I never knew that each snowflake has a unique and quite beautiful formation. Not living with snow, and seldom having ever handled it, its just not something I needed to think about. But this link shows some how truly exquisite  and intricately complicated nature can unexpectedly be.

I've always thought of snow as an homogenous mass, so the fact it actually comprises myriad tiny, beautiful, totally individual crystals, has rather grabbed me.

Proof perhaps, that things are seldom as they seem on the surface...

Rick has a love for boiled dishes, and I usually try and discourage him when he wants to put some sort of poached meat on the menu. Pot au feu may be much loved in France and Bollito misto is recognised as a classic in Italy, but I have found over the years, that the average Kiwi likes their meat roasted, and brown and crispy on the outside.

Which is interesting. Cos one of the things I've learned from years of making chicken stock at home from whole chickens, is that the chicken meat, given up after gently poaching a chicken with aromatics for a long time, is always moist, unlike roast chicken, which becomes dry after a nite in the fridge.

There is no doubt that poaching meat, makes it tender and moist - a fact taken to a logical extreme with cooking sous vide. But the ancient cuisines didn't know anything about vacum packing, they just knew that if you submerged meat in liquid, and cooked it gently then it would absorb some of that liquid, and not give up as much as the direct heat of roasting makes it do.

Ergo, it is a really nice way of eating meat, if you can get your head around the fact that there are no crispy brown bits on the outside. I've always had little faith that enough people would be prepared to try boiled meat in the restaurant, so I've always poured cold water on Ricks enthusiasm for listing such a dish.

It would seem that I was wrong.

He prevailed, and put a bollito misto on the menu pre Christmas, and we both now regularly comment on how intrigued we are by how many portions we sell in a nite.

The menu is all about balancing dishes. Rick figures he's got things worked out well, when he sells evenly across the board. Having said that, we have always had some sort of offal dish on, and never expected it to be a big seller, but liked having it on, becos it is the sort of food that people seldom have the time or inclination to cook at home, and we think that is a gap that restaurants should fulfill.

So the bollito misto was slotted into that spot on the menu - our bollito has tongue, chicken  and homemade pork sausage ( all poached) in a tongue stock with carrot and potato. And much to our amazement we are selling truckloads.
And people are loving it. Which pretty conclusively proves that you think you can know what you're doing, but you may still have stuff to learn....

By coincidence the latest 'Art of Eating' arrived during the week ( this is the best food journal out there, that I think you have to subscibe directly too to recieve, but for indepth, comprehensive articles on food and cooking from all around the world, simply cannot be beaten. It is the best), and one of its articles was on 'The Fair of the Fattened Ox in Carru", a tiny village in Piedmont, Italy, where a special breed of cattle is much celebrated. And becos beef is celebrated, so is bollito misto, a dish that can be found all over Italy, and which according to this article usually incorporates 7 different cuts of meat, although a gran bollito misto can go up to 14 different meats. In one plate. Conventionally these are served with between 4 to 7 different sauces -sauces that cover the spectrum of savoury and spicy, fatty and acidic, to provide balance with the meat.

To vary things a little, here at Somerset,  we've been using NZ grown wasabi - the real deal, which to us, gives a bite of heat to offset the smoothness of the meat flavours, and its a combination that is been well recieved.

And I am just delighted that so many people are enjoying it.

I am no computer buff, but I do enjoy the daily updates I get on American politics from the Daily Beast, and this afternoon becos I had nothing else to do, I'd gone to flick thru the updates, and by fortuitous timing caught a live streaming of Obama's State of the Nation Address - a written version of which is linked here.

We'd had friends for dinner at home on Monday nite, and one is an American - and a Republican American, who undoubtedly sits substantially more to the right of the political system than I do, and the ensuing conversation that we had about the impasse over health reform in the States, was very fascinating, cos it gave me glimpses of a mind that works quite differently to my own.

He was predictably no fan of Obama's - and looking at some of the impassive faces in the audience, during the Presidents speech, I would say that he is not alone.

Tonite is very quiet in the restaurant, so I've been over, had a discussion with Rhonda about the setup for the cookschool in the morning - we have our first one in the series due to start - tasted the cherry icecream which is newly on the menu, and retreated back to the house with my diary tucked under my arm, and a glass of Trinity Hill Chardonnay to sup.

If Rick gets away in time, we might head into town later to catch the George Clooney movie 'Up in the air', becos there seems to be a feast of movies coming our way that I'd love to watch, and the problem for us is getting the free nites to see them all, before they disappear again. So figure we may as well turn the negative of a quiet nite into a positive.

Becos quiet nites are a negative. They depress weekly turnover, and they make prep hard, becos quantities can be variable, and that makes consistency hard for the kitchen.

Last nite we were almost full, and last Thursday, we were over full - really good customers had to sit in the bar, and we had to turn away a number of requests for tables- and yet this week,  Thursday is quiet- a third full.  And wouldn't like to say why. Beyond the fact that this week, historically is quiet - schools about to go back maybe?

Theres no rhyme or reason - which is what makes it a titch frustrating, so you really have no choice but to roll with it. I suspect that our bookings even out pretty well - we don't get anything like the seasonal variation that we used too, years ago,  and from week to week the number of bums on seats that we get is pretty consistent.

So this isn't really a whinge, but more simply a commentary on the way it is sometimes.

Ricks just put some menu changes on tonite - watermelon and corn and tomatoes are currently too good not to be using. We're compressing the watermelon in the vacumn packer, and that condenses the water molecules, which makes both the flavour and the colour more intense. And we got over some goats cheese from "Over the Moon' in Putaruru to match with it. A soft, fresh cheese that reminds me very strongly of the cabacou that we ate in France. I know yum isn't really a descriptive word,( have just read in an American food blog that it shouldn't be used to describe flavours!) but it was absolutely what struck me when I first tried it.

