These are a few of my favourite things

When I envisaged writing this blog I thought it would be all about restaurants I visited and how good/not good they were. But a few posts in and I've already realised that food is about much more than that, and that I have much more to say about it than that. (In addition to which, most of that is already said repeatedly on a range of more popular blogs by people with better credentials). Food is actually a big part of how I find pleasure in the world, and even of how I interpret my surroundings and experiences of the world is often heavily influenced by what the food is like there (A trip to Adelaide, for example, was MADE by the discovery of the BBC at Ying Chow). Food is also a great primer for relationships with others. Most of my close friends really like food, and we talk about food and do things surrounding food.

Anyway, in light of the wonder of food, I thought I would list a few of my top items.

1) Dry roasted almonds. These are a revelation. They are so much better than regular almonds. And yet, according to the name, they're just roasted. Not coated in chilli and sugar or luxuriating in their own oilyness (like these wonderful peanuts I found in Indonesia and macadamia nuts, respectively) or smothered in happy portions of salt. I mean, all of those are nice additions, now that I think about it. But the roasted almond is so simple, and yet so special.

2) Shepherd's Pie made with lamb mince. Apparently this is real Shepherd's Pie. The other one (with beef mince) has some other name (also on the agricultural theme, I think). Did everyone know this? Anyway, it's heaps better. Though I still like to drown mine in tomato sauce. Did I just lose all respect?

3) Sour cream. Since I looked up the nutritional info on this I don't eat it much. But boy, do I enjoy it when I do.

4) Potatoes, in their many forms. I salute you.

Dinner's on the way. It's Shepherd's Pie. Soon my little mesclun leaves can join it in a side salad with balsamic and olive oil. More of my favourite things. Happy days.

Going Organic... sort of

My latest pride and joy are these seeds which have miraculously (okay, I know it's actually a very pedestrian event) blossomed from their little paper packets at Bunnings to tiny salad leaves. Quite tiny, admittedly, especially the second lot-- some kind of herb which I've already forgotten. Still, somehow this is really quite exciting to my husband and I-- as if we were watching a pregnancy or something. This may be to do with my sorry history with plants. I had a house fern-thing. It was really nice for about one week and then the flowers went yellow. Then I had a cyclamen. It was really nice for about one week and then... this time it was the leaves that betrayed me.

To be fair, neither was a great surprise. My cyclamen was kind of soggy. Which was in response to my overcompensating for the guilt felt for leaving my ferny-thing for 5 weeks while I went to Indonesia. Apparently, some people organise for others to water their plants. I am not there. Actually, the metaphor of parenting seems rather apt too. How many families do you know in which parents oscillated between over-nuturing and sending the child to every class known to man, complete with ensuring they know conversational French in kindergarten, and then by the third child they're pulling right back and letting the kid play with snails in the back yard and telling them that boredom is character building. Okay, that last part came straight from my own childhood.

Anyway, my plants. I am so proud of you, little plants. I love the way you are ACTUALLY LEANING TOWARDS THE SUN, like the science experiment success I never had. I love that you really did grow from seeds, in spite of me not reading the packet properly and realising post-purchase that you can only be sown in Winter if I live in a northern state. I love how grown up you make me feel. After all, purchasing seeds, pot, pot tray and soil was a number of steps to have covered and it has taken me some time. Little plants, strain away, and keep growing. I am so very pleased with you, and can't wait to enjoy you in salad.

