Córdoba is the first port of call in Andalucía. It's famous for what would have been the world's largest mosque (the Christians buggered that up), and for a smooth gazpacho. It is absolutely crawling with tourists. A pleasant place to visit and, perhaps, to eat.

On the road and gathering experiences. I'm writing travel notes here. Something different to the normal fare, but perhaps of help to others, or mildly entertaining for regular readers. This post takes you to Singapore Airport, then Paris and Madrid.

I hope my readers find it interesting and perhaps helpful in the future.

A good piece by paediatrician Zoe McCallum, in The Age, talks about the problems of dealing with children's weight in a constructive way.

Hello my lovely gastronauts. Guess what? I'm off to Iberia (and Paris). Quite soon, actually. Impending, so to speak. So bring on the tips.

The Australian Commonwealth Government raised taxes on ready-to-drink (RTD) alcoholic beverages by 70% this week.

I awoke to a hangover. A dull pain knocked at the back of my skull. Had I been an alcoholic hypocrite? Heavens, no! This was a very special hangover. Chocolate. Read about a new venture in Melbourne which will certainly keep the bar high for the chocolate scene.

The New Prohibition. Australia's battle against alcoholism, especially under-age and binge drinking, has been in the spotlight over the last weeks. Proposed solutions have been stronger penalties for supplying alcohol to children, graphic warnings on packaging and even the idea of raising the legal drinking age to 21. The concerns are valid, but the message and solutions are often strong on control and weak on social initiative. I give a personal perspective on the complex problem of addressing alcohol abuse and social traditions.

I'm not a great salad eater, probably because leafy ones tend to splash and I can't stand splashy food, but I love this one conceived late last year when apricots had come into season. I made it again recently with dried apricots and it was still pretty damn good, if you ask me. A great combination of textures and flavours make this a winner.

A product concept, the KitchenSync, might solve some of the hazards a laptop faces in the kitchen.

Bloggers aren't always quick off the mark. Heavens! It took Melbourne's community a whole evening and maybe a night to document the second Bloggers' Banquet. Ella and Furry had a lovely venue for a bayside gathering and we listened to the parrots, breathed sea air and, um, cried through the wood-fired oven smoke. Another successful bloggers' event for Melbourne!

Busy, busy, busy. That's been the past few months. Some of the activity has been on a new site, some on a few tweaks to Syrup & Tang, and a whole pile of unfoodieness has been keeping me away from food and cookbooks. This must stop! Here's a small update for the curious.

Before the last juicy plums vanish from the markets and fresh produce displays, buy up and bake a cake! This delightfully fragrant cake is dense and moist, strong with the aroma of plum and cardamom and lifted by tangy pieces of plum. The perfect cake for afternoon tea.

Just a quick heads-up to anyone who hasn't seen mention on other blogs around town. On Saturday, 5th April the next Bloggers' Banquet will take place.

Do you know there's a wonderful soluble fibre supplement out there which you can add to almost anything? I'm sure someone's happy, but how dare the advertising suggest you add it to coffee!

Bread. I like. Warm. Ovenly. Is it true that you get indigestion from eating still-warm bread? I know I do, but I suspect it's more through overconsumption than mythical powers. I recently returned to a life of sourdoughs and have been experimenting in an unconventional way. Sourdough bread is true slow food, but can it be done fast? Surprisingly, yes. With a bread machine!

The Melbourne Food and Wine Festival held its first 'Out of the Frying Pan' talkfest last year and has repeated the event in 2008. It's goal is to bring together industry and media to talk about issues (which can be interpreted in many ways). This sort of thing can be a mixed bag when there are so many not-quite-overlapping points of interest and last year's was an odd mix of industry discussion and wannabe cookbook writers. This year there seemed to be more media representatives but less industry (chefs, producers, PR people) and though the focus was better, perhaps, the format rather undid it.

