The puppies are here, and have quite successfully turned Rick and I into gooey eyed bores!. They are simply the most beautifully adorable things I've ever seen. Kazza is proving to be a spectacular mother - the power of the maternal instinct is truly humbling to watch - and our dining room has been transformed into this tableau of the most exquisite domestic bliss. We sit and watch entranced as the puppies, who still have their eyes tightly closed, and can't walk, wiggle their way towards their mother, grissle and groan, and scream their indignation when they can't find a conveniently positiioned teat; flop over each other, collapse in exhausted piles after  energetic suckling; and then murmur their contentment. Its all just too gorgeous. Having to leave them to go to work is proving to be a major bugger!

Hannah and Courteney are heading home today, and we're under no illusions that its not to see us! Hannah had to go back to Auckland last Sunday before they made their dramatic entrance into the world, and has been demanding photos during the week so she can be introduced. Courteney didn't have to go back till Tues, so she had a chance to make her acquaintance, and is keen to catch up.

We ended up needing a caesarian section to ensure live puppies, which will make me forever guilty about the facetious comments I made in an earlier blog about the tedium of waiting for nature to take its course. The staff at Bethlehem Vet care were truly wonderful, and our appreciation for the way they answered the call and came in on a Sunday nite, is most definitly heartfelt. After what had been a torrid few hours watching my beloved dog really suffer, it was with immense relief that we let the professionals take over. Like it when people know what they're doing!

We thought there were 6 girls and 1 boy - which suited Rick cos he's keen to keep a boy and only having one meant he wasn't going to have to make a decision. But I heard a loud exclamation this morning and when I went to investigate was shown 2 male puppies laid out side by side. . Not quite sure how we missed that - but there you go!

Did I mention that we think they are uttterly gorgeous?!!

Yet another single subject book that is truly fascinating in its scope and the degree  of detail that it covers, while written in an engaging and easy to read style.
As I understand it, Mort Rosenblum is an American journalist who has spent the last 20 or so years based in France. His journalistic instincts come to the fore in his ability to fossick out titbits of information from all over the world and from a hugely variable range of people.
He bought a rundown property in Provence ( as you do!), close to Patrica Wells, and discovering ancient olive trees on his land, set about reestablishing them, and in the process became obsessed with the history of olives.
I knew olives had been around for a long time but I didn't realise just how far back they went, and just how important they have been to all the cultures around the Mediterranean.

In New Zealand as in California of late, olive trees have been planted, often in symbiosis with new wine growing areas, and olive oil has become a substance of considerable catchet - with competitions held to determine the best, just as we do with wine.
The procession from a basic, essential food ingredient, revered for its fundamental importance, in old cultures, to the pursuit of the 'best' olive oil in the  Western world, as defined by trendy food magazines, has given rise to enormous fraud and misrepresentations. The Italians, thru some earlier Sicilian contacts ,cornered the American market in the mid 1900's and have never relinquished their position of dominance, shipping in vast quantities of 'Italian' olive oil, Effectively much more than is actually grown in Italy. The Italian conglomerates buy in oil from Greece, Tunisia Spain and Turkey, blend it and label it 'Product of Italy'. Worse, the fraud extends to cutting olive oil with cheaper seed oils - sometimes by up to as much as 90% . The politics behind how that situation has been allowed to evolve make for fascinating reading - and makes the Westerners look like dupes really. They will buy something becos it is packaged beautifully and becos they are told it is something that it often isn't. 'Lite' olive oil is a classic example of marketing that has nothing to do with reality.

He travels all over the the countries  with a deep history in growing olives, and describes the old ways of pressing oil, relative to the new centrifugal methods - and tastes oil everywhere, discussing in detail, the differences between producers, regions and countries.

The upshot of which is to confirm my strongly held conviction that competitions are a load of bollocks. The notion of ' best' is entirely and utterly personal, and what is one persons nirvana, someone else will say tastes like cats pee. So rather than needing to know what is best ( competitions are useful for marketing, period), becos that can never, nor should be defined, I think much more interesting is the range of flavours in olive oils, and what creates that variation: types of olives, climatic conditions, treatment of trees, and methods of pressing.  And how those differences in flavour should be celebrated rather than judged on some arbitary scale of taste.  It is truly fascinating.

