Ghosts of Christmas lunches past

Cold Duck, Blue Nun, Courage Larger and Dr Lindeman's
Coon and Cabana
Cream cheese dip, cocktail onions, Sao's and Ritz crackers
Plumrose ham
Cranberry sauce
Tip Top bread stuffing
Turkey Buff
Gravox
cold vegies
Big Sister plum pudd
Pauls' custard
St Agnes Brandy
shillings
Pea Beu fly spray
crackers and hats

The deal makers

The camera focuses on the extreme close-up of two mouths, both talking into mobile phones. We as the audience see them mouthing the words mid conversation but then the audio kicks in and we hear the dialogue. The camera switches from each mouth as they speak.

‘Look Ciccio I just don’t do endorsements, it’s not my thing’
‘The old girl is on board’
‘The old girl…Wow, she, she’s signed on?
‘Yep, yesterday in the AM’
‘I don’t know what to say?’
‘Howzabout OK?’
‘I don’t know, I’ve come this far you know, I’ve built this reputation, it’s not something that I can just sign away you know, its taken years of sacrifices, hard graft and….’
‘The package is worth 200 large over two years’
‘……………’
‘You there?’
‘Err yes I’m here, 200 large you say?’
‘Two hundred L. A. R. G. E.’
‘Hmm…and all I gotta do is a few ads you reckon’
‘Yea yea, a few ads mate. Piece of piss’
Chuckling, ‘Parmesan’s different the world over hey Ciccio?!’
‘It is now mate! Welcome aboard’.

Now morph to split screen as both mouths are shown smiling and laughing

Fade to black
Cut
Edit
Package
Influence
Sell

one year old today-happy birthday

And so I survived one fabulous year.
The Red Velvet Lounge is one year old today under my custodianship. I am looking forward to many more like it and hope you can come along with me on the journey. If you do pop in, say g'day, I'm the chubby one with glasses

the death of a friend

Noel in his element, captaining his beloved yacht


Very sad news today. I learned that my friend Noel Doepel was killed in an accident this morning in Cygnet.
He will be sadly missed by so many people.
RIP Noel.

A time before the laneway festival

1983-a time long before the laneway festival.

The laneway behind the restaurant was always a hub of activity. Early morning, the staff from many of the restaurants that backed onto it would park their cars, me included, in a conga line of marques ranging from the battered to the luxe. Once you had parked you were effectively locked in until everyone else finished their shift.
There was this one unique free-zone that the parking officers couldn’t issue you with a ticket. It was in the stage door loading zone for her Majesty’s Theatre which bordered the Chinese memorial and was right next to the famous Men’s barber, Vince and Doms, within the Her Majesty’s building. It could accommodate four lucky cars only and competition was tough for those spaces.
The laneway started down in Little Burke St, ran parallel to Exhibition St before turning into it. Directly across Exhibition St, it continued until it stopped right at the back door of The Florentino. Tiki & Johns, the Crazy house, café Verdi, Tsindos Bistrot, The east end car park, a Malay place and countless Chinese restaurants also shared it.
Routinely dozen of delivery drivers made their way around the cars to the back doors of all of these establishments leaving a collective trail of dropped vegetation, wrapping paper and cardboard boxes. Such was the activity at times, it resembled a city market. Milk crates made for seats in which to puff a coffin nail between orders, wooden vegie boxes made for wickets for a pre-service game of cricket and a large cardboard box became an impromptu card table for the Brylcreemed waiters.
On sunny days, we ate outside in the lane, balancing a bowl of pasta alla Amatriciana and a tumbler of red wine and lemonade on the cobbled bluestone. At mealtimes the lane sprouted little ghettos of communal eating at the back of the many restaurant doors.
The lane hosted some highs and lows for me. The times the chef took me outside and dressed me down and the time I nearly came to blows with an equally annoying apprentice chef-we eventually became each others best man at the others wedding! Numerous passionate pash's with my girlfriend between shifts in the cool of night.
But through all of these memories I often wonder whatever happened to the homeless man, George, who lived in that lane. For some reason that none of us ever could understand, George had the keys to two tiny rooms off the lane right next door to Tsindos Bistrot. In one room was a working toilet and the other room, not much bigger, was his mattress and belongings. I suppose ‘homeless’ might not be that apt but I didn’t like calling him a ‘Dero’. George was always polite, and always made the daily effort to clean himself and look as presentable as he could under the circumstances.
We routinely gave George food as did the other restaurants and cafes and George would crush the boxes and generally keep the lane in some sense of order. In some respects, he ate quite well, though the nights drinking would always claim him.
Years later that whole corner got redeveloped and the lane turned into a large two lane road which disappears downward into an underground car park. The wall where our restaurant back door was, is now long gone, as is the two doors in which George called home.

