Prick With A Fork

Sydneysiders like to think of ourselves as a sophisticated lot, but I increasingly think the whole thing’s an act. How else can you explain a town where talented chef-restaurateurs like Matt Kemp are forced out of business for lack of trade yet people happily queue for fat-tongued mockney prat Jamie Oliver’s mass-produced faux-‘talian?

Oh and it gets worse. Much worse:

IN A further blurring of the line between reality TV and reality, a MasterChef restaurant is set to open in Sydney.

The pop-up restaurant and bar, MasterChef Dining, a joint venture of the Ten Network and the media production company Shine 360, will be built in the forecourt of St Mary’s Cathedral and open from July 3 to 22, with funds raised going to the OzHarvest charity.

Of course, the thing will be a huge hit. Sydney has a seemingly inexhaustible supply of would-be masterchefs who are “rooly pashunit about food!” who will fill every table at every sitting of the venture.

The sad thing is that Becasse’s Justin North, lately forced to the wall, is actually participating in this charade, presumably in a bid for publicity and trade. Sorry mate, the people who come to this thing will never spend a dime in one of your joints. These foll think that a “hat” is not an award a chef earns, but rather an object of personal expression that on no account needs be removed from one’s head upon entering a dining room.

Remember the old Upper Class Twit of the Year competition? Seems London Mayor Boris Johnson is setting himself up as a late entrant:

I honestly don’t yet know if the New York mayor, Mike Bloomberg, is right to be banning big cups of sugary drinks. I have no idea whether Coca-Cola has a case when it claims there is absolutely no connection between children guzzling sugary drinks and children getting fat. What I can say with confidence is that we in the West have a fatness problem.

You should have been at the ball game in the Bronx, where I had the good fortune to be in the Yankee stadium hospitality suite with Bloomberg.

With all the legendary courtesy of the American catering industry, the white-hatted staff were piling each plate with enough calories to feed a family of Eritreans for a week. There were barons of beef, swaddled in ribbons of delicious yellow fat. The bed of the Atlantic had been denuded to provide the tails – just the tails – of a thousand lobsters. It was a kind of gastronomic United Nations: here the Mexican enchiladas, there the Chinese chop suey, and everything served on an all-you-can-eat basis, where all-you-can-eat turns out to be a very large quantity indeed.

And I think it is fair to say that while all of these things may make you fat, because they’re being consumed in ballpark hospitality suites, they won’t be the target of Mike Bloomberg’s wrath – unless a bunch of fatty-boombatty bridge-and-tunnel people start showing up.

For those of us who are instinctively libertarian, it is all a bit difficult – at least philosophically. But never mind the philosophy; what about the practical effects? This is the same Bloomberg, after all, whose smoking ban was also derided, and then imitated around the world.

His action against smoking is now seen as a big step in reducing a particularly nasty addiction that had claimed the lives of millions. Across the West, we are seeing a falling away in the number of cancers contracted, a fall in the number of deaths.

A hipster in Brooklyn had to step outside to light up an American Spirit, thus saving the life of a 68-year-old retiree in Fresno …

If we could reduce the consumption of sugary drinks, and release some children from the captivity of fatness, might that not be worth exploring?

I think we should pay tribute to the continuing boldness of the mayor of New York. He has been a public official for longer than Obama. He has run a corporation far bigger than Romney’s. He is the 11th richest man in the US, with wealth of $US22 billion, and yet he still cares about the size of paper cups and childhood obesity.

Do we need to do this again? “For the children” is not an “instinctively libertarian” argument, nor is it necessarily better for those self-same kiddies. The quantum of causality between smoking and cancer would be many times greater than the link between New York’s soda consumption and its residents relative largeness (though, frankly, I always thought it was out in the ‘burbs where the real fatties lived. If they’re all chowing down on lobster tails at the stadium, it’s not going to make much difference anyway).

And caring about the size of paper cups does not make you great, but rather, as my Scottish ancestors would say, a wee little man indeed.

