I was going to head over to the Mount this afternoon to clear my head after what has been a reasonably full on couple of days, but the weather is squally and unpredictable, so I've opted for a mooch down below with the dogs, figuring that shelter is closer at hand should one of those heavy showers come thru, then it is on the top of the Mount.

We did a cookschool this morning, and it usually takes me an hour or so to redirect my thinking after one of those, and I've found that canine company works perfectly well to achieve that.

We had Anna Flowerday from Te Whare Ra Winery, at the restaurant last nite for a Winemakers Dinner, and it proved to be a very happy combination of flavours from both the wines and the food.

Anna has grape juice rather than blood running in her veins - having grown up in the McLaren Vale, in a grape growing family, and then going on to marry a fellow graduate from Roseworthy who's family are also grape growers, but this time in Marlborough. She and her husband Jason, bought Te Whare Ra, one of the oldest planted vineyards in Marlborough in 2003, and are building on the tradition the winery has always had for aromatic styles, while also being unafraid to create their own legacy.

We had the good fortune to be invited down to a lunch at Roquette restaurant in Whakatane on Monday, and the car trip down with Anna who'd just been picked up from the airport gave us a chance to get acquainted. She is passionate and knowledgable and incredibly enthusiastic about her industry, and I knew we were going to get along just fine!

Lunch at Roquette was lovely - they were using different wines in the Te Whare Ra lineup to what we had planned for the next nite, with the exception of the pinot noir and the botryitised riesling, proving the depth and strength of the winery.

We don't often get the opportunity to go to these special meals at other restaurants, so its always a bonus, and an especially nice one when the meal was as good as it was on Monday. Some of the people from the restaurant came to our dinner last nite - great to be able to return the compliment, although I didn't envy them the trip back down the coast when the weather turned nasty later on in the evening.

I even promised one of their chefs that I'd email thru the recipe for the souffle that Rick used for dessert. I had thought he was completely mad doing souffles, for that number - becos there is no safety net. If they don't come out of the oven after 20 mins cooking looking spectacular, then you're stuffed basically. He'd taken the oven from the house over to the restaurant , so he had 3 ovens that he could use, and he had it timed so they were coming out of different ovens, at slightly graduated time intervals, so we, the front staff had time to literally rush them to the tables, before they began their inexorable descent. I don't believe in running in the restaurant no matter how busy you may be, but we weren't far of a trot last nite, getting them all out to the tables as fast as we could. And unfortunetly becos of the pressure to get them out once they started coming out of the ovens, I wasn't able to hang around long enough to take a photo to show you what I mean by how stunning they all looked. You had to be there...

We'd learnt the technique in France - or more correctly I had, in the classes I took some of our cookschool attendees to,  in a beautiful local restaurant Auberge Lou Peyrol, while Rick stayed back in the house with the others. When I reported back to Rick what Phillipe had done with the souffles he told me it wasn't possible - but I had photos to prove it, so he grumbled a bit, listened to the others who corraborated my story, and waited until he got back to NZ to play around with it. He's done it now for a number of dinner parties at home, but I thought it was quite a leap of faith to extrapolate that out to a formal dinner at the restaurant. Obviously I need to have more faith in my husband!

The noble riesling was sumptuous with the dessert, and I learnt listening to Anna, that the reason I've always preferred botrytis wine to late harvest, is becos botrytis infected grapes retain acid to offset the sugar, whereas late harvest are just a sugar hit. I didn't know that.

As always after these dinners, we come away with a heightened appreciation of what someone else is aiming to achieve, and for us and those who work with us - that adds immeasurably to what it is that we do.

I am not quite sure how I got to read about this book, but one of the food writers that I refer too would have recommended it, and as a result motivated me to buy it thru Amazon. The only problem with buying books that way, is that you're never quite sure what to expect, and it would be fair to say that this wasn't quite what I expected.

