This wasn't technically a complaint,  but I interpreted it as such becos I didn't have something the customer wanted, and I think it was a valid request. Tried to talk him into some locally produced artisanal eau de vies from Distillerie Deinlein, but he was a man on a mission, and didn't want to be sidetracked.

He asked for calvados which we don't stock - I knew that it was an apple brandy but is not one I've ever drunk, hence my attempt to get him to try one of the other Deinlein flavours although they don't do an apple. I should probably have gone and got a sample and brought it to him, becos the quality of the liquers and brandies that those guys are making are utterly superb, but I suspect we all still tend to be locked into the eminance of the European brands.

Deinlein's tangelo liquer beat Cointreu in a European based competition a few years back, which proves that what they're doing is world class. But I digress.

My gentleman who wanted  calvados then decided he wanted an armagnac, and I had to reply in the negative again ( which I hate doing!) becos we have 2 cognacs but no armagnac. He made the comment that he prefers it to only be distilled once, and I deferred to his superior knowledge on the subject, apologised for the fact we didn't have any and promised we would next time he came.

Have just been doing a little research just now to find out about both calvados and armagnac, and thought the comments in one of the articles I read on armagnac being superior in many instances to cognac becos the fact its only distilled once  means it spends longer in oak and therefore has more finesse and roundness, was very interesting. He obviously knew what he was talking about...

We don't sell alot of post dinner drinks - unlike in the European countries when they are treated as a digestif, New Zealanders aren't quite as keen to follow a meal with a liquer. Possibly becos of the alcohol content and the drink driving issues - but mainly I suspect becos we just don't have that culture.

I don't keep an extensive range of either spirits or liquers - we cover the basics and feature some special things like the Deinlein distillery, becos its local and deserving of our support, and Warren Prestons Milford Whiskey from Oamaru, but I don't get the demand for 6 different types of rum, if you follow my gist.  We just aren't a bar in that sense.

Wine is our biggest focus.

However, having said that, people asking for things that I may not have tried is often a good starting point to discover something new and I'll now be checking with some of the distributors that I deal with to get bottles of both calvados and armagnac. However I suspect I'll be starting at a lower price point than I've just seen at one retail outlet on the net, where prices of aged armagnac were over $1000 a bottle.

I don't think so. Something tells me I wouldn't sell too much...

 Many years ago, a customer sold us 2 bottles from about 9 consequetive vintages of Stony Ridge Larosse, and we did a evening in the restaurant, tasting the wines. Steve Bird led the discussions as I recall.

For me it was a fascinating opportunity to taste the same wine through the years assessing the variations, subtle in some cases, and more pronounced in others.

It is one of my missions that when I finally achieve my dream of an underground cellar that will hold top wines at correct temperatures, then I will be able to offer our customers flights of vintages of good wines, rather than just the single vintages that we currently do.

One of our suppliers is holding an auction of single bottles of Coleraine - the flagship red from Te Mata- from the 1982 vintage through to 2007. An extraodinary range of top NZ red wine.

I don't think we'll be biding becos single bottles of wine don't really work for our requirements. I did once also get the opportunity to buy some aged stock of Coleraine from the private cellar of another good customer, becos he'd decided he had more than he was going to drink in the years left to him - and that sold very quickly in the restaurant becos we were able to pass on the very reasonable rates that we'd bought it at.

One day, when we've got the cellar capacity, maybe....

The annual blitzkeig of media pronouncements on the Significance and Importance of Cuisine Magazines annual Restaurant of the Year competition, is currently doing the rounds. I'm picking  up on it thru a number of different mediums - various papers, the TV ( although I was told about that, I didn't actually see it myself), and various industry emails that I get.

And then today on our way home from the Mount I picked up the weekly  pile of magazines from Mag Addiction, which included the latest Cusine, within which  the winners and the various finalists are announced, together with some modulated opinion by the judges on what they think restaurants in NZ need to work on. ( Yes - that is a snort of irritation you hear in the background!)

There are a number of restaurant awards that restaurants can elect to go in during the year, Cuisine tauts theirs as being the best.

 I quote:

'The Cuisine NZ Restaurant of the Year Awards is the most authoritative national restaurant competition, setting the benchmark in dining excellence, and within the hospitality industry is regarded as the ultimate award.'

Umm...Says who exactly?!

But that form of self promotion is not my beef here, although it is one of the many underlying reasons why Rick and I have deliberately pulled back from entering any form of competition on a national or local basis for a number of years.

We simply aren't competition people. And in stating that fact I am not making any sort of value judgement on those who are. There is simply no doubt that publicity from an award can generate a significant amount of additional business for a restaurant - it can be a very successful form of marketing, and we get it that some people choose to go down that path.

