Find it interesting in this article, that a club has to be set up to deal with the notion of BYO at high end restaurants in London, but maybe thats how to avoid getting people to misuse the priviledge.Hmmm...

Interesting that the restaurants quoted limit the nites that they are happy to accept BYO, so you get the feeling that they're dipping their toes into the water but are undecided whether to take the plunge completely.

We had the last class in the current series today, and I took my camera over to take photos of the food as Rick plated it, becos I quite often get asked 2 or 3 years down the track what a certain dish looked like, and I find having a pictorial archive helps my memory considerably.!

Also I'm starting to think about planning the next cookschool cookbook - something I'd quite like to tie in with our 25th celebrations next year, so having some photos will help us decide what to include in that stage too.

A couple of people asked in the class today if I'd email thru the photos for their reference, and I've been downsizing them for email, and thought I'd post here, now that the series is done and dusted.

We started with a beautiful salad of apple and celery and walnuts, spiked with lime juice and naped with a celeriac puree. Celeriac is a new culinary star in NZ -we're currently seeing it in most of the local cooking magazines, which is great becos our first encounter with it was in France in the markets, and when we got back to NZ we weren't able to source it originally, so great that things have changed, becos this puree is one I could eat with relish at any time of the day. Served in a poppy seed tuile biscuit with a feijoa and apple relish.

The main is a  dish we currently have on the restaurant menu - duck canneloni, served with a pea puree, and Rick went thru all the composite stages of making the pasta and the 2 sauces needed for the duck, plus the pea puree, so as to bring the dish together.

Then for dessert we copied Phillipes souffle idea - radical becos the souffles can be prepped in advance and taken straight from the fridge to the oven, with no lose of the required lift. Souffles are all about the visual wow factor of this glorious elevation, and in the class Rick talked thru the various little techniques that enhance that process.

We'd encountered this recipe when we did some classes at Auberge Lou Peyrol, with the group that came with us to the Dordogne, and Phillipes name was mentioned often during the series!

( Equally as impressive as Phillipes!)

All quite involved dishes prep wise with multiple steps, but the theme was Fine Dining, and this style of cooking very much represents what we do here at Somerset, where theres layers of preparation that go into each dish- sometimes not always obvious to the casual observer, but each stage essential to make the dish a satisfying whole.

And then to drink with the lunch the Te Whare Ra Toru - a blend of gewurztraminer, pinot gris and riesling that I had wondered if people would enjoy, and have been pleasantly impressed by how positively people did respond and how much of it they wanted to buy.

So, another series down - have no idea how many series we've done since the classes inception back in 1997 now, but we're rolling on already to the next ones with lots of bookings in, and Rick narrowing down the recipes he thinks he'll use. We'll be doing some experimenting over the next few days to sort out what he thinks is going to work, and then we start the process all over again.

Its not a hardship though. Both of us thoroughly enjoy the classes and the people and the chat that flows back and forth. They're a very important part of the business.

It is now 3 years since we went on our last European trip, and up until now I haven't really been inclined to delve too deeply into the complexities of organising another trip.

But its funny how life, can start throwing little reminders your way, and there is no doubt that just recently I've been having a number of fortuituous little prods about some of the glories that await us.

I had assumed that when we do go back that it would be too France, but interestingly watching a movie a couple of weeks back that was set in Tuscany, got both Rick and I to reminescing favourably,  about the experiences we had at Podere Fineri, just outside Asciano,  back in 2004. That whole trip was our first big one overseas, and we finished of the 2 weeks of cookschools with time in Venice and then Paris. A massive experience.

And just this week I got talking to a couple who had heard about our overseas forays, and who mentioned that friends of theirs have a place close to Turin, that would be available for group bookings.

I really didn't think too much more of it, becos people often tell me that they know someone who has something that could be of use to us, and then we hear nothing more. But in this instance the lady was as good as her word and shes just sent me thru the website to have a look at , and I'm enchanted.

Click on this link and then click on the 10 min introduction video - not bad huh?!

Have just spent a while unpacking deliveries of wine. I order from a wide range of sources, and when wine arrives en masse as it did today, it can take some time to check pricing and vintages, and get it all stored away in the appropriate place.

Our wine list is quite deliberately printed in a way that means I can get updates run off frequently in a cost efficent manner. A quick email to Simpson Print, and I usually have new lists within hours. But even so, keeping on top of the quantities of the various different wines can absorb a reasonable amount of time.

 It constantly fascinates me, how there is never any predictable rhyme or reason to what wines sell.  We have our biggest sellers overall certainly - but quite often for no apparent reason, a wine that we may not have been selling much off, suddenly gets chosen by a number of tables all on the same nite. So for that reason I like to hold reasonable quantites of each wine, just in case we get a run, and that means having to know at any one time the volumes I have in stock.

