If swear words offend you, I wouldn't go on this link - becos swear words proliferate! But it's kind of an interesting window into a world quite different to the one I choose to inhabit.

Recently I bought a pair of jeans from a shop I'd never been to before - and I come away with a strange taste in my mouth, from the efforts of the admittedly, friendly enough sales assistant to encourage me to buy more. I was on a mission to buy jeans, and wanted nothing else, and had to vest a reasonable amount of energy in deflecting her efforts, when all I wanted to do was pay and leave - and not be forced to get rude in the process, becos I don't especially enjoy being rude.

Once she'd determined that she wasn't going to make any additional sales out of me, the offensive then switched to collecting my personal data, which kind of fascinated me. Its a trend that the comments in this blog I've linked too, indicate have been going on for awhile in retail, but one I've been blissfully unaware off. Possibly becos the shops I tend to shop in are ones I'm already known in.

But this link would show that this is a massive trend in both retail and now hospitality to build data bases of clients. We live in a world of constant contact, with Facebook and Twitter - and we're regularly exhorted to stay in communication with our customers.

I tend to believe differently - to think that too much contact can lead to overfamiliarity and fatigue.

I also get quite miffed at the checkout when the process of paying becomes protracted, becos of the information that accountants in a head office somewhere, require  to be entered into the computorized till system. More often that not all I want to do is pay and leave - I don't want to be captured in any shape or form, digitally or otherwise. And for that reason refuse to have one of the supermarket loyalty cards so they can track my spending.

The original rant in the link was from a restaurant owner, abusing his staff becos they hadn't collected customers email addresses. The issue of the absurd level of abuse directed at his staff aside , I can't quite get my head around, a business owner believing the collection of a volume of customer data is crucial to business success.

Call me really oldfashioned, but regardless of how much I enjoy the opportunity to wax on these blogs and newsletters that I write, I have never suffered from any form of illusion that it is that contact with our customers that bring people to Somerset. They are simply part of the restaurant story - but what really matters, what really determines whether people are going to come back to the restaurant, is the experience they have when they're there - the food, the service, the ambience.

Working hard to ensure that enough people enjoy that, is what our business concentrates on more than anything else. Becos that's what we think is most important.

I know that people enjoy getting the newsletter, becos I get alot of positive feedback about it. But I also know that it only goes to people who have directly requested it - either electronically or via conventional mail. And that is deliberate, becos I abhor the thought of sending it out unsolicited. We redid the mailing list last year quite deliberately - becos over 15 years it had got large and unweildy, and I correctly guessed, that we had ceased to be relevant in some peoples lifes. If people chose to continue to get the letters from me, they needed to fill in forms and return them, and from those I rebuild the list. That gives me the reassurance that the people I stay in contact with are people who are interested in hearing about what is going on in our world. That works for me.

I simply don't believe that everyone who comes thru the door at Somerset is going to want to either necessarily return, or  have that one visit mean that they are now contacted on a regular basis, by us.

But I guess my focus has always been on the 20% - the 20% of customers that give us 80% or our business. That is a perspective spelt out to me many years ago, by a man who's opinion I had alot of respect for, and although I didn't agree with him fully at the time - having watched our client base over the years develope, I tend to believe he was right. We are not going to please everyone all the time - but we have a large base of very special customers who I would rather focus on, then attempting to be all things to all people. And expecting all people to want to hear from us.

We're a niche business and that approach just doesn't make sense.

I therefore read these comments, on the link  with a distinct sense of distaste and lack of comprehension. And hopefully that doesn't sound pompous - its just that I genuinely don't 'get' that approach. Adn what concerns me, is that the comments that followed the blog , indicate that collecting customer data is now a recognised and standard business approach in America, which means it wil doubtless follow suit here.

And which means I will spend even less time than I currently do in chain stores, and a whole heap more in locally and personnally owned business', who treat me as an individual, and not another statistic.

We have alot of depth of talent amongst our current kitchen team. Together with Rick there are 5 other full time chefs - John, Craig, Helen, Jamie and Matt. They do a variety of shifts - on some days one of them will prep all day, and not do service, and other days they will start with lunch time service, prep all afternoon, do dinner time service, and then turn around and clean the kitchen before heading for home, often on the back of a 12 hour day.

I watch the various programmes on TV that elevate restaurant cooking to being something glamourous with a reasonable amount of cynicism, becos to my eyes the work involves a fair amount of sheer hard slog and repetition, and remarkably little glamour.

In a kitchen like ours, everything gets made from scratch. We pride ourselves on the fact. The stocks, breads, icecreams, pastas, even the sausages for the bollito misto are made on site. All our sweets and pastries and the sauces.

An example of the prep that happens every day on a multiple of levels - this is Paris gnocchi being shaped.

We believe that its not only a matter of culinary pride, its also to do with what distinguishes us from other restaurants. Our reputation is tied to our kitchens ability to produce all aspects of our menu from scratch. There are alot of companies trying to sell us preprepared foodstuffs - be it pastries or hollandaise sauce, as 2 recent examples - and these rather arrogant ( and stupid)  reps tell Rick he'd save lots of wage costs, if he bought food already prepared.

