by Kate on April 14, 2012
From footpath cooks to alcoves, bars and nooks, here’s where Tokyo insiders stop for delicious, inexpensive meals, writes Kate Gibbs.
Tokyo’s neon-lit alleys are packed with food carts and hole-in-the-wall haunts where queues of in-the-know locals and visitors seek ramen, soba, yakitori and tako-yaki. In a city known for its Michelin-star options and with 160,000 eateries – four times the number of Paris – street vendors win loyal customers by satisfying the desire to eat quickly, well and inexpensively.
“People in Japan are very particular, they are perfectionists,” says Kazuki Watanabe, who manages an elegant izakaya-style restaurant called Higashi-Yama in Meguro-ku. “This includes eating the best possible food, no matter if it is bought by the side of the road.”
Golf-ball size tako-yaki filled with tender octopus is the mainstay of food-on-the-run. Typically cooked in cast-iron custom-made pans by the roadside, the balls have a crisp exterior, are drizzled in a syrupy sweet and salty sauce, then mayonnaise, and topped with smoky, delicate shaved bonito fish flakes.
Some of the best food in Tokyo is found near or within train stations, as people like to eat before they commute home. Outside Shibuya Station, for example, a popular nook called Gindaco serves eight balls of tako-yaki for ¥500 yen (about $6).
Kerbside eating can involve ceremony, too. It’s not uncommon to place an order by buying a meal ticket from a vending machine by the front door of a tiny bar and walk through two squares of fabric into a place that has served the same secret ramen recipe for the past 150 years.
Glutinous rice balls spiked on to a stick and grilled with a sweet cloying sauce are often served outside temples and train stations. Odango-ya is sweet and one of the best-value street foods in the city.
This is an extract of an article published in The Sydney Morning Herald. Read the full article on SMH here.
Photographs by Kate Gibbs
by Kate on November 24, 2011
A pretty collection of books for food lovers has been released by Penguin Books, giving makeovers to some of the world’s top food lit.
A Dissertation upon Roast Pig and Other Essays by Charles Lamb and Claudia Roden’s A Middle Eastern Feast can fill in the gaps of your foodie library. I’ve been told only certain types of women read cookbooks in bed, so I’ve taken to reading these instead. Agnes Jekyll’s A Little Dinner Before the Play extols the merits of a cheerful breakfast tray, and conjures up a winter picnic of figs and mulled wine. Frankly it’s divine.
I open, randomly, the chapter Meatless Meals:
“Here is a breakfast or high-tea notion for a busy worker on a long winter’s day, when time and thoughts race too quickly for more deliberate nourishment: A crumpet with lots of butter and salt; on it an egg, or maybe two, perfectly fried, the pepper-mill just going out of action, and all served piping hot in a warmed muffin dish. This is moderate cost, simple in preparation, nourishing and nice.”
To any dietary cookbook author, I plead you take this route instead of the joyous and manic “isn’t exercise fun” one. In her chapter For the Too Fat, Jekyll writes this.
“We are reminded in Scripture that ‘All flesh is grass,’ but, as a great artist once added reassuringly, ‘We cannot be sufficiently thankful that all grass is not flesh.’ No one likes to be fat; it is unbecoming, fatiguing, and impairs efficiency. And although the condition is often the result of defective metabolism than of undue or indiscriminate appetite, still the experience of the war years, with their scarcity of the flesh-making foods, shows that weight can be reduced by a diminished consumption of dairy produce, sugar, and starchy foods. Unfortunately, all the nicer things are on a weights and measures black list, and the annual advice of an eminent financial authority to ‘spend less’ must be paraphrased into a diminished consumption of all nourishment for those who would grow thinner…
“If that insidious enemy, soup, be held indispensable at dinner, at least avoid the vegetable purees and bisques made with cream, butter, root vegetables, and rich fish, also the savoury potage in which milk and flour figure.”
Penguin has made a large part of the collection available in Australia, and at the top of the pile on my bedside now is Buffalo Cake and Indian Pudding by Dr A.W.Chase. The author, a travelling physician, salesman, author and self-made man, traipsed around America in the late nineteenth Century collecting recipes and domestic tips from people along the way. There’s a recipe for Kansas Puffs and for Love Knots for Tea, which are little cakes folded over in the shape of “love knots”, to have with tea.