Chris set me up an excel programme years ago, that I've continued to use to keep a record of stock levels, and I'd be lost without it, but as with most computor systems, its only ever as good as the information put into it, so if I miss a delivery or make a mistake in my inputting - the figures can go awry!

A trend we have noticed in the Auckland restaurants is to actively promote the sale of cocktails - something that I have no real desire to emulate at Somerset, becos our focus is very much on wine as a food match, and an extensive cocktail list would be too much upkeep for something I'm not really  interested in. We sell a couple of cocktails - kir royale, becos that holds nice memories of our french trip, a classic martini, and a gimlet. But that is pretty much the extent of it. I'm just not convinced that the demand is there.

I have taken care over the years to source good quality non alcoholic drinks, becos I'm consicous that not everyone wants to drink  wine with a meal. Years ago I read about the Camla Farm people down in Dunsandel, in Canterbury, who were making single style apple juice, and we've had them as a feature on our menu since. I think they produce 6 different flavours, and we've narrowed down what we offer to Coxes Orange, and its a pleasure to be able to offer a juice of such impeccable flavours.

Similarly we sell grape juice - something I would have shuddered at once, becos most of the grape juices on the market were hideously naff, and an attempt at a pale imitation of a bottle of wine. Sweet and cloying, I could never understand why people would bother. But then I feel a bit that way about decaf coffee. I've never drunk a decaf coffee whose flavour I've enjoyed, so therefore if I can't have caffeine, rather than pretending, I'd be more inclined to have a herbal tea...rather than a pretend coffee.

So I'd never listed a grape juice becos I thought they were naff, and I was therefore intrigued to spy some years ago, in an Auckland delicatessan the Herons Flight version which is in a single serve, 330ml bottle. Herons Flight is a special winery in Matakana and we've listed their sangiovese wine at the restaurant for some time now, and work hard to convince people to step outside the pinot noir/ cabernet/merlot mindset, and try a wine made from a different grape.

This juice is made from sangiovese grapes, obviously unfermented, and it tastes of the grapes. Quite beautiful. We sell truckloads of it, both for people eating at the restaurant and for some who want it at home, and last time I rang to order some more cases, David told me that they have got lots of phone calls from people all over NZ who tell him that they'd encountered the juice at Somerset and loved it, and want to buy some. Like it very much when  that happens!

And now just this week we will replace the Bundaberg Ginger Beer that we've had on, with a Waiheke Island brewed ginger beer, that Hannah ordered, when we took her out for lunch to the Ponsonby Rd Bistro in Auckland last week. This is a completely natural ginger beer, using root ginger, honey and lemon juice, and the flavours are clean and distinctly gingery, without overpowering sweetness. I was hugely impressed, and delighted to list a NZ product, becos we do like promoting NZ made product.

The Waiheke Brewery also predictably brews beer, and that naturally leads to my next task which is going to be to completely revamp the listing of beer that we offer, and change to almost totally small independent breweries. The inroads that have been made over the last few years with the independants is massive, and I think I should be reflecting some of that pride and quality with what we have to offer.

I don't particullary enjoy the flavour of hops, so tasting a wide variety of beers doesn't hold much personal appeal, but we have a good customer who is completely passionate about the beer scene in NZ, and we are going to tape into his knowledge to shape our initial changes.

Theres always something....

I went for a walk around the Mount this morning, after 3 weeks of complete inactivity and misery, caused by a cold, that didn't seem to want to release me from its grip.

There hasn't been any energy or enthusiam for exercise- and the frequent bouts of coughing have kind of made my couple of feeble attempts somewhat impractical. So it is a good feeling to finally be active again, although I think I'll stay away from the pool for a few more days until the cough has completely gone.

However - feeling reenergised is fabulous, and the gush of enthusiasm hasn't as yet abated!

While prone on the bed, feeling sorry for myself, I did get to do a bit of magazine reading, and had earmarked a couple of recipes that I wanted to try, when I felt like venturing into the kitchen again, for more than a cup of lemon juice and honey. And so this afternoon I made David Changs recipe for steamed pork buns.

David Chang is a New York chef, the current enfant terrible, whose restaurants and approach to food has gained him alot of notoriety, I got his cookbook  earlier this year - and have thoroughly enjoyed reading it. He was in Melbourne for their big food festival that they have every March ( this is a video of him cooking a korean beef dish at the festival), and it was the photo in the latest Gourmet Traveller of his pork buns that caught my eye.

Rick particullarly loves pork buns. Whenever we are in a city with a Chinatown, one of our first stop offs is to any shop selling pork buns to satisfy his craving.

