Produce the goods

Well it has been a while since I last posted anything of value (some people would argue that I’ve never posted anything of value). I have been busy. Really. I have. I’m working hard – although you might disagree when you’ve finished reading this post. On Wednesday night I picked up the cast and crew of Fresh – the channel 9 (I’ll get to channel 9 later) cooking show from the airport. They are the best film crew I’ve worked with so far, and were a lot of fun to host.

On Thursday night I attended a black tie, $200 a head, 6 course banquet dinner. I’d post the menu but you’d all be jealous, I’ve now tried rabbit, crocodile, tuna loins (but where are their legs), duck and other interesting stuff… with wine to match. The dinner was the opening of the Australian Festival of Chamber Music. My mother will be happy to know that I now just eat whatever is put in front of me – provided it’s been prepared by a 5 star chef… I’m being very sophisticated.

Here’s three things I learned while on the road with Fresh
1. The reason you never see flies on the set of cooking shows is because they spray the food with fly spray to keep bugs off… (I wanted to make a “bugger off” pun there but couldn’t think of a suitable way to frame it – and we all know the key to art these days is the frame).
2. The Nine network need to work harder to ensure their staff are confident about job security (I’d suggest that rather than spending millions of dollars flying the Footy Show to Germany, or having senior management catch a cab from the Blue Mountains to Sydney, they should keep their lower level staff employed.)
3. You should never begin a list with an arbitary number of things to achieve – instead you should edit in retrospect. Which I will not do now… So that you can learn from my mistakes.

People keep rewarding me for my work (which I get paid for) with produce (as in fruit and vegetables) – first it was the crazy fashion bash man with the eggplant (which I donated to a good cause), avocadoes (which i’m going to have to turn into a dip) and pumpkin – which became a pumpkin pie, enjoyed by all at work (but not prepared by me)… and now I’ve been further remunerated with items of home grown goodness. I took Fresh to a pineapple farm. The pineapple farmers were cool – they’re this four generation farming family – the farm was started by Mr Pace Sr, he had three sons, Messers Pace Jr, these sons had sons, Messers Pace Jr Jr, and these sons married and had sons, and daughters (the oldest of that generation is 15, the second oldest 14 – he drives trucks and stuff around the farm, and knows more about pineapples than anyone should at his age). All but the oldest Mr Pace still live on the farm. There’s 20 Paces in total, which sounds a bit like a duel… anyway, the Paces were lovely, and they gave me a huge watermelon, and some pineapples.

So this week I’ve had more free food than I could poke a stick at… well I could have poked a stick at it, but that would have been odd. Really, really, odd. I wonder where that expression came from.

I know I said I’d talk about Channel 9. But I’ll do that in a later post. Maybe the same one that I talk about the benefits of eloping (for Caitie’s benefit, or by her request (I’m not sure I know anything about eloping. I must be the world’s worst source of advice for any relationship issues)).