Test pattern

A shrine of sorts

One parent away

The remainder struggle with grief, big & little

The littlest, seeks the shelter of a grownups bed

Through the night, thrashing, words from the playground

In another room, removed

Sad fat tears of longing

A pillow hugged

An email printout clutched in sleepy hands

The next day a shrine of sorts eases the discomfort

Steely resolution in such young & delicate hearts

Makes me weep

The chores get done

We don’t chat much

Off to school

All grown up

The origins of Pizza e Birra in this country maybe?

Is this band, with the very English sounding name , but apparently very Dutch, George Baker Selection, the musical patron saint for our current obsession with pizza e birra e vino in this country?

A quote

With the Australian release of the timely new film Food Inc this week I remembered reading this quote from a famous foodie that still resonates nearly three decades later.

'I have always believed that a restaurant can be no better than the ingredients that it has to work with. As much & by any other factor, restaurant name here has been defined by the search for ingredients. That search & what we have found along the way have shaped what we cook & ultimately who we are. The search has made us become part of a community-a community that has grown from markets, gardens & suppliers & has gradually come to include farmers, ranchers & fisherman. It has made us realize that, as a restaurant, we are utterly dependant on the health of the land, the sea & the planet as a whole, & that this search for good ingredients is pointless without a healthy agriculture & a healthy environment'

Any idea whom it might be?

In praise of the team

As a kid I used to be a coxswain for several rowing clubs both here in Oz & in NZ. I came from a rowing family that had known some successes in the sport and after watching the 1976 Olympics it had me hooked, so it was inevitable that I follow my cousins into life on the muddy Yarra in boats. It was a relationship that was life changing for me in several ways.

Before this though I had to endure many false starts with sports that quite frankly, I was crap at.

I was too weedy for footy, too unco for cricket, too asthmatic for just about anything really. That’s why I started to swim. It was a prescribed physical activity of the day that was supposed to promote expanding ones asthma-enfeebled lung capacity.
In those days I resented the long drives to the Heidelberg indoor swimming centre & the almost asphyxiating grip on my throat that the chlorine inflicted, surely not asthma friendly? Just as I was beginning to dread this weekly torture of lung expanding
exercise in the slimy water, my lady of good fortune appeared, this time taking the form of a hot chip shop, which conveniently opened right next door and thus began my love affair with the fryer.

Fast forward to the end of primary school right about the time that most boys are adroitly drop-punting, niftily spinning & dribbling dazzlingly, I was sadly bereft of skills.
I blame my father for this malady to a degree. After a few cans of Courage, his idea of kick to kick was to boot the Sherrin as far as he could into the blue and over the neighbour’s fences. We would both whistle & marvel at the heroic distance achieved before I was dispatched down the street to commence my polite door knocking & ball recovery duty.
‘You’re a bloody good kick arntcha matey’, I would hear often after I explained I was from five house up. ‘I wish’, I thought to myself.
Curiously, I began to tire of this game of fetch & began to make excuses not to participate. Meanwhile at school things were getting more divided between those that could play & those that couldn’t.

As you might be aware, this time in any kid’s life is quite critical and the pressure from your peers can be quite overpowering and sometimes downright scary.
Take for instance playing cricket. I was one of those kids who regularly suffered the fate of not only being picked last but also the indignity of the two teams fighting over who HAD to have me on their side!

One particular day, kicking stones out on the oval boundary, day-dreaming, the crack of the bat snapped me out of my spell and I saw the ball hurtling toward me at speed. The batsman, seeing that it was me way out in the boundary began to slow to a canter, then an insolent walk before breezily chatting away, not a care in the world. This was at odds with my team mates who, red-faced, their necks straining & veins stretched, yelped at me like an army of Hyenas.
I fumed at the injustice of it all and fed up, snatched the ball up and chucked it toward the wicket with all the pent up fury of many sporting humiliations borne of these ungodly playing fields.

The ball arced over the oval before clanging into the steel wickets with a resounding twang. A Bulls eye! The presumptuous batsman, caught between wickets with mouth hanging open, appeared to be in shock, he was run out.
For a moment no one said anything, such was the gravity of the situation. The best batsman, a sporting hero of sorts was run out by me, the last man picked, it didn’t make sense? My heart swelled & my pulse quickened as I tried not to gallop toward the fallen wicket & claim my praise. When I arrived at the throng the discussion was well under way.
‘He’s not out, it’s not possible’, someone stated
‘Yea he’s right, it just isn’t possible’, another voice in agreement
Can I believe my ears? I thought, sensing my moment of glory slipping away
‘There’s no way he can be out, Cumper just arsed it’ the final nail in my coffin as the crowd trotted back to their positions & the cocky batsman winked at me from the crease. The deliberation was that although I did run him out they deemed the event as unlikely and so not fair to the bloke with the bat, hence allowing him to remain 'in'. Officially I had been ‘Skooled’ and trudged back to my stones & clods at the fields’ edge.

