EATING HEAVEN

Another review of Eating Heaven

Another review of Eating Heaven has appeared in Teach: The Journal of Christian Education. Eating Heaven, short listed for the 2014 Australian Christian Book of the Year awards, blends both anecdotal and scholarly research to produce a highly readable commentary on eating at “the tables of daily life.” Simon Carey Holt has written this book…

Thomas Keller on cooking and the mundane

“This is the great challenge: to maintain the passion for the everyday routine and the endlessly repeated act, to derive deep gratification from the mundane.” Thomas Keller is an American chef and restaurateur who came to prominence for his acclaimed Napa Valley restaurant, The French Laundry in California.

Gardening with God

It’s Spring — the time of year my beloved replants her vegetable garden. I watch her come alive as she digs, mixes, composts, plants and waters. Our garden is small by all comparisons. A city balcony is not the place for breadth, but she persists and with the most wonderful results. I remember, some years back, reading…

Waiters shall be nameless

Good waiting is an art form all its own. Good service in a restaurant can be the making of a meal, a good waiter the difference between a middling experience and one to remember. A competent waiter walks a fine line. A whole collection of lines really. A good waiter is professional without being officious, warm but not intimate, personal but not invasive, efficient…

Eucharist: Slow Food

“When we come to the Table in Communion we are called to take time to be together. The Eucharist ought not to have an express lane. It takes time: time to serve the elements of The Meal, time to stand in line, time to think and pray, time to prepare to eat together, and time to…

Ramsey on cooking & Viagra

“Cooking is this massive rush. It’s like having the most amazing hard on, with Viagra sprinkled on top of it, and it’s still there twelve hours later.” Gordon Ramsay is a Scottish celebrity chef, restaurateur, and television personality. Love him or hate him on TV, it’s good to be reminded that the man does know how…

Eating Heaven on Wesley Impact

A few weeks back I was on Wesley Impact, a program on Channel 9 (way too early on a Sunday morning) talking about Eating Heaven. It was all part of Homeless Persons Week and the segment included some photos of the great work done at Collins Street in our partnership with Urban Seed. Thinking it too…

Tony Bilson on the table as art

“The table is a place of physics and chemistry, of commerce and trade, of politics and ideas, but above all, a great table is art.” Australian chef Tony Bilson began his career with the ground-breaking Sydney restaurant Bon Gout in the early 70s. His biography Insatiable: My Life in the Kitchen was published by Murdoch…

Bilson on getting things right

“Cookery, a craft, is learned by doing things over and over again with the aim of getting things right; indeed, it is essentially conservative.” Gay Bilson is now retired from professional cookery and has become one of Australia’s most significant food writers. Her professional life included eighteen years at the acclaimed Berowra Waters Inn on the Hawkesbury River…

Muto on gratitude

‘To be a taker of food or any other commodity without appreciation diminishes our humanity. The height of selfishness corresponds to the avaricious depths of assuming that we are the reason the giver exits. Mother’s table is for me; all the thanks she needs is for me to eat my fill of what is on…

Pelaccio on simple pleasures and a pig’s head

“All I need for a good time is a whole pig head, simply roasted, my hands, a lot of napkins, a jar of pickled chilies, and a few friends to get elbow deep.” Zakary Pelaccio from the north east of the US, is author of the award winning Eat With Your Hands and founder of NYC’s…

Rabbit stew

So my son and I are at the market doing the weekly shop. After eggs, veggies, meat and bread, we stop at the poultry store. My chicken thighs ordered, I see him eyeing off the rabbits at the other end of the display case — whole slender rabbits, skinned, gutted and ready for the pot. ‘Dad, have your…

Link on the sounds of cooking

“Something magical happens when food is cooking — the rest of the world melts away, and nothing exists except what’s in the skillet in front of you — and it talks, breathes, and lives. The sounds, aromas, textures, flavours, and the heat of the kitchen — even the occasional searing burn — feel good.” Donald…

Down a Melbourne laneway

There’s a great little article by Sophie Timothy in Eternity, a publication of the Bible Society, that provides a glimpse into the work of Urban Seed and Collins Street through Credo Cafe. You can read it here.

More on the shortlist for Australian Christian Literature award

Paying attention: vinaigrettes, onions, etc.

To cook is to engage with small things. It has to do with paying attention to the detail. However grand the result might be (or not be, for that matter), a recipe is an accumulation of small steps. As any good cook will attest, the quality of the end product is a direct consequence of one’s attention to…

Bertolli on the inspired moment

“A recipe is at the very least a method accounting for a cooking process. At best, it captures a memory or inspired moment in cooking. But it can never quite tell enough, nor can it thoroughly describe the ecstatic moments when the intuition, skill, and accumulated experience of the book merge with the taste and…

EATING HEAVEN

Happiness at the corner café

Cooking as a Spiritual Practice

Slow Food & me

Breadmaking and prayer

The Providore of Heaven

Supermarket Pilgrims