Published in 1973, it is a description of a way of cooking, and a way of life, that I suspect is all but gone now, and for that reason is more of a curiosity of a way life used to be, then a description of something I can readily identify with. But for all that I found it fascinating.

The author, Roy Andries de Groot, is a journalist who was in a small alpine village, La Grande Chartreuse, in the French Alps, seeking the story behind the remarkable and unique liquer, Chartreuse, when he discovered, quite by accident a small Auberge - an Auberge in France is a restaurant with rooms attached that people can stay in. Run by the same 2 women for a number of decades, The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth, is a testamount to a level of care seldom seen today, and it makes for beautiful reading.

The menus  of the meals served at the Auberge, every night, are masterpieces - multiple in courses, and matched carefully with different wines, aperitifs to start and digestifs to finish. We just don't take the time to eat or drink, like that anymore, mores the pity.

3 cheeses are served between mains and desserts -one alone would seem miserly.

Everything comes from the surrounding area, not out of need to be fashionable and trendy, but simply becos that is the way it has always been done. The efforts made to source seasonal ingredient, and the desire to serve only the best, make sobering and humbling reading.

It is trendy in todays world to give lip service to using fresh ingredients, grown locally, with a minimum of carbon imprint ( how I am growing to detest that expression) - but we're really kidding ourselves, by comparison to this type of honest approach.

These women live by the principle of  ' first hunt your boar, then skin and hang it...', which puts the lie to the plastic wrapped, already individually portioned meat that gets delivered to most restaurant kitchens, these days.

Yes - some of us are starting to move back to a more old fashioned way of doing things- buying whole carcasses, and caring about the sources of our food,  but reading a book like this, has made me appreciate that we will never go back the whole way. Perceptions of food, of what is healthy, and appropriate - of time and of cost, have all changed too much now.

As the author himself says:

"When the ladies set their table with the animals and birds of their valley and its surrounding mountains, with the fish caught by their friends in the nearby lakes, with the cheeses carefully made and the fruits and vegtables laboriously grown by their farmer neighbors, with the wild mushrooms they pick themselves in the woods, with the wines from the nearby mountain vineyards, they are fulfilling the unity of that way of life, a unity which seems to me to be of the deepest value but which the world seems to be rejecting.'




'

There was a text on our phone this morning from our youngest daughter, who heads home over the Kaimais every Friday afternoon to stay for the weekend. asking if by chance there would be a sultana cake baked some time today.

Being soft as we are - its impossible to ignore a request like that, so the sultanas are currently simmering on the stovetop as a I type- Rick had them started before I got home, and was rumaging around in my old cookbook ( the one with recipes from my mothers kitchen) trying to find the recipe. Which proves conclusively that he's never made it, becos it is in fact in the Edmonds Cookbook...

We go thru lots of sultana cake, bananas and bread and peanut butter in this overachieving, sports orientated house hold.

The peanut butter consumption has extended to  yummy peanut butter cookies ,the recipe for which I discovered first in Doris Greenspans "Baking - from my kitchen to yours" cookbook., and which similarly get many requests.

And given the amount that my family eat of peanut butter, it makes me a natural sucker for this type of product - the link to which, a friend has just sent thru. He's tried the peanut butter and says its fantastic, so I've taken him at his word and gone online and ordered a couple of jars - one for us for home, and one for Courteney to take back to the hostel.

I will naturally feel much happier knowing that they're eating something completely free of additives, becos that just makes such simple sense to me.

Everything about this business model as espoused in his website feels right to me.

I'm looking forward to trying the peanut butter when it arrives!

An interesting article written by Simon Gault on the subject of molecular gastronomy.

He is probably New Zealands most experienced exponent of this approach to cooking, and I thought what he had to say, stripped away some of the criticism that is fueled by ignorance alone.

Maybe we should ask him to come and do a guest chef spot at Somerset sometime, so we can learn some more...