Meanwhile, another late entrant to the Upper Class Twit of the Year would have to be David Cameron, who has brought new meaning to the phrase, “No Child Left Behind”:

A Downing Street spokesman says David and Samantha Cameron were distraught when they realised they had left their daughter at a pub after Sunday lunch.

The couple’s daughter Nancy wandered off to the toilets while they were arranging lifts. They realised she was not with them when they got home after lunch on Sunday, The Sun reported on Monday.

The Camerons’ local is the Plough Inn, which seems to take rather more care with its produce:

All of the beef, lamb, pork & chicken are free range and slaughtered within Cotswolds & Gloucestershire area. No animal travels further than 25 miles from farm to slaughter house, thus reducing the stress that the animals occurs on long arduous journeys. The beef is dry matured on the bone for 28 days,lamb 10 days & pork 6 days. This process is vital for producing the best quality meat.

Bless.

So I’m tap-tap-tapping this out from the iPad in the passenger seat of the Prickmobile which, true to form for a public holiday, blew out a Pirelli in spectacular fashion somewhere between Kingston and the War Memorial and is now spinning a temporary donut in the right front well at a pokey 80ks an hour. Other than that, though, it’s been a lovely Queen’s Birthday long weekend in the ACT. Longer posts to come, but a few things struck me over the past few days:

* Three-plus years of Labor have been good to Canberra; the number of new developments since I used to half-live there in 2007 is really stunning. We had breakfast at a corner cafe and shop in Acton which felt more like Alexandria: All organic eggs benny, lycra-clad lawyers, and, in the wine section, top drops like Henscke Hill of Grace, going for a lazy $650 a bottle (!).

* Though I’ve spent more time in Canberra than is probably healthy over the years, until now I’d never done the tourist stuff: The War Memorial and National Gallery are absolutely top spots (get in to see the Von Guerard exhibit if you can); the Portrait Gallery is fun but much of it is “Clapping to the Classics” for the visual arts set. Old Parliament is fascinating, especially in the pokiness of the accomodation, and Questacon was more a playground than a scientific undertaking. Nick made the very good observation that there was far, far more propaganda about climate change at Old Parliament House than at Questacon.

* Canberra remains very hit or miss food-wise, but we had some good meals (more about which soon), and there are some places we’d like to hit next time we’re down sans Little Pricks. Nonetheless, despite its increasing pretensions, the old cow-town spirit still comes out. At one joint (Bittersweet Cafe, if you must know) in Kingston yesterday morning, they advertised a smoked salmon bagel but refused to serve it to me as it was not yet 11:30, and “that’s when we start serving our bagel sandwiches”. Honestly, what’s the point? The whole thing threatened to get very Five Easy Pieces.

So just as the declaration, “Nah, I’m going take it easy, no big night for me!” almost surely winds up with one locked in a nightclub toilet with four of one’s closest friends at 3am (or so I’m told), I suspect that my announcement that there won’t be much blogging over the next few days due to work and travel commitments should only be taken as a harbinger of some seriously manic David Foster Wallace-style epic posting to come.

But just in case, a few things to whet your appetite from the world of food …

• For restaurant-loving Sydneysiders, the frankly bizarre news that the economy is (allegedly) going great guns must stand in contrast to today’s report that Justin North’s various Westfield ventures have gone into administration. Sadly, I’m not surprised: I love the little providore shop that he’s opened on the fifth floor of the CBD Westfield, but I think it was something of an own-goal closing Becasse and trying a number of different concepts including Charlie & Co and Quarter 21 out in the same, essentially food-court, space. New York’s Time-Warner Center it ain’t.
• Lovers of freedom and foie gras, meanwhile, have their own cause to mourn as California’s ban on the delicacy creeps ever closer to entering into force. The peace-love-and-mung-bean set have been out in force on this one, threatening all forms of death and mayhem on those who dare to defy their peculiar prohibition. I’d spend more time ruminating about the petty, dictatorial mindset of those who would tell other people what to eat or drink but I am too busy mourning the fact that I will now likely never taste Thomas Keller’s torchon de foie gras at French Laundry.
• Finally, it’s not all bad news: in Paris, food truck culture is taking off, if slowly, accoring to the New York Times. As a great fan of Michael Steinberger’s Au Revoir to All That, I think this is just the thing to inject a bit more life into French food culture, which rested on its laurels for too long. I’m not being facetious when I suspect that the introduction of tacos-on-wheels will have positive ramifications that percolate far up the Paris food chain.