We use two tiers of olive oil at the restaurant - New Zealand olive oil with our homemade bread, and for any dressings, and then large cans of Italian olive oil that say it is Extra Virgin, for most of our frying. Having  read this book I am no longer quite so sure that what it says on the can is actually what is in the can, and I tried some last nite out of curiosity, and found it pale and anemic by comparison to the New Zealand oils that I am more used too, and would be very surprised if it was in fact Extra Virgin. All interesing...

My parents planted a couple of olive trees on the land here probably 10 to 15 years ago, and Rick and I have effectively ignored them since we bought the property, but have just been for a wander down to feed the worms, and had a closer look at them. They're definitly in need of some tender loving care - but possibly not beyond help. Mr Rosenblum talks about trees that have been neglected for centuries but which  still produce, so we may have to turn to someone who knows about these things to advice us.

We use 2 types of New Zealand oil - both grown by people we know and love. The Ellsgrove is grown by Ricks Aunt and Uncle, Sue and Trevor Lowe, in the Hawkes Bay, and Onemata comes from Plummers Point , close by us here in the Bay of Plenty, on an idyllic property next to the inlet, owned by Vic and Judy Bryant. They are quite different oils,with different aromas and nuances in flavour, just as you get variation in different wines. All of which I think adds to the interest. (We sell bottles of both oils at the restaurant.)

And of course a book on olive oil wouldn't be complete without delving into the  documented health benefits of olive oil, which perhaps explains part of its surgence in popularity in mainstream Western countries over the last 20/30 years. And  I kind of figure that the significance of those health claims make it all the more important to be sure that what you are eating is actually the real thing. Don't trust the labels on imported cans.Rely on your palate to tell you whether it is actually olive oil, or buy New Zealand.
Olive oil doesn't last - there are no benefits to aging it, and I see that as another reason to buy New Zealand becos  that way we get the first of the new season pressing, come August, September, and its grassy herbeacuousness is quite a revelation for those of us more use to bland mass produced oils.
But as with everything else in life, it comes down to personal taste! 

And now I'm of to make myself something for lunch -( I'm home alone, Courteneys racing in Rotorua with her father in attendance, and I've stayed home on puppy alert - the litter is due any time now.)., and I will be splashing around the olive oil in the sure conviction that it is good for me!

One of the unexpected, positive side effects of the cookschools, has been the amount that Rick and I have learnt from people who come to the classes. We've seen a hugely varied group of people over the years that we've been doing the classes - all of whom have done different things in their lives, and some of whom can unexpectedly be experts on subjects that we occasionally riff on. That means that we get to learn even as we are teaching - which I've always seen as a real bonus.
I tend to get excited about whatever my next great new idea is, quite regularly, and often discuss it during the classes, and as a result get all sorts of feedback. More often than not though, I'm usually humbled by the awareness, that something that is new and exciting in my life, may be something that other people have been quietly going about in their lives for aeons.  So I shut up, take a step back and listen - and usually learn in the process...

Ever since we bought this property from my father I've been wanting to extend the gardens considerably - but time and money and expertise have always been limiting factors. We did plant a number of various citrus trees in our first year, and got totally disheartened by the destruction that the pukekos caused. But a reasonable number of trees have survived, and I no longer feel any guilt at all when our dogs deal to pukekos. But there is a whole heap more we could be doing,  and sometimes the thought of how enormous it is, ends up being limiting becos I can't quite decide where to start.

We have an enclosure in the orchard below where we experimented with keeping pigs - all interesting, but not one we are in a rush to repeat. The daily committment of feeding, in amongst everything else we do in a day, felt like too much. But the fencing built for them has given us a dog free area which I've had designs on for a vegetable garden for awhile. My initial efforts weren't a resounding success - and like most things in life I decided I'd be much more successful if we went  back to the basics - good soil. So earlier this year we installed a  compost heap -  whichin typical 'me' style, I'd prevaricated over  for some time, over complicating what essentially should be very simple. A pile of decomposing food scraps. Have managed that with the house stuff, and have been wanting for some time to start  on the restaurant food waste, but volumes there,  are conspicuously bigger and I wasn't quite sure where to begin. So it was a good idea thats been sitting in the 'too hard for now' file.  I'd tried a worm farm a few years back,  for the house- bought a plastic layered job,  but that hadn't worked. 

