Pineapple Lemon Qi Cake

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Ok. The truth is out: I really DO have a thing about lemons... there's no denying it: a lot of the recipes on this site call for lemons in one form or another. The other thing about the Yum-Oh recipe blog is that you won't find any dairy or wheat here either, 'cos those two things just don't agree with me. The consequent necessity of living in a wheat-free, dairy-free world had previously meant the general eradication of delicacies like cheesecake from my personal menu.

So you can imagine how I was bowled over recently by the introduction to this amazing cake: no wheat, no dairy, but Oh My! how creamy-dreamy-yummy-cheezy it seemed! I guess you can imagine how, on a recent visit to make some family photographs for some friends, the discovery of this incredible desert felt like nothing short of a miracle. This truly is an ‘I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-dairy’ epiphany of a ‘cheese’-cake. And it uses lemons!

The recipe is blessedly shared with us by Regina and David Power from calmbirth® and PermaculturePower. Regina created the recipe after researching several sources and drew on some of the ideas from Julie Mitosis who runs a raw food company and cooking course in Sydney.

Regina and David's two-year-old daughter Maia has taken to calling it ‘Qi-cake’ – which besides being incredibly cute is also very apt, because you feel full of good Qi-energy after eating this delightful raw-food desert. (Regina says technically I can't call it an entirely raw-food recipe, because I created the addition of the agar-agar jelly topping, which does require boiling for a short time to set the jell in the seaweed - and the more hard-core raw-foodies wouldn't be seen within a hundred feet of a stove... But me? I'm into this cake for the flavour, the texture and the feeling of utter indulgence!)

So let’s cut to the chase – here’s the recipe - you’ll need a very strong blender for this one! I bought a whizz-bang, you-beaut, ice-crushing Ikon 600 from the Breville factory shop in Wattle St Ultimo for $160 that handled the job extremely well.

Pineapple Lemon Qi Cake Recipe:
(recipe kindly shared by Regina Power)

Cake Batter:
1 really nice, ripe, fresh pineapple (3 cups)
1-2 lemons juiced (taste the batter and see how tart you want it to be)
1½ half cups of fresh Thai coconut meat (approx 4 Thai Coconuts as sometimes you get more water than flesh.)
2 cups of dry cashew nuts (they get really soft when you soak for a few hours.)
3 tablespoon Agave Nectar
1 tablespoon Yacon Syrup (if you don't have yacon syrup, just use an additional tablespoon of Agave or Honey or to taste.)
2 Tablespoons lecithin*
1 Tablespoon of honey
¾ cup organic extra virgin coconut oil

Note:
*Soy Lecithin consists of three types of phospholipids, which are basically phosphorus rich lipids. The purpose of using soy lecithin in raw desserts is to emulsify and homogenize the fats and the aqueous liquids so that they do not separate, and it also helps make the dessert creamier. This desert will work without it - I didn't have any and it worked fine!

Nut Crust:
2 cups of dry almonds
Rind of one lemon
Some lemon juice to your liking
3/4 cup of pitted dates

Pineapple Agar-Agar Jelly Topping:
500ml fresh, unsweetened pineapple juice
200ml water
1 tablespoon lemon juice
3 tablespoons agave syrup
5g agar-agar powder
extra water, if needed

Method:

Pre-soak the cashew nuts for the batter in fresh cold water for a few hours to soften.

Place the crust ingredients in a food-processor and process until mixture forms a ball. Take out small chunks and press them into the bottom of a spring form pan, pressing to form a solid base. Be sure the cover up the seams of the spring form pan as the cake batter may leak through the sides since it tends to be a bit runny until it hardens.

Open the Thai coconuts by shaving the pith off the top of the nut with a large kitchen knife, revealing a bald ‘friar tuck’ nut. Keeping your hands away from the coconut, whack the nut on the ‘hairline’ with the sharp corner of the butt of the knife (not the tip) and wedge the base of the blade into the crack, working it backwards and forwards until the round ‘lid’ of the coconut lifts off. See a video demo here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THEdI_gSNQ4

Serve the coconut water as a refreshing drink. Enjoy... it is delicious!