Melbourne is alive with the annual Melbourne Food and Wine Festival. A special event as part of the two-week festival is 'A Taste of Slow', held this weekend. I attended two sessions and came away disappointed, with the feeling that Slow Food is still failing to get its message across or perhaps even to know what its message is. I didn't expect to hear clichés about obesity or endure junk science but that was part of what I heard.

Look what all those selfish seafood-loving tourists have done! No see, no touch, no flash in Japan.

Strange. I'm dining fine in Australia, yet the menu isn't French, Italian or Mod-Oz. Some of the staff and chefs speak a cuisine-appropriate language, but are most likely home-grown. The cuisine is usually regarded as meat-heavy and conservative. George Calombaris's very modern food successfully marries cutting edge with Hellenic tradition at The Press Club. It's hard to imagine you could leave this restaurant without a serious dose of gustatory satisfaction.

How do you store your chocolate? At various times I've made sure my chocolate was happily resting in many places, but not in a ludicrously expensive wooden vault.

Eggplant does not play a part in my life. I do not understand eggplant. I hate the smell of it cooking. But there is an exception. I can eat cupfuls of baba ghanoush. It's so easy to make, marries so well with good bread, and keeps vampires at bay.

Today is Shrove Tuesday. All over the civilised world, people should be pigging out on pancakes. As a child, there was only One True Pancake. It was thin. Not crêpe-thin, but close enough for the crêpe free people not to know the difference. Each pancake was bestrewn with soft brown sugar and sprinkled with lemon juice.

It seems the US diet includes eight ounces (235 gm) of meat per day. How much do you eat?

Some things seem so 'convenient' that you can't believe they could be a viable product. Today's exhibit is pancake batter in a spraycan.

Gourmands and gourmets, look at me! After a month of rest and relaxation slaving over CSS and HTML and swearing at Photoshop, Syrup & Tang has a very new look. Less pastel and more Melbourne-style black. Tell me what you think.

At Syrup & Tang I've been buoyed by the enthusiasm of my readers and encouraged to continue this project. Most of it has been fun. Here's a quick rundown on some facts about 2007 at Syrup & Tang and some questions for 2008.

The last breath of 2007 has been exhaled. As well as wishing all a wonderful 2008, I think it's time to clean out all the pieces of deliciousness which I didn't get around to writing up properly. Think of this as being the end-of-year/start-of-year food porn clearance.

This has been my month of macarons… La Macaronicité at Syrup & Tang, as I dubbed it. Time to squidge everything together with scrummydumtious fillings and go on a picnic.

I report on some who joined in the fun and folly and spoke of it to me. And I provide encouragement to redeploy the failed macarons with delicious results.

Time for some Christmas greetings… step inside!

Dear meringue shell crazy people,

It's time for fillings, flavours and frippery!

This article will be shorter than the others. I feel that the filling is where the cook has the opportunity to show their initiative and creativity and I want to communicate general principles rather than fine detail.

Macaroniers, Macaronistes et Macaroneurs… So you want to make better macarons? Welcome to the third instalment of La Macaronicité at Syrup & Tang! This time it's all about Italian meringue and some pictures of differences in mixing and oven temperatures.

This is the second in a special series about the macaron de Paris. Find out all the factors which influence successful baking of these beauties, and try out a 'simple' recipe.

This is the first in a special series about one of the world's favourite petit fours. Two delicate almond meringue domes are sandwiched together with a flavoured filling to become le macaron. The macaron is the diva of the biscuit baking universe.

I once lived in Canberra. In the late 80s it was shockingly quiet. For a city overrun with public servants, diplomats and the entourages of politicians, it offered relatively little in the way of nightlife or culinary enjoyment. Seventeen years since I left, has anything changed?

As summer approaches my meagre garden begins to yield harvest. My tomatoes have been recalcitrant and I am still waiting tetchily for both Roma and Grosse Lisse varieties to bear viable fruit. (My jealousy of Sticky's reports of tomatoes weeks ago therefore remains.) The story is different for my snowpeas and strawberries, thank goodness.

Much delayed but newly relevant (as some friends were asking me about Lyon), it's high time I published a description of a city I visited earlier this year and greatly enjoyed.

