Fine scents and quality foods don’t necessarily marry. Think of the aroma of some of your favourite cheeses. Hardly alluring are they?
Game is the same. The best game looks like something left over from a Rambo movie, all blood and guts, and smells like an untended underarm, wiped clean with a pair of old socks. [...]

Rabbits have never been something to make the mouth water, but they are cheap, readily available, and have a firm place in Australian folklore. For all those reasons, rabbit is something you should have at the table several times a year. There’s another reason jfor that: the longer you cook rabbit, the better you cook [...]

I want to tell you about a disaster. It was pheasant season, and the call had come from my butcher. He had a beautiful brace of birds and he promised to keep them hanging in his cool-room until they were ripe, pluck them, gut them, and present them to me to turn into something special [...]

It was while my little daughter was sliding her umpteenth slice of ox tongue down her tiny throat, like sardines into a pelican’s gob, that I started to wonder what it is in the pickle that helps preserve the tongues, and then makes them go pink when you cook them.

Would she turn pinker if she [...]

Please read this after breakfast.

The question is this: would we all be vegetarians if we had to kill before we cooked? I pose this curler after coming not from a kill, but from a clean.

I had dragged home a couple of squab — necks, heads, beaks and feet attached, feathers removed. Do you have the [...]

Gopal Kulkarni has a CV which would get him a job in just about any restaurant or hotel in the world. In fact it did, from Paul Bocuse’s famed restaurant out of Lyon, to several huge hotels in England, India, Nigeria, and more, until finally he came to Australia to make his mark and his [...]

There is a most underestimated treasure lurking in poultry parlours and butcher shops across town. You might well have to search diligently for these little wonders, and perhaps even argue with your butcher as to your rights to them.
They are difficult to find because most of us wouldn’t even think to look for them. Stuck [...]

You’re not ever likely to have a tandoor oven in the kitchen, never likely to have access to the brilliant dry heat of these marvellous Indian vats of cooking, but with a bit of trickery and a touch of magic, you can produce some of the flavours of the tandoor, simply.

6 chicken breasts — 1 [...]

Let me present to you the world’s most spectacularly successful, quick as a flash and wonderfully flavoured dish; a dish for cooks large and thin, old and young, keen and dull; for the flamboyant and the flat, for singles, doubles, triples and more.
It’s a curry which takes the same time to cook as it does [...]

We went through a phase with warm salads. An entirely admirable one it was, too, and not to be dismissed now, even though it might be out of fashion.
Salads represent an apparently disparate group of ingredients drawn together by a sauce or a common flavour. They are the ultimate in freshness and honesty on the [...]