food

Of all the pretty green spring vegetables, it is peas that bring me the most pleasure. I find them at their most sublime when they’re small and sweet and tender, so early in the season I harvest them as soon as the little globes start forming in...

Fungi are a fascinating food product. In recent years some incredible varieties have begun flooding the Australian market, but even so we are really only skimming the surface of their potential. We have gone from just using generic button or field...

For Australia’s restaurateurs – particularly those in Melbourne – the pandemic has required a big shot of resilience, layers of adaptability and more than a dash of optimism.

I came across a very unnerving statistic the other day. Apparently 24,000 cookbooks are being published annually. This doesn’t include the bloggers and other contributors to recipes on the internet, or, of course, weekly columns such as this one in...

The ubiquitous tiramisu turns up on so many menus. You’ll find it everywhere from dinner parties to street-side Italian(ish) cafes. I’ve seen it with strawberries, or set with gelatine into fancy freestanding shapes, then topped with flourishes to...

I’m not sure if it’s a professional hazard, or if I’m just a bit odd about numbers, but I love restaurant maths. I was never a good mathematical scholar when I was at school, but my basic arithmetic has always been solid and I’m not too shabby at...

Escabeche is a versatile method/dish that can apply to fish, meat, vegetables and even leafy greens. The origins of escabeche cross many borders, with it found in Latin American cuisine and also in African dishes. This version is less an escabeche...

The colour yellow. Not a colour I wear very often, except for the odd raincoat, but a colour that is all around me at the moment in the form of daffodils and wattle. It is a cheering colour, especially when it acts as the harbinger of warmer weather...

Pretty much every coastal country town has a fish and chip shop, and more often than not one is indistinguishable from another – they were all built around the same time, are often painted blue or feature blue signage in a familiar script, and have...