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:

dmblgit.nov.2006@gmail.com

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.

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 :)

It’s happened to you before. You’re browsing away happily, surfing from one blog to the next, enjoying content that a thousand monkeys typing for a thousand years would have no hope of recreating, when all of a sudden it happens. You come across a site that looks like a blog, calls itself a blog, is for all intents and purposes blog-like in nature… but reads like a paid advertorial on page 3 of your local gossip rag. Something that one monkey could knock up in a casual afternoon quite happily, and still have time for banana or two.

I’m not generally one to bag other people out, but it’s got to a point where I think something needs to be said, because it annoys me when the spirit of blogging and the organic dissemination of information is treated with such calculating disdain.

Such is the world of “Celebrity” Chef, Benjamin Christie, and his attempts to boost his own celebrity status by manufacturing hype. This takes the form of his blog, his Wikipedia entry about himself and his tv show, written by himself, and his frequent unsolicited emails asking me and others in the food blogging community for links and to visit his website, complete with web bugs and statistics tracking links built in (note the actual link address in image).

It’s no surprise why these kinds of sites exist. The Internet is an important part of our social consciousness these days. People rely on it for news, entertainment, and community, with blogs forming a large chunk of that world. It makes sense that where the people go…so the advertisers go. Everyone knows that you have to be online now if you want to capture that highly prized share of the market.

So why does this grate me so much ? Benjamin Christie has done a number of things. He’s appeared in a TV series and published a book (or had a hand it at some point), and from what I can gather (from reading his own publicity material) travels around the world as an ambassador for Australian native food. These are all good things… but that doesn’t make him a celebrity…

The blogging community is not stupid. We are normal people, with normal lives, who choose to congregate around each other websites in order to share ideas and receive inspiration. If you want to join in, feel free… Just don’t use your blog as a thinly veiled marketing ploy for all of your other products. If you do so, don’t call it a blog, call it a marketing portal. A self contained world where you are the most famous person in the world and everything else thinks so too.

Doing a number of searches online, you find it really difficult to find anything about him, that wasn’t either written directly by him (or one of his “team”), or posted as an advertisement for his various wares. Now I have no problem with commercialism. I have no problem with people getting paid for what they do. What I have a problem with are advertisements disguised as journalism, and with someone trying to hijack the food blogging community for their own marketing purposes.

The beauty of blogs is that they are written by real people. Ideas are shared freely and the comments you receive are taken on board and evolved into a new understanding of food, wine, or whatever you happen to be writing about. The best blogs have evolved over time through the authors writing great content that people want to read, and through actively commenting and encouraging others.

As soon as you start to try and change the course of public opinion through surreptitious ways, you start treading a very fine line between raising awareness and outright spam, and the nature of blogging itself takes a sharp and painful twist back to the days of media companies telling us what we should think.

To me it all seems like the emperors new clothes in blog form:

Yes there’s great content, because I say there’s great content !
Yes I’m a celebrity, because I say I’m a celebrity !

I think it’s time for Benjamin Christie to put his pants back on… because no-one wants to see it.

** Update **
Another article by Ed from Tomato about Mr Christie and his advice.
Responses to Ed’s post on Food Blog S’cool
A bit of history on the situation as pointed out by Sam from Becks & Posh

*** Update II ***
After some creative but accurate editions to BC’s wikipedia entry by Ed, the page was promptly reverted to it’s original glowing praise version. The IP address used to make that change, was incidentally used to visit my website recently, referred via one of his stats pages. The world is full of strange coincidences it seems…

Originally raised by Melissa of The Travelers Lunchbox, my first thought was “What a morbid sounding idea for a theme…”. But then who am I to shirk my civic duties by listing as many “must try” foods as I can think of, after being tagged by the lovely (I assume) JenJen (see, anyone with a double name must be lovely) of “I love milk and cookies” fame (and don’t we all really).

So… to the list. Which as far as I’m concerned is not the list of foods I would eat if I were about to die, but more a collection of food experiences I think would be nice for most people to try at least once in their lives.

1) Kiwi hot dogs - Being a former Kiwi, I can think of nothing more quintessential divisive to healthy eating than the Kiwi hot dog. It’s basically a thick sausage on a stick, rolled in flour and dipped in batter, then deep fried til golden and crispy. Not happy with the level of fat and oil already present in the sausage and batter, the inventive Kiwi’s then up the ante by soaking the top half of the dog in tomato sauce (ketchup for recalcitrant Americans). I have fond memories of stuffing down several of these bad boys before collapsing onto the couch in a fat induced stupor. Incidentally they also make the list of “Things to eat that will make you die”.

2) Feijoa - Another New Zealand classic, the Feijoa, also known as Pineapple Guava or Guavasteen, is originally from South America, but has now been adopted as New Zealands own. It’s a bizarre little fruit that I can only describe as being sweet, sour, fruity, and savoury, all at the same time. Inventive Kiwi’s have turned it into smoothies, sorbets, and even vodka. In its most basic form, you can just cut it in half and scoop out the middle with a teaspoon as you would a kiwifruit. Definitely something to try.

