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"!

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yum!

I didn't see the Sunday programme on TV the other nite where Mike King talks about the intensive farming in pens,  which are in sheds, of pigs that is happening, legally, in NZ. I've just had a quick look via TVNZondemand, and turned it off, becos watching animals suffer to that degree breaks my heart.

The contrast in conditions to the way those poor animals are been bred, and those up at Free Range Farms in Hume Rd, and other such pastural based farms, is obsene. As I mentioned in an earlier blog we went up to visit the guys at Free Range Farm, to have a look at their pigs, and came away feeling completely reassured that the animals are born and grow up in a completely natural and stressfree enviroment. 

And becos I always feel a titch conflicted over the fact that an animal has to die so that I can eat the meat, I can at least assuage  some of my consience by the fact that the pork we chose to use at the restaurant, is farmed humanely. I actually need to know that, and I don't think I'm alone in that desire.

I see in the Herald this morning that the Pork Industry Board have swung into damage control and are saying that if all pigs were converted to free range from pens, then the cost of pork would go up by $2 a kilo.

I have abolutely no doubt in my mind, that I would rather eat less pork and pay more for it, then wittingly buy cheap meat that is farmed under such unbelievably appalling conditions.

I used to think that making sure the pork I bought was farmed in NZ was enough of a guarantee that the animals had been raised humanely. But this programme puts the lie to that. No-one surely, can say that that is a desirable way to raise animals. No-one that is, who isn't driven by keeping costs down to the sacrifice of everything else.

You can buy Free Range Farm pork, which we heartily recommend, not only becos of the wonderful conditions its farmed under, but also ( and importantly,) the flavour of the meat, direct from them via their website, of from  the Village Butchery in Katikati .

The pups are fed and asleep - one currently, comfortably ensconced in Ricks arms- the lights are dimmed, and we're tiptoeing around just as you would for human babies, which is maybe a bit over the top. But we're finding the process of ensuring that 7 canine babies get fed enough in a day, possibly more fraught than feeding a whole restaurant of people. Ah well...we're learning as we go, and its been rather a steep curve!

We had a cookschool today - a really nice group of people, quite a few of whom were coming for the first time, which is unusual these days. The vast majority of people who come to the classes are returnees. A couple of the new people, had come with friends who've been many times, and it intrigued me to hear little mini conversations during the class as the regular would explain to her friend, some side point or idiosyncrasy of Ricks recipes, that those of us who are familar with the classes take for granted. For instance : ' the oven is always on 200oC'; 'he always uses unsalted butter';etc... Kind of makes me pause and realise how much we've got to take for granted over the years.

He does a feijoa crumble in this class, but feijoas may not quite last out to the end of the series. However with tamarillos coming on we will switch to those or maybe even rhubarb. The feijoas have been in abundance this season though, we've had a great crop, plus some wonderful box loads from friends, which we always appreciate immensely. Somewhat compensates for the occasional short, sharp conversation we have with people who feel it is OK to come thru the gate onto our land and strip the trees. We interrupted one man early in the morning last week, when we were running the dogs next door - he was ensconsed in the hedge half way along, having stripped it of fruit, and laid it all in a series of mounds, which he was obviously planning on putting into the onion sacks he'd brought along. And he had the audacity to be quite put out at Ricks suggestion that he leave, and leave the fruit behind! He was back in the afternoon doing the same from the road frontage, which we don't have quite the same problem with ,( although it would be rather nice to be asked if it was OK! ) - but I just wish people wouldn't pull them of the trees, becos I've always been taught that that is bad for the trees. Feijoas are only ripe when they drop. Hmmm... Some people just don't like the effort involved in bending over maybe?

Along with the cookschool, we currently have a dessert on the menu featuring the feijoas, with butterscotch sauce, and white chocolate parfait. Its part of the new menu that started tonite. And the kitchen team are constantly playing around with new flavour combinations for the macarons, now they've  perfected  the difficult technique, to my true delight. I think the feijoa ones they made a couple of weeks back would have to be up there with my favourite flavours, although having said that, the passionfruit ones last week were sensational! I say with total conviction that these macarons are as good as any you would get in a patissiere in Paris - we just don't quite get into the intensely bright colours that they seem to favour- but I suspect they would, if they could get hold of the right food dyes!

Our TV is broken, and in being, hopefully repaired, becos I'm not too enthusiastic about the thought of forking out for a new one right now, and it feels strange not to come over from the restaurant and flick it on to watch Boston Legal reruns - but Ricks even got out the guitar tonite, and I'm hearing songs I haven't heard in years, so maybe a bit of time without it, is no bad thing!

Rick made some menu changes last nite - the most obvious change was to move on from berry fruit into stone fruit which is now in plentiful supply. The strawberries that were  leftover in the chiller, I've made into icecream, following a David Lebovitz recipe out of his book ' The Perfect Scoop'. Icecreams are something that Rick and I are analysing in a lot more detail at the moment - different techniques and methods, and this book has been the latest to arrive. The icecream is currently churning, and will comprise supper for all of us I suspect....(After we've served everyone else in the restaurant first!)

