We have 2 daughters - one, who will be 18 in Oct and one who turned 16 in March. They are about as different as 2 females born reasonably close together, and both from the same gene pool can be.

Hannah, the eldest, takes after her father in many ways. This is her last year at school and we have no doubt that next year she'll be leaving home, even though she doesn't have a direct focus on what she wants to do. It seems almost too hard for Rick and I to grasp that after 18 years of being a tightknit family, one of our babies is getting ready to fly the coop. Ready, able and frighteningly competent, actually. Frightening, becos her level of focus and committment is something that I never had at her age and I am in awe of the goals that she sets herself and achieves. Having said that she is also a classic teenager with the messiest room I have ever seen in my life, and a wearying tendency to respond to parental enquiries with monosylabillic answers. Being of a more garrulous nature myself, I find some of those grunts distinctly testing!

Sport is Hannahs great passion - and she has exposed herself to a wide range, making us wonder at times whether she should be narrowing her options down and focusing on one or two - but as is her wont, she has countered all our arguments with a perfect logic, that we haven't been able to fault, and carried on with it all. Kayaking is her love - and she does flat water as well as  white. She cycles  - both road and mountain - and runs.  She has steadily built up this base of fitness , and is planning on doing the Coast to Coast as an individual next year. My kneejerk reaction is that its too much, but in this, as in so much I am quite wrong, and I've learnt to stand back and keep my comments to myself, becos she has proven time and again, that if you believe something to be achieveable and you work hard enough to make it happen, then it will. What you don't need are doubting Thomas's around, whose perception of what can be done is totally coloured by what they can achieve themselves. Hannah has a father who is incredibly fit, and who has actively encouraged his daughters to go out and do stuff - and as a result they don't put limits on themselves. Its been a salutory lesson for me to observe.

This weekend she had the school ball. Rhonda who works with us at the restaurant came over to the house and did the makeup for Hannah and some of her friends and they all left, looking stunning. When did our baby become so grown up? And when did our sporty, practical daughter turn into this feminine apparition? There was a definite lump in my throat as I headed over to the restaurant that nite.

We sat up and waited for her to  come home, as you do. Partly becos we naturally wanted to hear how it had gone, ( which is where those monosyllabilic answers can be so frustrating!) but also becos I had a pasta bake ready for her to eat before she went to bed, becos the next morning she was competing in the Kaimai Classic - a multi sport event. ( At least the need to get up early the next morning, cancelled out the need for any discussions on whether or not she was allowed to go to after ball events. She had other priorities, so it never arose as an issue.)

This is the second year shes done the Kaimai classic as an individual, and it was watching her compete last year, when it occurred to me that I was out of my league, and that what I thought my daughters were capable off, and what they were actually proving themselves to be able to do, was vastly different, and it was therefore time, that I shut up, and got out of the way. Theres a cross country run, followed by a mountain bike, then kayak down the river, road bike around Te Puna, and final road run up Wairoa Road and Crawford Road. She completed it in 4:32 - an improvement of 10 mins on her time last year.

The car loaded up with all the necessary bits of apparatus, and equipment needed!! We left at the crack of dawn to get the kayak down to the river and the bikes unloaded and her warmed up before the start of the race at 8am.

Suffice to say I think she is amazing!!  And as I contemplate the rain falling outside as I write this, I'm trying to find a little bit of that internal grit in me, to motivate myself out the door to go and do some exercise. It doesn't come as naturally to me as it does my daughters - but I'm fully aware that that excuse doubles as a copout that I should be ashamed of!

For more years than I can remember Diane Ponzio has been coming to us to do a Sunday lunch concert. Trevor Braunias, who sold Rick his  Martin guitar was our original point of contact, and Trevor still very generously comes out every year to set up the sound system, so that Diane can stand behind her microphone and regale us with her take on life and people, while playing a beautiful Martin guitar.

She is this bright, intense ray of New York energy that fills up the room with her zest and love for humanity. She travels constantly meeting a huge array of people all around the world, and yet engages with each person she encounters, on an intensely individual level. Her songwriting speaks of the human condition and the similarities we all face, regardless of where we may live. It is not unusual to look around the room during her concert and see grown men with tears , as her words evoke an emotional response. Parents dying; the mad freneticness of our pace of life; unhealthy relationships; and the specialness that is in all of us. She covers it all ( plus her love for carbohydrates!) with a succinctness that invariably hits the point perfectly. I don't think her CDs are available in music shops, but you would be able to purchase them from her website,  dianeponzio.com

We have got to the point now where we keep the concert small, and design an easy plated lunch that is served around her breaks.  Tried other formats in the past, but have found that this seems to work the best with Diane.  Bread and spiced macadamia nuts to start, with a fennel and feta dip: roast chicken with garlic and lime, served with potatoes and proscuitto wrapt roasted pumpkin and a simple sauce made from the juices in the roasting pan. John had been experimenting with an orange and chococlate icecream in the week preceding so we decided to serve that in cones, using trays that I had had made many years ago for catering jobs, that always remind me of the trays that you used to see at the movie theatres, back when I was  a child. People loved that idea. We don't seem to eat icecream in the cone as adults with quite the same gay abandon that we observed in Italy -and not quite sure why that should be. Then some panforte and espresso. All washed down with Akarua rose becos it was a beautiful sunny day, and I love the idea of a light rose as a lunchtime wine.

Music is an amazing vehicle for communication, and Diane gives enormously of herself whenever she comes- I marvel at her ability to be so genuinely caring. And her memory for remembering people is extraordinary.