One of our good customers is a worm expert having run a huge commercial operation - so he got quizzed the other nite when he was in, and dropt me round some coconut fibre the next day to use. Just what I needed to give me the impetus to get all fired up - so Rick started digging...
Becos of the volume of waste that we produce at the restaurant I'd suspected that farming worms in the ground was going to be better than the old bath style containers that lots of people use - and that is what we've started this week.

Some wonderful ladies who come to the cookschools, got us started with our first load of worms, but we realised quickly that they weren't going to be enough to break down the kind of volume that we needed, so I went to a commercial operation and bought 10 kilos as you do. My husband was heard to mutter in the background, that they were more expensive than whitebait! - but hopefully if we get everything right and they thrive, they will more than pay their way. And more importantly, it just feels like the right thing to be doing. I love the concept of leftover food not being wasted, but instead going down to feed the worms, who will in time produce a vermicast that we will use to feed our fruit trees and vegetables.  I love the circularity of that notion- it has a symmetry that appeals.

However being us - we're currently agonising over whether we're doing things correctly, and the worms are inspected each morning when we take down the container of slops to see whether they're happy and eating and doing their thing.
Do we lie the food on top of them, or do we put it next to them?- will it go stagnant if they don't eat it soon enough? so should we be making sure that its broken down into more 'worm' size bites?

We start the next cookschool series next week, so I have this opportunity handed to me on a plate to quizz people who know more about these things than us. Perfect really!

My siblings and I, all had to do Speech and Drama when we were growing up. Something I never showed any real aptitude for, being the type of personality who is too rooted in my present to ever be able to indulge in the flights of imagination necessary for good acting. I have however developed a voice which carries, sometimes inauspiciously so,  especially when I'm discussing something at the restaurant, that I don't necessarily mean for other tables to hear. Sotte voce is not a concept I ever grasped especially well.

Our speech teacher, Mrs Northcote Bade was a special delight - a grandmother figure for me, when I was otherwise deprived of one. My mother never really understood that in those last few years, she was paying more for me to go and sit in Mrs Northcote Bades gorgeous antique filled den( she lived in a Chapman Taylor house ), and discuss my woes and anxieties, more than I was learning to modulate my voice and diction.
That den was lined floor to ceiling with wood and glass bookcases - it is buried deep in my pysche as a place of emotional nourishment, and is a look that I tried to describe to the designers when we were working on the bar for the alterations at the restaurant, some years back. ( And something I thought we'd achieved very successfully, until shortly after we reopened, post alterations, when one of our old customers walked in, looked around, and told me with a distinct twinkle in his eyes, that it reminded him of an upmarket bordello!) Our shelves here are filled with wine , whereas Mrs Northcote Bades were old books, but walking into it often evokes her for me, regardless of Mr Eriksons opinion!

I was thinking about her this afternoon as I sat patting our heavily pregnant dog, and remembering a poem I did at some stage in my short career: 'Waiting, waiting ,waiting for the party to begin, waiting, waiting, waiting for the laughter and the din...'
It always had special resonance that poem, becos it evoked that childhood despair brought on by how painfully slowly time could pass when you're waiting for something special to occur. Something I haven't felt in a long time, becos these days I have the reverse problem, where life is so busy, that the days  flit by, rapaciously quickly, and I'm often left staggered by how far thru the year we are already.

So I haven't felt that sense of time dragging slowly in a long while - and yet here we are now, as we  wait for our dog to retreat to a quiet corner and have her babies. Her tummy is a round drum, and shes getting aggressive and territorial with the other dog, who's always up until now been queen bee - and we wait, and we wait, and we wait some more..Aware that we are not running this process - it will happen when she is ready, and we just hope to be around to capture the marvel of the creation of new life. I thought today at one point, that it was iminent, but she has gone of the boil, and decided she isn't ready as yet, so we wait, and we wait...