This is also the time of year for cherries - we get up 10k a week from Central Otago, and somehow it has become my self designated job to stone them. I bought more than one stoner in the forlorn hope that I might occasionally get some help, but it usually falls to me, and I go off into a quiet reverie while I stone them, and simmer the red wine that they're going to be bottled in. Also pickle some in verjus, to go with the Hohepa cheese, and I tried glaceing some last year, with considerable success.
I started this process a couple of years ago of buying direct from the grower, with some trepidation, that it would end up  like alot of my good ideas, and my enthusiasm would wane in the face of the weekly monotony. But that hasn't been the case at all - and I'm instead finding it a hugely satisfying process to embark on.

The chefs in the kitchen at the restaurant do this sort of thing day in and day out - becos virtually everything, even the butter, gets made from scratch - so they are used to it. But I'm somewhat more of a lightweight when it comes to cooking, and tend to indulge when the mood takes me. Over cherry season though - I'm obligated to attend to them when they arrive cos they're not going to last long. So I do.

Rick has put them on the dessert menu in a cherry tart, with pastry made with pinenuts and aniseed, and creme patissiere on the base. Simple and elegant - although I have to keep reminding the staff to warn customers that they were handstoned and there might just be the occasional errant stone...

From this:

To this:

And if you think that looks messy, you should see the state of my nails...

Our Christmas break is nearing an end, and tomorrow I will have to bestir myself and start thinking about being nice to people again. Over the few days we've had off, we haven't exactly been hermits, but there has been a fair amount of quiet retreat go on, where we've pottered around the property,taken the dogs for lots of walks, and had fun in the kitchen. I've even espyed my husband sitting still for longish periods of time, reading Steve Gurneys book 'Lucky Legs', which we bought for Hannah, on his adventure racing career. Rick doesn't do sitting still, so the book must be good!

I've cleared the restaurant answerphone most mornings and there has been a refreshing lack of the abusive messages that have been left in previous years, when people react vocally with outraged indignation to my recording that we are having a Christmas break. Apparently, in some peoples worlds, such a perception is untenable. Why on earth would we? I had a customer deposit himself next to me at a woolshed party we went to last weekend, and demand to know exactly that. He'd called in on Christmas Eve for a voucher and we were closed, and why would we close 'over what is the busiest time of the year'. I didn't attempt to explain that in fact he was wrong - the period between Christmas and New Year is not our busiest.  We could be full for Christmas Day many times over if we were so inclined, but the other days tend to be slower for our style of dining, becos people are preoccupied with the beach and  friends and BBQs. We start getting busy in the next week, when peoples holidays are coming to an end, and they maybe want to go out for a special meal, or they have someone they want to take out. And we will be open  and ready and willing for all of those bookings!
But the reality really, is that we close becos we can, and becos we think that we should. Christmas after all,  I thought, was about family, and taking time to appreciate and enjoy those you love - and I've come to believe that that applys to those of us in hospitality too. There is an assumption of hospitality being 24/7, which has grown over the last 20 years or so - people almost see it as their god given right, to go out to an eatery when it suits them, and that the establishment would possibly have another agenda that puts their staffs wellbeing ahead of the customers right to be fed, just blows some people away. They simply don't get it. I used to react defensively to people, but I've learnt to just take it in my stride now, and get on with it. One of the great lessons in life that it is good to embrace, is that regardless of how hard you try, you will never please all the people all the time, so you might as well aim for a middle ground and stay true to what feels right for you.

The other reason we went over to the restaurant was to feed the bread starter. We have had the same starter going for years now, and if it isn't fed daily it will die, and we'd have to start all over again, which would be a shame, becos one of the things that gives our bread its flavour is the age in that starter. The guys in the kitchen make bread every day - bread that we've become known for, and get many many requests for, so they're now not allowed to vary the recipe even if they wanted. Its a flat bread, a recipe we got out of Dan Lepards " The Handmade Loaf', one of the many books I bought on artisinal breadmaking back  a few years ago, when bread making was gaining a resurgence in popularity, worldwide, and people were going back to the basic concepts.

To make the loafs at the restaurant, approx 200gm of the starter is taken off per loaf, and to that we add flour, water and olive oil, and a little bit of additional yeast. That dough is gently mixed and then left to rise over a long period, shaped and left to rise some more, before its baked. The dough is sloppy and quite unlike any bread mix I've worked with in the past - and the process of shaping and rising it, fits in well with the kitchen prep, becos while it takes a long while for the bread to be ready for the oven, each successive need for attention is short, and the guys do it in amongst all their other prep. One will stop, go over and knock down the dough, shape it on the trays, cover it, and then carry on with what else they were doing. The starter ( or poolish), meantime, has has flour and water added to it - its food source, that keeps it alive, and is left to bubble away happily on its own until the next day. If it didn't get that daily dosage of flour it would run out of nutrients and die, literally. You can tell its alive becos its frothy and bubbly.

