North Otago Eating Odyssey

Chicken with tarragon and braised lettuce and peas - Riverstone Kitchen

I had had my eye on an eating trip to Oamaru and its friends for a long time. There has always been Fleurs Place (the lack of apostrophe, while frustrating, is authentic) of course, the legendary fish restaurant in Moeraki. Then Riverstone Kitchen won the 2010 Cuisine Restaurant of the Year. And then Fleur opened a new place in Oamaru, called the Loan and Merc Company. Well, that sealed it. Plans were made, appetites were whetted and fellow travelers were enticed.

By way of whetting the appetite, I made the Herb and Pork Rillettes from the Riverstone Kitchen's new cookbook (I don't have the book, but the recipe was in November 2011's Cuisine) as an entree for Christmas lunch. (Picture here). They were awesome. So at the very least, I had to know how they stood up to the original playing at home (very well as it turned out!).

We booked for 3, being me, Pav and Steph our friend from Christchurch, but by the time we had spent 5 days in Christchurch we had acquired 3 more eaters. Brilliant!! First to Fleurs where the windy, bumpy road did its best to put us off, but this place's reputation preceded it and we were hungry after a drive from Christchurch.  Lucky too as Fleur does not skimp on meal sizes.

The restaurant is in a building right at the foot of the wharf. From the tables you can see the fishing boats coming in, seagulls circling and the one-gloved-guy scaling and gutting all the fish for the restaurant. Lunch and a show!

View from our table at Fleurs Place

Fleur is a charming host; she popped over to say hello after we had sat down, offering answers to menu questions. She made us feel special for just being there. No wonder she's a legend in the food world and none other than Rick Stein insisted on making a special trip to eat at the restaurant.

Half a muttonbird with spinach and potatoes (and flower)

To the eating: none of us having tasted muttonbird (Maori name: titi) before, we shared half of one for a wee entree. It was salty and fatty, as it always is apparently, but very flavoursome. You can see why it's referred to as 'mutton' – the flesh is a dark red/brown and full of oomph. The texture was to me like an older rabbit or a turkey leg – more fibrous than chicken. The spinach and plainly boiled potatoes served with it were no doubt an attempt to soften down the inherent saltiness of the flesh.

Sole with lime and caper sauce (in paua shell!)

Then we got serious with our fish. My fried whole sole with lime and caper sauce was unbelievably good. They sure know how to cook fish here and each of our dishes, all different, were perfectly cooked. The sole was served with one side of the skin cut out like a picture frame to the tender, luscious flesh below. There isn't much to say about about such well cooked fish except that it's retained its moisture (regardless of the buttery sauce I ate it with) and every piece of it fell off the carcass perfectly.

Remember I said that they don't skimp on portion sizes, well, the chef was apparently concerned that the fish for the whole terakihi dish which Steph ordered were too small, so 2 were delivered. On a plate that you or I would serve nibbles for 10 on! 

Steph was good enough to let me try them (well, actually, she insisted we all help finish the massive meal). The almond butter with fried capers was a triumph. She would have been satisfied with one fish, two was a bit overboard, but luckily we were there to help!

Because we were sea-side, we were careful to remove the spines from our whole fish, rather than turning the fish over to access the other side. The latter method apparently sinks ships. Lucky we know the etiquette. I'm saving you from the photo of the spines piled on a plate!

Here's a shot of the Shellfish Hot Pot:

After the fish course, we retired to Oamaru to rest up for dinner. And what a dinner it was!

Riverstone Kitchen is on State Highway 1 just north of Oamaru. It's more than a restaurant, it's a garden, a play area for kids, a store and no doubt an expression of how the Smiths who own and run the place want to live. The main building is surrounded by a beautiful garden which they are quite happy for diners to wander around.  Pav and I got some ideas for our own garden and one of our companions says she saw the zucchini for my soup being picked just as we arrived.

The menu is a treasure of North Otago produce. The meat is apparently butchered on site and certainly most if not all of the vegetables and fruit are from the gardens just outside. Another example: the menu lists “Havoc pork with jasmine rice, spouting broccoli, chili, soy + garlic”, but the exact cut of pork is determined each night by what is available.  For us: loin.