We don't aim to in any way disparage those restaurants that choose to enter awards, and who quite deservingly generate a huge amount of positive publicity as a result of being named a winner. It can however  also create a double edged sword . I've never forgotten the comment of one of the partners in Pierres in Wellington, where Rick used to work,  who told us many years ago, that winning awards generates a whole new type of customers through your door, who arrive with the very literal attitude of ' OK, so you think you're good. Prove it." And woe betide you if they find something to critique.

Grant was adamant that the nice aspect of the increase in turnover, was sometimes undermined by the hassles of people who weren't your normal customer base making life difficult for front of house and kitchen alike.

Logan Brown, who has been named this years winner is a great restaurant - one we visit every time we go to Wellington. We love it, but do we think its better than The French Cafe in Auckland? No, definitly not. And that really gets to the nub of our problem with competitions - any competition that is. How can one great restaurant be said to be better, than another. What are the credentials of the people making such a distinction?

Our reasons for not wanting to go into competitions  are myriad - but not least is the fact that I find the whole notion of 'best' contrived, and artificial. Not to mention completely personal.

We went to a dog show yesterday to watch the brother of our pup and his dad compete, and the judge very obviously liked fluffy breeds rather than the more streamlined ones, and awarded the ribbons accordingly. I happen to think our pooch is the most gorgeous in the whole world, and I would never put him in a lineup with other dogs for someone to tell me otherwise. I'm just not designed to be told by someone else that what I have, or what I do can be held to want by comparison to someone else.

We don't feel any sense of need to be regarded as the best. We are comfortable in our skins with who we are and where we are.  And I suspect that it is longevity that allows us to be like that, and not  feel a need  to indulge in comparisons, becos to be judged the best, you have to be compared to others - and I tend to think that comparisons are odious things.

We eat out at other restaurants not to compare them to us, but to enjoy ourselves. Many years ago we were judges for the Beef and Lamb awards, and we gave it away after a couple of years, becos we genuinely felt uncomfortable about sitting in judgement on other restaurants. It just didn't seem right - but was a very interesting and illuminating experience, all the same.

Somerset Cottage is completely predicated on return business and the goodwill and recommendations  created by our customers,  not by media releases or the published articles of restaurant 'critics'.

 Our customers - those that we see weekly, monthly and yearly -  who come to cookschools, who travel to Europe with us, who've eaten in the restaurant on innumerable occasions  over the years, who have seen our ups and our downs, and with whom we've shared all sorts of lifes experiences... those are the people who matter to Rick and I. And no amount of publicity will ever take away from that simple fact.

We chose not to go in the Cuisine competition for the first couple of years, and then succumbed one year when we got a very direct approach from one of the conveners, and I got caught out and couldn't quite articulate why I didn't want too. So we did - and found the whole experience one we didn't care to repeat, and now when the forms duly arrive each year, I pause, wonder whether I'm cutting of my nose to spite my face ( which I'm all too capable of doing!) and throw them away.

And yet last year, and now again this year, I note that we are included in the list of other ' restaurants worthy of note', at the back of the publication. To a casual reader  it would appear that we entered, didn't quite make the grade, but are being included as still being worthy of a visit.

How nice of them.

Except for the fact that the underlying premise is false. We choose not to go in the competition, and the entire publication is about the competition , but no where does it state that we weren't actually in it.

Which I might add, it does for one of the other restaurants listed in the back, becos the owner is a writer for Cuisine ( and was a judge in previous years) and it clearly states under their listing that they were ineligible to enter the competition.

I wish the magazine had thought to extend a similar courtesy to us and point out under our listing,  that while we didn't go into the competition we were still worth a visit.

The irony is, that I don't doubt that they think they're doing us a favour. The fact that I interprete it as being patronised, doubtless speaks volumes about me. But thats OK - I think I can live with that.

And as a footnote - can I just add that it was my husband who urged me to write this blog. I was inclined to ignore it once again as we did last year, but reading out the comment to Rick in the car on the way home, he said 'Bugger it - you should write a blog." So I have, and I have to say I feel better already!!!

We are at the tail end of a Saturday nite - all mains are out and most tables are on coffee, so I've beaten a retreat to the house becos I've become redundant. Its been an early nite, cos the All Blacks are playing in Australia, and those that have been brave enough to come out, have ensured that they've done so early enough to be home before kick off. You get that!

One of the tables in tonite includes a lady younger than me, who has always shown a strong interest  over the years in my aquamarine ring - so much so that when I see her now, I just automatically take the ring of and hand it over. Tonite her husband took lots of photos becos he's planning on getting one made for her - and I told him to go to David Stride, who made this ring for me years ago, and who went out of his way to find a stone and a setting that I loved.

There is a story behind it all though....

When Rick and I got engaged we couldn't afford a proper engagement ring, we bought a secondhand one ( antique sounds better!) and borrowed the money from my parents to do so as I recall. We'd just bought a house, and there was nothing spare.

