MoG @ Home #4 - Attica (Ministry of Gluttony at Home)

Earlier in the year Alissa and I were lucky enough to dine at Attica, the Melbourne restaurant hailed by many to be the best in the country. Located south of the CBD in Ripponlea and featuring a stark black and white fit out, Attica does not have the incredible views, opulent decor and central location of a Vue de Monde or a Quay to fall back on; more than both those esteemed restaurants, the success of Attica is largely the result of the incredible food of head chef and co-owner Ben Shewry. Terroir driven, hyperlocal, ethical and deeply personal, the unique and often autobiographical nature of Shewry's food marks him as a culinary auteur, and our meal at Attica was one of the most artistically satisfying of my life. Shewry has fast become one of my culinary heroes.

MoG @ Home #3 - The Fat Duck (Ministry of Gluttony at Home)

Before I really knew much about Modernist cooking, I knew about Heston Blumenthal. Unaware of the pioneering (and arguably even more impressive) work of Ferran Adria and his peers, watching Heston's Feasts for the first time was a true eye opener. Fresh as I was out of art school when the first season aired, I saw someone working with food in a way that seemed closer in spirit to early 20th century Modern Art than any cooking that I'd seen before. Like the optimistic visual artists of the pre-war era, Heston's belief that anything was and still is possible was a comforting thought in an art world that to me at the time seemed jaded and cast adrift into a cycle of pastiche. And the fact all the new technologies, techniques and ingredients meant anything truly could be possible made it all the more impressive.

MoG @ Home #2 - Eleven Madison Park (Ministry of Gluttony at Home)

Regular readers of the Ministry may have noticed an almost month-long gap between posts between mid September to mid October. There were several reasons for this absence; moving offices, three birthday parties and a weekend away down south certainly contributed somewhat to a lack of writing time, however the biggest reason for the break was this cookbook.

MoG @ Home #1 - Momofuku Ko (Ministry of Gluttony at Home)

Something I haven't really talked about on the blog is home cooking. When I started the Ministry of Gluttony, I obliquely referenced cooking when I subtitled the blog 'gastronomic adventures at home and abroad'. Up until now 'at home' has meant dining out in Perth (or more generally Australia), but as a passionate and adventurous home cook I had always meant to include the meals that we make at home. I've been cooking since I was 5 or 6, and if I hadn't stumbled into Art School, I may very well have gone down the path of being a chef. As a student much enamoured with the avant-garde, new media and conceptualism while being decidedly unpainterly, I used to half-jokingly refer to myself as a failed painter, but when you consider I was for many years a member of an art collective named Spatula which interrogated and challenged contemporary food production, perhaps its more accurate to say I've always been more of a unrealised chef.

While I'm not really interested in a career change, in the last few years I've been really wanting to put more effort into upping my skills in the kitchen and challenging myself with recipes outside my comfort zone. I'm a confident home cook who is just as comfortable cooking from Heston Blumenthal at Home as I am freestyling a pasta of whatever is in the fridge, but as someone who is very much a product of my Art School education, the challenging modernism of contemporary fine dining restaurants is the kind of cooking I find most appealing. It is to this end that I've started Ministry of Gluttony at Home - a series of multi-course dinners for 8 (including Alissa and myself) focusing on recipes from challenging chef's books; the kind of cookbooks filled with multi-component recipes and esoteric ingredients that combined with time consuming methods and restrictive equipment requirements means most copies sold end up on coffee tables rather than kitchens.