All diners were happy to play the 'try not to order double ups' game, so we tried pretty much all the menu. Again, everything was cooked to perfection. The vegetables were captured at their peak, the meats were cooked just as they called for. Nothing was out of place. And yet, there wasn't anything show off-y or complicated about the food. It's the sort of food you imagine you could cook at home, but of course is difficult without daily access to a plentiful, well-loved garden, the very best of everything else and a serious but not stuffy, deft touch in the kitchen. This is how restaurants in a garden country should be.

The rillettes (ordered by a companion) were smooth and soaked in flavour. My soup was 6 or 7 ingredients blended exquisitely to make a zucchini, basil and parmesan masterpiece.

Zucchini, basil and parmesan soup

Capellini with broadbeans, lemon, mint and ricotta

The goats' curd tart was announced 'light as air'. The pasta was passed around excitedly as if to say 'I'm so proud I ordered this!'

The smoked salmon was declared 'pretty large for an entree' and delicious, even after all that fish.

Our mains were all fine pieces of meat, cooked exquisitely and treated to accompaniments fresh and pleasurable enough to make one squeal with delight, and squeal we did. My Wakanui beef steak was cooked just as I asked and the smoked almonds are coming home with me!

Pav's chicken, served on braised lettuce with tarragon, made him smirk with joy. The lamb at the far end of the table, with couscous, caponata and pomegranate molasses will live on in the memory of all who tasted it, especially the very pleased orderer who got to eat almost all of it. Even the kale side dish (one of us, who shall remain nameless, is kale-obsessed) with more smoked almonds was worth dipping into three times.

The lamb that will enter into legend

Then there was dessert. Pav and I made room (just behind the sole and muttonbird, under the smoked almonds, hiding next to the steak in my case) for Chocolate Nemesis, a famously difficult* chocolate cake with its origins at the River Cafe in London. With the blackcurrent ice cream, it was to die for. The panna cotta with roast rhubarb sent the eater muttering with happiness and Steph bought the restaurant's cookbook almost on the basis of the Panettone Pudding with Zabaglione Ice Cream alone.

Panna cotta with roasted rhubarb

We almost died with pleasure.  Or overeating.  One or the other.

Then to bed.

Next day to Steam in Oamaru for caffeinated beverages and then after a walk around the alternating steampunk and 19th Century old town before a quick visit to Whitestone Cheeses. Cool story: their Windsor Blue was a favoured cheese of the 'Scrubs' cast and crew for their weekly wrap parties. So much so that when the LA supplied stopped selling it, a mercy email was sent to Oamaru to fix the problem. Which it duly was with a hand delivery!

Then off for lunch at the Loan and Merc.

Fleur herself had warned me of the below par service and she wasn't wrong. It's not that they were rude or silly, just that they didn't seem to know what they were doing. Someone else warned me of the small portion sizes, but that had been fixed.

Osso Buco

We were down to just 4 eaters by now, the other 2 having returned to Christchurch to do something as frivolous as buy a house. We doubled up on meals here, because we struck some of our favourites. My osso buco was cooked well, the traditional accompaniment of saffron-flavoured risotto alla milanese replaced by couscous, which did it not harm at all.

I love slow cooked almost anything so this was a treat for me and would have been for any other meat eater too.

The cottage pie Pav and Steph had wasn't the best thing they had ever tasted.  Pav says it reminds him of family cooking, OK, but not great.  

And then, suddenly, our eating was over and we were thrust back into wobbly Christchurch.

You should definitely start planning your own North Otago Odyssey. Riverstone Kitchen or Fleurs Place are both worth the travel time alone. Go early and walk around the garden at Riverstone.

* don't tell Pav it's difficult because he's made one without realising its alleged difficulty and in the absence of that sort of pressure pulled it off magnificently!

Plenty of Veges with Yotam Ottolenghi

I decided several months ago that I don't really cook vegetables well. I do eat plenty of vegetables, but because our veges are sooooo gggggoooooddddd here in NZ, I haven't found the need to cook with them much. I tend to steam them a bit, just to bring out their natural flavour, and that's about it. An abundance of flavour and freshness has meant that I haven't developed a vege-skill. Is it the same for you?

So, I decided to invest some time in learning about vegetable cooking. This is, of course, a lifetime project, but I decided to start with one of the best: Yotam Ottolenghi. Mr Ottolenghi is the Guardian's Weekend vegetarian columnist and a London restauranteur and chef. He's not a vegetarian, mind, but he does do a well-regarded line in vegetables in that fine city. It seems that Mr Ottolenghi has more heritage than Stonehenge – Israeli, Jewish, Turkish, Italian personally, plus an Arab boyfriend/cooking partner (I think that's right). And he draws liberally from them all – plenty of aunts and others are referenced.