We exchanged wedding rings when we got married, but I was never particularly enamoured of the mass produced plain gold band, that was all we could afford at the time. And when I got pregnant I had to take the ring off becos my fingers swelled in girth, and somehow I just never got round to putting it back on.

Apparently that used to cause confusion for people I have subsequently been told - becos I didn't change my surname when we got married, and apparently becos I didn't wear any rings, people assumed that we weren't married. You get that!

Customers of ours owned an antique shop in Cambridge and once we were over there, and I spotted a gorgeous big square cut blue stone ring, which I fell in love with, and had to have. As you do. We bought it - a blue quartz stone and I wore it constantly on my dress ring finger..

Back at about the same time I used to do some teaching for Otumoetai College - taking some of the cooking students for an introduction to working front of house in a restaurant. I never felt that I was an especially good teacher, and was always very conscious that some of those guys weren't remotely interested in what I had to say - so it is always with considerable surprise that I occasionally bump into some of those ex students, who are now very grown up and with children and everything, who tell me that I helped fire up a passion for hospitality. Thats a nice feeling.

For one young girl though - the biggest influence I had was all to do with my ring. Apparently she coveted it back then, and when she started coming to the restaurant years later with her husband, she would always pounce and ask to try it on. I didn't realise till quite a few visits later that she had been one of my ex students - she looked different out of uniform and a few years older.

By the time we got to chat about all this though the ring was different. I used to clean the old one by boiling it in a mixture of water and Handy Andy - I wore it all the time and it got really dirty. And that worked perfectly for years, until one day, shortly after my mothers funeral when I was feeling washed out and exhausted I put it on the stove, and lay down on the bed for a rest, but fell asleep and awoke some time later to a very unpleasant acrid smell and the immediate realisation of how stupid I'd been.

The ring, predictably was ruined. With the saucepan boiled dry  the ring had cracked thru the middle. I cried.

Thought I'd claim insurance only to discover that if you damage your ring when you're cleaning it, then its non insurable. Go figure!

So for a couple of years I wore no rings and didn't really think much of it, until one day David and his wife, Carol were in the restaurant and somehow it all came up in conversation, and David told me that he'd look out for the perfect acquamarine stone for me and make me the perfect ring. I didn't have the heart to tell him that we couldn't really afford the extravagance of a step up to a custom made acquamarine stone, and really thought no more of it until one day he rang to say he had a couple of stones for us to look at.

I went into his workshop, convinced that I was going to say 'that's lovely David but not quite what I was looking for' - but then he brought out a couple of stones. One was easy to dismiss, but the second was exquisite, and somehow I just knew that I  had to have it, and I don't really know why cos I'm not really a 'bling' person, but I just knew that I needed that stone.

What finally clinched the decision was my father telling me to go for it, becos one of his regrets was that he had never bought Betty the square cut emerald of her dreams, becos they never could quite justify the cost. And he wished they'd stepped over that obstacle and done it, purely for the hell of it, becos now he'd never be able too, since Betty was gone.

We couldn't justify the cost either, but my sweet husband was relaxed about it, on the condition that I wore it on my wedding finger, something I was happy to agree too - so we maxed out the credit cards and bought it, and its a decison I've never regreted.

And the thought that David may get another commission becos someone likes this ring, somewhat obsessively, is rather a cool thought. I hope she's as happy with hers, as I've been with mine!

All of which has nothing to do with restaurants, but kind of proves that over the years you can meander down some interesting byways in your dealings with people, and all of which I figure, adds to the rich tapestry of what we do.

Some things you just have to share...http://www.flixxy.com/water-slide-jump.htm

I'm not quite sure what prompted me to buy this book, but I do distinctly remember reading a Sunday paper review of it, a year or so ago,  and thinking that it was one I'd like to read, and the next time I was in Books a Plenty I consciously sought it out - so something had made me feel a need.

It has then laid beside the bed in a pile with lots of food orientated books, waiting - and again, what prompted me to finally turn to it this wet, miserable weekend, when I've been feeling housebound and at a low ebb, I can't quite say, but it has been the perfect respite for me, and I didn't stop reading , once I'd come back over to the house last nite, until I'd finished.

It's beautiful. A paen from a son to a much loved and respected father - a heartfelt tribute to a distinguished legal mind and a principled, extraordinary man.

The writing is exquisite, and the profound sense of a life well lived is beautifully captured.

Justice Peter Mahon will be for ever associated with the phrase ' an orchestrated litany of lies', and it is his sense of true justice, unhampered by political and commercial associations, that led to his conclusions in the Erebus commission, and put him offside with the 'establishment'.

My sense of respect for those who have the courage of their convictions, to stand apart from generally accepted thinking, is enormous.

And this book is a tribute to such a man, written by his son, on an intensely personal, but somehow wonderfully uplifting level.

