food

Back in the good old days, when you could move more than five kilometres and make plans in advance, we booked a holiday house for Christmas – 10 days by the beach with a smattering of overlapping friends. Our restaurants were closed, which meant any...

When travelling, it is often street food that catches people’s hearts. In most places in the world, apart from the ones that specialise in drive-through fast food, the history, culture and flavours of any given region or country seem to be on best...

I’m not sure if it’s a seasonal thing, but last week I ate five meals of tinned sardines. Ten years ago I would not have viewed this as decadent, but the quality of some of the seafood conservas coming out of Spain and Portugal in particular is...

I love citrus, a family of fruits all with a sour tang and varying degrees of sweetness, their history a tale of hybrids. There were four firsts – citron, pomelo, papeda and the mandarin, the only sweet one – that were mixed and interbred so...

It seems many of us have returned to a winter of discontent. Bright sparks are few and far between. As restaurant kitchens slumber or pivot, with a near-hysterical glint, to takeaway offerings, I have retreated to my farm looking for some external...

Black truffles, or Tuber melanosporum , are kicking. The first frosts have hit our truffle-producing regions, promoting maturity in the subterranean fungi. While prices are intimidating – per kilogram they can cost many thousands of dollars –...

Before you dismiss the idea of cooking crab because you think it’s too hard, please give me a moment to persuade you that it’s not. I think most people will agree the flesh from a crab is delicious. It’s succulent, sweet and slightly salty, with an...

As the monotony of coronavirus seems to put life on repeat, there are many things we are all missing. For me, and my friends and customers, the travel question remains scratchy. Months ago it was a question of when; now we wonder about the prospect...

The debate over combining fruit with savoury dishes can become almost as passionate as that concerning religion. It’s all in or not at all. Like pineapple on pizza – the idea can be met with disgust or delight in equal measure. But – shock, horror...