3) Freshly Shucked Natural Oysters - This may be a good time to introduce my concept of assessing someones commitment to food. A sort of “how gourmet is gourmet” rating scale. It involves many layers of tests and I wouldn’t be the snob I am with out them. Pronouncing Riesling “Rise-ling” is one of them… as is preferring the taste of instant coffee to properly made espresso. A general aversion to any particular fruits or vegetables for no apparent reason other than “I just don’t like them” is also a big draw breaker. Towards the bottom of the list, this one comes in. Natural oysters, straight from the sea, out of the shell and into the mouth, with or without a little lemon juice or salt… are the ultimate in gourmet appreciation. You either hate them, and can’t abide the idea of a slimey thing like that slivering down your throat. Or you tremble in anticipation of the luscious feeling of freshness filling your mouth and shovel as many down as you can before anyone else gets to them.

For those in the non-oyster or cooked oyster camp… Just give it a go… at least once.

4) Lamb roast with all the trimmings - I’ve blogged previously about my love of a good lamb roast, so I’ll save the in depth explanation. Suffice to say that if you’ve never been bothered to go to the trouble of making a big home cooked meal yourself, with the stuffing, and the mint sauce, and the gravy, and the honeyed carrots, and sparkling grape juice (ok, that’s just my family), then you are really missing out on something.

5) Hāngi - A traditional Maori Hangi is something to be experienced. Common to many Polynesians cultures, but slightly different in each of them, it’s basically the process of cooking food in the earth, by digging a hole and burying the food amongst a pile of hot rocks. The food is typically meat like pork, mutton, and chicken, and vegetables like potato, pumpkin, and the all important kumara. It all gets put into baskets and wrapped in cloths that have been soaked in water, then put into the pit amongst hot rocks and covered for a few hours. There’s something very satisfying and humble about cooking in the earth, so if you ever get the chance, I’d say go for it.

That’s all I can think of for now. I know there are plenty more, but I can’t think of them at the moment. One thing I will add is that where any good food exists, great wine can only serve to highten the experience. So for all those beer drinking, wine haters out there… get off the wagon and give let your tastebuds do some work for once in your life. They’ll thank you for it later.

No it’s not Perth’s answer to the Page 3 girls, It’s actually the latest new style of news website produced locally, for Perth people.

PerthNorg (a contraction of News Organisation), is a community driven website featuring news, sport, lifestyle, and basically anything else you can think of that people want to read about. The idea is that anyone who registers with the site can submit stories, photos, links etc, and then vote on other stories, based on their level of interest/relevance. That means the most important and/or interesting stories will rise to the top, and the rest will float away into the never never of cyberspace.

It’s great for anyone who is now so entrenched in the world of blogs and online media that they cringe when reading a magazine, and look desperately for a comment box under each article in the newspaper (namely me). Collaborative journalism at it’s most raw and basic.

So please, especially if you’re a Perth resident, head over to the side, check it out, and if there’s some news affecting you that you think should be on there… add it ! It’s that simple. No longer should this town be shackled by the bonds of media conglomerates telling us what the news is.

Ok, that’s as “fight the power” as I’m going to get for a Friday afternoon… I should also note that I have a regular blog/column over at PerthNorg, so you’ll find some of my articles popping up there too, once I figure out what I’m going to write.

Dear faithful readers… It would seem I’ve become a bit distracted of late… and whilst I have a bunch of posts waiting in the wings for their run in the sun, the motivation to finish them is rapidly diminishing in the face of the overwhelming distraction provided by my latest toy.

So feel free to check out my recent photos on Flickr, which I seem to find easier to regularly update, and where you can leave equally witty comments that I will appreciate just as much, until I finally get my act together and write some real posts up.

Smooches all round.
Matt

Well I’ve been given a sympathy tag for this Meme by the always friendly Ange of Vicious Ange (who’s website is about as vicious as mine is abstract… or gourmet for that matter).

So here goes with the 5 things meme.

5 items in the freezer

1. Breadcrumbs: you never know when you will need them and I can never be bothered getting the food processor out to chomp them up… So when i finally give in to the relentness need for bread filling in my dishes, I make lots and freeze the rest.
2. Ice cubes: Ummm yeh… You fill up these little trays with water and then put them in drinks to make them cold. I know what you’re thinking… I was amazed too the first time I heard about them.
3. Chicken Stock ala Michel Roux: I just bought Michel Roux’s excellent book called “Sauces”. I should probably not admit to this, but i’ve never made my own stock before, and so just last night while waiting for the football game to start, I put together a couple of litres of chicken stock. It turned out great… So i’ve got a litre in fridge, and froze the rest.
4. Turkish Bread Burgers - I love turkish bread… but I’m not organised enough to make sure I always but it fresh. So from time to time I buy a bunch of loaves and freeze them. Not as great as fresh bread of course, but after defrosting and toasted it over a flame, its great.
5. Bugger… I really don’t use my freezer that much… I’m stuck already… now i know why I don’t get tagged for these things. Lets go with Chorizo… which is technically in the fridge and not the freezer, but is becoming more and more of a staple food for me every time I use it. I think I could plan an entire meal around that one sausage…