Personal titbits can be puerile and cheap and nasty - too much information, that sometimes we, the general public, don't really need to know. But this book is something quite different - a touching and gentle, exposure of the life events that built the man, and made him the complex person that he was.

Wonderful stuff!

As always, reading Michael Ruhlmans blog, leads me to other interesting places on the internet. This article by Michael Pollan, starts off as a dissertation on the importance of Julia Childs, and why the new movie about her that is shortly to hit our screens will be great viewing.

But the article then moves on to encompass how cooking on TV has evolved from the educative tones of Julia Childs day, to what is classified as 'food porn' today. The Food Network is more interested in targeting eaters who are likely to buy product from its advertisers, than it is in educating people to vacate the couch and the TV and head into the kitchen to cook.

The article is a fascinating discussion on why the art of cooking from scratch has become lost to so many, and at what cost to our culture. For someone who cooks becos I love to do so, but who also listens to a wide range of people at the cookschools, talk about their own approach to cooking, I found the article a pin point accurate description of where our culture currently sits, in its attitude to food and cooking.

Much to chew over. I hadn't considered before that we are the only species who transform our food source thru the art of cooking. Other creatures eat food in its raw state.

'Cooking is a metaphor for the transformation of nature into culture". In other words, by cooking we are adding value to what we eat, and like anything there are those amongst us who take it too an extreme, and get horribly pretenscious about it all, and then there are those who create good food, becos they like to share and nurture. And there are also those who simply don't care. They eat whatever is easiest, fastest and cheapest, becos food is purely a source of fuel to them.

I think I am comfortable with where we sit on that continuum.

I'm currently catching up on some internet reading - its gray and miserable outside, and I'm not feeling very disposed to do anything really - so flitting around various posts is working for me right now.

Thought this little video was interesting, becos in part it is such a different way of looking at presentation of food in a restaurant. Alinea is a restaurant in Chicago, that is at the forefront of the 'molecular gastronomy' movement. What they do there is quite unique.

Customers of ours have just come back from a major overseas trip during which they ate at a number of 3 starred establishments in Chicago, London and Paris - and their descriptions of the meals were vivid and fascinating.

They ate at Alinea and had their dessert brought out to them on this silcon mat - and said it was an amazing finale to a special dinner.

These guys are thinking outside the square all the time, and constantly pushing at boundaries - while here in Tauranga, we worry about whether we're pushing our customers too far outside their comfort zone by us finally making the call to stop serving potatoes in our vegetable dish, since most of the mains are plated with a form of starch! It seems a little incongruous sometimes...

Sometimes I do truly feel that I have a guardian angel, cos when things get a bit frenetic in one aspect of my life, there always seem to magically evolve a balancing somewhere else.

This week has been a bit like that - when there's been lots going on in some aspects of the restaurant, and with 2 longterm front staff finishing, and new ones coming to grips with whats required, it should technically be quite stressful. But the restaurant hasn't been too busy all week  - in fact ironically on a couple of days we did more customers at lunchtime then we did in the evening, which is very unusual for us - but meant that there was no undue pressure-  and was appreciated, even though I don't like the impact that quiet nites have on the bank balance. I haven't had to fly around at quite the rate of knots that I thought I was going to have too. Although tonite is going to be interesting - cos theres only 3 of us on, and normally we have 5 on a Saturday nite - but thats Ok, we will survive.

 By next week we will have started another new person, and while I say it takes at least 3 months for front staff to come fully up to speed, at least we will enough bodies around to cover the basics. I'm feeling good about the new people coming in, so it bodes well.

As mentioned earlier - the new coolstore is now up and operational, and is not only a thing of great beauty, (seriously!), but has made an immediate impact on the stress levels in terms of room and convenience. All the beer and juice has been moved out of my wine chiller - meaning that there is now room to get inside without having to step over boxes. Suddenly theres space! Its glorious! And it means that the beer is being stored at a cooler temperature, which is good I'm told, by those who drink beer, becos I've kept that  chiller at wine friendly temperatures, which are a few degrees warmer than those for beer.

It had been our intention to keep the old chiller, and use it eventually to hang our meat in - but looking at it in its disassembled, shabby state, we have both decided that it is time to move on - and that when we get to the point of needing a meat chiller we will get Tom back to build us a new one. His guys assure us that someone would be delighted to have this for homekill, so rather than having it lying around gathering dust, Ricks decided to see it on its way to a new home.

As is always the way when we make changes at the restaurant - we ooh and aah for the first few days, then somehow slide back into the daily routine, and before we know it, all the changes have just become part of our accepted normality.

I struggle now to remember what out the back of the kitchen door used to look like when we first bought the restaurant - there was a punga fence, on what was then our boundary - and hung between that and the restaurant roof, a very dodgy and grubby taupaulin, and a couple of upright, domestic fridges. I can't remember how long we coped with that, but I do remember the jubilation when we finally got a proper room constructed on that side. It felt like the height of luxery.

