This year’s lineup of Good Food Month events looks pretty tasty. For me, this fantastic month of celebrating food always culminates with the great Sydney Food and Wine Fair. Unfortunately it’s also a pretty busy month this year, what with work and an upcoming two week break in Tokyo.

We did however manage to squeeze in a Hat’s Off Dinner at Bilson’s Restaurant before our impending holiday. Bilson’s theme is “Cuisine Now”, a degustation featuring dishes by cutting edge chefs in France, as well as a dish designed by Tony Bilson himself, his head chef Manu Feildel and pastry chef Jeremie Mantelin. The list of featured French chefs reads as follows (from the menu) : Pascal Barbot, L’Astrance, Paris; Nicolas Le Bec, Lyon; Regis Marcon, St bonnet-Le-Froid; Michel Bras, Laguiole.

I love the Bilson’s interior even more now that they’ve fitted the lights with swatches of colour like something out of a Dulux factory. It lends a certain brightness, yet warmth to the space. Looking back at the menu now, I’m starting to appreciate how well thought out and deceptively effortless it all was. The dishes progressed from a few slices of melt-in-your-mouth, thinly sliced scallops to a very meaty tasting vegetable soup (in bold flavour, not in content), a gorgeous piece of fish tinged with chilli and the pop of finger lime caviar, a black-as-night risotto redolent with flavours of the sea and perfectly prepared pigeon with a ham mousse. All of this, whilst remaining true to the season and managing to taste light and fresh.

Then just when you think it’s time to have dessert and pack up and go home, the best cheese course I’ve ever had glides onto the table and I’m astounded by it’s simple yet so pretty presentation. On paper, it actually sounds quite boring : Medallion of Woodside goat cheese with spiced poached cherry tomatoes and gingerbread crumbs. Oh, goat cheese and tomatoes! That good ole vegetarian option staple, I thought. The cheese of course, is fantastic even on it’s own. But when you take a mouthful that combines all the flavours – slightly sweet and spicy tomatoes, apple-flavoured lemon compote and crisp gingerbread, with the cheese, it magically transforms into a deconstructed version of lemon cheesecake – an unlikely dish that segues perfectly from the savoury courses to the sweet. This dish, is worth the price of admission alone, and S wants to have it every day for the rest of his life.

Dessert itself also managed to hold it’s own, after the rapturous response we’d given to the previous dish. I’m not a big fan of marshmallow, but accompanied by a white chocolate sorbet and a raspberry and capsicum compote, the dish worked very well as a whole. The raspberry and capsicum compote in particular was fantastic. Not too sweet with plenty of crunch. Whoever it was who first coined that phrase, “It’s so crazy it might just work” could well have been thinking of pairing raspberries and capsicums together.

Finally the evening ends with Cafe riche (espresso with a side of frangelico spiked cream) and some petit fours – liquid lemon verbena truffles, soft raspberry jellies and pistachio madelines.

This will probably be my only taste of Good Food Month for 2007, but oh what a sensation it was.

Bilson’s Restaurant
Radisson Plaza Hotel Sydney
27 O’Connell Street
Sydney 2000

Duncan of Syrup & Tang tagged me ages ago to list 7 food facts about myself. It has taken me a long time to write something up because to be frank, I couldn’t think of anything factually interesting to write about. 7 is an awfully big number. I rather fondly remember when I was 7; a carefree age, unencumbered by anything. At 7 I was in primary school enjoying jam sandwiches for lunch and playing jump-rope with friends. Now, I’m loving everything to do with being aged some-number-above-27. I don’t know if anyone else would find much of the following interesting, but anyway, here goes :

1. I am very unfortunately, very intolerant of alcohol. Not to the point of breaking out into a rash like a fellow asian friend of mine, but one margarita (my favourite cocktail), and I’m whizzing through the various stages of intoxication, from happiness, depression, anger, denial, acceptance, being hung over and recovery. All within half an hour or so. Some wines make me sneeze. All of this is highly annoying when I’m in a restaurant and rather feebly have to be the only person at the table to decline wine. B also finds this annoying because if I’m not going to drink, I should at least learn how to drive so that he can drink and leave me in charge of getting us home safely. I don’t drive, but that fact belongs to an entirely different list.

2. That said, I like alcohol and love using it in food : red wine pears, prunes in armagnac, a Calvados cream sauce with pork, Triple Sec or Kahlua in a flourless chocolate cake, Kirsch truffles. Currently, I also love Pepperjack Cab Sav (which doesn’t make me sneeze), Little Creatures Pale Ale and Knappstein Reserve Lager.

