As a kid, I took great satisfaction when I heard the satisfying ‘clunk’ of pulling a little wooden Babushka doll apart. I can now re-live my childhood Russian affiliation thanks to Fred Studio’s M-Cups measuring cups. The six little cups fit neatly into a Babushka (or Matryoshka) arrangement, and are cute as a button on a Moscovian blazer. The measuring cups are becoming a staple item on the shelves of Brisbane’s boutique homewares shops, so it’s hard to miss the little Matryoshkas beaming at you from their red and white packaging. With Russian beauties taking over the catwalks, versions of beef stroganoff creeping onto our menus and Russian vodka a staple in our bars, it seems only fitting to add some Red Square flair to our kitchens.
Archive for the 'Food & Wine' Category
The way an orange is eaten is a very personal choice. Do you peel it and then cut it into segments, or leave it whole and pleasurably bite into it like an apple? Or do you leave the skin on and cut it into quarters? The Apostrophe orange peeler by Alessi definitely has a new designer take on orange eating. The Apostrophe works like an agile plough and cuts through the peel creating decorative marks. The ergonomic peeler, which sits comfortably in your hand, allows you to easily make the squiggly lines on an orange. Apostrophe is made of two parts welded together, a solid hemisphere and the other part hollow. This gives it the right balance when in use, and this also allows you to rest it in an erect position when placed on a table. The oranges would look great in a bowl of fruit and the orange peels can be used as cocktail garnishes.
Stephanie Alexander is well known and respected for many things within the Australian food industry, however it is her latest endeavour that truly highlights her inspiring passion and commitment. In 2001 Stephanie implemented a gardening and cooking program for an inner-city Melbourne primary school. In the program, children from years 3 to 6 spent time in a vegetable garden that they themselves, had helped to design, build and maintain within school grounds according to organic gardening principles. Then in a kitchen classroom, they spent a minimum of an hour and a half each week planning, preparing and sharing meals cooked using their own produce. Her belief that the earlier children learn about good food though example and positive experiences, the better their food choices will be throughout life, ensured its success. In 2004 the not-for-profit Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation was established to raise funds to help facilitate the roll out of the program into other Melbourne schools.
Continue reading ‘Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation’
How to know you’re buying the real thing! Although Parmigiano Reggiano is more well known, Grana Padano is actually the biggest selling cheese in Italy and abroad. They both belong to the same grana family (grana just meaning ‘grainy’) and also look extremely similar so it can be hard to tell them apart. Look at their rinds closely and you can see that they both have their own distinctive markings on the rind. And as each cheese has its own DOP status, they’ll always look the same. If not, you’re not buying the real thing! Often you will see heavily discounted Grana or Reggiano available on sale. Be aware that many of these cheeses are rejects! ‘Reject’ Grana or Reggiano can be recognised by either having multiple X’s stamped/melted into the rind or by multiple grooves carved into the rind. Continue reading ‘Parmigiano Reggiano or Grana Padano’
Tea is such a personal drink – even more so than coffee. Tea drinkers have particular rituals when making their preferred drink. The way the bag is jiggled, the number of seconds it’s left in the cup and the amount of milk are critical to the standard cup of English Breakfast tea. And then there are the tea fanatics, whose cups of tea are brewed with the finest and most exquisite ingredients from across the globe. Catering to the fastidious and finicky, the Dione Tea Set brews the perfect cup of tea for one. It’s made of two parts – a bottom and a top half. The tea is brewed in the bottom half and when it’s ready, the tea set is flipped and the tea is strained through to the top half. This part can be detached, leaving you a beautiful aromatic cup of tea.
Woah! Via: Epic Proportions. This massive burger costs $499, weighs about 85 kg and requires about 15 hours of baking. I am shocked.
Two courses and a glass of wine for $30 at some of Brisbane’s great restaurants. Sounds too good to be true right? Well it is too good and entirely true so jump to it and book your table from today until Friday 23rd October. Not only will you be supporting our local restaurants and your wallet, but also the fantastic Queensland produce that they’re promoting. I’m trying to choose between Restaurant II’s ‘Caboolture Berry Salad with Popcorn Gelato and Whipped Lemon Cream’, Timmy’s ‘Lowood Pork Belly with Seared Yeppoon Scallops and Green Bowen Mango Salad’ and 2 Small Room’s ”Mooloolaba Sand Crab Omelet with Namprik Dressing’. Maybe I’ll just have to go to all of them. Check out the Lunch on Q website for a full list of restaurants and their menus.