Fairfield's a bit disappointing

Recently my dearest partner in greatness and I moved across town-- south to north of the river, which everyone knows is a terribly significant move, and one that I felt particularly pleased with, since I've always felt much more of a northie. We moved from Ormond-- which was such a gastronomic wasteland it doesn't even bear writing about-- to Fairfield, which looked really promising with it's little strip of shops and smattering of cafes. It seemed a tiny bit hip (barely, but it's all relative) and still definitely very much a real suburb, rather than one of those places where you can get a really swish latte in a asymmetrical glass. But no bread or newspapers or library books. Fairfield has 4 independent grocers, which is pretty amazing since there are only about 20 shops on the strip. And it has a Baker's Delight, which is so twee-ly suburban for this neck of the woods. I love that Baker's Delight, with it's 90s-style pull-aparts and the non-organic white loaves. Anyway. Fairfield seemed promising .We had visions of breakfasts where they might serve vodka-infused trout on a bagel with hollandaise (like The Artful Dodger, in Elsternwick) and where we could have leisurely glasses of wine on a Saturday, whilst not feeling like we needed to shop for vintage clothing in order to leave the house.

But in truth, Fairfield is a B-grade suburb. There are a number of cafes, this is true. And the coffee is nothing to be ashamed of. I've had no burnt milk, though I have had a few luke warm coffees, and some of them have taken quite a while to come (classic errors of a B grade cafe). We've even had a brunch that was tasty enough, though we did have to eat the rather dated dish of bangers and mash and french toast with bacon to find something palatable.

However, there have been some sorry tales too. We ate brekky at The Lemon Tree because it was such a nice little set up. Comfortable chairs, lots of wood, nice open spaces, quiet street. It was a horrible breakfast. My poached eggs were boiled to oblivion and the 'cream cheese' was a tiny scraping dotted with dried out capers. The toast had no butter, just this bare coverage of dried out eggs and pitiful amounts of cheese. Ugh. I couldn't finish it. The salmon was okay, but it's hard to really get that wrong without actually giving someone food poisoning.

They told us they'd 'make it up to us next time'. They told us this without our even complaining-- they asked if the eggs were overcooked. Which begs the question of why they let the eggs be served so horribly (and the rest) and why they didn't think it would be better to make it up to us THIS TIME by NOT serving us HORRIBLE FOOD. It was a fairly feeble response, furthermore, given that they didn't ask our names or give any indication that they might devise some method of recognising us once we came back. Or what they would do to make it up to us. But of course, we were not going back, anyway.

We've had much delayed, then lost, focaccias at the Bean Counter. We've had the bangers and mash (again, very 90s) and french toast with bacon (could've cooked it at home) which tasted quite nice at the Station Cafe. But the metal backed chairs in the middle of the room (all the tables, apart from one sort of dark and too-far-from-the-heater booth are like this) and the noisily roasting beans (it's nice that the roast the beans, admittedly, on site) really kill the atmosphere to the extent that I'd rather eat at home in my tiny apartment. It's as if the cafe owners are all assuming that we're literally going there to eat, when surely going to a cafe is usually a much more loaded and kind of aspirational experience than that. I want to eat things, for a start, that are interesting and varied. I have been to enough cafes that I am not blown away by scrambled eggs and bacon. But more than that, I want to eat somewhere that is, I suppose, a version of what I would do with my own house or dining room or even, my own cafe, if money was no object, or if my job was really about making such a room into the right kind of space. Because if I want to eat somewhere that is merely functional and clearly defined by the limitations of time and money, then I can eat at home, frankly. Or if I don't want to cook, I can get take away. Eating out is supposed to be at least just a little bit nicer than that.

As for drinking wine, we could go to the 'wine bar'/Happy Days throwback that is tacked on to the pizza place. It looks like nice pizza but really, wine bar is a bit of a stretch. Instead we went to the Greek place-- Trapezi. Which looks like a really great restaurant, but isn't really suitable for wine. For a start, they only have a couple of wines and secondly, the restaurant gets really busy and there's nowhere separate to have a drink. Which is fine, because it looks like a gorgeous restaurant. But there's still really nowhere to have a drink. So we sat outside in winter and drank house white. Not quite my vision.