5 items in my closet

1. My safari suit - The best $20 I’ve ever spent at the Good Sammy’s. That suit has seen some good times, and has a way of turning every party into a 70’s cheese fest. Plastic white rimmed, rose coloured aviator glasses are the perfect companion.
2. A wooden tennis raquet - Which was probably pretty top of the range back when Bjorn Borg ruled the courts… but has since faded into anonymity since your fancy carbon fibre types came along… It’s really there only to make a fourth raquet alongside the rest of my collection, just in case I ever need to organise an impromptu game of doubles and noone else has a raquet… which may just happen one day.
3. Countless shoes that don’t belong to me - I have no idea where they all came from, I think some of them evolved in there, or were created through some kind of molecular fission. Either way, every time I open the closet there are more shoes in there than before.
4. Bull worker - I inherited this from my Dad. I have no idea how to use it, or why anyone ever would. I can however confirm that bulging pecs and ripped lats are a little more difficult to attain than squeezing this thing occasionally.
5. About 20kg of green coffee beans - Storage space is limited these days, and cool dry storage space even more so. Hence whenever I order my green coffee online it gets sent back in nice little cotton sacks and is safely stored away in the closet for me to roast when the urge strikes.

5 items in my car

1. Takeaway coffee cups - That I buy myself… to make takeaway coffee at home (which means I can still make myself a coffee in the morning even if I’m running late for work).
2. CD’s without cases and CD cases without CD’s - It’s about as bad as the ongoing missing sock fiasco in my drawers, but I can never seem to find the CD I want to listen to in the actual case it came in, and when I do find the CD, there is never a matching case… Coincidence ?? I think not !
3. Picnic Blanket - because you never know when the need to picnic is going to strike, and I hate getting grass stains on my knees. It’s tartan of course…because I think it’s a requirement that all picnic blankets be tartan.
4. Jumper leads - It’s happened one too many times and I refuse to be at the complete mercy of strangers in car parks again.
5. Not petrol - I think a car needs to earn its petrol. Really… If you give it to them all the time they get complacent. I make my car work for it. If I can’t drive for at least 3 days with the little orange fuel light on, then something is seriously awry. Suprisingly I have only run out of fuel completely once.

5 items in my purse

Well we can see who this meme is catered towards can’t we ?? :) Lets go with wallet.

1. A membership card to a video library that closed down about 4 years ago. It was a lifetime membership when I got it, so i’m hanging onto it just in case they ever open up again. It’ll save so much time having to reapply.
2. Every drivers licence i’ve had in the last 5 years… Some from when I had facial hair and some without. Just in case I need to get myself into a nightclub but I don’t look enough like myself for them to believe it’s me.
3. An advanced go-kart licence - That means I get to drive the fast go-karts when I go to Kart World… Which are infinitely faster than the normal ones. Yeh, i know you’re jealous…
4. Timezone VIP Powercard - I don’t know if Timezone even still exists, back in the day it was the best chain of video game arcades around, before Xbox’s and Nintedo’s and Playstations killed the market. They brought out these Powercards God knows how long ago to make it so you don’t use coins in the machines… My VIP status card meant I got discounts on games. That was a serious status symbol back then.
5. Enough Subway stamps to get a footlong for free !! - I haven’t been to subway in a long time, but I still seem to accumulate the stamps. Not the greatest meal, but sometimes (and i mean rarely) the thought of a footlong meatball sub smothered in bbq sauce just gets to me.

And I’m done… That was suprisingly fun… Perhaps because I got to tell a lot more stories than would otherwise have made it in under the “gourmet food” classification I tend to apply to myself. Thanks again to Ange for letting me know.

I hereby blanket tag anyone who reads this post that runs their own blog and hasn’t participated yet. Yeah, that means you ! Sucka.

Ok, well i’m not sure if this is going to go anywhere or not, but I’m toying with the idea of doing some video blogging… Just short clips of various/random kitchen/food/me getting drunk and falling over comically type things. I’m aiming for somewhere in between Jamie Oliver’s trip to Italy, and the Funniest home video where the guy gets hit in the nuts with a stick.

So as a first effort, here is perhaps one of my crappiest ever efforts at pouring latte art. Not helped by the fact that I had to hold my phone with one hand, and normally use it to tilt the cup towards me a little… But no excuses…

So there you go… Video blogging… Feel free to let me know if this is in any way amusing/interesting/helpful/cathartic, and I may or may not continue.

To infinity and beyond !

Just a quick list of some of the food blogs I read on a daily basis (or whenever they post something).

The Food Palate - by Deborah - Sydney, Australia
The Stone Soup - by Jules - Sydney, Australia
Spice Blog - by Anthony - Perth, Australia
La Tartin Gourmande - by Bea - Boston, USA
Tomato - by Ed - Melbourne, Australia
Vicious Ange - by Ange - Melbourne, Australia

and some wine blogs:

Appellation Australia - by Cam, Australia
Basic Juice - by Beau, New York, USA
See, Sip, Taste, Hear - Collin & LA, Memphis, USA

I’ve found the trick is to steal a little bit from all of them…that way it always looks like I’m being original :) bom bom !