IEatMelbourne has moved

And diversified. I'm now doing Melbourne stuff, writ large at girlmeetsmelbourne.wordpress.com.

Fairfield Deli We Love You

So I know I've given Fairfield a bit of a hard time previously but the deli is blowing my mind.
Things I have eaten from the deli in the last week:
Figs stuffed with marscapone cheese (2.50)
Apricots stuffed with marscapone cheese (1.50, and better, actually)
Beef Borek (in the oven with cheese and peas and carrot and happiness on a Saturday arvo)
Chicken and Vegie Borek
Vegie lasagna (least fav, but still good).

I plan to go nuts on their cheeses soon.

What I especially love is that the place is so unassuming. I go to a deli in Albert Park on Sundays sometimes and it is such a beautiful place: everything is just way nicer than my actual reality-- shinier, more expensive, more organic, more cheesy, usually.

But it is also a slightly absurd experience, in that everything is like double the normal price, and I feel like there are a lot of heroes in the room (I cannot get past the use of this phrase on reality TV). Even the apples from like, Nunawading, have their source noted as if there is something impressive about getting your apples from Springvale Rd. Maybe there is. I start to feel like there is while I wait for my coffee. It's all so shiny. And the barista is so witty and articulate. Where do they find these people? (Answer, obviously: Albert Park).

So I like Fairfield cause it's slightly odd in a MUCH less hip way, mostly because there are two men working there and the older guy seems to be totally redundant (supervised in all activities) and yet way too old to be a trainee. So what's going on there? Something sweet I suspect.

Fairfield, I got your number. You're going to weasel your way into at least B+ standard, right before we leave.

Ora-Thai: don't go there

OraThai is a traditional Thai name, apparently. That is where the authenticity ends. I knew it was a bad sign when I went to pick up the take away and there were curries in a bain-marie. Think: Thai restaurant meets 1990s Fish and Chip shop and you have a sense of the mood.

Their walls are plastered with signs about how they don't take credit card for their authentic Thai food. It seems odd that a) they would not take credit cards and b) this would be the thing they make front and centre of their advertising.

The chilli chicken with cashew nuts was light on cashew nuts and chilli.

The mee goreng didn't look like mee goreng, frankly.

It was all okay. I cannot wait to move back closer into the CBD so that my take out experiences can be elevated from this crap-house average standard that pervades the burbs.

Caveat: apparently there is some all-swank Thai restaurant in Ivanhoe. It is far too pricey for weeknight snacks. However, I feel I should acknowledge that there is good food beyond the tram line boundary.

Cooking for Partees, part deux

Cooking with 'gas', in the form of panadol and gin/tonic

So I cooked a crapload of food on the weekend. I am traditionally not a baker, but rather, a thrower-together of foods for dinner, and sometimes, a recipe follower. Of foods that can or should be consumed as a meal, that is. I generally avoid things that need to be measured. So my baking was a bigger enterprise than I anticipated because it turns out all that measuring requires a rather large assortment of stuff. Things you need if you are going to bake a clafoutis, some cup cakes, and some ginger bread:
1) a tray that fits in your oven
2) cookie cutters (these are an ARSE to do cutting with). Really incredibly time consuming bizzo. And still looked basically absurd, and not at all like a baby's hand and train, as was intended. In fact, it looked like it was made by a baby. But it was couched in a lot of celophane, so okay mostly
3) a rolling pin. Really, this felt like it was taking things up quite a few notches but I used it a few times
4) some form of blender/mixer. Because hand whisking the eggs really made my husband impossibly grumpy

However, in general the cooking was quite fun, and accompanied by lots of exclamations from said husband, mostly on the subject of how shocking it was that I was this kind of person. Actually, I was feeling pretty smug about being This Kind of Person, even if it was news to me that baking soda and powder were different things, and even if I did give up and roll out my pastry and gingerbread with the sticky glue from the label on the cheap rolling pin still semi-attached.

I figure I'm only about 24 steps away from having competitive dinner parties with exotic mushrooms served in shot glasses as cold soup (this is really happening in the lives of my older colleagues. She even admitted that it was competitive cooking.)



Because I am a substandard baker I get all my recipes from the internet. Sometimes this means you have to get things that are super-common in the US but ridiculous to get here. Like unsulphured molasses. When I asked for molasses at the supermarket they took me to the mussels.