All that says to us is that they haven't done their homework on us - and are treating us in the same way as they would a branch of a large chain restaurant, and to my mind that is just plain dumb. Restaurants are pitched at all sorts of different levels in the market, and as such, require different things. For a rep to assume a blanket approach, means they loose our interest pretty quick.

Our guys have pretty much all started on the dishes, and gradually worked their way up. We have been very fortunate in having alot of stability over the years - and our chefs tend to hang around for awhile. Some don't. Some are only there for a few short months - but I don't really regard those ones as having being 'trained' at Somerset.

Trained, means months and months of repetition of small monotonous jobs. Theres nothing glamourous about peeling potatoes, or prepping meat cuts - but its something that needs to be done day after day after day. Our team all share the prep ( minus Rick these days), and then turn around and do the service cooking as well. Thats 2 quite distinct types of cooking, and in some of the large American restaurants, I've read that they have 2 teams of chefs - cheap Mexican labour to do the day prep, and then the more expensive 'named' chefs who come in for the line cooking.

Rick doesn't do much prep these days - unless we have a large function on, but he goes over to cook service most nites. He finds prep boring, but still enjoys the adrenalin rush that the pressure of service creates. One day he may get over that too, and I guess at that point we'll all be looking for a new job!

We are not a big enough kitchen to have seperate departments as you get in the classical french lineup. Everyone tends to share a hand with the prep - at different times covering most aspects. That isn't to say though that certain talents don't start to shine through- a couple become more adept at some of the more complex pastry stuff we do, like the macarons, while others are more comfortable with the savoury prep.

Cooking during service is very structured though - and its the senior chefs that do the hot pan work - the hot entrees and the mains. And becos of the fact our staff are there for a while it can mean that the younger staff don't get a shot at cooking mains for literally years.

Which is why I'm always somewhat bemused by the attitude that quite often emanates from polytech trained students, with us for a weeks work experience, who truly regard themselves as chefs - and figure they're just going to start of on mains. It would be laughable if it wasn't sad. Sad becos some of these young upstarts end up convincing parents or retired dairy farmers ( for some reason the stories we hear always seem to involve dairy farmers!) that they should put their hard earned retirement money into a cafe/restaurant and they will be the chef. More often than not, their practical experience is absolutely zilch, and don't even get me started on what I think of their notions of good food!

We have seen the results of such startups, many many times - I think the average life expectancy of a food business in NZ is 18 months, and there's a huge amount of anguish and lost investment hidden in that statistic.

So I have a bit of an issue with those who think they can fast track their way.  You can't. To be a good chef requires years of hard, at the coal face graft, learning from others more experienced than you. To be a great chef requires that experience combined with a passion to develope and read and experiment and learn as much as you can. Very few have that fire.

We have learnt never to take anyone direct from the polytechs unless they're prepared to start of on the dishes. Not becos we're sadistic, but purely becos it gives us a chance to first  measure just how keen they really are - you'd be amazed at those that react with indignation that they're expected to start there and refuse, therefore denying themselves the opportunity to get in the door of a great kitchen - and gives us a chance to get the measure of the person.

Some of our guys have come to us as college students and have got their polytech qualifications while continuing to work. Meaning they come out the other end, fully qualified, with a great amount of practical work experience and no student debt.  Makes total sense to me.

It is quite common in the great overseas kitchens for young chefs to travel between them working 'stages'. They're not paid to be there, but they want the opportunity to see how the 3 star chefs work, and it will look great on their resumes when they get back to the States.  I wonder how much depth they actually learn in those massively populated kitchen - el bulli has something like 42 chefs for 45 diners - and the only reason the restaurant can afford to have that number of chefs, is that its not paying a reasonable proportion of them.

I'm not advocating that approach here - but it sits in the back of my mind when we have yet another approach from an overly cocky young individual who believes he ( its usually a 'he') has sprung from polytech as a fully qualified chef. He's actually only just began the journey to become a chef - and if he has any real potential he'll discover that fact very quickly and develope a bit of humility and be prepared to start at the bottom in a good commercial kitchen and learn, and then learn some more.

But some don't think they have anything more to learn. And they are the sort of chefs that end up in cafes and restaurants where they buy in such monstrosities as prepared hollandaise sauce, becos they lack the basic skill set to make it from scratch, and worse, they're lazy, as Joof said the other day, and can't be bothered making the effort to learn. The reps strike gold in those sorts of establishments.


What got me mulling all of this today was the fact that when I went over to the restaurant to unpack some wine this morning, James Broad was there with Matt for his last assessment, and I mooched back over to the house a bit later thinking about how the way James has come into our kitchen during the year to assess and grade Matt has been a markedly easier process than the one we'd done with our previous 3 chefs, who'd needed weeks off during the year to go over to Wairiki Polytech to do the practical part of their qualifications.  James is working under HSI's auspices, and for us as employers,  its proven to be a great way of our staff getting their qualifications, with minimum disruption to the kitchen.