Caesars are beginning to make sense! None of this being at the mercy of nature - in, out and sorted. Much more business like! I jest!!!!! Honest... But it is novel, being so not in control...and just having to go along with the process.

We've just had a huge weekend, and its had absolutely nothing to do with the Jazz Festival that has filled Tauranga and the Mount with happy people. Rick and I didn't get to see any of the music, becos we were heading over the Kaimais before 7am each morning with our youngest daughter and  all the paraphenalia that comes with road cycling for her to compete in the 3 day Te Awamutu Tour - a junior tour that attracts riders from all over NZ.
Hannah came on Saturday but decided to run up Mt Pirongia, when she discovered it on the map, before coming on to see her sister finish the first stage, as you do!

Courteney had an awesome weekend and to her huge credit, won the U19s - and proved in the process that she has enormous reserves of determination and strength. Cycling is her life, and when you see your children have this kind of success, you can't help but feel very real satisfaction that she is so good at what she loves. Life tends to be  alot less complicated when that happens.
( And having observed her up close over the weekend, her mother is now reassured that she has that extra level of grit and determination - the fire in her belly as someone said yesterday, to have what it takes to go for what she wants.) Pretty cool really...

Saturday am - heading to her rollers to start warming up, cool, calm and collected..

Team talk - her father who gets everything organised for her, helps, advises and supports; discussing tactics...

..

Start of the race...

.

Rick keeping virgil at the comp point on the circuit. They're going to all appear round the corner at the bottom of the hill any moment, and we want Courteney to be at the front when they hit the line at the top of the hill...

Thats our girl!!

Final stage - Time Trial on Monday, warming up on one bike, with her specially kitted out timetrial bike waiting for her. Time trials have been Courteneys weak link in Tours for the last few years, but thanks to the generosity of keen cyclists from the Tauranga Club, who've supported her in inumerable ways, shes got over that bete noir, and went out there as Tour Leader, and determined not to loose precious seconds.

So for now, she is the top U19 female road cyclist in NZ. That will change becos there are others who will tilt at the crown and claim it back on occasion - but she proved to herself at the weekend that she could do it. Her coach and her father believed she had the ability - and now she does too. And that is pretty cool to see!

A somewhat sobering appraisal from Jancis Robinson on the state of the Australian wine market -

We have had the good fortune to do 2 major trips to Europe in the last few years - each based around 2 weeks of cookschools. The first was in rural Tuscany at a gorgeous Podere outside the small village of Asciano. The second trip was to France, again to a rural aspect, this time about 10kms away from the town of Bergerac in the Dordogne.

Each time we've been lucky enough to have customers of ours from here in Tauranga join us. Each couple would have planned their own trip to Europe and would have fitted in the week with us around the various other aspects of their itinery. We would pick them up from the nearest airport or train station, or some would drive to the house, and we would spend the rest of the week on the other side of the world surrounded by people that we knew and liked. Pretty cool really.

Like us, most of those people were away for 4/5 weeks. Getting to Europe all the way from New Zealand involves such a mammoth amount of expense and time, that most who plan trips there aim to be there for awhile. They then fit as much travel into their itinery as they feel appropriate, and everyone does different things and goes to different places, and its always intriguing to hear the different comments about areas.

One of the things that lots of people do however, is barge - sometimes in the UK and sometimes in France - and I got used to hearing about how idyllic meandering down one of Frances watery byways was. Having watched Rick Stein in his TV series, I could conjur up a reasonable number of appropriate images...

All of which is a roundabout way of introducing this book by Mort Rosenblum - who's style of writing and love affair with France are all things I'm enjoying right now.
He lived for years in an old houseboat on the Seine, right in the middle of Paris, and that is what I thought the book was going to be about, but in fact I ended up with a whole heap more. The history of the Seine in fact - one of the major waterways in France.

 New Zealand is such a new country, relatively speaking, that we've never really developed rivers as a main method of transporting goods - whereas in Europe for centuries the canal system was used as a cost efficent way of moving stuff.
This book tracks that history and makes for fascinating reading. And then discusses how the old ways, the couples who spent their whole lives living on 'peniches' ( river barges), moving cargo thru France,  are now finding they can't compete with rail and road.
Its a dying breed, as trains and trucks and huge congomlorates take over from the individualistic approach of the river people, and gain the upper hand  - and much of the book focuses on the tragedy of a profession that is dying, but refusing to accept the inevitable, and raging at the dying of the light.

