a condiment blog

Tenderfoot Setup

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:44:08 +1100

Jess on a journey through time and space.

Stash hanging out on the Condiment/ffiXXed viewing mat with inbuilt bowl and plant holders.

Mr Kitly offers his curatorial opinion at Mr Kitly.

The Grampians

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:34:20 +1100

This weekend gone I went camping with Kris in The Grampians in Western Victoria. This photo was taken at MacKenzie falls, shortly before a kookaburra stole the D’affinois, tomato and the local Mount Zero olive tapenade baguette from right out of my hand. Serves me right for being a yuppie.

Tenderfoot

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 08:03:59 +1100

For those in Melbourne, we’d like to invite you to join us for the launch of an exhibition, Tenderfoot, at Mr. Kitly this Friday, January 27th.

The exhibition features photographers Kasane Nogawa (Japan), Ye Rin Mok (South Korea), Peter Sutherland (United States), Nich Hance McElroy (United States) and Jessica Brent (Australia).

Taken across continents, the collection of works seek to capture the spirit of eating in the outdoors and explore the affinity we form with food when it is enjoyed in nature.

The launch will run from 6.30pm to 8.30pm, so please drop in for a glass of wine from our friends and Jed, some mountain tea and marshmallows.

For those not in Melbourne, images from the exhibition will be included in the upcoming issue of Condiment due for release in Australia’s Autumn.

Endless Rosemary

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 10:03:00 +1100

At the very edge of the city there’s a small park that I often walk through or sometimes we have spontaneous picnics in where we drink bottles of champagne. My favourite part of the park is the geometric water feature from the 80’s that offers curtains of mist that you can stand in the middle of. One day a friend of mine pointed out the rows of rosemary that lined the footpath. I was in disbelief about failing to notice them, but also excited about my future relationship with these plants. Unfortunately, the park is slightly out of my everyday way, and in reality I’ve rarely been able to successfully utilise this resource.

My preferred route to work involves walking through three parks. Today in park #2 the spring air was fragrant and I was admiring one of the triangular garden beds brimming with lavender and a vaguely familiar plant. I picked a stem and rubbed it between my fingers to release the rich smell of rosemary. With a smile I selected a couple more to take with me and eagerly planned the food that I would cook with it this week.

I like to think that the same landscaper designer is on a mission to supply limitless rosemary to people who like to walk through parks.

Cloudy With a Chance of Pancakes

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 14:28:00 +1100

Sometimes it’s nice to sleep with food too.

Hot Pot

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 16:51:00 +1100

A couple of years ago some of my friends gave me a hot pot for my birthday. This year for my birthday we made a hot pot feast. We sat amongst mountains of mushrooms, lotus root, greens and wagyu, passing each other pieces of broccoli, handfuls of noodles and dishes of sauce.

CASA MARIOL

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 14:18:00 +1100

We are very pleased that Condiment has found a home in Barcelona in the Llibreria of CASA MARIOL, the wine bar and food store of a family owned winery of the same name, based in the Terra Alta region of Catalunya, Spain. We hope to visit them one day but for the time being we’ll have to be satisfied by their quite amazing website.

Gyoza

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 02:09:00 +1100

A delicious three person feast tonight with Kae and Daisuke at the famous harajuku gyoza restaurant.

Naked Lunch

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 01:41:00 +1100

It was Ben’s birthday on Sunday. I found him in Yoyogi park reading Naked Lunch and concealing a bottle of ume-shu and some olive bread.

Indoor Picnics & Outdoor Carpets

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 23:37:00 +1100

This winter we spent many chilly nights eating indoors on the picnic rug, imagining we were outside and it was summer.

On the first warm spring night in September, Sari invited us over for dinner and made a delicious Mexican feast. She dragged her Persian rug outside into her garden and set it up with cushions. We sat under the stars, ate tortillas, and lounged around as if we were on her living room floor.

Gallery Trax — Photo Diary

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 16:13:00 +1100

In late August we made a long awaited pilgrimage to Gallery Trax.

Cameron hired a car and drove above the speed limit at all times.

The car looked like a pink rice bubble.

It had been raining heavily.

