Meals on wheels - the Curry Truck

This beautiful elephant is hiding something rather special: delectable curries, samosas, raita, naan bread and more. He guards the back of The Curry Truck, one of the tastiest meals on wheels you'll find cruising Melbourne's streets these days. For lunch I ordered the special, because I can never go past a surprise. The first surprise was that my meal had to be cooked from scratch, which meant a longer-than-expected wait while my tummy rumbled. But when the meal did arrive, half the people in the (ever-growing) line behind me began twitching their noses. And more than one person asked "Can I look inside? That smells amazing!" Which it did.

It was chicken drenched in tandoori-style spices, with a refreshing raita and freshly-cooked flat-bread to mop all the flavours up. It's true my lunch didn't look all that pretty, but my little disposable plate was clean when I'd finished!

What did you have for lunch this weekend?

ps. More edible goodness on the Melbourne streets

Meals on Wheels - the Brulee Cart

It's a food truck. That sells crème brûlée. Honestly I could stop right there. But I won't.

Only a couple of weeks old, the Brûlée Cart debuted amid the patio lights, floating flamingos and historic buildings of Trailer Park, a weekend gathering of food trucks in the Village Melbourne precinct.

Village Melbourne is the relatively-new kid on the old Belgian Beer Cafe block, on St Kilda Road. There's food and wine, music, theatre, comedy and special events a-plenty. And on weekends throughout August and September, there's a curated gathering of food trucks! I took myself and my taste buds down to Trailer Park on the weekend and joined the line for a takeout tub of burnt cream of my very own. The flavour choices were classic French vanilla, nutella and strawberry, and salted caramel. Apparently they change regularly. After not a little internal debate, I chose the salted caramel.

They pulled out a blowtorch and set the toffee then and there while I watched, and followed it up with a generous grind of black rock-salt to finish things off. That added nice little bit of theatre to the usual food truck experience, I thought.

Oh and the dessert itself was sublime. The custard was sweet and sloppy (just the way I like it) and full of flavour.

And the best part? The toffee crust was thin, beautifully set, and cracked exactly the way it was supposed to. See for yourself.

ps. The Brûlée Cart was put on the road through crowdfunding. It's such a clever world we live in these days, don't you think?

ps2. More food trucks!

Meals on Wheels - food truck for kids

In a quest to eat my way through the menus of all the food trucks in Melbourne, I've brought you Po' boys, organic frozen yoghurt, pulled pork, classic burgers, chipotle chicken and loads more, with even more to come. But I've been neglecting a decent-sized portion of our food-truck-eating population: the kids! Enter the Famous OTO. It is a little further afield than most of the food trucks I've been visiting (it's in New York, to be exact), but OH MAN wouldn't you buy ice cream from one of these cute little food vendors pictured above?

Illustrator and animator Måns Swanberg (look for his other work under the name Pistachios) has designed a sturdy playtime food truck for kids, made out of biodegradable, recyclable cardboard. The vintage-style ice cream truck pictured here is his prototype, but Swanberg has plans to develop any number of other food trucks (including tacos, noodles, BBQ, churros, hot dogs, hot rods and lemonade).

This will completely revolutionise the lemonade stall, you mark my words.

After a successful Indiegogo campaign, Swanberg now has the funds to get into production, so look out for these little beauties soon.

Can you imagine if there were a few different kid-run food trucks in play at a kindergarten fete, serving up cupcakes and lemonade and fairy bread? The school would make a KILLING (even if the rest of us had to crouch down on hands and knees to make a purchase).

All photographs here used with Swanberg's kind permission, from the Famous OTO Facebook page

ps. You can personalise the number plates, too

Meals on Wheels - Babes on Grill

Folks, I put it to you that Babes on Grill are the actual Spice Girls of Melbourne: young, good looking gals who also happen to have some serious skills behind the BBQ grill. The babes have been popping up with their smoky menus at venues indoors and out all over the city for the past year and a bit so, when Madeleine and I heard they'd be at the Queen Victoria Market, we rugged up and marched on over for a fresh and flavoursome lunch.

However, we discovered a little more than we had bargained for, arriving at the tail end of a heated (literally) competition between the babes and TV chef Miguel Maestre to outsell one another on chicken rolls, for charity.

We joined the line for the girls. Gotta support the sistas.

