It’s a “truffle set”. Available at Amazon for a mere US$300. For a little glass jar, a truffle slicer and a brush. Without truffle. No comment, I might get sued.
Author: Gareth
Pea ravioli or soup balls
There I was, stumbling around the food blogs of the world, looking for people who might appreciate the book, when I tripped over a ball of pea soup at Hungry in Hogtown. I had a “ball” of intensely flavoured consommée served in a spoon at Manairo in Barcelona before Christmas, but Rob at HinH has deconstructed the orginal El Bulli technique, and then reconstructed it in his own kitchen. A most impressive dedication to molecular gastronomy, beatifully described.
Now, where did I leave that food grade sodium alginate?
Winosandfoodies like truffles…
Good reviews are always welcome, especially when they’re by someone who knows whereof they write. So thanks, Barbara at winosandfoodies.com for taking the time to read the book and post so nicely about it. She ploughed through the PDF edition in about a day, which shows great determination!
Don’t open the tin, Barbara…
Ice is nice
Seracs above the Fox Glacier, Westland
Back at my desk after touring the South Island with friends from London. Mt Cook, Queenstown, the glaciers on the West Coast, Punakaiki, the Abel Tasman (on Jamarh again) and dolphins at Kaikoura. A great time was had by all… Now I have to remember what I was doing before we left. At my age, that’s not trivial.
Listen here
Here’s the link [2010: now broken] for the Radio New Zealand archive of Saturday’s Kim Hill show. It seemed to go well. If you wonder why there’s a brief diversion into Welsh vocabulary in the middle, it’s because one of her earlier guests (physicist Paul Callaghan) was discussing colour, and opined that the Welsh had no word for green. He was wrong. The stream will be available for four weeks (Windows Media Player required).
On the radio
I‘m being interviewed by Kim Hill — New Zealand’s finest radio host — on her Saturday morning show on National Radio this week. Unless the schedule changes at the last minute, I’m due on at about 11-20am, after the regular food spot. You can listen to a live stream from the RNZ site (go to one of the links above and click on the Audio box in the top left of the page header), and the interview should be hosted on the RNZ site for four weeks afterwards. I’ll post a link when I have one.
Tinderbox does home calls
Mark Bernstein called in on the farm on Monday night. We ate, drank, and talked. A lot of each. And if I am to believe the message he and Linda left in our cottage visitors book, they enjoyed themselves enough to come back. We’re looking forward to it.
Strike a Flint
I‘m in the process of moving On The Farm over to a new blog, produced using the new web log “assistant” Flint. It’s got lots of nice gadgets, like the Google search box, and a nice way of organising the posts under “topics”, and it looks more contemporary — being done with css. It’s going to take me a while to move the whole of the old site over to the format, but it will be done. And the photo quality will improve. Watch this space.
[Update 2010: Those were the days!]
Give me your money
After much huffing and puffing, the new Limestone Hills web site is live, and quite probably kicking. It’s built with Freeway Pro, and uses some “actions” (a kind of plug-in that add functionality in the Freeway universe) to hook up to Mal’s e-commerce (free, and highly recommended by Freeway people). It looks as I think it should when viewed with Safari (the Mac OS browser), but is now reasonable in most browsers on most platforms that I’ve tried (which is not all that many).
So what’s new? Well, I think it looks a lot better – new header, new layout and organisation, and buttons to press and videos to view. And I can now accept credit card purchases of the book. Will anyone buy it? I need a few sales a month just to cover the bank charges…
New editions of The Truffle Book now available
Limestone Hills Publishing is pleased to announce the new limited edition hardback version of The Truffle Book, and for those who like to read on-screen, the brand new PDF edition. The hardback edition is strictly limited to 150 copies, reasonably priced at NZ$69.95, each hand-numbered and signed by the author. The PDF edition is priced at $NZ15 (roughly US$10, GB£5.70, E8.20) and I’ll sell as many as people want, but PDF purchasers who want the full book experience (more bandwidth, fully portable, no batteries required) will be able to buy either paper-based edition with a NZ$10 discount.
I’m now toying with ideas for the audiobook version. I need a cheap studio in Christchurch to record the basic audio tracks, and then I can do all the editing in Garageband. Anyone fancy a truffle podcast?