This exquisite goats cheese arrived today from Te Aroha - and I can vouch for the fact it is beautiful- Rick and I had the walnut one for lunch with a roasted beetroot and asparagus salad, and orange dressing, and we've been so impressed that we've  included the plain one in the menu for the Te Whare Ra Winemakers dinner next Tuesday.

We have had goats cheese on the  restaurant menu years ago,  as one of the cheese options, but people would often reject the one we used, saying it was too pungent. I  always enjoyed that flavour, so was always slightly bemused by those who would order goats cheese and then say it was too strong. But you get that.

However, when we were in the Dordogne a couple of years ago, we got to try Cabacou, the local goats cheese, which is sold in the markets as only a few days old. I was stunned at how mild the flavour was.

And people staying with us over those 2 weeks, who said they didn't like goats cheese discovered that they could eat cabecou with pleasure.

This cheese today, reminds me of those flavours, although it has a firmer texture.

Delightful people and a beautiful product. They sell via their website and courier out nationwide.

Yum!

I have just been approached by the producer of the Masterchef series which is soon to start filming in NZ to put the word out there to any amateur chefs who might be interested in being part of the process to contact them.

Apparently the one in Australia has absolutely blown away any expectations in terms of the number of viewers they were expecting, hence the desire to make a NZ version.

So - the script is as follows:

ABOUT THE SHOW

MasterChef - the global phenomenon is about to hit New Zealand television. The

programme which first appeared on screens in the UK in 1990 is still going strong and

Australia has just completed their first season to rave reviews and extraordinary

audiences. In July this year over four million tuned in to watch the final - an audience

bigger than the entire population of New Zealand. Not only did this set a new Australian

record, these ratings prove the delicious combination of food and individual achievement is

one of the most significant trends in television today.

MasterChef New Zealand will be filmed between October-December 2009 and will be

shown on TV1 in 2010. Via a huge promotional campaign on the network the show looks

set to attract thousands of applications from across the country - students, mums,

professional sportsmen, solicitors, nurses and cleaners amongst them. Young and old,

each will come prepared with raw talent and enthusiasm to leave their old life behind and

enter the kitchen with one driving aim: To become New Zealand’s first ever MasterChef.

ARE YOU THE FIRST NZ MASTER CHEF

The search for New Zealand’s best amateur chef will begin with auditions being held in

Christchurch, Wellington, Hamilton and Auckland. Cooks will be given a chance to

impress our judging panel enough to be invited to attend the final audition in Auckland. Its

here we will discover our Top 24.

The Top 24 go through a series of challenges that will put their cooking skills and their

palates to the test. Only 12 make it through to the weekly elimination rounds where they’ll

face a range of cooking challenges that will examine their ability in several styles of

culinary excellence.

Please note….to enter you cannot have any formal tertiary or other professional catering qualifications acquired in the last 10 years. Are 18 years and over.  You cannot have ever worked full-time in a kitchen as a cook, chef or in food preparation.

If this is you then go online to:

tvnz.co.nz/masterchef-new-zealand/want-masterchef-nz-2973586

Have just been over to the restaurant to help Rhonda and Grace cope with the initial onslaught of customers. Its Sunday nite and normally not a nite I front at the restaurant, but tonite, perversely, we are busier than we were last nite, Saturday nite, and I thought I should go over to help.

The All Blacks were playing last nite, and I assume that had some impact on making our Saturday nite so quiet - a game televised at 7.30pm at nite cuts right thru the dining evening. Fortunetly we had some catering on as well, so the nite wasn't a complete washout, but I sometimes do wonder when I will get to the point in my business career, when I won't be so put out by a quiet nite .When I'll just learn to roll with the punches...maybe when the bank balance isn't quite so adversly affected...hmmm...

Anyway -  this is supposed to be about cooperage and wine barrels.

I've always loved wine barrels. There is something about the age old craftsmanship that appeals to me immensely, and I was very excited when I acquired the small french barrel below from a shipment Steve Bird brought into the country last year.