We'd called into the shop when we were heading to Taupo to visit my brother after Christmas, and had a tasting session, and were hugely impressed - so nice to be using something that local.
 
Catharine stocks a range of their cheeses in her shop " the Village Pantry ' in Te Puna.

The other goats cheese that I'm addicted to comes from Te Aroha, and is a place I'd very much like to visit - Aroha Organic Goat Cheese - they are just beautiful. A firmer texture and milder flavour than the 'Over the Moon' one, and we've been eating alot over summer, tossed thru salads. Had some with my first tomatoes out of the garden yesterday ( incorporating a liberal sprinkling of salt, having just read Michael Ruhlmans blog on salt ), and it really was sublime.

None of which will appeal to the very good customer who is coming in for dinner tomorrow nite and has sent me thru a bullet point email of what he wants to eat, and none of which are things that we have on the menu. All of which is cleverly planned to see if he will generate a rise out of me - something I've managed ( just!) to avoid giving him the satisfaction of all these years.

Last time we cooked sausages for him was at a large outcatering wedding, of the daughter of good friends of his and ours,   where we'd cooked the bloody sausages, left them to cool in the house, as we started the massive plating job of getting the beef and chicken choices out to the 150 odd guests, only to hit his table, rush up to the house to grab them, and discover that the band ( who were absolute tossers from Auckland) had decided to help themselves and had eaten all of them. So service to  the remaining 138 people got held up as that news was relayed back to an incredulous Rick.

The joke backfired on all of us - and caused some stress along the way! I don't think he thought that we would do the sausages, and we and the brides father were determined to make it look effortless, but unfortunetly, it wasn't to be and  I think he ate beef that nite, becos he doesn't do chicken! And  I suspect he doesn't actually believe that there ever were any sausages, even though David bought them for us!

He is however someone who I have the upmost respect for - whose opinion on anything to do with what is happening in the restaurant scene in Tauranga, I actively seek, becos no one else has their finger on the pulse quite the way he does. However I bet he doesn't give the other restaurants the same kind of grief he gives us though.

He's testing, always testing...

There are a number of customers, who over the years have become the equivalent of a kitchen cabinet to me. We don't have a board of directors - Rick and I are the only directors, but we are in the very fortunate place where we  have the ability to tap into a range of business expertise,  from people that I hold in the highest esteem, on a regular basis.

These are people who know our business well, and from who I can expect a full and frank discussion of any point I might raise with them - and I never forget to say a private thankyou for having those people in our lives.

Which is why, if one wants to test the outer limits of the elasticity of my tolerance - by  ordering food that he knows will make me wince, then so be it. I'll play his game - and I'll win! ( I think!)

This link is to a Michael Ruhlman blog on the subject of salt - one of those vexatious issues that get brought up a lot in cookschools, becos Rick uses salt in his cooking, since he believes firmly that it improves, enhances and deepens flavour.

We get asked less these days for alternatives to use, and I can't decide whether we've pissed off the people who used to ask all the time, and they've stopped coming, or whether, like the whole fat debate, people are beginning to realize that a little bit used consciously ( I thought the tomato description nailed it perfectly!), is OK, and we really should stop worrying... there is no single magic bullet for health.

Well, well, well.

I dipped into this book almost reluctantly, becos I've never been taken by Heston Blumenthal when I've happened to catch him on TV. But John, one of our sous chefs,  had brought the book in to show us, and he was obviously impressed by it, so I thought I should at least have a quick flick.

A dip that became a riveting read - initially thru the front part which is his autobiography, and includes details of the life journey that saw him end up in a small restaurant in Bray in England, and come to be awarded 3 Michelin Stars, and world famous as one of those 'science based chefs'.

Next theres a series of recipes which I haven't gone near yet, and at the back is a number of essays written by the scientists that Heston does so much collaborative work with.  And like everything else in the book they are truly fascinating - even if I did have to refer to my dictionary occasionally, to interprete some of the more complex words, that haven't entered my lexicon before, not being a science orientated person!

So naturally I've had to order our own copy - becos this book is so loaded down with  interesting comments that its going to take a number of readings to extract all the information. And I'm sure John will be wanting to reclaim  his copy well before then.

Why so impressed?

Initially I was surprised by the degree to which I liked the man himself. He comes across as an obsessive certainly, but one who is achieving truly amazing things, and all, quite extraordinaryily,  without any formal training in either science or cooking.

In reading his background and how he was self taught and driven, it would be impossible not to have the most heartfelt respect for what he has achieved.

And it all started with a meal his parents took him on as a teenager to a 3 starred restaurant in Provence ' L'Oustau de Baumaniere - the whole experience excited him to the point where he decided owning a restaurant was his future. But unlike most of us who would then go of to apprentice ourselfs to learn how to become a great chef, he choose a uniquely radical path, that shouldn't have worked, but in his case did. In no small part becos of his extreme perserverance and focus.

As with everything that was to follow, he questioned the established ways, and looked for reasons and rationales as to why things happen. This has been a path he has trodden the whole way, and which makes his forays into the science of cooking seem almost a foregone conclusion.

He writes luminously and passionately, and must have a ferocious intelligence - all of which is captured in his prose.
On TV you sort of get the sparkle without the grunt and its always struck me superficially as being about dazzle, rather than about serious eating. This book has completely reversed that interpretation - and I'm not reknown for liking to change my mind! - and proves that serious is the one thing he very much is. Enormously so. And he gets so excited about what he is learning and the applications, that he possibly comes across like a kid in a candy shop, which to a degree is exactly what he is. He gets to play with all these applications, pick the finest scientific brains in the world for advice, and constantly expand  the realms of food knowledge.

You get the very distinct feeling that he is loving every step.

He is linked in my mind to Ferran Adri from el bulli in Spain, and Grant Archatz of Alinea in Chicago. They, and Heston are considered the pre- eminent exponents of the style of restaurant cooking that has come to be known as molecular gastronomy.
A label that they don't like apparently - but which was originally thought up to give a conference an aura of gravitas, back in the days when food science wasn't considered a subject worthy of research. How times have changed!