And then came the second hand chiller, that worked magically for a couple of years, until we got a wine license, and it rapidly became patently undersized to hold both food and wine, so eventually Tom built us a seperate wine chiller, which was just marvellous, until my wine list got larger and larger, and the boxes of beer and juice and ginger beer and bottled water and water carafes, started cluttering up the space, and getting to some of the bottles of wine in the far corner, became a major feat of balancing..

And now that is suddenly no longer a concern - we can walk in and relish all the empty floor space, becos those boxes have been moved to the big new chiller. Heaven.

But I guarantee that within 2 weeks, human nature being what it is, we will all be completely nonchalant about the change, and will be taking it all totally for granted.

Safari Paints, Gerrand Flooring and Paramount Sheetmetal will be doing their stuff next week - converting the now emptied room to a food prep space, that will allow us to get Somerset at Home up and happening.

We took another major step in that direction by having a day on Tuesday, when most of the photos that will be used on the website shop were taken. An incredibly tiring process for Rick and I becos it is so different to what we normally do - and to a degree you put yourself in the hands of others to interprete on your behalf, and for people who are used to calling the shots, that process can be stressful in itself.

(Props generously lent to us for the day by Kelly at Nest )

The photos I've seen so far on Chris' camera are fantastic, and I'm looking forward to viewing the final product.

In the meantime we now have to turn our attention to the packaging and the labeling, and then the systems behind everything - all of which is starting to come together. Its been quite a process...

The new chiller went operational today. During the cookschool this morning the compressor got installed, and everything fired up and worked.

It is not an exageration to say - it is truly stunning! The kitchen staff cleared out all the old chiller during the afternoon and moved everything over. When I went over to the restaurant tonite, the old one looked forlorn and empty and more than a little careworn . And tiny. The new one is 6 times the capacity of the old - a huge step up, and one that is causing us all some serious glee.

Tomorrow, the old one gets degassed, and then disassembled, and we will then have an empty room to paint and line and install the new freezer, and vacumn packing machine, and heat sealing machine, and benches and shelving - all of which is due to arrive over the next couple of days.

Most exciting!

It has been a busy few days!  Mondays, technically, are our day off, becos the restaurant is closed.

Rick and  I normally head over to the Mount, do our exercise thing, have breakfast at Slowfish, watch the world go by, and then head for home, having first popped into Mag Addiction, to pick up my weekly fix of magazines.

Today however things evolved differently, becos he had to be around to let the electricians into the restaurant to start the wiring for this glorious new coolstore, plus the coolstore guys arrived to put on the door, and then Jewell Refridgeration arrived to get the motor installed. So with all that coming and going, he was obligated to stick around.

We both needed to also sit down with Rachel Lochhead from Dove Digital who is doing all our graphic design work for the new product, and the styling for the food shots we're going to be taking tomorrow for the new shop on the website. Lots of shots to get our heads around, and we had to go thru them all one by one, so Rachel could get a handle on what was involved.
 
She and I then headed into Nest in Devonport Rd, where Kelly very generously gave us carte blanche to wander around the shop picking up platters and other acoutrements that Rachel felt could act as props in the photos. Bags and bags of stuff got carted out to the car - and I will have to be very disciplined to ensure that all of it goes back to the shop after the shoot, becos some of those pieces I could quite happily buy and keep for myself. But that is not the intended purpose of the exercise.

Tomorrow is going to be a big day...

Yesterday was a big day too, since we decided to drive up to the Clevedon market, becos there were a couple of potential suppliers that I was keen to have a chat too, and it seemed like a good excuse to get out of town and have a change of scenery. That is a hugely popular market, and I was fascinated by the types who were there, and what it looked like they were buying. We sat on a hay bale for awhile waiting for Hannah and a friend to arrive, watching people as you do. Amazing numbers around, socialising, shopping eating and chatting. The concept of the local market that we were so enamoured of in France transposed to a New Zealand setting without a hint of cultural cringe. Seriously cool to see.

The gorgeously effervescent Sylvia Sandford was in full flight selling lime products. We'd taken the wrong turn heading to Clevedon while driving thru Miranda, and I'd said to Rick as I spyed a cute little white house up on a hill, that I had a feeling that was Sylvia's, so perhaps shouldn't have been so surprised when she called out to me from her stall.

Many, many years ago I went to Interior Design classes that Sylvia took up at Suzanne Callanders wonderful house in the Minden - a time in my life when I seriously needed a shot of colour and enthusiasm, both of which those 2 ladies supplied in bucketloads. They were, and are amazing.!

