rustic tapas dish topped with an egg. Dino's version is served on a wooden board with two little side pots; one of olive oil dressed fresh roma tomato wedges, and the other a tangy spinach, yoghurt and tahini sauce, some pide strips are the spoon for all of these flavours. Quite interactive, very healthy and utterly delicious.
I'd also recommend stalking out the house baked muffins, the first time they had run out when we asked but then managed to score one hot from the oven. Trust me have another or even a third coffee as an excuse to wait for these hot treats, you will not be sorry.

St. Ali

Saint Ali may well be the guardian of coffee, yet St. Ali in South Melbourne is the guardian of food stories.

Having breakfast last weekend I was pleased at my good cafe selection, to see John Lethlean and his family arrive for coffee. Not really interesting enough for a post, except possibly if we had shared the larger table and loudly continued our conversation about why Jacques Reymond did not ring our bells despite its 3 hats, (that did not happen, and even if we HAD shared the table and a wall not been between us, would I've?? Probably not...)

It's a bit of a sport of sorts, for PDC and I to spot food reviewers and see who else in the dining room notices, unless they were particularly cool at St.Ali, I have to say no one blinked an eye.

We had just gotten back to our eggs when in walks another familiar face, Bob Harts wife (sorry, I only know her face, not her name).

Hang on a minute, a possible double food reviewer sighting and from rival papers, this was getting interesting until they choose to sit outside, with Bob arriving less than 5 minutes later.

With our noses back in our respective eggs, nothing more was to be seen until the coincidental toilet dash saw both John and Bob standing side by side. No, paper fights, no harsh words just friendly smiles and hand shakes.

I guess communal good taste, accounts for the witnessing of the similarities, of different food readerships.

Jack