What's Simmering
Matthew is the author of Kitchen Basics, Never Eat Chicken on a Monday and most recently, The Weekend Cook.
His whimsical recipe column, The Weekend Cook, appears in the Good Weekend magazine as part of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald each Saturday.
Matthew is the food editor of Grazia magazine, a weekly women's magazine that has news with shoes. And an evocative look at food.
Where I Live
8 August 2008
I arrived in Tassie the slow way, on an overnight boat, with my car buried in the hold. I travelled with Nick, my cheesemaker mate, and Ian, the other cheesemaker after a couple of days at the Taste of Slow behind Melbourne’s Fed Square. We filled the wee bunkroom with the smell of washed rind and red wine and I slept like the deceased. The air tight room soon smelt like the recently deceased. Cheese is like that.
Awoke to a brilliant Tassie morn and drove straight to Sheila’s house. A friend’s mother, she was expecting us and had the bacon and frypan at the ready. Jar after jar of preserved fruit filled the room, and after runny eggs we raided the back yard. Two types of nashi, so small they’d fit in a toddler’s palm, filled our crates. We picked hundreds of tiny apples and then gorged ourselves on mulberries.
For the uninitiated, mulberries are a deep purplish red. Squidgy and ripe, and impossibly fragrant, as you reach up for one others brush your clothes and skin. We ended up looking like we’d been at a massacre, faces smeared with berry juice. I learnt that we should’ve picked them naked; it’s the only way to save your clothes. The result was three grown men, giggling like schoolgirls at the flavour, the stains on our hands and shirts giving us the appearance of the criminally insane.
A Table In The Paddock
23 June 2008
Matthew and others will launch A Table in the Paddock, the first of ongoing regional food events where the table visits the regions. Long tables will be set up on site at a producer and we'll be serving local dishes as a shared lunch. The first Table in the Paddock lunch will be held on Bruny Island (and because of weather may well be an indoor paddock!). Contact us if you're interested in attending future events and we'll keep you posted.
Grazia Magazine
22 June 2008
Matthew has become the food editor of Grazia magazine, a weekly women's magazine where he attempts to inspire and excite the palate in his Out of the Pantry page. From restaurants to wine, from what's happening in the world of food, it's all fair game.