So, I bought his book “Plenty” – which includes plenty of his columns from the Guardian and some additions. It's a very pretty book and the cover is padded (ooo, ahhh). 

 White is clearly a bit of a silly colour for a book to leave lying around my kitchen, but I'll cope.

A friend already had the book and when I told him I had bought it, he simply said “have fun chopping”. It's true that there's lots of slicing, chopping, crushing and dicing to be done, but I'm up for that! Bring it.

Pav and I spent a week on Waiheke to start our summer holiday, so we took the book along to be our eating guide. We had previously made the Black pepper tofu – which was very very (very) peppery, as warned.  But this time we went further.

You may have heard of my aubergine complex: I love them, but find them difficult to cook (partly, I think because I fear the amount of oil they can soak up). Mr Ottolenghi's Aubergines with buttermilk sauce were a delight. They turned out just like the picture (which is always exciting on the first go) and were delicious – full of the earthy richness of aubergine and the slightly tart tang of buttermilk and yoghurt, plus sweet/sour of pomegranate. 

Pomegranates are around at the moment so get some and make this.

I'm not using his words here, so any trouble is my fault:

Aubergines with Buttermilk Sauce, and Pomegranate
Turn the oven to 200C. Line a baking tray with baking paper or tin foil.

Halve as many aubergine as you have people from tip to toe – then slash parallel lines in the flesh in two directions to make diamond shapes. Don't cut the skin. Brush each half with about 20mL of olive oil. Yes, that seems like a lot, but it worked wonderfully. Lay them in the baking tray, flesh side up and sprinkle with 1.5 to 3 teaspoons of lemon thyme leaves (they don't sell those on Waiheke, so we used ordinary thyme) – season with salt and pepper.

Bake for 35-40 mins until the flesh is soft and brown and looks like it wants to be eaten.

Meantime, make the sauce (this is the part Pav did for us).  This makes enough for 3 aubergine:

Whisk together:

• 140mL buttermilk
• 100g Greek yoghurt
• 1.5 T olive oil
• 1 small garlic clove, crushed
• pinch of salt

Now, for us the raw garlic was a bit full on. If you're into that sort of thing, cool, but otherwise you could try to use garlic infused olive oil, or you could roast the garlic with the aubergines and squeeze it into the sauce.

Serve the aubergines with

• the sauce,
• sprinkles of dukkah (Mr Ottolenghi instructs us to use za'atar, which is much the same),

•  the seeds of a pomegranate – one fruit for every 2-3 people. To get the seeds out, halve the fruit around its equator; place the cut side on your hand over a bowl and then bash the round side of the fruit with a wooden spoon or equivalent to release the seeds into your hand and the bowl – start bashing gently and gradually increase as required and as your confidence improves; pick pith out of the seeds.
• some more thyme sprinkled
• and a drizzle of olive oil.

Absolutely delightful.

We also made two excellent meal-styled salads: Marinated pepper (by which he means capsicum) salad with pecorino and Courgette and cobnut salad (sans cobnuts, almonds instead in our case). Both were delightful ways to use everyday vegetables in a new way.

Plus we made Green pancakes – pancakes full of spinach, spring onions and chillies, served with lime butter (more raw garlic if you don't mind). They were spectacular – spicy enough to be exciting, but without distressing anyone. And the lime butter is a new favourite. 

We will definitely be exploring more of the book and next time I'm in London I'll be sure to check out one of Mr Ottolenghi's several restaurants – assuming I can get in!

These are just a sample of the delights of the book, so you might even consider buying it yourself. If you do, let me know what you make.

Let's keep enjoying the bounties of the vegetable patch as the weather brings so many things to ripeness. And happy new year!

Edible Gifts Ahoy

Christmas time, apparently. At our place we've decided no presents, which is fine with me. So I'm reminiscing about previous food presents and thought I would share some possibilities for you.