Now then, off to Canberra, en famille!

James Lileks has produced an absolutely awesome and righteous rant against Mike Bloomberg’s lunatic soda ban:

A culture that redefines food choices as moral issues will demonize the people who don’t share the tastes of the priest class. A culture that elevates eating to some holistic act of ethical self-definition – localvore, low-carbon-impact food, fair trade, artisanal cheese – will find the casual carefree choices of the less-enlightened as an affront to their belief system. Leave it to Americans to invent a Puritan strain of Epicurianism…

As I said, it’s not about health. If it was, no one would mention the cost of obesity. It’s an issue only because the rest of us have to pay for it? If that’s the case, then there’s no end to the restrictions we can conjure up and impose with equal parts of sadness and resolution. Smoking was easy because it stinks. Trans-fats was easy because no one knew what they were; it’s not like you go down the store to pick up some trans-fats. The soda laws appeal to the overclass because fat people are disgusting.

Read the whole thing. Please.

I don’t usually post much about my own cooking on this blog, but I was pretty happy with one of last night’s efforts: a tidy little starter of seared scallops with jamon Serrano, cauliflower, and anchovy-raisin dressing. A little messy on the presentation, but I was pretty happy with the results…

Pork, shellfish, and cream … this may be the least-kosher dish on Earth

The dish was based on a recipe in Andrew McConnell’s Cumulus Inc cookbook, and it taught me a couple of things. One, do your cauliflower puree in a stand-up blender, and whizz the hell out of it. The texture is incomparable to what you’ll get, and what I’d previously been getting, with a domestic hand-blender (results may be better with big commercial models).

And two, make a little dressing of anchovies, raisins, capers, chilli, olive oil, and a few other bits and bobs – the full recipe is in the book. Big, bright, flavours here, with the funky umami of the anchovies balanced out by citrus and chili. This would not only make a great accompaniment to any white fish (I’m thinking snapper on the grill) but also, perhaps, pork tenderloin. Further experimentation required.

Next time I’ll also score and salt the scallops for ten minutes as per Thomas Keller’s suggestion for a quick mini-brine – this produces an unfailingly great crust on the seared sides – and I’ll be careful how early I prep them. The salt in the jamon seemed to slightly cook and draw moisture away from the scallops, and I think this might be better done, if not a la minute, at least closer to dinner time.

Move over, Mike Bloomberg: the carbon-neutral torch of the nanny state has been passed to a new generation. Meet six-year-old Thalia Gerloff. According to the New York Post:

Thalia Gerloff is on a mission to ban flavored moo juice, plastic wrap and Styrofoam trays from her Brooklyn Heights school — and she’s only 6!

“I saw kids pouring chocolate milk in their cereal and realized it wasn’t good,” the PS 8 first-grader said. “It’s not healthy.”

Last month, the young gadfly gave principal Seth Phillips a handwritten letter decrying the sweetened milk and the plastic wrapping on breakfast muffins.

So far, so precocious. But this detail suggests that she’s got a long and rich future ahead of her:

“It was the proudest moment of her life,” said mom Liz Gumbinner, who pens the blog Mom-101. “It’s awesome to learn as a 6-year-old that you have a voice. That if you care about something, you can go out and change it.”

Still, she admits her pint-sized protester eats ice cream and would eat gummi bears for breakfast if she could. “It’s a strange dichotomy on what she thinks is right,” Gumbinner said.

Your recommended daily allowance of vitamins, minerals, and vodka

So it’s cold, raining, miserable, and Sunday. Which means it’s perfect for making stock (there’s four kilos of chicken parts getting happy in the pressure cooker as I type), braising meat (ditto the lamb shanks in the oven), and making bloody marys. I used to love these things when I lived in New York, where a free bloody comes with your eggs at any brunch place worth its celery salt. Here, not so much, even though as I (re)discovered upon stumbling into the Vineyard in St Kilda after a huge night out in Melbourne, they’re the perfect thing to set you back on an even keel.