Tourism ( ie the barges that the people who were with us used) ironically, is viewed by many as the saviour of the waterways, and the cashcow that will encourage recalcitant local government to reinvest in their canals. But the old operators treat such endeavours with complete disdain - the old world doesn't want to be pragmatic and accomodate the new. And becos of that will probably disappear within a generation, which seems so sad.

Mr Rosenblum has a particular love for the Seine - he discusses often its profound beauty, and how it captivated many artists, who lived along its shores and tried to distill its essence onto canvas.
There are many charming facts thru the book, delving back to Roman times, but one of the loveliest legends is based perhaps, not on fact, but describes how the tidal ebbs and flows which occur in the Seine, and can make things interesting for boats,something that hydrologists have tried to tame over the years, relates to how the Seine was once a beautiful young nymphette in human form who turned into the watery  Seine to escape from the unwelcome advances of Neptune..

'Twice a day since, with great heaving and grunting, he thrusts himself after his lost love object. Each time, the Seine recoils. reversing the natural flow of a river, to keep her gentler green waters separate from his salty waves of blue.
Who knows? River people reject nothing out of hand."

This book is a delightful tour of the river, from its source to where it finally spills into the sea - full of captivating detail along the way...
I see we now have a house boat on the Waikato river, available for hire - we may not have quite  the same centuries of myth and history, but its neat to think that someone has taken the commercial risk to bring a European style of travel to NZ- I sincerely hope it works for them.

We are having a nice Saturday nite at the restaurant - and by that I mean we're full ( which is always a positive start to proceedings!), and there is a lovely low hum of conversation, from relaxed people who are enjoying themselves.

Last nite I came back over to the house twitchy, becos we'd had difficult customers in - people who did things like get up, mid way thru their meal, when their BYO bottle of wine was drunk, and headed over to the supermarket across the road to top up with another bottle; a man who complained that his medium steak wasn't, when in fact it was a textbook example of medium; another table who'd booked as a 9 and turned up as a 6, without any thought to ringing ahead to say their numbers had dropt; and people who were just generally demanding in a way that left us all feeling drained...

The contrast between the 2 nites just serves to remind me, that it doesn't matter how much money you have spent on your decor, or how fabulous your food or wine list is - if people don't appreciate what it is that you do, then it is just going to make you miserable. And even for a restaurant as long established as us, we have nites when I come back over to the house wondering quite why it is that I own a restaurant! Fortunetly though, they are few and far between. Most of the time it is like tonite - a  lovely feeling emanating from the floor - that wonderful confluence of happy people enjoying themselves. And that after all, is what it is all about.

 I tell the staff in their initial training manuals, that we are not about maximising the spend per seat; we are instead all about ensuring that people enjoy their visit enough that they are going to want to come back. Return trade is what makes businesses' like ours viable.
And interestingly tonite - of the 18 tables that we have,( 19 in fact cos one is being turned;) I personally only know the people at 3 tables,  which for me is a very low percentage. Usually I would know at least half, but tonite I don't and I'm not sure if thats becos we have lots of out of towners, or what the reason is- but I look on it as positive becos any business needs new blood coming thru the door all the time. As much as I love my regulars, and we have some formidably loyal customers, I am also acutely aware that we need to be expanding our customer base all the time. Nites like this prove to me that we are, and that is all good.

Tonite was the last nite in awhile that I'll walk over to the restaurant in daylight, given the clocks go back overnite,  which is cause for some sadness, becos as much as I enjoy the change in the seasons and the variation that it brings,( I'm now eating feijoas for breakfast which I love!), I have to say I've postively luxeriated all this week in the glorious late autumnal light that we've been getting in the evenings. Its been beautiful, and I don't feel quite ready to say goodbye...

We've had a good catchup kind of week becos we're between cookschool series which frees up our days considerably, and our last major wedding for the season is over. That has meant lots of free time,  so have put my feet up and read a couple of books, and gone up the Mount an extra couple of times during the week, and am just now at the point where I'm starting to do some more focused work at my desk.  Whereas Rick has mowed things, and cut things and sprayed things - making the property look spic and span! For now!  Stuff to plan for going forward, and I'm finding the energy and enthusiasm to start thinking about it all.