I've also been planning our Christmas day menu. Food being the reason for the season (the season of berries, jersey bennes, asparagus, stone fruit, outdoor eating and mosquitoes). We're starting with the Riverstone Kitchens' port rillettes, the recipe for which was in the November Cuisine magazine. It's essentially slowish cooked tasty pork, shredded and mixed with baby gherkins, parsley, capers, red onions and then preserved in its own cooking juices and fat. A big tub for Christmas nibbles are now sitting in my fridge and in a happy combo I was able to turn the remainder into gifts - two jars were presented last night to some lucky (I hope!) recipients.

Picture here:

Pork rillettes, packaged for giving

A few years ago we made flavoured vodka as gifts. Simply infuse vodka with fruit of your choice – we did some with lemon peel (don't include any white pith) and some with cherries (we were in Otago at the time). Infuse for a week or so, then strain and pour the now-infused and probably prettily-coloured vodka into a clean bottle. I've heard this works with chillis and I bet it works really well with mandarin. Wrap a nice ribbon around the bottle and deliver to a friend in need of alcoholic cheer.

Chutneys of various sorts are always popular. My grandmother used to make marmalade for everyone she'd ever met, which is a pretty good policy when you think about it.

Make homemade peanut or walnut or almond or almost-any-nut butter. Simply blend freshly roasted nuts (roast skinless nuts for about 14 minutes depending on size at 180C, watching them carefully as they burn quickly – and remember they will continue to cook after you take them out as they're high in oil) in a blender with some oil if required. Usually you need oil, but sometimes you don't. Salt to taste. If you can't get oil to match the particular nut, use peanut oil as it's virtually tasteless and goes with everything. I use approximately 1 and a half cup of nuts to about 1 tablespoon of oil, but add it cautiously in case you don't need all of it. Blend to your preferred consistency. If you want it crunchy, fish out some chunky chopped bits before continuing to blend smoother and stir those reserved pieces back in towards the end.

Deliver to a friend without allergies!

Biscuits are always popular. I like to make them to fit in a repurposed Pringles can (see picture). Today it was brandy snaps:

Melt 3T golden syrup, 85g butter and 1/3 c sugar and stir in ½ c flour and 1T ginger. Bake teaspoon measurements of the batter at 130C for about 15 minutes (or a bit more, but watch carefully) on a non-stick baking tray. Small teaspoon measurements come out about the right size to stack in a Pringles tin as a gift. You can also shape baskets around the bottom of an espresso cup while the snaps are warm or, if you make them bigger, around a large wooden spoon handle or similar to make the traditional tubes. Serve the baskets filled with fruit and cream if you're not giving them away. 

My chocolate puddle biscuits here work well at this (make sure they are really cool before stacking them). 

The other thing that would make a good present if I could bear to part with it is my newest fun find: Hakanoa Ginger Syrup.  Their site is here.  We've been making cold drinks with it with lime juice and soda water. It's also great in a cider cocktail, again with lime juice and ice and mint leaves. This is likely to be our Christmas day opener! It's also a lovely marinade for fish = equal parts ginger syrup, sake/mirin/sherry and light soy. Beautiful.

(note both half finished!)

We've been using Crooked Cider for those ginger cocktails, but also drinking it straight of an afternoon. It's a lovely, old fashioned, crisp, cloudy cider made with real cider apples in the Wairarapa and we're big fans. See here for contact details.  They've also made a pear cider, which is equally delicious.   Both are available in Wellington at Moore Wilson's, Glengarry's, Regional Wines and other places no doubt. Lars is often at the City Market in the Herd St building on Sunday mornings doing tastings and sales. Go see him, he's lovely.

Both the ginger syrup and the ciders would make great presents. If you're lucky, your giftee will share them with you!

Have a merry and safe summer silly season. Please eat fresh, local, seasonal ingredients and be careful on the roads, for my sake and yours. We're off to Oamaru and Moeraki for eating, so I'll report back once I've rolled back into town.

Celebratory All Black Cake (with Beer)

I discovered that being an All Black fan (which I have been for about 4 days now) can combine delightfully with baking! A few weeks ago I stumbled on Nigella Lawson's Guinness Chocolate Cake via Twitter and I liked the look of it. Then with the ABs doing pretty well, I thought that could be a fun celebratory cake for the World Cup Final. So I adapted Nigella's cake to make this!

Nigella uses white sugar in her cake, but I wanted to give this cake as much chance as possible of being black, so I used dark muscovado sugar. It turned out pretty well, but it did get a bit burned around the very edges, possibly because of the advanced caramel in the sugar. I just trimmed those bits off, turned the cake over so I had a nice flat bottom to decorate and no problem!