Sylvia continues to be a wonderfully generous, vibrant person - her lime curd and lime cordial are gorgeous - and she is passionately enthusiatic about the market, just as I would expect her to be. She never embraces anything less than 150% that lady!

She introduced us to Helen Dorrestyn who was the energy behind starting the market, and who with her husband Richard have  built up a commercial herd of buffalo to milk for mozzaralla, ricotta and yoghurt. We'd got some of the product down a month or so ago, and I had totally fallen in love with the yoghurt especially - simply the best I'd ever eaten. And the mozzaralla reminded us exactly of what we'd eaten in Italy - a cheese that needs to be eaten within days of being made. We were hugely impressed, and had sort of mentally filed it away, intending 'one day' to do something with it.

Helen was adamant that we should go out to the farm to have a look there and then, and even though I demurred initially, suspecting my husband would be wanting to head for home, so as to fit in a run, we somehow ended up making an unscheduled trip, thru the beautiful Clevedon countryside to one of the farms where they have the buffalo.

It is completely incongruous to drive along and suddenly realise the animals in a paddock are not cows or sheep, but instead a totally different creature. Slightly exotic but quite gorgeous. They had babies, with the biggest black eyes you ever saw - a couple of Italian bulls that rather fancied themselves, and fields of these statuesque creatures, who watched us inquisitively from a distance.

Without a trace of rancour, Richard talked about the arduous process of building the herd, the time its taken and the pitfalls along the way, dealing with the bureaucracy, and learning about making the cheeses. Its been an extraordinary labour of love for them both, and the product they have ended up with shows the committment to quality that they have been so focused on.

I'm not sure what I was expecting,but I got a whole heap more, and as we headed back to Tauranga, we convinced each other that we really had no choice now, but to support them in the best way possible, which would be financially. Supportive words are all very well and good, but at the end of the day, we would like to think that we can help spread the word in a more practical manner also. So expect to see menu changes in the very near future that will incorporate buffalo milk in some way...

It'll be our pleasure.

 And I know that Catharine at The Village Pantry In Te Puna is stocking the buffalo cheeses in smaller quantities if people want to try them at home.

We also think we found a supplier of fresh figs, and free range chickens at the Clevedon Market, but more on that later, when we've cooked the chicken and seen what we think.

All exciting!

I have pretty much given up on eating apples over the last few years. Almost invariably they would be disapointingly floury textured when I bit in. Nothing like the ones I remember we used to get from an apple farm in Carterton, when I was growing up. After too many disappointments, I just kind of stop going there.

I'd sort of put the difference down to the distortion of memories, and figured maybe they weren't really that stunning back then, it was just the way I chose to remember them that way.

But then our vege supplier dropt us in some yesterday to try, that not only were a thing of beauty to behold, but when we bit in, were juicy and firm, and  simply scrummy. Hallelujah!

Just like I remembered...

I'm going to be eating a few apples over the next little while!

We probably have the best kitchen team that we have ever had in all our 23 years here. They're a group of great people, who combine really well, all with different skills and strengths, but all of whom give us real depth. I thoroughly enjoy them all.

Helen is the lone female - and has coped as such for all the time she's been in the kitchen. Not becos we've made it that way - we don't have a policy of primarily hiring males, but simply becos its evolved that all the other chefs are male. She started with us on dishes, as most of our chefs have done over the years, about 5 years ago I think, and has worked her way thru polytech and become a fully qualified chef.

Ahead of her on the rungs of senority in the kitchen are Craig and John, both of whom have been cooking mains for a couple of years now, a nd who can run the kitchen in Ricks absence.

There is a hierachy in any kitchen - and chefs usually start of on cold, move to hot entrees and then eventually hit the line and cook mains. Becos Helen has always had these 2 guys ahead of her, she has never got the chance to step up to mains, and all that that entails.

She is very experienced and very good at what she does do, but until someone further up the line decides to leave, an opening doesn't present. Which is one of the problems with a kitchen our size, becos you want to keep extending your good staff, and make sure they are still growing and learning.

Helen flagged a month ago, that she's planning on heading down to Christchurch next year to do a pyschology degree, and we are going to miss her enormously when she goes, becos she's been such a core member of this great team.

I have to confess its given me some real satisfaction, believing as I do that girls can do anything! - to watch Helen have the opportunity to step up to do mains, with Rick at her side, since Craig is currently on annual leave, and John is recovering from injuries sustained in a car accident a couple of weeks back. As chance would have it, she's been presented the opportunity to step into the role. Rick had thought that he would have been doing mains all week, but Helen was at his elbow, keen to give it a go, and its been great to see her bringing it all together.

Its a huge step up - to take on the mains, hard to explain really,  but the balancing act and the timing is no mean feat. Its a buzz to see her doing it!

It can be strange - the things we get excited about in life...

We are slowly but surely bringing together all the multiple strands required to get the "Somerset at Home' concept of the ground.