Scoop out the flesh of the coconuts and place the flesh in a heavy-duty blender with the remaining cake-batter ingredients, except the coconut oil, and blend on high speed until smooth and creamy. Taste the batter and adjust the lemon juice and sweeteners to your liking. Then when the batter is very smooth, and whist the blender is still running, add the coconut oil and blend until well incorporated and mixture is smooth and uniform. This is the stage where you get to see if your blender can handle the job, as it can really start to work hard at this point.

Pour the cake batter into the prepared spring-form tin, covering the nut-base. Refrigerate for approximately 3-4 hours until the mixture hardens. Any left-over batter can be poured into dessert dishes and keep in the fridge. Put a plate underneath the spring-form tin in case it decides to leak a bit. Allow to set before adding the pineapple agar-jelly topping.

To make the pineapple agar jelly topping, bring the pineapple juice and water to the boil and simmer for 10-15 minutes. Measure the amount of liquid remaining and add extra water to make up to 60ml. Add the agar-agar powder and bring liquid to boil again, stirring until dissolved. Add agave syrup, sweetening to taste. Allow the agar jelly to cool slightly, but don’t allow it to set too much. Pour the jelly syrup over the cake and return it to the fridge for the final setting – it won’t take long, 15-20 mins should be enough.

And Voi-La... there you have it: Pineapple Lemon Qi Cake...

Yum-Oh!
Eat & enjoy!

Kota Bharu Breakfast Revisited

Lately I've been longing for some of the food we ate on a trip through central and northern Malaysia a few years ago... Still haven't found anything in Sydney *sigh* like the Nasi Lemak Bungkus that we had at the night Markets up in Kota Bharu on the border of Malaysia and Thailand... The other thing I've been longing for is the delicious curry breakfasts we had in cafes sprinkled throughout the country towns we visited. The first picture shows a typical breakfast meal: rice, curries, a fried egg and condiments. The second picture is my breakfast this morning, a red lentil curry on red rice with salty mango pickle, at home in Sydney Australia, dreaming of Malaysia.

Curried Red-lentil Dahl with Red Rice, Egg and Mango Pickle
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
oil
1 tablespoon mild curry powder
1 teaspoon tamarind concentrate
1 teaspoon palm sugar
1.5 cups red lentils
water

red rice, cooked
fried egg
mango pickle

Slice and fry the onion in a little oil until golden. Add chopped garlic and fry lightly. Add curry powder and fry until fragrant. Add lentils, water, palm sugar and tamarind paste and simmer until lentils are tender, approx 15-20 mins.

serve with boiled red rice, a fried egg and a spoonful of mango pickle.

Mmmmmm - Yum-oh!

Plant's Eye View - a Talk by Michael Pollan on TED.com

I was recently introduced to TED - a remarkable site that publishes video of talks by some of the world's most remarkable thinkers and do-ers. Below is a sample of a talk by the Real Food journalist Michael Pollan, who I wrote about in an earlier post... You can watch the talk full-screen by clicking the slightly obscured link in the top right hand corner of the embedded video (the width of my blog column cuts off a teensy bit of the edge of the video) or click here to access the video on the TED site.

It's worth having a browse of the rest of the TED site for inspiration!

Rice Cracker Infinity-Screen Experiment:

Simple pics today: - a stack of five tamari-seaweed brown-rice crackers and a set of three glasses. These were taken about six months ago and were among my first attempts at learning studio lighting techniques using an 'infinity screen' - which in this case was a curved piece of white PVC sheeting taped to a metal laundry-basket frame, so that the background behind the objects is smooth and white without the intrusion of any angles, edges or corners.

Here's some of the sites that were helpful when I was learning about studio lighting:

Digital Photography School
Jayden's Steamy Kitchen
David Kilpatrick at Photoclub Alpha
Kaylins Kitchen
Dragon Image - where I bought a kit of 3 soft-box lights, in Artarmon, Sydney.

Cafe Creme

Breakfast at Centennial Parklands Cafe, Sydney. The early morning light on the verandah is sublime for food photography!

Macchiato

Breakfast at Centennial Parklands Cafe, Sydney. The early morning light on the verandah is sublime for food photography!

Toast & Jam

Breakfast at Centennial Parklands Cafe, Sydney. The early morning light on the verandah is sublime for food photography!

Long-Time-No-Hear: Where's all the Recipes???

