The White Hat Food Guide

Newsletter - 25th November 2008

Contents

SOLE Food
Becoming a Locavore
Recipe – The White Hat Rat
Eating Out – Sydney
Reader Feedback
The White Hat Flash Rat
Our previous quiz
Eggplant
Ethical Food – part 1
From the White Hat Inbox
The White Hat Flash as a Rat with a Gold Tooth Rat
Eating Out & Food Shopping – Melbourne
The White Hat Morning After the Night Before Rat
Who Invented Vegemite
Ethical Food – Part 2
The White Hat Food Quiz

SOLE Food

In the past few newsletters we have been looking at some the issues connected with the currently popular concept of SOLE food where the SOLE stands for Sustainable, Organic, Local and Ethical, so we might continue with that theme for a while.

Becoming a Locavore

There are a number of advantages in being a locavore - meaning someone who eats predominantly local products. Firstly, it is often cheaper. If you go to your local market (as opposed to supermarket) the local produce that is currently in season and in abundance is usually the cheapest. Australian newspapers and magazines are pretty good at producing recipes suited to seasonally available produce. So are Australian television cooking programs and cooking segments. Even when Australian cooking shows are repeats, the television channels, even though are capable of perpetrating all many of other unspeakable atrocities on us, are usually quite conscious of repeating local cooking shows ‘in season’. Well done and thank you to even the crassest of commercial channels. Thus if you head off to the market with a recipe from a current or recent newspaper there is a good chance it will feature good fresh local product. The same applies to recipes from local TV programs with the proviso that what is in season in Adelaide won’t be what is in season in Darwin.

More locavore tips next newsletter.

Recipe - The White Hat Rat

This section of the newsletter can now be found at The White Hat Rat.

Eating Out - Sydney

In Sydney’s Chinatown you will find several bustling foodhalls with many stalls offering a wide range of Asian foods of the cheap and cheerful and (usually) authentic variety. Don’t expect any niceties like tablecloths and be prepared to share a table with perfect strangers. If you didn’t like the meal you chose this time, never mind – it cost you next to nothing and that stall has 69 other choices that you can try next time. Then there are 20 or more different stalls offering quite different cuisines. Our favourite hall of this type is above a shopping arcade on the east side of Dixon Street. This style of Asian food hall survived for a few years in Melbourne before disappearing and has never seemed to have taken route in other Australian cities. We rarely visit Sydney without going out of way to have a meal at such a food hall.

Reader Feedback

“Thank you so much for your alert about kitchen gardens in Melbourne. I visited both and felt particularly privileged to visit Dame Elisabeth’s garden.
James”

Thank you James. There is another opportunity to visit Cruden Farm in early December. You can find details at: http://www.whitehat.com.au/Melbourne/Parks/Private.asp

“I became a fan of your Melbourne newsletter several years ago when I briefly and am still a regular reader back here in NY. I also enjoy your food newsletter and have persuaded several of my colleagues to sign up as well. Just one request. We don’t recognise a number of the ingredients so it would be helpful if you could occasionally include the international names. There is no need to internationalise the units of measurements because we have noticed that White Hat recipes never include measurements. Thanx from the Yanx. Richard”

Richard, I note from your email address that you work in the financial industry. This might be a good time for you and your colleagues to learn how to survive in nuts and berries. As to the ingredient names for the White Hat Rat, you might know eggplants as aubergines and zucchini as courgettes. Tomato shouldn’t present a problem even though in Australia it doesn’t rhyme with potato. Thanx to the Yanx for your feedback.

The White Hat Flash Rat

This section of the newsletter can now be found at The White Hat Flash Rat.

Our previous quiz

The best answers came from Maddie:

“One pot cooking.

1. What is a Pot-au-feu and what can the broth be used for? Translates as pot on the stove/fire. Originally from the Lorraine region (so they say), it denotes a dish of boil beef on the bone, the later added vegetables (normally onion, potato, carrot, leek and "bouquet garni") and the broth. (eg not unlike your potmeister-dish) Traditionally the "slightly reduced - to concentrate flavour) broth is served first with crusty bread spread with the bone marrow, followed by beef and veggies normally accompanied by sidedishes such as mustarde, horseradish, capers, gherkins etc. . Many variations (eg add tongue, heart , other meat eg chicken, pork ,mutton ,venison, sausages etc other veggies parsnip, tomato etc) of this dish are found all over France and worldwide (eg Tafelspitz in Wien)

While pot au feu was peasant food until the French Revolution and not worth a mention in culinary treatises, it became respectable with "la revolution" and in the Third French Republic pot-a-feu was used as a "propaganda term" to promote French nationalism and to fight the growing insurgence of depopulation and feminism.

similar to: Vegemite in Australia, as American as apple pie etc

2. What ingredients might you find in a New England Boiled Dinner? An American equivalent of No1. but made with fish, shellfish and mussels what ever is in the sea. or with ham/ depends where you from - coast or no coast.

However nowadays seems to be related to "cat food" and something to do with sex - go figure.-

3. Some cultures enjoy food cooked in a communal broth at the table. Name one such dish.

New England clam bake Louisiana fish fry fondue - but Swiss is cheese - and Burgundian is oil

most Somali dishes eaten on communal inara pancake with various stews on top. goat is really good - but may be to solid to qualify

Cantonese steamboat ...or fondue chinoise as the Europeans call it.

