| Victoria Cosford | Updated January 30, 2012 |
Bell pepper, pimiento, capsicum, sweet pepper, bullnose pepper – depending on where you reside the name will vary. And Christopher Columbus can be blamed for the confusion: on his voyage to Asia, the land of the spice pepper, he entered the Caribbean and believed that he had found pepper when he was served a powdered version of hot capsicum in a dish. Read more »
There was a duck in my freezer, and it was time to bring it out. One of AJ’s beautiful birds, it would do wonderfully, I was thinking, for Gwyneth Paltrow’s Duck Ragu which I planned to serve to friends. Out of the freezer it came and I peered closely at the fine print. From frozen state, I read, use within six months of purchase. That had been April; now it was January, which meant Read more »
It’s all very well turning your glut of fruit into jam – but what happens with your subsequent glut of jam? This, she confided to me during my latest visit home, was my mother’s current dilemma. Yes, she would happily make feijoa jam and crabapple jam – and yes whenever the Wheatleys came over for their monthly afternoon tea she would wheel it out with lemonade scones an Read more »
It was to be one of my Canberra Christmas highlights. My sister had promised, for the purchase of our festive lunch ingredients, to take me to Costco. And in the light of what was to come it was an even better idea, if only for purposes of comparison, to preface that with the Fyshwick markets, whose early morning queues at that time of year for seafood were legendary. Read more »
Especially during holidays the question surfaces. Where do you recommend for dinner? Asked not only by locals but also by visitors, it is a question with which I always have difficulty, on several levels. First of all, the delicate matter of consistency, or rather its lamentable lack, means that I may gush over a recent restaurant experience and urge friends along, only to be told afterwards th Read more »
Lance William was forty-five when his health began to deteriorate. If he caught a cold it would turn into pneumonia; essentially, his immune system was impaired, and he knew why. Born and brought up on the land in a farming family, he had been around pesticides all his life. ‘I was growing beans and tomatoes and zucchinis with my brother as young as ten years, exposed to those dangerous c Read more »
Hurtling towards Lismore I am perplexed by signs, black paint on small white boards, which shout out SCORN. Scorn? A protest? An underground movement? Political comment? Then suddenly my head clears at the sight of a blotch beside the S : it’s sweet corn, of course, farm gate or roadside stall. Read more »
Out of my handbag I pull a tumble of business cards. There’s the Hotel School in Sydney; a Senior Project Officer from Sunshine Coast Council; a Burringbar banana grower; a Senior RDO from the Queensland government; Obi Obi Essentials (olive oil, green leaf tea, olive leaf tea and hand-spun alpaca wool). Read more »
t is the question most commonly asked of waiters. According to Morgan Frazer from Fins, why so many diners want to know what constitutes the restaurant’s most popular dishes is because they do not want to have to choose.I agree with Morgan, although I think there are other reasons as well. In a strange restaurant in a strange town the answer is a useful guide. Restaurant reviewers (whose Read more »
Until I knew better I had always believed I was making caramelised onions. This was just one of the components of the vegetarian breakfast I used to serve for several years at a Sydney cafe I co-ran, another life ago. Potato rosti, splayed-out avocado half, slow-roasted roma tomatoes and a dollop of these onions I had previously simmered endlessly in a heady sticky mass with chilli and ginger a Read more »