I've got a new Blog!

Where's all the recipes??? Weeeell, I have still been eating great food, just not necessarily photographing it...! Making a really good food-photograph literally takes HOURS, by the time you fiddle with all the props and ingredients and lighting... which is a perfect pass-time for a winter's afternoon. But the serendipitous summer days more recently have drawn me out of the kitchen and onto more spontaneous subjects. I'm sure the kitchen will once again become a food-photography studio when the weather cools down and there will be more great recipes coming your way - but for now, let me share some of my other photographic adventures on my new blog: Photo-Ventura.

http://photo-ventura.blogspot.com

According to Spanish-English dictionaries,
Ventura means:

1. Happiness, Contentment (felicidad).

2. Luck (suerte)'por ventura' = luckily
'Buena ventura' = good fortune told by gypsies and vagrants.
'Probar ventura' = to try one’s fortune, to venture at, on, or upon.

3. Contingency, casualness, happenstance, adventure.
'a la (buena) ventura' = at random; without a fixed plan.

4. Future; that which is to come.

... which is a pretty good description of my approach to photography...!

This new blog will showcase selected photos from my travels in Australia and O/S; of dance; plants; people; Life.

If you are interested in receiving these images as emails, simply log onto the site and subscribe to this blog, in the same way that you are currently subscribed to Yum-oh.

Happy New Year, may the year of the Ox bring stability and peace.

How Much Food is $700 Billion??

In the light of the recent stormy weather on the Global Financial front and the various knee jerk responses of governments around the world, reading this article on the SBS website gave me pause for thought. It seems astounding that $700 billion can be found 'just like that' to prop up a bubble of greed, when the far more alarming problems of global warming and food shortages could be all but solved with a fraction of that money.

To bring it all down to a human scale the SBS article (by journalist Phil Lees - creator of the Cambodian Food blog Phnomenon) crunches the numbers of the $700 billion corporate bailout down into bite sized chunks so we can picture exactly how much food that figure translates into - and how many starving people could be fed.

Here are some examples of what $700 Billion equals:

• $700 Billion = 2000 good old American Apple Pies for every man woman and child currently living in the United States


• $700 Billion = Dinner for the entire population of the top 5 most populated countries, at one of the world's most expensive restaurants: El Bulli in Spain could shout the entire population of China, India, USA, Indonesia and Brazil to dinner.


• $700 Billion at the other end of the spectrum = the UN World Food Programme able to feed 86 million people for the next 23 years.

Like I said, Food for Thought...



This is a photo from the fresh-produce marketplace in Kota Bahru in northern Malaysia, 2007.

A Crop of Cumquats

Last weekend, I just had to get into the garden – it hadn’t had any attention for months and the springtime jobs of pruning and tidying were over-due. The cumquat trees especially needed a serious prune, to clear out the heart of the tree and get them ready to spark up with spring growth in coming months. I’d planted five of these trees in pots for Feng Shui reasons in the garden of my Natural Medicine clinic – the bright orange fruit are considered a symbol of luck and prosperity in Chinese landscape-design - and I have to say, I like a tree that self-decorates with cute orange baubles! Some of the branches that needed to be removed were laden with this golden fruit and I couldn’t be let them to go to waste.

So the question arose: what to do with a bowl full of Cumquats?

Consulting the Oracle (Google) produced numerous articles involving advice and recipes for dealing with a crop of cumquats, including:

Cumquat Marmalade: from Cooks Almost Everything
Candied Cumquats: from Morsels and Musings
Kumquat, Fennel and Blood Orange Salad: from Erins Kitchen
Kumquat Compote: from Seattle Bonvivant
Kumquat Salsa: from Garrett at Vanilla Garlic
Wickid Kumquatini Cocktails: from Wallflower Entertaining

But in the end, what really captured my imagination was a mention of:
Cumquat Curd… I couldn’t find the actual recipe online – if no-one else is doing it, does that mean it’s a really good idea (that no-one in the Whole-Wide-World has thought of yet) or really a bad idea (that no-one in their right mind would even consider)?? - but the concept piqued my interest. So using my mum’s recipe for Lemon Butter, I juiced and zested my cumquats, reserving the skins to make into a pickle and here is the result:

The verdict? Cumquat Curd IS a really good idea - Yum-oh!