As the man himself says :' Until recently the preparation, cooking and eating of food was not generally considered worthy of sutained scientific study. Now things have changed. The efforts of a handful of scientists, writers and chefs have brought cluinary science into the public eye, and it has been acknowledged as a subject of enormous complexity and importance. Food is a basic human need, and our bodies and brains are designed to collect and consume it. Exploring the business of cooking and eating can tell us not only whats happening on the plate but whats happening inside our heads and how we process whats going on around us. Indeed, the subject is so vast and has so many fascinating potential practical aplications that it now draws on many scientific disciplines, and scientists often pursue highly specialised areas of research."

He has certainly made me a believer, and up until now,  I've approached the whole subject of molecular gastronomy with a jaundiced, slightly cynical perspective - wondering how much of the approach is generated by a 'look at me, aren't I clever, I'm doing something different to everyone else' reflex.

We bought the el bulli cookbook  years ago, and it did nothing to assuage that suspicion - I realise now that that is possibly becos Ferran Adri is Spanish not English, and wanted to use photos rather than words to convey his work .That just made it look all the more elitist in my eyes. I mellowed out a little when I read the book on a day in the life of the restaurant - that made more sense and made things more approachable, althought I confess to a snort of amazement at the sight of a restaurant with over 40 chefs  ( admittedly a significant proportion of which would be unpaid stagnaires),  in the kitchen and only 45 guests out front.

Grant Alchatz book furthered my warming up process as he described with passion what he was aiming to achieve, and this latest one has completely won me over.

In part becos it is a direction we are heading in anyway. Any chef interested in improving what they do, will naturally ask the question of why do certain things happen in the cooking process, and what can be done to control them, or work certain reactions to further the diners enjoyment.
Becos of the huge advances made in chemistry research over the last few decades, it makes sense that a lot of those questions are being answered by scientists now, rather than someones grandmother.

But one of the fundamental lessons I've taken from reading this book - is that the molecular way is not an eschewing of the cooking styles that have gone before - as it is sometimes contested to be in the media - but instead it is a process of continuation, of adding to and improving what already exists. It is not food constructed in a test tube, as  my somewhat limited understanding of it, tended to believe.

Just as much as the passionate, back to nature chefs like Darina Allen, this style of cooking is very much about quality of ingredients - about supporting artisinal farmers who practise good husbandry, becos the quality of meat will be so much better. The difference is that they can they explain in minute scientific reasoning why that is so. And I find that theory riveting.

In part I do so I suspect, becos of the need for research that the cookschools have created for us, becos people quite often ask questions, that beg a more involved answer than ' becos thats the way its always been'.
When we first started doing the classes I bought both Harold McGees "On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen", and Alan Davidsons " The Oxford Companion to Food", and used them regularly for research.

There is no doubt that understanding why things happen make you a better cook - and our focus at the restaurant over all these years has been to improve and refine our technique, and to make changes as far as the market will allow us.( Becos as the person in the business who also happens to stress over the paying of the bills - I don't want to get too far ahead of what our local market percieves as being enjoyable. We need bums on seats to keep paying bills, and that always will be more important to us, then needing to be seen to be employing weirld and wonderful techniqes.)

But that doesn't mean that we can't learn and tweak as we go along - just in the same sense that the introduction of refridgeration into peoples homes changed home cooking, as did the canning process, and many other scientific discoveries.
What is unique about what is happening in the upper echolons of the food world at the moment is this wonderful convergence of food brains and science  - which is significantly pushing forward knowledge. And while a lot of that centers on restaurant food and manufactured food at the moment, the trickle down effect will inevitably occur, and I predict in the not too distant future that there will be equipment like the sous baths available to home cooks.
Just like bread makers...

Vacum packing fish right after butchering helps prevent oxidation of natural fats in th flesh by the removal of oxygen. Didn't know that.

Salting can be a good way to reduce the moisture loss in meat, becos it makes each cell swell. Didn't know that - in fact we thought the reverse - that salt drew out liquid.

Cooking meat at low temperatures ( think 56c) for a long time under moist conditions (think sousvide) always for gelatinisation  to occur. Gelatinisation is good becos the swelling allows for more moisture retension in the meat . Didn't know that.

Fat in icecream makes it melt slower and  makes the flavour release slower. Which explains why Italian gelatos which don't have the dairy fat component taste so much more strongly of fruit. Didn't know that.

Temperature to which water is frozen  depends on what is dissolved in it. The more it is dissolved, the lower the freezing point.Didn't know that

Glucose is only 80% as sweet as sucrose.

Stabilisers and emulsifiers inhibit flavour release.

Distingushing flavour in food is so much more complex than just what happens on the tongue. Thats taste.  Flavour happens through the olfactory bulb.

As a result of what we've discussed  from the book so far ,we are going to have a look at some of our meat cooking and also our icecream developement, becos we're excited by some of the points he makes. For us its all about making what we do better - certainly at this stage I don't see it as a wholesale change in direction of Somerset.

We are not about to become a multi course tasting menu restaurant - partially becos of the point raised above about the practicalities of paying bills, but also becos that is not the style of food that we would want to produce every day.
We make food that we ourselves love to sit down and eat. There is nothing on Somersets menu that I wouldn't eat with relish - and I hope that that is always the case. We don't feel a need to be at the cutting edge of culinary developments, but we are very keen to learn when others have something to teach.

To go to dinner at Alinea or The Fat Duck of el Bulli, is to have an experience that you would most probably ( for those of us without private jets) experience once a year at the maximum. By all accounts it is a fascinating experience, but one that is cerebal rather than emotive. By emotive I refer to that corner trattoria in Florence where the food wasn't even that special, but the whole package was just impossibly romantic and is tucked away in your memory banks as perfect.