Last night (12 Nov) saw a get-together of some of the Melbourne foodblogging population. What a lovely bunch! Click through to read a little more and see a yummy pic of my contribution to the banquet.

An inconspicuous old redbrick building in the Berkshire village of Bray bears a sign of a webbed foot, a feather and a duck's bill, all with cutlery handles. This is The Fat Duck, Heston Blumenthal's restaurant, closely associated with the molecular gastronomy movement. Join me for a description of the four-hour lunch you might experience. You'll need an open mind, a tolerance of theatre, and a good credit limit.

Something interesting is going on at The Age newspaper in Melbourne. In the space of eight days, the newspaper has published two pieces about slavery in the West African cocoa growing industry. In September it also published a piece about this issue by a prominent Christian activist and anti-slavery campaigner from Britain. Why now?

Beautiful. Maggie Beer, one of the three modern female icons of Australian food, has written a book to weigh down your lap as you browse, read and cook from its pages. A wonderfully presented work, with well crafted content perfectly suited to the current focus on seasons and local produce. A book about food and cooking which also captures the culinary spirit of Australia.

Here you have my first straight food-porn post. Um, I mean the first unabashed food-porn post. A birthday nearby was the occasion for making my first tarte aux framboises.

What do you do when you find dinner too enjoyable? How is an irritable, jinxed diner like me to cope with a meal which delivers no disappointments and offers barely a scrap to quibble about? I felt embarrassed at how effusive I was. I sat through the meal thinking of all the people I needed to tell. I was dining at one of Melbourne's most avant garde restaurants, Interlude.

The recently released Secrets of the Red Lantern is a beautiful book. The photography is warm, despite a muted palette. Decorative patterns add a great deal to the appeal of every recipe page. The recipes hold great promise. Despite all this, Secrets of the Red Lantern has some profound flaws which could greatly mar the experience for some readers, but I think the human interest focus will leave many readers reluctant to criticise it.

There are so many reasons to visit Paris; so many reasons to enjoy the city and – most pertinently – the food. Lacking the resources to hop from one name-restaurant to another, it seemed much better do markets, shops, and luscious pastries while staying in modest lodgings…

Just back from seeing the newish Pixar/Disney animated film Ratatouille. Quite a fun ride. The animation is fabulous

Greatly worth seeing, but by no means perfect, the film is nonetheless a must — as a food fanatic, a scene close to the end captured the essence of why we obsess, write and think about food.

Allegedly popular and probably good — a recent tip-off about a new fancy-cake-place in Melbourne. It was the sort of tip you might embrace with exuberant expectation, but which history has taught you to approach circumspectly for fear of desperate disappointment. The place will not be named. I'm not convinced it deserves publicity. […]

A few weeks ago I was 'tagged' by Amelita at Squishyness to list seven food facts about me. Here, at last, is a list of tidbits. It's all here — hoarding, allergies, disappointment and substance abuse as a toddler! You never know, it might raise an eyebrow, if not a chuckle…

It's three years since I was last in Britain and I was curious to see what might have changed in the food scene. It wasn't hard to miss the popularity of gastropubs, the growth of decent chocolatiers, and the burgeoning enthusiasm for organics. My impressions of markets, new shopping habits and some random bits.

Australian book retail chain Angus & Robertson (A&R) has got itself in the poo. The mainstream media (Fairfax) ran stories briefly (08 August) about A&R attempting to screw its suppliers by demanding payments to cover their 'gap' in profitability.

An impressive 'chef's book' by respected Melbourne chef Paul Wilson, Botanical is both a serious cookbook and a self-congratulatory piece about the restaurant (the Botanical). Intended for serious home cooks or other chefs, this is perhaps the first local heavy-duty chef's book Australia has seen, with recipes often encompassing many steps and long lists of ingredients.

Rarely does my heart skip a beat in the confectionery aisle of an Australian supermarket. In France or Germany I could happily fill a shopping trolley with a chocolatey smile on my face, but in Australia there are few thrills. So here's a new product: Coles supermarkets have launched a housebrand Belgian chocolate. Still no thrills.

