One of the inherent problems when it comes to wording dishes on the menu is that different words provoke different responses in people. It has always been our approach at Somerset to keep our descriptions fairly lean - we'd rather under describe and over deliver, then do the reverse and have an epic description, and then bring out a dish that doesn't quite live up to its billing.

But it constantly fascinates me how tweaking a word here or there in a description can radically alter the number of times a particular dish is ordered - words set the picture for people, and if they've never had the dish before, it will be the written description that will tempt them to try or otherwise.

The problem with that is that certain food words can create varying responses depending on peoples background and eating experiences, and an example of what I mean by that was highlighted last week, when we had an apple tart returned becos the customer said the caramel sauce tasted burnt.

The word caramel to me, immediately evokes the process of boiling sugar ( we usually add water for the initial stage) to a temperature above 170oC until it changes into a deep golden hue. That is the basis for a lot of patissiere work and for pralines that we use in icecreams. In this instance we follow a Nico Ladenis recipe that we've turned too many times over the years, and add a cup of cream once the caramel has got to the right degree of intensity. This is all whisked together off the heat, and will keep for days in the fridge.

A simple, effective, sweet sauce, with just the right notes of bitterness that create a level of complexity, that we would expect when we see the word 'caramel'.

But 'caramel' obviously meant something different to this gentlemen. He was presumably expecting something purely sweet a la the condensed milk/ sugar/butter sauce that goes in tan squares.
He didn't expect to encounter any bitter flavours, and he incorrectly described them as burnt. It is possible to burn caramel - very easy infact, by taking the boiling process too far, and the resulting smell is very unpleasant, and impossible to ignore. The only solution is to discard the mix and start again - never easy removing the sad mess from the saucepan when its been taken that far either!

This wasn't 'burnt' - we know that becos we immediately checked to make sure. But it did have all the complexities of a true caramel sauce, which we, and the vast majority of people who are currently raving about the dish, love.

And one of the other lessons I've learnt is that at times like that there is really nothing you can do - expressing your point of view is only going to make him wrong, and people don't appreciate been made to be wrong. It is a natural desire to want to justify yourself, to point out that the kitchen haven't in fact stuffed up - but any attempt to do that, simply creates a demarcation, so I tend not to go there.

You just kind of mentally shrug and accept that you can't win everyone and get on with it.
But that hasn't stopped us recommending the tart when people ask what they should have for dessert, becos it really is quite delicious.

There are 5 component parts:

    - a pastry disk base made from our cream cheese pastry
    - apple pureed spread over that base
    -very thin slices of apple spread in concentina fashion over the pastry
    -caramel sauce
    -hazelnut praline icecream

Splendid!

While Rhonda is on holiday, I'm covering her Thursday lunch shift, and Roz is doing Wednesday and Friday. Its a long time  since I've fronted lunchtime - mainly becos I'm usually tied up with cookschools when lunch is happening, and also becos over the last few years, its one of the roles that Rhonda has taken over from me.

So I was a little ambivalent about the prospect of stepping back in, even if it was only for one day a week - and if Roz hadn't already been covering all the rest of Rhondas shift plus some extras, I probably would have encouraged her to do it. But to be fair, I figured she was going to need some time away from the place occasionally, so on a Thursday it's me.

And I've quite surprised myself by enjoying it. Our lunches vary hugely in busyness - we're percieved as a fine dining restaurant locally, the subtext of which is 'expensive', and therefore most people look to a more casual cafe style lunch. We do however, have some formidably regular customers, who like what we do at lunchtime, and I have no doubt that we provide a niche in the market for when people are looking for something a step up from a sandwich.

So while lunches vary in numbers, they are still very much worth our while being open for the 3 days that we do them, and one of the reasons is that there is someone out front to cover the phone calls, and the people dropping in to buy vouchers or product, or talk about cookschools,  or the myriad other reasons, that people come in for.

