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This place is only 5km from my front door by foot. But it is hard to find. Walk down Clarendon Street and turn first right after Market St. I know you are worried about ducking down a dark alley in South Melbourne. With its proximity to the Crown Casino this is brothel territory where winners celebrate (so the legend goes).

But fear not. Down the alley on the left is a small non-descript warehouse with a roller door. The only sign of life is a small lit sign above a door. Welcome to the Emerald Hill Brewery (20 Ross Street, South Melbourne, Vic 3205 +61 3 9696-5491). And it is my entry to the Session#4 local brews meme hosted this week by Gastronomic Fight Club.
Bushy beards aren’t mandatory here although there are a few hanging around. We arrive at 5.30pm and there are only a handful of people sampling the two award winning beers on tap, a pale ale and a wheat beer. Soon the places fills up with women as well as men.
In the far corner are four large stainless steel containers. Near the rollerdoor an old sofa and there are some stools and small tables attached to the wall. This is a deconstructed pub in all its perfection. Plain brick walls, beer brewed on the premises. It’s about quality, not quantity although A$5 pints are very attractive.

Apparently, a batch of stout is on it’s way which is welcome for what looks like being a cold southern winter.

Our only gripe with this place is the name.

While Australia is famous for producing a popular abomination known as Fosters nobody really drinks the sweet fizzy brew here. Most people drink VB – Victoria Bitter – or the real hard nuts Melbourne Bitter.

My mates reckon the Emerald hill Brewery should produce South Melbourne bitter. Something for the simple beer nuts.

Popularity: 35% [?]

The imperfect sandwich from Il Fornaio.

Thursday: It was a perfect sunny autumn day. There I was on the beach with my chicken sandwich when I hit an unexpected crunch. Crispy bacon, that’s okay. Then I hit something chewy. yuk! It was some cartilage and tendons from the chicken. Spit.

Another bite and more tendons. Yuk, the crust also tasted burnt.

Spit! In the bin the rest of it goes.

Result: Unhappy man who will starve rather than eat this crap.

The perfect steak sandwich from the Vine Hotel.

Friday: To the Vine Hotel (corner Wellington St & Derby St, Collingwood) where they have perfected the ancient art of making a sandwich to be eaten rather than drip down my front.

There are no concessions to fashion here. Inside two toasted slices of common or garden white bread are a couple of thin slices of steak, tomato and some lettuce. It works just fine so there is no point changing it.

Result: Happy man who gives the pub’s impending sale a plug in the Hun.

My own effort at the perfect sandwich.

Tuesday: Time to eat the leftovers from Sunday, some tender slices of beef ccoked at 60C for three hours and seared in my molecular gastronomy experiments. The bread is sliced to the correct thickness, spread with home made horseradish. Slices of beef are arranged and topped with a few (washed) leaves of rocket (aragula).

Result: Happy man with an entry to this week’s meme Leftover Tuesdays #5, the brainchild of David at Cooking Chat and this week hosted by Pam at Project F**die.

FOOD FASCIST

There are special rules to making the perfect sandwich that must be followed.

1. Engineering. It was be easy to manipulate without the help of external aids. What I mean is that just like the Vine Hotel, the sandwich should be slim and not too packed with ingredients. The idea is that you should be able to pick the sandwich up without the goods falling out (and leaving an unfortunate stain on my trousers although that is another story).

2. Bread. Unfashionable white bread is good a lot of the time, as with the toasted sandwich above. Also white bread is good for cucumber, fish paste, Marmite (Vegamite if you must) and egg sandwiches. If you must use some fancy poofta bread like sourdough it is important to ensure you are not using a slice with a massive hole in it through which the contents will fall (on to my lap leaving an unfortunate stain on my trousers). I might add that hopefully the bread will not have a burnt crust. Also breads with hard seds in them can be a problem - the unexpected crunch being mistaken for small insects.
3. Thickness. Doorstep sandwiches do have their place with bacon & egg and Cheddar & Branston pickle sandwiches. But in general the bread should be about 10mm maximum thick and cut evenly. Of course, to cut a straight slice is a challenge and requires the same steady arm required by pool players and golfers (I never thought I’s mention golf on this blog. They are a stain on the countryside).

4. KISS. Oops, slipped into management jargon there – keep it simple stupid. The common them among all the sandwiches I’ve mentioned is that they are simple. Put too much in and the ingredients are bound to slip out onto my already stained lap.