Celia Hay in Christchurch operates a private chefs training school, The New Zealand School of Food and Wine, and one day I'd be really interested to have a look at what she does there, becos we have become very disillusioned with the process that Jamie especially, experienced here. Celia wrote an immensely practical book "How to Grow your Hospitality Business' which should be compulsory reading for all those with rose tinted glasses about to throw themselves into a cafe or restaurant, simply  becos they so enjoy doing dinner parties at home! Its loaded with common sense.

We visited Ballymaloe in Cork, at the end of our French trip, back in 07 - something I've mentioned many times previously, becos I think the total package of what Darina Allen has created there, is simply magical. People came from all over the world to train to be chefs there - living in the middle of the countryside for 3 months. We thought it was an amazing concept.

But even a place as special as Ballymaloe can only fuel the fire - it can't make someone a chef. Only years of graft and inspiration achieves that goal, and I think its sad when people expect instant gratification, and simply miss the fact that the journey and the discoveries along the way, are actually what it is all about.

Brenda and Doug Leigh are very special people in our lifes - not only have they been enormously supportive over a very long number of years, with all the various aspects of the restaurant business, they also take an active  and genuine interest in what our daughters are doing.

They are food and wine afficiando's - both with extremely discerning palates, who travel widely, eat out extensively, and drink lots of great wines. They came to Italy with us, and to France, and are already sending me links of potential future destinations for the next trip, which I've been heard to start muttering about.

They are always there when we have a newsletter that needs folding and putting in envelopes, and Doug is the source of many witty email connections, that have me chuckling at my desk- usually quite appropriately at times when I need a little levity.

Their impact in our lives cannot be understated, and we consider ourselves very blessed to have friends like them around us.

Last nite was Brenda's birthday, and as is typical of the couple they wanted to celebrate in a special and generous fashion. Doug had wanted the event to be held in the  restaurant cellar, which he has seen the plans for, and offered ever so generously to start the digging process. The cellar will happen, one day - but its still only a gleam in my eye, so instead we had to compromise with a table in the backroom of the restaurant. Champagne and fingerfood on the deck to start, and then a menu degustation in the restaurant.

I hadn't known what to get Brenda for a present, and decided to take a series of photos of the evenings - both of the guests out front, and of the food taking shape in the kitchen. I am far from a professional photographer, but I love photographs for the links to memories they provide, and am trying to make myself feel less like a twit when I haul out the camera, and to just get on with the business of recording life.

Am always conscious that people wielding large cameras can look ever so pretenscious, and I'd hate to be classified accordingly, but I also know  the very direct pleasure that having photos from the past, flicking up on my computor screen as the screen saver, gives me, so I have to step over that reluctance and get on with it.
Which I did. Not quite sure how I'm going to package them as a gift - will debate that one later...

We'd also done a private luncheon yesterday for a long term customer who was celebrating a milestone birthday. We don't open up specially for lunch very often,  but I walked back over to the house yesterday afternoon once the group were on coffee, with a real sense of satisfaction, that we are able to provide a nice enviroment for people to get together to celebrate some of the those big events.

 Watching families come together always involves a degree of voyeurism I guess, but I'm always conscious of a sense of being priviledged to be able to be part of those celebrations. We have some very special memories.

It was a big nite in the restaurant last nite, which is good - cos some of the Saturday nites over the last few weeks have not been big, and I hate it when that happens, becos a full Saturday nite should be one of the constants in my life. It aids considerably with the bill paying.

So doing a table of 16 on menu degustation ( a series of set small courses), and having another 53 people on a la carte, puts pressure on the kitchen, becos the timing is out. Timing is always an issue for the kitchen and I've mentioned at length previously, the effort we now go too, to spread bookings, so that we don't get a mass of people thru the door at once. It is extraordinary, the difference in the ease of the flow of service, if bookings are spaced in half hourly  groupings of approx 4 tables at a time. The front staff, the kitchen and the customers all benefit, from the ability to be more measured and to simply have more time.

 When 40 people walk thru the door literally at once, everyone is scrambling. (Try explaining that to some people though, when they ring to book a table and we tell them we can't do them at the time they want but suggest half an hour earlier, or half an hour later. For some, we are being unbelieveably arrogant in daring to be so presumptous as to 'tell' the customer what time they should arrive, and the phone can positively vibrate as they express their indignation. We even have some people who will then refuse to come if they can't come at 7.30, or what ever time it is that they have stipulated. I figure they're calling our bluff and expecting us to back down, for fear of losing the income, and I've learnt to just  tough that out, apologise as genuinely as I can make myself sound, and hang up - without the booking. I don't like being bullied.)

This time of year it is especially hard to time the flows in the restaurant becos of the number of larger groups that we tend to get. Some of these groups book in at a time - and it will take up to an hour after that time, before the full number of people arrive and ordering gets underway. If we've timed our other tables on the assumption that that large order would have been in the kitchen prior to that, then we end up with gridlock for the kitchen. And we can never know - becos sometimes other large groups arrive, virtually all together, sit down straight away, and get into the meal.

Like most things in life it is a very inexact science ....