Its given me a chance to catch up on all sorts of things that I've been meaning to do, but usually don't have the down time over there to address. Now I find I'm even writing myself lists of other things I should do on the next Thurs - decided today that I want to list the rieslings on the wine list, from dryest to sweetest to try and give people a barometer for a grape type that can vary hugely in recidual sugar, and will line them all up next Thurs to do that.

Those sorts of jobs. Things that I often think about doing, but actually getting round to nail a time to address it always seems to escape me. So I've discovered that Thursday lunches are proving a godsend! And waitressing itself - actually serving people is something that I enjoy. It is the basis to all the other jobs that I do with this business, and it is one that I fundamentally like. If I didn't, I don't think I'd have survived this long in the job, becos I wouldn't want to merely work on the business- I thrive on being in the midst of it all.

There are some people who are maybe not a pleasure to serve, but they are such an infintisimal percentage of our overall customer base, and I work very hard to ensure that they don't become the dominant influence.

Lunches used to be a drag to do, becos for years we lived away from the restaurant, and would drive here in the morning to do the prep and get ready for lunch, serve lunch; drive home ( after picking up the girls from school and getting them to whatever after school activity they were involved in), and then be heading back to the restaurant at 5pmish for evening service. If people decided to sit late at lunchtime, which often happens, then our whole afternoon would be thrown askew, and often there would be no break between lunch and dinner - becos a quick dash home to have a shower and change doesn't constitute a break in my book.

Moving next door to the restaurant meant that was considerably less of an issue, and having Rhonda do straight through shifts has meant its even less of one now. If someone comes in at 5 to 2, wanting lunch we would once have winced, becos that would have meant, quite often not getting away till 4 or 4.30pm, but now with Rhonda there until 5pm, and me taking over for the nite shift, it means that its effortless for people to come and enjoy whiling away the afternoon.

Much better all round really.

I was however very keen to exit the door as close to 2pm today as I could make it, cos wanted to make a recipe that had come thru on the internet this morning for Rick and I for lunch, and had a few other things that I needed to get done during the afternoon, so was hopeful that today wasn't a day that someone would turn up after 1.30pm.

The gods were smiling, becos the customers we had,  left in timely fashion (and not becos I in anyway indicated I wanted them to go!), and I got away. Rick cooked the dish for us, becos he'd been able to leave the kitchen sooner than me, and becos he wanted to get in a run this afternoon, he wanted lunch as early as possible.

The recipe I'd seen was for papperdelle with spiced butter, and I'd brought home the left over pasta sheets from the cookschool yesterday, thinking at the time that I'd make something out of it, so when I spied this recipe I thought it would be perfect for lunch with the fresh pasta. We altered the recipe a titch - used peas instead of asparagus, and hazelnuts instead of pinenuts - and it worked out beautifully.

  101 Cookbooks is a vegetarian website - she writes beautifully, and her recipes are always interesting . I use them a surprising amount, becos somehow as I get older, I'm just less and less inclined to eat meat, and I find her ideas stimulating.
The cookbook she refers too, I've just ordered, becos I have the original one by the same authors, 'Ottolenghi, The cookbook', and it is superb. They're a series of very successful  cafes in London, and their food ideas are vibrant and fresh, with a middle eastern influence. As Nigel Slater says on the cover blurb 'This is simply wonderful cooking ...modern, smart and thoughtful."

Precisely!

Was following a series of comments of comment around the web, prompted by a blog from Michael Rulman discussing the behaviour of a journalist who, while dining in a restaurant with an open kitchen, took umbrage at the way the chef was yelling at one of his staff, and took it upon himself to go into the kitchen and tell the chef that he thought his behaviour was inappropriate.

As I read the commentary with a kind of morbid fascination I ended up on an associated blog by a female chef, who led me to this truly fascinating video of the commercial, but handcrafted, production of croissants and Danish pastries.

Acompanied by some spunky music, its a riveting 10 min viewing of the making of the pastries. I've tried many times, with varying degrees of success to make croissants, and I learnt alot about what I'd previously done wrong watching this.