Cumquat Curd Recipe:
4 eggs
140g sugar
70g unsalted butter
2 tsp grated cumquat zest
120ml cumquat juice

Whisk egg yolks and sugar until well combined but not frothy.

Tip into a heavy-based non-reactive saucepan and add butter, zest and juice.

Stirring constantly, bring to simmering point over a medium-high heat (about five minutes).

As soon as bubbles appear, remove from heat, still stirring. Allow to cool. Transfer to sterilised jars and seal.

Makes 2 cups

Cumquat Pickle

I wanted a recipe that would make use of the skins of the cumquats after I had juiced them for making the cumquat curd.

Cumquats are unlike other citrus fruits, as the peel is less bitter than the flesh. They produce an excellent sweet-and-sour pickle, combined with palm-sugar, vinegar and spices.

Cumquat Pickle Ingredients:
250 g cumquat rinds
100 ml white wine vinegar
2 cardamom pods, crushed
1 cinnamon stick
1 cm piece of ginger, shredded
1 tsp sea salt
60g soft palm sugar
2 cloves
water

Cut the cumquat skins in half and put them in a saucepan with the salt and water to cover. Bring to the boil then simmer for 5 minutes. Drain the kumquats, discarding any pips.

Place the vinegar, palm sugar, cardamom pods, clove and the shredded ginger into a pan and heat gently, stirring, until all the palm sugar is dissolved. Raise the heat and bring to the boil, then add the pre-boiled, drained cumquat rinds. Simmer for one minute, then allow to cool slightly.

While the mixture is still medium-hot (about 75 degrees), ladle the cumquats and the liquid into warm, clean, pre-sterilized jars. Cover with non metal (ie vinegar-proof) lids and seal.

Store in a cool, dark, dry place for 1 month before using.

Cumquat Pickle is wonderful with Malaysian and Indian Curries.

Yum-oh!

Naggy's Fork

As you know from my previous posts, I've been exploring of the art of cutlery - and here's the latest results of fiddling with my fork...

After recently getting my friend Ingrid hooked on the cycling craze, we've taken to exploring some of Sydney's beautiful cycle-ways in our lunch-times and looking for suitable places where 'ladies might lunch'. Ingrid introduced me to one of her cafe discoveries - Naggy's - on Glebe Point Road, near the T-intersection of Wigram Road.

Great for breakfast as well as lunch, I took my parents there on their recent visit to the Big Smoke, and it was pronounced a resounding success.

One of my 'tests' for how cool and groovy a cafe is, is if the waiters don't bat an eyelid when I make 'strange requests' - like:

"Can I have a hot soy milk, please? yes, that's right, no coffee - think of it like a 'big fat baby chino'... hot soy with a sprinkle of chocolate on top..."

and "would you mind using this bread?" when I whip out my two wheat-free slices wrapped in foil...

Naggys' passed with flying colours, gracefully able to accommodate alternative dietary needs. And the cook out the back was simply a wizard, with everything arriving on the table perfectly done and at the same time.


Their Eggs Florentine - poached eggs plus spinach, mushrooms and Hollandaise sauce on sour-dough - definitely Yum-oh!



They were just as happy to serve up the 'no-carb' breakfast that my dad requested (yes, wheat intolerance seems to be genetic...)




The Bacon and eggs for my mum were simple and delightful...

And the coffee is an artform. (Especially my 'no-coffee' coffee!)



Great work, Naggy's - you're our new favourite thing!

Yum-oh!

Fatima's Fork

Waiting for friends to arrive at Fatima's Lebanese Restaurant on Cleveland Street Surry Hills and playing with my Canon IXUS pocket-camera... alas, no photos of the great food we were served, cos we were too busy chatting and eating when dinner arrived on the table, but it was definitely Yum-oh!

Moroccan Lamb & Chickpea Broth

Barbara served up this delicious soup at a recent celebration of Tim's 'significant birthday' (one of those with an 'oh' in it...), while Tim's latest Jazz recording was playing in the background.
















