I have just zapped out to the venue where we are catering a large wedding tomorrow. Sometimes its nice where possible, to have a look at the layout of things a day or so in advance, just so that when I'm lying awake at 3am in the morning fretting about all the possible scenarios that can possibly go wrong on a catering job, at least the images of the marquee, that I'm conjuring up relate to what we'll actually encounter.

The bride, her mother and friends were covering all the chairs, and tying organza ribbons, and it all has that nice sense of anticipation that builds prior to big events.  But no drama. And that is possibly becos the quality of the marquee and all the fitout would have to be the most outstanding that I have ever seen. It looks utterly gorgeous - and theres nothing like knowing that something is looking special, to calm nerves.

Anna Robertson from Silver Bubbles will be out there tomorrow morning, when I go out with Hannah to set up the tables, and I have no doubt that she will take the whole ambience up yet another notch, if that is possible. She has a way of working complete magic, that woman.

Our kitchen marquee is attached to the back of the big marquee, and I swear that Rick is going to cry when he sees the set out. We simply aren't used to getting something that well thought out, or that much room! ( He's out on a ride at the moment, so thats why I'm writing, becos I need to get this very large 'wow' out of my system, and since he wasn't around to share it with...)

Everything in the hireage has come up from Wellington, and in our meetings last year, I got the distinct impression that Colin, who owns the hireage company, and is a long term friend of the family, was vastly experienced in these mattters.

My hunch has more than been proven correct. Its not only the size of the marquee, which is bigger, higher and more spacious than most marquees I've seen, not to mention, being in immaculate condition ( and made by Baytex  , which is owned by good customers of ours, Spencer and Wendy Tankard), but its all the small details that have been taken care off, and which  can make such an appreciable difference.

My 3am thought last nite was whether there would be any lighting in the kitchen - it has been a point overlooked on previous jobs, where much attention has been given to creating the right ambience in the main marquee, and the thought that we might need artificial light  after about 9pm wasn't even considered. And we were as guilty of that as the client. Mind you, you only get caught out once on something like that, so once I'd chatted to the bride and headed to the kitchen marquee to have a look today, the first thing I checked was the lighting. Not only do we have more than enough lighting but we also have an electric insect zapper box!

And the tressle tables in the kitchen have extensions on their legs. Tressle tables are universally too short to work at - and that is becos hireage companies hire them out for multipe uses, sometimes as tables that guests sit at, and sometimes as work benches for kitchens or bars, or to present buffet food on. The ones in this kitchen have extensions fastened to the legs, so they stand at commercial bench height. Matt is going to be so pleased - no sore back from bending over...

All the plates and glassware have been put in the appropriate places, by the men working for the hire company. That is ridiculously significant becos  one of the first jobs I usually have to do at a function is lug crockery and glassware around to be where I need it, becos more often than not it gets dumped in one mass dropoff. Not in this instance. Oh no. The predinner glassware, is over by the pool,  where the guests will be at that stage; the stuff for the table set up in the marquee, was left alongside them; and what we need for the entrees  and mains is in the kitchen, where those dishes will be plated. Such organisation.

The quality of the crockery and glassware is beautiful - I've never seen so many coffee plungers in one place before, so I'll put my ones back away becos we are definitely not going to need them. May take a teapot though, cos I didn't see one of those.

Early last year we went to an extraodinary party catered by Simon Gault and his top chefs on a high station down in the South Island. Miles from civilisation, the setup was unlike anything we'd seen, and the kitchen marquee alone, was bigger than the floor layout of all of Somerset. No expense had been spared, and we marvelled at the banks of ovens and equipment that had been hired, and kind of pondered how it is that we do what we do on catering jobs with a couple of mein host ovens, that blow out in the wind, and never get as hot as you want them too, and try and plate food for 150 people in a tight time frame. Yes - I confess to a degree of envy, and I'm not someone who ordinarily does envy.

But tomorrow, Rick has more oven capacity than he does in the kitchen at Somerset - as I say, he is going to cry!!

So. The setting is exquisite, the flowers will be outstanding - and the bench mark for us to measure up to is very high.

No pressure then!! ( And probably no sleep tonite!)

The next couple of weeks will probably be our biggest 2 weeks in the entire year for catering. We have a number of events on, and those include 2 large functions, both of which have required alot of background organisational work.

I honestly have nothing but the most heartfelt respect for caterers, who do functions each and every week in the year, becos the level of detail they have to cover continually is just amazing, if what we've been doing over the last week or so is any indication.

We don't do very much catering these days, and whenever we do gear up for an event, I'm always amazed at the amount that needs to go into making sure that you've covered all angles. I've usually spent a far amount of time in the months leading up to the event liasing with the client and making sure that we have agreement with the food that we're offering.

