Squashed Grapes

Squashed Grapes Has Moved...

2009-03-09T22:15:00.002+11:00

Squashed Grapes has moved to a new home and has been rebranded as Kitchen Decanted.

The new software gives me a bit more freedom to make interesting posts and is more flexible when it comes to customisation. As well as writing about food I'm trying to learn the blog software as I go and I decided after fooling with both that the new format is best.

Things are still in their infancy over there but there are some great posts coming up in the near future. So head over to Kitchen Decanted and keep reading.

Thanks!

The Lord Nelson

2009-02-22T21:42:00.006+11:00

After a week of nearly constant rain the sun is back. That’s one of the great things about Sydney; a week of rain is all you get before the sun comes out again. With that in mind it would be almost rude not to celebrate this return to form. So it’s time for a trip to The Lord Nelson.

There aren’t many places I’d rather be on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Picture a building with thick sandstone walls, huge windows looking out onto the trees outside and an abundance of dark wood and polished brass. Proper pint beer mugs (with handles!) hang over the bar and there’s not a midi or schooner in sight. It’s a proper pub.

As well as a great pub that ticks all the boxes, The Lord Nelson brews six beers right on the premises:

Nelsons Blood - A porter and my favourite of all the beers on offer. It looks almost red when the light catches it just right and has a fantastic creamy head. It fills the mouth with an immediate hit of dark chocolate and coffee; flavours reminiscent of Lindt 80% with a couple of strong short blacks on the side.

Old Admiral - This is classic old English ale with bags of malty flavours and a nice hoppiness. This stuff packs a hell of a punch. Don’t lose track of how much you’re drinking.

Victory Bitter - A British pale ale with spicy and malty flavours. A nice amber colour and great if you just fancy the one.

Three Sheets - A golden Australian pale ale with herbaceous and citrus flavours. Amazing length to this and it’s really hoppy. Perfect for a summer day.

Trafalgar Pale Ale – A classic English bitter with a lingering taste. Fantastic with some food.

Quayle Ale - A summer ale made with German ale yeast to give it a spicy finish. Easy drinking….too easy really.

The brewery is situated at the back of the pub behind a big set of windows that allow a great view of the fermentation tanks (mash tun is in the cellar). A chalk board lets you know what’s brewing for future visits.

In the interests of research and providing honest recommendations I have tried all of these fantastic beers and they really are a cut above the rest. They aren’t the only thing on offer of course. There is also a full range of more traditional Aussie fare such as Coopers and a great range of Belgian beers including Duval, Orval and Hoegaarden Grand Cru. If I were you I’d stick to the house brewed stuff though.

What could possibly make this better? A pie you say? No problem. The pork pies (which to be honest are pretty run of the mill) are served up with tasty pickle and a generous blob of English mustard. It’s perfect beer food. If a pork pie isn’t enough to line the stomach then there is the option of a full ploughman’s served with enough cheddar to keep even me happy.

Pubs like this, where they seem to really care whether you enjoy yourself or not, are heaven for me. It’s a great venue for a big night out or just sitting in the sunshine with a book and enjoying a perfect pint.

A perfect night for steak and Cab...

2009-02-21T21:40:00.004+11:00

Heavy grey sky and frequent downpours of biblical proportions? It might make the day a bit of a washout but it does mean that tonight is a perfect evening for steak and baked potatoes with sour cream. It’s a great meal to cook because you get maximum reward for minimum effort. The whole thing takes virtually no prep, very little actual cooking and it’s pretty much impossible to stuff up.

I picked up some porterhouse earlier, which I’ll be cooking very slightly on the medium side of rare and scoffing with some English mustard and (hopefully) hot horseradish*. Not much you can say about baked potatoes; crispy on the outside, fluffy on the inside and served up with a huge dollop of sour cream. A few steamed green beans on the side and we’re ready to go.

And what would this be without a decent bottle of Cab to go with it? If I’m being honest the thought of the decent bottle of Cab germinated before the thought of the steak. If I’m being brutally honest the thought of a decent bottle of Cab germinated before I brushed my teeth this morning.

So I headed off to Vintage Cellars and picked up a bottle of Wynns 2001 Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon for a bargainous $30.

It’s had nearly eight years and the rim is starting to lighten up a little but it’s still a beautiful deep purple colour. First impression (before decanting) is of a lot of great deal of fruit…..too soon? After a couple of hours in the decanter it’s opened up a bit. The blackcurrant (and a bit of cherry) is still intense but it has a beautiful sweetness to it (I say roasted squash, my wife says chocolate……she’s probably right) and there are underlying aromas of what I usually term ‘wet wood’ – it’s not quite as intense as cedar, but it’s heading in that direction.