Most people in restaurants order a la carte - an antiquated french expression which basically means, the restaurant gives them a menu ( a carte) which has a variety of dishes listed that they can choose from. A restaurant like Somerset designs its menu to incorporate 3 courses, which is what the vast majority of people who come to us have. We are a destination restaurant in the sense that most people come for the evening and we take it as a sign that we are doing our job well, when people eat a well spaced 3 course meal, followed by coffee and maybe some sort of digesif, and then sit on in a relaxed and amiable state, in no rush to depart.

There are variations on that theme though - and every nite in the restaurant we get hit with a request that doesn't fit that particular structure, and you learn to roll with the punches, otherwise you'd just get too aggravated, too often.

So, the point I'm trying to make here is that the kitchen is used to having no predictable flow in a nite. There are simply no guarantees about what people are going to order. We may have a nite when the vast majority of customers work their way thru the menu, or it could be that a number of tables don't order entrees and go straight into mains, moving the pressure in the kitchen from one side to the other.

Some well known restaurants overseas give their customers no choice - no, a la carte. People eat a series of small  courses in the order determined by the chefs. That is what 'menu degustation" is ( and was originally intended, I read somewhere, as a way of giving wealthy Americans who were in France "doing" the 3 star restaurants, a taste of what each restaurant had built its reputation on, becos they were eating lunch and dinner at major restaurants over the limited number of days they were on holiday, and had a very real physical restriction as to how much food they could consume in that time frame.) Those kitchens have a degree of predictablility about what is going to be ordered, but ours doesn't have it quite so easy.

On a busy nite, the pressure is on the kitchen anyway , to get out the meals in what is considered a reasonable time frame, to a wide range of people, all of whom have different expectations.. Add into that mix a multi course set menu for a table of 16 that has to be timed and plated around the other tables, and things get very busy!

So Rick had a pressurized nite - I didn't indulge in too much idle chit chat as I waited to take photos of the food being plated - I know the signs of intense concentration only too well, and stay as quiet as I'm capable off, until he heads for the bar and his wind down beer.

But challenges are never bad things in life - and when you put yourself out for people as special as the Leighs, who were very appreciative, then we all gain in the process!
But bed did feel especially good....

In this current cookschool series, the various dishes that Rick is doing, include a reasonable quotient of butter. Thats not deliberate - he didn't set out to come up with a menu that incorporated lots of butter - but when you're doing celebratory style cooking, as this Christmas series is meant to represent, it makes sense, I guess that some of the dishes will include butter.

I mention this by way of introduing this book - becos if we had done a similar menu 10 years ago, we would have met a phalanx of negative comment from people affronted by the use of large knobs of butter. Fat was evil - we were supposed to be eliminating it from our diets, and we would be asked constantly if it was possible to replace the butter with magarine or something else.

 For awhile there, we tried to be polite, but eventually we just got a bit sick of what we deemed to be a rather unhealthy obsessiveness that some people seemed to have developed over fat in their diet. So we stopped pretending that yes, you could use something instead of butter. And now if people ask - Rick just sort of looks at them, and returns the question - why would you want too, becos nothing tastes as good, or finishes off a sauce, or makes pastry as light, as butter. And people kind of smile. Some I note don't look convinced, but most seem alot more relaxed and the tenor of the discussion is much more pleasant.

The movie Julie/Julia has given me a new weapon when that comes up in conversation, becos alot of people coming to the classes have seen it, and the cooking in it is a complete celebration of butter's uses in the kitchen. And Julia Child lived to the ripe old age of 91- so the clear line between premature death and consumption of butter, that some people seem so intent on drawing is perhaps not as clear cut as they would like....

The movie is wonderful. I'm a huge fan of Meryl Streep and had read the biography on Julia Child written by her nephew that her segment of the movie was based on, so the story was familiar. I didn't quite as much get the part about the blogger, but Rick thought Amy Adams, the actress who plays that part was lovely , and very easy to watch,  so I pretty much kept my thoughts to myself.

Larry left me with the book Julie and Julia this week, and I've just finished it. Now I get it. This is the story of what made her decide to cook her way thru Julia Childs orginal cookbook and blog about the experience, in the process becoming a bit of a media presence herself, and it makes for rather exhilirating reading!

The movie made her into a much nicer, sort of sweeter person than she comes across in the book. And I much preferred the person who emerged from the writing - someone sharp and acerbic, with a poignant and totally identifiable take on life and the people around her, warts and all.

Julia Childs become famous becos she showed 'servantless' homes in the 60's how to cook serious french food. Americans had been cajoaled over the preceding decades by a barrage of advertising,  into treating cooking as a waste of time, something that got in the way of living. There were lots of very large companies who could make your food for you - and who sold it in a dehydrated, canned or frozen state, so that the only time or skill level  required from you,  was to reheat. Or, you could go to one of the plethora of drive-in's, that were starting to pop up all over the place, and order hot food to go- be it hamburgers or pizza or fried chicken or...

