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 :

• Good Life Organic Pizza
• Apothecary
• Melting Pot
• Bridgewater Mill

and wineries:

• Glaeztner
• Rockfords
• D’Arenburg
• Nepenthe

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.

1. A Menu For Hope – This is popping up on virtually every food website in the world, and so just to be different, here it is on mine too. It’s an idea created by Pim of Chez Pim to raise money for the United Nations – World Food Programme, by raffling off prizes donated by food bloggers the world over and giving the proceeds to the programme. Last year $17,000 was raised, and this year looks to be much bigger. Check out Helen’s site for full details of how people in Australia can participate.
2. The Food Blog Awards have been announced over at the Well Fed Network. I may or may not be in the running for one of the categories, but if anyone should deign my little excuse for a blog as worthy of another, then feel free to drop my name.
3. Spam – an unfortunate part of life online is spam… and just lately I’ve been getting slammed by it. Over 3000 spam comments in the space of a few hours almost brought my site down for a while, and there doesn’t seem to be much let up. To try and combat that I’ve installed a few extra wordpress plugins, and upped the level on all my spam detection radars, so if you’re having trouble posting comments or viewing the site in general, please let me know by email and I’ll try and sort it out. On a completely unrelated note, if anyone needs some all natural hoodia or cialis, I may know where you can find some…