5. Fresh. Sandwiches, unless you are buying through the nose for them somewhere like Pret a Manager in London, should be made to order. There is nothing worse than everything slipping out of a slimy pre-made jobby.

6. Tuna & sweetcorn. What is it about girls and this? And what is the best method of binding the sweetcorn to the tuna so that the kernels don’t drop out on to my (obviously) ruined trousers.

Popularity: 25% [?]

When Phil at Phnomenon opted into the “interview me” meme I sent him some questions. On Wednesday I met Phil at Bar Lourinha (37 Little Collins St) for lunch and probably should have whipped out my MP3 recorder and interviewed there and then. We talked about all sorts of stuff, the problems facing Cambodia, the food there and the emergence of the new Khymer cuisine and how blogging has led both of us to find ourselves writing about food for the dead tree media, his first big story being for The Wall Street Journal. You can see his responses here.

Later it was on to the funky digital media space Horse Bazaar (397 Little Lonsdale St) to meet some of Melbourne’s top bloggers, including the legendary five figure blogger Darren Rowse who organised the night and published a round-up here.

I didn’t meat any food bloggers but I did chat to James, Fairfax’s online community editor, Ren and Tania from Fashioning, Kirrily from Geek Etiquette, Alastair Cameron from his eponymously named blog, Martin from Small Office Australia, Karen from Miscellaneous Adventures of an Aussie Mum, Geoff at Pseudofish and John (Craig’s tech) among others.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Ilva at Lucullian Delights is actually pretty cool. Not only does she share her surname with a gun, she lives in Tuscany and I know from this post of mine that she at least once visited  Vivienne Westwood’s punk boutique SEX on the Kings Road. Oh, and she’s Swedish.

Right now though she’s running this fruity meme, where she was interviewed by another blogger and I volunteered to be interviewed. Here are the five questions Ilva sent me.
1. Are you happy to live where you do or would you like to live somewhere else?

In July we will have lived in the same house for seven years so I must be quite happy. We are lucky to live in a small friendly street in the Melbourne beach-side suburb of St Kilda, just around the corner from the famous Dogs Bar. Unusually for these times, we know most of our neighbours. I get to walk my dogs on the beach during low tide and a have vegetable plot at the local community gardens. I enjoy the inner city although sometimes I miss London and Europe for the cultural intensity, especially on the arts side. If I were to move again I’d like to try San Francisco or Barcelona – or I wouldn’t mind taking a six month sabatical writing some great opus in Hanoi. In reality, my only dissatisfaction is not having somewhere in the country to disappear to at weekends, chop logs and set up a proper cabinet-making workshop.

2. Australia is a gastronomical melting pot so I wonder which type of food is your favourite one? (or two or three…)

Many foods that are available elsewhere in the world that you can’t get here simply because of our strict customs controls. There is far more diversity of ingredients available in London but here the food is cheaper and more accessible to the people. This is especially the case in Melbourne where in the inner city we have three huge open markets and several more in the suburbs (not to mention farmers’ markets) What I’ve enjoyed discovering in Australia is Asian food. When I lived in Sydney I discovered rip-snorting, tear-jerking Thai curries – green, yellow, jungle. Thai food isn’t quite as good in Melbourne but with the access we have to superb quality fresh fish I’m really enjoying Japanese inspired foods – sashimi and sushi.

3. I know that you are a journalist, has your blog helped you in your professional life (has it helped you at all in your life?) and what do you think about ‘professional’ versus ‘amateur’ food blogs.

Funnily enough a reader recently asked how I, a business journalist, started writing about food. The truth is that I still am mainly a business journalist but blogging has allowed me to do some food writing as well. One of the things I’ve been doing on the blog is reviewing new restaurants before the critics got in. One of the local critics read one of my reviews and thought it hit the mark and invited me to review for the Good Food Guide. Partly because of my first night reviews, as well as being in the right place at the right time, I was offered a weekly column in one of the local daily papers, the Herald Sun (the columns aren’t yet available online but they are in my portfolio).
I would probably separate blogs between amateur, professional and journalists. I think journalists, myself included, sometimes treat blogs a bit like columns rather than personal diaries. And a lot of them, especially on newspapers, don’t really get involved in the community aspect and link sharing and aren’t really embracing the concept of social media which is what it is really all about. I treat my blog a bit like a personal notebook where I can post ideas and snippets without the polish required for a newspaper or magazine. Sometimes some of these ideas make it into print. What I have found difficult is that I want to post first on the blog but often feel I have to wait until the newspaper is published. Also because I’ve been out reviewing for guides I haven’t had the time to post on the blog. I guess I need to organise myself. I think the point of blogs is that there are no rules and whatever the level of quality of writing, photography or food we graduate to what we feel most comfortable with and stimulated by. I really don’t have time for various broadcasters and writers who say they don’t have time to trawl through all the blogs, good and bad, to find stuff. If they took the time to understand things such as RSS feeds they would be astonished at how effortlessly information comes to you.
4. Your favourite author (if it’s an obscure one please give us some details) and your favourite book, not necessarily by that author obviously?