Elizabeth David is there too, of course, in A Taste of the Sun. These words you don’t realise you’re reading, but instead you travel with her and pour over a Lasagne Verdi, “large strips of pasta coloured green with spinach”. It’s enough to send a food writer’s heart aflutter.
Taken as a bite of one book or a whole feast of food writing, this is a collection of delicious writing.
by Kate on October 8, 2011
Peking duck pancakes and the most incredible, sweet, soft coconut flesh laden drinks, and Vietnamese rice paper rolls stuffed with silken prawns. Yes, this was lunch, found at a Miss Chu stall at the MasterChef Live event in Sydney.
A production line worked away scattering Vietnamese mint, coriander, and pretty bunches of marinated tofu, prawns or a satay minced chicken inside the rice paper rolls. Queues of people waited patiently to grab the event’s heathiest lunch. Larger bamboo steamers filled with dumplings sat over boiling water, stacked and billowing the scent of Asian ingredients. The prawn rolls contained almost sashimi prawn, cooked perhaps in a squeeze of acidic lime juice and wrapped with crunchy bean shoots and green paw paw. A peanut dipping sauce, spiked with chilli, is the dish’s crowning glory.
The Masterchef Live event, which is on for three days and finishes Sunday, was absolutely packed on Friday, more than 20,000 people shoulder rubbing to get a view of their favourite chef, learn new knife techniques, how to cook perfect calamari, and the secret to cooking perfect fish (don’t overdo it!). I was delighted to see Miss Chu’s healthy Vietnamese rolls inspire a longer queue than one doing unhealthy pies and fried things.
Prawn toast, that greasy Chinese staple served in yum cha outlets across Australia, was taken to a new level at a cooking session held by Sydney chef Dan Hong, who reinvented the dish for the foodie crowd. Hong, of Lotus, Ms Gs and El Loco, demonstrated how to make the chopped-prawn and sesame on toast appetiser in one of a few hundred events taking place over the weekend.
Hong cooked a prawn and sesame toast with yuzu mayonnaise, a favourite on his Ms G’s menu in Potts Point. The dish involves finely chopping raw fresh, adding a drizzle of sesame oil and coriander, and then spreading that thickly over thinly-sliced toast. The open-sandwich is then sprinkled with sesame seeds and deep fried for several minutes, cut into fingers, and drizzled with yuzu mayonnaise.
“You want a thin crispy base, and heaps of prawns,” Hong told the crowd. “Prawns give it flavour, and who doesn’t love mayo?” Ms G’s does a combination of Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese cuisines, said Hong. There’s a mixture of herbs like mint and coriander, “there are no rules, it’s all about lots of flavour”.
Also appearing over the weekend are chefs such as Tony Bilson, Greg Doyle, Peter Doyle, Peter Gilmore, Matt Kemp, Kylie Kwong, Spanish-born Miguel Maestre, Jaques Raymond the French chef based in Melbourne, and Junior Masterchef’s Anna Gare.
Dan Hong and his prawn and sesame toast. All pics by Kate Gibbs.
by Kate on October 6, 2011
Review of Manly Pavilion, published in February 2011 in Sunday Life magazine.
Loved interviewing six women – Yumi Stynes, Sandra Sully, Margaret Pomeranz, Fleur Wood, Margaret Fulton and Nicole Trunfio – for the Sunday Life cover story on the weekend.
Having fun in your 20s, rearing a family in your 30s or getting wise in your 60s – at what age do women feel most fulfilled? Kate Gibbs talks to Yumi Stynes and others about the best years of their lives.
Yumi Stynes, 35, refuses to dye her hair. She confesses she’s lied about her age in the past, “partly a female thing and partly a vanity thing”, but will not budge on the tell-tale long grey streak running through her almost black hair. “This shows I am a warrior! This is an indication of the life I have lived, of the scars I have acquired. Why would I deny myself those symbols? I am proud of who I am and what I have done.”
by Kate on February 10, 2011
How sweet it is to visit Kangaroo Island’s colony of Ligurian bees, writes Kate Gibbs
Perhaps its their renegade status that keeps us enthralled with the bee: hard workers, mass producers, a sense of social order, the mystical ability to turn an egg into a queen, and a violent sting to boot.
“Next to humans, bees are the most studied living things on Earth,” the manager of Island Beehive and a quietly spoken authority on all things honey, Peter Davis, says.
