Bon Appetit!

It's been a year of good food and great wine. If anything, the past 12 months showed that, although a table with views of Sydney Harbour perks the spirit up, the most satisfying meals can be had in simple, unpretentious surroundings.

Most expensive meal:
The priciest meal we had was a $600-for-two degustation at Jaan, with many baby courses. The views atop Swissotel were gorgeous. Sadly, we thought long and hard, and cannot remember a single dish of note. It was that memorable. It was....aahh...nice modern French cuisine, I guess. But you don't spend the equivalent of a ticket to Sydney to have nice food. You want to be swept off your feet, blown away. Which is what we experienced with this next dish:

The "food this weird shouldn't taste this good" prize:
Snail risotto at Menotti's in the city. I didn't know what possessed me to choose this dish. Maybe it's because I had eaten their still-charming crab linguine one time too many. It was magic. Several plump escargots swimming in what seems more like watery arborio porridge than risotto. It was the taste equivalent of seeing your favourite football team kicking in a tie-breaking goal. Yessss! Whoever thought of marrying garlic-butter, rice and snails deserves a medal.

Top taste highlights of 2005:

1. Foie gras sushi at Wahiro. Heaven in a mouthful. The tiny hole-in-wall eatery has expanded next door, but if one restaurant shows that more customers doesn't dilute the quality of cooking, this is it.

2. Grilled steaks from Hog's Breath Cafe, Port Stephens. Humungous, tender slabs of meat to bring out your inner carnivore.

3. Lobster sashimi with wasabi at Sydney Fish Markets. One of the best things to happen to our tastebuds. It was not such a good thing for the poor lobster, who was obliviously swimming in the tank only minutes ago.

4. Miso cod at Ember. Melt-in-your-mouth slivers of fish, married perfectly with dark miso paste.

5. Crispy pork belly at Aria, Sydney. Not quite the same as roast fatty pork at your hawker centre. This version sings with a thick, satisfying crunch of the skin, and sticky, chewy soft flesh underneath. It did not hurt that our table had full-frontal views of the Opera House.

6. Nasu dengaku at Go Bungai. Finally, a veg entry! This traditional Japanese dish of fried-then-grilled eggplant with miso paste will melt even the most hardened of meat-lovers and eggplant-phobes.

7. Pepper crab in cream sauce at Seafood Paradise. So what if the setting is a coffee-shop unit in the deep, dark belly of an industrial estate, and you eat alongside grimy mechanics? The taste of the sauce leaves us speechless.

8. Fresh lamb cutlets cooked at home. Merely fried in butter and sprinkled with salt. Simplicity never tasted so good.

9. Chubby Hubby ice cream from Ben & Jerry's. It's good. I can't explain. Just go try it.

10. Popiah rolls from Qiji. "Perfect!", declares Boy of the rice-paper rolls with radish and shrimp fillings.

Here's to another year of new food discoveries. Bon Appetit!

One Thing Leads To Another

""Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes. After that, who cares?... He's a mile away, and you've got his shoes!"" - Billy Connolly

You can plan a career. Heck, you can even plan a marriage, if you are so inclined. But what humans cannot possibly orchestrate, and tend, wisely, to leave to chance, are friendships. And that's one of the nice surprises about life.

You never know who you're going to meet, where and how. And of the gazillions of first encounters you will have over a lifetime, who is to say which people will end up being your dearest - and which ones will scoot off into the sunset, never to be missed?

I like that quality about human encounters. Supes, one of the sweetest people I've ever befriended, I met in a queue. Honest. ( I know, people use the word "sweet" to describe her as often as they use "alcoholic" describe me, but that's not the point. )

We were queueing in one of those interminably long lines outside uni admin on the first day of school, for heaven-knows-what. Don't get me wrong, I don't normally chat up strangers in queues. Maybe it was the sight of someone as bored and clueless as I was. Maybe she appeared nice, i.e. she didn't look like a psycho axe murderer. By the time we got to the front of the queue, we knew each others life stories.

Then there's Tim, whom I first met through Supes, because he was selling me his used coffee table. Even during those student days, he already looked and sounded like the first of my friends who will make his first million - in US dollars, too. Through him, I met Jo and Roy who are to become formidable Scrabble mates.

And then there are first encounters that were so unpromising at the start ...but some people whom I thought were unlikeable or aloof at first sight - like SK and Fang - ended up being mates who meet intermittently over coffee and yet can totally dissect each other love lives and dish out brutally-honest, mostly-unsolicited advice.

You never know who you're going to bond with. So here's to the first encounters in our lives. What they lead to may not always be smooth and trouble-free. They may not always be physically there. But you will look back and thank god ( or whoever you believe in) for the day it all started.