Becos we don't operate from preset menus, we prefer to tailor the food to the individual requirements and tastes of the clients for each job, and that can involve a fair amount of tooing and froing, as we discuss the type of atmosphere they want to create, and what food options would best fit in with that.

Then a couple of weeks out, Rick and I have a series of meetings, just the two of us,  in which we start breaking things down into more detail, and lots of lists get made. Sometimes it also involves some experimentation if we're doing something we haven't tried before, or the realisation that we're going to need to buy more moulds becos we have to make 130 baby creme brulees,and we only have 65 in stock. It was on my list to count how many we had, becos niether or us could remember.  The fact you need more moulds is not a discovery you want to make a couple of days out from a big event, becos it just adds inexorably to the pressure, at the point in time when you least need the additional weight.

So we try and cover everything, while we're still at a respectable distance timewise. I now have my lists here on my desk, and Rick has broken down the food prep into daily lists over in the restaurant kitchen, and from now on, in additional to the normal daily restaurant prep, the kitchen team will also be focusing on all  this extra stuff. Its significant extra work in the week.

This weekend we're doing a large day time function over in Matamata, and as part of the array of food, we will be doing slow cooked shoulders of pork, following a recipe we did in a cookschool a few years back. Its a Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall idea, and the original instructions in his magnificent book "Meat",  say to cook the shoulder for 16 hrs, but we've been told by various people since, who cook it all the time now, that they've found that 8-10 hours, depending on the size of the shoulder is enough.

So we needed to calculate when we should put the pork in the oven if we were going to be heading over the Kaimais at approx 9am in the morning and the pork was going to be served to guests at approx 1pm - how much cooking did we do at the restaurant and how much did we finish off on site. We experimented with one at the weekend, and  that reminded us as to just why people have raved about that dish so much. It ends up with the texture of what the Americans call 'pulled' pork. You don't need a knife to cut it, its so tender, a fork suffices.

The other aspect of the dish that I realised I really liked but hadn't really thought about previously, is that the long cooking renders all the fat, so that while the pork is still rich to eat, you aren't conscious of any layers of fat. It has melted and is sitting in the bottom of the pan instead. Much better place for it!

The last time we did a catering job within close proximity of a diary farm, we were gobsmacked at the squadrons of big, black horrible flies that invaded the kitchen area, so one of the jobs on my list tomorrow is to head to Arthur Toyes to see if I can get some light see thru fabric, that we can use as a throw over for any food thats sitting out. I have weights shaped like grape bunches, that I'll be able to clip on to keep them secure, but I think we'll need to go prepared for the worst.

And I've stocked up on some new glass jugs that I need for the iced tea we'll be serving at the wedding the following weekend, becos we've had a bit of attrition there, and I didn't have enough. You get that with glass - things break.

I'd also spent a bit of time before Christmas trying to find a nice container to use in the bar area for a job we were doing back then, for keeping wine bottles cool. As is typical, when you're specifically looking for something, you never tend to find exactly what it is you want, and so it proved to be then. I did find a nice container, that worked perfectly OK, but it just sort of lacked that intangible X factor that I'd been hoping to source.

But needs must and it was a perfectly nice container, that did the job admirably, and I had every intention of using it again at all these functions we have coming up, when by complete chance I spotted the PERFECT holder, as I was flicking past the rather beautiful Tilly and Tiffen shop in Grey St, intent on grapping my weekly magazines from Books a Plenty. We were on our way home from the Mount, I was unkempt and hot and sweaty, and the last thing on my mind was beautiful objet d'art. But thats why canny shopowners put attractive product in windows isn't it? Your eye is drawn in , and suddenly you see something you hadn't realised up until then that you actually needed.

I did some mental gymnastics while getting the magazines, managing, without too much opposition, to convince myself that if it was under a certain price point, then I would be able to justify the cost, becos we'd just bought the extra brulee moulds we needed at Southern Hospitality, and had been pleasantly surprised at how much cheaper they were than I'd been expecting. So money saved, sometimes needs to be spent I figured - and especially when something is so goddamn gorgeous!

The cost was reasonable I discovered when I darted into the shop, so the deal was done, and I also got another glass container for the macarons to replace the one that had its lid broken during the week, becos there just happened to be some absolutely perfect glass stack containers inside. By that time Rick had appeared from the car, to see why buying some magazines was taking me so long...

Its a beautiful shop, with lots of gorgeous things, and  since I've been so constrained in my discretionary spending over the last few years - budgetary limits have a way of imposing nasty constraints on you - constantly having to justify to myself whether we really need to spend the money on any particular item, I must say it felt rather pleasantly reckless to buy something, not becos I especially needed it, but simply becos it was quite beautiful, and I knew I'd always regret it if I didn't.