But it was also edifying to realise just how much easier a job is made when you have the right tools for it  - hmmm....

The local Kaimai Classic multisport race was on last weekend, and for the first time in a number of years, none of our family was in attendance. Hannah had been planning on doing the whole thing herself, and we were support crew, but a twisted ankle in a race the previous week, put paid to that idea.

Resting her body is not a notion that Hannah is especially good at, but even she knew it would be folly to try to do that much too soon.

While she was home though, she showed us this video made of the Motu Challenge from 2009  ( click on Motu to view), that again, the family have raced for a number of years. For the last couple of years, they, with Ash Hough doing the mountain bike leg, have been the first mixed team home.

So good in fact that they came in just behind Richard Usscher, who you see a lot of in the video becos he's the top individual male.

Our team seem very practised at going about their business and staying just under the radar - but I liked in this video that Hannah got interviewed as she ran up from the kayak, about to hop on the bike for the last leg of the race.

You don't see Rick or Courteney in the video, but they had done the run and the inital road bike legs respectively, and it was with very real pleasure that a team with  2 females in it, crossed the line ahead of a team of all male college boys, who were none too pleased at the finish line at being beaten by ' girls'.

Love it when that happens!

!

Hannah crossing the finish line in 7 hours, 27 minutes and 36 secs... 3rd overall in fact, not that you would know from the commentary on the video..

I think they're all frigging awesome!!!!

I have had my normal bookwork Tuesday, alleviated somewhat by a catchup lunch with some friends in town, that allowed a pleasant break in all that I needed to plow thru.

Now nearly time to head over to the restaurant for evening service - haven't been near the restaurant all day, so not too sure what to expect bookings wise, but don't doubt that Roz has every thing under control.

One of the last things I've had to do here at the computor was order some more of the Te Whare Ra Toru wine that we're using in the current cookschool series, becos we are going thru so much of it.

Toru is a blend - a mix of gewurztraminer, riesling and pinot gris, the aromatics if you like. Te Whare Ra are famous for their aromatics, in no small part becos their vines are amongst the oldest in Marlborough, and becos the winery is owned by 2 keen, and energetic young winemakers, who are doing great things.

They are exactly the sort of people that I like drawing attention too, when I'm looking for a wine to use for the duration of a cookschool series - but I confess I was a little apprehensive about using a white blend, becos I just wasn't too sure how it would be recieved.

With the cookschools, with both the food we do and the wine we choose to accompany it, we like to do something thats a little different, so as to stimulate people. And in doing that, we try not to be too didactic, becos that wouldn't be pleasant for anyone, but instead to present something that people may not have seen before.

So the Toru was a little bit of a punt. We are used to drinking blended reds - people think nothing of having a bordeaux style red, which is almost invariably a blend of cabernet sauvignon, merlot, and maybe franc or malbec, but blended whites are a more unusual notion. ( I understand that a white like a sauvignon blanc can be labelled 'sauvignon blanc', even though it can have a small percentage of another grape variety in it, but it is marketed as one grape type.)

Toru is deliberately marketed as a blend - and I wasn't sure whether people would like the gewurzt dominate flavours or not. I think its a perfect lunchtime wine, but one of the lessons that discussing wine with lots of people over the years has taught me, is that just becos I like something doesn't mean it naturally follows that everyone else is going too as well. Would be nice if it did, cos would make my life alot easier! - but you can recommend a wine in the restaurant, and have it recieved very positively, and then get the totally reverse reaction to the same wine from someone else.

There are simply no guarantees.

So theres always an element of taking a punt when I decide to go with something a little different, and I have to say I'd been relieved about the generally positive response we've had to the wine in the classes so far.

So I didn't really need any further reassurance, but I can't say I was especially adverse to coincidently reading Jane Skiltons comments about Toru in the Sunday Times this weekend ( had time to read the paper, cos no one in the family was doing the Kaimai Classic!), where she was particularly enthusiastic. Jane Skilton is an MW and there aren't too many of them in the world, and she's a lady who's opinion on wine, I tend to listen too, so to have her unwittingly concur with what I'd already decided, just meant a nice pat on the back. Just one of those little 'aha' moments, if you like.