Although made with beer, it doesn't taste like beer, just a bit maltier than your average cake.

Here's the recipe.

All Black Beery Chocolate Cake

First butter (or spray with non-stick non-flavoured oil, which is what I do) and then line a 20-23cm cake tin with baking paper. Heat the oven to 180C.

Start with the following

• 250mL of porter beer – if this is to be an All Black celebratory cake, then best you use a porter from New Zealand. Likely brewers include Three Boys or Tuatara or Renaissance (who make a chocolate stout which I am sure it worth trying in this!)
• 250g unsalted butter

Heat the above together in a big saucepan until the butter is melted. Take it off the heat.

Whisk into the beer:

• 75g cocoa
• 400g dark muscovado sugar (presumably this works with white sugar (Nigella calls for caster), but I used dark)

In a separate bowl beat together

• 150mL sour cream
• 2 eggs
• 1 T vanilla essence

and then stir that into the beer mixture

Then whisk

• 275g of plain flour
• 2.5 t baking soda

into the mixture until all nicely mixed together.

Pour into the prepared cake tin and bake for 45 minutes to an hour until the skewer test shows it's cooked. For me the cake went from not cooked (gunk still stuck to the skewer) to cooked (nice clean skewer) quickly, so keep an eye on it towards the end. I also had to cover it with a bit of tin foil for the about 10 minutes or so of the cooking as the top was cooking faster than the middle.

Cool in tin on rack before turning out on its top (so that the bottom, which is the flat bit, is available for dressing).

I made a stencil out of the ABs' fern and logo with a stanley knife and some patience. Then I sprinkled icing sugar through the stencil just before serving. Be very careful as you remove the stencil. Serve with cream or yoghurt if you want (I didn't).

Enjoy! Preferable after a magnificent All Black victory. 

Congratulations to the 2011 All Blacks – the 6^th NZ rugby team to win a World Cup: 1987 (Men's, NZ), 1998 (Women's, Netherlands), 2002 (Women's, Spain), 2006 (Women's, Canada), 2010 (Women's, UK) and 2011 (Men's, NZ).

Now, time to focus on that election thingy and the rest of NZ culture!

Birthday Thai

Hard as it is to imagine, I get older every year. This year was no exception. By tradition, Pav and I gather our friends together to celebrate our birthdays (his is shortly before mine) in an interesting way. Last year Samoa (sort of), the year before lawn bowls, this year – Thai food and wine matching.

PhuThai Esarn is one of a handful of great Thai places in Wellington. We sorted out a varied set menu for 12 and asked our friend Rebecca Taylor who writes a wine column for the Capital Times (Wine Press) to think up some interesting wine matches for us. And she came up trumps. 

Grilled squid

Our chosen menu included a good mix of spice, heat and milder flavours. Consensus says that the top dishes were the Nam-tok Beef (grilled beef with fresh herbs and lime juice), the Larb Pork (pork salad, with lime juice, chilli and red onion) and the Kang Phed Ped Yang (red duck curry). That last being a sweet, creamy mix with pineapple and duck. The fresh spring rolls are a personal favourite of mine.

Being Thai, it's all a fine balance between spicy (chilli), salty (usually fish sauce), sweet (brown sugar or similar) and sour (lemons, limes, kaffir lime leaves...). Matching wine with that's a fun game as any one of those can fight with some wines. 

 The wines that Rebecca came up with were spot on. She texted tasting notes as she was running a bit late, so we did as instructed and started with the Black Estate Riesling 2010 as an aperitif. This is a Waipara wine from a family owned vineyard and was a smooth start to the night. But it came into its own when the entrees arrived. The fruitiness of the wine was fun to roll around the mouth with the various degrees of flavour and spice in the fish cakes, fresh spring rolls, deep fried goodies and, particularly, the Meuk Yang grilled squid with a chilli dressing. No nasty sauvignon-chilli clash here thank you very much. 

Red duck curry

As mains arrived we slid gently into the Seifried Würzer 2008, another South Island number – Nelson this time. Würzer is a rare German variety with only about 100 hectares planted around the world. Seifried says it has NZ's only Würzer plantings. The founders of Seifried have German heritage, so it's not outrageous that they might give this a go. The grape is a cross between Gewurztraminer and Muller-Thurgau (don't let that last put you off) and goes beautifully with the prickly heat and saltiness of Thai food, as we discovered. The tasting notes say elderflower, peach, apricot and sherbet flavours, which is fair enough. The sweetness which might be annoying in other food matches works wonderfully here. This was everyone's favourite wine of the evening.