In previous years I'd put her and Lyn ( the Martin importer from Lyn McAllister music in Auckland) up at Frog Cottage, a jewel box of a house that  a wonderful local lady had made into a precious B&B. That wasn't available this year becos its on the market, but Sally decided that she would have Diane and Lyn to stay in her beautiful home instead. Why do I get the feeling that things like this happen to Diane all over the world? We all had a wonderful dinner there that night,  with a free ranging conversation that put the world to right, as you do, and came home feeling replete and totally satiated, on all levels. Its nice when that happens.

Lyn talked about a one only Johnny Cash, all black,  Martin guitar that she had in stock, and I had to nudge Rick under the table to stop him drooling. Johnny Cash gets lots of air time in the car ( now that we finally have a car that we can play CDs in),  - a fact our daughters are far from receptive too, not being able to share in their fathers enthusiasm for songs about Fulsom Prison! Rick has 3 guitars last time I counted, and I'm hoping thats going to be enough for awhile!

Amazon has been a major influence on me. I buy a number of books thru its website every month - partly becos they are books I want and go looking for, and sometimes becos Amazon sends me an alert about a book that they think I might be interested in, based on my previous purchasing history.

That means that we have an extensive library, which I fail to see as a bad thing. A source of inspiration is never far away, and I like that.

It was an email from them that advised me that a biography on Alice Waters, and her important restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California had just been released. Seeing as how we had been heavily influenced by the cookbooks from that restaurant, I decided that that was a must read, and promptly ordered it ,as you do. The title: Alice Waters and Chez Panisse - the romantic, impractical, often eccentric, ultimately brillant making of a food revolution. By Thomas Mc Namee.

It made for fascinating reading. The restaurant opened in 1971, and has occupied a seminal place in restaurant accolades ever since. This book looks behind what has made it tick, what has driven the principal personality involved, namely Alice Waters. Ive read other books that allude to the restaurant, like Jeremiah Towers distinctly egocentric take in' California Dish', but this was the first opportunity to get to grips with what  it was that drove the reasons for the restaurant in the first place, and that has seen it survive thru a somewhat turbulent history.

Needless to say I found it fascinating. Longeivety in the restaurant industry in Anglo Saxon countries is not the norm, so Chez Panisse has become famous as much for the fact that it is still there, as for all the other precedents that it has set, and I was intrigued by the wheres and whyfores. They'd try to sell it a couple of times,but had never managed to do so, and it continues on as an icon of focusing on the very best of ingredients.

When we were in Venice  3 years ago, I wanted to go to Harrys Bar, becos the mystic of the place had always intrigued me. We peered into the interior but didn't venture in, becos it was one of those places where I didn't feel wealthy enough or skinny enough to go in. ( I get intimidated like that sometimes!) And that made me curious - becos what I had read about Harrys Bar was that it had started off as very much a neighbourhood venue where the locals came on a regular basis,  to eat the same thing day in and day out. Chez Panisse was the same. Intended as a local for people to come and relax. But it gained a form of noteriety that lifted it above just the locals and made it a destination for 'foodies'- just as has also happened with Harrys Bar. And what had made it special ceased to be what it was, becos of the constant flood of curious tourists, who arrive with an attitiude of ' ok, so I hear that you're supposed to be good, so prove it too me!"I find that curious. Becos that constant flow of people who are there, purely becos they're heard they should be, provide an income stream to the restaurant, that must be very nice, but at the same time it undermines what it is that made the restaurant special in the first place.

Their focus when they first opened was heavily influenced by the French, and by people like Richard Olney, who were living and writing in France at the time. Then when Paul Bertolli started cooking there as head chef, the pendulum started swinging towards Italy - with the food becoming more representative of the cooking in that country.

I have just coincidently finished reading Paul Bertollis book'Cooking by Hand" a book hes written based on his experiences in the restaurant he runs on his own, now that he's left Chez Panisse, called Olivetto. A densely written but absolutely captivating treatise on the importance of good ingredients, and going back to simple, expressive styles of cooking.  We are about to have our pigs killed, and are therefore reading up on charcuterie, which is why I'd turned to Pauls book, becos he has a substantial chapter on that subject, and is recognised as an expert in the field.

Most of Alice Waters energies these days are expended in food areas outside of the restaurant - but what she has created is proof that the principals of serving good food from the very best local ingredients that can be sourced, will find a willing and receptive market, even somewhere like America where the trends tend to be constantly  on whatever is new and therefore fashionable.

I like that notion of consistency, and not needing to titivate purely for the sake of titivation. Rather creating something that tastes good, becos its been made from quality ingredients, with care and attention. That is a concept I can most defintily adhere too.

So its made me drag out all the old Chez Panisse cookbooks to have another read thru - although 2 of them had their covers destroyed by our Doberman years ago, when we left him at home on his own for too long. Quite why he selected the only 2 Chez Panisse books ( which weren't side by side in the book case) that we owned at that stage, and destroyed their covers, is something I've never been able to figure.

Its all interesting, and all gist for the mill, as I write in my diary quite often!  I remember the first time I read one of Nico Ladenis' books back in the dark early days of us being at Somerset, when we were really questioning what we were doing and why. I remember that sense of relief that I had on reading that even a top restaurant in the UK has customers who come and question and don't like what is on offer. I remember that it made me feel better, that some of the negative crap that we'd had to deal with here, was not actually unique to us, but was in fact something experienced by restaurants everywhere. Maybe thats part of what I've liked about this book - even though I've drawn few parellels with it , there is still stuff that I can identify with and which is unique to the hospitality industry.

She has a missionary zeal that I admire and respect, but have no desire to emulate. My focus in much more on my immediate surroundings, be that in terms of people, and environment. But then I've never been motivated by a desire to rush out and change other people. I prefer to concentrate on that which is close to me.

We do however need the prophets, and those who are prepared to put the time and the personal energy into creating change on a grand scale, and I have nothing but respect for those who opt for that road.

Read the book. Its fascinating!