Death in the afternoon

I stole through the yawning entrance into a darkened expanse of apple history. Skyward, twinkles of sunlight produced skinny shafts of light which peppered the scuffed concrete floor highlighting its numerous imperfections bought about by many seasons of industry. Around the factory floor, like bowed sentinels, giant machinery lay stagnant, their parts congealed by lengthy inactivity. A time clock, its hands frozen signifying the death knell of this once thriving hub of apple production, a sad reminder of the army of workers who once punched in and out over the years.
Craning my ear I can almost hear the shouts of workers, the banter and the smell of a river of juice from thousands of apples, from hundreds of orchards all steeped in the history of generations of apple families.
A boyish man in his early sixties meets me cheerfully and shows me around. He knows every nook and cranny of this factory, having started here as a young lad many decades ago. Despite his chatty disposition, the balloons of melancholy hang off his shingles like pregnant beehives, he was about to retire but now he’s been forced to.
In the recesses of the furthermost corner, a large shape morphs out of the clutches of the dimness, my boots click clacking my approach. Its song, like a Siren, draws me forward into the darkened corners. Hands outstretched my fingers slide around its girth and slip down to its waist, not unlike an intimate embrace before I push myself back to fully regard its wonderful painterly and aged patina.
‘Cygnet Fancy Apples’ it says in a large stylised font reminiscent of a time long gone.
It’s a sizeable model of the kind of tinned pie apple that this factory churned out for decades here in Cygnet. For may years it was even the centrepiece on the main float during the Apple Festival. It doesn’t seem right to leave it here festering in obscurity. After a discussion and a handshake, it was liberated and travelled regally in the back of my Ute and now resides grandly on the bench at the café.
Earlier I had learned of the auction that was to denude this very large factory floor of many of its historical accoutrements so I made my play for a few of them.
The staff lunch tables and benches, a huge set of Avery scales, some rubber printing type set letters and the time clock are all I could salvage, soon the space will be sold and what was before will become memory.

Not our fault-check the fine print

Qantas leases its engines on its A380’s. This means they are maintained by an external body, in this case Rolls Royce. It also means that any technical issues arising from the use of these engines according to Qantas, is the responsibility of the manufacturer.
It’s a given that we live in a world of outsourcing for sure but I have a problem with the notion that some company is responsible for the engine attached to a wing of a plane which is owned by another entity.
Like I’m gunna be understanding after the accident that my air travel carrier is exonerated because the engines that caused the crash were owned by someone else?! WTF! Does anyone else think this is weasel wordage writ large?
They are engines people! IT’S THE PART OF THE PLANE THAT KEEPS IT IN THE AIR!

To apply this same logic to the everyday might read like this:

‘I understand you are upset at being hurtled through the windscreen of the tram but our brakes are made by so and so’
‘Of course I sympathise that your son has severe food poisoning but our chicken nuggets are outsourced’
‘Let’s be clear, how could we know that our supplier would send us toxic salad mix?’
‘It’s clear you are aggrieved, but honestly, is it our fault that you chose the contaminated meat patties?’
‘People are funny, they like to get from A to Z quickly and cheaply but the moment there’s a glitch they blame us, what’s with that, we just process the tickets?’

Reminds me of the Joseph Heller WW2 riddle, to get out of the air force you have to be crazy but to want to get out of the air force because of its high mortality rate indicates you are sane-a catch of sorts, it’s a neat catch that Catch 22

And while I’m on it. Innocent until proven guilty, isn’t that the catchphrase of the enlightened western democracy? Information is power and we are not supposed to know about it aparently. We have been initiated into the machinations of world politics through Wikileaks and I for one am shocked at how so many western leaders are falling over themselves to condemn a person before they have been charged with, well, anything.