And it will look fabulous on the bar at the wedding. And I'm sure I won't be the only one who thinks so!

Evening service is well underway at the restaurant, and I went over late, had a bit of a chat to everyone, answered a couple of queries, and collated all the invoices on the spike, seeing as how its the end of the month today, but beyond that there wasn't very much for me to do, becos Rhonda and Roz had everything under control. The start of this week has been horribly quiet. Perverse. It was this week last year too - but fortunetly tomorrow and Saturday nite will patch up the bank balance somewhat!

Have come back over to the house to sit down and work my way thru a quote I have to type up, with a glass of Ata Rangi Celebre in hand. There wasn't enough left in the bottle for a full glass for any customer, and decided it was just the right amount for me...

We had a meeting of sorts this afternoon with old, old family friends of my family. By meeting I mean that we had got together ostensibly to discuss some catering we're doing for them next year, and to run past them the ideas that Rick and I had for the lunch, but prior to having that conversation, we had a cup of coffee, and discussed our children, their children, the grandchildren, life in general and dairying in specifics, as you always do when you get together with Raewynne and David. So I use the word 'meeting' with some caution, becos it seems too formal a word for what actually took place.

I go back a long, long way with these people - Raewynnes parents lived down the road from the house I grew up in, in Upper Hutt, and they were very much surrogate grandparents to us. Raewynne had married this dairy farmer from Matamata, and I have strong memories of going and staying on the farm with my sister when I was probably younger than 10. Getting up at the crack of dawn to help in the milking sheds, was a totally alien experience for a suburban softie, and is something I remember with enormous affection. They have always been very special people to me.

And in January of next year they are celebrating a centennary of continual family ownership on their farm in Te Poi. David said today that his grandfather came out from Glasgow and bought the farm, and it has passed down thru 3 generations, with the forth now, responsible for milking the herd.
I doubt there would be too many titles of land out there in non Maori ownership that could lay claim to clear family title back 100 years.

So quite understandably they want to celebrate, and we are very chuffed to be able to contribute to such a significant event, and we discussed with them today the ideas for a format and menu that we thought might work with the sorts of numbers they're talking about, and allow for an informal and relaxed flow which is very much the Dawson way of doing things.

They seemed to agree with our suggestions, and now it behoves me to put all that chat and arm waving down into hard cold words on a page, and to wrap a price around the concept.

Funny - in a few short days, we will have been at Somerset for 25 years - 4th July is the day we opened. I think we took over ownership on the 1 July, of both the house and the restaurant, and spent the next few days, removing all the dutch memoriabilia - to this day I can't look at red and white gingham without whincing  - and prepping from scratch. Our predecessor left us a freezer full of Tip Tip icecream and croquettes, niether of which were on our first menu needless to say, so we started from  square one with everything. I don't remember sleeping very much!

And who knows, maybe in another 75 years, our childrens children, will be gearing up to celebrate 100 years of continual ownership at Somerset, on this land here. Mmmm.....I wonder what will be on the menu?!

Catering is a specialised form of work, quite different to what we normally do in the restaurant. And covering all the angles necessary for each job,  can create some stresses and strains.  We have a large garden party on this evening, where we are providing fingerfood for people who will be wandering thru, and socialising in a spectacular local garden.

The guys in the kitchen have been working all week on the fingerfood - becos such food prep is time consuming in the extreme. Not for the first time, I have said a very loud thankyou for the large chiller that we got installed last year. The difference it has made in our normal weeks, is significant, but when the level of food and alcohol that we need to keep chilled, amps up, as it does prior to a function like this, then it really does come into its own.

It is well loaded up, but there is still enough room for everything to be well stacked and ordered and for everything to be easily accessible. That is a significant step up from the old days and our other chiller which was about a sixth the size of this one, and which got so stacked prior to big functions, that it required significant amounts of time to move stuff when you wanted to access things on the back shelf.

Stressful and time consuming. And now, fortunetly consigned to memories only.

We've just been into town to pick up the glasses for the function and dropt them directly round to the property, and driving into this exquisite space kind of gave me the little jolt that I needed. Sometimes with catering jobs you can get so caught up in the minute detail of organising everything, that you forget to stand back and quite literally smell the roses.

This should be a happy occasion tonite. The garden is simply stunning, we have nice flavours with the food, and people will be coming intent on enjoying themselves, so our job is simply to facilitate that process, by being organised and making sure that everything runs as smoothly as we can possibly make it.