I’ve been reading Ian McEwan since I was introduced to one of his books – First Love, last rights – by a girlfriend at university. I’ve almost always got a book on the go and read most good modern authors. Top of mind: Martin Amis, Jake Arnott, Nick Hornby, Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis… Classics such as Waugh. You’ll also find me reading good political diaries – Woodrow Wyatt, Alan Clarke. On food obviously I’m a big Anthony Bourdain fan. The best food related book I ever read wa Bill Burford’s Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany. I’m currently reading (from the library) the disgustingly funny The bedroom secrets of the Masterchefs by Irvine Welsh. Also I have a strange affection for Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek.
5. Did you have a dish/treat/food that you could die for when you were a child?
I was very fussy about food and spoiled by the fact that my mother was a very good cook and that my maternal grandfather imported fruit & veg from Spain, Portugal and the Canary Islands (where my mother was born). I particularly remember eating smoked salmon from large waxed boxes, white peaches and cantaloup melons. He was known as grampy scampi because he ate so much scampi and obviously I ate a lot too. Then there were the exotic sweetmeats from Spain many of which I don’t remember the names of. I also have this memory for some reason of this one creamy curry containing fruit and topped with almonds that my mother made. I think she only ever made it once but for some reason it sticks in my mind. What leaves a nasty taste is appalling school food. The mash potato was lumpy, not fully cooked and had the eyes left in it. The mince not only tasted revolting but had little white pellets of gristle and bone in it. I couldn’t physically eat the food if I wanted to as it made me gag. Yet each day the teachers tried to force me, keeping me at the lunch table all through break.

Now it’s the turn of me Ed Charles to interview you my blogger friend.
DIRECTIONS FOR THE INTERVIEW MEME
1. Leave a comment saying, “Interview me.” Cut me some slack — it may take awhile.
2. I will respond by emailing you five questions. Please ensure I have your email address.
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

Popularity: 7% [?]

I’ve been tagged by Andrea, an Australian living in Paris, from Buy Organic for the “five things” meme. Sorry it has taken me a while…

1. I was exposed in The Australian today. Yes, it is true that this food blogger soon becomes part of the “enhanced” food media landscape. I was first approached by the Herald Sun (Australia’s biggest selling daily newspaper) last November, it firmed up earlier this month and I finally signed a contract last Wednesday. The column comes out weekly on Tuesdays in the Citystyle section of the paper. While on a similar subject matter, and a rival to John Lethlean’s gossip column in The Age, it is a case of “same same but smaller”. While everybody knows that John Lethlean’s column is quite large, mine is quite small in comparison. I should add that one Sydney journalist said to me last week: “Apparently, John Lethlean’s huge six foot six or something; they can’t miss him when he’s reviewing restaurants.” While I can confirm he is extremely large in Melbourne, Lethlean does get smaller on interstate visits and is roughly normal size overseas. I in comparison remain a throughly modern and rather cosmopolitan 1.9m wherever I travel. I have requested that my face is obscured in my picture byline to maintain some anonymity. For now, thank goodness, there will be no photo byline so I can preserve some anonymity. I hope to be able to enhance the profile of other local food blogs in my column on occasions.

2. As the above has raised my profile, (and some chefs already know me from my blog) and the gossip maybe getting round, I may as well reveal this one . After my review of Gingerboy last year, John Lethlean and his co-editor Necia Wilden invited me to review for The Good Food Guide. I don’t see any conflict with my column for the Herald Sun (I won’t write about GFG restaurants there) and there appear not to be any restrictive clauses. Most popular disguises: beard/sandals and painted toenails.

3. Currently my toenails are painted acquamarine. The food angle on this is that I was lying on the beach in Cambodia eating a local type of crustacean that looked like a deep-fried giant preying mantis while it happened. Drink: Ice-cold Angkor beer.