Babes on Grill were serving up chipotle chicken hot rolls with barbequed free-range chicken, crispy slaw, guacamole, tomato and pepper salsa, and Kewpie mayonnaise. Sisters or not, who could bypass that?

But while the girls were busy grilling up my chipotle chicken, that wily Miguel turned on all his charm to win Madeleine over to his side. He was all over her with the "Aw what a cutie," and "Come on! You want me to win this challenge, don't you!"

Madeleine was fascinated. And in the end, a crazy Spaniard in a bow-tie was too much personality for one baby to resist: she gave him her seal of approval in the form of a high five. So much for sisterly solidarity, Little Miss.

I won't tell you who won the competition, you'll need to watch out for upcoming episodes of The Living Room on Channel 10 to find out.

Although this photo may give you a hint as to the outcome.

But I will tell you my hot chicken roll was ah-may-zing. I wolfed it down in approximately one minute. With or without the TV cameras, I'll be first in line the next time these girls pop up again in my 'hood.

Just before I left the market, I spotted another food truck, one that had been around for more than 60 years. So I figured I should try out the wares on sale, in the name of good reporting and all that. The things I do for you guys.

ps. Have you sampled the Gumbo Kitchen wares? Tried a burger from THE Mr Burger? Want still more Meals on Wheels?

Meals on wheels - Dos Diablos

When a food truck rolls into your 'hood on the weekend, the best thing you can do is tuck a blanket (ideally made of excessively vibrant granny-squares) under your arm, call your friends, and make a picnic of it. The Dos Diablos food truck is both cheap and cheerful. Tacos and fries, that's it. Or at least, that was it the afternoon we visited the little food devils, along with our good friend Tonia. It was the perfect combo.

There were three choices of taco fillings, including a vegetarian option, and it's good to note that the whole menu is gluten-free, if that is important to you.

Miss Madeleine had been perfectly happy with her little lunch of steamed carrots and beans until she saw the fries. All of a sudden, half-chewed pieces of carrot were tossed unceremoniously onto the blanket and she positively lunged for the fries. Geez they start young these days, don't they.

ps. More of Melbourne's food trucks

Interview - where the truck at?

Maybe you know, or maybe you don't, that I've been following food trucks and vans around the streets of Melbourne for the past few months to sample their delicious wares. It's probably one of the best assignments I've ever set myself. These are the trucks I've visited so far (loads more to come!). A few people have asked me how I know where the trucks are at any given time, since there are a LOT of food trucks in Melbourne and even if you followed them all on Twitter or Facebook, the odds of finding the one near you in your social media stream at right time aren't great. So today I'm going to reveal my secret: wherethetruck.at.

Created by three Melbourne blokes (Jack, Tom and Xavier) who love meals on wheels, wherethetruck.at is a website that tracks food trucks' whereabouts in real time on a map, so you just select your city of choice and voila! Trucks R Us! Recently Tom was good enough to spill the goss on how this website came to be and what the trio is planning next.

ME: Food trucks: what do you love about them? What should WE love about them?

TOM: I love that it's all about quality food, done quickly and cheaply, all the while embracing our beautiful Australian landscape as the dining room. What should you love? That it's happening! It's so grass roots, no pretentious maître d', no bill shock, no need to dress up. It's all about fun, food and friends.

ME: What inspired you to start wherethetruck.at? How did you come up with the idea?

TOM: It was actually Xavier's idea, he saw something similar being done in the States, was pretty keen on the food trucks here, and so thought that we could put something together that was the best location service for food trucks and food truck enthusiasts.

ME: How long did it take for you go from idea to launch? Talk me through the process.

TOM: From inception to our public launch (March, Food Trucks United for Melbourne Food & Wine Festival) it took about a week. A LOT of coding, a LOT of late nights, a LOT of help from good girlfriends and from there it's been a very interesting ride. We basically screen printed our own t-shirts, got some stickers made up and then walked around for two days at Food Trucks Unite talking to people, giving them stickers, telling them about the site - from there we haven't looked back. Since March we've had over 100,000 people use our website to find themselves lunch or dinner from one of Australia's gourmet food trucks, and that's totally awesome.

ME: How do you guys know each other?

TOM: Xavier and I worked together at a market research company many moons ago (two-ish years ago?), we've been talking about ideas and things we could get going as a cool project for ages and this is the one that we made stick. Jack came on board as our Code Monkey on the day we launched V1 of the site and has been pushing the limits of Wordpress ever since. I met him at my place, he's a friend of my housemate, it was very serendipitous... He was around having a drink with my housemate and we were all shooting the shit, he came on board the next day - after a quick little dev task we gave him.