You might think that this & other events like it might have deterred me from participating in team sports forever. Well it did as far as footy of cricket were concerned but that is before I knew the majesty and awe of steering a racing eight at full throttle down the course against other crews.

Firstly it was a discipline & secondly it offered me the chance to observe the power of motivation. It was greatly illuminating for me as a youngster to be exposed to these two elements & my rowing experiences have come to inform me professionally over the years. I think many people who participate in sports not just at the elite level, but generally, apply many of the required principles to their working life & often with great success.

Sadly I had to give it all away when I started my apprenticeship but echoes of my time in boats reverberate throughout my life to this day. I still miss the beauty of the sport. The kaleidoscopic swing & separation of the sweep oared boats. The oars tearing for purchase in the water but at the same time appearing to be leveraging the skiff through several invisible pylons, an optical illusion that tricks you into thinking the oars are stationary when they’re not. This only happens when the blades strike the water simultaneously, to the split second and the shell rises above its usual water mark leaving a trail of aerated bubbles streaming from the hull.

‘Listen to the bubbles’ I would say to the crew through my microphone, everyone tuning in and realizing we were in that sweet spot, the boat attracting less drag as we scythed through the water.
‘Prepare for twenty strokes at full rate, starting now, on the next one’ before the stroke would up the rate & the boat would burst forward often throwing me back into the coxswains seat, it was rather like dropping down a gear on a motorbike and blasting off at full revs.
The power of eight fit men propelling a sleek shell through the water with me, a 14 ear old boy on the throttle was a great thrill; the injustices of the cricket pitch were a million miles from rudder strings of that boat.
Sometimes I catch myself wistfully watching crews on the Huon at Franklin & remember a time when I practically lived on the water.

Third Wave Chip Shops right here, right now!

Breaking news!

pictured left-The Armageddon

First it was the re-invention of Italian eateries, then it was the Britpack influence, followed by the fashion of small plates of foods, Molecular, Haute barnyard, new Spanish, third wave of coffee places & more recently flash Mexican.

The latest buzz ladies & gentlemen: The ‘Third Wave Chip Shop’.

In the nineties the old chippy of yore was given an extreme makeover & flash new places popped up everywhere almost overnight. Somewhere though, over the last few years their appeal has been on the wane. Until now.

Here in arguably Australia’s spud capital state Tasmania, two new ventures are at the cutting edge of chip shops.

‘Apple of the earth’ in Huon sur La Mar & i-chip3.0 in Shire Lower, define an invigorated and intense new appreciation for frying the humble spud. Both employ the radical & very expensive new fryer from Belgium the ‘Armageddon’.

What make the Armageddon so revolutionary is that it automatically calibrates its frying temp to suit the type of potato, its age and its sex resulting in the most perfect chip every time. This was recently recognised worldwide when the teams using the machine at the World Fry-offs in Blackpool UK, took out the top three positions on the podium causing a mass hysteria within the ecstatic crowd.

It seemed Armageddon had arrived.

‘The need for pre blanching will be a thing of the past’, gushed Dexter Van Donger, the proprietor of i-chip3.0. Van Donger, a former IT consultant but self confessed chip geek, was living in Bruges at the time and was so impressed by the machines capabilities he ordered three immediately and began his business plan the next day outbound for Shire Lower, Tasmania

‘Each of our machines has three baskets giving us nine different cooking chambers. This is another way we can get the best flavour profile from each chip in the best oil for the best result.’

Customers at i-chip3.0 can enjoy a range of first growth, single origin, heirloom potatoes chipped into in five different sizes & cooked in nine different oils.

‘You can see, the possibilities are endless’, Van Donger beamed

Meanwhile in Huon Sur la Mar, Dimitri ‘Dimmy’ Mavrokardia, a fifth generation chip shop owner saw the possibilities of the Armageddon at a recent tradeshow.
‘You know I used to watch Giagia & Papous working so hard in the shop when I was a little Agori imagine how easy their life would have been with one of these babies?’ he says, his hands sliding down & around the smooth contours of the machine, coming to rest cupping the rounded humps at the basket recess. Mr Mavrokardia is a man clearly in love with his machine. Business is brisk at Apple of the earth but Mr Mavrokardia could not put it down solely to the interest in the Armageddon.
‘Oh no its not just that, recently we were visited by Banksy who wanted a bag of chips but had no money so he paid for it by doing an impromptu stencil spray on the wall inside’. It’s a striking image. In it, a chimpanzee (a frequent effigy employed by Banksy) appears to be peeling a potato and each bit of peeled skin is a dollar sign. Genius.