4. I studied Theoretical Physics at Liverpool University (in the UK) and thanks to student laziness (I hated lab work) and drunkenness have a mediocre honours degree. I still can, however, calculate whether or not the universe is expanding or contracting and a rough approximation of the probability of an electron-positron collision producing vector bosons (maybe not now I think about it). I’m useless at plain vanilla linear mechanics. My unfulfilled ambition was to work at Cern in Geneva where the Internet was invented. While all this was going on I was living on chips, rice and curry sauce. In many respects Liverpool is very much like Melbourne. Great music venues and bars are hidden in alleyways between the warehouses. As a seven-year-old educational psychologists wanted to send me to a special school. It was only thanks to my mother’s belief in me and persistence that I wasn’t consigned to the educational scrap heap. Personally, I think I was bored. Also I hated school because the food was inedible. Teachers used to detain me until I ate the gunk, which I rarely did. That’s why I hated them too.

5. The other week I ate out six evenings. Even though I sometimes look slim, I weigh 105kg and I feel a little seedy from eating so much rich food. I hate the gym and instead have started kitesurfing and am probably the worst person on St Kilda Beach. I have one giant 16m kite and another dinky 12m one. However low or rotten I feel, all it takes is a half hour of being dragged face-down through the bay (emerging with lavatory paper in my hair) to feel refreshed and ready to attack the next restaurant review. I seem to have no feeling for aerodynamics despite having gained a private pilot’s license (as a series of articles for Australian Flying) when living in Sydney.

Anyone feel free to join in but I’ll come back and tag a five people later.

Popularity: 8% [?]

The latest bunch of blogger valentine postcards have been posted, mine one day late I’m afraid, as masterminded by Meeta at What’s for lunch honey?
Who receives this card and on what continent he or she lives, you will just have to wait. How I’m going to explain that I’m sending valentines postcards to 9and receiving them from) strangers I have no idea.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Wow! The Menu of Hope fundraising for the United Nations World Food Programme hust bust the US$38,000 barrier, over double the $17,000 raised last year.
We still need your money. Simply visit First Giving and donate, entering the prize code in the message box. Go now!
There is still a chance to buy tickets ad the odds of winning the prizes are pretty good. Check out the full Asia Pacific listing at Grab Your Fork and the worldwide listing at Chez Pim.

You too could be eating these rather cheeky Chinese doughnuts with raspberry chilli jam.

Prize code: AP45
Prize detail: A $150 voucher donated by Teage Ezard’s new hip Melbourne restaurant Gingerboy (27-29 Crossley Street Melbourne 3000 +61 3 9662 4200).
Ignore the stinging review in The Age (and my earlier one). The restaurant is much better than that. The food has all the sweet, sour and chilli bite expected in Asian food and just the right amount of kick. The chilli might sting your aunty but it won’t ruin your date. Gingerboy has a great cocktail list and really bustles – even on a Tuesday lunchtime. It is quite pricy though which is why you should buy a raffle ticket.

Prize code: AP39
Prize detail: $120 footbath and facial in a biscuit tin RRP $120
A voucher for a midweek Retreat Facial at Bodyfreedom is South Melbourne. It comprises 75 minutes of pampering and is worth $120 in what is a very cool South Melbourne, um, retreat. And it comes in a biscuit tin. It begins with a cleansing foot bath to wash away the day. Then melt into a back & neck massage while you are deep cleansed, double exfoliated, skin type specific mask, and lymphatic drainage face massage. Then your body will gently be awoken and revived with ritualistic Balinese body palming as well as a scalp & feet massage.
Prize code: AP37
Prize detail: James Halliday’s Wine Atlas of Australia RRP $79.95
It is the first book to ever comprehensively map all the wine regions – and there are over seventy – in Australia. It is the definitive work on Australian wine by on of the country’s top wine writers. He studies the types of grapes grown, the soil, the climate, the winegrowing history, and also introduces the most famous and respected wineries, winemakers and their signature wines.
James Halliday’s Wine Atlas of Australia. Donated by Hardie Grant Books.
I will post anywhere in the world.

