It was Father’s Day again a few weekends ago and my father is always the easiest person to buy or bake for. To buy: it was a gift voucher at an arts and crafts store (he paints) and to eat no complicated cake, but rather a dozen of my finest home-made Portuguese Custard tarts please. These are the only things he will give up his strict low cholesterol regimen for.

Despite the distinctly tropical look to it, the plate is one I brought all the way back from Japan when I lived there. I adore the beautiful lines of Japanese pottery and shipped back as much as I could with me even giving up precious shoe space for some of it which shows you how much I loved the stuff. Sure it has a tiny chip in it from when it made the big journey across the ocean and seas but I adore it and have not been able to find a replacement for it anywhere.

I was sent some Carnation Soy cooking milk which is the soy version of evaporated milk but it does not separate as soy usually does when heated so I decided to give it a try on these. Everyone could tell that there was something quite different about these and perhaps I would save the Carnation Soy if I were making these tarts for someone who was dairy intolerant or on a low fat diet. If you’re not used to the regular Portuguese custard tart flavour then you may not notice such an obvious difference. However if you do want to a coconut version, just use the recipe as below using milk and cream.

And as for the judging of which I spoke in the title? Excitingly, I was asked to be part of the Carnation Soy Masterchef judging challenge where all of the magazines in a magazine house (News, Pacific and ACP) were asked to create a recipe using the Carnation Soy and two judges from Nestle and I were to judge the success of these dishes. Going to the magazine houses was always going to be an interesting occasion, especially to ACP who had threatened legal action on me very early on in my blog’s life. Nevertheless, curious about my first time food judging, I happily went along.

Valli Little from Delicious: soy and White Chocolate Pannacotta and chocolate soy ice cream

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Foodus Bloggerus in action

I recently did a story about 10 Things You Should Know About Food Bloggers. I didn’t realise how popular it would be, after all it was just my rambling musings on the topic but what I did find out was exactly how alike we are as a breed and how fantastically comforting that was. The comments and astute observations of other food bloggers made made me chuckle too and gave rise to a second post on the topic, 12 MORE Things You Should Know About Food Bloggers.  So without further ado, here are another 12 things you should know about our particular, peculiar kind.

1. If you dine out with a Foodus Bloggerus, you’ll learn the art of dissecting food. An answer such as “It’s ok” is no longer sufficient. If you can create some oral poetry and describe the flavour or better still if you can pick the ingredients in it so that we can replicate it at home, you are a food blogger’s friend for life.

2. Is everyone at dinner thinking of ordering the same thing? Can you hear the voice in our head screaming “Dear God NO!” (or perhaps we even say it out loud). We love ordering different things as means that there’s more coverage of the dishes at the restaurant and it makes for a better story. In many cases when people ask me “What are you going to order?” my first response is “Depends on what you order” .

Oh yes there’s the Eiffel Tower around here somewhere..but look at the queue for ice cream!

3. If you’ve ever seen a food blogger’s holiday snaps you’ll notice that 90% of the photos will be of the food and restaurants that we’ve visited. Sure there may be 1 or 2 of the Eiffel Tower thrown in but it may just be because there happens to be the Jules Verne restaurant there. And ok we may also include the non food ones because we know that you’ll laugh at us if it’s full of food photos.

4. Sharing is caring and we love to share. Have you ever cut up a chocolate into quarters? We have. After all everyone has to have a taste right? Even if you don’t want to, just try it and let’s talk about it some more

5. Colleagues of food bloggers are the biggest benefactors of our habit.  In order to try and maintain a reasonable weight, it’s much easier to foist our creations on you. Send us your Weight Watchers bill.

6. How do Food bloggers kill time? Scouring obscure ethnic grocery stores and high end food emporiums for unusual ingredients. Is it exotic? Does it derive from the petals of a plant that only opens 3 days in a year? Check! Into the basket it goes.

7. Spouses of food bloggers are generally patient people, ones whose credit cards may have run slightly dry at the purchase of gold leaf and saffron (“Honey I had to buy it. And didn’t they say that gold is a good investment?”). I don’t want to say long suffering though as they do reap the benefits of good food. Some spouses like Mr NQN even get into the process and photograph the food even though he has very little interest in food whilst some remain bemused and embarrassed by the whole thing. Just surrender to us and comply quietly. It will make things a lot easier, trust me…

8. Some food bloggers take notes. Please don’t be offended, just pretend that we’re typing into a Blackberry and hopefully that may seem more normal.