Because I'm watching The Renovators I'm going to call these 'the heroes of the room'. But actually, I mostly am thinking, looking at them again, that they look a hell of a lot more lurid than Nigella's do. Less red velvet and more red psychadellic.

Cooking for Partees

So I was going to write about Vietnamese restaurants. And then I got the flu and I've done absolutely nothing all weekend except sleep and watch TV on the ipad. It's been dull. However, this coming weekend, I have a baby shower to prepare for. I'm making red velvet cupcakes. Whatever the velvet bit means I don't know; I believe it's a Nigella rip-off, but they should be red. I mean, I can't see me getting that part wrong. Actually, I'm making them for my sister, who once made me a 'red' themed birthday cake. Yes, the theme for my party was red. Simpler times, thus demonstrated. And if my cupcakes are not boldly and deeply red in hue, I'm sure she'll understand, because the piano cake she made me was pink, and was held together with toothpicks. I wish I had a photo. Thanks big sister!

I'm also making something with the word 'clafoutis' in it, which sounds vaguely rude, but promises to be delicious and not terribly difficult, I hope. I have bought buttermilk. I feel more homely already.

I'm still recovering from being a sweating, snotty mess, so this will be a short post, but I'm putting in a picture for added value. The goodies will be baked on Sunday, so I thought I'd include a pic of the shoes I intend to wear while baking, because a) they're awesome and b) it's a nice combination of happy things-- shoes and good food (one hopes) that is to come in the near future.

Happy Monday.

Tippling Theatres and Grand Tawny at Home

So I planned to write about drinks at the Sumner Theatre-- mid-show drinks, to be precise. We bought a subscription to the MTC last year and as well as seeing some great plays we've also been rather keen on the experience of hanging out at the Sumner, which is a really groovy little space with lots of black leather and gleaming glass. Unfortunately, it turned out that our show wasn't at the Sumner, but was at the Arts Centre, about a block away. The Arts Centre is nice in a way, but it has an unfortunate resonance with my experience supervising teenage girls at their Performing Arts Festival. I.e, work. And then my other strong association is with visiting MELBOURNE (anything in from Narre Warren) as a kid, specifically to see the Nutcracker Suite and The Phantom of the Opera with my primary school and my parents, respectively. All very nice, but not quite the atmosphere of sophistication that I can pretend I belong to over the road.

So I remain without knowledge on the subject of whether or not one should imbibe in the sense that I imagined. The pressing questions for me were-- how overpriced is the champagne (that is, how crap will the stuff by the glass be?) and-- can you drink a glass of champagne and go back into the theatre for 90 minutes without seriously overstretching your bladder? These remain mysteries.

What I can report on: the bar downstairs (near the Fairfax theatre) at the Arts Centre is not for those who aspire to glamour. Or variety. Or decent beer. Why they have on tap Crownies, Cascade Light and Stella (more appropriate choices for tourists on one of those cruises down the Yarra) I don't know. I had a hot chocolate, anyway, and she didn't glare at me too much when I asked for it extra hot, so that is certainly in their favour.

The experience of quaffing said beverages was sullied by the fact that by the time we worked out where we were supposed to be we didn't actually have much time left to consume our choices. Drinking my extra hot hot chocolate was made more difficult, even, by the fact that I'd gotten chilli on my hands after our Vietnamese dinner and kept rubbing it in my eye. So I was kind of keening with pain and sculling a hot drink, which didn't help the atmosphere. Anyway, there's not really anywhere to sit either and it all feels like you're just hanging in the foyer. Which we were, of course. But in the Sumner, it's better.

Finally-- tonight I'm having some lovely 'Grand Tawny' (port, I think) from Penfolds. We bought it from the cellar door in Adelaide and it's great, although it doesn't make me feel any younger to be drinking and talking about port! Still, this, I can wholeheartedly recommend. It's syrupy goodness that burns a little on the way down and has a raisin-y aftertaste. I love it.

Next time? I am bothered by the range in quality of Vietnamese in Melbourne. I'm going to make a best of.