[FULL STORY here: 8 February 2011, The Sydney Morning Herald]
by Kate on February 10, 2011
Watching produce being created builds up an appetite, writes Kate Gibbs.
It’s milking time at the station and children are counting the sheep. This is culinary adventure tourism on Kangaroo Island, where you can walk with the animals, talk with the producers and watch soil, sea and man turn things into food.
A litre of milk, taken from each ewe every morning and mid-afternoon, is transferred to a refridgerated vat in the factory to be pasteurised and turned into Island Pure fetta, haloumi, Kefalotiri and yoghurt, either plan or swirled with local Ligurian honey.
This paddock-to-plate theme is the general premise of the island’s gastronomic attractions. The tourism mainstay of farmers and food producers is showing visitors exactly what they do and then how it tastes.
[FULL STORY here: 8 February 2011, The Sydney Morning Herald]
by Kate on February 10, 2011
This cooking school is the perfect opportunity for beginners to get their hands dirty, writes Kate Gibbs.
It’s a wet, monsoon-like morning in the Adelaide Hills and at 9.30am I have shrimp paste pushed under my nose to smell. It’s followed by coconut milk, coriander and fish sauce, each scent more powerful than the one before. It’s a less on how to cook a Thai feast and a lesson in the virtues of spices to shock you out of a morning blur.
Guest chef Kelly Lord, head chef at Noosa’s Spirit House, is leading the Thai Feasts for Friends class at the Sticky Rice Cooking School.
He explains the five elements of Thai cooking: hot, sweet, salty, sour and bitter. Above him, a wall is scrawled with the autographs of chefs who have gone before and in front is an impressive array of gnarly roots and fragrant herbs, 18 sharp knives, 18 plastic boards, 18 aprons and 18 eager students.
[FULL STORY here: 8 February 2011, The Sydney Morning Herald]
by Kate on February 10, 2011
Harry Trotter is snorting and his bristled face is caked with mud as he ambles up to rare-breed farmer William Marshall. ”Good pig,” Marshall says to the animal and gives him a pat.
Trotter is a Large Black, one of 27 breeds of rare animals Marshall painstakingly raises on Kangaroo Island in an effort to save them from extinction and bring new flavours to the plates of Australia.
I’m the Indiana Jones of rare breeds,” Marshall says of his ability to track down pigs, cattle, sheep and poultry either facing extinction or being inter-bred with other strains of animal that will threaten their future as pure breeds.
[ FULL STORY here: 8 February 2011, The Sydney Morning Herald]
by Kate on January 26, 2011
You really need to have started these yesterday, so you can have them in all their glory on this momentous day. But I secretly didn’t and they worked out just fine, still soft and the chocolate icing firm enough to hold the coconut in place and avoid too chocolatey fingers. Is there anything more Australia Day than lamingtons? Ok yes there are snags and VB and pies, but for those the smell and idea is everything and the actual eating nothing at all. Really, we’ve come so far. Lamingtons, and maybe pavlova, are sustaining Australia Day stalwarts; happy and easy and a reminder of a time we used to take English things (like bake) and make them our own.
First you need to make a basic butter cake, and then cut the cake into lamington squares, leaving them like this for a day to prevent catastrophic crumbling when you ice them. To make the butter cake:
125g butter
1 tsp caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 eggs
2 cups SR flour
pinch of salt
1/2 cup milk
Preheat oven to 180C. Line the base of a 27cm x 18cm lamington tin with baking paper. Cream the butter and gradually beat in the sugar with the vanilla in an electric mixer, until the mixture is light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.
Sift the flour and salt, then fold into the creamed mixture alternately with the milk, do not overwork the mixture. Spread the mixture evenly in the tin and bake for 25-30 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean. Cool on wire racks then cut into cubes or oblongs.
Chocolate icing
3 cups icing sugar
3 tbsp cocoa
4 tbsp boiling water
1 tsp butter, melted
vanilla essence
desiccated coconut, for dusting
Sift the icing sugar and cocoa into a bowl, then add the boiling water, butter and a few drops of vanilla essence. Stir until smooth and shiny, adding another tablespoon of boiling water if needed. If the icing sets, stand the bowl in boiling water and stir. Dip the cake squares into the icing and immediately roll in desiccated coconut, to coat. Leave on a wire rack to set, at least 1 hour.