What’s the secret to bloody perfection? I’ve watched barkeeps make these things around the world, and I can honestly say that the two best bloody marys can be found at the Yacht Club of Rio de Janeiro, and at Martin’s Tavern in Washington, DC. My recipe combines a bit of both.

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With the Bunyip on extended walkabout, someone’s got to blog about Adele Horin. And having awoken this Saturday to find her 900-word screed against Western Australia, Tony Abbott, immigrants foreign and domestic, people who do not give as much as she thinks they should to charity, conservative cities trying to be “cool”, and God knows what else, I decided that someone should be me. Let’s get started, shall we?

Horin tips her hand early in the piece, and we soon find out that the woman suffers from a bigger grab-bag of prejudices than Archie Bunker or Eddie Booth:

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So regular readers of this site, both of you, are well familiar with the Prick’s disdain for the fifth floor food hall at the Pitt Street Westfield: A good idea at the time, it’s become a victim of its own success. Simultaneously expensive and harassing, lunch there can quickly become the most jarring half-hour of a local salaryman’s day. And don’t even think about going there during school holidays.

But that’s to say there aren’t other options in the Westfield. Down a level is the somewhat bizarre-sounding fashion concept restaurant Cara & Co, which made the list of places to try for lunch long before the Herald’s Terry Durack gave it (wait for it, Sydneysiders! You’ll never guess!) a score of 14/20 in yesterday’s “Good  Living” supplement. And up a level is a row of shops housing a few more relatively civilised options: venerable chains like Max Brenner and Chat Thai (both good, but both chains), as well as Greek joint Xanthi and Italian diner Spiedo.

My advice: Forget Xanthi. We did a lunch there once, and it was just as crowded and annoying as downstairs, only more expensive. I know that with the advent of Neild Avenue in Rushcutters Bay, Greek is supposed to be the food of the moment but an hour spent trying to wrangle gussied-up souvlaki out of the staff suggested to me that this this is a moment that will pass. The “pork belly baklava”, surely not a traditional dish out of the charming little villages that the menu harks back to on every page, stands out as one of the great “too much” dishes of all time: What was the point of that, we thought as we slogged through it. Never mind Athens going back to the drachma, the whole experience devalued Greece’s gastronomic currency in our minds.

The open kitchen at Spiedo

Instead, for a good lunchtime feed in town, head next door to Spiedo. There’s a reason why Italian food conquered the world, and this is it. Now I’ve been here a few times, but generally with co-workers or business associates or types I generally didn’t want to start shooting food in front of, but the other day Mrs Prick and I had occasion to call in for lunch. Surprisingly – though, presumably unlike their accountants, I’m not complaining about this – the place wasn’t full. (Keep in mind there are two areas: the “StuzziBar”, for bar snacks and drinks, outside the restaurant, and the restaurant proper. For my money, you want the latter).

Fried calamari …

First a plate of fried calamari with an agrodolce sauce – honey-based, it was supposed to be something of a sweet and sour affair, but was mostly sweet. Too sweet for my taste, but never mind. Because what came next was what may be the perfect lunchtime plate of pasta.

Now just as the eskimos have dozens of words for snow and Australians have hundreds of ways to describe being pissed, drunk, or maggoted, Italians have countless terms for pasta. And today’s new word was casoncelli. Say it slowly, it rolls off the tongue, especially when you recite

Que bella pasta!

the dish’s full name, Casoncelli alla Bresciana. Which means, in plain English, semi-circles of pasta filled with pork and veal and finished off in a sauce of brown butter, sage and pancetta. You see what I mean about a perfect lunchtime pasta, right? The key here is that you get the feel and texture of pasta, but the protein ratio is far in your favour, preventing the urge to curl up under your desk for the afternoon, George Costanza-style, which often comes to me after a big bowl of midday spaghetti.

And hey, if you’re not watching your carbs, you can always get the gnocchi (also excellent, I’ve had on other visits) with the wild boar ragout.