Foods I wish I hadn't eaten

I think I'm a fairly adventurous eater. There are only a couple of things I can think of that I won't try. Tuna, for instance. And I remember for a while in my childhood I was insistent that I didn't like Nutri Grain without having tried it. Imagine if tuna turns out to be like Nutri Grain! What a loss. But I don't think so. Tuna gives it's seedy self away by STINKING. See earlier post. I also decided to opt out of trying cocarech- cow lungs all mushed up - while I was living in Istanbul. Anyway, having been pretty bold in my time, I thought I'd use this experience to post a list of suggestions of things not to try.

1) Tarantulas- the abdomen. Many a traveller on the bus from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, has had the pleasure of getting off at the rest stop where you can buy tarantulas. By the kilo. When they realised I wanted only one they laughed and gave it to me for free. The history of eating tarantulas in Cambodia is a sad one-- when the people were starving under the Khmer Rouge they determined that anything was up for grabs. But these days the highway town of Skuon does a trade in breeding and selling them, fried and covered in chilli and soy sauce. If you like, you can wash it down with some dubious spirit with ground deer antler for virility. Because in fact, after you munch down on a limb, you'll be glad of it. But to the matter at hand-- the legs are not so bad. They mostly taste like chilli and soy, unsurprisingly. I did see another foolish lad chomp down on the abdomen, against the warning of others. It wasn't pretty. It was white, and gooey. And he drank a lot more deer-booze than I did. So stick to the spindly, slightly hairy, but nonetheless ultimately less alarming legs if you get the chance. (NB: just read a little more on Wikipedia and apparently the abdomen contains a mixture of excrement, eggs and organs. I thought we just said that to freak him out.)

2) Balinese roti. I've had roti in Thailand and it was wonderful. I've seen people cook it this way in Java in Indonesia. And maybe I got a bad batch. But the light, buttery pancakey
mixture whipped up in front of you with fresh eggs and covered in condensed milk, bananas and/or chocolate of my previous experience was a far cry from the 'roti' I bought in Ubud. Same kind of stall/cart on the side of the road, but instead of cracking a few eggs and slathering on some melted chocolate he took a loaf of white bread, cut in half lengthways twice, fried it on all sides in butter and then spread it with condensed milk and chocolate sprinkles. The layers were then placed upon each other and fried in butter again. So much white bread. (And this was no brioche or ciabatta. Cheap, flavourless white stuff). So many chocolate sprinkles. I didn't even like those as a child. If you wanted fruit, you could opt for a squirt of some kind of brightly coloured syrup. It was all wrapped in paper and ready to go, my own little chocolate sprinkle/butter/condensed milk LOAF of bread.

To be fair, my husband thought this was kind of cool. And I think we ate it. I was kinda hungry.

3) More from the highlights of Indonesia: bakso in the dark. Bakso is made of...actually, I'm not sure. It's a soup and it has these suspiciously smooth pale brown meatballs in it. Which is not traditionally my thing. But I love to try new things that I don't quite understand-- this is how I discovered battered, deep fried tofu balls. But my advice is not to eat bakso in the dark, and maybe not from a bus station that's a long way out of town. Cause it was a bit hairy.

4) Turkish wine. Not a food, but worth a mention. I went on a trip to a winery in Turkey within a couple of weeks of moving there. I was really excited at the prospect of trying it. Sadly, the wine that they had for tasting was basically undrinkable. And this at a tasting. In my year there, I didn't really have any nice Turkish wine. The expats warn against it. This is especially true if you plan to buy your wine from a corner shop in a relatively conservative area, as I did, and found that it was so corked it looked rather like brandy. Turkey has a wonderful food culture. But stay away from the wine.

5) Chips from Lord of the Fries. Ok, they're quite nice. But I strongly object to the way in which this franchise has gentrified the humble chip. All of the sudden they're to be bought in swanky shaped cardboard instead of humble brown paper, and they're 10 times the price. What is going on with that? How are we suckered in to this one? It's marketing genius, making a chip socially acceptable in the heart of the CBD with sushi bars and new-wave Greek food all around. And it lasts right up until you've realised that you actually just purchased and consumed deep fried potato coated in salt as an afternoon snack. As my sister rightly points out-- we are too old for this kind of behaviour. Thought it best to end with a home-grown disaster, particularly apt since I in fact ate quite a few of these devilish chippies just last night.

Next time: tippling in the theatre. Should you go there?