Tim and his friend John can be found early on any fine Tuesday morning, playing Saxophone and Double Bass outside Sydney's Central Station at the Elizabeth St entrance, before they both go off to work for the day. They were 'discovered' one recent morning by the manager of a recording studio and invited to cut the CD we were listening to, which I have to say sounds HOT! The CD will be available in the near future - I'll keep you posted when they release it. Knowing I live in a world where people still play great music in the streets for the love of it makes me - and a lot of other lucky Sydney-siders - feel filled with joy. Thanks Tim - and Happy Birthday!
















This photo was taken by photographer Marc Burlace, for a Penguin Books street-theatre promo that was going on outside Central at the same time as Tim and John were playing, with three people dressed like 1930's characters handing out old Penguins to celebrate Penguin Books' birthday.

The recipe for Barbara's Morroccan Lamb and Chickpea Broth is a two-step, requiring some preparation the night before the day that you want to serve it.

The-Night-Before: Prepare the Lamb Broth
500g lamb neck
4 tablespoons olive oil
100g onion
100g carrot
100g leek
2 tablespoons cumin seed
4 sprigs of thyme

Brown the lamb neck in oil, adding the onion and cumin seed, frying until fragrant. Add the remaining vegetables and the thyme and cover with water, simmering two-and-a-half hours until tender. Cool and strain the broth, reserving the lamb-meat and the broth. Dice the meat into bite-sized pieces. Refrigerate the broth over night and skim off any fat the next morning.

Also, cook 2 cups chickpeas in boiling water until tender. Strain and cool, refrigerating until ready to make the soup the next day.

The Next Day: Cooking the Soup
250g onion
250g carrot
250g leek
1 tablespoon chopped garlic
1/1/2 tablespoons turmeric
2 tablespoons cumin
1/1/2 tablespoons coriander
1/2 tablespoon cayenne
2 litres of lamb stock
2 cups cooked chickpeas
juice of half a lemon
1/2 wedge of preserved lemon, rinsed of salt and slivered
salt and pepper to taste

Heat oil in a large soup pot and sweat the onions and garlic. Add the diced vegetables and stir-fry for 10 minutes. Add the spices and cook three minutes until fragrant, stirring to prevent burning. Add the lamb stock and simmer for 1 hour. Add diced lamb meat, slivered preserved lemon rind and chickpeas. When ready to serve, add lemon juice and season with salt and pepper to taste.

Yum-oh!

So You Think You Can Dance - At Breakfast?!

In keeping with the themes of dancing and food, my sister Kirsten sent this to me after seeing yesterday's silly video. I don't know who created it - please enlighten me if you do know, as I like to give credit for creativity, but it looks like: "Danish Bacon company pays homage to Citroen's "Transformer"..."



Have a fun day. Yum-oh!

Hungry for Vegies!

This week I've developed a hankering for vegetables - can't get enough of them! IKU Wholefoods, the iconic Organic Vegan diner at 612A Darling Street Rozelle seemed the answer to my prayers. They also have shops in: Glebe, Darlinghurst, Waverly, Neutral Bay, several City stores and Bondi Beach - full of fresh, wholesome, lush Vegan food.

Their Gluten-free Vegan Lasagne is second to none!
















Yum-oh!

I also wanted to try out my new 'stealth' camera - the kind you can take to a restaurant to snap pics without needing an OB van and a team of assistants to carry all the gear that goes into a studio shoot with a high-end SLR. After researching different point-and-shoots, I settled on this little beauty: the Canon IXUS 860... The images are crystal-clear, it does well in low light and has anti-shake technology built in.

The front-bar at Rozelle's IKU is great for photographing your lunch, with a rustic wooden counter and gorgeous sunlight bouncing in off the street.

After lunch, I stopped by the park to do a little Tai Chi and to try out the video function on the IXUS, which is great quality for such a little pocket-rocket.



I made this silly video, of my warm-up 'dance', which is a sort of tribute to Matt Harding, a groovy young American adventurer who Andrew Denton interviewed last week on Enough Rope on ABC TV.

You truly should watch his video - click this link - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1E-4oPBFwNY
- it's the BEST travelogue ever!








And here's Matt's latest 2008 video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY&feature=user

Bankstown Bites!

Celebrity Chefs, Dumpling Demonstrations, Japanese Squid-balls and Authentic French Buckwheat crepes - some of the fabulous fare on show at the Annual Bankstown Bites Food Festival, when Greg and Beth and I ventured out there a few weekends ago.