I was in the mood for cocoa bean product. I set off with a sheaf of addresses under my arm. Chocolate from here to eternity. This is the first instalment of my Chocolate 2007. What I ate in London. A number of surprises and some unexciting old names.

In this world of the online bookselling behemoth Amazon, it's always nice to find an independent bookshop catering to one's specialist area of interest. Imagine my joy when I found a new gastronomic bookshop — and purely by chance. As the rain poured down on me on Place Bellecour in the French city of Lyon, I frantically looked around for somewhere to take shelter and spied a bookshop bearing the words 'la librairie de toutes les cuisines'.

It's old news, but for a moment last week newspapers and cafés were abuzz with speculation about the future of restaurant reviewers. A ruling by the High Court of Australia appeared to establish that a now-defunct Sydney restaurant had been defamed by a newspaper reviewer. In fact, reviewing is not yet an endangered art, for the case is by no means over.

Dear Readers: Behold! syrupandtang version 2.0. Yes, there's been an aesthetic overhaul. Although I was fond of the old design, there were a few problems with it - especially because so many people still use Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) - I can see this from the site statistics. IE6 is an unsafe browser which doesn't comply with web standards. If you are using Windows XP, pleeeease upgrade to IE7. The older version refuses to do things which just about every other browser (Firefox, Opera, Safari) manages successfully.

I hope you like the new look of syrupandtang. It will, hopefully, work for everyone.

Some wonderful internet services rely on so-called 'intelligent systems' to keep you interested and stimulated. They guess your preferences, guide your choices, point you towards new (and lucrative) potential purchases. Amazon took me on a recommendation ride, spanning Jamie Oliver, high heels and Posh Spice.

Ouch! The lemon tart that took my breath away. Delicious, in that I-want-more-but-it-scares-me kind of way.

This is what a good negative restaurant review should look like. London restaurant Suka gets a drubbing at the pen of Jay Rayner.

What were they thinking? A chocolate bar named after a prickly animal and with a textural anomaly which makes you fear for your teeth. Were the product developers on holiday?

Man. Woman. Curdled custard. Authors have made millions exploring the differences between sexes. We've all heard the clichés about the separate universes that males and females inhabit. I thought I was immune to this stuff until wikiHow served up an eye-opening tip for under-clad women. The earnest tip seems terribly misplaced. You just have to look around…

Think of Easter and food, and you probably get images of chocolate eggs and hot cross buns. How about a change from the mundane? Scrumptious little buns from Sweden! Cardamom, cream, marzipan. Each bun is about the size of a large apple and filled with a dollop of a marzipan mixture and a layer of whipped cream.

Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, published in 2001, is a well researched, persuasive and at times shocking work describing the excesses of big business and the broad spectrum of compromises that make modern, cheap fast-food lifestyles possible. Unfortunately, it's also longwinded and hyperbolic, with a clear propagandistic tone.

Welcome, gentle reader, to syrupandtang. The beauuuuutiful design is the result of many long, hot summer days and long, grumpy late nights over the last four months. You do find it beauuuuuutiful don't you? (This is a rhetorical question.) The site will probably need a few tweaks as I discover things I missed or decide that I don't find some features beauuuuuutiful enough.

The train that thinks it's a plane seems to have a sense of humour. Putting to one side Eurostar's once unenviable reputation for tardiness and its legacy-airline pricing model, one can't help being impressed by this touch of humour on the company's website.

Three brunching blokes on a mediocre café ride. Lavender ice-cream, omelettes, hash browns and dietary advice combine to spoil yet another foray into the land of brunch.

It was slow to cross the ocean to Australia, but eventually cult foodies here got to see Iron Chef America — the Masters series from 2004. I love Iron Chef. It is a masterpiece of kitchen prowess in a camped-up we-love-the-ridiculous style. Inspired stuff. Completely unlike Iron Chef America.