The 2 types of restaurant experiences are polar opposites, and we sit somewhere in the middle between them both. We want the food at Somerset to  be thoughtfully and well cooked and presented, to the best of our current knowledge. But we also want it to be approachable to a wide range of people, so that they are comfortable coming regularly. We need that to be viable. If the public perception is of us being so different and out there that you only come on special occasions, then life would be pretty quiet around here.

( And as an aside on that topic - Heston talks about how he was flying to a Science conference at which he was a guest presenter, at a time when the future viability of his restaurant was on the line, becos while they were busy at the weekends, they really struggled to get double numbers during the week - and that week he was having to cover the staffs wages by credit card, so things really were dire; when he got a phone call saying they'd just been awarded the 3rd Michelin star. And the resulting avalanche of publicity put them firmly on the culinary map - which included being asked for the first time if they had a helicopter pad!- and numbers in the restaurant have no longer been an issue.)

Interspersed within the menu though we can bring in new techniques, where we percieve that they will improve the quality of what we produce. Sometimes we will clearly state on the menu what we're doing, and at other times like with some of the sous vide cooking it will be a background technique that people won't even be especially aware off, beyond that fact that they will ( hopefully!) be impressed by how tender the meat is.

I see that as really exciting - and my current missions are to find a supplier of frozen carbon dioxide, and one of those old fashioned whipping cream siphons.

But to go back to Heston, who now has a restaurant kitchen and another  kitchen purely for the experimenting work that he does, and both of which  resemble more a science lab than a conventional commercial kitchen-  the research he does now, is not so much on the molecular composition of food, becos the depth of knowledge that he's built up on that subject is huge,  but more to do with the understanding of the science behind what prompts our emotive responses to taste and to smell.

Why are some foods percieved as delicious and others not - how much of that is genetic and how much environmental?  And how can he as a chef, play around with those expectations and responses.

It really is all quite fascinating.....

The arrival of this book was impeccably timed, becos it made perfect reading for my here and now. Kenny Shopsin and his wife Eve started out with a corner grocery store in New York over 35 years ago, and when the landlord increased the rent, they decided to convert it to a restaurant so as to earn more money.

His philosophy to life and the restaurant business, along with a host of recipes, is captured in the most extroardinary manner, in this totally unique book.

He's a complicated, difficult, demanding man, - who is fully aware that he is all of those things, and who calls life exactly as he sees it, without any pretence of trying to be nice to others.

'One of the things that's happening to me as I'm getting older is I'm seeing my beliefs, the tenets of my existence, coming back to me through my children.  I cast my bread upon the waters, and it's flying back in my face, fully baked. My kids - I have 3 boys and twin girls - have taken everything I've given them and developed it to the point where they're superior to me when it comes to discussing and acting on a lot of my own ideas. My girls especially are more unyielding in my beliefs than I am.
All their lives my kids have known me to have a leave-me-alone attitude toward the media and the public eye. In running my restaurant, I've done everything I could to avoid articles and accolades of any kind. I have talked about  how the media was evil, about the dangers of celebrity, and about the pitfalls of losing your self-doubt... What they didn't know, becos how could they - I certainly never vocalised it - was that behind absolute statements, like those that I made on a regular basis, is a complex set of emotions. Inherent in those absolutes were compromises.  It's like there was a tug-of-war inside of me that, in an attempt to resolve itself, took sides.
For me, writing this book was one of those compromises. On the one hand, it was tremendously satisfying to my ego to have someone ask me to write a book. On the other hand, I know that in writing this book I would be allowing strangers a look into our private lives - something I have vehemently avoided since I started my business in 1973. Even worse, I knew that a book would encourage these strangers to come into my restaurant"

You see, simply put, he only wants people in his restaurant who he likes. A luxery that I suspect restaurant owners everywhere would love to indulge in, but most of whom doubt our ability to be commercially viable if we kicked people out of our establishments as regularly as Kenny does.

I started reading the book, the morning after I'd dealt with a particularly unpleasant couple, dining in the restaurant - who'd complained about pretty much everything, and who were intent on ensuring that they didn't have a good time. The degree of their agitation and abuse stunned me, becos I simply couldn't figure it.

I understand and even accept that what we do here at Somerset is not going to appeal to everyone, and in many ways the fact that we are now well established in the market works to our advantage, becos we tend to only attract those who like what we do. But every so often we get some who come, and are obviously out of their comfort zone from the minute they walk thru the door, and for reasons not immediately apparent, they remain determined not to enjoy themselves. Its an attitude that fascinates me, becos I just don't get it. Why would you bother going somewhere you don't want to enjoy? Time and money are too precious as commodities for me to want to waste them purely to make a point of being unhappy.

In terms of people being actually abusive, we probably get about 3/4 incidences in a year ( and I hope I'm not tempting fate, by stating that!), it just so happened that I copped a nasty lady pre Christmas, and then just after we'd reopened, this guy blew up in my face.

Becos we don't have to deal with it very often, we're not especially skilled at coping with it - and for that reason I read Kenny's blunt opinions on customers who don't fit with positive glee.

The restaurant he owns, is I guess, kind of like a diner only more complicated. His menu has over 900 items, and his modus operandi is somewhat riveting to read. He personally cooks for everyone, and if he has a nite off, the menu gets smaller becos his second in charge isn't as efficent as him!

I've currently got a pot of creamed corn bubbling away on the stove, and am going to puree it soon, to make it into a filling for some crepes. The creamed corn recipe came out of the latest Gourmet Traveller magazine, and the crepe idea is one of Kenny's, that I just had to try. He turns a tortilla into a crepe by dipping it in an egg and cream mix, and reckons it bets homemade crepes any day. Rick is distinctly sniffy about the technique, so, as they say, the proof will be in the pudding...

Before I go though, I'll pluck out a couple of Kennyism's from the book, becos he has a totally unique voice. He is so contrary in every sense, and yet has managed to find a state of grace and happiness  that I suspect elludes alot of people his age.