Becos of course none of us need the experts to tell us what to drink. ( re an earlier blog of 10 Feb 2010 in which I link to 2 opposing articles written by wine writers as to how much influence they should have on peoples choice).  I would simply hate the idea of only buying what wine experts recommended, but that doesn't mean that I'm totally adverse either, to the notion of having an opinion of mine collaborated by someone who's palate I have a lot of respect for.

We have a customer who's first job was as a tea taster in Ceylon. Not your average kind of occupation, and I'd known Colin for a number of years, in his more conventional role as a corporate accountant before he told me about his tea tasting years.

And I think what brought the conversation up was a dismissive comment he made about the list of teas I have at the restaurant - he told me only one of them, the Darjeeling, classified as a true tea.

I have bought fresh tea for years from Tea Total, and rather prided myself on the fact that we have used loose leave and offered a range of flavours, well before it was fashionable to do so.

So I probably objected to his criticism, as I'm wont to do, but , on hearing his pedigree, was immediately hushed into respectful silence. Usually the best approach when you realise the person you're talking too, knows more about the subject matter than you do, I find!

Naturally then, I thought of Colin when I read an article in the latest edition of the Life and Leisure magazine, on the Chen family in Hamilton, who have created a traditional Oolong tea plantation and factory in Rototuna and Gordonton, just over the hill from us here and  familiar territory  becos its where our daughter races quite often.

By happy serendipity Colin was in the restaurant later in the week, and I gave him the magazine since he'd heard about the plantation and was curious to read more detail.

This link is to the website,  click on The Tea Journey once you get past the introduction, and then click on the little video of Zealong Tea Factory - to see how the picked camelia leaves are made into the special fermented tea that is oolong. A fascinating blend of ancient technique and modern technology.

And apparently there is now a teahouse and restaurant open on the site, so I will aim to head over there sometime soon, to have a look.

I find such innovation and committment to quality truly inspiring.

I have just put down Alan Bennetts " Writing Home" to tackle this blog, and that is possibly not a clever idea, becos Alan Bennett is one of my favourite authors, simply becos he is so good at what he does. I admire his skill both with words and ideas - his ability to punture thru human pomposity on all levels, with a deftly executed bon mot.

And which leaves me feeling more than a little inadequate by comparison. But then, comparisons are odious things, are they not - and I should instead be inspired by his ability to stand aside from the fray of general society, and pass comment on some of its more absurd angles.

Which, by a natural progression, brings me to Mothers Day. I wandered over to the supermarket around lunchtime, and emerging from behind our fence and gate that very effectively block out the outside world while we're at home, noted how busy all the eateries accross the road were - even a couple that don't normally do a big lunchtime trade, were pulsating at the seams. People and cars everywhere - simply becos it's Mothers Day.

Like Valentines Day, Mothers Day has grown in its commercial construct over the years, and is now a big day for hospitality, as I'm sure it is also for retail.Everywhere is busy, becos everyone feels obligated to take their mother out to celebrate this fanciful notion of Mothers Day.

I have problems with the idea on some many levels, I'm not quite sure where to begin!

The main part of my problem with the concept I guess, is that my default position to being told what to do, is usually to object. I simply don't enjoy being ordered around, and to my mind, that is what happens on a number of levels with Mothers Day. We are all fed the message ( and that has been cranked up considerably in intensity during my lifespan) that to show our appreciation to our mother we need to buy her something, or take her somewhere on Mothers Day - regardless of what we do or don't do for her on the other 364 days of the year.

It is purely a commercial construct - spend money. And to my mind begs the question,  'why should I?!'

I don't need someone else to tell me how to express my love for my mother when she was alive, or how my daughters should feel obligated to do so for me. I loathe the whole subtext that accompanies the message, that you need to do this, becos everyone else does and if you don't you will feel guilty, and worse, you'll be letting down your mother.