Prize code: AP38
Prize detail: Sunday Lunch by Gordon Ramsay RRP $45
What surprised me about “Gordon Ramsay’s Sunday Lunch and other recipes from the F Word” is that is is a really practical down to earth cookbook. Lots of the books from top rated chefs border on the pretentious and suffer from requiring too many difficult to search out ingredients. Not this one. It’s brilliant. Go and buy a fucking ticket now – code AP38.
Gordon Ramsay’s Sunday Lunch and other recipes from the F Word. Donated by Hardie Grant Books.
I will post anywhere in the world.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Feeling greedy and that you haven’t done enough for the starving this year? Now’s your chance to sate both appetites. Digusting isn’t it, but you can do good and possibly stuff your face at the same time.
Simply buy a stack of $US10 tickets for the Menu for Hope run by Chez Pim, and coordinated locally at Grab Your Fork, and you could win a ten course meal at Tetsuyas in Sydney or a $400 degustation menu at Interlude at Melbourne. There are plenty of other spiffing prizes, the local ones here. Personally, I don’t deserve anything this Christmas as I’ve really overindulged myself this year but in the spirit of charity will be buying tickets because some of the prizes are so darned tempting.
All the money raised (bar a few per cent creamed off by First Giving) goes to the United Nations World Food Programme.

Oh, and tell you friends about it. Raffle ticket sales end on December 22, 2006.
My own prize offerings are:

Prize code: AP45
Prize detail: A $150 voucher donated by Teage Ezard’s new hip Melbourne restaurant Gingerboy (27-29 Crossley Street Melbourne 3000 +61 3 9662 4200).
Ignore the stinging review in The Age (and my earlier one). The restaurant is much better than that. The food has all the sweet, sour and chilli bite expected in Asian food and just the right amount of kick. The chilli might sting your aunty but it won’t ruin your date. Gingerboy has a great cocktail list and really bustles – even on a Tuesday lunchtime. It is quite pricy though which is why you should buy a raffle ticket.

Prize code: AP37
Prize detail: James Halliday’s Wine Atlas of Australia RRP $79.95
It is the first book to ever comprehensively map all the wine regions – and there are over seventy – in Australia. It is the definitive work on Australian wine by on of the country’s top wine writers. He studies the types of grapes grown, the soil, the climate, the winegrowing history, and also introduces the most famous and respected wineries, winemakers and their signature wines.
James Halliday’s Wine Atlas of Australia. Donated by Hardie Grant Books.
I will post anywhere in the world.

Prize code: AP38
Prize detail: Sunday Lunch by Gordon Ramsay RRP $45
What surprised me about “Gordon Ramsay’s Sunday Lunch and other recipes from the F Word” is that is is a really practical down to earth cookbook. Lots of the books from top rated chefs border on the pretentious and suffer from requiring too many difficult to search out ingredients. Not this one. It’s brilliant. Go and buy a fucking ticket now – code AP38.
Gordon Ramsay’s Sunday Lunch and other recipes from the F Word. Donated by Hardie Grant Books.
I will post anywhere in the world.

Prize code: AP39
Prize detail: $120 footbath and facial in a biscuit tin RRP $120
A voucher for a midweek Retreat Facial at Bodyfreedom is South Melbourne. It comprises 75 minutes of pampering and is worth $120 in what is a very cool South Melbourne, um, retreat. And it comes in a biscuit tin. It begins with a cleansing foot bath to wash away the day. Then melt into a back & neck massage while you are deep cleansed, double exfoliated, skin type specific mask, and lymphatic drainage face massage. Then your body will gently be awoken and revived with ritualistic Balinese body palming as well as a scalp & feet massage.

Donated by Bodyfreedom Urban Retreat.

Follow these instructions now (otherwise you will forget):

1. Go to the donation page at First Giving which if you are feeling dim is here.
2. Buy loads of tickets at US$10 each. For each ticket specify a prize code in the ‘Personal Message’ section in the donation form. Specify how many tickets per prize, and please use the prize code -for example, a donation of US$1000 can be two tickets for AP37 (Wine Atlas) and three for AP38 (Gordon Ramsay) and five for AP39 (biscuit massage).
3. For US donors, if your company has agreed to match your charity donation, please remember to check the box and fill in the information so we may claim the corporate match.
4. For Christ’s sake check allow us to see your email address so that we could contact you in case you win. Your email address will not be shared with anyone.
5. Check back on Chez Pim on January 15 when she announces the results. (Although there may be a one week delay here as I will be in Cambodia/Laos and possibly incommunicado until the 22nd January.)

Popularity: 11% [?]