However not everyone is impressed by the new technology.

‘You know what? All I want is a bag of chips mate, nothing fancy, just bloody chips’ says long time Huon sur la Mar resident, Clancy St. Hubbins, clearly spitting chips.
‘It’s all a bit of a fad really, a club, some spiv has worked out another way to make a quid is all. And what’s with these chip fanatics getting round on Adult sized Big Wheel bikes?

Mr Hubbins’ was referring to the motif of the Big Wheel bike, that the third wave chip shop proprietors have appropriated to bring an urban edginess to the subculture

Too many bloody choices I say, they’re just friggin chips’ he wheezes, red faced & agitated, reaching for his inhaler.

Another sceptic is industry veteran & local scribe, Gilmore Pinkus who writes for the local daily. From his stately drawing room and puffing on his pipe, reclining, legs outstretched across his desk, he ponders the oncoming prediction of a future with Armageddon.
‘Hmmm, seems to me a bit of the Emperors new clothes syndrome at play here’
‘I mean, we are talking about chips right, potato chips cooked in oil?’ he questions before rolling his eyes to the heavens and breaking into a rumbling belly laugh.

Having canvassed a range of views & sought answers to my many questions, sadly I am yet to taste the effect of chip with the Armageddon treatment.

The jury is still out.

What not to wear in the kitchen-thanks Trinny & Susannah

As professions go, I have always been a little embarrassed by the uniform that has come to be known world wide, as that which is worn by a chef. Adding further discomfort to me was the insistence that it also be embellished with a starched white Toque, sitting like a tiara on a glistening white knob-end.

I still remember my first day at East Brighton Tech as it called in those days, when we pimply faced teens grappled with the oversized, coarse & stiff jackets, choking neckties & ballooning checked pantaloons in the change room before our first ever trade school class. Exchanging anxious looks as we all realized that, ‘yes’, we really DID look that ridiculously bad. Not making my shame any easier was the reality that my mother picked out the larger sizes ‘in case I went through a growth spurt’.

As I waddled into class, my rigid uniform rendering my usually chilled out amble into a jerky, spazzy staccato of Peter Garret like moves I decided then that I did not care much for my newly acquired look.

Thankfully the notion of a uniformed brigade was not the top priority for many of the restaurants I worked in during my apprenticeship. Jackets, checks & aprons were de rigueur however I never had to wear the necktie or the dreaded Toque. It wasn’t until I moved to London in the eighties that the strict uniform code was vigorously applied & it was a culture shock of sorts which was acutely at odd with my until then, laissez faire attitude.

At the hotel I worked in, we were supplied with uniforms, which on my meagre wages was a blessing. I also quite liked that in ol Blighty, they wear blue chequered strides instead of black. It was an unspoken but standard practice amongst the chefs & cooks to put two to three layers of new uniform on over the next & cover your deceit up with a large coat everyday after your shift in order to ‘acquire’ several sets of uniforms should you decide to leave the hotels employ-or be sacked for stealing.
Upon my return to Australia I had a neat set of crisp uniforms replete with the blue strides which denoted that I had ‘done time’ overseas.

After three years I had become institutionalised & no one wore the uniform with as much pride nor guarded its upkeep as vigilantly. At the Country place I worked in we would all wear our full white aprons so low as to appear to be rolling along the floor, like a Dr Who Dalek. As was the fashion then, we would also wear a blue striped butcher’s apron over our whites when prepping only to disrobe, Fully Monty style, when the chef decreed service had begun.

Years ago, I read that Marco Pierre White (you know who he is) was asked why his chefs all wear butchers aprons. He replied that they (we) were all commis (a French term for a ‘journey man chef’) & were always learning. This comment became a kind of touchstone for many chefs who adopted the butchers’ apron as a kind of motif for their intense devotion to the disciplines of the kitchen.

Upon my return to these shores I was an insufferable (more so than today, can you believe this is possible?) devotee of my time abroad, boring everyone I with whom I worked, with the minutiae of my experiences. Unkindly but not without some understanding I became known as ‘Mr Europe’ to my workmates.

This attitude took a year or two to grind out of me & once again I became accustomed to our more relaxed approach here.

