Food Styling for Spirit House book

Ever wondered why your food doesn’t look as nice as the recipe books? That’s because you don’t have paint brushes, tweezers and essentially a make-up kit for your food. Jaime Reyes was our wonderful food stylist for the new Spirit House cook book. It was a great experience watching Jaime at work:

See what I mean, Jaime is painting glistening highlights on to the chicken in the salad.

With so many of Annette’s recipes to shoot and just a few days to make all this happen, we are lucky that we have such great chefs like Katrina and Kelly to lend a hand:

And the person responsible for making the food look great in print is photographer Graeme Gillies, who had help from Spirit House owner, Helen Brierty. Here Helen can be seen working as a photogaphic intern – which basically involves standing around all day holding the fill card.

All in all, this promises to be our best recipe book ever. The photographs look amazing and eating the left-overs from the shoot had us all raving over the flavours. The new book should be available by Mother’s day 2010.

Spirit House Soups – now available

Hitting the shelves in time for winter are our new range of delicious frozen soups – Chicken and Galangal (Tom Kha Gai) and Spicy Thai Pumpkin. Each soup packet serves two people and serving is as easy as thawing and heating the contents in a saucepan or microwave.

To turn our soups into a hearty meal, simply add some cooked prawns or chicken – Easy! Available now at a stockist near you.

Can’t decide where to eat?

Urbanspoon is one of the largest restaurant review sites in the USA. It’s a site that allows customers to review restaurants and you can see menus etc. They have a great app for the iPhone that finds your location and let’s you spin a ’slot machine’ restaurant picker to find restaurants close to you. You can demo it below – I’ve locked in the Brisbane area for the app and you can click the LOCK icons to lock in a suburb or food style or price – or any combination of the three.

Here’s what others say about us:

and restaurant reviews:

Gordon Ramsay’s best scrambled egg recipe

I know what I’m cooking this Saturday morning:

Sticky Rice in a rice cooker

I’m not sure about this one – but according to About.com in the Thai food section, someone has posted a technique for cooking sticky rice in your rice cooker. And no, apparently you don’t have to soak it over night. I haven’t tried this technique yet but if you want to be the first let us know how it turns out.

Ingredients:

• SERVES 4
• 2 cups  “sticky” or “glutinous” rice
• 2 1/2 cups water
• 1/2 tsp. salt

Preparation:

1. Place 2 cups sweet rice in your rice cooker. Add 2+ 1/2 cups water and stir.
2. Let the sweet rice stand for 30 minutes (or longer if you want – up to 4 hours).
3. Add the salt and stir once more. Turn on your rice cooker.
4. When your rice cooker switches off (after 15-20 minutes), let the rice sit at least five minutes extra.
5. Enjoy your sticky rice!

Sticky Rice Tip: Sticky rice will become sticker the longer it sits.

The death of farmers’ markets

Despite the fact that since the dawn of civilization we’ve been buying and eating at village markets, the USA has introduced the ‘Food Safety Modernisation Act’. Essentially regulating and forcing registration on any producer who produces food of any kind and then transports it – the fines for non compliance are horrific.

Now I know what you’re thinking, “those whacky Americans” … but seriously, our politicians lack any sort of imagination and I think it’s only a matter of time before we see similar laws in Australia. Which could mean the death of farmers’ markets and a big win to Woolworths and Coles.

Farmers’ markets are a great solution for these troubled economic times – keeping the money in the local community where it gets spent locally. Let’s hope that our politicians leave our markets alone.

On another note, if you want to fight the economic meltdown, why not plant a vegetable garden and get some chooks? Not only do you save money but you now have some chores to give the kids that gets them away from their play stations.

Can I put this in the microwave?

If the kids are begging you to put some crayons in the microwave ‘ to see what happens’ or you are wondering what would soap do if you set it on high for a few minutes – then I’ve got the site for you. Heaps of videos of every day items put in a microwave and ‘nuked’. The videos are sped up which helps if you’re impatient like me and need to see results fast.

Onion ring volcano

I love an open kitchen, but it gets more exciting when danger is involved. A Japanese chef creates a volcano from onion rings, and oil plus some neat lava:

What! – they don’t even eat this.

Cool effect: Phonographantasmascope

What happens when you have an old record player, some cardboard, pins and a pair of scissors? You create these amazing effects:

Surviving the credit crisis

Certainly not food related but one of the most overheard conversations at the restaurant is this whole credit crisis thing. One of my favourite business authors Douglas Rushkoff has an amazing explanation about the credit crisis, and how it effects you over at boingboing.

Interestingly, the reason I bring this to your attention is because of his solution. It’s something that we at the Spirit House unwittingly have started to do ourselves inspired by the slow food movement and local harvest. By trying to source and buy from as many local suppliers as possible we stimulate the local economy which helps minimise the effects of the global market – here’s a quote from Rushkoff that says it all:

Whatever the case, the best thing you can do to protect yourself and your interests is to make friends. The more we are willing to do for each other on our own terms and for compensation that doesn’t necessarily involve the until-recently-almighty dollar, the less vulnerable we are to the movements of markets that, quite frankly, have nothing to do with us.

If you’re sourcing your garlic from your neighbor over the hill instead of the Big Ag conglomerate over the ocean, then shifts in the exchange rate won’t matter much. If you’re using a local currency to pay your mechanic to adjust your brakes, or your chiropractor to adjust your back, then a global liquidity crisis won’t affect your ability to pay for either. If you move to a place because you’re looking for smart people instead of a smart real estate investment, you’re less likely to be suckered by high costs of a “hot” city or neighborhood, and more likely to find the kinds of people willing to serve as a social network, if for no other reason than they’re less busy servicing their mortgages.

The more connected you are to the real world, and the more consciously you reject the lure of the speculative ladder, the less of a willing dupe you’ll be in the pyramid scheme that’s in the process of collapsing all around us at this moment.

Think small. Buy local. Make friends. Print money. Grow food. Teach children. Learn nutrition. And if you do have money to invest, put it into whatever lets you and your friends do those things.

I like that – get back to community. From Banana blossoms to scallops we try to use local suppliers wherever we can (which has inspired the theme for our next cook book). We use our local hardware store for all our garden and maintenance supplies and we bank here in Yandina. Building, maintenance and repair work is given to friends or friends of friends rather than the lowest quote.

I’m not saying we’re changing the world, but there’s something neat about being able to speak to the person who grows your food.