The Gourmet Forager - foraging for tasty finds in Sydney and abroad

Celebrations at Rockpool Bar and Grill

May 3, 2011

Another year, another birthday and this year, the roving lunar Easter holidays have collided with my birthday. Normally over Easter the Co-pilot and I would be off on an overseas jaunt – typically somewhere in SouthEast Asia involving barely identifiable street food and frosty cocktails next to piping hot beaches but this year, for the [...]

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The vegetarian strikes back at Efendy

April 27, 2011

After the meat fuelled posts of late, it’s time I veered off the meat freeway and explore other paths. In recent years I’ve been reading more and more about the types of food groups we eat; where the food comes from; what the Western diet has come to be and even what we’d evolved to [...]

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Paddock to Plate: A degustation of beefed up foodblogger creations

April 17, 2011

My much anticipated followup to the previous post is here. In my last post I introduced The Paddock to Plate project that I and 7 other foodbloggers were participating in, a project designed to increase the appreciation of the process and energy required to get a beef product from paddock to plate. I had been [...]

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Paddock to Plate: Pulled beef and pine mushroom cannelloni

April 8, 2011

There are plenty among us that have heard of mock meat or the more “appealingly” named, meat analogue where things like soy protein, wheat or vegetable protein are moulded, flavoured and transformed into the likeness of your everyday meaty goodies. My intriguing local mock meat store sells a mind boggling array of curious meat phonies [...]

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Fair Dinkum barbequed prawn dumplings

April 3, 2011

What do we consider Australian? What’s fair dinkum Aussie? For the uninitiated, “fair dinkum” is Australian lingo for “genuine”. It is a term probably lost of the current urban and multicultural generation, but one still stereotypically associated with farmers, the older generation, and folks born and bred in the country – generally those characters we [...]

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Foraging for pine mushrooms and yabbies in Belanglo State Forest

March 19, 2011

For most people when a stranger makes contact and invites you to Belanglo State Forest, it sets off alarm bells at orifice-damaging decibels. And… you might consider my decision to accept the invitation a sure fire bet to win me a Darwin award. For those unfamiliar with the infamous Belanglo State Forest, it is a [...]

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Musa Dagdeviren’s eggplant and lentil stew with pomegranate molasses

February 23, 2011

Once upon a time I had a love affair with far away Turkey. I was intrigued by the exotic silhouettes of domed mosques with proud minarets; cafes alive with chatter, the smell of coffee and the curling wisps from bubbling hookahs. I had long romanticised the idea of exploring the cave dwellings in Cappadocia with [...]

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Chinese New Year – blending old and new traditions

February 11, 2011

Gong xi fa cai! Wishing you: The vitality of dragons and horses (龙马精神, long ma jing shen) > good health A dragon’s vision and a tiger’s power (龙精虎猛, long jing hu meng) > good health Safety when going to and fro (出入平安, chu ru ping an) > safety and good health A long Centurian’s life [...]

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Chinese New Year and a recipe for Zhaoqing diced pork and green mango

January 31, 2011

With another Chinese New Year peering around the corner, it seems ripe for reflection again. With the recent publication of Amy Chua’s controversial book: “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” and the arguably even more inflammatory publicity in the Wall Street Journal, Chinese parenting has taken a hard knock in the media in recent times. [...]

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The quest for the perfect steak

January 25, 2011

The “perfect steak” is an elusive concept that titillates meat lovers around the world and it conjures up a smattering of images that oscillate from the barbeque enthusiast in his humble backyard to top chefs creating carefully temperature controlled slivers of delicate beef art. But before I even embark on the challenge of creating the [...]