EATING HEAVEN

Patricia Yeo on celebrity

“Chefs are not supposed to be celebrities! We smell bad, we’re adrenaline junkies, and we have strange social habits.” Acclaimed chef Patricia Yeo is a native of Eugene, Oregon with a doctorate in biochemistry. She is currently the chef of Om Restaurant & Lounge in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Van Gogh’s table

“The Van Gogh family ate where they lived, in the back room of the parsonage. Like everything in Anna’s life, food was subject to conventions. Modest and regular eating was considered crucial to both good health and moral wholeness. But with two cooks in the tiny kitchen, Anna could indulge her middle-class aspirations to larger,…

Poetry from the kitchen #1

Sometimes words are as beautiful as those things they describe. Each night, in a space he’d make between waking and purpose, my grandfather donned his one suit, in our still dark house, and drove through Brooklyn’s deserted streets following trolley tracks to the bakery. There he’d change into white linen work clothes and cap, and…

Link on bread and sacrament

Hans Georg-Link, ‘The Bread of Life: Comments on a Fundamental Biblical Experience,’ in Ecumenical Review 34 (1982), 249-257.

Apricot and olive oil cake

So it’s my last day of leave, my daughter departs for India tomorrow, and apricots are in season. These factors converging, tonight’s dinner was one of lamentation, celebration and some serious apricot consumption. My choice for an apricot dessert was further inspired by two factors. First, a week ago we headed up a friend’s farm in Nagambie and picked the most gorgeously delicious apricots…

Pomegranate, quinoa and feta salad

My beloved has a thing for pomegranates. Truly. So much so, I reckon if it was me or the fruit I might be out in the cold. Granted, a ripe pomegranate, prized open, is a thing of remarkable beauty. The Ancient Egyptians considered it a symbol of prosperity and the Hebrews had a thing for…

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.