Luxury Fast Food

With my horrifyingly busy schedule these days, I find myself eating badly on weekdays. In my case of course, eating badly means not having proper meals at proper times, or meals sans (horror of horrors) dessert. Closet food snob that I am, I still eschew cheap frozen pizzas (I only like the Ristorante brand) and hamburgers, and instead try to inject as much luxury as I can into my quickie meals. One of my favourites means of doing this is with that little bottle of magic called Tetsuya's Truffle Salsa.

My first taste of Truffle Salsa was at Tetsuya's last year. I was lucky enough to dine there courtesy of Tourism Australia while on a press junket to Sydney. It was love at first taste and greedy goose that I am, I polished off the whole bread roll which was served before my meal with no small amount of Truffle Butter. I only regretted it slightly when I started to fill up prematurely after the fifth course. When I was told I could buy the Truffle Salsa complete with a recipe for Truffle Butter, I nearly ran to the front of the restaurant. The only thing that stopped me was the fact that the waiter had just placed a plate of that famous, sublime Confit of Ocean Trout before me. The Salsa could wait, I conceded.

To cut what could be a long story short, I took home three bottles of Tetsuya's Truffle Salsa and kept one and a half bottles for myself (the other one and a half landed in the grateful belly of my equally greedy brother). Within a month, my bottles were empty and I felt a slight bereavement for the loss of that wonderfully versatile salsa. Then several weeks later, I discovered that Culina recently began stocking Tetsuya's range of bottled sauces, including the salsa and his delicious oyster vinaigrette. Suffice it to say, I bought a bottle and it now serves as luxurious quickie meals at the end of my increasingly busy days. I usually make up a batch of truffle butter to spread on hot, fresh-from-the-oven rolls, or top otherwise ordinary scrambled eggs with a dollop of the salsa. C particularly likes the truffle salsa tossed through hot pasta with some butter and a good helping of parmesan. Now that's what I call Luxury Fast Food.