'Cooking for me, is a creative process, and I believe that people who are creative are creative for one of two reasons: Either they are going for truth and beauty, or they create as a way to dilute the venom produced by their subconscious minds. I cook for the second reason. When I cook, I am in a cathartic, recuperative process that calms me down and brings me from a neurotic state to a relaxed, functioning state."

'The art of staying small more or less sums up my feeling about running a restauratn - and about life. I know it goes against our capitalist system, but I have never been interested in the normal symptoms of success, such as higher profit margins and expansion of income. I never had a goal to make more money so that I could retire or so that I could hire a low- wage employee to do the cooking for me. I have no desire to open a second restaurant, to oversee a restaurant empire with my name on it, or to endorse a line of pots and pans.
Running a restaurant for me is about running a restaurant. It is not a means to get someplace else. I wake up every morning, and I work for a living like a farmer. Running a restaurant is a condition of life for me. And I like everything about this life. I like waking up in the morning knowing I am going to the restaurant to cook, that something unexpected will happen to me in the kitchen,  and that no matter what, I will learn something new. I like the actual process of cooking . I like shopping for the food that I cook, and I like my interactions with the people I meet while shopping. I like my customers and I like working with my kids. It is a simple existence, but for me the beauty is in that simplicity. These are the things that bring me pleasure - and they bring me great pleasure on an extremely regular basis.
Living this way, pursuing your own happiness, is addictive, and it's the way I have tried to conduct my life. What this means is doing what it takes to make yourself feel good each day, not to make yoruself feel less good today in the hope that your life will be good in ten years because you're working really hard now or because your property will be worth more money then. The way I figure it, if you make every day of your life as happy as you can, nobody can take that away from you. Its in the bank."

Very cool!

I have been approached by someone who is doing a research project on the history of restaurants in NZ, and who was especially interested at my time at Bonapartes - a restaurant that I worked in in the late 70's when I was a student in Auckland.

So the below is a copy of the script that I've just sent thru to him, answering as best I could his queries about the history of Somerset, the place of restaurants in NZ culture and my memories of Bonapartes...

I mentioned in the latest newsletter ( the hard copy of which will be posted tomorrow, and the electronic copy has already gone - theres a copy on the website),  that our field of reference for what we do here at Somerset is quite wide, becos different aspects of the business, require food to perform in different ways. What works in an a al carte situation here at the restaurant, with a kitchen full of commercial equipment and 4 chefs, is not necessarily going to translate to a marquee with dodgey gas mein host ovens, in windy and wet conditions, and 150 guests wedding guests all wanting to eat at once.

We have to come at the food requirements from a different perspective. Likewise the cookschools and the Somerset at Home, and then the Winemakers Dinners that we do at the restaurant also require a different approach.

And then within Somersets  daily menu itself, there is a wide range of food styles. We have never called ourselves a particular 'sort' of restaurant, partly becos we never wanted to be lumbered with, and limited by, an imposed boundary. We're not Italian but we do cook Italian food; nor are we Asian, although we have been heavily influenced by David Thompson in particular. The french food we do can come either from books celebrating centuries of traditional country food, or something that one of the master chefs like Alain Ducasse or Guy Savoy, has created.

Lately we've been looking to sous vide methods, out of curiosity, and are experimenting with ways that that style of cooking can expand our repertoire. We're currently specialing a compressed watermelon salad - that is inspired by Peter Gordons idea of  combining  watermelon, with feta, and olives, but altered by vacum pressing the watermelon. A process that intensifies the flavour and deepens the colour. I have no doubt that there will be some who prefer their watermelon to be 'normal', ( just as there were some who objected stridently to the fact we served paris gnocchi instead of potatoes in our side dish of vegetables, over winter, when we couldn't get good small potatoes) but we think its an interesting technique,  and sometimes,  'interesting' is good.!  We think!

The menu is large by  comparison to alot of restaurant these days - and I blame that fully on our longevity and the number of return customers that we get, who come back to eat what they had last time.
There are certain dishes that we can't change - we have tried, and it just hasn't been worth the angst caused. So they stay on as perennial favourites, and becos we'd get bored if there was no change, we tinker around with other aspects of the menu, to allow for seasonal variation in ingredients, and to keep the kitchen team stimulated. ( And those customers who don't want to eat the same thing every time they come!). And that has had the result over the years, of the menu getting longer and longer.

We are still however, a fair way off getting even close to Kenny Shopsins menu of over 900 items...Gordon Ramsey would have a ball winnowing that back!

So, becos we're not limited by being a certain 'style' of  restaurant, the ideas we get, come from all over the place. One of the major ways that I personally contribute to that process is to order a constant stream of cookbooks thru Amazon, and their arrival usually sets me up for a quiet few hours of contemplative reading.

Today has been a classic example of that. The latest parcel from Amazon arrived yesterday with 3 books that I ordered pre Christmas. I remember reading one of the food bloggers lists of top cookbooks of the last decade. I don't think it was Nigel Slater, and I can't remember now who exactly it was. Possibly Michael Ruhlman or David Lebovitz...

So far I've almost read the 'Shopsin' one and dipped into the other 2 enough to get a feeling for them both. And it has struck me that they are profoundly different, but will all be very useful, which just goes to show how eclectic our food sources are.

 Rick is working on some cookschool ideas, along with changes to the current menu, so has been  actually sitting around within my vicinity for a couple of hours and has preforce been made to listen to a running commentary from me as I read out some of the more interesting concepts from the Zuni Cafe one - like salting stock at the start of the cooking process, and salting meat in advance, and then making beef and lamb stock out of chicken stock rather than water. Its all interesting gist for us - something to toss around and maybe try, and if it improves the flavour of what we do, then will be adopted.  We don't think we've reached an end place with our cooking. There is always new stuff to learn, and even new ways to look at things we've always done. Thats what makes it all so interesting.