ME: How do you work together on this project? Who does what and how do you all keep in touch?

TOM: Email, Skype, face to face, SMS, phone...it's probably fair to say that around all of our day jobs, Jack's and my girlfriends and then Xavier's wife... it can be difficult to do exactly that. Keeping lines of communication open between the three of us is certainly our biggest challenge. We somehow mash the thing together though, things always work out in the end.

ME: What's next for this project?

TOM: Well first up it's our app*, we NEED to get this going SOON and so any support you and your readers can throw our way would be so greatly appreciated. From here, once we've got Australia's scene sorted out we'll be taking it to the States as the food trucking scene over there is just enormous. Bit of work to do here first though...

* At the time of this interview, the guys were crowd-sourcing funding to develop a smartphone app for wherethetruck.at. They reached their target, so look out for this app soon!

ME: If you could pick a cuisine that's not yet supplied on wheels here in Melbourne, what would it be?

TOM: Vietnamese!!!!! We need a Banh Mi van like nothing else, imagine tucking in to a beautiful French baguette stuffed full of Vietnamese grilled pork, coriander, pâté etc on a warm summer's evening... YUM!!!!

ME: Tell me a funny food-truck-related experience.

TOM: The FUN(iest) experience to date has been trying to get people who don't quite understand the concept of a "gourmet food truck" to understand that you won't get food poisoning from a dirty kebab here!!! Australians have been so conditioned to expecting that anything served out the side of a truck is bad news: dirty kebabs, soggy burgers...yuk. So taking friends and family along to a gourmet food truck for the first time is always a lot of fun, they're skeptical until the first mouthful, then their faces light up, and most of them are hooked from then on.

ME: Anything else you want to say?

TOM: We do this for the love of it, it can be tough sometimes as we don't make any money from the site however there is an expectation of quality from both a user's and the trucks' perspective. We love that people love our site, what makes it all worthwhile is when somebody has something nice to say about us and what we're doing. That's the fun bit for us, when we get feedback from our users saying that they love using our service.

If you live in Australia, go to wherethetruck.at and select your city to find your nearest food truck. For photos and a bit of a story about the trucks, click on my Meals on Wheels tag at any time as I eat my way through the streets of Melbourne.

ps. Last chance to win some beautiful handmade gifts by Sparkling Flora

Meals on Wheels - Beatbox Kitchen

The day was grey. The car park alongside and empty strip of Lygon Street was desolate. On the side of the road, a man sat with his arm around his teenaged son beside a parked truck, and that truck was the one bright place for miles around. The truck was the Beatbox Kitchen, one of Melbourne's many food trucks, and it assaulted the senses with happiness on that lonely strip. Splashes of red and yellow, painted onto the side of the truck, lit up the sidewalk, while a cheerful row of orange lights warmed an awning over the truck's side window. An 80s beat-box renovated into an iPod dock sent Otis Redding's rhythm and blues out into the street, and the burgers sizzling on the grill made tummies grumble from blocks away.

I was buying for three, so I ordered a couple of Raph Burgers for Mr B and Em, and a Shroom Burger for me, as well as some crispy shoe-string fries to share. We took them home and had a picnic on our lounge-room floor, with Madeleine rolling around on the rug and trying to put her feet in the spicy tomato dipping-sauce.

Both kinds of burgers were delicious, and my marinated and grilled portobello mushroom replacement for a meat patty was as juicy as they come. All we needed was some Otis Redding on my iPod to make it perfect.

ps. Curious about more of Melbourne's food trucks? I'm slowly eating my way through them, one by one. Here's what I've tried so far.

Meals on Wheels - Fancy Hank's Bar-B-Que

What is it about food vans and lawn bowls that make them such a good combination? There's something about portable food and bare feet and booze and bowling that adds an extra atmosphere of cheerful relaxation to any meal, I think. As the summer sun crept slowly toward the horizon and local folks kicked their shoes off to take to the smooth green, Fancy Hank fired up a barbeque that looked something like a younger sibling of the Hogwarts Express, and I lined up under the coloured string-lights for a sticky, smokey, Southern-style barbeque dinner.