We have learnt how to make the buns, worked on that a couple of years ago,  but the Momofuku ones are shaped differently and that is what tweaked my interest. We have a catering job coming up for which we are going to be doing different style food, and we've been tossing a number of ideas back and forth. Steak sandwiches is one of the options we will be serving, and we need them to be in a sizing that people can eat them without needing cutlery, so seeing this photo in the magazine of David Changs buns, which are folded back in half, and therefore easily stuffed, rather than being the  more common ball shape, made me wonder if they would work.

The texture would be different to what we had initially envisaged, but a bit like the nasi goreng that Rick made for Wine Options last nite, sometimes these ideas that seen a little bit left field, are the ones that work surprisingly well.

So I made the dough this afternoon, and steamed the first batch while Rick and Courteney were out doing repeats. They were both impressed with the results, in fact Courteney made the comment that they were just like the 'real' thing, which coming from Courteney is praise indeed.

And they can be easily frozen and reheated, so rather versatile little things....

Like it when experiments work out - becos that isn't always the case!

According to the recipe, they can be easily reheated by a quick steaming, so will try that later tonite, becos they definitly have the type of texture that is glorious when its warm from the steamer, but which is distinctly gluggy when it gets cold. So will check later tonite when I come back over to the house after service to see how effectively they reheat. Will be perfect for watching "The Good Wife"!

I've written at length on BYO previously, and am completely comfortable with our position on the subject.

We have a good wine list, we provide nice glassware, that we attempt to match to the grape type being drunk, and we offer a wide range of wine by the glass.

With the wine list I try to cover a range of price points, as well as different terroir, and give people options that will sit well with our food. I consider the wine choices and the way that we serve it, to be an important part of what we offer to customers.

When we opened in 1986 the notion of a BYO restaurant was much more prevalent, and in those days we only had a BYO licence. The onlicence came later, after the loosening of the liquor licensing laws in 89, and was a natural progression for our business.

Wine research and sales are now a big part of what we do - it is not just a minor addendum to the food.

However, we have continued the BYO option, in addition to offering the wine choices that we do,  becos by the time we had established the onlicence so many of our customers were used to bringing their own wine, and I didn't want to stop them being able to do that.

It is a habit that is fading with time, and there are many evenings now when we get no BYO at all.

But it is still part of what we offer and I can't see that changing.

I was interested therefore to read this article on how some restaurants in the UK are starting to re embrace the notion of BYO as a way of countering empty tables, in the current economic downturn.

We get 2 distinct subsets of people who choose to bring their own wine to the restaurant.

           - those who aren't really interested in wine, but will have grabbed something under $10 from the supermarket, and bring it still in the bag, and ask us to chill it. Price is all that matters to those people. And I've got used to being nonchalant about it - the only time my eyebrows start venturing skyward is when one person at a table, will leave the restaurant after having being seated, and drive across the road to the supermarket, becos they've noted on the menu that we have a BYO option.

It is not unknown for people who do that to reappear, and wave the bottle of wine they've just purchased at us, and ask if we have one of the same thats cold that we could serve instead of the one they've just bought.....

       - and then we have a group of people who have good cellars at home and who want to bring a special bottle of wine out to dinner, and for those types it is very much our pleasure to serve their treasured wine properly. That often involves decanting, and is something we enjoy doing.

I guess the moral is, as with anything, there are always some who will abuse the intent of what you offer, and if you let yourself get too ground down by those few, then you have allowed them to take away your sense of pleasure in what you do. And that would be tantamount to admitting failure. And that is somewhere I choose not to go.

I rate this guy. Read 'Kitchen Confidential' years ago, and thoroughly enjoyed the no frills approach to describing restaurant cooking.

Have watched him on and off on the Food Channel, but we don't watch much of that channel becos we can't stand most of the presenters, so have been out of touch with whats he's been doing, and interested to read in this interview that he's just written a new book.

I'll be heading to Amazon next to order a copy, becos I do enjoy the way he simply ain't scared to call it as it is. And that includes himself. There are absolutely no delusions of grandeur, and that can be very refreshing...

Watching people who are good at what they do gives me a sense of pleasure, even when I am aware in the process, that their skill makes what they are doing look deceptively easy.

This pastry ends up being amazingly thin - but retains a pliability and elasticity that is extraordinary. Quite amazing I thought...

Every month or so, we get a whole pig carcass from Free Range Farms. Buying the whole pig, has made us relook at a number of things, becos ordinarily in the restaurant, when we have a meat dish on, we buy in only the required joints. For instance the midloin of lamb comes to us from the Hawkes Bay - packets of 6 loins all perfectly filleted and pretty much equal size, 10 kilos at a time.

It costs more to buy our meat that way, but it also means no waste, and its been our modus operandum for years.

