May 2006

Best Asia Pacific restaurants – two days left

by Ed

This is open to anybody with email, as well as bloggers. Everybody feel free to join in. Bloggers should post on June 2 and voting via email is open until June 12. Hosted by Chubby Hubby in Singapore, the idea is to vote for the best restaurants in Asia Pacific. He’s also looking for a [...]

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Missing ingredient makes the chai

by Ed

Sometimes you just need something to calm you down… when you’ve become hot under the collar over teabags. When two interviewees postponed today. As a matter a fact, I’m hot under the collar now. So it was that I though I had to buy chai, that calming hippy dippy Indian spiced tea. Three local supermarkets [...]

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The Mount Macedon tea bag rooms

by Ed

Yes, you heard right. A tearoom serving of all things Lipton tea bags in pots of tea. Still, although full of charming gardens and plenty of good walks there aren’t many choices for lunch and a cuppa in Mount Macedon, a one hour drive out of Melbourne. After a bracing dog walk, and a close [...]

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Drink within your means

by Ed

How much should you pay for wine? Or let’s put it this way: How much more than the cost of food should wine be? In Melbourne the cost of a main course in a restaurant is fast catching up with the cost of wine. If I’m feeling poor I may spend $40 to $50 on [...]

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Weekend toadstool mushroom blogging

by Ed

Someone was trying to be helpful. True those bloody Zucchini were overgrown. But under their leaves hid my winter crops – horseradish and jerusalem artichokes. J just ripped them out and I’m left with a barren patch of earth. No herbs. Just a few weeds and grass sprouts now. So I have had to go [...]

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Go Greek. Go.

by Ed

Whipped parsnip hides under the chargrilled swordfish, a foil to the a la greque dressed snowpea leaves Sometimes I feel I’m too snippy. I seems I too easily find fault with restaurants. I’ll pick every hole I can in the food service and price. Even the design. And then, sometimes, a restaurant comes along that [...]

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There’s a new old-fashioned kinda blogger in town

by Ed

Through a Gnoos search I stumbled across old media dressed as new in the shape of the Good Living blog. It’s first entry, Monday last week made it clear that this really is a half hearted attempt my old media at blogging. It is purely designed to trawl the web for comments, which the paper [...]

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Great wine advice for restaurants

by Ed

Veteran food writer Rita Erlich talks good sense in The Age over absurdly long wine lists. Giant wine tomes are best avoided: “Even a speed-read list would help – say, a dozen whites and reds, chosen because they’re appropriate drinking and fairly priced. The longer the list, the higher the individual bottle prices, since stocking [...]

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Fifteen foundation open for applicants

by Ed

On the theme of restaurants training the underprivileged, Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen restaurant in Melbourne is one step closer, according to John Lethlean in The Age. Applications are open for unemployed food lovers aged 16-24 and close on Friday 9 June. This will be the fourth fifteen in the jigsaw with the original Fifteen in London [...]

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What are little boy bloggers made of? Frogs and snails (no puppy dog’s tails – yet)

by Ed

France is best known for its frogs and snails. But the industrialisation and development of mass agriculture means you’d be lucky to find a French frog or snail in the shops nowadays. You’ll be eating the common or garden eastern European varieties. Or you could visit Vietnam. Pretty much everywhere has live frogs in the [...]

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All change in the food blog top 20

by Ed

Okay these lists are fiddly to do and Food for Thought (in at 15) just reminded me that I left him out. Three months ago I first listed the Aussie top 20 bloggers. I’m doing it with the technorati ranking based on links. Here we are again with a complete shake up and eight new [...]

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Food fight

by Ed

Yes, there are two good fight stories out there. Cuccina Rebecca in Sydney was asked to stop taking pics of her food “because the owner does like it” as someone once tried to take a picture of the blackboard. Silly restaurant paranoi perhaps. Many chefs do take food photos for ideas but this was a [...]

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Baguette & Chocolat

by Ed

We’re a short drive from the Chinese border. Chris, from Sydney, reckons Sa Pa reminds him of a French ski resort. And the more I think about it, he’s right. The hotels have that French chalet feel. Sa Pa is at 1650m, the base high of ski resorts like, um, Courchevel 1650. And then I [...]

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Crazy Aussie Singa food bloggers

by Ed

I thought this was a pretty cool over at Google Trends. Food (blog) crazy! I need to update on how many and who the food bloggers are in Australia but obviously there is a huge interest. I reckon there are about 70 or 80 food blogs here now but I could be wrong as some [...]