My relationship with my daughters is something that is totally special and private to us. I  don't need anyone else, thankyou very much, to tell me or them how to express what our feelings are to each other. We puddle our way along, thru life taking the time appropriate for us personally, to express our love ( and other emotions occasionally!), and the thought that there is one particular day in the year, where we should feel extra obligated to do so, is to my way of thinking, just nuts.

But people do. As the crowds accross the road attest - people will come out in their droves on Mothers Day. ( And interestingly, considerably more so than on Fathers Day - but maybe that is tied up with the idea of Mum not having to cook on her 'special' day!).

And we're full tonite at Somerset - which is far from the norm for a Sunday nite this time of year.

So I'm consious of the contradiction inherent in me questioning behaviour that my business actually benefits from.

We don't however open for lunches on Mothers Day - becos we don't do weekend lunches at the restaurant, and we do get a number of phone enquiries prior to it, wanting to make booking for lunch, and its fascinating the number of people who respond to our statement that we're not open for lunch on Sunday with the comment ' but its Mothers Day".

I'm never quite sure how to interprete that comment - do they mean that the day is of such cultural significance that we should be open, or do they mean that we're crazy not to open becos it'll be busy, and therefore if we're serious business people, wanting to maximise our turnover, we should be seizing the opportunity to make some easy money.

And for those hospitality business' that are open 7 days normally and carry the staffing levels to cope, I have no doubt that Mothers Day represents a welcome boost to the till, and they would look on this blog as some selfindulgent nonsense!

But for us to open, it would require existing staff to work longer hours, and as I overheard one of them explain to an especially obdurate person on the phone who'd got stuck on the idea that we should be open,  'some of us are mothers too!'. Well put I thought.

Being me, I'm probably overthinking the whole thing - giving it far too much weight and significance. If a bit of advertorial prodding makes people sit up and make an acknowledgment of their mother, then what harm can there be in that?

None really I suppose.

Except I do find it extraordinary that so many people from right accross the social spectrum feel this weight of expectation and the need to do the socially acceptable thing on Mothers Day. To fit in - you need to do as others do. Hmmm...

And now I need to go and get ready, becos we're busy tonite and one of the peculiarities of Mothers Day is that a significant portion of the tables book early, so we'll be getting our initial hit at 6pm, which is earlier than normal.

I had a beetroot salad recently and the beetroot just didn't quite taste right. Decided later that it must have been boiled - becos the flavours were flat and muddied, and there was no sweetness.

So when I went to cook some today, I roasted the balls unpeeled, in a medium oven for well over an hour. To tell the truth I'd forgotten about them, and they were well cooked by the time I retrieved them from the oven.

Let them cool down a bit then peeled  and sliced them, and debated what liquid to store them in. My mother used to regularly do boiled beetroot in malt vinegar - there were bowls of that in the fridge for most of my childhood. But I just don't use malt vinegar these days - its too astringent for me, and as I pondered what else to use, I decided to pop over to the restaurant and grab some of the orange and palm sugar sauce that goes on the duck, becos orange and beetroot are 2 flavours that work well together.

Discovered once I'd poured the sauce over the beetroot that what I had grabbed was in fact the burnt orange sauce, which is intensely orangey in flavour becos its been reduced right down to about a 10th of its original volume, but which has also had sugar added. So its sweeter than I'd anticipated.

Queried Rick when I tasted it, as to what I could do to diminish the sugar hit, and he suggested vinegar, and as I was going to grab a bottle of that out of the pantry, I spied the bottle of cassis, and having read a recipe last week, that involved cassis and red wine vinegar and beetroot I decided to use a splosh of that, and the end result has been magnificent.

We've just had a sandwich that Ricks made with lettuce, cheese and some of the slices of beetroot, and it was pretty damn fine, I have to say.

