Good.
More to follow.
I’ll hopefully be giving a series on updates loosely based on the following places:
St Ali
Journal
Vue Du Monde
Interlude
Bar Lourinha
7 Grams
Brother Baba Budan
Gingerboy
Longrain
Mini
Movida
(and a whole lot of bars)
How lucid or useful any of this will be is yet to be determined…
If you had an internationally famous food blogger in your home town*… where would you take them for dinner ?
(Assume that your home town is Perth)
Currently on the list are Jacksons, Balthazar, and Star Anise. But feel free to remind me of all the great places I’m forgetting.
So we’re headed to Adelaide. City of a thousand churches, and capital city of the state which is home to some of the finest wine producing areas in the world.
So I’ve been hitting up every person I can think of for tips about good restaurants in the city, as well as any memorable winery experiences they’ve had when visiting areas like the Barossa Valley, McLaren Vale, and Adelaide Hills.
So far on the list of restaurants is :
and wineries:
and too many more to list…
So for the readers of this blog who may have spent some time and had some great food and wine in South Australia, please drop me a comment or email with your suggestions. We’ll be there for roughly a week, so I doubt we’ll have time to do all the things even on this list, but where there’s a will there’s a way.
Look forward to a round up of the more memorable moments when we get back !
Dear readers,
Just a quick note to apologise for the recent ups and down on this site, which is having a few growing pains at present while I look for a new server to house it on. So if you’ve had trouble getting onto the site recently I apologise, and hopefully will have it sorted out soon.
In the meantime, here’s a shot of my lovely sister who recently got married.
And here’s the first few experimental shots taken mostly by Sharon with our new Holga camera. Very cool :)
Just passing on a message here folks. The W.A Barista Championships are nearing, very close in fact. So here are a few of the details from the man himself, Ben Bicknell of the W.A Barista Academy, who is a representative of AASCA, and organiser of the competition.
W.A baristas, this is your chance to show your skills and get some great insight on the only competition that will give you access to compete in the Australian and World barista championships.
Get on down and get involved !
Hi,
Bringing you the latest event on the Coffee Industry Calendar of WA:
The official W.A. heats for the AASCA Australian Barista Championships!!This is just a quick message to give you the initial information about the AASCA WA Barista Championships (WABC). If you are a coffee distributor, coffee roaster or just know of other people who may be interested in this event, feel free to forward this email on.
This year the WABC is moving to a bigger, slicker and more accessible location of the City of Perth Town Hall (crn of Barrack and Hay Street).
The event will be held over two days on Saturday 3rd and Sunday 4th of March. An information session consisting of a general run through, tips for the competitions and the opportunity to practice on the competition espresso machine will be held around a week before the competition (possibly Sunday 25th February). Additional practice sessions may be available throughout the week preceding the competition.
Any resident within Western Australia is eligible to enter. The winner of the WABC will secure their place in the AASCA Australian Barista Championships on April 29th, the winner of which will represent the nation at the World Barista Championships in Tokyo, Japan later in the year.
The WABC is an independent competition run by the AustralAsian Specialty Coffee Association (AASCA), a national non-profit organization. See www.aasca.com for more details.
If you would like further information, would like a copy of the rules and score sheets or would like an application form, visit the AASCA website: www.aasca.com. Also, feel free to either give me a call on 0439 511 881, email me at ben@baristaacademy.com.au or alternatively email AASCA at enquiries@aasca.com.
Further information about the event and prizes will be forthcoming.
Cheers,
Ben Bicknell
______________
Secretary for the AASCA Australian Barista Guild
W.A. Convener for the AustralAsian Specialty Coffee Association
This is my official “thanks to the academy” post for my recent success in a little online food photography competition called Does My Blog Look Good In This (DMBLGIT). I hosted DMBLGIT a couple of months ago to great success, and just last month Annie of BonAppgeek did an equally fantastic job of organising it, made even better by the fact that I won something :)
So I was fortunate enough amongst some excellent competition to come away with awards for Aesthetics and Originality for my little inadvertently grainy experiment called “Meanwhile In Italy…”, which is funny because I’ve never been to Italy, but I’m sure it looks something like this somewhere tucked away in a little cafe.