As I've mentioned in a previous blog, we use it to make our red wine vinegar, and I love it to bits.

Its small however, and I was  therefore delighted when I was offered a larger one, from the Bourgogne region. I've brought it home and am currently trying to reswell the wood which has dried out and shrunk as a result. That means that its not water tight - a definite liability for something you want to hold liquid! A bit of a mission though trying to soak something this large - had considered taking it round to a friends swimming pool, but don't think the chlorine will be conducive to nice tasting vinegar, so have desisted with that idea...

This link is to the latest David Lebovitz blog in which he shows pictures of the cooperage process, from the tree trunks - through the process of creating the barrels. In his blog he's talking about barrels used for cognac, and I'm acting on the assumption that it would be the same for wine barrels.

In the marvellous book "Wine and War" by Don and Petie Kladstrup, theres a wonderful description of how the Resistance used wine barrels to move men around the country. Apparently the wood allowed just enough air in to let them breathe.

Amazing things really!

It has been a funny kind of week, and I haven't been much inclined to do very much of anything really, possibly becos I'm preoccupied with 'other' stuff.

Announced to all and sundry last nite that we were going to sell up everything and run away, becos the current state of the bank balance is depressing me, but as one long term customer pointed out, ( and by doing so, very effectively cut me of mid torrent!), she's heard that all from me before, and she just knows we're not going to do anything that stupid.

She's probably right...

But sometimes it feels good to vent!

  I had however gone off on a bit of a tangent during the afternoon,  when one of the Paris based blogs I read regularly gave me a link to a beautiful looking chateau close to the Normandy/Loire region, and that got Rick and I discussing the probabilities and possibilities of another big European trip. We get asked alot when we're planning the next one, and I'm starting to get warm around the edges about the thought of embarking on the start of the organisational process. And certainly this particular Chateau looked liked a rather gorgeous place to begin. Hmmm..

We could of course sell up here, everything, and then just do cookschools and the occasional foray overseas. But then again as last nite proved, hospitality and restaurants are in my blood, and I do love what it is that we do, so I really can't imagine not doing it any more.

Any way - this link is to an interesting article on an American website which is very restaurant focused, and discusses the current state of dining out in America, and I thought made some interesting points.

We have some friends holidaying down in Nelson at the moment - and I've sent them names of restaurants to try, and have been reading their subsequent reports with interest becos we're heading down that way in a month for Courteneys Nationals, and are hoping to get to some of the good places to eat.

I think I'm in need of the break!

Ah well - first cookschool in the Christmas series about to get underway - have Kelly from Nest, who's lent us a heap of platters to showcase the food, and Anna from Silver Bubbles getting the table organised so I'll wander over and make everyone a coffee.

And go over again with Rick what it is exactly that we're doing. We always fly a little loose in the first class, as he brings it all together for the first time - but we had friends home for dinner on Monday nite who got experimented on, so we know that the flavours work - it'll just be timing of stuff today. By the time we've repeated it 25 odd times, we have it down pat, but always a relief to get the first one out of the way...

 It should be no surprise by now for me to state that I'm obsessed with macarons - our attempts to duplicate the Parisian delicacies have taken months of effort, but the guys in the kitchen are now making them quite nonchalantly. Anyone would think they were easy!

Its a technique that has been mastered, and the results are a pure delight to my eye.

With the Champagne dinner last Tues, we wanted to finish off with sweet flavours centered on aniseed and ginger, becos we knew they worked with champagne, so we decided to do licorice macarons and baby ginger cupcakes.

Jamie has been playing round with a number of macaron flavours over the past few months, and I think it was he who first made the licorice ones a couple of months ago. They got oohed and aahed over, and then kind of forgotten as we moved onto feijoa, and tamarillo and other flavours.