Black Pearl Epicure is looking for the ultimate Summer Cocktail using SENCE European Rose Nectar and is offering 50g of Sterling Royal Caviar (worth $155) as a prize for the best cocktail recipe. Served on its own, this perfect summer refreshment tastes of liquid Turkish delight and has a beautiful, blushed pink glow. You’ll soon notice it starting to appear on the drink menus of Brisbane bars and restaurants. It’s made from Kazanlak rose petals harvested in central Bulgaria during the three-week period from the end of May through to early June. The concentrate of the pink rose petals, natural preservative sugar and water is pasteurised at this peak of aroma and flavour, virtually the same way it has been produced for hundreds of years. Did you know that Leonardo Da Vinci drank Kazanlak rose nectar from Bulgaria regularly – both hot, as a tea and chilled? To enter, email your recipe to showroom@blackpearl.com.au with your contact details. Competition closes 5pm Friday 30th October, 2009.
If you have ever fantasised about a world where chocolate was the primary ingredient for breakfast, lunch and dinner, then you will be thrilled to know that in September, we are one step closer to that dream! 31 Days of Chocolate is on right now, and there are only 5 days left to take advantage of arguably Brisbane’s greatest festival. Hosted at the Sebel & Citigate King George Square, each day will have a chocolate buffet available for lunch and dinner. If Mango White Chocolate Mousse, Double Caramel Chocolate Tarts, or Choc Chip Banana Slice is something you would prefer for lunch over a toasted sandwich or sushi, then you better hurry before it’s gone for another year!
When you’re touted as one of the best chefs in the world, you can do almost anything you want. Ferran Adria of elBulli wants to open up a pizza restaurant in Italy (which isn’t going down too well with the Italians), and he’s just released a beer that wants to be wine. The beer – Estrella Damm’s Inedit – has a unique bouquet of barley, malt and wheat with hop, coriander, orange peel, liquorice, yeast and water. Cloudy, fruity, creamy and delicate, Inedit should be kept on ice and drunk out of a wine glass. The beer can be paired with most foods and goes particularly well with oily fish, vinegar-based sauces, salads and citrus flavours. Inedit is yet another example of how Ferran continues to challenge our perceptions of food and flavours. But he’s not the first to make a beer that resembles wine.
It’s not very often that we have a completely new ingredient to play with so when this arrived in Australia a few weeks ago, everyone was eager to try. Black Garlic is simply raw garlic that has been heat treated in a humidity controlled environment for a 3 week period, followed by one week of drying. During this process the cloves soften, sweeten and turn black. A pleasantly unique aroma develops and tastes of balsamic vinegary, sweet but savoury, intense roasted garlic. The versatility of its flavour lends itself to many different styles of dishes. Try mixing through butter with some fresh thyme and place underneath the skin of a roast chicken. Use it instead of raw garlic to make a black garlic aioli. Slice and toss through salads or use in marinades and vinaigrettes. Smear over warmed, crusty ciabatta drizzled with olive oil.
Whispers of exciting news for the Brisbane food scene this week! Word is there’s a daily produce market planned for the John Reid pavilion at the RNA showgrounds. If you’ve ever visited Melbourne’s Queen Victoria markets, you’ll understand the excitement.
Some great news this week, the world’s largest food chain, McDonalds has recently announced that they are moving towards using only free-range eggs in their restaurants. They purchase over 70 million eggs per year. In even more good news, supermarket giant Woolworths has also just announced that they will halve the number of caged egg brands on their shelves by 2010. A move as a result of customer trends they say. As a strong supporter of free-range organic eggs, I’m all for this move forward. I need to stress however that while free-range chooks are without doubt better than caged birds, the term ‘free-range’ is a fairly loose and varied one. It seems that a number of free-range accreditation organisations exist, each with their own definition of the word. Take a look at this table on Choice website for an easy to compare table listing the standards of some of the different free-range and certified organic governing bodies in Australia (and interestingly Europe). To finish, here’s an interesting fact I learnt today from my friendly local butcher - hormones have not been legally used in Australian chicken or egg production since the 1960’s. I now feel pretty silly for thinking that this was a point of difference when purchasing poultry advertised as hormone-free! Does your butcher advertise their poultry as hormone free?