I could go on to write off a few other venues based on atmosphere or cluelessness. But it essentially boils down to Fairfield really gentrifying itself in a bit of a cheapy, non-interesting way. I'm all for maintaining the provision of non-hipster venues. But I would prefer that the streets weren't proliferated with uncomfortable or poorly managed versions of what a groovier suburb has to offer. Perhaps it comes down to Fairfield's somewhat in-betweener status, geographically and in other ways. It's not an inner suburb in feel or proximity. It's near Ivanhoe and Kew, which aren't inner either, but they're posh, so it doesn't matter. Fairfield isn't posh. It's not terribly multicultural-- Preston, Brunswick and Coburg are nearby and all a lot cooler in that regard. And yet, Fairfield is really in a great location-- close to the freeway, close to town without being close enough to be terribly expensive. It's got a 'village-feel' as deemed by the Fairfield council website (which means that there's not many cars there and no real supermarket, as far as I can tell). So it's going to attract people who want to eat in cafes. But there's something distinctly different to the way that a suburb like Fitzroy or Brunswick has become gradually tarted up. The gentrification of Fairfield, whilst happening, is rather tediously moderate and uninteresting. I suspect that it's never been cheap enough to attract the artists and students that other suburbs have relied on to enliven their streets in a way that often sets a suburb up for rapid, and often more interesting, gentrification (not without it's problems) which tends to lead on to good food, in Melbourne, at least.

Fairfield is quite a nice place to live, and it's not without cafes and the like. They're just B grade. As is the suburb. B is good (I'm always telling my students that-- there's no shame in a B). But B means that I'll keep going to Northcote for lunch, I think.

Next time, I'm going to post about a place I really like! I already have a couple in mind.

Country Eating

My family is from Gippsland and so I go down there fairly often. Drouin is a little place with a few nice cafes dotted about, and nearby is Warragul (the South Yarra to Drouin's Fairfield) and Neerim South and Jindavick with their own little versions of fancy. Now, there is some really nice food around this area, especially given that there is obviously a smaller market and less competition, and probably quite a few fewer people who want to eat in cafes on a regular basis (can I say that? I am basing this on my experiences of visiting two people over 60). But there are also a bunch of restaurants that I like to call glamtry. You know glamping? When people who are not really into camping attempt to joosh up the experience by adding a lot of expensive and unnecessary elements to the mix to avoid feeling like they're really camping? And yet they miss the point of camping, after all? This is what it's like at a few shall-remain-nameless establishments in country Victoria, which, determined to prove (to themselves? To their partner in the business? Presumably they are not focused on the customer) that they are just as hip as their city cousins, and CHOSE to move to the country, dahling, make their dishes replete with inappropriate and ineffectively done trimmings and cooking styles that ultimately make the food taste a bit crapper than it should. This is often accompanied by bad service, of the kind that seems to be primarily focused on illustrating the superiority in manners and habits of said owner/manager/swanner-about-the-place-type. This the the domain of those who would glamourise the country.

Case in point: my husband and I went to a reasonably well known restaurant in Jindavick that I'd enjoyed a number of years before. They have a beautiful property and the place seemed pleasant enough in my brief visit a few years earlier. The same guy was still running the place. But now, with attitude. Firstly, on a Sunday afternoon in JINDAVICK (oh that anyone had heard of this place and could understand how middle-of-nowhere it is) we went out there for coffee but, in spite of there being many empty rooms and tables, were asked to sit at the bar. Presumably to remind us of how lowbrow we were being, to want coffee instead of a meal, this is a time honoured technique of the glamtry business. They may have beautiful rooms and service, but it is not for the likes of you. (Unfortunately for them, we were there to check it out for our wedding. We got married in Melbourne at the Italian, which was lovely and very professional. But that's for another day). Having been plonked at the bar, we ordered our coffees: a long mac for me and a latte for my husband/fiance. The waitress, who was also making our coffee, didn't know what a long mac was. No problem-- we are about two hours from Melbourne and at least 25 minutes from any other coffee shops. Long macs tend not to get a lot of press in Drouin, let alone Jindavick. What was less appealing was when the owner came out and growled, in front of us, at the poor waitress, about what a long mac was. Which was described as a glass of foam with a little dollop of coffee on the top.