It's good but I reckon it's got a good five to ten years left in it. Buy some now for $30 and lay it down for a while, I think it'll be worth the wait.

* How come I can't get hold of any decent hot horseradish in Australia? I have about ten jars all with one teaspoon removed. Am I doing something wrong? I think I might just start using wasabi instead. Any suggestions?

Top 10 Food Books

2009-02-18T08:41:00.034+11:00

A vast, groaning shelf laden with dozens of books about food and wine; cook books, wine guides, magazines and books stuffed full of foodie anecdotes. Sound familiar?

At last count, before moving to Sydney, I had sixty three books that sat comfortably in the category 'food book'. Some I used a great deal for cooking, reference or reading, and some I don't think I opened once after getting them home. Some contain pages stained almost beyond recognition by errant dollops of mustard or chocolately smudges and some still make creaking noises when opened.

The rise of food porn (not an easy thing to google for!) over the last few years has resulted in a vast number of every conceivable type of foodie book. The cookery section in Borders or Waterstones is the size of Wales and Amazon has 103,574 books listed under 'food and drink' . That's an awful lot of choice and, no doubt, a huge amount of repetition.

So, I've put together a list of ten of my favourites. These are the books I've used the most, read the most and just generally enjoy the most.

10) Feast - Nigella Lawson

It's got nothing to do with the fact that she cooks in her nighty and flirts with the camera. It's the tasty keema that's so simple to make and delicious with hot nan, it's the sticky toffee pancakes with vanilla ice cream, the meatballs and spaghetti, the chicken pot pies, the choco hot pots and the never yet been beaten Guinness cake. Fun to read, crammed with ideas and easy to get good results from.

9) World Atlas of Wine - Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson

Weighty and incredibly detailed. It's a coffee table book but a hugely detailed one. It gets it's hands dirty with a bit of informaton on terroir and making wine and then provides detailed maps and discussion on just about every major wine region you can think of.

8) Madhur Jaffrey's Curry Bible - Err....Madhur Jaffrey

No doubt there are better curry recipe books out there but this one is special for me. The first truly successful curry I ever made was the Goan Vindaloo from this book. Hot and sour, it was nicely balanced and fantastic with some nan, lime pickle and kingfisher beer.

7) Kitchen Confidential/A Cook's Tour - Anthony Bourdain

A fantastic double whammy. In Kitchen Confidential chef (or is that cook?) Anthony Bourdain tells of his experiences in the restaurant business in New York and beyond. Never order well done steak, keep an eye on the contents of Sunday brunches and treat your fruit and veg man like a member of the family. A real insight to the restaurant business.

In a Cook's Tour he travels the world to track down the perfect meal. Is it a fortune in sushi in New York, a partially formed duck foetus in Vietnam or a twenty course banquet at The French Laundry?

6) The River Cottage Meat Book - Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

I love Hugh. He's got the right idea about food as far as I'm concerned and this book is the only one you'll ever need on the subject of meat. It goes into detail regarding farming practices and how meat actually reaches us and has great recipes. I love that it features the more unfashionable cuts such as shin, cheek and offal, which are often cheap and incredibly tasty. Try the roast pigeon and the lamb rubbed with anchovies.

5) Hugh Johnson Wine Guide - Hugh Johnson

Every year it's in my stocking on Christmas morning. I tend to use it when ordering stuff online or putting together a mixed case. It's also handy for telling you serving temperatures, vineyards that are producing especially good value wines and when to crack open that '82 Petrus you've been saving.....what?

4) The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten

Jeffrey Steingarten takes 'foodie' to the next level. The man is obsessed beyond measure and rationality. He writes about clandestine truffle buying sessions in the woods of Piemonte, the wonder of trying proper Wagyu for the first time and, my personal favourite, judging the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest in Memphis. It's funny and always makes me hungry.

3) My Cellar Book - Me

Bit of a cheat this one. I love my cellar book though. If you drink wine and don't have one then I highly recommend it. It's a great way of keeping track of what you have and when you got it and, best of all, writing some tasting notes and a few words about when that special bottle was opened. Reading back through this evokes all sorts of memories; great meals shared with friends, the night I proposed to my wife, final exams at uni, the night we decided to move to Sydney. It's better than a photo album.

2) Made in Italy - Georgio Locatelli

I don't know where to start with this one. It's everythng I love about food. The passion for fresh ingredients and using them to create great food is evident on every single page. It's fun just to pick up and read the stories of Georgio's life and contains some truly sensational recipes (linguine with clams....drool). It's an instant foodie 'hit' and will take you from lounging about bored on a Saturday morning to planning a food extrvaganza on Saturday night. Simple recipes, quality ingredients and a love of food that really shines through.