The third bottle was a 12,000 Miles Pinot Noir 2010 from Gladstone out in the Wairarapa. I didn't get much of this as I had been enjoying the whites so much (and briefly forgetting my obligations to you, dear reader), but the little I did have was also well matched with the spice. That's interesting because I wouldn't think to order red wine with spicy food usually – I guess it's the spicy food = hot country = cooling white wines linkage in my head. Just goes to show that we should all check our assumptions every so often.

You too should check out PhuThai Esarn in the middle of Cambridge Tce, or its sister PhuThai Lanna on the corner of Vivian and Tory Sts. And take some risks in your wine matches. Hunt down a Würzer!

PhuThai Esarn

35-38 Cambridge Tce

Wellington

04 801 5006

www.phuthaiesarn.co.nz

Rugby, Pizza and Pig's Head

The Oval Ball Global Challenge continues unabated which means that I have now watched more rugby in 2 weeks that in probably the last 20 years (that's about 2 games). And what does rugby mean in terms of food? It means pizza and spicy nuts.

I've been experimenting with coatings for nuts and working with the base of 3 cups of nuts to 1 beaten egg, plus salt and spices. Our favourite so far is:

3 cups of raw mixed nuts

1 egg white (don't use a big one, otherwise this could end up LA omletty)

2 T chopped fresh rosemary

½ t freshly ground salt

½ t ground paprika (you can use more if you want to )

1 t brown sugar (I used dark muscovado, but it's not necessary)

Heat oven to 180 degrees. Beat the egg white until sloppily beaten. Stir remainder of ingredients except nuts in to the egg white. Then stir in the nuts. Spread nuts on a baking tray lined with baking paper and roast for 13 minutes or so until the egg white is dry and the nuts roasted (shake the nuts about half way through). Let them cool before serving so that the egg white and salt can go crispy. Don't worry, they don't taste sweet, the sugar just adds to the crunch and helps carry the spice.

Other combos include salt, finely grated lemon zest and chilli. And a Moroccan-inspired mix of salt, nutmeg, chilli, cumin and ground coriander seeds. Try your own and let me know if you hit on a good combo of your own.

Our pizza this week was ricotta spread on the base, proscuitto, canned artichokes, Kapiti's fresh mozzarella and basil (added after the pizza is cooked). I used Annabel Langbein's pizza base recipe from Smart Food for Busy People (an old favourite, with some great early 90s period crockery!). The pizza came out better off than the pizza 'stone' (which was actually an untreated tile that we bought for this very purpose).  Clearly it didn't like that 270 degrees of the oven this time. Coward!

Ex-pizza stone in 3 pieces!

New pizza stone ahoy!

And a couple of weeks ago, I made a pilgrimage to West Auckland to check out The Tasting Shed which an old TV colleague has opened with her husband in an old cider shed on the grounds of Cooper's Creek vineyard. It's a quicker than you imagine 20 minute drive down the spanking new extension to SH16. No more dog leg, just straight through to Kumeu.

You should take the road too and check out the great venue, food and wine on offer from Jo and Ganesh Raj.

The food options are on blackboards around the room and (as the name would suggest) are designed to be shared. Each that we had was a plate of well thought out and creative cooking. The rolled pig's head which was served with kohlrabi remoulade was a firm suggestion from Jo and she was spot on. That and the filo 'cigar' filled with duck confit served with orange salad and red cabbage were highlights of the savory selections. One small criticism: the fish had one too many flavours on it, but that's a small criticism of an otherwise excellent spread.

Our wine match (suggested by Jo, and again spot on) was the Coopers Creek Single Vinyard Arneis 2010 from Gisborne. Dessert was matched with Alvear Pedro Ximenez (that's the grape variety) 2008 from Montilla Moriles (in the Andalucia area of Spain). That's sherry country, but this wasn't a sherry but of a smokey, raisiny, caramely dessert wine. It was very easy to drink with both the Churros con Chocolate and the Brioche French Toast with honey and fig ice cream.

French Toast with Ice Cream and Honey

You should make the trip, either from Auckland, or if you're from further afield, next time you're in the 09. Get out of the city and try The Tasting Shed. Easier to get to than Parnell and way easier to park in than Ponsonby, and chances are the owner will serve you so you know it will be friendly.