3. I also can’t handle caffeine. This intolerance seems to have crept up on me over the years. I fondly remember knocking back espressos while in Italy, and am amazed now that I could ever have done that (these days, even black tea makes me feel a bit ill on occasion). So I’m relegated to the cattle class of coffee drinking : decaf. I know I’m not the only caffeinely-challanged drinker out there, so it’s upsetting to find that a lot of cafes or restaurants still serve a pretty bad decaf.

4. In Perdido Street Station by China Mieville, a monster accidentally unleashed by Isaac, can taste it’s “food” in the air and as it flies over the city, is able to sense it like a “massive, invisible flavour trail”. These flavour trails remind me of the images I have in my head of cities I have visited. The scent of food links me to the various memories I have of different places. Venice for example, smells of perfectly ripe fuzzy peaches; Amsterdam of Ritter Sport chocolate bars and Earl Grey tea; Kuala Lumpur of fumes from generators used by the roadside stalls while pressing sugarcane juice, deep-frying cempedak seeds, preparing sugary peanut pancakes and ladling out fresh beancurd into tiffins; Paris of explosively crispy, buttery croissants, Marco Polo tea and ripe cheese; Belfast of home-made stews and wheaten bread hot from the toaster, and New Zealand smells of fresh air and the best fish and chips I’ve ever eaten.

5. I will watch or read anything remotely related to food. Even if it’s a reality TV program like The Restaurant or Marco Pierre White’s Hell’s Kitchen. I loved Tom & Jerry as a kid because a lot of their squabbles involved food, such as The Little Orphan and The Midnight Snack. Now that I think of it, a lot of my all-time favourite computer games also have something to do with food – Tapper, BurgerTime, Super Mario, The Sims (love the chopping and humming as they cook, and the fact that they can burn down an entire house with their efforts if they have zero cooking experience) and Katamari Damacy.

6. I’m a chilli addict. As a teenager, I used to put MasterFoods Mexican Chilli Powder in everything. If memory serves me correctly, I might even have taken a bottle of it with me once on a family holiday overseas. Nowadays I like using my mom’s homemade chilli and garlic paste or dried chilli flakes, which I own a big container of. To a lesser extent, if I could eat chorizo with every meal, I probably would.

7. I can’t eat eggs for breakfast. I once worked in a fantastic French bistro and we had a ritual every morning at 9:30 where everyone had to stop what they were doing and have breakfast together. Various sections were relegated the task of preparing something with eggs and making toast. Since I spent a couple of years in this place, I kind of OD-ed on eggs, and haven’t yet fully regained interest in soft-boiled or scrambled eggs. It also took me two years after many staff dinners, to rekindle my love of pasta with tomato sauce, but I still hate shepherd’s pie.

In turn, I would like to tag Mirness at Imploding Central, whose blog isn’t about food, but who I know is as much into food as I am, the lovely Erielle of Fancy Toast who is currently a soon-to-be-mother so she might not have the time to respond to this tag, and a friend and fantastic writer Quick at twobluefish if he can find time out of his hectic working, theatre-going and famous-people-interviewing schedule to write something edible about himself.

If I could, I would like to go to Cake School every day for the rest of my life. This was my second class at Planet Cake, and I enjoyed every minute of it. The first was a Basics 101 cake course, during which I learnt how to create a star spangled cake (by the way, the end result was gifted to a little girl called Emma, to help celebrate her 9th birthday). In this class, which took place over four quick hours last Saturday, the wonderful Anna-Maria guided us through the icing and decorating of twenty cupcakes – from faces to flowers, and my favourites, little bumble bees and ladybirds with edible feelers made of vermicelli.

I hope to sign up for a couple more classes next year, as they’re very useful, loads of fun and also incredibly relaxing. Plus you get to take something home at the end of the day, to wow your friends with.

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Of course, what trip to Balmain would be complete without a quick visit to Adriano Zumbo? The hardest part was choosing what to get because everything on display looked equally tempting. Eventually managed to leave clutching a small pear macaroon (delicious) and a chocolate passionfruit tart (wonderful consistency and flavour to the ganache) topped with a bonus mini yellow macaroon. Unfortunately, my tart didn’t make it home without getting a bit of a battering (hence it’s dishevelled look). On the way home, a strong gust of wind lifted the paperbag off the top of my cupcake box and fell butter-side-down onto the pavement. For a couple of horrific seconds before managing to rescue it, I thought it was going to end up under the forceful tyres of a passing car. Despite this, it managed to still taste great when I had it the next day with a cup of vanilla tea.

I’ve liked what little I’ve had the chance to try from this patisserie… but don’t ask me, I’m just a Zumbo tourist; ask Raging Yogurt who must’ve eaten her way through their entire repertoire by now!

Planet Cake
106 Beattie Street
Balmain 2041

Adriano Zumbo Patissier
296 Darling St
Balmain 2041