As we browsed the stalls in a moveable feast, we decided to opt for a few bites of 'everything', sharing the dishes we bought between us, so we could sample as many as possible of the delights on offer...

Here's celebrity chef "Fast" Ed Halmagyi cooking up a storm while an energetic band of septuagenarian Greek kyries danced to Zorba's theme-song.






Here's Jacques, pouring-spreading-sugaring-flipping-lemon-juicing a crisp buckwheat crepe:

The special crepe batter-spreading paddle...

Mmmm, authentic French Lemon-Sugar Crepe, piping hot and crispy-crisp!


We signed up for one of the several
'cooks tours' that were on offer.
Our calm and peaceful Dumpling-Demo chefs whipped up batches of tasty dumplings in three different styles, in next-to-no-time-at-all...

Their restaurant New Top One is located at 277 Beamish St in Campsie. Ph 9787 8766. They open at 5.30am (!) and serve delicious dumplings like these, along with other Oriental delights, till 3pm - clearly one for the early birds and hearty breakfast-eaters!


















This is my dear friend My Le Thi at work - she is an exceptional Vietnamese Artist - and a great cook too! Here she is, helping some young kids get started on their creative adventures, making panels for inclusion in the Namescapes community art project. My Le is also the founding president of the Ian Bowie Memorial Association, which she formed in the name of her late partner Ian Bowie, to raise funds to carry on Ian's work of mentoring young people in the Theatre Arts. (I'm the volunteer treasurer of this charitable organisation and we will be having our second fundraising concert later in the year - will keep you posted...)

Lebanese Chicken Kebabs, barbecued by the batch...



A team of fast and efficient Japanese chefs made thousands of Squid and Prawn Balls: a seafood and vegetable batter is poured into scorching-hot cast-iron half-sphere griddle molds and the team's shiva-hands dart about over the griddle, deftly turning the balls with chopsticks when half-cooked, allowing the batter to expand on the turned side to make a sphere.







Dressed up with Japanese BBQ sauce, wasabi-mayonnaise and gossamer thin fish-paper flakes, these little snacks are seriously
Yum-oh!

Sydney Seafood School - Christine Manfield

When my sweet friends Ordette and Paul and Carol and Greg and Karen and Faith asked me what I wanted for my birthday earlier in the year, I said: "Please, no more THINGS! I've got more than enough 'stuff' - it's experiences that I treasure most..."
And their response was perfect: a gift voucher to the
Sydney Seafood School at the Fish Markets in Pyrmont.



















So I had a look at the program for the year and the selection of fine chefs they have on rotation, settling at last on Christine Manfield. Her unique style of international cuisine was especially appealing to me - she has taught cooking and created exemplary restaurants in both Europe and Australia and her latest venture is Universal Restaurant, situated in East Sydney - at Republic 2 Courtyard in Palmer Street (between Burton and Liverpool streets) Darlinghurst 2010.

For bookings, Phone: 02 9331 0709.

















The Seafood School class was excellent. Christine Manfield's presentation was very smooth and professional - as you'd expect from a chef of her calibre - and her good relationship with a great team of support staff was very evident. The kitchen auditorium and cooking stations were very well laid out - I think there were about 40 people in the class, but it didn't feel crowded at all. The demonstration took about two hours where Christine cooked each of the dishes, explaining the ingredients and methods, with a few tips and trade secrets thrown in. The demonstration kitchen in the auditorium had mirrors over the bench, so it was easy to watch all stages of the process clearly.


















































After the Demo, we progressed into the kitchen, forming groups of five around island benches dotted around a big open room, with each member of the group electing to cook one of the dishes, making enough for all five members.

Drum-roll pur-leeze! - here's what we made:

Garlic Saffron Mussel Soup




Oyster and Soba Noodle Salad




Palm Sugar and Green Mango Fish




Deep-Fried Fish pieces




Crab Fried Rice




Comprehensive notes and recipes were provided, so we can reproduce these gems at home.

When we had co-ordinated getting all dishes to peak at the same time, we proceeded to the dining room to enjoy the fruits of our labours. The dinner was complimented by a $100 bottle of fine champagne, which was lost on me as I don't drink alcohol - but they also had bottles of Perrier freely available.





