It was in country South Australia that my uniform horizons were about to be broadened considerably. The restaurant in the Barossa in which I worked, also had a fully operational fowl farm, rearing amongst other things, pheasants, guinea fowl & if memory serves me correctly, quails at some point? It was here that I truly felt most comfortable with the required uniform, it made sense, was comfortable & entirely in context to its surroundings.

We wore dark green King Gee or yakka workpants, black tee shirts & black aprons.
It spoke of the country, of farms & was in my opinion, uniquely Australian.
At last I had found a uniform that I was really happy to wear with pride!

It seemed to poke fun at the reverential confines of the starched uptight pearly whites & made mockery of those black jacketed ‘Ninja’ chefs with their large print chequered pants that could be observed in many early nineties kitchens.

Today my uniform of choice is check pants, butchers apron & black tee, a sort of post modern interpretation of all my uniform influences. Lately though I have taken it to another level by ditching my Birkenstocks, the Manolo Blahnik of kitchen footwear and replacing them with steel capped King Gee work boots. However my biggest fashion statement must be reserved for my inclusion of King Gee work shorts in my ensemble. Without question not the safest apparel in kitchens granted however it does get mighty hot jamming the pans in service & now that I am a card carrying, fully paid up Tasmanian, I have acclimatized to wearing shorts all year round.

You tradionalists out there please look away but to those who appreciates a nicely turned calf, enjoy!

P.S. Just realised that I mentioned King Gee so many times Phil Lees might think I'm on the take-I'm not BTW Phil, so please dont dollar sign me!

I'm spending too much time in the office

Meet my new writing partner, with thanks to The Mainland Cowboy

Le System

Between orders tonight I was reminiscing about my time working for a very big restaurant group who had two large footprints in Melbourne’s Crown casino.
My always curious apprentice Ben was asking me what it was like to work in a large brigade in a very busy restaurant. He did a fantastic job with Jenna over the folk festival earlier this year & got a taste of what being flat out is all about.

With a quiet confidence & wisdom beyond his kitchen years he said that it all goes smoothly if you’re organized. Seems like an obvious statement doesn’t it but you might be surprised at how many chefs & cooks try to ‘wing it’ when they are busy.
Whilst I appreciate anyone who can think quickly on their feet & respond effectively to whatever a busy service may throw at you, there is no substitute for methodical planning & thorough organisation.

Learning a particular system that a chef likes to impose on their team is like a fork in the road for many new staff. Some see it as a stifling regimen, a straightjacket to resist or even suffocating their individuality. So what if my container of spoons in one foot away from where you tell me it should be?

The old school French chefs & their British cousins used to refer to it as ‘Le System’. It is the general understanding that there is a modus operandi at play that has been proven to work & its practitioners vigilantly maintain its upkeep.

It was at Crown where Le System could be observed in its full glory.

Nightly, there would be a queue waiting to be fed at the seafood themed place that I was in charge of, which opened its gates at six pm sharp. By six fifteen, we had the orders for nearly all of the hundred & eighty bums on seats.
Like the shuddering & lurching of a dragster before its quarter mile sprint, the kitchen machine-like, poised, growling with a barely contained bubbling urge to red line was waiting for the mechanical chatter of the docket printer.

The noise of a kitchen that has gone from a standstill to full throttle is one to behold in wonder. Brows furrowed, limbs flailing, pans clanging, grill plates sizzling, liquids squealing in hot pans, voices, firm & direct, glaring eyes, steam hissing, the clamour & bustle all to the constant backdrop of the ever present, deafening thrum of the extractor fan.

By seven thirty most of the meals were out, customers were paying up & heading toward the movies or theatre. Now the dinner crowd are starting to arrive. Round two.

Then chefs wipe down, tidy up place utensils back in their rightful places not unlike reloading a magazine and Le System once again casts it long shadow over service enabling the delivery of meals consistently.

By ten thirty, this crowd are beginning to dwindle but it just another time to swab down again before the supper set start arriving.

As a chef unfamiliar with this culture you could be forgiven for being overwhelmed by the unrelenting onslaught of service. For those grizzled veterans however, they see Le System as their saviour as it is a shining path through the swirling melee that a busy service can be and as righteous as a blessed sword.

I can hardly believe that all those years ago we were regularly doing close to 400 pax per night, with a brigade of twelve chefs every shift.

Fast forward to now, years later and here we are tonight, just me & my apprentice, in a small country town busily cooking dinner for a few people.
‘Put your spoon back in its place & wipe down between orders’ I say
‘Yep’ he says.

Le System lives on