">My Big World Of Crap

The turkey growing season this year in Tasmania was apparently excellent, with the nice weather meaning the turkeys have grown about 2kg heavier than usual.  Great, you might think, more turkey for the customers to eat at Christmas, more money for the farmers.

Wrong!   People who ordered a 3kg turkey for Christmas Day are likely to find themselves battling to get a bird that will fit in the oven.

"It’s a nightmare,"

said butcher Shane Mundy of Hill Street Gourmet Meats. Customers are really upset and many are cancelling their orders.  Many people obviously do have issues coping with what you’d think is a fairly minor problem, as he went on to say:

"It’s caused mass panic and hysteria. People don’t know what they’re going to do”

Mr Mundy said he and his staff would work all through the night on Wednesday boning and rolling turkeys.  He also said they’d have to freeze a lot of turkeys and that they’d be making lots of turkey sausages.

The turkey farmer claimed the problem was a cooler than expected year, which helped the turkeys grow.  He said:

"They don’t tend to sit around as much as they do on a warm day, they get up and eat a lot more,"

He said his company was forced to sell a more premium boned and rolled product to butchers for the price of a regular turkey.

About his own Christmas, Shane Mundy had this to say:

"We’ll have a nice standing rib roast of beef on the Weber, the last thing I want to see is turkey on Christmas," 

As for me, its chicken and ham plus lots of salads for Christmas lunch with the family.  We’ve never been great fans of turkey.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

McDonalds in the Barossa Valley …. can’t have that, can we?   Plans by McDonald’s to open a restaurant in Nuriootpa have upset some of the Barossa’s most high-profile food and wine identities, including celebrity cook and food manufacturer Maggie Beer and wine legend Margaret Lehmann.

"We need to protect the culture of the valley that brings us so many tourists. We have to keep working on the Barossa as a gourmet destination. For me, McDonald’s would be like a thorn in the valley’s side. We would be seen as talking the talk, but not living the life."

said Ms Beer.  Ms Lehmann, of Peter Lehmann wines, said the burger joint would just be "out of place".

"I think it’s sad.  We have a wonderful, unique food culture but McDonald’s is exactly the same everywhere in the world; it irons out all the differences that regions produce."

she said. Ms Beer also said she would

"love to see a hamburger joint in the Barossa that uses local produce, proper meat from our butchers, fresh lettuce, free-range eggs from the markets, smoked bacon.  It’s not fast food I’m against, it’s about (supporting) using local food".

Another person working to brand the Barossa Valley as a gourmet food region, Jan Angus, the founding chair of Food Barossa, said nearly a decade of work was threatened.  She said:

"The only way to keep that and preserve it is to continue to have that as a viable enterprise and that usually doesn’t come about through globalisation."

I think the crunch of the opposition to the McDonalds is most likely to be found in the following views expressed by some of the locals.  Philip Lehmann, a winemaker, said it would be difficult for the region’s restaurants and cafes to compete with the low prices of McDonald’s.  Rachel LeBherz fears her family’s business, the Barossa Roadhouse, could be forced to close if it went ahead.  She said:

"McDonalds would crush them and many other small businesses. People don’t realise it’s not just the takeaway stores that will suffer, it’s our local suppliers and many other connected businesses."

Personally, I reckon the locals against the Maccas are being quite precious.  If people want to eat McCrap that’s their choice.  Equally if they don’t want to eat it, nobody’s force feeding it to them.  I doubt very much that there is much leakage of customers from the gourmet food end of the market to McDonalds, or vice versa.

Anyway, McDonalds in the Barossa will be good for the wanker in the current McAds on TV – he would really be able to enjoy a glass of red with his Grand Angus.

McDonalds is trialling “up market” dinner dishes around Newcastle soon, with a view to rolling them out around Australia next year.  The meals to be available are:

• lemongrass chicken
• beef rendang
• orange, lime and ginger chicken
• beef bolognese.

All come with penne pasta, which strikes me as an interesting choice - I would have thought rice for all bar the bolognese.  Pasta is obviously easier to heat up and keep warm in bulk than rice, or harder to screw up.  I suspect these things will be like pre-made frozen meals heated up in the microwave.  Can’t see myself rushing out to get one.  Anyway, I don’t go to Maccas to eat healthy … I go for junk.  If I want proper food I’ll cook it at home, or go to a proper restaurant.

How lame are some of those frozen meals?  I see spaghetti bolognese, and think I could make myself a home cooked batch in not much longer than the time it takes to microwave a frozen one.

Technorati Tags: McDonalds, dinner meals, lemongrass chicken, beef rendang, bolognese, junk food

I’m off to the Blue Mountains to enjoy some delicious slave cooked Indian food.  The owner of a number of Indian restaurants, including “Taste of India” at Faulconbridge, has been charged with people trafficking offences, plus a charge of “intentionally exercising control over a slave”.  Allegedly, Yogalingam Rasalingam enticed Anbalagan Rajendran to come from India to Australia, but when he got here took his passport, made him live in a tin shed, and worked him 11 hours a day, 7 days a week as a kitchen hand at his restaurants, without paying him a cent.

This beats the delicious taste of the food cooked by exploited overseas workers at a number of our local cafes and restaurants in Canberra, allegedly Zeffirelli’s, Milk and Honey and the Holy Grail.  There was also the rather bizarre instance of the alleged kidnapping of a Filipino chef who worked at Pangaea Restaurant after he complained of being ripped off and poorly treated by his employer.

Just when I thought food cooked lovingly by underpaid and exploited Filipinos was the bee’s knees, now we have the even better option of slave cooked Tandoori.  Yummy!!!

Technorati Tags: slavery, Indian restaurant, Blue Mountains, exploited workers, Filipino guest workers, Zeffirelli, Milk and Honey, Holy Grail, Pangaea, Taste of India