Julia Child had a profound influence on a whole heap of people  who didn't want to live like that and who wanted guidance on how to cook from scratch. Having lived in France and trained at a Cordon Bleu school when she was in her late 30's, she came to cooking as she seemed to approach most things in her life, with a zest and a sense of enquiry that would keep her animated and learning, even when she had achieved iconic status in most people's eyes. She never stopped wanting to learn more.

Many of todays great chefs, quote her as a  strong influence in their earlier lifes.  Rick can't watch her on TV -she is too klutzy in the kitchen for him, but he has huge respect for her knowledge, and I think I understand the distinction. She didn't work for years in commercial kitchens, so never built up the technical skill base that professional chefs have. Instead she cooked and experimented at home, while she was writing her various books and filming her TV shows. But she made food approachable, and  was absolutely the right person at the right time - which is why she became so loved.

This 29 year old woman, Julie Powell, living in a ghastly sounding appartment in the outer boroughs of New York, with a lovely man for a husband, decides to cook her way thru the epic' Mastering the Art of French Cooking' written by Julia Childs,  over the course of a year and blog about the experience. She decides to do this, not becos she wants to become a professional chef, but more becos she is inherently dissatisfied with where her life is at, she hates her day job, and is looking to do something to instill some passion into her life.

And the process makes a rollicking story - there is nothing this lady won't discuss or share. I am somewhat in awe!

And by way of a postscript, this is a link that I've just found to the blog that Julie wrote when she heard of Julia Childs death.  She describes the impact that Julia had on peoples lifes more eloquently than I did above.

I've been sitting on my lovely red leather seat in the bar writing in my diary about the last couple of days which have been pretty full on. The restaurant is quiet tonite - not sure why that is, becos the rest of the week is busy, but tonite is not, so I've retreated and left the customers in the capable hands of Rhonda and Vicki.

I took my camera over, intending taking some photos of the new dishes that came on the menu tonite - but I didn't quite get to be around when they were being plated so I missed that opportunity. The kitchen staff hate it when I bring out the camera, they all kind of slip away to the periphery of the room in the hope that they're out of range... so I figure I just have to do it more often and then they'll get used to it!

New dishes on - mainly changes to the mains, but also a couple of entrees. Rick has put on a bollito misto becos he has a passion for those types of dishes - he made sausages today, hand piped them into sausage casing.  But we often comment in cookschools that the average kiwi doesn't do 'boiled' meat. They prefer their meat to be crispy and brown on the outside, rather than gently cooked in a pot of broth.

So we will have to wait and see how it goes.

Interestingly, our experimenting with the hind lamb shanks has shown that by cooking them sous vide for 8 hours at about 80oC, means they end up moist and tender - quite perfect. Then reheating  them in the oven to order, they crisp up on the outside, and brown in the manner that people like.

I have had an American penpal and his wife with us for the last couple of days. Larry is a delightful gentleman that I have inadvertently ended up in this lengthy written communication with over the last 11 years or so. He discribed me as a penpal the other day, and I thought that was a very apt description of our relationship.

He and his wife Maggie  came to the restaurant back in about 1998 - they found us quite by chance when they were travelling thru, and were sufficiently impressed to come back the next nite. In response to his enthusiasm about our chicken liver dish, I sent him the recipe all the way to Portland, Oregon, and his response kicked off a wide ranging and much enjoyed correspondance that continues to this day.

They are very special people who's enthusiasm for what we do is much appreciated. When we were planning the big overseas trips, to Italy originally, and then to France, Larry was a source of much information and emotional support when the going got tough.

I've valued his opinion and his take on things for years - so it was a pleasure to have them both come back to the remodeled version of Somerset after all these years.

I suspect the bollito misto would have been right up his alley - but unfortunetly he wasn't here to give it a go. They'll be eating somewhere in Wellington  tonite...

I'm having a baking kind of day, which is sitting very comfortably with me. Ricks searching for inspiration in some cookbooks for some menu changes, and we've had a discussion about various aspects of that, and I've left him to it, and headed into the kitchen to turn the fruit thats been macerating all week, into 2 large cakes.

The first will come out of the oven at about 5.30pm so that is going to mean that I'll have to flick back over to the house during service at about 9.30pm to remove the second one from the oven, but that is one of the advantages of living so close these days. It isn't a hardship to do so - I just have to remember!

My daughters have requested the full monty when it comes to Christmas baking. They want Christmas cake with the 'proper' icing - by which they mean almond and royal icing - christmas mince pies and christmas pudding. My mother would be delighted. An emigree from Ireland, Betty never budged all her life, from the conviction that Christmas dinner involved the traditions, even if she had transplanted herself from a cold Northern hemisphere winter to a more moderate climate. Christmas was Christmas - and no variations would be brooked.

So the fact that her granddaughters hold true to that tradition, even though she has now been gone for over a decade would give her immense satisfaction, I am quite sure!

I acquiesce, and do as instructed, in no small part becos I too love the cakes, pudding and mince pies, and becos it does remind me somewhat intensely of my mother. She and I have just had a wee private conflap as I lined the tins with baking paper - a chore that always takes me straight back to her kitchen in Palmer Cres.