The day you think you know it all is the day you should retire I suspect.

Alot of this process is discussed in the cookschools - but you can never cover all that you learn along the way, people would get information overload.

Then during the evening in the restaurant becos we were quieter, I retreated to the couch in the bar and started flicking thru Michel Richards book, and kept having to rush into the kitchen to show them another picture or describe another technique that I'd just read that fascinated me. Some really cool stuff.

So 3 books from which we will get totally different ideas, but all of which will be workable within some context of the business.

The Shopsin book is a philosophy - an extraordinary read, which I will go into in another blog in more depth when I've finished it. The man is a complete iconoclast - he calls everything exactly the way he sees it, usually couched in swear words, and without any pretence of niceties. I rather admire the honesty, and adore the fact that if he doesn't like the look of customers when they walk in, and doesn't think they're a fit with his establishement,  he tells them to leave!

The Zuni Cafe cookbook is intense. She has an extraordinary level of taste. I've never thought to taste chicken stock as it cooks, and the food and her approach is reminiscent of Chez Panisse where she once worked. Quality of ingredients is key.

And then the Michel Richard book is all about technique. He is an ex pastry chef who is now a restaurateur - a most unusual career trajectory, becos the skill set is quite different, and chefs usually move from savoury to sweet, but very seldom the other way. And very seldom to the kind of acclaim that this guy has generated.

He argues that you have to keep moving with food. If you do the same thing all the time, it gets boring, and he's more interesting in learning and being stimulated, so is constantly experimenting and coming up with new ideas. A number of which involve sous vide, which is perfect for our here and now.

So, there are some dishes on our menu that we don't move with.  They stay. The squid, the duck and the licorice. Although there is a minor degree of tampering that will go on. We added vanilla to the kumura mash on the duck a few years back, and we now glace the orange slices that are coated in chocolate to go with the licorice, before we dehydrate them - where once we just dehydrated fresh oranges.

But the essence of the dish remains the same - becos significant numbers of people want them too. The rest  of the menu varies - seasonally and as inspiration takes Rick.  And within those changes it may just be the way we make our beef stock, or it may be a whole new technique.

The tweak may be so small that only some people will pick up on it and comment. ( One lesson I have learned, is that there is a huge range of variation in food appreciation.), and some changes will be so dramatic that everyone will comment.  Either positively or negatively. Becos that is another lesson that you have no choice but to swallow - you are not going to please all the people all the time....

So. I think we're in for a week of expermenting, which is cool. Rick has to nail the recipes for the cookschool by the end of the week, so he's under a certain degree of pressure, which is good for him!

We have history with people. We have that becos we've been here for nearly 24 years, and seen alot of people over a lot of time, and theres been an awful lot of living go on over that period.

Without any doubt, I can state unequivocably, that that people connection is one of the things that I, personally, find the most satisfying about the business.
I'm currently reading " Eat me. The food and philosophy of Kenny Shopsin', which will be the subject of a future blog all to itself, becos its a truly spectacular book, and he makes the very pertinent comment in it,  that what makes his restaurant special is

'my relationships and interactions with my customers - and the way they relate and interact with one another.'

So it was with a substantial smile that I flicked thru some photos that an Auckland customer has just emailed me thru. He and his wife are close friends of good friends of ours who live here at the Mount, and its been a January habit for us to see them all at some stage at the restaurant. 

They were in on Saturday, and James was adamant he wanted a photo of us all, even though Rick was away in Christchurch, and we all had to dutifully line up for the photo that then became a non event when Rhonda pointed out that the batteries in his camera were flat. You get that!

But in going back to Auckland, he's gone thru his albums to dig out previous photos taken at Somerset, and they have definitly raised a chuckle. And abolutely confirms one of the reasons I love photos so much, becos they capture a moment, and its amazing how much stuff you forget as time moves along.

This photo was taken in 93 - its the old back room to the restaurant, with the old blinds - and the haircuts have changed rather considerably from then till now...as have all sorts of things in the restaurant.  And looking at this and the others he sent thru, has reminded me of much I'd forgotten.

But right now I'd better get with the current day, and head over to the selfsame restaurant, cos we have customers due to arrive...

We've had a really good nite in the restaurant, and I've flicked back over to the house feeling nice and mellow, to watch the finish of the Elite National Road Cycling Championships. Tonite was the male race, and its always good to watch it with Rick who explains the finer points of the tactics to me.

But my nice benevolent mood got disturbed when they showed the presentation ceremonies at the end. The first was for the top 3 place getters, naturally enough, and then they had another presentation for the top 3 U23 males, which is also fair enough.

So what I now need someone to explain to me, is why they had an U23 presentation for the male race but not for the female race?

HUH?

I get daily emails from  tizwine.com, which is a roundup of news from anywhere in the world relating to the wine industry, and usually makes for interesting reading.

This link is to a US based article, predicting the trends in the industry going forward for the next 10 years.

Years ago - honestly can't remember exactly when, but would be at least 10 I'd say - Rick featured on Peta Matias'   Taste NZ series.

It was a fascinating experience to watch the filming process - I have photos that I took, somewhere. Must dig them out...- it took about 5 hours for what ended up being about 5 mins on TV.

As I remember Rick cooked the squid dish, and the crew went for a wander thru the orchard down below, and then we cooked them lunch apres.

There were only 3 of them - a camera man, sound man and Peta herself, who impressed us enormously with her professionalism. Her ability to flick between an almost meditative style mood to full on presentation mode, when the camera came on, was extraordinary. There is alot of down time in that type of filming - and the 'talent' gets to stand around for ages.

She coped with it  easily and seemed to have a natural rapport with the 2 guys she was working with. It was a fascinating glimpse into another world.

And the reason I mention is becos we were stopped walking into Alimento the other day by a lady we know, who said she'd just seen Rick on TV that morning. They must be running reloops of the series. And since then its been amazing how many people mention that they caught the show.

