Dani Venn

I usually go out of my way to avoid charity spruikers, you know the ones that hang outside of shopping centres with puppy dog eyes trying to guilt you into signing up to save the children or environment or whales or those poor CEOs affected by the GFC. Does that make me a bad person? [...]

I can almost hear the collective sigh across the country as the weekend is nearing! Hurrah for Friday night drinks, a Saturday sleep in and a relaxing Sunday morning reading the paper and maybe even going out for breakfast? But what if you only had $2 per day to spend? Well, that would buy you [...]

The other day I saw Tiffany Hall in the flesh. You know the blonde, bronzed Goddess from The Biggest Loser? The first (and only) thing I said to her was, ‘Wow, now I really feel fat and pale’. I couldn’t help but compare my short, chubby legs / cankles to Tiffany’s taut calf muscles and [...]

There’s certain things in life that just go together perfectly, take for instance, tomato and basil, vanilla and strawberries, lemon and fish. It just works! Lamb and cumin also fits into this category. Rub a little cumin and salt into a lovely piece of lamb before frying or roasting it and it makes the meat [...]

School canteens or tuck shops have changed quite a lot in recent years. When I was in primary school I used to order two party pies, a jam doughnut and a chocolate Big M every friday when I was allowed to have a lunch order. It was so much fun writing my order on a [...]

Before last week I had always associated picking fruit as something English backpackers did to fund their travels around Australia. For some absurd reason it had never occurred to me that I could go and pick my own fruit from farms in my local area. Silly me, for all these years I have been missing [...]

For as long as I can remember I’ve always yearned for the exotic, something less familiar. As a kid I never dug domestic cats and dogs, I wanted a white tiger as a pet. When all of my friends went to schoolies on the Gold Coast, I chose to live with a family in rural [...]

Lamingtons are about as Australian as you get. You can tell this because when you type the word lamington it is not recognised as a word and comes up in spell check. As today is Australia Day I thought I’d get all patriotic and bake a bunch of these sweet squares of sponge cake coated [...]

Unless your name is Heston Blumenthal, it’s pretty much impossible to invent a new dish. It seems that almost everything in the culinary world has been done before. But I guess that was probably what people in the 1950′s thought about music until The Beatles changed all that! Now I’m not saying that I’m like [...]

You may not know this about me but I used to be a ‘pescatarian,’ meaning that I didn’t eat any meat but was happy to eat seafood. It was during what I like to refer to as my ‘Buddhist Phase’. Wearing colourful fisherman’s pants, reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and attempting to [...]