We were estranged when she up and died suddenly of a heart attack - family and business had not been a happy mix for us - and part of the needed healing process has been to be able to reach back to some of the nice memories. Christmas cake, Christmas pudding and Christmas mince pies are very much part of that list.

I use her mince recipe - I think the original book it came out of was one of those Women Institute type recipe books, printed back in the fifties. The pudding recipe I've used for years, is slightly different to hers but only in minor things like the fact I use brioche crumbs rather than conventional bread crumbs. I have the brioche dough rising at the moment - and will eat the surplus  brioche toasted with the exquisite loganberry jam that Rick bought back from Somerfields when he went to get our first strawberries of the season from them yesterday. The pudding is a Roux brothers recipe, from their book on patissiere, which is a classic we refer to alot.

The cake recipe comes from Pat Foster at Jamele - she gave it to me last year when I commented on how delicious the fruitcake was that they always have in the salon in the weeks leading up to Christmas.

All week I've had a large mound of raisins, sultanas and currants macerating in red wine and Pedro Ximenez sherry - stirring it occasionally and watching the fruit gradually plump up.
And now after  a half hour of creaming butter and very dark sugar, and combining it all with eggs and flour and spices, the house is filling with that beguiling smell of Christmas baking, that I do so love.

Ironic really. Becos in the Christmas cookschool series which we are currently about halfway through, we very deliberately stay away from anything to do with dried fruits, becos experience in both the restaurant and with wedding catering has taught us that a significant percentage of people don't like fruitcake or its related culinary cousins. Most wedding cakes we encounter in todays world are chocolate or banana or carrot cake. That is just the way things are.

So I confess that I share, what I am quite sure would have been my mothers satisfaction that the next generation of females in this family also want proper Christmas baking in their lives. It'll be my pleasure to pass on the recipes, if and when they ask for them. In the meantime I'll enjoy the process of cooking them for all of us.

 2 blogs in one day -  which could be considered a touch excessive I guess, but the urge to sit down and write, tends to wax and wane depending to a very large degree on what else is going on in my life.

Today, we've had a stay at home day - I've made the Christmas cakes and generally mooched as you do sometimes. Saturday nite is well underway at the restaurant - we had an early hit, and I've come back over to the house to remove the 2nd cake from the oven, and decided to stay becos I'm pretty much redundant now over there.

The house is perfumed with that beautiful aroma of cooking spices and fruit, and I'm quite content to stay put and catch up on a few things at my desk. We have a bit coming up over the next couple of weeks, and I'm just wanting to dot my 'i's' and cross my 't's', and make sure that all is sorted. As you do.

Before I went over to the restaurant tonite, I'd been on Michael Ruhlmans latest blog - a reference point I return to regularly - and he was talking about Thomas Kellers latest cookbook 'ad hoc at home'  so I immediately used the link to order it thru Amazon.

 We are big Thomas Keller fans, and have all of his previous books. This man is widely touted as the top chef in America today - and his influence on the food scene is enormous.

By coincidence Rick and I were going thru his sous vide cookbook 'Under Pressure', today, as we were discussing some menu changes. Quite a different style of cooking to that in this latest cookbook, and that is one of the aspects that I enjoy so much about Somerset, in that we don't need to cleave to any one style of cooking - we can afford to experiment widely in our search for good food.

In setting up the Somerset at Home concept, we bought a vacumn packer, becos it would allow us to package food in an hygienic way, that makes food more transportable. A factor we considered to be important given we knew we would be transporting food to a much wider radius. And so it has proven to be.

I bought this 'Under Pressure' cookbook last year, and read it, thought some of it was fascinating, but essentially unworkable for us at that stage becos to follow a lot of the concepts, you need a vacumn packer. Now that we have one, some of these interesting techniques become possible for us, and Rick and I worked our way thru it this morning, discussing some of the ideas and how we could interprete them.

Menu planning is always an interesting process. Sometimes I step right back and just leave it to Rick. I might be absorbed in other stuff, and just don't feel I have much to contribute. At other times I get a bee in my bonnet about something I've seen or read about, and want to get him similarly inspired - so I interject myself right into the middle of the discussion.

I have, however, learnt to back right of after a certain point. Its all very fine for me to come up with fresh ideas, but if Rick doesn't believe them to be workable on a day to day basis in the commercial kitchen, then they will never get to the menu stage.

We play around with food ideas all the time. Some are suitable for the restaurant, some are catering and some are cookschool. And some just remain nice ideas that we try on friends at home, but which we decide won't translate to the commercial environment, for a whole host of reasons. Thats just the way it is.

The menu at Somerset is larger than a lot of restaurants. We ate out at some of the top restaurants down in the Nelson region recently, and one of the things we noted was how small the menu choices were. I am aware that restaurant 'critics' often speak positively of restaurants with small menus, the inference being that small, means  they are tight and focused.

I don't necessarily disagree, but nor do I believe that the automatic coralie is that a larger menu implies that the restaurant can't be on top of its game.

Our menu is larger than is maybe currently fashionable for a number of reasons. We appeal to a wide range of people, and if we were too much of one style, we would possibly  limit that appeal to a degree that would affect us economically.