1) Real Cooking and Appetite - Nigel Slater

I know what you're thinking. You really fancy some nice baguette slathered in roquefort. No? I've never been able to pick this book up without heading straight to the fridge and reaching for the blue cheese. That front cover is responsible for more than a few extra pounds.

This is where it all started for me. I got these a couple of days apart and they were the first books that made me go to the butcher, the greengrocer, the baker, the cheesemonger and the deli all in the same morning instead of just going to the supermarket.

I love the way Nigel Slater writes about food, like it's no big deal. As he famously says 'all you're doing is making yourself something to eat'. He makes it seem ok to try things out, substitute ingredients and stuff it up from time to time. These books made me realise that all it takes is a bit of practice and some passion.

There are almost too many recipes to recommend - the fish and noodle broth, the lamb roasted over potatoes, the chicken liver pate, the fish pie, onion and taleggio tart, chicken with tarragon and cream, a beautiful fish curry and the dill sauce for fish that I still use today.

Quality books that have stood the test of time and keep me coming back again and again.

Waiter there's a fly in my soup

2009-02-15T17:39:00.008+11:00

This is an adaptation of an article I wrote for The Schalter a few months back. I've trimmed it down slightly and tweaked it here and there. Essentially it's a nice new blog post without the effort and it's (hopefully) controversial enough to get a comment or two ;)

“Just because you like Jimi Hendrix doesn't mean you can play like Jimi Hendrix.”

- Anthony Bourdain

Half of all restaurants fail and close within one year of opening their doors. You heard that fact before? It’s not true. The figure is closer to 25% in the first year and 50-60% in the first 3 years. It is a difficult business though and yet despite that, in every town and city there are poor, even dreadful, restaurants that seem to persist year after year despite the fact they are selling crap food at inflated prices. The only people we can blame for that are ourselves.

I love restaurants. I love food and I love eating, so it follows that a place established solely to celebrate those things is pretty special to me. I don’t care if it’s a Michelin star restaurant in set in a beautiful country estate or a stall in a Vietnamese marketplace where you sit on those wee red plastic seats, as long as the food is good. The former can be incredible because it usually involves luxury items and things you don’t get to try everyday. The latter can be close to perfection as you sample a dish that the chef has made everyday for the last 30 years.

I also love menus and wine lists. A ‘foodie’ being handed a menu is like a fan of Formula One being given a choice of keys and a race track. A whole list of what really gets you excited is placed on the table in front of you and all you have to do is pick the items you want. Very few hobbies give you the opportunity to get actively involved at the highest level possible. That is what is so damn cool about food and wine; this is not a spectator sport and to get the best out of it you have to be prepared to get your hands dirty.

Some of the best times in my life have revolved around food and restaurants; a romantic meal in Prague as the snow fell outside; eating a dish of king prawns with chilli and basil in Bangkok that was perfectly balanced and yet so hot it made me feel decidedly odd and check for hidden mushrooms; countless times sitting round the table at home with good friends, ripping bits off a roast leg of lamb or chicken. Good food and good company together is a sublime experience and nothing comes close to matching it for inspiring feelings of great contentment.

It goes without saying then that a bad meal in a restaurant can be frustrating as hell and deeply disappointing. A restaurant should be the culmination of all that is good about food. It should be fresh, made from good ingredients, well cooked and well presented. The entire point in going is so you can have something to eat that you couldn’t make for yourself at home. That’s the deal. And it can all go wrong very easily indeed.

Take, for example, the humble steak. Steak is the easiest thing in the world to cook. It’s a real barometer for a restaurant. A check that reads ‘2 Fillet, one rare, one med/rare’ is a chef’s dream order in a busy restaurant as it takes no prep, virtually no cooking time and is nigh on impossible to fuck up. You can do it blue, rare, medium rare or medium (some say there is also a ‘well done’ stage but that makes good chefs cry and, more often than not, guarantees the worst piece of meat in the establishment, so we’ll leave it out). If you get a poorly cooked steak somewhere then you should never go there again. Simple as that. If you ask for a steak rare and it comes medium/well then they may as well have brought you chicken. It changes the texture and flavour of the meal and that means you aren’t getting what you asked for, which, again, is the entire point of going out.