The last time I tasted pulled pork I was in a small town in Arkansas, USA, on a road trip. My friend Sonya and I sat in a cafe that was lit up in neon pink and yellow and decorated with larger-than-life flamingos, and each tucked into the biggest mound of pulled pork butt you could ever imagine, with a slice of bread on the side, and tried unsuccessfully to wash it down with red wine. (This is me, crying with laughter at the sight of my still-giant mound of dry and dessicated pork butt, which had defeated me despite a good half hour of dedicated eating).

Later that night, because we didn't know what else was on, Sonya and I followed some signs to a Christian rock concert that was held in a rodeo arena. We lasted two songs. We bought matching T-shirts that said DON'T DO DRUGS JUST DANCE. We took off.

But that is all in the past.

On this night, I ordered a pulled pork and coleslaw sandwich that was moist and delicious and much more my size. Em was a big fan of her smokey BBQ chicken, and Mr B LOVED the pork ribs (although he was not to be convinced when it came to the beef link or the dill pickle I ordered for him on the side).

The real down-side to this meal, in my opinion, was that I had to take it home and eat it in the lounge room, because my darling Madeleine was already asleep. The night was so perfect, I would have loved to wile it away with a spot of bowling and a glass of chilled, white wine under the colourful cafe lights, while Fancy Hank filled the air with tasty, marinated smoke.

ps. More meals on wheels in Melbourne, here.

Meals on Wheels - Taco Truck

Hola, dear friends! When we moved to Melbourne, almost a year ago today, one of our friends came over to help us unpack, and told us a bit about our part of town. "If you walk all the way to the end of Rathdowne Street," he told us, "there's a truck that sells tacos from out the back."

This sounded too good to be true and so, as soon as I got the chance, I followed Rathdowne Street to the end. At which point I discovered that it was, indeed, too good to be true. At the end of Rathdowne Street there was... a cross-road. A little grassed area. Some houses. And nothing more.

It didn't take too long, however, to discover that my friend had actually been referring to the Taco Truck, and its newer sibling Taco Truck Dos, which roam the streets of Melbourne bringing the kinds of soft-shell tacos I'd come to adore in New York to our parks and byways.

And this summer, they have been good enough to return to the end of Rathdowne Street a number of times, and we have hurried on up for a tasty meal on more than one occasion.

My favourite order is the fish taco, but you pretty much can't go wrong with combinations like beef and slaw taco, chicken and corn, black-bean, and more; served alongside corn chips and creamy guacamole, seasoned with fresh lime.

Will you join me for a picnic by the edge of the road some summer evening?

ps. Sink your teeth into more of Melbourne's Meals on Wheels

Meals on wheels - Grub Food Van

Happy New Year to you, dear friend. I hope you embrace it with hope and gusto and bravery, and may it bring you deep love and great joy. Recently, in my quest to sample the wares of all the food trucks in Melbourne, I took a stroll up to the Grub Food Van. It was a bit of a stretch, but I included Grub because when the weather warms up, the folk here open up their classic streamline caravan for food service in the sunny courtyard.

I found a table under the shade cloth and ordered an avocado salsa on toast and the biggest, coldest drink on the menu.

The people here are lovely and there's a friendly resident dog called Mutti (they also serve hot dogs called Mutti Dogs, but she doesn't seem to carry a grudge), a fabulous greenhouse (photos here), and delicious food, all of which combine to make Grub one of my favourite local cafes. But I've gone on about all this before. So let's talk a minute about dating my daughter, instead.

Madeleine is an AWESOME date. First of all, she can almost sit up by herself, which is extremely desirable in one's choice of lunch company. When we get to a cafe, I tilt her stroller up into the 'big girl' toddler position, and she can't keep the delight out of her face as she watches the world from this whole new perspective.

Second, Madeleine is a great conversationalist. In that she is of the opinion that I am a great conversationalist. She hangs on my every word, laughs at all my jokes, and, as I raise my coffee cup to my lips and back, she watches with an expression that ranges from fascination to adoration at my manual dexterity.

She also smiles constantly, never raises an eyebrow if I order a cupcake, and is generously free with the cuddles and kisses (something more lunch dates should be). And finally, she wiggles her head in what we like to call "the Stevie Wonder" dance-move whenever I squeeze her squeaker-toy, like this.

At Grub, Madeleine managed all of the above. And when it got too hot outside we moved indoors, where she took her dance moves to the woven mat floor while I polished off a delicious slice of cake with heavy cream and read a magazine.

I defy you to find better company in a cafe.