New(ish) cooking/kitchen/gastronomy/culinary arts blog!

Now that I have been patiently led by the hand to the cyberplace where it resides, I can in turn direct the as-yet-uninitiated to Zoe-from-Crazybrave's beautiful new food/cooking blog, Progressive Dinner Party.

Consumer overconfidence

Woman On a Mission, it must be said, is not my usual mode; such drivenness as I am capable of usually lies elsewhere. But today I was in quest of the perfect wedding gift.

Because of reasons (as ThirdCat so fetchingly puts it), the prospective bride and groom are particularly difficult to shop for. But they entertain. They entertain a lot, and they do it in style.

After pondering this fact for while and making a few false starts, I suddenly knew exactly what I wanted and was almost sure where I could get it.

So I headed out to Adders' poshest shopping hub, Burnside Village (pronounced "Vee-yarzh", as in "Tar-zhay") and made for a shop I had walked past many times but never actually ventured inside before. I couldn't remember its name, but I'd always seen beautiful high-end table linen and decorative bedding in the window.

As I approached, hoping it hadn't disappeared since I last looked (the Irish Linen shop that used to be across the road certainly had, so this was do or die), I slowly made out the words on the sign outside 'QU*EN B*E LINEN'. This, reader, was more than I had dared to hope for. I felt like a leopard upwind of a lame antelope. I went in and approached the woman behind the counter.

'Can I help you?' she asked.

'I hope so,' I replied. 'I'm looking for a set of twelve good-quality ecru linen table napkins, preferably with a restrained amount of drawn threadwork or damasking or some other kind of traditional self-embroidery.'

The woman looked at me incredulously over her glasses, and didn't reply for a minute. Oh dear I thought, perhaps they don't come in sets of twelve. Perhaps she is insulted that I felt the need to stipulate 'good quality'. Perhaps she doesn't know what ecru means, though surely not. Perhaps I have mispronounced the word 'damasking', or indeed perhaps the word 'damask' doesn't really exist as a verb at all, much less in the gerundive mood. And actually this incredulity I see before me is starting to get a bit oppressive. I wonder what the problem is.

Finally the woman opened her mouth and spoke.

'Linen?' she said. 'You want linen?'

Pink Tim Tams and other offences against nature

Stephanie from Humanities Researcher has a must-read article on the multilaterally dubious pinkness of the breast cancer awareness campaign in today's Sunday Age.

Brought to you as a free public service

Order your 'Deliberately Barren' T-shirt today!




Available in a range of colours and styles. Caps and badges also available.

And as a bonus, there's a free larf up in the top right-hand corner of that site where there's a little box saying 'Send gifts in time for Mother's Day!'

Oxymoron of the week

"Choc Chip Hot Cross Buns"

Saturday Cityblogging: Adelaide Central Market

This is one of the places I drag interstate and overseas visitors to. I remember it from the time I was in high school, when the dominant cultural influences in South Australia, other than Anglo-Celtic, were German (a huge influence in SA since early settlement, when the state, founded by idealists, was a haven for religious refugees) plus Italian and Greek, by far the two biggest ethnic groups to end up in Adelaide in the postwar wave of immigration.

The Central Market in those days was where you went for imported groceries. There was an ornately fronted continental-cake shop run by a Viennese woman with whom our German teacher had an arrangement: every now and then for our German lesson we'd walk down to the market from school, which was less than 100 metres up the street, and buy a cake each. We had to ask for it in perfect, polite German before she'd hand it over.

It's got bigger and bigger over the years. Adelaide's Chinatown now kind of melts into it. There's a stall that sells Russian food. People queue up in droves to buy Asian greens. You can buy artisanal cheeses from the Adelaide Hills, or really seriously stinky cheeses from France at $86 per kilo. You can buy everything from bottom-of-the-range mega-shoddy mass produced statuettes of Ganesh the Elephant God to black pearls and unique gold jewellery of great beauty. You can buy fresh roast turkey and cranberry sauce baguettes, that morning's field mushrooms, corn-fed chicken, organic beef, giant chocolate crackles and still-warm wood-oven bread. The noise is overwhelming. The smell is fabulous.


Part of the car park is an old warehouse ...



... and when you get out of the lift, you see this.



These are the people with the gold, but their amber is even better.



I wonder where they keep the Mundane Fruit and Veg, and what it is. Parsnips, chokos and cabbage?