So thanks again to Annie for organising and to the judges for thinking me worthy of something. However after noticing a trend from my competition two months ago, and also from last months, I am totally making pistachio covered truffles next time… :)
Just a little note on a few things that are happening in the food blogosphere.
To those unfamiliar with the funky acronym, it might sound like Mary Poppins has a severe lisp… but what It actually means is:
Does my blog look good in this ?!?! (I added the exclamation marks for dramatic effect)
It’s one of a whole host of memes/competitions that exist for food bloggers to show off their wares (and one of the most prestigious too), namely being the best example of food photography taken in any given month.
So, food bloggers the world over are hereby encouraged to send in their entries, which will be judged on the three categories of aesthetics, edibility, and creativity.
The photos are judged by a panel, currently consisting this time round of Cate from Sweetnicks, Celine of Black Salt, Anthony of Spiceblog, Bron of Bron Marshall, Lara of Cook and Eat and Still Life With, and yours truly.
There are then three winners - those with the top 3 combined scores. There are also three category winners - those with the highest scores in aesthetics, edibility and creativity that have not already won 1st/2nd or 3rd place. So there’s plenty of chances to bag yourself a placing.
Only one entry per person and the photo must have been posted on your blog during November.
Please send all entries to:
along with:
- Your Name, and your blog’s name
- Your photo (in jpg format, preferably under 500kb)
- A link to the post its from
- Some info about the camera it was taken with
Closing date for entries is the 28th of December.
Best of luck and get crackin.
Check back here shortly for updates as the entries start to roll in. As they have now.
A gallery of entries now lives here: DMBLGIT November 2006 gallery
*Update* : I’ve decided to add the gallery into this post as well. Please spread the word and get those entries in ! Full details of all photos submitted can be found on the DMBLGIT November 2006 gallery.
*Update II * : Entries close today !! The 28th December. Get yours in now or you’ll miss out…
*Update III * : Entries are now closed. It’s already way past the 28th in Australia, and this should be enough time for those in other timezones to catch up. Thanks to everyone who has submitted photos, and look out here for the announcement of winners soon.
Error: Could not access the root of your gallery: (/home/fioricof/public_html/abstractgourmet/dmblgit/). Make sure you set your gallery path properly in the plugin options.I dropped into Epic again yesterday and learnt an important lesson. If you hang around long enough talking to the barista’s you get handed all sorts of great coffee to try :)
I happened to come in while Megan (W.A Latte Art Champion this year) was going through the motions of making and perfecting every drink on the menu… just for practice (!) My latte art skills are quite obviously lacking compared to this… but perhaps one day I’ll be able to pull a few of them out. The coffee again was great.
Just a quick post that will (read: will not) appeal to the geeks amongst you.
I’ve been updating my wordpress plugins and such recently, and a few nice additions have come up.
Firstly, I’ve added a print friendly version to all of my posts. Which means if you’d like to print off a recipe or one of my highly clever attempts at humour, you can do so without the harsh tones of my ill concieved green and pink theme to hurt your sensibilities. It will also remove the sidebar and other links, so you get just the content you might need.
I’ve also added a new version of the FAlbum plugin for flickr, which shows my most recent photos and albums. The updated version is a mashup of FAlbum and Lightbox, a very funky javascript library that you may have come across on many sites that will display the images in a special popup flash window. You can test it now by clicking on any of the photos across the top of the page.
There is also the “Subcribe to comments” plugin thats been getting a bit of a work out of late… making sure anyone interested keeps up to date with the latest replies to any posts they are interested in.
In photo geek news… I’ve recently purchased a new lens for my camera. It’s a 50 mm prime f1.8 lens, and its making me happy to have some sweet low depth of field photos coming out. I’m thinking about getting into the photography side of things a bit more seriously too, with some excellent posts by Lara on “Still Life With…” giving me some nice tricks to try out.
Oh, and it was my birthday yesterday, and Sharon’s two days before that. Yay us :)
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