Ceiling Lamps at The Tasting Shed

Lasting impressions:

food: surprising and delighting and to share

service: we were spoiled because we know the owner, but I reckon you'll be to

drive out: no hassle at all and parking's a dream

time to go: we were there at night, but it looks like it would be a great sunny day or summer's evening trip (they have an 'dog box' for private functions, which looks like a goodie for a loud laugh without disturbing your dinner neighbours)

also: there's a courtesy van, so you can be delivered home after imbibing
décor: upgrade to an old cider shed and it's sympathetic with a few sweet touches (lovely lamps on the ceiling and apple box shelving)

The Tasting Shed

609 State Highway 16

Kumeu

09 412 6454

www.thetastingshed.co.nz

Twelve go mad in Thorndon

Wellington on a Plate is a great festival of feasting and this year I gathered 11 of my dearest together for a truffle-infused fine dining experience at Le Canard in Thorndon. The Wellington on a Plate set menu of $55 for 3 courses and tea or coffee was the order of the day for about half of us, including me. The other half had the Menu Tradition at $65 for 3 courses, coffee and a glass of wine. Both were highly recommended after we indulged.

Both sets of diners started with Gratinee Duck Truffled Onion Soup. This was a luscious French onion soup made with what must have been duck stock and a touch of truffle. Gruyere croutons topped it off, as is traditional. The soft waft of the truffle lifted this peasant food to another plane. Sorry, no picture as we all woofed it down so fast!

After entree, the table diverged, though we shared around so everyone got to try the dishes. Those on the Tradition menu enjoyed confit duck with cepes (mushroom) sauce and what were described as rustic potatoes, which seemed to be cubed and fried until crisp. Pav reckons the potatoes were good, but prefers a smoother starch with duck prepared this way. Another at the table commented that the duck needed more pepper, but none was on the table. The skin of the duck was crispy though, which is a key test to my mind.

Boudin Blanc

The remainder of us were served a far more subtle dish of chicken boudin (white sausage), with chestnut and olive sauce and a kumara “mousseline” (which looks like a puree, frankly). Again, there was a truffle flavour to the boudin which we discovered was enhanced by breathing in through the nose across the sausage while it was in the mouth.

In France Boudin blanc is traditionally made with pork and milk. Its name contrasts with the more well known boudin noir, or blood pudding. I'm not sure if our boudin included milk, but it was certainly smooth and subtle and rewarded slow and curious eating.

Creme Brulee

Both desserts were perfect ways to end the meal: the largest crème brulee you've ever seen and a delicate selection of mousses. When you order crème brulee, you want as much brulee as possible. And brulee this delivered! A flat shallow pan filled with smooth, creamy custard and a wide crackling of brulee that everyone took great pleasure in smashing with their spoons. The murmurs of delight slowly spread along the table.

Eucalyptus mousse with chocolate and orange

My eucalyptus mousse was a winner. The promise of this dessert enticed me to the restaurant in the first place and it was a delight. Although not a common flavour, the mousse was an excellent vehicle for the subtlety of the tree gum. It was accompanied by chocolate, biscuit crumbs and a orange sauce. These elements all joined into a tour de force of dessert.

As you can tell, I was pretty happy with the night out. The service was welcoming and efficient and the food was gorgeous. This was my second visit to Le Canard, the first having been for my mum's birthday. That was a great evening too.

Lasting impressions:

service: feels family run and welcoming

food: Perigord/South-West French with a few twists and excellent execution

groups: encouraged and well handled. They have several set menus available for groups – including a degustation menu which kicks off with foie gras terrine, if that's your thing.

atmosphere: small, intimate and warm on a very cold night

parking: plenty in the evening. Less likely during the day I guess, unless you risk the supermarket!

deals: they're in the Entertainment Book – complimentary main course with another main course

Le Canard

10A Murphy St

Thorndon

Wellington

04 499 5252

I see that Le Canard has a “fairly-priced” lunch menu. It's the wrong side of town for me, but I might have to wag and go some time, anyway! Don't tell my boss.  

In other news: I saw Cowboys vs Aliens at the Roxy. The pre-show nibbles were excellent. The film less so. I also went to the Hog's Breath for steak. My mum always told me that if I have nothing nice to say, say nothing.