Japanese shabu shabu

Korean - bimbambap to an extend I suppose

Also there is always a soup dish on a south Vietnamese table, the broth to be enjoyed with the rice.

4. In some Asian communities stocks are continually topped up, sometimes over generations, and the ancient family stock is jealously protected but generously shared with guests. Some time ago, a delightful film about protecting the family stock was released. What is the name of that film?

No idea- waiting for the answer

or do you mean the Japanese film "Tampopo" but that is about a family recipe. [You are right - we had confused it with our fading memory of this film]

5. What is your favourite one-pot dish?

My mothers "Hungarian gulasch" - and do not ask me for my secret family recipe:-)

followed by jespren (pronounced yaschpren) - Slovenian barley stew-

and north Vietnamese Pho with offal

Cheers

Maddie”

Eggplant

(Or aubergine for Richard and his colleagues)

Ethical Food - part 1

This part of of the newsletter can now be found at The White Hat Guide to Ethical Food.

From the White Hat Inbox

We have received a number of unsolicited emails offering to assist us (for an undisclosed fee) to assist us with our business planning starting with writing for us (again for an undisclosed fee) a Mission Statement.

Thank you for the personal concern you have shown, but here at White Hat we suspect we can whip up a Mission Statement in less time than you would take to cook a soft boiled egg. Here’s one that took us two minutes:

“The White Hat Food Newsletter is an end-user-driven and focussed communication device using high-end technology distribution systems which aims to communicate user-centric methodologies of food preparation suited to the various modalities of the customer’s food preparation environments. In the ongoing process of providing these high level services we aim to generate synergies with other major players in the arena within trade-compliance boundaries and to leverage the segmented and evaluated data collected from the management of our end-to-end communities together with the monetising potential of its social networking potential in order to become a world player in our chosen field.”

So thank you for your offers of assistance in this area but we think we will just stick with the way we started out:

“We enjoy food. We know a bit about it but we’re not experts. We enjoy cooking. We enjoy writing. If you enjoy reading what we write, that’s good. If you don’t, that’s good too – there are plenty of alternatives out there. We’ll just keep on enjoying eating, cooking and writing anyway. Thank you.”

The White Hat Flash as a Rat with a Gold Tooth Rat

This section of the newsletter can now be found at The White Hat Flash as a Rat with a Gold Tooth Rat.

Eating Out and Food Shopping - Melbourne

Saturday morning brunch has become the most important communal meal for many Melbourne families. Mum and dad are out of their work clothes – only estate agents wear a suit on Saturdays in Melbourne – teenage daughter can take a break from watching the all-important global indicators (number of Facebook friends) and No.1 son can eventually be enticed away from his video game by the promise of food.

We can recommend Oasis Bakery in a rather unpromising stretch of small factories in Murrumbeena. This is a Middle Eastern food store with café and eating area. That means you can stock up on a wide range of groceries and fresh foods as well as having a family breakfast. The golden rule is to eat first. Always eat first because if you set about shopping with all those cooking smells in your nostrils you will end up buying twice as much as you need.

Meals and snacks on offer consist of a range of Middle Eastern staples accompanied by Turkish breads baked on the premises. As an accompaniment we can recommend the cardamom Turkish coffee. This sort of food is designed to be shared so those who talk the most eat the least which helps restore your faith in Darwin and puts the last week at work in perspective.

After the meal you can stock up on a number of essentials for the pantry together with ready made meals for the coming week.

There are a large number of items to choose from. We know. They are in our pantry. We made the mistake of shopping before eating.

You can find details at Middle Eastern Food Stores in Melbourne.

The White Hat Morning After the Night Before Rat

This section of the newsletter can now be found at The White Hat Morning After the Night Before Rat.

Who invented Vegemite?

This section of the newsletter can now be found at Who Invented Vegemite?

Ethical Food - part 2

This part of of the newsletter can now be found at The White Hat Guide to Ethical Food.

The White Hat Food Quiz

Some Australian food-related inventions

1. Adelaide invented a special culinary delight consisting of a brown disc allegedly containing animal substances floating in a green liquid. Inexplicably, I have never found this creation on the menus of supposedly high-end restaurants around the world. What is the name of this dish?
2. A piece of bush technology which uses the latent heat of evaporation to keep food cool can still sometimes be found in use in the outback. What is its name?
3. An Australian inventor created what was then the world’s best grain harvester. What has this got to do with the basic wage?
4. An Australian inventor created the world’s first commercial refrigeration plant in Geelong and later a second one in Melbourne. What was his name?
5. In the film ‘Sunday Too Far Away’ there is described a special method used to by a one-armed chef to add flavour to a hamburger patties. What method was this?
6. An Australian inventor created a refrigerator running on kerosene which made refrigeration in the outback practical in a way which it had not been before. What was his name?
7. An Australian inventor devised a method of creating high potency fertiliser out of chook poo. What is this fertiliser called?
8. The Australian diva Dame Nellie Melba had at least two dishes named after her. What are they? Another Australian diva, Kylie, has adopted a number of the promotional techniques pioneered by Nellie. Suggest a dish in her honour.

No prizes – just glory and a warm inner glow.

Victoria

New South Wales

South Australia

Western Australia