I think there are several ‘mistakes’ that we frequently make when dining out that detract from the experience and can be easily avoided;

We order the same thing time and time again

Can you imagine doing the same six tasks at work over and over again, knowing you’re capable of so much more and yet rarely, if ever, getting to show it? A grumpy, unchallenged chef who spends every night pissing his career up the wall isn’t likely to cook you the best meal of your life. Take a chance every so often. Never had liver, or, even worse, only had over cooked liver that’s all grainy and lost its sweetness? Order the liver and say you want it medium rare, you might love it! Try a veggie dish for a change; chances are it’ll be great.

We mistake quantity for quality

Step forward the buffet ‘restaurant’. I didn’t consider school dinners a great gastronomic experience and most buffet ‘restaurants’ are of a similar level. There isn’t a person reading this who couldn’t be head chef in a buffet restaurant inside a week. I’ve actually heard people say ‘It’s not the best food in the world, but you can have as much as you like’….why on earth would I want extra helpings of crappy food? Can I have a poke in the eye as well?

Chances are there will be a place within walking distance that uses better ingredients and therefore produces better food and charges the same price. Go there instead.

We assume chefs know their stuff

I don’t know if the person in the kitchen knows sea bream from salmon. The ‘chef’ could be the owners mate or some spotty wee chav that flunked out of catering college. Worst of all it could be a ‘foodie’ that believes they’re Jimi Hendrix.

There are armies of bad chefs out there. Nobody would look at a botched building job and assume that perhaps the builder knows best and maybe a gap around their windows is a good thing, so we shouldn’t do it with our food.

If you are sitting there with your dinner in front of you thinking ‘wow, this chicken is dry’ then that’s because it is dry. You’re not imagining it; you’re being ripped off.

We think complaining will get you stabbed to death

It’s mad to assume that every dish out of the kitchen is gong to be perfect. There are bound to be mix up s and mistakes and most restaurants really appreciate the constructive criticism. It has to be warranted of course, but you don’t need ten years of hard graft in the kitchen to know when fish has been overcooked. At worst you’ll be asked to leave and if that happens then trust me, it’s a blessing.

Complaining about bad food is critical to making sure the standard we get is high. We, as a nation, hate complaining about food. We sit and mutter under our breath and say ‘never coming here again’ but we rarely say ‘this was bad’ or even ‘this was great, but this part was not’ to the people that can make a difference. I can understand that though. Who wants to go out for a nice meal and then sit and watch their partner eat as they wait for their (possibly tainted!) steak come back to the table cooked as it should have been? Not me.

However, if you don’t complain it means you are condoning the meal. If you say ‘it was fine’ when they collect your plate then it means exactly that; your meal was good and you couldn’t find fault with it. Renting some space, setting up a few tables and sticking somebody in front of a stove does not make a restaurant and the best judge of a bad meal is not the owner, the waiting staff or even the chef; it’s you. If complaining about shoddy food was the norm rather than the exception then you’d have a lot fewer poor dining experiences. And please, if your meal is terrible then never, ever leave a tip.

Best plan of all is to get over the fear of looking daft and try to head off a bad meal at the pass. People in the food trade love food. They love talking about it and they love telling you where it’s from, how they got it and why theirs is the best around. If they can’t tell you what you want to know then assume the worst.

I don’t think any other industry enjoys such casual acceptance of mediocre service and for all our sakes we should try to change that.

Light Graffiti - taking pictures of nothing at all

2009-02-14T12:06:00.001+11:00

I've been wondering how to start this blog for a few days now. It's not about anything as such and I'm not really very sure why I'm producing it. I do have more of a desire to write something down than I need somebody to read it.....not that others reading (and hopefully enjoying it) is a bad thing.

Anyway, I think the best approach is to try and let it evolve naturally. With that in mind, I found something very cool in on the The Guardian website today. Artist Michael Bosanko has created a series of light sculptures. This involves setting a camera up on very long exposure and then 'painting' a series of images on the dark background with different coloured torches. None of the images have been photoshopped, they all appear as they were taken.

Here's some of my favourites - Light Graffiti:

A giant spider squats in the middle of the road

A visitor creating corn circles

A city of lights sitting in an empty landscape

They really captured my imagination when I saw them and I thought it was worth sharing. I like the fact that it lets you photograph something that isn't even there. It's as if you're exposing what might lie just beneath the surface. Very cool stuff.

A quick dig on google reveals loads of light graffiti from a number of different artists. It's worth checking out as some of the stuff is fantastic.

Metacafe has this instructional video if you fancy trying it out:

Light Graffiti Tutorial - The funniest videos clips are here

Not what I thought my first blog post would be but hopefully it was interesting enough. Not sure what'll be up next, I'll see what takes my fancy.