Smoked Eel Parfait and other amazing things to eat

Some things I have eaten so far in 2010:

• potato paper (this is potato shaved on thinnest possible mandoline setting and baked - so thin it melts in your mouth).

• earl grey tea ash (I only noticed this on the menu afterwards - it was a kind of grey dusty ash - tasted nicer than it sounds!)

• olive oil cubes (olive oil emulsified, mixed with setting agent like agar, frozen and then brought to a cool temperature in the fridge. You eat it with bread as it softens slowly at the table).

• almond jelly (with almond gazpacho and blue swimmer crab).

• pea crumbs (I think this is peas cooked, laid out to dry then crushed. These crunchy crumbs still kept their pea-ey integrity however)

• fish floss (I can't remember this that well, it was flossy and fishy).

• white carrot puree (self explanatory).

• mint, vanilla and buttermilk granita.

• campari and turnip (this appeared as small blood red squares on the plate, the turnip cubes had been soaking happily in Campari. As a contrast to steamed scampi it worked well but it was pretty out there, as they say).

And the above dish, consumed in a bar - restaurant in grimy down at heel Surry Hills in Sydney where the incredible kitchen produced a 7 course meal (for 50$ !!!) in an hour (the speedy timing was to kindly address the fact that we had two small hot curly haired impatient children dining with us).

It is smoked eel parfait, white soy, and seaweed salad. And I don't even like smoked things. Or eel. If you live in Sydney, you must go there. Thank you to the Bentley.

I am waiting for more hot weather so I can do an obsessive granita run and possibly a sorbet one too. The buttermilk and mint granita was an amazing and refreshing combination.

Oh how I love those Sydney restaurants.

Tell me - what is the most unusual thing you have eaten in the last year?

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