I mentioned in the February newsletter that we were going to be getting 2 pig carcasses a month from Free Range Farms, and that having already tried the pork, raised organically and free range up in the Kaimais, we were feeling pretty good  about this new direction, even though we were going to be required to learn some new skills to use all the pork on a carcass up, and in doing so, make it viable. Picked up on a Neil Perry recipe in the latest Vogue Entertainer, which looked lovely  - and one we might try for friends who are coming home for dinner on Monday nite; and Rick has put pork croquettes on the menu, done in the Spanish style, which is all intended as ways of using up the pork, that we don't otherwise roast or braise or...
I can even feel a special evening coming on - just focused on pork in all its glory! Hmm...

Sally from the farm has also informed me that the Village Butchery in Katikati will be stocking their pork from now on, so if you want to source the very best of NZ pork I suggest you try there. They are having an introduction on Thurs 9 April from 1 pm, with free hot roast pork samples, and I think Rick and I will mooch out in the afternoon to say hi, and offer our heartfelt support for what they are doing, becos we think its pretty awesome!

Will head up the Mount in the morning and brunch afterwards, as you do! - and then drive up to Auckland for a late lunch with my extended whanau which promises to be interesting, as family get togethers always are.. We're hoping to carry on to dinner at Jeremy Schmidts new restaurant in Mt Eden  before we head for home, and 2 indignant dogs who will not have enjoyed been left by themselves all day. They see it as their god given right to have human company...

Previously I've written about the connundrum that El Bulli represents to Rick  and I in terms of the style of food that it serves - this whole concept of molecular gastronomy is one that we don't pretend to have got our heads around. Food for us is  a sensual experience rather than an intellectual one - but I'm increasingly beginning to suspect that a statement like that over simplifies the subject.

We do use our intellect a reasonable amount in analysing new dishes and discussing the reasons for various things happening in the cooking process, and for understanding the background behind things.  We are constantly reading and experimenting, and  trying things and discussing them. Our body of knowledge is a work in progress that has been built up over years, and which we are sure still has a long, long way to traverse. Chefs like Ferran Adria however, push the barrel out a whole heap further than where we go, and this link is to a meal that a Paris based writer had at the restaurant back in 2006.

Dinner at el Bulli means:

35 courses over 6 hours

International travel based on when you manage to get a booking in the restaurant. Something you leave to the discretion of the restaurant, rather than you telling them when you want to come. They will fit you in maybe, when they can..and you will be hugely appreciative of the favour!

It's a whole another world, and one day we are going to have to go and try!

We've just been watching Gordon Ramsay on TV ,even though I'm distinctly off him since the revelations about his female on the side - and even though I was never particulary impressed by the American series where he goes into restaurants that are struggling. It all just felt a bit too much contrived for me.
However, what we've watched tonite is him going back to some of those restaurants, a year later, to see how they've progressed and whether they've held onto the changes he instigated. Its been heartwarming, I have to concede, to see the turnaround in the attitudes and the lives of these people, some of which are literally transformed.

Running a successful restaurant is something we aspire too, but quite how you define what makes a restaurant work, is something I think I'd struggle to quantify succinctly.  By happy coincidence I've just read a fantastic synopsis of exactly that, in the latest edition of Saveur ( April 2009 - Dining in America). It goes like this:

'Restaurants succeed for all sorts of reasons. Some are funded by investors with deep pockets. Others have the backing of a luxery hotel group. Still others come with a brand-name chef attached to them. Such restaurants usually have a well-tailored culinary theme. They have a public-relations strategy. They have a business plan.
Then there are the places that grow and thrive because, well, it's in the stars. They're in the right place at the right time. They're tenacious. They labour under the steadfast belief that every customer and every dish counts. And they draw their energy not from publicity but from the community around them."

So very, very true...

Saveur is one of my favourite food magazines ( and I read alot in a month!). Its written intelligently and is centered around ethnicity rather than mere fashion in food, and I much prefer the deferentiation.