The one thing we can't control though, and which is causing me some anxiety as I sit at my desk, is the weather. There are some threatening looking clouds rolling in, which don't bode well, for a function that has no plan b if the weather turns inclement. We are totally reliant on the weather gods.
And thats another thing that weighs down on the day, but which you have to almost ignore, becos there is nothing directly that I can do to alter whether it decides to rain between 6pm and 9pm tonite.

I'll just have to keep my fingers crossed!

And now to the garage, to sort the things on my list....

Have just got back from Sunday brunch over at Slowfish. As I sat and waited for Courteney and Rick to turn up on their bikes to meet me - they'd left home at 7am to ride a mere 100k before breakfast, as you do - I  took in the beach and surrounds, and mused over how much we take what is on our doorstep  for granted, when, we are in fact, incredibly lucky to have such easy access to such gorgeousness.
We'd done a wedding last nite, which was the main reason I was a little later than planned arising this am, and rather than 'doing' the Mount, I'd driven over to meet the rest of the family, and had arrived early, hence some fill in time, sitting on  a seat, indulging in a spot of people watching.

Courteney's been home for the weekend - she had a club Time Trial on yesterday, as a result of which she arrived fashionably late to help us with the wedding... before deciding she was surplus to requirements and headed for home to do some work on an assignment. Priorities she knew her parents wouldn't quibble over too much...

We are almost at the end of our wedding season, and one of the highlights for us this year, has been the discovery of 2 new venues where we can go in as outside caterers. Tauranga lacks wedding venues - and becos we prefer not to do them at the restaurant, since it would mean we would have to close too often for normal dining custom, we are dependant on other venues. Most of the functions we cater are for people we know, and as a result alot end up being in peoples homes - and usually in marquees in beautiful gardens.
Rick and I got married at my parents home, and home weddings can retain a degree of personalness that is very special. They do however involve conspicuous cost  and effort for the people involved - becos usually absolutely everything, right down to extension cords - needs to be hired. And then there is the months of effort to bring gardens up to a full display of gorgeousness, and the attendant demands that goes with that.

Not everyone is up to that kind of pressure, which is why quite often they prefer to look for an away from home site, when they can turn up, enjoy and then walk away at the end of the nite. Something I totally understand. So these 2 new venues that customers of ours suggested to us this year, have increased the range of possibilites that we can discuss with clients, and that is always a good thing!

One is Ambiance, which is up Pyes Pa Road. A marquee, in a lovely, expansive garden setting, but with a concrete base for the marquee, ( which has all sorts of positive connatations when the weather turns inclement!) Sonja is a consumate professional, and we worked with her for Juliets wedding and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Juliet is an old staff member, who we love dearly - and her wedding was always going to be special becos her parents and a couple of the guests had been in France with us - and we wanted it to be a happy day for her.  Something  we were helped to achieve by  the fact that  Sonya is a perfectionist, who understands all the little issues that go towards making an event run smoothly. We were impressed and have recommended her to another good customer who's daughter's wedding we will be catering in 2010.

And then last nite we had the somewhat odd - at least initially - experience of rocking up to the restaurant at Morton Estate  Winery, to do another wedding for good customers. Odd, becos our association with Morton goes back to our earliest days at Somerset, and we hadn't realised until these clients started talking about it as a possible venue, that the restaurant had in fact, closed down, and it was available for hire. I was out there initially by myself in the morning, just unloading some stuff from the car, and getting my bearings for the day - and I fully expected to see John, or Steve or Warren come round a corner with a boisterous greeting. But no - they are long gone, and the restaurant sits there empty - but not quite forlorn. The winery staff gave it a burst of care for the wedding and I have to say it scrubbed up rather beautifully.

 In fact it was the perfect location for what was a unique and very special wedding - there was a point late in proceedings when I suggested to Lyn and Trice that they come out of the kitchen  and have a look  - the evening sun was streaming in thru the vineyard, bathing the pools of people sitting around various tables in that golden light, and it all just had a lovely feel, quite buccolic in fact!
Being supremely organised, I forgot to take my camera out! - so regretfully didn't get to take any photos to prove my point, but Bill, who organises the hireage, can be contacted at the cellar door of the winery ,  if anyone wants to have a look.

We think it has all sorts of possibilities...

And when Rick and I were having our usual wedding debrief - ie. an exhausted chat  over a bowl of rice ( rice flavoured with kecap manis and seasame oil, I might add - a flavour combination that I truly love), as we collasped on the couch at home, having upacked everything - he made the  very telling comment that having a commercial kitchen to operate out off, with a fantastic walkin chiller, made what he does a huge amount less stressful. Which possibly contributed to the general  feeling of relaxedness that emanated thru the whole day... A few more benches would be useful though Bill! Its a small kitchen and I don't think it was designed to have quite as many bodies in it as it did yesterday - but we all get on well, and we coped, as you do!