We got lost. Cameron looked to the earth for answers.

We met a handsome dog.

Poetry was everywhere.

There were beautiful paintings by Ai Sasaki.

Kain and Fi were there.

Miyoshi-san made us fresh corn which we threw into an empty field afterwards.

Next door to the gallery was a hammock shop…

… and the gallery vegetable garden. The city seemed very far away.

Delicate - New Food Culture

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 15:31:00 +1100

Delicate - New Food Culture recently published by Gestalten is “an exploration of a worldwide scene that sees eating as a creative challenge.” We’re in there somewhere.

Papersky Food Club

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 15:20:00 +1100

Papersky is a Japanese travel magazine who are tirelessly organising events for friends and readers such as bicycle tours, mountain walks and food clubs hosted by their favourite local cooks like Yoyo from Vege Shokudo - featured in Issue 01 of Condiment. These photos were taken in August at their second Food Club event hosted by Chiori Yamamoto of Chioben at the Knee High Media home and headquarters (aka Green Studio). It was an intimate and inspiring afternoon and window into how weekends should be.

Half Baked

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 23:31:00 +1000

There are different kinds of cookie people. Their tastes range from the crunchy to the soft because people, too, are cooked in a variety of contexts. Cookie compatibility is, of course, a cornerstone of any friendship and is crucial to ensuring that freshly baked situations don’t end in disaster.

My favourite thing you can order at the Albion are the giant cookies, delicious and satisfying to hold in two hands. The cookie chefs are well aware of the importance of balance in baking and make their cookies large enough so that there is the perfect bite for every type. Or, in the situation you are they same type, you can select one that is either entirely crunchy or extra chewy.

On this particular day we shared a combination cookie and a carafe of rose. I munched on the outsides while my friend chewed the insides. Satisfied, we sat in the sun and watched the day go by. As we left we each picked our own cookie to take home.

Too Much

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 00:48:00 +1000

The Captain of the Banana Union at a sushi train on the road back from Motoyoshi having clearly had too much.

PAM FOODZ

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 14:00:00 +1000

For the launch of the Perks and Mini Sydney store, Condiment collaborated with The Commons. Our menu involved different PAM foods such as Popcorn and Maple, Prawns and Mayo, Prosciutto and Melon, which were presented in different coloured Risograph printed paper.

Eater's Digest #2: Les Mason - The Epicurean Exhibition Publication

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 16:54:00 +1100

Available through The Narrows’ online store.

Jello Study by Rafaël Rozendaal

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 17:45:00 +1100

Rafaël Rozendaal for TodayTomorrow

Mutton Bird Dreaming

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 17:39:00 +1100

If you’re allergic to seafood like Jess, the closest you can get to enjoying it is muttonbird which tastes like anchovies. They serve it at the amazing Fleur’s Place in Moeraki, New Zealand.

Eater's Digest #1: The Cheese Museum - Italo Calvino

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 19:03:00 +1100

Mr. Palomar is standing in line in a cheese shop, in Paris. He wants to buy certain goat cheeses that are preserved in oil in little transparent containers and spiced with various herbs and condiments. The line of customers moves along a counter where samples of the most unusual and disparate specialties are displayed. This is a shop whose range seems meant to exemplify every conceivable form of dairy product; the very sign, “Spe-cialites froumageres,” with that rare archaic or vernacular adjective, advises that here is guarded the legacy of a knowledge accumulated by a civilization through all its history and geography.

Three or four girls in pink smocks wait on the customers. The moment one of the girls is free, she deals with the first in line and asks him to express his wishes;the customer names or, more often, points, moving about the shop toward the object of his specific and expert appetites.

At that moment the whole line moves forward one place; and the person who till then had been standing beside the “Bleu d’Auvergne” veined with green now finds himself at the level of the “Brin d’amour,” whose whiteness holds strands of dried straw stuck to it; the customer contemplating a ball wrapped in leaves can now concentrate on a cube dusted with ash. At each move forward, some customers are inspired by new stimuli and new desires: they may change their minds about what they were about to ask for or may add a new item to the list; and there are also those who never allow themselves to be distracted even for a moment from the objective they are pursuing and every different, fortuitous suggestion serves only to limit, through exclusion, the field of what they stubbornly want.