A big step in that direction is happening at the moment as Tom Mc Cormicks team build us a brand new shiny coolstore. This is a very significant step for my husband and the the kitchen team, cos since forever, they've had to work with a tiny walk in chiller, 1.5msq. We bought it second hand about 20 years ago, so it owes us nothing, but has been way too small for far too long.

Those weeks that we do large outcatering functions combined with busy nites in the restaurant made the jostling for room in the chiller a real mission for all concerned. It was a regular occurrence for me to be heard hollering in indignation on opening my wine chiller to discover trays of food atop bottles of wine. I had to acknowledge however that here were times when the culprits had no choice. ( Not that I'd ever tell them that!)

So a large chiller has been high on the wish list for a very long time, and Rick is currently wandering around the place with a constant grin on his face as he watches it take shape.

This new chiller is going on the outside of the building - we'll access it thru a door in the external wall, and by removing the old one, which currently takes up space internally, we get to create a new prep room, where we'll be able to put the vacumn packer and heat sealing machines, plus more benches.

One day this will all be absorbed by the major cookschool kitchen alterations - but we can't afford to do those at the moment, and this is an interim step which is costing considerably less money, but which will make the kitchens life so much easier, while allowing us to create a further income stream for the business. And the plan is, that that in turn will help pay for the future alterations.

One thing leads to another ... story of our lives really!

Matt, who's just back from a weeks holiday, been shown the dimensions. None of the chefs can quite believe how 'big' it is!

One day this land will all be the new cookschool kitchen and underground cellar, but for now its very cool to be able to use it for this. Going to take that dirt down to my raised garden - a few wheelbarrow loads in that lot...

I have just recieved an email from a lady in Argentina, who is heading to NZ in October and is looking for work, and wondered if we had anything to offer her. The email came in via the website so I assume she's done a google search for restaurants in the area that she's heading too. Her English was impeccable - I wish my Spanish was even a tenth as good -and she says she has experience, but I will shortly send her a declining email, although with an offer to come and have a chat when she gets here, so we can recommend other people we know, if she's still looking for work.

We don't do shortterm staff, mainly becos we haven't needed too. Most of the guys who work with us, both in the kitchen and out front tend to stay for awhile, and I for one enjoy the familiarity that that association gives us. We are however, right in the middle of a changeover in waiting staff - Nicki's just headed back to Christchurch, Holly leaves for America next week, and Katie is finishing her pilots training, and just wants to fly, which means we're starting new guys, and Rhonda, Judy and I are stepping into the breach created until these new ones come up to speed.

Its been a long time since I've done a full nite on the floor, becos we've been carrying the kind of staffing levels that have meant that at some point in the evening I become redundant, have nothing to do, get bored and head for home. For the next little while however, I'll be there along with everyone else, doing what is required, during the various stages of service, right thru to the set up at the end of the nite.

And interestingly that doesn't bother me, becos I enjoy waitressing - I enjoy the people interaction, and I enjoy being busy, so its no hardship. ( And god, I sleep well, after a hard nite on the floor!)

It takes awhile to bring people up to speed with training though, and that is Rhonda's role and she is much better at it than me. I listened to her with Brad last nite - there is comments and advice running at all times, and explanations as to why we do things a particular way. She would have been exhausted at the end of the evening, becos you're having to think twice when you train. Not only are you serving the customers but you're explaining each step to someone as you do it.

The world is full of people who think that waitering is a mere matter of ferrying plates between patrons and kitchen, but we happen to believe that good service is a whole heap more nuanced than that. Some people have it innately - they just have the right personality mix to bring it all together, both on a skill level and on a people level. Those sorts are a dream to train, becos they grasp the point of what we're trying to achieve  and just naturally fit in. Naturally we love it when that happens.

Good waiting isn't easy, becos no 2 nites are ever the same, and when you deal with the public you can never factor in all the variables - you never quite know what you're going to get. For some of our staff over the years, working with us has been a means to fund other studies, and their involvement in the restaurant has been up to a certain point, but as with Katie and Holly, when real life calls, they're ready to move on. And with our blessing. You need all kinds to be part of the team, so as to give flexibility.  Some people like Judy, do it as a second job, but one that offers her light relief by contrast to the seriousness of her full time one, and allows her to indulge in her interest in food and wine. And then we have Rhonda, who like me, sees working out front in the restaurant as a vocation - she has developed a multiple range of skills, and has become a very important mainstay at Somerset.

I like to think she embodies the future of the hospitality industry in NZ, when more people will regard it as a career option, not just something to do on the way to their proper job. I have been waitressing for now, um, 30 odd years, and the body of knowledge that I have built up over that time makes me far better at what it is that I do now, than I was in the early years. And that makes sense - experience is a wonderful teacher.