Sign of the times

Recently spotted, this sign in a city cafe window

No food bloggers
No food critics
No restaurant or café groupies
No glossy food magazine readers
No Lifestyle Food channel watchers
No vegans or vegetarians
No well-meaning advice givers
No lite milk drinkers
No food allergics
No toddlers, babies or children
No elderly, pensioners or decrepits
No netball, footy or cricket kit wearing allowed
No chardonnay socialists, do-gooders, committee members
No hippies, ferals, fire jugglers or henna tattooed eco-warriors
No mid life crisis, red sports car driving and trophy girlfriended men
No groups of older women bonding over a book club novel
No free internet parasites
No agendas, skeletons in the closet or other attitudes
No slumming, designer-textured, wealthy earth mammas
No LA Lakers, FUBU, Kappa wearing homies
No Ford or Holden apparel wearing Bogans
No blind, wheelchair bound or deaf patrons
No people just hanging on, ready to snap
No agoraphobics

All else welcome

Why do YOU eat meat?

The skin was puffed and crisp. It was brittle along its edges and a small piece was easily broken off with a firm snap. It was darkly bronzed and pockmarked by the residual salt crystals and fennel seeds that peppered its surface and the grease gave it the look of a lacquered finish. Ripples of radiant heat, all that remained of the imprint of the oven, lifted the aroma rich with aniseed, garlic and rendered fat.
Underneath the skin, the thick white membrane of marrow-like lard glistened. Slippery lobes of greyish-pink flesh oozed ever so slightly tiny rivulets of juice. The whole joint rested in its own warm bath of translucent and viscous fat, like someone reclining in a Radox bath. Beneath it was a dark tanned stain where the juices had at first congealed before hardening into a caramelized resin under heat, capturing the very DNA of its flavour.
I leaned forward and inhaled, my nostrils filling with a fatty, faintly sweet and almost barn-yard scent, redolent of hay. My eyes returned to the skin, blistered by unrelenting heat and momentarily repulsed by its sight, I envisaged Lord of the Flies and notions of Long pig, repulsive thoughts I was unable to shake from my head.
I remember reading that many Firemen eschew roast pork, for the olfactory memories of charred human flesh cling to them long after the cinders have ceased smouldering.
To some it’s a vision of beauty, of bounty and a link to a carnivorous and ancient past and yet others cannot cope with the reality of killing yet alone roasting an animal.
Sometimes, for an instant, I side with the vegetarians
To me the slap of a bare buttock with its ripples of quivering flesh is not so different to that of a wobbly haunch in the paddock, the field or the pen.
It’s flesh, not human to be sure, but flesh.
Alone with my shop-worn moral compass I find myself wrestling with the ambiguity of consuming flesh and am usually left conflicted and tentative by my choices.
However, after all the introspection, hand-wringing and navel gazing, the simple truth is: I could live without it.

The shocking truth about the dangers of food blogging

I had been instructed to post this in the event that something ever happened to Hobart Food Blogger Rita, which it did yesterday.

Godspeed Rita, our thoughts are with you.

‘To my dear audience,
If you are reading this, the unthinkable has happened. In an attempt to muzzle my opinion, I have been ‘taken out’ by a ruthless organization, intent on silencing what they regard as damaging their business interests.
With a looming sense of foreboding, I had this post written in the event that the forces of darkness which have been swirling in a putrid plume of malcontent suddenly combusted into a lashing-out of retributive action. It seems evil has had its day.
For some time now my blogging exploits have been monitored by this faceless entity, incrementally ratcheting-up their case against my truthful beacons of light which dares to shine into their shadowy dealings.
Alas, I have stumbled and fallen, the baton of truth now beyond my grasp.
You must pick up this baton, carry on without me and remember: the truth always hurts.
Rita’

This is not a drill people. If the Tasmanian incident is anything to go by, anyone writing any sort of restaurant or café critique is in clear and present danger!

But breathe easy, we have had contingencies in place for some time, as we speak our Tasmanian food bloggers have already been scrambled to safe havens.

Victor is a checkout chick at Chickenfeed. Michelle looks after the buffet at China Diner, Colette works in HR at Steggles, Hazel is pie filling at Banjos

Same can be said regarding our Victorian cousins: Stickyfingers is already ensconced as a line cook at Hungry Jacks, Claire is working at Gloria Jeans, Mellie currently makes salads for Rembrandts, Jess is lying low at Best n Less, Duncan is currently twisting coffee scrolls at Bakers delight, Ed is a spruiker in Lygon Street, AOF is a sales person for new venture, 'Biltong-to-you', Essjayeff is making Footy-Franks for Huttons, Neil whips meringue in a cheesecake shop.

Rest assured, they are safe, no one will ever find them.