Everyone except us! I think we have it on video somewhere - must go and see if I can find it....

I mentioned in the electronic version of the newsletter which went out last nite ( the hard copy one takes a little longer to get out there - I'll be doing the envelopes for it,  for the rest of today, and Simpson Print will print off the letter now they're back at work, and then we'll fold them all and get them in the envelopes and stamps on and out in the mail , hopefully by the end of the week. A considerably more laborious process - but I have people who are adamant that they prefer to recieve a letter that isn't a bill in their letter box, and while they continue to feel so strongly about it, I will continue to send it to them...), that Courteney was racing at Elite Nationals in Christchurch.

So as promised, here is a link to the results. 7th in a field that classy, for her first stepup to the major league, was an awesome achievement, and her father was beside himself with delight when he rang.

Courteney herself, was a little more circumscript, but she obviously got a real buzz out of the experience - huge numbers of spectators, massive police escort - the full deal really.

Series of photos on the site for those who are intererested - this link shows her in the middle  of the peleton in Waikato/Bay of Plenty  colours - black and red.

Thought it was interesting on the TV news last nite that they quoted the ( is it?) Danish import,  Linda Villumsen, as having been a previous winner of the Tour de France. Most people I speak too, have absolutely no idea that there is a female Tour.

The male version has become very well known, but the female one gets no coverage at all here in NZ.

Hmmm....

(Courteneys 2nd from the front in this shot)

( Talking to me apparently, after its all over with a clearly elated father)

It is a glorious day - sunny and still. We went up the Mount this morning, and came home to breakfast at the out side table, far from the maddening crowds at the Mount. There doesn't appear to be any visual sign of the holiday crowds diminishing over there yet - and will probably be another couple of weeks before our chances improve in terms of getting a carpark a little closer. At the moment you have to park so far away, that you feel like you've done your exercise before you actually get to the base of the Mount, so I mumble a bit, but on a day like today, it isn't really a hardship, to amble along the boardwalk...

Put up the sun umbrellas at the back of the restaurant, becos it will be a magical day to sit out in the sun - not that we expect to be that busy for lunch. Most of the tourists are over at the Mount. We do however have lunch time regulars that we see every week, and they will no doubt be in some time this week.

Most of our suppliers are back on deck - some large wine deliveries happening today, now I can reorder, which is a relief, becos Simpson Print are on holiday and if I run out of any wines I can't get the list reprinted just yet. And I always feel a bit twitchy when I can't front with something thats on the menu.

We didn't have any white fish over the weekend becos the fishermen had decided to have a holiday - and explained it to people accordingly. Likewise, we don't get our next delivery of Clevedon Buffalo yoghurt and ricotta until tom, so the couple of dishes that feature them have had to be slightly rejigged in the interim. Its not too much of a hardship, and my approach to it is far more relaxed than it used to be.

Business' are actually allowed to take holidays, and if that means a bit of a reshuffle for us for a time, then so be it. Most customers that we get at the moment are also on holiday, and we're finding them pleasantly receptive to that reality.

Rick headed over to mow the lawns on the far side of the restaurant before the lunch crowds arrived, and I tried to get some photos of the dogs outside so I could show an up to date one of Benson, our pup.

We took him over to see his father and brother on Monday, having been told pre Christmas, that his brother, Gus was now larger than his father Daz. We remember Daz as a strikingly large dog, and Benson didn't seem anywhere near that size to us, so we were curious to see how he measured up. We're reasonably dog-centric, but Karen and Mark are even more so than us. They have 4 dogs all up, 5 on the day we called in, becos they were babysitting a pup.

Gorgeous, just gorgeous!

Benson and Gus have turned out to be 2 peas in a pod. Identical size and head shape - and we all swore that they knew each other, and were gratifyingly affectionate. They're both stand higher than Daz, but haven't yet filled out as much as he is. At 10 months old, I guess they still have a bit of development to go.

He is a beautiful dog - one of the most even tempered we've ever had, which I'd put down to no seperation anxiety. He's been with us and his mother all his life, and pretty much believes that life revolves totally around him, and he's fabulous and thats all there is to it. A complete boofhead!

Having the litter of puppies in 2009 was certainly an interesting experience, and pretty much took over our lives for a couple of months there. I don't think it is something we'd rush to repeat - Kazza is going to be fixed up this month, so her next season doesn't cause us too much grief, with a fully developed male around the place.

But there is no doubt that there will always be room in our lives for dogs - we just seem to be geared that way, and watching all those Wei's the other day underscored for me that that is no bad thing.

( On day 2 of life - tiny and precious)

(And 10 months on - a beeootiful pooch!)

I've always admired Jancis Robinsons ability to call it the way she sees it - so many supposed critics are little more than PR mouthpieces, with no original grunt.  This lady has always struck me as been made of sterner stuff.

This article talks about the importance of shipping and storing wine without significant temperature variations - a subject close to my heart.

Interesting to read in it that there is a trend now, in these energy conscious times to head back to underground storage of wine, becos the bonded warehouses that are above ground, go thru conspicuous amounts of energy to maintain the required even temperature.

I have wanted an underground cellar for years - probably right back to the start of our time at Somerset in fact. It has just always made sense to me- although sometimes I wonder just how much the dollars I have tied up in wine stocks will jump, when I finally have adequate storeage for lots more.

We had plans drawn up a couple of years ago - and it is a developement that will definitely happen, now we own the land on the far side of the restaurant, but we are realistically not expecting the bank to be too enthusiatic in the current market, and figure we should bide our time just a titch.

But it will come - and reading articles like this just confirms for me that it makes sense, and thats cool!

A customer of ours, who we knew well - he and his family came to France with us a few years back - died last year from motor neuron disease. A disease that came on very suddenly about 18 months ago, and which processed inexorably to all our horror.

