Newsletters

Super Ras El Hanout Our tenth birthday has passed in a flurry of celebration, and we must say that it was very moving to receive good wishes and congratulations from so many of you – thank you.  It seemed appropriate to mark the occasion by creating a brand new, very best, spice mix, and so our Super Ras el Hanout was born.  Most of you will be familiar

Tenth Birthday Celebrations This winter sees us celebrating the tenth birthday of Herbie’s Spices. In some ways it seems a lifetime ago that we opened the doors of our tiny Rozelle shopfront with little fanfare, unaware of the huge changes it would make to our lives. Yet in other ways, the decade has sped by, leaving us almost breathless with the excitement of it

Lemongrass and Lemon Myrtle Lemongrass is an ingredient which lends authenticity and fresh flavour to many of our favourite south-east Asian foods. In that case, why would we make a decision to delete lemongrass from our range at Herbie’s Spices? Well, it’s a sad fact that lemongrass just doesn’t dry very well. We originally had a dried lemongrass that was finely chopped pieces from the green

New Book – Spice Notes and Recipes Proving that he has extraordinary time management skills, Ian “Herbie” Hemphill has found time to upgrade and enhance his classic book Spice Notes, which has just reincarnated as Spice Notes and Recipes. With a 50% increase in the word-count, and over 80 recipes, many of them created by Ian’s daughter, Kate, this new hard-cover book also covers

Products There are always little buzz-words and catch-phrases that can tell you, in retrospect, just which time-zone they were in. Remember fibre? These days it’s low GI. Remember low-fat? Now it’s 97% fat-free. (Thanks, Catherine Saxelby, for those updates.) There is a new word in the food business now; the word is provenance. With the advent of mad cow disease and foot and mouth

Our Spice Kits As Christmas approaches for the ninth time since the opening of the doors at Herbie’s, we have been doing some soul-searching. Are our little gift kits becoming old hat? Should we be looking for new and interesting, albeit more expensive, packaging? Apparently we’re alone with these thoughts, as our customers continue to love them and come back for more. Herbie’s gift

Setting the Record Straight! Over the last eight years, Australian cooks have become more knowledgeable about, and more comfortable with, all sorts of spices, and we’d like to think that these newsletters have had a hand in that. So we beg to set a common misconception straight – Middle Eastern food is not Moroccan! So often one hears or reads about “Moroccan” food and spices which

India Travels January 2005 saw us once again tripping through India and Sri Lanka with our Spice Discovery Tour, accompanied by 16 of the most amenable people we could have hoped to meet. Booking all accommodation with the excellent Taj Group ensured very comfortable rooms everywhere we went, and the itinerary ran without a hitch. Our group has returned home armed with lots of

Spices from Bhutan About a year ago, we met a group of representatives from the small kingdom of Bhutan and agreed to assist them with the marketing of their spice crops. It is a landlocked country, bordered on the northern side by Mongolia and on the other three sides by India. To help you place this tiny kingdom on your mental map, picture Nepal

The latest on Spice Appreciation Classes After more than six years of trading, our Spice Appreciation Classes continue to be in great demand, and we have been sorry to have to turn people away from fully booked classes. As our classes for 2003 have been fully booked for some months, we are pleased to tell you that the timetable for next year has now

Where did Spring go! It would seem that our Spring newsletter never made it out due to a technical hitch, sorry! We thought as spring is still not quite over you may still enjoy this update. All the best, Herbie. Spice Grinding Mills During a stay in India not long before we opened Herbie’s, we found a marvellous spice grinding mill. It is the

Thursday Night Meal Ideas Do you lack a true appreciation of Thursday? It’s on the run-down to the week’s end, it’s almost Friday, and it’s a handy evening to catch up with friends when the weekend calendar is just too busy. As a friend so rightly says: Thursday comes but once a week, so you must make the most of it! With this in

Most of Australia is sweltering under the humidity and still heat of February, and autumn has never seemed more welcome or more attractive. On these hot days, we’ve been making the most of the melons in season and making a juice of fresh ginger, watermelon and rockmelon, with lots of ice. Very refreshing! Shichimi Togarashi Your response to our newest blend, Shichimi Togarashi, as been