It does however mean that the chefs in the kitchen merely have to open a plastic bag to access the lamb - there is no butchery skills beyond that. And that is something that has regularly given me pause - becos when you read about the great European kitchens, butchery is a necessary skill for chefs, as much as all the other aspects of the kitchen. And our guys simply weren't getting exposure to it.

In todays world, just as much with us domestic cooks at the supermarket, we can now buy our meat in a homogonised fashion, that doesn't remotely resemble the animal from whence it came. And most of us prefer that - becos we've become hypocrites, my generation, and when we eat meat, we don't especially want to be bothered with the notion that an animal had to die for us to do so.

Getting a whole carcass - head, eyes, ears, tail, the lot, kind of knocks your sensibilites around a little, becos there is no doubt that that was once a sentient being. And interestingly, becos that is reinforced, it makes you much more inclined to not want to waste any. So one of the positive aspects to come out of us dealing with the whole carcass, has been our need to step outside our comfort zone, and come up with ideas to special in the restaurant - just to use up the various cuts of the animal. That is an ongoing exercise that is really good for the whole team.

John has made a terrine a number of times, from the head. We call it euphemistically - "head cheese" - but then describe it for what it is, and invariably people at the table shake their heads with distaste. Why would you eat cheek meat? - how disgusting... Actually, not at all. When you think about it, it shouldn't matter where the meat has come from on the animal. Why is the cheek more disgusting than the belly? - except we are the generation that have got used to eating fillet, and we regard any offal or cheaper cuts with deep suspicion. And in doing so, we deprive ourselves of a whole range of treats.

It reassures me enormously, that whenever we special the 'head cheese', while we may get alot of negative comments, we do also get enough people who are either familiar with the concept, or who are prepared to give it a go, and we always sell out.

I love it - but then I love terrines and pates. They are a way of eating that has infinite appeal to me.

Somehow however - I doubt that we will ever present the head roasted, as an intact entity, as is done in this linked blog. Something tells me that bringing a platter of that out to the restaurant, would push people just that little bit further than they are prepared to go....

We'll stay with 'safe' for now - and just poke at the boundaries every so often to see what response we get. I fully concede that sometimes people surprise me, and an idea that I don't think is going to work, can take off, and certainly with what I'm reading about what is happening, especially in the States, there is this whole groundswell movement back to the idea of using whole carcasses, and getting back into the ancient craft of salume or charcuterie. Its an idea who's time has come round again.

And the fact that we're using free range pork - thats being raised here in the Bay, fits into that whole concept perfectly.

An example of a terrine John made last year from head meat,  that was spectacular. Wrapped in leek, and topped with a prune chutney.

Its nice when a wine we already have on the wine list gets this kind of accolades...  Once Rhonda gets back from America, and before the kitchen crew start taking their annual leave, Rick and I are hoping for a few days getaway, and Waiheke is where we want to head.

Be nice to actually go and visit the wineries, becos years since we've been on the island.

I've spent a fair whack of today trying to find the source of this pea recipe so that I could pass it on. I get alot of daily emails regarding the food world and thought it was in one of those, but going thru all my deleted folder was to no avail.

However, finally - after spending some time putting an updated version of the lunch and dinner menu on the website - I found it. ( We tinker with the menu reasonably often - sometimes the changes are very small, and I don't always update the menus listed on the website with every change, but it was time to play catch up.)

We have a tendency at Somerset to cook our vegetables so they are still green and have texture. In fact we're known for it. Occasionally we get good customers of my parents generation who ask in advance if the vegetables for their table, that automatically come out with mains, can be cooked more than we normally do. And having been forewarned we're happy to oblige.

Like most, I have memories of soggy and unbearably overcooked vegetables in my childhood ( and this was in a household with an enormous vegetable garden where vegetables took pride of place, so the trend of the time,  must have been to overcook.)

So we prefer to move in the other direction - and I always read with some interest the discussions in French cookbooks in particular about cooking green beans more. Some of the rationales given would imply that our understanding that giving vegetables more than just a quick introduction to a pot of boiling water, may be a bit of an over simplification.

So this blog on cooking peas, fitted right into that thesis, and I printed out the recipe intent on trying it.

Did so on Monday - and I have to say the end result was sublime. I'm a pea lover, and I simply never expected to enjoy eating peas that had cooked for over 10 mins, quite like I did the other nite.

Both Rick and I felt they were exceptional, and an idea we'll return too in some guise, or cookschool maybe.

We're doing a large outcatering job on Saturday nite that involves retro food, and its taken alot of discussion to come up with food ideas that while looking backwards, will not be considered bad taste.

We were going to do peas as one of the main course accompainments - and I think we've now discovered how we're going to cook them, and in some ways cooking them for a longer period then we would previously have done, is ironically showing more authenticity to the theme than we intended!