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Phil Lees
A blog about what the world eats, when and where it eats it, and why it matters to us all. Only much less ambitious than that sounds and with more excruciating puns.
Phil Lees grew up in rural Victoria, the first generation in his family to not have lived on the farm and thereby not slaughter their own meat.
In 2005 he moved to Cambodia and started the nation’s first food blog, Phnomenon.com, named after the best pun that he has ever made. It turns out that Cambodian food is delicious and unlike the warnings in most guidebooks, is not likely to kill you with any immediacy. Gridskipper called him a “national treasure”. Lonely Planet’s Greater Mekong guide called him “the unofficial pimp of Cambodian cuisine”. The New York Times laughed at a funny hotdog he saw.
Phil makes a mean sausage, a hoppy pale ale, a modest laksa. He owns three barbecues and is in the market for a fourth.
Foraging for dude food
1 CommentThe rise of two divergent food trends: foraging and dude food. According to the Los Angeles Times, we’re in nothing less than a mass-processed meat renaissance.
Raspberry explosion
The taste of fresh raspberries picked straight from their canes is incomparable to those from a supermarket punnet. When fully ripe, the berries are almost tender enough to collapse under their own negligible weight. They fall from their canes at the touch and burst sweet-sour on the tongue. When properly ripe, they’re impossible to store for more than a day or two.
The mystery of the world’s most boring beer
Of all the varieties of beer that exist, lager is probably the most maligned by craft beer aficionados
Adventures in umami
Can you make a fish sauce based cocktail? Last week was Guacamole Day; there is no prescribed way to celebrate it apart from heed to the avocado marketers various wonts. I’m almost certain that it is not a real day but can’t find advice to the contrary.
Book review: Modernist Cuisine
Is it the most important cookbook in modern history?
What drives someone to buy a $600 cookbook? Love. A point that author Nathan Myhrvold hammers in early in Modernist Cuisine is that the word amateur comes from the Latin root amare, meaning love. The five volume, fifteen hundred recipe tome encased in a Perspex box is a work for amateurs in the original sense of the word. The professional chef will save the cover price simply for the tables detailing cooking times for sous vide, but there will be no point in doing so if they don’t love it.
Mind-altering bacteria
Eating well makes you happy. We can argue endlessly about what defines "well" from ethically-sourced local legumes to deep-fried industrial bacon.
Equilibrium in the third winter garden
It has only taken three years, but I think that I've finally hit an equilibrium point with my winter garden. Two years ago, it was awash with cabbage. Last year, it looked good, insofar as it resembled a fecund, colourful cottage garden.
Fermented chilli sauce
I was given an entire styrofoam case of scotch bonnet chillies, a variety of chilli that is close to the hottest on earth. They lend earthiness and complex stone fruit flavours to dishes, if it is possible for you to get past the sensation of drinking lava. The only sensible approach to cooking an entire crate of these hot capsicums is either drying and slowly chipping away at piles of chilli powder and flakes, or making chilli sauce.
Most Popular
- Self Preservation (32)
- Industrial Bacon Flu (26)
- The taste of test tube meat (24)
- Chow Mein: The Australian Classic (19)
- Top 4 Roast Pork Belly Recipes (17)
- Intolerant Foodies (15)
- Makin' Bacon: A guide for city slickers (14)
- Spot the Aussie: The imported beer myth (13)
- 100 glorious years of MSG (13)
- Dealing with the zucchini mountain (12)
Featured Food & Recipes
- Andhra curry leaf chicken
- Fish head curry (gulai kepala ikan)
- Roast capsicum sauce (salsa de pimiento)
- Spiced pork skewers (pintxos morunos)
- Linzer torte
- Cauliflower and cavolo nero rice pie
- Indian chicken korma
- Lemon meringue tart with blueberry jelly
- Warm salad of rare roasted venison with celeriac, pear and red cabbage
- Best end of lamb with eggplant caviar and a fricassee of sweetbreads, chorizo and anchovy
Hot Tips
Hamburgers
Be careful not to over-handle hamburger patties when you are moulding them. The more you touch them the more compact the meat will become. This will result in a tough, dense hamburger.
Glossary
Tacos
Tacos are made using fresh soft corn tortillas which have been warmed and are filled with beans, meat (grilled not minced) and salsa. They are folded up to enclose the filling.