I’ve been putting off writing about this for a few weeks now because I’m a bit embarrassed about what I’ve done. And that’s probably why I’ve been away from Weekend Herb Blogging for a while. But I’ve made the brave decision to join-in this weekend with WHB hosted by Nandita at Saffron Trail.
It all started when a report arrived from Brisbane, Queensland, of the worrying trend of pineapple appearing in main courses in restaurants. I was happy to sneer and join in disparaging this habit.
I was even able to add my own tale of a wasted $45 by ordering at the Gourmet Traveller Regional Restaurant of the Year, Absinthe in Surfers Paradise, a dish involving pineapple and foie gras.
Yes, you heard right. Now, I usually wouldn’t order foie gras unless it was the fresh stuff. In Australia, unless you have some secret supplier in the country we have to put up with the tinned or the pasteurized varieties. These are nowhere near as good to eat but also many times more expensive than the fresh stuff costs in France or England.
So there I was trying to enjoy two wasted ingredients. I’d have been happy eating the pineapple alone and feeding the foie gras to my neighbour’s cat and donating my $45 to the local casino.
The problem is you can keep all of the pineapple out of mains some of the time. And you can keep some of the pineapple out all the time. But you can’t keep all of the pineapple out all of the time.
And this perhaps explains how I returned home with a pineapple and a metre or so of octopus in the same bag and thought I could somehow combine both on one plate. But then I had a recipe from Martin Boetz, the chef at the Asian inspired Longrain in Sydney (and now Melbourne).

Grilled octopus with pineapple mint & sweet chilli
Salad ingredients
50ml thick soy sauce
200g octopus
100g pineapple sliced into thin strips
1/2 cup coriander leaves
This should be regular mint but I used 1/2 cup of leftover Vietnamese mint
1 red chilli.
1 spring onion
Dressing ingredients
100ml lime juice
1/2 teaspoon chilli powder
2 tablespoons shrimp floss (Made, I think, by pounding dried shrimps until they become, um, floss)
2 tablespoons sweet chilli sauce (Blend 2 parts chillis, 2 parts castor sugar and one part each of water and white vinegar. Add salt to taste)
2 chillis (officially birdseye)
Dunk the octopus in the thick soy sauce and grill until golden. Mix the dressing. Mix the dressing wit the salad ingredients and then add the octopus.
Top with five year old crisp fried eschallots that make you wish you’d never bought that big bag of the stuff.

Eat. Drink beer because the chillis are hot.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Last week half the state’s fruit was killed by frost. today the north wind is blowing from the hot centre and it’s 30 degrees C – that’s about 86F.
I should be sipping warm java, the beans from some exotic country run by a not-so-benevolent dictator. Instead I’m sitting here with a bottle of Autocrat (if you’ve worked with me don’t laugh) coffee syrup.
Mixed with milk it is the official drink of Rhode Island, the home of Lydia and The Perfect Pantry who sent me my Blogging By Mail package. All this was marshalled by the fabulous Stephanie at Dispensing Happiness.
And as usual the Australian Customs rifled through my package.
I immediately obey Lydia’s orders and make a cooling Coffee cabinet. Two scoops of coffee ice cream I add 1/4 cup – a few good squirts in reality – to a glass of milk and whizz it all up.
It does the drink.
Lydia wishes Happy Breakfast. There should be a pile of lemon- current Johnnycake biscotti in the above picture. Being busy, I’ve been rising early and eating these biscotti instead of making breakfast.
Apparently, they are called Johnnycake in honour of the local Rhode island cornmeal used to make actual Johnnycakes, a thin pancake.
My package includes a packet of Kenyon’s Johnny Cake white cornmeal. The packet says that these cakes probably date back to 1886.
I’ll leave my actual baking of the biscotti version to another post, perhaps this weekend.
This morning I dug into the Moosup farm seedless blackberry preserve smearing it over our toasted sourdough each morning. Spring has arrived.
Also I received a copy of The Providence and Rhode island Cookbook. What I didn’t realise that was that RI had a mix of Italians, French and Portuguese, which reflects in it’s food culture.
This book is stuffed full of exotic chowders and more lobsters, clams and quahogs (a kind of clam) than you could point a gold bar at.
i can only say that lobster must be very cheap and plentiful. We eat corned beef hash at home. In RI they make hash with lobster.
As for my own effort, I have definitely reinforcing Australian clichés for Ellon at barbie2be. She seemed particularly impressed by the kind of people who drink cans of rum and coke down here. Well she laughed like a drain, apparently.

Popularity: 4% [?]