No restaurant can be all things to all people - you have to create a certain ambience and style, but we believe it is also OK to have a simple nourishing dish like lamb shanks on the same menu as dishes that require considerably more craft and technique. We happen to be doing quite a bit of work with the lamb shanks at the moment, becos we've switched to hind shanks from the fore ones, and Rick has discovered that they are substantially more meaty and require much longer cooking to break down the connective tissues. In fact one of the reasons that the sous vide cookbook came of the bookshelf, was becos I was looking for alternative ways of cooking them.

We have a significant number of return customers -  people who come to Somerset for a whole host of reasons, but one of which is paramount, is to eat that dish that they so loved last time. So we need to keep those dishes on the menu, and the strongest ones in that category are the squid entree, the duck main and the licorice icecream.  They will be there forever, just becos they have to be! I was up at the hospital during the week, and came away somewhat bemused by the fact that both the nurse and the specialist I dealt with talked about the licorice icecream.

 Whether we like it or not, that is what people associate with Somerset, and even though we're currently having problems accessing RJ's licorice straps to make it, I don't think we could ever seriously consider deleting it from the menu lineup.

When Rick sits down to make menu changes as he is currently doing, he is motivated as much as anything by seasonal ingredients. And by the awareness that the balance needs to be lightened, or made more heavy depending on what the weather is like.

He called up to Somerfields in Oropi yesterday to get the first of this seasons strawberries. Strawberries have been appearing in the supermarkets for a few weeks now, but the ones we'd tried lacked the sweetness of flavour that we want, so we waited until the Somerfield family told us they were good to use. And, as we've come to expect from these guys, they are quite beautiful.

So the changes he's making will incorporate those and a few more salady, lighter type entree dishes,  and different accompanionments with the main meats. Because we're moving into summer and lighter food is more appropriate.

We hear the criticism occasionally, that we don't change our menu enough, and we're never quite sure how to interpret that.

We feel that we are constantly tweaking the menu - subtle changes occur quite regularly, but the critics are correct in that wholesale change never happens. And that is purely becos we feel we can't. We are a long established restaurant that does a certain style of food, and it is our consistency that most people like when they return, repeatedly. Maybe some don't - but I think I've learnt to live with the knowledge that no matter what we do, we aren't going to please everyone, all the time.  ( But difficult customers are perhaps the subject for another blog one day....)

Thomas Keller is a very good example of a chef at the top of his game, who owns a number or restaurants, that do a variety of food styles. French Laundry and Per Se are examples of cusine mixed with science - molecular gastronomy if you like - a series of small courses incorporating all the latest techniques, that to my mind stimulates a mental celebration rather than an emotional response. The photos in this book ' Under Pressure' are truly spectacular, but the food and the techniques involved are complicated and involved, and in some of the dishes there are up to 10 different, distinct component parts. It is food that you look at with a logical and visual appreciation - food that appeals on a cerebal level, but not an emotional one.

He then has 2 other tiers of restaurants - Bouchon and  ad hoc  in which he does food that I call 'emotional'. Food that elicits a gut reaction, a 'yum' response, if you like - its food that we're familiar with, but done with a level of care that lifts it up to a whole seperate level.  This is the sort of food that excites me becos it is communicating on that very simple, instinctive, level, of: ' that looks so good, I want/need to eat it'.

 We only own one restaurant, and in that premise we attempt to incorporate a combination of all those factors. We want food that tastes good, that looks good and that satisfies, but we also occasionally deliberately seek out the wow factor.  Sometimes the dishes that present the simplest on the plate, are those that involve the most detailed prep in the kitchen - but the average customer in the restaurant is never going to fully understand that. And thats OK, as long as it tastes good, and they enjoy it.

But we are lucky in that there is also room for us to play around with new techniques and incorporate some of those ideas, when they appeal and prove to be practical. That stimulates us, and extends our kitchen and offers our customers a new and interesting option. Some like it, and some don't - and that is the way it will always be.

One of the things I have learnt to appreciate about the cookschool model, is that they give us an opportunity to talk directly about some of the stuff we are working with, in a way that you would never impose on people when they are dining in the restaurant. The cookschools allow us to get into a discussion, which can head of in all sorts of directions, and which I view as enormously healthy and positive. It heightens appreciation  all round, and that has to be a good thing.  Which is why I found this article in the Wall St Journal to be slightly out of kilter to my experience. Cookschools have taught us that people do like to cook at home. In general they aren't scared of technique becos they want to be confident of cooking food that tastes good and they enjoy that process. This article I thought, implied that people today can't be bothered. I don't agree at all.

Our menu is large, deliberately, to appeal to a wide range of palates, becos that is what represents our client base, and for us to go off on one select tangent would represent economic stupidity. Thomas Keller can afford to have different restaurants representing different food styles, but we need to be a little more broad in our approach at Somerset, and that is what our menu  reflects.

so when Rick is working on changes as he currently is, he is bearing all that in mind, sometimes intuitively rather than consciously, and sometimes with me adding my ha'penny worth in the background, and in the process he creates a menu with depth of appeal, and flavours that speak to a wide range of people.
Its good food - food that may appear simple, but which those who come to cookshools know is never quite as simple as it seems on the plate.!