So, when we make the decision to employ someone, we are always subconsiously looking for people that we hope will be around for awhile, and who will contribute in a positive sense to the team. Too much effort goes into training, to have people leave after a few short months - Rhonda would be constantly running on empty.

And now I have to head over to the restaurant - we have a Sunday morning cookschool about to start and I need a coffee before everyone arrives. We have a number of men coming to this class, and men, for reasons I can't fully explain tend to change the dynamic in the class a little, although in this case I happen to know them all extremely well, so I suspect we're in for a reasonable amount of levity, which will make for a perfectly pleasant way to spend a Sunday morning!

Michael Ruhlmans blog is one I refer to regularly, feeling that he has his finger on the pulse in terms of food and industry trends in America. He's a journalist, not a chef or restaurant owner, but one who decided that before he wrote a book on training to be a chef, that he himself would do the training at the Culinary Institute of America, and his book on the experience is fascinating.

His passion for cooking comes thru in all of his books that I've read, and I'm currently dipping into the latest " Ratio" with considerable interest. Mainly becos both Rick and I seem to have reached a stage, where we are constantly asking 'why' in terms of things happening during the cooking process. Partly fuelled no doubt by questions from cookschool attendees over the years, and our own observations in repeating the classes, that slight twecks here and there can create a substantive difference. I find it all fascinating, and love the new genre of cookbooks that tend to get into more description about why things work out in certain ways.

As a bye the bye, Harold McGee was the granddaddy of this type of scientific approach, and I've read some interesting links that show how profound his influence was on chefs like Ferran Adria and Grant Achatz who's restaurants have been at the forefront of the whole molecular gastronomy approach to food, a strong restaurant movement over the last 10 years or so.

We don't tend to take our 'why' questions quite to that degree however, becos its not a style of cooking that we are necessarily comfortable with, nor what we suspect our customer base would want to eat week in and week out. But we do like having access to information about queries, and there is an abundance of that around now, regardless of the level you operate at.

And thru Mr Ruhlmans blog I've read a number of interesting links to all sorts of things relating to food.  The latest being the hugely hot topic of the provenance of our food supply, and the evils of agribusiness. The movie "Food INC' is creating a large amount of comment in the blogshere, and in his latest article Mr Ruhlman describes his emotional response to the excesses protrayed in the movie, where profit is more important than food safety and human health.

Large companies are easy targets to paint as villianous, money obsessed evil entities. And history is littered with copious examples of how true such a portrayal can be all too regularly.

But!

Unfortunetly no argument is ever easily onesided, and I thought this blog from another commentator was a useful reminder of what the actual reality is for a whole host of people - and that while it is easy to romanticise the agrarian existance as being one of harmony with nature, the reality of farming people who had to deal with the vagaries of the weather and the sheer unrelenting physical hardship involved in working the land, tends to get lost somewhere in the descriptions by those determined to paint a rosy picture.

Which is why I always cringe a little over those who become obsessed about trumpeting one side of a picture. Life is never that uncomplicated, and I resent more than a little, those intent in hitting me over the head with their world view, a view that will usually brook no dissent.

I am acutely aware that I live in a fortunate country that allows me to make conscious decisions over what I eat and why. I have the ability to make rational choices, and I deliberatly do so becos my own health and that of those I love is very important to me. And I happen to believe there is an indelible link between what we eat, and how are bodies and our minds fare.

Which makes me very pro a lot of the arguments propounded in literature and movies like this - I feel that there is no doubt the pendulum has swung too far in support of intensive, unsafe farming methods, and I make the choices of what I buy to eat accordingly.
And I believe that the awareness that something like this movie creates is incredibly healthy, becos it influences the direction of the pendulum, but at the same time, I have to confess to a slight twitch at the evangelical zeal of some of the people involved.

However - I also acknowledge that to generate attitudinal change  in society, you need people who are prepared to stand up against the prevailing wisdom ( thank god for the suffragettes I say!), and in doing so these people seem to set themselves up for a whole host of abusive riducule. A couple of subsequent articles on Alice Waters, shows the backlash that is generated when people feel they're being told how to live by someone who has a priviledged reality.

Which kind of means I've argued myself round in a circle, which I think is more to do with my own self image. I've never seen myself as a crusader, or someone intent on changing the world. I simply lack the grunt required, or the need to project myself out to that degree.  My immediate environment and those I care about, and who care about me, have always been more my focus - and the way Rick and I live is pretty much reflected by that.  Without ever feeling the need to have a mission statement, or anything quite so absurdly pompous,  we live, both in our personal and business lifes, in a way that makes us feel comfortable. And that means making constant changes as we learn and grow as people, and have new information. It is a constant process, and one that I feel fully engaged with.

And that I suspect is why I have a tendency to shy away from dogma, becos it is entrenched and unbending, and resolute, and I just don't believe that life can be that unforgiving.

Hmmm...