When I was a kid, Sunday nights were special. That was the night my parents would take my sister and I to the Lean Sun Lowrestaurant in Dixon Street in Sydney’s Chinatown. They’d arrange to meet friends there and we kids would sit at a separate table, well away from the grown-ups, and have a [...]
What’s on your Australia Day menu? Kanga burgers? Hot Smoked Lemon Myrtle Crocodile? Barramundi with Green Ants? Wattleseed pavlova? Just kidding. But it’s odd, isn’t it, how we still shy away from using native Australian ingredients in our cuisine. Here we live on a continent which offers up to 4,000 different varieties of edible bush [...]
Hurry, hurry – book in now to my Mini Chef Kids Cooking Classes Junior Mduring the school holidays. My aim is to teach children to prepare a wholesome, nutritious meal which they love to eat and can reproduce easily at home. This is not celebrity chef restaurant-style food. Hygiene, nutrition – and loads of laughs [...]
Hurry, hurry – book in now to my Mini Chef Kids Cooking Classes during the school holidays. My aim is to teach children to prepare a wholesome, nutritious meal which they love to eat and can reproduce easily at home. This is not celebrity chef restaurant-style food. Hygiene, nutrition – and loads of laughs – [...]
Happy new year. And hello summer! Here in Sydney, where I live, the sun is finally showing its face and the skies are blue. I’ve had a blissful few days at the beach and when I returned home yesterday, I could no longer put off the dreaded job of tackling my fridge. Ugh. It was [...]
A successful Christmas meal is dependent on careful timing, and its preparation is an important part of the Christmas day ritual. The reason why my family leave our feast until later in the day is so we have time to set the table, prepare and cook the turkey, vegetables and make the the creme anglaise. [...]
I’ve hung the wreath on the door, taken the tall gold angels out of the cupboard and placed them in the hallway. Today I’ll take down the boxes filled with Christmas decorations and brush off the dust. Guaranteed, there’ll be lots of sneezing. So begins another Christmas. My mother actually prepares for Christmas all year [...]
The day I fell off a donkey and into some blackberry bushes is one I shan’t forget, nor recommend. Just what those blackberry bushes were doing right in the middle of a grassy paddock, I don’t know. When the settlers introduced the blackberry to Australia, little did they realise it would be declared a noxious [...]
Of all the stone fruits, the peach is the one I love most. The others – nectarines, apricots, plums and cherries, come a close second, though, because I am a devoted fan of all stone fruits. I think they’re best eaten fresh. And, as I mention in The Cook’s Garden, they also make lovely gifts, [...]
In my latest book, The Cook’s Garden, there’s a poem by Richard Tipping which goes like this: mangoes are not cigarettes mangoes are fleshy sinful passionate fruits mangoes are hungry to be sucked mangoes are glad to be stuck in the teeth mangoes like slush & kissing mangoes are not cigarettes mangoes are idiosyncratic seasonal [...]