Precisely what we needed in fact. Today was Mothers Day, and some of the tables that we get on Mothers Day, are not our normal client base, and their expectations are distinctly odd, and it can make for a very interesting few hours!

Quite what inspired the need for some rice pudding this afternoon I'm not sure - but it suddenly occurred to me that it'd be a nice thing to have a bowlful of, before we headed over to the restaurant for evening service. Maybe its that distinct chill in the air, that made me think of something warming and comforting. Hard to say really.

Mentioned to Rick I was thinking about making some and his enthusiatic response meant I had to get serious. At his suggestion I used a Guy Savoy recipe although adapted for what was in the pantry.

Mum used to make rice pudding by baking it in the oven - I remember that distinctly, becos we used to fight over who got the skin that formed on the top. Most recipes that I read nowadays though, suggest oven top cooking with occasional stirring - so I decided to mix and match.

Followed his recipe pretty much - bought half a cup of short grain rice to the boil, strained that and then transferred it to a terracotta  turkish cassarole dish I have, ( we've discovered over the years that the material that your cooking vessel is made of, can make a significant difference to the end result),  and added two and a half cups of milk, 1 and a quarter cups of cream, a generous tspn of vanilla paste, quarter of a cup of sugar, and the zest of a lime that I'd chopped up finely. Oh - and a handful of raisins.

The lime and raisins were my innovation - and the rice I used probably wasn't what Mr Savoy intended either but its what I had in the pantry - a good quality Italian rissotto rice - and it worked just fine.

Cooked it in the oven for over an hour at about 180o, until all the liquid had evaporated - did get up from my diary writing occasionally to stir it, which allowed me to check how it was cooking.

We've just had a bowlful, and I feel warmed thru. The tang of the citrus was just perfect with all that creamy richness.  Next time I'll pause long enough before dishing up to take a photo!

This link to an article on the significance of female winemakers in the NZ wine industry comes as no surprise to me.

Two of my favourite wineries that we list at the restaurant are the Richardson lineup and also Odyssey, both of which are made by committed, extraordinary women - and I quite often make that comment when I'm asked to recommend a wine.

Once I've poured a sample and the customer has agreed that yes it is delicious, I will say somewhat factiously that thats becos its made by a woman. 

I am acutely aware that there's a whole host of other factors that come into play in the making of a quality wine, other than the gender of the winemaker, but it never does any harm, just to poke the borax occasionally, and remind men that we, women can do anything, and can do it pretty bloody well into the bargain!

I'm not far from heading over to the restaurant - we are very quiet tonite which never exactly thrills me, but it will allow Rick and I to sit down and do some work on menus for a couple of functions that we have coming up, and it will also mean that I should be able to get back over to the house to watch 'The Good Wife', which has become compulsory weekly viewing for me. So not all bad..

One of the subjects that comes up for discussion in cookschools, and which I'm conscious that I still haven't quite got my head around is flour. Different flours ( assuming normal wheat flours here), impact on the end product, and our flour in NZ is different to European flours, meaning that interpreting some of the recipes from Europe or America, is the equivalent of guesswork sometimes.

We have added to our library on baking quite considerably over the last couple of years, and one book in particular : Bakewise - the hows and whys of successful baking, by Shirley 0. Corriher, gives an extremely literate breakdown on why various chemical reactions take place, and what you can do and use, to control those reactions in the direction that you want. But it was another cookbook which I can't find right at the moment ( story of my life!), that gave one of the most lucid descriptions of the different types of flour, and what they should be used for. I'll add a postscript when I finally dig it out.

Within reason, in the restaurant kitchen we try to stay true to ingredients and use what is stipulated, rather than jumping around too much. But experimentation borne out of necessity, -ie I don't have any of that so I'll try using some of this - can occasionally give rise to a whole new discovery - that sometimes can be a very pleasant surprise.

But it can become a logistical nightmare for an operation like ours, where a wide range of foodstuffs are made from scratch - to use a hugely variable range of subsets of ingredients. So out of necessity and practicalities, a certain amount of standardisation happens, and flour is a classic example. We use strong flour, which is high in protein, and which is intended for bread - but which we use for all our baking and pasta making as well.

