Zondar! Nerds in Food Land

The National Restaurants Association have an annual Hot Chef competition on YouTube. This year’s winner was Keith Snow’s ‘Wild Caught Fire Margarita Shrimp‘. But! The most viewed video was Rob Barrett’s Date Night Dinner, romantic coconut shrimp.

Chairman Kaga would love it, Shrimp Battle!

Deeper in Rob Barrett’s library is the reason for his fame. How to cook Coke or beer marinated steak has 190,000 views in a few months.

‘you can also use beer’ - awesome. Coke marinade arrives in the first minute… unless you want to wait until 1:40 there’s a wierd bit about a rub that ‘make bigger’ like msg.

Cookingfordad gets controversial with his banned vid where he makes yellow snow pops (out of lemonade).

Good to see the boys over at Mecca on King St, Sydney have kicked off their blog.

As part of good food month they are holdings Sat cuppings at their Roastworrks …

Check it: meccaespresso.com

The Iron Apprentice is run each year by Holmesglen TAFE at their restaurant Cilantro. Fourth year apprentices battle it out for… honor.  Meh, what about striving for a battle against their Executive Chef? Another cooking show… but which host could possibly match Master bell pepper biter Chairman Kaga?

Iron Chef Chairman Takashi Kaga

More info on the battle

The buzz you’d expect at a caffine party, big buzz, not so much hype though… Why would people get out there & spread their gear without giving their brand any… ‘jujjjjj’?

The Rocks was decked out with stalls all shaded with the same tacky plastic non-descript white blankness. From a distance they looked the same. Punters have to walk right up to a tent to work out what it was for. Isn’t this the big event for the year, the big chance to big-up your crew’s brew?

Is it an all pull marketing industry? Craft a delicious product then hang out and wait til its demanded? We know that’s not true although brands that play like that were noticeably absent (Starbucks and McCafe come to mind) .

Mission: dig up some kind of visual representation of the brands hidden under those white plastic generic display tents, take a snap and stick on flickr.

Today “Atlassian” is having a team building event “Cutlassian” the team tipped to win is “ragged arsed rovers”.

The best motivation for work has to be doing something you love. My brother works at Atlassian where they take a Google approach to the work environment. The lucky web workers have a team building event every quarter and spend the day running around the city collecting photos with strange landmarks, searching for trinkets and lining up friends for favours like getting posted on blogs, all in the name of team building. Don’t think they have an espresso machine in the office yet although they do have a music room with guitars and amps all set up for a lunchtime jam.

“This industry is booming” poured out of all the alleyways in The Rocks for the 2007 Aroma Festival. Even though a variety of complimentary products were also on display (chocolate, tea, incense) coffee was the ruler.

Toby’s Estate attracted the longest queues, punters waited up to 20 minutes for the $1 festival brew. Our Toby’s soy picolos brought on the second biggest ‘mmm yum’ grin of approval. However when Republica’s organic Timor blend hit thy lips ‘mmm yum’ became ‘oooh yeah…’ the only sip of the day that struck our taste buds with something different; a full, rich and deliciously earthy flavour.

The overseas passenger terminal became a home espresso paradise for the masses, dozens of glamorous touch-button machines with equally slick sales people, some priced at several thousand dollars. If the number of espresso machine tyre-kickers is any measure of the health of the economy, these may well be boom times. They say Ferrari sales are up.

Is there another cheap gst free staple that punters are willing fork out thousands of dollars for? German espresso machine manufacturer Krups’ (caution: website features excessive zooming on kitchen engineering devices!) slogan sums it up nicely ‘Beyond Reason’…

Interesting banter followed Georges Sabados’ rant on Coffee Geek. Alan Frew from coffeeco posted “More DOMESTIC espresso machines are sold and owned per capita in Australia than in any other country in the world ”

Apparently all those people with cardigans, ironed jeans and neat hair, along with their zooming Krups “get hands on training, gratis, on how to use their machine and how to understand the process that goes into making espresso. ” (CoffeeKid)

Apparently Ruben from Mecca got second in the latte art competition… Who was first?