This week, we grill Jules Lund from Australia's favourite travel show, Getaway, on the sort of food that floats his boat.
Q. Friends unexpectedly drop by and you ask them to stay for dinner. What do you cook?
A. The only time I'd dare ask my friends to stay for dinner is if I was just offering to be polite. If those buggers actually accepted my empty gesture, I'd teach them a lesson and fix them up a yummy bowl of orange soup. Orange as in the fruit, not the colour. My mum is a brilliant cook, but she did experiment once with a citrus flavoured hot soup. I had one sip and told her if she pulled another nasty trick like that again, I'd put her in a home.
Q. What's your favourite Friday night meal and where will you eat it —
home or out?
A. I don't like to discriminate but I'm a red-blooded dishist. I don't have a problem with clean dishes, but I really hate those dirty ones. Therefore come Friday night, I order takeaway. My choice —a sweet little Thai green chicken curry. I mix a bit of coconut rice in to soak up the sauce and then half the slab that'll follow it.
Q. What's your favourite indulgence food?
A. Wasabi peas and honey butterscotch ice-cream. Not together.
Q. What food couldn't you live without?
A. Big juicy steaks. Rare with mushroom sauce and fat chips.
Q. If you could invite three people to a dinner party who would they be?
A. Jessica Alba, Beyonce and Cameron Diaz. We'd knock back a bottle of tequila, then hit the oysters before settling into a nice, dignified game of kiss-chasey.
Q. If you could have five foods on a desert island, what would they be?
A. Let's be smart about this. If I go with a chicken and beef noodle stir-fry with vegetables and cashews, I've pretty much covered the five food groups! Oh yeah! Who needs a nutritionist?!
Q. What's your favourite restaurant?
A. There's a restaurant at the St Kilda marina in Melbourne called Riva and it's my favourite place to eat in the whole world. This joint has big round tables, beautiful lighting and music, a sunset view over the bay and sensational staff. What sets it apart from most first class restaurants is it's carpeted. Call me strange but to me that's as important as cuisine. It's all about ambience.
Q. What sort of food do you eat when you're stressed with a deadline?
A. I'm ashamed to admit it, but if I simply need food for fuel, I'll chuck a spoon in a cold can of baked beans and inhale it.
Q. What food would you quite happily never eat again?
A. As a travel reporter, I've eaten every local delicacy from Cambodia to Tanzania. Guinea Pigs, cockroaches, frogs, snakes, rats, turtles, llama, camel, crocodile, centiepede, scorpion, spiders, witchetty grubs, starfish, crickets, grasshoppers and ostrich. But I'd never eat a Big Mac. Too much mayo.
Q. What's the most memorable meal you've eaten overseas?
A.
While sailing through the tropical islands of Papua New Guinea, our skipper Jesse Martin served up the freshest, largest crabs I've ever seen. He cooked them in a chilli coconut sauce and the meat from their giant sized claws was the single best mouthful of food I've ever tasted.
Q. What's one ingredient you always have in your pantry?
A. Dead 'orse. Loads of Dead 'orse to douse my hot chips, pasta, eggs on toast and the occasional snag.