Ouch. So as I waited for my inverted long mac and squirmed at the thought of all the other customers in this poor woman's life who would be confused by their serving of milk with a drop of coffee, I was even more surprised to hear that the cake which we ordered to take away was going to be a problem. There were no cake trays. Our coffee came out-- sans serviette, in a hot glass. Eventually we did get a napkin-- our take away cake was wrapped in it.

All this might be quite acceptable-- charming even, if it wasn't for the owner's prancing about deeming us too peasant-like for his chairs and his waitress too ignorant for belief.

This is not the first time I've been patronised by restaurant staff who confuse preening and affectations of superiority with service. But it's probably one of the worst combinations of terrible service and sneering condescension I'd seen in a while!

Country restaurants, I say to you. Please do food and service well and accept that the presence of semi-dried tomatoes in your sandwiches does not place you at the cutting edge of gastronomy. Nor does it matter, if you are polite and cook nicely.

Lunches sans Tuna

In this first post I wanted to post about something rather un-glamorous and not very food-fashion-forward. Rather un-mastercheffy. There'll be nothing blow torched or demi glazed. There are communal tables, unfortunately. But the coffee is rubbish.

Lunch at work. And all the troubles that this has involved for me. You see, I don't like tuna. And this seems to have closed off a whole world of lunch possibilities that most people cling to. I know, because I'm often watching them to see what I could eat for lunch. Do you do this? Do other people find lunch as difficult as I do? In my 7 years of full time, grown up working (as opposed to the cafe where I worked part time and spent most of the day trying out various foods in the deep fryer) I have been fortunate enough to have lunch provided for 3 of them. I've only been at this for 4. Though, to be fair, that's a lot of lunch. And actually, I've struggled with this for longer than that. I am now recalling my cold vegemite toast of lunch in primary school.

As an adult, things are harder. Lunch has to fulfil a few criteria: easy, fairly quick to make and eat, inexpensive, reasonably tasty (I'm really willing to go pretty low here, but not tuna-low) and healthy. It seems like it's probably not too difficult to tick a few of these boxes. Tasty and easy? Bread and dip. Not too expensive either. Unfortunately, I cannot justifiably carbo-load as much as my little heart desires without turning into a flabbish heart-attack-waiting-to-happen. Healthy and easy to eat? Chicken salad. But I refuse to spend my Sundays cooking chicken. Or my evenings. I was going to list the number of other errands and efforts that I have to make during those times, but actually, even if I was sitting around on the couch watching Downton Abbey and drinking cider all weekend, I still wouldn't be comfortable making my lunches on a Sunday. I'm 29, not 102. Going out for lunch is out-- way out. The canteen (I work at a school) is basically the realm of the dark lord at lunchtime and the food is-- well, it's for children. And the shops are not viable-- for reasons of cost and yard duty and students wanting to talk to me and meetings and all that crappola.

And then there's tuna. And of late, those creepy little chicken tins with the rather good advertising which can't actually make up for the fact that it's CHICKEN in a CAN. This issue (cannage) also applies to tuna. In addition to which, it stinks. There are other foods that stink, I know, many of which I am quite happy to eat. Cheese can be quite wiffy. Garlic and onion (yum) can make the house smell rather strongly, in a delightfully foodie way. The thing about those smells, though, is that you can think about them and not run into any problems. Cheese smells like feet? For sure, it takes some getting used to but if you consider the process and the concept, it's all really quite organic (in the broad, rather than agricultural sense) and doesn't go against any basic human instinct. Garlic and onions are vegetables! Or... something like that. But they're not weird, is the point.

Meat in a tin is weird, and suspicious. Meat in a can is out. And so, I am stumped as I prepare to start work again, post holidays.