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Posts from the ‘Events’ Category

Mar 22

Songs I cook to …

Songs to cook to

1. Cler Achel,Tinariwen from Aman Iman: Water is Life

2. You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go, Madeleine Peyroux from Careless Love

3.Roll River Roll, Richard Hawley from Lady’s Bridge

4. Bach: Cello Suite #1 In G, BWV 1007 – Praeludium, performed by Truls Mørk

5. Boquinene, Ibrahim Ferrer from Buenos Hermanos

These are my five choices for the RN First Bite programmes ‘Songs to Cook To’ comp.

It wasn’t hard to come up with five. My kitchen activities whether they be meal making, baking or simply doing the washing up are always accompanied by a soundtrack. This could be a podcast or a digital radio tune in (BBC Radio 6 Music is such good fun) or a selection of music from Spotify.

As I was compiling my list however, I had the recurring thought that it’s actually whole albums that I enjoy listening to rather than a ‘playlist’ of individual tracks. Listening to an album in its entirety is such a joy. It as though you are being personally escorted around an artist’s gallery by the artist themselves. Albums ebb and flow and beckon you to follow them on to the next audible treat.

Go have a listen to some of the tracks on the expanding playlist.

Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk, Rufus Wainwright, Lilac Wine, Nina Simone, Return Of The Grievous Angel, Gram Parsons, Banana Boat (Day-O), Harry Belafonte …. there are some odd ones.


What would you add?

Sep 3

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Supper Club. The first of many.

Amongst food-loving types the words ‘supper club’ have become somewhat ubiquitous. The phrase is flipped around on telly and radio, there are supper club cookbooks, hundreds upon hundreds of blog posts and I’ve been to my fair share. So when I had the opportunity to try my hand at running one along with a friend, I jumped at the chance.

We picked our theme, Christmas in August and sent out word. What surprised me however was the number of times I had to explain the concept to people. Perhaps people aren’t as well acquainted with the idea as I had originally thought?

In a nutshell a supper club is a coming together of strangers and friends to share an often lavish meal created and cooked by amateur home cooks in a domestic or out of the ordinary venue. Invitations can be clandestine and spaces are restricted. Ingredients for the limited menu are usually responsibly and creatively sourced and diners are asked to donate an amount of money they feel reflect the quality of the meal and cover the costs. Labour is donated.

Supper clubs, unlike sometimes-snobbish dinner parties, are about a love of food and the sharing of said food with good company. And our little Christmas in August evening did just that. The middle of the year is the appropriate time for a hot Christmas dinner in Brisbane, Queensland. With ye olde fashioned Christmas carols blaring, candles lit and a waft of mulling wine hanging in the air we welcomed our guests and couraged them to mingle while snacking on  appropriately cheesy, literally and figuratively, Christmas hor d’oeuvres  - a labna ‘present’, vol-au-vent wreath and festive fruit tree.

A traditional Christmas dinner is nothing without turkey and we didn’t want to disappoint. Two of the finest turkeys were purchased from Allsop & England, brined and braised a la Nigella, then roasted before being presented to the waiting crowd.
Due to the amateur and frugal nature of events such as this it’s not always possible to cater for every dietary tweak but we did have a nut roast. Which perhaps may not look like much but I promise you it almost stole the show. Try it.

Peas and shallots, fancy roast pumpkin, rosemary roast sebago potatoes and honey carrots accompanied the dual turkeys and the nut roasts. We served these communally at the table which felt just like a family Christmas dinner with guests serving their neighbour and talking about Christmases past and yet to come. As the Food Connect homestead warehouse was the location for the feast we gave carving duties to it’s founder Robert Peakin who did a marvelous fatherly job.

Of course we followed this with Min’s great-aunt’s old-style plum pudding with brandy custard. We even lit up the puddings with blue flames – a trick I will definitely be trying again.


It was hard work. There are things we could have done differently. It was so difficult to keep our menu small as there are so much lovely festive fare to get excited about. It was great to mix researched recipes with old family favourites. It was so satisfying to be able to source local and responsibly produced fruit, veg and meat. Including some cavolo nero from my sister’s backyard. It was great to meet new people and share one of life’s great pleasures.

It really was great fun and, for me, highly addictive. We already have plans for the next event.

Jun 1

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Urban foraging for all

Last Saturday this little city dweller donned boots and a lovely brown felt/fur hat and headed out for a spot of urban foraging. The word foraging may conjure up images of frolicking in verdant fields with a basket full to the brim with mushrooms and berries of many hues, or chic restaurants such as Norma that produce plates of delicately hand-gathered herbs. Urban foraging however probably produces memories of bin-diving possums or scrapping, sneaky urban foxes. Well, I certainly wasn’t going to be bin-diving in this outfit but I guess you can’t blame the hungry critters when we throw out such amounts of perfectly edible food. Anyway that’s another matter for another day. What our little group of well-dressed urban foragers wanted to know was what tasty little morsels of leaf, herb, fruit and vegetable can be found in our suburbs and perhaps in our very own gardens.

Who better to guide us though the delicious discoveries and pitfalls of the urban palate than Mr Permablitz himself, the aptly named Ben Grub. I say aptly named because as Ben tells us, he’ll eat almost anything. Luckily he also carries around a little reference library in his manly black pull-shopper: Food Plants of the World and Mind-altering and Poisonous Plants of the World. He clearly knew his stuff and the strip of urban turf we were wandering.

Brisbane’s inner city suburb of West End is the perfect patch for pilfering and poking around for edibles. Mr Grub had no shortage of material to demonstrate how a fruitful garden can be cultivated in an urban environment. The suburb’s rich immigrant population combined with a higher density living and community spirit results in streets of tamarind, guava, loofa, olive and curry leaf trees and sweet potato vines. West End gardens are full of paw paw, fig, citrus of all shapes and sizes, spikey dragon fruit cactus, towering coconut palms and mammoth jack fruit which look as though they could kill a man but whose sweet yellow flesh tastes of gummy bears. Fences are laced with grapevine or creeping spinach or Brazilian cherry.

There are also the greens: the wild basil, the carotene-y thickhead weed, the unstoppable mottled all-spice plant and the delightfully named pig weed. It’s all there, alongside the neighbours who’ve jointly planted up their kerbside and housed beehives on rooftops. Truly inspiring.

Ben Grub believes the streets are for the people and the more we make use of them the more richly textured our lives and our plates will be. Luckily he and his permy pals have made a map to help us.

We ended our journey by wending our way downhill for a meal at Tukka, a restaurant that celebrates Australian native foraged flavours. I’d been longing to lunch there for a while but what I didn’t know is that their open-air dining room hides a little walled plot. Raised beds and a gravel path planted with herbs, rosella, lemon myrtle, Davidson plum and a very mean and spikey looking finger lime shrub. Given my recent and seasonally short addiction to finger limes I was quite surprised to find that the plant could do you some real damage. I certainly gained a new appreciation for the farmers. But this is what we had all come to find out, to see what things look like, to identify where and why they grow and to hopefully fill our gardens and our bellies with new and exciting foraged finds.

Special thanks go to the lovely @nataschamirosch for organising, @blitzbrisbane and Chef Bryant Wells for looking after us so well as well as all my fellow foragers.

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