9. The bedside table of a food blogger is simply a cookbook book shelf with little post it flags stuck to each second page marking recipes we intend to cook – one day. It’s a socially acceptable form of pornography – food pornography.

Autograph from Marcus Wareing

10. We question because we care. A non caring/unknowledgeable waiter is our worst nightmare and we are their nightmare customer. If we’ve enjoyed a dish we want to know more about it. so we can a) blog about it and b) perhaps recreate it at home. If a waiter has been trained to know everything there is about a dish, their face brightens when we ask them as they finally get a chance to show off what they’ve been asked to learn. And it may lead to a kitchen tour which is pretty much like going backstage at a rock concert. And that’s why we collect autographed menus from chefs.

Danish Horn of Plenty

11.Got a birthday/christening/anniversary/wedding coming up? Chances are the foodus bloggerus will probably help out. After all when else are we going to have the opportunity to make a Croquembouche or a Danish Horn Of Plenty? I brought this Horn of Plenty to a friend’s party once and it was such a hit I vowed to turn up to every party with a Horn of Plenty.

12. We carry a spare battery and if it’s a once in a lifetime moment, we carry a spare lens and/or camera. I also carry a fork with me and a knife is in the car. I have a response already prepared for the police officer that stops me and is alarmed to see I have a knife in the glove compartment. “I’m sorry officer but you see I’m a Food Blogger”.

“How about a private class to learn Victor’s Famous Chocolate Chilli truffles?” my darling friend The Second Wife asked me. It took me all of 20 seconds to answer “Yes please”. Chilli and chocolate are two words that the world has gone crazy over and Victor Pisapia is the Chilli King and his Chocolate Chilli truffles are famous.

Victor Pisapia holding a picture of his former self “Mr P”

We arrive at his gorgeous Danks Street apartment (where he conducts his cooking classes) one sunny Sunday afternoon. I adore meeting new people and I was fascinated to learn about Victor’s history. Those of you may know him as the chef and partner at the former Rattlesnake Grill in Neutral Bay but you may not know that he was originally a teacher who worked in the real ghetto in Philadelphia – you know the one where violence is a real possibility. He was called “Mr P” and to avoid being targeted by students he came up with this hairdo which served more to make him look racially ambiguous (and one which made his barber father distraught). A survival mechanism by way of hair if you will.

Originally from the United States, he ran the very successful Back Porch Cafe in an area just outside of Washington DC called Rehoboth Beach in Delaware. They started on little more than enthusiasm and $7,000, 3 entrees, 3 mains and 3 desserts. They picked fresh strawberries from the field for the day’s desserts and built it up into one of the most successful restaurants which still stands today where it’s run by one of Victor’s friends. He has owned designer restaurants such as Blue Moon where designer beautiful bodies waitered. This was one of the first places to have beautiful people only waitstaff and each waiter cleared about $1,500 per night. He also opened up “dives” (albeit ones where designers were called in to make it look like a dive) such as Tijuana Taxi, a 1950′s diner. His restaurants centered around this beachside area of Rehoboth Beach where people from Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia would gather to visit during vacation.

Victor then moved to Sydney Australia and opened up the Rattlesnake Grill in Neutral Bay which served South West American food. Opening up a restaurant in Sydney is also different from the United States. Not only are there are  an untold number of Sydney restaurants, U.S. customers tend to be more loyal to a restaurant whereas Sydney siders tend to like to try new things so gaining a loyal clientele is harder here.

As the “chilli king” (tomorrow he is judging the chilli category for the Royal Easter Show) he shows us his fantastic chilli collection full of Poblano chillis which become the Ancho chillies.

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The space for classes

But back to the truffles. They’re a gorgeous combination of a chocolate coating and a melt in the mouth interior. The chilli is a delicious tingly after thought, just strong enough but not too strong. Somehow the hours fly by and before we know it it’s 3.5 hours later and we were only meant to stay for 2 hours. Learning from Victor is like being taught by a soul generous in spirit and encouragement. The ideal teacher – afro or not.

Victor’sFood hosts cooking classes and team building exercises for corporates. They are also hosting a South Coast food tour with Masterchef contestant Michelle Darlington.

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