Mark had recently gone to Mexico to have stem cell implants, but he died before the treatment had any chance to potentially improve his condition.

We saw and spoke to him and his wife on a number of occasions - as you do. I thought I empathised and sort of understood what they were experiencing.

Reading this article though has made me realise that I had no frigging idea - humbling and devastating.

I'm not especially a fan of New Years Resolutions, but Chris sent me thru this little annotation at the weekend, and I decided it wouldn't be too bad a philosophy to attempt to adhere too over the coming year...

We are back into restaurant matters today. Rick's just headed out on the bike for an hour or so, having been up to the berry farm, and got all sorts of other stuff organised over at the restaurant. The boys have been prepping in the kitchen since 9am - and will go thru until service tonite. We had lunch out on the deck - roast chicken and rice perfumed with kecap manis, and macarons, and discussed the upcoming couple of months. No-one looked too much the worse for wear from New Years celebrations, I was relieved to note.

Becos we've been closed for the last week or so, most things have to be prepped from scratch, and that makes for a long day for them.

Carpets were cleaned while we were closed, so tables have all been moved back to where they should be and Rhondas been resetting them, so that we're ready to go tonite. Christmas trees have been covered and removed to the shed,  wine restacked, and water carafes cleaned and refilled. I think we're ready...

Going into a busy nite for our first one  back, which is going to be a bit of a shock to the system first time up after the break, but would far rather have it that way then be too quiet, so am not complaining. Hopefully we'll all remember what to do...

Its been a really nice break - we didn't really venture too far from home, choosing to just chill mostly here in Tauranga. That chilling involved quite a bit of very pleasant sitting around eating good food and drinking some special wines, in the company of good friends, so it certainly wasn't arduous. 

Rick and I went out for dinner last nite, a deux, and discussed the upcoming year in terms of the business. We both fulfill quite different roles at the restaurant and its therefore quite important to occasionally sit down and take stock of where the others head is at, in terms of what we want going forward. Even after all this time we sometimes have the ability to surprise the other with our expectations. Communication is good!

Already I'm back into sorting particulars with upcoming wedding catering, and will soon be working on the cookschool dates for the next series, so things revert back to normal very quickly.

I managed a bit of pottering around in our home kitchen  while we were closed, doing the sort of experimenting that I always enjoy, and going off on tangents that sound good in theory but which don't always work out quite so well in practise.
Made some neenish tarts using dulce de leche rather than conventional condensed milk - not sure why, the idea just occurred to me, and appealed, and becos I had some left over pastry from the Christmas mince pies Courteney and I had made pre Christmas, I decided to use it up in that fashion.

Also made a berry tart to use up the leftover marzipan. Under instruction from Courteney I make real marzipan for the icing on the Christmas cake, and ended up with an excess this year, that I turned into a tart, inspired by the idea of a pithivier. Rather than using puff pastry as they do traditionally in a pithivier I used the cream cheese pastry, becos we'd just finished a cookschool series in which we'd convinced people that it may not be quite as good as puff, but it was considerably less hassle to make, and cooks up with a very satisfying degree of puff to it. Instead of enclosing the tart with pastry as for a pithivier, I covered the top with blackberries, and it was pretty fine, I have to say.

We sell the pastry now thru Somerset at Home, and in the run up to Christmas, the kitchen were constantly replenishing stocks becos we sold so much. Even though we give people the recipe in the classes, we've discovered that lots have a 'thing' about making pastry, and prefer to buy it. Its great that we can now properly oblige.
 
Then to use up some raspberries which weren't going to last much longer I made a Louise cake and mixed the fresh berries thru the meringue mix on top, and used the raspberry jam from Somerfield Berry Farm, which is fantastic. That was particullary good fresh from the oven.

And becos the Christmas pudding I made this year was especially large, we had leftovers, and Rick and I fried some the other morning,( something my mother always used to do, and which I thought was commonplace, but I've had people react with horror when I've told them that we do it) but there is still more, so thought I'd revert to David Lebovitz's book 'The Perfect Scoop', to find a recipe for icecream that I could mix the remaining pudding with. Got sidetracked by a recipe for banana icecream, which I made so as to use up the overripe bananas that were languishing in the fruit bowl, and the pudding remains in the fridge, to be dealt with on another day. I will get there....

We had cherries from Katikati, and the best new potatoes from Te Puna, to eat over the break - both of which were quite sublime. I brought some of the restaurant bread starter over to the house and made bread on a couple of days, as you do, and the living was easy.

All most restorative really, even if I did have to go up the Mount an extra couple of times in an attempt to compensate for the eating and drinking. You get that.

There were no unpleasant messages on the answerphone this year, from people incredulous that we would choose to close, over the Christmas/New Year period.  If anything I've sensed a subtle switch in reaction. We used to think that successful businesses were those that were incredibly busy all the time, and open all the time. But maybe its a sign of us getting older, or maybe it is a general movement in the zeitgast, but I feel as if people are more appreciative of the need for everyone to have some down time. That life is not simply all about business and money, and that we all need some restorative time to balance out our lives.
This year, rather than the abuse that we used to get, there were far more complimentary comments made over our decision to close, which needless to say is heartening.

Here's to a happy, healthy and prosperous 2010!

This link is to a TV programme in the States featuring Eric Ripert from Le Bernardin. In this particular episode he explores a garden affiliated with a restaurant in California, and I found it inspiring listening to 2 chefs with significant restaurant kudos,  discuss the importance of fresh produce.

Gardening is one of my New Years resolutions - we have established a worm garden here, and have 2 raised gardens for vegetables, and I'm slowly going to build up the range of produce that we grow. For now I'm focused on tomatoes and eggplants and some herbs, but the repertoire will expand as my confidence grows.

Wouldn't it be fantastic to have the kind of knowledge and practical expertise to tap into that this chef in California has in the lady from Love Apple Farms. Maybe one day Anne..