Food And Wine
The Sunday Age
Sunday April 6, 2003
www.melbfoodwinefest.com.au
With categories like "cheese events", you know the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival is a serious matter. Its website provides a handy interactive calender; click on the day and a list of eating and drinking opportunities comes up. There's a bit of art and culture thrown in as well - this is a Melbourne festival, after all - and plenty of non-Melbourne events in the gourmet zone of the Yarra Valley and other emerging hotspots. Don't forget to celebrate the (coffee) bean.
www.melbourne.citysearch.com.au/section/food_wine
Citysearch's attempts at listing all of Melbourne's food and wine options are valiant, considering the size of the job. You can search the listings of food stores by category (the list of delis alone runs to 468 places), or specify your cuisine and area to narrow down the restaurant choices (Indian food in inner Melbourne yields a mere 34 options.) Some of the restaurants are reviewed and recommended, occasionally with extracts from The Age. A handy feature is the street search, which lets you specify a street and get a list of all the eateries on the strip.
www.afgc.org.au
Someone has to get all that tucker into the stores so you can buy it, and the Australian Food and Grocery Council knows who they are. Aimed mainly at people who need to know the ins and outs of food regulation, safety and business issues, the council's site is no-nonsense and full of press releases and government submissions pushing the industry line on genetically modified foods, the GST and other policy issues. Probably most useful if you're in the trade.
www.epicurious.com
Stumped on what to do with those fish fillets you picked up yesterday? How about fried fish with Moroccan-style herb sauce, smoked whitefish gefilte fish with lemon-horseradish sauce, or New England fish chowder? They're just a few of the 1067 fish recipes at leading foodie site Epicurious. Because the site is affiliated with a major publisher, all the recipes have been previously published in magazines and books, affording some quality control. Other features include a discussion forum, a wine zone and an etiquette guide. The main drawback is the northern hemisphere bias, with spring recipes currently featured.
© 2003 The Sunday Age