Rick bought me back some starter on the first day of the holiday, becos I thought it would be a good idea to make some fresh bread, as you do! I started in before I got his instructions on proportions on flour and water though, and stuffed up my first attempt, overdoing the amount of flour. Being the accomodating soul that he is, he went and got me some more, and this time wrote out the proportions, which in typical Rick style were still short one or 2 crucial details, but my next attempt was very successful. Almost as good as the restaurant bread in fact! What however delighted me, was his suggestion that I not throw away the inital bad effort, but instead use it to create my own poolish - which I have subsequently done, feeding it each day, and taking of some each day to make all manner of bread.

 Unlike at the restaurant, I'm not constrained by customer expectations and I've had a ball, using the starter in all sorts of ways. Reading A.A. Gills book 'Breakfast at The Wolseley", I realised that their croissant recipe started with a poolish, so away I went, and made the best croissants I've ever attempted. They weren't quite as good as the ones that Wendy and I used to go and get from the gorgeous little village bakery during our time at Le Bourdil Blanc, in France, but they were markedly better than anything I'd tried before. And not least becos none of the butter ran out onto the tray during baking. Usually when I make croissants I end up with half the butter content, melted and burnt on the oven tray.
I've also made grissini and loaves stuffed with feta and mascapone; then a loaf stuffed with the cheese and also ham; bread with walnuts and raisins soaked in rum; and buns with walnuts and raisins. The method has varied slightly with each as I play around with what gets treated like the restaurant bread, and hardly handled at all, and what needs to be kneaded for a smoother texture. Its been fun! Today, however I've run out of steam, and simply fed the starter without taking any off. Possible becos I've eaten so much bread over the last few days that I'm stuffed!

Its interesting though. One of the conversation threads in the Christmas cookschool series was on bread. Rick had suggested melba toast to go with the fingerfood idea. We were conscious that at Christmas, the bakeries are shut ( this pesky habit of selfemployed people wanting some time off too!), and I made the comment that I've reached a point in my life where I have become a bread snob, and mass produced bread just doesn't do it for me. I find the texture unsatisfying - too airy and cottonwooly, and I seem to have real problems digesting it. So I only eat Flaveur bread,  or our bread. Good bread however has no preservatives in it to keep it soft - it is bread you eat the day its made, or you toast it the next day. Hence Ricks idea of melba toast. Buy good bread, freeze it if need be, and then a couple of days before you need it, slice it thinly and toast it dry in the oven until all the water has evaporated, and it will stay crunchy in an air tight tin. Mum used to do something similar with marmite and cheese - mousetraps I think they were called.

A number of people during the series also commented that they had family members who'd been diagnosed with gluten issues but who could eat the Flaveur bread without any dire sideeffects. It wouldn't take much to convince me that bread that is made from organic sources of wheat, and which is risen over long time frames, and which has absolutely no artificial additives, is going to be better for you. Its a no brainer really. And apart from anything else, it just tastes so much better!

A basket of Flaveur bread which we buy in on a Wednesd and Friday for cookschools.

We get a huge amount of comment in the restaurant about our bread - its served with butter that we make ourselves, and olive oil from Ellsgrove. We've given out the recipe many times, and I can sense a bread class coming on, during which we give everyone some or our starter, so that they can have their own poolish in their own kitchen!

What will be a test of that idea, will be to see how long my poolish survives, once I revert to normal working life.Hmm...

One of the strongest impressions I've brought back from our trips to France and Italy was the fact that so many of the food stores concentrate on a small range of goods. I found that bemusing, becos we are so much more used to the supermarket approach of a dizzying array of identical product, differentiated only by its packaging.

In small villages and large cities in France and Italy, we were fascinated by tiny shops who focused on a small range of foodstuffs - no need to confuse and perplex with a 20 different types of the same thing.

I came home with a newfound respect for that degree of specialisation, and a desire that when we finally enter the retail market properly, that we will stay small and niche focused, rather than trying to be all things to all people.

And one of the things I fell most in love with were macarons - the meringue biscuit sandwiched with a butter cream.

I spent almost a year some time ago, working on how to perfect nougat - and was rescued by a good customer who'd undergone a similar process of trial and error, and incredibly generously gave me the results of her learning process..

I've been engaged in a similar process with macarons, becos I haven't as yet managed to crack the perfect result. Imagine then my delight when I discovered a link on the Paris Breakfast blog that I get ( mainly to be titivated by the images of Paris, a city I need to go back too!), to a dessert magazine, and a detailed description of the definitive method of making macarons.( Go to page 36).

I'm off to the kitchen!