food

I know it is significantly easier to use a curry paste from a jar, and no doubt some shop-bought products are excellent. But with food processors and a fairly ready availability of fresh base ingredients, it’s hard to beat a paste made fresh. A good...

Dry biscuits. I remember the standards from when I was a child. Saos and Saladas. Ritz, Savoy and Jatz. And Vita-Weats. All still readily available and all living up to their name. Dry by name and dry by nature. The word biscuit has its roots in...

Asparagus is a vegetable indelibly linked to gourmet French cuisine. It was the fancy dish in a sauce of I don’t know what. A celebratory vegetable course that communicated the chef’s pedigree. My first picking of asparagus highlighted how little I...

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...