ELLI LUCA

1.What's your worst food memory – well, I guess apart from school dinners, then eating Harira soup in Marrakech, which I understood from our waiter and with my schoolgirl French was a vegetarian lentil soup…. I must admit, it looked and tasted delicious served with crusty bread, but, as a vegetarian, I was dismayed that after several spoonfuls of this huge bowl of soup I found a really large, what I now believe to be lamb bone in there. Oh dear… I didn’t finish it (though I’ll admit, I had enjoyed it up to that point and obviously repressed any lamb taste in my mouth until the bones confirmed it!!). Another bad memory was many years ago when I was travelling around Europe. We were camping (admittedly not on a camping site), and one night, we came back to find a strange man sleeping in our tent. Our companions took pity on us and took us home to one of their parents to sleep there. We were immediately integrated into the family, and on the next night served a special dinner of ...

1. What's your worst food memory So in preschool it's not really expected that the food will be great, but mine really took the spice cake. Every two weeks or so we would be served "beef and rice" which, as I remember it, consisted of of rice and beef of equally grey and mushy consistency. I could barely choke it down with my small cup of milk and was once told I was hurting the cook's feelings by not finishing my portion of the stuff. Beef and rice will forever symbolize the gastronomical and emotional trauma of early childhood. 2. Best food memory Hmm, a more difficult question. Like my worst food experience, by best ones are tied up with emotions. I remember my first dinner out with just my dad to a steakhouse in Denver, CO while we were away for a soccer tournament. He bet I couldn't finish my t-bone steak so I attacked it like a starving wolf and remembered it as the best steak ever when I actually finished it (and no doubt had indigestion in the ho...

1. What's your worst food memory This is a tough one to answer, right off the bat too! It's a toss up between three events ... but I guess the most colourful one would have to be in the late eighties.  It was the first time I was invited to dinner outside of the extended family and it was to the home of  ... I wish this could be put more delicately ... a culturally clueless and more than slightly bogan Anglo-Saxon family.  They made a special effort, they told me, to make something that I would appreciate seeing that I was from an "eye-tie" background. They had made "spag" for dinner. This, apparently, was served in the traditional way: spaghetti from a can, served over toasted white bread that had been "buttered" with margarine, coated in White Crow tomato sauce and topped with a Kraft Cheese slice. I felt like, what I can only imagine, a vegetarian Muslim being served pork would have felt. I was shocked, horrified, culturally m...

1. What's your worst food memory A toss up between my mum's overcooked steak or her lamb stew with kidney. *shudder* 2. Best food memory Lunch at Eleven Maddison Park in New York City. Definitely the most amazing meal of my life. 3. My signature dish is. Oh that's hard... might need to ponder that for a bit. I'll ask the taller half and get back to you... although my recent rabbit ragout was a winner. I also make a mean snapper pie. 4. One of my favourite food photographs. (please see below) 5. Ingredient I'm currently obsessed with is Congo potatoes. The flavour and texture is so beefy in a potatoey kind of way. 6. Worst kitchen injury I stuck my hand through a fridge fan working after school in a kitchen in my teens. Mangled a few fingers. Not seriously thank goodness. 7. Cake I ask for on my birthday Bourke Street Bakery's flour-less sour cherry chocolate cake. Heaven/ 8. Favourite Chef A toss up between Heston and Maggie Beer. Both self taught and both ...

1. What's your worst food memory Eating peas! I don’t like frozen peas but my parents had decided that I should eat something green with my dinner and I used to negotiate with them just how many peas I would actually eat. I never ate everything that was on my plate and since I didn’t like the texture, I would eat them like I was taking a tablet, chased down with a glass of water to avoid any squishiness escaping. I still struggle with peas to this day, but now at least I'll eat them if they are hidden in things or if they are fresh. I also can't stand the smell of roast lamb cooking. I can almost hear the gasps from your readers, but I'm not much of a meat eater and I've always disliked lamb. Yuck! The smell used to fill me with dread when I rocked up to someone's house for dinner. 2. Best food memory My grandmothers spaghetti bolognese. My Grandma is no longer with us, but I can still remember almost every detail about it. I requested it often as it was one o...

    Thought I'd start a new section called "Interview A Foodie" so here it is, self explanatory really. The interviewee is Michael V.  1. What's your worst food memory It's actually quite embarrassing.  I was 19 at the time and I had someone take me out for sashimi and I was trying to show how worldly and educated I was so I ate (without realising what it was) the whole ball of wasabi.  It's fair to say I had fire coming out of nostrils.  It actually put me off wasabi for a very long time! 2. Best food memory This is a two-parter. My mother would ask us what we wanted for our birthday dinners and I was always after roast pork (with crackling) and appelmoes (dutch apple sauce). The other is related to our trip to Vietnam in 2007 which is when I learnt to really appreciate savoury breakfasts (and I loved that all the hotels we stayed at had a pho bar for breakfast!) 3. My signature dish is. Prawn tacos - there was a...