Mr. Palomar’s spirit vacillates between contrasting urges: the one that aims at complete, exhaustive knowledge and could be satisfied only by tasting all the varieties; and the one that tends toward an absolute choice, the identification of the cheese that is his alone, a cheese that certainly exists even if he cannot recognize it (cannot recognize himself in it).

Or else, or else: it is not a matter of choosing the right cheese, but of being chosen. There is a reciprocal relationship between cheese and customer: each cheese awaits its customer, poses so as to attract him, with a firmness or a somewhat haughty graininess, or, on the contrary, by melting in submissive abandon.

There is a hint of complicity hovering in the air: the refinement of the taste buds and especially of the olfactory organs has its moments of weakness, of loss of class, when the cheeses on their platters seem to proffer themselves as if on the divans of a brothel. A perverse grin flickers in the satisfaction of debasing the object of one’s own gluttony with lowering nicknames: crottin, boule de moine, bouton de calotte.

This is not the kind of acquaintance that Mr. Palo-mar is most inclined to pursue; he would be content to establish the simplicity of a direct physical relationship between man and cheese. But since in place of the cheeses he sees names of cheeses, concepts of cheeses, meanings of cheeses, histories of cheeses, contexts of cheeses, psychologies of cheeses, when he does not so much know as sense that behind each of these cheeses there is all that, then his relationship becomes very complicated.

The cheese shop appears to Mr. Palomar the way an encyclopedia looks to an autodidact: he could memorize all the names, venture a classification according to the form—bar of soap, cylinder, dome, ball—according to the consistency—dry, buttery, creamy, veined, firm— according to the alien materials involved in the crust or in the heart—raisins, pepper, walnuts, sesame seeds, herbs, molds—but this would not bring him a step closer to true knowledge, which lies in the experience of the flavors, composed of memory and imagination at once. Only on the basis of this could he establish a scale of preferences and tastes and curiosities and exclusions.

Behind every cheese there is a pasture of a different green under a different sky: meadows caked with salt that the tides of Normandy deposit every evening;meadows scented with aromas in the windy sunlight of Provence; there are different flocks, with their stablings and their transhumances; there are secret processes handed down over the centuries. This shop is a museum: Mr. Palomar, visiting it, feels as he does in the Louvre, behind every displayed object the presence of the civilization that has given it form and takes form from it

This shop is a dictionary; the language is the system of cheeses as a whole: a language whose morphology records declensions and conjugations in countless variants, and whose lexicon presents an inexhaustible richness of synonyms, idiomatic usages, connotations, and nuances of meaning, as in all languages nourished by the contribution of a hundred dialects. It is a language made up of things; its nomenclature is only an external aspect, instrumental; but for Mr. Palomar, learning a bit of nomenclature still remains the first measure to be taken if he wants to stop for a moment the things that are flowing before his eyes.

From his pocket he takes a notebook and a pen, and begins to write down some names, marking beside each name some feature that will enable him to recall the image to his memory; he tries also to make a synthetic sketch of the shape. He writes pave d’Airvault, and notes “green mold,” draws a flat parallelepiped and to one side notes “4 cm. circa”; he writes St-Maure, notes “gray granular cylinder with a little shaft inside,” and draws it, measuring it at a glance as about “20 cm.”; then he writes Chabicholi and draws another little cylinder. “Monsieur! Hoo there! Monsieur!” A young cheese-girl, dressed in pink, is standing in front of him while he is occupied with his notebook. It is his turn, he is next; in the line behind him, everyone is observing his incongruous behavior, heads are being shaken with those half-ironic, half-exasperated looks with which the inhabitants of the big cities consider the ever-increasing number of the mentally retarded wandering about the streets.

The elaborate and greedy order that he intended to make momentarily slips his mind; he stammers; he falls back on the most obvious, the most banal, the most advertised, as if the automatons of mass civilization were waiting only for this moment of uncertainty on his part in order to seize him again and have him at their mercy.

Excerpt from ‘Mr Palomar’ by Italo Calvino - Translated from Italian by William Weaver