Not A Cooks Blog... living the great New Zealand cookbook

How to celebrate our twenty-third wedding anniversary on December the 17th? I couldn't ever forget as it is etched on my wedding ring! With Jamie being away for the occasion we decided to celebrate earlier. Featuring in The Great NZ Cookbook was Craggy Range, a famous local winery restaurant in the foothills of Te Mata Peak.There are two recipes shared by the chef Leyton Ashley. The first being "Scampi tail with essence of Bora Bora". Leyton describes how this dish was inspired from the time he and his fiancee spent on Tahiti. Well, it was a signal that this was meant to be our dinner destination as we had our honeymoon in Moorea, Tahiti.  I had to google "scampi" to find out that it is a food that includes a number of certain crustaceans, including shrimp. Broken up tomato jelly is dropped over the lime infused scampi which is wrapped in sorrel leaves. The dish is completed by the drizzle of coconut bubbles. From the featured photo, it does sort of look like on...

Otane is a quaint rural settlement just up the road from where we live in Pukehou. Sir Des Britten was born there back in 1939. In the seventies, Sir Des became a New Zealand icon presenting two television cooking shows as well as running a restaurant in Wellington and being a radio presenter. His knighthood was received later in life for the work he did as an Anglican minister and heading the Wellington City Mission for over twenty years. Quite rightly Sir Des features in The Great NZ Cookbook contributing "Fail Safe Asian Salmon with Smashed Potatoes and Slow-Roasted Tomatoes". With the disaster from last week, I was quite keen on the "fail-safe" guarantee and I wanted something special as the extended whanau were coming for dinner. Seven fillets of salmon at the ready daughter informed me why I was not removing the bones ... as seen on master chef. Ahh... missed that programme and I really couldn't get the little blitters out with my fingers. Of course, whe...

I should have learnt from my locked in a toilet restaurant experience, that even though I may not understand the instructions does not mean I should ignore them. I was in my twenties and some youthful arrogance might have been in play, but I distinctly remember that I did not what to follow the "don't lock the toilet door" sign and possibly be interrupted by another person when attending to nature's business. So lock I did. This ended badly with myself not able to get out of the toilet cubicle and the restaurant owner having to come and rescue me - in which he popped his head over the wall exclaiming something about don't I read instructions! So fast forward 20 odd years or so, when I read the cheesecake instructions that stated after baking the biscuit base to "set aside to cool"   - not understanding why I continued on pouring on the filling. I  complained to daughter that I hate when there are instructions I don't understand the rationale for. O...