We popped down to Mills Reef today to have a look at some new stretch tents, that were having a demonstration down there, and I've come away with a severe case of grass envy!

Alot of the wedding catering that we do is in marquees, and these are  a new type of stretch marquee which are quite different. As someone near me commented - it looks a bit like the Opera House.  And they were right, in the sense that the vaunted ceilings and lovely feeling of space were quite lovely.

 We have a concert I'm planning here early next year, with an operetta style singer, and it did occur to me that this would make a lovely canopy. Especially if I make sure that the budget stretches to allow Anna Robinson from Silver Bubbles loose to do her thing. That lady could create magic within a space like that...hmmm..

She couldn't however, do much about our grass - which when compared to the spectacular grass at Mills Reef, on what used to be their petanque court, pulled up very poorly by comparison. Linda told me its instant grass - so I told Rick tonite that I wanted some, and he just gave me one of those smiles that he does, when I go off on a tangent, as I'm known to occasionally do.

One day we will have grass, which will be like velvet to walk on, as one of the staff down there described it, but I doubt it will happen before this concert, and thats OK, becos by the time Anna has worked her particular brand of magic, no-one will be looking down, they'll all be oohing and aahing about what's happening on the tables and up above. And thats OK.

I'll get my grass - eventually!

And unlike this - it will be flat and smooth and thick and velvety...

 But in the meantime, I'm OK about the outlook we currently have. Honestly!

I'm waiting for the vege bed I've just dug over to get a solid 2 hour drenching, before I take down the tomato plants we bought at the market this morning on our way to the Mount, and plant them.

 Getting the watering system working has necessitated 2 spontaneous wanders down the road to Palmers, firstly to upgrade our sprinkler, and then again, to get the correct hose connection. All the time making very sure that I wasn't feeling too resentful of the fact my husband was out on the bike with Courteney and not handily around, specifically when I needed him.

Becos girls can do anything...Huh?...

Have finished the last chapter in this book as I've let the time pleasantly pass. Had ordered the book thru Amazon, not sure where I'd read the recommendation, and was expecting a discussion of life as a restaurant critic in New York. But that is not quite what I got. Frank Bruni is the current restaurant critic for the New York Times - and someone more hated or revered in New York would be hard to find.

Over the decades the various people who have held this role, have come to establish it as a position with formidable power and influence. What they do or don't say about a restaurant - how many stars they choose to allocate in a 4 star system - has a massive impact on whether the general public decide to visit the restaurant, and therefore on a business' financial viability.

So the clout that the published reviews carry, means that restaurants go out of their way to try and discover when Mr Bruni may be eating in their restaurant, and equal efforts are made by Mr Bruni to try to maintain his anonymity.  He would visit a restaurant a number of times over a month or so  to give depth to his analysis, and as in when he did a review of 'Per Se',  the Times paid for him to pop over to the Napa Valley to  have a meal at The French Laundry, the sister establishment owned by the same person, so he could build a complete picture  of what Thomas Keller was trying to achieve.

The money spent and the effort expended is quite extraordinary when read in context of  a country like ours where restaurant reviews are done as a parttime occupation by journalists with virtually no hospitality credibility. There are one or two honourable exceptions like David Burton who writes for the Dominion Post and who is one of the few NZ reviewers I can read without wincing. Most are appalling.

In Tauranga, the local paper periodically bestirs itself to decide it wants to do restaurant reviews, but they are usually done at the expense and full knowledge of the restaurant involved, and are invariably glowing in tone. So not really what I would class as criticism as such.

Which is possibly why I've long been fascinated by what I have read over the years, about the New York Times restaurant reviewers particularly, and the seriousness with which what they do is regarded both by those within the restaurant world and also the general public. Ruth Riechl wasn't Frank Bruni's predecessor,  I think there was someone else in between, but she has written a  book about the various disguises she used to indulge in, to try and get into restaurants without anyone knowing who she was, which made fascinating reading.

I expected this book to be more of the same, and maybe a rundown on the New York restaurants, including the famous names that I read about all the time, from someone who is paid to see behind all the branding and hype.

But the book was more a discussion on his life's battle with excessive eating, right from when he'd been a toddler in a highchair throwing a paddy becos his mother wouldn't give him a third hamburger.  A successful journalist, who'd covered a wide range of subjects including politics and been a Pulitzer prize finalist - the gluttony and resulting obsese body shape defined who he was to himself, more than anything  he had achieved in his working life.

His honesty is startling. Utterly startling. Especially given I think he continues as the Times restaurant critic, what ammunition he has given those who would dearly love to use it against him. But in a strange kind of way, I suspect that complete self disregard is what will also protect him. No one can say anything to him, that he hasn't already beaten himself up with many times - and in exposing it all and having nothing to hide from, he therefore has nothing to fear.

Food is an addiction for him - and the book describes his life long battle to control that addiction -  I admire his candor and his honesty enormously. And thought the story of how he had come to terms with himself and his food demons was immensely admirable and moving. And not at all what I expected!