It’s hard to know what to eat these days. Someone at work will tell you to eat one papaya seed a day because, apparently, it’s good for you. Another will tell you about the benefits of rubbing sesame oil on you in the morning to stimulate the heart. And your mother swears by a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar in the morning to kickstart your metabolism. Don’t just take anyone’s health advice, find out for yourself why some foods are healthy and others aren’t so good. The Epi-Cure Blog is an accessible information portal for all things health-related, and it’s the perfect companion to a healthy diet. From posts discussing fertility foods and weight loss to those exploring the latest scientific studies on health and nutrition, The Epi-Cure Blog provides an insight into the world of natural health for those who have a keen interest in what your diet can actually do for you. Learn how to boost your mood with food, make gazpacho soup and ponder the idea that balsamic vinegar might be able to fight belly fat.
It’s interesting to think that rice is the staple grain for over half of the world’s population. So many different varieties, each with their own unique texture, appearance, flavour and traditional cooking methods that help indicate their place of origin. Risotto rice is highly absorbent and is graded into three different categories: semifino, the smallest, fino and superfino, the largest. The most well known varieties are Arborio and Carnaroli (both superfino) and Vialone Nano (semifino). Each type of rice behaves differently during the cooking process and I’m sure that cooks and chefs throughout the different regions of Italy will all tell you that a certain variety of rice is imperative for their particular style of risotto. When people ask me what the difference between using supermarket bought arborio and the latter two, I like to quote Giorgio Locatelli from his book ‘Made in Italy’. He explains that Arborio rice contains the highest level of surface starch (amylopectin) so it gives out more starch than it absorbs. This makes for a sticky and dense risotto in which the grains will have lost their shape. Not what you want for a restaurant quality risotto!
Continue reading ‘Risotto rice – Arborio, Vialone Nano or Carnaroli’
It’s a never-ending debate – which cafe in Australia really is the best? While it often comes down to personal taste, your suburb of residence, and where your ‘people’ hang out, when it comes to the official verdict, the votes are in. Artisanal roaster Campos Coffee on Wandoo Street in Fortitude Valley has been named the Best Cafe in Australia by the Lifestyle Channel’s I Love Food Awards. Voted by the public, Campos beat some serious competition from across Australia to seize the title, but to those who frequent the cosy laneway in which Campos resides, there was no competition. Congratulations to Eugene, John and the Campos team!
Foodies and wine-lovers, brace yourself, it’s that time of year again – the annual Ambiwerra festival. Touted as Brisbane’s premier food and wine event, Ambiwerra has a large following of loyal citizens who make the trip out to Corinda each year. This year expect to see a strong musical line-up, headlined by Mark Sholtez, Peter Cupples and Richard Clapton. Get your Ambi-dollars ready!
Now you can balance your finger food and your glass of Champagne with these neat little fingerplates. Yes, they are slightly ridiculous, but wonderfully kitsch at the same time. The mini plates look like something found at an 80s dinner party along with a creamy prawn cocktail, chicken wings and banana daquiris.
Donna Hay’s combination of simple recipes using basic ingredients accompanied by elegant photography really struck a chord with home cooks the world over. With 17 cookbooks to date (translated into 9 different languages), her own bi-monthly magazine (of which she is editor) and a weekly newspaper column, you may wonder what she could possibly do next. Introducing her new range of bake-at-home cupcake, cookie and brownie kits. Each kit is simple to make, has no added artificial colours or preservatives and tastes like real home-baked treats. ‘Triple Choc’ and ‘Choc Chunk’ cookies have real chocolate chunks and are crispy on the outside and soft in the centre as is the ‘Oat and Cranberry’ version that has customers coming back for seconds. The ‘Molten Chocolate Chunk Brownies’ are full of dark, chocolatey gooeyness and taste better than any other brownie I’ve ever made! There are also three different types of cupcakes to suit everyone’s taste and they even come with their own Donna Hay cupcake papers. If you’re to try only one of these kits, make it the brownies – they are seriously good! Continue reading ’sweet treats’
Brisbane is buzzing at the moment with new places to dine out. Some already open, some about to. Doors are now open at Libertine, a new restaurant at the Barracks centre in Paddington. Some may be familiar with the Sydney restaurant of the same name and it’s the same team behind this one. Their French-Vietnamese fusion menu is fabulous. The fact that Lien Yeomans (Green Papaya) helped create it just may have something to do with it. Like the Sydney restaurant, it combines dark timber and deep-red furnishings, moody lighting and gorgeous chandeliers creating a truly seductive atmosphere. Continue reading ‘new brisbane bites’
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