In summary, I have to say the whole experience was an absolute delight - I can definitely recommend doing a class at the Sydney Seafood School - and THANK YOU to my beautiful friends for thinking of sending me on such a sumptuous experience!

Yum-oh!

A Smorgasbord of Dancers...

Apologies to the readers who want more recipes - there WILL be more in future, don't worry - but here's some more of the rich fare that has lately lured my eye away from the kitchen.

I consider it 'food for the soul'...!





















My long-time friends Dr Richard James Allen and Dr Karen Pearlman of the Physical TV Company invited me to witness the next stage of their creative process, a documentary film about Dance called: Doesn't Fit into a Box, inviting me to take stills photographs during the filming.

Over the last few years, Karen has been doing some Post-Doctoral Research in the Dance-Film area through a Fellowship with an organisation called Critical Path, based in Rushcutters Bay in Sydney. Through that research she says she didn't so much come up with answers, but rather - as is often the way when delving deeper into things - discovered still more questions.

So in this stage of the documentary-making, Karen was posing her questions to a diverse range of professional dancers and choreographers, asking:

"Where does Dance come from?"

"Where does Dance go when it leaves you?"

- and the ultimate existential question - "What is Dance for?"

It was fascinating to listen to the varied responses of the professional dancers and choreographers who were being interviewed. Their expertise ranged from classically trained ballet, to flamenco, to indigenous performance, to Japanese Butoh, to yoga and martial-arts, to contemporary experimental cross-media arts that weave movement and text and light and voice together into dance.

Sitting very still for 20 minutes at a time - not a pin may drop during filming! - over a twelve-hour day and focusing intently on the responses of these professional artists was an intense meditation that made me reflect on my own creative practice.

And I found myself coming up with my own responses to Karen's Questions:

"Creativity comes from the air;
through the crackling impulse of the thoughts and experiences we share with each other;
though the moments of inspiration that we scatter like seeds from our flowering;
through the enlightenment that the burning of our flame sheds around us...

When it passes through us, creativity continues -
in the lives we have touched, in the minds we have changed - it goes back into the air.

And 'what is creativity for?'

- well, you might as well ask:

'what is breathing for?'..."

Here is the view out the window of the dance studio as dusk fell. It had rained heavily throughout the day, but as you can see, all clouds have a silver - or in this case golden - lining.













Yum-oh!

Out & About...

I've been a bit slack in the Food Photography department lately... not because I haven't been eating - there's still been plenty of yum-oh in the tum-oh - just no time to photograph it!

For the last few weekends my camera's gaze has lifted from the dinner table and my mind has been occupied elsewhere, captivated by learning a host of new technical skills, as well as embracing new photographic opportunities outside the kitchen.

Shooting in RAW has been one of the technical things I've been exploring, bringing an appreciable difference (I think?!) to the quality of my finished images.

Another has been getting hold of a new lens - the Zuiko 12-60mm wide-angle zoom, which has opened a whole new window on my photographic world.

I've also been shooting in a whole variety of fascinating and (gasp!) 'non-food' areas, such as: weekend travel, stills for a contemporary dance documentary, a Buddhist garden centre, a Catholic christening and promo shots for a pregnant yoga-teacher colleague... (you can see I'm a pluralist at heart!)

For now, here's a collage of some pics from a wintry day-trip to Shell Harbour, down near Wollongong on the South Coast of NSW, about an hour-and-a-half from Sydney.






















And a cup of hot soy-milk with chocolate stripes on top - just to show I haven't entirely abandoned Food Photography!

Yum-oh!

Learning New Presentation Skills

Today I learned some new presentation skills! So If you'll bear with me, here's a collage of some of the photos from Marienne's Zesty Citron Cake shoot...

This was done using the free software on Picassa from Google. Picassa is a great picture-organising tool, I don't know how I'd keep track of my pics without it - it's super-fast for browsing images and has some really good picture-editing tools. For some of the simple fixes - cropping / straightening / lightening / darkening / sharpening / saturation / etc - it is almost as good as PhotoShop and nowhere NEAR the mucking about.

Who said there's no such thing as a Free Lunch??! lol.