So licorice were made again for this dinner, and people positively eulogised - so much so that Matt had to make up a large batch to be sent up to a house party in Pauanui for the weekend, and we've decided to make them a permanent flavour. So now in the restaurant when people order a macaron they have a choice of 5 flavours - dark chocolate, white chocalate and orange, apricot, caramel and licorice.

Licorice icecream has long been associated with the restaurant,  having been on our menu for pretty much all of the 23 years, so it has a nice sense of natural connection to also be making licorice flavoured macarons.

Rick's just ridden home from Te Aroha (as you do!), where Courteney had a time trial, and we had some macarons for afternoon tea - quality control you understand- and I can vouch for the fact they really are sensational!

Have just had a meeting with Andrea from Moca, our website designers, and Rachel from Digital Dove, who is currently working with us on our logo and branding - and have realised that theres a whole language out there that I don't understand. They talked about fonts and exchanging files and other bits and pieces that might as well have been in double dutch for all I could comprehend.

 And that reassures me in a funny kind of way that, as with most things in life, when  you need something done to a high specification, you're better to get in the experts, simply becos they know, and can do stuff that you can't. One of life's little lessons that sometimes is useful to be reminded of,  becos as a small business owner its easy to fall into the trap of attempting to be a jack of all trades, and thats not always a good idea, I've discovered.

But I digress, and what I really intended to write about was a subject I am vastly more knowledgeable on which is champagne. I love champagne, so was naturally very enthusiastic when Sandy from Lion Nathan first brooched the idea with me, nearly a year ago, that we do a comparative tasting between the 3 French champagne houses that they import - Nicholas Feuillatte, Gosset and Duval-Leroy.

This evening has been a long time in the planning, but all came together in a rather delightfully sparkly fashion on Tuesday evening I have to say.

Customers got to try 13 different wines on the nite - a Brut N/V for the preliminaries, and then when they sat down at tables and got into the serious stuff, we served 4 flights - N/V, Rose, Vintage, deluxe. Opinions varied widely in terms of what people preferred - proving unequivocably that there is no 'right' or 'wrong' when it comes to tasting wine.

It was a unique chance to taste some very special wines and we are very grateful to Lion Nathan for helping make it possible.

The kitchen came up with some great food matches - interesting small plates of flavours that worked really well with the bubbles. We'd worked hard on the ideas, so it was lovely to have them so well recieved, becos some of it was bit different.

But the icing on the cake of the evening was, without doubt the indominatable Jane Skilton MW, who Lion Nathan brought down to lead us thru the wines.

She was brilliant.

Deeply knowledgable as you would expect from a Master of Wine ( a qualification that is incredibly hard to acquire - I think theres something like only 40 female MW's throughout the world), she was a natural and delightful raconteur. Easy to listen too, and extremely humourous, with a wit that spiced up the evening considerably and helped create a jovial atmosphere that we all thoroughly enjoyed. Very cool!

It was interesting logistically, pouring and getting out the wines to the tables - each person had to have 3 glasses in front of them, in the right order at the right time, then we had to serve food, clear that, clear glasses, replace and repeat. A postively balletic performance...

I'd lain in bed the nite previous, going over in my brain as I'm wont to do, just how the structure was going to flow, becos of the differences to the Winemaker Dinners that we normally do, and decided somewhere near 2am that we'd need to order more champagne glasses, so rang Tauranga Party Hire at first light, and they very obligingly got some couried over from Hamilton cos we already had everything they held in stock.

Pleased to be able to report that everything went smoothly, and everyone, staff included, went home with smiles on their faces, knowing that they'd got to try something that doesn't come along that often.

Simpson Print did a magnificent job of compiling all the wine notes for the various wines in a beautifully presented booklet for guests.

The packaging for the deluxe wines was truly extraordinary - a veritable artform in itself.

The wine chiller with some of its precious contents...

We got the chefs out to help pour the final flight, so we could keep up with the clearing and...