Sometimes specialisation makes all the difference to the end result - using kecap manis, Indonesion soy, rather than Tamari which is a Japanese soy, means a totally different flavour, becos, while once, in our ignorance, we may have thought that all soy sauce was soy sauce and therefore by definition, the same thing, we now know that that is far from the case, and different Asian countries have quite unique soy sauces, that don't cross over.

But with flour we have discovered that we are getting the kind of results that we like using strong flour, so the one fit is working. Although next time I try and make a sponge I may source some flour with less protein in it, becos cake flour is supposed to be lighter than strong flour, and that would be a useful excuse to blame my distinct lack of impressive results in the sponge making department all these years!

Rick is making fresh pasta in the current cookschool series, - and we feel quite strongly that normal strong flour will make perfectly good pasta. Its simply not necessary to buy Italian durum flour.

This link is to a blog written by Dan Lepard, an extremely good UK baker, discussing the different types of flour available, and I thought it broke down a subject matter that I've had several goes at trying to get my head around, in a logical fashion.

As a college student I used to bake for a few of Mums friends, as a way of earning some income. When I think about it now, I don't recall ever reimbursing my parents for the ingredients that I would have used - but that would have been typical of my mother, she was a very generous lady. The only rule was that I left the kitchen as I found it - which I must have done to a tolerable level, becos I don't remember too many arguments over it. And they also tolerated the noise of the mixer going for sometimes hours at a time, which when I think about it now, was pretty decent of them...

Rick and I were given a mixer as a wedding present, and that particular one ended up doing service in the restaurant when the one we inherited with the business died.

Now at the restaurant we have 2 mixers - one huge, that holds about 30 litres, and doesn't tend to get moved around. The other is a bench top one, but still commercial, and considerably larger than the average household one.

I replaced my old one some years back with a Kitchen Aid - that I have grown to love. My efforts at baking continue unabated, becos my family are so frigging active that they need constant calorie top ups, and I'd far rather they were eating homebaking, then some of the other options out there.

( They actually not normal my family - Hannahs just won the Superdune multisport race in Auckland; Courteney has just texted to say shes arrived safely in Shanghai with the rest of the womens team where they racing on Chongming Island in an international event that includes the World Cup; and my husband, god help me, has just enrolled for the Iron man in Taupo next March. Theres nothing normal about any of them!)

  So I bake, regularly, and the Kitchen Aid makes it a pleasure, mainly becos it creams butter and sugar better than any other machine I've ever used. And with well creamed butter and sugar, the rest always feels like a breeze.

Just before Christmas we bought a Kitchen Aid food processor - for use in the cookschools. The restaurant kitchen has a Robot Coupe processor which is larger and has considerably more grunt than the average domestic one, but which also understandably costs appreciably more money. I have always been a bit twitchy in the classes about using a machine that most people wouldn't have access too - becos it makes some of the jobs look much easier than people would find them to be, once they were transplanted back to their own kitchens.

Hence the new foodprocessor, which we bought at Table Pride, and which I have also grown to love, becos of its flexibility. They really are magnificent machines.

So was not at all surprised to read a David Lebovitz blog on the subject of visiting the Kitchen Aid factory. This is a chef who writes books on desserts, and who raves about his mixer - a ringing endorsement in anyones language.

Baking has been such a marked part of my life for so long, that I'm always left slightly aghast in cookschools, when we occasionally get asked by people, how else they can tackle a recipe that Rick has made in a mixer, becos they don't own one. I just can't imagine not having one in my kitchen, becos I use it so often in a week, and I'm  therefore always intrigued that people manage to get by without one. Some people do.

We also get asked what we would recommend for a domestic kitchen, and it is with complete genuineness that we tell people to go to Table Pride or Culinary Council, and have a look at the Kitchen Aids. They'll have them for life!